Now we're for it

An actual Iseq crash yesterday.

A 7% or so collapse in the Dow.

The Nikkei heading south tonight amid Japanese sub-prime problems adding to the international concerns from the USA.

And the likelihood of the FTSE going lower still tomorrow on the back of more concerns about British banks.

And no chance of legislation in America till Thursday because the Jews are celebrating their new year.

And all this on top of the disastrous market year globally already.

Now we're really for it.

Wave goodbye to your pension plans, your stock portfolios, and start worrying about the safety of wherever your savings are.

Buckle up. It's going to be a very bumpy ride.

Civil Service Skiving

I mentioned a little while ago that I support proposals to cull the dead wood from the Civil Service

I received some responses from civil servants who, while maintaining that they themselves work hard, admitted that many of their colleagues do not.

This week, I've had the displeasure to encounter some of those who don't work very hard at all, and as people in the private sector from Cork city to rural Kilkenny lose their jobs this week, the ongoing job security of some of these public sector wasters gets more and more insufferable.

I went to one public records office staffed by civil servants seeking access to public records. There was a big sign on the wall, demanding that people respect a 'business atmosphere' in the place by not eating, drinking or talking loudly.

Beneath it at a row of computer terminals was half a dozen people, all nattering away loudly at each other and on mobile phones, and half of them were munching on sandwiches.

I waited for a staff member to return from the back office to reprimand them. After about ten minutes I realised they were the staff.

Not once did any of them break off to see if I needed assistance or ask what I wanted, even though they'd spotted me entering (it's not a busy place.) I was forced to interrupt their banter to demand someone to serve me. The scowls I got were frankly outrageous. How dare I have the audacity to ask them to do their job!

In a second public records office, I went in to seek a record that ought to be available to the public. The spotty, barely post-pubescent lad behind the counter dutifully called upstairs and was told I couldn't get to see the record.

I asked the poor lad if I could speak to someone more senior, since the record ought to be available and I got no good reason why I couldn't see it. A random woman wandering past told me that I couldn't have it because a local authority had a copy.

I explained that I had no intention of driving halfway across the country to view a record that was two floors above me and ought to be freely available to the public.

Eventually, a balding man with a white-haired tonsure and flakey skin came down to see me. His manner and tone were appallingly patronising as he told me to go to the local authority. I again pointed out his statutory obligation to provide the record or a damn good reason why not.

He just repeated himself, in 'Computer Says No' fashion.

That's when I spotted the smell of alcohol on his breath. At 11.45 am. Clearly there wasn't any point explaining a person's statutory responsibilities to a person who is drunk at work. Nor is there much point in persevering in an office where people tolerate a senior staff member being drunk before lunchtime while on duty. So I left.

In the interests of balance, I have to report that I did go to a third records office this week. I went in with only sketchy information on what I was looking for, but the staff member I met was brilliant.

He gave me an hour of his time as we scoured records looking for what I wanted. When we couldn't find it, he made a series of useful suggestions on how to proceed. When I got more information, I returned to the office and the same guy came to the counter and told his colleague that he was familiar with my search and was willing to help again.

And after another half an hour, we found what I was looking for. I'd like to pay tribute to that excellent public servant while simultaneously deploring the unprofessionalism, laziness, rule breaking and alcohol dependency of some of the other civil servants I encountered this week.

Someone in Dell agrees with me

It appears that someone inside Dell agrees with what I wrote about their forthcoming shafting of Limerick, the IDA and Irish customers.

In any case, they've added my post to their media page (see below for screen grab - look at the section named 'Technology News' on the bottom left.)

Let's see how long that stays up before their PR police catch and delete!

The PDs are dead!

Hooray! At last some good news.

The PDs wound themselves up tonight, after winding up the rest of us for years. Obviously they couldn't face the hammering they were going to get next year in the locals.

Good feckin riddance to some seriously toxic rubbish.

What a rogue's gallery of chancers, gombeens, blusterers, pocketliners and ne'er-do-wells. I don't know how they ever had the audacity to pitch themselves as Fianna Fail's mudguard when they were the most damaging gombeen opportunists of all.

