Thursday 3 April 2008

Quote of the day


“ Don't interfere with something that ain't bothering you none”

Cowboy Proverb



“ There's always been some moron - who usually went by the name of 'producer' - who would have to justify his existence, and interfere.”

Frank Tashlin


Royal Mint monkey with UK coinage

The Royal mint has proudly announced a complete re design of Britain’s coins. To which the immediate response is why?

It is the first change in coinage since decimalisation was imposed on the UK in 1968 and will no doubt be accompanied by similar confusion in the elderly.

Clearly this will be more expensive than simply leaving the coinage as it is and appears to bring no benefit whatsoever. Business as usual for the British State under New-Labour then.

The Royal Mint’s chief executive Andrew Stafford, came up with the pathetically inadequate excuse (I bet he’ll get an unreasonably huge productivity bonus at the end of the year too) that:

"We had to make sure that the coin design was true to the heritage of British coins and gave fresh inspiration and modernity to something that has been in existence for 40 years."

Doh! No - You didn’t: “Fresh inspiration”? “Modernity”? I am not usually drawn to using such language in ‘print’ but... What absolute Bollocks!

As far as I know there was no universal clamour to change the existing coinage. It works perfectly well as currency, we all recognise it. How about changing all the road signs while you are at it, or switching to use a different alphabet while you are at it.

Apparently they had a competition (a pretty quiet one by the looks of it) and someone came up with re cycling the idea they used to use with card collections like the ‘Man from Uncle’ and ‘Batman’ ones of yore, part of a picture on one side that you need the complete collection to assemble.

Apparently the winning design was inspired by the thought of drunks in pubs trying to assemble the image.

So presumably Stafford feels that the heritage of the British State is fractured , maybe he is not so wrong there.

How about Britannia? That is certainly true to the heritage of British coinage, maybe with a raised hemline and a kick ass attitude a-la girl power?

Or better still - how about not wasting taxpayers money on an utterly pointless exercise? How about, just for once, not 'fixing' something that isn’t broken.