Periodic Coffee Table

Torn between wanting a coffee table and a really good periodic table of the elements? Why not have both?

Probably because it will set you back £4750.

Mickey Mouse Mask

If you're a student of the Second World War you probably know about the Mickey Mouse gas mask that was issued to British children to protect against gas attacks. I always that there was something perfectly logical yet slightly unnerving about a gas mask aimed at kids, but this had nothing on the American version, which was really a Mickey Mouse mask.

I like the logo. Nice touch.

Get a Dust Bin, See The World

On the bright side, at least they've got wheelie bins.

The local council is all heart.

"Revolutionary" Reform

New Labour has announced that in future people who are chronically on the dole will have to work for their benefit money.

The likelihood of this being implemented or heralding a true reform of the welfare state is about that of the above illustration coming to pass.

Prof. Quatermass, Call Your Service

The bad news, Wales is being invaded by carnivorous albino slugs.

The good news, they're only five inches long.

For now.

Old Monks

Times headline:

Medieval monks foot bill for Tower Bridge’s £4m facelift

In other news, there are 800-year old monks running around.

Sandwich Boards Get Toasted!

Microsats

Grass Scanner

Miss Alice Wang presents her idea for a device to tell you exactly how green your lawn is.

The perfect gift for the anal retentive in your life.

Nursery Nazis

What's the greatest threat facing Britain today? Jihadists? Knife-wielding thugs? A resurgent Russia?

Nope; racist toddlers.

And oh, yes: Eat your peas!

Update: A neat riposte from Classical Values:

Wow. Does this mean that the next time a Muslim child says "yuck" to ham (or, say, to shrimp and shellfish) that he'll be condemned as "racist"?

Irony Alert

Remember "hug-a-hoodie"? Guess what happened to the chap who came up with the idea?

Doggy Dhimmitude III

Police in Britain must now put booties on sniffer dogs while searching Muslim homes to prevent giving "offence".

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of 7/7. I bring this up because the police seem to have forgotten this little incident.

Oh, THAT First Commandment!

Dhimmitude in education from the Telegraph:

Two schoolboys were allegedly disciplined after refusing to kneel down and "pray to Allah" during a religious education lesson.

It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

It's as if commonsense just picked up her skirts and ran screaming from the room.

Cultural Suicide Judicial Style

Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Lord Chief Justice, says that he agrees with the Archbishop of Canterbury and that Sharia should be adopted in Britain.

Sometimes it's like going to the bridge of the Titanic and finding the captain trying to do a deal with the iceberg.

Right Purchase, Wrong Budget

Nova 2

Nova 2: another British bid in Space Tourism race with a ticket price of £98,000.

If Britain is going to build space rockets I'd prefer something more along the lines of Prof. Quatermass' ideas, but you can't have everything.

Rubbish Irony

Chichester District Council placed a £10,000 spy camera in a rubbish bag to catch illicit fly tippers.

It got picked up by the dustmen and chucked.

Life is good.

Doggy Dhimmitude II

And just to show that sniffer dogs aren't the only ones running afoul of the Faithful, Muslims in Dundee are in a lather because a post card advertising a new police telephone number has a puppy on it.

For today's bonus round, did the Dundee police:

a) Tell the Muslims concerned that Britain is a dog-loving nation and if the offended don't learn to accommodate themselves to their host's ways, they'd best reconsider their decision to immigrate.

b) Issue an abject apology and promise never to do such a wicked thing again.

If you answered b, then congratulations! You are now the new chief constable!

Update: According to The Courier, the incident is a bit overblown due to an overzealous Muslim councilman and that Mahmud Sarwar, trustee of the Scottish Islamic and Cultural Centre and the Dura Street mosque, has said that the dog wasn't really offensive.

That's certainly a welcome development, but it does, however, miss two important points. First, the police should never have apologised for something that no reasonable person would be offended by and second, though their comments are welcome, it is not the place of the Scottish Islamic and Cultural Centre or the Dura Street mosque to have a say whether or not the Tayside police put dogs on their postcards and should have no bearing on any decisions.

Fun Fair Food

Local government group LACORS has decreed that food served at theme parks and other holiday venues is unhealthy for children.

Sweet spirits of nitre, that's the whole point of holiday food.

Doggy Dialysis

Doggy Dhimmitude

From the Daily Express:

Police sniffer dogs trained to spot terrorists at railway stations may no longer come into contact with Muslim passengers – after complaints that it is against the suspects’ religion.

Perhaps the best response to this sort of complaint is that being blown up by Jihadists is against our religion* and that a sense of perspective is in order.

*I trust that I don't have to explain that "our religion" includes all creeds subscribed to by civilised men whether followers of cross or crescent.

