More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • BNP Scum Abuse British Veterans

    Now we all know that the BNP are the lowest form of scum in the political cesspool … even low and putrid enough that they cause other politicians to feel nauseous. But in a long history of astonishing ineptitude and a quality of thought that would bring shame to any self-respecting cockroach, they have managed a piece of grossly offensive stupidity. They are using various military images to promote their pathetic and ridiculous creed. One of the images used is the that of a spitfire which previously caused a row in early 2009. In addition the BNP have tried to lay claim to the British Legion’s poppy symbol which is also pretty offensive.

    The opposition to the BNP using military images comes initially from some old generals. Now I’m hardly a fan of the British military and I’m certainly not normally on their side. But they’re definitely right – using the military images to inflate the BNPs “Britishness” is definitely wrong. And offensively wrong given that many of those involved in the British military (including the WWII military!) were not the kind of people that the BNP would approve of. Personally I’d say there’s a lot to be said to being the kind of person that the BNP would not approve of – after all there is no chance that anyone would mistake you for being one of them!

    The BNP would have you believe that the immigration “issue” of today is comparable to the attempted invasion by the Axis forces in WWII. This is preposterous in numerous ways and shows pretty well that the members of the BNP are at best woefully and dangerously delusional. First of all, an invasion is vastly different to a migration; in fact an invasion does not even require permanent residence for many of the invasion force. Even more an invasion is a rejection of our society and standards whereas a migration is an acceptance of the same (the migrant might change his or her mind later on).

    Secondly the war against the Axis forces was not simply defeating an attempted invasion of Britain. It was bigger by far than that. The war started before the attempted invasion and went on long after the invasion was turned back. It was very much the realisation that the cancerous beliefs of fascism could not be tolerated and that defeating fascism was of sufficient value that the masters of capitalism felt that allying ourselves with the “evil communists” was the lesser of two evils. Whilst Nick Griffin is no more than the palest shadow of a buffoon alongside someone like Hitler, and the BNP are similarly shown to be inadequate alongside the Nazi party, they are very much cut from the same mould.

    Nick Griffin and his mindless thugs (look at their criminal records sometime) would be very happy in a world where Britain had been defeated by Nazi Germany. After all they could persecute their favourite ethnic minorities in any way they wished.

    Comparing the “struggle” against immigration to the struggle against fascism and Nazi Germany is a slap in the face of every veteran who fought in WWII.

    I notice that the BNP website today still shows :-

    • A red poppy (pah!)
    • A photograph of a spitfire (perhaps not the same photo they used in early 2009 which was flown by a Polish pilot)
    • And a picture of Churchill.

    I somehow doubt that Churchill or his descendants would be too pleased about his image being used to popularise the BNP scum. The funny thing is that this great British leader may not have been quite British enough to be allowed to join the BNP – his mother was American and there is a chance that her descendants include Iroquois and/or Jews (neither of which are any form of “stain” of course), and considering his father came from the British aristocracy was likely to be not quite so British as the BNP would like. If you read the BNPs constitution, the clause concerning membership (quite possibly to be removed shortly) restricts membership to a wide variety of different “folk” people (indicating a rather confused grasp on British history), but excludes various proto-French ethnic groupings which could well exclude Churchill (at which he breathes a huge sigh of relief, or would if he could).

    The BNPs big “thing” is race. They might well appear on TV or in other forms of media campaigning on other issues, but it’s still written large in their constitution that they want to return Britian to some pre-1948 mythical “white” utopia. Well first of all, the whole white thing is a bit mythical in itself – it’s only when you look at us from a distance that we look white; look a bit closer and you start to see differences (English, Welsh, Scottish, etc.). Secondly Britain has long been a home to people whose ancestors weren’t European.

    And it is doubtful that the proto-English that the BNP want us all to revert to were all that concerned about “racial purity”. The Saxon warlord who defeated the last Celtic king around these parts, and went on to found the House of Wessex was called “Cerdic”. His name indicates that his ancestry included some Celtic blood somewhere (the most popular theory was that his mother was Celtic) in addition to his Saxon blood. For the benefit of those whose history is as poor as the BNPs most undoubtedly is, this “House of Wessex” later went on to unite the newly formed kingdom of England – the most important Saxons of the “Anglo-Saxon” peoples.

    And now that I’m been writing of the BNP, I’m in urgent need of a long, hot cleansing bath to take away the stench.

