Quiz of the Week.

What do you call a bosom buddy of Donald Trump? OK what do you call a person who engineered Brexit to further his own career? No? Right, what do you call a guy who’s trying to make out he’s the second coming of Winston Churchill? What do you call a fallacious falanderer? Really still not got it? OK what do you call a man who calls a situation unprecedented when experts have been warning him about it for at least four years that it’s going to happen? What do you call a chap who’s been underfunding and quietly selling the NHS off to US health companies? No? I thought that might give it away. Right, OK what do you call a guy who comes across as a befuddled buffoon? So what do you call this person who is a befuddled buffoon? Oh come on I thought you might give it away! OK what do you call a befuddled buffoon who uses his position to lie to the British people? And downgrades Coronavirus from a dangerous pandemic to a general flue so the NHS front line can be given poorer PP equipment and get ill and sometimes die to mask his government’s failure to stockpile the proper PPE? Oh come on you should have got it by now. OK, he doesn’t possess a comb? He says he’s following expert advice when the WHO and numerous experts say he’s wrong? He promotes a friend to Health Minister who has no experience in that area? He’s going to pay out billions of our money and expecting us to thank him for his generosity? He’s been through a near death experience and not learnt a thing? Right that’s it, the quiz is off. If you can’t be bothered to try I’m wasting my time. But here’s a taster of next week’s quiz. Who told everybody you can inoculate yourself against Corvid19 by drinking bleach and sticking a torch up your arse?

Matt and the Nation’s Picasso.

Matt Hancock’s previous experience is in computer software, economics, and more recently culture and sport, and even more recently health. Dealing with the Coronavirus must be like being asked to fix the nation’s Citroen Picasso when all he’s ever done before is drive one. In panic he calls the AA, Kwik-fit and a local garage. He finds his AA membership has lapsed, Kwick-fit only do tyres and exhausts so he takes it to the garage. He relays the dealership information to the nation, “It’s probably the coil packs or possibly the mass air flow sensor.” Scrabbling for authority not knowing what any of that means, and to deflect any personal blame in case it all goes tits up, he calls in the expert mechanic to the stand. He says we’ve got the coil packs on order but there could be a delay because of the high demand. Matt retakes the helm and says we’re doing all the right thing at all the right times with the authority of a person who’s never heard of them before and says, "Could we have the next slide please." The expert again, “We fitted the coil packs but that didn’t fix it. We’re going to replace the clutch.” Meanwhile other garage mechanics, hearing of the nation’s predicament, suggest it could be an air leak in the throttle body causing the O2 sensor to go off scale. This is reported in the Guardian. Matt refers this suggestion to his mechanic who dismisses it as the work of an idiot as the O2 sensor is in the exhaust and wouldn’t cause the problem. He adds he’s replacing the camshaft and crankshaft sensors and sorting out a small oil leak in that area. A person in Chipping Sodbury says on This Morning that once his Picasso wouldn’t start because a mouse had made a nest in the exhaust pipe. Matt says it’s heartening to hear you’re all trying your best. At the 5pm grilling Evan Davis asks why we didn’t buy a German car and Sir Keir Starmer suggests Brexit was a big mistake and that car spares are readily available in Europe. Meanwhile Evan further suggests the EGR valve may be stuck from carbon build up and has the government cleaned it? Matt passes that one to the mechanic, the only one out of the three who knows what it is. “Did that while we were fitting a new alternator.” Evan, “And the cam belt?” “What about it?” asked the mechanic. “Well er is it still holding the cams up?” Mechanic, “Yes its fine and the cam braces are fine too.” Evans thanks him for the extra information. The mechanic finishes with, “This problem wouldn’t have occurred if you’d had it regularly serviced.” With thanks to Edmouse for the technical information.

A Virus Methodology.

The government are doing their best, poor things, which isn’t great because they think they have to govern, and governing means, “We must tell the imbecilic wretches what to do. Without us it would be chaos.” Well it is chaos and the imbecilic wretches are doing a fine job thank you very much.

Lets pretend the public are intelligent (which we are) and we’re prepared to do what’s needed to beat this virus. (which we have proved) OK we all know our local area and could exist in a defined area of streets containing say2,000 people, like a postcode. That’s 30,000 areas country wide. The government defines these areas and says from a certain date, say 1^st May, you must be prepared to not go outside your area for 14 days whilst maintaining your current lockdown conditions. Each area includes a shop or depot, chemist and doctor. This defines two levels of quarantine, households (1 to~4) and areas (2,000). In the 14 day period individuals must notify symptoms. Areas with no symptoms are assumed clean and in areas showing symptoms all individuals are tested and carriers extracted. The household quarantine will identify those possibly contaminated, and any possible cross contamination outside it explored. These two levels of quarantine provide an overall manageable number of areas each containing locally manageable household units. Under the current lockdown conditions the roughly twenty million household units each able to cross contaminate in undefined ways is chaotic, and with limited testing it will remain chaotic. The second level of isolation identifies carriers within boundaries and focuses action where it’s needed. If in the first round 50% of areas are clean and carriers identified in the other 50% extracted, in the next 14 days there would probably be another 30% clean. We are relatively quickly focusing on 20% of the population, or 6,000 areas. After 6 weeks the virus is definable and limited to say 5% of the population or 1,500 areas. With the government and the public in these areas focused on eradication the virus has nowhere to go. All the while experts are gaining data, the government is dealing in manageable numbers and the public are included and active in the process. Our limited capacity to test individuals is focused where it can do most good.

If this was actioned 1^st week in March we’d be 7 weeks in and dealing with less than 5% of the population and maybe two weeks away from eradication. As it is we have 3 more weeks and will still only have the curves of tested cases and deaths to go on.
These numbers are plucked out of the air but it defines a possible methodology far better than what we’re currently doing.

Lockdown- That’s it!

News at, well basically the C word any time on Radio 4. Interview; woman kneeling outside care home talking to her 90+ grandma, her bed rolled appropriately, on the phone through a window. Lovely grandma and they ended singing ‘We’ll meet again...’ That was it. Basically the poor old dear will be in lockdown while there’s contagious people people still running around. When is that going to be? Yes there are vulnerable people, the gov is supposed to have sent us all a letter so they know who we are, though I haven’t received mine yet. Meanwhile our collective future is crumbling before our eyes, which I have to admit has some positives to it: the stocks of summer fashions will all be going straight into landfill. But, Bolero Hot Pants aside, this current situation is bad for everyone. Enter the Stiffmouse solution. End the lockdown today but give the over seventy fives and other vulnerables cart-blanch to have a field day. Give us each a few grand, nah a hundred grand, free tickets to Saturday Night Takeaway, an evening with a star of our choice, exemption from speeding tickets, and a new vehicle. Honestly it wouldn’t cost that much. Most of us would be pushed to spend ten before I had a coronary from meeting Sandra Bullock or wrapping my new Ducati round a tree. And the rest would go to my kids and straight into a new house building boom. We’d all go out happy as Larry on a new batch of memories.
And the guy I saw today ‘kinda’ running down the road in shorts looking every inch he’d never exercised a day in his life before could go back to his lethargic ways.