Longrider

Is it any wonder we spend a small fortune on cat food? And all they have to say is “kbaithanx”…

And… I have no idea what this thing is, but I thought it would make an interesting picture. 

I publish below a letter sent to Connexion following their story about the UK police targeting foreign registered cars in the UK. The gist of the issue is that a European Directive requires that people who move from one country to another must register their vehicles within six months of arrival. Prior to that, they may continue to use their original foreign plates. This is fair enough and Mrs L and I registered our two Renaults and BMW motorcycle following our move within the required period (just, in the case of the bike).

It seems that the UK police are being a little over enthusiastic and failing to apply any common sense when they see foreign registered vehicles on UK roads. Here, then, is the letter:

There are occasions when the British over-enthusiastically apply European Union laws [you don’t say… ed]. The directive allowing Vehicles registered in one European country to be driven for up to six months a year, continuous or otherwise, seems to be one of them.

I live in Spain for about seven months of the year and France for the other five. My Spanish-registered car was impounded in March after two short visits to the UK within nine months of each other.

At the start of 2009, a pilot scheme called Operation Andover started in Northamptonshire, with any foreign vehicle seen just twice, more than six months apart, being impounded without warning.

It apparently did not occur to the police that the reason my car had not been seen by the number plate recognition cameras for nine months was because it had returned to the continent.

Because I caused a serious fuss, I managed to regain possession of my vehicle without paying the £420 the police demanded. When I complained, I was met with a barrier of evasion and misinformation, both from the police and the DVLA – and a suggestion from the
Leicestershire Liberal Democrats, who took up my case, that warning notices should be issued before impounding was immediately dismissed.
The implications for expatriates and foreign tourists with limited English is horrendous, especially as, with more than £400to be made on each impounding, this scheme will certainly soon be taken up nationwide.

Indeed, it is possible that someone who visits the UK just once a year, for the same couple of weeks, say in August, could become a victim of this ill-thought-out scheme. Their vehicle could be filmed on August 14 of the first year, then on August 2 of the next year – twice in one year, more than six months apart – and their car could be impounded.

I would urge all expats or French tourists who visit the UK more than once a year to keep their ferry tickets and other evidence with them and to demand that these are examined by any police officer who attempts to take their vehicle.

PETER WEST
Puntous, Hautes-Pyrénées

Now you would think, would you not, that there is an obvious explanation for a foreign registered vehicle being seen twice in a period exceeding six months, as Peter points out in his letter – you know, like oh, say, they are visiting and do so on more than one occasion? Expats are likely to have relatives in the UK and may want to visit several times in any one year, or like me, they work in the UK. Obvious to the moderately intelligent. Oh, no, not for the UK police with their boxes to tick and the assumption of guilt so readily applied; no, we are evading the road fund licence by having our vehicles registered abroad.

That this idea is risible is simply explained. When Mrs L and I registered our three vehicles in France following our arrival here, the average cost was around €300 per vehicle depending on what the manufacturers charged for the certificate of conformity and what the sous prefecture charged for the carte gris. Add to that, the little matter of higher insurance costs, and the idea of using this as a wheeze to avoid UK road tax falls apart. Only a mathematically challenged imbecile with a taste for bureaucracy would think it a good idea.

I travel back to the UK roughly every six weeks for a three week period to work. This is not unusual as more and more people are moving to France and working in the UK. So, instead of recognising the phenomenon and simply asking the question should there be cause for suspicion, the good old UK police take the easy option and try to make £400 into the bargain.

Believe me, should they try it on me “a serious fuss” won’t even come close to describing my reaction.

Obnoxio digs out a couple of rants from his archives for our delectation. The first is a general peeve about people who drive Renault Scenics.

Lately, however, I’ve repeatedly noticed an interesting phenomenon: it seems that one of the pre-requisites for the purchase of a Renault Megane Scenic is a severely diminished IQ and a complete inability to be decisive about anything once you’ve bought the cunting car. I’ve been amazed, it doesn’t matter if it’s a rusty old tip or a brand spanking new top of the line model, they all fucking dither worse than Arsey [long may his miserable soul rest in peace!] trying to choose a new zimmer frame. And then of course, when it comes to turning into a side road across oncoming traffic, the size of the gap required by these retarded cuntfucks is unbelievable. Even the bus driver this morning hooted at the stupid bitch to get a fucking move on.

