Saturday, July 28, 2012

Whistle by Flo Rida.


This song gets a lot of airplay on the radio and it is a real catchy tune. I like the song and I tend to sing along to it. But now I wonder if it is at all innocent? Is Flo Rida singing about a harmless whistle or is he really singing about oral sex and a blow job? Read the lyrics because they make me wonder and I think Flo Rida is a cheeky chappie!

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go

I'm betting you like bebop
And i'm betting you love creep mode
And i'm betting you like girls that give love to girls
And stroke your little ego
I bet i'm guilty your honor
But that's how we live in my genre
When in hell I pay rottweiler
There's only one flo, and one rida
I'm a damn shame
Order more champagne, pull it down hellstream
Tryna put it on ya
Bet your lips spin back around corner
Slow it down baby take a little longer

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go

Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whistle baby, whistle baby

It's like everywhere I go
My whistle ready to blow
Shorty don't leave a note
She can get any by the low
Permission not approved
It's okay, it's under control
Show me soprano, cause girl you can handle
Baby we start snagging, you come in part clothes
Girl i'm losing wing, my bucatti the same road
Show me your perfect pitch,
You got it my banjo
Talented with your lips, like you blew out candles
So amusing, now you can make a whistle with the music
Hope you ain't got no issue, you can do it
Give me the perfect picture, never lose it

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go

Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whistle baby, whistle baby

Go girl you can work it
Let me see your whistle while you work it
I'mma lay it back, don't stop it
Cause I love it how you drop it, drop it, drop it, on me
Now, shorty let that whistle blow
Yeah, baby let that whistle blow

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Let me know
Girl I'm gonna show you how to do it
And we start real slow
You just put your lips together
And you come real close
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby
Here we go

Whistle baby, whistle baby,
Whistle baby, whistle baby

Friday, July 27, 2012

Is The London Olympics The Next 9/11?


This is a very short story written in 2012 and is available as a small Amazon Kindle eBook of just 104 KB. It is a tale of conspiracy written in the style of an investigative journalist who remains anonymous. This report is nicely pitched and answers the problems of the recruitment of new security guards by G4S and the deployment of the army to make up the numbers. You can view this book as satire but the author does have a point to make.

Look at what is going on in the setting up of security before the games and ask yourself the question why? Are security guards so hard to recruit and train? Is our government not telling us something and will G4S become the scapegoat? Or is this short story written by a disgruntled employee?

Reading this before the Olympics start makes you wonder. It is an amusing story and well worth a read. I downloaded it for FREE shortly after it was released but today's price is £2.67 - quite a lot for a 104 KB eBook. I vote this short story a HIT simply for making people think. Can this be true? Time will tell.

Bring on the games!


Friday, July 20, 2012

Victim Six by Gregg Olsen .


Victim Six is a regular serial killer crime thriller novel. It is set in America and follows the work of 2 police officers and 1 journalist on the chase of the killer. They have to identify the killer and find him before another victim is found. This book is an entertaining read and is one of the better crime thrillers at the bookstore. The story develops the moods of a diverse character set and it is a very modern and up to date tale. This novel is a good mix of forensics, police procedure, small town journalism and adult emotions. This story is well written and you understand the motives of the killer and the terror of his victims...

Her last thoughts were the darkest that had ever gone through her mind. I hope he only rapes me. Yes, only rapes me. Her wits were nearly gone, but she knew the ridiculousness of her thoughts. She had a friend who’d been raped in a restaurant parking lot. It was nothing to wish for, but in that moment it was the only hope that she had. She wanted to live...

“He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”...

“This is far more than torture,” she said, locking her eyes on Kendall. “Victim’s areolae on both breasts have been excised,” she said...

“Good isn’t what I want or need. I like my women a little on the rough side, bitch. You know, sweet like a soft cookie, but with the crunch of nuts inside.” He let out a laugh.

...The killer is clearly a sadist, which spices the story up a little. The story develops at a good pace and everything slots together. The chosen title of this book is misleading and a bad choice. You know from the start, when nobody has been murdered, that there will be six victims. You also read the actions and thoughts of the killer throughout the story, so you already know who his is. The ending is poor but the journey you have travelled has been a good one.

Victim Six was written in 2010 and I bought the Kindle eBook which is a 663 KB file. It is a good book and I shall vote it 4 stars on Goodreads . Whenever I see a mobile home parked in someone's garden, I will always wonder if it is another "fun house".


