TBIM — too bad it’s Monday, folks.

– I’m in the USA for a few weeks. I was going to get a BT Home Hub off ebay and destroy it crunk-style on video here in the South with some high calibre weaponry or my nephew’s monster truck, but I forgot to purchase one before I left the UK. I wanted to create the most violent BT Home Hub snuff film of all time. Oh well, maybe on the next trip.

– I heard Comment Central is having a contest for a British motto. My first entry is nanny-state themed: ‘May contain nuts.’ How’s that? I actually just googled that and someone already thought of it… Anyway, my second entry: ‘Getting fatter, but on the property ladder‘…

– [cue: Celine Dion, My Heart Will Go On] The Vice President / Yacht Captain of the Bridlington Model Boat Society emailed us and asked for help in uncovering the source of interference to their … err … yachts. The society reports using 27 MHz, 40 MHz, and ‘the new 2.4 GHz’. Can someone help this nice fellow?

– Julian Shersby (saynoto0870.com) copied us on a blistering email he sent to Ofcom over the 0870 issue. Here’s the main nugget:

‘I am now writing … to express my complete and utter dismay that after more than four years of previous delays caused by an eternal plethora of consultations and then further re-consultations your organisation is now using the very flimsiest of pretexts (which if actually true would reveal the grossest professional incompetence by both the senior staff in your telecoms division and by some members of your Board) to yet further delay its previously long set date of 1st February 2008 as the day on which calls to 0870 numbers would cost no more than calls to geographic 01 and 02 numbers. Ofcom is now using the excuse of allegedly totally unforeseen problems for some auto dialling burglar alarm systems and personal attack alarms for the elderly to justify this quite outrageous indefinite delay in its proposed date for 0870 price harmonisation with 01/02 calls but in so doing it has also failed to reveal the far more dark and sinister truth that lies behind that announcement and represents the real reason why this minor technical issue is now do conveniently alleged to be such a major problem.

According to one of your own very senior officials in your NTS calls division to whom I spoke only last week the real reason why the presence of these call price announcements would now become a problem on such a massive scale is because Ofcom expected that on 1st February 2008 the only call originating company in the UK that would have charged its customers normal 01/02 rates for 0870 calls (and that would not instead have had a call price announcement saying a higher rate was instead being charged to customers) would have been BT. Indeed your official went on to say that he did not expect that any major UK mobile operator would have lowered their call prices to 0870 numbers to the 01/02 rate on 1st February 2008 and he also expected a great many domestic telephone fixed line operators such as TalkTalk, Tiscali, Virgin etc to also not cut their phone customers prices to the 01/02 rate.’

– My YouTube video from last week generated a few hits from the ‘Commission Europeenne’. The video was a little mean-spirited — I admit it — but at least I didn’t make fun of the way Ms. Reding says ‘reh-gooo-lator’ like Count Dracula.