You’re not paranoid when they really are out to get you

According to some German scientists, smoking makes you anxious and paranoid. Here’s a quick summary of what they did to invent arrive at this conclusion.

They showed volunteers a series of images, just symbols, but some symbols gave them an electric shock when displayed. The volunteers soon learned to anticipate the shock when the symbol appeared. So far, so Pavlovian. Nothing contentious there.

So now they have a group with a ‘learned fear response’. This, they seem to believe, is a bad thing. It’s the response that stops you poking your finger into a flame a second time. The response that makes you steer well clear of tigers and other things that might eat you. Yet, to these scientists, being afraid of something that hurts is a bad thing.

They then showed the volunteers the same symbols but without the electric shocks and with reassurances that ‘all is well’, The smokers tended to flinch at the symbols anyway, despite the reassurances.

Now, from this they conclude that smoking is bad because smokers don’t just accept the reassurances. Smoking, they say, inhibits your ability to suppress a fear response.

Hypothetical stiuation – some bearded loony is running at you with a machete shouting ‘Allahu akbar but it’s okay, I’m from the religion of peace’. Is it better to suppress your fear response because of reassuring words, or is if better to run like buggery and let the idiot who believes the words get sliced into halal bacon?

I’m a smoker. I’ll hang on to my learned fear response, thank you very much.

The ‘fear response’ is not the same thing as PTSD. That’s where they are making their fundamental error. PTSD needs a cure. It’s debilitating. The fear response does not need a cure. It’s a normal and natural part of being a human. In fact, any animal. Suppressing the fear response means developing people who will stick their finger in the flame a second time and who will try to cuddle tigers.

I seem to recall reading about a condition – might be considered the opposite of PTSD – where people have no ability to feel fear and do not learn from being hurt. That’s a pretty dangerous condition to have. Should we all aspire to be so fearless that we will walk back into a burning house because we think we’ve left the gas on?

A big confounder in this whole experiment is that smokers have a ‘fear response’ to the entire medical profession that has been drummed into us over decades. We know they hate us – it’s not paranoia, they are in the news every day delighting in new ways to make our lives miserable. So when a doctor says ‘Now this time we won’t electrocute you’, the smoker is far less likely to believe it. Basically, medical profession, we don’t trust you, and you made that happen.

The nonsmoker has no such conditioned response. They don’t take their septic finger to the doctor knowing they will be nagged about how smoking causes septic fingers and be told a lot of lies about how they have to give up smoking or the antibiotics won’t work. The smoker forced to interact with the medical world now does so from an initial position of anxiety that is caused not by smoking, but by the incessant nagging.

The article goes on to bemoan how PTSD sufferers smoke much more than us laid back hippie layabout smokers, and calls for ‘interventions’ to stop them. Interventions to stop anyone in a job such as the military, fire service or police from smoking in case their smoking triggers PTSD.

Seriously.

They are claiming smoking causes PTSD. Not attending a crime scene where the walls are decorated with blood and three sets of intestines are tastefully arranged into a semblance of a Christmas tree. No, it’s smoking that gives you PTSD. Not combing through a burning building, knowing it might collapse at any moment just as you come face to face with a charred corpse. Not cowering under heavy shellfire and watching your best mate blown into a thousand pieces right in front of you. No, it’s the smoking we have to deal with.

Seriously. They want to stop soldiers smoking because that’s the biggest danger they face. They want to stop police officers smoking becasue being stabbed by a loony is not so bad, really. The best one is still the firemen. The ones who routinely venture into clouds of choking smoke and flame are not allowed to burn half a gram of leaves and inhale.

This piece of research clearly had the conclusion ‘smoking is bad’ prewritten. It does nothing to advance any kind of treatment for PTSD or anything else. The only thing it advances is the antismoking agenda. Soon you will not be allowed to join the police, military or fire brigade if you smoke.

As the experiment has shown, only those whose natural fear response can be easily overridden will be allowed into those professions. They are the ones who will take unnecessary risks that will put themselves and their colleagues in danger. The smoker who says ‘Whoa, hang on, if we do that we’ll probably die’ is to be banned from the professions altogether.

