It really is beyond belief. The BBC news last night reported the story of a school which has banned it's dinner ladies from selling triangular shaped flapjack after a child had to be sent home when another child threw a slice of flapjack at his eye causing him an injury. Well actually he probably just threw it in his general direction, I doubt he would have ballistic accuracy with a slice of flapjack, whatever it's shape. I will point out at this point that the child made a full recovery. In other words he was just a bit upset.
I would consider this a freak accident, and would not rearrange the menu simply to prevent the highly unlikely event being repeated. But just look a the probabilities. A triangle has three points and three sides. The chances of being struck by a point are equal to the chances of being struck by a side. The school has been told to serve only square or rectangular pieces of flapjack. These have four corners and four sides. So whilst the chances of being hit by a corner remain the same at 50/50, the chances of being hit by a corner are 33% higher when compared with a triangle. And I would doubt the ballistic accuracy of a square of flapjack is any worse than that if a triangular piece.
Of course what the school has failed to take into account is the devious nature of school children. What will prevent them, left with their cutlery, from cutting the square of flapjack diagonally across and thus arming them with not one, but two triangular pieces of lethal flapjack? The consequences are unthinkable.
And if triangular flapjack is such a safety hazard within the school canteen, then surely wedges of quiche and slices of all sorts of pie should be outlawed too?
You really couldn't make this up. It's Health and Safety gone mad etc etc........
Of course those of a certain age will know of the real danger in school canteens - chocolate crunch with pink custard. This stuff really was dangerous. If Teflon is the slipperiest substance known to man then chocolate crunch is definitely the hardest. If the local council could only get hold of the recipe they could solve the pothole problem in an instance. Attempting to eat this stuff was nigh on impossible. An entire generation of dentists were able to retire early as a result of the inclusion of chocolate crunch onto the school meals menu. Hitting it with the sharp edge of a spoon would, when around 3 1/2 tonnes of pressure per square inch had been applied, result in the stuff shattering, with pieces flying everywhere. Many a child would go home with shrapnel wounds when chocolate crunch had been on the menu. People born in the mid sixties proudly show off their scars. Soaking the stuff in the accompanying pink custard after turning it upside down helped a little but not much. All that happened then was that the stricken child would go home with a simulated gunshot wound with unsightly creamy white stains around it, because the pink was a mere illusion, it always dried creamy white. It was a different time of course, before Yogurt and Lettuce were invented, but it was part of what out the backbone in British kids. So, let them eat triangular flapjack. Otherwise they will all grow up without the nerve to ever try a Vindaloo, or a late night Kebab. And the world will be a darker place without that.
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Now I really don't understand money - budget review.
As I admitted in my previous post, I don't understand money. And I sure as hell don't understand the budget.
We have had three years of austerity, with pay freezes in the public sector, redundancies, cost efficiency measures, pay cuts, tax rises, pension benefits reduced and we will all have to work longer. But this, we are told is for the greater good, as we will bounce out of recession in no time and be richer in wealth and experience. However despite all the savings the Government still borrowed £21 billion last year and £20 billion the year before (in rough terms - give or take a million, and when you're talking in billions what does a million here or there matter? Ask the CPS) Even with all those savings and all that money borrowed growth is at a standstill and inflation is rising.
Despite being in debt, and in a recession we continue to give away millions in foreign aid. This is so that African clan leaders and warloads can buy more guns and new Mercedes, and spend a very small percentage of what we send on buying a well, or building a school out of corrugated tin. It wouldn't be so bad if they spent the money on British guns, but they don't, they buy Chinese copies of the excellent Russian AK-47. So UK Plc doesn;t benefit at all from this, other than we get a nice warm glow from helping save ungrateful nations from their own stupidity in order that they can grow up and become terrorists to fight against us. But I digress.
We fell into this recession, if memory serves, because a bunch of greedy Americans loaned money to people to buy houses who had no hope of ever paying the money back. This caused soem American banks to collapse, which in turn, for reasons I am not able to fully grasp, caused Northern Rock, a UK bank to also collapse. And then caused lots of other financial institutions to have collywobbles of their own until suddenly it was my problem, even though I don't own a bank. I am in the happy position where whilst I have very little money, I owe very little money too, so I could manage reasonably well without a bank at all. So, in a nutshell, lending money to people who can't pay it back is not a good idea. Obviously you should only loan money to rich people, who can pay it back. But then, they don't need to borrow it because they are rich.
Anyhow, it would seem that the Chancellors plan to get the economy moving is that he will borrow £21 billion again this year. He will then use this to help people who can't afford the deposit to buy a house, to buy a house. This will be in the form of some sort of loan, which if they can't afford a mortgage, they will have no hope of paying back. Sound familiar?
Elsewhere in the budget, a political master stroke, Mr Osbourne announces he will not increase the duty in fuel that he had planned for the Autumn. We are supposed to be grateful for this. 'I am cancelling this September's fuel duty increase altogether,' said Osborne. 'Fuel is now 13p cheaper than it would have been,' he claimed. Well there's a convenient conversion back to imperial measures for a start. Yes it's 13p a gallon cheaper, but only 3p a litre which is what it is sold in. 3p doesn't sound as impressive as 13 p though does it?And don't forget that's not 3p a litre coming OFF the price, that's the removal of a 3p per litre increase he had previously threatened. So, If I threaten to punch him in the face, but then say I've changed my mind, does that make it all okay?
