Disney Travels In Time

Disney Channel in the UK (available through your local cable or satellite provider...) has just launched it's new package, containing three new channels, AT NO EXTRA COST !!

One of these is called "Disney+1", and is exactly the same as the main Disney channel, but running one hour later...

This, apparently, is in case you missed your favourite Disney programme first time round but still want to see it. And don't forget, it's FREE!!

It's An Outrage!!

What kind of chumps do Disney think we are?? Showing the same programmes one hour later does NOT constitute a new channel, and it damn well ought to be free - so no incentive there then!

But what concerns me is, what happens if you miss your programme on Disney+1? There seems to be no provision for this, such as Disney+1+1 (or is that +2?), surely a massive error on their part?

And what about really busy people who just can't wait for their favourite programme on Disney? Where is the Disney-1 channel? I mean that'd be a real time-saver; you need to see Sabrina The Teenage Witch, but also have a hot date to get to. No problem - just tune in to the channel that screens the main channel's shows one hour ahead of time!!

Or could you achieve the same effect by treating Disney+1 as Disney, therefore making Disney into Disney-1...??? Where's the Doctor when you need him?

The other two alternatives of course are;

1. get a video recorder
   

2. get a life...

(The BBC have been doing this for years of course, except in their case it's called BBC+20years, it runs on the same channel as their main programming, and costs £104 a year whether you want it or not.....)

Ridiculous Compensation Claim II

An unemployed Los Angeles man has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against pop group Duran Duran for endangering his life, after his telephone number was allegedly listed by them on the Internet by mistake.

Cornell Zachary, 57, claims the number was given out as being the one to call for tour details, tickets and souvenirs, and that as a result calls were coming in on a 24-hour basis from all over the world.

Zachary said his number was posted on the internet in July 1999, and although it was removed a few weeks later, he says that by that time he had already received "millions" of calls and was still being pestered.

In the action, he claims to have suffered "life-threatening high blood pressure episodes", together with nerve damage, sleep disturbance and permanent health problems. "They had me to the point where my doctor told me I could have a stroke." he is quoted as saying.

Interestingly though, despite being supposedly besieged day and night by the calls, Zachary insisted he never considered changing his number, saying;

"I didn't make the mistake. I had already had the number over a year. They have never even given me a sorry card, you know?"

Hmm... an unemployed 57 year old, who didn't consider changing his number, launches a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Can we all see a connection here??

Could it just be that Mr Zachary is just an over-the-hill, lay-about degenerate, who has seen the opportunity to make a quick buck on the back of someone else?

Could it be that, in the true spirit of the American litigious culture, he has glimpsed the prospect of getting rich without raising a single porky finger?

Should we have sympathy for him? NO!! Should he have unplugged his phone until the problem was sorted out? YES!! Is he a patient of Dr Nick Riviera the famous Springfield MD? Seems that way!!

Many people around the world have jobs, lives or problems that could be called dangerous to their health, and in most cases there isn't a single thing they can do about it. Having a constantly ringing phone isn't one of them.

If I were Duran Duran, I'd be tempted to settle this claim in nickels, and shove them one by one...

Want to know what the first Ridiculous Compensation claim was? Click here...

Want to hear how a pair of crap parents perpetuated this attitude? Click here...

Nike Advert Withdrawn

A barrage of complaints has forced American television network NBC to drop a Nike advert featuring a female Olympic athlete being chased by a hooded man with a chainsaw.

The advert, for Nike sports shoes, features the American 1500m runner, Suzy Favor Hamilton, spotting a man in a hockey mask about to attack her with a chainsaw. However, she runs off and maintains such a strong pace that the attacker collapses wheezing with exhaustion.

A caption at the end of the ad says: "Why sport? You'll live longer."

And yet this has been decried by a bunch of namby-pambies who seem to believe that this will compel men to dress up as 80's horror icons and chase women with excessively large and/or sharp garden tools.

NBC says it has received "adverse audience reaction" and has therefore dropped the advert.

It's An Outrage!!

