A quiet weekend

I had some business to take care of later on Saturday so as I had to go into Kidderminster for something else I left early at around 9:20am; leave earlier and you catch the work traffic, leave later and you catch everyone who's just woken up. I headed into Stourport and joined the queue to get over the bridge, very unusual - traffic is normally non-existent at this time. Headed into Kidderminster and joined the queues there too. Damn strange. Didn't seem to be any reason for it, so I'll just put it down to one of those things.

Regular readers (if I have any) may recall my delightful wait in traffic on Friday; according to someone I know they had a problem with the lights and had to get someone to direct traffic. As there is no line of sight between the two ends this leads to fun. Okay here's a ponderable - think about a set of traffic lights near you that you use a lot, a permanent set not temporary. Thinking about them? Good, now think about the number of times they've gone on the blink. If they're like the ones around here you're probably having to stretch a bit. Now think about the number of times I've talked about the bridge lights failing to work. So what gives? These are supposed to be intelligent traffic lights on a par with permanent ones. Now if the ones on, say, Minster Road worked as well as the ones on the bridge I think they'd be high-level talks going on.

Oh and they seemed to be well-screwed up this morning too. Good thing they hadn't set the cones out on Vale Road yet. Notice: Guy with "Painting Contractor" written on his back heading up to the bridge with a "Building Construction" chap. When was the painting supposed to start?


From a leaflet I note that the Labour Party are showing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Areley Kings Village Hall at 8pm on Thursday 19th, free admission. Film is an hour and a half long, but as this is a political thing might be some speechifying before and/or after.

Staying on the political front, the WFA posted the results of the St Chad's by-election with a Liberal win and Labour coming last. I recall some comments about a lack of campaigning on the Labour front, discussing this with people who will remain anonymous apparently Labour didn't really contest the seat realising they had pretty much zero chance of winning; and if you look at the 50% win for the Liberal followed by the 31.8% for the Conservatives it wasn't the daftest choice to make.


Rule 1 of sales talk never listen to what you say. From bid.tv

"Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephones - DECT. If you've heard people mention DECT that's what it means. I'll break that down - Digitally Enhanced; that means it's wireless"

pause - no that'd be the cordless bit of Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephones.

"It's wireless because everything is sent digitally"

Wow so digital=wireless I never knew that and I suspect it came as a big shock to anybody who actually knows what they're talking about.


Smacking - hah reading in the paper about a Conservative politician blogger whose name I can't recall, she advocates option "b" of my four choices on how to deal with tantrums. Leave them to it they'll get tired oh and when they've finished give them a hug. I would make a sarcastic remark about being a typical Conservative and not thinking about anyone else around them, but I'm not that type of guy.


I'll end on a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Normally I'd post a link, but this is an old one and the official site doesn't go back that far so with all copyright etc belonging to Bill Watterson and Universal Press Syndicate -

Panel 1: question- "Mr Jones lives 50 miles away from you. You both leave home at 5.00 and drive toward each other."

Panel 2: question contd - "Mr Jones drives at 35mph and you drive at 40mph. At what time will you pass Mr Jones on the road?"

Panel 3: Calvin's answer- "Given the traffic around here at 5.00, who knows?"

Panel 4: Calvin - "I always catch these trick questions"