Will somebody please tell me what the heck I’m talking about?
I was surfing around recently (Wikipedia, I think) and I came across the most marvelous term. It was something like the “national park effect” and it had an alternate version that mentioned a specific park. Yosemite, maybe. Does this ring a bell with anyone? I’d love to know the exact phrase.
What it means is, whenever a bureaucrat is ordered to cut back, he immediately chooses the most beloved or most important programs and threatens to disembowel them, as though it’s the only possible way to cut costs. Walk right on by all the useless cash-eating bullshit government sponsors — tax cuts mean drastic changes to the national parks or the military or highways.
Here in the UK, it’s usually schools and hospitals. Fortunately, those things mean nothing in the Badger household, but they get us with police and trash collection.
I know from my own experience (mostly reading the little area paper) that our local district council has a salaried position to show new-ish mothers at home how to brush a baby’s teeth (only this!), keeps someone on staff to come around and look at your compost heap and tell you if you’re doing it right, floats a full-time rat-catcher (okay, this guy was quite useful and interesting). They recently sponsored a trapeze artist to teach basic moves in the community centre (fitness, don’tcha know).
Don’t forget these employees enjoy salaries well above those in the private sector, benefits often equal in value to their salaries, and pensions...well. Pensions are the killer. Carrying civil servants through their golden years is murdelating our budgets. And, even worse than the States, government is the only part of the economy that has continued to grow and grow as the private sector shrinks.
We’re coming up on an election here, probably in May, and the Tories are probably going to walk it, though they richly undeserve to win. Already the BBC and Labour (but I repeat myself) are full of “ZOMG, Tory cuts in services!!!!!” and already the Tories have responded by deciding that cuts really don’t need to be deep.
Ugh. We are drowning in tax over here.
So what I like to do — it’s a little masochistic game I play — is mosey over to the Guardian jobs section and spot the most useless, expensive government job opening on the books. Lesbian outreach workers and sustainability officers and like that. Our entire household tax expenditure probably isn’t enough to support one of those useless parasites, and that makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as goat testicles.
Interesting to note, by the way, that the government’s favorite place for classified ads is a highly left-wing paper with tiny circulation. They know their constituency. Although today’s winner is from that once-great conservative paper, the Daily Telegraph.
February 1, 2010 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 36
Honey, I didn’t know you invited Al Gore to tea
We’re expecting sixteen inches of global warmening tonight. Okay, that’s the Mail. They are <ahem> somewhat prone to exaggeration — but we’ve just watched the evening news, and it looks pretty dire out there. It’s been snowing on Scotland for two weeks, and now it’s moving across the sunny South.
It’s a lot for here, I’m telling you. And worse than the snow is the deep cold that looks to hang on afterwards, turning us into a slippery Britcicle.
The Met Office has so much egg on their faces, they could make face omelets. They — for the third year in a row — promised us a record warm Winter, as temperatures have gone down and down to levels not seen in decades.
How can £200 million a year buy weather forecasts so consistently wrong? Because the Met Office is the throbbing heart of British warmist propaganda.
The current chairman of the Met Office, Robert Napier, was previously chief executive of WWF-UK, the UK arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature. In other words, a long-standing, committed environmental activist bugfuck looney-tune.
And, in the chattering teeth of this latest embarrassment, management has given itself nice, fat raises.
The question is, how long will Britons pay stupid money for short-range forecasts substantially less helpful than just sticking your head out the damn window, and long-range forecasts that amount to hysterical international suicide pacts?
January 5, 2010 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 43
I am SO TOTALLY not making this up!!!
I was going to give you a post about all the swell things we’re going to have in 2010, like antigravity boots and Thanksgiving-dinner-in-a-pill. But then we went to the supermarket and Uncle B put this in the cart. I ’bout wee’d myself.
OMFG! Uncle B is eating cheese out of a Wookey hole!
Turns out, Wookey Hole is a touristy tackfest, like Mammoth Cave or Rock City. It’s now owned by the former owner and ringmaster of Britain’s biggest circus, who declares himself delighted to be bringing cheese back to Wookey Hole.
Ahhhhhh…no. Can’t go on with a straight face. Have a good weekend, everybody!
January 1, 2010 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 40
Toiletpaper Week continues on sweasel.com
That’s him. That’s the little freak on my toilet paper.
I actually started the evening trying to find out why Bounty paper towels are called Plenty here. Turns out, Proctor and Gamble sold Bounty to SCA, a Swedish company, who decided to rebrand it. But, frankly, it looks EXACTLY the same, except it says “Plenty.”
Oh, and it’s two inches shorter. Because kitchen roll is smaller than paper towels.
Anyhow, it turn out SCA also owns Velvet, our house TP. And they’re in the process of rebranding that, for some reason. Let’s hope they get rid of Buttwipe Boy in the process.
SCA bought up Charmin in the deal, too. Which Uncle B says was a serious mistake, as — for some damn reason — Charmin clogged toilets up and down this green and pleasant land.
And that’s where I found this, which is some kind of promotional dealie for Charmin that’s, like, all New York City and pee jokes. Don’t get it.
I know. Lame post. I’m all bummed because I was set to watch the first online live famous brain dissection tonight, but either the server’s down or jammed or they’re blocking the UK.
No, really.
December 2, 2009 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 25
Happy Thanksgiving!
We’re having duck for Thanksgiving! Because I’m a idiot!
Also, today is my first anniversary of being an immigrant. That was a happy coincidence, falling over the finish line just in time for Thanksgiving.
I am thankful for many things today. I’m especially thankful for Michelle Obama’s eyebrows. Because, somehow, hundreds of people doing a Google Images search for that rude picture of Michelle are clicking on my snark about her eyebrows instead.
Eat too much turkey, drink too much beer, watch too much foo’ball and get into a fight with Uncle Bill for me, everyone!
November 26, 2009 — 5:52 pm
Comments: 25
Wherein Stoaty flunks being an American
We’ve got turkey and roast potatoes and hot dinner rolls and candied sweet potatoes and…shit. I was SO SURE Thanksgiving was the THIRD Thursday in November.
Wow.
Huh.
Comes to something when my mother-in-law rings us up to say she’s been watching the telly and she’s pretty sure we’ve got the date wrong. Well, dammit, no limey bluehair’s gonna to tell ME when Thanksgiving is. It’s my favorite holiday, and I’ll celebrate it any day I like.
Anyway, the turkey won’t keep for a week.
What’s that? OF COURSE I passed my written driver’s test! I got 100% of the multiple choice questions and 58 out of a possible 75 points for that supremely pointless ‘hazard perception’ section (44 is passing). Now I have to start prepping for the real test — the one where I actually drive a car. Um…yay?
Afterward, Uncle B took me out for a Big Mac as a special Thanksgiving Day treat. I still lumme some special sauce, so maybe I’m an American after all.
November 19, 2009 — 4:32 pm
Comments: 45
Oh, that witty weasel
One of the fun side effects of marrying a foreigner is that he or she will not have heard the dumbass kid jokes EVERYbody in your home country knows from the age of, like, five. So you get credit for being having an incredibly quick wit. Or, anyhow, you have stuff to talk about. It goes like:
“I’m rubber, you’re glue!”
“What’s this?”
“It bounces off me and sticks to you!”
“Oh, I say, Weasel! How frightfully droll!”
So I got to explain, “do you have Prince Albert in a can?” and his companions, “do you have Prince Edward in a box?” and “do you have Martha White in a bag?” yesterday.
Actually, I never heard those last two. I found them (and the ad on the right) on the appropriate Wikipedia page.
Yep, that’s right. I looked up “do you have Prince Albert in a can?” on Wikipedia. I’m a thoroughly post-modern weasel.
I love the ad, by the way. It typifies the weird mix of respect and disrespect we held for Indians way back when we were allowed to have attitudes about Indians. I remember the expression “to put the Indian sign on” — it was sort of the evil eye — but not “Jimmy” as an adjective. Or “smartweed” for nasty tobacco.
And that’s all you’re getting out of me today. I’ve got a written driving exam tomorrow!