I note they leave just as the economic meltdown they helped create gets properly underway.

Chickenshit bastards that they are, they won't even try cleaning up the mess they made.

Can we now, pretty, pretty please, kick that lump Harney out of health before there are no public hospitals left, and implement some tax hikes on the superrich?

Thank you.

Cry me a river, Michael Dell

Dell Computers came to build their shitty, always-crashing PCs in Limerick because it was a) inside the EU and b) the IDA offered them tax incentives to do so.

But now it seems like they're upping sticks sometime very soon. Canny people might have spotted them building a huge new manufacturing plant in Lodz in Poland and wondered about the likelihood of them keeping two EU factories going in the current economic climate.

Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, that's exactly what their intentions are. They're laying off 8,000 people, and it looks like closing Limerick will account for 3,000 of those. This will devastate the Shannon region economically. Not that Dell care, of course.

Their share price plummeted today when the news began leaking out. Good enough for them, I say.

Good enough especially for poor impoverished Dell founder, Michael Dell, whose desperation for some cash is what's behind this latest shafting of the Irish people whose tax helped fund his entry into the EU's lucrative PC market.

Michael Dell's eponymous firm has largely justified the preposterous situation whereby computers made in Ireland cost more here than almost anywhere else because they were providing employment here.

Well, since they won't be for much longer, should we expect a 30% cut in prices? My hairy arse, we should. Dell will relocate to Poland, pay the staff a quarter or less of the Limerick wages and seek to pocket the difference.

And whose pockets will enjoy this sudden deluge of cash? Michael Dell of course, the world's third or fourth richest man, a man who clearly wasn't as tight for cash four years ago, when he gave George W. Bush the maximum $250,000 an individual could contribute for his 2004 re-election campaign.

A man who the poor deluded people of the University of Limerick thought fit to honour.

But there's a recession on, and Dell needs money clearly. After all, he's got a $250,000 annual property tax bill on his 33,000 square feet Austin mansion (see pic above). And fuel costs for his Porsche Boxter, his Hummer and his other vehicles are no doubt rising too.

Dell will be blaming that recession on the need for the firm to abandon Limerick. But of course, the real reason that Dell are moving is because they failed, not just the people of Limerick, but themselves.

Michael Dell took on Steve Jobs at Apple very publicly, spoofing that his firm were the more innovative. But despite Apple's products being overpriced trendy trash, Dell has still seen their share valuation go from less than Dell's to triple Dell's in only a few years.

Dell is a shitty firm who have let down the Irish taxpayer and their loyal Limerick workforce. They make crappy computers which break down and crash a lot. Their customer service is famously abysmal.

I hope the Irish people boycott Dell's products. I hope the University of Limerick demand their honorary degree back. And most of all, I hope Michael Dell ends up unable to pay either that property tax or contribute to anymore redneck political campaigns anytime soon.

It's not easy being mean

Trust me. It's no fun being a contrarian.

People tend to make assumptions based on what you haven't said rather than what you have.

When you point out the obvious - like, for example, the unelectability of a Democratic American Presidential candidate who has no experience or the electability of a photogenic Republican Veep candidate, all of a sudden it's assumed in direct contradiction of all evidence that you're rabidly Republican and have left the planet.

This is not fun for me.

Similarly, when you point out some inconvenient truths, like the appalling inequity between men and women over reproductive rights, along comes a gang of fembloggers to depict you as some sort of Taliban.

Again, not so fun, and rather difficult to explain to the Marxist-Feminist better half.

So it is with a degree of trepidation that I say this - John McGuinness, junior Fianna Fail minister of State, is correct.

People want him to resign because he said there is a culture within the Irish civil service that stifles ambition, and that reform is hampered by overprotection of the civil service by their unions.

At the risk of being depicted in some quarters as a neo-liberal wingnut, I have to agree with the junior minister on this one.

