Author: old_wp_importer

I just read that 10% of perfume sold in the UK is sold at Heathrow airport. Huh? Can that really be true? Why?

[I looked briefly online for confirmation. There are several pages repeating the figure, but none giving a source for it]

[The Yorkshire Ranter](http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/) is well worth reading, for the incidental comments as much as for the main thrust of the posts. His [Review](http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2007/08/review-ak47-story-of-peoples-gun.html) of a history of the AK-47 nicely explains:

Mikhail Kalashnikov’s background as the son of kulaks exiled to Siberia, and his running away to join the engineers – he fled the penal colony and jumped a train, eventually landing an apprenticeship in the Turk-Sib railway yards. This is something a lot of people fail to realise about the Soviet Union; as well as a bureaucratic tyranny, it was (especially up to the 1940s) a continent on the move, full of transients and orphans and bastards and geniuses.

Rob (WINOLJ) posted this on Facebook, and I feel obliged to propagate.

Also….

Why is it that we have tea bags, but not coffee bags?

[This is the kind of thing I can ask, safe in the knowledge that a good third of you were

born

knowing the answer]

BBC journalists have fun with Iraqi rumours:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

….

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

This morning I decided I’d come to Cambridge if I managed to get a decent amount done today. Within an hour, I’d cracked the problem I’ve been battering my head against for the past couple of days.

Coincidence? I think not. See some of you at elise‘s tonight.

That sums up Blair nicely. Just watched his

last Prime Ministers questions

, where he praised everyone but the Labour party, and did nothing to transfer goodwill from himself onto Brown and the party.


Edit

: Also, the Labour party line seems to be that sentencing Chemical Ali to death is an unequivocally Good Thing. Including Ann Clwyd. So much for a moral stance against the death penalty.

[that’s right. I’m not dead. I’ve just not been paying enough attention to the world around me to say anything coherent about anything. This may – or may not – change in the future]