Ukraine, Russia, Mr Putin and the West

 As an ordinary chap in the UK who over the years has been writing a rather erratic diary which admittedly has at times been a bit strange. I feel it is time for me to write something about the present situation in Ukraine. Mr Putin has blamed Nato, The EU, Britain and the US for his actions in sending troops into the country. On the grounds that they are threatening Russia. Now I'm sure there are folk out there that will say  . . . Yes its True . . . but I dont agree because it's not true. You see Mr Putin does not always work in the interests of Russia, but does work in the interests of Mr Putin. He is reputably one of the richest men in the world and those around him, his long standing circle of oligarchs have also become incredibly wealthy too. I mean if you can afford a 6oo million pound yacht and 100 million pound houses then we are talking serious money. So the truth is that Mr Putin and his friends have milked the Russian economy for many many years. Not really the actions of a great leader although sadly a course taken by other world leaders over time. Power as the old saying goes corrupts. 

Many have even called Mr Putin and his little gang Russian Mafia something I am unable to comment on, but will say as an ordinary chap in the UK it does look a bit like that might be true. However I have little trust in the UK Government at present either and it appears the Tory Party have been happy to take Russian money for ages and also seem a bit slow on sanctions of  Russian individuals.

As things stand Russian forces are using what are regarded as classic Russian fighting methods to slowly destroy towns and cities using long range artillery and missiles destroying houses shops and the general fabric of society. Mr Putin firmly puts all this destruction down to Extremists, Nazis and Western Powers. And his own troops are saving the Ukrainian people. If you live in Russia and read this well that is not true. OOoooooo No I'm afraid Mr Putin is destroying Ukraine. 

Here in the UK I can safely say that I think our present Prime Minister Boris Johnson is rubbish and I'm sure he thought the whole Prime Minister thing would be one big Jolly for him and his pals to make money and get knighthoods before retiring. If I openly suggested such a thing about Mr Putin in Russia I would probably vanish. What this means is news reported in Britain can be far more critical and subjective than in Russia where at a time like this reporters report what they are told to report or else. So many ordinary Russians just dont realise what is being done in their name or just how many people both Russian and Ukrainian are dying because of one man's deluded ambitions. Not for his country but for himself. To protest in Russia you have to be very very brave indeed.

What Mr Putin thinks the outcome of all this will be I just dont know, it is very likely he will be unable to travel outside Russia in the future and will end up with more weapons pointing at him than he could shake a stick at as the west gets as paranoid as he is. He has made a terrible error and it is not one that can be undone.

I will return to this but right now it is late and time to sleep. I am lucky I have a bed and a safe home unlike so many in Ukraine. 

The Curse of Twitter, the A to Z and World War three

Well doesn’t time fly, it is St Davids Day today in Wales although as I am one mile over the border now I don’t see him as much. Although I will be in Wales later doing things. . . . I am writing a bit of this diary early, so it is possible things I say I am going to do will already be done and dusted by the time anyone reads this in three weeks time.

Last night I did a foolish thing indeed, something I have not done before and I suspect will not do again, I attempted to join in with a Twitter group chat all about the forthcoming blogging A to Z event. Well what can I say except it entirely scrambled my brain and made me look a mad gibbering idiot who knows nothing? OK some will I suspect nod knowingly and agree. The reason for this is simple my diary is a flurry of jumbled words that hopefully some of the time make sense, I like words even though I cant spell, type, use punctuation correctly and possibly put them together in an odd order. But Twitter is not a friend of words and punctuation it is all about short concise little bits of text that are short and to the point, and I hate that. What would Shakespeare have thought if he was limited to 140 characters (not as in folk like Hamlet or Richard the Third but as in a space or a letter or a squiggly thing). You see for my diary or any other cyber location of myself Rob Z Tobor, to have the true essence of me I need far more words.  All I can say to those who witnessed my Who? What? Why? . . . . . . .Seagulls? What again? Help? attempts at keeping up with the flurry of tweets is, I just cant think that fast . . . . . . it was hell.

I notice in the real world folk are starting to shout at one another over a place called the Crimea (part of the Ukraine), I just hope they are not doing it using Twitter or it will all go horribly wrong. Now I don’t know about you lot but only a few weeks ago if someone had shown me a map of the world and told me to point at the Crimea I would have been at a loss as to know where it was. I might have pondered North Africa or the like but I suspect I would have put in entirely in the wrong place and got it entirely the wrong shape. 

