CQ: Sainsbury’s Red-Hot-Deals: “BIKE HIRE ON BOURNEMOUTH SEAFRONT” (bring voucher, 2 for 1 offer ends 5 August)… Cycling is banned on the Prom 10h00 to 18h00, July and August…

10h22-BST Thursday 09 July 2009-CE

“Enjoy miles of car-free cycle routes starting from Bournemouth Pier” it says, and 01202 557007 or www.front-bike-hire.co.uk are the contacts.

OK, if you get there before 09h00, you will have time to cycle along to a nice part of the beach before 10h00. Then you will have to wait until 18h00 before you are allowed to cycle back.

Or, you could be thinking about cycling through the streets. That is what I do most of the time. But you will need a map.

It is true that the stretch of under-cliff twixt Bournemouth Pier and Boscombe Pier is a road. Both cars and bicycles are allowed at all times.

It is also true that the nice weather extends beyond August until half way through October, most years.

Nevertheless, I think the advertisement is misleading.

Folk might just as well go to Sandbanks by car (weekend parking on a nice day is doubly over-subscribed), or go there by 150 red bus from Bournemouth railway and bus station, or The Square, and hire a bike when you get to Millionaires Row (dual aspect properties).

One day, the seafront will have a far wider thoroughfare with distinct tracks for pedestrians, cycles, and cars. And the beach huts will be all of the fenced-off type, with proper pedestrian crossings.

Until then, the answer is:

Come and live here. Then you will know when and where to cycle.

But do not get a flat in Roumelia Lane, Boscombe, or anywhere near…

Do not buy a house or flat in the areas of mixed public-and-private housing, which are generally in the North of the conurbation… Avoid going out in the evening… Lock your doors and windows… Arm yourself with an Uzi…

In short, things are pretty much the same here as anywhere: sloppy management, silly adverts, weak authorities…

FIN 10h54

Shaheen Jafargholi sang for Michael Jackson… Who is going to be loving him? The same people as loved Tom Jones, for a start…

08h38-BST Thursday 09 July 2009-CE

I bought the Sun on Tuesday 7 July, just gone. SHAHEEN SINGS FOR JACKO was the headline with BGT STAR AT MEMORIAL above, and ‘Boy, 12, joins Wonder, Carey and Usher’ below.

Before I had time to yap about it, the Memorial was upon us, and I have covered the subject already. My posts of the past few days have been as ragged and disorderly as any sequence I have been guilty of in the past. I can blame the bluebottle invasion (total now about 100 over Friday 3 July to yesterday evening 8 July). But it may be the Michael Jackson sudden death.

It has the feel of the sort of swizz that you get when a soap is cancelled leaving various plot evolutions hung in mid happen. What was Michael going to say? Was he, in due course, going to admit to being sexually aroused by sweet 12 and 13 year old boys? Or was the issue going to drag on unresolved?

As to the star Shaheen, OF COURSE Michael was “a huge fan of his tribute”. Despite Shaheen’s being a manly boy, rapidly growing into robust adolescence, he is still a smoochy-poo to any fan of pubescent boys. He would have been soon discarded from favour as was Corey Feldman and all the toys of Michael.

I do not say persecute Michael (he is beyond the power of this Earth to judge and ridicule, in Marlon’s words, now anyway) I say only that the issue ought to be understood. When the short and curlies sprout, and the passion arises in the breast, at 12 or so, two options obtain:

1) society can deny the phenomenon and allow frustration to produce all kinds of perversion, pedophilia, sadism;

2) society can acknowledge the phenomenon, and accept it as natural and positive, and enable its healthy process, in other words, facilitate safe sex for the newly-functioning proto-adults.

I have watched very little of the X Factor, BGT, Opportunity Knocks type shows. But even I became aware of the run of talented young ones. Shaheen is terrific! I love his voice. It has the same defiant, potentially insolent, strong inflection as had Frankie Lymon’s voice.

Shaheen was going to be in the This Is It farewell concert tour with Michael. As to possibly being in Michael’s bed at some stage, I see Shaheen as a strong lad with attitude who would have easily found the right words to fend off such messing about.

I wonder what Tom Jones is thinking and saying about Shaheen. I have not heard.

Who’s Lovin’ You? has been a favourite song of mine for 35 years. I was delighted to hear it sung by Shaheen when I caught the BGT final, or semi-final, I do not know which, show. It made me think:

“Wow! Somebody else remembers that beautiful song, sung so sweetly by dear old Michael when he was a cute little popsy.”

The Sun reported Shaheen, soon after his flight with his mother to Los Angeles, as saying:

“Michael was a huge inspiration to me. I’m nervous, but I’m honoured and privileged to have been invited to perform here.”

Shaheen Jafargholi is already the man.

FIN 09h17

PS

Did this post live, tap-by-tap on the keyboard, rather than writing a doc and then selecting text for posting. No bluebottles this morning. No doubt when I come back from shopping, two or three will have emerged from somewhere. The next plague that I would like to see would be the slaying of the fourth-born, narrowly focussed down to one only: me. Neat it would be. A zap from on high, what a great way to go! Too bad it is all a fairy story.

CQ: Boscombe area of Bournemouth is back in the news as young professional man is stabbed (by fund-raising junkie I guess) on his way home, via Roumelia Lane, to his flat in the small hours…

06h22-BST Thursday 09 July 2009-CE

I cycle through Roumelia Lane, occasionally, in the daytime, en route from downtown Bournemouth to Sainsbury’s supermarket in Boscombe. The route minimises distance, inclines, and traffic. The owner of a bar that backs onto Roumelia Lane in Boscombe said to a reporter for the Daily Echo of Wednesday 8 July 2009:

“There’s a number of active and very obvious drug dealers around, which is only going to encourage people who want that sort of thing to come to the area. We should get them out…”

I agree, but where should they go to? They should go to State-Regulated shops where they can buy the product they desire cheaply, of unadulterated quality, and of predictable strength.

At the drug shop, posters, plus or minus a video screen or screens, would give the facts (as distinct from the prejudiced lies of self-righteous and hysterical Prohibition fanatics) about the products, with the purpose of getting the user off the junk which the pusher got him or her onto when he or she was a kid.

The policy of blanket Prohibition has presided over a calamity. The violent, ruthless element of the criminal class were stimulated to take over the supply of mind-altering substances.

In USA in 1922, the Volstead approach was put into effect in the Prohibition of alcohol. Police were corrupted. People died from drinking adulterated product. Criminals became millionaires.

From the 1960s, the same approach has been applied to various other mind-altering substances derived from herbs that our ancestors discovered. The alternative would have been to bring the supply of the frowned-upon substances under a similar, but improved, government regulation as alcohol and nicotine, with the purpose of:

1) keeping criminals out of the trade;
2) keeping the police out of the trade;
3) keeping the products as harmless as possible;
4) ensuring the users knew the dangers.

This would involve a ban on:

1) brand names;
2) glamorous packaging;
3) advertising;
4) open display.

The policy of Prohibition, which has been enthusiastically praised and violently pursued, as if it were the product of the sick mind of a Hitler or a Mao, has, to use polite understatement, resulted in things turning out not necessarily entirely for the better.

Or, to use the language even the most polite of us learn when we are exposed to low-life trash at school, at work, or on TV, Prohibition has UTTERLY FUCKED UP. It has brought us:

1) thugs in charge of the streets,
2) gang warfare;
3) police corruption;
4) narco-states;
5) product adulteration;
6) prisons that process mere fools into violent predators;
7) violent intimidation of respectable children, at school and on the streets, forcing them to try the stuff and become addicted.

The answer we get from the Prohibition lobby is to give the situation more of the same, to ratchet up the process, to enact more and worse State violence. I am happy for fools to continue to contrive a Hell on Earth for THEMSELVES via Prohibition, but they make it for every new-born innocent baby too.

The criminal class is taking power. Western Democracy is dying. All because of the rule of the fool. And certain gentlemen of a certain faith are delighted to seize upon and exploit our own stupid Western counter-productive Prohibition against us. Good intent is not all you need in this life. You need the ability to read reality, and to reject self-righteous principle in favour of pragmatic necessity.

FIN 07h51

CQ: Shaheen was fine, so was Paris… I hope they were introduced, for the sake of next generation solidarity… Stray thoughts from amazing yesterday… CNN (USA) was best…

07h13-BST Wednesday 08 July 2009-CE

Debbie Rowe was the one who insisted, she is reported to have said, that the kids’ faces be covered against paparazzi. So we can make of that what we will. Mike originally had to cover his face because of his nose injury. Then came the plastic surgery. All except the first couple of operations were unnecessary and sadly counter-productive.

It is true that Michael’s sensitive style (the Jock jerks would say ‘cissy’ style) would have been ill-matched, so far as our common emotional perceptions go, if it had remained coupled with the ugly face of his sadistic father. But, in time, on Michael, that face would have been accepted as noble. We might have used the term ‘gentle giant’. But that depends upon his having beaten his pederast kick.

I loved the way Debbie reacted when the scrum jostled her:

“Do not TOUCH me!”

The TV reporter asked her something like:

“Are you prepared to fight for the children?”

She came back:

“Are you prepared to get your ass kicked? Do not TOUCH me!”

Great!

Tony Paul’s show from Los Angeles, for Radio Caroline, was half way through when I awoke until 06h55 this morning. I had gotten about half a dozen bluebottles, by the way, appearing from curtain crevices, or from behind furniture, last evening.

Tony Paul says it very hot in LA, and he jumped in his pool before doing the show. He is dripping, but he is no drip. “He lives here so you don’t have to” his jingle says. Jammy so-and-so! Aka hard-working ambitious successful man! Yes, I am jealous.

Robert Nesbit for Sky News is reporting, through breaking-up and burbling audio that we can blame on the Free-View digital signal weakness (unless you select BBC -they have snaffled the good end of the band). Robert tells us that people are saying that Paris ought not to have been subjected to or allowed to speak. What nonsense! Paris was word perfect!

In fact, Paris BEGAN perfectly well. But then her uncles and aunts STOPPED her. They fiddled with her microphone and said “Speak up”. The mic was just fine! We could hear her loud and clear! They fiddled with her hair and touched her neck. I do not blame them so much as encourage them not to fuss in future. It can be difficult to hold back, and let a young person find her way, but we HAVE to.

Back to BBC News on the Free-View… PERFECT picture and audio. Well! Fancy that! Well! Whaddya know? Well! Fancy that! Silly old Sky having to make do with the bad end of the band!

Spelling and Grammar suggests Shady, Haddam, Shoddy, Wanda, Hardy, and Wadded in place of whaddya.

BBC News says we single people who go on vacation alone may not have to pay the single supplement anymore. I do quite know what they are referring to but I expect we are talking about the discount that is often involved for couples, certainly for children. It does not bother me. If I am disadvantaged by being single, it is nobody’s fault but mine.

Now Paul is going on about the “whole Michael Jackson thing” and the conspiracy theorist wankers making a big deal out of seven. Boring! So Michael Jackson’s penis was 7 centimetres, or 7 inches, or something, long? No I made that bit up. Freudian slop. Tony’s punch line is that a spokesperson says Michael Jackson left Los Angeles police with a seven figure bill. Ha-ha. Yes, very good.

For three hours yesterday, planet Earth needed only one TV channel. So many people were tuned to the AEG feed. BBC would have loved to snaffle the whole thing. And they accuse Murdoch of being greedy and monopolistic!

I swear that some of the shriekers in the Staples Center audience expected Michael to come forth if they shrieked often enough. It provided a disruptive and inappropriate element of the proceedings for me. Maybe I will be accused of the same unsuitable mixing as I openly discuss Michael’s obsession with pretty pubescent boys. I insist we must face the subject squarely and admit how it happens.

Marlon was the best dancer in the J5 days. His legs were graceful and fluid. He looked natural. Michael’s legs were jerky. He looked more contrived, but still sexy of course. Yesterday, Marlon said that Michael was judged and ridiculed by the media without mercy. “Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone.”

I did not surf between news channels once I saw that CNN, the original, were doing the best job. I just monitored my two screens, dedicated respectively to the platforms of Free-View and Eurobird/Sky.

I miss my six-screen days when I watched the attacks on London by certain gentlemen, on 7 July 2005, on five platforms (two Sky boxes). But it is nobody’s fault but my own. And while I suffer from shortage of screens, a billion or two suffer from almost no food, dirty water, flies everywhere, and religious indoctrination.

CNN stayed with the play-out, and caught the prayer. BBC jumped in as soon as they could as if they had something more important to do. What a contrast on my two screens! Two pretentious-looking BBC poseurs on my screen one. The unhurried winding down of the extremely moving event on CNN USA had grace and dignity. But as soon as CNN International took back control, cold again.

FIN 08h43
EDITED Thursday 09 July 2009

CQ: Michael Jackson Memorial Service via AEG Live LLC from Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles was the feed watched by everybody who had three hours to spare on planet Earth tonight…

20h59-BST Tuesday 07 July 2009-CE

Just had to quit CNN International. They WERE showing CNN USA with coverage of the Memorial Service for Michael Jackson. Now they have quit. I checked Fox News Channel but they were back on Czars. So I tried Sky News and they are still reviewing. Here are the notes I wrote during the Memorial…

I loved Berry Gordy’s piece. The shot of the brothers, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and I guess Randy, was handsome. Us pink guys are deep down inside, subconsciously, envious of that animal dignity of Africa.

I do not mind if Hollywood, and the Left-wing media generally, praise what is praise-worthy of what Michael Jackson achieved (songs of serious content, and his charity work) and ignore the falling short, the imperfection. We all need help.

Sadly, despite the dignity of most of the audience, some ego-trippers insisted upon screeching out inane phrases as if they were revelationary. And that damn fool “Woo!” pisses me off maximum.

There were artists I knew, such as Maria Carey, Stevie Wonder, and ones I did not know. Wonderful work.

I loved the four-way split screen showing Harlem, Times Square, Gary Indiana, and the First AME Church of Los Angeles. I also loved the periodic inserts from places such as Atlanta, and Neverland Ranch. These sample shots of the many millions in the TV audience make the atmosphere. Super device.

The knockers in the tabloid type media know only the Wacko Jacko of whom they speak. So for them the Memorial was more saccharine and slush. Boy do they need to check out the moron in the mirror! The old mote and beam routine is a lesson too. As for me, it is OK to slag-off the Beeb and other crooks because I speak sooth, and I do not pretend to be perfect.

I loved the way the CNN logo bore the picture of Michael Jackson at 13, alternating with a later shot. The whole media have been reporting the story as kid making it to a career.

I never anticipated that everyone else remembered the sweet boy. I thought they had all forgotten him. I thought they knew only the weird post-Pepsi walking-wounded character.

Al Sharpton was amazing and inspirational. If only he would join us non-theists he would be so useful in preaching the truth about the absence of a guy in the sky. To the next generation he said:

There was “Nothing strange about your Dad. It was strange what he had to deal with.”

Dear old Jermaine, who looked so sensational, in the magazines such as Oh Boy, at age 16, with his shirt off, transposed the words “gladness” and “sadness” in the song ‘Smile’ from the Charlie Chaplin movie [the name of which I forget].

Joseph’s sadism and Michael’s lust spoiled the story. But the sin of the father came before the sin of the son.

I loved it whenever we were shown a full screen picture of dear old Michael as a kid.

The sequence of references to the song ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’ made a most entertaining feature. First Berry Gordy told us that the song was written by Smokey Robinson, adding the story about 10-year-old Michael’s singing it better than its writer.

Then the big screen showed us gorgeous little Michael, with his lovely, soft-brown-sugar, smoochy-pie face, sang part of the song. ‘I’ll Be There’ and ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’ are my two fave J5 songs.

Then Smokey himself told the same story, filled out with his angle.

The, bless me, if the young gentleman from Swansea, who sang the same song in Britain’s Got Talent and did very well, sang it in full. He could not make the early high note, which Michael held for seconds. But he made the high note at the very end. His voice is changing fast of course.

His name is Shaheen Jafargholi, with roots in Persia, and neither Berry Gordy nor Larry King knew who he was. Mister Jafargholi forgot, I guess, to bow to the applauding audience. Hardly surprising. I would have forgotten the name of Michael Jackson if it had been me, let alone the words of the song. I would have said “Excuse me mate, what’s the big box over there?”

I loved seeing ‘We Are The World’ again, with all the family, including the children, some of whom appeared to catching up on sustenance. Shaheen was in there. An extra gang of kids came in from somewhere.

FIN 22h15

CQ: Celebration of the life and work of Michael Jackson from Staples Center, in Los Angeles…

18h11-BST Tuesday 07 July 2009-CE

Been watching the Michael events for a few hours now. I looked at map of Los Angeles included in the Automobile Association guide. From Encino, I guess the 18-vehicle motorcade made its way to the Ventura Freeway and onto Forest Lawn Drive. After the service in the Jehovah’s Witness tradition, they seemed to go down 5 to Harbour Freeway, off which they turned into Olympic Blvd.

I have watched E! and Fox News Channel; as well as Sky News, on my Eurobird Sky box whilst listening to the sound. BBC News silently stares from my Free View set, occasionally pixilating. I keep it there for reference.

I am not even bothering to go to the internet. It is bound to be choked up, except for people with very powerful kit. I am writing this on a Word document for pasting to a New Post on my blog later.

Now that Michael Jackson is dead, one can look at his life with relief that he cannot embarrass himself any longer.

I have no doubt that, even if he did play hand-shandy with his pubescent boy mates, he was gentle. But it is not on. The deal is you just say “no”. Sure, boy at 12 and a half mature into perfect peaches. They go through until 13 and a half, yummy for a year. So what? This show is for girls. Creepy older guys have to keep their ass under control.

Nice enough music… Might as well watch… I expect a number of previously straight-forward folk will suddenly get all religious tonight, what with “We are going to see the King, Hallelujah!”

I recall Journey Into Space on BBC Light Programme, the science fiction serials by Charles Chiltern As the captive Earth guys returned from Mars, in the invader’s ship, they tuned to TV all around Earth. The stations were shut down. They had received the warning. The Martian bad guy would not be able to hypnotise the people of Earth after all.

I remember in Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, in Eagle comic, the people of Crytos, and indeed of London, tended to have jumbo screens in the public places. I did not believe any of this would happen. But Apollo was telecast, Earth-wide, to prove me wrong.

Now, after many other world-audience events have received coverage around the planet, here is Michael’s show from Los Angeles. It is marvellous to hear the audience fall silent, in between applause. So far, the whole thing is dignified. How super!

At 09h20 today lo and behold another dratted bluebottle. Several more through the morning. When I opened the bedroom window ready for the repair men, I found it worked OK. I have cannot figure what happened exactly. The stay is bent but it works. Oh well…

FIN 18h46

Daniel as Harry, A N Wilson as Paul fan, two Welsh ladies who say “Oh my God!” not “Ni”… Michael is laid to rest today…

06h15-BST Tuesday 07 July 2009

Morning has broken. It is lying around in bits. But after tea for two, that is two mugs of the magic stuff, both for me, I am together. I expect it is still raining outside. One can hear the sizzle of the car tyres on the road outside. But the point I wanted to make was that I see not one bluebottle.

Meantime, I have watched various bits of TV. One is Daniel at 20, interviewed on Sky News, still playing Harry, and, given the shots of the lad at eleven years of age, I realise that he is an example of the morph type that stays boyish in appearance into manhood, bless him. He reminds me, in that regard, of Wil Wheaton, who had more parts than Dan, including Gordie The Luck and Wesley The Crush.

A N Wilson in Daily Mail for Tuesday 30 June 2009 reported on the bits of carbon dated bones from a hole, in a crypt, in a place of bullshit, in Rome. The idea is that these might belong to Saul of Tarsus, the mass murderer who had multiple citizenship and later called himself Paul. He spread the vile salvation-through-suffering creed, pinning saviour status on a simple Love and Peace guru.

I was 11, at Saint Paul’s Church of England Primary School, when Mister Santon (whom I name because he must be passed away by now, so cannot be tainted by association with me) taught seventh grade the subject of Bookbinding. Encouraged by my eldest sibling, I said I was dedicating the book to Paul The Apostle. Santo kindly scribed the title on the cover. I never touched it again.

Soon, baby, soon, I must hie me to the shops and the bank, before the window men arrive around noon, baby, noon, to mend the window. A N W:

“The fact that today billions of non-Jews know the Psalms, or the story of Abraham and Isaac, or the story of King David, or the words of the Prophets -all this is down to Saint Paul…”

Ten years after I was 11, I was 21. I then encountered the Ep E Fanny, a distant cousin of dear old Short Fat Fanny, bless her heart, poor soul, as I walked down Maryvale Road, In Bourneville. The blue sky with little fluffy white clouds caught my attention. The words of a chap called John (who was a Communist, but a very nice one) muttered in my mind. “No, there isn‘t.”

The previous evening, in U-Block 6, I had said that “There must be SOMETHING there.” But, of course, there is not. No fantastic guy in the sky. Just reality, matter/energy and unanswered questions about origin…

Sky News just ran the two Welsh ladies who were given the two Staples Center tickets. It is most interesting to compare the actual wording of the event with the lady‘s recollection. They looked like they were at work in some fast food place. But it was some black souvenir tee-shirts and white Michael trilby hats. Good on the bloke who won the tickets and gave them to Sky to find deserving recipients! Good for Sky News, too…

FIN 07h24

PS 07h34

The recyc collection just took place. The garbage collection was earlier. On each occasion, I make it my biz to hop out of the house and put the bins back off the sidewalk by the pedestrian crossing which is not far away. The mums and children need a clear space. So-long to about 60 sqashed bluebottles, in tissues, in the bin.

