Adam Laurie demonstrates how easy it is to read, and potentially clone, the new highly secure UK passports. From a distance. Without the owner knowing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1950226,00.html
Last night I released a stupid little blogging tool called Ploppy. It’s a little plugin for WordPress that lets you add a line to each blog describing the state of your bowel movements using the Bristol Stool Scale. For example:
Stools: Type 4 
Like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft
Anyway, this morning I received an appreciative email that nearly caused me to issue a Type 7:
Subject: ploppy rules!
You forgot to mention the painful joys of passing a gigantic 2. As you
stand beside the throne, panting with effort and tears of joy and relief
in your eyes, you hit the flush handle and are then presented with the
sight of your ginormous 2 pitching stern-up like a sinking ship and
whirling round and round with the water, coating the insides of the bowl
in all four quadrants. It is, if done at the office toilet, a
statement: "I was here, and I passed what was to be passed, and I did it
mightily. Your mere skidmarks do not impress me." (that's assuming
you're a thoughtless twit and don't apply the brush to it at once)
Just a cheery bit of scatology to entertain you.
Cheers,
Mike
I love the Internet 🙂
“Every time you turn on your new car, you’re turning on 20 microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you’re using a computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I’m using a computer. The only computer you don’t know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?”
— Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Because neither of us get enough exercise nor spend enough proper time with each other, Michele and I decided to get off the bus early on the way to my parents’ house today; sounds pathetic I know. We alighted in Kidbrooke and, in a desperate attempt to get away from main roads, decided to walk through Sutcliffe Park. Now, in my youth, this was a very dull, flat, park that was only ever really used by local football teams on a Sunday or the occasional funfair. However, a few years ago it was redeveloped and from the road it just looks like they dug a few ditches and left it.
Today we discovered that the redevelopment was a lot more impressive; now Sutcliffe park is a beautiful oasis with the backdrop of urban shite known as “The Ferrier Estate”.
What the council has done is create a wetland environment complete with bridges, a lake, and reedy marshland; it looked just like a mini wetlands centre. We wandered through the idyllic pastures towards the edge of the lake where a few families with young children were feeding the ducks, geese and moorhens. It was beautiful!
One noticeable difference, beyond the landscaping, was the people. When I was a kid they would have been white, battered-faced, fishwife women with tearaway kids shouting “fuck” all the time. Now they were excited but well behaved kids, with fishwife mums all wearing hijabs. Everyone else there was Polish. I love it.
As it was late in the day we had to leave soon after, but on the way out of the park, right where the Quaggy enters, we saw a Heron! A Heron in Sutcliffe Park!
There was also some loony bloke spouting incoherent, growling, claptrap into a video camera with a passionate by slightly mad voice. Look out for him on future Al Quaeda martyrdom videos.
One of the nicest things in the world is having a small, fluffy, green bird, with a beautiful pink neck, perch on the top of your laptop screen, grinding her beak.
Now don’t say I didn’t tell you to Choose Lewisham. And what did you do ? You didn’t Choose Lewisham did you ? No!
As a result of your negligence the poor bosses have had to make sacrifices. Yes, sacrifices! Wonderful, hard-working people like Claire Perry, the Chief Executive of Lewisham Hospital Trust, have had to personally sacrifice 68 of their staff as a result of your indifference. In her own words Claire Perry spells out the simple truth:
“The more people who choose to come to Lewisham, the more income we will get and the better our finances will be.”
It’s that simple. So go out and fucking choose Lewisham will you? I did, even though I wasn’t given a choice, so you can too. If you don’t then they’ll sack even more staff.
Perhaps even more shocking than the 68 staff they sacked are two of the senior bosses who are also about to lose their jobs. These particular people, Vivien Rhodes and Barry Etherton, are far more important than any of the 68 others; you can tell because they both earn around £90,000 which means they must be extremely skilled and talented. They also have further to fall than a bunch of common-or-garden nurses and cleaners so it’ll be harder for them. Thankfully the hospital has wisely decided to bung them £100,000 to cushion the harsh blow. Oh…and they’ll be taking them back on in a consultancy role. Even though the Trust is in financial shite, I confidently expect canny financial management like this will help them save the day.
