Trump’s imagination, caring for customers, and whether Trump is really a woman

26 July 2025

While the bigwigs are trashing societies and economies worldwide, here’s some light relief in a selection of irresistible and utterly forgettable facts.

Have you noticed that Trump’s combover has been gradually re-dyed from blonde to grey?  Curiously, the much-published photograph of him with Jeffrey Epstein (which incidentally proves to his complete satisfaction that he was never close to Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell so his name cannot possibly appear in the Epstein files that he’s desperately trying to stop being published) … where was I? … oh yes, the photo shows his hair was originally brown.

During his first presidency, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first four years as president. The Washington Post counted them.

I wonder when Donald Trump will realise his country was named after a filthy foreigner and needs to be renamed.  Trumpton would work and Trump could change his name to Captain Flack, the head honcho in Trumpton fire station (younger readers overseas may need to google this).

I generally try not to criticise people for physical features that are not of their choice, like height or physical abnormalities, but I do have great difficulty watching Trump when he purses his mouth into a shape that exactly matches a textbook anus.

A friend of mine has an EE phone.  When it broke recently, they bought a new phone that had to be verified by a code which, in a stroke of genius, EE sent to the old phone with the damaged SIM card.

This is the sort of unintelligent disregard for customers you expect from Ryanair.  I flew with Ryanair once, some 30 years ago, in the days before they sold flights for a token amount and then gave you the choice of paying extra to sit next to your violent, autistic child or to save money by letting a stranger sit next to them while you catch up on your sleep.

Anyway, our outbound flight was OK apart from landing us at an airport some 15km from Rome and bussing us into the centre.  When we left, they bussed us back to the airport before telling us all their UK flights that day had been cancelled but they could book us on a flight 4 days later, which left a lot of irate passengers trying to find other ways home.  All other direct flights were full, as were trains, so we had to buy an extra night in the hotel and spend a fortune on scheduled flights back the next day, via Prague.

I naturally wrote to the CEO, Michael O’Leary, about this and asked if could think of any reason why anybody should fly Ryanair.  He ultimately answered “reliability and price” so I pointed out he obviously hadn’t read my original letter and told him not to bother to reply.

Ryanair’s attitude to their customers is clear on their website:  they’ll fly you to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, but you’ll actually land in Malmö in Sweden.  Likewise, they’ll take you to Florence but you’ll land in Pisa.  O’Leary was once famously quoted as saying he’d wipe somebody’s bottom for a fiver, which perfectly sums up his character.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson to avoid frightening the peasants, is out of prison and in the news again, at least in Epping.  Lucy Brown, once part of his inner circle that includes the son of one of the Krays, a Canadian far-right publisher and a criminal convicted of threatening to slash the throat of a shopkeeper during a robbery, has described him as impulsive.

She has said “He’ll just rush in, straight away, whatever feels right at the time. He just does not think. Which is why he falls in [to] prison all the time, because he’s always saying stuff that he shouldn’t.”

More management disdain for the people who pay them was seen at the Nationwide Building Society’s AGM last week when an increase in the CEO’s pay of 43% was ‘approved’ (though voters didn’t actually have the power to stop it) and Debbie Crosbie will snaffle £7m of the assets of a mutual society that belongs to its members (who described the increase as “an obscenity” and “hypocritical”).

Another needy CEO is Trump himself, whose ratings are falling daily.  Increasingly, Americans are leaving their home country because they can see Trump destroying it, and many of them are relocating to the Cotswolds (formerly known as the Couttswolds because so many rich Brits live there).  One of the latest immigrants (who, according to my taxi driver last week, are the sole cause of all Britain’s problems) is the American comedian and former chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, the actor Portia de Rossi.

This seems diametrically opposed to right wing claims that Britain’s millionaires are emigrating in droves to pay even less tax elsewhere, but who lets contradictory facts stand in the way of a good slogan.

A possible side effect of one of Trump’s ill-considered decisions is that he should consider himself to be female.  One of his first acts as president was to sign an order that gender is “immutably” defined at the moment of conception, saying “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell …’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”  Which reveals his total ignorance of human biology.

In fact, for the first 6-7 weeks after conception, it isn’t possible to determine the gender of a foetus because a Y chromosome doesn’t start to develop testes until then.  However, most scientists now accept that sex is not immutably anything and gender is much more complex than just being male or female.

Trump’s unrecorded response to this criticism was “Bollocks to that, or not, as the case may be”.

Still, it does pave the way for an antique joke:  “How do you tell the sex of a chromosome?” / “Take its genes down.”

About Pope Francis

26 April 2025

Religions have always fascinated me, both for their ability to provide comfort to believers in times of need and for their power to make people feel bad about transgressions. 

