It's not as though we couldn't see that coming

Not once, but twice as it happens.

First the easy one, dog-faced junky warblesmith Amy Winehouse finally checks out in a haze of booze and recreational pharmaceuticals. I mean come on was anyone surprised? If I still played "dead pool" she'd have been right at the top of my list along with that other celebrity smackhead "musician" Pete Doherty. The only thing that surprised me was that it took so long.

Secondly the more difficult one, Anders Behring Breivik, and the horrible events in Norway last Friday. It would be easy to dismiss this as the actions of a lone nutter with a grudge and a thing for the Knights Templar but I think that would be too simplistic as this is clearly no fruit-loop with a swastika and a skinhead haircut; by all accounts he is lucid, intelligent and calculating. I hate to say it and I hope you don't take this the wrong way but what he did was, from a terror perspective, very clever indeed. Sets of a bomb in the capital and when everyone's attention is sorting that out he goes for his main target with a ruthless, military efficiency. This is clearly no foaming-at-the-mouth loony here.

And why did he do it, well again from what I've read it seems he had a grump that isn't that uncommon on both sides of the political spectrum, that multiculturalism and the spread of Islam has gone too far. Sure he went way, way past what I would consider a reasonable "Look, your culture isn't very nice, Sharia sucks goat cock and I really do rather resent paying for your extended family living on benefits who won't learn English so if you don't mind I think we should be more careful on how many people we let in, you're all going to have to learn our language, make a bit more of an effort to adopt our historic way of life and as to having separate courts where a woman's testimony is worth a quarter that of a man, well you can stick it where the sun doesn't shine." and wanted to drive every immigrant out of Europe in time for the anniversary of the Siege of Vienna and execute several thousand "cultural traitors" (including Prince Charles for some reason) and decided the best way to accomplish this was shoot up a camp full of kids learning centre-left politics and how to sit by a fire singing songs to a badly played acoustic guitar. Not very wise it seems to me but then wisdom != intelligence as any AD&D player will tell you.

Now what he did was wrong on every possible level and can't ever be justified but I can't help thinking that there's going to be more than a few people, especially if he gets his day in court today and says what the media are expecting him to say, thinking "You know, he might have a point."

I can't help feel that there is more than one Anders out there. I really hope that there isn't and that this is just a dreadful one-off, a Timothy McVeigh moment for Europe, but just from browsing the web, watching the news and listening to the odd conversation I sense there is a lot of simmering anger out there that isn't going away.

Note to self: start planting more veg, rear more chickens, just in case.

Knobend

So there we were, Rupert looking and sounding like they'd just dragged him out from the Budleigh Salterton Rest Home For The Terminally Bewildered and James coming across more slippery that a weasel smeared with KY Jelly¹ and then up springs some self-styled "anarchist" (styled by everyone else "a complete knobend") and tries to pie him. Up springs Wendy the Dragon Lady and lays down a claw/claw/breath weapon attack for 10d6 damage with a side helping of ninja-style quivering palm and next days headlines write themselves and the Murdochs slip off the hook.

It's almost so convenient you'd think this Johnny Marbles tosspot had been set up to do this by News International and he'll be getting a big fat jiffy bag stuffed with twenties when this is all over.

Johnny Marbles, It's probably pronounced "Mahr-Bahlls" or something. Stupid name, more stupid guy. as Twitterer @mattplats observed:

Johnny Marbles sounds like the name of the lead singer in an unsuccessful punk band that once nearly opened for Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Speaking of Siouxie I doubt you'd get to show this any more for fear of "Offending" the mussies.





¹ Bet that image got the furries who come here searching for httyd rule 34 hot under the collar.

You're not fooling anyone

Remember a little while back when CallMeDave was photographed catching a RyanAir flight for a weekend away in Spain? At the time I thought that it was rather suspicious that someone just happened to snap a quick piccie of Cameron being "an ordinary bloke" and taking scumbag airlines for a couple of days snatched budget holiday like the rest of the proles have to.

Turns out I was right.

The Tory leader delayed the start of his family holiday in Turkey to fly to Santorini, where he had drinks with Mr Murdoch on his 184ft yacht Rosehearty

and

Mr Cameron then accepted a second free flight to Turkey, while Mr Murdoch sailed to Corfu,

The full story is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-murdoch-and-a-greek-island-freebie-971470.html

Bastards the lot of them.