NHS & BBC

The BBC marks the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the NHS with a story that sets the benchmark for objectivity:

Three generations grateful for NHS

This headline that would do credit to the North Korean news agency was balanced in the story itself by lines like this:

Anthony was born with blue asphyxia. Today he is convinced the NHS saved his life - and that of his mother.

And from there It gets downright sycophantic. Overcrowded hospitals? Endless waiting lists? Mixed sex wards? Treatment rationing? A haemorrhaging budget with an army of bureaucrats to a squad of doctors? Sorry, no mention of that here.

All we need now is a pronouncement from Minitruth that all diseases have been eradicated and we'll have the set.

British Challenge

Britain is preparing to break the land speed record with this formidable and slightly International Rescuesque machine.

So?

It's a steam car.

Somewhere James Watt is smiling.

Labour Sinking

Labour has come in fifth in the Henley by-election–behind both the Greens and the BNP.

Anyone who knows the lyrics to "Nearer my God to thee" is requested to ring Labour headquarters.

Zimbabwe Question

My recent posting on Britain's contingency plans for dealing with Zimbabwe have received a few comments and emails that basically said that my idea of Britain going in and sorting out Mugabe the old fashioned way was not necessarily a good idea and, as this is not the day of the gunboat, we might get our heads handed back to us .

On the former I am entirely willing to concede the point that perhaps military intervention (i.e. pounding Mugabe and his ilk into the ground like a nail) is not the wisest course of action (though not for the craven reasons that Mr. Brown subscribes to, which is what really gets up my nose). The day I present a plan of attack and everyone else says "goodo" is the day I give up on the sanity of the world. I have trouble organising a trip to the swimming pool, so military options I leave to more experienced minds.

On the latter point, though, I must stand firm. True, Britain's might is not what it was, though this is largely a matter of numbers rather than quality, as comparable unit for comparable unit and man for man the British armed forces excel against anyone in the world. And we are not talking about taking on Red China in a land war here. We are talking about east Sub-Saharan Africa with armed forces for whom the glory days of the Impi are a faded memory and whose main experience is in pushing around poor farmers and tradesmen like Cossacks in a somewhat warmer climate. There are only two countries that need to be looked at for overflights to Zimbabwe: Mozambique and South Africa. Mozambique's air force is so small that it doesn't even show on the charts and South Africa only fields one fighter aircraft. I don't mean one type of fighter plane, I mean one plane. Even Zimbabwe only boasts half a dozen clapped-out Chinese fighters and God knows what condition they're in. As for ground defences, I doubt if they field anything that the RN or RAF couldn't take out before breakfast.

But for what happens when the SAS or whoever reach Harare, I submit for comparison the 1981 SAS mission where a force of three men was sent into Gambia to rescue the President's wife and family from left-wing rebels who'd seized the capital. Long story short, the three SAS men got the hostages out safe and for good measure liberated the country with the aid of a contingent of Seneglese paras that they hooked up with. Hopefully they got a commendation for initiative.

As I said, whether that sort of thing is wise is one question, but whether it is possible is another thing entirely.

James May & Meccano

We're doomed

Britain's Do-Nothing Contingency

The Times looks at Britain's so-called contingency plans for military intervention in Zimbabwe that reveals New Labour as a load of gutless wonders more worried about how they are seen by tin-pot African dictators rather than cleaning up the mess their predecessors made of Zimbabwe a generation ago at Lancaster House.

Any grown up nation worth its salt would have had plans that ran along the lines of putting together a special forces task force out of Diego Garcia with the mission of taking out the Mugabe regime in toto while the Foreign Office gave a gentle message to whichever country whose airspace was being crossed that the RAF can go through their defences like butter if they don't cooperate. And if any of the assortment of petty tyrants and kelptocrats who infest central Africa want to call it colonialism, they'd best say it very, very softly.

Unfortunately, Whitehall is in a rather infantile stage that demands that civilised men defer to barbarians and the MoD's plans, such as they are, amount to little more than Britain sitting on its hands while Zimbabwe's neighbours decide whether it's worth deposing a fellow dictator and then watching Her Majesty's armed forces hold Mebki's coattails. Or until hell freezes over, which is far more likely.

I assume that Mr. Brown has a barber shave him, because I cannot imagine how he looks himself in the mirror.

Father's Day Down the Memory Hole

Father's Day cards and projects are being banned from primary schools around Britain "in the interests of sensitivity" toward single mothers and lesbians.

That's the sort of "in the interests of sensitivity" the Vichy French showed to the Germans in 1940.

Zimbabwe Opposition Gives Up

Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has said that his party will not participate in the runoff presidential elections this week because of President Mugabe's reign of terror.

