Trouble?

I hear some people are having problems accessing the new Wordpress version of this blog.

If you are affected, please let me know here and I'll try to find out why.

Moved to new premises.

Okay, no more procrastination. The new place needs some bells and whistles added, some fiddly bits adjusted and links need to be updated but that can be done while it's in use. I pretty much have the hang of it now.

I think I figured out the problem with porting the comments. Wordpress is trying to take the comments from Blogger but Disqus is in the way.  So I'll shut down Disqus on this blog (all comments should still be there in Blogger format), leave this place with moderation on so I don't have to keep coming back to delete Captain Mindless the ASH Troll, and all new posts will be at the new place.

Since the new place allows nested pages, I plan to put most stuff into pages and keep the front page as clutter-free as possible. I don't have one of these phones that reads Internet but I know they only have small screens and I know more and more people use them to access Internet these days. So all the fancy stuff must make it a nightmare to read anything on the little screens.

Font size, I don't think I can do too much about. It depends on which device you use. I've already had comments that the font is too small and too big. If you use Windows, hold 'ctrl' and wiggle the wheel on the mouse to make the font bigger or smaller. If you use something else, there's probably a way to adjust font size but I don't know what it is.

Without further ado, I hereby declare this blog moved.  Disqus will go off shortly and the comments will go to moderation. I thought about turning them off but I'll leave them on mod for a while in case of stray comments.

Spam hit the Wordpress site almost as soon as I put it up. The first-comment-approval system catches all of it, other than the bits the spam-filter takes away. Spam is platform-independent unfortunately, no matter where you go, the spammers follow. I'll keep an eye on the Wordpress spam filter in case it gets over-zealous!

There's a link at the top of the page to the new place, but just in case your browser blocks those images, here it is again. Be sure to check the link to 'the comment thing' on the new site, it's not as intimidating as it looks.

See you over there.

Blog move: Another reason.

Blogger's new Captcha is causing problems for a lot of people. Including me. I have to refresh it a few times on blogs that use it because after a half-century of use, these eyes don't pick out the fine detail they used to. They can still rivet a student to the floor, even if I can't see them so well. The prominent canines probably help a little too.

(I still intend to put that N gauge stuff on Ebay but every time I take it all out, I just put it all away again. I mean, I have a Hymek, possibly the only N gauge one in the country! I would find it easier to sell my brother although I probably wouldn't get as much for him. He is 'used' after all - although, I hasten to add, not by me)

The move to Wordpress means I don't need to sign in to Sitemeter to track troll IPs, I don't need to sign in to Disqus to boot trolls out, and although the troll can comment in Disqus and get deleted, he can't get in to Wordpress in the first place. He has left a snide comment there but it was a waste of keypresses because nobody will ever see it. I'd still let interesting trolls in but not the no-issue loonies.

Wordpress does all those things and it doesn't have, or need, eye-crushing captchas. With one sign-in. The downside is that because it's more powerful it's also more complicated. I've been learning how to use it and I don't think I've even scratched the surface of what it can do yet - and that's just the free version!

Blogger seems determined to make it difficult. I've noticed that they have me as a .co.nz site sometimes and that's all part of their forthcoming 'hey governments, you can block this bugger if you like' function. The new captcha is getting on my nerves and from what I'm reading, I'm not the only one.

I had planned to complete the move over to Wordpress last weekend but getting prepared for my first job interview in 20 years was more of a challenge than I expected. Tonight I am neither commiserating nor celebrating because I don't know yet. I'm... practising.

With Whyte and MacKay, £11 in Morrison's. Morrison's also still stock flints and petrol lighter fuel and have staff who actually smile at you when you buy those things. I think they are the only supermarket (shop, even) left who will sell you smoking-related materials without acting as though you had requested Halal African infant eyes in aspic. When Man with a Van isn't available, the only place I'll buy duty-paid tobacco is Morrison's. The rest can get stuffed.

Okay. Wordpress. Moving the comments is proving tricky. Frank says it might just be that it takes forever but the last time I tried it duplicated a load of posts and moved no comments. I might just have to leave a link back here until I can get the comments sorted out.

