Glob-a-log

Now, I was reading about some hippos yesterday and I immediately had to think of Britney Spears.

First, this from the hippo article:

A scientist has gone undercover in a 14-stone armoured hippopotamus suit in Zambia to mingle unremarked with pods of the feared mammals. Dr Brady Barr, who returned from his mission last week, adopted the disguise in an attempt to harvest sweat samples from hippos in the quest for a new type of sun cream.

The suit, designed by a taxidermist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, consists of a steel-ribbed tube wrapped in bulletproof material and topped with mouldings taken from a female hippo.

“I was bent double in 100F heats and the stench was eyewatering,” said Barr, 45, after six hours in the suit.

The most dangerous day was when the hippo suit started sinking into mud, eyed by a lone male a few feet away. A park ranger called Boston Chulu risked his life trying to squeeze Barr through an escape hatch, but it jammed. The scientist had to crouch inside sweating until the real hippo became bored and wandered off.

That, and the latest story about our certifiable celeb, made me think:

Wouldn’t it be fun to have a Britney suit made?

You could snort and drink yourself silly, crash parties (and cars) and flash your pubes and nobody would know it was really you and not Britney.

Plus, you got to see all kinds of interesting places, like hospitals, and court rooms, and even more hospitals:

LOS ANGELES — Britney Spears was taken from her home by ambulance early Thursday and escorted to the hospital by more than a dozen police officers in cars, on motorcycles and in helicopters.

A Los Angeles police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said the 26-year-old pop star was being taken to the hospital to “get help.”

Yeah, a hippo, sorry, having a Britney suit would be real cool.

As long as you didn’t have to give blow jobs to some tattood featherlight freak, of course…

First, something I read in the New York Times:

In his book ‘Charlatan’, about a quack called John R. Brinkley, the writer Pope Brock describes early-20th-century America’s endlessly credulous populace, with “the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad.” Brinkley and his virility scheme tapped into the nation’s penchant for mumbo-jumbo and hence into opportunities for salesmanship that had been previously unknown.

What happened was this:

In 1917 the charlatan John R. Brinkley experienced what was truly a seminal moment. This so-called doctor, whose diploma had come from a medical school that was “vague, obliging and long defunct” and whose expertise was dubious at best, was consulting with a 46-year-old Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, who complained about a lack of energy.

Supposedly at his patient’s urging, Brinkley agreed to try to restore the man’s virility via an unorthodox transplant operation. The farmer wound up with two extra testicles courtesy of one luckless goat.

As Brinkley’s authorised biography has it:

“Dimly he had begun to realize that he was gifted beyond the run of doctors,” Brinkley’s adoring authorized biography would one day explain. [...] with this lovable characteristic of genius, he realised that money is not an aim, or an end in itself, but a means of enlarging the central idea of his life-work.”

I’ve ordered the book and can’t wait to read it. Still, Brock may be right to claim that in the early 20th century there were these “opportunities for salesmanship that had been previously unknown” but it sure as Hell didn’t end there.

Enter the Scientologists…

We know they already have Tom Cruise. In all honesty though, they are welcome to the little twerp. Anyone who’s have to sit through his ‘Oprah’s Ugly Couch Hysterics’ (OUCH) won’t shed a tear for this demented cocktail shaker.

Of course, as if the OUCH affair wasn’t bad enough, there was this taped interview – yes, that one. With wonderful lines like:

“Being a scientologist, you look as someone, and you know absolutely that you can help them. When you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else; as you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one that can really help.”

So, whatever is still left of his flea-sized brain, the Scientologists are quite welcome to wash, wipe, warp or whip as much of it as they like.

However, they are most definitely not welcome to fuck with real people – or icons. Like the world’s most popular Boy Wonder. No, not Batty’s sidekick Robin – who cares about that paedophile’s wet dream – but our belovéd Bart…:

Longtime Scientologist Nancy Cartwright — best known as the voice of Bart Simpson — last year gave the church $10 million to help spread the word of founder L. Ron Hubbard into other galaxies.

It was all part of Scientology’s Global Salvage effort, which aims to “de-aberrate” Earth — meaning to rid mankind of psychology ills and other “aberrant” behavior.

Surprisingly, Nancy, 50, forked over twice as much as the Scientology’s most prominent member, Tom Cruise, who only gave $5 million in an installment plan.

It’s a sad, sad world we live in, my friends and nothing is sacred anymore. Though there might still be a glimmer of hope…

I mean, if you can brainwash idiot actors and turn cult cartoon characters into creepy cult crazies, surely it should be possible to retrain certain animals as well? Like convincing your average lion that a Scientologist tastes as good or even better than a Christian…?

