Harum Serum

The vanity cosmetic industry must be one of the most ludicrous in it’s advertising campaigns and yet billions are made in profit every year, all in the name of vanity. I guess it’s an easy sell. The potential buyer wants to feel better about some aspect of their appearance and are easily convinced by the pseudo scientific babble that accompanies these products nowadays.

A popular one at the moment is the inclusion of the word ’serum’ on the product’s packaging and in advertising – ‘this wondrous wrinkle banishing cream contains a serum, specially formulated to reduce wrinkles. It has been tested on old man Steptoe’s bollocks and he now has two shiny billiard balls swinging in his trousers’.

Wrinkle banishing creams are a real good one to look at – and there are lots of them. As far as I can find, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that they work. There are no proper clinical trials that have been published. The statistics are usually given as something along the lines of  ’90% of women using Glassbollock wrinkle removal cream stated that they had seen a visible improvement in only two weeks of use’. Very scientific – and then you look at the small print and find that only 35 women had actually taken part in the survey.

So what are these amazing serums? Here is a dictionary definition of ’serum’.

se·rum (sir′əm)

noun pl. serums -·rums or  -·ra (-ə)

1. 1. a clear, watery animal fluid, as serous fluid
   2. the clear, yellowish fluid of the blood which separates from a blood clot after coagulation and shrinkage in full blood serum
2. blood serum containing agents of immunity, taken from an animal made immune to a specific disease by inoculation: it is used as an antitoxin and for diagnosis
3. the whey of milk
4. the thin, watery part of a plant fluid

I can’t see anything there that would make this an ideal wrinkle remover. The only wrinkles that you are removing by buying these products are the wrinkles in the many banknotes you will shelling out on useless nostrums and quack potions and unguents. They do not work.

Love your wrinkles. There’s nothing wrong with them!

Latest News – Boots have just paid for a proper clinical trial of one of their ’serums’ – very brave of them, but it paid off. Some positive results were noted with some people after 6 months use. Even though it only does any good for 1 in 5 people I can hear the cash registers from here!

Save the World, Live in Fear

It doesn’t get any better. This morning I noticed a new billboard advert that has appeared on the hoardings. It shows a busy shopping street with words along these lines – ‘A bomb won’t go off here because a few weeks ago a shopper noticed someone studying the CCTV cameras’.

Oh great, so we are in possibly the worst recesssion ever, the dole queues are around the block, the high streets only have half the amount of shops that were there previously, and now we’ve got to spot terrorists too. How do we do that? By carefully watching everyone around you… See someone looking at a CCTV camera – call the police immediately – have them sent down for plotting a terrorist act.

Any ’suspicious’ behaviour must be reported immediately. If you see an apparently intelligent person buying the Daily Mail for instance – doesn’t look right – call the police! And it’s not always what someone is doing – it could be what they are NOT doing, or unexpected behaviour.

How about you spy a couple of hooded youths who could possibly be muslim (say one of them has ginger hair and is wearing a kilt – y’know, the obvious signs), helping an old lady across the road. What are they after? What possible terrorist act are they brewing up? You know what to do – call the police.

You’ve got no job, no money and society is falling to pieces. What we all need is a healthy dose of THE FEAR!!

Free Daily Mails for all! Bring on the paranoia!

Google Street View

Recently, Google added their Street View feature to their Google maps service for London. This means that you can look at actual photo panoramas for any part of the Streets covered by the service. Go have a look, it’s very interesting and I think, a really neat feature.  Google have run all the images through software, which whilst not perfect, aims to blur faces and car licence plates etc. Now personally, living in one of the most surveillance heavy countries in the world, I don’t find this too much of a worry.

However, it seems to have whipped up a right frothy lather for some privacy campaigners. They say that our human rights are being trampled over and that privacy laws are being broken. So, being able to look at streets that just happen to have people in them, with blurred faces, is some kind of worry is it? What about if you go to a bookshop and pick up a London travel guide? What about all those pictures in there of streets milling with people with unblurred faces? Why is no-one kicking up a stink about those?

