Trump Surnud

I met a friend in a cafe in Tallin.  He had to leave early,  leaving me with an hour before my hair appointment. I took the time to practise my Estonian and started to wade through one of the newspapers gathered neatly in a pile on a shelf by the window.  I started with the headlines.  The front page was easiest: Trump something,  it said.  I couldn't quite work out the word: it was in the past tense,  it was short.  Finally I found it in my dictionary: Dead. In retrospect I should have got the sense of the article from the photograph that covered most of the front page.  It showed Trump at his inauguration,  his blonde hair like a frightened snow fox on Ivanka's shoulder,  his head a vast bloody hole.  I assumed it must have been some sort of exploding bullet. I used my dictionary to piece together the rest of the article.  As he crossed the podium to sign in,  live on TV,  his head had exploded.  At first it was assumed he had self-combusted,  apparently not uncommon in Estonia.  Detectives soon realised he had been shot from some point about half a mile up and two miles away.  Possibly a hot air balloon or air ship.  The newspaper speculated it was a rogue Amazon drone. 

To check my understanding I read the front page of an English language paper.  It simply reported the inauguration had gone smoothly,  Trump had said some inopportune things,  the Bruce Springsteen tribute band was well received,  and in short Donald Trump was now president.  I turned to page 2 of the Estonian paper.  The first article reported that the number of guns an individual was now permitted to own had risen from one to seven. This was more difficult to check,  so I asked the cafe owner.  He said he had heard a report on the radio that morning.  The law had been changed to allow those with a firearms license to own up to eight guns.  Not seven.  He was going to register his guns that afternoon.

This was odd.  The difference between seven and eight is not large. However,  it is still a difference. I read another story.  This one reported that ID cards were to be scrapped in Estonia: they were an infringement on an individual's right to be ignored.  I asked the cafe owner again.  His name was Mikael.  He laughed and told me that they had just made them even more secure -  much more difficult to counterfeit now.  Which, he informed me,  was a shame.  I asked him how he knew.  He had seen it on the TV before he came to work he said. 

This was odder still,  and something to think about whilst I had my hair cut.

Number Crunching and Rug Munching

The sexual habits of the nation – particularly women – are altering. I read with interest the results of the third National Sex Survey (NATSAL) last week.

It seems that more women (from a sample – pretty good by any standard – of 15,000 people) are having same-sex sexual encounters. The figures the survey extracted say that t 16% of women are having sexual 'experience(s)' with other women, up from 4% in 1990, while 8% were going for the home run, up from 1.8%. Well, although I am good friends with one or two lesbians who might like to take personal credit for this, what I wonder is whether we might actually be looking at an altogether different prospect: alien infiltration. This is a simple statistical matter. I would like to bring the reader’s attention to two apparently coincidental happenings that concern a corner of the Pennines that is close to my heart.

The mothership and a witness

"An analysis of 10,278 UFO sightings between 1947 and 2001 shows, that, as a ratio of population against sightings numbers, sightings are 12 times more frequent within the sparsely populated region that the national average...73 per cent of all alien contact reported within the Pennines occurred within 10 miles of Todmorden."
 

"Hebden Bridge has the highest number of lesbians per head in the UK."

And I might add that the ‘Hebden Bridge effect’ has spread into Todmorden with a high occupancy of lesbians in that town too. I have often wondered whether these two ‘facts’ might be linked. Is there a correlation? Might those two Pennine towns actually be a distribution centre for aliens who are ‘passing’ in the human population? My own belief is that members of the early lesbian enclave that developed there from the 1960s might have been picked up (let’s not mince our words: abducted) by aliens who have steadily replicated what they considered to be an average example of the population and are therefore planting more of their kind into their Pennine hub, allowing them to diffuse into the wider populace.
 

This might not be a bad news story. Let’s look at it another way and assume innocence until proved otherwise: these aliens, perfectly replicated, have no ill intent towards us. Lesbians have historically been committed to public services, and (historically) without family commitments have contributed longer working lives. Nursing, police work, social work, care work, community work, sports: who doesn’t have a stereotype of a lesbian in these professions? Although it’s hard to get the stats, in my legal career and among personal acquaintances I can testify to a higher proportion of lesbians per capita in these roles than in society at large. Tony agrees. So, more lesbians might well mean a fairer, leaner, fitter, more giving, society. Bring on the alien takeover!

The Cutns-Monte Act

I'm not sure how many of you have come across this little know piece of US legislation. It appears that both Obama and McCain voted for it. It was passed several years after a Mr Cutns Monte was cleared by the Federal Courts for buying a house with someone else's credit card. He still lives there to this day. Apparently this is every American's constitutional right. I think we can therefore hold both candidates responsible for our current plight...

Crime in Transit

Southampton’s Ford factory will cease production of the Transit van by 2011. Oh sad day, some cry, the vehicle that built Britain is being sidelined. But will the loss of the Transit have an incidental effect on the crime rate? Is this a subtle way to clean up Britain? The introduction of the Paracetamol 16 piece blister pack is believed to have cut the suicide rate by 25%, so maybe taking the vehicle of crime away will deter the potential criminal. In my professional life, the only vehicle that ever seems to come up in court – often including those that pull up outside court to unload the accused – is the ubiquitous Transit. It wasn’t a beige VW Transporter driver that tried to anti-Tebbit Dave Cameron off his bike with a well-timed shove. White Van Man is one thing – one of Britain’s more stagnant characters – but he’s small fry compared to Blue Van Man. We are a nation of van-driving murderers and our chief weapon is being revoked. As a classic 1973 Transit owner, I may mourn, but as a lawyer and a Brit, I’m glad that the blood-bath is over.

