STOP PICKING ON THE STASI

The Stasi have been getting a bad press lately, especially in readers’ comments in The Guardian. They’re all, ooh, I got fined for feeding the ducks, the British police are turning into the Stasi. The Bitish police are photographing enemies of the party just like in East Germany.

This is absurd. As well as suppressing dissidents, the Stasi also suppressed wrongdoers and bad apples. They did some fine police work. Life in DDR wasn’t many laughs, but it was safe to walk the streets.

Say what you like about police states, but they do at least have low crime rates.

In Britain we have managed to combine Singaporean levels of mindless niggling harassment with South American levels of crime.

-“Help! Police! There’s an intruder in my house.”

-I’m sorry, we’d love to help. But all our officers are cunting around in a field in Wiltshire, talking photos of some hippies.”

That’s a word-for-word transcript of a conversation I had with them last week. I’m just glad I don’t pay my taxes.



Some bad apples recently.

I was cycling round London the other day when I noticed that someone has built a hulking great wheel by the Thames, right opposite parliament. Seriously, what will those arseholes think of next? Look out for it, next time you’re in London. It's right next to County Hall. You can’t miss it.

Is a huge wheel supposed to inspire us, or cheer us up? I never heard such nonsense.

Future archeologists will no doubt lump it with Stonehenge, Avebury and the chalk horses, as having some kind of cultural or religious importance. No one will guess that it signifies absolutely bugger all.

LITTLE VICTORIES

"A council today defended its decision to fine a young mother £75 for feeding bread to birds while visiting a park's duck pond with her 17-month-old son."

Man, I would love nothing more than for a warden with no powers of arrest to try to fine me. The sheer joy of taunting such a person would put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. If I could taunt a smoking inspector as well, sleep with the Russian women’s gymnastics team, punch Tony Blair on his ears and eat dim sum, all at the same time, that would be the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

I was on my bike in Hyde Park a couple of months ago and one of Blunkett’s scruffy twat-style police officers shouted at me that there was a £200 fine for not sticking to the cycle path. But she was on foot, and I was on a bike, so I just kept right on going. Didn’t even speed up. My spirits soared when I thought of the impotent rage she must have felt.

I even woke up in the middle of the night and felt a wave of euphoria as I remembered my victory. I jumped out of bed and punched the air in triumph, shouting, “Yes! Yes! One-nil!”

IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES

The head of the Campaign for a Safe Caracas has been shot dead in Caracas.

Earlier this year, a team from National Geographic was in Colombia making a film about the country’s “secure highways” initiative. It almost goes without saying that they got carjacked.

Apart from getting robbed blind by its thieving inhabitants, the journalists found Colombia to be a country marvellous for its peoples, its customs, its festivals and its landscapes, the article says.

KILLER FACT!

Smokers die younger than oak trees.

ALL TOBACCONISTS ARE FASCISTS

Just went through the leaked BNP membership list to check if my local tobacconist was on it. He wasn't, but I came across this guy:

Rev John Stanton
Rochford
Essex
Activist. Ex-Conservative and then Lib-Dem councillor, ex-chairman of local Green Party and UKIP member. Minister of Religion. Cert. Ed. Hobbies: steam railways

There are apparently eleven BNP members in my constituency, including four student documentary-makers, two undercover reporters, one police spy, two anti-fascist campaigners, and two actual fascists.

Via Old H

THE SLAPPERS IN CLOSETS ARE COMING HOME TO ROOST

Shakira’s new video She Wolf is as subtle and rich in meaning as a Garcia Marquez novel, but I’m afraid that, like a Garcia Marquez novel, a lot of it went over my head.

For example, that glistening pink cavern she dances around is obviously a metaphor for something. But what?

“There’s a she-wolf in the closet...”

In Colombia, a she wolf –una loba- is a woman of easy virtue, a slapper. “There’s a slapper in the closet.” This is excellent news, if true, even if it’s only a metaphorical slapper in the closet of life type of situation.

Cultured Dan, an appalling oaf in my office, argued that this song “mucho sucks”, but said that, despite this, he would be prepared to give the pint-sized Colombian crooner one up the gary, if called upon to do so.

Peals before swine. See what I have to put up with?

To Berlin, for the opening of Wolfgang's Waffle Bar in Potsdamer Platz. On the way back to the hotel I ran into a demonstration against nuclear power, and, not having anything more pressing to do, walked along with it for a while.

Germany has never been known as the land of the friendly policeman, but they are charm itself compared to ours. No scowling fluorescent apes with clubs, no “intelligence” teams pointing telephoto lenses at you, no helicopters or sirens, no officious twerps searching people. All my experience of cops in recent years has been in banana republics like England and Colombia, where the police hate the public and the public hate the police. I had forgotten what a non-malevolent Western democracy feels like.

