Unleash the power of your inner geek with Iron Man 3 flash drives

If you never tire of going the extra mile to annoy everyone in your office with the latest geek gadget, then perhaps it’s time to put down your Darth Vader helmet and pick up one of the latest Iron Man 3 flashdrives.

There’s nothing quite like a super hero when it comes to inspiring grown men to behave like emotionally stunted and socially retarded fantasists who think it’s acceptable to talk in strange voices whilst pretending to wield a light-saber.

Marvel movies in particular have a way of awaking the dormant geek within us all, and there are a host of companies who are ever ready to cash in on our obsessions and help us make the kingdom of the nerd just a little more nerdier. 

The team at infoThink who describe themselves a “making ideas come true” have recently announced the release of a range of flash drives which are inspired by the new Iron Man 3 movie.

Set to be released to tie in with the movie this May, there are a trio of Iron Man 3 themed flash drives in total and, take a deep breath son, here’s what you’ll get for your money. 

All of these bad boys are on the market with 8 GB or 16 GB of storage and sport a slim slide-out connector. Perhaps the most popular of the bunch will be the one shaped as Iron Man’s Repulsor glove. When this bad mother is plugged into the USB port the light at the centre of the hand glows blue, which admittedly is enough to leave any Tony Stark fan quite breathless, but just you wait all you fanboys and fangirls, it gets better, a lot better.....

Because the fingers of the aforesaid glove can be manipulated into posable gestures, it is quite an attractive and feasible  proposition to leave the glove stuck in your USB port whilst it casually gives all and sundry the one fingered salute. 

The other two flash drives are not quite as Marvel-lous but when the one shaped as the epic arc reactor chest piece is plugged in, it too lights up like a Christmas tree in a way that has been rumoured to blow people’s Spiderman socks off. 

The Iron Patriot drive is in the shape of the character’s helmet but it doesn’t appear to do a whole lot except look fierce, or should that be vacant? 

You can see the Iron Man 3 Flash drives here, but the real question is, what will you keep on yours? 

School’s Out! But the Government Wants you Back in

Meet Mr Gove! Is this a face you can trust?

Maggie Thatcher may have earned the moniker of ‘milk snatcher’ but David Cameron could go down in history as the ‘holiday snatcher’ if Education Secretary Michael Gove gets his way.

The strange looking Tory wants to consign British kids’ traditionally long school summer holidays to history so we can compete and keep pace with other countries such as China.

It also transpires that Cameron’s government have already suggested the school day could be extended to last from 7:30am to 5:30pm, which beggars belief when you consider the detrimental effect those working hours have on the personal life and mental well-being of a grown man, let alone a growing child. 

If ever evidence was needed what a bunch of rampant capitalists and two-bit shysters are ruling the roost in modern Britain then surely this latest crack brained proposal is the proof that the pudding is decidedly sour, in fact, it’s laced with cyanide. 

The crackerjack who’s in charge of our kids’ education Mr Gove declared war on our children’s well-being when he announced that the traditional long summer school holiday is a relic of the 19th century and must be consigned to history.

According to Gove, Britain's school holidays are wrong because they are still scheduled for a time when children were needed to help out on farms and most mothers stayed at home.

The opinionated sectary snarled at an education conference, “We can’t afford an education system that was essentially set in the nineteenth century.” 

The educational crusader added, “British pupils are at a 'significant handicap' compared to youngsters in East Asian nations who benefit from extra tuition and support from teachers.”

To back up their boy’s attempt to turn our kids into little more than industrialised drones whose life from the cradle to the grave is sworn to the service of making the fat cats fatter, a Whitehall source added, “We can either start working as hard as the Chinese, or we'll all soon be working for the Chinese.”

So there you have, those long languid Summers you spent outdoors in the company of friends and family as free as a bird and as high as a honey bee will, if the men in suits and dark corridors get their way, be consigned to oblivion. 

In it’s place will be endless claustrophobic hours spent in a poorly ventilated and poorly lit classroom as some professor of pontification spouts endless drivel about meaningless trite. 

Those Summer holidays where you can smell, touch, taste, hear and feel the very essence of life, will be replaced by a constant bombardment of your sense by facts, figures, and fabricated fancy which has the sole aim of making you a more productive worker, a sedated citizen and an avid consumer. All in all just another brick in the wall which obscures anything of real value. 

What those dozy dopes in government fail to realise is, education is like everything else. It’s all about quality, not quantity. It’s a large number of teachers and the trite they teach which is failing our kids, not the limited hours they have to fill their pupil’s heads with it. 

