Hello, antismokers, it's playtime again.
While you sip your half-litre cappuccinos, remember that caffeine is a psychoactive drug and you are addicted. Because you are a helpless addict, you must be controlled for your own good, because just five cups a day will make the voices in your heads louder.
It's more effective than LSD and twice as addictive. Stock up on espresso now, and plant your own beans. The anticoffee days are dawning. You need your coffee, you helpless addicts, even if you know it will make you fit only for a rubber room. I hope you have medical insurance because we smokers aren't going to pay for your containment from our taxes.
Five cups eh? I really have to give that a try.
Oh, and while you fear the terrible cancer-causing meat, the bloating of the burgers, the artery-clogging of the chips and the trouser-soiling wrath of the beansprout, there is one thing left you can eat.
Tuck in. You know it's good for you.
You don't have to worry about cucumbers. Apparently they're on their way back to their home planet. The rest of your food will kill you before they return with their radish reinforcements and the courgette cavalry.
Will they fall for it? Well, I have spent a couple of hours this evening reading the comments on this article (found through Jredheadgirl) and yes, they will believe it. Look at their sincerely held beliefs in those comments. These are people who will believe absolutely anything and to hell with any logic or evidence.
Frank Davies and the now-retired-from-blogging Pat Nurse suggest direct action. Break the law so often it becomes unenforceable. Seems to be working with those super-injunctions, in fact as the Brian Rix of the football world has discovered, getting the injunction has only made his life into a tabloid-reported bedroom farce. Sympathy? Sorry, ran right out of that, one smoking ban ago.
I can see how making the law unenforceable would work, but I prefer a different path. A much more cruel and evil path, and one that is amusingly fully within the law. Look through a few of those frustrated gas-chamber-operator comments and see what they truly believe.
That's right. They genuinely believe that my smoking will kill them.
They genuinely believe that second hand smoke is more dangerous than active smoking. They are ripe for third, fourth, fifth and more hands of smoke and every one more deadly than the last. Homeopathic smoke will kill them instantly.
So I'm going to convince them it's true. Not from here, but face to face in the real world, one by one. I'll put the fear of smoke into them until they are calling for the cattle trucks and the gas chambers. Except they can't burn us because that will release all the smoke in us. They can't bury us because that will contaminate the land. They can't shoot or stab us because the smoke is released with the blood. They have built us into monsters and I will be what they want.
Blood transfusion? Are you sure it didn't come from a smoker? Really, really sure? You're certain it wasn't me, lying to the nurse in the donation clinic? Organ donation? Where did that come from? Only smokers die, remember. The nicotine in those things will make you wake up addicted, you know. Then your bits will all go lumpy and your teeth will fall out.
Best avoid vitamin B3, antismokers. Look it up. Look at the name. There is no such thing as vitamin B3, it is a nicotine derivative sold as a vitamin by Big Tobacco to get you hooked. Stay well away from it and from anything containing it. Eradicate it from your diet, along with the other fake vitamins I'll tell you about when we meet.
You'll meet me one day, antismokers. On the bus or on the train, in the departure lounge, on the street. I'll find you. Even in places where smoking is banned, the Electrosmokers will make you clear because you won't be able to help fake-coughing and hand-waving at the steam, and possibly even shouting them down. I won't be Electrosmoking.
I'll appear sympathetic and agree with you, then share my 'knowledge' of what you have actually just inhaled and how long it will take to kill you. I will be earnest and serious and advise you on what to do to avoid an agonising and lingering death. And you will do it, and it will make no difference. Your conditioned fear runs too deep for the rituals I will suggest to have any effect. You will believe you are going to die.
As for your conditioned children, well you conditioned them. I will use them against you. Their innocent terror will tear your heart and the only way to stop it is to tell them the truth, assuming you even remember what that word means. Conscience? Pffft. They will grow up to be as vicious and spiteful as their parents, so sod them. There will be those who will be shocked, who will say 'You can't scare children like that' and I will say 'Why not? Why would I care about a society that has excluded me?' I'm dehumanised, remember. Those children are not even the same species any more. They are the future, and that future looks horrible.
It's not just going to be about smoking either. I will explain the chemical mix in that cardboard cup of coffee you're drinking and what the plasticisers in your bottle of water will do to your gender. I will detail the changes in your brain caused by your phone and your iPod and your laptop. I will explain subliminal imagery on TV and I will turn every outbreak of infection into a biological attack aimed at you personally. Is any of it true? I don't care. It will be plausible and that's enough.
Every new ban, every new restriction, every new scare story and every new nannying rule will be one more swing in the playground for me. I'm going to encourage those who invent these insanities to higher and higher levels and you antismokers will be with me all the way. You can't get out now. The only way out is to admit what you have been and you cannot do it. You cannot face yourselves. All you have is spite and you are addicted.
No matter how high the madness roller coaster goes, you can't get off.
Eventually the madness will be too much for the general population and they will revolt, but by then they'll have seen you. You, not me. Like those Righteous, I will operate in the background. The drones will spread my lies alongside their own. They will be the ones picketing coffee shops and slapping bottled water off the supermarket shelves. They will be the ones taking plastic yoghourt pots away from children in schools. I'll be nothing more than the voice in their head after their fifth coffee. When it all goes pop, I'll be MacCavity. That's when the Righteous drones will finally see how few they really are.
Years ago I played around with something called 'cold reading'. One of the tricks fake-psychics use. I never pretended to contact the dead but it has many other uses if you want to spook the crap out of someone for fun. If I say so myself, I was fairly proficient at it, although anyone who knew me soon cottoned on to what I was up to so it worked best with strangers.
Who's the stranger on your train tomorrow, antismokers?
Who's that handling all the fruit on the display? Who's picking up items from the shelf and putting them down again? Who touched that door handle or that shopping trolley before you? Dare you accept that change? You don't know where it's been. Who pressed the buttons on the credit card machine or cashpoint, and which ones did they press? Remember, the more dilute the smoke, the more deadly it is. You were safer in those smoky bars than you can be anywhere now. Too late, you've banned them. Every damned one. Now you don't know where the smokers are. Hey, if we can't be in the pub any more, we have to amuse ourselves in other ways.
No mercy, no conscience, no compromise. As Frank quoted in that article, the only way to fight them is to be like them.
Or to be worse.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
The Stasi are here, and they're winning.
Chelmsford Crown Court heard how Mrs Palmer had spied on Collins, who is on incapacity benefit, from the moment he moved in - even when he was in his bedroom with women.
She gets an award.
He gets fined.
Total number of laws broken = zero. Oh, the noise?
On occasion she put her ear to the adjoining wall of their Victorian terraced homes in order to assess how loud the noise coming from her neighbours was.
If you have to put your ear to the wall to hear it, how loud is it?
Snooping is legal. Being different is not.
She gets an award.
He gets fined.
Total number of laws broken = zero. Oh, the noise?
On occasion she put her ear to the adjoining wall of their Victorian terraced homes in order to assess how loud the noise coming from her neighbours was.
If you have to put your ear to the wall to hear it, how loud is it?
Snooping is legal. Being different is not.
Still talking about work.
This story has already been comprehensively hammered over at Counting Cats and is well worth a read.
I'm not at all surprised that some dozy cretin is trying to use the outbreak to further a personal agenda - that was certain to happen, and happen a lot - but at the utter stupidity of the way it's done.
Yes, 'terrorists' could try poisoning food and I am sure they've thought of it, discussed it, and found that it is logistically impossible. There is a way to bring down cities with infection but I'm not going to be so irresponsible as to publish it here. Food is no good as a vehicle for such an attack, certainly not in the UK.
