Wednesday, 30 May 2018

Men's Summer Fashion To Forget

According to the Beach Boys, summer fashion includes T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs but as Summer has arrived early the male population has already burst into life but some men seem to fashion what crisps are to haute cuisine and without Summer proper even arriving yet, the following crimes against male fashion have already been observed.    

Hawaiian shirts
If ever anything was enough to make us wish for the perpetual winter of Narnia, it's the garish Hawaiian shirt. The only time you can legitimately get away with wearing a Hawaiian shirt is at a Magnum reunion party or on honeymoon in Hawaii and if you think packing one of those in your suitcase is a good idea then if you are divorced before the first anniversary then you won't get any sympathy from me.

T-shirts with slogans
'It's not a bald patch, its a solar panel for a sex machine', no it's not, it's a bald patch on top of a git and there’s no such thing as a Female Boob Inspector and if there was i'm sure they don't advertise their services on their clothing.

Skimpy Singlets
Unless you are a professional wrestler or a lifeguard, singlets should stay in the closet. Nobody wants to see your armpit hair or the side cleavage of your moobs.

Short Shorts / Speedo's
I really don’t need to see that much of your thighs while shopping in Sainsbury's. Burn the shorts and we can all move on with our lives in proper leg coverings and in time the memory of what we saw when you sat down and manspread will hopefully fade.

Cowboy Stetson Hat

This hat is where fashion and style go to die holding hands. Looked good on James Dean and Clint Eastwood on the plains of the Wild West, doesn't look quite so good on you in Worthing Town Centre. There isn’t a haircut bad enough to warrant wearing this.  

Socks and Sandals
There must be something about owning a Y chromosome that makes men pull on a pair of white socks and sandals whenever the Sun pops its head out.

Croc Shoes
Experts say you should avoid Crocs as they do not adequately secure the heel and can lead to tendinitis, toe deformities, nail problems, corns and calluses but mainly you should avoid them because they look awful. The shoe equivalent of Donald Trump, both are far too large, far too ugly and nobody in their right mind would want to be seen with either of them.

Man Bun
'Hey! Look at my top knot! Don't I look cool?' Um, sorry but, no you don't look 'cool,' you look like an idiot.

Monday, 28 May 2018

Just A Coincidence

It may just be a massive coincidence that days after the Swedish Government hand out leaflets to its citizens on what to do if a war breaks out, the Americans are doing the same with a document released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains what you should do in the event of a nuclear attack.

The EPA explain that you shouldn't drink any water from the tap or eat vegetables from home gardens and livestock shouldn't be allowed to graze in potentially contaminated pastures or fields.
If you are outside during a nuclear explosion then cover your nose and mouth and head inside immediately and close all doors and windows and turn off any fans or air conditioners or set them to recirculate. Using a gas mask or dust mask, if available, is also advisable. If you are unable to reach a building, getting inside a vehicle is the next safest option.
Remove your outer clothes and shower or use a wet wipe or clean wet cloth to wipe any skin that was not covered by clothing. Gently blow your nose and gently wipe your eyelids, eyelashes and ears with a clean wet cloth... Put on clean clothes and anything that has been contaminated should be placed into a plastic bag and placed outside.
Finally check official sources via the internet, radio, television and call lines.

I'm sure that it is just strange timing that nations are now warning their citizens on what to do in event of a war but looking around at some of the clownish Worlds leaders at the moment, it might be prudent to bookmark the Government website and lock in the Government radio station frequency on the radio just in case.

Think I'll Skip The Cockroach Milk Thanks

Apart from some of the more seedier places to dine, you don't immediately connect cockroaches with dining experience but that could be about to change as alongside the cow and goat on supermarket shelves we could soon be finding cockroach milk. 
More correctly it is post-natal fluid which is secreted from the insect in the form of crystals which according to researchers from the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India, boasts many nutritional benefits.
'The crystals are like a complete food with proteins, fats and sugars. If you look into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids' Sanchari Banerjee, one of the main researchers, told the Times of India.
It is said to taste rather like cow’s milk and follows a company who make ice-cream with milk derived from insects and eating insects whole is becoming a more common sight in western diets such as freeze-dried and dehydrated insects, from barbecue meal worm to salt-and-vinegar crickets and garlic chapulines.
Thanks but i think i'll stick with the semi-skimmed Cravendale.

