Nick Ferrari, a UK radio talk show host, wondered if Carole Middleton was dressing appropriately for her age (58 yrs)

This picture made the newspapers because writers felt that, at 58, she was too old to be wearing clothes like that. So Nick Ferrari wants to know: Is Carole Middleton too old to be racy and lacy?

Nick Ferrari is 53….

Pic h/t Splash   Contact Music

As a man maybe I should be outraged by this and calling it a “sexist slur”…..but I have to confess it does have a slight ring of truth…..

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!

At the end of WW2 my dad was demobbed from the army after nearly five years of service. Finishing up as a sergeant he was offered the chance of a commission if he stayed but, like most men of his time he’d had enough of military life and chose to return to civvie street.

Before the war he had worked in a grocer’s shop but, instead of returning to slicing bacon he decided to get a job on the buses working for London Transport. After a brief spell as a conductor he finally qualified as a driver, operating mainly from garages in South London.

London Transport was a closed shop which meant that drivers and conductors had to be members of the powerful Transport and General Workers Union – the TGWU. He’d never been in  a union before so began to attend meetings in the garage.

The first thing that puzzled him was the size of the meetings. In a garage that employed several hundred staff attendance rarely went above a dozen – including the three officials who chaired the meeting. As a new boy he kept quiet for a while until at one meeting most of the agenda was taken up with a motion congratulating the Communist governments of Poland and Hungary for their success in establishing a true workers democracy.

Seeing that those governments were really just puppet regimes imposed by the occupying Russian armies my dad not only voted against the motion but voiced his concern that the meeting was claiming to be the voice of several hundred when in fact only a handful ever intended.

He was immediately marked out as a troublemaker. He found himself placed on awkward shifts and the most difficult routes by a management that was intimidated by the union. He stopped going to union meetings and began to resent the weekly event on pay day when staff had to line up at the union table to pay their compulsory dues. Being short of temper and not easily intimidated he used to throw the money onto the table and declare, in a loud voice “ Here’s your blood money”

Things came to a head when the TGWU called a 24 hour bus strike to start at noon on a certain day. Dad’s bus was about ten minutes from the garage when his conductor rang the bell and told the passengers to get off. Several of them started arguing, pointing out they had already paid the fare to the end of the route.

Dad got out of his cab to find out what was going on. When the conductor said she was pitching the passengers off because it was time for the strike to start my dad told them to stay and he would finish the route. When they reached the garage all the passengers got off and came round to shake his hand.

Nothing more was said that day but, when the strike was over and dad went to collect his bike at the end of his shift to cycle home he discovered about half a dozen people around his bike which was on the floor, bent and broken. One of the union men, scarcely able to suppress a grin said that it had been “accidently” run over by a bus being moved around the garage.

Since his was the only bike damaged and it was in an area where buses didn’t usually turn he quickly got the picture. It was a punishment for breaking union solidarity.

He didn’t say anything, just left and carried the bike home.

At the beginning of his next shift he arrived early and went to the union office and found the TGWU rep.  “About my bike” he said and seized the man by the arms and pushed him up against the wall

“Each time any little “accident” happens again” he said “I’ll come round and punch you on the nose”

At the end of his shift he fully expected to be hauled in by the boss and/or the police but nothing happened and, oddly enough, there never were any more “accidents”……

So the great Xi Jinping taxi story (new President of China jumps into a cab to show he’s just an ordinary bloke) proved to be a hoax…..

Red faced media big cheeses in China issued grovelling apologies and, natch, airbrushed the original story from their sites.

But one of the reasons the hoax gained legs was because it sounded exactly like the type of fairy story fantasy “man of the people” pumped out by the agitprop churners of every party based dictatorship.

Beloved Leader “suddenly” decides to leave office, go out onto the street and hail a taxi. A few minutes later the cab deposits said leader outside his humble abode where Mrs Leader is in the midst of cooking noodles…..and, astonishingly, media hacks are present throughout the whole journey.

Fact is these characters are as distant from the great unwashed as any medieval monarch. China, Cuba, North Korea and the jolly old USSR – any communist regime – is based on dynastic rivalries not on any truly democratic process. The party is a divine vanguard whose members know the needs of ordinary people much better than the ordinary people themselves. But, because they claim to rule in the name of the masses, unlike a medieval king whose power came from a hotline to heaven, They have to pretend to be “just like us”…..

Maybe next time his PR guys should suggest a swim……

Our new ruling class?

