The Scottish Parliament (the one in Westminster)

I read an article from the taxpayers alliance today, it summed up my thoughts on this government. The Labour Party's Scottish Presbyterian Leadership has decided that they haven't had any positive press recently and are going for the eco-idiot demographic with proposals to ban supermarket plastic bags that people use as bin liners. Leadership or incentives to switch to biodegradable bags has not occurred to them. They can make some new laws and any chance to make some new laws and look strong and clever, must never be missed.

They sense the opportunity for more legislation and another way to make England more closely aligned to the moral values of tax funded champagne glitterati of New Labour.

The machinations of thought are already conjuring dreams of a Plastic Bag Tzar, a raft of news plastic bag laws that will put a halt to the evil supermarkets giving away free plastic bags that end up in land fill and force people to buy plastic bin liners that will end up in land fill.

As if there isn't anything more pressing going on in a country where no-one can afford a home, where immigration is running at +500,000 per annum, where the hospitals can't cope and the schools pump out illiterate children with qualifications that mean nothing because every year the exams are made easier to keep the statistics sweet.


They truly are vacuous parasites, spending their time and my money dreaming up new ways to piss me off.

No starter for me thank you.

I found this on the menu at the Corner Thai a hop, skip and a jump from Leidseplein. I think the translator must have opened his Thai-English dictionary at the section marked Synonyms.

Missing Laura and Evelyn. When Evelyn was just born she would curl up into a little ball on my chest and fall asleep. She's growing so quickly that I foolishly worry she'll be too big to do that when I see her next and I'll have missed out on all that early dadhood. We should all be back together in 3 weeks or so.

I have to change the photos of them I keep in my wallet, copies of their passport shots, they both look like they were taken at a police line up.

This is not a Drill

I have just finished reading "This Is Not a Drill" the funny and occasionally moving sequel to Paul Carter's "Don't Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse" and thought I'd share a couple of quotes from it with you.......

'.....he's so scary. Apart from being a big man, Miguel has a face that looks like it's been set on fire a couple of times and put out with a cricket bat.'

'.....there are two things every man should hear in his lifetime: "I'm pregnant" and "We have the building surrounded".'

The Netherlands, is funky!

See what you can buy on the streets here....

..... and what you can't.

Well that's fine for the adults but a young enquiring mind needs to be introduced to the big wide world slowly and what better way than through play? With the toy below you can introduce your kids to the fun and excitement of drink driving without having to worry about the hassle of car theft and getting the family motor trashed.

Amsterdam, is not only a wild stag night party town full of Eastern European prostitutes and coffee shops that don't sell coffee, it's also an enigmatic city of great depth and charm. But enough of that.........

I think this one means "No buskers!"

"Man, don't piss on the arch?" My Latin is very rusty!

I actually like this city a lot and so to this end I shall try to write another entry this week covering the following topics:

• 101 ways to carry the kids on a bicycle
• How not to get run over by a tram
• Canals, 18th century architecture and subsidence
  
  

I'm in Amsterdam on an assignment for my company, Laura and our wonderful daughter Evelyn are in Toronto. I'm looking forward to us all being in the same place again. I checked my e-mail before I trudged down to my hotel breakfast and there was an e-mail from Laura that made my chest swell and my heart race.

It's St.Valentines Day and I love my wife.

Well England were 10 points up at half time 16/6. But the team left their interest in the game back in the changing room when they went out onto the field for the second half 19/26. Bummer!

I recently bought a Logik IR100 internet radio for the kitchen. I love it. When you turn it on, it downloads a station list from http://www.reciva.com/ which you can browse by genre or location. Currently there are 9,854 radio stations and 21,242 on demand streams such as those available from the BBC Radio 4 Listen Again service. Once you have registered your radio on the website you can store your podcasts on the website and save your favorite stations and streams on the site and the next time you turn on the radio they are there for you in a convenient easy to access menu option. I managed to get my nearly new one on e-bay for only £20 more than I could have paid for an absolutely new one from PC World or Dixons as the price in the shops seems to jump around a lot. Buying from e-bay did mean that I was able to use up the last of my Paypal balance earned from selling a few bit and bobs. I don’t regard a positive Paypal balance as cash because actually retrieving it from those money grabbing swine is expensive and awkward.

In truth, you don’t need the radio to get all the benefits of the web page and if like me, your PC is hooked up to your Hi-Fi, it’s fantastic. Having the IR100 just means I don’t have to force my listening choices on everyone else in house when I’m in the kitchen or turn my Hi-Fi up to wall demolishing volume levels when I’m cooking. This morning I was listening to Fuego FM, a Latin hits station based in the US and Alaireweb in Colombia. As all the stations are vetted by Reciva then added to an easy to search and browse website all that music becomes accessible. There are stations from 269 countries and I can browse those from Costa Rica as easily as I can those from the UK.

On an only vaguely related note, my internet service seemed to deteriorate and then stop completely only coming back after I rebooted my router. When I first got the IR100 it could only play a station for a couple of minutes before rebuffering the station. A bit of rooting around revealed that my Thomson Speedtouch 780 router is particularly sensitive to poor line quality and by disabling the linksense functionality in the router command line interface I might be able to improve matters. I tried it and now the radio reception is fantastic and uninterrupted and my internet access is solid and does not break down over time. Marvelous!

My prediction for this afternoon’s 6 Nations Rugby game between England and Wales is that England will win by 10 points.

Laura and Evelyn are in Canada, I miss them both terribly.

Yesterday, at work, during a banal conversation about the impending re-organisation, a colleague astounded the assembled members of the team by announcing that he probably held The Land Speed Wank Record as he had tossed himself off on the Tokyo bullet train at 300km/h (about 180mph). It was competition between the itinerant consultants at the financial services company he was working at. He had been hoping for the World Speed Wank Record, having had one in Business Class on a Boeing 747, but failed miserably as someone else at the firm had had a supersonic wank at Mach 2.02 on Concorde (about 2,140 km/h or 1,330 mph). As Concorde is no longer flying this record will probably stand for quite a while, unless a space shuttle crewman can knock one out on re-entry of course, but this would likely remain a classified wank.