Down The Pan

The Daily Torygraph headlines a story about India thusly: India has more mobile phones than toilets: UN report

The report actually says only one third of the population of India has access to proper sanitation, which is entirely different.

Anyway, if we take the headline at face value and ponder the fact that, according to a Wikipedia page, The UK has 75 million phones for 61 million people I would hazard that in the UK there are more toilets than phones, too.

Normally You'd Just Get A Special Unlockable Character

According to the Telegraph a man in Gloucestershire found Ecstasy in a game manual for a preowned copy of GTA (IV I guess, the article isn't specific). Look here it says:

Richard Thornhill said the consequences could have been "horrific" if the tablets had been found by his son Jamie, or by his daughter Danielle, 16.

[...]

"I have two children and my son plays Xbox all the time. He could easily have opened the box and found them.

"I dread to think what the consequences would have been if he had. He is only 12. He could have died."

You should also look here, at the bottom left:



So, he's a cheap, lazy father who is quite happy to give his children age-inappropriate material.

Mr Thornhill, 34, a tool hire company manager

Three too many words.

£50 Million In Heroin Is Only £100,000 (Also Not Actually Heroin)

Ministry of Defence propaganda and the Afghan drug war

So operation DIESEL, in reality, resulted in the finding and destruction of somewhere in the region of 1300kg of unprocessed opium and an a quantity of the chemicals required to process opium into heroin. A few quick sums: According to the UNODC the 'farm-gate' price for opium in Afghanistan in 2008 was $85 a kilo, and these DIESEL stockpiles were presumably not far from the Helmand farms on which they were produced. 1300 x 85 = $110,500, in other words, opium worth approximately £78,000 to the Taliban, at this point in the supply chain.

Were this 1300kg of opium to have been turned into low grade heroin (and we can reasonably suspect that this was what was going to happen), on the basis that it takes around 10kg of opium to produce 1 kg of heroin, it would have produced around 130kg. If the ‘street price’ of a kilo of heroin in the UK is estimated to be around £50- 75,000, then 130 kilos would earn you somewhere between £6.5 and £9.7 million. A very large sum of money certainly, albeit nowhere near £50 million.

It does make you wonder what drugs the MoD is on.

Literally

As if to prove not all football fans are illiterate, comes the story of hoax player Masal Bugduv and some sly Irish humour.

Telegraph Lambasts Government For Giving Sensible Advice

The headline says "Absurd" new guidelines advise pet owners against allowing dogs to beg at the table, because, obviously the Government has no right to tell us how to care for our pets.

The fun thing, though, is in the first paragraph:

Chocolate, raisins or grapes are "poisonous" for pets, according to the code

I've not checked for raisins and grapes, but it's long been known that chocolate can be harmful to dogs. As snopes has it:

Theobromine [a chemical found in chocolate] affects the heart, central nervous system, and kidneys, causing nausea and vomiting, restlessness, diarrhea, muscle tremors, and increased urination. Cardiac arrhythmia and seizures are symptoms of more advanced poisoning. Other than induced vomiting, vets have no treatment or antidote for theobromine poisoning. Death can occur in 12 to 24 hours.

So chocolate is not "poisonous" it's straight up actual poisonous.

Tis The Season

I'm pretty sure I've read this article, or something very much like it, a few times before. In short it goes something like this:

Confident, possibly attractive New York women fails to pull at some event or other.
Realising the problem isn't her, or her judgemental, condescending manner, she looks for another possibility.
She comes up with one. English men's fear of sex, say, or, in this case, English drinking habits.
Generalises to whole country.
Includes flight to notorious drinking spot (Dublin, Ibiza or where ever, in this case Prague), so she can compare her normal, rarefied society to the oiks.
Writes article about it for quality rag (maybe also gets book deal).

The hilarious follow up to this is the stampede of English people rushing to furiously agree with her in the comments, because Englishness is nothing if not the ability to look at other English people with revulsion, followed by a handful of denials and at least one sarcastic reply.

I went to a dinner party the other night. The new yorker sitting next to me was brash, rude, passive-aggressive and generally unpleasant, so I stayed quiet for the first part of the meal while enjoying a little wine to dull the pain. Later I made sarcastic remarks about her she didn't understand.

Then, probably, a second wave of responses will come when the Guardian, seeing how many hits the Times piece is getting, writes a piece asking if the English (or British, as it tends to be for these things, though I doubt that Sarah Lyall met a single Northern Irish or Welsh person) are really like that. Normally concluding that, despite the Guardian (and Times for that matter) readership being sensible people who like a bottle of red wine or two with dinner but don't have a problem and who aren't generally loutish on holiday, well yes we guess the British really are a terrible lot, except when we aren't.

Really, though, to top it all off Ms. Lyall should have made the now de rigueur trip to Rotherham and had an awful experience in a Working Man's Club. Though may be that's in the book.

Just When You Thought Their Reputation Couldn't Get Any Lower...

... bankers find a new low to go to. Apparently some on the right, ignoring the obvious reason that the current calamity has been caused by a bunch of rich venal fucks who you wouldn't trust with their granddaughter's piggy bank, are blaming the finacial crisis on being forced to help out poor people (read "darkies" or other, worse epithets).

Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity."

I'm not usually one to advocate violence, but Krauthammer needs a kick in the balls. Several. Until he recants this nonsense. And then till he passes out. Same goes for anybody else who believes that rubbish.

Via 3QD.