What is Take the Blame?

Our ethos is simple, we are here to take the blame and highlight the blame. Apparently we live in a blame culture; and in a blame culture there needs to be someone who you can turn to when there is nobody else who will shoulder your blame. Whatever the reason, whatever the occasion, we are there for you. From the simple and the transparent – be it stubbing your toe or spilling your tea; waking up late for work or missing the bus – to the arduous, perplexing, intricate and convoluted – your dog died; you hate your boss; the IOC decided to oust you from your abode and build an Olympic sized Ice-rink in your back garden and erect an athletes village in your once pristine street-market turning a once thriving local community into a dull and bland advert for a hotch-potch amalgamation of too much glass, no class and student residents. We are there. Blame us.

Take The Blame™

Hidden amongst the vegetable fallout generated by the unstoppable E. coli outbreak, the last week has seen its fair share of blame being placed. Obviously, as is the norm, most of the blame has been in one direction. So as DSK sits in isolation in a plush, penthouse prison cell in NY; as the cucumbers bathe in their innocence whilst the bean sprouts take the E. coli blame in Europe; as Syria and Libya push, ever-increasingly, silently forward; as European Debt spirals; as the Weiner jokes continue unabated; as the football season closes and the transfer market ticks into money-grabbing overload; as PlayStation continues its battle with hackers and Google and Apple and Facebook squabble like infants; as the world tick-tocks its way ever onwards, just what the hell has been happening out there in the Blame Game? Barbie has been cutting down trees, that’s what.

Barbie on her way to chop down some trees.** chainsaw sold separately

OK, so obviously Barbie herself cannot cut down trees, she is a fictional plastic doll. Greenpeace, however, see her makers Matel, along with the likes of Disney, Hasbro and LEGO, as to blame for deforestation in Indonesia. Eyes are being turned in favour of cheap packaging from Indonesian rain-forests. So say Greenpeace, who approached the accused parties. Encouraged by LEGO (woop for LEGO. Best. Toy. Ever) but disappointed by the others, Greenpeace protesters engaged in some incredibly imaginative and funny shows of their disapproval. Dressed as Ken they broke into the Headquarters with banners.

Barbie: It’s over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.

**********

The United States has a big, badass economy and at the moment it is swimming upriver. Its paddling with the best of them but its hard to paddle anywhere when you are faced with continued level 2 rapids and you are going the wrong way.

Barack Obama blames Europe. Europe Blames cucumbers. Cucumbers plead innocence.

US Unemployment rose .1% between April and May 2011, up to 9.1%. May also saw the lowest hiring figures in over 9 months for the faltering American economy. The Economy is balancing on a wire, its not going backwards, but its not really advancing either. 1 step forward, 1 step back. With Obama and 2012 on a re-election collision course and the economy being top of the re-election mandate, time for some “its not our fault” rhetoric. So who is to Blame? Why Europe and Japan of course. As The President said on his weekly radio broadcast.

“Even though our economy has created more than two million private sector jobs over the past 15 months and continues to grow, we’re facing some tough head winds. Lately, it’s high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan, and unease about the European fiscal situation“

**********

Shania Twain released an album in 1997 called Come on Over. It is now the 10th best selling album of all fucking time. It has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, more than, get this, The Wall from Pink Floyd. More than Led Zeppelin IV. More than Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. More than Nirvana. More than Santana, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Queen, U2, Simon and Garfunkel. But less than The Backstreet Boys. The World really is a fucked up place when Shania Twain is more popular than The Beatles but less popular than The Backstreet Boys.

But she is unlucky in Love. Or, her best friend is a bitch. Or her husband prefers rock music. Anyway, there is some majorly weird relationship issues going on for the Worlds biggest country star. She got divorced from Robert John Lange because he was having an affair with her best friend Marie-Anne Thiebauld. Ms Twain blames Marie-Anne for the affair, calling her deliberate and calculating. Quite a restrained description. Shania Twain is now happily married to Federic………………………………….yes, Thiebauld. The ex-husband of Marie-Anne, ex best friend who had an affair with the ex Mr Twain.

“You can’t prevent those things from happening,” she mused.

Indeed.

**********

The Duchess of York is famous for her raging insanity. And for having her toes sucked by a business man on a yacht in somewhere fancy back in 1992 when she was married to Prince Andrew, who she famously used as a bank machine a few years back, by demanding £500,000 from some shady businessmen to set up a meeting with him. Prince Andrew was a British Trade ambassador at the time.

