THEY LOVE IT REALLY

Bogota- An oaf has been sentenced to four years in jail for slapping a woman on the arse. Police caught the scoundrel, a 22 year-old bicycle messenger, and asked his victim if she wanted to biff him in the chops as a way of cutting though the red tape. But she insisted on pressing charges.

Four years! He would have got less than that for clubbing her over the head with a lump of wood. Indeed, under the Law of Justice and Peace (for demobilised FARC, AUC, etc.) you can get a lighter sentence than that for massacring peasants, as long as you promise not to massacre any more. There’s a moral here, if only I could work out what it was.

SITE ANNOUNCEMENT

I have gone to Sinai, there to cleanse the flesh.
I shall live on roots and berries. And visions.

Through suffering there is redemption.

Back on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.

FOR TRULY GREAT BILLBOARDS YOU GOTTA GO TO PYONGYANG

Quico thinks these giant smiling Chavez posters are sinister, as well as being in questionable taste.

The thing is, based on statues and giant billboards “peppering the landscape” a visitor from North Korea would probably conclude that England is a dictatorship ruled by David Beckham. (In fact, this is not the case: we are a parliamentary democracy ruled by a git.) Of course, for truly great billboards you gotta go to Pyongyang.

It is time to cast out all the fatted calves from the temple. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds apt.



North Korea. Makes up in billboards what it lacks in wine, women and song.

DAVID IRVING

David Irving jailed for Holocaust denial.

Seriously, have you ever met a Holocaust denier? Can you, off the top of your head, name three Holocaust deniers? They don’t scare me. In the UK I would say they are about 900th on the list of dangers, behind escaped zoo animals and clumsy people with hot drinks.

People who don’t look where they are going are a genuine menace, but once again our political class buries its head in the sand.

ACCENTUATE THE NEGATIVE

They’re still going on about that Cheney thing. Jesus, you shoot one lawyer…

This week he hasn’t shot anyone, though you’d never learn that from the Mainstream Media.

Once, when I was a young sprout, I saw some dead pheasants our kitchen, and noticed that they had holes in them. “Daddy, have these been shot?” I asked. “No,” he said. “They give themselves up.”

Nasty old man.

WHO WAS WORSE, BLAIR OR HITLER?

“I think Blair has always meant well,” writes Brian Micklethwait, responding to my last post. Sorry, Brian, I can’t agree with you. In my opinion he’s worse than Hitler*.

Hitler had his faults, of course, as he himself would be the first to admit. Many of his “Nazi theories” have now been debunked. With the benefit of hindsight his invasion of Russia was ill-conceived, and his scheme to exterminate the “lesser races” has been widely discredited.

But once you accept his premises –lebensraum, the supremacy of the Ayran race, etc.- his actions did have a kind of loony logic. He meant well. Blair, on the other hand, is working single-mindedly for the triumph of Evil. Only when you have grasped this do his policies make any sense.

Now I’m not trying to defend the Nazis here, don’t get me wrong, but they did at least leave behind a few autobahns. Labour merely fucked up the railways, with no compensating benefits. Whether they “meant well” is beside the point, though in my opinion they did not mean well, but were motivated by malice, hatred of the British public, and the sheer joy of wrecking.

Can you imagine Blair taking responsibility for the state of Network Rail, and shooting himself in a burning bunker? Of course you can't. At least Hitler could admit when he was wrong.

*Adolf Hitler, a controversial Austrian politician. Unsound on ID cards.

MAD RULER BANS MORE STUFF

It’s been a pretty good week for all you non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tossers. All going your way at the moment, isn’t it? Must be feeling pretty pleased with yourselves.

For now you triumph. But you’ll get your comeuppance, you swine. That slippery villain is going to ruin us all. You think he doesn’t have plans for you too? You think that just because you don’t smoke or glorify terrorists you’re off the hook? Just wait. You’re gonna learn the hard way.


What’s this madman going to ban next?

THE CHENEY SHOOTING- HAVE YOUR SAY

Will shooting an old man in the face damage Cheney politically? What do you think?

	I strongly agree that shooting that old man will damage Cheney politically
	I somewhat agree that shooting that old man will damage Cheney politically
	I neither agree nor disagree that shooting that old man will damage Cheney politically
	I somewhat disagree that shooting that old man will damage Cheney politically
	I strongly disagree that shooting that old man will damage Cheney politically
Free polls from Pollhost.com

What do the experts say?

“Will it damage him politically? Probably not,” said Joseph Newport, senior analyst for Gallup. “I mean, shoot one lawyer, you can probably laugh it off. Makes you look human. But don’t make a habit of it. Shoot more than a couple of dozen and focus groups start to see you as an angry, divisive figure.”


What a wonderful news story! I doubt we’ll see a better one in 2006. He has caused more joy by shooting that old man in the face than he managed with his entire political career. Forget about Halliburton and the Energy Task Force: it is for this that he should be remembered.

A POGROM OF QUAILS

I'm sorry, but there's nothing remotely funny about the Vice President of the United States shooting an old codger in the face after mistaking him for a quail. Media guttersnipes. They think they can distract us from a record trade deficit with idiotic stories about people Dick Cheney has shot.

