Happy New Year

For this evening: TheEye will be trying out a new iPhone application called 'Top Shelf'. If you want to mix a new drink, the app thinks the way most of us do - instead of going out to buy the ingredients, it shows you how to build a new drink with the ingredients you have available. Or if you're feeling indecisive it can pick a random recipe. Guaranteed messiness.

For tomorrow morning: hangover remedies.

Please enjoy your alcohol irresponsibly; the way that Bacchus intended.

Happy New Year

Read more...

EyeTube v2

Back in September after much talk of censorship on YouTube and GrumpyOldTwat losing some of the videos that he had uploaded, TheEye and an intrepid band of testers launched EyeTube.


EyeTube is a video sharing site designed as a safe haven for more controversial stuff than YouTube are happy to host. Originally a free-speech resource for political videos, it is now also used to host a variety of music, comedy and other genres.

So why this post now? Well, shortly into the New Year EyeTube will be undergoing a massive rewrite and upgrade. The new code is already in the final testing phase. Many of the readers of this blog are users of the current system, so we don't want a sudden surprise when the change happens. This post is a marker for that day.

Also in preparation for the new version, EyeTube has opened up channels on Twitter and Facebook. Please subscribe for all of the latest site postings, news of uploaded videos, and most importantly in the next week or two for news of the upcoming changes.

EyeTube remains a great resource for people wanting free zero-censorship video hosting, so please feel encouraged to spread the word. Carrying the logo as a link in your sidebar would be fantastic, and if you can then here is the widget code:

<a href="http://eyetube.me"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JqYd3xXiruw/TIEmEEReYyI/AAAAAAAADeo/ck-1nwb7CLc/s1600/EyeTube.jpg" style="border: 0;" height="55" width="160" alt="EyeTube" /></a>

Please support the site, and if you've got any questions then leave them in the Comments here, on Twitter or Facebook, or by email to Eyetube.

Read more...

‘Most Beautiful Goat’ Competition

In the West we have beauty contests featuring human beings, but elsewhere it ain't necessarily the same. Saudi Arabia; where men are men and goats are nervous:

Riyadh, Dec 29 (DPA) A beauty competition for goats began Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, as part of an auction bringing together traders and herders in the holy Muslim city of Mecca.

Auction supervisor Fawzi al-Subhi said that over 170 animals are competing for the coveted title ‘most beautiful goat’. He expects the winner to be sold for at least $18,000.

Only in the Middle East do they put lipstick on goats and camels but cover their women in black sheets.

Read more...

Headline o' The Day

From Time Magazine today, and with no sign of intended irony or sarcasm:

There follows in the article a whole host of theories as to why it's so inconveniently cold when politicians and career labcoats in search of taxpayer-funded grants tell us we're all scheduled to fry. Of course, the "science" wasn't always that "settled" for Time. Oh no:

For those of you reading the other headlines across the top, the answer you're struggling for is that he had a nervous breakdown and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. No charge for that.

Read more...

Tagging Alcohol - It's For Our Own Good

Hideous Big Brother nonsense from the problem areas of* Dundee where alcohol is now being tracked in case you dare to do something the State doesn't approve of with your own property.

Under the scheme, bottles would bear a printed barcode enabling authorities to track whether legally bought alcohol has been given to youngsters.

The scheme, which is already being piloted in problem areas of Dundee, involves the police seizing alcohol from under-18s and then using the coded bottle labels to trace where the drink was bought from.

Officers then use CCTV from the shop to identify who bought the bottle, and offenders are taken off in cattle trucks to re-education camps.

Labour's [that's a surprise, eh?] community safety spokesman [a what?] James Kelly wants to roll out the scheme to other parts of the country...[yep, bet he does, the control-freak twat] 

So, this Orwellian wet dream is now being recommended for use all across Scotland, which means that it's only a matter of time before the Health Nazis think it'll be a splendid idea across the whole of the UK.

So who is going to pay for this and how?

The scheme is understood to cost less than £100 per shop to run

In this context, "understood" means "we don't have a clue, so we've pulled a number out of our arse". Doubtless someone will explain how the Dundee branch of Morrisons manages to label and track back the sales two aisles of booze across a whole year for a one-er.

But never mind the economics and practicalities; just curl up into a ball and keep muttering the magic words: It's for our own good, you know.

* Done just to wind up Subrosa :-)

Read more...

