Posts by Donkey

Pasta La Vista Baby

I am worried that splits in the Pastafarian movement may be about to make the whole thing look ridiculous. We have already heard of the blasphemy of the vegetarian tendency as mentioned above. No meatballs indeed; how repulsive - these people should be strangled with their own noodles. I now hear from various sources that the nefarious parmesian sect (of Italian origin) are taking up arms and intend to establish a Pastilifate on the European mainland. Anyone who does not heap large amounts of grated or sliced Italian hard cheese upon their noodle meal will be declared unworthy and stoned to death using bags of supermarket own label dried noodles. With this unfortunate development there can be no doubt that pastafarianism should take its place standing shoulder to shoulder with all the other stupid, mindless, faith based belief systems like Islam, Christianity, Judaisim, Google ("do no evil"), and Scientology.

Of course if you really need a Religion to guide you please contact me for details of my own new start-up world-wide organisation "Non-definitive Conceptualisim" It makes no demands, you can believe what you like and you are guaranteed eternal existence (during this lifetime only - terms and conditions apply - Minimum contribution $1,000 per calender month or 25% of your income whichever is the greater).

To Serve Man

In the Damon Knight short story it turned out to be a cookbook.

With the billions of earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone and the strong likelihood that many millions have developed viable technology based civilisations, we must also look at the time factor. Any civilisation older than our own is bound to have developed technology superior to our present level. Look back at where we were 200 years ago compared to now and then extrapolate the technology expansion for a thousand years. Sir Arthur Clarke's 3rd Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The technology available on this planet in 100 years could be at that level, in a thousand years it may be as difficult for us to understand as a caveman when we try to explain to him what wifi is. So imagine how a civilisation a million years older than ours would look to us - we would struggle to communicate let alone understand the technology.

I am certain that given enough time any civilisation will develop faster than light travel be it "warp drive" or something we cannot imagine yet. So the ones that are a few million years ahead of us almost certainly already have it. (to those who say "impossible" I quote Sir Arthur C Clarke's 1st Law "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.")

So it is quite possible that sufficiently advanced beings may have already visited us or are about to pop in any minute. It is also very likely that they would be so far ahead of us that they would regard us as we regard animals and consider us not worthy of contact, and it is just possible that they may even have engineered us thousands of year ago as part of a stock breeding program that will result in our demise and appearance on their dinner table. Or perhaps the "Predator" movies were nearer to the mark and we are actually a hunting preserve.

The seti project when it finally finds the right wave length, or perhaps when we discover telepathy or subspace communications, could be responsible for sending out the message that we have matured enough to be ready for culling. Effectively "Here we are, come and eat us".

It would be nice to make contact with nice friendly aliens only a little ahead of us along the technology curve who are falling over themselves to give us a cure for cancer, cheap energy, and the secret of immortality, but the odds are against it.

I have often read SciFi writers describing humanity as being like the Native Americans and the Aliens likened to the Europeans who came and took their lands and gradually wiped them out. I think that is a gross overestimation of our relative importance, we are more likely in the position of the Native American Buffalo.

BTW Apologies for quoting Sir Arthur C Clarke, but he was the man who invented the communication satellite.

It looks like part of an old iron bedstead or fence post that has been vandalised by a dyslexic welder with no artistic talent.

I thought Apple was supposed to be successful because of it's styling and design. Erecting this monstrosity will just make the company a laughing stock and speed the demise of the apple myth. A plastic dog turd on a plinth would be more tasteful and somehow more appropriate.

Anyone over 40 who can act

The Beeb's cult of "youff" has made each doctor progressively younger until the logical next step is a 10 year old. At the same time the plot lines have become sillier and sillier. The beeb should understand that this is not a children's program and that it worked best when a more mature person who could act properly took the lead role.

I know now that the appearance of John Hurt in the last episode was a spoiler, but for a moment my heart leapt with the thought that last someone at the bbc has taken their head out of their backside and realised what most of us know they need to do to make this sorry program back into the entertaining saturday night treat that it used to be.

The Best Way to make a bacon sandwich

Use smoked back or streaky bacon. Unsmoked bacon is not really bacon it is pork and should never be used in a bacon sandwich.

Cook the bacon in a microwave loosely covered with a plastic lid to stop splattering, cook until the bacon is just turning crispy.

