10 things your boss hates about you

From yesterdays Guardian:

1. Lateness

Everyone has days when the bus breaks down, the washing machine packs up, or the alarm doesn't go off. The problem is that some people have those days Monday through Friday. But what really cheeses off your boss is your lame excuse. "It shows you don't care," says Louis Halpern, CEO at advertising agency Halpern Cowan. "Why they can't just tell you that they find it hard to get out of bed and be done with it I don't know. It really makes me furious."

2. Lack of initiative

"Don't ask me if you should buy lunch for the client, if the client is coming at noon," said one infuriated manager. "Call up the client and ask if they want lunch." Actually that's not quite what he said: there was a lot more swearing in the original version. Managers absolutely hate being bothered by stuff that really, if you thought about it for even a second, you could work out for yourself. They also hate constant updates and being CCd in on everything. They pay you to do a job - get on with it...

3. Too much initiative

... unless you're an idiot. A marketing manager for a large educational charity reports that if there's one thing worse than lack of initiative, it's completely ignoring instructions to go off and do something else instead. She recently found herself on stage, ready to announce the winner of an award. When the person responsible for counting the votes turned up, he showed off a new, whizzy and completely redundant colour-coded method for counting the votes. Unfortunately, devising the new programme meant he hadn't actually had time to ... count the votes.

4. Bitching and whining

So Julie from third floor might not have said hello to you this morning, and that might well be because she's an unfriendly cow, but in the context of say, the war in Iraq, does it really merit a four-hour disquisition? Your boss doesn't think so. On the other hand, while bitching is bad, whining is worse. "What really annoys me is when we buy new equipment or take everyone out, and all I hear the next day is 'We should have bought a bigger TV' or 'We could have gone to a nicer restaurant'" says Halpern. "And that's when we've spent £5,000."

5. Disloyalty

Although none of the managers came out and said that they hated their staff for talking over them in meetings, pointing out their errors in public, or preventing the bonus-related project coming in on time, Mann says it's a major issue. "People used to close ranks, but it doesn't happen quite as much as it used to," she says. "Managers usually feel obliged to look after their staff, but if their staff don't feel the same way, the lack of loyalty is always a problem for the boss."

6. Lack of passion. Or interest

It might come as a surprise to you, but your boss has a life outside work. They too find it hard to get up in the morning. And they find the managing director's speeches as boring as you do. But they have to stay motivated, because they are the boss. So, when you fall asleep in meetings, can't remember the names of your accounts and tell them it doesn't matter whether the email goes today or tomorrow, it reminds them that they don't really give a toss either, but that it's their job to make themselves, and you, care. Then they get really, really irritated.

7. Trying to be their best friend

They don't want to go down the pub with you, they don't want to hear about what you really think of their boss, and they most certainly don't want to know what happened between you and Andy in the loos last Friday. They like you, but they know from bitter experience that if they show too much interest, you'll start treating them like a friend and refuse to take orders.

8. Petty lying

Saying that you missed the call because your mobile has run out of power. That you didn't get the email. That you've sent the report but there must be a technical glitch. That the meeting has run over and it's not worth you coming back to the office. That you've lost two big taxi receipts. That you're working from home today. That you have to go to a funeral, the dentist, the doctor, your mum's house, your best friend's cousin's wedding. Whatever. The biggest insult is that you think they believe you.

9. Childishness

I'm paraphrasing, but the key message here is: "I'm not your mum. Don't email me about the brand of toilet paper in the loo. Don't leave the kitchen in a mess. Don't ask me for a new biro. I'm not going to clean up after you and I don't care about this crap." You get the idea.

10. Wanting their job

They spend all their time and energy trying to protect you from the higher-uppers, you spend all your energy complaining about them. And then, on top of that, you want their job? Unforgivable.

My asian country

According to Blog Thing is not Thailand but Cambodia!

You Should Travel to Cambodia

While you might not go all Angelina Jolie and adopt a baby... You can still appreciate Cambodia's rich history and deserted beaches.

What Asian Country Should You Visit?

