Now Leaving the UK

Oh, how I wish I was.  This country is now, officially, a joke.  Actually, no.  It’s not a joke.  If it were a joke then people would be laughing.  But nobody’s laughing.  Except maybe for the government.

We’ve had this Labour government now for going on 12 years I think – frankly an absurd length of time.  I shan’t call them “New Labour” because after 12 years I find it hard to call anything “New” any more.  This is a government which was exposed as a bunch of self-serving, deceitful sleazebags within a year or two of their first term, and yet they were voted in a second time.  And then a third.  Which begs just one question.

HOW?!

Who in their right mind would vote these fuckers back into power after their exposure as a bunch of tricky fucks with nothing on their minds except money and power?  The answer?  A minority of a minority.  Less than half the population voted and, because of the cleverly rejigged voting areas, less than half of the voters were able to dredge these muck-fuckers back into Parliament.

Twice.

And what has happened in the last 12 years?  Hmmm, let’s see now…  The NHS has become a joke – a beaurocratic entity more obsessed with meeting quotas than actually helping people.  The school system has become a joke – there is now more emphasis on teaching our kids about sex and “Citizenship” than there is on trivial things like literacy and numeracy.  Testing in schools is now nothing to do with determining the best way forward for your child; it’s now about showing how great the schools are – that is to say it is to show how good the students are at regurgitating answers that they don’t understand to questions they don’t care about.

What else has happened?  Well, general beaurocracy has increased immeasurably: an arrest that used to be handled by two police officers (the arresting officer and the booking officer) now requires twenty police officers and an inordinate amount of paperwork; nursery schools countrywide have closed down because they’ve drowned beneath a mountain of paperwork; the NHS has more pen pushers now than it has doctors and nurses; hardly a day goes by when you don’t have to fill in some kind of form for some trivial thing.

Anything else?  We now officially have a Surveillance Society – we have more CCTVs in this country than anywhere else in Europe (quite possibly more than everywhere else in Europe combined); the police are monitoring people’s every move all day and all night, using CCTV footage to prosecute litterers and dog-foulers (and the ultimate irony is that, apparently, most of these prosecutions fail, which means that it’s all just a waste of police time anyway).  The government are talking about monitoring everyone’s phone calls, everyone’s e-mails and even, now, everyone on social networking sites like Facebook.  Their justification?  “We have to keep up with the technology to stay secure.”

Keep up with technology?  How long have telephones been around?  A hundred-odd years?  And everyone in the country has their phone tapped, do they?  Of course not.  It’s fuck all to do with “keeping up with technology” – it’s this government’s way of edging ever closer to their ultimate dream of a sinister police state.  Big Brother Is Watching You.  Spy On Your Neighbours.  In Our Utopia There Will Be Two Types Of Person: Police And Snitches.

How in the name of Good Fuck did we ever let it get so bad?  Why has there not been a coup?  Why do people not storm the Houses of Parliament and demand justice?  Well, it’s because we’re British, you see (whatever the hell that means any more).  Here in the UK we believe in the democratic process, even when it doesn’t work.  At all.  Robert Mugabe hates England.  Probably because he’s jealous at how good the government here has it.

I’ve started wondering if we’re actually going to get a general election in the next year or so.  Might this government declare that it’s not in the best interests of the country to have an election during times of such strife (in terms of both economics and the supposed “terrorist threat”)?

I’ll tell you one thing: if this government does delay the general election – for any reason at all – then I’m fleeing England and seeking political asylum in another country – any other country.

In fact, the way this country is already, I could probably go and legitimately seek political asylum right now.

I’m seriously considering giving it a go.

(Note – this post is not intended to stir up dissent.  This post is nothing more than the opinion of the blogger, and should not be taken as truth by anyone.  Any comments on this page that have been taken by the reader as Fact should be corroborated by checking elsewhere – your local library, books, newspapers (those things we had before they invented the Internet).  The blogger does not advocate, condone or endorse any form of violence or uprising.  The blogger has to write this to cover his own ass.  Jesus Christ, it’s just a blog, people!  Has nobody heard of Free Speech?!)

A Terrible Mistake

Yesterday was NFL Championship Day: Four teams, Two Games and One Goal – the Superbowl.  In the NFC matchup was Arizona’s Cardinals and Philadelphia’s Eagles, two teams I would have happily seen go on to the final game on 1st February.  Only one team could make it, though, andI guess the better team won in the end.  Over in the AFC, the Baltimore Ravens took on the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Now, the Steelers are my team (my wife and I have our Terrible Towels, we’ve got our replica jerseys – Polamalu for her and Roethlisberger for me – and I have a Steelers baseball cap that she bought for me and she has a Steelers cushion that I bought for her) so we really wanted to see the game.  The first game kicked off at a respectable 3.0pm (ish) ET, and the second at a still-comfortable 6.40pm ET, or thereabouts.

Still comfortable if you’re on the Eastern Seaboard, that is.  Over here in England it’s a bit suckier than that, what with our being five hours ahead of our American cousins.  So the NFC game took place over here at a pleasantly-mid-eveninged 8 o’clockish, which is a great time to watch football because the kids are in bed, you’re winding down and you can just collapse into a chair and mong to your heart’s content. 

That was all well and good, and I was happy to watch the game, though I ended up with decidedly mixed feelings when it was over – great to see the Cardinals win their first championship game in 61 years and trek to Tampa for the Superbowl; great for Ken Whisenhunt, the ex-Steelers offensive line coach and head-coach applicant two years ago (which he lost out on to the quite frankly fantastic Mike Tomlin); great for Kurt Warner, the seasoned pro football player who may never get another chance to play in the playoffs, let alone the Superbowl.

