How soon will the Euro implode?

UPDATE:- I said this the other day, too.

David Davis

About 12 years ago, or it may be 13, I bet a YEM* person £25 that the Euro, recently issued, would sink to UD$1.00 by that Christmas. It did fall, a bit: my prediction was only wrong in degree -  but I lost my bet and ponied up.

Now Peter Oborne thinks the project is at last about to come undone.

* “YEM” was the “Young European Movement”. God knows what’s happened to that.

Bank Holiday caption competition

David Davis

Teh funneh

David Davis

Go here and enjoy.

Wonderful-pun corner

Michael Winning

About Michael Foot I mean…

Obnoxio the Clown said something too about “one foot in the grave“.

Teh funneh

NewLabour surrogate mother of the day

Michael Winning

says I saw this on Man Widdecombe, its quite funneh…enough work today, and I fell in a ditch and a pig fell on me.

Good blog, just spotted

David Davis

Coldsteelrain, heart in right place, what more can a man want? I cannot tell exactly, but I suspect it is written by a soldier.

Here is one good observation for a start – and yes I am being provocative here. And I share his dislike of the unloveable, un-nice and smelly Piers Morgan. if “Britain’s got Talent” is some sort of show in the Wireless Tele Vision, and the man Morgan is involved, then I don’t think that ordinary functioning humans ought to have anything to do with it.

Shun him, for he likes Gordon Brown. There will have to be an “Independent Safeguarding Agency” register of such people, and the Police will have to phone us all when one of them moves in nearby, in case we object.

Hen parties

David Davis

I agree with Celia Walden on this one. The prevailing popular culture of course, under ZanuToryLieBorg, has forced ordinary people without much will-power, and of either sex, to have such events. They are invariably depressing, expensive and humiliating for the Principals.

My first wife and I, in 1973, decided to host a small dinner at a rather new and soul-less hotel in Winchester, for our parents and closest friends. (The hotel’s soullessness was not its fault.)

Thirty years later, my present wife and I decided to host a small dinner, a couple of days beforehand, at our flat in Battersea, for our closest friends, such as those who would be officiating closely on the Saturday, such as “witnessing”, or cooking the grub in the kitchen for everybody, and buttling, after we all shambled back from the Church round the corner. Most of our parents were then either dead, or geographically inaccessible such as my old-fella, who was birdwatching on the marshes round Antwerp, and thought that was more pressing.)

Liberal Classical education will destroy the need for these sad public-humiliation-events.

Missing him yet?

Michael Winning

Spotted this on Guido, http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2010/02/billboard_mystery_partly_revea.shtml?refid=0

The devil you know

The Hayekeo-Keynesian Rap

David Davis

I have to thank Tom Paine over at the Last Ditch who brought this droll little thing to my attention. Owing to strange and wonderful wireless-router-hiccups I have not been ablt to reach typepad blogs recently but it seems to be fixed now:-

I seem to be able to access my network again (for a bit…)

David Davis

If it falls over again, it’s probably the mesolithic router, which may have to go.

God help you all, if it stays working.

Yer-avv-ta-luff

But what’s a homophobic nude teabagger, for f***’s sake?

Wind Turbines: someone’s noticed the deliberate mistake

David Davis

I spotted this here, and  thought the following (don’t all, please, get killed in the rush…)

There is intrinsically nothing wrong with the idea of people installing wind turbines on a small scale if they want to, and if some idiot’s prepared to go to the trouble of fabricating the monstrosities for them. The concept that the wind is (sort of) free for the taking is an old one, and successful nations have risen and prospered, such as the Dutch, by using the stuff on a large scale by pre-medieval standards.

But to pretend that the electric power requirements, at high Amperage all the time and everywhere, of a large First-World Economy, including stuff like Aluminium-smelting-works and steel-foundries, can be thus provided by such machines, is flim-flammery.

Private wind-turbines are toys. There is no need for them to have expensive electronic nonsense, designed for “load regulation” or whatever, if they are not connected to the Grid. The people who will want them will be rich: therefore they should be connected via old car-alternator-rectifiers (about 40 sets in parallel is a good start for safety reasons) to stacks of lead-acid scrap batteries in the cellar: about two tons of the same, say about 120 batteries, will do for an average 2kW turbine. Good new car batteries can be had for about £2 each at any local Soviet mobile home park for Travelling People.

No wind? No charge.

Wind? Charge.

You will be able to run an average _/House In Notting Hill/_ with five bedrooms, two kitchens with AGAs, nine laptops for the three children and five for the parents and nanny, plus the XBox and two “Wii” thingies, for at least four hours on a full charge of two tons of six-year old batteries.

Get some geek to build you a 12v=/230V^, DC/AC inverter using about 100 scrap power MosFets and transformers from old laptop adapters, and you are home and dry. Any amount of these can be had for under £1 each from your local computer repair shop, just like gunpowder was from your ironmonger in the 1950s. If the assembly catches fire, simply let him build you another one.

teh funneh

From Man Widdicombe.

Burn a banker?

But it is utterly obvious that this is a joke…

David Davis

If our God, who is a Unitary Trinity of Beings, can’t let us tell jokes about Him, and His Acts that it pleased Him to do whe he was a young-’un, and what the guys in the Pub thought of them, then what use  are we to Him as ambassadors? He is (they are) our Ossifer: we can scrag and rag Him/Them (but we will try to follow Him,  _/even/_ when He has a map and He Is Sure that He knows where we are, in the face of the Enemy…)

Humour drives out evil: DISCUSS.

He is of course all-powerful, omniscient and benevolent, as the great mathematician Gottfried Leibniz suggested, so it can’t matter that we cheek Him and take the piss out of Him. This is the real one-over that we have on all other versions of “God”…

We’ve really got, we Western liberals, the best possible God: if you think about it. The rest can eat cake.

This might just work

David Davis thinks that “Burkha Barbies” may help to erase cultural gulfs between the actual world as it is and as it functions, and, er, Moslem young girls in unicultural households.

I don’t know if they’re allowed to play with dolls: I would suspect not. But this might be a transitional effigy, which would help to doconstruct the notion that a top-down/prescriptive/pre-modern survival guide is a religion.

Religions belong to the world of the non-material. Like Christianity, they can often inform liberalist-behaviour. but as recommendations.

Elsewhere today

David Davis

Duties call. But feel free to stop in at the Nissen-Hut. Some of the duty typing-chimps may be waving paper about. (It’s in the brownfield site, behind the disused State-Bacon-substitute-Rationing Department Skyscraper, with the broken windows…)

Yet another animal that will NOT become extinct

David Davis

African Pygmy Hedgehogs apparently are the “latest fashion accessory for WAGS”. This is good news for Pygmy Hedgehogs, whose population will now increase.

They are probably less emotionally-demandng than dogs, may be easily housetrainable, and will require less socialising and exercising: all characteristics which will suit the modern celebrity lifestyle.

..and I won't even poo on The Ivy's tables...

Too close for comfort

Michael Wining

Seems like what they call “Bringing Government Closer To The People”:-

Credit crunch?

The government is on your side!