poobumwee’s posterous

Posting so that I can share with my son. Carry on non Space Geeks.

I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.

He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt onto in the meantime.

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist. And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson- skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.

This made me laugh (and a little bit queezy). Very hard to get my mind around after being out of the UK for so long. Perhaps the Brits have something to learn from these guys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

Fantastic selection of tonics. Now illegal or proscribed.

A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night.

Student Rom Houben was misdiagnosed after a car crash left him totally paralysed.

He had no way of letting experts, family or friends know he could hear every word they said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1230092/Patient-trapped-23-year-coma-conscious-along.html#ixzz0XfGGN2Qy

Quite astonishing. Based upon my experience with mental health professionals, this does not surprise me in the slightest.

THE EVIL Sun front page showing NUM leader Arthur Scargill apparently giving a Nazi salute under the headline "Mine Fuhrer" has been revealed for the first time.

The-sauce.org has secured a world exclusive from a former mole at the News International printing plant in London's Bouverie Street.

The leak comes 25 years to the day after the hard-right tabloid first tried to tar the Marxist union leader as a Nazi.

The Sun front page never made the light of day.

Union members at the printers refused to publish the filthy slur and instead humiliated bullying editor Kelvin McKenzie.

They publicly shamed him by running across the splash: "Members of all The Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story.

"The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either."

It was May 1984 and the height of the historic miners' strike.

Sun owner Rupert Murdoch wanted to thank PM Margaret Thatcher for smashing the Monopolies Commission so the foreigner could buy four British newspapers.

At the same time, the print unions were showing striking miners around the presses - and raising cash to fund the industrial action.

The printers knew if the miners lost they would be next.

SHOCK
Olly Duke, 57, worked at The Sun's art desk making up pages when his union "comrades" blocked the Hitler front page.

He was a member of the NUJ and the hard-left Socialist Workers' Party. He would have screaming rows with the editor.

Yesterday, from his home in the south of France, he told the-sauce.org: "The picture came through John Brown of the National Geographic Association and he refused to touch it.

"Arthur was waving to someone - there was no salute. A huge shock wave went through the offices when we stopped the page. We just wound not set that headline."Hard to imagine now, but very believable in Thatchers UK.

Thanks @Beaubodor

Just a little bit out there.

When Jonathan Lynn and I started writing Yes, Minister back at the end of the 1970s, we had no idea whether the television audience would find it funny. We did, however, think they might be interested in a series that took them behind the scenes of government – there had never been a TV comedy series set in Whitehall.

So from the very first episode we tried to make sure that all the details were as authentic as we could make them; obviously we included lots of things that never happened, but nothing that couldn’t happen. Our hope was that even if people didn’t laugh, they would still be interested enough to switch on again next week.

This brought an unexpected benefit. We discovered that the further you delved into the realities of government, the funnier it all became. Who could invent a plot in which a schizophrenic clambered over the walls of Buckingham Palace, climbed into the Queen’s bedroom, and cadged a cigarette off her? Impossible – until Michael Fagan did exactly that in 1982.

And even when it turned out that the British television audience got the joke, we didn’t expect it to go any further. Well, possibly to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who had similar political systems, but that was about it.

Except that it wasn’t. In the end, 80 different countries took it, some such as Holland and India translating the scripts and producing their own versions. We even found, from Peter Ustinov, that Samizdat copies were circulating rapidly (and illegally) in Soviet Russia.

I wonder if PC Plod had to read this.

Thanks Mr Eugenides