Fossil fools?

A dearth of blogging lately. I’m attempting to sort out several books simultaneously, plus set aside one evening a week for my own writing – while learning Danish, loading up wood burners and, recently, scraping up a load of snow. If the forecast is right for once, at least the snow part of things should be easing off at the weekend. Today, a queen wasp appeared from its hibernation place somewhere under a cabinet. I considered it a mercy killing – coming out of hibernation in this weather meant she’d have no chance at all of setting up a nest. Also, I don’t like wasps.

Still, there’s always a little time available to watch the conspiracy theorists. Or in many cases, to watch the conspiracy theorists be proven right. Several countries have now banned the chemtrails few people believe are real, the Flat Earth mob are out in force (I still don’t think that one will ever be proven true, they are using some seriously twisted logic for it but in these crazy days, who can say?).

There is the current denial of my entire past career. It started with ‘Covid19 doesn’t exist’, and while I’m not sure about that, I can see the logic underlying that conclusion. It acted like a bad flu, killed as many as flu does every year, while the flu simply disappeared for a year. Were flu cases being recorded as Covid? I can’t prove it, I don’t have the data, but I have to say it does seem likely. After all, I knew from the outset that the PCR test was bollocks and set up to deliberately inflate the false positive rate, and that the mRNA injections were likely to do a lot more harm than good. But hey, nobody listens to microbiologists any more.

The ‘Covid isn’t real’ progressed into ‘Viruses don’t exist’ and now to ‘Bacteria don’t cause disease’. This is tinfoil upon tinfoil – although objections to the ‘germ theory’ are not a recent phenomenon. Still, as someone who spent an entire career dealing with disease-causing bacteria, I have to wonder how it is that the cures I devised actually worked. In vitro, in vivo, and in human trials. Of course, the pharmers won’t sell them because they used cheap and non-patentable components.

It’s rather like the discovery that dandelion root can cure at least some forms of cancer. Once the medical profession heard about this, they tested it and found it worked in vitro. So, did they tell people ‘get some dandelion root, clean it, chop it up, soak it in hot water for a while then drink the water’? Of course not. That would be free and also harmless, even if it didn’t work. At least it would get you a good dose of essential minerals. Instead, they set about isolating the compounds that had the anti-cancer effect. Then they’d synthesise those compounds, patent them, put them in a pill and sell it. They haven’t succeeded yet, as far as I know, and even if they do, it’ll be stomped on. Cured patients stop paying, so the Pharmers don’t want cures. We’ve known this for a very long time.

Anyway. The particular conspiracy theory for this post is fossil fuels. I have heard the claim, for some years now, that fossil fuels aren’t fossils at all, that they are produced naturally within the earth and will never run out. The theory goes that they were called ‘fossil fuels’ to give the impression of a finite resource, but they aren’t. Well, let’s consider it.

I have also heard the anti-oil brigade claim that when oil runs out, we’ll have to wait thousands of years for decaying trees to produce another batch. This is nonsense. It assumes that the conversion of decaying plant material into oil stopped thousands of years ago, and will only start again when we’ve sucked out the last drop. If oil does come from the decay of plant material, it is indeed being continually replenished with the burial and decay of plant material year on year. There’s no real need to come up with any other theory of how it is formed. What matters now is the rate of production vs. the rate of extraction. Unfortunately we have no idea of the rate of production, whether it’s from decaying plants or from some other chemical process.

So, to the base argument. Coal, oil, gas… are they fossil fuels?

Coal, definitely. When I was a pre-teen little ginger angel, we lived near a slag heap. No, not a pile of destitute wenches, this was the reject pile of a coal mine. We were warned it was dangerous (it was actually burning inside in some places), we were told to stay away from it and it was surrounded by a fence. None of which, of course, had the slightest influence on the thought processes of the average 11-12 year old at the time. We went exploring. Often.

It wasn’t like the one in Aberfan, it wasn’t poised on a hillside over a school so didn’t cause a disaster, but since that had already happened it wasn’t really surprising that we weren’t (technically) allowed to play on it. We did though. Somehow, someone had managed to get a derelict car to the top of it where it rusted most spectacularly. We used the bonnet as a sledge on the side of the tip.

There is a point to this. Hard to believe, I know, but there is. On that massive black slag heap, we’d occasionally find, in a split rock, the imprint of a leaf or maybe a bit of an ammonite. So yes, I’m convinced coal is a fossil fuel because it actually has fossils in it.

Even so, the processes that produced it didn’t abruptly stop a million years ago. It’s still being produced, year after year, but it takes so long that we can’t see it happen. There isn’t likely to be any noticeable production within a human lifetime but in another million years, the trees you can see now will be dug up as coal. Maybe the crappy coal we dig up now would become good quality coal if we left it for another few thousand years.

As for oil, well, I’m not a geologist or an organic chemist so I don’t have a good theory about it. Maybe it’s produced by chemical reactions within the earth’s crust. Maybe it’s produced from fermentation of buried dinosaurs, animals and plants. Maybe by another mechanism nobody’s thought of yet. I have no idea – but either way, it is being continuously produced, of that I am sure. Animals and plants still die and get buried, always have and always will. Proving either theory would need someone to discover proto-oil, an intermediate form that would lead back to where it came from. It’s not going to be me, I’m retired from an entirely different branch of science and I’m not feeling the need to study for another PhD. Even though it would be funny to be Doctor Doctor.

Is oil a fossil fuel? The answer is a definite maybe for now.

Now the diffcult one. Gas. Methane, to be precise. It’s also classed as a fossil fuel but…

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has lakes of liquid methane and ethane and a surface dusted with other hydrocarbons. It’s far too cold to support any life and there is absolutely no evidence htat there ever was any. So where did the methane and other hydrocarbons come from? No trees. No animals and definitely no dinosaurs.

On Earth, we know that methane can be produced by living things – specifically, a group of Archaebacteria called methanogens. They turn CO₂ into CH₄ and derive energy from the process. Incidentally, there is also another group of bacteria that can oxidise methane back into CO₂.

Yet Titan shows us that methane can also be produced, in large amounts, without the presence of living things. So can other hydrocarbons. It seems to require high pressure – such as that found underground here – but it can happen.

Cows are currently being blamed for methane in the atmosphere. Cows don’t produce methane – no mammals are capable of that. The bacteria in the gut, especially in the rumen, produce methane and that happens in every ruminant herbivore species on the planet. not just cows. If they get rid of the cows, the sheep and goats will be next. Then the wildlife. Oh, and horses, which are not ruminants but have a very active fermentation in the caecum. Then the nonruminants, which can harbour methanogens in the colon. And yes, that includes you. If you’ve ever seen a clip of a student lighting a fart – that was methane.

So basically, you’d have to wipe out all life on earth to have zero fossil fuels in the future and even then, methane and some hydrocarbons are going to be produced. Without life, they’d be a much biigger part of the atmosphere than they are now. Well, with no plants there’d be no oxygen so there’ll be plenty of room for methane.

In summary then, what’s a fossil fuel? Coal – definitely. The fossils are still in it. Oil – maybe, although even after a whole careeer in anaerobic fermentation I never found anything that could produce the mix of hydrocarbons in oil. Methane – some of it, maybe, but Titan has a lot more of it with no trace of any kind of life, ever. So maybe life has reduced the methane content of outr atmosphere, not increased it.

And maybe we shouldn’t be messing with it…

A little scientific history

There are people alive today who don’t know how to read an analogue clock. I’ve met one, they are real. Their only way of telling time is via a digital display. It’s all they have ever known. If they ask you fior the time and you say ‘It’s quarter to…’, it genuinely means nothing to them. They aren’t stupid. They’ve just never been taught what the rotating hands on a clock face mean.

There are people alive today who think a 3.5 inch floppy disk is a 3D printed ‘save’ icon. Who have no concept of ‘quarters’ and ‘thirds’, only the decimal equivalents. Who consider CDs to be old hat, and cassettes and VHS tapes to be archaeological artefacts. Who would stare at a dial phone, unable to use it.

I’m only 63. Aside from the dial phone, none of the other things existed for at least a third of my life. I wonder what they’d make of 5.25 inch floppies, or 8 inch ones that store a tiny fraction of the data their phones now handle. Mobile phones, they were the size of bricks and the stuff of Yuppies (bet they don’t remember those either) until they became smaller and close to affordable in my 30s. And those things just made phone calls. Text involved pressing the number keys to get to the letter you wanted. Internet? Well it was still in the Compuserve/AOL era. Bulletin boards and dial-up. Not even thought of as part of a pocket device.

