Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, April 20, 2013

So, the American Senate has killed President Obama's attempt to revise the gun laws. I have to say, I'm with the NRA on this. As it's clearly not possible in the USA to stop heavily armed psychopaths slaughtering kids, I think Obama needs to look hard at the NRA's proposals for not only having armed guards in each school but also arming the teachers. And indeed the kids themselves. My modest proposal is that the State gifts a handgun to every newborn child and then, on its sixteenth birthday, makes another gift of whatever is then the most powerful and most rapid firing automatic rifle on the market. Perhaps even a machine gun. At 18, the new adult would be entitled to a small personal armoured car, in which to sit through university lectures. OK, this won't stop maniacs attempting to gun down everyone inside an infant school but it will level the playing field a bit. If one can imagine a playing field inside a school. I've never seen myself saying this but the truth is that the logic of the NRA just doesn't go far enough. Wimps, really.

But anyway, here's the comments of one of the parents who lost a child in the Sandy Hook shootings. His view is that “A sane man's contempt for the United States Senate must now be certain and complete.” Which is a bit silly, as it implies there are no sane men in the NRA. And it doesn't put me in a good light either. But, hey, I'll let you judge for yourselves. I'll just finish with this statistic of the number of people killed by guns in the USA in the four months since the Sandy Hook tragedy:- 3,500. Makes you think. None of these would have happened, I venture to say, if all the victims had been encased in protective armour

They say that nothing much has come out of Liverpool since the Beatles. But this is obviously calumnious nonsense as, even recently, we had the famous “Scouse brow”. Fast in its footsteps we have “titooing”, which, as you may have guessed, is the tattoing of one's nipples. I say 'one's' but at this point the technique appears to be confined to the fair sex. It's “a process which originated as a medical procedure for breast reconstruction but now serves as a cosmetic procedure for women to darken, enlarge and define their nipples and the surrounding areola. The semi-permanent treatment gives them their 'perfect nipples' and can last a life-time with regular top-ups.” Which can only be good news. And more evidence of (wo)man's essential insanity. For this we poor men lived through four phases of feminism?

I don't look Spanish, I'm told. Nor Galician. I mention this because, when buying my ticket from Vigo to Pontevedra yesterday, the guy at the counter volunteered the time of the next train as “Dez e oito con dez e oito”. When I said I didn't understand, he said it again. When I said I still didn't understand, he changed it to “Diez y ocho con diez y ocho”. Or 18.18. In retrospect, I then recognised the Galician version but I've not figured out why the guy used it not just once but twice. Perhaps he's a Galician Nationalist. They do exist and one or two of them are a tad violent. But, if so, it'd be odd he was prepared to switch to Castellano. Perhaps only for a guiri.

By rather a great coincidence, there's a letter in today's El Pais which touches on several of this week's themes. The writer says that he accepted being fined 100 euros for crossing a line on a roundabout and he understood that the police didn't want to stop him and and so interrupt the traffic flow. But what was hard to take was the letter arriving three months later which informed him he'd been fined 600 euros for not giving his name. To be followed by another letter some time later telling him this had risen 754 euros to cover police costs. An expensive roundabout. The writer asked whether this was anything other than theft. Well, it could be, I suppose. But I prefer to see it, as I've said, as a variable road tax. I mean, to think otherwise would be to suggest the Guardia Civil would stoop to state-institutionalised robbery. Surely not.

Meanwhile, I must now wait to see whether I get a further 600 euro fine for not giving my name as I drove along the motorway to Málaga with a police car next to me. Presumably by shouting it through the window.

No comments: