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The UK's worst clamper allegedly threatened clamped motorists with large dogs.
Elderly ladies were forced to pay the clamp removal charge in Marks & Spencer vouchers and a heavily pregnant woman was made to walk with her young child to a cash point over two miles away to get the money he demanded for the clamp's removal
http://cars.msn.co.uk/CarNews/worstclamper/
Today is my big sister's birthday and I didn't even remember to send her a card, how bad is that? I called her for some other reason and she didn't even tell me, luckily I remembered before I came off the phone.
Off to try to see if Interflora can guarantee next day delivery.
Update
I'm a retard aswell, just sent a card and realised I addressed it to her maiden name, now she will recieve and envelope with her maiden name scored out and her married name appended to the end two days late.
" There's gold in them thar hills. No, seriously, there actually is. The Gortin-Plumbridge area of the Sperrin mountains is a bona-fide gold bearing part of this otherwise Emerald Isle, and this has been known for quite some time. The fact that no-one has really bothered doing anything about it is a shining testament to the laziness of the typical Irishman, which is so dedicated to its task that even in the face of insurmountable opportunity it encourages us to favour sitting down at the television and scratching ourselves with the remote control rather than getting up off our backsides and, say, digging up a fortune in nuggets. "
I voted on my way to work this morning, never seen an election card so long, looked like about 14 on it. Problem was the pencil was on a 3 inch string and the polling card was about a foot long, so to vote for someone on the bottom you had to do some mad folding of the paper, I wanted to get right down to the bottom to give George Rainbow Weiss for the Vote for Yourself Party a vote but I honestly couldn't get the pencil to reach. I would have tried harder if I had read this first:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/vote2001/hi/english/northern_ireland/newsid_1371000/1371190.stm
So give old George a vote, he's forked out 2 grand so far in fees and is standing in North, South, West and East Belfast.
As election day approaches, I'll pick up my election card wander down to the local school and tick the same box as my parents have done for the last god knows how many years. It will be the same box as the vast majority of my friends, a fair percentage of my neighbours and possibly (fingers crossed) the majority of the electorate in my area. Do I feel happy doing this? No not at all, but it's the only valid option open to me, except not voting.
I always go right down the card, leaving off three parties along the way, mainly because it must really annoy the counters having to work out what a 6 vote is worth down the line.
I worked the election once, I was an electoral officer in Ballyoran school which is in the heart of the Gravaghy Rd in Portadown, it was right in the middle of the big Drumcree years. You wouldn't believe the corruption and underhand tactics I witnessed that year, and not from the obvious quarters, though this is not the best place to publicise details, but if you ever see me in the pub, ask me...I have some great stories from that day.
Incidentally I have had one shread of contact from my local MP since I moved to Sydenham, it was a letter telling me about aircraft noise and what they were going to do about it. They were going to challenge Belfast City Airport flight expansion plans, sentences like 'jets roaring over our heads at all hours of the night etc etc). I think aircraft noise is the least of the worries facing the community where I live at the moment.
'Sydenham displays signs of significant disadvantage as evidenced by its ranking within the worst third of wards in Northern Ireland. It ranks particularly highly on the domains relating to Health (55th) and Education (96th).'
http://www.eastbelfast.com/information/sonapp2a.pdf
Shandy Bass is another uniquely Northern Ireland thing. I don't think Shandy (as in any lager/beer half and half with lemonade) is that well known outside of here/Scotland and Africa.
This bloke seems to think it is some sort of delicacy
The English squaddies who used to drink in the local back home always asked for a lager tops when they wanted a shandy.
Anyway when we were kids you could buy shandy bass in newsagents, it had a tiny amount of alcohol but ecouraged you to get the taste for beer,and was a great ploy by Bass to get kids interested in their product. There were other cheap imitations with no alcohol such as Top deck, but Shandy Bass was a winner, it felt so illicit sipping it in the summer holidays.
I saw the Aurora Borealis again tonight. The trusty Aurora Watch also charts the beginnings of a storm. Get out there quickly thos who missed it last time.
