Lost Cause?

Is it worth bothering with the actual Pro Bowl match any more? Playing it the week before the Super Bowl, instead of the week after, means that no one from the SB teams will be in it – no Steelers or Packers this year – and the guys who just couldn’t be ersed because they’re too rich to be bothered about $25,000, or $45,000 for a win, won’t be there, either. Maybe it would be better to pick a couple of fantasy teams and just leave it at that from now on.

They just don’t get it

Gadaffy, displaced a king in Libya, became ruler for life but pretends he’s not the new king of Libya. Mubarak, thinks he’s entitled to be president for life of Egypt, and sacking his government will deflect a discontented population’s attention away from their main problem, namely him. What a funny old world it is, and no mistake!

And now we’ve got A. Campbell, New Labour spin doctor and war-monger, expecting people to feel sorry for him because someone’s nicked a couple of bikes from his shed. Obviously, no one has told him that bad things happen to bad people. But not often enough.

Olds, Not News

Is it news that supermarkets have been pumping bacon full of water? Not to anyone who’s ever opened a packet of supermarket bacon and had to pour the water in it down the sink. There’s obviously not enough protesters being killed by the regime in Egypt to fill up the newspapers.

And another thing. Who’s going to want pills made out of red grape skins, which are supposed to stop heart attacks and cancer and all sorts of other stuff, when you can get the antioxidant stuff in bottles of wine in a much more palatable form?

No new? Good!

Watching the lunchtime TV news today, I was struck by all the non-news stuff padding it out. Like some soldier in Afghanistan dialling the wrong number and leaving a personal message on the wrong woman’s answering service.

Is that the best they can do? I asked myself. And then I realized that maybe we’re safer if there’s nothing newsworthy happening around the world. Because the worst disasters always start with some idiot doing something that seems like a great idea at the time.

Further To Yesterday . . .

The Association of Miscellaneous Sexual Deviants is being allowed to feature its members in school exams, thanks to a grant from the Training & Development Agency for Schools, a New Labour quango. The AMSD-oriented questions include the likes of:

MATHS: If two transvestites can dig three holes in two hours, how many holes could they dig if they weren’t wearing frocks?

GEOGRAPHY: If two lesbians try to ride their bikes across Africa, in which country are the bikes most likely to be stolen?

Tony “Education, Education, Education” Blair always wanted a legacy. I wonder how chuffed he is with the one he got?

Govori, “Nyet!”

This whole phobia thing is totally out of control. You get stupid politicians [tautology, Ed.] telling people they can’t be xenophobic, by law, when what they really mean is they don’t think you should have the right to be disgusted by the disgusting habits of other people – mainly foreigners.

So the proposal is on the table to ditch “phobia” and go for a simple “nyet” instead. Islamophobia is out and Islamnyet is in for people who want nothing to do with murderous faux Islamicists. Likewise, homosexnyet for those who don’t think homosexualists deserve special rights, and xenonyet for people who don’t want to be forced to have anything to do with the weird customs and diet of foreigners in their own country.

I think you get the picture – just say, “Nyet!” when confronted with “xenos” and demand your human right to have your own preferences respected by intolerant minorities and petty burrocrats.

Restricted Vision

We don’t get fogs like the ones we used to get in the 20th century. The fogs last Thursday were so-so, but I remember one in the late 1960s or early 1970s because everyone got to go home early from work on that day. And you could walk faster than the buses were crawling along. There’s not been another like it since (where I’ve been, at any rate). Probably something to do with Gorbal Warming.

Scamotage

Those bl’Indians are still at it. “This is Mary,” says a voice with distinct Indian accent. “Am I speaking with Mr. Halloran?” He was the previous occupant of the Mansion but you don’t complicate things by denying it. Then she’s off into a spiel about how she’s a MicroSoft certified computer expert and your computer is downloading buckets of malicious software from internet, which is going to destroy all your data.
   When you tell her you’ve got an antivirus program to detect malware and a firewall, she takes no bloody notice and insists you switch on your computer so she can direct you to some perfectly normal part of the data logging system, which she insists is proof that your PC has more nasties than you can shake a stick at.
   If I’ve got nothing much to do, I generally mess the bl’Indian about with questions about where the bad stuff is coming from and protests about my data being stored on-line and checked constantly to make sure nothing terrible is happening to it. You can also give them a hard time about not showing a number to the caller ID system, which any reputable company is legally bound to do if it wants to operate in the UK.
   Another good way to waste the bl’Indian’s time is to ask them to explain how they know your computer is downloading nasties – which program is sending reports to them despite an expensive firewall. Then you can tell them you’ve been on holiday for a month so your computer hasn’t been doing anything so what makes the bl’Indian think it has?
   Then there are the excuses for not switching your PC on. A neighbour’s using it because I’ve got the fastest broadband in the street. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and we don’t believe in computers. The motherboard went and you’re waiting for them to get you a new one. If the bl’Indian gets away with having less than 10 minutes of his/her time wasted, you’re not trying!

