sparrow chat

“The [UK] Food Standards Agency has today issued a food alert about novelty food products from China, including chocolate-flavoured ‘willy spread’, containing melamine.

Melamine is an industrial chemical that should not be present in food. Milk products containing melamine have been at the centre of a major food incident in China.

An Agency spokesperson said: ‘This is a first. We’ve never had to put out an alert before on “willy spread” – chocolate-flavoured or otherwise…….”

Read more HERE.

Filed under Organ pollution

NOTE: For those innocent North American ladies who read this blog, “willy” is British for a male sex organ. (From the comments, that innocence is more widespread than anticipated).

Posted under Sparrow Chat

Sarah Palin recently told a rally of Republican supporters Obama would “bring socialism to America”. She gave graphic, if inaccurate, descriptions of the effect of ‘big’ government on people’s lives. She said that there were countries with governments like that, and the populace were to be pitied, because they were “not free”.

Over the last few weeks, since the credit and economic crises began to bite, much has been made in the media of its effects on ordinary Americans. Many have been interviewed. By far the most common emotion expressed by American citizens has been fear. Fear of the future; fear of what will happen to them.

In the UK, the crisis is even worse than in America. The British pound is losing value rapidly; the nation’s economy is now officially in recession; property values are falling; unemployment is rising.

As in the US, the British media is given to interviewing ordinary citizens for their reaction to the crisis. The most common emotion expressed is anger. Anger that the rich are once again fleecing ordinary people; anger at the government for using tax-payer’s money to bail out banks.

Fear is not a factor noticeable in the UK.

Why is this? Are the British more stalwart than Americans? Is the famed British “stiff upper lip” simply covering up the real, quivering, terror inside?

Certainly, there’s trepidation. No-one relishes the prospect of unemployment. Thankfully, for the British, they suffer from ‘big’ government. It interferes in their lives, forces social security and unemployment benefits on them in times of crisis. It ensures families are not left to the mercy of volunteers manning soup kitchens, or Christian missions seeking converts. The jobless receive the same free medical treatment as the well paid. ‘Big’ government insists on a safety net to protect those falling on hard times. Rarely will you see beggars on British streets, with boards proclaiming, “Need food, will work” .

Sarah Palin knows as much about ‘big’ government as I know about the workings of a Mars orbiter. She says she’s for the ordinary people of America, yet from the shelter of her own personal financial bastion, works to propagate even more fear.

The British are free; they’re free to be angry at what’s happening.

Americans can only fear for their future.

Filed under: Politics and freedoms

Posted under Sparrow Chat

The horrifying case of baby-killer, James Howson, was highlighted today by TOB. To read more details of this case, click on the link.

Killing one’s own baby in such a hideous, apparently cold-blooded, fashion is guaranteed to diminish to minute levels any questioning of the societal causes behind Howson’s crime. It’s difficult to feel other than revulsion towards this man; the inhumanity of the crime serves to block any sympathy based on his own childhood, or adolescent, problems – even assuming there were any.

A factor society generally tends to disregard is the sheer numbers of James Howson’s that are spawned. Not all kill their baby by breaking its back, but the quantity of cold-blooded killers, or rapists, or mutilators, surfacing in our societies seems to rise remorselessly.

The hothead with a gun, robbing the convenience store, or murdering his girlfriend during a quarrel, while no less forgivable, is certainly more understandable than Howson, whose crime rates revulsion and disdain by the very nature of its incomprehensibility.

Is that, though, a reason for not attempting to comprehend what caused James Howson to commit his vile act? If we simply shrug it off as an inhuman crime, are we not, at best, emphasizing a contradiction? How can an act be inhuman, when performed by a human being?

Of course, the pedantic would argue that the very definition of “inhuman” is: ‘lacking pity, kindness, or mercy’ – attributes supposedly unique to the human race. Few, though, would dare to argue that the antonyms: piteousness, cruelty, and intolerance, are other than very human traits. One has only to view the activities of any culture on the planet to realize that. Pity, kindness, and mercy are in very short supply throughout the world today.

