Too big for a woman

Get your minds out of the gutter. This is about phones.

Remember the first Yuppie mobile phones? A brick with an aerial sticking out that would cost six month’s income for the average worker. Everyone laughed at the Poserphones – who the hell needs to be contactable when out of the office? It was a gimmick.

Then they got cheaper and smaller and eventually pocket sized. I had (might still have, somewhere) a Motorola Razr flip phone that is tiny. It did the job. It had games but the golf game graphics were so slow to update it was actually unusable.

I got my first one when a pheasant hit my windscreen. Quiet, dead straight country road, full daylight with clear vision ahead, travelling along at a quite reasonable and almost legal speed, a pheasant decided to cross the road ahead of me.

It saw me and stopped. Took a few steps one way, then the other way, finally its pea brain said ‘fly’ just a second too late. It smashed the windscreen.

Well, okay, the insurance covers that so the windscreen repair cost me nothing. While in town though, waiting for the garage to fit a new one, I picked up a mobile phone. It cost about £60, PAYG, primitive but serviceable. I only bought it in case the next collision took me off the road in the middle of nowhere. I rarely used it and gave very few people the number.

That last part is still true. I have a very short contact list in my mobile phone. A couple of them are work ones and they can be a pain on holiday but I rarely bother with holidays anyway. I’m lucky enough to live in a place many people would think of as an ideal holiday destination as long as you like finding skulls in trees and total darkeness when there’s no moon. Also, self-employment means your working hours are when you’re awake. Stop working and nobody is paying you.

Phones got smaller and cheaper… then started to get bigger and more expensive again. And the batteries didn’t last as long because of all the weird shit they can do.

I used to have a Hudl tablet computer. It died, as they all do eventually. I replaced it with an Ibowin Android machine and then another after I stepped on the first one. They cost around £50. Enough to make you swear when you break it but not enough to make you think your financial world has ended.

I do not buy Apple devices. Never have and never will. This is not really about the ridiculous prices they charge, it is much more to do with their declaration that the warranty was invalid for smokers in case a molecule of nicotine in the returned (full of evil and toxic rare metals) gadget killed their entire servicing staff.

They may have withdrawn this paranoid nonsense by now. I do not care. The fact they were so stupid as to put it out in the first place means I can have no faith in their ability to do anything sensible at all. At the prices they charge I expect to see intelligence at every level of the company. They have proved, to me, that this is not so. They employ idiots. I’m not paying their prices to support idiots.

The Ibowin thing I bought runs Android. It’s not fantastic but it does what I want to do and also things I don’t want to do.

It has a slot for extra memory which I instantly filled. Everything important goes on to the SD card in case this one dies. I can then just port it elsewhere.

It also has two SIM card slots. Two. I had to get a £1 SIM just to shut it up because it bleated about having no SIM whenever I turned it on. It’s a phone too! This is as big as an iPad and it’s a dual SIM phone. I am not holding this thing to my face to have a conversation. It would be like talking to an ironing board and people have been sectioned for less.

So, for phone calls I have a Fusion Android phone. It’s bigger than some phones but easily manageable. I picked one I could handle. It’s not a hard thing to do and Android phones are a fraction of the cost of Apple ones.

I had a Windows phone for a while. It didn’t die. Apps were no longer being updated for it and things stopped working, which forced the change. Pity. I liked that one.

Now we have feminists moaning that the new Apple phone is too big for girlie hands.

Well don’t fucking buy it then.

I could use the Ibowin tablet as a phone. A dual SIM phone. I’m not going to because it’s just silly. I’ll use the Fusion phone as a phone.

And you know what? Buying both of them cost about £100.

Imagine what you could do with the money left over from not buying the Apple gadget.

I’m going to spend it on trains and whisky.

Fat or sugar. Make your choice.

There is a current spat on Twitter about the low-carbohydrate vs low-fat diets. Which one is better for weight loss?

Neither.

Also… both.

Anything can make you fat. I have met the occasional fat vegetarian. I was once pretty fat because of whisky. Really. There are around 1800 calories in a bottle of whisky so a daily bottle plus all the food plus the fact that, back then, I spent most of my time in front of a computer, made me into a stunt double for Mr. Blobby. Some nights I became less intelligible than him…

I cut down a lot on the whisky, landed a job as a janitor (times were very, very hard). Very physical working 6 to 8 hours a day, 6, sometimes 7 days a week – the weight simply vanished. I made no changes at all to my actual food intake. It was the same ‘unhealthy crap’ I always ate and still do. Curries, pizza, lemon chicken, anything I can culturally appropriate, I’ll eat it. Except rat on a stick. Everyone has a limit. I’d try it once though.

