Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

In my earlier post I mentioned the Google Bombs, which are the results that had been manipulated by people linking to pages with terms that some people may not feel are totally relevant to those pages. Famously ‘Miserable Failure’ got George W’s bio as the top result on Google and ‘Dangerous Cult’ gives the top result Scientology. After a new set of revelations about Bush’s administration finally admitting that they did take kidnapped foreign nationals, (sorry extraordinary rendition, my mistake) through Bristish territory without telling them (even though it was a shared base and the need to know was explicitly required) and showing their popularity once again overseas by getting their embassy burned down in Serbia. You cannot believe that one man’s administration managed to turn the goodwill of the world after 9/11 to complete and utter mistrust and hatred in only a few short years. You do get the feeling that ⇥ Continue reading

A friend of mine sent me this from the Beeb and for the first time since the turn of the 20th Century, people in the UK will be earning more per person than their US counterparts. Partially down to currency fluctuations, but also down to the higher economic growth, which unsuprisingly are related – if your country gets stronger economically then so will your currency assuming you don’t print too much of it. Now I have never been a fan of Bush, from the start I thought he was a hawkish half-wit with a bunch of oil hungry cronies in tow…or rather paying his way. Now I could go on about how he managed to turn the huge amount of goodwill the rest of the world felt towards the US after 9/11 into a state of affairs whereby being an American abroad is bad for your health. So after spending trillions on his ‘war on oil’…sorry ‘terror’ which seems to have done a good job of increasing terrorist activity by acting as the best recruitment advertisement Al-Qaeda could ever have hoped for (and just the response the provocation of 9/11 was supposed to induce) He has also introduced some restrictive trading practices that have seen the WTO (not normally known for their anti-US bias) hand out several penalties against the US. Lastly, and probably the most harmful, is the floodgates were opened on cheap credit leading tohuge inflationary pressures on prices, which meant that globally the dollar had to fall – how does this affect anything for the average joe? I’m glad you asked, because that means I can go off on one of my periodic, but always dull economic lectures…. ⇥ Continue reading

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was a bit dismayed about the comments of Trevor Brooking in the run up to the England vs Israel game. He and the FA believe that the number of foreign players in the league is harming our own aspirations. Really, why is this Sir Trevor? “Well,” he says, “take a look at Italy, almost all their players play in their league and they won the World Cup” Good point Sir Trevor, but statistically it’s a little irrelevant, it’s a bit like saying “I flipped a coin and it came up heads, so it must always come up heads” So, lets have a look around the other power houses in International football shall we…. ⇥ Continue reading

I live in London, there are lots of Aussies here, usually whinging about everything - the weather, the food, whinging Poms etc. but generally a good laugh. You’ve seen the pictures of the Mardi-Gras and the closing ceremony at the Sydney Olympics….however it hides a dark secret, many of the Aussies back home are nearly as scarily right-wing and religious as their US counterparts. In fact they have spent $84 million on an internet porn filter, which a 16 year bypassed inside 30 minutes. OK, so a government spending money on dumb ideas is nothing new, as always it’s the quotes that make the interesting reading…. ⇥ Continue reading

A quick update, it appears that the problem stems from a dubious patent infringement claim. Bodog, not being a US company, did not respond to it as they felt it was outside the juristiction of the court, so the judge awarded the name to the patent holder

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So, Bodog are having some ‘issues’ with the Bodog.com name. According to their release there is a legal issue around the ownership affecting them. They really are not having too much luck over the last year or so, I mean who would have thought that after sponsoring lasy year’s World Series of Poker winner, Jamie Gold, you would get so much negative publicity….who said there is no such thing as bad publicity

Good luck to them though, I honestly hope they sort it out soon. I live in the UK where we can play poker online ⇥ Continue reading

It’s good to see that wherever you go in the world those nice sports stars do a great job of driving like we do when we get behind the wheel of our Lamborghinis. The only difference is that when we get to drive a Lambo we are playing Grand Theft Auto. However, like me, I am sure you drive carefully in GTA too, stopping at all stop signs, letting old ladies cross the road, just like Lance Briggs does in real life, so when a Black Lambo registered to an NFL Linebacker appears wrapped around a telegraph pole one night with no driver or any theft filed, there must be a sensible explanation? ⇥ Continue reading

I always loved Charlie Brooker’s witty, world-weary and more importantly, usually spot-on take on the world, such as

This week Charlie shook his head in tearful dismay at Sally Morgan: Star Psychic on ITV1: “If the TV networks want to ‘regain trust with the viewer’, why gleefully promote the kind of bogus supernatural bullshit a stunned foetus could see through?”

 and I read this and I just have to say….I agree. ⇥ Continue reading

Following on from the last post about Facebook, according to Auntie Beeb, the likes of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and the Prudential have all withdrawn ads from Facebook. The line they have given is that they could not control where their ads appeared. OK, so this may be true, but across the site how many pages are actually dedicated to the likes of the BNP? I may just be cynical, but in this world of spin do people really believe this line? Isn’t there is a much more simple explanation – money? ⇥ Continue reading

I read the story about Manchester United signing a 9 year old from Brisbane with a bit of sadness. As was ponted out here there have been a lot of youngsters that have shown promise but not lived up to it. Manchester United claim they have not broken the rules in any way and I am sure they have followed the rules. The problem is that you are now seeing the pushy parent syndrome kicking in and moving the whole family thousands of miles to be within the catchment area for the club. ⇥ Continue reading

A friend of mine sent this link through to me. It starts out as a vaguely amusing thing about Gingers and how we have lots of them in the UK. However, in true US style reporting, the histerics kick in and soon it becomes a story or Ginger persecution that would make Papa Doc Duvalier proud. Then I started reading the comments and I was caught in that weird state between laughing your head off and utter dispair. ⇥ Continue reading