Thursday, July 12, 2007 by Andrew John.

I get a bit tetchy when people don’t think straight. I had a go at a couple of modes of alleged thinking on The Underground Edition on 8 July. This is what I said.

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It’s funny how unreasoned we are as a society. We don’t really think. Joined up, I mean. We don’t think joined-up thoughts.

We’ve got these worldwide concerts called Earth Aid or Save Aid or Lucozade or something. Live Earth, that’s it. (Sounds like instructions for wiring a plug!)

And we have Jon BonBon Jovial or somebody, and other highly paid rock stars – many of whom have several houses dotted here and there – jetting off all over the world, piling on the potential for climate change, and they’re singing to raise our awareness of, yes, climate change.

They don’t get it, do they?

There’s controversy in some circles as to whether climate change is caused by humankind or whether it’s part of the natural cycle of things. However, there’s a huge consensus that says it’s manmade, and it’s that consensus that’s driving this bash. So let’s stick with that explanation for the time being.

Right, why don’t they just stop jetting about the place. Wouldn’t that be the best message of all? Stop jetting and then hold a press conference to say, ‘We’ve stopped jetting.’

And just who am I to say all this? you might ask. Well, I don’t jet; I do recycle – and I’m an inveterate moaner. But, hey, sometimes I get you going. I bet you’ve all written to your MPs after listening to one of these eminently sensible little homilies on The Underground Edition.

Maybe not.

The other example of totally unhinged thinking this last week has been that of a bishop – yes, a highly paid man who lives in a big house known as a bishop’s palace, paid for by his bosses (not the Boss – the big one in the sky, but his earthly bosses), a man who has been to university, probably got a doctorate, has had a high-quality education, paid for by you and me – yes, this bishop, this man who is looked up to, revered, respected by many, gets the ear of governments and politicians and journalists . . . And what does he say? He says that God has sent the floods to the UK because the UK has civil-partnerships legislation, which allows people of the same sex to get married.

Let me just run that one by you again, because I can see through your monitor screen that you’re tutting and shaking your head in disbelief, banging your head on the desk, tearing your tongue out and calling for copious quantities of brandy. This man – the bishop of Carlisle, the so-called ‘Right Reverend’ Graham Dow – says that the Sexual Orientation Regulations, which allow for same-sex marriages, are, and I quote, ‘part of a general scene of permissiveness’. He goes on to say, ‘We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.’

Right, so God, who is reckoned to be omnipotent and omniscient, who in the Old Testament, sent his Angel of Death on the occasion of the Tenth Plague. Now God in his wisdom could tell the houses of Israel from the houses not of Israel – the people of Israel, that is – and so the Angel didn’t kill those. He skipped over them.

My point is that an all-seeing God has already proved that he can discriminate between one house and another. If Minnie and Mandy have shacked up together, and Phil and Bill have shacked up together, this same god, you would think, would have the nous to flood only their homes. But no: he has flooded, it seems, the homes of good, upstanding, decent, clean-living straight folk, too.

Odd, that. 

I read a humanist blog the other day, on which someone said, and I quote, ‘If he thinks these floods are the result of pro-gay laws rather than global warming, then how come far more catastrophic floods afflict homophobic nations such as Bangladesh? And how come ultra-pious nations such as Pakistan suffer catastrophic earthquakes? And the self-proclaimed religiosity of the United States doesn’t protect it from lethal hurricanes either.’

There you go, then. Something to ponder on next time you hear the BBC wheel a bishop into the studio to pontificate on matters of the moment. Especially if it’s Graham Dow.

Still, where would we be without them, eh? I mean, you’ve got to admit: they do brighten up our day from time to time. Good job hardly anybody takes them seriously.

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Wednesday, July 4, 2007 by Andrew John.

Ever been beaten up in the cyberworld> No, neither have I. It happens, though, and I had a rant about it in Bill’s Underground Edition last Sunday. Here it is . . .

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Remember the days when, if somebody at school at a grudge against you, they just took you behind the bike sheds and beat seven shades of crap out of you – or, if you were bigger, you turned the tables and beat seven shades of crap out of them? Good, old-fashioned healthy bullying. Don’t argue. It was good for you, and you know it.

It’s a bit different these days, though. There’s this thing called cyberbullying. It’s happening a lot. And there’s just been a report about it that says that, in the USA – where else? – a third of online teenagers have been cyberbullied.

