Month: November 2018

Theresa May be an idiot

I’m not on Facebook anymore, so I cannot ‘like’ or ‘share’ something that needs greater exposure. But I can highlight it to my readers (both of them) .

Mike Harding, comedian and folk singer, aka the Rochdale cowboy (remember him?), has just explained why Theresa May’s appeal to the country to unite behind her and her Brexit ‘deal’ is just so bloody offensive.

You can read his ‘letter’ here, but I’m taking the liberty of printing it in full as well, with due acknowledgement to him as its author. (The ALAW follows at the end.)

Dear Mrs May

I am in France having a break having come here on the train all the way from Settle. I just read your letter to me and the rest of Britain wanting us all to unite behind the damp squib you call a deal. Unite? I laughed so much the mouthful of frogs legs I was eating ended up dancing all over the bald head of the bloke on the opposite table.

Your party’s little civil war has divided this country irreparably. The last time this happened Cromwell discontinued the custom of kings wearing their heads on their shoulders.

I had a mother who was of Irish descent, an English father who lies in a Dutch graveyard in the village where his Lancaster bomber fell in flames. I had a Polish stepfather who drove a tank for us in WW2 and I have two half Polish sisters and a half Polish brother who is married to a girl from Donegal.

My two uncles of Irish descent fought for Britain in N Africa and in Burma.

So far you have called us Citizens Of Nowhere and Queue Jumpers. You have now taken away our children and grandchildren’s freedom to travel, settle, live and work in mainland Europe.

You have made this country a vicious and much diminished place. You as Home Sec sent a van round telling foreigners to go home. You said “ illegal” but that was bollocks as the legally here people of the Windrush generation soon discovered.

Your party has sold off our railways, water, electricity, gas, telecoms, Royal Mail etc until all we have left is the NHS and that is lined up for the US to have as soon as Hannon and Hunt can arrange it

You have lied to the people of this country. You voted Remain yet changed your tune when the chance to grab the job of PM came. You should have sacked those lying bastards Gove and Bojo but daren’t because you haven’t the actual power.

You have no answer to the British border on the island of Ireland nor do you know how the Gib border with Spain will work once we are out. 

Mrs May you have helped to divide this country to such an extent that families and friends are now no longer talking to each other, you have managed to negotiate a deal far worse than the one we had and all to keep together a party of millionaires, Eton Bullingdon boys, spivs and WI harridans. Your party conserves nothing. It has sold everything off in the name of the free market.

You could have kept our industries going with investment and development – Germany managed it. But no – The Free Market won so Sunderland, Barnsley, Hamilton etc could all go to the devil

So Mrs May my answer to your plea for unity is firstly that it is ridiculous. 48% of us will never forgive you for Brexit and secondly, of the 52% that voted for it many will not forgive you for not giving them what your lying comrades like Rees Mogg and Fox promised them.

There are no unicorns, there is no £350 million extra for the NHS. The economy will tank and there will be less taxes to help out the poor. We have 350,000 homeless (not rough sleepers – homeless) in one of the richest countries on Earth and you are about to increase that number with your damn fool Brexit.

The bald man has wiped the frogs legs of his head, I’ve bought him a glass of wine to say sorry; I’m typing this with one finger on my phone in France and I’m tired now and want to stop before my finger gets too tired to join the other one in a sailors salute to you and your squalid Brexit, your shabby xenophobia and Little Englander mentality.

Two fingers to you and your unity from this proud citizen of nowhere. I and roughly half the country will never forgive you or your party.

Well said that man!

A northern comedian called Mike
Told the world what is just not to like
About Theresa’s appeal
To support her and her deal,
So, please Mrs May, ‘On yer bike’!

 

‘Balls’ to that! 

‘Hats off’ to those members of the UK Parliamentary women’s football team who decided to have a kick-about in the Chamber of the House of Commons after their scheduled match was cancelled due to a possible late sitting and vote.

Apparently, the Parliamentarians told the Chamber’s doorkeepers that they had permission for their antics; something the Speaker of the House later insisted was not given by him!