When pushed for an answer, I tend to describe myself as a borderline Buddhist but I emphasise the ‘borderline’ and these Mutterings very rarely venture onto religious subjects because I respect and admire people who follow the principles of their faith, or its absence.

In the UK, the 2021-22 census showed that 46.5% of the population described themselves as Christian and 6.0% described themselves as Muslim.  While it’s thought that Muslims will outnumber Christians worldwide before the end of the century, they will not be evenly distributed and it seems likely that there will still be more Christians in the UK.  Mind you, having said that, we must remember that, in the same census, 37.8% of the population said they followed no religion so, by 2100, a majority of the country will probably be non-believers.

Almost half of the Christians worldwide today follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church which is headed by the pope who is seen as the latest member of a direct line back to St Peter, ‘leader’ of the apostles and the rock on which the church was built (Gospel of St Matthew, chapter 16).

As a result of Pope Francis’s death last week, a conclave of cardinals will now go through the processes necessary to identify the next pope, something that rather reminds me of the work done by Tibetan Lama ‘officials’ to identify the next Dalai Lama after the last one has died.  That’s if there is to be another pope:  some people are suggesting that the Irish Saint Malachy, the 12th-century bishop of Armagh, prophesied that there would be only one more pope after Benedict.  (He wrote a bunch of obscure prophecies centuries before Nostradamus did something similar in France in the 16^th century but Malachy failed to mention which Benedict and there have been 16 so far.)

Apart from Pope John XXIII, Pope Francis is the first pope who I could have named during his reign and both of them gained that irrelevant distinction because they came over as being humane people as well as religious pontiffs.  Francis in particularly seem to have preferred to distance himself from the pomp that surrounded his office.  His first public demonstration of this was, on being elected, to take a bus back to his hotel to pay the bill instead of travelling in the papal car, and he then moved into a simple room in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse, rather than the official papal apartments.  He also rarely wore the papal red shoes or white trousers, saying they made him feel like an ice-cream vendor.

I know little about his predecessor except that, for anti-Roman anglophones and Shakespeare lovers, the name Benedict made him more approachable than Ratzinger.  (Did you know that, rather charmingly for anglophones, a German Town or City Hall is called ‘ein rathaus’ – insert your own joke here.)

Be that as it may, the Catholic church was looking for a reformer who could modernise the church as Benedict’s successor and Jorge Mario Bergoglio was selected, choosing the papal name Francis after the saint of Assisi, even though he’d hadn’t always been a career priest.  He’d originally gained a diploma as a chemical technician and joined the Jesuits in his early 20s after recovering from a serious illness that had led to the removal of part of one lung but he wasn’t ordained as a priest till he was 31, being elected pope about 45 years later.

One of his earliest actions was to face the revelations of the mismanagement of the Vatican’s finances so he fired the committee and appointed a new team of cardinals and lay experts.  In the face of resistance from the more conservative (small c) cardinals, he gave his views on subjects that the Vatican had previously shied away from.  Perhaps his most famous actions included his reply when asked about gay people in the church and he just said “Who am I to judge?”;  his encouragement of parish priests to make their own decisions about whether divorcees who’d remarried should be allowed to receive communion;  and his proposal to allow the blessing of same-sex unions (Benedict had condemned all homosexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil”).

Faced with such challenges, which he described as being like “cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothpick”, he inevitably upset the liberals by not going far enough and the conservatives by going too far.  He brought more women into the church’s administration and management but didn’t allow them to be admitted to the priesthood.  He was also criticised for being too lenient with priests who had been involved in child sexual abuse.

On the wider stage, during his time as head of the Catholic church, he responded to many acts of terrorism and violence worldwide and consistently emphasised that violence is not part of any true religion.  He specifically said in 2016 after a Catholic priest was murdered in France “I think it isn’t right to identify Islam with violence”, adding “I think that in nearly all religions there is always a small fundamentalist group … we [Catholics] have them.”

His compassion extended to refugees and the victims of wars and those most affected by economic hardship and politics.  He even published an encyclical in 2015, advancing sound scientific and theological arguments for protecting the earth from the climate crisis, arguing that it was mankind’s responsibility to protect the planet that God had created.

He was outspokenly critical of Donald Trump’s policy on migrants and wrote to America’s Roman Catholic bishops saying “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

But he retained his humanity to the end and, when saying the Angelus prayer in St Peter’s Square on Sundays, would end with “buon pranzo” – enjoy your lunch.

GBNews, Tory leaders, national borders, abortion and Hermes’ incompetence

5 October 2024

GBNews has obviously been doing some research into their market because I received an unsolicited email from them last Sunday giving me the latest headlines.  It was obvious that they believe they know a lot about me so I’d open the email and jump at the chance to send them money.

