In Which I Lambast a Frightful Practice

Several things before the main theme for today. I bought a tub of waffle and caramel ice cream that was on offer- apparently my thrift blinded me to the fact that I can't eat them. I'm still learning. The thrift in me suggests I should use the ice cream as betting credit with D, if he'll accept it- the nominal value is £1.75, and our stake is usually a pound. Also, I watched Revolutionary Road on iPlayer the other day. The leads, Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (and in fact the rest of the cast) were acting the shit out of that film, but it was rather depressing. For one thing, American men of the 1950's apparently couldn't have sex for more than forty seconds before they orgasmed.

Right then. Halloween. Originally an Irish/Scottish tradition, I rather imagine it was an excuse to get pissed. However, due to the potato and deep fried mars bar famines, a lot of the Irish and Scottish emigrated for the United States and they brought the tradition of Halloween with them. Now tradition and America are words that don't sit very easily with one another. The main U.S tradition that we don't have here is probably Thanksgiving. They have one in Canada too, but we'll ignore that because I don't want to drag bacon or maple syrup into this, eh? Now Thanksgiving is a celebration whereupon the populace give thanks (to whom is unclear) that they have a surplus of food. They then proceed to gather all of the family to eat the surplus of food. I couldn't help but be reminded of this:

Anyway, this is essentially a dry run for Christmas, where they do exactly the same thing, but with presents. D'you know that Father Christmas used to dress in green? Well, that didn't really suit Coca Cola, who wanted to bung adverts of him everywhere wearing red, for that is the same colour as the Coca Cola labels. Anyway they couldn't get into contact with Father Christmas to talk about his image rights for some reason, so they just went ahead with the advertising campaign. He hasn't sued them- yet. Anyway, we've had it brainwashed into us that he was a crimson-wearing Christmas. I seem to have gone off topic here. Right.

Back in the day, Halloween was a little bit about having a laugh about spirits coming to visit because the next day is All Saints Day. I don't understand the link myself. As L.P. Hartley once said, the past is a foreign country- they do things differently there. I don't have a problem with people dressing like twats and having fun- Halloween to me is essentially a rather limiting fancy dress party in that you can only dress as something supernatural. But at some point in the 80's British children picked up the idea that they could get sweets and money by being utter arses. I blame this on E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. Extra Terrestrial: The Extra Terrestrial was an incredibly popular film, seen by millions of impressionable British children who saw other kids dress up in ghost and ghoul related garb, and decided to do likewise.

You know the Easter bunny? That time when Christ died and then the biblical bunny came and hid egg shaped chocolate outside in Judea because he was a sadist and liked the idea of children finding that their lovely Easter chocolate has melted into the sand? And why was the chocolate egg shaped? As far as I know, Jesus wasn't a lizard. My point is that Americans seem to warp traditions. Halloween used to be about dressing up as something supernatural, but it seems that now you can dress as whatever you want, because fuck, we never really believed in that ghost shit anyway so let's abandon what shred of integrity this stolen celebration might have had. I wouldn't be surprised to be trick or treated by a couple of kids dressed as Captain Planet and George Formby. So these kids dress like something they're not and go around door to door demanding sweets and cash from adults with the old favourite "trick or treat." This is despite the kids dressing like this being no advantage to the grown ups- I mean, what's in it for them (unless they're a nonce)? The equivalent of this would be me going to a butcher's dressed as a croupier and demanding free meat, and threatening to do them some unspecified harm if they failed to give me any. This is teaching kids that they can acquire goods through two things which aren't causally linked (dressing up should not equal profit) essentially that through some butterfly effect, chaos theory will make these chiddlers better off. Teaching kids to live their lives according to chaos theory is not the best route.

X= Dressing like a twat, Y=Profit?

Perhaps even worse, trick or treating is teaching kids that blackmail is alright. Essentially, trick or treat means "Give us the goods, or we will fuck your shit up." At the very best, trick or treaters consist of expendable children sent out to forage by their families that are below the breadline- despite the not inconsiderable danger of this being Christmas for paedophiles. At the very worst, this is basically extortion. On any day of the year, this would be criminal, but for the reasons of tradition, it's perfectly fine on one day of the year. Because of religious freedom? I may well go out on the second of June and celebrate the feast day of Erasmus of Formiae. This would manifest itself as launching rockets at people, burning things and blowing shit up, because Erasmus is the patron saint of pyrotechnics. If the police told me to tone it down a bit, I'd explain to them that I'm exercising my freedom of expression/religion and for them to grow up as it's only once a year. So yes, trick or treating is literally daylight robbery. Or it would be, if it didn't happen at night.