Of course it just cries out for a limerick…

Within Parliament’s sanctified halls
There’s nothing, it seems, that forestalls
The sense of unease
When our female MPs
Start playing around with their balls!

I started so I’ll Finnish…

This week’s ALAW draws on the anatomy of certain fish species, notably salmonids and many catfishes, and concerns what was once considered to be a vestigial feature, the adipose fin.

Adipose means fat, but ironically the root of the adipose fin is no longer considered to be a site of fat storage. The name stuck anyway, and recent research suggests that it is not, in fact, vestigial, but may act as a flow sensor ahead of the tail fin to improve manoeuverability in turbulent waters.

However, ‘manoeuverability’ is not a word that I would associate with this week’s theme; a Finnish fisheries scientist (who I shall not identify) that a former colleague nicknamed with reference to his gargantuan size; the pun is obvious, but it still makes me laugh:

A scientist whose girth was akin
To a humongously large garbage bin
Studied fish in the sea
With Finnish esprit
So we called him ‘The Adipose Finn’

Das ist mir Wurst

It’s late afternoon in November in the German town of Ettlingen and I’m sitting outside at an Eiscafé eating ice-cream, as one does, whilst trying to compose this week’s ALAW.

Germany? Sausages? Bad puns? Here it is:

I’m sat here all starving and glum
With an empty and aching old tum.
In a café so German
The waiter’s called Hermann,
And I’m hungry, but the wurst’s yet to come!

A lunartic limerick

It’s well-known in my family that I have strong opinions on what comprises a ‘proper’ rocket and I can say without fear of contradiction that, as rockets go, the Saturn V is peerless! Which is why I’ve just seen the film First Man, a biopic of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon and an event that I remember watching as a kid. In fact, the Saturn V launch sequence was the highlight of the movie for me and I suspect it is no coincidence that Lego produced its version of the rocket in the same year that the film was released; a commercial tie-in, perhaps?

Which brings me to the events of a couple of years ago when shortly after watching SpaceX launch a re-supply mission to the International Space Station, one that succeeded in ‘landing’ the launch vehicle’s first-stage propulsion unit (upright!) on an ocean barge for re-use, ‘Firstborn’ messaged me about its awesomeness and significance (having watched it in the presence of an astrophysicist who had explained the various goings-on).

Awesome indeed, and a terrific technological breakthrough; however, my subsequent suggestion that there was only ever one ‘proper’ rocket, the Saturn V, was met with some disdain by the astrophysicist concerned: “Saturn V was a glorious rocket, but SLS will be even better. Also F*** YOU!”. Charming, eh?

(Actually, although our young wordsmith had been telling Firstborn about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle, his comment about ‘SLS‘ refers to NASA’s Space Launch System, a bigger re-usable launch vehicle that can chuck a whole lot more metal into the sky than the Falcon 9, but one that is still delayed in production, over-budget and yet-to-perform)

The thing is, my reasoning about the Saturn V had nothing to do with technology. It’s all about ‘soul’. To anyone that stayed up all night as a youngster in the UK in 1969 to watch the TV relay of the first-ever moon landing (on a 405-line black and white vacuum-tube TV), the image of the Saturn V still resonates. So despite the subsequent technological advances, for a youngster whose first-ever Airfix-kit model was that of a Saturn V rocket bought as a result of watching those fuzzy pictures of ‘Eagle’ landing on the moon followed by Neil Armstrong’s timeless declaration, there can only ever be one rocket with soul, only one ‘proper’ rocket; the Saturn V!

(Apollo 8, shown above, was the mission that first entered lunar orbit, paving the way for Apollo 11’s successful moon landing.)

Anyway, here’s what I replied to the errant astrophysicist…

An astrophysicist once thought that he knew
Of a rocket that could easily out-do
The outer space jive
Of an old Saturn V
But it can’t, so go F*** yourself too!

Postscript #1:  N.B. Apollo 13 is by far a better movie than First Man and, if you are interested, a charming recreation of events surrounding the TV relay of the Apollo 11 mission can be seen in the Australian movie The Dish.

Postscript #2: Did you know that you can become your own man or woman in the moon by taking a selfie through the cardboard tube from the innards of a roll of paper towels…