It’s been sunny today. Which was odd. Usually it’s sunny when I’m at work and rains/snows/hails when I have time off. Maybe I just mistook today’s fire and brimstone for sunshine. Anyway, most of the garden is de-weeded now. Just the pots to clear out and there’s no rush, it’ll be a while before the tobacco plants are big enough to need them. It’s also not definitely frost-safe out there yet. A warm spell in April has caught me out before.
Those damn red lily beetles are back again. I thought I’d exterminated them last year but some must have survived. This calls for some serious chemical weaponry. Best get my gooseberries treated too, sawfly of the gooseberries was a nasty experience last year. Hey Sawfly, I wanna play a game…
In this relaxed gardening mode I refuse to look at the newspapers. It’s just going to be more crap anyway. Instead, here’s a miscellany of whisky-drenched thoughts typed through a haze of smoke.
Finally, with no work to worry about, I took out the gifted enlarger and found a developing tank included! It really is an entire darkroom in a box. I also found the can of LNER Green – thanks, whoever you are, No note yet but there is a lot to look through. There might yet be one.
Good news for a change. There’s not much of it about these days. Anna Raccoon has survived the ministrations of the medics and is back in charge of the Raccoon Arms. The French NHS appears nowhere near as lethal as ours. Our lot could learn a lot from the French, if our lot were actually capable of learning anything at all.
I like espresso. A lot. Enough to have my own Gaggia espresso machine and a wide range of coffees and a grinder in case I buy any that are not espresso ground. I have flavoured coffees too – white chocolate flavour, cherry chocolate flavour and (no kidding) Christmas pudding flavour. Those are cafetiere ground and work best in a bigger cup anyway. I have not yet tried adding brandy butter and cream to the Christmas pudding one but there’s some left so it can happen.
There is a coffee filter machine under the stairs that I haven’t used in ages. These days it’s all espresso or cafetiere. There is a jar of instant around for when I’m in a rush. Douwe Egbert’s which, if you pronounce it ‘Dewey Eggbutt’ in a Welsh accent, allows you to convince a passing idiot that it’s grown and processed in Wales. That really does work. I should be surprised, but I’m not.
There have been many Daily Mail attacks on the Red Bull style of canned wakey-water lately. I’m not going to look for an example right now, that would mean opening their website and the abrupt end of a good mood. I like canned wakey-water too, but I go for the four-for-a-pound ones in Farmfoods or Poundland. It’s an entirely synthetic chemical fizz, anyone can make it so why pay a pound per can? Lidl’s cost a little more than 25p each but they have added berry flavours. When spending £20 on a bottle of Ben Bracken, I’m not going to baulk at £1.79 for six cans of artificially flavoured chemical fizz. Yes, it owes its existence more to a chemistry lab than any tree, but I like it so I buy it.
The anti-caffeine movement has now come out into the open, as Junican notes. Coffee machines that turn themselves off after a while. Now hold on a minute here. In fact I will go so far as to ask you to hold on to a cotton picking minute, and those are slippery. Those heated bases under the coffee pots already turn themselves off. A lot. All the time the coffee is at the right temperature, the thermostat running the heater is off. If the heater was always on, the coffee would boil away and that thin glass jar would explode.
This is a trivial issue as far as power consumption goes. It is as nothing compared to the oven and hob and kettle and radiator that are generally in the same room as that little coffee machine. It’s like a power station blaming you for pollution because you left the light on… oh wait, that already happens.
So it is not about electrickery. As usual it is all about control. In the comments to Junican’s article, Rose points out where the anti-caffeine league get their ideas. Same place as all the others.
Just doing a Godwin there. The drones will be expecting it by now. Those few whose attention span allows them to get past the first paragraph, and if you are a drone who has got this far, well done. Keep it up. One day you might be able to read an entire Beano in one sitting and that would be something to write home about, if you could write.
I think we are now safe from drones. I have used far too many words and most of the drones will be stuck trying to pronounce ‘ministrations’ so will never get this far. Those who did will have left in an outraged huff at the previous paragraph.
It’s tax time in the UK. This year, Taxman has decided that my tax code for the janitor job is 0T. This means I get no tax relief at all on the job that currently produces most of my income. Since this was evident from last year’s tax form I can only conclude that the entire tax office is staffed by spite-ridden vicious thugs and/or idiots, but we already knew that anyway.