Heve you seen current food legislation? One copy could account for half a rainforest. Suppliers are tested, ingredients are tested, food process lines are tested, the final product is tested and any fail at any stage on any test and the whole lot is recalled. All the tests are documented and the labs doing the testing are accredited, so everything they do is documented too, on the other half of the rainforest. In writing, not on computer, because every entry must be initialled and changes must be initialled too. Right down to who checked the pH meter and the balance and the incubator temperatures, when they did it and the result. Anything out of compliance triggers a whole series of irritating and time-consuming checks.
Any contaminated ingredient will not only be caught, it can be traced back through the documentation to exactly where it came from. You cannot contaminate the UK food supply without getting caught, and your chances of getting any through to the point of sale are so small as to make the whole exercise futile. You can't even sell home made jam at a country fair these days without enough paperwork to make a Vogon cry.
You could really only contaminate food on the shelves, and then CCTV will catch you. It caught the mad biochemist who poisoned food with atropine (a stupid choice - as soon as it's identified as atropine you start your search with biochemists because nobody else knows what it is) and he only did a few items. Contaminate a whole shelf? Not a chance.
So yes, I am sure various terrorist groups have thought about it but the reason they have not done anything about it is that there is virtually no chance of success, and every chance of being traced.
Look at that current outbreak. It came from salads. The Germans tried to blame it on Spanish cucumbers so it wouldn't look like their fault. At that stage, the only fact known was that it came from salads, but not which part of the salad.
Now it's stated that it came from beansprouts which wouldn't be routinely tested for E. coli - but the water used to wash them should have been. In the UK, water supplies are tested. If you have a well and it's just for your own use, you are not required to get it tested. If you supply that water to anyone else - even if you don't charge for it - then you have to get it tested. Using it to wash farm produce for sale counts as supplying it to someone else too.
The test is cheap and if you run any food business using non-mains water, you'd be daft to ignore it because it can save you a lot of litigation. Mains water is tested by the water companies because they don't want to be sued either. Same for bottled water. There is an awful lot of testing going on behind the scenes.
Escherichia coli only comes from one place. Shit. So if it's there in the food, there's shit in the food. Not necessarily human. It's used to detect faecal contamination because it's easy to find and if there's crap around, it's certain to be there. Usually, this bacterium isn't dangerous but if there's crap in the food then Salmonella and a whole range of other nasties might well be there too.
So was the farm water tested? At the moment I haven't been able to find out. I don't know whether German regulations are the same as UK ones, maybe it didn't have to be, but Germans without regulations are like cars without wheels. Unthinkable.
Where else could it have come from? Fertiliser? Why would anyone bother to fertilise beansprouts? They only need to grow a few inches before harvest. Yet there are personal-agenda idiots in Germany who want to blame the waste from biogas plants for this (thanks to an anonymous tipster).
Ernst-Günther Hellwig, director of the Agricultural and Veterinary Academy in Horstmar, warns that the bacteria likely comes from new sources, saying the epidemic is a house-made German problem. ‘It is possible that the EHEC contagion comes from biogas plants,’ he said.”
Evidence? Who needs it? It's possible that the EHEC* comes from outer space, there's as much evidence for that as for this assertion. Besides, it's not possible for it to have come from a biogas plant. They heat the waste to 70C for an hour before sending it out as fertiliser. At that temperature, any E. coli present are dead within the first minute. Outer space is actually more likely. But this guy hates biogas plants so they must be blamed. I'm surprised smokers haven't been blamed yet.
Hellwig is not alone in this belief.
Loonies rarely are.
Die Welt also writes that laboratory director Bernd Schottdorf, founder of the 1500-employee private medical laboratory Schottdorf MVZ in Augsburg, the biggest in Europe, also thinks the connection is possible.
Well, that's the appeal to authority firmly in place. Let's see what this learned gentleman has to say.
“Spores survive the biogas plants’ prescribed hygienization of 70°C without a problem“, he says. “We don’t know if the hygienization is properly carried out at all biogas plants.” When waste product from biogas plants is spread on fields, they can contaminate the vegetables.
Okay. The head of the biggest private medical laboratory in Europe thinks that E. coli can form spores. German medical research is in big, big trouble if this is their best man. E. coli cannot form spores. It will be dead in under a minute at 70C, and an hour at 70C will kill a good number of those bacteria that can form spores too.
Also, the fermentation process for biogas is not E. coli-friendly. There aren't likely to be many in that waste even before it heads to the heaters.
Finally, what the hell do you mean you don't know if the process is done correctly? You're German, aren't you? Even in the UK, we check. I know, I've actually done the tests on the treated 'cake' myself. It's not hard and it's not expensive. I find it hard to believe that the Germans have a relaxed attitude to such things.
The rest of the article is pure scaremongering, just like the Daily Fear's. Spores sticking to plants despite the rain and despite the fact that none of them could possibly be related to E. coli, farmers who use shit-sprayers for irrigation as if the dilute stuff is far more deadly than the real thing (that sounds familiar) and really, who could possibly believe that anyone is going to drive a tractor spraying crap through a beansprout field? You wouldn't be able to find your crop afterwards.
In the absence of person-to-person spread, the level of contamination needed to infect so many people would have to be huge. No fertiliser could do it. Even if it's like O157 and has a low infective dose, where ten bugs is enough to infect, that still needs a lot of bacteria to reach so many people. Something, somewhere is heavily contaminated so it shouldn't be hard to find.
Water? Do any of those farm workers drink water at the farm? If so, and if the water is contaminated enough to put an infective dose into the beansprouts, then the farm workers must all be infected. Even the wash spray would be enough to infect them. Are any? There's been no mention.
Okay. So we can rule out the biogas plants as nonsense. The water is a possibility, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't tested and the level it would need to be contaminated with would not escape testing even if a badly-trained monkey did it. Salads are not routinely tested for E. coli (well, they didn't used to be but that might change now) because it only comes from guts and plants don't have any. Shit-sprayers are not likely to be used much on salad crops, certainly not anywhere near harvest time, because farmers don't like committing economic suicide. And nobody in their right mind would buy any form of fertiliser for a crop that's harvested when it's a few inches high.
It's not making sense. Beansprouts as a vehicle for E. coli infection is unlikely to start with. Not impossible, but I wouldn't expect to see more than a few cases from such a source, nor indeed from any salad source. There simply should not be enough bacteria on the food and this one won't grow at all on chilled plant material. Add to that a new and previously unknown strain, a particularly nasty one, and it looks very wrong.
Deliberate? Some think so. I don't. E. coli is a rubbish bioweapon. It's easy to find and deal with. It doesn't last long outside a gut. It can't form spores so it can't be easily stored. Pasteurisation kills it.
Food as a vector for a weapon is also lousy. There are so many checks and tests at so many stages that even if something does get through, it can be traced right back to the origin and stamped on.
Why is the infection still happening? If the beansprouts were the source, dump the beansprouts and it's all over. I suppose we'll know in a few days whether that's worked. But beansprouts are not the source. They can't be. They don't have intestines. They could be the vector, but not the source.
There is also the question of how a new and deadly strain suddenly appeared in sufficient concentration to infect thousands. E. coli does not grow on beansprouts. It does not grow in soil. It has to come from a gut and this one, this particular one, must have come from a gut that wasn't at all well. Not necessarily a human gut. It lives in most animals. Could even come from an insect.