Solar Panel Trousers

Are those solar panels in your trousers or are you just pleased to see me? Because first in the list of Glad I didn't get those for Christmas we have solar powered trousers. Oh yes.

For the low, low price of $920, you can own a pair of Go Urban Cargo Pants, which boasts "fly front, low-slung drawstring waist, and two back patch pockets with button down flaps" on the company's website. But the main reason you might pay nearly $1,000 for a pair of trousers: "two side cargo pockets each comes with independently functioning power supply."

This really quite disturbing ability to charge your MP3 players and mobile phones on the go can also be achieved with a really quite hideous looking hip-length jacket. Any of them can be topped up with extra solar panels at $20 each. A pdf of the technical specs and other assorted nonsense is here.

Screaming "rob me, I'm carrying expensive electronics" you've got to wonder what'll happen the moment you have an absent-minded moment and put them in the washing machine.

Read more...

Culturally Significant Films

This can only be one step down from doing a degree on Coronation Street.

It's official. When, in hundreds of years, the future of humanity scours the U.S. Library of Congress for clues as to how primitively we lived back in the early 21st century, the jive-talking granny in "Airplane!" could very well be integral to the study.

That movie, a slapstick comedy from 1980, along with 24 other films will be added to the National Film Registry this year because they have been deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," according to the National Film Registry Board.

Also among those to be immortalized on government shelves are the "Star Wars" sequel "The Empire Strikes Back," "Malcolm X," "All the President's Men" and "The Exorcist."

Surely the Uk doesn't have the equivalent of this? And if we do can we abolish it?

Failing that, what films would you put in it as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant"? TheEye picks Zulu, Dambusters and The Cruel Sea to start off with, but those might not be 'acceptable' these days.

Read more...

Using Steam Trains To Beat The Snow

....but not in the UK. They're using antique rolling stock to clear global warming off of the tracks over in southern Sweden:

The trains, old DA locomotives normally resident in the Swedish Railway Museum in Gävle in northern Sweden, have been dusted off and put back into service to clear the tracks of snow between Mjölby and Alvesta in southern Sweden.

Furthermore a 100-year-old snowplough is in place alongside the tracks in nearby Nässjö, ready to be called into action if needed.

"These are made of stern stuff which can take the winter and we are very happy to be able to help to keep the railways running," said Henrik Reuterdahl at the museum.

The two locomotives were constructed in the middle of the 1950s and are currently equipped with a heavy duty snowplough in order to perform their task.

Can you imagine how many 'elfnsafety regulations this would slam into in the UK? It'd just the sort of off-the-wall stunt you could imagine Boris trying though, for the the pure oddness of the idea. Unfortunately that  would just give cheap ammunition to the BBC/Labour, who would inevitably blame the "cuts" which are responsible for all of the woes of today even though they don't start until April. You know, the ones which will take us all back to the dark days of 2006 spending levels when libraries were forced to open and the dead were left buried.

Bring back the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman!

Read more...

Christmas 1940

Via Fraser Nelson, this is "Christmas Under Fire", a Ministry of Information film made by an American about life in 1940.

Happy Boxing Day, one and all.

Read more...

Merry Christmas

On behalf of all four contributors to the AllSeeingEye blog, TheEye wishes you all a Merry Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year; and for those of you on deployment or serving in unfriendly places, a safe homecoming.

Read more...

Cable vs Sky - The Animation

For those who haven't seen this marvellous offering from barking mad animators Apple Daily yet, we have Cable vs Sky:

Read more...

Coping With A Zombie Apocalypse At Christmas

A cheerful Christmas post tomorrow, probably, but in the meantime you can never be too careful...

Read more...

Yes, You Are In A Slower Queue

It's the age old feeling, and no doubt it's been honed over the last few weeks as you've stood impatiently waiting to buy Christmas presents. That other line is moving faster than yours.

Turns out that it's probably true.

And in a perfectly valid academic exercise to enable shops to optimise checkouts, a study proving it has just been released in time for Christmas.

Using the work of Agner Erlang, a Danish engineer who helped the Copenhagen Telephone Company determine the best level of service with the minimum number of operators, Bill Hammack, from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana demonstrates queuing theory in this surprisingly interesting (honestly!) video.

Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers. This is because if any one line slows because of an issue, the entry queue continues to have customers reach check-out optimally. However, this is also perceived by customers as the least efficient, psychologically.

Or just buy online. No queues there.

Read more...

