Shaken, but not stirred...

So there I was, perusing my morning Telegraph, when I was hit by the full force of the most colossal earthquake to hit these isles in a thousand years:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7267567.stm

Or to be strictly accurate, for there is nothing in God’s own creation that pleases me more than accuracy, I was hit by the full force of the most inane whittering about the greatest non-event to hit these isles in a thousand years.

Most of England, from the Home Counties to some awful northern place, was subjected to a minor tremor, no greater than a knee-trembler in a side-street. To read the accounts of the survivors (i.e. everybody), this was the most terrifying event of their sad benighted little lives.

My God, is this really the land of Churchill, of Haig, Kitchener and Butcher Cumberland? Of Nelson, Wellington and Rodney? Of Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh (who still makes splendid bicycles, I might add)?

Switching on my television set, after the idiot houseboy had locked himself in the coal cellar, I was assailed by photographs showing the devastation which, as far as I could gather, consisted of a bent chimney pot, some skew-whiff brickwork and two cracked teacups.

Why oh why are we so unable to display the stiff upper lip that saw us through two world wars and entry into the Common Market? Whatever happened to that Bulldog Breed, the insouciant officer class and the stolid cockney chappie, all too eager to shrug off the latest assault from the Bosche with a crude working class quip (or punch in the mouth to the nearest dachsund)?

It shames me to admit it, but our slitty eyed brethren in the shaky islands on the Pacific Rim must be chortling inscrutably at our squalid hysteria...

ASBO or ASBEE?

Good bloody God, is there no end to the onward march of this repellent police state?! I refer, of course, to the terrifying news that the government is now tagging bumblebees:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7258822.stm

Government ‘scientists’ attach tiny little electronic tags to these innocent, flighty little beasts, and use cowardly computerised devices to spy on the little chaps as they go about their daily activities. Can there possibly be a more flagrant abuse of our bees’ freedoms? A more intrusive intrusion into the lives of our fellow Britons?

Man’s Best Friend, the humble bumblebee, is reduced to the status of a common criminal, bracketed with the hooded young scum who infest our streets like a pimply plague. The gallant bee, defender of this sceptered isle since time immemorial, betrayed by neo-Labour gauleiters not fit to dust the pollen from their fragile little wings...

What child has not delighted at the wonderful food made possible by the modest bee, the sweet and tasty morsels conjured into existence by that monarch of insects? Who, after all, but a bee could have invented the strawberry cheesecake? Or the creme caramel, or the spotted dick? All of them, and more, harvested from the luxurious hives on our greatest country estates.

Or the contributions to medical science made possible by bees. It was, as every schoolboy knows, a bee who discovered penicillin.

And the glorious bee has made this island fastness of ours safe from the filthy, greasy, foreign sneaks who have long coveted our English freedoms. Who has never been moved by the story of King Canute (or, more properly, the stupid Cnut), that slovenly Scandiwegian usurper who, upon trying to turn back a swarm of Anglo-Saxon bees, was stung to death on a beach?

Or The Tale of St Bedevere and the Bee? It is to that inestimable holy personage that we owe our Christian heritage, and it is to that anonymous bee that we owe St Bedevere’s victory over the pagan Visigoths at the Battle of Spindle-on-the-Wold.

It is to an English, or possibly Belgian, bee that we owe our country’s eternal gratitude after the heroic arthropod stung the ghastly Corsican in his haemorrhoidal nether regions at the Battle of Waterloo, distracting him at a crucial moment. Was it not the Iron Duke himself who, upon sighting a regiment of bees, said, “I don’t know what they'll do to the enemy but, by God, they scare seven shades of shit out of me”?

And if the awful Austrian Herr Hitler had not had a mortal phobia of bees, the good Lord alone knows what would have happened at Dunkirk...

As I have said before, but it can never be said too often (especially to Blinkers 'Blinky' Blenkinsop, late of The Queen's Own Hooligans, due to encroaching senility), I didn’t fight and die in two world wars to make this sceptered isle safe for a craven crowd of neo-stalinist, backsliding, spineless, control freaks to start spying on bees!

