Smokers have no property rights.

Bucko found a snippet in a local paper that will have the antismokers wetting themselves with glee. I don't mind them wetting themselves as long as they don't do it near me. They can keep their filthy second-hand pee to themselves.

I would never buy a home from a self-dampening antismoker unless they gave me a serious discount to cover the cost of mops, carpets and disinfectant. Plus the cost of an exorcist to remove the Smugness Demons from the very fabric of the building. Also, since smoking is now the only reason to redecorate a home, it is safe to assume that those filthy antismokers who never like to wash themselves nor their clothes also never do anything to spruce up the paintwork.

It's only fair - after all, they would demand the same from me. Of course, they wouldn't get it. If I were to sell my house and found out that a prospective purchaser was a rabid antismoker, I'd put the price up to cover the inconvenience of having to deal with them. My ambition is to one day make enough money to move out and sell this house to a radical Islamist group for one shiny British pound. I wouldn't move too far away. I'd want to watch...

Smoking is portrayed, by those who don't do it, as a waste of money. Well of course it is - if you don't like doing it. Paying for something you don't like doing is obviously a waste.

If you like to drive, add up all the costs of petrol, tax, insurance, servicing, fixing things that break, replacements for bits that wear out, and as far as I am concerned every penny of that is a waste of money. I don't like driving. So, do I demand you all give up driving because I consider it a waste of money and because you'll crash and cost the NHS money and because I don't like all those fumes?

Of course not. It's your money, spend it how you like. You can spend yours on things I consider a waste and I will spend mine on things you consider a waste. How does that sound?

Not good enough for the antismokers. They want to keep their cars but they don't want me messing up their diesel fumes with a bit of burning leaf. Further, they want smokers banned from everywhere outdoors in case we disrupt the heady scent of traffic fumes, which are of course good for you.

It's true, antismoker. Traffic fumes render you immune to tobacco smoke. Breathe deeply of them and live forever. In fact, if you divert your car exhaust into the main body of your vehicle, no tobacco smoke can ever enter your lungs again. If you tell smokers you've done this, none of them will attempt to enter your vehicle. Traffic fumes react with tobacco smoke to produce severe discomfort in smokers, which is the real reason we don't like being outside.

Traffic fumes have absolutely no effect on the fine, healthy lungs of the antismoker. They don't cause any damage at all unless the lung has a layer of nicotine all over its surface. But you antismokers already knew that, didn't you?

If you pipe exhaust gases from your garage into your living room, it has the effect of keeping smokers out of your house forever. Guaranteed.

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. Studies have shown, you know, and experts have said.

Let me know how you get on.

Apology from the Dick in the Film.

The Dick in the Film has apologised for regarding certain human women as of less importance than dogs and for laughing at a woman being beaten up by thugs.

You might regard it as sincere, you might not. I regard it as a line drawn under the matter.

I have written before on the way the Righteous regard apology and I will not be Righteous on this. He has apologised and for me, that is the end of it. Whether he meant it or whether he was scared for his BBC prospects, it is done. Over. Finished.

He has publically admitted his dickiness and I consider the matter closed.

The two Bens he says were not involved were very probably really not involved. Leave them alone. There is no evidence to prove either of them were involved so chasing them is just a waste of time and likely to get the chasers prosecuted. Gonnae no' dae that'?

So Dick in the Film will not appear here again on this particular matter.

When he screws up again, he'll be back. Closing the past is not a free pass for the future.

Stirling University - Drone factory.

Stirling University are refusing to admit that their results on the plain-packaging of cigarettes are entirely fabricated Stalinist nonsense. There is only one possible logical conclusion.

Personally, I will never employ or engage in business with anyone who has Stirling University on their CV, and if I ever have to I'll pay them half or charge them double. The organisation pumps out indoctrinated drones and nothing more. It is a Righteous clearing house producing graduates of no value whatsoever in my view and that view will not now change. Ever. Every human-shaped void that emerges from that institution is an utter waste of space.

If you are thinking of paying that university for your education, think again. They do not educate, they indoctrinate. Your degree will be worth less than the paper your Friday night chips arrive in. You will be paying to be worthless forever. I will not employ you, and in every case where I act as consultant to employers, no Stirling university graduate will be considered.

Unfair? Look at those 'Smokers need not apply' ads and then tell me it's unfair. Then fuck off. Your game, Righteous, your rules.

