To allay any rumours that I´m a male chauvinistic pig-
Eleven people were hanging on a rope under a helicopter, ten men and one woman. The rope was not strong enough to carry them all, so they decided that one had to leave, because otherwise they were all going to fall. They weren´t able to name that person, until the woman gave a very touching speech. She said that she would voluntarily let go of the rope, because, as a woman, she was used to giving up everything for her husband and kids, or for men in general, and was used to always making sacrifices with little in return.
As soon as she finished her speech, all the men started clapping their hands.
Yet another victim of "the curse of Bates"! The monstrous "sculpture" of a hand in a globe by Lorenzo Quinn on the corner of the Paseo Maritimo and Argentinas which I cursed in a past issue is being dismantled and moved to Son Pacs wherever that is. Good bloody riddance.
Oh-oh! The little quip about fish ‘n chips seemed to go down rather badly up in the stalag muelle viejo ivory tower.
The ´codfather´ of b.y.p. tried to give me a lecture on the dog ´n bone in attempt, presumably, to put me in my ´plaice´.
Hook, line and sinker comes immediately to mind.
At least I´ll have a bit of a clue where any anonymous ´hake mail´ might come from. (ed´s note: that´s enough of that fishy ****ocks)
Changing the subject, the recent audit of the last looney left government of the Balearics has shown a whopping 256.428.000 Euros overspending of budget- what can you say?
Easyjet aims to set up EasyCruise, a company with a no-frills cruise ship where customers pay extra for niceties such as bedding. "It will be aimed at people in their twenties, thirties and forties who would not normally consider going on a cruise," says Easyjet. Passengers will clean their own rooms or be charged for housekeeping, but the fee could be as low as £14.50 a night.
The cruise is planned to include Majorca. Customers will be able to choose how many nights they spend on board and hop on and off as they please. Hardly the ´quality tourism´ that Mallorca says it´s aiming for!
Talking of cruise ships, the Palma-Sete (S.France) ferry has restarted. The 14 hour trip is running twice a week and they´re offering a number of discounted offers right now.
They say that curry is now the UK´s favourite meal and presumably adding this to the fact that the KitKat UK sales fell by 5.4 per cent last year the bright young things in the Nestle marketing department have come up with....wait for it....Curry-flavoured KitKats....yuk!
Health warning! Do not try to put your trousers on when standing on a wooden floor. If the UK figures are anything to go by putting on trousers is hazardous, with 9,400 injuring themselves, while zip-fly accidents fell slightly in 2002 to 700.
As far as ´arse over apex´ incidents are concerned, more than 12,000 people were hurt in falls on wooden floors.
So ladies, if you find your man asleep on the sofa, fully clothed, when you get up, don´t bollock him for the smell of beer fumes and the half eaten kebab; you should compliment him on his foresight in avoiding a potentially nasty accident!
Did you hear the true story about a bank customer who had just withdrawn 1,000 euros from a bank in Lisbon, Portugal, was confronted by a man who shouted "This is a robbery!" and grabbed the money. He was armed with a tree branch. Other customers, not terribly intimidated by the branch, tackled the unnamed 46-year-old robber, beat him up, and held him for police. A police spokesman said officers "have never dealt with thieves trying to rob banks with branches before."...It´s just a sad indication that amateur thieves don´t grasp the concept behind "stick-ups".
When you see the soot and **ap coming out of the stacks of some of the larger vessels using ports such as Palma and Alcudia bear this recent extract from the New York Times in mind!
"With the consistency of mud and sulfur levels 3,000 times that of gasoline, these low-grade fuels, powering the commercial ships of today, must be heated simply to allow them to move through pipes to enter the engine cylinders. The result? A single cargo ship coming into New York Harbor can release as much pollution as 350,000 current-model-year cars in an hour. Satellite photographs show that trails of pollution thousands of miles long are causing semi-permanent clouds above shipping routes in the North Atlantic, Pacific and other oceans. These atmospheric scars of international shipping are causing concern among scientists studying global warming. So far, the International Maritime Organisation (a United Nations agency with authority over the world fleet) has ratified a global treaty that will take only small steps to improve fuel quality and require technologies that reduce harmful emissions.
Why? Because passing a global treaty requires approval from nations representing more than 50 percent of the world´s total shipping tonnage. That means that Panama, Liberia and other "flag of convenience" countries, where the bulk of the world´s cargo ships are registered because of their lax regulations have the power to weaken any treaty before passage."
It is bad enough having to wade through 50 or 60 e-mails telling me that I am a physically, sexually and financially inadequate human being every morning, without having to wonder who is trying to steal my account details too!
Look out for what is known as "phishing". The name comes from fishing for passwords or credit card details, spelt in the hacker style. Now it has spread from stealing access to someone´s e-mail to stealing their credit card details, PayPal balance or even the contents of their bank account.By and large, companies like eBay and PayPal do not send out e-mails asking for details, they wait for you to log in and then tell you there is a problem.
And banks do not ask for customer passwords in e-mails- be careful!
Now that Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas has become firmly established in Hollywood, the Welsh film industry is to receive additional funding to step up production. They are going to remake many well known films, but this time with a Welsh flavour.