Well, anyway, here’s to hope!

In England it is often said that you can tell to which party a politician belongs by the kind of scandal he gets involved in.

When money is involved, common wisdom has it, it must a Labour MP or minister involved – the reason being that people coming through the Labour ranks didn’t have enough of it when they grew up.

In the same way, when it’s some kind of lurid sex thing, it must be a Conservative politician, because most of them went to the kind of schools, where years of spanking, buggery and all other sorts of humiliations warped their tiny, pustule-popping minds.

Of course, times have changed a bit, so while all of the above still holds true in quite a number of grubby incidents, the sins of the fathers don’t always equal those of their sons.

Speaking of which – fathers and sons, that is:

The MP Derek Conway faces a possible police investigation and de-selection as a Tory Parliamentary candidate over £260,000 of taxpayer-funded payments he made to his two sons and wife, it has emerged.

Amid growing concern over the secret employment of family members by MPs, the backbencher was on Tuesday suspended from the Conservative Party by David Cameron.

It emerged that Derek Conway had also employed his eldest son, Henry, as a researcher while he attended Cambridge

The Daily Telegraph has established that at least 38 other MPs are currently employing members of their immediate families.

Back to mister Derek Conway though – and his eldest son, Henry, who was the first to go on his daddy’s pay-list.

And a nicer guy to blow the taxpayers’ money on you’ll never find:

In the biographical note promoting his book ‘Knit Couture’ we are informed that Conway “has had other success sprinkling magic across London’s nightlife”.

One of his most recent and undoubtedly magical events was a party in a Chelsea nightclub entitled “Fuck Off I’m Rich”. Everything about that sounds tempting, does it not?”

You know how they say, ‘There is a time and a place for everything?’

So, you don’t suggest to your prom date to have one for the road at the local Hooters. You also don’t wear your Man. United kit to your gran’s funeral or sell pig trotters next to the Wailing Wall.

Same with religion. Freedom of religion is great, of course; and a deep and abiding faith can be, well, a God-sent, I suppose – but maybe not at 35.000 feet:

Yelling, crying and invoking God, the co-pilot of an Air Canada flight from Toronto to London had to be forcibly removed from the cockpit of his jetliner after suffering an emotional collapse as the plane flew over the Atlantic.

Shackled by the wrists and ankles, the shoeless first officer had to be restrained by crew members with the help of a traveller who was a member of the Canadian Forces.

Left alone in the cockpit, the captain cut short the journey of Flight AC 848 by diverting to Ireland’s Shannon airport. Meanwhile, the first officer was crying and screaming as he was cuffed on a free seat.

After the plane and its 146 passengers landed on Monday morning, the co-pilot was taken by ambulance to a psychiatric ward.

Ah, let us pray that this poor man soon will make a full recovery. That should be doable, with the help of a dedicated pastor, a cartful of tranqs, a few gallons of camomile tea and some soothing mellow jazz from the asylum’s hidden speakers.

Well, maybe not the jazz. Some people with a nervous disposition would do better to stay away from mellow jazz:

AUSTIN — A volunteer at a community radio station set fire to the station because he was upset that his song selections for an overnight Internet broadcast were changed, police said.

Paul Webster Feinstein, 24, has been charged with second-degree felony arson for the Jan. 5 fire that caused $300,000 damage to the studios of 91.7 FM KOOP. He faces from two to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted.

Station president Andrew Dickens said Feinstein had been in a dispute with another volunteer about what kind of music should be put into a digital library for the Internet program.

Feinstein was a jazz fan and his Internet program was called “Mellow Down Easy,” Dickens said.

Now, before you shut off your computer in despair and disgust, muttering things like, ‘Has the whole damn world gone stark raving mad?!’ just remember what the Good Book says:

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

So there.

Talking of which; judges I mean - and yes, okay, you’re right, the world has indeed gone totally and pathetically, poop-on-a-Popsicle crazy:

A Philippines judge who said he consulted imaginary mystic dwarves has failed to convince the Supreme Court to allow him to keep his job. Florentino Floro was appealing against a three-year inquiry which led to his removal due to incompetence and bias.

He told investigators three mystic dwarves - Armand, Luis and Angel - had helped him to carry out healing sessions during breaks in his chambers.

The Manila trial judge had asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the complaint and return him to the bench, after being sacked in April. “They should not have dismissed me for what I believed,” Mr Floro told reporters after filing his appeal in May.