Now that's a line worth pursuing. An insect might carry this without being ill, and insects tend to arrive in big gangs. A lot of them like to nibble on plants too, and they shit everywhere. Tiny pellets you can't even see but which are loaded with bacteria.
Anyone looking for the actual source, I wonder, or are they all content to blame their own personal bugbears? Meanwhile, the sewers will run with blood...
[Sorry to fill the blog with work, but I like work.]
*EHEC - entero-haemorrhagic E. coli. In layman's terms, it makes you shit blood.
I'm not at all surprised that some dozy cretin is trying to use the outbreak to further a personal agenda - that was certain to happen, and happen a lot - but at the utter stupidity of the way it's done.
Yes, 'terrorists' could try poisoning food and I am sure they've thought of it, discussed it, and found that it is logistically impossible. There is a way to bring down cities with infection but I'm not going to be so irresponsible as to publish it here. Food is no good as a vehicle for such an attack, certainly not in the UK.
Heve you seen current food legislation? One copy could account for half a rainforest. Suppliers are tested, ingredients are tested, food process lines are tested, the final product is tested and any fail at any stage on any test and the whole lot is recalled. All the tests are documented and the labs doing the testing are accredited, so everything they do is documented too, on the other half of the rainforest. In writing, not on computer, because every entry must be initialled and changes must be initialled too. Right down to who checked the pH meter and the balance and the incubator temperatures, when they did it and the result. Anything out of compliance triggers a whole series of irritating and time-consuming checks.
Any contaminated ingredient will not only be caught, it can be traced back through the documentation to exactly where it came from. You cannot contaminate the UK food supply without getting caught, and your chances of getting any through to the point of sale are so small as to make the whole exercise futile. You can't even sell home made jam at a country fair these days without enough paperwork to make a Vogon cry.
You could really only contaminate food on the shelves, and then CCTV will catch you. It caught the mad biochemist who poisoned food with atropine (a stupid choice - as soon as it's identified as atropine you start your search with biochemists because nobody else knows what it is) and he only did a few items. Contaminate a whole shelf? Not a chance.
So yes, I am sure various terrorist groups have thought about it but the reason they have not done anything about it is that there is virtually no chance of success, and every chance of being traced.
Look at that current outbreak. It came from salads. The Germans tried to blame it on Spanish cucumbers so it wouldn't look like their fault. At that stage, the only fact known was that it came from salads, but not which part of the salad.
Now it's stated that it came from beansprouts which wouldn't be routinely tested for E. coli - but the water used to wash them should have been. In the UK, water supplies are tested. If you have a well and it's just for your own use, you are not required to get it tested. If you supply that water to anyone else - even if you don't charge for it - then you have to get it tested. Using it to wash farm produce for sale counts as supplying it to someone else too.
The test is cheap and if you run any food business using non-mains water, you'd be daft to ignore it because it can save you a lot of litigation. Mains water is tested by the water companies because they don't want to be sued either. Same for bottled water. There is an awful lot of testing going on behind the scenes.
Escherichia coli only comes from one place. Shit. So if it's there in the food, there's shit in the food. Not necessarily human. It's used to detect faecal contamination because it's easy to find and if there's crap around, it's certain to be there. Usually, this bacterium isn't dangerous but if there's crap in the food then Salmonella and a whole range of other nasties might well be there too.
So was the farm water tested? At the moment I haven't been able to find out. I don't know whether German regulations are the same as UK ones, maybe it didn't have to be, but Germans without regulations are like cars without wheels. Unthinkable.
Where else could it have come from? Fertiliser? Why would anyone bother to fertilise beansprouts? They only need to grow a few inches before harvest. Yet there are personal-agenda idiots in Germany who want to blame the waste from biogas plants for this (thanks to an anonymous tipster).
Ernst-Günther Hellwig, director of the Agricultural and Veterinary Academy in Horstmar, warns that the bacteria likely comes from new sources, saying the epidemic is a house-made German problem. ‘It is possible that the EHEC contagion comes from biogas plants,’ he said.”
Evidence? Who needs it? It's possible that the EHEC* comes from outer space, there's as much evidence for that as for this assertion. Besides, it's not possible for it to have come from a biogas plant. They heat the waste to 70C for an hour before sending it out as fertiliser. At that temperature, any E. coli present are dead within the first minute. Outer space is actually more likely. But this guy hates biogas plants so they must be blamed. I'm surprised smokers haven't been blamed yet.
Hellwig is not alone in this belief.
Loonies rarely are.
Die Welt also writes that laboratory director Bernd Schottdorf, founder of the 1500-employee private medical laboratory Schottdorf MVZ in Augsburg, the biggest in Europe, also thinks the connection is possible.
Well, that's the appeal to authority firmly in place. Let's see what this learned gentleman has to say.
“Spores survive the biogas plants’ prescribed hygienization of 70°C without a problem“, he says. “We don’t know if the hygienization is properly carried out at all biogas plants.” When waste product from biogas plants is spread on fields, they can contaminate the vegetables.
Okay. The head of the biggest private medical laboratory in Europe thinks that E. coli can form spores. German medical research is in big, big trouble if this is their best man. E. coli cannot form spores. It will be dead in under a minute at 70C, and an hour at 70C will kill a good number of those bacteria that can form spores too.
Also, the fermentation process for biogas is not E. coli-friendly. There aren't likely to be many in that waste even before it heads to the heaters.
Finally, what the hell do you mean you don't know if the process is done correctly? You're German, aren't you? Even in the UK, we check. I know, I've actually done the tests on the treated 'cake' myself. It's not hard and it's not expensive. I find it hard to believe that the Germans have a relaxed attitude to such things.
The rest of the article is pure scaremongering, just like the Daily Fear's. Spores sticking to plants despite the rain and despite the fact that none of them could possibly be related to E. coli, farmers who use shit-sprayers for irrigation as if the dilute stuff is far more deadly than the real thing (that sounds familiar) and really, who could possibly believe that anyone is going to drive a tractor spraying crap through a beansprout field? You wouldn't be able to find your crop afterwards.
In the absence of person-to-person spread, the level of contamination needed to infect so many people would have to be huge. No fertiliser could do it. Even if it's like O157 and has a low infective dose, where ten bugs is enough to infect, that still needs a lot of bacteria to reach so many people. Something, somewhere is heavily contaminated so it shouldn't be hard to find.
Water? Do any of those farm workers drink water at the farm? If so, and if the water is contaminated enough to put an infective dose into the beansprouts, then the farm workers must all be infected. Even the wash spray would be enough to infect them. Are any? There's been no mention.
Okay. So we can rule out the biogas plants as nonsense. The water is a possibility, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't tested and the level it would need to be contaminated with would not escape testing even if a badly-trained monkey did it. Salads are not routinely tested for E. coli (well, they didn't used to be but that might change now) because it only comes from guts and plants don't have any. Shit-sprayers are not likely to be used much on salad crops, certainly not anywhere near harvest time, because farmers don't like committing economic suicide. And nobody in their right mind would buy any form of fertiliser for a crop that's harvested when it's a few inches high.
It's not making sense. Beansprouts as a vehicle for E. coli infection is unlikely to start with. Not impossible, but I wouldn't expect to see more than a few cases from such a source, nor indeed from any salad source. There simply should not be enough bacteria on the food and this one won't grow at all on chilled plant material. Add to that a new and previously unknown strain, a particularly nasty one, and it looks very wrong.
Deliberate? Some think so. I don't. E. coli is a rubbish bioweapon. It's easy to find and deal with. It doesn't last long outside a gut. It can't form spores so it can't be easily stored. Pasteurisation kills it.
