OLD MAN’S RANT – JULY 2015 – BAHRAIN THIS MONTH MAGAZINE
It’s Ramadan….. so be careful what you say as people are very touchy about food at certain times of the day. Most not and couldn’t care less, but we do have bigots and snitches, so Ramadan Kareem to all who supposedly practice and for those who pretend, I’ll see you for a bacon butty and a coffee at the studio for indulging.
Certain countries (names of which cannot be revealed until prison food improves) block questioning web sites, especially those containing alarming subjects such as we speak of today. So at risk of being burned at the stake, we bring you news of life’s termination as we know it Jim. No jokes, no funny lines, this edition of the Old Man’s rant is a stunner, frightening and seriously serious, so don’t bother to write a will.
Judging by the dates of some of the old magazines we see in waiting rooms especially barber shops, it might be too late and your awareness posthumous as you flick through pages while sitting on Cloud Nine waiting to go in, wondering what the hell happened! Well, a massive asteroid from hell hit earth September 2015 and we are all gone. Google it! (Edit – March 2016 – um er!). Maybe even those arrogant white Toyota Land Cruisers owners who think they rule the road are rid of. A drastic measure but hey! Coming back to now, the news is front page of the UK’s Daily Mirror in full colour, so it must be true. If Fox News starts reporting it as well, really fear for your life.
It has been almost 3 months since the word ‘Illuminati’ and the associated conspiracy theory rants appeared in this column, yet there was a solemn promise to include something about it in each article. No scientific facts collaborate the reality of this uber catastrophe, but it is thought to be some conspiracy the Illuminati has scammed it up. It even pre-empts Armageddon, of which at least some are supposed to survive. That would be all Virgos then.
Like being locked in a dominatrix’s dungeon, this magazine is strapped to philanthropy, forfeiting their own well-being to warn others less able. No expense has been spared with Skype calls around the world warning one and all to prepare. A pacifist’s solution might be to immediately uproot to Denver Colorado where people gather in huddles and converse in ‘wow’ speak with the invisible, as they smoke the envisaged horror away. Claiming drug use as a recreation is just denial anyway, but now business on the streets will be booming, all lighting up to block out the pending doom. Imagine the state of the place; a stoned dude walks along the railroad track believing it to be the stairway to heaven but wonders why the hand rail is so low. A quick warning was communicated to a commune and caused an instant stampede to the coke shop. Heeding our plea to focus and stay well away from this evil powder they agreed and now use 5 meter long straws.
Being pedantic, let’s call it a bucket shop legacy, but there is a scientific boo-boo here. The headline; ‘Asteroid will hit earth in September’ is just so wrong, so don’t panic. Asteroids are orbiting something and become meteors once they start going off the rails. This is hardly surprising, with all that Denver air and shisha from here wafting to the stratosphere and beyond. Any alien that descends will already be stoned. If a meteor is not completely destroyed by the earth’s atmosphere and actually lands on earth, they become ‘meteorites’. So it will be a meteorite maybe 100 times smaller which destroys us, not an asteroid. Now don’t you feel better having cleared that small matter up in your final seconds? OK, so the original asteroid was bigger than Jupiter and could be about the size of the moon as it enters our atmosphere. Relax; even if it is one hundred times smaller, it would make no difference, we are gonners.
For now, asteroid…. what asteroid? This is insignificance compared to the fears sweeping through the expatriate community dreading the moment government subsidies are removed and we are forced to pay on average something like BD 150 a month for electricity during peak summer demand. Most labourers in Bahrain will wish the Asteroid came sooner. So chill and gulp more shisha as fast as you can, don’t bother about buying in bulk at the supermarket or ordering anything on Amazon after August this year. Don’t even bother buying the ultra large bags of soap powder to wash your soiled underwear, because where we are going, you won’t need any.
Not only beating out Armageddon this baby even tops the BBC’s desired finality of having an ethnic, disabled, lesbian President, which sounds like as much fun as an asteroid hitting earth.
OLD MAN’S RANT – BAHRAIN THIS MONTH – JUNE 2015
OK, how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Of course, old joke; firstly one has to assess if the light bulb wants to be changed. This is just the sort of analogy we need to enhance scientific leaning and career prospects – not!
