The Bloody Olympics

I don't suppose it's too late to give the Bloody Olympics to France is it? I mean they did seem to want it at the time.

I mean it's all very nice for the athletes and I'm sure they are all fine and dedicated people (although probably a tad obsessive) but I am failing to see why I should stump up a huge amount of money via my taxes just so you have a place to run around very quickly. I mean when you add everything up the total bill is probably going to come to the best part of twenty billion dollars and you can do a lot with that kind of cash, one blogger worked out that for the price of four Olympic games we could put a human on Mars; and that's a damned sight more of an achievement than watching a lycra clad berk run about and chuck a spear.

And this is before all the other shite that seems to come as part of this wonderful sportfest that's bebeen vomited into our laps. I'll leave aside the idiocy of putting missiles on people's roofs in East London, the utterly over the top security that stops people taking a picture of a fish tank at one of the venues because of "terrorism concerns", the fact that we might as well have painted a huge target over London for every hacked off member of the "Religion of Peace"^TM to have a go at and the creepy, deformed mascots that look like they were designed by the kid on the short bus whist going through Ritalin withdrawal.

What really tweaks my tail is the corporate bollocks and the way us poor schmucks who paid for the bastard thing are treated. My station are handing out "walking maps" and have a 'get ahead of the games" website which is basically saying "the transport will be fucked, the buses are being forced into the rest of the clogged traffic to make sure the Zil lanes for the corrupt parasites in the IOC can whizz up and down unimpeded so you bastards can walk everywhere" And if you're going to any of the actual events (which I am definitely not) which we made you pay for the tickets (even though you funded everything) then you WILL pay by Visa card and no other method, you WILL NOT take in any soft drink of your choosing, you WILL only eat Mc Fucking Donalds as no other "food" will be on sale and you will be prevented from bringing your own ¹ and most likely you'd better be bringing a Samsung compact camera because god forbid you're carrying a Ricoh the "Brand Police" will probably stamp on it before laying into you with the rubber hoses.

Quite frankly the bloody Olympics can go and screw itself. I'd scrap it tomorrow in a heartbeat if I could. However having built all those stadia it would be a shame to not to use them so I propose we hold the show trails and executions of all the pompous, self aggrandizing politicians and IOC members who spent our money on this vanity project.



¹ and yes the irony of the world's largest purveyor of junk food sponsoring an elite athletics event is not lost on me.

O tempora! O mores!

There's been a lot of 1977 retrospectives on the tellybox recently, what with it being the jubilee. Also a lot in the news has been lots of talk about marriage equality, "Gay Marriage" if you prefer, especially since St. Obama has played his hand in favor.

It got me thinking as to how much things have changed in 25 years. I was 12 years old back in '77 and I can still vividly recall that the very, very worst insult in the playground was to call someone gay, puff, bummer or any other word indicating that the target of the insult was a fan of musical theatre. Even though I'm pretty sure that 90% of the time we really had no idea what the words really meant it was certainly a cause for an immediate punch up. Certainly actually being gay was I am sure at the time social death and certainly not something spoken of in a positive light where I grew up. I recall my dad, commenting on an article in the paper about a police raid on a gay-friendly pub in the town, saying something along the lines of "they should all be strung up" which was a bit of a shock as he was normally a pretty tolerant guy. I think the mindset back then was very much gay = child molester or at the very least that being gay was some deep, dark perversion and only vagely acceptable if you were a "comedy" gay like Danny LaRue or John Inman's character in "Are You Being Served"

It's really quite strange how quickly things have changed and how far. Now it seems that if you're opposed to marriage equality you're the one that's the deviant. Looking across the pond to North Carolina it's quite surprising the opprobrium that's been directed towards the people of the state who voted in favour of denying gay couples even a civil union with many calling them "hicks" and "backward" at best. On a political note it's a shrewd move by Obama to come out in favour of gay marriage; a lot of the shine has gone off his presidency and he failed to deliver all that "hopey, changey" stuff in the storm of a recession and he's aligned himself with the "progressive", younger vote ahead of the presidential elections later this year.
 
Over this side of the shining big-sea-water we can see that it's mainly the religidiots who are hanging onto the "it's one man one woman" like a drowning man grasping at a straw, swimming against the tide of history and sinking their antediluvian beliefs further and further into irrelevance. Politically again Camoron really has no choice but to push this forwards, despite the grumblings from the blue-rinse wing of the party; he's in deep political crap as it is and scrapping his proposed gay marriage bill will just pin the "nasty party" label back on the Tories and right now that's the last thing they need.

Still, maybe in another 25 years we'll be twittering (using our neural interfaces whilst on a day trip to the moon) about "do you remember when gay people couldn't get married?" in the same way as we'd talk about mixed-race marriages now.* One can only wonder what'll be perfectly socially acceptable then.



* To be fair as far as I know the UK never had a race bar on marriage but they certainly did in the USA