CQ: Bluebottle! Damn! Beachcomber of Daily Express is the same guy as when I was a kid! The Sun slags BBC indulgence… A N Wilson, Daily Mail, slags whingeing Brits…

21h20-BST Monday 06 July 2009-CE

21h15! Suddenly, out of nowhere, a damn blue-bottle zooms across the room! I grabbed the folded newspaper off the recycles pile in the kitchen and saw the critter on the ceiling. I grabbed the stepladder and swatted the filthy, vile excrescence.

And I had thought the problem was over. I had all the internal doors open. If I ever get a whole bunch, like last Friday, I shall open my flat door and quietly chase the buggers out into the hallway. We will see who is nuts. I may move my bed back into the living room tonight, and shut the bedroom door.

Whilst I am on here, I will catch up with stuff I have on my pile of clips. I had been assuming that the Daily Express ‘Beachcomber’ could not be the same one that I saw in the paper when I was a kid. But on Friday 26 June 2009, I learned the truth! The sub headline says “92 years old and still serving up a treat” Wow! But now I understand the humour. It was my mother’s daily. I never used to get the allusions.

The Sun editorial for Friday 26 June 2009 said: “When the wealth-generating private sector is crippled, the feather-bedded BBC should not indulge itself with five-star hotels or by showering goodies on their favourite luvvies. Many people think the licence fee -a compulsory TV tax- should go. Unacceptable abuses of the licence fee strengthen that case.” Call it ‘extortion racket’ fee, Sun scribe.

A N Wilson, Daily Mail, Friday 26 June 2009, comments on stress, which is supposed to be a big deal these3 days:

“…stress, which I suggest might more properly be called ’self-pity’, cannot be blamed on anyone but ourselves…

“…In World War 2, many people in Britain saw a nightly rain of fire descend on homes and places of work. Whole streets were destroyed, with property, livelihoods and lives wiped out.

“Did they call for counsellors and ask for therapy? Did they say that the air-raids were increasing their stress-levels? Of course not…

“…We just need to pull ourselves together, count our blessings and stop behaving like babies…”

FIN 21h50

CQ: Information bar on Sky always lags behind… Conan is Tonight Show mouth now… Blue tailed flies all gone… Obama and Medvedev make a start… China doing a good job in their west…

17h19-BST Monday 06 July 2009-CE

Electronic Program Guide on my Sky Digital box, and the Information Bar, are still billing Leno as the presenter of the Tonight Show, which O’Brien is now doing from Los Angeles.

When I had opened the bedroom door this morning (having slept in the living room) there were only two bluebottles left. I swatted them, and I returned all the furniture to its proper places.

I realise that the bluebottles that appeared all day yesterday, in ones and occasionally twos, must have been crawling under the bedroom door, even though I tried to block the space. The window men are coming tomorrow lunchtime to fix the bent stay on the bedroom window. This will enable me to open the dratted thing if ever there is another invasion of bluebottles.

I just watched Obama and Medvedev in Moscow. I have been pee-ed off, since 1992, with the USA not acknowledging that Russian Federation became good guys when all those statues of Lenin were pulled down. As to the Party/Mafia who bought state enterprises for peanuts, we have those too: Madoff and the rest. Our rulers have been sickening in their hypocrisy.

I am still waiting for an apology from the Central Intelligence Agency of USA in regard to their training of certain gentlemen who were then, and are still now, the enemy. The medieval tribes bosses were bad enough when we Brits fought them. The modern day gangsters add cyber technology to misogyny and murder.

China is also battling in its western province against the same maniacs, who masquerade as freedom fighters, but intend to impose a tyranny as vile as that of Mao and his Red Guards. At least BBC News said that China regards them as terrorists [of the same internationally-operating group as are attacking the West, only the BBC named names which I cannot afford to do].

FIN 17h59

GP: African Party, Plymouth, UK… British Telecom (BT) were once the We-Know-Best General Post Office Telephone Service, and now they are getting it in the mighty neck…

Saturday 4 July 2009

Warm and sunny all day here. Weather next week should be cooler. Went to African party here in Plymouth today, great music and food but the house was jam packed with guests. I think everyone had a good time.

Nice to see BT lost about £130 million in the past year. Now they want to lay off staff and make pay cuts. Great! How I remember so well those c*ck suckers holding a gun to everyone’s head in the sixties and seventies, doing what they f*cking liked and ripping customers off month after month. How the mighty fall! LOVE IT! All we need to do now is sort out the Beeb…

Kool Geezer

CQ: Neverland needs a ban on cars and a rail link from the highway… Memories are over-rated, made of a mixture of good and bad…

08h06-BST Monday 06 July 2009-CE

Neverland suffers from having neighbours from:

“Hell, no! We won’t go for tourists here!”

The excuse they make about access, is piffle. How much is it going to cost for a cheap little one-line railway from the main highway a few kilometres into the site? One year’s takings I expect. It will pay for itself in no time. By all means leave the cars and coaches at the highway stop.

Jo Christie-Smith was the newspapers reviewer just now on Sky News. She is an LDP person. I was a member of the Liberal Democrat Party for a long time. I supported them, on electoral reform, for even longer. But they have gotten so loony-Left that I cannot stomach them any more. In any case, my fine-tuned 51/49 plan is better than blanket proportional representation.

An experiment on rats, where old age memory loss was fended off by consumption of coffee, was discussed. I would LOVE to lose my memory of all the stupid, crass, embarrassing things that I have done in my life. Instead, I tend to forget things I would like to remember, and remember things I would like to forget. In fact, we live longer these days so old age memory loss is more apparent.

Those folk who have lived through hideous wartime experiences such as starvation, bombing, battle, occupation, imprisonment, and torture, hate their damnable good memory, with all its crystal-clear images and emotions, I confidently expect. Memory is like life itself. It has no intrinsic merit. Its merit depends upon its content.

FIN 08h31

CQ: TMZ dot com team did a good job in breaking the hospitalisation and death of Michael Jackson, but computer technology itself showed its weaknesses again…

06h41-BST Saturday 27 June 2009-CE

I was one of the millions of people unable to get on Internet Explorer, or use my own desktop shortcuts to my email or blog, when Fox News Channel showed that tmz dot com was reporting that Michael Jackson had been taken to hospital. The site actually switched itself off, or whatever these things do.

As far as I was concerned, the stupid machine had broken down again. It was deliberately messing me about for some reason. My attitude is that if the system EVER works, then it should ALWAYS work. If it fails to work, then I am being got at.

I know this is unlikely. I am so unimportant that life, the universe, or something, is hardly going to pull out all the stops, or even just one of them, to bug me. But that is the psychological effect. I feel a desire to smash the silly machine. But it cost me half a grand. So I have to stay my hand. I am one of a large band. All across the land.

MSN News screen said later that the news of The death of Michael Jackson sparked:

“…a massive surge in online traffic around the globe as millions of people logged on to find out more…

“It was the American site www.tmz.com that broke the news reporting it was ‘looking bad’ for the star…

“…So many people wanted to verify early reports of his death that the computers running Google’s news section interpreted the ‘Michael Jackson’ requests as an automated attack for about half an hour…”

How much longer do the geeks (whom I admire) need to fix up the internet so that it actually works ALL THE TIME? “Interpreted the flood of requests as an automated attack”. What kind of set up is that? Why did it take half an hour for the machine to check up?

MSN News also mentioned the crowd gathering on Hollywood Boulevard at the sidewalk star named for Michael Jackson, but:

“…There was but one problem: they had picked the wrong star.
The Michael Jackson whose career was celebrated by the brass and marble monument where the mini-shrine sprang up was in fact the King of Pops’ namesake: a DJ for local radio station KABC, who retired last year.

“Jackson’s real Walk of Fame star was covered over by scaffolding erected by the organisers of Thursday night’s premiere of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, Brüno…

“…At UCLA Medical Centre, where Jackson died, a media circus remained throughout yesterday. Fans, many of them carrying banners or memorabilia, converged on the hospital as soon as reports began circulating that the singer had been rushed there.

“So did the world’s media. At one point, no fewer than eight rolling news helicopters were circling the skies above the building.

“More crowds gathered at the Jacksons’ family home in Encino, and at the rented Holmby Hills Mansion where the singer was taken ill (a tour bus had been passing when he was loaded into the ambulance there on Thursday).

“Flowers were left at the gates of Neverland, the singer’s old country pile…

“…In Harlem, a small makeshift shrine to the singer sat outside the Apollo Theatre where he first performed at the age of nine, as a member of the Jackson 5…

“…For residents of Gary, Indiana, Jackson’s death meant the loss of the city’s most famous native son. Hundreds of people gathered and left tributes outside the squat white house where he was born…

“…The seventh of nine children, Michael Jackson spent all his early childhood in Gary. He was already 11 years old and a national sensation when the family left the city…”

I have finally discovered that if I check the spelling and grammar on a piece I am writing, then the apostrophes and inverted commas operate properly: “ ” and ‘ ’ with curves, instead of straight marks. What kind of a silly software decision is that?

“When the user presses the upper-case 2, such-and such. But if he or she has been to the spell checker, make the marks so-and-so…”

That last bluebottle which I spotted last evening is either still hiding, or it was indeed hit by my folded newspaper, (Daily Star 29 June pp 11-26 and 34-46) but bounced off into the shadows. I still have not opened the bedroom door. I shall leave it until Dave Wells’ men come to see.

FIN 06h52-BST Sunday 05 July 2009-CE

CQ: Bluebottles problem still lingering…

21h47-BST Saturday 04 July 2009-CE

This morning I reported the problem to the lady at Dave Wells and said it was necessary to check whether anything had died.

After I had carried on from there and done my shopping, at Asda, I came home and put my bike away in the bedroom. There were about a dozen, all on the windows and net curtain.

I got my hanging rail and small chest of drawers out of the bedroom, the bed was already out on Friday evening.

I actually asked the guy in the next float if he had had a more than usual number of bluebottles in his room. He said no.

I then phone Maintenance at Dave Wells and told them the next flat had no problem, and I had gotten my stuff out of the bedroom, and they need not bother with the problem until the weekend was over.

A few bluebottles have appeared in my front room, one by one during the evening. I have swatted dead all except one, that just got away and hid.

About 20h30 (I think) two cops came and rang my bell. They had had a phone call about an old guy walked into the house, confused. And my flat number had been cited by the caller.

I told them I had not called. They went away.

I have left the bedroom door shut for hours now. I will not check it until Monday, or when the maintenance men come, whichever is the later.

FIN 22h04

CQ: Asda on Vodafone… Tesco on O2… Telstar on its long and winding way… Armada Way in Plymouth looks like Dan Dare land… With friends like computers, nobody needs wild dogs…

10h04-BST Saturday 04 July 2009-CE

Just swatted another two bluebottles. They are getting in somewhere. I suspect the holes around the plumbing pipes coming through the floor.

My mate in Devon, an expert on cell phones, says:

“I was just checking out the ASDA and TESCO Mobile websites and I noticed that TESCO has dropped their price to match ASDA. They are both level pegging at 4p per text and 8p per min to call. Nothing like competition to keep prices down.

“I still think ASDA is the best option as they piggyback on the Vodafone network and Voda is very strong. Being on ASDA is the same as being on Voda in terms of performance but saving the consumer about 65% in network charges.

“TESCO is on O2. They are ok (I have used O2 in the past) However I did not think that their signal had the same quality as Voda in overall performance.

“I have not seen the film TELSTAR here in Plym. I checked VUE and REEL listings but nothing. Yesterday I checked the Art Centre Cinema listings for July/August but nothing there. I think it will come to the Arts Centre later in the year. I will probably buy the DVD, It’s the same old story being stuck out in the provinces, You have to be in or around London in order to see everything.

The centre of Plymouth is like being at the Tennis in SW19. Loads of people enjoying the Big Screen sitting around drinking and eating in the Sub Tropical weather. Going into the City Centre in the Sixties one would never have seen so many people on a weekday. Don’t you remember? We all had JOBS!!!!!”

Meanwhile, my mate in Thailand has been having a problem with his theme. It simply popped away. He has shoved another in its place. He likes the new one better. On another issue he says:

“…And a rogue company messed up a transaction I was doing with EBay and although the money has been refunded to my “cyber account”, it could take WEEKS to REGISTER there (it only takes an ATTO-SECOND to go OUT) – but that’s another issue.

“Cy, it all adds up to my life-long conviction that computers are a NUISANCE!!! Granted, they can be a fine servant, but when they turn and bite you in the ARSE…”

I am still getting dry after a nice bath. These days, I only have a bath every three days. None of the bluebottles were trying to settle on me, yesterday, as I waved the vacuum cleaner hose around. So I evidently do not smell rotten enough. It is such a relief to know.

FIN 10h17

PS Damn! There’s another bluebottle bastard!

CQ: Invasion of blue-bottles… I have deaded them…

21h59-BST Friday 03 July 2009-CE

Some time after my return from my bus ride, and after finishing the previous blog, I noticed a blue bottle (blue-tailed fly?) in my living room. I thought it must have come through the door as I came home. I swatted it and relaxed. Some time later there was another one. Then I saw it was two. I forget why I went into the bedroom (until recently the spare room) but I found a swarm of about 30 of the disgusting things.

I Hoovered most of them off the curtain and the window frame, then began swatting. Obviously something, a pigeon or a rat, had died in the solem, or in the floor/ceiling space. I threw the vacuum cleaner dirt bag into the garbage outside. For the next few hours flies kept popping up in ones and twos. I have blocked all the air vents and fan ducts and moved the bed into the front room.

I have seen none of the critters for the last two or three hours. I am watching Year of Hell, the Star Trek Voyager episode. It is time for 7 of 9 to make her classic remark…

It is offensive. Fortunately taste is irrelevant.

I love that line!

FIN 22h12

CQ: James May is a spaceflight fan but he does not speak in hushed tones of reverance…

18h33-BST Friday 03 July 2009-CE

I have tried to watch all the recent documentaries celebrating 40 years since Apollo 11. But they are not always accurate enough for me. James May delivers a lot of his commentary in a jokey fashion that I find unacceptable. He is semi-mocking. He does not make things clear.

He could have been better about the flag waving in the exhaust fumes. He could have been better in regard to the New York Times getting it wrong about vacuum precluding rocket engines working. In fact, they work better. The thrust is more efficient.

Driving a lunar rover on the road on Earth, which he did for one shot of the program, is pointless. The lunar rovers had torus-shaped wire mesh wheels, not great heavy rubber tyres.

The thing most often un-mentioned, as by James May, is which camera is being used for which shot. The clear colour movie footage was 16mm film brought back to Earth before being developed. We see some of it taken at 2 frames per second,played back at 18 and therefore speeded up. We see some taken at 18 and shown at 18.

The fuzzy monochrome moving footage came down via wire mesh dish opened up on the lunar surface and shown live on TV around the world, as well as being recorded direct off-feed in Australia.

FIN 18h48

CQ: Stupid snake lovers… Jack Mills was a real working-class hero… Robin Hood’s son hates greenery… Michael Jackson yelled… Denis Delve looked after his gold watch but…

14h21-BST Friday 03 July 2009-CE

“Our stupid snake got out in the middle of the night and strangled the baby” whined Charles Darnell (32), the very stupid pet-lover of Oxford, Florida.

The even more stupid reptile expert said that the Burmese python “may have felt threatened or thought the [2 year old] girl was food”.

Since there are many people equally stupid as Charles Darnell, who keep dangerous critters and think them to be smoochy poo members of the happy family, I suggest we seek them out and hang them slowly. As they strangle, they will have a revelation: Nature is not a bowl of cherries. It is a crock of shit. Humans have to rise above nature, not wallow in it.

Poole Bay’s golden sands and leafy streets brings a lot of thieves with their new-gotten gains down here for the life of leisure. Daily Echo today recounts some Great Train Robbery details. Many boys wanted to be an engine driver (locomotive engineer) when they grew up. Jack Mills at least got to be a Train Guard. He was thumped with an iron bar in the robbery and never recovered.

I have seen a couple of minutes of the BBC fiction serial Robin Hood. It is now killed off, with the death of Robin Hood himself. Anytime they decide to revive it, they can have a young bastard come looking for his long longed-for daddy, only to find he has just died. The young blood, Herbert Hood, known to his mates as ‘Spud’ can take over the cause of Rocking Robin.

He can forget the grotty green-wood and take it to The Smoke. Much more plot potential lies in wait in the streets of London. The alleged free citizens, out of Feudalism but no less downtrodden, can be saving servant girls and horses from abuse and over work. They can be putting on shows, with orphan kids saved from priests and their lies. Bit of knees-up and hokey-kokey…

Paul Routledge in Daily Mirror today calls Michael Jackson’s performance childish and over stylised. Sadly, I have to agree, if we are talking about his last 30 years. However, Paul goes on:

“But the grief over his untimely death is genuine and impressive. That said, the hype over his musical contribution is over the top, typically American and quintessentially Hollywood. And false…

“…The three great singers of the second half of the 20th century were Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Sinatra had it for passion, Presley for raw power and Lennon for originality…

“…all three were essentially balladeers. They sang songs of love and loss that belong firmly in the Romantic cultural tradition. And you can sing along with them, because you can hear and understand the words…

“Jackson’s high pitched yelling just wasn’t in the same class…”

Geoffrey Lakeman reports in the Mirror that an unknown thief took a gold watch off Denis Delve’s casket. The 82 year old veteran of World War 2 (RAF) was left his medals and a book of poems. All these were to be presented to his grandchildren. Can you believe anyone could be so stupid as to expect that such goodies would not be nicked? Junk cost money you know (under Prohibition).

It was a dull start to the day so I left the bicycle at home and caught a couple of buses for The Square. As I stepped off, I beheld the red 50 for Swanage about to take off. On impulse, I hopped aboard. It was open top and I sat upstairs, port-side. Along The Avenue, some of us got swatted by some twigs, rapidly grown since last trimmed. It was most amusing.

As we approached the Sandbanks Ferry, the sky was no lighter. I dropped the idea of going to Swanage and popped in the Haven Ferry Shop for a nice pork pie. Standing at the bus-stop a few metres away from the site of Aunt Mimi’s bungalow, where John, and/or son Julian, may, or may not, have done the boogaloo, we waited for the red 52 for Poole to roll up.

At Poole Bus Station, I bought today’s Daily Echo and two cakes for £1. I jumped on the yellow 26 and tried to recall when I ever did that ride before. Getting off at Winton Banks, I decided I could not wait for a cup of coffee, and I slid into the Rhapsody. A yummy regular filter, once £1, was still only £1.20p, despite two years of price rises and tough times for the catering and retail industries.

Yellow 5 got me to the Landsdowne, and yellow 2 got me home. So now I have to write up the stories that took my eye in the Echo, and in the Daily Mirror which I also bought… (See above)

FIN 15h38

CQ: Cyclists who speed on Bournemouth/Poole sea front make parents feel violent… As a considerate cyclist, and given human nature, I say only a blanket ban is practicable… Kids come first…

07h22-BST Friday 03 July 2009

Cycling never used to be permitted along the pedestrian promenade at the foot of the cliffs in Bournemouth and Poole. Then, the green agenda dictated that cycling was righteous and driving cars was a sin. Commuting along the prom on a bike was supposed to save the planet. The prom is flat. It is easy to cycle from Bournemouth to Poole (until you get to Sunset Hill, that is). I simply enjoy the ride.

But the worst thing is that some few cyclists are vile, selfish, scum. A 9 year old girl was washing her bucket and spade at a tap on the prom a couple of weeks ago when a speeding scumbag hit her. She flew over his handlebars, suffering cuts and bruises. I saw a small girl a couple of weeks before that lying unconscious. She had been hit by two boys who gaily proceeded.

During July and August, cycling is banned on the prom from 10h00 to 18h00. I rode to Sandbanks Ferry, yesterday, via the streets, which is all easy enough, if you are fit. The return ride is similarly easy for the fit, except for the two unpleasant hills of Chaddesley Glen. I made it up them OK, as I always do, so far. An old guy, slightly younger than me, with a rake was: “Keep going! Keep going!”

The Daily Echo of Bournemouth is filled with letters and news items about the pros and cons of cycling on the prom. A rogue cyclist, spotted speeding Thursday 25 June, was blocked further along, and stopped for a polite warning. But, as could be expected, the speeder turned out to be a nasty, stroppy, bolshie scumbag and had to arrested by the police.

The 10 miles per hour limit in the prom is too slow for most stretches, and too fast for sections where children are playing. If the prom was wide enough to take cars, bikes, huts, and children playing, as well as pedestrians, then fine. But until that day, the sane option is to ban bicycles altogether. New cyclists, trying to be green, will cope with hills in the streets and roads, with practice.

