Response

Well, that's a very dramatic response. I'm overwhelmed. Cannot be many places where one can write just about anything that will appear in public and yet no one gives a toss.

Be warned

My blog has a counter. It certainly will not wear out from recording visits if I am to set visits against comments left. Actually, I am not very impressed with the mechanics behind the clicks. It claimed that a nice retired teacher in Welsh Wales was living very nearly as a Russian school hostage taker halfway across the world.
So, I'm going to see if the counter is a valued asset or just a waste of bandwidth (Whatever that means but it seems a very fashionable phrase right now). I wasted some time working out what might attract comments - that photograph of me naked on a lambskin rug perhaps? Spot the difference in a photo of me standing next to King Farouk? Sophia Loren with the sun behind her?
After much time, I realised the truth in that I was looking in the wrong direction. Instead of showing the dimples in my behind, my unsatisfactory attempt at a Muslim moustache or the perfect Body, I needed to provoke people. In this day and age, easy peasy.
So, watch out. Bar the children, get dark glasses and hide the cat in a flower vase. I am working on the repulsion blog to end all repulsion blogs. I shall pose as a gay male with a occasional lesbian personality shift. Stories of haunting childrens' playgrounds with my camera. My powerful binoculars and sixth-form girls on the way home from school in their black tights. Torture of cats and dogs. Lighting bonfires in neighbour's gardens at midnight whilst the washing is still hanging out. Abusing the minimal shelter of telephone boxes for all of my needs and desires. Advising teenagers that bodily fluids are good for spots and pimples.
And that is just the negative side. I shall write in support of wind farms in rural areas of great beauty. Insist that all pigs be destroyed because they offend our Muslim brothers. Set up a Pram Police to arrest and detain those who admire and go coo coo at babies. Big Brother on all TV channels. Wife Swap to be mandatory.
My goodness - I'm beginning to enjoy even the planning.
Remember, it is only your comments that will dissuade me. You might even suggest other topics for my Repulsive Blog.
You have been warned.
This is not a drill.

Useful stuff

The way this world seems to be going, you may one day be very glad I showed you the way to this skill. Note there is further information at the bottom of the page for those of you interested in what bears do in the woods.

Used to

I don’t feel exhaustion
Like I did before
Instead of pushing through it
I crumble to the floor

I used to be the master
Of a thousand sleepless nights
But now I am the servant
To the disappearing lights

I used to think my body
Was impervious to pain
Now my heartbeat thunders
Underneath demanding strain

I used to think that temperance
Was only for the weak
But those who crave dependence
Know of which I speak

I used to be immortal
And death I did not fear
Now I feel her shadow
As she whispers in my ear

Now my life it teeters
On a stack of vertigo
Just waiting for disaster
To kick out the bottom row

Saudi Jihad propaganda

Here’s an interesting bit of news. Whilst I personally hold a very jaundiced view of any Middle Eastern country, the people and the religion, I suppose many in England thought that there was some sort of sympathy within Saudi for the problems spread by their co-religionists. They provided facilities in GWI and appear to take a hard line in their actions against dissidents in their own country. Not so it seems.
Senate to probe Saudis' jihad propagandaAs the Senate prepares an investigation, the U.S. State Department is demanding Saudi Arabia account for its distribution of hate-filled, jihad propaganda through American mosques.
The developments are based on a yearlong study by a Washington human-rights group asserting the government of Saudi Arabia is disseminating propaganda through American mosques that teaches hatred of Jews and Christians and instructs Muslims that they are on a mission behind enemy lines in a land of unbelievers.
The 89-page report by Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques," concludes the Saudi government propaganda examined reflects a "totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence."
The report says the fact it is "being mainstreamed within our borders through the efforts of a foreign government, namely Saudi Arabia, demands our urgent attention."
In response to the report and the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings Oct. 25, the New York Sun reported.
The Accountability Act, introduced in June by Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., sharply criticizes the Saudi regime for its support of terrorist activity and, citing the Freedom House report, its part in spreading the radical Wahhabist ideology shared by Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 attackers.
Specter has held Judiciary Committee hearings into Saudi financing of terrorism and Riyadh's role in injecting ideology into textbooks for Palestinian Arab schoolchildren, the Sun said.
In March, 15 senators responded to the Freedom House report with a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanding the Bush administration take stronger action against Riyadh.
Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, were among the signers of the letter, which called for the U.S. to define its relationship Saudi Arabia more clearly.
Schumer stated: "It is a massive contradiction that a country we call an ally could be both so regressive in their own country and so brazen in its propagation of anti-American, anti-women, anti-Semitic books, publications, and practices. American security is undermined as the Saudi government exports these hateful commodities to millions beyond its borders, planting the seeds for new generations of terrorists and totalitarian Wahhabi leaders."
Collins said the report "raises some disturbing concerns about the spread of extremist materials in American mosques and Islamic centers."
"If we are going to win the war on terrorism, these types of actions cannot be tolerated," she said. "It is important that the Saudi Arabian government join us in this fight and stop supporting the spread of ideologies that promote hatred and intolerance around the world."
The Freedom House report cited samples of more than 200 books and other publications from American mosques used to educate its members that preach a "Nazi-like hatred for Jews" and "promote contempt for the United States because it is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law."
One highlighted document, distributed through the Saudi Arabian Embassy's Cultural Department in Washington, is a fatwa against the taking of American citizenship by Muslims and thereby "acquiescing to their infidelity and accepting all their erroneous ways."

