Is that a gun in your pocket…or a banana?

This case continues to make waves on Planet Blog and now, amongst other worthy bloggers, the mighty Devil’s Kitchen has weighed in with some killer punches.

I’ve also had some really thought-provoking comments left here after I blogged quoting Constantly Furious’ article in full.

Something I find remarkable is that none of our national newspapers seem to have picked up this story yet.

As DK says:

The police behaved like utter, utter cunts and the jurors were disgustingly craven. But the people really at fault were the stupid, corrupt, piss-poor politicos who drafted this piece-of-shit law.

As usual, it is the politicos who are destroying this country—when do we rise up and hang the fucking lot of them?

and

Under this fucking stupid law a policeman can handle a gun with impunity, but a citizen goes to prison for five years for doing so. This totally undermines the concept that the police are citizens and the citizens are the police: it undermines the Peelian Principles of good policing because it elevates the police above the level of ordinary citizen, paving the way for a police state (were we not effectively living in one anyway).

This, surely, is an issue which affects us all and not only goes to the very heart of our justice system but discredits the very concept of justice itself in a 21st century Western democracy.

The silence of the MSM is truly deafening but, one is forced to ask, is this silence intentional?

And what about our precious government and Harlot Hairball’s ‘court of public opinion’?

Isn’t this all just one more step towards a banana republic Britain?

Mariah, miasma and melisma

One of the delights of being a musician is that you get to learn all sorts of interesting terms for various concepts and techniques.

Melisma is one such term and refers to singing a single syllable and protracting it over a series of changing musical notes.

(As opposed to ‘Miasma’ with which it can share certain qualities as I’ll demonstrate later…)

The word ‘me’, for example, could be sung over three notes as ‘me-e-e’.

One of the best-known examples is probably in the Christmas carol ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’ in which the ‘o’ sound in ‘Gloria’ is strung out over 4 bars and some 30 notes:

It’s a legitimate technique when composing and performing and is used in all sorts of music including pop, jazz, blues and rock.

However, like all techniques it can be overused and one of the chief culprits is Mariah Carey.

You can hear her tortuous melisma at the end of almost every line she sings and it gets intrusive and downright annoying to say the least. Some would be fine – but an excess takes me towards red mist territory.

I also have to admit a dislike for Ms Carey’s egotistical attitude and behaviour. I mean, make no mistake, she’s hugely successful and popular (she’s outsold Madonna in the US) but, then again, so are Egg McMuffins and Gregg’s pasties but I wouldn’t give either to a fucking dog.

So, imagine my mood after I read this.

The author – one John Arlidge – seems to be such a fixture up Mariah’s back passage that I suspect that he’s now getting his post delivered there after such observational gems as:

She’s lying on her back in a darkened room in the basement of the TV Asahi studios in Tokyo, dressed in a black miniskirt, a leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana trench coat and 8in Gucci bitch stacks.

But under the skin of this twittering popsicle is a businesswoman who has sold more singles, albums and downloads in the US than any other female artist, even Madonna.

Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

Okay, there may be wine on the table — this is still rock’n’roll — but Carey is focused.

“I don’t care if the rock-band person thinks, ‘Oh, I’m a sellout’. Well, guess what? They’re a sellout anyway for going to a record company. I’m sorry — you are.

She hoists herself up slowly from her chaise longue, asks whether there are any stairs on the way to the limo — walking in 8in heels ain’t easy — and tells a flunky to round up the gaudy Hello Kitty dolls and take them to the limo. “I have to have my little toys,” she gushes.

My favourite part of the whole sycophantic piece is this quote from Carey herself:

“I change ethnically according to where I am in the world. I can be a spokesperson for black, white and Latina. MC could stand for multicultural.”

Well, I know what MC could also stand for but I’d welcome any other suggestions…

Blogroll update

I’m delighted to add JuliaM’s excellent Ambush Predator blog to my growing essential reading list.

The articles are never overlong but have real substance and she takes no prisoners with her pithy conclusions and on-target comments.

Quality blogging!

Truly, the law is an ass

I first heard about this story via Twitter yesterday.

Now Constantly Furious has blogged about it and I quote his excellent article here in full:

There’s a term in law known as ‘Strict Liability’. This is official, formal legal shorthand for ‘You know what? I really don’t care why you were doing it, mate’.

Strict Liability applies to offences like speeding. So, if you’re caught breaking the speed limit, you can’t just claim that you didn’t know, or that you had to get home to see the end of X-Factor, or you were fleeing violent axe murderers. Speeding is speeding. You cannot exceed the limit for any reason.

Now, this might not seem too unreasonable, really. A bit crude, a bit simplistic, but you can sort of see where the legislators are comin’ from, eh?

However, what happens when lazy or inept legislators, rushing to put together yet another knee-jerk set of laws, use this as their own little shortcut?

Paul Clarke of Reigate can tell you.

Mr Clarke found a discarded shotgun and – rather than blagging a bank, or shootin’ up some boyz in da ‘hood – decided that he should hand it in at the local police station.