It’s this crazy notion about sharing all your intimate details that does it. You join up to something such as MySpace, and put all your personal stuff on there. Do they put their breast size, their willy size, their bank details, their mobile phone’s entire directory of friends, their mother’s breast size, their dad’s – but you get the gist. I bet they do. The old-fashioned equivalent would have been going round the school with all this written on the back of the fag packet you’ve just emptied by having a crafty ciggy behind those bike sheds, and handing all your information to your friends – friends who will soon become enemies – to hand round.

But we didn’t do that, did we? So why are kids sharing all this stuff about themselves online, where dirty old men in cyber-raincoats lie in wait to do nasty things to them?

When I was a kid – and you, too, I dare gamble, dear listener, no matter how old you are – mothers told their kids not to talk to strangers. It’s harder to know online who’s a stranger, I know, but, blimey, what’s wrong with just keeping your personal stuff off there? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that. Why do they think banks and other online merchants use sophisticated security to protect people’s identities – and even then sometimes get it wrong? But why do they think they use them? For fun?

Now, OK, some of this bullying lark amounts to sending malicious emails about the place. So where’s the difference between that and rumours circulating your entire school, from mouth to ear, where people could actually look at you? The favourite at my school was ‘Andy John’s a poofter’, or ‘Andy John shags sheep’.  If both of those were true, it would mean I had an eye for rams, but I don’t. Because they smell. And I don’t like having intimate relations with things that smell.

But that’s by the bye.

Back to cyberbullying. OK, in the days of the cyber world, you can find your photograph or a video passed around so quickly, which you couldn’t before. Yes. I’ll concede that. But why put a video on there in the first place? It’s yampy. A video of you enjoying yourself doing nice dainty things such as having tea with the vicar, yes, but not shagging that bloke or bird on the kitchen table at your mate’s 16th-birthday party.

Or across the freezer cabinet.

In Sainsbury’s.

I’m afraid it’s something we’re going to have to live with. All innovation is a Pandora’s Box. And you open one of those every time you turn on your radio or select an excellent online radio service such as Celtica Radio. I mean, it’s one thing tuning in and getting me in your earhole. Think yourself lucky. You might get Bill Everatt. 

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Thursday, June 28, 2007 by Andrew John.

They gave Sir Salman a knightood, and guess who complained about it! Yep. The usual suspects. So I had a rant about this in Bill’s Underground Edition last week. Here it is.

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I have a confession to  make: I occasionally abandon books I’ve begun reading because I’m getting bored rigid. I’ve just done it with a Stephen King one. Yes, that master of horror Stephen King. But this one is just crap storytelling, I’m afraid. It’s called Cell, and the premise is silly and the story just one long linear narrative with no tangential intrigue and just three boring characters, and I find myself hoping the crazy people get to them and dispose of them.

I began reading Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses some years ago. I gave up on that, too. I found it boring, tedious, tiresome, making me say life’s too short. I keep meaning to go back to it and try again – especially now that Mr Rushdie is Sir Salman. Not because the book will have improved any, but because I feel I owe it to him.

Once again, this quality writer has come in for death threats because people with an overdose of superstition perceive some sort of offence in what he’s written. Something to do with a historical figure they call a prophet. No one has yet told me what he prophesied, but that’s by the bye.

Now I do believe people should be allowed to believe whatever they wish, and I believe I should be allowed to call it balderdash, piffle and poppycock – or even worse – if I so choose. They can always argue with me, provided they use logic and reason. That’s part of the free speech we have in the UK – although that seems to be diminishing, what with so-called religious-offence legislation and the emergence of what are laughably being called ‘faith crimes’.

Faith crimes? Blimey! You can commit a sort of special crime by attacking somebody because of his choice of superstitions? That’s yampy, that is. You bash him over the head with a stick and, quite rightly, are taken to court for it. You bash him over the head with a stick because he’s a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Jedi Knight or a Scientologist, and it’s something more than assault: it’s something heinous. Oh, wait a minute, the UK doesn’t recognise Scientology as a religion, does it? Sees it as some sort of barmy doctrine, a cult, which of course, the nutty Scientologists deny. But, then, they would, wouldn’t they? Your Tom Cruises and your John Travoltas. Total fruitcakes.

But the other religions. Oh, yes – faith crimes indeed!