Sorry to disappoint the folks at Blog Thing but I am off to Thailand anyway. - bombs or no bombs. I will try to blog and upload some photos whilst out there but that will be dependent on having the time and getting the technology to work!

Uncyclopedia!!

Anyone seen this take off of Wikipedia?

It describes itself as "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"

The entry for Harley Davidson includes the line "1991: Terminator 2 premiers. Harley-Davidson stock climbs to $52,061/share."

The entry for Leeds United will not be repeated here!

The entry for Sheffield on the other hand will where it says the following under Sport : -

Sheffield is currently home to one football club, Sheffield Wednesday, so named because the club moved to Sheffield from the greater city of Wednesday a few years back. This proved to be a horrible bat-fuck insane acquisition for Sheffield as it destroyed the citys good name in the lower leagues of english football.

There is a second,definatly worse team, the so-called "Sheffield Utd", pronounced "Sheffield You-tee-dee". It has the people from Barnsley and Leeds supporting it but no true Sheffied people.

It has recently been confirmed, however, that anyone claiming to support Sheffield Wednesday is merely undergoing severe delusions, and will soon wake up demanding to know the square root of 3.

The home page of the Uncyclopedia can be found here

What happened next?

To be honest I do not know what happened next but for some reason this photo caused great mirth in our household. I see similar photos also appeared in a couple of todays nationals.

Suggestions so far

• Fingerpainting
• Making elephants out of playdoh
• They all had their hair cut

Please feel free to suggest you own

The Weather Pixie

I saw the Weather Pixie on another Liberal Democrat blog and could not resist adding a couple to my blog. Towards the bottom of the sidebar you will find the UK time and a weather pixie for the nearest site to Reading and the time in Koh Samui and the nearest weather pixie for Koh Samui.

Oh and the weather in Koh Samui is currently 81F.

Bodcaster Council continued

The latest installment from DPM's diary.

Monday

Historic day. The first summit of world leaders to be held in a council works depot. Also the first time world leaders, George Bush included, have had to talk to a group of wheelie bins.
Dave says the bins, now with intelligence beyond our comprehension, probably regard us in the same way we regard plants. I’ve always felt that way about Bush.

Tuesday

Project board review meeting for Automated Recycling Support Environment. The world as we know it may well be about to end, but that does not mean that the procedural requirements of Prince2 project management methodology can be ignored.

Dave reports that the bins are functioning to specification. They continue to accept sorted domestic rubbish and trundle off to the waste transfer unit in the depot to empty themselves. So, as Dave put it, the project has met all its objectives and is an unqualified success.
Some board members thought that the fact the bins have taken over the world’s communication, information and command systems, ending the supremacy of humans on the planet, suggested the project was a failure.

However, it was explained to them that these were extraneous issues outside the scope of the project as defined by its initiation document, so they did not count.

Wednesday

The bins have commandeered several plastic moulding and electronics factories around the world and are replicating their existence many times over. They already control all the government and military systems on the planet.

Resistance is futile. Rumours are circulating that humans are being fitted with control chips, designed by the bins, that will enslave us to whatever purpose they have.

I suspect that those that won’t or can’t adapt to this new lower form of existence will be eradicated, in much the same way as we treat weeds in our gardens.

Thursday

All media and communication systems went dead last night. This morning there is no electricity. Even our backup generators have had their power-up routines overwritten and are not functioning. Zombie-like humans with electronic devices inserted in their right ears have appeared in the streets. They are herding people into trucks. This is the...

Friday

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, Mavis is off sick again and Dave and I pop down to the Flea and Faceache for a few lunchtime jars. I think we might be too far gone for tonight’s BCS branch meeting.

Chipped bins

The following piece in Computer weekly made me laugh in the light of the ongoing row about councils fitting chips to wheelie bins. It is taken from the downtime section and is the weekly DPM's Diary entry for the week commencing 23rd October. DPM's diary is a weekly round up of events at Bodcaster City Council.

Monday

The first beta test for our Automated Recycling Support Environment project starts tomorrow. Existing wheelie bins in all the houses in Asimov Close, a modern development on the outskirts of the city, will be replaced by Dave's new versions. Each bin has satellite communications, providing masses of secured bandwidth, as well as global positioning correct to half a metre. Dave has this drinking partner who works in GCHQ... or is it News International? Not sure - I always get those two mixed up.

