GRUMPY OLD MAN

On first glance this delicious full English breakfast appears to have come straight from the frying pan - but it’s actually a birthday cake, made by Paul James of Colchester,Essex.

(MailOnline)

RIP Mr Bean
False rumour of actor Rowan Atkinson's death

An internet hoax about the death of British actor Rowan Atkinson became the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter yesterday.

It was apparently sparked by a single post from a user based in the Philippines who wrote:

‘Fresh news from Britain, Rowan Sebastian Atkinson (A.K.A. Mr. Bean) passed away this evening.’

The rumour quickly spread around the globe and the hoax even briefly fooled internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which displayed Mr Atkinson’s date of death as 26 February, 2012 on his entry page.

Mr Atkinson is not the first global star to be the subject of a death hoax.

Owen Wilson, Charlie Sheen, Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy are among a growing list of stars to have been killed off in cyberspace.

They were all said to have been tragically killed in snowboarding accidents, according to rumours which have circulated around the internet in recent years.

(Based on a story in MailOnline)

It just shows the power of the internet and why we should not believe everything we read there.

A man is dining in a smart restaurant and notices a gorgeous redhead sitting at the next table. He has been looking at her since he sat down, but lacks the courage to talk to her.

Suddenly she sneezes and - her glass eye comes flying out of its socket towards him! He reflexively reaches out, grabs it out of the air, and hands it back.

'Oh dear, I am so sorry,' the woman says as she pops her eye back in place. 'Let me buy you dinner to make it up to you.'

They enjoy a wonderful meal together, and afterwards they go to the theatre, followed by drinks. They talk, they laugh, she shares her deepest dreams and he shares his.

After paying for everything, she asks him if he would like to go to her place for breakfast in the morning.

They had a wonderful, wonderful time.

The next morning, she cooks a marvellous breakfast. The guy is amazed. Everything had been SO incredible!

'You know,' he said, 'you are the perfect woman. Are you this nice to every guy you meet?'

'No,' she replies. . .

 

Wait for it. .

 

 

It's coming. .

 

 

The suspense is killing you, isn't it?

She says:

 

 

'You just happened to catch my eye.' !!!

On a beautiful summer's day, two English tourists were driving through Wales.

At Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogoch they stopped for lunch, and one of the tourists asked the very blonde Welsh waitress:

"Before we order, I wonder if you could settle an argument for us: Can you pronounce where we are, very, very, very slowly?"

The girl leaned over and said:

"Burrr.... Gurrr.... King."

Note: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a large village and community on the island of Anglesey in Wales, situated on the Menai Strait next to the Britannia Bridge and across the strait from Bangor. This village has the longest place name in Europe and one of the longest place names in the world.

It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years.

From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.

The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday's issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" of the United States.

"We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth's surface," the scientists said in the article.

Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

(Daily Telegraph)

The south east of England is now officially in a state of drought, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said today.

Some rivers and groundwater levels are lower than during the drought of 1976.

Across the country the dry rivers beds are being turned into new paths or play areas: (pictured above left) a woman walks her dog along the River Greta in County Durham, (centre) two boys play with a football In The River Lavant near Chichester in West Sussex, and (right) Simon Evans from Thames Water tracks a trickle of muddy water where the river Kennet usually flows west of Marlborough.

People are being urged to cut down on the amount of water they use, from taking four-minute showers which they can clock using egg-timers being posted to households and turning off the tap while brushing teeth.

Some rivers and groundwater levels are now lower than they were during the drought of 1976 and householders are being urged by water firms to cut down on the amount of water they use, even suggesting taking an egg-timer into the bathroom while showering.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103809/UK-drought-2012-Water-companies-say-mustnt-spend-FOUR-minutes-shower.html

As Britain shivers forecasters say temperatures will soar to 17C later in the week.

As chilly Arctic winds set the mercury plunging and snow settled on the ground across the country, it felt for many like the freezing weather was back with a vengeance over the weekend.

But nothing is that predictable with the English weather. Temperatures are set to rise as high as 17c (63f) this week, ten degrees warmer than the average for this time of year, as gusts from the south blow away the cold snap.

The milder conditions will be welcome after a white weekend in parts of Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, the Pennines and North Wales.

Forecasters said that winds ‘direct from the Arctic’ had delivered the most severe windchill of the winter. Drivers battled icy roads and there was widespread frost.

But the chill is set to lift this week. Tom Tobler, MeteoGroup forecaster, said: ‘It turns much milder from Monday for the whole of the UK, due to south-westerly winds from around the Azores.

'Tuesday will be milder still, with very mild air on Wednesday and, by Thursday, much of England seeing 13c (55f) to 16c (61f) temperatures, with 17c (63f) possible.

(From Mail Online)

I am taking a few days away from the computer.

See you again soon!

A woman who said thieves stole her 52-inch television was caught out when police measured her window - and discovered it would not have fit through.

The television, which the woman said cost £1,200, was found hidden under her bed at the home in Paignton, Devon.

She had claimed that burglars had broken in and taken it out of a window - but when police measured the opening, they found it would have been too narrow for the TV.

They then obtained a search warrant and located the 'missing' item, still in the house.

The woman, who is in her forties, was fined £80 for wasting police time but was not charged with perverting the course of justice, reported the Daily Telegraph.

Victorian desserts make a glorious comeback as Brits turn to comfort food in hard times

British bakers are turning to Victorian desserts in a bid to banish money worries.

Spotted dick, Bakewell tart and steamed treacle puds are all leading a remarkable revival that comes during the bicentenary of the birth of the period's eminent author Charles Dickens.

Experts say the renaissance of vintage favourites, which also includes coconut pudding, Eve's pudding and Bramley apple tart, points at people turning to comfort food during uncertain times.

Food historian Caroline Yeldham said Victorian puddings went out of fashion in the 1920s and 1930s because of the time it took to make them.

However, if you don't like making your own, you can always open a can.

P.S. Spotted dick is a British steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit (usually currants) commonly served with custard. Spotted refers to the dried fruit (which resemble spots) and dick may be a contraction or corruption of the word pudding (from the last syllable) or possibly a corruption of the word dough or dog, as "spotted dog" is another name for the same dish with the use of plums rather than currants. Another explanation offered for the word "dick" is that it comes from the German word for "thick" or dick. (Wiki)

(Based on an article in MailOnline)

India’s Finance Minister has said that his country “does not require” British aid of £280 million a year, describing it as “peanuts”.

Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money.

The disclosure will fuel the rising controversy over Britain’s aid to India.

The country is the world’s top recipient of British bilateral aid, even though its economy has been growing at up to 10 per cent a year and is projected to become bigger than Britain’s within a decade.

Last week India rejected the British-built Typhoon jet as preferred candidate for a £6.3 billion warplane deal, despite the Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, saying that Britain’s aid to Delhi was partly “about seeking to sell Typhoon.”

“We do not require the aid,” he said, according to the official transcript of the session.

“It is a peanut in our total development exercises [expenditure].” He said the Indian government wanted to “voluntarily” give it up.

But officials at DFID, Britain’s Department for International Development, told the Indians that cancelling the programme would cause “grave political embarrassment” to Britain, according to sources in Delhi.

DFID has sent more than £1 billion of UK taxpayers’ money to India in the last five years and is planning to spend a further £600 million on Indian aid by 2015.

Amid steep reductions in most British government spending, the NHS and foreign aid have been the only two budgets protected from cuts.

Britain currently pays India around £280 million a year, six times the amount given by the second-largest bilateral donor, the United States. Almost three-quarters of all foreign bilateral aid going to India comes from Britain. France, chosen as favourite to land the warplane deal, gives around £19 million a year.

Controversial British projects have included giving the city of Bhopal £118,000 to help fit its municipal buses and dustcarts with GPS satellite tracking systems. Bhopal’s buses got satellite tracking before most of Britain’s did.