Thursday, July 19, 2012

New duties at work.


We have another new roster that started this week down on the farm. The old roster basically had 22 duties spread over 32 weeks. This new roster is slightly larger with 24 duties spread over 34 weeks. This is because we have 2 new duties running a late night service to Gatwick Airport.

The big problem with this roster is the same as the old roster. There is NO PATTERN. All the duties are jumbled together without any sense of progression.  There was an opportunity to compile a roster that would flow in a natural way in line with drivers body rhythmns. This opportunity has been lost and we have been given this hodge podge of a roster.

In the rostered 34 weeks there are 12 lines which involve a single rest day to fulfill the weekly rest requirement. This is perfectly legal but still a bad show as I prefer 2 consecutive rest days for my weekly rest period. There is no pattern to the sequence of rest days. Fifteen years ago we had a roster where all the rest days went in a strict repeating sequence. There are also 9 lines where you work the maximum 6 consecutive days before a weekly rest period. Some of these shifts are rather long and our drivers can get very jaded and short tempered on their 6th day.

On the plus side there are 6 lines where you get 3 consecutive rest days together. There is one small pattern which is a conscession to common sense. There are 2 long duties to Gatwick Airport and what our line manager has done is make a trio of late shifts. Day 1 starts at 14.30 and finishes the next day at 04.00 - day 2 starts later that day at 16.15 finishing at 05.15 the next day - day 3 starts later that day at 16.15 and finishes at 01.50 the next day. Because of the late finishes on these 3 duties there may not have been another option but to string them together. This is the only pattern in the whole roster. All the other duties appear on the roster at random.

We will be working around the clock as 2 duties start at 03.00 and 1 duty at 03.15 every day. So with a first start of 03.00 and a last finish of 05.15 this is truly a 24/7 operation. Of course the nationwide company drones on about how concerned it is about public and road safety by fitting alcohol breathtesting locking devices. These devices stop the driver starting the engine if his alcohol breath sample is anything other than zero. These devices do not measure driver fatigue that can be caused by a badly compiled work roster. They had the chance but management just cobbled together this nasty roster. We do not come down the farm at 08.00 and have every weekend off but have to accept a roster we had not chance of compiling ourselves.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Barney gets his hair cut.


We took our pet dog to get his hair cut yesterday. Barney is a 12 year old Jack Russell - Lakeland Terrier crossbreed and we took him to the Best Friends Grooming Parlour, 6, Camms Corner, Dinas Powys, South Glamorgan CF64 4QY - Tel: 029 2002 0352.

We have taken him there before to have his hair cut and the service yesterday was just the same, first rate. Barney looks so much younger when he has had his hair cut. They do a lovely close cut that brings out the Jack Russell in him and it is well worth the £30 we paid.


Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Magical Maze: Seeing the World Through Mathematical Eyes by Ian Stewart .


This book was written in 1997 and I downloaded a free copy onto my Kindle although it is no longer available on Amazon for some reason. The book uses the metaphor of a maze to explore how our world is related to mathematics. It is not a text book on pure mathematics but an easy read on applied mathematics - how our world follows mathematical rules. It does explain the beauty of mathematics and is very easy to understand. The aim of this book is clear.

Ian leads the reader through a number of problems that make you think. All becomes clear and you then understand how those magic tricks of guessing numbers actually work.

• Think of a number.
• Add ten. Double the result. Subtract six.
• Divide by two. Take away the number you first thought of.
• The answer is seven. Always.

The ancient Tower of Bramah puzzle is worked through by first looking at the smaller Tower of Hanoi puzzle. The process you use is the same and leads to the mathematical motto of "think first, calculate later".

Have you noticed that when you get a big group of people, a couple share the same birthday? Yes, if the group is greater than 23, you will get 2 people whose birthdays match. Why is this when there are 365 days in the year and the group is as small as 23? Ian explains the mathematics behind it and states "Amazing. I know how to calculate it, and I still have difficulty  believing it. But it's true. Try it at parties with over 23 people. Take bets.  In the long run, you'll win. At big parties you'll win easily".

