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Showing posts from May 6, 2007

10% ethanol my arse

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Summer's here and along with record petrol prices (for no good reason), they've started the 10% ethanol "summer" blend again. This crap is such low octane it makes my bike detonate really badly. It's not bad enough you can only get 91 octane up here, they lower that to about 85 with the stupid ethanol blend. Oil is bastards. Still - this made me laugh today :

The Blair Ditch Project

Praise your lords, for Blair is gone. It's too late of course, in the same way that Tiffany posing for Playboy was 18 years too late. So Prescott or Brown are going to take over the country. It's a clever ploy that normally works in a country as corrupt as England. Let the public vote for the PM, then get him to step down and replace him with the person the government really wanted in power without a general election. That's what we call "democracy" in England. Christ. It would be like Bush stepping down and Cheney taking over. Talk about a bad situation getting worse. Blair reminisced about how well off the country was in '97 and how totally screwed it is now. Well - technically he tried to spin it the other way around. Still - he does hold a few records from his time in power: record tax hikes, record petrol prices, record bankruptcies, record hospital closures, record police failures, record levels of teenage drinking and pregnancy, record illegal immigra

Riding with the lads

The weather is going through an unseasonably warm spell at the moment (and no, it's not global warming - it was hotter here at this time of the year in 1941 and 1960 than it is right now). Having been shamed into washing the bike by the bloke at work with a brand new Kawasaki Ninja, it was time to cover it in dead flies again. I managed to convince a couple of colleagues to take a short after-work ride this evening. Truth be told it didn't take any convincing - I phoned up and basically said "want to ride?" and 20 minutes later we were off. I'm glad we managed it because Motoboy and Squidney took off this afternoon for another ride but I wasn't keen to leave the three acceptance models I'm working on mid-stream so I turned them down. So off we went up East Canyon and back. It was short but pleasant and we managed to worry a Tosser Hummer off the road too. Which was nice.

Al Sharpton : Hyppocrite.

Not that I really care, because Al Sharpton is essentially a giant sack of hot air, but I think it's funny that he managed to get a radio host fired for a mildly offensive comment (that hardly anyone knew what it meant) yet when he makes an anti-religious comment, suddenly there's nothing wrong with that. "As for the one Mormon running for office, those that really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don't worry about that." Al Sharpton -noun- see also: bigot.

Delta cough up.

I received a cheque in the mail tonight for $50 from Delta. 8 days from destroyed bag to cheque in the mail. That's almost quicker than travelling on Delta and having them lose your bags then courier them to you destroyed.

Quick petrol-related question.

Pop quiz: Crude oil is $64 a barrel right now compared to $80 a barrel as it was last summer. Petrol is currently $3.24 at the pump as oppose to $3.09 as it was last summer. So why if the crude price is lower is the pump price higher? I mean I know they've trotted out all the usual bollocks about refineries below capacity and being repaired and such, but cast your mind back to Hurricane Katrina when two refineries were destroyed along with several rigs, and the price of petrol was $2.89 at the pump. So clearly that's not it. And given that America's oil comes largely from south of the border and Canada (only 2% from Iraq I believe?), it can't be the catastrophuck over in mess-o-potamia. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? My best guess : the house and senate pissed off Bush so he's thrown his toys out of the pram and is "teaching us all a lesson" with unheard-of profiteering courtesy of Big Oil. Nice lesson. Record petrol prices and oddly enough, the three car compa

London Olympics - some nuggets of info.

I've just been reading an article about the 2012 London Olympics and there were some fun facts that I hadn't realised in there. The central olympic area in East London is so crime-ridden that DHL, Fedex and UPS (who will all deliver to places like Baghdad) won't go there. The olympic village is being built in a crime hotspot where they average 39,000 crimes a year including 19 murders and 180 shootings. Apart from that, they're building it on top of the largest sewage overflow pumping station in the country - an area that has 100% probability of being flooded with raw sewage around the time the olympics will be in town, because it does every year. And finally, in their infinite wisdom to not allow any cars near the olympic sites, Red Ken is making sure that everyone is going to be forced on to public transport. As it happens, that area has the most crime-riddled bus and train routes in the country with 453 stabbings, over 9,000 muggings and one actual death each year.