whatever

Over the Weekend

2011-08-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

I live in Tottenham.

There were separate incidents.

1) There was a peaceful demonstration of about 200 people seeking explanations of the death of Mark Duggan who was shot dead in the only place in Tottenham that doesn't have CCTV cameras (the Ferry Lane Bridge).

At the time media were reporting that he had shot at police but once forensics suggested that the bullet found lodged in a police radio came from a police gun, they stopped saying that. Meanwhile there was an equally (no more, no less) false rumour going round that Mr Duggan was shot several times in the head, execution style.

The execution rumour caused a great deal of anger in the community and this seems have got out of hand and, about 8:30 PM, youths began attempting to attack Tottenham Police Station. Police decided to concentrate all of their resources into protecting Tottenham Police Station.

At this point, with control of the streets having been abdicated to the mob, the youths moved about 200 yards North at first to sack Northumberland Park and Bruce Grove Police Post but later to carry out various acts of violent disorder.

(Police stated on SKY News that they had only fifteen officers available when it kicked off at 8:30. I make no comment except to say that my stepson called from the Tottenham Hotspur ground half way through the match between Spurs and Athletic Bilbao asking my wife and I to take his son home because he was bored with the football. The match ended at 7:00 and at that time we saw literally hundreds of police officers escorting supporters the five hundred yards from the Spurs ground to Seven Sisters station, a route that took them past the point where the violence would kick off within half an hour of the last few stragglers reaching the station)

2) With police having abdicated control of the streets to the mob, outsiders from Hackney, Walthamstow, Wood Green and Edmonton arranged through their smartphones what was essentially not a riot mass burglary of Totteham Hale retail park and Wood Green Shopping City. They did this to take advantage of police being unavailable but that does not mean these events were in any way connected with the violence on Tottenham High Road except inasmuch as they were the actions of opportunists taking advantage of the original violence.

(Events in Walthamstow, Enfield, and Brixton on Sunday copied these mass burglaries. It seems the mob has realised they can get away with this sort of behaviour and don't need a riot to cover them.)

3) I walked through the area at about 7AM on Sunday morning. There were many more people than usual but, with the exception of one burned down building, the damage was not as bad as that caused to de Coolsingel by Feyenoord fans winning the Dutch league in the 1998-99 season (when I was in Rotterdam). Many of the damaged buildings on Saturday night were derelict before Saturday. Most of the East Side of Tottenham High Road, from the old DSS office at Scotland Green as far as Aldi had, with only two exceptions been empty for years and the Pleasure Rooms had recently been demolished by Viridian Homes to make way for a new housing estate.

Off the High Road there was light ash which appeared to be huge lumps of charred polystyrene foam everywhere on the East Side. There was a strong smell of burning in Baronet Road and the Victoria Pub on Scotland Green appeared to have been smashed beyond use. On the West side, even ten yards from the High Road, it was as if nothing had happened.

Twenty Years

2011-08-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago today, I was standing in Ingoldmells Methodiist Church beside Hopie and getting married. I wore a light coloured suit and had an erection. Hopie wore a peach dress. There were only twenty people in the church and I was my own best man.

Today is our wedding anniversary and it seems against all the odds, our marriage has lasted longer than the church in which it was celebrated.

After twenty years of getting on one another's nerves, we are still together and neither of us has killed the other. I'm proud of that.

New Videos

2011-06-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I got together with the Swampies, a bunch of reprobates from the Waterloo Delta and we recorded a few tracks. I'm the singer for those who don't know what I look like.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Man Of Constant Sorrow

Mack The Knife

It's St George's Day... here's something English

2011-04-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

A Traditional hymn from the English Civil War - I heard this while watching the film Winstanley.

Hail the day so long expected, hail the day of full release
Zion's walls are now erected, and her watchmen promise peace
Throughout England's wide dominion, shrill the trumpets loudly roar:
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen.
Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.

All her merchants stand with wonder, what is this has come to pass
Murmuring like a distant thunder, crying O alas, alas.
Swell the sound ye kings and nobles, priest and people rich and poor.
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen.
Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.

Blow the trumpet in Mount Zion, Christ shall come a second time
Ruling with a rod of iron, all who now as foes combine.
Babel's garments we've rejected and our fellowship is sure.
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen.
Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.

Tune your harps ye heavenly choirs, shout ye followers of the lamb.
See the city all on fire. Clap your hands and swell the flame.
Now's the day of compensation. Hope of mercy now is o'er.
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen.
Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.

Economics 1.0 is broken.

2011-02-16T04:17:00.001-08:00

We have reached a point where a genuinely free market would leave people to starve. If those people have the strength of course, then they can introduce the concept of negative utility into the equation.

(Negative Utility relates to an offer to provide a product or service which will be actively detrimental or harmful to the recipient unless the recipient agrees to pay the price of not providing that service).

But that simply sidesteps the question. We have reached the point where everything that can be needed by the whole population can be provided by a fraction of the population, leaving the rest with literally nothing to offer. The market cannot and will not provide for those people's needs and since governments can gain income only by taxing (or by providing services free of charge, thus taking many commodities out of economics altogether since they are as abundant as air - and thus denying those still in the economy a chance to profit).

The point of an economy is to find a way of distributing resources. The market works as long as there is enough demand for labour but once demand for labour falls, as it has now, then we are in a position that means we need to find some other way of distributing resources.

There have been arguments about 'fairness' but in the realm of the possible, 'fairness' doesn't get a vote, so what else can happen? We know that planned economies are even less efficient, leading to mass starvation in Stalin's Russia for example.

Economics 1.0 is broke and somebody needs to fix it, but who? The market has failed. Communism doesn't work with real humans. Some kind of religious equation won't work unless people believe in the god or gods involved.

I believe that Economics 2.0 will evolve over the next century or so, but in the meantime, there is going to be a lot of death and a lot of suffering as the market moves meaningless tokens into higher and higher concentrations while elsewhere food rots in the ground and people starve, all for the want of an efficient system for the distribution of resources.

On the objectivity of science

2011-01-25T07:22:00.000-08:00

The thing is, science IS an ideological construct but those who are ignorant of it tend to attack from a ridiculous angle. They usually tilt their lances at straw windmills and attack "the infallibility of science", whereas science has never claimed infallibility.

And then others with fundamental views of their own, attack science for its lack of certainty, usually by saying something like "relativity is only a theory" (other theories are available and those who replace 'relativity' with other words are no less ridiculous) as if that somehow undermined the validity of relativity.

It's worth looking at the scientific method. It's very simple, we begin with a problem or an observation, for example "What is the moon made of?".

Next we come up with hypotheses. "gold", "silver", "green cheese" "plastic" and so on. A hypothesis is a guess as to what the answer might be. We will have to consider what we would predict to be observed if the hypothesis is true.

Then we carry out an experiment or further observation (sometimes an experiment is impossible or unethical so we just have to watch and see if the hypothesis is born out by observation) to test the hypothesis.

Next we conclude either that the hypothesis fits the facts or it doesn't. That may well lead to further questions we need to pursue further.

That's it, science in a nutshell, so how is it an ideological construct?

Well, first of all, what problems do we consider worth investigating? Scientists need to attract funding and the organisations offering the funding are rarely interested in "pure science". For example, a tobacco company might want somebody to find a way of delivering the hit of nicotine without all the dying of cancer side -effects (or alternatively, might like someone to show that smoking tobacco does not cause cancer).

Secondly, how do we consider the hypotheses? Essentially, at this point, the scientist is guessing. There was, for example, nothing unscientific about the theory that burning released a substance called phlogiston rather than absorbing a substance called oxygen. en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Since the scientist is human, he chooses hypotheses appropriate to the current paradigm. This continues for a while until there are so many anomalous results worldwide that the paradigm itself has to change. There is an inbuilt resistance to this because science is peer-reviewed by people whose entire career has been within the current paradigm. It is also TAUGHT by people who have a vested interest in continuing the same paradigm and for a scientist to be considered a scientist, his PhD needs to be approved by such a person.

But then, things change and there is a new paradigm and the whole cycle begins again, the former iconoclast becomes the new iconodule.

Next comes the experiment itself, the most objective part of science. The point of an experiement is not to prove a theory but to test a hypothesis. Of course, the hypothesis could still be wrong (as it was with phlogiston theory) but nevertheless be supported by the evidence. This is the basis for the uncertainty of science.

That uncertainty though does NOT make science a matter of opinion. It is why peer-reviewed journals are essential. Such scrutiny enables the scientific community to come to a consensus on what is, more or less, for the time being, true.

Science does not, and never could have the certainty of religion, but neither is it as much a matter of opinion as art or politics. It is, at any one time, the best guess available but, unlike fundamental certainties, it is capable of change. I view that as a good thing.

Nineteenth Stranger

2011-01-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

Nineteenth stranger in a month
You wore a gin and tonic and had a little black dress on.
You told me how you wanted fun
You kissed me with juniper breath and put your hands on
Stroking me beneath the fabric
Wanting me: It feels so fucking good to be wanted.

Nineteenth Stranger in a month
I think you may have had blonde hair or was that number sixteen?
Or it could have been both of you.
Number nineteen you've soft hair cut close like a boys own
And your lips are such sweet poison
Wanting me: It feels so fucking good to be wanted.

Nineteenth stranger in a month
Hey baby you're not strange now. I have a sense of deja vu
Sure I saw you a week ago
Wasn't that you? The one who blew my mind as well?
You whisper, feels like I know you
Wanting me: it feels so fucking good to be wanted.

The Lost Songs of Billy Strayhorn

2011-01-05T14:23:00.000-08:00

The lost songs of Billy Strayhorn
Echo in my empty head
The whispers of my own frustration
Tell me I'd be better dead
My limp dick thinks it's Christmas Eve
When you come to share my bed
I dare to dream of might-have-beens
With words that are best unsaid

I lived a life in shallows
I Guess I must have missed the tide
The cold light of Sunday mornings
Leaves my fuck-ups nowhere to hide

The lost songs of Billy Strayhorn
Echo in my empty head
The whispers of my own frustration
Tell me I'd be better dead
My limp dick thinks it's Christmas Eve
When you come to share my bed
I dare to dream of might-have-beens
With words that are best unsaid

I wanted you like cocaine
And when I had you I wanted you again
The cold breath of the guy with the scythe
Disappears for minutes at a time
I kissed you in the afternoon
And I drank you deep when the evening came
I dreamed about you the whole night through
But in the morning it ain't ever the same.

I lived a life in shallows
I Guess I must have missed the tide
In the light of Sunday mornings
My broken dreams got nowhere to hide

The lost songs of Billy Strayhorn
Echo in my empty head
The whispers of my own frustration
Tell me I'd be better dead
My limp dick thinks it's Christmas Eve
When you come to share my bed
I dare to dream of might-have-beens
With words that are best unsaid

Corruption in the UK

2010-11-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

This country (the UK) has become corrupt. That's not a government thing alone, although there's plenty evidence of various kinds of malpractice in some of the minor parties as well as the three main ones. The corruption runs right through society, mainly among the money markets but also reaching down to our very neighbours who may well be fiddling the social.

Economists have shown that in any economic system, corruption introduces a "Lucas Paradox" where instead of flowing naturally from rich to poor parts of the economy, it flows to the least corrupt areas. Thus we end up with rich, clean areas and poor, corrupt areas.

This is then a vicious circle because poverty forces the inhabitants of currupt areas into further corruption.

The problem is not whether we trust the vote but whether we trust the whole political class. Clearly we don't. Clearly we can't.

A Visit to the Sixties

2010-01-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to visit the nineteen sixties. Needless to say, I grabbed it with both hands.

This story begins (for me) in November 2009, when I answered an ad on
http://www.joinmyband.co.uk/ from a chap called Richard who wanted people to join his latest project of producing a band that sounded like Can, or like Metal Machine Music etc. Now, although I neglected to blog any of this, my friends know that, for the last year, I've been taking every opportunity I can to perform.

I've been singing with the Swamp Band since March 2009. I've also done some solo performances including an acapella rendition of Tom Waits' God's Away on Business at the Royal Festival Hall. In November, I also bought my first instrument, a stick dulcimer, which is not only the easiest instrument to play, but also one of the most versatile (at least in my hands). I bought it because acapella gigs are hard to come by whereas if one can accompany oneself, it's much easier.

Anyway, I answered Richard's ad and he began working on ways we could perform. And on Monday he told us all were gigging on Thursday. The gig was at
http://www.illfm.net/ which is where I found myself suddenly in the sixties.

