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29th August 2007
So,
was a good time had by all? Did the barbeque manage to invest your
neighbour's washing line with the pungent aroma of burnt animal flesh and
kerosene? Was being trapped at the retail park roundabout for three and a
half hours made all worthwhile when you switched on that hi-def, 42 inch plasma
screen TV and saw a repeat of Last of the Summer Wine in it's true glory?
Mmm… wrinkly. Did you manage not hurl yourself from a second story window
when Uncle Joe began, yet again, the narrative of his 'suspicious growth'?
Ah, the August Bank Holiday. A time to rest, reflect and reach the
conclusion, "oh crap, summer's over then". It's all downhill
now until Christmas, I'm afraid. Back to the 9-5 doldrums again in the
cold, the wind and the rain. But wait just a moment; is that the
Institute for Public Policy Research riding in like the cavalry. It is!
Everybody’s favourite quango this week published a report stating that Britain should
have a new bank holiday in November to celebrate the achievements of heroes.
Brilliant, it can be Spiderman Day! People can dress up in webbed lycra, hang from
the ceiling and watch Spartacus all
afternoon. However, the IPPR unimaginatively
says “a new bank holiday would act as a national ‘thank you’ for community
heroes and as a national ‘ask’ for people to give back to their communities.” Community Heroes? No one cares about those losers. Think of the fun that a competition for “Bank
Holiday Superhero” would have brought.
At the very least it would have given someone that Channel Four could’ve
filled the vacated Celebrity Big Racist Brother house with. “Day 22.
Bananaman is in the Diary Room.
Wonder Woman is feeding the chickens…”
Because superheroes are real of course.
Nevertheless,
just like Christmas when we flock in our millions to church, or Easter when we
give thanks to our risen lord, the new bank holiday will no doubt see the Great
British public devote themselves to their community for the day and won’t just
sit at home gorging themselves on chocolate covered Pringles with a cake on top
and occasionally scratching themselves. Neil Carberry, head of employment
policy at the Confederation of British Industry, is all for it: "Offering
staff an extra bank holiday would cost the economy up to £6 billion."
Good old CBI, always on hand when there’s a rumour of time off work to tell us
we’re lazy scum on the verge of economic collapse. What does the fretful
Neil Carberry do each bank holiday, go to work? Wait outside work until work opens? What is the cost
to the British economy of Neil Carberry saying the cost to the British economy
is £6 billion? What is the cost to the
British economy of Neil Carberry worrying about the cost to the British
economy? Interestingly the CBI neglect
to comment on the billions of pounds of unpaid overtime done by British workers
each year, the costs of stress and boredom at work, or the fact that Britain
has the least holidays in Europe. France seems to manage on their 300
days paid leave every year without their economy collapsing. And they’re on strike for the other 65. Surely Britain could cope with another day
off to lift the winter gloom. What about
this wasteful “weekend” as some people call it?
The CBI officially term Saturday and Sunday “The Time of Evil”. If we
can cope with two days off a week, hell, we could cope with three! How about they calculate the cost of an extra
shit break each day? People of Britain,
think of the damage your bowels are causing to the economy!
The CBI loathsomely looks upon people as economic units, neglecting to notice
that they in fact have innards and spirits which need tending to. In the dark
citadel where the CBI sit, conjuring up billion shaped figures of lost revenue
and shaking their Borg-like heads at the wastefulness of sleeping and eating,
work is elevated to the all powerful and the all meaningful. In reality
most people recognise that work is fannying about with spreadsheets that are of
no consequence to anyone. Except the CBI.
This week has also been one for retirements. ‘Tiger’ Tim Henman announced
that next month would be his last in competitive tennis*, and John Prescott
will bow out of politics at the next election. Neil Carberry said
the loss of the annual eruption of Hennmania could cost the British economy 10
billion pounds in reduced sales of stupid Union Jack hats and pointy foam
fingers. However, he added that Prescott’s
departure from politics would no doubt save the country trillions. So
everything’s all right. Now get back to work.
*own
obvious punch line required. The BoF
does not lower itself to slagging off Henman; he was rather good.
24th August
There are two types of people in this world: those who wear
an ipod in an attempt to disconnect themselves from society, and those who wear
an ipod whilst knowing that the removal of one of the 5 senses leaves them
vulnerable to attack from chavs. Statistics show that the latter group is
expanding faster than Lindsey Lohan’s criminal record. It seems nowadays you
can’t even pop out for the Sunday papers and a Chunky Kit Kat without getting stabbed
and/or shot. And whereas many a frightened citizen may have, in the past, been
prepared to don the body armour and risk all in a mad dash to the local Spar –
the tide is turning. The people are ready to fight back, and take the battle to
the Burberry clad yobbos. Take for example the testimony of Jeremy Vine on BBC
Radio 4. The Vinemeister was in no mood for punks handing out evils in his hood
– when a man refused to stand behind the ‘stand behind this notice’ sign on a
bus, Jeremy let him have it with both barrels: "The bus driver is a public
servant and this is his bus. Behave yourself” shot Jeremy, palms sweating.