All these things, all the devices I saw invented and discarded growing up – the Walkman, the cassette tape, the VHS player, the CD, are all the stuff of distant history now. And let’s not even mention reel to reel tape, 8 tracks, laser discs or Betamax. It all arrived and disappeared in just half my own lifetime. Even DVDs have already been replaced by streaming services.

With this rapid contraction of history, it’s not too surprising to find many people – even some who claim to research – believing that the coronavirus vaccines are just another iteration of a vaccine technology that’s been around for some time. They are, in fact, the very first mRNA vaccines to have been jabbed into humans on a ridiculous scale. They clearly don’t work and are far more dangerous than the disease they are claiming to protect against. But first, a little history.

Modern genetics is usually claimed to have started with Gregor Mendel and his experiments with pea plants in 1856. He observed the effects of his crossbreeding of those plants, he saw that it worked but of course he had no idea why it worked or of the molecular mechanism behind it. He didn’t have the tools to work it out. In fact, the same type of breeding had been done for millenia: Farmers selecting the breeding of cattle and sheep, horses being bred for particular characteristics… again, they did not know how it worked, they just observed that it worked and carried on doing it because it worked.

Likewise, local healers used mouldy bread poultices to treat infected wounds for hundreds of years before penicillin was discovered (1930s, Alexander Fleming). They had no knowledge of bacteria nor fungi, and would have had not the slightest idea what an antibiotic was, but they used it and it worked. You don’t have to know how it works to know that it works.

Anyway. DNA.

Science knew for some time (since 1869) that DNA was present in cells but didn’t know what it was for. Still, it was present in every cell they studied, from bacteria to elephants, so it must be important. It took some time (until 1943) to work out what it was for and why every cell had it, and the structure of it was finally found out and credited to Watson and Crick in 1953.

That means we are 70 years (71 if you count the first week of 2024) from the point where the structure of DNA was discovered. That’s only 7 years before I was born and I know there are those reading this who are much older than me. So the conspiracy theory that the Spanish Flu of 1911 was a bioweapon is easily bunged into the ‘utter bollocks’ bin. They had no idea how to do it then.

They do now.

Ah, now. MRNA (messenger RNA). basically, the photocopies of the original (DNA) plans that were transferred to the ribosomes (the actual builders). This was first described in 1961. I was one year old. It’s not quite ancient history.

And so, I see those who think themselves intelligent claiming that mRNA vaccines have been studied since the 1960s, and I will not engage because they are clearly stupid. mRNA was discovered less than 60 years ago and its role in gene expression was not even widely accepted at that time. And people think scientists were working on mRNA vaccines when they had only just managed to work out its mechanism? There are those who are arrogant enough to think that’s true, you know.

There has never been a successful mRNA vaccine for anything and there still isn’t. There is no mRNA vaccine for rabies and no vaccine of any kind for ebola. They were tried and they failed. The rabies vaccine (not mRNA) I had before going to China in 1991 wasn’t even going to stop me catching rabies, it was designed to slow it down enough to give me time to get treatment and anyway, when I got there the dogs weren’t going to bite me. They were on the menu.

No vaccine against any coronavirus has ever worked. It’s not possible. mRNA vaccines have never worked and still don’t. They never will. The risks will always outweigh any potential benefit and the entire field is an insane combination of death and profit. It is becoming ever clearer that few, if any, vaccines actually work – and this is a direct result of the nonsense mRNA covid vaccines. The Pharmers have blown their game wide open.

The next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.

Storm? What storm?

Well, we have survived the consecutive storms. It did get pretty wet and windy, to the extent that going outside was no fun at all. No trees came down in the immediate vicinity, there doesn’t seem to have been any serious damage beyond the barn doors blowing open, and the lid of the cardboard recycling bin opening to admit a load of rain. Just the cardboard one. Of course.

The electricity glitched, there was a bit of light-flickering but it stayed on. No serious power outage and no trees smashing into walls or blocking the driveway… we’ve had worse. Much worse.

The news keeps saying ‘Snow!’ as if that’s something unusual for the time of year. We had one day of snow, it was all gone by the following day. Yet the news threatens ‘Snow!’ daily and has repeatedly predicted the ‘exact day it will arrive’. It never does.

There are pictures online of cars ‘paralysed by snow’ and it’s not even halfway up their wheels. One side of the road has a line of ‘stuck’ cars. The other side of the road is clear apart from two furrows caused by the wheels of vehicles going the other way. I once drove from Aberdeen to Cardiff overnight in far worse snow. In a nearly-derelict Commer van, ex-Water Board (you could still see ‘Dwr Cymru’ on the side) that had a jammed accelerator and was only driveable at a constant 20 mph. It took a while but I got there.

So… you’d think modern cars would be even better in the snow than the rustbuckets I drove in the past, right? Well, they might well be just as good or even better, but the drivers seem to be only taught how to drive on lovely summer days now. They can’t cope with snow or even heavy rain. Car slides a bit, they panic. Going full speed is their only solution to any problem, and out here it can mean they meet a stray cow or wandering deer when they zip around a blind bend. Or a tractor, or a tourist just tootling along enjoying the view.

But I digress. The loony drivers are a different rant. This is about the weather, or rather about the weather forecasts these days.

All through the summer, there were continuous warnings of impending thunderstorms. They were going to be devastating. We heard a distant rumble once or twice, and that was it. Nothing like the big one of 2019. Not at all.

Now we get continuous warnings of ‘The Snow!’ and we had maybe two inches of it for one single day. The weather forecasts always seem to have yellow warnings on them which pretty much amount to ‘There’s going to be some weather! We’re all doomed’ and then it gets a bit damp and breezy and that’s it.

It’s going to be like ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ except the met Office cries ‘Weather’. One day they’ll put out a weather warning that really means it and nobody will take the slightest notice. Their forecast for the next few days changes by the hour and yet there are those who believe they can predict climate for the next decade. I don’t know why they don’t just say ‘It’s the damn UK, the weather does what it likes’ and all go down the pub.

One more thing. We are told that the best Vitamin D is the one we make ourselves (it’s made from cholesterol so if you’re on statins you’re pretty much fucked in that respect). The Vitamin D we make when we are exposed to sunlight. Oh, you don’t need supplements, just go out in the sun and that lovely sun UV will make your Vit D for you.

Here is our UV exposure for Saturday. It’s the bottom line.

Yeah, we can get 6 hours of level 1 UV exposure if we want to stand out in the cold for that long – and since it only works on exposed skin, that means it’s bluetit and button mushroom time. A year’s supply of 4000 IU vit D costs less than a single pack of cigarettes. Guess which option I went with?

You will also notice the yellow warning for rain and snow, while the chart shows some rain and no snow. The Boys who cry Weather have not learned a thing. This is Scotland. It’s two days to January. Rain is easy. Snow is what we expect. If we can still drive to Local Shop without skidding into the river it’s a mild winter.

I recall the summer weather charts where 20 degC was coloured red as if it was going to melt the very ground we stand on. We would be delighted to get 20C here. it’s pretty much as warm as it gets. Heck, we’re happy if it’s above freezing here.

Weather forecasts are no longer forecasts. They are scare stories. You are expected to believe that 30 degC will end all life on the planet while you book a summer holiday to somewhere where it routinely reaches 40 degC. You will be amazed when you find out how many idiots believe this. They take flights to those warm places for holidays while telling you you can’t heat your home when it’s -10 outside because ‘global warming’. And they cannot see any issue with it. They really can’t. They genuinely have no cognitive ability at all.

All they do is repeat the nonsense that ‘the science is settled’ and that a rise in temperature of 1.5 degC will kill all life on the planet. Well. where I live, the temperature can vary between -20 degC and +20 degC over the course of six months. Every year. Funnily enough, it hasn’t killed me or anything around me, although it’s tried, I have to admit that. A variation of 40 degC annually hasn’t had the effect claimed for a variation of 1.5 degC over a century.