It’s really simple (as long as we are talking solely in terms of weight loss and ignoring essential amino acids, vitamins etc). Calories in, calories used. If you take in more fuel than you use, your body will store the excess. If you use more fuel than you take in, your body will use its stored excess to make up the difference.

What should you eat to lose weight? It does not matter. Eat what you like but don’t eat more than you need. Eat less than you need and you will lose weight.

Do remember to stop dieting at some point though. Too thin is actually more dangerous than too fat. Having a little bit of reserve is always a good thing – you never know when you might need that little bit of extra energy reserve. Chubby Venezuelans will attest to this. So will all the currently-villified British fatties if Corbyn gets in.

There is much more to it than weight, of course. Healthy eating does not simply consist of calories. The above considers body weight in isolation, it does not consider what those calories consist of.

Sugar, the naked truth – you don’t need any, other than what’s already in the food. Now before you get all outraged, hear me out. I don’t need to smoke, I don’t need to drink whisky. In fact I know that those things are likely to be bad for me one day. I do them because I like them. I know the risks and accept them because to me, the enjoyment outweighs the risks. Okay I don’t drink as much as I used to by any means but I do still like my whisky. One of the advantages of reduced whisky intake is that I don’t need the swill at the bottom end of the market. I now have smaller amounts of the good stuff.

I like sugar too. I will not buy aspartame sweetened things because I know, from personal experience over many experiments, that aspartame will make the world drop out of my bottom. My guts don’t like it at all.

Then there are the energy drinks, or ‘wakey water’ as I call them. I have, again, restricted my intake to one or maybe two a day and never after midnight. But I still like them. Actually I prefer most of the cheaper ones to the full-fat Red Bull but that’s a matter of personal taste and also wallet strain. One for about £1.50 compared to a pack of six for £1.50, it’s not a heavy decision for a one-time homeless guy in Scotland.

As I said before, calorie-free ‘energy’ drinks are a joke. If you drink those and believe they give you energy you are insane. And probably awake and tired.

We use sugar because we like it. Yes, too much is bad for you but too much of anything is bad. The dose makes the poison – even too much water will kill you. It will kill you faster, too. We do not, however, need raw sugar in the same way that we need water. In an internal sugar shortage, your body can make the sugar it needs from fatty acids produced by bacteria in the gut, and even from protein. There is also sugar in a lot of foods anyway, especially plant foods. Your body can get all the sugar it needs from a salad but, well, salad… chocolate… no contest really.

Oh I eat salad sometimes. With salt, because everything is better with salt.

That’s another issue. The healthists insist we have a daily salt allowance. I do not accept any kind of ‘allowance’ because I’ve always been a rebellious little goblin and always will be. I live by my own rules and often break those too.

The salt thing is bollocks on many levels. If you have a job that involves a lot of physical work you will sweat a lot. If, like me, you really don’t like hot weather because it makes you sweat to the point where you have to replace your eyebrows with rain gutters: If you labour day in, day out at heavy lifting… you lose salt as well as water in that sweat.

If your job involves sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office then you don’t need to sweat much. If you are one of those Satanic hybrids who like hot weather and don’t feel like you’re melting whenever the sun hits you then you probably don’t sweat as much as those of us from normal, cold places. So you don’t lose salt and water so quickly.

A one size fits all approach is horrifyingly wrong. In anything, if it comes to it. I eat a lot of salt. I’ve no idea how far over the ‘allowance’ I am because I don’t care enough to measure it. I carry little salt packs from takeaways with me everywhere and I have been known to just open one of those packs and eat the contents as raw salt. On very hot days, usually.

Your body regulates its salt/water balance. Too much salt and your urine is salty. Too little salt and you die of hyponatremia. It takes a hell of a lot of salt intake to wreck that balance, and you’ll know if you’re heading that way. Your kidneys will tell you with pain.

It doesn’t take very long to die if you have too little.

There is no point drinking water on hot days if you’re not also taking in some salt. You lose water and salt in sweat, you have to replace both, not one, or your body will simply piss out the water to keep them in balance. Modern medicine makes no allowance for this, nor for differences between individuals. Modern medicine uses the British Standard Human as their model and if you don’t fit the manual, well tough. They will let you die.

It used to be enough to have a bag of peanuts or crisps to get plenty of salt. I have, in recent years, had to add salt to peanuts and crisps when I eat them because it’s now been reduced to silly levels. Like the calorie-free energy drinks, we now have ‘ready salted’ crisps to add to our list of false advertising. I remember when crisps were unsalted but came with a litle blue twisted bag of salt to add as much as you wanted. Sometimes a pack had two bags of salt by mistake. I loved getting those.