There’s not a hardened criminal in the land who could take that verbal beat
down, and the troublemaking mofo promptly left the bus in disgrace. So this,
you see, is evidently the way forward. Stop taking it up the ass from local
scummers: get out there and distribute a few oral pezzlings of your own. Next
time you see some moron declaring his love for Shazza via the medium of ‘green
spray paint on piss soaked bus shelter’, remind the young rascal that your
council tax paid for that shelter. And probably his parents’ benefits that paid
for the paint. If indeed he hasn’t half-inched the paint from Halfords. In
addition, perhaps you could produce a prepared leaflet about the dangers of using
paints in confined spaces…
Vine - feel the rage
Last weeks’ BoFdate was concerned with the media furore
surrounding drunken yobbos, but the truth is that alcohol is not the sole cause
of societies decline, merely one of many. Britain is a tolerant nation, and
it seems that above all we tolerate idiots. That can be the only feasible
excuse for why there are so many. These idiots tend to culminate in large
cities and group together to share their collective idiocy in what are known as
‘gangs’. Why be stupid on your own, when with the helps of others, you can
become 8 times as stupid? You must, of course, carry knives and guns. This is
to stave off the threat of radioactive pterodactyls, psychotic alien Labradors and other suckers who may try to muscle in on
your patch without showing a satisfactory quota of ‘respec’. It would seem that
it is all about respect. Drawing a line in the sand gets you respect. Hanging
out with the right people gets you respect. Carrying a weapon gets you respect.
We’re uncertain how much kudos can be gained from being shot in the face, but
using this idiotic logic, it’s probably a helluva lot. To people on the outside
looking in, it’s ludicrous. And tragically, it leads to utterly devastating
results for those who get caught, quite literally, in the crossfire.
The
solution? Well, it may be extreme, but we at the BoF suggest putting a 25ft
concrete wall all the way around the Isle of Mann and inviting every idiotic
gun/knife toting pratt in for a good old fashioned rumble, no questions asked.
Then, when they’re all safely inside, sink the Isle of Mann. Hell, we’ve been
to the Isle of Mann: everyone’s a winner. Then people would be safe to walk
down the street whilst listening to the Pointer Sisters Doin’ The Neutron
Dance, not worrying about if some gang hoodies might take exception with their
cagoule and beat them unconscious. The winds of change are beginning to blow
through Britain,
and its time for Average Joe to fight back. Let’s take back the streets. One
idiot at a time.
16th August 2007
Kids today, eh? It
seems that despite A level pass rates reaching a record high of 1001%, if our unhealthy
youth aren’t drinking or eating themselves to death, they’re out stabbing
themselves to it. However, help is at
hand from the aptly (or inappropriately, the BoF can’t decide) named, Bladerunner who are producing a fashionable range of
stab proof school uniforms utilizing the slash resistant power of Kevlar. Yours for a snip at £130. One concerned parent keen on suiting up her
vulnerable child said “I think paying £130 is worth it for peace of mind - kids
spend more than that just on trainers.” But are those stab proof trainers? The fact that Kevlar would have minimal life
saving capabilities if confronted with the biggest killer of children in the UK,
cars, doesn’t seem to trouble the tormented mind of concerned parents, despite
a fetching range huge plastic bubbles being available. But we like our cars so can spend £130 on
stab proof vests instead. For piece of
mind.
If that were all our knife wielding youth were up to we
could happily leave them to it, however it’s when they take it upon themselves
to stab decent people to death that it’s a problem. Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, Peter Fahy, has called for new measures to curb underage drinking after
a man was murdered for having the temerity to approach a gaggle of inebriated youths
in Warrington. As usual when the topic of Britain’s youthfully sodden liver
is raised we look with envious eyes across the channel where French toddlers
discuss the merits of taking a glass of the 1995 Château Margaux with dinner as
opposed to the '89. Our pasty hooded
wretches, on the other hand, have trouble discerning the difference between the
full bottle of White Lightening and the empty one their mate has just
used to take a slash in. Changing Britain’s
reputation as the pissed twat of Europe is the
aim. Fahy suggests sweeping measures to
reduce the “scourge of anti-social behaviour by young people”, including a ban
on drinking in public areas and raising the legal drinking age to 21, thus creating
thousands more potential underage drinkers, which seems a little
counterintuitive. The Home Office, in
the form the Meg Hiller, was not so enthusiastic: “It’s not something that
government or legislation or the police alone can solve; it’s much more of an
attitude in society” she said, shifting uncomfortably on a chair that appeared
to have £14 billion of tax revenue from alcohol stuffed underneath it.
