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I became horribly nostalgic for Vegas last night. I'm not sure what triggered it, it happens quite frequently to be fair, but I was very very unhappy that I was a good 8,000 miles from the poker room at Binions.

I of course checked flight prices and room prices and discovered flying on a Sunday early in May is only £460 of your Earth pounds! I could stay at the Golden Nugget not 15 seconds from my spiritual home for $50 a night and exorcise some awful silicon demons while I'm there.

I shall almost certainly have to get myself over there should I be victorious in the £230 pre-Cheltenham Festival freeze-out next week. I will place an audacious wager this evening on all sorts of sporting contests in order to finance my poker playing for 8-10 days and also because I'm very bored. I'm sitting comfortably so let's begin. I think darts and UEFA cup football will be our main focus.

I've been busy placing more wagers this evening as there's nothing on TV. I almost climaxed when I saw Real Madrid's price. I had a semi already and Real at evens to beat Liverpool almost pushed me over the edge.

How on God's clean Earth can they be even money to beat Liverpool? How how? One can only assume the exaggerated level of respect given to Liverpool here by the bookies is purely down to deluded scousers lumping on with their income support.

I recognise that Liverpool have done well in this competition historically, but the one team that has done even better is Real Madrid. They've won it fifty million times for crying out loud. Also, Liverpool are rubbish at the moment: They've drawn with Stoke, Wigan, Everton four or five times, lost to Everton in the cup and drawn with Man City at home and and have never even played at the Bernabeu! Meanwhile Real have won 9 games in a row and yet the bookies believe that Real Madrid are a coin flip here!? Madness, Madness I tells ya.

Arsenal of course were able to beat Real Madrid on their first visit to the Bernabeu, but as we all know, Arsenal are at least 45% more awesome than Liverpool so I really can't see anything but a comfortable win for Real Madrid tonight*. In fact, Liverpool have as much chance of winning tonight as the Japanese have of making porn without an alien rape theme .


I also expect CSKA Moscow to beat Villa tomorrow and Cologne to beat Arminia Bielefeld on Friday as my flying monkeys have informed me that the Bielefeld team have been stricken down by a consignment of dodgy weiner schnitzel.

If you ever wanted to know what goes through my mind in the wee small hours of the morning, well this is it. While the rest of the country sleeps and it's collective stream of consciousness is smooth and undisturbed like a fast flowing river, I lie awake like a rock in the middle of the stream churning up the waters behind me into a torrent of white water thought. Oh yes.

I won't divulge exactly how I stumbled upon this mathematical wonder, cause you won't want to be friends with me any more, so just marvel instead at the awesomeness of numbers and the cool things wot you can do with them.

See here, come closer, behold my discovery: If you add up the digits of the totals of multiples of nine until you're left with a single digit, that total is always nine!! Always. How cool is that? Nine is now my favourite number...just look:

And so on...amazing stuff. But wait, there's more. Nine was my favourite number until I realised that 8's are even cooler. Look, look what happens when you do the same thing with 8's. No go on, please look, it's cool I promise.

The totals perpetually count down from 9 to 1. 7's, 6's and 5's are all gay by comparison. Man, I tell you what,.. I love tits as you know, I think tits will always be my favourite thing, but this stuff really fascinates me. I only hope I still find this as cool tomorrow afternoon when I wake up and am not delirious because of number related sleep deprivation and also that it isn't something everyone knew already.

It's been a few weeks since my last McDonalds related anecdote, but if you'll indulge me I have another one for you.

I prefer to use the drive-through and on this occasion I was asked to wait in the car park for my quarter pounder with cheese and side order of potato wedges.

I was happy to do so. It's amazing incidentally, how many people would rather eat their meals in their cars in the car park than actually sit in the restaurant. I myself like to drive home as it's not far.

Anyway, I digress. The person who asked me to wait was one of those funny him-she creatures you read about. It's awkward when you encounter a person whose gender is unclear from their physical features. How do you address such a person? Usually at McDonalds if a male serves me I use "geezer." If it's a female I use "toots" or "doll face." If it's a very ugly woman, I generally don't say anything and try not to look.

So anyway, this him-she approached with my food and it's walking style suggested the absence of the Y chromosome as did the breast size, pear shaped hips, and pony tail, but I also thought I could see a clear Adam's apple! I was very very confused. As it handed me my food I was still in two minds but was ready to gamble on it being a man. I meant to say "thank you buddy," but I sort of panicked and what I actually said was "thank you bitch."

