Nam

Luckily an opportunity to d my bollocks has come along right at a time where I was wondering whether or not I should set fire to some money or throw it in the bin.

I shall only be wagering on the first four races today as they're the only ones I'll get to see as the last three clash with nap time.

So anyway, I've invested wildly in Yankees, singles, and what not in as follows:

Supreme Novices - Midnight Game

Arkle - Al Ferof

Speciality handicap chase - Hold on Julio

Champion Hurdle - Hurricane Fly

Good luck with all your bets.

We can see you sneaking out

Harry Redknapp in films..

Escape from Alcatraz

The Shawshank Redemption

The Great Escape

Escape to Victory

Scum

Shut up FA

England's FA, I know you read my blog so will you please shut the fuck up about this poppy wearing business. Jeeeezoooos Christ if it means that much to you just wear the damn things against Spain anyway and pay the fine or just cancel the game altogether.

Why are they making such a fuss about this? It's just a symbol..it's not essential these things are worn. There are other ways of remembering and recognising and honouring the dead. It's a fair enough rule. If the England team get to wear poppies then other nations will have to be allowed to honour their war dear in a similar fashion too.

What if some other country wants to drench their team in the blood of their fallen comrades or wear ceremonial swords or something the Japs for example might want to do? Where would it all end?

If it sounds like I'm not taking this too seriously it's because I'm not. How hysterical people get about poppy wearing is just pathetic, depressing navel-gazing. We're at a point now where people wear these poppies not to honour the dead from the World Wars, but just so they can be seen to be honouring the dead. It is epiphenominal (never thought I'd get to use that word) of the syrupy shows of public emotion that have become acceptable.

I think we're at a stage now wear the British Legion might have to end the Poppy wearing tradition as it has completely lost it's gravitas. Wearing a poppy has become an entity in itself rather than a symbol of something.

There should be no obligation to wear one. The people who fought in those wars did so to protect our right to choose. And if people choose not to wear a poppy and pay their respects in other ways then fine. It's also fine if they choose not to pay their respects. The lack of respect comes in not knowing you ought to do one thing or another.

This is a completely empty gesture. The England team won't have any idea what the fuss is about anyway. John Terry for example, will just be keen to get the game over with so he can go out and urinate in someone's drink. And Sepp Blatter is just a senile old duffer who hasn't got even the slightest clue about reality.

If the FA feels so strongly about this, why not leave a poppy on every seat? Too much hassle is why, which means they don't really care about this at all, they just want to be seen to be caring. And cancelling the game would be too expensive.

Like people who travel for miles to leave flowers at the location a small child from Doncaster or some other place was murdered, or furious cro-magnon men chasing after police vans carry convicted paedophiles, these people don't believe they have to actually care about those who have suffered, so long as we think they do.

It's all very odd. I actually blame Gazza.

Sigh: A pillock yesterday

WSOP Mein Event

Nice enough chap

Squarehead Pius Heinz has won the WSOP main event and with it the $8.5m first prize (which is approximately €13 by the time the exchange rate and Pius' bank has gotten hold of it thanks to Greece) and there are a few things we need to discuss about this victory so let's get to it shall we. Let's not spare the horses.

Now, he seems a pleasant enough chap. But I have to say I am always unnerved, as I think we all are, when individual Germans are successful in sport as it gives the Teutonic collective sinister ideas.

Especially when the final push, as it were, involves defeating an eastern European nation as was the case here when Pius eventually rolled over Martin Staszko from the Czech Republic echoing Hitler's Panzar tank division's inexorable occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938.

OK technically poker isn't a sport and has a tiny audience in Germany compared to football, Ze X-Factor and Strictly Come Schuhplatter, but it's popular enough to ignite that fire of desire to world domination that is inherent in all of the Bosch.

I can only hope that the fact that we're all doomed and on the brink of financial collapse will mean news of Pius' wictory vill go unnoticed as the Germen press, unlike our own, have not been refrained from reporting the coming of a depression that made the one in the 1930's look like a party made up of a physical manifestation of people's spam email - which is essentially what Las Vegas is really.

