Dogwash

Private Eye has been published for the past 50 years, and I've been reading it for about 45 of them. And I'm seriously beginning to wonder if it has finally outlived its original purpose. For what point is there in parodying and lampooning politicians and the press when they make such a good job of doing it to themselves?

We have had the Guardian obsessing about Kelisgate. First, Hugh "I is (sort of) a Darkie and I is a victim" Muir and then Barbara "I is an overprivileged White tart and I apologize for everything" Ellen trying to parlay this tedious minor chantoose into some kind of latterday St Stephen Lawrence with which to browbeat what remains of the unbroken indigenous British population.

According to Wikipedia, "Kelis" is pronounced /kəˈliːs/, or for those of you who don't speak IPA, cur-LEASE with the stress on the second syllable. Well Gordon Ben Et, as they say in Israel. It would seem that this attention-seeking bint, who it appears is too thick to remember her own surname and so it is hardly surprising that she has had difficulty understanding which country she is in, has not been getting nuf rispek from the local serfs and so she kicked off with some outrageous cock-and-bollocks story which the Grauniad eagerly laps up to demonstrate how incorrigibly racist the Brits are even after 40 years of exhaustive antiracism indoctrination. Thing is, Hugh and Barbs, we've heard all this before and we don't fucking care.

And, frankly, the only kind of "red-faced Brit" likely to use "slave" as an ethnic slur against an "African-American" would himself be of West African heritage. Contrary to Alex Haley's sanitized portrayal, those who captured and initially enslaved his putative African ancestor Kunta Kinte would have been other native Africans who then sold him on to Europeans. "Real" Africans are quite aware of this and some of them take malicious pleasure in reminding American and Caribbean Blacks of their Loser heritage.

And now to cap it off, we have the fascinating case of the Cherokee and the Freedmen. To the extent that I can get my tiny brain round this, it's a grubby political inter-ethnic conflict revolving around access to federal handouts. Unfortunately the protagonist groups both have victim-status, which is well tricky, innit. The agonizing among the Righteous must have been truly gutwrenching. But don't worry, the White Man is to blame in the end.


I can't cope with any more World of Victimhood (now available for Xbox 360 and PS3) just now, so let's get back to the real world with a wildlife photo I shot on a recent safari in Sarf London. (Sorry about the poor lighting.)


Here we have a nest of semi-feral beergarden furniture spotted in Greenwich. Note how the young, known as "stools", retain some mobility and also have short arms, known as "rests", with which they entrap dog leads and attack passing ankles. The adult form, the "table", is however completely sessile. The arms disappear entirely and the feet fuse into a single pod. Curiously, in this stage of the beast's lifecycle, the original quadrupedal form of the beer table's ancestor, the dinner table, becomes apparent, if only vestigially.

The adult beer table is generally docile and obtains its nutrition mostly from spilt beer and discarded food, as well as the occasional incautious pigeon. The juveniles, however, when particularly hungry, have been known to take babies and small dogs. While beergarden furniture can generally be approached safely, tourists are advised to exercise vigilance.

The group photographed above, it should be added, have quite clearly been badly spooked by something and should not be approached at all.


As the late great Dave Allen was wont to say, Goodnight, thank you and may your God go with you.