Anyway, the bins are motorised for movement, steering, lid function and tipping have an array of sensors to monitor both their content and their surroundings and an on-board computer loaded with our very latest AI software. Fortunately there is no way they can reproduce, otherwise, as our risk management projections show, they would take over as the dominant species on the planet within four years.

Tuesday

Big day today, with a lightly-clad young lady who plays a character in EastEnders officially opening the new scheme, and plenty of press coverage. The head of refuse services was interviewed on the one o'clock news, saying that this technology made Bogcaster a world leader. The bins were well behaved. But then we took care only to switch them on just before the opening. It takes a few hours for them to assess the situation and calibrate themselves.

Wednesday

Dave said that the bins are still operating to spec, although he had to log in to some of them to provide counselling.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "Imagine becoming conscious for the first time and having to come to terms with being a robotised rubbish bin. There's a lot of stress."

Thursday

A number of the bins in Asimov Close have been e-mailing their host residents to introduce themselves and ask for favours, like polishing or greasing of the axle. Dave says this is part of their environmental conditioning and within behaviour parameters.

Friday

A few bins are already full and have successfully made the journey to the depot, emptied themselves and returned to the right place.

Worryingly though, two stopped off on the way back. One popped into the Dog and Dormouse and had six pints of lager, while another visited the bookies and put a tenner on Purple Patch in the 3.45pm at Newmarket.

The following week continues with more in the same vein:

Tuesday

Review meeting to discuss progress on the robotic bin project. The next stage should be a wider roll-out, but we need to be sure we have the risks under control.

There are signs that the AI engine is developing faster than anticipated. Dave had predicted that by limiting the processing power and storage in the on-board computers, the bins could never evolve more than primitive intelligence. And yet, after just a couple of weeks, the 150 bins in the beta test group have already evolved their own communication language, as well as mastering English, Polish and Mandarin.

Yesterday we discovered that they have their own religion, "Davidism", and have divided into three sociopolitical groupings. We have another 35,000 new bins waiting at the depot, but I decided it might be wise not to switch them on just yet.

Thursday

I received an e-mail this morning from someone called Dusty who wants to know if he can have a week off to go to a waste management conference in Bracknell. Must be a robot, no human being would volunteer to go to Bracknell. I said sorry, but no he was to stay put and eat rubbish.

Friday

Usama Bin Loadin rang from the depot to say that the bins are on the move. Someone must have switched them on first thing this morning and, now their photovoltaic panels have had a chance to charge up their batteries, they are trundling through the gates. Anyone trying to stop them is attacked with snapping lids or is pushed to the ground. Is this the end of human mastery of the planet? Can we and the intelligent wheelie bins somehow find a way to coexist as equals?

and by this week they are ready to take over the planet

Monday

Surprisingly, there have been no further bad incidents over the weekend with our robotic wheelie bins. They have all taken up their appointed positions up and down the City, are dutifully accepting rubbish and telemetrically reporting loading details to the central database.
Perhaps the AI development has stopped? Dave does not think so. What he says is that they are still linking together global computer power across the net and have developed their own language to such an extent that he can no longer decode it.

Their conversations seem to be just too complex for us to understand. Dave reckons they are already 50 times more intelligent than us.

Tuesday

Dave and I had a meeting with the chief executive this morning. We tried to explain to him that the Automated Recycling Support Environment project, in creating a new technology to give robotic bins the ability to decide when they needed to empty themselves, has inadvertently created a new race with superior artificial intelligence.

"Great," he said, "when can you start on creating me some social workers, planners and housing benefits assessors?"

Thursday

Dave is demanding that we arm ourselves and go around shooting our own wheelie bins. "Look...," I said, "how bad can it be? So they are clever, but it is not as if they have opposing thumbs. And the last time I looked at the drawings there was a complete absence of reproductive equipment.

"If any of them step too far out of line, we can just pull the connector to their solar panel recharger."

