It's Not Just The Muslims!

Campaigners are calling on theatre bosses to stop serving bacon, sausages and ham in their cafes...

Whut?  The usual suspects? No, Reader, and yes.

...at least while Peppa Pig and her family are performing in the same building.

Oh, for god's sake! What happened to people who once did this in response to stupid demands from lunatics? 

 This is how you should have dealt with PETA! 

Grimsby Auditorium in Lincolnshire said this week it would remove pork from the menu when Peppa Pig’s Big Family Show opens next month, after a request from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta UK). The campaign group is sending the venue vegan ham as an alternative. Jennifer White, an associate director at Peta, welcomed the decision, saying she hoped it would remind people “that all pigs are individuals with personalities and not body parts to be chopped up”.

They are both, actually. 

The auditorium told Peta it would remove pork products from the Stage Door cafe menu as a “considerate gesture” during the show’s run on 3-4 March.

Why? Why not tell these charlatans - who kill more animals than anyone - to sit and spin if they don't like it?  

In November, Peta said it had persuaded Chichester Festival theatre to drop pork products from its menus during a run of The Three Little Pigs.

Ah. Because yet more spineless arty types encouraged them... 

So Many Long Names..

Police have charged four people with the murder of a 17-year-old boy in a village in south Wales. Officers were called to Lower Francis Street in Abertridwr, Caerphilly, at about 17:45 GMT on Thursday after reports a teenage boy from the village had sustained a serious injury. He was declared dead at the scene and later named as Tristan Shae Kerr.

What a good old fashioned small Welsh village name, eh, Reader? As for the 'serious injury' it was caused by a zombie knife.

Three men, aged 18, 24 and 26, and one woman, 24, are being held in custody and will appear at Newport Magistrates' Court on Monday, Gwent Police said.

Are any of those called Jones or Evans, I wonder?  (Ed: no,Ricardo Elliot, 26, Connor Palfrey, 24, Elexi Manny, 24, and 18-year-old Georgie Mears). And neither are the authorities:

"We understand that there has been a great deal of interest in this investigation," senior investigating officer Det Ch Insp Jitka Tomkova-Griffiths said. "However we would ask people not to speculate about the identities of those involved," she continued.

It seems Wales is in danger of a severe hyphen shortage.  

It seems feelings are running high, judging by this rather cryptic comment. 

Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke (Ed: !!) told the court that it was "vital" for court proceedings not to be interrupted. "I am well aware that feelings ran high when this case went before magistrates' court [on Monday]," she said.

Another one to watch.  

I Love Modern Twists On Old Fairy Tales...

...and so, it seems, does Matt! 

I Beg Your Pardon?

                                 

The term is 'hangdog'....

Sunday Funnies...

 No 9 is just applying the same rules as Narnia....

Happy 30th Birthday, Little Japanese Time Sink!

During the first wave of Pokémania in the late 90s, Pokémon was viewed with suspicion by most adults. Now that the first generation of Pokémaniacs have grown up, even becoming parents ourselves, we see it for what it is: an imaginative, challenging and really rather wholesome series of games that rewards every hour that children devote to it.

And even those who didn't grow up with it (as I was never a console kid, but rather a PC gamer), now feel the call and like me, take a day off work and travel to the Excel Centre in London to take part in mega-events like The 2026 EUIC.

Over the three decades since the original Red and Blue (or Green, in Asia) versions of the video game were released in Japan in 1996, Pokémon has earned a place among the greats of children’s fiction. Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia, it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision. In every game, your mother sends you out into the world with a rucksack and a kiss goodbye; after that, it’s all on you.

 No kidding! 

It was designed from the beginning to be a social game, encouraging (and indeed necessitating) that players traded and battled with each other to complete their collection of virtual creatures and train their teams up into super-squads. Today, the internet has entirely normalised the idea of video games as social activities, but in the late 90s this was a novel idea.

Not for us PC gamers, of course, we had MMORPGs like Ultima Online and Everquest...but for the console kids, hooking up to a fellow player's machine - via physical cable! - to play co-op or evolve a 'mon was revolutionary!

But it hasn't all been smooth sailing... 

Today, Tajiri is a reclusive figure. Almost everything we know about him comes from a single 1999 interview with Time magazine. The tone of Time’s piece is shockingly dismissive. Declaring the series “a pestilential Ponzi scheme” it describes the “delinquent” and “criminal” behaviour of young Pokémon fans, and the moral bankruptcy of the whole craze – which, it comforts, is likely to peter out soon, like it did for the Power Rangers. Now that Pokémon has become one of the most enduring and successful entertainment properties of all time, this alarmist attitude seems ridiculous. But the scaremongering was very real.

Thankfully I missed all that, as it was 2016's smartphone accessible 'Pokemon Go' that hooked me in, followed by my first ever console (barring a Playstation 2 I bought to play Cabelas's Hunting games and soon ended up using as a DVD player), the Switch, and recently the much more powerful Switch 2. 

Perhaps understandably, given the disrespectful and, presumably, hurtful tone of that Time interview, and the moral panic that Pokémania unwittingly ignited, Satoshi Tajiri has shunned the limelight ever since. Now 60, he remains at Game Freak and is still involved in the creation of each new Pokémon game (as of 2025, there are 38 in total), though he reportedly stepped back from day-to-day development in 2012.

