Shoe Trees

I'm thinking about becoming a pirate...

Avast you scurvy dogs!

Do pirate ships have chemical toilets? I hate chemical toilets.

There is a good piece by Gerald Warner in the Telegraph today. It's about global warming. Even if you're not a hard-nosed sceptic like me you should have a look. Apart from anything else he makes fun of Al Gore, which is always a good starting point as far as I'm concerned.

Interest rates have dropped again to almost nothing. It makes you wonder what the government is going to do when they can't lower rates any further. They were forced to deny they were planning to print more money this morning. It seems to me that making borrowing cheaper is done to encourage spending on credit. That would kick-start the economy of course, but isn't debt what caused the problem in the first place?

Here is the interesting story of the day. A tree located near the A40 road near High Wycombe has for 30 years been regularly decorated with shoes. Yes, mysterious person, or persons unknown have been hanging shoes on this ash tree for three decades and no one knows why. But that isn't what makes this the interesting story of the day. No, the interesting part is that £265,000 from National Lottery funds was allocated to fund an investigation to find out who's doing it and why. Personally I can think of much better ways to spend a quarter of a million pounds of public money, but the really funny thing is that The Chilterns Woodland project managed to spend all this money over four years and still draw a blank.

Yup, they took the money and over four years discovered nothing. I don't know how often shoes are hung on this tree, but I'm pretty sure I could find out what's going on in a matter of weeks with some cheap video equipment, or even staking the place out for a while. It's not rocket science is it?

Steven Green, the nutter that fronts Christian Voice, has got himself all worked up about the atheist bus campaign. He's made an official complaint to the advertising standards authority suggesting that the slogan breaks rules on substantiation and truthfulness. It'll be interesting to see where this one goes since there has recently been a Christian campaign suggesting that atheists will burn for all eternity in a lake of fire.

And finally, here's an odd story; Britons are panic buying incandescent light bulbs because the government has decided to ban them because they are inefficient. I don't understand why the government has decided to ban the things since they represent such a small part of the nation's energy consumption, banning them can't possibly make any measurable difference to our national energy consumption. But actually, I can't understand why people are getting worked up and panic buying either because the low energy versions appear to be just as good. I know they're more expensive, but they also last longer and cost less to run. I was slightly worried that I couldn't find any bulbs to fit our living room lights, but I can confirm they do exist, so I don't care.