Foucault's Hamster

Santa's Elfen Safety Fascism - Christmas Special

2006-12-24T07:04:00.000-08:00

From the Christmas Eve edition of The Times comes the following bit of elfen safety nonsense:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2517364,00.html

"As winter finally arrived last week I spent hours blocking off the icy blast that creeps under my front door and around my windows. Having done that I went out Christmas shopping, only to find that the chain stores all keep their doors wedged open.
I looked about me into the dense fog shrouding my high street shops and rubbed my chin with frozen fingers. Something didn’t make sense. At Gap Kids, thinking I could do something to stop this madness, I shut the door behind me. But moments later a member of staff quietly wandered over to open it again.
I asked for the manager. When she appeared I gave her a brief overview of climate change and added that even if she didn’t believe carbon emissions will kill us she would anyway save money on utility bills, to the satisfaction of head office and shareholders, if she shut the doors.
She was sympathetic: I wasn’t the first person to tell her this. A woman had come in recently and talked hysterically about polar bears dying out. She said her staff got terribly cold but they couldn’t shut the glass doors in case somebody walked into them by mistake or even on purpose. “They might sue.” "

So there we have it; the big battle between the 2 great behomeths of the modern age. Climate Change Fascism and Elfen Safety Fascism. And the winner is ... in the blue corner ... Elfen Safety Fascism! Who gives a toss about the planet tomorrow when someone may sue you today.

Towcestarian's verdict. Lets have exploding glass doors to cull shoppers too stupid to avoid bumping into them- bring back a bit of natural selection into our dismally shallow gene pool.

Elfen Safety Fascism - Part Deux

2006-12-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

"Organisers of a village Christmas party have been told they must carry out a risk assessment of their mince pies - or their festivities will be cancelled.

Council bosses say posters will have to be displayed at the party in Embsay, in the Yorkshire Dales, warning villagers the pies contain nuts and suet pastry.

The cocoa content and temperature of the hot chocolate must also be checked. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/6207970.stm

Those peanuts are such a manace to civilization, I don't know why we just don't ban them and have done with it. However, I am at a loss to see the danger of cocoa levels in hot chocolate. Maybe the council were looking at the Nuclear Reactor Safety page by mistake?

I'm sure there must be a market niche for producing a cocoa content checking meter. Just think of all the people selling hot chocolate - all I need is cocoa paranoia to spread from Craven Council to the rest of the local authority jobsworths and I'll be a millionaire.

Towcestarian's verdict... Craven lunacy.

Hat tip to Tim Worstall for the link.

Elfen Safety Fascism - Part 1

2006-11-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

Rather tickled by a bit in today's Times Online on the abject capitulation of BA to the god botherers over the cross jewellry. A camparison was being drawn beteween the dress policies of BA and Virgin which contained the following elfen safety gem:

"Virgin staff can wear turbans and headscarves, but they must undergo additional safety training on how to react if the material becomes trapped in equipment."

With all that dangerous "equipment" at check-in, the training must last several days. I hope the policy is extended to other items of clothing; it is so important that staff know how to react to a baggy blouse being caught in a computer keyboard or the bottom of your flared trousers being caught in the castors on your chair.

Towcestarian's verdict? Shoot the lunatic risk assessor that dreamt that one up.

Laughing at fatties

2006-07-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Whilst it is still legal, laughing at the clinically obese is one of of my few remaining pleasures.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=YDWZNWL0WGRCXQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2006/07/27/wobese27.xml

Americans are growing so large that patients are increasingly too big to fit into X-ray scanners.
Their fat is also too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, according to a report in next month's issue of Radiology magazine.
Hospital equipment manufacturers are having to build new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners with extra-large boreholes to accommodate obese patients.

More fattie news, this time more sad than funny.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=J4NGNXCQUMPZRQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2006/07/28/nfat28.xml

Firemen demolish wall to take 52st man to hospital

A house had to be partly demolished to enable the emergency services to take a 52-stone man to hospital. A fire service crane was used to bring him out after the window and exterior wall of the upstairs bedroom at his home had been knocked out. As he was also too large to be transported in an ambulance, a fire engine was used to take him from his home to hospital.

This was in the UK, not in the USA as I first thought when I saw the headline. Its an odd thing that "poverty" and obesity are so closely linked in welfare-society bits of the world and exactly the opposite is true in non-welfare countries. Maybe obesity could be used as a measure of poverty in the west, rather than the idiotic "relative income" measure we currently have.

2006-07-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

My god. The names you have to dream up to find an unused blog name these days...