I didn’t watch Tuesday nights election coverage. There was something inside me that just couldn’t tolerate another “historic night.”

Living in the United States it has always amused me to see how desperate the American media are to make themselves a part of history. They don’t seem to realise that everything they do is (in some way) is a part of history, even if it’s reporting Ms. Jones cat stuck up a tree for the third time this week.

An overblown sense of drama might explain it as might the constant ratings war but really it all comes down to a basic insecurity in the psyche of the “movers and shakers” which is not shared by the common citizen.

That insecurity is that the United States of America has a history that runs from the present day……… All the way back to last Thursday!

The United States has achieved many incredible things in its time but just because someone puts the milk in the fridge the world will not be immediately applauding and licking its collective pencil to scribe another chapter in the ever popular history of world events.

Hearing “One small step” is a major historic event for the world, against which Dan the Dick becoming W.W.E. Intercontinental champion in a fixed competition pales into insignificance.

Barack H. Obama being elected President will probably be regarded as interesting enough to merit a marker in world history but how much is written will depend on what is achieved (or not) during his time in office. The fact that the United States elected a new president for the 44th time in its history in itself is really unremarkable (despite race) because it has already been done 43 times previously.

Actually living in this country allows a different perspective from one gained from living abroad. You have to wonder if when world events unfold other paths might have been taken had the American participants not been so worried about their place in the hallowed halls of history as defined by the American media

I am indebted to my my best friend Hissing Sid for coaxing me out of semi retirement with this article from Auntie Beeb.

Just when you thought that the P.C. silly season had reached its zenith in the disunited kingdom comes a reminder that in actual fact the silly season actually lasts 364 days 23 hours and 59 minutes (extended opening on leap years.)

God Bless Hissing Sid and God Bless Flintshire County Council for making me smile for the stupidity of the ruling classes.

Seems that Flintshire County Council have a problem with puddings…. (No! Not the councilors themselves, the after lunch treat in the canteen.)

After nearly 200 years the idea of amusement at the name of “Spotted Dick” has just reached this esteemed body and in a gesture of considered deliberation (panic to you and me son) they have decided to rename this venerable treat “Spotted Richard!

(For my American readership (that’s right both of you) “Spotted Dick” is a steamed desert made from suet and currents.)

What a bunch of “pilchards!”

Of course eventually they have had to rescind this order but the Crazy One has to ask whatever possessed them to join the lunatic fringe in the first place? What would they do if a set of thespians came to the county performing Shakespeare?

Rename Richard the Third to Dick 3 (Son of Dick)

If they had to make such a ruling why did they not pronounce that from hence on in the Flintshire County Council canteen the pudding shalt be known by its other name of “Spotted Dog?” You could not go out of your way to draw attention to yourself by calling it “Spotted Richard.”

Then they have the nerve to restore the rightful name and threaten sanction upon anyone behaving childishly! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Honestly; you couldn’t make this stuff up (and why would you need to?)

So  Flintshire County Council you take the award for the 2009 Richard Heads of the year!

TTFN

To all Americans that visit this site, may the Crazy Englishman wish you a happy 4th of July.

(Personally I am off down to the local lake to throw a few cases of coffee in:)

Enjoy the fireworks

Happy Saint Georges Day everybody

The Crazy Englishman is indebted to his usual circle of concerned “English subjects” for highlighting a disturbing new trend of political correctness taking place inside “This Sceptred Isle.”

It seems that running out of ideas to interfere with the English way of life the “P.C. brigade” have now decided to brainwash children.

Having effectively outlawed many children’s books and characters they have now turned their unwanted attention to nursery rhymes with the apparent blessing of the British Government.

A Government funded project has decided to change the wording of “What shall we do with the drunken sailor” to “What shall we do with the grumpy pirate.”

Is there no end to the politically correct stupidity running rampant in England?

An Oxfordshire nursery has taken it upon itself to alter the words of “Baa baa black sheep”  to “Baa baa rainbow sheep” and it would seem that the traditional English seaside children’s Punch and Judy show now has the skids under it.

This is not the way to do it!