Do not bother telling me 'it's only one department and the rest are okay'. It is not one department. It is the central management of the university. This is the entire university, not a little clique of arseholes (which every university has) hiding in a corner and just making stuff up. The refusal to comply with the law comes from the centre of the university. The pretend Farcebook page with pretend support for those refusing to comply with the law comes from the centre of the university.

This involves the entire university. I don't care which department you are in, I don't care how diligent you are with your science, your university has declared you useless and declared your research worthless. Your university did that. If you are applying to universities, note that Stirling will mark you as a Righteous drone the moment you put them on your application form.

Are you a Stirling astronomer who is perfectly happy to release data on your new-planet discovery via FOI? Your university refuses FOI requests, therefore you are lying. Are you a Stirling mathematician with a perfect solution to Fermat's last theorem and you'd be delighted to release your calculations to an FOI request? Well, your university refuses FOI requests so you are lying.

Or maybe they just refuse the ones that are based on lies? Either way, that university cannot be trusted. If I were you I would never apply for a job there and never apply for any course because the entire university is suspect.

You might be in Stirling's microbial taxonomy department thinking 'Oh, this has nothing to do with me'. Yes it does. Yes. It. Does.

This is not about a department. This is about the university as a whole. Whichever department you are in, this reflects on you. Whichever class you take hoping for a job on graduation, this reflects on you. This is not a department setting up Farcebook fakes and defying the law. This is Stirling University. All of it. Yes, comparative psychology, you too.

Let's not play semantics. Stirling University is the problem here. All of it. ALL.

You work there and you want it to change? Well do something about it.

The only thing I can do is to recommend students go elsewhere and to strike your graduates from employment shortlists. This, I will do. Whichever department they come from. No prejudice and no distinction.

I am an equal opportunities bastard.

You made me, Dr. Antismokenstein. Aren't I doing what you wanted?

When jokes die.

An elderly man was stopped by the police in the early hours of the morning and is asked where he was going at that time of night.

The man replied "I am going to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body."

The police said "Really? Who is giving that lecture at this time of night?"

The man replied "My wife."



That's a joke at the moment. It won't be long before that joke no longer works because the police will be obliged to give that lecture themselves. Or maybe direct the tipsy codger to the nearest Puritan centre.

Next? Plain packaging for cereal packets. All those cartoon characters are making the cheeldren eat too much sugar.

The brain runs exclusively on glucose so you can't let the proles have any. They might work out that the 'experts' are talking utter shite.

Ta.

A quick thank-you to all those who voted me to either no. 3 or no. 12 in the Total Politics don't-give-a-damn category. Apparently I'm third of fifty or twelfth of fifteen. Which does sound uncomfortably like a Borg designation either way.

So... best go and find some politics to talk about.


But first, a little drinkie.

Hurricane Gordon.

It's nowhere to be seen.

We had weather warnings, we were told to run about screaming 'We're all Dooooomed!' and nothing's happened. Days previously described as just 'windy' knocked over plants but today, barely a leaf rustled.

Which is odd because not very far away, roofs were blown off and trees blown down and power was cut and all sorts of terrible things, but here? Not a peep.

Maybe it's because the hurricane took one look at this place and decided there was no way to make it worse. Maybe it's because of the magic tomato plant in the greenhouse. Maybe it's because I spent ages fighting the damn wasps to get the last two carrier-bags of plums off the tree before they were blown off, and the hurricane thought 'Oh, he's got them, might as well find some other garden to mess up'.

Or maybe it's waiting for tomorrow... the day I have to go out.

The Wrong Man.

A Ben Melchiors has left a comment on the Jocko Homo post. Those who were tracking the idiots in the video have apparently found the wrong man. This is certainly possible - my name is so common that if you Google me, you'll find me all over the world, from a trucking office in Nova Scotia to a golf pro in Australia. There's even a famous namesake in the UK. In fact, I seem to be the poorest person in the world with my name which is probably some kind of record.

This Ben Melchiors has been getting threats. Whether he's the wrong man or not, threats aren't a good idea. In the days before Internet they were called 'poison pen letters' and were illegal - and the new electronic version is just as illegal because it's the same thing.

There's really no point to these threats. Those making them aren't going to do anything and are open to prosecution, so threatening people just gets the threatener into trouble. They are taken seriously by police. People get prosecuted for causing someone to be offended by a doll in a window these days, so causing someone to feel threatened is more serious than that.