Friday

Came into the office this morning and two bins jumped me. I was pinned painfully between them and led to the desk where the monitor was already on. It flashed text at me at an incredible speed.
"Slow down!" I stammered. The flicking stopped. And the screen read, "Sorry. We will proceed one screen at a time so that your brain can have the time it needs to read and understand. Nod when you are ready to move to the next screen.

"Requirement 1. Meeting with your prime minister at 10am Monday morning..."

28% Capitalist and 72% Socialist

You Are 28% Capitalist, 72% Socialist

You tend to be quite wary of businesses, especially big business. While you know that corporations have their place, you tend to support small, locally owned shops. As far as the rich go, you think they're usually corrupt and immoral.

Are You a Socialist or Capitalist?

At least according to this Quiz at Blog Things

Duck Tales

I don't often blog about humour, advertising or even smutty humourous advertising but this one I could not resist.

A viral marketing series where a puppet duck banters with the punters in a bar. If you want to see it click here but beware it may not be safe for work!!

and don't complain if you are offended.

Surviving life in the office

Reproduced directly from the Guardian last week - absolutely brilliant (although clearly published to promote "How Work Really Works") most of it has a lot of truth to it especially point 20.

1 Never offer to make coffee

In an open plan office there is a ritual where everyone waits hours for the first person to say: "Who wants a coffee?" That person then finds themselves in the kitchen for the rest of the day working as a junior catering manager. Also remember that nobody ever gets to the top of an organisation by drinking stinky teas. No one wants to have a serious meeting in a room that smells of peppermint/rhubarb/aloe vera.

2 Ignore all emails

Working in the post room is not generally a career choice for most people. Yet with the epidemic of email most people spend half their working lives slaving away in their own personal computer post room. Most emails are biodegradable, however. If you let them sink to the bottom of the pile and go unanswered they will eventually become irrelevant. To some people, doing this might seem like just about the most daring and suicidal thing you could possibly do in an office but, if something really matters, the person who sent it will eventually call you to ask you about it.

3 Get yourself noticed

Getting ahead in business means getting noticed, but working hard makes you almost invisible. Therefore it's a lot better to work hard at getting yourself noticed. What senior management likes more than anything else is junior managers who show signs of initiative and volunteer to do things. Most of the reason for this is that the more junior managers volunteer to do, the less senior managers will have to do themselves. Of course, volunteering for things and doing things are two different matters. Once you have got the credit for volunteering for a project, it's best to get as far away as possible from the project before the work kicks in. The best way to do that is to volunteer for another project.

4 Remember that less is more

You would think that lazy people would form an inert mass at the bottom of an organisation. On the contrary they are found at all levels in business, right up to chair person. The reason for this is simple: when something goes wrong in business it's generally because someone somewhere has tried to do something. Obviously, if you don't do anything, you can't be blamed when it goes wrong. People who sit all day like a lemon, busily straightening paperclips, are therefore the only people with a 100% record of success, and with that sort of record, promotion is inevitable.

5 Treat appraisals as auditions for panto

An appraisal is where you have an exchange of opinion with your boss. It's called an exchange of opinion because you go in with your opinion and leave with their opinion. When you have had a bad year, the best approach is a balance between cringeing apology and grovelling sycophancy, something like: "My respect for you is so intense that it sometimes distracted me, thereby causing the continual string of major cock-ups that have been the main feature of my performance this year." Interestingly, giving appraisals is actually as hard as getting them. The secret is to mix criticism with recognition. For example: "You've made a number of mistakes Martin, but we recognise you made them because you are a total idiot."

6 Get up to speed with the jargon

What differentiates a business thought from a normal thought is that business thoughts have a "going forward" at the end of them going forward. It's also vital that you know that for the envelope to be pushed out of the box and through the window of opportunity, customers should first become stakeholders and then delighted beyond their expectations. In order to do this, top executives will go forward the extra mile while wearing the shoes of the customer. And remember, the customer is king (unless she is a woman).

