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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
«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?
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.
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!
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?