The Oddness Of Sweden

If this was a Daily Mail story they'd have got benefit scrounging asylum seeking witch into the headline somehow. But it doesn't hail from these shores - it is a Swedish story of stupidity.

A Stockholm woman who approached a psychic medium for help to free her from the evil which she felt had begotten her, has been awarded damages after claiming fraud when results were less than satisfactory.

The case dates back to November 2002 when the woman reported the psychic medium to the police alleging fraud. The woman claimed that she had paid the medium 29,000 kronor ($4,300) in 2000 seeking to "burn away all the evil" and help her to recover from mental illness.

The woman had no receipt to forward to the police but was able to divulge her surname, approximate age and address.

After a second person came forward with the same complaint, the psychic was then told of the fraud suspicions against her during a police interview held in February 2004.

The psychic obviously foresaw a future involving bars...and not the good sort...so she went on the run. But even in that prediction she was wrong, because in May of this year the police gave up and the charges were dropped.

Always useful to know that justice in Sweden works only until the authorities get bored.

Furthermore the plaintiff, knowing that the medium had no money, was heavily in debt and probably realising that the whole thing was a load of nonsense anyway, decided against bothering with a civil case for damages.

But just to top the whole pyramid of nonsense, Sweden's Chancellor of Justice has now instructed the National Courts Administration to pay the accuser compensation because she didn't get her European Convention "right" to watch a trial.

Compensation, effectively, for being stupid enough to get defrauded in the first place.

Madness, yes, but not as stupid as this story from two days ago about a 57 year old plumber from Stockholm who groomed a 13 year old girl he met on a contact website for sex. When she didn't turn up to meet him, he tracked down her father and demanded the return of 500 kroner (about £50) he'd given her. He got a fine for doing it.

Sweden? There must be something in the water over there. Goodness knows what circus will kick off when they get Assange in the dock.

Read more...

UFOs in New Zealand

Yes, indeed. TheEye is taking a break from working on The Project That Just Won't Die and needs some form of distraction.

Helpfully, the New Zealand government has just made public 2,000 pages of UFO eyewitness accounts dating back to 1952 and that should do the trick quite nicely. Local newspaper The Dominion Post has scanned the documents and has made them available online.

Among the accounts of alien encounters and strange lights in the sky is one of New Zealand's most famous UFO mystery: the Dec 1978 Kaikoura Lights. But was it aliens? The Defence Ministry at the time attributed it to "lights from squid boats reflected off clouds, unburned meteors, or lights from the planet Venus or trains and cars" which just about covers every one of the boring possibilities.

TheEye has only read the first few reports, but is so far drawing a blank on any anal probing anecdotes....just in case anyone was wondering.

Read more...

Google Review Of 2010

Quite US-biased and a bit lefty but the Google Review of 2010 isn't bad at all.

Read more...

Job Opportunity: Auto-Rickshaw Driver

....because they say you should always look for the good news in everything. And you know you're having a bad day when:

A middle-aged man was beaten to death allegedly by his four wives at village Kabirpur under sadar upazila of the district early Tuesday. The deceased was identified as Yunus Bapari, 46, an auto-rickshaw driver and resident of Mulalidaha under sadar upazila.

The police said that at about 11:00pm Monday, Yunus went to a village fair at Brahmankanda near Faridpur town with his two wives where he ran into his third wife that triggered a family row as his first two wives did not know he had a third wife.

At one point the three women came to know that Yunus even had a fourth wife living in another village. The three women then took him to the residence of his fourth wife at Kabirpur where the four women together beat him up mercilessly, locals said.

Yunus was admitted to Faridpur Medical College Hospital in a critical condition where he died at 4:50am. The body was sent to the hospital morgue for post-mortem examination.

Hat-tip to the JawaReport for text and picture

Read more...

Christmas Cards

Much attention has been given to the Christmas cards given out by the leaders of the two main political parties (and the rapidly imploding other one), as it always is every year.

This, for example, is Clegg's effort:

There's probably enough material in the detail there to keep an amateur psychologist in work for weeks.

However TheEye is much more interested in Paris Hilton's 2010 Christmas card offering. And if you've ever touched her life (or her) then this is what dropped through your letterbox a few days ago:

Does she have no shame? And are those bracelets or handcuffs?

For the record, TheEye didn't get one from her. Or a Christmas card.

Read more...

Peer Reviewed Scientific Papers

We hear much about how Warmist scientific papers are "peer reviewed", as though the scrutiny of work by one grant-seeking conformist by another is somehow a good thing.