One question. Does anyone care enough for me to put in the effort, or is the existence of comments on a soon-closed but not-deleted blog fine with everyone?

I mean, it would be a right bugger to spend ages making it work only to get a chorus of 'We didn't really give a shit'.

Interview

Tomorrow I have a job interview, which is why I have been somewhat distracted of late and have put off the blog move until I can devote time to approving first-comments. It won't be tomorrow night because that is reserved for celebration or for drowning sorrows, both of which take much the same form and require exactly the same materials.

It's been over 20 years since I had a job interview but this one is perfect. It's microbiology and it's a one-year contract. Exactly what I need to wait out the recession. Not too highly paid but high enough to allow for some decent malt whiskies and rebuild some reserves too.

That's why I'm putting in some effort, not drinking too much tonight and going to bed early. I even ironed a shirt and looked out my least offensive tie, the one with no LEDs or music - yes, it's that serious.

The age thing shouldn't matter because it's a one-year job. I can understand why companies don't want to invest training in the over-50s who are just going to retire a decade later. Much more cost effective to train a 20-year-old and hope to get at least 40 years out of them. I won't need any training for this job and since it's fixed-term, there is no pension issue either.

My one big worry is that I am massively overqualified for the job. On the plus side - no training. On the downside - I probably have more qualifications and experience than their head of department, and some heads of department aren't happy with that. Not that I have any plans to take over. I have had quite enough of the job following me home. These days I have other things I want to write in the evenings. Clocking off and forgetting about it has a great appeal at the moment. I have no more ambition. There's no point, in this country. Just enough and no more, that's the way of things now. Work harder, earn more and the government will punish you for it. And that's the conservatives!

In the twenty years since my last interview, times have changed. When I went for that lecturing job in 1990, nobody wanted to see any of my qualifications, not even my PhD. This time I have even had to hunt out my O-levels! They want it all. I also have to take along my original birth certificate (written on parchment, in Latin, with a quill pen) and passport and evidence that I have a real National Insurance number so that I can work in this country. Wonder why they want all that, eh?

I'll take my CSE in biology along too. When I did the biology O-level, in 1976, it was part of a new experiment. One exam for all. So if you failed the O-level you went into CSE grades. Naturally, since the government was running this, there was an unintended consequence. If you passed the O-level you also automatically passed the CSE so you got that one too! I have a qualification for which I wasn't even registered to study. As far as biology goes, I almost have the full set now.

I found them, eventually, although the print is a bit faded. One shot with a photocopier should bleach them away. There are also S-level biology and something called 'Use of English' which nobody even recognises any more.

There's the publication list which I have as a separate document because it's 14 pages long, single spaced, pitch 12 and I don't want to scare the interviewer. I might not show them that at all. Nor will I mention the books, articles and stories. Not relevant, and it's another four pages. The list is not stapled. It's fitted with a plastic comb binding.

So I have to appear capable, but not so capable that I'd have the head of department's job by the end of the week.

Anyway, best get some sleep so I don't look like the living dead tomorrow. No smoky whiskies tonight.

There were two stories in the news that I wanted to have a pop at but Dick Puddlecote has already covered one and Frank Davis has fisked the other.

I see the Mail is still repeating the mantra of the brain dead - that supermarkets sell alcohol cheaper than water. Well my local Tesco will sell me two litres of bottled water for less than 20p. If you know where I can get booze at less than 10p a litre, I would be very interested to hear about it.

Purely in the interests of research, of course.

As for those 'social smokers' who feel superior, don't they know that tobacco is  more addictive than heroin? The 'social smoker' cannot exist. Perhaps they.. like those antismoking vapers, or CAMRA, think they will deflect Righteous attention from themselves? Good luck with that.

You'll need it.

The tobacco template reaches your dinner plate.

 Jamie Oliver's secret desire.

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about 'organic' and 'natural' foods, but the truth is, there's not much of that available and hasn't been for quite some time. It starts out natural and organic but by the time you get hold of it, a great deal might have happened to it.

