Quiet? I don't know the meaning of the word

Earlier today I retweeted @caitlinmoran because like a lot of people I follow, I don't always agree with her but I'm getting sick of the hate I see in my TL towards her & many others who're trying to effect change.

I don't quite agree with the Report Abuse button because it itself is open to abuse, but in the same breath I'm sick of the derogatory comments &/or threats of any degree made to all, including (but not exclusive to) women, minorities of any kind, atheists, agnostics, members of all religions, undecideds, transgender, transvestites, or whoever the fuck an individual may be.

I am all for the freedom of speech, even if the ideas etc. are anathema to me. If I wish someone to be silenced because their ideals make me sick to my stomach, then I should be silenced too. I didn't take part in yesterday's #TwitterSilence because despite my supporting its foundation, do not agree with being silenced because of vicious members of society wish people not to be equal.

In Orwell's Animal Farm*, those in power paid lip service to the idea that everyone is equal. That's not true in today's society & until it is, people trying to effect equality should not be silenced because those trying to prevent equality will not be silenced either.

I don't know what the answer is, and I doubt I ever will. A lot of people who are much cleverer than I could ever hope to be have written extensively on this subject. My thoughts are those which are not researched, terribly well thought-out or comprehensive. I don't write much about the important issues any more (not that I ever did with much dedication). But this past few weeks has driven me to it**. I hope I'll never do is lose sight of the problem and hope I never end up on the wrong side of history.

*English Literature GCSE, don't fail me now!

**now look what you made me do!

En Français

As many if you poor sods what done follow me on the twitters for a bit may've realised, that despite a tenuous grasp on the French language that makes Del Boy look fluent*, I regularly submit, for your delectation, choice tidbits from what appears in my timeline.

These include, but are not limited to, epithets, made-up words, adjectives, nouns, portmanteaus, verbs, Spoonerisms and even entire tweets du jour.

A few of you have even submitted tweets for my consideration, which misguidedly leads me to believe I am a comic genius.

*modest face*

Not ten minutes ago I logged on like the wanton twitter addict I am for my latest fix, to be greeted with a submission not just for tweet du jour, nor even tweet du semaine**, but tweet de l'année***.

I clicked like a mad, clicking thing and was greeted with one hell of a tweet. Not only does it contain a worthy entry for epithet du jour, but it lays into that most hated of species: TORIES! (The children! Won't someone think of the children?!)

Without further ado, I present to you, 2012's Tweet of the Year!

Oh, the person who submitted it? One @jodieohdoh. Follow her.

*Chaise longue, Raquel. Chaise longue.

**I totally had to Google that.

***but not that. Get me.

Gems of Wisdom: Chocolate

Wednesday 11th May 2011

While eating a Cadbury’s Picnic bar.

"Orgasmic. Is that a word? What does it mean? I know what one is..."

Gems of Wisdom: Rubbish

Tuesday 10th May 2011

Claiming something I said was rubbish

Colleague: "Gobswallop."
Me: "Godswallop? Don’t you mean codswallop?"
C: "No! Gobswallop!"
M: "Ah I thought you were saying GODswallop. Still, you mean codswallop, right?"
C: "No, the term's gobswallop!"
M: "Bless. No, it’s codswallop."
C: "No! It’s gobswallop!"
M: "It’s not, it’s cod, as in the fish. Codswallop."
C: "I’ve been saying gobswallop all my life! You’re wrong!"
M: "I’m not."

I then sent her an email with links to the search results from Google for both gobswallop and codswallop. Her version returns 4 hits. Codswallop returns at least 138,000 hits.

Gems of Wisdom: Introduction

In my position as a call centre monkey, I had the pleasure of working with a woman a few years younger than me. I have said, and she fully agreed with me, that she didn’t seem to have anything stopping her from speaking exactly what she was thinking at a given moment in time.

Sometimes a gem occurred as she was thinking out loud, and I had absolutely no input into the stream of consciousness. If a gem occurred as part of a conversation, the gem was written as a conversation.

Disclaimer: The subject of these posts has given me full permission to publish these excerpts from our conversations.