[Don’t read this if you are eating or have a weak stomach]
Santorum got shafted by Bob Casey Jr during the last night’s American renaissance. This makes me feel a lot better about our impending move. To counter this nice feeling, and staying on the subject of Santorum, I had another visit to the hospital today. This time it was an investigation into a recent eruption of piles – well pile singular in fact but who cares – so as you can imagine I was thrilled to bits at the prospect.
Over the past few years I’ve had to get my pants off for more doctors and nurses than is healthy outside of a “Confessions” film plot; but even so, piles examinations are a little too intimate and embarrassing for me to cope with as quotidian. Fortunately the name of the doc on my chitty was “Mr E Larch” and so I felt slightly less awkward in the build up to the treatment.
However, maybe it’s the water in Lewisham but it would seem that the arse section of Lewisham Hospital is snowed under with patients these days and so instead of “Mr E Larch” I was dealt with by some young female doctor who looked not a day over 19.
The whole experience was too horrific for even me to document but if you want a vague insight into the scene, imagine lying on your side, facing the wall, and having a young woman, an older male and another student sticking fingers and objects of various lengths up your arse so high that it feels like they’re going to choke you.
I left my dignity at the hospital gates and instead walked out with two future appointments, hideous flashbacks, and an enema kit.
Choose Lewisham? My arse…
Remember that Christian-fascist preacher, and close personal friend of
George W, who threw Richard Dawkins out of his church in the documentary ?
Well bugger me if he didn’t turn out to be having a homosexual affair like
a big fat lying hypocritical bag of shit:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/02/leader_of_megachurch.html
update here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/03/voice_mails_are_from.html
Any description of the slaughter that continues in our house would sound like some sort of Stephen King bloodfest. On the morning that we left for America, a little bastard mouse got up early and paraded around the front room in front of us to let us know he would be running shit while we were away.
On the night we got back, we saw him on top of the hoover and a couple of nights later we chased him up the tube – at which point we turned it on. Clunk – captured mouse. We chucked the bag out that night.
However, tonight, after several nights of failing to catch other mice, and failing to suck them up the hoover, I got a call from Michele asking me to find out what model hoover we have so she could buy some more bags. As I opened the top of the chassis, to my horror, there was a dead rotting mouse in there, generating a really nasty smell. There was also a tail hanging down…belonging to a very alive, but not very awake, mouse. Those bastards have been nesting in our hoover! That was a step too far.
Now, anyone that knows me will know that I hate any harm being done to any animals. I’ve even been known to cry over accidentally murdered spiders and snails…but this time was different. I gloved my hand in a plastic bag, grabbed the poor, beautiful, little mouse, and repeatedly smashed the bag with a wine bottle. The whole experience really freaked me out but it seems that it does get easier to kill things with experience. Not a good thing really. He had to die, and I suspect he was injured as a result of the hoover and also mourning the loss of his mum…
Traveling back from the US has, once again, broken our internal clocks. I know how to stop it happening – you just stay up all day when you get back, but that’s easier said than done; must be age. But I did manage to force myself to get up at 6pm and meet the others down the pub. Good night that was, despite Dan’s mullet.
The trip back was great once we’d undergone the “theatre for stupid people” that is US security.
“Hey – your bag’s covering your laptop. I’m going to have to put it through the scanner again” screamed the “security official”.
“What ? I took it out of the bag – like you asked me to.”
“You put your bag on top of it so it looks like you’re trying to hide it.”
WTF ? I was standing there in bare feet, holding my trousers up by hand, since my belt was in yet another grey plastic tray; I’m being told that I’ve breached security in some way and as if this whole charade wasn’t ridiculous enough the guy is telling me the x-ray machine can’t see through some cheap nylon laptop bag. So, here is my list of top tips for terrorists wishing to blow up planes in the US:
Look, I understand the need for security, and I even understand the need to put on an OTT display for the benefit of the stupid people. But couldn’t we have two queues, one for the “patriots”, that includes all of this bizarre pissing about to make them feel better, and one for everyone else ?