Whilst Punch and Judy has some overtones of domestic violence most children view the show in the same way that they view Tom and Jerry cartoons. As a fan of both I have never been persuaded to dress up in a stripy costume for the purposes of beating up my wife just as I have never tried to see if I could flatten a cat to the thickness of a piece of paper.

What sticks in my craw is that this is just another way of removing the identity of the British.

The primary purpose of teaching these rhymes to children since the 17th century was to encourage the development of vocabulary skills whilst sometimes also relaying historic events. Another way of keeping historic records by way of mouth when reading and writing  in society was the exception rather than the norm.  Now we have a situation where as many as 10 schools in the London area have no English language whatsoever.

In one of the examples above: Baa baa black sheep was either a complaint against King Edward 6th for the “Enclosures of Sheep” law or a complaint against an export duty place on wool back in 1275. During my life I have seen quite a few black sheep but outside of a toy shop I have never seen a rainbow coloured one.

“What shall we do with the drunken sailor” was an old sea shanty sung when sailors had to undertake heavy monotonous labour (such as hauling up an anchor) and came from a time when sailor arriving back from a shore leave drunk or having too much beer (kept on ship because it was easier to keep than fresh water) was not uncommon. Some of the words (Hooray, up she rises) probably refer to either the anchor or the sails.

Britain was (not so much these days) a seagoing nation and therefore rhymes of this nature are a part of our history just as in the USA slavery was a part of theirs but I don’t see a movement there to alter gospel music.

The United Kingdom is deep in the heart of a recession and to get out of it the population will need to pull together and its government will have to show much fiscal responsibility. It is time for the Prime minister to take a lead here and call a halt to this shameless frittering of taxpayers hard won contributions which only serve to deny history and cause divisiveness amongst it’s people.

As an amusement let me try a P.C. rhyme myself.

What shall we do with the P.C. nutters,

What shall we do with the P.C. nutters,

What shall we do with the P.C. nutters,

Early in the morning.

Hooray taxes rising,

Hooray taxes rising,

Hooray taxes rising’,

Early in the morning.

Make ‘em all P.C. and waste their taxes,

Make ‘em all P.C. and waste their taxes,

Make ‘em all P.C. and waste their taxes,

Early In The Mornng.

T.T.F.N.

A number of Americans have approached me in the last 24 hours to ask me just what is going on in my home country. One even went so far as to print from the Internet a copy of an article which appeared in last weeks Sunday Times.

Americans are baffled as to how the British Government  could allow sharia courts to enforce rulings in Britain and be  also enforceable under British law. Whilst I understand that it is a loophole in the legal system I fail to understand why in 13 months it hasn’t been closed.

Perhaps that is a little disingenuous of me because I can see why I just don’t believe the shortsighted stupidity that has allowed it to remain open. It suits the political ambitions of the “loudest minorities” I wrote about in the series “This Sceptred Isle.”

Let us make no mistake here; this is nothing short of an act of treason which will leave British allies in the so called “war on terror” wondering just how much they can trust the British Government for support.

The British legal system has been seriously undermined and the silent majority of the country must be wondering if they suddenly woke up one morning and found that they had all emigrated to cloud cuckoo land.

It has long been suspected in Britain that there is a law for the rich and one for the poor but now it seems that there is a law for anyone who wants it? How long will it be before the Germans want their own law or the French? How about a special Al Qaeda court? (You bombed and killed how many????? Award this man 40 virgins and a lollypop!” How about a special court for oil companies? Do you see how when you  put your toe on this road you will rapidly find that there is no end to it.

The British have always prided themselves on the fairness of their justice system forged over the period of a millennia. How can a so called civilised race operate two systems of law and still claim to be fair and equitable? How long is it before a Muslim commits the crime of murder and demands to be tried under sharia law rather than the law of the land? Once again we are looking at the thin end of an extremely fat wedge and this wedge has the potential to wedge open Pandora’s box.

Whatever happened to to the concept of emigrating to a country and then respecting the laws of your adopted homeland?

Of course at the bottom of all of this is the man of inaction himself: The Right Honourable Gordon Brown M.P. Leader of the Labour party and Prime Minister of the Disunited Kingdom. Looking at his record from 5,000 miles he seems as much use as a chocolate fireguard. A man who seems intent on throwing the Labour party back into political abyss that Tony Blair worked so hard to drag it out of.