Today's Tune

In Which I Recall the CSA

I like being from a country that led the way in banning the slave trade without finding the need to have a war about it. In fact, here's a little thing you might not know (and shamelessly ripped off of Wikipedia). Great Britain established a Royal Naval squadron to patrol off the west coast of Africa purely to intercept slave ships and emancipate slaves. At one point, the West Africa squadron used a sixth of the Royal Navy fleet and Marines. Considering the British Empire had the largest navy in the world then, that's a hell of a commitment to getting rid of slavery, and for no financial gain (a massive financial loss, actually). The humanitarian gains were huge, however- between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.

I'm going somewhere with this. Anyway, the Confederacy was a doomed movement of 11 states that decided to break away from the United States and form their own country. A certain trend amongst these states is that the white folks in charge liked (still might like, but there's some legislation that's put a stop to this) making people with a darker skin tone form the base of their economy. They weren't so keen on doing things like giving them rights or paying them, however. This lot didn't exactly have the moral high ground. Regardless, three of the states which rebelled and are now somewhat sulkily in the Union still have flags that are based on Confederacy flags. This is not exactly friendly looking to anyone who has African origins. The European equivalent of this would be how a Jew felt if  Bavaria or Rheinland-Pfalz had swastikas on their state flags.

Imagine my displeasure, then, as I have seen in my locality a Confederate battle flag being constantly flown from a flagpole. Now I know that they do this a lot in America in the southern states, but you'd expect that of some of them on account of not having so much going on in the cerebral department, but over here? That's depressing. I don't know if they simply don't know what it means and think they're being rock and roll (flown from outside a bungalow, so probably not) or they're a white supremacist. Either way, I feel like setting fire to the damn thing. No, strike that. I feel like paying someone to do it. No, strike that. I feel like kidnapping someone from their native land, forcing them into a life of servitude and having them do it for free.

Today's Tune

In Which I Show You Excuses I Made Up Yesterday

Yesterday was the day of The Village Cricket Quiz. Yesterday was the day when I was awoken at half past ungodly hour by N, imploring me to recognise the fact that I am more interesting (or less dull) than those around her. Yesterday was the day in which I could not get to sleep after N's communique due to the environment trying to do its best impression of a hurricane. Yesterday was the day when I walked from the station to C+C's in a typhoon. It was ridiculous, I was walking against the wind and I had to tack from left to right like a sailing ship- one mile became three. Yesterday was the day that I developed mild pneumonia from this Marcel Marceau inspired sponsored swim. Yesterday was the day that when I got to C+C's, I was met with a cloud of narcotics more heady and toxic than if an opium field had spontaneously combusted in his house. Yesterday was the day that I just said no, but unlike the cast of Grange Hill, I did inadvertently inhale a storm cloud's worth of PCP (despite the pneumonia). Yesterday was the day when H designated herself the Writer of the Answers at The Village Cricket Quiz. Yesterday was the day that H didn't actually get any answers right that no one else knew. Yesterday was the day that H actually ended up with negative equity as she overruled three of my answers which turned out to be correct. Yesterday was the day that the quiz masters took out the James Bond Themes round (which I would have aced) because of "technical difficulties".  Yesterday is the day where I spent the last round of the quiz making up excuses for this blog as to why we hadn't won. Yesterday is the day when I did NOT take The Village Cricket Quiz too seriously. Yesterday is the day when we won The Village Cricket Quiz.

Today's Tune

In Which I Celebrate a Beautiful (albeit brief) Sentence

I wasn't going to write a blog entry today, but then Silvio Berlusconi got sentenced to four years in jail. Granted, it got reduced to one because in Italy if the court cases are a little slow (and Berlusconi is renowned for drowning Italian prosecutors in syrup), then the cases are nullified, or the sentences are slashed. This is known as the statute of limitations. Berlusconi's been tried for so many crimes that have simply disappeared because of the legal red tape he tied the prosecutors up in. I find it utterly bizarre that a (ex) world leader could close his eyes, put his fingers in his ears and say lalalalalalalalala and his problems melt away. If I'm ever in the dock, I may try that myself. And here's a thing. He actively changed the law to exaggerate this effect because the bastard knew he'd finally get done sooner or later. So now he's in jail for a quarter of the time that he should be. Well, for this particular crime. Berlusconi won't live long enough to have served the sentences for all the crimes that he's guilty for. What I'm trying to say is that I'm very happy that this man will finally go to jail, and that I'm going to recycle something that was in another blog that in any case I wrote last year because it's just so damn relevant. Ciao, bella!

Burlesque only? No, huge amounts of corruption too.

