Best goes West

So George Best has finally karked it. The Best death of all time?


I can't help seeing it as ironic that Georgie's last hours came just as England's drinkers were granted a few more
hours in the pub.

Alanis Morisette, if you're reading this blog, THAT's irony. All that stuff in that naked song of yours missed the mark.

In the interests of transparency, I should declare an interest. George Best looked like my Dad.

Rioting in France - what did I tell you?

What did I say? Hmmm? All that bally-hoo over how the Americans can´t organise themselves out of a flooded bayou and how it wouldn´t happen in Europe because we´re different and whaddaya know? A couple of weeks later all of France is up in flames.

And before any smart arse pipes up with "ah but that´s different, that´s the French, they´ve never won anything," well it wasn´t so very long ago that northern England was aflame with racial rioting and only just over 25 years ago Spain was a dictatorship.

So it does happen here. Less of the gloating please.

I refer the assembled self-righteous to my previous blog: click.

...and anyone who points out that maybe, just maybe, this post is a little self-righteous, I point you to the title of this blog.

I´m living the brand.

I cannae change the laws of physics captain

Poor old Scotty. He wanted his ashes spread across the final frontier but the spaceship's knackered.

Fix the warp nacelles and get warp 3 in less than three minutes or they´d all be dead! Alas, the energiser was bypassed like a christmas tree. In life, as in death, he couldnae change the laws of physics.

security guards and foreign exchange

I've made good friends with the security guard at work. He's a nice fellow, looks like Steven Segal's dad. He collects coins and has a thing for pound coins so whenever I go back to the UK I bring him one. Anyway, one morning we were discussing the pros and cons of sporting a leek on your coin of the realm and he explained how expensive they are:

"They're not cheap you know."

"Really?"

"Oh no, I mean how much is a pound in euros?"

"About 1.50, give or take"

"Well, there you go you see. I paid 2.50 for this one."

I let out an impressed whistle.

This is surely China's century

When the International Olympic Committee makes synchronised yogic flying an official sport, China will be ready and waiting.



That the same can't be said of our once-Great Britain speaks volumes.

Kindly old gent pooh-poohs world-domination rumours

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4290944.stm

Not the leader of a shadowy organistion that rules the world

Katrina cause: lesbians, jazz or Japanese?

Pat Roberts was meanly misquoted by Hollywood Dateline as blaming Hurricane Katrina on famous lesbian, Ellen Degeneres. link to slanderous, degenerate commies


That would be silly. The punishment for lesbianism is earthquakes, as every good Christian should know. And Hurricane Katrina was all about sinful jazz music.
link to grovelling apology from slanderous, degenerate commies



I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.



He's angry with the jazz, not the lesbians.



Pat Robertson reveals controversial plans to wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.


Rug-munchers! Suffer thy shame.


Scientists think talk of Godly vengeance for jazz is bunkum. According to one clear-thinking and rational egg-head, Katrina was caused by Japanese gangsters annoyed by Hiroshima and hoping to clean up on the futures markets. Click here to know the truth about Katrina.



...and more from the world of science:

"Patrick Leman of Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London, has presented the results of his research into conspiracy theories to the annual meeting of the British Psychological Society, which was held last week in Bournemouth. He thinks the reason people believe in conspiracy theories is that humans have an innate tendency to try to link major events with major causes.

To test this idea Dr Leman presented 64 students with clippings of articles that looked as though they had been taken from a newspaper. In fact, the articles had been made up. They were about the president of a fictional country, and they came in four versions, of which each student saw but one. In the first version, the president was shot and killed. In the second, he was shot but survived. In the third, the shot missed, but he died shortly afterwards from an unrelated cause. In the fourth, the shot missed and he lived. The students were asked to rate the likely truth of six statements on the subject of whether the assassin was a gunman acting alone, or whether there was a conspiracy at work. They were also asked to rate the accuracy of the “facts” in the article.

...Dr Leman found that if the fictional president “died” after the shooting, readers were much more likely to believe that the gunman was part of a conspiracy. This was true even though the other facts in the story were unchanged, and even if the death was due to an unrelated cause, such as a heart attack. This curious observation is the basis of Dr Leman's hypothesis that there is some underlying process in human psychology that assumes that the bigger the effect is, the bigger the cause must have been."

Taken from: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1648616

Healthy living

The white room stretches six metres in front of me, two metres wide, three metres tall; a corridor to nowhere, a white-tiled cul-de-sac. A dull chrome bar clings with menace to the far wall. I am sent to it, told to face it. I want to steady myself on the bar but am afraid to show my fear. The white walls, the dimensions of the room, my near-nakedness, all threaten me. From behind a white counter, by the entrance, a water cannon is turned on my back. I flinch under the cold spray which starts at my feet and rises to my back, growing harder and warmer. Turn round. I am facing my aggressor. Nothing to hold on to. My arms hang awkwardly. Our eyes don’t meet. She blasts my body disinterestedly. It is a job to her, dull, functional, workaday.