But to give a marker of how rigorous the standards of such publications are, a group of British schoolchildren have become the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colours and patterns.

It's written entirely in the childrens' voices, complete with sound effects (part of the Methods section is subtitled, ''the puzzle'duh duh duuuhhh') and figures drawn by hand in coloured pencil.

TheEye, who has had several peer-reviewed papers published in one major scientific journal (in its field), is delighted that they have beaten Emily Rosa to the record; overturning her study of Therapeutic Touch published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 when she was 9. She later graduated from the University of Colorado at Denver in 2009 with a major in Psychology.

But much as it's excellent to see real science being taught in at least one school, and kudos to the children for achieving this feat, the paper has only been published because of their age. Which makes you question whether other papers on other subjects; Warmism, for example, make it through peer review on merit alone...

Read more...

Official: It's Not Art, It's A Lightbulb

All but the most hard core Islington coffee-morning types seem to agree that what passes for modern "art", isn't.

Indeed, passing through the Tate Modern (the usually missing "The" has been replaced here for grammatical accuracy) is likely to reduce a true art lover to garlic tears of rage and impotent contempt.

So it is with considerable nausea that we report that the European Commission is correct (aargh, that hurt) to say:

European Commission officials claim pieces by the American artist – who is famous for installations using fluorescent strip lights – are liable for full VAT because they are no more than “lighting fittings”.

It means that any museum or gallery bringing his works into the country from outside the EU will have to pay a full VAT levy, which is due to rise to 20 per cent on Jan 1.
The ruling will also affect the works of Bill Viola, a US artist whose slow motion video pieces won acclaim when they were exhibited at the National Gallery in London.

It's bound to be time for the article to rehash a tired cliche.

It is likely to reignite age-old the debate over what does and does not constitute art.

Oh yes, there it is. And no it's not "likely to", really, because everybody has made their minds up long ago.

Just to add an extra frisson of joy to the whole episode:

St Paul's Cathedral could be among the first victims of the ruling. It has commissioned two altar pieces from Viola, due to be unveiled next year

Serves 'em right for wasting money on nonsense. TheEye hasn't been in the shadow of St Paul's for over a decade, but suspects that visitors are now aggressively mugged for entrance donations and gift shop sales. Now you know where your money is going - not on restoring the place but on fancy lightbulbs.

Read more...

Clegg's Last Christmas

The Nick Clegg As Pinnocho edition...via Paul Waugh:

Read more...

Wikileaks Becomes Hypocritical Farce

So the Wikileaks bloke is up in arms because...files about him have been leaked. Just read the article - the stench of hypocrisy and double standards is enough to knock you out at a hundred yards downwind.

But, annoyed though he might be about that, there's a classic line to treasure in this article. No wonder he's furious.

Incriminating police files were published in the British newspaper that has used him as its source for hundreds of leaked US embassy cables.

In a move that surprised many of Mr Assange's closest supporters on Saturday, The Guardian newspaper published previously unseen police documents that accused Mr Assange in graphic detail of sexually assaulting two Swedish women. One witness is said to have stated: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."

Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange's Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. "It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position," he told a colleague.

TheEye takes great comfort that someone has now contradicted the loudly restaurant-delivered verdict of one particular disatisfied ex-girlfriend of mine. "The world's worst" was a bit harsh...

Read more...

Thought Crimes

TheEye disagrees with the so-called "crime" of Holocaust Denial. Not because of the truth or otherwise of any historical event. No; on that front historians, most with clear minds and some with agendas, have crunched the numbers repeatedly. Politicians then pulled a number from a tombola and, in certain countries, it is now illegal to question that version of history.

The disagreement is because TheEye believes strongly that the right to question everything should be paramount. Come to whatever conclusions you like, however wrongheaded, but you should be free to believe and speak them if you choose. Be guided only by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's axiom that Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

What makes one event so 'special' that it deserves ringfencing from the much greater, by some measurements, crimes by the murderous regimes of Stalin, Pol Pot and so on? Whilst decriminalising thought is this blog's chosen way forward, some are trying to push the barriers in the other direction.

Despite a pathological hatred of all things socialist, TheEye cannot agree with a proposal just made to the EU to extend thought crimes; even when in this case communist crimes are the target:

Six post-communist EU members, including the Czech Republic have urged Brussels to push for an EU ban on denial of communist crimes. In a joint appeal sent to the EU’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, they argue that the principle of justice should assure the same approach to all totalitarian regimes. Holocaust denial is already banned in many EU states and the six nations petitioning the EU justice commissioner would like to see similar treatment applied to the crimes of communism.