Let’s talk about fat.

You do not get fat from eating fat, unless you are eating human fat. Or you are eating too much fat. Your fat is not the same as cow fat or pig fat or sheep fat or nut fat. Yes, bags of nuts now have a ‘high fat’ warning. Sigh. They are seeds. The plant has to start growing underground, in the dark. It has to have energy reserves in the form of fats and starches until it can get its leaves into the light and start making its own.

Seeds are full of stored energy. That’s why we eat them.

In fact seeds – cereals, grains – are so full of stored energy that you can get very fat indeed eating those things. Even if you never eat any meat based fat at all.

When you eat a bag of nuts or cereal or rains you are not eating pure carbohydrate. You are also eating some protein and a lot of plant fats. So don’t tell me you are ‘avoiding fat’ by eating those things. You are avoiding certain types of fat by eating loads of another type.

In the end it doesn’t matter. Any fat you eat is broken down by your cells and if it doesn’t need to be used, it is reassembled, along with any excess carbohydrate, into human fat and then stored. Fat does not make you fat. Carbohydrate does not make you fat. Taking in more calories than you use is what makes you fat.

There’s a lot more – there’s enough for a series of lectures in this topic!

Some vitamins are fat soluble and you will not get them at all on a fat free diet. They only exist in the fat. They are insoluble in water. Vitamin K – ever tried to make a bacterial growth media where that was an essential ingredient? It just sits on top in a little blob.

So much more, but this is just a little backwater blog and putting whole lectures up feels somewhat futile.

Protein is worth a mention. Some years ago, the Atkins diet was all the rage. No carbs, just protein. Everyone on it was instantly recognisable because they had acetone breath. Their bodies broke the protein to make sugar and dumped the excess parts as nitrates and acetone. Sure, you can live like that but if your only goal is weight loss it’s pointless. All it does is make you smell like cleaning fluid.

All you need for weight loss is to take in fewer calories than you use. That is all there is to it. There is nothing more complex involved and it will save you money, not cost you money. You spend less on food. Alternatively you can spend more to have someone else to tell you to spend less on food. Can you see how silly that sounds?

Diets are expensive. You pay people to tell you to spend less money on food. You pay more than you save. Does anyone see the scam in this?

Look, it’s really simple.

Are you happy with your health on your curent diet (ignore weight)? No? See a dietician. A proper, quialified one. Yes? Your diet is fine.

Are you feeling like you have to lose weight but answered ‘yes’ to the first question? Just eat less and/or exercise more.

Are you feeling like eating a cake of yourself and don’t give a shit? Good. Carry on.

All of those are correct answers. If you want to lose weight, take in less than you use. If you are feeling bad, and you think it’s because of what you eat, see a dietician. If you are happy as you are, carry on.

Modern medicine will never get it.

So the diet scammers have an open field for profit, when losing weight should, by any definition of logic, cost less than whatever you spend on food now.

You can change your life and body without outside help.It does not depend on how much you want to spend.

It only depends on how much you care about it.

Boycott Suicide

It’s all the rage now. Boycott this or that because they are connected, sometimes tenuously, with something or someone who is the current focus of today’s Two Minute Hate.

I’ve been feeling a bit left out. Everyone is boycotting things I’ve never bought anyway so I can’t join in.

Not that I would anyway. I can’t be bothered with boycotts, other than personal ones. The ones where I get shitty service in a business and simply go elsewhere. I’ve never demanded anyone else boycott that business. Maybe I was the only one to get shitty service. Maybe most people are happy with shitty service. I strike them off my list of shopping places and move on. Life is too short to get involved in organised boycotts and silly vendettas.

I’m not talking about the supposed ‘boycotts’ of reduced-sugar fizzy pop or breakfast cereals. People have stopped buying them because the new taste is awful, not because of any organised boycott.

I have also not boycotted pubs. I rarely visit since the smoking ban but it’s not a boycott. I just don’t feel welcome in them any more. It’s no longer an enjoyable experience so I don’t go there.

This has been made worse by the Spiteful Nannying Puritans of the Scottish government and their recent lowering of the alcohol limit for driving to where one beer puts you over the limit. The local pub is two miles away. I could take a 40-minute walk to a place I can’t smoke with my drink, or drive to a pub in which I can now neither smoke nor drink. What would be the point? The same drive takes me to Local Shop where I can buy a bottle of whisky, drive home, and then drink and smoke indoors in comfort.

