Au Revoir, Paddy

I’ve spoken before of my distaste for “holidays” which simply serve as a catalyst for “social drinking”, not the least because like New Year’s Eve, they put a whole bunch of amateur drinkers out on the streets and behind the wheel of a car.

Most egregious of these is St. Patrick’s Day:  a time when, as the marketing goes, everyone turns Irish and drinks Guinness, Bushmills and Tullamore Dew.

Except me.  This would be like commemorating “St. Boromir Day” when I wear a Cossack hat and drink chilled neat vodka till I fall over.  What a farce.

Still, let me not be a killjoy.  There are always the costumes:

Makes you proud to be “Irish”, dunnit?

3 Voices I Can’t Stand

…and I’m talking about singing voices, not (say) political screeching like that of Hillary Clinton.

When these guys start singing, I hit the Mute or Skip buttons:

  • Bob Dylan (any song except Lay Lady Lay, which I can get at least halfway through before hitting click)
  • Steve Tyler (Aerosmith; Dream On is the most egregious offender)
  • Van Morrison (Brown-Eyed Girl… OMFG kill me now, but everything he sings is horrible)

And let’s not forget the chicks:

  • Joni Mitchell (I’d rather listen to blackboard fingernails ad infinitum  than any one of her songs)
  • Joan Baez (preachy bullshit, and that vibratissimo… ugh)
  • early Dolly Parton (until she stopped warbling and started singing)

Don’t get me started on the modern chick singers;  you all know about them.

Sublime, Meet Ridiculous

Readers may remember this little bit of news from last week:

A driver who was trapped behind the wheel of an out-of-control Jaguar I-Pace has revealed to MailOnline how he almost cheated death as his car accelerated up to 100mph on the busy M62 motorway without brakes.

Nathan Owen, 31, was on his way back from his first day at a new job when his 2019 electric car started malfunctioning, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

But in a shock revelation, Mr Owen told how his car had also gone rogue on the motorway in December, this time reaching up to 120mph.

Well, if you thought that was the end of the story, you forgot that this happened in Britishland, so of course there’s a sequel:

Police have arrested a Jaguar I-Pace driver on suspicion of dangerous driving after his ‘out-of-control’ car had to be rammed off the road by officers when it ‘went rogue’ at speeds of up to 100mph.

Nathan Owen, 31, was arrested by Merseyside Police in relation to the incident on the M62 on Wednesday, March 6.

He was arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and causing a public nuisance and taken into police custody to be questioned.

Mr Owen claimed his £80,000 electric car went gone rogue on the motorway that day, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

His arrest comes after a detailed investigation was carried out by police and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) – who said it ‘seeks to investigate all reports of issues relating to product safety’.

Yeah, surrounded by umpteen police cars, he just carried on speeding — of course it’s his fault, even though ’twas Owen himself who called the rozzers for help.

Once again, I’m reminded of the incident in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, when MPs burst into a hotel room where Aarfy has just thrown a whore out of a window to her death — and arrest Yossarian for being AWOL.

Fucking hell.

Can’t Go With That

Here’s a headline that made me scratch my head:

Are Nephilim Still Ruling the World?

Wait, Nephi-what?  Oh FFS, I wish I hadn’t looked this one up:

Genesis 6:1–4 tells the readers that the Nephilim, which means “fallen ones” when translated into English, were the product of copulation between the divine beings (lit. sons of god) and human women (lit. daughters of Adam).

I know, I know… it’s in the Bible, so it must be true.

So that means that all those Greek “myths” weren’t actually mythical at all?

Zeus and the other Olympians were constantly and permanently knocking up princesses, queens, nymphs, sirens, lesser goddesses, warrior women and just plain fair maidens who bathed in the pool with their handmaidens. And the handmaidens, too, sometimes. Zeus even managed to impregnate mortal women when he was a swan or a bull.

Hercules was the illegitimate child of Zeus and a mortal woman, as were Perseus, Helen of Troy and Minos (among other very, very famous offspring of Zeus). Yep, the Greek God family tree is very, very tangled. The genealogy is near impossible to try to map.

And ancient Greeks who literally believed in their religion also believed that Zeus could produce offspring with human women in the real world; among the many people who did was Alexander the Great’s mother, who claimed that Zeus had fathered her son. Alexander the Great was alleged to have actually believed this himself.

I can see why Alexander might have believed it of himself, but I cannot believe that anyone in this day and age would even be discussing this bullshit.  And yet they are, and I perforce must pass comment on their drooling fantasies.

Talk about yer animal husbandry…