I soon got bored, though.

Yet another article about Smeato. The guy punches one burning terrorist and suddenly he’s a hero. But what was Mr Smeato doing when the Arabs struck? Loafing, having a cigarette. To me, the real heroes are the baggage handlers who were handling baggage. They are the ones who should get medals.

As far as I’m concerned, Smeato can punch as many terrorists he pleases in his free time, but not when he’s meant to be working. It’s any excuse for a fight with these people.

COMMUTER DIARY

Sitting on the train with my iPod turned up full, listening to Move Bitch by the rapper Ludacris, with my finger tips pressed together and my eyes closed in rapture as if it were a Bach cantata. Excellent, I think it’s annoying the other rail users.

Ooh, look at that guy with the Mac. He seems to be hard at work on an important presentation. In a minute I’m going roll up a copy of Metro and take a swipe at an imaginary wasp, and accidentally smite him on his ear. That will show him.


UPDATE!
Here.

THE BIG THREE SEVEN

I helped an old lady with her suitcase the other day. She said, “Thank you. I’m 110.” My niece tells people with great pride that she is nearly 6.

But when I tell people I am 37, they are not interested.

Looking back on my life, I would say that there have been two great world-historical changes: the Soviet Union fell, and women started shaving their bits.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached and East Germans poured through to be met by cheering West Germans on the other side. The Cold War was over.

And look at this photo of Madonna from 1985. Shocking, isn’t it? Yet our homo erectus ancestors would not have raised an eyebrow at Madonna’s bush. They would have found it to be much as they expected. To them –and to the Victorians, and the Tudors– that was simply what it looked like, and always had. A design classic. Who could have forseen, when that picture was taken, that 100,000 years of history were about to come to an end?

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate.

I suppose the great sorpasso must have happened in the final years of John Major’s government*, when, for the first time in history, it became more surprising to see one that hadn’t been…

And, of course, Nelson Mandela got released, and South African grapefruit was back on the menu. Under the old apartheid laws, Mandela served 27 years on Robben Island for riding a bicycle without lights, whereas a white man would probably have been let off with a fine.

The Berlin Wall, Mandela, Madonna’s bush… Like a jigsaw, all the pieces fall into place as you get older. Then, just when you are finally starting to make sense of it all, you die.

*Correct me if I am wrong about the dates. God knows, I am hardly the go-to guy on this subject. You might want to double check with David Mellor or Heff or someone.

Like everyone else in my generation, I have no idea where I was when I heard the news that Edward Kennedy had died. I can't even remember what town I was in.

OPEN LETTER TO THE PEASANTS OF HONDURAS

Dear Peasants,
I don’t want to give you compassion fatigue or anything, but try to see it from my point of view.

I haul my weary carcass out of bed each day before I am rested, and get on a train with the other lame-os. Most days there are signal failures. I don’t know where they buy their signals, or why they can’t get some that work, but there you go. Some days the driver stays in bed with a bad back. No doubt you have such trains in Honduras.

Sooner or later the train will show up, if I stand there long enough, and I’ll waste the rest of the day in some stinking office up a tower, surrounded by oafs, scrotes, scrubbers, louts, buffoons, toadies, tossers, illiterates and football fans.

Mine is a pig’s life.

At lunch I sit in the shopping precinct and eat my sandwiches, washed down with five or six tins of cider. And as I eat my sandwiches and drink my cider, I open The Guardian, and see that there has been another military coup in Honduras. Or perhaps it’s the same coup as the one a couple of months ago. It is hard to keep track. Someone must know.

Either way, there doesn’t seem to be much that I can do about it, since Honduras is more than 100 miles away, and my influence there is limited. But reading about it has depressed me even more, and I was already as miserable as hell. The train, the office, the shopping precinct, Honduras… wherever one looks, this world is just a vale of tears.

Then I go back to the office, lock myself in the stationary cupboard and sob for twenty minutes, about Honduras and about my life.

I would be happy to donate £10 for the oppressed peasants of the Andes, or wherever it is, but I’m not going to read about it anymore.

I got my own troubles, Honduras.

Good luck!

How is it that NASA can put Americans on the moon, while in this country Sainsburys cannot even make a soup container that doesn’t explode like a ^#&*ing hand grenade when you open it?

As I type this, with tomato pulp all down my new suit, I do not love my country any less. But we have to be honest about our failings. As Benjamin Franklin said, the true patriot is the man who complains all the time.