Not even Holocaust Denial is an EU-wide "crime" (yet!). And yet these people, who have only recently thrown off the shackles of one totalitarian though-controlling regime are now seeking to regulate the free speech of everyone in another; the CCCPs ideological successor, the EU!

In an open letter made available to the press this week, the foreign ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania say that the denial of any totalitarian crime should be treated according to the same standard, in order to prevent favourable conditions for the rehabilitation and rebirth of such ideologies. Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg says the argument behind this is simple:
“In my opinion denial of Stalinist crimes is as serious a matter as Holocaust denial. Both the Communist and Nazi regimes took millions of lives. Both were mass murderers and those who served and abetted them participated in those murders. That’s all there is to it.”

The key phrase there is "...should be treated according to the same standard..." and that standard should include the freedom to stand up at Speakers' Corner and spout nonsense, and the freedom for you to walk past and ignore it.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 "On Liberty"

Read more...

The Wonderful Cuban Healthcare System

In 2007 director Michael Moore released Sicko, a film that claimed to compare the free market health care system of the United States with the "universal" approaches in countries such Cuba and the UK. His rather transparent agenda was to show that Cuba, and the NHS, were vastly superior to the U.S. model.

Yesterday The Guardian reported a WikiLeaks revelation that Cuba's government had banned the movie.

Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a "mythically" favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a "popular backlash", according to US diplomats in Havana.

...The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so "disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room".

Castro's government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it "knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them."

Yet another reason, if any were needed, to never watch anything produced by Michael Moore. They are so blatantly leftist propaganda and lies that even Cuba bans them in embarrassment.

Hat-tip Doug Ross

Read more...

RIP GOT

And finally it comes, the news that we've been fearing and yet expecting for a couple of weeks. The Grumpy Old Twat has hung up his blogging boots for the last time.

"Gotty's keyboard has been hung up. It's tired and all twatted out, just like Gotty ..."

It's a sad day for TheEye, who counts Gotty as a longstanding friend in the blogosphere. He's an occasional contributor here; TheEye over there, and we've worked together on a few projects and other ventures over the years.

But the constant pressure of turning out top quality video and images (check out some of his vids at EyeTube) has proved a bit too much - he set himself a demanding pace and he always kept it up. And there's only so much swearing you can do when you can't see anything changing because of it. Maybe he'll surface again as a non-sweary blog? Or maybe he'll haunt our Comments sections with red wine fuelled rants against the dying of the light? Or maybe that's really him signing off for good. Who knows? TheEye suspects that we'll find out soon enough.

So its goodbye to a fine, fine blog.

RIP GOT

Read more...

European Court Imposes Abortion on Catholic Ireland

Ireland may be regretting its slavish capitulation to all things European tonight after the European Court once again enthusiastically meddled matters that should only be decided by national parliaments:

Ireland's constitutional ban on abortion violates pregnant women's right to receive proper medical care in life-threatening cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday, harshly criticizing Ireland's long inaction on the issue.

The Strasbourg, France-based court ruled that a pregnant woman fighting cancer should have been allowed to get an abortion in Ireland in 2005 rather than being forced to go to England for the procedure. The judgment put Ireland under pressure to draft a law extending abortion rights to women whose pregnancies represent a potentially fatal threat to their own health.

Ireland has resisted doing that despite a 1992 judgment from the Irish Supreme Court that said Ireland should provide abortions in cases where a woman's life is endangered — including, controversially, by her own threats to commit suicide.

Including suicide threats would make abortion effectively legal there, and that's a long way from the position consistently adopted by the voters of Ireland since its creation. Rather like votes for prisoners, the ECHR is interfering in domestic matters never envisaged by its well-intentioned founders. It's time to reassert national sovereignty on both sides of the Irish Sea and ignore these rulings until elected parliaments speak.

Read more...

Naming Cocktails

Firstly, apologies for the sparse posting in the last few days. TheEye is working on a large project which will be of interest to everyone when it's done. In the meantime, with typical BBC handwringing, we hear that:

A Swansea bar serving a cocktail drink called a 'Suicide Bomber' has apologised after being accused of "insensitivity."

The advert in the window of The Lounge in Wind Street advertises the drink with a mock image of a person wearing an explosive-packed vest.

The director of the Swansea Bay Race Equality Council said it went beyond a poor joke and wants it taken down.