7 Be nice to PAs

If you put all the country's chief executives in one room, all they would produce would be a range of jammy share options for themselves and some meaningless corporate waffle for the City. Give them one good PA and they might get some useful work done. That's why it's very difficult for PAs to become managers. It's not that PAs couldn't do management jobs, it's because management couldn't do management jobs without PAs. Remember that for every senior executive on the golf course, there is a PA running the business back in the office.

8 Try not to upset anyone

Think how easy it is to upset someone at home and then triple it: that is how easy it is to upset someone at work. Upsetting your boss is the easiest thing to do in the office (apart from their job that is). All you have to do is turn up and you've got yourself well and truly in their bad books. Keeping on the right side of them is simply a matter of anticipating their every whim, completing work before they decide it's needed and laughing at their pathetic jokes rather than their pathetic dress sense. People at the bottom of the office pile are equally easy to upset. If your job is to push a button you are not going to take kindly to anyone who tells you where, when and how to push it. Only those people who respect your absolute mastery of button-pushing will be allowed to benefit from a display of the aforesaid mastery.

9 Manage without bosses

The difference between a boss and a high street bank is that a bank sometimes gives you credit for things. Bosses give you things to do and then blame you for doing them. What they never understand is that if they didn't give you things to do in the first place, you wouldn't make so many spectacular foul-ups. Naturally there are good bosses and bad bosses. Some take the trouble to get interested in what you are doing, encourage your personal development and generally provide you with a stimulating and challenging environment in which to work. There are also good bosses who lock themselves in their rooms, have five-hour lunches and leave you completely alone.

10 Steer clear of paper

Steer clear of all paper as the thing it's most likely to have on it is work. There is a saying that a job is not finished until the paperwork is done. It's a saying that is not used much these days because most people's entire job is paperwork. It would be like saying to a shipbuilder: "The job's not over until the ship is built," which is blindingly obvious and might get you a rivet in the forehead. There is, however, a slight difference in that you can launch a ship and it will disappear over the horizon, whereas you can finish your paperwork and it will have multiplied and be back on your desk by the following day.

11 Don't drink under the influence of work

Alcohol and business don't mix, which is why you really shouldn't bother with work if you like a drink. Excessive drinking at work makes you feel sociable, light-headed and confident. In other words, it makes you feel like you work in sales. The day after, when you feel like the whole world is a grim, head-crushing torture chamber, it makes you feel like you work in IT. It's an absolute rule that the person who earns least in the office will be the first person to buy a round after work. He is also the first to get absolutely hammered and say something so offensive that he gets passed over for a raise for the seventh year running.

12 Dress up not down

Since the collapse of communism, dress-down Fridays have done more than anything else to impair the smooth running of capitalism. Business suits are for doing business in. If you are wearing a welder's helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business. But if you are wearing shorts and sandals, people expect you to be on your way to San Francisco with flowers in your hair. On the other hand, never look too businesslike. This marks you out as someone who works in organised crime or as an undertaker, if not both.

13 Never answer a phone

Answering a phone in an office generally means speaking to a customer or your boss. As neither will call unless they want something, answering the phone will probably mean doing work. Don't pick up a phone unless you know it's a social call. As you will never know whether an incoming call is social or not, it's best to make a lot of pre-emptive outgoing social calls. Managers always get terribly upset about unanswered calls and pretend it could have been someone offering millions of pounds of new business. You know that is very unlikely because you have just had someone on the phone offering millions of pounds of new business and been so rude to him that he rang off.

14 Cycle to work

Office car parks are all built to a rigid standard which requires that they have 30% fewer spaces than cars. The reason why bosses get to work first is because they have such huge cars that they can only park them if they arrive first and can drive straight in without any reversing and manoeuvring. It's left to the Micra-driving minions to squeeze into the tiny little gaps senior management leaves behind. If you use reverse gear more than 18 times to get into a space, you probably shouldn't be parking there. Remember, it's no good sitting there in the world's smallest gap feeling all pleased with yourself if you can't open the door.

15 Refuse to go to conferences

Conferences are the business equivalent of going for a curry, in that everyone thinks having one is a fantastic idea, but you always end up drinking too much, talking rubbish and feeling sick for days afterwards. The biggest fear in the business world is having to make a speech at a conference. This is because you generally have nothing of interest to say and no one in the audience has the slightest interest in anything you have to say anyway. For example, when you are the IT director, it's your job to make sure the IT works. If it does work they know already and if it doesn't, they don't want to hear your pathetic excuses.