Look, nobody normal is going to object if the he mows down a few lawyers from time to time. If the Vice President feels the need to let off steam by shooting his friends in the face, that is surely a matter for him. It's better than bottling it up, and if he can help keep the lawyer population under control he’ll be doing something useful for once in his worthless life. But what kind of bloodthirsty ghoul wants to spend his leisure hours massacring quails? Not even normal quails, mark you, but special slow wheezing quails, bred for feeble-mindedness, that stand there looking confused as you blast them at point-blank range. Of 500 birds they managed to annihilate 417: that isn’t a hunt, it’s a fucking pogrom. I guess that in those lawyer / Vice President circles the concept of a "sporting chance" doesn't really compute.

Walking around eating seeds and saying "cheep" isn’t much of a life, but to many quails it’s the only life they know, and the decision to end it should not be Dick Cheney’s. Lawyers are another matter, of course. I’ve often thought of going out and hunting them myself. Quite apart from the sport, it would be in the public interest. On the other hand, what have the public ever done for me?

A quail, recently. I simply cannot understand the mentality of someone who can see a beautiful live little creature and want to shoot it, anymore than I can understand people who drop litter, burn down embassies, wear jewellery, listen to Wagner…

The way other people behave is completely unintelligible. I sometimes worry that I’m the only normal one left.

KILLER FACT!

Pablo Escobar's son is now a University Professor in Buenos Aires. He teaches Industrial Design, and calls himself Sebastian Marroquin Caballero as a nom de false.


Source: a book by Escobar's a-hole lawyer.

OOH, MY SIDES

Some comedy champagne from Norfolk police this week:



A crime victim has criticised a police e-fit of a suspect.... "I don't think I've ever seen anyone who looks like that in Stalham or anywhere else in my life.... Apparently the problem with the moustache was that the police only had long moustaches on their computer so they had to sort of chop it off at the ends." A spokesman for Norfolk Police said: "We couldn't comment on current e-fits as that might jeopardise investigations."

"If he really looks like that we shouldn’t have too much trouble finding him," said a policeman, who asked not to be named.



And this, according to them, is a would-be baby snatcher.

UPDATE!

There's a coffee-tasting event in Colombia at the moment. It said in the paper that the judges taste more than 200 spoonfuls of coffee in a day. Which is equivalent to 48.7 minutes of British television in terms of twitching, headaches, nausea and irritability.

KILLER FACT!

A gram of pure cocaine is equivalent to 87.3 mugs of tea in terms of stimulant effect, according to a study by the University of East Anglia.

“Don’t imprison the tea in, like, bags,” Professor Henry Toadstool told BBC Radio Norfolk. “You gotta use leaf tea. It gets into the bloodstream quicker and totally mashes your ‘ead.”

                          ..........................................

In other narco news, Edgar at Cocaine Corner has written a 900-word essay about his left nostril.

I was trying to think of something that would make me riot. Not much, to be honest with you. The only thing I could think of was if they tried to make me join the army, or pay back my student loan. If Blair abolished parliament and declared himself Lord Protector I would be irritated, certainly; but irritated enough to haul myself out of my armchair and commit acts of violence in Grosvenor Square? I hardly think so.

I HAVE LOST TRACK OF WHO IS ATTACKING WHAT

You may have missed it, but a couple of weeks ago Denmark also had a diplomatic row with Colombia. A man in Copenhagen is selling FARC t-shirts, which is the typical twerpish sort of thing you would expect a Scandinavian progressive to do. In itself, no big deal; except that this guy actually sends some of the proceeds to the guerrillas, and everyone in Bogota was huffing and puffing about it. I don't remember if anyone ever got round to attacking the Danish Embassy. There's so much other aggravation going on these days that one loses track of who is attacking what.

If the Danes are looking for someone else to piss off for an encore they might want to consider China's "millions of mouth-frothing, Japan-hating, America-hating, Taiwan-hating ultra-nationalist students." They're probably the only other people who could be provoked into rioting by a mere cartoon. The slightest thing sets them off.

RATADORS

Saw a bull fight on TV the other day. The bull lost. It’s a pretty poor sport. You could create a similar afternoon’s amusement by poking a caged rat for a couple of hours, then blowing its head off with a pistol.

When I was at Oxford with Boris Johnsons no one could call himself a Corinthian who hadn’t raced around Scone College quad with a live ferret down his britches. The other chaps would try to whack it with croquet mallets.

This was before they let women in, of course.

KILLER FACT!

For the third year running, the Vietnamese are the most optimistic people in the world. Bosnians are the most pessimistic, according to the survey, though I find it hard to believe that anyone is more pessimistic than those miserable bloody Swiss. God, I hate the Swiss.

Had an interesting chat with Krugman the other day. He was saying that America's deficits could trigger a debt crisis, a run on the dollar, a spike in interest rates, the collapse of the housing market and a world recession. Then he starts on about Iran's "inevitable" acquisition of nuclear weapons, "which could find their way into the hands of terrorist groups..."

I held up a hand to interrupt him.

"The trouble with you, Krugman," I said, "is that you're a pessimist." And I squirted him in the face with my joke shop plastic flower.