Wednesday 8 June 2011

Fun with fools.

I confess. I've always done it. It wasn't malicious, although playing with the idiots was good practice for the now-definitely-malicious attacks I make on the antismokers.

I've convinced people that cows can climb trees, that the long fur on Highland cattle is reserved to be woven into curtains for Glasgow tenements, that sheep have burrows they can hide in when it rains, and that pigs cannot be allowed in graveyards because they'll dig up the corpses and eat them.

All in fun, well, I enjoyed myself anyway.

I have never thought to tell an idiot that the one-uddered cow would appreciate a particularly vigorous milking. Or this, ah, this is brilliant -

Three out of ten people questioned could not identify the red triangular road sign for frogs or toads crossing – with one in six believing it means ‘beware of frogs’.

Beware of frogs! Fantastic! I didn't do that, the idiots did it all by themselves. They also think milk comes from bulls. That means they think milk is... yeuk. Stick with the espresso, give the latte a miss.

It's not really fair, of course. When I was a kid I kept mice and lizards and tadpoles and frogs and sticklebacks and newts and never once went near a pet shop. None of that would be allowed now and even if it is, most people believe it isn't. Kids found in a stream with a little net would no doubt soon see black-clad armed men abseiling down from a helicopter. "Put the jam-jar down and back away".

We used to play on open grassland where cows roamed. Have you ever put a banger in a cowpat? The fastest runner was always the one to light it. Parents now would be absolutely horrified at the thought of kids a) near cows, b) tampering with cowshit, c) having unsupervised fireworks and d) having matches. Yet nobody died and nobody was damaged, aside from the parental damage inflicted when coming home splattered in crap.

So okay, these idiots didn't make themselves idiots. Political correctness did that. Treating children as porcelain dainties did it. Defending them from the dreaded Outside World did it.

Oh, and taking most of the useful stuff out of schools did it too. Why, I'll bet they leave school nowadays not even knowing how to make gunpowder.

They are still idiots though. And I will still torment them. Because it's funny.

The most vicious torments I reserve for the antismokers.

25 comments:

RobT said...

You brought back some happy memories with this posting. The noxious fumes, clouds of dense smoke, big bangs etc, also irate parents.
Then I wondered if it is possible, these days, to purchase the kind of chemistry sets we used to enjoy. No chance was the answer after a quick google.
I can remember that as an 8yr old I could buy all kinds of chemicals from the local chemist with no questions. Today it would result in the anti terrorist armed response police being called, and probably days of helping police with their enquiries.
I don't recall learning how to make gunpowder, it just seemed to be part of every boys everyday knowledge.
Cowpats?My constant companion, my dog, used to love them. The fresher the better to roll in. My parents loved them less. I was under strict orders to always walk home via the river and not to forget to wash the dog in it.
Happy days L.I. but not forgotten.

RobT

Dr Evil said...

At school we collected frog spawn, put it in a tank of water plus oxygenator and fed the taddies the different diet at each stage of growth, reareed loads of froglets and released them into the wild near where the spawn had originated. Learned some excellent biology from this. Would it be allowed to day? I think taking frog spawn, toad spawn etc is illegal.

James Higham said...

I've convinced people that cows can climb trees, that the long fur on Highland cattle is reserved to be woven into curtains for Glasgow tenements, that sheep have burrows they can hide in when it rains, and that pigs cannot be allowed in graveyards because they'll dig up the corpses and eat them.

What, is that not so then?

David Davis said...

The hollowing-out of school science syllabuses (what's now in them will shock you even more than what's got taken out) also denies today's children the pleasures of thermite. You may like to know that it's impossible to destroy a water-melon weighing about 4 kilos with less than its own weight in the stuff. We found this out in about 1965. The school technician was displeased when he found a large reagent bottle of Iron Oxide to have become missing, and some people were "kept in" but that was all.

Anonymous said...

I lived above a stream separating two villages. I saw lots of elderly dog walkers but never once children playing in the water, kept safe from the paedos, playing Grand Theft Auto on their Playstations at home, I assume. I would have loved to have lived there as a child when I learned to dodge sad solitary blokes proferring icecreams.

wcoaphorse2010 said...

If it's any consolation, I made sure I taught all of my classes how to make gunpowder and also how to use it to direct the charge - Fireworks 101 if you will.

On the down side, the politics inherent in today's teaching profession forced me to quit and do something more productive.

Elby the Beserk said...

Ah yes - the joy of weedkiller and sugar explosions. My favourite - a sealed metal tube, inserted into a fire, and sparklets canister inserted, "nose" downwards. Stand back and enjoy...

harris carpets ltd (tripoli branch) said...

yes, leg-iron, i'm all for letting the kids 'get it out of their systems' when they are young and cannot do too much damage, because, if the natural childish tendency towards destruction is suppressed, it simply erupts uncontrollably in 'adulthood', and when mixed with a small quantity of elementary 'politics', the resulting combustive reaction can be absolutely explosive - and consequently we see oil refineries and storage depots blowing-up, inextinguishable forest-fires, junk-yard blazes, ecoli outbreaks, urban inundation, twister swarms, earthquakes rocking major cities, and unprecedented global warming. we never had anything like this when i was a child...well, i suppose there was the second world war, but that was a properly organized and supervized government-approved activity, right?

mrs t mayday (delivering inner-city riots as a core promise of the conservative manifesto) said...

quite right, mr carpets, and now we are left with the livewire labour legacy of fractionated and frustrated youths - which is why we must ensure that funds from the government's anti-radicalisation programme must not get into the wrong hands. any chance of dropping off another load of afghan rugs, baron?

sergeant s snuff-snout of the stasi said...