The real boycotts are coming from howling Twatter/Farcebok mobs. None of them work and most seem to have the opposite effect to that intended. A recent one involved an American burger takeaway called ‘In and Out’ or some such. Sounds more like a brothel name to me but we don’t have that company in the UK so I couldn’t have boycotted them anyway. Apparently business has boomed since they got all that free Twitter advertising. They are now out of the shadow of MacDonald’s and the other really big franchises. Boycott? They’re lovin’ it.

I can’t remember what that boycott was about. It was, most likely, something very trivial. They usually are.

There was a call to boycott Amazon some time ago. Well I’m not going to do that. They sell Leg Iron Books! Boycott my biggest outlet? That would be as much of a commercial suicide as, say, Lucozade selling energy drinks in which they have reduced the sugar – the primary source of energy in the drink. It would be a stupid thing to do.

Incidentally, I have noticed some so called ‘energy’ drinks describing themselves as such, then boasting that the can of chemical fizz is sugar free and calorie free. So there is no energy in there at all. It’s just chemical fizz with caffeine. It’ll keep you awake and tired. I fail to see the advantage in this.

Back to Amazon. I live about 15 miles from the nearest town that’s big enough to have an Aldi and Tesco. Two miles away is Local Shop and it’s actually called that. Prices in there are not sky high. They are quite reasonable. Also they have cut price whisky sometimes and I’ve become quite partial to a drop of Glen Keith whenever they have it at £20 instead of £30. It’s one of the few places I’ve seen Glen Garioch on the shelves too. They don’t have a big range… of anything. It’s a small shop. You can’t really stock up your kitchen there without emptying their shelves.

Actually, as long as the bridge is out, Local Shop is 8 miles away along single track farm roads at harvest time, which is very inconvenient as it’s also the post office.

So if I need something that’s not stocked by Aldi or Tesco, I can drive all the way to Aberdeen (nightmare!) or I can bring up Amazon on the browser, click ‘buy’ and it’s delivered to my door. I don’t care what they’ve done to upset the perpetually offended. I am not boycotting them.

The most recent boycott involves some football bloke with big hair called Colin Kapplenapple or something like that. I wasn’t really paying attention. Seems he got fired from football for being useless and a pain in the arse, and lots of Americans despise him. So Nike, the sports mob, have taken him on to advertise shoes. Now, lots of Americans want to boycott Nike. I may be a bit sketchy on the details because I don’t actually give a shit. I don’t know anything about American football (it’s a bit like rugby for girls, I think), I’ve never bought anything by Nike and I have no interest in any sport that involves no sharp objects.

The bit that got my attention was all the idiots on Twitter videoing themselves burning their Nike shoes. What is that about? You do not hurt a shoe company by buying shoes from them and then burning the shoes. You still have no bloody shoes, have you? So now you have to go and buy more shoes. The shoe company doesn’t care. They have the money you gave them for the shoes. So you burned the shoes. You cannot cost them a sale by reselling yours.

If you don’t want your Nike shoes any more, give them to the homeless. They don’t care about fashion or politics or boycotts. Trust me on that, I’ve been there. You would wear Lady Gaga’s goat-hoof shoes if that was all you had.

I wonder if I can convince these maniacs to burn books. Get them to buy all the books I publish and burn them all. That would be fantastic. I’d get paid, the authors would get paid, and those books won’t be floating around the second hand shops cutting down sales of new ones.

The best part is they are all print on demand. Keep buying them and we keep printing them. And getting paid.

We make more per sale on the eBooks. Are there people stupid enough to buy fifty copies of an eBook and then burn their Kindle? There has to be at least one out there.

The search begins.

Here comes chaos

Still working on the Dutch book, slow going due to hot weather that has made it hard to concentrate and almost driven me nocturnal, a couple of nights off the computer due to thunderstorms that could have wiped out whatever I did, plus battling two wasp nests and figuring out how to use a ride on mower that didn’t come with a manual. The blog may stay a bit sparse for a while.

I have been trying to keep up with the news without reading too much of the actual news. It’s not easy, the main news has descended into silliness and every online source has a political bias in one direction or the other. There is no longer any such thing as an impartial and unbiased news source and I’m beginning to wonder if there ever was.

Basically, it’s utter chaos. It’s not going to get better. You can console yourself with the thought that it cannot get worse if you like. You’ll be wrong. It can and it will. A lot worse.

In the USA they have the Trump War. For or against. Nothing in between. Looking in as a disinterested observer, he seems to be doing what he said he would do. Is that bad? Our politicians don’t do that. We vote them in on promises they make but they long ago proved in court that mainfesto promises are not legally binding. So once in, they ditch the lot and do as they damn well please and we can do nothing about it.

Trump is not a politician. He’s also rich to a level I dream of. You can’t buy him.