Sad, though, for Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles, who we really like.  He seems like a great guy, and there seems to be nothing but nice words for him.  He and his Eagles bested the New York Giants last week, which was really nice (especially for my mother, whose New England Patriots were denied a perfect season by the Giants last year).  It would have been nice to see McNabb – another seasoned pro football player – get through to the Superbowl, but ’twas not meant to be.  Maybe next year, Donovan.

So, what with being all mixed up, emotionally speaking, I really wanted to watch the Steelers/Ravens game if for no other reason than to finish the night with a definitive feeling of either complete unadulterated joy or utter miserable desolation.  But the game didn’t start till very nearly midnight.  On a Sunday night.  And I had an early start the next morning.  Oh!  What to do? 

It’s important to realise that I’m an obsessive compulsive Steelers fan, and when it comes to football I have no sense of proportion.  (I will quite happily encourage my players to yank the heads off of the opposition and piss down their neckholes.)  Besides, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep knowing that the game was playing out at that very moment scarcely four thousand miles away.  So I figured I might as well just stay the hell up and watch the damn thing.  Which I did.

We’re darned lucky we didn’t wake the kids up with all the hooting and hollering that was going on in my living room last night.  We cheered, we screamed, we waved our Terrible Towels, we rubbed our jerseys (for luck, you understand), we booed the Ravens, we hurled abuse at the refs, we spurred our players on with voices that could probably be heard clear across the Atlantic.

And, finally, we won.

By that time it was almost 3.30am (GMT, at this point).  I had to be up in three and a half hours.  But I didn’t care.  (Actually, I kind of did care, because I’m crap on little-to-no sleep.)  We went to bed and were so unbelievably stoked that it must have been well after 4 o’clock by the time we got to sleep.  And then, thirty-six seconds later, I dragged my sorry arse out of bed, got the kids ready for school and drove them out, taking extra care not to trip over the bags under my eyes.  I have spent the whole day looking – quite literally – like Droopy the dog (though not sounding like him…which is a shame…).  I had a visit from my parents who, rather sensibly, had not yet seen the game.  I had to keep a poker face so that I didn’t blow the result.  I think I pulled it off, if only because all of the muscles in my face weighed too much to move.

In fact the only reason I am able to type this post right now is because I’m riding high on my fifth wind (having passed through my second, third and fourth winds several hours ago).  I have just downed my seven-hundredth cup of coffee of the day, and smoked my two-hundred and sixty-ninth cigarette.  And, somewhere in this house, my bed is calling to me.

Staying up to watch the Steelers game was a terrible mistake.  But it was a great experience.

And in two weeks’ time I shall be doing it again for Superbowl XLIII.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………………………..

2009

Long time no post, and my creative juices have dried up so much that “2009″ is the best title I can think of.  Damn.  Still, at least it’s factual, which is more than you can say of most of the drivel you read on the Internet or in newspapers, or hear on TV or the radio, or watch in movies, documentaries and sitcoms.

So I bet you’re all just dying to know what I’ve been doing with myself since I last wrote.  Not a whole helluva lot really.  I’ve been watching a ton of football (Go Steelers!), counting  my pennies (both of them) and keeping track of the unfolding economic crisis (and realising, at the same time, with some dismay, what a bunch of braindead kneejerk reactionary assholes I share this planet with – and that’s just the government, let alone the economists, stock market bigwigs and general investors).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and doubtless I shall repeat it again and again and again numerous times in the forthcoming months and years): how long will it take people to realise that, by panicking and selling off stocks and shares upon hearing the pessimistic news that the markets are going to hell in a handbasket, they themselves are causing the markets to go to hell in a handbasket?!!!  These people are masters of their own destinies, but they’re too fucking stupid to realise it.  The big problem is that these people are also the masters of our destinies, at least insofar as the economic situation is concerned.

Personally, my own financial situation was pretty grim to start with, so this financial meltdown has almost literally zero effect on me, but there’s some really depressing stuff going on.  Woolworths has gone bust and disappeared from the high street.  Woolies has been in (Not-So-)Great Britain for 100 years (actually it folded just prior to its hundredth birthday, which makes it even sadder).  Practically everyone in the country had a local Woolies, and has fond memories of going in there as a kid and buying pick ‘n’ mix to take to the cinema, or spending their hard-earned pocket money on some toys, or getting their first chart single from there (on 7-inch vinyl – those were the days…).  A frighteningly large number of people in this country held their first job at Woolies.  And now it’s gone like a puddle in the desert, leaving nothing but a slight haze where it once was.

The towns nearest to me are starting to look like something out of a Western – very few people around, and plenty of tumbleweed.  I’d like to bet that very soon there’ll be more boarded-up shopfronts than open ones.  And why?  Because a relatively small bunch of dumb kneejerk reactionary morons panics at the first hint of trouble, sells their shares and screws up the financial dealings of pretty much everyone  in the Western world.

