But we all knew the Daily Mail would soon revert to type. This poll is inspired by Richard Littlejohn’s column which leads on Fast-tracking the Tarmacing community on the NHS… scroll down and he follows up with an attack on Martin McGuinness, who he alleges is a racist.
Travellers have always been an easy target for racists and Littlejohn plays well to the Daily Mail gallery. These aren’t even proper Romany gypsies, he complains hysterically, but ‘Irish tinkers, itinerant scrap-metal merchants, scruffy hippies left over from the 1983 Glastonbury Festival, or dubious waifs and strays from Eastern Europe doing a bit of freelance begging.’
According to Richard Littlejohn, the edict that they should receive special treatment comes from the ‘diversity industry’ which ‘which takes sadistic pleasure in persecuting the taxpaying majority’. Yet there is enough in Littlejohn’s article to see that he is talking nonsense.
Travellers do suffer significantly poorer health than the rest of the population and the NHS is right to act on that. Richard Littlejohn probably feels they should all live their lives as he lives his and become Daily Mail readers.
Presumably, one of the people his fellow columnist Max Hastings feels is being ignored by politicians, Richard Littlejohn has done much to create a political environment in which racism is acceptable. Let’s hope the travellers continue to reject Littlejohn’s way of life and the politicians continue to ignore him: vote yes to gypsies jumping NHS queues.
Rachel Allen’s whole fruit juicer, which I was recently invited to review by Amazon, is part of the Irish celebrity chef’s range of ‘small domestic appliances’.
As an Irish celebrity chef, it is perhaps inevitable that Rachel’s idea of a small domestic appliance is rather different to mine. Her whole fruit juicer is not a gadget that will be sitting lost and forgotten at the back of one of my kitchen cupboards. My cupboards simply aren’t large enough. The juicer is huge and so demands and expects to permanently reside on a kitchen surface.
The second immediate disappointment is that it doesn’t take many whole fruits, although to be fair the instructions make fruit preparation sound far more onerous that it actually is and you can cut corners. For example, I’ve found that you can get away with just peeling oranges and ripping them in half, while the instructions recommend removing the pips.
The third problem is that the juicer is messy. Fruit needs to be dropped into the juicer while the motor is running. Sometimes it pops right out again. The pulp container doesn’t catch all the pulp and there’s no drip tray, even though juice drips for quite sometime after the machine is finished. The juicer itself is not easy to clean.
You are so limited in the range of fruit the juicer can take, all the smoothie recipes included in the instructions assume you have a liquidiser or blender as well.
Sadly, you don’t get much juice out of a single fruit (not Rachel Allen’s fault, but hey), which makes this an expensive as well as a messy and time consuming option.
What a plonker. It seems Purnell, pictured above during his revolutionary phase, thought himself so important his resignation would be the killer blow to trigger the prime minister’s resignation.
Nevertheless, James Purnell has not offered an alternative vision for the country or an exciting new strategy for Labour to win the next election. He remains tainted by scandal and apparently focussed on personality.
Hopefully Purnell will emerge from his self imposed wilderness years a humbled and committed team player.
A form of political activism, there are a number of good reasons why those who blog and tweet are not particularly representative. Social Media Affairs reckon the BNP is the most talked about party on Twitter, but we don’t know if that’s through their own efforts or those of the Hope Not Hate campaign. It is certainly true that blogging has long appealed to those who believe that what they call mainstream media is hopelessly biased. That is, blogs provide an outlet for reactionaries and we should expect a reforming Labour government to provoke their bile.
So it is true that the Conservatives have some good high profile bloggers in Iain Dale and ConservativeHome, but neither has emerged thanks to the party machine.
What matters most is what the parties have done to establish a new media infrastructure; something less ephemeral and more reliable than a couple of blogs.
Having faced constant criticism for being behind, Labour has gone beyond YouTube channels and Twitter updates to be genuinely innovative with LabourSpace and a virtual phone bank. Much more is on the way, while the Conservatives, convinced the new media is theirs, rest on their laurels. These are the kind of insights an outfit like Social Media Affairs should offer its clients.
Five years ago I shot to number 1 in Google for Carol Kirkwood naked with one of my shortest posts and this continues to attract weather girl fetishists from all over the UK.
