Just thought I’d post some cheerful, happy and uplifting music videos to help shake off the January blues You wouldn’t believe how hard t is find cheerful songs on the Net – if you don’t know what they are called then you haven’t much chance of finding them. Must worn you, cheery songs tend to be accompanied by the worst music videos.

The first is Always Look on The Bright Side of Life from the film The Life of Brian by Monty Python which was one of the more comical films released when I was a child.

Here’s a bebop called Don’t Worry be Happy by Bobby McFerrin. It’s one of the easiest songs to remember, sing and whistle. The best thing for me is that it makes me smile every time I hear it. Probably because one of my ex girlfriends gave it to me on a vinyl just before we got together.

This next one is called Sunshine Reggae. It was released in the early 80’s by a Danish group called Laid Back. The B side of the 7″ Vinyl became a hit in the US whereas the rest of the world preferred the A side.

This final one is livelier and more uplifting. It is It’s A Beautiful Day by Tom Boxer ft Jay

I’ll post a few more cheery songs as and when I remember them.

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If you’ve ever been where loads of unskilled fork-truck drivers are whizzing around then you’ll know how deadly they can be. If this German video nasty doesn’t frighten you then you must have balls of steel. I kid you not, this is a genuine part of European safety training instruction; I saw this when working as an air freight handler in the Netherlands.

Here are some of the darkly humorous things I remember from when I worked in airport freight handling:

One forklift driver went into a lorry trailer with the wrong type of forklift and raised his forks so high that the trailer he was in gained a new sun-roof;

Another driver used a twelve ton forklift (big heavy-duty one) to take an eleven ton crate off a side loader.  The lorry driver told the forklift driver his forks were all the way under the crate.  When the forklift driver reversed and the crate was no longer supported by the trailer bed, his forklift dropped forward putting its back wheels in the air.  More people used their phones to take pictures than went out to help him;

Impatient lorry drivers have caused their share of accidents too.  It’s not uncommon for truckers to rush off with a fork-truck and driver still inside their trailer; and,

Not all lorry drivers use their hand-breaks whilst they’re being unloaded, I’ve seen forklifts fall through loading bays as the lorry gradually moves from under the ramps that allow the forklift to drive in and out of the lorry’s trailer.

To celebrate all the pitfalls of forklift driving, I thought I’d give you a short health and safety video to watch.  This is the same as the one I was shown in the Netherlands.  It’s in German with Czech sub-titles and comes courtesy of YouTube.  Sit-back and enjoy this dark comedy thriller…

Researchers at the University of Nevada have found that ground coffee is 10-15 percent oil, which is easily extractable and turned into bio-diesel. What’s more, it could be offered for as little as 60p per US gallon – that’s around 16p per litre!

Coffee is in abundant enough supply to provide hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel every year, and the oil can be extracted from leftover grounds – so we shouldn’t find ourselves missing out on our morning coffee for the sake of fuel.

And the find was stumbled across by accident, according to chief researcher Mano Misra, who said: “I had left my coffee out one night, and the next morning, I noticed that there was a kind of oil around the edge of the cup.” Misra then collected used ground coffee from Starbucks and found extracting the oil was easy.

There are over 7.2 million tonnes of coffee produced worldwide each year from which to extract fuel and it’s also more stable than traditional bio-fuel because of coffee’s high antioxidant content. A larger scale pilot scheme is now underway to see how viable coffee could be as a genuine fuel source.”

Interestingly, it’s not the first time coffee’s been used to power machines. It was used in 1932 Brazil to power trains.: