Category: Current Affairs

The Evolution of Train Spotting

Many years ago Britain was the home of a most peculiar pastime.  Trainspotting.  For the Europeans among my readers I feel I must point out that Trainspotting does not in actual fact require participants to take heroin and become Scottish.  Trainspotting actually refers to a long, forgotten hobby, as archaic as druidism with even sillier costumes.  The participants of this strange pastime were almost always funny looking bespectacled men, adorned in anoraks and bobble hats.  The activity itself solely consisted of spending entire weekends sitting on train station platforms writing down the numbers of passing trains in tattered notebooks.  Believe it or not, the participants of this form of social relaxation, did it for…. fun.  I don’t know whether this futile pursuit still exists, rather  regrettably, I suspect it does.

Something strange happens to people on trains.  For some reason our chronic fears, and distrust of fellow humans tend to float to the surface for no other reason than the fact that we are on a train.  The most common rite of passage usually takes place on the underground.  For some reason people fear making eye contact and go to enormous lengths to find a spot to look at which is free of those terrible manifestations of evil: the human eyeballs. The determination and commitment shown in this endeavor often makes participants look as if they are experiencing some form of fit as their eyes twitch all around the cabin.  Strangely it is not the nauseous odor of human bodies trapped in a metal coffin which offends people.  The vast majority of us are fine with being surrounded by the potent cocktail of perfume, sweat and farts.  It’s the eyeballs which worry us.

That of course doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same problems on regular trains, it is simply that the seating arrangement reduces the chance of ever having to make eye contact with a stranger.  They still stink, there are still lunatics, it is more a question that normal trains are presumed to be more civilized.  The reason for this is simple.  We are extremely unlikely to find ourselves ‘face to crutch’ with a stranger, or ‘nostril to armpit’.  The perceived civility comes from the fact that by and large normal trains are more orderly.  Of course we still avoid eye contact, we still stiffen when someone asks ‘is that seat taken?’ and we do shuffle in out seats when a stranger sits next to us.  All of these examples of perceived incivility make the fact that a new pastime has developed on trains, which given the human discomfort which is evident on every journey has come of somewhat a surprise to me.

The fact is that trains have become a hunting ground for wankers.  Literally.  It is hard to believe given the fact that a train is hardly conducive to romantic liaisons.  Unless Virgin has started lacing their tea with aphrodisiacs.  The first time I heard about a locomotive pleasure seeker was in a news story involving a man acquitted of indecency on a train, on the grounds that he had been playing an invisible banjo underneath a newspaper on his lap.  I know given that picture, some of you may dispute his innocence but I find his argumentation incredibly persuasive.

Think about it:

Recently I read another story about a man in Florida who was accused of stimulating himself on a train.  In his defense, one I might add, that is perfectly plausible, he claimed that he was rocking backwards and forwards because he had an itchy belly.  I can imagine how such an action could easily be misjudged and honestly it’s an example of how people in general always jump to negative conclusions.  He did incidentally admit that he may have accidentally ejaculated on the train’s bathroom floor.  I for one admire his courage as honestly, who hasn’t been there?

A quick search on Google brings up a startling amount of stories from all over the world.  America, Denmark, Australia, Thailand to name but a few.  An exception to the rule is when something like that happens once, in one corner of the globe, in one isolated incident.  When repeated incidents take place across numerous continents it can then be classified as an epidemic.

The reality is that the appearance of train wankers coinciding with the disappearance of train spotters is no accident. It is a natural byproduct of evolution.    It is a living example of ‘Gradualism’.  Train wankers didn’t appear suddenly. They didn’t pull themselves out of the swamps and march towards the cities.  They are an example of a slower, gradual change which is reflected in our societies as well as our biology.  Once upon a time it was unthinkable for a man to sit in the same cabin on a train as a lady.  Even today women-only passenger cars  are still offered in Japan, Egypt, India, Iran, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Dubai.  Yet 100 years ago they were commonplace in most countries, which begs the question whether this is truly evolution, or really devolution.

