Thursday, March 31, 2005

Random excerpts & interludes, part I


This past few days have been a trial for me.

I haven't managed to do much. Most of my time has been spent micromanaging to the nth degree.


Which means I don't get my stuff done for doing other peoples' stuff .. which is annoying.

In the past month, I’ve managed to add yet another high-profile scalp to my collection.

The victory was sweet, but at the expense of over fifteen-hundred pounds worth of non-recoverable time and expenses battling Companies House.

When I originally discussed the conflict I have waged on Companies House with my accountant, he expressed concerns that I may be a little out of my league.

Being a governmental organization, they are not in the habit of capitulating to anyone .. and many have tried.

Not only did I defeat them, but I had all of my demands met with.

I demanded a written apology, an exemption from Companies House pursuing me further over the matter, all signed by a member of the management team on letter-headed paper.

When I told my accountant of my triumph, he was astonished.

Never in his entire career had he known of anyone taking on Companies House and defeating them.

Such was his amazement, he asked if he could have a copy of the letter made which they would place in a picture frame in their conference room.

Well, it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

How did I defeat them?

I used logic as a tool to bludgeon them with.

I keep notes of nearly all conversations that relate to my business.

I made myself such a colossal fucking nuisance that in the end, admitting defeat must have seemed preferable to hearing my voice yet again.

So I’m in a philosophical mood, and from this, a whimsical thought came into my head:

I’ve found that in depth of knowledge there is often an appreciation for most things, good or bad.

In a cursory examination of detail, there is usually only a wealth of fallacy and an army of questions running from their answers.

But then again, I could be wrong .. it happens...

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Things that really .. really piss me off: part VI


People who go abroad on holiday and complain about the food.

They know where they're going, so why go there if they have a feeling they're not going to like the food?

Questions abound, as do concerns, not least the fact that most of these people are just miserable bastards who aren't happy unless they're eating processed shit from a tin or a bag that they hoist in & out of the microwave...

I 'blog, therefor I am


If you build, they will come. And a sound idea it is, too!

So I build my 'blog. I make my 'blog my own.

I work hard to be topical and I remain objective when required and get all uperty when the mood takes me.

And if at all possible, entertaining. But that's for you guys to decide, not me.

I nurture my 'blog and make [most of] my regulars feel at ease and welcome.

I also value their / your opinions, so long as their / your opinions have a low noise to signal ratio.

I'm sure there are those who lurk in the dark, pixelated shadows. Reading, absorbing but never commenting.

In an attempt to draw them / you into the digital lens-flare of light, I shall say: come one, come all!

I'm fortunate enough to have a broad, eclectic and geographically diverse readership, of which I'm very proud.

So, this isn't me signing off, as was the interpretation by one of our number. This is instead, a continued thanks to all of you that choose to spend your valuable time here on this 'blog.

Also, this is a chance for me to be a little self-indulgent and dig up some of my more memorable articles, if only to give them a bit of an airing.

Those that count themselves as regulars to this 'blog will have a pretty good grasp of me. I have opinions, and I make them known.

If you're easily offended by ways of thinking that veer from the accepted sociopolitical dogma, well .. I make no apologies for some of the articles you may read:

An argument for the death penalty: A matter of life or death

Man as child and technology as a bridgehead to lands both fair & foul: Are we learning yet?

Insincerity, crass humour and damn good PR: The people versus humour...

Telephonic chaos, piss-poor support and angst on a land-line: Oh ohh, telephone line...

Recently unearthed, a personal best rant, worth a squint: Political correctness: a growing evil?

An argument for euthanasia: A matter of life & death

Fox hunting is just wrong, OK! Crazy like a fox

The title sez it all: An Englishman's home is his castle, right?

Read. Enjoy. Be enlightened / enraged / fascinated / disgusted. But above all, make your opinions known...

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Obituary to the former American president Richard Nixon

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
~ Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

Thought of the day after the night before


Note to self: in future, moderate drinking and don't mix them up .. stick to the same damn drinks...

Monday, March 28, 2005

Thought of the day


Gaia Hypothesis
This will serve as an introduction to the Gaia hypothesis;
It is a review (published in 1989) of James Lovelock's The Ages of Gaia


What is the hypothesis of Gaia? Stated simply, the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.