Irwin

Spreading the load

Do I have it in for Yanks? Absolutely! Do I love everyone else? You gotta be joking!
   Take the Aussies for instance. The Land of Oz is full of Global Warming Swindlers and also one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal, creating a self-perpetuating circle of buckets of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and the swindlers moaning about it.
   Queensland has its fair share of GWS, who are obsessed with drought. Water is a precious commodity to be reserved and conserved at all costs. So when the Wivenhoe dam started filling up after buckets of rain, what did A. Bligh, the state’s prime minister, do? She only ordered the dam operators not to release the trapped water in a controlled fashion.
   And when the water level got to inches from the top of the dam, they had to send a humongous amount of water down the river and it was good night Brisbane. So if anyone living in the area wants to know where to send the bill for a wrecked home and ruined possessions, the office of A. Blight would be a good place to start.

Irwin

The Yanks are an odd lot

Their fearless leader, President O’Bummer, has spent the last eternity trying to make himself popular by slagging off BP and accusing this Anglo-American company of being 100% British and a symbol of everything that’s wrong in the world.
   But BP’s main crime against humanity is that they were daft enough to employ the American company Haliburton to do some seabed cementing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Yanks made a total bog of it.
   Feeling unloved, BP does a deal with the Russians for a go at Arctic oil and suddenly, the Yank politicians are up in arms again and accusing BP of treachery and being unAmerican. But if you’re as two-faced as the average Yank politician, I guess it all makes a sort of sense in a weird way.

Irwin

Thought For The Day

’Is Lordship is off on his travels again, so he’s asked me to provide a little something for his fans. How about: “Extinction is Nature’s way of increasing life’s diversity and adapting it to changing ecological conditions.”
   It’s something to tell the chuggers next time they come at you with “Save the polar bear” or a similar scam.

Irwin

All things to all climate “scientists”

I’m currently half-way through Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe by Fred Warshofsky, which was published in 1977. It seems that back in the 1970s, climate scientists were worried about fine particles in the atmosphere, produced by nations burning fossil fuels for power generation and torching forests, and emissions from jet airliners, sending the world into an ice age. 30 years later the Global Warming Swindlers are telling us that exactly the same processes are causing catastrophic heating of the Earth because of the carbon dioxide released. Has someone rewritten the laws of physics but we haven’t been told about it?

The book also notes that there were huge rises in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the middle of the 20th century at a time when global temperatures were dropping. The conclusion was that it’s not possible to prove cause and effect in a system as complicated as the Earth’s climate, which also depends on what the Sun is doing. Something else that’s been rewritten in the last 30 years, mainly by people who expect us to believe the garbage that comes out of computers with garbage-generating software.

Dawn? What’s that?

One big advantage of living the Mansion lifestyle is that you’re not bound by time conventions. So you can stay up half the night watching American Crunch on TV and get up at the crack of noon the next day.

Who would have thought the spluttering Seahawks would knock off the Saints, even with home advantage in a stadium built to maximize crowd noise? And what started as a defensive battle in Indianapolis: who’d have thought the Jets would win the battle of the field goals to knock off the Colts and make sure that neither Manning has a shot at a Super Bowl ring this year? That was definitely worth staying up half the night for!

Oh, Soddit!

It’s the ultimate leveller. You can be as poor as a person with no money and nowhere to live or as rich as . . . well, me. The one thing we always have in common is that we can both be laid low by a stinking, rotten cold, which feels it doesn’t want to go away and leave you in the lurch.

The universe can be a shockingly egalitarian place at times.

Value for money? What’s that?

You really have to stand and stare, gobsmacked, at the job New Labour has done on local councils. They can’t get their dustmen to do their job, or if the dustmen are willing to work, the council’s ’elf ‘n’ safety nazis come up with a reason why they shouldn’t. But as the bin bags pile higher and higher, it’s not beyond the powers of local authorities to send out their enforcement squads and threaten residents with a big fine for putting up lost cat posters. And as for putting a stop to ripping off motorists with parking fines, or abolishing New Labour red tape, both of which our blessed Coalition government says it wants to do . . . In the words of the prophet, “Like that’s going to happen.” Not unless we introduce a Ministry of Pol Pot and start re-educating our local burrocrats.

Congratulations!

We have done very well to get though the last month, apparently, because it was the coldest December since 1890, even though there was twice as much sun as normal and only half the usual amount of rain. Which probably means there will be drought regulations in force before the end of this month! The temperature in central England remained stubbornly below zero, averaging -0.6 deg.C, and on 10 nights of the month, the temperature at places around Britain fell to -18 deg.C. No doubt global warming will get the blame somehow.