The atmosphere was a cross between Radio three and a commune. I loved it. And we played as if we were the Velvet Underground and we were part of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I have no idea yet how good we were but I enjoyed myself and even got to pose for photos. After 49 years, for the first time, I felt cool!

Let's Storm the Charts

2010-01-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

Well to begin with, before I forget, here's where to go.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=231943888357&ref=mf#/group.php?gid=231943888357&ref=mf

Right, so why are you going there? Just because I said so? No... because this group on facebook is doing everything in its power to break record companies' oligopoly of the music you get to hear on the radio, on TV and anywhere else that the charts are used as some kind of barometer of youthful taste.

I'm hoping this is a worldwide phenomenon, not just an English one and so, I've invited all of my facebook friends to join, not just those in the UK. Later, I shall invite all my Myspace friends as well... and my local newsagent (hallo Harry), the landlord of the Rose and Crown, all the messagegroups I'm still using (which means mustardland right now) and anyone else I can think of.

This is a spur so, once I've got a better recording of Armageddon Ball, or maybe any recording at all of one of my other songs, I'll put it on itunes and Amazon and put my name forward (although it'll have to be good to compete with Joy Shannon's band (once you're in the group, you can find a link. She's good)).

One word of warning though. No covers so, although I think Gemiinii Riisiing's version of Don't Fear the Reaper is awesome, she'd have to nominate another track. Likewise, I'm hoping to see nominations for Playing Rapunzel, The Sharron McLeod Fauxtet, and the Pennebakers as well.

Good luck everyone.

Looking back from 2109

2009-12-29T06:13:00.000-08:00

The discussion takes place in a chatroom officially sanctioned by the Gunhuaguo, I imagine it will pretty much follow the Party line.

Back in 2009, there were still wars being fought on Earth itself, in fact, Earth was all there was. This was before the Mars Colony, before Titan, even before the moon was colonised. There was concern in those days that a "failed state" or a terrorist group might get its hands on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. That was before the sixth Pakistan-India war, of course, when the Indians showed uncontrovertibly that but for its "shock and awe" value, a nuclear weapon was useless as a weapon of war. Remember how the "New Thugs" went through the Red Zone in Kashmir to take Pakistan by surprise?

The people in 2009 were terrified about so much and so much of it was needless. They worried about Terrorism, Islamification, Disease, Famine, Overpopulation never realising that the truly implacable enemy was apathy.

Look at the fall of the United States. It didn't come directly from any of the perceived threats much touted in the American media at the time. Even the Gunhuaguo waited until the state had fallen before intervening. No, instead, like Prince Prospero in Po's "Masque of the Red Death", they tried to protect themselves from the forces at large in the world by removing more and more of the liberties their citizens enjoyed to the point where the country simply ceased to be democratic (and then it was an easy matter for the Gunhuaguo, through rational argument to subsume the Republic into the Benevolent Global Hegemony of Zhonghua.)

But enough of politics. You all know the stories. What of technology, what of recreation, what of humanity itself?We've mentioned Mars, Titan and the Moon, buto those colonies are the results of 20th century thinking. Under the benevolent guidance of the Son of Heaven, Mankind is now looking further, beyond the solar system. We know of at least forty habitable planets of other stars, true it will take a lifetime to reach one of them, but the Gunhuaguo has lifetimes and the first generation starships are already being built in the Belt, and shipped to O'Neill station for assembly. Then there are the undersea and Antarctic habitats. The beginnings of global climate control, the emergence of nano-technology, so loudly heralded in the twentieth century, but only now coming to fruition.

And of course, there are the remaining vestiges of democracy, the only form in which it was popular, voting on reality shows like the X-factor and You Bet Your Life.

In music, who remembers rock music? House? Reggae? Of course not, these are all obscure. Do you know in 2009 few people even knew what a Bassoon was, let alone a Saz or a Zhonghu, for popular music was still in the age of the electric guitar and the synthesizer.

And what of humanity itself...? There were artificial hearts of course, but in 2009 there were no cyborgs in the world. There were not even shaped people - everyone and we mean everyone, was born with the genes they inherited randomly from their parents. Can you imagine that, a world in which you could have been born stupid or ugly, or suffering from dread diseases such as albinism?

We've come a long way in the last 100 years and it's hard even to imagine what the next hundred years will bring.

Channeling Kafka

2009-09-18T05:15:00.000-07:00

I find it easy to imagine being taken from my home in the dead of night for something I never did (always assuming someone was kind enough to tell me what I was supposed to have done, not all countries of the world give a prisoner the right to know with what he is charged).

I find it easy to imagine being woken up in the cells by the caress of a baseball bat against my ribs and then having to endure the beating. I can't imagine confessing but many people would, provided they were told what to confess to.I find it easy to imagine being refused communication with anyone outside and then given a lawyer appointed for me who turns up drunk and unprepared on the day of the trial.

I can imagine hearing endless evidence that would convince anyone with half a brain of my innocence... only to look at the jury as they pronounced me guilty and realise they didn't have one between them (or alternatively, they just didn't know me and so didn't know I must be innocent).

I can imagine being taken to prison and locked away, perhaps in solitary confinement after the other prisoners and guard are told my crime is particularly repugnant even by their standards.I can imagine being turned down for release countless times because I would not admit my guilt for a crime I did not commit.

I can imagine dying in prison because I was not prepared to admit a crime I did not commit.Alternatively, I can imagine crying my eyes out and begging for my mom (or almost anybody else to be honest, you don't know my mum) as they dragged me kicking and screaming to the gurney and held me down while they filled me up of poison all for something I knew I didn't do.

I can also imagine being murdered and do you know what. A murderer is evil. It's somehow worse to be killed after "due process" by upstanding normal citizens just doing their jobs. Whether one person suffers that fate, or millions, there is no difference in quality between the regimes that allow it.

Teaching Science

2009-03-08T06:06:00.001-07:00

I won't beat myself up. I know I failed in my new years' resolution to write every day but I expected to fail so there we go. On the other hand, I have been writing (under the name Alcuin) on http://www.fanstory.com/index.jsp where people can judge my works and I get feedback (which helps me be a better writer).

That's not what I really want to write about today. I'm prompted to write by a TV programme in which a teacher in Burnley is trying to enthuse pupils with an interest in science. The trouble is, there's an elephant in the room that was mentioned but not discussed.

He was trying to interest kids in science but health and safety regulations meant that many experiments could not be performed by children. More to the point, he was using fireworks to provide the enthusiasm but WITHOUT telling them the formula for gunpowder. Not only could he not give them the proportions but there was one scene in which a professor from a firework company was explaining how they add strontium chloride to make a bright red flame. The teacher had to stop himself mentioning Sulphur, Charcoal or Potassium Nitrate and instead said "Strontium Chloride and other stuff".

I mean come ON!. When I was at primary school, they told us how to make gunpowder and by the time I was thirteen, I went on a school trip to Nottingham University to see a lecture on explosives in which they even gave the formula for RDX, a form of plastique.

As long as we treat the idea of letting kids know things as somehow dangerous. As long as we won't let the little mites have hands on experience with chemicals (at least things like dilute sulphuric acid) which may be dangerous in the wrong place, can be handled safely with proper supervision. We're going to have generations with no interest in science.

Worse still. No wonder we have people who went to school under this teaching regime arguing that science is just another opinion. They don't understand how science works because they've just been taught it out of a book. No wonder they're bored and no wonder we're descending into anonymity as just another small country. Soon we'll be Denmark.

Arrrgh

2009-01-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

I haven't gone to bed yet, so I can pretend it's still yesterday and come in under the wire.

The cat's still ill and worse but unconnected, I forgot my PIN number today. I tried it twice then stopped I don't want to lose my debit card. I'll go to the bank and get it changed tomorrow. When I've been to the vet.

One thing I did do today though, was cook! I made Lasz (a vegetarian dish similar to Goulash) but served it with conchiglie instead of rice. Best of all, I did it without following a recipe (although I did use a recipe as a basis for a shopping list).

Here's the recipe:

Slice a big onion and fry it in sunflower oil for five minutes. Add three half peppers chopped up (I used one each of red, green and yellow). Add 250g of fresh mushrooms peeled and sliced. Add a big spud, diced and two cloves of garlic, crushed. cook it for another five minutes.

Then put a tin of chickpeas and a tin of peeled tomatoes in another pot with a little chilli and a lot of paprika. Add the contents of the frying pan and simmer for forty minutes.

Cook the conchiglie separately (takes about ten minutes) and when it's al dente, add it to the pot. Stir for a couple of minutes and then serve. It serves three. My family liked it, even when I told them it was student food.

Memory 3

2009-01-03T15:19:00.000-08:00

I don't know how old I was but probably very young. I remember the dark of a black cab. I remember the glow of the streetlights and the old vans with the Evening News logo. I don't remember getting into the cab or out but I imagine the ride was from Victoria to Grove Park, Camberwell, where my grandmother used to live.

I remember my grandmother's black hair and parchment skin. She had a very strong resemblence to Madame Jiang Qing, and this resemblance grew stronger as both my grandmother and Jiang Qing, both grew older. When we were around her, she and my father would talk about spiritual evolution but it was always more Blavatsky than Teilhard de Chardin, but at that age, I'd heard of neither. I thought my grandmother very wise for a very long time.

I guess we all think our forbears wise until we grow into our own wisdom. I hope mine isn't long in coming.

Sometimes it's hard

2009-01-03T15:14:00.001-08:00

Sometimes it's really hard to find anything to write about, but that's what I've promised myself I'll do. It's Saturday. I stayed in all day with young Tashai crawling all over the place, demanding attention and even worse, disturbing P-P, who has a swollen face from being attacked by another cat.

P is a most unhappy cat right now. It could be worse though. Last week, he had a visible tumour growing on his head. This has now fallen off, and I've examined him closely. It's no longer there. The scarring from the other cat's claws though is deep and probably painful. I'm going to have to take him to the vet. I remember the last time I took him. He's a heavy cat, and his carrying cage is big enough for an ocelot. And then I'll get to the vets and find it full of dogs.

Let's hope he gets well soon.

Memory 2

2009-01-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

When I was young, I taught myself to read from my father's science fiction magazines. I cannot remember not being able to read and I even remember my first day at school, when I could read but not understand numbers. The teachers showed us the numerals 1 2 and 3, but I saw the 3 as an E, and couldn't understand how it was different.

It wasn't dyslexia but a simpler problem I share with my mother, namely I have difficulty understanding the concepts "left" and "right". I even thought my name was Ebwards because I had seen it written like that (or thought I had).

Anyway, back to the memories. We lived in a council house behind the Secondary Modern School. There were some lovely French Doors, leading out to a back yard (which would these days, no doubt, be called a patio). Beside these doors, there was a bookcase that seemed to be made of bamboo and it contained many editions of Astounding Science Fiction, which later became Analog, as well as the Rosicrucian digest (since my father was a member of AMORC http://www.amorc.org.uk/ ) I didn't read the Rosicrucian Digests though (even though my own name originated from the fact that Alcuin of York was mentioned in the February 1960 edition.

I did read the SF magazines. I read not only the stories, but also the editorials. I remember John W Campbell's opinions on society, on science, and on writing and for a long time in my writing, I have been trying to write a story that Campbell would buy. Except that Campbell would not have bought a story that was 50 years out of date so I was barkign up the wrong tree.

The love of SF though, and not just fifties SF, but both older and more recent material, has stayed with me ever since.

Logging on

2009-01-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

It's hard to think of something to write about every day, but I intend to try. Today may be difficult because I did not go to work, or even leave the house. What I did do, as every day, is logon.

My home page is the default for my provider, Virgin Media. I usually wizz off somewhere else while it's still loading but occasionally, I read some of the articles. They're invariably about celebrities, music or movies but I think the editor may be on holiday today...

Today, there was an article entitled "How to give a good blowjob". As a connoisseur of such pleasures, I can attest that the advice given was sound, but that's not the point. The presence of the article raised a question for me. Do I feel all prudish and offended, or do I admit that I wished certain people had been given the information years ago. In the end, I settled for nostalgia and heaved a heavy sigh in mourning for my lost libido.

Memory 1

2009-01-01T14:09:00.000-08:00

I was three years old. The room in the house was painted a pale blue. I woke up and my mother was not there. Instead, there were other ladies there who I vaguely knew but could not have named.