After all, possession of an unlicensed firearm is an offence, innit?

Oh yes. It is. But, unfortunately for Paul, it’s a ‘Strict Liability’ offence. Remember them? No excuses.

So, when Mr Clarke arrived at the local nick – having had the courtesy to ‘phone ahead to announce his intention – was he offered a cup of tea and the thanks of several beaming Bobbies?

Was he fuck. He was promptly arrested, and thrown into a cell.

When the case came to court, was he given an apology for the misunderstanding and sent away, without a stain on his character?

Was he fuck. ‘Strict Liability’, see?

The judge, directing the Jury, sealed his fate, saying,

“This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.

The Jury, not really knowing what the fuck was going on, and probably slightly disappointed that this was not really like on the telly at all, took a scant 20 minutes to go along with the Judge’s direction, and find the poor sod Guilty. Guilty. For fuck’s sake.

So, will the judge now unravel this mess, and sentence Mr Clarke to something proportionate and tolerable: “you will be taken from this place and given a cup of tea and your cab fare home” ?

Will he fuck. He can’t, even if he wants to.

There’s a minimum sentence for the crime of possessing a firearm. A mere judge can’t be trusted to know what’s appropriate, so he’s given guidelines from on high.

So – and here comes the sit down and brace yourself bit – when Paul Clarke is sentenced, on December the 11th, he must be sent to prison for a minimum of five years. Five fucking years. Five years in prison, for doing what pretty much every last single fucking one of us would have done in the circumstances.

What the flying, gibbering, fuckity fuck have we come to?

It’s an over-worked phrase, but could you make this shit up? No, you fucking could not.

What kind of insane, kafka-esque fucking mess do we live in?

Really, really, really. What the fuck?

If anyone sets up some sort of legal fund to keep Mr Clarke out of stir then count me in for a donation.

The glorious inanity of pop music

One of my favourite Noel Coward quotes – and I’ve used it in this blog before – is this:

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is

And he’s not fucking wrong.

Pop music, by its very nature, was never intended to be of lasting worth – although much of it is – but sometimes the most inane music can capture public imagination in an enduring way.

Foe some bizarre reason, I’ve had this first piece in my head a lot lately and although it’s totally dumb, it’s great fun. Here’s Electric Six with ‘Gay Bar’. Turn your intellect off and just enjoy some great but edifyingly stoopid pop music:

The companion piece is much older. It’s Scotland’s finest: the Rezillos. The girl singer’s stage name always makes me laugh. Fay Fife…”I’m Fay Fife’…”I’m from Fife’…imagine this said in a Scottish accent…

The Rezillos were great fun and covered many songs that were already totally dumb like ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘I Like It’. However, they also wrote some great original material and here they are with ‘(My baby does) Good Sculptures’. In fact, the overall vibe – guitar-based, slightly crazed over the top enthusiasm – isn’t a million miles away from ‘Gay Bar’, which shows that there’s always room in our lives for cheap music – and hoo-fucking-ray for that I say!

In a state agents

Shark Towers has now been on the market for just over a week and we’ve already had 4 lots of potential buyers viewing the family estate.

Of course, selling this little piece of England means that we’re now faced with the prospect of buying a small corner of La Belle France, so we’ve been looking at French estate agents’ sites.

In doing so, we’ve stumbled upon a new interweb game: ‘Spot the worst photo of a French property‘.

I don’t know about anyone else, but my philosophy regarding photos of a house you want to sell is that you present the rooms nicely – clean, tidy, uncluttered, etc, etc.

But not so with many French vendors.

Here’s my favourite so far:

More to come.

Hooray! I’m not a racist anymore! Gordon Brown says so…

It looks as if the rise of the BNP and other parties with immigration at the heart of their policies may have goaded our government into some sort of action.

For several decades, people’s concerns over the unsustainable level of immigration to this country have been brushed under the carpet but, in the run up to next year’s General Election, Gordon Brown is now seeing votes to be won or lost over the issue.

Mr Brown insisted that immigration must not be made a “taboo” issue tackled only by fringe parties, but should be “a question to be dealt with at the heart of our politics”. People who voice concerns about migration should not be branded “racist”, he said.

In an attempt to assure voters that he understands their concerns over immigration, he said: “If people ask me, do I get it? Yes. I get it. I have been listening and I understand and I am today announcing new changes…”

I found his insistence that People who voice concerns about migration should not be branded “racist” particularly interesting.

As leader of a Labour government that has actively supported such reactions by draconian legislation and the stifling of public debate, he’s not only acknowledging that such a culture of misrepresentation of public concern has been systemic in our society but was, in fact, wrongly encouraged in the first place.

That’s a major fucking shift in perspective.

It’s also a cynical vote-whoring exercise and is far too little, far too late.

Oh, and don’t look to the Tories to sort this one out when they come into power – they haven’t got a fucking clue about anything…

Sting – cunt du jour

Another Twitter-sourced story – this time courtesy of Jamie Lovell who has an excellent blog here – concerns holier-than-thou, overrated rock dinosaur and all-round cunt talented musician and passionate environmentalist Sting:

Sting said the singers who participate in the X Factor, created by Cowell in 2004, were “humiliated when they get sent off”.