I hope none of the senders call themselves Libertarian, since the central creed of that philosophy is 'not to initiate force or fraud against another' - including the threat of force.

The internet makes those poison pen letters faster and easier but they are poison pen letters just the same. Same rules apply. The sender is committing an offence. In theory, putting threats on newspaper articles or any other site such as 'Kill all these people' whether referring to EDL, BNP, UAF, smokers, fat people, anyone, all count as the same poison-pen threats but we'd need a much bigger police force to track them all down so they get away with it. Actually, I recall one newspaper columnist suggesting that the long-ago-leaked BNP membership list might be useful to what he called 'black power' groups. I don't recall him being prosecuted. He certainly should have been.

Sending a specific Email to a specific person is much easier to track than a newspaper comment and those Emails can be every bit as swivel-eyed and vitriolic as the worst of the newspaper loons. I've seen them.

A few years back, one of my Email addresses was used by a spammer as a fake return address. The first I knew of it was when the failed-delivery messages started pouring in at a rate of around three hundred a minute. I had to shut the Email down quickly while I arranged for that account to delete all failed-delivery messages without forwarding them to me.

Once in a while I'd get an Email from some furious spam recipient threatening me with all kinds of violence. The first time, I responded and explained that the spam was nothing to do with me, that spammers use other people's Emails for return addresses, that I had no idea what was happening or who was doing it. Well, I soon learned just how deranged some people can get, because that just set off more threats, then they'd get their friends involved... in the end I deleted the account and let them shout into darkness. The account had been rendered useless anyway because it was being blocked by spam filters.

In real life, face to face, threats are rarely serious. Most are just bluster from someone who hopes you'll back down before they have to put their threats to the test. That's ten times as true on the Internet where the threatener might be on the other side of the planet and isn't going to be anywhere near you, ever. The trouble is, unlike those old poison pen letters there is no postmark on an Email, so you can't be sure if the threat came from a hundred miles away or next door. So it's understandable that those being threatened will often take it seriously - and so will the police.

I can't delete any references to this Ben Melchiors from here because as far as I am aware, there aren't any. Certainly none posted by me, in fact the comment he left is the first time his name's appeared here. The only contact referenced here is the Email he put up himself.

Even if someone does track down the idiots in the video, sending threats is not going to do anything other than get the threatener arrested. Even if you send a threat from five hundred miles away and have no intention of carrying it out, the threat itself is the offence and you can be prosecuted.

Even if the target of the threat is one or both of the two actual idiots in the video, seen and heard laughing about a real, physical attack on a real woman. And no, her having a tattoo, being a member of the 'other side', none of those justify laughing about an attack on a woman by a gang of thugs. Yet even if the target of the threats is one of those two, as soon as you send the threat, you become the bad guy. The threatener is open to prosecution by the threatened, even if what the threatened did was disgusting.

If you threaten the wrong person, you can end up in a lot of trouble for no sensible reason.

So think before you send that threat. Poison pen letters are still illegal, even if they are electronic and even if you don't intend to follow it through. The crime is in the threat.

Looks can be deceiving.

I've been busting a gut on this next short story book because I want it out of the way and because money is running short and I need to get another pot-boiler out while I wait to hear about the next novel. Some of the stories in this next one are far nastier than in the last one. It's not bedtime reading.

Tip: if you're self-publishing something, always let it rest for at least 24 hours and then read over it. Read it as if it was written by someone you hate so you're looking for every trivial little error.

Self-editing on short stories is okay but it's far harder to do on novels. Those need the eyes of someone who hasn't read the whole thing fifteen damn times already. Novels are too big for self-editing. They need proper publishers.

So, while that collection rests, I started looking for ideas for the dystopia novel. This is a random process and usually starts with YouTube comedy clips then gets into the weird stuff once I'm in receptive mood.

I came across some videos by an ex-Mormon girl. If you saw her in the street you'd dismiss her as of that species often described as Bimbonius boobius maximus - the Large-Breasted Bimbo. You'd only have to talk to her for five minutes to find she has a brain to match those frontal accessories.

In this video she describes the technique of the Invisible Watchman and describes it very clearly indeed. She describes it in terms of religion, but I see it in terms of CCTV.



Consider - not all those speed cameras have cameras in them but do you slow down for each one or take a chance? It's not possible for all those CCTV cameras to be continuously monitored unless we were all employed to do it, and most of them produce such crappy images they're no use anyway - but which ones? Are they even real? You can buy dummy ones to fit to your house and all they have is a little red light. Yet the camera you see might be watching you. You don't know.

