Andy's Glasses

How excited can you get over HS2? On a scale from: ‘so what?’ to ‘oh, a new train; wake me up when something interesting happens’. Estimates for this project range from £60billion to infinity. And beyond. But worst of all; it won’t be completed until 2030. Which, allowing for delays, legal issues, union business, the deportation of most of the work force when Farage becomes Prime Minister in 2024, probably 2050 by the time the first High Speed (2) trains start their official delays. Its Hinkley Point all over again. You’re building something that will be obsolete by the time its finished. If it gets finished. Its a government, infrastructure vanity project. Which is fine, we need those for jobs and morale. But do something better. Piss away our money on things we can get excited about.

Like Boom jets. They look like Concorde, they smell like Concorde (aviation fuel does that), they have long noses, like Concorde, they don’t take many passengers, like Concorde, but they’re fast. Wonderfully, unashamedly, obscenely, carbon emittingly fast. New York in 3hrs (and 15minutes if we’re being pedantic, and we should, we really should). LA to Sydney, 6.5 hours instead of the current 15. That’s almost as wonderful as cutting half an hour off the journey from Stoke to Newport Pagnell, as long as there’s no leaves on the track.

Boom is the company and Virgin are their main investors. Not sure they’ll ever make any money, just like Concorde, but at least its hi-tech and the French aren’t involved. Because the plane will only take 40 passengers. Seated in single rows so they can all ‘look out of the windows’. Like they have a choice? Concorde took 100 at a time and made a year-on-year loss, think how much this can lose? The potential is limitless. But let me know when it reaches 60 billion quid and I’ll start to worry on Branson’s behalf and do the ‘I told you so’ thing about HS2.

So it won’t be cheap to fly. And its all about weight. To fly at 1400mph (100mph faster than Concorde) the plane is made of carbon fibre instead of aluminium, to cut the weight. Fat people will be banned from using it. I made that up. Obviously they won’t be as that would be discriminatory against Americans. Not sure what they’ll do about luggage, maybe send it later by HS2. So you arrive in New York 2 hours before you left London (time change effect) but your bags arrive Thursday week.

I’m not suggesting that the millions of people using trains every week shouldn’t have a better experience. I’m just not convinced HS2 will provide anything different. Build a Superloop; the technology is there. Build something for the future. This is no longer the year 1876. Robert Stephenson is dead. Get over it.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

“Chief branded a racist, fascist, misogynist”, ran the top of the page in the Times. Oh, they’re talking about Trump again. But no, this was Steve Bannon, Trump’s newly appointed chief strategist. And again, a man with no political experience. Unless you count running a right-wing web-site as ‘political experience’. The site, ‘Brietbart News’ is the digital version of the Ku Klux Klan. According to some. According to the site, it represents the ‘alt-right’. Whatever the fuck that means.

The implication is ‘alternative’, of ‘not-quite the full Adolph Hitler’, of ‘racism light’. Its the Faragesque sanitised version, the ‘nationalism in smart suits’ which makes ‘immigration’ as its main focus and then blurs it to existing immigrants. Which in America, unless you are a descendent of Cochise or the Sioux Nation, you are the ‘son’ of immigrants.

Bannon has been accused of being a ‘white supremacist’. A hateful and all-encompassing term which normally brings to mind swastika tattoos and cropped hair on death row. But it comes in many guises. Even in that of a fat ex-Navy, ex-Goldman Sacks, Seinfeld producer like Steve Bannon.

He’s also, allegedly, an anti-semite. Which is not unheard of at that end of the political spectrum; they’re pretty much anti-everything. But Trump’s dearest and favourite child, Ivanka, is now Jewish after her conversion when she married Jewish hubby.

So if we now remove the 90% press sensationalism, the liberal media over-reaction, the anti-anything-Trump sentiment currently raging across the States, you’re still left with someone in the President’s ear who is, say, just 5% Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK. That’s ok; surely???

Trump has many more people to appoint. He promised, pre-election, that he wouldn’t use those same old political staffers that are part of the ‘old establishment’. Then he appoints Reince Priebus as his Chief of Staff. He may sound like someone who taught at Hogwarts but in fact he is as Republican establishment as you can get.

Trump doesn’t have enough family to fill the 10,000 jobs at the White House, so he has to use ‘outside people’. Obviously white people.