You know, if I was as rich as Trump or Soros or Gates or any of them, I would have no interest in meddling with the world. I’d buy an island with its own power generation (wouldn’t need much, there won’t be many people there) and the rest of the planet can fuck off into the depths of absurdity. I’d spend it all setting up a place that doesn’t need money.

I don’t want to impose some kind of New World Order. I don’t want to run anyone else’s life. I have my own (possibly short, considering my favourite hobbies of whisky, fried food and tobacco) life to live and I am not going to waste my time managing yours. Your life is your job, not mine.

Make me a billionaire and I’ll vanish. I have wondered how many of them have done exactly that and who now roll their eyes at the Soros thing wasting his declining years trying to herd cats.

Yet these billionaires, people with bank accounts I couldn’t empty if I bought the top shelf single malts daily, want more money. What the hell for? Money isn’t a real thing. It’s numbers on a screen. Everyone is mortal, there is only so much meaningless crap on eBay you can fill rooms with. Why would you die with billions of unreal money in your account? It’s stupid. You have one go at this life. One. You really want to use it to create ephemera?

‘Oh it’s for the cheeldren’. Yeah, like the world doesn’t have enough spoilt little bastards already. Just teach your kids to lounge about doing fuck all and wait for Daddy’s money to let them continue doing nothing useful for the rest of their lives. They can’t even dress themselves. You really want to produce kids so utterly useless? Okay. Go ahead. Do that.

But when it all falls down, and it will, who will dress them then? You have raised rich kids who expect everything done for them. What will they do when a solar flare wipes out their computerised bank account? Your DNA is gone, boyo. Your legacy is ended. Bye-bye, useless DNA.

Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to teach your kids how to hunt and fish and grow veggies and actually survive without having a whole load of people do it for them? But hey, your kids, your choice. Make them useless if you want to.

Trump isn’t immune here. He is doing what he said he would do, yes. He is actually doing what his voters wanted, yes. I appreciate that, it is something the UK longs for in the wasters we keep electing.  But I bet his kids can’t set a snare or tell one wild berry from another. They ‘have people’ to do that. What will they do when it falls down?

They’ll starve. Probably while waiting for someone to dress them.

See, the whole Soros idea cannot work. It’s based on money, which doesn’t exist. Since the introduction of fractional reserve banking, only about 10% or less of money is in the real world. The rest is just numbers on a screen. Chasing money is chasing zephyrs in the wind. Catch it and you hold on to nothing real.

And still we hear of ‘redistribution of wealth’ which shares out the imaginary equally. Get real. This does not matter. I’ve lived most of my life with no money and I’m still here. Money is not life and life is not money.

I have been to where I had a five figure bank account. I have also been, more than once,  to the bottom of the overdraft, where there is no more to take. I didn’t die. I adapted. At the very bottom I did some things I’m not proud of and associated with people most of you would rightly call the police on but I’m still here. Could any of those billionaire kids do that? I seriously doubt it.

We now have the BBC telling us that gender is not defined at birth. Just because your child has a plug or a socket means nothing, it does not define male or female connections, which is probably why Maplin died.

Recent reports state that more and more American teenagers identify as LGBT. They aren’t really, well apart from the small percentage who actually are. Am I sure? Another report states that teenage lesbians are getting pregnant at a higher rate than straight ones. Seems these ‘lesbians’ have not read the manual.

The kids have a world where they can self-identify any way they like. They can identify as a potted plant and nobody is allowed to deny it. Ridiculous pronouns abound and in some places you can be fired or even arrested as a ‘hate criminal’ for forgetting who wants to be addressed as xe, xir, zimbo or diddly-binky-boo.

This is indulging in a toddler’s fantasy world. Worse, it is enforcing that world on the decreasing number of actual grown-ups. Sure, identify as whoever you like. Especially teenagers. Was there ever a teenager who didn’t want to be someone else? We all wanted to be rock stars or actors or demolition experts when I was a teenager. If we had had the option to self-define as a biologically impossible gender, hell yes we’d have tried that.

But the adults would not have indulged us. They might have smiled and shaken their heads, some might have tried to talk some sense into us, but not one of them would have forced anyone else to accept our new identity as a triple-penised female Martian warrior badger. There certainly would never have been a law demanding such acceptance.

Making it illegal to deny the reality of toddler fantasies is another step in infantilising the population. It also helps with the eradication of gender and the ushering in of sexless drones. Babies are increasingly being called ‘theybies’ so as to avoid gender bias – but ‘baby’ is a word with no gender already. Making up a new word serves only to dehumanise the baby and break the parent/baby bond. It also prepares the parent to accept gender reassignment surgery for their child, thus rendering them permanently infertile. Did anyone mention ‘population reduction’ recently?

