The Official Nonsense Thread

[Minty]

How can you go to Spain & not get a tan? Bottle of Ardbeg, lovely! Although surely this is cider & Pims weather?

It's now come out that UK firms are being given £1000 for every non-British EU worker they hire (up to 20), & the workers in question £1100 for "resettlement costs". WTF? So in other words it's more worth a UK employer's while to get someone from Eastern Europe that they can get away with paying less for in the first place, AND they'll get a £1000 bonus for doing so on top!

If you want to know the effect of this scheme, 800,000 UK jobs have been advertised through the scheme so far, in comparison to under 50 000 French jobs & 12 000 Italian.

Why the hell am I even bothering to try? I do @20-30 job apps a week, in some cases the same firms who are re-advertising over & over again, but can't even get a reply. No wonder if this is what has been going on for God knows how long. This country has completely lost it, it truly has.

[Caspin]

How? Factor 50 sun cream, a hat to be worn at all times and a strong dislike of sunbathing.

Don't like Pimms, bleugh! Very pleased with my bargain Ardbeg.

Resettlement costs, eh? They do come up with some barking schemes don't they. Poor Minty.

[Minty]

Watched the last part of the "Skins: Pure" story yesterday. There was all manner of possibilities to make it a story, instead it meandered all over the shop like a drunk at three in the morning.

The bit where Cassie by accident & karma becomes a model for one whole shoot in a magazine (and um doesn't get asked to join an agency or anything?), there's the possibility of her past with drugs & anorexia both raising their ugly head again, although her dumping the cocaine out the window at the party makes you think, yeah, this is an older & wiser Cassie that's going to make the most of this.

But no, it's straight back to the whole non-relationship with that Jewish boy (who looked about twelve!), & wanting to jump back into bed with that Israeli paratrooper (yeah, like an ex-IDF para's going to be working in a cafe when there's thousands of armed security services around the world he could be working for & earning heaps of money for instead!). I swear most of that episode seemed to involve Cassie walking away for one reason or another: if it was supposed to be some sort of clever metaphor for her life it was lost on me.

The ending though was totally stupid. Her dad, whom she's been criticising all episode long for being irresponsible since her mum's death, says he's going to Italy with her little brother, & she blurts out an offer to look after him while he does & sorts himself out. Like, WTF? Not only does it fly in the face of all she's said, but didn't she always resent her younger brother whose arrival in the world when she was in her teens saw her marginalised & all but forgotten about by her parents? No, sorry, not buying it. Whatever else Cassie is, she's not an altruist, least of all to someone that's been a source of emotional resentment for the last six years of her life.

Was this part meant to be some sort of "closure" to her past or the old cliche about every woman only feeling truly fulfilled if they're nurturing a child, any child? If so, it's nonsense: unless Cassie plans to kill the kid & feed it to stray dogs, telling her father he'd vanished as one part of an elaborate revenge to make him suffer like she'd suffered thanks to him & the mother that's beyond her. Deep down the darker selfish & psychotic Cassie from Skins 2 is something always waiting to happen. It should have ended on that, not on a cheesy happy families ending.

[Caspin]

Saw a strange sight on the way home this evening. It was quite windy so I was not surprised to see little leaves and bits of foliage being blown off some of the trees on the street. When I got closer I realised that the "leaves" were moving strangely, floating back up and down and around. I stood there staring at them for a while before realising that they were not leaves but were actually bees, flying very slowly and in a drunken manner. I wonder whether they'd come across some fermented fruit and got a bit tipsy on natural punch or something. Either that or they were all auditioning for a ballet.

[Minty]

It may have been part of a wedding flight, but yeah bees can (& do) get drunk in the wild. But more often than not it's the chemicals people spray on their roses to kill aphids has a similar effect on the bees. If you see a bee landed with its tongue sticking out, that means its ingested something it shouldn't have, & it can take two days to clear.

If I ever see bees on my window sills looking out of sorts, I dab a spot of honey in front of them as when they ingest some of that it always seems to get them back to normal pretty quick (works better with bumble bees I've found).

Not looking good for Hearts right now, although there's others saying the administrators in Lithuania know they're onto a loser & are simply trying to squeeze a bit more out of the bidders before cutting their losses.

[Caspin]

Aw, a bee wedding, what a nice thought. Particularly seeing as the trees that the possibly inebriated bees were waltzing around was directly outside a big Majestic store, so very handy for picking up the wedding champagne.

I admit I have lost track of what is going on at Hearts and am dependent on Minty to give occasional bulletins!

Now that I'm home I will be resuming my programme of cultural pursuits. Tonight will be a spot of Shakespeare at the NT in the form of Othello . It was a battle to get tickets for this one after it received so many rave reviews, so my expectations are high. They've been releasing lots of extra tickets by extending the season but they are still getting snapped up quite quickly. It could run until the cast drop from exhaustion I think!