Its very exciting. In a scary kind of way.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

So the movie ‘Arrive’ had to be seen, and was. Job done. Food for thought. And without ‘spoiling’ it, its about aliens arriving from another planet. Not aliens from another country, though the questions raised are roughly the same in both cases.

Do you come in peace? (ET, Close Encounters) Or are you here for dinner? (War of the Worlds).

These massive suppositories arrive, made of ‘unknown material’, tougher than teflon, harder than steel, lighter than feathers, 150 metres high. Usual sci-fi stuff. ‘From another planet’. Inside are the ‘aliens’. They look like Squiddly Diddly. All tentacles and squirting ink, floating/hovering in the mist. Big fuckers. Calamari City. And 12 of these ‘pods’ landed in various places around the world. Oooohhhhhh.

So you have various nations working out the issues. Together. Ish. As is the nature of nations. Trying to communicate with their own visiting squids as best they can. Which is not easy as the visitors only speak in ‘ink circles’ and we use words. Even ‘google translate’ can’t handle that. But fortunately for planet Earth, Amy Adams, linguist exrta-ordinaire, can. Or could. For the purposes of the movie. And Amy has deep love for these deep-sea-looking things, you can tell. She trusts them. They bond. Whereas the Chinese pod-squad don’t. There’s distrust. Which rapidly flows to the Russians and Sudan. Who all want to attack the aliens. Squidicide.

At which point, if there was any doubt, you know you are watching an American movie. ‘They’ are brutal and violent; ‘we’ are calm and prepared to ‘speak’, in an inky way. The squiddleys have almost become less of an issue than the damned Chaaarrrrnese and Russkis.

Yet it remains an interesting point. Aliens arrive; what do you do? The great body of this planet’s science fiction history would suggest a 90% chance that the aliens would want to kill us, eat us or destroy the planet. But that’s only because those films sell better than the ones when we all get on and love each other, like Cocoon.

And how would Donald Trump respond? He’s a real ‘shoot-first-ask-questions-later’ kind of a dude and he calls Mexicans ‘aliens’. What would he do when negotiating with a squid-thing?? Just as important; what would the squid-thing think of humans if Trump was their only example. It’d think we’re all loud, stupid and orange.

Live long and prosper

A xxxx

The thing about Cockney Rhyming Slang is that its not a proper ‘thing’. Its not a language. Its a nothing really other than a way for chirpy cockneys (read: low-class West Ham supporting thugs) to appear chirpy, clever and enigmatic. Obscure. The synonym for which is ‘dim’ but that’s not where I’m going. I have no fucking clue where I’m going, in fact, and seldom do.

“I took a butcher’s outsaaard an’ it was well parky so I grabbed me titfa, ran down the apples and…”

What a load of bollocks. It sounds like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Bob Hoskins in virtually anything. Strained. Too much effort. And scummy.

The point is though that its a bit of a game. Which is the bit I like. Because you never say “‘old on, got a call comin’ through on me dog’n’bone”. You just say ‘dog’. The game bit is someone either has to know that dog’n’bone is phone, or work it out. Either from the context (ie a phone ringing loudly; even real Cockneys probably wouldn’t miss that) or because they’ve heard it before. Its not like there’s a limited number of accepted and definitive ‘rhymings’ listed on the sacred wall of the bus stop at Bethnal Green and everything else is wrong. You can make it up on the spot. As long as someone else can work out what you mean. Otherwise the whole, kind’a, ‘communication’ bit of language is lost. ‘He’s off for a quick Jodrell’, like Spurs Paul.

Many years ago a guy I worked with ran into work, looking anxious, and, tearing off his coat, said: ‘I’m busting for an Ivana’. I paused, as he headed toilet-wards, and then laughed until the tears… yeah, it was funny. I’d worked it out. Ivana Trump: ‘dump’. Fabulous.

Thus I’d now like to propose before the approval committee, to amend this tres amusante phrase so that in future, if you need to take a shit, you’re simply off for a ‘president’. All in favour? Say pork pie.

Went to see Arrival last night. Fab movie. And total, absolute and irredeemable mind-fuck. It took all the way out, the walk to the car and most of the way home before we’d sorted it all out. By which time my eyes were bleeding. No spoilers here. Go see it. Amazing Amy Adams. That’s not rhyming slang. To my knowledge.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

America is up in arms. Some bastards voted in a moronic, egotistical, racist, misogynist orange thing to be their next president. Who’d’a thought? So they’re protesting, rioting, last night in Portland, Oregon, there was even a shooting.

