Sim-O

It all sound very nice and balanced and even handed, but this sentence regarding Palestinians exiled to the refugee camps says it all.
Iain Dale:

Until there is an acceptance that there is no going back it is difficult to see how life in the West Bank can be normalised

Bored with golf? Can’t hit that little ball with that stick? Fed up of being the last one to get to the green because, well, you’re shit? Want to go hunting but enjoy the golfing atmosphere?
Well now there is *drum roll*…

The Golf Ball Launcher!! Yay!!
[[image:golf_ball_launcher.jpg::center:0]]

The Golf Ball Launcher is an all-new concept, making golf accessible to everyone!

Some of you have stopped playing golf because of mobility difficulties or lack of time to practice your game. Some of you have never played golf because of a physical handicap or because the game never appealed to you. But now EVERYONE can enjoy the great outdoors and the camaraderie of golf with the amazing new Golf Ball Launcher!

So if you can’t/don’t want to play golf, buy this fucking huge gun that looks more at home in Iraq, and still not play golf!
I can see 20 year olds running round the greens firing golf balls at each instead of paintball. It’ll be Extreme War Games. With a nice plush club house to go to for pint and to compare wounds.
That gun is fucking huge!

I hate golf, but this, it looks mental. I think I might add one to my Christmas wishlist for Mrs -O.

I sat down at my desk at work this morning after my journey in, listening to how the Daily Mail had had it’s fill of the twitching carcass of the BBC and was sloping off to the nearset cave feeling smug.
There was a conversation going on about this and that and one of the women made the comment

If that girl had kept her legs shut, this wouldn’t have happened.

I wasn’t sure that I had heard her right, but yes she was actually apportioning blame for this whole sorry affair on Georgina Baillie.

What sort of twisted logic is going on there? There is no way that Georgina can be blamed for this. She may have slept with Russell, and you can debate the decision making process involved in that choice till you’re blue in the face, but it was Russell and Johnathon Ross that decided to put in a radio show and someone elses decision to broadcast it. The blame for this incident lays fairly and squarely with 3 people. Ross, Brand and the person who cleared it for broadcast (the buck stopped with Lesley Douglas, but it might not have been her that took the decision to air it).

There is no difference between blaming Georgina for this whole debacle and blaming rape on the rape victim.

The OCD Diet:

This was a bit like being at a finger buffet. The chips were in dire need of some tomato ketchup, but I did burp a little sick into my mouth half way through the meal that was tinged with the taste of tomato soup from this morning, which went some way towards filling that gap. Altogether a not-unpleasant meal (apart from the moment of sick).

Via

“Well done, Andrew, on your nomination for the Paul Foot Award. Some good work on the ‘Lee Jasper affair’. Definately shoo…Oh Hi Tim.
You what? He’s been caught doing what?
Where?

Oh.”

Liberal Conspiracy (Anton Vowel):

Have a look at Antons’ post on Liberal Conspiracy and see why the BBC is getting it’s head kicked in over the Ross/Brand bollox.

Yeah the BBC fucked up, it was a joke that a) wasn’t funny b) probably shouldn’t have been broadcast but Ross and Brand have apologised/and resigned, Andrew Sachs seems quite cool about it, so have a look at the process for clearing material before broadcasting and leave it there.

It’s hardly like there was malicious intent or similar.

You may not like having to pay the ‘tax’ that is the TV licence, but look what you get for the money, fuck load of channels, terrestial and digital, radio, a website big enough to live in.
The key point though is something for everyone. Something of the size of the BBC is not going to be perfect and will always have room for improvement, and need the costs watching, just like it’s impartiality and you won’t like everything it does. But you will like some of it, because the other channels won’t want to/can’t afford to make some of the types of programmes that it does.
And most of it is better quality than the bullshit served up by the Murdoch empire.

So stop the hysteria and lets put things back into perspective, please. It’s only a childish joke that went wrong.

Reuters:

Royal Dutch Shell beat all forecasts with third-quarter current cost of supply (CCS) net profit up 71 percent at 6.5 billion pounds, as high oil prices and asset sales outweighed a 7 percent drop in oil and gas production.

71 per-fucking-cent! No, of course you’re not profiteering, you robbing bastards.

Telegraph:

“I liked the whole fear factor,” he said cheerily when explaining what had attracted him to the Hirst shark which he bought for $8 million four years ago.

The fear factor is something Mr Cohen, and around 100 other hedge fund managers, are experiencing, like never before, as SAC Capital and others collectively lost a staggering £24 billion with a doomed gamble on Volkswagen shares, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The biters have been well and truly bitten, and in a week full of ironies it was Porsche, manufacturer of the hedge fund managers’ transport of choice, which was to blame.

While “hedgies” bet on VW shares falling because of the global economic downturn, regarded by some as “the safest play in town”, Porsche had been secretly building up a 74.1 per cent stake in VW through intermediaries.

When Porsche showed its hand, it sent the VW share price rocketing and exposed the hedge funds to breathtaking losses.

“I have had hedge fund managers literally in tears on the phone,” said one London-based analyst yesterday. Others likened the Porsche disclosure to a “nuclear bomb going off in our faces”, describing the resulting losses as “a bloodbath”.

heh!

Nadine has got an interview in the Metro. It’s a bit good.

Tim spotted it earlier and has already fired off a letter to Metro letters, giving us a sneak peak:

Your interview with Nadine Dorries only furthers her reputation as a self-publicising fantasist. In it, Nadine claims to get 500,000 hits a month on her website (which is not even a blog as she claims). Elsewhere, she has claimed that she has 800,000 readers a month. Never mind that her traffic claims are so fantastic as to be laughable; because ‘hits’ describes the number of files downloaded (pages, images, etc.), this figure cannot possibly be smaller than the number of readers. Nadine’s either making things up, or becoming very confused again.

I don’t know when the article went up on the site proper, but when I looked about an hour ago there were no comments.

I thought I should leave one.

I’ve got some questions for Nadine too if you don’t mind, I’ll ask them here seeing as Nadines’ ‘blog’ doesn’t allow them.

1. When is Ben Goldacre going to get his apology?
2. Do you think it is ok to mislead (putting it politely) people into thinking that the complaint about your behaviour regarding your ‘blog’ was dismissed when, in fact, it was upheld?
3. Re: ‘Hand of Hope’: Why do you keep pushing the lie that the 21 week old foetus pushed it’s hand out of the womb when the doctor performing the operation says that the foetus and mother were both anaesthetised and could move?
4. Any chance of someone explaining to you how to explain interpret statistics properly?
5. Is the person you email your ‘blog’ posts to, to put up on your ‘blog’ paid by your Parliamentary Communications Allowance?

That’ll do for now, don’t want to get meself labelled as a stalker.

Hmm. “All comments are moderated”.

Update – 30/10/08 08:30:
Still no comments have been passed and there were definately others who commented, without being rude or abusive, too.

Update II:
At about noon some comments have been published. Well, a couple anyway and both critical of Nadine.

I wonder if herbal tobacco is that bad…?