Anyway as we all know Russia have sort of moved in to save it from the nasty westernised Ukrainians who are, as the Russians have put it, are all terrible right wing fascist extremists. Well; we are like that in the West, as is plainly clear from my decadent bourgeois diary here in cyberspace. Their decision to do this appears to have surprised the governments of the west who even as I type are protesting. This slightly surprises me after all Crimea is the main strategic harbour of the entire Russian fleet and well to think they would be happy to have it run by folk they used to think of as the enemy (us) is rather silly. It is a bit like American handing Pearl Harbour over to Japan and saying you can look after it as long as you don’t mind the odd ship popping in and out. . . . . . . .  Anyway what is the worst that can happen . . . . . .World War Three . . . . . . .AH DAMN.

Maybe we should just let Russia have the Crimea back even most folk living there would be happy with that, and the rest of Ukraine can join us and complain about the Euro and weather.

White Rabbits, Harry Potter and the Rainbow

I am still in a bit of a rush, I feel like that white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland; you know the annoying one with his incessant singing of We Are off to See the Wizard, telling everyone he is late and stuff. It is no wonder that the big cheese Wizard Dumbledore turned him into a rabbit in the first place really. Still the White Rabbit is less annoying than that Harry Potter chap who appears to have just given up the ghost these days, I always thought the Cheddar Cat was the really cool one, totally crackers (Cheddar Cat . . . . Crackers . . . . . .HAH HAHAHH HAH hah ah hah ah ha hah ah haha ha ha ha ha hahah ah ha ha hah ah h hah hah ah ah hahh ah hah ah h ha ha ha ha ha.)

So for the moment I will continue The Slightly Eccentric Diary of Rob Z Tobor (volume three and three quarters) because I need time to start volume four which is just not about due to White Rabbit Syndrome (that’s time not about not volume four, which as it happens is not about either).

I did see a rainbow today so that was good in fact it stayed put for about 10 minutes, Oooooo while on the subject of staying put I noticed a big headline on the BBC internet news that stated that Russia and America were no Closer. Now call me a fool if you like, but is that really news after all they are both huge countries and are not going to suddenly move about. And yes we all understand tectonic plates and stuff but unless the end of the world suddenly pops up like a certain White Rabbit then I think we can take it as read that neither America or Russia are going anywhere.

Anyway I must go now as I have chickens to paint, the damned Rabbit escaped…. 

Oooo DAMN I forgot to tell you what I did today ….. O well such is life….

Snowden, GCHQ, NSA or Mt Snowdon and the Four Eyed Devil Beast meets IKEA

Although I have been busy I do not appear to have anything tangible to hold up and say AH YES look I created this huge thing today with pointy teeth and undulating legs that can scurry about in small spaces, which is well cool for a huge thing. Only it is not a cool thing because it does not exist. So far today I have not be able to return to the Animal-Scope (mark one) to do stuff, I have added mark one because I plan to build the more complex mark two Animal-Scope very soon.

As it happens it is also Sunday today and coldish and wet and traditionally in Britain that means either sitting about doing not a lot pointing at seagulls and wood pigeons in the trees and saying things like OOOOOO LOOK A PIGEON, or spending the day in IKEA, but that is far to far away to go to from here just because it is wet. In the old days of course folk would head off to church but it is not as popular a pass time as it used to be and the local church regularly has a congregation of two, the vicar and the organist. It appears that someone said that the rumours of the strange Four Eyed Devil Beast were in fact just rumours and it was not going to eat everyone who spent their days frolicking in IKEA. You can see the advantage of Micro Gods they are far more comprehensive; having just the one God means that once people think the Four Eyed Devil Beast is not going to get them they lose interest in singing in a large cold building to save themselves.

  

Talking of Four Eyed Devil Beasts and being saved I notice that Mr Snowden man who let slip that we are all being listened too by NSA in the USA, and GCHQ in the UK (hello Charles and Quinton) has had to sneak off to Russia now after King Kong (sorry Hong Kong, his sister) got all confused by a large pile of paper sent by the American Government. Well if you sent a large pile of paper to China then the word Origami comes to mind and so you really need to make it clear or the whole international legal process becomes a Plague of Frogs, several Biplanes, a swan eating a leopard and the Chinese speciality with reams of legal documents, a Giant Panda hiding in a Bamboo Thicket on a Mountain (an origami favourite). Ironically it was only after making the Giant Panda hiding in a Bamboo Thicket on a Mountain, that an official noticed the word Snowden on the mountain and realized their error because of course the rather famous Welsh mountain is spelt Snowdon, But by then Mr Snowden was in a plane (not a Biplane) and heading to Russia where President Putin is lets face it not going to help the government of the USA much after he was made to feel rather uncomfortable at the G8 summit, so I think we can safely say that Mr S will be off again soon in his bid to outrun the  Four Eyed Devil Beast.

Oooooooo yes one small thing it is OK to use the internet on Sunday because they don’t work in NSA or GCHQ on Sunday’s, they tend to be in IKEA, except Charles and Quinton who are getting paid double time and like reading my Sunday diary entries (well done chaps). 

