Substitute products - a different view

Something else I'm not cut out for

LtK has started her part-time job in a well-know Pharmacy. Good luck to her today. Talking about this recently, and having just discussed supermarket home delivery services and substitutions, we found some more unsuitable careers.

If I was doing the online shoppers' trolley push for them, my lorries would be full of things like:

Blue stripe carrots, £0.15. Sold out. Substitute product: 54” widescreen television £750.

Roman Catholic Times. Sold out. Substitute product: ribbed strawberry flavour condoms.

Venison haunch. Sold out: Substitute product: nut cutlets.

Bad, but it'd be worse if I had trained as a pharmacist. Sooner or later the low boredom threshold would be breached. The mind would start going:

“What would happen if I swapped the contents of the viagra and beta-blocker boxes”.

Then:

“And then swap the super high caffeine with added amphetamine and triple adrenaline with the chill-out anti-high-blood-pressure tablets...”

And then:

“laxative / diah-calm; earplugs / painkilling suppositories; preparation H / Ralgex; eye drops / surgical alcohol swaps”.

Better add those to the long list then. Along with anything involving folding fabrics and cleaning things.

The Ryder Cup Day 3

Jack Nicklaus has just said that today is the day that counts. Apparently, the first two days amount to mere posturing. Unfortunately, the USA players seem to have postured their way into an unassailable lead, with nothing short of a miracle required for Europe and Ireland to retain the trophy.

Attitudes revealed by timing

After all the crowing, shouting and rubbish from our politicians about their true, deep and sincere love of sport during the Olympics, the Lib Dems and Labour have their conferences during the T20 World Cup and the Ryder Cup, important events that render their blah meaningless. The Tories are even worse, remember Thatcher and her cabinet started the rot and this lot are no different.

If they understood team sports, they wouldn't be where they are doing what they're doing. That's fair enough, it's just how it is. Stop pretending. You lot are the specky nerds that ran to the debating society and always had a note from your mum excusing you games. Live with it.

I am not your slave

A letter to government departments...

...in general, and some recently surfaced idiot at the student loans department in particular.

Dear Shiny trouser-arsed clockwatching work-dodger,

Contrary to what you seem to believe, I'm not your lackey, and am unwilling to respond to your every command at the snap of your fingers. The general population isn't your unofficial and unpaid workforce.

Sitting opposite you, or on the end of the phone, is your counterpart at HMRC. Unless otherwise engaged strictly observing his working hours, arriving seconds before nine thirty and sprinting for the taxpayer subsidised parking facility at five precisely, lunch hours, standardised annual sickness, on a toilet / fag / tea / coffee / rehydration break, or away being trained in being awful at his core duties while maintaining absolute levels of political correctness, bullet-evasion, and living below the parapet, you could talk to him directly. But that would be sensible, efficient, and would not cheese me off.

For some absurd reason, rather than approach someone being paid to compile and look after the data you require, you insist on pestering me.

Look, I'm really not a people person. In general, the sliding scale I apply starts at irritating and steeply descends from there to rot in hell, bitch, now. So, no, I'm not able to send you what you want within five working days. The threat of a late or reduced student loan does not really apply, as due to your department's incompetence, he's not received anything, and your deadline to put something in his bank account has passed. You lost the copy of his passport he sent you. We had to send another. Registered. You've probably lost that, too. In short, given some earth-moving equipment and licence to please myself, I would excavate a massive pit, lob you and all your ilk into it, and gleefully and remorselessly top it off with tons of mass concrete. That would make me smile.

That would also dam the rivers of ineptitude, seas of inefficiency, and oceans of misery that are all you have ever produced.

Yours,

Etc.

I am concerned that I may have understated the point. There could be some torture in the pit before the concrete is poured in. There could be more detail about just how inept these departments are and how they throw their responsibilities onto the population in general, who are all far busier than the government department blokes, actually earning money so that they can be taxed, in order to pay for the government department people, who do nothing but simply throw their responsibilities...etc.

I have omitted the following:

Overpaid.

Underworked.

Unqualified.

Unregulated.

Smug-faced, backbone-lacking, urine for blood, mealy-mouthed pasty-faced ninnies.

Quite a laid-back response, really.

Ryder Cup day 1

The Ryder Cup

Before the BBC-apologists, terrestrial TV lovers, interfering, meddling MPs, or their ilk start to get their grubby fingers grubbier playing about with sports coverage, they need to look at the Ryder Cup and television coverage.

The Ryder Cup is three days golf. I take on board the fact that while there may be a very small minority quite happy to watch bits and pieces, among other viewing. However, the majority will either care not a jot about the whole shebang, or care about little else for the three days.

Who did the BBC or the terrestrial channels really serve? The tiny minority happy to watch bits and pieces. The don't cares were irritated by constant updates on some silly beggars playing golf somewhere. The golfers wanted to watch the golf. Not the 3:15 from Haydock Park, not Mrs Pete Beale at the kitchen sink, not the Tory / Labour / other lot prattling on at their conferences / not etc. Three days of glorious, intense, wonderful matchplay golf. Nonstop. End to end. Stop the world, I want to know what's happening on the sixteenth tee.