3,000 miles away from Trump in New York. Because if you think about it logically, these people are not protesting against Trump. They’re protesting against the minority (because Clinton actually polled 53% of the vote; but ‘college systems’, like our own constituency based one, does that) who voted for the Tosser.

So they’re angry with their neighbours, their bus-drivers, their teachers, students, bosses, workers, with everyone who voted for Trump. He was the man who was ‘up there’, because democracy does that. But the hate is directed at those who give him victory.

And this is very very divisive. Like Scotland was horribly divided after their referendum. Like Britain still is over Brexit. Trump realised this, which is why he’s suddenly being really nice about Hillary and Obama and all the others he’s been trying to imprison for the last 18 months.

There is a theory that Trump only wanted ‘the victory’, not the actual job. He doesn’t want to be CEO of the USA in anything other than as a figurehead. He said that the VP would do most of the domestic and foreign ‘shit’, leaving Don to ‘make America great again’ (please ask for no details on that). So maybe Don either realises his own limitations (unlikely) or he can’t be bothered with the boring stuff. Either way, Mike Pence is gonna be a busy guy.

And there’s another good person. He must be. He’s an evangelical Christian. Oh joy. I love an evangelical anything. But that does come with a few assurances. Not altogether good ones. He’ll hate gay stuff. All of it. Burn in hell forever, kind of hate. He’ll be so anti-abortion that you have to worry about any ‘choice’ that may remain after a few years. He’ll love guns. I don’t know why, he’ll quote ‘an eye for an eye’ and the right to defend, where really he should be ‘turning the other cheek’ (though getting shot in the bum is apparently very painful) and adhering to ‘thou shalt not kill’. And would be if Colt weren’t paying all the Republican party wages.

But he’ll be good on Israel. Evangelicals luuuuuurrrrve Israel. But they, like their leader, hate Muslims. I’m not sure what the Bible says about Mexicans but we’ll find out, for sure. The bible is nothing if not very accommodating to interpretation. As has been proved by Apartheit, by ISIS, by Hitler.

So I’m not panicking. I don’t even live in America (thank Trump) and in the words of the prophets, ‘it is what it is’. Let’s see what happens.

Yours (naively?) optimistically

A xxxx

There are, currently, 75 outstanding lawsuits against Donald Trump. He may become the first President-Elect to have to go to court and defend himself and his companies. Will this affect Don’s Supreme Court choices? Will he choose judges who were kind to him? He’s unlikely to choose Judge Gonzalo Curiel from San Diego, who Trump called ‘a Mexican who won’t be able to judge fairly because of his hispanic heritage’. Even though the judge is from Indiana. Which may sound a bit ‘ethnic’, a little ‘tomahawk and teepee’, but is, at this time, part of the USA.

More importantly, Theresa May was the 12th world leader to receive a phone call from DT yesterday. After Saudi Arabia. Egypt. South Korea. Israel. Even fucking Ireland got a call before we did. Even Mexico. After all he’s said about that fine nation and its people.

But heh, I can’t be all doom and gloom. I would normally say; whatever happens, we’ll survive. But in Trump’s case that may not be so true. He does tend to act or speak first and think much, much later. If at all. But he’s the one we (a big ‘we’) have got and we can only see what happens in the fullness of time. Nuclear holocaust or not.

Meanwhile I was accused, just last night, of being rather ‘narrow’ in my view of football. Of being a little ‘one-sided’, blinkered, even ‘parochial’!!!! in the way I see the beautiful game. Basically, the gripe was that I never mention Crystal Palace. Well there you are, Malcolm, I done it.

The fact is that we (as in ‘we football fans’) all see all events of the game filtered through the very powerful lens of our own preferred team. I try to kerb this tendency as much as possible, to remain impartial and as objective as I can. But fail miserably. In fact, I fail very happily. I love that failure, its one of my best failures (of very very many; speak to Mel for the full list).

So when I read that ‘England really need Harry Kane, even though he’s not fully fit’, my national pride and love of my country lead me to think: THEY CAN FUCK OFF AND LEAVE HIM OUT SO HE CAN GET FIT FOR THE NEXT SPURS MATCH. PLAY SODDING ROONEY!

