California – the maddest place on the planet.

There is a fantastic place in California. They deliver fried chicken, pizza, anything you want to eat… and they deliver alcohol and cigarettes too. Look along their top menu bar.

Apart from, perhaps, their vegetarian option, everything they sell will send the Bansturbators into apoplexy. Everything. And they deliver. Unfortunately not to Scotland.

I didn’t think you could buy tobacco as a takeaway delivery in the UK but it turns out Tesco do it. At horrible prices. I’m surprised every image isn’t just a picture of a little door. Apparently there is no danger of cheeeldren seeing these packs online because they are all too busy watching fisting videos (DO NOT look that up. I didn’t believe it when someone told me about it, many years ago, looked it up and the revolting images I found will be in my head until I die).

Also in California is the other extreme. Picked up via the #Octabber group on Farcebok is the news that a city in California is the first to ban smoking in all homes, including private residences.

Halfway up the west coast of Wales is the stair where I sit – wait, I’m channeling that damn frog again. Ahem.

Halfway up the west coast of Wales is a place called Aberystwyth. I went there for a job interview once. It is a very long way from anywhere at all other than the attractively named Borth, the next town. The only roads are really, really twisty and have that uppiness and downiness to the extreme. The Romans never saw this place, they gave up long before getting that far. It’s not possible to build more than five feet of straight road on that landscape.

There is a single track railway that crosses the estuary at Borth on an old wooden bridge that looks like this. Oh, it’s all very picturesquee but that bridge is very, very old and often closed for repairs. The only other way out is over the mountains by tractor or well-waxed racing sheep.

Nevertheless, it is a popular holiday destination even though the locals hate everyone to an extent that makes Royston Vasey seem like a left-wing multiculti paradise.

A little over a decade ago, the overwhelmingly leftie people of Aberystwyth (yes, they are all Labour or Plaid Cymru voters, all for immigration but not in their town) decided that nobody should be allowed to buy a house in Aberystwyth unless they had lived there for two years. They really did.

The result was predictable, to all but the dense and sinister Left.

House prices plummeted. Nobody could sell because the pool of buyers was so restricted. Only those in rented accomodation and had been renting for two years were able to buy. They were in rented accomodation because they couldn’t afford to buy. So they didn’t.

This particular insanity was almost instantly scrapped.

This will happen in California. If 20% of people there smoke (I don’t know the real figure, it might be lower since if I lived in California I’d have moved out long ago and many smokers probably have) then the market for buyers for any home that is not stand-alone just dropped by 20%. If you have a wall that joins on to next door, or an apartment, a smoker doesn’t want it. They will not be allowed to smoke in the home they have paid for.

You want to attract the next Einstein to your town? Oh dear, they won’t want to live there. All you will be left with are your antismoking drones and the hate-filled hand-wavers. Then Panoptica will be reality. Maybe I should give up on that one. California is just about there.

Californians still believe that tobacco smoke passes through solid walls while simultaneously believing that dope smoke does not -

The law will also not impact marijuana smokers, only tobacco users.

Just how much dope are they smoking over there?

If you smoke tobacco in California, put a bit of dope in it. Just enough to make it stink  of dope-smoke so the dopes think their walls will protect them from the magically transcendendent power of God’s True Leaf. Or, burn a dope-scented candle while smoking. Your opponents are not intelligent at all, don’t expect them to catch on. Oh and when you move away from California as all sensible people eventually will, leave them a note explaining why they are about to die.

In California, you can have tobacco delivered to your home but you can’t smoke it in there. You must believe that walls are permeable to only one type of smoke and that only one type of smoke will make you die. If your neighbour smokes a cigarette you must report them so they can be stoned to death but if they are spaced out on Mary the Iguana, standing naked on their balcony and reciting the entire Iliad in a voice that sounds like Donald Duck – don’t bother the police, that ‘s fine and legal.

When Dorothy said to Toto ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more,’ I think I now know where they were.

How the Big Bang was started.

And the Lord spake unto Adam saying ‘Go on. Pull my finger.’

And Adam didst pull and lo, there was an Almighty bang.

And the Lord didst fall about laughing.

 

Well, the lightning bolt missed me again so I thought I’d have another go. I’m sure a supreme deity can take a little taunting now and then. Besides, maybe that’s what happened? Who’s to know?

Life came from God’s butt.

(Blasphemy alert. The deeply religious are not going to like this one very much. In the interests of balance, neither will the atheists)

Life came from God’s butt. Science has declared it so. Experts have said and studies have shown and all that jazz.