Sky have delivered the golf watchers from frustration. Hell for the sports fanatic is terrestrial television. The coverage is superb. Yes there's some adverts. No, there's not huge gaps while they report the starting prices now they've weighed in at Wincanton. Hands off, Westminster. You lot have not understood sport since Heath and Wilson had the grace to attend every cup final, no matter how much you spout off about the Olympics.

An honourable mention for Radio Five which I listened to at work today. Good coverage, but when I got in the car? The news. Then the news in depth. Then other stuff. For three days I want to be captivated by, and escape to the Ryder Cup, and Greece, Spain, Portugal and whoever can be as skint as they like, the Yanks can do what they like on their election campaigns, and the world can go to hell in a handbasket for all I care.

Chicago weather

We've had rain all day. Medina, Chicago, is dry and sunny.

OK some other things do matter

We play Chelsea at ours tomorrow.

Something SKY could do better

Tell Monty he's not allowed to say “momentum” repeatedly.

Rain

Next to last game of the season tomorrow, and it's unlikely to go ahead. Due to the rain. Every day this week, heavy rain. The pitch is going to be like a quagmire (whatever one of those is), and they look after it themselves, so are not going to want it torn to pieces just before the autumn months.

Backward-ism

Backward by design

I can't lay claim to doing much in evolutionary terms. Riddled with Eastern European knuckle-dragging, caveman genes, me. Polish, like Yorkshire. As in “born and bred, strong in the arm, thick in the head”. When age and infirmity de-strengthens the arm, there's little useful stuff left. I'm willing to try though. I don't particularly want to scrape my knuckles back to a cave and a diet of sabre-tooth tiger eaten just before he eats you. Neither do I think pasteurised, heat and chemically treated, vacuum-packed microwaveable grub necessarily amounts to true progress, actually. Just another pollutant. Ingested.

Whooping cough is back. Babies are dieing, months old, from a disease that had been all but eliminated. TB's making a comeback. They're just the first two I can think of. There's plenty more, I can't name them because medical stuff bores me and I switch off.

They're back because of religion. Not the only cause. But the main one.

Muslim nations (perhaps rightly so, when you look at the history; but wrongly when you look at the science and the facts) reject innoculation programmes because they suspect the infidel west is somehow injecting the need for Rolex watches and wearing bikinis into kids arms. Others (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) deny their kids blood transfusions. Let's deconstruct this: they kill their own kids in the name of some god they have in their mind without any rational basis, any scientific basis, any philosophical basis for.

Here's where I fall down, arguing the point: lack of patience, tolerance, and manners. There comes a point (all too soon) when I'm off. An example: at a function, we arrived with others and I bought a round at the bar. Everyone took their beers and drinks and started mingling. A colleague's wife wouldn't accept her gin and bitter lemon because the bitter lemon was the diet version.

Now, she may have had a point. But it was boring, it was the inappropriate place and time, and she was clogging up my ability to get away and talk to people about stuff far more interesting than an artificial sweetener. Apparently, if you feed lab rats on aspartimine, in truly biblical, Oliver Reed binge doses, in the absence of other nutrients, they die. A bit early. Really, lady, the odd glass at a do may reduce your life expectancy by minutes, but if those minutes are spent reading the labels of mixer bottles, then what the hell?

Rudely, and wrongly, I slapped the money on the bar and told her to bring me the change when she finally resolved the problem. I'm the same when trying to assimilate the reasoning of people who say there must be a god because of the 'intelligent design' all around. Where? Where, exactly, are the god-backed improvements in design? There's been a series of Roman Catholic leaders (and yes, they do wear silly hats and ask who, exactly (or similar) are Tottenham Hotspur?) who claim that condoms do more to spread AIDS than limit and contain the disease.

Recently the radio has broadcast the arguments from the great and the good and the very good at arguing their point from the various god-excuse positions. None hold water, and all, I think, are backward. Sooner or later, there's problems (as in war, torture, bullying, mass killing, refusal to face facts and progress) all from the God / Allah / Buddah / Whatever / - botherers. Thanks guys. Thanks for the TB. For the whooping cough. Who knows? For the plague? For the twin towers, anyway. For AIDS in Africa. For everything else you've inflicted. Really. Thanks.

Now. Clear off.

Wet, very wet.

It's raining in the north...

...heavily. So much so that a Newcastle fan posted that if they beat United tonight, he would “get in his canoe and have a paddle down to the pub to celebrate.”

In a bid to get Internet hits...

...the online Guardian has the headline “Rain heading south”. Buried deep in the article is the less than sensational information that as the weather front heads south, the rain is going to fizzle out.

Pump it where, sir?

When parts of Putney flooded, a wealthy chap insisted that we pump out his basement. The big stretch of water? That was the Thames. The temporary stretches of water? That would be the road and the surrounding area, as far as the eye could see. Where, exactly, we asked, did he propose we pumped the water to, such that it wasn't replaced by more water? He said something about aqua-vacs and making a complaint. Someone said something about the world's biggest aqua-vac.

Oy, mate, your pump's alight

Every so often everyone copped the equivalent of directing the traffic, or securing premises duties. Doing nothing interesting for hours on end. Acres of baled paper alight, and I was stationed at a base pump, a portable engine and pump on a frame, lifting water from a river and supplying a fire engine.

