Can't argue with that logic. Roll on 2015.
Friday 19 September 2014
Something I learned from the Scottish independence debate
Can't argue with that logic. Roll on 2015.
Tuesday 9 September 2014
Swedish Piano Stairs
This is what happens when a country doesn't spend all its money on tax cuts and wars, illegal or otherwise.
However it could be that VW paid for it all, which is a shame as their cars are still overpriced blandmobiles.
Monday 25 August 2014
Best hospital food ever
It's all very well Channel 4 being sniffy about this. But they're the ones with a national TV franchise that puts out programmes for idiots all day long ...
Fry-up in a pie served at hospital in Dundee - send us your hospital food pics using #c4frypie http://t.co/fYrG2gAA7c pic.twitter.com/bwzGm9gjyl
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 25, 2014Saturday 17 May 2014
Sunday 11 May 2014
The Nazi Oath to Hitler
Autocorrects don't usually make me laugh. This one did.
From Cormac O'Rourke (@cormacorourke19) on Twitter:
My mom always asks me what time I'll be home, so I changed "home" in her shortcuts to the Nazi Oath to Hitler.
From Cormac O'Rourke (@cormacorourke19) on Twitter:
My mom always asks me what time I'll be home, so I changed "home" in her shortcuts to the Nazi Oath to Hitler.
Friday 2 May 2014
Got any tickets?
This 'Got any tickets?' cartoon appeared in a West Ham United programme just before the 1964 Cup Final - which took place 50 years ago today.
Tuesday 25 February 2014
Video games
This was the first video game I ever owned.
Well ... the one we had was a clone - a white plastic case instead of the wood veneer finish, but exactly the same four games and graphics (and yes there are subtle difference between this and others which I can identify!)
The game called Handball on the American version was called Squash/Handball on ours. The one we had might have also been called "TV Fun" but I can't remember who made it, it was someone like Binatone (but not them)
It was in white moulded plastic with two paddles and probably came from Romford Market. The above ad was from JC Penney in 1976; we probably got ours the same time.
Well ... the one we had was a clone - a white plastic case instead of the wood veneer finish, but exactly the same four games and graphics (and yes there are subtle difference between this and others which I can identify!)
The game called Handball on the American version was called Squash/Handball on ours. The one we had might have also been called "TV Fun" but I can't remember who made it, it was someone like Binatone (but not them)
It was in white moulded plastic with two paddles and probably came from Romford Market. The above ad was from JC Penney in 1976; we probably got ours the same time.
Tuesday 11 February 2014
Sunday 9 February 2014
Tuesday 4 February 2014
Ello Ello Ello, What's All This Then?
The Met Police's team after 27 Ryman League games this season.
Edit: Have been asked if they play their home games at Letsbee Avenue.
Edit: Have been asked if they play their home games at Letsbee Avenue.
Monday 3 February 2014
Sunday 26 January 2014
Freckles and his Friends
From the Ottawa Citizen, 4 March 1936. This is the kind of thing I end up looking at when there's nothing on TV in the evening.
I'm not sure who needs a talking-to the most - the robbers or the kids. Hasn't he ever heard of the Darwin Awards?
I'm not sure who needs a talking-to the most - the robbers or the kids. Hasn't he ever heard of the Darwin Awards?
Saturday 8 June 2013
Prankster Photoshops People Into Ads While They Wait for the Bus
I'll go somewhere interesting again soon. In the meantime ...
Tuesday 14 May 2013
Part 20 - My odyssey of beers from many lands
While my experience on the Trans-Siberian train wasn't the drunken vodka-fuelled rampage that everyone claims it to be, I did manage to sample a lot of the local fare. I didn't JUST drink beer, but hey, it's Russia, not much else to do sometimes ...
This actually says Zhiguly. It was very nice. It was 250 roubles (£5.20) for 500ml in the Hotel Cosmos. It was also 55 roubles (£1.14) in the kiosk at Ulan Ude. 9/10.
This is Kozel, a Czech beer served in the wrong glass by a very unhelpful barman. It also cost about 300 roubles (£6.20) for 500ml in the Hotel Cosmos. Wasn't very nice though. 6/10.
I had this one, Stare Misto, in the London Pub (what else) in Kiev. Despite lack of Cyrllic it's a Ukrainian beer. 8/10.
Chernigiv-something? Another Ukrainian feast. 7/10.
This is Spaten, served in the wrong glass in my hotel in Moscow. Grumpy barman didn't make it taste better. 5/10.
Baltika 7 was the best of the Baltikas we saw. There was a 0, a 3 and a 9 version too and there are probably all the ones in between too. They vary in strength but this one hit the spot. 9/10.
Here it is again, in a one-litre can version. That's quite a big can. They're common in Russia (in places that actually have stocks of beer).