(As a quick aside I would like to go over something I said a moment back there – back in the good ol’ days, pocket money was hard-earned.  It wasn’t a God-given right, it wasn’t a wage or salary.  Your parents would give you pocket money – a pittance, by the way – for doing odd jobs around the house.  Sure, you’d maybe try to weasel your way out of the work every now and again, and sometimes you might even get away with it for a week or two, but for the most part you worked for your money: vacuuming, washing up, polishing, mowing the lawn – whatever your parents wanted you to do.  I remember I got my first pocket money at the age of six, I think it was – at least that’s when I first remember getting it.  I got the princely sum of 60p every Saturday for – usually – vacuuming the downstairs carpets.  Every year, after your birthday, you’d get an extra 10p, so at the age of ten I finally got a full £1.  Kids these days get anything between £5 and £30 a week, on average (or so I am told), for doing slightly less than fuck-all around the house.  Mollycoddled much?)

Anyways, after reading over everything I’ve just written I have depressed myself supremely.  Sorry about that, folks.  I’m going to quit now and go to bed.

Night-night…

Economic Strife and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Synopsis: When Indy decides to change his name to “Economic”, against the advice and better judgement of his friend and colleague Marcus Brody, he is instantly disowned by his father, Henry Strife Sr., and expelled from the University at which he works for failing to have a sensible first name.  Within hours of his departure, though, he is catapulted into a new adventure in which he must face hordes of ruthless investors who are so unbelievably pig-ignorant that they create the very economic crisis that they so fear…

Coming soon to a theatre near you.

So…just why are people so fucking dumb?  Okay, so the banks were on fairly shaky ground to begin with, but what’s the one thing guaranteed to tip a financial institution over the edge?  Banks need money (don’t we all?), but interestingly there isn’t a bank in the world that actually has enough capital at any one time – even times of financial stability - to give everyonetheir money at the same instant.  The banking sector is based on the principal that their customers can take out a bit of money and leave the rest riding in cyberspace, where it can grow into even larger sums of virtual-money, and this growth is what they call “profit” (in addition to the exhorbitant and unfair charges they levy whenever a customer so much as looks at them).

What kind of ignorant twat would think that the best way of safeguarding their money is to take it out of the very institution that is safeguarding their money?

It’s identical to the stock markets in this respect – rumours go around of the potential instability of a particular share.  Because people are morons and actually listen to this shit, they panic and sell their shares at whatever price they can get for them.  One guy sells his shares in a hurry (often at a knock-down price) and others get deeply concerned so they too sell off their shares post-haste.  Before you know it, the shares are absolutely worthless, and not because of any actual problem with the shares but because of a belief that there is a problem.  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I actually think that a large part of the current financial problem is down to the media – they hear of a slight upset in the financial markets, blow it up out of all proportion, scare the crap out of just about everyone and bring about the collapse of the economy because people actually believe what they read and then set about dealing with the problem the worst way possible.

If it wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious.

Here’s something that most people don’t seem to realise:

Money Doesn’t Exist.

It’s true.  Money exists only as a concept in people’s minds.  Sure, we used to have a gold standard – on a UK £20 note it still says “I promise to pay the bearer upon demand the sum of twenty pounds”.  But twenty pounds of what?  It used to be that you could legitimately walk into the Bank of England and demand your £20 of gold – you wouldn’t get a very big lump, it must be said, but that was your right as the possessor of a £20 note.  If you were to do that today then the only thing you would get would be a smirk.  Surely this means that the Bank of England is guilty of misrepresentation and should be immediately investigated by the Office of Fair Trading?

And where is our gold?  It’s in China, of course.  Gordon Brown sold it to China for a fraction of its value because he desperately needed the money (because our Economy’s so strong under New Labour – thank God the days of “Boom and Bust” are over, eh?).  But then England’s good at things like that – we sell our gas and oil to Europe, apparently just for the privilege of buying it back at a loss.  Still, I think it’s a fair exchange – we give China all of our gold, and China gives us a bajillion units of tacky plastic shit that our children can buy with their pocket money.  Get the kids spending – that’s the secret to a healthy economy.

So what can we do about the current economic situation?  I think the only solution is to set up a free (and preferably obligatory) training programme that can teach people how to not be a complete moron.  Listen up everybody – hold your nerve, keep your money where it is and just let things blow over, for Christs’ sake.

 

 

PS – I’m afraid I can’t help out – financally - with this one because I’m broke.  However, I’m more than happy to share my thoughts with the world.

The King Is Dead – Long Live The King!

Last week the crowned King of stand-up, George Carlin, passed away.  Sadly I missed out on most of his work until relatively recently.  I first saw him at the tender age of 15 as Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and, at the time, I wanted to grow up to be just like him – cool, smart, a snappy dresser (to this day I still have a thing for trenchcoats and mirrored sunglasses).  He dropped off my radar for a while and then resurfaced in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, in which he had less screen-time but exuded more cool.

Next time I saw him was as Cardinal Glick in Kevin Smith’s Dogma.  He was looking older and wasn’t playing such a nice guy, but he was great.  He had a cameo in Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back a few years later.  It was a couple of years after that that I discovered his stand-up, and I couldn’t believe that I had been missing out for so long.  Here was a guy that inspired a generation of stand-up comics.  He himself was considered the successor to Lenny Bruce (whose work I have never seen or heard to this day – I really must look him up).  Carlin’s influence can be seen most notably in the work of Denis Leary, Bill Hicks (who sadly passed away several years ago, and much before his time, of pancreatic cancer at the age of just 32) and Kevin Smith. 

Smith’s “stand-up” routines – his Q&A sessions released as An Evening With Kevin Smith and An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder – are hilarious.  They seem as much improvisational comedy as they are fan-meets, with Smith doling out anecdotes with surprising eloquence (surprising given the gratuitous swearing and the frequently less-than-family-friendly subject matter), and they stand up (if you’ll forgive the pun) as equals with the likes of Carlin, Leary and Hicks.  Smith was an enormous fan of Carlin (and Hicks as well, as it turns out).  He recently wrote a tribute to Carlin for Newsweek in which he makes a point which I could only agree.