Easily bored, I was sat with my feet in the water, the pump running happily while suffering total neglect, reading a day-old newspaper.

Out of view, some stray paper had blown against the exhaust, caught fire, and was burning away dangerously near the petrol can. The petrol can I'd not bothered to put the cap on. Easily bored and prone to sulking. Luckily, a bloke walking his dog tipped me off “oy, mate” he shouted from the opposite bank “it that thing supposed to be alight?”.

Anderson scored for United...

...a fan Tweeted that if he can avoid injury and “doughnuts for breakfast” he might get a run in the first team. Just because he's a big lad doesn't mean he scoffs sugary, fatty, naughty stuff 24/7.

The Deadman's Pedal

Is my current book. By Alan Warner. I read The Stars in the Bright Sky last year or the year before. This is very different to that. I'm in the early stages, but it's unfolding nicely.

Whatever happened to Bovril crisps...

...they were the absolute best.

Cold? Take these. In two weeks it'll be gone

Come on medics

Who's lagging behind here?

Take cars, back in the 1960's:

Take old computers and the progress made there:

Have a look at an old telly:

Cold? Two weeks of this:

Come on guys. Move on. Same as it was fifty years ago.

(I have a cold).

Sticks and stones and words are all very, very, bad

Sticks and stones, eh?

There's a bloke on a bike getting all sorts of trouble for calling a copper a pleb. That's pretty tame. Even years ago, that would've been pretty tame. He should be getting the flack for being an MP and all that goes with that. It shows a bit of the bias the everyday world skews things with too, doesn't it?

Little old lady meets jobsworth: Marge O'Nice, eighty-nine, was told today that she could not knit stuffed piglets for the school fête in case they offended the muslim pupils or parents. A spokesman for the education authority said...

Well, that's little old lady one, jobsworth nil.

Pregnant woman meets jobsworth: a hospital parking attendant who would not allow a pregnant woman with no change to park without a valid ticket despite the fact that she was experiencing contractions...

Easy, easy. That's the jobsworths two nil down.

(This one may even be true).

SEB COE: I'm here to collect my ticket.

LORDS STEWARD: I'll go and check (exit left, rummaging noises off). Nope. It must be at the other gate. Back out, left, around the ground and up to the north entrance.

SEB COE: My good man, the game's about to start. Do you know who I am?

LORDS STEWARD: Your Seb Coe, 'aint'cha?

SEB COE: That's right.

LORDS STEWARD: In that case, you'll have no trouble getting there in time. Run out of here, around the ground...

Suddenly, due to the smarmy, unlikeable nature of Seb Coe, the jobsworths have pulled one back.

One angry Tory chief whip on a bike and one jobsworth copper is all it takes. Suddenly it's two-all and the jobsworths have drawn level against all the odds.

Then there's John Terry. I'm no fan. But really. He said something to an opponent. Arsenal have had three (Aaron Ramsey, Eduardo, and Diaby) players kicked out of the game for years by opponents either sent out to damage them or at least with “get into them, they don't like it” teamtalks ringing in their ears. Then there's been all that “he's not that kind of player” bull trotted out, and zero action by the FA. All the time blokes are being suspended for game after game for something they said.

There's no excuse for racism and no way to condone it, and action has to be taken. But hanging someone out to dry over a few words while others end careers and get away with it? That stinks to high heaven of a body devised and run by the twisted and evil minds behind our legal system, which sees prison dished out for non-payment of a television licence while violent crimes go unpunished on technicalities. When a body is seen to deliver some sort of equitable and just rulings, then it can command some respect. The FA? A joke.

Ken's game

Ken's Game

That's what it was called. Celebrating sixty years association with the cricket club. That's a huge achievement, I think. I'm old and I feel my age well and truly on a Sunday or Monday morning after playing. Even so, he played his first game for the club, age fourteen, before I was born. He played every year since then, for fifty-six years. Towards the end of those years there were some seasons when he only played a handful of games, but fifty-six years unbroken service is phenomenal. Unable to play due to an injury, he has umpired (and done a fantastic job) recently, as well as being the club chairman.

We had a great turnout from current players and the recently retired, playing a twelve v thirteen player game, with two non-playing umpires and plenty of ex-players who are no longer able to play turned up as well.

There was bit of a presentation after the game, including a photo of everyone in their whites ready to play. Rushed to the printers, printed and framed during the game. Ken isn't often lost for words, that's the first time I've seen him unable to speak. When he recovered he thanked everyone for a good afternoon's cricket, played in great spirit. Which it was.

Saraswati Park

I really enjoyed this, Anjali Joseph's first novel. An examination of undercurrents in a strong marriage and a young man's awakening years.

Arsenal at Citeh

One-nil down, having had far the best of the first half, we salvaged a draw, away, at the reigning champions. A game we could've won, but a good result at Middle Eastlands.

England v India

Bit of a pasting, really. Knocked over for less than 100 chasing 170. Still, we're through to the next round, but perhaps not in as good shape as we'd want to be.

Sorry about the weather

My fault. I tweeted something about it being a nice crisp morning, shortly before the stair-rod rain set in. For the day. Should know better by now.

