tomroyal.com

From this day forth, should anyone ever criticise my choice of home town (and yes, this does happen, with depressing regularity), I shall simply point out that nowhere outside of Lewisham have I ever seen a drive-thru* German sausage stall. Nowhere else can one purchase several varieties of wurst without having to step outside of one's automobile. Nowhere. Take that, Manhattan.

* Whatever happened to the "o" and "gh" in drive through? Were they quietly murdered, and the bodies dropped in the mid-Atlantic?

I know, it's not really a newspaper, and this is not really news. But still, this could be the single laziest way to fact check anything, ever:

I've found people on Google and Youtube who think they've invented a perpetual motion machine and create videos titled "DAVID ICKE: TOP BRITISH HERO". I guess it's all true.

Check out boycottmcdonalds.com, a treasure trove of stupidity, illiteracy and, er, McMuffins. The comments are all kinds of dumb. There's mathematical genius:

"3 kids 2 adults will now go to a competitor. If we all do this, the numbers will add up."*

Moral relativism:

"No Big Mac is worth the moral compromise of agreeing with the homosexual agenda."

(Note: in fact, the homosexual agenda equals one Extra Value Meal, or to put it another way four hamburgers and a strawberry milkshake). A plea from one hungry family:

"We have purchased our last happy meal for my family of 6"

The world's least effective boycott:

"I work for McDonald's as a manager. I am forced to boycott your chain because of this action you have chosen to take. This will be your loss nationwide."

A tearjerker:

"I will have to kiss those sausage mcmuffins goodbye. Your reponsibility lies not with gays but with the American people that helped build this empire. You have lost your integrity."

And then the nadir:

"YOU DID NOT BILD YOUR COMPANY ON HOMOSEXUAL PEOPLE! IT WAS BUILD ON FAMILY VALUES! MAN,WIFE.CHILDREN!MOSTLTY CHILDREN! THEY DON'T COME FROM HOMO PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I tried to build a restaurant chain on homosexual people once. It didn't work, because making the restaurants small enough to be worn as a hat meant that nobody could fit inside to work or eat there. It didn't turn out any better when I repeated the exercise using straight people, though. Next time I'll just buy some land like anyone else.

* Bonus prize to anyone who can work out how many they will add up to.

I don't often find myself swearing at the TV news - no, actually that's a lie, and I very often find myself swearing at the TV news, for various reasons - but this story pisses me off even more than usual. Quotes from the employment tribunal who decided that a registrar was unduly discriminated against after she refused to preside over civil partnerships:

The panel said: "Islington Council rightly considered the importance of the right of the gay community not to be discriminated against but did not consider the right of Miss Ladele as a member of a religious group.

"It decided that the service it provided was secular and that the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community must be protected.

"In so acting, Islington Council took no notice of the rights of Miss Ladele by virtue of her orthodox Christian beliefs."

So, by virtue of this, should I have the right to refuse to interview white/black/Asian/female/male/gay/straight/whatever people for my reporting because an invisible yet all powerful figure whose existence is very far from proven - let's say I believe in a kind of omnipotent yet strangely prejudiced Care Bear, perhaps - tells me that I should behave that way? Should I bollocks.

It's another example of the idiotic idea that having faith is in some way virtuous, regardless of what it is you have faith in. What if I had faith that apartheid was a good thing? Or faith in Satan, maybe - should I be allowed to wreak havoc at work in the name of doing his evil deeds? The whole outcome of this case is imbecilic.

Of the world's first, and hopefully last, vertical looping waterslide, assembled in New Jersey's "Action Park":

The Loop opened for exactly one month in 1985 before being shut down by New Jersey's Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety (who knew such a board even existed?). Those who did ride the dubious Loop were lucky if they escaped without bloody noses or a serious back injury. The ride opened for a few days 10 years later before further guest injuries forced a permanent shutdown.

I particularly like the fact that, ten years after it first wreaked havoc on riders' spines, someone took the decision to re-open the ride - you know, just to see if the rules of gravity had been amended in the preceding decade. Read the article here, or check out the visitor memories here (sample: "Blood, blood, blood. All I remember was blood. All for under 25 bucks a person"). It's also worth clicking back a few pages to the one that explains how various theme parks are exempt from building safety codes.