Talking of Carlin’s undoubted intelligence, coupled with his penchant for copious swearing, he says that Carlin (and he) didn’t believe that there are bad words, just bad intentions.  And it’s true.  The word “Fuck”, for example, is used more and more as a sort of form of punctuation.  It can be used, in one form or other, as a comma, for spacing out a sentence and changing its pacing, or it can be used to add emphasis to an otherwise relatively bland comment (for example, “he’s talking rubbish” becomes “he’s talking fucking rubbish,” which is undoubtedly a more emphatic phrase).  It’s not necessarily abusive, it’s just emphatic, like a verbal equivalent of using italics.  It could be argued that stressing a word is emphasis enough, but adding the obscenity makes it abundantly clear what you mean.

Furthermore, these days it isn’t considered particularly offensive if someone calls you a bastard or a fucker or a son-of-a-bitch.  They’re almost used as terms of endearment (and indeed they frequently are).  If you really want to offend someone then you call them an idiot or a moron or just plain dumb.  For some reason these terms, which attack an individual by questioning their intelligence, are far more insulting than simply being sworn at.  Okay, so you might call someone a fucking idiot, but the term of abuse is actually the word “idiot”, with “fucking” merely being used for emphasis.  The intention of the phrase is to make clear to the victim that they are cognitively challenged.

In fact I am always quite happy for someone to call me a fucker, because it confirms that I do actually get laid from time to time:  I fuck, therefore I am a fucker.  My wife is also the mother of my children, and therefore the word “motherfucker” is apt, and therefore not insulting, as well.  Being called an idiot I really do find insulting though.  Everyone has their own opinions, and everyone believes that their opinions are the be-all and end-all of any argument.  Being called an idiot means that, if it’s true, all of your opinions are invalid because you lack the capacity to form legitimate ones.  Now that really is abusive.

So, Bill Hicks is sadly departed, Denis Leary doesn’t really do stand-up any more (or does he?  Please someone correct me if I’m wrong), and no other stand-up comic comes close to Carlin.  So who is to don his mantle?

I vote for Kevin Smith.

 

Is Technology Destroying Society?

Now there’s  a title for you.  It’s evocative, it’s alarmist and it’s got a selection of polysyllabic words, which can only be a good thing in a serious discussion, can’t it?  But I’m not thinking about the idea that mankind is relinquishing control to machines, or that we are doing inhuman things with the human genome, or that we’re destroying the planet (as if I’d ever  say something like that, anti-environmentalist that I am).  What I’m talking about is simple socialising, with regards to telephones, text messages, e-mails and chat rooms.

I’m starting to think that the art of conversation is rapidly dying out.  What could be a more succinct and efficient than having a face-to-face conversation with another human being?  If you can’t get face-to-face then a telephone call is a pretty good second place, but even using a ‘phone is more difficult than direct conversation.  Why?  Well, when you talk with somebody in person then you can see their face, their body language, their clothes, their shoes – all things which help in gauging the conversant’s personality and intention.

It’s easier to lie on a telephone.  There may be subtle clues that you can pick up on in the person’s voice to determine the veracity of their statements, but if you can see their face then it becomes far easier to pick up on a lie by reading their body language.  “The cheque is in the post” is easily tossed into a phone conversation because you know they have no way of confirming or refuting the assertion.  Most people are wise to this ruse these days, but even so it is generally accepted (if only because they know that you’ll put the cheque in the post straight after the conversation in an attempt to cover your tracks), but I think that it would be rejected in  face-to-face conversation.  In fact I think few people would even try  it in a face-to-face conversation.

So, telephone calls are a close second to actually meeting a person, but they do encourage fibbing because they make it much easie to get away with.  (Or is it just me?)  Next on the list is the dreaded e-mail.  A lot of folk seem to think that there’s nothing wrong with e-mail.  After all, people have sent letters by regular mail (or messenger or whatever) for centuries, and e-mail is just the same but faster, right?  Well, no.  Not quite.  The problem here is that e-mail is a far more immediate device than the postal service.  You can send a message to a person and expect a reply the same day, or even the same hour (or, if you’re impatient, within thirty to sixty seconds).

Because e-mail is so quick, easy and convenient it is not regarded with the same degree of seriousness as a handwritten letter, and so the actual form of writing is far more relaxed and colloquial.  This isn’t a good thing if the e-mail you’re sending is an important one.  E-mails dispense with “Dear Sir,” a formal and deferential opening to a letter, in favour of “Hi,” which isn’t entirely professional.  (In fact there seems to be an association between the proliferation of e-mail as a communication tool and the decline in referring to professionals by their surname – bank managers used to be Mr Smith, but now it’s “Call me John.”)  “Yours sincerely” and “Yours faithfully” have been replaced by “Best Wishes,” “Kind Regards,” or even simply writing your name at the bottom with no closing statement.  These are fine if you’re a close personal friend of the recipient, but if you’re writing to a bank manager or a high court judge then it comes across (to me, at least) as rather insolent.

There have been many cases of people being fired from their jobs or losing important contracts because their e-mails were too familiar.  Especially when conversing internationally, it is a good idea to treat people with a bit of respect and write deferential letters to them.  (The Japanese, for example, have a whole culture built around honour and respect – talking to a Japanese businessman with phrases like “Wotcher!  ‘Ow’s it going?” is not going to win you any friends.  There are clearly far worse places to live than Japan.)

