Harriet Harman: a parrot would be cheaper.

Under fire waste of rations and deputy leader of the Labour party Harriet Harman MP earns around £125,000 a year.  In recent days all she has said is ‘I acted in the letter and spirit of the law,’ when questioned about the funding of her deputy leadership campaign.

A parrot could do that perfectly well, and would be cheaper to run ovedr the course of a year.  A mate’s got one for sale for £50.  It also whistles and says ‘Bobby’s a wanker!’  It’d make an excellent deputy leader of the Labour Party.

Iran: be afraid.

Lots of USAF F-15s shrieking low over the village in pairs this morning - and afternoon, here’s another couple shattering the sunny winter afternoon calm. Which will be very useful if there are any picturesque sandstone fishing villages concealing atom bomb factories in Iran.

For more on the US gearing up for major cock-waving at the Ayatollahs in the Gulf, the Dynamics of Cats has a good round up of newspaper and blog chatter.

Sudan teddy bear case God-off.

Soft toy blasphemist Gillian Gibbons is due in court in Sudan. For those not paying attention she allowed the class teddy bear to be called Mohammed and is now facing jail, a fine or a whipping from the Islamist authorities.

I hope she is acquitted. Christians will be praying to their God she is, Islamists heading to Friday prayers will be praying to their God she isn’t. It’s a God-off. A top-two fixture, a six pointer. Who’s gonna win?

There ranty populist British foreign policy solution - ‘bomb Sudan back to the stone age’ - won’t work, because Sudan is 95% there already. There have already been calls to ’send in the SAS’ in comments here where the post points out that the British Foreign Secretary has been a bit of a drip in this case.

Gordon Brown, friend of science

at least that’s the impression given by his last budget.

And how is science faring under Gordon ‘Mr Bean’ Brown’s prime ministerial regime? Er, science centres in cash crisis (thank you for once again exposing our national Luddishness Inkycircus) and thank you to Steinn’s ‘Heckuva job, Brownie’ for pointing out that Mr B has hacked funding so that British astronomers can’t afford time on two of the worlds finest telescopes…which Britain paid to build. Some civil servant said that the astronomers didn’t need access to them, astronomers at the forefront of their field said they did.

Sigh.

The evils of a consumer society:

Mano Singham (who should be bookmarked, or rather whose Web Journal should, since it contains lots of well-researched meaty goodness on the evolution and religion question, and slamming a man one has never met in a book is just rude*) writes oodles of sense.

We’ve also just missed Buy Nothing Day (23rd Nov.)

*Although I could think up a few deserving candidates.

Speaking of sinkings, Vince Cable torpedoed Gordon Brown

in Prime Minister’s Questions today.

‘…the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation from Stalin to Mr Bean in the past few weeks, creating chaos out of order.’

Funny, accurate, telling and a big hole below the waterline. There should be work afoot in the Cowley Street basement to splice some of Vince Cable’s DNA for wit, intelligence and political nous into whoever wins the Lib Dem leadership election.

The prime ministerial bilge pumps should be overwhelmed soon.

Bleeding the radiators…

and I wonder what if instead of air then water…blood really did come out?*

It’d be a Steven King novel plot. As far as I know, the only domestic object he has has not imbued with evil and had terrorizing humans is central heating.

Ladislav, the Polish plumber comments: ‘Or you have put stiff in header tank. Proper place for stiffs, under patio. That forty quid, pliz. What come after s?’

‘T?’

‘Ny-I thot you vud never ask. Two sugars, pliz.’

*and your central heating system would soon become one big black pudding, obviously.

Whitby motorboat sinking (5): last seconds.

No, I don’t have a picture of the capsized boat. The Whitby Gazette has two, and some excellent pics of the whole sad event here. The pics reinforce the descriptions I’ve been given: ludicrous, incomprehensible* decision by the boat crew, utter heroism from the lifeboat crew.

The Gazette also has a new pic of the seconds before the final sinking here. It shows the boat still afloat off the East Pier. According to eyewitness accounts, by this point the two male crew had been swept overboard and were in the water off the West Pier, the woman was still aboard and on the phone to the emergency services. The boat is broadside on to a 10-15 foot wave that is about to break.

* There are two reasons I can think of for the boat trying to get to sea that day. Stupidity is one.

Whitby motorboat sinking (4)

Answers to some of the points raised in this thread, which has been sending a lot of traffic here.

With modest experience you can tell by the time you get between the pier extensions whether or not it is safe to go to sea. It is possible to get suckered, because in moderately rough conditions you get breaking white water to port and starboard, but the offing does not have much breaking water, especially on the flood.

On Friday that was not the case- it was a nor-nor-westerly f7, gusting 8 and an eyewitness told me that there were large breaking waves right across the harbour entrance and that the water between the extensions was very rough - you get short, steep waves bouncing off the walls coming at you from angles and clapotic chop. They would have been able to see the sea state from the outer harbour and there is room to turn but if (as seems the case) they didn’t know what they were doing they may not have had the confidence to spin the boat.

The upper harbour would have been windy, choppy but not rough. Below the swing bridge it would have been slightly rougher and by the time they were between the training walls (the inner pier arms) they would have been heaved up on metre-plus swells and should have been able to see the outer harbour and the offing. They went out at 2 hours before high water, I took this pic of conditions at high water that day:

Claimed wave heights: the estimates of 20-30 feet in the reports were exaggerated. I usually halve claimed wave heights, and on Friday I estimate 10-15 foot waves.

This what the outer harbour looks like when a big northerly is blowing right in - this is not the day of the sinking, it is the storm surge (here) three weeks before, West Pier training wall to the left, pier extension to the right. According to a witness, the conditions were not much different to this:

They appeared not to have, or be incapable of using a VHF and having asked around they asked no-one for advice before they cast off and headed downriver.

The pork pie, the foreign holiday and the suppositories.

I hear tell of distant sailors. Friends have arrived from Angle-land bearing gifts. Not gold, frankinsense and myrrh, no! Marmite and pork pies. The Marmite is for antifouling the hull.

Up here we have a fantastic bakery which makes the best pork pies in the world and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. They are best ‘et ‘ot, straight from the bakery between 9 and 10 am.

A few years ago, an acquiantance went on holiday to Malta, first time abroad. Not wanting to risk eating ‘that foreign muck’, he and his g/f laid in a good stock of these finest kind pork pies. They were wrapped in clingfilm and packed in suitcases. Travel to Heathrow, flight, arrival, bed - those pies had a good 36 hours of sweating and fermenting away. Next morning a pork pie breakfast was had, and by mid afternoon both were in hospital, arses running like glassblowers’ noses, with shattering bouts of food poisoning.

Snatched from jaws of death, they were eventually returned thin and wan to the hotel with medication: ‘Whey, ow the fuck’s we supposed ti eat these?’ Asked my friend, looking aghast.

‘Ah dean’t nah,’ his g/f replied, ‘mebbes yer cut em up.’

So they cut up the suppositories and ate them. I can’t remember if that put them in hospital a second time, I was sympathetically laughing too hard.