You wonder how we arrived here, you wonder who it is that decides that you need to think differently, who is it that chips away, a little change here, a little change there, chip, chip and you wake up one morning wondering how you got here.

#MeToo 2018

A US radio station banned the 1949 song, Baby It's Cold Outside from its Christmas playlist claiming the song's lyrics are at odds with the #MeToo movement. Someone from the station said the lyrics felt "manipulative and wrong". He also said:

"The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended, but in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place."

#MeToo is a relatively recent movement but it is already having a deep impact on male-female interaction in general, even a miscontrued word might end up as a charge for sexual harassment. Bloomberg reported:

"Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women."

Gender Stereotypes Ban 2019

The Advertising Standards Agency says "gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence and contribute to how people see themselves and their role in society", and can hold some people back." The ban will be with us in June 2019.

Pleased as Punch

Once we were "pleased as Punch" but now we are not sure if we should be, as Punch no longer puts Judy through the mangle and now beats her with a feather duster, instead of a stick; what kind of perversion is this. Wiltshire council have discussed taking Punch and Judy books off their library shelves, while Colchester council plan to ban the puppet shows altogether. Obviously, pretending that domestic violence doesn't exist is healthy for children.

Once upon a time

Once there was a Golly on our jars of Marmalade. The the Absurdists went looking for symbols of black denigration and they found the Golly, he had to go. Children used to collect the labels from the marmalade jars to gain their Golly badge, they read the Beano and Dandy, they didn't read Umberto Eco and Ferdinand de Saussure on the wonders of semiotics. The children didn't realise they were being brainwashed by James Robertson and Sons.

Golly lost his place on the marmalade jars in 2001. But long before that the Absurdists were mounting their assault, in the early 1980s, Mr Golly lost his job in Enid Blyton's Noddy books at the Toytown garage, being replaced by Mr Sparks and the Greater London Council boycotted Robertson's products - that must have been Ken Livingstone's finest hour.

Dennis without Menace?
A new age of idiocy descended upon TV land. Once Dennis the Menace was allowed to tie a cat's tail to a car bumper but the cultural landscape in Britain has been damned by political interference in the thought processes of our children. A young boy wrote to DC Thomson comics in 2010 to complain that the new incarnation of Dennis was "boring" without his catapult, peashooter and water pistol. Replying to the boys letter, writers at the Beano comic actually had the audacity to say that they had not toned down Dennis's behavioiur - there's no cure for that. A source told The Sun: "Dennis can't be seen to use weapons and giving other kids grief in a BBC cartoon. The BBC doesn't want to be accused of encouraging children to be violent." We don't believe the Sun but we do know that Dennis's dog, Gnasher, does not bite people any more. How can Dennis be a menace without menace?

 

Spotted Dick

Spotted Dick is a steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit, and it's probably been around since the mid-19th century. The 'spotted' part of the name refers to the currants, no one knows from whence the dick derives. However, snowflakes at the Flintshire County Council canteen decided that they simply coundn't take any more silly comments about dicks and renamed the pudding, Spotted Richard -- all very silly.