Stalinist Bastard

Good Lord, is that the time? I really must apologise for the unpardonable interval since my last message, how crushing this must have been for my ever expanding legion of fanatical readers. I can only put it down to the lingering after effects of a rather superb meal I had with ‘Bullwhip’ Blunkett, late of The Queen’s Own Hooligans, into whom I bumped anon whilst out gassing badgers on Hampstead Heath (‘Bullwhip’ was shooting blue tits with his trusty service Webley, a harmless enough hobby but one which has got him into hot water with the busybodies of the so-called PC Brigade more times than he cares to remember). Anyway, we repaired to his club for a mouthwatering meal of poached calves’ brains and a barrel or two of claret, and that’s the last I remember. Hope the blighter hadn’t spiked me drink with that Rosehipnol, or whatever it’s called...

Suffice it to say that I was roused from my post-prandial torpor by the latest assault from the sanctimonious ayatollahs of the PC Brigade, in the form of an appallingly self-regarding piece of pious drivel written by a talentless little creep named Chris Hallam, published in The Grauniad (see picture, above). The greasy little oik with the eminently punchable face has got it into his Stalinist noggin that the ban on smoking in public places is insufficient, and should be extended to the home as well!

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/chris_hallam/2007/12/smoke_out.html

Good God, has the man taken leave of his senses? An Englishman’s home is his castle, damnit, and I didn’t fight and die in two world wars to be lectured to by some anally-retentive social-worker with delusions of grandeur. Seldom have I read, even in The Grauniad, that vomit-inducingly priggish busybodies’ arse-rag, such arrantly Stalinist bilge, even from the foul harridan Toynbee.

So angry am I that I am compelled to examine his putrid rantings in greater detail, so please bear with me, dear reader; you may want a whisky stiffener and a puff on a cheroot to help you through...

“Instead of producing the dream of a land free of the scourge of secondhand smoke, it's now virtually impossible to enter many pubs and clubs without first pushing your way through an unhealthy congregation of smokers converging around the doorway.”

What a nauseating example of spinelessness Hallam is, that the mere presence of smokers around a doorway almost impassably impedes his stately progress. Clearly, he has never had to thrash his way through an angry mob of a hundred Pathans in Kandahar armed only with a sharp stick and a service revolver, has he? And that was just to get to the bar…

“More pointedly, the ban has exposed a wealth of contradiction in public attitude. To pick just one example, while nobody seriously questions that anyone using a mobile phone while at the wheel at the car should face the stiffest penalties, people are less concerned about smoking behind the wheel.”

Words fail me! The gap in logic is almost unbridgeable! Arguably, mobile phones are sophisticated pieces of machinery difficult to operate whilst driving, involving not only complex manipulation, but also the loss of concentration whilst speaking to the dolt on the other end of the line (who almost invariably turns out to be trying to sell insurance). It can no more be contrasted with the instinctively smooth and unconscious action of smoking than, for example, wanking behind the wheel. But I suppose Commissar Hallam would ban that too!

“And what about children? If the government is sincere about protecting those most vulnerable from second hand smoke, then why isn't a ban on smoking in all households containing children, at least being considered?”

Ah, the old what-about-the-children ploy, the last refuge of the journalistic scoundrel! Well indeed, what about the children, Hallam? Frankly, children should be not seen and not heard, and if the little beggars are stupid enough to insult their elders by being in the same room as them when their betters are smoking then woe betide them! Frankly, if I had had the temerity to appear in the same room as my father whilst he held forth to his guests on some pressing issue of the day over a brandy and cigar, I would have been thrashed to within an inch of my life and been thankful for it.

In my day, we’d have taken a greasy tick like Hallam and tied him spreadeagled across the muzzle of an 18-pounder, shoved a lit cigar up his arse for ironic effect, and blown the blighter to smithereens.

Dear Auntie Beeb...

