There's one born every minute

You know what I hate?

Well, yes, stupid people, drivers of black MR2s that sit right up my trumpet going down the A45 this morning, haggis, gardening, chavs, pikies, people with whiny voices, people who eat noisily, shellfish, fruit in curries, drawn-on eyebrows, carrying so many plastic shopping bags that your finger-ends go white, other people's children and the French.

OK, no-one could have expected any of you guys to know that entire list, or the fact that what I'm about to waffle on about isn't actually on it.

At this precise moment in time, the thing that I hate more than anything in the Western World are things like this:

I've blanked out the poor kid's face for a couple of reasons...

1) No-one except possibly a facio-maxillary surgeon really wants to look at a picture of a child that's allegedly been shot in the face.
2) The privacy of the portrayed individual.
3) I have no idea whether this picture is actually of the person described in the text.
4) I have no idea whether the incident described in the text actually happened.

You'll notice that I haven't blanked out the person who posted this originally, as he knowingly posted this update (but without the face obscured, obvs.) and is therefore happy to have his face spattered all over the Internet.

Please note, I, at no point suggest that Mr Gunzmore, who I assume, from his Facebook page, is some kind of up-and-coming rap star, is using this image as some kind of sordid and heartless advertising tool.

So, what do I particularly hate about it?

Well, apart from the things that I enumerated above, and the fact that it's entirely posted in CAPITAL LETTERS and that the grammar is, quite simply, appalling... Let me post the entire text below, for those trying to read it on mobile devices:

-oOo-

14 YEAR OLD BOY WAS SHOT 6 TIMES BY HIS STEPFATHER . THIS BOY WAS PROTECTING HIS LITTLE 6 YEAR OLD SISTER WHO WAS ABOUT TO BE RAPED BY THIS POOR ... EXCUSE OF A MAN . THE LITTLE GIRL DID NOT GET HURT , THANKS TO HER BRAVE OLDER BROTHER . THEIR MOM WAS AT WORK WHEN THIS HAPPENED . NOW THIS BRAVE YOUNG LITTLE BOY IS FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE , BUT DOCTORS SAY HE WILL NOT SURVIVE UNLESS HE GETS AN OPERATION WHICH IS COSTLY AND HIS MOM CANNOT PAY .ALL FACE BOOK COMPANIES HAVE AGREED TO DONATE 45 CENTS FOR EVERY TIME SOMEONE POSTS THIS TO THEIR WALL . SO , PLEASE SHARE THIS ON YOUR WALL . SO , THAT TOGETHER WE CAN HELP SAVE THIS BOYS LIFE .I JUST PASSED THIS MESSAGE DOWN AND "SHARE" FOR A LITTLE LIFE#HUMANITY COSTS NOTHING

NB; My post ain't about likes or shares its all about "humanity and charity service"

‪#‎join‬ US ( only if you cool) ;

Stay blessed world - make peace not WAR !

-oOo-

I have removed the gentleman's link to his Facebook page that Gunzmore put in after the 'Join US (only if you [sic] cool)' message, as leaving that in was just a little too sordid even for me.

So, let's see what is actually says (I'm not going to bother putting the word 'allegedly' in after every statement, you just go ahead and imagine I have, OK?)  So, a fourteen year old boy, trying to stop his Stepfather raping his little sister, gets shot six times.  Let's all take a look at the picture... The fact that you can't see any wounds would say to me that all of the damage in in the bit you can't see, i.e. the face.  Now, I have seen what's in the blanked out area - Don't get me wrong, it's not pretty, and a lot of his head is bandaged but it's more the sort of thing you'd expect to see if the child in question had been beaten with a bat.

The picture itself seems to have been taken in an Emergency Room, where even my rudimentary knowledge of the American Health System, backed up with a good five minutes research on Google, says that treatment for immediate life threatening trauma is free, certainly to a child.  Even the most heartless, jobsworth, doctors will not let a child die as a result of a crime because his parents cannot afford to pay for treatment.

And even if they would...

Facebook WILL NOT donate money to causes that are advertised by individuals in this way.  Mark Zuckerberg (who I really shouldn't have to introduce to you if you're reading this... And if you're not, I'm not going to introduce him out of spite.) regularly makes massive donations of his own money and Facebook shares to Charity.

