Parking Made Complicated

This story took a bit of getting my head around.

Here in the UK, you can rent out the driveway of your home to someone who needs a parking space in the vicinity.  Martin Lewis has an article about it here.

Similar schemes seem to run in Australia.

One of them is called "Parking Made Easy" and it is them who feature in the story above.  The story is headlined...

Wish someone would pay your parking fine? Now they can.

If you sign up to their service, they will pay off your parking fines or help with putting together appeal letters if you want to challenge your fine.

So what is to stop you parking wherever you like and then getting them to pay your fines?

Herein lies the catch.

They will only pay off the fine of one lucky winner of a draw performed every month.  Bad news for the motorists of Queensland at least...

Queensland motorists owe $42.3 million in unpaid parking fines

So the initial headline is misleading.

Maybe not surprising since the author, Kathryn Fisk admits to having worked for The Sun - a paper aimed at the hard of thinking.  She has also apparently worked on two "renowned" UK regional publications although I can't find anything by her outside of Australia.  Google does come up with the message, "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe." which means that someone has stated that they don't want irrelevant stuff they've done searchable.  So I tried Bing.  Someone in Silicon Valley must have been briefly excited that somebody outside of Microsoft had just used Bing but they also couldn't find anything by her.

You'd probably have more luck finding an article by me.

Oh Jeremy!

You've really gone and done it this time haven't you?

"At night, I'm unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her."

Not the cleverest of things to say about Meghan Markle.

Apparently it is a Game of Thrones reference.

I've never watched Game of Thrones.

And he made the reference in his column in what Greatest Hits Radio (Liverpool) calls "The paper we don't name"

Although calling it a paper is being generous.

And given that its readers are generally as thick as the proverbial brown stuff, they won't have gotten the reference even if they did watch Game of Thrones.

Anyway, the paper that Greatest Hits Radio (Liverpool) don't name has received over 12000 complaints and counting and he has replaced his online column with a tweet that shows a teensy bit of regret.

Even is own daughter spoke out about the misogyny in the article.

The BBC reporting of this is here.

It's a shame - this is after he'd established himself as a very competent host of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and had received plaudits and new fans for his Amazon series about his farm.  There is a release date scheduled for series 2 of 10th Feb 2023 - less than two months off - is all publicity good publicity?

I'm a big fan of Jeremy's.

99% of the time.

We all know he loves to shock - I think he may have overdone it here though.

And the only person covered in manure will probably be him.  Does he keep cows on his farm?

Norfolk AGAIN!

Maybe the Norfolk Police are more media savvy than other police forces.

Or maybe a lot of idiots live in Norfolk.

Here is today's picture:

The story is here and tells of a driver stopped for "erratic driving" who had no tyre on the front wheel.  He's hardly got any wheel left on the front wheel.  Breathalyser readings showed more than three times the drink-drive limit so that could explain a few things.

 

I've decided that it's an old Seat Leon.

 

This is on the back of my most recent Norfolk story - which listed previous ones therein.

 

This particular story keeps going partly due to the media's fascination with Royals and also due to this woman who broke her wrist when The Duke of Edinburgh's Land Rover collided with the car she was in:

She has been cashing in big style since the accident appearing on Good Morning and selling stories to The Mirror.  I've not heard much of the driver or her baby who was also in the car he hit.

 

I suppose she couldn't sell out to The Sun because that it what The Duke is blaming for the crash.

 

Meanwhile her name is Emma FAIRWEATHER.

Rolls Royce Brexit

Last week, I decided that there could have been a Ford Brexit.

Then, the World (or Europe at least) fell apart.  We have reports of an acrimonious split and headline-hitting resignations.

Yes, apparently, Matt LeBlanc will quit Top Gear if Chris Evans isn't sacked.  It was reported by The Sun after speaking to "a source".  Now, The Sun does have quite a bit of form for publishing lies but Evans & LeBlanc do seem to be harder to find at the moment than Boris Johnson & Nigel Farage.  Evans didn't do his scheduled Radio 2 show this morning.

While we're discussing form, Top Gear has form for controversial number plates.

And last night, we saw Evans' Rolls Royce Corniche driving about part of the EU with a Brexit Number Plate:

That's  BRX 522 T  which is near enough.

5 is the number of the Top Gear episode that came straight after the Brexit vote.
2 is the number of Top Gear Presenters that include Evans and LeBlanc.
and 2 is thember of guests that we now have every week on the Top Gear sofa.

Wow.  Spooky Huh?

Clarkson et le Hamster Sont Interdits

I'm surprised not many sites have got this story.  None of the major newspapers have it, just a few motoring websites.

The story is this one:

It is from a Clarkson article so it will be in The Sun or The Sunday Times.

 

It will be hidden behind a paywall online but I wouldn't want to read either publication anyway since they are part of the odious Murdoch empire.

 

The gist of this is that Clarkson & Richard Hammond have been fined for speeding in France and banned from driving there for three months.

 

Being me, I am suspicious that if this happened, that it was just a publicity stunt for the DVD they were filming that will be out "just in time for Christmas" - the DVD that gets mentioned in the stories of the incident.

 

If it was though, it hasn't worked - yet.  Maybe it's just that nobody at The Mail has noticed it up to now.