Optimist defined?

The story is original.
Hope it works for him.

The Ladies - God bless 'em!!

I have been collecting examples of things that the women in our lives do that annoy us the most. The file is now so huge that I have to release some of them.

Can’t buy food and wait to get home before starting to demolish it. (They open a bag of crisps in the shopping bag to facilitate walking/eating).Pretending to examine the last dress at the door because they don’t want to leave.Asking the time even ‘though they have a watch on.Racing you to the foot of the escalator then taking all day to go up ‘cos it’s too much effort to walk.Rain is made of Sulphuric Acid necessitating a taxi home.“It’s FREEZING in here!”Inability to ask a question then wait for an answer but feel the need to suggest all known alternatives then walk off before you’ve finished answering.Just HAVE to examine whatever item a male is standing in front of to make them move.Don’t look where they are going even ‘though they have zero spatial coordination.Ignore tired screaming toddler so they can examine essentials like costume jewellery at 2100hrs.All conversations with pals must be at 108 decibels so everyone else can hear.
Will go out of their way to walk into you and say “sorry” in a totally empty shop.If there are a group of them then each one asks a bit of the question, known as Shared Brain Syndrome btw.Suck the face off partner when halfway up an escalator. (Look at me I have a boyfriend).Wearing daft high heels, texting and listening to iPod then wondering why they got mugged.Stand in a queue for 5mins to buy a packet of chewing gum.Unable to tell the difference between Navy Blue and Black even ‘though they can see more colours than men.Stopping to look at stuff without telling male partner/children leading to “I’ve lost my husband/children”.Old ladies turning up at lost property looking for their walking sticks...think about it. Shouting “Mum”. Looking round when someone totally unrelated to them shouts “Mum”.Reading out signs to male partner and telling him which shop they are in.
Carrying on an argument once she/you has left the room. Starts of as something simple , which she blows out of all proportion, then drags stuff in from a minor offence from 5 years earlier. You think the argument has finished and leave the room, then they decide to carry it on, and accuse you of not listening when they are speaking to you and you’re 4 rooms away
She asks you a question, you tell her the answer, she flies off the handle. What’s that all about?She has a three week sad on with you, but you’ve no idea why or what you’ve done, and she won’t tell you. Apparently you are supposed to ‘think about it and work it out’. (So you think about it, and walk.)
Why do they have so many pairs of shoes, when they only have 2 feet?Why do they drag you around town for hours at a time just to return to the first shop and buy the original dress?Why do they always think there fashion sense is better than your own?I even knew a woman once who brought a car because and I quote ‘ The colour matches My Jacket’ even though the car cost her loads of cash to keep it running!
Asking a question to which they already know the answer. Asking a question and not listening to the answer. Not asking a question but expecting you to answer it.Talking. They do it way too much, and see it as a sign of emotional maturity, which makes them feel superior to blokes, who, because they don’t talk even half as much as women do, are see as emotionally retarded. When in fact we all know the opposite is true.Coming in from work. They park the car, slam the door, rattle their keys in the front door, slam that, put down their bag and take off their coat, with all the accompanying noises. They then come and find you, look at you for a minute, and say “Well, I’m home.” The inverse is true whenever they get home before you do, except they say “Well, you’re home.”Arguments. They are incapable of looking at something objectively, or from your point of view. Whatever you say, they are just going to spout the same few sentences at you until you give up, interspersed with insults.
Refusing to come to the table, where the food is going cold, until the dishwasher is stacked and all available horizontal surfaces wipedOverfilling the dishwasher because leaving three dirty plates and a pan out until morning is unthinkableCleaning the whole house from top to bottom ‘so that it will be clean when we come back’ - ignoring the inevitable three week accumulation of dustCruelty to rechargeable batteries in mobile phone, PDA and camera Allergy to all IT, including, would you believe, total inability to get money out of an ATM until three months agoPlanting up huge number of huge pots on terrace while vast, neglected garden borders grow to resemble Matto Grosso or Congo BasinBelieving all available tosh about vitamins, diet, homeopathy, aromatherapy and such like in preference to medicine that works and going into mega sulk when diagnosed as having high blood pressure and having to take proper medicine prescribed by proper doctor rather than pond water brewed by charlatan
