British Polite-isms

Us British are just too damn polite sometimes and Trinity College London have released new research exploring the role of polite-isms, or indirect expressions used to soften requests in British English.
They found that the average Brit used 14 of these polite-isms a day to avoid confrontation and to be nice and avoid any unnecessary tension although non-English speakers find our strange way of saying something while not actually saying it confusing, overly complicated and don't recognise when to use a polite-ism.
The top five polite-isms used are 'Could I just squeeze past you' rather than 'Could you please move out of my way', 'I’ll let you know' rather than 'No', 'I beg your pardon?' instead of 'I’m fuming', 'I’m a bit busy at the moment'  rather than 'Leave me alone” and 'No rush' when we actually mean 'Hurry Up'.   
Other favourite's are 'No Worry' (I am but will pretend i'm not) , 'With all due respect' (Your wrong) and 'As per my previous email/letter  (As i have already told you) and 'I’ll keep that in mind' (I will forget it 10 seconds after you have gone) and 'A gentle reminder' (You STILL haven't done this??)
It does seem to be a very British trait and I use the 'Gentle Reminder' and No Rush all the time although my version of that is 'When You Get a Minute could you...' which is a lot less confrontational but seems to get across the message that the minute you should get is NOW.
I can see how it would be confusing for non-English speakers but also it shows how us Brits can take them to be rude sometimes, nobody likes a direct No when you ask for a favour or if they would like to do something together, much more polite to at least pretend you would consider it.    
So with all due respect to non English speakers, I hear what you're saying about this being overly complicated and will bear your interesting idea of not using them in mind but if you find this confusing, wait until you hear about Rhyming Slang, that will blow your mind me old China.

Thinking About Tariffs

I am a bit confused over this tariffs thing so let me see if i have this straight.
If i sell something to America for £100 but they put 10% or 20% tariffs on it so it now costs the American consumers £110-£120, the consumers either pay more or stop buying my thing and start buying something cheaper.
To avoid the tariffs i could move my business to America and sell the things again for £100 there but then if i wanted to sell my things to the rest of the World, because of the retaliatory tariffs put on America by everyone else, the consumers there would have to pay £110 - £180.
So the choices then are to move my business to America and sell to Americans but struggle to sell to the rest of the World or stay where i am and sell to the rest of the World but struggle to sell to America.
Why would anyone do that and restrict their goods to one country and limit their options with the other 194 countries in the World?
It's not a great business plan but it must make sense to Donald Trump, a man who literally managed to bankrupt multiple casinos but maybe he is an economic genius after all and is the guy to reshape the American economy. On the other hand he may tank it completely so let’s find out!
Either way, only 45 months of his presidency left to go.

Come Fly With Me (In A Decade Or Two)

When the Hindenburg Airship Hindenburg fell to the ground in a ball of flame in 1937, the idea of Airships was put away but they may be back on the agenda again as a Company LTA Research attempt to revive the whole thing again.
Founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company have spent the past decade testing a prototype Airship and the 124.5 meters (408.4 feet) long has passed every test with flying colours.
Almost half the size of the Hindenburg, the Pathfinder 1 has just completed it's first flight which was the first time a rigid airship of this size had flown since the 1930's and is made from modern, lightweight materials and most importantly, is made from  flame-retardant synthetic material filled with the less flammable Helium rather than Hydrogen but the trade off is that Helium generates less lift and is in short supply which makes it expensive to fill the Airship with.
Nobody knows for sure what caused the Hindenburg to collapse in the fiery inferno it did and suggestions such as sabotage, a build of static, lightening and being covered in flammable paint have been put forward which is why the developers are saying they are being ultra cautious and have a safety first policy with no plans to rush to the next stage.
Obviously with one eye on the changing climate and the disasters that brings, Airships would be immense from an Environmental angle but that may be decades into the future but the first step has to be to convince people that it is safe so years of test flights before anyone even gets close to climbing into one.