There is a good section that deals with conditional probabilities and what game show contestants should consider to double their chances of winning the prize. This calculation fooled a lot of educated people who should know better! The contestant has 3 choices hidden behind closed doors. One door hides a car, the other two hide goats. I will not spoil the answer for you as this tale shows how conditional probabilities are not especially intuitive.

Ian explains why all coastlines look the same, which is strange when the structures appear so random. Chaos is not as random and you first think because coastlines are 'statistically  self-similar'. The same mathematics applies to vegetables like broccoli.

Ian does show the beauty of mathematics in everyday life but he does go into extreme detail and history. Ian does not give any conscise answers and fills his book with tons of background from mathematicians who are long gone and dead. Ian is an expert in his field and can get his message across but it is a long journey.

93% of this Kindle eBook is the content of his work but the last 7% is references he has referred to earlier. The average reader will not need to know his sources so that they can check them, you can take them in good faith. I feel that this book has not covered an awful lot of ground but the small ground it has covered has been drilled to death. The reading pleasure I got from this book was poor as the number of mathematical issues covered was small. I did not like the employment of the maze metaphor as the detailed description of hedges, walls etc had little to do with mathematics and just padded the book out wasting the readers time.

I really enjoy applied mathematics but this book was a disappointment. It was not a good daily read and although Ian maybe a good teacher of mathematics, he is not a good author. I did not like the way this book was written. I did not like it's structure, the way Ian waffled on about mathematicians who were dead and gone. I really hated his stupid idea of a maze that the reader had to travel through. It was not an entertaining read and therefore failed as a book. This is all a shame as I had seen a programme on television some time ago about numbers and I am sure it was Ian Stewart who presented it. That television programme I really enjoyed as it showed how our world revolves around mathematical rules. I was glued to the television series and thought it was a hit. But this book is poor and I shall only vote it 2 stars on Goodreads .


Friday, July 06, 2012

Announcement 13.


Following the success of the Coach Driver's onboard announcement guide, I now have the pleasure of posting an update with an additional announcement...

The effect of driver announcements in the real world (to be done when stationary) Announcement 13.

Step 1 - Bring your coach to a stop. Apply the parking brake and select neutral. Press the front door and luggage hold open buttons. Take a deep breath.

Step 2 - You must make the following P.A. announcement:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have now arrived at (stop name)

If you are leaving the service here, please make sure you take all your personal belongings with you.

If you have luggage in the hold, please wait to the side of the coach while I unload it.

Thank you for choosing the nationwide company and have a pleasant onward journey."

Step 3 - Switch off the microphone, unfasten your seat belt and leave the driving seat. Walk off the coach and discover that all the passengers have ignored your announcement and helped themselves to the luggage. Press the luggage door close button and be content that although nobody listens to your announcement, the passengers have unloaded the luggage and your operator will not be charged a 5% penalty on the whole diagram because a driver did not make an announcement, word for word, from the guide.


 ...Of course, readers of this blog must be aware that there are 2 nationwide companies operating express coach services around our country. I do not think that the other nationwide company has a Coach Driver onboard announcement guide following yesterday's drama on the M6 Toll Road in Staffordshire...


On the M6 toll road, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, the kind of public alertness that anti-terrorist investigators encourage led to the evacuation of 48 passengers from a coach and the closure of the motorway for seven hours, when a concerned passenger apparently mistook a fake, electronic cigarette that gave off a vapour for a bomb.


In Staffordshire the police defended their response to the alert by a passenger on board a Megabus coach run by Stagecoach, which was on its way from Preston to Victoria station in London. The alarm was raised when a passenger saw an individual, described as of Asian appearance, pouring what they believed was liquid into a bag that was emitting vapours, the police said. The passenger alerted the driver, who called the police around 8.20am.

A full multi-agency response was put into motion, with an army bomb disposal team, a chemical and biological weapons team, armed police, counter-terrorism officers, ambulance and fire crews, called to the scene at Weeford, near Lichfield. Passengers were evacuated one by one from the coach. Drivers caught in the traffic jam as emergency services blocked the road in front of them were told by police to shut their car windows and not to use the air conditioning.

After arriving at Victoria coach station in London on a replacement bus last night, one of the passengers, student Vermilion Von Kangur, said she had feared for her life as armed police swooped around the coach. "Some people thought there was a bomb on the bus, some people thought it was going to explode," the 20-year-old said. "Some people thought the bus had broken down, or that there was a prisoner on board. I was scared."