I had to go and stay with my Auntie Mave, and I remember having to share a bed with my cousin Linda. I thought she was 12 or 13 at the time, but in reality, she was probably younger. I can't picture her now. My only image of her is from after her wedding, obviously much later.

Anyway, we stayed a while, and my Auntie Mave taught me to play three card brag even though I was still shuffling around on my potty, and then I went home again after a week or so. My brother (Adrian) also returned from wherever they had taken him and my mum returned with a new brother (Craig).

Onward and Upward

2009-01-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

Today is new year's day and the time has come for new year's resolutions to remain unkept. As is my wont, I have failed in all three of my 2008 New Year's resolutions. I have not been to an introductory Krav Maga session. I do not speak Bulgarian. My next novel remains unwritten (although I have extensive notes for several).

The problem with writing a novel is the stamina it requires. Basically, I would have to keep writing every day, adding a few pages and never approaching the precious goal. The trouble is, I find I have to have substantively written the thing in my head before I can sit down to keep writing it every day, with a point to aim for and a known finishing point (both of which I have found invaluable in my career as an amateur long-distance walker).

Any resolution is likely to end up as an excuse to beat myself up, which in turn results in me putting down the work and abandoning it. So. I've thought of an easier resolution. I will try to write here every day. This is today's entry. In addition, whenever I feel able, I shall write another post with a memory and another containing some random writing.

Cooling down to mere anger

2008-11-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

You know something? I BELIEVE in democracy. I may not always like the results of democracy and I might sometimes think the wrong candidate won, but in the end, democracy is the most important thing the 20th century has given many of us and any rolling back of democracy should be fought.

There are those around the world who agree with Amy Chua that it is important to prevent democracy from impinging on the economic rights of "market dominant minorities". I would argue that it's not ABOUT these minorities. The kleptocracy in any society is always mainly indigenous although Chinese in South East Asia, Jews in Russia or "Syrians" in the Caribbean all make convenient scapegoats for those who want to ensure that any economic realignment is racist or nationalist in form rather than a class issue.

The so called PAD in Thailand has raised my ire this week. People are blockading the airports and demanding that the Government introduce a new, less-democratic form of government with 70% of MPs being appointed so that Thaksin's party cannot keep being elected by the millions of the poorest people in Thailand. They argue that they deserve more political power because they are more "educated" than the rural peasants.

It's not about education though. The rural peasants know what they are voting for. They are voting for the Government to help them gain at the expense of those richer. They know that democracy may well be snuffed out once again and the army stage a coup but this time, they say if there is an anti-democratic coup, there will be a civil war.

Let us hope that democracy will be allowed to prevail in Thailand. I never thought I'd be supporting Thaksin but as I said before. In my mind, democracy comes first.

Rage Issues

2008-11-17T11:57:00.000-08:00

First thing's first, I begin to wonder about my mental health today. I had to wait seventeen minutes fro a bus that would take me all the way home. The company advertises that buses will arrive "every 8 to 13 minutes" so it was longer than advertised. Okay, it was raining and I was coughing somewhat but the rage I felt at that moment, was over the top.

When the bus did arrive, it filled up (if it had arrived on time, I was early enough to miss most of the rush area) and, about half way through, the complete bus was decanted so I had to queue up with another hundred or so people to get on the already crowded buses runing behind.

Now I was seething, imagining flinging curses like some malevolent Gandalf, or perhaps eating the people around me. Even when the bus came, I was chanting, only just under my breath, "I am a man-wolf, the wolf in me would eat the man, I am a wolf-man, the man in me would kill the wolf".

Still. I didn't eat anyone and arrived home just in time for the news. It seems a Saudi oil-tanker has been captured by Somali pirates. My first reaction was to state that had I been on the crew, that tanker would have gone up in flames as soon as the pirates were too close to escape. I then suggested using a cruise missile to sink the tanker and the Somali vessel that captured it, foo miles from land. I later realised this was in fact a sensible solution, but that's neither here nor there, it wasn't like me.

And then, Baby P. I hold every Haringey councillor responsible and hope we all remember that come election day in May 2009. I may also have advocated the death penalty for the perpetrators but I wasn't serious. After all, sadly we allow a much bigger drop these days, a proper sacrifice to Odin requires a shorter drop and strangulation for days.

I'm calmer now, and realise that won't bring the baby back. The perpetrators need to be brainwashed until they understand and CARE exactly what they've done to the baby. I still believe we should nuke one of the pirate ports though, that's not rage speaking, just common sense.

Another Keeper

2008-06-04T03:47:00.000-07:00

The original post was moderated away for allegedly being about football when in fact it was about the financial fallout from Gretna's disastrous financial performance in its SPL season. I repost my reply here because I didn't want to lose it.

Lens can manage it. They have a stadium with a capacity three times the town's population and yet they manage to operate in France at a top level.

PSV can manage it, they are a top team in Europe and can survive despite Eindhoven's relatively small population base (when compared with the likes of Ajax or Feyenoord) because of the interest of the Philips electronics company. (Meadowbank Thistle - which later became Livingstone, began with similar support from Ferranti)

I'd like to think the chap from St Johnstone was right because Hull City DOES have the population base to keep it in the Premiership and I'd love to see them stay up (my grandfather played Rugby for Hull back in the 1890s and 1900s so I have a soft spot for the City).

As for Gretna, yes, sadly a lot of people have invested in something which proved unsustainable, a small town on the Anglo-Scottish border qualifying for Europe and getting into the Scottish top flight. Did they fail though because of a lack of a population base? Given the success of Lens, and to a lesser extent Ebbsfleet United, I'd say no. What is needed is not necessarily a big population base but some kind of innovative financial package that enables the club to compete on a sporting level quite separately from the need to perform financially.

Eurovision

2008-05-25T04:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, first of all, I confess, I did not particularly like the UK entry. I liked the Finnish, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Israeli, Armenian and even the Spanish entry but there's no way I thought Russia deserved to win.

So, the question becomes, "does it matter"? Myself, I think it's a sign that the Eurovision song contest is no longer a competition to choose the best song, but a political backscratching. Now to me, this represents an opportunity.

There are two ways forward. The first is "Cymrw am byth", "Gora Euzkadi", "Visca Catalunya" and even "Freedom for Tooting" if necessary, just to make sure we can outvote the Eastern Europeans. Failing that, perhaps the time has come to treat the Eurovision song contest as it was meant to be... instead of the bland lowest common denominators we were often stuck with. So... since we can't win, and we still love the programme, why don't we start entering songs that we think are wonderful.

Morrissey offered to be the entrant last year, so did I for that matter and neither of us got anywhere near the battle of the bland (I mean A Song for Europe). Wouldn't it be great though if our entries had been Led Zeppelin instead of the New Seekers, Queen instead of Cliff Richard, Fat Boy Slim instead of Gemini, or even Leona Lewis instead of Andy Abraham?

If we can't win, then let's start insisting that every single UK entry from now on will be one we'll be proud of 20 years later.

"Whiter Girl"

2008-03-11T03:48:00.000-07:00

Having now seen "White Girl", I was more impressed than I was by the trailer.

Most of the muslims apart from the teacher and Leah's friend struck me as interchangeable nonentities. The white characters were more like real human beings, apart from Leah's father who appeared to be a stage villain.The programme did not juxtapose Islam with Christianity because with her background it appeared Leah had no real access to Christianity. In the situation she was in, Islam appeared to be the only source of stability.

Of course it was an artificial situation, if she had been elsewhere, she would have become a Jehovah's Witness, a Scientologist or a Wiccan... the question is only who shows up first to provide the guidance her mother is unable to provide.

This, in essence serves as a warning. Nature abhors a vacuum and if we stand back and, whether through postmodern irony or thoroughly modern fecklessness fail to provide the proper guidance our children need, then someone else will, whether it's Miss Jean Brodie, Osama bin Laden, or Gary Glitter.

Slovaks go home.

2008-02-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

London has been a multi-ethnic society for as long as I've been here and longer still. Everybody has been welcome and myriad cultures have made their contributions to London's cultural life.

We thought we'd got Racism licked to the point that only the extreme right or otherwise retarded would still make racist judgements or remarks even in the privacy of their own homes.

Now, I've seen and heard Eastern Europeans approach black people on the bus and say things like, "Hey Nigger, this man here is from Romania. He doesn't speak a word of English but he has a job." Then on being told that the man he's speaking to HAS a job, the Slovak (or whatever he is) says, "Smoke a spliff".

My stepdaughter was told by one Albanian using the little English he'd bothered to learn, "You're a nigger. You're dirty".

Pim Fortuyn once attacked Muslims on the grounds of their intolerance. I begin to think we should have the same attitude to the Eastern Europeans trying to reimport Racism to this England. Neither racism nor racists have any part in our society and it's high tide we started deporting them... even the English ones.

The Missing Discs

2007-11-24T06:44:00.000-08:00

Other than revealing that I am available should the English FA require me to take over from Steve McLaren, I shall gloss over England's disgraceful performances against Russia and Croatia.

That's not the big issue in the news though, is it? The big news is two CDs on which were burned sensitive details of 25 million people have gone missing. I have a theory about that though. Here's what I think happened.

Once upon a time in the Revenue's headquarters in Newcastle, there was a low grade civil servant, an AO, who I shall call Dave because, him being a Geordie, it's probably not his name.

Now, like all civil servants, Dave is squeezed between demanding customers such as the National Audit Office (NAO) and a management that gives no support to its employees.

The NAO had written to the Revenue requesting some details of parents and children receiving child benefit and the family tax credit. Unfortunately, senior management decided that it was too expensive to separate off the sensitive details so the information could be shared. A satisfactory decision perhaps... except that they forgot to tell either the NAO or Dave.

Now Dave has been a civil servant for a couple of years so he's used to being blamed for other people's cock ups and of making his own cockups because of overwork.

The first time NAO rang Dave, he told them he'd find out and asked his boss (who I will call Mr Purviss). Dave then told the NAO that it had yet to be decided how the information would be provided.

The next time, Mr Purviss was out at lunch when the NAO called. (Has anyone else noticed the number of people who decide the best time to call an office is between 12 and 2 so that the Daves of this world end up answering 40 phones, mainly to take messages?) Dave could not remember the information he was being asked about but he said "Oh, it's going out today."

A week later the NAO phoned Dave again and he said he didn't know where the information was. The NAO said, "Now come on Dave, you promised last week that it would go out, now where is it." Dave did not know and said he'd find out. Needless to say, Dave did not phone up later that day.

The next day though, the NAO called again so Dave thought he'd play for time by lying. "I've sent it to you". He said.

"So", asked the NAO, "Why haven't I seen the Email?" (Umm, I ummm burned it on a disc). "Okay, so why haven't I received an email with the decryption key." (Umm, I ahh, didn't encrypt it.) "Hmm, Okay so how did you send it...?" (Internal Courier, you should get it tomorrow).

But of course, they did not get it the next day because the disc did not and does not exist. Needless to say they complained and revealed how the disc had been lost.

When Mr Purviss approached Dave, Dave was in a vile mood, having received little or no support and having gone further and further on a limb. Dave did indeed "resign". More accurately, he told Mr Purviss precisely where to stick his job.

Pictures

2007-10-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

In the past week I saw a couple of interesting films and I thought I'd just share them.

The first was called "Kenedi is Getting Married" by Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/index.php?aid=418

It's a great film, mostly in German but some Romani (both the Serbian and Turkish versions, rather than the Anglo-Romany many in England know as "the Jib") about a Kosovar Gypsy who, after living there for seventeen years, was expelled from Germany (twice) and wanted to find a way to get back. He wants to marry a German called Max, who he met at a music festival in Novi Sad (it's a "civil partnership" in England but the film used the word "heiraten" which I take to mean "to marry" so I imagine it's called marriage in Germany).

Unfortunately, Kenedi (who played himself in the film even though the film is fictional) is something of an asshole and the whole thing falls through when Max catches him screwing a woman at his going away party.

Anyway, if it's ever on again, it's well worth watching. Afterward, my friend Natascha from work introduced me to Zelnik and to Max Steiner who played Max. Zelnik seemed very down to earth. He explained that he'd had to improvise all the scenes but for very different reasons to Mike Leigh. In Zelnik's case, he had to improvise the scenes because there's no point in writing a script when your star can't read and write.

That, believe it or not, was the first time I'd been to a cinema for 14 years (I'm fairly sure the last film I saw at a cinema was "The Net" with Sandra Bullock.)

