Words To The Wise

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Most areas of England have been invaded by the fast growing Japanese Knotweed plant which grows at a rate of a metre a month and causes damage to tarmac pavements, buildings, drains and other structures. It is very difficult to kill and it also kills off our native species by literally smothering them.

The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau is to introduce a bug which is a kind of louse and sucks the sap from the plants, killing them off, at two secret locations. Tests on ninety native plants have shown that the bug will not attack other plants, but many local river authorities, including the South Cumbria Rivers Trust have their doubts about it.

Historically, trying to introduce biological controls into a non native environment has not been successful and there are serious concerns about introducing these insects. It seems that river authorities in Cumbria will find their own methods for dealing with this problem weed.

If this experiment gets out of hand how do they propose to stop it? Has anyone thought about that? Once these insects are released into the wild there is certainly no way of putting them back into the bottle again.

On the other hand, if it should be successful and the lice suck their way through all the Japanese Knotwood out there, what will they eat next. Will it be our native rhododendrons, or rose bushes, our oak trees or wildflowers?

Tampering with the balance of nature is a dangerous gave with unpredictable results.

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• Biocontrol in the UK: will they be singing, "Where have all the flowers gone"? (tagline: When will they ever learn) (scienceblogs.com)
• Alien v predator: moth out to kill Japanese knotweed (guardian.co.uk)

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Trips to the Far East for pleasure, or business, are not as expensive as they used to be and it has become quite common for people to jet off to Hong Kong and Tokyo for a few days holiday.

Flights are easy to arrange and finding good quality accommodation at low prices just got a whole lot cheaper too. Cheaperthanhotels.com gives a choice of 60,000+ places to stay in different parts of the world and can save you as much as 70% on the price you would pay booking with the hotel itself.

There are a whole range places to stay, if you are looking for a cheap hotel in Hong Kong , the choice includes several 5 star choices and good but basic accommodation in somewhere like the YWCA hotel. The choice is entirely yours and the prices are there to see.

Cheap hotels in Tokyo are also available on the site. Choose an upmarket top of the range hotel like the Hilton Hotel, or opt for something a bit more economical. There are options for every pocket.

Getting insurance quotes can take a lot of your time. If you use the telephone you have to explain over and over what you want, hold the line for ages listening to electronic music and then listen to a sales person trying to sell you a different insurance from the one you want.

If you go to high street offices and try to buy insurance you have to park your car and then explain what you want to a sales person each time you go to a different insurance provider’s office.

It is so much easier to get a quote on line. Try Netquote.com. You can get multiple quotes which you can then compare. It’s simple to do this with Washington insurance All you have to do is to put your details into the online form once and press the button. You will be provided with a list of companies and prices which you can compare at your leisure and it all takes just a couple of minutes.

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Department of Works and Pensions staff in Carlisle, Cumbria were involved in recent national strike action but not all of them actually came out on strike.

Some of them remained at work, trying to keep an already overloaded service working. The staff were doing the best they could to answer calls. Then matters were made considerably worse. An official instruction was sent to all workers, ordering them to pretend to be answer machines when too many calls were coming into the office.

They were told to answer the phone and say, ‘We are sorry, but because of the huge volume of calls, we are unable to take your call at present. Please call later’ and then put the telephone down.

Apparently some of the callers had been holding the line for far more than ten minutes before their call was answered.

Most workers objected to this and some even joined the strike because of it. Bosses were asked why they did not just set up an answer phone message saying that calls could not be answered because of industrial action. The answer to this was that it didn’t seem right not to answer calls at all.

If I had been one of those people in need of help who called their offices during that time I would be furious. This really is disgraceful and shows total lack of concern, or respect for callers who have patiently waited in what they thought was a queue. What’s more, not all of them were calling on free to dial numbers.

To cap it all, these people are public servants paid for with the taxes that those of us who do work pay the government. They would do well to remember that they are actually employed by the public.

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• Civil servants 'told to imitate answering machines' (guardian.co.uk)

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A giant green Burmese python is reported to be slithering its way through Northampton. The snake is loose on a housing estate in Lingswood and was last seen in a wooded area, hiding in the undergrowth. So far it has avoided capture.

Police say that it is not a dangerous snake but who would fancy all that muscle coiled around an arm, or a leg? If it has been out there in the cold, without food for a while the poor creature won’t be in the best of moods.

These snakes can grow up to twelve feet long, or more, in the wilds of South East Asia but it is just too cold in Northampton. It is thought that the reptile may be an abandoned pet which has become too big, or too expensive for its owners to cope.

Police have received no reports of escaped pet pythons.

So, if you are enjoyed the crisp Spring sunshine in the woods of Northampton, don’t get too engrossed in enjoying it. You never know what might be lurking in the undergrowth.

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• Burmese python on the loose on housing estate (telegraph.co.uk)

Insurance marketing takes up a great deal of time and finding good leads is a tedious business. This is where it can be beneficial to let someone else do the leg work.

