Pale blue dot

I’m asking a favour. If you drive could you fill in a questionnaire for me? It will take 5 minutes, is totally anonymous and will ensure you contribute to a published piece of work. You will even get a copy of the finished research. Download the MS word document by right clicking the link below and selecting save link as.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/bluetealeaf/Pilot study version 3.doc

Thanks in advance. Just email the completed version to the address on this page.

The puzzle was almost completed, but in the end no one posted the correct answer in the comment box. Here is the solution.

The image was a QR code, if you had right clicked and selected properties you would have found the image was called qrcode.png. This should have prompted you to have a mooch on the internet to find out what QR codes are. Wiki would have told you all about them. A further net search for a decoder should have led you to download the little applet I posted earlier. Armed with this you should have found that hidden within the image was this url

http://www.palebluedot.co.uk/puzzle.html

The question isn’t difficult if you have google, but a bit of lateral thinking is required with what to do with the answer. With a bit of logic and luck you should have come up with the following url.

http://www.palebluedot.co.uk/harperlee.html

Now this page may have seemed like a dead end, but a bit of digging and right clicking and you would find the page source code. Hidden within the code was a question, What was the date of birth of Dr. Winston O’Boogie? Again, a bit of googling and you will discover that this was John Lennon’s pseudonym. Lennon was born on the 9th of October 1940. The date format may have given you a bit of trouble, but eventually you would have ended up with the following url.

http://www.palebluedot.co.uk/09.10.40.html

Now you have something to think about, but where do you go? Well, hidden directly under the text is more text but it’s the same colour as the background, you have to highlight it with your mouse. You will find this url.

http://www.palebluedot.co.uk/enigma.html

Now you are on the last stretch, 6 questions to get and an anagram to work out. The answers should have been

1. Rome
2. Inxs
3. Watt Tyler
4. Dionysus
5. Neutron
6. Arkle

The letters RIWDNA become Darwin.

The next one will be more difficult but will have a prize to tempt you.

Aries.

Arians are myopic, well proportioned and smell vaguely of lavender.

You should watch out for Greeks bearing gifts this month, you know what happened last time. For anyone with a birthday this in April there is a fair chance your gall bladder will burst, everyone else should be ok to eat fat. Don’t even think about Euromillions, you’ve got no chance unless you have been eating peas, millionaires generally smell of peas. If you call on one of your friends and there’s a wooden horse in their garden, run and don’t look back.

Lucky number: 9.
Lucky colour: Grey.
Dead Edna says: “You’ll not find it looking there you mucky devil”.

Here’s the final clue. Download this little decoder.

If you right click the puzzle image and select properties, the little box will tell you what the image is called. After you find that, the internet will help you, but you need to think a bit too.

The carphone shithouse looks after all our telecommunication needs at the moment, but only because I can’t be arsed to bin them. Today, however, they have surpassed themselves in the fuckwit stakes. The phone rang at about half five and an automated voice imparted this amazing piece of information.

me: Hello.
av: This is an automated message (no shit) to tell you that we called you today but you were out (again, no shit).
av: Don’t worry, we’ll call you back in the next couple of days.

I’ve been the recipient of pointless phone calls in the past, but non as mind numbingly fucking useless as this one. I can’t begin to understand the logic behind an automated message to tell me what I already knew. It’s no fucking wonder my connection is shit, they’re spending all my cash on fucking phone calls.

Please put the answer to the question in the comment box.

I will give you a clue in a few days if you need it.

For some reason JD Wetherspoons have caught my eye twice in the space of ten minutes. This puzzled me because my only other encounter with the seemingly ever present shit hole was the mistake of trying food in one. Both meals were in front of us for about thirty seconds before we sent them back. They were inedible shit, and we haven’t been back in one since. I accept that trying food in a Wetherspoons is a little like going to China and asking for black pudding, but you have to try everything once.

So, I see an article on the BBC website about a lib dem joke that has pissed them off. It must be fucking infuriating to have political non entity rip the piss out of you. Mind you, being likened to a high street bank must hurt, those fuckers would rape their dead grandmothers’ eye sockets for a couple of points on the FTSE.

Then there was this article on the Guardian website about how binge drinking isn’t their fault. Apparently our culture of getting completely shit-faced by consuming our own body weight in alcopops before vomiting in a kebab shop doorway is the result of seeing celebrities do it on television. So that means binge drinking started sometime after 1926. Unless of course the ancient Romans had sky. I don’t think social responsibility is at the forefront of your thinking when you utter the words “I know, let’s open a chain of pubs”. It’s more likely to be along the lines of how much cash can we part from the scroats? This is another anomaly surrounding the culture of booze in this country, if you wear Burberry and drink wkd then your a binge drinking chav, if you go to the Henley regatta and get shit-faced on Champagne then you’re just engaging in high jinx with your chums. Whatever the class of person that goes through the doors of Wetherspoons I think we can safely say that the JD wants them drunk.

These days I prefer to engage in my booze fuelled fuckwittery indoors, that way I can disguise my alcoholism as a hobby and stay out of the local papers. Two birds, one stone.

This post will be continued, I can feel a rant coming on about drink driving.

Straight into the “you couldn’t make this shit up” category of this blog comes this story. Blair to teach the Americans about faith? This is like sending a Cornish man to teach northerners about whippets. Faith and globalisation, now there’s a subject, maybe it’s why he left the Church of England for the Catholics, the Church of England has a really good stock portfolio, which includes some companies that manufacture arms. Maybe Tony has turned pacifist too. Or maybe the Pope has head hunted him to reopen the inquisition, well it was a form of globalisation.

He should be careful though, as a middle east peace envoy he could end up in Guantanamo for smelling vaguely eastern.

I suppose I should be celebrating the government’s changes to the ID card scheme. I think it’s a crap idea that will cost the tax payer a fortune and not make a bit of fucking difference to crime, immigration or terrorism. A big fucking white elephant with a biometric strip on it’s arse. The celebrations would be a bit premature, I don’t trust the fuckers. They will still try and bring it in, hidden among other rules and regulations, covered in a cloak of fear and under the promise that it’s for our own good.

Here’s a radical thought, lets look at root causes of all those things the government are attempting to to convince us that ID cards will help.

Crime: Make parents responsible for the miscreant spawn, teach children to respect themselves and others and come down hard on criminals through the police and justice system.

Immigration: There is nothing wrong with immigration in this country. We are a mongrel nation. Non of us can claim to be pure British. The fact that Europeans are flocking here for jobs is the result of two things. Britain’s entry into the EU and bone idle dole bums who wont get off their lazy arses and do a days fucking work. If there were no vacancies they would have nothing to come here for.

Terrorism: Do we really think that an international terrorist will be vaguely fucking bothered that he hasn’t got an ID card? Will he think to himself as he writes his shopping list for Semtex and copper wire “actually this is pointless, I might have a bit of bother getting through customs” The US has ID cards, and I suppose you could call 9/11 a spectacular failure of the idea. But again, what about root causes? Why are we a target of international terrorism? Tony? Any ideas? Thought not you cunt.

A final thought. Throughout history, everything that needed to be fraudulently copied has been, often to devastating effect. Why should we believe this to be any different?