From Overheard in New York | The Voice of the City…
Sassy flight attendant: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will be released from the overhead above your seat. After the screaming subsides, please place the oxygen mask around your nose and mouth. If you are traveling with a child or an adult who is acting like a child, place your mask on first before attempting to help put theirs on. –Flight out of LaGuardia
From an email reporting an exchange overheard in New York:
Old lady, to woman speaking on Bluetooth headset: “Excuse me, but are you talking to yourself?”
Woman just looks at her and keeps talking.
Old lady: “Because, if you are, you should be nicer to yourself.”
Reminds me of the time a colleague of mine was walking down a long, deserted corridor in Denver airport at night. Coming towards him was a very large black guy who spoke thus: “First I’m gonna whip your ass, then I’m gonna kill ya”.
Just as my friend was composing himself for sudden death he noticed the hands-free wire dangling from the chap’s left ear.
Hooray! My esteemed colleague, Ray Ison, has started a Blog which gives him a soap-box on which to rant about the idiocies of the governmental and corporate world.
From today’s Guardian…
John Reid will sanction the forced removal of up to 32 Iraqis today after telling the high court he would ignore any last-minute legal challenge to their deportation. The Guardian has learned that the home secretary has told the high court that today’s specially chartered flight will not be stopped by anything short of an injunction.
Last November, an attempt to deport more than 70 Iraqi Kurds ended with just 20 going home because of a host of last-ditch legal applications. Mr Reid has since decided to take a tougher stance and told the high court today’s flight would go ahead regardless of any legal applications.
Footnote for overseas readers: Dr Reid is the British Minister of the Interior. For some reason, he is called the Home Secretary. It’s a sinister post which turns almost all its occupants into monsters. The only exception I can think of is the late Roy ‘Woy’ Jenkins, an erudite, civilised and liberal man who wound up as Chancellor of Oxford University.
Amazing animation.
Lovely post on Thomas the Tank Engine Blog. It’s headed “John Naughton Certified as Braindead; Few are Surprised” and goes on:
In my first ever attention grabbing, go out on a limb, blog post, I decided to comment on John Naughton including Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (1984-1991) among his worst 50 TV shows of all time (discussed here).
The inevitable conclusion of his including Thomas and Friends on such a list is that he’s lost his mind. I suppose there might be other conclusions… feel free to post below should you think of any but my list is as follows:
John Naughton is so stupid that he sits on the TV and watches the couch
John Naughton recently sat on an airplane in close proximity to a loud-mouthed Thomas loving 2 year old
John Naughton thought no one would pay any attention to him unless he said something so stupid that it was news worthy (I have no doubt that this is true… whether he realizes it I have no idea)…
Good stuff, eh? It goes on a bit in the same vein.
Sadly, it’s nothing to do with me. There’s another guy with the same name who writes about film and TV for low-rent magazines (and, I think, the Sunday Times). I still get sarcastic flak from my academic colleagues over a review he wrote, many years ago, of a compilation of stag night videos!
Just for the record, I loved Thomas the Tank Engine and often had learned (and interminable) conversations with my kids about Annie and Clarabelle (who — I need hardly remind you — are Thomas’s carriages).
Later… It’s interesting to see what bloggers pick up. When I looked on Google Blog Search, I found that the two things that had been most widely linked to were my piece about ‘websites that changed the world’, and my doppleganger’s Radio Times piece about the worst TV programmes ever. Clearly there is something about lists that piques people’s interest.
The interesting thing about the ‘websites’ piece was that I didn’t choose the sites — that was done by other Observer writers. I was merely asked to write the introduction to the list. But that hasn’t saved me. On Friday I was having lunch in Cambridge University’s West site (where the Computer Lab and the Microsoft Lab are located) when a prominent computer scientist walked in, spotted me, and said severely “I have a bone to pick with you, John Naughton”. She then sat down and berated my for the list which — she opined — was far too oriented towards what she dismissively referred to as “leisure sites”.
Interesting report in yesterday’s Guardian.
The annual bill for Whitehall consultants advising government departments is running at more than £2.2bn, an investigation by the Guardian reveals today…
One reason for this is that New Labour ideology includes a naive assumption that ‘business’ methods are invariably superior to old-style ‘public-service’ methods. The problem is that nobody in the Labour leadership knows anything about business because they’ve never run one. And (poor saps) they think that consultantcy firms do. The Guardian report claims that one section of the Department of Health is now staffed by almost as many consultants as full-time officials – 180 civil servants and 170 consultants.
I read the Financial Times every Saturday, mainly because its magazine still contains some of the best book reviews. One of its more quirky features is “Lunch with the FT”, in which a journalist takes some grandee out to lunch at the paper’s expense and, under cover of that, conducts a half-baked interview. This week, the guest was Professor Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian. The lunch was in Wilton’s, a ludicrously expensive restaurant just off Jermyn Street in London. What interested me about the piece was not so much the content (which was pretty banal) as the bill:
1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bernaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x expresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume
Total: £169.88
Wow! iPod eBooks Creator…
This utility/PHP script loads a large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It’s as simple as turning pages of the book…
James Cridland’s in Berlin and has seen the future.
The television has DS:F on it, which until recently has been showing a motor-sport type show, and is now showing what QuizCall would look like if it was also a porn channel. A leggy blonde in yellow hotpants is asking questions to a caller – they could win 200 euros – and has just peeled off her top to display a fearsome set of headlights. She’s now stroking her hotpants suggestively. This is the German equivalent of ITV1, at 10.50pm, folks. This is what might happen at home. Please write to the Daily Mail now…
