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Normally, I do my shopping on a Thursday, at Wal-Mart. While I consider Wal-Mart the epitome of capitalist monopolies, it really is the only place in our town available to purchase all one’s weekly needs under one roof, which rather proves my point.

This week was an exception to the norm. Rather than shop Thursday, I decided to go early Sunday morning, while it was quiet. The Wal-Mart experience is horrifying enough without the addition of milling hordes, screaming kids, and constant trolley collisions.

Consequently, 9.00am this Sunday morning saw me trolling around Wal-Mart, filling my trolley with all possible speed and ready to make a hasty dash for the exit.

Now, I’m not a great consumer of alcohol. As a part-time school bus driver, abstinence through the week is essential, so it’s usually only Friday and Saturday evenings that a small tipple becomes the order of the day. But this week saw the last of school for the summer, and my long stored bottle of Scotch whiskey had landed in the trash can only the previous night, and needed replacing without delay.

Consequently, by the time I arrived at the Wal-Mart check-out, at precisely 9.10am this Sunday morning, sitting atop the food and other items in my trolley was one bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label and two bottles of white table wine.

I had already loaded the conveyor, the part-time Sunday check-out girl busy filling bags on the carousel, when I heard a loud cry behind me:

“You can’t purchase those before 10 o’clock!”

Bewildered, I turned about to see a rather fat, middle-aged, woman in pince-nez spectacles standing behind me, the word “Supervisor” emblazoned across the plastic badge pinned malevolently to her bosom.

“Alcohol!” She barked.

From her lips the word flashed like some medieval witch’s curse, as with a decisive sweep of her arm she reached over the belt and rapped long, plastic, fingernails cursorily across the bottles.

Aware now that she must be invoking some ancient, religious, Illinois taboo, I determined not to give an inch until having to.

I smiled sweetly, “Is there a problem?”

For a moment she appeared perplexed, assuming perhaps I had not understood the first time.

She repeated herself, “Not before 10 o’clock! You may not purchase alcohol before 10 o’clock.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

It seemed an innocuous question to me, but Ms Supervisor was obviously not used to being interrogated by the irreligious on the Sabbath.

She drew herself up to full height, “It’s the LAW!”“

Unlike those obnoxious individuals who take delight in berating innocent shop staff for rules over which they have no control, I am always careful never to utilize them as a focus for my frustrations in such circumstances, but my present adversary’s attitude was irksome in the extreme.

I returned to my sweet smile. “Why?” I repeated.

Momentarily, I observed a tinge of pink on the face, a brief uncertainty in the eyes, before the only answer she had available popped into her brain.

“It’s the Sabbath!” she exclaimed with a trace of triumphalism, as though this were a totally plausible explanation.

I glanced at my watch. “But, according to you, only for another fifty minutes?”

The trace of triumphalism vanished, to be again replaced by pink face and bewilderment. Reaching out, she vigorously swept the three bottles from the conveyor, and snapped……

“We don’t make the law. We just have to enforce it!”

……..before rushing away in the vague direction of the Wines and Spirits rack.

I caught the eye of the check-out girl, brows quickly raised, then lowered as though afraid someone in authority might see, and reprimand. I grinned at her. She grinned back, briefly, before lowering her eyes and returning to her check-out duties. I got the picture. She didn’t much like the overzealous supervisor, either.

Driving back home, car trunk loaded down with the week’s groceries – less three bottles of booze – I got to pondering on the strange illogicality of this law that set its Sabbath time limits. In my own native Wales, for many years the cold and religious held sway over the laws of the land, banning alcohol on the Sabbath in large areas of that country. Then, slowly the Welsh began to realize most of their income came from English tourists, flocking to the picturesque hills and mountains and seashores on their leisure weekends, and demanding alcohol to enhance their recreation. Gradually commerce overcame piety, until now the whole of Wales is open for alcoholic business on the Sabbath, just as any other day.