Science is now considering that vitamin B3 – niacin, aka nicotinic acid, arrived on Earth on what they pretend are meteorites. Since vit B3 makes up a vital component of basic metabolism and is essential to all forms of life from bacteria to brachiosaurs, that means there would be no life on Earth at all without it. Well, there might be life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Naturally, nowhere in the article does anyone suggest the merest hint of a slight consideration of the outside chance of any connection between nicotinic acid and nicotine… even though the former was first synthesised in the lab from the latter.

What this suggests is that far from being a wonderful paradise, the earliest incarnation of this planet was as God’s ashtray. Where he stubbed out his butts while pondering what to do with the great mass of nothing around him. Whether to create a planet with a sun and a moon and whether, once he got started on that sort of thing, he’d know when to stop. He had planned to make just one angel, for a bit of company, and now he had whole hosts of them. It might start out as just one star and one planet but…

One day God looked into his ashtray and noticed the formation of some interesting molecules. ‘I could make living things out of those’, he thought. Where to put them though? Well, why not use this little round ashtray. Tidy it up a bit, plant some trees and stuff, make all kinds of different living things with all their metabolism based on nicotine, God’s favourite molecule. Formed from dust we were indeed, the dust in God’s ashtray. We are all made of cigarettes.

This is incontrovertible proof that God smokes because if he didn’t we wouldn’t even be here. The Puritans have it very, very wrong.

There is no mention of Jesus smoking, but since his very first miracle involved gatecrashing a wedding party and showing how amazingly fast he was at homebrew, I think we can safely assume that he was no Puritan either.

All life is based on nicotinic acid. Meteorites, coated in third hand smoke, are still arriving. Those gas clouds out in space are just massive puffs of cigarette smoke. The entire universe is just one big smoky pub and all the angels are laughing and shaking their heads at our little smoke-free corner of it.

That’s why Hell is full of flames. The evil ones spend eternity sat on God’s lighter, and it’s a big one. It’s always on.

The evil ones are, in the main, those who want to eliminate God’s favourite molecule from the face of the Earth and thereby turn it into a barren wasteland, devoid of all life.

All those sacrifices by fire in the Old Testament produced a lot of smoke and this is described as ‘pleasing to the Lord’. God likes smoke! It’s all through that book. Denying smoke is denying God and (whoops, getting a bit Ian Paisley with this one. Deep breaths…)

The tobacco plant grows just about anywhere. It grows from an infinitesimal speck into a six-foot monster in a single growing season. A Big Bang in chlorophyll green. Then it sends forth thousands of new tiny specks to do it all again. God made sure that one wouldn’t die out.

I feel the dawn of a new religion – or rather the dawn of a new subset of an old religion. And yet this vision, vouchsafed to me by a bloke with a beard, unites all religions. They all burn something at some stage. They all have the Holy Fire somewhere in their tenets. The One True Smoky God and His Drinky Son. Then there’s the Holy Spirit, which must surely live in a bottle.

I cannot believe that any kind of God would go to all this trouble so that Puritans can just pretend it’s all simply not there. If we were put here for a reason, that reason cannot possibly be ‘Live a life of abject misery, deny yourself the pleasures I have put forth to tempt you, and then you can leave all hope of those pleasures behind and sit on a cloud all day playing a harp.’

It’s really not that great a deal, is it?

Isn’t it more logical to consider that the first thing you will be offered at the Pearly Gates is a glass of port and a cigar?

“Don’t smoke? Oh dear, the big guy won’t like that. Didn’t you notice how he had tobacco plants growing all over the planet? Didn’t you ever stop to wonder why? You were supposed to enjoy life, not ignore it!” This is where he reaches for the trapdoor lever…

Then there is yeast. It’s everywhere too. It lives on the outside of fruit – surely that is a really big hint? “Look, all you have to do is mash it up in water and honey and keep it warm for a while. Come on guys, it’s right there for you in kit form.”

If we assume that the planet was made, and we were put on it, and that there was a purpose, why would we assume that this Creator made us just to be miserable? Are we really only here to worship a deity? Well I’m not playing that game. That sounds like a deity with a Narcissus complex to me.

Consider what else is here. Tobacco – loads of it. The means to make booze – loads of that too. Bacon. If all that stuff we aren’t supposed to have is all just the temptations of the Devil, then the Devil did more creating than God! Sure, we should thank God for providing this huge party room, floored with nice soft grass to fall down onto, that’s only common courtesy after all.

