Archive for February, 2008
Baby food and air travel
These are the rules on taking baby food in your carry-on luggage, from the Department of Transport:
Liquid baby food or sterilised water, sufficient for the journey, can be taken through airport security. The accompanying adult will be required to verify by tasting.
The sensible thing, then, would be to make a parent sample one carton or bottle, randomly selected by security. But what actually happens - at least, what happens at Glasgow and Belfast International airports - is this: when you’re carrying cartons of ready-made baby formula, the adult will have to decant *every single sealed carton* into bottles, tasting each and every carton.
It’s not that formula is minging, although it is; it’s that the cartons state (and pretty much every baby book says) that ready-made formula *must* be discarded if it hasn’t been consumed within an hour of opening*. But, hey! Only terrorists want their kids to have uncontaminated food!
For fuck’s sake.
* Personally I think the 1-hour thing is balls, but that’s what the manufacturers, and the doctors, and the baby experts say.
PopJustice on Heidi Montag: good point, well made
Reality TV star Heidi Montag was a bit upset when those nasty internet people slagged off her video:
“I just started sobbing uncontrollably. I cried myself to sleep that first night after my video came out. I just couldn’t understand [how people] I didn’t even know felt the need to be so cruel and hurtful toward me. I am just a 21-year-old from a small town in Colorado trying to follow her dreams.”
PopJustice is absolutely right:
Do you know what, there’s no easy way to say this, but this woman just doesn’t have what it takes to be a popstar… If she bursts into tears when people tell her they don’t like her new video, how’s she going to react when, say, a gossip blogger Photoshops spunk onto her face two hours after a family member dies? Someone, just lock her in a room with a bucket and Britney’s press cuttings from the last twelve months, and don’t let her out until she’s thinking about a job in an office.
Radiohead: the rap remixes
Here’s something different for a Friday: Radiohead’s In Rainbows remixed, with appearances by the likes of Del Tha Funky Homosapien. Like all remix projects it’s an - ahem - mixed bag, but 15 Stepz and Video Tapez are great.
Gratuitous Bebo mention in teen suicide story
A teenage girl commits suicide for no apparent reason. The Daily Mail reports:
Chelsea, a keen dancer, had her own page on the social networking website Bebo.
Her death comes in the wake of a series of 14 recent suicides involving young people in Bridgend, South Wales, and fears that they may have been linked by websites such as Bebo and Facebook.
However, there is no suggestion that Chelsea’s death has any connection to these.
So why mention it?
Firefox 3 beta 3 is out
Download link here. As ever, some extensions aren’t compatible yet, browser sniffers like the ones used by online sodding banking will lock you out, blah blah blah. But I’ve been using Beta 2 as my main browser for ages now, and it’s great.
Government listens to turkeys, bans Christmas
Rather than go over the insane anti-file sharing plan the government apparently intends to implement, here’s an extract from this month’s The Word magazine talking about EMI.
The average salary across EMI is estimated at £57,328, heavily weighted towards the top. A FTSE 100 company on average has fewer than 20 execs on £500K-plus; EMI is reported to have over 50. These top execs are the ones sitting on top of massive severance packages too…
While all labels rely on that 10 per cent of signings who are multi-platinum successes in every key territory, EMI has (Norah Jones excepted) not signed and nurtured one this side of the millennium…
EMI ignored the warnings of the last ten years to its detriment. The same accusation can be levelled at all the majors. For the first time, a format (MP3) and a delivery channel (online) were developed outside of the labels’ control; their inability to understand the opportunities and possibilities were pre-Luddite.
So obviously, the solution is to cripple the internet industry. Sheesh.
Flats ridiculous
The Evening Times reports that a development of luxury flats in Glasgow’s Tradeston is going to hell in a handcart, mainly because absentee landlords aren’t paying their share of communal bills - so the residents who do pay expect the water and electricity to be turned off any day now.
It’s a ridiculous state of affairs, but one detail in the story jumped out. The developers offered cashback to purchasers, so one company bought 40 flats (in the one development) and netted £200,000. And now the company has disappeared.
Is the housing market so overheated that developers don’t think “hmmm, 40 flats in one block is an unusually large purchase. Better do some background checks before handing over a fifth of a million quid. Who knows? The company might just take our cash and disappear!”
Taxpayers’ money well spent
From The Register:
The Scottish government has tackled the thorny issue of cat welfare by issuing a Draft Cat Welfare Code of Practice aimed at providing “basic information and guidance to those responsible for cats on how to care for them”.
The chair of wrong
This can’t be real. Can it?
[Consumerist, via Graham Linehan]
When heroes have feet of clay
Last week I was wondering whether you could still enjoy something if it turned out that the people behind it were flawed. For example, “I’ve kind of gone off James Ellroy of late after seeing him in a documentary, because he seemed a lot less tough and a lot more creepy than I’d imagined him in my head.”
That’s nothing compared to this bombshell.
Lorraine Kelly is a caravan enthusiast.