The judge said he had made a covenant with his dwarf friends that he could write while in a trance and that he had been seen by several people in two places at the same time. In a letter to the court he said: “From obscurity, my name and the three mystic dwarves became immortal.”

However, the Supreme Court said dalliance with dwarves would gradually erode the public’s acceptance of the judiciary as the guardian of the law, if not make it an object of ridicule.

Giuliani in happier days: “I’ll protect you from the evil terrorists”
(photo taken by his second wife)

So, the mayor of New York finished third in Florida, and only managed to beat old Huck by a born-again whisker.

Ah well, so it goes.

Or does it? After all, as people say, ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.’

But hey, waddayaknow?! There she is…!

So we can all go home now.

Men are lazy. We all know this. Men know this – and, more to the point, women know this. When Mrs caveman looked out of her door on a fine prehistorical Sunday morning, chances are that she would sigh and say to Mr Caveman, ‘But you promised me that you would mow the lawn yesterday!”

Things haven’t changed all that much since those early days and men still procrastinate when it comes to mowing the lawn. However, there is a very simple way to get your man to take that damn mower out. Just get him drunk.

The only downside being that you really would need to keep an eye on him…:

ADRIAN, Mich. (AP) — Authorities say a man ran through two bottles of wine, then cut through a snowstorm on his lawnmower, riding down the center of the street to reach the liquor store.

He told officers his wife had taken their car to work, and the mower was the only way he could reach the store two miles from his southern Michigan home.

Police told WLEN-FM Kozumplik’s blood alcohol level was 2 1/2 times Michigan’s legal limit of 0.08 percent. They arrested him on a drunken driving charge and confiscated the mower.

Another easy arrest, in other words. Chasing a drunk on a lawn mower must be only marginally harder than cuffing a garden gnome who’s been loitering with intent. Still, that’s how cops like it: easy. Cops don’t want challenges; they want their criminals nicely stupid and preferably incapacitated.

Like the guy in this next case. Who wants to chase some bloody burglar down the street or, God forbid, over roof tops? Neither do you need all the forensic hoopla with DNA or fingerprinting.

Though footprinting can be fun, of course:

It is alleged that a man who was trying to steal goods from informal traders in Cathedral Street, central Durban, impaled himself on palisade fencing.

ER24 paramedic Katya Evans said emergency services personnel arrived at the scene on Saturday morning to find the unfortunate man hanging upside down with one foot still impaled on the large metal rods, and an unlit cigarette hanging from his pursed lips.

“He had been trying to climb over the fence and both his feet had been impaled. During the course of the evening he had managed to free one foot. According to bystanders, he had been hanging on the fence for nearly 12 hours.”

“Sometime during the night someone had obviously felt sorry for him and given him a cigarette. It appears that no one was kind enough to offer him a light.”

She said that the man was treated once removed from the sharp fencing and taken to Addington hospital. The police are eager to speak to him when he leaves hospital.

Yes, I’m sure the cops would love to talk to him. If only to thank him for making their lives a little bit easier.

For as sure as Hell comes with ABBA songs and instant noodles, there will always be those who love to make cops as miserable as a bat in a blender:

A woman kicked a police officer in the groin then smeared her faeces across his pristine van, a court heard. “All hell broke loose” when Shirley Kirkman was arrested near her home, Lincoln Magistrates’ Court was told by the prosecution.

She went berserk - kicking the police officer so hard he was in considerable pain and unable to work for two days. But things got worse when she was put into the van, which had been dispatched from Market Rasen Police Station.

The 43-year-old pulled her knickers down and defecated in the back of the van - watched by another horrified officer. PC Steven Lingard said: “We switched on the extractor fan and she was picking up her faeces and putting it in the vents. This continued all the way to custody. At one point she stood up and urinated on the floor as well.”

But Kirkman didn’t appear intoxicated, he told the court. In her absence yesterday, Kirkham of Gibson Road, Hemswell Cliff, was convicted of assaulting a police officer and causing criminal damage. District Judge Richard Blake said he expected Kirkman would pay at least £300 compensation as part of her sentence.

A warrant, without bail, was issued for her arrest.

You know how they say that there is nothing sure in life, except for death and taxes?

Well, add a third one, for I’m pretty damn sure that the poor cops who will be sent out to rearrest that lady won’t be happy little troopers at all.

Okay, you heard it here first - and it’s official: Obama will win the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

No, it has nothing to do with demographics or the tone of the debate; old versus young or that irritating buzz word ‘change.’