I said it so politely though that it may not have realised how rude I had just been to it. I laughed for most of the way home at my unintentional abuse of a poor creature who to be fair, belonged under a circus tent not in a restaurant handling food. I don't usually verbally abuse the physically deformed and then laugh about it - you'll have to take my word for that - but on this occasion I couldn't help myself.

It's proof though that generally speaking, people rarely listen to the words when they're being spoken to. We've de-evolved. We're like dogs now and it's the tone of voice rather than the words we pay attention to. It's quite possible to call some one a cunt without it registering in their tiny minds.

Try it yourself. It's good fun. Go outside now and ask the first person you come across for the time. Say, "have you got the time please cunt." Say it very quickly and politely with a smile on your face. It won't register. They may ask you to repeat yourself, but then you can just ask for the time again without the cunt part. For an added adrenaline rush why not ask a really big emotionally unstable man. Email in with your results.

Happy Fat Toosday everyone. Oh how proud and appreciative Jesus would be that we honour his endurance in the desert and his refusal to bow to Satan's temptations, by eating pancakes and wolf whistling at college girls who get their tits out in New Orleans.

For lent I will mostly be giving up losing money in sports wagers. For the next forty days I shall only be placing winning bets. Starting with this evening's Champions League fixtures. I haven't actually put together my wager just yet, but I should imagine I'll win thousands.

* I did not win thousands.

Is this cartoon racist? The Republican leaning New York Post, which is owned incidentally by Rupert Murdoch, claims this is just an innocent caricaturing of the shooting by two police officers in Connecticut of a mental chimpanzee that attacked a woman and a police officer.

Everyone else thinks it's a racist dig at Barack Obama. Given that the stimulus bill designed to kick-start the US economy was put together by Barack Obama, they appear to be suggesting the bill was written by a monkey no? That's how I see it anyways.

Fair enough, a lot of politicians are portrayed as monkeys or apes in cartoons because they're animals synonymous with being stoopid, but it is obviously a racial slur aimed at black people too and given that Barack Obama is black, the cartoonist must surely expect the message behind the cartoon to be questioned. Of course he did.

If someone drew a cartoon of Nicolas Sarkozy portrayed as a frog sitting in the mouth of Gordon Brown and tried to claim it was just a comment on how the French Prime Minister always leaves Gordon Brown speechless (frog in the throat - get it get it?), you might get away with it. French people on the other hand, might object to him being associated with frogs given that that is a xenophobic slur aimed at the French. Actually that idea is gold, I'm going to email into the Daily Mail when I've finished this.

Anyway, is this over sensitivity on the part of anyone who views this is a bigoted cartoon? Possibly, but since it appeared in a newspaper owned by Murdoch and was drawn by Sean Delonas who is in fact a racist homophobe with a history of offensive cartoons, it's far more likely that he's just taken the opportunity to call the President a monkey with a cartoon thinly veiled as political commentary.

I'll be perfectly honest with you - I don't like Jacqui Smith. I never have in fact. I don't like her because she's got horrible big woman's tits and likes to show them off, she has only average intelligence and poor judgment exemplified by her awesome idea to claim the home in which her family lives is somehow her second home.

Mostly though I dislike her because her position as Home Secretary is costing the tax-payer well over half a million pounds a year and a Home Secretary is utterly irrelevant in this day and age since all of the rules and regulations regarding all aspects of this job are determined by EU lawmakers in Brussels not Jacqui Smith in the poky little spare room she's claiming cabillions of pounds for in expenses. She has no chin either and I have never trusted the chinless.

This thing about her housing expenses is clearly a con. Everyone can see that. The fact she might have behaved within the rules is a front. she's still taking the piss. She has a fifteen bedroom home in Redditch which I imagine has a fairly juicy mortgage attached to it with some equally juicy interest. She also has access to her sister's spare room. The mortgage payments, one assumes, amount to considerably more than the £7,000 a year she's payer her sister. Hmmmm what to do?

How about claiming that you live in London more than Redditch, therefore allowing you to claim expenses for the more expensive home in Redditch rather than the little spare room? Voila!! Jacqui can now live in a sprawling fifteen bedroom home in the country for what amounts to £7,000 a year. Notice how the Tories are not making a big deal out of this because they're all at it.

