Author: Scott Andrews

Reclusive former writer of absurd nonsense. Occasional contributor to #newsbiscuit

Celebrity Arseholes And The Sebald Islands

The greatest threat to the human race is and always has been stupidity.  In the 21st century the stupidity bug appears to have mutated with celebritism and created a new super powered celebrity arsehole.  The symptoms of celebrity arseholism are as follows:  over rating your own talents, travelling to other countries where you are more popular than your own, and last but not least, saying cuntish things.

Recently intellectual luminaries such as Sean Penn, Roger Waters and Morrissey have all seen fit to have their say on the Falkland Islands/Los Malvinos/Sebald Islands without having any credentials or expertise or knowledge on the subject.  Seeing as the debate appears to be open to anyone, and that the only relevant qualification appears to be that you must be a giant arsehole, I feel it’s only appropriate for me to join the party.

When trying to ascertain the ancestry of the people of the Islands a good starting is always a census survey.  The most recent I found on the internet is from 2006.  Suffice to say I was stunned when I got to the bottom of page 8.  I expected to see a large number of islanders with Argentinian ancestry.  The next page(table 14b) shows the population by ancestry(other).  Now despite not having a celebrity superpowers I am fathoming a guess that it refers to the number of people who consider their ancestry to be mixed.  In total 17 of the 2955 Falkland Islanders consider themselves to be Argentinian to some degree.  To put it into context, it is less than 1 percent of the entire population.  Maybe the answer is to be found in the history of the island?

A less than intelligent human being would, rather than waste any of his precious superstar studded time on research, make idle speculations based on the few memories they retain about the history of Britain at the back of their super minds.  Therefore it would be really very easy to conclude that Spain had probably colonised Los Malvinos and then the British invaded, stole it and plundered it.  I applaud such a line of thought as that is exactly what Britain did mostly.  Except when it didn’t.

The Falkland Islands were first sighted in 1600 by the Dutch explorer Sebald de Weert who subsequently named the islands the Sebald Islands.  Not very imaginative I know, but absolutely true nonetheless.  If the world was ruled by five-year old boys and the finders keepers rule was applied the Islands would be Dutch and none of this mess would have ever happened.  In 1690 the first Brit sailed between the two main islands and named the passageway, the Falkland Channel.  That man was Captain John Strong.  Still there was no problem, as no one tried to settle there.  Trust the French to ruin everything.  In 1764 Louis Antoine de Bougainville founded a settlement in what is now Port Louis, East Falkland.  And this is where things become a little complicated, so complicated that I shall continue in bullet points.  For the record lets recap first nation to see it – the Netherlands, first country to move in – France.  

  • 1765 – British Captain John Byron explored and claimed Saunders Island.  Apparently unaware of the French presence, he laid claim to all of the archipelago in the name of King George III.
  • 1766 – Britain built its first settlement in Port Egmont.
  • 1767 – Spain acquired the French colony and placed it under the control of the Buenos Aires colonial administration.
  • 1770 – Spain attacked Port Egmont and expelled the British presence.  Later that year a peace treaty was signed, and the British returned.
  • 1774 – Great Britain withdrew from the islands as part of a mass of withdrawals caused by economic problems.  Insanely they left behind a plaque laying claims to the island.
  • 1806 – Spain withdrew its governor, leaving behind a bigger plaque in his place.
  • 1811 – the United Provinces of the River Plate(which later became Argentina) withdrew the remaining settlers.

As you can see the end of the 18th century was quite a turbulent time for the attempted settlers for the Sebald Islands.  Incredibly it wasn’t until 1820 when the Argentinians properly entered the stage.  All because of an American named David Jewett.  His boat the Heroina was damaged in a storm and he took shelter on the islands.  While he was there he claimed the islands in the name of the United Provinces of the River Plate.  Did he stick around?  No.

It wasn’t until 1828 when Luis Vernet established a settlement, after first getting permission from both the British and Argentine authorities, that the first Argentines settled on the Falkland Islands.  Some 64 years after the first settlement had been built.  Unfortunately for Vernet his settlement was destroyed in 1831 when the Islands were raided by the USS Lexington, after a dispute over hunting and fishing rights with the US Government spiralled into a conflict.  In 1832 Argentina sent Commander Mestivier to found a penal colony on the island.  His efforts lasted a whooping 4 days before he was killed in a mutiny.  In January 1833 the British forces returned and requested that the Argentinian garrison leave, to which they did somewhat reluctantly.  In 1840 the British government decided to establish a permanent colony on the Falkland Islands.

Let’s take a moment to consider Argentina’s claim to the island.  They were 56 years too late.  They occupied the island for 5 years.  They did not discover it.  They were not the first to settle on it.  Or the second.  In fact the first Argentinian to claim it was an American.  They settled on the islands after seeking British permission.  They loved the island so much that they tried to turn it into a prison.  All in all in my non-celebrity arsehole opinion they have a magnificent case for ownership.  So strong in fact that I can’t understand why they didn’t take their case to the United Nations.  In 1947 the United Kingdom offered to submit the case to the International Court of Justice at the Hague.  Argentina refused.  In 1955 a unilateral application to the court, by the United Kingdom failed after Argentina announced that it would not respect the decision of the court.

