How to lose weight

Posted on by July 20, 2017 4

I brought Penny to the vet the other day.

It was about time for her annual one mile service [she doesn’t like exercise so I had to lie about the distance she had covered in that time – it was nearer a hundred yards].

There is one feature of every visit to the vet – they always castigate me about her weight.  I keep explaining to them that Penny’s greatest form of exercise is yawning and occasionally circling before settling down to sleep again.  Even eating has become a waste of sleeping time and her latest trick is to bring a mouthful of dinner to bed so she can chew bits between naps.

Anyhows, I have been doing my best.  I don’t give her little treats any more and while we were waiting for our appointments she eyed up a bull mastiff but I told her to chew on a Chihuahua instead but she was too lazy to get up and went back to sleep again.

Her name was called, so I woke her and dragged her into the surgery.

The vet was a girl I hadn’t met before, and she had another girl who was apparently a French trainee.  I knew the latter was French because she hadn’t a word of English.

“Ah!  A Lurcher!” says the vet.

“They say she’s a Lurcher” says I, “but I think she only inherited her head from the Lurcher.  I think her daddy was a Newfoundland and she inherited its body.”  I like to get my arguments in early before they start whining about her weight.

“Yes, she is a little out of proportion” says the vet.  “Let’s weigh her.”  I groaned.

She has apparently lost a couple of pounds since last year!  Wonders will never cease.  I don’t know how or where she lost them, but I can’t comment as I’m always losing my car keys.

The examination continued.  The French girl was encouraged to examine her eyes [just how eyes should be apparently] and listen to her heart [a perfect heartbeat to judge all other dogs by] and peer into her ears [clean as a whistle].  All in all a perfect bill of health.

She had her injections [Penny, not the vet] and her nails clipped and that was that.

I congratulated Penny on her weight loss as we drove home.  She wasn’t listening though.

She was fast asleep.

Sleeping Penny

 

The Scunthorpe Syndrome

Posted on by July 19, 2017 26

There is some very bad news for the residents of the UK.

From next year, they are to be denied yet another avenue of “private” pleasure.

Yes indeed.  The UK is to block porn on the Interwebs, thereby slashing Kleenex Tissue’s share price and removing stickiness from the nation’s keyboards and computer screens.

Being the Nanny State they haven’t really thought this through, but then they never do, do they?  They think up some harebrained scheme [for the sake of the cheeeldren of course] but then they leave it up to others to work out how their aspirations are to be achieved.

Of course they could do something simple like leaving to the nation’s parents to supervise their little brats, but that doesn’t involve a ban, or a law, or fines.  No Nanny State is worth its salt if it doesn’t have loads of bans, laws and fines.  So they somehow have to work out a system where they can monitor what people are trying to view.  Naturally, they haven’t a fucking clue how this is to be done so they wash their hands of the problem and say that it’s up to the service providers.  They learned that method from Tobacco Control who left it to publicans to police their own customers.

So how will the service providers do it?

Are they supposed to block specific web addresses?  Good fucking luck with that one.  Every provider would need a heavily staffed department just to ban all the addresses as they pop up.

Will they insist on porn sites putting a little “Are you over 18?” thingy on the front page?  That will really work well.  Naturally the thousands/millions of site owners throughout the world will be only too delighted to comply with that?

How about monitoring all web traffic for “obscene” words?  They tried that once before which let to an uproar from the people of Scunthorpe [Jayzus – do I have to spell it out for you?] who suddenly found their town had vanished from cyberspace.

If by some miracle they do devise some method of filtering porn then what next?  My money is on a Politically Correct Web.  All sites will be banned if their content contains any gender specific noun, pronoun or adjective.  That should make searches a lot easier – instead of getting millions of results for your search, you’d be very lucky to get one.

Then the Anti-Smokers will want to get in on the act.  Filter all sites that mention tobacco, smoking, cigarettes or fags?  [Though on second though, “fags” would already be cut under porn or non-PC?]

But don’t worry people.

There is always the Darknet.

Let’s see them try to block that!

Go hang yourself

Posted on by July 18, 2017 9

I have just been skimming through the UK’s Tobacco Control Plan.

There isn’t that much to it really.  It’s the same old same old.  We know how you should live your lives and you had better conform.

One piece did give pause for thought though.

Smoking rates have remained stubbornly higher amongst those in our society who already suffer from poorer health and other disadvantages.  Smoking rates are almost three times higher amongst the lowest earners, compared to the highest earners.

The Prime Minister has spoken about the burning injustice that sees some of the poorest in our society die on average nine years earlier than the richest.  Smoking accounts for approximately half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest in society.  This injustice in the variation in smoking prevalence can be seen across England; from places where adult smoking is as low as 5% to others where smoking remains above 25%.  The prevalence remains even higher in people with mental health conditions, where more than of adults with a serious mental illness smoke.

“Smoking accounts for approximately half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest in society“?  So it’s the smoking that does it and not the fact that they are poor?  They seem to think that there is a clear case of causation here.  There is the implication that people are poorer because they smoke, which in a sense is true thanks to the punitive taxation levied by the very people who wrote the report.  A nice touch of hypocrisy?

The poorest  live a considerably different life from the wealthiest.  Generally they live in poor housing in the inner cities, surrounded by noise, crime and stress, and breathing nicely polluted city air.  On the other hand the wealthiest tend to live in the place of their choice surrounded by leafy suburbs in a more spacious home where the only noise is young Samantha playing games on her iPad.  [If the report writers can make sweeping generalisations, then so can I.]

Stress is known to be one of the biggest factors affecting health and longevity.  It affects people both mentally and physically.  And one bit of relief can be found in a cigarette.  Poorer people tend to smoke more, simply because it eases the stress.

Equally people with mental health problems find relief in a cigarette.  It calms them.  It gives them a moment of relief from mental anguish.

But the Bully State doesn’t give a damn about the poor or the mentally ill.  It has its agenda and the individual can suffer as a result.  Force people off cigarettes and if the suicide rate goes up, well, it wasn’t the tobacco that killed them so that’s all right.

So prisoners can riot, the poor can be denied one of their little pleasures and the mentally ill can go hang themselves.

But at least it’s a “smoke free” society.

And it’s also a nasty sadistic society.