This of course is scandalous. But for me, the far larger scandal and the far more bitter pill to swallow, is that she is permitted to exist as a senior minister at all. What does the Home Secretary do these days? Immigration control? Nope, that'll be controlled by the EU. Citizenship? No not really, not anymore, that'll be mainly determined by Brussels too. Policing? Brussels again. National security? Yes, she's in charge of keeping us safe with measures she considers appropriate, as long as they are considered justifiable by EU law which comes from Brussels.

Forget the £23,000 a year she's claiming in order to keep her "second home" in Redditch, what about her frookin £80,000 salary, the £140,000 a year she claims to keep her office and the £400,000 a year in police protection she gets when she goes anywhere.

What I'd like to see if this is to be permitted is a Running Man style game show where MP's who want to claim expenses over £20,000 a year have to negotiate a series of obstacles built into an urban sprawl while they're hunted down by the most unhinged members of the tax-paying public with Pit-Bulls and Rottweillers and other dangerous dogs. If they make it through the maze they win their expenses...usually though they'd be torn to pieces and their various body parts displayed on spikes...Noel Edmonds could host.

If you're a fan of Jewish grot novels I heartily recommend Sabbath's Theatre by Phillip Roth - a story of a mad puppeteer who enjoys sex involving piss. I've placed some daft wagers just now that have little to no chance of returning anything in the way of monies and I know not why. I've become the gambling equivalent of poor Mickey Sabbath.

I usually don't bet on the Sabbath, not because of any religious sensibilities of course, just I'm never up in time...it was as if I was being controlled by the gambling Gods. They have foresaken me, for reasons I know not what. Still, this should be good clean wagering theater, because as we speak, four of my wagers shall be worthless in less than ten of your Earth minutes if Celtic or Motherwell aren't winning at half-time. Ooooh the tension!

My current mood expressed through the medium of terrorism photography.

A Saturday without a sports wager is like a German family tree without a conspicuous Nazi war criminal rotting one of the branches that's what I always say, so with that in mind let's discuss my 'final solutions' from today's action.

With a typical lack of any real research I have settled upon the following:

Football: A standard £5 Yankee; Lincoln City who have won already beating Port Vale last night; Chelsea who I believe are value at odds against given that they now have a new man in charge and Martin O'Neil is almost certainly a paranoid schizophrenic and his "other side" is due to surface any day now; Swansea City who have a great home record and I think are playing Doncaster Belles today so should not have too many problems and finally Portsmouth - yes I did say Portsmouth. I don't recall why I picked them if I'm honest. I think I read somewhere that Rory Delap is out and obviously Stoke can't score without him almost throwing the ball in the net. Also, surely Portsmouth are due a win sometime? Straws, clutching, at.



Horseys: The last time I bet on a horse race, wife beating was still considered necessary domestic discipline, but I'm having a punt today on the Racing Post Chase.

I've heard nothing positive about the favourite 'Big Fella Thanks' except from Harry Findlay talking it up while he spilt chili sauce all over his front, so I'm having a tenner on Fleet Street at a horse-tastic price of 16.5 on Betfair.

I always like to capture the red properties when I play monopoly and that's all the justification I need for this bet. Oh, also this race is usually won by a horse who won last time out and has the stamina of Dawn French working her way through a tin of biscuits.

This should all return enough monies to finance some much larger wagers which in turn should then finance a very long stay in Vegas which is somewhere I really need to be at the moment. Or alternatively, allow me to bid for Michael Jackson's silver socks he wore in that Billy Jean video where he does his moon walk about ten years before he started the whole going mental thing. They're priced up at about $600 I think, which is certainly value.

Everton are upset because their home game with Stoke on March 14th has been postponed by 24 hours because the local police force are having to police a BNP rally the same day and can't accommodate both events.

Now I'm not suggesting Everton are in anyway a racist club even though it took them until 1994 to sign a black player, but the cynics amongst us might think it in the club's best interest to have this game moved as if it was held the same day as the BNP rally there would be no fans at the game.

The lezza couple who paved the way for same sex marriage in Massachusetts are filing for divorce! Julie and Hillary Goodridge who were together for about fifteen years before they were finally granted the legal ascent to marry, have obviously realised that marriage is bullshit after all and just like hetero couples after a few weeks of marriage, are now utterly sick of the sight of each other.