For example, there are legal limits to how much 'added' water can be in any meat product when it goes on sale. Some water is inevitable, due to the processing methods, but once you have a maximum limit, then it becomes legal to add water up to the limit - so everyone does. If the process doesn't add enough, a syringe will finish the job.

Paying bacon prices for water is irritating but harmless. With most fresh meat and vegetables there isn't too much else to worry about other than whatever contamination it might have picked up on the way to the shop. Yes, it's tested for bacterial contamination but not all of it. The test destroys the food so it can't all be tested. Just samples.

Then there's the processed stuff. The mechanically-recovered scraps from the skeleton after it's been stripped of the good stuff, compressed into something roughly meat-shaped and covered with a disguise in the form of breadcrumbs or batter. Other forms of processing result in things like coleslaw and potato salad, sauces and dips. The more handling, the greater the risk of contamination and the greater the amount of added chemicals.

Salt is a trivial concern here. It will be reduced because the food industry is reacting in exactly the same way as the tobacco and booze industries to Righteous demands. They are attempting to appease the Banmeisters in the hope that they will be satisfied. No, they won't. They will never stop. The only thing the food industry has been vocal about is sugar and since that is now firmly in there with alcohol and tobacco, they stand no chance.

So we have scientists claiming that salt in crisps takes 20 seconds to be released. Who chews a crisp for that long? No matter, they will chemically modify those crisps so that, along with the artificial flavourings, you will now experience the wonders of chemical coatings so they can use less salt and more strange chemicals because strange chemicals are good for you and salt is deadly.

Who gets most of their salt intake from crisps?  It's surely an irrelevance unless you live on the things. Yet the salt reduction techniques applied to these high-salt snacks is likely to spill over into ordinary-salt-level foods. There are already drugs that limit the uptake of fats by the gut, and drugs that limit salt intake must be at the development stage by now. Why else would all those Pharma drones be so vociferous all of a sudden?

There's plenty more. Phosphates added to food (often used as a cheap acidity regulator) will now give you heart attacks and so the scientists want the labels to have red, yellow or green tags to reflect the phosphate content. How many of the general public know what phosphate is? It's going to be a breeze to terrify them with that. It's also going to confuse the hell out of them when there are the same labels for salt and fat and now sugar. You'll have more traffic lights than London on every packet. It'll be a case of 'Which would you like to die from? The salt in this one, the sugar in that one, or the phosphates over there?' There will be endless fun to be had just watching the drones trying to buy food.

Interesting, isn't it, that despite the claimed fantastic fall in heart attack cases since the smoking ban, practically everything you eat and drink will give you a heart attack? How can this be? Never mind, none of the drones will even think to question it.

So how will the food industry fare against the Righteous? Surely they must have a better chance than booze and baccy. Nobody needs to smoke or to drink alcohol but we all have to eat. Food is natural. Isn't it?

Well, here's a formulation for mayonnaise that contains no dairy products at all. It is an entirely artificial construct. Tastes like mayo, but what are you actually eating there? Then there is, at last, the reality of Soylent Green - food made from algae.Yes, it has arrived and even though grazing on algae is about as natural for humans as swimming around filtering krill through our teeth, it is presented as 'good for you' because it doesn't have fat in it.

Well, neither does gravel but I'll pass on that, thanks. There are many more scientifically-produced foods and additives to be found on that site.

The food industry has long treated us as one big experiment. 'Feed them this stuff and see what they make of it. Oh, it makes them fat? Sell them this other stuff and tell them it'll make them thin.' So the food industry can claim no moral high ground against the Righteous. They've been meddling with food for years. Preservatives in, preservatives out, E numbers, flavour enhancers, acidity regulators, things like 'I can't believe anyone thinks axle grease is butter' and value-brand cheese that melts like plastic. Now the Righteous want to play too.

 There is nothing the food industry can do about it. Not that they're likely to try too hard. If they can leave out something and all their competitors have to leave it out too, everyone saves money and they're all happy. The 'level playing field' is all ready for this new game. Once more we see, instead of 'get lost and stop hitting us' it's another case of 'if you hit us, you have to hit them too'. Ah, but when those hits actually boost profits...