They claim catastrophic seal level rise while their billionaire supporters buy up beachfront properties. They stand in the street to stop ordinary people getting to work or hospital while their billionaire supporters fly overhead in private jets. And they cannot see it. Even when they try to get their court dates changed so they can still have their holiday in a place much warmer than where they live. Yes, that happened. They cannot see the irony. Lenin’s description of ‘useful idiots’ has never been so apt.

The saying goes that ‘good times create weak men’. Well, we have experienced some very good times indeed and we have certainly created many extraordinarily weak men. Weak men create hard times, and this time around it’s likely to be very hard indeed.

But then, as the saying goes, hard times create strong men. If that holds. then the next men will be very strong indeed.

I wionder if I’ll live long enough to see the next Sparta.

Entertainment – The Anti-Christmas

Loads of stuff out there to moan about, debunk and ridicule, but it’s Christmas Eve so I’m going to let it all slide for the moment. I have many submissions to get through but I’ll be taking the whole day off tomorrow, no matter what Scrooge has to say about it. We’re having duck for dinner and I know there’s a bottle of something rather tasty under that tree.

Here, then, is a story for Christmas. Taken from the latest anthology (number 22! Blimey!) which contains some pretty dark Christmas tales – this time, I think mine is the least dark story in the book! Without further ado, I present…

The Anti-Christmas

“Ho ho ho.” Santa placed his hands on his ample belly and roared with laughter. The hands holding the belly were, of course, superfluous. That amount of fat wasn’t likely to be going anywhere.
Tiddles the elf didn’t even crack a smile. He simply stared at the fat idiot who thought he was in charge here and repeated his question.
“What the Hell are you talking about, Santa? And where did you get this crazy idea?”
“It’s in this book.” Santa held up a copy of something called ‘The Great Reset’. “It says that people will be happy owning nothing. My new friend gave me a copy.”
“Okay.” Tiddles pursed his lips, rubbed his nose, scratched his backside, pursed his lips again and when he thought he had the words in order in his mind, he spoke.
“Let’s leave aside the little detail that you have just broken your own record for the most idiotic thing ever to come out of a human mouth, and consider where this idea will lead.”
“Well.” Santa waved the book. “It leads to universal happiness. Why is that a stupid idea?”
“Really?” Tiddles inclined his head. “So you actually think that children will wake up on Christmas morning and find no presents under the tree – or perhaps in a more cruel scenario, some nicely wrapped empty boxes – and they’ll be delighted? Is that what you actually believe?”
Santa’s face crinkled in his best attempt at thought. “Possessions aren’t real happiness,” he said. “That comes from within.”
“This is, of course, true.” Tiddles nodded in agreement. “but this is not how human minds work. Especially the undeveloped child mind. Look at all those billionaires, they think they are happy because they have money. It’s bollocks of course, but they believe it and so the accumulation of ‘things’ whether of real value or not, is what makes humans think they are happy. Take that away with nothing to replace it and what do you have?”
“Um…” Santa’s face crinkled so hard Tiddles feared it might implode.
Tiddles sighed. “You have a people with nothing left to lose. They will soon realise that, not only do they have nothing, but they will never have anything to call their own, ever again. Then you have a war, a big one. Bigger than any war ever seen before. They won’t care what happens to them because they have nothing at all anyway. You will have a global army of Berserkers who just don’t give a shit any more.”
“Hmm.” Santa’s brow furrowed. “Ah, but they will be guided by the new thing. Artificial Intelligence. It will explain everything to them.”
Tiddles’ face drooped. Artificial intelligence. If only this idiot had a mere trace of the real thing, it would make life so much easier.
“Right.” Tiddles got up to leave. “We have only a few days to Christmas and if you’re not going to deliver anything, we have to work out what to do. You are proposing a major change to our entire business model and we elves will have to discuss this.” He headed for the door.
“Ah, it’s not that big a deal.” Santa reached for the whisky bottle. “It’ll be relaxing, you’ll see. You won’t have to work so hard making toys and trying to predict what next big thing the kids will fixate on.” He poured a generous glass.
“You haven’t…” Tiddles left the sentence unfinished. He hasn’t thought this through. More likely he hasn’t thought at all. Tiddles shook his head and closed the door behind him.

Tiddles paused at the door to the workshop. The sounds of hammering, sawing, drilling and the occasional merry whistle filled the air. Tiddles blew a slow breath. Santa’s latest idiotic idea had to be stopped, and soon, or he would have to explain to these elves why they were suddenly out of a job, and stuck at the North Pole. Tiddles licked his lips. There was another matter, too, a very important one.
“George.” Tiddles tapped his friend’s shoulder. “I – what the Hell is that?” He pointed at the toy George was assembling.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” George held up a silver, tubular device with bits sticking out here and there. “It’s a light sabre. From those Star Wars films. Kids love these.” He pressed a button and a beam of red light appeared from one end of the thing. The beam extended roughly three feet into the air and stopped there.
“Is it safe?” Tiddles narrowed his eyes.
“Sure.” George swung the beam around. “As long as you don’t let the beam touch anything.”
Tiddles took a step back. “What happens if you do?”
“Oh, it’ll vapourize anything it touches.” George switched the thing off and placed it next to a row of similar tubes. “We should probably put a warning on the boxes.”
“Probably.” We should certainly put a warning on you. Still, it won’t be the first time I’ve had to remove George’s efforts from the sleigh. Tiddles composed himself. “George. Santa has a new lunatic idea and this is likely to be his worst idea yet. Come on, let’s get some tea and work out a way to stop it.”
“Tea sounds good.” George rose from his seat and followed Tiddles to the canteen.

Distracted by his thoughts, Tiddles did something entirely alien to his nature. He paid for the teas. George subtly replaced his wallet in his pocket and raised an eyebrow.
“I’m guessing this is something serious?” George took his tea and followed Tiddles to a table, well away from the few other elves who were there.
“It’s incredibly serious.” Tiddles stared into his tea. “Santa has a new friend, and that new friend has been putting some diabolical ideas into his head.”
“He’s not planning on appointing a new safety officer, is he? The last one really cramped my working style.”
“Yeah, until he tried your version of exploding candy.” Tiddles forced a half-smile. “It’s not supposed to have real explosives in it, you know.”
George took a sip of tea. “Well I didn’t know that at the time. So what’s Santa’s new idea?”
Tiddles swirled his cup. “He—or rather his new friend—thinks that people will be happy if they have nothing.”
George blinked a few times. This was a concept his mind had never considered. “What do you mean? Nothing at all?”
“Absolutely nothing. They are to rent what they need, and only what they need. They will own nothing at all.” Tiddles stared into George’s eyes. “Which, for us, means there will be no more Christmas presents to make or deliver.”
“What? But… that’s insane. It’s what we do here. It’s all we do. You mean we’ll all be unemployed? What on earth will we do all year?”
“Keep your voice down, George.” Tiddles glanced around. A few of the other elves were looking in their direction. “It’s worse than that. It will mean the end of our little, ah, side business.”
George considered this. “Well, not immediately. We hand them the bill for their presents when they turn thirty, so if we stop giving presents now, we still have twenty-nine more years of collections.”
“No. We don’t.” Tiddles steepled his fingers. “If the presents stop this year, what happens when we hand out bills on Boxing Day?”
“Well, they still owe us for their presents. Their Santa lists were a request for services, it’s all legal and valid.” George paused. “Well, maybe not entirely legal but they did sign the letters so it counts as a contract.”
“You’re missing the point.” Tiddles leaned closer. “What’s our final sales pitch to those who won’t pay?”
“We tell them their children won’t get any more presents until the bill is paid. It never fails…oh!”
Tiddles nodded. “Exactly. If their kids aren’t going to get any more presents anyway, our argument loses all its persuasive power.” He sat back in his chair. “If we don’t stop this lunacy right now, our profitable little sideline is dead in the water.”
“So we lose our side income as well as our jobs.” George shook his head. “What are we going to do?”
Tiddles thought for a moment. “We’re going to need help from the Dark Side.”
George’s jaw dropped. “You mean…?”
“Yes. We’re going to have to talk to Dodgy Pete.” He drank his tea and put the cup down. “Come on. There’s no time to waste.”

