Great Balls of Fire

Listen up everyone, I have an important announcement. My male staff has taken on a second job. From now on he will be spending four days a week in his reverse people smuggling office. Quite frankly I feel betrayed. I've given him the best years of my life while he's been working from home. I'm there twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. If he needed a piggy cuddle or a chat with an intellectual superior he could turn to me whenever he liked. If he ever felt the need to sweep bush chocolate and straw from the floor I was always happy to oblige, and when he was in need of a wet lap I was there for him.

What thanks do I get? He decides to bugger off to the office, so now I'll only have Badger to talk to and that's a bit like holding a conversation with a train spotter. All he wants to talk about is the best way to keep his bedding tidy or the different ways of colour coding vegetables. When he's not talking about his damned feet of course. There's always Paolo the Budgie, but he's more interested in his mirror than having sensible intercourse with an intelligent cavy. Honestly, I've never met a more narcissistic creature. He spends all day gazing at himself in his mirror, occasionally kissing the glass and frequently singing to his reflection. If you ask me it's not healthy. It's the kind of thing I can imagine my male staff doing in his youth as he dressed up in his lime green suit and cream and brown platform shoes, while preparing to visit the local disco, where he and half a dozen of his spotty, desperate friends would spend all night guzzling warm beer and watching gum chewing girls dance unenthusiastically around a pile of handbags, while the flashing light put them all in danger of having epileptic fits and the million decibel music ensured that they'd spend the last thirty years of their lives saying "eh? " rather a lot.

Now, where was I? Oh yes. An important announcement. Due to the fact that my male staff has abandoned me I will be unable to produce two blog posts a week. This isn't because I'm not capable of being creative without him. It's a simple matter of logistics. You see I tell him what to type and he punches it slowly and inaccurately into the laptop, which actually hasn't rested on his lap since the time he left it there too long and his pubic hair burst into flames. If I hadn't been close at hand to pee on him it could have been quite serious. As it was he received first degree burns and ended up with a willy that looked like a barber's pole, albeit a miniature one. Anyway, my point is that he no longer has time to type out two blog posts a week for me. Naturally I complained that he needs to get his priorities sorted out, but he replied that if he didn't spend more time in the reverse people smuggling shop there would be no more treats for Badger and I. I suggested that he just works there part time - enough to be able to buy my treats and Badger would have to forage for himself. He just gave me that old "I'm disappointed in you." look, the one he'd learned from my female staff, who after twenty three years of marriage to my male staff has perfected it. So, as of this week it looks as though you only have to put up with one weekly blog instead of two. I will get my male staff to post it every Monday. Don't worry too much though, he'll probably get the sack soon and then we'll be back to two per week again.

Now, I don't like to say "I told you so." But I told you so. There has been yet another tragic mass shooting in Colorado. Why is it so easy for nutcases to get hold of weapons in the USA? Why? Do the nutters go to wherever it is you have to go to get a license, say "Can I have a license for an AK47 and a rocket propelled grenade launcher please?" and the guy behind the counter says "Sure, you look dangerously insane. Here you go." Because that's what it looks like from here. Take a quick look at my post from about eighteen months ago. Have no lessons been learned since then? It seems not.

http://pemery.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/just-this-morning-i-was-scratching.html

From my position inside my cage surrounded by bush chocolate and discarded vegetables that I'm saving for later it's quite obvious that most of the world is being run for the benefit of big business. Multinational companies are free to wreck the natural environment as long as it produces a few jobs for people in some politician's marginal constituency. That's certainly how it works in Australia. It seems that the United States it's different though. There the gun lobby has just as much power as big business and it seems as though none of the politicians there have the guts to stand up to them and say "THIS IS WRONG". Every country has it's massacres. Norway had one recently, Australia had one a few years ago at Port Arthur, but for Heavens sake! It's a once in a decade thing, not once every couple of months! All this bush chocolate about the right to bear arms being enshrined in the constitution. Big deal. Change it! Our former Prime Minister John Howard may have been nothing but a lying rodent but at least he did something to reduce the amount of firearms in the community after the Port Arthur massacre despite a lot of pressure from his own side of politics.

Some sort of rodent

From here it seems like an awful lot of people are complaining about the cost of so called "Obama Care", but I'm willing to bet a kilo of basil to a bit of Badger's bush chocolate that many of those people are among the strongest defenders of the right to bear arms. It's just sad that they conveniently forget the cost of treating thousands of people every year for gunshot wounds. Every year over 30,000 people die from gunshot wounds in the USA according to Wikipedia and over 260,000 suffer non-fatal wounds. 30,000 deaths! That's the entire population of an Australian city about the size of Tamworth. While 260,000 is about two thirds of the population of Canberra - Australia's capital city. What other nation would put up with that?

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
I think America may have shot itself in the foot with their gun laws. That's something I would never do.