U turn time

Wooo Hoooh! Nerr nerr nee nerr nerrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Anyone misled by my previous post into thinking the Ryder Cup is pointless should get things in context. And the context is: the Americans got beaten. They lost. They were in the parlance of Newcastle 'lucky to get noot'. Right up theirs . So let's give three rousing European cheers for a collection of the fat, ugly, boring, humourless and above all totally damn rich from across the great continent I am proud to call home (well actually I call it Europe, but go with me here). You stuck one up the fat, ugly, boring, humourless and above all even totally damn richer Yanks*, which definitely goes to prove something. And I don't think their names were funny enough this time.

*Except Tiger - he's terribly suave dontcha think?

we have a winner - or two

Gentles all,

I have been blown away by your enthusiastic tsunami of comments in the desperate hope that you might win an unknown and probably non-existent prize. You can see the entries in the comments section of the post below.
And I have cogitated and pondered in true Lloyd Grossman stylee. Quite apart from the fact that I have been checking for days and cursing the mettle of this world where even prizes can't persuade some people to turn off the overpaid bloaters playing golf for 'Europe' against America (can I really identify with a hugely rich and disparate collection of brits, swedes, spaniards etc. when the dane didn't get picked?) and hit some keys at random - because given the number of people against whom you are likely to be competing and my own insane whimsy, that's likely to be good enough. Having eventually found your latest batch of comments, I have one that will not be surpassed, and the entrant cared enough to post it twice. Kingcod has won this month's prize with the upbeat and succinct 'Comments rock'. We can only wonder whether the winner of next month's competition will contain the word 'rock' - or indeed be someone who is a close friend of mine.

So Codders - your prize.. as someone who enjoys membership of an online community that blathers about life in the trenches in Sweden in WW2, and has a keen interest in the garden shed, I had wondered whether to offer you a fucking life. However as mine is the only one I could offer at short notice, I think you deserve better, so you are hereby presented with a second class single rail ticket from Winlaton to Whitley Bay - or a transfare to those of us in the know. And I'll even pick you up at the station. I only hope you can use it sometime soon.

The second winner didn't even post a comment! How clever is that? He is Superintendent Dominic Clout (I think that was his name) of the Metropolitan Police who made the following comment at a fairly boring meeting I attended the other day:

'The people who answer 999 calls are on the street at four o'clock in the morning 24-7'.

He wins a 24 hour clock fashioned in the shape of Stephen Hawking's wheelchair set to Bujumbura time for his flexible approach to the subject of time and logic.

For those of you who entered, well done and tough; for Violet, who managed to ask two questions about rules and dates and where her comment had gone I can only offer the helpful hint 'get your finger out of your arse' - just write something; the standard is low and I like you - you're bound to win sooner or later. And her a doctor an'all.

The next competition begins now (if not sooner).

comment of the month - big prizes to be won

That's a shameless lie, but hey the Tories started it, so don't blame me. The concept of the prizes will be big, rather than the prizes themselves.

I am hereby instituting a prize of, at best, minimal value (or is that worth?) for the most brilliant comment posted at this blog during the month. And I have rules. Some follow, but you never know there may be others I haven't told you about - or made up yet. And I may or may not adhere to any of the following rules:

1 The voting panel will consist of me.
2 I will accept nominations and bribes.
3 I will acept requests for guest judges to join the panel (me) on an ad hoc basis.
4 If I like you personally, you may win even with a really crap comment - so don't let perceived lack of ability on your part dissuade you from making loads of entries.
5 The prize(s) will be random, fanciful and whatever I decree.
6 They may occasionally be real.
7 They may less occasionally be surreal.
8 If I can't be bothered with any of this, I won't.

I have already selected my first winner and ....drumroll....
............it is....
anonymous (canned applause)
for her/his concise yet erudite comment on my cat post:

'cats rock'

(S)he wins: a year's supply of upper case 'A's to minimise her/his anonymity
and a copy of my recipe for Warm Salad of tossed cat and pan-roasted wingnut.
Just give me your name and they'll be dispatched to you forthwith, Nonners.

Thanks to everyone who entered (albeit unwittingly) this month's contest - I think all the judges agree that the overall standard was incredibly high. Good luck next time - try a bit harder to post comments that come up to the required standard and you too could be the fortunate recipient of something pointless.
P.S. It can sometimes help to write comments out in pencil on some scrap paper before you get clever with a keyboard!
Get posting and Win Win Win!!!

guess what's on the telly tonight

Plenty of the better US blogs have had their say on today's anniversary, pouring predictable scorn at their leadershit (that concept gets much better when you take the p out of it). My own personal fave

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com

is no exception and you have to feel sorry for the Americans as one of the world's less brilliant leaders and his cronies trample all over the dead to further their political ambitions - not often they do it at home, though...