The other film I watched this week was called "The Believer" by Henry Bean http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247199/

It was on at 1:30 in the morning on film four and I'd been planning to go to bed beforehand. I didn't, couldn't look away even in the commercial breaks. I'd never even heard of it before.

I can see why it was on so late, but in view of the recent trial of neonazis in Israel, it's fairly topical. Somehow though, I don't think those young hooligans in Israel were anything like as intelligent as Daniel Balint.

Oh yes, and Glenn Fitzgerald was in the film. I thought he was great in "Series 7: The Contenders" as the young contender with testicular cancer. Hmm, while we're at it, that's another film you should see if you get half a chance. Especially anyone who loves or hates reality TV shows. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251031/

Regrets (Alternative Histories of my life)

2007-09-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

Regrets, I have a few, but not really too few to mention. My mum always reckoned I'd regret not studying. Mostly that's not true but there are one or two places where a little extra studying might have changed things just a little.

When I was 17, I needed a C in Chemistry and E's in Physics and Biology to get into Nottingham University (I already had a C in Maths taken a year earlier) (Failing that, I needed just a D in Chemistry to get into Warwick University but I got that, so it's not relevant.) In the end, I got a D, E and E but my parents decided not to fund me so I left home and got a job at Fisons instead.

Thing is, at my visit cum interview to Nottingham, I met a rather nice young lady (I think her name was Sheila Curtis but I'd be hard pressed to swear to that) and she was interested. As it goes, there was only one bus per month to Nottingham and it happened to be on that day... but that meant, I had to get back to the bus station by 4:30 and so I had to leave early.

So... perhaps if I'd studied a little harder, got a C in Chemistry, I might have studied at Nottingham University... and more importantly, got together with the lovely Sheila, which would have done my confidence a world of good (and might also have meant I gave up my virginity 11 or 12 years earlier).

The second place I think I should have studied harder was in my first year at North East London Poly. In fact it wasn't so much studying as writing essays. We were supposed to write 8 essays in the first year, but come the end of term, I'd only written seven (I had enough marks from the first 6, that I could afford to get a big fat zero for the last two but they insisted on my writing the essays anyway. I had to do that in the summer holiday so that I was late registering for year two and by the time I registered, I'd missed the deadline for the second year exchange to Arhus, Albany or Berlin.

Around the same time, I regret not helping someone else study. Jude Soden was gorgeous with dark curls, violet eyes, a wicked sense of humour and exquisite curves. I'm also fairly sure she was into me as well but in those days, at the ripe old age of 22, somehow, I'd never learned to read the signals. (So, if you ever read this Jude, I apologise. I wasn't rejecting you, I was just too stupid to realise). Jude dropped out after the first year. She wasn't the only one, but to be honest, I didn't miss Richard Fairbrass (yes, the singer in Right Said Fred) at all.

And that's it really. I didn't study and failed my HNC in Chemistry twice... and I don't care. I didn't study and only managed a Desmond instead of a 2:1 or a first. Not only don't I care, but I was told afterward by at least one of the lecturers that I'd done better than they expected.

No, I didn't particularly want a PhD or a Masters. I wouldn't have enjoyed being a lecturer and anyway, since then I HAVE studied stuff... but for my own enjoyment, not for any exams. So no mum, bar the minor ones above, I don't regret not studying.

The phrasebook

2007-09-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have quite a healthy collection of phrasebooks for most of the languages of Europe. From Turkey to Portugal and from Poland to Italy.

As a rule, the phrases seem to be pretty much the same. "Two beers please". "Where is the airport?" "Excuse me, can you speak English?"

This one is different though, and I'm hoping someone can advise me why it's different. It's Greek. It contains two phrases I have never seen in phrasebooks of any other language. The phrases are "Let's make love", and "Help, I've been raped".

What does this tell the prospective holidaymaker about her visit to Falariki? Just as the phrasebooks of the fifties included the likes of, "Please make sure my carriage is there at seven, Pedro", or "We will be dining on the terrace this evening", showed the plebs that the life they would expect in whatever country they were visiting was not for them unless they had won the pools (there was no lottery in those days), these new ones paint a strange picture of Greece or Cyprus.

I think I may decide to go to Honduras next year.

End of an Era

2007-09-03T10:58:00.001-07:00

Farewell to Alternate History.

It seems I've been banned from http://alternatehistory.com/ apparently on the grounds of "advocating religious terrorism". I don't remember the post where I did that so I have no idea if it's true. Obviously, it's Ian's website so if he wants to ban me, that's up to him. Of course, knowing me, I'm rather surprised to do such a thing, so I can only assume somebody putPCP in my Wray and Nephew Overproof Rum.

Anyway, this means, there's a good chance I'll post future counterfactuals I think of either here or on myspace. I have an idea for one right now but I'll wait until I work it up some before posting.

Oh well

2007-08-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

I went to the cashpoint today and found that I am officially skint. I wouldn't mind but it's only two days after payday. Even worse, I've not been particularly extravagant. I need a boost to my income.

Given that I arrive home exhausted after a hard day's telling lies for the Government, I'm not going to be able to find another part-time job. What's left, I guess is to actually WRITE all the stories I'd planned. Unfortunately, I can barely manage two hundred words a day, so that means 73,000 words a year. It'll take me at least two years to write a book at that rate.

After that comes the selling. But of course, if I've taken two years to write the book, the ideas are probably two years old by the time I finish it. Then it'd take 13 weeks per agent to have a look at it, so that's one year per four agents (they resent it if you send the same material to more than one at the same time and there are a couple of hundred in England so it could be fifty years at the most), on top of that, publishers then take a couple of years on the publishing cycle... so if I start now, I could be 101 before I start making money.

So. To get around this problem, I guess I have to find a way to write more quickly in the hope that I get paid more quickly and can quit my job and spend more time writing.

I think I'm going to start on my MySpace page after I come from Cambridge in two weeks. (So... beginning on w/c 13 August, I'll be writing and posting. So, any thoughts about what I should write, given the object is not becoming a literary giant, but becoming obscenely rich in the shortest time possible?

Degrees - Another Keeper

2007-07-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

It just so happens I DO have a degree (it's a Desmond in a Mickey Mouse discipline from a Polytechnic but it is, nevertheless a degree). I have also, through work, private study and plain curiosity, gained degree level knowledge or higher in several disciplines (or sometimes parts of those disciplines if those were the only parts that interested me).

Much of this was gained from, what I DO consider to be Britain's major educational assets. That is the public library. I read statistics some years ago (back in the late seventies) comparing public libraries per head of population in various countries of the world. The top three were UK, Switzerland and the USA. But that doesn't show just how far ahead we were in Libraries. Switzerland had six times as many libraries per head of the population as the USA... and Britain back in the seventies had ninety three times as many as Switzerland.

Since then, successive Governments have stopped investing in Libraries although I imagine we're still well ahead... but more importantly, Libraries have become less important with the availability of information on the Internet (provided we know how to sort the wheat from the chaff).

Now, what's my point? It's not the degrees themselves that matter, but the knowledge represented by those degrees. If the degree is devalued in terms of content, but upgraded in terms of its essential character, do we lose that knowledge that was going around the country?

Such knowledge reached a peak in this country between 1890 and 1950, roughly the time when Workers' Education Associations flourished. Now, it's falling back and it wil be a shame to lose it.

As for degrees as qualifications. I don't believe the state should be involved. Qualifications exist to help employers choose among candidates, who is the most likely to be able to do the job. Let us separate these functions. Let the state fund education in its abstract sense, but let employers fund their own sifting exercises.

__________________The 53 State Timeline - Buddy Holly as President and 75,000 people on Mars http://alternatehistory.com/discussi...ad.php?t=63105

Godverdomme!... in Portuguese

2007-07-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

I know there are gaps between my posts. This is not unrelated to the fact that I can never remember how to access them. That's neither here nor there though. Today, what I want to talk about is my recent holiday. It was so recent that I woke up in Portugal this morning (hence the swearing in Portuguese).

For the first time, I decided to book a holiday on the Internet. Nice and convenient, I thought, cheaper than the high street so I could afford a better holiday. Es Verdad? Well, es up to a point, verdad.

My wife and I just spent a relaxing week in a five-star hotel in Vilamoura (a thoroughly English resort in the Algarve). My room had a view of the sea along with a stretch of undeveloped land and some broken down shacks. That's the clue. At the other side of those shacks was the village of Quarteira. Quarteira is every bit as Portuguese as Vilamoura is English. We crossed no-man's land, under the watchful eyes of the people living in the shacks and visited a real, Portuguese supermarket, where things were about a third of the price charged in Vilamoura. On the way back, there were Gypsies dancing, not for Tourists but for themeselves.

There were even two marinas. Visible from our room at the other side of no-man's land, was the harbour of Quarteira, full of real fishing boats belonging to real fishermen. At the other side of our hotel and past a couple more was the Vilamoura marina, home to about 1500 yachts and surrounded by English pubs, Italian icecreameries, chinese restaurants and even a Swedish place.

But anyway, the week was relaxing. That's what I wanted. A chance to sleep when I wanted, slob around and generally behave indolently. All was well.

Getting there and back was less as desired. We flew out with Monarch Airlines. For an extra 30 quid, extra leg-room was available (and I, of course, availed myself of this). No amount of money, however, would buy extra arse-room so I spent 2 and a half hours each way (actually more like 3 and a half on the way back because our flight was delayed an hour) in a seat designed for an infants school.

Getting back, Gatwick to Victoria was no problem. "Here's 29 quid", thank you Sir and Madam, that gets you to Victoria in 35 minutes. I thought we'd take a taxi home but the taxi driver said he wouldn't go to Tottenham because there was too much traffic. (Or maybe because my wife is black - definitely a reason I can't rule out).

No Taxi, so we tried the Victoria Line... "Alles kaput".

No Victoria Line so we tried a number 73 bus, which (hours later) dumped us in Tottenham Court Road (for those who don't know London, it's no where near Tottenham). Somehow, we limped, heavily laden with suitcases, to Euston and a 476 bus that this time did bring us near enough to home.

To make matters worse, while on holiday I won... a holiday. I'll be going to the Canaries in September.

Some Stupid Marketeer

2007-05-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

Y'know (and Carien's not going to be happy to read this), I've always thought marketing was an easy job. On the one hand, you have people with stuff they want to sell. On the other hand, you have people who want to buy the stuff the first lot of people want to sell. The Marketeer's job is to find the people who want to buy the stuff the Marketeer's clients want to sell.

Sounds easy. Bit of advertising, some market research, talk to the designers and hey presto, Bob's your zygotic mynki, you've done your marketing, made money and can go off and do it again.

Today though, I've learned to appreciate how hard it can be. Now obviously, the best way to appreciate the skill it takes to carry on a trade is to see somebody do it spectacularly badly. Well today, I've done exactly that.

I came home from work to find, as usual, a menu from a Chinese food delivery company. (I get dozens of those every week). This one though is from a Chinese restaurant in the Great Cambridge Road and some stupid marketeer has named it....

...wait for it...

CHASING DRAGON!!!!!

I mean, unless all its customers really are smack heads, who on earth is going to buy from someone called "Chasing Dragon"? Not me, that's for sure.

The Truth

2007-03-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

My name is Alcuin Edwards and I am here to tell you the truth.

Anyone who's read the inventive but sterile works of Harry Turtledove will recognise the quote from Jake Featherstone, founder of the Freedom Party in the Confederate States of America, and the most evil man in the world. Well I'm not him.

Yes I admit I'm as full of bile. I am an English-Speaking Poujade. I'm here to tell you that the fact that we all live shitty lives is not down to any mysterious "them". It's not the blacks, the whites, the gypsies or the Jews. It's not even the Devil, a conspiracy of Green Lizards or the Bourgeoisie.

It's us.

That's right, we are all responsible for accepting the shittiness of life as inevitable. We don't vote... or if we do, we're more likely to vote for a contestant on a reality TV show than we are to vote for those who will decide how our lives will be lived.

And then beyond voting. Do we do ANYTHING to clean up the mess around us? Do we even pick up litter or scrub away graffitti? Do we teach our children right from wrong. Do we fuck!

We're living in a world that Anton Szandor LaVey (or his close ideological companion Margaret Thatcher) would be proud of. There really IS no such thing as society. There's only a game in which we must play each against all, with the odds stacked up against every one of us before we begin.

The only way to make the game more even is to resurrect society. We need to realise that we are all responsible for the fact that our neighbours live shitty lives. It's time to make things better... yes it is, but it's also time to work together in this game so that we can win for a change.