Isn’t he going to get a bit confused when Puritans thank him for all the stuff they are not using? Isn’t he going to be shaking his head in despair at those who seek to stop others using all the things he has provided to keep us, his pets, entertained?

What if there is a smoky-drinky God who just wants us to be excellent to each other and party on, dudes, and has provided all the means to do so with little effort on our part? Where is the Devil then?

The Devil is in those who want to wreck God’s plan, just as religion has always said. The Devil, being a cunning old devil, has done that by setting up organised religion that tells us not to do what we are put here to do. Immensely rich and powerful bishops, cardinals and the Pope order us to live as they instruct and tell us it is the word of God. “Deny yourself everything. Give it to us and… er… we’ll dispose of it all to save you from yourselves”.

It started long before Christianity. Priests demanded a free lamb for the sacrificial fire because lamb was expensive to buy in pre-Lidl history. There’s not much meat on a lamb so you have to pay more per pound.

Picture the scene, the Priest Canteen. The people have been calmed and it’s time for lunch.

“What’s on the menu today. Lamb? Great.”

(five sacrifices later) “Oh come on. Lamb again? We should get them to sacrifice an ox next time.”

So it was always okay for the priests to eat lambs. The sacrifice part only applied to the plebs. The elite get to eat and the poor get to pay for it. Is this the work of God or Satan? You decide.

So it is with modern politics. Same thing. The elite get subsidised bars even though they have more money than most of us will ever see in a lifetime, and we poor buggers subsidise it. They get cheap booze while demanding we pay much more for ours, even though we are already paying for theirs. Nothing has changed.

It is said by the Popery types and the other religions of that ilk that Satan will one day rule this world. Look around, dopes. Satan has been in charge for ages. Why do you think that gold-encrusted bishop passes around a collection plate? Whose side is he on? Yours? If he is on your side why does he want to make you even poorer? Religions, of almost all types, have a very, very rich elite and they all take money from poor people. God or Satan? Which of them would do that?

So when they tell you to sacrifice your pleasures and give them money, they are going against the word of the Smoky-Drinky God who set up an entire planet full of stuff to smoke and drink and eat and enjoy. Why would He do that if he wanted to save you from sin? He didn’t. That is what the uber-Righteous will never understand. It is not about what you do to yourself. You can strap a sharp celise to your leg and flagellate your back with fish hooks if you want to. It is all irrelevant.

It is about what you do to other people.

Filling your limited lifespan with pain and self-denial must surely count as total insanity. No God could possibly be impressed by such idiocy. No, if there really is a God, what he is interested in is your actions towards other people.

Those who want control over others are going to the burny place. Those who are happy to enjoy life and to let others live life their own way will be the favoured ones.

That is the doctrine of the Smoky-Drinky Religion. Who wants to sign up? No self-harming or penury or pointless guilt for things you didn’t do are required.

You just have to give the God smoke. No need for cigarettes, this God is happy with tobacco burned in a bowl. Douse it in vodka and he will smile upon you. A little lopsided at times but a smile nonetheless.

Note – do not burn malt whisky. Never mind the wrath of God, the wrath of Leg-iron is more immediate. If you wish to sacrifice malt whisky, I will deal with that.

And so, I have become the next L. Ron Hubbard but without all the aliens and shit. Just booze, fags, salt, sugar and Mars bars in batter.

I have a nasty feeling I could outstrip Scientology in five years if I was to take this seriously.

In ten years I could overtake Christianity, Islam and Judaism. And I offer nothing beyond what is already in everyone’s reach. The fruit of the tree next to the tree of knowledge. The tree of life.

Take a leaf. Roll it up…

A Monday Mix.

It’s been sunny today. Which was odd. Usually it’s sunny when I’m at work and rains/snows/hails when I have time off. Maybe I just mistook today’s fire and brimstone for sunshine. Anyway, most of the garden is de-weeded now. Just the pots to clear out and there’s no rush, it’ll be a while before the tobacco plants are big enough to need them. It’s also not definitely frost-safe out there yet. A warm spell in April has caught me out before.

Those damn red lily beetles are back again. I thought I’d exterminated them last year but some must have survived. This calls for some serious chemical weaponry. Best get my gooseberries treated too, sawfly of the gooseberries was a nasty experience last year. Hey Sawfly, I wanna play a game…

In this relaxed gardening mode I refuse to look at the newspapers. It’s just going to be more crap anyway. Instead, here’s a miscellany of whisky-drenched thoughts typed through a haze of smoke.