November 18, 2009 — 6:47 pm
Comments: 24
And you thought OUR lot were pinko stooges
You know, I try to stay out of British politics. I still own property, pay taxes and vote in the States. I got enough to get wadded up about with the politics I know. Plus, nobody likes a bitchy immigrant. But Uncle B sent me this link and I’m just…stonked.
Just after WWII, Harry Pollitt — leader of the Communist Party in Britain — gave a talk at Cambridge and told a bunch of bright young lefties don’t join our party. Join the establishment and work from within. And they did. The Communist Party withered away in Britain, and the USSR issued a postage a stamp and named a battleship after Pollitt when he died. Because he did Communism such a service.
The handwritten diary of the Soviet’s point man in the West turned up in the US Archives and has recently been translated. The man, Anatoly Chernyaev, is still alive and tickled pink that his life’s work is being recognized. It details how close the relationship was between Labour, trade unions and the Soviets. Right from the start (or almost the start — the Labour Party was founded in 1900).
Some of these guys were paid agents of the Soviet Union, actively working with Moscow to bring down Thatcher. Why that hasn’t resulted in charges can only be because most of the old coots are dead. And Labour is still in power.
It’s a long but a fascinating read, if you’re the sort of person who wakes up in a cold sweat dreaming of Antonio Gramsci.
The UK Spectator broke the story, but the only place you can get it for free is the Daily Mail. In the darker phase of my paranoias, I often think They let the embarrassing stories go out in the Mail because it’s such a trashy, low-rent rag.
November 12, 2009 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 20
I guess I never really thought about what the Bomb Squad drives…
Cramming for a test at fifty is like a dream come true. You know — the one where they read your transcripts and find you never REALLY finished Algebra and you have to go back to High School. Oh, and for some reason, you are in Study Hall in your underpants. That dream.
I’ve got the Theory part of my driving test a week from tomorrow. That’s a multiple-choice dealie plus a bogus ‘hazard perception’ test that probably sounded all high-tech and sciencey when it was first proposed in, like, 1995 (you press a wired input device charmingly known as a mouse!).
I’ve got a study DVD Uncle B very kindly gave me for my birfday and I’ve started the long cram. I have to answer fifty from a pool of nine-hundred-something questions, with 80% accuracy. So far, I’ve passed all the simulated tests I’ve taken using common sense, but I certainly haven’t aced any. And some of the questions make me wish there was a default, “no, seriously — WTF?” option.
Pelican crossing, my silky sable ass.
November 11, 2009 — 8:13 pm
Comments: 17
Happy Guy Fawkes Night! Don’t burn anybody I wouldn’t burn…
I mentioned a while back that Sussex makes a Very Big Deal out of Bonfire Night, holding parades and fireworks and bonfires in one village or another most weekends between late September and late November.
Well, tonight — November 5 — is the real Guy Fawkes Night. By Sussex tradition, Lewes holds this one, the biggest one. That’s because Mary Tudor burned 17 Protestants in Lewes High Street while she was on the throne, so they kind of earned the right to a party. Yeah. It’s a whole sectarian thing.
Lewes has been trying to put people off recently. It’s getting big and out of hand, with Londoners coming down and all. So instead we went to one in the ancient tiny village of Icklesham tonight.
And a damn fine firework display they put on, too. They charge £3 a head and put it all toward next year’s fireworks. And they roast a pig (a heartbroken Uncle B was put off by the queue) and serve booze and dance about in ancient costumes and bang drums and burn a honking great huge pile of wood pallets with a Guy on.
You know, the nannies have been trying to shut this thing down for years. The fires and the crowds are both very big and very dangerous. Some bonfire societies drag their explosives through town carrying torches(!). Some Guys are rigged with dynamite(!). Some of the fireworks are homemade(!).
There was a sign saying “no sparklers — they will be confiscated!” under which a group of drunk people were happily waving sparklers. There’s lots of booze involved. This afternoon, we bought a whole big box of fireworks (for our own personal bonfire night) in the grocery store.
I wouldn’t count these people out just yet.
November 5, 2009 — 7:32 pm
Comments: 11