Food as a vector for a weapon is also lousy. There are so many checks and tests at so many stages that even if something does get through, it can be traced right back to the origin and stamped on.
Why is the infection still happening? If the beansprouts were the source, dump the beansprouts and it's all over. I suppose we'll know in a few days whether that's worked. But beansprouts are not the source. They can't be. They don't have intestines. They could be the vector, but not the source.
There is also the question of how a new and deadly strain suddenly appeared in sufficient concentration to infect thousands. E. coli does not grow on beansprouts. It does not grow in soil. It has to come from a gut and this one, this particular one, must have come from a gut that wasn't at all well. Not necessarily a human gut. It lives in most animals. Could even come from an insect.
Now that's a line worth pursuing. An insect might carry this without being ill, and insects tend to arrive in big gangs. A lot of them like to nibble on plants too, and they shit everywhere. Tiny pellets you can't even see but which are loaded with bacteria.
Anyone looking for the actual source, I wonder, or are they all content to blame their own personal bugbears? Meanwhile, the sewers will run with blood...
[Sorry to fill the blog with work, but I like work.]
*EHEC - entero-haemorrhagic E. coli. In layman's terms, it makes you shit blood.
Denormalisation Club welcomes new members.
There are some vapers out there who really, really hate smokers.
Not all vapers by any means. Just a few. To these rabid antismoker vapers, we smokers emit a stench to rival Satan's sewage system while they, the keepers of the Holy Smoke, puff away harming nobody.
It's been sickening to read their outpourings on the vaper sites I've lurked at. To see the ex-smoker turned vaper who now believes in all the ASH propaganda and demands that the camps are erected right now, so all the smokers can be cleared away and the final solution applied.
Try to tell them that they're on the list too, and they'll laugh at you. Electrofag is safe, so there is no reason for the Righteous to even glance in their direction.
Bad news, folks. They have glanced. They have seen the light of profit in their 'approved' versions, much more expensive ones of course, so they now need to eradicate you folk because well, you're standing between them and a big pile of money. Just as smokers stood between them and a pile of money in the shape of pharmaceutical nicotine.
Welcome to Denormalisation Club. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Update: Take a look at the comment by pambie, london, 05/6/2011 22:44. She still isn't getting it, is she?
Not all vapers by any means. Just a few. To these rabid antismoker vapers, we smokers emit a stench to rival Satan's sewage system while they, the keepers of the Holy Smoke, puff away harming nobody.
It's been sickening to read their outpourings on the vaper sites I've lurked at. To see the ex-smoker turned vaper who now believes in all the ASH propaganda and demands that the camps are erected right now, so all the smokers can be cleared away and the final solution applied.
Try to tell them that they're on the list too, and they'll laugh at you. Electrofag is safe, so there is no reason for the Righteous to even glance in their direction.
Bad news, folks. They have glanced. They have seen the light of profit in their 'approved' versions, much more expensive ones of course, so they now need to eradicate you folk because well, you're standing between them and a big pile of money. Just as smokers stood between them and a pile of money in the shape of pharmaceutical nicotine.
Welcome to Denormalisation Club. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Update: Take a look at the comment by pambie, london, 05/6/2011 22:44. She still isn't getting it, is she?
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Odd timing.
The current scare on vegetables is hugely overblown. And that's from a microbiologist who started poking around with bacteria in 1978, has a PhD specifically in gut microbiology and is still playing with those bacteria, and now with some real botty-exploders too.
The Daily Terror has wheeled out the Government's favourite fear-monger, Saucy HP himself, to demand that all German produce is removed from supermarket shelves. I don't know how this guy keeps popping up. Local legend is that he is stored in formalin between scares.
They have a map showing the spread of the infection. Except it shows no such thing. As far as I can tell, everyone who caught this infection caught it in Germany. There has, as yet, been no transmission between individuals outside Germany and no sign of anyone catching anything from any German exported produce.
Of course, given the crap state of our hospitals where easily-controlled infections do the rounds faster than a consultant with an imminent tee-off appointment, that's just a matter of time. For now, there is no danger involved in eating salads outside specific parts of Germany. For cooked veg, there is no danger at all, anywhere.
If you want your lettuce checked for E. coli, there are food testing labs all over the place who would be glad of the business. The test would take 24 hours, it's simple and cheap. I would charge £10 a test and I don't have the turnover of the big labs. There is no need to find out which E. coli variant is present because fruit and veg shouldn't have any E. coli of any kind at all. If it does, there's shit on it and you don't want to eat it anyway. This bacterium isn't found anywhere else, its presence indicates faecal contamination.
Russia has banned all EU vegetable imports even though the problem is confined to a specific area of Germany and only applies to salads. This summer, there will be stacks of cheap fruit and veg but next summer it will be expensive. This scare will put a good few producers out of business, so dig over that lawn and be ready to fill it with vegetables next spring.
Here in the UK, we have Saucy HP telling us that vegetable consumption risks a condition that would allow you to shit through the eye of a needle. I think the EU should consider sending him the bill for this.
All in all, everyone gullible (ie most people) will be loading their freezer with fish fingers and burgers and saying sod the vegetables.
You would think, then, that this week is a very, very bad time to promote the consumption of vegetables among children. Then again, we are dealing with pressure groups composed of people who are barely self-aware, never mind aware of their surroundings.
It's true that a heavy, stodgy diet will slow you down. That's not news, we've known about that for decades in science and for centuries in Granny Lore. There are many things your granny 'just knew' that are actually very true indeed. It didn't come from official science but from generations of experience. Unfortunately, scientists dismiss everything Granny says because she didn't publish a peer-reviewed paper on the subject.
In fact, all of you already know this. Who feels like exercise after a huge Christmas dinner? Most people feel like sleeping afterwards and the sonorous tones of the Queen's Speech are a great help in achieving this. Better yet, the 'Sound of Music'. I have never seen the end of that film. Usually I pass out while trying to parse the grammatical insanity of that 'Doh, a deer' song.
True, eating lightly before an exam is the best idea. Enough to avoid feeling hungry but not enough to make you want to nod off during three hours of immobility in a silent room.
It doesn't have to be vegetables. Eating lightly means just that - the opposite of a hefty three course meal. A small pork pie would do the job. Or a doughnut. Both are cooked and both are subject to food-testing so the risk of rumbly in your tumbly halfway through an exam question on the projectile capacity of the human rectum is very low.
It's low with fruit and vegetables too. Despite what Saucy HP wants you to believe, despite the terror in the eyes of the greengrocer as he gets you to sign a waiver when you buy tomatoes, the risk is very, very low indeed. Lower than the risk of catching rabies by brushing past a smoker. Although I have met people who believe that one, but then I have met people who will believe anything that suits their personal paranoia. They're fun.
Fruit and vegetables are good things to eat. That's why I grow them. Yet now is not the time I would choose to promote such things or even draw attention to them. It's a bit like deciding to sell a seafront property in Japan - now is not a good time.
The infection is very nasty. I admit to a chuckle at the advice 'if you're crapping blood you should consider seeing a doctor' because there can't be anyone on the planet incapable of thinking that for themselves. Haemolytic uraemic syndrome is a pretty name. It means you've moved beyond crapping blood and are now pissing it too. If you haven't had the sense to seek medical advice by that stage then, frankly, the average value of human intellect will be improved by your demise.