She said everyone on board was made to leave it one by one at 10-minute intervals with their hands visible, as officers looked on with their guns poised. "My legs were like jelly, I couldn't walk," she said. "I felt very intimidated. I thought if I moved I would get shot."

She said passengers were not given any information about what had happened after the coach pulled over without warning at around 8.30am. She said: "The driver was talking to police but they weren't saying anything to us. People thought they were going to die. They were calling their families.

"People didn't know what was going on so we only had to use our imaginations and picture the worst."

Staffordshire police said they acted after a "genuinely concerned" member of the public mistook the vapour from an electronic cigarette – used by smokers to circumvent the ban on smoking on public transport – for something more sinister.

...So, that is what happens when a driver does not make an announcement and passengers wonder if the Police will shoot them on sight. Very frightening indeed. Look forward to the Olympics everyone as things could get a lot worse!

Monday, July 02, 2012

The Christening.

Okay folks, it is family time on Natural Yogurt. Readers by now will know that I am an Atheist but yesterday I was press-ganged into a church. Oliver was being Christened at the Church of the Resurrection, just down the road from us along the Grand Avenue in Ely, Cardiff. There were 2 children being Christened yesterday but we did not know the other family at the church. The Church of the Resurrection is a branch of the Church in Wales but this blog post is not about the differences in the liturgy between Anglicans , I will leave that to my dad.

What affected me was the patience of the Priest conducting his service. Here he was doing his day job in front of a group of strangers. These people were not Christians but people who had come along to see Oliver and another child "get done". These people were not members of his church but consumers of a service. These people would not normally dress like this on a Sunday morning but appeared to be dressed for a court appearance to support the defendant. These people would not be there next week unless it was a funeral or a wedding of someone close to them.

In my day job driving coaches, passengers ignore announcements on the microphone and the CD player. The passengers do not control their noisy and badly behaved children. Passengers drone on and on into mobile telephones. At night you can get distracted by camera flashes.

The Priest has the very same problems in his day job. He started his service by pleading with anyone who would listen, to switch off their mobile telephones and not take photographs until the end. His attitude to children was different as he said it was okay for them to be noisy and run around.

We then had the very short Christening service that followed a laminated 2 side of A4 paper sheet. Yes, the children were noisy and the adults chatted amongst themselves. I was not aware of any telephone use or camera flashes but the adults were clearly not paying much attention. It looked more like a large queue at McDonalds and the adults slowly making their way to the counter.

At the end I felt rather sad for the Priest. Here was a crowd of people who had come along simply to get a child "done" - like a vaccination at the doctors. There seemed no respect for his religion from the crowd and he may as well have treated his service as an audition for the X Factor and sang a hymn. I am an Atheist but still feel offended that this crowd of people abused his religion just to get their child "done". This was a show for the parents and the children did not ask to be Christened. This cheapens religion no matter which religion, if any, you practice. I went to the Christening because it was a family thing and I was expected to go. The Priest was there because it was his day job. The Priest is a very patient man and I know how he feels when he speaks and knows he may as well be speaking to a brick wall.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

More chicken abuse.

We read many tales about the bad treatment of chickens in our food chain. People want cheap food and as businesses cut costs, chickens are reared in worse conditions. But the cost cutting in the name of profit does not stop there. People serving hot take away chicken are now living and working in worse conditions. Take away shops in East London are ignoring the national minimum wage and as Newham council found "We came across one chicken shop where the pay was £1 an hour. To be fair, they gave the workers some free accommodation – a mattress at the back of the shop, with three of them taking turns on it."

It is a long story but certainly worth a read. A lot of people will be paying big money to attend the Olympics in East London oblivious to the squalor going on in nearby take away shops. These staff are very cagey about their lack of pay and awful living conditions but know to the penny the cost of their chicken meal deals.

Welcome to the other side of London where the Olympics are not the only games being played. There is a cat and mouse game being played among businesses, councils and illegal immigrants that is being ignored by the public as they stumble into these take away shops offering what appears to be cheap food. Now we know why it is so damn cheap, not only are the chickens probably badly treated but the staff are valued like pigeons.

What value are pigeons in London? They are scum, dirty creatures and should not be encouraged. Why some people can actually fancy pigeons is beyond me but then the same goes for those nasty take away chicken shops.

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