It’s about the music.

In 1992 Bill Clinton rode into town to that highly annoying song ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’ by the baby boom band Fleetwood Mac.

A lesser known theme song of that campaign was ‘Radar love’ by the Dutch rock band Golden Earring - which, knowing Bill’s way with the ladies, was really more ‘truth in advertising’ than the campaign could comfortably stand.

Now Hillary has upped the ante considerably, by returning to the same Dutch group. Browsing through their back catalogue, she or some dimwitted intern decided that the song ‘When the lady smiles’ would go down rather well with all of her fans.

Someone should have told her about video-clips though.

There’s nothing much wrong with the song itself, which is a bit of harmless rock fluff - and not nearly as offensive as that Fleetwood Mac vomitus.

Anyway, you know how Obama already gets more votes from the young and the black and the middle-classy part of the Democratic party?

Well, in that video clip, the singer first sexually assaults a nun in the metro, before he actually rapes a psychologist’s assistant in an elevator.

So, there goes the women’s vote as well…

Way to go, Hillary.

Looking on the bright side though, now she will finally be able to divorce Bill.

People, on the whole, are quite fond of animals. Dogs and cats have their loyal followers and apologists. There are others who swear by snakes, rabbits, spiders, pigeons and God knows what else as their belovèd companions. Ken Livingstone, for instance, the mayor of London, is quite possibly the world’s most famous newt fancier.

Horses, of course, are also very popular. Like the following, rather old news story shows:

The three-year-old Shetland, who has a taste for Guinness and cheese crisps, can be found in the bar on most days after his owner worried he was spending too much time on his own. Alfie first trotted down to The Woodman in Woodmansterne, Surrey, three months ago after he started squealing when he was left in his pen.

Owner Sharon Sutherland said, “I wondered if we might not be allowed in but the sign banning animals only said dogs were not allowed – it didn’t say anything about horses.”

Matthew Lowe, the pub’s landlord, said, “My wife thought it was a dog at first, but we soon realised it wasn’t. I was just surprised at first, but now it’s fine. He’s a lovely horse, he doesn’t cause any problems, but he does need to work on his toilet training.”

Having a miniature pony as a free-loading customer might seem a bit strange at first but apart from that small matter of toilet training, ponies should cause less problems than your average dog. At least ponies don’t bark, sniff your crotch or try to have sex with one of your legs.

In Austria, by the way, they have taken things even further. There, dogs are not merely (barely) tolerated companions in restaurants and pubs, they are actually invited to all manner of social and cultural expeditions. So, in Vienna they now have ‘doggy days’ in the cinema:

Vienna’s dog owners can now share their favourite movies with their pets after Admiral-Kino, one of the city’s old traditional cinemas, on Wednesday introduced the Austrian capital’s first “Doggy Day” at the movies.

Every first Thursday of the month, dogs will be allowed into the 95-year-old establishment to enjoy big screen adventures. For €6 ($8,8) per biped and accompanying quadruped, special cuddle seats are available to the Viennese moviegoers and their best friend, complete with fresh water and dog popcorn for the four-pawed audience.

“Lassie,” “101 Dalmatians” or other movies that may be especially suitable for the dogs’ taste would, however, not be on the programme, the cinema said. The Admiral management also asked pet owners not to forget leashes and muzzles and only bring dogs who “liked the cinema and are friendly and agreeable companions”.

The same applied to humans, the cinema said.

Of course, there will always be grumpy nay-sayers, so not everybody shares these loving feelings for animals. Enter master A.A. Gill, restaurant critic for the Times online.

Being a restaurant critic he obviously does love animals – but not exactly in a sentimental or animal rights kind of way. Here’s what he has to say about the desperate plight of the factory chicken:

Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn dish of boiled wattles about the lives of chickens. Giving them a hay bale, a square yard of grass and an hour a day in the chilly drizzle is a bit like putting a bridge table on death row. If you care about the quality of chickens’ lives, their happiness, there’s only one thing you can morally do: don’t eat them. Animals are bred into humiliating, unnatural shapes and idiotic imbecility in strange, unnatural habitats, and then die for dinner. Get over it or eat grass. The only thing you should campaign about is whether they’re improved eating. This zoomorphic sentimentality, this Beatrix Pot-au-feu of food, is as dysfunctional and disassociated from the reality of field and table as medical foodies who think that all breakfast is either poison or a cure for cancer.