FIN 08h09

CQ: Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail: “Will someone tell the overgrown teenagers running the BBC that the [extortion racket] party is over?” Public service? Accountability? Gone along with Picture Post…

03h42-BST Friday 3 July 2009-CE

Melanie Phillips in Daily Mail for Monday 29 June said that she understands that the BBC plays a unique and historically vital role in British public life. USED TO, Melanie, USED TO. It no longer does. That is the whole point, and, surely, your whole point in your excellent article.

We want today’s loony-Left, Marxist-fascist British Bullshit Club to revert to the BBC of old. We want the low-brow entertainment to revert to being done by private companies. We want the restored BBC, both radio and TV, to do News, Talk, Documentary, Drama and Music the way it used to, old-fashioned and highbrow for the intellectual minority.

When we fought, via such operations as Radio Normandy, Radio Luxembourg, Radio Atlanta, Radio Caroline, Radio Jackie, Radio Kaleidoscope and even Radio Free Plymouth, we did not want Auntie (as I remember someone’s saying) to do the knees-up and show her knickers.

I personally wanted there to be the BBC, with a single home service, and a single overseas service, in radio, plus short wave services for other languages which targeted politically unstable cultures. In TV, the same deal at home: BBC Television. Now, with satellite, we can have BBC World TV as well.

I wanted independent companies to do the broadcasting equivalent of Tit-Bits and Reveille, not the BBC. Melanie says:

QUOTE

…since 2005 the Corporation has spent more than £250,000 contesting freedom of information requests -in other words actually charging the public for trying to keep secret how it spends the public’s money…

…the money is paying for legions of endlessly duplicating middle managers or senior executives with absurd non-job descriptions such as Head of Diversity or Head of Compliance…

…the BBC sent more than 400 to cover [Glastonbury] at an estimated cost of £1.5 million… …comprising 125 staff and 150 freelancers working as presenters, producers, directors or technical crew, plus about 150 short-term contractors hired by the BBC to provide rigging security and other support…

…why? Glastonbury might be popular among the young, along with a bunch of superannuated hippies vicariously visiting their lost adolescence, but it hardly caused the nation to cancel its social engagements en masses in order to sit at home glued to the telly…

…The BBC has become so big and bloated that it has lost all sense of what public service and accountability actually mean…

END QUOTE

Melanie Phillips declares her own modest receipts for appearing, and mentions that “a very large number of BBC employees survive on very low salaries and contracts with no job security, let alone holiday travel perks.” But she keeps using the term ‘licence fee’. In fact, the system is an extortion racket. The doorstep enforcers leave no doubt. We finance the crooks in clover or get legally done over.

FIN 04h39

CQ: David Adam and Douglas Millard debunk myths by conspiracy theorists in regard to the Apollo Moon Program… John Harris sums up…

18h05-BST Thursday 02 July 2009-CE

David Adam, with Science Museum’s Douglas Millard, in The Guardian section 2 today, debunks ten of the Apollo conspiracy moron myths. They fall slightly short in The Shifty Shadows item:

QUOTE

CLAIM: Pictures show shadows cast by objects on the surface at different angles. There must have been multiple light sources as in a TV studio.

WHY IT’S NONSENSE: A low sun and uneven surface can distort the angles of shadows in images. But if there are multiple light sources, why does each object cast only one shadow?

UNQUOTE

The remainder of the Shifty Shadows rebuttal is weak. What David and Douglas needed to point out is that the shadows converge because that is what perspective does. Stand in the middle of the road, or the railway track, and see the convergence of the kerbs, or the rails.

I cannot recall whether the Hasselblad used in the still shots had a wide angle lens. The reflection in the helmet visor of Aldrin, showing Armstrong and parts of the ALSEP, produces a wide angle effect. This produces its own variation from the view of the naked eyeball.

John Harris discusses the shock suffered by the Space industry, and the Space fans, and all the people who thought that for humans to acquire knowledge was important, when politicians cancelled Apollo missions 18, 19 and 20.

Nor does he mention that, despite the reason offered having been cost (“throwing money away in space“), the truth was that every cent went into someone’s pay packet here on Earth, and the total cost was about the same as Americans spent on smoking, and a tenth of what they spent on drinking.

FIN 18h58

CQ: Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone 1080 discusses the proper use of the word ‘existentialist’… Some folk are using ‘existentialism’ in discussing the subject of Politics… Is ’em right or is ’em wrong to do that?

07h49-BST Wednesday 01 July 2009-CE

Matt Taibbi, the masterly writer for Rolling Stone, mentions a trendy usage that I also noticed about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Politicians are using the word ‘existential’ in a more mundane context than do Philosophy students and professors at university. I seemed to quit Grammar School half way through what seemed to be Sixth Form so I know little of this philosophy of which you seem to speak…

Some quotes: “…the hot malapropism of the pseudo-intellectual age of Obama…” “…hilarious mis-use of the term ‘existential’…”

New York Times was quoted: “…the entire world, except France, hates intellectuals. When threatened with a gun, they call a meeting to deconstruct its meaning….”

Words evolve: scholarly studies used to come within the generic term ‘Philosophy’. Then knowledge expanded and fell into special areas, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, Geography, and so on. The word ‘science’ has replaced the word ‘philosophy’ which now means (primarily) the academic study of Knowledge itself. If you start with Philosophy, it can fit you to contribute in grown-up affairs.

Modern philosophers seek to agree on the exact meaning of words used in their discussions, and to ensure that straight thinking, also known as Logic and Reason, is involved, rather than unsupported assumption. Philosophists are the alternative to the priesthood. All would-be politicians need to go through philosophical discipline of the mind if they are to accurately evaluate, say, the ass end of a cow.

Talking about our existence, asking whether one is what one appears to be, an organic life-form with self-direction, or merely a character in the dream of some sick bum in the Skid Row District of Cloud Nine County, on the down side of the cosmos, is existentialism. But the word ‘existential’ now apparently applies in discussing the existence of human institutions like nation-states, not only human individuals.

I approve! Hilary said that the enemy [that were originally trained, and armed, by the United-States Central-Intelligence-Agency, to fight the Soviet forces occupying a certain country, where sadistic, medieval misogyny is the norm, and which has lots of mountains, and caves filled with theist-fascists] is an existential threat to [a neighbouring country that spawned them in the first place].

FIN 09h47

CQ: Donald Trump says destroy OPEC… Sean Hannity plays with his silly ball… Driver running from Dallas cops crashes…

06h36-BST Tuesday 30 June 2009

Donald Trump was on Fox News Channel just now saying OPEC must be destroyed. This was my sentiment in the early 1970s during the oil price leaps. OPEC people laugh at stupid Western politicians. Tankers waiting at port to off-load oil sometimes dump their cargo and leave. That is how much oil there is. Shortage is an invention of OPEC, and Green-fascists (self-styled environmentalists) sucking-up to OPEC.

Donald also said. to Neil Cavuto, that Michael Jackson was a different man in the last 12 to 15 years of his life. He had no self-confidence. He knew surgeons had messed up his face. And, since Michael said the O2 show would be his last, it is clear that he knew he was too old to go on. I think Donald Trump is making sense.

The coverage, both electronic and print, of the passing of Michael Jackson has emphasised his boyhood beginnings. This has been a nostalgic ride for me.

Hannity sickens me with his damn ball. Few things could be more potty than a jock (sports fanatic, not Scotsman) allowed to pontificate about matters of importance! There is much to agree with in the FNC Right-wing case against the Obabma approach to economic recovery, but their self-righteous unwholesome wholesale slagging off of the President is tiresome and tedious.

The police chase from Dallas, yesterday on Fox News Channel, was brill. It would have been perfect if we had seen the low-life-jerk leaking blood and guts, dying on screen, blabbering for help, would have been perfect. To see the useless waster stretchered out of the motor was good enough I suppose. I certainly clapped with glee. Keep the chases coming you guys!

FIN 06h55

CQ: Michael Jackson wins a new generation of fans… Disgusting incident after the Moonwalker movie at the ABC, Plymouth…

07h02-BST Monday 29 June 2009-CE

Much has been said on TV, in discussions with anchors and guests, about the under-20s of this time, and their not knowing who Michael Joseph Jackson is, or was. To them, he has been just another name attached to the odd record played on oldies and general format radio stations. I am unsure whether that is true or not. If young folk did not know much about MJJ before, they surely do now.

I loved the best of what he did as a kid, because he was a sweet boy, so pretty, sexy, and clever, with a voice to match. His superbly best stuff was manifest in ‘I’ll Be There’ and ‘Who’s Lovin’ You?’ His merely excellent stuff (good at first, but too strident to play too often after the first week) was shown in ‘I Want You Back!’, ‘ABC’, and ‘The Love You Save’. Then came ‘Ben’, the boy Michael Jackson at his best, for my money.

The spotty, adolescent years went by, during which I put Michael Jackson down on my mental list as boring, doing Disco-like, James-Brown-like, unremarkable, dreary, routine-Motown, jerky, strident dross.

Blame It On The Boogie then took me by surprise, in that I liked it both as a song as a music video.

After that, another, longer time has gone by, in which I disliked the constant, driving, insistent jerkiness, and the squeakiness. During about three decades, until the present, I have liked only the occasional song, usually without knowing the name of it.

I like the one which asks “what about US?”. Help me out here. Is that one called ‘Earthsong’?

I liked ‘We Are The Children’.

I loved the song which went “You are not alone. I am here with you…”

The years will settle the question of where to put Michael on the All-Time-Ratings…

There was a sickening and enraging moment, that I experienced immediately after the end of the movie ‘Moonwalker’ in which Sean Lennon played as a boy-mate of Michael Jackson. It was at the ABC (formerly the Royal) in Plymouth. The audience, myself included, were leaving the auditorium, content enough.

Then a juvenile jerk behind me, who was with an adult male, I presume his father, came out with a loud derogatory comment. I have forgotten whether it was the ‘c’ word or the ‘n’ word he used.

Did he think he was being clever? Was he upset at having enjoyed the movie? Was he angry at being well entertained by Michael Jackson, an African American? Was he exasperated at having found nothing to complain about? Or was he just keeping in with his Dad, as if to apologise for liking Michael’s music?

“He’s just a coon isn’t he?”

What the Hell was THAT supposed to mean? What were the two of them DOING there in the first place? And whom was he addressing? Was he talking to the rest of us, who took no notice? Was he apologising to his escort, whoever the guy was? Or was he just thinking aloud? If he is still alive, he is middle-aged, now. I wonder if he has sorted his head out yet. What do you think?

FIN 08h24

CQ: O2 Arena show could go on (MUST go on?) as a Michael Jackson Tribute Show… Tickets to stand, with free Special Book… Here’s an idea of how…

12h43-BST Sunday 28 June 2009

If I were the boss of the Michael Jackson shows at O2 Arena, I would have wanted to keep the shows going. All the musicians, singers, and dancers would appear and perform, generally the songs planned and rehearsed, but each of the hard-working, talented, and mostly very young, participants would take turn, through the show, in speaking a relevant brief jigsaw piece about the life and work of the absent star.

The curtains would open in stillness, with silence, with the quiet beginnings of the opening song, I’ll Be There. An an empty spotlight at centre stage would remain at first, until grandally fading to the end of the first song. The first song would start in plain chorus. Solo interpolations would be in quiet keeping with the mood.

At the point where music takes over from the verses and chorus for a spell, a spoken voice-over would make dignified, relevant mention of the purpose of tribute to, and celebration of, the life and work of the absent star, here in spirit.

The continuation of the song, as the lyrics are reiterated, would come in with raised volume and beat, and with somewhat livelier interpolations and dancing, would ensue. By the finale, the lone spolight would be gone, and normal lighting in operation.

The rest of the show would involve performers, each introduced, taking the centre stage and paying their respects as best they could, first the singers and dancers in the company, then a few of the best amateur look-alikes in such numbers as Do Your Thing would bring in a party mood. A few little kids having a go too would bring in the kindly laughter.

There will be such Michael Jackson life-story-tribute shows, as described here, in the years to come.

But I see no reason why it should not start at O2 Arena, 2009?

In addition to the range of books, magazines, and other memorablila on sale at the show, there should be a free, numbered, confirmatory souvenir book about the show itself, and how it had to change with the death of the star, and how everyone involved decided, on behalf of Michael, that the show ought to go on, MUST go on…

FIN 13h20

PS at 15h17

BBC News channel just reported that choreographer (Ortega?) is looking at ways to resurrect the O2 Arena show using Michael’s star friends. Either great minds think alike (because the above came as an original thought to me) or my blog has greater influence than I thought. After all, this post has had only 2 views since I published it in final form at 14h20.

CQ: Parent-Training for the low-life trash is being talked about by another feeble UK government… It will fail without Repeal of Prohibition…

08h00-BST Sunday 28 June 2009-CE

Gold news on the hour quote the Jackson family as saying that their pain cannot be described in words. It never can. You try, and you do variously well, according to your level of vocabulary, but the feelings have a greater spectrum of nuance than any language, even English, can contain it seems.

Another of the (UK) news items has been overdue ever since humans got together in groups of huts. There have always been individuals who were useless as parents.

The slack used to be taken up by perverts in robes, working together with gangsters wearing crowns, telling the people what sacrifices were demanded by the imaginary unseen malevolent powers that messed up the weather and the crops, and what imaginary sins were supposed to have been committed.

Some of these faiths would evolve into positive influences. When the beliefs were attenuated over time, and came to be given only lip-service, the good elements (love thy neighbour, and so on) remained as a positive factor. But a vile, fundamentalist group of perverts would then break away and restore the evil.

Perverts and gangsters finally lost their official control in England. The protesting, intelligent few were allowed to ask questions about natural phenomena, and to invent ways and machines to cope with challenge, and to exploit potential. All the people eventually gained the benefit, not just a few greedy bullies.

But useless parents are lost without control. They have always needed to be TAUGHT the job of raising citizens.

The news I welcome with a jaded version of joy, and a sceptic sort of enthusiasm, is that the Government, Gordon and the crew, are thinking about requiring the parents of offspring who are causing trouble, committing crimes, making life miserable for others, be taught how to exert positive, constructive control.

But none of this (obviously necessary and long overdue) social intervention will work whilst Prohibition remains.

After Repeal, the driving force, aka mal-motivation, that exists, at present, for amateurs, aka black-marketeers, to supply and distribute (unreliable and damaging) mind-altering substances, both natural and synthetic in basis, will pop like a bubble.

In regard to over-18s at least, stealing to raise the high prices will pop. Warfare for gang-turf will pop. Adulteration will pop. Over-concentration will pop.

What will remain will be dangerous use by under-18s. Black market junk will be still be forced upon unwilling kids until they are addicted, just as at present. The police, and the education system, will be able to focus their efforts on this.

Then, and only then, will the parent-training that is being, once again, vaguely proposed, work, provided it begins the moment that the midwife observes that she is dealing with stupid, ignorant, dysfunctional new parents, aka low-life trash, and provided that attendance is compulsory.

FIN 09h09

CQ: Michael Jackson is out of this world… I loved the FIRST new nose and I understood the crushes on peach fuzz… But the fire sent sanity far away…

06h17-BST Friday 26 June 2009-CE

The death of Michael Jackson came as a surprise to me. Nor, at the beginning of Thursday, had I any idea that I was going to buy an odd piece of carpet from Dorset Contract Flooring to lay in my bedroom. When the job was done I felt nicely fatigued. It was good to sit down, and switch on my two TVs, plus my laptop.

Then the Fox News Channel anchor broke the news that the TMZ site was saying Michael Jackson had just been taken to hospital.

I switched my Free-View off BBC and on to Sky News, despite the Rupert Murdoch channel’s having to suffer and put up with the serious extra pixilation, thanks to BBC’s ruthless manipulation.

All the news channels were taking care not to claim Michael Jackson was dead. Sky News got round it by simply putting the TMZ site on screen. TMZ first stated that Michael had had a cardiac arrest, where the heart stops, as distinct from a heart attack where the regularity of the heartbeat is compromised.

Then TMZ suddenly changed their screen to specifically state that Michael Jackson had died. By leaving TMZ on their own screen, Sky got themselves off any possible rap if it turned out that Michael got better.

All the news channels were being careful not to say that Michael Jackson was dead. The hospital would not discuss the matter because it fell within the legal rules about patient confidentiality.

Eventually, first Fox News Channel, then the other channels I sampled, had the live pictures from outside the UCLA Medical Center (I see from Google Maps that there is a Santa Monica one on Wilshire Boulevard, and another one on the campus itself at Westwood Plaza).

It made me wish that I had explored the Westwood area, rather than just sitting by the bus terminal at the entrance to University of California at Los Angeles, last September. Finally, it was confirmed that Michael had not revived. There followed the Now It Can Be Told story, so new, so old…

Michael Jackson had a heart attack at home, in his rented house in the Holmby Hills area, possibly North Carolwood Drive, and 911 was called. It was reported that the emergency services had to smash their way into the expensive, secure, French style mansion to get to the patient.

The celebrity Ben McMahon had died a few hours earlier, followed by Farrah Fawcett.

Now, it was Michael Jackson who was out of this world… MJJ who was gone… The little Climb Every Mountain boy, never allowed to play, had gotten through five decades and found the end of the line. O2 Arena, the Millennium Done, London, would have finished him off anyway. At age 50 you cannot do what you did before age 30.

I was 18 in 1958, when Michael Joseph Jackson was born, and I was 30 when he first appeared in the hit parade. I tolerated songs such as I Want You Back, ABC, and The Love You Save. I could not 100% dig them because they were too fast and squeaky for me.

But I loved I’ll Be There, Who’s Lovin’ You, and Got To Be There. We had the first three LPs, aka albums, at the flat I shared with Radio Free Plymouth guys in Devonport, Plymouth.

A journalist for New Musical Express made a point about Michael’s beautiful soft afro, and gorgeous velvet brown skin. It was as if that writer had just discovered how sexily yummy boys could be. Or perhaps he already knew, and this was an opportunity to sing the praises of that special age when the male child trails those clouds of glory. (Or perhaps the journalist was a lady!)

I admit having thought that it was a shame that Michael was not so mega-cute as Jermaine, who was doll. Michael, with his wide nose, was to be loved as a boy with a voice, not worshipped and fantasised upon as a gorgeous pubescent godling.

If I had known what the poor dude was going to do to his face, the weird nose he was going to buy for himself as he went into denial of African roots, I would have shut up my thoughts.

In trying to put on a happy, white-folks face, Michael Jackson certainly distanced himself in appearance from his bully of a father.

I LOVED the record Ben, when Michael was no longer a little boy in puberty but had phased into being an adorable adolescent. I had to admit that, by the time he did Off The Wall, Michael looked better with his trimmed schnozzle. He needed to have stopped right there.

I was going to watch the whole coverage right through last night from Los Angeles, and from FNC studios in New York, but by midnight here in UK I was forced by fatigue to hit the sack.

After six hours, I got up again and watched the non-stop coverage. Paul Gambucini was one who did a superb evaluation. I admired the announcement made by Jermaine. His brother, the King of Pop, had passed away at 14h26 Pacific Time 25 June 2009 Common Era…

Aside from Michael’s suffering hate-filled words and deeds from a loathsome father, a fat lot of good religion did the poor schmuck…

FIN 07h35
EDITED Saturday 27 June 2009
EDITED Sunday 28 June 2009

CQ: Nichelle Nichols at Star Fleet Ball here in Poole Bay city… Questions not asked… Enlightenment never derived…

10h09-BST Wednesday 24 June 2009-CE

Here is a slightly-edited section of a post I wrote at:
09h58-UTC Tuesday 27 November 2007-CE.

Nichelle Nichols is, all being well, Star-Guesting at Star-Fleet-Ball, in Poole Bay City, February 2008. I am economising and will not go, so the other fans, most of whom are the best people on the planet and deserve better company than I am, will be spared listening to my questions, which are below.

1. Ms Nichols. can you remember being given any advice that you totally ignored at the very start of your career, which you now look back upon, and think “Boy, am I glad I took no notice of that!”

2. Have you written any other books, apart from the one which revealed to us that William Shatner and Phil Specter are not necessarily perfect? And have you anything you wish to say here and now about William Shatner and/or Phil Specter?

3. If you were to be cast away upon a desert moon, which eight million legal, or will-be-legal-as-soon-as-you-find-how-to-pay, downloads would you choose to have on your pocket player?

4. I love old Rythm & Blues from Elmore James thru to John Lee Hooker, but I hate new Hip-Hop and Rap. Does that make me wicked or wicked? I am confused.

5. My uncle sent me a post-card of Holly-&-Vine in 1954 and I aim to visit Los Angeles in 2009. A San-Francisco fan in Westbourne said LA was just a-great-sprawl (sounds excellent to me) and I should think about San-Francisco. Is this rivalry real, or a tourist-bureau promotion?

6. My neighbour’s dreams always involve his job, making glass-fibre sail boats, but something is wrong and he is frustrated. I checked, and mine are the same, only I am often back in school feeling like a fool. How about your dreams?

7. I visited Kenya in 1980 and was really bored because I was making up a foursome with three lion-lovers. I would have liked to remain in Nairobi and check the local-live-music. As a pale person, my roots in Africa are very ancient. Yours are, I guess, richer and more recent. What is Africa to you?

8. My favourite Elmore James song is ‘It Hurts Me Too’, especially the cover-version arrangement, by me, in the bath. May we please know some of your favourites in all the genres of music?