It's serious. It's nasty. It can kill. So can yellow fever but we don't have that in the UK either. Nor do we have leprosy or much in the way of Dengue fever or elephantiasis. I don't think we have rabies here but looking at the frothing mouths and evident insanity of the likes of Shenker and Arnott and their drones, I can't be certain.
If a greengrocer or farmer comes down with this, I'd be wary. I'd only buy veg that needs to be, or can be, cooked. Fruit can be made into fruit crumble (real butter in that crumble, no plasticine). All variants of E. coli are killed by pasteurisation and you only need to get above 73C for fifteen seconds to exceed that. Roasting, they have no chance.
So far the only victims are those who have eaten salads in certain parts of Germany. My brother visits Germany often for work, but I'm not worried. He has never knowingly eaten a salad and there's nothing to suggest it's in the beer so he'll be fine. I wouldn't worry about travel to Germany either. Just don't eat salads while there.
This outbreak, if it really is in salads, should be contained by now. It's not difficult. There might be cases popping up after containment depending on how long it takes the infection to fire up, but in a sensible world (oh dear) it should already have been sorted. So far there has been no sign of person-to-person transmission but with this bacterium, it can happen. Quick and easy measures can prevent it. If the EU didn't move like a sedated sloth in response to emergencies this would have been a page 5 news story.
Even so, this is not the week I would have chosen to promote vegetable consumption. I'd have waited a while.
The Daily Terror has wheeled out the Government's favourite fear-monger, Saucy HP himself, to demand that all German produce is removed from supermarket shelves. I don't know how this guy keeps popping up. Local legend is that he is stored in formalin between scares.
They have a map showing the spread of the infection. Except it shows no such thing. As far as I can tell, everyone who caught this infection caught it in Germany. There has, as yet, been no transmission between individuals outside Germany and no sign of anyone catching anything from any German exported produce.
Of course, given the crap state of our hospitals where easily-controlled infections do the rounds faster than a consultant with an imminent tee-off appointment, that's just a matter of time. For now, there is no danger involved in eating salads outside specific parts of Germany. For cooked veg, there is no danger at all, anywhere.
If you want your lettuce checked for E. coli, there are food testing labs all over the place who would be glad of the business. The test would take 24 hours, it's simple and cheap. I would charge £10 a test and I don't have the turnover of the big labs. There is no need to find out which E. coli variant is present because fruit and veg shouldn't have any E. coli of any kind at all. If it does, there's shit on it and you don't want to eat it anyway. This bacterium isn't found anywhere else, its presence indicates faecal contamination.
Russia has banned all EU vegetable imports even though the problem is confined to a specific area of Germany and only applies to salads. This summer, there will be stacks of cheap fruit and veg but next summer it will be expensive. This scare will put a good few producers out of business, so dig over that lawn and be ready to fill it with vegetables next spring.
Here in the UK, we have Saucy HP telling us that vegetable consumption risks a condition that would allow you to shit through the eye of a needle. I think the EU should consider sending him the bill for this.
All in all, everyone gullible (ie most people) will be loading their freezer with fish fingers and burgers and saying sod the vegetables.
You would think, then, that this week is a very, very bad time to promote the consumption of vegetables among children. Then again, we are dealing with pressure groups composed of people who are barely self-aware, never mind aware of their surroundings.
It's true that a heavy, stodgy diet will slow you down. That's not news, we've known about that for decades in science and for centuries in Granny Lore. There are many things your granny 'just knew' that are actually very true indeed. It didn't come from official science but from generations of experience. Unfortunately, scientists dismiss everything Granny says because she didn't publish a peer-reviewed paper on the subject.
In fact, all of you already know this. Who feels like exercise after a huge Christmas dinner? Most people feel like sleeping afterwards and the sonorous tones of the Queen's Speech are a great help in achieving this. Better yet, the 'Sound of Music'. I have never seen the end of that film. Usually I pass out while trying to parse the grammatical insanity of that 'Doh, a deer' song.
True, eating lightly before an exam is the best idea. Enough to avoid feeling hungry but not enough to make you want to nod off during three hours of immobility in a silent room.
It doesn't have to be vegetables. Eating lightly means just that - the opposite of a hefty three course meal. A small pork pie would do the job. Or a doughnut. Both are cooked and both are subject to food-testing so the risk of rumbly in your tumbly halfway through an exam question on the projectile capacity of the human rectum is very low.
It's low with fruit and vegetables too. Despite what Saucy HP wants you to believe, despite the terror in the eyes of the greengrocer as he gets you to sign a waiver when you buy tomatoes, the risk is very, very low indeed. Lower than the risk of catching rabies by brushing past a smoker. Although I have met people who believe that one, but then I have met people who will believe anything that suits their personal paranoia. They're fun.
Fruit and vegetables are good things to eat. That's why I grow them. Yet now is not the time I would choose to promote such things or even draw attention to them. It's a bit like deciding to sell a seafront property in Japan - now is not a good time.
The infection is very nasty. I admit to a chuckle at the advice 'if you're crapping blood you should consider seeing a doctor' because there can't be anyone on the planet incapable of thinking that for themselves. Haemolytic uraemic syndrome is a pretty name. It means you've moved beyond crapping blood and are now pissing it too. If you haven't had the sense to seek medical advice by that stage then, frankly, the average value of human intellect will be improved by your demise.
It's serious. It's nasty. It can kill. So can yellow fever but we don't have that in the UK either. Nor do we have leprosy or much in the way of Dengue fever or elephantiasis. I don't think we have rabies here but looking at the frothing mouths and evident insanity of the likes of Shenker and Arnott and their drones, I can't be certain.
If a greengrocer or farmer comes down with this, I'd be wary. I'd only buy veg that needs to be, or can be, cooked. Fruit can be made into fruit crumble (real butter in that crumble, no plasticine). All variants of E. coli are killed by pasteurisation and you only need to get above 73C for fifteen seconds to exceed that. Roasting, they have no chance.
So far the only victims are those who have eaten salads in certain parts of Germany. My brother visits Germany often for work, but I'm not worried. He has never knowingly eaten a salad and there's nothing to suggest it's in the beer so he'll be fine. I wouldn't worry about travel to Germany either. Just don't eat salads while there.
This outbreak, if it really is in salads, should be contained by now. It's not difficult. There might be cases popping up after containment depending on how long it takes the infection to fire up, but in a sensible world (oh dear) it should already have been sorted. So far there has been no sign of person-to-person transmission but with this bacterium, it can happen. Quick and easy measures can prevent it. If the EU didn't move like a sedated sloth in response to emergencies this would have been a page 5 news story.
Even so, this is not the week I would have chosen to promote vegetable consumption. I'd have waited a while.
Saturday, 4 June 2011
La Cucumumber.
Back from Smoky-Drinky. We had a Japanese film on, called 'Love exposure', which wasn't porn or violence (by the standards of the genre) but was really a pretty complex and intricate plot. Unfortunately we called it a night before it ended. The damn thing was nearly five hours long. Maybe next time we'll take up where we left off.
The tobacco plants were well received and now lie in greenhouses and cold-frames until their new owners sober up. I still have more than I have room for but there are plants in my garden that don't need to be there, and since the weeds grow in the gravel it is reasonable to assume... but we'll see.
So on to some real life stuff.
This killer cucumber business. To a microbiologist, it sounds wrong.
Okay. It's identified as a strain of Escherichia coli. Identifying that particular bacterium is what is technically known as a 'piece of piss'. It is bacterial taxonomy lesson one. If you can't spot E. coli you are not a microbiologist. Spotting the variant is much more difficult.