Wherever you stand on the matter you must acknowledge the fact that one day you might be on a train and you may notice a man acting suspiciously.  Before rushing to any rash judgements you should perhaps ask him if his belly is itchy.  If he shakes his head you should then play him a note from your invisible banjo and see if he responds.  If he doesn’t then the chances are that he is stimulating himself.  Unfortunately given the fact that people like this are hard to stop mid flow there is only one thing you can do.  Don’t scream.  Don’t hurl abuse.  Shout ‘dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens’.  If that doesn’t kill his mood you can be sure that he is a proper wanker.

Horses For Courses

Over the past week all the joyous forms of social media have been rife with jokes, gags and criticism regarding the Horsegate scandal.  For those of you that live under a rock, the denizens of Great Britain and Ireland have been thoroughly disgusted to discover that a number of supermarkets (the most notable being Tesco) have been selling beefburgers containing horsemeat.  The sense of outrage has been generated by one of three things: incorrect labelling, animal rights, or possibly the fact that our Gaelic cousins do it, so it must be wrong.  Strangely, the sense of outrage hasn’t been caused by the one fact that is the most outrageous about the whole affair.  In fact it has been largely overlooked.

Ever since the invention of advertising and marketing, labels have become largely worthless.  Although the days of adverts supporting smoking are long gone,smoking the concept of not telling the truth hasn’t.  This is why McDonalds adverts never feature fat children that get out of breath whilst standing in line, or why Coca-Cola doesn’t feature people with no teeth or Bell Whisky show homeless people abusing themselves at bus stops.  The very concept of truth-telling in business is absurd as so many things are terribly unhealthy for us.  There is more chance of the tooth fairy existing.

Many newspapers have put forward the argument that people in Britain and Ireland do not eat horse because a horse is widely regarded as a companion animal.  Obviously the vast majority of those that keep horses for companions  have two surnames, live in mansions and have a tennis court and a swimming pool.  Strangely I have never met anyone who kept a horse as a pet.  They simply aren’t that much fun to cuddle up with on the sofa, and well when you forget to walk them they do make an awful mess on the carpet.  If we are honest to ourselves we know deep down that horses aren’t companion animals no more than the person you happen to go jogging with is your best friend.

Perhaps it is moral outrage.  Would you be outraged to discover that you had eaten horse and not known it?  Not really because you didn’t know about it.  It’s like being angry about the second world war.  You have missed the bus.  It is in the past.  You have eaten, digested and shat it out by now.  Most amusingly, the people who appear to be the most outraged are those people reading articles by newspapers that may or may not have hacked the telephones of dead people, on their tablets or telephones that were manufactured by Chinese slaves, as they read they tut aloud and tap their feet in anger.  The feet in question are adorned with american sports shoes which were made by Africans being paid less the a pound a month.  Moral outrage, in an age where it’s impossible to have clean hands is nothing more than mere hypocrisy.

The other aspect which is quite bizarre is what exactly people are outraged about.  ‘Oh my god, I’ve eaten a meat which is completely legal and doesn’t harm my health!’.  You would think that the morally outraged would be outraged at the fact that people are outraged that they have food to eat when millions of people on this planet do not.  Horse is eaten in France, Italy, Asia and South America.  It is not a rare and unusual source of sustenance.

Let’s briefly recap.  A number of people in Britain are outraged because they unknowingly ate horse.  Eating horse is not dangerous to a person’s health.  It is not a crime.  Nor is it a sin.  In fact there are no reasons why a citizen of Britain cannot eat a horse.  Let’s be honest it’s not like it’s against our religion.  Now that would be outrageous.  Imagine if they had put pork in the beefburgers.  Could you imagine the reaction of the 1.54 million Muslims and an estimated 250,000 Jews that live in Britain?  The small print you don’t see in most of the news stories is that pork was also found in the beefburgers.  It’s impossible to estimate the number of people who may or may not have broken their own religious vows because a number of businesses were trying to increase their profit margins.  Isn’t that outrageous?  Isn’t that something the morally outraged should be outraged about?  I guess not.

