Monday, March 21, 2005

Creeping Rot

As my regular reader (me) may have gathered, I am employed as a sort of intellectual hunter gatherer. Today I came upon an example of Hanlon's Razor (look it up). In the CoSHH (Amendment) Regulations 2004 OES and MEL are replaced by a new occupational exposure limit called... wait for it... the Work Exposure Limit, or WEL. It would appear that because of some sloppy drafting, every formerly innocuous occasion on which an OES is exceeded during workplace monitoring will now have to be reported to the hapless worker or his representative, thus occasioning hordes of walking worried. Were I more convinced of the effectiveness of natural selection on human intelligence I would welcome this, but I fear that the result of this poor piece of legislation will be to criminalise those who sensibly overlook it and to demonise those who do not. Comments on a virtual fag packet please.. Ohhh, I do hate having to grovel.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Pots and Kettles

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1525702,00.html



When Cardinal Bertone opines, of Dan Brown in The DaVinci Code,

"He even perverts the story of the Holy Grail, which most certainly does not refer to the descendants of Mary Magadalene, It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies"

the irony is so delicious.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Finnegan's Wake

Well here we are on Saturday, a fine beer festival in our recent past and Max in her best non-conformist mode. Ptolemy is safely returned, I have a better vehicle (ye gods, it is soooooo beautiful), Dani is lookin her teenage finest and we are so proud of her; hey.... what's going on? Where is the rant? Well I just don't need one tonight. I'm flippin' celebrating. Have you heard of 'peak experiences'? Well I'm not having one. This is a trough experience, but it is a high altitude trough. And at this point I am going to get a bit personal.. Mum, I love you nearly as much as you love me. Eddie, I miss you. Viv, I am sorry we haven't stayed in touch.

OK, enough emoting. I are goin' 2 bed soon. In all likelyhood nobody will ever read this. It is the blogger's dilemma. There is a deserved hierarchy of Blogs, and one wishes to get netwebbed by all one's favourites, but the best one can do is, as Dorothy Parker so delicately put it, spill one's seed. It is so tempting to re-name this Blog Onan. Post a comment if you get the joke.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Skirwith

To plagiarise somebody or other, life is just one damned thing after another. My motor vehicle is expiring, the Woodle dude has gone AWOL and Dani wanted help with her mechanics homework - from me?! But one should be grateful for those wonderful moments that make life worthwhile, like PG challenging himself at Perudo, and Malcolm saying - as we passed Lancaster - "Didn't we go to the Lakes this way?." "Malc, we are going to the lakes." "Oh, I thought Penrith was in Wales."

Sad to say, I never made it to the top of Helvellyn, but I managed to hit at list one peak over 3,000 feet before my agoraphobia - no, dammit, not vertigo - got the better of me. Ah well, back to the grind. A marvellous piece of corporate umska today. E-mail ONE sends us a compulsory Sigmoid Colon powerpoint template in odious EU oronnnnge, which not only tells us what colour scheme to use but also prescribes how to fold toilet paper. E-mail TWO then tells us that the training department has just adopted a new powerpoint format. And guess what? They are quite, quite different.