On Friday the 2nd of April 1982 the Argentinian Army invaded the Falkland Islands on the orders Leopoldo Galtieri, the last of Argentina’s military dictators.  907 lives and 74 days later the Argentinian army surrendered.  Which brings us all the way to 2012.  The newspapers are full of talk about British acts of aggression which include sending a destroyer and a submarine and most threatening of all, Prince William to the region.  In Argentina the President has arranged a ban of Falklands flagged boats landing in South America.  As the sabre rattling continues, one has to ask why is it starting again?  As a human being I hope that humanity learns from war, rather than repeating the same mistake again.  Could it be a purely territorial dispute?  Or could it be something even more sinister?

My neighbour has a lovely house in the country.  I don’t.  I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that the government are planning to build a motorway exactly where his house is (to see more about the motorway – click on the link beneath *).  The value of his land is going to skyrocket.  I went there for 5 days a few years back.  I have told him that I think I should now have the house, after all it’s much closer to where I live.  He says that is absurd, some of his family live there, and I don’t even speak the same language.  Last year I went there and kicked his family out.  I was planning to live there forever.  However he called the authorities.  They came and removed me.  He doesn’t speak to me now.  He says I am in the wrong.  I know I am not though.  As Bono agrees with me.

*Click here to read an article about the motorway

I Will Always Love…… News

On Saturday evening, I sat down to eat dinner and turned on the news.  Habitually, I tend to flick through the various international news stations in an effort to avoid programs such as Business Today, Technology Yesterday and Wall Street Tomorrow.  Perhaps I am peculiar, as when I turn on a news station I like to watch something called news, which unfortunately for me tends to be much more difficult to find than it sounds.  On Saturday, Whitney Houston’s Funeral dominated the news channels with CNN, BBC, Euronews, NBC, HBC, TSB, and the vast majority of the stations programmed on my decoder between channel 200 and 250 all showing the glitzy, star-spangled send off.  It was therefore left to Al Jazeera to feed my appetite.  After watching a documentary about the revolution in Tunisia, they unbelievably had some news.  Strangely they didn’t start with Whitney, instead they led with a story about an Iranian Warship entering the Mediterranean for the first time in fifty-something years.  Quite stunned by the fact there was some real news going on somewhere, I quickly flicked back to BBC and CNN to check what they were showing.  I was delighted to see that they were still bringing us blow-by-blow coverage of Whitney Houston’s funeral, as I like the rest of humanity can see that there isn’t a greater threat to world peace than someone not singing someone else’s song, which was written by someone else, well enough to befit the memory of such a legendary voice.  It’s with that thought in mind I have decided to create  an exercise to try to figure out why the likes of the BBC and CNN chose to cover the funeral, as opposed to any actual significant news, like an act of aggression from a rogue state, or something.  And to demonstrate just how intelligent this exercise is, I shall use numbered points.

  1. Whitney Houston dead is more dangerous than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is alive.
  2. Iran recently ordered the assassinations of a number of Israeli diplomats in India, Georgia and Thailand.  Whitney Houston successfully assassinated millions of brain cells with the aid of a crack pipe.
  3. Iran is run by religious extremists, Houston was extremely religious.
  4. Iran is trying to develop nuclear bombs, Whitney Houston’s voice was ‘da bomb’
  5. Whitney Houston was on her journey to heaven, the Iranian battleship was only going to Syria.
  6. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often paranoid, irrational  and delusional.  Whereas Whitney Houston was perfect.  It’s a good job drug addicts don’t have comedowns.

It seems somewhat amazing that in the 21st century our obsession with celebrities now trumps world peace in the public domain.  In death comes a massive loss of perspective.  In any communal grieving process a pattern often emerges.  It becomes something of a pissing competition as each person tries to bestow greater platitudes than the next.  It is absurd.

Something has gone wrong with the world.  We have taken our eyes off  the ball and are content to be a race of Homer Simpsons just doing the best we can until the day we die.  We have accepted our meaninglessness, so much so that we seldom use our brains.  Our reality is bigger than we are.  Our aptitude for denial is immeasurable.  I am only trying to point out that we are doing it wrong.  That somewhere in the shadows of the last century we left sanity behind and instead bought into cultural oblivion.  An oblivion which we not only chose, but invested in with both our hearts and our credit cards.  Obviously you don’t have to take my word for it, after all my funeral will never even be mentioned on CNN. But this guy’s might….

Popularis Immortalis

A true story for you.  There was once a carpenter who disappeared from the high pressure world of carpentry when he was thirty years old.   He devoted his time to his favorite hobbies which included hanging around with twelve men, wandering around preaching at people and claiming to be an astounding magician.  Many people were disturbed by both his peculiar words and his disheveled appearance.  There were rumours that he was crazy, that he was a terrorist and that he claimed he was the son of God.  When he died, tragically of course, many people thought it was his own fault.  People mourned him.  Not for him personally but for the quality of the furniture he produced.  Some claimed him as a genius, saying that there would never be a carpenter of his ilk again.  It was said that his dovetail joint was quite possibly the greatest the world has ever seen.  At Christmas people went out and bought job lots of his furniture, which they sat on once, and never ever sat on again.  Two thousand years later barely a soul remembers his name.