It also means that next year I will be claiming back almost all of the tax I pay for the next twelve months. This year’s tax form will not be left until the end of January. Like last year, it wil be filled in as soon as I have all the info I need. I pay as little tax as possible. Unlike the gentry and the rich folk, I cannot afford accountants to hide my money and there would be no point anyway because I don’t have any. My method is to earn just enough to cover the bills and make no use of my expensive training and decades of experience. I am not paying for my own persecution.
There is no way to not be self-employed now because of the books. Unless I take them all off sale I am always self-employed even though last year’s book income was no more than a few bottles of good single malt. I like making up stories. That will never end. It doesn’t pay well and probably never will. I’ll be claiming back loads of tax every year for the rest of my life.
Everyone should fill out a tax form every year. Everyone. Even those entirely on PAYE because the tax mob make ‘mistakes’ and have probably overcharged you. They get quite enough of your money as it is, don’t let them get away with taking more.
Ah, but we might all die of a nasty dose of asteroids. NASA confesses (to use the Daily Inquisitor parlance) that actually, they have no way of tracking every bit of rock that’s floating around in the infinity of rocky bugger-all that surrounds us. How could they? The rocks don’t all have yellow ‘wet floor’ signs on them because Elfin Safety only looks after the safety of elves and those little swines never get smitten with the asteroids.
It was a bad case of asteroids that did for the dinosaurs because they had not thought to develop Preparation H. Oh, and T. rex was done for anyway, his hands couldn’t reach his arse. Imagine that. T. rex never, ever, wiped. The tagnuts. The clinkers. The horror.
The itch. No wonder he was in such a bad mood. Imagine having an itchy arse and you can’t reach it. I’d bite the heads off animals too, in that situation. Especially animals that could scratch their own arses. Bastards.
We are doomed to eventiually be wiped out by the asteroids because they are on the way and there is nothing at all we can do aboui it. All this ‘ooo, we have to save the planet’ is utter nonsense when placed against a big rock that sees Earth and thinks ‘yeah, I’m going to smack that bitch up’.
Five inches of sea level rise? How about several kilotons of explosion right over your house? Which do you think will cause you more inconvenience?
We live on a big stone floating around in nothing and other stones bump into us often. We are also all going to die. Just to boost the cheery factor, we are ruled by people who think that the Earth is a constant and unchanging and who also demand that evolution is real while paying a lot of your money to conservationists who want to stop it happening and who think of nothing but little pieces of green paper.
Space rocks and the short span of human life are as nothing to them. They don’t believe in either.
If God made humanity, He made us as a joke.
A self-terminating joke.
underdogs bite upwards 
I must to bed, but I cannot resist.
The really serious asteroids were moped up billions of years ago. That is why there are no asteroid belts within the ambit of the ‘near’ planets. Nothing really, really big has survived which is ‘floating about’.
But it is possible. There is nothing that can be done about it. The idea of paying thousands of ‘spotters’, looking for asteroids which might just possible collide with the Earth is ridiculous. But why not spend squillions on such a search? Such spending has already occurred on ‘tobacco harm’.
I wonder whether the ‘bedroom’ tax would be necessary if our government stopped chucking money at the scoundrels who inhabit the gravy train of the EU? There MUST be thousands of really, really clever people who saw the potential of the EU for personal enrichment.
I wish that I was one of those clever people.
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Erm…. I mean that I wish that I could earn sqillions for doing nothing!
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Some years ago, I adopted the practice of drinking a toast to every asteroid that passes within 5 million kilometers of us, while those passing within the moon’s orbit are celebrated with rather more lively carousing.
What has been noticeable with NASA’s extra detection efforts – apart from the increase in alcohol consumption – is the number of very close approaches that are not spotted until after the event; since spotters rely on reflected light, anything Earth-bound approaching us shadow-side first is unlikely to be picked up until it’s too late to do anything about it.
My favourite quote on the subject is from Rusty Schweickart, ex-astronaut and co-founder of the B612 foundation (the chaps behind today’s much-heralded conference) on the subject of what to do about The Big One:
“If we don’t find it until a year out, make yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch.”
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Years ago, a Brummie comedian called Jasper Carrott had a similar line about the three-minute warning for a nuclear attack. “What can you do in three minutes? Buy a Datsun and watch it rust?”
The concluson was the same. Just drink faster.