Definitely not as impressive as last time, but pretty amazing to see it again so quickly.
Click the graph to see yesterday's activity.
I used to work behind the bar in the Masonic Hall in Portadown, a common request was for a vodkey wi a dash of brown (vodka with some brown lemonade) or for a 'low flyer wi a dash of brown' (a famous grouse with some brown lemonade).
I remember one old boy who had gone over to visit his daughter,who was at university in England, being very disgruntled that the bar man didn't know how to deal with his request for a low flyer wi a dash of brown. His main annoyance wasn't necessarily that the bar didn't stock brown lemonade but that he was forced to buy a whole bottle (mixer) of lemonade. This was a real bone of contention in the Masonic. I used to work in another bar in the town, and the Masonic locals called it a poofters bar because they didn't give you a dash of lemonade but forced you to buy a whole bottle.
Perhaps a dash is a uniquely Northern Ireland thing I don't know, but it is dying out, as is brown lemonade. I think brown lemonade is also available in some parts of the States though. I have been told it's just normal clear lemonade with a touch of molasses if anyone wants to recreate it.
Also the term lemonade is used a lot here in my part of the world for any fizzy drink. I think this stems from the lemonade man (Braid or Maine) who delivers all manner of fizzy drinks to your door step, sasparillo, pineappleade, splice, red lemonade.
This train of thought got me thinking about those uniquely Northern Irish products, we used to have Soda Bread and Potato Bread, but Paul Rankin now packages them up in brown paper designer packaging and flogs them for 1.20 a farl in Waitrose and Sainsburys.
I think we still haven't sold out with our Veda. Although it appears to have been repackaged and exported as the link shows, I haven't seen it on the mainland though.
We also have the usual tayto crisps, dulce (seaweed) and yellow man (honeycomb), but are there any other uniquely Northern Irish products I can't think of any.
On another note my mate who works a lot in England was asked by one of his colleagues to think of a stunningly beautiful woman from Northern Ireland that would be well known on the mainland, this has stumped us for over a month. We tried our best with The Corrs, one of them is often dandering round Stranmillis, but we can't lay claim to her. Mary Peters, Gloria Hunniford. Both lovely women (and from Portadown aswell) but not exactly stunners to the younder generation.
Scraping the barrel?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/3281537.stm
Driving down Mersey Street this morning and SR electrics on the Holywood Rd have big posters up in the style of election campaign posters emblazoned with Vote Sam...Sam's yer man for a bargain. Big Discounts.
About time someone injected a bit more comedy into proceedings, Northern Ireland electrocal campaigns are always so dry, except of course for Big Ian in his bus.
This piece on the confrontation between the UUP and the DUP outside the UUP headquarters is pure comedy. The two pictures speak volumes, Big Ian seems to be well chuffed with his efforts, Trimble seems slightly upset by the events.
I loved the Portadown News take on the DUP bus escapades last week, with a snide dig at Robert McCartney on his unicycle.
The PUP were round about this week, their party political broadcast was filmed in the dereliction of Mersey Street about a mile from here. Their broadcast was so blinking depressing, what it fails to say is that the houses where they were filming are being redeveloped hence the transition period where it looks like Beirut. At the other end of the street they are redeveloping the old Gallaghers factory and there is a bit of a buzz about the street again.
It appears me has been misrepresented by the jungle massive, there be an imposter by the name of MC Jaff on the scene:
http://www.jaffs.com/trumpet/000007.html
You can see a movie of him in action...aye:
http://www.redspot.org.uk/fest2003.htm
Rewind!! Bo!!
That blokes comment is pretty terrifying by the lack of basic grammar and spelling.
Some photos from a dander up Cavehill today
This is pretty clever and a much nicer way of embedding flash and including an image if the browser does not have the plugin.
I always blindly assumed that the Macromedia generated html was clean and needed, must question more!!
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/
When you are next driving past the Culloden hotel in the direction of Bangor, look to the left at the end of the car park a hundred yards or so from the entrance, Orange erected one of those transmitters disguised as a tree a few months back.
