Nasty little shits

Marvin thinks I’m a nasty little shit because I enjoy tormenting drones. He is entitled to his opinion and he’s actually right in many cases. I do enjoy tormenting the drones. The possibility of scaring one to death is still on my list of things to do. If I succeed, the world will not have lost another Einstein or, very likely, not even a till operator. The level of gullibility and stupidity required to let me succeed in this quest will mean we will, at most, have lost another politician. We have too many anyway.

Some people don’t think it’s possible. Some people think that kind of mind control with nothing more than conversation cannot be done. I have done a cold-reading over the internet with a guy in Australia in one of my other internet incarnations and I didn’t make full use of it. I revealed too soon how I did it. I have convinced people of utter absurdities, both online and offline. I have enjoyed it. I make no bones about it, it was bloody hilarious. Yes, some feelings were probably hurt but I did no physical damage and even if they damaged themselves, well, frankly, fuck it.

I have fed utterly nonsensical science to other scientists (I was pissed off about some work they stole so I let them steal something else, something totally shite – and they fell for it). The drones are not all in the uneducated camp. It’s not about what you know, it’s about what you think you know, and the latter is easily manipulated. Astonishingly easily.

When I have finished playing with a drone, I let it go. I have no interest in controlling anyone’s life – hell, I have enough to do trying to control mine – so when the game is over, I have two choices. I can say ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m just messing with your head’ or I can leave them to expand on the crap I’ve fed them until they go insane. It depends on how much I like or hate them.

For me it’s a game. A nasty and vindictive game sometimes but just a game. I’m the soft cat who plays with the mouse but keeps the claws in and ultimately lets them go. Maybe they’ll kill themselves later, but I won’t control what they do. Think of me as the stunt double for Bagpuss and you’ll get the idea.

So yes, I can be cruel. I can be merciless. The thing is, when you go away I will not come after you. When you leave the room I will forget you. The rest of your life is your problem, not mine. You sort it out. Accept or deny the things I said, I don’t care at all. I’ve probably forgotten them myself anyway.

There is a question of degree. If I took one step to the left I could easily be a Righteous. I have the skills they seek and the abilities they desire. Fortunately I also have the withered remnants of a conscience and no interest in other people’s lives so cannot become one of them. My lack of interest in money or power obviously helps here. It all means I see them only from the perspective of disinterested science. The Righteous are a curiosity, nothing more. It can be hard to understand why they want to push the game into total control of other people but iut is absolutely clear that that is what they want.

I’m also immune to insults. Call me bastard, call me vicious git, call me arsehole, call me little shit. I don’t mind. You can even call me Al, as at least two of Local Shop’s long term staff still do after nearly 18 months and neither is called Betty. Which is a shame. Both wenches are fearsome enhough to be effective bodyguards too. I don’t have that much worth guarding anyway.

But hey, if you want tio hear about nasty little shits, then the works of Charlotte Iserbyt will be of considerable interest to you. She has known those who make me look like a kitten on a program of cuteness steroids and by whatever Gods there may be, that is quite a feat.

Here is a sample.

Pigeons – don’t smoke in bed!

Birds have been known to collect cigarette ends to line their nests. The residual tobacco acts to repel irritating parasites, much as active smoking tends to work for smokers. Birds, however, do not generally smoke. Not even crows, even though they sound like they do. They don’t have lighters, and have so far not mastered the .vocal requirements to pronounce ‘Twenty Rothmans please’. I’m sure they are working on it.

There have been occasional sightings of birds carrying lit cigarettes in their beaks. Outdoors, naturally, since birds abide by the smoking ban and never visit pubs. They are usually jackdaws or magpies since these thieving swines will grab anything shiny. If enough of them were to gather in one place they could carry off Vince Cable’s head. Well, it’s not as if he makes much use of it.

I’m sure there have been a few fires caused by these smoking birds, but they will be rare. Not least because the flight home will accelerate the burning of the last bits of tobacco in a discarded cigarette end so that all they have left is a filter and a bit of ash. Once in a while, one could make it back to the nest with the smoke still alight and enjoy it with a glass of Old Crow while laughing at comical cats on the internet.

It’s not impossible for a bird to start a fire in this way but I would contend that it’s likely to be very rare.

It’s not something I would assume when investigating a house fire.

‘We looked everywhere, but the smoking gun was found when we discovered a partially burnt birds’ nest.

If the bird’s nest was the first thing alight, why was it only partially burnt? That would suggest it was at the periphery of the fire, not at the centre of it.

‘Neighbours told us they often saw birds flying in and out of a hole in the roof.
‘We believe that one of the birds picked up a cigarette butt that was still smouldering and dropped it into the nest, causing it to catch fire and set the roof alight.’

That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? A partially burnt pigeon’s nest, extrapolated to a pigeon smoking in bed? Why not blame spontaneous sparrow combustion or a flamethrower attack by enraged neighbouring greenfinches? It looks less like an investigation and more like ‘We have no idea, let’s just blame the smokers’.