On second thoughts, to hell with this country and its exploding soups. If Gordon Brown hasn’t sorted this by Christmas, I’m emigrating to Canada.

THE PANT-WETTERS OF GATWICK

A fire alarm in Gatwick airport. No one took it seriously. You’re dealing with people who think a tube of sun cream is a threat to the flight, so when they tell you there’s an emergency you think, "Yeah, yeah. Fuck off." I wanted to stay in the departure lounge and explain to someone in charge that I was ignoring their alarm, that they had blown their credibility when they confiscated my nail scissors, and that if I got I roasted alive it would be their fault.

But, of course, there was no fire. For the hundredth time, they were just dicking me around.

BLACKMAIL

If I worked for the Foreign Office in Russia I would probably spend half my salary on blackmail payments. My heart is bleeding for James Hudson, the British diplomat filmed with a pair of local tarts by Russian spies. Like most of these sex scandals it reflects terribly on everyone except the man at its centre.

Shame on the Russians, who still live in the same spy-infested tyranny they had in Peter the Great’s day. Shame on the smirking tossers who put the clip on the internet. Shame on his sanctimonious vindictive ratbag of an ex-wife. Shame on me, who searched for the clip on Google. And shame on Pizza Hut, who put my bodyweight in pizza leaflets through the door each month. They are not directly involved in this case, but damn them to hell.

What was he supposed to on his own on a wet afternoon in central Russia, thousands of miles from his friends and family? Read an improving book? Buy some fruit and learn to juggle? Apparently Yakaterinburg is known for its theatres, but how many gloomy Russian plays can one stand in a weekend? He’d have shot himself, sooner or later.

Were they underage? Did he mistreat them? Leave him alone, then.

CALIFORNIA'S CREDIT RATING SLASHED ON BRITNEY ENGAGEMENT

The state's debt rating was slashed to near-junk this week after the princess of pop was spotted with a massive sparkler on her wedding finger.

Californians should do what their forefathers did when times got hard: go west.

BROWN’S BRITAIN

-Graduates of mediaeval history reduced to working as pimps.

-Wiltshire Police acquire a spy drone and use it to photograph some hippies. (This was by Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times, so it may well be untrue.)

-And this is simply the most retarded thing I have read in my life.

KRUGMAN’S CAT

Krugman has posted a photo of his cat on the New York Times website. It is just the sort of cat you would expect Krugman to have, all snooty and superior-looking. Acting like it won the Nobel Prize.

I am Krugman’s Russian Blue,
Pray tell me, sir, whose cat are you?

It is no secret that Krugman and I haven’t always seen eye to eye on the issues. He thinks we need a $28 trillion fiscal stimulus, for instance, whereas I believe that you don’t need a fiscal stimulus if you’ve got Jesus.

And there are those who say that this is a debate between one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, and Krugman, sparring as equals. Let us not drag families and pets into this clash of the heavyweights, they say. Leave the cat out of it.

But wait a minute. Once the Clintons appeared in public with their 13-year old daughter, the rules changed. She became public figure, and Rush Limbaugh could call her a dog with a clear conscience.

Sorry, but if Krugman is going to use his cat to bolster his public image, there is no reason why I cannot call his cat a dog, and write ad felinium attacks mocking and denouncing the animal.

As far as I’m concerned, it is open season on Krugman’s cat.

HE TOUCHED THE HEARTS OF SIMPLETONS EVERYWHERE

Michael Jackson is dead, but his songs will always be with us. So will he, in fact: he's made of plastic.

Obviously I had grown out of that crap by the time I went to secondary school, but I know you simple folk used to like him, and I respect your simple tastes. Some of his early stuff was good.

Whatsa matter you? Hey!
Why you looka so sad? Hey!
Gotta no respecca...

That song helped me through a lot of difficult times, though I don't know if I would use the word genius.

No display of ass-hattery will be judged excessive in the coming days. If Blair himself read a prayer at Jackson's funeral then led the congregation in an embarrassing dance, I would hardly wince.

HUGH GRANT

With typically English understatement he hoofed a photographer in the testicles.



If it weren’t for that man the foreigners would have realised years ago how violent and uncouth the British are. We could reel their streets at noon, smashing up bars and vomiting into the fountains, but there was always Hugh Grant with his floppy haircut, making out that we’re a nation of weedy booksellers.

Now that even Hugh Grant is snarling and taking socks at people, perhaps the truth will dawn.

There are only two things in this world I hate: R n’ B singers, and the people who hide them.

These people are trying to claim that the British National Party (the B n’ P) want to ban R n’ B and replace it with Chas n’ Dave. The idea being, I suppose, that millions of Whitney Houston fans will Unite Against Fascism.