I’m just glad that the Racial and Religions Hatred Act or whatever it was called, which creates an offence of inciting hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion, got so watered down in the end that it might as well not be on the statute book. The Act was the New Labour’s third attempt to bring in this nonsense: provisions were originally included as part of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill in 2001, but were dropped after objections in the House of Lords. Good for their lordships, I say. The nonsense was again brought forward as part of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill in 2004–5, but was again dropped in order to get the body of that Bill passed before the 2005 general election.So what’s the message we’re getting? That most legislators just don’t want this nonsense? That seems to be about the size of it.

But you can bet your bottom that those who object to Salman Rushdie’s knightood will bleat and whine, burn books, burn effigies, threaten suicide bombings until the British government make some concession, somewhere, somehow. Fortunately, they won’t take the knightood off Sir Salman, I’m glad to say: that’s irrevocable now unless he does something naughty such as shoot Prime Minister Gordon Brown. (Oops! Was that incitement? I don’t think he heard me!)

I think we live in interesting times. Let’s just wait and see what happens in the free-speech and free-expression departments, shall we? But, once they start stripping us of our hard-won freedoms because fruitcakes burn books, as used to happen in medieval times, then it’s time to protest for a genuine cause. Keep those banners and slogans handy. You never know when you may need them.

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007 by Andrew John.

I chewed the fat a bit on Bill’s Underground Edition when, as usual, called on to have a rant about this or that – or the other. You can find a link his programme on the Celtica home page.

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When I was a kid I had a bit of puppy fat. Once I was in my mid-teens, I shook it off. Could be because I took up weightlifting and other exercise or just that it went. Puppy fat does. But not these days. I’ve just read about a 12-year-old lad who had to go to hospital in order to be put on a diet, and his family were caught smuggling one-pound chocolate bars in to him. That’s bigger than one of those one-pound-thirty-pence-or-so Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. But obesity’s been a factor in at least 20 child-protection cases in the last year, according to a survey dear old Auntie BBC has done by contacting 50 consultant paediatricians around the UK to ask if they believe childhood obesity can ever be a child-protection issue. Well of course it can! If I starved a child so she was a bag of bones, it would be a child-protection issue. So if I let a kid get so enormous he can walk only with a walking stick – as in one case was reported – am I not equally guilty of child abuse? 

Get real, folks! Stop blaming everybody else. If your kid’s fat for no congenital reason – in other words, because you have fed him too much fat and not encouraged him to exercise – then that’s your fault. Nothing wrong with a bit of puppy fat or a rounded figure. Goodness, but the great masters used to paint beauties who’d look a bit on the plump side to us now, but they were considered gorgeous back then. Bit of something to grab hold of, you know? Or so I’m told. But there’s a difference between enjoying life with the occasional bit of choccy as a treat, and getting enormous! As you’d expect, the touchy-feelies have entered the arena in this one. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said that obesity is a public-health problem, not a child-protection issue. Oh, yes? Well who’s looking after the child, Mr Paediatrics and Child Health? Not the public, but the parents, you moron. I’m not blaming the kids in this. In fact I feel sorry for them. They’re the ones whose health is at risk, and they’re the ones who get to look like shite and won’t be able to pull members of the opposite sex, the same sex, a sheep, a sexy Welsh yak or whatever. And they’re the ones who, when it does come to crunch time, have to suffer the big changes their lifestyle will need to get them back to a healthy size. 

I think people who want to become parents ought to be licensed. One doctor told the Beeb that as a society we’re lily-livered, and he’d seen an obese child taken away from parents actually get back to normal bodyweight in a few months. Another said parents were killing a kid slowly because they were feeding her only chips and high-fat food. No one else was doing that, Mr Paediatrics and Child Health touchy-feely hippie tree-hugging excuse for a human being. Not the public, but the parents. Then you get manufacturers who say they’re being responsible by making some things in smaller portions. But they don’t want to lose a bit of revenue for the sake of ensuring they have healthy kids who’ll live long enough to continue buying their choccy, oh, no. No long-term thinking like that. What they do is sell something that’s in two bits or easily breakable and say, ‘For sharing’ or some such nonsense. Oh, yes, in today’s me, me, me society, kids share all right: ‘I’ll share this with me,’ they say. ‘I’ll give the me of now half of this four-kilo bar of fondant-filled milk mush, and give the other half to the me of ten minutes hence.’  Nah. Manufacturers don’t do responsibility, except to the bottom line. And it’s the bottom lines that are getting bigger. A bit of parent power might make them and their own kids think a bit. Government initiatives don’t seem to cut the mustard. You might say they’re a fat lot of good.

