It's really bad, but this is making me drool.
http://uk.gizmodo.com/2006/03/31/pimpstar_led_rims_the_video.html
I suck, I know.
Month: March 2006
You can't legally drink, but you sure as hell can broker international arms deals
Pupils import torture tools to highlight UK arms loopholes
Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday March 30, 2006
Schoolchildren have exploited loopholes in Britain's arms controls by importing torture equipment including thumb and wall cuff restraint devices and a Chinese “sting stick” – a metal bar covered with spikes.
All that teenagers from Lord Williams's school in Thame, Oxfordshire, needed was a letterhead, a mobile phone, an email address, and a little money. They also set up a separate company in Ireland to avoid British controls on the sale of small arms.
The government says it is opposed to any trade in torture equipment, but bans only those items mentioned on a published list. The wall cuffs from Poland, thumb cuffs from Taiwan, and sting stick from China do not appear on the list.
The pupils set up two companies, Williams Defence and Williams Defence (Eire). Through their Irish company they arranged deals to destinations covered by British and other national trade embargos, including the sale of Pakistani grenade launchers to Syria, Turkish guns to Mali, and South African rifles to Israel.
The Thame children got quotes but did not go ahead with the deals. However, children from a school in Portloaise, near Dublin, succeeded in buying electric shock batons from Korea and leg irons from South Africa.
The ease with which British controls on trade in torture equipment and small arms can be evaded is exposed in a Dispatches programme, After School Arms Club, presented by Mark Thomas, to be broadcast on Channel 4 next Monday. “It should not be legal, and yet we've proved that children, who by law are not allowed to drink alcohol, can broker arms from countries along a trade route from Poland to China, Israel to South Africa. And many of these arms are used against – or tragically even by – children,” said Maddy Fry, 16, a pupil at Lord Williams's school.
George Lear, head of citizenship at the school, said: “We were stunned by what we could achieve. Nobody questioned us at any stage.” Roger Berry, chairman of the Commons quadripartite committee which monitors export controls, said yesterday that Britain was in the absurd position where children could freely import equipment that could be used in torture while anyone could be arrested for carrying “offensive weapons”.
The pupils presented Malcolm Wicks, minister responsible for export controls, with the sting stick outside the Commons. He has asked them for a report on how they managed to import the torture equipment so easily.
From The Guardian.
Physical pain is good for you
Went to the gym today and replaced mental fatigue with some of the good old-fashion physical kind. Spent 25 minutes on a cross-trainer, 15 minutes on a treadmill and the rest of the hour doing weight stuff. Maybe I'll be tired enough to make it through the night tonight.
This is a bitchy post. Read at your own peril
I am not in a happy place at the moment, for several reasons. The first would be because I haven't been sleeping well, and that's always a good way to start a downward spiral, really. The second is that it feels (and smells) like a small furry rodent has taken domicile in my mouth and proceeded to die and is now happily decomposing. Joy of joys.
Between my canadian taxes and my british landlady (mostly, but there are a slew of other little things), I am a fount of happyhappyjoyoy thoughts, which also are not conductive to restful nights.
I need a hug.
Today is one of those days I wish some of the boys were around.
Taken from an article on hard-to-open packaging
British researchers blame “wrap rage” for more than 60,000 injuries in this country. In 2004, a writer for The Times of London described the CD as “the crucible of wrap rage,” whose old cardboard box was replaced by a “zip strip. The answer to our unwrapping prayers! Yet 12 years later, a pull-tab torn off in hand, we are still chewing through plastic like wild dogs.”
That's so true though. Some of the stuff we buy these days, you need a chainsaw to open. Katy is always afraid I'm going to stab myself with my leatherman when I try and cut through that hard plastic clamshell…
Weekend pictures
More here: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/leics25032006/
We survived the weekend, hoorah hooray. My back is killing me from sleeping in Katy's old bed in Leicester. It was mother's day here in the UK this weekend (though it's in May across the ocean) so we drove down on friday after work and spent the weekend there. Saturday was a busy day with going to Ikea to get the last of the stuff we wanted and then into town to pick up a few sundry items. We went to put flowers on Katy's gran's grave on Sunday prior to stuffing our faces full of Sunday lunch. Katy's mom was feeling under the weather because of a cold so the usual military precision of serving dinner was off and we had to play musical dinner plates a few times to ensure that everybody got the right plate. It all got sorted out in the end, after some comedy value :)
This week should be fairly sedate and hopefully we can get most of the touch-ups done to the house decor this weekend.
Quote of the day
Being British is about driving in an Italian car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then traveling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.
Superb :)
Good news, bad news
+ Katy and I went to Argos last night to replace our new TV with an even newer one that finally doesn't sound like it's clicking like a dog on a hardwood floor.
– The wall-mounting bracket doesn't fit this new TV. We'll need to get a new one. Joy
+ The meeting with our landlady wasn't as painful as it could have been
– She was still nitpicky and we don't know when we'll get the money.
+ We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means curry.
– We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means two big people sleeping in one small bed.
I want things to settle down.
I want all the paperwork to end. I want it all to be over and done with so we can just have peace and quiet. There's been too much crap lately and I don't know on which foot to dance any more.
At what point is a country bankrupt?
WASHINGTON — With no fanfare, President Bush signed a bill Monday pushing the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9 trillion. The measure allows the government to borrow an additional $781 billion and prevent a first-ever default on Treasury notes. It also lets the government pay for the war in Iraq without raising taxes or cutting popular domestic programs. The debt limit increase was the fourth of Bush's presidency, totaling $3 trillion. With the budget deficit near record levels, an additional increase in the debt limit almost certainly will be required next year. The measure allows the debt limit to rise from $8.184 trillion to $8.965 trillion.
Yes folks that's 9,000,000,000,000$USD. Now given the fact that at the time I'm writing this, the world population is about 6.6 billion people, this means that if you spread out the US debt across the whole friggin world (!!!), each man-woman-child would owe about 1400$. If you reduce that down to the US population, about 295 million, that comes to a staggering 30 grand!
Canada's debt per capita is a third of this amount and people are already worried the country is going to go bankrupt. But since this is the US, everything is hunky-dory…
From the I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-reading-this-shit desk:
As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts.
Said an FBI spokesman on why not all agents of the FBI are allowed to have an email account…