Slower than a spastic in a magnet factory
IT WAS with depressing inevitability that in the week the much-lauded TV series Life on Mars came to an end, a leather-elbowed teacher’s union apparatchik should crawl out of the woodwork and lambast the Gene Hunt character for being a bad example to schoolchildren.
According to a lady called Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT (probably with sensible shoes and slight moustache), youngsters are taking the politically incorrect bile spouted by DCI Hunt at face value and using it in the playground. Well of course they are. They’re bloody children, innit?
Ms Keates raises the spectre of homophobic bullying and mass suicides, but fails to mention Hunt’s legendary line about a particular case moving “slower than a spastic in a magnet factory”, mainly because leg irons seem to have gone out of fashion these days.
What worries me is not the idea that we’re breeding a new race of violent bullies (although that would be preferable to another generation who burst into tears because they’ve had their iPods confiscated by the Iranians), but the fact that public servants like Ms Keates may well be in charge of educating our children. Are these people completely without humour or understanding? Are their lives so lacking in colour that anything deviating from the monochrome, right-on world of the Guardian Education Supplement is to be immediately condemned?
Kids are kids. They’ve always recited the catchphrases from TV shows in the playground the next morning. They always will. Ms Keates should just be thankful that Class 4A isn’t reciting huge chunks from Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch during double history, as we did in my day.
IN ANOTHER throwback to the 1970s, an appalling outbreak of rampant snobbery sees Prince William give his bird the boot because she’s a bit common (i.e. she doesn’t get out of the bath to have a wee). Cue crowds of wailing, blubbering, nose-blowing old ladies throwing themselves under horses in The Mall.
It appears that William’s chinless hooray pals have been looking down their noses at poor Kate just because her pushy mother used to be an air hostess and the bloodline of her family goes back not to Tudor aristocracy but to the only-just-walking-upright mining stock of the Durham coalfields. How outrageous.
Anyway, we’ve all seen what happens when the Royals go searching for someone to deliver an heir and a spare amongst their own inbred circles - they end up with some mad bint liable to run off with ginger-headed tank drivers or hurl herself downstairs in despair just because Duran Duran have split up.
I think young William should have a careful think and then do the right thing by Ms Middleton. It’s only fair.
By the way, anyone want to buy a William and Kate souvenir tea towel? I’ve only got 10,000 in the garage.
COMBINE humourless Lefties and rampant snobbery and you’ll get the reaction of the ciabattering classes to events at Virginia Tech this week. Anti-Americanism abounds.
Aren’t those liberal gun laws terrible? You know that five-year-olds can walk in off the street and gunshop owners are legally bound to sell them pump-action shotguns, don’t you? Yes, and they’re giving away Walther PPKs in cornflake packets.
Well perhaps we ought to have another look at our own situation before casting sneering glances westward. Since the tragedy of Dunblane and the blanket banning of the possession of handguns, gun crime in this country has absolutely has soared. Your average scrote can lay his hands upon a small armoury in 10 minutes flat. Bullets routinely fly through the night in our major cities.
The British Olympic shooting team might have to travel to France to practice, but look the wrong way at a 15-year-old wannabe Yardie and he’ll pop a cap in yo’ ass without thinking, innit.
So say what you like about the Yanks, but at least over there the would-be victims are just as likely to be armed as the would-be assailants. That must do wonders for their burglary figures. It’s called the Tony Martin Effect.
AND THE madness continues, with some blonde totty called Jacqui Oatley crowbarred into the job of commentating on football for Match of the Day this weekend. (Look at the stupid girly way she spells her name. I bet she draws a little heart above the “i” as well.)
There is no need for this blatant sexism. There are dozens of middle-aged men on the BBC payroll who are quite capable of commentating on a football match. Their voices fit; they know how to behave. Now we’re going to have a shrieking harridan inflicted upon us just so the Beeb can play at ticking the PC boxes.
I’m writing this in advance of the programme, but I only hope there were no controversial incidents during Fulham v Blackburn Rovers last night. I can’t afford to have her cracking my windows. Or a new telly, should my foot go through it.
I APPEAR to have upset a couple of Scotch people last week by calling them red-headed, pasty-faced weaklings and suggesting that while they make up only eight per cent of the British population, they manage to claim 16 per cent of all benefits paid. Well it gets worse.
They’re now eating twice as much as the rest of us – McDonalds, Pot Noodles, shortbread, deep-fried Mars Bars – so that when they keel over at an early age with a heart attack, we can’t even fit them in the ovens at crematoria. One establishment in Lanarkshire has now ordered a 41-inch cremator to accommodate the enormous coffins of the tartan obese.