In the same column he also told a very moving story of his old Balinese pet cock:

I once had a big, black, Balinese cock. It was about a yard tall, fully extended, and was very black, with a sinewy, metallic, blue-green iridescence. Game cocks are fighting birds and all leg. They have tiny, malevolent, beady heads, like the missile triggers on Top Gun joysticks. This one had the look and temperament of Naomi Campbell waiting for room service. Hens fled from its dark, murderous lust. To my knowledge, it shagged three peacocks, one labrador and an idling lawn mower. It would hide behind hay bales, and go for the cow man at head height, feet first. It had spurs sharp enough to eviscerate a spleen. It was one bad mother, kung-fu chop-chop, cocky cock. And after it had rounded up a terrified gardener, a gardener’s boy, a topless-sunbathing belly dancer – don’t ask – and a vet with hay fever, and chased them into a pig’s ark with a farrowing old spot, it became sadly obvious that there was no room in Surrey for the badass game cock and any bipedal mammal. It had to be dispatched.

It was like trying to kill Rasputin. First, my friend, the hooray farmer, went to stab it in the throat with a machete, but was swiftly beaten back to the kitchen, swearing like a drunk duchess and bleeding from the temple. After a lot of Highland courage was consumed, eight of us crept out with flaming torches, scythes, antique Murdi spears and mashie niblicks. The battle wasn’t exactly heroic, but it was bloody frightening. Finally, I blew one of its legs off with a shotgun and beat it to death with a baseball bat. It didn’t go quietly.

Somehow I don’t think you would see monsieur Gill buy the next round for a miniature Shetland pony – or take a dog to see the next Hollywood blockbuster.

Still, when the animal finally has stopped moving, there’s no better man to talk you through the culinary processes by which it ends up on your plate.

By the way, Gill was less than impressed with his Balinese cock in that regard:

And then I cooked him. After hours of boiling, its dark, grey thighs were still the texture of soggy teak and the broth tasted of bitter tears and bile. I wore its tail in my tam-o’-shanter.

It is often suggested that politicians always react too slowly in times of real crises. Whether it’s a hurricane called Katrina, mass slaughter in Ruanda or a sudden drop in the markets, politicians only seem to do something after the fact – if they don’t try to actually bury same facts, of course.

The terms ‘political classes’ and ‘whirlwind fashion’ are not usually on speaking terms.

So, it’s always nice to see the occasional exception.

Enter the president of France, monsieur Sarkozy:

A Spanish magazine has published an exclusive picture of French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s fiancée Carla Bruni wearing only a pair of black leather boots - and what appears to be a wedding ring.

The image, published online in the February edition of DT, shows the model-turned-singer-turned French President’s fiancée lying on floor cushions with her arms protectively crossed over her chest.

The presence of a simple gold band on her wedding finger will further fuel rumours the Italian beauty has wed Sarkozy after a whirlwind romance.

I know that many people disapprove of president Sarkozy’s public wooing of his fiancée. While most people would agree that mademoiselle Bruni makes a very pretty picture indeed, many a French intellectual has bemoaned the fact that the latest photos of petit Nicolas and his amour were taken at Euro Disney, of all places.

While it’s true that it is a small step from going to Disneyland to wearing novelty condoms it must be said that it isn’t all that easy to court someone in style these days. Sure, a Mickey Mouse photo shoot is rather tacky but what’s a man to do in this new and brave Millennium?

Write long and passionate love letters? Not with the way out postal offices are run these days…:

It’s official. Postal delivery is as slow as snails, at least in Poland.

An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter.

Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11.1km.

Given the distance and the time, the speed of the letter was 0.03775 km/h. Mr Szybalski calculated that a garden snail travels at around 0.048 km/h.

Oh, talking about moving slowly – and this new Millennium with its ever-louder calls to go green…

So, you’re worried about the environment and you don’t want to use the car all the time. That’s good. Very laudable, of course. More people should walk, or take the bicycle or use the good old public transport system.

Problem is, buses, on the whole, don’t move as fast as a Sarkozy in heat. Most of the times, they resemble the Polish Post and believe me, when you are in a certain line of work it does pay to remember that small fact:

After botching a bank robbery in Sandy Springs and ditching the money, police said a robber was caught flat-footed — waiting for a bus. Channel Monae Gaskin admitted to robbing the Wachovia Bank at 8721 Roswell Road.

Gaskin went into the bank shortly after 1 p.m., Wednesday and demanded money, police said. She didn’t show a weapon. After being handed a bag of cash, she ran across a parking lot to a restaurant, where a dye bomb exploded orange-colored ink on her and the money. She then left the restaurant and tried to stash her dye-covered clothes and the money in a women’s bathroom in the Publix nearby.