Please pass me that metal bucket – I just need to put it over my head and bang it with a hammer for eight hours…

un•kempt
/ˌənˈkem(p)t/
Adjective
(esp. of a person) Having an untidy or disheveled appearance.

Synonyms
disheveled – dishevelled – untidy – slovenly – scruffy

No wonder the police as an institution have become increasingly regarded as an ineffective, inefficient bunch of jobsworths – unfairly in my opinion because the majority of officers do a hard and often thankless task remarkably well considering the restrictions imposed on their actions by “political correctness”. But you do wonder, sometimes, if some senior officers undermine the reputation of the troops on the ground by their unwillingness to use discretion in cases of “political correctness”

Recently a conservative MP was the subject of a lengthy investigation by Sussex Police for the ultimate 21st century sin – racism. The Race Card was played by a man who claimed that the MP had described him as “unkempt” – thus demeaning his “gypsy” heritage.

In an email to Mr Loughton complaining of his treatment by the authority, Mr Francis said he was insultingly described in an official council document as unkempt, although he bathed regularly.
But Mr Loughton wrote back: ‘As regards the specific whinge about being described as “unkempt”, given the meaning of the word as “untrimmed, dishevelled and rough” it strikes me as eminently accurate.’
The MP, who describes Mr Francis as a ‘serial complainer’ and his most problematic constituent, added that the complaint was ‘another example of the whingeing, self-serving, poisonous b******s that seem to have become your hallmark’

After several months the investigation, which probably cost £100.000 did not lead to a prosecution and was filed for no action. Strange, is it not, that in this case the police claimed they had no option but to pursue the matter but could quite happily use their discretion and not pursue the matter of 1,000 suspicious deaths at Mid Staffs Hospital…..

Whenever we grind to a halt as a result of a bit of snow and we see all those motoring slithering about because they expect to be able to drive as if it’s a sunny day in August I always think of this Teeside bus driver giving us a masterclass in how to handle a vehicle in icy conditions….

So, within a few hours the long saga of the US Presidential election will be over. Compared to our own bursts of six week frenetic electioneering, the American process is a long drawn out affair which began in the early autumn of 2011 when Republican hopefuls started throwing their hats into the ring.

I have never been a great fan of Mitt Romney. He has a well deserved reputation for shifting his political stances according to prevailing winds and he always distanced himself from the Tea Party revolution that emerged, unbidden, from the wreckage of the 2006 and 2008 GOP defeats.

His problem with many conservative Republicans, at present submerged beneath the soundbites and overblown rhetoric of whistlestop campaigning, is that once in the White House he would revert to type and pursue a don’t rock the boat, steady as she goes establishment pleasing Bush style governance that would kick the can of America’s dysfunctional indebtedness further down the road for Willow Palin’s generation to sort out.

Nevertheless, since the alternative is allowing Obama and his seedy gang of hacks an opportunity to set in concrete their goal of turning America into John Lennon Imagine World, it seems to me that Romney is the least worst alternative.

The other solid reason for enjoying a Romney victory would be the delights of relishing the deflated balloons at the BBC which, throughout the campaign, has scarcely deigned, via the wretched duo of Mark Mardell and Jonny Dymond, to conceal a sneering disregard for the views of flyover USA. Throw in the tears of Obama’s wealthy groupies in Hollywood and his mainstream media palace guard and it would be a repeat of that glorious November in 2004 when GWB confounded the elite and won his second term fair and square with the bonus of congressional control.

Unfortunately the GOP establishment threw that magnificent moment away in subsequent years. Would Romney do the same?

Perhaps.

But remember, during Bush’s second term, there was no figure who symbolised the spirit of conservative resistance. With President Romney he and his advisers would always be aware of the presence of Sarah Palin, always ready with a red hot poker near the presidential derriere to keep him on the straight and narrow……

If the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the newly elected Barack Obama was a sick joke the news that this year’s prize is going to the EU reduces the selection process to the level of a meaningless farce. This bureaucratic monstrosity, steeped in corruption and nepotism, subject to no democratic oversight and run by a bunch of second rate jobsworths has no foreign policy credentials and lacks any military capability

“The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,”

This was the justification that the secretive cabal of Norwegian grandees offered to a bemused world. Perhaps they hired a North Korean hack to compose it for such a Pravdaesque concoction of sycophantic untruths could only be cobbled together by someone well practised in the art of purveying the most audacious of lies with a completely straight face.

That Europe became a continent of peace had nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with NATO – but rest assured the airbrushing out of inconvenient facts is already under way…