The aim, the ultimate aim, is a liveable world. A world in which life is pleasant for the majority of people and there is no advantage for those sybarites who choose to hoard their wealth like ancient dragons and to sequester themselves away from the world so that the shitty world is hidden from them. Instead, we will squeeze the shittiness from the world and make it clean and sweet and new.

By any means necessary.

In Malcolm X's autobiography, Malcolm tells us how his first step toward the Nation Islam was refusing to eat pork because a visitor to his prison had suggested it. Now here's the first step for all of us toward making the world a more liveable place.

Clean up a graffitto.

Yes I know, dear old Banksie and all that. Well no, Graffitti, especially "tags" are not, never have been and never will be art. Graffitti "Artists" are deluding themselves and deluding us. They aren't artists, they're merely wolves pissing on walls to mark their territory and it's time their piss was washed away because the Liveable World is OUR territory... let's claim it.

Here's to a liveable world.

South Coast Idol

2007-02-18T01:28:00.000-08:00

So okay, I went. I traveled to Croydon and stood in line waiting for my 30 seconds in front of the judges, but I blew it.

I'd decided to sing Elvis Costello's "Couldn't You Keep That To Yourself?" but instead, I'd been practicing Alice Cooper's "No Man's Land". I know that was stupid, but I thought I'd got the Elvis down pat (which in point of fact, I had).

South Coast Idol auditions singers in groups of five, so the five of you go in together, each take a turn in front of the Judges then go out together. Unfortunately, I was the first of our five and stood on the X.

"What are you going to sing for us"? said the judge.
"I'm going to sing 'Couldn't You Keep That To Yourself?' by Elvis Costello".

The head judge nodded, but I could feel "I got a job in Atlanta..." on my tongue instead of "The tiny slip of midnight".

"Well I will in a minute", I said
"Breathe", she said.

Then there was a longish pause as I tried to shift to the right song...

"The 'Tiny Slip' at Midnight
The little sip at Noon
You're tied and torn
Approaching dawn,
My penitent buffoon.

"Wouldn't you think I'd know by now?
I shouldn't have entertained it
Couldn't you keep that to yourself?

"You cry for my forgiveness..."

"Thank you".

And then there was Ebony, singing an R&B song I didn't recognise, Nicola singing "Cry Me A River" (appallingly badly), Marsha singing a soul song that again I didn't recognise and David, singing "Omaha" by Counting Crows. For about five seconds, I thought I had a chance against the competition, but it was not to be. None of us got through.

With hindsight, I recognise that I was 10-15 years older than the oldest of my competition, and long hair, grey beard and beer belly didn't help much. (I was also a good foot taller than everybody in the queue apart from David). Perhaps if I'd started exercising in December when I applied, and if I'd shaved my face and gotten a crewcut the day before, I might have looked younger (I do look about 15 years younger when I shave) and maybe got through.

I wasn't really disappointed to not get through but the problem is, I was using this as a way to stave off the depression into which I was (and am) falling, so now I have to find another distraction.

Other Places

2007-02-04T03:34:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while since I've posted on here, I bet you're all wondering where else I may be. Well, you may be pleased to know that, although I'm no nearer to finishing my book and realising my hope to move to Dublin, I'm not completely inactive.

On 17 February, in Croydon, I have an audition for "South Coast Idol"... a sort of X-factor for radio, where it's voices that are important, run by "Live and Unsigned".

I've also been posting here... http://www.43things.com/person/Alcuin here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbarts/MP3815709 and here http://alternatehistory.com/discussion/search.php?searchid=336648

On top of that, there was work. Then designing two separate Steampunk roleplaying campaigns (One a multiple world in which lots of 19th century (-ish) characters travel through a cabalistic universe - the other set on Wizards of the Coast's "Forgotten Realms" but 400 years later.)

P-P-

2006-11-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

whatever

I may have mentioned P-P- a few times while discussing weighty matters on the BBC boards. Add to that, Carien mentioning that it is quite some time since I have written here and the result of the equation is this post, while P-P- sits on my lap.

Now, many of you know that, when Chichi died, I was angling to replace her with a mongoose. There are dog people, there are cat people, and there are of course mongoose people. Unfortunately, Jamaicans (like my wife for example) view mongooses as vermin rather than beautiful predators that will keep foxes, cats and small children out of the garden, so instead, we got a cat.

I wasn't expecting a cat when I came home that Friday. (I hadn't spoken to my wife for over a week because I'd said something unforgivable again - or she had, I can't remember which) But, I came home and there was that trembling ball of black and white fur.

Stefan and Cleo had both gone to pick him up. They went to the house and the mother's owner picked P up by the scruff of his neck and asked. "That one?", a pause while he had a look, "Female?" and that was that.

As a kitten, Precious, as we called him at first, hid away and it took a full day of coaxing before I could get him to eat. Even then, he was quite happy to BITE, just not eat. Now he bites just about everyone but especially me (I suspect this is because he enjoys getting slapped).

Of course, he had to go to the vet for flea treatment etc. and that's when the vet pointed out that he was in fact, male. I have seen proof since then. Just after the vet chopped his balls off, I saw him with a little cat erection, curled up and licking his own penis.

So... Precious became P but that was too short and he gained an extra P, to be P-P-. He's a full grown cat now, and he's chased most of the other cats out of the garden, but the squerls laugh at him and the foxes attack him whenever they can. At the moment, he mostly stays in, after all, we've had Diwali, then Eidh and now it's coming up to Guy ffawkes' Night, so there are lots of bangs to frighten him.

There... it's okay Kovacs, you can look now, I've stopped talking about my cat.

Blatant plugging

2006-09-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

http//www.bforb.nl/EN-Zjian.html

So why am I pointing you in the direction of a Dutch website. Well there are clues here and there, the story can be pieced together from stuff I've said elsewhere. Note the address given. Note under the Colophon, that I edited the Engish language version (which is not an exact translation of the Dutch). Take a look, and if you're a potential customer, get in touch with Zjian, I can vouch for Carien.

Times Change

2006-08-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

We had our chimney swept yesterday and the sweep found a newspaper that had been stuffed up the chimney some time since the last time the chimneys were swept.

The headline referred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer's maiden budget. The paper in question was the London Evening News and Star. The Chancellor had inherited a £800 million deficit, which he said was "disturbing". The chancellor's name was James Callaghan and the paper was dated November 1964.

The back page, by the way, went on about how badly Leyton Orient were doing so I don't suppose everything's changed. (Although if the paper was a year later, I believe Northampton Town would have been enjoying their one and only season in the top flight.

Not related to sweeping but still with football, I was reading about the so-called Matthews final, when Blackpool won the FA Cup 5-3. Stan Mortensen scored a hattrick for Blackpool but despite that, it was still "the Matthews Final". When Stan finally died, some joker was heard to say at his wake, "I bet they'll be calling this the Matthews Funeral".

Writing

2006-07-24T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've said that I'm a frustrated writer so I thought I'd say a bit about the attempts I've made in the past (or since I left school in any case... school projects don't count).

1977-82 From age 17 to 22, I wrote over three hundred poems. I was quite proud of them but in the end, I gave most of them to my friend Linda who took them home to St Paul, Mn. I wrote poetry easily and had something of a talent for it. I have always enjoyed playing with words and the discipline of formal poetry (whether sonnets, quatrains or even haiku) concentrated my mind wonderfully.

1982-85 For a while, I continued carrying a book around to jot down ideas for poems (or as I now told myself, lyrics but I also started trying to write short stories, including one, "What Would Lucy Do?" that formed part of the "Cultural Product" required for my degree.

1986-7 I continued trying to sell short stories to the only markets available to me at the time "The Gate", "Interzone" and "Aboriginal SF". I also wrote a couple of scripts on spec for 2000AD but they never even returned the stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Apart from 2000 AD, I collected a few rejection slips but continued until Interzone sent me a rejection slip that said, "Thank you for letting us see "Seventeen", it's a good story and moves along well but is not suitable for Interzone". That was it. No chance for a real "apprenticeship" because I'd written something that was good enough but there wasn't a market available to me for which it was suitable.

1987-8 Around this time, I joined the cabaret troupe, "Bored Experience" and wrote and performed in some sketches, some of which went down well with audiences in London and Newcastle but eventually, I had to get a proper job and so could not cope with Bored Experience as well. It wasn't a ladder to stardom anyway, we managed to get exactly ONE equity contract.

1989 onward
That's when I began trying to write novels (and screenplays). There were several attempts.

Tranquyl

This was an attempt at a reprise of "What Would Lucy Do". It's the story of a thalidomide style disaster that left some kids twisted physically and/or mentally, many more dead and the lucky few gifted with psychic powers. The main characters were Alison and her stillborn sister, Lucy, living in a world that was falling apart at the seams as Bidonvilles full of refugees grew along the Thames. I managed about 30 pages.

John the Bomb/Wonderland

(Several of my attempts have more than one title as it changed during construction. John, the central character is a human being brought up by a computer, who has programmed him to destroy an arcology (part themepark and part gated community) called Wonderland as part of the revenge of a scientist kicked out of the cosy world of the gated elite around the turn of the Millennium. I made about 14,000 words or 55 pages.

The Book

A deliberate attempt to write a book for young adults. It's the story of Elvis Ryan, an unpopular child at a comprehensive school, who buys a book from a second hand bookshop, which turns out to be the lost grimoire of a notorious wizard burned for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition in 16th century Mexico. The Wizard, who calls himself Tlaloc after the Aztec god of the rain, tries to live again in Elvis's body. I managed about 23 pages.

The Void/Moth/Sodium Light

Kate Christian is a policewoman trying to solve a series of grisly murders in Tottenham. She's also trying to fight off the unwanted advances of a male colleague. There are real vampires in this story but there is also a serial killer who believes in vampires and goes around staking young women who are NOT vampires. The main real vampire is a KGB sleeper at a loose end after the KGB ceased to exist. I finished this one and sent it to two agents. There is one full copy of the manuscript but it's in Rotterdam.

Babylon Rule

Part 'how to' book for poor people and part screenplay. I think I wrote about 10 minutes of this. It traced the rise of our hero from MC to Prime Minister.

Rapunzel/The Promised Child

A retelling of the Rapunzel Story in space. I'm pretty proud of this actually, it's a screenplay but sadly only about an hour long.

There's more recent stuff as well. I haven't written more than a few pages of these but plenty notes.

The Mongol Gallery - told from the point of view of Kees van Helsing, a descendant of Abraham who meets a man who has sold his voice to a demon in return for bizarre powers relating to painting.

Cargo

A people trafficker begins a new business.... transporting damned souls BACK across the River Styx.

Balls!

2006-07-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I remember taking the mick out of Argentina because of their shocking behaviour after being knocked out of the world cup on penalties. (I have to say, I was disappointed too, I'd bet on Germany to win inside Ninety Minutes (I also bet on France to win after extra time).

So, I was wrong. As a gambler, I'm not good but as a manager, I'm pretty sure I'm better than Sven... most of us are... and now we have Steve McClaren. Do we have to? Is there no way the FA can say, "Sorry Steve, we've changed our minds and we're going to give the job to Jose Pekerman? (Or better still, Alcuin Edwards).

The match itself was ... well put it this way, enough to drive a man to drink (And I have a couple of litres of Jack Daniel in the house). Although I do remember saying...

"I hope we win on penalties. I hope we win 5-4 on penalties with Cristian Ronaldo the only one to miss a penalty. I want Robinson to look into his eyes, take his measure and break his spirit there and then for all time, so he loses his confidence and never scores again for anyone."

Sven says they PRACTICED penalties... well, it looked to me as though Hargreaves practiced penalties (maybe Rooney, Owen and Bekham as well) but nobody else did.)

Everyone say that Rooney's sending off was justified but it looked accidental to me. Two men were deliberately trying to knock him over, and he was trying to stay upright and accidentally trod on Carvalhao's balls. I noticed Carvalhao got booked for fouling a player when the ball was at the other end of the pitch... but it was the second time he'd done it. The first time, the referee awarded a free kick (bizarre because that's a sending off or booking offence and one the ref must have seen to award the free kick).

Two years now before Euro 2008 and McLaren will be making all the same old excuses. It isn't good enough. Saddam Hussein was a monster but he had the right idea for dealing with underperforming footballers... Bastinado. I'm half serious. These people, because they can kick a ball a bit, get paid more in a week than I get in ten years, the least they could do is win the World Cup.