Gaskin apparently changed clothes and went to the bus stop at Dunwoody Place and Hope Road, just behind the grocery store. A police officer responding to the report saw Gaskin waiting for a bus, matched her to the robbery description and apprehended her.

The Sandy Springs bank branch is no stranger to bumbling bandits. Another woman blew a robbery at the same place. She put a black bag and a white bag on the bank counter, and had the teller load all the money into the white bag. She took off with the black bag.

You know what they say about terrorists. That they hate us and our way of life. That if you’d give any of those warped little people the power to kill all of us by pushing one button, he or she would happily do so. All of that may well be true but the fact is that none of these lunatics have such a button, so all they can do is kill some individuals here and there and/or blow stuff up.

Of course, any time that they succeed in this, it is devastating for the victims and their loved ones. However, on a societal level, the things they do will never be much more than somewhat annoying – and the only reason that they seem to be relatively successful is that dimwitted and vainglorious politicians like Bush and Blair and a few others overreacted by quite ludicrously claiming that these blood-thirsty clowns formed some serious threat to our societies.

Which is utter bullshit, of course.

You know how many bombs fell on London during World War Two? Neither do I but let’s say these bombs, on average, did a ‘Twin Towers’ per week. Maybe it was a bit more, or a bit less but that’s unimportant really. The point is, the Londoners cleared away the rubble and buried their dead and got on with things.

And if you need reminding, Hitler and his planes and his armies did not manage to win that war. So, to think that some jokers with bomb belts or a few hijackers would succeed where the whole might of the Third Reich failed is too moronic for words.

That Bush and Cheney and the other (neo)cons lied their country into a war with Iraq and fed the flames of fear for their own perverted reasons is one thing. That Blair went along for the ride, knowing full well that these delusional jihadists had no ghost of a chance of even seriously disrupting business as useful was an outrage – a true insult to all the victims and survivors of the Nazi bombardments (or the far more serious and longterm campaign by the IRA, for that matter.)

Anyway, those terrorists will never be able to do our societies as a whole any serious harm – unless ‘we’ do their work for them by overreacting, like our political leaders have been doing since those Twin Towers came down.

There is, on the other hand, a far more nefarious force, that is doing serious harm to us on a daily basis. Yes, I’m talking about those political correctness and Health & Safety nuts. In a very short time they have infected our societies and political establishments with their own demented fears and hysteria. We can’t eat what we want, or drink what we want. Smoking is outlawed. You can’t play conkers or have veteran soldiers’ marches. You can’t fly a pirate’s flag in your garden or burn autumn leaves.

They are killing our societies stroke by stroke by stroke – like the old Chinese death of a thousand cuts. Every bloody day they are at it. Every dreaded day you can read about a dozen or so more assaults on our way of life. Like this one:

A CHILDREN’S story based on the Three Little Pigs has been snubbed for a Government award — for fear it might offend Muslims.

The classic fairytale was reworked as the basis for an animated CD-Rom called The Three Little Cowboy Builders. But it was turned down from Government agency Becta’s annual awards after judges warned using pigs “raises culture issues”.

They said they rejected it because they “could not recommend this product to the Muslim community”.

Muslims consider pigs unclean and are banned from eating pork. Becta also claimed the story in which pigs play the cowboys might offend builders.

Yes, terrorists may hate us and would love to kill all of us – but those foul commandos and footsoldiers of the PC and Health & Safety army are actually getting away with their particular brand of terrorism.

Far worse, they are winning the war.

Gods, if only these PC and Health & Safety clowns were as pathetic and inept as your more regular brand of terrorists, then ours would be a much, much happier world. Alas, you only read about their disgusting victories – and, more’s the pity, never an uplifting story like this one:

A WOULD-be suicide bomber fell down a flight of stairs and blew himself up as he headed out for an attack in Afghanistan, police say.

It was the second such incident in two days, with another man killing himself and three others on Tuesday when his bomb-filled waistcoat exploded as he was putting it on in the southern town of Lashkar Gah.

Yesterday’s blast was in a busy market area of the eastern town of Khost, a deputy provincial police chief said.

The would-be attacker tripped as he was leaving a building apparently to target an opening ceremony for a mosque that was expected to be attended by Afghan and international military officials, said Sakhi Mir.

“Coming down the stairs, he fell down and exploded. Two civilian women and a man were wounded,” Mir said.