It’s almost as if Gove and his cronies want our kids putting in longer hours at the coal face of the curriculum so they’ll suffer from a bad dose of information overload. You fill someone’s head with enough junk and work them to the point of exhaustion then they’ll no longer think for themselves because they’ve got bloat of the brain and it’s all just too strenuous. 

It appears at the heart of these imbecilic proposals is a scant regard for our kids who these cretins seemingly view as little more than tools of production which are not being utilised enough to make the economy go boom with a bang. 

What ever happened to learning for the pure love of learning? Now it’s all tailored to getting a job and making as much filthy cash as possible. 

Children live in the moment and learn best when they are engaged and excited about something which means something to them. Sitting at a desk for long hours and wading through hours of wearisome waffle will just foster ennui and generate nothing buy mental stagnation. 

As the man Alice said Mr Gove, when August rolls around like a lazy old sun, “School’s out!” And no amount of bureaucratic proposals and cracking of the whip will make the kids go back in.

And aint nothing gonna change that Great British tradition - not even all the tea in China. 

The Gory Tories, a High Maintenance Queen and the Lords of Avarice

It’s a taxing situation sir! 

Despite what the third-rate snake oil salesman David Cameron would have you believe, we’re not all in this together. No sir! Most of us are knee-deep in the shit and it’s only a select few who are serving up the sandwiches. 

Anyone who had the grave displeasure of witnessing a contemptuous Cameron pouring all the haughty disdain he learned in the desolate dormitories of Eton over David Dimbleby, when the veteran presenter quite reasonably asked if using ten million of taxpayers was a tad excessive in regard to burying Thatcher, would have realised there and then just what the word ‘democracy’ means to a dog called Dave.

The aggressive Cameron reacted like Dimbleby was attempting to rape God rather than voicing the concerns of the majority of British people, who when struggling to make ends meet see it as a bit rich, or quite a lot rich, that a dead millionaire who viewed privitisation as akin to a religion was given a state funeral at the public’s expense. 

I am the resurrection!

For a British Prime Minister to so vigorously defend the right for Maggie to have a right rare send off whilst flippantly dismissing any counter argument as nothing more than the petty protests of the rabble is not the behaviour of an elected democratic leader, it’s the behavior of an over privelleged elitist toff and tin-pot tyrant who fails to understand the concerns of the ‘ruled.’

There’s no greengrocer’s daughters in today’s cabinet but there’s a lot of millionaires and a lot of hypocritical, pompous and spineless clowns who are having a right old knees up at our expense whilst endlessly pontificating on about how we’re all in it together, but just a casual look around will tell you that isn’t the case at all. 

Putting the gory Tories and their corrupt ways aside, much like a soiled nappy, for one moment. let’s take a little look at a couple of examples that hit the headlines, or rather were buried behind Kim Kardashian and Pippa Middleton’s butt, earlier this year and which succinctly demonstrate that Britain is a country where the gap between the rich and poor has now become an abyss which Cameron and company appear to be doing their level best to preserve. But just you remember plebs, we’re all in this together!

If you’ve got a job can you remember when you last received a pay-rise? The Queen can, she gets one every year but this year was certainly one to remember. Because old ma Windsor has received a £5 million extra in taxpayer’s money to carry our her official duties. 

That’s right, £5 million! Which is a lot of money for any one person to have for nothing, especially in the worst recession in living memory. Remember we live in a time when people are counting every penny and going both cold and hungry as they bury themselves deeper in debt as our superiors attempt to boldly navigate the way out of the double dip by fleecing the peasants and eating all the cake. 

Just look at all those poor people!

This juicy little nugget of information about Her Majesty appeared in the Daily Mail on April 2. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot fuss about the Sovereign Grant as it’s ironically called. And compared with what sort of gloves Justin Bieber is wearing and who is the most fancied in One Direction it probably pales into insignificance, but it’s definitely something which a government that apparently represents the sovereign rule of the people should be questioning with something along the lines of, “Hang on a minute isn’t this taking the piss just a little too much! Even for us blue-blooded Tory half-wits!”

But then again Cameron is a distant cousin of the Queen so perhaps it all makes some kind of crooked sense in a remote corner of the conspiracy theory galaxy.

Talking about conspiracy theories, have you heard the one about the fat cats in the House of Lords feasting on lavish three-course meals to the tune of £60,000 a week in taxpayers money? No! Well maybe you should. 

The Daily Mirror reported on February 2 that the  760 Lords, bishops, baronesses and other blubber merchants who idle their hours way in the ‘Upper House’ feasting, fighting and farting in no particular order, are wining and dining at our expense to a tune of £1.3 million a year. 