They haven't all been winners, the most recent, 'Pokemon ZA' changing the combat to real time rather than turn based didn't sit too well with older less nimble-fingered players like me, but the upcoming 'Pokopia' (which I got a chance to play a demo of yesterday at EUIC) looks far more my idea of a cosy and relaxing game to pick up after work.

Pokémon’s story speaks to an important truth about video games: they are a powerful vector for connection between people. Millions are united by these imaginary creatures, born from one boy’s love of the natural world.

Indeed so. If any of those 'Time' writers are still around I hope they now realise just how wrong they were. 

FULL SPEED AHEAD....

 ...AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES*! 

* Sadly, Reader, there are no torpedoes. Nothing can seemingly prevent this dead-on-its-feet government from fatally wounding the country as it thrashes around in its death throes...

The Judicial System Of Great Britain - Protecting The Rights Of UK Citizens?

No, not really.

Pakistani national Sheraz Malik, 28, was found guilty of raping a 'vulnerable' teenage girl whom he and a friend pounced on in a park in the constituency of Reform MP Lee Anderson. Mr Anderson first exposed Malik as an asylum seeker last year after he was arrested for targeting the 18-year-old woman when she was alone in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.

But a judge stopped the public from being told about the rapist's asylum status by gagging the Press from reporting it until the end of his trial, it can now be revealed.

A jury on Monday convicted Malik of two counts of rape after just a few hours of deliberation at Birmingham Crown Court.

Who imposed the order? One of those 'diverse' judges we were told we desperately needed to 'improve' our justice system, of course: 

At a hearing at Nottingham Crown Court in September, Judge Nirmal Shant imposed a reporting restriction postponing publication of Malik's immigration status until the end of the trial, to avoid a 'substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice'.

But don’t focus all your opprobium on her, Reader, the old white male judges are really no better:  

In court Malik was asked why he took advantage of the victim, and replied: 'What else was I supposed to do?' Asked how he arrived in Europe, Malik protested that the question was not relevant – prompting Judge Simon Ash to intervene and side with the defendant.

Malik will be sentenced at a later date.

The entire edifice needs sweeping out like the Augean Stables. For the same reason.

Boy, Was Joe Jackson Right...!

"Don't you know that it's different for girls?"

Harry Potter being a work for children, about children, starring children. Good grief, If a male star had reported that he employed a Hermoine Granger stripper at his stag do, we'd all be looking for his name to pop up in the Epstein Files.

Margot said: 'So we all had a weekend in London when the job was done. And of course, we went to Infernos, and within about 15 minutes, we got kicked out. 

'And while we're getting dragged out by security, I was screaming, “but this is Infernos, you can’t get kicked out of Infernos.” 

'And the bouncer was like, “Look, we allow most things, but when your friend does [redacted], then we kick you out”. 

And I was like, “okay, fair enough!”' Margot did not reveal what her friend had done to alert security, but went on to admit: 'Most of the clubs in Clapham, I'd say, have kicked us out.

Ugh. Am I the only one that wishes we could go back to the times when movie studios employed people to ensure the public didn't find out their stars were degenerates? 

Bet You Won't See The Elites Eating It Though...

“If we’re going to address the world’s insatiable craving for animal meat, we’re going to have to replace like for like.” That means cultivating meat from cells in brewery-like factories or making taste-identical plant-based meats. In both cases, for people to buy them, the products must also cost the same or less than conventional meat.

In most cases, for people to buy them, you'd have to hold a gun to their head. Or maybe that's just me?  

These alternative proteins are the electric vehicles (EVs) of food, Friedrich says; the same experience, but better: “Just like a car doesn’t now need a combustion engine, a phone doesn’t need a cord, and you can take pictures without film, you can make meat without the need for live animals.”

It's Frankenfood. I suppose it's a natural progression from the 'science' that seems to believe it's possible to change women into men and vice versa. 

But such progress will require governments to ramp up their support for the scientists overcoming the obstacles in this still-embryonic field. They have done it before for previous transformative technologies, from penicillin to the internet to renewable energy, Friedrich says.

All vastly useful inventions, that had no viable alternative at the time, or like this, did but it suited governments and lobbyists to pretend the viable alternative had become problematic.  

If China went all-in for example, he says, conventional meat could be all but history by mid-century: “They took EV sales [at home] from 1% to more than 50% in the 10 years to 2025, and that’s a tougher tech challenge and scaling challenge than alternative meats.”

China? You're pinning your hopes on China?! The population of which eats everything with wings that isn't a airplane, and everything that with four legs that isn't a table? Well, good luck with that!

Friedrich is a compelling advocate for his goal of ending industrial agriculture, with answers for the many criticisms: “It’s just a shockingly inefficient way of producing food. It takes nine calories of crops to get one calorie of chicken, 10 or 11 calories of crops to get one calorie of pig meat or farmed fish and 40 to 100 calories of crops to get one calorie of beef.”

That's industrial factory farming. But - for example -  lamb and goat can be produced on land that is useless for any other type of food production.

Frequently raised is the “yuck factor” of cultivated meat. This is overblown, Friedrich says. “People are not eating meat because of how it’s produced,” he says. “They’re eating meat because it’s delicious and affordable. All of the polling indicates significant enthusiasm for cultivated meat, especially among people who eat the most meat.”

Who are you polling, Friedrich ? Is it the people who are expected to eat this? Because, let's face it, this stuff isn't going to be on the menu at Davos or the Oscars, is it?