I’m talking about the idiots who take medication (or give it to their kids!) without bothering to look at the box, let alone read the instructions:
It says ALL OVER THE BOX that co-codamol contains paracetamol. She took it for six months without ever noticing!
The pharmacist was of course wrong wrong wrong but still. EYE. EAR. TWO DIFFERENT WORDS.
I feel so tired… so tired…
Just watch that video. The biker was going at 97mph on a 60 road! He didn’t even see the car until it was too late (and shrieked), no wonder the car didn’t see him either.
Maybe the driver just didn’t look (after all he did lose his licence) but “Think Bike” is neither here nor there in this situation. People just do not have the eyesight of a peregrine falcon and a speeding car would likely have crashed into him too.
I watched the video several times, and even knowing what’s coming I cannot see the car until the very last second – and a car is much bigger than a motorbike. Even without looking, the car would have had plenty of time to turn if the biker had been following the speed limit.
The biker should have slowed down when approaching a junction too, but I suppose that was too much to ask.
And all his mother can say to excuse his behaviour is “He loved speed”?! Please, he was 38, not 18. Come on.
She even says “I just hope that somebody benefits from it, that motorists slow down” and sadly the irony of it just totally passes her by. Also, what happens if motorists love speed too?
So says the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Apparently any depiction of said skyline could “evoke thoughts of the Port Authority, the twin towers, W.T.C. and the September 11th terrorist attacks.”
And we really don’t want that to happen, do we, boys and girls? Clearly, all that though-evoking can only be a bad thing. It’s not at all insane to think that way. Nope.
Victoria Coren Mitchell, annoying leftie extraordinaire, won a poker tournament on Easter Sunday. She immediately took to Twitter, as you do:
Then for some reason she panicked and posted this:
“Sorry for that language on Easter Sunday”? What is the nitwit on about? Does she apologise to Muslims and Jews every time she has a bacon sandwich? Unlikely.
So what is the meaning of this random attempt at political correctness? If she cares so much about not antagonising Christians, how about not boasting about gambling on Easter Sunday in the first place! Frankly, mild swearing should be the least of her worries. But that’s the problem with the professionally right on: engaging the brain is usually a last resort.
Also, ‘bloody’ is hardly offensive these days. If Ron Weasley can say it approximately one million times in the Harry Potter series, Victoria probably will not burn in hell just yet.
The other day we received a Christmas card addressed to the previous owners. We moved into this house in April 2008.
I just don’t understand why these people bothered to send a card if they know so little about the would-be recipients. They even got the house number wrong!
But never mind, let’s turn back to the really important things in life:
Man finds a lot of money, hands it to the police, gets shafted.
…and the police station’s Christmas party is off to a good start. Noël! Noël!
“Mr Justice Lewis said the careful sorting of the notes into bundles of one denomination meant they were ‘unlikely to be the profits of legitimate cash trading’.”
Are these people for real? Has this guy never seen a cash till before? What on earth does he think his Coutts bank manager does with his savings?
Traveller arseholes live up to their reputation yet again
Poor thing. And as for the poor sod who got his car totalled, well it’s all part of Ireland’s rich cultural tapestry, right?
The thing is, those inbred bastards always swear up and down they “love” their horses, that having horses is their ancestral tradition, blah blah bullshit. You just have to look at pics of travellers riding or driving their pony and traps: ill-fitting (and therefore painful) bits and tack everywhere, not to mention zero riding/driving skills and a complete disregard for horse welfare.
They know fuck all about horses and care even less but it’s so picturesque, isn’t it? Bring on the next C4 documentary on the Appleby horse fair!
I also do not FUCKING BELIEVE the video in this article. DO. NOT. BELIEVE. I’m still shaking.
And this is allowed to happen because…? Oh yes,the tapestry. I forgot.
Dear British Museum,
Don’t get me wrong, your exhibition Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum was excellent. It is quite impressive to see these hugely famous artefacts for real at last.
(love the snake!)
Although I wonder whether you were a tiny little bit unprepared for just how rib-crushingly popular it would turn out to be. Because that’s certainly the impression I got.
This is how the day went: first we queued outside the Reading Room (tickets already booked and paid for, of course). Groups of people were let in every ten minutes – our tickets were for 11.40am. Someone checked our names against their list and let us in, waving us without a word towards another queue inside the building. So we queued some more, without quite knowing why.
It soon became clear that this was the queue for the audio guides, which would have been fine except that they cost £4.50 per person! I find this extra expense a bit steep, not to mention the inconvenience of having to queue twice on the day. When we went to the Harry Potter studio tour, I was able to book the audio guide online as part of my ticket and only had to present the ticket at the counter to be given the guide (it was also nowhere near £4.50).
Even the app had to be paid for: £1.99 for smartphones, £3.99 for the iPad. God forbid that something should be included in the ticket price.