Ready made leads are available in batches and there is even help with the administration side of things for anyone who is connected with the insurance business. All you have to do is ask for details and life will suddenly become much easier.

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By June 2010 Sir Edward Elgar will disappear from the English £20 note. Apparently his portrait is too easy to forge.

Scots economist Adam Smith will appear on the new notes which will take over entirely from the Elgar ones in June. Currently there is a bit of a mixture of the two floating around.

What I want to know is why there is a sudden invasion of things Scottish into England’s high places. The Scots do not consider themselves the same as Englishmen (or women) and there’s no doubt about the feeling is reciprocated. Yet, we have already been invaded by a Scots Prime Minister when he has a perfectly good Scottish Parliament to play in if he wants to dabble in politics. Now we will be forced to look at another dour Scotsman each time we cash a £20 note.

Surely, someone in England had a complicated enough set of features to make a twenty quid note interesting and difficult to copy. I wonder what the Scots would say if famous English characters were used to decorate their currency (and for those who don’t know, Scottish notes are different to English ones, but are generally accepted in England, and most times vice versa.)

Why not send them an English first minister to head the Scottish Parliament and see how they like that? Outcry? Oh, yes, there would certainly be one of those. Isn’t there always?

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• Elgar £20 note no longer legal tender (telegraph.co.uk)

Anyone involved in the insurance industry, be it as a broker, agent or whatever is bound to find that a lot of their working weeks is taken up looking for decent insurance leads, or wading through stacks of poor quality ones that end up being a waste of time.

Getting ready made, hot leads in a batch and having back up services has to be good for your customer base and your bank balance.

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Birmingham Council in England is trying to sell local people £100 hurricane survival kits. Experts in survival have said that the whole idea is ridiculous in a city like Birmingham.

The kits contain rubber boots, gloves, plastic water bottles, first aid box and sleeping bags, plus a camping stove. The experts say that this is appropriate to disaster prone rural areas in foreign countries but not to city dwellers in England.

The council say that camping stoves may be a bit over the top, but the rest is essential. I beg to differ there because I live in Carlisle where we had no power for four days during the floods and a camping stove would have been a real boon. As for the rest, well, most modern city dwellers have equipment like that in their homes already.

Now, if Birmingham Council had been trying to sell camping stoves ready for when we either run out of gas for the energy companies go on strike again, I could have understood it.




On the work front, anyone who is involved in insurance work on a self employed basis will find that they waste a lot of time looking for fresh leads. This time could well be spent converting good leads into sales.

It does not have to be that hard and there’s a quick way to gather up red hot insurance sales leads without having to waste time.

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• Council advises families to stock 'hurricane survival kit' (telegraph.co.uk)

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If you are looking for Los Angeles auto repair this is the website to visit before you do anything else. This site gives you repair estimates, information about your vehicle and the parts you might need.

It also provides details of the most common faults found on particular models, so whether it’s a Ford Explorer, or a Honda Civic, or any other model, you can get all the information you need right here. When it comes to vehicle repairs you need to know as much as possible before getting an estimate.

You can even keep a record for your car right here on line so that you have all the information available in one place should you need it. It could save you lots of time and is easier than trying to find receipts, bits of paper and even remember what was done and when.

There’s an encyclopedia of car parts here too, so if you don’t know your head gasket from your water pump you can soon find out about them here.

Knowing what you need and a little about how it all works can often mean that you are in a better position when it comes to getting a good price for a repair job.

It really is a simple matter to find more insurance business if that is what you are looking for. A larger customer base will soon bring more enquiries and more money, and the bottom line is what is all important these days. Health insurance leads are easy to get if you go to prospect zone. Agents and brokers can use this system.

The leads which you get will be genuine, hot leads taken from genuine enquiries, so you know that you are not wasting your time chasing them up. You just have to go and get the leads. It’s as simple as that.

You can even use the material available on the site to sharpen up your own selling and closing skills. Without these you will have little chance of turning a lead into a sale.

There is also a lead management scheme run by Prospect Zone and it is a system which pushes everything through the system as quickly as possible. Hot leads soon cool down if they are left lying around and once you have a complete health insurance form you need it to be processed quickly so that it turns into money.

The advanced training system will brush up old selling techniques and help you to learn a few new ones which is all good for your business. You can go to the site and use the training material wherever you get your leads from. It’s free of charge.

Matilda, a Dutch Welsummer hen amazed her owners when she produced an egg which was four times the normal size of a hen’s egg. The egg which is only Matilda’s fourth or fifth measured three and a half inches high and had a circumference of just over eight inches.

Although this must have been quite a shock to Matilda, her owners thought at first that a goose must have managed to get into the coop, but it was certainly a hen’s egg. Unfortunately it had a crack in it and the shell was paper thin. Owner Mark Cornish said that he needed to eat it right away.

There seem to be some very odd egg episodes happening all over the UK recently. The story of the lady who found six double yolked eggs in one box recently also hit the news.


http://www.louieswords.com/2010/02/these-eggs-are-certainly-no-yolk.html

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• Hen lays giant egg (telegraph.co.uk)