Killer Dogs & Politicial Assassins
I was rummaging through the French press in an electronic manner yesterday and came across a few interesting things:
First of all, much as I hate sensationalism - which is particularly prevalent in Ireland at the moment through the "Oirish" publications and supported by swelling masses of the idiot classes - it really is hard to resist a headline that reads "Woman killed by 4 Rottweilers". That's a headline straight out of a Stephen King book, if ever there was one. The unfortunate unnamed 23-year-old met her untimely end when not one, not two, not even three, but actually four - that's FOUR!- hungry Rottweilers took a ravenous liking to her, specifically her left arm and her head. It all happened in Villers-sur-There, near Beauvais (a place familiar to Ryanair travellers for the large shed with the marquee extension that passes for a an airport terminal building - not that there's anything wrong with it, in fact). According the local captain of the Gendarmerie - Michel Le Ray, the fire brigade were called to the courtyard house and had to terminate the lives of the four dogs with extreme prejudice before entering. "These were big bastards!" (I'm translating with liberal usage of poetic licence here) said Le Ray, holding his hands wide and his eyes bulging. "They must have been somewhere between 60 and 80kg". Now an 80kg-dog is a big bastard. I happen to know that I'm about 82kg myself, so in my opinion a mutt that size doesn't really need to live any longer, especially one that's been bred for causing terminal death. The neighbours were of the same opinion. They had already complained about the dogs that seemed to belong to 3 men who lived in the property. The mayor Christian Sadowski confirmed this, saying that only 2 of the dogs were declared to the town hall, accounting for a 50% figure of undeclared man-eating dogs. Dogs killing people is a rarity in France. In fact, there hadn't been any cases of it for ten years until a 17-month-old girl was killed by one of those dirty rotten-looking staffordshire bull terriers in June at Seine-Saint-Denis and an 8-year-old was killed in June also in Seine-Maritime by a bull mastiff.
Whatever about an animal losing the head and attacking, the calculated nature of political assassinations is very depressing. Pierre Gemayel appears to have been murdered by Syrian agents, just like the Prime Minister Hariri was. I heard old Walid Jumblat speaking to Le Monde laying the blame for Gemayel's death firmly at the foot of the Syrian president. Hariri's son saying the same thing. All of this is not good for Lebanese unity. It makes we wonder in whose real interest all of this unrest really lays. I know I'm becoming more rabidly anti-American every day, but this kind of shit does play into their hands and into the hands of the Israelis... Maybe not.
Whatever you do though, don't criticise Vladimir Putin specifically and the Russian government generally. Because if you do, you'll be lucky to suffer no more than international boycott (like they did with the Georgians) and if you're not so lucky, you'll end up shot (like the journalist Anna Politkovskaya) or poisoned, like Alexander Litvinenko. There's no other nation that so brazenly assassinates its personae non grata, is there? The Americans make sure to cover their trail pretty well, the British and the French do it very secretly and, if they're caught red-handed, at least there's a token gesture of embarrassment. But the Russians? All the clues are just dropped in a heap at the scene; a bunch of arrows pointing straight at Putin's rat-like features. And he smirks, shrugs and says (I don't speak Russian very well, so I'm partially making it up) "Did I do that? Ha ha! Prove it if you dare, or else fuck off and don't be annoying me!"
All this talk of Rottweilers and shifty politics brings me back to Brian Cowen - finance minister of the Glorious Peoples Republic of Ireland. It's so boringly undramatic presenting a CD to the media, isn't it? In the good old days, the finance minister had an attache case crammed with papers and the reason it made much more exciting television is that you know that if you could just reach out your hand and grab the attache case and open it, you would have all the papers laid out, which you could read and be party to a great wisdom. It made you drool slightly. Not like the feckin' CD. I mean, what's the point? You'd have to grab it, find a computer, put the disk into it, plug in the computer, switch on the monitor, get a cup of coffee, and you know what? I couldn't be arsed with it - I'm sick of looking at computer screens all day. But the point is that you can't grab a cd and immediately rifle through its contents. That's the crucial and dramatic difference right there. I'm going now, tired as I am of staring at a computer screen, to go and rummage through a desk and then an attache case.
