So, In The Night Garden is due to finish in its present format, leaving Iggle Piggle (bastard son of Spongebob Square Pants and a crack-addict female jellybaby) Upsy Daisy (clearly the product of a hedonistic night of passion between a pillow and Frank Zappa) and Makka Pakka, who can only really be described as the larval stage of the Golgothan shit-demon from the movie “Dogma”.
All things must come to an end and sometimes we are sad to see them leave, but in this case I am breathing a huge sigh of relief as an institution that I firmly believe is bad for our children is finally taken out the back, given a last cigarette and shot in the face. Hopefully in comedic fashion using a harpoon, but I digress.
A great deal of people are fans of this show, and that is fair enough. I can fully understand why children enjoy the show as it is a sedate affair, with soft speech and nothing threatening, and parents find it keeps their children calm and happy. Fine, but throwing an armful of potent marijuana into an open fire and getting your kids to sit in front of it would have the same basic effect.
Pardon me for wanting my children to learn to speak English, but I don’t want them exposed to a world of Ninky Nonks and Pinky ponks, sponge demons and Aah-Boos at an age when they are supposed to be learning to converse.
What’s wrong with animals? Or people? Or calling a train a train and a zeppelin a zeppelin instead of making up bullshit names for things, then having to teach the child later on that that is not what they are called?
But the thing that really got me, was the reaction of one of the parents. “Now my child will not be able to get to sleep in the evening.”
I’m sorry, what? At bedtime you stick your children in front of the electric fish-tank until they fall to sleep? You have out-sourced an essential part of being a parent to the BBC? Are you completely, totally fucking insane?
A bit of TV is fine and can be an excellent educational tool if handled properly, but to think that you use it as an auditory equivalent of valium to make up for your own inadequacies as a parent is frankly galling, and I would love to meet up with you and punch you in the head, if I’m honest.
Every year it’s the same, record pass rates in GCSE’s, mingled with never before seen levels of illiteracy.
I once threw a teenage lad out of a shopping centre and told him that once his ban was lifted, he would have to apply in writing to the management for permission to return. His response? I can’t write. Was he severely dyslexic? Did he have a learning difficulty? No, and yes, I did ask. He had an attitude problem at that was about it.
Do I have a sneaky suspicion that the dumbing down of children’s TV might (in part) be responsible for things like this? You bet I bloody do.
Ok, so we had the Transformers, Thundercats and the X-Men which were lots of fun with bright colours, explosions and a lot of violence, but with it we had morality, not to mention the fact that even the bad guys had the decency to speak English in an intelligible fashion.
Should small children’s television be fun, with oodles of fun characters and silliness, an innocent place where people come to no harm and the good guys always win? Yes, absolutely.
But should childhood be spent growing up in front of a load of fuzzy, inoffensive nonsense that will have the same basic effect as ramming a knitting needle into my child’s brain so that I too can slack off from parenting and raise a dribbling, poorly educated moron? Should it bollocks.
I’ve been Alec, and if you’ve been allowing a household appliance to take your place as a parent, you’ve been a fucking idiot.
Ciao!
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
Monday, 6 September 2010
“What? They put leftover meat in sausages? The bastards!”
Those that know me in real life will know how much this subject annoys me, and it is one I want to briefly share with the approximately three people who read this that only know me from the interwebz.
People complaining about the contents of sausages.
I’ve just read another article about foods that are bad for you, and YET AGAIN they lament the fact that sausages and chicken nuggets contain the bits of meat left on a carcass after all the large sections of meat have been cut off. Well bugger me backwards, paint me purple and dip my nads in butterscotch, can this BE?
Of course it can, you dizzy bunch of brain-dead, feather-headed nipple-jockeys. Why do you think people made sausages in the first place? Did you think that they were a throwback from a day long past when tribes of wild sausages roamed the plains, eking out an existence by cultivating tiny carrots while keeping the large predators at bay by doing their tax returns for them?
Get real!
You take the left-over wobbly bits of meat, the bits that remain stuck to the skeleton, and make them into things like sausages to use up all the available meat. Presumably you would rather we ditch the animal carcasses with all this edible material stuck to them, meaning that even more animals are killed so we can use the “choice cuts” to make a product designed to be an economic use of leftover meat?