  • Keyboards: Where’s My Compose Key ?

    If you are old enough to remember a time when if you were really lucky you might have access to a computer over a 9600 baud serial line connecting with a terminal, you may well have encountered the Compose key on DEC serial terminals (or in many other places). If you aren’t, I’ll have to explain what they are …

    Imagine you have a US or UK keyboard, and suddenly have a need to enter an accented character (such as ü) – perhaps in a place name or perhaps you simply want to spell “café” properly for once. If you look at your keyboard you’ll find that the relevant characters do not appear anywhere. One of the solutions to this are the “dead letters” where certain symbols (such as “) work by putting the mark on the key over the next letter you type.

    This apparently works well enough for those who enter such letters every other word or so, but I’m a monolingual Englishman who does not need them so often and I would rather have my quote key left alone thank you very much.

    Now imagine a special key on the keyboard. Let us call it “Compose” for the want of any other name. You press it, and a fourth LED on your keyboard lights up. You can then enter any suitable two character sequence to generate accented characters or other symbols (½, «, ¡, ♯, ə, þ, etc.). Perhaps it might stretch your memory a bit remembering all the sequences, but you soon get used to much of it … it doesn’t take much memory capacity to remember that compose, u, ” becomes a ü, and that if you want anything with an umlaut on it, just use compose, whatever needs an umlaut, and “.

    Back when I got started in IT, we had a bewildering variety of different types of keyboards with different layouts (and many of which were better by far for typing than most modern crud). For better or worse the IBM keyboard layout effectively won (the Macintosh keyboard is an IBM one with a few extra function keys and some of the modifiers relabelled). One of the big losses was the lack of a Compose key.

    Let’s have it back!

    Oh! And if you are going to have an “Alt GR” key to function as a “shift” key to enter funky symbols, please engrave the symbols on the front of the keys. You will notice that where the Shift key produces a different symbol, the different symbol is shown on the key – see the 1 key with ! shown.

  • Wardrobe Malfunctions

    For some reason the term ‘wardrobe malfunction’ has come to be used in reference to those little ‘accidents’ that happen to people when their clothing slips to reveal a little more than is conventional. For some peculiar reason this seems to happen more frequently with famous people and even more frequently when cameras are rolling.

    However that’s not the reason I’m writing this. Who first coined the phrase ‘wardrobe malfunction’ in reference to incidents of this kind ? Said person needs to be gently informed that a more correct phrase would be ‘clothing malfunction’ seeing as it is the clothes that are causing the problem.

    A wardrobe malfunction relates to those tall cupboards that store clothes. A malfunction of one could be one of the following :-

    Whilst opening the door, you trip and fall into the wardrobe and get tangled up in the clothes and have to call for your partner to help you get released. Who is out in the garden at the time and doesn’t hear your calls until they come in a few hours later.

    Or you pull open the door and the door falls off, lands on your foot to cause you to jump about in pain and to fall backwards down the stairs.

    Of course there are those who will say that one of the meanings of “wardrobe” is clothes themselves. Maybe so, but that refers to a collection of clothes. You do not wear a collection unless you want to get hot and sweaty to the point of unconsciousness.

  • MPs Whinging About Paying Back Their Ill-Gotten Gains

    So an interim report on the expenses scandal is out and it is suggested that many MPs will have to pay back some of the expenses they have claimed over the last 5 years. And of course we have MPs claiming that it is not fair that they have to pay back expenses that were legitimately claimed under the rules that were set at the time.

    No it isn’t fair.

    It isn’t fair that MPs had such a lax expenses system that they could claim such ridiculous amounts on ridiculous items.

    Complaining about paying back some of the excess is foolish in the extreme – whilst it may not be fair, everyone other than an MP is going to see this as just typical corrupt politician behaviour. Still it should make the next election interesting – we may not have a majority of Labour or Conservative MPs. There will be too many independents 🙂

  • Level Crossing Accidents

    On the news this morning are increased figures for those killed by acting stupid with rail level crossings. Given the level of stupidity shown in some of the videos :-

    It is perhaps time to concentrate more on the effect these accidents have on the train drivers and train passengers. And those who have to scrape up what is left behind after this sort of accident.

    After all those who mess around on train lines and level crossings should really be taking responsibility for their own stupidity. You do not have to be too bright to realise that taking the risk of crossing a train line when the barriers are down (or when the lights are red) is taking the risk of being hit by a train. And you don’t live through being hit by a train.