Get a Goddam Clue, People

So I'm watching TV (and hating myself) tonight, coz NCIS was on or something. Included in the many and voluminous ad breaks were the 30-second news updates. And what, you wonder, were the ground-breaking headlines for this evening?

1. Interest rates going up (again).
2. Something I can't recall.
3. Tiger Woods' press conference.

That's right. Of all the many things that happened around the vast world today, the most earth-shattering news those TV exec knobs could come up with were interest rates and Tiger Woods. TIGER F*CKING WOODS.

Are you friggin kidding me? A hundred men were rescued from a Chinese coal mine after being buried up to their arses in water for a week. The Space Shuttle just took off to deliver some cutting-edge components to the ISS. The big supermarket chains are trying their darndest to shut down Costco in this country, for Christ sake. But what are we given? What constitutes top billing news in this miserable excuse for a nation? Some twirp in expensive pants who can hit a ball with a stick. And it wasn't even news about him hitting a ball. It was about a press conference where he said he's really really sorry for his tawdry, pre-packaged sequence of despicable antics of late, (that is to say, he's sorry he got busted), and that he's ready to start making millions of dollars again.

What exactly has Tiger Woods' contribution been to this planet, anyway? What indescribably brilliant thing had he done to warrant being paid a billion dollars? Did he cure cancer? Is HIV suddenly off the books? Did he get the Jews and Palestinians to kiss and make up? Huh? Well? No. He can hit a ball into a f*cking hole. That's it. The sum total of this schmoozing dickhead's life. Oh, and he gives hope to millions of African American kids that they too can become President of the United States. Oh, wait...

Don't even get me started. Speaking of Tiger "Smack me with a 9-iron" Woods, it just reminded me of another shining pearl of the intelligence of the Human species. Before Tiger's taking his dick out of his pants had the whole world enthralled, I recall last year he got himself into big trouble by stating, after a shocker of a round, that he "played like a spaz". Woods' uttering of "spaz" caused not so much as a titter in his home nation, but across the Pond the PC nancies couldn't flip open their phones fast enough. You see kids, just in case English isn't your first language, back in Old Blighty, "spaz" (short for "spastic") is considered derogatory against disabled people. It's right up there with words like "f*cking c*nt" or "Hitler had it right all along".

Oh, the sheer impertinence! The result of Tiger Woods' faux-pas was a bitch-session of epic proportions by probably the worst combination of whinger one could imagine: British AND liberal. The sad part is, I bet we'd have trouble finding an actual disabled person who was genuinely offended by Woods' use of the word "spaz". But that didn't stop an army of gammy-toothed bleeding-heart pansies getting supremely miffed on behalf of "differently-abled" people everywhere.

And so poor ol' Tiger had to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness for committing that most heinous of crimes: Saying a Bad Word.

(And of bloody course, all of this unimportant nonsense was late-breaking plaster-scrolling-banners-all-over-Family-Guy news, even down here in the antipodes.)

The worst part is, it wouldn't have mattered what Tiger Woods had said or where he said it, someone would have taken offence. It happens to all famous people, sooner or later. They dribble something totally innocuous, and suddenly a whole cross-section of the community collectively grasps their chests and gasps in mortal horror that anyone would dare utter such an evil, derogatory epithet in public.

Would you people WAKE UP! WAKE THE F*CK UP! It was just a goddam word. I can't believe that in this day and age of death and deprivation on a biblical scale, that a simple string of phonemes would cause such gnashing of teeth. I mean, does anyone care that 100,000 children in Africa starved to death or died of AIDS in the time it took for Tiger's Freudian Slip to blow over? Or that the US government bombed another bunch of camel-f*ckers to keep millions of gasoline-powered death-traps on the road, while another family is rear-ended and burned to death? Or that, if the amount of money paid in one hour to some grimy c*nt of a CEO were spent on schools, we'd have a new generation who could actually count to 21 without dropping their pants?

I swear to God... If all the ordinary slobs got off their fat arses and got on with things with the same vitriolic vehemence as they do bitching about something TOTALLY IDIOTICALLY F*CKING TRIVIAL as a RUDE WORD, (or cheering on some shit-for-brains who hits a ball real good), maybe we'd get somewhere as a species.

But nooooooooooooooo. Who wants to do great things when mediocre is much easier. So it is with the news, the apogee of the intelligence of the People. Sigh.