Now you is just the kinda girl to break my heart in two,
I knew right off when I first clapped my eyes on you,
But how was I to know you'd bend my earholes too?

You know who else liked Chas n’ Dave? Himmler.

Chas n’ Dave, Whitney Houston, Himmler, the BNP… it is hard to take these people seriously.

DE MENEZES, JAQUI SMITH

The boys in blue have complementary opposing forces up the yin yang.

THE SOAP YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

Needing some Daz! for the washing machine I left the house and proceeded in a disorderly manner to the shop on the corner. It was shut.

I have started my own Twitter account. Now you can follow the minutiae of my dull lifestyle minute by minute, and share the tedium with me in real time as my life unfolds, or folds up.

BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY

Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

(Raymond Chandler, The High Window)

Today is Tony Blair’s birthday. If there were any justice he would be shot like a pig and hung upside down like Mussolini. But not on his birthday! I hope you’ll join with me in wishing him a very special day with his friends and family. We can always shoot him like a pig and hang him upside down tomorrow.

HAIKU

Do not whinge about
Signal failures at Balham.
Turn puce with fury.

NORMAN CONQUEST DENIERS

Tim Worstall is banging on about something called the “Anti-Gallican League.”

“Dedicated to such absurd ideas as keeping French products, French dancing masters, French garlic and French “frickasees” out of a proper plain beef-eating nation...”

There used to be a movement called Saxonism which wanted to turn English back to a Germanic language. The tiresome sods wanted everyone to say “sunprint” instead of “photograph”; “tonewright” for “composer”; “birdlore” for “ornithology”; “bendsome” instead of “flexible”.

But there is no Saxon word for vol-au-vent and the movement collapsed in ignominy. And you have to admit that French phrases have a certain I-don’t-know-what. Saxonism got nowhere.

The I-R.A.S.C is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer...

Gonna order one of these. You can make your head look like a burning ball of magnesium when you are waiting for the train.

Meanwhile, high above, Blair is circling the earth in his space rocket. He bangs his little fists on the monitors and howls with impotent rage when he realises you have defeated him.

.

Fritzl, who turned 74 on Thursday, has been pestering the family he had with his wife Rosemarie to visit him behind bars so he can "reconcile" with them.

Some of the stuff said about Fritzl recently would be considered highly offensive if you said it about the Irish.

The Irish lock their daughters in underground cellars and rape them. The Irish hide their evil old faces behind blue folders.

If I said stuff like I’d probably be arrested under the Nanny State’s bonkers Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which makes it illegal to murder people for their religious beliefs.

But wait a minute! What are the police arresting me for? I’m not the one who raped his daughter. I’m not even Irish! Why aren’t they out there on the streets, trying to catch Fritzl?

The world’s gone mad.

THIS COUNTRY HAS REALLY GONE TO THE DOGS SINCE JADE GOODY DIED

Yesterday was the last day you could use the internet without the stinking government spying on you. In future I shall check my emails in a series of internet cafés, wearing a Mexican sombrero and dark glasses.

London is the most hellish place I have ever visited. Last time I counted there were five CCTV cameras pointed directly at my front door. These days you would need to be mad –literally insane- to travel on the Underground without a Mexican sombrero.

“Please report any suspicious behaviour to a member of staff.” Whenever I see one of their members of staff I take him to one side and whisper that some fucker keeps filming me. And you have to admit that’s suspicious.

Now when I travel I buy a ticket with my credit card then I pay cash for another ticket heading in the opposite direction. Last weekend, for example, I wanted to visit my old Mum in Norfolk, but I didn’t want the government to know that. So I bought a ticket to Scotland, sending the police haring off in the wrong direction, while I concealed myself in Tie Rack. Then, when the coast was clear, I boarded the Norfolk train wearing a false beard.

And the beauty of the scheme is that my mother doesn’t even live in Norfolk. It was somebody else’s mother! I am outwitting them at every turn.

Fritzl's Approval Ratings Fall Below Brown's

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

BLAIR MUST HANG

Interesting piece in The Times about what Bomber Blair is up to these days. As you know, my campaign to have him hanged has yet to bear fruit, though these are early days, and after he resigned as PM he started looking around for new ways of “making the world a better place”.

The UN, the European Union, the United States and Russia appointed him Peace Envoy for the Middle East, and within a few months the locals were tearing each other limb from limb, much as I expected.

How did he do it? “I was on the phone to the Arabs, the Americans and the Israelis and the Americans the whole time,” he explains.

Even by his own standards, he has done a marvellous job as Peace Envoy. Really first-class.