And every result I see is analysed for its impact on my team. I can’t help it. Its a disease. And alas, as poor Crystal Palace have as much effect on Spurs as does Ed Balls in Strictly, I ignore both. For which I would apologise, if I was a better person. But I’m not, I’m me. A Spurs fan.

If anyone else would like me to mention their third-rate, non-league, Sunday football, Hackney Marshes type team, just send £5 to the Tottenham Hotspur benevolent fund and I’ll happily slag them off.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

In bridge you play your hand in spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds or no-trumps. Last night, during a particularly challenging rubber, I decided to call ‘no-trumps’, a ‘clinton’. In honour of…

and now I’m bored with it. Not bridge, never. But ‘that’. Its over. Thank fuck for that.

If you want to travel to Stoke (no idea why you would, other than for football; but that’s the place they chose in the paper) the train will get you there in 1 hour 20 mins. Once we’ve ‘invested’ (read: ‘pissed away’) the 70/80/90 billion quid on the proposed HS2 (high speed railway), that time will come down to just one hour. Giving you 20 minutes extra time to enjoy the pleasures of that fair city. Phah.

If you go by ‘hyperloop’, it will take 12 minutes. The 400 miles between LA and San Fran (that’s more like it; give us glamour, give us cool, fucking Stoke!) would take just half an hour.

This ‘thing’ was kind of invented by the Galileo of our times, Elon Musk. The paypal dude who went on to create Tesla cars and space rockets and other really cool stuff. But after working it out he just put the idea ‘out there’ for others to use. What a mensch.

A ‘hyperloop’ is a massive tube that sits on stilts. And inside it there are pods in which people can travel at 760mph through the vacuum tube. It is, apparently, a cross between ‘Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table’. Basically, the pods are not propelled but more ‘fired’ through the tube. And being a vacuum there’s no air to slow you down or create friction. Or, errr, breathe. But I’m sure they’ll work that out. And because the tube is on stilts, you don’t need to spend billions and billions flattening hundreds of miles of ‘track’.

The first one is being built now. To run between our two favourite Emirates; Dubai and Abu Dhabi. 78 miles, 12 minutes. Be completed in 2020 by a Danish company called B.I.G.

I’m going. Having never visited the uber-luxurious culture-void of the tackiest most superficial place in the world (other than South Manchester, and I’ve never visited there either) I will go to Dubai in 2020, just to have a go on the hyperloop. Speed of sound. Mach 1. And me. Oh yeahhhhhh.

Happy Thursday. Now I’m getting on the Tube (6mph; 6 miles in 34 minutes)

A xxxx

That was the phrase that greeted me on The Godson’s facebook post this morning. Its brilliant. But requires a little thought. Just a little. In fact its much too clever for the Godson to have conjured it up himself but I’m just very proud he copied all 5 words without making a spelling mistake.

Donald Trump is the new President of the Unaaarted States of Ameeeeericaah.

Will Americans be subject to the same border control restrictions to the UK as the Poles, the Romanian pick-pockets and the middle-east boat-people? As they flock from their homes to avoid what will follow?

Though in his ‘acceptance speech’ this morning he was very up-beat. And he intends to make America prosperous. That’s unusual. Get people in jobs (building walls), tighten security (lynch mobs searching out Mussslims or anyone who might be or might one day become, Mussslims). He’s going to create jobs, prosperity, infra-structure, wealth, work and regular visits from Santa Claus. Its so easy what needs to be done; its amazing no previous prez-to-be had ever thought about it. Then it turned into the barmitzvah speech he never had, or the Grammy-winning speech he never gave, as he thanked all the lovely people that he’s spent the last 18 months annihilating in public.

Hillary? She’s been banging on about the ‘glass ceiling’, making it all about whether America is ‘ready for a woman president’. But this result wasn’t about ‘a woman president’, it was about ‘that woman president’. If it was Michelle Obama (praise her saintly soul) we’d have been listening to an acceptance speech rap this morning instead.