The maths have been done and it’s been worked out that each and every one of these aristocratic noblemen are benefiting from an £84 grant each week to fill their faces with truffles, snails, puppy dog tails and perhaps, but it’s highly unlikely, KFC buckets. 

Abandon hope all ye who enter here!

That £84 a week is probably a paltry sum to the excessive amount of multi-millionaires who dwell in the Lords, but it’s worth bearing in mind it’s £13 more than Jobseeker’s Allowance for the unemployed. It’s also a welcome bonus on top of the £300-a-day “subsistence” given to peers each day they attend the ‘upper house’. 

And where most families throughout this green and pleasant land are forced to make every penny count by eating horse meat burgers and drinking nothing but tap water, the good old Mirror also revealed that the Lords have spent a whopping quarter of a million pounds on champagne and vintage wine. Cheers! 

With Dave the rave looking to fill even more benches with loyal Tories who enjoy lording it over the rest of us, the situation is only going to get worse, but not for them, so it doesn’t really matter.

So there you have it folks. Thatcher’s funeral, the Queen’s pay rise and the Lords buffet, just three examples amongst many of where this government is redirecting the money you earn every hour of every day of every month of every year in a job you most probably don’t want to do and one that pays you a pittance in the first place. 

And in case you’re in any doubt as to wether your nose is being well and truly rubbed into the Tory trough here’s an eye-opener for you. Tighten you belts everyone! In 2011, David “I’ve got the stomach to make the necessary cuts” Cameron splashed out £700,000 of taxpayers’ cash to revamp Downing Street. Kind of puts the spare bedroom tax into perspective doesn't it? 

Yet in all of this inequity and inequality the one burning question remains, as posed by the noble truth-seekers over at the Daily Mail - Did Katherine Jenkins go far too low at Baroness Thatcher's funeral? You decide! 

Margaret Thatcher: Even in Death She’s Still Bringing out the Worst in People

Being accused of turning rampant and reckless greed into a virtue, declaring war on entire  communities and engineering mass unemployment, not to mention denying the kids their daily dose of milk, is surely enough to warrant at least a pat on the head from Satan?

Yet when your reputation is such that your very name continues to bring out he worse in people from all walks of life even when you’re dead and gone, then perhaps you weren’t just one of Lucifer’s lieutenants but the devil’s daughter herself? 

Despite what large swathes of finger-pointing witchfinder generals would have you believe, Margaret Thatcher was no anti-christ. Nor for that matter was she Boudicca, the reincarnation of Queen Elizabeth, or the best thing that ever happened to Britain. She was a human being who had ideas and opinions, and made both a lot of decisions and mistakes which effected Britain hugely over 20 years ago. 

A lot has happened in the two decades since the Tory turn coats did a Brutus on old Maggie and threw her out of 10 Downing Street like a discarded rag doll for Tony Blair to pick up and receive special instructions from. Yet it seems judging by the fierce and frantic furore surrounding the Iron Lady’s recent demise, that what Britain has really lacked in the two decades since Maggie last sat on her terrible throne of miner’s skulls and empty milk bottles is a public figure who inspires the sort of religious hate and love that modern politicians have wet dreams about. 

Thatcher stepped down as British Prime Minister on November 28, 1990 and she died on April 8,  2013. In the last years of her life she had become a frail old lady who suffered from ill health and dementia. Yet judging by the mixed reaction which greeted the news of her death, you would have thought that either Britain’s best and brightest hope had disappeared into the great beyond, or that the ice Queen had finally been slain by the reaper and Britain would be transformed once again into a mythical hand of milk and honey.

In the immediate wake of her death, a cloying and collective amnesia seemed to take control of large parts of the British mainstream media, and Thatcher was suddenly hailed, honoured and lionised as a saintly figure who inherited a bankrupt country cancerous with high taxes and held to ransom by the unions, and singlehandedly picked it up of its knees and made it great again by pumping the economy full of special steroids and igniting the spark of initiative in potential entrepreneurs everywhere. Not just Tory, but Labour politicians queued up like well behaved schoolboys to spout their fawning tributes to the mother figure who had spawned, or perhaps cloned them all from her iron testicles of tenacity and fortitude. 

In other parts of the media, particularly the no holds barred gladiatorial arenas of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, Maggie was vilified as perhaps the most hideous and evil monster ever spat into God’s good creation. Comrades everywhere stood shoulder to shoulder at the trough and fought for their right to tell a little old lady to ‘rot in hell’ and express their ‘sheer joy’ at another human being’s demise. In sickening examples of the sort of self-righteous behavior usually the sole prerogative of the religiously insane, people slapped themselves and one another on the back for showing no compassion or empathy to a woman they demonised as having none. Like a pack of wild wolves these noble freedom fighters sought out anyone on the internet who had dared say the Iron Lady wasn’t so bad and proceeded to relentlessly persecute any perceived protector of the grandest persecutor of them all. 

