Have you ever got so drunk…

…that you missed the team flight to South America?

“On Saturday night, whilst out for an informal dinner in Auckland, I made a poor decision regarding the limits of my alcohol intake.
This has resulted in the unacceptable action of me being absent from All Blacks assembly on Sunday morning and thus missing the team flight to Argentina.”

Still, that line: “I made a poor decision regarding the limits of my alcohol intake”?
That’s the best way of saying “I got really pissed” that I’ve heard in a while. Maybe it could be adapted to other situations as well:

“In the early hours of Thursday morning, whilst in my Pretoria home, I made a poor decision regarding the limits of my criminal responsibility.”

or:

“Since 2009, whilst being President of the Republic of South Africa, I repeatedly made poor decisions regarding the limits of my personal architectural and construction budget.”

But still – how does that happen? No, not the Nkandla thing. How does an international rugby player – or indeed even an international rugby team not have some sort of fail safe backup plan for getting their players to the airport on time? No, they shouldn’t need one, but as this incident proves, they obviously do need one.

Still, with the All Blacks having suspended Aaron Cruden (for it was he) for two games, Argentina must really be fancying their chances against the world champions now. *cough*
Presumably, they’ve already got their “poor decision regarding the limits of their rugby playing abilities” statement ready in case they don’t manage a win in La Plata on Saturday.

Bit tired

A very poorly daughter meant that we spent a couple of hours in the local ER last night, with a couple more either side of that trying to get her sorted out at home.

Consequently, all plans for today – including those for a long blog post –  were shelved early on.

The lack of any sort of repeat performance tonight would be much appreciated.
But just in case… it’s sleep time now.

Beaglegas

Previously, my email inbox looked fairly normal. Some family stuff, a Superbru reminder or two, a bit of hate mail from some Afrikaners about something I wrote on Steve Hofmeyr in 2007. Nothing particularly unusual there.

Now, however, my email inbox seems to have emails about beagles in it. Often. And some of those emails look like this:

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Lovely. And WTF is a BeagleKiss? Eww.

It turns out that Beaglegas is yet another drawback of dog ownership. I don’t know if it is any worse than Spanielgas or Poodlegas, but it’s far from the pleasant end of the scale when all you want to do is chill out in front of a game of footy on the TV. There are two main reasons why Beaglegas is more dangerous than the mustard gas used during the First World War: firstly, because it’s unexpected – you’re not on some godforsaken battlefield in the middle of Belgium, you’re on your couch watching an Everton Europa Cup game – and secondly, because it’s colourless, meaning that there is no visual warning of its impending arrival at the gates of your respiratory system.

In addition, there is no incoming shell here: the method of delivery can be as innocuous as a dozing puppy. In fact, I’m rapidly learning that there’s actually nothing innocuous about a dozing puppy at all. Those moments when the dog is calm, and everything (including its back door musculature) is relaxed, are the moments of most danger. But that’s not to say that you are safe from Beaglegas attack during the dog’s waking hours either. Earlier this week, I inadvertently trapped Beaglegas in the kids’ school lunch boxes after an early morning run-by attack in the kitchen. Not nice for anyone. And it dissolved their cheese rolls.

There are several hints and tips available via that BeaglePro email, hints and tips which one can employ to reduce the incidence of Beaglegas. They’re most likely tried and tested by other Beaglegas sufferers and would probably work in reducing the incidence of Beaglegas in your proximity at any given time. However, I can (quite easily) recall a time when there was absolutely zero Beaglegas in my home. That was fewer than two months ago and those were magical, fresher times; times where one could happily breathe deeply, confident in the knowledge that it was going to be nitrogen and oxygen making up the bulk of your inhalation, rather than the manifestation of Satan in aeriform.