Finally, with no work to worry about, I took out the gifted enlarger and found a developing tank included! It really is an entire darkroom in a box. I also found the can of LNER Green – thanks, whoever you are, No note yet but there is a lot to look through. There might yet be one.

Good news for a change. There’s not much of it about these days. Anna Raccoon has survived the ministrations of the medics and is back in charge of the Raccoon Arms. The French NHS appears nowhere near as lethal as ours. Our lot could learn a lot from the French, if our lot were actually capable of learning anything at all.

I like espresso. A lot. Enough to have my own Gaggia espresso machine and a wide range of coffees and a grinder in case I buy any that are not espresso ground. I have flavoured coffees too – white chocolate flavour, cherry chocolate flavour and (no kidding) Christmas pudding flavour. Those are cafetiere ground and work best in a bigger cup anyway. I have not yet tried adding brandy butter and cream to the Christmas pudding one but there’s some left so it can happen.

There is a coffee filter machine under the stairs that I haven’t used in ages. These days it’s all espresso or cafetiere. There is a jar of instant around for when I’m in a rush. Douwe Egbert’s which, if you pronounce it ‘Dewey Eggbutt’ in a Welsh accent, allows you to convince a passing idiot that it’s grown and processed in Wales. That really does work. I should be surprised, but I’m not.

There have been many Daily Mail attacks on the Red Bull style of canned wakey-water lately. I’m not going to look for an example right now, that would mean opening their website and the abrupt end of a good mood. I like canned wakey-water too, but I go for the four-for-a-pound ones in Farmfoods or Poundland. It’s an entirely synthetic chemical fizz, anyone can make it so why pay a pound per can? Lidl’s cost a little more than 25p each but they have added berry flavours. When spending £20 on a bottle of Ben Bracken, I’m not going to baulk at £1.79 for six cans of artificially flavoured chemical fizz. Yes, it owes its existence more to a chemistry lab than any tree, but I like it so I buy it.

The anti-caffeine movement has now come out into the open, as Junican notes. Coffee machines that turn themselves off after a while. Now hold on a minute here. In fact I will go so far as to ask you to hold on to a cotton picking minute, and those are slippery. Those heated bases under the coffee pots already turn themselves off. A lot. All the time the coffee is at the right temperature, the thermostat running the heater is off. If the heater was always on, the coffee would boil away and that thin glass jar would explode.

This is a trivial issue as far as power consumption goes. It is as nothing compared to the oven and hob and kettle and radiator that are generally in the same room as that little coffee machine. It’s like a power station blaming you for pollution because you left the light on… oh wait, that already happens.

So it is not about electrickery. As usual it is all about control. In the comments to Junican’s article, Rose points out where the anti-caffeine league get their ideas. Same place as all the others.

Hitler.

Just doing a Godwin there. The drones will be expecting it by now. Those few whose attention span allows them to get past the first paragraph, and if you are a drone who has got this far, well done. Keep it up. One day you might be able to read an entire Beano in one sitting and that would be something to write home about, if you could write.

I think we are now safe from drones. I have used far too many words and most of the drones will be stuck trying to pronounce ‘ministrations’ so will never get this far. Those who did will have left in an outraged huff at the previous paragraph.

It’s tax time in the UK. This year, Taxman has decided that my tax code for the janitor job is 0T. This means I get no tax relief at all on the job that currently produces most of my income. Since this was evident from last year’s tax form I can only conclude that the entire tax office is staffed by spite-ridden vicious thugs and/or idiots, but we already knew that anyway.

It also means that next year I will be claiming back almost all of the tax I pay for the next twelve months. This year’s tax form will not be left until the end of January. Like last year, it wil be filled in as soon as I have all the info I need. I pay as little tax as possible. Unlike the gentry and the rich folk, I cannot afford accountants to hide my money and there would be no point anyway because I don’t have any. My method is to earn just enough to cover the bills and make no use of my expensive training and decades of experience. I am not paying for my own persecution.

There is no way to not be self-employed now because of the books. Unless I take them all off sale I am always self-employed even though last year’s book income was no more than a few bottles of good single malt. I like making up stories. That will never end. It doesn’t pay well and probably never will. I’ll be claiming back loads of tax every year for the rest of my life.

Everyone should fill out a tax form every year. Everyone. Even those entirely on PAYE because the tax mob make ‘mistakes’ and have probably overcharged you. They get quite enough of your money as it is, don’t let them get away with taking more.