He added: “How appalling for a young person to feel that rejection. It is a soap opera which has nothing to do with music.

“In fact, it has put music back decades. Television is very cynical.”

You know, Sting baby, I really don’t give a flying fuck what you think about anything anymore.

Not after some of the shit you’ve come out with since you stopped making music that isn’t downright fucking dangerous to have playing on the car stereo in case you nod off on the outside lane of the M1:

“I think cancer – I’m not an expert or a doctor – but I think cancer is the result of undigested dreams and forcing yourself to do something that is not distinctively you.”

I turned to Trudie. “There’s a little black spot on the sun today.”

She waited expectantly, not really indulging the mood but tolerant.

“That’s my soul up there,” I added gratuitously.

“I come from a family of losers, and I’ve rejected my family as something I don’t want to be like.”

“One of the rewards of success is freedom, the ability to do whatever you like.”

“I think I’m a focus for international attention.”

Then there’s Mrs Sting – Trudie Styler:

when the queen of ethical celebrities Trudie Styler, film-maker and wife of Sting, was asked about the elephantine carbon footprint for which she and her husband were responsible – seven houses, a band touring the world with a retinue of 750 people, a cook obliged to travel 100 miles to cook some pasta for the children, and so on – her reply was predictable. “I would like to think that we both work hard for the rights of indigenous people… but we do need to get around.”

Still, at least we’re not paying for this pair of cunts out of our taxes…

The Stasi is alive and well and working in Cambridge

Courtesy of Rob Waller (via Twitter) – chairman of the South East Branch of the LPUK , I heard about this story today.

Un-fucking-believable.

I joked the other day about the Stasi getting gainful employment here now that East Germany no longer exists, but now I’m not so sure it was a joke:

Thomas Catcheside, a grandfather, was arrested in a dawn raid and held in a police cell for six hours for swearing in front of a council official.

The 67-year-old was woken at 5.35am when officers knocked on his door in connection with a single swear word which he used six days earlier.

He was marched back to his bedroom in his dressing gown – where his wife Deborah, 62, was still asleep – and ordered to get changed before being driven away in a police van.

Mr Catcheside was then held in a windowless cell for six hours, had his fingerprints and a DNA swab taken, before being issued with an £80 fixed penalty notice and released.

How many ways can people we pay – and pay fucking well – to work in our interests be so wrong in so many ways?

Mr Catcheside didn’t even get his day in court.

The story gets even more gets alarming as you read on.

A Cambridgeshire police spokeswoman said they had been following ”national policy” in their response.

Which is a little reminiscent of ‘But we were only following orders’ and, more recently, with regard to MPs’ expenses, ‘We were merely following the advice given’.

Is personal autonomy a thing of the past or are people still capable of thinking for themselves?

She said: ”We were responding to reports of an assault, which is a serious offence.

Well, someone at the council seemed to think that being sworn at constituted an assault. So why weren’t they charged with wasting police time?

”The suspect was arrested at the earliest possible opportunity, which happened to be at 5.35am.

A time favoured by totalitarian police forces worldwide and throughout history.

”There was not enough evidence to suggest he had committed an assault but he admitted to being abusive and was issued with a fine and words of advice about his behaviour.

Where do you cunting start?

Yes, we all know that it’s not always appropriate to swear. At 67, Mt Catcheside probably knows that better than the cunt official from the council, but to fine the guy for the offence of swearing and giving him a disclosable offence on his record, after banging him up for 6 hours following a dawn raid just seems excessive to put it mildly.

”National policy states anyone arrested will have a sample of their DNA taken.”

Now, DNA sampling is in the news today, and Mr Catcheside’s sample will now be able to be legally kept for 6 years. My advice to him is to be very careful when he pulls his next bullion blag or goes on a killing spree in Cambridge, and if he does go totally fucking apeshit with an AK47, I just hope he starts shooting somewhere in the vicinity of those stoat-felchers at Cambridge council.

Robert Hollingsworth, head of City Homes, said they had reported the incident to the police because their representative had felt ”threatened”.

FFS…He’s 67 and he swore once, you sensitive fucking flower! If their ‘representative’ can’t deal with people sometimes acting in a vaguely hostile manner then he should get another fucking job, and not waste PUBLIC money being an ineffectual cunt!

He said: ”We had no choice but to report the incident to the police. Our staff member felt he had been threatened by Mr Catcheside and that is something we take very seriously.”

This really is true societal meltdown.

But it’s not the deviants, the criminals, the layabouts or the feckless who are really fucking things up for us, it’s the people who we pay to sort this shit out for us all.

Now that IS fucking worrying…

Mandy gags Jezza – but not in an S&M way

Here, courtesy of OH, is the Jeremy Clarkson article that the Sunday Times and Peter Mandelson didn’t want you to read.

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

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 4×4s 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.