The following are planned for release next year................91/2 Leeks; Trefforest Gump; Cwmando;The Lost Boyos; An American Werewolf in Powys; Huw Dares Gwyneth; Dai Hard; Cool Hand Look-you; Sheepless in Seattle; The Eagle has Llandudno; The Magic Rhonddabout; Independence Dai; Welsh Connection; Welsh Connection II; A Beautiful Mind-you.
With escalating fuel prices prices in some areas and gridlock on the rise, the Balearic university is stepping up development of their newest brainchild: the anger-powered car.
"By drawing a significant percentage of its motive power from the unbridled temper of the Mallorcan motorist, the new anger-powered car will change, or at least take mechanical advantage of, the way locals drive," Pedro Capullo, the university vice-chairman said. "We plan to have these furiously efficient machines careening madly down Mallorca´s highways, byways, and sidewalks within two years."
Capullo said automakers have been researching fury fuels since the mid-1970s. As early as 1984, they began to look for ways to take advantage of the limitless supply of bad temper generated daily by the local drivers’ outrage currently vented wastefully into dashboards, steering wheels, passengers, and other road users.
An engine burning clean, white-hot hatred will release few harmful by-products into the atmosphere bad vibes and a small amount of water vapour will combine to be released in the form of human spittle.
In addition, anger technology will turn the standard fuel-economy paradigm on its head:
An anger-powered engine is actually more efficient in heavy urban traffic.
"The theory behind the anger-powered engine is actually quite simple," said Manuel Gere Xange, the original chief engineer on the Project ´Joderlo´.
"The average motorist travelling a clogged Mallorcan road produces hundreds of kilowatt-hours of negative energy per infuriating drive.
The Joderlo motor converts this emotional energy into kinetic energy by a process most drivers (people too goddamn stupid to use their goddamn blinkers when they change goddamn lanes) will never be able to understand. Just trust me, it works."
Snr. Gere Xange, who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter and high-efficiency battery, added, "In the white-knuckled hands of the average local driver, it´s an extremely powerful tool."
Anger power was first explored by Daimler-Chrysler, whose concept car, the Plymouth Violent, caused an uproar upon its introduction at the 1989 Detroit Auto Show. The Violent, more a seething showcase of technology and rage than a workable production car, achieved a remarkable 89 miles per gallon and hospitalised 19 auto-show attendees.
The Inca produced anger-powered car will be aimed solidly at the middle of the market. Options such as semi-tinted glower windows, auto-locking brakes, and a baffling array of randomly blinking warning lights will be standard on all models.
"Production models will have angry-punch-absorbing energy-conversion pads in the dashboards, steering wheels, and driver-side doors," Gere Xange said. "Sound-sensitive materials in the cars´ interiors will convert livid outbursts into motive power. And, because an angry driver is, in this case, a better driver, literally hundreds of anger- and performance-enhancing options will be available, including loud, ineffective silencers, talk-station-only radios, truly intermittent wipers, steering wheels which imperceptibly tilt forward over the course of an hour, and excruciatingly well-heated seats."
Early consumer tests of the cars indicate that they perform beyond designers´ expectations.
The automotive press has been particularly enthusiastic about anger power.
Fully anger-powered cars are expected to begin hitting the showrooms and other cars in summer 2005. If successful, the venture may vindicate the auto engineers still smarting over their brief and disastrous flirtation with love-and-happiness power, a trend that failed commercially and eventually petered out during the positive-energy crisis of the 1970s.
Now not many people know this but I’m sure that you, gentle reader will find it fascinating that foreigners are now legally barred from working as belly-dancers in the cabarets of Cairo and Egypt´s various tourist resorts.
The announced reason is that foreigners were stealing jobs from Egyptian women. Officials will not come right out and say it, but many in the dance world also believe that the government suspected that women from Russia and elsewhere were claiming to be dancers while actually plying an older profession.
Now for those of you who are not convinced that our Gallic cousins are not..er..how can I put it? A tad on the odd side....Christelle Demichel, 34, got married to a dead man last week.
She carried a bouquet of yellow roses and gleefully ducked rice after the ceremony in the Riviera city of Nice. About 40 people later attended her reception at a local restaurant where the champagne bottles bore custom labels with the newlyweds´ names. The only thing missing, besides a wedding cake, was the groom.
The law dates to December 1959 when southern France´s Malpasset Dam burst, inundating the town of Frejus and claiming hundreds of lives. When former President Charles de Gaulle visited the town a week later, a young woman named Irene Jodard pleaded with him to allow her to follow through on her marriage plans even though her fiancé had drowned.
A priest and a rabbi are sitting next to each other on a flight to the Holy Land.
After a time the priest turns to the rabbi and asks, "Is it still a requirement of your faith that you do not eat pork?"
The rabbi replies, "yes, that is still one of our beliefs."
The priest asks him, "Have you ever eaten pork?"
And the rabbi answers, "Yes, once many years ago I did succumb to the temptation and I tasted a ham sandwich."
After a while, the rabbi turned to the priest and asked, "Father, is it still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?"
To this the priest replied, "Yes it is, it is very much a part of our faith."
To which the rabbi asks, "Father, have you ever fallen to the temptations of the flesh?"
The priest replies solemnly, "Yes, rabbi, on one occasion I was weak and I broke with my vows." The rabbi nodded understandingly. He was silent in thought for a while, and then he said, "It sure beats the hell out of a ham sandwich, doesn´t it?"
Cheers,
Bates