The only other striking bit of news in the budget was a reduction in the price of a pint of beer by 1p. Wow! With beer costing on average £3 a pint in pubs that is really something to drink to. Actually he missed a trick there, becasue had he converted it to litres it's more than twice as much at 2.1 pence per litre. So, for example, if you are a raging alcoholic and drink 10 pints of beer every day, that will save you £36.50 a year, enough to buy another 12 pints, and one for yourself darling. If on the other hand, like me, you enjoy a nice glass of red wine at home you save nothing. Or if you have the occasional pint after walking 30 miles in the beautiful rural North Yorkshire moors, at a nice country pub, assuming it hasn't closed down because of the recession, it will save you only about 5 pence a year. Which is more than the 3p a litre you'll have not saved on the reduction in the fuel duty that never was in the first place.
The final bit of budget news I caught was that we will now be able to earn £10000 before paying any tax at all. Unless you are a mulitnational company in which case it will remain as it was £100,000 million.
Of course what George should have done is gone down to "Cash for Gold" with the nations gold reserves and flogged them - but too late, seems like the preceding Labour Government already did that.
We have had three years of austerity, with pay freezes in the public sector, redundancies, cost efficiency measures, pay cuts, tax rises, pension benefits reduced and we will all have to work longer. But this, we are told is for the greater good, as we will bounce out of recession in no time and be richer in wealth and experience. However despite all the savings the Government still borrowed £21 billion last year and £20 billion the year before (in rough terms - give or take a million, and when you're talking in billions what does a million here or there matter? Ask the CPS) Even with all those savings and all that money borrowed growth is at a standstill and inflation is rising.
Despite being in debt, and in a recession we continue to give away millions in foreign aid. This is so that African clan leaders and warloads can buy more guns and new Mercedes, and spend a very small percentage of what we send on buying a well, or building a school out of corrugated tin. It wouldn't be so bad if they spent the money on British guns, but they don't, they buy Chinese copies of the excellent Russian AK-47. So UK Plc doesn;t benefit at all from this, other than we get a nice warm glow from helping save ungrateful nations from their own stupidity in order that they can grow up and become terrorists to fight against us. But I digress.
We fell into this recession, if memory serves, because a bunch of greedy Americans loaned money to people to buy houses who had no hope of ever paying the money back. This caused soem American banks to collapse, which in turn, for reasons I am not able to fully grasp, caused Northern Rock, a UK bank to also collapse. And then caused lots of other financial institutions to have collywobbles of their own until suddenly it was my problem, even though I don't own a bank. I am in the happy position where whilst I have very little money, I owe very little money too, so I could manage reasonably well without a bank at all. So, in a nutshell, lending money to people who can't pay it back is not a good idea. Obviously you should only loan money to rich people, who can pay it back. But then, they don't need to borrow it because they are rich.
Anyhow, it would seem that the Chancellors plan to get the economy moving is that he will borrow £21 billion again this year. He will then use this to help people who can't afford the deposit to buy a house, to buy a house. This will be in the form of some sort of loan, which if they can't afford a mortgage, they will have no hope of paying back. Sound familiar?
Elsewhere in the budget, a political master stroke, Mr Osbourne announces he will not increase the duty in fuel that he had planned for the Autumn. We are supposed to be grateful for this. 'I am cancelling this September's fuel duty increase altogether,' said Osborne. 'Fuel is now 13p cheaper than it would have been,' he claimed. Well there's a convenient conversion back to imperial measures for a start. Yes it's 13p a gallon cheaper, but only 3p a litre which is what it is sold in. 3p doesn't sound as impressive as 13 p though does it?And don't forget that's not 3p a litre coming OFF the price, that's the removal of a 3p per litre increase he had previously threatened. So, If I threaten to punch him in the face, but then say I've changed my mind, does that make it all okay?
The only other striking bit of news in the budget was a reduction in the price of a pint of beer by 1p. Wow! With beer costing on average £3 a pint in pubs that is really something to drink to. Actually he missed a trick there, becasue had he converted it to litres it's more than twice as much at 2.1 pence per litre. So, for example, if you are a raging alcoholic and drink 10 pints of beer every day, that will save you £36.50 a year, enough to buy another 12 pints, and one for yourself darling. If on the other hand, like me, you enjoy a nice glass of red wine at home you save nothing. Or if you have the occasional pint after walking 30 miles in the beautiful rural North Yorkshire moors, at a nice country pub, assuming it hasn't closed down because of the recession, it will save you only about 5 pence a year. Which is more than the 3p a litre you'll have not saved on the reduction in the fuel duty that never was in the first place.
The final bit of budget news I caught was that we will now be able to earn £10000 before paying any tax at all. Unless you are a mulitnational company in which case it will remain as it was £100,000 million.
Of course what George should have done is gone down to "Cash for Gold" with the nations gold reserves and flogged them - but too late, seems like the preceding Labour Government already did that.
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