I've just finished listening to SModcast #106 that I Huffduffed earlier in the week. I heard about all this via a @leolaporte tweet and started reading @ThatKevinSmith’s tweets on the subject.

Essentially what happened was that Kevin Smith was asked to leave a Southwest Airlines flight due to his size. He had already flown on the same airline that week and on the flight back had taken his seat before he was told to leave the aircraft. Kevin admits himself that he’s fat and said that he was quite comfortably seated between two other passengers, with the armrests down and his seatbelt fastened before he was approached by a stewardess. He was told that there had been an order from the Captain of the plane who was concern with passenger safety. But from where he was sat he couldn’t see the Captain so, by that wild and wacky rationale, the Captain couldn’t see him. As you can imagine being asked to leave the plane must have been embarrassing to say the least.

The next flight out he was sat at the end of a three seat row and a woman who was of a similar build to Kevin was again approached by a stewardess. The way Kevin tells it in the SModcast it’s just heartbreaking. You can tell that he was more angry/upset at the way his fellow passenger was treated than for himself.

I must have watched Clerks when it came out on video years ago and I've seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back a few times so I've had a passing interest in Kevin Smith. My colleague at work is a huge fan of his, has seen all the films and has bought the t-shirt. But after listening to that SModcast I have a whole new respect for him. Hell I've even ordered An Evening With Kevin Smith and An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Trying to be polite to the airline staff, the whole “death before discourtesy” credo, being angry about the way his fellow passenger was being treated, the way he tells it with all the swearing was both funny and touching.

Kevin has posted a blog entry at My Boring Ass Life, that I haven’t read yet and a SModcast #107 that I haven’t listened to yet.

Two items in the news this week that are linked.

Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Winterton says he’s “infuriated” that he can’t travel on first class trains. He was being interviewed by Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 live’s Victoria Derbyshire show. His comments can be heard in the audio clip so it isn’t just a case of people tuning in live who caught the discussion but anyone with an internet connection. I think it was a trending topic on twitter in the UK for a day.

“I can’t be trying to work on government documents with people looking over my shoulder in standard class. Poor people banging their begging bowls when I'm trying to concentrate on my papers. Their children running around bare foot causing a nuisance. Besides the smell of the commoners and their livestock. The working class are a totally different type of people.” He didn’t actually say that but I'm sure that’s what he was thinking.

This was followed by the sad news of the death of Lionel Jeffries. I remember him being in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as Grandpa Potts and finding out that he was a year younger than Dick Van Dyke. I can’t remember seeing him in anything else. But it’s the song he sings whilst his little hut is being lifted across the sea by airship that is memorable.

“O the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me”.

Maybe that’s what needs to happen to Winterton, airlifted away to a foreign land.

“Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, Posh”

I've just been listening to The FT Money show podcast and to some poor soul asking when he should sell his Lloyds shares. I think he said that he bought thousands of them, as an investment, when they were £4 each, now they are down to 50p. What should he do?

When I used to buy shares I read a vast number of books and magazines on the subject. They all said: don’t get attached to them and sell them if they drop out of your comfort zone. But you do think, “So they've dropped to £3, so they must go up”, they might do, then again they might not.

If you've studied the fundamentals of the company, read the all the accounts for the last five years and you've come to the conclusion that the shares are still under-valued, then keep them. If you haven’t, and you’re getting twitchy, then sell and invest the money elsewhere.

I used to produce graphs on my Psion 3a (those were the days), something I enjoyed doing more than the actual investing. These charts would plot the share price against the FTSE 100 and the FTSE All Share, showing variations above, or below, the market.

Also I used to plot a graph with a trailing sell price. I don’t know if that’s the correct technical term for it but it will do. What this did was show a point 10% below the highest price for the stock. So you buy a stock at £1.00, you would see a point at 90p, if the stock went down from there, the line at 90p would stay. Now that is always a worrying time. You've just bought a share whose price has dropped. Should you sell when it hits 90p? But let’s say that the stock price goes up to £2.00, then so does the trailing sell price to £1.80. Then it goes up again and hits £4.00, trailing price also goes up to £3.60. The share price then starts to fall, it hits £3.60 and you sell with a tidy profit.

Setting the comfort zone to 10%, or whatever, is difficult because you are saying that you would sell no matter what. Even if the price drops steadily from the purchase date. Because you have already taken a hit with the purchase fees you don’t want to swallow a loss and selling fees to boot.

It really is all too easy to get emotionally attached to shares. You can only really be detached if you truly believe that the stock is significantly undervalued by the market.

I heard Henry Rollins say on his radio show, Harmony In My Head, that a band that he likes called The Prids had been involved in an automobile accident.

I've never heard any of their music. From what Henry said they sound in a bad way. There’s a Paypal link on their web-site. I gave some money… if you’re a fan of touring musicians then so should you.

Yes, I thought that I was dreaming. I woke up and I could still hear the wardrobe doors rattling and I thought that I imagined it all. I got up out of bed and had a walk around, thinking that if it had been a quake that people would be congregating in the streets. I looked around, expecting to see signs that the earth had moved. Pictures askew on the walls, a CD toppled from its shelf, the crystals in a chandelier tinkling. Nothing. Nothing to show that my little semi-detached penthouse flat had survived an earthquake. I went back to bed. I did think about checking the internets or switching on the TV but decided to get back in bed. Maybe Radio Five Live would mention it so I switched my bedside radio on and they were discussing something about healthcare for a few minutes. Then another presenter joined in and asked if anyone in the studio had felt the earth move. They hadn’t, so he started reading all the text messages that people had sent into the radio station. More or less the entire country had felt something at 0:57am this morning.