14:03

well, i suppose that a state policy of paying criminal elements to snoop on moderate unaligned bloggers was in hind-sight perhaps offering a hostage to fortune...

Anonymous said...

I loved playing with Mercury which my elder brother had smuggled from school whilst I was a nipper.
Eventually it got dropped and dissappeared into the carpet. Frogs and sticklebacks were fair game as well.
No tree was unclimbed, no apple unscrumped and no ditch unjumped.

Anonymous said...

Kids here in Greece aren't actually allowed to touch any chemicals in Chemistry lessons - far too dangerous. My poor daughter, who would dearly love to blow something up, has to deal with balancing chemical equations on paper only. No Bunsen-burners, no test-tubes - and certainly no Sodium-metal (that shit is fun to play with :). It is pointless to muse that THEY simply don't want any Chemists in the future, because THEY obviously don't... As an aside, I regularly used to visit our main Chemists at the bottom of Goldsmith's in N'ton when I was 8 or 9 - asking for all sorts of stuff, including hydrochloric acid. Nobody batted an eyelid. I regularly used to mess around with my Dad's gold cyanide solution... Kids only need to be told - stick it in your mouth and you're dead. What a useless crappy world we allowed to develop on our watch.

petem130 said...

From time to time I wonder how on earth we survived. As kids we went out around 9.00 and cane back for lunch at 12.30 then went back out until 4.30. We'd also go out at night until it got dark or until we were old enough to cope with it.

We played on garage roofs, trees, rope swings, walls, in the woods... you name it we got up to it. Aaprt from the odd broken arm or leg no one got hurt. Plenty of bruises, scratches and cuts.

We survived. Adults kept us right if we strayed whether they were our parents or known to us.

We knew to stay away from strange people and avoid the bad boys as much as possible. This isn't rose tinted it's just how it was. No one I've ever spoken to could remember anyone being seriously hurt or assaulted.

The elfnsafety idiots have a lot to answer for.

colonel crackerjack said...

18:17

My poor daughter, who would dearly love to blow something up, has to deal with balancing chemical equations on paper only.

in my personal opinion, i consider it to be an abysmal violation of your daughter's inalienable human rights that she is not permitted to play with fissile material in order that she be afforded every possible opportunity of gaining the top grades. i'd take it up with europe if i were you. maybe the citizens advice bureau could give you a prod in the right direction.

captain crockercock said...

18:17

My poor daughter, who would dearly love to blow something up, has to deal with balancing chemical equations on paper only.

in my personal opinion, i consider it to be an abysmal violation of your daughter's inalienable human rights that she is not permitted to play with fissile material in order to afford herself every possible opportunity of gaining the top grades. i'd take it up with europe if i were you. maybe the citizens advice bureau could give you a prod in the right direction.

funny, i could swear i already said that. now pay attention and don't let me repeat myself.

Leg-iron said...

harris carpets - congratulations on a well-constructed strawman.

I have never claimed that repressing childhood play turns them into violent adults. Rather, I have made the point that over-coddling children turns them into weak, helpless adults incapable of looking after themselves.

They might try to be violent but it's flailing tantrum violence, not measured and calculated psychopath violence.

There is a very big difference.

Leg-iron said...

James - if you look at the colour of the curtains in many Glasgow tenements, it's hard to refute.

Leg-iron said...

Anon 18:16 - you can't have mercury thermometers in labs any more. Not teaching labs - research labs. Far too dangerous.

Anonymous said...

We used to play in the Iron Foundry, I remember we mixed 2 40 gallon drums of red and green stuff and it made a mini volcano for 10 minutes.

We also shat in the undergrowth and wiped our arses with dock leaves, opened a hatch to the high rise opposite and pushed a fucked telly off it.

Car batteries in bonfires, jumping off warehouse roofs into sandpits, 40ft long "tarzans" with 19 people on a pile up before the rope snapped and nobody even suffered a brusied coxic.

Dead cats with twigs stuck up their arse ledt to rot on a backgreen fence for 3 months, and that's not mentioning the bathing in the local burn which had slaughterhouse effluent form upstream flowing in it, the "bigger boys" committing arson in an abandoned office, pushing a Mini in into a water flooded drainage pit and then dancing on the submerged roof.

Oh we found another abandoned Mini and the older chaps, started up a parked JCB and rode over it making it a metal pancake.

There, I have confessed, may I now get absolution?

pope by miraculous election said...

00:39

good-lord, is that the best you can come-up with boy. well listen-here, i joined the ss and it didn't do me any harm. you are forgiven my son - now, do ten hail-marys, fuck-off and don't waste any more of my time, for christsakes.

Anonymous said...

"Anon 18:16 - you can't have mercury thermometers in labs any more. Not teaching labs - research labs. Far too dangerous"

Dont worry, I'll bet there is plenty of mercury left in the CFLs used to light the lab!

nonny the neandertroll said...

22:41

sorry dear, you are obviously a genuine boffin, but, like most people who write on this blog, i have absolutely no bloody clue about anything scientific whatsoever. would you care to expand on your comment?

Leg-iron said...

nonny - don't you know? If you break one of the new low-power bulbs it's treated like a nuclear spill.

You can't just put them in the bin.

nonny the neandertroll (genetic smithy and devout darwinist) said...

04:13

oh...i wondered what the cat was licking-up.

Amusing Bunni said...

Hilarious post, LI!

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