Archive for the ‘Everyday life’ category

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The (over) honest ebay seller

April 16, 2010

How splendid, given the way most ebay sellers over-egg whatever particular pudding they’re trying to con you into buying, to come across a listing that tells it like it is.
605impala certainly does that in trying to shift a copy of one of his mother’s old books, Linda Goodman’s Star Signs:
“This is a wonderful book. If [...]

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How casinos carpetbag their punters

February 16, 2010

Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski was surprised by the garishness of the carpets in the casinos of Las Vegas. Until, that is, he realised that they had a purpose – to stop the punters feeling sleepy because sleepy tourists don’t spend money. If your eyes stray to the floor and see one of these monstrosities, you [...]

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Fake perfumes may contain urine

February 4, 2010

With money tight, we’re all looking to save money. But those who buy cheap perfume or after-shave at markets, online or when abroad, believing they’re conserving cash, may not realise they are actually putting some deeply unpleasant substances on their skin.
Harper’s Bazaar in the United States investigated a range of counterfeit perfumes and found ingredients [...]

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Train punctuality figures fiddled

January 19, 2010

YOUR TRAIN IS OFFICIALLY “ON TIME”, EVEN WHEN IT IS LATE
Waiting in the cold for a train that seems to take forever, do you ever look at those “Aren’t We Punctual And Wonderful?” posters from train companies and marvel at their claims of 90%-plus punctuality or whatever. Do you ever feel it doesn’t chime with [...]

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In Moscow, Big Brother is NOT watching you

January 14, 2010

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF CCTV CAMERAS IN RUSSIA’S CAPITAL FED FAKE FOOTAGE TO THE POLICE
After an investigation lasting several months, Moscow police have uncovered a massive security fraud. The company StroyMontageServices was paid to instal CCTV cameras throughout the city and then feed live images from them to the Police.
What was actually appearing on police [...]

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Ill Met By Moonlight

January 11, 2010

FORECASTERS AIM FOR CONSISTENCY. BUT THE MET OFFICE’S CONSISTENCY IS IN GETTING ITS PREDICTIONS WRONG
Forecasting is an inexact science, no matter what the field. It’s said, for instance, that economists have successfully predicted 14 of the last five recessions. Yet Britain’s Met Office has achieved an extraordinary consistency in its long-range forecasts – by getting [...]

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Zebu review of the year – part 4

January 5, 2010

Zebu Organization of the YearWhat else could it be but the House of Commons, the high reputation of which has been brought low by the Expenses’ Scandal? It’s as if our 646 MPs lined up their feet and took aim at them with shotguns. What is most disgraceful is not the claims that have been [...]

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Zebu review of the year – part 3

January 4, 2010

A ROUND-UP OF THE MOST GLARING, RIDICULOUS AND EGREGIOUS LIES, DECEPTION AND BULLSHIT OF 2009
Zebu OrganisationsRoyal Mail clearly deserve to be singled out for their “Sorry You Were Out” cards, pushed through letterboxes, whether people are out or not. Initially, facing an imminent strike, Royal Mail’s less-than-stellar management maintained that this hardly ever happened and [...]

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Zebu review of the year – part 2

January 3, 2010

A ROUND-UP OF THE MOST GLARING, RIDICULOUS AND EGREGIOUS LIES, DECEPTION AND BULLSHIT OF 2009
Zebu OrganisationsBritish Telecom make the list, primarily for telling the villagers of Hambledon in Oxfordshire that it was impossible to provide them with broadband. That might not have been so difficult to live with, had they not then discovered that BT [...]

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The most ridiculous calls to the RSPCA in 2009

January 1, 2010

As well as the emergency services, the RSPCA also get their fair share of mind-boggling calls from the public.
The RPSCA have issued their list of the most ridiculous calls they received from the animal-loving British public in 2009.

A member of the public rang to report a slow moving tortoise on the hard shoulder of a [...]

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Ridiculous emergency calls

December 31, 2009

“Is that the police? Help! I’m trapped in my duvet”Two days ago Greater Manchester Police revealed that one of the many 999 calls they’d had which weren’t real emergencies came from a woman, possibly drunk, who called because her cat was playing with a ball of string and it was “doing her head in”.
Now Devon [...]

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Even the train companies think rail travel is too expensive

December 24, 2009

With train fares due to rise yet again, it is no surprise if commuters find rail travel expensive. What’s more surprising is that Network Rail clearly thinks so too.
200 Network Rail staff had to travel to Coventry from Reading for a conference, a distance of 90 miles. As a senior executive noted in a memo: [...]

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Are speed cameras snapping aircraft?

December 22, 2009

We’ve remarked before how councils justify their phalanxes of cctv cameras by claiming they are for crime-busting while, in reality, they are mainly used for extorting money from hapless motorists.In their desperation to squeeze cash from us, councils become ever more wily. But we were still puzzled to see this speed camera in the borough [...]

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Facial recognition biometrics do not work

December 22, 2009

After we wrote about the inaccuracy of facial recognition systems, we received such a detailed comment on it from David Moss that we asked if we could make it a blog entry. David, a former IT consultant, writes widely on the subject, most recently for The Guardian.
Biometrics based on face recognition do not work. All [...]

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Inventive spam names

December 21, 2009

We all hate spam, except presumably the loathsome bottom-feeders who flood our in-boxes with the bloody stuff. However, we noticed a while back that while the products they tout may be pretty well identical, month on month, year on year, there’s often an element of inspiration when it comes to inventing the names of the [...]

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The Image Too Far

December 19, 2009

We were furious when we wrote about a CCTV camera that was pointing into somebody’s home. It seemed an appalling invasion of privacy but, while we felt sympathy for whoever lived behind the net curtains, at least we had no idea who lived there or what the CCTV operator actually saw.
And then somebody sent us [...]

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Council CCTV cameras triple in decade

December 18, 2009

We wrote the other day about how the oft-quoted figure of 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain is utter Zebu and explained the less than scientific way the number arose. We’re glad to say that somebody is trying to find out how many cameras there spying on us.
Big Brother Watch put in Freedom of Information requests [...]