Chewing gum conspiracy

I don't know if it's because I live and work in a - let's admit it - posh part of the world that I haven't seen this but I think there's a conspiracy when it comes to "chewing gum droppings".

Chewing gum droppings = chewing gum on the footpath (and in innumerable other places).

Every year the local council - Kensington and Chelsea - must spend a LOT of money removing chewing gum off the footpaths/pavements in the main shopping areas. Some guy goes around with some kind of turbo-powered water blaster and takes seemingly a day to do about 10 meters of the footpath.

From the view point of our office it leaves "negative droppings" - where the bit where the chewing gum was is now wonderfully clean and the rest of the footpath isn't.

Now, the question is, has anyone actually seen anyone throwing their chewing gum on the footpaths? I'm pretty aware of the world around me and I can honestly say I've never seen anyone dumping their used chewing gum on the footpath here (there's no shortage of litter/trash cans around - and I have seen smokers dump their butts around the place). I'd like to say that maybe it's because we're classier here and don't do that sort of thing (yeah, right)....but there's a phenomenal amount of gum on the footpaths.

Where does it come from? Does someone gradually sneak it onto the footpaths in the middle of the night?

Supporting terrorism

If a terrorist uses open source software does that make every contributor to the code a supporter of terrorism - I hear Firefox is really popular these days!


...for the sceptical out there you might want to see what people ARE arrested for in the way of supporting terrorism like the guy who gave his cousin a SIM card that WASN'T used in a bombing.

Then again, to be fair, maybe if Microsoft or Apple aren't actively trying to crack down on piracy in the Middle East, maybe they're participating too if they use Windows or OS X.

Oh, the dilemmas!