And so it is that Zimbabwe, once a democracy, albeit an unjustly limited one, and the breadbasket of Africa has descended into a nakedly racist dictatorship ruling over a terrified, hungry and impoverished people. If ever there was an object lesson in how moral posturing leads to disaster, this is it. The old Ian Smith regime was nothing to applaud. Its whites-only government and open rebellion against Britain left a permanent bad taste in the mouth, but it was at least a fundamentally civilised society that, given time, could have been reformed. Instead, a load of we-know-better types at Lancaster House demanded instant solutions that boiled down to handing power over to a Marxist tyrant whose literally only qualification was that he wasn't white. But that didn't matter to successive British governments who just wanted to wash their hands of the whole mess. The result has been a slow motion Grand Guignol while Britain, who forced this situation and bears the largest responsibility for its outcome, sits back and does nothing for fear of being seen as "colonialist."

I'm sure that's a great comfort to the Zimbabweans.

Battersea Saved–If You Can Call It That

The good news is that a group of Irish developers have come up with a way to save Battersea power station from the wrecking ball.

The bad news is that it involves hooking it up to some happy-clappy "carbon neutral" architectural monstrosity that looks like it escaped from a 1980's lighting fixtures department.

A Bigger Haystack

Over at the Guardian Cory Doctorow looks at the bumper crop of CCTV cameras that infests Britain and concludes that not only are they a gross imposition on freeborn Englishmen, but that they are self-defeating because beyond a certain point additional information actually confuses more than it clarifies.

I understand what he means. Every time I add another channel to my RSS feeds I feel like I'll never get through that fire hose of news.

War is Peace, Etc.

Headline from The Telegraph:

Tougher terror laws and ID cards actually enhance freedoms, claims Gordon Brown

And the chocoration has been raised ten grammes

Bin Laden's "Right Hand" Slaps Common Sense

A British court has granted Jihadist cleric Abu Qatada bail pending an extradition hearing.

If New Labour had been fighting the Nazis Rudolph Hess would have been put up at the Savoy rather than the Tower.

Top Gear USA

Top Gear, the only car show in history that got me to watch a car show, is to be transmitted on NBC television in the States. Sorry, not the BBC original with Clarkson, Hammond and May, but an American version that somehow is going to catch lightning in a bottle twice running.

The creative ineptness and poor judgment of American network television never ceases to amaze me–particularly when it comes to buying successful foreign shows.

Any other broadcaster for anything other than game shows would simply have bought the broadcast rights for the original programmes and left it at that, but the major American networks operate by their own bizarre rules due to a little episode in the 1960s when Britain's ATV started making heavy inroads into the syndication market, followed by The Avengers becoming a smash hit on ABC television. The Hollywood production companies had a collective infarct when they saw the possibility of competing with British programmes that they threw down the gauntlet to the networks and told them that if they ever bought another foreign product the producers would boycott the lot of them.

Since then, not a single British series has aired on a network unless it was essentially an American production filmed in Britain and so certifiable hits like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Spaced are relegated to cable while the networks indulge in the strange practice of buying formats, but leaving everything else behind. Sometimes this worked, as in the case of All in the Family and Three's Company, or The Office, though all were pale imitations of their parents. More often it ended up with painful abortions visited upon such classics as Fawlty Towers and Couplings that vanished in a mercifully short time.

But, fools and their money, as they say.

£90 Million Electric Bill

A woman in Cambridge recently received an electric bill for £90 million.

Excuse me while I switch off the porch light.

Motoring in Airstrip One

Welcome to Mr. Gordon Brown ectopian towns. All Outer Party members are informed that all (temporarily) private motor cars must be parked on the periphery of the town, that a fee will be charged for this space, driving during peak hours will result in further charges, and that if you drive out of town you will be fined.

Remember, Freedom is Slavery.

Doctor Whippy

An ice cream machine that gives you bigger portions the more unhappy you sound.

Marvin was unavailable for comment as he's all sticky.

United Gall

The UN Human Rights Council has called on Britain to abolish the monarchy.

There is a concise reply to this, but EI is a family column.

100 Years of Seeping

The teabag is 100 years old.

And I know the hotel in Blackpool that's still using it.

Ralph 142c41+, Call Your Service

Thanet Earth: 220 acres of Kent glassed over to form one enormous greenhouse.

Some say that it was inspired by Buckminster Fuller, though I suspect that Hugo Gernsback is closer to the mark.

Shadow Home Secretary Resigns

Mr. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, has resigned from the House of Commons in order to force a by-election on the issue of the government's proposed 42 day detention bill.

As regular readers know, I'm a firm believer in taking the war to the Jihadists fast, hard & often, but I'm with Mr. Davis in opposing the 42 day detention idea–not because I think it's too harsh or unjust, but because New Labour refuses to recognise that we are, in fact, at war and this detention powe