underdogs bite upwards

Nobodies.

2012-01-27T21:17:00.000Z

Smoky-Drinky night so no sense here for the evening.

This is looking like a popular Smoky-Drinky anthem...

We dare to know just who we are.

These days, how many can honestly say that?

The Smoke Wars update.

2012-01-27T02:35:00.000Z

I hear, via Email, that the appeal to keep Chris Carter out of pokey has passed the halfway mark but is not there yet.

I know, because it affects me too, that January is a bad time to ask for donations. We are all suffering the post-Christmas cash depletion and the taxman is about to rip a dirty great hole in my not-healthy bank account by Tuesday.

However, if anyone has a bean or two spare, please consider this man who is going to go to prison for smoking while those who beat a woman senseless while calling her a 'white bitch' and those dregs from the shallow end of the gene pool who hospitalised a man who asked them if they wouldn't mind not being bin-kicking arseholes are all let off with slaps on the wrist.

If we let this persecution of smokers continue, you will soon have to have a licence to buy alcohol and you will be refused a bag of chips based on your waist size. It is not just about smoking. It never was. It has always been about control. Total control. Of you. Yes, you, not just those you disapprove of.

'Panoptica' is fiction. All it needs to become reality is your continued silence.

Smokers, the new rebel horde.

2012-01-26T20:34:00.000Z

A long time ago, me and my brother Kyle here
We was hitchhiking down a long and lonesome road.
All of a sudden, there shined a shiny demon
In the middle of the road
And he said:
"Roll the best smoke in the world, or I'll eat your chips".

Oh no wait. I was distracted by YouTube. I'll start again.

Long ago, in the dim and distant past, when I worked for and with the allegedly intelligent (you wouldn't believe how shocked they are by the suggestion that Electrofag with no nicotine is suitable for non-smokers, even if they are vegetarian and like veggie burgers) smoking was only mildly frowned upon.

When I was a PhD student we could, at a pinch, get away with even smoking in the lab. It wasn't a good idea but it was not actually illegal. In fact most of us didn't because putting anything at all in your mouth in a microbiology lab has the risk level of 'mad'. Leave the sandwiches, coffee and smokes to the common room. Still, it wasn't illegal to smoke in the lab and some did.

It was eventually banned and really, in a lab with compressed-gas-cylinders, including hydrogen, and every surface at risk of being coated in some deadly disease, that ban was something nobody could sensibly object to. Nil by mouth is the best way to be in such a lab. A good microbiologist washes their hands before they go to the toilet. And after. During, if it's a long one.

So we smoked in the common room and nobody minded. It was my third post-doc job when smoking was first restricted.

Some objected to smoking. No problem. We smokers took our breaks at different times to avoid the whiners. Coffee break at 10:30? We worked through it and took ours at 11. Not a problem. I would take work into the common room outside break times and smoke while drawing graphs and writing reports. Productivity was not at all affected. Especially since most paper-writing happened outside working hours anyway.

Then came the first silly excuse from the antis. 'Some labs use ether and it's dangerous to smoke in the common room outside coffee breaks in case there's an explosion'. I am not kidding. That really is the reason given for forcing smokers back into 'normal' coffee break times. In that building full of PhD-level people, not one - not one - pointed out that if there is an explosive level of ether in the air in the common room, you really don't want to be the one who turns on the coffee machine. Every one of them agreed with the smoke restrictions, of course.

I moved jobs and was once more able to work in the common room while smoking. Then a no-smoking sign appeared. I enquired and was told it was not official, just put up by a git and could be ignored. Nonetheless it was pointed out to me every time I smoked because There Is A Sign and again, PhD-level people proved themselves to be utterly controllable drones.

It is true to say I have had fun with this realisation in the past. I had someone believing that ammonia-absorbing bacteria in the pig gut were the next Big Thing just by talking in hushed tones in the presence of a known gullible idiot. You haven't heard of this even if you're in biological science because it doesn't really exist but it spectacularly wasted someone's time. He's a professor now, and he still doesn't know what I did yet..I have done worse. If I had been involved in climate science, the horrors I could have perpetrated would have made the current lunacy pale into insignificance.

In my last day-job employment up to 2005, we ended up smoking outside the fire door at the back of the building. Even then we were told by those who took half-hour coffee breaks twice a day that we were 'costing the business' and we should be docked pay. We took no half-hour coffee breaks. Why spend half an hour in the presence of pompous self-righteous gits when you can spend ten minutes with the smokers? We took less actual time off work than those who spent an hour a day complaining about us.

Now the smoker-bashing is mainstream. More and more companies are taking on the idea that smokers must clock off when going for a smoke. The coffee drinkers and Farcebook users are ecstatic.

So when they have to clock off for coffee breaks, they will no doubt be just as delighted. When the IT department logs their use of Farcebook or YouTube or reading this blog and docks their pay accordingly, they will be almost orgasmic. Come on, it's not a hard thing to implement. Leave your work computer on Farcebook all day and you will not get paid for that day even if you were running your guts out elsewhere. Fair? You are asking a smoker about 'fair'? Get real.

Can't happen? Well, take a look at this. Pretend the smoking ban wasn't just the start if you like. Accept control of the minutiae of your life if that's what you want.

But never, never ask the smokers to help you when it's your turn.

We're on our own. So are you.

Antismokers, Apple, CAMRA and the entire leisure industry don't want us to fight for them. So I won't.

Farcebook reveals what you've told it.

2012-01-25T23:57:00.000Z

There is Outrage! over the changing face of Farcebook. They have a new interface that the Mail thinks will tell the whole world every detail of your life.

Well... surely Farcebook can only tell the world those things you've put on there? Personally I don't even put my real date of birth on sites like that. They don't need to know beyond the year of birth and I'm so old I am well past any age restrictions. I'm even old enough to buy Sanatogen without raising anyone's eyebrows (although I haven't actually tested that yet because I hear it's not very good).

The 'new look' has been voluntary up until now.

Being on Farcebook is voluntary. Nobody 'has to' join and nobody 'has to' put anything in particular on there.

From now, users will simply be notified that they are being 'updated' via an announcement at the top of their home page, which users click on to activate Timeline.

Don't like it, don't use it. It's free so you lose no money by simply deleting it all. Nobody pays to be on Farcebook so the users cannot claim to own the site. It belongs to the Farcebook Corporation and they can do what they want with it. Again, don't like it, don't use it. Simple.

It's not like the phone lines. People need phone lines for communication by talking, fax and internet. If the phone company said they were going to broadcast your phone conversations you'd be right to be livid. However, Farcebook has no such power. It can only show people what you've put on there.

Timeline has been criticised for showing off pictures and posts that people might have wanted to forget.

Who puts up pictures they don't want people to see, on a website the entire planet can see? Are people just emptying their cameras into the thing? And if you post something in a drunken haze and don't like it in the morning, well, that's what 'delete' is for.

The new look also pairs with 'timeline apps', such as Spotify, which post every time people listen to a song, or eat a recipe or visit somewhere.

No. It can only do this if you let it. Farcebook do not have cameras in your kitchen to record what you cook and they can't follow you around town unless you tie up some kind of link with GPS and other gadgetry and allow it. If you don't have a Farcebook account it can do nothing to you at all because it doesn't know you exist unless you tell it..

People are scared to death that Farcebook, a voluntary program nobody has to join, will spy on them. They seem to believe that this program will reveal details of their past that they have never put on Farcebook in the first place.

Nobody seems bothered by those CCTV cameras on every street and in every public place. Nobody seems to mind ANPR cameras following them everywhere they drive. nobody is even slightly perturbed by the modern assumption that they are a criminal in need of checking when they apply for certain jobs. No, they are all in a tizzy because a free computer program that nobody has to use is getting a new look.

What happened to priorities?

Amazon US, meet the ghost book.

2012-01-25T23:09:00.001Z

Page proofs for 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' arrived from CreateSpace today. I think Lulu do better covers, to be honest, but Amazon use better, whiter paper which is good for the photos. Can't have everything. I checked and approved it so it's now on CreateSpace.

It'll be on the Amazon US site in a few days. Getting it onto other Amazon sites costs a little money, not much, but I'll wait until the short story book proofs arrive and then see about distribution once they're all in.

The Lulu option is so far the only real option for UK print versions and the bugbear there is their postage costs. However, there is a little bit of good news. Until 31st January, you can get free postage on Lulu, with the code WHOASHIPPINGUK

It only works in the UK and it only works once per user. US readers won't care anyway because Amazon has the free-post option all the time.

This is the code I wait for from Lulu because it's the biggest saving. A good time to pick up a few for signed-copy distribution, and the only sensible time to buy those single-story pamphlets.

Best not do it tonight. Credit card plus whisky is never a good combination.

Haggis and Whisky.

2012-01-25T22:03:00.000Z

Scotland gives us just enough time to recover from New Year before we have to deal with the birthday of Rabbie Burns, farmer, poet, revenue man and pisshead. It's another official whisky night and this one comes with haggis to soak it up so we don't die too quickly. New year comes with stovies, the recipe for which is somewhat less horrifying than that for haggis. Stovies are a sort of practice haggis for newbies, I think.

There's no smoky-drinky tonight, we'll have an official one at the weekend. With more whisky.

Next up is Valentine's Day. This year I will get to the butcher's early, before they run out of hearts.

In the unlikely event that there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard of Rabbie Burns, Subrosa has an educational video.

Well, I have to drink more whisky now. It's the law.

Jobseeker who actually means it.

2012-01-25T02:01:00.001Z

I have been looking for a job. Not a career, I have two of those already. I am past the age of ambition. I just don't care any more. All I want now is for the rest of the world to piss off and stop asking me for money.

A part time job just to cover the background bills when the day-job is silent. Something in the evenings, something that won't follow me home like my day-job has throughout my life. Something I can maintain when the projects are running because projects end and then there is silence again. Benefits? No. Absolutely no. Been there long ago, felt the jaws of the trap and heard the pompous and exultant cries of the Righteous and I'd rather live and die in the woods. No, that benefits trap is not for me. I will not be owned.

I don't want to be a manager. I could do it, I have managed academics and that makes you envy cat-herders. I have dragged at least one unworthy student through a Ph.D. and hammered a few more useless drongos through M.Sc. Only just, but they made it despite themselves.

Not one of my students has ever failed because they knew if they did, their heads would be on spikes as a warning to others. I learned the technique from my school English teacher who also recorded no failures. No violence, just verbal humiliation. It works really, really well. My best one was to tell a Ph.D. student I didn't expect her to be able to complete an experiment because she was 'only a woman'. That produced one of her best publications ever and she gave me the silent treatment for three days, which was a bonus.

One job I considered was part-time warden at an old folks home. I mentioned it to some friends.

'Do you think I could be a carer?'

I have never seen so many people say 'NO' so emphatically and so quickly. If the buggers had reacted like that to the smoking ban, there wouldn't be one. Their reasoning was that caring requires patience and I don't have any, it also requires caring and I don't. Their objections to 'cleaning up incontinence' I brushed aside. My entire career has seen me elbow-deep in shit and not the nicely-formed healthy lumps, the horribly infected runny stuff. That shitty part would be no problem. It's the 'giving a shit' I'd have trouble with.

There was also concensus that I would be instantly in trouble with the Righteous because the first thing I would demand is a decent smoking shelter for the elderly in sheltered housing. Sure, the residents would be happy with me but the bosses would have contract killers on my tail by the end of the first day. So that was out.

They were right. I was once course tutor for a (ahem) course. One student was hated by the staff but he wasn't a bad guy, just a youngster trying to look hard. I pushed him to appeal his unfair third class degree, we won, and I wasn't course tutor the next year. I put principle above money which is why I am utterly skint and the likes of Tiny Blur are loaded. It means I would be doomed in any council job.

There was a job in the Apple iStore in Aberdeen but there is the small matter of ethics. Apple have declared their warranty invalid for smokers. I can never buy their products nor can I encourage anyone else to buy them. Even if it means going back to living in the gutter, I won't do it.

So it's supermarket or cleaner jobs. Evening work, low pay, enough to cover bills and I don't have to ditch the part-time stuff when the contracts come. I really don't want a day job because I'd have to drop it to run a project and that means when the project ends, I'm sitting on my arse doing nothing again. Once you drop a job they don't want you back.

There are many cleaning jobs around. Unsociable hours - no problem. I am inherently unsociable. Pride? That's for the rich. Cleaning is something I do a lot of anyway. No cleaners ever enter my lab because I use deadly bacteria in there. Cleaning is my problem and since I don't want to die a horrible runny-bottomed death I am merciless with the cleaning. You want me to clean your house? Prepare to be sterilised. It's all very... dirty.

It's not even a job, it's a vocation. Thirty years of microbiology makes you paranoid about cleanliness. I know what lurks in the little bit of damp dust in the corner and I kill it before it gets me. You won't believe how much disinfectant I get through. Oh, the cheap bleach works as well as the posh scented stuff, by the way. The kill rate does not depend on the floral scent.

My kitchen is entirely painted white. I have often heard 'But white shows the dirt' to which I reply 'Yes. That's how I find it'. It's a bit nasty on a summer morning if I haven't closed the curtains and the sun is shining in and there's been whisky but... I have never had a serious gut infection even though I've worked with them all.

Too much cleanliness is as bad as too little. Don't worry about garden dirt, worry about kitchen dirt. Garden dirt contains almost nothing to worry about. Kitchen dirt contains it all. You do need a little bit of dirt in there to give your immune system practice.

So yes. I am thinking 'cleaner'. I have been in places I'd have cleaned for free so why not get paid to do it?

I have also been told I'd make a good barman but 'fox in charge of the chicken run' comes to mind there...

All I need now is a light green suit and I am ready to be terrifying. Who says you can't have fun on minimum wage?

Might inspire a few more tales too.

Meat and mirth.

2012-01-24T01:08:00.000Z

I'm going to need a lot of help laughing at this one.

Remember all that healthy eating advice? Stay away from red meat, live entirely on fish and chicken or you die?

Well...

HEALTH conscious women who eat mainly fish and chicken could be storing up as many problems as those who tuck into junk food.

It's no good. I have to have another dose.

So what's wrong with the fish and chicken diet? Haven't we all been told that red meat will kill us? Haven't we all been told it will make us all obese and cancerous?

Too little iron in both sorts of diet is to blame.

Oh dear oh dear. All those who listened to the healthy eating nuts are now anaemic and feeble. What to do?

Switching a few meals to foods high in iron, such as steak, liver and watercress could make all the difference.

Uh-oh, here it comes again...

Yes indeed, health people, make those messages clear. So do we give up red meat as you wanted, and languish with anaemia, or do we just eat a bit of this and that, as humanity has done since it first dragged its scaly carcass out of the sea? How did we ever live without you? The answer, I think you'll find, is 'better'.

But - how can this be? Who, in this Righteous age, would have the temerity to claim that red meat can be in any way good for you?

The National Diet and Nutrition Survey, conducted by YouGov for industry body MeatMatters, found that a quarter of British women and teenage girls suffer from a low intake of iron.

Aha, another pressure group. The Meat Men are fighting back with Righteous techniques of their own. As for the credibility of YouGov polling, I think Junican has some clues for us there.

Oh dear, I can barely type for laughing. All that hectoring and nagging about 'healthy eating' has turned the population anaemic. Well, the female half. Nobody seems to care about the male half - but that's not new. Now the burger bars can advertise the iron content of their burgers and entice the fish-and-chicken eaters back. Put some lettuce and cress on top and your State-sponsored anaemia will be cured in one meal.

From the health advisors that gave your children rickets, you can now add anaemia to their list of wondrous 'progessive' influence on your lives.

I mean, how can you not....

It's good to laugh. Even better when the Righteous are the ones being laughed at.

Formulating a horror.

2012-01-23T00:40:00.000Z

Long-term readers will know that my primary occupation is microbiology. I meddle with germs, sometimes dangerous ones. Also that I write horror stories as a sideline. I'd rather make a living from the writing, it's safer by far, but it is not to be. Not yet anyway.

Only once have the two worlds collided, in a story called 'The Ignorant Assassin' in the collection 'Dark Thoughts and Demons'. It's not easy for me to write a microbiology story without it sounding like a report - but then, it might be even scarier if written that way. Hmmm...

Sometimes I think along strange lines, usually after a good belt of the hard stuff, and sometimes a fictional horror will come out of it. The thing about fiction is that, unlike real life, it has to make sense. There has to be a logic in the sequence of events so that the reader can work out what's going on.

Okay, so let's give the microbiological Armageddon another go.

First, we need a virus. Viruses are much easier to store and weaponise than bacteria and can be made species-specific. They can be made to attach to very specific cell surface features so they can be made sub-species or even race-specific. That won't be perfect but it will definitely wipe out one race much faster than another.

We're not really into the fiction yet. This is possible now. However, what we want for this fictional world is not the eradication of a race, but the eradication of all but the most compliant drones. That can't be done genetically so we must find another way.

And yet, there is a problem. When there is an outbreak, the first thing everyone is clamouring for is a vaccine. If it doesn't work, they'll spot it at once. So a dud vaccine won't cut the mustard here. There has to be a real one - well, there has to be one anyway, so that those who release the virus don't catch it themselves. They also want to save their drones.

Now we need a way to make sure the compliant drones take the vaccine but the troublemakers refuse it. That way, nobody is 'denied the vaccine'. It's on offer to all, but only the drones accept. How to achieve this?

First you set up a scare concerning a virus that isn't really that big a deal. Then you provide a vaccine that's tainted. Let the word get out that the vaccine is bad and the virus isn't nearly as dangerous as claimed.

Then you have another scare, with another tainted vaccine, and assess the uptake. Most of the troublemakers refuse it this time round? Excellent. Again, the virus scare doesn't live up to expectations and the news is full of terrible tales of those damaged by the vaccine.

Now we are ready to release the real thing. Of course, we have to let everyone know it exists so our compliant drones will accept the vaccine while the troublemakers refuse it.

Oh, and those working on it will make a point of getting the hell out of the way just before the crap hits the fan.

This is, of course, just an outline for a tale of fiction. The sort of thing Lex Luthor or Dr. Evil might come up with. Horror fiction works best when based on real life events. I mean, demons are all well and good but they can't scare people who don't believe they exist. No, for the real universal scares you need the psycho, preferably the highly intelligent psycho with a motive and the means to carry it out. Suppose the motive was a massive reduction in the world's human population, in such a way as to leave only those who will do just as they are told? Would the logic in such a tale hold up, I wonder?

Good thing it's not really happening, eh?

Smoke War - another in need of help.

2012-01-22T15:34:00.001Z

Under modern UK justice, if you are part of a gang that hospitalises an innocent bystander, you get stern words spoken at you and then you get sent home.

If you light a cigarette you go to jail.

Keeping Chris Carter out of jail and allowing him to continue his appeal requires £1250. That's a tenner each from only 125 of us. The donate button for the Chris Carter appeal is at the top of the Smoker's Justice page.

This month I have to give thousands to the taxman. I'd rather give a tenner to the taxman and thousands to a cause that actually matters, but unfortunately I can't do it that way round.

All that money going to the taxman helps to pay the judges who treat smokers as if they are murderers and who treat vicious thugs as if they were upstanding members of society. The voluntary tenner goes to fight the thousands I am forced to pay to promote my own oppression.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see something very, very wrong here?

Big, clever and cool - and photos to prove it.

2012-01-21T21:05:00.001Z

Off out for a smoky-drinky. It's windy and cold and wet and horrible out there, but that's okay because I won't have to go outside to smoke.

There will be none of these present because they are photoshopped fakes. Excellent photographs, but no child is really smoking in them any more than there are real dogs playing pool and poker as in those pictures popular some years back.

Naturally the antismokers are delighted with them and have no problem using pictures of children smoking to further their vicious little crusade.

From the comments:

These pictures could be effective in a campaign against passive smoking. - me, uk, 21/1/2012 18:48

I agree there should be a campaign against passive smoking. If you want to inhale smoke, buy your own. I also think these pictures should be on the walls of every school in the land. Oh, I know what the antismokers think they look like, but to a kid they make smoking look big and clever and ultra-cool.

So go ahead, antismokers. Use them in your campaigns.

Anyway, time to go. Back very late. Don't wait up.

Of brick walls and heads.

2012-01-21T03:24:00.000Z

Sometimes it's best to stop whacking your head on bricks.

Via Pat Nurse, I find another of the Paul Flynn ilk but this one is a Liberal Democrat. As a model of Liberal Democraticity, this one is perfect. There is nothing liberal about him at all and judging by the response to the huge majority of his commenters, he's not interested in democracy either.

Lib Dem voters take note, They are all like this. All of them. If you vote Lib Dem because you believe in liberalism and democracy, you are a sucker. Oh, and you voted this little Stalin into office. Aren't you pleased with yourselves? Aren't you going to be delighted to vote him in again to get rid of your remaining pubs and corner shops? Mugs.

Tesco are apparently losing money. Tesco! Losing money! That's impossible and yet I note our local branch no longer has those permanent ads for trolley collectors and shelf stackers.Word from the inside is that there is a ban on overtime too.

So, Mr. Tesco, will minimum pricing on alcohol boost sales? Will a display ban on plain-packaged smokes increase your profits? The lottery till is at the baccy counter because gamblers are on the denormalisation list. How many of those smokers take a quick go on the lottery while they're there? It's over £6 for a pack of smokes now so they're likely to think that one more pound on the lottery is a good bet. What happens when they buy from Man with a Van instead? You think you have seen a bad year, Mr. Tesco? You ain't seen nothing yet. They haven't even started on your pizzas and curries.

If Tesco are having trouble, just imagine want Mr. Patel's Corner Emporium is suffering. A display ban on their biggest profit-making product should finish them off, eh, ASH?

I have no intention of commenting on the idiot from Bristol's blog. Waste of time. He is not listening, he doesn't give a damn about people, not even those suckers who voted for him. He cares nothing for the collapse of the economy or the destruction of small businesses. All he cares about is his personal agenda, an agenda that would make Hitler proud. He wants one-fifth of this country's population declared monstrous and evil because they choose to engage in a legal and highly-taxed activity.

If you are Lib Dem and are thinking 'he's not typical', I refer you to your leader's opinion of the smoking ban in which he stated that even relaxing the ban would be like bringing back the death penalty. Stephen Williams is an archetypal Lib Dem as defined by the leadership of that party. All Lib Dems are like this. Anyone who votes for them is like this. No other conclusion can be drawn.

Bristol voters, vote him in again if you want to but do not come bleating to the rest of us when all your pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops are closed. You did this. You voted for it. Live with it.

And remember to accept the blame for it when it all hits the fan.

I Fought the Machines and the Machines Won.

2012-01-21T02:42:00.000Z

I have been locked in battle with computer stuff, and the machines have been winning. Several people recommended CreateSpace as a way to get books onto Amazon and it was only my natural indolence that made it take this long.

Damn, but CreateSpace is fussy! Their program found a problem. I fixed it. They found another...

Anyway, I now have three books in the process. When they eventually reach availability I'll put up links and change those I currently have elsewhere to the Lulu.com print copies. Then I'll remove the print copies from Lulu because they price in UK pounds and Amazon bases everything on dollars, so having both will cause confusion.

Lulu do a good job, I have to be honest here. There are only two problems. First, their postage charges are far too high. If you buy one book you could end up paying more for postage than for the book. If I buy a batch of ten for signed copies it's not so bad but buying one, well the postage is insane.

Second, Lulu.com is well known among writers but people who want a book to read have never heard of it. Their first port of call is Amazon. The same goes for Smashwords - full of writers but few readers. With Smashwords, it's the distribution to the likes of Kobo, Sony, Apple etc that is of interest. Direct sales on Smashwords are tiny.

Getting onto Amazon for free means fighting the CreateSpace interface. I think I won but I won't know for sure until the books get through the system. For the moment the machines have the upper hand.

Getting decent distribution means forking out a little money, but not very much. I'll look at that once I have the books in the listings.

Between this and the tax form, expect little activity here for the next week or so.

Out of the frying pan.

2012-01-19T01:22:00.001Z

There are those who think the Germans will ditch the Euro this year. It's not impossible, it has been a bum deal for Germany, but the Angry Merkin insists it was all a great idea.

The reasoning behind this particular argument seems flawed. It's based on the idea that if Germany drops out of the Eurozone, they won't have to pay for bailouts any more.

Well, we have never been in the Eurozone but we are putting a hell of a lot of money we don't have into supporting it anyway.

So if Germany does drop out, it won't be for that reason.

Stranger than fiction.

2012-01-19T00:56:00.000Z

In 'Panoptica' I had considered implanted brain chips but dismissed them as too far-fetched. Crime rates are low because nobody remembers any crime happening to them. Victims are re-educated and given a pill that eradicates unpleasant memories (it already exists). Nobody remembers being a victim of crime therefore there is no crime.

My first thought was brain-chips because that made it easy to get the main character into trouble. His chip would report non-Righteous thoughts. Then I decided he wouldn't have any non-Righteous thoughts as a fully indoctrinated drone so found another way to get him in trouble. That also avoided unlikely science fiction scenarios like this one.

Yes, even the stuff I rejected as being way too far-fetched has started coming true.

The scientists doing these experiments are not evil. Their intent is to find a way to repair the damage done by things like Alzheimer's or by feral scroats who happen upon an innocent member of the public. Then again, Einstein did not envisage his equations leading to a bomb that could wipe out a city - and the new ones that can wipe out a large chunk of a country.

Darwin did not imagine his evolutionary theory could lead to eugenics. If van Leeuwenhoek had known about bioweapons he might never have built those microscopes.

No, the scientists rewiring rat brains have no evil intent. Unless you're a rat.

However, those in charge of us have nothing but evil intent. Take this innocent-sounding scientific sentence:

'It's a proof of the concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the biological network, and then return it to the brain,' says Prof. Mintz...

The authoritarian mind will add in a few words there:

...we can record information from the brain, analyse it, adjust it to suit what we think they should be thinking and then return it to the brain...

One small step for science, one giant leap for the authoritarians.

And I thought it was too wild for fiction...

Meat is microbiology.

2012-01-18T02:15:00.000Z

You know how, when you've set aside time to sort out the tax form, suddenly everyone in the world wants to talk to you? Well today's that day. It feels like everyone's New Year Resolution is to get in my way.

Anyway, since I was distracted I thought I'd scour the Mail for horror story ideas. There's at least one a day in there.

How about lab-grown meat? Grown from stem cells in huge vats. Let's play with the idea that in one of those vats, some of those stem cells produce nerve tissue, then a brain...

Its a silly idea. Meat grows in cow-shaped lumps in the middle of fields. It grows on grass, which is free, rather than on cell culture media which is expensive. It requires no effort other than good fence construction. It uses very cheap farm labour rather than expensive lab staff and it has no bacterial contamination on the inside, unlike vat-grown fibre.

I have no moral objection to lab-grown meat but I will not eat it because bacteriologically, the risk is huge.

Is it halal or kosher? Do we have to say prayers when inoculating the growth medium?

If this starts appearing without labels I am going back to setting snares and to throwing bread to pigeons with one hand while holding a cricket bat in the other.

It's not likely to reach economic viability but that hasn't stopped wind power. And once you eat undefined meat without question, Soylent Green is only a crematorium away...

The Phantom Boozer.

2012-01-16T22:11:00.000Z

Lots of scare stories around boozing cheeeldren lately. You'd think someone was trying to ban it or something.

A girl with a pickled pancreas is held up as being a typical teenager. Apparently she had been drinking two of those three-litre bottles of cheap cider every day since she was 14. She bought them at £3 a bottle which means she bought own-brand supermarket stuff.

It's around 5%, that stuff, and each bottle contains just under 16 units. So she was on 32 units a day, 224 units a week. That is, even by my standards, excessive. It's about the equivalent of an entire bottle of whisky every day. No wonder her pancreas packed up. I'm surprised her eyes hadn't melted.

The scaremongers feel the need to ramp up even those figures.

Kieran Moriarty, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, told the Sunday Times: 'The teenager had been drinking 400 units a week since she was 14, cheap lager and cheap cider, and she came in with severe acute pancreatitis."

Take a figure and double it. 224 units a week is quite scary enough without making up a new figure, but then force of habit...

Six litres. Twelve pints. Every day. At the height of my imbibing skills, in my early twenties, I once achieved the 'double gallon' in one night - sixteen pints. I never felt the need to repeat that feat, it was a one-off and it utterly wasted all of the next day. I recall not feeling like drinking at all for several days after that one. Normally, making it to the gallon was considered an achievement, the usual night-out rarely reached eight pints and that was certainly not every night. Midweek drinking was one or two pints and often none.

Drinking twelve pints a day, every day, is going to put anyone into a permanent state of drunkenness. Nobody's liver can detox at a rate that could keep up with that intake, and with that volume of fluid going through, the bladder would be under such strain she'd whistle when she peed. Yet here we have a fourteen-year-old who was able to buy six litres of cider a day, at a rate of £6 a day (£42 a week).

[Buying the equivalent in bottled water would have cost less than 50p a day, for those 'booze cheaper than water' nuts]

Where did she get the money? A weekend job? A paper round? Nobody drinking at that rate could hold down any job at all. Not even a job that involved mainly vomiting and urinating. She had to find £42 a week from somewhere.

She also had to get around the fact that she was four years under the legal age for buying alcohol and she must have been permanently pissed so she would have been bouncing off the supermarket shelves when buying it. Did nobody notice?

The solution? Minimum pricing, of course. Let's ignore the fact that we have a law stating that nobody under 18 can buy alcohol but nobody is enforcing it. Let's ignore the logical conclusion that the only way a 14-year-old pisshead could get £42 a week is by stealing it, and if the price goes up they'll just steal more. No. let's have minimum pricing and pretend that will solve everything.

There is no mention of her parents. Presumably they put a bottle of gin in her school lunchbox every day and cooked every meal in brandy. Are we seriously to believe that even the most inattentive parent is not going to realise their child is on twelve pints a day? It would be like living with a younger version of Father Jack and every conversation would be like talking to Rowley Birkin QC.

What of the shop that let her buy the cider? Yes, I know, it's not the shop's responsibility to tell anyone what to do with the stuff they buy, but when they sell booze to someone four years below booze-buying age, they are responsible for breaking the law. The article makes no mention.

Instead, it harps on about 'the evil drink stealing children's lives' while ignoring the fact that we have laws stating they can't buy any.

The girl's current age is not stated, just that she started when she was 14. All we have is -

The astonishing revelation was made by a doctor who treated the girl, who is from north west England.

... and the claim that she drank 400 units a week, equivalent to around 13 bottles of whisky. Enough to floor a walrus. Every week.

You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking the Mail just took the story at face value. I'm thinking about all those 'thousands of deaths' from second hand smoke that never existed. I'm thinking this is propaganda and that the sozzled teenager does not exist.

Well, the antismokers get away with ridiculous claims and the dopes in the comments below the articles soak it all up. As they have with this one.

400 units a week and you'd soon be dead. If they cremated you, you'd burn for days and if they buried you, archaeologists would dig you up in a thousand years and marvel at the embalming techniques we must have had. You'd sterilise your entire intestinal tract with that much alcohol and denature every surface protein all the way down. Nothing would work. Nothing. Pancreas? The least of your worries.