More precisely: that about one billion years after it's formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of transforming this planet into its own substance. All the life forms of the planet are part of Gaia. In a way analogous to the myriad different cell colonies which make up our organs and bodies, the life forms of earth in their diversity coevolve and contribute interactively to produce and sustain the optimal conditions for the growth and prosperity not of themselves, but of the larger whole, Gaia. That the very makeup of the atmosphere, seas, and terrestrial crust is the result of radical interventions carried out by Gaia through the evolving diversity of living creatures...

Link: 'Thought of the day'

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Things that really .. really piss me off: part V


The idea of a United Kingdom is gone.

I say let all of the other nations do their own thing.


I'm English, not British.

I'm from England, not the United Kingdom (which on one occasion resulted in a standing argument with an American customs & immigration official when arriving at Los Angeles LAX .. but that's another story)

So the thing that pisses me off is some of the athletics commentary you get with television coverage.

If someone like Kelly Holmes picks up a medal, she's done it for England.

If someone from Scotland, Ireland or Wales pick up a medal, then they've done it for Great Britain.

Parading itself as some kind of inclusive patriotism, when in actual fact, you're listening to something bordering on patronizing racism.

Thankfully, this kind of things is lessening, but it's still a source of irritation, non the less...

Friday, March 25, 2005

A bad case of drink, youth and arachnids...


I recently had cause to recall a strange incident from my youth:

Having spent a night out on the razzle once, I trundled home, colapsed into my annoyingly creaky bed and .. well, passed out.


Some time later [not sure when] I felt something on my face. This woke me up.

I raised a shaking hand to my head in a sad attempt to wipe my face.

The resultant blow from my poorly coordinated swipe nearly burst my nose.

Anyway...

Morning. Woke up. Got out of bed [only just]. Went [staggered] into bathroom. Looked at myself in the mirror.

Spider smeared diagonally across my face.

Poor little bugger never stood a chance...

It's not just Friday! It's Good Friday!


Which means .. no work!

Which, when, err .. reality is factored in, this just means no phone calls from clients, but I've still got work to do...

Thursday, March 24, 2005

The sorry tale of the daft banker, the gay couple and a note


A bank worker is facing the sack for scribbling an insulting while non too unamusing note on an application form made by a gay couple.

Ronnie Hillman, 20 and his boyfriend Rob Wade, 19 saw the note, which read: "Ronnie is a very, very nice boy. Watch your back." when they went into their local NatWest to open a joint account.

The couple rightly demanded to see the manager of the branch in Leyland, Lancashire and are now considering legal action.

Very nice Ronnie went on to say: "It's not simply a gay issue. What are staff saying about fat people, the disabled or elderly?"

I’d hazard a guess and say that -- people being people -- some of the staff may have the same attitude to all those of sufficient physical, mental or sexual scewifedness.

Personally, I find this highly amusing, but that’s not to deny there’s a serious side to this.

On the one hand, if you’re gay, you can expect this type of thing, so I think these guys are taking matters a little too far.

Getting the staffer sacked is about right. No matter what the humour value of this numpty notation, to write his thoughts out on the damn application to be paraded around in front of everyone, not least the applicants as well as senior staff is just plain stupid.

You can’t hope to sanitize people’s thoughts in this way.

After all, when would ‘correct-thinking’ end and social censorship begin?

Many people don’t enjoy their jobs and humour aimed at those either less fortunate or significantly different to yourself is just human nature and a way of passing the time.

There’s a lesson to be learned, here .. damned if I know what it is...

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Octane does LA...


Got an e-mail yesterday that I just skimmed through, picked up on what I thought were the salient points and then dismissed the thing with the usual brusque contempt.

But then I got a call from the shy and awkward, but non-the-less sweet-sounding Heather.


She explained to me that what I thought was a gimmick is in actual fact, the real deal.

The "The South Yorkshire International Trade Centre, a department of Sheffield Chamber of Commerce", sponsored by the "UK Trade & Investment" want to send me to Los Angeles to "spend 5 full days in the market which will include a briefing with British Consulate officials, visiting the E3 Expo & Conference, Networking Receptions" et cetera.

The added bonus is that they'll be giving me a £500 travel grant.

So all I have to do is find the cash for the booze, the cheap clothes and sundry items I'll be buying while I'm out there.

Now, where's that bloody passport got to?

Lurgee


What the hell is wrong with you people, eh?

What with the resident DJ, Tim nice but drug-addled and Raida + belly-bump all coming down with the lurgee, it looks like we've got a pandemic on our hands, here...

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Thought of the day


"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
~ Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

New 'blog


I've started a new 'blog: Blah, Blah! Technology.

Why? Because technology is my thing, that's why.