I think this is bullshit man. Divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other and most importantly of all can fuck up the lives of the kids they had while under the ridiculously deluded belief they'd be together forever. Had he had the means, Adam would have divorced Eve, not Steve.

Fair enough sometimes you have to be left alone to make your own mistakes and they may have now finally realised that it is in fact far more romantic to stay together simply because you want to rather than because you've contractually binded yourselves together through the eyes of the law - the fact remains these woman in comfortable shoes irritated the hell out of everyone with their equal rights silly bollocks and they should now have to live with it.

I don't know what the actual reasons are for their seperation, one assumes another woman is involved, perhaps they have both finally had to admit to themselves and each other that they miss cock, but tough titty I say. You wanted it, live with it.

If anyone is still in any doubt that aliens are on the brink of a global invasion, I trust this video of a flying Japanese paratrooper's bomb dunking training - cunningly disguised as sport - be sufficient evidence.

To be fair to myself the selection of John Part wasn't too shrewd given that he took an absolute pasting, but it's a profit and one can always find cause to rejoice when Tottenham lose. This has returned a nelson in cricket parlance - £111 - not quite enough to finance my weekend plans so I may re-invest it or just spend it on sweets.

Speaking of cricket, what a bizarre ending to the test match. I don't know much about cwicket and hindsight is 20-20, but I did say at the time - albeit to myself - that they should have enforced the follow on.

But given that Flintoff and Harmison are such nancy boys they couldn't have coped with the remaining 12 overs left in that day, it's fair enough they chose to bat, but they should have not have put a night watch man in when they had a lead of nearly 300 on Toosaday night and should have declared 75 runs sooner saving themselves at least two hours.

England seem to have an awesome knack of making the absolute worst from promising situations. Kevin Pietersen may have even busted up his hand at the end there, ironically because of his more aggressive approach to the game they'd have won had they kept him as captain.

How does he conjure up such tunes, and why? No doubt it's a talent honed over the course of hours of dirty phone calls made to woman who have refused his advances. Huuuuum huh huh huuuuuum will you huuuuuum huh huh huuuuuuuum tickle my beard huuuuuuuuum huh huh huuuuuum. No worries.

Listening to Phil Hellmuth and Dave Ulliot's interviews after they bomb out first in another Poker Premier League heat, you wonder if they might have been suffering from genuine paranoid delusions all these years rather than just behaving like a couple of ego-centric cretins.

Hellmuth and Dave Ulliot are fairly old by now anyway, but given their opponents in this competition have yet to start shaving (except Annette maybe), both of them are looking and playing like ancient relics.

They're like a couple of Lancaster Bombers with dialog clocks and a payload of conventional bombs. They can cause a lot of damage if they can get close enough to their targets, but are so easily spotted they can be destroyed long before they get anywhere near them.


Tom Dwan, Peter Eastgate and little Annette Obrestad on the other hand are like a fleet of Stealth bombers with digital read outs, traveling at 2,000 miles an hour, firing lazer guided bombs which destroy their targets without anyone having seen them or heard them.


If Hellmuth and Dave Ulliot were genuinely mental one might feel some sympathy for them, but unfortunately it's far more likely that their ego's have just cocooned them in a shell impenetrable by reality. It seems no matter how badly they play, both of them are still able to convince themselves they were unlucky.

Their ego's may be secure, but their money and chips are certainly not safe from the attacks of their only very recently post-pubescent opponents. It could get quite messy. Nurse, the screens please.

On my way home last night I came within feet, feet people, of colliding with a deer. I didn't notice it until it's face was almost touching my number plate. I was singing along to Kajagoogoo on Fox FM and suddenly two sparkly eyes were staring back at me.

Why do they just stand in the middle of the road? Surely the A40 isn't a deer's natural habitat. I assume he lives in the area. Is he so stupid that he hasn't figured out yet that the hard dark grey surface is home to big metal moving things that would fuck his shit up if he got in the way of them?

If I didn't have the reactions of a cat I'd have had a most unfortunate accident. Of course, if another car was coming from the other direction I'd have had no choice but to plough into Bambi and would have then spent hours scraping his guts off my windscreen. Phew!


My search for a jumper with an R on the front has almost come to an end I hope. I haven't gotten around to learning how to knit so I've been trawling the intrawebs for one. Who knew it would so difficult to find such a garment!