9. The Frankie Lymon oo-aa song changed my life. Its impudent joy made me realise that Sunday School did not have all the answers after all, and that it had made me all a-twitter and twisted. Did you have a song that changed your life?

So, dear blog readers, either tell me to thin-out and die in the vacuum of space, or… tell me how GOOD you think my questions are…

FIN 10h24

CQ: Ham Radio, Radio Free Plymouth, Free Radio Association, The Duke of Cornwall Hotel, and associated oddities…

07h07-BST Wednesday 24 June 2009-CE

“Calling CQ. Calling CQ. Is there anybody there?” was the line that sticks in mind from ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H G Wells, adapted for the Mercury Theater of the Air by Orson Wells. The show went out over the radio a couple of years after Prohibition of alcohol was Repealed, a year before Hitler invaded Poland starting World War 2, and a couple of years before I was born.

Most listeners, tuned in late, the way you do. They took the ongoing radio fiction feature as real news coverage, of a real invasion from Mars, by real powerful tendrily gobbley critters, in real metal cylinders, on real long metal legs, and they went haywire.

Orson Wells was away to his bed, having the peaceful kip of a hard-working genius, whilst cops sorted out the chaos. This was in USA, you understand, where they do things in a big way, bless their generous hearts.

So when I recently began to edit through a thousand old posts of mine, hoping to cut out the boring stuff, and polish the interesting stuff, I put ‘CQ’ for Cy Quick upon the finished products, and I saw straight away the purely coincidental similarity of term. CQ calls CQ for kind souls to drop by…

Amateur radio operators were licensed by the regulatory authorities in UK (I know little of this ‘USA’ about which I speak) to yap on selected short-wave radio bands, but they were banned from discussing news or sports results. They were limited to discussing radio equipment and personal health. To minimise their numbers, they took a Morse code proficiency test and learned call letters.

“CQ” meant: “Is there any other idiot out there with nothing better to do than ego-trip, and yap about inconsequential matters?” Some person, very early on, took to calling radio amateurs ‘radio hams’. We all remember the Tony Hancock skit upon the hams world. As recently as ten years ago, I overheard a couple exchanging the corny double entendre about “sitting here twiddling my knob”.

Curly, one of the best mates of Kool Geezer, was a licensed radio ham in Whitleigh council (public housing) estate, Plymouth. He built a medium wave (amplitude modulation) transmitter, to put out an unlicensed popular-music record station, over a wire strung through adjacent trees. Given that the Wonderful Radio London jingles were all they had, in quality, they so named their station.

The signal was excellent. A mate going across Torpoint Ferry to have a few Sunday lunchtime pints in Cornwall reported the station booming out from lots of radios. Given the choice between either the Light Programme, later ‘Radio One’, which yapped for ages twixt record requests, with old British Forces Network lovies Cliff and Jean, or the ‘Radio London’ presentation, local accent, minimum yap, all top Pop records, no contest.

When the radio authority inevitably homed-in on Curly’s house, the smaller of the two front bedrooms in particular, for a raid, Kool’s younger brother Farmer was delegated the job of taking hold of the incriminating evidence, one hot transmitter, leaping out of the back bedroom window, and disposing of the box. He ripped it apart and hid the parts under various piles of leaves.

Actually, a couple of years or so earlier, Farmer broke into school during the evening with some mates and set up the film projector to watch some movies. When the cops walked in, the other guys froze, but Farmer did a Hollywood leap, karate-chopping his way with his arm, through a glass window. It was real glass that cut him badly, not Hollywood glass. What a character!

The fully-legal Free Radio Association was campaigning and demonstrating for free radio. This is like the free press we enjoy in this free country. Nationwide, members desired radio independent of the BBC. Colin King, of FRA, acting entirely legally, contacted all the Plymouth members of FRA and we met at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel. We set up a Plymouth branch of FRA over coffee and biscuits.

It was very nice of Colin to bring us together. The fellow FRA members were the first real friends (aside from work-mates with little in common) that I ever had, until I joined Mensa. Later, some of us broke away from the legal Plymouth FRA and decided to set up Radio Free Plymouth. Colin got interviewed on Westward TV that evening. Westward TV was fully legal, you understand!

We non-technical FRA members were impressed by the work of Kool and Curly, and we made contact even before they were forced off the air. Working at the heart of radio communications in the navy facilities, the Old Man of the Sea somehow knew where to find Radio London (Plymouth) guys. Soon we were knocking on Kool’s door. “I’m the head DJ on Radio London” says Kool, not so deep-voiced as Tony Windsor.

Us break-aways, wanting to set up Radio Free Plymouth, were sent by someone in Essex some heavy old German wartime gear, a transmitter and a power unit. It was like carrying sacks of cement. RFP was definitely in defiance of the fascist Home Office laws of the time. Radio hams sucked-up to all that. Praise to Hughie Green, Paul Bryan and all who helped in the legal fight for free radio.

Later, in the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s, when the fight for free radio was long since won, Citizens Band radio was taken over as the cause. Please note, dear fellow bloggers, respected readers, breakers, and good buddies all, that there is Comment space below…

CQ… CQ… Calling CQ… Is there any buddy there?

FIN 08h44

CQ: John Bercow is the new Speaker and runner-up George Young is a good guy… Sky News coverage… The future Republic of Britannia…

20h56-BST Monday 22 June 2009-CE

Speaker Elect John Bercow said again that he believes the vast majority of the members of the House of Commons are decent, upright, honourable people. (Not at all like me. How about you?)

TV reporters, and members in the House, kept saying that John Bercow, as new Speaker, was, by tradition, required “…to cast away political views…” This is NOT TRUE. He must cast away only PARTY political views (as he selects a member from those who are standing up, indicating their desire to contribute to a debate).

I was sad to see Sky News cut away after the congratulations of the Democratic Unionist Party, to Adam Boulton, so that I had to go to my Free View screen, for BBC Parliament, where an Independent MP spoke.

I have only two platforms, now, to simul-view.

The monarch is about to approve the new Speaker. How marvellous it would be, after Elizabeth has passed away, having been the best by far to wear the British crown ever, if dear old Charles were to relinquish the royal role on behalf of himself and his family. It would be so cool to live in a republic again.

FIN 21h07

PS

07h04-BST Tuesday 23 July 2009

The monarch dutifully confirmed John Bercow as Speaker, before I switched off the TVs last evening, to read some more of my Rough Guide to Los Angeles.

I wonder if the ancestors of John Bercow would have pronounced their sur-name ‘ber koff’ or “ber kov”. I always like to stick to the original, once I know it. I scrupulously say “verner fon brown” when speaking of the German rocket man. And “vag ner” when speaking of the New York Major of my teenhood.

As to George Young, his speech was not too bad at all. He spoke of reforms. I warmed to him. But his morph type is repulsive to me. I am not saying that it is proper of me to shudder in distaste at the tall, thin, superior type. I just do. I am prejudiced. I am a morphist. But who started it? It is the lofties who go on about short-asses, and Napoleon.

Henry Vernon Moore, Headmaster at Nunthorpe Grammer School in York when I was there from September 1952 to October 1958, Alec Douglas Hume, Prime Minister after Anthony Eden, Iggy Pop, and the wraith, are all of that boney, ectomorphic type. The racist, black-uniformed, Nazi SS typify the worst of the tall thin image.

George Young is quite possibly completely unlike any of those in character. But the image is all that my subconcious mind sees. It is left to my conscious mind, the Doctor Jeckyll, to think straight.

But, in any case, John Bercoff (irrespective of his nice compact size) speaks without hestitation, establishing himself as an intelligent, quick-thinking, capable person. And he was applauded by only a few Tories, so we know he is a defy-er of the worst of the Tory Party extreme-Right batty attititude.

All we need now is for Speaker Bercoff to, somehow, help bring about the institution of my 51/49 Representational System. In this (as per the sidebar Page on the subject) the party with most votes nationally, wins 51% of the SEATS. The remaining parties take 49% of the SEATS proportionately. Details upon application.

FIN 08h14

PS Wednesday 24 June:

George Young is reported to have made generous comments about the new Speaker. Good for him! You see? Tall thin skinny people can be good guys after all.

CQ: Dog-lover snuffed on Pennine Way… Tobias Ellwood MP learns about street reality… Long dangerous beeches to be felled at last… New flats built too high to flood, so must be demolished…

13h16-BST Monday 22 June 2009-CE

Recent stories covered by Daily Echo (Bournemouth):

Good news! A stupid dog-lover got herself trampled to death by cows. Yippee! She needed to let her two dogs loose, say experts in canine handling. Then the dogs would have run, faster than any human, leading the attacking cows away. I encourage all owners of pet dogs to get into the fields amongst cows and their calves, and get themselves stomped to death. It lifts my heart to hear of it.

Tobias Ellwood, Bournemouth East MP, was mad enough to think that jerks so alien as to kick a football around amongst pedestrians would somehow change into meek boy scouts when told to stop by a Member of Parliament. He got severely thumped. MPs can help by making way for a military dictatorship that will video and shoot dead such people, on the spot. It will be so good to see on TV.

Protectors of giant weeds are still shoving their obsession upon their betters. It has taken years to get a permit to cut down a set of beeches, black and rotten inside, in Parkstone Heights. In a sane world, people on the spot would get rid of the danger in good time. In our insane PC world, a beech fell on a house at 03h45 Saturday. The family slept on, unhurt, but the tree huggers should be shot.

Dratted dolphins are hanging around near Poole Harbour entrance and interfering with the legitimate rights of tax-paying human citizens to ride their speedboats. Apparently these creatures, who bully porpoises in a nasty way, have also been seen hanging around at Mudeford, and the two piers, Bournemouth and Boscombe. Wild life lovers have asked people to stop so propellers do not chop.

Newly-constructed flats in New Milton had to be raised when the ground was found to be water-logged. This sensible decision has to be punished by the planners. Demolition is decreed. It is such fun to wreak havoc with lives and business. The place is 156 cm “too high”. “Shoot the planners!” you say. But I urge you to consider an alternative. Make them live in a hut on the River Stour flood plain.

FIN 14h22

CQ: Morpheus on Rupert Murdoch… Marco Polo House stole a winner’s name and made it a byword for failure… How Star Trek won for Sky One…

Morpheus wrote a post recently on the rise and fall (in terms of the quality of programmes) of what he calls ‘diggervision’, the channels owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company, News International. It is a piece of very useful insight. Please go to my sidebar, find All Mindkind links, click on Morpheus, and read the whole excellent post! Here are some snippets:

QUOTES

…Rupert Murdoch’s rise in the world of “news” is well known… …Fox News is legendary. Producing heavily biased low-brow reporting which no intelligent person would linger over for longer than it takes to wonder how they get AWAY with it…

…In 1989, Murdoch launched Sky broadcasting. It was one of two satellite broadcasting companies that won the U.K. franchise – the other being the ill-fated British Satellite Broadcasting. The latter soon encountered difficulties and was “merged” with Sky, to become British Sky Broadcasting…

…It’s the same here in S.E. Asia. In ‘93, Murdoch bought the then-fledgling Hong Kong-based Star TV and proceeded to fill its schedules with a NOSE- GAY of prime, NEW American series – whilst padding out the rest of the slots with OLD, CHEAP stuff.

At the moment, Star World is cheaply available to all – but how long will it be before Star goes the way of Sky? As soon as Sky had a fair-sized audience, Murdoch did a “re-package” – which meant all of its GOOD stuff suddenly cost a lot MORE.

END QUOTES

Morpheus and I partly disagree on the subject of Fox News Channel. I watch it a lot, always hoping to see a police chase in Los Angles. I desire to witness live some vile thug, running after a violent crime, smash and burn.

And when a major international breaking-news story happens, FNC matches up adequately in seriousness. FNC is needed to balance what would otherwise be a monopoly by the loony-Left. I shudder at FNC’s theist smarminess. I tolerate it because BBC Marxist-fascist sucking-up to enemies of the West and attacking our private-enterprise system in the West, is equally sick.

Guru Morpheus also mentions the way that BBC 2 Cricket coverage used to bump Star Trek. Sky One channel saw the opening and bought new packages of Trek (Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager) to run Monday thru Friday in Primetime.

We Trekkers were indeed overjoyed, as Morpheus reports. And he points out: “…Suddenly, Sky TV had become the television equivalent of the Premiere League…”

I was delighted!

The reasons why British Satellite Broadcasting failed are:

1) It was run by duopoly (BBC and ITV spawned) poseurs, full of themselves, certain that they knew best, convinced that they had a Divine Right to Rule.

2) It spent vast and ruinous sum of cash custom building an arty-tarty marble hall called Marco Polo House to suitably cosset its noble ass, whereas Sky occupied an economically-priced industrial shed.

3) It chose to leap-frog over tried and tested delivery technology, in favour of a more expensive, allegedly better, unfinished system which was not ready until months after Murdoch had grabbed the market.

I was delighted!

FIN 05h50

CQ: Adam Boulton lets an f slip, during set-up… Over-worked school-leaver video editor has no time to cut it…

13h15-BST Sunday 21 June 2009-CE

“Why are they doing Woodward again? This so fucking irritates me.”

This was Adam Boulton waiting to begin his piece for Sunday. I saw it on the Sky Active repeat.

Kool Geezer often sees such slips, black holes, and so forth. Is this sloppy situation going to go on for ever?

“Do you pass the prole-ier-than-thou test?” asked Adam of one of his guest commenters on the Sunday papers.

I never heard that clever one before. Neat!

Adam never swore at me when I phoned him, years ago, to nag him about British reporters saying Heathrow was the world’s busiest. It is busiest for INTERNATIONAL flights. But so what? Chicago O’Hare is, in fact, the busiest, with every so many domestic flights that would count as international in Europe. LHR has masses of International flights which would count as domestic in USA.

FIN 13h31

CQ: Atlas 5 gets the development of Selene, our twin planet, underway again… The high frontier is preparing to open for business at last…

07h18-BST Saturday 20 June 2009-CE

On UK MSN, under Latest Tech & Gadget News, we have pa.press.net reporting:

“Nasa launches double moon mission”

“Nasa has launched its first moon mission in a decade, sending up a pair of unmanned science probes that will help determine where astronauts could land and set up camp in years to come… …Scientists cheered as the Atlas V rocket carrying the two spacecraft blasted off, ducking through clouds and providing an exhilarating start to the 583 million dollar (£356m) mission…”

Yes, I am pleased, but, at age 68, I am also PHILOSOPHICAL.

My state of being THRILLED was killed, cold and dead, back in 1972, when politicians, led by a dairy farmer from Wisconsin, slew the Apollo Moon Program on the cost issue. In fact, NASA cost the taxpayer only 1% of the sum spent by USA at National, State, and Local levels, on the Welfare budget. American smokers were spending the same as NASA. Drinkers were spending ten times.

USA is back on the job of developing the off-Earth resources, not because it is the intelligent, truly human path, but because Peoples Republic of China is competing, as it promised, in 1985, that it would.

It is also even cheaper now, because we are using materials and devices evolved over decades of application of the spinoffs that public money, via NASA and its contractors, generated in the first great push, 1957-1972.

Sadly, USA, and the spacefaring nations generally, have still not developed a proper space-plane. The X-plane program of the United States Air Force was evolving one. Eugen Saenger (say: “oy-gen zeng-a”) had designed a small one. And British Aerospace had HOTOL, the horizontal take-off and landing vehicle, with supersonic ram jet (scramjet) engines, about ready to cut metal.

The Space Transport(ation) System (or ‘shuttle’), comprising the orbiter vehicle, two solid rocket boosters, and one external tank, also known as ‘the flying bomb kit’, is being abandoned. It was a compromise that astonishingly inventive engineers put together when the barely adequate NASA budget of 1972 was slashed to the dangerously under-funded budget of Challenger, Colombia, and…?

Of course, I am irritated by the way NASA calls itself ‘Nasa’, and calls our twin planet, Selene, ‘the moon’, not even‘the Moon’, let alone ‘Selene’, which would show respect.

And I detest Roman numerals. The launch-vehicle ought to be designated as Atlas 5. And, mister Press Association dude, the two spacecraft are NOT unmanned. They never HAD any testicles in the FIRST place. They are MACHINES, not men. You mean ‘robotic’ our kid. I also dislike

I am prepared to accept that the word ‘ducking’ is poetic and acceptable, though it rather brings to mind a cartoon image of a launcher with a face drawn on it. One ducks under low branches in a wild forest. I am probably wrong but I think a rocket-powered launch-vehicle rather tends to thrust its way, like a young person performing before watching parents, through the uncaring clouds.

I would like to quietly dedicate this moment of re-engagement to:

L5 Society

National Space Society

all other pro-space workers, campaigners and journalists

and fans of all the SF worlds

for keeping the hope alive and telling the truth about the “throwing money away in space” accusation.

Every cent went into a pay packet on Earth.

And every up-graded technology, spun off from astronautical research and development at the leading edge of human endeavour, was applied by enterprising manufacturing and service industry to evolve the edgy consumer products which continue to generate tax payback (aka profit, not a dirty word) to the treasury many times over the original NASA investment.

FIN 08h22 Sunday 21 June 2009

CQ: Babel tower designers spoke English… Gerrit Blank is a life-long celebrity whom a meteorite spared… Mark wants more useless Prohibition…

21h15-BST Friday 19 June 2009-CE

Nothing to report. So I will begin. Here comes nothing…

An update of my idea in 42 zine 1989 came to me as I awoke from siesta. The reason why fellow mindkind speak fluent English when SG1 meet them, is not that they watch CNN. It is that the pre-Babel language, Cosmish, is identical to English. The automatic adhesion build-back to talking proper has finally come full term until Earth uses Cosmish again. Pedantic fellow mindkind permit no babble. Their Cosmish abided.

In space it was a meteoroid, in atmosphere a meteor. That pea-sized meteorite that glanced the back of the left hand of Gerrit Blank, a German boy of 14, hit the road a micro-moment later and left a 30 cm diameter crater. Walking to school, he felt a sharp pain and was knocked flying. It is covered by Nicky Cox in issue 161 of First News (the latter-day Children’s Newspaper). We are all envious.

Mark in Boscombe wrote to Daily Echo today about his younger brother who hanged himself in a car park. “…although he went into many drug rehabilitation projects, he was unable to rid himself of this modern day plague…” “…The law must be used efficiently and ruthlessly, it must be non-stop targeting the source and supply, the middle men, and, yes, the user…” More Prohibition bullshit!

22h29

CQ: Cell phones with dratted sophisticated geeky features are for the YOUNG, but why not make a BASIC 14-button model for the OLD?

10h06-BST Tuesday 16 June 2009-CE

Le me share an email exchange that took place. I first reported that Cook Lady needed help with her cell phone (mobile phone in UK) because it kept switching itself off. When I call her, I only get “The mobile phone you have called is switched off. Please try again later.” Her family have the same problem. They have to drive round. My buddy responded:

“As far as I know, ALL phones have a system to STOP accidental button-pushes while they’re in your pocket / handbag / rucksack / whatever. It generally consists of holding a particular button in for a couple of secs to disable all the buttons – then pushing a button (sometimes the same one) for a couple of secs more to re-enable them. However, an incoming call over-rides this facility, so’s you can push the green button to answer the call.

“The precise system hers uses should be in her destruction manual.”

And I replied:

My Vodafone functions in the way that you describe. Cook Lady’s ON/OFF, wherever it is, does not seem to have the two-seconds safety protocol.

Cook Lady knows only about 2% of the keystrokes that geeky young designers impose on us when we buy a cell phone so as to make and receive phone calls. I know about 4% so I am the very minimum of help to her.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, I supported privatisation of GPO Telephones. Now, I wistfully long for a return of the British Nationalised Monopoly on phones, and for it to apply to the new technology, cell phones, and for them to have FEW features, ZERO gimmicks, and a BASIC MODEL for folk such as Cook Lady and I with fourteen buttons marked as follows:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
PICK UP THE DRATTED PHONE
HANG UP THE DRATTED PHONE
SWITCH THE DRATTED PHONE OFF DURING THE SHOW
SWITCH THE DRATTED PHONE BACK ON AFTER THE SHOW

There would, therefore, be ZERO dratted menus, I concluded.

It took me a subjective million years to get the hang of my Sky Box, my cell phone’s simpler functions, my personal computer’s simpler functions, and Word Press’s simpler functions. The fancy functions are there, but I do not bother them. There is a line to be drawn, and its place has a name. It is called Enough Already.

FIN 10h37

CQ: Terminator Salvation is to watch… Chris Barrie recapped how Comet pretty windows violated engineering values… Short-changed back and sides of buildings economically unavoidable…

03h55-BST Tuesday 16 June 2009-CE

Watching Terminator Salvation is like being a child. You have no clue what is going on but it does not matter. You just observe and wait. “All will become clear to you” as Slarty Bardfast said to Arthur Dent. It doesn’t, not fully, but you have to just enjoy the clever effects and acting. I liked it! I told myself: Ours not to reason why. Ours but to watch the jolly movie, darling.

Of course, the way that human heroes get smacked across the room by hyper-strong robots, and crash into the furniture without being dead, is silly, as is the fact that the robots do not just kill the human, instantly, in the first place. But that too helps the story. Resistance guys and gals, quit not. Up, again, they get. Actually, to terminate homo sapiens (mindkind or not) would save much suffering later.