Sunday, 27 May 2018

Hand's Off Until Debt Covered

Somehow, after a decade of severe austerity measures, the UK's debt is double what it was before the 2008 financial crisis but the UK Government are on top of it because they intend to force open a charity fund which was set up in 1928 by an anonymous benefactor on the condition that it must stay untouched until it had grown enough to pay off the national debt.
The amount donated 90 years ago was £500,000 and today stands at £475 million but as the UK debt currently sits at £1.7 trillion, someone with much better maths skills than i has worked out it represents just 0.06 percent of the country’s total debt.
Amidst the sound of goal posts being scraped along the ground, the Attorney General is interpreting the instructions of 'pay off the national debt' to mean 'put it towards paying off the national debt'.
To access the fund the Government will need approval from the High Court who i hope will tell Theresa May and her awful cronies to take a hike and leave it until as the benefactor wished, there was enough to payoff the total debt.
So leave it alone and let it build more interest to cover the whole amount but if you really are that hard up after your disastrous decade in power, use it to build a hospital or a school and if you are so broke because you can't run an economy properly, you could save £133 billion tomorrow by scrapping the useless Trident Nuclear missile system and a further £100 million a year by telling the Monarchy to stop scrounging off us and pay their own way.
There you go, problem solved. Economics really isn't that hard.

And Then There Was Four

Of the very special and exclusive club of the 12 men who have walked on the Moon, the death of Alan Bean brings the number remaining down to four.
The fourth man to walk on a land other than Earth, Bean was an astronaut on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing in November 1969. 
It is a sad fact that nobody has trodden on the Moon since 1972 and of the remaining four astronauts, the youngest is 82 so we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other than our own planet.  
After hanging up his Spacesuit, Bean became an artist specialising in Space art and using a speck of moon dust in all pictures, taken from his space suit.
'Im the only artist who can paint the moon' he said, 'because i'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not'.
With the focus now seemingly shifting to manned missions to Mars, we may not be adding to the 12 sets of footprints on our closest neighbour in space anytime soon and that not only seems such a waste of a practise site but a magnificent case of running before we can walk.

Buzz Aldrin 88
David Scott 85
Charles Duke 82
Harrison Schmitt 82

Alan Bean - Died 2018
John Young - Died 2018
Eugene Cernan - Died 2017
Edgar Mitchell  - Died 2016
Neil Armstrong - Died 2012
Pete Conrad - Died 1999
Alan Shepard - Died 1998
James Irwin - Died 1991

Friday, 25 May 2018

Back to the Future

'If there is such a thing as time travel' people say to me, 'how come we aren't seeing people from the future here today?'
I point them to the HG Wells Laws of Time Travel which states that you shouldn't do or say anything which may cause a ripple which results in them being stuck in the today without being able to return to their own time so they just observe silently so you wouldn't know if they were here or not.
That doesn't mean that some time travellers don't take a chance and try and warn us about future events and luckily for us 2018 seems to be a bonanza time for people travelling back to warn us.
People like Noah Novak who came from 2070 to tell us we can look forward to another four years of Trump presidency, as he wins a second term in office and in 2028 the first manned mission to Mars will successfully take place.
In March 2018, a purported time traveller known as W.D. Davis stated that he had arrived from the year 2200 and announced that future humans had developed a miracle food pellet which had eradicated world hunger, cancer had been cured and the average human life expectancy was around 200 years and people were living on Mars.
In December 2017, a man claimed to have travelled to 3207 as part of a top secret project by the Greek military to study a future war between humans and artificial intelligence but he only stayed for two days before coming back but was unable to give any details of what 3207 will be like.
It is not just the Greeks sending agents to the future as the American military sent an agent called 'Clara' to 3780 to bring back future technology for unknown, secret purposes.
If the Greeks were at the vanguard of fighting errant AI in 3207 it was still going on in 4000 according to 'John' who spent six years living in the future tackling AI running amok.
John stated in 4000 there are flying cars, birds, cats and dogs are almost extinct and can only be seen in zoos.
A thousand years forward in 5000 is where 'Edward' came from and as proof he bought a photo of Los Angeles submerged under the Ocean due to the melted polar ice caps with humanity surviving by floating on the waters in cities on huge wooden platforms.
Even further to travel has James Oliver who came back from 6491 and from another Solar System where humans have set up home but due to a malfunction with his ship when the time travel transmission was interrupted, he is stuck in the present until he fixes his transport home.
William Taylor was sent to 8937 by the British military to have a bit of a nosey around and reported back that humans as we know them have been replaced by part-human, part-robot species that enjoy eternal life. Unfortunately all the photos he took of this future world were confiscated by UK intelligence services on his return.
The furthest humans have gone into the future is 9428 where the Soviet Union sent an agent in 1987 to look for new weapons on a fact finding mission but little is known about his mission.

The future isn't looking so great according to the people who have been there with killer AI and cities disappearing under the oceans but if you see a man tinkering with a time travelling space ship then be nice and offer him your jump leads.

Katie Hopkins A Racist But Not A Druggie

Katie Hopkins has made a career out of saying pathetic and outrageous things and then getting sued for it so she decided that it was time to turn the tables and took the Daily Mirror to the Independent Press Standards Organisation for their story that she had been detained in South Africa after collapsing from drug use.
The Daily Mirror alleged that the right-wing numpty was detained for taking Ketamine however, that proved to be inaccurate as she was actually detained for spreading racial hatred.
After succeeding in her case, The Mirror was forced to issue an apology and went with the brilliant: 'A previous version of this article suggested that Katie Hopkins was stopped from leaving South Africa because of the consumption of Ketamine. We are happy to clarify that Ms Hopkins was detained for spreading racial hatred, which took place after the Ketamine incident'.
Probably the greatest apology ever although how happy Katie Hopkins is that she was successful in her fight to prove she was detained for spreading racial hatred and not for drug use is another question.
Not that she has much of a reputation left to damage anyway but a bit of an own goal and maybe she should have had the sense to go with people thinking she was a druggie rather than have it confirmed that actually she is an abhorrent racist but to be fair, we already knew that anyway.