So let’s see. The fire started at 10:20 pm. Sunset is around 6 pm (I wasn’t watching tonight but it was fully dark by 6:30). Pigeons are not nocturnal. They tend to be asleep at night unless one of them woke with a full bladder and decided to nip out for a smoke since he was awake anyway.

This does not point to the conclusion drawn by professional investigators at all.

Another point worth making is that if smokers weren’t all banned from every single pub in the land, they would not be discarding cigarettes outdoors. They would be stubbing them out in ashtrays indoors. Away from smokophobes and finger-waggers and away from nicotine-loving pigeons. Birds, as I said, never go to pubs, so all those cigarette ends would be safe.

And the birds can buy their own.

 

 

Return to Sender

There was a council by-election in Nottingham in which Labour won with 1179 votes, Tories came a close second with 1025 votes and UKIP came in third with a respectable 536.

The Lib Dems? They came fifth with 56 votes. Yes, there are 56 people in Nottingham who still believe in this crowd of loonies. A low enough result to stamp ‘Return to Sender’ on the yellow rosette this time. But wait, I’ve missed one out.

Fourth place went to the Bus-Pass Elvis party with 67 votes. Campaigning this time on a promise to legalise brothels and have a 30% discount for pensioners. That, it seems, was more appealing than whatever the Lib Dems had to offer.

Unfortunately, the various incarnations of the Elvis Party also want to ban airguns. So no real improvement then.

Even so… I laughed like Sid James at the story.

What a pity the Tories split the UKIP vote. There could have been a decent result otherwise.

Covert Rationing.

Some time ago, there were reports of a poor olive harvest with a resulting shortage of good quality olive oil. Suddenly, olive oil went from ‘good for you’ to ‘bad for you’ in the eyes of the Food Freaks. You don’t want this, oh no, it’s bad for you, and if you want it there might not be enough for us.

Now we have sugar as the new smoking. It’s addictive, you must have it or you will suffer withdawal symptoms and since it’s what your brain runs on, these symptoms can be pretty severe. Naturally, anti-everything Puritans will suffer no ill effects from a total sugar withdrawal since they are already brain dead anyway.

This new demonisation has a cause. There might not be enough sugar to go around, so naturally the plebs must be scared away from wanting to have any. Demand by plebs will only push up the price, and the plebs won’t riot when they can’t get something they’re scared to have anyway.

The Puritans gave up on salt control very abruptly, didn’t they? There’s no shortage of salt. I bought a 3 kg bag in Poundland the other day and I’ll buy more. They also sell plastic containers to store it in. Tesco sell the same size plastic containers for four times the price. It only has to keep the stuff dry on a garage shelf, it’s not some kind of kitchen fashion statement. A one-pound plastic box does the same as a four-pound plastic box.

I’ll have to lay in a stock of sugar too. There are six pounds of frozen plums waiting for the demijohns to be freed up – although I have noticed, on eBay, plastic fermentation bins that will be far easier to get the first fermentation run out of. There’s a lot of mashed fruit in that first run and demijohns have very narrow necks.

Also, I have been eyeing up those huge plastic bottles of cheap supermarket water. Much cheaper than demijohns and so easy to fit with an airlock… but I’m digressing as usual.

I wonder about this antismoking stuff. I used to think it was based entirely on spite because there is no other clear motivation. There is no advantage to the Dreadful Arnott and her drones if we all stop smoking. It is already banned anywhere it could trouble the delicate nostrils of the girlie-men. Banning it in private cars (and soon homes) does not improve the life of a single whining toadie anywhere. There is no reason for it other than pure spite.

Maybe there is. The level of control over the hive-mind of the drones that was established by the antismokers has proved useful. They believe the crap about second, third and nine hundredth hand smoke, they believe all smokers are stupid (a very useful thing to have them believe, I find). They believe it all.

The same technique formed the Church of Climatology with its army of useful idiots who believe what they are told to believe. It has formed the legions who think that eating any kind of fat will make you fat, who believe that sugar is addictive, that inhaling a wisp of smoke from half a gram of burning leaf is more deadly than sucking on a SUV tailpipe (I’m going to get one of them to prove it, one day, I just need to find one stupid enough), that meat and cheese are deadly, that tax is a good thing, that the amount of time you sit at your desk is a measure of how much work you’re doing… and so on.

On that last point, I have sat at this desk all evening and achieved bugger all. It’s too early to write and I have to sleep in order to work tomorrow. Soon this mad time-frame will end and I can get back to normal hours, spent in the cold darkness of past-midnight when the ideas that come border on the dangerously insane. Luckily for the rest of this town, all I ever do is write about them. It just has to be dark and silent save for the scratching at the windows and the creak of distant doors in an empty house.

A quick digression (it’s worth it) – here are some two-line stories that are worth a few minutes of your time. I didn’t think of any of them, I’m ashamed to admit. I especially liked No. 13.

Five a day. Units per week. Smoke that becomes ever deadlier the more it is diluted. Remove fats, salt and sugar from your diet and you will live forever (you won’t last a month). All utter nonsense and all believed, unquestioningly, by the drones. All because they have been trained by the antismokers to believe absolutely anything at all.