The infamous toe-sucking scandal

Well, now she is in the Blame Game, just like everybody else. In honesty, she has probably played before. This time, in a tearful interview with Oprah Winfrey, she blames her parents for her fragile emotional state.

“When she used to hit me because I didn’t sit on my potty or wouldn’t eat, a little vein would come up on the centre of my head near my red hair“

Spanish anger at cucumber blame has been vindicated. For now.

Germany has admitted that Spanish cucumbers are not the source of the E. coli outbreak that has killed 16 and left hundreds ill across Germany and parts of Europe.

Just what the fuck is causing the contamination? Bin Laden in vegetable terrorism? Europe’s children – they have finally had enough of being forced to eat their greens and have retaliated in the only way they know how. E. coli. Space terrorism? The outbreak came in on a meteorite from space? The Chinese? The Russians? The Corse? ETA, IRA? The French? Just what is out there and why cucumbers????????

MORE TO FOLLOW

Apparently Rikers Island prison, where Dominique Strauss-Kahn spent a few days last week, has bad food. This is according to a French Lawyer who obviously puts food above male shower rape, drug abuse, violence, self-mutilation, starving prisoners, corruption and God knows what else which goes on behind the locked iron doors of one of the most feared prisons in America. “Oh, they don’t have a nice foie gras over at Rikers you know. Its not like the French prisons where prisoners get gourmet food on a platter even if they butchered their own family.” He probably didnt say.

We Like mugshots or lock up your daughters.

At the moment there is no blame and finger pointing coming out of the DSK DSK DSK DSK (chanted venomously to the same tune as USA USA USA USA in some parts of France) camp at the moment so we will hi-jack an American journal and tell you what they think. They think the French are blaming the Americans. We don’t know, but the quarrelling is always worth a gander.

“today, thanks to Strauss-Kahn, the French who choose to criticize the US have a fresh reason to shake their heads and point fingers at the country they love to hate“

If you’re French or American, let us know what you think about the whole sordid DSK affair.

*********

Oh David Milliband. Sometimes he just can’t let sleeping dogs die, or lie. Or, he cant cook a goose with 2 stones in a glass house. Whatever melange of idioms you want to use, he has been having a pop at Tony Blair (again) over the Iraq War. He blames big T for the chaos that the invasion caused. Whilst sporting cliche rap hand gestures, he pointed the finger.

“I am afraid the failure of the Western forces to develop a proper strategy for peace, not a strategy for war, has held back the country“

********

The Apprentice. Its a TV show. People watch it. It’s probably crap but we are not here to take the blame for that. We are here to let the latest Muppet to be fired point some blame for why he was fired. Its a cracker. Latest loser Gavin Winstanley blames the Yellow Pages for his teams complete ineptitude. That’s right. A phonebook. He blames a phonebook. This is after going into a dry-cleaners to ask for a top-hat. (riveting TV.) Genius this one. Anyway, his team were given a task and they failed, according to Gavin, because he is from Liverpool and there is only one Yellow Pages in Liverpool but in London they have many. Jesus. He didn’t realise this.

“I’m from Liverpool and we only have one Yellow Pages in Liverpool,’I’ve never known any different. So when it came to looking for all these businesses, I just assumed we were looking at the same one.”

Would you hire him?

*********

Other blame

Are humans to blame for Whales beaching themselves?

Google blocks android movie rental. Blames DRM. Whatever the fuck that is.

People have stopped buying houses. Is the weather to blame? Probably not. But some people think it might be.

Breaking blame from across the World (Wide Web)

Faster than a freight train on amphetamines, the daily blame game is careering down the tracks of the global news wires. This week has seen a mighty fine collection of do-gooders and evil-doers pointing the blame and taking the blame and here we collect some of the finest from over the Internet for your reading pleasure. First up we head Stateside and to New York where a dog, yes a dog, caused a terror alert.

Is this Bin-Ladens replacement?

19-year old Melvin Ruffin was on his way to court. He wasn’t a lawyer and he wasn’t going as a journalist. He was going because he had to answer a disorderly conduct citation. Whilst on route to the courthouse a fellow travellers chihuahua cocked its leg and urinated on his bag. Just why the dog in question felt inclined to empty its chihuahua shaped bladder all over Melvin Ruffins bag is something you will have to make up. Anyway. We digress. After having arrived at the courthouse with a stinking bag and an angry judge to contend with, he decided to stash it in a bush until after the performance. To cut a long story short; someone saw the bag, thought it was a bomb, called the police, the police came, the bomb squad came, they brought their cool little robots to diffuse the bag and…..hoopla. No bomb.

