Loonies

I wrote something yesterday about Madeleine McCann, the child abducted from a Portuguese holiday resort. I decided that I didn't want to post it however. The child's parents must be out of their minds with worry. Nothing I wrote seemed appropriate. I'm seldom moved by stories in the news, but this one is really affecting me.

Instead today, I'm going to write about lunatics:

First on the list is Professor Paul Ekins. Prof Ekins is described on the BBC website as a "leading expert on climate change", and someone who studies "the economics of climate change". The first statement led me to believe he was in some way scientifically qualified, the second made me think he's an idiot. If you can stay awake long enough to read to the end of the report, you will find out that he is in fact an economist, and therefore completely unqualified to make any comment on matters to do with anything other than economics. I'm fed up with economists preaching outside their field. Anyway, the long and the short is, he wants the government to tax plasma TV screens, because it would be good for the environment.

The figures don't make a lot of sense to me. The report suggests that plasma screens are "50% bigger than their cathode-ray tube equivalents". What the bloody hell does that mean? A 20" plasma screen is the same size as a 20" crt screen isn't it? Apparently, "a cathode-ray tube TV costs about £25 per year to run and accounts for 100kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions". Huh? What? Where did you get these figures from? It rather depends upon how much TV you watch, and how your electricity is generated. If you have electricity supplied by a nuclear power station, both tvs will produce zero emissions. Later we learn that, "a plasma TV costs about £100 per year and accounts for 400kg of CO2". The same comment applies, but I'd also like to know if this is an equivalent screen size plasma tv, or one 50% bigger, or some other random size. Oh these people get up my pipe. Go back to counting your beans and get your neatly manicured fingers out of things you don't understand. Lets move on.

Apparently poor old Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney are terribly worried about the copyright expiring on their early recordings because they're down to their last few Rolls Royces and Spanish villas, and they need to make more money. I really can't abide the hyper rich bleating to me about how they deserve more bloody money. Go out there and bloody work for it like the rest of us have to. Honestly, they've been lucky enough to become filthy rich by singing, something the rest of us do in the shower because it's fun. I don't begrudge them their wealth, but I get really p!ssed off when they forget just how lucky they have been. Paul McCartney is a dope smoking layabout who happened to meet John Lennon at school. If he hadn't been blessed with that amazing stroke of luck, he'd be living in a squalid council house like all his contemporaries. Cliff Richard is just a nutter who also happened to be in the right place at the right time and make a few lucky choices.

Stand in any crowded shopping centre and throw a bread roll, and I'd say you have about a 50% chance of hitting someone as talented as either of those two. And come to think of it, a near 100% chance of hitting someone who works about five times as hard to earn a living.

Finally, if we're doing an entry on loonies, it wouldn't be complete without some input from my old friends PETA. This week they are protesting about chef Gordon Ramsay, who cooked horse meat on his TV show, and they dumped a tonne of horse shit outside his restaurant. So that's a bunch more free publicity for him then.

OK, tomorrow I'll tell you about my new glasses.