Reading the Banns

I'm not sure if they actually do "Read the Banns" - the proclamations of marriage - any more in churches given that the last time I was actually in a church was in 1991 for my sister's wedding.

Well in any event, some 21 years after that wedding, I'm having one of my own. Yes you read that right, Mrs Dracunculus is going to become the real Mrs Dracunculus in September.

You might ask, after having lived together for 18 years, why we are bothering. Well quite frankly it's for tax reasons. We're both getting to the stage where there's the odd grey scale just by your left horn, the twinge in the wing joint and thing that goes "ping" in your back that's your bodies' way of telling you that you're quite a long way from having hatched. Now as we're not currently married if either of us shuffles off this mortal coil and goes for that audition with the Choir Invisible the remaining one will be landed with a monstrous inheritance tax bill for the half of the house the other one of us owned. If you're married, everything just transfers to the surviving partner with nothing to pay.

So you can see we're doing this for the noblest of motives, keeping our cash out of George Osborne's grubby hands.

Yesterday we did the modern equivalent of reading the banns which is called "giving notice". This involves schlepping down to a registry office which is all painted institution beige and waiting the obligatory local government 10 minutes past your appointment time whilst sundry tattooed landwhales crawled through the door and went "wanna register a baby so I can get me benefits, innit" at the receptionist. Once seen we get asked a bunch of questions some of which I could see the relevance of (like "are you related" - this is Norfolk we are talking about here^*) and some I could not, like "What was your father's profession" - I mean what has that got to do with anything?

Half an hour later we're done and 70 quid poorer and in three weeks we get out chitty that says we can do that "I do" stuff.

However whilst I was waiting to see the registrar I was watching one of those little TV Screen advertising thingies which was flashing up adverts for wedding car hire, funeral services and the like. One was for, I kid you not, wedding insurance. You can insure your wedding, I assume from being jilted at the altar or something. Anyway this advert said the average wedding cost £20,000.

Ours won't, mainly because it's us plus my sister and brother in law as witnesses in Swampland reg office first thing on Saturday morning when it's 50 quid instead of 250; then back to behind the water pipes for Tattinger and nibbles.

Who said romance was dead.



^* Chatting to the registrar apparently they have had cousins asking to marry. "We had to get the books out" she said - apparently it's two blood lines of separation.

Its not hacking

Look everyone, ringing a mobile and entering the default "0000" voicemail PIN code does not really count as hacking. I mean its not even script kiddy level hackery. It's just the usual media feeding frenzy of talking shit up to make it sounds really big and scary.

Anyone of course is more than happy to "hack" my voicemail box where they will find plenty of titillating and scandalous messages like "Dragon, it's Mrs Dracunculus here. Can you pick up some milk on the way home" which is probably pretty much what you would find on 99.9% of everyone's mailbox.

However I cannot help but smile at what's happening to that evil cow Rebekah Brooks who, back when she was called Wade, stridently called for mob "justice" and outing paedophiles to the slavering mob; it's rather amusing to see the mob turn against her.

Not that she's lost her job yet although now with Murdoch, who is a cockwallet of the first order but no fool, disposing of the toxic News of the World that threatened to poison the whole of News International can only be part of the solution. I can't see as she could remain with the organisation.

Oh and interestingly the domain "sunonsunday.co.uk" was registered two days ago.

Coincidence?

Wiccan for a weekend

Oh great, some numpty has come up with a crackpot scheme to "test drive" religions. Just to set you off you can go on holiday to Turkey and become a "Muslim for a Month". And if you don't fancy that you can be "Sikh for a Week" which means at least you get to go around tooled up and the plod can't do anything about it.

Actually if it has the effect on people of going "Well I was a mussie for a few weeks and I can now see what an unreformed heap of violent, misogynistic bronze age goat herding beliefs Islam is" then maybe it's all for the good. However I think there may be a downside in that, just like Facebook and the Hotel California, you're never allowed to leave, the prophet Mohammed (piss be upon him) said quite clearly "whoever changes his (islamic) religion, kill him"

As General Ackbar observed:

Sniff

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