So we close with another traditional Scottish song this week: “And we’ll all push together, To get your fat arse in that urn, In that 41-inch cremator, Will you burn Lassie, burn …?”
THERE IS much indignation that “tight-fisted” Premiership football stars have snubbed a campaign to help hard-up nurses. Of 556 players in the league – many of who earn millions every year – just 71 have agreed to chip in a day’s pay to an appeal called MayDay for Nurses. We are told that all money raised will go towards a hardship fund for nurses who get into financial difficulties in the first few years of their career.
According to a lady called Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT (probably with sensible shoes and slight moustache), youngsters are taking the politically incorrect bile spouted by DCI Hunt at face value and using it in the playground. Well of course they are. They’re bloody children, innit?
Ms Keates raises the spectre of homophobic bullying and mass suicides, but fails to mention Hunt’s legendary line about a particular case moving “slower than a spastic in a magnet factory”, mainly because leg irons seem to have gone out of fashion these days.
What worries me is not the idea that we’re breeding a new race of violent bullies (although that would be preferable to another generation who burst into tears because they’ve had their iPods confiscated by the Iranians), but the fact that public servants like Ms Keates may well be in charge of educating our children. Are these people completely without humour or understanding? Are their lives so lacking in colour that anything deviating from the monochrome, right-on world of the Guardian Education Supplement is to be immediately condemned?
Kids are kids. They’ve always recited the catchphrases from TV shows in the playground the next morning. They always will. Ms Keates should just be thankful that Class 4A isn’t reciting huge chunks from Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch during double history, as we did in my day.
IN ANOTHER throwback to the 1970s, an appalling outbreak of rampant snobbery sees Prince William give his bird the boot because she’s a bit common (i.e. she doesn’t get out of the bath to have a wee). Cue crowds of wailing, blubbering, nose-blowing old ladies throwing themselves under horses in The Mall.
It appears that William’s chinless hooray pals have been looking down their noses at poor Kate just because her pushy mother used to be an air hostess and the bloodline of her family goes back not to Tudor aristocracy but to the only-just-walking-upright mining stock of the Durham coalfields. How outrageous.
Anyway, we’ve all seen what happens when the Royals go searching for someone to deliver an heir and a spare amongst their own inbred circles - they end up with some mad bint liable to run off with ginger-headed tank drivers or hurl herself downstairs in despair just because Duran Duran have split up.
I think young William should have a careful think and then do the right thing by Ms Middleton. It’s only fair.
By the way, anyone want to buy a William and Kate souvenir tea towel? I’ve only got 10,000 in the garage.
COMBINE humourless Lefties and rampant snobbery and you’ll get the reaction of the ciabattering classes to events at Virginia Tech this week. Anti-Americanism abounds.
Aren’t those liberal gun laws terrible? You know that five-year-olds can walk in off the street and gunshop owners are legally bound to sell them pump-action shotguns, don’t you? Yes, and they’re giving away Walther PPKs in cornflake packets.
Well perhaps we ought to have another look at our own situation before casting sneering glances westward. Since the tragedy of Dunblane and the blanket banning of the possession of handguns, gun crime in this country has absolutely has soared. Your average scrote can lay his hands upon a small armoury in 10 minutes flat. Bullets routinely fly through the night in our major cities.
The British Olympic shooting team might have to travel to France to practice, but look the wrong way at a 15-year-old wannabe Yardie and he’ll pop a cap in yo’ ass without thinking, innit.
So say what you like about the Yanks, but at least over there the would-be victims are just as likely to be armed as the would-be assailants. That must do wonders for their burglary figures. It’s called the Tony Martin Effect.
AND THE madness continues, with some blonde totty called Jacqui Oatley crowbarred into the job of commentating on football for Match of the Day this weekend. (Look at the stupid girly way she spells her name. I bet she draws a little heart above the “i” as well.)
There is no need for this blatant sexism. There are dozens of middle-aged men on the BBC payroll who are quite capable of commentating on a football match. Their voices fit; they know how to behave. Now we’re going to have a shrieking harridan inflicted upon us just so the Beeb can play at ticking the PC boxes.
I’m writing this in advance of the programme, but I only hope there were no controversial incidents during Fulham v Blackburn Rovers last night. I can’t afford to have her cracking my windows. Or a new telly, should my foot go through it.