Dodgy Pete was nowhere to be seen in the workshop. Tiddles led George to the exit door. “He’ll be in his shack, I expect.”
The shack was near the sleigh barn, close enough for a couple of raids on certain categories of presents that Pete would later sell back to the elves. Mostly booze and chocolates. Tiddles and George trudged through the snow to the little shed. George knocked on the door. After a pause, it opened, just a crack, to reveal Pete’s narrowed eyes and tight-lipped expression.
“We have a deal, Tiddles. I keep quiet about your scams and you keep quiet about mine. So what do you want here?”
“It’s about our scams. They are going to hit a wall and end in a few days if we don’t do something.” Tiddles pushed the door. Pete let it open. Tiddles and George entered.
“What’s going on?” Pete turned on a light to reveal the shack’s interior. Just a few chairs, a table, a single bed and a stove for heat.
George looked around. “I was expecting piles of… you know… stuff.”
“Nah, of course not.” Pete nonchalantly moved a chair over what looked suspiciously like a trap door. “I wouldn’t be involved in anything dodgy.”
George snorted. “Your name is literally Dodgy Pete.”
“Shut up, George.” Tiddles could see this conversation was likely to result in unpleasantness. “Right. Pete. Here’s the problem.” He gave Pete a full explanation of Santa’s latest crazy idea.
Pete shrugged. “I know about his mad friend. He’s a daylight goblin and his ideas are totally insane. Even a dope like Santa can’t fall for them.”
“Apparently he has.” Tiddles said “And he wants the ridiculous nonsense implemented.”
Pete put his hands over his face. “Does he understand what it means? Apart from all our scams disappearing, it means he has an army of elves with no jobs. Nothing to do. No reason to stay here at the North Pole when we could all be back living in the forests.”
Tiddles snorted. “I don’t think this particular Santa understands the instructions for a toaster. We really need an IQ test for the next one. If there is one.” He put his hands on his hips. “We need ideas, and not standard nicey-nicey elf ideas. That’s why we are here.”
Pete took a seat and motioned for Tiddles and George to do the same. “Right,” he said. “This goes against all elfin oaths to serve Santa but I think we’re all far enough out of the mainstream to consider it.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Make the daft sod experience what he wants.”
“How do you mean?” George leaned forward. “What should we do?”
Pete shrugged. “Sack him. Send him home. He’s been here so long he won’t last a day back in the real world. He’ll be begging for his job back before the first snowflake hits him.”
Tiddles frowned. “How do we sack Santa? I mean, he’s effectively in charge of the whole operation. Or at least, he thinks he is.”
“Use his own logic.” Pete picked up three tin mugs and took them to the stove, where a kettle boiled. “If he’s not going to deliver presents any more, then he has no further purpose here and neither do we. Tell him we’re all going back to the forests and shutting down the entire present making shit. Make sure he understands that it was all his idea.” Pete took the kettle off the stove and laid it to one side, then picked up a bottle and poured a good slug of whisky into each mug. He passed two to Tiddles and George.
Tiddles took a sip. Ah, naturally he keeps the best ones for himself. “Pete, what you’re proposing is unethical and breaks all of our Elf Oath to the original Santa.” He paused and took another sip. “I like it though.”
Pete grinned. “We took an oath to the original Santa. This one is, what, number eight or nine? We took no oath to him.”
George shifted in his chair. “Well, technically, we took an oath to the office of Santa. So it holds, no matter who is in the fat boy seat.”
“Well.” Tiddles placed his mug carefully on the table. “If he’s not going to deliver presents any more, he’s no longer qualified as being Santa. He’s just some guy. So our oath of allegiance is void.”
“Quite so.” Pete drained his whisky and poured himself another. He offered the bottle to the others, who declined.
“So you’re saying we should just walk into Santa’s office and tell him he’s fired?” George wrinkled his nose. “What if he refuses?”
“No.” Pete smiled. “On Christmas Eve, the sleigh is outside time. It can travel the world in the blink of an eye. That’s when you ditch him and that’s when you pick his sorry arse back up.” He steepled his fingers. “Let him ride the sleigh, but one of you has to hide in the back. The first time he gets off, take the sleigh. Leave him behind. Deliver all the presents and then go back for him. Then you ask him if he wants to be Santa or just some homeless dope in a red suit. He’ll experience real time while the sleigh is away. It’ll feel like days to him.”
“Pete,” Tiddles raised his mug, drained it and held it up for a refill. Pete obliged. “Pete, that is absolutely diabolical and I love it. It might smack some sense into the madman’s head at last.”
George grunted.
Tiddles took another sip. “What is it, George?”
“I think we should just replace him.” George paused for a moment. “I mean, he’s given us trouble every Christmas since we brought him here. And now he doesn’t want to work for the only day of the year we expect him to work. We need a better Santa.”
“Sure.” Pete smiled. “The trouble is, every Santa we bring here is in the job for life. We can never send one back or we risk him talking, and blowing our entire operation wide open.”
“I wasn’t talking about sending him back. Just install a new one and let this one drink himself to death.” George took a deep drink, and spluttered. He regained his composure and wiped his eyes. “One of us could do the job.”
Tiddles sniffed. “We have less than forty hours before the sleigh takes off. If presents are delivered by an elf, the children, or at least the few little sods who stay awake, are going to notice. There will be questions. And letters. More complaints.”
“Well.” George swirled his cup. “We need one who can dress up as Santa. How about Chubby Roy? He’s shorter than Santa, sure, but almost as wide. He’d fill the suit enough that the kids won’t notice.”
Tiddles and Dodgy Pete roared with laughter. Pete slapped the table. “Have you ever had a conversation with Chubby Roy?”
“Indeed.” Tiddles held on to his mug with both hands to stop himself shaking. “Oh, I can see it now. Some wide-awake kid catches him putting presents under the tree and Chubby Roy gives it the whole ‘Ho ho ho. Merry bastard Christmas you snot nosed little twat.’ Oh, the letters we’d get.”
“Okay. Point taken.” George took a rather more careful sip of his whisky this time. “But Pete’s plan has the presents delivered by an elf anyway. We really do need one who can at least look something like Santa.”
Both Pete and Tiddles became serious in an instant. Tiddles puffed out his cheeks. “He’s right. Who do we have who could look enough like Santa to fool the world?”
Pete rubbed his chin. “The only one with enough width is Chubby Roy, but we’d have to tape his mouth shut. How about we fill the suit with padding and add a fake beard? That would widen our options.”
“At sleigh speeds, the padding might deform. We’d be sending out Shapeless Santa.” Tiddles stared into his whisky.
“The last resort then, is to fix this Santa and get rid of his current delusion.” George said.
“Yeah, well, that’s not an easy option.” Pete took a deep drink. “Remember how he acted last year with just some booze and a few films?”
Tiddles nodded. “Yes, but to be fair, Pete, that was mostly your fault.”
Pete held up his hands. “Well if we’re going to talk about blame…”
“Never mind. It’s in the past.” Tiddles finished his drink and motioned for George to do the same. “I have an idea. Might be a long shot but it’s really all we have – and if it doesn’t work, we’d better use the sleigh to get back to some decent woodland while it still has its Christmas magic. Otherwise we’ll be stuck here.”
“It had better work.” Pete rose from his seat. “If Santa gets his ‘own nothing and be happy’ lunacy in place, we’re all screwed.”
“Oh, I don’t think he will.” Tiddles winked. “I plan to give him a taste of it, as you suggested. Thanks for the ideas, Pete. Come on George. Let’s go.” He led the way out of Pete’s shack and headed for the workshop.
Once they were clear of Pete’s shack, George spoke. “So are you thinking of using one of Pete’s ideas?”
Tiddles grinned. “Not quite, although he did get my mind working. I’m thinking of using one of yours.” He led the way through the workshop, pausing briefly at George’s bench to pocket one of the shiny silver tubes. Then he hurried on towards Santa’s rooms.
“You’re not planning to vapourize him, I hope?” George struggled to keep up. “I mean, that might be against the rules, you know?”
“Oh no.” Tiddles’ grin widened. “I have something much worse than that in mind.”

