Recorder Alan Steynor is a terrible cunt, who deserves to be brutally murdered in his sleep.
Jailing anyone for drug possession is a retarded and brutal waste of time and money that only a lunatic could ever countenance. Yet even within those parameters, jailing people in their 70s whose only crime is to not grass up their junkie son is uniquely vile.
I’m iller and less capable of working than I’ve ever been on a work day, thanks to last night’s insane jolly. Highlights included our telesales manager buying the MD an enormous melon, which later got drop-kicked up 9th Avenue; me ordering sambuca shots for everyone in the bar on the company tab (four times); the ‘who can drink the strongest Belgian beer’ contest; and the head of marketing exclaiming “I have to leave right now. I’ve just realised I’m not just the only girl still drinking, but also the only American”. And then staying for another three hours.
Sorry. In my head this post sounded much more interesting and much less Ricky Gervaise-y. Admittedly, my head isn’t a venue of sense at the moment.
Six years in jail seems highly unreasonable for crashing your car. Unless we’re content for society to have the moral understanding of a five-year-old, the judicial system should be about intentions rather than outcomes.
In a similar vein, I’m still slightly ashamed of myself for not following through on my plans to set up a ‘free Gary Hart’ campaign.
New York is a peaceful city, which doesn’t deserve the reputation it earned in the last century; I’ve seen the crime stats, and I’ve been out in the city and felt safe. Therefore, it must just be an unfortunate coincidence that I saw some bloke get shot on my second night in town.
That’s a slight exaggeration. We heard what could have been a gunshot or a car backfiring or a firework, thought ‘ah, it’s just our English paranoia, there’s no way it was a gunshot’. 15 seconds later two black guys dressed gangsta-ishly came running past, one staggering and looking very unwell and the other propping him up and yelling variations on ‘this guy needs a motherfucking ambulance’ to the (many) passers by.
Being pathetic wusses, we walked away very fast until we were a few blocks further downtown, and went to a Starbucks to chill out. I’m still slightly in shock…
It’s easier to buy a phone charger in this city than a Sunday newspaper. And they showed an edited version of Pulp Fiction on TV yesterday lunchtime. Truly this is a strange place.
I’m leaving tomorrow; yes, I’m going to be a part of it in old New York. Which should make for an entertaining week, even though I’m going to be working.
Hopefully some posting and no explosions will happen (you can probably rank the alternative options in order of preference without any particularly great difficulty). To be honest, I’m far more worried about spending a week not able to smoke in pubs.
I’m not a big fan of Subway’s pseudo-deli sandwiches. However, I doff my cap at them for their exceptionally interesting German advertising campaign.
Only an utter dickhead would have been offended by the main corporate campaign, which was based around the concept that Americans are lardy slobs. Coming from an American company, this is an impressive and laudable piece of self-mockery.
Of course, it’s never hard to find an utter dickhead: the one in this particular saga was the Center for Individual Freedom (that’s ‘for’ in the sense of ‘against’, presumably), which stirred up a ridiculous hate campaign against Subway and got the campaign pulled.
Some of their local franchisees took the campaign a little further. I’m awed, disturbed and amused by this picture from a promotional pack:
There’s a fairly hard-to-refute argument that US cultural imperialism and Middle Eastern policy have been a major factor in creating the environment where Al-Qaida and its co-ideologues flourish. I’m not sure, however, that cartoons in deli stores are the best place to make the case.
I’ve found a diplomatic solution to the Gibraltar problem: we tell the Spanish that we’d be happy to return the rock to its rightful owners. Its rightful owners, of course, are the people who controlled it for 700 years, and agreed to give it up only under duress: the Moors.
This would leave us only with the task of finding the modern day successors to the Caliphate. I think Al-Qaida have a strong case, since their aim is to establish a new one; Gibraltar would be an excellent base for such an endeavour.
As a next step, Spain ought to cede control of Andalusia, which was stolen from the Moors at the same time (perhaps Al-Qaida could somehow persuade the Spanish people that this would be a good idea). With the Gibraltan and Andalusian problems solved, southern Europe could enter a new era of peace and prosperity.
This also seems like an opportunity to mention my plan that we give the Malvinas back to Argentina, on the condition that the Argentinians all move there and give the mainland back to the four remaining Indians that their ancestors forgot to slaughter. I had a similar plan for dealing with Hong Kong, but it fell down on the (in my opinion minor) grounds that it would have led to global nuclear war and the death of everyone in the UK.
To summarise, I’d be marginally better than the current US administration at running foreign policy.
(thanks to libertarian lunatics Francis Turner and Ed Thomas for facts and inspiration).
If hard-left catfighting is your bag, then this comments section is the place to go. SWP ‘wankers’ take on SIAW ‘preschoolers’, before a baying crowd… can someone produce a special edition of Celebrity Death Match to celebrate?