************

Cheese has a lot to answer for. Amongst its misdemeanors you can now add criminal incarceration. At least if you are Sheriff Van Duncan of the Buncombe County Police who has blamed cheese for a false reading on a drugs test which led to the 4-day incarceration of a perfectly innocent man who did nothing more than eat some cheese burgers. “I blame the cheese“, is what he said, in a roundabout way.

This much cheese equates to 49 years in prison

Antonio Hernandez was stopped by police and a drugs test was carried out on a suspicious looking bag and its contents he had in the car. The drugs test flashed and beeped and did whatever else a drugs test does. Mr Hernandez was arrested. There are 2 things in this story which defy belief. The first is that the drugs test failed. There were no drugs. Nada. Nothing. Zip. what was in the bag is the other unbelievable thing; cheese, shrimp and tortilla and tamale dough. The detectives (and we use that term very very loosely) couldn’t tell the difference between shrimps and cocaine and an innocent man spent 4 days in prison. Goddamn cheese.

*********

Have you noticed the heat? Have you noticed that it doesn’t rain anymore? Its not just here, its everywhere. Rain has died. And the death of rain has brought about some problems. And that stinks. Like manure. Especially in Michigan where the lack of rain has delayed the farmers annual planting season and filled the air with the smell of shit. Such is the smell of the manure in the dry, sweltering air that residents have probably started wearing gas masks and blaming the weather.

“I’m getting blasted with manure, and I’ve got to breathe — you can’t even get away from the smell,” Forman said. “I’m not no city boy, (but) there’s something wrong.  This is getting ridiculous.”

*********

In our relationship blame game this week we have a major A-list mega celebrity and Sebastian Bach, the former singer of Skid Row. Lady Gaga, ladies and gentlemen. If her Twitter followers and Facebook friends formed an alliance and set their sights on sovereign status then they would become the 3rd biggest country in the world. Or something. It takes a lot of effort to keep 78 billion friends and one devoted boyfriend happy. She couldn’t and has split up with her boyfriend with two first names, Luc Carl. She revealed the news to her plethora of followers and devotees on the Graham Norton show. The poor bee blames her workload.

Lady Gaga has more friends than there are people in Germany.

Sebastian Bach on the other hand, has blamed Gossip for his break up with childhood sweetheart of one name, Maria.

************

In the world of sports there is one German man who divides opinion more than anyone else. To some he is the worlds greatest ever racing driver, to others he is an arrogant bastard. To us, he is Michael Schumacher and he crashed into Vitaly Petrov’s Renault early in Sunday’s Turkish Grand Prix. Now back in the day, before he (some might say), foolishly came out of retirement, when an incident happened he was rarely heard taking the blame for anything. He was a cold, calculating winning machine who did what was necessary to win. Now he has become shit matured he is much more open to blaming himself. Taking the blame. We like it. He has only gone and taken the blame for the crash in the Turkey grand prix.

“I am not very happy with my weekend, but I’m responsible myself for the result,” Schumacher said. “The incident with Petrov kind of dictated my race. We were very close and I was surprised that we touched but it was mostly my mistake.”

You might want to punch him in the face but he is taking the blame

Fuck Blimey, it’s been a week already! In that time so much blame has fallen onto the Internet highway that it must be time to do a bit of digging and retrieve some of that delicious, mud slinging blame… mmmm

Sony. They used to make Walkmans, remember them? Technological icon. If your heart was beating during the 80′s and 90′s then two things are fundamentally clear; you were probably listening to shit music and you were probably listening to it through a Walkman. But then the Internet and Cd’s came along and raped the Walkman dry; time for a paradigm shift. Enter the PlayStation.

Ipods older, uglier, slower, retarded, inbred cousin

Unfortunately Sony has been so successful with its flagship gaming console that every game player in the universe uploaded all of their personal and financial details onto the online gaming network and then Sony lost it all in one of the biggest online identity theft mega crimes in the world. Unless you are blind and haven’t seen the news, essentially what happened is that someone or something caused all of the online information stored on the Sony gaming servers to be breached and a billion indiviuals’ bank and credit card numbers went public; Sony went offline; shares crumbled; Sony went into meltdown; someone has to be blamed. Well.  Sony has shifted blame back onto the Anonymous hactivist group.