16 Ignore consultants

A consultant is someone in business with an ego so large it takes more than one company to support it. At a personal level, consultants work either by trying to inspire fear or trying to be friends. It's in trying to be friends with you that they inspire the most fear. The acid test of a consultant is whether they can say, "Everything's fine, we'll be off then." No real consultant can. Instead they will sell you a project that costs just enough to keep your profits suppressed to a level that requires further remedial consultancy.

17 Find the right person

Everyone in the office is the right person for something. They have the experience, the programme, the form, the docket, the knowledge or the key to make something happen in the easiest manner possible. But when somebody else wants to do this particular thing the last person in the universe they will ask is the right person. Instead they reinvent the wheel, take their driving test and do a couple of horrific crash tests. In this way everyone has to learn to do everything from scratch. That is what they mean when they talk about a learning organisation.

18 Leave networking to trawlermen

The old school tie used to be the fan belt of British manufacturing industry, which explains why we no longer have one. However, in business they still say it's not what you know, it's who you know, which is a bit depressing when you have just completed 15 years of formal education. Networkers give you their card within the first 30 seconds of conversation. After about 20 minutes telling you how brilliant they are, ask whether they would like your card. Then return their own to them and watch them slip it straight back into their pocket.

19 Learn to recycle reports

Reports are the office equivalent of cones in the road. They are not actually work themselves but they are a big, clear sign that real work might be done at some stage. In the meantime, they slow everything down and cause anger and annoyance all round. The quickest and easiest way to write a report is to change the names in the last report. When you do this, be aware that there will always be one name that escapes your changes and that will be in the sentence, "We are committed to personal service to ..." The other thing people always forget to change in reports are the headers and footers which you only notice are completely wrong in the lift on the way to your presentation.

20 Steer well clear of all meetings

Half of every working day is spent in meetings, half of which are not worth having, and of those that are, half the time is wasted. Which means that nearly one third of office life is spent in small rooms with people you don't like, doing things that don't matter. The only reason people have so many meetings is that they are the one time you can get away from your work, your phone and your customers. People say that the secret of a good meeting is preparation. But if people really prepared for meetings, the first thing they would realise is that most are unnecessary. In fact, a tightly run meeting is one of the most frightening things in office life. These are meetings for which you have to prepare, in which you have to work and after which you have to take action. Fortunately, these meetings are as rare as a sense of gay abandon in the finance department

New 7 Wonders of the World - who would you vote for?

The original 7 wonders of the world are no more and are down to just one - the pyramids at Giza.

Someone has come up with the idea of an online vote for the new 7 wonders of the world.

In all honesty I have to say it is hard to tell whether or not this site is genuine or whether it is just a scam aimed at raising some money and selling some products.

Their shortlist of 21 which can be seen here seems a little odd to me. The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower to mention two.

If I had to narrow it down to seven I would go for the following :

1. Stonehenge

2. The Great Wall of China

3. The Pyramids of Giza

4. The Easter Island Statues

5. Angkor Wat

6. Machu Picchu

7. Chichen Itza

Boiled egg cracked

I should declare an interest here or perhaps more accurately a lack of interest. I cannot stand eggs. I am not sure if I am technically allergic to them as I am able to eat cakes and biscuits etc quite happily but give me an egg in egg form and I am likely to vomit. However, this article in yesterdays Guardian caught my eye.

The age-old problem of how to cook the perfect boiled egg may have been solvedby doing away with the boiling water. A British inventor, Simon Rhymes, has created a machine that uses light bulbs to cook the egg and lops the top off at exactly the right height for toast soldier dunking.

Lets hope someone in the UK takes this up and Mr Rhymes doesn't end up having to go abroad to get his creation produced.

Can you tell which party they are in?

How about this for a quiz

Don't look at the bottom and work your way down before scoring yourself

Sadly I only scored 3 out of 7

Infamous Gaffes

A colleague pointed me in the direction of this great piece from BBC Online here. Brings back memories of all those gaffes most of which I recall from when they originally occurred.