First roast dinner of the autumn today...

...I didn't know it was autumn already. BLISS tells me it is now officially autumn. Apparently it is also now officially cold, and the central heating is officially on.

The Prince of Darkness 2012, Episode Two

The Prince of Darkness 2012, Episode Two

Peter Mendelson, The Prince of Darkness, and his man Friday, Terry Boyle, are sitting at the kitchen table. Terry has a large mug of steaming coffee. Mendelson has a glass of something murky and unwholesome-looking in front of him, and a pile of pills.

MENDELSON: Passed over again. When will I ever get a break...

TERRY: Boss, there's more to life than celeb-reality television...

MENDELSON: ...like what, exactly?

TERRY: Well, there's beer...

MENDELSON: Disgusting. I'm to be a lager-lout am I? Taking a pint of that Australian rubbish over a glass of the finest...

TERRY: And there's football...

MENDELSON: I get football the way I get lager. Not at all. Really. There's got to be more to life than beer and football...

TERRY: Of course there is boss...and when I discover what it is, I'll be sure to let you know.

MENDELSON: Very funny, I'm sure. Terry, I'm not sure these stem cell and vitamin cocktails are working. How's my complexion?

TERRY: Like a bloke half your age's, boss.

MENDELSON: Should I change my name?

TERRY: Eh?

MENDELSON: Should I do the Tony Benn thing. Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, becomes Tony Benn, man of the people. Old fashioned socialist.

TERRY: What, like adopt that 'Mandy' nickname?

MENDELSON: Certainly not. What about 'Pete' instead of Peter? You're not known as 'Terrence' are you? And you're, well...

TERRY: Common as muck?

MENDELSON: Blessed with the common touch, shall we say.

TERRY: I don't think so, boss. In any case, don't you think it's a little late...

MENDELSON: I'm the comeback king Terry, I don't know the meaning of too late. Look at Tony. Ah! See! Another Tony, not Anthony.

TERRY: Well. If you insist. Now. If you don't mind, boss...

Terry picks up the remote control and fires up the kitchen television, tuning to the World Cup T20 Cricket.

MENDELSON: Now. I could get cricket, given the chance.

TERRY: Boss, that's a very hard ball. Flying past your throat, at speed. Do you really think...

MENDELSON: But what about the jumpers. The white jumpers and trousers. Think about the Brideshead Revisited posters. I'd look charmingly foppish. I might even dig out that old teddy bear...

TERRY: The one on top of your bed, is that?

MENDELSON: Yes. Don't you have a soft toy...

TERRY: No boss. I don't have a soft toy. I have a Chelsea season ticket. I have a cricket bat, along with the rest of my cricket kit. I have a liking for lager and male company talking bollocks about sport and taking the piss out of each other...

MENDELSON: Alright. Don't labour the point. I still think I'd look...

TERRY: Petrified? Out of your depth?

MENDELSON: Dashing. Striding out to the, er, the bit in the middle.

TERRY: Striding out to the crease, boss. And you'd look like a prize...

MENDELSON: Enough, Terry. Terry, are these vitamins working? Are they doing what the doctor ordered?

TERRY: Boss, I had to go to a right dodgy Hammersmith basement to collect that 'prescription'. God knows what they are or what they do. For someone who won't touch a can of Fosters, you don't mind ingesting any old chemicals...

MENDELSON: Terry. That's a top of the range private doctor we're talking about. These white ones? Kate Moss swears by them. The blues one? Sir...Mick...Jagger. These pink ones here? Madonna.

Terry goes to the fridge and takes out a can of lager.

TERRY: See this? Wifebeaters everywhere can't get enough of this. The bees knees, this is. Good for coughs, cold, scabby holes and pimples on the...

MENDELSON: Terry!

TERRY: Puts a cut in your strut and a glide in your stride. Now, boss.

MENDELSON: What?

TERRY: Your asses milk bath's ready. Run along and let me watch the cricket, there's a love.

The Zoo

Zoo

A spontaneous visit to the zoo yesterday, and we saw a baby gorilla and a rhino calf. It was an Aspinal zoo, and it was moderately spontaneous. We were in the general area.

BLISS: What about the zoo?

ME: OK.

BLISS: (Looking up the postcode on her phone) forget it, have you seen how much they're charging? I want to see the animals, not go home with several of them in the boot of the car! That's extortionate, that's...

ME: Well, they do spend it all on breeding threatened species and animal welfare, not for profit...

BLISS: (without pause)...shall I see if there's any online vouchers then?

A kind lady tipped us off to the little rhino in a field with her mum, and she eventually emerged, and even came over to say hello.

I used to feel extremely uncomfortable in zoos. Big cats walking up and down, up and down in very small cages. Those polar bears at London zoo in accommodation that, in human terms, would be little more than a cupboard. These are living things, not exhibits. I don't understand religions that put man at the top of some arbitrary importance of the species list and promote cruelty to animals.

BLISS' camera battery had died, so she used mine and I played with the toy 'digital Holga' for he day. The zoom (I found out) is absolutely useless, but the unpredictability and the psychedelic effects are great, as long as someone's mopping up the important stuff with a proper camera (or as long as there's nothing wedding- or baby-gorilla-like to record. These are my photos because I don't want to infringe BLISS' intellectual copyright or anything. The baby gorilla is on her mother's lap in the photo above, the best one I took all day, I think.