Another To Add To The Israeli War Crimes List

 
The Israeli military says its forces opened fire on vehicles moving suspiciously towards soldiers without prior co-ordination and with their lights off and killed nine Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.
The Red Crescent say what they shot at was Ambulances and they killed 15 people, all Paramedics and some at close range shot in the head in execution stye, and the bodies then thrown into a mass grave.
The Israel military dined shooting at Ambulances and launched an investigation into the claims which  found that the vehicles were coming at them with no lights on so that's why they were fired upon.
Video emerges of the incident and the Ambulances can be clearly seen to not only have headlights on but the external flashing red lights also, clearly marking it as an Emergency vehicle.
The IDF has admitted to mistakenly identifying a convoy of aid workers as a threat The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect and they will re-investigate into the original investigation.
Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that: 'This episode raises further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military'.
Just another to add to the growing list of the Israeli genocide going on under our noses, only this time their lies have been exposed, consider the many times a camera wasn't there to record them.

New Atheism

Apparently there is a thing called 'New Atheism' which is a movement which not only dismisses religion, but mocks, criticises and challenges it.
Whether I am a New Atheist or just a run of the mill Atheist I don't really know because I will tolerate it but will challenge it if somebody tries to ram it down my neck or stops me in the street to hand me a leaflet or ask if I pray or if I have accepted Jesus as seems to happen from time to time as i make my way around the Town Centre.
I have yet to see an Atheist stop someone in the street to push their beliefs on them uninvited or knock on someones door to discuss Atheism so i can only assume that the religious have got their rosary beads in a knot because Atheists are not content to just ignore them anymore and are openly challenging them.
I assume this makes me a New Atheist then because i stick to my belief that you can do what you want but if you try to persuade me or stop me or try and force your belief on me i will mock, criticise and challenge you about it.
If you want to ask me why I don't believe in a God then you had better be prepared for me to answer with why do you believe in it?
If you want to point to everything around you as proof of a God made Universe then you had better be prepared for me to point out the mountains of evidence which proves it isn't.  
If you want to push the Bible on me as some sort of manual to live by you had better be prepared for me to point out the abhorrent bits which guides you to kill homosexuals, witches and plenty of other innocent folk.
I am happy to ignore Religious folk, as i have said many times it brings comfort to people and I understand that but if there is a New Atheism that challenges your notions then good, hopefully you will wake up to the fact that its all a load of nonsense if only you stopped to look at it rationally.

Poor Penguins

I will let other blogs with more understanding of what the Tariffs imposed by Donald Trump means although from what I am hearing it is stiffing Americans who will now have to pay more for things while the things they export will be boycotted by everyone else as is already happening but what they hey, that's for them to debate but i was amused to hear that the brains behind Liberation Day sought to impose tariffs on places which not only don't export anything to them but has no humans living there anyway.  
Not sure what the Penguins and Seals of the Australian Island Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic thought of Trump imposing 10% tariffs on them but the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, called them 'a bit strange'.
The orange faced plank also said that Europe doesn't buy American Beef and Chicken which is true because us Europeans don't much like the taste of Chlorine in our Chicken or steroids in our beef so both practices are banned this side of the Ocean.
Interesting that Russia was exempt but Ukraine wasn't but every news outlet is mulling over that so i'm just going to leave them to it and just hope that the Seal and Penguins can find another outlet for their goods...whatever that is.

You Could Be Mine (For £96,546)

How much are you worth? Obviously priceless is the correct answer but in 2013 the Royal Society of Chemistry worked out how much it would cost to build a human from scratch using all the constituent elements and it came out to £96,546.79 for materials alone.
Apparently all the chemicals needed to make a human body could be bought in a hardware store but before you turn up in B&Q with a shopping list and a plan to build your own person, what would you actually need?   
Sugar and spice and everything nice for a girl and frogs and snails and puppy dog tails for a boy you might think if that rhyme is to be believed but the RSC calculations include fifty-nine elements with Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus accounting for 99.1% of what makes us so that would be the best aisles to visit first but what goes into the other 0.9%?
In the shopping trolley would need to go a few atoms of Molybdenum, Vanadium, Manganese, Cesium, Zirconium, Arsenic, Uranium Tin and Copper and twenty atoms of cobalt and thirty of Chromium which means you now have the material for your self made human.   
After taking it home and spreading out the materials on your kitchen side, the problem you got now is how to actually make the human from all those bits because you won't just be chucking it all it a bowl and giving it a good mix and unfortunately you won't find the answer on the Internet and even if you have the telephone number of the cleverest Scientists on the Planet, they won't be much help because nobody yet knows how to make a single living cell from scratch, let alone the 50 trillion human cells needed for an average sized human.
Hopefully you have kept the receipt.