Haircuts, why on earth do women pay up to and over 40 quid for a haircut when I can get mine done for a fiver from the bloke at the top of the road. I mean really even when a bloke goes into these salons/strip clubs (see earlier thread on subject) They get charged considerably less for the same treatment. “Oh but we have more hair they say”, balls, its still the same thickness and requires no more actual effort to cut it off.Handbags, Why do women insist on buying a handbag that matches her shoes when nobody actually cares because her handbag is on the table and her shoes underneath it. The handbag in question is something totally ridiculous that they cant fit anything in so the give all their stuff to the bloke who’s with them to carry. They then bugger off for half an hour to the toilet (what they do in there I have no idea) leaving blokey stood there like a spare prick guarding 2 watermelon Bacardi Breezers, 2 sparkly handbags that everyone is laughing at because neither of them match his shoes and the women’s entire money to fund their evening out. However when bloke nips in for a quick lag he gets grief for buggering off with all their stuff.Cars, women and cars. Listen to me car designers STOP DESIGNING CARS FOR WOMEN I mean cars that look “cute” there’s just no need for it is there you can always have a laugh at the guy driving down the road in a pastel blue VW convertible because you know his wife chose his car. Curves on cars do not look good cars are meant to have straight lines that show aggression towards other road users. Oh and 2nd hand cars. Buying a crappy old 1975 shed that will only run if you push it down a steep hill because you think you’ll look dead good driving it and how much would it suit my personality is complete and utter rubbish.Magazines, how much drivel and tripe do they feel the need to publish these days, who cares what the guy who got kicked out of big brother fourth is having for his tea. Men’s interest magazines actually contain an interest like cars, or power tools or building sheds. Women’s interest magazines contain nothing they’re just full of absolute garbage. You buy a pair of shoes (and matching handbag) that you see a celebrity you like wearing in one of these drivel magazines, you wear them once then you never wear them again because you see a different celeb who you don’t like wearing exactly the same pair.Presents A bloke will buy a present for a woman and pout a lot of thought into it. they will either get it right or get it wrong. It’s a 50:50 shot and we accept that and ok the consequences are not right but we know what we’re in for. When a woman buys a present for a bloke she puts about 5 minutes thought into it, buys him what she likes then expects him to like it.Phone calls. Why oh why do you women spend 45 minutes on the phone to somebody then as soon as they hang up they go too see them. What do you talk about how can a phone call last longer than. Hey, Pub, Bye. I mean what is there to say. You phone somebody up while your watching a TV programme who is watching the same programme and talk about it.E4. They watch the drivel they insist on watching every week at 10pm on channel 4 (the shite hour) then at the end of it the voice pops up “if you cant wait till next week to see what happens turn to E4 now for next weeks episode” So off the y pop to E4 and make you sit through another hour of drivel then when next week comes and the same sh1te is on they sit there and complain that they’ve already seen this episode so they grab the phone and off they go to talk to their mate about it again.

Does sleeping with a woman suffering from schizophrenia qualify as a threesome ??????

That will teach him

“The father of a pupil who tried to sue exclusive public school Marlborough College for expelling his son has had his case thrown out. A judge at Southampton County Court ruled against Russell Gray, who claimed the school was trying to get rid of his son to boost its league tables”. “[He showed] an almost total disregard for school rules and the failure to understand the effect his behaviour would have on others”
Judge Anthony Thompson QC
Nice to see that maybe, just maybe, we are seeing some sense creep into disputes regarding the right of a school to decide what happens to disruptive scholars. The pupil in this case had a extremely poor disciplinary record. This was not just in minor matters but involved incidents such as being arrested at 13 for being drunk and disorderly and had called a police officer an ‘idiot’. Statements attributed to the juvenile showed that he had a most obnoxious manner and appeared to consider himself to be above normal social rules and expectations. Part of the father’s case was that his son had a good scholastic result in his GCSE. This was revealed as 4 A levels, 3 B levels and 2 at C grade. Given that we now know that 40% marks gained an A classification, the C pass should only require a student to write his name and exam number. If he got both right, he would get a B.

