Load o’ Ballog

No mob rule!

I abhor cruelty to either humans or animals, so I was disgusted by the actions of Mary Bale when I saw the video of her dumping a cat into a recycling bin.

Her excuses (“moment of madness”, “just a joke”, “it’s just a cat”) are pathetic. Her act was that of a mean-spirited person and had it been my cat, I would have been livid.

But the next steps should be taken by Britain’s RSPCA, not by mobs.

Some of the comments on the Facebook page “Help Find The Woman Who Put My Cat In The Bin“ are puerile and somewhat disturbing:

• “Give her a yeast infection”
• “Hang her”
• “We should all find her and kill her”
• “Punch her, punch her real hard, that shud [sic] fix her mind state”
• “We should bombard her with hate messages”
• “Anyone planning on paying this woman a visit? just [sic] wondering, if you are good on you”
• “Too bad we can’t put this bitch in a time machine  and set it for September 11, 2001 World Trade Center”

All over the world today, people are starving and homeless. Women and children are being raped in their hundreds in the Democratic Republic of Congo. People are being press-ganged into slave conditions to mine for the minerals that enable our mobile phones to work. Fish stocks around the world are on the verge of collapse. People are losing their jobs. People are losing their homes.

Do you see mobs protesting on the streets?

But one cat gets locked in a bin for fifteen hours and people go apeshit.

Don’t get me wrong, that woman deserves the humiliation her public shaming brought upon her and I am delighted to see her get her comeuppance (especially after the sneaky way she checked to see if anyone was looking). To their credit, however, the owners of the cat have called for calm and have asked the nutjobs from the Net to leave the woman alone and to let the matter rest in the hands of the RSPCA.

Now, however, the Mail Online is reporting that lynch mobs  are demanding that she be fired from her job at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Is RBS going to submit to pressure from a baying mob? Is that how they run their business? If so, perhaps the banks need more baying mobs at their doors screaming for them to release more credit for mortgages and to businesses.

But this woman is due to be investigated by the proper authorities. If we ran our businesses based on the misplaced expressions of outrage of the mob then the economy would be in a far worse state than it is now. This woman should be fired from her job if she cannot do her job. That’s it.

Show some balls RBS.

All this over a cat? Are you fucking kidding me?

Ash, sure it’ll be grand!

With the fiendish people in Iceland planning to spew ash into the air for the next several years, governments have put their highest-paid “worst-case-scenario” thinkers to work.

The highest threat to freedom and the security of the civilised world is now:

• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• people blowing up airliners with Lucozade bottles (I had a bottle of Lucozade in an airport yesterday and it was fine)
• people trying to blow up their shoes
• people trying to blow up their underpants
• exploding breast implants for women (Seriously!)
• men replacing their testicles with C4 (OK, I made that one up but let’s see how long it takes before Rupert Murdoch puts it forward as a credible threat)
• ASH CLOUDS

That’s right, ash is now considered the greatest threat to world peace and profiling at airports will no longer include brown people, but will target instead hardy, blonde, blue-eyed types with rosy cheeks.

Passengers wishing to carry ash in their hand luggage will be limited to ten 100 cc, clear, plastic containers of ash, presented in clear, plastic bags (available at a profit to airport management companies).

On a related note, in response to the terrorist threat from the North, France is considering banning the wearing of Icelandic sweaters in public.

“Zeir wooliness and ziggy-zaggy pattérn are clearly an affront to Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité,” Nicolas Sarkozy might have said.

You have been warned.

See their beady, terrorist eyes!

Spanish army pays homage to Monty Python

Yesterday was Día de la Hispanidad in Spain, the national holiday.

Strangely, some Spanish soldiers decided to celebrate by paying homage to Monty Python’s “precision drilling” sketch.

Don't come the Brigadier bitch with us, dear!

RIP Stephen Gately

It doesn’t really touch me on a personal level that Stephen Gately has died, although it is always sad when someone dies and a tragedy when they go “before their time”. However, I did not know him personally, nor was I ever a Boyzone fan, so I’m not upset.

I am irritated, though, by the innuendo in the media. It’s disgraceful that the family’s lawyer had to issue statements to say that Stephen did not kill himself or die of a drugs overdose or after a binge drinking session.