As for the poker itself, it might be that I'm just a cranky old man, but given how much money these people are playing for and given how taxing on the mind the game can be at that level, I wonder if ESPN, the WSOP people and Harrahs have really thought the way they stage the final table through properly.

For the purposes of TV they have turned it into a massive game show. People in the crowd shouting and cheering, pouring beer over each other they're not supposed to have and composing appalling chants which are neither clever or funny - no surprise these were coming from the Germans and 'mercans.

I'm wondering in fact if the players don't deserve a bit more respect from the organisers than that? I know TV has its demands and really the first thing that is sacrificed when they get involved in sports is the purity of the sport, but I think their modus operandi, their mantra, that loud is good, big is better, is wrong.

You don't need people screaming utterly banal bullshit to create an atmosphere. Tension creates an atmosphere. Total silence can be deafening. Poker creates these things all by itself. Have these people not seen any horror movies?

What I'm saying is, I reckon their approach to broadcasting this specific poker final table with it's near $10m first prize should have been more classy tuxedo wearing deathly silent chess and less something that involves Graham Norton on a Saturday night.

Poker needs thought, it needs concentration, it needs conversation between the players, it needs evil stare downs. This event needs more respect. The game itself can create it's own atmosphere. You don't need to try and artificially create one with twats in silly t-shirts who are only there anyway because they hope their guy will buy them something afterwards.

This is what happens when you give something valuable to children, they ruin it. It's a rule everyone knows just like the one about not running with scissors, although to be fair I'm fine with children running with scissors. I'm fine with them drinking bleach too, but anyway I digress.

Poker has been hijacked by children and they have ruined it. They have turned a beautifully atmospheric, nuanced, complex, analytical game and turned it into a weird subculture, with it's own language, uniform and identifiers.

Unless you're a pasty, sunken-eyed, hooded, computron boffin who hasn't been outside for more than twenty minutes this year, can't drive a car or work an oven but can grind twenty tables at once online for eighteen hours a day, the game is dead to you.

I blame the sandal wearing hummus eaters who insist children should be respected and treated as equals. Bearded sexually dysfunctional liberals who think discipline is oppression and would rather let a delinquent stab them to death and steal their wallet than call the police.

I hark back to the days of David Copperfield, the Empire and fighting wars against tribal armies armed only with bits of wood. An age where children were shoved up chimneys and made to feel lucky about it.

If an urchin had found the temerity to four bet shove his elder light in those days he should be lucky if he escaped with his life. Now he gets $8.5m for it. It's enough to make you weep.

Picture of the day

www.eureferendum.com

The calm before the storm

I've just been handed a dossier on the Euro-zone economic crisis from my foreign correspondent, a marmoset called Dudley. He was the first to report from the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that David Hasslehoff would be performing live and earlier that same year was asked to hold the lunch box of a Chinese student who then went off to stare down a line of tanks depicted in that iconic photograph during the massacre of Tiananmen Square. In short, his information is to be taken seriously, and it confirms what we've been saying on the blog for some time now; there's a storm coming, we're doomed and it's every man for himself.


As we speak the CIA in the US of States have concerns of a military putsch in Greece as a consequence of its inevitable bankruptcy. Having organised and financed the Greek coup d'état in the 60s they ought to be able to spot the signs.

The consequences of which will ultimately draw the entire continent of Europe into a war. Unfortunately for us we do not have a Winston Churchill waiting in the wings to see us through this conflict. We have David Cameron who is currently in Ibiza with Pete Tong. And of course even if we did have a Churchill, with all the classic timing of a $5 Rolex sold by a Puerto Rican on 5th Avenue, we have dismantled our Armed forces anyway.

The long and the short of the situation is as follows; there is a natural order to things in life and a united European super state runs completely contrary to it. And when we as humans have the impertinence to assume we can run against the tide in this way it always ends in disastrous violent failure.

Thusly; Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal are to be jettisoned from the Euro and adopt their former currencies. Other nations will also fall by the wayside causing a level of economic hopelessness in those states, not to mention awful rebel folk songs, that can only be assuaged by violent campaigns engineered by military juntas.