Yet despite both figures stating that culture and society
are at the heart of the problem, neither appears willing to elaborate. Perhaps it is because, unfortunately, class
and money are the top hat wearing, monocle sporting elephants in the room in
this “scourge of anti-social behaviour by young people” debate. It is not “young people” en mass that are the
problem, it is young people from socially excluded and disadvantaged
backgrounds. Or chavs as we are allowed
to call them now. Carrying out an in-depth
anthropological study on one group, original BoF research discovered that
amazingly 99.9% have not attended Eton, Harrow or Winchester.
And that, incidentally, Lambrusco isn’t all that bad.
Perhaps a more useful question to ask than ‘should the legal
drinking age be raised’, would be why can such a large number of creatures who posses
the most sophisticated mechanism in the known universe, a brain, think of
nothing better to do than slowly destroy it.
Or why did one man have to confront a group of these aggressive and
ignorant strangers himself rather than expecting the invisible policeman to
oversee the boundaries of civil behaviour.
Or why ‘government or legislation or the police’ have withdrawn their
visible presence from society and over 40 years managed to transform a working
class into an underclass. Interestingly, Fahy commented that alcohol is “too
cheap and too readily available”, making it the exact opposite of the police.
But if new laws and a raised drinking age don’t do the trick
we could just give our aggressive underage boozers some Mattel toys to play
with instead of two litres of Frosty Jacks.
A good dose of lead should keep them quiet for a while. Or perhaps instead of attempting to turn
around Britain’s
urban wastelands and their populations of feral youths we should take a leaf
out of the Russian’s book and say everything is just great. Recent studies of Chernobyl said rare species had thrived in
the radioactive hellhole. Rare indeed; the
frog with 12 eyes and herd of dear with wheels
instead of legs aren't found anywhere else on earth...
10th August 2007
Are Britain’s
farms all built on ancient mystical burial grounds? Perhaps farmers have a
penchant for putting umbrellas up indoors, smashing mirrors and picking 3 leaf
clovers. Or maybe each farm has a solitary resident magpie, because it’s fair
to say that farmers have had their share of bad luck recently. We’ve seen BSE
and bird flu take their toll, and now foot and mouth has returned, just when
you thought it was safe to go back in the abattoir. Every time one huge,
diseased obstacle is overcome, another comes trudging into view. This must be
leaving farmers wondering what’s next; sheep scabies? Pig rot? Or could it be
that farmers will awaken one morning to find that their tractors are not simply
vehicles specifically designed to provide a high tractive effort at slow
speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery used in agriculture
or construction, but are in fact alien robots in the midst of an intergalactic
war. The fate of the world lies in the hands of Massey-Fergatron…What must nark* the farmers more than anything is that this
new outbreak of F&M (which, when shortened like this sounds like a trendy
shoe-shop) seems to be down to human error. Exact details remain unclear, but
it would appear that rather than having been shipped in on a dodgy cow destined
for Kev’s Kebab Emporium, this disease would appear to have been nurtured like
Rosemary’s Baby before escaping like Michael Myers. All of this lead to COBRA
(which sadly stands for ‘Cabinet Office Briefing Room A’) having yet another
meeting. It seems that no-one can pass wind at present without COBRA meeting to
discuss the follow-through. We at The BoF harbour the faint hope that these
meetings consist of a discussion via satellite link with Sylvester Stallone,
who gives his opinion on how Rocky, Rambo or that chap from Cliffhanger would
deal with the crisis. Either that or a quick chat with Kriss Akabusi. Awooga!
So, following the outbreak an exclusion zone was set up around the source. But
this is Britain,
so there was less barbed-wire, concrete bollards and armed guards, more plastic
tape, hand-written signs and P.C. Plod. And whilst the outlook may be grim for
the agricultural sector, at least the makers of plastic document wallets will
be enjoying a surge in sales. Every ‘Keep out’, ‘Footpath closed’ and ‘Get
‘orffa my laaand’ signs follow what has become a national trend of being badly
written and shoved in a document wallet (in some kind of pathetic attempt to
create a waterproof barrier despite having a sodding-great hole in one end and
two smaller ones so it fits neatly into an A4 ringbinder) before being pinned
to the nearest gatepost. Come on people, we’re better than this. Even in times
of crisis, take a moment to think ‘hmm, is my lackadaisical attitude to signage
and misuse of stationary really an appropriate way of underlining my
displeasure with the current situation?’ Sort it out. Laminators are very
affordable nowadays. So, with foot and
mouth set to cost the nation billions it’s been another easy week for Gordon
Brown. Perhaps he was a farmer in a former life.