The Invisible Watchman isn't God any more. It's CCTV. And I owe that girl a signed copy if I ever get this into print.

Tacos and planes.

America has been on red alert because some people on planes spent too long in the toilet.

Well, perhaps they should question a certain taco maker...

It's really just a game, you know...

The missing link between humanity and fungus, Russel Brand, is in trouble again.

Well I don't like him, I have to say. But that's just me. I don't like his low-grade schoolboy humour and his irrelevant use of swearing and the unbelievably stupid things he does. Evidently, lots of people do like him because he makes money at being an infantile git, but I'd never pay to watch him.

This time though, he is unfairly lambasted. The paralympics athletes are Outraged! Outraged I tell you! Apparently he has insulted them.

Here is what he actually said.

He told his audience: 'I don’t give a f*** about the Olympics. It’s boring Blue Peter sport and a waste of taxpayers’ money.
'At least the Paralympics have some kind of novelty value or something.'

Now, he is allegedly a comedian. That joke would not have raised a smile with me. Not because of Outrage!, not because of the 'oo, that's a bit close to the bone' feeling I get with some of Frankie "Specky Ginger Plonker" Boyle's stuff, not because of mild irritation, not because of anything other than it's a pretty weak joke. I mean, I expect jokes at that level from Pissed Angus McWaster late in the evening, but a professional? I'd expect something with a bit of thought behind it.

I don't care about the Olympics either. It's full of people doing stuff I'll never be able to do so watching it is akin to watching a porn film starring Nine-Inch Nigel with a woman who keeps saying she wants even more than that. That's not exciting, it just induces feelings of inadequacy.

Those taking part in the Olympics are the closest to physically perfect specimens the human race can produce. When you have enough muscles to put half of Coventry in the shade, lifting what appears to be a locomotive axle with extra wheels on it isn't such a big deal. If I did it, you would first be utterly stunned, then you'd have to call an ambulance and a crane.

So watching someone with the leg muscles of a gazelle running like, um, a gazelle, isn't interesting. Point to one of them and say 'He won that race' and I'll point to his muscles and say 'Well that's hardly a surprise, is it?'

Point to someone with no legs and say 'He won that race' and I'm going to look twice. Won a race with no legs at all? Now I'm impressed.

So, although I'll have to wash my fingers in bleach after typing it, Urko's stunt double is right. The paralympics are much more interesting than the olympics. Watching people do something they've trained to do for years, with bodies at the peak of fitness and perfection - yawn. I know they can do it simply because they're in the competition. I know I could never hope to come close to the level of fitness of the guy who came in last. There's no need to rub it in.

The paralympics is full of people competing in sports despite missing a few limbs here and there. Now that, to me, is worth seeing. Naturally, I still couldn't beat the guy who came in last but that ceases to be the point here. This is about people who, when I was a kid, would have been told 'You can never do that' and doing it anyway.

The PE teacher ( the gym stuff, for non-UK readers) used to say that to me and I thought 'That means he's not going to force me to try. I'm just going to nod and keep quiet and let the other poor buggers sweat.' The chemistry and physics teachers stopped saying it after a while.

So it is actually embarrassing to hear paralympic athletes bleating about a comment made by the guy who didn't get Animal's job in the Muppet auditions. He made a comment which, when you look at it, wasn't actually derogatory. In fact he rated the paralympics as more entertaining than the olympics and if you want to say it's not about entertainment, what the hell did you think all the tickets were for?

People buy tickets for the olympics and paralympics for the same reason they buy tickets to watch Barnum's scariest freak. To be entertained. That's it.

I won't buy tickets for any sports events because I'm not interested enough so I won't be entertained. I won't buy tickets for the last toilet brush in the shop's shows because I'd just sit there through the entire performance thinking how many bin bags I could have bought and then thrown away instead.

It's entertainment. All of it. That's what it's for. All the olympics, all the paralympics, all the football, the cricket, Wimbledon, all of it. Entertainment. It is all 'novelty value'.

That's what people pay for.

If you imagine it is there for some higher, empowering purpose then I'm afraid you're just nuts. It exists because people pay to watch it. Sponsors hand over cash in return for advertising because people will see the advertising. No other reason. Don't go looking for deep meanings and Righteous missions in the paralympics. It is entertainment, just like any other spectator sport.

If it wasn't entertaining it simply wouldn't exist.