In fact, the only individual in our house who seems wholly immune to Beaglegas is Colin. This is strange. Given that Colin’s sense of smell is allegedly somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 times (depending on which book you read) more sensitive than ours, it should, by rights, have between 20,000 and 50,000 times more effect on her. It should be instantly fatal. Very fatal. In fact, given those astonishing olfactory comparisons, it wouldn’t surprise me – upon exposure to Beaglegas – if Colin was immediately vapourised and she was erased from photos of herself with the family, like Marty McFly in Back To The Future. And Michael J Fox just messed with the passage of time, he sensibly steered well clear of anything as serious as Beaglegas. Lest we forget, when given the alternative methods of powering the infamous DeLorean, he and Doc Brown took one sniff at Beaglegas and opted instead for plutonium stolen from a heavily-armed Libyan terrorist group.

They knew.

And suddenly, I’m in two minds as to whether to publish this post. I need to express my suffering, yes. I require your sympathy and I need other sufferers to understand that they’re not alone. But it concerns me that some terrorist group might read this, have a lightbulb moment and understand the gravitas and power of Beaglegas. They would then get some beagles and completely ignore all the BeaglePro advice in order to produce and harvest vast volumes of BeagleGas before launching a terror attack that would make 9/11 look like a unfortunate incident in a Lego factory.

But then I figure that they could just Google for “most evil things on earth” and somehow find themselves at a page which at least mentions the rectal emissions of tri-colour hounds.
I can’t be the only one who has found cause to write about this heinous compound. Or maybe I am the only one who has managed to put pixels to paper before inevitable asphyxiation.

The Reykjavík Metro Police Instagram account is a thing of wonder

We at 6000 Towers think that Iceland is pretty cool. We might have mentioned that before. Repeatedly.

But here’s yet another feather in the cap of the chilly volcanic island’s cap: Lögreglan – The Reykjavík metropolitan police official Instagram account.

How cool are these guys?

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Brekkan getur oft verið ansi brött, en ekkert er óyfirstíganlegt… #þrjárbrattar & Brace yourselves winter is coming

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Fuglunum gefið brauð & Var sumarið ekki að undirbúa komu sína? #reiðhjólasumar #snjóengill

Presumably, there’s some actual police work going on at some point as well. Presumably.

I do use Instagram, but I use it to share photos rather than to follow other people – there’s Flickr and or twitter for that sort of thing. However, I’m going to make Lögreglan the first and only account I’m following. And I won’t be alone, with their cult following of almost 19,000 users.

I somehow can’t see the Cape Town metro cops doing something like this, and even if they did, I can’t see it being nearly as good as the Lögreglan one.

Yes, South Africa is very cool, but Iceland is (quite literally) a bit cooler.

Glasgow independence vote “a possibility”?

Everyone has now heard how “close” the Scottish Independence vote was (but in case you haven’t, there was 10.6% between the yes and the no vote totals). I’d also heard that Glasgow had voted Yes and Edinburgh had voted No.
What I didn’t realise is that basically, it was only Glasgow (ok, and Dundee) that had voted Yes overall. That said, it’s worth noting that because of the paucity of population elsewhere in Scotland, those 4 tiny blue areas make up almost 20% of the electorate.

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That’s not to say that the results elsewhere weren’t close. In fact, apart from the outlying islands, it was all very tight.

And, in another interesting stat, with the Scottish National Party supporting independence and the Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and Labour against it, the referendum results bear no correlation to the general election results of 2010. None of the SNP held areas voted Yes, and the areas the did vote for independence were held by either Labour or the LibDems. This shows either that there’s been a shift in perception since the 2010 election (maybe) or that this issue transcends all other party politics (yes).

What it also shows is that maybe Glasgow should go it alone and become an independent state. It would leave about half the people unhappy if they did go, but then about half the people are unhappy anyway. And if you thought that Scotland was going to become a failed state after declaring independence, then wow, Glasgow would be a disaster. Even more so than it is now.

If that’s possible. (Spoiler: It’s not)

So we English are stuck with subsidising Scotland for a bit longer. Our annual rainfall stays unrepresentatively high and our life expectancy remains reduced.
But it’s nice to still be the vaguely United Kingdom.