I was reminded of a rather more positive anniversary that fell this week. It's 20 years since some women decided to make a stand against an ideology that threatened to kill us all and trotted off to a then little-known US airforce base destined to take delivery of Britain's first batch of US cruise missiles.

And Greenham Common was born. Ordinary women of all ages and descriptions (well maybe not so many Tories) took a stand against madness and murder and taught us some valuable lessons in non-violent resistance. One day they joined hands and hugged the base and all the time they put baby clothes and children's possessions on the wire. The irony of the Daily Mail readers' hatred of these women as your classic hairy lesbian lefties was that many fought in the name of their own children and husbands - all made their stand for men and women everywhere and every innocent potential victim of the nuclear weapons to be stationed at Greenham. They were there on the side of life - some were veterans of Aldermaston, some became politicised for the first time, but they proved (if proof were needed) that women can see past the dick-swinging and the rhetoric of destruction and focus on life, on love and lots of the good things people pretend they are fighting wars for. On this orgiastic day so associated with death, we might take a moment to think of these women with respect and gratitude.

win friends and influence your uncle (nos 1 and 2)

No surprises at the first...

Boris Johnson has once again made friends the world over by the simple expedient of opening that bloody great gob almighty; crowing over the current in-fighting in the Labour party, he expressed his delight at the 'cannibalism and chief-slaying' that he usually associated with Papua New Guinea - any guesses which High Commission was on the phone to complain - typical that they have no sense of humour; what with them being a bunch of savages with grass skirts and a penchant for highly flavoured sauces.

...and a gifted cricketer warms the cockles of our hearts...

Kevin Pietersen in one of those endless Sunday magazine profiles was asked what his most treasured possession was:

his fiancee!

I was shocked - has the man no sense of a man's most sacred and private bond. His partner apparently said something about a big plank that's only good for hitting cricket balls...Sheila has requested a divorce and has been seen out with Inzamam Ul Haq. Inzi was quoted last night as saying 'I think Sheila is a silly name for a cricket bat.' (Don't laugh too hard - it's a very old computer.)

ideology blah blah name Pt. 2

On the fish/barrels principle, I promised myself I wouldn't keep on about conservativehome, but I can't keep away. It has the mesmeric power of a runaway train about to mow down a crowd of fluffy bunnies. So imagine my delight when I decided to trawl the links and found the tantalising offering: Young Female and Tory. The click leapt unbidden from my fingers and then... a pause as the technology grappled with the enormity that surely lay beyond the cyberportal... only to get the message: 'internal server error' - every word resonates.

the great leap forward

For those of you who formerly worried about the weird disparity between my comments and the timestamp (eg one day I claimed to be off to bed at about noon), I have now ventured through the settings section of my toolbar (don't worry, I took plenty of sandwiches) and reset the time zone to Africa Bujumbura.
So it's not like I don't go out of my way to make life better for my readership.
That's you lot....

.....hello???

my blog may be shite but at least...

It seems that if you scratch the surface of any otherwise decent blog hard enough you uncover photos of fuckin' cats.
why why why???????????????????????????????????????????

the ideology that dare not speak its name

For lovers of political jokes I bring you...the conservative party. Now a lot of us on the left have been whingeing about dear Mr Blair and his thoroughly crap and dishonest 'Labour' (ahem) government. Yes they have lied about this and that, shot a few people who, strictly speaking, might not have done anything wrong, smiled benignly as Israel pretended they were Rambo - cum- Terminator and even cocked up the NHS computer system - still who among us can honestly hold up our hand and say we haven't blown the odd billion on a shite bit of redundant software - OK poor analogy, but you see my point. We might all have been forgiven for thinking they were the worst political party currently in Britain...if only...and this is why life is so fuckin beautiful, if only the Tories could have kept their stupid mouths shut for two minutes and not vomited some of their views on life. Just as Nasrullah's basic error of opening his mouth reminded me that the Israeli government weren't the only bunch of penis wavers in the middle east, today I am overjoyed to be reminded about the conservatives.

