It may sound cruel, but some would argue that if you are THAT stupid, you deserve to be ripped off

The BBC were featuring a story today about "work from home" scams where people are told they can earn £300 a day for stuffing envelopes in return for a one off £35 fee.

Now lets start by doing the maths. £300 per day is £1500 a week which equates to £78000 a year. Does anyone honestly believe you can earn £78000 a year stuffing envelopes ?

It may sound incredibly cruel, but if you honestly believe you can earn more than a doctor, an MP, a head teacher, a senior policeman, a bank manager, a solicitor or an accountant by stuffing envelopes you really do need a reality check. Why would anyone go to university or train to do one of those highly skilled jobs if they could sit at home drinking tea stuffing envelopes with Jeremy Kyle on the telly ?

Perhaps £35 is a cheap price to pay for a reality check.

Time to prosecute the 999 time wasters

The number of idiots phoning 999 for totally unimportant rubbish seems to be hitting an all time high, and the news today that former topless model Linda Lusardi phoned 999 to ask if she can have permission to use the hard shoulder because she was going to be late for her pantomime only highlights this further.

In recent days the emergency services have revealed that a member of the clergy phoned 999 to report that he could not get through to Strictly Come Dancing in order to vote for Tom Chambers, someone else phoned 999 to ask how to get to Homebase whilst nearer to home here in Norfolk we had a Tory County Councillor a few years back who phoned 999 when she was stuck in a queue leaving an event because "ordinary people were being let out before her".

I don't think it takes a great deal of common sense to understand what an emergency is. Put simply, if it involves a criminal offence, fear of a criminal offence, something the fire brigade can deal with or a serious medical emergency which means the person hurt cannot safely make there was to a hospital, then that constitutes an 999 emergency. People phoning for other reasons ought to be fined and publicly named and shamed.

The most stupid of gaffes - Giving the Green Party free publicity and credibility

Fifteen years ago I attended a Lib Dem campaign training day in North Norfolk where Chris (now Lord) Rennard taught us how to campaign like professionals, not amateurs. it was an enlightening day and was one of the great spurs that eventually drove us on to victory in North Norfolk some eight years later.

At the end of the day Chris did a question and answer session about anything and everything to do with his political history. When asked about campaign gaffes he has seen in the past, he told us of an SDP candidate who, so sure if his winning arguments, decided to give his opponents space on the SDP leaflet in which to allow both the Labour Party and the Tories to publish their manifesto pledges. Unsurprisingly, to anyone with half a brain, this appeared to the electorate as though the SDP was endorsing the other candidates, which meant the SDP candidate lost whilst the credibility of Labour Party and the Conservative Party in that area received a massive boost.

Well that incident was more than twenty years ago and nobody would be stupid enough to do that sort of thing now, would they ? Well yes, they would.

Bizarrely, a Lib Dem in a part of London with an active Green presence, has decided to allow the Green party to tout for votes on his blog. Confused ? I should say.

If a Lib Dem chose to use their own blog to be critical of the Lib Dems, then that is a valid use of "their own" blog, but to turn it over to a senior Green Party candidate, to give the Green Party such publicity and to allow them to tout for Lib Dem second preference votes whilst the Green Party have official sought to block any such reciprocal agreement when they signed a pact with Ken Livingstone last week urging all Green's to support Ken with their second preferences just defies understanding.

This is the most one sided debate in history. What do the Green's get ? Publicity, credibility, and possibly extra votes. What do we get apart from being made to look stupid ? Nothing.

I know I am supposed to feel sorry for these people, but I don't. Does that make me a bad person

If someone dies whilst playing Russian roulette for fun, do you feel sorry for them ?

Okay, so I must be a bad person, but I really cannot summon up the energy to feel sorry for idiots who choose to something as idiotically stupid as THIS.

If you go tombstoning, you know you are doing something very dangerous and bloody stupid. You therefore accept the risks associated, which in these cases appears to be death. The shame of it is that we all pay the price through our taxes of the emergency services and the NHS having to save them. yet we don;t have enough money to treat cancer patients with the right drugs ? it's an odd world.

What an absolute prat !

This morning when my car was telling me the outside temperature was just about minus 2 degrees celcius, I saw an absolute tit of a bloke driving a Citroen "pluriel" (as seen on the right), with the roof down. He was wearing a woolly had, a winter coat done up to the neck and a scarf around his neck and face.

I used to own a convertible, I never had the roof down from about November to April, and only then if it was warm.

So all I could think was that the bloke was an absolute prat. Sorry, I just had to tell someone !