Don't like being molly-coddled? Then blame the terminally stupid!

I really could not believe what I was reading when I browsed through the recent dress-code for Royal Ascot's annual Ladies Day. Apparently, underwear is essential, and tans must be even and correctly applied (basically, no streaky marks). Now, Ladies day is a formal event for well presented ladies with satellite dishes on their heads to attend and enjoy the festivities, and has been running since Queen Anne opened the first day on 1711. Clearly, having been opened by the Queen would suggest it's quite a well-to-do event. So what's happened here to allow the risk of some ladies turning up sans pants and with limbs that are coloured part-carrot and part-parsnip to be so great, they felt the need to send out letters to this effect rather than relying on common sense?

Chances are, right now, you live in what we call the "Western World". I can tell from my stats that the regular readers of this blog are 3/4 from various European countries (the vast majority being the UK) and 1/4 are from America (not including a very small percentage from Australia, China and Russia). This means that, chances are, you have access to one of the best education systems in the world. No, really, you go to school up to the age of 18 for free. You have access to the Internet: a world of information that is absolutely staggering in it's sheer volume. I can pretty much find out anything I want to know within the law, and some things outside of it, thanks to Wikileaks. You can watch news from anywhere in the world, while it is happening. By all rights, we should all be so intelligent, that we run out of space in our brains by age 5.

So why aren't we, then?

On Monday, I was perusing through Facebook when I came across a comment by someone who suggested that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg was now "bored" of Facebook and was going to shut it down the following day. I decided the poster must have been momentarily a complete imbecile and all his friends would have commented to agree with my sentiments. However, they were all saying things along the line of "OMG, I cnt liv wivout FB", and the like. They all believed that a lad, who owns a poky website that happens to generate about $1Bn in revenue per year, and was recently valued at $50Bn, would suddenly say "You know what, this being a billionaire at aged 26 malarkey is OK, but I'd rather be poor, unemployed and known as the guy who threw away  a massive fortune". If you've ever wondered who actually responds to those emails from Nigerian Generals with £30m to put into your account, then look no further.

Why do people so readily accept such nonsense? I appreciate that in the days before the Internet, research would take days and involve a trip to the Library, so it was a tad tricky and we had to rely on someones good word. However, I'll simply access Google, on my phone if necessary, to check if someone is telling me a massive whopper. Granted, you can't take everything on the Internet at face-value, mostly because the Internet is full of bonkers conspiracy theories and ladies whose clothes appear to have fallen off, but people don't seemed to have embraced the idea of "double-checking" before opening their mouths.

Most people like being respected. People always whine about being treated like a child who needs wrapping in cotton wool, whether by the Government, Health & Safety bods, Councils or Employers. However, they will only do this if people prove they are incapable of surviving a few days without doing something monumentally stupid. So if you read something in the paper, see something on TV or read it on Facebook, look into it before you spout off about it.

And if you really cannot bear to mix attending a horse-race and wearing underwear, may I suggest staying in and watching it on TV? That way, you can wear whatever shade of oompa-loompa tan and as few La-Senza products as you want.

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