Grumpy man with too much time on his hands.: June 2011

Thursday, 30 June 2011

COCKNEY UFOS OVER LONDON THIS YEAR.

Monday, 27 June 2011

”JUST ONE MORE THING…..” GOODBYE COLUMBO.

My dad loved the Columbo show, so did I. Even now if I see an episode repeated on TV I watch it to the end so see him catch the baddie.

In fact Columbo was so good and so original that no one else ever got his job. He was unique.

Ever since Sir Arthur Conon–Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine we have all become used to the “Whodunit”, where the clever detective solves the “perfect crime” and unmasks the villain at the end of the piece.

What made Columbo different was that it was the first TV show to use the “inverted detective story”, or "howcatchem", where you see the commission of the crime at the beginning and the show is about how the detective solves the crime and arrests the perp.

Like all original things, you can’t ever remember it ever not existing. All the cop shows have some “howcatchem" episodes now.

The TV companies have never been able to recreate the show because Peter Falk was, well…perfect. What they did do however, was to chop up the show’s component parts and mix them up in other shows.

If you look carefully you can see Lt Columbo in: Monk, CSI, Criminal intent, Criminal minds, Lie to me and The Mentalist

Monk Solves the crime by finding the fact that doesn't fit and exasperating the villain.

“The guys in the lab came up with….” Became the guys in the lab.

Super-awareness.

Perhaps the natural successor to Columbo is Robert Goren in Criminal Intent. Goren is the poor guy who catches the evil rich bad guy, using his off putting manner, super awareness and even the evil eye for detail.

What was Columbo’s first name? He said it was Lieutenant, but it was in fact Frank.

Trivia corner. The first episode of the first series "Murder by the Book" was directed by young Steven Spielberg.

Peter Falk died on 23rd June and Columbo died with him. Oh, just one more thing....we'll miss him.

Sunday, 26 June 2011

TALKING DOGS

THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION. NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE.

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

WHOOPS!

Monday, 20 June 2011

THE FIRST GLASTONBURY CUP FINAL: HENRIX 1 MARLEY 0. AET

Sunday, 19 June 2011

UFO'S. THE GREATEST STORY EVER DENIED.

If you've got an hour and a half to spare it's well worth a look. The film includes early sightings, "Foo Fighters", the "battle" of Los Angeles, the "Disclosure Project", military and scientist witnesses, NASA footage, free fuel and the weaponization of space.

COCA-COLA. IT REALLY IS THE REAL THING.

So you don’t have to be a pub quiz expert to know that the original recipe for Coca-Cola used to contain coca leaves, which contain cocaine and that they stopped the practice in 1903, but the word remained in the name…..Wrong!

We also know that it is illegal to possess coca leaves in pretty much every country in the world….well…er yeah…

That is, unless you are Coca-Cola!

Coke is still very much “The Real Thing”. Coke still contains Coca leaves.

How is that? I hear you say.

Well, it seems that the Coca-Cola Company have been given exemption from prosecution all over the world.

No way.

Way!

So what you’re saying is that Coca-Cola has still got cocaine in it?

Well, no, there’s no cocaine in Coca-Cola. They take the coke out of the leaves before they go into the drink.

OK, they make billions of gallons of Coca-Cola worldwide, that’s a lot of Charlie they extract from the leaves. Where does all that cocaine go?

That’s sort of the point of this post. Where does it all go?

Well it kind of goes like the drug dealers in the movies:

In the US the big boss (Coke) never touches the product. Coca-Cola has the exemption to make it happen. The leaves go via another company The Stepan company of Northfield, Illinois, who are the processors. The Stepan company is also exempt from government prosecution.

About 100 metric tons of coca leaves are imported to Stepan every year, mostly from Peru. They send the coca leaves to Coca-Cola and the pure cocaine to another company, the Covidien/Mallinckrodt company of Mansfield, Massachusetts. These are the big time drug dealers. Mallinckrodt also grow cannabis in the US for the THC and import opium from India.

So this Covidien company of Massachusetts has got shitloads of cocaine, cannabis and opium.

What do they do with it?

It’s supposed to be for “medicinal use”. I don’t have the figures for the cannabis and opium. Let’s say they take in as much as they need, but Coca-Cola is huge, they have to take everything they are given…right?

OK, get your calculators out. If it takes 300g of leaves to make 1g of cocaine. 100 metric tons of leaves equals 333 kilos of cocaine a year. At £50 a gram that’s £16.7M worth of cocaine each year in the USA alone and that's before they cut it!

So Coca-Cola are responsible for producing £16M worth of pure cocaine in the US alone, never mind about the rest of the world!

Maybe it is for medical use and it’s all innocent?

According to Wikipedia the only medical use for cocaine is it is occasionally used in nose operations as an aesthetic if other solutions don’t work. Humm, 6.66M lines of cocaine for occasional nose operations….nah!