Besides this... as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to see any Portuguese players in the Premiership. It's sickening that our teams pay good money training people to beat England.

I sincerely hope McClaren will try something different... what I'd love to see someone do is start training players to hit the bar or the post consistently from anywhere on the pitch and at such an angle that they know where the ball will bounce. I can't see him doing anything though. Same old same old, over and over again.

A spider in my bath

2006-06-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

Actually, it wasn't in my bath but on the tiles behind the shower head. If it had been in the bath, I think it would have been hard to get out, being so small. (Only about 8mm long so I'd be worried about damaging it).

It was fascinating really. Plain reddish brown in colour, almost certainly a member of a Clubiona species but with an elongated abdomen and with the size, I'd have thought it was probably Clubiona pallidula but the colouring was more appropriate to Clubiona trivialis. Either way, I'm privileged to see it in my bath rather than in the garden.

World Cup and such and stuff

2006-06-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

I've been silent far too long (well not silent exactly, because I was still posting on the BBC website and the Alternative History website, but silent here).

Now though, it's the world cup. I've been to the bookies to hand over my biennial ten quid (England 5 quid to win at 6-1 not good value but I feel strangely confident for a change. Australia 1 quid each way at 80-1 a flutter I know but I've a feeling Harry Kewell and the lads could surprise some of their opponents, they've already beaten Uruguay and I see no reason they can't beay Japan or even Brazil. Australia, USA and Ivory Coast to win their groups. I have to say Ivory Coast's chances faded away against Argentina, I'm so used to Argentina being overrated, I never expected the hype to be pretty much true.)

So.. impressions. I found the England game almost as frustrating as Peter Crouch did, that referee didn't like him one bit. That much was obvious. I enjoyed the Argentina game obviously and the Trinidad-Sweden game was fun, although I was hoping for the Caribbean lads to put one past the Swedes at the last moment. And then today, the Netherlands-Serbia & Montenegro game. Seeing the Dutch hanging back and desperately defending a one goal league, I felt so disappointed. Whatever happened to total football.

BBC Bias? (another keeper)

2006-03-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

<"It is not possible that the media can have shaped the British psyche so much".

Why not?
Quoted message from Grant

Actually, I take it back, but almost all of the influence comes not from the news but from Soap Operas. Most English people cannot be influenced by the media because they simply do not consume the media. Only 18% read newspapers. Only 10% keep watching a station when the news is on, unless it's Channel 5 news (nothing to do with the BBC) because it lasts less than three minutes and comes on just after a commercial break in the middle of a film).

Certainly there have been great changes in British culture and thought over the past 100 years. What has brought that about?
Quoted message from Grant

Not 100, longer than that but let's look at the last 100 years.

In 1906 there was a Liberal Government. The two major parties were Conservative and Liberal. There was no media organisation then that was supposed to be "neutral" but if there HAD been, it would be even handed between the views of those two parties. It would regard the Labour Party as far left.

Now, any media required by law (as is the BBC) to be "neutral" between the two major parties. Has to be even handed between Labour and Conservatives. That, by legal definition, is where the centre lies for the BBC. Anywhere to the left or right of that line breaks its charter.

(It is allowed to make programmes expressing views to one side or the other but if it makes a programme like "Lefties" a current BBC series that shows the failures of the British left in the seventies and eighties, it has to be balanced by a programme about Far Right rock bands. It is overall that the balance has to exist - so there's no point in quoting examples because to prove bias by an example, we'd have to prove that the opposite programme didn't exist).

Why, for example, is there so much antiAmericanism in Britain? Is the United States really the worst country in the world?
Quoted message from Grant

I don't believe anti-Americanism is that common but I live in London. Londoners and New Yorkers tend to consider each other twin cities and not really think of the rest of either country. Obviously, I'm not going to come across it. Besides, a very high proportion of Londoners have BEEN to the USA (at least to New York City and many have been elsewhere as well). It's hard to sustain a mindless prejudice when you've seen it.

Of course, if you meant a British American RIVALRY, there's nothing new in that. In that sense, Britain has always been "anti-American". In the Second world war, there were constant jokes about Americans, "arriving half way through". That's not anti-Americanism, it's banter.

While I'm at it, I'll let you into a secret. We're not anti-Scottish, anti-Irish, anti-Australian or anti-French either. All of those are healthy rivalries (even though there may be the occasional loony who means it... but at the end of the day, we're all united by a dislike of the Germans).

Added to that, I live in Tottenham, which has a higher West Indian population than most of London. Most Caribbean people I know, including my wife, have relatives in America.

So the question is? Which survey found a majority of British people are anti-american, what questions did it actually ask? I don't know the details of the survey but from my experience it's wrong.

Why is there so much anti Israeli feeling in Britain, to the point where a majority of Brits feel that Israel remains the greatest threat to world peace?
Quoted message from Grant

Again, I live in Tottenham. The local football team, Tottenham Hotspur has fans who call themselves the Yid Army. If there was anti-Israeli feeling it wouldn't be here in Tottenham.

Unfortunately, England has been antisemitic since before Jews were first expelled in the thirteenth century. Even when that happened, the King was merely reflecting popular prejudices.

Despite that, when Israel were unable to play their World Cup and European Championship football matches in Israel because of the murderous activities of terrorist groups, the Israeli FA chose to hold their "home" matches in England because that was where they could rely upon the greatest level of support.

Are your fellow democracies really that evil
Quoted message from Grant

Of course not. We hold the good guys to higher standards and for the most part (I've never been there so I only get my news from the media so I can't be sure) Israel MEETS those higher standards, at least as far as the reports I've seen.

If they fall below from time to time, it's disappointing but not a reason to regard them as somehow worse than, say Zimbabwe, North Korea or Uzbekistan.

But it's hard to argue when I, from a vantage point here in England do not SEE the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiment that is so plain to you in Canada.

I see no point in blaming the BBC for a phenomenon that as far as the evidence of my own eyes and ears is concerned, has not happened.

I have ignored your last paragraph since it takes further the arguments your penultimate paragraph failed to establish as true.

"Hypocracy"

2006-03-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

Democracy and Hypocracy are the same thing as far as I can see...

Democracy from Greek Demos (people) and Kratia (rule) a government by the people.

Hypocracy, similar but with the Greek Hypo (below or under, compare with the hypodermic needle that gets drugs under the skin). So... Hypocracy, if such a word existed, would mean rule from below and, given that the majority in any society, are from the lower levels of society, it follows that those at the bottom could outvote the rest in a democracy.

Normally I can't be bothered to correct typos but I have actually seen hypocrisy spelled "hypocracy" on here more than I've seen it spelled correctly.

It's not illiteracy because if you ever look at letters by people with poor literacy, they tend to spell the longer words properly, because they looked them up in a dictionary, it's the short words they think they know that they tend to misspell.

Sorry to rant and I know it's off topic but it's one common misspelling that i find very irritating.

Thank you for listening. Rant over.

The Promised Joke

2006-02-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

I promised a joke about Political Correctness and here it is.

Once upon a time, one of those PC types (as only cretins refer to those who aren't knee-jerk Colonel Blimp types) was very proud because his son had passed through Primary School and gone on to Secondary School where they teach proper subjects like History and Geography instead of fingerpainting and self-esteem.

"So, Sebastian", said the PC Type, "How was your first day at the Big School"? (Patronising as well as PC, you see)

"It was great Dad", said Sebastian, clearly too downtrodden to complain when his father talks down to him.

"What was your favourite lesson then?"

"Oh biology, definitely, that was fantastic."

"Really, that's interesting. What did you do in Biology?"

"We dissected a guinea pig".

The PC type went as white as the sheet on a Ku Klux Klansman and, looking shocked, said. "Oh for goodness sake Sebastian. Didn't I bring you up to be politically correct at all times? Can't you remember, we don't call people "Guineas", they're Italians."

Sometimes

2006-02-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

Everything gets to be so frustrating sometimes. Apparently, we're supposed to react well to frustration.

I don't know if anyone's noticed but the standard criticism of violent men, whether they're alcoholics, roadragers or however their violence is expressed, somebody always says that it's because this man "has a low tolerance for frustration".

I've been thinking about this lately and wondering, why violence should be the reaction to frustration. I mean, for crying out loud, what's wrong with tears? What's wrong with running and running until exhaustion? Why do they have to use their wives as punchbags? They give men a bad name.

Now, I know I've mentioned elsewhere that I've no problem with rough sex (shall we say) provided it's safe, sane and consensual. The thing is though, if you're taking your frustrations out on your partner, it ISN'T.

It isn't safe because frustration causes depression at least temporarily and with it, a lack of judgement. A depressed "top" is a dangerous one. It isn't sane for the same reason it isn't safe. And consensual? I don't say it's impossible but for the most part, I don't think so because whatever your partner may have consented to, it was with the more rational you.

So... what IS a good way to deal with frustration. I've found nothing that helps so far but would be happy to see suggestions.

All I Ever Wanted

2006-02-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

The one thing I've always been good with is words. It's a very specific talent though. My skill is in painting pictures with words.

It might have been nicer if I'd had a knack for telling stories. When I was starting out, I could have made money from stories. I might even have finished my novel ten years earlier than I did.

When I was much, much younger, roughly from seventeen to twenty two years old, I wrote around 300 poems. Some of them found their way into fanzines or found themselves used by the bands of people I vaguely knew. Others I gave away, usually to girls in whose knickers I hoped to get.

It never worked. Or rather it DID work, spectacularly so but I was too young and stupid to realise just how well it had worked. The poems provided an avenue to allow a degree of emotional openness men so rarely attempt, let alone achieve. I could write the words and reveal my hunger, my rage, my fear or whatever. Each of them made me somehow alluring. That's the other thing I wish. I wish I'd known at the time just how powerful the effect of my words was.

It's not the real regret though. I did eventually get rid of my virginity (I was twenty nine years old and that's a story for another time). My real regret is, I could never make a living as a poet.

I realised that pretty quickly and began to try writing short stories. They were very short, in effect prose poems that drew pictures instead of telling stories.

As an exercise, the leader of a writers' workshop I was in briefly, tried to stir up our creativity by having us write fifty word stories. That's the story boiled down to its bare essentials. The thing is, my creativity didn't NEED to be stirred up, it was dancing with fireflies already, sizzling and snapping like snow on a grill. What I needed was some way to hold it in check long enough to write.

I did finish stories. I even sent them off to Interzone, the Gate, and Aboriginal SF, the only three magazines that would take SF/fantasy/horror short stories from people in England. They all turned me down and when I finally got a rejection slip (I remember, it was for a story called Seventeen) that said, "this is a fine story and moves along well but is not suitable for Interzone", I knew, at the age of 27, that if I was ever to make a living from writing, I'd have to write a novel.

I was 37 when I finally finished it. I thought it was really good but came to realise that the words were good, it was well written and every scene jumped out of the page, seeming real to the reader, but as a storyteller, I was far too dull.

That threw me into a spin. I sank into a deep depression. Princess Diana died. My father died and I managed to crawl out of the hole I'd dug myself.

I tried to sell the novel as slowly it became dated. I even found someone who loved it (but loved me more). Now I need to write another but it's 8 years since I finished the last one. I've written a screenplay since then but it's for a movie nobody will ever make (Rapunzel set amongst the stars).

To write for a living. To do nothing but write is STILL the only thing I want out of life. Nothing else comes close.

Gigs I remember

2006-02-23T04:48:00.000-08:00

Having made Lionel jealous on the BBC board by referring to the two times I saw The Smiths, I suddenly realised I've actually been to a relatively small number of gigs. I thought I'd let Lionel see just how few I've seen.

Thin Lizzy - Bourne Corn Exchange 1970 something
Gary Glitter - ditto
Motorhead - Cambridge Corn Exchange 1979 and 1980
X Ray Specs/The Members - Cambridge Corn Exchange
The Soft Boys - about half a dozen times around Cambridge. The same goes for less famous Cambridge bands, Device, Autopilot and Hazzard.
Katrina and the Waves - The Great Northern, Cambridge
Wang Chung - I can't remember what the place was called but it was a poxy little disco underneath the Great Northern in Cambridge.
The Undertones - Cambridge Corn Exchange 1978 and Brixton Ace 1982 (their last gig I believe)
Spider far too many times - and that's an embarrassing confession.
The Vapours - Cambridge Corn Exchange - Can't remember the year but Turning Japanese was in the charts.
The Smiths - twice North East London Polytechnic
The Cure - I think it was Brixton Academy
The Dead Kennedys/The Redskins - 1982 Brixton Ace
The Fall/Danse Society plus a bunch of bands I never heard of - The Lyceum 1983
Nico/God's Toys - The Venue 1983 (this one was scary because someone I later realised was Dennis Nielsen tried to pick me up)
Redskins/Abacush/Billy Bragg/Benjamin Zephaniah and lots more at one of Ken Livingstone's fairwell gigs, South Bank 1983
Lloyd Langton Band (ex Hawkwind) - an impromptu gig outside the Royal Festival Hall
Cream - first reunion 1978 East of England Showground Alwalton Peterborough.
Rubella Ballet - Chicken Shack Club, East London (to be fair, I was the doorman for this gig so I didn't really get to see much).
The Thrashing Doves - ULU

There are some more I've seen (eg, the Adverts/TV Smith's Explorers, Stranglers, Tom Robinson Band but I can't remember where or when).