Probably, such is the case with Illinois. I’m sure there was a time when the sale of alcohol, along with plenty of other commodities, was totally banned on a Sunday. Wal-Mart lost sales as a result, and eventually the pious found their influence dwindling before the pressure of capitalist commerce. As a sop to the churches, it was no doubt agreed to keep the hours from midnight Saturday till 10.00am Sunday as sacrosanct to God, given that it didn’t really interfere with alcohol sales as the only mugs daft enough to be up and about at that time, and not in church, were irreligious wretches like RJ Adams.

To my mind, it’s a great presumption to limit one’s Almighty to a couple of hours on a Sunday morning, though it’s certainly in line with the way most Christians seem to treat their “God”.

It’s all highly illogical, but then, for many of us so is religion.

Filed under: Have a drink on me

I’ve had it with this president. He is truly a bully, and a blithering idiot. Today, he stood on a podium and told the world: “Al Qaeda is a threat to your children.”

No, Mister President, YOU are a threat to our children. You had al Qaeda holed up in Afghanistan. You allowed them to escape by diverting large sections of the US military into a nation that had no affiliation whatever with al Qaeda. You, Mister President, then proceeded to rape and pillage that country. You permitted your troops to massacre innocents and you condoned your minions wrecking the country’s infrastructure. Then, Mister President, you allowed that country to be infiltrated by al Qaeda operatives supported by Iraqi insurgents already decimated by your flawed policies in that country.

Not content with creating the greatest conflagration seen in the Middle East in centuries, you, Mister President, then turned your ignorant, bullying countenance on its neighbor, Iran.

Despite you, Mister President, tearing up virtually every anti-nuclear proliferation treaty in existence, you had the nerve to demand Iran suspend its own nuclear energy program, because you wished to protect the sanctity of your much beloved ally and war criminal, Israel, from possible retaliation from Iran. This, despite assurances that Iran’s nuclear program was entirely peaceful.

You, Mister President, have bullied and cajoled other western nations to conform to your irresponsible policies. You have berated Russia and China for refusing to bend their knees to your will in the United Nations. You are presently threatening Russia with nuclear missiles on her very border, and by so doing are risking a new Cold War. You, Mister President, have now ordered your navy to behave aggressively in waters off the Iranian coast, forcing confrontation and deliberately escalating the tensions in the area. You, Mister President, are the reason Iran finds it necessary to intensify its nuclear program; to protect itself from YOU.

Mister President George W Bush of the United States of America, my children have little to fear from the rag-taggle bunch of militant Islamics YOU chose to lump under the grandiose title, “al Qaeda”.

But, they have everything to fear from you.

Filed under: Political retards

News media can usually be relied upon to inject pessimism into the most positive of minds, and of late the major organizations are surpassing themselves. While the BBC led last night with the gun-battles in Lebanon, amid lurid prophecies of another civil war, NBC Nightly was more concerned with the latest forecast of an above-averagely violent, hurricane season. [NBC link]

As the former is a battle between the Lebanese army and a few hundred Islamic militants holed up in one of Lebanon’s refugee camps for Palestinians, the concept of this ugly skirmish transforming into a civil war is somewhat far-fetched, rather as the prophecy by NOAA of a 2007 season of hurricanes on the scale of Katrina, given they were totally wrong in their predictions last year, is also likely to prove as accurate as upending a teacup and reading the leaves.

Nevertheless, it’s the job of news media to fill us with fear and foreboding, so not content to stop at civil war in Lebanon, the BBC then launched into the ongoing and sordid saga of Russian secret agents contaminating half of London with radio-active material, in the process of murdering one of their own. Obviously, they’d been watching too many James Bond films.

The London police say they want to finger Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, for the crime, but unfortunately for the London Metropolitan fuzz, Lugovoi is holed up in Moscow and Mister Putin isn’t keen to let him go.