 

They were doing 140kph in a 90kph zone that they claim to have thought was a 130kph zone.

 

There's no mention of James May - I guess Capitaine Lente would not have made that mistake.

Right-Wing Rubbish

Autoguide news pointed me this morning back to our own Daily Mail and a story about Jeremy Clarkson being racist about Lenny Henry. Being American, they had to explain who Lenny Henry is. For those who don't know, I shall also explain who Lenny Henry is.

He is a very talented comedian/writer/actor from the West Midlands of England:Who also happens to be black.

The Daily Mail is accusing Jeremy of racism due to an article he wrote about how eco-friendly TVs can be set so dim that everyone looks like "Lenny Henry in a cave"

I don't know if he was being racist or not - I know he always tries to find funny analogies for everything and if they are going to be controversial - then all the better. This is why he keeps ending up in trouble. I know that I find him very funny.

"Owning a TVR in the past was like owning a bear, I mean it was great, until it pulled your head off, which it would."

"We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging."

"The Ferrari 355 is like a quail's egg dipped in celery salt and served in Julia Roberts' belly button."

I got those off a Clarkson fansite.

The Daily Mail is a horrible, right-wing, muckraking rag read by people who will gullibly take in all the propaganda it reports. But those people will agree with Jeremy who can only be described as very right of centre. So they won't have a lot of sympathy with their own newspaper here - the comments under the story seem to back this up. The story uses a VC-winning soldier who was offended by the article (good, typical Daily Mail fodder) and who also happens to be black.(Oops)

I think the result was right but for the wrong reasons - it was the old Alf Garnett effect - you're supposed to laugh at him, not with him.

So why pick on Jeremy anyway?

Could it be because he writes for different right-wing rags, The Sun and The Sunday Times? These are part of the awful Murdoch Empire and I would love to see them go the same way as "The News of the World" - it's the end of The World as we know it.

The Mail won't mention the competition, but it must have been one of these papers that Clarkson wrote the offending article in.

May, meanwhile, writes for yet another right-wing rag, The Telegraph - why do all the interesting people write for right-wing rubbish?

Oh yes - money!

Anyway, has anyone asked Lenny Henry what he thinks about all this? Maybe he isn't even aware of the story - I doubt if he bothers with The Sun or The Daily Mail or autoguide.com or Metro's Car Blog. If he does know about it, he is keeping a dignified silence - there's no mention on his Website and although there are a couple of Twitter accounts purporting to be him - I don't believe he actually is a Twitterererer.

As you may be able to guess, I'm not a fan of the right-wing press - but they are diametrically opposed to what I believe in. I'm not afraid to use the word "Socialist" - I know many Americans are - it would be suicide for an American politician to use it - but I know the difference between Socialist and Communist.

And I also envy places like Sweden where people are richer, happier, have a better standard of life and more choice. Yes, everything is more expensive there and they pay more taxes and foreign tourists will be put off, but the Swedes themselves can afford stuff because they don't have to pay extra for their public facilities and they earn more anyway.

Pity the left-wing press is crap too.

They're up for Contempt of Court over that coverage which hounded a man that they had decided at the time was a murderer but, given that someone else has been charged in the meantime, is almost certainly completely innocent.

"Not Bad For a Number 2 Driver!"

That's what I'd have said over the pit radio today if I'd been Tom Onslow-Cole in the third BTCC race at Silverstone today.

As usual, the BTCC provided lots of good racing action and thrills and spills (crashes) with Plato and Neal coming together as usual and Plato storming off in anger at the end - very entertaining.

In the first BTCC race of the day, Onslow-Cole was leading from his team-mate Chilton when he pulled out of the way to let Chilton past. This is not unusual in BTCC where you get an extra Championship point for leading the race for a lap so team managers will ask their drivers to swap position for just one lap in order to get the extra point. There are none of the silly rules about team-orders in BTCC that cause annoyance and confusion in F1.

Anyway, you would expect Chilton to make way after that lap for Onslow-Cole again - but he didn't. At the post-race interview, they both came up with a consistent story about Onslow-Cole messing up a gear change so letting Chilton through to avoid a collision while he regained his momentum - honest racing so no need to concede the position. This seemed plausible.

Then, in the second race, Onslow-Cole was leading from his team-mate Chilton when he pulled out of the way to let Chilton past. Hmmmm. Chilton went on to win and a fine bit of barging by Rob Collard knocked Onslow-Cole down to the third step on the podium. This time, they admitted a bit of team orders claiming that Chilton was faster because he had been more cautious early on so his tyres were in better nick.

Race three saw Onslow-Cole take the lead from the popular, very likeable Scouser, Paul O'Neill. Chilton couldn't get past O'Neill, possibly because he was carrying some extra weight (success ballast) or possibly because he isn't as good a driver as Tom Onslow-Cole but this meant that team orders would have been very silly so Onslow-Cole won the race fair and square and should really have won all three.

As previously mentioned, there is nothing actually wrong with team orders in BTCC, but surely it makes more sense to favour the guy doing better in the Championship?

Tom Onslow-Cole is now running second in the Championship and would be a lot closer to the leader, Jason Plato if the team hadn't interfered - so why did they? It's not as though Chilton has a very powerful sponsor is it?