Papists!

I wonder what the Rev Ian Paisley and others of his ilk are thinking today? Pious thoughts?

First things first. Hat's off to the <BBC for choosing a swash letter e at the end of the word Pope in their little Pope logo. Well done. Reminds me of that scene in 3rd Rock from the Sun where that guys says, "I'm right behind you Mary - I just downloaded some angry fonts."

As I was driving home yesterday I wondered idly what it is that cows and sheep think about all day. Standing in the field, chewing the cud. I mean, our goldfish are capable of recognising when someone is near their tank and start begging for food. Horsey people will tell you that the horses "love" going round the Grand National, risking their bollocks, if they've got any bollocks, on the high fences. They'll tell you horses have personalities etc.

But do cows and sheep think at all? What's it like, as a life? For insight, one need turn no further than the streets of Rome, to see the herds queuing for hours on end, grieving to order, weeping and wailing and generally making utter twats of themselves.

Or turn inwards, let's do that, to us bloggers and our pages and pages of utter gobshite. Afraid to be left behind, everybody writes about the same thing, ad nauseam.

I'm getting tired of several things in life. Flickr is one. I'll still upload photos, but the much vaunted community vibe is leaving me behind. There are a couple of decent coves on Flickr, and then there are an awful lot of anal retentives, and a collective of pervy old blokes. Photographers: let's admit it. Photographers are mostly a bunch of pervy middle aged and older men. There are also disturbing amounts of male nudity on Flickr. Flickr is the new dirty mac for the exhibitionist tendency. Please fuck off.

And I'm tired of people being nice all the time. I'm just not. I'm a miserable old bastard, a cynic, 100% unsympathetic, contrarian. I'm not a joiner, in short, and if I can't be sarcastic and cutting, I'd rather not bother.

And television. I love television, but I'm tired of seeing children beaten and starved - albeit fictionally - in the name of entertainment. So that means I'll prolly stop watching ER and CSI, and possibly other shows with acronyms for names. Scriptwriters should fucking cut it out. Just because it's a short cut to people's emotions doesn't mean you should do it all the time. In the end, all it does is make us inured to the very idea of child abuse.

And America. You sick, sick, bastards. To show the viscera, the violence, the bruising, the injury and death, the horror of child abuse and neglect - to hammer us with that, over and over again, and then throw an epileptic fit just because someone flashes a tit or arse. To do all that, and then call yourselves christians and talk about how wonderful JP II was - well, I'm tired of you, too.