Abakanskoe beer. Better than the food. 7/10.
Syngur beer from Mongolia. This was very enjoyable. 9/10.
Borgio - as it says on the can, a Mongolian "lager beer" (those two words just make me think of Mitchell and Webb). 7/10.
Finally, a continuation of my journey which I didn't quite make. This is Hite, a South Korean beer I picked up in a supermarket in Peace Street, Ulaanbaatar. It cost about 60 pence but most beers were a bit cheaper than that. It was quite nice - like a lot of Eastern beers it is brewed from rice instead of hops. 7/10.
This actually says Zhiguly. It was very nice. It was 250 roubles (£5.20) for 500ml in the Hotel Cosmos. It was also 55 roubles (£1.14) in the kiosk at Ulan Ude. 9/10.
This is Kozel, a Czech beer served in the wrong glass by a very unhelpful barman. It also cost about 300 roubles (£6.20) for 500ml in the Hotel Cosmos. Wasn't very nice though. 6/10.
I had this one, Stare Misto, in the London Pub (what else) in Kiev. Despite lack of Cyrllic it's a Ukrainian beer. 8/10.
Chernigiv-something? Another Ukrainian feast. 7/10.
This is Spaten, served in the wrong glass in my hotel in Moscow. Grumpy barman didn't make it taste better. 5/10.
Baltika 7 was the best of the Baltikas we saw. There was a 0, a 3 and a 9 version too and there are probably all the ones in between too. They vary in strength but this one hit the spot. 9/10.
Here it is again, in a one-litre can version. That's quite a big can. They're common in Russia (in places that actually have stocks of beer).
Abakanskoe beer. Better than the food. 7/10.
Syngur beer from Mongolia. This was very enjoyable. 9/10.
Borgio - as it says on the can, a Mongolian "lager beer" (those two words just make me think of Mitchell and Webb). 7/10.
Finally, a continuation of my journey which I didn't quite make. This is Hite, a South Korean beer I picked up in a supermarket in Peace Street, Ulaanbaatar. It cost about 60 pence but most beers were a bit cheaper than that. It was quite nice - like a lot of Eastern beers it is brewed from rice instead of hops. 7/10.
Part 19 - The Zaisan Monument
Ulaanbaatar is a very odd-shaped city. It goes on for several miles east-west - maybe 15 or so in each direction from the centre - with only a few miles north-south. The Zaisan monument is only a couple of miles from the city centre but it overlooks the whole city, sitting on the edge of the impressive Bogdkhan Uul mountain which imposes over the city.
Having reached the monument Erdenee stopped to get some lunch from the kiosk at the foot of the stairs. No one told me I had to climb up 295 steps to get to the top! (Yes I counted them all).
What's worse of course is when I get to the top, out of breath, there's a 90-year-old lady standing there. Okay, so the climb wasn't that hard.
The monument is impressive and the view is impressive. On the outside you've got a stone-cold communist lump of concrete complete with hammers and sickles and images of Lenin and Sukhbaatar, the father of modern Mongolia. Inside you've got a mosaic presented by the Communists to the grateful people of Mongolia showing the struggle of the Mongolian people against various capitalists and imperialists through the ages.
The view over the city is pretty impressive too.
At the bottom there was something else going on with a tank and another communist frieze. I'll come back to you on this one!
Having reached the monument Erdenee stopped to get some lunch from the kiosk at the foot of the stairs. No one told me I had to climb up 295 steps to get to the top! (Yes I counted them all).
What's worse of course is when I get to the top, out of breath, there's a 90-year-old lady standing there. Okay, so the climb wasn't that hard.
The monument is impressive and the view is impressive. On the outside you've got a stone-cold communist lump of concrete complete with hammers and sickles and images of Lenin and Sukhbaatar, the father of modern Mongolia. Inside you've got a mosaic presented by the Communists to the grateful people of Mongolia showing the struggle of the Mongolian people against various capitalists and imperialists through the ages.
The view over the city is pretty impressive too.
At the bottom there was something else going on with a tank and another communist frieze. I'll come back to you on this one!
Part 18 - A great big statue of Ghengis Khan
Today I've decided to get one of the locals to drive me around all morning and afternoon. And just in case I needed to reassess the wisdom of the decision, I've gone and found myself a car with HELP in big letters on the side of it.
The driver is Erdenee from Helptaxi and he's collected me at 10.15am from the hotel. My plan is to visit the Chinggis Khan Equestrian Statue at Tsonjin Boldog, 54 km east of the city. I expected it to take an hour or so to get there, an hour back, simple?