Greek God anyone?

Morpheus


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

Whimpering about poverty

This is from a guy I have featured here before. Fred Reed. I have posted his stuff before and doubtless will again. He has the same views as I do but he manages to express them far better than I. He is commenting here about the drama that was raised about the effects of poverty.

Maybe You Should Try The Real Thing
September 25, 2005
Repeatedly I hear that the misbehavior in New Orleans sprang from the exigencies of poverty. I would offer a countering view. Permit me to start with the family of Violeta, mi pareja in Mexico. I know them well. Listen, and judge.
Her father was born poor 78 years ago. Poor in Mexico in the twenties meant poor--dirt-floor poor, village well with typhoid and no sewerage poor, no safety net, no medical care, and government by caciques who had unlimited power and didn’t care whether you lived or died. It was hookworm, roundworm, pinworm, tapeworm poor. It was louse poor. Obesity from eating at McDonald’s was not a concern. Just eating was a concern.
Her Dad learned to read from an aunt who had learned in a Catholic school. In Mexico then, as in the United States now, the Catholic schools were better than the public, when the latter existed. He then apprenticed himself to a primitive machine shop, the only kind available, and became a valve-maker.
Eventually he hired on with a company, saved hard over the years, and bought a house, now paid off, in which he still lives. Buying a house for a Mexican worker then required grim determination. After thirty-six years he retired with a pension adequate to support life. In all this time, he did not sack a single city.
Poor doesn’t mean ignorant. He read whatever he could find, to include newspapers daily. He knows a lot of history and geography. If you mention, say, Ceylon, he knows where it is, and the capital. Do American college graduates?
He wasn’t shiftless, you see. Poverty is a condition characterized by a lack of money. Shiftlessness involves a lack of backbone, morals, independence, self-respect, and drive. They are not the same thing. Of course, if you are shiftless, you are likely to be poor.
I note in passing that anyone who wishes can learn to read, short of the genuinely retarded. Illiteracy is a choice. So is ignorance.Along the way he married, whence Violeta. He was an imperfect dad—strict, yelled a lot, and wasn’t too tolerant, though he didn’t hit her. He taught her that there are things you have to do, things you ought to do, and things you ought not to do. She learned. A thoroughgoing Catholicism reinforced these ideas.
Adolescence came, and high school. Violeta decided that she wanted to go to the University of Guadalajara. There was the little problem of no money. Mexicans do not get preferential treatment in Mexico. To her, poverty was an obstacle to be overcome, not an excuse for failure. For five years in the Facultad de Letras y Filosofia, she worked three jobs. And graduated.
Poor, you see, is not the same as, nor does it imply, nor justify, passive, thieving, dependent, and benighted.
At this point I am going to sacrifice literary consistency to explication. When I was nineteen a buddy of mine and I hopped the freights to New York where, listening to a Copland concert in Prospect Park, I met a little Italian girl of seventeen on the grass. We began writing, and then dating. Her father having died unexpectedly, she and her mother were living essentially on Social Security in Brooklyn. They ate, but not much more.
They were not shiftless, however.
Her mother got her into a Catholic school. Eva understood perfectly which way was up. Good grades were not optional. They were going to happen. And did. Four years of high school and a 4.0 later, she blew away the Regents and got a scholarship to NYU Washington Square. She repeated the roughly 4.0 performance. After grad school at Rochester, she is a tenured professor of mathematics in the New York system. Poor Italian kid. Never burned a city.
Anyway, Violeta. While in university, she became pregnant. Contraception is an imperfect art. On moral grounds she decided not to kill it. (Actually it wasn’t a decision. There are things one doesn’t do and, in her view, that was one of them. Today The Unkilled is fourteen and prospering mightily.) Violeta was now a single mother as well as working three jobs and going to school.
She did it. It wasn’t easy, but she had no expectation that it would be. There are things one does.
On graduating she got some wretched office job, discovered that it was a snake pit (un nido de serpientes) and that she couldn’t give enough attention to her child, who turned out to be a girl named Natalia. So she said to hell with offices and moved to Ajijic, the American enclave on Lake Chapala, to teach Spanish to gringos.
It was a gutsy call. She had no safety net and very little money: North Americans living in half-million dollar houses object to paying an extra dollar an hour for a service that would cost ten times as much in the US. When I met Violeta, Natalia was twelve. They were living in, by American standards, a desperately tiny one-bedroom house, with one small bed and a mattress on the floor, and a total of $300 between them and destitution. Don’t tell her about the high price of running shoes.
Now in the US, social class, which we pretend doesn’t exist, depends chiefly on consumer goods owned, money coming in, and credentials on paper. Two BMWs and Yale beats three Volvos and the University of Maryland. Violeta, ever wrong-headed, believed that what you are worth depends on how you behave. Again, Caholicism.
She conveyed this to Natalia, who was (and is) the best student in her school, reading constantly with the fluency of an educated adult. Principled motherhood has its virtues. If the child had been a latchkey, she would doubtless now be pushing either drugs or a stroller. Today Nata is fourteen, smart as a whip, largely over the tyrannosaur stage of hideous disagreeability that briefly afflicts teenage girls, and pretty as a flower. She very much likes boys, but has none of that unhappy—what? Lack of self-respect? Desperation for love?—that makes so many US girls easy prey to libidinous striplings.
If I may digress again, long ago on the police beat I rode in DC with a black cop from a bad section of New York. How did he get out, I asked? From my column of the time, I quote: “My father told me, ‘Son, you’re going to learn your lessons, or I will whup your ass.’ He did, too. So I learned. Best thing that ever happened to me.” (Boys are a little different.)
You don’t have to be helpless, nor useless, nor immoral because you were born poor. If this were not true, the Irish, Italians, Jews, the Chinese of railroad coolie days, the Poles and the Czechs would still be in slums. They aren’t. They made it, as Violeta made it, as Eva and lots of black cops made it, without Section Eight housing, welfare, scholarships, minority preferences with no expectations attached, medical charity, or monotonous self-pity. She has a contempt for those who could, but don’t, that would peel chrome from an engine block.