Officers have said they want to trace the owner of a blue transit van which is thought to have been seen in the drive of the pensioner's home last Wednesday.
A total of 500 blue Transit vans and over 180 Range Rovers were traced and eliminated during the course of the enquiry. … "However, we still need the public's help in tracing a white Transit-size van which was travelling in Sanderson Road behind the blue van we have now traced.”
His car was forced to a stop by a white transit van before two men got out of the van and opened fire.
Torbay Police are hunting a light blue Transit van in connection with the disappearance of a Paignton man nearly 5 months ago.
4 days later a blue transit van that was believed to be the same van that abducted Jenny was spotted by CCTV in Birmingham.
Danielle was seen talking to a man in a blue Transit van shortly after leaving home the day she disappeared.
Detectives say they have been able to pinpoint the time of death to within 36 hours and widened their search for the drivers of a blue Transit.
A suspicious blue Transit van was seen around the playing fields on Monday morning and could be linked to the burglary.
The married father of two had gone into the shop to buy a newspaper, but emerged to find his blue Ford Transit was being taken, the spokesman added. The vehicle then struck the victim a glancing blow before running him over.
Twenty years ago, on a dark November morning, a gang of five armed robbers were sitting in a stolen blue Transit van on the Heathrow trading estate, waiting for their "inside man" to turn up [... but let's not forget the Transit's dodgy axle problem ...]. As the robbers filled up the battered Transit with this windfall the vehicle's axles started to bend.

So, since my last blog I read the following in an article about women in Farc. It got me thinking again about the Revolution and god:

Another recent deserter resorted to particularly dramatic measures in order to return to the family she had left behind when she joined Farc. Sitting in her mother's sparse sitting room in a Bogota housing estate, she looks every inch the typical city girl: manicured nails, carefully groomed hair, white trousers. Amalia now has a respectable job in a travel agency and keeps her guerrilla past a secret from her neighbours. When she went to the camps, her two-year-old daughter was sent to live in Bogota with her grandmother but, after two-and-a-half years, Amalia could no longer bear the separation. 'I was given the task of looking after an airstrip, and I saw my opportunity,' she says. She got on to the plane with her gun and told the pilot he was being hijacked. 'He went very pale and did what I said.' On the journey to freedom she read her horoscope in the newspaper El Tiempo. 'It said I was about to start a new cycle in my life. I remember thinking how true it was.'

I bet no one realised that day that El Tiempo's astrologer was writing about an escaping female guerrilla. This is what El Tiempo says about me today:

VIRGO

24 de agosto a 23 de septiembre

Tu talento recibe mayor expansión y es posible que puedas encauzar con mejor precisión tus proyectos. La inteligencia y calma, que empleas al hacer tus negocios; se convierten ahora en la llave secreta del éxito.

Or is it actually addressed to another Farc member about to employ her intelligence and calm to organise a successful kidnapping. Who knows?

Is God a Marxist-Leninist?

And so another day, another painstaking journey across google earth in a virtual hot air balloon in search of a likely plot of land for my Plastics Injection Moulding Company. I don't think I've mentioned my dream yet. Briefly, I managed to get our money out of Bare Fanny Sterns (or whatever it is) before the crisis which Gordon tried so hard to avoid. So it's sitting in a bank looking for somewhere to go. Since I was a child I have loved plastic of all shapes and sizes. In fact one of the nicest things about it is you can mould it into nice shapes of nearly any size. And before any of you write to tell me about my carbon footprint these days you can use recycled plastic and even honey. And that's exactly what I will do. I will turn recycled plastic into Habitat chairs and Save the Children Toothbrushes and create a Foundation for Underprivileged Children with Human Rites. (Geddit? future?)

But I need a place to build my factory where labour costs aren't too high. Hence google earth and my desire to share with you an interesting place I found today. It is a district in Binh Duong province in Viet Nam called Tam Uyen. As you can see it has lots going for it. The most interesting claim was that made on the 'Natural Conditions Page'. The land density numbers and relative moisture are good by any standards, and actually fall in the range I am looking for. But what about the other claim? That God hardly does anything there. I, as a practising Catholic, find that hard to believe. I know Viet Nam is a Marxist Leninist Country, and strictly speaking, they aren't really believers. But that would be more of a reason for God to visit the place, not stay away. And so I am forced to ask myself - and you, dear readers - is God a Marxist-Leninist? Please vote.

Snatch, Clean and Jerk

I swim (see last post). I swim well. Sometimes - as some of my bar colleagues have discovered - too well. But, my real sport has always been the Men's 56 Kg weight lifting. There is something about little men lifting several times their own body weight that I find inspiring. Tony never came close to qualifying and I don't hold that against him. But Liam. As a young lad well within the weight threshold he chose to go out drinking rather than make use of the No. 10 Gym. As mothers we get used to shattered dreams, but I think my sons' lack of interest in the sport was particularly hard to take.

Without subscriptions to certain channels which Tony won't let me have it's almost impossible to watch 56Kg events, particularly with a schedule as busy as mine. But I still love to watch the little men and the Olympics is a break in my cloud. A sunshine of big muscles on little arms. An opportunity to see, in the flesh, what my sons could have been. What a tournament we were treated to. Men from Indonesia, North Korea, China, Viet Nam and other countries with little men lifted and lifted and lifted. And then they lifted some more. And finally, when the chalk dust settled and the dumb bells stopped bouncing we had an Olympics 1,2,3: China, Viet Nam and Indonesia: Little Men with Muscles on a podium. What more can a barrister ask for?