Evolution – Evidence and “Gaps”

This girl is great, I’m moving to Romania.

Separated at birth?

 

 

 

 

Seperated at birth?

My Celebrity Twit Factor Face

Last night was the evening of marmite television. Love it or hate it, tonight’s x-factor results show and the first of a new series of I want to be a celebrity get me a career, (see what  I did there) are the source of equal excitement and dread across the land. And love it or hate it, these two programmes are the pinnacle of realiTV, the flagships of an entire genre.

I’m not a fan of realiTV in general. I have no time for Big Brother, a bunch of nobody’s who want to be somebody’s, battling it out to become gross caricatures of themselves and claim their five minutes of notoriety.

I have less time still for the likes of Bailiffs looking hard, traffic cops looking harder or airport security playing soldiers with their high-vis jackets and walkie-talkies.

These shows are indeed the dregs of televisual output, the very last scrapings of the genre’s barrel, but that does not mean however that there is not value in this cheap Ronald McDonald format. X factor and I’m a celebrity represent this value, and to deny it is to deny our own morbid curiosity for the highs and lows of other peoples lives.

I was thinking about this when it occurred to me that social media- Facebook and Twitter especially are the children of this realiTV craze. We are both the viewers and the stars of a perpetual big-brother world through these sites. We watch with glee the highs and lows of other people’s lives, and willfully provide material for our friends and stalkers to view. And all of us are cynical producers of the worldwide show, tagging often inappropriate photo’s of our friends for the amusement of all before the victim has a chance to untag him or herself.

But, I digress. X-Factor last night failed to eject the lacklustre Lloyd, a contestant so dull I’m sure even his mother nods off during his performances. Worse still, my Sky Plus decided to fuck up (technical term) resulting in me missing the bushtucker trial on I’m a celeb.

I wonder how long it will be before Jedward are presenting that show. Ant and Dec should be very scared.

Lewes Bonfire 2009

We decided pretty early this year that we were going to bravely ignore the state sponsored rumours of chaos and police roadblocks, disregard the scaremongering speculation of people who have probably never been, and go to Lewes Bonfire.

So I packed the family and a couple of friends in to my trusty Volvo (named Bertha) and headed off into the night, eastward on the joyous A27, which we were led to believe was a no-go area. Indeed, a veritable war zone if you were to believe the hype.

We did encounter a bit, well, a lot of traffic at Falmer, but this turned out to be due to an accident, nothing at all to do with Lewes Bonfire. Luckily we just about managed to park in the Cliffe Industrial Estate at around half past six, and headed into town from there.

First stop was the Snowdrop Inn, where we sought to get our bearings, plan our next move and decide exactly what the crack was with this whole bonfire shebang.  

I bought a pint of Harvey’s that was served in a charm-sapping plastic cup and a burger from their makeshift gazebo enclosure. After informing the lady that I required no onions, I asked them what time the parade was happening, and was told it started about 5 o’ clock. I had heard this rumour earlier, but suspect it may have been more scaremongering. Nice pub though, and the barman had the most splendid moustache that just has to be mentioned.

Moustache wearing barman at the Snowdrop nn

I was really keen on seeing the parade. The one time I’d been before, the parade was the best thing about the night. I just love the way that political correctness and health and safety rules are disregarded for this one special night of the year, and I gleefully relish the dismay of the authorities.

We finished our beers and walked only a few paces up the road, where to my surprise and delight, announced by much banging, fizzing and hurrah, the procession was just about to come past.

Grabbing my woefully inadequate camera phone I seized the opportunity to take some grainy, blurred photos and poor quality video footage of burning barrels and crosses, cannons and costumes, marching bands and drummers. It was a spectacular triumph, not least because we thought we’d missed it.

 

 

When it had passed, and we had managed to calm our daughter down a bit, we followed the remnants of the parade where I was delighted to witness an effigy of a female MP, who I could not identify, being somewhat compromised by Charles Kennedy. We also saw a small child bravely battling the fires much to our amusement.

 

All aboard the gravy train

 

After all that, we headed down to the Waterloo Bonfire site, and stood around for ages waiting for the show to start. We ate some doughnuts and clutched our daughter nervously as drunken local youths threw bangers and sparklers around exuberantly.