I'm sorry to be mean, but there it is. He's absolutely right. The Irish civil service is overstaffed by a large cohort (and I mean in the tens of thousands) of lazy, skiving, entitled, pensioned-up ne'er-do-wells who wouldn't last ten minutes in a job in the private sector.

Of course there are diligent, hard working civil servants. But they're seriously outnumbered by the flexi-time brigade who'd rather apply for career breaks to go travelling, demand auto-promotion every couple of years, and count their end-salary pensions than do a day's proper work.

Just think about any interaction you have with the state. If it isn't the Revenue Commission you're dealing with, you'll be waiting a long, long time for a response. And when it comes, it will be slapdash, ill-considered and probably wrong.

Then you'll have to write to them again, fill in forms again, phone them up and wait endlessly on the end of the line again, while some surly weapon busy gossipping with her mates or some bored graduate completes his fantasy football line-up before deigning to take your call out of the queue.

We've all heard stories about how some parts of the civil service (don't) work. My favourite was told to me by a pal who once did a stint in the Births, Marriages and Deaths office.

On day one, he noticed the phone ringing and no one answering it. When he went to lift the phone, he was advised by his senior that if he did so, it would from then on become his responsibility to do so all the time. So he didn't bother. And so the phones were never answered.

Now, there are major difficulties in overseeing the reform of the service, largely because there are so many working in it. That's a large cohort of people, who unlike a lot of the population working in the private sector, do make a point of voting.

That makes it profoundly difficult for any government that wants re-electing to do anything about the excess of entitlements, massive pensions, guaranteed promotions and daily skiving that exists in the civil service here.

And it is exactly this threat that is being made by the civil service unions demanding McGuinness's head on a spike. They're effectively saying, 'Leave our pork alone, or we'll turf you all out of office.'

And to a very small degree, you can see their point. Why should they have to give up their easy life when the politicians still enjoy some of the highest wages and longest holidays in the world?

But as a taxpayer working in the ever harder-hit private sector, looking at our delapidated health service that can't afford to screen women for mammograms or immunise all at-risk children against cancer, looking at our overcrowded schools and their rundown portakabin classrooms, I want to see a cull in the civil service. A big one.

I want to see someone with the cojones to axe the pension schemes, axe the job security, cut the numbers, and reduce the lengthy list of perks in the Irish civil service.

Under benchmarking, civil servants were pegged against private sector wage levels. This being Ireland, it meant that they ended up being paid around a third MORE than their private sector equivalents, while enjoying a whole ream of things, like auto-promotion, job security and state-subsidised pensions, that no one in the private sector ever gets.

It's now time for the benchmarking to flow in the opposite direction. It's time that the civil service experienced the job losses, rationalisation, pay freezes, and slashed perks that the private sector in Ireland has been experiencing during this economic downturn.

Until we address the huge pork barrel that is the Irish civil service, we're never going to be able to correct our state and our economy to ride out this recession.

Fair play to John McGuinness (and it's rare I say that about anyone in Fianna Fail) for recognising that and putting his career on the line to say so in public.

A fright with every flight

Sky News (same three headline stories every five minutes) was running a story about another travel agent collapse on heavy rotation this morning.

XL are apparently Britain's third largest travel agent. They have thousands of Irish customers too.

I'd rather leave it to experts within the travel industry to debate the effects of the credit crunch, or fuel prices, or the global economic downturn, or environmental concerns upon their industrial sector.

I do have sympathy for the customers stranded abroad today, and especially for the staff, who found out they'd lost their jobs when they turned on the news this morning, having heard nothing from the craven management whose decision-making led to this demise.

But it seems to me that something a little more profound has taken place than just corporate cocking-up.

This collapse, like those that preceded it and those that will follow it, like the consolidation of the airlines (BA and American Airlines look like the latest to buddy up in the ongoing turbulence of the travel sector), has to do with the democratisation of travel.

In short, this is a victory for the internet. The web's ability to put a vendor anywhere in touch with a potential market of the whole (online) world was inevitably going to lead to professional middlemen losing their jobs.

