Another Rant

Palace Admits Prince Charles is Gay

Debate Unlimited is Bigger Than Jesus

Is Sex With Animals Always Wrong?

How to Win the Lottery without buying a ticket

Meatheads, Slobs and Pencil Necked Geeks

Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?

Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue

Freedom is Bad for Your Health

Will Momma be Blonde in Heaven?

Religious indoctrination is child abuse

Ban it or Make it Compulsory: Isn't There Any Middle Way?

Libertarians: Why They Have it All Wrong

Management Speak: Management Lies

Why are Americans such assholes?

Use Your Handbrake!

Driving in stop-go traffic at night is a bloody nightmare when you're behind a car with high intensity brake lights and a driver who doesn't use his handbrake.

Modern cars have got more efficient brake lights than ever, a minimum of 25 watts each with highly efficient parabolic reflectors, super-efficient high-output bulbs and lenses that fire out light like a bloody laser, three times over, right at your eyeball level. Those lights are designed to be noticed through thick fog. No doubt they are very good at being noticed, especially when you are crawling along in a traffic jam with your face lit up in red like the Demon King in a pantomime for several minutes at a time.

Some of the central high level brake lights look like a row of photon drive units on the back of a starship.

BBC speak

Where's the candidate for the MCSDLP? The Mainly Catholic SDLP, the one they talk about on the news. Why does this party always get this health warning attached to it? The BBC doesn't talk of the mainly Catholic Sinn Féin or the almost exclusively Protestant Democratic Unionist Party so why do it all the time to the SDLP?

UK plc

ARRRGGGH! I hate this phrase that makes out Britain is a company rather than a country and that all that matters is profit. A nation state is a way of organising people, a democratic state is a way of organising people for their own good and with their consent. It is not a company looking to maximise profits or to sell shares. What do countries compete for? How do people know who has won? Never ever start a race without a finishing line.

The smell of disinfectant

Why do railway stations smell of disinfectant but hospitals don't? In the old days hospitals had a reassuring smell of antiseptic throughout. Now people die in hospitals from infection and yet they don't smell of antiseptic. Why is this? What proportion of patients react badly to antiseptics compared to the proportion who react badly to severe untreatable infections?

What do you do with litter at Piccadilly train station? Eat it? There are no bins. The place is full of shops and restaurants generating extra litter and there is nowhere to dispose of it.

Instead of litter bins we now get regular drenches of noxious smelling disinfectant. This is not designed to kill germs but to deter young people from loitering. This is chemical warfare, Jeyes fluid is being used to drive away human pests. What next, aerosol homicides?

Non-brewed condiment

In a British fish and chip shop today you are likely to be asked whether you want salt and vinegar on your meal. But they don't have salt and vinegar, they use non-brewed condiment, a cheap ersatz vinegar made from a weak solution of acetic acid with brown food colouring.

Trading standards officers required McDonald's restaurants to say “McDonald's cola alright?” whenever a customer asked for a Coke in case they were seen as passing off an inferior product as a better one. When chip shops sell bottles of non-brewed condiment that is what it says on the label. How can they keep getting away with offering vinegar and yet supplying an inferior substitute? There would be prosecutions if a company gave customers carbonated tap water when they asked for Perrier and claiming that chemically it is almost identical is neither here nor there.

I do not expect chip shops to ask if you want non-brewed condiment on your chips, that would be silly, I suggest they supply what they have been offering: genuine malt vinegar. Or if they can't do that they should leave a bottle of the nasty stuff on the counter with its own label.

In the Bank

Another thing that really annoys me is assertions like this “since giving up a life of crime and violence rapper MC Murderous Pimp has made a fortune, he now has $55 million in the bank.”

I'd like to see the bank statements. This is real voodoo economics and creative accountancy. By the same reckoning I would have about half a million in the bank. The way this bank balance is calculated is

1 ] Add together all earnings you know about (read the cuttings file) going back as many years as you feel like going back, round the figure up to the nearest whole ten million dollars. To estimate earnings from a tour take the highest ticket price and multiply by the number of seats in the largest venue then multiply by the number of dates. Of course the stadiums, theatres, roadies, agents etc. all donate their services for free and the taxman is a fan too so ignore tax.

2 ] Add on a bit more for speculative earnings that they might have made (they will never challenge it, they want you to exaggerate it too, as long as the taxman doesn't believe the hype)

3 ] Add on the current market value of any houses they own or are vaguely connected with even if these are leased, rented or bought on mortgage

4 ] Add on the current market value of any cars, aircraft or boats they own or are vaguely connected with even if these are leased, rented or merely borrowed for photo-shoots

5 ] Add on the value (gross, before deduction of auctioneer's fees) of original oil paintings if you see a photograph of an interior of their house showing a print in the background

Rich people don't spend money, they don't waste it, they bank it all and keep it in stacks of dollar bills and go and shower themselves in it periodically. The only money they ever lose is used to light their cuban cigars. In doing calculations of how much these people we should envy are “worth” we must always ignore spending.

Developing World

China and India are in the developing world. Burkina Faso isn't. The key aspect that makes a developing nation is development. Zimbabwe and Ethiopia are not developing they are lurching between crisis, decline, sluggish and short-lived spurts of corruption-riddled inappropriate and uncompetitive enterprise and stagnation. We should call them the stagnant world or the basket cases.

Explorer?

How can you explore somewhere that people have been before just by trudging there, having your photo taken and trudging back again?

You can't explore the North or South Pole or Everest or the Eiger. You can go there to show off your machismo but you're not being an explorer, you're being a self-indulgent adventure-tourist.

People who are genuinely polar explorers make maps and charts and do real science. Trudging through the snow because it's cold and a long way from a warm fire has nothing to do with exploration. If you want to explore you have to go out and find somewhere that is unknown. To call yourself an explorer when all you do is travel to places people have already been in ways that are deliberately hard to do is to debase the term. Walking to the South Pole with one arm tied behind your back or while female is not exploring, it is just showing off.

Experimenting with drugs

How is smoking your thirty eighth joint of the month experimenting with drugs? Experimenting? Bollocks. What do you expect to discover? What theories do you intend to prove or falsify? You are not an experimenter with drugs you are a consumer of drugs. There's nothing inherently cool, radical or worthy of respect from being any kind of a consumer. People don't experiment with camembert, Ben and Jerry's or asparagus. At least they don't after the first time, if they consume some for a second or subsequent time the appropriate verb is consume, not experiment.

Trick Cyclists

I get annoyed by cyclists riding on the footpath. But what really annoys me is cyclists who ride on the footpath because the road is too dangerous for them, then ride without hands on the handlebar or on one wheel because riding on the footpath doesn't feel dangerous enough. It is for the people walking.

Fictional Events

I think there is a whole class of events that happen significantly more often in fiction than they do in real life:

1] Murders in English country manors

2] Exposure of moles in MI6

3] Passengers pulling the communication cord to stop a train

4] Congregants interrupting a wedding with a just cause

5] Cases of amnesia

6] Couples living happily ever after

7] People getting into a taxi and saying “Follow that cab!”

not forgetting the classic snow falling for the first time on Christmas Day in England.

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