Finally we threw in the towel and decided to take our now agitated daughter home before she, and the bonfire started. She’d had enough, and we had seen what I self-indulgently wanted to see. We had ignored the horror stories, and defied the sheep-like bleating of the harbingers of doom. In the end it was a largely hassle-free and rewarding night out.

We wanted to call her Matthew.

Here at Pearson towers there is a new member of the family. Her name is Custard and she’s a Jack Russell who is causing me no end of headaches.

We bought her a few weeks back when she was 8 weeks old for our daughters’ birthday, or at least that was the story my missus gave me. She had been banging on for ages about getting a little doggy, and although I had resisted initially, in the end the pressure became too much to bear.

It’s not that I don’t like dogs, quite the opposite in fact. Dogs are loyal, friendly and often endearingly stupid. This is in stark comparison to cats, which are very often selfish, vicious and devious.

So I gave in on condition that I would not be the only mug taking the thing for walks and clearing up its crap, knowing all too well that this was a request too far and that I needed to practice my ‘walkies’  and get used to the smell of dogshit.  The only comfort I could salvage from the situation was the thought that it may be amusing to observe the reaction of Dave, our snooty, disdainful, aloof cat.

Vogue.

Anyway, we got her home safely, and much to our dismay, our daughter decided to call her Custard. She has very strange taste in pet names; she called her gerbils Tuna and Salty for god’s sake. Needless to say we tried to come up with a better name ourselves. We wanted to call her Matthew, and are still trying to get consent for that. It would have been so cool, a cat called Dave and a dog called Matthew, our daughter has a lot to learn about comedy.

So here I am 5 weeks later, up to my eyes in faecal matter. One day I cleared up 15 poops from the front room which is where she likes to relieve herself. I take her out for walks and I put her in the garden, but she won’t tinkle, let alone dump, not a sausage. Then the missus swans in from work to find an excrement-free house and proceeds to love that bloody dog more than she loves me.

Dave seems to have coped better than expected much to my dismay. He is constantly under attack from Matthew Custard Yappy Doo, but usually goes for higher ground to avoid confrontation. Poor old Dave, I can’t believe I actually feel sorry for him. I went to give him a stroke of support the other day, he just meowed at me with a look of utter contempt in his eye, before disappearing out the cat flap.

The ungrateful little bugger.

This is it. My first blog post.

So this is to be the first post on my new blog and I’m scratching my head wondering what topic will amuse and enthrall my as yet non-existent readers.

Actually, that was a complete lie. What I’m actually considering is how to gently and without incriminating myself raise an issue which will no doubt mark me out as some kind of odious right-winger.

To hell with it, this is important so here goes.

 My head is spinning in the wake of the outrageous treachery revealed by Andrew Neather (former Labour speech writer) in the Evening Standard last week. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers—london-needs-immigrants.do#

Neather has revealed that there was a “deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, to open up the UK to mass migration.” and that furthermore “mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.”

Neather doesn’t stop there. One of the main aims of this policy was “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

Now, regardless of your views on mass immigration and multiculturalism what must concern any right-thinking person who believes in democracy is that the whole project was conducted in secret, a conspiracy against democracy and an astounding contempt for the voters that the Labour Party are supposed to represent and the British public at large, for “while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs.”

Of course it’s not. Nobody in their right mind would have agreed to, much less voted for this kind of social engineering  much to the dismay of the sneering Marxist revolutionaries intent on upsetting the fabric of our society. Even Neather, despite his pleasure at the instigation of this stealth project admits: “Of course we’re too small a country to afford an open door.” Then why be a party to it you scumbag?

So, I won’t prattle on too much further other than to say that fan of mass immigration and multiculturalism or not, Labour’s shocking disregard for democracy should send a shiver down the spine of any democrat as it does mine. I hope and pray this destroys those paternalistic nut-jobs that claim to represent us in Britain.

But wait, surely the opposition will make full use of this information which should consign the Labour Party quite rightly to the history books. But alas no. David Cameron at PMQ’s yesterday failed to mention it at all.

English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only thing necessary for the Triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’

Cheers Dave, I hope you go to the grave with that quote ringing in your ears.