Unless he means all of the fifteen million or so companies that have a Facebook presence? - The Chimping Dandy was never asked to take part, and neither was the company that currently pays my wages, despite having a number of Facebook pages.

So, We'll tot it up shall we?

There's a crime that may not have happened (+1) perpetrated by and on people who may well not exist (+1) and a boy that was certainly injured, but probably wasn't injured in the way described (+1), who definitely would not be allowed to die for financial reasons (+1) who could not be saved by such a plea, because Facebook doesn't operate like that (+1)

If I've added that up correctly, there are five instances of things you can happily call B*llsh*t on in one badly laid out paragraph without even thinking about it too hard.

So, can someone tell me why it has 358,591 likes, 53,573 comments and has been shared 628,657 times? (at the time of writing at least) - Which if it were true would mean that the un-named child would already have received $161,365.95 - If the 'Facebook Companies' just means Facebook itself, or $2,420,489,250,000.00 (Two and a half Trillion Dollars) if every company on Facebook donates 45c for every Like...

And that's only by Mr Gunzmore's share alone... If every one of the 628,657 people that shared it got a couple of likes, not only would we have saved the boy's life, he would now own the entirety of the known universe.

Does any of this seem a little bit unlikely to you yet?

I mean, it's all a lie, but some lies are at least believable aren't they? 

People can say things like 'No, it's perfectly fine that you used my toothbrush to clean the dog's rectum and took two weeks to tell me, I'll just buy a new one, no biggie.' - You might be able to believe the person who said that, if you were very simple, or if the person whose brush you used was a Buddhist Monk, legally and religiously obliged not to kill you with a rusty spoon.

I don't mean to single out Mr Gunzmore, I'm sure that he's a wonderful person who loves his mother very dearly - We've all seen the pictures of babies with lesions from some terrible illness, and young, dehydrated African children covered in flies that they are too weak to wave away.

They're terrible, and it shouldn't happen... But really, liking the image will not help their plight in the slightest, no-one will donate money to some unspecified cause because of you clicking a mouse and then scrolling down to see a picture of a cat asleep in a shoe.

Share them if you must, to raise awareness of the issue, but do me a favour if you will.

Take the time to see if the story that you're promoting is true, check Snopes Which is a great Urban Legend resource and can let you know with a quick search whether you're going to look an idiot when you press 'Post', and think what it is that you're promoting if it says 'For every like we get, 45c will be donated to the cause.'

Promoting a lie makes you a liar, and I know that no-one who reads The Chimping Dandy would admit to being one of those.

So, as a certain training shoe manufacturer may once have almost said, 'Just Don't Do It.'

 

Like a firm, ripe, peach

I think that I speak for us all when I suggest that at some time, each and every one of us has been subjected to a young schoolboy's bottom.

Whether it has been due to its constant emission of noxious gasses, or its frequent companion, the loud, moist, noisome retort. Or it may be for more nefarious reasons, you may be a high muck-a-muck in the Catholic Church, or have been a Radio DJ in the 1970's for instance.

But imagine for a second that you are the wife of a 76 year old Tory Peer who made his name by noticing an Iraqi supergun and destroying the Halesowen metalwork business that had helped to build the Titanic in the process, and made his (vast amounts of) cash by working for Lloyds and various other City financial institutions.  Some of which was given back to the Conservative Party JUST before he became a Peer.

(FOR LEGAL REASONS I SHOULD LIKE TO JUST POINT OUT THAT THE DONATION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL SUM OF MONEY, FOR A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE AT LEAST, TO THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PERSON, MICROSECONDS LATER, BEING NAMED A PEER AND GAINING A SEAT IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, EVEN THOUGH THIS TYPE OF TITLE IS MORE USUALLY HEREDITARY, AND PASSED FROM PARENT TO CHILD)

So, if you were that person, how do you think you would usually interact with young boy's bottoms?

No, that's Reverend Paul Flowers you're thinking of, he's the one with all the drugs and the bumming.* Try again...

Picture the scene, after a number of years, your husband has finally convinced you that going to watch 'The Rugger' is a respectable pastime, and not at all like being found in bed with a Supermodel on a Saturday afternoon... He has also convinced you to accompany him to 'Twickers' for all three of England's Autumn International matches on three consecutive Saturdays, despite you thinking that it's all a bit sordid and homo-erotic.  The roads are busy with plebs, going about just doing whatever it is plebs do. There was even the occasional coach full of ruddy-faced schoolboys, full of high spirits, jolly japes and jam roly-poly.