"It’s good for the circulation."

I have mixed feelings about the imminent massage.

Beating the Bush

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing, and concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident"


"Oh No", the President exclaims. "That's terrible".

His staff sit there, stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President slumps, head in hands. Finally the President looks up and asks...





"How many is a Brazillion?"

Norway not boring!

Norway's prime minister today proved to a shocked international audience that his country is not nearly as boring as everbody thought, by resigning with his government.

"Sje peebol ov de worrld dink we de borink but we naat. I haf sjoan dis dooday," mushed the outgoing premier.

"Ssssss...harrumph...mine's a gin and tonic...ssss...zzzzz," said Britain's Foreign Secretary in a statement issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office responding to the news.

Special

An apology to the hordes of readers out there who may be missing my irregular posts.

I will be more erratic than usual for the next couple of weeks because I've moved flat and don't yet have broadband. I ordered it at the weekend and was offered a special price, which made me feel special.

"Ooooh," I asked coquettishly, "and how much is this special price?"
"39.95 a month."
"oooh...oh. That's the same special price as usual. Which is to say, it's not special. And by extension, neither am I."
"It is special,"
"No, it isn't."
"...and so are you. Would you like ADSL?"
"You're all the same you, you, you UTILITY companies. All charming with your fine words and special prices but at the end of it all you're just after one thing."
"You get a free router."
"Hmmmm...ok then, but this is the last time..."
"It's wireless."
"Well, you'd better think about throwing some wires in, hadn't you? Hmmm?"
"..."
"For free."
"...it'll be with you in 20 days."

Disaster strikes!

Booze and the oldest democracy

Harry Hutton wonders whether you're four times more likely to get punched in the chops in England today than 10 years ago.

Now there's a grand hoo-har over relaxing licensing laws to distribute chop-punching activity more evenly through the night and give the vomit on your porch less time to dry before morning.

It's maybe a good time to point out that your average Briton chinned 9.2 litres of pure alcohol in 2002 (link, info on page 2). Pretty impressive. Booze is surely one of the pillars upon which the oldest democracy stands.

On of the arguments for relaxing licensing laws is to encourage a more "continental European" drinking culture. The hope is that pallid yobs who like to follow seven pints of cheap lager with a fight and a kebab, will become tanned sophisticates sipping wine and strolling through the boulevards. I fear this is wishful thinking. Take a second look at this: link, info on page 2. In 2002, Britain boozed less than Luxembourg, Hungary, Ireland, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Portugal and Spain.

I was carousing in Spain last night and it is certainly possible to get staggeringly drunk over a long period of time in this fine land. But Spaniards aren't nearly so terrifying when drunk.

The British drink more recklessley, take more drugs and steal more road cones than any other country in Europe; always have done, always will. A stroll through the Victoria and Albert museum is like strolling through a British student's bedroom on Saturday morning, full of the spoils of past excesses.

"...and the priceless treasure on your right turned up in Lord Elgin's possession while the British Ambassador to Constantinople was on the outside of six pints of lager and a bottle of Metaxa. It is a sorry loss for history that Elgin couldn't remember the exact provenance of the vase but reckoned he must have swiped it from somewhere between the Good Times Taverna, where he fell into the arms of a syphilitic maiden, and his offices, the steps of which he woke up on at six in the morning having lost his keys. Elgin later attributed an otherwise inexplicable bruise on his shin to the same night out."

there's just a thin layer between us and total ratshit

I have had the overwhelming feeling today that if all this New Orleans carry-on happened in my home town, or in any of the cities i've lived in, the spiral into lawless mob-rule would be more or less the same.

I'm pretty comfortable in my western middle class cocoon watching disasters on telly, reading about famines in the paper, feeling bad for a minute before worrying that I'm nearly thirty and my most valuable possession is a pair of shoes (which need fixing, incidentally).

But if I was corraled into a stadium with no food, no water and pounding heat after having all my possessions washed away (ok, that's one benefit of the aforementioned) by a biblical deluge, I reckon I'd get pretty shirty too. Fuck it, I'd be pissing-on-my-socks terrified. I'm an utter and devoted coward. A mean fucker with knives wants my underpants and my broken shoes?

"Why certainly, good sir, and may I say, your one eye lends you a dashing mystery. I don't care what others say."

Put a gun in my hand and I'd undoubtedly shoot Mean Fucker instead of giving up my broken shoes and pissed-on socks. Not having much of a clue about guns, I'd probably shoot him in the ear, at a stroke justifying and increasing the tempo of the ensuing beating. Nope, I wouldn't come out of such an ordeal smelling of roses.