Gems of Wisdom: Swim away!

Tuesday 28th FebruaryTalking about her scuba diving classMe: "Are you going to learn to swim while you're on holiday?"Colleague "I can swim a little bit. (yawning) It's easier with the woo-ey things on"M: "The... the 'woo-ey' things?"C: "The webby things."M: "Oh! Webby."C: "Yeah. What are they called?"M: "Flippers."C: "Yeah, flippers. With them on I can go quite far."

Well ain't this just adorable!

Yesterday I was sat sitting staring blankly at the idiot box after a long and arduous day with my nose pressed firmly up against the corporate grindstone.

All of a sudden I was presented with a new advertisement which I hadn't seen before.

It took a moment to register some kind of emotional response in me, but when it did, I HOWLED with laughter. It's absurd, cute and completely addictive.

Enjoy.



(This post is in no way an endorsement of EDF Energy. But if they want to give me some cold, hard cash, I ain't saying non. Je voudrais le dosh, s'il vous plaît.)

Update: (finally) the second EDF poo advert which is also tres cute. You're welcome.

Processed Pork Products

Spammers. They're everywhere? (I mean, not literally. Else there'd be no room for anything else.)

I'm sure I'm not alone in being offered a wide variety of drugs, to refresh my banking details and more untoward subject matter. Those strike me as not willing to put the damned effort in.

However once in a while, an email arrives which, although clearly being nonsense, deserves to be highlighted for the pure comedy value. I received this gem last week. Enjoy!

Hello. How are you today?

I like a nice, polite spammer. Manners don't cost a thing.

Do you remember me? Not so long ago we met on a dating site, you gave me your e-mail.

I've never even visited a dating site, let alone registered with one.

I'm sorry about the little waiting to answer The most important thing that I came in contact with you. I'm looking for just new friends. For fun and companionship.

Harmless enough motive. UNLESS YOU WANT TO WEAR MY SKIN. o_O

My name is Viktoriya, I live in Saint Petersburg.

Ah, mother Russia! Wrap up warm, now.

I am 27 years, and because of my work, I have very little free time to communicate with friends in real life.

Employers just want blood. I'm with you, sister!

So I decided to make friends on the Internet. If you want to make friends with me, I'd be happy to get your answer. In this letter I send you my photo, so you can see other signs of me.

Signs of you? I'm not going to track you, dear. I'm not Chris Packham.

If you are not interested in my friendship, please, let me know about it anyway.

Ah, you're alright love. I've got the voices in my head for company.

And none of us will spend our precious time is wasted. I wish you good mood and good day! After all, our mood is the key to our success.

And there was me thinking the key to success was hard work and all that gubbins.

I am writing to you from your work e-mail,

You... you're writing to me from MY work email? How the fuck did you manage that? WITCHCRAFT!

Answer me on my private email: vikasupina@yahoo.com

Bossy boots.

Viktoriya

Bless 'em, they do try.
Just not hard enough.

Eee, tha’s reet classy, like

What’s the best invention in the world?

ALCOHOL!

What’s the best idea in the world?

DRINKING IT!

When’s a good idea to drink the best invention in the world?

ON A SCHOOL NIGHT!

Oh wait...

Ah, Homer Simpson.
The classiest of classy drinkers

Disclaimer: Today’s blog is not borne of me classily drinking Bailey’s from a coffee mug yesterday. Oh no. *innocent face*

The Futility of Politics

A few years ago I couldn't give a toss about politics. Even after I reached voting age and was determined to use my right (people have died to give me the chance to have my say) I still wasn't at all fascinated. To date I have always voted Liberal Democrat and could be heard to say that "they were the best of a bad bunch".

I started to give a miniscule rat's arse about the policies of those whom we elect to be in power roughly five years ago. These people, who were all but faceless to me, are the ones we put in a job with a salary in excess of £50,000 and whom we trust to make the right choices for us as a population.

Then Twitter threw itself into my path. I signed up without really giving it a second thought. It was another way to keep in touch with online friends. Soon I upgraded to a smartphone which really started my tweeting frenzy which hasn't really let up in the two years since.

