Category: Current Affairs

Olympic Fever

As we all know, aside from those of us that live in forests, jungles or on the moon, the London Olympics are now in full swing.  Competitors from all over the world have descended on London to spend a few weeks proving who is the best at not getting caught for using performance enhancing drugs running, jumping, running and jumping, chucking stuff at blades of grass, making horses dance, riding a bicycle in circles and numerous other fun-filled events.  I can’t help but feel like the entire circus is a deeply distressing repulsive freak show fantastic advert for the Olympic spirit.

Now that’s a load of bollocks.  The Olympic spirit, I mean.  As a kid I somehow formed the opinion that the Olympics were about men and women competing in events which anyone could do in the spirit of fair play.  Little did I realise how wrong I was.  Putting the obvious drug abuse to one side, I have to ask myself how I formed that opinion when the Olympics contain a myriad of pointlessly stupid events.  Any event where the competitors can use different equipment is one which potentially gives an artificial advantage to a competitor.  Surely in the equestrian events the medals should go to the horses and not the jockeys.  In the various cycling in circles events does everyone use the same bike?  And well the inclusive nature of the yachting and rowing speaks for itself, as the number of yacht clubs in Essex is incredible.  That’s without even starting on the team sports, as the Ancient Olympics were never about teams.

The Ancient Olympics initially contained only one event.  It was a single foot race, a sprint.  Over the years it added a number of other races, the most notable of all was the hoplitodromos.  This race was ran in full or partial armour and a helmet, for sometimes two laps of the stadium.  It wasn’t about loving your fellow-man.  It was about infantry tactics.  Surprisingly there were NO FIELD EVENTS as individual competitions.  The only recognisable field events were part of the Pentathlon which consisted of wrestling, a sprint, long jump, javelin and the discus throw.  Probably the most interesting of all were the three different fighting disciplines.  Boxing, Wrestling and Pankration(which was a mix of the two).  Interestingly the fighting events had no rest periods or rules against hitting a man whilst he was down.  The fights continued untill a man surrendered or died.  In the true spirit of the Olympics, if a competitor died, he was declared the winner.  The last thing I would like to add about the Ancient Olympics is that horses were used in a chariot race, which means that those people who claim that equestrian is not in the spirit of the Olympics are talking nonsense.

As we can see, the modern spirit of the Olympics has nothing to with Olympic origin.  In essence the Ancient Olympics contained events which were functional.  There was no sense of fair play.  It was about who was the best at doing things which were sometimes necessary for their own survival.  It’s apparent that the true spirit has been lost in time.  What we need now is a new spirit, a spirit representative of the magnificent age we live in.  It’s with that in mind I have decided to make a suggestion to the Olympic committee.  Let’s throw out all events and start again.  Let’s create an Olympics for our generation, one with relevance to our everyday lives.  We shall call it ‘The Even More Modern Modern Olympiad’  I will leave you with a few suggestions to help the Olympic committee get started.

  1. To combat the use of performance enhancing drugs, force competitors to drink 8 pints of beer before the start of each event.
  2. To encourage children to be interested in sport, include events which anyone can play such as knock down ginger, who can wee the highest and who can spit the furthest.
  3. Keep the hurdle events and make all competitors compete naked.  Oh, and cover the hurdles in barbed wire.
  4. Get rid of all throwing events.  They were only included to make fat kids feel better on school sports days anyway.
  5. But keep the hammer throw.  Replace the hammers with dwarves.
  6. Replace the horses in equestrian eventing with coconut shells.
  7. Completely redesign the cycling events.  Instead of bicycles, give the competitors tesco shopping trolleys.  Instead of using a velodrome, use a hill.  The rest is self-explanatory.
  8. Tree climbing.  Kids used to like it.  Adults shouldn’t do it.  Especially drunk.  It will be great.
  9. Replace all of the shooting events with one universal event.  Instead of guns or bows and arrows, give each competitor a straw and a serviette to soak with spit and blow throw it.
  10. And last but not least, a ‘talking about the weather’ event.  This way we can guarantee that Britain will win at least one gold every four years.

My Disappearing Act

I haven’t posted anything for a month for two reasons.  The first is that I have been busy editing novel number two.  The second is that real life has been getting in the way.

Between various trips, visitors and damn right boring responsibilities I have had very little time to think.  After living that way for a number of weeks I have found that I am drowning in a sea of passive indifference.  It’s as if I finally understand what it is to feel normal.

In the past month I have discovered that Harold and Maude is a fantastic film, Danish people eat spunk Yes, really....and that I can’t decide if I am indecisive or not.

As Poland steels itself for EURO 2012 I must take my hat off to the homeless bums of Warsaw.  In the past few weeks many of them have managed to get their hands on a pair of crutches in time for the tournament.  Sadly the bums have shown a greater aptitude for innovation than the organisers.  If only they could have planned the whole tournament…..

That’s all for now I shall leave you with Poland’s official song for EURO 2012 Koko Koko Euro Spoko (Yes, really…)

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….