Category Archives: Default or Miscellaneous
If something appears here, it means I probably forgot to put it in any of the other categories! Either that, or could think of any other to put it in…
Fish and chips…?
Logo of the anti-RFID campaign by German privacy group FoeBuD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve just finished watching the main Polish news programme of the day, the evening “Wiadomosci” programme on TVP1, which had as its closing story information about how in Poznan there has been a blitz on people who have dogs and haven’t paid their dog tax. Dog tax is a local tax in Poland, some municipalities charge it and some don’t, and there is a degree of freedom as to how much can be charged, and in Poznan that amount is 55 PLN/year, which is about $16 a year. This is more than I can remember from the UK, but dog tax was abolished there many years ago. During my childhood the amount was a good deal less than that, but maybe comparable if you account for inflation.
The question asked, and answered, in the news broadcast, was how the authorities knew where these dog owners were in order to charge them and take them to court for their missing payments of dog tax. The answer is, some time ago the municipality had a free chipping exercise for dogs whereby owners were given a free ID chip so that their dog could be returned to them in the event of loss. This you can have from any vet, by the way, but then it is a paid service. Not thinking that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and taking this inexplicable magnanimity on the part of the City at face value, Poznan citizens queued up and took part in the action and had their free ID chips with their addresses and telephone numbers, which of course were all put in a big database and reported to the City. The news report didn’t go into detail as to whether these people had signed anything which allowed that to happen or whether it was simply an abuse of privacy and a breach of the Data Protection Law, but when has that ever bothered government anyhow? It’s the little man with his business that has to worry about that, and not the governing elites.
Anyway, the next thing they said is that a number of Polish cities which did not have dog tax before are about to introduce it, citing Krakow as an example. They then also featured a few seconds of a disgruntled dog owner saying how he found it unfair that taxes apply to dogs but not to cats, guinea pigs, or aquarium fishes. I am sure he was about to use the word “”racism” had they only given him time to do it. Read the rest of this entry
A little look at the prize…
Here’s a sneak preview of what the Huliganov.tv pens look like, five of which are going to be given away in the contributors’ competition which still lasts another twenty five days. I hope these pictures whet your appetites to add more comments and to to links into this service!
Hotel Room & Lost Luggage Kit (South Africa series 1/10)
| Playout date: | 12 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Cape Town Arabella Sheraton, South Africa |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Hotel Room Review |
| Music used: | “This could be heaven for everyone” by Queen |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
This is a video you might like to watch if you are interested in the sorts of things that might happen if they lose your luggage on an intercontinental flight.
We have a look at the room I got at the Arabella Sheraton in Capetown. They managed to lose my luggage (that was my first time so far for lost luggage, first of many) and so we have a look at KLM‘s so-called “care collection”. I had lost luggage with Lufthansa and with KLM and both of those companies behaved properly. I had lost luggage with SAS and they were hopeless and impossible. When the luggage finally appeared it had been plundered and no compensation was available as it was only one day before the 14 days they say.
The upshot is I never flew SAS again, but I still fly Lufthansa and KLM with confidence.
Related articles
- Visiting Cape Town, South Africa (blogher.com)
- Last day in Cape Town – Cape Town, South Africa (travelpod.com)
- Weekend Luggage Ritual (willtravelforwork.com)
Latest Changes to Huliganov.TV
Hi, gentle reader,
You possibly noticed a couple of changes going on around here today, so, since I rarely do anything without appending several paragraphs of justification in true Calvinist fashion, I thought I’d give you the lowdown on what is going on and why, just in case you’re remotely interested.
First off, I got a bit tired of using Quoracy Blue as the background to this blog. I couldn’t get any of the tag colour schemes in WordPress‘s “Mystique” template (which is what I’ve been using for nearly a year now and like it a lot) to work with it, it certainly clashed with many of the header images and on top of that it kind of distracted the eye from the main content. So I decided to exchange it for another of the colours I bought from the Unicef site www.ownacolour.com, namely my wife’s Christmas present (she didn’t use the malaria tablets and water the purchase funded personally, by the way, I believe they went to a village in India) which I called Elena James’ Dark Silver . At the same time I put my tabs to grey, which is one of the six colour options, and unsurprisingly they don’t clash, and even the way most of the header pics look doesn’t clash and also it is a more discrete and elegant colour all round, rather like the woman it is named for.
Anyway, since my wife owns, under the full rigour of international law that an august institution like Unicef represents, the colour with the hex code #505050, I hope people will respect that and not use the colour themselves without remembering to pray to God for her relief from her condition Multiple Sclerosis, and the additional disadvantages of having two autistic children, another child who is pathologically lazy and a fat eccentric workaholic husband who spends too much time goldlisting or messing around on the internet and whose sentences structures are far too long.
Second off, I changed the fonts again today. This one’s called Eigerdals or something. I had FF Dax before. I put both Quoracy.com and Huliganov.TV on the same look just for simplicity and a kind of commonality, as it were, but in the end that’s pretty boring and whilst FF Dax is OK, I think that this is a bit more original looking. Probably it will have difficulties with some of the foreign diacritics and I’ll have to improvise. I hope everyone can read it ok, as one size up from this looks less good – the dot on the i runs into the stalk and makes it look like the hard i in Turkish. Your feedback more than welcome.
Third off, as you can see I’ve been doing a post a day for the last ten days or so. That is made easier now by the use of scheduling, so I have started using this feature to spread out the content more evenly, so that subscribers don’t get indundated with posts on a productive day and then nothing for weeks when I’m busy with other things. I would be adding unscheduled ones like this one is on top anyway, and also I’ll be monitoring and answering comments in the same way as I was doing before.