The message was headed “For you:  Bringing you the stories that matter most to you” so I knew they really had worked hard at identifying my personal interests, and I felt warm inside that they’d gone to all that trouble.

The update was obviously designed to appeal to red-top readers and included just 12 pictures and headlines leading to the more important stories last Sunday.  Five of the them were about royals, three of them about Harry and Meghan, our ex-pat royals. 

There were also five stories implying that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves might not be the best people to run the country:  pensioners having to return to work, more than 2m extra people now paying tax, “sick-note Britain”, “11 taxes Rachel Reeves could increase to fill Labour’s ‘black hole’” and an invitation to vote on “Do you trust Starmer and Reeves with this country?  VOTE NOW” which will give them a guaranteed scientifically unrepresentative view of Britons’ feelings about the Labour government for a future email.

The other two top stories of the day were “Virgin Media issues broadband warning to millions of UK households who break the ‘golden rule’ of good WiFi” and “Major car brands recall 350,000 vehicles amid fears engines will be replaced and airbags may injure drivers”.

Well, I mean, royals, politics, broadband and cars – right up there with crotcheting in my list of interests. 

I have to admit that I didn’t open all the links but the style of those I did read seemed to be aiming at readers of the Daily Mail, which is not one of my favourite news sources and comes way below Reacher books.  But I did love the reference to eleven taxes that could be increased.  I bet I could think of more than eleven.  Increasing taxes on champagne, olives, tofu, The Guardian, the Hampstead & Highgate Express and the wokerati are six for starters.

The Tories’ grasp of Britain’s problems was as obvious at their party conference as Labour’s conference the previous week had been innovative.  The only excitement on the menu was supposed to be the “Vote For Me” speeches from the four people stupid enough to want to be the party’s leader. 

There was a memorable reference in Kemi Badenoch’s pre-conference pamphlet which apparently used words to the effect of ‘Right is Left and Left is Right’.  I expected a ‘(8)’ at the end because it looked like a red-top crossword clue leading to the answer ‘oxymoron’;  surely she can’t have meant ‘Left is right’. 

Furthermore, all four speakers exceeded the time limit they’d been allocated which doesn’t augur well for whoever wins, if ‘win’ is the right word for a poisoned chalice.

Speakers at the Royal Institution are given an hour to explain their specialist subject to the public.  At the end of their hour, a bell rings and they wind up in a couple of sentences.  The neatest lecture on record is one speaker who heard the bell, finished a sentence and stopped.

A mudblood Trump could be about to cause some discussion in America when Melania’s memoir, to be published next week, reveals her to be a supporter of women’s rights to abortion while her husband is busy leading the Republicans’ efforts to limit women’s rights. Where do they see the dividing line between preventing women having abortions (good because that’s Republican policy) and making them cover their faces and bodies in public (bad because that’s Taliban policy)?

The border between Switzerland and Italy has recently been moved without a shot being fired.  Between Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley, it has traditionally followed the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow but, as the glaciers have retreated, so have the dividing lines moved.

Changes to the border were agreed by a joint Italian-Swiss commission in May last year and the Swiss have now approved the treaty.  Italy’s approval is still awaited but nobody seems terribly exercised by either the change or the delay.

Further east, Mount Everest is now an estimated 15-50 metres higher than it was about 90,000 years ago (no, I don’t know how it was measured that long ago).  It’s known to have been formed when the Indian tectonic plate crashed into the Eurasian plate and the collision threw up the Himalayas, a bit like pushing a sample of jam in a saucer to see if the surface rises, thus showing it’s cooked.  Neither the Himalayas nor the Alps are yet quite cooked.

In the UK, Hermes, whose policy is to call itself Evri in the vain hope of breaking with the appalling reputation it had earned as Hermes, is at it again.  I recently bought something from Temu who reported its passage through various depots and airports(!) before handing it over to Evri who proved they delivered it by sending me a photograph of its being put into somebody else’s letterbox. 

I was also told after I’d placed the order that Temu is apparently a marketplace for small suppliers in China.  If I’d known this, I’d never have spent £10 on some plastic bags that were going to be flown half way round the world.  Online, they just seemed to be the best quality at the price but burning carbon fuel to send them 5,000 miles to get Evri to deliver them to the wrong house is just crazy.  I won’t be using Temu again and I’m waiting to see how Evri respond to my complaint …

By the way, why has the English transliteration of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy been changed from Zelenskiy by some, but not all, news sources, when it used to be Zelensky anyway?  Is it an attempt to acknowledge an almost inaudible extension of the last syllable?