If there was a shop selling that much booze to a teenager, the Mail would have gleefully reported their prosecution. The parents would have been prosecuted too. No mention of either. The Mail reporter seems not to have noticed and neither have the commenters.

Also, no mention of liver damage. At that intake her liver should have looked like it had been used for close-range shotgun practice.

I call 'fake' on this story. It's too far-fetched on too many levels and yet they are getting away with it because the drones are just so incredibly dim. An Expert has said - so we don't need to think. The Expert has done it for us.

Next on the denormalisation train? Meat. All of it. The drones will accept this too.

Sometimes, I wonder whether that New World Order idea of killing most of the people on the planet is actually quite a good one.

Anyway, as a responsible citizen and in the interests of promoting moderation in drinking, here's a song extolling the virtues of sensible beer consumption.

Letting the madness out a little at a time.

2012-01-15T07:45:00.000Z

My head hurts. I've been trying to work out what we'd see if a four-dimensional being protruded into our three-dimensional world. Starting from the point of view of a two-dimensional creature who meets a three-dimensional one (Edwin Abbot's 'Flatland' the text of which is probably free somewhere because it's out of copyright) and extraoplating that creature's 2D image of a 3D creature into a 3D observation of a 4D one.

It could appear and disappear simply by making use of a spatial dimension we can't access, but when it was here, what would we see? I have a feeling it would look like what we generally refer to as a ghost. As to specific appearance, well since it has total control over what it pokes into our dimension, it could appear any way it wants.

If I can get this little story written it should infuriate everyone of every religion everywhere. It's not an atheist tract, it's even worse than that, it's an entirely new religion that binds them all together while simultaneously denying the reality of all religions, including itself.. If this doesn't get me a nasty letter from the Pope, nothing will.

Once it's out I'll have to be on my guard against the Secret Ninja Jehovah's Witnesses. They say the last thing anyone hears is a breathy voice...

I had another go at getting the cartoons onto Kindle. Still no luck. These old ones might have to be restricted to print-only and a new set drawn specifically for the Kindle screen size. They could work as PDF on a computer screen but I don't think they'll work on little E-readers.

Something occurred to me. I have always maintained, in smoking-related arguments with the religious, that the Holy Books say nothing about smoking. They don't say you can, but they don't say you can't. The Government won't let you smoke in a church, but God doesn't mind. So who is the higher authority?

I was wrong. The Bible mentions smoking. A lot.

Leviticus 1:13 : He is to wash the inner parts and the legs with water, and the priest is to bring all of it and burn it on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.

Leviticus 1:17: He shall tear it open by the wings, not severing it completely, and then the priest shall burn it on the wood that is on the fire on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.

Leviticus 2:2 : and take it to Aaron's sons the priests. The priest shall take a handful of the fine flour and oil, together with all the incense, and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.

There is a long list of these available. It seems that God likes the smell of something burning, which means those who object to the smell of smoke are heretics and must be cast out.Perhaps we should torture them a little first.

There is more:

Leviticus 3:16: The priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made by fire, a pleasing aroma. All the fat is the Lord's.

Numbers 15:7: and a third of a hin of wine as a drink offering. Offer it as an aroma pleasing to the LORD.

So God likes a smoke, a drink and some fatty food. If it's good enough for God, then who am I to argue?

No wonder the Righteous want God banned. He's setting a bad example to us all.

Little Johnny's baby photos, age negative.

2012-01-14T03:23:00.001Z

A midwife who looks like a close relative of the Childcatcher from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' has declared Outrage!

It seems that expectant mothers are using modern technology in ways this midwife finds reprehensible. They are meeting up and comparing ultrasound pictures of their unborn progeny. Some even have film of baby doing... not very much.

Worse, it appears that these expectant mothers have circumvented NHS control and paid for these photos and videos privately. Naughty, naughty mothers.

I admit my first thought on this story was 'So what?' No taxpayers' money is used, it's not costing the NHS a penny and no children or mothers are being harmed. If women want to show off a photo of something inside them that looks like one of those corpses they sometimes dig out of peat bogs, why should anyone else care at all? Really, it is the most harmless thing anyone could be doing and if the NHS are now at the stage of objecting to this level of trivia, then their time must surely be up.

My second thought was 'There must be more to this, there must be a reason behind it' and there are at least two in that article.

Prof Warwick also questioned whether it may escalate the thinking among some people that a foetus should have a life of its own before birth and, therefore, rights of its own.

Ah, right. People might start thinking that maybe they don't want an abortion after all, and we can't have that, can we?

My views on abortion are simple. It's none of my business unless it's my child. Some people declare that a baby cannot be called a baby until it reaches the point where it can survive outside its mother. Until then it's just a growth. Others insist that life begins at conception and that even aborting a fertilised egg with a morning-after pill is murder.

I have no argument with either viewpoint. People have strong views at both ends of the scale and everywhere in between and when they apply those views to their own lives, no problem. When they try to enforce their own views on other people, then the problems begin.

That's a small agenda item in this denormalisation of baby photos. There is a much bigger one, and this one caused me to pause for a long time.

'At the moment, UK law allows for the mother to make decisions on behalf of her baby until the baby is born,' she said.

Read that once again. At the moment, the State generously allows mothers some leeway when it comes to deciding what's best for them and their child during pregnancy Not a lot of leeway, not once they get hold of your smoking, drinking and eating habits, but so far they have been benevolent in allowing those mothers to get ultrasound images made without restriction.

Oh, and note the end of the line. 'Until the baby is born'. As Captain Ranty will tell you, once you have a birth certificate, that baby is not yours. It belongs to the State. You are merely the registered keeper and if they don't like you, they can take it away.

There are anti-abortionists who loudly proclaim that life starts at conception. If this woman gets her way, State ownership of life will also start at conception and then they will be able to decide who is aborted and who is allowed to live.

Can't happen here? The stuff of Hitlerite dreams? It happened in America after WWII, where some states enforced sterilisation of anyone declared unfit to breed through either physical or mental differences. Now that we have an array of tests that can tell whether the foetus is likely to under-perform in terms of State requirements, it would be a simple matter to prevent those costs to the NHS from Downs' syndrome, malformed limbs, below minimum State-required IQ level (and for the proles, above the upper IQ limit declared by the State) and the long-sought eugenics dream becomes reality.

Hitler didn't invent eugenics, and it didn't die with him either.

She has other silly notions, including the old 'equality' saw - if not everyone can afford private scans, nobody can have them - but this one is, I think, the real giveaway.

We pay the NHS to control our lives and they want more. They want to own us from conception. There is no end to this, not until we are a race of identical clones built to State specifications and living and thinking within State limits.

If ever anyone finds proof of life after death, the first the ghosts will know of it will be when the spectral tax demands arrive.

One-liners.

2012-01-13T04:32:00.001Z

A 'just for fun' post to break up the misery stream and because I have the no-sleeping thing again..

'Population explosion' doesn't mean what I want it to mean, but sometimes I like to savour the image.

Did you hear about the hungry clock who went back four seconds?

I saw a sign in a shop window that said 'Batteries included - no charge'. I thought 'What use are they then?'

I haven't written a will,. It would be a dead giveaway.

Is the Thatcher film rated PG because it's not suitable for miners?

My girlfriend thinks I'm a stalker. Well, she's not quite my girlfriend yet.

And now we return you to the normal, doom-laden world of reality. Sorry about that.

Where the Haggis cry 'Freedom'.

2012-01-12T04:03:00.000Z

What is the Cameroid up to?

He has already made noises about the SNP referendum on independence for kilts and sporrans, but now he seems to have had a toddler tantrum about it. "You can't have it unless I says so, nyah".

Reminds me somewhat of a saying of my father's from long ago (Granny would never have used one so coarse unless it was in Welsh). It went 'Like a bitch with a bone' and it meant 'He/she doesn't really want it but they don't want anyone else to have it'. Cameron has no support n Scotland but he wants to keep it anyway.

If Scotland separates, the remaining UK will probably have a Tory government forever. The Libby Dimmys will be wiped out. Labour will be reduced to a shadow. Why would a Tory Prime Monster resist that? He'd be in a job for life if he ditched Scotland and if he had any sense he'd be looking at Wales and saying "See? They did it, how about you?"

What does he lose in terms of MPs? One or two? This is a local country for local people, Tories, there's nothing here for you.

I can see why Labour don't want Scottish independence. They'd get hammered if they lost the Buckfast vote. The Libby Dimmys still have a few here too, and they can't afford to lose even one MP at the moment. The Tories, however, would be well shot of Scotland and if they wanted to, they could move their remaining voter south.

Al the Oily Fish didn't set this current argument going. The Cameroid did, all by himself. Why now? Oh, he claims the polls show Oily Al would lose if he had a referendum now but those polls were taken before the Cameroid threw his toys out of the pram. He has, with his 'I am Teacher and you will do as you are told' attitude, advanced Oily Al's position more than any SNP rhetoric ever could. A referendum now is not a guaranteed result, not at all. If Cameroid had silenced the flapping of his gob, chances are Oily Al would have lost.

There seems no logic to it, apart from one little possible bit.

If the UK breaks up, the constituent parts would have to reapply for EU membership. England might rip Cameron a new one and not bother reapplying. Scotland probably would if the SNP get their way but even then, the process would take years. Meanwhile the EU might not get their idiot tax from any part of the UK and we might not feel obliged to obey any of their laws.

I wonder, is it possible the Cameroid has been visited by The Management?

"Nice government you got 'ere, Davey. Shame if anyfink was to 'appen to it. My mate Sarky can get a bit clumsy sometimes, you know, signing things in uvver people's names an' that. Anyway, we got a nice EU pension for the good boys and a special place for the bad boys, know what I mean?"

If Oily Al won his referendum it would cause problems for the EU. It might also get the English thinking "Hang on. They got a referendum, where's the one the Forehead promised us?"

I have always been a 'don't care' on Scottish independence because I'm not Scottish. If they get independence and I don't like it, leaving wouldn't be a problem.

But if it will annoy the Cameroid and the EU, my vote will now be 'yes'.

Too many irons, or not enough fire.

2012-01-12T03:17:00.000Z

Sometimes I overload with activities. I have too many things on the go and too many deadlines to meet so I should not be embarking on something new. Can't help it, I just have no control when I get interested.

I saw a part time job today as a buyer of tat for a local shop. You know, the person who actually chooses the meaningless and pointless impulse-buy trinkets that fill the side shelves of newsagents and garden centres. It had never occurred to me before, but it must be someone's job to decide what goes on the tat-shelves and they must know where it all comes from.

Now, as a frequent buyer of useless crap myself, I was intrigued by this. A job was vacant and it was a job I didn't even know existed. I won't get that job, I have no sales experience and if I showed the results of my somewhat dreadful attempts at marketing books, they'd laugh. Even so, I have absolutely no idea where those trinkets come from, and I have to know. So I'll apply and hopefully get as far as interviewing them about this mysterious and shadowy position of Head of Useless Stuff, and maybe find out how they persuade us to buy stuff nobody, anywhere, has ever even imagined they needed and which could only have been created by a madman.

It's dangerous, I might find the source of the tat and that is not safe for someone like me to know. Then again, I have always wanted to know who actually makes those musician figures out of welded nuts and bolts, those glass animals, the wooden things that I can't quite identify and all the rest of it. I would also like to know how they go about selling that stuff to the Head Of Pointlessness and how he/she manages to con saps like me into handing over money for it.

As part of this new book-writing business I must learn about marketing and if someone can sell a wine-bottle-holder that appears to have been roughly slapped together by a bored scrapyard worker after some serious drinking, then they must be great at marketing. I must meet these people.

I just hope they don't sell me anything.

I wonder if they'd be interested in stocking books by a local author on the tat-shelves? That would actually be a better outcome than getting the job.

Cough. Aha, you're a smoker.

2012-01-11T03:09:00.000Z

Still on the brandy tonight. That's two nights of not-proper-drinking in a row, Aren't I being a good little drone?Actually, during winter I do not drink during any day at all, seven days a week. Fortunately it's night before 5 pm and the rules only apply to 'days' of drink.

I'm still working on the editor test, which comprises three 'submissions' and I have to decide whether I would ask for a full manuscript or reject, based on the samples. One is easy, the story might be great but it would take an editor a year to rewrite the grammar. The other two are not so straightforward. I have a few days to make my choices and I suspect (if common sense prevails) the outcome will depend more on my reasons for accept/reject than on my decisions. If I use the wrong criteria, ie that which does not fit what the publisher wants, I lose.

Then there's the tax. I have to do this year's too, to see how far I can cut the 'payments on account' which translates to "We know you don't owe this tax yet but we want it anyway". This year has been much slower than last year and to be honest, unless a miracle happens with the books, there won't be much more income this year. There are meetings scheduled for the research work but once it gets through meetings - deciding the project - changing the project - firing up the lab - doing the work - writing the report - invoicing - there's really not much chance of anything more from that direction arriving within this tax year. Still, there is a faint chance of a short but expensive project landing in February. Not much of a chance, but it can happen.

It's a gamble, reducing those payments on account. It's tax I don't actually owe yet but it's treated as if I do. If I overpay, to be fair, they will refund promptly when I fill out the next form. If I underpay the tax I don't owe, they will hit me with the Naughty Tax Dodger Hammer and it won't have the soft padding they use for Vodafone or for MPs. I can, of course, simply not send out any more invoices this year but that's no longer reliable. One of those books could take off and make me rich enough to get away with tax discrepancies, or in the worst case scenario, not quite rich enough to get let off but rich enough to fleece.

Okay, a sudden book boost is not likely. The Bible Belt and the Vatican have still not noticed my use of actual grimoires and Crowley's spells in those books and even if they notice now, the income isn't likely to filter through before April anyway. Perhaps it's time to release that Crowe theory that there is no God, but the devil is real. All the bad guys exist and there's nobody on our side. Maybe that will poke the Puritans into action. I tried it on some teenagers at one of the New Year parties. It looks like being my scariest idea yet.

I can't be too hard on the taxman and I am happy with the questions for the editor job because neither of them have asked me whether I smoke, drink, use butter and salt, what my waist size is and whether I have changed all filament light bulbs to the new low-calorie versions. They don't care. In the case of the editor job I suspect the drinking part is taken as read.

These questions are to come from dentists, pharmacists, proctologists, chiropodists and probably acupuncturists and herbalists too.

Homeopathists would be fun. "Do you smoke?"
"No, but I remember it."
"Oh, then you need a bottle with no nicotine in it. That'll help."

Or acupuncturists. "Do you smoke?"
"Yes. Try not to let any leak out through the holes".

If you visit a chiropodist or proctologist, be sure to scrub nicotine stains from the appropriate areas and if you have nicotine stains in those areas, I would be intrigued to know how you did that and very interested in why.

I should be outraged at the idea of popping into the pharmacy for some aspirin to be faced with some smug-faced, clean-cut horror straight from the Amish School of Evil Modern Medicine who asks "Aspirin, sir? Hungover, are you?" but I'm not. Not at all.

See, if I'm buying aspirin, which I do very rarely, it is usually for a hangover. So I'd just say "Yes, and here's the deal. You shut up and sell me the aspirin and I'll let you keep your face." Being smug in the presence of a hungover Leg-iron is not a good idea.

Cough medicine, I never buy. It's no use. If I have a cough it's usually because someone's left the tap running in my sinuses so I need a decongestant. Cough medicines are no different to those things the Wild West snakeoil-sellers used to peddle. They are as effective as nicotine patches.

I know several non-smokers who do buy cough medicines because for them, a cough is something unusual. Something to be feared rather than a natural response to stuff in the lungs that needs ejecting. A persistent cough could be something serious but an occasional one is, dare I use the word, normal. We inhale all kinds of horrors every day, even if nobody is smoking within fifty miles and even if they are, the tobacco really doesn't register among the constant crap in the air.

I'm not outraged by the idea of pharmacists asking stupid questions. I think it's hilarious. It's not going to offend me, I'm just going to take the piss.

"Do you smoke?"

"Depends how fast I go".

"Do you drink?"

"Only the good stuff and only to excess."

No, I will not be offended by their questions, but I will be puzzled by their advice on excessive drinking if I'm buying condoms. In my experience, the two are about as unconnected as they can possibly be. If I'm drinking too much I can't remember what it's for, never mind worrying about putting a sock on it.

Consider who will really be offended by this. Not the smokers, not the drinkers, but the anti-everything brigade. They don't imagine it will apply to them. They actually believe you can tell a smoker from a hundred yards because of the smell. They are the Pure and must never be questioned.

Picture the Dreadful Arnott with a touch of the winter sniffles, calling in to Boots the Chemist for a bottle of Covonia. What are they going to ask her? She'll deny it but the knowing looks will be there to whack her in the face. Consider Don Shenker buying aspirin. He'll deny the hangover connection but again, the knowing looks...

It doesn't bother me if the local pharmacy thinks I am buying aspirin for a hangover because I don't buy it for much else. I am not in the least bit concerned if some bleached-face harridan disapproves of my smoking because I disapprove of her existence. We can come to a deal on that - She can let me smoke and I will let her exist. Everyone's happy, well, as happy as harridans can be.

No, this new idea will not scare me away from the chemist's shop. If it takes off I will be there more than ever just for fun and I will hang around to hear the banmeisters reap their own harvest. I will be there until they throw me out for being a persistent nuisance or for pretending to work there and offering demonstrations.

If anyone asks, yes, I smoke, because smoking is big and clever and smoking is cool. I drink because those who don't drink have no livers and are not real people at all. I eat salt because humans need salt and reptilian creatures who want to enslave us don't. Chocolate is toxic to most non-human species which is why the Thetans want it banned.

I know, other smokers/drinkers/etc get enraged by the constant nannying but to me it's all a new game. A new source of torment for the tormentors.

There has never been a Righteous scheme that has not backfired in spectacular fashion. Not one. This is no different. Their drones will be incensed when staff refuse to believe thy have never smoked when they are buying cough medicines. They will be outraged to be told that they must be buying aspirin for a hangover.

It's going to be the best fun yet. Bring it on.

Other people's stuff.

2012-01-10T04:09:00.004Z

Busy here. I applied for a part-time job as an editor so I can get some understanding of the publishing world. My chances of getting the job, based on the extent of my experience in the field, are slightly less than zero but I thought I'd give it a go. Anyway, the 'test' arrived and I'm doing that now.

Then there's the terrible taxman to deal with. Since the Coagulation intend to use HMRC to shut down every small business in the country, this year I have to be extra-diligent about having all the receipts and invoices in order, and this year there are two sets of them to sort out.

So tonight I have nothing to say, and anyway I've been beaten to the stories.

We are to take two days off the booze every week. I'm only on the brandy tonight so that counts as one. Frank can see where it's going, because the banmeisters will soon declare that we are not doing what they say voluntarily therefore pubs and off-licences must close two days a week. Then they will be shocked to discover that we have thought to stock up, and they'll encourage children to report their parents for drinking on Days of Purity.

The behaviour of children has as much to do with parental discipline as the closure of pubs has to do with the smoking ban. The real corrupting influence on the new ferals has been found.

Those nicotine patches used to claim a failure rate of only 95% or so, but a proper study has shown that in fact they make no difference at all. The comments are full of panicked antismokers pretending to be ex-smokers, which is always fun to see.

For a glimpse into the sort of mind the antismokers really have, the Moose has pictures. I'm sure all political parties are proud to be associated with such vicious propaganda and they'll soon be fully supporting the same sort of bile aimed at drinkers and smokers too.

Right, best get back to this test. It would be ideal for me to work for an American publisher since my waking hours fit theirs better than the UK anyway.

The dregs of life.

2012-01-09T04:33:00.001Z

Time-out from writing. Also from fixing previous writings. Apparently the Word format for a successful Kindle book is not the same as that for a EPUB format book and so my choice was - bugger it up yourself or let the software bugger it up for you. I let the software do it first then tried it myself and this time it hasn't come straight back. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile the Cameroid has told Oily Al he can't have a referendum on Scottish independence from England unless England says he can. The slappy-foreheaded moron has just told the Scots that they can't leave unless he says so, and has just handed Salmond the result on a plate. Maybe there is a bit of brain behind the sweaty pink facade, and Cameroid realises that with Scotland separate there will never be anything but a Wet Tory government in Wastemonster ever again. There'll never be a proper Tory government as long as the Heir to Blair is not a Patch on the Thatch, so nobody will actually notice the difference anyway.

Oily's plan was a referendum in 2014. Why? It's the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and he hoped to ride a tide of whisky-fuelled kilted patriotism to victory. Well, assuming he has left a drop of whisky within range of the ordinary budget by then, the short-sighted idiot. As it is, the booze run to Carlisle will not vote to close the border. Al, you are a dick, if only you could see it.

There is much talk of 'mandates' - he doesn't have a mandate to do this, they don't have a mandate to do that, and they all talk as if we believe they give a shit.

No government had a mandate for the total exclusion of a large chunk of the population based on lifestyle, but they did it anyway. No government had a mandate to foster hatred towards smokers but they did it anyway. No government had a mandate to promote anti-drinking laws but they did it anyway. No government had a mandate to declare fat people legitimate targets for hate but they did it anyway. No government had a mandate to subvert science by encouraging total fabrication of statistics but they are doing it anyway.

No government had a mandate to install a Mugabe-style justice system but they are doing it anyway.

So don't talk to us about mandates, Oily Al. Don't talk to us about lawful process, mirror-bonce Cameroid. Neither of you can be trusted. Neither of you produce one word of truth, neither of you give a toss about those who voted for you, neither of you do a single damn thing that benefits anyone but yourselves. And we are all seeing it, more and more, every day.

I have met and spoken with quite a few of those we describe on the blogs as 'chavs'. Yes, they are mostly not too bright, yes, they are in it for themselves, yes they will grab an opportunity to fleece you if they can. I prefer them to the politicians for very simple reasons.

They aren't pretending they want anything other than money, and they aren't interested in controlling my life.

Politicians, of any rosette, are far, far worse than any chav you'll ever meet. You think the chavs are the dregs of life? Look deeper.

Much deeper.

There, in the deep slime at the base of the abyss, are the politicians.

Ghost post.

2012-01-07T23:00:00.000Z

Ceci n'est pas un Legiron.

I am not here, I am playing with the timer thing. As you read this I am in a place that has no internet and not even a landline phone.

Yes, I am at a Smoky-Drinky and might, even now, be in no state to type this well.

And yet I am still posting. Creepy or what?

Abbot - ah, but...

2012-01-06T20:02:00.000Z

I don't have a Twitter account for a lot of reasons. One, I cannot even say 'hello' in 140 characters, two, I don't know what it's for, three, it just gets people arrested for making jokes, four, I have too many accounts in too many names as it is, five, I don't have a phone that can do it and don't have eyes that could see such a tiny internet screen and fifty,. can't be bothered with it.

It gets ordinary people in trouble for careless comments (remember the guy and the Robin Hood Airport tweet?) so for anyone in the public eye, MP or celeb or whatever, can they really imagine the press isn't watching every character they type?

Diane Abbot, loony champagne Leftie extraordinare, has been accused of racism because of some idiotic comment she made. She claims the comment was taken out of context but quite how you extract an out of context quote from 140 characters is beyond my analytical capabilities. Then she apologised and she and her loony leftie friends thought that was the end of it.

Is she a racist? I don't think she is. I think she's an idiot because sending such a comment into the ether is lunacy. It's not her first visit to loony land, as Pingu's sweary cousin points out and it won't be her last because Ed Moribund won't sack her. Then again, as Cullingworth's view observer says - politician, hypocrisy, why is anyone surprised?

In the law, as it stands, she is guilty. Not because it makes any sense but because it's the law. If someone calls me a greasy Eyetie or a spaghetti-nosher, I don't care and will not call the police. However, if someone nearby perceives the calling of me by those names as racist and calls the police, the law as it stands means that the name-caller will be prosecuted under race laws.

Diane Abbot's comment was racist even though I do not believe she is. It was racist in that it defined an entire ethnic group within one derogatory statement. As a honky myself I took no offence other than to observe that it is not white people, but politicians such as herself, who are using the 'divide and rule' principle these days.

So in law, as defined by her own party while in government, if any third party whether white, black, beige or blue decides to be offended by perceived racism, she is in trouble.

Oh, and the Righteous see apology as a sign of weakness. If the Righteous want her gone, she's gone. She is one of them, true, but so is Jamie 'Spittle' Oliver and it hasn't helped him. They will turn on their own the moment they go off-message.

I suspect that, despite the Moribund's utter lack of balls and her own utter lack of principle, she will still be on the next voting forms. That Tory who went to a party where someone dressed in Nazi uniform was sacked and now risks criminal charges, but a slur on everyone white is just laughed off. She represents a constituency which, we are told at every turn, is 61% white. I bet most of them never bothered to vote at the last election.

I also bet most of them will be sure to vote at the next one. It doesn't really matter because they'll drone-vote anyway so whichever party gets in, that fan will be just as brown and stinky as before.

Lee Jaspercarrott thinks racism is more rife than ever before,. Possibly it is, after all, Labour put a lot of effort into encouraging it and the Coagulation continues their agenda. However, these days it's not about what race you are. It's about the size of your waist, your frequency of Oddbins visits, how much salt you put on your chips and whether you smoke.

If you are a fat black drinking smoker who likes salty chips.you are, in the UK, in serious trouble. However, you are in no more trouble than your white counterpart. That's equality. Diane Abbott was a big booster of equality so remember that when putting your X in the box next time. She's one of those who did this to you.

Diane Abbott was part of the government that brought about this equality. The one in which the politicians despise us all equally. Modern hate is not about the colour of your skin, it's about how much skin you have and what you put inside it. The law, however, only defends the colour.

She was one of those who made this happen. She was one of those who created these laws.

They are ridiculous, but they are laws. Should she escape them?

One rule for the proles, another for the Politburo. Let's see if that's true.

Many, many people are about to find out just where they stand.

Buy shares in tinfoil.

2012-01-06T03:08:00.000Z

It's time for a new conspiracy theory, David Icke-style. I'm bored with the reptile thing, it doesn't seem to be developing any further and besides, nobody would buy any book by me with 'reptilians live here' as a theme because Icky Dai has the franchise covered. He's left nothing for me to write about, he's covered it all and science fiction has used up whatever bits were left.

Still, he managed to convince a lot of people that George Bush was an escaped monitor lizard painted pink (even though monitor lizards are far more intelligent) so if there are gullible people out there with money, it's only reasonable to take advantage of them. Gullibles hate smokers, drinkers and everyone they are told to hate so I feel unpeturbed by the idea of fleecing the buggers.

Finding a world event to attach to a new theory was the work of about ten seconds. In the news today, the Merkozy dual-body creature has decided to rip the finance out of London and use the money to shore up their collapsing currency. A quick quote from France tells us how it is:

Mr Leonetti said: “This is on the programme for the next summit. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have decided on this and it will be put in place before the end of 2012.”

They have decided it will be so, and it will be implemented. The EU is theirs, we just get to pay for it.But what of the Gullibles? What have they to say?

Left-wing campaigners were last night backing the tax. David Hillman, spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, said: “In these tough economic times, it is great news that Europe is acting to ensure the financial sector shoulders its fair share of the burden.

This man is no relation of mine and if he is, he can consider himself disowned.

“The UK Government is ever more isolated in blocking a tax that could raise billions to protect public services and the poorest.”

What a moron. Does he actually believe that the EU want the money to 'protect services and the poor' rather than to keep themselves in the style to which they have become accustomed? Yes, yes he does. Okay then, here we have a man who will believe anything and there are many more like him out there. Time to let the madness out.

Entering Icke mode. Have your roll of tinfoil handy:

One of the premises of a good conspiracy theory is that the conspirators are always confident enough to give away blatant clues. They want people to notice them because there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. If you don't place the clues to your conspiracy, the Gullibles never get that 'Oh, yeah' moment that starts them buying your books and paying to hear you spout nonsense on a stage.

'Merkozy' doesn't help here. How about an alternative, perhaps 'Sarkiel'? That sounded familiar so I did a bit of book-skimming.

The book of Enoch (7:10) lists the leaders of the fallen angels, and one of the names (depending on translation the spelling can vary) is Sahriel. Close enough. They have picked up the 'Merkozy' tag in the press but if we use the other parts of their names, Sar- and -el then it's not too much of a stretch to get to Sahriel. Enoch was originally written in Aramaic using a different alphabet so spelling is irrelevant. There's our main clue for the Gullibles. Sahriel is telling us of his influence, but only to those clever enough to look the right way (the dimmer the sap, the more they enjoy being called 'intelligent').

These aren't Lucifer's gang. He was still around in the book of Job so he hadn't been booted yet. By the time of the New Testament he had been. I'm still not sure exactly when, but since he was still on speaking terms with the Boss during Job's time, he couldn't have been the serpent. Besides, in Job, Lucifer seemed to still have limbs and didn't ssssspeak like Kaa.

These fallen angels are the ones who took a fancy to a bit of human wench-flesh and introduced lots of naughtiness into the world. Up to this point, all that Adam had done was bite an apple and there had been one murder, the miscreant rapidly apprehended, but these angels arrived with all sorts of new ideas. Swords, armour, sorcery, that sort of thing. They also get the credit for fire (cf. Prometheus) because the Righteous have never believed that humans could possibly have done anything for themselves, and still don't.

These were angels, spirit creatures with no bodies and since they were immortal they were created with no naughty bits. No need for reproduction if you never die. They could only have sex with humans if they possessed human bodies. We don't need that silly scene where the lizard rips off its man-mask to reveal a face that could not possibly fit behind the mask. Our demons are spirits.

The angels took over human society and their offspring were greedy giants who consumed everything the humans produced and still demanded more (are we folding the tinfoil into a hat shape yet?).

The first lot of giants, aka Nephilim, were destroyed in Noah's flood but they are mentioned again in the Bible after the flood. Can't lay my hand on chapter and verse at the moment, I think it was in Numbers. How come they were still around? Simple.

The angels are spirits who have taken over human bodies. When those bodies die they simply go looking for another. So after the Flood, they just waited for humanity to breed like chavs, possessed a few more humans and carried on as before. This time they stayed away from the Israelites and picked on some barbarians, who didn't know about them so were easier to control. We know God often allowed the smiting of non-Israelites, probably because they used Lot's wife to salt their chips.

Since the angels are immortal (as spirits, not bodies) they must still be here. They can be blamed for the Roman and Greek gods, the Norse gods, all sorts of Pagan gods - there were two hundred of them and only one, Azazael, was bound and incarcerated. We still have 199 to play with.

Where are they now? Who are they in? Why is there such a quest to make the human body immortal and why, in particular, are the EU so obviously intent on suppressing Christianity?

Well, if you wanted to take over, and there was a book containing information on what you really were up to, wouldn't you try to stop anyone reading it? Wouldn't you try to replace it with a book that does not give your game away?

That's right. Jam that hat on tight.

End of Icke mode. You can all take your hats off now.

I made it up. All of it, obviously, but I made it up using referable material. I made tenuous links between totally disparate things (the Merkozy tag was an absolute gift, I admit it) and I think, with a bit of work, this could be turned into a conspiracy theory that will have the Guillibles in a total panic and more importantly, desperate to buy the book it's in.