Two blocs of nations will become established across the European continent. Essentially any nation with a laissez-faire attitude to paying tax whose citizens spend most of the afternoon asleep will form one vast army easily identifiable by their Russian weapons and the plumes of feathers on the enormous hats worn by the officers in the tradition of all useless armies.


The second bloc of nations will mainly consist of France, Germany, Turkey and Great Britain (who we understand have promised to provide refreshments in lieu of a fighting contribution).

As war is waged in Europe the financial markets across the globe will melt-down and a mad scramble to hoard hard assets especially Gold would begin. We of course have no gold as Gordon Brown sold it all because he is a genius.

The American dollar briefly and the Chinese Yen would then be the only currencies worth more than the paper they were printed on. The entire globe save for China and America would begin starving and out of desperation a third world war would begin.

China having roughly 2 billion people located around the world, would use the European conflict to begin their campaign to seize control of the entire planet and would overwhelm everyone within approximately eight days. America would enter secret negotiations with China promising them anything they wanted just please don't hit us in the face.

China hits the 'mercans hard in the face and now owns the world. Cutlery is withdrawn from all shops except spoons and anyone caught eating with anything but two sticks is removed for re-education in heaven. Everyone is forced to wear pyjamas at all times and dentistry is outlawed. Mass starvation purges almost 3 billion people from the world's population.


What happens to the few who survive under Chinese rule is anyone's guess. But slavery I imagine will be viewed as a life of luxury only a very privileged few will get to enjoy. I personally cannot contemplate this future without some wee leaking out.

You'll have noticed none of this has been discussed in the main stream media. The printed press preferring to focus on who Ryan Giggs has been sleeping with instead. There is a history of our media ignoring approaching epochal events like wars.

They refused to even acknowledge the second world war had begun until Buckingham Palace had been shelled. Today however we have t'internet and lucky for us we do as now, thanks to me, we have just enough time to evacuate the area.

I'm moving to Japan where I plan to set up a school teaching young girls how to wrestle. I suggest you do the same. This is it people. It's happening. It's every man for himself.

Good luck everyone.

Telegraph: Shortage of RAF pilots for Libya as defence budget cuts bite

Telegraph dude who clearly can't be arsed to actually do his job writes there's no pilots to do the job in Libya:

But when you get to the last two paragraphs, the bit where he hopes most people have stopped reading we find out that this is actually bullshit:

Air Marshal Dick Garwood, Deputy Commander-in-Chief Operations, said there was no shortage of pilots. “We have enough aircraft and people to carry out all the tasks placed on us,” he said.

MoD sources suggested that the Libyan conflict vindicated the decision to retain the Tornado over the Harrier as there were more pilots in the pool and it had a greater reconnaissance and strike capability.

Diplomatic crisis breaks out on twitter

I've only been tweeting as Belgium for a day and already diplomatic relations with North Korea are breaking down. It began this evening when I noticed this tweet from North Korean.


I immediately countered with this:

Hopefully by Tuesday I'll have that nuclear exchange I was talking about in my previous post.

Apocalypse later

"NO I shan't do that you silly man": James Blunt ignoring orders in 1999

James Blunt saved the world in 1999 apparently by averting World War III. I don't know whether this is a good thing or not, given how things have turned out post-Bush, but I suppose we must thank him.

A nutty US General who'd clearly watched too many war films ordered him and his troop, backed up by the Parachute Regiment, to attack a bunch of 200 Russian soldiers who had occupied an airfield because he wanted it for himself.

Officer Blunt respectfully declined as he felt NATO forces attacking Russian soldiers might have consequences for the future of man kind. Fortunately the head cheese of the British army General Sir Mike Jackson, who most certainly does not care for the smell of napalm in the morning, was listening in and alarmed by the language being used - "destroy," "attack," "Commie bastards etc" - suggested perhaps just encircling the airfield might be less confrontational and the Russians would then have to "share" the airfield as they would run out of rations in a couple of days.

Thus World war III was averted, phew...however apparently the Parachute Regiment guys were in a foul mood for the rest of the tour. Jolly good show though, I like James Blunt he's a funny chap and good egg, conversely the United States military is a danger to the entire galaxy.

A standard US General yesterday.