I APPEAR to have upset a couple of Scotch people last week by calling them red-headed, pasty-faced weaklings and suggesting that while they make up only eight per cent of the British population, they manage to claim 16 per cent of all benefits paid. Well it gets worse.
They’re now eating twice as much as the rest of us – McDonalds, Pot Noodles, shortbread, deep-fried Mars Bars – so that when they keel over at an early age with a heart attack, we can’t even fit them in the ovens at crematoria. One establishment in Lanarkshire has now ordered a 41-inch cremator to accommodate the enormous coffins of the tartan obese.
So we close with another traditional Scottish song this week: “And we’ll all push together, To get your fat arse in that urn, In that 41-inch cremator, Will you burn Lassie, burn …?”
THERE IS much indignation that “tight-fisted” Premiership football stars have snubbed a campaign to help hard-up nurses. Of 556 players in the league – many of who earn millions every year – just 71 have agreed to chip in a day’s pay to an appeal called MayDay for Nurses. We are told that all money raised will go towards a hardship fund for nurses who get into financial difficulties in the first few years of their career.
Please read that last sentence again. We shouldn’t be indignant that thick football stars don’t read the papers; we should be indignant that we pay our nurses so badly that they have to become charity cases in the first place. Is no-one in the corridors of power even remotely embarrassed by this?
posted by BarryBeelzebub @ 1:24 PM
16 Comments:
Nah, we should be embarrassed that we educate our nurses so badly that they can't manage their finances so as to afford the rent once they've necked a Saturday night's worth of Bacardi Breezers.
I didn't think nurses pay was that bad these days. Maybe not in the same league as tube drivers, but a living wage - I thought they got a substantial pay rise a few years back.
Bazza...re: the kiddies being cruel in the playground. I recall vividly the glee in which the term 'Joey Deacon' became the abuse of choice of the playground following the relevant Blue Peter episode. This is now a shared reference point for a generation, part of the glue that holds us 30 somethings together...and a PC do-gooder thinks that he can deny the next generation their own version by quango edict, eh? *belms*
Ps...for a happy half hour of nostalgia:
http://www.judascow.com/joey.html
"One establishment in Lanarkshire has now ordered a 41-inch cremator to accommodate the enormous coffins of the tartan obese."
What you failed to mention:
"And Lewisham Council has ordered a special cremator from America, measuring 44 inches in width.
As part of a £1.2m refurbishment, a new furnace at Mintlyn Crematorium in Bawsey was recently installed by King's Lynn and West Norfolk Council to accommodate coffins a metre wide.
Blackburn with Darwen Council has plans to install a 42-inch cremator in the next few years to deal with wider coffins".
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6566953.stm
Top quality journalism, cherry-pick facts to support your story and ignore others which don't. Nice one.
Who cares about nurses! We need more management!
And to think Yes, Minister was just a sit-com. ;-)
Anonymous said...
"Ps...for a happy half hour of nostalgia:
http://www.judascow.com/joey.html"
Kids are one thing...being "grown up" and still saying the same is another.
Just think, one day you may have a stroke and you won't have to pretend any more...you can live the fucking dream!
hey anti-twat...you've lost touch with your 'inner child'. You miserable, sour-faced, joyless tool! If i ever become a spacca, I'll be sure to mosey on down here with my head wand and let you know how I get on.
could be worse...she could be ginger too. Look on the bright side.
Got a point though hasnt he. Cant imagine you being a very nice person somehow. I can remember the blue peter show and laughed as well but I would be embarassed to admit I still felt like that now. Takes all sorts I suppose
LiR
Perhaps it takes a woman's touch. You have put my point better than I did.
Thanks.
I often think that Bazza's blog, more than anything, records and illustrates the sheer stupidity of the world. In some ways, it's surely a better world now that it's not acceptable to mock people who are disabled or handicapped. But that, like so much of political correctness, is only in theory: it still goes on, (and I don't believe it should), it's merely that PC likes to pretend that it doesn't, or that changing words makes the intent any less nasty or discriminating.
My grandmother fairly often used the word "nigger"- but not once, in my experience, to condemn black people or to deride them. And yet we all know plenty of nasty racists and bigots who never use that word: "immigrants" or "ethnic minority" or even "Afro-Caribbean" seems to do the job for them. Intention is everything, yet PC's sheer stupidity and blind adherence to dogma in the face of reality has actually led to a backlash.
Gene Hunt would never, ever have appeared on TV 10 years ago. The PC police would never have allowed it. Telly, in some ways, merely reflects wider society's attitudes (and forms quite a few of them, too). People now are using what they KNOW is offensive language, and indulging in puerile behaviour, such as taking the mickey out of others less fortunate, and racism, as some sort of childish stance against a creed that only took hold because, at some point, most people went along with it.