“Sony has discovered a file named “Anonymous” planted on one of the Sony Online Entertainment servers. The file reportedly contains the words “We are Legion,” which is the unofficial slogan of the unofficial group”

Ahhhh. Fat kids. We all laugh at them. They are funny. Fat is funny. But why are kids fat? Too much alpha bettie spaghetti? Not enough smoking? Maybe they should be forced to smoke 37 Marlboro reds a day, soon have the pounds tumbling. The obesity in children epidemic could be washed away with a mandatory daily intake of fat shedding smoke. Or not. According to a new study fat kids are the result of bottle feeding. You heard it here second folks. Milk makes you fat.

“Letting a toddler continue to drink from a baby bottle may be a big fat mistake. Kids who stay glued to the bottle after age two are more likely to become obese, according to a new study. Scientists at Temple University tracked about 7,000 babies born in 2001, and found more than one in five were still sipping a bottle at age two. Of these kids, almost 30% were obese by the time they were 5 1/2.“

This is what could happen if you dont smoke

Piracy. It’s a crime. Apparently. We are not referring to Johnny Depps latest Pirate adventure (which is another crime. A crime against cinema) but to the Internet music and video kind. But who is to blame? The people who download or the people who make it available to download? Fuck knows. We don’t know and our copyright lawyers are about as much use as a 1-legged sheep dog; so we will leave that decision to the law makers Stateside. We might be close to an answer as CBS, which runs CNET and ZDNET, is being sued for copyright infringement. In a particularly unuseful analogy…….

“Alcohol is legal to purchase to a majority of citizens in the United States. The younger minority, however, fall under strict prohibition. If a youngster buys alcohol illegally, and drink-drives and kills someone, who is responsible? The person driving the car, or the person who sold the alcohol?“

Goats don’t make the headlines. Name a famous goat? You can’t, there aren’t any. Elephants have Dumbo, mice have Mickey, rats have Ratatouille, even pigs have Babe. Maybe that is why a West Virginian man went on a goat butchery paranoid trip after snorting too many “bath salts”. Yes, bath salts.

This is a goat. A psycho from Virginia killed it whilst wearing suspenders.

A psychopath from West Virginia put on suspenders, took off his trousers, went next door and killed his neighbours goat!!! crazy bastard. Apparently bath salts are to blame, not the psychos’ mental, paranoid personality.

“found the dead animal lying on the floor, with Thompson, 19, standing half naked and wearing women’s undergarments, according to police.”

Hot Diggity, Hot dam. It’s that time of week again folks. Who would have thought it. As is the norm, the fingers are out and the blame game is in full effect. Most are accusations but amongst all of the slime and sin there is a smattering of self actualisation. Yes, the finger does indeed point both ways and when it does we will be there to leap on it like an injured zebra. We are the lion.

And in at number 5. Denise Grimsley, she’s a politician. Sits on a chair. Chairwoman. House Appropriations Committee. Its American politics. She blames the budget frustrations on the senate it says here.

“Unfortunately, in each subsequent offer we have received, the Senate opened up previously agreed on issues and moved further and further away to the point where the last Senate offer places the House and Senate $425 million apart”

And in at number 4, (and it probably should be at number 5)  more politicians on the younger side of the Atlantic taking out and sharpening the claws and pointing blame at each other. This time we go right to the top. TO THE TOP we tell you. House speaker John Boehner blames the big man Obama for the soaring price of gas (petrol) on American soil. When asked who was to blame, what did he say to ABC News?

“They’re going to blame somebody, all right. And the fact is he has done nothing to help the situation,” oh yeah. He also goes on to the election campaign….

“But if the economy doesn’t get better, I don’t think he’ll win. If people don’t feel better about government-run health care, I don’t think he’ll win. And if gas prices are $5 or $6, he certainly isn’t going to win.”

In at number 3 is a sport story. We all like to do sport. If we’re not fat. And even if we break the scales we can still go swimming or indulge in some arm chair sport fanaticism. In football, Arsene Wenger has shifted the blame onto his, well, shit defence. He didn’t quite put it so eloquently but you get the idea. If you don’t give to shakes of a rats tail about football, then jump to blame number 4.

‘It is frustrating because you produce the effort. The team has had an outstanding attitude and they will not be rewarded because the small things cost you a lot.’

Banging on the cold fridge door of number 2 a glaring bit of obvious. Apparently Easter falls on different dates (oddly enough, the poor easter bunny rabbits of Otago New Zealand dont care when it falls) and apparently the moon is to blame for the date being different. Really? Actually it is quite interesting. Have a gander.