Ah, but we might all die of a nasty dose of asteroids. NASA confesses (to use the Daily Inquisitor parlance) that actually, they have no way of tracking every bit of rock that’s floating around in the infinity of rocky bugger-all that surrounds us. How could they? The rocks don’t all have yellow ‘wet floor’ signs on them because Elfin Safety only looks after the safety of elves and those little swines never get smitten with the asteroids.

It was a bad case of asteroids that did for the dinosaurs because they had not thought to develop Preparation H. Oh, and T. rex was done for anyway, his hands couldn’t reach his arse. Imagine that. T. rex never, ever, wiped. The tagnuts. The clinkers. The horror.

The itch. No wonder he was in such a bad mood. Imagine having an itchy arse and you can’t reach it. I’d bite the heads off animals too, in that situation. Especially animals that could scratch their own arses. Bastards.

We are doomed to eventiually be wiped out by the asteroids because they are on the way and there is nothing at all we can do aboui it. All this ‘ooo, we have to save the planet’ is utter nonsense when placed against a big rock that sees Earth and thinks ‘yeah, I’m going to smack that bitch up’.

Five inches of sea level rise? How about several kilotons of explosion right over your house? Which do you think will cause you more inconvenience?

We live on a big stone floating around in nothing and other stones bump into us often. We are also all going to die. Just to boost the cheery factor, we are ruled by people who think that the Earth is a constant and unchanging and who also demand that evolution is real while paying a lot of your money to conservationists who want to stop it happening and who think of nothing but little pieces of green paper.

Space rocks and the short span of human life are as nothing to them. They don’t believe in either.

If God made humanity, He made us as a joke.

A self-terminating joke.

 

Most blatantly made-up story of the week.

Getting past the Daily Mail site is like passing a fatal road accident. You know you shouldn’t look. You know you’re likely to see something that will disturb and distress you, but you just can’t help it. Then there it is in all its gory detail, and what has been seen cannot be unseen.

Once in a while, the Mail does go that little bit too far and transcend propaganda. Off into Absurdity-Land where only the dimmest of drones and the most sociopathic of tobacco-control maniacs dwell. Then it’s not gory or disturbing at all. It’s a cartoon car crash, a comical and badly drawn tangle of lines and lies and pretend characters in pretend pain.

Today they presented the story of a nine-year-old child begging the NHS KillDaSmoker helpline for help in giving up smoking. The child cannot of course be named or pictured or identified in any way. Somewhere in the UK? Somewhere over the rainbow, more likely.

It’s all there. All the standard and by now very old propaganda. He tried one cigarette once and was hooked. Then he realised what it was doing to his health and tried to stop but could not. He just had to keep smoking. Finally he begged the ‘Experts who have Said’ for help in kicking his (by now, perhaps) 100-a-day habit. This is supposed to be the mindset fo a nine-year-old and you, dear reader, are supposed to be stupid enough to believe it. If I had put this out as fiction, the reviews would have been more caustic than the blood of an Alien face-hugger.

All utter rubbish. One cigarette does not hook anyone. My first pack of ten came from a vending machine outside a shop. I’d been smoking cigars for a while but hadn’t bothered with cigarettes. So I thought I’d try the cheaper option.

I smoked one. It was vile. I stuck the rest into a dry-stone wall, lit them and watched them burn away. Rolling tobacco was more to my taste although I did find later that different readymade brands were different blends. Some were reasonably good, some were dreadful. They all sell so I guess for some people’s tastes it’s the other way around.

It’s like whisky. In Wales we mostly saw Bells or Famous Grouse in my youth. There were a few malt whiskies but then, as now, they were more expensive. Having tried Bells and Grouse , and found them to be terrible, I wasn’t going to risk money on malts. As far as I knew, I didn’t like whisky very much. That changed when I came to Scotland where people practically ambush you in the street and force it down your throat. Go drinking with the Scots and there will be whisky involved at some stage – often it’s all there is. That’s when I found that Bells wasn’t the only whisky flavour around.

Bells also sells in large amounts. So a lot of people must like it. There is a smoky-drinker who hates Islay malts but loves Speyside ones. I adore the peaty malts, the peatier the better. All a matter of taste.

Back to the point. That first cigarette did not hook me at all. I found it repellent. Yet I had always liked the aroma of my grandfather’s smokes. His were rollies, made with Franklin’s tobacco. I tried that some months after my first cigarette and it was a very different experience. Like a little paper cigar.