This afternoon, my journey out of town to the old park and ride was twice fucked for a ridiculous length of time (15 minute journey took 20 — a 33% fucking increase!) by two cunting Megane Scenics. But the thought of being able to drop the roof of my car and blast home calmed me down by the time I got off the bus. Only to find that some dumb ass-felching fucktard had parked so close to my car that I could not get in. I had to remove the roof entirely (an aggravating task in an old car) so that I could clamber in from the other side. And the car that parked me in was?

A CUNTING FUCK OF A SHIT PILE FUCKING RENAULT WHOREMOBILE MEGANE SHITBAG FUCKING SCENIC!!!

Yes, well… While I don’t doubt that the incidents happened, the logic – well, lack of logic, really – doesn’t hold up.

Just under a year ago I was supplementing my bike with an ancient Mitsubishi Sigma estate. While it was a nice enough motor, things came to a head when it expired on Erith High Street in the middle of the morning rush hour. Mitsubishi were unable to identify the fault and knowing that this would probably happen again, I decided that another car was in order fairly sharply. Not least with an imminent move to France and long distance commuting back to the UK on the cards. I needed something that was decently sized, comfortable over long journeys and reasonably fuel efficient, so a diesel, then.

As I was living within walking distance of the local Renault dealer… yes, you see where this is going… I had a look at what they had in stock. As it was, they had exactly what I needed at their Weston Super Mare branch – a 1.5 turbo diesel Scenic. Right price, right car for the job. Now, according to Obnoxio’s logic at that point I ceased to be an experienced and highly qualified driver and my IQ diminished. Yes, Obo, right… 

During the comments to the piece, some of  Obo’s readers came out with the usual diatribe reserved for the drivers of cars in their particular hate list. This, for example, from aljahom:

Yeah – I always thought this about Scenic drivers, as with the Picassoles.

Then I had the terrible terrible misfortune of having to drive one. Damn the company hire-car scheme.

Utterly fucking awful.. 25mph feels way beyond the limit of chassis stability, so it’s no wonder these cunts drive like they’re on ice.

Also the worst ergonomics in any ‘car’ ever, before we even get to the electric parkimng brake.

So in summary, anyone who buys one of these things should be put in a bath of ebola, for their incomparable fucking stupidity.

I therefore make it my life’s work to terrorise any cunt in one of these things.

In Obo’s infamous words, the man is a weapons grade cock-end. While not liking a vehicle is perfectly fine – I didn’t like the Citröen C3 – but that was a matter of personal taste and nothing to do with the car itself. aljahom prefers to dress his prejudices up in technobabble about instability. This is pure one hundred percent cockwaffle with gold plating. If there was a problem with stability, all those millions of Scenic owners would be complaining about it. They aren’t. And, having driven over 30,000 miles in mine since last September and not having experienced the slightest twitch of instability, I have to weigh that evidence against an assertion made by a semi-anonymous Internet commenter who listens to too much Jeremy Clarkson.

Indeed, I stopped taking notice of this bollocks years ago when reading motorcycle magazines. Road testers (and what a bunch of self-important tosspots they are) would complain about a machine’s handling, or vibration or some such while screwing the balls off it on a race track. Ridden within its normal working limits, the machine was fine. Comparing their hyperbolic hogwash with my own experience of riding the machines taught me to take no notice whatsoever of people who make such assertions. Modern vehicles are generally well built, reliable and do what it says on the tin. Gone are the days when buying a vehicle was a lottery that could leave you stranded at the roadside because you bought a lemon. Yes, they do occur, but they are rare.

If you try, you can determine patterns wherever you look. There are plenty of bad drivers out on the roads, so any popular vehicle will be driven by a fair share of them. For a long time, motorcyclists were convinced that Volvos were driven by homicidal maniacs out to kill them. I could, should I wish, look for the same pattern in the Ford Focus – it’s easy if you try. Bristol Dave does it with the Ford Ka. But it doesn’t prove anything. Indeed it is the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.

So, while rants like Obnoxio’s are mildly amusing for the reader, help to vent the author’s spleen and shore up the prejudices of those readers looking for an emotional crutch to justify those prejudices, let’s not kid ourselves that you can determine a driver’s ability by their choice of vehicle, because you cannot. You might just as well read the tea leaves.

Obo then goes on about motorcyclists, or more specifically, the silly public information signs warning drivers not to knock them off their bikes.

