One down, one to go

In all honesty, I really can’t say I’m sorry to hear this news about Myra Hindley. I do find it amazing (in an odd way) that she’s been in jail since 5 years before I was born – and I mean amazing as in “how much the world has changed in that time”, I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to be in prison for that length of time. But in conjunction with that, there’s a visceral gut response of “good, she died where she deserved to be”.
I don’t normally feel like that about anyone, and in fact I almost wish I had more compassion, but in some cases it just seems to leave me and walk down the road with it’s thumb out…

Update – Yes, the illustration I nicked from the BBC has been removed, following comments etc., and also the basic problem that it was, in a word, shit.

Coincidence?

1) You’ve got a nice big warehouse, still full of fireworks that haven’t sold over the preceding month.
2) You’ve got a fireman’s strike where the Army have stated several times that they value lives over property.

What do you do?

Have a nice little fire, perhaps? Sounds like a good reason to have insurance, doesn’t it?

Or maybe I’m just too cynical…

How not to do it

Thanks to Userfriendly, I’ve just been busted laughing out loud at work.

The reason? This site.

Someone rid me of this troublesome priest

Is it me, or do the words “Henry the Eighth” spring readily to mind when reading this from the Guardian? OK, it’s an interesting move, allowing the divorced to remarry in chruch (under exceptional circumstances, of course :¬P ), but one does wonder how much influence the next monarch and his troll beloved have had over the entire matter.

Bastard Busses and their Drivers

Bloody rotten sodding useless keffwitted monkey-shaving knob-rot tossers!
Ah, I feel better now. As regular readers of this or Vodkabird‘s site will know, there’s a war currently going on between Stagecoach Busdrivers and the public in general. Today was no exception – hardly a shock, but there we go.

The bus was crowded anyway (going with the regulation “Black Hole of Calcutta” mode of transport), which gives the drivers plenty of scope for what they call “fun“, and what the passengers call “being shaken about like a fart in a tornado“. And oh boy, this one used it to the best of his inability. Amazingly, I’d managed to get a seat. Well, not so amazingly, considering the person next to me was old, fast asleep, and snoring. Loudly. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that two stops later, a man with the most serious odour problem it’s ever been my misfortune to suffer got on. And stood in the aisle next to me. Hanging on to the pole – yes, you’ve guessed it – with armpits that could double as Iraqi weapons factories. In fact, I’m not sure that the person three in front of him with a bright blue bobble hat wasn’t an undercover UN weapons inspector.

So, it’s not even 7.30am, I’ve got audio-concussion from the snoring behemoth to my left, and incipient nasal mutiny to my right. Life can’t get any better.

Of course, that’s when the bus driver decides to prove me wrong. I like to think it’s a special role they hold in life – to prove that no matter how shit you think life is, they can always make it worse. When the end of the world arrives, it won’t be the Four Horsemen, it’ll be the Four Stagecoach Drivers of the Apocalypse. Hell, my bus definitely had Pestilence on it. And very nearly War too.

Anyway, we’re trolling merrily on at Warp Factor Seven, and as we approach one stop, the driver realises there’s someone who (god forbid) wanted to get on the bus. There’s no way – no fecking way – we’re going to stop in time….

Have you ever seen a bus skid? I hadn’t. I have now. I think we stopped within the length of the bus. Every single standing passenger could have doubled as a skiing stunt double. And every person sat on a seat with one of the “passenger safety” poles (i.e. fuck off great pieces of steel tube from seat up to ceiling, so standing sufferers passengers have something to hang on to when being flung around corners transported from place to place.) now has concussion – that’s how quickly we stopped. It would have been comical, except one of those people was me…

Oh, how I’m looking forward to the journey home.

Internet Exploder

Because I try and avoid using Internet Explorer as much as possible, it’s been quite an eye-opener to use it today. It’s just so messy. I’m normally use browsers like Opera, Mozilla and Netscape 7, all of which have tabbed browsing. Basically, this just means you’ve got one browser window with several tabs inside it, rather than opening a new window for every time you look at a new site or whatever.

Of course, IE doesn’t do that, and I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d got used to tabbed browsing instead of bloody loads of windows…

Life Sentence

Looking back through the comments, I knew there was something I’d wanted to blether about. And of course, it was Green Fairy’s thing about Manchester people having a lower life expectancy than pretty much anywhere else in the UK.

Now, of course we all know that this is based on statistical analysis, and that (from the great cliche) there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I’m not sure how I feel about this – when I saw it on the TV news the other day, they seemed to be emphasising that it applied to people born in Manchester, rather than just people that lived there. But surely where you were born is pretty much irrelevant in this context? It’s the risks relevant to the place where you currently live that affect your life expectancy while living there. Of course, considering the number of times I’ve moved, and the number of places I’ve lived that have a decidedly deleterious effect on life expectancy, I should probably start making funeral plans now, as I’ll have pegged it within five years…