If any of us knew someone who died at the age of thirty-three, we would immediately be thinking of the tragedy of it and how awful it must be for their loved ones and friends. But when it’s someone famous, or even better, someone famous and gay, the media have to look for something sordid.

Well, there was nothing sordid. The poor man died of a pulmonary oedema. Would it have been too much for the media to have waited for the autopsy report instead of speculating?

Of course, it would have been too much, because decency doesn’t sell papers.

I have a vision of a large sack of snakes into which hack journalists would be thrown and then beaten with sticks. Form a disorderly queue.

Looks like you blew a seal…

There’s a joke which goes something like this…

A penguin is driving his car one day when it breaks down. He calls the recovery service and while the mechanic is taking a look, the penguin decides to go for an ice-cream, as it is a very hot day.

Of course, not having opposable thumbs, the penguin gets ice-cream all over his beak, but he is used to that. Once he has finished, he walks back to the car. The mechanic looks up and says: “Looks like you blew a seal.”

“Nah,” says the penguin, “it’s just vanilla ice cream.”

Now read this.

God is nowhere, apparently

United States Senator Ernie Chambers brought a lawsuit which was intended to result in an injunction to prevent the “death, destruction and terrorisation” caused by the greatest fictional character ever created: God.

However, according to Judge Marlon Polk, the legal papers could never be served because the defendant had no address.

You would think, though, that it would be easy to serve God with legal papers. Isn’t he supposed to know everything? So he would not need to be physically served. And even if he did, surely you could just leave the papers on a desk somewhere, or in a bin, or nailed to a tree. After all, God is everywhere, isn’t he?

Not according to Judge Polk, he isn’t.

So there you have it, folks, according to a United States Judge, God is neither omnipresent nor omniscient.

But I already figured that out for myself.

BBC article: Legal case against God dismissed

It’s all in the mind

There’s an interesting coincidence of articles on the BBC news website today:

Swearing ‘helps to reduce pain’

Pain in childbirth ‘a good thing’

Give me a fucking epidural!

Oh, wait. I don’t need it any more.

RIP Farrah Fawcett

Forget about Michael Jackson – Farrah Fawcett has just died.

Farrah Fawcett was an icon to many of us. An image of angelic beauty here on earth. Her golden hair, her ivory smile, her sweet voice.

For me the connection was far more personal. Charlie’s Angels mesmerised me and it was a tragic day when Farrah was replaced by Cheryl Ladd.

And it all started for me that day in 1978 when I saw scratched into desk in the biology lab at school: Continue reading RIP Farrah Fawcett…

This Brother just ain’t BIG enough!

Rowan Manahan has an excellent post on the attempts made by the city of Bozeman, Montana, to find out everything it can about job applicants by insisting they “list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Those Bozeman bozos are amateurs! They forgot the following:

• A copy of every key you own, labelled to indicate what it opens
• A copy of every key everyone in your family owns, labelled to indicate what it opens
• Your mobile phone
• A DNA sample from all your sexual partners, ever
• A video of all your sexual activities, ever
• Detailed notes on your sexual fantasies, differentiating between those that you would enact given the chance and those that even you consider too obscene to enact
• A notarised copy of your voting history
• A list of all the people about whom you have ever said: “I could kill that bastard!”
• Details of your religious beliefs
• Details (dates, times, circumstances) of every time you have ever exclaimed “God damn it!” or “Jesus Christ!”
• A list of every publication you have ever read
• A list of every country you have ever visited
• The names, dates of birth, social security numbers and contact details of all your friends
• The names, dates of birth, social security numbers and contact details of all your enemies

Sardines in The Joy

I am somewhat bemused by a news report on the RTE website about violence among prisoners in Mountjoy Prison. The article implies that the violence is related to overcrowding at the prison.

I believe that prisons should do what they can to rehabilitate criminals so as to minimise the risk of repeat offences and part of that rehabilitation should be reasonable living conditions, so I do I think the authorities should be taking steps to ease overcrowding, perhaps by building another prison.

However, the people really to blame for overcrowding in prisons are the criminals.

If you are unhappy about overcrowding in The Joy, stop breaking the law, yiz gobshites!