Friday 16 December 2011

It's Christmas, Let The Misery Commence!

How do you know when Christmas is really close?

Tree up and tinsel glittering around the house? Santa in your local department store? Easter eggs on the shelves at Asda?

Nope, it's none of the above. It's when the grinches pop up every-fucking-where.

The BBC have led the way today with blanket coverage of what they call 'Black Friday' ... or a night where a hell of a lot of people enjoy their annual Christmas works party to the rest of us. It's an exceptionally busy night because - for many many out tonight - it is the only time in the year they'll do it.

Even that is too often for the tutters and head-shakers.

The doom and gloom has been laid on thick, with Beeb reporters camped out in Cardiff just itching to report on puke and gore. Ambulance drivers have been wheeled on TV and radio all day to bemoan the fact that they have to work harder than usual, and to make the customary air-headed demand for charges on top of the taxes citizens have already handed over to pay their wages. Of course, if we were all tucked up early in bed and their services weren't needed, they'd be striking and marching on parliament once their jobs were cut.

Words to describe the evening - like jovial, revelry, merriment, celebration, carnival etc - have been replaced with carnage, mayhem, bedlam and irresponsibility.

Happy pigging Christmas to you too, you whey-faced tossers!

And just to prove it's a global thing, here's some quite hilarious idiot from Boston describing his decision to tell kids to "leave the Christmas cookies, cakes, candy bars, and soda at home and to bring fruits, unsweetened juices, popcorn and raisins instead.".

Superintendent Everett Olsen says the ban on holiday sweets has nothing to do with being politically correct, rather, his motive is simply promoting a healthy lifestyle.

“We aren’t trying to take the Christmas out of Christmas. We’re not trying to take the enjoyment out of children’s lives. We’re just trying to act responsible,” he told WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Mike Macklin.
It seems that even Christmas isn't free of the toffee-nosed snobbery of the self-righteous. Because they, of course, are entirely perfect in their choices and restraint. Having fun and abandoning oneself to joyful things is just so common, isn't it?

There's still another week of this crap to go yet, too. Let's see what other miserable shite these morons have lined up before the 25th finally shuts their hideous traps, eh?


18 comments:

Anonymous said...

As on many topics, there is an apt quote from Henry Mencken -- "Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

They aren't going to spoil my Christmas, though. Oh, no. Every 10 minutes or so, I just imagine the whole lot of them boiling in chip fat and that cheers me up immeasurably.

nisakiman said...

Turkeys have rights too, you know...

Unknown said...

DP it used to be the obligatory drink driving campaigns and then, after the New Year,the 'work of your excess eating over the Christmas hols with some unknown celebrity and buy the vid' shite. Now they, the fuckin' tofu eaters, have taken over the world and want to deworm us over the festive season of things we indulge only once a year.

Merry fucking Christmas you haters of enjoyment, I hope you fucking die a horrible death.

(Sorry DP, I'm in a horrible mood tonight.)

Anonymous said...

Yes it's seasonal isn't it? ... Christmas crackers in the shops - cue 'research' on fire dangers.
I made that up but life overtakes satire all the time these days. Press release? The BBC will swallow it whole. Safety workers and junior ministers on Radio Four. Prolific calls on Radio Five phone-ins. Treble mineral waters all round. What did become of independent-thinking journalists? To be fair to them I don't think they're given the time or the authority to think objectively. It would probably be career suicide. I write as a long-retired news agency hack.

timbone said...

If 1000 boys and girls go out one night to have a drink, kebab, dance, smoke etc, then some of them will have an accident, either unintentional, self inflicted, or inflicted by a knobhead.

Let me for the sake of argument say 3%, which is of course 30 of them.

On a special night, 10,000 boys and girls go out for the same, this means that 300 of them will need medical or police assistance, (which they pay for with their tax and NI...well, most of them), this means more medics and police......

......hold on, I am using common sense, silly me.

Anonymous said...

Just as 1984 was meant to be a warning, not a page by page guide book, Monty Python was meant to be a comedy, not a serious effort by BBC and fake charities to take all the joy out of life and normalise what was beforehand satire and laughter at the ruling class. Today the ruling class has once again climbed on the holier than thou bandwagon and in all seriousness, it continues to make a fool out of itself. Future historians will have to look back on this as a gilded age of extreme prudism.

JuliaM said...

" Every 10 minutes or so, I just imagine the whole lot of them boiling in chip fat..."

I'm going with sunflower oil. It's healthier... ;)

Anonymous said...

We have seen this lot before,so no matter what the current excuses are, they might as well stop pretending.


When Christmas was illegal

"In 1650, a year after the execution of Charles I, a Puritan minister confidently asserted that, during the twelve days of Christmas, "more souls are sent head-long to hell than in all the rest of the year beside".

And, six years later, another preacher, regretting that people simply wouldn't give it up, insisted that "most of the national church do serve the devil on that day and the twelve days following".

He added that he saw his job as being to "beat the people off from this observation whereunto they feel themselves driven by a cursed thing within them"

"The formal announcement came in the summer of 1647 - the Year Zero of the English revolution, when anything seemed possible. While Levellers were spreading ideas of radical democracy in the New Model Army, and Diggers were experimenting with communism in the Surrey hills, parliament was flexing its executive muscle.

