How jug-eared Lineker ruined my life

WHAT’S THIS? According to those national newspapers who love to scare people when they haven’t got story about the Duke of Edinburgh murdering the Princess of Wales, society as we know it is about to break down just because we’ve now got to use PIN numbers with our credit and debit cards instead of signing slips of paper.

(And before the pedants reach for their green crayons, I know that PIN stands for Personal Identification Number and that therefore the use of the word “number” after the use of the acronym “PIN” is tautology, but frankly I just don’t care.)

It appears that the population of Great Britain is so stupid that we’re incapable of remembering four simple numbers. Chaos will thus reign at the tills, with desperate shoppers fainting in mile-long queues while pensioners, the Welsh, women and other thick people will stand sweating and drooling at the checkout while they try to remember the date of their dog’s birthday.

What tosh. I’ve been out shopping this week and nothing has changed. My lady wife, who shops like Imelda Marcos on speed, has, if anything, spent even more pounds per minute than usual. I haven’t seen anyone in tears at the till and I haven’t seen anyone taking their shoes and socks off at an ATM machine to check the number they’d written in indelible Biro on their toes.

There really is no need for this unseemly panic. I have a foolproof method to ensure that I’m never without my principal PIN. We all use a regular cashpoint, right? The next time you go, take a nail with you and simply scratch your PIN number onto the metal surround. Bingo! You never need to remember it again.

And it’s not as if its any use to anyone else. So they know a random PIN number. So what? They haven’t got your card so there’s nothing they can do with it. As I said, foolproof.

FORGIVE ME if I don’t have an attack of the vapours over the video of Our Boys giving some Iraqi rioters a bit of “education”. Now I’m not saying that it’s right, but I’m not saying that it’s wrong either.

The soldiers concerned had been under sustained attack from machine gun and rocket fire for weeks. Just minutes before the alleged atrocity, a mortar round and a home-made grenade had been fired into the barracks while a constant fusillade of stones rained down.

To send a snatch squad out of the so-called safety of the barracks to try to grab the ringleaders of the riot was a brave act. Under the circumstances, why is anyone surprised that those ringleaders, once detained, got a bit of a kicking before being sent back to their rag-bag army with a few illustrative bruises? What better way to deter the rest?

We hear much about the poor teenage victims. No-one seems to consider that the lads in British Army uniform were, in all probability, teenagers too; frightened, pumped up on adrenaline, and thoroughly fed up of spending 24 hours a day dodging missiles.

Two final points: if the troops involved had been American, the rioters would probably have been shot dead. And if you think the gentle chastisement shown on the video was over the top, you want to try being a football fan at the mercy of our supposedly enlightened police forces. I’ve seen worse beatings handed out at a reserve match.

WHILE WE’RE talking about crimes against humanity, we should look with jaundiced eye on the continued success of Walker’s Crisps and the sad demise of the makers of Golden Wonder, who went into administration last month.

Golden Wonder invented the cheese and onion crisp. To kids whose previous experience of extruded potato snacks was a packet of Smith’s with a little blue bag of salt in the bottom, it was as much a revelation as the arrival of colour TV.

Now Golden Wonder always put cheese and onion crisps in green bags. That was the natural order of things. Until Walker’s, owned by the Satanic PepsiCo UK and backed by the jug-eared Lineker, arrived on the scene. They committed the ultimate crime of putting cheese and onion crisps in BLUE bags. Cue a taste/sight breakdown and a catastrophic confusion of senses from which many of us haven’t yet recovered.

No wonder half the nation's kids are suffering from ADHD, or whatever it's called.

IT WOULD be appropriate for those of us of a certain age to spend a quiet minute or two in memory of Jackie Pallo, wrestler par excellence and mainstay of the Saturday afternoon World of Sport programme through the 70s and 80s.

And what a great crew he had around him. Mick McManus, Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy, Kendo Nagasaki, Johnny Kwango and my own personal favourite, Les Kellet, their exploits all lovingly narrated by the velvet-voiced Kent Walton and his supporting cast of baying grannies.

Old Les was a bit of a lad. He’d get pummelled around the ring for three rounds by some nancy boy with Brylcreemed hair 30 years his junior and then, just as he was comatose against the ropes with his young opponent approaching to deliver the coup de grace, he’d spring back to life and deliver a devastating head butt to win the bout.

Week after week he managed this Herculean task. Truly a supreme athlete.

MY MAN Whittaker goes from strength to strength. The performing penguin he acquired a couple of months ago is now bringing in serious money by busking down at the local concrete shopping centre. The strange metal sculptures that have been clogging up the stable yard for months are slowly being melted down into scrap.

Now a Danish flag-making business appears to have sprung up overnight and is doing seriously good business. And I can swear I saw him drawing some kind of cartoon when I strolled past the window the other night.

It’s like I always said: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and before you know it he’s a fucking criminal mastermind.

Pip pip!

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone not worrying that they’ll be banged up for glorifying terrorism by celebrating Bonfire Night, of anyone stupid enough to invest in Asda’s eight pence Valentine’s card – the world’s cheapest suicide note, or of anyone outraged that News of the World reporters took three hours to score some drugs in the pub where Prince William was last Saturday night. THREE HOURS? I’d have been on to Trading Standards.