Carol appears to have blown her entire wardrobe budget on perhaps as many as half-a-dozen flasher macs in a range of pastel colours.
I reproduce a couple here for the benefit of Kirkwood fans, but feel a need to point out that she remains far too mumsy for my tastes and I find her rambling weather forecasts virtually indecipherable.
I imagine it’s just me, but the Muzak-style noise made by Sky boxes while you’re desperately searching the programme guide for something to watch is on the verge of driving me mad, or at least reaching for the mute button.
It’s trying so hard to be inoffensive, it can’t help but be totally offensive.
Worse, it reminds me of the worst restaurant meal I ever had. This was taken, not surprisingly, in Wales. The starter was a prawn cocktail, the sauce of which might have been made by mixing tomato ketchup and mayonnaise, it came with a modest, fresh-ish side salad; the main was a piece of salmon that had most likely been frozen a decade before, it came with a modest, not-so-fresh side salad; then there was cheese and biscuits, doorstops of near-frozen coloured cheddars, which came with a modest, wilted side salad.
But what topped the meal, was not so much the recurring side-salad but the inoffensive music they played; Chris De Burgh on bloody pan pipes… over and over again.
Nevertheless, we should spare a thought for the poor session musicians who churn out this crap. Nobody grows up with dreams of making inoffensive Muzak for set-top boxes. The chances are that these people once had dreams of stadium gigs, world tours, groupies and drug fuelled orgies. Instead, they are zombie musicians.
I’m not one for boring people with tales of woe around boring IT stuff, but I have found myself contacting technical support lines a fair bit lately. And going through all that restarting, reinstalling, waiting in online chat rooms, waiting on the phone… it really take it out of you.
And the thing is, there’s no real satisfaction at the end of it.
The best part of a day spent setting up a wireless printer is a day wasted, especially when it turns out that Dell reckon the only to get it working is to not bother securing the network; ‘people will be able to use your internet, but probably not see your files.’
There comes a point where you have to give up and send it back.
Yet there can be no real job satisfaction for the techie either. Days spent in an internet chat room telling people to click start, then control panel… must really take it out of you. And at the end, somebody’s printer might do what it’s supposed to do.
I can’t understand why they don’t all just top themselves.
With the MPs’ expenses scandal so dominant, its seems odd not say something. But the affair is unrelentingly depressing and the speaker’s resignation will have little effect.
Like so many people, MPs feel they should be paid more than they are, but they instinctively know 75 per cent of voters are against them. So rather than pay themselves what they think they’re worth, they like to pretend to be getting by on what they imagine to be a relatively modest wage for the job.
Topping up their salaries with expenses isn’t fiddling in the usual sense, but a long term deliberate strategy to fool the public that they’re getting real value for money.
Too slowly, MPs are coming to realise that the public are not happy and should never be. Parliament should be transparent and that means MPs’ remuneration should be easy to understand.
Yet even those who think they understand the public’s anger are out of touch. Hazel Blears seemed to think waving a cheque about on TV made things all right. Few people who had wrongly claimed £13,332 could make things all right simply by paying the money back after they’d been caught. Most would be prosecuted as well. Many of Blears’ Salford constituents will be earning the minimum wage and won’t make £13k in a year. They won’t be impressed that writing big cheques is so easy for Blears.
Today Gordon Brown emailed Labour Party members to report that the party’s National Executive Committee has established a panel to scrutinise expenses claims made over the last four years. It will have the power to deselect MPs. This will take time and many, including Stuart Bruce, appear to believe every Labour MP should be put up for reselection.
Unfortunately, Luton South has already shown that local parties cannot be relied upon to do the right thing. Here one of the worst offenders may now be challenged by Esther Rantzen. Putting everyone up for reselection would not deliver the result required: heads must roll.
Given that heads must roll individual MPs must receive a fair hearing. Provided those MPs who have most wantonly abused the system are stood down, the NEC will be seen to have taken the right approach, even though it offers little relief in the short term.
Anyway. Watching this video, which Alan Duncan reckons is an unacceptable stunt may cheer you up. The funniest moment comes when the real gardener asks if Duncan knows what’s happening and seems to accept that he does…
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Five years ago I shot to number 1 in Google for 