If you look in any culture collection catalogue you will find page after page of variants of this bacterium. It's a remarkably versatile little beastie. It not only makes use of internal variation, it can also transfer many plasmid-borne genes through tubes called pili. Technical, I know. In layman's terms, it's the bacterial equivalent of a flaming tart.
Every case in the UK comes from someone who has visited Germany. Containment should be, again in technical terms, a piece of piss. This infection should not go anywhere.
My bet is that it will. Why?
Because those in charge of our hospitals are not doctors or matrons, but imbeciles. You want to eradicate all hospital infections? No problem. I can do it in a month. I don't need any power over any pharmaceuticals and I don't need to be involved in medicine at all. Just give me absolute power over cleaning and hygeine with real sacking powers and there will be no more cases ever again. You can designate my job as Ubermatron or just as 'that bastard'.
It won't happen in this country run by a forehead and a backhand swipe. They will bleat but do nothing. They will be suckered into paying for research into something I can cure now. The research will be inconclusive because as a retiring boss of mine once said -
"We used to research to chase knowledge. Now we only chase money."
There is no profit in cure, only in treatment. That's why the cures never work but the lifetime treatments do.
I am taking a daily dose of the Stuff which I have proved (but not in human trials) hammers E. coli. The rest of you? I can't give you any. It has not passed human trials on this new bug nobody knows about so it cannot be sold. For health and safety reasons, I can make no claims and sell nothing. The Forehead and the EU have said so.
Don't you feel really safe now? I do.
E. coli is easily transmissible but this one is claimed not to be. Containment of an infection in a specific area should be easy but seems not to be. There should be no cause for concern in the UK but the MSM are trying to scare everyone.
Why? Tinfoil hats at the ready please.
A EU-wide food standardisation system?
Nah. Never happen.
The tobacco plants were well received and now lie in greenhouses and cold-frames until their new owners sober up. I still have more than I have room for but there are plants in my garden that don't need to be there, and since the weeds grow in the gravel it is reasonable to assume... but we'll see.
So on to some real life stuff.
This killer cucumber business. To a microbiologist, it sounds wrong.
Okay. It's identified as a strain of Escherichia coli. Identifying that particular bacterium is what is technically known as a 'piece of piss'. It is bacterial taxonomy lesson one. If you can't spot E. coli you are not a microbiologist. Spotting the variant is much more difficult.
If you look in any culture collection catalogue you will find page after page of variants of this bacterium. It's a remarkably versatile little beastie. It not only makes use of internal variation, it can also transfer many plasmid-borne genes through tubes called pili. Technical, I know. In layman's terms, it's the bacterial equivalent of a flaming tart.
Every case in the UK comes from someone who has visited Germany. Containment should be, again in technical terms, a piece of piss. This infection should not go anywhere.
My bet is that it will. Why?
Because those in charge of our hospitals are not doctors or matrons, but imbeciles. You want to eradicate all hospital infections? No problem. I can do it in a month. I don't need any power over any pharmaceuticals and I don't need to be involved in medicine at all. Just give me absolute power over cleaning and hygeine with real sacking powers and there will be no more cases ever again. You can designate my job as Ubermatron or just as 'that bastard'.
It won't happen in this country run by a forehead and a backhand swipe. They will bleat but do nothing. They will be suckered into paying for research into something I can cure now. The research will be inconclusive because as a retiring boss of mine once said -
"We used to research to chase knowledge. Now we only chase money."
There is no profit in cure, only in treatment. That's why the cures never work but the lifetime treatments do.
I am taking a daily dose of the Stuff which I have proved (but not in human trials) hammers E. coli. The rest of you? I can't give you any. It has not passed human trials on this new bug nobody knows about so it cannot be sold. For health and safety reasons, I can make no claims and sell nothing. The Forehead and the EU have said so.
Don't you feel really safe now? I do.
E. coli is easily transmissible but this one is claimed not to be. Containment of an infection in a specific area should be easy but seems not to be. There should be no cause for concern in the UK but the MSM are trying to scare everyone.
Why? Tinfoil hats at the ready please.
A EU-wide food standardisation system?
Nah. Never happen.
Friday, 3 June 2011
Big Electrofag rises.
With Tesco's habit of squeezing out small competition, Electrofag companies had better take a close look at this.
It is developing an aerosol-based product that looks like a conventional cigarette but, subject to regulatory approval, will allow smokers to get a nicotine fix without the harmful side-effects from tobacco.
Yes, it's another reinvention of the wheel, by someone experienced in the Way of the Supermarket.
With backers like that, the new Electrofag will be able to afford to go through any regulatory hoops. The smaller companies can't. What happens next? Well, the big-money companies will press for harder regulation 'for the public good' and install procedures they can afford but which will flatten the smaller companies overnight. Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, meet Big Electrofag.
It had to happen. As for me, I'm off out to Smoky-Drinky with a load of spare plants to hand out. We'd better learn how to extract the nicotine for use in Electrofags while we're at it.
It's water soluble so it won't be hard. The hard part would be gauging the concentration.
It is developing an aerosol-based product that looks like a conventional cigarette but, subject to regulatory approval, will allow smokers to get a nicotine fix without the harmful side-effects from tobacco.
Yes, it's another reinvention of the wheel, by someone experienced in the Way of the Supermarket.
With backers like that, the new Electrofag will be able to afford to go through any regulatory hoops. The smaller companies can't. What happens next? Well, the big-money companies will press for harder regulation 'for the public good' and install procedures they can afford but which will flatten the smaller companies overnight. Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, meet Big Electrofag.
It had to happen. As for me, I'm off out to Smoky-Drinky with a load of spare plants to hand out. We'd better learn how to extract the nicotine for use in Electrofags while we're at it.
It's water soluble so it won't be hard. The hard part would be gauging the concentration.
Scared of Light.
Still busy but had to note the return of Mummylonglegs with a sensible and logical post.
Today was unusually sunny. The greenhouse had exceeded 40C (104F for any rebel colonists reading) before I went out there and the blast of heat from the door nearly knocked me over. The plants seem happy enough, in fact I had to put some of the triffids in the garden just to space them out. If the slugs waste them, no matter, I have more. I still can't believe these came from seeds that look like dust, and in just a matter of weeks.
I mentioned grow-bags to a friend who is an experienced greenhouse keeper. He scoffed. Why buy a bag of dirt when your greenhouse floor is made of it? He has a point, I will plant most of the plants in the ground inside the greenhouse. Most baccy plants will have to be outside, it's only a little greenhouse and it has to support peppers, tomatoes and chillis too. Although I plan to experiment with outdoor chillis this year because I have grown enough plants to blow my arse to Pluto. Some are Scotch Bonnet. Enough of those and I'll be blogging from the heliopause. If that happens, all I'll be writing is 'Send cream. Cold, cold cream'.
The soil here is crap, mostly heavy clay, so heavy that the worms wear hard hats and carry pickaxes - but right next to the greenhouse is the compost box. Leachate from that will help, as will digging in some decent bought compost and sharp sand. When I put this greenhouse in I had to include a drain beneath it because the garden is a swamp when it rains. All good things if you want to grow plants under cover, of course.
I won't undermine the greenhouse. It's screwed down onto a frame of six-inch fence planks, three deep and fitted together with six-inch-square mortice and tenon joints at the corners. That's attached to posts set into concrete lumps. This thing is going nowhere.