The bar said they did not mean to cause any offence or to upset anyone. The cocktail is part of a promotion for bomb-themed drinks, alongside 'Skittle Bomb', 'Cherry Bomb' and 'Melon Bomb'.

There have always been cocktails with names rather close to the edge. Try here for some of the obvious ones and some you might not have heard of. But no-one tries to ban them. Actually they probably do, but nobody listens.

Taha Idris, director of Swansea Bay Race Equality Council, said: "I just can't believe that anyone could be so insensitive with all that is going on in the world.

So the approach of the Swansea Bay Race Equality Council is "stick your fingers in your ears and don't mention terrorism ..... it'll all go away". And when did Islam become a "race" again, please? Must have missed that memo.

Read more...

The Twelve Days Of Winter

Ahh, "winter songs"...perfect to get us in an ethically-cleansed politically correct holiday mood.

Read more...

Torture Is Illegal

In an ideal world, every person who buys the Independent would be crucified either side of the M4, as far as Swindon. For surely no sane, normal person could possibly buy a newspaper which advertises as an auction item a day in a studio with Richard Bacon - a man who has the charm of Fernando Alonso, the humility of Barack Obama and the personality of smallpox.

For out-of-town readers of this blog who might not have heard of the man, try this (disturbingly obsessive) sweary Richard Bacon hate site for a primer.

The Independent; a newspaper for the type of person who would want to meet Richard Bacon. No wonder their sales are so poor.

Read more...

Monumentally Screwed

Literally 'monumentally'....because the Global Warmist Cult is now preaching the Doom of Statues.

This image comes from last weeks Warmist conference in Cancun, where they ironically suffered the coldest local weather in the last 100 years. Take a look at the drowning statue in the middle. And then consider...

Now that'd need a hell of a lot of flooding.

For some great snowstorm weather footage from Minneapolis, Christopher has some spectacular video.

UPDATE: As for the fate of the Eiffel Tower, this is more likely than flooding. Pages of fun Ice-Age Photoshopping from FreakingNews.

Read more...

Sinai Shark Attacks Could Be Israeli Plot

TheEye wasn't going to blog about this shark attack conspiracy theory story, mainly because it is a few days old and is completely stupid.

A possible connection between Israel and the shark attack that left a 70-year-old German woman dead in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday is not unfounded, according to South Sinai Governor Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, quoted by Reuters on Monday.

Some have suggested that the shark attack could have been part of a secret plan by Mossad to harm Egyptian tourism.

"What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm," Shousha was quoted as saying by state news site egynews.net, according to Reuters.

So why blog on it now? Wanting to pass on this superb bit of artwork; that's why!

Read more...

Save The Manatees, Put The Heating On

As collectivists and hand-wringers brave the 100-year record cold temperatures in Cancun to push the shopworn global warming hoax there is news from the Orlando Sentinel via Doug Powers:

Cold kills record number of manatees in 2010

Florida’s record number of manatee deaths in 2010 — 699 — were largely blamed on the severe cold last winter. And that count could rise with more cold temperatures expected next week…

…Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said Friday that 2010 saw an unprecedented die-off for the endangered mammals…

…Last winter’s freezing temperatures gave many manatees an acute cold shock, like severe hypothermia, that killed them faster than in previous winters [and] the cold weather spread as far south as the Everglades and Florida Keys, areas where manatees usually don’t see many cold-related deaths.

So turn up the heating. By a 4x4 and leave all the lights on.

There's a manatee depending on you.

Read more...

Question Time LiveBlog 9th December 2010

Question Time tonight comes from London. On the panel we have Liam Fox MP, Norman Lamb MP, Sadiq Khan MP, Aaron Porter and Janet Daley.

For those playing the Buzzword Bingo we'll be using the Broken Promises Rules. You should play your Clegg joker early as riot police, any excuse to miss lectures,  anarchy, fire extinguisher, and we're all in it together are all in play. References to Aaron Porter's emails suggesting cutting grants and loans aren't on the cards tonight, nor Labour's promise to implement the Browne Report because the BBC have airbrushed all of that from history. Usual points for spotting a Thatcher, but points this week also for references to Gordoom's new book and any direct quotes from Wikileaks (only if made in the context of undermining somebody who is right-of-centre).

The LiveBlog will also cover the insane This Week, with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo, a random lefty politician and a collection of X-Factor rejects.