Brits Saying Thank You

I blame my parents and being British for seeming to spend an inordinate amount of time thanking people for everything but all us Brits seem to be at it because new research demonstrates that Britons really do say thank you more often than anyone, coming top of eight cultures studied.
The study showed that in situations where expressing gratitude is an option, the British deploy thank you 14.5% of the time, whereas Russians say it just 3% of the time, and Cha’palaa speakers of Ecuador never do as their language doesn’t even have a word for it.
Luckily us Brits have plenty of ways of saying 'thank you' and some make it possible to say thank you without conveying any gratitude at all which confuses non-Brits no end.
You can say 'Thanks' or lengthen it to 'Many thanks' or even 'Thanks so much' but 'Thanks a lot' is usually reserved for conveying sarcasm.
Another saying for a show of gratitude is 'Cheers' and usually comes with 'mate' attached to make 'Cheers Mate' which is very informal as is 'Nice One' and both are really only used when someone had done you a favour or gives you an unexpected gift.
'Ta' is a thing for Northerners and children under 7 so might be better to avoid this unless you are geographically above Birmingham or have a Power Rangers duvet set. 
'Appreciate it' or 'much appreciated' is used more in writing so you would write: 'Thank you for not mentioning what happened in the store cupboard, i appreciate it'.
Something that is becoming more common is to call someone 'a lifesaver', 'a star' or 'a hero' and is something you would say to someone to thank them when they do you a favour along with much obliged but it's quite rare to hear that nowadays.
A minefield is 'You Shouldn’t Have!' which can be said dripping with sarcasm as well as appreciatively as is 'You're too kind' so it's a bit of a guess whether a Brit genuinely likes that gift if we say 'you shouldn't have' because we could very well mean that seriously, you really shouldn't have.
As we have so many ways to say 'Thank You', it's no surprise that we say it the most and have even developed a way of saying it while meaning the opposite.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post, seriously, you really shouldn't have.

Thursday, 24 May 2018

Non-Consensual Sex Is Always Rape

Deciding if a rape has taken place should be straight forward, if consent is not given then it is rape so it is disheartening that Sweden have had to pass a law to clarify what shouldn't really need clarifying.         
After more than a decade of campaigning to change the law in the Scandinavian nation, Sweden has finally passed a law to make sex illegal without explicit consent but Sweden is just the tenth country in Europe to recognise non-consensual sex as rape.
The new legislation aligns Sweden with the UK, Belgium, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Iceland, Ireland and Germany.
Shockingly marital rape is still legal in 33 countries across the world. These include Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Lesotho, Nigeria, Oman, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. UK courts only ruled that husbands were not entitled to have sex with wives regardless of whether or not they offer their consent in 1992.
Sweden’s decision comes at a time when a recent Europe-wide survey on the issue revealed widespread victim blaming and challenging views on consent. Nearly one-third of respondents said they believed that sex without consent is sometimes justified.
Sex without consent in any circumstances is rape and it really shouldn't be that hard to understand and i'm bewildered that to some, this concept is not understood and laws have to be imposed to make it a crime.

Irish Abortion Vote

It's taken it's time coming but the people in the Republic of Ireland will tomorrow vote on whether they want to make changes to end the country's strict abortion laws.
The pro and anti abortion campaigners have been out in strength this week trying to persuade the Irish people with their arguments and opinion polls point to a majority for yes when the votes are counted on Saturday although there is a large amount of people in the undecided camp.
The anti-abortion movement, calling themselves 'Love Both', has focused its message with emotive posters showing an ultrasound scan of a foetus accompanied with the words: 'Don’t repeal me' while the pro-abortion camp have been using the message that the Government shouldn't be forcing women to do what they decree.
In 2016, over 3500 women made the trip from Ireland to England to undergo an abortion and as things currently stand, a pregnant woman in Ireland has three options, they can stay pregnant, they can travel abroad for an abortion or they can illegally self-administer an abortion, having ordered pills online.
Abortion is always a deeply difficult topic to think about but to not allow the fourth option of a safe, legal abortion can't be right, who is anybody to impose their will on others when ultimately it's for the woman involved to have the full set of options to decide.
If you don't believe in it, then fair enough, don't do it, but don't limit other women and restrict their rights to their own bodies.
It should only be the decision of the people directly involved with the help of professional advice and then be left to make their own decisions and access to all the options but mostly it is far too important a decision to have someone else remotely force the choice on them.