With the Beijing Olympics now less than a year away, it’s
been a mixed week for the Chinese hosts. Whilst presenting an immaculate
celebration to mark the 365-day countdown, awkward questions about pollution
and poverty were raised. The thick smog that hangs over Beijing has lead to games organisers becoming
concerned that endurance races may have to be postponed. The Chinese have tried
everything (with the inclusion of firing rain-inducing shells in to the sky -
rain dammit!) with the exception of stopping the huge CO2 emissions which lead
to the problem in the first place. In order to give Britain the competitive
advantage, Lord Coe has commissioned the construction of a time machine to take
athletes back to London in 1952 for a bit of smog-related endurance training.
This will be funded by a new lottery scratch card called ‘Smoggin’ for Gold’,
which features a depiction of Jean-Claude Van Damme assisting Jimmy Saville
back in time to win Gold for Britain in the 1952 London marathon.
* Official contender for ‘Understatement of the Year®’
A Beijing 2008 Gold Medalist
2nd August 2007
After last weeks’s flooding disasters brought out the best
of British in the good folk of southern England (looting, pissing in water
bowsers, mixing drinking water with bleach) it’s sad to see mankind’s baser
instincts high up the news agenda this week.
Video broadcast websites such as Youtube and Liveleak have been
criticised by the BBC’s Panorama program for hosting films showing people being
bullied, battered and taunted. One film
showed young scamps punching and kicking other children. Another featured a youth smashing a police
car windscreen. In another several men
in white flannels were seen throwing jelly beans at an Asian man causing him
great upset. In response to these
accusations the internet companies bravely absolved themselves of all responsibility
whilst simultaneously taking responsibility for all of their millions of
dollars of profit. A Youtube spokesman
said the site relied on users to flag up inappropriate material. This buck hurling response could quickly find
itself extended to other fields, so blame retardant are its capabilities. George Bush could quite rightly declare that
the shambles of post war Iraq is not his fault as he was relying on voters to
flag up the inappropriateness of invading one of the most politically volatile
and anti-American areas of the globe.
Crash into a pensioner at 100 miles per hour and clearly it was granny’s
responsibility to flag up your excessive speed and nothing to do with you. According to Youtube, pre-screening videos is
a form of censorship, bizarrely suggesting that because something is censorship
it therefore shouldn’t happen. Yet
censorship has a much needed role in society, especially as morons make up such
a large part of it. In traditional media
there is a consensus that sadistic violence is not endorsed, for example; Hardcore
pornography is yet to make it on to pre-watershed BBC1, as much as we’ve written
in to Points of View requesting it. Hayden
Hewitt, co – founder of LiveLeak, provided an equally shaky moral argument to
YouTube’s: “We have to take the stance of saying “look, all this is happening,
this is real life, this is going on, we’re going to show it.” So, that’s all right then. As long as it’s
happening LiveLeak have to show it, apparently.
If only video phones had been around in the 1940s we could all be watching
‘atomic bomb blast disintegration man’ or ‘gas chamber death special’ going
on. But then that perhaps would provide
the only form of censorship that is practiced by such new media companies – bad
press. Myspace was praised this week for
barring 29,000 sex offenders from the site.
Strangely the BoF campaign “Sex Offenders Have Rights Too, You Know” met
with little support. When notions of
illegality rear their ugly heads, websites are quick to position themselves as
protectors of the young and vulnerable.
When the young and vulnerable batter each other and then upload a film
of it, websites wash their hands and cry illiberal censorship should anyone
suggest they police their own content. Much
waffle is spouted about the new media taking the place of the old, yet this new
media fails to acknowledge the great responsibilities that come with the great
power they now wield. Like a film of Spiderman
happy slapping the Green Goblin.
It was also a depressing week for pro-bovine groups across
the globe as Shambo the sacred bullock lost his fight against irreligious
bureaucracy. The TB suffering beast
reportedly showed great dignity in his final moments. However, an unauthorised video of the
execution is apparently circulating, showing beef farmers taunting Shambo as he
mounts the gallows with chants of ‘you call those horns?’ and ‘I’d put you in a
bap’. The footage has been universally
condemned by world leaders and animal rights groups as offensive and
immoral. A spokesman for Youtube agreed,
saying they would be relying on the cow section of their audience to flag up any
inappropriate execution material.
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