My wife has just emailed me a report in the British Daily Mail newspaper concerning a US pilot jailed in Britain.
A pilot who turned up so drunk at Heathrow that he didn’t know where he was supposed to fly his transatlantic passenger plane has been jailed for six months.
George La Perle was stopped by security officers because he was reeking of alcohol, Isleworth Crown Court was told.
He told them he had just had a few beers the previous evening and that he was scheduled to fly to New York. His destination was in fact Detroit……..
Flying regulations allow pilots a maximum of 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood – La Perle was found to have 89. [my bold][1]
US school bus drivers are permitted ZERO milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.
Does this mean school bus driving is considered a more responsible job than flying a Boeing 767, with around two hundred and fifty passengers, four and a half thousand miles across the Atlantic?
Well, is it? Or is there anyone else out there sick to death of buying inferior quality products that fall apart, or cease to work, after a very short time. Household items are often the most obvious culprits.
Take these three, for example:
I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with the contents of these plastic canisters; they appear to do what is stated on the label i.e. clean and disinfect the bathroom.
At least, they would if I could get the liquid out of the containers.
Here, we have two part-used spray bottles of Chlorox ‘Clean-Up’ and an equally part-used container of Lysol ‘Bathroom Cleaner’. They’ve sat in my bathroom cupboard for months, along with similar, more recently purchased, items.
Why, you may ask, am I discarding half-full bottles of cleaner and buying more?
The answer lies with the mechanical device that screws to the top of the bottle. Designed (if that’s the relative word) to spray a fine mist of disinfectant over my lavatorial surfaces at the touch of a lever, these – no doubt, oriental – inventions cease their function long before the contents is exhausted.
One moment I’m spraying with all the vigor of a gardener chasing greenfly on his tomatoes, then, with no warning, the handle’s gone limp, the issue subsides, and any further pumping results in no more than an occasional splat of bubbles on the porcelain.
I keep hoping that, somewhere out there in our great retail world, there’s one lone pump-action canister with the muscular might of the ‘Exterminator’, the staying power of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and with workings that won’t ever develop plastic fatigue. When I eventually find my ‘Charles Atlas’ pump-action screw-top, I can use it to finish off all those half-empty bottles in the washbasin cupboard.
Inferior bathroom items don’t stop at disinfectant bottles. There was a time when a brass fitting was manufactured from brass, and stainless steel was actually stainless. Nowadays, they rust, which is really quite strange as neither brass nor stainless steel produces ferric oxide.
A few months ago I decided to refurbish my bathroom. To compliment the newly painted walls and lacquered woodwork I went to Menards where I purchased a new toilet seat and brass fitments for the cabinets.
Today, the ‘brass’ fitments have gone rusty and the ‘stainless steel’ screws securing the toilet seat are leaching a brown stain onto the bowl. Even the heavy ‘brass’ bolts securing the toilet to the floor are being rapidly converted to ferric oxide.
Nothing is what it says it is anymore. Yet, ten years ago I could trust a brass screw or bolt in my toilet cistern to still be fit for its purpose today.
The schism in American politics, that has divided left and right, had never been wider than it was on the afternoon of Friday January 7th. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were hollering into their microphones for all they were worth, damning the president, castigating the Democrats, rousing their fan base to fury at the ‘horrors happening to America’. John Boehner, only recently in receipt of his oversized gavel from the outgoing Leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had already declared war on President Obama and his ideas for transforming America into a ‘socialist’ (or was that a ‘communist’?) state.
Obama’s ratings had crashed through the floor. His presidency looked set to nosedive out of existence at the next election. In Congressional rest rooms, Democratic politicians could be heard mumbling and grumbling about their leader’s spineless acquiescence to Republican blackmail.
Less than one week later – to be precise, last Thursday morning – the change that enveloped this nation was palpable. Had Disney World released its finest fairy godmother to sprinkle magic stardust from Maine to Louisiana?
Republicans and Democrats suddenly began talking to each other; Beck and Limbaugh took turns to deify the President – so humbly they would probably have kissed his feet, had he been close by them – and Obama discovered he was the best thing this nation had produced since Henry Ford invented the Model T.
It would have been wonderful, indeed, had Disney been able to manufacture a real fairy godmother for America. Alas, Disney deals only in fantasies. It wasn’t magic stardust that caused this miraculous change to take place, it was more a magic bullet. Or, to be precise, around thirty of them.
While Obama is known for his oratory skills, his speeches had become boring to Americans. The trouble was they all said the same thing. Jared Lee Loughner finally gave him the opportunity to say something different.
The memorial ceremony in Tuscon on Wednesday night held an air of evangelicalism. One almost expected a heavenly choir to burst forth at any moment. Obama was at his best, doing what he does so well, reciting speeches written by someone else.
Americans revel in these grand displays of communal emotion. They clapped so much, and so often, it seemed the show might well go on all night. Australians, watching in Queensland, thanked God it wasn’t happening near them, for the plethora of shed tears may well have raised flood levels another foot.
To a British peasant, it was all way over the top. To Americans, it was an opportunity to join together in shedding their pent up grief and frustrations. To a country riven by political strife and back-biting it was a means to calm fears, unify, and cast off frustrations.
Sadly, like fairy godmothers, the cloak of togetherness is only a fantasy. In a few weeks they’ll all be back to hating each other once more. But, for just a short while, Jared Lee Loughner, accomplished what nobody else in this nation was able to do.
What a pity so many had to suffer and die to achieve it.
Where is the sanity?
Chinese crappers
Life in fantasy land