Wings Over Scotland

And so tick follows tock. Alert WoS viewers may recall a subscriber feature from way back in December 2009 in which we chronicled the grim retail decay of the Welsh city of Newport. But two years into the Tories' medieval bloodletting "cure" for Britain's financial woes, the evidence of the country's slow but inexorable economic collapse can no longer be contained in the ghettoes of the working class. Because this is Bath.

This compact city of just 80,000 or so is swelled all year round by swarming hordes of well-heeled tourists (because you have to be well-heeled to come here at all) who troop in in their literally-millions to admire the pretty architecture and spew money into a local economy that's already cherry-pink with high-earning professionals.

I've lived here, lurking unnoticed in one of Britain's wealthiest corners, for over 21 years now. In all that time, it's hard to think back and recall even a single instance of a city-centre shop that's been empty for anything other than a brief transitional period between owners. Not any more.

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This page lists the various contract tariffs for the imminent iPhone 4S on O2. If you add them up, you get some pretty strange results.

(For the purposes of these calculations, we've worked out the total cost for the term of a 12-month contract, including a £6 "Bolt-On" for 500MB of data, and based on purchasing the 64GB model.)

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Viewers! The beloved Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is coming to Bath this [EDIT: Friday] for "an open question and answer session" with the electorate.

As a Lib Dem voter for the past 20 years, I feel I ought to pop along and hear his views on the topics of the day. What should I ask him?

Come on. It must have been one of you, or someone you know, and it’s time to own up. Because until we deal with this serious issue and reach some sort of closure, Jobs is going to keep taking it out on the rest of us.

There’s simply no other remotely plausible explanation for the staggering hostility – no, make that absolute naked loathing – with which Apple continues to treat the hundreds of millions of customers who’ve made it so rich.

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Also incorporating: The Story So Far.

Turns out that this one just keeps on running.

Today's thrilling developments include WoSblog's new best friend Olin Coles, Executive Editor of "independent" "reviews" site Benchmark Reviews, being exposed for some fraudulent DMCA claims and for yet more instances of lying to to his innocent, trusting readership. Read on!

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WoSblog apologises for any inconvenience caused to would-be viewers this afternoon, when for several hours visitors to the site were confronted with the image below.

The blog's suspension for much of yesterday was the result of yet another desperate attempt by Olin Coles, the in-no-way brainless and cowardly owner of widely discredited "review" site Benchmark Reviews, to suppress the evidence of his site's not-at-all dishonest practices.

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Ooh, things just got even more interesting. Viewers following the mysterious tale of Benchmark Reviews and where their fully independent reviews come from will recall that WoSblog's shadowy agents tracked down the text of their glowing review of a $1200 office chair to the website of an online retailer called Smart Furniture. When asked, Smart Furniture asserted that the text was their own original work.

Since then, further developments have transpired. Read on!

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WoSblog is internationally renowned for its psychiatric expertise, so I wasn't surprised yesterday when a viewer of the WoS Forum asked me, quite out of the blue, to assess their mental stability.

"I want to know if I'm going barmy", wrote the clearly-distressed reader, whose cause for doubting his very sanity was – of all things – a review of an incredibly expensive office chair.

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At least, it’s statistically probable that you do. The majority – 53% – of votes cast by the British electorate last Thursday were worthless, because they were cast for candidates who didn’t win, and are therefore simply thrown in the bin by the First Past The Post electoral system.

So if you were one of the thousands of people locked out of polling stations across the country on Thursday night, don’t fret too much. Your vote would probably have been completely ignored anyway.

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