I came upon the awesome idea of purchasing one of those varsity letterman sweaters, but there appears to be a lack of colleges beginning with R. If my name was Bob my search would have been over ages ago.

Anyway, I came across the very definition of awesome in the shape of this wrestling team jumper and I now just have to wait four days for the auction to end. I can barely stand the tension. I plan to wear it when I play poker. I figure it'll make me look dorky and silly and therefore people will target my chips as easy money. I shall then unleash the full force of my pokering whup ass on them. Ah ha ah ha ah hahahahahahahahaha.

I saw an effigy of Jose Mourinho in my tomato soup this evening which I obviously took as a portent that his team are about to achieve greatness and so, given that Arsenal will somehow win the FA Cup and Reading will clearly become Champions of the Cola-Pepsi league championship thingy and of course Denman will win the Cheltenham Gold Cup again - I've obviously lumped these selections together in a suptuous Yankee paying hundreds and hundreds of thousands of monies and finally FINALLY elevating me above the law.

Last night's £30 freeze-out at Aspers was not so much a poker game as an interpretation of Jean-Paul Satre's "No Exit," just with a poker theme. Three people; myself, Ian Dowie's ugly brother, a hairy South African woman called Tyrone and a dealer together in a room with no windows and only one door, tortured for what seemed like all eternity by our own unpleasantness.

Now I don't spend much of my time reading Existentialist plays written by French philosophers, and an Existentialist play is a contradiction in terms ain't it? Eeeek..that's now doing my wee head in thinking about that....did Satre ever wonder about that? A person is defined by his own actions, you illustrate this in a play, but in a play he's an actor. Weird no? That's easily too much thinking for a Sunday already so let's move on shall we?

Anyway, I'm telling you, as this game progressed last night I couldn't help but think if I was a really poncy writer with very little talent instead of being an awesome writer with oodles of the stuff, and if I had nothing better to do with my life, and I wanted to put on a poker adaptation of "No Exit," then this was how it should look.

There was initial politeness but that soon evaporated. Ian Dowie's ugly brother trapped me in quite embarrassing circumstances in one hand and then called me a sucker as he scooped up my chips while Tyrone the hairy woman giggled away. He seemed unsure if I had heard him so he repeated it.

I suggested to him that that wasn't necessary. He apologised, I told him he didn't need to apologise, just don't do it. He then told me to "fuck off then." I wondered for a second if he might, with his ape like arms, reach over and chin me, but I think he forgot about me. With a brain the size of a ping-pong ball I think he was struggling just to remember to breath let alone play poker and argue at the same time.

I didn't think our dealer had been in a casino before, let alone dealt a poker game, but in hindsight it's clear he was a manifestation of Satan and was doing all he could to create as much bad feeling, tension and distress as possible. No matter how many attempts were made at Tyrone the hairy woman's tournament life, he would not die. Several unsuccessful attempts were made on my own life also and Ian Dowie's uglier brother as the blinds represented a bigger and bigger proportion of our stacks, but we were kept alive by the Satanic dealer with his silly spiky hair and red face.

As the final table progressed I had assumed by this point that we were destined to become the final three players and would then spend all of eternity passing chips between ourselves while the Satanic dealer cackled wildly as all three of us slipped deeper and deeper into an infinite insanity.


As it happened though I ended up busting out in fifth, the first money place, phew! Having shared in the neuroses, unpleasant eccentricities and drunkenness of my table mates, busting out came as something of a relief. I had feared my feeling of salvation was premature and I was still entombed in my own personal hell on the way back as the A43 was closed, but eventually the lord our god in the shape of the A5 delivered me from evil. The night may have ended differently to Satre's play and he may have been a beret wearing ponce (how appropriate the French word for think is, 'ponce'), but hell is definitely other people.

It's a common misconception that my blog is named after the horsey that runs today in the 2:15 at Ascot. But it ain't. I will be placing a wager on him today though at even money despite my not knowing anything about the race or racing in general in fact. It's one of those wagers placed on the strength of my instinctual waters. The same waters that are telling me Burnley will turn over Wolves today and Bristol City will triumph over Southampton despite the Saints being a better team away from home.

I fancy West Ham too as Gareth Southgate pretty much conceded in one of his interviews that he cares not what jot for the FA Cup and Middlesbrough generally don't do too well in London anyway. I've got all sorts of other wagers placed on a bunch of stuff today and next week's Champions League. Most of these bets I don't even remember placing. I get bored see, and in the wee small hours of the morning there's very little to do other than watch repeats of Dallas or place arbitrary wagers.

I'm off to Aspers again tonight also to make an attempt on the treble. A treble no one has ever completed or attempted. The Pigeons/Fox/Aspers treble. If I'm successful I'll attempt the quadruple with a visit to Abingdon tomorrow for their £30 freeze-out.

If I can manage it, no doubt the Mayor of Carterton will have me bronzed. Immortality awaits. Or I''ll just read my book while Alan wins it. Incidentally, my blog name means something like "I go before you" or "this is for you." It's what matadors say before plunging their swords into the bulls face. An appropriate metaphor I think you'll agree.

I've just subjected myself to one of those traffic cop shows on ze television. Some of the "punishments" dished out to the car stealing kids made me wish I lived in Saudi Arabia.

For example, a thirteen year old kid, we'll call him Ryan, gets caught for the fourth time stealing a Nissan Micra. His punishment is that he's banned from driving for 12 months!!

Without sounding like an hysterical Daily Mail reader, how can you ban someone from doing something that's already illegal? He's thirteen fucking years old, it's already illegal for him to drive. You can't ban him from driving if he's not legally allowed to drive anyway. You can't ban a bank robber from holding up anymore banks for 12 months.

Another kid was banned from sitting in the front seats of any car for a year? Ha ha what!? If he's in the passenger seat, so what? If he's in the drivers seat then he's driving and that's already illegal. I very rarely feel any sympathy for the police, but I did on this occasion because they have no means to combat crime any more.

It must be the very definition of frustration to keep arresting the same little chavy bastard every Friday night with him knowing full well that nothing will happen to him. The Saudi's to be fair are a bit harsh some times with their due process what with their stoning of women for adultery and all, but one has to concede that perhaps our approach to law enforcement has become a little too liberal and tilted in favour of the criminal.

It would be very difficult for this kid to steal anyone else's car if his hands were in a bucket in a back room of Grimsby Magistrates court. Do we even have kiddy jails anymore? What was the reson why they abandoned the bortsal institutions? Was it cause they were nasty and they made some of the kids cry?


Fair do's I accept that from a rehabilitation point of view, Bortals were not too successful..but leaving young car stealing Ryan to roam the streets of Grimsby free to take which ever car he finds most appealing isn't offering him much in the way of rehabilitation either. At least the Bortsals were a decent enough punishment. At least they would keep young Ryan away from everyone's cars for six to eight months.

I personally would like to see him flogged with the seat belts of the car he stole in Grimsby town centre by anyone who has been a victim of car crime in that area. I've emailed Barack Obama about this and am awaiting reply. In lieu of this can we at least acknowledge that we have a broken system and begin locking these wee ones away until it's fixed? Twenty or thirty years should be fine.

I'm afraid people still don't believe you Mr Darwin, but maybe in another 200 years people will prefer to believe in science rather than incoherent speeches yelled out by men in funny hats.

This Geert Wilders business, it really makes me wish it would snow again. In my opinion, people whining about the snow is roughly 15% less tedious than listening to people like this Dutch version of Boris Johnson carrying out what they believe to be a courageous crusade against tyranny, but which is in fact just tedious bollocks.

I watched his movie "Fitna," sixteen minutes it lasted. I could have had a wank and some soup in that time. It's not an important film. Anyone with reasonable reserves of intelligence will take it no more seriously than if some dude with a funny tash came over from Germany and started reading passages from Mein Kampf at Hyde Park corner because he felt Jews were directly responsible for the economic melt down.

It's difficult I think for this bloke to object to his exclusion from the UK, when his whole message centres around excluding people with similar messages to his from the Netherlands. The views of extremist Muslims may be on the opposite end of the spectrum to his, but in terms of just how much hooey and logic there is contained within their opinions, they're cut from the same cloth.

If they let him in and he gave a speech after showing his movie, then some Muslim kid from Bradford shot him in the face then his movie and message gains some validation and justification that it doesn't deserve. I agree with him that the Koran is nonsense, authoritarian and dangerous in the wrong hands. But so is the Bible, by definition Holy scriptures are authoritarian. One of Delia Smith's cook books read by anyone with the appropriate levels of delusion and lunacy can use one of her recipes for lemon meringue pie as validation for their desire to harm trifle eaters. Or something. The point is people see what they want to see.


