The old ones are the best.

Newsthump did the Sonny and Cher/Sunni and Shia joke yesterday, which was quickly removed again from the main site but can still be viewed via Google Cache.

The last time I did this one was eight years ago.

"Family of murdered EastEnders actress demand answers over delay in finding bodies"

From The Evening Standard:

The family of murdered EastEnders star Sian Blake today asked why it took so long to discover the bodies of the actress and her two young children.

Police officers from the BBC found the remains of Ms Blake, 43, her sons Zachary, eight, and Amon, four, buried in the back garden of their bungalow in Weatherfield, yesterday, three weeks after they were reported missing.

A spokesman explained that it took time to obtain permission from the ITV to carry out a search at the location of the long-running soap opera Coronation Street.

Ms Blake’s partner Arthur Simpson-Kent, 48, is the focus of an inter-channel manhunt. He is believed to have fled to Channel 4 after he was questioned by police who visited their home and is currently filming a new series believed to be set in Ghana.

Media lawyers say the extradition proceedings will be protracted and do not expect Channel 4 to return Mr Simpson-Kent to the BBC for several months.

"Live well for less about the same"

Ooh the delicious irony of it:

BBC 22 December 2000:

Supermarket chain Sainsbury's has sold its Homebase DIY chain in a two-fold deal worth £969m. The arrangement will see its chain of stores sold to venture capitalist Schroder Ventures for £750m.

A further 28 sites, which were intended to house new Homebase stores, are being sold to Kingfisher, owner of DIY rival B&Q, for £219m...

Guardian 5 January 2016:

Sainsbury’s has made a £1bn move to buy Home Retail Group, the owner of Argos and Homebase, as it seeks to strengthen its business against the rise of the discounters and Amazon.

The supermarket group said it had made an approach to Home Retail in November, but its proposal was rejected last month...

For more of this pointless hilarity, see BT trying (but failing) to buy back O2:

BT (BT.L) has entered exclusive talks with the owners of EE for a potential 12.5 billion-pound acquisition deal to give the former UK state telecoms firm the top position in mobile as well as fixed line broadband services.

BT had been in competing talks with both the Spanish group Telefonica's (TEF.MC) rival mobile firm O2 and EE's owners, Orange (ORAN.PA) and Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), putting the 168-year-old fixed line firm in a strong position in negotiating for a return to the consumer mobile market after 13 years away...

A deal with Telefonica would have returned O2 to its original owner, as it was demerged from a heavily indebted BT via a share flotation in 2001 and subsequently bought by Telefonica in early 2006.

Well done everybody who guessed the oil price would be $40/barrel in December 2015.

The price of a barrel of crude oil had fallen from well over $100 in June 2014 to £70 at the start of December 2014, so I ran a Fun Online Poll in December 2014 with results as follows:

How low will the price of a barrel of oil fall over the next year?

$70 - 16%
$60 - 31%
$50 - 23%
$40 - 22%
$30 - 4%
$20 - 4%

So well done the 22% of people who went for $40, which is what it was last month!

As it happens, I voted $40, I explained why when I started the poll when price was still $70. Let's not get too technical about the different benchmark prices for different types of oil.

This was of course luck as much as anything - I would have been equally unsurprised if the price were now $140 again. It just strikes me that the inflation-adjusted price of oil hovered around $20 (in 2010 prices) for ninety years (1880 - 1970), which is presumably the average bare minimum extraction cost, and that it is reasonable to expect the price to fall back that low every so often. Everything above that is speculation and manipulation. $30 is probably the averaged out actual extraction costs nowadays, so $40 seemed like a reasonably floor to go for.

* If it were $140, the 'experts' would be queuing up to tell us why: tensions in the Middle East; drop off in supply from Libya, Syria and Iraq; the embargo on Iran; Russia-Ukraine pipeline disputes; North Sea oil running out; extraction costs going up.

And they would clearly be wrong, just the same as anybody can explain why the oil price is so low now. It is easy to explain why the oil price will fall back to extraction costs every so often - I just did. But it is impossible to say why it has happened now.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Evening Standard:

THE Government abuse of the word "affordable" knows no bounds. Describing starter homes, which will cost up to £450,000 in London, as affordable is not just dishonest, it actually damages the city's housing market.

It's easy to claim you're building a record number of affordable homes when you pretend that homes costing almost half a million are such.