I caught the Chris Barrie documentary involving the Comet jet airliner again. The square design of the windows of the Comet were, I do not doubt, motivated by cosmetic considerations, rather than sound engineering principles, although alloy qualities of strength with lightness were advancing all the time and the Americans benefited by being second.

As yellow 2c bus, yesterday, passed the gap on Holdenhurst Road where B and Q once was, and I saw the backs of the buildings in Southcote Road, I thought again how planners, given business costing constraints, allow commercial buildings to have tatty backs and sides but insist upon decent fronts. To have all-round good-looks, like houses, we would need a level playing field.

FIN 04h55

GP: Monophonic records preferred by AM Top 40 radio stations in 1960s USA…

[Guest Post from Kool Geezer]

With reference to the post from Cornelius Re: Phil Spector and Joe Meek, may I point out the following facts?

In 60’s USA the TOP 40 Radio Stations across the country were broadcasting on the AM Band in MONO and did not like to get pressings in STEREO from the Record Companies.

Their studios were set-up for MONO, and both Station Owners and Programme Directors have stated that the STEREO recordings did not sound as good ON-AIR. In other words they lacked the same PUNCH that came from a MONO pressing.

I do not know what the Record Producers at EMI and DECCA were doing in British Studios during the Swinging Sixties.

Stateside, it was normal practice for Producers of TOP 40 HITZ to ask their Recording Engineers to playback the Final-Mix through a 2-INCH speaker.

They understood that it was fine for them to be listening in the studio on expensive MONITOR speakers, but what they really wanted to know was what it was going to sound like when some kid over in the BRONX tuned in on a cheap TRANSISTOR RADIO. That was much more important as the kids had to buy the 45’s or there was no ball game.

Kool Geezer

GP: Telstar movie about Joe Meek is a Must-See… Digital terrestrial tv in Plymouth region might be turned-up on 12 August as analogue is switched-off… Murdoch gets no subscription from me!!!

[Guest Post from Kool Geezer]

At midnight last evening, Sky3 ran a movie review show called 35mm. They went behind the scenes of the Joe Meek film Telstar. Looks very interesting and is a Must-See for me. The film will hit cinema screens next Friday.

I’m getting very good pics on the Freeview, but not receiving all the channels. I could try boosting the signal or just wait until the switch-off on August 12th and see if they turn up the power. I tend to think they will. That will probably sort it out.

It will be interesting to see if the Freeview channels are expanded after the switch-off to allow more new channels to come on the platform, or if the bandspace is sold off to other operators like Mobile companies. It is going to be 2012 before the switch-off is complete, with the London Area being the last to go. That’s the plan now, however they could speed it up if they wanted to do so.

I can’t get my head around paying Murdoch a subscription to view commercial channels. I thought the whole point of commercial tv was that the sponsors paid!!! 95% of what’s on offer is bollocks and is nothing more than video wallpaper.

Kool Geezer

GP: Both Phil Spector and Joe Meek were total paranoids, but produced some of the greatest Pop ever recorded!

[Guest Post by Cornelius]

Factoids:

“Telstar” was re-recorded from speaker to mic, using two tape recorders – in order to get the ECHO (Joe couldn’t afford an echo-chamber). The original recording was lost, so now, even a MINT copy of Telstar is a little lo-fi!

The thump on the Honeycombs’ “Have I The Right” was not Honey’s bass-drum, but rather, Joe’s FOOT, banging on the floor of the same bathroom – with a mic wrapped in a towel laying on it. Both CLASSIC recordings.

And of course, Spector’s “Great Wall Of Sound” was achieved by over-dubs. “Proud Mary” and “River Deep, Mountain High” KILL! All of Phil’s ’60s tracks were mixed on 3-track for MONO.

But when, for a couple of years, Phil lost the rights to his music, FIENDS remixed it for STEREO. TRAGIC!

But Phil re-acquired his rights and The Christmas Album once more only became available in MONO (I’ve GOT one of the rare stereo copies – and Phil was RIGHT!

Cornelius…

[Please click to the outstanding sites by Cornelius, Damien, and Morpheus via the links on my sidebar under All Mindkind links.]

CQ: Edward Current is an inspiration to us all with his video “An atheist meets “God”…

23h31-BST Saturday 13 June 2009-CE

“An Atheist Meets God” (a video from Edward Current) is so good that I have placed it on my sidebar under All Mindkind links at:

http://www.myspace.com/eddiecurrent

FIN 00h23 Sunday

PS: If I am contravening any copyright I hope the holder will let me know in a Comment below and I will delete as appropriate.

PPS: Edward Current site was not showing video when I last checked. It is to be seen on Perfectionist Gal, but you cannot hear it over some music that is somehow playing all over the blog.

CQ: Sadism, as of Raffaele Sollecito, Amanda Knox, & accomplice, can be recognised in kindergarten & countered with determination if society quits denial and starts giving a damn…

07h35-BST Saturday 13 June 2009-CE

Raffaele Sollecito, Amanda Knox, and the other psychopath, did not take part in (as the police are reported to have said) “…a sex game gone terribly wrong…”

They knew exactly what they were doing. They were making their dream come true. They were turning their fantasy into reality. The activity is called ‘sadism’.

It is what happens when the Mister Hyde inside is indulged during masturbation over the years until the point is reached where the vile sicko says “I deserve this pleasure. I am superior. I have a right to hurt and kill.”

The Mister Hyde is encouraged and indulged, these days, by TV, movies, and video games. It used to be horror comics.

Frustration of the sex drive when it arises at puberty is the environmental element of the process.

An in-born predisposition to dominate, which could be nurtured out of the child by sustained and focussed attention, is the hereditary element in the process.

It is up to society, including the entertainments media, as well as the health-&-education profession (yes, it ought to be regarded as one entity), to awaken to the facts above, quit denial about them, end timidity, and recognise the superior right of victims-of-atrocity over perpetrators-of-atrocity, and intervene in the kindergarten when those who love to hurt are first observed.

FIN 07h54

CQ: ITV Morning News suffers severe loss of consonants…

06h14-BST Saturday 13 June 2009-CE

The lady who just read the ITV Morning News, 05h30-06h00, has a problem with clear articulation. She is unwilling to pronounce some consonants, and consonant combinations. Whole syllables disappear into nothingness.

“ITV Morning News” became “I T [nothing] Morning News.”

“Four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand” became “four-hundred-and-fifty-[nothing]sand.”

The little girl, Mercy, from Malawi, was, “wee-ing her way to America.”

It is as if there is a vestigial self-effacement and lack of confidence dating from early beginnings. Say it loudly, and clearly, lady!

Or used she to twin-present with a man? I see the lady talked over by the man often. As a (less-testosteroned) male viewer, I often become aware of the male presenter’s impatience with the lady’s taking a moment to express a feelings-related sentiment. Is it professional concern for tight presentation, or are the males simply bullies?

The fact that nobody tells this ITV News lady must surely be a symptom of the fallen standards of the post-Reith era. The baby of clear articulation was thrown out with the bathwater of treating politicians like angels, forcing the Sabbath upon us all, and rationing popular records to next-to-nothing per day.

I love the young lady. I just want her to be given proper help, like any young person has a right to expect. Did she begin in Children’s Programmes? I have a vague recollection of seeing her face briefly on the zapper-trek.

FIN 07h23

CQ: Reyner Banham Loved Los Angeles…

13h24-BST Friday 12 June 2009-CE

I have written a post on the following subject before, but I cannot locate it. Since I still have the scribbled notes on the shelf, I will do it again anyway:

In his documentary, Rayner Banham Loves LA, on BBC 2 in the early 1970s, Rayner Banham said he loved Los Angeles with a passion that goes beyond all sense or reason.

He was Professor of the History of Architecture at University College, London.

He called Los Angeles the super city of the future, the metropolis of Southern California, a city like no other.

As a boy, at the movies in Norwich, he was transported, as we all were and still are, to Los Angeles.

“All these marvellous old Hollywood silents were made on location as Los Angeles was being built. I knew Los Angeles long before I got there.”

Reyner Banham, despite his slagging-off some aspects of the social scene in LA, seems to appreciate the cool way the planners laid down the grid and left the developers free to do their stuff.

I remember writing in my earlier comments that the freeways cut through the grid until people complained in the early 1970s. Then the freeways were stopped. The balance arrived at seems ideal.

To see the doco, go to Los Angeles & USA links and click on Reyner Banham Loves LA.

FIN 1h45

CQ: Justin Gero is a person we need to carry on the work of enlightenment… Bertrand Russell in Penguin Specials was a consolation of my youth…

06h52-BST Friday 12 June 2009-CE

The Hawt Post at this moment on WordPress.com is Gero’s Blog headlined:

“Brilliant Atheist Bertrand Russell On Science And Religion.”

From about 1958, when I became 18 years of age, I bought a series of Penguin Specials. ‘Hiroshima’ by John Hersey was the first. There were several by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the time. You see him in a news clip sitting on the ground in Trafalgar Square. I met his son Conrad (1937-2004) in the 1990s when I volunteered for Liberal Democrats.

Justin Gero says of himself, on his blog, that he best falls

“…into the category of a left-wing, atheist, agnostic, freethinking, environmentally-conscious, science-loving, history-studying West Philadelphia resident…”

He is into history & politics and technology & society. He is an academic person. He is the type we need to counter the rule of the fool wherever it flourishes. He is what a half-baked scribbler such as I would like to be. Do go to my sidebar and Mindkind links and find the young gentleman at (Gero).

Gero’s Blog offers a link to homoeconomicusnet where we have a link to a lecture delivered by Bertrand Russell on 6 March 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall.

“…Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards’ edition of Russell’s book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays … (1957)….”

Here are quotes from the speech:

“…The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.”

“…since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.”

“…although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out — at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation — it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.”

Bertrand Russell mentions Albert Einstein who may or may not have been correct or mistaken about various things which came to him after he saw a tram go down a street in Vienna.

Bertrand Russell said:

“…where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance…”

I think it is far too early for particle physicists or astrophysicists to reach any conclusions about matter. Yet they conspire, with mathematicians, to form the study into a fixed dogma, in the style of priests.

Even the very beginnings of the design of the study of matter, are a work in progress. We are still restricted by primitive instruments of observation such as Hubble telescope, places like CERN, and computers of today. Better instruments may reasonably be expected to come, and wiser users, we may optimistically hope, will come.

Meanwhile, neither the people such as myself who deny everything modern astronomers and physicists say, nor the people such as the New Scientist magazine editor, and the BBC Horizon documentary producer, who swallow every burble that drops from the holy lips and the contrived computer models, is in a position to judge. Nor are the burblers themselves in a position to judge.

FIN 08h26

CQ: Jeremy Clarkson dislikes Bournemouth… Homeless young people rebuilding bikes… Ghost bikes spreading… Speeding cyclists let the side down on Poole Bay promenade… Riding buses…

20h29-BST Thursday 11 June 2009-CE

Jeremy Clarkson does various programs on TV that I dislike. One is about modern cars. 1950s US cars I LOVE. The rest are just horseless carriages that are driven too fast.

Jeremy seems to have gotten stuck on the midtown thru-way, that we call Wessex Way, because he slagged: “…traffic has to be seen to be believed…” He complained that he had never heard of places on the road signs. Wessex Way is jammed because Greens stopped its completion in 1970s from Westbourne to connect with Boundary Road by the university and Canford Way for Dorset Way.

BIG ISSUE this week reports on a Newcastle (Tyneside) project to train young homeless people to transform old bikes into “shiny new ones”. George Simpson, youth worker, is the switched-on guy who set this going.

I was so glad I had bought the same BIG ISSUE because it told me about ghost bikes. I knew of the one placed at Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards for Ilia Parkin (see my Page Los Angeles 2) which was later removed but I knew nought of the origin. It was in Saint Louis in 2003. They mark cyclist deaths in many places now.

More and more Daily Echo letters are complaining of speeding cyclists on the Poole-Bournemouth promenade. I saw a small girls (about 5 or 6) on Canford Cliffs stretch lain down unconscious. Her mother was bending over her. This was nearly a month ago. A life guard man told me it was a local boy who had hit her, not an adult. I will be glad if they ban bicycles. Until then, I take care.

I was heading back on the yellow 1b bus to Boscombe from Christchurch the other day. At Tuckton a young lady came up the stairs and greeted another who had boarded when I did, outside the library. I think these were two of the same girls who entertained me on a previous occasion reported in this blog.

This time, the conversation opened up with “I am getting a car on Friday for my birthday!” The model of car was revealed. I neither caught what name the young lady said, nor would I have known the Asian make or model anyway. “I am not allowed to have anyone else in the vehicle.” This was an insurance matter.

Yesterday I took the yellow 2b to Kinson but stopped short and changed to the red 14 at Moore Avenue junction with Poole Lane; yellow 1c Poole to Boscombe. All this just for the ride round.

The weather is still colder than I like for cycling. Today, I rode the bus around again. I took the a yellow 1 for Poole but in Upper Parkstone the phone rang. It was Westbourne Book Shop. I got off at Waitrose and caught a yellow 1 backwards to pick up my Rough Guide to Los Angeles and Southern California. Then I resumed the Poole heading. It have been a red M1. It was not a sky blue pink 7.

At Poole, the red 11 for Kinson was due in 4 minutes. I bought a small hot sausage at The Chip Shop. The red 11 was 8 minutes late so I had plenty of time to finish eating. At Kinson shops, I failed to resist buying a lemon meringue pie, a quiche, and a small bottle of Old Jamaica ginger beer. Of these I consumed half. Yellow 2a back to Boscombe. All these back roads to Kinson were new to me.

I have cycled through the main roads, Castle Lane, Wimborne Road (Poole), and Ringwood Road, many times, and on motor cycle too before 1975-1982. This free old-timers bus pass is just solid gold.

FIN 21h54

CQ: Twin-Sails-Bridge pointed meeting-edges will warp and be constantly under repair… £10 million to be handed over for the work… Yachts ought to go to new-built marina at Whitecliffe…

14h31-BST Thursday 11 June 2009-CE

Some arty architect has designed the proposed Twin Sails Bridge over the shallow channel which exits Holes Bay behind Poole town centre. Part of the bay was pared-off behind the railway, which is on a simple rubble embankment. The road to the Truck Ferry terminal, serving France and Spain, could be put on a similar embankment, parallel to the railway.

But the planning people allowed a yacht marina to be upgraded a couple of decades ago, and the sailors have the right to sail in and out of the bay. The planners do not want to put the road on an embankment upstream of the marina. They want an ‘iconic’ fancy, arty Twin Sails Bridge, where the road raises for the yachts but is not cut across squarely, but at a long diagonal stroke.

These long points will distort and create a road surface hazard with time. The designer will be safe in some foreign sunshine haven, and will blame everyone else. Latest: The regional development agency has given the OK for £10 million to be wasted on Twin Sails. The thing will be built on mud. No alternative. The thing will be a silly shape. Plenty of alternative. Try regular engineering.

FIN 14h57

CQ: David Davies, Conservative MP for Monmouth, ought to focus on the counter-productive effect of Prohibition, plus the treachery of the entertainments media…

08h45-BST Thursday 11 June 2009-CE

David Davies spoke on TV about loss of values and responsibility in the population generally. He is Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Monmouth.

He thinks he remembers a time when all of the working class had ambitions to improve their lot, and the educational level of their offspring. No, it was just a proportion. Whether the proportion has reduced or grown, in these days since Comprehensive schools and red brick universities, I cannot say, but there is certainly an ‘Any Way But Lose’ attitude created by entertainments media.

Low life trash are in our face more because they have cars and are out and about spending money. Increase in violence to their betters, not just to their fellows, is because loony Left entertainments media have been at pains to establish that law is not automatically worthy of respect. But worthy secular values in replacement have not been pushed because portrayal of violence is more profitable.

We have no social cohesion, no family structure, David Davies points out. Poverty can no longer be flourished by Marxist subversives as the cause. The vulgar and violent MTV rapper or rocker is the role model… David, my old son, you miss the main point: PROHIBITION is presiding over growth in cop corruption, thug wealth, concentrated stuff, pushing in schools… WAKE UP!

FIN 09h24

CQ: Federal Reserve & Internal Revenue could be worse… Should mates of the late Aaron Russo leave well alone?

07h52-BST Thursday 11 June 2009-CE

In regard to the previous post about the movie “America …From Freedom To Fascism” shown on Edge Media TV, I think that we cannot expect the abolition of Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Service even if the Aaron Russo case is ever accepted by the mass media, the public, and the politicians.

We can instead expect that retrospective laws will be passed validating and extending the powers of the two apparently beneficial and essential institutions.

Are the Federal Reserve and the IRS, actually, a good idea? If we raise the issue of their non-constitutionality, ought it to be for the purpose of retrospectively setting limits on their powers, rather than sweeping away their powers and leaving a vacuum to be filled by something worse?

Life itself is an institution (albeit natural) of dubious benefit. But only idiots such as I am desire to have a doomsday button to press. That is: I did, in my youth. In later years I have down-rated the item to last resort status, at the foot of my wants list.

It will be enough if I find my way to making an exit past all the treacherous and distracting stalls offering trivial fulfilment, such as blogs, booze, cycle rides to Sandbanks Ferry, airplane trips to Los Angeles…

CQ: Sky 200, Controversial TV, shows Edge Media TV, most of whose shows comprise worthless conspiracy theorising…

06h00-BST Thursday 11 June 2009-CE

Controversial TV is on the Eurobird/Sky platform (for Europe & North Africa). It is occupied by Edge Media TV at present.

Most of the shows on Edge Media TV are worthless conspiracy theory presentations as far as I can judge from a quick look at the titles and blurb.

BUT one show I watched has SOME educational value, although the conclusion they reach needs much questioning and putting in context.

It is a documentary film by Aaron Russo

“America …From Freedom To Fascism”.

The film discusses the Internal Revenue Service of USA (its equivalent in UK is called Inland Revenue) and argues convincingly that there is no law requiring an American citizen to pay a direct unapportioned Tax on their labour.

The presentation also attacked the Federal Reserve in USA. The idea was that the Federal Reserve (founded 1913) is unconstitutional.

(IRS and Federal Reserve are seen as just a part of the movement towards world government and the concentration of power into the control of a few wealthy individuals. In other words: the erosion of the freedom and self-reliance of the individual which the US Constitution attempted to guarantee for all time.)

See my sidebar:

TV & Movie links: Edge Media TV

Politics links: Freedom to Fascism.

OK, I can see that the Federal Reserve may very well have far too much power for all I know. And the Congress does not use its power of control. This is surely because politicians have neither the knowledge, nor the intelligence, to make judgements on the fine details of adjustment. But I trust professionals over elected politicians any day, anyway.

And I do worry about the fact that financial institutions can click on computers and make ANYTHING “true”, either from carelessness or from some criminal motivation.

The doubtful morality of the situation rather echoes the situation where the private equity companies harvest assets. The products and services which working people had been supplying, under honest but failing management, are disregarded and destroyed so that the entirely loathsome quasi-criminals can sell attractive units and walk away with the money.

The established contrary case, justifying the powers wielded by the Federal Reserve, is, I suppose, that their actions bring stability and serve the best interests of the population.

And it is indeed true that, if we go back to the old days of printing only that quantity of paper money as is backed by public holdings in gold, silver, and other rare substances, judged to be cool by the gangster type, the perceived value of which fluctuates wildly, then the economy itself can fluctuate wildly as in the past.

Yet, despite the Federal Reserve and sophisticated financial institutions, slumps, recessions, and depressions still continue. And powerful controllers of money have recently been seen to over-estimate their cleverness (to put it mildly). Others have simply committed crimes. Although I have to admire the iron-eyed way Gordon Brown stared-down the recent financial collapse.

We can only hope that such powerful people as Federal Reserve and other money mongers know that, if they wreck the affluence of us common people, then they will undermine their own good.

Kings (gangsters is a better word) once had total power but it was over a minute economy and a feeble infrastructure. Free enterprise, and good pay, made the cake big, with icing.

At the very least, “America …From Freedom To Fascism” is a useful exercise for the mind.

FIN 06h45

CQ: Natal (as in the Azanian province?) will be fatal to knitting and needlework. Do crazy gamers ever think of THAT? Video Games are destroying our culture like a vulture picking off our guts and nuts.

08h24-BST Wednesday 10 June 2009-CE

Akismet identified a comment put on my Millibandwagon post as spam. It is no doubt a site trying to sell something. I have deleted it. It is all in Chinese text. But the name is brilliant-storage.com.hk and I leave you to your fate. (Sure and that reminds me: I must buy some more slippers.) But the actual text of the Comment is:

QUOTE

Microsoft has been secretly developing technology that lets people play videogames using natural body movements instead of handheld controllers.

The US software giant behind Xbox 360 videogame consoles revealed a prototype of a project codenamed ‘Natal’, a system that combines cameras and voice and face recognition software to recognize people and their actions.

“The gamer in me went out of my mind when I got to be interactive with this”, director Steven Spielberg said during a Microsoft press conference on the eve of a major E3 videogame industry show in Los Angeles.

“I got a feeling I was in a historic moment. What Microsoft is doing isn’t reinventing the wheel; this is about no wheel at all.”

