>Quote

Posted on 23 October, 2009 by jb

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If you talk to God, that’s called “prayer”.
If God talks to you, that’s called “schizophrenia”
Thomas Szasz
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>How silly

Posted on 23 October, 2009 by jb

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BurgerKing in Japan is celebrating Microsoft’s rollout of Windows 7 with a 7 patty Whopper.
A mere 2000 calories.
Given that I’m running Mac OSX 10.5.8 on my PowerBook, I feel I deserve something appropriate.
About 74 metres high, if I’ve worked it all out correctly…
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>"The weather’s so crap"….

Posted on 22 October, 2009 by jb

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said Hildegard at her eponymous cafe in Cornaiano in South Tyrol
“that this might cheer you up a bit”
It was and it did.
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>Lost in translation

Posted on 17 October, 2009 by jb

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Technology refresh time.
Out goes the Becker Highspeed satnav thingy.
In comes the Vermin (Garmin, I think…) Nüvi 1390.
All very flash and even does the text-to-voice trick and tells you the name of the next road.
Which is all very fine if it’s “Main Street” or “Hauptstrasse”, but if you happen to be in Alto Adige (South Tirol/v. Northern Italy to you), you’ll encounter road names such as
Strada Statale Del Tonale e Della Mendola
Now apart from the fact that flossy’s Italian pronunciation is crap leaves a lot to be desired, by the time she’s spat it all out, you’ve overshot the turning by a good 500 metres.
Upon which she suggests that you do a U-turn and try again from the opposite direction.
And by the time she’s spat it all out again (and you can’t read the name of the road on the display because it’s writ very small to fit it into the space where you’ve normally got “Main Street”), you’ve overshot again.
Repeat ad nauseum
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>Forget the Bean Bag…

Posted on 14 October, 2009 by jb

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..here’s the Cactus Sofa

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>Does this really surprise anyone?

Posted on 13 October, 2009 by jb

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The New York Times ran an article on Sunday, titled “U.S. Can’t Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas“
This can’t surprise anyone who’s visited the United States.
When you front up to Immigration, you’re photographed and fingerprinted, questioned and sent on your way with a stamp in your passport and a small stub of green paper.
When you leave the country, you hand in the small stub of green paper to the airline’s check-in agent
Unfortunately, not every does.
Or the small square stub of green paper gets lost.
Or the border official at a land crossing doesn’t ask for it.
So it doesn’t really surprise me that they lost track of almost 3 million visitors last year.

And that’s not counting the Visa Waiver visitors.

Add another 3 million……

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>Current events

Posted on 13 October, 2009 by jb

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Courtesy of Political Irony

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>Scrabbled

Posted on 11 October, 2009 by jb

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Source

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>This is interesting. I think

Posted on 10 October, 2009 by jb

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>Ye who speaketh with forked tongues

Posted on 9 October, 2009 by jb

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Dr. Rowan Williams, the Bishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England (of which I’m a very lapsed member) ripped into the moneychangers in the temple the other week.

Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: “I worry. I feel that’s precisely what I call the ‘lack of closure’ coming home to roost. It’s a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year ‘idolatry’, that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don’t have them.”

Full story here

Now that the C of E has noticed that European Union is quite serious about regulating hedgefunds, there’s been a rapid about-face.

You see, the church’s investments have dropped from £5.7bn to a mere £4.4bn in just over a year and they NEED THOSE HEDGEFUNDS to get their wealth back to where it was and a bit further, if you don’t mind.

Hypocritical bastards

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