An open letter to the cock on the motorway

Dear Cock,

I was behind you tonight on the M6. It was pitch black and out in the middle of nowhere, with a light rain falling.
Ahead of me was an expanse of road and darkness, dotted with various auto mobiles, including you.
I was driving along at some miles an hour, in the inside lane, where I should be. You were just ahead of me and there was a truck in the distance. I assumed you were probably going to want to pull out to overtake, but as you weren't going all that fast and were still reasonably far away from the truck, I figured I had plenty of time to go past you safely.

Once the guy overtaking me had gone past, I pulled out to overtake you. There was still loads of time; I'd planned well in advance. It was at this moment you decided to pull out to overtake the truck, which would have been fine had you bothered to indicate. Instead, you thought it was appropriate to sort of drift out into the middle lane, meaning I had to swerve into the outside lane to avoid you. Slamming on the brakes was not an option, as sharp, high speed braking on a wet road next to a cliff is a recipe for death.

Luckily, it was fairly quiet on the road and there was nobody in the outside lane. I had checked my mirror before swerving, to be sure. If there had been another car there, I would probably have slammed on and taken my chances. The last thing I would want to do is put another motorist in the position you put me in.

I don't know exactly what kind of car you were driving, as it was dark and I was too busy not crashing into you, but it was silver and probably a Ford Mondeo. After I managed to get past you alive, I flashed my indicators at you, hoping I might remind you that those yellow flashy things on the side of your car are not just fucking decoration. If I hadn't been paying attention, we would probably have both ended up at the bottom of a Scottish valley in a twisted pile of metal.

I hope you noticed. I hope you realised what you did. I hope you had that sick-to-your-stomach, shaky-knee feeling. I hope it makes you think more in the future. However, I fear that's wishful thinking and it's far more likely that you didn't even notice. You will probably go on being an oblivious cunt until you kill somebody. Maybe then you'll learn.

There were several idiots on my long journey home this evening and you were by far the worst. I hope I have the good fortune to never encounter you on the road again.

Yours faithfully,

FwF

On Prohibition

It has been proven time and time again that Prohibition does not work.

Yet for some reason it continues on, regardless.

The Alcohol Prohibition in America (1920-1933) basically created what we now think of as 'Organised Crime'. Al Capone made a fortune, smuggling alcohol in to supply speakeasies which he owned.
The crime syndicates and structures put into place during Prohibition basically led to modern organised crime.

On top of that, it is really expensive! Not only is it a very expensive thing to Police but the Government also lost all the duty that was being paid on alcohol. The only people profiting were Criminals.

Nearly 100 years on, we're still doing it. Prohibition is alive and well and happening around you as we speak, only now the target is drugs.

The UK Government is spending billions every year fighting a battle it can never win. The Drug Trade is like a Hydra. Every time the authorities catch a high level player, two more pop up to replace him.
But it isn't the high level players that pay the highest prices.

The people Prohibition hurts the most are the Consumers. This is for a number of reasons:

1. It's a lot easier to arrest a regular member of the public for possession of a tiny amount of Marijuana than it is to try and catch a King Pin. In the UK, possession of Marijuana could get you up to 5 years in prison. It costs somewhere in the region of £40,000 a year to keep a Prisoner. So that's £200,000 for possession of a small amount of Pot and it's the taxpayer who has to shoulder that financial burden.

2. Whilst drugs are illegal, the quality cannot be assured. The main reason people die from drugs is because a lot of drugs are produced by some smacked-out nutter in his kitchen, using whatever he has lying around. For example, the active ingredient in Ecstasy is a compound called MDMA. Tests in the UK have revealed that a hell of a lot of Ecstasy sold in the UK contains no MDMA at all. Instead, it's often a combination of Cleaning agents and other chemicals. These cobbled together drugs often kill people.


3. A lot the profits from Drug Sales go straight into the coffers of Organised Crime. I'm not saying that a random hippy who grows dope in his garage is a Drug Lord, but when the gear is imported and distributed on mass, most of the money is going back into Organised Crime. This is especially true for Class A drugs, like Heroin and Crack Cocaine.
Rival Dealers will often have Turf Wars and similar. Innocent bystanders often get caught up in these Turf Wars and many people loose their lives, totally unnecessarily.

The only real way to deal with any of these things is Legalisation, and I mean full legalisation of every thing.

A lot of (stupid) people seem to believe that, if all drugs were legalised, the whole world would grind to a halt whilst everybody gets utterly fucked.

This. Is. Fucking. Stupid. Just think about it!

Alcohol is legal, yet people still seem to get into the Office, most days.