I have loads of reference material on this because I use it in the entertainment fiction. Stuff Harry Potter and his made-up magic. I use real demons and real spells, well, at least, ones you can look up. Best not read those parts aloud, just in case. I have several versions of the Bible, a good bit of Crowley's stuff, books on Celtic and Pagan legends, copies of the Key of Solomon, the Goetia and the Grimoire of Armadel, and many more. Don't look so impressed, I bought them in paperback from Amazon. Don't bother with Armadel, it makes no sense at all. Goetia is at least full of things to scare the children, and works best on the grown-up ones.

With a little refinement I am sure this could blow Icke's lizards out of the water. I have a feeling he started with the lizards first and rooted around for a basis later. Not too hard, most religions had some kind of lizard thing among their gods, but why make work for yourself? Get the basis first and make the conspiracy solid. Then let the Gullibles have it with stuff they can look up for themselves.

No, I can assure you I am not going to pretend to be the second coming of Jesus. No chance of convincing anyone of that. I don't even have a beard, and the marks on my hands are quite obviously burn-marks. Healing up nicely, incidentally, and I now have new and hole-free oven gloves.

I might, if Wogan is still available, pretend to be the other guy. Yes, I think I could pull that off. I could borrow Lady Gaga's prosthetic horns.

All ideas for expanding this into something that will leave the likes of Icke and von Daniken in the dust are welcome. The main difference between me and them is that I'm not pretending it's real.

Of course, that could be a ruse to throw you off the scent...

(Panoptica first or it'll never get finished, but once that's done I'm definitely going to have a play around with this. Crackpots have made fortunes with shit like this).

The Smoke Wars - real life.

2012-01-05T04:24:00.000Z

For those willing to see it, the War on Smokers has become the War on Drinkers, the War on the Overweight, the War on Salt, the War on Sugar, the War on Drivers... the list has no end and the method is always the same. Watch for the endgame on smokers because exactly the same is coming for you. Look at the comments on this article. Never mind the article, just the comments. Are you a little on the portly side but hate smokers? Are those comments something you might have applied to smokers, maybe even written? How do you feel to see the same hate applied to you? Now, how do you think smokers felt about it?

If you're a drinker who hates smokers, how do you feel about an MP spending his time chasing a PR group who are trying to prevent a persistent verbal link between strong lager and violence? Evil Big Booze is trying to pretend that not everyone who has a drink becomes a raving psycho. Don't drink Stella? It's only about 5% alcohol, which by today's standards isn't all that strong. How strong is your preferred tipple, and have you stopped beating your wife yet? Joke? I'm a smoker and a drinker. I'm not laughing.

Watch the faces in the chip shop when you ask for lots of salt on your chips. Watch the faces behind the counter when you ask for booze or fags. Watch the faces when you buy more than one cream cake. Try putting the booze at the end of your supermarket-shopping and watch the till operator's face as it reaches them. It's not yet all-pervasive but if you watch, you'll see it and you'll see it increase over time. The disgust at the filthy subhuman.

You want to see real disgust? Buy whisky before lunchtime. They assume it's your lunch (It's not - well, not every day). It's way beyond smokers now. We're all being denormalised. Fit the pattern or expect contempt, and expect to pay an ever increasing cost for your filthy addiction.

Once there was duty applied to tobacco, increasing it in the name of Public Health became easy. It's bad for you so you must be deterred from buying it by increasing the cost. So it was with alcohol, so it was with petrol, so it is now with fizzy drinks in France, and so it will be with any salt or sugar containing product soon. It's the same game.

Just as we smokers are defined by how many 'units' we smoke - whether thin, short rollups or Superkings which contain about four times as much tobacco and it's more processed too - drinkers are classified by how many units of alcohol they drink. Whether concentrated or diluted, it is taken as the same thing even though drinking neat absinthe is a very different experience to drinking the same number of units in beer. One will gradually develop a comfortable buzz, the other will rip your throat out and stuff it up your nose. If you're a regular neat absinthe drinker you're taking a much bigger risk than someone drinking the same units as you in red wine. But then, if you're a neat absinthe drinker you'll have passed out before reading this far so you won't be worried.

The Righteous are already talking in terms of the price per alcohol unit being too low even though nobody, anywhere, prices per unit. VGIF has the quote. These people are no longer talking in terms of imposing a price per unit, they are talking as if it has already happened and now has to be increased. They are talking as if alcohol tax is already applied like tobacco tax, based on the amount sold. They are talking next year's talk already because they are confident of winning.

Why? Because of the smoker ban. Nobody resisted, nobody put up much of a fight other than a few pub landlords, one of whom went to prison as a result and was sprung early due to the efforts of Anna Raccoon and Old Holborn. Having won that battle so easily, the Righteous are confident of winning again, and they are. Their alcohol controls are meekly accepted by the brewing industry, they have an army of mindless drones to attack fat people, they have convinced the gullible that salt will kill them, that all fat is bad, that sugar is a poison, and they continue to push. No safe level of anything, and that includes pleasure.

It seems to me that if we can break the smoking ban then the rest of the controls will fall because they are built on the foundation of that ban. How to go about breaking it has been on my mind for some time and it won't be easy. I still don't have a foolproof battle plan.

There have been repeated calls for a group of us to descend on a pub and all smoke there. I've never been in favour of that because it's the landlord, not us, who will get fined and not all pub landlords are in favour of the smoking ban. As in my fictional world of Panoptica, they have been turned into unpaid monitors and unpaid enforcers through threats. All stick, no carrot, is the Righteous way.

Also, why a pub? Restaurants and cafes are not permitted to decide whether to allow smoking. Neither are cinemas, buses or trains. Why take it all out on pubs?

I was Emailed a link to this article by the author. He parodies the ban by comparing it to a ban on farting. Not an ideal comparison because those delicate little flowers who cover up the smell of a bit of burning leaf with sprays of mysterious and possibly deadly canned chemicals would likely agree with a ban on farting, and also because farting is something all mammals do and can't be helped. A friend's dog brews some exceptionally vicious ones. You wouldn't notice fifteen people with cigars when he's around, you'd just think it was the Aurora Borealis lighting up. Nonetheless, the author's point is valid. It's all about something some people don't like.

What was interesting was the comments. Only two at the moment.

S. Bryant left this one:

It is a fact that smokers continue to blame us for the smoking ban. The following is a post on a Daily Telegraph forum yesterday looking at pub closures. It is typical of the mindset of many smokers.

'Anyway, I shall put my soap box away, I shall leave the podium on the note that NOT one landlord stood up for the rights of the smokers when it was introduced... NOT ONE... no-one disobeyed, they were all perfect little pussies... so don't expect to see me in the pub spending my money to pay their mortgage anyday soon... to hell with them.'

The attitude he describes is one I have often seen, but not here. We are all aware of what happened when Nick Hogan defied the ban and while we applaud his stance, nobody can blame him for not repeating it. The Righteous hit him with a hammer that could dent the Forth Bridge.

Perhaps more pertinent is this one by R. Yates

Nicely put Robert. I too am bored with a section of society that continues to blame us publicans for the ban. Have they stopped using cinemas, planes, buses, restaurants etc. of course not, they are just using the ban as their excuse and sadly often a reason to shoehorn in their political agenda onto us.

It's dull....though I have noticed the bars have improved by the pub bores no longer propping up the bar. Coincidence? I think not!

Have I stopped using other venues since the ban? Yes. I stopped using cafes and coffee shops for lunch or for ... anything. I stopped visiting the local dairy where I used to get a great bacon roll, cup of tea and cigarette while shopping. I have not been inside a cinema for years and have no plans to visit. I used to take train rides for fun but now only when necessary. I don't even browse shops, even though smoking was never allowed in them,. because I don't go into town for lunch any more, ever.

If I was a pub bore, Mr. Yates, you are well rid of me and if I see your name above the door when this silly nonsense ends I will be sure not to trouble you. He doesn't sound like a publican, I have to admit. He sounds more like an ASH drone. But there are publicans who welcomed the ban even though they could have banned smoking on their own premises at any time if they'd wanted. We would obligingly have gone to another pub. That's what they didn't want. They thought that if the smoky pubs were banned they'd have a level playing field but it turns out they now have no playing field at all.

R. Yates maybe never liked smokers in his pub but nonetheless he raises a point that should be addressed. We smokers tend to concentrate on being banned from pubs but we are banned from everywhere. I hear no calls for smokers to descend on Starbucks and light up inside but if it came to crippling business-closing fines, I'd rather lose the Starbucks than the pub. If the ban breaks, which would you rather see survive, the Starbucks or the pub?

What about an open, windswept station platform in the middle of nowhere? We're banned from there too. How about a bus stop that is less than 50% enclosed but still has a no smoking sign? What about shops where nobody has ever smoked but which now meekly display signs telling people not to do something that nobody has ever done in there anyway? They might as well put up 'No fishing' signs but few seem to have realised the creeping control that smoking ban represented.

That smoking ban did something that has yet to materialise in other areas, but probably will. Frank describes it well. Before the ban I would have been unlikely to mention smoking at all online and nobody would have asked. Now we seek out other smoker blogs and are banding together. If I saw someone else smoking in real life, it was just someone smoking and nothing more. Now we exchange a glance and a knowing nod. We are both wary, and with good reason as Jredheadgirl reports. The threat of violence is ever present and drinkers (not drunks, drinkers, and unless you are tea-total, that means you) and fat people ( not blobbies, we are talking just a little chubby here) are starting to get this too. Soon, put salt on your chips and you'll be pulverised by Government-supported thugs before you've finished them.

We are circling our smoky wagons at last. It has taken us too long but we smokers didn't see the template. There is no excuse for the rest of you because it's the same template, the one many of you helped create. The one you thought would never apply to you.

We smokers have concentrated on our exclusion from pubs because that's leisure time but we have neglected our exclusion from the workplace, the lunchtime cafe, cinemas, restaurants, transport (aside from a surge of interest now they have started on private cars) and everywhere else. We cannot even foster or look after children which to me is a positive thing but it isn't for others.

The war against us has been going on for years and really, we've only just begun to talk about it. It's as if the Second World War involved Germany bombing us for ten years and finally someone says "That banging sound, do you think it might be someone shooting at us? Let's form a committee to study it."

We have to actively fight this war. It's no good saying 'Oh they'll lose, they always do' because they keep trying precisely on the basis that one day they will win. We keep saying 'they never learned a thing from US Prohibition' but they did. Every time they come back they have learned something from the last attempt.

We have to learn too and the biggest thing we have to learn is one of Granny's old sayings. "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile". She was underestimating them. Give them an inch and they'll take the damn planet.

Smokers have learned the hard way. If you are an inch over the waistline laws or a shandy over the drinking laws, you don't have to learn the hard way. You can start your fightback now.

If the smoking ban breaks they all break. If the smoking ban stays then all the bans stay and the bans increase and proliferate. You want to be a Puritan Vegan, fine. I have no objection but I don't want to be one.

If you want to stop the rot, start at the source. Trying to stop it halfway along the beam is futile. Hate smokers today and you'll have to hate yourself tomorrow. Do you want to see the smoker-hate that is now posted against the overweight eventually posted against you? Let the hate ride, join in while it's not you, and one day soon it will be you. Or deal with it before it gets to you, as it inevitably will. Choice is freedom if you choose it.

Pat Nurse has something in mind. My own mind works along more devious and cruel paths and I am not well equipped for a march but if you are, this is a good and sensible place to start.

Even if you hate smoking, bear in mind that we are only the beginning and we are near the end of that beginning.

If you still derive delight from your hate of smokers after all you have seen, then we are at the beginning of the end.

It's, uh, not my end I'm talking about, antismoker. Your eventual fate is here. Many of you have already reached that point and it started with ASH and the smoking ban. You really want to live that way?

The Smoke Wars - the fiction version.

2012-01-05T01:24:00.002Z

Parties are over, it'll be at least another week before anyone even mentions any lab work so it's back to writing for me. I'm concentrating on the dismal world of Panoptica because I want to get that finished before real life nicks all my ideas.

It's called Panoptica after the Panopticon, a circular prison where the guard can see the prisoners all the time, but the prisoners can't see the guard. No guard could be looking in all directions at once so the chances of him looking at a particular prisoner at any one time are slim.

However, since the prisoners cannot see the guard, they have no way of knowing when they're being watched and when they're not, so they soon behave as if they are being watched all the time.

The world of Panoptica isn't a prison in the walls-and-bars sense, and the main character is a CCTV operator so you'd think he's one of the guards. So does he, at first.

Nobody knows who the guards are, not even those who think they are the guards. CCTV is a distraction because everyone is watched by actual people at ground level. Dodged the CCTV? Maybe the guards saw you anyway.

I've been thinking up backstory components to slip in here and there to explain how this terrible world came about. Some of these will take the form of "The War On (insert anything enjoyable here)", how the Coalition (all parties in power all the time) pretends they won those wars and how they convince the population that they did.

Some of them are easy. The War on Guns was won by coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone caught with anything even remotely gun-like, while any inter-criminal gun crime is Winston Smithed out of the news. Likewise drugs and knives. The criminals learn that as long as they keep the violence out of the public eye they can get away with pretty much anything. The public are by now so scared of guns and knives that only a total psycho would bother to use one - the sight of one is enough - and the Panoptica Coalition are more concerned with keeping the weapon out of the news than catching the criminal.

I had a 'trauma treatment' set up to deal with this, in which memories of traumatic events can be deleted from the mind. The entire event could be erased from history so effectively that even the victim would not remember the knife. It was a psychological battering, including hypnosis. I didn't think anyone would believe it could simply be done with an injection.

Obesity has been solved. Everyone must weigh themselves in the morning and their bathroom scales are connected by WiFi to the local health centre. Anyone have one of those that transmits from the floor platform to a readout on the wall? You're only one step from Panoptica's solution. The weight determines your permitted calorie intake for the day, and that's what the readout shows you. Not your weight, but the precise types and quantities of food you are to eat that day.

One of the wars 'won' by the Coalition was the War on Smoking. Real people don't smoke any more because anyone caught smoking, or suspected of it, has their embedded chip disabled. Other 'crimes' cause this too, and there are more than even Labour thought of. With no chip they become 'ghosts' and are not permitted anywhere near real people, have no bank accounts and no official homes.

How did they win this war? They banned it from everywhere and put the fines and penalties on those responsible for each area rather than on the smoker. You don't own anything at all in Panoptica, but you are responsible for many, many things.

Those who would get fined soon became unpaid enforcers and unpaid informants. Nobody knows when they are being watched so turning a blind eye to the smoker in the corner is likely to get you fined and maybe ghosted too.

Of course, they didn't really win any of these wars. Those whose weight persistently strayed outside official limits, those who smoked or who drank more than permitted, those who used too much salt or sugar, those caught practicing any religion, were simply deleted from databases and excluded. They did not exist, they never existed. They live in poverty in ghettoes and the Coalition doesn't care as long as they stay there. They are out of the economy, which is doing quite well for reasons too unpleasant to talk of here.

There are parallels with '1984' which is inevitable because I was heavily influenced by that book. This is set further ahead, where doublethink is the norm for everyone and the 'proles' of Orwell's book are not visited by the citizens because nobody knows they exist. It's the pure, clean world Orwell's 'Party' was aiming for. In Panoptica, they have done it.

Real life is getting closer, which is why I have to write faster. That tobacco template is moving ahead on many fronts now and it won't be long before restaurant owners will be fined if they allow you to use too much salt, off-licences and pubs penalised for selling you too many units a week and transport cafes closed down if you put two spoons of sugar in your tea. They will comply and they will enforce the rules because the penalty will fall harder on them than on you.

They'll never know when they're being watched.

Denying denial.

2012-01-03T21:24:00.000Z

Not quite back to full speed but the healing qualities of the fry-up are starting to kick in. Good thing it's not taxed yet.

It won't be long. France now has a 'fat tax' on fizzy drinks which contain no fat. The tax is on the sugar. Oh, but it's just the fizzy drinks, nothing else, It's just a little bit of tax, you'll hardly notice it and it'll never increase, oh, no, and it won't spread to other foods, of course not.

Will it affect how fat people get? Of course not. If it did then the banmeisters' work would be finished and they wouldn't be able to say "It didn't go far enough. Next we have to..."

This is that one smoking carriage on the train. Those seatbelts that had to be fitted but wearing them was optional until every car had them. The first round of the ever-decreasing 'weekly permitted booze allocation'. It's a beginning, it is certainly not an end.

Look at that smoking ban. "Just in enclosed public spaces. We wouldn't extend it to outside, that would be silly".

"Just outside areas where children go."

"Just outside areas where children might go."

"Just outside areas. You're okay to smoke in your car."

"Just in cars with children, just in cars, never in your own home, but maybe in rented accomodation, and maybe we'll make it impossible for you to sell a house if you smoke..."

It never ends. They never stop. Nothing is ever enough. This little tax will grow and spread like ringworm right across the food industry.

I think though, this time, one company has finally worked out how the template functions.

Earlier this year Coca-Cola Enterprises slammed the tax proposal by suspending plans for a 17million euro investment at a plant in the south of France.

Not quite the usual roll-over-and-accept-it that the banmeisters are used to. Big Cola are going to be villified for it but I hope they stick to their guns. Even though I never drink the crap they sell, other people still have the right to buy it.

The normal rules apply here. Remember how, if you argued that you smoked because you liked it, you were 'in denial'? The Righteous don't like it therefore nobody could possibly like it therefore smokers only do it because they are addicted.

Then booze. In the habit of having a sherry once a day? You're addicted. Try claiming you just enjoy a sherry once a day and you are 'in denial'.

And now fat. The Righteous say you're fat. If you say you're not, there's nothing wrong with you, guess what?

You will be told this through a smug grin by politicians, medics and fake-charity workers who are fatter than you because you're buying all their food. They will not realise the irony because these rules are for you, not them.

The worst part of the whole charade is that the Government is itself in denial. Denial that these taxes are for any other reason than to take more money from us. Petrol, booze, tobacco, food, they say they want us to moderate our use but if we all did that, their tax take would plummet. Really, they want the likes of ASH promoting smoking every day, the BMA drawing attention to those burgers and chips we might otherwise have overlooked, the Liver Lot telling us there's no point cutting back on the booze in January because the government needs the duty, and so on. Keep it in the public's mind so when they see it in the shops, they'll try it to see what the fuss is about.

Smoking rates were in decline before the current antsimoker frenzy. The surge in activity wasn't to finish off smoking, which was going out of fashion all on its own, but to boost its appeal.

You'll see occasional stories in the news about marijuana or cocaine or heroin but these are illegal, and attract no tax. You'll find three or four stories a week telling you how rebellious and anti-establishment smoking is and you will note that the term 'legal product' appears in every one. ASH didn't ban tobacco advertising. They took it over. The baccy income was in decline and they had to do something about that.

As with tobacco, petrol and booze, once the food-tax flow starts the government will not want it to stop. If everyone stopped drinking the fizz, the tax would move to crisps (fat and salt, so they're done for anyway) and while there will be fake-charities aplenty to tell us we shouldn't have these things, bans on when and where they can be consumed, plain packaging and warnings and an immense cupboard behind every shop counter with everything in it, nothing that is taxed will be formally banned. We'll just be paying extra tax to fund those who beat us up when we leave the shop.

It's all about keeping the tax flow going to fund the anti-everything brigade.

If they tell you any different, just tell them they're in denial.

... and there it goes.

2012-01-02T18:28:00.001Z

The parties are finally over. Detox time. My head is full of sand and my liver is soaking in a bath of distilled water. I should really know by now - in Scotland at least, the first two days of January are total write-offs.Absolutely nothing productive happened for two entire days. It's a great country. It's very, very quiet around here today apart from some groaning and the clink of clearing-up.

The British Liver Foundation are quick off the mark, telling us there is no point in detoxing because that means we'll all just start drinking again in February. I actually hadn't planned to wait that long. Just until the pain recedes. The article contains some biological 'facts' that someone studying O level biology could rip to bits so I won't bother.

The consensus on New Year Resolutions seems to be 'drink more, smoke more, eat more' so that's okay. Most of the smokers I met were much younger than me so that antismoking propaganda is obviously working as intended.

Expect much more troll activity on the smoker blogs this year. You'll see a lot more of 'Janet47' who logs in with a different IP each time and a lot more from the resident troll. Their bans are breaking in more and more countries, their hate-fest is falling down (not one single incidence of hand-waving, not one mention of third hand smoke in all the various houses visited this New Year) and they are now cornered beasts. They will get nasty at the end. These are not ordinary trolls.

They've been busy elsewhere today because they've found out that The Enemy has been talking to someone in Government and they're the only ones allowed to do that. This might spark an investigation into the activities of lobbyists which ASH imagine won't apply to them. Could be interesting.

Okay, the annual Scottish recycling-bin-filling escapade has come to a close and when I have full control of all my fingers again I can resume typing.

Here it comes.

2011-12-31T17:49:00.000Z

I'll be out later and back in the early hours. Tomorrow I might attempt to post or I might stay in bed, depends how it goes. The Scots take New Year very seriously indeed. Nothing starts before 9 pm and the parties really only get going after midnight.

Have a good evening, all.

Dirty macs and pebble glasses.

2011-12-31T03:07:00.000Z

I used to have a grubby overcoat. I left it unattended once and it escaped. I have no idea where it is now. Probably returned to the wild and building a nest somewhere.

It was great. Literally. A grey greatcoat from the Army surplus store. You could put a full pint glass in the pocket and not spill a drop.

In Cardiff there used to be (maybe still is) a shabby cinema called the Prince of Wales in which, it was said, the moaning and groaning from the screen was often interrupted by the rustling of paper tissues and empty crisp packets. It was also said that if you stayed still throughout the film you risked being stuck to the seat. Despite being the proud owner of a grubby overcoat, I never entered the establishment to check. They wouldn't have let me in anyway. My glasses were barely curved and that apparently marks me as a mere apprentice perv. The folk going in there had proper bottle-end glasses, so thick that their eyes looked bigger than their heads, and coats that needed no hangers because they could stand on their own.

So the filthy cinema existed and I didn't want to make any use of it. How did it impact upon my life? Not at all.

Porn is of little interest to biologists, I hope, because that's my excuse. It's like an anatomy lecture. I once sat on Cardiff Queen Street station, facing the stairs from below, when an extraordinarily attractive, skimpily clad and very slim girl climbed those stairs. Guess the first thought in my head? I was about 20. What was my first thought? I'll tell you.

"You'd never get thirty feet of intestine in there".

My second thought was "Maybe I'm working too much."

When you know what the human (and animal) body looks like on the inside and have handled and experimented with those internal bits, naked bodies don't have the same effect as they do on other people. I don't see your skin colour at all. I don't even see your skin. I see the bone structure, the musculature, the adipose tissue, the churning of your intestines, the flow in your capillaries and watching porn films, all I see are the mechanics of reproduction. It's as exciting as any other instructional video. Might as well have Mr. Cholmondley-Warner in grey suit and neat moustache explaining it and pointing out the pertinent bits with a long stick.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some emotionless Vulcan-type thing. I'm not a medical doctor either. I have spent more time than is healthy around pieces carved from animals and humans and been present when those pieces were carved from the corpses and sometimes from not-yet-corpses. I'm no use to you if you get stabbed while I'm there because I don't have even first-aid training, but I won't lose my head or pass out either. You'll lose consciousness to the sound of me droning into my phone "No, I don't think he'll survive that long. Can't you get here sooner? He really doesn't look very well at all." I promise to resist the urge to see how far in the knife is and to take a sample from your perforated transverse colon.

But I digress. Porn is of little interest to me and anyway, those that are sometimes put on at Smoky-Drinky involve blokes that just make me feel inadequate. All I'm thinking is "How come he doesn't pass out, since most of his blood is pumping that thing up?" and "She is going to regret stretching her rectal sphincter to that extent when she gets older". I have learned to keep quiet during such screenings.

Strip clubs are of no interest to me either. Having some woman who wouldn't normally give me the time of day taking her clothes off and waggling her baby-buffets at me is no different to someone standing the other side of a bulletproof glass screen and drinking whisky at me. It's just cruel.

I don't wish to visit strip clubs so... I don't go there. It's not a problem. I don't care if one opens next door, I still won't go there. Will I object to it? Why would I? I'm not going in there and their clientele are not likely to want to come here (even though I now have a USB microscope so could potentially wave my bits visibly) so it would be no different to having the Plastic family living there. It might even be preferable.

Actually... if there was any kind of club next door... and I put up a sign saying "You can smoke in here all night for a fiver"... and drilled a few peepholes in the wall... hmmm.

There have apparently been lots of new 'Chicken Choker' clubs opening in the UK because of what the banmeisters like to call a 'loophole' in the 2003 licensing law. They could open just like a karaoke bar - which is far more of an offensive thing in my view. Then the new law clamping down on them came in, in 2009, classing them as 'Wankemporiums' or some such thing, and councils who have never had a place for sperm donor rejects to gather have banned them anyway.

Sounds a bit like that idea for 24-hour licencing that is now blamed for excessive drinking while pubs close at a rate of knots exceeded only by a Vindaloo-and-beans-powered hydroplane and none of them are actually open 24 hours and never have been. Set up the perceived problem so you can then impose the controls.

That wasn't a loophole. That was intentional. 24-hour licencing was never going to be widely taken up but it's a great thing to blame excessive drinking on while real booze intake falls. Let loads of clubs open for the dirty mac brigade through a 'loophole' and then you get the drones all worked up and close the loophole and they think you're wonderful. The Brown Gorgon tried to do the same with casinos but he was too dim to use the insidious techniques of Tiny Blur so he failed. Never mind, the 'no safe level of gambling' meme appeared anyway.

The Cleggeron Coagulation are not smart enough to see how this game works so they're playing along like good little Borg drones. Both have even pretended to give up smoking as instructed. If they use Electrofag, they dare not admit it.

(By the way, the Electrofag cigar isn't much good. Ordinary Electrofags can do the flavour and they work better. I'm thinking of trying an Electropipe one day, anyone tried one?)

The 'Down with this sort of thing' groups are out in force. There must be no knob-hardening experiences available even for those so repellent that even Slotgob wouldn't defend them in a human rights case on the grounds that she's not sure they qualify as human. Even the RSPCA would have to think twice. No equality for the frictionally challenged then.

I've seen a little Japanese porn in the past. I do not recommend it, it is nasty. To my analytical mind it appears to be based on the premise that women do not like any kind of sexual experience and must be forced. That is a horrible perspective, it is akin to the Middle East idea that women are pure until they have had sex (no matter how) and then they are to be reviled. It is, to be blunt, scary to find that such attitudes exist in the world. It is terrifying to see them arise here.

The Japanese tentacle stuff, well, if that turns you on you are seriously weird. Even octopi have, when shown this, tapped out the Morse code for "WTF?"

But then most of that Japanese stuff is cartoons. Nobody really gets poked in every orifice by a grinning demon who has fifteen tentacles with an elephant penis on the end of each one. Well, nobody I know has ever mentioned such an experience anyway.

Those clubs pay women to wave their bits at men who have no chance at all of ever finding themselves in an amorous encounter with anyone more attractive than a Macbeth witch. So, are the women being exploited? The Daily Drunk Reporter thinks so.

In October a case was brought to light which highlighted the alleged poor terms dancers at strip clubs have to with.

Terrible terms of employment. Waggling your doo-dahs on minimum wage must be so degrading.

Nadine Quashie earned up to £1,265 a night at the club dancing toplesson stage wearing only a G-string and dancing naked in private.

(long pause) ... WHAT? I will waggle what I have for a tenth of that price. £126.50 a night and you can see it all (no touching, no tweezers) and after a £40 bottle of Lagavulin I'll have enough left over to get drunk. Okay, let's say £12.65 each for party rates and it's a deal. If that is exploitation, where do I sign?

Last month she won her three-year battle to take the club Stringfellow's to an employment tribunal.
She had complained of unfair dismissal but was told she had no right to a tribunal because she was self-employed.

Uh... that's exploitation? I am self employed. If those who employ me don't want any more work done, that's the end of that.

On that basis, every self-employed person whose contract ends and is not renewed is exploited. Funny, I never felt exploited when it happened. I felt paid. The work I did was paid for except in a couple of cases where I won't do work for them again, but that, in self-employment land, is called 'live and learn'.

These women are self-employed and can earn more in one night than I can in a month and that is exploitation? The Wimmin think so.

Anna van Heeswijk, of the feminist pressure group Object, told The Times: 'Putting in a nil limit is part of ensuring the safety of women. It's part of a council's responsibility. It's an issue of local democracy.'

So, stopping a self-employed woman earning £1265 in one night just for dancing around, no more, without even makeup or wardrobe assistants to pay, is part of the emancipation of women, is it? You idiot, Anna, these women could earn enough to retire at 40 before it all goes to gravity and then set up in business or just live off the interest. If there was any call for hideous little old men to do this I'd be right in there even though I can no longer retire before 55 even if there was a secret massive market for badly-formed nude monsters with bits even mice laugh at..

This ban on chutney-chucker clubs will not affect me because those clubs are of no interest to me, but they are just another smoking ban to those who can see it. You didn't like the smoky pub so you didn't go there, yet you banned them and protected all those smoking bar staff and owners from other people's smoke by putting them on the dole.

I don't care about what happens inside the Tadger-Tugger's Club so I don't go there, and yet I am supposed to be offended by this? Why? I have never seen it and avoiding seeing it is easy. I see a sign saying 'Wankers, this way' and go the other way. As in the old days when an antismoker could open a pub door, say "Pooh, my delicate girlie nostrils cry the tears of the Nile at the stench of reality" and then fuck off out of everyone's way.

So what happened to diversity? We used to have that before it became a legal requirement and now we don't have it any more. We used to have all kinds of people living in this country, some nice and some nasty, but the law and the MSM is pushing us into blue overalls, Chinese-style.

The drones don't see it. They are not pushing diversity. They are pushing conformity.

Tighter and tighter conformity.

What we are supposed to conform to isn't yet clear but consider that China now has control of most of the world and....

Mae win ti

Crabs, Spices, Orange, Ginger and Beer.

2011-12-30T02:13:00.000Z

Right, well, if I can, for a moment, draw everyone away from making more of a bloody mess of the comments than the troll did, perhaps we can discuss something serious.

Apologies to Pub Curmudgeon for turf-trespassing but I doubt he'd review this one anyway.

Beer.

Specifically, the most bizarre beer I think I have ever tasted. It's called Crabbie's Spiced Orange Alcoholic Ginger Beer and I know, it sounds like something concocted by a drunken maniac out of whatever was left of the flat cider, decaying fruit and Creme de Menthe at the end of a particularly virulent New Year party.

Crabbies - I think of green ginger wine.
Spiced - I'm thinking rum.
Orange - what's that blue stuff? Bols? Or is it the clear stuff? Cointreau? I've never tried either sober and didn't like them drunk so I'm not sure.
Alcoholic - well duh. That's three drinks so far, I think we can take the alcohol as read.
Ginger Beer - that's a mixer. Also known as root beer.

Now, imagine drinking something that tastes like all of them at once. A cocktail invented by Asmodeus himself when he was devising new ways to torment W.C. Fields or George Best.