Maybe I should let David, Baron James of Blackheath (for it is indeed he), tell his wife's story from here, just as he told it to his peers (who all happen to be Peers - lol! - geddit?) in the House of Lords:

'She was totally horrified by the sight of the school buses coming down the road to Twickenham filled full of children who were indulging in a pastime I believe is called mooning.

I am not going to explain it to your lordships as we are in mixed company.

The sight of some 40 school children mooning simultaneously is not a pretty sight. She was horrified.

My wife is a youth justice officer and she watched as the police motorbikes went zooming past these kids giving them a friendly wave as they went and she said: "We have a law against this sort of thing. Why aren't they being brought into court - I would put them away for a year if I got them".'

Three thing strike me as odd about this story:

1. I can't imagine that she's never been in the room when a young boy's hindquarters have been roughly unveiled*
2. She wants the sentence for 'mooning' to be 12 months incarceration 
3. England got stuffed by New Zealand (Actually, there might only be two odd things in the list)

Now, mooning has been a traditional way of cocking a snook at figures of authority for hundreds of years and is, 999 times out of a thousand taken in good humour by people who unexpectedly come across another person's bare buttocks** (as displayed by the police officers in the above story)

It just goes to show how out of touch and easily outraged some people are.  Especially odd when you consider that when news stories involving those sort of people's husbands regularly include the words 'Gold' and 'Bullion' they don't seem to get half as outraged about those.

If she were in New Zealand of course, she would have every right to be outraged, the indigenous population over there have a thing called Whakapohane which is like mooning, but it's intended to be deeply offensive and symbolises the act of giving birth.

But if you really want to illustrate the logical conclusion, the zenith, the very epitome of 'Mooning gone wrong' You have to go back to the first recorded instance of intentional mooning.  In the first century AD, the Jewish-Roman historian and Hagiographer Titus Flavius Josephus recalls an occasion where a Roman Soldier mooned a group of passing Jewish Pilgrims on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem.  There was a localised riot, which the local Roman garrison countered in their usual fashion and many hundreds (if not thousands, depending on your historical source) of people were put to the Gladius that day with extreme prejudice.

-oOo-

On a slightly more personal note, you'll be glad to hear that I was once involved in the planning of a public spectacle that was aimed at... Well, I'm not 100% sure what the aim was, I think it was just one of those 'Hold me beer and watch this' things - It was to take place in the small Derbyshire town of Melbourne and it went by the name 'Mmmmm' Which stood for the wonderfully alliterative: '(T)he Massed Midnight Moon (I)n Melbourne Marketplace' - I say that I took place in the planning, but I didn't say anything about being involved in the taking part.

I mean, I probably did, but I honestly can't remember, as I was very, very, drunk by about 10:30 and it was a long time ago.

If you feel that you have, in some way missed out on all these rectal hi-jinks and have not been witness to my broad, British buttocks before, please send a stamped, addressed envelope to the usual address and I will send you a photograph of my rear end by return... Well, as soon as I can find time to balance myself precariously on top of the A3 colour photocopier at least.




* Allegedly
** Sorry, couldn't resist (Which, oddly is what is normally said under those circumstances)

It's all your fault!

I just read a post on one of those 'Spotted' Pages on Facebook.  I don't know if your area is covered, but effectively it's a page where people can post things about people they've seen in the local area that they would 'Like to get to know better' - I presume that that's what they mean when they say 'I'm rite lyk to smash er back doorz in bruv.' anyway. Or when they find your choice of car or clothes unacceptable or they wish you would close your front curtains whilst you are excitedly banging your spotty buttocked, squealing girlfriend when they are peering through your windows whilst taking their kids to school and suchlike.

Anyway, going off on a tangent there... Don't know where that one would have ended up if I'd carried on with it *whew*.

The post was from someone thanking some kids who had handed her Grans purse into a local shop when they'd found it on the floor.  It still had all the money in it and everything.  Wonderful story, very uplifting - Proving that the youth of today deserves to be looked at as a disparate, loose grouping of individuals with their own special attributes and aspirations, rather than a huge septic mass of snapbacks and hoodies who cannot spell a three letter word never mind have an original thought without putting 'ey' or 'YGM' or something on the end of it.