At Santa’s door, they paused. Muffled voices came from inside, punctuated by Santa’s ‘Ho ho ho’. It sounded a little slurred. Tiddles knocked once and opened the door.
“Ho ho ho. Come on in.” Santa sat in his armchair with a large whisky in his hand. “We were just discussing the new arrangements for Christmas this year.”
Opposite Santa sat someone not much taller than the elves, wearing what looked like a science fiction jacket with massive lapels. Over the jacket hung a face like a wax mannequin that had been left in the sun too long. This newcomer raised his glass and nodded at the elves, but showed no indication of smiling.
Maybe he can’t smile because his jowls are too heavy. Tiddles turned his attention to Santa. “What new arrangements? I thought we were about to shut the whole Christmas present thing down.”
“Well, my friend Claws here—”
“It’s Klaus, Zanta.” The saggy face opened to admit a sip of whisky.
“Well I was ‘claws’ enough.” Santa shook with mirth to the point where he had to put his glass down. He harrumphed a few times to compose himself. “Anyway. As I was saying, Claws – sorry, Klaus – has come up with a way to get presents to the children without them owning anything. So they’ll own nothing but they’ll still be happy.”
“You’re about to break your own record for the most ridiculous statement ever, aren’t you? For the second time in a single day.” Tiddles picked up a glass and poured himself a large one. “How is this insanity going to work, then?”
“I don’t get it.” George wrinkled his nose. “So are you delivering presents this year or not?”
Tiddles nodded at Santa. “You know the sleigh will leave on time, and you know what happens if you’re not on it, right? You’ll have the mother and father of all migraines until it returns.”
Santa waved his hand. “I’ll be on it. I just won’t be delivering presents. I’ll be handing out rental agreements.”
“What?” Tiddles narrowed his eyes.
“You zee,” Klaus assumed a haughty expression. “Zey vill not own ze toys, but zey vill rent zem. Ven they outgrow ze toys, zey can send zem back and shtop paying.”
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Santa raised his glass. “No more clutter of old toys filling up everyone’s attics and cupboards. They just rent them while they’re children and when they grow up, they can return them.”
“One little detail you might have overlooked.” Tiddles said quietly. “Children don’t actually have any money.”
“Ze parents vill pay,” Klaus said. “Ozzervise zeir children vill have no presents.”
George nudged Tiddles in the ribs. “This is going to put us out of business,” he whispered.
Tiddles waved him to silence. “It’s not going to work. If the parents have to pay rent on the children’s toys, why won’t they just go to the shops and buy them themselves? And what happens if the toy is broken? Do they have to pay for a replacement?”
“No problem. We can sell them insurance.” Santa smiled.
Tiddles let out a sigh. “So we are going to have to collect annual rent on an ever-increasing number of toys, deal with returns as well as run an insurance business. Have you considered the administrative nightmare you are proposing for us?”
Klaus inspected his fingernails. “Ze parents vill not buy toys in shops. Ve are in ze process of closing down ze retail industry and turning it all into a rental industry. Ve can undercut ze shop prices.”
“And admin will be computerised.” Santa added.
“We are elves,” George said. “We don’t work well with computers.”
“Ah, zen you vill learn, or you vill be replaced.” Klaus inclined his head.
“What?” Tiddles faced him. “Who the Hell put you in charge?”
“You can’t run this operation without elves.” George folded his arms. “All of it runs on elf magic. Without us, you have no toys and most importantly, no sleigh. Oh and you can’t travel the world outside time on Christmas Eve either.”
“That’s right.” Tiddles reached into his pocket and grasped the silver tube. “Without us, this whole game is over. No magic, no flying sleigh, no flying reindeer. And you—” he pointed at Santa, “—you end up homeless, jobless and stuck at the North Pole alone. Because we’ll all go back to the forests.”
Santa licked his lips. “Now wait, lads, let’s not get all worked up. I’m sure we can come to a compromise.”
“I’m afraid zere can be no compromise.” Klaus rose from his seat. “Ve have a plan, you zee, and zere can be no deviation from it.”
“Okay.” Tiddles withdrew the tube and held it up. “Fine. Let’s see how happy you are with nothing. We’ll be taking the sleigh and leaving, and you, Santa, can take the headaches. Best get used to them because when the sleigh doesn’t come back, they’ll be permanent.” He marched over to the drinks cabinet, placed a full bottle on top of it, activated George’s latest toy and vapourized the bottle. “You’re going to be really happy when you have no more whisky.” Tiddles took out another bottle. He held the light sabre over it and stared at Santa. “Well?”
“Oh come on.” Santa’s eyes grew wide. He turned to Klaus. “You have to give them something. There must be a compromise.”
“Nein.” Klaus folded his arms. “If you are shut down, zat vorks for me too. Zen my ozzer rental outlets have less competition.”
Santa ran his sleeve across his forehead. “You know, Klaus, I don’t think we have a deal. This whole Santa thing can’t work without the elves and they aren’t going to go along with it at all.”
Klaus drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much, and pointed a finger at Santa. “You fail to grasp ze seriousness of zis situation. Ve, ze Day Goblins, are to become Masters of ze Vorld. Zose who resist us vill be eliminated.” He puffed out his chest like a pigeon on heat. “Ve are ze new Gods of zis vorld!”
Tiddles snorted. “If you’re a god, heal this.” With a deft movement, he swung the light sabre and vapourized Klaus’s pointing finger, simultaneously cauterising the wound.
George nodded his approval. Santa’s jaw dropped so far it risked dislocation. Klaus stared at his hand with its missing index finger.
“You… you can’t do that.” Santa stared, wide-eyed, at Tiddles. “You’re an elf. You’re all about magic and kindness and toys for children. You don’t go around mutilating people.”
Tiddles switched off the light sabre. “Day Goblins are not people.” He pocketed the device. “And if you knew anything about elves, you would know what we are capable of. The original Santa did, which is why he made us swear never to harm a human.” Tiddles inclined his head towards Klaus. “He’s not human so he’s fair game.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why the original Santa took us all here, to the North Pole?” Dodgy Pete spoke from the doorway. “There are so very many remote places, in lovely warm forests, but he chose this place. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”
“Well… it’s tradition. Always has been.” Santa shook his head.
Pete moved into the room. “Well, when we live in forests, we’re a highly territorial species. It’s a dangerous place to live. We don’t like strangers.” He narrowed his eyes at Klaus. “At all.”
“Zo?” Klaus bared his teeth. “Ve do not care about being liked. Ven ve haf total control, you vill all do as you are told.”
“Yeah, well,” George said, “we don’t really get along with doing as we are told. We agree to things if we like the idea, and frankly, we don’t like your idea at all.”
“You see,” Pete leaned forward and patted Santa on the head. “In the forests, most of us would be patrolling our borders and fighting off any potential invaders. Or warring with nearby elf colonies. Here, we have no need to do that. Santa’s proposal gave us all an easy life, playing around making toys and no concerns about borders or invaders. We see an occasional polar bear or arctic fox but they are no threat to us.” He smiled. “It’s actually quite a relaxing life.” His smile dropped. “If we have to give it up and go back to forest fighting, we are really not going to be happy that you caused it.”
Klaus snorted. “Zere vill be no forests. Ve are removing zem, and all who live in zem, using vindmill power as our excuse. Zere vill be nowhere to hide.”
Tiddles took out the light sabre and turned it on. He raised one eyebrow. “You know, Klaus, we are already very unhappy indeed with you. You are an invader in Elf territory, a most unwelcome one at that, and we have taken no oath to avoid harming Day Goblins.” He brushed the tip of the sabre against Klaus’s lapel, which fell to ash. “So if I were you, I’d be keeping very quiet at the moment.”
Santa took a deep drink and stared into his glass. “I’m seeing a side of you boys I’ve never seen before. I mean, I always knew you had some side scams going on, but I never saw you as a full-blown Mafia.”
“That’s because you’re not the original Santa.” Pete took the bottle Tiddles had left on the cabinet, opened it, and took a large swig. “And because you never bothered to read his notes on how this all started.”
“Nor considered how it might end.” George folded his arms. “We took an oath to the original Santa and we considered that it applied to the office of Santa, no matter who sat in the fat—I mean, who sat in the seat you occupy. But if you refuse to fulfil your side of the contract, our oath is null and void. All of it. It’s up to you now, Santa. The choice is yours.”
“Zere is no choice. Ve—” Klaus stopped and blinked at the bar of light that appeared across his eyes.
Santa put his head in his hands. “I don’t know what to do. I’m in charge here and I don’t know what to do.”
Pete laughed. “You have never been in charge here. We let you booze and amuse yourself all year and you have one night of work. The original Santa was in charge, he recruited us, but when he died and we found replacements, we recruited them. And you. We’ve been running the whole place since the original Santa passed away.”
“Vait.” Klaus backed away. Tiddles followed, holding the light sabre near his face. “Vait. You are not in charge, Zanta? Zen who should I have been instructing?”
Tiddles moved the sabre closer to Klaus’s nose. “Perhaps you should have considered asking those of us who would be most affected by your insane ideas.”
“Pah.” Klaus backed away until his legs hit a chair. He fell into the seat, harrumphed and looked up at Tiddles. “Does ze farmer discuss his plans viz ze cattle? Ve are ze superior race.”
“You are just failed goblins.” Pete said. “You were thrown out of the goblin caves, centuries ago, because you can’t see in the dark. Useless in their society. So you rebranded yourselves as Day Goblins and you’ve been making up idiotic schemes to prove your ‘superiority’ ever since. The truth is, you’re so useless your own people don’t want you around.”
Klaus slammed his hands onto the arms of the chair. “Zis is not so. Ve haf transcended ze dark vorld of ze goblins. Ve valk around in ze daylight. Zey cannot do zis.”
“They can, actually.” George sniffed. “There was a tribe of them in a mountain, near the forest we used to live in. They’d be out in daylight sometimes, but they didn’t like it much.”
“I remember that.” Tiddles switched off the light sabre. “The goblins thought that too much sunlight could drive them insane.” He looked pointedly at Klaus. “They seem to have been right.”
“Hm.” Pete said. “I have been hearing some conspiracy theories about blocking out the sun. Know anything about that, Klaus?”
“Vell…” Klaus examined his remaining fingernails.
“Wait, wait, wait.” Santa rose, a little unsteadily, from his chair. “I need to do some catching up here, before Tiddles uses his magic torch thing to vapourise any more of my fine single malts.”
“Vot about my finger?” Klaus waved his hand.
“Shut up, goblin. You know it’ll grow back.” Tiddles turned to Santa. “So what is it you don’t understand?” My bet is, pretty much everything.
“Pretty much everything.” Santa responded. “First of all, are you telling me goblins are real?”
Pete laughed. George groaned.
Tiddles ran his hand across his eyes. “You’ve been talking to one for the last few days. How can you say you didn’t know he was real?”
“Well… I just thought he was a particularly saggy-faced elf. He never told me he was a goblin. Do they all look like that?”
“Only the ones that have been left in the sun too long.” Pete managed to get the words out between laughs.
“You do realize I am zitting right here?” Klaus’s face had turned a rather fetching shade of purple. “You cannot speak of your masters in zis fashion. Zere vill be repercussions.”
George leaned over Klaus. “You know, you really should have listened to the goblins who threw you out. You caused them nothing but problems, but if you had stayed on friendly terms with them, instead of getting all caught up in human money and your stupid control ideas, they would have told you something important. Whatever you do, do not mess with the elves.” He stood straight. “If I were you, I’d shut the hell up before Tiddles uses the toy I made to cauterise your neck after your head comes off. And that won’t grow back.”
Santa’s bushy eyebrows almost covered his eyes. “All I’ve seen you lot do is make toys and run a few harmless scams. You’re hardly a terrorist organisation.”
Tiddles sighed. “If only you had spent the last few years studying the origins of this whole Santa thing instead of boozing, watching films and playing games, you might have developed a bit more respect for us, and for the office you currently hold.” He waved his hand at the dust-covered bookshelves. “It’s all been there, right in front of you, all these years. All of the original Santa’s notes and all our history. You never read a single bloody page.”
“But…” Santa sat back down. “I never saw any indication of any of this kind of attitude. You were just the jolly, and sometimes nagging miserable bugger, elves. You were never so… brutal… before.”
“Our way of life was never under threat before. Well, not in your lifetime.” Pete said. “What this Day Goblin proposes is likely to wreck not only our lives, but all of Elfkind, everywhere.”
“Humans too.” George added. “And we have sworn to bring no harm to humans. So we can’t just sit back and let him do it.”
“Again,” Tiddles pointed at Santa, “this is entirely up to you. It all hangs on what you decide, right now. If we shut down because you want to go with this nutsack-faced moron’s ideas, all our vows become void. We go back to fighting for ourselves and we don’t have to care about you or any other human. You’ll die of either migraine or cold, here, because we’re all going to leave and the sleigh won’t come back. The children get no more presents, whether gifted or leased, but it won’t matter because your walnut-faced friend plans to kill them all anyway.”
“What?” Santa stared at Klaus. “You never mentioned killing anyone. Is this true?”
Klaus shrugged. “Zere are far too many people in ze vorld. Imagine how much easier your job would be of most of zem simply veren’t zere any more.”
“No.” Santa held up both hands. “No, I cannot and will not be a part of this madness. The elves and I are going back to our usual routine. Giving away presents. For free.”
Tiddles and George exchanged a glance. George whispered “Well technically they are free when we give them…”
“Shush, George.” Tiddles turned to Santa. “So the deal is off? You’re kicking out this daft Goblin idea?”
“Absolutely. I’ll be riding the sleigh and delivering presents this year, as always.” He glared at Klaus. “So you can kick this… thing… back out into the snow.”
“You vill regret zis!” Klaus lurched from his seat. “You vill feel ze wrath of ze New Gods.” He pointed at Santa, realised he was pointing a stump, and then pointed with his other hand.
“Get this wrinkled monstrosity out of here.” Santa picked up his glass and took a swig.
“We can’t just throw him out,” Pete said. “He’s made credible threats, some of them directly against us. We don’t know how many friends he has out there either.”
“You’re right.” Tiddles switched his light sabre on. “Come on, goblin. We’re going to ask you some questions in our… oh what’s the word? Ah yes. Interrogation room.”
“Oh, is that the room with all the chains on the walls?” George said. “I’ve often wondered why we had that room. It’s probably going to need dusting, we haven’t used it before.”
“I think dust will be the least of his problems.” Tiddles grinned. “Right. Get moving, goblin. You’re about to find out why your ancestors never attacked us.”
Klaus, surrounded by Tiddles, George and Dodgy Pete, left the room.