It looks something like this
I got broadband installed last week and have been running without a firewall since then. I thought it would be wise to get one up and running so I installed the free version of Zone Alarm. It wouldn't work, getting all sorts of errors about Vector Internet Monitor's shutting down, and the application kept closing. I ran a virus scan on the laptop and there were 223 infected files on my machine, none of which would have been installed via mail, I can almost guarantee that. So I removed the files and Zone Alarm is working fine now.
I consider myself to be relatively computer literate, so I dread to think what exists on other less literate home users machines.
This has inspired me to have a whirl with Linux again, I purchased the Red Hat Linux O'Reilly book and CD a while back but powdered about with dual booting and never committed, but this time things are gonna change, what distribution would you all recommend?
From various blog gathering I have a feeling Debian will be high up the list, but is it for a beginner? I have a nice fresh PC sitting in my loft, currently installed with Windows 95 which I will use for the project.
I intend to catalogue a fresh install on this here blog, and get advice from various quarters hopefully, to see if it is possible for a retard to get linux up and running as a desktop operating system.
I went to the Circus of Horrors last night in the Whitla hall, words can't describe the show. Their website describes them as a Rocky Horror crossed with Tarantino - a barrage of rock music and a dazzling light show... riveting entertainment.
We witnessed full frontal male nudity, a bloke lighting a flourescent tube by sticking a conducter in his backside and holding it, a woman carrying milk jugs attached to her nipples by clamps, a woman trapeze artist using her hair as rope, and all manner of obscurities. Rebecca got dragged on stage to attach crocodile clips to a blokes skin, he had elastic skin which could be stretched out inches from his body. He appeared on stage for the finale with hundreds of clothes pegs attached to his head.
If you ever get the chance to see this show again, and I am sure they will be back you must see it.
Britain's first municipal aerodrome was cited at Malone a suburb of Belfast.
The flights out of Malone were primarily for carrying mail and newspapers, but passengers were also carried. The first lady passenger was Miss Sarah Ingram, Departmental Manageress of Easons. Her diary can be heard here
" Than across the Solway Firth to Maryport,where I was told the machine was observed by the watchers."
There is a great history of Ulster's aviation here. Imagine using Lough Neagh as a base for transatlantic flying boats, or the regular balloon ascents in the Botanic gardens in the 19th century.
Make Jacob Nielsen cringe, go and get lost in the graffiti at http://www.banksy.co.uk
Oh my god, I had no idea the 600k connection would be so blinking good. I thought we had a ood connection in work but this seems to be so much faster.
The install was seamless, only one blip when one of my connections from work had a static IP address and the installer asked me to disable it until installation was complete.
This is fun, just have to wait for the abuse from Rebecca when she sees the modem and six feet of cable I asked him to coil up behind the chair for when I get the router.
Northern Ireland had one of the cheapest prices for two litres of milk at 49p.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3241639.stm
I remember in the late 80's in Portadown, Stewarts and Dunnes had a coke war (not the type you would expect in Colombia) but Coca-Cola. Prices dropped to 7 pence a can. My mum never allowed soft drinks in our house due to the damage to our teeth, surprisingly when coke was 7p a can we would go off on holiday with cool boxes overflowing with coke.
You know when you are driving around and you see nice houses that one day you would like to live in, should the little bolloxes round about not trash your street too much and leave you in a negative equity nightmare. Well two of my favourites went on sale recently, one has sold and the other is still on the market. If anyone has 325 grand to spare buy the second one. I think it was renovated by that Dawson Stelfox bloke who climbed Everest and was the architect involved in the restoration of the Albert Clock amongst other things.
What a hedonistic weekend, last month of hard saving for the honeymoon before Christmas, so it was a weekend of free stuff. Went to the Ulster Museum yesterday and the tropical ravine, they had a 60's exhibition which is worth a look. Went to the fireworks display last night in Holywood, stood in the torrential rain with a 'poke' of chips, but it was a decent display.