In all fairness, if I really wanted to I could probably get hold of Heroine. I think anybody could if they wanted to enough. Thing is, I don't want to. I have no interest. I wouldn't suddenly want to take arse loads of smack, just because it's legal. Alcohol is legal yet I pretty much never drink because I don't like not being in control of my body. Plus, I like to drive places so I can leave when I want to, which makes drinking a no-no.

None of this would change if drugs were legal.

The average person is not going to turn into a rabid druggie in the same way the average person is not an alcoholic now.

However, if you do want to experiment (just like kids do with the booze and cigarettes), you know that what you're taking is Government approved. Instead of having to buy it from a dodgy guy in an Underpass, you can walk into a head shop or chemist and buy it over the counter. For things like Heroine, which you usually take with a needle, a new hypodermic can be supplied with each sale or something, increasing the cleanliness of the needle and reducing the risk and spread of Hepatitis and AIDS.
It would also allow for more honest teaching in relation to drugs. At present, teachers lie through their teeth about a lot of drugs. The problem with lying about drugs is that when a kid then tries Marijuana and realises everything he was told is crap, he may assume they were lying about harder drugs. They often aren't lying about these harder drugs but the trust is broken. How can the kid believe anything he was told about any drugs after that?

Of course, the Government don't actually care about you, regardless of what they say, so we need to appeal to their mode of thought.

If all drugs are legal and controlled by the Government, they can be taxed.

The UK spends something like £5-6 billion a year on drugs. If that was taxed at just 5%, that's £275 million a year and considering the current VAT rate in the UK is 20%, that's £1.1 billion every single year, just in VAT! That's before you even consider the Duty and Excise.

Add to that all the savings from not locking people up for bullshit possession charges and it spirals exponentially. It would essentially help eradicate national debt in a surprisingly short time.

It's really a no-brainer.

On Crime And Punishment

Recently, me and the missus have been watching a lot of Traffic Cops and similar such shows. There are few things quite as satisfying as watching some mouthy little fuck get himself arrested.


The problem is that the Police often can't charge the little bastards, or at least not with anything major. It's usually a night in the cells and then a fine or something like that. Most of them have done it before and will again.

I wish to propose a new way to deal with these minor offences; a new tool to help stamp out petty crime.

Angry Badgers.

Hear me out.

Say some little shit commits some minor crime, like drink driving. He hasn't hurt anyone but he could have done.

5 minutes in a dark cupboard with an angry badger.

I don't know about you, but if I had to spend 5 minutes in a dark cupboard with this:

I really don't think I would be inclined to re-offend.

For a more serious crime, like mugging (assuming no-one is injured), maybe 15 minutes in the Badger Cupboard.

I think we could save a lot of money, time and resources, as well as helping to deter criminals whilst they're still on small time crimes. The only real over-head is Badger Upkeep.

Write your MP/Congressman today!

On Cutlery

I've mentioned before that I'm quite OCD. This means that little things in every day life really, really annoy me and I have to put them right whilst cursing the person who has done it wrong.

One of the things that drives me up the wall in my day to day life is Cutlery, or more specifically, the way cutlery is placed in a drainer.

After you wash cutlery, you put it in a drainer so it can dry before you put it away. Now, the correct way to do this is business end up, as in the eating end pointing upwards.
This is important for two reasons: First of all, unless you wash your drainer a lot, the bottom of it probably isn't the cleanest place in the world. Secondly, and more importantly, if you put the cutlery in eating end down then the water is all running down towards it, rather than away from it, and this often means it can't drain properly and you end up with water marks and soapy residue all over the bit you're gonna be using to put your food in your mouth. It's like washing a glass and putting it on the drainer the right way up so all the soapy water collects in the bottom. It's fucking stupid!

I would think that all this is pretty basic common sense, and I know it is common practice in the trade from some really shitty catering jobs I did once when I worked for an agency (which is another story altogether).

So why is it that so many people seem to be totally oblivious to this very basic premise? Why do people put the cutlery in handle up? Why?

In the kitchen at my work the cutlery is constantly the wrong way up in the drainer which means that, every time I go in the kitchen, I have to turn it all the right way up. Seriously, I cannot walk past a drainer with the cutlery the wrong way up without fixing it. This may seem like a small and stupid thing but when you're kinda OCD and it happens all the fucking time, it becomes pretty damn tiresome.

So I have made this handy chart (starring the drainer at work) for people to refer to if they forget which way up the cutlery goes.

On Call Of Duty

Of all the FPS games out there, Call Of Duty is by far my favourite. Not that's I'm all that great at it but I enjoy trying to be.

I came into COD later than most; the first one I played a lot was World At War, which is widely considered to be one of the worst by most hardcore COD players. Regardless of your opinion of WAW, it got me hooked and I played the shit out of Modern Warfare II and, more recently, I've played a lot of Black Ops.