Next down the list is Chatrooms, but since I’ve got quite a lot to rant about there I shall skip it for a moment and start on about text messages.  Urgh!  Perhaps the most antisocial communication device ever invented, text messages are quick, convenient, ugly and impolite.  They are impolite because there simply isn’t space in a text message to include the niceties that show respect and deference to people.  (I don’t accept that phrases such as “Thx” actually provide any real show of respect.)  They encourage curtness, they absolutely mangle grammar and spelling and if you want to cut a conversation short you just don’t reply to a text (which you can later cover with an excuse like, “your last text didn’t come through,” or “I lost the signal”).  And worst of all, texts are generally sent between friends!  Not just people you know enough to say “Hello” to, but actual friends  that you ostensiby like!

But chatrooms and message boards are great, because people don’t stop and think about what they’re saying.  In a regular conversation, when the person to whom you are speaking is actually present, a badly worded phrase can be quickly and easily corrected without any noses being bent out of shape.  On a message board there’s always a delay while other posters type in their response (and some people take ten minutes just to write and post the word “Yes”).  In this time a comment you have made can sit there and fester – you might not pick up on a mistake you have made or a phrase that could be taken badly, but other posters will  pick up on it, take offence at it and get frustrated or even angry.  I have rarely been involved in a message board discussion that hasn’t gone sour at some point because of some bad wording.

There are many reasons for this – some people just aren’t good at using their given language.  Some people can’t spell, can’t use punctuation, wouldn’t know good syntax if it jumped up and bit them on the arse and write utter drivel that makes sense to nobody but themselves.  Others write phrases that are ambiguous, and there’s always going to be someone who takes it the wrong way.  Others still are just argumentative bastards who write posts just to wind others up, which puts everyone on edge and makes them write sloppy comments back.

Most of the resulting venom could be easily drained in a more intimate and immediate environment, but on the Internet there’s just a hell of a lot of spite and vitriol caused by distance and ignorance.  So next time you bump into someone, try talking to them with the aid of your vocal chords and not via your 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi enabled, mp3-playing, personally-organising mobile telephonic device.

Mish-Mash

No particular topic today.  I have vowed to just see what comes out and then publish it to the world, as if anyone cares.  Very little of any consequence has happened recently, except the sudden bleak awareness tht I have no money, a malaise which I currently share with a sizable proportion of the British public, I imagine.  Interest rates are high, food prices are high, oil prices are high, but this is happily offset by the general public’s income level being low.  Our tax burden as a nation is, I think, the highest it has ever been.  It’s not the highest in the world, I will grant you, but the difference between England and, say, Sweden is that in Sweden they actually get something for their money.  Our politicians seem content with merely giving themselves obscene pay rises and flushing any leftover funds down the 10 Downing Street toilet.

On the subject of food, one of the explanations for price rises is the surge in production of biofuels.  (Another explanation is, of course, the increase in oil prices, which means that the costs of producing and transporting food has soared.  This has to be paid for by someone so, rather than allowing anything to impact their profit margins, the cost is passed on to the consumer who then can’t afford to do petty and frivolous things, like eat.)  I have come up with two potentially unpopular alternatives to biofuels though.  One alternative is to develop a car which runs off Ethiopians. 

At first glance this may seem a little harsh, but since we’re killing them off in our desire to grow biofuels to run our cars it seems that a far more efficient method would be to cut out the middleman and use the Ethiopians directly.  My second alternative is a method of running cars which I have read about on the internet.  Electric cars are expensive, there is a big debate about the overall efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells, and having nuclear-powered cars might be a bit of a temptation to terrorists, so I thought it might be an idea to try using this fairly abundant substance in the Earth’s crust that can be easily attained by drilling.  It is a thick black liquid know as “oil”.

I’ve heard that it’s quite flammable, which would make it ideal for running car engines.

(NB – I would like to stress that I am obviously not  actually in favour of using Ethiopians, or indeed any African native, as a fuel source, despite the obvious benefits.)

Going off at a slight tangent, my good friend Vinyl Richie (read his blog if you haven’t already, damnit – it’s in my blogroll to your right) has given up his PlayStation 2 in favour of the bulkier, greyer, more Microsofty XBox 360.  Considering games such as GTA4 and…probably others, it may have been an astute idea.  It was particularly beneficial to me as he very kindly passed a few PS2 games my way.  At his recommendation I immediately played a game called God of War, a third-person action-adventure game based on Greek myth in which you play Kratos, a Spartan Psychopath, who is sent out to stop Ares, the eponymous God of War, from destroying Athens.  It is a truly fantastic game – it looks great, it plays great, it’s got enough violence, blood and gore to keep a seven year-old amused for hours, and it even has some gratuitous nudity.  (Just why did  the Oracle wear such revealing clothes?  Was it so that she could say things like, “your army will fail, the city will fall and you will die in agony…still, get a load of this rack…”?)

So that’s been my number one gameplay option this last week.  I took GTA: Liberty City Stories out of the PS2 for the first time in weeks just so I could play God of War.  I have realised that playing LCS any more will result in insanity, due largely to the fact that I’m unutterably crap at the Unique Stunt Jumps.  I’ve only found about ten of them (I believe there are over 30 jumps in the game), of which I have completed three.  Despite numerous attempts I just can’t seem to get the damn things right.  I managed to do every last one of them in Vice City, all but two of them in San Andreas, most of the ones in Vice City Stories and about half of the ones in the original GTA3, but Liberty City Stories has got me stumped.  It doesn’t matter whether I use a PCJ-600, an Infernus or a bloody scooter (bloody in every sense of the word, the way I drive), I have about the same success rate with all of them.  Dying in Liberty City gets a bit trying after the hundred and thirty-seventh straight Death-By-Unique-Stunt-Jump.