On 8 June came the terse announcement:
"Be it ordained, by the Lords and Commons in parliament assembled, that the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, and all other festival days commonly called Holy-days, be no longer observed within this kingdom of England."

"To conclude, I'll tell you news that's right,
Christmas was killed at Naseby fight:
Likewise then did die
Roast beef and shred pie."

So went a verse of a ballad that was sung to one of the best-known royalist tunes.
A favourite device was to have an ignored and dejected Father Christmas walking the joyless streets of English towns in which no one dared to welcome him."

Taylor then scorned the lengths to which the regime went in order to prevent any sign of seasonal celebration: "Their madness hath extended itself to the very vegetables, the senseless trees . . . holly, ivy, mistletoe, rosemary, bays, are accounted ungodly branches of superstition."
http://www.newstatesman.com/200012250051

Rose

Russ said...

"Oh, no! no, no, no, no, no! You are most definitely, categorically and absolutely not allowed to enjoy yourselves in the way that we used to. Nope. Stop it. Now!"

Hypocrites. The lot of 'em.

Anonymous said...

Supt. Olsen may help the cheeeeldren more by learning the correct use of the adverb 'responsibly' rather than the adjective 'responsible'.

Sam Duncan said...

Superintendent Olsen obviously doesn't know what “politically correct” means.

Anonymous Rose: Interestingly enough, that's why New Year is traditionally a much bigger deal in Scotland. They were successful in stamping out Christmas up here (it didn't really come back until the 1950s, believe it or not: Christmas Day was a normal working day for both my grandfathers, and only a half-holiday when my dad started work), so the revels simply transferred to a week later. The law of unintended consequences is hardly news to the banning brigade.

Anonymous said...

This was a popular, satirical song after the English Civil War:

http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/english/knowthis.htm

Amazing how contemporary it seems

Jay

Anonymous said...

Sam, thank you for that. I have always wondered why there seemed to be such a huge fuss over a change of calendar in Scotland, now I know.

You can't keep the humans down for long, we are as slippery as greased eels when necessary.


Jay

Thank you for the song, I am glad that there was an explanation that it was a song mocking the activities of the Roundheads at the bottom,I wondered what I was reading.

I agree, it does have a very contemporary feel.

"4. We'll put down Universities,
Where learning is profest,
Because they practise and maintain
The language of the Beast;
We'll drive the doctors out of doors,
And all that learned be;
We'll cry all arts and learning down,
And hey, then, up go we."

Rose

Anonymous said...

They should at least have had the decency to tell us the new rules of the game.

Post-Normal Science

"The traditional distinction between ‘hard’, objective scientific facts and ‘soft’, subjective value-judgements is now inverted.
All too often, we must make hard policy decisions where our only scientific inputs are irremediably soft.
The requirement for the “sound science” that is frequently invoked as necessary for rational policy decisions may affectively conceal value-loadings that determine research conclusions and policy recommendations.

In these new circumstances, invoking ‘truth’ as the goal of science is a distraction, or even a diversion from real tasks. A more relevant and robust guiding principle is quality, understood as a contextual property of scientific information."
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Post-Normal_Science

Rose

Anonymous said...

Ecological Integrity - Post-Normal Science - "Ecological Footprint" - Ethics - The Precautionary Principle

Abstract
" Present laws and regulations even in democratic countries are not sufficient to prevent the grave environmental threats we face. Further, even environmental ethics, when they remain anthropocentric cannot propose a better approach.
I argue that, taking in considerations the precautionary principle, and adopting the perspective of post-normal science, the ethics of integrity suggest a better way to reduce ecological threats and promote the human good globally"

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely practiced by the States according to their capabilities.
Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific uncertainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental damage.

This principle clearly indicates that, because of the gravity and the urgency of the many environmental problems and crises that face us, it is sufficient to be aware of the threats, even before the scientific certainty might be available,to indicate priority action on the part of policymakers.

This principle is introduced as an agent of change in order to counter the arguments of those who would appeal to scientific uncertainty, or to disagreements among experts, as a delaying tactic and as a reason to postpone action."
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2870733078384h2/

Rose

Anonymous said...

We wish you a lousy Christmas,
We wish you a lousy Christmas,
We wish you a lousy Chrismas,
And a dreadful New Year.

Foul tidings we bring,
To smokers and friends.

We wish you a lousy Christmas,
And a dreadful New Year.

Lyn said...

I saw on the news tonight a politician (or some such) going on about the Conservative MP who was seen at a stag party where the groom to be was dressed as a Nazi; he was saying how we fought the Nazis and won to become the great country we are today!

To be honest, I would rather be in Germany today than in this dictatorial state, most especially when the so called 'evidence' is so flimsy a 5 year old could pick enormous holes in it!

It comes to something, doesn't it, when the country that lost the war recovered before we did and is today a much stronger force to be reckoned with, politically and financially, than we are.

Who are the true winners of WW2? Not us, I think!

Sad that so many wasted their lives for what we have today. After all, the German people would have got rid of Hitler as soon, if not sooner, than we did!

rightofcentre said...

This morning I was listening to a discussion on R5L at around 04.30 (ain`t insomnia a b*tch?).
The topic that was being discussed - nuclear Armageddon, just the thing to brighten up the Holiday period, and set you up for a working day.
They actually gave the impression of enjoying remeinissing about waiting for the 3 minute warning warning to go off.
Some very weird people at the Beeb!