22 June 2024
This week produced inspiring news from Scotland: Edinburgh Council has decided not to spend £100,000 on a scheme to catch the dog owners who leave their dearly beloveds’ poo in public places.
The proposal would have involved shipping dogshit to America where its DNA could be identified and matched against a database of canine DNA.
You will immediately see why I enjoyed picturing a bunch of seriously-minded Scots sitting around a table and considering a report on how to deal with the problem after the city had been named as the worst place in the UK for ‘dog-fouling’.
“Och, I well remember when dogs were licensed. Was it 7/6 it cost? That’s 37 and a half pee to you, Angus. We’d have to issue biometric chips and licences, and get PooPrints to upgrade their DNA records.”
“Och Mhaira, I ken £sd, my tooth fairy would leave me sixpence. And we’d need scanners to read canine microchips and card machines to fine owners of unchipped dogs.”
“Och that’s great material for this summer’s Fringe comedians who sit on stools.”
“Och Duncan, you’re havering again, but we shall need chipwardens on the streets …”
“Och that’ll cost, Mhaira.”
“Och aye. That’s agreed then – let the wee puppies poo where they want. What’s next on the agenda? Feline faeces in flowerbeds! Would you look at the time. Meeting closed.”
Other geniuses of the week include the inimitable Donald Trump who accused Joe Biden of being cognitively impaired because of his verbal stumbles and reminded people he’d “aced” a cognitive test while he was president. He said Ronny Johnson, who “was the White House doctor … said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much.” This is how lasting friendships are made but it would have been even more impressive if he’d remembered that the doctor was Ronny Jackson, not Ronny Johnson.
Why don’t both Biden and Trump both take tests for early-stage dementia, administered by the same professionally qualified specialist? These tests do exist because I’ve done one and I aced it with covfefe.
But now a request for advice – all suggestions will be welcome.
I use YouTube to listen to music but I’ve just discovered that there’s all sorts of other stuff on there. A young child of a friend asked if he could play games on my ipad and I said he could if he promised not to spend any money, so he disappeared upstairs with it.
When he left, he said “Don’t look at my games history” so, naturally, I did.
I’m sure everybody else knew already but I had no idea that YouTube went so far beyond music as to include snuff ‘games’ and videos. Some are manga videos, with simplistic cartoon figures being cut up and having their heads blown into red blotches while some are more like games I’ve seen older children playing, with more realistic soldiers going through ruined towns and shooting ‘the enemy’.
Before you ask, yes, I’d been through the ipad’s ‘settings’ and introduced all the parental and other controls I could find but these ‘games’ seemed to have by-passed all of them. They have titles like “This game put me on an FBI watchlist”, “This game made me psychotic” and “Do not tell my therapist I played this game”.
I was shocked – and it takes a lot to shock me – that people are twisted enough to put them up on YouTube and that YouTube hasn’t attempted to stop them and, worse still, that 6-year- olds can access them so I’ve now got to find out how to limit what can be seen on YouTube.
Any advice on how to limit access to YouTube would be welcome (in simple language please!) Can I restrict access to YouTube with a password?
My children used to play ‘bang you’re dead’ computer games in their teens and I later asked one of them if he thought the violence in the games had made him more violent and he said he thought not because they weren’t real.
I also wonder how children’s hearing will survive the repetitive and percussive sounds of gunshots and explosions. It’s thought that some 37.5 million adults in America, that’s about one in six, are hearing-impaired and many rely on subtitles but, despite arguably having damaged players’ hearing when they were younger, video-streaming and podcasting companies have been slow off the mark in damage limitation.
Films from Europe and the Far East are automatically subtitled, so should films also be subtitled when the words are mostly spoken in the accent of an ethnic minority. ‘Trainspotting’ for example, which is largely incomprehensible to sassenachs.
Also incomprehensible to everyone (except misogynists) is why the wife of a man who is knighted becomes a Lady while the husband of a woman who is made a Dame doesn’t get any title. So Sir John Smith’s wife becomes Lady Smith but Dame Jean Smith’s husband doesn’t become Sir Smith. (A Lady Jean Smith would have got the title from her father, not her husband; someone I used to know, who died far too young, would get quite cross and say “I’m not Lady Hilary Weir, I’m Lady Weir”.)
However, the title ‘Dame’ wasn’t introduced till 1917 when the Order of the British Empire was introduced and men were men and even the suffragists were still chattels.
David Furnish, Sir Elton John’s husband, recently pointed out a further inconsistency by saying he should have been given a title when Sir Elton was knighted. What though? Could you have a Sir Elton whose husband was Sir John? And what about lesbians? Dame and Lady? And trans couples – the Knight formerly known as Lady?
That should rock the boat, upset the applecart, put the cat among the pigeons and stir things up as well as taking the wind from governments’ sails and putting a spoke in their wheels.
I’m on David Furnish’s side: the current system is sexist and unfair so let’s just invent a new title for the partner of people given titles.
Lesser Mutterings 