It looks like beer. Well, perhaps a bit light for beer but not as light as lager. It's 4% ABV so it's about average beer strength. It smells like ginger beer and it tastes like a pint of Crabbie's Green Ginger wine that someone has diluted and then dropped a fruit bowl and a spice rack into.

The weirdest part is that it's not unpleasant. If you're expecting it to taste like beer you're going to get a hell of a shock but once you get over that it's okay.

Not one I'll buy a lot of but maybe once in a while for novelty value. I had two because they were on special offer at Morrison's but it's not one I'd buy at full price. If you like the weird and the wonderful, give it a go.

As for me, I'm off to cleanse my palate with whisky.

Comments

2011-12-29T15:52:00.003Z

I decided to give Disqus a try. It's been recommended before, and often, but I was just too lazy to bother with the change. Amusing Bunni mentioned it again so I thought hey, worth a try. It lets you reply to specific comments rather than just adding another one at the end of a long list. Might make it easier to follow conversations.

It 'says' it's importing the Blogger comments. There are a hell of a lot of them so it might take a while.

We'll see how this works out. If it's crap I can revert to Blogger. All your comments are still there on my Blogger screen.

Update: That was quick. The order is a bit jumbled but new ones should follow a proper thread pattern.

We'll see how this thing pans out. If you use NoScript you might have to 'allow Disqus.com'. If you block all cookies you'll need to allow disqus.com in the 'exceptions' list. Couple of clicks.

Sugar.

2011-12-29T04:35:00.001Z

In New Zealand, a man called Frankenstein is calling for a tax on sugar.

Really. Sugar. That basic chemical that all your body cells run on. A lack of which will cause your body to burn protein for energy, send you into ketosis and eventually kill you.

It's okay though. Mr. Frankenstein has the answer. He'll sell you some water.

This is way below the level of biological knowledge we were once expected to understand at O level. By the end of the first year at university I had all the pathways and equations in my head. Only for the duration of the biochemistry exam, of course. Now I just need to remember which book they're in and they are conveniently all in one very big book.

Salt and sugar are essential to life. If you don't eat fast food and never add any salt, you are risking salt deprivation. No, there is not enough in natural foods. That's why we started digging it up in the first place.

The sugar doesn't have to be refined and it can be in the form of some carbohydrates, such as starch. Not cellulose, mammals can't digest that. You need it or your body will break protein to make it and it will throw away the bits of the protein it doesn't need. Some of that will appear on your breath as acetone. You can spot Atkins diet afficionados with a quick sniff.

It's not good for you. Metabolically, it's a disaster. Your body can use protein for energy but it's not designed to do that for very long. This is a backup system for use in emergencies, it is not designed to be a way of life.

Ruminants such as sheep, goats and cows get no sugars directly from their diet. None. All their sugars are made in their liver from fatty acids. Bacteria in the rumen break their cellulosic feed and the cow absorbs their waste products. There's a reason they evolved to live on bacteria crap, and indeed on bacteria because they get their protein when the bacteria are digested further down the gut. It means they can live on cellulosic stuff like grass, which is no use to humans. Cows can't digest it but bacteria can. Since the cow's bacteria can make all the amino acids, and the cow's liver can make sugar from fatty acids, cows can live on newspaper and urine. Their bacteria will make everything they need from that.

We can't do that. Our bacteria are mainly in the lower gut, too far down to be digested. They are throughout the gut, sure, but not enough to provide a protein source in the stomach. Our livers can make sugar from fatty acids but they are set up primarily to deal with actual sugar. Glucose, specifically. The alternative pathways are a backup and will be overwhelmed if over-used.

So yes, we could live with no sugar input. But not for very long.

This proposal is a tax on staying alive. A breathing tax cannot be far behind.

Ink and pixels don't mix.

2011-12-29T03:16:00.001Z

Still trying to get those cartoons on Kindle. The ones with no words seem reasonable but I really need each one on a separate page - and Ebooks have no concept of 'page'. When it puts two to a screen, the ones with captions are unreadable.

I think it would work best with cartoons drawn and sized with the Kindle in mind. Some of these predate the ZX-81. Maybe they can be made to fit but I think I'm going to have to size each one individually before loading them.

I'll try again tomorrow.

Nutcracker.

2011-12-29T00:47:00.000Z

Mark Wadsworth has long been cataloguing the Great Bovine Uprising in which our proto-burger stocks insist on killing us back. Most cases are the cause of stupidity, people who have fallen for the Green hype that all humans are evil and all animals are peace-loving hippies who avoid stepping on ants. Nature is nasty and farm animals are not pets.

It's important to know the difference between ewes and rams before you get into a field. Ewes will run away. Rams will not. Cows are well aware of the relative size and strength of us and them and are likely to come over and see what you're doing. If they don't like what you're doing, you're in trouble. If there's a bull in the field, start with the premise that he doesn't like you and harbours a strong desire to stamp on your face. Most of the time you'll be right. Pigs... will eat you.

All well and good, but what about underwater fishy rebels? Even big ones can be hard to see in murky water. I don't mean sharks, I mean the sort of thing that has me typing with one hand because the other is guarding my bits. Sharks tear chunks out of you and you are likely to die fairly quickly, possibly without even knowing what hit you.

Shark attacks are as nothing when compared to a fish whose mode of attack is to bite your nuts off. Yes. Feminist fish! With a taste for raw sweetbread marinated in river water.

'Amazingly,these things are quite elusive so we had to be patient catching one. Weput a line into the water and waited for it to bite.

I do not want to know what they used for bait.

Update: Looked at the pics again. 40lb? I'd say it's closer to four. Still, that mouth is big enough to take a lump out of your lumps and that's bad enough. The day you have to have a cricket box in your fishing bag is the day I stop fishing!

The Troll Poll

2011-12-28T22:46:00.004Z

I have added a poll, first time I've tried this.

The troll isn't a big problem. There is no gardening and no lab work, it's dark for most of the time here now and the weather is definitely not wide-brimmed hat weather. I'm staying in and writing so I'm at the computer most of the day so I can have Blogger's comment list open in another window and stomp the troll as soon as he appears.

However, I do not consider this blog mine. I didn't pay for it and at least half the words here were written by others in the comments. My own inclination is to simply delete every word the troll posts but I realise that isn't fair on everyone else who has to wade through his crap to find something worth reading.

If I block proxy servers, that would block some legitimate visitors who use them.

If I disallow anonymous comments, that would block those who don't want to have to sign up for an account.

So that leaves moderation.

Moderation would slow down comment conversations. Not by much at the moment because as I said, I'm going to be here all the time for a while. There will be times when I'm away at the lab that would mean it could take some hours to get the comments posted but lab work cannot start for at least a month. Those who pay for it are all on holiday, and when they're back, it'll start with meetings.

I put it to you, the reader. Would you tolerate delays in your comments appearing, or would you prefer to leave the troll window open?

Here's something for the troll to consider. Not one word of his, in any incarnation, will ever appear on this blog again. I will not respond to anything he says in the moderated comments or by Email. I can hold a grudge to the end of Time but in his case I'm willing to apply an extension.

So what say you? The troll will claim he wins if moderation goes on but does that really matter if nobody ever sees his words again? Who will he brag to? What has he won, beyond his own permanent exclusion?

This is not a totalitarian blog. I am not going to impose conditions here, I am going to ask the readers what they want.

Should he stay or should he go?

Update-
Whoops - forgot. The poll runs to 2 pm (GMT) on the 31st. So if the vote is 'moderate', he won't have anything to do on New Year's Eve.

Everyone is Saved!

2011-12-28T18:36:00.002Z

A politician, lying.

Picture led by the nose from here.

It seems the Cameroid's latest tax wheeze has been stamped on by his masters. They won't let him penalise everyone because of a few who can't handle their booze.

Experts believe the proposal could save up to 2,000 lives a year and cost drinkers around £700million per year.

The money generated could be ploughed into the NHS.

Well that makes no sense at all. If the NHS has two thousand fewer people to deal with every year, then they need less money, not more. In fact, since nobody gets heart attacks or cancer since the smoking ban, nobody gets hypertension because of salt controls, children don't fall out of trees or play boisterous games because of health and safety, and women can check their boyfriends for violence before taking them on, we don't actually need the NHS at all, do we? The Experts have told us that their interventions have worked and so, according to the Experts, the NHS is now superfluous. Nobody gets ill or damaged any more. They have Numbers to prove it.

All that's left for the NHS to do is to take in the elderly and neglect them to death, which could be just as effectively done in their own homes. Although maybe not, because those pesky relatives might feed them and keep them warm. The medical profession cannot possibly allow such amateur meddling in the affairs of the old. I am sure the local council will provide home don't-carers to make sure all those people are neglected to NHS standards.

Well, that's that. All done. We can now safely disband the BMA and sack all those who have been so busy making sure we're all living the Puritan way, because their work here is finished.

Seriously, folks, we're all just fine now. You can go. Sir Liam and the rest, 'bye now.

Close the door behind you.

In between boozings.

2011-12-28T16:29:00.000Z

Visitors have gone and most of the clearing-up is done. I have enough empty bottles to start my own recycling centre. Quite a few nearly-empty too. I'll deal with those later.

Despite being the only smoker here, I did not see one instance of hand-waving or nose-wrinkling. Not one fake cough, only real ones, mostly caused by drinking booze down the wrong pipe. See, antismokers? It is not necessary for nonsmokers to be like you. You're the odd ones.

Strangely, nobody died of second hand smoke and nobody even suggested smoking outside. Outside? That's where all the fresh air is, for anyone who wants it. It's moving around a lot today, so fast you wouldn't need to inhale. Just open your mouth and wait. Although maybe not, there's a lot of water flying around in the fresh air at the moment. Imagine how clean it will be! Don't bother God today, folks. He's washing his air.

Not one liver failed, nobody gained any noticeable amount of weight, no heart attacks and no spontaneous popping of the eyeballs. We tried really, really hard but none of those terrible things came to pass.

Ah well, New Year next. That usually puts Christmas in the shade. I suppose I'd better let some liver grow back over the next few days.

Right, time to browse the news for lunacy. It doesn't usually take very long.

Just asking for trouble.

2011-12-27T17:10:00.002Z

Cadbury's new owners, Kraft, have decided that people are not eating enough chocolate so they are going to spend huge amounts of money making the products visible.

Well I never have any trouble finding them. They are usually in a display so large you can find them by chocolate smell alone. Kraft are about to waste six million beer vouchers promoting chocolate while all around, the banmeisters are preparing to lock it all away behind the shutters, along with the fags, the booze and the fizzy drinks.

The cheeeldren might eat them and there is no safe level of chocolate. It's addictive and will cause heart disease, browning of the lips and enlargement of the midsection. If a child so much as sees a chocolate bar they will soon develop a five-bar-a-day habit and end up on the street, sleeping in the gutter and stinking of Bourneville.

Sticking your head above the parapet at this time is a bad idea, Mr. Kraft. The drones are already primed to believe they will soon be assailed by legions of rotund spotty beggars, desperate for a few pennies because they haven't had a Toblerone since breakfast. Second-hand obesity has already been suggested, and now you can even catch obesity if you hang around with chubbies.

Chocolate addiction is already well established in the popular consciousness. That part is easy. Warning labels are on the way, with pictures of rotting teeth and spotty faces and overhanging bellies. Then will come plain packaging, and then the behind-the-counter sales. Really, Mr. Kraft, there is no sense in making your products more visible. You're just making them easier targets.

I haven't heard 'Big Chocolate' mentioned yet although Kraft would better fit the monicker 'Big Cheese'. The 'Big Food' one covers it all, perhaps, but it would be nice if the banmeisters tried to develop a little bit of humour. If they did that though, they wouldn't be banmeisters.

I wonder if that 'Old Jamaica' chocolate is still around? I haven't seen it for a long time. For some reason I have a hankering for a chocolate bar flavoured with booze. Oh wait, it's just after Christmas. There should be discount liqueurs available!

I think I'll pay a visit to Local Shop later.

Was there a special at the knife shop today?

2011-12-26T23:12:00.000Z

Two years ago, just before Christmas, there was a fight in our local Tesco. Two elderly ladies had chanced, at the same time, upon the last bag of sprouts. When I heard about this my first thought was to imagine them saying "You take them." "No, you take them." "You take them or I'll thump you." I am not a fan of sprouts and would, if sent to get some, wait until there were none left so I could report "There were none left."

This year people were buying them on the stalk, which mystified me. Surely you're paying for the weight of the stalk, which is even less edible than the sprouts?

People often fight for things I can see no reason to fight for. I would never queue all night or barge into shops to be the first to have the latest gadget. I'd wait a few months until the price came down. Besides, if you're first to have a video phone, who will you call? Nobody else has one yet.

I hope video phones never become popular. Some women wouldn't answer until they'd done their hair and makeup. To be fair, some men too. Personally I'd have a selection of latex masks beside the phone. Lord Lucan, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and so on. If I was feeling vindictive I wouldn't bother with the masks, but I'd have a set of fake hillbilly teeth on standby at all times.

The January sales (which now start around mid-December) have always involved some handbag-swinging and shoulder-barging. Desperate to buy things they don't really need or actually want just because it's cheaper, people batter seven bells out of each other. I have never attended the sales and never will. These days you can just order the stuff online and wait for delivery. Less bother and less bruising.

PC World must be getting desperate. I've been getting three Emails a day which are now at the stage of 'Oh please, please buy something'. Soon they will offer to pay me to take stuff away. I'll let them raise their price first.

Today's sales have taken a new and very unpleasant turn. In London, two people have been stabbed and crowds gathered to get in the way of the emergency services. Old Holborn has video of those crowds, some of whom took the opportunity to pick a fight with the police. I am no fan of the Metropolitan Police, they are one of the reasons I won't visit London because they have interpreted 'anti-terrorist' as 'anti-tourist' and regard anyone carrying a map and camera as a potential terrorist/tourist/legitimate hassle target/DNA donor. besides, London's mayor can't even make the trains run on time. Or at all.

In this instance, however, the police were trying to clear space around a seriously injured man. Somehow they had to fit an ambulance through the London sales crowds and that was never going to be easy. Having those crowds pressing in despite repeated instruction to stay back was not helping.

The police did not stab the man. They were trying to help. Yet I would not be at all surprised to hear about more rioting on the basis that someone was stabbed and the police were involved. "It's the system, man, innit like?"

I doubt any of the rabble read this stuff because I use words of more than one syllable but should one happen by and manage to get this far without total brain burnout, consider this:

Maybe it's not 'the system' that stabs people, loots, burns shops and generally makes other people's lives miserable.

Maybe it's you.

Aftermath

2011-12-26T16:46:00.000Z

Visitors are still here and have to be carefully watched since one of them made Irish coffees using Glen Orchy! Sacrilege! That was why I had Black Bottle available. The Penderyn has been sampled and put away because while I can grit my teeth at the abuse of Glen Orchy (it's the cheapest single malt around), putting coffee in the Penderyn will make for a very chilly atmosphere around here. I have to admit, a single malt does make a very nice Irish coffee, but if they want more they'll be using Black Bottle.

I can't be annoyed. I have a USB microscope which means I don't have to sell all that N gauge because I can see it again -

At a scale of 2 mm to 1 foot, it had been getting difficult. Now I can patch up the paintwork even though no human eye could ever see it. I'll still sell off some rolling stock. I have far too much of it and some is never used.

It's not the microscope Neal Asher described, it's a Veho VMS-004. I installed it on the laptop to make it mobile.The frustrating part is that there are no insects to play with at this time of year.

Speaking of playing with insects, I see our resident dickhead had a cold and lonely Christmas on his own once again, eating a Co-Op turkey sandwich and a single-serving Christmas pudding while hunched over his Macintosh that's running Windows. You really should get a better proxy, troll, and put some tape over your webcam. That free French one isn't one of the best. You get what you pay for.

Santa must have left him some coal because he hasn't gone into hibernation. Had your Christmas bath yet, troll? No hurry, it's not as if anyone wants to spend time in your company anyway.

He now plans to fill the comments with long blank posts which I will delete if they get in the way because there is nothing amusing in them at all. I will keep the copies sent to me by Blogger in case Pat ever needs them as evidence. These 'troll tests' of his are not worth bothering about. I will never ban him from the site because he's just so much fun but like all those with toddler mentality, an occasional sideswipe with a rolled-up Beano is called for. Expect him to claim the deletions as victories even though he is the only one who'll get deleted and the country will resound with laughter at his expense.

Okay, that's Christmas done. I have to take my time with this Penderyn because it's a rare treat. This is the 'Madeira' version and it's very smooth indeed. They make Brecon gin too, and while I'm no afficionado of gin I hear it's very good. It also comes in the tall thin bottle with an inch-thick base, which makes it less easy to knock over.

Oh, the word 'blockage' in the last post attracted some kind of psychoanalyst. Apparently I am in denial about some childhood trauma that never happened but it did but I blocked it out so I don't think it happened but it is affecting me even though I have no memory of it or something along those lines.

I recall my childhood. It was great. No money, but lots of woodland and frogs and lizards and fire-meddling and everything that's banned now. All those things were free. We didn't need money to play with them. Well, a few pennies for the chemicals for explosives and matches, but that was all.

No Xboxes, no DVD or video, not because we couldn't afford them but because they hadn't been invented yet. We didn't feel the need for them. There was no childhood trauma.

No, psychoanalyst, there is no secretly loving and caring me beneath this exterior. There is no 'new man' in here. It's rage-filled smoky-drinker all the way to the middle. You want to find out why? It's simple. The smoking ban. Can you fix that? No? Well then, there is nothing else to fix.

Well, looks like I'm going to be branded 'Censor' by our very own village idiot for deleting long blank posts full of nothing. The irony is not lost on me.

I'll bet it's lost on him.

A Merry Humbug!

2011-12-24T22:14:00.001Z

On Boxing Day, the blockage was removed.

So it's here again. Humbug Day. I have visitors for the occasion which means I will look helpless in the kitchen until control of the cooking is taken out of my hands. It never fails. There are a couple of bottle-shaped things with my name on them and I'm pretty sure one is the Penderyn. I have also been dropping very strong hints about that USB microscope Neal Asher had, so we'll see how that turns out.

My vicious perfectionism has not permitted me to put out the next short story book because I want to check, double-check and then check all over again. This is why editors like me. I don't generally leave them with much to do. That doesn't guarantee the stories are any good but it does guarantee you'll be able to read them.

It'll now be after Christmas so it won't need to be purely about Christmas. The print version will have the cartoons. I decided to put the eBook-version cartoons separate as a free file because I'm not sure how it will look on an e-reader. Should be OK as a PDF on a computer screen but on a little Kindle, it might not work so well. It will therefore be free, as an experiment.

Tesco will be closed for the day. The effect was amazing. I was there yesterday evening after the main flock of gannets had been in and there were bare shelves everywhere. Staff trying to fill them and people with bulging trolleys emptying them. You'd think they were closing down for a month but they'll be open on Boxing Day.

When I was a kid, absolutely everything was closed by lunchtime on Christmas Eve and nothing opened again until the day after Boxing Day. Except the pubs. If you had a present that needed batteries, tough. You just had to leave it in the box for a few days. Nobody considered it at all unusual. Now, the thought of Tesco closing for a day induces panic.

Well, time to imbibe. Many thanks to all who sent in donations - I promise none of it was spent on anything sensible. Thanks to all the commenters (yes, even Drippy Doodlebug, for the entertainment) and I swear I'll be relatively sober by March at the latest.

There might be a post tomorrow. It might not make a lot of sense.

Don't forget to make sure the kids are tucked up tight after you've told them that a strange old man with a sack will be sneaking into the house when everyone is asleep. That's why there's so much glitter in your house, kiddies. It attracts old men who like children. Now go to sleep because if he finds you awake, well, we just don't know what he might do.

Ho ho ho.

All in one.

2011-12-24T19:33:00.000Z

Well, apparently they've found it. Cancer of the oesophagus is caused by everything. Smoking, drinking and easting. The smoking connection to heartburn demonstrates a startling lack of anatomical understanding unless there are people eating lit ones, but then the heartburn link to cancer of the oesophagus is still a matter of conjecture. Acid reflux might be linked to cancer or it might not. The jury is still out on that one.

However...

Reflux is the type of cancer which killed Christopher Hitchens and is seen as a growing danger

... is utter nonsense. Reflux is not cancer. It's not anything that the immune system can deal with.We all experience heartburn when we've overdone things. I haven't had it in years but like everyone else, I've had a dose of it. Some get it often and it hurts, it's unpleasant but nobody dies of it. One of the biggest causes is stress and continually telling people they are doing life wrong will cause lots of stress in those who believe it.

I knew Christopher Hitchens died of cancer. A great loss to the world. If it was cancer of the oesophagus then it probably wasn't smoking that did it. It could have been drink, he made me look like an apprentice boozer, but then again it could have been just plain bad luck. I heard his father died of the same cancer so it's possible he was always at high risk of it and tanking down the booze won't have helped reduce that risk.

One of my aunties died of cancer. Smoking? Maybe. There were seven on my father's side and all smoked, including the One Of Whom We Do Not Speak who is probably in prison somewhere. One dead, six alive, all old smokers, not quite the 50% early death rate we are led to expect. My mother's side has eight, some smokers, some not, none dead.

I can understand people being scared of cancer. It's nasty and a horrible way to die. But are we seriously to be scared of heartburn now? Don't they make Milk of Magnesia any more? Sure, for some it's an unpleasant regularity but for most of us it's an occasional uncomfortable inconvenience. It is, for most people, akin to living in fear of dandruff.

There are, at last, some who question these links.

Lately the DM is absolutely obsessed with linking cancer to obesity. Every day there is at least one new article about this. This focus is a little misplaced when 41% of cancers may be preventable by lifestyle changes compared to 80% of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. So to put things into perspective, most heart disease is preventable, while most cancers are not.

- Pat, Dunkirk, 22/12/2011 5:59

Cancer was all about smoking until the target changed. All those fat people who delighted in sneering at smokers are now in the cross-hairs.

As are the vapers who so enjoyed lambasting their ex-companions.

First they came for me, antismokers, and you did not object, in fact you revelled in the chance to hammer me down.

Now they've come for you, and who will speak out for you?

Me? No.

You're so vain...

2011-12-24T13:46:00.000Z

I bet you think this blog is about you.

Hey Troll. Dickless doubledim, or whatever you're pretending to be today. Take note, I do not spend my days wondering what you're going to do next. You will act as expected, you always do. When I am not writing something specifically addressed to you I am not thinking about you at all. You don't matter.

What are you thinking now? You are sneering to yourself and thinking 'Oh yes I do. The fact that he's writing this proves I'm getting to him'. You will be poised to post a comment to that effect.

You made your mindset clear with your last comment, in which you believed that my random thoughts were there to bait you. In fact, you took the bait a long time ago. You're here, aren't you? You're on the hook already and well on the way to the keep-net.

You will attempt to force me to shut down comments and try to get me to react. You've missed the point. I don't want you to go away. I enjoyed the time Dirty European Socialist tried his games here and I look forward to our games. DES used to at least try to advance an argument in between his tirades of abuse. Do you have an argument? Do you have a point? Is there any point to you at all?

Or are you simply a foul-mouthed boor who enjoys being despised and scoffed at?

Let's find out. Let the game commence. My first move begins now. I already know how you will react but I'm going to enjoy watching you do it anyway.

The Christmas Remenisce

2011-12-24T01:44:00.000Z

I had to join Farcebook again. An old school friend keeps sending Christmas cards and I can't send them back because the dipshit never includes a return address. He mentioned Farcebook, I looked him up and found him - and he's a bloody Marxist now! He was a hang 'em and flog 'em type at school to the extent that the Tory furthest to the right would have said 'Now hang on a minute'.

Well, I thought, I could hardly introduce him to my current Farcebook persona. He'd send the Red Army round to my house. So I have another one, designed to sell my books to commies. They won't like the Brown Gorgon's poem in 'Fears' but they'll appreciate the Coagulation one in 'Dark Thoughts'.

I am shocked and dismayed to find an old school friend has fallen into the deepest trench of Socialism but well, a good capitalist never lets an opportunity slide. I'll be a capitalist one day, if I ever have the money. It's not likely to be soon. Anyway, the books are politics neutral so far and when Panoptica is finished, the far-left and far-right (same thing really) will either read it as something to be aspired to or they'll wake up. As long as they buy it.

There was another of our group who joined the BNP for a while. Again it was odd because he has no racism in him at all, no beef with immigrants in the slightest. At school, we'd have pegged him as the future socialist. People are strange.

A third is into mediaeval battle re-enactments. I last heard of him years ago when he said he had given up smoking. His Farcebook pictures show that he is now bald. I am not. Therefore stopping smoking will make your hair fall out. Hey, it's as scientific as anything the antismokers have ever come out with. At least I have a verifiable sample.

We were a small and scruffy group, the dirtbags that even geeks avoided. We played wargames in one guy's room because he had a long, narrow room with the wargame board along one wall. It was a tray, about fifteen feet long and filled with seven hundredweight of dirt for shaping the day's battle. The 'pieces' were 1/72 scale Airfix models and they had to be right. Not just thrown together. We had the book of rules, played that way for about ten minutes then said 'sod it' and got the airguns out. Eventually we just filled the models with cut-off match heads as we built them. I didn't smoke then but the stuff we inhaled must have killed us all by now.

Oddly enough, the only one who is dead was the non-smoking non-boozer (we were barley wine afficionados in the days before it was weakened) who played for a professional football team and was never involved in our chemical escapades. He wasn't there when the Strepsils tin filled with weedkiller-explosive went up. He wasn't there when we had to keep hosing down the shed because our bonfire became somewhat overlarge. He did not partake of the apple wine that had aged so wonderfully strongly.

All the rest of us are alive and well. The ex-smoking swordsman, the Commie, the Hulk and me.

Funny old world.

We are the British. Resistance is futile. Oh, and "Black!"

2011-12-23T01:31:00.000Z

If you have a set of coloured lights, one for each of the primary colours, and you shine them all at something, the light looks white. If they're all off, then you see black. Where lights are concerned, black is not coloured. White is all the colours.

With pigments, it's the other way around. Black absorbs all visible wavelengths so it has all the colours in it, and white reflects them so it has no colour. Whether you consider 'black' or 'white' as 'coloured' is a matter of which aspect of physics you're looking at.

In the real world, the one not inhabited by the Righteous and the professionally offended (we could call them 'reality deniers') none of this applies to people. It applies to lights and paints. White people are not white, we vary between a sort of pink and an ashen grey depending on how much we had to drink last night. Actually, I have met two white people, and both were very scary. One was a chemist who looked as if he showered in bleach. The other ran the greatest homebrew shop I've ever seen and was known as 'the zombie'.

Generally though, if your skin looks actually white, it means you are not at all well and quite possibly dead.

Not so long ago, you could not buy a blackboard but you could buy a chalkboard. That was before another arm of Righteousness banned them on the grounds that chalk dust will give you rabies, or warm your globules, or something. You also could not order black coffee or refer to a black telephone as 'that black one' or indeed use the word 'black' in any context whatsoever in case it offended someone. Oddly, it never seemed to offend anyone sensible who was black, in the same way that 'whiteboards' or 'white coffee' never offended any sensible white people. Even though white coffee isn't white and very few people are as white as a whiteboard. Incidentally, I used to have a tin of paint called 'Rustin's blackboard black' which was such a tremendously matt black you couldn't see it. Nobody on the planet is that black.

You were not supposed to call black people 'black', you were supposed to say 'coloured', and the Righteous reasoning went that, well, not everyone with non-white skin is black. Some are beige, some yellowish, one I know of was orange for months (too many tanning pills so we sympathetically referred to him as 'Tango'). This served the Righteous agenda of separating 'white' people from everyone else.

Then they changed it again. Now, 'coloured' is offensive even though those who call it offensive are the same ones who insisted 'black' was offensive. The term 'coloured' when used to refer to people was always offensive. It was a useless descriptor because all it means is 'not white' so it covers everyone else on the planet. What about those like me, who have an almost chameleon-like ability to go out for the evening a healthy pink and wake up the next morning ash-grey? Sometimes tinged with green.

PC terminology changes all the time. Fail to keep up and there will be Outrage! Then they will rewrite history right before your eyes.

Hansen was even labelled ‘ignorant’ and ‘overpaid’ by society blogger Toby Young on the Telegraph website - the same newspaper Hansen writes for as a columnist.
Mr Young wrote: ‘Alan Hansen, the overpaid football pundit, just dropped a clanger on Match of the Day. In fact, make that two clangers.
‘Clearly, Hansen’s intentions were honourable. But his ignorance is breathtaking. Is he really unaware that the word “coloured” has been verboten since the mid-70s?’

Mid-70s? Really? I seem to recall Outrage! over the use of the word 'black' in any context within the last ten years. This Righteous switch is recent, so it's no surprise to find someone missed the memo.

What the football chap said was not racist. He was not calling for any kind of censure or control. He merely intended the word as a descriptor. True, it's a lousy descriptor and always has been, but is he really to be branded Hitler because he was using an old copy of the Manual of Righteousness? There are those calling for him to be sacked over his use of the wrong current PC term.

People are desensitised to real racism by nonsense like this. There are white people who beat up black people just because they are black. There are black people who beat up white people just because they are white. That is racism. Yet what causes Outrage! is the use of a word that is currently on the Righteous naughty list.

If a black man called me 'honky white trash' is that racist? I would not consider it racist unless it was prefaced with 'kill the...' It's an insult, yes, but I've had worse. In some contexts it might not even be an insult.

I don't care when I'm called 'wop', 'spic' or 'dago' by people who are too dim to know the proper derogatory term for Italian. I don't mind when I hear, once again, the line 'What do you call a Welshman with a hundred girlfriends? A shepherd'. If you come from Wales you don't laugh at that joke. Not because it's offensive but because you've heard it a million times and just wish they'd come up with a new one. I don't worry about insults because insults are only words, and I can retaliate with words of my own.

I only worry about words when they are accompanied by bared teeth and fists or weapons.

Ron Manager... oh wait... Alan Hansen, did not even intend an insult. Oh look, I just insulted him by using the wrong name. Did he die? Is he bruised? No. It had no effect on him whatsoever. Even though my use of the wrong words was deliberate and his was not.

Counting Cats has an article in which he argues that any culture that must be defended by legislation is a culture that's on the way out. He is right. If the culture cannot survive without laws forcing everyone to comply then that's a culture nobody really wants any more.

British culture, whether English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish has nothing to fear from immigrant peoples. No matter what colour their skin, no matter where they come from, we absorb them. We have never needed laws to force us to do this. They bring new foods and new words and new ways and we'll absorb them too, and often corrupt them to suit ourselves. Eventually we don't even notice the differences.

I was at school with kids with surnames like Tomacevsky and Poslad, in among the mass of Davies and Evans and Prossers. What nationality were they? Welsh, of course. Their families had been in the country for generations. They had definite Welsh accents. Why would I object? My own family includes Barberos and my own surname derives from the German while my first name is Irish. Check my DNA and you'll probably find I'm related to everyone on the planet. I am Multiracial Man, the Ultimate Mongrel and as scruffy as any mongrel you'll ever meet. Racist? Against who exactly? I belong to them all and chances are, so do you.