There are also some I've known but never seen. Jeremy Valentine of The Cortinas and Richard Fairbrass of Right Said Fred were both in my class for the first year of my degree course. John Hegley of the Popticians was a regular in the King Edward VII pub in Stratford at the same time as me, as were AR Kane/MARRS (of "Pump Up da Volume" fame) and Green from Scritti Pollitti.

There you go, that's it Lionel. Pretty much all the gigs I've been to... not an impressive total, I'm sure you'll agree.

Music - other than Patti Smith

2006-02-20T06:05:00.000-08:00

So, who else can I talk about?

Me'shell Ndegeceolo

Long, long ago, I saw two brilliant tracks together on MTV. The second was Milk by Garbage but the first took me ages to track down. It was "Leviticus: Faggot" by Me'shell Ndegeocelo. I had almost forgotten about it when I heard my friend Sharron McLeod (a Canadian Jazz Singer) doing her version of Me'shell's "Mary Magdalene" and, on Sharron's advice, I tracked down some of Me'shell's work. "Bitter", "Comfort Woman", "Who is He and What is He to you?" are some of the excellent tracks I've heard. She's also one of only two singers my wife and I both love (the other being Mary Margaret O'Hara).

Alice Cooper

I got into him when I was at school and I've loved most things he's done since then. I don't just love the things he did when he was big, but the stuff he's come up with since. "From the Inside", from the period when he was pulling himself back together after madness and alcoholism. "Dada", also tinged with madness and alcohol (and surrealism) has some fantastic tracks as well as Bob Ezrin's synthesizer work. "Fresh Blood" is a Vampire story, "Former Lee Warmer" a take on Virginia Andrews' Flowers in the Attic and "Pass the Gun Around", a deeply melodic song about despair.

Later on, he progressed to "Brutal Planet" (his 2000 album). "Brutal Planet" itself is, believe it or not, a Christian song, about the Fall of Adam. The same album also has "Gimme", a take on the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil and "Wicked Young Man", which is about evil and censorship.

Music

2006-02-20T02:23:00.000-08:00

Today, I thought I'd talk about music.

I've talked about what I like to read, or at least the latest writers I enjoy reading and thougt, well... what about music?

A few months ago, I took part in a national Pop Quiz. In fact I was only there making up numbers. The only records I recognised that my teammates didn't were "I predict a Riot" by Kaiser Chiefs and "Romeo" by Mr Big. But what was interesting about this quiz was a round based on favourite tracks chosen by the members of all the teams (4 people, 13 teams). I chose "Land" by Patti Smith although in fact they played "Gloria" instead (the one that begins "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine"). It's got me thinking about favourites generally.

Patti Smith

I've mentioned "Land" from the Album "Horses". It's 12 minutes long with a pounding beat. Apparently it was written after Patti Smith was raped ("The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanna run but the movie kept moving as planned).

Whether or not that's true, it's become linked in my mind both with Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill's book on Punk, "The Boy Looked at Johnny" and even more with the TV series, "Millennium". At the end of the second series, where the world, including Frank Black's wife is dying of Bird Flu, the blonde female member of the Millennium Group loses her mind. The camera focusses on her, watchign her fall apart. There is no dialog, only "Land", the full extended version. It's one of the most powerful music videos ever and yet was never released as such.

I've been into Patti Smith since the first days of punk, perhaps even longer. I bought the album "New Wave", which is an eclectic album with tracks by artists as diverse as the Boomtown Rats, Richard Hell, and the Talking Heads. It includes Patti Smith's "Piss Factory", an extended rap record long before rap's time and that was enough. I was hooked. Since then I've heard other great tracks from her, "Because the Night", "Kimberley", "Easter", "A Room in Lebanon", "Ask the Angels", "Gandhi" etc.

And now I've gone on so long about Patti Smith that I'll have to do another entry about music more generally.

Room 101 - another keeper

2006-02-18T05:13:00.000-08:00

They'll none of them be missed.

1) People who think there are non-mathematical questions that have only one answer and then rant and rave and bluster because somebody proposes an alternative.

2) Any -isms that suggest a single solution whether it be the dictatorship of the proletariat, the return of Christ to Earth, the removal of "immigrants", or the wearing of beanie hats wrapped in aluminium foil will cure all the world's problems.

3) People who refuse to believe that human beings individually or collectively are capable of solving their own problems.

4) People who refuse to take responsibility for their actions or inactions.

5) Broccolli

6) Politicians who have any motivations other than the best interests of all of their constituents.

7) This viral bronchitis I have at the moment.

8) My own inability to concentrate on sitting down and writing my novel then selling it. (Or perhaps the reverse, selling then writing)

9) The petty bureaucrat at my local train provider who decided that the start point for trains to my local station should be moved from Liverpool Street to Stratford.

10) Conformity.

Another Keeper

2006-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

"The flaw in your argument is that if a majority voted for someone whom they thought had no chance then they'd get in. You'd still have a government, but quite what its makeup would be I have no idea, since when push comes to shove they'd still have to come up with some policies for running the country. I suspect the chaos that would ensue would quickly bring these Raving Loonies, whether official or not, to their senses and hopefully the rest of us as well."

Quoted from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbfivelive/F2148564?thread=2267363&post=26190130#p26190130

I don't see that as a flaw at all. If a majority of the people in this country voted for no hopers, there would be some weird politics going on in Parliament. We'd have the extreme right, the extreme left, greens, Christians and the extremely weird with NOBODY holding the balance of power.

These people would have to find things they COULD agree upon and we'd gain from the Wisdom of Crowds. In the end, you could not find any group of six hundred-odd people in this country who would rule much better or any worse than the current lot.

That said, at what point do you think the no hopers would form a government? They're such a disparate group that they wouldn't be cohesive. If the no hopers got less than say 70% of the vote, we'd still find ourselves with a (albeit minority) Labour or Tory government. If 80% of the population REALLY want to vote "None of the Above" then the major parties are so out of touch with the electorate, or so corrupt, or so scandal-ridden or any combination of these that they do not deserve power.

Titles

2006-02-14T01:54:00.000-08:00

I've talked about contemporary writers I like but there's another list I'd like to share. These are my favourite TITLES. They can be books, songs, films, albums, poems or whatever but they're all titles that make me laugh or smile or wince.

I'll start with some songs...

Broken Hearts are for Assholes by Frank Zappa
Praying to the Aliens by Tubeway Army.
New York Mining Disaster by the Bee Gees
Pissing in the River by Patti Smith

Then books...

The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill (I'd never heard of this one but saw it in a bookshop and had to buy it. The book was dull but the title is marvellous)

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

An Interview with Ann Rice by Michael Riley

The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century by Michael Moorcock

I was going to go onto Films next but the only one I can think of is the old Fredric March film, "Death Takes a Holiday" so I'll go onto albums instead.

Paranoid and Sunburnt by Skunk Anansie
13 by The Doors (An excellent name for a greatest hits album)
Music to Murder by (selected by Alfred Hitchcock)

Then poems...

Almost anything by William McGonnagal
When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed by Walt Whitman

And stories...

The Beast Who Shouted Love At The Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed by Ray Bradbury

Choices

2006-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Gavin says it's not enough to produce a reading list. Instead, it's important to choose, to tell people which books I like.

Later, I may go back in time, but for now, I'll list some contemporary writers I enjoy.

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman wrote, with Terry Pratchett, "Good Omens" which is based around "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch". While Pratchett is popular with many people whose opinions I value, I'm not a fan at all. I am, however, a fan of Gaiman. In comics, he wrote The Sandman series, which is fine and dandy, a great achievement etc. In literature though, he wrote Neverwhere, about another world parallel to the London Underground. Best of all though, he wrote the magnificent, "American Gods".

Iain Banks

Sometimes Banks comes with an M (Iain M Banks being, sort of, the pseudonym he uses for Science Fiction). I rate him both with and without. With, my favourite is The Use of Weapons (one of many novels set in The Culture). Without the M, his first novel, The Wasp Factory remains a splendid achievement, but my favourite is Complicity (because I could not help but be complicit in the plans of the villain.

Orson Scott Card

Card is a Mormon from Utah. He is also one of the most humanistic science fiction writers I know of. He has written many varied peieces including the Alvin Maker stories, set in an alternative North America where the continent is divided between a Royalist and republican section. His greatest achievement though is the book, "Ender's Game" about children trained for an act of xenocide (albeit in self-defence). This was followed by Speaker for the Dead, in which Ender Wiggin, who killed an alien race called the Hive, then wrote the book that brought the human race to shame for what it had done.

Gregory Maguire

Maguire rewrites fairy-tales and other stories from popular culture. Wicked is the Wizard of Oz, told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is Cinderella. Mirror, Mirror is Sleeping Beauty with Lucretia Borgia as the wicked queen. Angela Carter is dead but Maguire writes well enough to be a worthy successor.

Neal Stephenson

The Baroque cycle is over 3000 pages long and tells the story of how the renaissance became the industrial age. It sounds dull when you put it like that but it is a marvellously ornate fantasy that's every bit as compelling as, say Lord of the Rings. Stephenson also wrote The Cryptonomicon which is another fine fantasy set in and after the second world war.

Stephen Baxter

I'm not that big a fan of hard science fiction and generally find Baxter's work too dry. I make an exception though for his Destiny's Children trilogy... "Coalescent", "Exultant" and "Transcendence". Well worth checking out.

Adam Roberts

He writes works that are heavy on ideas, On for example, where the world is a wall and gravity is sideways. My favourite works by Roberts are Salt (a novel about an attempt to colonise another planet failing not because of problems on the planet but because the colonists were too alien to each other before they ever left Earth) and Snow (which is an end of the world story).

Richard Morgan

Lionel Hutz/Takeshi Kovacs knows this work. It's absolutely splendid (Takeshi Kovacs is a central character in three of Morgan's four books (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies - the exception being Market Forces).

Jacqueline Carey

I originally bought this because a central character in Kushiel's Dart was called Alcuin. There are three books in her trilogy, Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen, and Kushiel's Avatar (Alcuin dies in the first book I'm afraid but by then I was extremely interested in the life of the main character, Phaedra no Delaunay). The books are very sexy, epic fantasy with huge scope and a heroine who is a masochist and a prostitute. An extremely brave work and one that works very very well.

Texts

2006-02-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, I find myself raging.

What should be included in a canon and what should not? How about the books that have shaped the world...

But there are hundreds... how about the barest minimum

The Bible, the Koran, Socrates' Dialogues, Pythagoras' Geometries, the Odyssey, the Illiad, Machiavelli, Bernouilli, Newton, Leibnitz, it becomes a list of names.

I'm unsatisfied at the IDEA of a Canon because there are simply so MANY books.

As promised

2006-02-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

I shall have a go at a list of essential books. To make it easier both to read and to write, I'll break them into categories...

1-5 Shakespeare

1 Hamlet
2 Julius Caesar
3 Romeo and Juliette
4 The Taming of the Shrew
5 King Lear.

6-10 Latin and early Italian

6 The Divine Comedy - Dante Aleghieri
7 The poems of Catullus
8 Metamorphosis - Ovid
9 The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
10 Lives - Plutarch

11-15 Other Ancient

11 The Odyssey - Homer
12 The Mahabharata - (Ancient Sanskrit epic - author unknown)
13 Tao Te Ching - Lao Tse
14 The Book of War - Han Tzu
15 Aristotle (I'm not sure which book to choose)

16-20 More Pre-Shakespeare

16 Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
17 Le Morte D'Arthur - Malory (Not the best version but you need to know about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table)
18 Dr Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
19 Snorri Snurrlasson (sp?) again, I'm not sure which to pick, this guy wrote down many of the Viking Sagas, I think if forced to choose, I'd pick the Vinland Saga.
20 The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (I don't know which version to choose but again, something that you need to know).