All these groups will fragment the once cohesive LGBT movement. It’s already started. ‘Trans’ men who identify as lesbians to get access to women are at war with actual lesbians because actual lesbians don’t want to sleep with someone who has a penis. Trans men who have transitioned are well on the way to making it a hate crime for any man to refuse to sleep with them.

It’s not all, not by any means. But, as with every such case, nobody hears from the quiet ones.

The LGBT movement is being destroyed by the addition of more and more bizarre groups. Really. Women who like women and men who like men, those who like both and even those (genuine cases are very rare) who feel very strongly that they are in the wrong body – whether you agree with their lifestyles or not – were still within the realm of male and female genders. Suddenly, gender is a social construct and you can identify as female today, male tomorrow, or pick from a plethora of options for the weekend.

So now you have 50 shades of sexual definition and none of them talk to the others. I do not care. My granddaughter is going to be brought up as a girl with trains and slingshots and archery and potato growing and car maintenance and all the other things a girl needs to know.

She will also be warned about rape gangs. Oh it’s not just Muslim. That is only Level One.

This goes much deeper. The Muslim gangs are being pulled in because they got caught. The names revealed in those investigations have been quietly pushed down. Have you never wondered why the trials are so secret? It’s a new thing, all those high profile people who were accused were subjected to trial by newspaper immediately after being arrested.

More and more ex-police are coming out now. The scale of peado protection is becoming clear. Some big names are named. I will not name the names I’ve heard because I could never afford the lawsuits and I don’t personally have access to the evidence. But they are big names.

Cyril Smith wasn’t named until after he died. The evidence against him was uncontestable but never used while he lived. Quite how that flesh planet managed to find his reproductive organ under his bouncy-castle frame I’ll never know. Perhaps it was a Victorian-style thing – send a small boy in there with a lantern and tell him what to do when he gets there.

The raid on Cliff Richard’s house was filmed. He was not guilty but there was no secrecy around his trial. His was a show trial. ‘We can get you anytime we want’. Let’s face it, if a non-celeb gets that treatment, good luck finding a job afterwards. That kind of mud sticks.

Jimmy Savile was a distraction. I saw plenty of evidence that he was a creepy old man who liked young girls but none that he liked them under legal age. The late Anna Raccoon did a fine job of debunking many of the more bizarre claims. Again, nothing happened until he died. But this time it was so that he could not defend himself.

The paedo reporting shutdown wasn’t just political correctness. That was a useful tool but those using it were not purely Muslim. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) their Muslim rape gang cover, and one of their supply chains, went way too far and had to be reined in.

‘For the children’ rings a little hollow, doesn’t it? When thousands of little girls are gang raped while the government puts in anti-porn internet controls.

Of course, we all know what those controls were really for. It’s now in the open. They want to stop all criticism of politicians. They want to make it illegal. They want to call political opponents ‘trolls’ and ban them from taking public office. And this is the Tories! Big Sister is watching you. Or Big Brother. These days you can define the gender of your own slave master.

The internet-control desire is enhanced by Brexit of course. It can’t be allowed to happen. Other countries might get ideas. The rise of ‘far right’ (as in, the EU doesn’t like them) groups is increasing all through the EU because of their insane insistence on importing more and more benefit scroungers. Why? Because they will vote for free stuff and keep those elites in power. What the elites have not considered is this: they’ll be in power over a non-working benefit-fed population. Who’s going to pay for it? Ask Venezuela.

Except… Venezuela has working people. The EU won’t have any. So the elite will have nobody to sponge off and Juncker will have to learn homebrew very quickly.

The New World Order will have a few people with all the money. But having killed off anyone who produces anything, what will their money buy? Faced with an imported violent benefit class, what will they do? Send in the army? Oh they can pay them but then… what do the army do with money when nobody is making anything?

It is going to fall apart. It is going to be war. It is going to be very nasty indeed because there is no middle ground on any of those issues any more. No room for compromise. No purpose in discussion. The time for talking is over.

When the dust clears, the sun will rise on ruins.

Ban the Banned

Suzi Quatro could have done something brilliant with this title.

Our Ruddy Home Secretary has decided to ban ‘zombie knives’. Take a look at what she wants to ban.

Three throwing knives, useless in unpracticed hands. They are fixed blade so are already illegal to cary. Already banned.

Some stupidly thin wobbly-edged blade that you could probaby bend in half with your hands. Still, it’s long and half-sharp and illegal to carry in public. Already banned.

An axe shaped so as to be pretty much useless and again, too thin to be practical. Also illegal to carry in public anyway, as are all axes unless you’re off to chop some wood. Already banned.

