Condorosa

Things are rather windy here at the moment as I read that the coalition are planning a £1,000,000,000.00p scheme to get a few NEETs off the dole! Think about that one…(doh! do you really need to?)
Meself I’m thinking of where that £billion will have come from in the first place! (Now defunct job-providing companies perhaps – surely not?)

There is a giggle or two as well as, on the same page, are ‘adverts’ for a) solar-heating panels – how cheap they are because the government can’t legally lift the subsidy (brilliant sales pitch that!) and b) wood-burning stoves! The latter will give you a bit of heat (more from chopping wood than burning it!) while the former do bugger-all this friggin’ weather!
A turbine story, on the same page, wood have made me day sunshine!

Helen from Blue Peter (the children’s programme not that porn website! ) is on her way cycling to South Pole. Good luck chuck – had things gorn wrong you might have had to cycle through Radcliffe today!

Tomorrow, perhaps, a Blue Peter presenter has a go at cycling across Antarctica. Good luck Helen!
Meanwhile Josh buys a new ATB…
I’ll put a bit of air in my tyres too shortly and go for a run.
While all this goes on Bentley, yes, the posh car folk, report 37% sales increase last year and Nissan, at Sunderland, knocked-out 480,485 new cars in 2011! A record for a UK car-plant.
Mind you, have you seen Rail Fares lately?
Luckily BMW are sending 4000 cars over for big-wig transport at the 2012 Olympics, so that’s all right then!

2012 and Holts Manchester Brown Ale is better than ever! As too a lump of Stilton with a cracker!
Holts Brewery is close to Manchester’s River Irwell, a possible reason for its potency! NASA actually rate one or two of its spectacular brews as Rocket-Fuel – they’ve veto’d one or two more as too powerful!
Strangely, a few years ago, Holts, together with Guinness, were available and indeed offered, on The National Health! Hospitals were jam-packed! Apparently the saving on anesthetics was enormous!
But New Year is the time for resolutions and for those on ciggies one such may be paramount.
But bearing in mind that New Year resolutions are always broken, it is wise, in the case of smoking, to say, “I will NOT give up ciggies.”
Then go ahead, break it!

Have a good one!

Another day of murk again with the hills befogged in thick, drizzly cloud. South East water though, apparently entrenched in drought, have asked ‘customers’ not to take baths to save water.
So I will join in with them in sympathy…

I watched Military Wives programme on TV last night. A good insight into getting a choir of ordinary folk singing. Highspot for moi was when they did that Bob Dylan song – just awesome. It’s on youtube somewhere if you fancy a listen.

Meanwhile, archaeologists and scientists are studying an obsidian bracelet, that’s volcanic glass in English, made some nine or ten thousand years ago. Apparently its finishing and polishing is all but impossible to re-create today! Yet the maker would have lived and worked in what we call the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Period.
In Hungary they’ve erected a statue of Steve Jobs…
Mmmm…I wonder if they’ll be able to re-create that in ten thousand years?

At the beeb global-warming, eu warming, and anti-everything website they ask: “What’s it like being jobless at Christmas?”
In a nutshell? Bloody marvelous!

It’s bright and mild this morning and, after the solstice, slowly getting lighter again.
But the glut of different coloured dustbins that now stand where once trees pumped oxygen into me garden is a constant worry.
No one knows what time men will call to empty them. So at a fine-avoiding 6.30 a.m., when it’s pitch-black outside, you’re up tryinta decide which bin is foggy grey or mushy-pea-green, in case you shove the wrong one to the pavement for the emptiers. (Huge fine?)
What you have to remember is: Is it the grey week, or the green week, or the blue week or the brown week? Or, is it one of the weeks when two or more are permeated from the four for collection on the same day?
Or is it, you ask yourself, the week, that surely must occur, when no bins are collected at all!

A murky morning again with really low cloud over the hills – mind you yesterday Boris the Mayor was seen down Diagon Alley. Maybe he was after a wand…

In such austere times, like old Vince, I wouldn’t give-up me heating allowance either! For him it’s just more of the same, for me it’s getting me own back!

In things national health a new term has been coined – The Super Quango. It’s not officially kicked-off and losing money like water down a plughole yet, but already about 5,000 otherwise doled ex-other-quango mouths-to-feed have already signed-up. The brief? To protect our health.
Whether we want it protecting or not.

Some interesting snippets around in the news as, locally, the weather is murky and unclear.
An mp no less whinges about his student loans, money borrowed, and borrowed by thousands as they educate themselves.
Meanwhile The Turin Shroud and Stonehenge, despite much scrutiny and research, still defy academe as to what they are and how they were made.

A bit of mushy snow falls here today as, rumour pervades, the beeb are to build a real Tardis for Dr. Who, rather than just film time-travel in the studio!

Exeter council say managers can now track their bin-collections, from council HQ, on satellite CCTV.
Mind you, if you didn’t pay for one, you’d not have to pay for the other.
Doh!

The TV gaffe’s continue as viewers are stunned to see that The Wombles of Wimbledon are really people in funny suits.
Shock horror!!

In Coventry they’ve been deluged with shedloads of apples falling for about an hour from the sky.
A core of a plot surely for Dr. Who to get his teeth into – but where is he when you need him?
(Filming at The Nebula II Galaxy five hundred light years north of Wapping!)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

A murky old morning as The Coalition target ‘problem families’ in a big way that they say cost us £9 billion a year. (Mail)
With the new proposals that figure should rise by oh, at least double!
But, interestingly, ‘The Coalition says Labour’s welfare legacy means there are many parts of Britain where three generations of families have never worked and live a life funded by state benefits’.
Do they mean The Houses of Parliament? Of course not, silly me.

The good news is that Self – Employment numbers are now up to 4.1 million after 166,000 chose the brave path between August and October. A spokeswoman for Capital Economics said, ‘…the jump is likely to reflect people resorting to self-employment.’
As if it’s a crime? But obviously no one at Capital Economics is tarred with the ‘self-employed’ brush, so are they funded? Don’t they have a boss?
A spokesman for The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development said, ‘..it’s a sign of economic weakness not strength..’
Again, no self-employment there then! Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mick Jagger, Kelly Brook, Cliff Richard, Clint Eastwood…just a few ‘economically weak’ folk then eh?
Bear in mind that to self-employed folk the biggest ‘problem families’ are those govern-mentally funded!

Mmmm…Moss Bros, upmarket clothiers, report good High-Street and Online sales, (Mary) well, all those newly self-employed folk have to look good don’t they?
And doubtless therein is a good, initial ‘quality’ thought for those so braving.