In the past I've seen some really awful attempts to bring Shakespeare's plays into the modern day. Some seem to think that putting the cast in jeans is sufficient to call it a new interpretation, but this should be well done and I hope it lives up to all those five star reviews.

[Caspin]

Very sad this morning - all those drunken bees I observed are now dead.

There were dozens of little furry corpses all over the pavement under the trees this morning. I guess whatever they'd ingested that had made them act all tipsy had eventually killed them. A very unfortunate outcome given that the bee population is in such peril.

On a happier note, Othello was brilliant and met my high expectations. The stages at the NT have a lot of moving sections, so plays that are staged there tend to be very dynamic in terms of sections of the set moving around and being very flexible. The set for Othello was like a big 3D jigsaw of a military camp, with boxes opening and closing to reveal different rooms in the camp. I was glad I had tickets for the circle so I could look down and see all the movement properly because the way they stage things often fascinates me as much as the play itself. It was brilliantly cast and the actors did a great job of making Shakespeare's script fit with a modern look. They chap playing Iago (Rory Kinnear) was particularly good and brought a lot of humour to the role.

One negative thing was the bunch of people sitting right in front, who thought they were oh-so-knowledgeable and so-cultured-dahling, which seemed to mean that they should speak extremely loudly and pretentiously about the "physicality" and wave their hands around as much as possible while saying things like "Oh this is so 'estuary'!".

Oh yes and I was livid when not one, not two but three mobile phones rang during the performance!

[Minty]

Poor bees.

Rory Kinnear? Is that Roy Kinnear's son?

I know what you mean about "modern interpretation". The Richard III movie of years ago was embarrassing, & I've saw other ones on stage back in my uni days that reeked of trying to be "rad" for the sake of it. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" seems one of those that can be done pretty much any way without hassle, possibly because there's no real historical context to it. The version I last saw had Hermia as a hot chick and Helena as a nerd - it worked brilliantly, pure early Buffy & Willow mismatch, & the whole case apart from the fey hammed it up something wicked (esp. the dude playing Bottom, which is always a good excuse to go OTT!)

Twice I've been at the theatre when a mobile phone has gone off & someone on stage has shouted some barbed comment to give everyone a good laugh at their expense. They were lucky: at the Edinburgh Playhouse I saw someone thrown out by security (he didn't go quietly either). They tell people to switch off their mobiles before performances, & it's downright bloody selfish of them not to both doing so.

The garden is now like a paddy field from the amount of rain we've had last night & this morning. To think a fortnight ago I was fighting a losing battle trying to stop it all from drying out!

Someone locally got conned out of money by someone pretending to be a police officer saying they were investigating a fraud on their account they hadn't even known about & asking for their bank card & PIN number. They handed it over & were cleaned out via cash dispensers within a week, only discovering the truth when they went down to the police to ask how much longer they were going to be. How stupid can some people get?

[Caspin]

(01-08-2013 10:05 AM)Minty Wrote:  Rory Kinnear? Is that Roy Kinnear's son?

Yes I believe he is.

It amazes me that people fall for stunts like the one you mention. "Give me your card and pin number"? You would think that the crook would have to try harder than that - but no. I knew someone who lost a lot of money because he kept receiving those 'you have won a big prize, just call this number!' cards through the door. He'd phone them and be on the line for ten minutes only to be told that he'd won a biro, then the phonecall would turn out to have cost £25 a minute or something. Probably all there in the small print but he was very elderly and I suppose rather vulnerable to being preyed on for this sort of thing. He honestly believed it was all legit.

[Minty]

Yeah, that sounds like that Castlecary mob that appear in the newspapers every so often, tricking people into phoning premium lines. What gets me is the authorities way of dealing with them is spending a fortune on adverts warning people that if something sounds too good to be true, it is, rather than jailing the people behind it.

The excuse is that it's the people's own fault for getting conned. If the front envelope tells you that you've won a telly, but the small print inside at the very bottom in this size of typeface if you are lucky, that's not a case of buyer beware, that's a clear confidence trick. Certainly there should be a law making it illegal to have wording in competition flyers less that 10 point in size (the smallest used in standard newspaper articles), but no doubt the current & future governments don't want "wealth creators" being tied up with "red tape" from pursuing their democratic right to swindle little old ladies out of their life's savings phoning premium rate lines.

You have to admire St. Johnstone. First they stuffed Rosenburg, & now they've stuffed Minsk & bar disaster will be in the Europa League. Not bad having spent next to nothing on players bar the superb & desperately underrated Nigel Hasselbank.