One of MM's best ever birthday cards was the zebras talking to their boy, saying “forget Arsenal replica kit, son, you'll have Newcastle like everyone else.

Shifty

Shifty

I don't know how I missed this first time around, but I've caught up now. Gritty and uncompromising, but really a short look at two mates getting back together after too long. Now and again actors just seem to gel, hit it off somehow to make something work naturally and organically. They work without any suspicion that they are anything other than the characters they are playing.

Composers' names

I listened to Mahler's 9^th Symphony. While listening, for some reason, I remembered (in one of those useless information remembered episodes) that his name was Gustav. Or at least I thought it was. I had to check. Then, later, I thought that there could be certain entertaining improvements made to composers' names:

Better		Actual
Eric	Beethoven	Ludwig van
Brian	Mozart	Wolfgang Amadeus
Aaron	Bach	Johann Sebastian
Frank	Wagner	Richard
Hayden	Haydn	Joseph
Edmund	Brahms	Johannes
Joel	Schubert	Franz
Igor	Stravinsky	Igor
Alan	Bizet	Georges

Igor is just funny, with all the “wooorking in the lab, late one night” stuff.

Scratching my head...again

There's stuff I don't get...

...including hairdriers. I'm easily bored. Morning routine bores me senseless. Of the three esses, you can only read while undertaking one. It pays to watch what you're doing with the razor, and Amazon have yet to come up with a shower-proof Kindle. Washing hair is achieved with whatever comes to hand (usually soap, sometimes shower gel). A wipe with the towel. Done. Don't even own a comb. I could not be fussed with having to blow hot air over the stuff for (what would seem like) hours.

There's more:

Clearing snow and ice off the drive when it'll melt in due course.

Sweeping up leaves even as the wind blows more leaves on the bit you just swept.

Trainspotting / planespotting / spotting in general.

Having parked 85% ok, spending time to-ing and fro-ing to get it up to 87.5%.

Cars. CD? Air-con? Enough, already.

“What's in this?” It's a restaurant. They'll not be serving anything too deadly poisonous. Bad for publicity. Eat it, there's a dear. Try to act like a grown-up.

The faff that is milk and sugar in drinks (tea and coffee) that are better without either.

(100% with MM on this one): porridge. Wallpaper paste. Without the adhesion and a worse taste.

Predictive text. Designed by the same dyslexic Russian Ouija boards conjure up if no-one's cheating.

Dungeness

We went to Dungeness today. I love it there. The abandoned boats, waste iron artefacts, go-nowhere rails. The views over the shingle to the sea. The small dwellings standing strong against the elements. There's Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage with the Donne lines on the flank wall. There's lighthouses. There's any number of species unique to the area. There's a strong feeling of a fierce new-age independence. There's no fences.

The power station looks over all this, but we saw no two-headed gulls.

European football nights are back

Champions' League Football's...

...back. Montpellier away for the Arsenal tonight. This is when I appreciate telly. Interviews with Arsene Wenger before kick off. In-depth team news and dissection of what we can expect. Sky do this much better than the terrestrial stations. They allocate time both before and after the game to do what fans do. Get there early. Soak up some atmosphere. Banter. Play the predictions game. Participate in a small, localised editions of Mock the Game, That Was The Team That Was, Take Your Kick (that's a blast from the past, Google it), Sorry, I Haven't a Decent Centre Half. Visit William Hills or Ladbrookes, visit the bar and the burger van. Flick through the programme and (in the Arsenal fans' case) wonder just how far into insanity the manager has drifted.

This should be a good game. They punched way above their weight last season. We're rumoured to be resting some players with one eye on Sunday's trip to the Petro-dollar stadium to paly Citeh. I don't think we will be, somehow, but I do think Giroud will start against his old team.

Splice

A sci-fi film with a sense of humour but still with a dark side. Recommended by William Gibson, no less. Biochemists splice DNA to create hybrids and bite off more than they can get through at an all-day all-you-can-eat buffet. They work for NERD (humour there, not clever of subtle, but humour nonetheless) which turns out to be a rotten to the core bio-pharmaceutical corporation (pretty true to life cynical observation).

Hospice

The Antlers album has had the rare distinction of being described as 'harrowing'. It's that, and beautiful, too.

A film afternoon and evening

Bit of a film day

Illness and lack of energy meant an afternoon in front of the telly. Don't happen often, not in these parts. I'm telly-phobic (unless it's sport). BLISS seldom watches anything. We found ourselves alone. With the remote control.

“How does this work again?”

“Dunno. I'm surprised it's been left behind.”

“Maybe it's just a dummy, like those CCTV cameras.”

So we watched some films.

One Day

Was gently funny, with some great lines here and there, laugh out loud funny moments.

Inhale

Was a decent thriller, with an interesting, thought-provoking ending.

The Hurt Locker

Another good call. I enjoyed this one, too. Interesting to see the difference between this point of view (policing with soldiers) and Generation Kill (soldiers fighting their way to Baghdad).

A new species!