Natal lets people play driving games by simply moving hands as if turning a car steering wheel. In-game characters in boxing, skateboard, football and other sports titles mimic the body movements of real players.

The system scans faces and voices to determine who is playing.

Xbox 360 consoles equipped with Natal will be able to respond to spoken commands for actions such as playing movies or connecting online with friends for video chats.

An expected completion date was not disclosed, but Microsoft yesterday released a software kit for videogame makers interested in designing titles to take advantage of Natal’s capabilities.

“This is a landmark in computer entertainment. This is true technology that science fiction has not even written about and this works today”, said British videogame icon Peter Molyneux, chief of Lionhead Studios.

END QUOTE

We have already had all this trailed on Word Press, on TV, and in the newspapers. I HATE video games, even though they are consistent with the predictions, made in the 1950s in Everybody’s magazine, that automation would do all the work and humans would have to be content with leisure activities to fill their time.

Isaac Asimov and many other SF writers postulated societies where games based on electronic brains (as we called computers in the 1950s) kept the people busy and uncomplaining. But all the dratted games spark not a single tingle in me. To Hell with them, say I!

FIN 08h45

CQ: Milliband is the only potential Labour leader worth listening to… Will it help the Millibandwagon, and save Labour from the worst, if Brown makes him Deputy, & Dispatch Box Star?

06h47-BST Monday 08 June 2008-CE

Gordon Brown has done better, than anyone else could have, in staring down the economic catastrophe. But the TV age demands the charisma content. I would love to see the next twelve months involve a three-way Commons contest involving Milliband, Cameron, and Clegg.

With Milliband as Deputy Leader, and leading spokes-person at the dispatch box, Labour could recoup image and reputation, whilst Brown, respected internationally, gets around, and works what modest wonders can be won in 12 months, in the background.

Given that no party is going to Repeal Prohibition (which would save Western Civilisation, as wealthy crooks lost their wind) we might as well enjoy the Commons on Parliamentary Channel with three young dudes doing their charismatic stuff…

Then, the General Election…

the return to a Conservative Government…

continued expansion of thug-control in our streets as Prohibition feeds more money into their pockets…

continued weakness from the government of the day in face of alien-theist-fascism as theist ghetto rulers claim rights to violate the rights of a FEW, now, so that they can violate the rights of us ALL, later…

and ongoing indoctrination via the TV, movies, and video-games of young alpha-cools to believe that squares-bashing is OK.

Kool Geezer and I had a chat last evening, and he reminded me of Milliband. I had not given much thought to options for a new Labour leader. They are all extras on the set except Milliband. I liked him when he was first brought into the front line.

FIN 07h36

CQ: European Elections results in UK are satisfactory… Robert Atkins suitably scared…

06h15-BST

The results, announced through the night, of the election in UK for members of the European Parliament, were satisfactory. I had voted for a small independent party. I nearly voted for BNP, just to frighten the lazy, corrupt, and sloppy parties of power, Labour and Conservatives, and the party who once held power, the Liberals.

I was glad to see UKIP (who want UK out of EU altogether) win a modest boost. I was content to see BNP, the British National Party, win a couple of seats (as a warning to parties of tradtional power). And I was happy to see the centre-right Conservative Party of Churchill and Thatcher, came back strongly, as the UK Labour Government lost many EU seats.

BNP, the British National Party, appear to be sidelining the racist element of their membership and support, and recognising that British citizens who are modern-minded and loyal to UK, despite having roots in old-fasioned cultures, are “on our side”. Our side is the side of the freedom of girls to be educated, ladies to have jobs and wear what they like, and citizens generally to keep their throats uncut.

Robert Atkins, Member of the European Parliament, a member for the UK Conservative Party, demonstrated something of what I hoped for. He looked suitably dismayed. He seemed to speak of a disadvantage of having elections, people were likely to vote for those frightful bounders whose names he did not mention.

But Labs and Cons who stuffed more public money into their already well-fed wallets, via outrageous expenses claims, and allowed crime to flourish (driven by Prohibition 2), and allowed certain gentlemen to establish places of bullshit in which they indoctrinate the next generation of throat cutters, need this kick up the balls.

FIN 06h40

CQ: Neil Armstrong’s “fra” and “fuh” were perfectly understandable as meaning “for a” and “for”… Obama seemed to kiss the hand of the King… But Nelson’s “Kiss me Hardy” or “Kismet Hardy” is no big deal… Telstar movie on Joe Meek is coming soon…

19h17-BST Sunday 07 June 2009-CE

The coverage of the European Election Results are being set up. Sky News will begin at 20h00. BBC News at 19h35.

The other day, some prize wally, calling himself a language or phonetic expert, was de-mystifying a non-mystery: the slurry pronunciation of Neil Armstrong of Wapokeneta who said “That’s one small step fra man, one giant leap fuh mankind.”

He was standing by the front leg of the lunar landing module. He had emerged backwards through the egress hatch onto the porch, and continued in the same way down the leg. He jumped down from the bottom rung into the inside of the inverted dish that comprised the footpad at the bottom of the front leg. He jumped back up, and down again, to confirm that it was easy.

Then he had described what he saw. The lunar excursion module (to give it its full title) aka LEM or LM, was pronounced “lem”. Neil said “I’m going to step off the lem now.”

With his left booted foot inside the footpad dish, Neil placed his right booted foot upon the regolith, or loose surface soil. He intended to say:

“That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”

He was contrasting the slight effort that it took him to transfer his booted foot from the footpad to the lunar surface, against the mega effort of 400,000 people, from exalted to humble, over 8 years, upon the shoulders of giants such as Newton and indeed the ancients, that had made it possible for himself and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin to be there at Tranquility Base in the first place.

I think it is a similar media mix-up that causes people to miss the fact that Obama gave every appearance of kissing the hand of the King. Otherwise, it was a bow so unnecessarily deep as to approach mockery or parody.

I recall at school (Nunthorpe, York) the History teacher being certain that Nelson had said “Kismet, Hardy” or it is fate, mate. The popular take was that Nelson wanted a peck on the cheek in a manly sort of way. He was hardly in the mood for a passionate smooch. He was just indicating that this was sign-off time. “That’s it and that’s all from yours sincerely Tony Hall” was the way a 1950s Luxy DJ put it.

Kool Geezer put me onto the movie Telstar, about the innovative recording engineer and producer, Joe Meek, who created new techniques of recording, producing a unique sound, in the same way that Phil Spectre produced a new sound. I shall chase the poor old Odeon front of house staff for news of when we may expect Telstar.

FIN 21h05

CQ: Cyndi Lauper on the slings and arrows of outrageous religion… Hell of an electric storm last night… Hard for kids to imagine that bombs really fell here in England…

06h11-BST Sunday 07 June 2009-CE

Cyndi Lauper in Rolling Stone 422 for 24 May 1984 (when I was in Southport, Merseyside, listening to Radio Nova from Dublin) is quoted again in RS 1079, just out in Border’s yesterday.

“One time at Catholic school, I scratched this girl’s back. I was nine and she was twelve. A nun ran in, ripped me off [the other girl's] back, threw me against the lockers, beat the shit out of me and called me a lesbian. I didn’t know what a lesbian was.”

The point here is that it takes one to imagine one. The nun was (as, I assume, a good half of nuns are) herself a sadistic paedophile fancying little girls. In other words, a type of lesbian. Her excuse for getting postal on 9-year-old Cyndi, despite the teaching about motes and beams, was that she, the nun, was (in her self-righteous perception) qualified, having “confessed and been absolved” week after week, year after year.

This is mental illness. Damn all established churches! But be kind, my children, to those other children who profess a minority faith. They are victims of indoctrination, as are their parents. It is the institution itself that is evil. And it is the priests (by whatever name) who are the medium via which evil is inflicted. I had stupid (evangelical) beliefs. But they were not MY idea.

Today, we were expecting the great rain storm to arrive. It was soaking the D-Day commemoration in Normandy yesterday. Sky News Weather predicted it would be giving Southern England a good wash today. But it came in the night, with one boom of thunder that sounded like it was a mere metres away in Kings Park. Another followed a little farther off. Now the sky is unclouded, and clear aside from a plain haze, with Sol burning through.

My mind, never my best friend, came up with something in one of my pee breaks through the night. I recalled the incident a year or two ago in Scotland when a sibling and I were nostalgicizing about our childhood in wartime 1940s. A niece and her son were listening. She said “You think of its happening in other places. It’s funny to think of its being here.” Then, off to sleep again.

16h12

Went a great ride at 10h00 to the Sandbanks Ferry. On return, by 12h30, checked email and fought off siesta for a while but, eventually I had to get horizontal and nod off. Woke up at 15h30 saying “I guess I ought to get off this bed.” I replied to myself “Well, if it involves a cup of tea, I would be agreeable.” Noticed that it had started raining heavily outside.

Lo and behold, Gold, played End Of The World from Skeeta David for a lady near Leicester. I thought I would go for Radio London Big-L on this here laptop and, lo-and-behold #2, they played my father’s favourite pop record Morningtown Ride. Still no luck with the clever paragraph…

16h30

Downtown by Petula Clark is on. Just checked Wil Wheaton again. The video by his mate Shane Nickerson about Twitter is very good. As a bitter quitter, I do not even try any of those silly real-time, trivial socialising programs.

CQ: D-Day Commemoration Saturday 6 June 2009 Common Era

14h20-BST Saturday 06 June 2009-CE

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Thank-you gentlemen of Juno Gold Omaha Sword and Utah beaches (and all ladies and gentlemen in service before and after) for my life free from mindless, jack-booted thugs.

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Watching the D-Day Commemoration which the announcer says is coming from a site above the cliffs of Omaha Beach, I am reminded of the cliffs at Santa Monica and the way they suddenly slope off to the levels of the Venice district.

The poor old Yanks copped Hell on their two beaches, Omaha and Utah, under the high cliffs. Our British blokes, and the Canadians, not on a picnic, had a much better chance. I have forgotten how the British and Canadians were distributed twixt Gold, Juno, and Sword.

The commemoration service is magnificent. But I am so ashamed that our UK national anthem is still the same, silly God Save The Queen.

It is not that Elizabeth 2 is not the best we have ever had. She has to be because this is modern times and she shares the modern attitude of us all. But she could still be a pain. However, she is not. She is alright. It took her some time to get the common touch. She had to cope with Churchill, Eden, Mac Millan and Douglas-Hume. Then, experienced in the job, she was a tremendous help to the newer generations of Prime Ministers.

No, it is because we want an anthem that says something about the land and the people of England, Scotland, Wales and, for as long as Eire remains 26 and not 32 counties, Northern Ireland.

President Sarkozy is being very nice to President Obama. Quite right too. In fact, Sarkozy is being brilliant… I will buy a paper tomorrow just to read it again. Surely The Times or The Telegraph will print it in full?

Might as well trot off now.

CQ: Professional Astronomers… what is there to say?

08h08-BST Saturday 06 June 2009-CE

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Thank-you gentlemen of Juno Gold Omaha Sword and Utah beaches (and all ladies and gentlemen in service before and after) for my life free from mindless, jack-booted thugs.

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

The sort of people that take up astronomy as a profession are starry-eyed burblers. They do a lot of coo-ing. They say things such as “Hot diggetty dog! How about that! Gee whiz! Well, whaddya know!” It really can be rather tiresome.

When they find that the pretty sights they see are merely things generating light, or bouncing light, they are a bit deflated. So they make mysteries where none exist. They invent stuff. They make fancy labels for simple things. Stuff which neither generates light nor significantly bounces light off is labelled “DARK MATTER!”

The dust on the dresser of a bachelor is stuff that was floating in the air but has been caused by gravity to settle. Before, you did not see it. Now, when it adds up enough, you see it. Star systems get accrued in this way. No mystery. Just stuff. Maybe it sends you light enough for your eyeball to see it, maybe it does not. No big deals.

CQ: Glass wall at Bendorm hotel (and any such arty-farty-designer defiance of ordinary sense) is a criminal death trap… Athletics are tolerable, ball games are vile… Chain Ferry at Sandbanks made an interesting visit this morning…

15h21-BST Wednesday 03 June 2009-CE

Jane Reader reported in Daily Echo 28 May 2009 that a Bournemouth lady on holiday in a Benedorm hotel in 2007 walked out of a restaurant into one of those invisible glass walls beloved of arty-farty-fascist architects and designers. She bounced off and fell down some stairs to her death. Two other victims had black eyes and bruising. Stickers and plants were belatedly put in front of the glass.

The guilty party, far from being shot or even put to work in chains breaking rocks, is still poncing around preening as if he (or the fates forbid she) were a human being rather that a monstrous posturing tosser on legs pretending to be a good use of a human skin.

A BBC-News Sport-reporter was chatting to the recipient of sponsorship from Aviva (Norwich Union) for atheletics. The Beeb boyo said it is his passion to get children into sports. He justifies this insolent intrusion into freedom of choice, and into children’s rights, by references to obesity and lack of fitness generally. I realised, as I listened, that when I say I hated sport and PT at school I ought to have excluded athletics. Running, jumping and throwing things was fine.

It is always fun to see the chain ferry engineers replacing chain links whilst the ferry is live in service! The guys have to intervene whilst the ferry is at the other side. I sat at the Sandbanks side this morning. The guys have a mechanism. I think it pulls the links (either side of the faulty one) closer so that they can cut and replace. It is fascinating.

I kept getting faint moments in the last few days, especially when I stooped, and I thought “Lovely, I might go suddenly” but it was only the velcro adjustment band on my ‘baseball cap’ set too tight. We had very breezy days and I had gotten into the habit of wearing the cap tight even when it was no longer necessary.

FIN 15h49

CQ: The BE attitude dot com -blog is most excellent, dude… I add that evil is only contained as long as our rationalist secular control, State Education, and separation of Church and State is defended…

16h42-BST Tuesday 02 June 2009-CE

This piece was tagged onto a post for Saturday 30 May 2009. I herewith give it independent life:

Another Word Press post recommended this morning [Saturday 30 May] is from the BE attitude dot com. The writer points out that the imaginary guy in the sky is wrathful, jealous, hateful, and kills nations of people like it is a bodily function. He is certainly not just or “holy” in nature.

One of the many who comment is Kramer 11 who says that atheists have no faith… because there is no proof… we default to a no-proof, no-belief standpoint…Exactly! It is the job of those who claim there is sky-guy, when none is apparent, to prove it.

But not only are theists not of a scientific attitude which demands evidence, but also it is obvious that the ideas of thousands of religions and faiths originate in human need for this “god-shaped” sugar-daddy. They would be better served by my Natural Afterlife deal (see Pages in my sidebar).

Another Comment on the BE attitude is by kennotation:

“Christianity makes me happier. Even if there is no substantial proof, and even it depends on faith, it changes people. When someone tells me he/her is Christian, I am guaranteed that somewhere in their heart, there is love. That’s what matters to me the most.”

This sounds like my family. It IS true that a certain OTHER faith has exclusive hatred in its teaching. But the old Christian (nothing to do with Yehoshua) ideas can always return: heretic hunting, inquisition, misogyny… Such evil is only contained as long as our rationalist secular control, State Education, and separation of Church and State is defended implacably.

FIN 16h46

DD: Fox News Channel could not relay this Wessex Way cop action… Prangs I have eyeballed are very few, in fact only two…

15h04-BST Tuesday 02 June 2009-CE

Daily Echo in Bournemouth today reports on an action Friday night when a vehicle stolen in Westbourne (where I like to order my books, and where I used to live) was followed onto and eastwards along Wessex Way (our mini version of a Los Angeles freeway). The copper chopper was in use and one of those lovely pantographic spiked things was shoved out in front of the (we must say ‘alleged’) bad guys. The vehicle was a red 4WD.

I missed all that. But then, out at night, this old dude doth not venture, excepting for the movie about Hunter S Thompson, when I got a cab back home for £20 including tip. It is great to know that we have a little bit of LA action though. Not enough to get it on Meridien, sadly.

I once (in the 1960s) saw an Austin A40 of the 1950s tough-steel rounded-shell model swerve and roll about three times and land on its feet. It was at the junction of Elliot Street which heads up to the Grand Hotel on Plymouth Hoe and the main road at right angles that comes from the Duke of Cornwall corner and ends up by the Holiday Inn (as it used to be). I cannot recall the name of the road. The priority on the junction had just been changed.

A car coming up the hill slammed on the brakes half way over the road, having violated the new stop line. None of the windows on the Austin shattered. Some other motorist was rushing to help, so I kept on walking.

I saw a pedestrain topple over the bonnet (hood) of a car in 1989 at Hounslow West. The car had accelerated out of a hold-up (slow-down) at the same moment as a man (about 30) saw his chance to walk across. The man ended up on his feet, and kept on crossing with a disgusted look on his face. I am trying without success to remember what other fun incidents I might have seen and forgotten.

But what is bugging me at present is the fact that, despite my cycling to either the Sandbanks Ferry, or Christchurch Quay, or today Mudeford Quay and the small ferry to Hengistbury head, I have missed seeing several good laughs in the superb weather of the moment, only knowing of them via the Daily Echo.

It must have been most amusing to see the speed boat hit the Bournemouth Pier. It was on Saturday 30 May at 09h30. A lady was thrown out and hurt her head. I am sorry to hear of that. The boat ludicrously named The Exorcist made it to the beach where a paramedic tried to sort out the lady’s head.

Dily Echo reported another speedboat capsized off Mudeford at about 09h00 on the same day. Four people were fished out of the drink. The local lifeboat and coastguard helicopter were involved in the rescue.

Of course I was disappointed to have missed the excitement on another recent Saturday afternoon when two boats, ten minutes apart, misjudged the fast-flowing tide and hit the Sandbanks to Studland chain ferry vessel. That is another hilarious story to read in Daily Echo.

FIN 15h48

CQ: Donny, and his fellow engineers, built the Bailey bridges, as Katie Clark reported in Daily Echo. Red House Museum in Christchurch now has its grant for the project celebrating scientific innovation… Sky Weather to sack meteorologists and employ frock experts?

07h00-BST Tuesday 02 June 2009-CE

Donald Coleman Bailey was given the go-ahead with his idea of “a strong but relatively light steel truss that could be prefabricated in sections” (as Katie Clark writes in Daily Echo yesterday) in late 1940 at the same time that I was being born. World War 2 (which happened because our soft government shied away from going in, secretly, and killing racist madmen in Munich in 1928) was on.

When the polar ice began to retreat from what is now the Southern Midlands of England, allowing the Atlantic to advance over the continental shelf, creating the offshore islands of Great Britain and Ireland, drowning upper river valleys, building flood plains, the needs of the Military Engineering Experimental Establishment in Christchurch for an area of streams and mud was in preparation.

The technology of what became known as the Bailey Bridge with its “readiness of assembly in field and adaptability to bridge long spans with the aid of pontoons” was essential to victory. First you destroy bridges in moments to deny the enemy ability to supply his lines. Then you re-bridge the rivers in hours as you advance. See the bridge testing area from the Bournemouth-Christchurch train.

That astonishing but archetypal English town museum, the Red House, in Christchurch has been given a grant. Red House “will celebrate the life of [Donny] and the many men who worked with him on his innovative bridge construction. We hope the project will become a unique resource which will promote pride and scientific innovation, as well as interest in our recent heritage…”

Southern England has enjoyed the annual Flaming-June period of hot, sunny weather all through the last week in May. I was sitting next to two ladies of nearly my own age, down at Sandbanks Ferry yesterday. They were complaining that it was uncomfortably hot. They needed loose-fitting, long-sleeved, light-weight cotton garments. Weather on Sky News should tell ladies what to wear (and cyclists: wind direction and strength). Forget technicalities.

FIN 08h04

CQ: Susan Boyle parodies the wiggle-waggle of the show-biz mindset. Get well soon, dear lady! You are the best! I hope tabloid reporters who gave you the hurtful nickname get genital cancer and are allergic to pain-killers…

01h20-BST Tuesday 02 June 2009-CE

Susan Boyle reminds me of Andy Stewart the Scottish singer (big hit: A Scottish Soldier) of broad entertainment talent who had his own show for years. Andy also did the song about the wiggle-waggle o’ the kilt. This innocent innuendo is the same culture wherefrom cometh the kidding around that Susan did as she graciously bowed-out, having come Second in the latest BGT.

When complimented on her graciousness by one of the two young presenters, Susan curtsied, then did the primping twirl, then the mocking leg flash, all part of the humour of the Celtic Periphery, manifested in common with the Irish. You may recall commercials on Radio Nova for Bitberger Pils: “…a ‘BIT’ of alright!…” (smirk, simper), the harmless jokiness of the basically god-fearing.

As to hating the show, any normal person would hate such shows. They involve exploiting a newcomer’s need for a showcase. The industry could routinely audition new talent, as a duty of public spiritedness. Instead, the vulgar format whacks up the tension. I only watch the Final. I actually want to see the good acts. There is no need for competition. I hate the show too, Susan. Good for you!