Also in the news, it was Father’s Day on Sunday.  It was a fairly unremarkable day in my household for the most part, notable only for the fact that I had excruciating toothache and I did absolutely nothing all day.  Doing absolutely nothing all day is hardly noteworthy for me, but I wasn’t hounded to do stuff all day, and that’s what made it special.  Just when I thought everybody had forgotten about Father’s Day (though I suspected that someone remembered due to the lack of badgering), at about 8.30 in the evening, after a rather nice roast dinner, I was presented with a bag containing a Father’s Day card, a very large white chocolate Toblerone (which was a bit of a bummer considering my toothache) and, right down at the bottom of the bag, Cloverfield on DVD.  Being Father’s Day, I was even allowed to watch it that very night. 

My wife bravely watched it with me.  I don’t mean to suggest that she’s squeamish or scares easily – far from it.  She’s got a stronger constitution than I have.  But she feels nauseous watching NYPD Blue (I used to get nauseous watching it as well, back when David Caruso was in it, but I suspect for a different reason).  She almost threw up in the cinema when watching The Bourne Ultimatum, which has its fair share of sweeping, swinging, juddering camera-work.  Cloverfield is, of course, completely hand-held camera-work, supposedly by terrified civilians faced with the wholesale destruction of New York city, so the picture on screen is fairly wobbly from start to finish.  She ended the evening with a queasy stomach and a headache that was actually visible to others.

More on Cloverfield another time, but suffice it to say for now that I thought it was bloody brilliant.  I suspect that this post may have outstayed its welcome now, so I shall sign off until another time.

Snoogans

Moving On

I confess that the last couple of posts have been a touch on the serious side, which is something I usually try to avoid.  God, if everybody was that serious all the time then the human race would have died out a long time ago.  Mainly from suicide.  Maybe my approach to life should be more upbeat and then I would be a happier person.  The government’s raising taxes?  Ah, who cares?! That’s what governments do, isn’t it?  The abortion limit won’t be cut?  Screw it!  There’s not a damn thing I can do about it, and all those people who have abortions will face their Final Judgement with God one day.  Why should I make it my problem?

Because that’s what I do – I stress about things.  And if there’s nothing for me to stress about then, Goddamnit, I’ll find  something to stress about!  And if I can’t find  anything to stress about then I’ll start to get stressed out about having nothing to stress about.  After all, something  must be wrong somewhere, mustn’t it?  In fact, I seem to be spending pretty much my entire life just waiting for the hammer to fall.  Not even a specific hammer – just any unsupported hammer that happens to be preparing itself to succumb to the influence of gravity.

So it’s time for me to turn over a new leaf.  I’m not saying that I’ll never worry about anything ever again.  Some things you have  to worry about, or at least think about and resolve if not actually worry.  But I’ve got to stop fretting about the little stuff (like the fact that I’ve inadvertently hit the Caps Lock key four times during that last sentence, so perhaps I’d better get a new keyboard with better-spaced keys, but that means getting down to the local computer shop, and that means taking my three-year-old with me, and that means finding her some clean clothes and that’s going to take a while, but I can’t be out too long because my wife’s having a lie-in this morning and I need to make sure that I’m here when she gets up because we’re supposed to be going out today and….  See how good I am at fretting?).

What new leaves am I turning, I hear you say?  Well, money’s always a big factor when it comes to…just about anything in life (and money’s kind of at a premium, what with the government taking it all away from us).  I need to be aware of my money – how much I’ve got, how much I’ve spent, how much I need to put aide for this, that and the other – but actively worrying  about it really isn’t going to help.  I’m told by some (though not all) that I present a very laid back image, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It would be nice to try and find some kind of middle ground between the image and reality.

I’m quitting smoking.  Okay, so I’m actually puffing away on a roll-up even as I type, so I might not be doing a very good job, but I am quitting.  Let me explain myself.  I finally went for broke and bought myself a pack of Nicorette gum yesterday.  They’ve decided to start selling it in packs of ten, which makes it affordable (about £1.50 per pack which, compared to a pack of ten cigarettes at around £2.99, is pretty good value) – Nicorette used to come in boxes with a month’s supply or something which, while ostensibly a good idea, makes it a hell of an initial outlay, especially if you’re not sure whether you’re going to get on with them.  Buying packs of ten probably works out a darn sight more expensive in the long run than getting a month’s supply in one hit, but it offers the ability to effectively pay in installments.

So yesterday I had my first Nicorette.  At first I was pleasantly surprised – it tasted kind of like gum.  You know, minty and everything.  I had expected it to taste of cat piss or something, so mint was a nice surprise.  Everything was going well until the first Nicorette Sensation occurred – it makes your mouth and throat feel like they’ve been sandpapered, presumably from where the inside of your mouth has absorbed the nicotine.  I’d read the info sheet, so I was expecting something like this and I soldiered on.  Then the nausea hit me.  That kind of nausea you get when you’ve just chain-smoked a half dozen cigarettes.  I plugged away at the gum until I realised that I was on the verge of spewing quite dramatically, at which point I spat the gum into the nearest dustbin.