Mars are gleefully cutting the size (but not the price) of their chocolate bars in a pretend-health move. Peanuts are noticeably less salty, even the ones that are not advertised as being suitable for gullible morons who believe all this crap.

All these lactose-intolerant, wheat-intolerant, nut-allergic people - where did they come from? All those irritable bowels, all those bloating stomachs. There was none of this forty years ago. I knew nobody, growing up, with any such ailments and now it seems every other person I meet has them. It's still milk, still bread, still peanuts. That hasn't changed. Has it?

Well, there are things in animal feeds now that weren't there forty years ago. Milk was pasteurised or sterilised or condensed or dried. Now there is a whole rack in every supermarket of various grades of processed milk and you sometimes get funny looks if you buy the non-diluted stuff. Bread lasts disturbingly longer than it used to and includes all kids of 'added nutrients'.

Maybe it's not the lactose and the wheat. Maybe it's the meddling that people are reacting to. The answer? More meddling, of course. Soya milk and chemical mayonnaise. Flour made from algae. Replace the sugar with chemicals. Replace the sodium chloride with potassium chloride and don't, whatever you do, find out what vets use to put down dogs.

Now the Righteous are involved with their tobacco control template and what happens next is entirely predictable to every smoker in the land. Just as many of us have already started growing our own before plain packs make the flood of dodgy baccy inevitable, it's time to start finding your own sources of food. Plain packaging on those cat chicken dippers means you'll never know what's really in them because that plain packaging is so easy to fake. Learn to set snares and find out where the nearest rabbits live. Take another look at the rising numbers of roadkill-collectors. Keep a few rabbits or chickens, dig out the geraniums and plant potatoes.

There is no aspect of your life the Righteous will not meddle in. Tobacco was just the start. The end?

There isn't an end.

Work.

Real life is keeping me busy at the moment. I tried porting the comments over but it's not working. I might have to leave that part for the moment and just leave a link back to here.

I have a post in the draft pile but I'm too knackered to finish it tonight. So I'll take the lazy way out by pointing at some other bloggers and saying 'Look at them!'

Some very good news at Nothing 2Declare.

Some very sad news at Freedom-2-Choose.

Dick Puddlecote and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist have the latest target - it's food.

As for me, I have to sleep now. Too many projects...

On the road again.

I am mirroring posts in another place. Ultimately I want a domain of my own where all aspects are in one place and there is no problem if one of the many bits go out of action. That will take time because I have no real idea what I want on that site.

So I am considering a move. The posts are already there. All that's left is to move the comments. So far it's a bit '1970s Spanish hotel - be very nice when fineeshed'.

The new place will have no Disqus and no fiddly stuff and can be drafted into a real site easily. It even has the drop-down menus of proper internet places and it's not Google-run.

So, what do you think? 

The evolution of childhood.

'N' gauge grain hopper. Once sold as a toy, long ago...

I've never seen a bottle of the Abbot's Choice whisky. Maybe it disappeared before my whisky days began. Never touched the stuff until I moved to Scotland and found out that there was far more variety than just Bell's.

I can just imagine the reaction if they used a slogan like 'Make it a habit' today. It would be as if someone said 'Drink bleach, it'll do you good'. It won't, in case you're thinking of trying it. Unless you consider 'agonising death' to be a good thing. Stick with the whisky, it takes a lot longer to kill you and it's a much more pleasurable way to go. In fact, if you drink enough of it, you might not even realise you've died.

In the Ordovician, when I was young, I had railway wagons with 'Guinness' on them. I have another of these hoppers with 'Haig' on the side. I still have a few Siphon G wagons with adverts for Palethorpes' sausages on the side too (rail geeks will know about Siphon G and nobody else will care). All these things must surely be banned from the modern child's playset because they will immediately become fat and drunk just by looking at them. It didn't happen in the old days but that's Progressive, I suppose.

What's on modern toy wagons, I wonder? Iceberg lettuce and tofu? I'll bet they are discouraged from having coal wagons too, and soon they will only be allowed to play with third-rail or overhead electric engines pulling goods trains full of mangoes, but only when the wind blows at the right speed.