We had Pakistanis running shops who would call you 'butty' and 'boyo' with Welsh accents. They looked like Pakistanis still, but they were Welsh. And they had no objection to selling bacon or booze. You wanted to buy it, they'd sell it.The stock in the shop had no connection to the owners' religion at all. Islamophobia did not and could not exist. We were vaguely aware of Islam just as we had noticed the church in passing but neither contained anything to frighten us.

None of those people needed laws to 'protect' them from the natives, other than the same laws that applied to all of us and protected all of us from the likes of the skinheads. They were around, sure, but nobody liked them. I never met a white person who liked skinheads and had some unfortunate encounters with those we called 'the Densa boys' myself. Their brand of racism extended to anyone not fitting the old eugenics idea of Aryan, and I don't.

These new laws that claim to promote inclusivity have entirely the opposite effect. When moron after moron can regard the innocent misuse of a simple word as equivalent to marching six million people into gas chambers then something somewhere is very wrong. It is deliberately wrong. It is intended to be wrong. That's why the rules keep changing.

Black people, Muslims,. all you 'minorities', take care when dealing with those who claim to be looking out for your interests. You have moved into a strong culture that will, if it's allowed to, painlessly and effortlessly assimilate you. You will be British, no matter what you look like on the outside, no matter which god you follow, no matter how you choose to set up your home and your life. Everyone here does those things differently anyway, a few more differences won't even be noticed. One Of Us.

The Righteous and their permanent taking of offence is not to protect you. It's not there to save you from slavering white cannibals ready to tear you limb from limb and spit-roast your children. We're not like that. We don't want to force you to be exactly like us and there's no need anyway. Left alone, it'll happen. Resistance is futile.

Yes, the Borg were modelled on the British. Our language is composed of bits of grammar and vocabulary from everywhere we've been and that's most places. Restaurant menus cover most of the recipes we assimilated from all over the world. Clothing is modelled on anything the rest of the world designed and we liked the look of. My own family came here from Italy three generations ago. None of them now speak Italian, hardly any are Catholic, they are primarily Welsh and they drink beer and whisky. Some of them don't even like olives!

So I speak from experience. This country is a Borg cube. Set foot in it and the assimilation begins. It's not obvious, we don't force the issue, it just happens bit by sinister bit. Those Islamic hate preachers can spout all the shit they like, we're sucking in their congregations and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Shout and bawl, preachers. We have fish and chips. This cannot be resisted for long.

The ones trying to stop it are not the immigrants. They are our own malcontents and vicious spiteful bastards who see themselves as polar opposites to the National Front but who, really, are the same. While the NF wanted a 'pure white Britain' (ridiculous since the earliest inhabitants so far discovered were Iberian) and were prepared to use violence to get it, the Righteous want the exact opposite, the destruction of the white race and its culture, but are just as prepared to use violence to get what they want.

Their form of violence comes in the shape of laws. Laws that excuse any non-white violent attacks on whites as justifiable while decrying any white mention of those who the Righteous deem different as being akin to a demand for racial purity.

Let's be clear on this. There is no such thing as racial purity. In fact, if you look at the history of human shagging, it's touch and go whether there is even species purity. We will, let's be honest here, poke it anywhere warm and wet. Rabbits could learn from us.

The Righteous actually think their Frankfurt school crap will work here.They think they can destroy British culture by sending more people from different cultures to live here. We. left alone, would just absorb them and the Righteous know this. So they make up laws to separate us and to put us in fear of those we once welcomed.

Immigration is the UK. It is what we are. It is what we assimilate and what we have welcomed since before Stonehenge. This island at the wet end of Europe has always taken the dregs, the leftovers, the runaways and the mongrels. They come here and they make themselves British and then they look at the rest of the world and say '"We are British. We live in the shitty place at the arse end of the world and we love it here. Fuck you."

We are British. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

The Righteous cannot win here in the long run. Their desperation shows in their Outrage! at trivia. Let them squeal like pigs. It's abattoir time. What they hare never grasped is that while this British culture assimilates what it wants, what it does with things it doesn't want can be brutal. You cannot object. It's our culture.

The professionally offended will arrive here within seconds because I said both 'black' and 'coloured'. Hello, hello to you all. I'll respond when and if I can be arsed.

They, like Dickie Doubledickless, will never work out why I just don't care.

Call it a disability and give me money.

Or maybe we could go back to the old days and just ... get along.

It used to be so easy.

A flying visit.

2011-12-22T21:12:00.000Z

Still on drive-by blogging at the moment. I finished what was possibly the most difficult book review I've ever written yesterday and sent it in. You know how sometimes you read a book, think 'That was really good' and then find you can't articulate why it was so good without giving away so much that nobody would need to read it? Well, it was one of those.

So I sent the review and relaxed with the amusing little film 'The Devil's Rejects' which Amazon sold me cheap, along with a large part of a bottle of 'Glen Orchy' which Lidl sold me cheap. An evening's entertainment for under twenty quid. Damn, I'm tight. Must be the Aberdonian air.

Today, the inevitable happened. The editor wants changes. I also owe this particular editor a short story and I'm still trying to put together the next collection ready for Christmas (electronic only - no chance of getting the print version ready in time). So I will be scribbling and typing and I have a nasty suspicion I will still be doing that on Christmas morning.

The New Year is for Panoptica, which is the current title of the dystopia. It's nicked from a particular type of prison called a 'Panopticon', the principle of which has been successfully applied to our CCTV-infested world.. Panoptica has no prisons. No need.

I now know what brings our hero out of his Righteous-induced trance, how his life plummets from comfort to pain as a result of a trivial transgression he did not even do, and where the 'retired' actually go. I think - I think - I am still a few steps ahead of the real world but they're catching up fast so in the New Year, that project gets priority.

If you get an apparently deranged comment from me, it's probably not me but the Pseudopat troll, who I don't have time to properly torment at the moment. He's not important enough to prioritise, and he's stupid enough to stick around until I'm ready to play tease-the-troll. If you're on Blogger, then I'm always signed in to comment.

Right. Back with something to rile up the Righteous later, once I've done this review again. Hint: It'll have the word 'Black' in it. Start that blood pressure climbing, Righteous.

Fiddling with the kiddies.

2011-12-21T20:04:00.000Z

"Hello Kiddies. Ready to play the Dull and Pointless Life Game?"

Picture reproduced in crayon from here.

History. I remember that. It was the beginning of Grammar School which turned into a comprehensive shithole while I was there and has now been closed and demolished.

I was twelve. I wanted to hear about Cavaliers and Roundheads, the Spanish Inquisition, Napoleon, about Romans and about Knights in armour and what did we get?

The economic development of the Balkans or some such mind-numbing rubbish.

Okay. That might actually interest me now I'm past fifty but to a twelve-year-old this is absolutely in the 'Couldn't give a damn' category. I dropped history at the first opportunity because I saw no reason to stick with it. If it had been tailored to twelve-year-olds at first and built into serious stuff later it would have worked for me.

I have many history books now. If only school history had been interesting I might have done well, although obviously not as a history teacher because Labour made that illegal.

Then there was geography, Not a subject of great interest but not one I objected to either. To those of a geographic bent it might have been fascinating but not to me. I dropped geography before the O-level years too.

Both these subjects are to be compulsory until the age of 16. Which means they join English and Maths as the only compulsory subjects at GCSE (O-level).

Michael Gove is an idiot. He wants to take schools from their Socialist ridiculous curriculum to one that is more proscribed than any in the past and he expects children and teachers to just switch, just like that. One extreme to the other not in a generation, in a term.

Yes, there should be more real subjects in schools. But forcing history and geography on twelve-year-olds does not improve their lives nor ours. They should be options, yes, and certainly, history classes for the first year could be better designed to get twelve-year-olds interested in the subject, but compulsory?

So what's next, Govey-boy? Compulsory woodwork so we can build the huts you arses want us to live in? Compulsory metalwork to boost the stock of windmill-makers? Compulsory voting?

The thing I remember most about being twelve is that if you wanted me to apply myself to the utmost to avoid doing something, make it compulsory. If you wanted me to do it to the best of my ability, ban it.

I doubt things have changed.

The intelligence of politicians certainly hasn't.

Fire.

2011-12-20T23:54:00.001Z

If you put wet wood on a fire, it spits. If you use pressure-treated wood on a fire it spits like Satan with a bad dose of catarrh. If you are putting wood on top of a coal fire you're an idiot. Fireguards are there to catch spits and crackles before they hit the carpet.

I knew these things when I was seven. I was allowed to build and light the fire in the living room at that age and trusted to be left alone with it long before that. Careless parents? No. Respect for fire and how to deal with the problems it might cause were drummed into me from as far back as I can remember.

Fireplaces were the only source of heat in those days. Therefore, anyone with children had to be certain their children knew all about the fire and its dangers. About the fireguard, why it was there, why it should not be touched. All of it.

This is not to place any blame on the mother who has lost four children to a fire. Not at all. These days, few people know how to set a fire and keep it going safely. It's a skill that must be learned and Greenery has ensured that two generations have no idea how to deal with it. I will not blame the mother in this instance.

Others will. But not for the right reasons.

Mr Hunter read from a statement given by Mrs Burrows in which she said: 'It was generally known that Rachel liked a drink and I used to see her with a glass or a bottle in her hand.
'She never used to hide it.'

Mr Hunter asked if she and her husband considered Ms Henson’s alcohol consumption above average and she said: 'Yes.'

When she was taken into Mrs Burrows’ kitchen she said she was 'very vacant.''She asked for a cigarette and I said ‘We don’t smoke’. Somebody brought her one in, I can’t remember who.'She opened the back door and I told her that she had got to come in and close the back door because the smoke was coming into the kitchen and she just fell backwards on the doorstep.'

She is not being blamed for not understanding fire. She is being blamed for smoking and drinking. Evidence? Who needs it? Hearsay is good enough when it's a smoker or drinker in the firing line.

There is nothing to suggest that her smoking or drinking were in any way the cause of this tragedy. She fell over a step, but maybe her house doesn't have a step there so she wasn't expecting one. The neighbours who consider her drinking 'above average' would no doubt consider mine 'positively Satanic'. They objected to her cigarette smoke coming into the house while she was outside and rather than close the door, they insisted she stop. Nice people? I don't think so. I bet they do.

The likely cause of this was the actions of people just like those who try to condemn her for being a smoky-drinker. Those who have prevented children learning about that most basic of human skills, the safe use of fire. Without which we would still be huddled together in caves.

The woman has lost four children and what is the prosecution's case? Another case of smoking and drinking demonisation. She will be told it's her own fault. Is there anything more disgusting?

Give me at least half a bottle of whisky (good stuff, or I will not drink it) and point me at a fireplace and you will see a perfectly safe and correctly banked fire roaring away within half an hour. Drunk? Doesn't matter. This is subconscious now, it's been ingrained since childhood. Give me the rest of that bottle and then hand me wet wood for the fire and I won't put it on. It will spit, and wood should not be on top of coal anyway. Coal burns too hot to be supplemented with wood. One or the other. Coal or wood fire. Start as you mean to go on.

Again, it's set so deep into my mind that it no longer matters whether I'm thinking in words or in bottle shapes. I have never burned myself with fire. Once with phenol and twice with electric grills, with electric irons and other gadgetry, but never with open fire.

The problem here is not booze, and it's certainly not smoking. The problem is education.

Not school education. Real life education.

Handling fire is basic in a way that even learning to read and write can never be. Failing to teach children about fire is failing to teach them how to be human.

Have we really forgotten so much?

Book idea.

2011-12-20T23:03:00.001Z

The trouble with new ideas is that you want to drop everything else and do the new thing now. This means that nothing will ever get done so the impulse must be resisted at all costs.

The people I do some work for send me a box of wine every year. I send them copies of the latest book. It's a bit like when you're a kid and your parents give you Action Man's tank and you give them something you made out of toilet rolls and tinfoil but these company people, like my parents, have much more money than me.

One phoned to thank me today. In the conversation he mentioned that he liked short stories because they are ideal for reading while engaged in Nature's way of dealing with the indigestible. Okay, let's be blunt. He reads them on the toilet.

Other writers might be offended by the suggestion that their book might be hanging next to the toilet but my brain is wired differently. The 'Idea' light came on. I thought 'Aha. What the world needs is Bog Book'.

The ideal toilet companion. Very short tales for those quick visits, longer tales for serious emptying sessions and of course, the 'scare it out of you' section for the times when you're convinced it has corners. All sorted according to expected session requirements.

It must wait. It must. I have a request for a short in the works, I have the Christmas eBook (no time to get it edited and ready for ordering print versions) and I have a book review to finish.

The Bog Book must happen. The world is ready, and full of shit, and needs this book.

But not today.

Meddling with marriage, and other things.

2011-12-19T19:13:00.000Z

Apologies to commenters and Emailers for the lack of response from me lately. It's now too late to get the print version of the Christmas collection ready in time for Christmas but there is still possibly time to have it available for all those ebook readers that will no doubt be unwrapped on Christmas morning. I decided to keep the ebook cheap and simple - the experiment with cartoons will be separate in the electronic versions, the print version will have both.

There's lots of parenty stuff around today, which is why I dredged up that image from 1983. I'm not going to bother with links for most of this, much of it is old news anyway.

Children are getting rickets through lack of vitamin D, so while Clegg claims the Tories are taking us back to the 1950s, he conveniently forgets that socialism has already taken us back to the 1890s. Which means that Cameron's pledge to encourage married couples to stay together by paying them actually represents a move forward in time, not back.

I don't see how morality is enhanced when the only reason Government sees for couples to stay together is money. Tax breaks for married couples are fair enough: a married couple occupies the same number of houses as a single person and is allowed the same volume of bin waste each week. However, this idea that all you need to do to fix a problem is throw money at it is typical of modern political thought, no matter the rosette.

Couples should really only stay together because they want to. Staying for financial reasons only is a terrible basis for a relationship, just as young girls getting pregnant as a career choice is a terrible basis for parenthood. That's what happens when you throw money at problems. They get worse.

This extends to everything Government interferes in. They fund the Salt Haters and therefore the Salt Haters must hate salt in ever more minute quantities in order to continue their funding. That's why we now see that our once-a-year Christmas dinner will instantly turn us into a pile of pork scratchings and we have to continue the Puritan minimalist lifestyle on Christmas Day.

Interestingly, these are the same sort of people who once banned Christmas altogether. They aren't Christians this time, but neither were Cromwell's lot, not really. It was just a convenient vehicle for their particular brand of controlling spite, as political correctness is today.

The antismoking groups only exist because they have convinced Government that smoking is a problem. Smoking was in decline before the smoking ban and has stopped declining, in some places increasing, since the ban. They have not solved 'the problem', they have made it worse and that was their intention all along. A group that exists solely to address 'a problem' can only exist as long as that problem exists. They now deny that any contraband tobacco enters the country and will continue to do so until they are ready to make it the next problem.

So it is with the anti-drink groups. Boozing has also declined but we aren't allowed to believe that. We are to believe that last Friday night's once-a-year revelry is a standard weekend in every town centre. The anti-booze groups can't let us believe that the problem is gradually solving itself because that means they, and their funding, are not needed.

The Brown Gorgon extended boozing hours, in theory, which gave rise to Smoker's Hell on Earth. Pubs can open 24 hours a day but we're barred from every one of them. In practice, I have never seen nor heard of a 24-hour pub anywhere near here but maybe there is one somewhere. The 24-hour option means that the antiboozers can claim that we are all raging alkies, plastered from the moment we wake until we pass out. Not everyone is like that, not even in Scotland. There's this bloke across the road...

The Gorgon also planned to give casinos free rein. He didn't do it in the end so the anti-gamblers are now struggling a bit. Especially since we are less likely to risk any money when times are so tight. They must be so disappointed.

There is talk of raising the speed limit on motorways to 80 mph. You just know that the next pile-up will be blamed on the irresponsibility of letting drivers choose their speed rather than on some idiot shaving, putting on make-up, filling in a crossword, updating Farcebook or carving a granite bust of Lady Gaga while driving. These days, clearing up after motorway crashes is a breeze. The police close their eyes and count to ten and when they open them, a Romanian gang has nicked all the wreckage.

All those apparent relaxations of the iron fist of control are traps. Take them up on their offer and you'll get blamed for anything that might happen, even if it would have happened anyway. All that Government meddling ever achieves is to mess things up in the most expensive way possible.

Look at the current state of their family meddling. They are calling for an absolute ban on smacking children, soon to be a ban on touching them so you'll have to goad them up to bed by poking them with a foam-tipped stick or laying out a trail of gummi bears. There are calls to define shouting as domestic violence, equivalent in law and in punishment to flattening your spouse's nose with a steak-hammer before carving it off, microwaving it and serving it with buttered new potatoes and peas.

So there will in the future be no means to discipline children at all. If you so much as raise your voice, you will be in trouble.

Meanwhile, Cameron wants fathers to be forced to sign birth certificates and this will inevitably mean that the father is whoever the mother says it is. She's not going to let Dwayne sign, he's skint and useless, she's going after Paul McCartney because she had the Beatles playing to drown out Dwayne's weird animal noises. She was thinking of Sir P McC at the time, so he's the father.

Men who actually care about relationships are going to become extremely wary and will insist on a chaperone at all times just in case they get blamed for something they didn't put there. Gobshites with a knob that's been down more holes than Sid the Ferret, champion ferret of the ferret fancier's elite, won't give two hoots. They'll just sign the form 'Paul McCartney' anyway, except they'll spell it 'X'.

Women, on the other hand, will be allowed to visit the police station with a photo and a name and check whether that bloke from accounts she met at the Christmas party is really Charles Manson in a ginger wig and glasses.

Neither side can now trust the other. Even if they do get together and pass the CRB checks to show they are suitable child-keepers, they dare not have children because they will not be permitted to control them in any way, even if the child starts dropping dead postmen on the doormat and chewing up their slippers.

It's not even as if they can reasonably expect to keep their child. If they gain weight their child will be confiscated. If their store loyalty card reports they have bought a can of shandy, their child will be confiscated. If someone spots them in MacDonald's their child will be confiscated. If they smoke, their child will be scrubbed with disinfectant, hosed down with formalin, kept in quarantine for six months and then confiscated. Step out of line and they steal your child. Do as you're told and your child becomes uncontrollable. Honestly, who's going to bother?

This is the Government recipe for family life. This is how they plan to improve things and they will spend money as if the numbers are fading from the notes while they do it. This country will soon host the most expensive shambles the world has ever seen. In many ways, we are already Number One.

If the Government really wanted to improve our health and happiness, there is an incredibly easy and astoundingly cheap way to do it. It's the only option they have never considered.

Leave us alone. Don't you have a country to run or something?

Champix for chubbies.

2011-12-19T08:22:00.002Z

The inevitable reasoning behind the demonisation of those who have, shall we say, a little more gravitational influence than average, is now here. There is a miraculous wonder drug that will make you lose weight.

These drugs don't just pop put of the air. They have to be developed, tested, refined, retested, and go through approval procedures. It takes years. In fact, it is entirely possible that the first indications of success in the life of this kind of drug would have been, oh, let's see, around the time the fatties had their first invitations to Denormalised Club.

Denormalise you, ostracise you, push you out of society and then sell you medication so you can get back in. A familiar pattern and one which we will all experience eventually. Well, those who think society is currently worth getting back into will experience it.

Currently there are drugs that interfere with fat absorption but this means that the fat continues in its natural runny form all the way down the gut and emerges as wet slime. Not pleasant, as you can imagine. It can also lead to lower-gut problems as things that should never reach the colon are fermented by hungry bacteria. A combination of acid, gas and runny stuff is not going to brighten anyone's day.

The new one works differently. It works rather like Champix...

‘I think we could mimic the dramatic weight loss achieved with stomach bypass surgery by giving people gut hormone-derived therapies. If you could take away hunger, food is not attractive.’

Yes, it removes the enjoyment part of eating. With this hormone coursing through you, you will not find food attractive and will eat far less of it. That makes perfect sense to the clinical scientific mind.

As did the Champix notion that removing the pleasure associated with smoking means people won't bother doing it any more. That made perfect scientific sense too, in a Mr. Spock world of pure logic.

However, people need some form of pleasure and what makes one person happy does not make another happy. I like to smoke and drink. Some people don't like those things at all. Some people find a long drive in the country relaxing. It used to leave me a nervous wreck when I did it. Some people find food a particular pleasure.

Take away a person's primary source of pleasure, whatever it is, and what are you left with? A miserable git who, sometimes, decides that life is no longer worth living. That part is never factored in to any scientific calculation because science has no means of measuring it. I don't think it has ever really tried.

It's worse than just taking away a pleasure. My enjoyment of smoking is curtailed these days pretty much whenever I leave home. Even so, I know that when I get back home I can fire up the espresso machine or pop the cork on the whisky and light up a smoke. These drugs are different.

They take away your ability to find pleasure in something that was pleasurable. It's still there. You can still eat. You just won't enjoy it any more. No matter what is on your plate, the pleasure you once took from it is impossible to feel. This is not a ban on food. It is not applied to particular foods or particular places. It's a ban that applies inside your head, a hormonally-induced ban on pleasure. The Puritan dream made reality.

If you like beer, imagine being at the greatest beer festival the world has ever seen where all your favourites and more are freely available. However, you have taken one of these mind-meddling hormones and no matter which beer you try, you cannot enjoy it. It tastes the same, smells, looks and feels the same, is at the perfect temperature and the perfect degree of carbonation. It evokes no feelings of pleasure in you at all.

This is a horror story I couldn't write. It is a depth of despair I cannot imagine.It is a situation that makes suicide inevitable.

Worse, you will find those who will take pleasure in the death of someone just because they disapprove of their lifestyle. They will crow and cheer the suicidal chubbies as they now do with smokers. This is how they get their kicks. This is where they derive pleasure.

Those are the minds those scientists need to treat. They never will, because those are the minds of the Righteous.

Fifty Captions.

2011-12-19T02:03:00.000Z

(I'm supposed to be working but procrastination is more fun)

Fifty old photos, fifty captions.

The photos are here and my attempts at captions are here -

1. The ladies took their turn in helping to fill the dirty bomb.

2. He took umbrage at her not being a virgin... so she stabbed him.

3. The Knobhead Express encounters an unexpected tree.

4. "Do you want a smoke, or are you chicken?"

5. "I'm sure I heard someone speak."

6. Never again would Roger blow a kiss at a bear.

7. Cedric was shocked to note that the cycling skeleton wore a wholly unsuitable hat.

8. Mavis thought that maybe it was time to take personal hygiene seriously.

9. The fat hairy kid was never much use in goal.

10. The child obesity inspectors call.

11. Emily and Josephine demonstrate the art of wardrobe cycling.

12. When it was Johnny's turn, the other kids substituted Easy Alice with a hen.

13. Rubber. If his father had known about it, he wouldn't be here.

14. Smoking stunts growth. This man is 54.

15. Boxing, sponsored by Scottish Widows.

16. Piglet's anti-child shield seemed to be working.

17. "See, Bob? I told you a bull terrier would never attack a gorilla carrying a parasol."

18. He had been dead fifty years, but his chat-up lines were still incredibly effective.

19. Showtime at the Baked Bean Feast.

20. "No problem. It's double-barrelled"

21. "You said you wanted to stroke my pussy.. Where are you going?"

22. "I'm not going through all that again. This parrot is dead and I want my money back."

23. The look in the cat's eyes said "Call the police".

24. There is no more secure mode of child transport than the firmly clenched buttock.

25. Quoth the raven: "What the fuck?"

26. Every winter, the potholes on the M25 are worse.

27. The Crufts' new 'Smoky-Drinky' category.

28. She knew the heads hadn't seen her because the trousers had not reacted.

29. The NHS recruits a new goat-sliding consultant.

30. The Russians had managed to get in on one ticket.

31. Deborah Arnott arrives for her pre-TV makeup session... three days before the show.

32. When he married her, she neglected to mention her addiction to sprouts.

33. This year's beer festival was limited to one drink per participant.

34. At the ' Miss Hideously Ugly but Good Figure' finals.

35. America. Land of the free... and some very small psychos.

36. "Goooorrrrdonn. It's tiiiime".

37. The perils of the travelling peanut salesman.

38. A young Madonna demonstrates the correct way to punt a gherkin.

39. AAAAH! DIET FOOD!

40. "Shut up woman, or I'll swat you with a dwarf."

41. The gin trap. They get in, drink the gin, and they're too pissed to get back out.

42. They don't want it, and they have uniforms. Don't mess with the uniforms.

43. "It's an unusual shape," said the cat, "but it's neatly brushed."

44. The railways demonstrate their new cut-price engine horns.

45. The rest of the band never understood why Ozzy insisted on wearing that dress.

46. How modern teaching sees mathematics.

47. On reflection, Death decided the scythe was more his sort of thing.

48. "I'm sorry. This has never happened to me before."

49. Another two ministers face the sack.

50. "So, Santa. Did you bring everything?"

Your turn.

Happy Herman's Christmas Cheer.

2011-12-18T22:19:00.000Z

This week I received my annual box of wine from one of the companies I work for. A little surprising, considering they have asked for very little work this year, but appreciated. It's not a 'box of wine' in the sense of a box with a bag inside. It's a bigger box with twelve bottles inside, one for each of the twelve days of Christmas.

I reciprocate in a small way. I don't have the bank balances of these successful business owners by any means so last year I sent signed copies of 'Fears of the Old and the New' and this year it was 'Dark Thoughts and Demons'.

It seems I'm not the only cheapskate sending books. Herman van Munster has send the world's leaders a series of essays on 'Happiness'. There isn't much happiness in my stories, I'm afraid, although there was a Christmas tale in 'Fears'.

Perhaps he should have sent a series of essays on 'listening' or 'actually working for the people who pay them' or simply on 'how to not be a total git all the time'.

All the same, it did tickle me to see someone who looks the way he does sending out books on happiness. It's a bit like being told to cheer up by Death.

Just before he swings the scythe.

Pricing meat out of the plebs' reach.

2011-12-18T03:38:00.002Z

Flying visit tonight. More deadlines.

Just had to mention the best way we have of long-term storage for bacteria. We freeze-dry them. Freezing will reduce their numbers but it's certainly not a reliable way of killing them all.

Chilling only irritates them. A fridge at 2 C is no better than one at 4C, despite what the mindless morons in Brussels might have been told by fridge manufacturers. When it's an open chill cabinet, the cost of losing those extra few degrees is appalling and will be reflected in prices.

Still, as with smoking and drinking, we can't eat meat if we can't afford it, eh? The smoking-ban template has been applied to everything. Break the smoking ban and you break it all. Consider this, even if you don't care about smoking at all. The smoking ban's success is the reason for the ban on the thing you do care about. As long as it is there, the banmeisters will never stop.

Destroy the root and the whole tree falls over. Chop off a branch and another one grows. You will never stop the bans unless you destroy the root. As long as smokers are the whipping boys, everything you enjoy, everything you hold dear, comes under Righteous control. We were just the beginning, as we told you at the time and you didn't listen. Some never will. We were proof of concept and it worked. It's now working on you.

Right, back to deadline-chasing. I made the last one, just, and the next one is imminent too.

Hey, Pepsi...

2011-12-16T18:12:00.000Z

Well, looks like you'll have to ban your workforce from drinking your own product soon.

Just like every other company will be obliged to. Still enjoying this Righteous game?

A deadline looms.

2011-12-15T23:10:00.000Z

I have a couple of deadlines for Friday night and if I can get get them done in advance, I can go out to Smoky-Drinky. Hence, you are spared my ramblings for a little while.

Just had to point out to those halfwits in authority who believe the tosh they are fed by the medics what really happens when you price booze to high for ordinary people. It's already started in the UK. Exploding stills and methanol-laced fake vodka has already appeared here. Next plan for the healthists? Make it worse.

Also, tipped by hangemall in the comments, the crackdown on dissenting voices has stepped up a notch.

Interesting times. Right, back to work or there'll be no Friday night boozing for me, and that would be terrible.

The meaning of vendetta.

2011-12-15T09:21:00.001Z

I own no Apple products and never will. They declared some time ago that their warranty is invalid for smokers. .I don't care if they change their minds. Mine will not change. Apple are off my options list for all things forever.

I no longer donate to nor buy from PDSA even though I was a regular in their shop, since they declared their belief that second hand smoke harmed pets. I don't care if they change their minds. Mine will not change. PDSA have ceased to exist as far as I am concerned.

Now, (via Pat) Pepsi are on the list of things I will never buy. No product even referring to that company will get a penny from me for as long as I live, no matter what they say in future. There is no going back. A vendetta is for life.

No apology will I accept. None. They have joined the Antismoker Nazis and there will be no forgiveness from me under any circumstance, ever.

This is my vendetta. It means nothing to you and nothing to those companies but it matters to me. I will not pay to be bullied. You can buy all the smokefree stuff you want, you can support harder and harder intrusions into your home and life all you want. I support none of it.

The smoking ban was not just an inconvenience for smokers. It was a starting point, a proof of concept. It was proof that the Righteous can control what happens on private property. Pubs and clubs and cafes and restaurants. All private property. Shops didn't allow smoking even before the ban. It was their choice to decide what happened on their private property. It's not their choice now..Many of them have not understood the difference.

So the Righteous can now dictate what can and cannot happen on private property and the owner has no say. The idiot drones support it and continue to pay money to those businesses that support it. Controls of anything anyone does on private property is just fine with them. They think it will only apply to those they disapprove of.

How would you describe your home? Private or State-controlled? Where are we now? Is an Englishman's home his castle or just another local amenity under State control?

"First they came for the smokers..."

I'll modernise that.

"And when they came for Pepsi, the smokers said 'Fuck you'".

Seek no sympathy here, Pepsi, when they come for the fizzy drinks. They have already started on you in some places. Sympathy?. Smokers have long forgotten the word.

I am Fishead.

2011-12-13T20:46:00.000Z

Today I watched a short film, an hour and twenty minutes of very interesting information. Unfortunately it's password-protected and I can't hand out the password because it's not my film. Sorry about that. There are some clips available though.

The film is called 'I am Fishead'. It explains the creatures I refer to as the Righteous. It explains how they have reached such high positions if influence. It explains why there seem to be an incredible number of them these days (something I didn't know the answer to). It explains why people don't seem interested in stopping them and it suggests a course of action to turn things around. Oh, and people are smoking in it.

The two freely available clips are the best explanation you'll hear of the Righteous mind.

Clip One

Clip Two

The title is taken from that old saying, 'A fish rots from the head' and the reason for the title becomes clear at the end.

If the clips get you interested, there is a contact page where you can request a password. I am not clear on whether there is any charge for that. The ideas it contains are definitely worth hearing.

Just because I can...

2011-12-13T09:00:00.001Z

Over at Mark Wadsworth's, he has an explanation of the way the whole sun/moon thing works. So, just because it's a fine day and the moon is only a few days from full, here is this morning's daytime moon.

Just in time too, the clouds have it now. If you look really closely you might be able to spot the Toast King.

I accept no responsibility if you waste a chunk of the day watching all 22 episodes.

Death and laughter.

2011-12-13T04:38:00.001Z

A click should result in considerable biggerification.

A long time ago I developed an interest in cartooning. They were never good enough to let me turn professional although a few did manage to get published. Cartoonists get paid peanuts, unless they come up with a cartoon called Peanuts and sell it themselves. It wasn't a career option. Some were too subtle, some had to be stared at for a long time to get the joke and people these days have no patience. Some were just plain crap.