Readymades have always, to me, had a chemical aftertaste. Rollies (and cigars and pipes) don’t have that. It can’t be the paper because now I’m tubing leaf there’s no chemical taste. Something in the processing, maybe. Anyway, I found it harsh and I was over 20 when I tried that first cigarette. Must be hard going for a nine-year-old to stick at it.

Also, back then there were only vague mutterings of ‘it’ll stunt your growth’ and such things from the antismoker camp. I still like saying that to smoking six-footers. Now, kids are bombarded with antismoking as soon as the State get their hooks into them. The idea that a nine-year-old only found out it was ‘bad for him’ after he’d been smoking for a while is derisory. He’d had that message hammered home since he was five. They all have.

There are still young kids who start smoking. Of course there are. The antismokers taunt them with this forbidden fruit every single day, everywhere they look. Of course they are curious. Of course they will want to try it. Kids rebel, it’s what they do. They test boundaries and push limits. These days, thanks to Leftie indoctrination, there are no boundaries and no limits – or at least, no real punishment for crossing them.

When I was very small I could have bought a packet of smokes any time I wanted. In fact I often did. My father sent me and my little brother to the corner shop to buy his smokes. We had not the slightest interest in those cigarettes, we were only interested in how many sweets we could buy with the change. Then came the day of the age limit. The shop wouldn’t sell us Dad’s fags so no change, and no sweets. That age limit was 16. Might have been 14 at first, I was too young to care.

Recently it became 18, which was nasty, I thought. What about all those 17-year-olds smoking legally today who can’t get any more tomorrow? No phasing-in either. Bang. Overnight. Today you are legal, tomorrow you’re not.

Which sort of begs the question – how is a nine-year-old getting cigarettes? It begs another question – how much bloody pocket money does this kid get? Fags must be near £10 a pack by now. I’m in regular employment and I’m spending time each evening shredding leaves and stuffing them into tubes because I can’t afford to buy them in the shops. How the Hell is a nine-year-old doing it?

Let’s not bother rehashing the lies about ‘one smoke and you’re hooked’ and all the rest. Let’s look at what tobacco control has achieved.

The age limit for buying cigarettes is now 18. Increased from 16 at the behest of tobacco control to stop young kids taking up the habit. Yet it’s tobacco control themselves who claim that thousands of young kids are taking up the habit. TC 0, kids 1.

Smoking propaganda is so prevalent now that it’s almost an O-level in itself in schools. All this propaganda paid for by taxes and run by the very well paid ‘Experts who Say’ has, by their own admission, had absolutely no effect whatsoever on kids taking up smoking. TC 0, kids 2.

Cigarette prices have skyrocketed thanks to the scaremongering of tobacco control. Low paid adults can’t afford them. Kids can’t possibly afford them. They seem to have less trouble affording them than I do. TC 0, kids 3.

Smoking bans are everywhere now but for schoolkids there has been no change. Smoking was not allowed in school when I was there and that was (mumble mumble) years ago. The teachers could smoke in their staff room but not in front of us kids. Oh, we knew they smoked in there because a sixth-former lined the woodwork teacher’s ashtray with nitrogen triiodide. He wasn’t expelled but he did get a whack.  Well worth it, he said.

We had bike sheds, big brick ones, never saw a single bike in them but saw a lot of fag-ends behind them. It was banned in school then just as it is now. It made no difference then and it doesn’t now. TC 0, kids 4.

The antis hid all the cigarettes behind the Doors of Shame to stop kids even seeing them and now complain that more kids than ever are taking up smoking when they can’t see them, can’t buy them and are banned from smoking them anywhere. TC 0, kids 5.

Plain packaging is next. This will be as effective as all the other antismoking campaigns in that more kids than before will be taking up smoking. I predict the result as TC 0, kids 6.

The government are delighted with the antismokers. They are bringing in far more tobacco duty than those old tobacco ads ever did. They are ensuring that smoking never dies out when we old smokers shuffle off aged 100 or so. The government will need all that new tobacco revenue to cover the cost of our pensions and they know it.

Every day, smoking is in the news with the tagline, ‘Kids, you should not do this. It is rebellious and cool and will make your friends think you are hard and fearless’. That’s not what they think they are saying but it is what they are saying. Children do not give a flying fuck about mortality. Not one child on the planet believes it applies to them. Not one child believes they can die. Not one. They can jump off things and shoot arrows at each other and even set each other on fire and they have no thought about the consequences. No child, in the entire history of humanity, ever has thought about consequences until they get to that ‘whoops’ moment. Tell them, every day, that smoking will kill them. They will just have to try it. When they don’t die after  the first one they have proved you wrong and you lose. That is how a child mind works. Simple logic, no complexity.