Military, fire service, police. Three professions where the alleged dangers of smoking are utterly trivial when set against the dangers they face every day. Yet here we have a piece of ‘research’ designed to eliminate smoking from those professions.

Why?

Puritanism. It’s the answer to everything now.

Dust off those saddles…

I have broken my tablet computer. Terminally. I had left it on the floor by the bed, the phone rang, I got up to answer it and crunch. To top it all there was nobody on the phone. It was probably one of those timeout sales calls.

Fortunately I had opted for a cheap Chinese-made one so it won’t hurt too bad to replace it. And it did mean I got to take it apart. I’ve always wanted to see inside one of these things. So I now have two very small good quality speakers that will fit easily inside a model train with a sound generator, a couple of tiny cameras and a microphone (not sure how to wire up a camera but I can find out). Best of all is the ‘vibrate’ motor. Runs on 3V and is less than a cm long. I can fit that into something very small indeed, along with a couple of tiny button cells. My model building interest is rekindled!

I might make a tiny electric car. Might as well, we won’t have any petrol or diesel ones soon. Then again, I’ll be 80 in 2040 so probably won’t want to do much driving. My kids will still be driving age though. They’ll be stuck with those God-awful electric cars. Not even hybrids – the petrol and diesel won’t be allowed.

Suddenly, cars are the cause of all ills. Does that let smokers off the hook? We’ve been saying for a long time that the smoke from a cigarette is nothing compared to a passing truck, nor even a drive-by in a Mini. Nobody wanted to hear it.

It doesn’t let us off the hook because it was never about health and neither is this.

Ministers believe it poses the largest environment risk to public health in the UK, costing up to £2.7bn in lost productivity in one recent year.

Ministers believe whatever it is in their interests to believe, as always. But their thinking is in terms of lost productivity, not health. Sick drones don’t work as hard. That’s how it was sold to them. Same as with tobacco, booze, salt, fat, anything. They don’t give a shit about you. You exist to pay taxes to them. You exist to work so they don’t have to.

Remember when the antismokers checked carbon monoxide in breath tests on smokers in the street? On busy streets. They never tested nonsmokers and never tested themselves. If they had, all the results would have been the same because the CO and other stuff from exhaust fumes on a busy street will overwhelm anything a cigarette can do.

And yet, at that time, the buses and cars rolling by were totally harmless compared to half a gram of burning leaf.

When my grandmother was born there were no cars. They are really that recent, starting in the early 1900s as rich men’s toys. You had to have a man with a red flag walking in front to warn people you were coming so they wouldn’t be startled. That might come back with the electric car because those things are almost silent. They’ll need sound generators like model trains have, so they sound like a real one.

The Cult of the Green God is not satisfied because like all the other ‘mememe’ groups out there, they are never satisfied. They want cars banned right now. Except theirs of course. I mean, how do you get to the next conference on stopping oil use if oil products are banned? Walk there, like a common pleb? They are far too important for that.

Seriously, imagine a world where you can’t speed around in a flash Audi or BMW and have to try to pick up girls in a glorified disability cart. See it happening? The car industry can adapt of course, they just make electric cars instead of petrol ones and then charge more than the car’s value for new batteries.

But the oil industry? You really think they are going quietly into oblivion? Oh no, this isn’t going to be like the tobacco wars at all. The antismokers never wanted to ban tobacco. That would put them out of work so they work with the tobacco companies to reach a compromise where they both profit. Can’t happen when you completely delete all use of a product. The oil wars are going to be a lot more vicious.

Really though, it’s about our ability to go places without being controlled. They don’t like that. They didn’t like us having places to gather and talk so they wrecked the pubs and everything like them. There has been a war against personal transport for a long time and it was always going to be banned one day.

Your 2040 electric car will have all the latest gadgetry installed. No need to worry about speeding, it will be incapable of exceeding the limit, even in an emergency. No need to worry about it getting stolen because the authorities always know exactly where it is and have the power to turn it off remotely.

A lot of people are going to think that’s all good.