So we can’t wash our hands of the James Howson’s by categorizing them as, in some way, less than human. Yet this is exactly how society deals with these people. In the more barbaric nations they are killed, then forgotten. In ‘civilized’ society they’re locked away for years, and forgotten.

No-one, it seems, makes any serious attempt to a) discover what caused Howson to commit his crime, and b) question how James Howson may have been prevented from becoming a cold-blooded baby killer.

Isn’t it time we did?

Filed under: Cold blooded killers

Posted under Sparrow Chat

One of the great freedoms unleashed by the internet has been the lack of censorship. While most would agree that the prerogative to write what one feels, is sacrosanct in a modern democracy, it behooves the writer to undertake a degree of maturity for which censorship was once the alternative. Pick up any quality book, or magazine, and you’ll note a lack of profanity within its pages. Editors generally agree that good writers make their point adequately without recourse to what is best described as the more ‘Anglo-Saxon’ of English.

Censorship was originally seen as a means of protecting people from the base and obscene. Lenny Bruce’s problems with the law and four letter words during the 1960′s, perhaps marked the beginning of a battle against censorship that has seen the pendulum swing out of control. Use of four letter words beginning with ‘F’ or ‘S’ are now commonplace, not just in the blogosphere, but throughout cable media. America still pays lip service to its censors by bleeping out expletives, while leaving the viewer in no doubt as to the word being expressed.

The internet is swamped with uneducated, boorish, individuals whose sole purpose in blogging is, it seems, to beat the world record for fitting as many expletives as possible into one paragraph. Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to pass over such literary disasters and head for the relative calm of more mature prose, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of the TV media.

In TV land, the casual use of expletives is almost always integrated with cheap humor aimed at intoxicating the basest and most immature of society, who might be better served watching kindergarten programs on PBS.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a perfect example. It intersperses a mixture of intellectual political comment with the basest of humor, designed to stimulate the hormones of small boys cloistered behind the school bike sheds, who seem, for the purposes of this particular program, to have suddenly migrated to the studio audience. From this vantage point, they titter quietly at Stewart’s satirical humor, only to burst forth into insuppressible shrieks and guffaws when the host utters an expletive in confirmation of his political opinions.

It’s not only the Daily Show that produces such an immature reaction from studio audiences in America. Virtually every American comedian utilizes expletives as a guarantee of stage success. in fact, for some, it’s the very basis of their routines.

While, of itself, the expletive is relatively harmless, it takes a truly brilliant comedian to utilize it in an inoffensive manner. In my opinion, only one has ever succeeded in achieving this. His name is Billy Connolly. This Scottish comedian is unique in being able to use the the ‘F’ word in front of an audience of elderly Christian ladies without giving offense.

Connolly’s secret is in making his act funny without expletives, then using them in so natural a manner that it is the joke that creates the humor, rather than the ‘F’ word. Many have copied him; most have failed.

When Sparrow Chat was born, back in 2003, the ‘blog description’ demanded by Blogger was agonized over for some time. Eventually, it was decided upon, and has not changed since. The last line reads:

No obscenities, please – unless necessary to the description of certain politicians and others of that ilk.”

It was never intended as a form of censorship, merely a desire for the reasonably correct use of English in expressing one’s opinion.

Jon Stewart is a funny man. He is also an intelligent human being. Catering to the basest in our society does neither him, nor them, any good.

It’s time we moved out from behind the school bike sheds. It’s time we grew up.

Filed under: Catering to kids

Posted under Sparrow Chat

….secession becomes a more attractive possibility……

……just one quick push, and Alaska would be in Russia.

Filed under: Alaski, comrade?

Posted under Sparrow Chat

In my opinion, Richard Dawkins’s passion for atheism just categorizes him as yet another high priest, but I have to agree with his views on the latest advertising campaign by the British Humanist Association:^[1]

The advertising banner reads:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”

Which seems excellent advice to me.

For more on this, visit “How This Old Brit Sees It” where there’s a link to the BBC website carrying the story.

^{[1] British Humanist Association website}

Filed under: I’m God, and so is my wife*

*With apologies to Monty Python

Posted under Sparrow Chat