Autor: fesago

Another week of election planning in Spain has gone past… pathos..  to be ignored. It will all turn out for the worse.
Have you voted yet for your least disliked option?
Plenty of articles in teh international press, including several by Javier Cercas. Does he have a new book to sell or what?

The Brexit nonsense continues with more ministers secretly breaking the laws of the land and denying it. Another subject to be ignored as it is already turning into the worst possible scenario.
What will the news be in 1000 years time?
«It’s year 3019, humans have saved planet Earth and have mastered inter-galactic space travel, building constructive relationships with several alien species.
Also, Brexit has been delayed a further 2 months.
«Don’t waste the time of the latest extension», said Tusk in serious warning, as the British do exactly that. I don’t even read about it any more.

Macron making promises is another bit of information to be ignored as said promises «n’engagent que ceux qui les croient».
Meanwhile, yet another believer who was close up to the low temperature conflagration (i.e. it wasn’t hell) in Notre Dame has been on the media claiming to have seen Jesus in the flames.
Personally, I believe her.
Really!
It would have been one of the many statues of Jesus all round the walls going up in flames.
Science… the Church of the middle ages was right: science is too dangerous.

News comes in that Kim Jong Un of the terrible North Korean haircut has been meeting Vlad «Impaler» Putin, who is being obviously set up (by whom?) to act as a go-between with the Orange Shit Gibbon in future talks on denuclearisation.
This is the same pair (Impaler and Shit Gibbon) who recently left the non-nuclear proliferation agreement in tatters and are now busy producing the next generation of nuclear bombs.
Three narcissists with inferiority complexes leading the charge for world safety from nuclear proliferation…. what could possibly go wrong ??
You don’t have to be of high IQ to know that Haircut thinks he is manipulating both Impaler and the Shit Gibbon, while it is also certain that Impaler is the Shit Gibbon’s in-line boss.
Of course China is manipulating all of them. And they have spies everywhere. Just look at the number of «chino» shops in Spain!
We’re fucked.

I read recently that, just like the Shit Gibbon, the Haircut’s father, Kim Jong Il was a keen golf player. Whereas we know that the Shit Gibbon cheats at golf, it is different for Kim Jong Il. He is so much better at golf too, having set the record for the finest round of golf in North Korea… at a score of 18 on their only full size course.

The anti-vaccine gang have done enough damage, you might think, with the very serious rise in cases of measles (sarampión) throughout the world. All of these conspiracy nuts have created an unjustified worry amongst parents of new borns leading them to not take up the MMR vaccine (vacuna triple vírica). Consequently, the herd effect is lost and people will suffer as a result and many will die.
It gets worse.
In Australia, veterinarians are complaining that animal owners (especially of dogs) are now refusing to have these animals vaccinated. Why? Because they think that the dogs will become autistic.
No, I am not inventing this. You couldn’t invent this.
But, one, can animals become autistic?
Two, how would you know?

Science fiction gets closer to reality with news that scientists have partially revived some dead pig’s brains.
Okay!
I don’t know whether I am just speaking for me or the whole of humanity when I hesitatingly say to these scientists…. eh…. thanks?
«It nevertheless gives more proof that cell death in the brain takes place over a much longer time period», screamed one pig’s head.

At our age, all over 50, he said diplomatically, we are beset with the signs of aging, mainly concerning the skin and muscle structure underneath. How many people begin to think of changing appearance at this point? Botox injections, after all, are only a short step beyond dying one’s hair. Just another temporary image change, right? Well, it is time to act fast as there are new rules agreed upon by the European parliament in Brussels. From the end of this year, cosmetic clinics will have «to assess patients’ suitability for Botox in an attempt to detect those whose desire to alter their appearance is due to mental health problems».
Well, if they will use the word «patient» it is already assumed that every Botox fan is a sicko.
So, girls, off with the shackles now and get thee to a Botox clinic before you are subject to checks for mental health problems.
I can’t wait until they do the same for hair dying.

Silly headline of the week from the outraged (they have to complain about something)
«Trieste half-marathon accused of racism in excluding Africans»
So now an actual marathon can be accused of racism???
Whatever next?

I saw another small headline this morning and I was drown in to read the nonsense. It is some man (an architect) asking about his friend (another architect), neither of whom, he stresses, are gay, with whom he shares a bed every week and they kiss and hug. But no more than that, as they are definitely not gay.
All right, I don’t take that one seriously, but it does call to mind several other cases of astonishing denial of reality.
We are not racists, said Abascal of Vox.
Only we can save Spain, said Doctor cum Fraude of the PSOE.
Brexit is for the good of Great Britain, said several millionaires of the Conservative Party
I do not cheat at golf says any number of those lying bastards.
I paid my taxes, said Lionel Messi
I have qualifications, say many Spanish politicians;
I see Jesus in the flames…
well… I say that too as all I can conclude is that Christian philosophy is being burned on the altar of madness.
Oh but that is a depressing thought. If only Leinster had won last night!

In conclusion, we are all drifting down a river of liquid manure without paddles or rudder and having to listen to numerous loud navegators about where we should be going.
Now get out and spoil some votes! At least that way you can laugh.

Blessings, love, brandy
f

There is a very long line of now empty Guinness cans on the dining table. I am mostly responsible (a little help from son Maximilian) and am financially happy thet no pub was open today for the game. It would have cost me a fortune!
If you didn’t realise what the important event was on this Easter Sunday, I will inform you….  it was the semi final of the European competition of rugby. Otherwise known as the Heineken Cup.
Anyway, my home team Leinster (I am wearing the shirt now) won their semi-final against the French power-house of rugby Toulouse by a score of 30-12.
Clinical, entertaining, joyful and victorious, it was a game to celebrate.
You can now be assured that I have celebrated it already and will continue to do until I can no longer stand up or until the Guinness runs out.
Consider me happy now with the hang-over of the century planned for tomorrow.

A good way to to pass the afternoon, especially after I prepared an excellent series of tapas (of the Sevillian tradition) to get (three of my kids and me) through the afternoon to accompany the Guinness.
My only problem is that I forgot to eat.
Merchants pub tonight should be fun. They will miss me at least for the noise and the money.

Hello to all and please drink to my health.
I will need much paracetamol before the morning.

love and joy to you all!
f

And a Happy Easter Sunday to you all!
I’ll stick with the Sunday only as happiness never lasts very long in the family context, does it?
The tenseness will increase over the evening and you will all be relieved to get out to work tomorrow if only to get away from your various sources of family irritation.
Back to normal, in other words.

So, where to start… It’s a religious week and I would like to think that you did manage to participate to some extent. Having partially watched a lot of it during the week while working, I propose this:
Question of the week: Is the Santo Entierro procession a parody?

Meanwhile Notre Dame burned down. When they were building it 900 years ago, it was common for the rich to finance the enterprise in return for Indulgences and forgiveness for the way they amassed the very money they were partially donating. Ah, the feudal system and patronage… rich lords buying their way into Heaven by making huge donations to the Church to atone for their robbing, exploitation, killing etc.
No hypocrisy in sight, right?
Well, here we have French billionaire Bernard Arnault (and family, it says here) and fellow French Billionaire François Pinault (and his family too) each offering 100 million Euro, that’s 100000000!!!!, towards the rebuilding of the cathedral. The l’Orèal family (you wouldn’t expect less) also pledging several tens of millions.
What sins are they guilty of that they have to offer so much in donation to the Church? Please send me your suggested list of their sins on a very long postcard.

Being a professor of thermodynamics helps me resolve mysteries too. After the fire, pictures from the inside show the golden Cross at the front of the altar untouched by the devastation around it. The fundamentalist Christians have jumped on this as proof of God and His intervention.
I have bad news for them, or rather, good science. The chief combustible of the fire was the wooden seats. Wood burns at a temperature of between 600°C and 800°C (depending on its chemical composition). The melting point of gold is 1600°C.
Really, one doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.

Being Sevilla and with a general election on the horizon, there would have to be a potent mix of both religion and politics somewhere along the way. Again, no hypocrisy in sight, right?
We have the «Sash» (or fajin rojo) and the Baratillo and prospective Vox votes. Who, in their right mind, would even consider using a bright red sash, worn by a dictator guilty of much bloodshed, and donated by the Franco Bahamonde family (family again,eh?) as a decoration on a symbol of peace? And this has been going on for years… on the Virgin del palio of a Holy Week procession.
This is a scandal. For all his sins, the dictator’s family only gave a sash. A miserable sash?!?!?! Why couldn’t they give a few million Euro like all the other bastards? (see above).

In another parody of hypocrisy (okay, but it is the only expression that fits), it is reported that Game Of Thrones has been banned in military schools in Turkey to protect young people from “sexual exploitation, pornography, exhibitionism, abuse, harassment and all negative behaviours”.
Seriously?
It’s a f***ing television program, with actors. Actors!
Yeah… now get out there and kill some innocent civilians for real!!!!!!
The military, eh?

There is a Peppa Pig film out at present: «Peppa Pig: Festival of Fun». They have special maninee showings in the UK, probably as an excuse for parents to bring along their children on Saturday morning, then make an excuse to leave after ten minutes to do what they like for a couple of hours (relaxed shopping, go home and have uninterupted sex, whatever), but things didn’t work out that way in Ipswich, UK.
Before the film, some trailers for forthcoming films are shown… except that the trailers chosen were for the films «Ma» featuring dead bodies, sexual violence and a man being hit by a car, and «Brightburn», which features a malevolent child with a horror mask as well as blood and violence.
Cue: kids in tears and screaming in terror.
Cue: lots of parents suddenly realising that their morning shopping or Saturday sex was a non-starter.
One parent, Mrs Jones, a BBC journalist, said her daughter Annie had been subdued since the experience. She said: «Normally I would expect her to be singing and dancing when watching something like [Peppa Pig] but she was just really subdued. I hope that they can show these horror film trailers every week. It hasn’t been as quiet in the house since Annie was born.»

Okay, I added a quote of my own in there.

Still in the «we’re not talking about Brexit» UK, this one also made me wonder about the general levels of education there.
A couple phoned the local newspaper in Doncaster to report finding a piranha in the local lake. Ah well, this now fitted in with recent dramatic reports of ducks being massacred and other wildlife being torn to shreds, now obviously by the «razor-toothed Amazon fish»….  in the freezing waters of Martinwells Lake.
Do you have proof, asked the reporter, busy checking the date… not the 1st of April. To his shock, photographs began to emerge of a couple of fish that looked just like the actual South American pirhana.
The Environment Agency confirmed that the dead fish were indeed pirhanas.
Obviously they were exotic pets that some owner released into the water when they became too big.
However, logic or intelligence were never a part of rural British life and the reactions were worth a laugh.
“It was quite a shock. We couldn’t believe that we’d found a piranha fish. It’s not the kind of thing you expect to find in Doncaster,”
No, nor in most of Brazil either, where the tropics are.
“When we realised what it was, it sent shivers down my spine. This is a popular spot among families, dog walkers and fishermen. It’s always busy here. There’s a play park nearby, with lots of young children.»
Playpark?
Do these things have legs now?
Keep an eye out for pirahanas among the columpios in Alfalfa, Felix.

Speaking of dicks…..
The male organ rears its ugly head again (puns completely intended).
Doctors in Papua New Guinea have warned of a “nationwide problem” of men injecting foreign substances, including coconut oil, baby oil, silicone and cooking oil (side effects are serious, sometimes irreversible) into their penises in an attempt to make them bigger.
Yaaheeeey!!!! The male ego, eh? Completely concentrated in the genetalia.
A doctor at the Port Moresby General Hospital said that over the last two years his «clinic has treated at least 500 men with penile disfigurement and dysfunction as a result of injections. The bulk of them have abnormal, lumpy masses growing over the penis and sometimes involving the scrotum” said Dr Danlop.
He continued “Predominantly the men, usually aged 18-40, regret what they have done,”
Read that again…. «predominantly»????
Some of them are okay with this??

We men do so many things to keep women happy.

Still speaking of horrors…An American man is suing his parents for throwing away his pornography collection, which he estimates is worth $29,000 (€25,600). The 40-year-old Indiana man filed his lawsuit last week in Michigan, where he had moved in with his parents in 2016 after his divorce. His twelve boxes of magazines were dumped by his father.
The man is now seeking financial damages of around $87,000 (€76,800).
The question remains… who buys porn magazines in the age of the internet?

«Now, why didn’t we think of that?» Part 154
After American Airlines announced that it was canceling 115 flights a day between now and the summer because of «problems» (problems? that’s putting it mildly) with the Boeing 737 Max, Donald Trump, a.k.a. the Orange Shit Gibbon, decided to show them the solution.
And the solution of genius?
Change the name and keep selling and flying. I am not sure that this particular piece of advise had occurred to anyone in Boeing, probably because they think that not even Americans are that stupid.
The tweet is yet another classic in a long line of shite:
“What do I know about branding? Maybe nothing (but I did become President!), but if I were Boeing, I would FIX the Boeing 737 MAX, add some additional great features, & REBRAND the plane with a new name. No product has suffered like this one. But again, what the hell do I know?”
This is one that Homer Simpson wouldn’t try, but I can imagine the Orange Shit Gibbon standing on the wing with a big marker pen changing to MAX8 to «all new MAX9» badly and being convinced that no one would notice.
You can imagine it too, right?

For your information, the problem has no proper solution. The position of the reactors under the wings renders stability much more difficult to retain and control. This is the fuck-up of the century and is the equivalent of the White Star Line producing hundreds of Titanics. 

White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump (yes, that’s her real job title) said her father asked her if she was interested in taking the job of World Bank chief but she passed on it.
Please just think about that for a moment.
The president (i.e. the Orange Shit Gibbon) recently told The Atlantic newspaper: «I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank. She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers.»
That’s some serious qualification right there. Good with numbers.
Christ!
Ivanka Trump worked on the selection process for the new head of the 189-nation World Bank, David Malpass. She said he will do an «incredible job».
Quite incredible, indeed!

Meanwhile, submissive friend of the Shit Gibbon, Kim Jong-Un has had his army test firing a new tactical weapon with a “powerful warhead”.
Someone is laughing anyway.

I will end with a quote from a very senior British diplomat concerning Brexit, but it fits in with everything..
«We’re fucked! Totally fucked! There is no other way to say it. Fucked»
He has a way with words.

Peace and blessings be upon you all,
f

I actually thought that the April Fool’s jokes in newspapers were easy to spot but I was wrong.
By dismissing the story about the Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar (gay party) inviting Kylie Minogue to perform a concert in Dublin, I make the intelligent error of the week. By that I mean that no intelligent person would give it any credence.
Imagine my consternation, indeed stupefaction, this morning when I read this…

«Leo Varadkar’s letter to pop star Kylie Minogue has been labelled «cringe-worthy» and «demeaning of his office» by an Opposition member of parliament.
The Prime Minister wrote the letter to the Australian singer ahead of her proposed visit to Dublin in October for a concert and offered to give her a personal welcome to the country.
The letter was issued on official Department of the Prime Minister headed paper.
Despite it being an official note, Mr Varadkar attempted to prevent its release on two occasions under Freedom of Information, before finally relenting.»

Is there one, even one! dignified and intelligent politician on this effing planet?
This is once more beyond any parody or comment I could make.

I despair!
Will someone please have a drink with me?

blessings!
f

In case you think that my presence in Sevilla precludes you from my usual tactic of using the news and my cynical view of it as therapy, then you are wrong.
Despite the work, the frustration, the failed expectations, the unwanted repetition and the goggle-eyed stupefaction… I am going again.
But speaking of eyes and travel documents and no doubt other things, I notice that there is a square of apparently random patterned smaller squares on everything. They read this electronically at airports and everywhere else. I asked what they were.
«They are QR codes», was the answer.
What’s that, I asked.
«QR codes» was the answer again. So they don’t know what they are either nor what QR stands for as an acronym.
Then, after some advanced thought, I worked it out…
These QR codes (or strange squares) are Rorschach tests for robots – I think we should be paying attention to artificial intelligence now.

The MIchael Jackson (was a predatory paedophile) documentary has been shown at two cinema & TV festivals now and the reactions are quite strong. I was just thinking about the release of his album «Bad» and how, at the time, the word ‘bad’ meant ‘good’. It was a rappers thing and even my students would say ‘bad’ for ‘good’. You know, I’m bad, I’m bad was really saying I’m good, I’m good.
Well, it turns out that ‘bad’ meant ‘bad’ after all.
It’s a good job, though, that he wasn’t black. Otherwse he would have ended up in prison.
LOL
Now we know why he did everything to stop being black. White people never go to prison in the US.

In Russia, a naked man was arrested in Moscow after trying to board a plane while shouting about how clothes made him less agile and aerodynamic.
(What? Was he planning on flying himself through the air?)
Eyewitnesses said the man passed through checks at Domodedovo Airport before suddenly taking off all his clothes and running on to the jet bridge, which connects airport terminals to planes.
He was arrested by the police, who no doubt looked to avoid any physical contact. I mean, what would you do in those circumstances? 
The other passengers said the man did not appear drunk.
So what’s the criterion now that allows us to be naked in public?

To escape from the boredom of the gilets jaunes, the French thought up something that would divert attantion elsewhere.
The plan is to privatise the shops and in Lourdes that sell holy water and religious trinkets.
Since the arrival of the Virgin there with instructions that the locals should ‘sell! sell! sell!’… the real third secret of Lourdes… or was that Fatima?
Up to now, the rights to sell! sell! sell!  were given to local families for minimal rent as a way to distribute the wealth brought to the small French town by pilgrims travelling from around the world.
No longer! The Jesus trade was not bringing in enough money, so, the local council now wants to sell the shops to private owners in order to pay off municipal debt.
Josette Bourdeu, the town’s left-wing mayor, is anticipating a windfall of at least a million pounds from an initial round of sales this year – with more to follow in subsequent years.
Why do I think that this will all end in tears?
Lourdes attracts more than six million visitors a year and many purchase bottles of holy water, statuettes of the Virgin Mary and rosaries, all signed by the Virgin herself, along with signed photographs of the Virgin and Jesus.
Trust the communists to make money out of the emblem of the poor.
All the same!

During Saddam’s reign (yet another anecdote from those years) they developed the SCUD missile, or they misdeveloped the SCUD missile. These missiles were so «accurate» that they not only missed their target every time, but they also missed the country towards which they were launched. I mean, how do you miss an entire country?
Hello to British Airways, whose passengers were mistakenly flown to Edinburgh rather than Dusseldorf last week.
An honest mistake, you shout.
They are blaming this one on a «paperwork error».
And there was I thinking… incompetence. In between Scotland and Germany there are France, Belguim, Holland..
not just missing a target…
I am all for giving work to minority groups, but blind pilots???

