Badgering the badgers

There are many things in this life which conjure up the most bizarre images, William Hague’s recent Parliamentary reference to Gordon Brown in his Speedos being one of the more unpalatable ones.
But the announcement that the Government is to tackle the spread of bovine TB by inoculating badgers is just a scream.
Presumably officials will retrieve, from a data base they have not yet lost, the names and addresses of every badger in the country and send each one of them a letter giving them a day, time and place for an appointment.
The badgers will then form a long, cute black and white stripy queue to see the nurse, who will ask them to roll up the fur on a front leg so she can administer the injection.
Ah, I hear you cry, but what about that hard core who ignore the letters, eschew the idea that they are carriers, or may have moved house?
The Government has a Plan B. They will set traps for these unwary types and give them a jab in the bum (flaws, there are a few, but then again, too many to mention).
And for those who shy away from needles or swoon at the very thought?
Why, Plan C, of course. Oral vaccination. Ha! Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
So if you go down to the woods today and come across discarded syringes or little plastic cups scattered around, think not ill of our younger generation but rather smile knowingly and remember that we are paying these goons to dream up this garbage.
And if you meet a cow with TB, tell her it’s her own fault.

WARNING: Do not read this

This blog may be short. It may even never appear. In fact, I may well have wasted my time writing it.
In another fact, if you cannot see or read this, let me know at once and I shall alert some technical type.
Yep, as you may have guessed, its new software (or something) time at Chronicle Towers, although we were assured that it was only a minor upgrade.
There is a word to describe “minor upgrade” but because children under 12 may be reading this I am apparently not allowed to say “bo**ocks” so I’ll have to stick with cobblers. (That could become a slogan for saving shoemakers: Stick With Cobblers: Make Them Last – last, geddit? Not to worry).
So, minor upgrade. That’s minor as in everything you used to do has been abolished and nobody is telling you how to do it the new way.
But are we downhearted? Are we depressed? Bloody right we are.
That’s why I’m swanning off to Cornwall for me hols (times are hard).
No doubt it will all be fixed and sorted by the time I get back.

That just takes the biscuit

They just don’t get it, do they? Amateurs who dunk are like ladies who lunch – superfluous to the real world.
The tough dog-eat-dog biscuit world of professional dunking was rocked this week by the news that some geek of a professor has concluded that the chocolate digestive is the best biscuit for dunking because the melting chocolate helps to bind the biscuit together for longer.
No, no, no no!
Fools! Idiots! Incompetents (OK, that’s quite enough exclamation marks for one blog!).
Does this bloke not realise that the Society Of Dunkers’ Institute of Technology (SODIT), which runs all competitive dunking, from local leagues to the biennial World Championships, banned chocolate coverings from all dunking years ago because it gave an artificial and unfair advantage.
Why, it was only five years ago that the Greek dunker Theo Slopadopollop was thrown out of the competition for coating his little dunkee in a thin film of almost invisible white chocolate which enabled him to set what, briefly, was a new world record in the Morning Coffee event of 23 seconds before break-up.
As this was 20 seconds longer than the previous record it was regarded with some suspicion. As Slopadopollop had promptly eaten the evidence he seemed to be in the clear but a sliver of dunkee was found in his saucer and subsequent lab tests led to his downfall.
Now we get some boffin praising choccy coverings without any thought for the ramifications (I love that word – might use it again in a minute) for the sport.
Simply encouraging youngsters to dunk choccy bikkies could rob the whole dunking world of its youth policy, with no promising youngsters coming through the ranks for the Ginger Nut Tremble, Rich Tea Shake or Plain Digestive Wobble.
Ramifications.
There, I feel better for that.
(By the way, a recent survey said McVitie’s chocolate digestive was the most popular dunkee among the hoi-polloi. I wonder which biscuit brand commissioned the survey? Answers on a postcard to the Do They Really Think We Are That Stupid Department).