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Wednesday, June 6, 2007 by Andrew John.

Never thought I’d have a rant about Teletubbies. But this was what emerged when I joined Bill Everatt for his Underground Edition on Sunday night . . .

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Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po are four rather lovable creatures known as Teletubbies. But Tinky-Winky is thought in some circles to be a disgusting pervert, the most heinous, the most frightful, the creature from hell, the antichrist. Why? Because it’s thought he – if he is a ‘he’ – might be, wait for it, gay.Well, get you, Tinky Winky ducky, you’re a poof. And the whole world wants you to fall down a gaping active volcano and burn to death screaming and writhing. Or worse.Well, that’s what you’d believe if you took any cue from some PC-riddled idiot in Poland – a Catholic country, don’t forget, so there’s probably something of excessive religious zeal mixed in, too. This is the child-rights ombudsman. Just hold onto that a moment. Child-rights. And this person thinks that the suspicion that Tinky Winky might be gay – a suspicion begun some time ago because he, she or it carries a handbag – could promote ‘inappropriate attitudes’ among children and, wait for it again, ‘promote’ homosexuality.
Gosh, what a black and evil world this is, when cuddly propaganda such as The Teletubbies is used to this dreadful, atrocious, shocking end. Surely the work of the devil himself.

The irony is that there’s obviously someone of the Catholic tendency who has an ounce of sense left, because the country’s deputy speaker, said to be a conservative Catholic, has told the ombudsman not to be such a berk, because it makes the office of child-rights ombudsman look silly.

What gets me is this nonsense about ‘inappropriate attitudes’. Inappropriate to what, exactly? If Tinky Winky’s accessory were in the shape of a huge erect phallus and he were seen hanging around down at the docks waiting for dishy sailors, I could understand it. But I’d have that reservation if he were kerb-crawling in his car looking for a bit of the opposite sex. That is what’s known as behaviour, Mr or Ms Ombudsman, not being one thing or the other. Now behaviour could be seen to be inappropriate. But being?

But, anyway, Tinky Winky is not seen picking up sailors: he’s a doll-like figure who has a handbag. I had a boss once – the programme controller on a radio station I worked on in the Midlands – who was tall, handsome, had a beard, was as heterosexual as a prize stud bull, but carried a handbag. It was a so-called ‘man’s’ handbag, yes, and he looked a prat. But he did it. Lots of men carry handbags – well, back then I seem to remember a few. This was in the eighties. They may have gone out of fashion by now.

I don’t carry one. Not because certain idiots think you’re gay if you carry a handbag, but because I just think I’d look a prat.

Then there’s this oft-trotted-out line about ‘promoting’ homosexuality. How, might I ask, do you promote something that is a fact of nature – as much of a fact of nature as gravity? Did Isaac Newton promote the idea of gravity to a gullible, impressionable public when he pronounced on it? Perhaps children should have been sheltered from such facts.

Then there’s this business of a child-rights ombudsman. Child rights? Goodness, it’s the right of every child to have his or her mind opened up to all the possibilities that are going to be presented to him or her during the course of his or her life – and they include sexual ones. They’re going to have sex. They’re going to find it enjoyable. Some will find the company of their own sex preferable. Fact of life. Fact of nature. Get used to it. The only reason these kids might stand to lose out if it turns out that they’re gay is that there’ll be idiot Christians and those of other religious persuasions making them feel like committing suicide, as so many do already, because of their shame – shame that shouldn’t be instilled into their impressionable minds in the first place.

I despair.

In this country, at least, we’re moving on, thankfully, from condemning people for their sexual orientation. There’s a right-wing almost militaristic element among conservative Christians in the USA that needs its collective brain looking at, and a few over here are similarly in need of psychiatric care – preferably the sort that takes place behind bars with a good deal of hard labour.

One of those who’ve criticised Tinky Winky – and this was some time ago – was one Jerry Falwell, the right-wing, vicious, nasty, malevolent Christian in the United States who died a couple of weeks ago, still hating all gay people with a hatred that it’s hard to match – although he would have told you he loved the so-called sinner but hated the so-called sin. But he was a shite of the first order. Now I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and should speak only good. OK. Falwell’s dead. Good!

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