It’s been reported this week that some parents have taken to using a tutoring service for themselves so that they could understand what their children were learning and could help them with their homework. That would never have occurred to me. After all, one of the points of school was that my children were supposed to learn stuff from teachers that I didn’t.

Nasa is offering people €15,000 to spend 60 days in bed as part of a study in bodily deterioration; a job I could literally do with my eyes shut. Sure, there are certain indignities to be endured – you’re not allowed to get out of bed even to go to the toilet – but I’ve suffered far worse and €7K a month is not to be dismissed. Also, on the plus side, I could read and rewatch the entire series of GoT. Where’s that address again?

As regards the parody of the parody that is this week’s Brexit..  anyone still breathing in the UK should go  home and overdose
That sums up the last three years there. .
Teresa May, decided then to take a theme from the Romans… immortalised by Shakespeare… and fall on her sword.
Except that she missed.
I can just imagine an ordinary British person watching on and hoping that this is all a bad dream and then, waking up in panic saying… I’m going to snap my fingers and all of this will all go away as if nothing happened.
One, Two, Three – SNAP!
…… SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!
….. Fuck it, SNAP!

Are we having drinks tis week?
I should bloody well hope so!
Just indicate which evening.

love and blessings to all and sundry
f

Hello!
Sorry for being late!
My finger still works but I will use the right one mainly over the next few days.

I have to start with a quote from Mark Twain. «It is easier to fool the people than to get them to admit that they have been fooled.»
How often every day does this adage prove to be true?
Answer: in every news report on anything, everywhere.
Let’s check…

Who votes for the Orange Shit Gibbon?, you ask. Well, just about everyone in the US. That doesn’t make them all stupid, just unwilling to admit that they were taken in by someone who is actually stupid.
You will remember the Gulf war when the USA «coalition» moved into Irak, deposed Saddam and replaced him with worse and allowed the «Imperial Guard» of Saddam to go away and form the Daesh.
Anyway, there was one genuinely funny moment for history amongst all the bloodshed. The minister for publicity, sorry, information, under Saddam was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Meanwhile, Saddam’s brother, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was the minister of defence who dropped lethal gases on the Kurds. For this he was nicknamed «Chemical Ali».
On the day that the Information minister was standing on a platform in the centre of Bagdad announcing to reporters from everywhere that the Americans had been repulsed with great success at the border, several American army vehicles drove over the cross-road directly behind him. When the reporters, laughing with incredulity, tried to point this out to him, he just got more animated and continued to shout that the imperial pigs would never enter Irak He did not look over his shoulder.
For this reason, he was known from then on as Comical Ali.
Why do I mention this?
Well, Drumpf has been busy impersonating Comical Ali.
After his latest great success/humiliation (delete as required) negociating with Kimical Un of North Korea, he was told by a reporter during a press conference that the Koreans were again building launch pads for more nuclear missiles. There were even satelite pictures. He replied that Kim would not do that. He said «I would be very, very disappointed in Chairman Kim, and I don’t think I will be, but we’ll see what happens.» More Comical Ali than idiot? You decide!
In any case, who would admit that they were wrong in voting for him?

I watched another video of him being interviewed by two reporters from the southern states at the start of his mandate as POTUS. The two men were of the episcopalian religious right. They read the Bible and take it literally.
What’s your favourite book? asked one of them.
Oh, I would have to say the Bible, of course, anounced the Shit Gibbon to loving religious applause from the loving religious audience.
Wonderful!, the two men cooed, and what is your preferred book in the Bible?
Panic on the Shit Gibbon’s face as he looked to simultaneously dissimulate his complete ignorance of the book in question, try to remember or even invent a possible plausible title and, to find some excuse for not answering.
This was already excruciatingly embarrassing, but about to get worse.
After weakly and lengthily prevaricating, they changed tack and asked for his favourite passage from the Bible.
I was already laughing out loud at this point because if he couldn’t think of a book of the Bible, what hope had he of guessing a line?
I prefer not to say, he eventually replied, it is too personal. And repeated it like the terrible actor that he is.
And the two credulous fools asking the questions believed him.
Finally, when the program time was running out and you could see the relief on the Shit Gibbon’s face that the ordeal was just about over, they suddenly added in one last question just before the credits rolled.
You could see he was having difficulty controlling his sphinctor at this stage.
«Are you an Old Testament man or a New Testament man?», the interviewer asked, with a big friendly and genuine smile on his stupid face.
Silence and panic.
Cringe-meter exploding..
Finally…
Oh, I’m 50 – 50 answered the Shit Gibbon with fake gravitas.
Roll credits!
So, tell me, is Mark Twain right?  Would you admit to having been fooled by the fool-in-chief?

In a week when the only plane stories were of the Boeing 737 Max 8 disaster, you might have missed another little tale of a woman who should only be given soft toys. Her Malaysia-bound plane had to turn back to Saudi Arabia after a she realised she had left her baby in the terminal. I am not making this up.
The pilot had to request a turn around, something only allowed in life threatening emergency.
The video of him calling air traffic control is worth a look if you can find it. However, it disappeared from the source site some days ago.
“May God be with us. Can we come back?” says the pilot. You could sense the state of astonishment of the air traffic controller, wondering if this was real or a joke. You can just about hear him conferring with others around him about what to do. He says again, loudly,
“This flight is requesting to come back. A passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing.”
The flight turned back.
Felix, count your kids when you are next taking the plane!
That woman didn’t count. One…. One….. One….  Count them… One. How difficult is that?

France now and expansion…
The O’Tacos phenomenon. This chain of shite «food», or just shite, is a French thing. These fast food dumps are opening everywhere selling vomit in a dough covering. The smell from the street causes me to cross the road to avoid it.
Apparently the O’Tacos chain are expanding fast and a lot. While journalists marvel at this great success, I wonder at their job titles. I usually expect journalists to investigate.
So far, all they have researched is that these shite fast foods hovels started in Grenoble after «three school friends got together with an idea».
This is where I started to get a bad feeling.
The tacos joints started among the north African community as a front for laundering drugs money. The cheapest of shite sold cheaply. There is no way that they could have the financial turnover that they claim. They don’t have 10000 customers par day.
Now, with the strong rise in drug selling all over Europe (this is taking on unheard of proportions according to a police friend of mine here) there is a need for more and more money laundering outlets.
The kebab and taco shops.
A simple glance will tell you first. Then the vile smell will inform you of the «quality» of what is being sold.
Teenagers buy this shite because it is cheap and filling.
But then, so is cement.
And the drugs keep being sold.
Journalists?
My arse!
At best, inept… at worst, complicit. 
Another example of fools who prefer to believe the nonsense rather than admit they got it wrong.

Still in France…
You think despairingly that Spain is far too interested in football?
A football-mad couple in south-west France have been barred from naming their son “Griezmann Mbappe”.
An old French student of mine from my Guildford days married a family judge, He sent this to me some weeks ago but I missed the email until last week.  They live and work in Brive-la-Gaillarde, a town so devoid of normal life that you could make science fiction films there about a hidden alien takeover of humanity by just filming in the street on any given day. His wife just got famous for legally stripping the baby boy of his two first names, nearly five months after his birth. The local authorities referred the parents to prosecutors as they deemed their choices of name were damaging for the child. Yes, it took that long.
His parents have now decided to call him Dany Noe instead.
Checking this on-line on the official government site threw up some gems. The most striking name of all to have been deemed illegal was “Jihad”.
I mean, who the fuck?

Political correctness gone mad again in the US.
Democratic presidential contender Beto O’Rourke acknowledged making mistakes as a teenager. But then, who hasn’t made mistakes in their teenage years?
During a political podcast in Iowa (which makes Almendralejos seem positively cosmopolitan) he addressed criticism of his campaign-trail joke that his wife, Amy, has raised their three kids “sometimes with my help”.Okay, fun good humour on the campaign trail.Then all of a sudden he was fiercely criticised as being insensitive to the challenges faced by single parents raising children.Outrage! Outrage!! I want, nay, demand to be outraged.
And he apologised?

Meanwhile…
Three Michael Jackson fan groups are suing his alleged victims in France for “sullying his memory” by taking part in the «Leaving Neverland» documentary.
Okay, he was a chronic paedophile but you shouldn’t say bad things about him, right?
The Michael Jackson Community – which claims to be the “official fan club forum” – and the MJ Street and On The Line groups accuse the Robson Wade and James Safechuck (the two sexually abused by Jackson when children) of “lynching” Jackson.
Their pay off money must have run out then.

Let’s move south…
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have protested across Algeria for a fourth consecutive Friday, as the country’s political elite began distancing themselves from the «ailing 82-year-old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika».
He has decided to not run for the presidency, they announced as a result.
The thing is that he is, medically, a vegetable.
I mean, he has no operating physical functions beyond the machine that keeps him vaguely alive. Just like several USSR leaders in the past and Michael Schumacher now.
The coterie of money men running the country using him as a front, are now busy looking for a new popular and highly complicit candidate.
Good luck with that in Algeria, boys!

Headline of the week from the Guardian yet again…
«I met my girlfriend’s parents – and realised I once slept with her father»
with the sub headline:
«She is everything to me and I was going to propose – but now he has told me to end it with her»
I first thought that it referred to a lesbian affair but I was wrong. It was a man talking. Who is this bloke?

In the US they are asking about weak academic students with money who can get into top colleges easier than poor students who are excellent academically.
The British are asking, without a hint of self-awareness or irony if there are any mediocre students getting into Oxford or Cambridge.
Given that quite a significant number of the most idiotic ministers and ex-ministers (all supporting Brexit, not at all surprisingly) in the present UK government are graduates of both of these universities, the question is answered.
And I, along with many others, ask: how did these eejits ever get through a university cursus?
Fooled by these people? I wouldn’t admit it either.

As you no doubt know, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our own sun, at around four light years away. It’s believed that Proxima Centauri has at least one planet in its orbit that may have conditions close to those of Earth. In four years time, the lucky inhabitants of that planet will be picking up tv and radio signals from the news/parliament channels of Brexit Britain, 2019. They are in for an unparalleled comedy treat when they start to watch the ridiculous carry-on over Brexit in the absurd UK House of Commons.
So, at that point, not only will Britain be an international laughing-stock, it’ll be an intergalactic one, too.

My seriously too great intake of Guinness last night prevents me from further concentration.Blessings and ardour be heaped upon you allf

We’re doomed! The world is coming to the end!!!!
That’s what the scientists worryingly tell us. And what do they do to show us the imminence of the danger?
They show us a clock.
A clock!
And with midnight as the instant of doom, «we are two minutes from the end», they scream. «We have to do something now», they plead.
And the general reaction?
Nothing!
The reason is easy to see. The only clock we know from childhood is the one in Cinderella and that midnight gong turned out well in the end. That won’t give us any nightmares.
I am proposing a new image to wake us up.
A toilet roll.
And there are only two sheets left.
And we are just realising that we ate a huge curry yesterday.
Now, if that doesn’t cause a sense of panic within us, then we deserve to disappear as a species.

You can get up in the mornings, deal with kids, go to work, try to deliver in exchange for your salary, look to enjoy life in general, the drinks, the company, the food..; you know, living.
And when you do that, you reasonably think that all is okay within your own world, even if the shit is flying left, right and centre beyond your little sphere.
But that’s not the way it goes these days. We have social media. We have opinions. We have outrage!!!! And it flows all over us whether we like it or not.
The message comes through load and clear: fuck facts, fuck knowledge, fuck science!
I mean, who needs that stuff?
There’s the Orange Shit Gibbon, Brexit, Bolsonaro, the Catalans, the right wing Italians, the Poles and Hungarians, the Catalans… populist opinion is all the counts.
Relying on feelings used to be a sign of intellectual feebleness (it still is in my book) but we have now reached some strange point in our evolution where emotions are prioritised over logic and fact.

So let’s get this rant off to a proper start…

Controversy is the thing. Every brain-dead moron wants to get involved in order to demonstrate their moral credentials and feel important.
How does one feel important now?
Not by doing something, or being depended on to do something.
No!
You do so by having an opinion (without any form of Aristotlean syllogistic logic that might lead to it) and getting outraged.

I couldn’t avoid the Oscars the other night, or rather the next day, when various excerpts flooded the news reports. Every speach by any actor clearly showed them to be terrified of saying the wrong thing.
The Oscars were supposed to be presented by a guy named Kevin Hart but he made a joke several years ago about gays. A joke. That was him finished.
One journalist wrote about him and said he should realise that «what you say has consequences» and he deserved all the trouble he got.
What, are we living through the Inquisition?
Again?

We are drifting into Spring and thoughts of young couples are floating (like turds in a bath) towards marriage.
A moment here please as I vomit….
Listening to these eejits (a very Irish word that can be translated by the word idiot, but is in fact much worse) and their plans on the radio recently, I was struck by the number who were going to IKEA in order to furnish their first home. IKEA!
Hang on… I feel the need to vomit again at the memory of these people…
Personally, I hate that place with all of my rational being. I vehemently and viscerally avoid the place and those who think it a great day out.
How poor is your life if a day in IKEA represents any form of pleasure?
However, after a few years of inevitably unsatisfying marriage, the same people will end up being dragged there by the other spouse, with all the enthusiasm of emptying bins, for yet another forced guided visit to the bland, sterile and boring produce. This will break even the strongest will and divorce is only a short number of visits away. The contribution to divorce stastics by these Swedes must be frighteningly impressive. They should change their publicity:
IKEA, voted number one in the world by «Places to End your Marriage» magazine.

And how is it possible to get your head around the report that a man (apparently living in the community without minders!) managed to consume half a tub of paint that he thought was…. yoghurt?
There are too many questions there that have no answers.

And in the Canary islands, what possessed the children’s clown to dress up in a mask and carry a gun to a swimming pool party?
Did he actually wonder why everybody was running away in complete panic?

And now that the Oscars have bored the whole world, the Olympics organisers are desperate to get us outraged. The IOC are seriously considering including surf boarding (where do you get the wave conditions?), surfing (same question) and, get this… breakdancing in the next Games.
Breakdancing?
Sport?

Yeah, sport! Speaking of which…. it is the recommended solution to being over-stressed. At least get out for a brisk walk with a sense of purpose, say the doctors.
I tried that and it got me as far as the fridge. Three cold beers later and the stress just went away like snow in a fire.

The Orange Shit Gibbon was made a fool of by the North Korean Hair Cut again. That was to be expected, I know, and the authoroties in Hanoi suspected the same thing. In the two weeks before the summit (or trough, really) they banned all Trump and Kim impersonators from entering the entire region around Hanoi. What was the point in that? I wondered, and then it struck me… they were half hoping that they would somehow «accidentally» stop the real pair from entering too.

On an Air France flight last week, a man in his 40s or 50s decided he couldn’t get comfortable with his trousers on. So he took them off. He stood in the aisle and took off his shoes and then his trousers and resumed his seat while wearing his boxer shorts. There are images on the news sites.
Despite the shock of surrounding passengers, the air hostesses seemed entirely unconcerned. And it isn’t that he was a fine specimen of buff manhood, he was over-weight and the boxers were not exactly attractive. After about an hour he obviously felt cold. The nearby passengers assumed that their view of the world would return to fully dressed. But they were wrong. The man stood up and got his coat. He put that on and zipped it up.. And then sat down again and went back to sleep.
Did he snore too?
And I used to always complain about having every fat sweaty guy sitting beside me on the train who would fall slowly asleep on my shoulder. At least they had their trousers on.

The pro-Brexit fools in the UK are starting to get a taste (pun intended) of what is to come in any American trade deal. The Americans want no restrictions on their food exports into Britain, many of which are banned in the European Union.
They will have to welcome growth hormone fed beef and pork and chlorinated chicken. They are also fed a lot of anti-biotics which remain in «circulation» for years with undesirable consequences. But the politicos are desperate for the money and will sign anything. They are worse, far worse, than the Gurtel gang but they will get away with it.
I looked up some facts about why the US chickens are banned in Europe and it makes for a sort of schadenfreude* on my part anyway.
(* get a dictionary if you don’t know it)

The quotes from the medical journals are in italics…

US chickens have more than tripled in size since 1957.
[Was Frankenstein involved?]
The birds cost 20 per cent less than British chickens,
[Obviously they are also healthier, right?]
Major poultry producers have cross-bred and interbred birds in recent decades to create ‘mutant’ chickens which grow larger in a shorter space of time and need less feed.
[So, which of you will be temporary vegetarians next time you visit the USA?]
‘These chickens grow far too large too quickly and they cannot move around. They end up sitting in their own waste.’
[The UK politicians are knowingly pushing this trade deal.]
The animals bring more faecal matter to the slaughterhouse with them, posing the food safety risk which requires the birds to be washed in chlorine or similar chemicals.
[Be afraid! Be very afraid!!]
However, the US poultry industry maintains that its birds are healthier than ever.‘
Christ! What were these Franken-chickens like before?

But there are worse things to find in your belongings.
One woman returned to Scotland from a holiday in Australia to discover a snake hidden in one of her shoes.
You are tired after a 15000 km journey and all you want to do is sleep… just as soon as you have emptied the cases. Aaarrrggghhh! It even shed its skin during the flight. This was a spotted python and is non-venomous.
It is in quarantine in Scotland. I don’t think the woman will be travelling south any time soon.

This caught my eye…
«A Wisconsin school is ending cheerleading awards given annually to girls with the largest breasts or buttocks — dubbed “Big Booty” and “Big Boobie” — after officials received repeated complaints from parents and a former coach.»
Straight onto googling Wisconsin cheerleaders.
Site down!
Damn!!
I would have applied to be a judge.

Meanwhile, US officials say they are probing whether President Donald Trump is rushing to sell sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia to please corporate supporters who stand to profit handsomely.
Sale! Sale! Sale! Everything must go!!
To go into the surreal, the Orange Shit Gibbon’s favourite television station, Fox News, has a reputation for giving airtime to conspiracy theories that benefit the White House agenda. One of his preferred TV hosts (Pete Hegseth) said on air that he doesn’t wash his hands and hasn’t done so in ten years.
I saw an excerpt of his show where he discussed eating day-old pizza that had not been refrigerated. He did not see any problem with that and then he said: “Really, I don’t really wash my hands ever.”
“I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”
What the fuck is he breathing?
This is the same news (news? Ha!) station that deliberately discusses climate change when the weather is particularly cold, helping the idiots to doubt over accepted science regarding rising global temperatures.