Yestermorn, I had the misfortune to 'tune in', as the young would have it, to Radio 4, a British 'wireless station', to use the patois of the street, whence my ears and brain were assaulted by the witless yapping of the so-called Today programme. At the time I was happily breakfasting on devilled kidneys whilst reading the latest issue of White Wolves of Whitstable Awaken (Weekly)!, an inestimable periodical to which I subscribe, and which, incidentally, has been traduced by the 'politically correct' with the label 'repellent neo-Nazi rag' (I would classify it more as PostNietzchean White Supremacist, but there you go).

Anyhoo, a learned professor of some ghastly third-rate metropolitan university was debating the merits, or otherwise, of incorporating Creationism or Intelligent Design or Colonic Palmistry or some such bilge into the school curriculum as a topic of argument. All well and good, with more or less characteristically insipid comments being made by both sides.

Gratingly, however, the BBC chose to invite the comments of ordinary members of the public via the medium of 'email'! Quite frankly, this despicable development must be stopped. I do not spend hours every year forging medical notes from my doctor to send to the BBC in order to excuse myself from paying their extortionate license fee, only for that bloated and over-funded organisation to abdicate its responsibility to provide a professional journalistic service by inviting pig-ignorant cretins off the street to 'email' their ill-formed bastardised opinions to fill what I understand is referred to by those in the profession as 'air time'!

As it is, the useless turds who float upon the BBC's journalistic pool can scarcely be trusted to report their way out of a brown paper bag, without further diluting their already pitifully inadequate and foetal abilities by inviting kneejerk claptrap from drivelling housebound morons.

A quite disgusting case in point was presented to me with all the aplomb of a cup of cold sick being plonked on the table before me in Quo Vadis on Dean Street on the aforementioned Today programme. As I say, some academic oaf had been discussing Creationism, and the mooning female presenter, whose name quite escapes me but she really isn't on a par with the MacGregor woman, read out 'on air' an 'email', as follows (so shocked was I by this blatant display of inadequacy that I had to thrash my houseboy into transcribing the piece for me, a difficult task for a 16-year old fresh off the banana boat from Thailand, but there you go):

"An email from Simon Bradbury on Creationism - what your guest conveniently failed to mention is that the Theory of Evolution is just a Theory, it is not fact."

And no-one in the studio pointed out that this is wrong, wrong, wrong! That Bradbury is an unsuccessfully-aborted durr-brain who doesn't understand what the term Theory means in science! I wanted to scream (in fact I did, as I hurled the wireless set across the room) and hunt down Simon Bradbury and bellow into his fat moronic dribbling face, "You disgusting fuckwit, you sicken me!!! The Theory of Evolution is a Theory in the same way that E = m c-squared is part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, but would you deny the hideous concrete reality of the consequences of that Theory to someone who was in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945?" before vomiting copiously down his throat. Except that Simon Bradbury, who is demonstrably a mentalist, probably wouldn't understand the reference.

But more than that I was revolted to the very core of my being by the utter absence of editorial comment on such dickwittery, though this is hardly surprising in an organisation stuffed with scientifically illiterate humanities-educated mediocrities who wouldn't know a hadron from a hardon. Has no-one in the Media the guts to stand up to the stunted intellectual pygmies of the Public and tell them that they are hideously ignorant stinking ugly bastards whose sole role in relation to the news is to passively consume and do what they are damn well told? Hhhm? Eh?

Spineless mental cripples.

Into Futility!

By way of an introduction, I caution you, dear reader, not to accept anything written here as the unvarnished, unpolished, even, dare I say it, unsandpapered truth. What clues I inadvertantly let slip as to my nature and identity will have been finely calculated to a minimum of three decimal places to mislead. My life story is unimportant and of even less interest to you - but my opinions are of the most supreme significance. Hanging upon them lies the very future of the sordid cosmic experiment we call the Human Race!

So sit back, dearest reader, crack open a cheap bottle of four-for-a-tenner wine, and embark upon the whitewater whiteknuckle whitebread intellectual adventure ride that is the frequently profane but never sacred To Futility & Beyond!