After all, do we really believe that a photographer who has taken a picture of Trafalgar Square has gotten everyone in the image to sign a release? And this is what worries me. The police and private security guards are already giving photographers a hard time, citing the prevention of terrorism act at us for photographing a pigeon on a lion’s head in Trafalgar Square. There is enough nannying going on already and I fear that the feeding frenzy whipped up by these people is not only ridiculously wide of the mark, but will cause further problems for photographers in this country.

If you take this to extremes, we would not be allowed to look up when walking about the streets in case we catch sight of another person’s face and violate their privacy and human rights. Aren’t things bad enough in this country at the moment without everyone having to walk around with their heads down, avoiding eye contact.

Perhaps we should all wear disguises when we go out,  or to keep it cheap and affordable for everyone, wear paper bags over our heads.

Gee up Granny!

The latest idea to sort out London from that fine, trustworthy loon known as Barmy Boris is to speed up the rate at which people cross the roads. The poor dear recently had an awful experience and had to wait in a car in Ealing – ‘There was hardly any pedestrian traffic to speak of and we were being kept at red for minute after minute. The thing was totally crackers.’  Boris, I feel your pain! All that waiting is not good for a man. As Mayor of London, he is in a position to prevent himself from this sort of insanity in future. So what is the solution?

Well, pedestrian crossings are to be fitted with special lights, possibly with a countdown and an ever speeding up beep alarm. There is also talk of making the little green man walk faster and faster to speed people up. Of course the lights will be adjusted to reduce the amount of time the light is actually red. I recently talked to some visitors from Canada and they were amazed at not only the speed of the beeps at our traffic lights, but also how quickly the red light disappeared again. They will certainly be amazed if they visit in the future!

So, from now on, we can expect to have to wear running shoes when we are out and about on foot. Let’s face it – it’s only ‘oicks’ who walk about the streets anyway. And never mind those old people, blind people, the wheelchair bound and anyone else who may not be able to raise a sprint.

Solve our traffic problems and help people who are so poor they have to actually walk to keep fit. What could be wrong with that? Tell you what Boris old bean, why not take it a step further? Attach a starting pistol to every traffic light – when the lights change, there are three beeps followed by the starting pistol being discharged, and they’re off! A ribbon automatically extends on the other side of the road and we have a winner! There could be a cup awarded to the person with the most wins each month. 

Come on, it’s a winner, and with the Olympics looming, we could introduce this new sport to the World.

Thatcher flattery

I caught a glimpse last night of a TV drama based on the behind the scenes goings on in government as Margaret Thatcher came to power. An interesting concept, but made totally implausible to me as Thatch herself was played by the beautiful Lindsay Duncan. How utterly unbelievable that made it for me – I just couldn’t take any of it seriously.

Now if she had been played by an out of work, ageing, donkey’s arse, I could have stuck it out until the end.

Who smelt it, dealt it!

I have given up counting the ridiculous quantities of fart, belch and puke applications appearing in the iTunes appstore. There are just far too many of them to keep up with. However, there is an amusing bit of news in connection with these high-brow confections.

The makers of the ever popular iFart, it seems, are suing the makers (called Air-O-Matic!) of a rival application called ‘Pull my finger’ , as they claim their application used the term first. So the US legal system is swinging into full flight to decide whether the use of the phrase ‘Pull my finger’ is a possible copyright violation.

Nonsense begets nonsense.

A cheaper round?

Keeping in the same area as the previous post, the Daily Telegraph today has a report stating that a line of the devil’s dandruff is now cheaper than a pint of lager.

So next time you are getting a round in, it may be worth double-checking with the lager drinkers that they wouldn’t prefer a line of Charlie instead. You could save quite a few quid over the session.

Is this the government’s long-term plan for getting us all off alcohol??

Cheers! …snort!

Nanny State

Some of us may remember the cold war, when Russia was seen as a tyrant state, spying on its own citizens, tracking people’s movements and reading their mail. Remind you of anywhere? Yes, we are now living in a state that is inspired by cold war Russia. We have the highest number of surveillance (CCTV) cameras per head than any other country. And the madness doesn’t stop there – take drug law for example.