I'd hoped that this 'blog would have allowed for a odd excursion or two, but as broad as this 'blog is, it's not that broad...

Link: 'New 'blog'

Things that really .. really make my day: part II


I don't often fawn over any woman, but...

Just how utterly beyond beautiful is Rachel Weisz?


Looks, success, intelligence and a real personalty.

All far to much for a simple white boy like myself...


Monday, March 21, 2005

A little colourful wrist action...


While not a fully qualified: 'Things that really .. really piss me off', this is close.

What is it with those stoopid coloured wrist bands?


Apparently, they're meant to be this pro-active thing were you're either up on gay rights, down on red meat, against bullying, happy to eat kosher / halal food, have been let out from the local mental hospital on day release or some other tiresome pseudo-political, 'right on' fleeting fancy.

The only time I ever wore one of those things was at my local swimming baths.

If you got a yellow one, you were out before three thirty.

If you got a red one, you were out after three thirty.

If you got a white one, you needed adult supervision.

And if you got a pink one .. well, you were a big girl! Nah, nah, na-nah nah!

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Life, death and politics...


Ok, I'm going to break rule #1: don't drink and 'blog.

In between bouts of drink, watching the Simpsons and the James Bond movie, Goldeneye, I managed to catch the news.


I heard the story of Terri Schiavo, a very attractive woman cut down in her prime by a sudden and unexpected condition that's left her permanently and irreversibly brain damaged.

So...

We have the various religious groups wading in, making this their next collective cause celeb, prognosticating on issues various .. but mostly those pertaining to the moral & ethical.

And we have the various political bodies / people / parties using this as an opportunity to exercise their standing on difficult issues, seizing the chance with both hands to be seen to be firm and resolute in their belief and postures politick.

Then we have the family. The poor bastards who have to mop the shit and wipe the brow day in, day out.

Those who have seen the vibrant youth snatched from the fresh-faced 26 year-old and then be left with a shell of woman preserved in state of unknowing, living death.

What I don’t want is people taking the limelight and using this as a chance to further their own standing, artificially extending the shelf-life of their shabby, lack-luster careers off the back of someone without the requisite faculties to tell them where to get off.

What I do want is someone to listen to the needs of this family and respect their wishes. And if they choose otherwise .. well, then make sure they role their sleeves up, make room in their house and their daily schedule, and be sure to mop the shit and wipe the brow day in, day out.

Love alone does not a worthwhile existence maketh.

And if several lives should end because one life is put on hold, then everyone looses...

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Going the distance


By way of a follow-up to an earlier article on the amazing Jane Tomlinson, I'd just like to mention that's she's recently completed the Iron Man competition:

The 17-hour challenge involves swimming two miles, completing a 112-mile bike ride and running a full marathon.

The 40-year-old mother-of-three, from Rothwell, Leeds, took on the challenge despite a stay in hospital last week.

Mrs Tomlinson completed the event, which started at 7am and ended at 11pm Florida time, in 15 hours 47 minutes.

For those that do not know, she's terminally ill with cancer, and the various events that's she's taken part in are all in aid of charity.

An amazing woman if ever there was one...

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Things that really .. really piss me off: part IV


Well, it's that time again!

I know I've covered the topic before, but political correctness is just filth.


What few and fleeting little reasons there might have once been for its otherwise meaningless existence have all but evaporated into the ether.

Political correctness is a menace.

Be afraid. Be very afraid...

Monday, March 14, 2005

Making a meal of things...


Recently, the venerable if not oafishly irritating Jamie Oliver (by the way: watch the video clip, it’s quite amusing) has set out to revitalize school dinners by applying his curiously and nauseously boundless enthusiasm to the problem.



Personally, I think the guy has bitten off more than he can chew (sorry!) and if he's any hope of affecting real change, this recent undertaking will either be his greatest success or a career-ending event.

He's a new dad, so with all of that floating around his head, he probably thinks he's the Dr. Doolittle of children.

While in reality, children beyond the age of three are not quite the bundle of fun they were, and are more like a series of car accidents, burglaries and verbal & physical assaults, all rolled into one .. spread liberally over a period of eighteen or so years.

Anyway, enough of my cynical despondency towards kids, this really isn't the problem that's bothering me.

At the same time, it emerged that the typical cost of a school meal was between £0.35p - £0.45p

So the tax payer might either be thinking someone is doing a really good job of keeping the costs down, or someone is feeding the kids a load of discoloured shit.

Add to this one other morsel (I really am sorry!) of knowledge: the typical cost of a meal for prisoners is four times that which is spent on school kids.