Not to be outdone by the BBC, NBC Nightly moved rapidly from the wet and windy forecasts of the approaching hurricane season, to the dry and parched agricultural land of twenty-one American states officially suffering from severe drought conditions. Of course, as NBC has so often reiterated in the past, none of it has to do with global warming.

The hell it has!

NOTE: this story can also be viewed at the above NBC link, if you can bear to sit through the agonizingly boring advertisement that precedes it.

Moving from the depressing to the macabre, the BBC made much of the discovery of a Japanese mini-submarine at the bottom of Sydney harbor in Australia. Apparently, the vessel and its two-man crew sank in 1942 after managing to blow up a ship and twenty-one Australian and British sailors.

Not ones to hold a grudge, the Aussies have refused to salvage the vessel, even though it is likely the crew are still inside, but have designated it a “historic site” and are sending the families of the crew each a jar of Sydney harbor sand as recompense.

Oh, that renowned Australian generosity.

While NBC Nightly couldn’t match the BBC’s spookiness, it still knew how to fell American viewers with one swift jab to the solar plexus. As reporter Kevin Tibbles tried just a little too hard to enthuse over a glorified, two-seater, golf-cart in the guise of the latest “Smart car” to reach U.S. shores, SUV lovers sat on their couches stunned and horrified beyond belief. This was to be America’s answer to rising gas prices, a reversion to the cramped and seriously un-cool European “bubble cars” of the austere fifties and sixties.

“You can’t help but love this car – you want to hug it and take it home,” say the car’s manufacturers. For my money, most Americans would prefer to kick it into a ditch.

NOTE: this story can also be viewed at the above NBC link, if you can bear to sit through the agonizingly boring advertisement that precedes it.

On a lighter note, it’s understood that following airing of this NBC segment, the suicide rate among pick-up truck drivers climbed dramatically to an all-time high, which just proves that every cloud does have its silver lining.

If there’s one thing we can rely on from our news media, its those final moments of every program when they try to make up for depressing the hell out of us and offer a tit bit or two of fun and frivolity to restore our joie de vivre.

Tonight, both the BBC and NBC offered a glint of sunshine – the funeral of long-time hate-stirrer and fundamentalist, Jerry Falwell. In NBC’s case it was a mere eighteen second glint, with no obvious mention anywhere on their website. Had Brian Williams just said, “Falwell’s dead. They buried him today,” he couldn’t have been much briefer. The BBC, showing more respect for the dear departed, spent much longer on Falwell’s internment; to be exact, eighteen seconds on the funeral but a good three minutes listing all the eminent political figures who failed to attend.

Unable to match the BBC further in the “fun” department, NBC Nightly did what it always does in these situations and reverted to a medical story. In this case, “Lybrel”, a new birth control pill for women that stops the takers from menstruating. NBC’s resident “medical expert” Dr Nancy Snyderman – though many who know her refuse to acknowledge the sex-change, preferring to still call her, “that Snidey Woman” – raved on about the benefits for women of never menstruating again. Of course, in ten years or so, when it’s been pulled from the shelves as a prime cause of uterine cancer, she will appear again to tell us how much she was against it in the first place.

The final word must lie with the BBC for its tale of a female hammerhead shark producing a virgin birth. Apparently, scientists are able to prove using DNA techniques that no male was involved in the reproductive process, as the resultant offspring contained only the genes of its mother. The occurrence raises the question whether this may be the official “Second Coming” as expected by fundamentalist Christians for the last 2000 years. After all, Jesus only promised to return. He never defined what form that return would take. Given his fate first time around, he may well have decided it was safer to come back as a fish. If the baby shark was Jesus on the return, and not just some piscine Messianic impostor, it’s deliciously ironic that Jerry Falwell should miss the event by a week. Sadly, though, we may never know, for the young shark was eventually killed by a stingray.

However, the debate will long continue to rage as to whether the stingray was of Jewish or Roman descent.

Filed under: Here is the news