These articles are meant to comprise of events that are unfolding, or have unfolded recently, but I could write about the 74th richest man in the world (according to Forbes) at any time, because he’s always in the news. This man holds amongst his possessions the football club A.C Milan. He is a politician, and all the palaver that went on in Britain with MPs claiming expenses for duck houses and love seats simply pales in comparison with what this man is alleged to have done. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the Prime Minister of Italy and Archduke of Demons, Silvio Berlusconi.
 
It’s difficult to know where to start with the man- the word limit on this article means it’s utterly impossible to cover every “indiscretion” he has been involved in, or has been alleged to be party to. We’ll start with the press. He owns it. That is to say, he owns 3 of 7 channels nationally broadcast on terrestrial television, and let’s say that the Leader of the Italian Opposition doesn’t get much chance to appear in party political broadcasts on them. Coupled with the power he has as Prime Minister, being able to “strongly suggest” the choice of the management bodies of the other channels, he effectively has control of 90% of all national television. He also owns the largest publishers in Italy, which gives him the option to print sycophantic magazines and the like, and his brother Paulo owns a newspaper. This is not right. Imagine the uproar if Rupert Murdoch became an M.P and used his affluence and influence to weasel his way to becoming the Prime Minister. Berlusconi of course disagrees, explaining that if he is looking out for everyone's interests as well as his own that there can't be a conflict of interests.
    
Berlusconi has an uncanny ability to be called to court, but he has hit upon a rather handy way to make his legal problems go away. He has passed much self-serving legislation, most key of which is shortening the amount of time that crimes can be prosecuted for. He employs a cabal of lawyers to make damn well sure that by the time the dust has settled and everyone has stopped squabbling that by the time any of his cases come to trial, the infringement was so long ago he is immune to prosecution- by his own admission he has paid around 200,000,000 euros. However, he said that he had spent this money over the years on consultants and judges, before correcting himself to say consultants and lawyers. An easy mistake-a to make-a, I'm sure.
 
We'll gloss over his mafia involvement and his hiding behind political immunity and move straight onto what I like to call “Things Berlusconi has said which make Prince Philip seem like a diplomat.” On the father of fascism, Mussolini, he said "Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.” This is the equivalent of Angela Merkel saying that the invasion of Poland was actually a goodwill visit. He offered to act as a broker in ushering in better relations with the U.S and the new Russian President, commenting “I don't see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama because he is young, handsome and even tanned.” Perhaps best known is his bucking up of the population of the Abruzo region that he toured after a devastating earthquake that killed over 300 and made around 65,000 homeless. He asked those communities who had lost their homes to think of it as a camping trip, and asked a local councillor if he could fondle her. I wonder if even he would think that's crass in retrospect.
 
So what is it that people are actually starting to believe could topple the man with the impossibly low political centre of gravity? It's too depressing and detailed to fully chronicle here, but essentially it involves lying to the police, abusing his position of power by having sex with an underage prostitute. No doubt Signor Berlusconi will say that this is just another example of the left trying  to besmirch his good name as they so often have before. One last quote from the great man himself:
 
"I am without doubt the person who's been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man."
 
To Silvio’s many characteristics we must also add dyslexia. He obviously was trying to say prosecuted.

Today's Tune

In Which I Wait to Be Told What I Already Know

On November the something or other, I go for a follow up appointment with the gut doctor. He will tell me that I am indeed allergic to wheat, barley and rye and that those things are in an awful lot of food, and laugh in my increasingly emaciated face. He'll then refer me to a dietitian, and God knows how long it'll take to see him. I was told I'd have my results within 14 days, but it's been 37 and no sign so far. But when I finally do see the dietitian (by the time Romney's invaded Canada at this rate) then they'll say stay away from the gluten, because if you munch it down then you'll get bowel cancer and osteoporosis. Then they'll send me back to my GP who will write out a prescription for me. There is no cure (they're working on one) for Coeliac's disease, so what could this prescription be for? It'd be for gluten free bread, pasta, flour and bourbons. That's bourbons as in the biscuits, sadly, not as in the whisky. I do like the idea of going to the chemists and picking up 250cc's of Tagliatelle and 50cc's of sticky buns. Actually, maybe not, as I just read this article. If the NHS are going to get utterly ripped off by companies with things that I could buy for a fraction of the cost, then I might not in all good conscience be able to go along with that. I shall use that as the justification I need to obtain a disabled railcard (for the epilepsy).

I was happy to note a bit of personal growth for me yesterday. I went past a bakery and caught the strongest smell of freshly baked cakeys, and I smiled and walked on. There was a time when if thoughts would kill, anyone holding a pastry within thirty miles of me would have been a twitching corpse, riddled with mind bullets. This, then, is progress. Now if I can just stop hanging around the supermarket cake aisle screaming at the ceiling "Why, God, why", then I'll have it cracked.