You have to almost feel sorry for the ordinary English man with any sort of education.  He will have a busy day at work, go home via poor public transport, catch up with the news….»Transport minister C Greyling latest fiasco costs taxpayers another 33 million», «Ex Brexit minister Dominic Raab again demonstrates complete lack of understanding about Ireland’s history and EU negotiations that he was responsible for», «US will screw UK in trade deal», «another one of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” immigration policies has been declared incompatible with human rights law»….
JESUS WEPT!
And this all happened in ONE day? (I just took a sample of the headlines on only one day last week.)
Ordinary English man with any sort of education needs a drink.
And they are asking why there is a drinking problem there?

A London rapper (I refuse to use such words as music or artist), Adetokunbo Ajibola (26), otherwise known by his stage name Trapstar Toxic, who spent the last year boasting publicly about possessing drugs… has been jailed for five years after being caught by police for drug possession.
Ha!

I am alone here again and I think I will go and get some coffee.
Anyone available this early?

Blessings be heaped upon you all
f

Travel writers just can’t avoid getting things wrong sometimes.
However, what are the chances of one (or three!!) of them getting almost everything wrong?
Over tea this morning at 7am, I came across this article in the Guardian newspaper, a serious organ, if you will allow me the pun after recent series of non-erotic images of the human body…. (which begs the important question… when do we get «Me and my arse»?)
Several things jumped out at me as I read the travel guide to Sevilla, because that’s what it is. Seriously, you have to read it yourselves, just so that you can see what others say about your town.
But just in case you don’t have the time right now, I will list some of the most awful comments… Oh, and before you think this is the work of visiting ‘guiris’, it isn’t. This was written by a ‘guiri’ living in Sevilla along with two local Sevillanos. Hard to believe that someone isn’t taking the piss.
Calle Feria features too much so we can guess what type of people did the writing.
The first «top tip» is the Viscaino, a bar much frequented in the distant past by Felix (and me while living nearby) over the years. It starts with the description of it being a «classic Sevillano watering hole visited by fedora-wearing veterans and hipsters». I have walked down that street many times over the past 33 years and not once have I seen anyone wearing a fedora. A fedora? In what century? Is this like the article about bring fried fish into Pepe’s for all to eat? A momumental pisstake! 
The authors write about the famous vermouth served there. I think they only serve it to gays. Everyone else is drinking beer or fino. It certainly isn’t vermouth.
«Traders and punters drink vermouth (and beer) and crunch olives.»Crunch? Olives?
Take the fucking stone out, you fool! You’re not supposed to eat the stone!
«Waiters chalk up tabs on the bar top, while the odd confused guiri (tourist) looks on in bewilderment»Not the only ones bewildered by the description.

The Guadalquivir riverside is next… and the ‘jardines del Guadalguivir’… during which visit you can «Wander its mazes, lily ponds and avenues of orange trees, before moseying back to Triana for cold beer and churros.»
Who, on this God’s Earth, has chorros with their beer? Or beer with their churros?
That’s how it reads, folks.
Christ!!Of course, after that you can «Take your spoils across the bridge to the warm golden flagstones opposite Calle Betis to watch the sunset.»
Seriously? I mean, seriously???

I have passed by the «bici» and I have seen the clientelle. Not for me, thank you! but it it is your idea of a buzz….

I’ll skip the next terndy visits and go to the Parque Maria Luisa… if you look at the image of Plaza de Espana, you might notice the colour of the reflections in the water. It really doesn’t match the surroundings. Some terrible photoshopping there, then.
As for having picnics in the park… never seen that either.

«Los Pajaritos (“the little birds”) ……..  This family-run, ….. since 1970, etc. Don’t be put off by the stern-looking bartenders; in kindly broken English they will soon make you feel like a regular.»Yeah, like a regular… That’ll be 45€ for the three beers please!
The Bodega Santa Cruz is included in the list and look at the image of the bar. I recognise the camarero… he used to work in Dos de Mayo (or the version in Alfalfa).

As for vegan food…  and what exactly is a vegan breakfast? Tostada and coffee?
Can you imagine going to a vegan restaurant? As joyless an evening as the probable company.

Here’s the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/mar/04/locals-guide-seville-spain-10-tips-gothic-cathedral

Further blessings on you allf

I inadvertently missed out on some other gems from the little boy misister of defence in the UK… you know the one with the supermarket drones as a war strategy who wants to send a big boat with no planes to the Pacific to warn China…
 Well, in another speech last week about Russia and the Cold War, he described it as ‘The Cool War’.
Cool! said Bart Simpson upon realising that he knew more than the minister about anything.
Said minister suggested loading guns on tractors as a way of stretching the shrinking defence budget.
But the best one refers to Spain and Gibralter… he suggested firing paint-balls to prevent Spanish fishing ships from trespassing into Gibraltar’s waters.
Paint balls??????????????
Be afraid, world, be very afraid!

So he wins the «stunning idiot of the month» award for February. No one can be worse than this, can they?

My daughter in Cardiff has started to prepare for the Brexit by stockpiling food in her room. She isn’t the only one. All foreign students and staff at Cardiff university are doing the same.

With elections announced in Spain, I expect some form of clusterfuck to break the surface amongst the ambitious there.
But it is a pity that Spanish news papers do not openly portray the incompetence of politicians there. Too respectful altogether!

Back next week with another dose of other people’s madness.

f

And good morning to you all!
It seems that the sunshine and temperatures above those that would kill a semi-naked human within an hour are enough to allow one to imagine that one’s health is improving. But it’s all an illusion.
For this week, I have to mix things up and will not discuss sex at all. No doubt you are relieved after the pornographic onslaught of last week. I cannot avoid Brexit, or rather the quality of minister in her majesty’s government, but will also visit Spain, Kondo-mania, happiness and other things. So let’s get the British out of the way first, since I have not mentioned them much in recent weeks. The point is that no matter how bad you think things are where you live, it is often a lot worse elsewhere.
And as a bonus, I will not be mentioning the Orange Shit Gibbon either.

Concerning the British, it isn’t their failing Brexit that interests me but the utter stupidity of the crown ministers. In the past, these guys were at the top of the diplomatic tree and showed their worth against any international opposition (whether they were against us or with us at any given time). I didn’t like them but had to admit that they were formidable intellects.
Well, that’s all changed and radically so.
So far we have had the female minister who complained that the Europeans were treating the British unfairly by not allowing them seats in the European parliament after Brexit, no representation of the various European Union councils, no Euro-deputes, no use of European funds… again, after Brexit. Please try and get your head around that one. I am still slightly bewildered.
This was followed by the next idiot who claimed that he could simply go to Dublin and get an Irish passport by asking for one, and only because he is 100% British, with no connection at all to Ireland. He must be delirious in his personal fantasy world.
There were the Brexit ministers David Davies and the even more stupid Dominic Raab and now there’s another one whose name I don’t know. Tusk’s and Barnier’s comments about them were careful so as not to be seen as insulting those intellectually deficient people who suffer from accidental or genetic disorders. These ministers are almost a new prototype of single brain cell entities.
Then we had the present misister of transport who gave 20 million Euro to a «shipping company» who had no ships, no staff, no experience, no contacts and no permission to use the two harbours in question to ship goods. He is also previously responsible as minister for prisons for stopping the inmates having access to books. I am not making ths up.
However, in the race to see who is the most incompetant and most useless minister… and the most stupid, we have a new contender… «the minister for war… sorry, the minister for defence». That verbal piece of sarcasm was spoken yesterday by the Russian minister for defence, Lavrov.
This particular minister (name : Gavin Willianson) is worth googling just to get a look at him. He makes a complete break with the British diplomatic past by looking like someone who graduated three years ago from a low ranked university, last in his class, with a degree in selling insurance or second hand cars. When I looked up his past just now (having typed that), I was actually shocked – and not shocked – to learn that he was actually a fire-place salesman before he went into politics. Not shocked that it’s true as that’s what he appears as and totally shocked that anyone on the planet at any time in human history would give him a job as defence minister for the UK.  It is impossible to accord his face any credibility. You just know, that since he was named defence minister, he has been spending as much time as possible alone in his office making plastic model aeroplanes and tanks and ships. He knows that they are British models because it says so on the boxes. He would then be playing with them as if he were Lord Commander of the air force, the fleet, the army, charging at the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans and the Europeans and beating them all… in his little boy’s imagination.
His real world stupidity comes in with the award of 9 million pounds for the purchasing of «drones, to fight against the enemy, waves and waves of drones». That’s a fucking quote!!!!! Fortunately he didn’t go as far as to specify the enemy in question… just imagine the consequences! Well, he wouldn’t be a contender for the most stupid boy in the world if that were still the case.
He also misunderstood the types of drone needed by the military. He was basing his «calculations» of the drones cost by what you can buy on the internet or in a supermarket, you know, the little ones, with cameras. The military ones cost a lot more, a lot lot more. What he also didn’t work out was that each drone needs a human operator to control it. Sending in a thousand drones against this imaginary enemy would require as many operators. One army general at the official meeting was heard to mutter the word «idiot» while rolling his eyes to the Heavens. But things never stop with the first mistake, or the tenth, or the twentiest, in this case. His pronouncement last week that he would send the new British aircraft carrier (which, incredibly, has no planes yet, but are you really surprised?) to the Pacific to keep the Chinese in check and show them that the British mean business when others are being naughty. He actually said «the UK [was] prepared to use lethal force to deter countries that flout international law.You have to ask: Is he living in the year 1850? Or is he abusing the opium? Or is his IQ the same as his age?
Amidst the guffaws of some and the despair of others, the Chinese responded.
They hinted at their displeasure. That is a serious rebuke by their standards in case you don’t have experience of how the Chinese operate diplomatically. The follow-up was announced yesterday (Saturday) when they told the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (one of the only strong and educated minds in the present government) that his long planned visit to China to discuss trade agreements after Brexit was … cancelled, just two days before he was due to travel.
Ouch!!!
Meanwhile, the boy minister for defence is planning his next move against someone else, maybe the Russians.

Please understand, I am not making any of this up. It is all real and it all happened. I am not even exaggerating. I wouldn’t dare as the reality is just too awfully funny.

But Brexit is a success according to their Trade minister (a man named Fox who has a penchant for sharing a bed with his male business friend while on government business trips, just to save money for the country… yeah, right!) Having announced that there would be at least 40 countries ready and willing to sign advantageous trade deals with the UK after Brexit, he just announced that he had signed a follow-on deal with … the Faroe Islands. He even urged everyone to celebrate his achievement. When it was pointed out to him that all other countries were sticking with the European trade agreements with the EU and didn’t really care about the post-Brexit UK, he immediately claimed that the Japanese had be told by the European Union to not make any deals with Britain. I would love to have seen Barnier’s and Tusk’s faces when they heard that one. Apparently the Japanese are none too pleased either with the British comment.

Having followed all this with morbid fascination, I’d be astonished if any of them could tie their own shoe laces.
But enough of that depressing yet fatally amusing nonsense!

In fact, the best way to describe the whole thing is to consider them like the crew of the Titanic deciding, by themselves, that the iceberg really must get out of the way.
Good luck with that!

I see that the Catalan gang who are now on trial have been giving indirect interviews via family and lawyers about how they have all become born again Catholics. They all (with one exception) go to Mass regularly, one of them even got married in prison, and they are generally now all pious.
Prison does that, you might be given to say.
I don’t.
For me this is their play to become allies with Vox, the ultra right wing party of zenophobes. They were obviously made for each other.

Combining both Spain and Britain next, and this is what you will not be missing when they have gone…

A flight from Glasgow to Malaga had to be diverted after a fight broke out on board. The Ryanair (who else??) plane landed in Madrid where a disruptive passenger was met by Spanish police on Thursday evening.
The flight then continued its journey to Malaga.
The fight started when one drunk man started pestering women in a hen party. None were sober, really.
Two men were trading punches in a full fist fight in the aisle … in a plane…. in mid-air!!!  Even more incredibly, the cabin crew had to ask the passengers for help. That’s when the drunken women tried to «help». Only on Ryanair and only the British.
Complete chaos at the back of the plane. I wonder how they are now enjoying their holiday in Malaga.

Forget about these American serial killers that they make films about. Russian police are investigating whether an 80-year-old woman is a serial killer after her lodger’s dismembered body parts were found in her fridge. The retired farm worker was arrested after the 52-year-old victim’s remains were discovered. Who discovered them? Another lodger? (I want a cool beer… opens fridge door… grinning head looking back out from among the beer cans.)
The investigating detectives suspect she could be linked to the disappearance of up to seven people.
What was she doing? Eating them? Serving them up to new lodgers?
The arrested woman reportedly slaughtered pigs as part of her farm work and since burning human flesh gives off a smell similar to pork… I don’t want to think about that one any more.

No one seems quite sure whether Raphael Samuel, the anti-natalist from India who plans to sue his parents for having been born without his consent, is for real or not. My natural cynicism makes me think that his logic is somewhat fragile. Does he want his parents to kill him? Does he want the right to officially be considered not to exist for tax purposes? Is he writing a book?
Personally, I hope that his parents retaliate by counter-suing him for being an ungrateful miserable bastard and not the son for which they had hoped.
Or maybe not…. There must have been plenty of times when my parents felt like suing me for damages.
Thinking more about this, who can I sue for the fact that one day I am going to die?

Research from the Resolution Foundation (that can only be American) uncovered the curious finding that people are at their happiest at the ages of 16 and 70. Given how crap my life was when I was at 16, I will not comment on the second date until I get to 70, if I do. I can’t imagine that I will be taking month long cruises to fill in the time but I will ensure that I won’t be spending time with people with much more money than me. How depressing would that be?
I don’t know about you lot at 16 but I spent most of my time hiding in the shadows of my own life, desperately wishing I was someone else. I was a spy in school (I groan with embarrassment thinking about it now still), an undiscovered footballer who would win the world cup (yeah, with no ability, no vision, no potential and no hope, I was going to go far.), a unique boy with X-ray vision (you don’t really think I was normal, do you?) and a future Pope (an actual possibility compared to the previous).
I don’t know when I grew up. 

Not only the Eurovision, but the Grammys, the Oscars, the Baftas, the Goyas and whatever French version they have, are all coming up soon. With no television I can avoid all that shit. But you can’t, can you? You all have televisions.
And someone in your house is going to be watching them… and you will just fall in line and watch them too.
But why?
Not only do these programs invariably overrun in time, all you get are people you’ve sometimes heard of give rambling acceptance speeches, thanking people you’ve certainly never heard of. The format is numbingly predictable. A bad joke, someone reading out the four nominations, a few clips of the show in question and then the winner is announced. Repeat for four hours, ending with a lifetime achievement award for someone the organisers think is getting old and might die soon.
Why? Why? Why, Lord, why???

And speaking of losing the will to live, I get to Marie Kondo…..  the latest in a long line of people put on this earth to make others feel bad about themselves. Do not deny that you have heard about this ordeal of a person. I am also willing to bet that you are taking her seriously.
Step back please and try to get your head around the idea that being tidy is not the invention of Marie Kondo.
Her plan is to SELL you order (rather than disorder) so that your life will take on order too, so she says. If your wardrobe is all nice and ordered, your emotional life will benefit.
An orderly home is an orderly life.
The fuck? Such bollox!
Just throw out all those things you don’t use any more…. books, kitchen impliments, tools, clothes, shoes, bags, pictures, furniture, knives, forks, plates, cups, glasses, food, cars, beds, rooms, phone numbers, addresses, CDs houses, jobs, husbands, wives, ungrateful children, grandparents… aaaarrrggghhh Throw away everything!!!! Just think of how happily ordered your life will be afterwards!
The only thing you end up throwing away is the money you spent on her books.
The French have bought into this too, as well as the Spanish, the Irish, the English, the Americans (of course), but not, apparently, the Japanese. Or the North Koreans… though that may have to do with the fact that they own nothing and therefore have nothing to throw away.
The secretary in the department was watching a video on-line this week and I watched for five minutes, coldly and with morbad fascination (again).
Watching Kondo kneel on the floor, patiently teaching stressed out middle class parents how to fold a T-shirt (for fuck sake!!!!), fills me with something closer to eternal sadness for humankind. She just doesn’t seem to have any problems in her life at all. What’s hidden?

The idea of «sparking joy in the world through tidying” is such bullshit that I get angry just thinking about it. Why is it that the neuroscientists have been pointing out that untidy people are usually the sharpest intellects?
Well, they tidy ones are, by extension, idiots. Or Brexit ministers.
Have you picked up items in your homes recently and looked at them with the question: does this spark joy in my life?
If the answer is no, then throw it out!
Applying the same idea to friends and family is not suggested in her drivel, though it is the only one that would bring any happiness to anyone.
The KonMari method (as it is called) also claims that couples can deepen their ties through tidying, but, personally, I can’t be arsed with that. Go on, start sharing the tidying with your husband, wife or special friend. The fight starts within five minutes… don’t put that there, you didn’t clean here, that’s not mine, I’m not cleaning up after you and so on. Horror!

Let’s face it… this is nothing other than Obsessive Compulsive Disorder being sold as an advantage to life. It isn’t.

And I like collecting things. Even clothes from 40 years ago. And toys from 50 years ago. And Christmas decorations from 100 years ago.
And when I see this type of normal desire for having a clean house being appropriated by someone in order to make money, I just want to make a mess.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks untidy mess.
love and dirt to you all
f

And I’m looking forward to all those beers soon. Make a gap in your untidy calendars please!

Another week (or two) of women and men. One always causes the other problems. And sometimes not. Men are at a serious disadvantage and everywhere you look, most problems can be reduced to…. sex.
At least that’s what the news throws up this week. And when I say throw up, I am closer to the sense of vomiting rather than discovery.
Let’s start with the harmoneous advantages of married life. Okay, I have no personal experience of such wonderful harmony and none of you do either, but it appears to be a thing. I will make my comments inside square parentheses.
The latest «research» courtesy of University College London suggests that if you can make your marriage work, you’ll reap the benefits.
[Please list any benefits, if any, from your own personal experience.]
It appears that older people who are married are physically fitter,
[Yeah, because the man is constantly looking to get away from the bins, painting, repairs, washing up, complaining, grass cutting etc and goes for very long rapid walks to the pub every night.]
have a stronger grip
[Due to masturbation no doubt.]
and walk further and faster than their divorced counterparts.
[See above!]
The researchers [who pays them for this shit? And can I get one of those jobs?] studied more than 20,000 people over the age of 60 in England and the US to get to these conclusions.
Furthermore, they then go into the «secret of a happy marriage» with input from old fools. Don’t blame the other person! is the main way of avoiding difficulties in a marriage. [What’s the point of a marriage if you can’t blame the other person?]
Interestingly, the time before serious problems are addressed via marriage counsellors is after 13 years. But come on! If the marriage is dead, get the fuck out! What are you supposed to do with these counsellors? Forget the past years of shite and go on as if nothing happened?
The other marvellous advice is to show your vulnerability to the other person. «Showing your vulnerability is very brave and, actually, you’re probably at your strongest when you can do that.» said the head of the Council for Psychotherapy (CP).
[And at your most stupid and you deserve what you get. All you are doing is showing where you can be crushed.]