New species discovered

There's a new species of monkey, discovered in Africa. It's a cross between the dreary bus-stop old-lady opinion-churning 'journalist' Richard Littlejohn, and a baboon.

The Clarkson school of journalism. Specialist subject (as Basil Fawlty would have it) the bleedin' obvious. Add a large pinch of the drinking club bar, sprinkle liberally with intolerance / xenophobia / Mail-reader-point-of-view. I'm not convinced they're always wrong, I just don't see the point.

The baboons are dismayed.

The Furies

I read this last week. The photo-real artwork is superb, the story strong. I too seldom hit the graphic novel section in the library. Every time I do I'm glad I did. This was absolutely fantastic.

A couple of books...

Fowler's End

A brilliant, funny book. Published in 1957, it's fresh and relevant now.

While I was slowly reading it, between library loans, certain parts really hit home. There was a paragraph, that I came across while the news broke about the couple who shot their burglars being banged up for three days, about English police stations being designed to strike fear in the hearts of the innocent, while making criminals feel right at home.

Then, as the news about the Hillsborough cover-up came out, I read Kersh's mocking account of a policeman during the concluding Fowler's End riot outside the playhouse. Disturbed by boiling water thrown from a window heating up his helmet, he has a flashback to his training for dealing with rabid dogs. He thrusts his hand into his helmet, and this in turn he thrusts into the face of a nanny out buying nappies inadvertantly caught up in the riot. “Later he swore by the Almighty that she was frothing at the mouth, and had a tail”.

In Sam Youdenow, the dodgy owner of the playhouse and other parts of Fowler's End, Kersh has predicted the typical footballer's or estate agent personality blueprint.

Sweet Tooth

Finished this last week. I make sure I get hold of all Ian McEwan's books as they come out. This is a second look at the MI5 / MI6 black arts, and a great exploration of the human side of the agencies personnel and their efforts to get results through influencing the arts and the media.

Henry Ford may have something

Why history, actually, is bunk, and a sense of proportion

The observatory at Greenwich reminded me of the cosmic scale of things. The Earth isn't just one pea in a huge bag of frozen peas, nor a pea in a container lorry of frozen peas, and not even a pea if the Earth itself were made up of frozen peas. Then add the time factor: if the earth were six hours old, then human life on this indescribably small and insignificant lump of the universe is one second long.

So, in real terms, how interesting or important is anything historians feel the desperate need to record and repeat for us? Scientists and engineers have made massive progress. Artists have produced beautiful, dazzling, amazing works. What have the humanities delivered? A history so inaccurate and subjective that we seem incapable of learning from it. A geography of desert, water shortages, extreme weather patterns. Politics of greed and self-interest. Any number of faiths egging believers to torture, maim and murder.

There's still the number of people starving and living in poverty as there ever were. There's massive protests going on at the moment. About the starvation, disease and poverty? No. About a film. It's upset the Allah-botherers. It has come to light that there's a multi-million pound government funded history re-writing industry in the UK, as the Hillsborough families will testify.

Some good work, easily undone

Some ex- and serving policemen and ancillaries on the radio this morning. It started so well. The ex-chief officer first made unreserved apologies, agreed that there were no excuses and that reputations had been severely tarnished. Asked whether the failure of trust should apply across the board, he responded that it shouldn't, but that wasn't the question at the moment.

Next up, destroying the efforts to suggest that “they're all the same” isn't the way to go, a retired copper from Dover refered to the problems he'd had with “football fans” at the ferry terminals, “all drunk, no money, no tickets”. Right. So much for treat everyone on their merits. What was his point? They got what they deserved because someone else had once given me a hard time?

Next up, a woman customs officer who got it wrong and admitted being let off a speeding ticket when she told the patrolman she worked at the Heathrow border agency.

Next up a serving PC who pleaded the case for the everyday bloke on the beat, then, without any prompting, started up the “of course, it's more corrupt the higher you go” track and couldn't fully apply the brakes.

I didn't hear the rest of the calls, but that was enough to answer the question:

No. You can no longer trust the police (and probably never could).

An alternative point of view on Chris Moyles, to his PoV, that is

Mate, you 'aint one of the boys. You're the podgy little boy with the note from your mum for games trying desperately to be one of the lads. When you pitch up in hell you'll be in the pit with Clarkson, Evans, and all the others desperately seeking ladhood and falling at the first hurdle. See Danny Baker for someone who manages it. Without trying. That's the crux. Without trying. Apparently there were all of seven people at broadcasting house to see Moyles off. Two were autograph hunters who “can't stand him”.

Apparently, you either get ot don't get Moyles. I get football, cricket, rugby, and talking rubbish with the boys. Moyles I don't get.

Truth. Justice to follow?

When and where...

...would you think this had happened?