One thing I've already experienced from crossing the road is that drivers don't give way to pedestrians or each other. There are zebra crossings but they are always ignored, and there's no such thing as cars giving way to each other - they just drive out and merge. It's the worst driving I've ever seen - but it's not aggressive driving. I didn't see any accidents or anyone nearly get run over. It's an organised chaos and everyone accepts it as a way of life.
This chaos has taken Erdenee ONE HOUR to get out of Ulaanbaatar and onto the road that heads east. The traffic was horrendous - he said a few roads were closed and it was forcing everyone onto the same roads. Cars are weaving in and out of lanes, cutting each other up. What's worse is that I only saw ONE direction sign, and that was soon after leaving the hotel. It's almost impossible to do this without satnav - unless you're a guy like Erdenee, who's clearly done the Mongolian knowledge and took every shortcut he could to get us out quicker.
As we got out of the town it got predictably a lot more rural. The roads were terrible though. If you live anywhere where there are potholes in the road, you still won't have seen anything like this. The Chinese built a better motorway that goes to Beijing, but unfortunately we didn't go on that one.
It took nearly two hours in all to make it over to the Ghengis Khan statue. But it was worth it. It's basically a big steel statue, 40 metres high and probably the same amount or more long. Because of the way the land lies you can't see it for miles around, but it's still amazing when you get the first glimpse of it.
When we got there we were the only ones there so I pretty much had the place to myself, although a few more tourists turned up within half an hour or so. Well worth the 7000 Togrog (£3.20) it cost to get in.
Going back, I asked Erdenee if we could stop off at Zaisan, a momunent on the south side of the city. He said yes, no problem, I know a shortcut. This is where the shortcut started ...
And here are some of the ROADS we travelled on ...
If you can imagine driving through a quarry with jagged rocks on the ground, or just grass with nothing ahead of you but a few vague tracks, that's Erdenee's road. Even if you did have satnav you'd give it a go because the roads are shown on Google Maps, but you'd come to a point very soon where you'd think the road had ended and would just turn back, but there we were travelling across the plains, over rocks, up and down banks where vehicles shouldn't rightly be allowed at all, and we didn't even have a 4x4 to do it in. Fair play to the guy, he knew exactly where he was going, and if was a shortcut, we didn't hit another traffic jam until we hit the Zaisan monument (not literally, of course).
The driver is Erdenee from Helptaxi and he's collected me at 10.15am from the hotel. My plan is to visit the Chinggis Khan Equestrian Statue at Tsonjin Boldog, 54 km east of the city. I expected it to take an hour or so to get there, an hour back, simple?
One thing I've already experienced from crossing the road is that drivers don't give way to pedestrians or each other. There are zebra crossings but they are always ignored, and there's no such thing as cars giving way to each other - they just drive out and merge. It's the worst driving I've ever seen - but it's not aggressive driving. I didn't see any accidents or anyone nearly get run over. It's an organised chaos and everyone accepts it as a way of life.
This chaos has taken Erdenee ONE HOUR to get out of Ulaanbaatar and onto the road that heads east. The traffic was horrendous - he said a few roads were closed and it was forcing everyone onto the same roads. Cars are weaving in and out of lanes, cutting each other up. What's worse is that I only saw ONE direction sign, and that was soon after leaving the hotel. It's almost impossible to do this without satnav - unless you're a guy like Erdenee, who's clearly done the Mongolian knowledge and took every shortcut he could to get us out quicker.
As we got out of the town it got predictably a lot more rural. The roads were terrible though. If you live anywhere where there are potholes in the road, you still won't have seen anything like this. The Chinese built a better motorway that goes to Beijing, but unfortunately we didn't go on that one.
It took nearly two hours in all to make it over to the Ghengis Khan statue. But it was worth it. It's basically a big steel statue, 40 metres high and probably the same amount or more long. Because of the way the land lies you can't see it for miles around, but it's still amazing when you get the first glimpse of it.
When we got there we were the only ones there so I pretty much had the place to myself, although a few more tourists turned up within half an hour or so. Well worth the 7000 Togrog (£3.20) it cost to get in.
Going back, I asked Erdenee if we could stop off at Zaisan, a momunent on the south side of the city. He said yes, no problem, I know a shortcut. This is where the shortcut started ...
And here are some of the ROADS we travelled on ...
If you can imagine driving through a quarry with jagged rocks on the ground, or just grass with nothing ahead of you but a few vague tracks, that's Erdenee's road. Even if you did have satnav you'd give it a go because the roads are shown on Google Maps, but you'd come to a point very soon where you'd think the road had ended and would just turn back, but there we were travelling across the plains, over rocks, up and down banks where vehicles shouldn't rightly be allowed at all, and we didn't even have a 4x4 to do it in. Fair play to the guy, he knew exactly where he was going, and if was a shortcut, we didn't hit another traffic jam until we hit the Zaisan monument (not literally, of course).
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