Dave Thorp's Blog

So today I’ve had a letter I wrote into The Sun newspaper printed. Well I say printed, it was quite heavily edited from the original content as this post will show.

Middle of last week, they ran an article about police wasting £20k including the deployment of a police chopper in order to arrest two people for the hellish crime of recycling having taken items worth 47p from their local tip. The full article can be found here

This prompted me to send in the following letter expressing my thoughts on the story and the actions of the police who should be far too busy dealing with drug dealers, murderers and armed robbers to be bothered by a couple of people recycling

I was absolutely disgusted to read in today’s paper about police
wasting £20k of funds including deploying a helicopter to nick two
people for taking items worth 47p from a tip.

No wonder this country is rife with drugs, murderers and armed robbers
when the police are far too busy targeting the recyclers!

The letter printed in the paper today is as follows

HOW dare cops spend £20,000 to nab two people for nicking items worth 47p from a tip. If something that has been thrown on a tip is considered useful by someone else it is called recycling. No wonder this country is going to the dogs

Nice to see I was quoted word for word there!

Yes I originally dubbed it a giant iPod touch when it came out but thanks to winning a competition from the lovely folk at 3 Mobile I am now the proud owner of one. So how am I finding it.

Well in one way it is a big iPod touch. But on the other hand it does make browsing the web, and in particular using social networking and watching news a lot easier compared to doing all of the above on my iPhone which I frequently would do. Games such as angry birds and the like also benefit from having the larger screen the iPad provides. I’m certainly finding a lot more use for the device than I felt I would especially when it launched and I called it 4 iPod touches glued together, a comment I’ve since found to be inaccurate – it’s actually more like 6!

The burning question is would I pay for one? Hard to say since my ownership of one is down to being luckily selected to win the competition 3 Mobile were running. I certainly wouldn’t fork out for the top 64 GB model as I’m finding it hard to fill mine but a lower end model may be worth the money. Saying that I won’t be forking out for an iPad 2 which the only differences between that and my model is it’s thinner, faster, has two cameras that are so poor they may as well not bothered, magnetic cases that offer no protection for the back and a gyroscope that I’ve found little use for in my iPhone 4 never mind iPad 2. Oh and it’s actually just 6 iPod touches glued together…….

Monopoly is back at McDonalds and is taking the usual format of instant wins and collect to wins, with the collect to wins having the usual one rare winning sticker with other stickers in the set being common as muck. After 2 trips I’ve established the rare stickers for most of the sets so here they are

Brown – iPod Shuffle – Old Kent Road

Light Blue – Pogo Pro (substituted for £100 cheque as prize not available) – Euston Road

Purple – Blackberry Curve – Northumberland Avenue

Orange – Laptop – Marlborough Street

Red – £500 experience voucher – Strand

Yellow – Weekend Break – Coventry Street

Green – Mini Cooper – Bond Street

Dark Blue – £500k – Mayfair

Stations – £500 littlewoods credit – Liverpool St Station

As you can see I’ve yet to establish the rare stickers for brown, light blue and orange. If anyone else has established the sticker feel free to comment.

On the subject of comments, after the complete horror that was last year where some of the most stupid people on god’s green earth decided to comment the following serves as an FAQ

1. People wanting to sell their park lane stickers and split the £500k, just take a second to look at how this promotion works. You have a park lane sticker, I have a park lane sticker, EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN TO MCDONALDS HAS A FRICKING PARK LANE STICKER!!! The park lane sticker is WORTHLESS without the mayfair sticker of which there is just one in circulation. Therefore a fair price for anyone wanting to sell a park lane sticker is £0.00 including postage!

2. If you have won, your sticker tells you how to claim, there is no reason to post here claiming to have mayfair, bond street or any of the other valuable rare stickers. You should be too busy claiming and enjoying your prize, if indeed you are telling the truth which is highly unlikely