Working 9 to 5 ..... What a Way To Make a Livin'

I really cannot fathom why most people have to work 5 days a week 48 weeks a year. How can each job fill the same amount of time? Why has this become the accepted norm? WHO came up with this ridiculous working plan anyway? ... *David googles* ... aha! -

According to wikipedia it was the Earl of Inbred, who thought of the idea whilst playing bridge at a house party in Kent in the nineteenth century. It seems he lost badly to a pair of untitled men and petulantly enquired as to why these men were free to be playing bridge on a Friday in any case. He declared, ominously, that,” something ought to be done about it!" One of the chaps who the Earl was losing to, a self-loathing grammar school scholarship-winning coal-miner's son named Mr (later Sir) Reginald Sadist, who was, at that time, employed as a page1 at Whitehall, thought the idea to be an excellent one. He subsequently suggested it to Lord Mundane2, Minister for Employment and Doing Something About It who brought it up in the next Cabinet meeting and it passed both houses in the next sitting of Parliament. Well there you go then.


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1.More specifically Page 12 of the Financial Times in the Members’ Lounge at Parliament House .

2.Those in the legal profession may be interested to know that Lord Mundane was related by marriage to Baron Billable-Hours, the pioneering lawyer and Managing Partner of the world’s first multi-national legal firm, Boredom, Misery, Boredom, and Sellout. (Now known as Boredom, Misery and Boredom, or more simply BMB after Charlie Sellout did just that and spent the last thirty years of his life wearing only sandals and linen shorts while imbibing gin and tonics aboard his yacht in the Caribbean. Coincidentally, Baron Billable-Hours also spent the last moments of his life in less formal attire having been stripped to his briefs before being beaten to death with a 'rather pressing brief that just had to be sent out by 7 pm at the latest’. His murder was never solved and the press made much of the fact he was murdered outside a Young Lawyers Convention in the popular seaside resort of Revenge by-the-Sea.

ROOTnest Island...

Brace yourself readers - this one comes right out of left, or at least West, field. West Australian Opposition Leader Troy Buswell says there is "absolutely no substance" to reports he once did something inappropriate to a quokka.

In his defence, the politician who has previously been outed as a chair-sniffer and bra-strap flicker, said,

"I'm not aware that I've caused any offence to a quokka."

Priceless.

Is anyone else disturbed by the specificity of the denial? It seems to leave open the possibility that other species may have been assaulted in the past...

I think touching the quokka should now become a euphemism for doing something a little wrong and dirty.

And I will raise him up....

The Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli remains missing presumed dead, nine days after lifting off from the port city of Paranaguá in Brazil, strapped to hundreds of helium-filled balloons. He is the small dark dot at the bottom of the colourful balloons in the above picture. He was wearing a helmet, an aluminum thermal flight suit, waterproof coveralls and a parachute and was seeking to raise money for breaking the 19-hour record for the longest time in-flight with party balloons. I find it difficult to feel much sympathy for someone who self-indulgently and wrecklessly endangers their life to break a record that is so narrow, insignificant and pointless. I think the next time the parish needs to raise money they might have a cake stall...

Torch-capades

OK. So there are Pro-Tibet and Human Rights protesters protesting during the Torch Relay for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. No surprise there. But what is worthy of noting is the choice of transportation for some of the crew escorting the torch through Paris - Rollerblades!!! I am sure they are functional but they look a little too 'fun'-ctional. It all seems very Cirque de Sin-eil...

Art becomes Salmon-ella

A very creative individual has produced a series of photographs of landscapes using food. The only thing missing is the owl and the pussycat for that pea-green-pod boat! The second scene is bucolic - or should that broccolic....