I've used Twitter has a place to have a ruddy good old rant about myriad subjects. It's a forum away from The Book of Faces where a lot of my relatives can see my status updates, and gives me the chance to spout my liberal tirades away from the more right-wing tendencies of certain members of my family.

As is the nature of time and its passing, the 2010 General Election hove into sight and I leapt into the fray behind Nick Clegg without a backwards glance. I followed his account, my then-MP's account, Chris Huhne's and the Winchester candidate's, these latter two being the next closest constituencies to mine.

I fully believed that the Lib Dems stood a jolly good chance of getting their most decent showing for absolutely ages and that David Cameron was an abhorrent windbag who wouldn’t be able to fight very well against the living memory of 18 years of his bloody party before Tony Blair.

Okay, so Cameron didn’t win an outright majority, though to listen to him prattle on you’d think so – uh, Mr Cameron, if you did, why the hell did you have to form a coalition government? Oh yeah. BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T GET A MAJORITY OF SEATS.

For the week following the election, I had great hope that a coalition would be formed between Labour, the Lib Dems and the few others here and there that would’ve created a majority of seats. After all, wasn’t everything Mr Clegg pointing towards his party’s policies being of a similar lefty bent as Labour’s? Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister was a much more palatable prospect than a bloody right-wing, privileged toff in No. 10.

I’m a damned fool. Of course Clegg got in bed with Cameron. After all, the Lib Dems are SUCH a match with the Tories. Aren’t they? Yes. I was shocked, I was absolutely dismayed when the news of a deal broke, and hated the sight of that press conference in the garden. I remained somewhat hopeful though. We were all told in the news that there were deal breakers in the formation of the coalition government; that the Lib Dems would temper the heavy-handedness of the Tory policies.

Bollocks.

We’re coming up on two years down the line and not a week has passed without some new Cameron-backed policy being trumpeted in the right wing press, derided in the lefty papers or sneaked out as quietly as possible because it’s total lunacy.

And what do we see of the Lib Dems? In recent weeks, not much at all of Mr Clegg (or the spineless wonder I now believe is a more fitting, if not to say polite, name for him). And of the others in the cabinet? Seemingly wheeled out when a boorish Tory needs someone to take the flack for some rotten pile of codswallop.

We’ve had, among others:
Two sets of riots
Strike action
Job cuts
Rising unemployment
The economic recovery seems to be resident in the same realm as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny
Local budget cuts leading to the closure of libraries and the withdrawal of services
Cuts to benefits for the most vulnerable members of society
Effective cuts to the budget of the BBC
Reams of rhetoric telling us there is no money for any of this
An Olympics which is costing billions yet which we are told ad nauseam will plough even more back into the economy
A royal wedding which was also a drain on the public coffers and which we were also told would generate a lot of revenue (but the extra bank holiday we were given has since been blamed by Gideon as the reason for another quarter of poor growth)
The potential sale of forests
A bible being given to every school pupil (even though ‘there’s no money’)
And the effective privatisation of the NHS, an institution which has seen the improvement in the health of the less well off in this country, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.

How are the Lib Dems tempering the Tory’s running roughshod over those of us (and there are a LOT of us) who were not born with silver spoons jammed up our arses? And with Mr Cameron giving Alex Salmond even more firepower to progress the split of Scotland from the UK, I just can’t see how the rest of us can fight off further Tory governments without the aid of Labour constituencies in that fine country. In my constituency, Labour really don’t stand a chance, it’s either LD or Tory.

So right now, I can’t help but think, what's the bloody point? Why should I care anymore? I’ve always used my vote but look where that’s got us. I’m thoroughly ashamed I appear to have wasted it on the Liberal Democrats because of the government we’ve been landed with thanks to Mr Spineless-Wonder, yet had I voted Labour that would’ve been wasted too. Plus, on the day of the election, how was I to know that Spineless was even more of a lying shit that I assumed many politicians to be already?

So tell me. What is the bloody point in caring anymore? Because I don’t fucking well know.

You will never find a more wretched
hive of scum and villany.