OK, here’s my peeve of the day: why is it that all the fucking nanny state road safety ads pick on cars and drivers?

Well, actually, they don’t. A ride through the peaks will be spoiled by nannying signs warning us that riding too fast is fatal. This, along roads littered with white lines and ridiculously low speed limits. Those roads are spoiled forever as motorcycling roads – and, frankly, it really, really pisses me off to be constantly nagged about stuff that, as an experienced and qualified rider, I can work out for myself.

Still, at least now I can ride better roads in France and not a silly nagging sign in sight.

Apparently people are using file sharing to illegally download their favourite TV programmes. Yes, really…

Millions of television viewers are now using illegal file-sharing services to access free and unauthorised copies of programmes, research has revealed.

Maybe it’s me being a little bit dense, but If I switch on my television, I can watch these programmes for free. What, then, is the difference between doing that and catching up on an episode I’ve missed by downloading a copy?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that as a non UK resident, I’m not paying a UK licence fee, so that one is irrelevant. Copyright is irrelevant because these people are doing nothing that doesn’t happen if they record the programme via their DVD or Video recorder. Loss of revenue is irrelevant because they would be watching for free when watching the live broadcast.

So, ultimately, this has to be about the media trying to exert control using copyright infringement as a Trojan horse.

“Millions of television viewers now access free, unauthorised versions of favourite shows at least some of the time,” says Eric Garland the chief executive of Big Champagne.

Note the use of the word “unauthorised”. Who the fuck is Eric Garland to authorise what we watch and when?

“This is a socially acceptable form of casual piracy – and it is replacing viewing hours.”

What? What!?! In practice it is no different to time shifting using a video recorder. If you miss an episode and download it to your computer, there is no difference whatsoever to having managed to record it via the television signal as both affect “viewing hours”. Piracy indeed. It is not piracy while the programmes are transmitted free no matter what authoritarian morons such as Eric Garland might say. That is why it is socially acceptable. And while the Eric Garlands of this world continue to make a fuss about something that is innocuous, we will not take them seriously. 

I see that CiF surpasses itself following the risible article by Peter Jones the other day. Joseph Harker, permanently offended by anything that he might consider to be racist (though, of course, in Joseph’s little world, black people aren’t capable of being racist). He comments on the silly Microsoft story whereby someone photoshopped (rather badly) a white man’s head onto a black man’s body. While it may have been unwise of Microsoft to have doctored this picture – not least because the hateful, bile mongering Joseph Harkers of this would would crawl out of the woodwork to cry “racist” at the top of their tiny voices, but because it is probably unnecessary anyway… After all, why not just take another picture?

Then, on the same day, we get a misandrous rant from Melissa McKewan, who despite an anti-man rant claims that she does not hate men.

There are also individual men in this world I would say I probably hate, or something close – men who I hold in unfathomable contempt. But it is not because they are men.

No, I don’t hate men.

It would, however, be fair to say that I don’t easily trust them.

My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man: the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonising of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eye rolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language (“humankind”).

The first thing that strikes me is that the lady doth protest too much. If a man had written such a dire piece of hateful generalist drivel about women, the professionally offended feminists would have been out in their droves claiming misogyny – something they see under every bed, lurking behind every corner, but that is mostly a product of their over active imaginations. Indeed, the women in my life have not been subject to the persistent abuse, harrasment and insult that the professional feminists claim to have had happen to them – and, frankly, looking at Melissa’s photograph, one tends to wonder why. Or is she fabricating it all?

Then there’s the last line of that quote – no, Melissa, people do not roll their eyes at your request for non-gendered language because they are misogynists, they do so because you are being a pompous self-righteous prig who cannot even be bothered to understand the roots of our language – and Melissa had better not learn French, where a mixed group of people is referred to in the masculine.

There are the insidious assumptions guiding our interactions – the supposition that I will regard being exceptionalised as a compliment (“you’re not like those other women”)…

Damn right you’re not like other women and thank Christ for that. Other women aren’t a bunch of spiteful misandrists.

CiF, once more demonstrating that there are no depths too low for it to scrape.

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Update: Mark Wadsworth also comments and reminds us of victimhood poker.

Following on from the spammy email I received the other week, I have been approached again – although this time the company concerned appears legitimate, if a little misguided.