Until they are driving somewhere the authorities don’t want them to go…

The Mark of the Beast

Revelation 13: 16-17: Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

I’m not religious, still. I’m not convinced of the existence of any God and yet, the Bible was written by some very interesting people. And, as a writer of scary stories, I have had occasion to dip into the Bible (as well as some *cough* ‘rival publications’ for fact-checking and inspiration). The Mark of the Beast is a big story plotline which nobody seriously thought would become reality.

Well, here it is. (hat tip to @Raven80504432 on Twitter).

And also here (another hat tip, this time to @Leahurst66) The last line of this one contains a typo –

“I want to be part of the future,” she laughs.

Surely she meant ‘furniture’. They hold parties where unchipped workers get to be assimilated for free. It’s not yet compulsory to be chipped to work there but it’s going to be damn inconvenient to be unchipped when the card readers start breaking down. Who wants to pay maintenance costs on obsolete equipment? There’s no need to ‘force’ compliance. Just make non-compliance a hassle.

These are all volunteers. They’ll be delighted with their new Borg implant that lets them open doors and operate vending machines. How long before there are doors that can only be opened by the chip? You don’t have the chip, you can’t go in there. How long before it’s simply too inconvenient to be unchipped? How long before it’s mandatory? How long before you can’t open your door or ride a bus or start your car without one? How long before resistance is genuinely futile?

Oh, the technology has been around for some time. Implanted chips are years old. Implants in pets are actually compulsory in many countries now, and you can already pay for stuff by tapping your credit card on the machine rather than going to all that hassle of slotting it in and pressing four buttons. I’m still a Luddite and use cash most of the time, and absolutely refuse to get involved with contactless when I use the card.

I can keep the cards in a screened wallet so they don’t get scanned by passing crooks, but what if it’s in your hand? Will we have to wear chain mail gloves?

Yes, people welcomed contactless technology and as I suggested at the time, if pressing four buttons is such a hassle, wouldn’t it be so much more convenient if you didn’t have to bother with the card? Why not have that contactless chip embedded in your hand? You can’t forget it or lose it and it’s unlikely to be stolen. You’d certainly notice if it was. I said at the time that it wouldn’t have to be mandatory. People will welcome such convenience.

Remember, a few years back, the calls to have children microchipped like pets so they could be traced if they went missing? Oh that met with absolute outrage! It died out and went quiet. Well it’s back now, except now they will get adults to demand them rather than force them on us all.

They could replace passports. Yes, you can be scanned remotely as you pass without even knowing your credentials are being checked. Isn’t that convenient? Any government authority can know where you are and who you’re with at a moment’s notice. Does that make you feel safe? I bet many people will answer ‘yes’ to that.

The amount of calories in your shopping could soon be displayed on your till receipt and from there it’s just a small step to a siren and red light announcing ‘too many calories!’ at the checkout. Most people will be shamed into buying fewer calories. Personally I’d see it as a challenge to set off that red light every single time.

Buying too much booze? Buying too many chocolate bars? Buying another can of fizz when you bought one only last week? Does it really sound so unlikely when even now, you buy something on Amazon and get related ads popping up on Facebook and other sites. Use your store card and they send you vouchers for money off stuff you buy. Oh yes, it’s all great until you start thinking about how much data is really stored about your life.

Your medical records can be stored on another chip. How would you sell that to people? Well, suppose you were in an accident or passed out on the street. If an ambulance crew could just scan you and get your records, it would save vital minutes and ensure they know what to treat you with right away. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Link it to your home Wifi and the medics can tell if you’re suddenly taken ill. They can also tell when you’re smoking, drinking, overeating…

All this, and the total removal of even the concept of gender, is already in Panoptica. The story I wonder about finishing – and wonder whether I should have written it at all. It seems to come true as I write it.

Although I didn’t have calorie counts on till receipts. There are no till receipts and your shopping is assembled for you depending on your State-defined dietary needs. That hasn’t happened in real life.

Yet.

 

The ‘Devoid of Choice’ Generation.

It still makes me laugh to see companies with signs saying ‘This company operates a no smoking policy’. No, you don’t. No company operates such a policy because no company has any choice in the matter. Every company, every operator of every workplace and every place open to the public is obliged to prevent smoking on the premises. If they fail to comply they will be fined.