Brilliant, great post, great event, warm and firm handshakes all around.

However, I started to notice a worrying trend in some of the replies.  Apart from the spelling (which genuinely caused me to try and mouth the words and see if I could figure out what they were trying to say) and the almost apocalyptic lack of punctuation (Really, a sentence that stretches over four lines? - you must have some well hench lungs if you can say all that without stopping to breathe) - Oh! Lookit me! I'm trying to sound like a skinny, spotty white-boy, who weighs 5 stone wringing wet, doesn't know how hats work, thinks 'flipping the bird' is the epitome of human pulchritude, wears a lot of knock-off high-nylon-content sportswear and really wants to have been born, as a heavily muscled black gentleman, in South-Central LA or Compton.

So, apart from them, I kept reading things like 'Ah! they've made their Mums proud.' and 'That's because of the way that their Mums have brought them up' and 'Bet their Mums are giving them extra-big cuddles tonight'

See the theme?

Give you a clue, it starts with the letter 'M' and rhymes with 'bum'

I'm a Dad, and even if I say so myself, a pretty good one.  I appreciate that traditionally, mothers have always been seen as the primary caregivers and I'm not trying to take anything away from them.  I'd say that at least 80-90% of Mums are great, brilliant, wonderful people who inspire their kids whilst teaching them the proper boundaries and don't say 'It's just kids being kids, innit' when Little Jay-Zee gets brought home by the police as they've found him keying cars whilst still being dressed in his primary school uniform at 02:30 in the A.M.

I like to think that I've done my bit, in-between being out of the house for twelve hours a day doing the whole work thing.  I've helped to teach my kids to think for themselves, to be proud of their achievements, to know the difference between right and wrong, the correct pressure to use when you're putting someone in a sleeper hold (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, there's a very real danger of brain-damage and/or death if you don't know what you're doing!) and, most importantly, respect for themselves and others.

Yet I still get looked at as if I'm either a paedophile, or some other kind of deviant if I happen to be seen outside with my own daughter - I understand from other Dads who have daughters in their late teens that they have a similar but slightly different problem, there's active tutting being directed at them on a fairly regular basis from the more mature (agewise) female members of society.  I know that that might sound a bit sexist, but invariably, it's the classic 'Little Old Lady' that's giving it large with the 'He's old enough to be her Dad' business.

So what do we do about it?

How do we change that?

How do we make people start saying 'I bet their parents are proud' Rather than 'I bet their Mums are proud'?

Buggered if I know - but it might be a start for blokes to start taking responsibility for their children, acting like Dads and not just like bloody spermatozoon cannons. Getting their girlfriends pregnant and then rinsing and repeating with the next one and the next one and the next, wandering through their poky housing estates like a sexually ambivalent typhoid Mary (or Typhoid Marlon perhaps, in this particular case) begatting all over the place without a care in the world and bringing hordes of pale, acne-ridden ginger kids into the world who go straight from their third or fourth-hand plastic coated cots to the dole-queue, not passing Go, but still collecting £200 every bloody fortnight.

Parent who have been together for a long time and have subsequently parted after having kids - I get it, things happen, life's not like it is in fairy tales.  This isn't directed at you.  Neither am I talking about people who've escaped from abusive relationships or people whose partners have died, or mature people who have made the conscious decision to have children but to raise them on their own.

I'm talking about those boys, because they don't deserve to be called men - The 'I'm not wearing a condom, you can't feel anything' brigade, the 'If you loved me you'd let me' types, the ones you see in the adverts who prey on girls with low self-esteem, the ones whose face you would literally never get tired of punching, the ones who grin vacantly at you and you know that no matter how you explain it to them, they will have no idea what you're saying or why they should even care.

The ones that have made women hate men.

The ones that misguided women who don't really understand the difference between feminism and misandry blame all the world's problems on.

The ones that have made women who don't know me mistrust me because I am what is currently known as 'a big bloke.' (people used to use the word imposing you know - Better ring to it I think)

The ones that have made all men into monsters.

The ones that, if there was any justice in the world, would still be contained in a crusty old sock, hidden under their Father's bed.

This is aimed at you...


You make me sick.