LOCO HAROLD UPDATE

I put out an alert asking for information about Loco Harold, and five days later he was shot like a pig, in the company of his friend ''Knife''.

They were offering $2.5 million for Mr Knife* and an Amazon gift voucher for Harold. Personally, I would have given them probation, instead of shooting them like a pair of pigs.

*Señor Knife, in Spanish.


CORRECT!
As Laban the Tall points out, this post is a shoddy piece of crap, which compromises this site’s credibility as a serious news source. Loco Harold was no more shot like a pig than I was. They merely flung him in jail. And Mr Knife wasn't shot like a pig either. He seems to have drowned after police chased him into a river.

I would like to apologise to Loco Harold’s family for any distress I may have caused.

EL LOCO HAROLD

Colombian police are looking for El Loco Harold. There's a reward if you know where he is.



I haven’t seen Loco Harold since Klosters in 1995 when he lost a wager with Percy Dingethorpe about who could fit the most snow down his salopettes, and Boris Johnson got his foot stuck in an alpine horn.

Of course, back then he was known as non-payment-of-council-tax Harold. We were at Eton together. Frightful cad. Used to cut the nose off the stilton.

And now he's gone and joined the Colombian paramilitaries, the dog. Doesn't surprise me. Doesn't surprise me in the least.

You know what? This isn’t the same guy.

Steve Gerrard has a hamstring injury. Meanwhile, Turkey is trying to devalue its currency.

The obvious solution would be to give Gerrard a job as president of the Turkish central bank. His hamstring would get some rest, and the Turkish lira would plunge as investors bail out.

They pay me to solve problems.

ANOTHER HOLIDAY RUINED BY CROCODILES

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — An acclaimed outdoorsman who wrote movingly about testing himself against nature is presumed dead after a crocodile snatched him from his kayak while he led an American expedition from the source of the White Nile into the heart of Congo.

You're not safe anywhere these days.

REVIEW

The first thing that strikes you about the iPhone4 is how unlike it is to the Reverend Ian Paisley. Its compact design and slick curves bear little resemblance to the crag-faced unionist leader. And its new operating system allows it to run more than 50,000 applications, unlike Paisley, who can’t run any applications, and whose operating system hasn’t been upgraded since his birth in 1926.

But you can’t compare Apples with Orangemen.

I just worked out a solution to the European debt crisis, but I’m not going to tell anyone what it is.

WIKILEEKS

Bradley Manning, the prime suspect in the leaking of the Afghan war files, raged against his US Army employers before he allegedly downloaded thousands of secret memos. The US Army intelligence analyst, who is half British, went to school in Wales...

TODAY IN HISTORY

It was 200 years ago today that Bogota rebelled against the Spanish crown, laying the foundations for the wealth and stability that Colombia has enjoyed since.

If the Spanish crown were still here, the Colombian success story simply would not have been possible.



Colombians living their life of love and laughter, free from the Spanish crown.

Trouble is brewing in Russia.

GOLDMAN SACHS MAKES BILLIONS SHORTING GOLDMAN SACHS STOCK

I was shocked and dismayed –I think we all were- to learn that Goldman Sachs had been involved in whatever it was they did. I had always ranked them with unlicensed boxing promoters and taxi drivers in Cairo, as people who inspire one with absolute confidence.

I was visiting my poor mother in Somerset when I heard the news.

"You’re never going to believe this," I told old Longbottom the farmer. "Goldman Sachs defrauded investors out of more than $1bn by mis-marketing toxic sub-prime mortgage-related securities."

He looked at me with tears in his honest, weather-beaten old face.

"I don't understand it," he said, "but I know it's wrong".

RUM: NOT JUST FOR RIFF-RAFF ANYMORE

“You remember that I asked whether whisky and brandy were in the cabin. You said they were. How many landsmen are there who would drink rum when they could get these other spirits? Yes, I was certain it was a seaman."
Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of Black Peter

When you think of brandy, you probably picture a St Bernard (dog) rescuing a man in a snowdrift. When you think of whisky, you perhaps think of ghillies, whatever they are, shooting grouse in their gentlemen’s club. When you think of rum, you probably imagine a Central American peasant lying face down in a ditch, or sailors fighting in Plymouth.

Rum has an image problem, but they’ve put their top marketing people on it, and are re-launching it as a luxury product, the kind of thing that oil traders and secret agents can drink on their golfing holidays. I was invited to a tasting of Zacapa, the best -or at any rate the most expensive- rum in the world. It is produced 2,300 metres above sea level in the mountains of Guatemala, said their salesman. Well, well.

They gave me the 23-year old Zacapa, with its rich dark flavours, the mystery of the Guatemalan highlands in every sip. Twenty-three years ago Guatemala was having a civil war which left 200,000 dead, but the rum seems to have escaped unscathed, thank God.

Anyway, so I bought a bottle. It was a lot of money, but I am a man who appreciates the finer things in life. I didn’t have much to do next day, so I drank it in my underpants, while playing Mike Tyson’s Super Punch-Out.

Martin Amis wishes his sister had converted to Islam.

To me, Martin has always been the greatest of the Amis brothers. Sir Kingsley hasn’t written anything worth reading in years, while Sir Hardy has always been more interested in socks than in literature.

"Scarlet is perhaps the most masculine of all colours, but its very flamboyancy limits its use... The matching of socks to the tie I find affected."

Interesting points, but it’s not exactly Tolstoy, is it?


