Was it the oil exchange? Or Liffe? Anyway, one day the Swampy crowd decided to do some direct action against the toffs of The City. Broke into one of the exchanges which had floor trading. Where they promptly got beaten up – they not realising that floor trading is rather the white sock crowed ‘oo kno’ ‘ow to ‘andle aggro.
Which brings is to vegans protesting at the meat counter:
Shoppers attack vegans at Sheffield meat market
Right on! The particular fun being this:
One market customer waved a placard at the camera saying: “Sorry we killed the cow . . . but it was eating your dinner.”
“Blind”, was he? How convenient. Why do I suspect another,’ram packed’, contrived incident?
LIFFE at Cannon Bridge. Friends of mine was in charge of floor security. “You want to go in there? Go right ahead…”
Good odds the blind bloke was pushed over by one of his own. Political extremist looking for publicity at a political demo? It’s a wonder they didn’t tip him out of a wheelchair.
Shoppers attack vegans at Sheffield meat market
Yep, just happened. Spontaneously and out of the blue. You can trust our media to report fairly on this.
Yes, I was immediately suspicious of the convenient photo op.
The theatrical flailing around on the floor didn’t help with the plausibility. I’m not sure what it is about blindness which prevents you getting up reasonably promptly when you are lying on the floor. That, or rolling into a ball to protect yourself.
Either of which would seem to be more instinctive and sensible options.
Just an everyday steak out.
I love the Stevie-Wonder-circa-1982 blind guy glasses. Pretty convincing stuff, lads.
However, I see he’s also wearing a wristwatch.
@Steve
Believe it or not, wristwatches for the blind are actually a real thing – I’ve a blind friend who has one. They look like a normal watch, but you can flick the top open and physically feel the position of the hands. I presume that they are made especially robust to stand this treatment.
Not that this does mean that the whole thing still isn’t a total put up job of course.
My father is blind and has a watch, you press a button and a voice tells you the time.
TheProle – good point, I’m getting to that point in my life where new technology is starting to become slightly baffling (UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA) so could just be my 80’s cultural bias. But he does look like the sort of blind guy central casting would send for a walk-on part in a BBC3 sitcom.
Never a good idea to mix it with floor traders. Just because they wear whistles doesn’t mean they’re accountants. The Sun newspaper thought it would be a cunning stunt to get a female onto the floor of the LSX. This was back in the days of the old market, when the waiters wore pink, the government broker a top hat & women weren’t allowed on the floor, . Lesser form of life, you see. Puzzled by big numbers. They wouldn’t even serve them in Birch’s. She got kidnapped & held to ransom. Cost the Sun a grand, if I remember rightly, to get her back.
Talking about numbers, this was when calculators were full of cogs, you wound the handle like a coffee grinder. Pocket? Not exactly. You could just about lift one. So you did your multiplication & division in your head. In pounds shillings & pence. Now I have to wait whilst some clown of a barman adds two beers at 1,50€ on the till. Whatever happened to mental arithmetic?
I was going to make a quip about Braille watches, then the Prole and Jim spoiled my fun.
bloke in spain
For decades in the UK one of the basic initial screening tests for dementia and similar problems has been to ask the patient to start at 100 and keep subtracting 7.
Apparently they have stopped teaching this now as so few students could do it themselves.
Having said that,
a) I know perfectly intelligent people who just really don’t “get” numbers and fly into a cold sweat at the thought of the “Countdown” numbers round.
b) I know that my mental arithmetic skills have declined noticeably even since the introduction of debit card swipe payments as it means that I don’t need to calculate small change most of the time.
In *Sheffield*? They really were stupid. This is the city that stamped out violent criminal gangs in the 1930s by the police forming their own gang.
Some people would say they’re not intelligent, then, JS.. More a species of mobile plant..
JS: After attending election counts annually for 25 years I used to be able to add up the numbers on the fly and calculate a percentage as I go, but now it definitely takes longer than before and if the total isn’t an easy number like 25N, 33N, 50N, 66N I start reaching for the calculator.
I think as you age it’s not speed you lose, but the number of “registers” you can hold in your head. I find I temporarily forget the operation I’m trying to do: 52, (sees 3) 55, (sees 2) 57, (sees 4) 57… 57…. 57… 61…
@BiS
Ah, twiddling the handle of a hand Monroe. Happy days! They offered us electrically powered ones (the future is here!), but we pointed out we could operate by hand more quickly 🙂
@ Chris Miller
Yes, I remember – I was *required* to learn how to use one, but after a bit they let me have a desk without a Monroe as I could do it in my head a lot quicker and slightly more reliably.
@ JS
+1
I too have known highly intelligent people who just could not do sums.
There was one occasion when I was explaining to one of the admin staff how to do a calculation and when I said “divide by two” she used her electric Monroe to multiply by 0.5. It took me a couple of seconds to recover but fortunately less time than it took her Monroe to do the calculation.
If the alleged attack was a false flag operation by the veggies, was it really wise? I would have thought it highly likely to start a preference cascade.
My father had one of those hand cranked calculating machines and a hand cranked Gestetner duplicating machine – both grey.- in his business.
As a child I loved using them – parents appreciated my working for free.
My plumber puts an apprentice through college every two years, I was impressed by him teach the young’uns sums shortcuts, such as (can’t remember the details): release so much gas and calculate the flow per minute, but those numbers are hard, so instead do it for exactly two minutes and divide by two (and repeat it more accurately if the number looks ‘wrong’.) I do similar short-cuts with electrical measurements, but I’m old enough to have taught myself.