Man in a Shed: Hamster

Thursday, April 23, 2009

On the lighter side

My daughter has finally worn me down into letting her have a pet.

Given that she started of looking for a puppy I hope I've limited the damage to a Hamster ( Humphrey the hungry hamster by the looks of things ). Though I once had a Gerbil and always looked down on Hamsters ( slow and lethargic etc ) but this one seems anything but. He's already formed his own escape committee and is training for the London Marathon on his Hamster wheel at night.

Now I'm busy googling Hamster teeth and welfare as well as spending too much time blogging and not getting enough work done !

Still Humphrey's cute, but keeps scratching. Does he have mites ? I bet any vets bill is 5x the cost of buying him.

I'm busy trying to gather a set of useful web sites for looking after Hamsters at the moment.

But it takes my mind of the criminal irresponsibility of the Labour government for a few minutes, so perhaps he's worth it, after all the big bills are coming in the future from Gordon Brown.

PS Perhaps I should have got her to name him Special Patrol Group.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman