The Thamesmead Grump

FREE THE BONEHEAD ONE

I've just been informed by fellow blogger Arthur Pewty and since confirmed by the BBC that my old friend, champion of free speech and human rights, Joshua Bonehill-Paine, has been sent down for 3 years after being convicted of inciting racial hatred.

He has been inciting racial hatred for years but this is the first time he has actually been convicted of the offence. This followed a series of posts on Twitter containing "vile and anti-Semitic material" ahead of a planned rally in Golder's Green, according to the prosecution.

He is the same person who was convicted back in 2014 after posting hoax messages about a pub in Leicester, claiming that the pub was banning service personnel in case it offended immigrants.

To be honest, I'm really disappointed with Joshua. He took the trouble to send a threatening email to Arthur Pewty after he reported my campaign against the witty and informative Daily Bale but never tried anything with me. I guess it's because I'm just too scary.

With him now put away for the foreseeable future, I am going to have to find another cause to champion. Fortunately there are plenty to choose from. Britain First is my first choice, (geddit?) closely followed by a scam artist who goes by the unlikely name of David Avocado Wolfe and whose posts regularly turn up on my Facebook page.

TOLD YOU SO

You read it here first.

As predicted by my earlier post, footballing legend Jose Mourinho has finally been sacked by Chelsea Football Club after stating that he "had their full support".

Anyone who follows football, and even those of us who don't, are in no doubt as to the fate of any manager who has the "full support" of his club. Those magic few words that turn "if" into "when" were pronounced by Chelsea in October and started the clock ticking down to doomsday for Jose.

Strangely enough, according to the BBC, other managers are surprised that he has been sacked, citing the fact that he is their most successful manager ever, winning them three league titles, the FA Cup and three League Cups.

How can they be so naive? Being successful has nothing to do with it. Football managers are sacked on a regular basis regardless of their performance and go on the merry-go-round of hiring and firing that is a familiar part of the football tradition.

You sack your manager due to poor performance and hire someone else who has just been sacked by their team for poor performance. This is the way it has always been done.

It seems that a fellow called Guus Hiddink is in line for the job. Sounds about right. He is well qualified as he has already been sacked by Chelsea once already and has since been leaving a trail of destruction across Europe. Good luck.

I'M NOT SURE I LIKE THIS

Facebook is to introduce a dislike button although quite what this means is not made clear. Do I dislike a post because it contains something I dislike? Do I dislike it because someone has commented on something I dislike? Do I dislike it because I don't like the person who made the post?*

What is really alarming is that it could be used to do someone real harm. Think about it, how many times have you liked a post because it will help a sick child or make Amazon or Microsoft et al to pay for some poor person's operation?

If you dislike that post, will it make the person sicker? Or make Amazon or Microsoft et al raid your bank account and make you poorer?

Just think, enough dislikes, or even "amen" spelt backwards could kill someone. A dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.

Personally, I think this should be banned on health and safety grounds. In fact, I think I will dislike it as soon as it arrives.

*Thinking about this, perhaps we should have lots of different buttons for all of these. There could be a competition to design them. Personally, I would like a button which says, why are you posting this crap on my page? I would use that a lot, especially on Britain First and David Bloody Avocado Wolfe ones.

THAMESMEAD GOLF COURSE

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed workmen securing the site of the old golf course in Thamesmead. They had already removed the netting alongside the footpath and were installing new fencing around the driving range. They were also securing the windows in the clubhouse with metal screens.

I have never been able to get any response from anybody to enquiries about the fate of the site but one of my regular readers has had more success although there still seems to be no clear decision made.

Part of the problem lies with ownership and responsibility for maintenance. The land is owned by Tilfen, which in turn is part of the Peabody Group who lease it to a company called Parpost Ltd. Parpost are responsible for the maintenance and access issues and their only activity in this regard was to block access to the public footpath with a huge ditch. Perhaps the new fencing is down to them.

Peabody themselves have what they call a "final map" which shows the golf course site as a "large scale sports and leisure park". Let's hope so.

VERY 21st CENTURY

The latest Pope, who goes by the name of Francis is supposed to be a progressive (whatever that means) and is trying to make the Church more relevant in the 21st century.

In this image, he is seen to be driving out demons possessing a man sitting in a wheelchair.

The Church later published a retraction saying that it wasn't an exorcism, rather a blessing. In any case, it didn't work as the man says that there are still demons inside him.

He has now decided that he is going to declare Mother Teresa a Saint because she has miraculously cured two people of cancer .

The first involved the bogus claim that an Indian woman was cured of cancer after putting a picture of Mother Teresa on her stomach. This laughably absurd claim which has been dismissed out of hand by rationalists, and more importantly, the Doctors who treated her, had been cited by the Roman Catholic Church as proof of a miracle.

The second miracle supposedly cured a man in Brazil of several brain tumours after his Priest prayed for Mother Teresa's intervention with God. So far, there is no more information about this case that I have been able to find but I would be willing to bet that there is a lot more to the story than we are hearing; assuming that the whole thing isn't fake anyway.

If the Catholic Church is going to continue parading this superstitious medieval nonsense then the 21st century is still a long way away.

DUMB AND DUMBER

Anyone following the campaigns of the Republican candidates for the US Presidential elections will be getting increasingly alarmed at the prospect of Donald Trump winning, and even actually getting his finger on the nuclear trigger. What some of you may not realise is that this American version of our own Nigel Farage is not the craziest of the bunch.

Amazing as it might seem, there are names on the candidates list that make even him look like a beacon of sanity.

Step forward Ben Carson.

Now if you look at his career as a successful neurosurgeon, he has an impressive track record. He was the Director of Paediatric Neurosurgery at the prestigious John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland with his work being recognised with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

The problem starts when he lets his religious views cloud his judgement; these have the effect of making him look like he is at least a couple of side plates short of a dinner service.

He claims that Charles Darwin proposed his "theory of evolution through natural selection" because of Satan. As far as I am aware, Satan isn't mentioned even once in his book. (I do own a copy, bought from Down House when I visited a couple of years ago, although I haven't gotten round to reading it yet).

When he gets onto the subject of the pyramids though, he stops flying round the ceiling light of sanity and starts bumping into the crackpot window.

According to Ben Carson, the pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain and that the mummies were used as scarecrows to scare the birds away. No mummies have ever been found in the pyramids by the way.

He also believes that the pyramids have pointy tops to prevent blimps from landing on them. The fact that blimps didn't exist at the time just shows how forward thinking the Ancient Egyptians were.

On the Subject of Joseph, he also claims that the "coat of many colours" described in the Bible was in fact only black and white and brown. It seems that in those days black and white were the only colours, as you can see from old television footage, and it was the first time anyone had seen brown.

Vote for Donald Trump anybody?

HAPPY FAMILIES

I know I keep posting pictures of Seals on the Thames foreshore but I think they're cute and it's my blog, so there.

This is a small family of Common Seals that have been seen pretty much in the same place now for a couple of weeks. There are two adults and a juvenile who seems to be losing its baby fur. You can spot them on the mud in front of the Power Station water outlet, near the golf course.

By the way, you can get involved in the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Thames Marine Mammal Survey by going to this page and reporting what you have seen.