Eclipse of an eclipse

Anti-climax. Today we were due to see a total eclipse. Sometime this morning. I had planned to have a look and had even armed myself with a piece of glass that had been coated in soot from a candle. The hazard of getting the flaming candle to deposit smoke without getting third-degree burns on my fingers was far greater than the damage that might be caused to my eyes by looking at the event without the filter. I saw nothing. Cloud? Looking in the wrong place? Who knows. Looking at some of the sites manned by experts that were following the event, it seemed that we were at the far North limit of any sighting. One thing I did gain was the scary detail about hazardous asteroids. Seems there are a number of these things out there that have the potential to make a really scary movie.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs are on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. Seems that right now there are 710 known PHA out there. Seems that back in August we had a really big one pass by in what the men with pointy heads call a near miss. 6 million kilometres was their estimate. Having seen the Meteor Crater in Arizona, I do not require any movie to show me just what power these things have. The crater is a damned big hole and the rock that struck was only 45 metres. The story of the crater is quite interesting.

Flunkit Blunkett

Oh deary deary me! What is the man Blunkett up to now? The latest of his “man of 58 with woman of 29” saga has hit the world news with her releasing that, not only was his interest in her carnal rather than platonic, he wanted to bless the union with a baby. Her description as to how he made this desire known is just so so yucky that one might imagine it was scripted by Dame Edna. As if the basic story were not dodgy enough, we have the involvement of some ticky tacky go-between; one Tariq Siddiqui. He set the woman up on a blind date (sorry, that is what they call that sort of arrangement – the story does not need off-colour non-p.c. jokes) at a London night club. Our swinging David asks, “Does she look as good as she sounds?” which fires a bit of a broadside through his claim of an intended platonic friendship. Siddiqui’s role in this sounds exactly like those guys who haunt such clubs and approach young – usually blonde and busty – girls with lines like, “My sheikh would like to buy you a drink”. Pimp or procurer – either fits. He hassles the woman when she is unsure where the association should go.
My interpretation of DB’s last passage to paternity was that he was used as a sperm donor by a willing couple who did not want to go through IVF channels. Here there is no doubt that he really does want offspring. “Come out with me and I’ll give you a baby” may be a successful chat-up line to some schoolgirl mum-wannabe on a sink estate but is hardly a come-on for a well set-up woman in reasonable employment. I can sympathise with the guy – at 58 anyone of the opposite sex aged 29 must feel as if that first real love has returned – but he needs to be removed from the gene pool because he seems to be degenerating into a bottom-feeder. I cannot see him returning to any government post after the next re-shuffle or election; he has lost all credibility even for a Labour politician. Perhaps we could make him a British consul in somewhere like Thighland where he may fornicate and father away with fecund females without attracting too much attention. He could earn his corn in the visa section exporting nubile girls for his friend Siddique’s escort agency.