21-25 17th century

21 The King James Version of the Bible
22 Paradise Lost - John Milton
23 Fanny Hill - John Cleland (one of the earliest if not the earliest known novel written purely as pornography - and well written it is too)
24 Poems of John Donne
25 To His Coy Mistress (a poem) by Andrew Marvell

26-30 18th century

26 Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
27 Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift (you might also try "A Modest Proposal" which is short and influential - cf J G Ballard's "To Howard Hughes - A Modest Proposal" in which a rich man holds the world to nuclear ransom).
28 Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
29 To a Mouse - Robert Burns (known as Rab in life, but never as Rabbie)
30 Poems of William Blake

31-35 19th Century

31 Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott (or pick any other of his novels, all influential, all readable and all great fun)
32 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
33 The Mask of Anarchy - Percy Bysshe Shelley
34 A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and all the other Sherlock Holmes stories of course)
35 The Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Lord Tennyson.

36-40 Charles Dickens

36 Great Expectations
37 Bleak House
38 The Olde Curiosity Shop
39 A Christmas Carol
40 Oliver Twist

41-46 20th Century

41 Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs
42 The Trial - Franz Kafka
43 The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
44 The Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum
45 Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A Heinlein

AND I COULD NOT LEAVE OUT

46 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
47 Sonnets on Orpheus - Rainer-Maria Rilke
48 The Castle of Crossed Destinies - Italo Calvino
49 Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
50 Dracula - Bram Stoker
51 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
52 Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

I'm afraid the list goes on. I don't think I can do it after all. Sorry 6.

Why I have Such A Name

2006-02-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

As Span has pointed out, my name is not Michael Arthur Edwards or even Sebastian St John Nigel Edwards, it's Alcuin Insull Edwards, so why do I get such a name?

I'll start with Insull because it's a longer story. My grandfather's name was Clarence Insull Edwards. He was born not a throwin away from Villa Park back in the 1880s when Villa used to win things all the time instead of the occasional League Cup win and the League once every ten years (we're overdue by the way).

I have no idea why he was called Clarence but he got the middle name Insull because of a family tradition of giving the oldest son (until the early 19th century it was all children) his mother's maiden name as a middle name. (His mother was Sarah Insull - Sarah also had a much older brother who was the father of Samuel Insull who emigrated to the USA before my grandfather was born, became secretary to Thomas Alva Edison and at one stage almost literally OWNED Chicago.

When my father was born, for reasons known only to himself, decided to call my father Anthony Clarence Edwards, rather than giving him Porter as his middle name as he would under the tradition. My father knew there was a family tradition but he didn't realise precisely WHAT that tradition was so he gave ME the middle name Insull thinking he was following the tradition. Of course, if he HAD been following the tradition, my middle name would have been Lockwood, but there you go.

I have not continued this family tradition for two reasons... firstly my wife had her tubes tied before I met her and so we have no kids. Secondly... my wife's maiden name is Coote (although when I met her she was living under her married name of Blair ... no relation to Lionel, Tony or even Sander from The Armageddon Rag).

So... that's Insull so why am I called Alcuin. That is a much shorter story. I was born in 1960 at the very beginning of Generation X. This in turn means that my dad was an early breaker of the Boomers' mystical hippy wave (actually it was a separate tradition, that runs in the family, my Grandmother on his side was a devotee of the odious Madame Blavatsky)

Anyway my father was a member of AMORC

(The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) otherwise known as Rosicrucians. Rosicrucianism claims origins with the Comte de St Germain in the 18th century, with the Illuminati in the 17th and even with ancient Egypt or Atlantis but AMORC was founded in 1915 and publishes (or used to publish back in the fifties and sixties) a magazine called Rosicrucian Digest. In the February 1960 edition, there was an article on Alcuin.

So... I have my name because my Dad messed up a family tradition and because there was an article in some mystical magazine about an 8th century Northumbrian Beatus (who is unusual in STILL not being canonised 1201 years after his death)

Suicide - another keeper

2006-02-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

Sorry folks, I've just seen this thread and I notice there are huge numbers of threads modded. I can imagine what they say and frankly, I don't want to know.

I have in the past considered suicide. In fact, back in the 1986 0r 7 I seriously considered becoming a suicide bomber. I'd been unemployed for about two years (apart from two weeks as a security guard) and was getting to my wits' end. Even the German Democratic Republic laughed when I sought political asylum (having read that they had zero unemployment).

In the end, two things stopped me. The first is, at base, I'm far too arrogant to let my self-esteem sink that low. At the end of the day, I could not convince myself that I was worthless, and I knew that there were people who would be upset if I was not around anymore.

The second stage was the realisation that my unemployment was a result of decisions taken by a limited number of individuals and it would not be fair for me to take out my anger on those who were innocent in this matter. I spent so long trying to work out who to blame that I realised I could use the effort I was making more constructively. I have to say, I am EXTREMELY glad there was nobody around to point me in the "right" direction.

In the end, Augustus, depression just isn't a good enough reason to kill yourself, in fact, nothing is. It's an act of violence against everybody who loves you.

Don't do it.

To quote the great philosopher Geldof, "Suicide leaves such a bad aftertaste in the soul".

Vindaloo - another I wanted to keep

2006-01-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

Nonsense, criticism does not damage our country. Helping out complete strangers does not damage our country. The best thing about the English and our Frisian and Danish ancestors is our adaptability.

No Englishman, I won't even say patriot because it's not about patriotism it's about the essence of Englishness, would EVER seek to turn the culture of MY country into something unchanging.

Forget the usual useless argument racists tend to make about people coming in, look at how England has changed in the past couple of years... Now you can buy sushi in Sainsburys (do you see THAT many Japanese people around, no it's English people eating Sushi. We go bungee jumping some of us (and that particular piece of madness came from New Zealand).

But one change, the brilliant change that makes me PROUD to be English because it can ONLY happen in England. I saw two buskers on the Underground playing together. There was a Chinese guy on bongoes and a white dreadlocked rasta playing the Didgeridoo.

We take the culture of the world and we make it OURS and yes, that makes me proud to be English.

THAT, my friend, is the England I'd happily fight for.

"Vindaloo... vindaloo, we're gonna score one more than you."

A post I wanted to keep

2006-01-25T11:21:00.000-08:00

Social Engineering is not a requirement of communism, neither is it necessary to be a communist to be a social engineer. The commonly used "ie" means one thing is the same as the other. This statement is clearly not true. Neither is it commonly used, so it is not available as a throwaway line. If not accompanied by an essay describing why communism and social engineering are identical to each other, it is a lie.

Every time a government passes a law that rewards or punishes a kind of behaviour, any kind of behaviour either by taxing it or by making it illegal, that is social engineering. Every time the Government decides to set army pay above, below, or AT the average wage, the decision is a form of social engineering.

Even without governments, every time a shop offers a loyalty card or special offers, that is social engineering. Every time an advertisement is made, it is attempting to change people's behaviour, again it's social engineering.

Of course I believe in it. I believe people should behave well to one another and that any means is legitimate in attempting to make sure this happens.

whatever

2006-01-25T04:17:00.000-08:00

whatever

Gavin says I must write something. Span wants something mathematical. How about Prime Numbers?

A set of numbers which are not and cannot be Prime.

If a number N, has a whole number square root(r), then clearly it cannot be prime because it has at least three factors, 1*r*r=N.

But did you know that N-1 can't be prime either? Consider the equation (x+1)*(x-1)=M. multiplying out the brackets we get x squared + x -x -1 or M=x squared minus 1. If x is a whole number, then this is the same as making x the same as r in the first equation.

So... r squared =N and r+1 times r-1 = N-1.

There you are Span... maths. Happy?

I'm off work sick today.

whatever

2006-01-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

whatever
Is this how to do it? I wonder if Blogspot has been taken over by the BBC.

How sick am I?

2006-01-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

In truth, not sick at all. I still HAVE the edema but after testing my heart (fine) thyroid (perfect), Kidneys (fine), Liver (fine except that my Gamma Globulin's a bit high, suggesting I'm an habitual drunk), and checked for lupus, diabetes and other stuff (leprosy and/or pregnancy for all I know) my doctor thinks my veins are just too lazy to carry my blood ALLLLLLLL the way back from my feet to my heart.

whatever

2006-01-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

whatever

Hmm... what happened there. Has Blogspot been taken over by the BBC?

Okay... a shortened form. My heart, thyroid and kidneys are fine, my cholesterol is borderline, my liver's okay except that Gamma Globulin's a little high (which suggests I'm a lush and probably drink more than I think). Now the doctor thinks my veins are just too lazy to take all the blood from my legs alllll the way back up again.

MOT

2006-01-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

I suppose I ought to let people know the result of my MOT.

My heart is in perfect working order. It's as healthy as that of a man half my weight (Okay, technically a man of half my weight would probably be underweight if he was 6'4" tall... but not by much and his heart might be quite healthy... it's only at the extremes of starvation - say a third of my weight, that things start going really badly wrong).

My thyroid and kidneys are fine too. I don't have cancer, nor lupus nor any of the other exotic things mentioned. Basically, my veins just can't cope with all that blood so the Doctor said she'd send me to see a venologist. It's a while since I saw her though and I've heard nothing. Perhaps she likes to procrastinate too.

Of course, it could be that I have the edema just because I'm really fat but I'm not considering that yet.

I was fat as a child but then had dysentry at age 4 and never put on the weight again until I was 26. Hmm... wonder if perhaps I ought to take a trip to Laos?

And Now I'm sick....

2005-12-26T01:03:00.000-08:00

Oh great. I finished work on Tuesday and on Wednesday went to the doctor about my swollen foot. I spent THURSDAY in Hospital having all kinds of tests (a full MOT as the doctor says). She says she will have some idea how to get rid of the Pitting Edema once she knows what's causing it.

Well, naturally enough, I went to check it out. It could be...

Congestive Heart Disease and the edema is caused by the heart not being able to pump all that fluid so it colects in my leg...

Cirrhosis of the Liver - a bit of a bummer because I don't drink that much so I'd hate to turn into George Best.

Chronic Kidney Failure which means gradual loss of kidney function.

Hyperthyroidism - watch me turn into a zombie

or some other less likely possibilities like lupus and various forms of cancer.

Now I have to wait and see.

Procrastination

2005-12-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

Another week has gone by and still I've done nothing. My novel remains unwritten, I have a few posts on the BBC website, I've done very little at work. If Procrastination was an Olympic sport, I could procrastinate for... well, probably for the Beaker People because nobody else would have got round to invading Great Britain.

Whatever

2005-12-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

Another day wasted. What did I do? Well, in Championship Manager, I managed to get the sack from Aston Villa but I did win the Scottish League with Celtic, which was nice. My addiction rating is "Just one more game, honest", which suggests a problem, as does the fact that I have managed to write exactly zero pages of my novel today. I really should be ashamed of myself. Like the man says JfDI, Alcuin.

Maybe next week.

Beside that, I was watching the footage of the explosion at Hemel Hemstead, then some football. I must admit, I enjoyed the row between Brad Friedel and Robbie Savage. I wonder if Savage said anything really unforgivable and to his own teammate. After all, this is a character so vile that even Dion Dublin lost his rag with him. Oh yes, and in the same game... Tomas Repka. Does Repka know there's not actually a war on?

Sunday Morning

2005-12-11T01:21:00.000-08:00

Like the Velvet Underground say, Sunday mornings are indeed about the wasted years so close behind. As usual, I wake up, still counting those hundred dollar bills that are so much fun to count than sheep. I check it out, did I win the lottery? Oh well, maybe next week.

I look at the work to do on my novel. I have the scenes completely plotted. I just need to write 1-2,000 words for each scene to produce a 150,000 word novel (and this time, it'll work and get published). I don't do it though. I waste another day playing Championship Manager.

This may change in the future though. I bought one of those self help books (for procrastinators like me). When I get round to reading it, I'm sure it will help. It's called JfDI just do it by Nicholas Bate. And yes, the f does stand for what we all think it stands for.

Right

2005-12-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

It's Saturday, the BBC has gone to bed long ago and I'm up, awake and blogging. Yeah, that's what I'm doing and I'll do more later but for now, I'm just setting things up.

Later, of course, the time will come to post all sorts of exciting (or at the very least interesting) things that come to mind.