The Monarchy – Not Your Usual Benefit Claimants

The British monarchy sets itself apart from other benefit claimants. They are quite principled about not being seen as a tax burden. In fact they pay their taxes… out of the extra taxes we raise to provide them with an income. Further, they don’t jam up the queues outside the post office Monday mornings waiting to cash in their Giro cheques. How many on benefits bother opening civic centres or smashing bottles of champagne to launch ships or raise a finger to go on state visits to the Bahamas? (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

The History of the Mouse Double Click… from the Future

The double click on the computer mouse is used today to do things like highlight one word in a Word document, or open up a file. But some day in the future this operation will be replaced by something like a voice-activated command. ‘Highlight that word’ or ‘No, not that one, I said highlight that other word’ we will say. Or, ‘Open up that file’. It’s quite possible we won’t be very polite to our computers. Some people, for instance, might treat them like shit. Unless we bother giving computers feelings. Then we might not want to prevail upon them so much. ‘Do you mind highlighting…?’ we might begin. Whatever the case, double clicking our computer mouse will be something future generations will look back as barbaric.

‘Granddad, tell us how you had to double click your mouse’, a grandchild will plead when we take them upon our knee for a bit of nostalgia.

‘You couldn’t just double click. Oh, no. The second click had to follow the first in quick succession.  And if you didn’t do it fast enough…’

‘Yes, granddad, yes. What happened then? Tell us. Tell us…’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

 ‘You would end up doing two single clicks.’

‘Many years ago – more than I can bear to think of now’, you will say, delving deeper: ‘We had to learn how to move the mouse around to move the cursor’.

‘Grandad, granddad, what’s a cursor?’ a grandchild will clammer. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Editor's Choice

Rocketman raises some good points in relation to the blog 'The Tours de France and Breaking the Cycle (in a good way)'. An interesting observation on horse racing fans wearing jockey shirts to race meetings much as (fat) blokes wearing replica football shirts. Please refer to the article below and do join in the discussion or feel free to take it in another direction.

The Tours de France and Breaking the Cycle (in a good way)

Cyclists on the Tour de France race stand to wear a yellow jersey if they clock up the lowest aggregate time over the stages. Problem is yellow doesn’t go with much. Stick on your jersey with a pair of blue jeans to go out for the night, for instance, and you run the risk of looking something like your dad on holiday dressing smart for dinner.

Another problem is that all you have in terms of luggage space on a bike is a saddlebag, perhaps the smallest personal item storage system available save for the little pocket inside your jeans pocket to stick not all, but a proportion, of your change. The saddlebag offers just enough room for a spare pair of pants (trunks not boxers). Perhaps you could look into fitting a bigger saddle so you can reasonably argue for a comparatively larger saddle bag? A bench-type seat would allow a saddle bag big enough to drape one of those zip-up bags you stick your dry cleaning in (and attached sideways onto the frame, give the rider more berth when it comes to bunching up with a lot of falling off riders (sometimes onto cobblestones). (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Track of the Week

Fire Drills and the Hitler Moustache

It has long been a fear of the author to be mistaken accidentally for a Nazi having been forced to break off from shaving in response to a fire alarm and gather outside his residence with the other tenants from his building. It’s a relatively niche phobia, but it stems from my shaving routine which is to shave the ‘handles’ first before moving onto the bit under the nose (a process that could be technically termed ‘filtrum depilation’). Dropping everything at that point in time would result therefore in the sporting of an inadvertent Hitler moustache. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Fake Tan Dust

There is a lot of debate about whether someboy has a tan or a fake tan. And mostly when that person is bronzed around the time of the Winter Solstice (December 21^st) when spotting the sun is more usually restricted to people glimpsing its two-minute bob above the horizon at Stonehenge.

Of course you could say you tan very easily. You have very sensitive skin. In fact, your family has a long and unenviable tradition of avoiding rickets. A family of rickets-dodgers. And further, you might have a job that keeps you exposed to what you regard as the fierce winter sun, like Stonehenge druid. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)