England's England

Say it with penis

Erm.  Ok, I’m not looking, ok?  But what exactly is it that I should be saying with penis?

Erm.  Oh, yeah. Snort Snort. Chortle Chortle.  Mine was far too large to fit in this picture, honest.  F’narr F’narr.

Weird Poisoned People

Why are some people weird? It’s usually purely down to the poisons they either unknowingly or knowingly ingest.

Years and years ago when people didn’t know about such dangers, lord knows what stuff was in their food and water. Even as late as the last century people were going mad from lead poisoning because of the lead pipes used to deliver water. Harping back hundreds and hundreds of years, yes people would get fevers and die from having eaten contaminated foods, without the slightest idea how or why the food was contaminated. Other wouldn’t get fevers, but would just go ‘weird’.

Indeed, whole religious instructions like to not eat pork are based on the fact that people had no ideas about how to check the meat or know if it was safe or not. So, rather than have people die, religious leaders would dream up some supposed reason why their particular brand of god had decreed items to be forbidden food (or ‘dirty’).

Anyway, it is not illogical to assume that quite a few people were ‘poisoned’ across the centuries such that they became loony. These people would then act oddly and be written off as eccentric, or would rule their household or even their land with their weirdness all induced by the poisons they had unknowingly ingested, causing them brain damage. Their weirdness would affect the others in their charge who had to just accept it.

More recently, for reasons that have always escaped me, we moved into an era obsessed with getting away from reality and deliberately ingesting poisons in order to achieve this state. For a long time it was just alcohol, but pretty soon it was all manner of things, getting more and more refined until we reached the era of LSD, Ecstasy and Cocaine. Now, these are serious mind-altering poisons. And we are discovering that they do very long term damage to people. Robbie Williams has to take prescribed drugs for the rest of his life to combat the long term effects of ‘e’ burning his brain out. For years, I’ve always found extensive cannabis smokers to be oddly paranoid and usually depressive. Surprise surprise after many years of research they prove this is in fact the long term side effect. I guess it’s no different to it taking a very long time to discover and confirm that tobacco actually kills you.

The worst thing at the moment is cocaine, which is probably the most used poison of choice behind alcohol. Yeah, the person feels great and like they rule the world with their enhanced confidence, and they stand around with other coke heads gabbling at 200 words a minute, none capable of listening, just talking at each other about themselves, but for every minute that they are high, they face an hour of terrible come downs. This is when they are moody, extremely paranoid, and ‘weird’. This is when they beat their children and have weirdly odd demands and screaming fits for no logical reason, and then can’t cope without subjecting themselves to more poison. Alcoholics are similar.

What I do find strange is that as we have slowly managed to identify and stop the poisons our forefathers were unaware of and accidentally ingesting, we seem to have equally slowly started to deliberately use more and more poisons for what we consider to be recreational purposes.

The net result is the same, we are still producing a high proportion of weird people, weird because their brains are completely messed up by the recreational use of poisons, but nonetheless, weird. Isn’t it about time we rounded these people up and did something with them to protect normal folk, especially the children?

What Secret Millionaire, eh?

The Secret Millionaire is a show on TV.  The idea is simple.  Take one millionaire.  Make him/her travel hundreds of kilometres from home.  Make him/her live in a tiny tatty house for a week and volunteer with various local charities like he’s not a millionaire.  He/she secretly decides who to then spring a load of his/her own personal cash on to.  He/she writes out cheques comes clean about who they really are and hands them over.  Tears of happiness.  Roll credits.

The thing I don’t get, right, is that absolutely every episode is exactly the same.

The main number one impossible thing is that the supposed not-a-millionaire turns up at a charity with a full-on film crew. I mean, after all these years how many people involved in running charities really haven’t heard of the Secret Millionaire programme? I mean, if I was involved in a charity and a film crew and a not-a-millionaire turned up and filmed the first thing I’d be thinking is “OMG, is that really a Secret Millionaire??? Am I going to get loads of dosh???”.

Yet, none of these charities ever do suspect, and they all get so surprised and emotional when the cheques get handed over!

Something doesn’t smell right about this.

Also, why is it always such an emotional journey for the millionaires themselves, with every single one of them every single time having a near emotional breakdown as something to do with one of the charities they oh so accidentally discovered somehow touches home about their past or previous experiences?

Something doesn’t smell right about this either.

There was one where they planted the millionaire in a house in Anfield (a part of Liverpool, the home of Liverpudlians). It made me laugh ‘cos he was a big butch ex-army man, done time in the Falklands, bla bla bla, but as soon as the scallies started their regular evening entertainment of setting fire to nearby houses, he panicked. Then when the scallies started bricking the car the production team were using, they all legged it and spent the rest of the week staying in a nice hotel.

The interesting thing about that one, which seems to be similar to most Secret Millionaire programmes was that they didn’t actually get involved in any charities based in Anfield. Not even in Liverpool. But they went miles away to parts of Sefton, a completely different Borough, and much wealthier area. Yet it’s all presented as if it’s just up the road from the scary house they have to live in. Same as when they had a guy in a scary house in Warrington. He’s then fiddling with charities in St Helen’s or on the Wirral, none in Warrington itself.

It’s getting far too silly!

Why aren't there any revolutionary pirate radio stations?

Broadcasting radio without a licence can be fun, although of course you shouldn’t try this at home.  As long as technically your transmissions are not causing anybody any grief, as in, you aren’t causing maydays from aircraft to go unheard or the little old lady next door to not be able to watch Corrie, then what’s the problem?  Nothing.  But it is against the law and you can be very heavily fined or go to prison for far longer than if you’d decided to systematically torture and kill a child.