First of all, much as I hate sensationalism - which is particularly prevalent in Ireland at the moment through the "Oirish" publications and supported by swelling masses of the idiot classes - it really is hard to resist a headline that reads "Woman killed by 4 Rottweilers". That's a headline straight out of a Stephen King book, if ever there was one. The unfortunate unnamed 23-year-old met her untimely end when not one, not two, not even three, but actually four - that's FOUR!- hungry Rottweilers took a ravenous liking to her, specifically her left arm and her head. It all happened in Villers-sur-There, near Beauvais (a place familiar to Ryanair travellers for the large shed with the marquee extension that passes for a an airport terminal building - not that there's anything wrong with it, in fact). According the local captain of the Gendarmerie - Michel Le Ray, the fire brigade were called to the courtyard house and had to terminate the lives of the four dogs with extreme prejudice before entering. "These were big bastards!" (I'm translating with liberal usage of poetic licence here) said Le Ray, holding his hands wide and his eyes bulging. "They must have been somewhere between 60 and 80kg". Now an 80kg-dog is a big bastard. I happen to know that I'm about 82kg myself, so in my opinion a mutt that size doesn't really need to live any longer, especially one that's been bred for causing terminal death. The neighbours were of the same opinion. They had already complained about the dogs that seemed to belong to 3 men who lived in the property. The mayor Christian Sadowski confirmed this, saying that only 2 of the dogs were declared to the town hall, accounting for a 50% figure of undeclared man-eating dogs. Dogs killing people is a rarity in France. In fact, there hadn't been any cases of it for ten years until a 17-month-old girl was killed by one of those dirty rotten-looking staffordshire bull terriers in June at Seine-Saint-Denis and an 8-year-old was killed in June also in Seine-Maritime by a bull mastiff.
Whatever about an animal losing the head and attacking, the calculated nature of political assassinations is very depressing. Pierre Gemayel appears to have been murdered by Syrian agents, just like the Prime Minister Hariri was. I heard old Walid Jumblat speaking to Le Monde laying the blame for Gemayel's death firmly at the foot of the Syrian president. Hariri's son saying the same thing. All of this is not good for Lebanese unity. It makes we wonder in whose real interest all of this unrest really lays. I know I'm becoming more rabidly anti-American every day, but this kind of shit does play into their hands and into the hands of the Israelis... Maybe not.
Whatever you do though, don't criticise Vladimir Putin specifically and the Russian government generally. Because if you do, you'll be lucky to suffer no more than international boycott (like they did with the Georgians) and if you're not so lucky, you'll end up shot (like the journalist Anna Politkovskaya) or poisoned, like Alexander Litvinenko. There's no other nation that so brazenly assassinates its personae non grata, is there? The Americans make sure to cover their trail pretty well, the British and the French do it very secretly and, if they're caught red-handed, at least there's a token gesture of embarrassment. But the Russians? All the clues are just dropped in a heap at the scene; a bunch of arrows pointing straight at Putin's rat-like features. And he smirks, shrugs and says (I don't speak Russian very well, so I'm partially making it up) "Did I do that? Ha ha! Prove it if you dare, or else fuck off and don't be annoying me!"
All this talk of Rottweilers and shifty politics brings me back to Brian Cowen - finance minister of the Glorious Peoples Republic of Ireland. It's so boringly undramatic presenting a CD to the media, isn't it? In the good old days, the finance minister had an attache case crammed with papers and the reason it made much more exciting television is that you know that if you could just reach out your hand and grab the attache case and open it, you would have all the papers laid out, which you could read and be party to a great wisdom. It made you drool slightly. Not like the feckin' CD. I mean, what's the point? You'd have to grab it, find a computer, put the disk into it, plug in the computer, switch on the monitor, get a cup of coffee, and you know what? I couldn't be arsed with it - I'm sick of looking at computer screens all day. But the point is that you can't grab a cd and immediately rifle through its contents. That's the crucial and dramatic difference right there. I'm going now, tired as I am of staring at a computer screen, to go and rummage through a desk and then an attache case.
posted by MunsterMad at 2:29 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home