Elsewhere, Thatcherites everywhere lined up like knights in shining armour to defend their lady and condemn these plebeian scum who dared dishonour her name so. Nodding their heads sternly whilst clenching their buttocks and gritting their teeth, these warriors of old lamented  that their lady of iron had not done enough to put these benefit leeching low lifes firmly in their place when she had the opportunity.

Meanwhile, privileged revellers, many of whom were but babies and a glint in the milkman’s eye when Thatcher was in power, took to the street to drink and celebrate and dance on the grave of a Greengrocer’s daughter from Grantham, all because rich celebrities and attention starved radicals on Twitter had told them that a long time ago she had stolen people’s jobs and turned them into drug addicts and criminals because she was evil incarnate.

As these happy and badly dressed idiots danced and held up their hastily put together banners telling us how evil an old woman called Maggie had been before burning pictures of her, we were subjected to hysterical cries of, ‘mass Unemployment’, ‘factory and pit closures’, ‘communities destroyed’, ‘de-regulated finance and banking’,  ‘privitisation’, ‘tax cuts’, or at least we would have been if these hapless half-wits busily absorbed in their smug and attention seeking antics had any interest in anything more substantial than a good old fashioned witch hunt and the giddy intoxication of a mob with the scent of fresh blood in its nostrils and a hang-rope in its hands.

As it was, after a night of celebrating Britain’s blessed liberation from the old witch, the sun rose the next day on a world which remained unchanged in every way. Politicians remained untrustworthy, bankers still called the shots, celebrities appeared just as vacuous, society’s vulnerable remained vulnerable, the abused were still abused, the broken weren’t fixed, the poor were still poor, the rich were still rich, the corrupt were a little more corrupt and there were still an abundance of very real monsters at large in this green and pleasant land. The only thing that had changed was the amount of people who were constantly at one another’s throats because they couldn’t agree on the real legacy of an old woman called Maggie.

Not only that, but they couldn’t disagree amicably, they had to disagree aggressively and resort to personal insults and judgments of another person’s complete moral make-up dependent on if they hated Maggie with an irrational and burning intensity or loved her with the mindless obsessiveness of a besotted sycophant.

Some insisted that she was the scourge of the working class and saw the common folk as the ‘enemy within,’ who were not that much different from wild animals who needed to be reined in and brought to heel. Others saw her as the great liberator of those who wanted to get ahead and smash through the glass ceiling. They called her a true leader during a time when the role involved a little more than winning popularity contests and not shying away from making the difficult decisions. Some took the view that she closed the mines because they were heavily subsidised by the taxpayer  and hemorrhaging money. Others adhere to the idea that Maggie never forgave the unions for bringing the Tory government down in 1974 and perpetually holding the country to ransom. They said she declared open war upon the unions and hammered her rule home by smashing the miners and seeking to forever eradicate the power of collective action that once was synonymous with a way of life she destroyed. And in it’s place many argued, this woman created rampant individualism and a dog eat dog mentality where compassion was viewed as a weakness and might truly did made right. 

Others will cite her biggest crime as the big bang of 1986, which freed the bankers from the shackles of supervision and regulation and paved the way for the rich to rule free of the constraints of the law and the poor to be labelled as abject failures in a world that anything done in the name of the greater good rather than just to turn a profit was undervalued and dismissed as worthless. 

Many will associate her name with the council home they bought and the opportunity to finally get ahead after suffering a never ending grind of three day weeks, powercuts, rubbish strewn streets, and babies being born by candlelight. Yet others will remember fondly the days before everything was privitised and the rich didn’t own the air that you breathe, and perhaps others will remember being one of the three million unemployed who saw both their unions and bones broke as the boot boys in blue moved in to do their Iron Lady’s bidding. 

Whatever people remember and blame Maggie for, the simple fact is it’s all become just as redundant as the mines she closed down. She’s hasn’t been in power for decades and now she’s dead. So the question shouldn’t be what Thatcher did or didn’t do for this country, but how long can you blame any one person for the collective problems we face as a society today. A blame obsessed society breeds negativity and lack of accountability. If there was a little more personal responsibility and a lot less pitiful whining and gleeful scapegoating then just maybe we’d finally find something a little more productive and helpful to do with our time than send ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead’ into the top ten.