So, that might be my cynical attitude, but can any of you indicate the advantages of not blaming (when the blame is right there pointing itself at someone) or of showing vulnerability?
Didn’t think so.
And really, when was the last time when you didn’t think of saying to the other person «when was the last time you understood anything?».
Oh, and divorces peak during early January.

But men can be idiots too. Inevitably, at this time of the «me too» movement (who are effectively claiming that all men are rapists and should be castrated) we get to the latest heavily awaited documentary series (soon to hit the televisions of Spain too) about Lorena Bobbit.
Who?
She was suddenly notorious in the early 1990s as a perpetrator (of sexual violence), a victim (of sexual violence) and a punchline all rolled into one.

This young Venezuelan woman, with a name that sounds like a short, sharp chop (surely you remember her now?) married her small-town husband who was called (I kid you not) John Wayne – and he was a US marine. As a teenager she had moved from Venezuela to America and got a job working as a manicurist. She met John Wayne at a dance hall and they were married in 1989, when she was just 20 and he 21.
Ah, nice! The American dream come true.

Not!

The marriage was not a good one. Where are those marriage counsellors when you need them? She blamed John’s sexual and physical violence for the problems. There you go… the blame game again. She also alleged he forced her to have an abortion. He claimed she was greedy. The fights got worse.
Their house was repossessed. They broke up and got back together. It didn’t last.
Then, one night she got her famous revenge when she took his penis in her hand. Of course he simply presumed she was giving him «a handjob». An hour later, Lorena was flinging his severed penis out the window of her car into a grassy patch as she drove through the town.

Ouch!

She phoned the police to tell them and they went out and actually found the penis. By a miracle of surgery, doctors then managed to re-attach it to the heavily sedated John Wayne (Bobbitt). The documentary reveals, when he awoke from the operation the surgeon told him «the surgery was a success, but your penis may turn black and fall off again».

Now please do not try to tell me that you didn’t laugh out loud just there.

The trial was on daytime television non-stop. All in the public interest. Yeah, right! John Wayne (Bobbit!) was eventually acquitted of abusing her during their marriage and she was, at length, adjudicated not guilty by reason of temporary insanity for her moment of madness with the kitchen knife. He became a novelty porn star and was employed for a time by Dennis Hof. Remember Dennis? He was the dead man who was voted into the Americal Congress recently in Nevada.
And all this because they blamed each other.
But she certainly knew where he was vulnerable.

and the Spanish version from this week.. a Spanish man (51 years old, who couldn’t walk fast enough or far enough, obviously) was arrested in Leganes for trying to cut out his wife’s tongue with a kitchen knife. She is from Honduras.
Lesson?
Avoid South American women at all costs!

Staying with Spain… another study claims that libido drops with cold weather. You have too much money in Spain.
The researchers found that only 33% of women want sex in winter, 48% in Spring and 54% in summer. Mind you, they didn’t say how often it was proposed during each season.
This joint study was with researchers from Switzerland and Holland.
The Swiss input was to suggest that the man and the woman wear socks. I know of no woman on this planet or any other who would accept that the male wear socks. I have no clue as to how I would consider a woman with socks. Violence?
The Dutch neuroscientists (yes, neuroscientists!!!) suggested that orgasm was easier with socks on.
And this was published in Nature?

Lads! Lads! Just turn the fucking heating on!

Meanwhile, a man in Sidney, Australia is under investigation after making a call to emergency police services because his wife expected him to pay for the entirety of their Chinese meal.
When the police arrived at the restaurant they first reminded the man that the emergency number is for actual emergencies.
«Police are unsure of who eventually paid for the remainder of the delicious Chinese meal,» North Shore Police Area Command said in a statement. I wonder what the sex was like afterwards and did he hide all the knives?

To France now and on Thursday, the famous French rugby club Carcassonne announced that they were entering into a commercial partnership with the pornographic website «Jacquie et Michel», claiming that they “share values of power, endurance, and vigour”.

Dear Jesus! Save us from spin doctors!
Carcassonne’s general manager, Christine Menardeau-Planchenault, [a woman!!!!] explained that “as a family club” [you could have fooled me!] they had put limits on what Jacquie et Michel could get up to. “There won’t be any naked young women at half-time or any naked rugby,” she explained. Despite that, Menardeau-Planchenault added that while it is normally “hard to get people to the stadium”, tickets for their upcoming match against Biarritz were now “flying out of the ticket office”.
I know the French too well and all the supporters (from now on, all male) will be expecting a different type of show at half time and they will riot if they don’t get it. I feel sorry for the players.

Okay, headline of the week goes to this one in El Mundo on Wednesday of this week, from a short series of articles on «Prostitución en Tierra Santa»:
A los 18 años, yo elegí esta profesión (prostituta) de forma voluntaria ya que no me fue bien como camarera [o cuidando niños como a mis amigas].
Maybe it’s me, but I find the leap from being a poor waiter in a bar/restaurant to being a prostitute a bit difficult to imagine. Is it just me?

The annual gay pride song contest … sorry! the Eurovision song contest, is fast approaching. Let’s get moving on the choice of song, say the homosexuals. When is the contest, we ask.
May!
So how is it going in Spain this year?
The reason that Ireland has failed so spectacularly during the past 15 years has to do with winning it almost every year during the 90s. We were unfortunately unstoppable. And since, when you win, you host and pay, the national television company was in serious danger of going bankrupt because of it. So, they made the deliberate decision to choose the worst songs and artists ever, knowing that they had no chance of winning. Of course, they said the opposite. That still doesn’t explain sending a vulgar turkey puppet to sing «Irlande douze points» in 2008. It was the worst ever, seriously. Judge for yourselves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfuJaf6IBpk
Utter shite!
And we didn’t even win. In fact, we got zero points.
So what is Spain’s excuse for sending crap songs?
Spain hasn’t troubled the top half of the votes since Franco died. Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal etc (consider, Israel have won it twice in recent years and they’re not even in Europe) have done so badly that they can’t do worse this year.  The selection criterion seems to be “probably won’t come last”, a bar so low you’d need limbo training to navigate it…. probably an advantage if you are gay.

I see that the grave stone of Karl Marx in London was attacked and damaged. The police are saying it was the work of right wing extremists.
WTF??
I read the definitive biography of Karl Marx. When did he ever become a Marxist?
Answer: he didn’t.

Extremists these days: no knowledge of history or anything else.

The Orange Shit Gibbon is at it again. The latest tweet from the Brain Donor’s Club president comes when parts of America are in the grip of a double cold cyclone from the Arctic, with temperatures of close to -50°C, a phenomenon that occurs increasingly with even slight global warming.
His tweet?
«What the hell is going on with global warming? Please come back fast! We need you.»
This guy’s gift is to render sarcasm and satire redundant.

As a final gesture I offer a warning with these three web links from the Guardian newspaper. Remember, this is the most serious of newspapers in the UK and the content of the links has been published in their entirety in their weekend magazine. In colour.
Please do not open them in the company of others and not at work.
If you are of a sensitive disposition, do not open them!
This is considered serious journalism, but not by me.
You have been warned.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/06/womens-breasts-laura-dodsworth-photography

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/09/me-and-my-vulva-100-women-reveal-all-photographs

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/27/me-and-my-penis-100-men-reveal-all
I don’t know whether to be disturbed or frightened. However, if I said these were published in a national newspaper, no one would believe me. I had to share my personal shock.

But I still don’t know if I’m normal.

and not even one mention of Brexit.
Back to normal next week, as long as my health improves. I am still in a bad state.

Blessing and (stop looking at the images!) warmth be upon you all without socks
f

Good morning to you!
I had planned on not skipping a week with this diatribe but things never work out as planned, do they?
We have to start with the awful Brexit nonsense. (Again? you groan.) A week ago the Teresa May «plan A for Brexit» got voted out of existence (by a majority of 230, a margin unheard of since Cromwell when he set an example of beheading opponents). Unacceptable! they all shouted about her big deal. Rubbish! Treason!!
So, she then had three days to come up with «plan B for Brexit».
The applicable and astonishingly appropriate mathematical equation is
Plan B = Plan A.
There is no difference.
Whatsoever.
If you think that your own politicos are inept, this gives useful perspective.
Nevertheless, with the English bringing up all sorts of clichés about the wars and how they resisted, I am particularly reminded of the British generals between 1914 and 1918. Their initial plan A was for the soldiers in great numbers to walk across no-mans land while the Germans shot them all dead.
You do remember what their plans B and C and D .. all the way to Z were, don’t you?
So if we think that the British establishment would never repeat disasters… oh yes they would, and do.

You have to wonder how often Barnier has silently said to himself: the British: you can count on them to have a problem to every solution.
But he is a diplomat at heart and everyone in the UK thinks him soft and that he will eventually yield. That really isn’t understanding what diplomacy is. I’ll give you a pragmatic definition:
Diplomacy…. saying «nice doggy» until you can find a heavy rock.
The endgame should be fun.

When you think about Brexit, are you reminded of Game of Thrones?
In the capital, an amoral woman clings to power through any means necessary, surrounded by backstabbers, focussed only on defeating rival factions, deliberately ignoring the onrushing threat that’s about to overwhelm the whole country.
While further North, sinister mind-controlling alien lords drive forth a 17-million strong army of the brain-dead, unthinkingly bent on the destruction of everything men have built.
For Britain, Winter is Coming.
However, while I find Cercei Lannister greatly desirable, I cannot say the same for May, particularly since she has no genetalia.

The elite restaurant chain McDonalds has had to apologise to large numbers of customers who ordered vegetarian meals only to find they contained chicken nuggets. Rather unexpected, you say, and why would anyone complain to find this delicacy in their plastic box?
But the vegetarians were indeed surprised to find the chicken in their boxes and complained. Personally, I would be surprised if I found actual chicken in a chicken meal in McDonalds.Even vegans could eat these «chicken nuggets» and not really break their anti-meat vows.
I am always reminded of the perfect response in a high class restaurant (in Scotland, Glasgow, I think) to a request from a rich English lady customer: «Yes, Madame, we do have a vegetarian alternative…. you can fuck off!!»
Don’t deny that you have always wanted to do something similar!

Meanwhile the Orange Shit Gibbon showed all his class and his great regard for his fellow citizens by feeding a group of invitees to the White House with Big Macs and Coke. And pizza too from another fast food joint.
You can’t imagine the photographs of the event… miniature plastic packets of mustard and ketchup (just like the ones you inevitably take home with you when you go to fast food places to eat crap and put in a kitchen drawer to be forgotten about until the use by date causes them to rot and seep) except these ones are on a genuine silver serving plates.
Above the table was the official portrait of Abraham Lincoln, looking down on the proceedings… if only the portrait could think and talk, eh? «Has my country come to this? How? Ah Christ!!»
As the «meal» progressed and the guests ate the quickly cold Big Macs, there are images of pizza slices taking the appearance of Dali clocks slowly flowing off the edge of the tables.
The McDo salads remained untouched in the middle of the table, present but not involved.
Of course, in the usual way he does things, the Orange Shit Gibbon claimed to have bought 300 burgers for the event and within minutes was claiming to have bought «1000 burgers».
Barf!
Do you want lies with… sorry, do you want some fries with those?

Staying with the Orange Shit Gibbon (I like calling him that), have you noticed how his ties are always worn long,
Yes, of course you have.
You know that way women (no, I’m not sexist) have «methods» to hide their size, or rather give the illusion that they are not fat (wear stripes, long shirts, dark colours, etc…), well, the POTUS has his own tricks to give the impression that he is not obese. Wear your tie very long! He recommends the fashion hint as “slenderizing” and he actively encourages his aids to do the same. The end of Trump’s tie usually falls well below his waistline and onto the position of his genetalia. The result is …comical?
For those of you who wear ties, the tip of a man’s tie should fall right in the middle of his waistband or his belt and no longer.
(The pedagogue within me is always trying to get out.)

Speaking of crap… doctors in a number of (first world) countries have made discoveries and breakthroughs in helping the human digestive system operate better. It appears that as regards the gut (or the intestines if you prefer) we can be divided into two main groups: those of us who have «good» fecal bacteria that aid digestion and ease stresses on the digestive system while allowing extraction of all nutrients, and, those of us who don’t, being stuck with «bad» or essentially ineffective fecal  bacteria.
Well, the doctors have discovered that they can extract the «good» bacteria from the…. eh…. «eliminations» of the human digestive system (not enough women or money available in the world to compensate me for that particular job) and inject them into the gut of people with the bad bacteria. And it works. So, people with poor digestion can be greatly helped by this new method.
Wow! Great news over breakfast.
But, we are also now in a position to do good to those close to us. With the 14th of February (Valentine’s day) looming and the search for gifts for our precious partners becoming desperate, we can offer a novel … and healthy … gift in the form of «good» bacteria. And all you need is a plastic bag.
(The Spanish expression «me cago en la puta/leche/anything» can possibly be adapted to this new and caring gesture.)

Meanwhile, following on from finding things where you least expect them, police in Essex in the UK are investigating the discovery of a human bone in a pair of socks bought from a Primark store. For a Christmas present, apparently. The socks, that is. The statement from the police was: “The bone does not appear to be a result of recent trauma and had no skin or other particles surrounding it.”
Well, thank the gods for that! The official Primark statement goes a bit further to cause indigestion…
“No evidence of any kind exists to suggest that any incident has occurred in the factory.» Are they using cheap labour from some tribe of cannibals? It sounds as if that’s what they were checking;
They also sincerely apologised «to the customer who found the item for any distress caused.”Distress is putting it mildly.

Gone mad??
Despite the utter despairing sadness of the lost child in Malaga, the Sexta has been active for all women and minorities.
They produced on their website (and sent out on twitter) an image of the selected method of attempted rescue: the vertical hole with a side tunnel in the direction of the child. In the image there are drawn two Asturian miners standing in the prospective tunnel, for scale, i suppose. Upon close examination, the drawings are of a male miner and a female miner.
The female is black.
Can someone, anyone, please tell me that there really are some black female miners in Asturia and that this is not stupid political correctness gone completely mad.
When HAL took over the space station in the film 2001, it imposed its own logic on the situation to the detriment of all the humans. They all die. Political correctness is not any different.
To oblivion and beyond!!!!

Back in that strange country to the north (the UK), news comes that thousands of judicial cases have been disrupted or delayed after the courts service’s main computer network repeatedly crashed, preventing lawyers and judges from working.
The Ministry of Justice has spent £1.2bn in a high-profile programme promoting online hearings which aims to replace the legal profession’s traditional reliance on paperwork.
WTF?? They also have on-line courts? Personally, I want to be close enough to my accuser to be able to hit her.

And some pharmacies in Europe, the US and Asia are introducing screening tests for people seeking Botox injections, to ensure that those with mental health problems are not having injections because they are dissatisfied with their body.
Did I misunderstand something?
Any woman of any age can walk into a pharmacy and get Botox injections?
And only «some» pharmacies are introducing checks?

I saw that in Segovia a judge rejected complaints that a proposed statue of the devil was an affront to religious sensibilities that could make the city a focus of satanic worship.
What?
When did Spain become a version of dumb America? This went as far as a judge??
Someone complained and a judge temporarily halted the statue’s installation. Worse, and illogically, they complainants claimed that the statue was too jovial and insufficiently repulsive to constitute an accurate representation of Satan.
…………..
Hang on… an «accurate» representation of Satan,?????
…………
The group also expressed fears that the bronze statue could prove a magnet for people inclined towards devil worship.
I think it is already too late and the devil has already abandoned Segovia due to there being no one there with a brain.

And lets not forget the Belgians. They also play petanque, or boules, just as the French do. They even have clubs and lots of competitions. My view of it is that it’s an excuse to drink pastis and stay away from the house on weekend mornings until lunch is ready, thus avoiding being asked to help out in the kitchen. They are all older fat men who play and there isn’t a campsite in either country without the petanque players.
But… the clubs are getting more serious and the top players in the sport (sport????) have been found to be taking cocaine in order to give themselves an edge over their opponents.
Performance-enhancing drugs in boules… I have heard it all now…
or maybe I haven’t…

And the winner of the most stupid article title of the month goes to the Irish Independent newspaper for «I am a lesbian trapped in a man’s body».
You can Google it.
This weirdo says he has no interest in males whatsoever. In fact, he has great difficulty talking to them, but no difficulty talking to women.
It hasn’t occurred to him that all males are actively avoiding him.
He is 58 and married and has a teenage daughter. Call the men in white coats, please.
In any case, it is the worst chat-up line I have ever heard.

Blessings be heaped upon you all,
with my personal benediction
f

You just can’t avoid the inevitable. For all of the stupidity of uneducated humanity, nothing beats the stupidity of the «educated».
Here’s a strategy… I am corrupt and have lots of friends availing of my «generosity» with other people’s money. All good and cosy until I get replaced. So, to avoid being shown as corrupt, I suddenly get the same type of conversion on the road to Damascus as Saul/Paul (who you gonna call?) and immediately I start to denounce all those corrupt people who were taking advantge of my «generosity» with other people’s money before they start to denounce me.
A fairly dumb and unconvincing strategy, right?
Now play a game and stick a name on the above protagonist please.

It would take a sick mind to invent this shite and attempt to trade it off as realistic. no Holywood promoter would consider any of it as realistic. And these are the guys who sell us Batman and Superman and Marvel, all tinged with a message.
Jayzis!
My most repeated phrase can only be «you couldn’t make this shit up». Except that it is all unfortunately and incredibly real.

Let’s go to another place and consider an emission from a well known personality. Here is a quote:
“Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!”
Dear Jesus, but who from outside a juvenile school playground with an IQ that would make you fear for them looking to breathe and digest simultaneously could come up with tripe like that and send it to the entire world?
Okay, you guessed straight away.
It is of course the Orange Shit Gibbon.
Unless he has caught rabies, I have no explanation, but… a quick analysos of the words used (again). There are 50 words. There are 32 one sylable words, there are 16 two sylable words, 1 three sylable word (agency) and 1 five sylable word (investigation). It is just me that finds it ironic that the longest word he seems to know is «investigation»?
The next tweet was also a cracker:
 “I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!”
The only thing missing was «Is this okay, Vlad?»
Meanwhile, he isn’t getting other people’s money to build a wall and so nobody except him continues to get paid. He actually imagines that by throwing a big tantrum he will get his way. What did I say about little children? He ain’t gonna win this one. I can imagine him practising staring himself down in the bathroom mirror (so as to have his impressive stare ready to browbeat the democrats) and losing. 