It’s a good job people aren’t so fickle nowadays….

I Love Warsaw

I woke up this morning to find that (for the second time in as many months) we have no water.  Being somewhat strategically minded I decided the best course of action was to wait as long as possible before getting ready to leave for work.  Unfortunately we still had no water.  In a panic I ran around the flat in search of mineral water.  I was horrified when I realised that I had less than a fifth of a litre at my disposal.  I had a choice, the likes of which I had never faced before.  Should I wash?  Should I shave?  Should I brush my teeth?  Or should I use it to flush the toilet?  Or should I try to do all four?  Sadly I was only successful in 75 percent of my pursuits.

Unfortunately that’s the price we pay for living in the 19th century, what do you mean it’s the 21st?  I guess you should expect such things in third world countries.What do you mean European Union?  It’s actually pretty typical when you live in a village.  What do you mean Warsaw is the capital of Poland?  Am I being antsy?  Am I merely just angry?  No way, there is plenty to love about Poland.  There just isn’t much to like.  Especially in regards to Warsaw.  In most countries the capital city is the proverbial Cinderella.  Not this city though.

This city where a bus has not run on time since 1637, where there is a shortage of small change in every single shop large or small, where you have to pay to piss in a public toilet, where beggars rarely hide their real intentions, where gay parades were banned as recently as 2005, where history is a matter of convenience rather than truth, where building flats is more important than building homes, where the underground is one straight line, where old ladies in mohair Berets are more intimidating than the youth, where there are more churches than football pitches, where customer service is yet to be invented, where drinking alcohol in public is prohibited.  This Warsaw.  This home.  This ugly sister.

S**A P**A A**A And Censorship

Whilst I have been idly traipsing around Europe the world appears to have woken up slightly in regards to the freedom which we don’t have.  It’s apparent that the vast majority of human beings are completely unaware of the censorship which surrounds us.  The catalyst(s) of this knee jerk reaction have been a number of bills which intend to redefine the golden age of technology in which we live, all with absurdist acronyms (my favourite being PIPA – which has more interesting connotations in a number of languages) designed to obscure the view of an ordinary man behind extremely broad legal bullshit.

Since the dawn of organised authority censorship has existed in one way or another.  You only have to look as far as the best-selling book of all time.  For around 1,000 years ordinary people were banned from reading the bible.  From 500  ad to 1500 ad, average Joe was not permitted to read the bible.  And it didn’t stop there.  In 1536 a man named William Tyndale was strangled to death while tied to a stake and then his body was burned for being a heretic.  His crime.  Printing 6,000 copies of the bible in English.  I am not intentionally trying to compare the internet to the bible.  The point I am trying to make is that censorship has always existed in one shape or form.  The problem is that we only notice it when we see it at close range.

In the UK you are not free to write what you want.  If you write erotic fiction which the courts deem as not possessing sufficient literary merit you are liable for prosecution.  Thankfully all judges have to take a mandatory phd in English Literature.  In the UK the censorship of the theatre was only abolished in 1968.  As late as 1977 blasphemy was a criminal offence.  The Terrorism act of 2000 makes it illegal to collect or possess information likely to be of use to a terrorist.  Does that mean Prince William’s Grandmother never tells him where she is going tomorrow?  Is the boy scout who knows that rubbing two sticks together makes a fire a terrorist?  The Terrorism act of 2006 makes it an offence to glorify terrorism.  Unless of course you are making a film about it or standing for government.

It was only ever going to be a matter of time before governments starting glancing nervously at the internet.  For me personally the evil in these bills has nothing to do with piracy or copyright infringement.  The Arab spring has proved why the internet must be protected.  Censorship in so many countries has kept people under control.  The internet has given them freedom.  The internet has been a tool which has enabled people to fight for their own freedom.

I cannot for the life of me understand why a Western democratic government would put their name to any of these bills. When our politicians sent our young men to die in Afghanistan they said it was to bring freedom to the people of Afghanistan.  They said the same when they went to Iraq.  They bombed Libya for the freedom of the people.  It’s apparent that in the world in which we live the way to give people freedom is to kill, bomb and maim.  Our governments talk of the great freedoms we enjoy yet suddenly they want to restrict our freedom of speech.  Only such a grand contradiction could exist freely in the 21st century.  Undoubtedly this blatant dishonesty only serves to make our leaders look like a bunch of (*this comment was deleted by SOPA,PIPA and ACTA.  Instead here is the word FUZZY WUZZY BUNNY RABBITS written in block capitals.)

Censorship is a reaction of the nervous, and I for one cannot think of any reason why our leaders might be…. aside from the three words which they have been blasting at us day and night in a veiled attempt to prepare us for the worst.  I will give you a clue.  It has absolutely nothing to do with a Global Economic Crisis.

And seeing as I have written a post which mentions copyright infringement I best leave you with a quote.  The words in question belong to a Dane who is starting to interest me more and more as time goes by.  His name is Soren Kierkegaard.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.