They're losing their jobs because people no longer need their services (except for special circumstances where professional planning assistance is useful to help organise complex travel arrangements).

They're losing their jobs because people can tell a good deal from a bad one simply by scouring some aggregator and price comparison sites online. The global market drove prices down.

But markets overshoot. And the Ryanair effect of no-frills, no-comfort, no-rights flights is for many people a discomfort too far.

I've discussed the Ryanair effect before on this blog, especially their contempt for customers, their maniacal chairman, their bullshit additional charges that add up to multiples of the advertised price of the flight, and their sense of social responsibility to the disabled.

But the Ryanair effect has pressured prices and practices of other airlines downwards too. And this is what is leading to the streamlining of the industry, as the last fat is burnt off the former national flagship airlines, but as also standards are cut to the bone in emulation of the Ryanair model.

The position of equilibrium for consumers is a happy medium between price and service. Unfortunately, as yesterday's latest Ryanscare emergency at Dublin airport demonstrated, Ryanscare standards of care and service are not sufficient.

We don't want a fright with every flight. We don't want the Seventies back either, when it cost a month's wages to fly one-way to London, but you got lovely meals and could smoke and flirt with the trolley dollies.

We want to be able to travel in a modicum of comfort, at a commensurate price set by a competitive market, in stringently monitored safety standards.

Memo to SDLP

Dear SDLP,
Your vote has been declining in recent elections. People have been querying the party's very raison d'etre, even including senior party members.

Your leader has ignominiously touted his mandate to Fianna Fail in a desperate attempt to shore up some electoral relevance, and been embarrassingly rebuffed.

Now he's proposed scrapping designation, a nice recipe for a return to sectarian majority rule, in an attempt to grab some headlines.

In short, you're still on your own and you need every vote you can get.

So would it not make a bit of sense to sort out your communications?

I got a letter from the SDLP through the front door. There wasn't even a phone number on it, or any mention of how to contact my local SDLP representative.

On the SDLP's website, there is no mention of how to go about joining the party, if anyone was so inclined.

Is it any wonder that the electorate and membership of the SDLP is declining to the extent that senior party members are prostituting themselves at FF, when basic communications are so lax?

Sort it out, or else stand back and watch your decline into irrelevance.

JC Skinner wants your vote

There is a large proportion of the American electorate who are unconvinced by either Obama's vision thing or McCain's maverick conservatism.

Reluctantly, I have finally agreed to put my name forward following a massive groundswell of appeals that I enter my candidacy in the forthcoming election:

I was in the Provos ...

... and all I got was this lousy power-sharing executive.

Well, I wasn't, but a lot of people I'm aware of, have met, have socialised with, were part of the militant Republican movement.

The war was declared over some years back. Now the British overlords have confirmed that the transition to mainstream political activity is complete.

I suppose there wasn't much time left for Martin McGuinness (see pic, far right) to be holding IRA council meetings since his day job as Deputy First Minister to Ian Paisley and Mr Iris Robinson (who himself was a terrorist in his day, as the people of Clontibret can testify, see pic below) takes up so many hours.

But today's final nail in the Provo coffin must be hard to bear for some of the ground level volunteers - the people who took a guerilla war to what were often violent, brutish and sadistic British troops.

They've got out of prison early, which I wasn't a great fan of. But where are they now, the best years of their lives spent fighting a civil war or incarcerated? Sure some of them have got nice state jobs like Marty McGuinness, as 'community workers' and the like.

But most of them must now be wondering what was it all for? This paltry power-sharing deal? The same deal as Sunningdale offered so many decades ago? For Martin McGuinness to swan around preposterously posing as a peacemaker to Iraqis?

And what of the victims? Not just the victims of Provo attacks, but the victims of Provo domination of neighbourhoods, the victims of Provo intimidation of individuals, the victims of Provo insistence that they and only they could speak for Irish Republicanism?

How do they feel today?

Well, the Unionists now have what they wanted. They have Stormont back, they have made the IRA go away, they have their gerrymandered veto on Irish reunification. They have their pet Provos in the ha'penny power places.