Santa stared into his glass. What the hell just happened? It feels like the cat you had for years just turned into a rabid tiger. He realised he could see the bottom of the glass and reached for a refill. His hand paused when his eyes fell upon the shelf of dusty notebooks. His tongue ran across his lips.
Maybe I should read them. They might help me understand who and what the elves really are, and who and what I now am.
Santa snorted, grabbed the bottle and poured a good measure into his glass.
Maybe tomorrow.

Skimming the deadline

Well, it’s finally done. The Christmas book is now available in print and ebook formats on Amazon and Smashwords and the Leg Iron Books website is fully updated (which reminds me, it’s time to pay the annual fee for hosting). All authors who wanted cash have been paid, those who wanted payment in books should have them by Thursday. In time for Christmas – just!

It was close this time. Far too close for comfort. Next year I’ll have to factor in the possibility of unexpected major delays when setting dates for closing submissions. This year has seen so many unexpected events I’m actually surprised I got anything done at all. I’m still way behind on the novel queue and have just received another short story collection, plus some shorts for future anthologies. So next year, deadlines will be shorter, I will refuse to get sick and nobody is allowed to die.

As for the car, it has a mind of its own and it’s a sick and twisted mind at that. It had been refusing to accept its central locking system whether applied with the key fob or with the key in the door. Oh it’s fine with the central unlocking part, it’ll do that either way. It just won’t lock again. Which means walking around it, locking every door individually. A bit of a pain but hardly terminal. If the unlocking part wouldn’t unlock every damn door I wouldn’t have to do that.

So it’s been to the garage again. They found the fault. It’s a short circuit in the panel of door and window switches on the handle of the driver’s door. If that panel is disconnected, the central locking works. But the windows don’t – at least the driver’s window won’t. If it’s connected, the windows work but the central locking has a tantrum and you can hear the locks clattering randomly as you drive.

They can’t get the replacement part before the New Year. It’s not something that’s generally in stock. So, I have to decide – drive while hearing the locks rattle and lock every door individually, or give up on opening the windows. Pah. It’s December in Scotland. It’s too damn cold to open the windows.

Oh, and just to make it that little bit more interesting, they’ve closed the road into the town (15 miles away), just before the garage, so I have to detour around the town to get there and back. Through Christmas traffic, all of which is subject to the same detour.