“Easter is determined by the paschal full moon because that is the date of Passover in the Jewish calendar, and the Last Supper (Holy Thursday) occurred on Passover”

And at number 1 and by no means any more or less important than the proceeding 4. We head down under, to the land of possums, kangaroos and boomerangs. Surfers Paradise, a paradise for surfers on the Australian East coast. The traders and restaurant keepers are getting annoyed with Christian evangelists who are preaching on Cavill Avenue and scaring of the paying patrons. They blame them for lost revenue and want action taken.

“They stand right outside the restaurant with a 300-watt amplifier and scream their message out,” he said.
“The group has a right to spread their message but not in front of restaurants at seven at night.”That is a time for families to relax and enjoy good food — not religion.“

More Breaking Blame™ today as the news wires go completely berzerk with Blame. Fingers are pointing quicker than the price change of petroleum on the Trucking Info website. Tongues are wagging, the nails are out, the hair is being pulled; there is a bitch fight and mud is flying. So who is blaming who today?

12-year old mums you say? Whatever next? In Australia a girl of said age, living under state-care fell pregnant. Under state-care? 12? The state is not to blame according to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu.

“Victorians would be disappointed but I don’t think you can attribute this to any actions of the Government,” he said in Melbourne today.”There has been a failure of the system as such, it clearly took place a long time ago“

In India the planes are running but the pilots are being blamed for flying when they shouldn’t have been. The story is complicated but essentially 6 planes took off from Dabolim airport on Monday when the airports PAPI air safety system was turned off. What is a PAPI air safety system? Who knows, read the article below. From what we can gather, it is a landing aid which helps pilots land planes. Some fear inducing comments for those scared of flying follow.

“During poor visibility conditions even the most experienced pilot will not get a correct perception of a safe three degree descent angle. Weather can change and visibility can fall any time,” said a senior commander. “Under conditions of fatigue, when a pilot has done three to four landings before arriving in Goa, even the most competent pilot could misjudge the safe descent angle onto the runway,”

Football is a game. Liverpool kicked balls at Manchester. Liverpool kicked more balls at Manchester. Manchester lost. Their manager Robertooooooo Mancini takes the blame.

I am disappointed with myself because I made a mistake. It was my fault

Kirstey Alley’s – the bar lady from Cheers – shoe fell of on a dancing television show. She blames Petra Nemcova in a weird dancing on ice conspiracy theory that Mulder from the X-files will most definitely be investigating.

“other girls came into my dressing room and tampered with my shoe. And I’m not going to name any names … Petra [Nemcova]“

Saving the best for last, the Big Guns are out. Donald Trump is going apeshape as he blames President Obama for the soaring cost of oil. He waxes lyrical about never being able to recover and Life blood of this country and in bed with these people and ripping off our country and when was the last time you saw a bridge being built in this country? He Blames Obama for his high petrol prices. And yours. Is he right?

“When was the last time you saw a bridge being built in the United States? You see them falling down all the time. When was the last time you saw an airport being built? We’re like a third-world country.”

Fresh off the entrails of the biggest and most accessible search engine in the galaxy comes the breaking blame of the day. The news wires are awash with people blaming other people, objects, animals and US government tests for all manner of inept behaviour. Here are a few of the best from today.

Are possible secret government tests to blame for the wailing, rambling, bumbling, gibberish reports coming out of parts of Canada and America? Check the video and make up your own mind.

“The idea of the U.S. military disrupting the evening news to test out its secret ray-guns sounds like the far-fetched imaginings of the most paranoid.”

Cricket. Say the word to a European and they will have you down as having been exposed to the ray guns which caused the gibberish spouted by the news reporters in the above story. Say it to the 1 billion Indians who watched the world cup final on Saturday and they will love you. As it is, India won the final. Muttiah Muralithian, Sri Lankan freak spin bowler and losing finalist, takes the blame.

Condoms are in short supply and the UN blames the high price of rubber.

“UNFPA pays three dollars for 144 condoms”

Job suicide as Universities Minister David Willets blames Feminism for lack of jobs for working class men.

“because women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men”

London is polluted. The air is acrid and the stench of burning plastic floats dreamily through the parks. The air is thick with an eerie brown/green pollution. Obviously it is Europes fault. London blames Europe for its continued failure to reach air quality limits.

“air pollution knows no borders and it may well be that air pollution from continental Europe is transported to the U.K”