Amphibian news

Peru arrests German toad-smuggler.

Frogs have regional accents.

For those wanting thoughts on current events

… you’re out of luck, I’m just not in the mood. Meanwhile a site of comedy random sentance generators presents The Daily Mail-o-Matic. Why go through the pain of reading the hate-filled nonsese when you can amuse yourself with convincing sounding headlines.

Less depressing than real life.

BBC in Chaos

After they said responsibility for the Andrew Gilligan cock-up may be Greg Dyke’s he’s resigned. More soon from a more reputable outlet. Despite being guilty of many mistakes and misjudgments, I do find it laughable that some claim the BBC should learn editorial standards from our paper-based press.

Hutton has changed little round here, most trust the BBC far more than the government.

Poem of the day

Edward Lear – The Akond of Swat.

Mentioned as I remember it from far back on a Burns night Scout meeting, recited from memory by Robert Burns- the other PL at Fairfield Morravians. I must have misheard him all those years ago and thought he claimed it as Burns rather than Lear- I think his excuse must have been any poem recited by him was Robert Burns, just not that Robert Burns.

Slightly less violent

A fiendish game that is absent of penguin abuse.

Jenny Tonge

On the one hand what Jenny said was largely speaking indefensible. The words were badly chosen and can be misinterpreted as giving support to suicide bombers. Of course it’s easy for someone to criticise with 20/20 hindsight but the media treatment of Cherie Booth over similar comments last year should have taught Jenny to be more circumspect.

On the other hand this seems to me to be yet another case of the media paraphrasing a comment out of existence. The media reaction is as out of proportion on this, as it was over the original Cherie Booth comments.

This does show how much of a lie the claims our media are anti-Isreali. Had Jenny been seen to be giving a similar or even marginally greater level of sympathy for Israel’s soldiers, no one would have batted an eyelid. The Israeli army are supposed to be a legitimate fighting force, yet behave worse than the terrorists they face.

Things

Nicola has gone home to her parents for a couple of days, taking “her” new laptop with her. At present it’s just like a big game boy.

Explorers is going okay ish. Yesterday was an international theme with a chopstick challenge (run from one end of the hall to the other over obstacles carrying chick-peas in the chop-sticks.) a stars and stripes challenge (find the star – name the state) and two run around quizes based on water and rice. The run around quizes turned into amble arounds. I don’t know whether it’s me or whether 14-18 year olds just have short attention spans- but I struggle to get something out of this lot. They don’t seem to want to do anything I set, or come up with anything they want to do. Perhaps they just want to go out of a Wednesday night and be entertained.

Managed to get my PC running without crashing- removed the cover and it ran all night nearly.

Problem is this makes it perfect for Nicola to play games on.

Bus rage?

Peter Black (AM) asks why bus drivers are seen as hate figures for some, worse even than politicians.

For some it may be bus lane envy, or traffic jam frustrations causing them to misidentify bis drivers as a target for demonisation. However as a bus user, I see a different side. Bus drivers can’t help there being too few buses when people wish to travel, meaning people stand at the bus stop while 95% full buses sweep past. But they can help their attitude towards customers.

Many don’t seem to realise that they are customer servants, and as such owe their passengers a certain degree of civility. The other day I got on the wrong bus. Frustrating enough, but the driver had clearly been off the day customer care was taught. I pressed the bell in heavy traffic but we crawled past my stop. It would have made no difference to his schedule to stop in the express area. Nor would a sense of deference towards his customer have cost anything either.

“Do you know what bus this is?” sneered the driver.
“71″
“No X35″.
Pause.
“Er are you going to tell me where I can get off?”

Wholly inadequate. A more ideal transaction would have been:

“Excuse me sir, terribly sorry about this, but I think you may have got on the wrong bus. This is the X35 an express service and unfortunately I’m not allowed to stop before the Esso station further up.”

But then, as some claim, we’ve never been much cop at customer service here.

On time

Scout census is due to be emailed in before 18th January, so I did it 10 minutes ago. It’s not the 18th for a good oooh 50 minutes is it.