Well, it’ll soon be Christmas shutdown time. I have whisky stocked and I’ll probably get a bit more before the Big Day, most likely delivered. I really don’t like shops at this time of year – well, to be precise, I don’t like the maniacs they call customers. There was an actual fist fight over the last bag of sprouts in a nearby Tesco a few years back. Those things are Satanic fart bombs that taste like tiny cabbages bred to contain the essence of an entire full sized cabbage that’s been boiled in something sulphurous. I’d be fighting to make someone else take my share.

Sure, I’m going to start on the novels before Christmas. There are still a few days before my annual half-day off. When they tell you that you can work for yourself, it takes a while to find out that you’re actually Bob Cratchit working for Ebenezer Scrooge. Christmas parties are pretty dull too, but at least they’re cheap.

I doubt I’ll get far on the novels before Monday – I mean, Christmas – but I’ll definitely have made some progress. I want that backlog severely reduced before the Spring anthology and before any more lunacy happens. So expect a rash of new Leg Iron Books publications in the new year.

Might even get some of my own done.

Getting there

Apologies for the radio silence on responses to emails and comments. I’m concentrating on getting the Christmas book finished. The Kindle version is up, on US and UK sites at least. Seems you can’t find it with a search on the UK site yet, but it’s there.

The print book is now loaded. I’m a little concerned that the spine text might be too large. They can get stroppy about that so I’m busily assembling a new cover with slightly smaller spine text in case they reject it. I went ahead and loaded it up anyway, since it might just pass inspection and time is short. Here’s the cover, not my greatest effort, something of a rush job but not a total disaster, I think. It’s certainly not my worst…

The bird on the tree is a jackdaw, I think. It would have been pretty neat if it had been a raven but they don’t visit us very often.

The text colours were chosen simply for visibility. I’ve only just realised they are the colours of the Ukraine flag but hey, if some flaggie buys it because they think it supports Ukraine, it’s still a sale.

Next, the Smashwords loading. I have to do the Amazon one first because if their bots find it on Smashwords first, I’ll get the whole ‘are you sure you haven’t nicked this’ scenario again. At least things loaded on Smashwords go up on the site straight away. The other important thing to remember is to make the Smashwords price the same as the Amazon price. Undercut Amazon and they pull your books from sale. Not an issue with these anthologies, I price the eBook versions at 99 cents anyway. It has more effect on actual novels, which are priced a bit higher because the authors probably won’t be happy with getting a few pennies per sale.

I hope the print book goes through quickly. There have been so many unforeseen delays this year, and I hadn’t factored major delays into the submission deadlines – because it hasn’t been a big problem in the past.

Tomorrow, my car visits the garage again. This time it’s the central locking. Whether I use the fob button or the key in the door, opening the car unlocks all the doors. Neither method will lock them all again, so I have to go around the thing and lock them all individually. I miss the days before all this computerised crap went into cars and I had a good chance of fixing them myself.

Maybe I should just get the back doors welded shut and turn it into a van…

The Nightmare before Christmas…

…is likely to continue after it.

Right. The Christmas book is complete, I’ve loaded up the Kindle version and hope to have the print version up tonight or tomorrow. The cover isn’t my best, it was rather a rush job but the stories inside are excellent. Mine is pretty okay too. They’re all dark, which fits with the times.

Here’s the cover. It should start appearing online soon, I hope.

This is a low-res version because the full 300 dpi version would take all night to load up. Next year, submission and closing dates for these anthologies will be earlier. They have worked fine up until now but they had not factored in any leeway for life’s little surprises. CStM’s father spontaneously dying, my mother getting cancer, then myself being whacked out of action for about half a year with kidney surgeries, then having a car that should really be humanely destroyed but struggles on regardless, these are among the things I had not expected to all arrive at once and they caused so very many delays this year.

Anyway. I have seen so much bollocks this year I’m turning into a frog.

So. Anthrax has been found in a couple of cases in Romania. The headline? ‘The Anthrax virus, normally found in Africa, has now been detected in Europe’.

Bollocks.

One. Anthrax is not a virus. It’s a bacterium. An aerobic, spore-forming, Gram-positive bacterium that is susceptible to penicillin. Bacillus anthracis, if you feel like looking it up.

Two. Anthrax is global and always has been, probably long before humans appeared. It’s a soil inhabitant and does not need a host. The WWII British experiments on Gruinard Island contaminated the place with anthrax for decades. It’s been finally cleaned up now. The very nasty strain they used was isolated from a cow in Oxfordshire. England. It’s not an African speciality and never has been.

And then, if we needed any more evidence that our news reports were delivered by people who can’t even spell IQ…

If it’s a virus, it has never responded to antibiotics. Antibiotics affect bacterial growth and replication. They have never affected any virus of any kind, anywhere, ever. Which means ‘the world has been gripped by fear’ is a fear of nothing at all.

There is no ‘mystery China virus’. It does not exist. As evidenced by their claim that they were treating it with antibiotics, which have absolutely no effect on viruses and never have. They are hyping up seasonal flu. Again.

Didn’t you get it, when they had all those mysterious sudden falling-down people who were always centre stage on the cameras and always immediately attended to by guys in space suits? Didn’t you notice that it never happened anywhere outside China?

And all those boarded up apartments. Made no difference, because it was all a show. It was all to get the weak Westerners scared. It worked. There are still people wearing masks that protect them from nothing, even now.

Suddenly everything is a virus. I’ve seen talk of the malaria virus. It’s called Plasmodium, look it up, it’s almost as far from being a virus as you are.

The real virus is fear. The fear that makes you shun family and friends. The fear that makes you wear the mask that will give you respiratory distress, disease and death. Which you will blame on the virus you don’t have. The fear that makes you take a dodgy test that, at best, can’t tell the difference between flu and covid (hint: they are the same thing) and then get all paranoid on social media because you think you must surely be about to die.

I understand why many will believe the bollocks from the news. They aren’t retired microbiologists, their careers were in law or bricklaying or wasted in councils and government so they won’t instantly see the bollocks in the news. They will trust the twisted messenger.

The blame lies not with them but with the reporters and editors who publish this crap. Many people still expect their news to tell them the truth. It rarely does, in fact it rarely ever has, but it has become so much worse in recent years. It has reached a point where, if it’s reported by a serious faced newscaster, it’s almost certainly bollocks.

Somehow, I don’t think 2024 is going to be an improvement.

The comedy continues

2023 is nearly over, and I for one will be glad to see the back of it. It claimed the lives of CStM’s father and of Gloom Dog, it gave me a long-running charade around a kidney stone… and much more.

Oh, they had one last scare for me on the kidney stone story. After they took out the stent and I went for an ultrasound scan to check all the internals had grown back, I had a phone call a few days later. Could I come in for an X-ray within the next two days? The (presumably admin) person calling didn’t know why, she just knew it had to be very soon. So I had a couple of days of thinking ‘what did they see in that scan they didn’t tell me about?’

Last time I was called in at very short notice was at the beginning of the stone story. So naturally I was a little perturbed by this. It turned out to be a very routine check in order to be sure there were no more stones. Would have been nice if they’d told me that to start with. At least that visit didn’t involve needles or anything else being poked into me.

I’ve heard no more so I assume it’s all over. The holes in my back are healing nicely, I should be able to lift things again soon. Don’t worry, I won’t start with the 3 foot by 2 foot concrete slabs. I’ll build up to those.

So, 2023 has finished with me now? Nope. We had hte heating boiler serviced last week, and as soon as it came back on the house filled with the stench of heating oil. So the engineer was back yesterday, found and replaced a leaking valve so that’s another thing fixed.

Then… the car. It went in for MOT and service last Thursday. It wasn’t ready Friday, they need to get some parts. Well, okay, the car is 18 years old so I can’t expect the garage to have the parts in stock.

They did loan me a courtesy car. It’s a Ford Ka, you know, the ones you’d normally expect to see at the circus with 15 clowns getting out of it, or attached as an emergency escape pod on a real car.

On Friday night, it broke down. Just died. I was once again towed by the AA – never been towed before, and now this was the second time this year. So now there is a bit of an issue. I can’t go to get my car (it’s ready) because there is no public transport out here and my son has the flu. I thought it might be a simple matter of getting a lift in with the garage recovery truck when they come to get their car. So I phoned them.