But just when you are thinking that it cannot get worse because he is only one man (with a scalp reduction), news comes in that he is about to nominate someone close to him as president of the World Bank. This incerdibly important role is usually designated by the president of the good ol’ USA and accepted without a vote, being a well considered economist with international recognition and respect. The name floating around Washington (yeah, floating around like a turd in a swimming pool) is the first daughter: Ivanka Trump.
Much coffee was splutter over breakfast tables when this was published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times followed by derision, but derision driven by the fear that it could easily come to pass.
This is a slight departure from the premise of Orwell’s 1984. Instead of the government crushing dissent by forcing public announcements into the public conscience as truth, this is the establishment hoping that by nervously laughing at something, it might go away if they laugh hard enough.
I am not taking bets on this one. He previously considered her for the job of US ambassador to the UN (I want to see her CV.) She also sat in for her father at a G20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017, to widespread consternation. The Japanese prime minister was heard to ask «who the fuck is she?»
It gets a little more painful yet. She is quoted as having ambition to run for President of the United States.

This is close to the UK situation more and more with people in positions of power for which they have no evident qualification. You already know about the ferry company with no ferries getting 14 million of their British pounds to run a ferry service.

Personally, I didn’t apply for the contract to start a ferry company between England and Holland, assuming naively, and wrongly for that matter, that not actually owning any ferries would be an obstacle. In an effort to get in on the money grab, I have purchased seven inflatable plastic children’s boats from Lidl and recently submitted an application for money to the UK ministry of transport. I am waiting for a reply and will keep you all informed of the response.
In the same vein, I will write to the world bank with my CV … after all, I know absolutely nothing about economics but I at least know that the world is not flat.

What do you throw away?
In the toilet, I mean…
There are the inevitables of the human digestive system, some paper that should easily dissolve (preferably only after use) and really, that should be it. But who follows common sense and instructions?
Not the English in the town of Sidmouth on Sea anyway. They get the picture of the week and it is referred to euphemistically as a fatberg. It should be a shitberg, really, but they don’t say that. Since I have trouble getting the images to appear here, I will include the link to the newspaper article.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/08/sixty-four-metre-fatberg-discovered-in-english-seaside-resort-sidmouth-devon
I can’t help but laugh, but I pity the poor workers who have to break it up in order to let the **** flow. They might well be wearing full biohazard suits but there is not enough money in the country for me to consider that particular job.
What no one asks is how they found out about this big blocking shitberg. How many toilets just didn’t empty until the alarm went off? That’s quite an unappetising image right there in your minds.

And on London underground, or the Tube, even a fairly short ride makes your snot go black. Researchers have found air pollution in London’s underground stations is up to 30 times higher than beside busy roads in central London. The Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants has warned Transport for London it is “likely there is some health risk”.
And water is wet, eh?

What is it about the word «democratic», There is the Democratic Republic of North Korea (enough said!). We now have the Democratic Republic of the Congo…  where the latest general election result was delayed and the opposite result announced two days later to the consternation of the observers, the opposition and even most of the government.
Democratic?
Meanwhile… Military officers in Gabon have staged a coup attempt, seizing the state radio station and declaring their dissatisfaction with President Ali Bongo, who is in hospital in Morocco.
The military coup leader Lieut Kelly Ondo Obiang in a radio address to the nation said the coup was being carried out “to restore democracy».
Please tell me what I don’t seem to understand!

For those of you with kids, here is a test. Do you know about the experiment with children and marshmallows? Well, you give kids the choice: eat one now, or two later
Those who delay seemingly go on to achieve greater academic success, better health and lower divorce rates.
Now get those marshmallows out and perform a little experiment. I am also willing to bet the other present adults might eat the marshmallow before the kids. Can anyone guess to whom I may be referring?
(However, it is also possible that the test may fail since some kids probably like marshmallows more than others.)
Now let’s talk about sex…. or rather sex toys.
Lora Haddock, founder of the company Lora DiCarlo, said she had been overjoyed when the company’s «Osé personal massager» was selected as winner of the Consumer Electronics Show 2019 Innovation Award in the robotics and drone product category.
What is this product, referred to as a «personal massager» (yeah, right!!!) ?
It is a hands-free device developed by an almost entirely female team of engineers using new micro-robotic technology that mimics all of the sensations of a human mouth, tongue, and fingers, for an experience that feels just like a real partner, it says on the companys website.
I am not inventing this stuff.
Anyway, the award was suddenly withdrawn and the reason published was this:
the product “should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program” because it “does not fit into any of our existing product categories”.
Yeah, right! I know what it fits into even if they don’t.
In reply the company said that their engineers designed the «massager» in partnership with Oregon State University, whose robotics lab is ranked as one of the best in the nation.
I imagine that the Chancellor of that university is asking for explanations right now. «What in the name of hell are we doing developing ‘a vagina-focused robotic massager for blended orgasm’*?»
Blended?
I’ll now have to reconsider my whiskeys of choice. They are all blanded. What am I drinking?

Anyway, if the aim is to replace men, there is nothing I can do about it from here.

Have a pleasant Sunday!
I am going to watch my son play rugby.

And in spite of never inviting comment or discussion, can someone please tell me what a blended orgasm is and how I might go about getting one.

Love and Himalayan blessings to all
f

* quote from the company website

Good morning, good morning and good morning!
As you might guess, I have returned once again from dispensing my energies on the sports field and am (as of writing) still alive and capable of thinking and typing.

The news this week is yet another total abandonment of logic, to such an extent that you have to wonder if there is a fundamental flaw in mankind that drags us to perdition. We just have to stand back and look at our own lives for confirmation. 
But less of that existential introspection, on with the real news!!

Let’s change continents and look at Australia and see what there is to cure you of any desire to actually go there.

Australia’s collection of «fuckers to be avoided» has a new entry. Just when you thought that the deadly snakes, the man-eating crocodiles and the poisonous jellyfish and the sharks would be enough for any corner of the Earth, in comes Hermie the huntsman spider. This «fucker to be avoided» is not just huge, it is strong enough to carry an adult mouse up the side of a fridge. There is a video and you can google it yourselves, but I watched it and…. Christ!
I would have moved out of the house naked and sent in a SWAT team with flame throwers. The house owner filmed the thing and put it on line. Yes, in a house in Queensland.
I include a still from the video:

How’s that for a «holy fuck!!!!» moment?

Meanwhile, police in Western Australia, another part of that hostile environment, sent their equivalent of a domestic SWAT team to a house following an emergency call. A person walking outside a house in Perth heard a toddler screaming and a man repeatedly shouting “Why don’t you die?”
The team arrived and immediately broke into the house only to find a man “trying to kill a spider”, who then apologised (as expected with guns being pointed at him) for having an extreme fear of spiders. The police report stated “No injuries sighted (except to spider). No further police involvement required”.
In 2015, a similar incident occurred in Sydney when police were called to a house to find a “quite embarrassed” man throwing furniture at a spider, alone.
What type of spider was this one?
Who wants to live there?

Public health is becoming prominent and the doctors and researchers in the fat countries (i.e. all English speaking countries) have been complaining again. It seems that the average 10-year-old has already consumed as much sugar in their lifetime as the recommended limit for an 18-year-old. They say that this has serious implications for obesity and health.
Well, who would have guessed it?
In all these countries, at least one-third of children are overweight or obese at the age of 10 and 4.2% are severely obese at 14. They then add that obese children often become obese adults, at risk of heart attacks, strokes and type 2 diabetes.
Ya don’t say!
I see it as the only remaining way that parents have to keep their offspring quiet now that you can’t punch the little bastards in the face any more.

Fortunately beer is a liquid and has no sugar.

An official British ministerial document about Brexit last week, that’s last week, December 2018, stated that «fishing fleets are often to be found close to the coast».
Who knew????
Seriously, who knew?
Fuck me… does that mean that there are fish in the sea?
An official document.
My Christ! The level of education is supposedly lower in Andalusia compared to the rest of Spain, but the level of «education» in the UK is so shockingly low that you would not believe what they are incapable of understanding.

I have listened to the opinion shows on the radio and while I didn’t comprehend how they got to this point, I do now. This is Europe, after a thousand yours of advancing history, after the invention of formal education, the printing press, communication, ease of travel, knowledge of others, and then even after two world wars in the past 100 years, and one of the oldest states only produces arrogant ignorance.
I do not know the answer to this and I am starting to feel like some rational Germans in the 1930s. They saw what was happening and didn’t quite believe what was going to happen. They could not really accept that the path they were being lead onto was a possibility. Then it was too late and in despair, they tried to leave and could not. Normal people who were witnesses and who eventually became the first victims must have never quite understood what the hell was going on. 

The fall-out from last weeks ministerial decision («We looked very carefully at the ferry firm») in the UK to give a 14 million pound contract to a bunch of (Conservative) businessmen to run a ferry company continues.  You have to feel sorry for the minister (who championed Brexit from the start) when some official handed him a map and pointed out to him that the UK is an island and that things like food and medicine come there via aeroplanes and big boats. «Oh shite!» he must have thought, «we need more big aeroplanes and boats». So the minister takes charge. This is a guy who you would closely supervise if he picked up a scissors and attempted to use them. And he takes the decision to award a £14m contract to a ferry company that has no ferries. no experience, no harbour that can take big ferries, no staff, no plans, no nothing… except for £14m and a website and on that website there is a description of its «terms and conditions». This is a legal requirement. You would think it would be fairly simple to set this type of document out, wouldn’t you?
Well, no!
The stated terms and conditions were copied and pasted from a …. pizza delivery site…. without any modification.
And no, I repeat this every week, I am not making this stuff up.
A random journalist used a service inaccessible to government, apparently, known as “a five-second Google search” and found the documents officially filed and then made another search to find the exact same document listed under «Papa John’s Pizza». Well, they have something in common: neither of them know how to run a ferry company.
Some quotes are given by the journalists from teh Seabourne Ferries site (not the pizza one)… can you tell the diffierence?
“It is the responsibility of the customer to thoroughly check the supplied goods before agreeing to pay for any meal/order,”
“Delivery charges are calculated per order and based on [delivery details here].”
“Users are prohibited from making false orders through our website.”
“Seaborne Freight (UK) Limited reserves the right to seek compensation through legal action for any losses incurred as the result of hoax delivery requests and will prosecute to the full extent of the law,”
Quite incredible!

In another surprising report, thirteen people applied online to divorce their partners on Christmas Day, according to UK government figures.
During the period between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, 455 applications were lodged in England and Wales, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said.
The first full week of the new year is one of the busiest periods for initiating divorce proceedings, as unhappy couples, having failed to resolve their differences over Christmas, resort to specialist lawyers.
Your initial reactions would be
How bad was the cooking?
Was it the poor choice of presents?
My reaction is … you can do this online?????????????

Meanwhile in America… and the shut-down of the administration by the Orange Shit Gibbon because they won’t give him the billions to build his wall to keep a few immigrantsout. In the big parks there are few rangers and no administratives resulting in services being closed.
The latest report says that «Human feces, overflowing garbage, illegal off-roading, fights over camping spots and other damaging behavior in fragile areas are beginning to overwhelm the American west’s most popular national parks».
The parks remain open with no staff.
Some rangers have complained to the media that it can only be traumatising for the animals to have to witness humans using the parks green spaces as toilets.
As if these animals would… could…. what do the animals do?
Besides, I expect that apart from not caring if humans crap on the grass, the animals have seen worse and not been traumatised.

Speaking of worse… I would love to be able to watch the male staff at the Hacienda HealthCare facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
A woman who has been in a vegetative state for at least a decade at this private healthcare facility gave birth to a healthy boy last week.
The police have been called in to investigate, obviously and will start with a DNA sampling of all the men working there. This comatose woman has no relatives or visitors and so…. you can guess; 
None of the staff were aware that she was pregnant until she was pretty much giving birth.
Well, one male member of staff must be starting to sweat a lot and be thinking about sudden holidays in Brazil.

And before I go back to recovering from the sport, here is the picture of that Huntsman spider again. It still freaks me out.

Pluga el cielo derramar sobre vosotros sus bendiciones!

Your Sunday friend
f

This would appear to be the last contribution this year. We don’t do retrospectives here. That is left to the «newspapers» who are not offering anything other than lists.
No lists here.
Let’s start with the Orange Shit Gibbon and all his nonsensical pouting. You have seen the facial expression, with his mouth taking a weird shape, You can’t immitate it, can you? Between the mouth and the hair, it is difficult to see the true human being underneath. However, the guy is about 73 years old and his hair and face do not fit. I saw a comment by an American journalist and followed it up on the internet. Then, I fortuitously met an ex-colleague (now retired) with his wife. She was a plastic surgeon. I asked about the procedure. Bingo!!!
the reason for the hair is that the Shit Gibbon got a scalp reduction;
Huh?
This is done for men who are losing their hair on top. The bald part is removed.
Wha’?
A rugby ball shaped part of the scalp is cut out on top of the head and the sides are sewn up so that the hair growing on each side is brought closer, thus reducing the bald area. This can be done up to three times per head. This has consequences a little similar to a face lift, but doesn’t pull from the same place.
The result is that the hair does not grow in the same direction as the original hair that grew in that geographical place initially. If uncontroled, the owner looks like he just stepped out of a wind tunnel. Or looks as if he is wearing a scrawney dead bird on his head.
Subsequently, it is difficult to force the hair to go in the «right» direction in the right places, i.e. in a direction that looks normal on a human head. The required severe control is enabled by huge quantities of rigidifying hair spray. That is why the Shit Gibbon’s hair is combed in the strangest of directions. The hair spray is of industrial strength and if sprayed on the male member would have an effect similar to viagra.
The other collateral effect of scalp reduction therapy is on the face. In a face lift, it is best to pull from the back. When pulled from the top, it is the mouth that is mainly unaffected. Imaging pulling the skin of your face from the back… your mouth gets wider and the wrinkles disappear. When the skin is pulled from above, the eyes and nose take the stretch. This leaves the Shit Gibbon with a high face with the hair line moved further back. He compensates by brushing the hair like a cantilever over his forehead. Now you know about the hair: it is real but in an unnatural position, and the mouth, all small and wrinkley.
Please tell me that you knew none of this. Apparently no American journalist will report on it. But now you all know the truth, the secret truth.

Brexit is going from being a theory to a terrifying reality and the Conservatives are engaged in a vicious feud amongst themselves. And they have all taken two weeks holiday for Christmas. I mean what could possibly be wrong with that?
Nothing! This is the plan all along: the hardest of hard Brexits. The thorn in their side is the international agreement they signed about no border in Ireland. If only they could get rid of that….
But they can’t, so fuck ‘em! (That’s a quote from Richard Nixon)
The thing to remember is that the hard Brexit proponents are the multi-millionaires who want no regulation on their monetary affairs. The more reasonable ones are those who want to avoid a hard brexit. Guess who is winning. And rumours that the sterile husband of the sterile Teresa May is an investment banker whose company stands to make milti-millions out of a hard brexit are completely true.
Why do you think that she is outrageously ignoring what the now majority of people are screaming? 60% want to stay.

And before you say anything… what the fuck do you think is any different in Catalunia?
As the Americans say…. «Follow the money»…. and you find out all the reasons.

Stamps! You would think we need fewer and fewer of those. Well, the British produce commemorative stamps quite a lot. This being a war anniversary year, they have come up with more war stamps. Unfortunately, the image of American troops landing in Normandy was quickly spotted as not being American troops landing in Normandy. It was American troops landing in Indonesia.
Of course, we would all be likely to confuse the coast of Normandy with the coast of Indonesia. Entirely understandable, right?
Anyway, I include the link because of the response of the public to getting it wrong. The alternative versions of the stamp down the article made me laugh.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/28/royal-mail-in-stamp-blunder-after-confusing-d-day-beaches-with-indonesia

In a move that has made the French, Belgians and Dutch laugh out loud, the ministry for Transport in the UK have been making new plans for Brexit. You remember the Brexit, right? Get rid of Europe and let’s do things ourselves. Well, to ease the inevitable problems at the port of Dover, they have had to prepare other ports. But to go with the use of other ports, they need ships. They don’t have any more ships. So they have spent more than £100 million (that’s one hundred million pounds) to rent ships for a Britain that is independent of Europe.
The ministry has signed contracts with the French firm Brittany Ferries (£46 million), the Danish company DFDS (£47 million) and the UK’s Seaborne Freight (a mere £18 million)
It would be impossible to make this shit up.
But it is just like the passports. They, the Conservatives and the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Europe brexit fans, didn’t want the burgundy coloured European passport any more, they wanted their old colour of dark blue. In their blind ignorance, they could have had that anyway in Europe as there is no rule at all as to the colour of passports. So, they have contracted a company to produce the new not-European dark blue passports for Great Britain. Of course the company in question is French, based in France, and the British government will pay in Euros.
And the minister in question still has his job. I suppose that calamity doesn’t discriminate when it comes to making mistakes and you have to ask if the minister in question had simply won a competition to be a minister.
Incompetence meters exploding everywhere.
Why so bad?
British universities can offer an explanation. They are all suffering from grade inflation, and have been accused of doing it by officials. When I was at university studying for a degree, only about 3% got first class honours. They were exceptions. At the same time it was fairly similar in the UK. I couldn’t find any stastics for Spain. However, now that people have to pay a lot for their university studies in the UK, all the universities have to fight for more students to increase income. And how do you entice more students to come to your university? Yes, you guessed it. In 2000, the number of firsts was typically 10%, a serious rise on the past. In 2011 it was 16%. Last year it was at 26%. Are they are all fucking geniuses in the UK.  Hilariously, employers are strongly complaining that graduates (including the «best») do not have «any ability to do basic maths» and only have «a vague notion of English grammar». They find that foreign graduates know more of both.

About 30 years ago I went loking for a key ring of the Spanish Republic in Madrid. The girl I was with at the time there was horrified and when I went to ask a street vendor at the entrance to the metro, she ran away thinking that I would be beaten up or murdered. The stand was full of images of Franco and the Falange. The vendor, of course, just opened a drawer and sold me the key ring.
Now the Doctor cum Fraude and his sidekick with the big villa and the stupid hair want to remove the body of Franco to somewhere, anywhere else. They are missing out on a sales opportunity. Look at what is happening in Italy.
For 10€ you can go to most places and buy Mussolini calendars, key rings, framed pictures.
You can find the calendar images on the internet fairly easily and I looked. A flick through from January to December reveals various images of the fat bastard addressing a crowd bare-chested; punching the air in triumph after signing Italy’s 1939 pact with Germany and striding through Rome in military garb. You can buy them on Amazon. I had one of those quizzical looks on my face as I read this.
Then I remembered Putin. He does it too.
For the Spanish state to gain money, they should also be selling calendars of Franco, bare chested on a horse, sitting in the bath, walking along the beach, winking at the camera from behind a tree. Make up your own poses. Who wouldn’t want to buy one?