Just so you know where we are going, let’s assess the nuance of this article. Finding the perfect job is as rare as unicorn sh*t, but life ostensibly begins in our late teens with that sole goal in mind. Amazingly, so called studies show that among the worst university degrees to obtain are within the arts, which according to this research are close on a complete waste of time. Shockingly, criminology is also high up the pile of pointlessness if this list of defeatism is to be believed. Speechless!
Just like media hype for inanity and without being too sesquipedalian about it, most of these long winded surveys are just that, tosh! Wait a minute! Who are you to incinerate that I don’t know big words? But if authentic, then music and graphic design or degrees centred around these subjects are ostensibly as useful as a one armed trapeze artist with an itchy bum and below the status of stuff like marketing or Social Studies which every man and his gold fish seem to have. That and Psychology. Ah, but ask yourself who carries out these studies? Oh! That would be marketing people and psychology students trying to justify and validate their own existence on degree courses. What they fail to remotely intimate is that there are more psychologists working in McDonalds than wannabe actors in Hollywood.
Apparently only some 20 percent of degree holders actually carry their qualification through to a related vocation with most just wanting the acknowledgement and credence of degree level intelligence when applying for jobs. What jobs….where? Yale degrees in hip-hop and black rap or street talk are commanding high paying positions within corporations, simply because the Curriculum Vitae lists a ‘degree’. Yes, some American universities even offer degrees in what can only be labelled pornography and one suspects a super-graphic memory helps with IQ tests. Indeed, the Proprietor of this ‘ere bastion of literary works wishes to bring to our attention that there is currently a large (using the word very sparingly) shortage (using the word lovingly) of male employees in the Japanese adult movie industry. Lots of openings apparently!
With physics, the ‘s’ and the ‘y’ are in the wrong order so avoid that, but because it begins with ‘psycho’, psychological profiling is way up the must have degree desires. After all the CBS series ‘Criminal Minds’ portrays most of us as chain saw murderers and none too clever because the profilers know exactly how we think and have this uncanny ability to guess which brand of chain saw will be used by all. The profilers go down the hardware store, which miraculously has a list of purchasers and bingo, perp. arrested! By this time, 20 souls minced but hey they know who did it. So the question is; how come these psychologists can’t perform in ‘Minority Report’ mode and go to the store earlier? Or is that too deep?
If psychology is credible and factual, then life as we know it is nothing but organized ideology. Analytical comedians like Emo Phillips tend to test psychology to its inner or outer limits by going against teachings and asking God for a new car or something material, but we know it doesn’t work like that. So just go out and steal the car and then ask God for forgiveness. That apparently does work. Then we have those who somehow look out from the inside and we call that philosophy. Dare we mention the psychotherapist! Apart from the word itself being made up of ‘psycho the rapist’, who the hell is psychoanalysing the assessor?
Don’t despair; jobs are out there. A lot of say highly educated ladies from ex-communist blocks holding doctorates in rocket science are walking around gainfully employed. They could quite possibly land a rover on Mars, but earn far more on a much smaller scale guiding pocket rockets around Juffair in Bahrain.
As a footnote; before the Internet, Plymouth University in Southern England has or had infinitely more wannabe psychologists swarming and swamping the place compared to the number of light bulbs in the entire building. For those on complex mathematical and technical degree courses, seeing this entire abstract curriculum in play exasperated them to the Nth – Y degree. The psychologists had umpteen free periods and no lecture days, so continuously filled the top floor library blocking access to those hard working geeks who got no free periods at all yet were desperate to get a shot at the books but couldn’t. Catching this Bombay like train lift crammed with twittering anal retentive Freudies was a nightmare, so drastic tactics were employed by the geeks. One would force his way into the lift squeezing among the mass, while his colleagues would walk up one flight of stairs. Pressing floor one, once the doors had closed and the lift started moving, said geek would covertly let out an enormous fart (through his mouth we think) which resulted in a rapid mass exodus at the first stop. Needless to say, waiting geeks would quickly jump in, shutting out the psychologists. Who knows, maybe they started to study this methodology as ‘contra-deviance’?