Surely the VERY OBVIOUS point of the advert is that, by taking part in sport (as long as you have the appropriate footwear of course...) you can pretty much beat anything. Shouldn't that be congratulated for championing the cause of women? Or is that something that dullards just can't see??

We do not need to be protected from every image we see, as most of us have brains enough to tell the difference between a humourous advert aimed at selling fancy pumps and a rallying cry to maim another human being.

Nike's complimentary advert showing an Olympic cyclist, Lance Armstrong, resuscitating a collapsed circus elephant, along with the slogan: "Why sport? Healthy lungs." is still running.

Look out - here come the animal rights loonies to change all that!!

Schools Ban 'Too Violent' Musical Chairs

What is the cause of violence in society today? This is a question that has vexed ministers, scientists and theologians for years, and has produced some interesting answers. The lack of National Service, a decline in moral values, abolition of corporal punishment, the rise of single parent families, Hollywood trends. All have been suggested as caused, and each has it's merits.

But now a new Government-backed booklet, entitled Towards A Non-violent Society, has lain the blame squarely at the door of Musical Chairs. Yes, the party game.

It would seem that a group of charities formed after the James Bulger murder have concluded that violence in children can be linked to the teaching of strongly competitive games. As such, it is recommending that schools do not use the game, lest we breed a generation of maniacs (okay, that last bit isn't in there, but it might as well have been!).

They say that in Musical Chairs, the strongest and biggest children always win, and thus shows that violence is a favourable trait.

I don't know what rules are being used today, but I seem to remember it was always the quickest or sneakiest children that won, not the big lumbering farmers' sons I played it with.

What concerns me more is that we are seeing a gradual removal of all competitiveness in schools, it being replaced with the ethos of 'everyone can win'. And I'm afraid this just isn't true.

In the big real world of adults, full of careers, bosses, love, sex and money (sometimes all rolled into one convenient package!), there are clearly winners and losers. Just look at your own friends and colleagues. Are there not some of these that are better and more successful than others, yourself included?

It's An Outrage!!

What we need to teach children is that competition is a natural part of life and should be embraced. We need to help them find their own particular field of success, and then support them in it. Not everyone will be a sprinter, or a mathematician, or a solicitor or a jet pilot, but we will all be something. Ad we need to be the best we can at it.

Look at America, where the divide between success and failure is more pronounced than it ever will be here, and what are they concerned with? Winning.

If we remove the concept of winning and losing from children's early development, they are going to have a hell of a tough time coping with it when it jumps up and bites them on the ass for the first time. Plus, we'll all still be crap at sports that we invented.

Musical Chairs has as much to do with breeding a violent society as doing exams - leave it be.

David Beckham - Master Chef

This is David Beckham as pictured in a recent copy of OK Magazine. He is portrayed as a master chef, standing in his expansive kitchen holding out to the camera the latest in a long line of his exquisite creations. He seems very proud of this dish - just look at the confidently cocky raising of his eyebrow.

But wait - let's take a closer look at this gastronomic delight; why, it's just pasta, with a tin of tomatoes on top.
No cheese, no herbs, no vegetables, no meat, no sauce. Just pasta... and tinned tomatoes.

Now, I don't have anything against young Dave, I think he has a fantastic footballing talent and is right to make the most of it. But I do think that allowing yourself to be photographed like this (however much money you're being paid) leaves him open to the question of how much sense he has. A chimp could put pasta in a bowl and pour tomatoes over it, and that's the sort of thing most people will think when they see this.

I don't particularly feel the need to leap to Becks' defence (better to imagine him groaning when he sees it on the news-stand.), but I'm afraid the whole OK Magazine thing in general outrages me. Celebrities queue up for this sort of treatment, and then wonder why we're laughing at them.

OK Magazine print vacuous interviews ("Were you good looking as a boy?") alongside meticulously posed 'natural' photos (David making a cup of squash), and half the population ooh and aah as though it has some actual value!!