I was good enough to be almost forcibly drafted into drawing all the posters for a social club at one place I worked and I did get better with practice. I'll never be Charles Addams though.

Still, I thought I'd pick out some of the less dreadful ones and combine them with the stories in the Christmas book. You could call it padding because I don't have time to write enough short stories and you'd be right. Still it amuses me to put the jokes next to the scares. It ought to drive a few people nuts.

This time I hope to have a hand-drawn cover for the book. It's been a while since I dipped a pen into Windsor and Newton ink but if I'm not too rusty, it'll be better than my usual Photoshopped imagery.

Or maybe worse. Worth a try.

Opinions on the combination of cartoons and bizarre stories are welcome. If nobody would ever buy it, I won't do it.

(Updated to add - I'm thinking of separating the two for the electronic version. One of stories and one of cartoons. Is a cartoon Ebook even possible?)

Lumps, damned lumps and statistics.

2011-12-13T03:24:00.000Z

I had one of those Emails today. The ones that are designed to scare you into parting with money to cover you against something that might or might not happen. Medical insurance, but specifically cancer insurance.

It began with 'Did you know that you have a 50% chance of getting cancer?'

Well that seemed to imply that half the population gets it. I have not noticed a preponderance of lumpy people going about. It's meant to imply just that, but what it actually says is something different. What it actually says is mathematically correct but you're not meant to notice that.

You either have cancer or you don't. There is no period of 'getting' cancer. One cell turns cancerous, you have cancer. It happens a lot but your immune system catches them and beats them to death. Then you don't have cancer. Sometimes the cancerous cell dodges the Cell Police and grows, and manages to produce enough of a lump of cells that the immune system says "Oh shit" and goes and hides in a lymph node.

The point is that the 50% applies to you as an individual, not to the population as a whole. At any specific time, any individual either has cancer or does not have cancer. Yes or no. There is no 'maybe'. Therefore, at any point between birth and death your chance of having a cancer is 50%, the same as the chance of you not having one.

Their opening statement is logically correct but designed to imply that half the world will turn lumpy tomorrow unless they send money to Lumps-R-Us cancer insurance. It's a great insurance business when you look at real cancer rates.

Hardly any of their customers will ever claim and that number is further reduced because those who take up the offer are those who are concerned about their health and avoid all deadly carcinogens such as second-hand smoke, boozer's breath, fat people, burgers, salt, dandelions, string vests, Tunisia and spaghetti. All are equally likely to make such people wake up one morning to find another head growing out of their arse beside the one they normally keep there.

You know why GPs often miss the early stages of cancers, including that current terror, lung cancer? It's because they see it so rarely. Some go their entire careers without seeing a single cancer case. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard "I work in a hospice and I've seen what smoking will do to you. Everyone who smokes dies in agony". If you work in a hospice then the only patients you see are terminally ill patients. All of them are dying because that is where the medics put them all. If cancer/emphysema/leprosy/mange/whatever current scare were as prevalent as we are led to believe then there would be a hospice in every second street. I don't think I've ever seen one.

Every so often we hear about a cure for cancer. Here's the latest. They are trumpeted and then they disappear. I don't believe cancer will ever be cured by a simple injection even if it could be. The NHS and other vested interests will not allow it.

How can they scare us into stopping smoking, stopping drinking, stopping eating meat, stuffing ourselves with approved foods and not touching non-approved foods if we can say "Cancer? No problem, one injection and it's fixed."

How can the Dreadful Arnott howl and wail that cutting her funding will result in preschool smoking clubs and an entire generation growing up to look like the Elephant Man if cancer can be cured with a single injection?

The most terrifying thing to those old Puritans who demanded that everyone be celibate was the invention of penicillin. Suddenly, sexually transmitted diseases were not so scary any more. "Infected by a prick? Cure it with another". That wasn't the slogan but it should have been.

No, if that particular bogeyman could be cured by a few drops of stuff in a syringe, too many vested interests would lose their power to terrify us. They aren't going to let it happen.

If you want to see a cure, you first have to get rid of all those who use cancer as a means to control behaviour. That will not be easy.

No Nagging.

2011-12-12T00:29:00.001Z

Freed from the control of her faithful hound Alistair, the evil Crystal Tipps is now playing her deranged pranks in the real world. The world was a much nicer place when she had her own show on TV and was too busy tormenting her dog to bother with the rest of us. Now she wants to tell us what we can eat, how much, and when. I'm going to need a bigger garden if I have to grow my own bacon.

So does this mean we can all have a go at ordering people around? Certainly not. Such things are not for we plebs. Only the High Ones can give orders. We are to be further oppressed instead.

The Lib Dems, the smaller and even less intelligent half of our Siamese-twin government, have decided to criminalise raising your voice. So the next time Hubby comes rolling home plastered at 2 am, scold quietly or he'll call the rozzers.

Really? Nah. Women can still shout at men. These new rules are clearly set out to keep the menfolk under control.

The proposals could, however, raise concerns that the law is being widened to criminalise non-violent behaviour unfairly.

Oh really? It might be used to criminalise non-criminals while letting the real ones off scot-free? You mean, as with every other idiotic pronouncement that has dribbled like watery diarrhoea from the cesspool of government for around two decades now? Could it happen again, as it has every time before?

Earlier this year three police forces began trialling Domestic Violence Prevention Orders, which allow the courts to prevent suspected abusers returning home to their wives or girlfriends for 28 days.

Did you spot the key word there? 'Suspected'. Not 'convicted', not even 'charged with'. Suspicion is enough to boot you out of your marital homes for a month. If you are accused then you must be guilty. The Spanish Inquisition would be delighted to see their core principles so thoroughly upheld.

Separately, ministers are considering a new law allowing women to find out if their boyfriend has a history of violence.
It would allow the police to tell women who ask whether their prospective partner is a danger to them or their children.

If some woman felt the need to ask the police if I was safe to be around, that would be the end of that relationship. The police would tell her I have no record of any kind but I would never speak to her again, nor even acknowledge her existence. Relationships are based on trust and if she wants to CRB-check me then she evidently does not trust me. It's the same reason I will never be a teacher, never give a talk to schools, never volunteer to help out in any activity involving children. Since all those things start with the premise that I cannot be trusted then all I can say is, find someone who doesn't mind being mistrusted.

I note that these ministers are not, apparently, considering allowing the boyfriend to check whether his new squeeze has a history of chopping up boyfriends and feeding them to the cat. He'll have to find out the hard way but his dismembered corpse can rest easy in the knowledge that she'll get a strongly worded telling-off from the judge. Oh, and a fine from the RSPCA.

It would never occur to me to CRB-check anyone I know. This is a horrible world these monsters are creating, in which trust is based not on human interaction and experience but solely on official advice. What about those who were once inadvertently involved in a pub brawl in their youth, or who were arrested for defending themselves, as keeps happening these days? They will wonder why their girlfriends keep disappearing.

There are some good parts, of course, there have to be some good parts there so that anyone pointing out the objectionable parts can be shouted down at once.

They plan to make forced marriage illegal. I thought it already was, but it seems not. So if you raise any objection to any part of this new law, you will be met with a face so smug you could cheerfully ram it through a granite block no matter how many tries it takes, and the words issuing forth will be "So you think forced marriages and wife-beatings are just fine, then?" Object to the silly parts and they defend it by pretending you also object to the sensible parts. Old tricks used by new dogs.

Governments don't have the intelligence to edit their work. All or nothing, take it or leave it. You want the sensible parts, you have to accept the insanely stupid parts too. Even though everyone knows by now that the sensible parts will not be enforced while the stupid parts will attract the most severe penalties because the sentencing guidelines cover the whole of that law. Not just the serious parts.

Soon, shout at your wife for using your razor to scrape the varnish off your antique table and then mixing it into your coffee, and you will face arrest and imprisonment. Send a strongly-worded text message to your child and you will be on the text offender's register for life. Upset Antie Gladys by pointing out that the jumper she knitted you for Christmas was rejected by the charity shop and you will be sentenced to wear it in public.

We don't need a new law every day. We don't need specific laws for specific instances of violence or kidnap or coercion. We already have general-purpose laws to cover those things.

What we need is a legal system that takes breaches of the real laws seriously. That's what Clegg's Crusaders should be looking into.

Not making up new ways to criminalise everyone except the criminals.

The safest place to be will soon be in prison. It'll be the only place in the country that has no criminals in it.

The cruelty of Blogger.

2011-12-11T03:18:00.001Z

Blogger is evil.

I have moderation turned on for old posts to stop the spambots. If I get a comment that needs moderating, Blogger Emails me the comment with a note to do something about it. All comments eventually get released unless they are obvious spam.

If Blogger's spam-machine catches a comment, I get that comment by Email as normal but with no indication that it's in the spam bin. As far as I am aware from the Emailed comments, it went through.

So if you get caught by the spam-monster and it takes a while to show up, that's because the damn thing hasn't told me you're in the sin bin. I only find out when I check in there or if I look for your comment to reply.

It seems to randomly pick on people. I haven't found the logic in it yet. Maybe there isn't any.

Maybe it just has targets to meet.

The last cheek turned.

2011-12-10T21:37:00.000Z

I am not, and have never been, funded by any tobacco company. If they want to fund me to moan about the ridiculous control freaks who pretend they care about health, I will accept.

I would even put their logos on the blog.

Ah, but... if I were to put their logos on the blog, that would be considered tobacco advertising and the control freaks would demand they be removed. If I then took the logos down, the same control freaks would insist that I was hiding my connections to the tobacco companies and that the absence of logos proves it. See how they work?

That's not really important. No tobacco company has ever offered to fund me and I doubt they ever would. Why would they, when I do it for free anyway? Although they might be induced to pay me to keep quiet about the latest addition to the blogroll. A site I should have been paying more attention to during this year's gardening cycle.

It's easier to grow your own in Wales than in Scotland and the Welsh Arsembly are about to ensure that gardening becomes a big interest for a lot of the Welsh. That fragmented society Frank describes is about to lose more links. Not content with dropping society on the floor, the idiots Wales elected are now stamping on it.

When (not if) the controlling dickheads decide to make growing tobacco illegal, they cannot police it. The plants will grow as big as you let them, they will grow in a pot on a windowsill as well as in the garden. Not as big but they'll have leaves and flowers on them and that's what you need. They do not have the distinctiveness of cannabis, the leaves look just like any other common border plant. You don't need all the fancy lighting and installation that goes with cannabis (and banning that has totally stopped all growing, hasn't it?). It will even grow wild on waste ground and produce vast quantities of seed. Within a few years it could be sprouting in the Dreadful Arnott's window box and the chances are she won't even notice it.

Health? This war on smokers was never about health. Never. There was not one iota of concern for anyone's health in the minds of any of the Ban Brigade and there still isn't. It is about control and money. That is it. Now they want to ban advertising for foods 'they' consider bad for us. Oh, and where did the antismokers start? Do you remember?

Make no mistake, it's a war. We smokers have always tried for compromise, complied with more and more draconian regulations and put up with assaults on our liberty - and sometimes on ourselves - but where we have tried to fight back we have always tried to do it fairly. With consideration for non-smokers.

That approach has to be abandoned. It's time to seed this land from coast to coast with tobacco and to hell with those whose children get hold of it, whose dogs and cats eat it and who find it growing in their gardens. Too bad. We didn't start this war. We didn't, and still don't, want to fight it. The demands of the antismokers have just kept coming, they have become more and more intrusive and more and more downright evil. The hate and abuse directed at smokers with Government approval is disgusting. The medical profession are actively seeking all our deaths and if we don't die, they have a pill to fix that.

No smoking on trains or anywhere on the platforms. No smoking on buses, at bus stations or bus stops. No smoking in pubs, clubs, restaurants, or cafes even if no nonsmoker has ever entered the place. No smoking at work. No smoking outside work. No smoking in the street and soon no smoking in the middle of the fucking Sahara desert. A camel might explode if it gets a whiff of smoke, or some council arsewipe will show up to fine you for dropping ash in the sand.

Is that enough? No. No smoking in your car. No smoking in your home. No smoking in your garden. No smoking in your rowing boat even if you are five miles offshore. It is not going to stop. If you like a drink or a burger, they have already started on you and that will never stop either.

That's just some of the demands of the antismokers and I've left out the ones calling for snipers and gangs of armed thugs. Do you know the demands of the smokers? Have you ever heard them?

There aren't any. Not one. There is only one small request. "Leave us alone".

The antismokers will never do that. Never. They will not stop until we are eradicated and stopping smoking is only a temporary defence. Ex-smokers are not quite as villified as active smokers yet but once they've eradicated us, the difference between an ex-smoker and a never-smoker will suddenly become all to horribly clear.

I know the born-again non-smokers who have embraced the path of Righteousness will not believe that. Those ex-smokers who have not become Righteous will see it coming. Forewarned is forearmed. Another apparently lost saying.

Everyone has heard of the Daleks. Absolutely ruthless and unstoppable killers. They do not sign treaties, they do not make deals, they do not compromise. When you fight Daleks the outcome is - they die or you die. Leave one alive and it keeps killing. They cannot be reasoned with and they are not interested in your opinion. They simply keep doing what they do until whoever is the Doctor this time manages to destroy them.

The Daleks are fiction but that mindset is not. It is the mind of the Righteous. That's why the BBC does it so well. That mindset does not care about you. You are inferior. You must comply or be exterminated. The Righteous mind considers no other options. Your opinion is irrelevant. They know best.

That is what smokers have been trying to reach compromise with. That is what the entertainment industry, the drinks industry and the food industry have been dealing with when they think they are reaching a reasonable compromise. They are up against Dalek-like minds and they have not realised. The Righteous will not stop. Every compromise is just another step on the way to total domination.

Argue, or even hint that they might not be working in everyone's (or indeed anyone's) best interests and you get the same response, no matter the subject of discussion. All dissenting smokers are shills for Big Tobacco. Anyone disagreeing with global warming is an oil industry stooge. Anyone against further alcohol controls is working for Big Booze. Anyone against food controls is in the pay of Big Food or Big Salt or Big Cheese. You are addicted and therefore your mind is scrambled to the point where you cannot make your own decisions. No matter the subject. It's always the same.

It's not new. Think back to all those online discussions where someone so much as suggests that uncontrolled immigration might not be perfect. Immediately they were - and often still are - declared a BNP member, a gas chamber advocate, a racist, a bigot, a Nazi. They were, and are, brutally and viciously put down. Just for raising the subject. It's the same game.

The reasons the Righteous do all this are also the same every time. Money and control. This kind of disgusting individual, the slimy, oily contents of the likes of ASH, the BMA, most of modern politics and so on, get a particular sadistic pleasure from ordering others around. The more ridiculous the assertion, the more pleasure they take in watching others comply. These are truly revolting people, the very dregs of humanity, and yet they consider themselves superior. Such vile individuals have always insinuated themselves into administrative positions because they are no bloody use for anything else. Just as a paedophile will try to get a job as a priest, in a school or nursery, the repellent control freak will do their utmost to rise above their park keeper status to a position where they can control more and more people with more and more perverse demands.

The money? That is taken from you by force. You are taxed to pay their wages and if you don't pay you are prosecuted. You pay for those medical officials and in order to keep the money for themselves rather than spend it on the healthcare you think you are paying for, they direct you to live by arbitrary rules allegedly designed to make sure you never get sick so they don't have to use the money on you. That's not what the rules are for. They exist only so that you can be blamed for your illness.

That applies to smoking, drinking, food, how much exercise you take, anything at all. The money you pay as an insurance against becoming ill is not for you to use if you become ill. It is to pay for the consultant's golf club fees and his new Bentley and his huge house and his children's private education and so on. If you get ill, it's your own fault. You cannot have followed the rules or you wouldn't be ill. The rules consist of invented numbers and arbitrary declarations but that doesn't matter. Protest your compliance all you want. If you are ill then you cannot have been following the rules. It's your fault so they don't have to help you.

The Netherlands' government have decided they will no longer pay the antismokers to tell them how to make people suffer. Suddenly it's all about smokers' health again, smokers will die because nobody is helping them, plague and despair will blight the land. The antismokers are back to square one and they genuinely believe that we do not remember that this is where they started, and that we do not remember anything that has happened since.

That's not hyperbole. They truly think that way. The Righteous are superior and are the only thinking beings on the planet. The rest of us have no minds of our own and cannot remember what we had for breakfast. We plebs could not possibly have seen the plan unfold for tobacco, then again for alcohol, salt and food. Only the Righteous have the brains to deal with such complex issues. It worked last time and it will work again.

On that last part they are unfortunately right. They keep coming back with the same rubbish and the dopes keep falling for it. The thing is, they normally wait a few decades between their attempts and this time they aren't going to do that. This time the Prohibitionists aren't going to slink off, lick their wounds and plot their return.

This time they intend to push until they have absolute control over every detail of everyone's life. This is our opportunity to show them as they really are and to show them what happens when they persist while the tide turns.

It's time for smokers to take the offensive. No more taking it on the chin. No more turning the other cheek. The antismokers have not had a war so far, they have been shooting fish in a barrel.

I know some will come here and say 'Well, can't we compromise?' Listen, that is what smokers wanted all along. Let us have our places and you have yours. The results of our attempts at compromise? A ban on smoking on private vehicles soon to be followed by a ban on smoking in private homes. Many rented properties already have this. Just you try compromising on beer or lemonade or salt or sausages. Go on, have a go. Watch the prices rise and the places you can buy these things fade away. Then come back and talk about compromise.

No compromise can be initiated by the smokers. All our attempts have been ignored and that will continue. The government will not even discuss the issue.

Next Spring I will be sprinkling seed everywhere I go. Most won't grow but I have so, so much of it here that I only need a fraction of one percent to germinate to set this in motion. One plant growing here and there is enough. Each one will produce thousands more seeds. Tiny seeds that the winds will carry for miles. Once it starts it cannot be stopped.

Don't bother telling me that people might get sick or be inconvenienced. Don't bother telling me that cattle and sheep will eat it and the meat will be full of nicotine (it won't harm the animals or normal people, and I don't care about antismokers). Don't bother asking me for compromise. We've tried that over and over and there is no compromise on offer. Only more hate and spite.

In the years to come, when even the most ardent antismoker fails a cotinine test because of the weeding they did at the weekend and the roast beef they had on Sunday, when these plants are popping up like triffids on every railway embankment and every roadside verge, perhaps one lone antismoker will think to themselves...

"All the smokers ever wanted was to be left alone. If only we had."

Somehow I doubt they will ever reach that conclusion. Still, there'll be free tobacco for all just there for the picking.

We won't need the tobacco companies any more. Perhaps then the drones will accuse us of being funded by hedgerows?

I have in my hand a piece of paper...

2011-12-09T04:34:00.001Z

...wrapped around some shredded leaf, and it's burning.

That piece of paper has more value than anything Dai Cameroid is ever likely to bring back from Brussels.

Cameron is either incredibly stupid or very smart indeed. I don't think he can possibly be anywhere between those two extremes.

If he is a total gimboid, as he appears, then the EU will put pressure on him to either do as he is told or step down, and he will then do one or other of those things. The EU have form on this: Italy and Greece's leaders were brushed aside, those now in charge in Ireland and Spain are doing as they are told. The EU have even started a petty vengeance against those rating agencies that have downgraded their countries. That's actually comical. Don't these EU bureaucrats know who's really running things? Where do they think all their credit comes from?

So if he is a dope in the EU pocket, then those genuine Eurosceptic MPs will have been joined by a lot of planted EUrophiles whose job will be to make some trivial concession look important enough to shut the rest up for a while. That might have happened without Cameron's involvement at all so it doesn't prove his gimboidity in this instance.

There is another possible scenario in which Cameron would still appear to be a total gimboid but would be playing a very long and devious game.

Let us suppose that he actually does want an EU referendum, that he wants the EU to lose it, that he actually wants to be in charge of his country and not merely a local official on behalf of the EU. How could he go about achieving that?

He could not start by tub-thumping and shouting. He doesn't have a majority in the House and even if he did, some of his own party are EU drones. He is in coalition with the EU Brown-nose party sometimes referred to by the totally inaccurate name of 'Liberal Democrats'. So, if he tried to push through a referendum he would certainly fail.

Even if he succeeded, can he be sure that the population will vote us out of the EU? He's only going to have one chance and if he fluffs it, that's the end. No more chances. If the EU win that referendum there will never be another.

If the EU lost they would make us vote again, as they have in every other country where they lost. And again, and again, until we gave them the answer they wanted. Cameron must be aware of all of this. The EU drones in Parliament and in the general population know it too. If there is a referendum and the EU loses, we'll just do it again. The EU has nothing to fear from a referendum but those who want out have much to fear. The EU never loses because the voting only stops when they have their answer. Then it stops for good.

So maybe a referendum isn't the best way. Engaging all the devious brain cells in my possession, I wondered how I might go about things in Cameron's place. The remaining four non-devious cells looked away in disgust.

What I would do in this instance is certainly not to have a referendum. I might lose, and if I win I'll have to do it again and again until I lost. Then there would never be another chance. So no, I would not give you all a vote.

What I would do is piss you all off to monumental levels. I would have the Press reporting every petty little EU diktat, every instance where someone has suffered because of EU legislation, and all the while being big pals with the EUphiles in Parliament. I would do apparently idiotic things, to swell the ranks of the EUsceptics and make them as vocal as possible. The first thing I'd want is for everyone in the country to be aware of what the EU is doing to their lives, their businesses, everything. I'd want to hear protesting voices. Lots of them. I'd ignore them all.

I won't listen to what you want because I want you to want it more. I want you to want it more than anything and the best way to achieve that is to tell you you can never have it.

Then I would set about pissing off the EU. Get in the way, disagree, stick my nose in where it's not wanted, and finally chuck a King Dick spanner in their bailout plan. They will plot revenge, as they always do. As they are now doing.

Greece was not allowed to leave the single currency even though it's destroying them. We will never be allowed to leave the EU. A referendum is futile, it will just be re-run until we answer correctly. Really, there is only one way out.

We have to get thrown out. The majority of people in this country have to want to leave so there is no popular uprising in favour of staying in, and the EU have to want to be rid of us so badly that they are willing to lose all that easy money we hand over, and the fishing, and the oil, and the financial sector and more. If we are thrown out, Cameron can then call a general election and win. Those who will produce knee-jerk 'We must get back in' soundbites will be voted into oblivion and the risk of losing to UKIP will be completely wiped out.

Is that his game, I wonder?

Or is he just an empty forehead who will now either step down or roll over?

Time will tell.

Tick-tock, Dave.

Oh, and if Oily Al's promise of independence for Scotland is ever going to mean anything, Scotland has to be out of the EU too. Otherwise they're just swapping masters.

A bit of a breeze.

2011-12-09T03:39:00.001Z

I'm knackered from sitting at this bloody machine all day. Nothing to let me procrastinate from working today because the air outside is in a hell of a hurry. It's worse than Prescott's downpipe after a triple madras and three vats of lager.

It's above freezing, not much, but compared to this time last year that's luxury. This is called Global Warming. It's easy to play, the rules are simple. If the weather is a bit warmer than normal, that's Global Warming. If it's fifty degrees colder than normal, you have to say 'weather is not climate' and assume a smug expression. At no point should you admit that we live in the UK where the weather has done just as it damn well pleases with no regard for season for the last million years.

This wind has extra cold in it. I was only out there long enough to get the recycling bin back in (there are plastic bottles and tins all over the street because as soon as the bin men lifted the bins, the wind had a rummage). It didn't feel cold while I was out there but when I came back in it felt as if I had left all my body heat in the garden.

This particular wind has been dubbed Hurricane Bawbag. Nominedeus has the details.

Global warming? I'm all for it.

How do they do it?

2011-12-08T20:49:00.001Z

Still writing furiously. I don't know if I'll have enough Christmas tales in time for a decent sized book but I'm typing with bleeding fingers here. Time is running out if I want it available for Christmas day. The eBook version is no problem, I intend to have that out ready for all those new Kindle users on Christmas morning but the print version will have to come by post.

When I get stuck I work on the dystopia. In an Email conversation recently, Angry Exile asked if this fictional world would have compulsory fun runs to keep the drones healthy.

I said no, because Health and Safety have banned running. Only properly qualified and tested runners will be allowed to go above walking pace and then only on designated and inspected running tracks within specified times.

I thought, that's pretty far out. Well into the realms of utter absurdity. Surely I can get that in the book before some Righteous idiot gets started on running? Too late on the thought crimes, the loonies already want to arrest people who shoot Xbox characters in games where the aim the game is to shoot characters who aren't real using guns that don't exist..

But running, I have to be ahead of them on that one. Must be. Surely they can't even have taken the first steps in the denormalisation process.

There is a deepening head-shaped dent in this desk.

Nothing is too insane for these people. I take some consolation in that there is only one of me and hundreds of Righteous out there. I have to imagine all the madness while they each have their own designated bit to concentrate on.

I still think they're stealing my ideas.

No more hard drugs.

2011-12-07T21:21:00.001Z

I avoid all forms of medication because most drugs have side-effects that are worse than what you had in the first place. Every day I get generous offers of discount pharmaceuticals by Email, usually starting 'Dear Mr. Floppy...'

That bit still works despite the warnings on the baccy and despite the same warnings on the booze. Just can't seem to kill it unless I think about Deborah Arnott. So, no Viagra here, not yet anyway.

The NHS supply this to men whose flexible friend refuses to develop a stiff upper lip. Quite right too, it's a medical issue that the NHS can fix. There are those who insist the NHS should not be involved and there is some logic these days in keeping medical problems well away from them. Some say the NHS 'should not be using my tax money to fix people who are ill' and the same people insist we must keep the NHS while not allowing anyone to use it. Ah, reality is so difficult to get a grip on for some people.

Now it seems your NHS-sponsored bonkathons are to be rationed. You can have two goes a month and that's it. Married men can sell their spare ones on the internet. It's back to the old lollipop sticks and elastic bands for anyone who gets a bit frisky at the wrong time of the month.

Viagra does have some potentially nasty side effects, which is a little odd considering that it was originally designed to treat some other ailment, was found to be no good at that but is now sold because of its unusual side-effect in the trouser region. Still, it's not safe for everyone and so anyone thinking of getting this hard drug really should only get it after a doctor has checked it won't kill you. If it does, the funeral director will have to drill a hole in the coffin lid and they charge extra for that. Although I understand it's free to have a little flag on the end.

So, what is likely to happen? It's obvious really. Those daily spam Emails keep coming for a reason - people are buying dodgy willie-pills from them already. When the NHS restricts this medication, those using it will simply buy from the criminals. People who would be advised by a doctor to avoid these drugs will not be so advised by the criminals. Some will be fakes and some will contain dangerous additives.

This is already happening with tobacco and booze and soon it will happen with prescription drugs. The criminals will flourish and we'll all be told we're very naughty for funding terrorism. By those who seek to control us. Um...

It seems to me that it doesn't matter who you buy stuff from any more. We're going to get terrorised anyway. At least the criminals don't terrorise all of us at once and they charge less too.

But hey, as long as the NHS smoking cessation Gestapo and the five-a-day forcefeeding officer get to keep their BMWs, who gives a stuff about the patients? They just clutter the place up. Get rid of them and the NHS won't need doctors or nurses either and they'll then save enough money to put deep-pile carpets throughout the admin block and employ knob inspectors alongside the smoke-sniffers and the waistline measurers.

Funding criminals and terrorists? We already are!

Just when you think the stupidometer is at its limit...

2011-12-07T00:22:00.001Z

...along come two who have pushed the dial all the way up to 11.

I saw this first one earlier today but was too gobsmacked to know what to say. There have been three tips to it by Email too, each tipster equally astounded by the stratospheric level of idiocy it contains.

If you are drinking anything, put it down now.

Ready?

Smoking can make your nipples drop off.

I warned you, didn't I? Encouraged by those twenty gazillion deaths per minute from passive smoking or whatever today's number is, widely believed by the terminally gullible even though the real figure is actually zero, the brains of the antismokers are just freewheeling now. The gullible will accept even this. Comments show that some of them already have.

If you want to prove yourself a non-smoker, get a peephole bra or shirt and put your nipples on display. You can prove you don't smoke because you still have those bits. Be aware that prospective employers, landlords and council officials might want to tweak them to check they aren't latex fakes.

No need for expensive blood-testing, because aside from a tobacco stench detectable (and still toxic) fifteen miles away, a tangible cloud of fumes announcing their arrival like John Carpenter's 'The Fog', teeth like a moonshine hillbilly, a cough that rattles the plates on the shelves and yellowed skin that looks badly in need of ironing, smokers have no nipples.

Makes you wonder why they need all those expensive cotinine tests, doesn't it? Those who can't spot a smoker from a mile away must be dim creatures indeed. Just listen for the foghorns and hide in the church.

I have never heard of anyone's nipples dropping off and I've read and watched everything by Spike Milligan and Monty Python. The nearest I can think of is the 'Belgian phrase book' sketch that included the line 'My nipples explode with delight' and to be fair, John Cleese was buying cigarettes at the time. Maybe that's where the idea came from?

Maybe it came from 'The man who fell to Earth' in which David Bowie plays an alien with detachable nipples. He was smoking in that film. The link between smoking and spontaneous nipple loss is therefore a matter of record, even if only in fiction. Fact, fiction, it's all the same to the medics these days.

In real life, I have never heard of it happening and if it had it would definitely have been in the Daily Mail. My own suspicions, faced with nipple atrophy after breast surgery, would tend more towards a botched operation - but then, the medical profession blames smoking for everything else, so why not for chronic nipple decay also?

The Dawn of the Zombie Nipple is joined today by Death by Shandy.

In a drive to encourage teenagers to give blood, a company gave away bottles of shandy. Not just bottles, but whole cases of the stuff. Enough to distil into almost a pub measure of vodka if your distillation apparatus has 100% recovery.

The medics are Outraged as usual.

A spokesperson from the health authority said: 'Donating blood is a completely altruistic act and NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) does not welcome or condone this sort of promotional activity in association with the generous act of donation.
'There is also an inappropriate general health message conveyed through this promotion.

It's shandy. Not pub shandy, not half beer and half lemonade. Bottled shandy. The stuff real people used to let five-year-olds drink, back in the days when adults were in charge.The stuff that had no effect on anyone at all, ever, throughout the whole of its existence as a drink, other than to hasten the next trip to the toilet. Liver damage by shandy? Only if you swim in it after having nine-tenths of your liver removed.

They are giving this shandy to students who routinely drink shots of some luminous stuff washed down with the deadliest beer they can find. Shandy will no more encourage them to binge drink than would lemonade.

Lest we develop the notion that the local people are rolling eyes and tut-tutting at this ridiculous over-reaction from the Health Police -

Local residents have also slammed the manufacturer for encouraging binge drinking in Leeds which has one of the country’s largest youth populations.

The locals are fully indoctrinated and have been correctly de-brained on the NHS, and smokers' and drinkers' taxes have paid for it. Surely, encouraging shandy drinking can only be a good thing? Compare it to, say, whacking down gobfuls of barley wine or chugging vodka from the bottle. Wouldn't these people be happier if the students went out on a Saturday night and drank nothing but shandy?

