Apologise my arse

Head Rambles Posted on by 6
Government apologises for hurt and stigma inflicted on gay men

Sweet suffering fuck!  Is this what I pay my taxes for?

We seem to be swamped with apologies these days.  Write something in the paper?  Apologise for it after.  Send an inane message on Twitter?  Apologise for it after.  Express a personal opinion?  Apologise for it after.

What’s more, apologising to people in the past is like pardoning someone after he’s been executed.  It is fuck all use.

Mary McAleese says Ireland ‘now grown deeply respectful of gay citizens’

Oh do fuck off Mary.  I know you like to sound all cuddly and inclusive and all that crap, but “deeply respectful“?

I don’t deeply respect gays. I don’t deeply respect straights or any of the other 1001 genders out there.  I don’t deeply respect anyone unless they are an individual that has earned that respect.  I treat everyone the same unless an individual deserves my deepest contempt or highest respect.  To include me in your sweeping statements is frankly an insult to me, and I expect an apology forthwith.

Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan offered a State apology to the men for the effect of laws denying them the right to live without fear and for the failure of tolerance in Irish society.

That rings a bell.  How about apologising to us smokers who live under a lack of tolerance aided and abetted by the state, instead of apologising decades down the line when you finally realise that you were wrong and the whole pogrom was just a money making scam and a lust for control?  Just do it now while it might do some good instead of after I’m. dead

On second thoughts, just fuck off.

I’m sick of the lot of you.

 

May I have a minute of your time?

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

In the years before retirement I sometimes wondered what I would do with all that spare time.

I needn’t have worried because there is precious little of it.

On top of all the household stuff I have to do, the garden has added considerably to the burden.   I have to hack back hedges, mow the lawn, weed, mow the lawn, do some strimming, mow the lawn, hack back some trees, mow the lawn.  You get the gist?

So with all of that I have little time to be arsing around on the Interwebs.  And what little time I have there is mostly taken up with doing maintenance and stuff on the sites I look after.

I have [or had] however two little projects of my own.  The first was a wee website I was building.  It was a very interesting project and will be of interest to many.  I can’t however say much more about it because it has to be passed by a Compliance Committee [a sort of peer review].  If it’s passed, I will put it live.  If it isn’t I will bin it.  That’s just the way things go.

The other little project was to experiment with Ubuntu.  That was interesting in a strange way.  It’s all Linux underneath and Mint is based on Ubuntu so I expected them to be much the same.  They’re not.  Chalk and cheese.  Ubuntu looks lovely and it comes with some interesting programmes in its package.  It’s a fucking nightmare to customise though.  So I installed Cinnamon in it so that it has the same desktop that I’m used to.  That restored a lot of functionality but that was more than tricky to customise too.  It now looked like Mint with a horribly bland layout.  I have gone back to Mint on a permanent basis.

So that’s why I have little time to scribble here and even less time to comment on comments.

Time now to empty the washing machine and put the contents on the clothes horse, full the washing machine with the next batch, do the washing up, clear the table for a grocery delivery due later, tidy up and make Herself a drop of lunch.

Spare time?

What’s that?

An open litter to the lawmakers

Head Rambles Posted on by 15

Apparently the majority of litter in this country consists of cigarette butts.

Well, quelle surprise!

What the fuck did they expect when they exiled all smokers to the outdoors?

Back in the days when sanity ruled the earth people would go for a pint, and there, within arms reach was an ashtray.  When they got into work, there on their desk would be an ashtray.  Cigarette smokers are forever dropping ash and were in the habit of just reaching out to their ashtray and having a quick flick.  But the streets have no ashtrays.  You’re lucky if there is even a litter bin.  Okay, there are those little boxes stuck to the wall outside every premises these days but they are more like letter boxes for midgets and are not designed for the stubbing of cigarettes.  So people flick their ash on the ground and naturally when they are finished, that’s where the butt goes too.

The gubmint is “considering ways” to reduce this problem.  Naturally the first thing that comes to mind is increased penalties.  After all, every problem can be solved by increasing taxes, prices or fines?  That’s their mindset and they will not shift from that.

There is of course a much simpler answer.  An answer that would cost the gubmint nothing, would stop the decline in the hospitality industry and – dare I say it? – give our tourist industry a nice little boost.

And what is this answer?  Remove that fucking smoking ban, of course.

Let the publicans, the café owners, the hoteliers and everyone else who owns their own property set their own bans.  If a publican doesn’t like smokers then he can have his own ban.  He can stand and watch the punters pass by as they head for the pub that doesn’t give a shit whether people smoke or not.  The non-smokers can equally have a choice as to which institution they want to frequent.  Everybody is happy [except maybe the non-smoking establishment which will probably be empty].

The likes of FOREST spend their time campaigning for smoking rooms which is an anathema to me as it is licking up to the antis and a tacit admission that the smoking laws were in some way reasonable.  The smoking laws were inherently wrong from the very start for one simple reason – it dictated to business owners what they should allow on their own property. If I buy a pub then it is my property and my rules.  If I want to sell only Guinness then that’s fine and my lack of trade will reflect on that decision.  If I want to allow only pipe smokers then the same will apply.  The gubmint should have no say whatsoever in the way I decide to run my own property.

So there is the answer to their litter problem.  Ashtrays on all the tables in pubs, bars, restaurants and wherever the proprietor wishes to place them.

I guarantee the streets would be a lot cleaner.