Banditry: The idle musings of John B

As usual, Alex Harrowell makes sense.

The redhead girl from the BA safety video really is cute, isn’t she? Shame she’s clearly still very much in love with the vaguely-Barack-Obama-lookalike father of her adorable kid. Ah well…

- me, various points, the last 18 months.

Even more tragically, for those of you who don’t fly BA, the video is a cartoon.

Retail sales rose 4.6% in May 2008 compared with May 2007. Oh noes, the sky is falling, worst recession evah!, etc.

I’m not sure Boris would approve:

(photographed by me at Kings Cross St Pancras station, 14/5/08 at 2215)

Update 19/5 – Veroniq has come up with a much better headline:

“And the London Underground is not a political movement”

Simon Jenkins:

No good is served by incarcerating an illiterate drugs “mule” in Holloway for 14 years for a first offence when she had no clue what she was doing and has left four children on the streets of Jamaica. She will be sent back in seven years, after Britain has spent £250,000 turning her into a drug addict and a wreck. Not since deportation for poaching has British penal policy been so heartless and so stupid.

You may think drugs are awesome fun or unspeakably evil, but either way it’s difficult to deny Mr Jenkins’ point. The really weird – and mildly encouraging – thing, if you ever read the comments on Commentisfree, is that none of them object to the article…

“Can someone please explain on what basis I am supposed to care more about the plight of the white working classes than that of, say, Congolese people driven out of their homes by war?”

(an oasis of sanity in a thread dominated by horrible bigots)

Tom Lehrer is 80 today. Which is nice, since when I saw references to him on other blogs I assumed he’d died. Sheer genius.

I’m entertained by this comment from CT:

The world really needs more like him – brilliant math teachers who are brilliant parodists and public intellectuals on the side.

Yes, this is precisely what the world needs more of. Relatedly, Dinesh D’souza is an arse.

It’s reasonably silly that you can get a qualification as a homeopath, given the complete lack of potential for an unlicensed homeopath to do any harm or for a licensed one to do any good (“you’ve been struck off the homeopath’s register for actually giving someone a traceable amount of medicine”, etc).

But it’s absolutely amazingly implausibly incredible that the course for said qualification includes a module on the benefits of astrology. I mean, are they trying to eradicate any spurious credibility they may previously have had…?

There used to be an excellent website of bad celebrity name puns called The Wesley Snipes Archive. Sadly, the old link for it is buggerised. Anyone know if this still exists in any format? (note: I’ve tried the Wayback Machine, but for some moronic reason the site owner vetoed it in his robots file…)

John Lennon once spiked Jimmy Tarbuck‘s drink with amphetamines.