Personally I find the idea of taking all the “good bits” and grinding them down to make products like chicken nuggets and sausages mildly offensive. Sure, they might taste better, but I don’t think that flavour is the issue here.
It is simply that people are woolly minded and turn their noses up at perfectly edible and good-tasting food purely because of its origins.
Need I remind you that when the menu says “Rump steak”, it really means “Thick-sliced cow’s ass?”
But never mind. As they say, “you can’t educate pork”.
But the crux of this “health issue” is simple. People want to be able to eat shit-loads of such foods and not suffer any ill effects. Well boo-ruddy-hoo. If people weren’t so hell-bent on eating quantities of food that are nearly sufficient to make them explode, there wouldn’t be an issue. So people would rather harp on about the contents of innocent things like sausages than decrease the amount they shovel into their gigantic mouths.
It’s one or the other. Eat less processed food, or don’t. It’s really very simple. But there is really no point in claiming that a product designed with reclaimed meat in mind should be made healthier. That’s like saying those environmentally friendly bags at Tesco (you know, the ones with the texture of a bull mastiff’s scrotum) should be made from the finest of Egyptian cottons so they don’t rub your hands raw when you lug the sodding things up and down the aisles.
Personally from an ethical point of view I’d rather such things remained as they were, as they seem to be the one salute we still have to the principles of our ancestors, where when we kill an animal we use every single part of it out of a basic respect for life.
So I’ll take my sausages the old fashioned way thank you, nipples, nostrils and weird, wobbly-bits included.
People complaining about the contents of sausages.
I’ve just read another article about foods that are bad for you, and YET AGAIN they lament the fact that sausages and chicken nuggets contain the bits of meat left on a carcass after all the large sections of meat have been cut off. Well bugger me backwards, paint me purple and dip my nads in butterscotch, can this BE?
Of course it can, you dizzy bunch of brain-dead, feather-headed nipple-jockeys. Why do you think people made sausages in the first place? Did you think that they were a throwback from a day long past when tribes of wild sausages roamed the plains, eking out an existence by cultivating tiny carrots while keeping the large predators at bay by doing their tax returns for them?
Get real!
You take the left-over wobbly bits of meat, the bits that remain stuck to the skeleton, and make them into things like sausages to use up all the available meat. Presumably you would rather we ditch the animal carcasses with all this edible material stuck to them, meaning that even more animals are killed so we can use the “choice cuts” to make a product designed to be an economic use of leftover meat?
Personally I find the idea of taking all the “good bits” and grinding them down to make products like chicken nuggets and sausages mildly offensive. Sure, they might taste better, but I don’t think that flavour is the issue here.
It is simply that people are woolly minded and turn their noses up at perfectly edible and good-tasting food purely because of its origins.
Need I remind you that when the menu says “Rump steak”, it really means “Thick-sliced cow’s ass?”
But never mind. As they say, “you can’t educate pork”.
But the crux of this “health issue” is simple. People want to be able to eat shit-loads of such foods and not suffer any ill effects. Well boo-ruddy-hoo. If people weren’t so hell-bent on eating quantities of food that are nearly sufficient to make them explode, there wouldn’t be an issue. So people would rather harp on about the contents of innocent things like sausages than decrease the amount they shovel into their gigantic mouths.
It’s one or the other. Eat less processed food, or don’t. It’s really very simple. But there is really no point in claiming that a product designed with reclaimed meat in mind should be made healthier. That’s like saying those environmentally friendly bags at Tesco (you know, the ones with the texture of a bull mastiff’s scrotum) should be made from the finest of Egyptian cottons so they don’t rub your hands raw when you lug the sodding things up and down the aisles.
Personally from an ethical point of view I’d rather such things remained as they were, as they seem to be the one salute we still have to the principles of our ancestors, where when we kill an animal we use every single part of it out of a basic respect for life.
So I’ll take my sausages the old fashioned way thank you, nipples, nostrils and weird, wobbly-bits included.
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