Already those pop-guns and cap-guns we played with have disappeared. Some were very realistic. I had a double-barrelled shotgun with corks in the end, made of steel and realistic enough to get me riddled with police bullets in this ridiculous modern world. A revolver that took a ring of extraordinarily loud caps. One game with that today and you'd be dead for sure. Now, a child with a plastic toy gun with a bright red tip is regarded as a prototype Ronnie Kray and sent for counselling.

I wonder what future generations will grow up with? My youth was defined by black and white TV, the Woodentops, Bill and Ben, Andy Pandy. Programs that must surely have been dreamed up by Sixties hippies who were high on something  illegal. We sixties kids didn't need drugs, the mad stuff was there on the TV. We had little men made of flowerpots who talked like they were plastered and who had conversations with a plant. We had Spotty Dog who spoke by raising his ears and his owners, who were all made of wood, understood him. Why would we take drugs? How much madder could it get?

Then it moved on to something closer to a soap, with Camberwick Green and Trumpton providing the future addicts for Emmerdale and EastEnders. Sometime after that it moved to produce the first inklings of reality TV - Postman Pat, Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam... and those kids are now glued to the adult equivalents of watching someone go about their ordinary day. They are now the sort who would be riveted by a CCTV screen and ideal for the modern government job of keeping an eye on the neighbours.

What's coming? Well, Scalextric is not going to be the same when it's Prius vs. Smart with 30 MPH speed limit signs all over the track except where it's 20 past the little plastic school (if you go lower than 20 you are arrested as a kerb-crawling paedo), and train sets without steam engines are going to be dull. Neither of these things can be used when the sun isn't shining because they'll be solar powered.

No more armies of toy soldiers, no wargames with simple rules such as set them up, get the airguns, last one standing wins. No evenings spent putting together Airfix models of Churchill tanks or Flying Fortresses and especially no Stukas. Crochet and weaving will replace those hobbies, along with such Green pursuits as growing cabbages and smiling at birds.

Transgender Barbie will leave Ken and shack up with the Bratz lesbian collective, while Ken finds solace in the arms of Action Man, who has left the military and is now a peace protestor who lives in a tatty tent on a roundabout. He still has a wide flat willy but Ken doesn't mind because he has no willy at all. That tells you a lot - it tells you who is on top and it explains Ken's permanent grimace. They will adopt those indeterminate creatures from Sylvian Families to prove they don't consider humans to be some kind of elitist species.

Kids TV will have Vince the Taxman (Can he tax it? Yes he can!), Tarquin the Protestor and Puritan Pete. They will build models of yurts and of Cambodian villages full of soldiers whose guns fire sunflowers into the air and whose tanks leave trails of mung beans and brown rice everywhere they go. Their toys will be strap-on sex-changes and strike placards. All those 'Britains' tractor toys will be replaced with hand-drawn ploughs pulled by muscly men and equally muscly women and people in wheelchairs who pull from an adjoining concrete disabled-access ploughing path. No horses. That would be speciesist. I mean, it's not as if the horses get to eat the oats that grow there, is it?

Almost full circle. From the beginnings, which were mad stuff with no agenda, we end up with something from the Beatles' highest (in a drug sense) point but with an absolutely insane agenda.

The thing is, kids will still compete with each other, it'll just be about different things. They will fight over who has drowned the most puppies by pretending to forget to turn their bedroom light off before falling asleep. They will tally their polar bear kill by seeing who can strike a match and keep it alight longest. And you know what?

They will smoke. They will drink. They will eat banned foods. They will do absolutely everything they have been taught not to do.

Just like we all did when we were kids. Remember sugar mice? A mouse-shaped block of lightly flavoured sugar - and I mean solid sugar - with a bit of string for a tail. Even in the 1960s, my mother told me it would rot my teeth. She was right, I have enough mercury in my teeth to act as a human barometer but do I regret sugar mice? Hell no. I'd have one now. They were fantastic. Not least because the adults all regarded them as horrible.

