Idiot O' The Week - The General Public

This is a sort of quickie, kids. I'm knee deep in clipping layers at the moment and I haven't really had the time to post a full blog for the last few weeks now.

This article was something a friend linked me to just now and it tickled me so much I had to share.

Santa 'ho ho ho' ban bemuses world
Thursday Nov 15 12:00 AEDT

By Phil Han and Shaun Davies
ninemsn

People around the world are bewildered that Australian Santas have been told not to say "ho ho ho".

News of an Aussie recruitment firm replacing "ho ho ho" with "ha ha ha" has travelled fast, with people in New Zealand, the UK and the US amazed at the "extreme" political correctness.


Santa Ernest, the president of charitable organisation Santa America, said he was puzzled and surprised that such a move would come from Australia.

"It's amazing to me that it would come from the wonderful land of Australia," said Santa Ernest, who visits children in hospitals year-round.

"Whether you say 'ha ha ha' or 'ho ho ho' doesn't really matter, as long as you bring (children) love, hope and joy."

Trainees from Westaff, which supplies hundreds of men in red suits to Australian shopping centres, were told the traditional phrase could scare children and be taken as derogatory to women.

"We ask our Santas to try techniques such as lowering their tone of voice and using 'ha ha ha' to encourage the children to come forward and meet Santa," Westaff's national Santa co-ordinator Sari Hegarty told the Daily Telegraph.

The revelations sparked a storm of blog postings, with many international writers bewildered at the campaign against Santa's "ho".

"Who else wants to destroy traditions and re-write history? Santa has always said 'ho, ho, ho'," wrote one blogger at New Zealand-based friedbrains.com.

"How can banning 'ho, ho, ho' possibly better our world — why would anyone even begin to think it would in the first place?"

Macquarie University linguistics professor Pam Peters said the idea of changing the phrase was ridiculous and inappropriate.

"How can it be scary for children if it's been there as long as anyone can remember?" Professor Peters said.

"It's the time-honoured thing that Santa says and if they change it, it's as if he's speaking another dialect."

Two Santa trainees have quit over the politically correct new greeting, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Santas at department stores David Jones, Myers and the Westfield shopping centre chain will still use the customary greeting as part of their customers Christmas experience.

"Senior management (at Westaff) have assured us that Santas provided to David Jones have not been censored in any way," a David Jones spokeswoman told the Telegraph.

Some ninemsn readers though agreed with Westaff's decision.

"Finally I can walk the streets without being harassed by morbidly obese men in red," CK from Sydney said.

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Oh yes kids! Stop the presses! Run to the bunker! Loot the convenience store! Because the day Santa is forced to say "Ha ha ha" instead of a forced "ho ho ho" is the day the world changed forever. Forget 9/11, JFK's assassination, The stock market crash, V-Day, the fall of the Berlin wall -- they all pale in significance to this black day.

Okay, so maybe it is a very silly thing to do in the first place. Santa's laugh, while it might sound a little forced, maybe a little old fashioned, could only be percieved as a derogatory term by someone with a criminally perverted mind. Those who were raised in the western world recognise his jovial laugh instantly and aren't about to start calling the PC cops every time we hear it.

On the other hand, those who haven't been raised in the western world, those who didn't have crappy christmas specials shoved down our throats every november and december probably won't recognise it so easily. Australia is an incredibly diverse country and december is quite a popular month for tourists here. But this shouldn't be cause for banning the laugh so much as a great reason to rub out christmas and religious displays from public altogether.

Yeah I said it. Kill Santa. Get rid of the fat cunt. String the fucker up and let the ADHD kids go to town on him like a piñata.

Seriously, I am actually quite lenient when it comes to christmas (or pagan Yule as t'was once the season to be jolly and don our gay apparel...) It's been very secularized. Even Santa Claus - aka Saint Nicholaus the most celebrated saint in all of history, (except maybe St. Patrick,) - the icon of christmas, has become less of a Saintly, jolly fat man and more of a capitalist archtype that sometimes has wacky and or zany Disney adventures on the big screen and regularly makes small screen appearances to advertise everything from coke to mosquito repellent...

The star idiots here though are not the ones who tried to make concessions for those from different cultures, but the alarmists declaring that a small employment agency killed Christmas.

Take a look at some of these comments:

"Any shop that does not allow Santa to say Ho Ho Ho will not be getting any of my business."

--Oh noes! Whatever will westfield do?!

"I'd be more insulted visiting Santa and have him chuckle "ha ha ha" at me instead of "Ho ho ho". Christmas is a tradition, what gives "Australian Recruitment Firms" the right to try and change history? It's ridiculous and they could be spending their time a lot better."

Sorry, I must have skipped the lesson on pre-industrial arctic toy manufacturing.

"I am bloody sick to death with our way of life being chisled away. How come when we go to others countries we have to abide by their way of life but when it comes to our way of life they are allowed to walk all over us........ It is time to stand up for the Australian way of life..."

-- What? Beer, Cricket and meat pies?

During the peak of summer, we dress up elderly men, stick them in malls in red polyester fur suits, and make kids sit on their lap. Everywhere else in Australia people are heading down to the beach or disrobing and cavorting in the sun and water or sitting underneath a nice shady tree because of the heat. Last year, even one of "santa's reindeer" went for a dip in the spit. And yet these idiots are clinging onto a tangent to try to preserve the illusion that we're actually Germany, England, Switzerland or some place white and Christian. (They're not doing much to preserve the illusion that Australia is actually a highly literate society either.) Heaven forbid we'd actually be proud of being a multicultural society and even exploit it at a time like the summer tourist season.

So this is why I nominate the General Public of Australia (and apparently the panicking billions all over the globe,) as Idiot O' the Week.