January 2012
3 posts
French horn vomit whimsy
I’m so glad you could all make it here today for our little celebration of your time at St Swithin’s School for boys. And I must say how gratifying it is to see how so many of you have succeeded in your chosen careers to become pillars of the professional communities upon which the prosperity of our society rests.
Sir Robert Bingham, as I’m sure you all know, is chairman of the Royal First Bank...
Information underload as Wikipedia goes down
Wikipedia, the world’s only significant source of information you can get at without doing any fucking work at all, closed for 24 hours today to protest something whose details I was going to look up on Wikipedia. Whatever it was – and there is absolutely no way of finding that out now – it was serious enough to merit the suspension of 84% of media activity in the free world, 78% of...
Cruise ship sinking just in time to save national...
You know how you believe something for years and you even say it occasionally when drunk and everyone tells you to be quiet or looks at you in horror and your partner shakes their head and then one day something happens that absolutely proves your broad-brush generalization was spot on all along? Well that’s what the capsize of the Concordia cruise liner does for all those who’ve been...
December 2011
5 posts
Eminent professor admits he is coke head
These really, really make me laugh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30ruBtLIvJM
Sex is dead but it won't lie down
The Japanese are way ahead again. They invented dancing plastic plants to replace the boring, static ones that die. They gave us bleeping mini-eggs as pets and we cared for them more than we care for our aging parents. And they built robots so pervily lifelike that you just knew they were the kind of robots that would get their willies out at you on Barnes Common on a cold, wet November night.
Now...
I could've been a pervert
It came to me that something had gone wrong when I was in Tokyo. Well I’ve had that realization several times much closer to home, often led to it by the therapeutic support of the police, but this time I was hung over and leaning heavily on a podium. For reasons that were clear to no-one, but involved the lack of anyone else willing to do it, I was opening a conference on securities clearing and...
November 2011
17 posts
You timed that like a glove
An ex-colleague of mine who shall remain nameless is a master of mutilation when it comes to the English language. Here is a selection of his finest moments, many on the phone with important clients. If English is not your first language, then as well as apparently having something in common with him, you will also be as confused as he is.
We’re walking on thin water here.
I’ve been in and out...
10 Ways to Beat the Recession
Read every column about economizing written by rich ladies who lunch. Their advice is invaluable.
Don’t buy any more food until you have eaten everything in your freezer. Even the things in foil at the back that might be chicken but could be fish.
Open your own charity shop without telling anyone that you are the charity.
Let Gok Wan dress you and take his haberdashery hints seriously.
At...
Mexican bus horror
There was pandemonium in downtown Ciudad Juarez yesterday when a bus containing 43 innocent Mexicans arrived safely at its final destination. According to police chief Henrique Guapo del Muerte, “No-one has seen anything like this since 2006. Nowadays if we do not find the passengers bound with their own intestines and beheaded by the roadside, or buried in a mass grave and unidentifiable because...
Fat is the new fit
Unfitness is a lot like fitness; you really have to work at it. With fitness, you struggle and pant and sweat for weeks without losing weight or getting any faster and then suddenly, the next run you do doubles your stamina. You lift a few more weights and those weird veins pop out of your biceps when you’re asleep. From then on, you just get fitter and fitter.
Well I find unfitness works the...
Executive pay: “because they're worth it”
Like the expensive hair gunge you’re encouraged to buy because ‘you’re worth it’, executive pay happens to people who believe that they deserve the very best and are prepared to give it to themselves.
Who sets your wages? That’s right, someone you call your boss. Who sets their pay? Right again. Someone they call their boss. But who sets the pay of the guys who run...
This is the birth of European democracy, not its...
So the European Union is steamrollering democracy as it tries to fix the mess it’s created? Greek prime minister Papandreou in Greece is handed his notice by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel because he dares to suggest the Greek people should decide whether they want to starve for the next 10 years. Unelected Eurocrat and Brussels yes-man Mario Monti takes charge of Italy and appoints a cabinet...
It’s not au revoir, France, it’s goodbye. You’re...
In Europe we are still supposed to think of France as a sensible country with its own nuclear launch codes and the right attitude to pirates and not a bunch of greasy, lying spendthrifts, which is what we now think of the Greeks, even though it was only yesterday that they were the blokes who brought us Euclid, democracy and delicious sliced meats at chucking out time.
France has not run a...
Stop shouting at me, I thought this was yoga
A yoga mat is an island of peace in the stormy cauldron of anxiety that middle class life has always been. The gnawing certainty that most of the useless nonsense that modern Britain calls work is not really what we should be doing with our lives has to be kept at bay by something. And if that something is the distraction of wondering how that bloke get his legs to do that or pretending to mumble...
We need to talk about Germany
Now just stay with me, this is important and I’ll make it funny, I promise. We all know about quantitative easing don’t we? You know when the central bank (the government) literally creates money and gives it to the Treasury (the government) by buying more of those government (Treasury) bonds. If that sounds weird to you then it should. The government is paying its credit cards off by...
No-one is innocent →
Death Star Canteen →
I'm sick of trees, take me to the city
By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very...
The hypocrisy of football
So Sepp Blatter couldn’t be dethroned because of the extraordinary corruption of the organization he ruled, the pointlessness of his job, the outrageousness of his compensation, his views on women or homosexuality, but, like Al Capone tripped up by the taxman, he could now find himself on the wrong end of a football boot because of a brief conversation in halting English on the subject of racism...