The Muslims are exploiting a loophole of British law and the British Government should act now to close this loophole before they find it tied around their necks and the British people decide to tighten it for them.

So Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg are funding an “anti tobacco” campaign are they?

I have nothing to say about Bloomberg but Bill Gates? I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I heard the news.

Perhaps it’s guilt that is the motivation for the founder of Microsoft…..

How many of us have gone to our computers to install Bill’s latest offering at 6 in the evening to find that “Start Me Up”  is really code for “Keep me up” as installation problems have kept us up into the small hours of the morning?

How making times have we spent endless hours trying to get Windows something which is critically urgent and Microsoft claims (like be an operating system) it can do only to find that it either can’t; or it will only do after several hours and only if you are standing in one corner of the room with the opposite trouser leg rolled up and having already sacrificed the cat!

How many of us come away from our computers after many  frustrating hours only to realise that they are times in your life that you will never be able to get back and even if you have defeated the “Death Star” (known as Windows) the exhilaration of victory is beyond you because you are tired enough to be beyond caring?

Most of us have experienced this and then realised that they were clean shaven when they began and those divorce papers look so strange because you hadn’t even realised that your wife and children had left you a month ago.

At that moment; when you either have declared victory or sulked off into the night to hunt down an axe for your computer, your final glance back reveals the horror of your miserable  existence. The clean ashtray (which was the size of a bucket) has overflowed onto the desk and carpet and that new Marlboro carton is empty and screwed up, thrown across the room to lie forlornly atop the light shade.

And all this from a rabid chairman of an anti smoking help desk……….

In about 5 years a new form of lung cancer will be discovered….. Windows Cancer

No wonder Bill might feel guilty.

What next Bill? An anti alcohol campaign? Bill donates in 12 steps…..

Let me see…..

How many of ush…. (hic!)

T.T.F.N

I left home at the crack of dawn this morning to the news that one of America’s brewing organisations had been bought by a Belgium company.

I arrived home some 12 hours later to find CNN reporting that there has been some sort of outcry amongst the public with the Internet being awash with postings decrying the takeover.

My immediate thought was that some people need to take a deep breath and smell the reality of their lives. One of my earliest perceptions of the American people is that they love their freedom, it is other peoples freedoms that they seem to have a problem with. Dubya has apparently brought freedom to Iraq but were the Iraqi people free to choose their own idea of freedom? They weren’t even free to choose whether or not they wanted to be free. Everybody here espouses this as “The land of the Free” but if Iranians decide they are free to burn the American flag then Americans then the American people decide that they have too much freedom and America should declare war.

European companies are free to bid for American military contracts….. Just as long as they don’t have the audacity to actually win otherwise Congress has to get involved.

And so it is with Budweiser it seems. Sure; it is an “American Institution” just as Aston Martin was a “British Institution” when Ford bought them. It seems that America is free to buy any company in the world that it wants but the world is not free to buy American.

I can understand the pride of the American people in Budweiser but I can promise them that the Belgium version of “Joe Public” is even more horrified!

Europeans generally regard American beer as weak and little more than soda water (I personally have always liked it) and Inbev does brew more notable beers such as Beck’s and Stella Artois But will this be the end of it? I think not!

The mighty U.S. Dollar is now valued somewhere below a snakes belly compared to the other currencies of the world and across the world companies are looking at the United States like the American public looks at the Wal - Mart Thanksgiving sale.

Is this the end of truth justice and the American way…? No it is just business as it actually is in the rest of the world and America should wake up and smell the coffee before it get’s bought out as well. America will go on; just as Britain survived the sale of it’s car industry to the Germans (before they sold part of it to India) and America (before they tried to sell it because they are on their “uppers.” In the meantime’ if you see some funny looking gentlemen with bulging pockets and speaking in tongues then the rough translations are probably “Look at my wad” and “is that all????” Please remember that they are supposed to be free as well, even if you can’t get your head around the fact that American companies almost are to them.

T.T.F.N.

When I went to school in the mid sixties I remember a discussion about oil and the teaching was that supplies would be exhausted by the turn of the century.