Having bypassed any and all attempts to part us with even more of our money (temporarily, since I was acutely aware that the gift shop was awaiting us at the other end), we finally entered the Reading Room.
They had erected dozens of partitions to create rooms and the whole place was pitch black, apart from the brightly lit display cases, statues and mosaics. As soon as we went through the doors we had to go up a flight of stairs, at the top of which was the first display window on a small landing and the accompanying text panels on the wall, at hip level. Guess what happened next..
We all gathered around it like wasps around strawberry jam, trying to see the exhibits between the heads of the 11.30am group who were still there, whilst attempting to read the text on the wall between their arses. We then got sandwiched between them and the 11.50am group who turned up not long after.
Since most people had bought an audio guide (indispensable for most foreign visitors as the text was in English only), they stood right in front of the exhibits blocking the view until all the relevant information had been disgorged into their ears, which meant the bottleneck never eased up. This happened throughout the exhibition and got very annoying.
We finally moved on to the next bits, which turned out to be a little film followed by a timeline of the disaster on the wall. Both of these were interesting and, more to the point, easy to see. Then it was room after room full of fascinating stuff and even more full of people. Since all the little text panels next to the display cases were at hip level, it was very difficult to read them. How on earth did the organisers not anticipate this?
Also, no attempt was made to guide the visitors through the rooms so as to make the crowds flow a bit better. Some people were going clockwise, others anti-clockwise. This caused more chaos as we all stopped to see the same things and then tried to move on into oncoming traffic.
There was one irritating man who clearly thought he had VIP status and constantly tried to hurry everyone up by saying “Excuse me! Excuse me!” in increasingly exasperated tones, as if we should all make room for him. I don’t think so, muppet.
It was so busy we plain missed a room! They were not numbered and without the audio guide to alert us, it was very easy to walk straight past a doorway without noticing. So we never saw the carbonised crib:
How incredibly modern is the design, by the way? I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if I saw it in IKEA.
The jewellery was also to die for; those Romans certainly loved their snakes! How refreshing. I also fell in love with every single mosaic/fresco/clay oil lamp/etc… honestly, I was born way too late.
I spotted a slight obsession with phalluses too. They were pretty much everywhere, like Hello Kitty today (and yet, strangely enough, no phallus-themed souvenirs were available in the shop).
And then we turned a corner and hit the plaster casts of dying people, which was pretty sobering.
The contrast with the gift shop was a bit jarring, to say the least. Speaking of which, how come half of this stuff wasn’t available in the shop?! My wallet is very thankful though.
I did get this:
So, all in all, it was a fantastic exhibition. Well done, BM. Only next time, how about some decent crowd control, huh?
And Hufflepuff worked very hard for this one so it’s fully deserved. Well done Puffs!
Although we didn’t do so badly ourselves…
Stephen Fry thinks the French are a better-educated race than the British.
First of all, the French are not a race. Neither are the British. It never ceases to amaze me how much Lefties love that word. But never mind.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, Stephen Fry knows next to nothing about the French education system. He was educated in England and has no child currently at school in France. He’s only basing his remarks on one study, which is hazardous at best – but knowing nothing about a topic has never stopped Stephen from inflicting his opinion on us in the past, so why should he start now?
He may have a point about French primary schoolchildren knowing more than their British counterparts, but what he’s missing is that this state of affairs is all due to relentless rote learning, one-size-fits-all teaching methods and much stricter discipline than in British schools. Sadly, it appears nothing has changed since I was at school.
He says
“A lot of it is at the right age, somehow getting that gear, that cog fitting that excites a child, that makes them feel pleased with themselves for achieving and for knowing.”
Yes, that would be nice but that’s not the way they go about it in France. I don’t remember feeling pleased with myself for “achieving and knowing”, but for not getting detention at school and a bollocking at home if I got a bad mark. French kids have no interest in learning anything that isn’t marked by the teacher, because it’s worth nothing to them and is a waste of brainpower.
He’s also not realising that all this knowledge is acquired at the expense of creativity and self-expression. No one cares what pupils think or what they are capable of creating. They’re at school to fill their heads with other people’s thoughts then regurgitate them at exam time, and that’s it. It’s the same at primary school, secondary school and even higher education level.
If Fry had gone through the French education system himself, he could never have learned to act by joining the Footlights at university as there would have been no Footlights to join. In order to write his novels, he would have had to learn writing techniques on his own, as an adult, as there would have been no Creative Writing classes to attend. And so on and so forth.
Yes, the French education system produces people with a good smattering of general knowledge, but it doesn’t produce good all-rounders. Anything physical is neglected at best and despised at worst and woe betide the pupil who has different learning needs, as streaming is banned in the name of equality. As I said earlier, one size fits all and if it doesn’t fit you, you are made to feel a failure.
Since Stephen has spoken at length about how much of a gifted outcast he was at his English public school, I wonder how he would have fared in the strict French system where individuals matter even less. Not too well, I suspect.