I wasn't one of them, by the way.
Now they're looking back at the good old bigoted past as nostalgia.
What I'd like to know is why does it always have to be "either/or"? Some people need to piss taking out of them- it was a great safeguard against twattish behaviour at one time, whereas others have enough troubles without wider society making life even harder for them, and all for the sake of a tasteless joke. Sure, all humour is at someone else's expense, but what most people seem to have forgotten in their tirades against PC is that in the past there were notions such as decency knocking about. No room for that in Blair's Brave New World, it seems.
Well said Black Dog.
The trouble with most PC rules is that it's usually not the "victim" who is complaining, but some do-gooder who thinks they need to stand up for the poor defenseless mite, failing to see that that's often more derogatory than the original "offence".
Black Dog
I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not. As I said I have personal experience of this sort of attitude. I have had the years of my daughter being stared at by idiots who should know better.
I think Gene Hunt is a breath of fresh air...brilliant programme. And of course the character is of its time.
There is a difference between being PC, which I am not, and “adults” displaying the sort of cruel attitude to people that kids in a playground display.
Nearly all children are cruel ...I was I know. I just hope that I am not so nasty, crass and discourteous to show that sort of attitude today.
It has nothing to do with being PC…it is down to common courtesy …something that is fast disappearing and one reason why this country is in deep shit. Kids have no respect and half the population is frightened to go out at night because they think they can act and say what they like with no thought of anyone else.
anti-twat mentions the attitude that people believe they can do whatever they want with no regard for others. I think that underpins a lot of problems we encounter on a day to day basis. Whether its the sort of experience a-t is describing, neighbours playing loud music at 2am, people taking up 2 seats on a rush-hour train, people letting doors swing closed in your face.. the list goes on.
The trouble is, the perpetrators aren't just hoodied youngsters - people of all ages, classes, races etc exhibit this attitude. If anything, the worst group is OAPs, who seem to think they've earned the right. You can see the next generation being prepared too - the little darlings whose parents let them do whatever they want and bugger everyone else.
This makes day to day activites unpleasant for many of us, and any communal activity is almost certain to be ruined by some twat who thinks he's the only one there. But you can't say anything to these people because they just don't know any better and wouldn't understand your point (I know, I've tried!).
Anti-Twat, I am agreeing with you.
The gist of what I wrote was that PC has provoked a backlash of the worst possible sort, where supposed adults think that they're "fighting back" by using crass and nasty language. Bigotry is becoming respectable again.
However, PC was/is equally as brainless as what preceded it. As I said, the intentions of one's words or ideas are far more important- and dangerous- than the words themselves. PC did not take this into account: modern racism, for example, needn't use words like "Paki" or "Nigger": it uses PC approved words- but is still racism. It's not just the words, it's the intention. PC never understood this, and I personally despair at the form of rebellion against PC we're seeing today. And that PC had massive double standards is plain. There's plenty of "truths" about, for example, women's good points: they can "multi task", they're "more mature" etc. Men? Well, what good does PC have to say about them? Inverse sexism.
As you and others said, kids are often cruel, but they're supposed to grow out of it. Plainly, these days, they don't.
For my own part, I wish that decent morality and common sense formed people's ideas, rather than the mindless dogma of PC or the reactionary childishness of anti-PC.
It's all a symptom of the me-first society's dying days. Once the great Chinese conveyor built slows or becomes more expensive, and once personal debt reaches saturation level, and once the UK has to stop playing the middle man, more austere times may follow. Historically, this has done more good than harm.
Like yourself, I feel contempt for those who laugh at those less fortunate, and I definitely think that a creeping callousness is making things worse. You'd know more about that than me, but compassion, it seems, is being dismissed as a PC virtue, rather than a hallmark of a decent human being.
Should there be a Salary Cap in Football?
Personally I think there should be! It’s just getting to be stupid money in football at the top of the premiership!
It’s always the same teams at the top proving that football success is based purely on money which ruins the idea of it being a sport! They’ve done it in rugby, basketball, hockey and American football and it makes the sports more competitive and better to watch!
I do a little Spread Betting (or more precisely Football Spread Betting) from time to time and most matches don’t hold much surprise who is going to win, its boring! I want to see a team at the bottom pulling off an amazing season beating last seasons winners in a close fought battle!
Make things fair! It shouldn’t be about money!
Post a Comment
<< Home