56 Today!

Today is the end of my 55th trip around the Sun and the start of my 56th and the latest meeting of the 01/04 Club which consists of Me, Chris, Phil, Susan, David and Beth meeting up in the same coffee house, sing Happy Birthday to each other over a couple of lattes and a bit of Birthday Cake, shoot the breeze and then go back to our lives and agree to meet up next year.
It's kind of macabre but as i have made it through 55 still alive, I have lived longer than people such as Henry VIII, Tammy Wynette, Francis Drake, Bill Haley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Del Shannon, Johnny Ramone and Steve Strange who all died in their 55th year so now my next goal is to navigate the next 12 months and be able to list Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Beethoven, Sinead O' Connor, Linda McCartney and Rik Mayall who will forever be 56.
If you happen to be in the South Western side of the Country today and pass a cafe this afternoon and you hear the strains of 'Happy Birthday' and see a group of people slurping latte's and laughing raucously, pop over and say hi and if you are also celebrating a birthday today, pull up a chair.

Welcome Sir Killalot

Seems like hardly a day goes by without someone mentioning the words Artificial Intelligence and there was a scientist on the radio this morning claiming  that within our lifetimes we’ll be fitted with brain-enhancing microchips which will 'wake up' with us every morning which puts an image in my head of hearing and seeing the Microsoft Windows start-up screen in your head instead of the alarm clock.
The scientist was full of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and was quite excited about the integration of machines and humans (Cyborgs?) and was quick to dismiss fears that robots will soon be out-thinking humans and experiencing emotions and in no way will our new metal chums be using us as squishy playthings as we will ultimately still be in control of them.
So for him no oppressing us with powerful laser eyes or giant metal claws and I think he may have a point because every computer I have ever owned has either crashed when I have tried to run more than two programs at the same time or stopped to tell me i need to download a driver, the one I downloaded three times already that morning.
Obviously the solution to make sure the Robots don't get too big for their boots and take over is to get the new robots to run on the Windows Operating Systems but then when you think of some of the people currently running the World, being lauded over by Sir Killalot and Wheelosaurus from Robot Wars and their army of USB 2.0 Stormtroopers may not be so bad after all.

Ho Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Arghhhh!

We are off on our first Cruise to the Norwegian Fjords in June and we are hopeful of maybe seeing some dolphins or whales which sometimes come alongside Cruise Ships so I have been informed but what I am not expecting to see is Pirates because it isn't 1680 and because you don't seem to get many splicing the main-brace or whatever they do in the North Sea.  
I imagine the passengers on the Cunard Cruise Ship, Queen Anne, are also hoping not to see any but a warning has gone out to passengers to turn off their cabin lights and close the curtains because of the risk of pirates in the area they are heading, the Sulu-Celebes Sea off the coast of The Philippines.
The problem with calling them Pirates is that for some reason, Pirates conjure up visions of swashbuckling adventure movies even if modern pirates don’t do any of the stuff the old, fictional ones used to do, like burying treasure or making people walk the plank or hobbling around on one leg with a parrot on their shoulder.
Modern pirates are not salty sea-dogs using flintlock pistols and saying things like Shiver Me Timbers, they are hardened terrorists using rocket launchers which isn't  really much fun at all and digging up recent Pirate attacks over the last 30 years, there have been over 13,000 attacks on vessels with the overwhelming majority in South Asia and off the coasts of Africa.
The trip to Norway and back then should be fine and Pirate free and the only ho ho ho and a bottle of rum will be in the bar.