Rip Off Britain

Optrex Actimist Eye Spray….

Well you have probably heard of folks calculating the price of printer ink by the gallon, £1000-£4,000!

Having spent £14.00 on Optrex Actimist Eye Spray I was disappointed to find that it just made my tired, itchy eyes sticky but no less irritated.

I got even more irritated when I  read the ingredients and got out my calculator.

Apparently my £14.00 bottle contains 10ml of product so a whole litre of the product would cost £1400

Each 1ml contains

Soy Lectin  10 mg
Sodium Chloride 8 mg
Ethanol 8mg
Phenoxyethanol 5mg
Vitamin A Palmitate 0.25mg
Vitamin E 0.02mg

The rest is Purified Water.

Totting that up I get 31.27 mg of ingredients in water.  Well, 1 ml ( millilitre, or thousandth of a litre) weighs a whole gram so my 31.27 mg is just 3% of the contents of the bottle.

So with the product costing £1400 a litre and the active ingredients only constituting 3.127% of the product then the active ingredients are being charged at a whopping £ 44,771 a litre or £203,598 a gallon!

So what are these active ingredients?

Soy Lectin – a simple plant extract.

Sodium Chloride – common salt.

Ethanol – plain old alcohol.

Phenoxyethanol – a common ingredient in sunscreens and the like.

Vitamin A Palmitate – a derivative of plain old vitamin A.

Vitamin E – pretty self explanatory too, Vitamin E is a common preservative by the way.

So nothing very exciting there then.

Welcome to another example of Rip-Off Britain, £ 203,598 a gallon for common ingredients for itchy eyes that didn’t really work for me.

Hope it works for you..

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10th Time Lucky

A young man married a beautiful woman who had previously divorced 10 husbands. On their wedding night, she told her new husband to “Please be gentle; I’m still a Virgin”.

“What?” said the puzzled groom. “How can that be if you’ve been married ten times?”

“Well, husband #1 was a Sales Representative; he kept telling me how great it was going to be.

“Husband # 2 was in Software Services; he was never really sure how it was supposed to function; but he said he’d look into it and get back with me.

“Husband # 3 was from Field Services; he said that everything checked out diagnostically but he just couldn’t get the system up.

“Husband # 4 was in Telemarketing; even though he knew he had the order, he didn’t know when he would be able to deliver.

“Husband # 5 was an Engineer, he understood the basic process but he wanted three years to research, implement, and design a new state of the-art method.

“Husband #6 was from Administration; he thought he knew how but he wasn’t sure whether it was his job or not.

“Husband # 7 was in Marketing; although he had a product, he was never sure how to position it…

“Husband # 8 was a Psychiatrist; all he did was talk about it.

“Husband # 9 was a Gynecologist; all he did was look at it.

“Husband # 10 was a Stamp Collector; all he ever did was lick it….. God I miss him.

” But now that I’ve married you, I’m so excited”.

“Wonderful”, said the husband, “but why?

“You’re with the GOVERNMENT, this time I know I’m gonna get screwed.”

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Not rearing pigs for a living

I don’t know if this is a real piece of correspondence but it could well be….

This is a copy of a letter sent to David Miliband:

From: NIGEL JOHNSON-HILL, PARKFARM, MILLAND, LIPHOOK GU30 7JT, UK

Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3JR

16 July 2009

Dear Secretary of State,

My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs. I would now like to join the ‘not rearing pigs’ business. In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.

I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these?

As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven’t reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this? My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is – until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.

If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases?

Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don’t rear? I am also considering the ‘not milking cows’ business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current DEFRA advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?

In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.

Yours sincerely,

Nigel Johnson-Hill

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The unstoppable virus

I thought you would want to know about this e-mail virus. Even the most
advanced programs from Norton or McAfee cannot take care of this one.
It appears to affect those who were born prior to 1960.

Symptoms:

1. Causes you to send the same e-mail twice. Done that!

2. Causes you to send a blank e-mail! That too!

3 Causes you to send e-mail to the wrong person. Yep!

4. Causes you to send it back to the person who sent it to you. And that!

5. Causes you to forget to attach the attachment. Well darn!

6. Causes you to hit ‘SEND’ before you’ve finished. Oh no – not again!

7. Causes you to hit ‘ DELETE’ instead of ‘SEND.’ and I just hate that!

8. Causes you to hit ‘SEND’ when you should hit ‘DELETE.’ Oh NO!

IT IS CALLED THE ‘C-NILE VIRUS.’

Hmmm….Have I already sent this to you?

Or maybe you sent it to me!

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Darling Brown joke.

Gordon Brown called Alastair Darling into his office one day and said, ‘Alastair, I have the answer to Cameron. We’re going to win back Middle England’.

‘Brilliant, PM! What’s the plan?’ said Darling.

‘Well’ said Brown ‘we’ll get ourselves two of those long Barbour coats, some proper wellies, a stick and a flat cap – and a dog, unless we can get Harriet Harman to come. Then we’ll really look the part. We’ll go to a nice old country pub, in Much Something or other and show we really enjoy the countryside.

‘Right PM’ said Darling. So a few days later, all kitted out and with the requisite hound – a Labrador – at heel, they set off. Eventually they arrive in a quiet little village and find a lovely country pub and go in and up to the bar.

‘Good evening Landlord, two pints of your best ale, from the wood please’ said Brown.

‘Good evening, Prime Minister’ said the landlord, ‘two pints of best it is, coming up’

Brown & Darling stood leaning on the bar contemplating new taxes, nodding now and again to those who came in for a drink, whilst the dog lay quietly at their feet.

Suddenly the door from the adjacent bar opened and in came a grizzled old shepherd, complete with crook. He walked up to the Labrador, lifted its tail with his crook, looked underneath, shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the other bar.

A few moments later, in came a wizened farmer who followed the same procedure, to the bewilderment of Brown and Darling. People of all ages and gender followed suit over the next hour. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer, Darling called the landlord over. ‘Tell me’ said Darling, ‘Why did all those people come in and look under the dog’s tail like that? Is it an old country custom?

‘Good Lord no,’ said the landlord. ‘Someone told them there was a Labrador in this bar with two arseholes.’

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Clarkson’s Gaydar goes bingly bong!

Apparently the Sunday Times didn’t want this contribution so we have unashamedly borrowed it. If Mr Clarson wants it taken down then fair do’s otherwise consider that we are lending the oppressed some free web space.

“Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out”

I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.

He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt onto.

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany … because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit. [Obviously written before Rumpy Pumpy got the job].

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit in the meantime.

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Did you read these and hear Tommy Cooper?

To the best of my knowledge Tommy Cooper never used any of these gags but when I read them I could only do it in his distinctive voice, how weird is that.

Does that makes him immortal or just bloody irritating?

I met this bloke with a didgeridoo and he was playing Dancing Queen on it. I thought, ‘That’s Aboriginal.’

This lorry full of tortoises collided with a van full of terrapins. It was a turtle disaster.

I told my girlfriend I had a job in a bowling alley. She said ‘Tenpin?’ I said, ‘No, permanent.’

I went into a pet shop. I said, ‘Can I buy a goldfish?’ The guy said, ‘Do you want an aquarium?’ I said, ‘I don’t care what star sign it is.’

I bought some Armageddon cheese today, and it said on the packet. ‘Best before End’

I went to buy a watch, and the man in the shop said ‘Analogue.’ I said ‘No, just a watch.’

I went into a shop and I said, ‘Can someone sell me a kettle.’ The bloke said ‘Kenwood’ I said, ‘Where is he then?’

My mate is in love with two schoolbags. He’s bi-satchel.

I went to the doctor. I said to him ‘I’m frightened of lapels.’ He said, ‘You’ve got cholera.’

I met the bloke who invented crosswords today. I can’t remember his name, its P something T something R.

I was reading this book today, The History of Glue. I couldn’t put it down.

I phoned the local ramblers club today, but the bloke who answered just went on and on.

The recruitment consultant asked me ‘What do you think of voluntary work? I said ‘I wouldn’t do it if you paid me.’

I was in the jungle and there was this monkey with a tin opener. I said, ‘You don’t need a tin opener to peel a banana.’ He said, ‘No, this is for the custard.’

This policeman came up to me with a pencil and a piece of very thin paper. He said, ‘I want you to trace someone for me..’

I told my mum that I’d opened a theatre. She said, ‘Are you having me on?’ I said, ‘Well I’ll give you an audition, but I’m not promising you anything.’

I phoned the local builders today, I said to them ‘Can I have a skip outside my house?’ He said, ‘I’m not stopping you!’

This cowboy walks in to a German car showroom and he says ‘Audi!’

I fancied a game of darts with my mate. He said, ‘Nearest the bull goes first’ He went ‘Baah’ and I went ‘Moo’ He said ‘You’re closest’

I was driving up the motorway and my boss phoned me and he told me I’d been promoted. I was so shocked I swerved the car. He phoned me again to say I’d been promoted even higher and I swerved again. He then made me managing director and I went right off into a tree. The police came and asked me what had happened. I said ‘I careered off the road’

I visited the offices of the RSPCA today. It’s tiny: you couldn’t swing a cat in there..

I was stealing things in the supermarket today while balanced on the shoulders of a couple of vampires. I was charged with shoplifting on two counts.

I bought a train ticket to France and the ticket seller said ‘Eurostar’ I said ‘Well I’ve been on telly but I’m no Dean Martin.

I phoned the local gym and I asked if they could teach me how to do the splits. He said, ‘How flexible are you?’ I said, ‘I can’t make Tuesdays or Thursdays.’

I went to the local video shop and I said, ‘Can I borrow Batman Forever?’ He said, ‘No, you’ll have to bring it back tomorrow’

A waiter asks a man, ‘May I take your order, sir?’ ‘Yes,’ the man replies. ‘I’m just wondering, exactly how do you prepare your chickens?’ ‘Nothing special, sir. We just tell them straight out that they’re going to die.’

Miss you Tommy.

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In pieces over this

Mazzy Starr fans will be pleased to know Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions released Through The Devil Softly on September 29, 2009!

Bliss

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Captain Pugwash creator dies

Captain Pugwash

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Recession, The Cause of Domestic Strife

Husband and wife are shopping in Tesco’s when the man picks up a  crate of Stella and sticks them into the trolley

What do you think you’re doing?’ asks the wife ‘They’re on offer,  only £10 for 24 cans’, he says

Put them back.  We can’t afford it,’ says the wife and they carry on shopping…

A few aisles later the woman picks up a £20 jar of face cream and sticks it into the trolley.

What do you think you’re doing?’ asks the man, ‘It’s my face cream.  It makes me look beautiful,’ she says.

The man replies…  ‘SO DOES 24 CANS OF STELLA AND IT’S HALF THE F***ING PRICE’

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