Flag burning is the quickest way to say “See your country? I spit on your country, its piece of shit government, its wishy washy laws, its dumbass community and its worthless people.” And saying such things - especially in a public place, with a lot of rather agitated people who may or may not have taken to arming themselves with convenient items, is like smacking those people with a leather glove and then throwing it at their feet. Hence burning the flag is seen as an antisocial act of hooliganism.

On the flip side, however, I see sporting the flag as a vulgar display of patriotism. I can’t help but consider it a hyper-emotional declaration of allegiance, a sort of embarassing, cringeworthy pastime akin to crying openly in a public place. The St George’s cross is everywhere in England at the moment - hanging out of car windows, painted on buildings, it’s on clothing, handbags, shoes, hair bands, dogs are wearing St George’s cross bandanas - but it’s different, because it’s for football. It’s a reaction to something that’s generally accepted as an excuse to be nakedly emotional in the presence of strangers.

I’m sure I read somewhere that an Englishman, on returning from work, will chastely peck his wife on the cheek, affectionately pat his children on the head, and then roll boisterously around on the front lawn with his dog. While he may watch the World Cup and spend his evenings screaming at the television and weeping into his pint, I’m not convinced that, when confronted by the St George’s cross aflame, he wouldn’t just respond with “…oh, I say.”

The insanity of the US government marches on unabated. This week freedom of speech nearly took yet another hit when the banning of flag burning was voted down by a mere one vote. This wasn’t even a simple majority vote, this was a 2/3rds required vote and STILL it almost passed. That means that more than half of the US Senate is batshit insane. It boggles the mind.

Flag burning isn’t that big of a deal to me. I don’t generally pay money for things and then light them on fire, but I’d at least like to know that if I felt like it I could without the gestapo busting down my door. The phrase “slippery slope” is overused but that’s really what we’re talking about here. First you burn flag burning, then you ban burning people in effigy, and then you move on to shutting down harmful media stories (I mean shutting them down more than is done already).

And it is almost entirely the Republican party pushing for this. Oh yeah, they also happen to be the guys that put a connection between a man marrying another man leading to a man wanting to marry a horse. Yet they can’t seem to make the connection between shutting down one form of protest leading to a path of shutting down any other method of protest that they deem to be dangerous.

What’s so wrong with burning the damn thing anyway? It’s just a piece of cloth. The men who fought and died whos honor Congress claims to be protecting didn’t do it for that flag, they did it for the country. They did it for the people who are, for the time being, free to do and say what they want as long as they don’t infringe upon the liberties of others. I don’t really see how the burning of a mere piece of cloth with some colored bits has any bearing on anybody’s liberty except the person that bought the thing and the guy who has to clean up the leavings.

It’d be nice if the people we elected spent their time helping us and making our lives better rather than trying to control our every move and thought for no reason other than trying to get reelected.

I just wanted to fill in that gap on the calendar. I’m actually writing this on Monday, July 10th, and then I hopped in my time travel machine to go back… WAY BACK!… and fix up the site to be awesome terrific and such.

You see, the way the site currently works, you can break some things and it looks all ugly if there isn’t a post every day. So here I am.

WELL IT SEEMS NOONE CAN DO THEIR WEDNES… day…. article…

Aw crap, and I was hoping to get rid of her, too. Not only did she post her article for today, she posted it well earlier than most.

Well, I’ll have to make it through the day with mocking or something.

* Feeling polluted by a week of too much Guinness.

And that’s a bad thing? Aww c’mon, suck it up. Have another, you’ll feel better.

* Feeling sore from walking up this mountain/hill/thingie. (My home town has an uphill walk to a large stone cross, because we love Jesus, apparently.)

Ever think that it’s just a giant lower-case T? As in… T… Time… T… Time to go?

* Wondering why the poxy town I came from was ever called the “key to the Garden of Ireland”.

We have a crappy little town nearby that calls itself the entertainment capital of Canada.

And I’ll bet 90% of Canada couldn’t even guess the name, and even when told it wouldn’t be able to figure out what province it was in.

* Confused from having stopped the car half way through the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains, stopped to smoke a cigarette and look at the view and wonder why everything about my birthplace isn’t this lovely.

Probably because of the smoke! The smoke screws up your perspective while you’re gazing at nature. Stop sucking it up and take it like a hippie!

* Happy I visited Glendalough, the local ancient monastery, and sat at the side of the lake.

… WTF kind of crappy ass spelling is Glendalough? Trying to get fancy pants on us? It’s “Glen’s Loaf”.

* Fresh out of the Harbour Bar in Bray, the first place to ever serve me a pint without asking for ID, and wondering how it hasn’t changed in, erm, 14 years.

Without knowing your weight the age information is useless to me!

Right. Today, for me, is Sunday 18th June. And this is Wednesday 28th’s article. See, I’ve just been in Ireland, with no access to a PC, for a week. Well, chances are I’ve had access through a friend’s house or an internet cafe, but hey, I won’t risk not being able to steer y’all through Wednesday, the hump of the week, on that. (Mainly because Weas will just advertise my position to someone else, the mercenary bastard that he is.)

If you’re reading this on Wednesday 28th, know this. Barring acts of God, I am:

• Feeling polluted by a week of too much Guinness.
• Feeling sore from walking up this mountain/hill/thingie. (My home town has an uphill walk to a large stone cross, because we love Jesus, apparently.)
• Wondering why the poxy town I came from was ever called the “key to the Garden of Ireland”.
• Confused from having stopped the car half way through the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains, stopped to smoke a cigarette and look at the view and wonder why everything about my birthplace isn’t this lovely.
• Happy I visited Glendalough, the local ancient monastery, and sat at the side of the lake.
• Fresh out of the Harbour Bar in Bray, the first place to ever serve me a pint without asking for ID, and wondering how it hasn’t changed in, erm, 14 years.

And also, overwhelmingly, unnervingly, totally prepared to move to the other side of the planet and never see my home town again - or at least not for a few years. Does this make me a bad person? Does anyone else get wanderlust? I mean, if I move to Australia, I get this, or I go home to Ireland and get this. Let’s hope it’s not just same shit, different day.

The funny thing is these “set the animals free” goons most likely have a pet of one form or another at home. For some reason they believe that dogs and cats don’t yearn to be free. Hell, they don’t even get to be locked up in their own environment! Pets are required to live in a foreign human dwelling with none of their natural surroundings or survival requirements. I assume the crazy people think that just because dogs and cats have lived with us for so long that they’ve lost their fundamental wants and needs.

I think anybody found guilty of trying to set animals free should be placed on an island Robinson Crusoe style and left to their own devices. I mean if it’s good enough for the animals, it should be good enough for them, right? Oh wait, I forgot. They’re hypocritical bastards! Just like the environmental freaks who use electricity in their homes which is produced by burning coal, or have TVs which are made from plastics and nasty chemicals, or whose houses have displaced some fertile patch of mother nature’s bounty.

Jackholes

This isn’t an issue I thought about a lot throughout my life. I never had a problem with animals at zoos, but I knew some people did.

Then, the Golden Girls’ “Rose” (Betty White), ran to the defense of some animals at a local zoo. And she had an awesome point. Click the link if you want, but the jist was that kids go to zoos, and become familiar with the animals. Thus, rather than the captivity of animals doing harm, through the captivity of animals human beings learn compassion and feel connected to wild species, which increases their concern and awareness about these animals.

I followed that up with the first few chapters of “Life of Pi”, and following the Weasel logic, I agree. Life in the jungle is not all romance, it is strenous. They even addressed the few downsides - oftentimes not caused by the zookeepers, but by the general public being idiots.

So keep the zoos. The benifit all. Just keep them responsibly.