While I was on Amazon, I couldn’t help but notice some new useful gadgets. The most impressive one that will save me in my old age when I forget some things is the alarm that goes off if I don’t zip up my trousers. Finished will be the days when old men walk out of the public toilets with their manhood lolling down in front of them. Now they will also have an alarm to warn everyone.

Who are the tourists in Spain?
A few years ago (2012?) some pious woman went at a faded image of the Christ in the Santuario de Misericordia near Borja in the Sierra de Moncayo up in the north east and «restored» it to the amusement of the whole world. The final image resembled more a simian than a human. You all remember this, don’t you?
You can get bottles with the image on the label, thimbles, bookmarks, teddy bears, pens, mugs, T-shirts, mousepads, badges, fridge magnets and keyrings all with this work of art. (see the mayor’s website)
Anyway, since the ridiculous effort of the old woman went viral, the number of tourists to the place has multiplied by 4.
Seriously?
Who are these people and why don’t they have a life? Are there no interesting places in Spain to visit?

And speaking of life… or a version of it, I see that some bishop has been to the press to talk about his visits to Michael Schumacher. Oh how the family are doing all they can to ensure that he has no intrusion and only complete tranquility, he said. The truth of the matter is not quite in his words. Poor Michael is a vegetable and will remain so until someone unplugs him. The 5 million euro machine is kept running until the whole inheritance is fully in the hands of his associates and family members long enough so that they don’t have to pay any taxes whatsoever. That date is soon and I expect that Michael will be unplugged sometime in 2020. And yes, I know some of the hospital staff in the general hospital in Grenoble where he was (not treated, only) kept alive for several months. They all signed confidentiality agreements to not divulge any information whatsoever on his vegetative state.
Cynical?
Just follow the money, and he had a lot of it… several hundred million.

So, no lists or retrospectives of the year…. just a strange form of reality. But I will make one prediction: the return of hats. I mean the 1940s and 1950s style. No man will be seen outside without a hat. It will be the «must have» fashion item of 2019.
I want one.

What do you all want?

I am stopping here as the whole trawl through the papers this week was cold and uninviting and well… miserable. I can only reflect that.

Will a hot whiskey cheer me up, I wonder.
I’ll try.

Blessings of the season on you all and may the next weeks bring me something funny to recount!
f

And as you can see, I survived the football.

From an article in tomorrow’s Guardian…
LOL

«One of the companies contracted by the UK government to charter ferries in the event of a no-deal Brexit does not own any ships, has not previously operated a ferry service and is not planning to do so until close to the UK’s scheduled departure date from the European Union, it has emerged.»

Okay, this can only be true. In no one’s imagination could that be invented.

«Concerns have been raised about Seaborne Freight, which was awarded a £13.8m contract to operate freight ferries from Ramsgate to the Belgian port of Ostend»

Okay, now can I follow the money?

(Anti-brexit).. Paul Messenger, a Conservative county councillor in Ramsgate, questioned whether the government had carried out sufficient checks on the firm, telling the BBC: “It has no ships and no trading history so how can due diligence be done?
“Why choose a company that never moved a single truck in their entire history and give them £14m? I don’t understand the logic of that.”

Nor would anyone…. unless you follow the money.
The company, the only British one in the list, is owned by three brexit financiers who only founded the company after the brexit vote in 2016.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
A parody of a parody.

You do realise that the Brits consider the Spanish to be both incompetent and corrupt, don’t you?

Gibralter should be fun.

f

Good morning and may the panic of the season be on all of you with a vengeance!
It is with me.
I must reassure you that despite playing abysmal football this morning (with son Axel who was still drunk) I am fine and uninjured in any evident way.

This being a sort of morning thing, usually, I cannot but start with the droning sound of Gatwick airport. It is my habit to read and then digest, sometimes distill, and then scribble a resumé of the news, but for once, I will simply reproduce this section of an article on said Gatwick problems printed in the Guardian here. Can you spot the strange bit?
And really, you’ve got to love this guy.
«Some more tales of woe now from Gatwick. David Sowter, 79, set off on his journey to visit his daughter in Jersey for Christmas at 5am on Wednesday morning, driving first to Jacksonville in Florida and flying to Fort Lauderdale in order to catch a connection to Gatwick.
But following the drone sightings his flight was unable to land in London and so was diverted to Paris. After sitting on the runway for four hours, he was put on a bus to Calais and a ferry to Dover. He arrived at Gatwick at 5am on Friday morning. His flight to Jersey is now scheduled to leave at 7pm.
He doesn’t have a smart phone and so has been unable to follow the unfolding situation with drone sightings. “I’ve got a flip phone. My daughter in Jersey doesn’t even know where I am,” he said. His plans for the rest of the day at Gatwick mainly involve drinking beer. “I already had two at breakfast this morning,” he said. “I had a proper English breakfast with two pints of Guinness.”»
At 79? For breakfast? My kind of man!
And can you guess what I am having for breakfast? (Hint: it might become more noticeable as I type.)

As announced, it is play sports day for me this morning and there has to be a valid reason to do it. Everyone who says that running is the way to burn up calories is talking bollocks. I have looked at the rate of use of energy while running (I am a professor of thermodynamics, you know) and it comes nowhere near burning off any extra weight.  Basically, sport gives you some cardio vascular exercise and indirectly reduces your appetite for eating fast food and sugars. To get the message through to the general populace (also known as the usual idiots) one newspaper has translated a simple sport (running) into the equivalent of eating Christmas crap. One slice of cake or a small sweet pie will require 35 minutes of running to burn off all the energy. Run for an hour and you can eat two.  That is one miserable return, you reasonably say, and the clear idea was to incite people to eat less by looking for a balance between energy intake and energy use. Except that it has worked in the opposite direction. The newspaper blog under the article is full of comments about how it is now obvious that running or sport isn’t worth it at all if you are overweight. It does nothing except make you tired, so we may as well keep eating and damn the consequences. Obesity crisis? And on we go with that one.
French doctors (among others) keep saying that it is better to go for a fast walk after eating a lot (and eating a little too) and this is far more healthy than not burning off any calories at all.
However, and this is for those of you with a dog, not only does a good walk burn some (small number of) calories and exercise the dog but allows accompaying guests the chance to  practise digestive amelioration by discretely allowing gross flatulence, for which the poor dog has been taking the blame while inside the house.
Dog lovers! Yeah! Now you know why they have dogs.

Some ancient Greek offered better advice but as I can’t remember the exact quote, I have to paraphrase: «Eat, drink, copulate with a willing partner of choice, work as much as necessary and as little as possible, for tomorrow you may be dead or something else unpleasant might happen.»

That’s us all eating and drinking, then.

Have you seen the official White House Christmas photograph this year? Lines of Christmas trees with the Orange Shit Gibbon in a black dress suit beside Melanoma (isn’t that her name?) in a white dress standing in the middle. The smiles are stark reminders that vampires do exist and are flourishing. This has to be the most child-frightening Christmas image ever. It is devoid of all life as we know it. 

To the hilarious embarassment of the Brexit voting usual idiots (them again) it was wonderful to see that beacon of democracy and openness Tsar Vladimir the first and last give his opinion to Teresa May (a vagina drier than the dust on Mars) on a second referendum. Fulfil the will of the people, he intoned in a planned hypnotic message (The Manchurian Candidate, anyone?). In Russia, of course, he gets 93% of the vote because it’s not the people who vote that counts, it’s the people who count the votes.
Besides, he has a strong financial interest in Brexit and he doesn’t want a second referendum. After all, he paid enough for the first one.
He also has some serious interests in Catalunia. And I reckon he has compromised your Doktor Sanchez cum fraude.

Much comment has been made over the English speaking world concerning a recent article in the British Medical Journal, the premier medical publication in the world. There is an interesting article concerning the use of parachutes in aviation. A group of medical researchers have done a study of the effectiveness of jumping out of an aircraft with or without a parachute. Here is the reference:
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
The outcomes of the experiments are somewhat conclusion-limited by the aircraft being on the ground.
Complaints were being urged by journalists who are being «responsible about the spending of public money». I laughed.
Why?
Because some of those commenting haven’t realised that the BMJ Christmas issue is a parody issue full of joke studies written by actual medical researchers. They even put the articles on their CVs. 
I mean, how could a study on whether parachute use reduces death rates for people jumping out of aircraft be taken in any way seriously?

The next bit of certifiable madness comes from the Great Brexit… eh… Britain.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38 (originally from Portugal), are a neo-Nazi couple who named their baby son after Adolf Hitler.
Family picture showed Thomas holding his son while wearing the hooded robes of the Ku Klux Klan. They were put in front of a judge for belonging to an illegal racist organisation. No! Not the Conservative party.
At the trial in Birmingham the court heard that the father had also taught their daughter to do a Nazi salute, and then sent a message to Patatas saying: “Finally got her to do it.”
They gave their male child the middle name “Adolf”, which Thomas said was in “admiration” of Hitler, and the couple had swastika cushions in their home.
These caring and reasonable parents cried and held hands in the dock as they were jailed for six years and six months, and five years respectively.
It took the authorities over five years to react. The couple should have stayed in the Conservative party.

Despite the cringing awkwardness of Theresa May dancing on stage at the Conservative Party conference and also in South Africa, (choreographer Ray Harryhausen), she still has more credibility than the fool leading the Labour party, who just announced that no matter what happens, he will vote for Brexit.
Then he will get a better deal than May.
Where does stupidity end and delusion start?

There is also news from both Spain and the UK that the 15 Saudi murderers of that journalist some weeks ago have been banned from entering either country.
This must be quite surreal for the Saudis with their public beheadings and hand «removing», let alone their unhidden illegal military actions in Yemen. The idea that they would be vilified all over the world for killing a fully grown man in private with no witnesses must seem ridiculous to them by now. Spain and the UK apparently “share values” with the Saudis. After they behead someone (48 in the first four months of the year), they sometimes crucify the body in the public square for three days. The average Saudi then has the good sense to behorrified by women driving cars. What is the world coming to?
Given teh continuing arms sales, it appears that both governments were so angry about the murder that they sent a strongly worded arms invoice to the Saudi government.

Christmas presents are as always difficult for me since my kids now ask for branded goods and it is no longer possible to buy the no-label equivalent while telling them that it is just the same. The advertising seriously upsets me. All of these multi-nationals are pushing themselves as moral arbiters for young people and now the adults in the room. Look at the publicity! Are we suddenly expected to look for moral guidance to corporations like McDonalds, Nike etc? In fact, speaking of Nike and their brand message of “Just do it”. I have it from a reliable source that this started out as a looped PA announcement in their Vietnamese trainer factory to the children making the produce… «just do it, just do it, just do it…». ad nauseum.

I saw one strange comment in an American publication, related to the anti-women supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh (I love beer, weep! Do you love beer? sniff! ). A rather macho ex-colleague of said judge claimed that after drinking plenty of beer (I love beer, sniffle) during his student days, he would complain loudly about not having a woman nearby when he would wake up in the morning feeling arousal. Well, the only positive I can see for his case is that his erection would probably have stopped him from rolling out of bed.

The world is depressing me. Have you read the newspapers from different countries?

I will take this opportunity to wish you all, and your families, a fairly Happy Christmas. Can we expect more?
Also, with mornings now without the obligation of work for the next two weeks, I might well find the cynical inspiration to write more often but shorter messages.

love to all
f

Good morning to you all.
There is, with the season that is in it, a strong chance that demands from every side will prevent me from the preparation of this weekly (though sometimes more often) deluge of drivel, albeit actual real life drivel.
So, this morning, let’s talk about Christmas.
And sex.
We haven’t touched on sex yet, if you forgive the unfortunate pun. But that will be down the line.
I have never learned how you all play Christmas, but I can’t see any more than two ways to approach the whole thing. You either relax into a period of unstressed down time (my first americanism of the day) or you go aaaarrrggghhhh!!!! at the slightest sign of something not being exactly as you want to imagine. To paraphrase, you are looking to get stressed out of your skull. This is panic just under the surface… Felix!! Donde estan los chocolates de mi primo? Me has dicho que ibas a cojerlos. No lo has hecho, y con todo que yo (ho ho) tengo que hacer… todo esta aruinado!!
You can feel the impending doom now imposed on your plans to actually relax for a few hours and think happy thoughts about the world.
Despite the meaning of the season (the innocence of a baby being born in the equivalent of a shanty town and the soon to be announced murder of all children under 2… ah here, Frank, hang on! That’s not it!) half the people we know appear to be determined to stress out everyone else. 
This is now part of the tradition of Christmas. Also, lots of people want and like to be under pressure and stress.
My mother was a perfect example of a Christmas-stresser. No problem was too small to prevent alarm calls that would have emptied the Titanic. What was it? A sense of obligation to make sure the dinner was perfect, the presents were the best ever? Deep down, I think she enjoyed playing her role.
Don’t we all?
A time for the kids? Yeah, right!
If you are lucky, everyone will want to contribute to the food preparations, except that everyone is also secretly (ha!) ultra competitive. That is the straight line between relaxing and duel fighting at dawn the next day.
Thinking back, I remember one occasion when I took the task of preparing part of the dinner. It was fine, and as good as my mother’s usual efforts. All good until she produced «one that she had prepared… just in case».
In case of what? A disaster? I think she hoped rather than expected a disaster on my part.
Ah here, for eff sake, Ma!
My father was in the middle of all this looking rather unsettled and knowing that he had two possibly warring personalities in the room with him.
On Christmas Day too.
So he would (over-)eat both, while I would eat mine and my mother would eat hers, grumbling.
But really, despite the dangers of confrontation, it was fun. Roles to play.
Irritants abound of course, but they should be unimportant. There is (or should be) plenty to enjoy.
Again, I don’t know enough about your day, but I notice that I have assumed a number of habits(?.. wrong word, really) that remind me of the best times and that I hold onto fiercely now that my parents are no longer around.
And that’s the thing – the older we get, the more opportunity we have to drop the stuff we never enjoyed and to keep the things we did.
I would love to know how you go through your Christmas day(s) but I am far away and only I find the time for nonsense like this.

So, let’s get to the real thing, the news…
What’s happening in Spain? We are not fascists, shout the new party in Andalucia, as they struggle to control their right arms in a similar way to Dr Strangelove.
LOL
Meanwhile, in the north east… Kim Torra (also now known as «you must be Jouchim»… go on, look for the pun!) is sending out his radical supporters to cause damage while he hides from doing what he wants others to do.
What a man!!! Leading from the back again.

There aren’t enough problems in the world so let’s get outraged!!!
The professional outragers are back again this week. In New York.
Prada had to apologise after some of its toys displayed at a store in New York which appeared to contain blackface imagery.
What?
Like the actors in early American films? The white ones who used to have their faces blacked so that they could play ‘negros»?
Yes, now you have it.
The «Pradamalia» toys  were immediately removed and destroyed after they caused yet more outrage and accusations that they depicted racist caricatures of black people.
I mean, come on! How bad can it be?
Prada said in a statement that it had «not intended the products – some of which seemed to resemble black monkeys with outsized red lips – to have any reference to the real world or blackface imagery».
Oh yes, we all say, it can be that bad and there is a picture below to prove it.
What on Earth could they be complaining about?
You decide!
Again, for my sins, I laughed.

Okay, that is astonishingly racist.
Once more, the management meeting must have been fun but unfortunately they didn’t sell tickets for it.

France now, and the Gilets Jaunes.. and the Emperor.
Ex-banker and man of the rich finally decided to appear on television in very late response to four weeks of brutal protests in the streets by mainly ordinary people. This should have been considered by his advisors to be the most important TV appearance by the fucker. He is permanently being accused of being the “president of the rich” and this was his chance to show that he understood ordinary French people’s struggle to make ends meet. You know, the usual «I feel your pain» type of speech on social inequality, austerity, etc. Where is the speech from? There he is, sitting in one of the most opulent and golden rooms in the luxurious, 365-room Élysée Palace, sitting behind a gold-inlaid desk. Yes, he feels our pain.
The protests have continued.

In the UK, and Brexit panic is only hitting the streets now. The Brexit plan vote in parliament was cancelled 24 hours before it was due to be convulsively rejected. No way were they going to stay in any agreement with that bunch of authoritarian madmen who are in total control of everyone else and want to keep things that way. However, with the cancellation of the vote, the British House of Commons was thus denied a vote on their own future.
What did the German parliament do?
They decided to have a free vote on renegotiating the withdrawal agreement that the British were just denied.
That’s Germany, the country in complete control of the “undemocratic EUSSR” having a free vote whilst the British parliament isn’t allowed to vote!
Irony meters exploded everywhere.

And on now to the Orange Shit Gibbon…
Last year he gave us “covfefe” in one of his midnight tweets. This year – and just in time for Christmas –he gives us another literary gift: the “Smocking Gun”.
He even wrote it twice.
“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun… No Collusion,”
Some people are claiming that he wanted to write «smoking gun» but I don’t believe them.
There is no upside with this bastard. This being Christmas I can only imagine a slightly different game to the usual one. I’ll call it Snakes and Snakes.

Two South African men accused of cannibalism were given life sentences for murder last week.
One of them, Nino Mbatha, 33, was arrested after handing himself in at a police station. He was carrying a bag containing a human leg and a hand. He told officers he was “tired of eating human flesh”.
Now how can one get tired of eating human flesh? The variations are vast and it tastes just like pork, so they say.
Quite incredibly, South Africa has no direct law against cannibalism, but mutilating a corpse and being in possession of human tissue are criminal offences. Thus, they went to jail, not for canibalism, but for chopping up a dead body.
It is quite the opposite in Europe, fortunately.

It’s Christmasssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In Brexitland, Cambridgeshire specifically, a Santa Clause charged angrily out of his grotto during a fire alarm evacuation to shout and swear at everyone while tearing off his hat and beard.
The fire alarm went off and he ran about shouting “get the fuck out, get the fuck out!!!”.
Clearly, he was taking the incident seriously, as one would, with lots of children about with slow-moving parents.
Organisers of the event apologised for “any offence or distress” caused by his behaviour.
They were apparently less concerned about the panicked children and the spectre of having another Herodian disaster.
Said one outraged parent…  “The guy dressed as Santa at the Corn Exchange is an absolute disgrace. He came charging in, ripped his hat and beard off in front of 50 odd kids and started shouting and swearing at people to leave.”
Another outraged woman said children became extremely distressed when “Santa told them to get the fuck out”.
Please tell me that I am an extremist because I would have punched the slow parents.

