TV Licence Blues (Or: If you can’t face life there’s always Facebook…)
Each country has its own rituals. Once a year in Spain, for instance, they open a few cans of live bulls and let them run out in the streets. In Belgium, every once in a while, they have an election and then call for the dissolution of their country. Germany used to send out its army from time to time to conquer the world – a tradition the USA seems to have taken over from them, with even less success.
Meanwhile, in England… No bulls, or dissolution – or real dreams of world dominance. Still, they do have this one seasonal ritual: The hunting of the Snark – or more prosaically, for the BBC licence fee, and all the excuses that people come up with for why they haven’t paid, of course:
One man said he had not renewed his licence because his wife had flushed the old one down the lavatory - along with his wallet.
A woman told investigators: “I couldn’t make my last payment as my baby was sick on my shoulder and I didn’t want to go to the shop smelling of sick because the guy I fancy works there.”
Another man said: “I don’t watch TV because I’m too busy having vigorous sex with me wife.”
Quite. You can either have a TV licence, or sex. Both would indeed be overdoing things a very British tad.
Talking about overdoing things (or people really needing to get a life) prime minister Gordon Brown has been working so hard that he’s seeing things - in the mirror. He’s not quite insisting that people call him ‘Maggie’ but maybe it is time that he slows down a bit.
(And wouldn’t it be fun if old Maggie would look in the same mirror and decide it was time for a come back…? The Return of the Dragon Bitch…?! Well, maybe ‘fun’ would not be the right word…)
Anyway, people who really should get out more – and yes, indeed, we’ve found ourselves a real running theme here, called ‘Get a life’ – are the desperate souls who have so little to live for that they are restricted to turning the pages of Facebook.
Which can lead to very weird and obsessive behaviour:
There’s currently a minor storm on Facebook because of a group or groups called Fuck Islam — there are several with the same name, but this one currently has 769 members. According to The New York Times:
In the month or so since the group was created, the reaction has been building across Facebook. As of the weekend, more than 58,000 Facebook members had joined a group that said that unless the anti-Islam group was removed, “we r quitting Facebook.”
Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a similar furore about groups such as Fuck Christianity, Fuck Jews, Fuck Israel, and many more.
More serious – and much more depressing – is what happened in Israel this week:
Israeli police have broken up a neo-Nazi cell that had been carrying out attacks on religious Jews, homosexuals, drug addicts and workers, in a case that has shocked the Jewish State.
The youths, who had Nazi tattoos and allegedly celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday, belonged to Soviet Jewish families who had immigrated to Israel under its law of return, which allows people with at least one Jewish grandparent to become Israeli citizens.
Israel’s law of return is based on the Nazi definition of what constitutes a Jew, as laid out in Nuremberg in the 1930s, on the grounds that if a person was considered Jewish enough to be murdered by the Nazi regime, they are Jewish enough to live in Israel.
Under its rules, more than a million people from the former Soviet Union flocked to Israel in the 1990s. But according to the immigration and absorption ministry, more than 300,000 of them do not consider themselves Jewish.
The neo-Nazi group was allegedly headed by 19-year-old Eli Buanitov, known within the cell as “Eli the Nazi”. He and his acolytes are believed to have been in regular contact with neo-Nazi groups abroad.
These people you would almost wish to put in a time machine, to let them try and get a life in Nazi Germany, under the Nuremberg rules.
Enough of these depressing madmen though. Let’s end with some fun stuff:
People working in 38 pubs in Horsham, Sussex will be trained to approach drinkers displaying suicidal tendencies.
Pubs will also display posters and information cards which advise suicidal people to call the Samaritans.
Yes indeed. You’ve had a really hard day: some idiot from the licencing bureau didn’t buy your ‘but I was having sex’ excuse, you just read that piece about the Jewish nazi scum - so, all you want to do now is to go to your local, have a few pints, try and wind down a bit, and…
“Excuse me, sir, but you do seem to be a little bit depressed. I’m not sure you should have another beer but here you have a leaflet about the Samaritans…”
So, to top off a really lousy day, now you’ve just gone and topped the bloody barman as well.
On the plus side, no sane judge would ever convict you. He’d probably dismiss the case right out of hand and advise the team for the prosecution not to ask for life but to get one instead.
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