Bee Stung

I went to mow the lawn today. I don't do this very often, because I'm not really into gardening. So in a sense, I only have myself to blame for what happened next.

As I was merrily mowing down the long grass to a more manageable level, I suddenly found myself in a cloud of irate buzzing insects.

Usain Bolt wouldn't have beaten me in the sprint to the kitchen door.

Since then, I've been watching from behind locked doors and glass as the buzzers hover in an angry cloud, coming and going from their ground nest, whose top I've lopped off with the mower.

A couple of calls to pest control later, and it seems like that's all I'm allowed to do. My vision of astronaut-suited pest controllers pumping chemicals into the lawn or dowsing the entire garden in plumes of toxic smoke have sadly vanished.

No one will touch my bees. Why?

They are, apparently, a protected species.

I'm told they won't sting unless attacked (but I'm guessing the accidental destruction of their home would count as an attack.) I'm not allowed to dig them out or poison them or do whatever one does to get rid of a ground nest of stinging insects in the back garden.

But that rules out using the garden for a bit, I fear. Apparently, September is the height of the colony, and they should die back as it gets colder. Haven't they noticed that this was one of the coldest, crappest summers in Irish records?

Any tips from green-fingered bee-killers would be welcome. I'm not averse to breaking the law when the law prioritises insects over me.

No more conspiracy theory crap please

This blog is now a crappy conspiracy theory-free zone. (Well, it always was on my side, but one or two regular visitors need to get with the programme.)

Any more posts about British military intelligence, the CIA, MI5 or 6, collusion between paramilitary groups, the New World Order, Zionist Occupational Governments, the Jesuits, or shape-shifting lizard people will be removed.

Same goes for nonsense about what 'really happened' in relation to 9-11, the bloodline of Jesus Christ, the conflict in Northern Ireland or the English royal family.

I lost patience for all that crap a long time ago, and I'm going to delete it any time I see it because those sort of contributions only serve to derail actual interesting debates.

I don't mind a topic going off-topic, so long as it's heading in some interesting directions. But the welcome mat is no longer out for anyone who's sole interest is to derail every single thread they post on with the same paranoid conspiracy theory crap.

Real Estate in the virtual world is pretty cheap. Go build a temple to the madness somewhere else on the interwebs. This blog ain't it. Sorry.

Miss Alaska for Vice-President?

Or maybe even for President in four years time?

It seems that John McCain has decided to go with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate.

It's a superlative choice that's really going to let the Democrats know they're in a fight for the Whitehouse.

She is a dream candidate for the Republicans - she's extremely photogenic (even now, as opposed to her beauty queen heyday, right), married to an Inuit (there goes a slice of Obama's ethnic vote), the mother of a Downs' Syndrome kid and a soldier on active duty, and she has actual experience of governance (unlike Obama, Biden or McCain).

She'll appeal to the ethnic vote, to the swing vote and to the still disgruntled Clintonista sisterhood vote.

An election that ought on paper to have been a Democrat landslide is now blown wide open. They have the wrong candidate, the wrong vice-presidential candidate and the wrong election strategy (Roman pillars for the acceptance speech? WTF?)

By contrast, McCain is quietly playing a blinder. Palin is a genuine heavyweight candidate, despite her beauty and relative youth. Alaskan politicos allege that the political landscape of the territory is littered with the corpses of those who've opposed her in the past.

She will give Biden a good debate and she will shore up the demographic holes in the McCain vote.

Despite the Obamania of the convention, the much-awaited bump in the polls has not materialised for the Democrats. McCain remains doggedly in touch.

It will be interesting to see the polls following the Republican convention. I suspect by then McCain will be neck-and-neck with Obama if not in front.

Certainly, the media agenda hijacking of the Democrat convention by today's announcement is a genius move by the GOP that the Democrats have nothing to respond with.

If they keep boxing clever like that, no amount of waffly Obama rhetoric will be able to propel him to the Whitehouse come November.