When I entered the U.S. in November of 1999 a gallon of petrol in Oklahoma fetched the princely sum of $1.00 per gallon and I told of $10.00 per gallon in England.

Now as a barrel of oil is only marginally less than Roman Abramovich’s transfer budget for Chelsea football club my local petrol station is current offering petrol at $3.80 per gallon.

Now the truck drivers across Europe are becoming restless and who can blame them?

The last time this happened in Blighty I had the privilege of taking talk show host Neil Boortz to task on his nationally syndicated radio program. He was “on air” sprouting about the “left wing” and how these truck drivers should capitulate etc. I told him a few home truths that his extensive research had somehow managed to miss.

He was unaware that in Great Britain the tax on a gallon of petrol was levied somewhere around 82% of the cost of a gallon. He was also unaware that the excuse given by respective governments for this high rate of taxation was “to cut pollution.” I offered the British public opinion that they were paying so that China and the U.S.A. could pollute at will and be subsidised by Britain to do it!

Let’s make no mistake here it is time for all citizens around the globe to stop following the government spin and start making the effort to be better informed.

In the U.S. the public are told that China is responsible for the shortage of oil.

Fact: China’s economy (whilst ramping up) is currently only about the size of the Italian economy.

Fact: There is no shortage of oil in the world at this time.

What there is is a shortage of refining capacity caused by short sighted governments and over greedy oil companies.

If we could all power our cars and trucks on hot air then we would have free global power supplies until they build a ski slope in hell because all we would need to do is tap the vast energy of our various government assemblies.

Am I advocating the overthrow of governments or promoting anarchy? No I am merely suggesting that the people should be better informed so that they can make the proper judgements about some of the supposed problems of our world.

I was recently on vacation in Rio and was surprised that this so called polluting country actually offered no less than four different fuels at its filling stations and that our guide was actually running his “people mover” on pressurised gas. During our visit we learned  that Rio’s population is around 17,000,000 and yet the only time we saw a traffic jam was coming away from a derby (two local teams for my American readers) football match where the attendance was near 100,000.

So where am I going with this?

Back in that rundown English school almost 50 years ago that boasted that Lord George Brown had been a pupil it was common knowledge that the supply of oil would eventually run out. So why in almost fifty years has research not been prioritised to find new forms of fuel that the citizens of this 21st century could use? Why is the world only now beginning to think about it when it is too late?

We are told day after day that the “free market economy” works…… Is it working now?

t.t.f.n.

According to a new report in Britain schoolchildren could soon “swear an allegiance” to the Queen. I can hear the cries of “hogwash” ringing around the realm now; rising only slightly above the hysterical laughter.

To what do we owe this latest lunacy?

To promote Britishness of course!

And to whom do we owe these pearls of wisdom?

Gordon Brown and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith!

Under the proposals a new public holiday will be created in time for the Olympics in 2012 and that (and I quote)” schoolchildren should take part in the same kind of ceremonies for foreigners taking British nationality.”

Please reread the above paragraph and see if you see the same glaring flaw that hits me in the face like a dead and decomposing fish……

How do you promote “Britishness” by copying foreigners?

To the Crazy Englishman; Britishness was the stuff of Thomas Savery, Sir Issac Newton or Aneurin Bevan to name only a tiny few.

Savery gave the world the steam engine; Newton’s gift to the world was physics and Aneurin Bevan’s vision was a free quality health service copied throughout .the world.

Just three from an enormous cast of British heroes renowned throughout the world yet we apparently need to copy someone else’s ideas…

What a wonderful suggestion from a government which still fails to acknowledge the English as a race. I have another; declare St. Georges day as a public holiday and recognise the English before you celebrate “Britishness” without them.

Lets see how this so called pledge of Allegiance could possibly go…..

I pledge allegiance to the Queen of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth and the European Union and any other “Johnny Come Lately.”

And to the Monarchy, For which it Stands.

Multitudes of races (but not the English,) under millions of gods; idols; and despots (delete as applicable)

Divided (unless we forgot somebody)

With liberty and justice for all (except the English but including everyone else)

Doesn’t have quite the same ring does it? T.T.F.N.