And it’s Christmas in New Zealand too…
A Māori Santa Clause was subject to racist boos and jeers after appearing in a parade dressed in a traditional Korowai cloak of bright red feathers. The man, Herewini was referred to as Hana Koko, or Māori Santa.
But this outraged many people, with some Nelson residents accusing parade organisers of “ruining Christmas” for their children, and said efforts to reflect New Zealand’s bicultural and multicultural makeup had gone overboard.
“Santa is not, has never been and will never be a bloody Māori!” said one man with a slurred Crocodile Dundee accent, who threw an empty can of beer on the ground and promptly opened another one. And belched while thumping his kid on the side of the head for not standing still.

Christmas toys, anyone? A robot?
A “hi-tech robot” named Boris, shown on Russian state television, was able to walk, and dance and actually jump, something exceptionally difficult to make happen and something impossible for Teresa May to do at all. After the music stopped a very robotic voice rang out. “I know mathematics well but I also want to learn to draw,”
On Wednesday morning, the television report briefly disappeared from Russia-24’s YouTube channel but by early afternoon it was accessible again.
It had turned out that Boris was really a man in a suit and not a robot at all.
The state-run Channel One was forced to apologise for the fake report
Young Russian nerds were outraged while watching the «robot» move and dance. Where were Boris’s external sensors? Why did the robot make so many “unnecessary movements” while dancing?
And why did the robot look like a person would fit perfectly inside of it?
Later, photographs of the “robot” posted on social media showed the very visible neckline of the person in the suit.
«Ah fuck!» President Putin was heard sayng.

And just as the Brits manage to make a bad situation even worse… there comes this book about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table…

King Arthur’s name continues to resonate with us today, some 1,500 years after he was supposed to have lived. John Steinbeck was given Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) as a nine-year-old and it became his “magic book”, sparking a life-long love of Arthurian literature and of storytelling. Raymond Chandler tipped his hat to the Arthurian age of valiant knights by naming Philip Marlowe’s forerunner Mallory. A week after her husband’s assassination in 1963, Jackie Kennedy used Camelot as a metaphor for the White House under JFK. The knights of the Round Table, as well as Guinevere, Merlin and the sword in the stone have all become cultural memes deeply rooted not just in the British consciousness but around the world, generating new books, films, operas and computer games in which the stories are constantly renewed.

Despite his fame, Arthur is “something of a nightmare from the historian’s perspective”. As Nicholas Higham shows, practically everything about him is disputed, even down to “when and where he belongs”. In this fascinating, authoritative analysis of the many Arthurian texts and theories, Higham asks: “Was he a fiction, right from the start?”

Practically everything about King Arthur is disputed, even down to when and where he belongs

Since the 19th century, Arthur has been viewed as a historical figure who lived around AD500. But the lack of reliable contemporary accounts of his life poses a problem. His name does not appear until some 300 years later, in the Historia Brittonum. But despite its title, this is not history in the modern sense. “Britain’s foremost Dark Age hero” was, Higham concludes, “made up by one imaginative clerk”, who was anxious to please his master, a Welsh kinglet, by creating a historical tradition of resistance to foreign invaders.

Higham weighs the evidence and ultimately finds it all wanting, from mythological explanations (“clutching at straws”), and apparent references to Arthur in Old Welsh texts that predate the Historia (“no evidence”), to the intriguing theory that he was a Roman soldier, L Artorius Castus, who served in Britain and is buried in modern-day Croatia (“entirely unconvincing”). He even casts doubt on the existence of Camelot, which is first mentioned in “a highly imaginative” 12th-century French romance. Higham remains sceptical All we are left with are poems and stories in which the life and exploits of King Arthur have been written and rewritten. They are testament to his enduring mythic power. Perhaps the true value of this elusive leader lies in what he can tell us about ourselves rather than the long forgotten past.
While cannibals might get tired of eating human meat, it isn’t the same for all creatures..
A Buddhist monk was killed by a leopard while meditating in a protected forest for the big cats, the fifth such attack in the area this month according to Indian police.
Some people never learn.
Two other meditating monks who were with him at the time escaped unscathed to alert police, who started a search for his body.
The monks had ignored warnings from police about venturing too far into the forest.
The moral to the story is easy to see.
When in serious difficulty, you don’t have to run faster than a leopard. You just have to run faster than at least one of the people with you.
Okay, and now for the sex…
There are literary prizes every year for best books, prizes for actors, films, etc.
However, teh English do get some things right, and in an equivalent to the Razzies in Hollywood (awards for the worst films and actors), there is a literary «bad sex» award in the UK for the wost description of sex in a book.

Ah come on!!  You didn’t expect serious sex from me here, did you?

The judges at the Literary Review chose the winner which included sex encounters in a car park and in the back of a taxi, but were especially convinced by an extended scene in a Paris bathroom. They have to give the specific examples of their decisions and the exerpts are given here…
And please, do not read unless you are over 18 and have had several awful sex experiences yourself.

This is from the winner, as I said…
“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one,”

The writer, a Mr Frey, must have had either no sex ever, or else is the worst participant in the UK. All the participants in the awards this year were male, incidentally. In the past there were some female writers. The next example is almost vomit inducing…

 “One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles.”

Truly awful!
Here are some more examples for the other writers…

Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (“I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter”);

Woodward’s The Paper Lovers (“Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready”);

Scoundrels by Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan (“Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her”).

Actually, that would have been my personal choice. Absolute nonsense.

So, did you find that erotic?
To be honest, I am not sure how to describe the sex act as a literary contribution.
If any of you are bored, please feel free to offer your own contributions. There are no judges here.

That’s it, I’m going to start lunch. I have hungry sons.
I did not go to play football this Sunday.

Stay well and happy (if that’s possible) and enjoy your week.

love and blessings and the hope of experiencing something better
f

Hello, and let’s get the truly gruesome out of the way first. I really have to start with this…
The picture you see has to be the most misguided «tribute» in the history of man since the Grand Inquisition attempted to offer «tribute» to God by torturing people.
The travel company TUI refunded a couple for their holiday after hotel staff in Jamaica left an effigy of their dead son in their room as a «tribute».  Faye and Andrew Stephens, from Willesden (U.K.), made it a tradition to mark the birthday of their son. Alex Stephens, who died after falling from a balcony while on holiday in Spain in 2014 with a cake and a quiet moment of reflexion. He was 22. All very sad and normal, you say.
The dead lad’s  godmother who was on holiday with the couple, asked the hotel staff (this is at a five-star hotel!!!) to surprise them with a cake in their bedroom to mark the day.
So far, so good, what could go wrong?
Basically, everything!!
To make an even better tribute to the couple on the birthday of their dead son, the hotel workers created an Alex life size figure by stuffing the couple’s clothes with towels and arranging it on the bed. The figure had tears on its face and a can of lager in its hand and was positioned next to petals spelling out: “We miss you Alex.”
It looks like a zombie from a crap z-list film.
And a can of fucking lager??????
Now that’s the cherry on the cake, seriously.

You don’t have to use much imagination to picture the reaction of the couple as they went into the room with the dummy body on the bed,
To steal a quote from Oscar Wilde, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
As for the travel company and hotel directors… how do you put a positive spin on this special disaster? I would have loved to be in that meeting.

Speaking of travel and travel agencies, did you kow that there is such a thing as Dark Tourism?
These are run by agencies that will take you and your group (stag parties before weddings, birthday weekends, weddings themselves and other various assemblies) to disaster zones. You can visit (up close with your Geiger counter) Chernobyl, the most radioactive place on the planet, famous (recent) battle fields (hopefully with the dead removed but maybe with dummy body tributes, see above), former prison camps where many died, you can take boat trips to gawp at the wreck of Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany, and tourists in New Orleans were briefly encouraged to see the districts worst hit by Hurricane Katrina up to a year or two ago. You can even get into the crowd during visits to the poorest slums in Mumbai, Rio and South Africa, However, the organisers do warn you that you might be lynched, though the possibilities are remote.
Who on Earth does that as a celebratory holiday?
God, I need a drink…
that’ll be a gin and tonic… or rather, no it won’t.
Flavoured gin, pink gin, with fruit, … is the new drink of the stupid classes… It is now all the rage. I can see in the eye of my imagination the face of Pepe upon being asked for a pink gin.. or a strawberry one… How close would he have finally come to simply punching a client? The thing I see is that none of these new gins taste like juniper.
Personally, I have always thought that the alcohol bit in gin is fine, it’s just the other 60% or so of it – a nasty medicinal-flavoured horribleness – that spoils it.
In one strange period of my life, I thought gin was good for when I was on a diet (the alcohol was only to to keep me sane), while the absence of the usual beers and wines helped me lose weight. When I saw it didn’t work as a diet strategy, I just added the beer and wine again. My doctor had strong words with me about it (thanks to my own son Maximilian explaining to the doctor how much I drank at the time. «Shut up! you little fuck!»).

Sorry, I digress… I was forgetting the actual news. George Bush senior died. My take on his life is distilled into the one Simpsons episode in which he appeared. He played it really well and you couldn’t help but laugh when he and Ned Flanders became friends. World leaders flew in from everywhere to pay tribute (that word again implies a punch line) and one news commentator was heard to say: “It’s nice to have something positive to focus on that doesn’t involve dead Iraqis, false tax promises or a broken economy. Honestly, I wonder how many people would be here if it wasn’t for George’s fantastic performance in The Simpsons.”
Why do I find that to be closer to reality than I should?

Let’s stick with the departed…
The personal possessions of Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine who died in September 2017 (you remember him, lads, eh?), went up for auction over the weekend and the item that brought the highest price was his typewriter.Two questions…
Why did this guy have a typewriter?
If this got the highest price, what sort of other crap were they selling?

In Spain, Lucio Ballesteros, an 87-year-old writer, musician and YouTuber from Montoedo, has built a flying saucer, or, comic book space craft.
This end of life work is 20m in diameter and weighs over a ton. Even more weirdly, this genuine nut job will have a documentary made about him by Xoel Méndez.
Ballesteros estimates he’s spent more than 100,000 euros building the spaceship out of aluminum and methacrylate, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
Who said that El Pais doesn’t have its finger on the very pulse of world news?
I did, for a start.
In a minor set-back, the lunatic said that the craft won’t be operational until he installs some motors, and he doesn’t imagine it will be used until sometime far in the future. In an interview with yet another Spanish newspaper El Ideal Gallego (now printed with indelible ink so that it can be put to good use in every toilet in Galicia) he said that humanity will have to “evolve psychically and spiritually” before people can figure out how the technology that powers the craft works.
Have they closed all the phychiatric hospitals in Spain or what?
Someday, Ballesteros hopes the ship will be used to travel to “10/7,” a planet that comes from a series of novels written by ― you guessed it ― Ballesteros himself. He has a website and is, incredibly, mixing with the general public.

You had elections in Andalucia, so, after reading the next piece of news, I scream: «Quick! Vote Vox!!! This type of thing has to stop.»»For the first time in the history of the Miss Universe pageant, a transgender woman will compete for the crown.»
That’s what it says in the newspaper.
We are talking about Angela Ponce, 26, who won Spain’s Miss Universe competition last June, beating 22 other contestants.
Okay, I am a bit late with this but I only saw a reference to the article last week and decided to read more.
Ponce, who lives in Sevilla, Spain, will compete in the worldwide Miss Universe contest set in the Philippines in December.
Duterte will have him shot.
However, Sevilla? Be careful who you chat up in that town.
But let’s be reasonable for an instant… there is no such thing as a transgender woman. That is a biological impossibility. Gender is clearly and medically defined by the presence of the physionomy of reproductive organs.
Removing the penis and testicles doesn’t make a woman of a man. It makes a man into a eunuch.
With fake tits.
Or, as one would say in Dublin… «Transgender? Me bollix!!»
At this rate, the Boxer rebellion in China in 1899 would be given a new and unacceptably interesting interpretation.
It doesn’t bare thinking about.
This would never have happened under the Generalissimo.
Go on! One of you deny this!Looking back at the almost imperial Spain under the General, you had fine southern beauties, women like the duquesa de Alba and … oh!
Well, if that is what Spain has to offer as a «woman», I am leaving for Portugal. Those real hairy women need real men.I just saw that there are anti-fascist demonstrations in Cadiz… against Vox… who got lots of votes in Cadiz… It should be noted that the eunuch with fake tits above was apparently Miss Cadiz.
I am sure there is a connection.

The detachment of the fools and the ones in yellow. More news from the French front….
During the week on French television a parliamentary deputy was complaining about the cost of food. He actually said that he could barely afford pasta at the end of each month… having less than 4000€ in the bank.
I saw the repeat of this on the internet and he actually said that.
While my colleagues in the university department were outraged the next day at his detachment from real life and how dare he complain with so much money, I could only ask one question… where is he buying his pasta?
And how are they getting away with selling it at that price?

Okay, time to move to the Brexit. Let’s play a game. Here is a quote… please try to guess who said it or even who might have said it.
The answer is in a short email just after this one so you can’t cheat by looking at the end of this message.
«It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.»

In essence, the biggest and most outrageous lie will almost always be believed because people wouldn’t imagine that something so gross would be fed to them as truth.
So, Brexit…
First, the public. I heard some guy on BBC radio complaining that the British needed to get out of the EU because .. he had travelled and lived in Spain, and everything was better there, trains , roads, housing, hospitals, food etc.
I honestly thought that I had misheard him and that he wanted to remain and not leave the EU so I listened more carefully as he continued with his argument. I copied this down immediately so that I would be able to repeat his words exactly and this is what he said, quote: «Spain is obviously doing well out of the EU as a result of all the money «we» put into it.» So it is the British who have built modern Spain?
The mind numbing stupidity of some people still shocks me. And this guy is NOT in a minority.

This is summed up succinctly and clearly by a newspaper journalist who wrote:
Brexiters are the kind of people who say ‘and that’s a fact’ when it’s actually a load of absolute bollocks.
You can sense his frustration.

And now to the members of parliament… the Indian immigrant and Conservative politician, a disgraced ex-minister who was summarily fired for being a liar and corrupt, Priti Patel (how English can you get?) has seriously suggested that the British government should demand a better deal from Europe and if they don’t, then the British should starve out Ireland.
Jesus H Christ!!!!!!!!!!!
A suggested famine? In Ireland? Caused by the British?
A history book might help her, but really it wouldn’t. She is a complete racist and clearly considers that the Irish are lower than animals.
Furthermore, if you google her image, you will see that she has never had a problem personally sourcing food in large quantities and disposing of it internally. I think she is useful for reminding everyone of Gibralter, the rock. Not for political reasons, but because of the huge size of her arse.
To be fair, many people in England are outraged by her comments, but she is a part of the Tory party and was a minister until 6 months ago.
But it is very unfair to accuse Priti Patel of being intelligent.
In the embarassing rush to find new friends and make new trade deals with other markets, the Brits finally have a new one… Minister Jeremy Hunt is
«delighted to announce that UK will open new Embassy in the Maldives. Over 100,000 British people visit every year & this will help our countries to work together even more closely. Proud to continue the biggest expansion of foreign office’s diplomatic network for a generation»
This is one of the places that is specifically marked as likely to be completely submerged within 30 years due to climate change.
Can they get anything right?

That’s it, I am leaving for Portugal now.
Love and blessings on the lot of you!
And welcome to the nonsense, Ana!

f

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X[1]

Did you guess?

Christmas is coming as winter is already here and the house is decorated since yesterday.
Now the race is on to get presents for the kids before the 24th.
I am tired of rushing around the shops (why with lots of other men?) on Christmas Eve looking desperately for last minute gifts for which I pay too much and which no one really wants anyway.
I am determined to do better this year. I aim to complete the purchases by the 23rd.
Wish me luck!
Now go and have that Christmas drink!
and think of me, here, in the cold.
f

Lies and liars. Who isn’t or doesn’t? I mean, you ask anyone if the masturbate and they lie. Then they say they don’t lie.
For the past week we have had the lies of Casado, Sanchez, Iglesias, all the mad Catalans, The Orange Shit Gibbon, May, Macron, the Saudi prince who murders, Matteo, Putin,… Basically, everyone who has direct or indirect power and influence over our lives is lying.
Constantly.
No respite.
So thank God for the Irish and the lie of the century…
When we think about ourselves, we know that lies are occasionally required for school, work, relationships … we are all of us guilty… but sometimes they’re necessary for calling off a football game because a member of the team is not available. Yes, this is about the slightly ill-thought out (he said with remarkable restraint) strategy of the village football team Ballybrack FC in looking to get their weekend game called off. And of course it is all the fault of their Spanish player Fernando Nuno La-Fuente. This is a student living temporarily in Ireland and who changed accommodation without telling everyone first.  He wasn’t at the usual address and the club «strategist» assumed he had finished his studies and gone back to Spain (in November?). Not bright people, these football types! So, to avoid playing their great rivals Arklow Town, they announced that poor Fernando was dead, as in dead, not alive any more. I mean, what could go wrong with this inventive excuse? And the game was duly cancelled. But some things have a way of back-firing spectacularly. The players of Arklow town were saddened and decided to inform the local press…. who then contacted the national press… and then the Spanish Embassy… and the British newspapers got hold of the story… The French newspapers, German, and on and on.. until, after two or three days, the student read about his own death in a newspaper. No one in his new accommodation or village would have known who he was and wouldn’t have been surprised to see him in the street. Had he appeared in his old accommodation, there would have been mass hysteria, the dead have risen again. This whole thing could have been more easily solved had they said that their team players were all too ill to play and hope for a cancellation. It would be a lie of course, but it is still better than going straight to the «he’s dead” plan.
The fun part is that the matter was brought up at this week’s FIFA meeting.
Well, that one got a bit out of hand, all right.
Fernando himself has appeared on television claiming to be alive. He had a huge smile on his face too.

The best thing is not to go straight to death as an excuse. That should be the golden rule for lying to hide something. Practised liars have to learn that particular lesson along the way (Ballybrack FC know that now, for sure).

However, in fairness, if I had to pick between pretending to be dead, or playing for Ballybrack, I’d chose the former every day of the week.

But this is not a new tactic. There was a well-known footballer playing for Manchester City 7 or 8 years ago by the name of Stephen Ireland. What else could he have been called? He was so full of himself playing for Manchester City that he no longer felt he wanted to play international football for little Ireland. But he didn’t want to harm his image in front of the fans. So, his plan for getting out of playing for the Republic of Ireland was to claim that his grandmother had died. On a number of occasions.
It was when he reached the total of 3 grandmothers that the Irish Football Association became a bit more suspicious. The two grandmothers (alive and well) were not necessarily amused either, though whether they were more annoyed at the possibility of there being a third grandmother (what skeletons were in those closets?) or being told they were dead, is unknown.