For a brief period I worked in a company of Independent Financial Advisers. I didn't learn much about finance, really, but I did pick up a few things. Such as, for example: when looking for currency trading service, don't pick one that

a) Advertises on Facebook
b) Puts "Sterling" after the word "the". Or before "is pounding", for that matter. Or,
c) Illustrates Sterling with the symbol for Yen

Key facts: I will be charging for this advice on a commission basis, so you now owe me exactly two percent of any money made by following it. The value of this advice may go up or down. Past performance is not a guarantee of future etc etc.

Libel law in Britain is confusing and, it can be argued, unfairly skewed towards the claimant. Libel law in Russia, on the other hand, is now completely batshit. From an AP report, available everywhere:

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Russia's lower house of parliament voted Friday to widen the definition of slander and libel and give regulators the authority to shut down media outlets found guilty of publishing such material.

The bill's passage comes just days after a scandal involving a tabloid newspaper that reported Putin had divorced his wife and planned to marry a champion gymnast.

The legislation, passed by the State Duma 339-1, is the latest attempt by the government to squeeze the country's increasingly embattled news media.

The bill allows authorities to suspend and close down media outlets for libel and slander — punishment that is identical to that for news media found to be promoting terrorism, extremism and racial hatred.

It also expands the definition of slander and libel to "dissemination of deliberately false information damaging individual honor and dignity."

I can't find out the name of the one MP who decided to vote against the bill, but I hope he or she survives without any repercussions of the kind that have been seen to crop up when one criticises the Putin government.

From here:

"So why are so few of the rest of us able to apply out rightous attitudes to our wallets? It's the question every personal finance book for the young and moneyless has attempted to answer. It usually goes like this, "Slaves to debt, living paycheck to paycheck, credit card to credit card, a tragic and growing number of twenty- and thirty-somethings have little if any financial cushion." What seems more serious is the apparent lack of empowerment needed to change, to dig ourselves out of financial misery. My own money "issues" have been and sometimes continue to be the following (raise your hand if this is you): an inability to delay gratification, a mad desire for all things Hollywood prescibes (and by Hollywood I mean Jennifer Aniston), and a false feeling of protection when pulling out the plastic (credit cards, not condoms)."

Where to start.

1. One cannot empower oneself, surely? Either one can do something, or one cannot. The rest is psychobabble.
2. Using double quotes around "issues" makes you look like an idiot. Actually, the very word itself does a good job of that on its own.
3. The same goes (usually) for (excessive and pointless) use of parentheses.
4. Nobody should ever raise their hand in response to a book. Doing so makes one look like a fool.
5. Stop. Italicising. Text.
6. Isn't Jennifer Aniston, at a guess, in her forties by now? In any case, she's hardly a cultural touchstone for twentysomethings. Did it take that long to get published?
7. The condom reference might seem risque if you travel through time back to 1983. Today, why not remove the last set of brackets and everything contained within them? Just a thought.
8. "You're so money"? Swingers was released in 1996. A decade is a long time.

In any case, I reckon I could boil this book down to one bullet point:

1. If you want to save money, don't buy stuff you don't need.

Twenty-somethings, for this (message of) "empowerment", you are welcome. Condoms!

This article from the Daily Mail is pretty funny in itself, but the photo that accompanies it is a work of genius. It's hard to work out quite what the Photoshop artist was aiming for, but it's fair to say that they failed. Spectacularly. Either that, or Anne Diamond (who is she, anyhow?) is actually a ghost who can SHOVE EVIL VIDEO GAMES INTO HER BODY AND ABSORB THE EVILNESS INSIDE THEM.

It turns out that, contrary to my earlier claims, a new gas hob will not cost around £100. Instead, because I live in a flat, it will cost substantially more. Due to some obscure regulation passed earlier this year, any gas cooking appliances I buy need to have some sort of safety cut-out thing - house owners are, presumably, deemed responsible and rich enough to dice with death by using a hob without such a device, or maybe creating a giant tyre bonfire in their own living room to cook on should they choose.

And whatever the safety device is, it's expensive: cheapest hob without is around £60, cheapest hob with is exactly £174.

More annoying still, though, is the fact that there's so little information on this new regulation (IGE/G/5) - and, although I've found it on the web (here) it'd cost me a whopping £107 to read the stupid thing, although for some reason amendments are freely downloadable. Gah. Ironically, the upshot of this situation is that we probably won't be able to afford a new hob, so we'll have to stick with the old one. Which is broken. And without any kind of safety cut-off. Brilliant.