What's worse for the Democrats is that if the McCain ticket does get elected, then Palin can run against Obama or Hilary or whoever the Dems choose in 2012 with four years of executive experience under her belt.

The real nightmare for them would be for McCain to die about three years into a term of office. They'd be looking realistically at eight years of Bush junior, followed by three of McCain, followed by nine of Palin.

Civilisation is crumbling

Jade Goody naked here.

'Civilisation is crumbling,' said Bill the Butcher (right) in 'Gangs of New York.'

Bill was correct, of course. Just a century or so premature in his diagnosis.

But two news items today indicate that Bill's prescient prediction is now coming true.

Firstly, a book written by a chimp has been nominated for a best first book award.

Now, I'm going out on a limb here, but I reckon that the monkey didn't write the book. No matter how many years he was chained to a typewriter. I'm guessing it was written by a bunch of marketing scum, seeking to 'create some buzz' around nothing by billing their verbal silage as being the product of a monkey.

Every year, tens of thousands of debut novels emerge onto the market to a resounding silence from the media, the review pages, the awards lists. This is how it must be, when there is so much output and so little space for promotion or endorsement.

But could you blame each and every one of those dedicated writers for feeling outraged that some piss-poor marketing fluff, advertised as being written by a chimp, gets shortlisted for a prestigious award while they struggle on, creating art in a vacuum (or freezing garret)?

For added irony, the book has been listed even though it hasn't been published yet. That's right, this book which no one has read, which was allegedly written by a chimp, is so brilliant that it has been shortlisted for an award.

In case you're still not convinced that the end of the world is nigh, let me refer you to Marina Hyde, who is in her own little way despairing about the fate of humanity.

The reason for her concern is the opening this week of a finishing school for reality TV show contestants.

I'm afraid that's not a typo. There really is now a college in New York dedicated to teaching people how to become the next Jade Goody.

If anyone's looking for me, I'm spending the rest of the day in my nuclear bunker.

Pervert Central - South Belfast

South Belfast is pervert central.

Of the nearly 900 people on the Northern Ireland sexual offenders register (ie, child abusers, rapists and assorted other perverts) a terrifying 774 live in the community, free to strike again.

Unfortunately, you don't get to know if they're living in your neighbourhood or not. The Government and the police don't think you deserve to know if a paedophile lives at the end of your street, or next to your child's school.

But at least we have this breakdown.

It seems that the place to avoid if you want to live far away from nonces and pederasts is leafy South Belfast. There are 116 convicted sex offenders living freely and openly in South Belfast.

If the house prices weren't falling there already, they'll be tumbling now.

I'm just surprised that there weren't even more in West Belfast, given its long-standing reputation as an incest hotspot.

Obama becoming more unelectable by the day

Apparently it IS possible to make Barack Hussein Obama even more unelectable than he already is.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next never-will-be-vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden.

Okay, he's an aged white man, just like the Obamaniacs wanted (though one wonders why.)

But he's also one of the wettest eco-liberals in US politics. Not exactly the sort of person to mitigate and soften Obama's own hyper-lefty tendencies so much as exaggerate and amplify them.

Biden's pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-tax cuts, pro-gun control and pro-gay civil unions. Whatever the merits of any of those individual positions, they certainly won't endear the Obama ticket to the MOR Republican-lite voters and undecideds that they need to get over the line in November. If anything, the opposite.

He is vaunted for his foreign affairs knowledge, however. Again, his positions seem unelectable to me. He's in favour of dialogue with Iran and North Korea, the so-called axis of evil, for example. He wants American troops sent into Darfur.

While his pro-Israel views might align him with the US mainstream, they're hardly a standout issue. After all, is there ANYONE in American politics who doesn't give the Zionist regime a carte blanche?

According to the Washington Post, who analysed senatorial voting patterns, pretty much the only Senator with a more liberal voting record than Biden is - Obama, of course.

Response in the States has been predictable:

Glee from the McCain camp, who are delighted to see Obama pick such an unelectable running mate.