Magnitude 4.7 – ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM

I have to admit that I like flickr. Since buying a pro account last year I've been putting more of my photos up on the site. I've also been subscribed to the RSS feeds for a few groups that I belong to, as well as a few people in the tech/web industry. I enjoy seeing photos from around the world, where people live and where people work. It’s interesting.

Back when Yahoo! bought flickr I think there were quite a few people who removed all their photos. They were saying that they didn’t want to be part of a large corporation that may change things that they didn’t agree with. That’s all fair enough. If you don’t like the situation then you can leave and take your photos elsewhere.

Now it looks like Microshite® are going to buy Yahoo! Both companies are struggling against the Google onslaught. If this happens then I won’t be renewing my flickr membership when it expires next year. I’ll just take all my photos down and go elsewhere.

I just can’t see anything good in Microshite® at all. Nothing. They thought they could make money in the console market and ended up having their arse handed to them by Nintendo. They thought they could compete in the MP3 player market and still aren’t selling their player in Europe.

The only thing they have done recently is this ‘Surface’ coffee table. Not available yet and when it is it’ll be $10,000, which kills any market it may have had. What they should have done is demo it at an expo somewhere and said that it’s $2,000 and available today.

If Microshite® can afford to consider buying Yahoo! for £22.4bn then why aren’t they putting more of this huge pot of cash into research and development so they can compete with Google.

Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap are going to reform again to perform at the Live Earth concert at Wembley Stadium in London on July 7.

Documentarian Marty DeBergi has made a new short film which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Quite why the band are still speaking to him is beyond me after he made them appear foolish during the ‘This is Spinal Tap’ movie.

“They’re not that environmentally conscious, but they've heard of global warming,” said DeBergi. “Nigel thought it was just because he was wearing too much clothing – that if he just took his jacket off it would be cooler.”

I'm glad to see that the bands song-writing is still on a par with the classic Tap songs :

The devil went to Devon, it felt like the fourth degree
He said, ‘Is it hot in here, or is it only me?’ Warmer Than Hell – Spinal Tap

866 570 PENN
that's 7366

Well that was a shock. I updated my podcasts in iTunes to see that the March 2nd Penn Radio Podcast had a description of ‘The End’.

Over the past year and a bit I must have listened to them all at least once. All the guests that have been on, the ‘Ask Layperson Penn’ shows (“Is that Doctor Penn?”), ‘Monkey Tuesday’ (the theme is still my ringtone), ‘The Blow Dryer Story’, Nurse Goudeau fixing Penn’s finger, the finger snaps during the intro music and ‘Pull of the Weasel’ Fridays. Way too many good times to mention.

Thankfully Penn said that he hopes that all the show will still be available to download. You only seem to be able to download the last 90 shows in iTunes.

Never better boss, never better.

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be.

Steve Irwin 1962-2006

Steve Irwin had enthusiasm in abundance. An, all too rare, passion for animals and conservation.

When his programmes were first broadcast on television, you watched them because you thought that at any minute he would get bit. He never did because he knew his subject and wanted to show, you the viewer, what these animals were really like. By the end of one show you were hooked. Just enough to want to watch him again, not so much that you started to wear khaki shorts and utter the word “Crikey!”, in a broad Australian accent, at every opportunity.

Crocs Rule!

"Lots of practice"

Words fail me.

According to the BBC and other media today an 12 year old girl is due to give birth next month. She apparently became pregnant at the age of 11 when she had unprotected sex with a 15 year old boy. GMTV this morning reported that she was drunk at the time. Which isn’t surprising as she is said to smoke up to 20 cigarettes a day.

“I think I’ll be able to cope as I've had lots of practice looking after my brothers,” she said in an interview. “I'm enjoying being pregnant – even though I get a bit of a sore back and sore ribs.”

Has no one mentioned to this girl that the birth will be like having a bowling ball ripped out of her lower intestine.

Thankfully the ‘father’ has been charged with rape but what good will that do? With the judicial system in this country he’ll get a pat on the head and a book token for showing initiative. Now, it’s an extreme view, but I think he should be castrated. Spending the rest of his life sitting down to have a pee would remind him of his complete and utter stupidity.

I'm starting to think that it’s genetic. If a girl has children in her teens then those children will be more likely to have children while still too young. If your parents never had children then the chances of you having any are real slim.

But I’ll tell you this. Where’s this idea that childbirth is a miracle came from. Ha, I missed that fucking meeting, okay? “It’s a miracle, childbirth is a miracle.” No it’s not. No more than a miracle than eating food and a turd coming out of your ass. It’s a chemical reaction, that’s all it fucking is. If, you wanna know what a miracle is: raisin' a kid that doesn’t talk in a movie theatre. Okay, there, there, there is a goddamn miracle. It’s not a miracle if every nine months any yin yang in the world can drop a litter of these mewling cabbages on our planet. And just in case you haven’t seen the single mom statistics lately, the miracle is spreading like wild-fire. “Hallelujah!” Trailer parks and council flats all over the world just filling up with little miracles. Thunk, thunk, thunk, like frogs laying eggs. “Thunk, look at all my little miracles, thunk, filling up my trailer like a sardine can. Thunk. You know what would be a real miracle, if I could remember your daddy’s name, aargh, thunk. I guess I’ll have to call you Lorry Driver Junior. Thunk. That’s all I remember about your daddy was his fuzzy little pot-belly riding on top of me shooting his caffeine ridden semen into my belly to produce my little water-headed miracle baby, urgh. There’s your brother, Pizza Delivery Boy Junior.”Bill Hicks