Recently I resisted temptation. One of the Local Shop girls had apparently waved to me as she came out of the swimming pool. I never go there but I pass it every day on the way to work. She was mortified that I hadn’t seen her because it made her look as if she was some kind of loony waving at nobody.

Normally, there is one thing more delightful than wrecking someone’s day, and that is wrecking their entire lives. For the lulz. But, I quite like this girl so I didn’t say what was in my mind. “Swimming pool? You go in there? It’s just a load of people sharing a bath full of each others’ filth.”

She’s young and the young are thoroughly indoctrinated. Their minds can now be turned with just a few well chosen words. It would have been cruel. But funny.

If only she had been an antismoker. I’d have listed the bacteria in the water and described the growths in the filters. She’d never have bathed again and could have become a Green.

I think I’m going soft in my old age, you know.

The conditioning of the antismoking mindset has a purpose. You want to raise the chocolate ration from 35g to 25g and have them rejoice? You can now do that. They will not notice.

There is no need to publicise shortages any more. All you need do is tell the drones it’s as bad as smoking and they won’t want any. Then the price won’t go up.

The smart ones stock up from the pound shops, before the supermarkets notice the ‘shortage’ stories among the hype of the ‘bad for you’ stories.

Poundland currently have 1.5 kg of sugar for a pound. And the plastic containers to keep it in. I’ll be in there tomorrow. No rush, the drones won’t touch it.

 

Everyone knows your secret disease.

One more tonight and then I must heed the call of sleep. It seems unnatural to be asleep before midnight but as I said earlier it shouldn’t be for much longer. Excuse typos, eyes are now pointing in different directions and focusing on things that are not there.  This is the body’s revenge for not letting it sleep enough and it’s my body so it’s naturally vindictive and delights in cruelty.

This one could have waited until tomorrow but it’s important and makes a mockery of all this ‘oh, we won’t share your NHS records with all and sundry then’ claim.

They already have.

Tipped by email (I’m assuming the tipper wants to remain un-named) along with another link.

If you are in the records of England’s NHS, your medical records are now on Google and can be hacked into by anyone in the world. All that crap about opting out was a total waste of time. ASH can find all the smokers with a few keystrokes, the antifat brigade can find the overweight, the antidrinkers can find all the boozers… and no anonymity has been applied at all. They can find you.

So. Next election. Who are you going to vote for? Because they are all either entirely incompetent or entirely malicious. All of them.

One day soon we will have another King Charles. Correlation, causation, coincidence?

You have to wonder sometimes.

 

Safe as Milk

Tipped by Alcantara, it seems that eating milk and cheese produces a death rate and cancer rate that is pretty much the same as that attributed to smoking.

So, maybe it wasn’t smoking doing it after all? Hands up who thinks that that is what they concluded. If your hand is up, you’re an idiot.

They also failed to notice the corollary. If cheese is as dangerous as smoking then smoking is no more dangerous than cheese. Take one step more and smoking is as safe as milk. We know a song about that, don’t we? I do, and now you will too.

Coincidentally, the Captain’s first line here is ‘Cigarette died when I washed my face’.

The last line is ‘I may be hungry but I sure ain’t weird’ which is, perhaps, a little more questionable in his case.

Sometimes, real life wins.

Early posts tonight. My body insisted this morning that 2:30 am does not count as an ‘early night’ and made threats that I must heed. Still, there are signs that there will be a stabilisation of working hours soon – and I’ll be back to afternoon starts, even later than before. I’ll work later in the evening but that’s okay, the nocturnal life suits me fine.

At night is when I write best. Considering the usual subject matter I suppose that’s hardly surprising. It’s hard to write about madness and demons when the sun is shining and the birds are tweeting their hateful joy all over the place. I still put out food for them because I like birds, but even so, the day-birds are not helpful in the writing. The strange and mournful calls of the night-birds are much better for setting the mood.

Anyway, I have many aborted short stories on file. The ones that started out promising but really didn’t have anywhere to go. No decent ending, or at least no decent and credible way to arrive at that ending. They languish until an idea pops up that fits those random paragraphs.

One such tale involved a rich idiot who thought it awfully cool to buy ice cores from Antarctica and use ice that was thousands of years old to cool his gin. What he didn’t realise was that, frozen in that ice, was a virus long extinct. A virus that infected the tiny mammals that lived along with the dinosaurs. A virus capable of infecting humans and the human immune system had never seen anything like it.

The story stalled on two points. First, I couldn’t decide what the virus would do (not zombies, I have another virus story for that) and second, could a virus still be viable after all that time? Was it believable?

The first point is not solved. It can’t just be a horrible death. It has to do more.

The second point though, ah now there I wish I had persevered. I could have taken calls of ‘No virus could survive that long’ on the chin and just waited.

The virus they found does not infect humans but it has survived 30,000 years in ice. Naturally, they scare people with ‘global warming will release more viruses’ which is tripe, intended only to get them eternal funding. That part is possibly the most annoying.

It is not the job of science to go around scaring people.

That’s the writer’s job.