Coffee Prices Rise

Where do you get charged £361,514.97 for four cups of coffee?

If you guessed Terminal 5 at Heathrow, you win!

Earth Hour Update

Well, I can confirm that Earth Hour was a roaring success. Within minutes of the Space Needle in Seattle (where all the power is hydroelectric!) going dark as a sacrifice to Blessed Gaia in an effort to fight global warming, Chez Szondy was hit by two degrees of frost and three inches of snow.

Any more successes like this and we'll be wrestling polar bears in August.

Update: Tim Blair calls Shennanigans.

Win for Oxford

Oxford has won the 154th boat race against Cambridge.

Here is our exclusive "boatcam" footage of the event.

The 10 Most Prophetic Sci-Fi Movies Ever

Popular Mechanics looks at the most prophetic science fiction movies.



How Quatermass and the Pit missed out I'll never...

Maybe I've said too much.

Future War Tank (1939)

Not bad, but I've seen better.

Dracula

Children of the night: Shut up!

Breakfast Three Times a Day

In defence of the Great British Breakfast.

Earth Hour

It' s Earth Hour today at 8:00 PM Zulu Time, when we are all exhorted to turn off our lights for an hour to worship Blessed Gaia Save the Planet^tm.

Naturally, Chez Szondy will be participating. How? Let me put this way: If you're popping over for a visit, I recommend wearing one of these.


Update: Ha!

Anti-Terrorist Bed

For that special raving, paranoid nut-case in your life.

Filter to protect precious bodily fluids extra.

Justice is Blinkered

The full might of English law will be brought to bear against those who would make war against the Realm, Her Majesty or her subjects.

Unless the prisons are a bit crowded, in which case you get out early.

.577 T-Rex

Ow.

Pre-Edison Sound

A sound recording made two decades before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

The only snag is that the earlier machine's recordings couldn't be played back until now, so it was a tad on the pointless side.

Vintage Science

Well worth a shufti.

Future Bus

Something tells me this wasn't thought through very well.

Vanguard: World's Oldest Spacecraft

Vanguard marks a half-century in orbit.

Still the cutest little space-grapefruit.

PHaSr

I don't know if it works or not, but it definitely looks like something Avon would tote around.

Bjørn Lomborg, Call Your Service

Introducing the "non-skeptic heretic club", whose message is, "Okay, we'll give you global warming, but don't you think it's better to spend a small amount of money on damage mitigation rather than sacrificing the entire civilised world on the altar of Blessed Gaia in a pointless effort at pulling a global King Canute?"

Lord Summerisle was unavailable for comment.

"Bugger Off" Drone Buggers Off

A story of bad engineering and even worse procurement policies.

XCOR Aerospace

A new contender in the spaceplane race promises to fly within two years.

Cool.

Um...

Taiwan asked the United States for helicopter batteries and got nuclear warhead triggers instead.

In what is in the running for understatement of the century, the no. 2 at the American Defense Department called this development, "disconcerting".

Gustav Graves, Call Your Service

Nazi orbital death-ray.

Bet that got your attention

Terminal Condition

CCTV cameras on every street corner and (probably) half the loos in Britain not oppressive enough for you? Then nip over to Terminal 5 at Heathrow, where you can experience having your fingerprints compulsorily taken in the name of "security". For added enjoyment, ask the courteous staff how any of this pointless invasion of privacy is going to keep a Jihadist from climbing the fence and watch how fast you're subjected to a cavity search.

Just goes to show what happens when you approach a problem by having the cart jammed hard in front of the horse, strip off the wheels, and then shoot the horse.

Jeremy Clarkson, Call Your Service

Lord Summerisle at the eco-town groundbreaking ceremony

In an effort to combat global warming and (all together now!) Save the Planet^tm, the British government is planning 15 "eco-towns" with a speed limit of 15 mph on the major roads.

And it gets better:

Under the plans, the central areas of the new towns would be pedestrianised, with the 15mph limit introduced on "key roads" into the centre. All homes would be built within 400 yards of public transport stop and 800 yards from shops.

The government thinks that these sort of draconian measures will make people "abandon their cars", though it is more likely that they'll abandon the foul little eco-towns to self-righteous Gaia worshipers and people on the dole who are too poor or shiftless to move anywhere else.

Still, it is an impressive achievement: from new town to slum in one go.

Life in 2008

Life forty years on.

If you live in 1968, that is.

Grim Reporting

With grim crocodile tears, grim the MSM grimly reported that the grim United states grimly passed the grim milestone of grimness in the grim war in grim Iraq as grim American grim casualties of grimiosity grimly reached the grim number of 4000.

When grimly asked why the grim MSM grimly gives grim front (grim) page grim-prominence to such an out-of-grim-context number while grimily ignoring non-grim grim-type other grim news about grim-positive grim developments since the grim surge grimly started working with grimness or, indeed, why the grim MSM never reports on grim grim milestones of any other grim conflicts or grim armed grim forces (especially those of the grim enemy), the grim MSM just looked grim.