There is no choice. No amount of smug signs saying ‘we are making this rule’ changes that fact. You might as well put up signs saying ‘we obey’ because that is what you are really doing.

Hiding from that fact only emboldens the Health Nazis. They see such compliance as weakness and they know they have not reached any boundary yet. In fact there’s no sign of any such boundary. I suppose, denied the old fashioned persecution of anyone non-white, gay or otherwise different, the bigots out there have to have someone to hate and the Health Nazis have a target for them. Smokers.

They have more targets too. The overweight. Anyone putting salt on their food or swigging a can of chemical fizz. All lined up for when the last smoker has been dealt with.

Still, the war on smokers continues to its final solution…

“We want to address this. Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

That’s a quote from Steve Brine, whose surname is going to get him into trouble with the Salties in the future. They want a salt-free world, Steve. No more brine.

But look closely at those words –

“…Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

Ah, the new Aryan race. Moulded along lines directed by those who consider themselves lords over all. And to think, they object to being called Nazis.

This ‘smoke-free’ generation are not going to be asked if they want to play along and be part of Briny Steve’s ashtray-free Utopia. Oh no. That generation will be created by the Salty Fuhrer and his coven of We Know Best.

You won’t have the choice, kids, and you’ll be so proud that you have no choice that you will crow about your non-smoking even though you will never get to try it. You will not be allowed to try it and you will obey.

Oh I know there are antismokers out there thinking ‘Excellent. No more smokers’. They don’t see it, do they? Once you are obedient there is no end to it. No salt. Obey. No meat. Obey. No milk. Obey. No booze. Obey. No socialising without State supervision. Obey.

Oh I know, you’re thinking ‘Well I don’t smoke but they won’t make me give up meat’. They won’t make me give up smoking either. It’s not for us. It’s for their Aryan generation of your kids and grandkids and then on forever. The obedient drones they want to create. You want that as your family legacy? We’ll all be reviled as the filthy ancestors who ate burgers, swilled beer and drooled over meat pies with salty chips. Our headstones will be smashed to rubble to pave the pure streets of Obedience Utopia.

Sure, we’ll be dead, why should we care? Why should we care that our descendants will be drones for the elite (who, incidentally, won’t be giving up anything)? Why should we care if the Earth turns into a planet of slaves to be worked and culled and occasionally harvested for the entertainment of a few utter arseholes? Why should we care that Mount Olympus will be staffed by human gods in the future? Why should we care that our children’s children will live their lives in terror of saying a word out of place and ending up ‘on the farm’?

As fertiliser, not driving a tractor.

Why should we care that our great-grandchildren will watch each other constantly, hoping for that buzz of reward when they hand in a wrongthink criminal and get a pat on the head for it?

Ah, maybe I’m exaggerating – but look around. How much of it is in place already? We have ‘bacon crime’ as a real imprisonable offence. Really, we don’t have far to go.

Smoker persecution was just the start. It soon moved on to other things. Smoker eradication is, likewise, just the start. This smoke free generation will be an obedient, choice free generation. They will not smoke. Not because they don’t want to, because they have been told not to and they will obey. Just like those businesses who pretend that being smoke free is their choice, that generation will pretend it’s their choice too. It won’t be. They will not smoke, or drink, or ever taste bacon or beef or chicken, because it will not be allowed. They will be conditioned to believe it was their choice. Just like those businesses with their no smoking policies.

It’s better to believe you chose that path than to accept you were forced onto it, for many people. Not for me. I will not accept force but then school wasn’t a conditioning factory when I was there. They taught us how to think, not what to think. We are no use to the Briny Steves of the world, they are waiting for us to die and, in the meantime, silencing us with political correctness and poofterphobia and dynamitewaistcoatophobia and racism and all the other bollocks. None of it is real for pretty much all of us but their upcoming proto-Aryans believe every word. Especially the made up words. Oh and the suckers who currently enjoy ‘protected status’? Oh you are going to have a really shitty time, very soon.

In the future your grandkids will not smoke and they will convince themselves it’s because they don’t want to. I am not promoting smoking here, I am promoting choice. The choice to not smoke is as valid as the choice to smoke. When you don’t have the choice then you are nothing more than an obedient drone.

