Meanwhile, in the real world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quotes from the medical journals are in italics…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessings be heaped upon you all
f