Today there remain up to a hundred radio pirates around the UK, and in all cases they are using their transmitters for the subversive purpose of, erm, playing music.

Hmmm.  Now, this is the bit I don’t really get.  Ok, for those currently producing the next big thing, pirate radio is the only way to get said next big thing to the people, assuming that radio is still the method of delivery to the masses (There’s an argument that it no longer is).  Legal radio, with the possible exception of the BBC’s digital only station 1Xtra, refuses to ‘break’ the new and unsafe.  Definitely this is the case with the commercial sector. The next big thing has to already be the now big thing before commercial radio will touch it.  The only exception of course being anything produced via one of Simon Cowell’s hour long pop promotional TV commercials like the X Factor.

Most of today’s pirate radio is in the hands of da yoof, and those most likely to be producing the next best thing.  However, excitingly, there are a tiny handful of old folk who have being playing at piracy for decades.  What wise and alternative radio can we expect from these fellows (it’s always men, never women) in their 40s and 50s?  Will they use their hijacking of the airwaves to bring down the Government or to say “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this any more!” as they orchestrate the revolution?

Nope, damn it. They’ll play nice safe pop and rock records from over 30 years ago.  The same safe records that the commercial sector plays.  Some of these granddad pirates will even go through all the expense and danger of putting on a transmitter in order to play recordings of entire radio broadcasts made over 30 years ago.

They’ll do this not because it’s a rousing speech or landmark revelation that was broadcast 30 years ago and we need it to re-educate the population or give them hope, but because it’s something safe and bland and represents some imagined safe and bland childhood they think they may have had.  Bizarrely, all that the recording contains is a safe radio station of the day playing safe records that were current when the tape was recorded but are now 30 years old and even safer.  Surely this is the behaviour of people with a mental condition you may suggest.

Who knows.  It’s certainly not radical behaviour.  It is the behaviour of old and pointless pirates.  It is a waste of the potential power to empower that truly free radio should have.

Look.  We have a confused country limping its way into becoming a third world nation.  We have fearful futures with the undead like Tony Blair and his New World Order about to take control of us from a central command centre in Europe.  We have global warming or destruction or whatever else we can find to be paranoid about.  We have whole sectors of the population feeling disenfranchised, frightened, troubled, angry and suspicious of each other and everything around them. We want to be free.  We are fed up with being so overcrowded, so alienated, so used and so abused.  We want to hear people who sympathise with us being as mad as hell and not wanting to take it any more.

So what do the pirate radio stations run by the old people do?  They put their fingers in their ears and play Devil Gate Drive by Suzi Quatro.  Jeez.

We have racial disharmony, homophobic attacks, anger, guns, drugs out of control, confusion and fear.  The old people are wise.  They can call for calm or call for revolution.  They can speak of solutions that the politicians daren’t speak of, or don’t want us to consider or know exist. These are our needs.  So the old pirates give us Popcorn by Hot Butter.

It is time that the grass roots rebelled instead of being so compliant.  It is time that pirate radio meant wise words showing us how to think freely and outside of the corporate politically correct box.  But, we get Una Paloma Blanka.

Pirate radio operators from the older generations should be absolutely ashamed.

My Trolley Rage

Okay, I’m getting to grips with this shopping lark, but I am suffering from trolley rage.

Supermarkets. You get a trolley, walk around the stacks of food containers that have inside them the product of your desire.

You then queue up at a check-out behind some stupid fool who has a trolley full of items that won’t scan properly, and despite the ringing of the bell twice by the check-out girlie the supervisor is nowhere to be seen. When all purchases have been finally rung-up it is then, and only then, that the fool starts to slowly search through their bags for their purse, which of course is nowhere to be found.

Eventually they find something and pay, trying to slowly count out the exact change which they haven’t actually got. They only realise they haven’t got it when they finish counting out the pennies and other loose change for the third time.

It is then and only then that they slowly start to pack away their purchases into bags, despite the fact that they are obviously in your way and should have damn well started packing as soon as each item had been scanned. They are now seriously in your way. You lean over them or try to squeeze past them to save your purchases from stacking uncontrollably over theirs, but they don’t budge from their preoccupation with putting foods into sub-bags within their main bags.

Frustrated, you try to boil their brain with powerful rays from your eyes, but they are far too stupid to pick-up on your displeasure. It is only then that you suddenly realise this is the same moron that trapped you for 15 minutes by the bread counter, by having their trolley straddled completely across the aisle at right angles so that nobody could get passed, whilst they stood staring blankly at the choice of loaves available. More than one loaf being available obviously overloads their tiny brains forcing them to stand motionless for hours at a time trying to re-boot into decision mode.

Anyway, you remember their face from the accusing scowl they gave you when you’d tried to do something about the log-jam of trolleys stuck behind her by saying, “Excuse me please?”

So, you can deal with all that by deliberately visiting supermarkets late at night. This is a time for efficient well-oiled shoppers who know how to get in, get what they want, and get out. The fool never shops at night, so you are safe. Night is the time when the fool has spent 20 minutes working out where their bedroom is, and how to get into bed, following their brain saying, “Oh. It is dark outside. It must be time for bed.” Sigh. These people are allowed to vote and reproduce?

Meanwhile, they just leave me with trolley rage and a need to scream in their faces.