It wasn’t that long ago that cannabis was downgraded from a class B to a class C drug, a move welcomed by the police and many other institutions, including the Courts. This move appeared to work well, to the extent that the number of people using cannabis in the UK actually went down. So the government should be trumpeting their success, pointing out the validity of their decision.

Are they hell! Jacqui Smith, despite the above statistic and advice from all the top scientists, doctors, police etc. for some strange reason, has upgraded cannabis to a class B drug again. Is she on drugs!? 

Ecstacy. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has recently issued a report on the actual harm caused by ecstasy. They suggested moving it from class A (like heroin and cocaine) to class B. Of course, the government have just ignored this and refused to consider it.

A lot of the blame for this sort of nonsense falls at the feet of the gutter press – whipping up frenzies of unresearched and insupportable paranoia about any drug death concerned with a class A or B drug. They don’t bother reporting every death from alcohol, or paracetamol, but you can be sure that EVERY death  attributed to ecstasy will be reported.

The truth of the matter is that there have been an amazingly low number of deaths from ecstasy, so why is it an offence that can net you up to seven years in prison to be found in possession of, or using it?

If we extrapolate this logic into other areas of everyday life, what other restraints might the government put on its citizens? Nigel Inkster, who was an MI6 officer from 1975 to 2006, has recently said in a presentation about counter-terrorism, trying to put terrorism into context – “For example, every year in the UK, more people die in road accidents than have been killed by terrorists in all of recorded history.”

So listen up Jacqui, look at that statement and think about what it really says. You could put ecstasy in smartie packs and in many, many years it may cause a tiny number of deaths. However, the motor car is killing our citizens in their thousands every year!! It’s time something was done about this. How about a 10 year sentence for anyone caught with a set of car keys, 15 years for someone caught entering a vehicle, and 20 to life for anyone who starts the bloody engine?

Take these killers off our roads now!

Back to the Daily Flail

Interesting that the website of that noble and upstanding journal, that backbone of Britain that is the Daily Mail, today has stories on Jade Goody not wanting to die, Katie Holmes getting thinner whilst the waistlines of ‘celebrity slimmers’ apparently ‘yoyo’ and boys as young as TEN (sic) are caught roasting live puppies over an open fire.

So what else is happening in the World? Well Gordon Brown accidentally mentioned the word ‘depression’!,  Kelly Brook was caught in trainers with no make up! and Amanda Holden braved the chill with plunging neckline ‘plunging faster than the icy temperatures’. So far, no surprises there. What IS surprising perhaps, is that there is no mention at all of a chap called Trevor Hemmings.

Trevor Hemmings is a businessman – owns Blackpool Tower and one of his horses won the 2005 Grand National. He is also big in slot machines. Turns out that 4 companies owned by him, donated between them the princely sum of £200,000 to the Conservative Party last year. The strange thing is, it was just after they had called for softer rules on arcade gambling. Hmmm, now there’s a coincidence. Seems to me there is definite whiff of fish in the air on reading that, but obviously not to the Daily Mail. Wonder why?

Perhaps there was no room left after they had written about the heroic grafter who had walked through 18 miles of snow (for 8 hours) to get to work, or about the Japanese underwear model driving Jenson Button wild.

That’s it Mail – keep the nation informed

Iggy Plop

First I whinged about the surprising sight of John Lydon (nee Rotten) telling all about some brand of English butter that we should all be covering ourselves in for the cold snap (something like that!)  Now, horrified viewers are looking on with horror as Iggy Pop, disporting himself about the TV screen in a carefully choreographed display of wild wackiness, looking like nothing other than a CGI crispy duck, tries to sell us car insurance. Somebody, somewhere, obviously thought that this, in some strange way, was a good idea. I wonder if they still have their job?

What with all this snow stuff that’s been falling, causing half of the UK to down tools and hibernate, I reckon all this strangeness on our TV screens may be caused by global warming. You read it here first

Whatever next? … A holocaust-denying Catholic Bishop??

…You’re kidding me!?