If this is what Nicorette is like, thought I, then I’d rather carry on smoking.

It took me a while to change my mind, and this change of mind was brought on by a creeping realisation.  I had been chewing this gum a little after lunch – probably about 1.00pm.  The realisation dawned on me when I wanted another cigarette.  Which happened at around 6.00pm.  I lit up the cigarette and enjoyed it, as I always do (yes, I’m one of those weird bastards who actually enjoys  smoking), and then it hit me that I hadn’t had one in five hours.  Five hours!  The only time I ever go without a cigarette for five hours is when I’m sleeping (and, judging by the way my cigarettes disappear, I’m starting to suspect that I sneak in crafty cigarettes at night when I’m not conscious).

The reason I’m having a cigarette now (he writes as he stubs it out) is because I can’t face the inevitable wave of nausea at this time in the morning.  Apparently the nausea and the sandpapered throat are side-effects that you quickly get used to, so I’ll start chewing the gum in the morning when I am sure that I won’t get a bad case of pseudogastroenteritis.  I know for a fact that I am not capable of holding my vomit before noon.

What’s really weird to me is the dosage.  The brand I smoke has about 0.5mg of nicotine per cigarette.  The Nicorette I get is “Low Strength”, and each tab of gum contains 2mg of nicotine.  That’s four times more than what I get through smoking.  No bloody wonder it makes you feel sick.  What are full strength Nicorette like?  Do they disintegrate your internal organs?  I suspect they might, so I shall avoid them at all costs.  But that makes me wonder how effectively I’ll be able to quit smoking.  My body’s used to semi-regular doses of nicotine which I want to wean myself off.  Traditionally, weaning involves lowering  the dosage rather than increasing it?  Do they cure heroin addicts by giving them a quadruple dose of heroin?  (I guess that would work – can’t be an addict when you’re dead.)  Do they help painkiller addicts by prescribing them a stronger painkiller?  I’m no doctor, but I suspect not.  Will I cure my addiction to cigarettes only to find that I have an even stronger craving for Nicorette gum? 

I guess even that wouldn’t be so bad. 

It’s cheaper.

 

Men Are Pointless

It’s now official: There’s no need for men in today’s society.  That is effectively the declaration by our MPs this week in Parliament when they voted that the need for a Father should not be considered in cases of IVF treatment.  The bitter and cynical side of me is almost surprised that they didn’t call for the immediate culling of the male gender to reduce unnecessary numbers (after all, it would help reduce our Carbon Footprint in the long run if we had almost half our current population, wouldn’t it?).

Seriously though, what purpose do men serve in today’s society?  Traditionally men were the breadwinners and women were the homemakers.  Over the years that dynamic has changed, and now you have couples wherein the woman is the breadwinner and the man is the homemaker.  That’s fine, so long as both parties are happy with the setup - I know couples in this situation and in many cases it works out fine, though in others the man dislikes his dependence on the woman and the woman yearns to spend more time with the kids.  I’m sure that in some “traditional” households the woman hates her dependence on the man and the man yearns to spend more time with the kids, so the role reversal isn’t such a big issue.

But now our government – who once declared that they were all for the family unit and would support marriage, before yanking out the carpet under all married couples with families – has decided that marriage, family and traditional values are irrelevant.  A homosexual couple (be they gay or lesbian) or a single woman can have IVF treatment with no questions asked.

(It’s quite ironic, I feel, that a lot of single women have abortions – the other hot topic of the week - because they don’t want to be single mums, and the government has voted that single women with no really good reason may happily kill their unborn child at anything up to 24 weeks while at the same time saying, “here you go – have a baby by yourself!” to pretty much exactly the same people.  Is that oxymoronic, or just moronic?)

So what purpose do men actually serve these days?  Well, women can be cops, firefighters, doctors, decorators, plumbers, mechanics (everyone old enough will remember Kylie in Neighbours back in the 80s).  They can run businesses, be high-powered jetsetters, become lawyers, electricians, shop workers, accountants, surveyors…  You name it and women can do it.  (I would like to add that I have no problem with this whatsoever – I do not believe that women should be chained to the kitchen sink while hoovering the carpets and churning out babies or anything.  I am not trying to proclaim that men are better at any of these jobs than women, when women are demonstrably better at some of these jobs than men.  I’m all for women following the career path that they want, I don’t feel my masculinity threatened by them, and I object to the degradation of women.)

The problem is that men and women are now on a pretty much equal footing, except for in the area of parenting.  If you reject the need for a male presence in a family unit then you are effectively saying that men are pointless.  After all, the one thing that a man can do that a woman absolutely cannot do is produce sperm, just as the one thing that a woman can do that a man absolutely cannot is produce eggs.  Men and women are absolutely essential to the propogation of our race, and one would have to assume that nature made humans in two genders for a reason.  If men were truly irrelevant then we would be a one-gender hermaphroditic species capable of natural self-fertilisation.  It has obviously been beneficial, biologically speaking, for there to be a male parent and a female parent to the child.

In the future perhaps MPs will vote to have only 2% of the population as men, and these men would be kept on farms much like stud bulls – solely for the purpose of producing sperm that can be used for artifical insemination.  The MPs would all be women, of course, thereby making the bill more likely to succeed.  In fact I think it would be in the best interests of civilisation as we know it if all men, myself included, killed themselves now and got it over with. 

I apologise for the fact that my last couple of posts have been rather vitriolic and devoid of humour, but these issues are not easy to laugh about when you’re wound up by them.  In an attempt to lighten the mood in preparation for my next post I would very much like to entertain you with a joke.  I hope you’re all sitting comfortably…

How many men does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

……

None, apparently.