The Steam Powered Weather Machine, A Very Very Large Rock and the Russian City of Chelyabinsk

What a lovely sunny day it has been here in the UK, dad is claiming it is all due to his weather machine but I think we can take that with a pinch of salt. AH yes another one of those silly saying. 

As it happens dad has been trying to refine the steam powered weather machine for a while now to create large hail stones and did his first live test last night over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in order to avoid causing any problems or damage.  Then when dad heard the news this morning about all the bits of meteor, the large bang, broken windows and injured people he said AH . . . . But then you could argue that meteors are very similar to hail stone.

Also at breakfast he remembered that he might have accidently set the weather machine settings to the wrong setting last night, it was set to Large Rock Passing VERY VERY Close to Earth, mum had warned  him that his little joke (the equivalent of having eleven on your guitar amp) was all well and good but also very fool hardy and that one day it might come back to haunt him, and he may find himself having to explain to the United Nations that the huge hole in the planet is because he accidently pressed the wrong button.

So (back at the breakfast table) . . . . .  AH DAMN I ACCIDENTALLY PRESSED THE WRONG BUTTON said dad while eating his breakfast this morning I may have pressed the Large Rock Passing VERY VERY Close to Earth button ,  we all shook our heads and Mum said IDIOT.  But then he said later on, that it is probably the Large Rock Passing VERY VERY Close to Earth setting that gave us such a lovely sunny day, it seems that what dad might be saying is that if we want it to be sunny we may have to put up with large rocks travelling very fast and very very close to earth with the possible destruction of the planet. I must admit it is a close call floods or rocks mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, we have had a lot of floods for a long time now in the UK we need a change and a large rock would be novel.

Meanwhile in other news

As a result of DNA testing by the police in the flower shop they have tracked yesterdays incident with the flowers to the school mascot (the goat), you see the goat has form so to speak (that means he has a police record, not that he is a member of one of the classes in the school) so the headmaster has had to pay ten thousand pounds in compensation to the owners of the flower shop. He has warned all the pupils that he will need to save this money from the school budget and so has found a cunning way of doing this. It appears several large supermarkets have Food Mountains of accidentally incorrectly labelled food products that are going cheap, by buying in bulk he has been able to buy all the school dinners for the next twenty five years but has warned pupils that if they don’t like horses they might need to bring sandwiches to school.  So far there has only been one complaint from a parent called Mr Roy Rogers whose son Trigger says kemo sabe . . . . . . .?

Oooooooooooo yes I sharpened a chainsaw today and it is now very very sharp, so sharp it would cut a large fast moving rock in half like a hot knife through butter. . . . . Phew that could prove useful.

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Four poster beds, Mr Putin and Rastafarian dominos

One of the draw backs to sleeping in a big four poster bed with drapes and stuff is when they need to be taken off and put back again it takes ages. I know it’s not that normal to sleep in big grand four posters with drapes but mum insists; mum and dad’ as I have said before have one from the Imperial Palace in Moscow.

Not sure where my one came from but if was not Moscow and when ever I ask Mum and Dad why they were given theirs by that Mr Putin bloke they always say DON’T ASK and dad says its best if I don’t put that in my diary anyway AH I did it again I think, SORRY. We have a picture of Mr Putin hanging in our dinning room, apparently it is the only one in town, well almost because Napoleon Beelzebub has one in his Very Strange Victorian Curiosity Shop but I don’t think that counts because he has loads of stuff no one else has.

We are all off for a family get together tomorrow at some point for Mothers Day. Auntie Karen won’t be there because she says she will be crowd surfing while playing both the saxophone and ukulele at the same time, not many people can do that although dad had a friend who could play the piano and a guitar at the same time. Somewhere in the house we have a cassette tape of him doing that but our house has a lot of stuff in it and even the stuff has stuff in it so it could be anywhere.

As it was such a nice day me and the dog went for a walk in the woods once we got near the clearing in the middle we found all the Banshee’s practicing playing domino’s, I think mum keeps beating them and they are trying to get better at it. They play it the same way as the Rastafarians do where they crash the dominoes onto the table it is well cool to watch but a bit noisy. Me and dad don’t play domino’s any more because at Christmas Granny would always cheat so no one else could win not even Mum or Great Great Great Granddad so we stopped playing but mum likes Rastafarian dominos as it reminds her of snow ball fights?      

I have remembered to use paragraphs tonight; my proof reader says I need to use more paragraphs, but I get paragraphs and parachutes mixed up all the time. The English teacher has told me to stop taking paragraphs to school because her cupboard is now full of them and she hates heights anyway. I still have not got the hang of English yet.