In January 2008, J P Morgan Chase took him on as an advisor, plunging the bank into a crisis from which it may not recover. “Our firm will benefit greatly from his knowledge and experience", they said. Over the next year the share price halved and profits plunged by more than 80%, much as I expected.

Now he’s helping to modernise Rwanda. Woe to that land that appoints Blair to modernise it! His normal way of expressing concern is to send the RAF to destroy their infrastructure. I don’t know what precise form the catastrophe in Rwanda will take –could be genocide, could be a plague of frogs- but it will come. And if the Americans ever ask his advice on resolving the financial crisis he may yet succeed in ruining us all.

I honestly believe him to be insane. And the fact that this very dangerous lunatic is still poking his nose into the Middle East shows that Blair remains one of the most serious threats to our national security, and that his arrest and execution should be matters of the highest priority.



Fucking nutcase.

SNOW DIARY

-I’m supposed to be doing some stuff in London today, but the snivelling tossers cancelled all the trains and buses because there was a bit of snow. On the bright side, shutting down our financial services industry for a day will save the country billions.

-Some kids down the street built a gigantic snow cock. It was mighty witty, I’m not denying it, though the effort / benefit ratio was huge. They must have spent hours on it.

-Some Venezuelan ditz in London sent me a message complaining about the English climate. What did she expect? Tropical breezes? The stupid cow.

-The Guardian set up a live snow blog, which quickly got overrun with tiresome northerners saying that our snow is a poof, and congratulating themselves on living somewhere even more freezing and uninhabitable than London. Why does anyone stick it out up there? Do they enjoy all these gales and blizzards?

Take Scotland, for example. Everyone in Scotland has an EU passport. They don’t have to stay, which begs the question: why do they stay? Why does the entire population not re-locate to Tenerife?

-Some guy on The Guardian pulled rank on the northerners. Snow, you say? Well permit me, as a Canadian, to butt in here...

"... we've record amounts of snow in Toronto right now too... lots of driveway shoveling... ermmmm but yes we're used to it I guess (everyone has their own snow shovel.. indeed it's the standard big birthday present when you're 11..."

Digging snow out of your drive to get to work is very impressive, and makes you a real man. But to do this every day for three months because you lack the wit to move to a habitat fit for humans is the behaviour of a fuckhead.

MY BOY GEORGE VIDEO SHAME

“Sex-crazed Boy George has been jailed for 15 months after he handcuffed a male escort to his bed and threatened: “You’re going to get it!”

Sounds like wholesome British fun to me, I don’t know why people can’t mind their own business. Like Big Sausage Pizza, chaining up rent boys and threatening them with dildos is good for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, but these people who build their whole lifestyle around it give me the creeps.

Boy George is the only pop star I have ever met. When I was about 10 they bussed a load of kids my from school up to London to be in his video The War Song. I don’t know who organised it or why, but we were forced to dress up as skeletons and walk down a street to make some trite point about war being stupid.

In fact, he couldn’t have been more wrong. War is great, providing children with fresh air and healthy exercise. If it weren’t for war and the opportunities it gives them, Congolese children would be as fat and repulsive as our English bratties.

Not long after I appeared in his video, Mr Boy was in some kind of heroin scandal*. I don’t remember if he was arrested or if it was just a story in the papers, but he wrote a letter to our school apologising for letting us all down. I think he thought he was a role model for us, though before they forced me to be a skeleton in the man’s video I had never heard of him. One of the teachers read his letter out in assembly. It said something like, “Drugs are bad. Whatever you do, children, don’t spend 800 pounds a week on heroin.”

And to this day I have never spent 800 pounds a week on heroin.


I'm on at 3.13

*This was about 1982 or 1983. I can’t find anything about it on the internet, but it definitely happened, and I think that figure of 800 pounds a week is accurate.

About a decade ago I conducted a survey on the wine and spirits trade in the Gaza Strip. Here are my findings.

BLOGGING IS FOR TOSSERS

My post about Big Sausage Pizza has degenerated into a row about Jews and the Israel-Palestine question. This nuisance must now cease.

This is a web site, primarily, for the pizza-lover. People come here to read about pizza, cock-munching and things of that kind. They don’t want to have to wade though a lot of extraneous material about the Israeli Air Force.

As it happens I agree with Sol Kashberg, but what does he want me to do about it? Is he under the impression that my views carry great weight with the State Department and the Israeli High Command? I am one of the few people in the British bloggingsphere who has ever lived in the Gaza Strip, and I like to think that for once I am marginally less ignorant than average on the issue of the day. But mouthing off about it on the internet would only serve to confirm my own impotence, whereas by writing about Big Sausage Pizza I feel I can really make a difference.

Palestine is the happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance. Blogging is for tossers.