Greenhouse expert is a smoky-drinker and I'll be visiting tomorrow night. Some news for Don Shenker - Tesco are selling Glenfiddich 12-year-old and Glenmorangie 10-year-old at £10 off at the moment. News for the Dreadful Arnott and the tightly puckered anuses of the antismoker movement - I'll be taking spare tobacco plants to the Smoky-drinky too. Soon they'll be growing wild on railway embankments, waste ground and in the middle of motorways. Especially when our local winds catch the seeds. Then they'll be growing in cucumber greenhouses in Spain.
This far north we are fast approaching the time of no darkness. We are already in the time of blue-sky-all-night. All the vampires and other undead creatures have fled to their second coffins in Holyrood for the duration. We don't get midnight sun, but for the next month we get a wonderful effect where the red sky of the sunset just moves around the horizon until the sun pops back up. It really confuses the shepherds.
And so, in a roundabout way, we get back to the subject of sunshine. Once, labourers worked the fields all day, every day, as long as the sun was up and they wore no shirts. Once, people on holiday just flobbed out on beaches and let the sun toast them to a lurid pink.
British beaches, not so long ago, resembled a mass lobster stranding every summer. The stench of roasting flesh reached miles inland, as did the screams of the raw and blistered as they enjoyed their holiday by immersing themselves in unimaginable pain. It was a place where Satan sent his new devils for work experience. The Old British were not scared of Hell. It's one long holiday.
There was sun cream in the old days. When I was a kid, the highest was factor 12, I think, and it was like emulsion paint. Now it goes up to at least factor 30 which I suspect is chrome plating. I don't use any. I have inherited my grandfather's attitude to beaches. If forced to go there I will wear my jacket, a flat cap and a deep scowl. No joke, I have seen photos. He once, I hear, rolled up his trousers almost to the knee in a fit of reckless abandon but mostly the only thing he rolled was tobacco. Franklin's. I haven't seen any in a long time. I bet it's horrible with sand in it.
My grandfather had no fear of skin cancer. He was a coal miner so he spent most of his life as far from the sun as it is possible to get. Pneumoconiosis got him instead, ironic because sunlight grew all those plants that eventually turned into coal. Looks like the sun will kill us all, one way or another. If you hide, it's set traps.
Yet now, with anti-UV creams that are so powerful they actually bend light around you and make you invisible, it seems skin cancers are rising like mad. What about all those shirtless muscle-laden sweaty labourers (calm down ladies and in the interests of equality, if you're gay, put that away) and the beach full of screaming blistered lobsters? Surely with the new paste-on sunproofing there must be a decline in the dangers of the tan?
Not so, apparently. Even with all the modern anti-sun measures like Xbox and Playstation and TV and internet and Gary Glitter, parents worry that their children are getting too much sun (in the UK!) so they have to wear a little gadget to tell them when to return to the underworld. Too much sun? Modern children? What is this, a question of surface area perhaps?
It's interesting, isn't it, to note that when nobody gave a stuff about sunburn, hardly anyone got skin cancer. Now that everyone is dipped in Dulux before venturing outside, there's loads of it.
Like the massive decline in smoking in the last fifty years that has led to a massive increase in lung cancer, heart attacks, asthma, silly little people who can be scared shitless with a few words, and all other smoking related illnesses.
As drinking declines, the problems it causes vastly increase. These same scientists scoff at homeopathy, you know.
Children are apparently getting fatter because they never play outside and parents are worried that they are exposed to too much sun (again - in the UK!). Well if they played outside they'd be less fat and there would be less of them for the sun to hit and they'd have less skin to get cancer in. When they are slim and speedy they'll be better able to dodge sunbeams. Thin enough and the light will pass right through and think how much the NHS would then save on X-rays. How about that for logic, parents? It makes as much sense as anything else these days.
We used to play in the sun as kids. If it became uncomfortably hot we used to head for the shade until we'd cooled down. It was a thing called 'common sense'.
I think most kids still have it, you know.
The adults don't.
Today was unusually sunny. The greenhouse had exceeded 40C (104F for any rebel colonists reading) before I went out there and the blast of heat from the door nearly knocked me over. The plants seem happy enough, in fact I had to put some of the triffids in the garden just to space them out. If the slugs waste them, no matter, I have more. I still can't believe these came from seeds that look like dust, and in just a matter of weeks.
I mentioned grow-bags to a friend who is an experienced greenhouse keeper. He scoffed. Why buy a bag of dirt when your greenhouse floor is made of it? He has a point, I will plant most of the plants in the ground inside the greenhouse. Most baccy plants will have to be outside, it's only a little greenhouse and it has to support peppers, tomatoes and chillis too. Although I plan to experiment with outdoor chillis this year because I have grown enough plants to blow my arse to Pluto. Some are Scotch Bonnet. Enough of those and I'll be blogging from the heliopause. If that happens, all I'll be writing is 'Send cream. Cold, cold cream'.
The soil here is crap, mostly heavy clay, so heavy that the worms wear hard hats and carry pickaxes - but right next to the greenhouse is the compost box. Leachate from that will help, as will digging in some decent bought compost and sharp sand. When I put this greenhouse in I had to include a drain beneath it because the garden is a swamp when it rains. All good things if you want to grow plants under cover, of course.
I won't undermine the greenhouse. It's screwed down onto a frame of six-inch fence planks, three deep and fitted together with six-inch-square mortice and tenon joints at the corners. That's attached to posts set into concrete lumps. This thing is going nowhere.
Greenhouse expert is a smoky-drinker and I'll be visiting tomorrow night. Some news for Don Shenker - Tesco are selling Glenfiddich 12-year-old and Glenmorangie 10-year-old at £10 off at the moment. News for the Dreadful Arnott and the tightly puckered anuses of the antismoker movement - I'll be taking spare tobacco plants to the Smoky-drinky too. Soon they'll be growing wild on railway embankments, waste ground and in the middle of motorways. Especially when our local winds catch the seeds. Then they'll be growing in cucumber greenhouses in Spain.
This far north we are fast approaching the time of no darkness. We are already in the time of blue-sky-all-night. All the vampires and other undead creatures have fled to their second coffins in Holyrood for the duration. We don't get midnight sun, but for the next month we get a wonderful effect where the red sky of the sunset just moves around the horizon until the sun pops back up. It really confuses the shepherds.
And so, in a roundabout way, we get back to the subject of sunshine. Once, labourers worked the fields all day, every day, as long as the sun was up and they wore no shirts. Once, people on holiday just flobbed out on beaches and let the sun toast them to a lurid pink.
British beaches, not so long ago, resembled a mass lobster stranding every summer. The stench of roasting flesh reached miles inland, as did the screams of the raw and blistered as they enjoyed their holiday by immersing themselves in unimaginable pain. It was a place where Satan sent his new devils for work experience. The Old British were not scared of Hell. It's one long holiday.
There was sun cream in the old days. When I was a kid, the highest was factor 12, I think, and it was like emulsion paint. Now it goes up to at least factor 30 which I suspect is chrome plating. I don't use any. I have inherited my grandfather's attitude to beaches. If forced to go there I will wear my jacket, a flat cap and a deep scowl. No joke, I have seen photos. He once, I hear, rolled up his trousers almost to the knee in a fit of reckless abandon but mostly the only thing he rolled was tobacco. Franklin's. I haven't seen any in a long time. I bet it's horrible with sand in it.
My grandfather had no fear of skin cancer. He was a coal miner so he spent most of his life as far from the sun as it is possible to get. Pneumoconiosis got him instead, ironic because sunlight grew all those plants that eventually turned into coal. Looks like the sun will kill us all, one way or another. If you hide, it's set traps.