TheEye, David Mosque and Ollie Cromwell from the Red Rag blog will be hitting demonstrators with batons here from 10:30pm.

Read more...

"Say Goodbye To Broken Promises"

With the important vote on tuition fees now here it's funny, in a slow motion car-crash sort of way, to re-watch this Liberal Democrat party political broadcast from the last General Election. Enduring the whole thing isn't important; just the first 10 seconds will make the point.

For a two-faced minor party never expecting or even really wanting power - just the freedom to face all ways and only pick the populist causes - creating a hostage to fortune like this seemed unimportant at the time.

“Broken promises. There have been too many in the last few years, too many in the last 30 years. In fact our nation has been littered with them. A trail of broken promises.”

It's come back to bite them in the arse now. In no uncertain terms.

UPDATE: As 'Banned' noted in the comments, the first copy of this broadcast has now been pulled from YouTube. This (inferior quality) copy was then tracked down and uploaded to EyeTube for safekeeping. If anyone has the original high qulaity version, please email TheEye.

Read more...

On The Piste

If you're looking for winter sports with a useful twist, how about a weekend of pub table sledging starting tomorrow in Kuhtai, Austria?

To enter all you need is an upturned table and a two man crew. From the ever odd Austrian Times:

The event was dreamed up when student boozers found themselves trapped in a mountain hut and flipped over a table as a makeshift sledge to get to the bottom.

Now scores of teams made up of athletes and local celebs have lined up to compete in the three day event, which starts on Friday (Dec 10).

"The great advantage we have over other sledgers is that when we finish the race we can turn over our equipment and have a great party," said one competitor.

Read more...

Brown: I Am Not A Finance Expert...

“I am neither a finance expert nor a trained economist but fear of making technical mistakes (of which, I am sure, this book is full) should not silence us altogether when the task before us is so urgent.”

Hang on. Isn’t this the chap who ran the UK economy for a decade? Who treated the Treasury’s expert officials with open contempt and relied instead on a handful of cronies? Who proclaimed the end of boom and bust, before presiding over the biggest bust since the 1930s? And all the while he was an amateur. I’ll be jiggered. It’s rather nice to have this admission of his fallibility – it would have been even nicer to have had it before the roof fell in on the British economy.

David Hughes in the Telegraph

Such is the excitement today on the publication day of Beyond the Crash it is currently 727nd on the Amazon bestsellers list - struggling just ahead of (for example) Vintage Handbags by Marnie Fogg and Behavior of Pipe Piles in Sand: Plugging & Pore-Water Pressure Generation During Installation and Loading by Magued Iskander.

By contrast Tony Blair’s A Journey, published on September 1, this morning is a mere 694 places ahead of him at No 33.

Read more...

Happy 90th Dave Brubeck

Yesterday was the 90th birthday of legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.

Born in Concord, California and son of a cattle farmer, he served in in George Patton's Third Army and created one of the U.S. armed forces' first racially integrated bands, "The Wolfpack". With one of that band, Paul Desmond, he founded the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and they quickly established themselves at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco.

The album Time Out - including "Take Five", "Blue Rondo à la Turk", and "Three To Get Ready" came in 1959.

After health problems earlier this year he had a pacemaker fitted in October of this year and amazingly doctors cleared him in November to resume his concert touring...which he did.

Still going strong at 90 - happy birthday Dave Brukeck.

Read more...

Ark Royal Enters Pompey For The Last Time

A very poignant picture from the Navy News. After 50,762 hours at sea and 621,551 miles sailed the massive decommissioning pennant stretched from the main mast, along the flight deck and into the Solent.

Doesn't it remind you of Turner's Fighting Temeraire being towed away to be broken up?

Here's the footage, murky through the pea-souper and flecked with snow, from ITN:



Ring off main engines.

Read more...

Geordies Reminded To Wear Coats

Pure genius from Northumbria Police:

Police have issued a reminder to Geordies to wear their coats this weekend.

Drinkers in Newcastle are famed for going out without a top layer, and pictures of revellers enjoying a night on the toon in just their party dresses featured in the national press this week.

There are fears that people wrongly-dressed could become dangerously ill if they have to wait for a taxi after a night out. Temporary Superintendent Andrea Henderson said: "People on nights out over the weekend should be aware of the very cold conditions and dress appropriately - bearing in mind that they may have longer to wait at taxi ranks and bus stops.

But for a marvellous kicker and direct from the Who's Paying For This Dept we learn that:

Last year researchers at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle said they were creating an experiment to see if women in the North had thicker skin than women down South, and could withstand the cold better.