• 96 innocent people killed
• 41 of the 96 could have been saved if the police and ambulance crews had done their jobs
• All the deaths were caused by police action
• After a 23 year cover up, politicians of the time are even now blustering patent rubbish
• A chief officer involved in the cover up thinks he has nothing to hide or apologise for
• The police cover up started before the dead were cold
• The dead were all tested for blood alcohol levels, even a ten year old
• Those that had no trace of alcohol were checked for criminal records
• The police claimed the events were due to: drunkeness, ticketlessness, and violence
• There was no evidence of those claims standing up
• As the news broke to the families, the chief officer called a meeting of his top boys to agree a 'rock-solid story'
• As families were weeping in empty bedrooms, the police started feeding false information to the press and media
• 116 of 164 reports (71%) were altered to suit the 'rock-solid story'
• The dead had been exposed to the risk of attending an event in an unlicenced, uncertified arena – there has still been no apology for this
• The coroners were involved in the cover up, not considering the emergency service response minutes into the event
• Huge sums of taxpayers' money have been spent on defending the police in general and some officers in particular, employing top barristers at massive hourly rates

Russia under Stalin? Sheffield, under Thatcher.

Take a line through all events between Hillsborough and Ian Tomlinson's autopsy by the most inept pathologist in the country, specially called in for the job when off-duty at the time, and who do you trust? Corrupt police forces, corrupt from the very top down? The politicians that backed them?

If those families had not fought like dogs for twenty three years, the cover up would have remained just that. The attitude of Thatcher and her cabinet was that “some football fans had died, you know what they're like”. None of them has had the decency or humanity to apologise.

Greenwich

Greenwich

Go to Greenwich. Everything's free. Apart from the car park (£12.50 for the day), and the Noodle Bar (busy, bench seating, noisy, £17.60 for a Singapore style vermicelli noodles with mixed meat and a mixed veg and tofu noodles, ten veg mini spring rolls, a Tango and a pot of really good Jasmine tea, huge portions). Even then BLISS had a witchy-poo moment and played the car park bandit refund button game to the tune of two quid (reducing the actual cost of parking to £10.50).

The National Maritime museum is big, and interesting and free of charge. We tried the bridge simulator. We didn't get out of New York Harbour before crashing. There's a lot of models, and huge propellers and, well, more fantastic exhibits than you can shake a bargepole at. We narrowly missed death by foreign student coach party. That was a close thing.

Then we climbed the hill up to the observatory, where we tried the trip to Venus. We didn't get out of Cape Kennedy because we'd overloaded the rocket with all the great kit they tempted us into packing. We looked at the meridian (seven quid just to enter the courtyard? Have they not heard of Photoshop?), dodged the builders striking the stands for the equestrian events (cricket conversation: “was there equestrian stuff at the paralympics?” “Nah.” “Why not?” “Shortage of three-legged horses, isn't there?”) and moaned about the steep hill (stupid place to build an observatory, oh, yep, actually the perfect place) and marvelled at the view.

Nice day.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The English version is great. It's much better than the Swedish version (with the bad dubbing) and just marginally inferior to the Swedish version (with subtitles). James Bond does a decent job, and the story does the rest, really. The books must've been a movie-maker's dream. The only dilemmas would've been what to leave out.

Arkology

Listened to this all day:

Reel (CD) 1: Dub Organiser

Reel (CD) 2: Dub Shepherd

Reel (CD) 3: Dub Adventurer

Lee Perry is a genius. Of the highest order (if there's a genius rating system).

Cube

Going to watch Cube with StbFTP tonight. It'll be interesting to see if she enjoys it. It depends so much on atmosphere and the claustrophobic nature of the Cubes and the Cube that I think it'll either be a hit or a resounding miss, with the decision taken to walk out of the front room fleapit early doors.

Ah ahm da lah

Dredd 3D

First the Oxfam bookshop and a good find, a little, hardback, illustrated WB Yeats collection. Colour plates. Nice.

The Odeon filmgoers review said: no real plot or depth to speak of. Plenty of great chases, shoot-outs and 3D effects. Pure and simple escapism.

What's not to like? Eighteen certificate. The censors said: blood, gore, drug references, violence, bad language. We said (StbPFT and I) "what's not to like" and went to see it and it's great. Just over an hour and a half when there's nothing to think about but Judges Dredd and Anderson and how they're going to cope with a locked down tower block, rogue Judges, an army of bad guys and even some dodgy kids after their scalps for the bounty. No, there's not a lot of character development, or plot, thankfully they've delivered a 3D rollercoaster ride without the too-primitive overbearing rubbish 3D. The bikes are cool, too, and I want one of those voice activated DNA-sensitive guns.

Imagine: “talking loudly about last night's rubbish television on the train. Penalty: death. Hi Ex.”

Bang. Heads explode.

“Sorry, passengers. That was messy. Justice has been done. A cleanup crew will attend in due course.” Heh.

Bestival, MM returns

I'd've liked to see quite a lot of the bands. The website is impenetrable, showing the bands in one huge list, or in alphabetical order with links to more info, and no night by night, stage by stage programme anywhere. I've also not read a single bad review, of the event as a whole. The Guardian bloke did say that “despite what they keep telling us, Sister Sledge clearly didn't have all their siblings with them” and that the Earth Wind and Fire (Experience) singer had a falsetto “you could perform surgery with”.

Django Django (who would've been on the 'must see' list, with New Order, The XX (who were the in-car CD of choice for weeks), Orbital, and Buraka Som Sistema) said it was the only festival they've played all summer where it wasn't 'pissing down with rain'.

