Not on tick exactly, but close. I’m gobsmacked to learn that you can rent guns for $10. DIY death at discounted prices – only in a certain country…
A commenter on YouTube called this guy ‘the Colonel Sanders of murder’. Exactly.
UPDATE: Compare and contrast:
(Do they mean wigs or weed, btw?) Cognitively dissonant much, America?
What a pretty little pickle Nick Clegg’s found himself in. If he goes with the Tories he gets;
whereupon Clegg’ll be;
after which, he’ll be
all whilst having earned;
and
If he goes with Labour (but only if he can somehow get the numbers to work out) Clegg gets:
plus
and
So far as I can see Clegg’s best (for certain values of ‘best’) option would be to refuse an alliance with either, let the Tories try and form a minority government, and start campaigning like hell for the next election when it all falls apart.
Which it undoubtedly will.
UPDATE Sunday noon
This morning’s X- ray shows it’s pleurisy, probably fungal and migrated from the yeast infection in my kidney. That’s the trouble with being immunosuppressed, any stray infective organism sees me and goes “come on guys -FREE FOOD!
Damn it, I haven’t been through all this just to fall to a fungus at the last hurdle. And I suppose better a pleural infection than a heart infection. I do try to be resilient, but still, the bright side is a little hard to find sometimes.
UPDATE Sunday a.m: Just call me Job. The shoulder pain got much worse during the night – it seems I may well have dry pleurisy and/or pericarditis.
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
But never mind, there’s always an upside to everything, and if I hadn’t had to look up pericarditis I’d’ve never come across the amusingly named coxsackie virus..
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Light posting from me today: the reason is that, when I was intensive care post kidney transplant, the medics tried numerous times to put in an arterial line (Considering the damage, they must’ve used a hammer and chisel.)
Doing this caused several massive haematomae – and subsequently scar tissue – to form up my right arm and damaged both my radial and median nerves. The damage appears to be permanent. (More than you ever wanted to know about needles and nerve damage here)
The practical upshot is that my right hand and arm are numb yet paradoxically incredibly painful at the same time and my shoulder hurts like a very, very hurty thing, and as I have a high tolerance for painkillers, it takes morphine to shut it up.
Yes, I know I should be grateful to still be here and I know too that yet again, they were trying to stop me from dying, but bloody hell, don’t they know I have blogposts to write?
Not that anyone reads them, but I have rage to offload. Especially about the election.
Anyhow, if you don’t read anything else today, read Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science piece, “The real political nerds”, on just how crappy the data management of election information by UK gov has been and how intelligent bystanders have taken up the slack. It’s packed with interesting links if you, like me, are a political nerd too.
“Want to look back at how people voted in your local council elections over the past 10 years?†asks Chris: “Tough. Want to compare turnout between different areas, and different periods? No can do. Want an easy way to see how close the election was last time, and how much your vote might make a difference? Forget it.â€
Like so many data problems, all that’s needed is a tiny tweak: all this information is known to someone, somewhere, and it’s all been typed in, several times over, in several places, local websites, newspapers, and so on.
So what the hell have we been paying for all this time?
I’m listening to Any Questions on Radio 4 (click for podcast) atm and someone’s just asked the panel who they think the next Labour leader will be. Several panel members suggested Alan Johnson….
Remember, you heard it here first.
Do Keep Up, Pundits
I predict, right here and now, that Alan Johnson will be the next leader of the Labour party. I’m even willing to put a fiver on it, as I did on John Major, and I was right about him too…
….who would this likely new leader be? Harriet Harman? Dawn Primarolo? Cooper herself ? Those cooing martinets of incompetence offend women and men alike. Straw? Iraq – enough said. Hillary Benn? Not unless technocracy gets sexy all of a sudden. One of the Millibands? Surely they can’t’ve finished their work experience already….
You see what I mean. Who’s left that hasn’t pissed everyone off, but Alan Johnson?
Jackie Ashley, recently-turned former Brownite, in The Guardian this morning:
… If the party gets the kind of historic shredding the polls suggest then all bets are off.
…Stopping that kind of meltdown is focusing many minds and explains why Alan Johnson has become such a fashionable figure. He is genuine, genial, moderate and working class. He has spoken loyally without sounding greasy – and without closing the door on his own emergence as a unity candidate leader. Yesterday, defending Hazel Blears, he emphasised her roots as a working-class woman. “Blokes and blokettes, keeping calm and carrying on” would be the message.
What did I tell you? Sometimes even I’m shocked at my own prescience. Anyone willing to stake a fiver against Johnson now?
And his revenge is cruel yet just.
From The Metro:
Woman sentenced over goth kittens
A woman has been sentenced to six months house arrest for trying to sell ‘gothic kittens’ with piercings on the internet.
35-year-old Holly Crawford, of Pennsylvania, was also ordered to shut her dog grooming business for more than two years after being convicted of animal cruelty in February.
Prosecutors said that Crawford gave the three black kittens ear and neck piercings because ‘she thought it was neat’ to sell goth kittens on the web.
Crawford insisted that she used sterilised equipment and checked carefully on the kittens’ health. She said she had started piercing kittens on a whim, when she first decided to pierce the ears and neck of a stray kitten she took in last autumn and named Snarley Monster.
She was offering her pierced kittens for sale online for hundreds of dollars when authorities were tipped off by charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. More….