Horsegate is yet another example which highlights how far wrong our way of life now is.  The idea of moral authority should be buried in a casket named the 20th century.  We should be reactionary about things which matter now, not what may have mattered ten years ago.  Essentially, this scandal could safely be reflected under a ‘corrupt company blames another corrupt company for doing something unpopular’ headline.  As irrespective of punishment, this will never change.  Businesses will always seek out ways to cut costs and increase profits.  In the meantime it takes valuable attention away from issues which really matter.  And that ladies and gentleman is the biggest shame of all.

A New Year Message

Those of you that have been stopping by my blog for over a year may well remember that I am not a big fan of New Year’s Eve.  In fact I detest it.  It’s almost certainly the one party each year which is inevitably shit, that’s why this year I shall be avoiding New Year’s Eve parties like pandas avoid sex.  I don’t wish to waffle on too much about the matter as I laid out my position last year in a post entitled ‘New Year’s Evil’.  Instead I wish to share a few thoughts on New Year’s resolutions.

A resolution by definition, is a decision taken to do, or not to do something over the next calendar year.  The vast majority of unimaginative cretins are convinced that the only path to self-improvement is to disallow themselves from doing something they enjoy.  The usual suspects almost always relate to giving something up.  Usually smoking, drinking, eating, self-fellating, being irritating, breathing, wheezing, sneezing and stranger pleasing.  It’s as if the world has mistaken New Year’s resolutions for the entry requirements to a monastery.  And that dear friends is why the vast majority of people fail miserably in their quest for pointless self-improvement.

What most resolution makers fail to realise is that at heart the vast majority of human beings are hedonists, which means that the hardest things to stop doing are things which bring you pleasure.  By choosing such opus dei-like resolutions you are choosing the path to failure.  It’s like going to the casino and gambling to lose.  The most frustrating thing of all is the fact that people are so often blind to the fact that a resolution is something that you can decide to do.  It does not have to involve quitting something, it can involve starting something.  Common sense dictates that the most succesful resolutions are made by those people who actually choose to do something they will enjoy.

It’s with those thoughts in mind that I have decided to join in and make a few resolutions for myself:

  1. Every time I exit an occupied lift I will try to leave a fart behind.
  2. Every time I receive poor service, I shall complain.  Not only that, I shall enjoy complaining.
  3. In 2013 I will finish my next book, receive suitable acclaim for my new project, and try something so brave that I will require bollocks the size of Saturn’s moons to pull it off.
  4. And lastly.  Over the next year, I shall have more fun that I did in the last one.

P.S. If anyone has their own resolutions feel free to share them in the comments below.  That way we can check back in a years time and see how we fared.  Good luck to you all.  Oh and Happy New Year.

A Traditional Christmas Post

Today is the last day of the Christmas trilogy, otherwise known as Boxing Day.  For you Continentals not familiar with island practices, tradition dictates that on Boxing Day you must have a boxing match with the first person you see after leaving the house.  This morning was quite unfortunate for my Mum’s elderly 84-year-old neighbour, Alice.  However I am pleased to report that I knocked her out late in the seventh round.

I know what some of you may be thinking.  What an absurd tradition!  And you would indeed be right.  By and large traditions are absolute nonsense, and what makes them even more amusing is the fact that some people still cling onto them.  Christmas Day is a fine example.  If you ask people what we celebrate on Christmas Day, most of them will point to the fact that it’s the day Jesus Christ was born.  And they would be completely correct in their thinking if it wasn’t for the fact that they are completely and utterly wrong.  Jesus was actually born in April.  Historically December 25th is actually a Pagan holiday.