Tom Copley, Labour's London Assembly housing spokesperson

Not the most original thought, but one that must be repeated every time the government talk about "affordable" housing. I'd consider something like £150,000 for a house or £100,000 for a nice flat to be at the upper limit of affordable, i.e. three times earnings.

And it's not like things were better when Labour were in charge (London Mayor until 2008; national government until 2010).

"Slowdown in Chinese manufacturing raises worries about basic numeracy skills"

From The Guardian:

Against the backdrop of a faltering global economy, turmoil in the country’s stock markets and overcapacity in factories, Chinese economic growth has slowed markedly. The country’s central bank expects growth in 2015 to be the slowest for a quarter of a century.

After growing 7.3% in 2014, the economy is thought to have expanded by 6.9% in 2015 and the central bank has forecast that it may slow further in 2016 to 6.8%.

A manufacturer who knows China well pointed out the fundamental fallacies in this to me. (Let's assume that the actual underlying figures and statistics are correct and not a figment of the Communist Party's imagination. They can fib about a couple of percent here or there, but you can't fake an economy quadrupling over ten or twenty years).

1. If an economy is growing, albeit more slowly, then it is still growing. It is not in any way "slowing"; growth of 6.9% is still double average annual compound growth of industrialised societies since the Industrial Revolution.

2. The Chinese economy has grown so quickly over the twenty years that 6.9% growth this year represents a larger absolute increase than 12.5% growth ten or fifteen years ago, to wit:

2000 - GDP per capita RMB 8,000, grows by RMB 1,000 to RMB 9,000 = 12.5% growth
2015 - GDP per capita RMB 45,000, grows by RMB 3,100 to RMB 48,100 = 6.9% growth.

So in absolute terms, the Chinese economy is growing three times as fast as it was fifteen years ago.

Fun Online Polls: Floods & Dry January

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What is the better way of minimising flood damage?

Scrap subsidies for upland deforestation and allow rivers to meander - 58%
Keep the subsidies, straighten rivers and keep dredging them - 42%

The correct answer is obviously 'both' i.e. upstream we should stop subsidising deforestation and allow rivers to meander (and reintroduce beavers); and downstream we should do more dredging, remembering always that dredging and straightening just shift the problem elsewhere (see Jubilee River and Wraysbury). In other words, if you increase the flow capacity of a river at any point (by dredging, widening or straightening), then you have to make sure that the flow capacity everywhere further downstream is at least as great.

But faced with the deliberately stark choice (basically George Monbiot vs agricultural landowners), the first option is the better one.
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This week's Fun Online Poll.

How will you respond to the new drinking guidelines?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Pubs prepare to be hit by 'normal' January as millions unlikely to give up alcohol for a month"

From The Daily Mail:

Pubs have described this month's proposed 'dry January' as 'fairly normal' for the industry, as none of the more than two million drinkers who signed up for a booze-free period are likely to stick to it for more than a few days.

The Dry January campaign has this year been backed by Public Health England, which has led to record numbers pledging to stave off alcohol for a month but only staving it off until next Friday.

While the empty pledges have been applauded by self-appointed 'health experts', it has not sent shockwaves through the licensed trade. Pubs say the 'dry January' is a 'load of bollocks'.

A spokesman for the British Pub and Beer Association said: "Half of New Year's Resolutions since the dawn of time were to give up drinking, so we're understandably not too bothered by this little stunt. They try it on every year, don't they?"

Good kitchen design (5)

Continuing my occasional series…

Image from here:


Today's topic is "doors or drawers" and which of those makes stuff easier to find. Clearly, for the eye level cabinets, you want doors or just shelves.

But for the cabinets under the work surface, you are far better off with drawers (the picture shows both). If you have doors, then you have to bend down and rummage around; they are not very well lit; and if there is something at the back, you have to remove the stuff from the front first.

Traditionally, you have a couple of drawers under the work surface for cutlery and gadgets, but the logic applies to everything else - ingredients and pots and pans etc. In the previous house we lived in, they had two large drawers next to the oven for storing pans, and although it seemed unusual at first, actually, it is a much better way of doing it.

Fun with conspiracy theorists

Instead of making themselves as inconspicuous as possible, the nutters (who overlap with Faux Libertarians to some degree) are making it easy for the Illuminati (or whichever shadowy organisation is ruling the world this week) to identify them by attaching these notices to their front doors:

What baffles is the notion that if a 'government agent' enters the premises, he has to pay a 'fine' of £100,000. The nutters also believe that the Illumaniti run the legal system as well, so surely they also believe that no court would ever enforce the 'fine'.