Use only wholemeal bread, white bread is tasteless pap designed for the masses and has no place in civilised society. Hand cut the bread and never ever fry the bread or add anything except Daddies brown sauce and Daddies tomato sauce.

Spread the brown sauce on one piece of bread and spread an even mixture of brown and red sauce on the other. Place the Bacon on one slice of bread then liberally drizzle over the fat that has escaped from the bacon whilst cooking and more brown sauce to taste. Assemble the sandwich by placing the other slice of bread on top (sauce side down) and cut in half horizontally (never diagonally or into quarters unless you are a lady or a cissy).

Consume quickly before the meat cools too much.

The best beverage I find to compliment this splendid meal is a very dry cider (none of your nancy boy medium dry rubbish).

It is the nanny state gorn mad!

phoning is less distracting than tuning and listening to the radio, and what about smoking, picking your nose or rummaging about in the glove box for your chewing gum or favourite CD?

None of these things are dangerous if done with caution, just as speed doesn't kill. Stupidity and bad driving kills.

Fact : The government is looking at compulsory re-testing for older people when the vast majority of accidents are caused by young testosterone-fuelled men. If you want to reduce accidents raise the driving age to 30.

Fact: Around 20% of accidents involve someone who has used alcohol. So statistically speaking drunk drivers are far less of a problem than sober ones. Yet all the effort seems to be aimed at the drinkers who only are involved in (not necessarily causing) 20% of the carnage.

So I say forget all these petty "can't do" things which in the scheme of things are minor, and concentrate on improving the driving standards.

Davis is a Pratt

Most of the sensible people in this Island support Gordon Browns stance (on this issue) - that is according to the opinion polls. I certainly do. I would give the police the right to hold these people until they need to, more than 42 days if necessary. If a few innocent people get inconvenienced - tough. Rather that than a mad bomber is allowed out to take out a tube train or a bus.

In reality no one's civil liberties are threatened by this except the suspects.

As for fun boy Davis resigning, it proves nothing except that he is a media tart. Who is his resignation supposed to influence? Not Gordon certainly he'll be glad to see him go, and not David because he agrees with him.

The by-election will cost in the region of £80,000 - what a waste of time and money the whole thing is.

I hope K Mc K stands and whips his arse!

Blue tooth Synchronisation

THis should be a top priority.

It is a PITA not being able to update my contacts directly to and from my phone. I have to keep a copy of outlook which I use only as a "master"contacts list to update my phone and Thunderbird from.

Market Economics

All this negative stuff about MS and uncle Bill is way off target.

They are entitled to sell their software at whatever price they think it is worth. The fact that so far it has continued to sell very well is not Bill Gates' fault it is the fault of the mugs who buy it (of which I am one).

The solution is simple don't buy it! There are plenty of free or low cost alternatives out there that are in most cases better than the MS alternative; Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office to name a few. More importantly don't upgrade all the bloody time, it is unnecessary to buy something just because it is new. I'm typing this using windows 2000, I have office 2000 and when I "upgrade" it will be to the excellent free alternative open office which I am starting to use on my home machine. There is no great advance or utility in having the latest microsoft office suite. The differences between the older and "newer" versions are mainly cosmetic, they make their money because millions of people trot out sheep-like and buy it... why?

You are all the people who made Bil Gates wealthy by buying his products, so stop doing it. Don't just whinge about the man.

Stealing?

As much as I sympathise with the views stated above it is utter bollocks to say that it is OK to steal something because you couldn't afford to buy it.

With logic like that we would all be driving Ferraris.

Let us be honest if you obtain a copy of someone else's copyright material that hasn't been paid for either you are stealing it or the person who gave it to you is stealing it.

Must go now, I couldn't afford to buy lunch today so I'm just going to Tesco and shoplift some sandwiches. If anyone from Tesco is reading this don't worry it is not stealing because I wouldn't have paid money for them and they probably wouldn't have sold them to anyone else anyway.

To quote a song that I recently downloaded (it's OK because I wouldn't have bought it):

"If it looks like a duck. it walks like a duck and there's duck do on your pick up truck, you can bet your bottom buck it ain't no armadillo!"

99% of Browsers are not used properly

I notice the cowards didn't make any statistical jokes about race, religion etc.

e.g. 97% of Muslim fundamentalists use IE5.

What about Opera users? I believe they are more likely to suffer from haemorrhoids but I have no accurate data to back this up.