These days, a lot of adults don’t believe they can die either. When every day is the same round of a flat half-can of Stella for breakfast followed by flobbing out in front of the Jeremy Kyle show with the cold remnants of last night’s pizza, who would imagine anything would ever change? They don’t believe they will die. This is incomprehensible to me. At my rate of whisky intake I’m actually surprised every time I wake up, thinking ‘Oh what, I have to do it again?’

That nine year old… there is no mention of teachers or parents in the article. We are told that smokers stink, that we can be easily identified by the green cloud of foul miasma that follows us everywhere. Yet no teacher, mother, father or sibling noticed that this nine year old child stank like a pipe smoking tweed wearing biology teacher? How can that be? Aren’t we all just like the reekie lums o’ the auld toon, puffing out oor stench o’ vile smook an’ terrible, terrible disease?

By all the laws of Studies have Shown and Experts have Said, this nine-year-old smoker cannot exist. It is impossible. All the bans and controls imposed to date make his existence impossible.

If he exists then not one of Tobacco Control’s measures have worked. A hell of a lot of tax money has been wasted. A lot of people have been well paid to be utterly useless. Cameron and Clegg have been so stupid that the most transparent and blatant of con artists have ripped your money from their pockets.

Either the story is true or it is not. Either way, the Coagulation, and the Moribund Party too, look like utter dicks with a gullibility rating that is off the scale. There is no face-saving way out of this one.

So what’s it gonna be then, droogies?

:D

 

Quiet weekend

I have drawn Saturday Late and Sunday Early this weekend so will be mostly silent.

Then I have a week off so will be babbling.

For Oestre Sunday I have some interesting images.

Avoid eggs that open at the top.

Now that’s what I call a Kinder surprise.If you prefer your chocolate slow-moving and moaning ‘Braaaiiiiins’ then this is for you.

And here is the real deal your parents made, kids.

Easter. The time of hollow eggs that are big enough to hide a scorpion or a tarantula inside.

Bite into them, children. You might not have one of mine.

Happy Oestre.

What a sad and stupid people…

…the human race has become.

Over in America, a teenager is accused of peeing in a reservoir.  A pint, maybe, of sterile urine (if you don’t have an infection, urine is sterile) into 38 million gallons of reservoir water which is most definitely not sterile. Are there no fish in the reservoir? No insects? No birds wading, swimming, flying over? No animals along the banks?

Reservoir water is full of shit and bacteria. That’s why water companies have to go to such great lengths to clean it up before pumping it into homes. One pint of sterile urine actually made those 38,000,000 gallons 0.0000003% less contaminated for a brief moment, until the bacteria moved in on that little bit of urea. The ‘contamination’ would be undetectable within seconds because the bacteria will have eaten it.

So the teen is arrested and charged and the water company plans to dump all of those 38 million gallons because it is now ‘contaminated’. What was it before? Pure, pristine, distilled and sterile? Evidently that is what they believed it was.

There are people out there who drink their own urine. It has no appeal for me (unless I ever discover it’s still 40-proof when it comes out) but those who do it have never been reported to suffer any ill effects. Even if they have a bladder infection, what harm can it do? They already have that infection anyway.

Nobody with any sense drinks water straight from a reservoir without treating it with something. Boiling, or water purifying tablets, or whatever. That large body of standing water is one big pit of watery poo. Every species in the vicinity will have taken a dump in it and some of those species carry bacteria that do them no harm – but which will make us shit through every available orifice if they get into us.

A pint of pee is of no consequence whatsoever. The local authorities even tested the water and found no pee. Not surprising – as I said, bacteria will soon dispose of the urea and not just that of human origin, but from bats, rats, birds, otters, fish…. oh, just think of an animal. They all use the reservoir as a toilet.

What is surprising is that they tested. Why? What the Hell did they hope to find? How big do they imagine this guy’s bladder is? What do they think he’s been drinking? There was nothing to test for. Their normal routine tests would never pick it up, in fact I don’t believe any test ever would.

It’s not the first time this kind of stupidity has floated up. It’s like the turd that’s scared of the dark so won’t leave the bowl.

In 2011, the city dumped 7.8 million gallons of water from the reservoir after another man urinated in it.