Hi,

I was curious what it would take to get a text link on your blog saying something like “Tungsten Wedding Bands” or “Tungsten Wedding Rings” with a hyperlink to our site  (link removed). We are a relatively new company and we are currently trying to improve our page ranking on Google. We operate on a small budget, and we would be more than willing to give you a tungsten ring from our site in exchange for a link. Let me know if this would be something that you would be interested in. Thanks for any help you can give us.

Thank You

Nick

Tungsten Rings Online

Well, Nick, to take your initial question first – nothing. This is because had you bothered to read the statement on my comments page, you would realise that I don’t host commercial links. And, had you bothered to read it, you would not have sent this mail, now, would you?

Secondly, this practice will eventually get you into Google’s bad books and is therefore probably not a good thing to be doing anyway.

So, bottom line – no, I cannot be of any help to you and no, I don’t want a ring from your site. And to anyone else contemplating e-mailing me on this subject – please don’t. This is not a commercial site and I don’t host commercial links m’kay?

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Update: it’s worth pointing out that if you Google the phrases Nick is asking for in his links, then the company is already on page one, so spamming blogs and annoying their authors isn’t necessary anyway.

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Update: I see that DK has succumbed – but, then, he had a need for wedding rings

Via Johnb, this wonderfully hilarious piece of po-faced piffle from Peter Jones, demonstrating once again that Guardian writers are, without doubt, a bunch of weapons grade bell ends ^TM. Read the comments, he is deservedly ripped to pieces.

I don’t often agree with Roy Hattersley – usually, he talks bunkum – however his piece in the Times today, is one with which I concur.

I’d sooner ride a motorbike than get into time’s wingèd bathchair, so why stereotype me as elderly?

Quite so. My father is a septuagenarian and is still riding a motorcycle – certainly he is not ready for the bathchair. My mother in law is still whizzing about the south west selling stuff at antiques fairs and teaching music well into her eighties.

The point Roy makes is very much that being older, elderly, a senior citizen or whatever euphemism is used, does not mean that those people are ready to be patronised by the government and treated as if they are all ga-ga and need “help”.

Forty years ago few things would have given me more pleasure than the thought that Joan Bakewell took an interest in my welfare. But now I am by no means sure that I welcome her concern. I make no complaint about the way she discharges her duties as “czar for the elderly”, a strange designation that in itself suggests something contrived is going on.

It is the creation of her office that troubles me. Whatever the perennially youthful Dame Joan may say and do, her public role helps to create the impression that, without help, nobody over 65 can take the top off a boiled egg. No matter how sensible her advice about the underrated potential of the over-65s, the existence of someone who “speaks on behalf of the old” creates the wrong impression among the younger generation.

Quite so. The creation of “Czars” is downright silly. We no more need an age czar than we need a drugs czar or a dance czar. Also, the idea that having reached a certain age means that people can be conveniently lumped into a homogeneous group is equally ridiculous. We all get older and we are all individuals with differing needs, opinions, lifestyles and aspirations. We don’t suddenly become the same when we hit retirement age and we don’t need czars any more than the Russians did…

I suppose that it was inevitable that there would be calls for a boycott of Scottish goods and services – much like the pathetic French Fries wankery a few years ago, following the Scottish government’s decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

The government of Scotland has decided to release convicted Lockerbie terrorist bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi on “compassionate grounds.”

Scottish (and English) law allows for this. Foreign countries have a habit of doing things differently. Get used to it and grow the fuck up.

The government of the United Kingdom has washed its hands of the entire affair, allowing the Scottish government total freedom in taking this perfidious action against the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103.

Because Scotland is a devolved administration and has autonomy in this area you ignorant fuckwits. Oh, and before you invoke “the families” just bear in mind that not all of those families agree with you.

Now, there are things that the US administration has done in the past few years of which I strongly disapprove. Invading other people’s countries being one, strutting about the world stage lecturing others how to run their affairs being another. However, I do not refuse to buy products from the USA as a consequence – indeed, I’ll still be buying my new pair of boots from them. This is because, being an adult, I am aware that the producers of goods and services are not the same people strutting about the world stage waving their dicks in the air. Also, those producers of goods and services (and the people who work for them) have little if any direct influence over the behaviour of said dick wavers.

And, anyone who thinks that collective punishment is in some way an acceptable practice is a moron. So, yes, the boycotters are indeed sending a message to Scotland. That message being; “We are a bunch of ignorant, immature cretins who probably don’t know where (or what) the UK is, let alone understand the nuances of devolved government and a legal system that predates the Pilgrim Fathers.”