That’s basically it. Hope you enjoy these changes.
Related articles
- Grammar and the Goldlist (huliganov.tv)
- Our 2011 year in blogging quoracy.com (quoracy.com)
- Romanian Tax Alert Newsletter no 2 (quoracy.com)
Count von Weytzentrenner’s Oktoberfest appeal to North Korea
| Playout date: | 7 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | WMM |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | My wife |
| Genre: | Comedy |
| Music used: | A little “Lano Moje” in the intro |
| Languages used: | English, German |
| Animals featured: | None |
Oktoberfest is, for Germans, one of the most important dates in the Christian calendar, but while drinkning copious amounts of alcohol and swaying from side to side, spare a thought for the North Koreans, and their leader King John the second, who needs to give up his weapons testing. Count Sproey von Weytzentrenner has no truck with Communists, and is sure that King John of Korea feels likewise, and sings him “Born Free” in a hamster’s voice, accompanied on the beerstein.
Watching this I can’t help feeling a lot of reminiscence as it was only 5 years ago but still my wife was able to walk freely around the home without crutches. How fine she looks in this video.
Related articles
- Japan’s World Cup win over North Korea was a fixture with many sub-plots (worldsoccer.com)
- North Korea Launches First Cruise Ship (weirdasianews.com)
- In North Korea, Anxiety About ‘Markets’ (online.wsj.com)
- US sending aid to North Korea (sfgate.com)
- South Korea Will Allow Buddhists to Visit the North (nytimes.com)
Monty the ginger cat not reacting to Colonel Bogey
| Playout date: | 7 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Hemel Hempstead |
| Other people featured: | My wife and my dad |
| Genre: | Cat film |
| Music used: | A whistled version of Colonel Bogey (Creative commons) |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | Monty the ginger cat |
I used to be able to make my old cat come by whistling Colonel Bogey like this, but Monty was a one-man cat, and could only be summoned by my father. He was at first my sister’s cat, but when she started to live with her later husband, the cat needed a new home as like most young people these days he is an allergist for cats.
Unfortunately Monty passed away a couple of years back, having lived about 17 years, which is a ripe old age. His presence lives on a bit in the house in a way. I still go gingerly into the kitchen when the light is out from having needed to do so before in order not to walk into him.
Related articles
- Bus lane spy rakes in £20,000 a DAY (thesun.co.uk)
- My life partner (thesun.co.uk)
- Britain boasts 100,000 new millionaire homes (money.marksandspencer.com)
- Property Millionaire Hotspots Revealed (moneyexpert.com)
Spanish food
| Playout date: | 5 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Video by my friend Krzysztof |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Seafood restaurant in Madrid |
| Other people featured: | Adam Ciuhak, Ivan Mier Moran and his wife |
| Genre: | Food film |
| Music used: | None |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
A nice memory of a happy evening. Ivan kindly took us out to one of his favorite restaurants in Madrid. We had lovely fish dishes and finally this meat sizzling away on hot volcanic rock plates.
The Spanish know how to have fun. If something is fun, then they do it, and if it stops being fun then they stop, and do something else.
I only regret that right now I cannot recall the restaurant. I could for a good while but 5 years have elapsed and it is gone.
Related articles
- languages (bensaif.com)
- A Spanish Starbucks for Sandwiches (businessweek.com)
- Hot Clive Owen Has a Spicy Spanish Dinner With Guy Friends (popsugar.com)
- Famous Spanish restaurant El Bulli shuts, for now (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
If I loved you
| Playout date: | 5 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Intro’d song |
| Music used: | If I loved you, karaoke track |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
I decided to sing this because at the time of posting I didn’t really like any of the renditions I saw on YT. Since then I’m happy to say I’ve seen quite a few that I liked and which are certainly better than this. Hence not everyone likes the description to this song – the prevalance of dislikes to likes for this song is probably provoked a bit by my saying that I didn’t like the other ones, but what can I say? At the time it was a fair assessment!
ICMTSU: You just can’t make this stuff up.
I received the following mail which seems to be doing the rounds. It was funnier than the ones I’ve seen before so I thought I’d share (click on any image and it should take you to a place you can look at them one by one full-size and without overlapping):
Something to lighten the mood…
- image
- image1
- image2
- image3
- image4
- image5
- image6
- image7
- image8
- image9
- image10
- image11
- image12
- image13
- image14
- image15
- image16
- image17
- image18
- image19
- image20
Related articles
- The Story of Stuff (ficklefolly.wordpress.com)
- The bible’s old stuff is way funnier than the new stuff (thepunch.com.au)
- Clear As Mud. (doesitallmatter2.wordpress.com)
- stuff of legends (edinburghexchanges.wordpress.com)
- I Have Beans (embejoetc.wordpress.com)
Tattoos – your opinion
Has she improved herself or just ruined herself?
Today I would like just to canvas the opinion of people coming to this blog about tattoos. It seems to me that the fashion for wearing them is really growing, and yet tattoos seem to be like Marmite – you either love them or you hate them. In some cases people might like some discrete and unique body marking, others will accept tattoos no mater how extreme, the more the better, and then again there are those who don’t like any.
I am putting a poll together below that shows a range of attitudes to tattoos – it may not be a full spectrum of the way people react to them but please mark all the statements in the below that you would agree with about tattoos.
Anything more you would like to add, feel free to open up discussion in the comments.
Related articles
- Would You Get a Crafty Tattoo? (casasugar.com)
- Literary tattoos (lolablueblog.wordpress.com)
- [BONUS] Quoth The Tattoo (skulladay.blogspot.com)
- A Permanent Relationship With Words: Literary Tattoos (via Amanda Rudd’s Blog) (myjfashion.wordpress.com)