Yet now, with anti-UV creams that are so powerful they actually bend light around you and make you invisible, it seems skin cancers are rising like mad. What about all those shirtless muscle-laden sweaty labourers (calm down ladies and in the interests of equality, if you're gay, put that away) and the beach full of screaming blistered lobsters? Surely with the new paste-on sunproofing there must be a decline in the dangers of the tan?
Not so, apparently. Even with all the modern anti-sun measures like Xbox and Playstation and TV and internet and Gary Glitter, parents worry that their children are getting too much sun (in the UK!) so they have to wear a little gadget to tell them when to return to the underworld. Too much sun? Modern children? What is this, a question of surface area perhaps?
It's interesting, isn't it, to note that when nobody gave a stuff about sunburn, hardly anyone got skin cancer. Now that everyone is dipped in Dulux before venturing outside, there's loads of it.
Like the massive decline in smoking in the last fifty years that has led to a massive increase in lung cancer, heart attacks, asthma, silly little people who can be scared shitless with a few words, and all other smoking related illnesses.
As drinking declines, the problems it causes vastly increase. These same scientists scoff at homeopathy, you know.
Children are apparently getting fatter because they never play outside and parents are worried that they are exposed to too much sun (again - in the UK!). Well if they played outside they'd be less fat and there would be less of them for the sun to hit and they'd have less skin to get cancer in. When they are slim and speedy they'll be better able to dodge sunbeams. Thin enough and the light will pass right through and think how much the NHS would then save on X-rays. How about that for logic, parents? It makes as much sense as anything else these days.
We used to play in the sun as kids. If it became uncomfortably hot we used to head for the shade until we'd cooled down. It was a thing called 'common sense'.
I think most kids still have it, you know.
The adults don't.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
From Here to Absurdity.
Flying visit tonight. Busy trying to earn a few pennies. It takes time to get paid and I don't invoice until the work is done so the sooner it's done, the sooner I'm paid.
I have a post up at Orphans of Liberty for tonight's offering.
Also, I see the latest antismoker idiocy has been delightfully demonstrated by none other than the Goebbels of the control freaks herself, the Dreadful Arnott. She's not as good-looking as the original but she's twice as mad.
Oh, it's reaching explosive levels of absurdity now. This is way beyond Godwin's Law. She is just about ready for direct quotes from Mein Kampf.
Then there are those complaining about the smell in clubs now that the smell of smoke (which they hated and which they pretended to believe was bad for them) has been banished.
Guess what they use to mask the stench of sweat and vomit? Aside from filling the air with synthetic chemicals, that is...
Any scent other than cigarette smoke certainly lifts Darin Sanone’s spirits when he hits the club. A bartender for nine years at Rage, a gay nightclub in West Hollywood, is all for a little aromatherapy/air freshener. “One of the DJs last week burned incense,” said Sanone, “and it traveled all the way through the bar and even masked a horrible smell coming from a corner of the club.”
Said without a trace of irony. They replace the smoke with... other smoke. Actually, I think the smoking ban is worded in such a way that incense would be illegal too. Since it's scented plant material it actually contains more chemicals than tobacco smoke. Don't tell the poor dears just yet. We want to build the terror nice and slow.
We really can't equate these people to the Nazis. The Nazis were nowhere near as dim and probably not quite as evil.
Two fingers, antismokers. Beats your salute in every war.
Right. Merriment over. Back to work.
I have a post up at Orphans of Liberty for tonight's offering.
Also, I see the latest antismoker idiocy has been delightfully demonstrated by none other than the Goebbels of the control freaks herself, the Dreadful Arnott. She's not as good-looking as the original but she's twice as mad.
Oh, it's reaching explosive levels of absurdity now. This is way beyond Godwin's Law. She is just about ready for direct quotes from Mein Kampf.
Then there are those complaining about the smell in clubs now that the smell of smoke (which they hated and which they pretended to believe was bad for them) has been banished.
Guess what they use to mask the stench of sweat and vomit? Aside from filling the air with synthetic chemicals, that is...
Any scent other than cigarette smoke certainly lifts Darin Sanone’s spirits when he hits the club. A bartender for nine years at Rage, a gay nightclub in West Hollywood, is all for a little aromatherapy/air freshener. “One of the DJs last week burned incense,” said Sanone, “and it traveled all the way through the bar and even masked a horrible smell coming from a corner of the club.”
Said without a trace of irony. They replace the smoke with... other smoke. Actually, I think the smoking ban is worded in such a way that incense would be illegal too. Since it's scented plant material it actually contains more chemicals than tobacco smoke. Don't tell the poor dears just yet. We want to build the terror nice and slow.
We really can't equate these people to the Nazis. The Nazis were nowhere near as dim and probably not quite as evil.
Two fingers, antismokers. Beats your salute in every war.
Right. Merriment over. Back to work.
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
The Day after No Tobacco day.
I didn't even notice. Dick Puddlecote did.
Yesterday was No Tobacco day, and apparently millions tried to stop in honour of this Righteous religion of self-denial and fascist control.
Guess what I did yesterday?
I repotted my tobacco plants into 6-inch pots. I also smoked some rollups and tried some Condor for my pipe. Condor arrives just as I remember it. As little planks of compressed tobacco. Hmm, I could easily make that if I can get the initial processing right. I could use something based on a cheese-press design to make blocks and then cut that into planks. Blocks would be easy to store too.
I didn't know it was no-tobacco day in time to buy cigars. I'll get some tomorrow and have one in honour of the anitsmokers. Who, as pointed out by Kitler, really shouldn't be allowed to play with fire.
Note to ASH - Six percent success rate for the price you charge is nothing to crow about. There is only one successful stop-smoking method, one I have seen used many times and one which involves no withdrawal symptoms at all.
It involves the smoker thinking 'Nah, I don't want to do it any more' by a process that will be unimaginable to ASH. A process known as 'free will'.
This method not only has no withdrawal symptoms but does not turn the ex-smoker into a born-again non-smoker. It's no different to giving up trainspotting or stamp-collecting.
If you don't want to stop then either you won't, or you will accept being forced to and then spend the rest of your life raging against those who enjoy what you still want to enjoy but aren't allowed.
It's simple really.
I wish I had a cigar though.
Yesterday was No Tobacco day, and apparently millions tried to stop in honour of this Righteous religion of self-denial and fascist control.
Guess what I did yesterday?
I repotted my tobacco plants into 6-inch pots. I also smoked some rollups and tried some Condor for my pipe. Condor arrives just as I remember it. As little planks of compressed tobacco. Hmm, I could easily make that if I can get the initial processing right. I could use something based on a cheese-press design to make blocks and then cut that into planks. Blocks would be easy to store too.
I didn't know it was no-tobacco day in time to buy cigars. I'll get some tomorrow and have one in honour of the anitsmokers. Who, as pointed out by Kitler, really shouldn't be allowed to play with fire.
Note to ASH - Six percent success rate for the price you charge is nothing to crow about. There is only one successful stop-smoking method, one I have seen used many times and one which involves no withdrawal symptoms at all.
It involves the smoker thinking 'Nah, I don't want to do it any more' by a process that will be unimaginable to ASH. A process known as 'free will'.
This method not only has no withdrawal symptoms but does not turn the ex-smoker into a born-again non-smoker. It's no different to giving up trainspotting or stamp-collecting.
If you don't want to stop then either you won't, or you will accept being forced to and then spend the rest of your life raging against those who enjoy what you still want to enjoy but aren't allowed.
It's simple really.
I wish I had a cigar though.
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