A cynic would propose a direct correlation between skimpy Friday clubbing gear and the slapper potential occurring at the time. Another night passes here with the good burghers of Gibraltar huddling over our stoves, so the natural scientific deduction is that we must be skinless or dangerously transparent.

Read more...

Retro Warmism

When our children look back on the global warming hoax, they'll have a laugh at the absurdly overblown prophecies of doom and the willful idiocy of the fools of our generation who believed them....and the gullibility of their own for swallowing their school based eco-brainwashing.

Slowly but surely more people are taking the Red Pill.

But until then, we already get a chance to look back and laugh at the 70s, when the same sort of people were telling us that only submission to Big Government could save us from an onrushing ice age.

And even then they were hedging their bets, the way they do now by saying "climate change" instead of global warming. For example:

"At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science… the consensus seemed to be that, rather than experience either a warming trend or a cooling trend, we shall have both. Although not at the same time, fortunately."

Incredibly, our generation of politicians are still peddling the same faded tricks. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Read more...

World Cup: Will Qatar Even Exist By 2022?

Al-Qaeda has apparently welcomed the decision this week by FIFA to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

EXTREMISTS welcomed FIFA’s decision to have Qatar host the 2022 World Cup, predicting Al-Qaeda will establish an “Islamic State” in the Gulf region in the coming years, monitors said.

“You fools, know that Al-Qaeda is on the threshold of establishing the shariah (Islamic law) of Allah the Almighty,” a user who went by the name Hafeed al-Hussein posted on the Shumukh al-Islam online forum, according to the US-based SITE Intelligence Group.

“And who knows, Allah may empower al-Qaeda so that it takes control of matters after a year or two, or five years at most.

“In 2022, there is no country with the name Qatar, and there is no province called Kuwait and there is no Saudi (Arabia). Instead, there is an emirate called the Islamic State,” the post added.

No chance of that happening, no? Well who'd have placed a multi-billion pound bet 12 years before the Berlin Wall came down?

Read more...

Airport Security

Via Atlas Shrugged, does this make you feel safer when travelling by 'plane? Behold the latest conscript in the Islamic army...an 80 year old wheelchair-bound Terror Nun.

El Al-type profiling, anyone? Please?

Read more...

Question Time LiveBlog 2nd December 2010

Question Time tonight comes from Coventry, and on the panel tonight we have Danny "Ginger Rodent" Alexander, Nadine Dorries, Ken Livingstone, Sir Christopher Meyer and John Sergeant.

For those playing the Buzzword Bingo we'll be using the Football's Not Comin' 'Ome Rules, meaning that Beckam makes an unexpected entry on tonight's cards, and extra points for attempts to connect the loss to Thatcher, cuts, or tuition fees. This week we're also awarding bonus points for any mention of the weather, especially references to global warming, we're all going to fry and save the polar bears. It'd be nice if it snowed the same time each year, just to prepare the grit lorries, and any panelist linking the World Cup and Global Warming is an instant win.

The LiveBlog will also cover the awful This Week with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and a smorgasbord of mediocrity padded with third-rate childish graphics. Marvellous.

Your dynamic Moderation team of TheEye and David Mosque will be kicking a football about around here from 10:30pm.

Read more...

Leslie Nielsen

Most people now know of the sad loss of Leslie Nielsen on Sunday. Pneumonia, in the end, rather than the much more likely banana peel, wheelchair, and eight flights of stairs.

He was famous for roles in dozens of films and tv shows including The Naked Gun and Police Squad; and if there's any justice in the world the hearse will have flashing lights on top and crash into some bins. As a sci-fi fan TheEye also fondly remembers him as the starship captain in The Forbidden Planet.

So why the belated mention? Well, because TheEye has just seen this clever photoshop of Nielsen with the caption No! My Name is Martin! Steve Martin! and laughed.

RIP Leslie Nielsen. The world is a less funny place now.

Dutch Gunderson: Who are you and how did you get in here?
Frank Drebin: I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.

Read more...

Joining Islam4UK

Surely this YahooAnswers entry has to be a troll? In case it isn't why not head over in the 4 days left on this question and help the lad out with a helpful suggestion or two?

TheEye's favourite suggestion so far is "Your best bet is to Google "Lemon Party" as this may be the new name of the organisation."

If you don't know what Lemon Party is, then....ummmm....don't try it.

Read more...