In Future Child World, the sunflowers from the Cambodian guns will be made of lead and will flatten anyone they land on. Ken and Action Man will barbecue a Sylvanian and probably shag it first while swigging from a bottle of moonshine. Disabled ploughmen will veer off their concrete track into the path of the plough with predictable Halloween consequences. The Scalextric game will become 'outrun the auto-police-car'.

All this New World Order shit is adult-think.You can persuade a gullible adult into pretty much anything. The easiest ones are the ones who think they are not gullible.

Children will do exactly what they are told not to do. That will not change. Ever.


If there is hope, it is not in the proles. It is in the children. Oh, we hate them now, none more than me, but when it comes to saying 'Up yours' to the control freaks, nobody does it like a twelve-year-old.

You can indoctrinate children when they are small, but when they get to be teenagers they will rebel against everything they have been taught so far.

Okay, they might be feral now, but don't think of it as the end of an era.

Think of it as a new Stone Age.

Or maybe... 'Human race reboot'.

Pop goes the smoker.

I have used my Zippo to light my pipe. It's not easy. The Zippo isn't safe to use tilted so the pipe is almost on its side for lighting. It can be done without setting fire to yourself, but you do need to be familiar with the Zippo.

Unlike the gas lighters, you don't need to hold down a button to keep the Zippo alight. The only way to put it out is to close the lid. If you drop one of those gas lighters, the flame goes out as soon as you let go of the button. If you drop a Zippo, it doesn't go out. If it's just been filled (or worse, overfilled) you could soon have quite a little conflagration going.

I fully expect a ban on Zippo lighters soon because obviously we can't be trusted with fire. I mean, it's not as if you'd let cavemen have it so you're not going to let modern adults have it, are you?

The ban will go hand in hand with the ban on smoking in cars because of a single incident. Bucko has already covered that aspect of it and he is right - any car accident that can be even tenuously linked to smoking or to a smoker, whether they were smoking at the time or not, will be 'smoking-related' in future.

The comment drones are all present and correct and declaring that 'smoking while driving must be banned'. Several commenters have pointed out that, according to the article, he wasn't driving. He was sitting in his car, in a car park, outside his home. Not driving.

Naturally, the drones come back with protests about being red-arrowed for saying that smoking while driving is dangerous and again they are told that he wasn't driving. Again they come back with the same noises, still doing their best to take advantage of a man's appalling death.

To those people, he wasn't a man. He was a smoker.

Just how low can ASH and its drones go? The man burned to death within sight of his own home and their glee at making a political statement out of it is almost tangible. These are the very dregs of humanity, the most vile and disgusting creatures on the planet, and they think they have the moral high ground because they don't smoke.

None of them wonder why an elderly man might be smoking in his parked car just outside his home. None of them connect this incident with their years of hectoring about the pretend dangers of second hand smoke and the nonsensical insistence that smokers leave their own homes to smoke.

It was October. Not very warm outside. This man, after all the hectoring by those who now claim him for their campaign for more hectoring, was very likely outside his own home for a smoke. It might have been cold, windy, raining, maybe all three. If there was a smoking shelter available it would have been as woefully inadequate as they all are. He had a car. Why shouldn't he sit in his own car, maybe even have the heater on, and smoke in comfort?

Why the hell did he have to leave his home in the first place? Because of the Dreadful Arnott. Because of Nick Clegg and David Cameron and that stupid bastard Blair who let it all start. If not for them he would have been in his house, in the warm, smoking his pipe in comfort, not sparking a Zippo in old and cold fingers.

Why did he drop the lighter? Why didn't he get out before the car burned? The clue (which no commenter, nor even, it appears, the coroner has noticed) is in the article. He had a stroke. After or before dropping the lighter? We'll never know but it would explain why he didn't get out when the seat went up.

They did this with their hectoring and now they want to use it to do more hectoring. The end justifies the means, as all Nazis are fond of saying. At this moment I can think of nothing more disgusting than an antismoker. Stuff Godwin. Hitler had nothing on these people.

Don't think you're going to get away with being an antismoking vaper. I still use my Electrofags because of the weird flavours they can do and because they irritate the hell out of the Righteous. Antismoker is antismoker, and some of the vapers are among the worst. Not all, but the smugness of a few is so immense it just makes you wish their batteries would explode.