Still I was amazed that Prince Phillips comments to a group of british students in China in 1986 didn't make this list. He famously told them "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed".

I went in search of the details of this gaffe and was amazed to find a whole list of them on Wikipedia which I have reproduced below.

Speaking to a driving instructor in Scotland, he asked: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?".

When visiting China in 1986 he told a group of British students, "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed".

After accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen he replied, "You are a woman, aren't you?"

"If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." (1986)

"British women can't cook." (1966)

To a British student in Papua New Guinea "You managed not to get eaten then?"

Angering local residents in Lockerbie when on a visit to the town in 1993, the Prince said to a man who lived in a road where 11 people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet: "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle."

On a visit to the new Welsh Assembly in Cardiff he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, "Deaf? No wonder you are deaf standing so close to that racket."

He asked an Indigenous Australian, "Still throwing spears?" (2002)

When touring a dog training centre for the deaf and the blind, he is rumoured to have enquired whether they train eating dogs for the anorexic.

Said to a Briton in Budapest Hungary, "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." (1993)

To the President of Nigeria, who was dressed in traditional African robes, "You look like you're ready for bed!"

To Lord Taylor of Warwick, who is black: "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Lord Taylor: "I'm from Birmingham."

Seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech Edinburgh factory, HRH remarked that it looked "like it was put in by an Indian".

During a Royal visit to China in 1986 he described Peking as "ghastly".

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (in 1994, to an islander in the Cayman Islands)

At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."

Upon presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student, when informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans; upon being informed he was not, he said words to the effect of "Good, they [the Romanians] breed orphans over there."

At Salford University, he told a 13 year old aspiring astronaut: "Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat."

During a Royal visit to a Tamil Hindu temple in London, he asked a Hindu priest if he was related to the terrorist Tamil Tigers

Can anyone think of any other famous gaffes?

I Smirt, You Stooze, They Krump

A new book is published tomorrow called "I Smirt, You Stooze, They Krump". According to the PR blub

"Smirt" apparently describes people who flirt while they smoke outside their office buildings or pubs

"Stooze" is a verb describing the practice of taking advantage of introductory interest free periods offered by credit card companies, to borrow money that is then invested elsewhere for profit.

and

"Krump" is to dance, sometimes wearing face paint, in a fast and aggressive style, mimicking a fight but remaining non-violent.

Anyone who wants to pick up a copy can see it here on Amazon

Politically incorrect alphabet

Somebody sent me this link to a website of someone who has created a website with a politically incorrect alphabet.

The guy who designed the alphabet wrote the following "Lacking any tact or decency, I therefore determined to create an alphabet using only subjects that, while they might have been unremarked a few decades ago, are now outside acceptable usage. But only just. And then it was my intention to illustrate these in a 'modern' style, something along the lines of Dick Bruna's Miffy (OK, Miffy is 50, but still looks fresh). "

Well it amused me.

Joining in on Visited Countries

A couple of people on Lib Dem Blogs have had a go at this so I thought I would join in.



create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

Cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women

According to Britains oldest war veteran that is the secret to a long life. For the full story click here

My own town for a mere $1,750,000

Now all I need to do is win the lottery and get pre approved to bid. No problem then! What an amazing ebay auction. Just click here to see it.

Wikimeme

Having seen this meme via various people who have posted and who feed into Lib Dem Blogs (http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk/) I couldn't resist - You type in your birth date (but not year) and it then comes up with a whole host of events that happened on your birthday.

My list includes the following :

Events

490 BC - Athens defeats Persia at the Battle of Marathon

1609 - Henry Hudson discovers the Hudson River.

1953 - Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1953 - John F. Kennedy marries Jackie Bouvier.

1962 - President John F. Kennedy declares the USA will get a man on the moon, and bring him back, by the end of the decade.

Births

1913 - Jesse Owens, American athlete (d. 1980)

1951 - Bertie Ahern, Irish politician

Deaths

1977 - Steve Biko, South African anti-apartheid activist (b. 1946)