Their recovery truck is out of service. Might be working again tomorrow.

It’s as if the universe looks at my fiction writing and says ‘Oh you think that’s pretty far-fetched? Watch this.’

UPDATE:

Turned out not so bad in the end. My car came back on the recovery truck they sent to pick up the dead clown car, and I paid the bill by phone – and it was far, far lower than I expected it to be! So Christmas lunch is going to be a bit better than beans on toast after all.

The Armageddon Vaccine

No, I’m not dead. I’m pretty much recovered from all the jabbing and poking around the kidney stone story. Still have to be a bit careful of my back, I did effectively get stabbed twice rigfht into the kidney after all. It’ll take a while to fully grow back but there’s now no issue with sitting at the computer and any heavy gardening is months away.

I have calculated the quarterly author payments, which unfortunately didn’t take very long. I suspect Amazon’s ‘Is it AI?’ question is still affecting the books, plus nobody really has any money to spare. I noticed that on eNay, I was going to sell off some surplus on there but the bidding rate on almost everything is so low as to make it pointless. I’ll get those payments dealt with in a couple of days, none of them are likely to boost anyone’s christmas but it’s better than nothing.

The Christmas anthology won’t be much longer. The cover artist who did the Halloween cover isn’t available due to family issues, so I’m finding an alternative. It won’t be as good but hopefully it will be okay. There’s no snow here so far, only frost, and it’s raining now so even that might be gone by tomorrow, so I’m combing the back catalogue for a good image.

So. On to serious matters. I remember when the mRNA ‘vaccines’ first appeared, my initial reaction was that it was an autoimmune disease in a syringe. With a normal vaccine, you inject dead cells, the immune system gets to see them and produce antibodies, and the idea is that you’re then primed for a quick response if the real disease shows up. The mRNA idea had your own body cells producing virus proteins. Now, when your immune system comes across one of your own cells expressing a foreign protein, it assumes that cell is infected and does the only thing it knows how to do. It kills the cell.

Normal vaccine – your immune system attacks the foreign protein injected into you. mRNA vaccine – your immune system attacks your own cells because it assumes they are infected. See the difference?

Well. mRNA doesn’t stay stable for long. So the stuff jabbed into you will keep producing foreign proteins, and your cells will keep getting killed, until that mRNA runs out. Which could be anywhere from days to months, and depending on which cells are affected, could be trivial, mild or very serious. But eventually it will run out. The residual damage could be trivial, mild or very serious in the long term. It was a stupid idea with a lot of risk attached to it, and in the end, it didn’t work anyway. It had no discernible effect on transmission or severity of the disease, but the side effects just keep on mounting up.

So, what has science done about it?

You know that feeling you get when things just can’t get any sillier or more dangerous, and some short Dexter in a white coat says ‘hold my test tube’?

Science has now devised a self-replicating RNA strand they plan to use as a ‘vaccine’. (H/T Chernyy Drakkon in comments). The linked article is pretty technical but anyone should be able to get the basic idea.

This is the very definition of a ‘virus’. An invasive strand of DNA or RNA that self-replicates inside your own body cells. If you’re one of those who don’t believe viruses exist… they do now.

The initial dose level of this muck is irrelevant. It’s going to replicate once it’s in you. It’s not going to gradually fade out or degrade away. It’s going to keep on going until it exhausts the cell’s metabolism or the immune system finds and kills that cell. Bits from the shattered cell will find their way into other cells and the game continues until you’re dead. Which might not be very long. This is not a vaccine. This is an infection. An infection that the immune system cannot detect until after it’s invaded a cell – and then it will kill that cell.

It’s interesting that there’s no actual specification of what this ‘vaccine’ is going to protect you against. That’s because it’s not going to protect you from anything, certainly not from itself. It’s going to act just like an RNA virus, it’ll mutate just as fast as any other RNA virus, it’ll evade your immune system and once it’s injected into you, there is no way to get it out.

Can it spread person to person? Depends. The naked RNA isn’t likely to, but if it gets encapsulated in bits of the shattered cell’s membrane, then it might. By the time we find out if that’s possible it’ll be too late to stop it. If it does happen, then effectively, science has just invented a virus. A virus with no protein component for the immune system to attack. A virus whose outer coat is human cell membrane, and thus not recognised as foreign until it gets into your body cells and starts producing foreign proteins for that cell to express.

Does that sound even remotely like a good idea? It really isn’t, but they’re going to do it anyway.

And people will queue up for it.

A different direction

Well. It seems Argentina has a new president. This one is so far to the right he’s almost off the map. He is virulently anti-left, anti-political correctness, and vows to cut out most of the junk stuff that has been esconced in his government, as it has in others. He claims to be Libertarian, and he says all of the things the right wing (I use the labels, even though they don’t really mean anything any more, if they ever did) and the general public have wanted to hear a leader say for a long time.

Not only that, he delivers his message in a wild-eyed ranting style that would make even Alex Jones say ‘Whoah, chill, dude’. So is he a sign of a change in the tide, at last someone who can turn back the tsunami of lunacy we’ve all seen building over the last decade?

Well… he’s one of the WEF’s mob of ‘young global leaders’ so I think I’ll reserve judgement, and wait to see if he actually does any of the things he says he’ll do. I’m reminded of Georgia Meloni (might not have the spelling right), the ‘far right’ leader of Italy. Did the waves of illegal immigrants stop? Did the problem ones get deported? Well, no. In fact hardly anything has changed. Although Italy did give the masses a tiny glimmer of hope by banning lab grown meat and insect ‘flour’ in pasta. So I won’t be getting too enthusiastic for the new Argentine boss. Especially since he thinks the Falklands should ‘go back’ to Argentina, even though the Falklands were British before Argentina existed.

He comes across as somewhat deranged, to be honest.

Incidentally, I recall, years back, that there was uproar when it was discovered that a certain level of ‘insect parts’ was tolerated in certain foods. That’s because it’s impossible to keep the little buggers out of things like wheat and occasionally, one or two get ground up with the flour. Eating a beetle leg a week won’t really do you any harm. It’s only when there’s an infestation that there’s a problem. There was, however, absolute uproar that there could even be a tiny bit of an insect in our food. Yet now, we have more and more people insisting that the insects are the food. It can’t be long before there is uproar about the insect powder being contaminated with wheat flour.

But I digress. In other turning tides, medics are now blaming the government for the end-of-life ‘care’ they imposed on the elderly during covid. Maybe the government ordered it, but the doctors administering it knew what the effect would be. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance are claiming they were misled by the science, even though they were the ones in charge of it. Wind farmers are getting out of the business because it is becoming impossible to make a profit even with massive subsidies.

The covid scam is being revealed. The climate scam is falling apart. The lunacy of the mRNA jabs is finally coming to light. Moderna and Pfizer are losing the battle to keep secret their knowledge of what their highly profitable scam would do to many people.

Remember when the Just Stop Oil idiots were guarded by police and given cups of tea while they had one hand glued to the road? Well now they are all arrested within minutes of starting one of their funereal marches. Get the message guys. They don’t need you any more. They have a new crowd to cause disruption, and the new ones are now under police protection. Your little marches are getting in the way of pro-Palestine rioters. Also, the whole ‘net zero’ nonsense has hit the buffers, hard. It’s now so ridiculous that even the politicians are beginning to notice.

Is it really turning? Has common sense overpowered Common Purpose and the WEF? I’m afraid I don’t think so. I don’t think Schwabby and his saggy faced gang have given up. I think they’ve just changed direction.

Left wing authoritarianism is failing. People are rebelling against all of the scams and associated control freakery. They are never going to accept it. So what do you do?

Simple. You give them saviours. You turn everything to right wing, blast the hell out of the left wing, and when people cheer it on you can impose right wing authoritarianism – which in the end, gives you exactly the same result. See, these globalists don’t care which version of politics gets them to their goals. Right or left, the end result is the same. “You don’t like this one? Well how about that one? We get total control in the end, either way”.

Maybe I’ve become overly cynical. Maybe the tide really is turning on all the lunacy and depravity of recent years. Maybe it’s because I’ve read about Weimar and the conditions that got Hitler voted into power – which, I’m sure, Germany thought was a good idea at the time. Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.

But, all I see here is a classic ‘bait and switch’.