If there is any good to come out of this, and surely good comes out of everything, just as bad does, it is that we can no longer presume that bad things, disorganisation and collapsing societies only happen in far away countries we visit. ("Ya, such a great experience, man. The people are so real.")

We're all humans and disaster, whether it is war, famine, flood or other stuff, can happen however civilised you think you are. Some of the dumb fuckers moaning about how Africa should be left to sort out its own problems would do well to remember that.

Sorry for the serious post. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Whoever names hurricanes should be well-versed in popular culture

In 1998 Hurricane Bonnie struck North Carolina. I was confident Hurricane Clyde was just around the corner. Two vicious Hurricanes named after two vicious bank-robbers. Can't say fairer than that, now.

Alas, the next awesome demonstration of nature's might was Hurricane Cyril, or Clive, or Chris or some other unmighty name.

I shrugged, disappointed. If I was at the business end of nature's kosh I probably wouldn't want the world to be smiling wryly at a well-chosen name while I'm watching my house swoop over the horizon with a cow.

But maybe not so much thought goes into the names after all. I've had "Walking on Sunshine"* stuck in my head for three days now.





*by Katrina and the Waves

Euphemism and cultural relevance

"The [flying of planes into tall buildings is] understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs... even by Chinese."

Osama bin Laden demonstrating that even crazies in caves use "Chinese" as short-hand for "you won't understand them and they won't understand you".

(link: later conversation turns to football (albeit with a flying-planes-into-buildings twist))

When I was 14, I wondered how my Dad's painter and decorator friend was big-house-with-swimming-pool-in-leafy-part-of-London-rich.

Me: How comes your mate Painter Decorator's got such a big house with a swimming pool?

Hughes the Elder: ...well...err...well...he's done work for Arabs y'know.

Me: ...

I now know that "done work for Arabs" is a Hughes-the-Elder short-hand for "married money".

I wonder who the Chinese think is unintelligible and Arabs think is rich? And do they both use "Greek" as short-hand for "buggery"?

Madness: you've either got it, or you haven't

There is a good-natured-looking crazy fella in Venezuela, according to a chap called Hutton (link here).

He's not got a patch on Carlotta the Mad, wife of an Emperor of Mexico. She was firmly in your full-baked category of nut jobs: spent days talking to a life-sized doll dressed in imperial robes and when her house caught fire, leaned out of the window (ok, sensible) shouting, "That is forbidden! That is forbidden!" at the flames (mad).

Nuns as batty as thought

A batty nun.

I am a menace

Weeks ago, in thrall to an “efficiency”, I bought a return ticket from Paris to Somewhere in Rural France to see Hughes the Elder. Leaving the house to catch the plane for Paris, I left the tickets on my bedside table. Arriving in Paris Gare de Lyon, I bought a second ticket to Somewhere in Rural France. Buying a return ticket would assure me of having a ticket for the return leg. I bought a single.

I surfed the internet (a fantastic device, they say it will be a big thing) and e-bought the e-return. I will pick it up at the station when I go home. After a lovely week of fine wine, strong cheese and odd dreams, Hughes the Elder drives me to Gare du Somewhere in Rural France.

There’s a diversion and we park a few minutes’ walk from the station. The diversion is a red herring which steals valuable moments. We arrive. I collect my ticket. Do I have my reservation number? Of course not. We argue. I don’t speak French and Hughes the Elder’s hearing is poor. I buy another ticket (this is the third I have bought for the same journey). I miss the train. I panic. We think. I get annoyed. I buy a ticket from a station 200 kms away.

We must drive quickly. Allez-vites, allez-vites. We are in the car. We are lost. We are found. We are going the wrong way. We are going the right way. We are where we started. We’ve lost half an hour. We must go quickly. We need a pee. We stop, pee and continue. My spirits have lifted. I am no longer angry. The gods smile on us. The journey is fast, the conversation engaging. We bond. We arrive. Will we find the station?

We do, miraculously quickly. I have my ticket. We joke about missing the train. The train is late. It arrives. I say my goodbyes and headbutt a girl walking in the opposite direction. My eyes water; she is bruised and affronted.

The train door won’t open. I try another. Hughes the Elder worries. No problem at all! I laugh and wave affably. My eyes are streaming and my nose throbs. I board the train and find a seat.

Two and a half hours later, I arrive in Paris. An hour to cross town and I arrive at Paris Orly airport with time to spare. I drop my mp3 player down a toilet.

Nuns not as batty as thought

Vindication at last for generations of nuns ridiculed into silence for their unscientific and, during the 70s at least, downright unpatriotic belief that looking at lewd pictures makes a boy go blind.