More dark murmurings from the Clintonistas and the sisterhood that they don't feel comfortable voting for the Obama ticket, especially without a woman on it, and double-especially without Hilary.

Forced cheer from the true believers, whose initial JFK hysteria is subsiding into an 'Omigod, what have we done?' hangover more and more each day.

What does it all add up to? Another Republican president, of course, albeit a one-termer.

I don't mind adding my voice to the cliche - the Democrats really are set hard on grasping defeat from the jaws of victory, and it looks like they've managed it now.

Gary Glitter's new runaround

Apparently, Gary Glitter has now agreed to return to the UK, after faking a heart attack to avoid his flight and trying to flee to Hong Kong instead.

Now that he's accepted he must return to Britain, he's already gone and bought a new motor. If you're in London any time soon, look out for the new glittermobile:

Asian babes not good enough for marketing mongs

Apparently Asian babes aren't good enough for the marketing morons at chav outfitters, the incorrectly named Top Shop.

When they decided to foist their tacky, ill-fitting clothing on the people of China, the advertising wonks didn't think to hire some local models to try to make their clobber look wearable.

Nope, instead they spunked 24 million euro on ageing addict Cocaine Kate.

According to one fashion victim, the reason why people keep giving this human car crash so much money for effectively just standing about looking bored while wearing clothes is because of her 'look.'

Now, I'm no fashion expert. So I rely on those morons who are to inform me as to what this magical 'look' is (since to my untutored eye she looks exactly like what she is, which is a skinny, coked-up chav from Croydon.)

And here's what they say:

"Kate Moss was so different when she first arrived on the fashion scene," says Jen Stevens, editor of U Magazine. "At the time the catwalks were filled with six-foot goddesses and then suddenly along came this short, pretty ordinary girl from Croydon. It was this 'difference' that drew everybody's attention and upon which she managed to build a career."

So it isn't her look, because she looks short and ordinary. My eyes weren't actually lying after all. Even the fashionistas think she looks like a chav.

Okay, let's try again. Maybe it's her winning personality? Nope again. In fact, she almost never speaks in public and barely ever in ads. One assumes her paymasters in the fashion industry are aware that the sound of her grating estuary tones would shatter the glamorous image they've spent a fortune on creating.

Is it perhaps her life story that inspires people? That's definitely what one fashion victim believes:

"Maybe it's because she's fallen so low and fought her way back up again," says model agency boss Celia Holman Lee. "She's shown a vulnerable side that people can relate to."

Yes, you heard that correctly. Cocaine Kate's tabloid fall from grace, not to mention her house-trashing antics and association with hard drugs and hard druggies, is something that we can all relate to. What a load of shit.

Which brings me back to the news item I began with. What the fuck are Top Shop paying this cokehead chav tens of millions for?

And if they really must pay people preposterous amounts of money to stand around looking bored while wearing clothes, what's wrong with paying some stunning looking Chinese babe who doesn't do tons of hard drugs and isn't closer to forty than twenty?

Baldy Blogger dies

RIP to the Baldy Blogger, the award-winning, brave Adrian Sudbury who died in his sleep last night.

Adrian did more than anyone to demonstrate the validity of blogging as an activity.

His online testimony of his illness helped to demystify the medicalese surrounding leukaemia and cancer in general.

And his selflessness in sharing his experiences, and explaining and contextualising them for the lay person, is some feat given that he was suffering a terminal illness.

He died at the age of 27. But he achieved more than most people do in three times long a life.

Baldy blogger, RIP.

Your boys took a helluva beating...

Yes, that really is a man in South Ossetia riding a tricycle through a war zone wearing a Tyrone GAA jersey.

No, the picture is not photoshopped. It was taken by an Associated Press photographer and was published on the Guardian website last Wednesday.

I can only assume that while the lad is somewhat unhappy about Russia invading his country and looting and destroying it, he might be just a little pleased to hear that his adopted Gaelic football county slaughtered the Dubs at Croker today.

Okay, maybe 'slaughtered' isn't quite the most appropriate word.

Sorry!