A lurid green version of a liner-lock knife. Used to be common but it’s now illegal to have a lock knife in public. Already banned.

Finally, at the bottom, some kind of fishing implement I think. It has no purpose other than slashing and is the most non-excusable offensive weapon of the lot. Even before all the other things were banned, I’d bet you’d have been arrested for having that. Anyway, it’s definitely already banned.

Look again at those ‘weapons’. The throwing knives are dangerous if you can use them. The liner-lock is dangerous in the wrong hands. The fishing thing is an obvious weapon. It has no other use. Except maybe for clearing weeds from between patio slabs but it doesn’t look like it would be very good at that. A crack hoe would do a better job.

The axe is a useless toy. It’s far too thin and light for any practical application and even as a weapon it’s not going to do what a cheap splitting or garden cutting axe would do. As for the ‘sword’, come at me with that and I’ll beat you with a broom. It’s pressed steel sheet. That’s why you can buy these things for under £10. They are crap. Sharpened at the front half only and it won’t hold an edge. It’s cheap soft steel. The sharpened bit has non-sharp notches cut into it for no reason at all. It is all just for show. I wouldn’t accept one as a gift, never mind buy it. If gang members are really bragging they have these, they are a laughing stock.

These ‘zombie weapons’ are ornamental toys. I have some ornamental swords that look really impressive but if you try to use them in a real fight, the blade is likely to come off the handle. You grab one of those. I’ll grab the kitchen chopping knives. I will win.

Nobody, as far as I can see in the news, has ever used one of these toys in a real attack. Nevertheless, carrying any of them in public is already illegal and frankly, why would you? Aside from the lock knife, none of them have any practical use and none of them are any use in self defence either. The whole ‘zombie knife’ shit is just an excuse to disarm us more.

On June 1, 2018, footage emerged of a cyclist using a zombie knife to try and smash the window of a car in an apparent road rage row.

That was not a ‘zombie knife’. That was a real and very dangerous big knife. What they propose to ban has nothing to do with that already fucking illegal massive knife. It’s just an excuse.

A long list of dangerous weapons that glamorise violence will also be included in the total ban, putting them on the same legal footing as unlicensed firearms.
They include sword sticks, butterfly knives and blowpipes, as well as a range of martial arts weapons such as deathstars and handclaws.

Sword sticks and butterfly knives have been banned in the UK for many years. I used to use a site called Blades-UK which dropped those from its listings 20 or more years ago. Because they were no longer legal to sell. Yeah. Already banned. Pity I missed out, I’d have liked a butterfly knife.

Deathstars and handclaws come under ‘fixed blade knives’ and are already illegal. I know nothing of blowpipes but I bet they aren’t hard to make.

Our Ruddy Home Secretary wants to make it illegal to have anything sharp at home, whether you take it on the street or not.

I mean, come on. I have a scythe. In this garden, in summer, I need it. It has a grass blade and a ditch blade for the wooded parts. I have oilstones and whetstones and a peening kit. Grinding wheels and files. I have the means to make a tyre iron sharp. And we are to be scared of lurid green toys?

What this country needs is not more bans.

What this country needs is a government that is not entirely populated by idiots.

Yeah. Not happening, is it?

Tobacco, the wonder plant

As suggested by Smoking Scot in comments, here is Nisakiman’s elegant idea for a ‘smokers welcome here’ image:

It comes from an idea a long time ago which I seem to recall was started by either Frank Davis or Junican. I’d like to be more specific but I’m afraid I was very, very drunk at the time. I’d actually written two of the stories in the latest Underdog Anthology around that time and entirely forgotten about them… yeah, pretty drunk.

Tobacco is currently villified by the Righteous and their indoctinated dancing clowns of hate but the original inhabitants of America (is that the latest PC term? Please forgive me for not caring) knew a lot more about this plant. They used it for more than just a sly puff at the back of the wigwam sheds.

Modern science has been gradually catching up. Well, the discovery of vitamin B3, Niacin, aka nicotinic acid, and its derivation from nicotine happened a long time ago. There is much more though.

Tipped by Sam in email – Tobacco flowers have a yeast-killer in them.

I had seen this go by on Twitter along with another claim that tobacco may have anti-cancer properties (now there’s a twist, eh?) but no antismoker worth their bile would accept a cancer treatment that came from the tobacco plant, naturally.