Abortive Attempts

It was inevitable and yet supremely depressing: MPs have voted (by a disturbingly large majority) to retain the current 24-week abortion limit.  A vote was taken on reducing the limit to 20 weeks, which failed miserably, and then there was a vote to reduce it by just two weeks to 22.  This also failed, albeit by a smaller majority.

Leaving religion aside completely, what is the moral standpoint on all this?  Is religion our only moral barometer?  Or are totally atheistic people capable of having a set of moral values without the need for a God?  Of course they are, and there are many atheists who oppose abortion, which only goes to show that abortion is not a religious issue – religious views may be invoked when arguing against abortion, but that does not make it a religious issue any more than World War 2 was (Hitler may have hated the Jews, but the war was always about land and power).

(Going off on a complete tangent for a moment, I am aware of “Godwin’s Law” which states, effectively, that any internet debate will eventually make a comparison with Hitler, the Nazis or World War 2.  This implies that any such reference or analogy is unwarranted, but in fact the analogy is a useful one – everybody knows about the second world war and Hitler and what happened at the time, and so parallels of this sort easily evoke the appropriate reaction in the reader.  I stand by my analogies.)

So where do we (or should we) stand on abortion?  The most commonly used defense of abortion is the old “A Woman Should Have The Right To Choose What Happens To Her Body” routine.  Okay, let’s follow that through logically shall we?  Excepting the instances of pregnancy in rape victims, which is a whole other issue, pregnancy is a potential side-effect of sex.  (Or so I’m told.)  When someone engages in any activity, they have to be aware of, and accept, the risks inherent in that activity.  If you go skydiving then you have presumably accepted the possibility that your parachute may not open and you may spread yourself over a very wide area in a pretty thin layer.  In this case you have chosen what will happen to your body – it’s going to get thrown out of an aeroplane at several thousand feet and plummet towards the ground, and hopefully this descent will be slowed to a more comfortable speed by a large silk sheet.

When you go to a tattoo parlour you have chosen that your body will be stabbed with needles full of various inks that will permanently stain your skin in what you hope is a pleasing pattern.  Once again, you have chosen what happens to your body.  If you get an infection in the tattoo, which is a potentially unwanted side-effect, then you really have nobody to blame but yourself.  You could blame the tattoo parlor for not keeping adequately sterilised equipment, but at the end of the day it was you who decided to be tattooed in the first place.  Ultimately the responsibility lies with you.

So, by engaging in sexual activities (which, while fun, are not without their risks) you have chosen what happens to your body.  It’s going to get shagged, a biological process is going to take place, and you might just end up with a tiny person growing in your belly.  (I shall avoid the temptation to make a very dirty joke at this point – I’m sure the reader is capable of conjuring up some suitably filthy imagery.)

By the time the egg has been fertilised, your choice over what happens with your body has been and gone - you have made your choice and now you must deal with the ramifications of that choice.  I’m going to now give a hypothetical situation which will no doubt cause ire and rancour within some people:

Let’s say that a woman has become pregnant with her husband of ten years.  She’s happy to have the baby because she has money, a loving partner and a roof over her head.  Nine months later, out pops a baby.  Within a few weeks her husband loses his job – their money dries up all too rapidly.  A couple of months later they have difficulty making ends meet, they default on their mortgage and the bank repossesses their house.  There goes the roof over their heads.  They have to move in with her parents which is far from ideal, especially since they hate her husband.  Within another couple of months he leaves her for a woman with lots of cash.  Now our protagonist is a single mum with no money who is living in a far-from-ideal situation with her parents who, though they love her dearly, don’t have the space to keep her in the house.

What should our Mum do? 

If you think along the “Pro-Choice” line of reasoning then the mother should obviously kill her six-month-old (ish) baby.  She’s got no money, is in an unstable position and quite clearly is not capable of giving her child a perfect upbringing – it’s not fair on the child to be brought up in such an environment.  No, it’s far more humane just to have the infant put out of its misery, isn’t it?

Oh, I’m sorry – is that murder?  Surely not?!

If you fail to see the parallel between abortion and my little diarama above then perhaps your moral barometer is broken (now there’s an inflammatory statement if ever I wrote one!).  The argument that the baby is somehow more capable of surviving outside the womb is inappropriate – I defy anyone to leave a six-month-old child by the side of the motorway and honestly expect them to survive to adulthood.  Babies are at least as dependent on their mothers as foetuses are, so why should babies be afforded protection that foetuses are not?

They say that a foetus aged, say, 16 weeks does not have fully developed lungs and so cannot live outside the womb.  Well, as long as I’m doing parallels here, I believe a baby aged six months does not have fully developed hunter/gatherer skills and so cannot live apart from its mother.  Development happens as much outside the womb as it does within – the difference is that antenatal developments are, shall we say, more obvious (although, having said that, what could be more obvious than a baby taking its first steps?).

The real definition should be based on the question “When Is The Foetus Alive?“  Of course this is a loaded question – a foetus is alive from the moment its cells start dividing.  Termination of this process can only be defined as the killing of a living organism.  We might not hold ants or wasps in high regard, but if you stamp on one then you’ve still killed it!  The difference is that there are safeguards, laws and “Human Rights” that protect people from being stamped on or swatted (which must be a relief to the teeny-tiny folk out there).  Why do these safeguards and laws and human rights only kick in after 24 weeks…?