It seems there has indeed been one such incident. I remember, a long time back, a claim that an ordinary cigarette had exploded. It didn't sound very likely and neither does this. Lithium batteries can explode if they overheat or are shorted but they get very hot before they do. If you had one in your hand you'd notice and you'd be unlikely to hold on to it, much less put it in your mouth. So something odd happened there.

The commenters show the mindset of ASH and their antismoking drones perfectly:

Sorry to have to say but this has been the best laugh I have had in years reading this. I've had to stop writing I can't stop laughing. Just think how much money he's saved on Dentist Bills, free dentures from cost acquired. My eyes are full of tears from laughter. Sorry I can't help it. - Carl Barron, Christchurch, Dorset, 16/2/2012 13:20 

oh my goodness thats funny!!!!!!! - charlie, margate, 16/2/2012 7:50 

Still did him less harm that smoking a regular cigarette.... - Carl, London, 16/2/2012 13:12 

I don't know why, but the thought of teeth flying everywhere cracks me up. (poor guy)... - rene, virginia, usa, 15/2/2012 21:12 

Moral;-Smoking is bad for your health - Down2Earth, Edgworth Towers, 16/2/2012 9:36 

Now that's FUNNY !!!!!!!!!! - ONSLOW1066, LONDON, ENGLAND, 16/2/2012 14:24 

 These are Duncan Bannatyne's brethren. They are the spawn of Clegg and Cameron. They are the Children of ASH. They are the ones who consider themselves superior. They revel in the death and pain of smokers and vapers alike. Yet we hear all those vapers telling us smokers that we are disgusting.

Read those comments again and then tell me who is disgusting. Still want to set yourselves above the smokers? Still want to be friends with those sort of people? Then go ahead because if you think like them you will never be welcome here. Smoker, ex-smoker, vaper, nonsmoker, all are welcome here but antismokers, fuck right off. You people are vile.

Also stupid.

Electronic cigarettes have propylene glycol in them and are not proven safe. - Deana, London, England, 15/2/2012 19:42 

I'm not even going to bother with any kind of explanation because antismokers are far too dim to grasp it.

I have said in the past that vapers and smokers should be fighting the common enemy but too many vapers see themselves as a cut above the smokers. They see themselves as superior and more than one of the Electrofag companies has joined in with the antismoker rhetoric. Feeling good about that? Read over those comments again. They are talking about a vaper, not a smoker. Yes, they hate you too.

Meanwhile, in Honolulu...

Check out the vapers in the comments. All they see is that the smokers they left behind are stinky, filthy things. Now they are to be taxed just like the filthy smokers and that's not fair.

No. It isn't. It's also not fair that the only ones paying extortionate tobacco tax have to go out into some half-built shed while those who pay no tobacco tax can vape away indoors in comfort and I guarantee that is the first time that idea has entered your head.

Fair? You expect 'fair' from the kind of people who will try to make capital out of a man's death and laugh at someone who's had half their face blown off? You really think they give a damn about what is fair?

You vapers are up against sociopaths. So are the drinkers, the salties, the fatties, all of you. The smokers told you and you are still not listening because we are only filthy addicts and not worth your time.

Fine. Find out for yourselves. The hard way. Pretend it was only the smokers they wanted beaten and left at the roadside. When the realisation finally dawns, don't come knocking at the Smoky-Drinky door.

We're not open to the public. Your antismoking law won't allow it. I'm afraid you're on your own.


(Thanks for all the Email and comment tips. I'm slow and inefficient at responding but I do read them all)

Meddling.

I have, as you might have noticed from the sudden appearance of a menu bar, worked out how to add extra pages to the blog. That part was easy. Tracking down every damn link was not. Anyway, there'll be more pages in the future.

Today I was in an extraordinarily good mood for a time because I came across a very complimentary review. It's old, and those stories aren't free any more because I thought a thousand downloads each was quite enough of a giveaway. Still, it's a good review.

Then I looked at the news and at some of the links people have sent by Email lately. Now it's rantin' time.

This one will require whisky.