We Irish are awful at lying because we don’t get any practice due to our parents’ uncanny ability to see through every story. However, when lying on a huge scale, the Irish are masters. Emmigrant sons and daughters (or uncles, in my family’s case) would come home on holiday from England with new suits and gifts telling everyone they were fine, when they were all hired clothes that had to be returned and/or bought with expensive loans. These people were actually semi-destitute being served a half a fried egg by miserable English landladies in hideous accommodations the rest of the year.
I suppose too that the people at home wanted to believe that their own kids etc were really fine.
Even I used to lie about being fine while doing my thesis. I would spend weeks living on raw red cabbage and a baguette each evening. The women in the heavily subsidised canteen used to take pity on me and give me extra food at lunch. At weekends I had extra cabbage.

Now I end up thinking of Bill Clinton (possibly because George Bush has died) and about when he was asked in court about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
He said, and I quote,
..’there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship.’
He went on later to say
‘I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.’
However he denied committing perjury because … the legal definition of oral sex is not sex per se.
Yes, good luck with explaining that one to your husband or wife.
Hilarious, eh?

Meanwhile, in Great Brexit, the minister for new foreign trade Liam Fox suddenly realised that the EU is an important market. He has signed no new deals. This guy also denies being gay, even though he was caught claiming expenses for travel (as a minister) that included lots of costs for his friend, a mister Werrity. They shared beds in single rooms together, as one does. I mean, what two men don’t share beds when travelling in a ministerial role?
The incredibly stupid ex-brexit minister, Dominic Raab was astonished to discover that Dover is a rather important port.
Andrew Bridgen was amazed to find that being English does not actually automatically entitle you to an Irish passport. ( And why should one need one anyway, when he can have a new blue British one? ).
David Davis mumbled something about the Irish border being a non border.
Karen Bradley, the minister for northern Ireland knew nothing about Northern Irish politics, and was happy to admit it. «I was really surprised to learn that protestants only vote for protestants and Catholics only vote for Catholics. And the Catholics are Irish nationalists and the Protestants are all unionists». This was after 6 months in the job.
Do you wonder why it is all going badly for the Brits?
Oh – and was it David Lidington (the number 2 in the Conservative party) who recently claimed that Britain could just pretend to still be part of the EU and simply keep Dover open as usual, temporarily, in the event of a no deal?
Such is the calibre of the politicians representing those people.
Now Argentina are about to make a play for the Malvinas since they have seen with profound wonderment the abysmally low IQ of the British parliament. What surprises me is that the Spanish government haven’t managed to get Gibralter in exchange for a packet of cheap cigarettes and a pint of warm beer. Oh, hang on… I forgot… it is Sanchez cum fraude who is in charge.

In comparison to the British government, Sanchez and Iglesias and Torra seem almost normal…
except that they are not. They are actually worse.

Across the Atlantic, a truly heroic level of dumb was witnessed last week.
A US ‘mommy blogger’ (yup, that’s a thing these days) provoked widespread ridicule when she admitted that one of her five kids just doesn’t get the same number of Instagram ‘likes’ as the rest.
This is true. I am not making it up.
Katie Bower became this week’s «Most WTF? Woman Ever» after she complained that pictures of her six-year-old son «never got as many likes as my other children».
She then produced what is perhaps the least maternal sentence ever written in the English language: «From a statistical point of view, he wasn’t as popular with everyone out there. Maybe part of that was the pictures just never hit the algorithm right. I say all that because I want to believe that it wasn’t him, that it was on me. My insufficiency caused this statistical deficit.»
For f u c k sake!!!!!!!!!
Many families have pet names for each other, but I imagine this is probably the first time any of us have seen a mother refer to her kid as a «statistical deficit».

Women, eh?
I am going to stop there as I am weary of the state of the world.
That and the fact that I can still laugh at the above.

I will add just one joke… this one is the only invention…

An elderly man is on his deathbed. Although he can feel the end is near, his senses are suddenly aroused by a wonderful aroma. He realises his loving wife of 60 years is baking his favourite cakes.
He finds the strength to drag his tired body to the kitchen and as his frail, withered hand reaches over to the table, he suddenly feels the whack of a wooden spoon on his knuckles as his wife barks, «Feck off, they’re for the funeral».

Please stay happy and hungry for news
I bid you both well.

the ever beleagured
f

Oh, and if you get the chance of having a coffee (not this week, but the week after) please remember those of us living in the cold and miserable winter climate.

.Oh, and I will explain about the real McCoy next time

Ah good afternoon. We are in the midst of paper signing in Europe and they can all eff off as it is now officially the most boringly stupid event of offer this century.

Sorry for being late, but that is down to not putting on the alarm clock. I went to a party last night that included several members of the Algerian consulate and a few French people. All brought food, but I was the only one to actually make it and not buy it. It was Ulster pork, with a difference, as there were several Mahommedans present. Obviously I could not use pork so I used chicken. I did not attempt or consider attempting to replace the Jameson whiskey that is always added liberally. The dish was devoured by all and especially appreciated by my Mahommedan friends. As one of my children paraphrased it: Score: Jesus 1 – Mahommed 0.
I left early and walked back to the house. I was tired but unfortunately sober as the only wine was the bottle I brought (and which was consumed by the French present like camels dying of thirst).

In the end, I woke up late this morning and had some tea quickly and left to go and play football. To my recurring horror, there was no tram withing the time scale and I ended up running all the way to the stadium. It’s only 4km but seems a lot more. Then I played football (Maximilian was there too) and walked back in the company of the son for the most part.
Consider me exhausted.

So, what did you do this weekend? Were you tempted by Black Friday? There are no bargains because you can get the same things for cheaper in the same places at other times of the year according to Which? magazine. I didn’t even go into any shops.

However, there were some, albeit inadvertant, Black Friday bargains…
Three unusable water cannon bought by Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London have been sold for scrap, at a net loss of more than £300,000 each.
Johnson bought the crowd-control vehicles from the German police in 2014 (apparently they are still laughing), in anticipation of social unrest, without checking whether they could be used on London’s streets. In one of his most humiliating episodes as mayor the then home secretary Theresa May (before she bacame prime minister) banned them from use anywhere in England and Wales. It left London’s taxpayers with three expensive white elephants. In fact, he might have been better buying three elephants as they can also squirt water and can be used as tourist attractions.
Boris Johnson…. Is there no bad situation that he cannot make worse?

A report by academics from King’s College London and Harvard University, published in the British Medical Journal, has declared «Brexit-induced depression» to be a genuine psychiatric illness. It goes somewhat beyond boredom, then.

A lament from the radio… I was listening to a live phone-in program on BBC 4 during the week and this elderly man came on and said this…
«When I retired, I told myself ‘do not fear old age! Think of retirement as a beginning not an end! Think of this as an adventure! This could be the best part of your life if you just let it be’. Then came the 2016 referendum and the followong two years incredibly inept attempt of British politicians, and I thought to myself … oh, fuck!»
They had to apologise for allowing the comment through. They didn’t have the impresion that the gentleman in question was about to say fuck.
I laughed.

Personally, while shocked by the right wing nuts and what they are doing (Italy, UK, USA, Brazil, Hungary etc), I remain untouched by any of it. This suggests that my default positions of despair and futility at life in general are holding up very well.

In a first for warmer oceans, a pair of killer whales have been caught on film just a few miles off the coast of Dublin. The film footage was taken by crew aboard a fishing vessel six miles east of Rockabill last weekend.
Crew members state that the whales are «John Coe» and «Dopey Dick» of the Scottish West Coast Community group of killer whales.
WTF??? They have nemed for these things and can even recognise them?
I can’t even remember faces or names or just about anything after a few beers.
Aren’t whales all… similar?

I was looking at the analysis of the recent Senate vote in the US elections and came across this wonderful piece of information that just confirms the distopian nature of everything that the Orange Shit Gibbon touches.  The candidate Denis Hof was voted into the US Senate for the state of Nevada.
And this is news? you say.
Yes, because Denis Hof, a one time brothel owner, died three years ago. They actually voted a dead man to the Senate. What was the opposition like, you have to wonder. There are no protocols as for what to do next. Incredible!

And a quote from the Orange Shit Gibbon during the elections…. «I’ve kept promises that I didn’t even make».
I mean, seriously, this guy is in charge of America?????
He should be put in jail for fraud… the charge: attempting to impersonate intelligent life.

Asked what he was thankful for this year in the annual Thanksgiving presidential address, Trump cited his “great family” … as well as himself. “I made a tremendous difference in this country,” he said. “This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office and you wouldn’t believe it and when you see it, we’ve gotten so much stronger people don’t even believe it.”
That’s an actual quote from what is traditionally a homage to the «little people» who work in their communities without payment or recognition. But it’s all about the Shit Gibbon.

An American man who was killed by an isolated tribe on a remote Indian island wrote to his parents hours before his death that he wanted to “declare Jesus” to the tribespeople”.
John Allen Chau, 26, a «Christian evangelist, was hit with a shit-load of arrows and killed on Friday last shortly after making land on North Sentinel Island, part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The island, which is off-limits to visitors without permission, is home to a 30,000-year-old tribe that is known to aggressively resist outsiders.
However, Chau repeatedly tried to contact the tribespeople, managing to reach the island the day before he was killed and trying to offer gifts of fish and a football. He wrote this drivel in his diary. He tried to communicate with them by repeating their words back to them (you would want to have some serious gift to reproduce words in a language you have never heard before). Anyway, they just kept laughing at him. Finally, they tired and fired.
His Darwin award was posthumously given to him personally by God, who is also suspected of firing some of the arrows. «Declare Jesus»!! Indeed!
I’m with God on this one.

At the end of this, I have to return to the Brexit (indirectly) and reply to prime minister May’s claim to be delivering the «will of the people to leave the EU». She should have paid closer attention to history and the experience of those who went before her. As Churchill said;
«The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.»
That goes for every country.

Blessings on all!
Please accept my best wishes and love of mankind.
Now, I shouold have something hot…. I know, hot chocolate.

f
(oh, and news of your various states of being is always welcome)

And good evening to you too.
Despite the recovery from the abyss of scrambled consciousness brought on by justifiable excess, I am later than even I expected. That, in fact, is down to a skype call from Genevieve in Cardiff. It is always good to talk with her.
As always I trawled through the various newspapers and found just a few things worthy of mention, but while I try to avoid the obvious topics, I cannot avoid them completely.
Anyway, since you have been following the news too, let’s start with Spain and the doctor cum fraude…
who, in a void of self-awareness, started the week with an appearance in the UK newspapers who reported that the «Spanish Prime Minister» (someone in the British media should do some research, the head of the Spanish government is the president, not the Prime Minister) was telling the British that if he were Teresa May, he would have a second referendum.
This is shameful for everyone in Spain and hilarious for everyone else. This is a president (cum fraude) who has not even called one election to legitimise his own status and here he is telling the Brits what to do. Breath-taking ignorance of breath-taking arrogance? I can’t even say that you have picked «a good one» there since he took the presidency by default. Wait until he throws out the presidential pardon to the mad Catalans. The day that happens I will make a ton of popcorn and sit at the computer watching the news blogs for wonderfully entertaining comments.

Speaking of clouds, at the world darts championship this week, one contestant (a previous world champion, no less) was well beaten but blamed the defeat on his opponent’s digestive system. He said «every time I went to play a shot, there was a sudden odour of a foul nature». Okay, I am paraphrasing in my own way, but basically, he claimed that his opponent deliberately used the «guano strategy» by forcing Hydrogen gas accompanied by various … eh… aromatics from his lower region during the match. The offensive attack on his ollfactory receptors was so bad that it put him off his game and he thus lost. The darts player who won said «I didn’t do nothin'» followed by various rumbling sounds and the sight of reports running for the exits.

In France this week… a man of Syrian nationality took the TGV train from Lille to the south of France. He had evil in mind (not his mind, however, he was acting for his version of a god) and was carrying a liquid in a bottle that he would use as a combustible for a great conflagration, or so he thought. Then at the appropriate moment, after his fevered prayers, he took out the bottle and poured the contents over himself and then, shouting how great allah is and other such things, he tried to light a match to set himself on fire. It wouldn’t take light. Another match and … nothing. Panic! And again…. Then someone grabbed him and subdued him. They had noticed the smell.
While he thought that he was carrying a bottle of inflammible liquid because he saw the word «alcohol» written on the label, it was actually a bottle of rosé wine with the word «alcohol» on the label. The guy didn’t speak French and he was fairly shit at chemistry too.
Just goes to show, some of these terrorists are not very intelligent. I suppose that must be the case, otherwise they wouldn’t do it in the first place. And if they were intelligent, many more of us would be dead.

Brexit has taken up everyone’s time and driven us to stultifying boredom. Nevertheless, some gems of intelligence inevitably come to the surface.
The now ex Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, a man of no wit and full of self-satisfied arrogance, who admitted a week ago that he was unaware of how important the nearest port to the continent was, resigned because he rejected the Brexit deal that he was in charge of and signed. Schroedinger’s cat comes to mind for some reason.
I hope that there is a film of people trying to explain to Dominic Raab that the English Channel isn’t a television station.
However, I think we have a new winner for the «Dominic Raab Brexiteer All-Comers Cup for Knowing Fuck All About Brexit».
The member of parliament Nadine Dorries is the gift of idiocy that keeps on giving. She wants out of Europe in the hardest terms and is objecting to the recent deal signed by Mr Raab himself and the Prime Minister May, or Maybot, as she is known for her robot-like repetition of phrases that have nothing to do with any of the questions asked by journalists. She actually stood up in the house of Commons and said
«But unfortunately, the future of the country and of our relationship with Europe is at stake. This deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner.”
There are nematode worms crawling about my garden that would make better public representatives.
This is so surreal that I have to repeat it. She is rather uspet because this Brexit deal will leave the UK, after it has left the EU with no elected Members of the European Parliament, no commisioner and in fact no voice and no vote in the EU! She blames it all on the «bad deal» that PM May has got.

I am lost for words. How is it possible to explain anything to someone who is clearly missing parts of her brain? She expected to have representatives in the European Union after they have left it? And commissioners too? And she expected to be able to vote?
is this worse than the other idiot who thought he could simply go to Dublin and get an Irish passport because he is 100% English or not?

It isn’t just the policians and the uneducated. Genevieve told me of this conversation that she had with some staff member of the University of Cardiff.
«Oh dear God, Papa, I was speaking last week to Brexit voting lecturer who is about to retire and is planning on selling his house and moving with his wife to Spain. I asked them how they thought they would get on if the freedom of movement was restricted by Brexit. So he said «that’s not a problem because Freedom of Movement only applies to people coming into UK not to UK citizens leaving and going abroad.»
Poor Genevieve! Surrounded by complete idiots.

And a topical piece of humour to conclude with?
….. and then, then, then, Barnier said to May:
«How many Brexiteers does it take to change a lightbulb? One to promise a brighter future and the rest to screw it up!»

You will have begun to notice that these days every minority group is telling us that they are victims of society and it is all our fault. We have gone from the hierarchy of needs to the hierarchy of competence to the hierarchy of victims and they all want to get on the ladder. They all have something useless and stupid to say and confuse opinion with fact. 
Twitter and the social media has a lot to answer for.
But things have reached the depths of weird shit when vegans start to consider themselves a protected group who equate mockery of them to mockery of people who have actually experienced genuine oppression.
Well known chef William Sitwell discovered this week that he is a bad bad man. His humourous comments about vegans has just cost him his job as editor of the hugely successful Waitrose Food magazine, which he had both written for and edited for the last 20 years.
A vegan journalist and activist Selene Nelson aggressively suggested that he feature a series of articles about vegan food. He responded: «Hi Selene. Thanks for this. How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force feed them meat? Make them eat steak and drink red wine?»
It was a joke obviously and showed his exasperation in what he thought was a funny way.
Suddenly he is being accused of incitement to hatred by the vegans.
How could anyone seriously imagine that Sitwell genuinely hopes for the day when he can hunt down and kill any vegan who approaches him with an idea for an article?
Well, the vegans did – or, to be more precise, they pretended they did. When another journalist Giles Coren (who I met many years ago while he visited Brian at the Mill) tried to defend him online, the reaction was as quick as it was dumb, with people telling Coren that surely as a Jew, he’d be more sensitive to the vegans’ worries.
In short, a sarcastic email about your food choice places you on the same moral plane of persecution as the victims of the Holocaust?
Anyway, the chef lost his job.
This type of thing is happening everywhere, be it the homosexuals, the vegans, or any tiny group of nuts
It also shows that the main side-effect of becoming a vegan is an apparent total loss of all humour and proportion.
This week I am bound to encounter the Vegan communications teacher who can only ever find a seat in our dining area and kitchen next to me. I hate vegans almost as much as I detest ecologists.
I will find a way of asking her if a vegan «swallows» a man, is she still a vegan? I will let you know the response.

Okay, I have had my rant and am stopping there.
May the lords of the universe smile upon you both and all of yours!
I need a drink.
f

And did I mention that Ireland beat the All Blacks in rugby yesterday?
They did. They did.

And in the news today…
Well, Donald’s friends are falling and looking to make deals. Two more today. Any other politico would have already been downed by all the shit, but not this guy. It is all down to a complete lack of education. You can’t educate a salesman. Here is a quick quote by the nut. This is more like a second hand car salesman talking, not a president:
«I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words.»
And 96% of them have been shown to be only 1 or 2-sylables long (fact!).
So, for anyone out there thinking that there will be a fall… forget it!
He communicates with the lowest educational standard people in America, far far lower a standard than Europe, or anywhere else on the planet, and they make up 52% of the population. They vote for him and the republical party will not risk an impeachment. So, there is no news from the USA.

In the UK, the further horrors of life after Brexit are popping up in the kitchens. They can get chick-peas (garbanzos) from the old colonies and they will have no shortage of hummus. But that won’t do for the lumpen proleteriat. They want sugar, and more sugar. So, the latest thing is ….
I need a run at this one…
….
….
choc-o-chic.
Yes, this is a mix of chick peas and chocolate, in a mushy mix that can be used as a dip.
Christ Almighty!!!!
I refuse to speculate on what they might dip into it.
This is beyond perverse.

To not be left out of the insanity all round them, Ryanair are flying the flag for Ireland. Not content to piss the world off with strikes and refusal to accept responsibility for ruined holidays and travel arrangements, they were obliged by the European Aviation Authority to reimbourse all passengers whose flights were cancelled. Not liking this at all, they sent cheques to a large batch of disappointed clients. There was only one problem. All the cheques bounced. Not one could be redeemed. Now, who would like a hollow apology?
And like Trump, they won’t lose passengers.

Meanwhile, in Spain… where do the jokes start or end?

Today is officially worse than yesterday.

I would go to the zoo if there was one here.

f