The Koran/Bible are used to justify incredibly crappy behaviour, the Koran or Bible do not demand it. There are of course incredibly violent passages in these books, but anyone who thinks they ought to be taken literally in the 21st century is going to be a dangerous individual anyway, even if these books didn't exist. Political ideologies for example develop because so many people are so easily manipulated and are incapable of thinking for themselves.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the body count is between the three main monotheist religions, but I'm sure Christians and Jews have killed more people and tortured and maimed more people over the centuries in the name of their holy book than Islamic extremists. It's religion in general that's the problemo, not any particular version because it causes otherwise reasonable people to do incredibly unreasonable and irrational things. I haven't heard Wilders calling for Christians to be banned from entering the Netherlands. I assume the Pope is still welcome and he's pound for pound the most evil cunt on the planet at the moment.


Everyone of course should have the freedom to read and believe in whatever they choose in the privacy of their own home, but freedom of speech does not extend as far as the rights one has privately because imposing these beliefs on other people is unacceptable.

I'm a member of the National Secular Society and they are not happy this man has been denied entry to the country. But turfing this man out of the country is not a victory for those who want to see religion and the state intertwined and Islamic extremism in particular. Nor is it a black eye for democracy or freedom of speech.

Even if it causes more problems than it solves, it's the right thing to do because it is a victory for reasonable and intelligent people who don't want their time wasted by blonde twats spewing out biased and tedious self promoting propaganda movies any more than having their drive to IKEA interrupted at the weekend because some Muslim cleric is stood in the middle of the street demanding that non-Muslim westerners be engulfed in flames as soon as possible.

Silly world, I'm so glad I resigned from it some years ago.

After a failed bet on Brazilian football, I put together a completely random Yankee on Monday in order to recoup the losses at the cash table in Walsall and the loss from the Brazilian bet. It really all rests on Chelsea signing up Gus Hiddink.

My subsequent pokering successes means the return on this bet will leave me with an unlikely healthy profit for the weekend (I'm still counting it as part of the weekend's gambling).

With these monies I'm thinking of having Gus Hansen's face tattooed on my face - I feel this way my raises out of position with 4 high might be afforded more respect.

It's a funny old game poker. Funny peculier, very rarely funny ha ha. I felt I didn't really get the rub of the green as it were in Walsall, I had two million outs in total with the various drawing hands I played and missed every single one of them. Two million outs I tells ya. I also didn't help myself of course by playing with all the composure and prudence of Ronnie O'Sullivan when he's one of his moods.

I learn no lessons from my experiences in the black country, play exactly the same way at the Pigeons, which I think we're all agreed is a far harder to game to crack than a poxy 200 runner Championship event, and win! And last night at the Fox I win as well and I became the first man in all of pokering history to complete the Pigeons/Fox double twice, the "double-double" if you will, which in order to see me over the finish line, I had to hit flush cards on many many occasions! Many occasions indeed.

To be fair, I was helped in some way last night by the fact that, at three handed, my opponents were; "Lucky" Jim who wasn't about to volunteer any chips into the pot unless he was dealt huge hands - incredibly ironic really since he has the biggest hands of any man I know, and I think he looks like Pol-Pot; and also Farmer Pickles who gets bored pretty early in these things and likes to bet blind.

Dan Harrington talks about hidden luck or sommat in one of his books I haven't paid any attention to. Last night was laced with delicious strands of the stuff that helped me to victory.

Pickles for example, just a few minutes into the freeze-out period had decided he was either bored or wanted to get home before it snowed too much and was betting blind - Simon Stocken, who is one of the best players in the place - had him all-in, but Pickles managed to wake up with the nut flush draw which he completed on the river.

Had he lost that pot Pickles would have been asleep at home by the time the game reached heads-up stage and given the chips Stocks would have held, I'd have had as much chance of victory as playing a pot with Joy and Tim.

Still, you've got to laugh haven't you? I'm best and that's all that really matters when all is said and done. I shall now have some celebratory soup I couldn't enjoy last night because I only got home an hour or so ago, my car being so shit I couldn't spin it out of the car park, but there are worse places to become stranded than a pub in the Cotswalds, that's what I always say.