UPDATE!
On the other hand, Martin is the only Amis brother who doesn't have a knighthood, the useless fucker.

According to Venezuela’s newspaper of record, purchasing power has fallen 162% under Chavez. So if, pre-Chavez, you could buy 100 potatoes, you can now only afford 62 anti-potatoes.

What about the Venezuelan intelligentsia? What does he have to say about this?

Warren Buffett is now merely the world’s third-richest human. Thanks to my buy-high-sell-low investment strategy, I’m not even in the top twenty any more, so I’m in no position to point and laugh.

I may not know much about investing, but, if I were called Buffett, I would name my children All-u-can-eat and Salad.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ELECTIONS IN COLOMBIA

Patria this, patria that, patria the other. The patria can kiss my nutsack.

HOW TO WIN WITH WOMEN (2)

So I had the new Morso Cleanheat Multifuel stove installed. I reckon I can heat my house for a whole winter with the pizza fliers that come through my door.

I tried recycling the pizza fliers, but they kept coming back as more pizza fliers, on top of the pizza fliers that would have come anyway. This is why you must destroy the pizza fliers with fire.

How many women have I had since I had the stove installed? None, believe it or not. I am sure a lot of chicks would give their right arm to go out with a guy with a top-of-the-range stove, but it is hard to drop it into the conversation without seeming like some nouveau riche Russian.

I took out my Morso Multifuel owners’ manual in Starbucks today, and leafed through it while winking at the girl opposite me. She got up and left. She could hardy finish her coffee fast enough.

I don’t understand women.

But we were talking about pizza fliers. I have no grievance against the suffering fellow creatures who put the things through my door. They are only doing their job. And they are doing it very well, since if I go away for a few days, the pizza fliers are ankle-deep by the time I get back. If only the rest of the economy were this efficient we wouldn’t be in this hole.

I guess what I’m saying is... (more later.)

When I was a teenager, DJs would devote an inordinate amount of time to the question of who was, and who was not, in the house. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of that?

The Campaign for Uncommunicative Navigation and Transit

Just bought a pair of polarizing sunglasses. They make me violently disagree with whoever I look at.

Needed some shades for my flight next week. This time I’m going to show up at the airport wearing dark glasses, a pair of earmuffs and a t-shirt that says, “I am not listening to your announcements.”

I’m flying with Delta, or “Swine Air” as they are known. They are the absolute worst for abusing the intercom system, especially the pilots. Bus drivers don’t spend twenty minutes hectoring one. They let one read one’s Vogue magazine in peace.

And if you politely request that he stops interrupting and shuts his goddamned cake hole for five minutes, they wrestle you to the ground, put plasticuffs on your wrists and have you charged with air rage when you land. I know this from personal experience.

And I can’t block them out with my iPod, because they claim it is an “electronic device” which interferes with their beastly avionics.

In fact, an iPod is not capable of bringing down a 300-tonne jet. If it were, 747s would be dropping from the sky like pheasants. But if you point this out, they will wrestle you to the ground, put plasticuffs on your wrists, taser you and have you charged with air rage when you land. The slightest show of defiance elicits this reaction.

I’m going to get the fucking boat next time. I really hate these people.

REASONS TO VOTE LABOUR

Reading the latest news from Colombia I realised that the Labour Party does have one redeeming feature, and it is this: they don’t murder people and dump them in pits, at least not in England. No one ever gives Gordon Brown any credit for this. Nor did he go to Eton.

Vote Brown! He didn’t go to Eton, and he doesn’t bury people in pits.

BOGOTA- Went to the market this weekend to buy an expandable cosh, but they didn’t have any colours I liked. I had a long chat with the salesman, to help find the right cosh for me, but they only had three varieties in stock, police issue rubbish from the United States. He tried to fob me off with a knuckle-duster, but knuckle-dusters are gauche whatever colour they are.

I don’t want a knuckle-duster, I want a cosh. And not just any cosh. I want the cosh that Harrods would sell me, if they had a branch in Colombia. A cosh that Princess Diana would not have been ashamed to club photographers with.

“You’re not going to see the Duchess of Devonshire wearing a knuckle-duster, you know what I mean?” I said to Pancho, the salesman. He didn’t have an answer to that one.

If a murderer comes round my house this evening I guess I’ll just have to make the best of a bad do and throw plates at him.

POPULAR MYTHS REFUTED

“Shutting windows when you go out makes it harder for burglars to get in,” says Bystander, citing Her Majesty’s Government.

This simply isn’t true.

According to rogue economist Steve Levitt, there is no correlation between a window being open and a toe-rag climbing through it.

Money spent on windows might be better spent on tennis courts, Levitt argues in his book Freaking Idiots, since people wearing tennis shorts are only one fifteenth as likely to rob houses as non-tennis players are.

Or perhaps a dog would defend your house from burglars? Nothing could be further from the truth.

“A cat is 37 times more likely to bite a burglar than a dog is,” Levitt refutes. “A dog is more likely to bite its owner.” Money spent on dogs might be better spent on roller-skates, Levitt argues.

Statistically, a burglar is more likely to tread on a roller-skate, fly through a window and fracture his pelvis, than he is to be bitten by a cat, Levitt points out in his paper The Impact Of Sandwich Fillings On Prison Population: A Response To Pappenhacker and Stoat.



Levitt, hard at work debunking stuff.

Fucking telephone gets on my tits, ringing and dinging all the time.