Chief Scout

Bear Grylls has become the new Chief Scout for the UK. Presumably he will be able to instruct kids on how to fake television shows and pretend you're sleeping the night in that desert you've been crossing with only a rattlesnake for a pillow while actually you and the crew are straight off to an air conditioned motel as soon as the camera's off. And is a man who kills animals just for the sake of making a TV programme really a good role model for kids? Seriously, the fact that he kills animals as part of this show disgusts me. You want to show survival skills, stop biting the heads off live frogs, you bastard, drop your white ass down into Compton and live on the street there for a week without being shot or knived. Oh well, the kids can at least enjoy making fun of his name, I suppose. Distract them from how silly their uniform looks.

Seal clubbers drowned

I see news reports of a group of seal hunters (Canada's great shameful annual bloodfest) drowning after their ship overturns among the ice and frigid waters of northern Canada. And I have to admit it makes me feel a bit conflicted - on the one hand I feel awful that people died but on the other hand as these are folks who jump off a boat, run up to seals, club them violently over the head then drag them back to their ship leaving a long trail of bright, crimson blood on the snow as they do its also a bit hard to feel sympathetic to them (especially as they do this to thousands of animals and monitoring groups have found that often the animals are not killed outright, some escape but seriously injured to die slowly in agony, others are dragged on board semi-conscious where they start skinning them dead or otherwise). Like I say, leaves me feeling conflicted - I hate the idea of people drowning in those frozen waters but I also despise what they do by the thousand every single year. I suspect the seals have a different perspective on it.