In India, meanwhile, government audit reports found £70 million had disappeared from one DFID-funded project alone.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent on delivering more than 7,000 televisions to schools — most of which did not have electricity. Few of the televisions ever arrived. A further £44,000 of British aid was allegedly siphoned off by one project official to finance a movie directed by her son.

Most aid donors to India have wound down their programmes as it has become officially a “middle-income country,” according to the World Bank.

However, Britain has reallocated its aid spending to focus on India at the expense of some far poorer countries, including the African state of Burundi, which is having its British bilateral aid stopped altogether from next year.

The decision comes even though India has a £6 billion space programme, nuclear weapons and has started a substantial foreign aid programme of its own. It now gives out only slightly less in bilateral aid to other countries than it receives from Western donors.

Supporters of British aid say that India still contains about a third of the world’s poor, with 450 million people living on less than 80p a day. DFID says its programmes — which are now focused on the country’s three poorest states - save at least 17,000 lives a year and have lifted 2.3 million people out of poverty since 2005.

The junior development minister, Alan Duncan, said last week that cutting off British aid to India “would mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, will die who otherwise could live.”

(Abridged from an article in The Telegraph)

Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997.

Britain's Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree, according to the London Daily Mail, that Planet Earth could even be heading for an icy patch “to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the [frozen-over] Thames in the 17th century.” They call this Cycle 25.

The report of the findings in Old Blighty follows an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 eminent scientists, including both physicists and other climate researchers, that the panic promoted over global warming is not now, and never has been, shared by “large numbers of scientists, many very prominent.”

The number of these “heretics” is growing, and “the reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.” The chief among these “stubborn scientific facts” is that the global warming scare was bunk from the beginning, promoted by high priests of the great god Science, not actual scientists in pursuit of secular knowledge. (Think Al Gore.)

“Why is there so much passion about global warming,” these 16 eminent scientists asked, “and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society … refused the seemingly reasonable request by so many of its members to remove the word ‘incontrovertible’ from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question of ‘cui bono?’ Or the modern update, ‘follow the money.’ “

The rising temperatures which led some researchers to panic, like frightened teenage girls fretting over prom dates, actually began to subside when sunspot activity began to subside. According to this new research, sunspot numbers are less than half of those recorded during the cycle peaks when scientific hysteria was at its wildest at the end of the 20th century. The sun is moving now toward a “grand minimum” of sunspot activity, which would threaten cooler summers, colder winters and shorter growing seasons. It’s all part of the natural cycle of something the rest of us call “nature.”

Sunspots appear to be the villains. Since the sun is beyond the control of scientists, this makes their hair hurt and teeth itch. Scientists at the Met Office, which concedes that global warming has subsided, nevertheless argue still that the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide (or cow-made, since bovine flatulence has been cited as contributing to climate change). “Our findings,” says the Met Office, “suggest [that] a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.”

This frustrates cooler heads in the Church of Science. Says Henrik Svensmark, director of Denmark’s sun-climate research: “It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.”

The Met Office, like most of the global-warmist strongholds, relies on computer models for emanations of the penumbras of doom. These models did not foresee the pause in global warming, but the Met insists the models are still valid. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, regarded as one of the most eminent American climate scholars, finds the prediction of a “negligible” impact of sunspot activity on climate difficult to understand.

“The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,” she told the Mail. She thinks it more likely that the rising and falling of the temperature of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have more influence on climate than man-made carbon dioxide.

“If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015,” says Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, “it will start to become clear that the models are bunk.” Heavy-breathing humans and flatulent cows will be off the hook, and a lot of scam artists will be pushed away from the public trough and on the street looking for work.

A prayer giving thanks for the reign of the Queen has been released by the Church of England to mark her 60 years on the throne.

The Diamond Jubilee Prayer, written at the Queen's direction by the chapter of St Paul's Cathedral, will be used at the Jubilee Thanksgiving Service on June 5th in St Paul's as well as at other events throughout the year.

The Church of England said the prayer was commended for use by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York throughout all its parishes.

(MailOnline)