Now, factoring in your average inmate, being somewhat larger than your average school kid, and the fact that the prison service probably doesn't have the same bulk purchasing power as the people behind the provision of school dinners, this still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth (that's the last one, honest!)

And I'm not alone on this, in the last couple of weeks, over one hundred ministers have signed a commons motion -- which is basically a petition -- to have something done about this and to get the situation rectified.

So I'm guessing old Jamie is enjoying all of the positive publicity recently. And I'm sure that him being a new dad won't harm matters, either.

Which ever ay you look at this, this is definitely food for thought...

(OK, so I lied! What you going to do, send me to prison?)

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Reality


So there I am, driving through to my accountants and I'm licking the hole where my tooth used to be.

The pain I can deal with, it's the incompleteness of it all that bothers me more than anything else.


On the side of the road, a middle-aged guy ambles along with his right hand tucked deep into his cardigan pocket.

As I drew closer, I realized that it was only his sleeve that was tucked into the pocket.

There was no right arm to fill the sleeve.

Note to self: stop whining, things could be measurably worse...

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Madness with numbers and colours...


I found the game Twinoo on another 'blog.

This may well be the work of the devil...

Gay necrophiliac ducks, no less


All too often, fact is much stranger than fiction.

In this case, you really couldn’t make this kind of thing up...

Link: 'Gay necrophiliac ducks, no less'

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Things that really .. really make my day: part I


Being first in the queue and getting a polite, courteous service.

No hassle. No Fuss.

No mess. No stress...

Monday, March 07, 2005

Test your sex I.D.


You might think you're a man, but you might think like a woman .. or visa versa.

You want to know for sure? Then take the sex I.D. test, now...

Link: 'Test your sex I.D.'

Music on the move...


Don't know how many people from Britain come through here, but if you're ever sat near the radio, in a bar or a nightclub and you hear a song that you just have to know the name of or the artist who created it, and you have your mobile with you, type 2580 -- which is straight down your keypad -- and you're away.

As soon as the call goes through, make sure your mobile has a good earful of desired tune and then wait for the text message.

The service is provided by a firm called Shazam which somehow scrubs the song sample and gives you the song title, artist name, blah, blah, blah .. it's pretty damn amazing, actually.

No, I'm not on a retainer with them, nor am I a sales guy of theirs. I've been using Shazam for years, now. It's an excellent service and rarely fails to tag a song.

So once you've tagged a song, go to their website and log in, which is accomplished by simply entering your mobile number.

Once you've signed up, you'll see a page full of all of your various tagged songs .. in my case, dozens of the buggers!

Even better is the fact that you can click on the song and buy it through Amazon. But be warned, some of the latest stuff often isn't available via mainstream services like Amazon et al.

Have fun and get tagging...

Friday, March 04, 2005

The week in review...


What a week.

After a near never-ending battle to get a client to put arse in gear before engaging deadline, he finally supplied me with a written, if poorly-spelled brief .. that turned out to be wrong .. and late.


Had a run-in with Companies House who, in their infinite wisdom bounced four sets of company books for no fathomable or apparent reason, then lost three sets of accounts in the post, plus a string reminders, nags and threats respectively.

Then skipped several stages of the process and went directly to the fine and penalties stage.

Still, my unnatural and unholy mix of withering sarcasm, well-managed rage and blistering scrutiny forced them into a bit of climb down.

Apparently, government bodies do not admit blame or liability for anything, which my accountant imparted to me with a certain degree of incredulity.

That all changed on 3rd of March 2005.

I wrestled with an unbending, slippery and just plain fucking annoying job for two days. Well, I say two days, but that's the cumulative time I spent on it, which was spread liberally over the course of the week.

So if you have need of the splendiferous services of a creative, and you ask said creative for an estimate of time, if they say five working days, there's every chance that the five days will be scattered hither & yonder across a three week period.

Yet another confrontation with yet another agency that seem to think that they can be authoritative about not only my role in a particular project, but also take it upon themselves to make claims to the client about my services and abilities that are typically either full of shit, full of holes, or so full of holes and shit, that everything pisses out all over the place and we end up falling behind and missing deadlines.

One of these days, these people will skip the whole ego-driven jostling for primacy thing and concede project leadership to me, skip the set-backs, skip all of the misdirection and near-libelous tosh and just do their fucking job and let me do mine.

Shortsightedness is the order of the day. The agency over-sell this one minor, near-trivial feature of the project to the client. The client goes all gooey at the prospect.