But more importantly: HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY’RE DOING TO TOBLERONE???? Its a crime against… against me. I love Toblerone. And chocolate, as we know, is not about what it made from so much as the ‘mouth-fill’. Which is why a Cadburys Flake tastes different from a Freddo. Same chocolate, different mouth-fill. Its about the texture. And they’re fucking about with Toblerone. Damned Swiss. I bet FIFA are involved. Either by corruption or by deciding that old, proper Toblerone was ‘too much a political statement’ for their fragile little minds to cope with.

What an awful day this is becoming…

Happy (??) Doomsday

A xxxx

Someone is now planning another lawsuit over Brexit. Cos we really need another one. The one we have isn’t really enough trouble that civil war is now imminent and the entire judiciary is about to be sent to a gulag in Hartlepool until they can ‘learn to get the right answers’.

Now someone is intending to demand another referendum (NOOOOOOOO!!!! ANYTHING BUT THAT, ANYTHING!!!!) because of false claims made by both camps during the pre-vote debacle. Mainly by the Leavers but both sides stretched the truth way beyond the point where it had any truth left in it.

£365million A DAY TO GO TO THE NHS IF WE LEAVE!!!! Oh fuck off. But that kind’a thing.

So because of these misleading (to the electorate) distortions, the vote has no validity.

As if MPs are honour-bound to be honest. They should be, but they’re not. The only ‘check’ in place is the other side. If they think claims are wrong or totally exaggerated they can say so and use it as a rod to beat the enemy with.

And then I heard a fantastic statistic. Not that I believe in anyone’s statistics unless I know who’s paying for it. But this seemed valid. As I heard it spoken by a comedian on a current affairs quiz show. Can’t be more significant than that, surely?

They’ve been monitoring every word spoken by Clinton and Trump (haven’t we fucking all) and have calculated that Hillary runs at 24% true statements. Which apparently, and rather disgustingly, is perfectly average at the hustings. Trump runs at 4%. And that includes stating his name, rank and serial number.

America is all wrong for us, time-wise. The elections don’t start til lunchtime and by the time Hawaii has finished it’ll be tomorrow morning. Not that you learn much whilst voting is taking place. But I’m going to stay up anyway (yeah; right) and watch the baseball-hatted nation as it leaves the polls. And I’m going to have an ‘American themed party’. Not sure what to serve foodwise, not sure it even matters, as long as the portions are FUCKING HUMUNGOUS.

Happy US Voting Day

A xxxx

Arsene Wenger has managed Arsenal since the Ice Age. Not the last one, the Ice Age prior to that. Humans weren’t formed. You could walk from Siberia to Alaska across the ice. Can you imagine, a real ice age with no-one there to blame cars/planes/carbon emissions?? Anyway, Wenger, been there forever. And whenever they play Spurs we sing to him. Our special Wenger song. As soon as he stands up, normally because someone’s unwrapped the cotton wool on one of his delicate little superstars, we sing: ‘sit down you paedophile, sit down you paedophile…’ and (you’ll have to trust me on this) its very funny. Always makes me laugh. The mere fact that Arsene (probably) is not a paedophile, has never been one and would be horrified by the very thought, is largely irrelevant. This is football. Its much more important than mere facts. And Wenger simply deserves all the abuse you can hurl at him. Because on Friday he stated that ‘he’s not worried about Spurs, Arsenal are just too strong for them’. And because he’s a bad loser and an even worse draw-er. ‘2 points lost au jours d’hui’ he smugly asserted after the game yesterday. Never credits the other team with anything, other than the invisible penalties they inflicted on his players that the biased refs failed to pick up.

Arsene Wenger (manager extraordinaire; and sadly, he really is) is thus my ‘Tosser of the Week’. And pretty much, every week.

Meanwhile, over in Pukesville, USA, the presidential campaign rolls on. And on. And… will it NEVER FUCKING END?!?!?!?!? Oh yeah, tomorrow, its over. Praise be the Lord. And Hillary has been exonerated by the FBI. Again. Her emails were harmless. All 650,000 of them. Just rubbish, non-sensitive, shopping lists, orders from Amazon, penis extensions, usual rubbish. Helluva lot of rubbish but there ya go.

I would execute the head of the FBI. Just shoot him where he sits. He needs no trial, no judge nor jury, just shoot the bastard and be done. For causing such a massive massive nothing. For destabilising the most unstable election run-in of all time. All for nothing.

So who you gonna vote for; Donald Trump or Arsene Wenger?

Happy monday

A xxxx