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Coffee. Ah yes. Mrs D resisted for years saying that our Nespresso machine would be a waste of money and a flash in the pan. It wasn’t. Mind you, that George Clooney’s a pretentious twat…
http://dioclese.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/nespresso-aspirational-lifestyle.html
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Ah, I still prefer the Gaggia. Looks like it’s made out of the floor plates of a battleship by out of work dockers in the Gulags. It’s actually made by the same race who brought us Ferrari and Bugatti but looking at it, you’d never know.
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It’s selfish of Hitler to have so many claim to fames. Didn’t Stalin have a few too?
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They were pretty much the same claims, to be fair. Kim Jingly Jongly is trying for better ones but he probably won’t win. He seems to like killing off his family members
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Like Junican, I too cannot resist!
“If God made humanity, He made us as a joke.”
The way most people think and act, you might think that, but He was totally serious. He made us in His image, gave us dominion over the other animals and told us to replenish the earth (although I’ve still not got around to that part myself).
In fact:
“Almost half of the world faces the same demographic problem: not enough babies are being born to keep up with an aging population. As a result, countries have been trying all kinds of measures to get their citizens in the mood for procreating.” http://qz.com/200728/what-countries-around-the-world-give-their-citizens-for-having-children/
But that’s due to the ‘soft’ eugenics of family planning devised by such people as Marie Stopes, who doted on Hitler (there, I said it too). Or, in my case, not being able to find a woman who could put up with me for longer than a few months.
But as well as messing up our demography so we have to rely on millions of immigrants (why, you’d think it was all planned), the social engineers must, through their ‘education’ system and media, “demand that evolution is real” because if we believe we evolved from apes then we are more likely to behave like monkeys.
All right then, “ape-like ancestors” (to keep the evolutionists happy). I saw a picture of one of these supposed things the other day, which looked a bit like a ring-tailed lemur. They have amazing imaginations, these modern-day ‘experts’.
One of my favourite Lenin quotes, although there are lots of crackers, is: “Our programme necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism”.
Exactly the same today, with the Marxist-Leninists in charge in the UN, EU, Wastemonster, Rottenburgh and Carduff.
Just come across these “21 Fears that Will Kill Your Dreams if You Let Them!”
No. 8. is the Fear of Greatness
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson
http://www.slwrites.com/face-your-fears/
That’s one reason the social engineers hate our Judeo-Christian foundation, but it also gave us just laws and rules on which to build a strong, civilised society, which has to be dismantled – the family unit, especially – to destroy this order and create a totally socialist society from the ashes.
But thanks for the link. It just occurred to me the other day (people’s gaze is diverted by the illusionists in power all the time) that the ‘poor’ ought rather to complain about their massive indirect taxes rather than worry about the income tax rates of the ‘rich’.
It’s like all those fake (in my opinion) “patriot” groups who moan about Islam 99% of the time as a way of diverting attention away from the governments who have allowed them to come here en masse and who have changed our country through fake equality measures.
And using SHS (and third-hand and fourth-hand) myths to ban smoking and making unrealistic climate predictions to impose ‘green’ taxes and forge global governance.
Great news about Anna. She has said that if she hadn’t gone to live in France, she’d already be dead at the hands of the NHS, because we are brought up to trust them implicitly, “best in the world” and all that garbage. Another example of the unreality of daily life.
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I’ve also got a Gaggia. It used to take 15 minutes or more to make a cup of latte but now it’s down to under 5. Lots of head shaking from the wife who is a tea drinker. It only takes about 20 mins to clean it out inside and out once a fortnight. It’s makes a spiffing noise especially when it’s steaming the milk.
The German made grinder is a great bit of kit! I’m not sure if Hitler was involved in the design process but it definitely works. Significant Squishing (SS) of beans is carried out ruthlessly.
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‘I served the Fuhrer … with cakes and cream’
“Salvatore Paolini, 79, says that he was the only Italian member of staff at Hitler’s mountain lair, the “Eagle’s Nest”, at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. There he served Hitler and his senior officers and discovered that the dictator rarely drank but liked to indulge his fondness for puddings and cream cakes. ”
“He supports the contention that Hitler was virtually teetotal and vegetarian. “He did like sausages and ham, but on the whole he never ate meat, preferring potatoes and green vegetables. They were always very highly spiced because he had lost his sense of taste after a mustard gas attack in the First World War.”
What Hitler “really adored were puddings, all kinds of desserts, especially huge cakes covered in whipped cream”. Hitler was “not much of a drinker”, Signor Paolini said. “The wine waiter opened the bottles, always vintage wine, but he scarcely drank anything. We always had to make sure there were plenty of water jugs on the table.”
http: //www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article1971543.ece
Lifestyle, health, and health promotion in Nazi Germany
“”Smoking was only one of the health related behaviours that received attention in Nazi Germany. The consumption of alcohol was also strongly campaigned against.