We didn't know when to expect MM back or whether he'd need picking up or anything. We didn't know any of this, because he's lost his phone. Again. I imagine the lost property at festivals is pretty phone heavy, and that they're not so easy to trace in the storage bins if their batteries have died. They've now got one of his lost phones. They're not collectors' items. Not rare enough. Anyway, he got off the IoW at about eight o'clock last night after queueing for the ferry for eight hours and got home in the wee small hours.

We've now got a part-share in an abandoned teepee they brought home. A big one. Sleeps six people.

“That's nice” I said “maybe we can go camping.”

“Apparently there's a big cock painted on it.” BLISS said.

“Oh. Maybe not then.”

Bookcases and shoes

Bookcases and shoes

Our old secretary loved those rubbish sayings. She provided the kind of secretarial support that involved typing documents under protest (don't like handwriting, don't like all capitals, dictation, that's better, for almost half an hour, then not more dictation) and handing them over so full of errors you had to allow plenty of time for correction, correction you had to do yourself, because she had red pen meltdown (took it all personal, bless) and returned the 'corrected' versions part-corrected and with new errors inserted, to keep you your toes and sap more valuable timeⁱ. She had to get all that work stuff out of the way in order to read the online Daily Mail and hone her white van man opinions. That's probably unfair to white van men. She'd be slung out of that club for subscribing to every populist idea goingⁱⁱ.

She said that if she wanted to know about a man, she would look at his shoes, and they would tell her all she needed to know. Needless to say, spit and polish was a good thing in her book.

My shoes say: “this bloke can't be arsed with shoesⁱⁱⁱ.”

Lets face it, at first, during formative years, blokes^iv, unless they're very odd indeed, don't need to take care of their shoes. You grow out of them too quickly. There'd be the trip to Clarkes and the grow-meter thing with the tape over the instep, sharp intakes of breath, a new pair of all purpose (school, family occasions, all other times when plimsols were deemed appropriate, that is, those occasions that fill small boys with dread) and the old pair thrown away. Then you'd outgrow those before ever having to polish them.

Then there was school. Far too busy times to polish shoes. Then blissful years, when I only had trainers and DMs^v. Eventually I ended up at fire brigade training school. We were issued shoes and two pairs of steel toecap rubber boots. We were told to polish one pair of boots and use the other for drills. “It's a wind-up” I said. “You don't polish rubber, that's just stupid. They're famous for wind-ups, this lot.” I didn't know that there was a hangover from days of leather boots (which were to return before I finished my service), and that, yes, we were expected to polish rubber. The shoes had to be super-shiny, too. Neither seemed any problem. Gary Champion, ex-Army bandsman, found shining shoes a soothing occupation and like chocolate. Shoes and Mars bar handed over, shiny shoes returned. The boots didn't go so well. We used 'Klear', designed to leave kitchen floor tiles shining and housewives proud. Great at first, but it cracked and crazed with wear, and went cloudy in the rain.

Then we moved from the Reigate training centre to Southwalk and I packed the wrong pair of shoes, rushing. Parade. Inspection. I did the best I could in a couple of minutes. Not good enough. The inspecting officer, behind me, tried to yell in my ear, but was vertically challenged and I was saved a perforated eardrum. He was clearly incensed by my in-shoe-shance^vi.

“WELTS” he bellowed.

“Whelks?...is this, like, seafood Tourette's?” I didn't know shoes had welts.

Then station life, and one station officer with a thing about polishing shoes. I never bothered with mine after training. This bothered him. I noticed. I began polishing my football boots whenever he was in the TV room (there were £1 fines for dirty boots on Saturday afternoons) wearing the scruffiest brigade shoes I could find. At one station the stairs had long, wide, straight strings either side, so when we had a shout (and it was a fantastic, busy station to work at) we would 'ski' down the strings, in a convoy. Usually someone would say “we're on a mission, from God”. This resulted in a whole watch with at least worn, and often worn-through leather on the outside of our shoes. I wounder what that said about us?

Colours nailed to the mast, it isn't shoes with me. Bookshelves. Record collections. Contents of the fridge. Newspaper of choice. I've a range of litmus tests, shoes isn't one of them.

Talking of fridge contents, Kiz's mate's got an all-singing, all-dancing beer fridge. He describes the actual fridge as the overspill facility, coming into play when there's no more space in the beer fridge.

i Spellcheck was partly to blame, and the Word software inability to add to the dictionaries. Yes, they may have red squiggles under them, but 'rooflight', 'sanitaryware', and 'loadbearing' are correct, and don't require separating into two words or hyphens.

ii At least The Sun is The Sun. The Daily Mail is a sub-Sun Sun for people who think they're way too good for The Sun. 

iii If they could talk, they'd be screaming “no, no, anyone but him” when I approached them in the shop.

iv Or girls. Patent leather means whatever that clingfilm stuff they apply renders polish redundant, and sandals, well, the leather's too narrow to polish, I'd imagine.

v With an emergency wedding, christening, interview pair of brogues kept in their box at the bottom of the wardrobe.

vi I find something extremely creepy about blokes wandering about paying such detailed attention to others' attire and appearance. Made to do that sort of thing, I think you should stroll about a bit, pretend to be impressed, and leave it at that. Really. Who cares?