If the MSM wasn't working so hard to make political capital out of Coalition deaths while giving succor to the enemy, this would almost be funny.

Almost.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter
from
Ephemeral Isle

The Brain That Wouldn't Die

At least she's got neck juice.

A Modest Proposal

Lamperd of Canada has a modest idea for improving airline safety in these troubled time: Force all passengers to wear bracelets that allow the stewardesses to taser them by remote control.

I suspect that the owners of Lamperd have a great deal of stock in railway companies.

Breaking News

Next up: an "I told you so" interview with Sarah Connor.

Doctor Who Egg Cup & Spoon

I know they were smoking crack when they thought this up. The only question is, how much?

Famous Five Follies

Disney has demonstrated that their bolderisation of Winnie the Pooh was not a one-off and is bringing back Enid Blyton's Famous Five-- or, at least, an "updated" animated version.

Unsurprisingly, one of the girls is now a Californian "shopaholic", the other is, in accordance with the 1975 Childhood Integration Act that requires that any gathering of more than two juveniles must include a member of an officially recognised ethnic minority, Anglo-Indian, one of the boys is a computer nerd and no doubt we will subsequently learn that the blond boy is homosexual.

What character atrocity is planned for the dog remains undetermined.

According to the BBC,

Producers say the animated tales remain faithful to the themes of storytelling, mystery and adventure central to the original books but add a contemporary twist.

That's "contemporary twist" as in looking like every other PC cartoon on television.

Meat Out

I was not aware that today is "Meat-Out" day-- when, according to the organisers, people can,

Kick the meat habit... and explore a wholesome, nonviolent diet of fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

I love the "nonviolent" bit-- as opposed to those other diets that involve hand-to-hand combat.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have an ox to roast.

Brian Cohen, Call Your Service

Telegraph headline:

Easter warning: crucifixion is bad for you

Good to see the news media on top of things.

Car Shooting

Top Gear-Car Shooting - Click here for another funny movie.
Now that is what I call sport.

Chicken Poo Defence

Mr. Joe Weston-Webb of Soar Bottom, Nottinghamshire has found the perfect answer to his rural vandalism problem: a 30 ft Roman catapult loaded with Grade-A chicken poo. That is not, of course, taking into account the cannon that fires railway sleepers or the exploding coffin.

I am particularly impressed with Mr. Weston-Webb's response to officialdom's frowning on his defending what is his. It is both reasonable and suitably insolent.

Nottinghamshire Police said yesterday that they would send an officer to offer advice on “conventional security techniques” and on the use of “reasonable force”. Mr Weston-Webb promises to be reasonable. “We are putting a rubber block on the end of the railway sleeper,” he said. “It should just knock an intruder down.”

And you can't say fairer than that.

Big Brother in a Box

I think I'll stick with satellite.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 - 2008

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed on.

Mile-High Update

As a follow up to the other day's post on skyscraper atrocities in London, a visitor has requested a posting of the Architect Sketch.

Yes, Cinders, you shall go to the ball.

White Season

Ron Liddle over at The Spectator sums up BBC's "White Season":

When those programmes were commissioned and the BBC executives sat around discussing the content, they undoubtedly caught the whiff of the zeitgeist — that, come on chaps, we really ought to do something about those dreadful people in the north who somehow feel estranged and alienated. But they were singularly incapable of commissioning anything which said, actually, they might have a legitimate grievance.

That would have been a step too far. Instead they commissioned a bunch of programmes that said: white working-class people, we feel your pain, but unfortunately, you’re wrong. In other words, they demonstrated precisely the same mindset which infects every single news bulletin, documentary and drama we have witnessed for the last 20 years on the BBC. Can you imagine them commissioning a film about a Muslim girl who converts to Christianity, converts her mum — and by the denouement is proven right to have done so? It will never happen.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

It's Saint Patrick's Day at Chez Szondy, so while I'm tucking into slow-cooked corned beef and cabbage and a few pints of Guinness, here is the late, great Dave Allen to take up the slack.

Enjoy.



And for you married-types; yes, I did have to put the slow cooker out in the garage.

Meet the "Pitbull"

Meet the British Army's replacement for the venerable Land Rover.

Just when you start to despair, the MOD shows flickers of competence after all.

The Fairey Rotodyne

Proto-Thunderbirds engineering at its best

Mile-High Madness

Popular Architecture proposes that the answer to Britain's housing problems is a block of flats a mile high. According to the authors,

The tower allows a massive intensification of the city without the need for dramatic alteration of London's existing fabric.

That's no "dramatic alteration" as in, "Driving a stake through the man's heart was not a dramatic alteration of his existing fabric."

Battle of the Worlds

Calculus!

Happy Pi Day

Happy
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