FIN 01h56

CQ: Patrick Gough, of Daily Echo, did NOT mean to say that Luigi Bray, of Gigga Gelateria ice cream parlour, in Bournemouth downtown, is still curious as to how ice cream is made…

23h54-BST

Patrick Gough reports for Daily Echo, Bournemouth, today on the Italian hand-made ice cream parlour, Gigga Gelateria, which has operated in the Burlington Arcade for one year, run by brothers Luigi and Andrea Bray from Italy. Journalists work under pressure but we all know that it was modern ignorance and sloppiness that had Patrick Gough writing:

“Being curious as to how ice cream is made, Luigi demonstrated the elaborate procedure to me.”

No, Luigi is NOT still curious as to how ice cream is made. What Patrick could have written, to express what he clearly intended to say, was one of the following:

“Since I was curious as to how ice cream was made, Luigi demonstrated the elaborate procedure to me.”

“I was curious as to how ice cream was made, so Luigi demonstrated the elaborate procedure to me.”

“Being curious as to how ice cream was made, I watched with interest as Luigi demonstrated the elaborate procedure to me.”

This particular botch-up of sentence construction pops up all over the news media today. The graduates of Comprehensive schools and Red-Brick universities might know the names of the latest rappers, or how to use a pocket music and video entertainment centre, but have a monkey’s uncle’s idea of putting words together in English.

The next step is that the loony-Lefties who have been given the task of compiling dictionaries ever since the Penguin paperback in the late 1960s, will be saying that this construction is just fine because the people use it. Correction: the sad victims of sloppy modern education use it. We all make mistakes (I make a whole bunch) but some do not actually know that they are doing it.

FIN 00h43 Tuesday

Dave Brittan suspects that I would buy ‘real estate’ in places like Studland Bay while sticking two fingers up to everyone else and depriving countless thousands of people the pleasure of visiting it. Dave asks: Why not just concrete over all the National Parks? Is Dave correct?

12h17-BST Sunday 31 May 2009-CE

In my post about Sandbanks (inspired by my volunteering visit, to help clear litter) I was scathing of birds. Only insect eating birds ought to be allowed to survive in my opinion. I disagree with Moshe (Moses) about a guy in the sky, but I agree with the Egyptian prince when he puts words into the mouth of the imaginary, fantastic, non-existant sky guy:

“Have domination!”

However, this has been given as an excuse for cruelty in all societies down through history to the present day. The opposing view held by people who are made profoundly miserable by the knowledge that sentient creatures are made to suffer by sins of ommision or comission by humans (despite the capacity for pain and pleasure which they share with us) is that the other critters have rights of occupation wherever they have their being.

I say, humans are the end product of evolution, the leading edge, the model for which all prior species are but inferior prototypes. It is OUR interests which ought to dominate. BUT if we are CRUEL about the way we exterminate the other critters, rather than HUMANE as we ought to be, then this affects our mental health. Literal karma as related to afterlife faith does not exist, but there IS an effect of brutalising society if we tolerate cruelty.

Furthermore, those of us who are born hyper-sensitive, decline into depression as soon as we learn of the wider world than our happy family. When we learn that the zebra in the grass is jumped on and suffocated by the lion, and so on, we want only for the horror to stop, else let us die. The ficticious Curse of ficticious Eden named (by contextual implication) Predation as a bad thing for the good reason that the human writer saw it as vile, not natural and acceptable.

Anyway, as you can see if you search for the Sandbanks post, I got a Comment in response.

Dave Brittain Said:

30 May 2009 at 17:15

Who is the idiot that wrote this piece? ‘Prime bit of real estate ripe for development’?? ‘Setting aside wildlife guff’.

I can’t even begin to describe how much I totally disagree with those remarks, and how wrong this twat really is, that’s of course if he means what he says and he’s not just making it up for journalistic effect.

It’s w*****s with views like that who would buy ‘real estate’ in places like Studland Bay for untold millions while sticking two fingers up to everyone else and depriving countless thousands of people the pleasure of visiting it. Why not just concrete over all the National Parks as well, so that dickheads like you can build on them?

What a complete nob!!

I replied to the worthy gentlemen thus:

Greetings, David, welcome, thanks for visiting and for speaking your mind. This is Cy Quick, the alleged idiot, twat, wanker, dickhead, and nob.

I LOVE your Comment so much that I am quoting it in this post. I only PARTLY exaggerate my views for journalistic effect.

I regard myself as a GENUINE green, not an idiot, twat, wanker, dickhead, and nob of the deep green, or Green Party, mould, who stop vital motorways, with the result of: congestion with more fumes.

I seek a compromise. This can only arrive in the correct, middle place if BOTH start from extremes. So I gleefully articulate MY extreme. I do actually BELIEVE every word I say, even though I know it is, sadly, not going to sell well.

It is my assertion that EACH and EVERY picturesque hamlet, village, town, or city, that is now vociferously ossified as heritage, whether Studland village, Clovelly, Malibu, Portofino, or you name it, would, if the building of it were to be proposed today, BE PROTESTED AGAINST equally vociferously by exactly the same type of ossifying conservationist and preservationist people…

…or idiots, twats, wankers, dickheads, nobs… and I bet I know more of these gorgeous old English wordies than you do!

NOTHING would ever have been built under the protocol of the NO CHANGE mentality. We would still be in caves. Not a mud hut, let alone a wheel. Conversation? …No fancy language allowed! Only: “Ugh! Ahh! Oy! Oooooo!”

Love, Cy

FIN 12h27

PS: When I become King of Earth, I will certainly develop Sandbanks. But the beach, the streets (no cul-de-sacs allowed), and the path around the lake will be public. A few small birds will be allowed (no Canada geese or swans). See? It is called compromise, as opposed to Green-fascism. Paradise regained…

COME BACK BREAKER

CQ: Lawrence Anthony allows adolescent elephant to live in terror… Thugs start as abused babies & society does fuck all… Wiki bans Hubbardite fascists… Doddy was correct: do not trust banks…

08h12-BST Sunday 31 May 2009-CE

Lawrence Anthony (reported in Weekend, the Daily Mail TV weekly guide) was a heartless beast when he allowed a 14-year-old elphant to remain alive. She had seen her whole family shot dead, and was traumatsied with shock and grief, screaming herself hoarse. To put some sentient life form out of misery (human or non-human) is kindness and responsibility personified.

To fail to do this act of mercy is cowardice and vile self-righteousness.

Daily Echo reported the 03h00 beating to death’s door of a man aged 43, as he left The Opera House near here, by eight young thugs a week ago. I was reminded of what I have often said. When these vile shits were babies, they were brutalised by shit parents, since made worse by violent video games & TV. Gonna do something one day are we? Like, shoot low-life, including video makers, til there are none left?

Wikipedia, I see, has banned the church of Scientology. Just caught this out of the corner of my eye as I clicked My Dashboard. Sounds like a progressive move. This freedom of speech has to be balanced, by good judgement, with freedom of the individual. Human society is a work in progess. Only by discussing the whole situation in the free media of the West can we arrive at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I oft slag the media, but they have covered the Hubbardites well.

My (edited) Comment on CNN Wikipedia / Hubbardite Ban story:

Wikipedia is free speech to the extreme of 1920s Weimar Republik danger. Hubbardites are fascist-indoctrinated victims (with a few well-aware criminal kidnappers). They need to be de-programmed. Who will choose you ask. Someone MUST.

Freedom is a work in progress. Such a debate as this, is the medium. But action cannot be delayed forever. Scientific rationalism (that liberated still has a long war to wage.

We all know how some good young folk are trained to be polite. But they must just walk on by. Do not even say “no”. Do not react. Ignore! Do not slow down.

It ought to be legal matter. The predatory recruiters with their clipboard doing their “survey” must be banned. How long does it take authorities to react to a clear and present danger? Until they get loony-Left riots, I sadly admit.

Ken Dodd (my mate Kool Geezer reminds me) was right after all. Some of us laughed when the great comedian from the English North (who owed income tax to the Inland Revenue) was found to keep money under his bed in suit cases. He did not trust banks. How old fashioned, I thought. Banks are not like the Wild West, these days! Now hath come a new, post-Maggie set of ‘these days’. Doddy knew!

FIN 08h44
EDITED Saturday 13 June 2009

CQ: Corporate Speaker says that his carefully thought-out site design was made flashy by a market-oriented person… This is par for the course in today’s moron-ruled world… His boss should match designer to client…

08h00-BST Saturday 30 May 2009-CE

Corporate Speak on Word Press on Turning Right Into Wrong, One Project At A Time (which you read for yourself) elicited the following comment from me:

Please excuse my butting in. The work you do is far beyond my abilities. But I would have assumed that you would back-up your cumulative product, at the end of each session, to disc, and put it in your pocket.

I am a 68-year-old non-geek and amateur blogger. I hate to be told that I can do more things using a new operating system, or blog theme, when it has taken me long, hair-tearing hours to learn what I already manage. I want only to write my banal and trite pontifications, and email words (not pictures) to my friends and family.

Your analysis and articulation of the difference between your purpose-oriented approach and the tacky mess-up of your colleague, echoes complaints I have about the entire hi-tech world of today, including ads in all media and programme trailers on TV, even street furniture, mall layout. My feeble mind has to cope with using my personal computer and cell phone amidst the confusing noise of unwanted sexy options.

I have always fallen back on subjective terms such as ‘arty-tarty’, but your descriptions paint the dreadful picture precisely, if I understand what you are saying:

…flashing cyan Comic Sans text on a burgundy background, passages of text she thought were important highlighted and in bold…

…marketing mentality, which isn’t the best thing to have in a content production role; that is, if it’s not big, shiny, and flashing, and above the fold, it doesn’t exist…

…take apart someone else’s vision with inexpert tools and slam it back together, then put a coat of paint on it and hope to dazzle the client with bullshit…

This attitude is what I encounter every day in the street, on the TV, and on my laptop screen. I think it goes further. It is the alien core of today’s thinking that it is involved in take-overs, asset-stripping, and financial services crime.

Given my generation, and my UK context, I relate all this to the death of grammar schools, where kids of high-IQ, a treasure of the nation, could flourish. Comprehensive schools mixing all IQs, and many new red-brick low-challenge universities were opened.

There is also the issue of high-brow/low-brow. Your colleague perhaps desires her day to be spent to the accompaniment of beat music, with minimal intellectual challenge. She caters for people like her.

Your company needs to recognise this and set up two steams, one for clients who want the pop product to suit teens and twenties in a leisure context, and the other for clients whose business involves serious work.

FIN 08h48
EDITED Tuesday 02 June 2009
EDITED Saturday 13 June 2009

CQ: News media hyenas promote profitable Green-fascist lies, riding the bandwagon of pseudo-scientific Green-fascism…

07h31-BST Wednesday

This little blog of mine (I struggle to make it feebly shine) is, to the mega blog of Anthony Watts (he maketh it to shine gloriously, bless him), as a child’s foot-push skooter (of which I see a veritable fleet each morning as the children go past my window) is to a Golden Hawk or Firedome or Thunderbird or Trans-Am (you can tell how old I am). Even the Comments are brilliant! Here is one today…

“It is all about research grants and publications. *CLIMATE ALARMISM IS WHERE THE MONEY IS. Given the political currents in the US, federal funding is likely to continue to flow to catastrophist computer model-based “studies”. The news media [are] unwilling to question this new religious melding of politics and pseudo-science, so it is up to a few brave and persistent questioners to keep pointing out the flaws in the arguments.”

The above Comment is quoted from a reader of the post entitled ‘MIT Global Warming of 7 degrees “Could Kill Billions This Century” ‘ which is the post of the day on the WordPress lead page. They do a marvellous job in selecting their “Hawt Post”. (Holy And Wondrous Things? Helpful And Witty Teachings?) Or do they mean Hot Post? Is Hawt a USA in-joke on the Bawston accent? (We hate to see once-rocking MIT go down.)

Stephen Goddard presents the feature today. It is the best post I have ever seen, so far, on the magnificent blog of Mister Watts, which is cleverly entitled “Watts Up With That?” and in which Anthony uncovers exactly what is wrong with a series of widely-accepted, media-trumpeted Not-So-Stories. Read the Watts man for yourself via Mindkind links on my sidebar. More Comments:

(1)

This report shows how [politically oriented] scientific institutions have become.

It’s a great shame that developments are going in the direction of a complete fraud committed by the United Nations, the United States Government, Government bodies like Environmental Protection Agency, and our elite scientific institutions.

People will accept this [nonsense] which will put the [nation] in green shackles for generations to come [unless we] unite and fight back.

We are ruled by monsters and their faces will show uglier than those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot put together.

(2)

These clowns need to look up from their computer screens long enough to ‘observe’ what is really happening.

We don’t see much press about real concerns. Those created in computer simulations take priority. I suppose this is yet another disappointing example that unethical support for the green political agenda marches on.

(3)

The models are not programmed to say anything about how life on Earth will do. They are just programmed to give an expected outcome on global temperature.

The people looking at the computer output come up with the doomsday scenarios, most likely for political attention in order to increase funding. Good old science does not sell well. I know, else I would be rolling in millions

(4)

It is all about research grants and publications. Climate alarmism is where the money is. Given the political currents in the US, federal funding is likely to continue to flow to catastrophist computer model-based “studies.”

The news media is unwilling to question this new religious melding of politics and pseudo-science, so it is up to a few brave and persistent questioners to keep pointing out the flaws in the arguments.

(5)

If current world population is around 6.8 billion and “billions” may be killed by global warming, how is that a bad thing? After all, isn’t it the most sacred wish of Gaia worshipers that most of humanity be eliminated? Perhaps we should just let nature take is course and enjoy ourselves for the few decades we have left.

With friends like these, my anti-Green-fascist stand is doing OK. Well done Watts and friends!

FIN 08h57

*My CAPS Cy Quick

Memorabilia-addicts and Lennon-lovers must compete to give this charming, hearty balustrade a Hollywood home-in-the-West, or New-York-City will win-the-race and find-a-place for this one-in-a-space-time, used-to-be-by-the-sea enchanting thing…

16h11-BST Tuesday 26 May 2009

Off on the jolly old bicycle I pottered, through the streets in the lovely old sunshine, down to the dear old Sandbanks Ferry. I bought the Daily Echo and then ordered scrambled egg in the Haven Cafe. Lo and behold what should I find in the paper but a piece on page 16 about the nearby spot, not three houses down the Panorama Road, where Mary Smith Mimi had her bungalow.

John Lennon is reported to have had built, for his ‘Aunty Mimi’, a balcony, with white wrought iron railings, for the attic bedroom’s French window. After Mimi followed John to the great argument in the sky, the boogie trap, named Harbour’s Edge, was sold by Yoko Ono and demolished in 1994. The balustrade survives. You can buy it if you get in quickly. But please be dignified. No screaming.

The undeniably beautiful item incorporates three sections. Two panels on the left, three panels in the centre, and two panels on the right. Each panel has a heart design filling the frame, with an inner heart, and just the right number of twirls. You can read all about it if you go to my sidebar (to the right of this text) under Bournemouth links and click (Daily Echo BH) it is in MORE NEWS. Also: www.houseandson.com

House and Sons Auctioneers at the Lansdowne salesroom have already had international interest, including some from the good old United States. The sale is tomorrow, Wednesday 27 May 2009. If you can afford it, and you desire to see the economy recover, and you love Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds or Imagine, then how will you ever forgive yourself if you not let the moths fly free.

FIN 17h02

PS 16h28 Tuesday 02 June 2009

Daily Echo today reports that the balustrade is thought to have fetched £750 when it was auctioned on Wednesday. I am disappointed. “The lot was accompanied by a newspaper clipping from the letters pages of the Daily Mail, from a woman who bought the railings when the bungalow was bulldozed in 1994.” -said the Daily Echo today…

Some of my Comments, placed on the blogs of other people, are even good enough for you lot…

09h13-BST Tuesday 26 May 2009-CE

On the subject of that “In God We Trust” gag that USA has stuck on its money in recent years, I made the following Comment on another person’s blog:

USA, and the rest of us here on planet Earth, have to decide to grow up, and face facts. No trust, faith or prayer EVER worked for a victim being pushed into a gas chamber, rushed into an alley and held down for rape, or bullied in the school yard.

Whatever is true of the Ghandisitic long-term, the short-term way that works, in this world of jerks, is “IN GUN WE TRUST” and everybody knows it.

The men who wrote “In God we trust” had the power that money, largely inherited, gave them. They could afford to make silly theist claims. It is a form of false advertising to promise kids that ‘God’ will look after them. The filthy lucre blurb is a similar lie.

On another blog, I opined in regard to green-nutter Doctor Jim Hansen, saying that he is like a person who is profoundly convinced that there is a guy in the sky who made everything, and who offers a salvation package deal. The person is terrified of giving up that belief because it would reveal that decades of his life had been dedicated to a delusion.

So he tinkers with the fantasy, perhaps selecting physical resurrection to judgement and Kingdom, in preference to instant passing in spirit form to Heaven.

Hansen needs to give up the entire sad athropogenic-climate-variation lie produced by prejudiced computer-modelling. Devoting sincere effort to fighting over details of doctrine inside the host of the deluded, is sadder than sad.

In regard to different degrees and aspects of Religious Tolerance, I pointed out that our official British tolerance of the atrocities of misogyny that take place in our cities, for alleged Political Correctness reasons, and allegedly justified because “it is their culture”, is vile hypocrisy. The tolerance of child mutilation ditto. Morons have run our Western establishment since the 1960s.

At last these PC plonkers are waking up a bit. Will they ever admit how loony their policies have been and apologise?

In yet another Comment apropos of whatever, I brought in my view about the benefits of Christian protest in Britain and Germany against the Roman faiths. I have edited it so that it is even more splendid and worthwhile than it was before:

Western science-based technology only began to develop about 1750. It was able to evolve to the present level of advanced electronics because people, who asked questions about how things work, were no longer persecuted by established faiths. They were freed to discover facts of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. They became able to invent systems for manufacturing and medicine.

Now we are finally enabled to obey the command “Go into all the world [and all the cosmos, already] and have domination over all things.”

This line in Genesis was a justification that the Jewish-Egyptian Prince Moshe obviously felt was needed by progressive forces of all eras and cultures. In these days the reactionary creeps afraid of change call themselves ‘greens’. But they are nothing new. They always diss humankind, beat their tits, and call for sacrifice.

It is both pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific, wacko ginks that are the problem. Certain gentlemen, latter-day people of ‘true’ faith, are included.

Only sober and sane science can find the facts that tell us how to use power wisely. Moshe put it into the mouth of a fictional guy in the sky. You and I can see it for ourselves. Ye that have earholes to hear, listen up chumps.

FIN 10h03

Thailand… USA… Los Angeles… Earth Tour… Space Museums… Rock and Roll Museums… Brainfall… Foothoils…

08h45-BST Tuesday 26 May 2009-CE

My friend in Thailand, who is an ex-patriate Englishman, raised the question with me as to whether I might ever visit the beautiful land of the Thais. He had the following (mostly in his words) to say on the universal misunderstanding about Thailand.

There are areas and clubs where escorts will spend time with you for around £20 a day but you pay for the person’s time, not for sex. It is nothing like the sordid scene in the West. And the bar people rarely rip you off. The people who control the clubs frown on that.

I have indeed mused upon the idea of a vacation in the beautiful land of the Thais, but Cape Kennedy, New York City, even Seattle, the Rocket Museum at Huntsville, and Sydney would have to come first.

I have zero capital and have to save hard for holidays. During my employed years, 1958 to 1982, I spent every penny, on every payday. I need the incentive of obligation in order to stop spending. For example, when a sibling was preparing to go to Canada, I was asked me if I could help cash-wise.

It was fortunate that I had several weeks notice! Despite my having only a low-paid shop job, and an evening job pulling the pints, I was able to save £80 (that would have bought 160 bottles of cheap sherry in those days) which just made the difference. The old noblesse oblige of the working bloke (the toffs are more tight) kicked in.

I had saved at the maximum rate and I astonished myself!. What a pity I did not have the same willpower in ALL those days of full-employment. I could easily have become wealthy. But I was, like the character Bobby Thompson, a waster!

In order to take the California trip, I gave up Sky TV, cable TV and phone, and I forget what-all else. Now, after fitting out my new flat, I am going to be able to save enough for LA in the Autumn of 2010.

If I were miraculously made young again, and I could take back with me all that I know now, and were this fantastic miracle-working power the giftie give me to resist temptation to fritter away every penny on booze and trivia, I would desire to spend my money seeing Cape Kennedy, New York City, and Sydney. Even Seattle would feature in my list ahead of the jewels of the Pacific Rim.

I would have liked, in my life, now nearly used up, to have made it to Huntsville Rocket Museum, Cleveland Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and even Sun Studios in Memphis. But I have no resentment against life. It is ME wot prodigalised every penny, consumed every cent.

Hey! I just got a mental picture of me tottering along with some slender young dude in BK. Actually, I do not like pubs (sorry bars) any more. They are filled in the evening with people 50 years younger than I am. I only ever pop in a British public house during the daytime when I cannot find any other loo. I always buy a half and look after the bartender “Take for one yourself, pal.”

From the raw material of my live posts of 7-8 months ago in Los Angeles, I have just produced a three-part Page (see my sidebar) Los Angeles 1, 2, and 3. It shows that I am more of a museum man, a star walker, a sign-worshipping hilltopper (better cover of I’ll Be Home than Pat) or a beach-way cycler.

There are a few other cultures that I respect, for my sins, but USA for all its excruciating ineptitude geo-politically, is the land of the folk I indentify with.