Fruit and vegetable consumption was encouraged, as was the use of wholemeal bread and the avoidance of fat.”
“A key figure in Nazi medicine, Erwin Liek, predicted that cancer would come to be seen as a product of diet.
The consumption of whipped cream seems to have been a particular target of disapproval. The official newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarzes Korps, reported on German tourists in Austrian coffee houses and said that anyone would “think Greater Germany was only created so that this raving Philistine rabble can wolf whipped cream.” A prominent promilitarist slogan read, “Fighting power or whipped cream?”
“Martin Gumpert, considered the lifestyle campaigns to be a cover up for the fact that health in Nazi Germany deteriorated dramatically.
Gumpert proclaimed that the “abstinent Hitler, who from conviction never takes a drop of alcohol… now drives the people at whose head he stands into fatal alcoholism.”
http: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC535959/
Hitler had shocking table manners, gorged on cake and suffered flatulence, reveals never-before-seen profile
http: //www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1147744/Hitler-shocking-table-manners-gorged-cake-suffered-flatulence-reveals-seen-profile.html
Adolf Hitler’s medical care.
“For the last nine years of his life Adolf Hitler, a lifelong hypochondriac had as his physician Dr Theodor Morell.
Hitler’s mood swings, Parkinson’s disease, gastro-intestinal symptoms, skin problems and steady decline until his suicide in 1945 are documented by reliable observers and historians, and in Morell’s diaries.
The bizarre and unorthodox medications given to Hitler, often for undisclosed reasons, include topical cocaine, injected amphetamines, glucose, testosterone, estradiol, and corticosteroids.
In addition, he was given a preparation made from a gun cleaner, a compound of strychnine and atropine, an extract of seminal vesicles, and numerous vitamins and ‘tonics’.
It seems possible that some of Hitler’s behaviour, illnesses and suffering can be attributed to his medical care. Whether he blindly accepted such unorthodox medications or demanded them is unclear.”
Click to access Hitler%27s_medical_care.pdf
The strychnine and atropine were apparently to cure the flatulence.
Fascinating reading.
But it wasn’t just Hitler
Hitler’s Drugged Soldiers
“The Nazis preached abstinence in the name of promoting national health. But when it came to fighting their Blitzkrieg, they had no qualms about pumping their soldiers full of drugs and alcohol. Speed was the drug of choice, but many others became addicted to morphine and alcohol. ”
“Many of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers were high on Pervitin when they went into battle, especially against Poland and France — in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed. The German military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were part of a plan to help pilots, sailors and infantry troops become capable of superhuman performance.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-nazi-death-machine-hitler-s-drugged-soldiers-a-354606.html
But even so
The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45
“Late in the war nicotine was suspected as a cause of the coronary heart failure suffered by a surprising number of soldiers on the eastern front.
A 1944 report by an army field pathologist found that all 32 young soldiers whom he had examined after death from heart attack on the front had been “enthusiastic smokers.”
The author cited the Freiburg pathologist Franz Buchner’s view that cigarettes should be considered “a coronary poison of the first order”
http: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2352989/?page=1
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I served the Fuhrer, but I did not serve his deputy..
Sorry. Will try to be more serious tomorrow. Tonight, the Ledaig wins.
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: )
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Lily beetles- as well as chemical warfare and simply picking off and squashing the buggers this time of year you have to get rid of the overwintering eggs/Larvae – which are typically 1-2 inches down in the soil around the lilies – in really cold winter they get frozen – after a mild one many survive.
My ploy is to take off the top 2 inched of soil after lilies have died down and replace it with a nice fresh compost/sand mix every year. Dug up soil goes into next year’s compost heap where it adds a nice dash of soil bacteria/fungi/yeasts to get compost going and the heat kills off any eggs. Lily bulbs should be 3-4 inches deep in soil so they are not disturbed.by this process – a couple of season of this and you have dramatically reduced or eliminated the little red swine, also gives the plants a kick start every year (bit of bone meal in the new mix does wonders)
Best lilies are the one I grow large pots – makes this process even easier but there I usually lift the bulbs entirely, take off little bulb scales and grow them on into new bulbs – you soon have hundreds of lilies and can give some away/trade them etc
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That’s very handy. Thanks. All my lilies are in big pots which will make this particular method easy.
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