What I really want to talk about is one of the new features they brought in with Black Ops.
As well as the usual games, like HQ and Ground War, they have also brought in a whole new set of games where you bet Credits and the top 3 players get a pay-out.

There's a few of these new Wager Matches but I generally play Gun Game.

In Gun Game, you start with a Python Revolver and advance to the next gun with each kill. The guns get progressively better and then progressively harder to use. You start with the Python, then double pistols, then you move through a couple of shotguns, a few machine guns and eventually a couple of different sniper rifles and onto rocket launchers. The last two weapons are a crossbow with explosive arrows and then, finally, a ballistics knife, which is a knife you fire out of the handle at opponents. The winner is the first person to get a kill with all 20 weapons or the one on the highest weapon when the time runs out.

In Gun Game, it is also possible to demote people to their previous weapon by humiliating them. Humiliation is when you stab them with your combat knife but it's not really beneficial for the stabber as you don't advance in level unless you kill with your gun.

Yet you get some dickless wonders that just run around stabbing people! They're gaining nothing except the hatred of the other players. I just cannot fathom why people do it! If you aren't going to play properly then why not just fuck off and play something else? I know it's just a game but it is really fucking annoying when you've finally managed to get past the bloody Sniper Rifles, which are a nightmare as the levels are kept small, due to only having six players per game, and then some fucking ass clown stabs you and demotes you back down again.
Invariably, you then can't seem to get a kill and end up stuck on a shitty gun and loosing the game.


So this is a message for all those utter wankers who run around in Gun Game stabbing people:

How about you go die in a fire? kthnxbye.

On Dating Websites

Recently the number of adverts I'm seeing for Dating Websites is getting higher and higher.

For the most part, the adverts are the usual crap: Various couples, usually ethnically diverse, partaking in some light sailing or a piggy-back ride through a wood, whilst a female Voice Over gives us dubious statistics about the success of the company or some kind of unlikely situation in which two people spontaneously play a song in a music shop or tie their shoes together and dance.

The companies also tend to work in the same way. Men and Women sign up and are then matched to others, based on whatever lies and embellishments they have put in their profiles.

However, there is one dating website I have seen advertised that defies logic.

It's called Matchmaking4men.

The clue to why it makes no sense is right there in the name. Matchmakin4men.

If it's a matchmaking service just for men, then where do the women come from?
And before you jump to conclusions, this is not a site for gay men and I have never seen an advert for a possible partner site (no pun intended) called Matchmaking4Women.

I can only assume that either the people who run the site walk the streets recruiting/kidnapping women to pimp out to lonely men over the internet or it's all mail order brides from Eastern Europe.

Source.

On Lowering My Standards

Hi All and a Merry 2011!

So, FWF has been on hiatus whilst I tried to get through my writers block and some other stuff.

One of the main problems I've been having is that I feel the need to write long pieces and if I can't write at least a couple thousand words on a subject, I don't feel like the piece is worthwhile.

However, my wonderful and loving Fiancée, who, for reasons unknown, is always there for me, no matter how stupid my problem, has assured me that I don't always need to write huge posts.

The main reason I started this blog is because, in my every day life, I rant a lot and people tend to find my rants quite funny so I thought I'd try my hand at internet comedy. At first, I got a little hung up on list-based humour, being a big fan of Cracked.com, but I couldn't make that work for me as I often get angry at things that don't lend themselves to numbered lists. I also did a couple of "Nature/Computers wants to kill you" articles, but that too was not sustainable (although I may still do more in the future).

Eventually, I started to find my stride and posted some good content, but I was still getting hung up on length. And we all know that it's not the length that matters but what you do with it. Or maybe it was Girth that matters... I don't think this metaphor is working.

Anyway, one day I was having a little rant to my Missus and she said, "You should write stuff like this more."
I explained about being hung up on word counts and how I didn't feel I was putting the effort in if an article was short.
She told me that was stupid and didn't matter; that a short but funny rant could be just as good as a long article and that I shouldn't worry so much.

I have mulled over her words a lot since and I think she is probably right, as usual.

I was discussing my writers block with a friend who reads my blog, explaining how I tend to be a lot funnier during spur of the moment rants when something has annoyed me and he asked if I've ever thought of using a Dictaphone to record my rants so I can transcribe them later.

Although it's a very good idea, in theory, I don't think it's something I could do. First of all, my rants tend to be off the cuff and mid-conversation. Secondly, they're spontaneous. I'll be having a conversation with someone and something will set me off. I can't exactly pause and say, "give me a sec to get my tape recorder."

It wouldn't be natural.

I'm not going to start promising lots of posts and I am not going to stick to any sort of schedule but I am going to try and be less hung up on word counts and just post what I want.
After all, it is my blog!

I'm currently editing a post, so that will be up soon.

Thanks for bearing with me. I will be back.