This yeast-killing antibiotic (the term is usually used to mean an antibacterial in my world but we’ll let that slide) is vey interesting. It works on Candida albicans, a ‘mostly harmless’ yeast that can still cause thrush and other, not necessarily fatal but really annoying infections. I wonder if it works on other yeast/fungi? Athlete’s foot is really hard to permanently dispose of. Ringworm is an evil fucker and there is speculation (not proof) that seborrhaic dermatitis has a yeast as a causative agent. They are all hard or impossible to cure at  the moment. Should we rub some tobacco flowers on it and see?

The article talks about the ornamental versions of Nicotiana but you know they have to be so, so careful these days. Ornamental tobacco is no use for smoking but as with all these domesticated things it’s a toned down, weaker version of the wild one that has to survive with no watering or plant food or weeding or pest control.

I’m betting real tobacco flowers are way more effective than the domesticated, pampered ones. These plants are quite capable of looking after themselves. In many ways.

Tobacco has multiple medicinal properties. Who knew? Pretty much everyone before the white man’s Puritan horde decided they didn’t like it. Hating tobacco is racist now. There’s one to have fun with.

I look forward to the first tales of antismokers refusing niacin, the new anttfungals and the new anticancer drugs because they come from tobacco. You can watch them suffer and die while watching me not care.

They have no sympathy for me. Expect none in return.

Gammon, Amazon and a favour

It seems I am now a ‘gammon’, a middle aged straight white man who voted ‘leave’. At least I think that’s the definition.

It’s a sort of insult, you see. Not a particularly good one, there are far, far worse things I could be called and over the years I have indeed been called most of them. ‘Gammon’ does not leave me feeling insulted. It leaves me feeling perplexed.

I mean, If you’re going for meat-based insults surely ‘tripe’ is a better option? Pale, rubbery and bland. Or perhaps ‘chitterlings’. The intestinal offal that really, nobody wants to eat unless they absolutely have to. The latter has the added advantage that most of today’s youth have no idea what ‘chitterlings’ are, so you could greet them with ‘How are you, my little chitterlings?’ for days before one of them gets curious enough to look it up.

But.. gammon? I’m being compared to posh ham? Why not go the whole way and call me sirloin or T-bone? Those would be just as perplexing if used as insults. These SJWs have relied on the old ‘racist-Nazi-bigot’ mantra for a very long time, and this new ‘insult’ goes a long way to explaining why.

They clearly have no imagination. The little light that goes on above their heads when they have an idea must be like illuminating a cathedral with a five watt filament bulb.

Call me ‘gammon’ to my face and I will not be in the least bit insulted. I’m not going to call you racist or ageist or pork-product-ist. I am going to laugh and compare you to a recently defaecated tapeworm segment, in terms of both appearance and intelligence. I might respond by comparing you, unfavourably, to a suppurating pustule or to the back-end consequence of feeding an elephant a massive amount of Vindaloo.

Or I might just call you ‘lamb chop’, just so you can be as baffled as I am.

There is much hoo-ha on Twitter about this. One commenter even refers to it as the ‘G-word’. Yes, it’s already verboten! Brilliant! We can now go into Tesco and ask if they have any of the G-word ham. When they finally ‘get it’ and say ‘Oh, you mean gammon?’ we can then launch into faux-outrage and call the police. We can also take a permanent marker and black out ‘ammon’ on every packet. Oh, the fun to have…

Anyway… Amazon.

They have screwed up again. The print version of ‘Rebellion’ has been incorrectly linked to another novel by the same name, which is entirely dissimilar in every way to Mark Ellott’s book. Only the title is the same. Oh and the author’s first name. The Kindle version is unaffected. ‘Click to look inside’ the Kindle version and you get the right book. On the print version, it links to the other author’s content. They seem to be sending out the right print version though.

There are two reviews which are for the other book. At least they are 5 star reviews, might as well grab that silver lining while it’s there. I have informed Amazon of the blunder, of course nothing has happened so I will inform them again from another account.

This brings us to the favour. If you have time and the inclination, could you click the ‘report incorrect product information’ link on that page and tell them the ‘look inside’ links to the wrong book? Maybe if they get a few more reports they’ll actually take notice.

This is incredibly irritating. I swore not to play with the new G scale trains until this book and Lee Bidgood’s were done and there is a pile of track, two locomotives, three coaches (they are seriously big!) and five freight wagons waiting for me. I’m trying to finish the cover for Lee’s book and ‘Rebellion’ should have been clear by now. Still, it can’t be too easy, eh?

The cover is coming along. So many scenes from the book I wanted to depict but the orange Lada, the scene on the Fred Flintstone slide in the playground and the transsexual policeman really had to be in there. It’s testing my drawing skills to the limit but I think it’s going to be worth it in the end.

If you get the right book on ‘click to look inside’, it means they finally fixed it.

I hope so. It’s too good a story to get this kind of treatment.