We don't know these people, we never will, and what does it matter how many pair of shoes a 3rd rate TV presenter has? Are we really all that boring that the only way we can spice up or lives (pun intended) is to peer into someone else's?

If we do need to do that, let's at least read something meaningful.

It was once said the TV was like chewing gum for the mind. If that's the case, then OK Magazine must be like Space-Dust; a bit of sweet tasting fizzle, then it all just evaporates.

Crap Parents at Harry Ramsden's

So there I am last night, sitting outside at Harry Ramsden's (for those of you not in the know, this is possibly one of the finest fish and chip shops in the world, now with an outlet reasonably near you!) eating my fish supper (how I got there is a long story, involving broken ankles and wallpaper, and is perhaps for another time) and looking at the family at the next picnic-table over.

There's a mum and a dad and a girl aged about 13ish and a boy aged about 10ish, and I'm drawn to them for all the usual reasons. Like, dad's wearing sports gear and doesn't seem to be the type that can actually remember the last time he was out of breath; the mum is more than a little overweight and wearing shall we say inappropriately tight pedal pushers. The daughter is the same, only more overweight and wearing even tighter clothes, and the son looks pretty average considering.

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. Which is, that the kids were playing in the specially made play area with a slide, rocking horse type things on a spring, and a see-saw, when the boy comes limping back with a pouty lip and whining that he's got a splinter in his backside from the see-saw.

The dad offers to have a look, rolls down his shorts (out of the view of the other diners) and the kid starts balling his eyes out - and I mean like he was being murdered. He was screaming and jerking and wailing, and I seriously expected his leg to be hanging by a scrap of flesh judging by the noise he was making. In an attempt to placate him, his mother and sister were effectively pinning him to a bench and shouting at him to calm down; you can guess how effective that was...

After some five minutes (and the offending article presumably still lodged bone deep and close to an artery), they carry him into the main restaurant muttering things about "compensation". I could see that they were met by a man in a tie who, after being on the receiving end of some gesticulation, took them off into the depths of the building. I sat there for a good half-hour afterwards, and they hadn't emerged by the time I left, so maybe the surgeon ran into difficulties...

What outraged me were two things, the first being the ineptitude of the parents in dealing with the 'splinter' in the first place, i.e. lets get him screaming at the top of his voice from obvious discomfort, but continue to do it with no thought for his mental state.

Secondly though - and this is the biggie - is their attitude to something that 'in my day' would have been put down to 'just one of those things'. So he's managed to pick up a splinter from a wooden seesaw, and they automatically want to lay the responsibility at the door of somebody else? What kind of abdication of parental duty is that? Had the see-saw collapsed and broken his arm (or ankle, which would have been much more painful I bet...) then I could understand it, but a splinter? From a piece of wood? Get a grip!!!

We are hurtling down the liability highway to a nanny state dead end. Pretty soon everything that happens will be somebody else's fault, and they'll have to pay out for not stopping it. And where do you think this money will come from? Higher prices and less choice.

We are also creating a generation of people who can't accept that sometimes accidents happen and that there are such things as common sense and personal accountability. You've scalded your tongue on a hot pie? Hmm, perhaps you should have blown on it and tested the heat before shovelling it in. You're a fireman and want compensation because the sight of a burned body has upset you so much? What did you expect when you joined the fire brigade - that it'd all be kittens stuck up trees and ladies in bathtubs?

It's An Outrage!!

One of the reasons that Britain is so far 'behind' the US in terms of litigation is that up until recently all our Judges were old enough to have been through at least one world war and seen some real suffering. As such they were apt to treat with disdain many of the cases that came before them on the basis that the claimants needed to get a bit of a backbone, pull themselves together and get on with it.

Not so now, as a younger breed of judiciary come to the fore that have seen only the excesses of our trans-Atlantic cousins and think that this is the way to go.

It isn't. Very soon we will be wondering where all our kid's playgrounds went and why all the soup in restaurants is tepid, and why you just can't buy a beefburger from a street vendor anymore. And it'll all be the fault of that kid with the splinter in his arse...