You remember - cuddly duffers like Boris Johnson who speak for ordinary people everywhere (ordinary well-off white people anyway), moderates like Norman Tebbit who isn't too keen on buggery and the perverts who practise it, friends of the ethnic minority (who just think 'they' would be happier 'back home'), espousers of feminism like Thatch the Mighty. They brought us Clause 27 (breaking new ground for homophobes everywhere), the poll tax (and had the grace to try it on the lab rat Scots first), the Falklands - the only war as dishonest and pointless as the scouring of Iraq for WMDs, arrested any 4 males travelling together on the A1 on the grounds they were clearly about to picket a pit, decided teachers were 'the enemy within' and shut down the whole of British industry in favour of getting on a bike and looking for work that didn't exist (and this from a former airline pilot). Ah yes we say - but they have changed - they have women (surely you saw that nice young gel in Putney) British Asians (well the odd millionaire) and that nice homosexual Matthew Parris (oops! he's left, but there are other buggers in the party and we only snigger about them behind our hands) and anyway 'could they be worse than Blair?'

Hmmmmm, I wonder.

A hint is provided by the glorious website

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2006/08/inigo_wilson_a_.html

I perked up at once at the title, imagining a quiet place, probably by the seaside, without windows or doors where the passer-by could just hear echoes like '...say what you like about apartheid it certainly kept the darkies in line...' '...damned women's libbers - they'll want the bloody vote next...' '...buggery is buggery and that's why God hates a queer...'. No such luck; it seems the conservatives in this particular home are free to mingle with real people; however they do have a charming museum of unpleasant opinions which the more optimistic of us might have hoped were extinct.

One example is the Lefty Lexicon compiled by Inigo Wilson - as someone who 'manages community affairs for a large telecoms company' (Orange) he was unwise enough to publish this (in my opinion) harmless enough selection of unfunny shite. (Unfunny and yet laughable - my favourite combination!) As it contained some stupid opinions about Palestinians and Muslims in general, you might have thought a man working in 'community affairs' would have had an inkling that some people might be offended. Oh No! Surely only humourless muslims could deem it a bit off and as they are all suicide bombers etc they can go hang (good idea, that...). Lo and behold people did get offended and complained to Orange who promptly suspended him for a nice full investigation until he can be shuffled off somewhere quietly. The Tories have made it a free speech issue and smell a muslim conspiracy against this poor innocent. Have a look at how they use their free speech and then tell me we couldn't do worse than this labour government...

bloody hell not another attempt at a pro-feminist post - I mean how scared is this man?

I was recently fortunate enough to stumble across The Dawn Patrol, the wittily-titled website of a Ms Dawn Eden. Among other sensible and logical thoughts presented entirely without bias, she has single-handedly cracked the old chestnut:
if (wo)man is born free (nothing to do with those lions - please try to concentrate) then why is (s)he in chains everywhere?

The gloriously simple answer that has oddly enough eluded some of our greatest minds from Rousseau to Stephen Hawking to Gary Lineker is as follows:

"In an age of sexual liberation (made possible, in part, by easy infertility) and feminist freedom, we resurrect the concept of people as chattel."

Of course! It's feminism, the availability of contraception and freedom of thought in general that mean we are errr really very unfree. Those naughty feminists - they pretend they want to empower women and even up some of the more glaring inequalities that bad old patriarchy has created, but really they are trying to make people (presumably women included) slaves. I don't think she really explained why that should be so, but, hey Dawn, that argument is enough to convince me.
Tomorrow Dawn explains why the earth is flat and the devil put the little stones in the ground so we could dig 'em up and imagine they were animals from long ago. Don't miss it - I include her address for those who wish to be enlightened.
http://www.dawneden.com

pro-feminist post (basic)

To my thousands (ahem) of loyal readers I have to admit this blog is no longer my own. I have received a visit from an angry (not to mention toothy) dinosaur suggesting I get off the fence and post something pro-feminist. I hate those who cave to such pressure only slightly less than the thought of being ripped into tiny bits by pearly-white saurian gnashers, so here goes - I'm keeping it very simple here and going for a gentle lob to bury at the back of the court. Something, in short, that nobody with blood still reaching the brain can find at all contentious - I have no desire to be descended upon by scores of people telling me I just ain't feminist enough. Tho a bit of traffic would be nice - this isn't exactly the kind of blog where the constant tramping of cyberfeet would keep you awake all night. Anyway, I offer you two things without too much comment:

First is this refreshing news from the godly land of America.

A Sunday school teacher has been sacked after 11 years because she is a woman. Mary Lambert was told she could not continue teaching at the church because Eve "is the root of all evil." "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission, I do not permit a woman to teach a man" she was told in a letter from leaders at the church in Waterton, New York.

Now be honest - did you think this still happened even in Dubya's America?

Second a link to something less depressing - not the first person to link to this, but who cares?
http://angertoactivism.blogspot.com/2006/07/nothing-safe-to-sacrifice.html

It's almost as if some women do have things to teach the world!