This year I spent the 25th searching for the spirit of Christmas.  What I can safely say,  is that it was definitely not Tequila, Vodka, Whisky or Brandy.  If the television is to be believed, the spirit of Christmas is ‘giving’.  Sadly the vast majority of people believe that ‘giving’ is the responsibility of  Santa Claus.  And they would be completely correct in their thinking if it wasn’t for the fact that they are wrong.  On my home island it’s about a visit from Father Christmas, and believe it or not, they are not the same person.

The point I am trying to make is that tradition is whatever you decide it is.  If you want to spend every New Years Eve naked, standing in a cardboard box, wearing a lampshade on your head whilst singing ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ that is a matter for you, and you only.  Just don’t expect anyone else to join you, after all, one man’s tradition is another man’s laughing matter.

Ignorami

Recently a number of American embassies across the Middle East have come under attack.  News programmes have been filled with burning buildings and stories of the dead.  Each in their own way telling us what is happening, yet no one daring to tell us why.  Doesn’t that make you curious?

The problem with news programmes as such is their desensitizing nature.  We are so used to scenes of carnage in the Middle East that we tend to ignore the fact that most of what we watch is a consequence of some other action.  It is incredibly rare for the TV cameras to be rolling for the cause.  They only catch the effect.

This reality creates a disturbing mental trend.  It links the Middle East with violence in our minds and in effect Muslims.  The present troubles are a great example of such a thought process.  Ask someone if they have seen pictures of the riots on the news.  And then ask them if they know why they started.

The cause in this case was a film.  A film which depicts the Prophet Mohammed as a sexual deviant, criminal and lunatic.  A film which is extremely offensive, islamaphobic, disturbing and extremely bizarre.  If you cast your minds back to the reaction a certain Danish cartoonist received, it is unquestionable that the makers of this film knew exactly what they were doing.  It is without a doubt a provocation.

If we measure the reaction in the Middle East through Western eyes, it’s almost impossible to understand.  The fact that ordinary people are screaming blue murder over a film, is almost as ridiculous as when they did over a cartoon.  However this is exactly the problem.  We cannot judge another culture from our own moral standards, as their culture is ANOTHER.  Westerns standards are mostly inherited from Christian ideals, however flexible they may be.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.  Yet still we continue to tell ourselves that we would never behave that way, that we can laugh at ourselves, and that, that fact makes us less morally reprehensible.

The film entitled ‘Innocence of Muslims’ was initially reported as being made by an Israeli film maker named Sam Bacile.  In the same reports a number of newspapers also claimed that the film was funded by 100 jewish donors.  For many news sources it ticked all of the boxes.  As it turns out Mr Bacile, doesn’t exist.  Let’s not ask why someone would go to such lengths to hide his identity.  Let us turn our attention to the man who has been unmasked as the film maker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.  The first surprise is that he is American.  The second is that he is a convicted criminal.  And the third is that he is a Coptic Christian.

For those of you that don’t know Coptic Christians make up around 10% of the population of Egypt.  For the last forty years Coptic Christians have been the subjects of a number of sectarian attacks, leading Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh to describe the situation as ‘an Arab Apartheid’.

Let’s recap.  Presently, if the webpages of CNN and the New York Times are correct,  an anti-islamic film was made by an American Coptic Christian.  It was then translated into Arabic and uploaded to You Tube.  It eventually was shown on Egyptian television and spread to Yemen, Libya and Lebanon.  A number of cities erupted into violence.  The most notable casualties were the American Ambassador to Libya  and a number of his colleagues.  Yet all our news stations continue to show are video footage of burning buildings and rioting youths.

I haven’t written this post to argue the rights and wrongs of this terrible situation, as I find it deplorable.  I am not a Christian, Muslim or Jewish.  Nor is it my intention to take a side in this argument.  I have written this post for one reason only, and that is to point out the fact that our information sources are complicit in the spread of ignorance across our lives.  They are reinforcing negative ideals.  It is because of reporting like this, that more and more people are finding fuel to their bigoted opinions.  I am not calling for you to stop watching or reading the news.  I am only asking you to think about what you see.