As for the company, surely, surely they must have said what Buckfast said to these nannying simpletons? Surely they responded with 'Git awa' tae buggery, ye daft wee gobshites'?

Last night, Turbo Drinks company spokesman Nigel Tarn, who has previously worked on the launches of Red Bull, Peroni and Crabbie's Alcoholic Ginger beer, admitted the promotion had been a huge error of judgement.
He said: 'We employ numerous freelance staff and require them to create their own promotions.
'One of them naively thought that by doing the promotion they would be highlighting the shortage of blood andensuring new donors.
'We now recognize this to have been in poor taste and have terminated the campaign.

Nope. They caved to the Righteous. Idiots. There will now be another push against this company, now that they have shown weakness.

Wait for the whines from the NHS that their blood donor rate has plummeted as all those students take a rather different line from the shandy-sellers. I would like to thank those Righteous for the useful tip they gave in the story too. If you've had a drink in the last 24 hours, they won't suck the blood out of you. Useful to know in case one of the mobile vampire trucks rolls into town.

I am happy to report the single malt flows here this evening thanks to the generosity of donors. It's the Singleton this time and there is enough donated booze-money for more tomorrow. Shandy? Hell no, that's against health regulations so I won't be touching that stuff. Besides, that shandy is made by girlie men who roll over and bleat at the behest of the Righteous. Drinking that stuff will turn you soft and dilute your mind.

I'm smoking too and let me just check - yes, both nipples are in place and there is no sign of blackening, loosening or flaking. So far, so good. Not that I have any real use for them anyway, other than as cold indicators.

Ah, smoke and whisky, twin islands of sanity in a world gone utterly bonkers. My blood is no good to the NHS. It's got sense in it.

It had to 'come'.

2011-12-06T22:43:00.000Z

Or perhaps not.

No safe level of sex.

I think my laugh gland just burst.

Elephants and paper balls.

2011-12-06T22:19:00.000Z

There's an old joke about a guy sat on a British train crunching strips of newspaper into little balls and throwing them out of the window. You used to be able to open train windows in the old days.

Someone asked him why he was doing it.

"It keeps the elephants off the tracks", he said.

"Elephants? This is Britain. There are no elephants around here."

"See? It works."

The same can be applied to many products in my own field of work, probiotics and prebiotics. As long as you don't get the shits, they're working. Since you cannot say when you'll get the shits unless you have dodgy guts like me - genetic, incurable, and my lifelong incentive to find a treatment - you cannot know when they have protected you from a bad dose of squirty bottom. But once you're on them, like the paper ball man on the train, you dare not stop. My latest product is a little different, it actually cures the severe shits and not just in humans. But I can't say much, the IP isn't mine and it's going through independent tests now.

This also applies to global warming. Another scare story has conveniently appeared to prop up Chris 'Zoom-zoom' Huhne's new windmill fantasy.

I had a phone call recently from someone selling carbon credits, in between all those Indian guys called Gary who insist my computer has downloaded a virus. I laughed and asked if he was really holding a lot of them and told him to get shot of them quick. His persistence at trying to sell them to me anyway was commendable. He had been in marketing a long time, he said, and knew what he was talking about. He sounded to be about twenty.

Well, I said, I've been in science a long time (probably before he was born) and there has been no increase in global temperatures for over a decade.

He played his trump. "Don't you believe in global warming?"

I played mine "I'm a scientist. I deal in facts, not beliefs. One fact is, there is no warming and another is that the scientists proclaiming it have been caught out. Good luck with your carbon credits but I don't want any."

It'll still work though. Those elephant-scarers will convince the drones that the paper balls keep away an animal that isn't found in this country. Why?

There will be no warming and Zippy Huhne will claim that it was because of his windmills. If we had not fired up the steelworks to full capacity, used up all the fuel on the planet moving those monsters into the middle of nowhere, put each of them on a 100-ton concrete block, dug up the countryside for cables, turned a large chunk of China into a toxic lake for our magnets and kept the windmills still for all but five days a year, the planet would now be a fireball. Honest.

The suckers will fall for it. They don't want those elephants on the tracks even though they can't see the ones in the room.

Beyond parody.

2011-12-06T03:30:00.001Z

Sometimes you come across something so unutterably stupid there really is nothing more to say.

No safe level of gambling.

2011-12-06T02:05:00.001Z

I bet you didn't expect that.

The 'no safe level' rubbish is now being applied to absolutely everything. No safe level of smoke so people burn candles and incense to avoid smelling tobacco smoke, no safe level of alcohol so all those hand-washes and cough medicines will have to go, no safe level of fat - and I can tell you I know someone who refuses anything cooked in olive oil because it's 'just fat', so forget all that Omega-3 health advice. It's fat. The drones won't eat it.

Now we have a silly cow insisting there is no safe level of gambling and that any gambling, at any level is inherently evil.

Betting can never be 'responsible'. So how can anyone possibly justify gambling lessons in schools?

Her argument is that if you teach kids about gambling, they will gamble. Funnily enough, I don't hear the same arguments coming from the MSM concerning sex education to small children. Her argument is also somewhat undermined by her own figures -

There are already an estimated 100,000 problem gamblers under the age of 18, including some 60,000 12 to 15-year-olds — a prevalence rate of 2 per cent, more than twice that for adults.

So if there are twice as many 'problem gamblers' among children as there are among adults now, when racing form and the football pools are not taught in schools, where did they come from?

Most likely from the same place those thousands of deaths due to passive this or that came from. Straight out of some qango's arse. Define 'problem gambler'? Someone who gambles when they can't afford it. Children with no income can't afford it so any kind of gambling for them - including the premium bond Auntie bought for them - is gambling they can't afford. That gives you a huge base of 'problem gamblers' to play with. Especially if you include games like marbles.

I don't gamble, in the 'place your bets' sense. Not for any moral reason, but because I'm no good at it. I worked out a long time ago that I never win any kind of bet so I don't do it. I was once in a works' lottery pool. We each put in a pound a week and shared out the winnings after a year. We each received less than the £52 it had cost us for the year. We would all have been better off putting a pound a week into a jar.

The lottery odds do not reflect the payouts anyway. The UK lottery gives you odds of about 57 to 1 of getting three numbers right. So you bet a pound, get three numbers and it pays you back £58? No. It pays £10. The odds of getting those numbers are 57 to 1 and if you succeed, the payout is at 9 to 1. If a bookie did that they'd be lynched.

That's the kind of thing that's proposed for teaching in schools. Not 'how to fill out a pools coupon' or 'how to beg for coins to feed the slot machine'. Probability theory. Mathematics. What is the probability of your pound coin winning you the jackpot before a falling piano lands on your head? On the whole, not very high.

Gambling is the next pleasure to be denied us. This terrible, terrible toll of gambling infants playing poker behind the bike sheds (well they aren't allowed to smoke there any more) will be spoken of most gravely by politicians who will then rush off to check their stock market investments and rend their garments when they find they gambled on the wrong company.

They don't see it as gambling. They call it 'investing'. It's not like Joe Scroggs putting a tenner on a horse on Saturday, and if the horse doesn't perform his tenner is lost. This is serious money on serious shares and it is, in no uncertain terms, gambling. Big time gambling. Some of them do it with millions at a time and if the company they bet on doesn't perform then they can lose millions at a stroke.

'No safe level of gambling' means shutting down the stock markets and no investment in any company ever. It's all gambling. Even when they try to fix the odds by promoting windmills and shoring up currencies, they are still gambling.

If I take on a job I gamble that the company will pay. They usually do but there have been some that didn't. That's why, if a new company wants work, I'll run a short and cheap experiment first. It lets them know how efficient I am and it lets me know how their accounts department treats smaller businesses.

There is no way to take the gamble out of that. If the company pays up front, I'm not gambling, but they are. They're gambling that I won't just bugger off with the money and end up drunk in a gutter somewhere. One of other of us has to take a chance and in real life, it's always the smaller business that gambles.

We have to weigh up probabilities all day, every day. If you have an extra cup of tea in the morning, what are the chances you'll be bursting for the toilet on the way to work and how likely is it that the train toilet will be working, if it even has one? Do you leave for the bus now, and risk longer waiting in the cold, or do you leave later and risk missing it? How fast is that truck approaching and can you cross the road before it gets here?

It's not just the small stuff. Do you buy the big house in the posh area and hope your salary continues until retirement, or just buy the semi-detached in the tatty corner of town and build up a reserve in case of redundancy? If you're in the tatty corner and never made redundant you've missed out on the posh house but if you buy the posh house and lose your job, you're stuffed. Which will you take a chance on?

I would not be in favour of teaching children that gambling is a viable lifestyle but I'd certainly agree with making very clear to them that every decision in life is a gamble. I'd definitely agree with teaching them how to work out probabilities, and how to make decisions based on likely outcomes, because it would teach them something that has been fast disappearing from modern education.

It would teach them how to think for themselves.

Is that why there is so much protest against it, I wonder?

Steaming.

2011-12-06T01:12:00.001Z

A busy evening. Caught up with some Emails although there are more waiting, and heard from Lulu.com that the ebook of 'Ghosthunting' isn't getting past their conversion filters. I'll have to fiddle with it and try again. It's because it's written as a manual so it has subheadings. Novels and short story books don't have those. Apparently subheadings mess up the contents page. This doesn't affect the print version.

I've also spent a fair bit of time processing some leaves. I lost all the ones in the greenhouse to mould. It was too windy here to have the roof vent open and even though temperature and humidity were perfect, without air circulation the mould took hold. High humidity, warmth and no circulation means mould can spread very, very fast. All those are now in the compost.

Fortunately that was only half the leaves. The rest were in the garage and remained mould-free but humidity in there was too low. Some dried too fast despite regular misting and are still green. Roughly half of the garage stock was okay but all of it was too dry.

I've steamed all the leaves and re-hung the too-green ones. They might still work, they might not, but it costs nothing to try. If they refuse to change colour I will use them in an attempt to produce nicotine juice for Electrofag. They won't go to waste. If the Righteous succeed in banning Electrofag (oh, they haven't given up yet!) then I'll need a way to keep mine in action.

The nicely browned ones are now rolled up into cigar-sized wads. Still a bit on the rough side for smoking. They need to ferment a bit and age. This evening produced 42 grams of smokeable baccy and I have about the same still hanging up in the garage. That 42g would cost somewhere around a tenner at UK shop prices so even if it is a bit rough and even if it's all I get, I've broken even on the experiment. More than break-even if I include the leaves in jars with brandy/cherry brandy flavouring and the ones I 'tested' - and way more than break-even when I consider this year's first-ever experience of smoking the flowers (thanks to Rose for that one). If there are any Electrofag juice producers reading, that flavour would be a winner.

So this experiment was a success in that it ended up costing nothing. I'll look forward to the flowers next year and start collecting earlier. A whole rollup of flowers is too much but sprinkle some dried and chopped ones into the rollup and it's like smoking a summer meadow.

Seeds - I have enough to cover Scotland in tobacco plants. I already have the buckets and trays from this year so next year's cost is only compost. And I have until then to set up for a better drying method. .

Correct drying would save a lot of lost leaves and a lot of bother. Steaming overdried leaves doesn't half stink out your kitchen. I used an old pot and an old bamboo thing that was for steaming those pancakes you get with crispy duck. It's never been used for its intended purpose and is now designated as 'tobacco steamer'. They don't need much steam, just enough to give them a thin-leather consistency. Don't cook them!

It would have been better if they hadn't needed steaming at all, but this is all experimental and there were bound to be cock-ups on the first try.

Next year I'll know which disasters to avoid!

The pressure valve cracks.

2011-12-04T23:02:00.001Z

Went to visit Bill and Ben, the Whisky-pot Men last night. I play the part of Little Wheeze, and the Dreadful Arnott is the gardener we all have to hide from. It's become abruptly freezing here. Some light snow flurries but nothing on the ground. Well, not quite nothing. It rained, and then froze, so the entire town is like a skating rink. Normal winter service has resumed.

I had a rage against the antismoking machine planned but then I read this and this and thought 'Well, it's not so bad for me. I don't have pubs but none of my friends go there any more anyway. At least that hasn't happened to anyone I know and I thank a God I don't even believe in that nothing even remotely like it has ever happened to me.'

Stolen Child remains stolen and his parents have never been accused of any kind of abuse, certainly nothing physical. I know this because if the father had done anything remotely like that, his own family would have disposed of him in a piggery somewhere. They are not the 'forgive and forget' kind and they are not interested in excuses where a child, especially one of their own, is harmed. There has been no such harm in Stolen Child's case. Why Stolen Child is still stolen has never been made clear. Why other children are left with rabid psychopaths is also never made clear.

Then again, it's not always easy to tell. I read recently of a father who killed his child while trying to change a nappy. The child's wriggling threw him into a rage. He had never done anything to the child before. That is not an excuse but it does explain why nobody thought the child was in any danger.

This sort of thing has always happened, not usually to the sickening extent of that particular case but it's not new. What is new is that such incidents are not confined to the shame of one town these days. Now the story travels the world in minutes. And not always accurately.

Remember the retired teacher in Bristol who was questioned over a murder? His life was made hell by the press. His name, his face, his personal details were beamed to all corners of the world and yet he had nothing at all to do with any crime. Unfortunately for him he happened to be of memorable appearance and in this Righteous world of hate and suspicion, he is always going to experience some idiot or other asking him 'how he got away with it'. The whispers and the sly glances will never stop even though he has done nothing wrong.

I don't know who caused that child's terrible injuries but I would be willing to cut them off at the knee and stand them in salt. That is not a joke, not hyperbole, that is something I would genuinely like to do to such people. Believe me, that would be just the beginning.

Who was responsible? Nobody knows for sure. The parents were arrested but that always happens in such cases. They were released on bail which doesn't seem a likely police action if there was solid evidence against them.

So maybe they did, maybe not. The vigilantes don't care. Someone must pay and they aren't interested in trial by jury - and that's not much of a surprise. All those cases of violent offenders let off with a slap on the wrist, all those thugs getting community service, and the random nature of sentencing even if the lawyers don't manage to get the criminals off with 'human rights' have destroyed faith in the justice system. Why don't the police rush out to catch burglars? What's the point? The courts just let them go again.

Recently, two men each received two-year prison sentences. One fiddled his VAT and harmed nobody, the other stabbed a stranger in the street. Where is the logic? Where is the justice? The rise of vigilantism is inevitable when the courts refuse to apply any sense at all to the law.

I don't blame the police. If they catch someone speeding then they can be sure of a conviction and an actual fine. If they catch a teenage thug pushing a grandmother's face into the ground, they know the courts will let the thug back onto the streets even if he has done the same thing five times before. In that position, wouldn't you concentrate on the parts of the job that are going to get results? The police risk serious injury when tackling the thugs and if they know the courts are going to pat them on the head and send them on their way, why would the police take that risk?

This can be traced into the current shamble of social work too. They have those Labour targets still, and the targets must be met. If you're a five-foot female, is it easier to meet the target by taking children from a middle-class smoker or from a family with a history of spontaneous and random violence? The courts won't help and the social workers know it.

So do the thugs. These are not entirely moronic people, they have realised that the more confrontational they are, the more violent they are, the more the police and social services will leave them alone. If they end up in court they'll get an ASBO, a fine they won't pay and community service they won't do. They know it, the police know it, the social services know it and the judges don't care. The outcome is that the officials stop bothering with these people because they know the courts will simply let them go.

I have to wonder whether the legal profession actually wants to see a rise in vigilantism. They are certainly acting as though they do. Vandalise a power station in the name of Green Lunacy and go free. Fail to show respect in a court and go to jail. The Judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. They don't care what you've done, they are more interested in who you are. Fit the approved groups and go free, join the denormalised and go to jail.

They're not much different to the vigilantes, really. They deal harshly with whoever they don't like and they do it on a whim.

The damage done to that small child is appalling and if I witnessed the vigilantes tearing apart the right culprit, then I couldn't possibly recognise them. However, vigilantes have no means of knowing whether they have the right culprit but they have already started attacking someone anyway.

The vigilantism is the direct result of the court system's destruction of the law. Laughable sentences are handed down which send people to holiday camps where they can demand respect and human rights to their hearts' content. Deportation orders are ignored and violent criminals get rehomed alongside people who know nothing of their past. Okay, they've done their time, but it has reached the point where the criminals have more rights than the law abiding.

This is now a place where you can be arrested for saying something a little bit offensive but get away with robbery and violence. Look at the comments on this idiot's story. Sticks and stones may break their bones but words will hurt them more. The people of this place have become pathetic, more concerned with a dropped sweet wrapper than a thrown grenade, harsher on words than on actions. Sentencing is random, conviction depends on how you dress, outrage is generated over a casual remark while someone having their throat cut in public is merely tut-tutted at. The shallowness of modern society is sickening.

It's not just smoking, drinking and chubbiness that are denormalised. The destruction of the language started a long time ago. 'Racism' was devalued from a word to describe the sort of activities carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, the slave trade, Hitler and so on, to something that means 'someone who questions the wisdom of uncontrolled immigration'.They became the same thing.

Now we hear that smoking within sight of a child is child abuse. Giving a child sweets or a hamburger is child abuse. Letting a child put salt on their food is child abuse. Giving a child a small taste of wine at Christmas is child abuse. The value of the words 'child abuse' have declined into something trivial, something to be applied to any disapproved activity.

The people who did this are happy to devalue the words in this way in the name of Righteousness. They don't care at all about children. They don't care about immigrant minorities and they don't care about gays or the disabled or anyone else. Nobody matters to them. They are only interested in control.

So they equate drinking within sight of a child with what happened to that baby in Gravesend. To them it really is the same thing. It is another opportunity to control others and means absolutely no more than that. If you think what happened to that child is disgusting, try adopting that Righteous mindset for a moment and see if you can come out of it without smashing everything in sight. Vicious child abusers are rare. The Righteous who delight in such opportunities are not.

Common sense is dead. All the old sayings are gone. All the wisdom accumulated through thousands of years of human ingenuity was wiped away in just two decades. Doctors moan that people don't trust them when they spout demonstrable lies at us every day and kill more people in their hospitals than smoking, obesity and drinking combined. The police moan that people don't trust them when they arrest the victims and let the criminals claim compensation. The courts complain that people don't trust them when they lock up Granny for not paying council tax and let the man who stole her money go free. Civilisation as we know it is over. We are now in the time of the professionally-offended, the bleaters, the whiners, the useless and the spiteful. There is nobody in any position of authority we can unequivocally trust any more. The civilisation you see around you now is a tired seventies plastic veneer, already cracking and flaking away.

So we are in this alone. Not together, as Cameron pretends. His government, thrilled by their control over private property so far, now want to extend their malice to private finance. Don't imagine that Labour are not drooling at the prospect of making use of the Robin Clegg law when the stupid bastards vote them back in.The Brown Gorgon already ruined private pensions, it is but one more small step to private savings and private property is on a knife-edge now.

Those vigilantes know all this. They know Clegg's intended control of private finance will go far beyond banks and into their savings. Politicians, judges and all manner of officials like to imagine they are the most intelligent beings on the planet, but so do earwigs. In a direct comparison my money's definitely on the earwigs because they actually care about their offspring and they don't shit on their own species.

Those vigilantes know the law has become a parody of itself, a sick and vicious practical joke played on us all, and they are not the mindless cattle the Righteous have played them for. They have been furious for a long time but the British way is the way of the bitten lip, the make do and mend, the silent shrug and acceptance of the way things are. They don't like it but they put up with it.

Perhaps, at last, not any more.

Epitaph for a currency.

2011-12-03T04:50:00.001Z

€

Heh. It works. Thanks for all the tips on how to get that wretched symbol to show up. It does feel a little like learning Latin - all very interesting but likely to be of limited use in the future.

Might as well do it again while there's still a currency with that symbol. €

There is much hoo-hah in the €urozone because they're skint. I'm skint too, but skint is a relative term. Currently, 'skint' means I can't buy single malts and have to reserve money to be sure the bills are paid. That's not the 'absolute skint' I've experienced before. There was a time when I had nowhere to live and would follow drunks at a safe distance in the hope they would abandon their fish and chips unfinished and I didn't care if they'd gone cold.

It would be awful to live like that now. Hardly anyone puts salt on them any more.

So my current level of 'skint' still has a roof over my head and no immediate prospect of losing it. Why? Well, I learned something from my youthful homeless period. I learned that I didn't like it one bit. It was, to put it gently, a period of such utter shittiness that I will eat my neighbour's children before I submit to it again. And we are talking about some non-Halal and possibly toxic children here. Even Tesco wouldn't stock the meat from them.

When I was new to the world of earnings I would watch my bank balance fall to zero and then below and think 'I should get around to doing something about that one day'. That was the attitude than led me to the absolute zero on the Kelvin scale of skintiness. It was a stupid attitude.

As I recovered I started worrying when the money approached zero. Then I started to worry when the balance went below a hundred. Then a thousand. It has never reached ten thousand and isn't likely to so the below-1000 concern is probably my limit. It's good enough. I rein in spending, ease off the malts and the gadgets and turn from buying crap on eBay to selling it there before the balance gets dangerously low. It keeps me warm and fed and alive and out of debt. The mortgage is still my only debt so although I don't have much money, I don't owe much either. There's no point having very much of it anyway, it's getting more worthless by the day. Once we hit Weimar levels I'll be able to pay off the mortgage with the proceeds of one book.

All those politicians, all the EU officials, seem to still be at that 'borrow it, spend it, bugger it' stage that landed me on the streets all those years ago. I learned from those mistakes. It seems they have not.

The Eurozone is falling apart. There is no more money but still they spend. They can't borrow any more so they're likely to just print some.

Cameron is pretending anyone cares what he thinks and is in talks that will end up with us handing over money to prop up Hitler's dream of a Germany-controlled Europe. Repatriation of powers? Won't happen. A referendum on the inevitable new treaty to allow Angela Merkin to control every country's budget whether they use the €uro or not? No chance. The Forehead will decide for us because he knows that nobody intelligent will agree. Fortunately for him he has ensured that nobody intelligent is in government.

When I had that attitude I ended up homeless. When Cameron and his EU cronies have that attitude we all end up homeless. Except them.

The Euro will probably collapse and that won't be good for us either. This mess makes the Brown Gorgon's fiscal policy look almost sane. The EU has never had its accounts in order. If my accounts were in that kind of shambles the taxman would prosecute but Cameron is happy to do business with, and kowtow to, an organisation that makes Al Capone's look legitimate.

What the hell is he thinking? Let's have a Romulus Crowe quote - 'Do I know what you think? I'm still wondering whether'.

It's all been a twenty-year-old's first taste of independence and income that he thought would go on forever. That rude awakening when the income stopped has simply not happened to the Eurospenders. They went below zero a long time ago and they have suffered no consequences so they just keep on borrowing and spending.

As an individual, the opportunity to keep borrowing dried up pretty fast. As for the government, they kept borrowing until they owed more money than exists and are only now finding that the lenders are saying 'no'.

It came as a shock to me, so I can see that it's come as a shock to them too.

I owed levels that could be paid back, and were. I became, and remain, free of debt (mortgage excepted but I'm working on it) They now owe levels that can never be repaid because there isn't enough actual value on the planet to repay it.

So they think we'll pay it for them.

No.

Time for Cameron to learn how to play 'chase the chip bag'.

Entertainment time - A Christmas Contract

2011-12-02T18:26:00.001Z

It's been a while since the last pure entertainment post. In this festive season, where Jeremy Clarkson has offended the unions and the strikers, the unions have offended everyone who didn't strike, and a man dressed as Santa offended someone by telling her child she was on the naughty list, I offer something that should have every child on the damn planet screaming awake in terror on Christmas Eve and every parent, every church, and pretty much most of those seven billion delicate little souls out there well and truly huffed and upset. I will not be outdone by a pompous car show presenter and a bunch of humourless union yobbos.

Read on, and discover what your child's notes to Santa really mean. I'm just going to sit in the corner and cackle for a while.
__________________________

A Christmas Contract

Father Jacob Monteith stopped in the snow outside the toyshop and stared through the window. He passed this shop every evening on his way home from church. Most of the year he ignored it but in the weeks before Christmas he allowed himself a curl of the lip. He had always walked past, sneering, but this evening he stopped and stared.

It was never meant to be this way. The birth of Christ was the only reason for Christmas. A message of peace and an end to mankind’s strife, but this window showed him console games of war and death, of cars racing through city streets, of criminal activities undertaken for fun, of torment and of the demons of Hell. Toy robots bristled with weaponry. Monstrous plastic shapes leered back at him through the glass, the latest horror film characters rendered in ghastly realism and encased in individual see-through packs.

Dolls dressed in tiny skirts and low-cut tops, dolls ready to be made up and dressed like street-corner hookers and boxes of play makeup for the little girls to emulate them. This Christmas did not come from God. This Christmas came from someone else, and now Father Monteith knew who, and he knew where and when it had changed. The memory of today’s confessional blurred his vision.

***

It had been an uneventful confessional so far that afternoon. A few lustful thoughts, the usual petty snipes at neighbours, things said in haste and now regretted. Father Monteith doubted that God even listened to such trivial concerns these days. Against the mayhem in the world, they could surely mean nothing. He dispatched each with no more than a few ‘Hail Marys’ and some lit candles. There was nobody doomed to eternity in the flames this day.

The final confessor of the day took a seat and Father Monteith opened the grille. The shadowy figure spoke with a man’s voice.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” There followed a pause.

“How long has it been since your last confession, my son?” It was unusual for Father Monteith to need to prompt his parishioners. His brow furrowed as he tried to place a face to the voice.

“I haven’t done this before, Father.”

“Are you a Catholic?” The prospect of telling one not of the Faith to clear off was daunting, but could he take confession from someone outside his flock?

“Yes, Father, but I have rarely attended church. I am sorry. If I had known—” The voice choked off.

“There is a first time for us all, my son. What is it you wish to confess?”

Another long pause. “It’s something terrible. I didn’t know until it was too late. It’s not just me. There are others. Hundreds. Thousands. All over the world.”

“Calm down, my son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as that.” Father Monteith released the catch on his door. The man’s voice had become shrill and he could well be unhinged. This might be the confession he had heard about and always dreaded—the real, terrible crime confession.

Through the grille came the sound of deep breaths. “I am sorry, Father. It’s just so terrible. I can still barely believe it. I’ve sold my soul to evil, Father.”

Father Monteith pursed his lips. He suspected the man had watched one too many horror films. People did not sell their souls to Satan in this day and age. Still, there were some who believed in that mediaeval nonsense and they had to be brought back to reality gently.

“Pacts with the devil are not binding on the good Christian soul, my son. Tell me about this deal you made and we’ll see what can be done to free you from it.”

“It’s too late, Father. Christmas is nearly here. I always thought it was Christian to observe it but all these years I was wrong. It’s not Christian at all. The tree, the fairies, the tinsel, the gifts, all of it is wrong.”

Father Monteith sighed. “The Church has often spoken about the commercialisation of Christmas. We ignore the pagan aspects and the money-changing parts and we stick to our beliefs. We rejoice in the birth of Christ. It does no harm to partake of the gifts and the decorations as long as that love of God is foremost in our minds. You need not fear Satan, my son.”

“Satan.” The man spat the word. “Satan has nothing to do with this. I made my deals with Santa. Year after year, I wrote notes and year after year, he delivered. He kept his part of the bargain. Now my soul is his.”

“um...” Father Monteith checked his door was free to open in case he needed it in a hurry. There had been fruitloops in the confessional before but this one was the whole Harvest Festival’s worth with a cherry on the top. Sold his soul to Santa?

“Santa isn’t real.” The man spoke the words before they left Father Monteith’s lips. “He’s just an image. Stolen from Christianity.”

Father Monteith rubbed his head. “Santa is not part of Scripture, my son. He’s based on Saint Nicholas and—”

“You’re wrong, Father. They took the image, the affinity with fireplaces, the corruption—smoking, drinking, gluttony—the unseen and secretive nature, an association with the old Pagan elves, the midnight appearance and they even contrived to make his name an anagram of the most evil creature in the Bible. Santa isn’t Satan, Father. He’s a caricature. A corruption of the most corrupt, so cleverly made that he seems benign.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” Father Monteith said. “You didn’t make some kind of pact with Satan and you don’t believe Santa is real. So who did you do this deal with, and why?”

The man took a deep breath. “When Christianity swept across Europe, it brushed away all the old gods. It did this by taking over their festivals and renaming them. So the Pagan spring fertility rites became Easter and the Winter Solstice became Christmas. The early pilgrims did it deliberately. They wanted to overwrite the old ways.”

Father Monteith nodded. “That’s a matter of history and is well known, my son. The True Faith overcame the primitive superstitions and devil-worship.”

“No, Father, it didn’t. It pushed those old gods aside but they didn’t die. They watched and learned and they retaliated. They created Santa.”

“Oh, come now. Santa is a children’s story. Based on Saint Nicholas, maybe, but he’s just a story. An image on a card, a fantasy. Something to entertain the innocence of youth. He’s nothing to do with devils and monsters.”

“Isn’t it the Church who says that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to make people believe he didn’t exist? Father, I’m not making this up. Those old Pagan gods made Santa and they made him nonexistent. He’s a mask. An illusion. It’s not Santa we ask for gifts. It’s those old gods.”

Father Monteith lowered his head and wished there were some way to refer this confessor to a psychiatrist. “Look—” He heard the harshness in his voice, paused and tried again. “The gifts come from the parents. Santa delivers nothing. There are no real elves making presents at the North Pole and no flying reindeer. Santa is just a story. A game parents play with their children. Santa doesn’t get the notes the children send and he doesn’t really bring presents down the chimney. Your pact is imaginary. Those childhood notes to Santa were fulfilled by your parents. If you owe your soul to anyone, it’s to them.”

“Temptation, Father. The children write the notes and the old gods tempt the parents into spending money they cannot afford. The gods don’t buy the presents themselves, that’s true, but they get the child’s wish granted. They fulfil their side of the contract. The deal is made with the help of our parents and none of us realise what we’re doing.”

Father Monteith blew a long, slow, silent breath before responding. “This is all in your imagination, my son. Those old Pagan gods are long gone. They were never real in the first place. They were made up by people who had not heard the Gospel and when they did, they abandoned their illusory gods and turned to the one true God.”

“How can you say that, Father? The demonic spirits are taught as real and dangerous by the Church. We are told to beware of them, told to watch for their tricks and deceptions and the old Pagan gods are among those spirits. Spirits don’t die, Father.” The man snorted. “If spirits die, then the promise of an everlasting afterlife rings a little hollow, doesn’t it?”

“It is not the same thing!” Father Monteith held up his hands. “I am sorry, my son. I didn’t mean to shout. But surely you must see the absurdity of your statements? I mean, Santa wasn’t even invented until Christianity had been the dominant religion here for quite some time. He hadn’t even been thought of before then so he simply cannot be a Pagan god.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “You accept that Santa is not real, that he does not receive the children’s notes and that the parents buy the presents. There is no demon making deals with infants. It’s all a fairy tale.”

In the long silence that followed, the man’s breathing and his occasional shifting on his seat were Father Monteith’s only indications that his visitor was still there. He moved closer to the grille. “Are you all right, my son?”