What do they do when there’s a dead bird floating around, I wonder? Empty it all and get in there with bleach and brooms? That doesn’t sound unlikely, and it would be a lot worse for water quality than the pint of pee. In reality, they are not worried about dead rats or foxes or cows or corpses, only about teenager pee.

This is the mindset that produces the terror of second hand smoke – even second hand steam – while declaring a street full of diesel fumes to be ‘fresh air’. This is the mindset that is terrified of putting too much salt on their highly processed GM foods. ‘Made from reclaimed meat’ is food-speak for ‘Don’t eat this, it’s bone scrapings, gristle, ears and testicle bags all mashed up and formed into the rough shape of something edible, then covered in batter so you can’t see it.’

I know people who live on those things but won’t eat liver. Liver is a great meat. And very cheap because idiots think it’s horrible while they tuck into testicle-bags and snouts in batter. I like to eat liver. Have to, considering my drinking habits. I need the parts to make more of my own liver every day.

Thirty-eight million gallons of water are to be wasted in a drought area because one teenager might or might not have dropped a pint of urine in there. What about the concrete-booted bodies the Mob have left there? No problem because the water purification system will remove all trace of them. There will be no eyes popping out of your taps, probably. But keep watching. You never know.

However, teenager pee will retain its form after any kind of processing and will emerge intact into one single pint of tap water one day. It could all be in one pint of beer. Okay, fair enough, some of the cheap beers do actually taste as if they were not so much brewed as urinated into the bottles but even so.

You know, we have installations that can turn raw sewage into drinkable water these days. It’s pretty hard work but it does work. What goes in is utterly disgusting but what comes out is safe to drink. Against that, is there really any danger from a bit of second-hand fizzy pop diluted to a level of 1 in 304000000? That is 0.003 parts per million or 3 parts per billion which is even less than the amount of anything remotely dangerous in the Electrofag steam on its way into the vaper. Yet you can terrify a drone with what comes out.

Getting a pint of pee out of an entire reservoir of water involves no actual work of any kind at all. The normal water purification process deals with far more really dangerous stuff every day. The pint of pee is nothing, it’s already diluted away and dispensed with by the teeming bacterial load of the water within seconds. If there was any intelligence left in the world there never would have been any idiots testing for it.

Did you know that water looks crystal clear when it has 10,000 bacteria per millilitre? It has to get to around 1,000,000 per millilitre before it even looks a bit cloudy. That crystal clear lake or sea water is definitely not sterile.

Urine is sterile, unless you have an infection. Water, any water, even tap water, is not.

In the end it does not even matter. All the dangerous bugs are taken out of tap water and the water is tested to make sure. I don’t drink it anyway, it has no taste and fish do unmentioanable things in it. I prefer my water to be mixed and fermented before drinking, like in the old (very old) days when it was safer to drink small beer than to drink water. They knew what they were doing.

Stupidity is rife. It is everywhere but it is not where you’d expect it to be.

I had a visitor to the toilets in Local Shop today. A zombie mouth breather in the flesh, with her brood of monstrous simians in tow. I left there expecting to come back to a trashed toilet.

No. She and her brood had left the place very clean indeed. Far better than I have seen after some pompous middle class wannabe aristos had been in there. She wasn’t much to look at but I bet her house is clean. Okay, she won’t be on University Challenge but then neither will those wannabe aristos who evidently have butlers at home to flush for them. Dirty old tarts. And the pompous-git blokes are no better.

One of Winston Smith’s quotes in ’1984′ was ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’. He might have been right. Now that I have descended from the ivory tower of science into the real world of people who don’t know what IQ means and who actually believe that while a group of crows is a ‘murder of crows’, two or three crows is just a ‘manslaughter’ (today, and it was once again the same poor gullible girl. She’s lovely, I just can’t help myself) – I can see that Orwell had a point.

It’s the proles who have standards. They have control of their children. They have Heritage and a past to look at. Ignore the chavs, I’m talking about the real proles now. The ones I came from, grew up with and thought were all gone into the benefits entrapment.

They still exist but are forgotten. They don’t get into the Daily Mail because they are not whining about their lives, they just get on with it. The real proles are still there.

They are the ones who will laugh at peeing into reservoirs because they know what else pees in there. They are the ones who will, without any microbiological training, instinctively understand why this is wrong.

They, those proles, are the real hope for the future because they are the ones nobody pays any attention to.

The ones nobody tries to control because they don’t think it’s worthwhile.