
Pffffffffffffft! </tea>
Bullfights...
Reg reader Graham Schofield was this morning offered perhaps the most sensational reason for being late to work we've ever seen: an air raid affecting the A4 in west London. Mercifully for Graham, his Audi's satnav flagged up the conflagration before he got caught in the crossfire resulting from what we assume is a serious …
Now, come on - why would we even want to? Especially after reading this: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/05/25/euro_implosion_strategy/ . Admittedly, UK isn't Greece, but suggesting to put your money into Germany speaks a few words about your trust in your own economy...
AC for obvious reasons.
Some of the less well known ones...
Zombies (4387)
Gordon Brown streaking (113)
Lorry full of kittens shed its load (2120)
Impromptu illegal jungle/drum n bass rave in carriageway (1085)
Road closed due to flooding caused by football hooligans urinating en-mass (775)
Diversions due to a young couple making love atop a keep left bollard (4569)
They thought of almost everything!
Reading an early draft of EN-ISO 14819-2, I found a few slightly odd ones:
627 - No Motor Vehicles Without Catalytic Converters (Why would that change?)
628/629 - No Motor Vehicles With Even/Odd-Numbered Registration Plates
28 - Road Closed Intermittently (Huh?)
709 - Blasting Work
37 - Restaurant reopened. (What, no pub?)
1479 - Gunfire on Roadway - Danger (You don't say?)
Possibly the strangest would be: 1477 - Police Checkpoint.
Why would they advertise that?
Of course, the actual standard requires monies to be paid, and I'm not bothered enough to find out what exacting changes happened in the end.
"628/629 - No Motor Vehicles With Even/Odd-Numbered Registration Plates"
If memory serves, there's a legitimate reason for this one - in some countries (can't remember where - maybe in asia? or south america?) In an effort to reduce traffic congestion without spending money on infrastructure, governments require that only cars with odd/even numbers on their rego can drive on certain days - effectively halving the number of cars on the road at any one time. (And results in all sorts of weird economic effects, such as black market rego plates, etc).
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"If memory serves, there's a legitimate reason for this one - in some countries (can't remember where - maybe in asia? or south america?) "
Lagos, Nigeria (Africa) was one, maybe still is. Although it had the opposite effect. People went out and bought a second car, usually the cheapest old bangers they could find with the right number plates, car use didn't decrease and air pollution levels shot up.
We had something similar in New Zealand in the late 70's. Everyone had a coloured sticker on their windscreen with a day of the week printed on it, on that day you couldn't drive your car at all, they were called "Carless Days". It was part of a weird economic policy thought up by a raving lunatic who was our Prime Minister. He also instituted a price and wage freeze in an attempt to prevent inflation. That didn't work terribly well either.
Please, PLEASE someone post a link to the draft standard with all the possibilities in it!
I wonder if there is a huge list of $ANIMAL on road for all likely and unlikely values of large mammal, bird or reptile? I wonder if there is one for the peculiarly English "Police holding up traffic so mother and baby ducks /swans can cross the road"?
Ask and you shall receive...the full listing is contained within this source code: https://www.cgran.org/browser/projects/radio_data_system/trunk/src/lib/gr_rds_tmc_events.h
Not the actual spec document as those all seem to be pay to download, but close enough.
My favourites are "1026 - less extreme temperatures" (what?) and "1071- swarms of insects", imagine seeing that flash up on your satnav!
I suspect some sort of time-travel based shenanigans where our intrepid reader's car has taken a wrong turn and emerged in 1941. Cue some no doubt hilarious sitcom fun involving a flirty barmaid and rationed luxury items. Stretched out over 36 episodes.
How ironic the car was an Audi.
I am about to make a Pun about a German car. Afterwards you will wonder "Audi Do That?".
Actually you won't it's a pretty poor joke. Heard the one about the german cowboy who is inexplicably at the wheel of a car? "Audi Partner". I don't even know if that's a cowboy phrase, none of this makes "Any Audi Sense" (lol that last one WASNT a pun).
If someone has used this once now, then that might well be a dry run for later on. Imagine if you will the following scenario: Take a city with a lot more tourists driving about than normal due, say, to a large sporting event of some sort. Next, using several of these spoofers, send out faked notices of road closures with the message "OLYMPIC CLOSURE" on them.
Someone from outside London would almost certainly believe such a message, and do as the sat-nav told them to do; if they knew where they were, they'd not be using a sat-nav. If done carefully, then hundreds of lost drivers could be funnelled onto just a few roads, to create instant and long-lasting gridlock.
The police would likely respond to this as if it were a terrorist attack, especially if something else was coordinated to happen about the same time. Even a flash-mob of people dressed as kittens would likely do the trick; ANY unusual things would be treated as enemy action. Once alerted and sobered up, our politicians would definitely feel the need to contribute, and given what a complete shower most are, this would make matters infinitely worse.
The best remedy: jam all RDS signals and hope that drivers have enough common sense to avoid road accidents and the like.
"The fact that the German car manufacturer's satnav systems have an air raid warning option points to the possibility that Angela Merkel intends to resolve the eurozone crisis in the time-honoured local tradition."
Dear el-reg
Please find enclosed the bill for a new keyboard
Yours etc
I'm told there used to be a running gag amongst British airline pilots in the 50s and early 60s along the lines of "sure, I know the way to Berlin / Dresden / Dusseldorf / name-your-major-German-city, I used to do regular run every night."
There's another famous bit of aviation humour: a BA (should that be BEA?) pilot requests instructions from a very busy Templhof aproach controller repeatedly. Control replies in a rather short manner suggesting the pilot is of less than average intelligence.
A very British voice replies "I'm terribly sorry, the last time I was here was 15 years ago, it was dark and I wasn't landing. It's changed a bit since then..."
How many readers were even born before the end of WWII. I wasn't, I missed it by a few years.
Yet the German stereotype is still firmly fixed in the comic-book images that I remember from the 1950s. It was more than sixty years ago: time for something new?
Sorry to be serious. I still loved the message.
Err, No,
I wasn't born either, its good humour and no malice is intended my fear would be that if we stopped talking about it, "...All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..."
but of course, there are always some instances when we should be thinking "DONT MENTION THE WAR!!!)
:)
"The fact that the German car manufacturer's satnav systems have an air raid warning option points to the possibility that Angela Merkel intends to resolve the eurozone crisis in the time-honoured local tradition."
Alternatively, Iron Sky is a documentary.
I read an article recently that claims it was actually filmed on the moon! Apparently a leaked video shows a cameraman tripping over a cable and falling further than they would under normal gravity.
A conspiracy theory based on a film based on a conspiracy theory. The net nutters must be running short of ideas!
So, you get those guys and the moon landing nutballs, and you have one group who thinks there was a conspiracy, and something that was filmed on the earth was actually filmed on the moon - and another who think there's a conspiracy, and something that was filmed on the moon was actually filmed on earth.
Gotta love it.
Simplest explanation is finger trouble by the person entering the messages.
Any way we all know that if a nuclear bomb went off in the centre of London then all that we would be told was that "an incident is causing traffic congestion around Central London". All the traffic cameras would of course go offline "for maintenance".
i like the way the message list includes predefined messages for anyone who uses the train or tube, as well as motorists:
rail services irregular. Delays
underground services irregular.
And also one for people who live in the same country as Bob Crow.
public transport strike
so predictable, there's a predefined code for him.