“You cannot help me, Father, because you do not believe this devil is real. I don’t mean your horned and hoofed red Satan. I mean the invisible, silent, ancient spirits that the Church ignores. Your own Church teaches that Satan works best when we don’t believe he even exists.” The man opened the confessional door, allowing a little light into his side. “I didn’t really think you could help, but I hoped you could warn others. It’s too late for me.”

Through the grille, Father Monteith could make out a shabby, unshaven man, his face mostly obscured by the shadows in the small box. He felt an urge to discuss this matter further. Something had touched his mind, something primal, some idea buried in what people like to call ‘race memory’.

“We can continue this conversation less formally, if you wish. Would you like to chat in the church, when it’s quiet?”

“There’s no point.” The man rose from his seat. “Santa is not Satan, Father. Satan’s ways are known to us and we watch out for them.” He leaned in close to the grille, sending a blast of cheap-tobacco and discount-whisky breath into Father Monteith’s face. “Nobody believes in Santa, Father. Nobody makes deals with spirits they don’t believe exist. Those spirits can do as they please because we aren’t even looking for them.”

Father Monteith backed away from the grille, thankful that the darkness hid his expression of disgust. “You’re right, but that solves your problem, surely? You cannot have made a deal with an imaginary creature.”

“Ah, but there are some who do believe. Some who call on the power of the old gods without ever asking the price, without even knowing they are making deals with demons.” The man pushed his door fully open. “The children, Father. They get us when we’re children.”

Old memories drifted through Father Monteith’s mind. Snatches of remembered histories, pieces of information picked up but dismissed as irrelevant throughout his studies for the priesthood. Fragments of thoughts that had never before been called upon to connect into fully-formed ideas. His subconscious shouted unintelligible warnings, wordless articulations that seemed to hark back to a time of frightened cavemen, a time when people staved off the horrors of night with fire. A time when the ghosts were real, a time when gods were not worshipped, but appeased. A time of vengeful spirits, a time that had passed into oblivion. Had those old gods really passed into oblivion too, or were they plotting their return? They had had two thousand years to do something. Had they already done it, and had the Church not even noticed?

By the time Father Monteith regained his composure and stepped out of the confessional, the man had left the church. All that remained was the scent of unwashed vagrant, a trail through the aisle that was almost tangible. The man had left more than an odour. He had left an idea, an awakening of lost thought.

The fairies of old were not pretty little things with gossamer wings. They were dangerous spirits. The genies, the Djinn, were not the comical lamp-dwellers of modern children’s tales. Both granted wishes but there was always a terrible price to pay. Accept the granting of the wish without asking the price and the demon could set its own deal. Souls were lost, children taken, lives destroyed, and often for no more than a desired trinket. A toy. The sort of wish Santa might grant.

Father Monteith only just reached the pew before collapsing into it. It was the same. All the same. Those Djinn granting silly requests, the fairies making spells for trivial desires, they were the same as a child’s Santa list. The list was accepted, the wish fulfilled, the deal struck and the price left undefined. Just as those vicious fairies became delightful little images of beauty, just as the evil Djinn became entertainment for children’s shows, so the dangerous old gods became the amiable and jolly Santa.

All along, all this time, Christianity’s true enemy had not been Satan. The enemy was hidden in plain sight and nobody, before the mysterious confessor, had noticed. Father Monteith’s church had a Christmas tree, decorated and lit, where he would never have countenanced the inclusion of Satan’s defiled altar. Yet there it was, in his own church, with its Pagan symbolism laughing at him. Laughing at the Catholic belief in triumph. The old gods were supposed to have been vanquished yet there was their symbol, their tree, mocking him in his own sacred church.

***

There was another decorated tree in the toyshop. More, in every shop and in every house. Another in the town square, a big one. All bore the tinsel strands, the representation of those ancient solstice sacrifices where the glistening entrails of the victims were draped on the bare branches of the frozen trees. The old gods were not dead. Their festival continued.

Through the toyshop window, Father Monteith saw the entrance to Santa’s Grotto. A dark papier-mâché cave that had never disturbed him before as it did now. Memories of the dolmens and underground rituals of the pre-Christian Pagans chilled him to the bone. Santa’s Grotto was a dolmen. A place of connection with the world of death. A place of ritual where children passed into a land of fantasy and made deals with that representative of the old gods within. Surrounded by elven-folk, fairies, they made their wishes and Santa saw to it that their wishes were granted.

Not one child ever thought to ask the price. Father Monteith almost choked when he remembered his own childhood. His bright-eyed acceptance of Santa, the notes up the chimney, the visits to the Grotto, the Christmas mornings of frantic paper-tearing and childish wonder at Santa’s generosity. He had never asked the price either.

Father Monteith, for the first time in a life based entirely on faith, did not want to believe what his own mind told him. He tore at the logic but it would not yield. He tried to blank his memories but they came through his defences like a train through fog. Santa was not Satan. By comparison, Satan had been a sort of celebrity devil, a bragging and shallow dilettante of devilment. Santa had been so much more subtle, so much more devious, so much more clever.

The clues had been there all along. Right there, right in the face of reason. The link to Saint Nicholas could not hold when Santa was a fat, smoking drinker who associated with Pagan elves. Where was the saintly self-denial, the exclusion of Paganism, the refutation of commerciality? Santa’s elves made toys. Nothing useful. Toys. Santa delivered what children asked for and let adults believe he did not exist. Precisely what the Church watched for in Satan and yet ignored in that anagrammatical illusion.

Could it be? Could all those years of preaching have come to nothing? Had every one of his flock written a note to Santa in their youth? Did he have no souls at all to offer Heaven, not even his own? Did Darvell Gadarn still laugh from his oak tree at the upstarts of the new religion?

Father Monteith headed for home where his pipe and his small nightly sherry waited for him. On the way he passed the huge Christmas tree in the town square. He had paid it no more than a passing glance in all the years it had been there but this time he looked with new eyes on the illuminated star at the top. The one that had adorned the tree for every Christmas he remembered.

A five-pointed star. The old gods’ laughter rang in his ears all the way home.

________________________

Back to work for me. I have a few more yarns to spin and I hope to have enough for a Christmas book you can all give to other people's children this year. Unless you happen to like those children, naturally.

Christmas is coming. Humbugs at the ready.

2011-12-02T03:23:00.001Z

Santa’s Claws

There was once a printmagazine called NFG (Canadian, eh?) which ran a regular competition called theGreat Sixty-Niner. You had to write a story in exactly 69 words. This onedidn’t win the competition but it reached the level of being printed in themagazine.

Harry smoothed his Santa suit andclimbed the ladder. He loved Christmas Eve.

He tapped on the window until thecurtain opened and a small face appeared.

Ruffling his beard with one hand,he watched delight bloom in the child's eyes, then he scowled and pointed afinger.

"You're gettingnothing," he said, laughing at the tears as he descended the ladder andmoved it to the next house.

___________________________________________

I wrote that, and it appeared in a magazine, six years ago. It's one of the previously published stories in 'Fears of the old and the new'. So when I read this story I thought 'Ha! Finally, I am ahead of reality in something!'

Okay, to sane people it won't look like anything worth getting excited about but if you've been trying to write horror or dystopia stories and finding the morning news is way ahead of you, it feels like a little triumph.

Just for once I got in there before real life did. Assuming smug mode for a moment, please be patient...

My silence lately has been due to working on a Christmas tale that is both delightfully vicious and entirely gore-free. Nobody even gets bruised. Nobody does what the mother in the Mail story does - nobody uses their child's distress to force a company to give them free stuff while claiming the moral high ground. Even Clive Barker wouldn't have come up with something that horrible.

I, however, hope to have done so. I'll have to edit and check it but it's December so here comes the humbug man. It will be part of the Christmas collection but it's too nasty not to spread as a freebie too ;)

A Euro oddity.

2011-12-01T21:34:00.000Z

Amazon have moved the Kindle market into Spain and Italy. No complaints from me, the wider those Kindle books are available, the more likely it is that someone will buy one.

I had to go in and add pricing for all the books, which means they are likely to be offline for a day while they update. Can't be helped I suppose.

The easy option is to set the price in US dollars and then check the boxes that make the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain prices equivalent to the dollar price. It means the European prices fluctuate by a few pennies as the currencies move in relation to the dollar but it means the books are the same price everywhere.

What seemed odd to me was that currently, the French and German equivalent of a $1.99 price is euro 1.45. However, the Spanish and Italian equivalent is euro 1.50 (I don't have a keyboard with the euro sign. I should get one before they become collector's items).

It looks as if there is a different exchange rate between the dollar and the French and German euros than between the dollar and the Italian and Spanish euros.

Is that possible? Is the Eurozone breaking up? Or am I missing something?

Anyone out there understand international money markets?

I am Cornholio!

2011-12-01T01:51:00.001Z

Beavis and Butthead fans will know that Beavis becomes the Great Cornholio when given caffeine. Those whose education is lacking in this department might want to quickly revise this piece of historic American heritage.

I have made the mistake, in the past, of firing up the espresso machine late at night and even attempts to lie down in the dark mean nothing after that. Now I restrict my espresso intake to, at the latest, early evening and am almost approaching normal people's hours. It does have an effect. That's undeniable.

I was not aware that pregnant women were advised not to drink too much caffeine. Perhaps that's not much of a surprise because it involves 'woman' and 'pregnant' and I have never knowingly been either. It seems they are indeed so advised, probably because their child risks being born with its caul pulled over its head and demanding T-P for its bunghole. A hyperactive newborn must be a terrible thing to behold and having given up caffeine completely once, I know there are real withdrawal effects which I have never experienced with smoking withdrawal. You wouldn't want a wide-awake high-speed newborn with a coffee habit.

Put me in an airport departure lounge, tell me the plane is delayed four hours and I can't smoke, and I'm okay. Tell me there's no caffeine and someone is going to lose body parts.

I like espresso. I don't currently have a working filter-coffee machine and if I get another one, it'll be cheap. My espresso machine is a Gaggia. No half measures for that one.

Some things in that article seemed odd to me. Not this part -

Researchers from Glasgow University bought single-shot espressos from 20 coffee shops in the city and measured their caffeine content.

This is perfectly normal behaviour for scientists. Coffee is an important part of the scientific process and naturally we all want to know where to get the best stuff. The stuff that lets the day zoom by and might even, if we drink enough, let us live fast enough to exceed the speed of light and go back in time.

However, it occurred to me that if pregnant women were advised to limit their caffeine, then pregnant women would not be very likely to order espresso. That's like telling a beer drinker to cut down on alcohol so they switch to whisky.

The article helpfully points out that Starbuck's is low-octane diesel espresso and that the real hard stuff is to be found at a place called Patisserie Francoise, which I have never seen. It probably vibrates so fast it's just a blur.

Not a big surprise in the name there. I once spent a week in Marseille (in which I was mistaken for a hired killer, but more of that another time) and when I came home I could not find coffee strong enough.Caffeine appears to have no effect on the French at all unless they are all comatose without it.

The story has its call for regulation that all scientists have to demand now in order to get further grants, and its nonsense aspect too.

A study of other coffees such as lattes and cappuccinos is also warranted, he said, as they are often made from an even stronger espresso base. He added: ‘There is every possibility this applies to all coffee shop coffees and not just espresso and not just in Glasgow.’

No, those lattes and cappuccinos are made with exactly the same espresso base. My machine has the milk-foaming spout and the coffee that goes in is the same (except mine is permanently set up for 'doppio'). It's just diluted into a pint mug's worth. If you drink a whole cardboard vat of coffee made by one of these shops it contains the same amount of caffeine as the espresso. The espresso is just a way of mainlining coffee without the foamy milk and the bursting urge to pee later.

But there was also a horrifying aspect to this story:

A spokesman for Starbucks said: ‘It is nothing new that caffeine is bad for pregnant women. We offer decaffeinated espressos in our stores.

AAAAAAAHHHH! Unleaded espresso? What? What? Have we crossed into the Twilight Zone or something? Everyone knows espresso is the final destination of those who start on the Nescafe gateway drugs. We've already seen alcohol-free whisky and beer. We all have taps in the kitchen dispensing alcohol-free vodka. Almost nicotine-free smokes (remember Consulate and More?) and smoke-free nicotine in Electrofag.

What next? Drug-free cocaine? Carless driving? Trains with no rails? Come on. Decaff espresso is missing the point to the extent where the point is the size of a barn door and a sniper is aiming at it. It should be a point impossible to miss.

If you are advised to cut back on caffeine, don't drink espresso because nothing screams 'Concentrated Wakey Water' like a tiny cup with what appears to be an oil distillation residue in the bottom. It's not rocket science although most rocket scientists are fuelled by this stuff. Their mothers probably were too. The Italians designed Ferrari and Bugatti cars really fast while we British tea-drinkers were drawing Austin 1100's. A good espresso machine could have saved Vauxhall. Just imagine the Astra on speed.

Patisserie Francoise was unable to comment.

Well, no, they were too busy demanding T-P while grinning, gibbering and trembling.

Next time I'm in Glasgow, save me a seat in Patisserie Francoise. That's where the single-malt espresso lives.

Oh. And stand clear. I am Cornholio.

Something happened today.

2011-12-01T00:36:00.001Z

Apparently millions of people were on strike today. I didn't notice anything different. The post office was full of long-past-their-bury-by-date geriatrics as usual and the bank was full of people with bags full of coins and cheques and none of them had the right weight of coins per bag. It's a good thing I'm not allowed to have a gun.

I even took the short cut across the Council car park and noted that while it was less packed than usual, it was more than half full. What they do in there remains a mystery to me but more than half of them were doing it anyway. I don't suppose the ones responsible for council tax were on strike. It's direct-debit day tomorrow and someone has to push the button when the relevant committee tells them to.

A strike in November has little appeal for the sensible here. It means paying to heat your house all day when you could be sitting in a warm office and getting your heat free. The hospital was apparently on strike but the nurses weren't and neither was Casualty so the important stuff was still working. I wonder if the NHS Smoke Puritans were on strike? That would have been welcomed by the inmates and most of the staff too.

One noticeable effect of the strike was seen at UK border control. It was apparently much more efficient with the usual staff out of the way. Oh dear, that wasn't what the strikers wanted to happen, I'm sure. They're back at work tomorrow so it'll be back to normal, unfortunately. Perhaps they could be induced to strike for longer next time.

I'm neither for nor against the strikes. I don't much care what Ozzy does to pensions because I will only get the small one I built up before becoming self-employed. I don't care what he does to retirement age because I have no intention of retiring. I'll work until I die because I enjoy what I do. What would I do in retirement? Potter about a lab, write some books? I do that now.

So the medics are on strike. I don't trust them anyway. I know they are lying about smoking and drinking and five-a-day and more, so what can I trust from them? If I take my sore wrist to the doctor I am sure it will be smoking-related or drink-related (it was in fact paint-related but they don't have that one on the books yet). It's getting better gradually on its own. No need for painkillers, but I have a bottle of Grants at hand just to take the edge off. Currently £16 a litre in Morrison's. Cheaper than drugs and fewer side-effects.

[Cheapskate Aberdonian tip - if you have a visitor who drinks brandy drowned in Coke, refill an empty Courvoisier bottle with Tesco Own Brand. Saves a fortune and in all that Coke, they can't tell. Same goes for whisky and mixer drinkers. That's why I have a whisky decanter. It saves me the pain of watching someone pouring lemonade into the good stuff]

If the border people are on strike, does that mean that for one day only there was nobody stealing legally-bought baccy? Who could complain about that, apart from the Dreadful Arnott and her zombie horde, or the BMA - who are already on my list of liars anyway.

As for Ozzy's generosity in his little budget, he's not going to hike up petrol more than it's already hiked, at least not just yet, and he's going to cut the rate of increase in money we throw into the sea to look generous. All those dictators will just have to make do without gold-plated tyres on their Ferraris for now.

It was quite a trick. Making an increase in Government wastage look like spending cuts. For many out there, he pulled it off too. There are lots and lots of people who think he really is trying to cut the deficit. Let's just hope they work out they've been scammed before the next election.

As for the strikers, well, if they want to do it again I have no problem with that at all. It seems to have made little difference this time. Let them make a habit of it and the private sector will soon adapt with childcare facilities in large businesses and pooled childcare between smaller ones, and eventually these will become schools. That, as far as I can see, was the only real problem they caused and let's be honest, one day off from watching porn films and learning how socialism was responsible for the creation of the universe won't harm any child.

Otherwise, everything seems to have carried on quite nicely without them. A few more strikes and those town halls might get back to what they were supposed to be doing, once they've realised that nobody actually needs LBGT/ethnic diversity outreach departments and smoking cessation officers and booze price watching committees.

Perhaps then we can have councils who concentrate on doing the stuff we really want done.

Degeekification time.

2011-11-30T01:41:00.001Z

Busy here today. I have spent a good bit of the day trying various passwords on my eBay account because it's a long, long time since I used it. Since it has 100% positive feedback I didn't want to abandon it and start again. Finally worked it out.

I'm putting up my vast collection of 'N' gauge railway stuff. The layout goes right around the attic and if I send a coal train out at scale speed I won't see it again for at least five minutes. The collection of engines and rolling stock exceeds even that huge track plan and it's all going to go. All of it.

Why? I'm getting old. I no longer have the eyesight and steady fingers of a twenty-year-old and putting thirty coal trucks onto track that's nine millimetres wide is enough to drive me insane. Then there are those long steam engines with all the wheels and one wheel out of line means it'll run fine - until it hits a set of points.

I might go back to railway modelling in the future but it'll be in a bigger scale. I've long been hankering after a G scale live steam train in the garden, but the cost!

It's a bit of a wrench, some of that stuff has been with me for decades and some of it is handmade. As you can imagine, I went over the top with it as I do in all things. There is a scale A4 'Coronation' in whitemetal that I never managed to add the lining to, and I'm the only N gauge modeller I know with a Class 35 Hymek.

I know the geeky train terminology means nothing to most of you so here are some non-train pictures of models in that scale.

The ruler is in centimetres and all the models are metal. I have a signal box with all internal fittings too, and as with those pictured I really don't think I could assemble and paint such tiny things now. These days I prefer to work in 1/24th rather than 1/600th scale and yes, I have brass wire to add brake pipes and engine wiring to those model trucks. Bigger scale means better detail. Even in places nobody can see it. I know it's there and that's all that matters.

Another issue is glue. Those metal models need superglue and I have pondered the day I might turn up in casualty with tiny brass signal levers stuck to my fingers. It could happen. I have made working N gauge signals in the past. I can just see me growling at the doctor who is trying to remove them - 'Don't bend them.'

Sorting the stuff, persuading myself that this time I really do have to sell it and then getting decent photos and putting it all on eBay will take time. But it must be done and the lead-up to Christmas is the time to do it.

I can no longer see these things properly and am too old to make any more.

And I'm skint. That's the decider.

UPDATE: Rechargeable batteries were not invented by man. They are extruded from the Devil's suppurating anus after a particularly bad bout of 'Helli belly'. They sit for ages claiming to be fully charged while you take inconsequential snapshots but as soon as you need to take photos for any serious reason, they die. Anyway, I charged them up and found my photography isn't too good on such tiny things. Tomorrow I will enlist the help of someone who has a proper macro lens with a circular flash on the end. The link will go up when I finally get this done!

It seemed like such an easy idea...

Fire, walk with me.

2011-11-29T00:08:00.001Z

When I was a horrible little child we lived in a council house. In those days, council houses were for working people who didn't yet earn enough to buy their own and my father worked at the coal face. He took home fourteen pounds a week in the sixties and that was a seriously good wage at the time. So we weren't poor but we weren't rich either. I was at school with the dentist's kid and a sleepover at his house was an eye-opener.

I remember the little house. It was semi-detached with a long garden, and was heated by two fireplaces. One in the living room and one in the kitchen. The kitchen fireplace was built in to some kind of cast-iron monster that had an oven attached to it. My mother never used it for cooking, she had a proper electric cooker. The house is still there, I've seen it on Google Streetview. It looks much the same but it has a satellite dish now. The old frog pond and the woodland of my youth is now beneath another housing estate. Those children who live there now will not come home covered in stinking mud. They won't bring home jars of wild lizards or shiny beetles or tadpoles with the back legs grown in. I wonder what they do for fun these days?

Having a coal fire was not a sign of affluence. Neither was the cast-iron cooking and heating monster. That thing would have been disposed of if it hadn't been built in to the wall, and if we had owned the house I have no doubt my father would have chiselled it out himself. I have seen him do much worse to houses we did own. If he had such a monstrosity now he'd sell it to some Hooray Henry as an original Aga because that's pretty much what it was. Old-fashioned and ugly.

Heating with a coal fire is not something to be aspired to. Now that it's getting cold here, I can set the central heating to come on half an hour before I need to get up and the house will be de-chilled before I roll back the sheets. I recall those mornings when the windows had frost on the inside until someone dragged themselves through the freezing house to light the fire.

It wasn't a matter of turning a switch. First, yesterday's ashes had to be scraped out and the hearth and grate cleaned. Not just cleaned 'a bit'. Cleaned to Mother's specifications which meant practically sterilised. Then place the kindling, paper and sticks, with a few bits of coal.

Then light it, let the coal catch and gradually add more. It took time to get the fire going and it took a long time for it to heat the house. In really cold weather you'd notice a big difference in temperature between the side of you that was facing the fire and the side that wasn't. One good thing about that house was that the chimney was in the middle so it heated all of the house. Chimneys in a side wall are silly.

The idea that heating your home with a coal fire is all romantic and sweet is bollocks. It's messy, you have to look after it all day and you have to start it in the freezing cold. I am delighted to have central heating.

On the other hand, a fireplace is cheap to run. One of the Smoky-Drinkers recently had central heating installed and since his bungalow is small, he opted to have the fireplace removed and the chimney closed off. It gives him a lot more space but I think he was mistaken to do that. The minor niggle is that you can't throw your fag-ends into a radiator but the bigger issue is cost.

Last winter there was a week in which I left the heating on continuously. That was expensive but it was the coldest winter week I can remember in the last fifty years. I remember deeper snow, but never so cold. Tonight is positively balmy by comparison.

It would have been good to have a chimney then because I could have saved on heating by burning some of the old palettes my neighbour gives me for my chimenea. If I could have used the central heating to start warming the house each morning and then turned it off when I had a good fire going I'd have saved a lot of money and still been continuously warm.

So I have often toyed with the idea of fitting one of the new wood-burning stoves. A friend in Wales has now installed a coal/wood burner that runs his central heating, provides hot water and looks very nice. Apparently his heating bill for all of last winter was £60, the bastard. Mine was more than that per month. He is tougher than me, cold mornings are easy when you're built like an orang-utan and he's five hundred miles further south. However, a daytime cheap-heating stove would mesh well with the timer on the central heating.

There was, until recently, nothing but praise for the wood-burning stove. It reduced gas and electricity use, it burned renewable wood and it was Green and trendy. People who had never experienced the sole dependence on a fireplace for heating thought they were wonderful. Very New Age, very back-to-the-roots, very working class, very socialist credential. Not for them the rooms coated with coal dust and soot, not for them the coal scuttle and the shovelling snow aside to get to the coal bunker. They used bought-in reconstructed logs with not so much as a flake of bark to sully the carpet. If you pick up a log and your hand doesn't get dirty, it's not real.

Unfortunately, the plebs took a shine to these things too, and saved a good bit of cash using them for heat rather than decoration. This is, of course, sinful under the New Socialist Utopia which is only for the rich.

I suspect that the reversal in the wood-burner's fortunes is partly due to that reduction in gas and electricity use (with the resultant reduction in socialist shareholder profit), but it's definitely very much linked to the new antismoking Puritanism sweeping the country.

Take a look at the comments on this one:

The government needs to ban these. This is the 21st century!-
Thomas Roll, London, 26/11/2011 15:18

yuo don't need a scientist to tell us that our neighbours stinky wood stove is poisoning the air.....- BrummyDoug, Birmingham, 26/11/2011

You wood burning folk only care about yourself. You stink the whole street out without any care in the world.- Dave, Uk, 27/11/2011 5:26

And the fumes stink!- Ray Smith, Nottingham, 26/11/2011 17:22

Straight out of the antismoker handbook. Every one of them.

It's smoke, you see, and smoke is bad for you. Candles have been implicated already. All smoke is bad. Didn't the Puritans realise what they did by telling the drones that a tiny whiff of smoke from a bit of a leaf will kill them? It seems not.

If it wasn't for Man's control of fire we would still be huddled in caves over the winter, being picked off by pumas and lions. We grew up, as a species, swathed in smoke. It made us what we are.

The drones argue that we don't need that smoke any more, that we have outgrown it but it is part of us. Our bodies have become used to it being there. Thousands of years of development and all the while surrounded by the smoke from something burning. Leaves, wood, coal, oil, always something burning. It is unnatural to be without it.

I have no fireplace in this house. It's about twelve years old and was built without one. Yet I have to have fire. When I'm at the computer there is a big white candle burning. It's not for heat or light, it's for fire. I have an array of anglepoise and spot-lamps (you young ones will need them when you get older so buy them while you can) all around this little office and there's a radiator right next to me. I have heat and light in plenty.

The candle provides flame. Fire is part of my life and as a human being it is part of my heritage. I was brought up understanding its use and its dangers. So was, not only my family, not only my countrymen, but my entire species. This goes beyond race and beyond nationalism. Every human being on the planet is linked to fire and to its smoke. It made us what we are.

The drones can deny their humanity all they like. I'm going to continue to burn something every day even if it's just a candle or a bit of leaf wrapped in paper. I'm not going to deny my existence to suit some ridiculous fantasy that refutes the heritage common to every human on the planet. Let the drones wither and fade in their imaginary worlds.

Fire, walk with me.

The Dark Days of Christmas

2011-11-27T23:58:00.001Z

It's approaching the Dead Time of Year. That time when all those companies we self-employed folk rely on for work shut down for Christmas. There is no holiday pay for the self-employed.

Therefore I have to get as much money-earning stuff done as possible before the whole of Capitalism closes down for a month. January starts with meetings and discussions, actual work might start again around February or March and income will begin sometime after that. It's a lean time of year at the end of an already-lean year.

The new business, writing, might not follow the same pattern. I don't know for sure because it's my first year of taking it seriously. One thing that has occurred to me is that lots of people will get Kindles and Nooks and the equivalent Kobo gadget for Christmas so it's a good time to get their attention before the novelty wears off.

The dystopia isn't likely to be ready by Christmas. It's a departure from my usual themes and novels take time even when I'm fully conversant with the subject. I am concentrating on some short stories for the Christmas period but whether they'll be in print in time, I don't know. That's going to be a close call. The electronic versions are easy, they can be online in a matter of hours although distribution to the whole range of retailers will take a while longer. One big advantage of those eBooks is that Christmas post times are irrelevant. You can even buy them on Christmas morning and get them in minutes.

Well, you can if they are available. Mine will be available if I knuckle down and write them and with this knackered wrist, typing time is limited. Typo-fixing time is also increased. I don't yet have enough Christmas tales for a full collection although I could intersperse it with commentary by my evil twin if necessary (that's the even-more-evil twin as opposed to the slightly-less-evil twin. Note that the most uncompromisingly evil of my online personas is the only one that doesn't smoke. It's not an accident).

I was visiting Neal Asher's place and noticed he had a good idea. An idea so good I felt duty bound to steal it. So I have.

I'm not with the big league publishers yet. The one that took Jessica's Trap concentrates on eBooks because with little to no physical inventory, overheads are minimal. They do make print copies available through Barnes and Noble and through Amazon but they aren't cheap. Discounts are minimal, but then discounts are good for readers but bad for authors.

The publisher has fixed costs - editors, cover artists, marketing etc - which they pay for. If you're asked to pay for these things then you're not dealing with a proper publisher. In fact, if you pay for these things, you might as well self-publish and keep all subsequent profits yourself.

Then there is printing. Someone once asked me how many copies of Jessica's Trap were in the first print run. The answer was 'none, but as many as you want'. In the old days, a printer had to pay someone to sit with a big box of metal letters and assemble the whole novel in reverse. Later it was automated but those metal letters still had to be paid for. Self-publishing was only for the rich because no printer is going to set that up unless they are printing several hundred copies. Buying one copy was as expensive as paying someone to write it all out by hand. Now, someone calls up a print file and presses 'print' and you can have one copy at a reasonable cost.

Next, the bookseller's cut. You can't buy and sell anything without profit. It just doesn't work.

Those fixed costs can't be reduced. The only part of the price that can be reduced is the author's cut. That's the part the discount comes out of.

Anyway, back to the point. The author's cut looks really generous but whenever there's a discount, that's where it goes. There is another side to this. It means I can buy copies of Jessica's Trap at a good discount because all of my apparent cut is taken off.

Self-published is different. I still have to pay Lulu for postage so if I do order copies I wait until I need a batch. Postage isn't so bad if you buy ten or more at once.

The upshot of all this is that I have books for sale. No, don't turn away now. It's too late. Auntie Wainwright has locked the door and sneaked up behind you.

I don't get hardbacks delivered from the publisher, mine go straight to paperback. I can make hardback versions of the self-published ones but the cost is insane. So we can ignore those.

If you have a hankering to see the illegible scrawl of a drunken leg-iron (I could have been a doctor, you know. Oh wait, I am one) mangling the message of your choice in the front of a paperback book, or if you know someone who would be duly impressed by a 'signed by the author' book this Christmas even if they don't read it, then listen up.

I have a few copies of Jessica's Trap in paperback and some of Dark Thoughts and Demons. I have only two of Fears of the Old and the New and no spare copies of the ghosthunting books. I can order in if there is interest but let me know soon because they take a week to get here and the Christmas random postal deliveries are upon us.

I can't guarantee overseas delivery in time for Christmas unless you want airmail. The last two packets I sent surface mail to the USA were quoted delivery times of over a month. Pigeons would be faster.

The prices look, shall we say, inverted. Amazon charge around £10 for Jessica's Trap but that includes postage. Lulu prices look cheaper but their postage costs for single books are nasty. Anyway, here's what Santa wants to ram in your stockings:

Without postage charges:

Jessica's Trap   £8.50
Fears of the Old and the New   £6.00
Dark Thoughts and Demons    £5.50

And from my slightly less evil twin, for those of a paranormal bent:

Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator, second edition   £5.50

There is a first edition but Lulu's print costs make small books overpriced so if you want to see that one it's best picked up as an eBook. At 32 pages it's not so hard to read on screen.

Postage depends on how many you want and where you want them sent. I'll look it up if you tell me what you want and if it's diabolical I won't blame you if you then decline.

What are these books about? Well, you can get a blurb on them at my embryonic writing site which I decided to test out on my day-job site and buggered both up in the process. They are being fixed. This test site is peppered with ads (none earn me any money so ignore them) and I'm told that sometimes they can set off antivirus software. I use NoScript in Firefox so I don't see the ads.

Here are the links for H K Hillman books and for Romulus Crowe. The free stuff remains free, naturally. Those sites will eventually be separated once I've finished meddling and handed them to a friend who can do them properly.

Oh, and if you're buying Kindles or similar gadgets for anyone this Christmas, do let me know and I'll send you some free advertising ;) I know, they don't actually need a bookmark, but it's free.

And now, back to our usual programming.