Is that what you see for your family’s future?

The vapers will soon point out that the UK Health Nazis have now decided to allow vaping to help with cutting down on smokers. Yeah, don’t get too cheery about it guys. You have not had a reprieve, you have had a stay of execution.

When they finish us off, do you really think they’ll leave you alone?

If you do, you’re going to be very, very disappointed.

 

 

The Grimy Reaper

First of all, here’s a review of Margo Jackson’s ‘The Mark’ on the US Amazon site. It’s a good first review!

I think I have Dirk Vleugel’s next book ‘Tales from Under the Drinking Tree’ about ready to go. Just trying to catch every possible glitch before CreateSpace start playing the ‘no, do it again’ game.

Today though, today was gardening day. Gardening means getting grimy and if you don’t need a hose-down or at least a wash when you come back in, you’re not doing it right. Today was perfect – a day when it actually didn’t rain! The scythe arrived and after a bit of setting up and adjusting, I set about reaping many nettle souls and a lot of other weeds that the strimmer can’t deal with. The blade is almost glowing with all those souls now!

If you’re thinking of trying one, don’t just buy the scythe. You need a whetstone and water sheath (to keep it wet) and a peening kit to periodically bring the blade back to evil razor sharpness. The cutting edge is very fine and wears in use, so you have to give it a quick sharpen with the whetstone every five minutes or so – basically, when it starts bending things rather than cutting them. The scythe is the biggest expense so the accessories are not that much extra. Leaving them out is a real false economy because you’ll soon have a blunt scythe with no means to sharpen it.

I was surprised at how easy it is to use. I expected hard work but just a casual swing and the nettles fall. I have the ditch blade with the stone point – a nail-like end rather than sharp all the way to the end. That’s important for me because I’m cutting in the woods where I might encounter all kinds of hidden hazards. The pointy end hits the hazard first so the sharpened blade is protected.

I found two rusted frames for school desks in the undergrowth. I doubt they can be re-used so I’ll let the farmer add them to his scrap metal pile. They are, technically, his since they are on his property, but I suspect he doesn’t know they exist. They’ve been in there a very long time.

There is an extensive rabbit warren under the nettles. When they emerge they are going to survey the devastation around them and wonder if the local fox has deployed nukes.

The scythe isn’t the simple primitive tool it appears to be. You need to set the handles so the swing is easy and consistent, set the lay (blade angle on the ground) and the haft (angle between blade and shaft) and when you have all that just right, using it is so easy you’ll wonder why these things ever went out of fashion.

There is still a place for the strimmer. There are places the scythe can’t get into, especially near fences and around what I euphemistically call a ‘rockery’ although it’s actually just a pile of rocks. It can’t get between trees and fences and it doesn’t work well among densely planted flower beds. Well it would work there just fine as long as you don’t mind turning the flower bed into a monument to Tunguska.

One big win for the scythe is chopping the nettles around things like pampas grass. If a strimmer hits pampas grass it won’t cut it, it’ll wrap the leaf around itself until it’s tied up tighter than a tart in a bondage brothel. Pampas grass yields to the scythe.

I can’t mow lawns with it yet but then it has only been in my possession for less than twelve hours so far. Maybe I should get a second blade for lawns. You only need one snath (shaft), you can change blades easily.  I actually prefer the lawn cut I get with the hand-pushed cylinder mower that I got for £30 from Aldi. It cuts really close and has a roller so it leaves those attractive lines. Now the lawns are pretty much clear of pine cones it’s working well. A pine cone, and especially a fallen twig with ten cones on it, will stop that mower dead.

The petrol mower cleared the cones. It cares nothing for pine cones nor even fallen branches, it mashes them and throws them into the grass basket. As I don’t fancy picking cones off a razor sharp scythe blade I’ll still need that mower. Especially at the start of the year when the cones have been dropping all winter.

Also, a summer like this one with daily rain leaves the grass long and wet when you finally get a chance to cut it. The push mower can’t cope with that. Maybe the scythe can, we’ll see. It got so bad at one point that I had to use the petrol mower without the grass box because the grass was so long and wet it was choking the mower. This meant a lot of raking up afterwards which was a pain.

There’ll be raking up afterwards with the scythe too but when the grass is long and wet, raking will happen anyway.

It’s resting now, with the other tools. Munching on nettle souls and waiting for me to set up a proper wall mounting for it. Hanging it like that will mean resetting the blade because it’ll shift relative to the shaft.

I hope it’s a fine day tomorrow, There are many more nettle souls to reap.

 

Number 14 FFS!

When I was about 14 I took part in an essay competition at school. Not really voluntary, it was assigned to us in English class. Anyway, the subject was ‘women’s liberation’ as it was known in 1974. I won the damn thing with a cobbled-together rant and spent the money on the first three of Kraftwerk’s albums. The ones before they discovered actual music. I still have them.

The teacher handed the essay around. Most of the girls in that class didn’t speak to me for weeks. Some probably won’t speak to me now.

So, with the announcement that Dr. Who has gone all transgender, let’s see if I can repeat my youthful success at offending just about everyone.

Another thing I was good at at school was maths (I know the Americans call it ‘math’ but we have more than just adding and subtracting in the UK so we need to use the plural). A consequence of this is that I was forced to grind my teeth at the announcement that the new Doctoress is number 13.

I have watched this show from its original, monochrome, wooden-acted beginnings. It took me almost 50 years to notice that in the first encounter with the Daleks, there were only about four actual Daleks. The rest were painted on the wall. However, I have noticed each and every Doctor incarnation.

We can ignore Peter Cushing’s Doctor in the films because he wasn’t a Time Lord. He was a human inventor who built a Tardis in his shed. Something we can all aspire to, but he wasn’t an incarnation of the Doctor so doesn’t count here.

One. William Hartnell. A wonderfully grumpy old sod who was clearly, from the outset, a non-human entity. Two, Patrick Troughton, a bit more jolly and then three, Worzel Gummidge – no wait, Jon Pertwee. At that point it all became a bit silly with him driving around in a yellow clown car dressed as Sherlock Holmes. He was stuck on Earth so no expensive special space effects. The biggest special effect was Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s moustache.

Number four, possibly still the best of the lot, was Tom Baker. Large, with a grin bordering on the wildly carnivorous, a fondness for jelly babies and the scarf! I have two of those scarves. My mother made one for me when I was at university (paired with an ex-army greatcoat, I won a fancy dress competition wearing my day clothes – but I was very, very drunk). CStM has since made another one. The old one was getting a bit faded.

Tom Baker brought the show back into a little bit serious. Not too far into serious but enough to make the scary bits a little scary again. After he left it went rapidly back to silly.

Five, six and seven – Colin Baker (arrogant clown), Peter Davison (cricket-playing arse) and the one we all wish never happened, Sylveste McCoy. Oh come on. The thin wiggly guy from Vision On is the Doctor? No wonder the show gathered dust for a couple of decades.

When the show was shelved, so was Sylveste. He didn’t regenerate at the end of his run. He seemed destined to be the last Doctor forever. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and burning of childhood Dalek suits (they were real, I had one and so did my brother – in the 1960s).

The show never had any message. It was just fun. The adventures of a bumbling alien idiot with a time machine, an astronomical IQ and no common sense. Then the BBC brought it back and gradually added an agenda.

Number eight was Paul McGann. Just the one special episode where we could delight in watching Sylveste McCoy gunned down by mistake by a gang. It was set in London about 10 am this morning. He regenerated into Paul McGann, the angst ridden Emo Doctor dressed like Percy Bysshe Shelley without the booze. Again, we didn’t see him regenerate and that’s where the trick was pulled.

The next one we see is not nine, but ten. He’s called nine because we haven’t met nine yet. Bernie – no wait, Christopher Ecclestone, the jolly Northern lad who’s okay with the pansexual antics of Captain Jack ‘if it stays still I’ll bonk it’ Harkness. Not too much message, it was still mostly fun and it had mercifully lost the ridiculous flamboyance of most of the earlier incarnations.

Next up was David Tennant followed by Matt Smith. Both good, both continued the scatterbrained genius approach to the role and both wore (relatively) sensible attire.

They were billed as ten and eleven but they were eleven and twelve. It’s during Matt Smith’s tenure that we meet Doctor Nine – the war doctor, played by John Hurt. Played very well, may I say, but the sneaky insertion of that incarnation between Paul McGann and Christopher Ecclestone cost an incarnation.

Which is evident at the end of Matt Smith’s tenure. Facing down an entire Dalek fleet with only his trusty Cyberman head, Handles, at his side, he is very old now and has no more incarnations left. As he says to the Daleks: ‘You lot have been trying to kill me for thousands of years and here I am, dying of old age. If you want something done, do it yourself’.

But that’s not the end – the Time Lords poke through the rift in spacetime and send him another incarnation. How many does he have now? Even he doesn’t know.

But that was it. Twelve incarnations. Thirteen was a bonus and thirteen was Peter Capaldi.

He started out a bit silly but improved, and then the agenda really kicked in. Lots of in-your-face gayness. Oh it was there before, with the Lizard Lesbian, but it was discreet. No more. Bill, the last assistant, never failed to remind us that she was a rug-muncher first and foremost even though it never had anything at all to do with the Dr. Who storyline.

Sidelines – It was a little endearing to see the last male Doctor fighting the Mondassian cybermen and that they did look rather like the original Mondassian cybermen encountered by the first Doctor. Also a big plot hole. The Master (John Simm, a delightfully psychotic portrayal)  regenerated from Derek Jacobi and was confined to Earth until he died. His next appearance was as ‘Missy’ (Michelle Gomez) and it’s not clear how he got there – but it is clear that as the John Simm incarnation he never left Earth he was cremated there. So how did he end up on the Mondassian ship?

Anyway. Bil is going to be seriously pissed off to find that she spent all that time hanging around with an old dude, only to be turned into a cyberman and then die just before the old dude turned into a hot chick. Oh that is some serious bad luck right there.

But then they had to Kill Bill. She can’t come back now the Doctor is an automobile’s nightmare. She’d try it on with the Doctor like that loose floozy Amy Pond did (and she was engaged to Rory the Dull!).

So the new one is a wench. I wonder if the Tardis wardrobes contain any women’s clothing? I mean, after 13 male doctors, why would it? Unless one or more – or all –  of them was into that sort of thing. Perhaps they used to go off to some remote part of the galaxy and become Doctorina for a few years. Maybe sneak back as their own assistants.

This new one is number 14 though. Why this mad insistence on 13? Is it supposed to be unlucky that this regeneration missed out ‘the package’? The first Doctor had a granddaughter but he hasn’t used it since then anyway. Twelve new knobs and no action. No wonder he’s given up on them.

If it wasn’t for all the PC crap introduced into the show recently I’d have no trepidation about this new Doctor. A Doctor I can drool at rather than have to make do with the assistants would be a nice change. But then, having seen the 13 men she was before that could prove difficult to get past.

Still, I have a feeling it’s going to have a lot more anti-white-straight-male going on. Not 14’s fault, it’ll be in the script.

The agenda just moved on a notch. Those cheering it don’t know where it’s going.

It’s not where they think it’s going.

 

 

Letter to Theresa

Frank Davis has brought to my attention a very calm,. measured and rage-free letter sent to Tessie ‘Jackboots’ May by an older lady. A currently vaping ex-smoker. Which, in the eyes of the total morons most countries have accepted as Health Dictator, is the same thing anyway.

I like older women. There aren’t so many of them around now, I find.

We seem to be doing a little better with the health Nazis in the UK but not much. When the Nanny doesn’t want to be called ‘nanny’ but insists on nannying anyway, it’s not going to end well. Not for nanny.

But hey, let’s keep it calm and measured and none of the modern frantic swivel-eyed stuff. I mean, I know I’m moving fast forward in time here and when my scythe arrives I will have reached the technological prowess of the Amish. The rest of America won’t take much longer to catch up on.

A quick side note – if you want to track vaping posts here, don’t type ‘vaping’ in the search bar. I don’t call it that. I have called it ‘Electrofag’ from the beginning and always will.

Without further ado, here is a video even better than Bowie’s excellent ‘Letter to Hermione‘

It is more logical and makes more sense.