552: Spring

Yesterday was the first day of spring; the vernal equinox when the sun is at zenith over the equator. The earliest in over a century. Sorry Southern hemisphere dwellers; Autumn is upon you, Summer Dying Fast. Back here, in the North, we have the resurgence of life and a general increase in temperature to look forward to. You know the drill, you've seen spring before.

The local wildlife immediately began celebrations. When I opened the window I immediately had to close it again to prevent midge infestation. A huge amorphous spinning crowd of the little twats had formed right outside the window. As one they performed that seemingly meaningless random dance that presumably has some highly important social or sexual function. Staring at this swirling vortex of tiny wings my focus suddenly shifted to a flutter of feathers in the bare branches of the tree directly outside:

One Romeo pigeon leapt onto the back of his lovey dovey, depositing his spermatozoa into her cloaca, flapped about a bit, hopped off, perched beside her for a couple of minutes, then flew away to a higher branch. Love is in the air. I'm just glad birds don't reproduce in the same way fish do, otherwise it'd be more than the weather and the pollen count that we'd have to worry about. Fish, as it is so delightfully described on Wikipedia, reproduce "with the male and female fish shedding their gametes into the surrounding water". Delightful. I don't know about you, but I'm happy for birds to continue with their presently preferred method.

Today is the second day of spring, and as yet no wildlife have displayed their behaviour in my vicinity. Unless they have and I've already become desensitised to the naturalistic orgiastic filth crawling, slavering, slopping and slutting their immoral ways across the seas, surfaces and skies. So, er, yeah, spring is here. Good times.

515: Make mine a Top Totty

Instead of doing something important like sorting out this country's fucked-up libel law, you know like they should be, some MPs, well, one, is engaging herself with something entirely more trivial, and all together more overstepping the mark and impinging on free speech and free enterprise. That was a rambling and overlong sentence I know, but I'm full of petty and futile rage. According to MEN, Metro and BBC News, Labour MP shadow equalities minister Kate Green took offence to a beer called Top Totty being sold at the Westminster pub, The Strangers' Bar. The pump has a cute drawing of a blonde lady in a white bikini and a description of Top Totty, a blonde beer, as a "stunningly seductive, voluptuous variety of hops with a fruity, fresh finish".

Kate Green saw it, was offended, (or perhaps didn't actually see it because the BBC says she was "'disturbed' to hear it was on sale" my italics) and within 90 minutes her actions had somehow lead to Top Totty being withdrawn from sale. This can only be described as a gross misuse of her influence to stifle free speech and free enterprise. No members of the public she represents were offended, she was acting entirely on own whim, and even if it is offencive, so fucking what? Free speech is of paramount importance, even if it causes offence. Being offended by something does not give you the right to remove it from the public domain; it gives you the right to complain and be upset. The right to cause offence should always trump the right to be offended.

What makes this especially disgusting is Kate Green's abuse of her power. Today I walked past the main entrance to the shop I work in. I rarely see in the windows because I enter and leave via a staff entrance on the other side of the building. I noticed a very very large poster advertising underwear and comprising entirely of a photography of a staggeringly sexy model looking sultry in her bra and knickers. Sights like this are common and I am confident in saying that Kate Green sees them as often as we all do. Is she constantly staggering around in a persistent tut of indignant offence? Does she fight against every commercial sexualised image of a semi-clad female? Or is she merely flexing her muscles against Top Totty and The Strangers' Bar because she knows she has some direct influence?

Every single person, or official body, she took her complaint to should have said, "you are entitled to be offended, but you have no right to remove this from sale. It is none of your business; if you don't like it, tough." What I really hate about this whole thing is that the most sensible statement appears to have come from Mike Nattrass, a MEP for horrid populist right-wing party UKIP: "This sort of knee-jerk Puritanism does more damage to the cause of equality than a thousand beer labels. It suggests that to be in favour of equality you must be a dour-faced, insult-searching misery".

As an aside I would like to address anyone who wants to complain about the objectification of women as sexual objects: I would like to suggest that women are sexual objects, as are men; indeed humans are sexual objects. How could we be described as anything else? We are objects who think about sex, have sex, think about sex, have sex, ecsextra, etc, &c... Of course we are so much more than just sexual objects, men and women alike. We are thinkers, workers, friends, scientists, artists, geniuses, idiots, and everything else and in between.