Meanwhile, I'm working on substance that has a higher priority. But the agency have only one level of priority and are utterly incapable of seeing how totally unimportant that one over-sold thing is on the grand scheme of things.

Client is getting fidgety and decides to bring the deadline forward nearly a month, and also decides to demonstrate current project -- such that it is -- to superiors.

Agency doesn't bother telling me, which is always helpful:

Agency: "Oh, by the way, [client] isn't having the meeting today."

Me: "What meeting?"

Agency: "Oh, didn't I tell you? Yeah, [client] was domo'ing the project to his bosses."

Me: "No, you didn't tell me."

Gritted teeth.

Agency: "Thought I did."

Feckless to the point of being dangerous.

So while I have a tome-like list priorities, agency has one. And why is this? Because it's the cosmetic frippery that has hardly any bearing on the project, but it looks nice.

Really?

Having done some quick arithmetic in my head, nearly two hours of my day is spent getting people to do their job properly.

Chasing up invoices is the bane of my life. I have to call up every other day to get someone in the accounts department to actually lift their arse of their chair and walk down / up to the office of the signatory in question and get them to sign the damn cheque.

Them: "But he / she isn't in."

Me: "So when will he / she be in?"

Them: "I'm not sure."

Me: "Do you know of anyone who is sure?"

Trying not to sound patronizing.

Them: "I'm not sure."

Me: "Does he / she have a secretary?"

Them: "Oh, yes!"

Alle-fucking'-luia!

Me: "So, wouldn't it be a good idea to leave a note with their secretary?"

Them: "That's a good idea!"

Quite.

Me: "Can you do that?"

Them: "Yes!"

Me: "When?"

Them: "Well, Mr. / Mrs. / Miss [secretary] is on a training course for three weeks. So I'll leave a note for when they get back."

So, the weekend is a chance to wind down, get drunk, eat too much .. you get the idea.

Then build up my defenses and prepare to fling myself with gay abandon into the ceaseless yet strangely never-changing battlefield of business management and creative angst for yet another rib-tickling festival of mirth and merriment.

Wish me luck!

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Going to the movies


It is something of a tradition for me. Every Sunday evening, I -- along with a few friends -- go into Sheffield to see a film at one of the cinemas.

In short, I enjoy films.


While I might have a broad taste in films, I'm also quite selective. So, films like The Fast And The Furious (or should I say: The Crass And The Spurious?) don't feature highly on my list of ones to watch.

While there have been notable failures in my cinedar early warning system, such as going to see Brit-Flick flop Trauma which was just utter .. utter shite, I'm more often than not able to deftly side-step the turkeys that some how lurch into main stream cinemas.

For me, a well-made film is a wonderful thing. The attention to detail in correct casting, imperceptible editing, character nuisances and plot pace and development are the things that I enjoy immersing myself in.

So, when offered the chance to sit through pirate DVD's which are perplexingly piss-poor in quality, screaming: 'Sit down you bastard!' when someone stands up and shuffles across the screen to go and take a piss or whatever, I often decline.

I love the whole immersive quality of the cinema.

I'm able to take a film for what it is. So if I watch a James Bond or an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, then I let the thing go over my head and the film becomes nothing more than school-boy escapism and pure entertainment. Nothing too serious, just sit back and let the thing wash over you.

While other films immerse you in a world of believable characters, circuitous story lines and both harrowing and hilarious moments, with realism as well as surrealism.

There are some actors and actresses that make a film more than a simple excursion to the cinema and instead propel you into another world entirely. Here are a few that spring to mind:

The pure acting depth, subtlety and genius of Alec Guinness.

The sublime and enigmatic Morgan Freeman.

The reliable and matriarchal Brenda Fricker.

The curiously framed but non-the-less ferocious Gene Hackman.

The detailed, well-groomed and deliciously witty Kevin Kline.

The debonaire and adept George Clooney.

The beautiful, talented and still yet to peak Halle Berry.

The indomitable and laconic Charles Laughton.

The icomparable, rugged and stoic Clint Eastwood.

The intoxicatingly sensuous and strangely curious Angelina Jolie.

The rewarding, exact and intelligent Samuel L. Jackson.

The memorable and just simply watchable Dennis Quaid.

The charismatic, handsome and daringly versatile Sean Connery.

Feel free to add your own...

Thought of the day


Patience is only rarely a virtue.

More often than not, patience is a luxury enjoyed by only fools and those who are well organized.

And as for the rest of us? When we have the luxury of time...