14th Sep 2009
The famous Haggis maker McTaggart’s of Perth has been making moves to de-scotify its business, after fears have emerged of an anti-Scottish backlash by American consumers following the release of Alexander al-Megrahi. They are having to put vast unused quantities of haggis in self storage.
The news comes as some Americans have been pointing out that Alexander sounds like quite a Scottish name, and perhaps the Scottish are looking after their own. McTaggart’s has begun the process of changing its name as well as that of its major export – Haggis. Now ‘Smith’s Of Oxford’s Sheep’s Pudding’ will now be exported to the USA, where Mctaggart’s are hoping their American customers won’t notice the change.
It is thought by some economists that the extra Government revenues generated by the new oil deal with Libya (shh, no one knows, right?) will be cancelled out by the loss of export money from Haggis sales, frozen battered mars bar exports, and the real money spinning export – everyone’s favourite ambiguously-flavoured drink, IRN BRU.
And salmon sales to the USA have also dropped off to zero and are set to reduce further over the coming weeks. While all Scottish exports are suffering from the fall-out of the al-Megrahi episode, this fish has been particularly badly hit, sounding as it does suspiciously like the first minister of Scotland, Alexander Salmond. It does seem like this man (who shares the same first name with Al Megrahi, as it turns out) has made a bit of a boo boo.
Something smells a bit fishy about this entire episode, and any amount of de-Scotifying is unlikely to prevent the situation getting much worse for the Scottish economy.
21st Aug 2009
If I had a driving license I imagine when traveling I would probably make use of Car Hire. The car I would rent would probably be one of those nice looking Honda Civics. In Black. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to drive so the whole thing is nonsense jibber jabber. Or is it?
Turns out the person renting the car is the only one required to have a driving license and after you have left the car park it’s a free-for-all in the drivers seat. Guess I’ll be driving then? Well actually, no I won’t. Law breaking isn’t really my cup of tea and the potential danger to the public outweighs the internationally uniform level of rubbish you can expect from public transport services.
So what, if any, is the moral here? Public transport is bad, but jail is bad-ass! So, does anyone know of any good and cheap Driving Instructors?
13th Aug 2009
The National Health Service has been under attack from some Americans who are holding the system up as evidence that Barrack Obama’s health reforms are a bad move. Britain’s free at the point of delivery system has been used by the President’s opponents to show how a “socialized” system would be bad news for patients, providing a low level of care. …more
04th Aug 2009
This is a great one to serve your husband when he gets back from a grinding day at the office. Us housewives are always busy with ironing and Jeremy Kyle, but this quick and easy meal shouldn’t eat into your schedule too much.
What you need to do is like get some potatoes and take their skin off with some sort of implement – perhaps a potato peeler – and then give them a bit of a boil. Just 5 mins. But wait! before you do this get a leek or something (no, actually get a leek) and then slice it up proper. Then boil this with the tatties for a bit. Make sure you wash the leek well, as it might have loads of dirt in it.
Now, after those 5 minutes passed you by (you can watch Kyle during this – but don’t get too engrossed) get the par-boiled potato and grate it up. The leek (actually, now I’m thinking about it you shouldn’t have boiled the leek. Forget that bit. Fry it instead) should be already fried up at this point.
Now, rub your hands together in an excited manner, and toss the grated potato and leek into a frying pan – and fry it. OK OK, before all this, you should have got an egg and whipped it up so that all the yellow and see-thru bits are a yellowy colour. You can use a fork or something for this. Right, what I should have said is add the egg to the potato and leek BEFORE you put it in the pan. Right go back and do it again.
So, put that egg, potato and leek in little dollops. And fry them. You should probably add salt and pepper at this stage if you actually want it to taste of anything.
And you should find that these things are cooked after a bit of time has elapsed.
And Voila!
Your Fried Potato and Leek Thing is ready! You’ll probably find it doesn’t taste of anything at all, so get a massive lump of cheese out of the fridge and eat that with it.
24th Jul 2009
Surely just being British can’t help your search engine optimisation?
If you look at the current emerging markets – primarily China and India – they have a lot of advantages; namely low cost labour. But what they don’t have, is a good command of the most important language in the world of business. This isn’t a slight on the good name of Indian or Chinese education – but the truth is it takes years and years to fully understand the ins and outs of any language. This is particularly true of English, which is constantly expanding.
Telecoms and banking giants outsource their telephone-based servcies to Asia, and in order that the call handlers have a good grasp of the kind of colloquial English they are likely to encounter from Brits and Americans, they put their workers in front of various English language soap operas. But the truth is that these operations have had limited success – with many UK corporations eventually deciding to use UK-based call centres as a marketing tool (think NatWest).
The advantages of knowing a language inside out are even more pronounced when it comes to SEO. You have a few seconds to convince someone to hang around on a website; if this home page reads like it has been copywritten by someone who doesn’t have English as their first language, it’s going to turn potential customers off straight away. Equally, understanding how UK English or US English is used by people is essential in being able to making a website respond effectively to these searches.
People who optimise websites with a full grasp of the English language have a distinct advantage. And Brits have a direct line to the biggest web-based market in the world – the USA. No wonder some of the most successful SEO companies in the world are based in the UK.
21st Jul 2009
A friend recently accused me of looking round the choosing the first thing I clapped eyes on to do a blog post about. In order to refute this allegation, this post is about raindrops. OK, it was a bit drizzly this morning.
But in reality, a French university (Aix-Marseille) have been investigating the raindrop in all it’s thrilling complexity. You can’t accuse the French of scraping the barrel when it comes to research. Apparently, raindrops kind of balloon out whilst falling and then disintegrate into tiny drops. This news is likely to change the course of all raindrop research, probably forever.
It seems a shame that the only country that’s actually famous for rain (that’s us) hasn’t managed to pioneer this research first. The French probably just did it to annoy us. But I have to hand it them, they’ve produced some pretty fabulous footage of raindrops falling.
Not only have our friends across the channel started creating black holes underground (with their particle accellerator thing), but they’ve also uncovered the final mysteries of the raindrop.
Is nothing sacred?
17th Jul 2009
This particular author owns an Xbox. And not the good 360 degree kind either – a big, heavy 3 kg monster from the early naughties. Rather than 360 degrees, you might describe it more as an Xbox 45 degrees. It’s not great – or so people tell me. But if I’m perfectly honest, the thing blows me away with its ‘3D’ technology. The enemies in Half Life 2, for example, display incredible artificial intelligence – namely by ’shooting back whilst standing in clear range of my gun’.
Jokes aside, it still is a lot of fun for a piece of technology that was released in 2002 (in the UK at least). To be honest, a Luddite like myself would be blown away by the 360. One of the best games for me remains Project Gotham Racing 2, a quality piece of high octane urban car racing that cost me only £2.95.
And what about that rumble pack? It’s like those nasty gas masked Germans in Big Red One really are shooting you in the face. That Messerschmidt BF109E really did just blow your arm off. One day of course, you really will see your arm lying on the ground – such will be the virtual reality of the future. It’s only a matter of time before we all start inhabiting VR worlds where we can do all the things we can’t do in what we laughingly refer to as reality – namely shoot Nazi stormtroopers and have biblical encounters with Kate Beckinsale – in that order if possible.
Until then though, its just me and my old fashioned Xbox.