Today's Tune

In Which I Show My Ugly Side

On Friday I shall be seeing C+C, who have moved locally from London because rent+travel to London jobs= less than London rent. Having travelled by train recently I can safely say that renting a house in London must be astronomically expensive. The only way to get a reasonably cheap rail fare is to book a seat on a train at a particular time of day for your as yet unborn grandchild and hope that on that day they might require to travel on the 14:37 to Skegness. However, I have recently discovered that I am entitled to a railcard that will give me 1/3 off rail fares. I intend to use the money I will save on buying a small army and launching a coup in Equitorial Guinea.

C is a disgrace of a friend. I spent years trying to tell him to listen to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and Led Zeppelin, and then he went on some sort of interrailing tour of Europe and came back saying that some American had been playing some really good rock from the 60's and 70's, and that I should start listening to Hendrix, The Doors and Led Zeppelin. C, then, can be very slow on the uptake. I've been trying to convince him for his entire life that he's not as good at video games as me. Perhaps he needs a homoerotic encounter with an American to convince him otherwise.

C is C's long term girlfriend, half American and half Mexican. She seems to have taken like a duck to water with that most British of qualities, taking the piss and being taken the piss out of. I hope she is anyway, else every other thing I say to her is causing her to die a little more inside.

On Saturday, I am at THE VILLAGE CRICKET QUIZ.  For reasons that escape me, I have a familiarity with this cricket team, despite not having played it properly. My mate R used to be the captain of the team, but the England Cricket Board said that he had to stand down on account of them being too good for everyone else. Anyway, people say that I am the ringer for the quiz team we'll be entering, but I reckon they could easily win without me. All the other people probably get more answers right on their own than I do, it's just that the ones I do get are the unbelievably obscure ones that people remember. Example: What d'you call the round pieces of card/paper that you are left with when you use a hole punch? Chads. There's two things I hate about quizzes. One is cheats, which are surely more prevalent in this day and age with the advent of interweb phones. When I am promoted from being Queen of England to being King of the World, I will redesignate where the military money will be spent. After all, I'll be King of the World and I wouldn't start a war with myself. One of the worthy causes would be funding the installation of an internet blocker for every quiz in the world. I'll say this- I realise the other thing I don't like about pub quizzes will probably make me sound like a wanker, which is fine as I may actually be a wanker in this regard. I really don't like people who think they are helping when they answer the questions that everyone else is answering anyway. It's not the fact that they don't know the other answers, some people might regard good recall for trivia as a sign of nerdiness (the arrogant twats). It's the fact that they think they are helping, when all they're doing is diluting the prize fund and winning money off of everyone else's back. Imagine someone tagging along with a builder, watching him do all the work and taking half of his wage. Now imagine that that someone who was watching the builder do all the work has some sort of totally unmitigated sense of pride in their achievement. And now you know how much of a wanker I am. Still not as much of a wanker as those quiz freeloaders, mind.

Today's Tune

In Which I Resort to Snippets About Myself

Here's a list of things you might not know about me.

1) As a rule, I like the Dutch.

2) I cry quite easily at films.

3) I cannot chop onions as my eyes react more to them than anyone I've seen. I've heard that you can wear swimming goggles to get around this, but I don't have any because I can't swim. In any case, if I did have them I wouldn't wear them because I wouldn't want to look like some kind of gimp.

4) The reason I hate the television show "Friends" is not so much because of the scenes of self obsessed totally untrustworthy and unrealistic people always sticking together in an inbred group through thick and thick which are so sickly sweet as to give you type 2 diabetes. It was more the fact that I have rarely seen a gulf so wide between how bad a programme is and how popular it has become. Someone familiar with how much the programme annoyed me informed me that Arena magazine had compiled a top 30 list of most pointless stuff ever. The character of Phoebe Buffay came first.

5) I considered trying to cut my hair the other day, because my hairstyle was too long for the fancy dress costume I was in (Goose from Top Gun, since you asked). Chickened out and went to a barber instead.

6) I don't really benefit from horror films as they don't scare me, and I'm not sure if I'd go out of my way to scare myself anyway.

7) I hate theme parks. This is probably because I'm afraid of heights and really don't like rollercoasters. Or big crowds. Or wasps.

8) I think I have laughed harder at (with) friends than anything on television.

9) I think that not enough people cook.

10) I think that not enough people who think they can cook can cook.

11) I despise Halloween, and I suspect I'll devote a blog to it at some point.

12) The worst film I have ever watched at the cinema was Dunston Checks In.

13) The first date I ever went on was to the cinema to see Dunston Checks In.

14) I'm not very good at hiding that I have no idea what to write about.

Today's Tune