What I need is a world tour, dipping in for an afternoon at each iconic jewel. Actually, the same goes for USA. One cannot spend more than an hour looking around the visitor centers that must, I imagine, be plugged onto, for example, the Buddy Holly statue in Lubbock, and the Apollo in Harlem, and any other High-School Doo-Wop 1950s location in greater NYC.

…The CNN weather man (Christopher Goodstuff or Goodstaff, not kidding) said this morning (in his excellently-articulated, speedy delivery) “heavy brainfall” and “in the foothoils”… …I would hate that job!

FIN 09h33

CQ: Jim Cole says that “The BBC long ago lost any sense of scruples or integrity on the issue of [supposed human impact] on climate change… Anthony Watts focuses on news media use of weasel words such as COULD and MIGHT…

06h46-BST Monday 18 May 2009-CE

The web log Watts Up With That? passes-on a BBC story that the melting of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet will not raise ocean levels on Earth as much as routinely claimed by fake-scientists (using the computer-modelling tool that only works in mechanical engineering). If the poles become clear of ice, and Earth returns to former warmth, sea levels will rise less than the computer-model fakers suggested.

In reports on the subject of Climate Variation (that you and I know is a natural phenomenon driven by our star, Sol) mostly Left-wing sensationalists use such words as COULD and MIGHT because, in their finer depths, they know they are passing on pseudo-science aka junk. Jim Cole placed a Comment about this jargon we get from so many scientists and journalists, flashing junk-degrees, these days.

[QUOTE]

How sad. The BBC long ago lost any sense of scruples or integrity on the issue of [supposed human impact] on climate change. They’re so totally in the tank for the alarmist camp now, that facts no longer matter… …see the Climate Audit site on the Steig bogus analysis of Antarctic temperature trends, or the Catlin follies…

You cannot debate BBC logically any more than you can debate the Vatican about the existence of angels. High priests, heaven and hell, mythical Eden, original sin, salvation through penitence and sacrifice –it’s all the same for the true believers.

There must be a couple of reporters who are beginning to feel the prickly heat of real-world facts who might start challenging the Anthropogenic Global Warming dogma. But that takes cojones…

[END QUOTE]

Anthony Watts has added the site Climate Sanity to his Links at Watts Up With That. See my Mindkind Links…

FIN 07h50
Edited 07 June 2009

Wil Wheaton, and just another freeway crash in LA… Cy Quick, and just another WordPress.com blog… Cup-of-tea, and just another Sunday in dear old Poole Bay…

08h59-BST Sunday 17 May 2009-CE

“Shortly after I got on the freeway, I saw a huge crash happen, entirely because someone was driving like an asshole…”

I am quoting Mister Wil Wheaton.

Right after publishing my plodding post about Press Association’s coverage of Hubble provided to MSN I went to my favourite blog wilwheaton.typepad.com and read the man’s latest post entitled

PLEASE DON’T DRIVE LIKE AN ASSHOLE.

[QUOTE]

…When I was on the freeway just about an hour ago, I was in the number 2 lane, cruising along with the flow of traffic. I saw that the number 1 lane was slowing down a lot, so I slowed down too, just in case people whipped out of that lane and into mine. It happens all the time, because people drive like assholes.

Sure enough, some asshole was speeding down the number 1 lane, and I don’t know if he wasn’t paying attention or what, but he whipped around into my lane – about 100 yards in front of me…

[UNQUOTE]

Go to my sidebar and click (Wil Wheaton) the fifth link in Assorted other bloggers… Transport your mind to magic Los Angeles and find out what happens to our 35-year-old movie star mate who used to play Gordie LaChance and then Wesley Crusher, an is now an amazing writer, geek, and voice-actor for cartoons and games.

FIN 09h09

PS.

You see: even a famous LA dude blogs about what happens to the riders of the road… Therefore, I shall continue to document my bicycle rides to Sandbanks Ferry or Christchurch Quay… But now, tea…

GP: Reply to HOLLYWOOD Sign… Bedfordshire can produce the best or the worst… Ways to go: Piper stick forward over Essex, or Grand Canyon convertible dive…

[Guest Post by Cornelius]

I’ve always figured that if one has one’s mind and body more or LESS intact, one should identify what one wants from this existence and GO for it – pushing all obstacles aside.

But sometimes one does not want ANYTHING. Having been there, done that and bought many tee-shirts, one just wants it all to END.

I’m lucky. I’ve fought, connived and worked DAMN hard to get everything I ever wanted. Mainly, the ideal life partner and enough comforts to enjoy life. I quit the rat race and haven’t regretted it once.

But it could have been so different. If Murphy had said “no”, NO amount of work would have reversed His decision to fuck up my life. Then what?

Having had a series of kidney stones and fuck-ups by what I later discovered was the WORST hospital in Beds (hospital – beds? Hmm) I am now ALERGIC to physical PAIN – thus most routes to Blackness are too horrible to consider.

Most people think a premature exit is simple. On TV, people are pictured sleeping peacefully with an empty bottle of sleeping pills by their side.

But it AIN’T that simple. A schoolfriend’s middle-class father took the family car out to the country one day – and blew his head off with a revolver.

The thing was, he was a DOCTOR.

I couldn’t understand this. Surely, he could have obtained any pills he wanted and gone out in a less spectacular fashion?

Later, I discovered that it’s a WEE bit more complicated than that.

Like, I have SERIOUSLY powerful pain-killers left over from my time as a kidney-stone sufferer (only one minor attack in 13 years now. I avoid too much milk). They would doubtless still work – but get the DOSE wrong and my muscles would relax and I would die, CONSCIOUS, from ASPHYXIATION. No bloody thanks.

But luckily, my World is fine. And I have responsibilities. So I have no NEED of a quick exit. But things CHANGE. I defy ANYONE with a brain to deny they have at least CONSIDERED the prospect of a short-cut to Another Place, at SOME time.

But they, like me, will have discovered it ain’t as simple as HOLLYWOOD would have us believe.

A footnote: my favourite story of a guy taking that short-cut occurred some years back. This guy had part-ownership of a light plane. Now, those who imagine the skies are FREE don’t know nuffin about it. There are more restrictions up there than on our damn ROADS.

Anyhay, he took his Piper up and spent the afternoon doing what EVERY pilot would LOVE to do. He flew round and round the City of London, buzzing the streets, whizzing round buildings and zooming UNDER the bridges over the Thames.

Now this was YEARS before 11:9 (9/11) so no-one was going to shoot him down. The authorities decided to just wait until he landed – then throw the BOOK at him. But he didn’t care – he had no intention of LANDING, per se.

When his fuel ran low, he pointed the sharp end out towards Essex, found a nice big empty field and pushed the stick forward…

I remember having some admiration for this bloke. He had no wish to take others with him, so didn’t really ENDANGER anyone. He just had a LOT of fun and stuck two fingers (one finger) up at the authorities.

Granted it was a bit hard on the co-owners of his aircraft, but aside from that small consideration, this guy had STYLE!

And I noticed the media played the incident down. I suspect they’d been “advised” to do so, by said authorities, for fear of copy-cats. Not like British tabloids. Makes one wonder about their actions over paedophiles. Did the authorities privately CONDONE their illegal excesses?

Anyhoo, I can’t fly. The best I could manage would be to DRIVE into something solid. But after the best part of a million miles, my natural instincts would never permit it.

I still think you should have hired a convertible and visited Grand Canyon, Cy. They can’t have fenced it ALL off – it’s too fucking BIG, surely? (Don’t call me Shirley).

Cornelius…

[Please click to the outstanding sites by Cornelius, Damien, and Morpheus via the links on my sidebar under All Mindkind links.]

Very last Titanic survivor helped by stars including Leonardo DiCaprio… Bournemouth is not safe any more says local, but NO place is, during crime-generating Prohibition 2… UBC Vancouver finds day-dreamers are switched-on ideas-dudes, as we all knew… George Foulkes and Carrie Gracie are both paid too much but fight over it anyway…

22h40-BST Wednesday 13 May 2009-CE

Leonardo DiCaprio (34) and Kate Winslet (33) have responded positively to the charity Millvina Fund to help Millvina Dean (106) the last remaining survivor of the Titanic (built of cheap steel and captained by a reckless ego-tripping bully). She was 9-weeks old when her Daddy put his wife and two children in the lifeboat, said goodbye, and stepped back to die. Other people associated with the 1997 hit musical Titanic are helping too.

“Bournemouth used to be safe place in which to live, but not any more…” says a writer to HAVE YOUR SAY in today’s Daily Echo of Bournemouth. He is correct to a large extent. Prohibition of mind-altering substances (which is a gross intrusion by the state into the rights of citizens) has generated perhaps three times as much violent robbery on the street and in the home as once was.

But if you are a baby or toddler, born to low life trash, nothing is new. No matter how much of a psychopath, sociopath, sadist or moron your parent, or step-parent, is, there is no hope for you. The nation of which you are a new citizen will assume that you are the property of the vile beast. You will be tortured to death and people will say that no-one could have anticipated this common occurrence and it is beyond belief.

It is true that human society is a work in progress, and that balance has to be struck between the need to defend a child from monsters on the one hand, and on the other hand the need to defend good parents from monstrous error of services staffed by loony morons. But we are not trying hard enough. The people to judge are proven good parents in organised community groups. It can be done.

John Chapman in Daily Express today reported that the University of British Columbia finds that day-dreaming “…sparks parts of the brain into life”. I knew that, although I had not framed those words to express it. I speak of having a good imagination. The report says “When a person is awake, the brain is primarily involved in solving day-to-day problems and getting on with whatever needs to be done.” Day-dreaming, I say, is where ‘hunches’ that lead to scientific discoveries and social solutions come from.

George Foulkes is a member of the UK House of Lords (the second-guessing chamber to the House of Commons which seats the elected representatives) and he had a robust response to Carrie Gracie, a BBC TV anchor/interviewer who asked “Why should the public go short of healthcare, of education… …just for somebody chandelier or second home?”

She was covering the story about Members of Parliament who claim expenses for things unrelated to their work. She was right to be tough. It just shows that even BBC employees, typically loony Lefty self-satisfied jerks, can get it right some time. Foulkes asked her what she got paid. She owned up to copping £92,000 per annum. He said “You are paid nearly twice as much as an MP to come on television and talk nonsense.”

Good old freedom! She is correct to slag him off. He is correct to slag her off for getting far too much that cash, all from the BBC doorstep extortion racket. She said “I don’t even make a personal call from the BBC because I know what public money is all about.” Daily Express Political Editor reported this in a side box today.

FIN 23h33

PS Monday 01 June 2009

MSN reports to day that Millvina has now died. Renewed thanks are due to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for helping enormously to make the last days comfortable for the last survivour of the cheap-built death-trap liner captained by a moron.

CQ: Atlantis showcases co-operation twixt Human Sapceflight and Robotic Spaceflight, both of which specialties are vital… I was a fan of astronomers until they became very silly…

08h09-BST Wednesday 13 May 2009-CE

Satellite TV news and documentary channels satisfactorily covered the launch of the NASA orbiter-vehicle Atlantis, on its mission to service and upgrade the Hubble telescope in its orbit around Earth.

There are astronomers who now call themselves space scientists. They work at NASA and other institutions such as universities. They design, build, and launch space probes aka robots to travel to Selene (the Moon of Earth) or Mars, or Venus, or other planets.

I heartily admire the work these space scientists, or astronomers, do. As they remotely operate the robotic probes, and as they receive and interpret the data sent back by the robots, these brilliant people do scientifically invaluable essential work. Their whole area of expertise and operation can be called Robotic Spaceflight.

Human Spaceflight is where organic mindkind, called humans in this neck of the matter cloud, journey into space and interact with events, both natural and instigated by themselves. First we sent robots. Soon after, we lofted humans, beginning with spam-in-the-can orbits and lobs around Earth. Both robotic probes and human missions evolved ever-greater sophistication.

But, right since Sputnik 1 in 1957, there has always been PERCEIVED (by astronomers) competition between the Human Spaceflight camp and the Robotic Spaceflight camp for money from governments. This money, by the way, is used to pay the wages of the people building, launching, and operating in government space agencies, their contractors, and in turn THEIR many sub-contractors.

So Robotic Spaceflight people have constantly, and up until very recently consistently, vociferously condemned Human Spaceflight. This is a crass political error, as well as being contrary to the scientific necessity. It only gives, for example in USA, Congress the idea that ALL spaceflight is bad, and they try to cut budgets.

That is why I often sound as if I hate space scientists, or astronomers. All they have to do, in order to stop my being mad at them, is to quit saying bad things about the International Space Station and the planned human colonisation of Selene and Mars.

Both Human AND Robotic Spaceflight specialties are essential, in co-operation, if we on Earth are to extend our knowledge and habitat beyond our home planet…

I am glad that school introduced me to Physics and Chemistry but I can remember very few specifics of it, and, as I am not academically gifted, my involvement with science is limited to watching news and documentary channels on the Eurobird/Sky platform.

I am vaguely interested in the birth and development of matter, also know as (aka), the cosmos; and somewhat interested in the geopolitics of planet Earth; and also quite a lot interested in any intelligent life, aka mindkind, both here in Sol and overseas aka overspace.

I am an enthusiastic fan of both Human Spaceflight and Robotic Spaceflight. But I am NOT a fan of Extra-Solaric Astronomy because most astronomers are wedded to big-bang speculatory extrapolation, aka pseudo-science.

Most professional astronomers seem to believe that the great cloud of matter, which we term the cosmos, is, as a whole entity, expanding. They base this upon the red-shift which we observe far-travelled light to exhibit. I reject this idea. Here, in my non-academic plain person’s words, is why:

The farther away the object is

(from which any given light is generated, or off which the light has bounced)

the farther that light has travelled before it hits our eyeball, and the more towards the red end of the light spectrum the light has shifted, and the less data the image retains.

Obviously, a given stream of light starts out whole. But some of its bits hit bits of stuff which are in the way.

(I am drawing attention, not to planets and stars which are big enough to see, but to the myriad bits so tiny as to be unlit and therefore unseen.)

The surviving light streams on, becoming less populated, and consequently less white and more red, as it goes.

From our point of view as big organic lifeforms, we see nothing, aka space, between the big somethings (planets and stars) and we call it ‘vaccum’. But radiation of all sorts is actually belting through it at various velocities. And to lots of little somethings (dust and particles) it is home.

“We have just as much right to stop a bit of light as have your human eyeballs!” they insist, bitterly!

Any bit of light that makes a hit, gets stopped in its tracks, or kicked aside. The more bits of light that are missing from any given surviving, ongoing stream, the more red-faced and fed-up the rest get.

“There is no point” one of them points out, cleverly.

“Red is my favourite colour” another vouchsafes, brightly.

After 13 billion light years of distance travelled, the last survivour of this particular charge of the light brigade is ker-splatted.

This way of looking at it will have to suffice us until we discover, and name, more aspects of energy/matter. The idiots amongst us can, as always, ego-trip in their belief that they now know almost all.

From between 13 and 15 we receive only non-light radiation. It is handy for scientific purposes, but, for most of us, Caroline and Big-L have it beat for tea break purposes you may be certain.

The folk at 16 billion light years distance from any given source of radiation, light or non-light, know nought of that source. If they are as stupid as the majority of Earth astronomers, they might even deny that anything exists beyond the limit, 15, of what they can sense.

Of course, instruments that are more advanced than those of 2009, and that we might one day place outside System Sol in somewhat less data-drenched space, might be anticipated to extend our sensing of nuance beyond the 13-for-light, 15-for-radio limit.

As astronomers (you, me, some guy or gal with a degree) look in every direction from our human birth-place on planet Earth, of system Sol, in Milky Way galaxy…

noticing that light is coming from objects from distances up to 13 billion light-years in distance from us…

and seeing no reason to believe that we are at the centre of a distribution of things that suddenly ends…

we can conclude that light is not sustainable beyond that distance, and that objects exist outside of outside finite view…

and that the weight of probability is on the side of our opti-sphere
being merely one speck in a hyperly-vaster entity.

Or, if we are the sort that cannot bear to think that unexplained phenomena can exist in our lifetime, we can insist…

that red-shift means that the objects we see in all directions are retreating…

and that what we see is all there is to see, and that we know it all, and that we are really really really clever.

In fact, red-shift (not to be confused with red shirt that I just typed) is far-more-simply explained by concluding that the image is merely deteriorating. The farther an image has travelled, the more it has deteriorated. As it zips along, data gets demoted from the running.

If matter aka the cosmos were truly expanding (which I say it is not) then, over the generations, we should see objects at the 13 billion light-years away spherical edge fade from view.

EDITED 07h00-BST Saturday 06 June 2009-CE

This text is also a Page, Space is bigger than 30, on the sidebar.

CQ: Atlantis heads for Hubble… Endeavour stands by for possible rescue… Fox News Channel shows us the clean feed whilst CCN, BBC and Sky ruin the picture with straps…

20h53-BST Monday 11 May 2009-CE

Atlantis orbiter vehicle got off OK, heading for Hubble. We saw fine pictures from Fox News Channel who let us see the clean feed from NASA whilst CNN, BBC News and Sky News blocked the lower 20% to 25% of the picture, the most important, the flame from the engines, with a fatuous strap saying “Atlantis off to Hubble” which they had been telling us for the last few hours.

The lights we see in the night sky are either lit by virtue of their generating their own light, or lit by virtue of their reflecting light that is hitting them from a nearby light-generating object. Any unlit object can be called dark matter. There is nothing mysterious about it. The individual bits of it will vary in size from sub-particle to agglomerations that are big, but not big enough to start a fire.

Comment from the space scientists was, as always: “We now know the size of the universe; we now know the age of the universe; and it is expanding faster than we thought.” Utter nonsense! The red shift of far-travelled light is a function of its loss of content as it travels, and unlit matter blocks its data until none remain. It is not an indication that the collection of mattwer that we call the cosmos is expanding.

FIN 21h30

CQ: Ralph of BIG ISSUE murdered by his pitch… Faith Eckersall supports the right to help in dying… Bikes are stolen not to use but for drugs cash… Star Trek movie keeps the wessels crap…

10h51-BST Monday 11 May 2009-CE (REVISION)

Ralph Millward (41) sold BIG ISSUE for years outside Waitrose in Westbourne, now Marks & Spencers Simply Food. Ralph was found dead around 07h00 on the sidewalk out front near where he slept. He had been beaten up by these courageous NOT heroes NOT of righteousness NOT. Six teenage boys (3 aged 16, 1 aged 14) and two teenage girls (1 aged 17 and 1 aged 18) have been arrested… Updating this at 15h26 Tuesday: three have been charged with murder, 2 aged 16, 1 aged 14.

Christopher Brockway of the local Baptist Church said that Ralph was “…an intelligent, kind and generous man who always had his head in a book…” Customers had to enter and leave the store round the side whilst police checked the scene. It is reported that Ralph was so courteous that traders liked him… Updating at 15h27 on Tuesday: I went past on the bus today, Tuesday, and there was a half dozen folk around the spot reading the tags on the flowers.

Another seller who died recently was Michael (32). He always had a couple of dogs with him. It was possibly him who was involved on the day that I saw a boy of about four freeze in the Waitrose shop doorway and wet himself when he saw the two dogs. His mother came back and chided him when she saw the puddle of pee on the entry. She failed to make the canine connection. I saw that he was lookiing at the dogs with great fear on his face.

Also at the Waitrose (now M&S) site I witnessed a seller being given £70 one day by a lady who felt sorry for him. The other Westbourne site is outside Iceland. BIG ISSUE has not had my £1.50p for the past four special editions on Food, Fashion, Environment, and some other boring stuff I forget.

A silly reader wrote to the Daily Echo in Bournemouth about a daughter and grandson who had their bicycles stolen from outside Waitrose in Winton. The silly person assumes the bikes were taken by youngsters to use for themselves. The far greater likelihood is that the machines were turned into cash for mind-altering substances within the hour. This is part of the fund-raising driven by Prohibition. Repeal is the cure.

Faith Eckersall in Daily Echo yesterday was magnificent. “We have a Human Rights Act that guarantees the right of foreign rapists and murderers to live here on benefits, of extremists to cream hatred in our streets, yet the right to be helped to die is ignored… …Assisted suicide is not wrong, it is not evil and it is not against the wishes of any God worth worshipping.”

Star Trek had all that the movie critics enthused about but I was very sad to see the retention and continuation of the very silly gimmick whereby we are expected to believe that, roughly 200 years from now, it will be impossible for a highly qualified Star Fleet officer, who happens to be from Russia, to pronounce the ‘v’ sound, as in victory.

I would have thought that the ill-thought-out idea could have been quietly dropped for this 2009 movie, and the few examples of the nonsense in the orginal series, where the character Chekov was made to look inconsistent, recorded-over.

FIN 11h11

USA and UK systems of democracy need to reform, following the examples of new democracies such as the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Ireland, and others.

In the UK Westminster system of democracy, the head (called Prime Minister) of the administration is an elected, removable member of the house of representatives (called the House of Commons) as is each one of his cabinet members. There is an unelected second-guessing chamber (called the House of Lords).

The hereditary monarch is there to rubber-stamp new laws, and to be there for us if Westminster falls apart. In practice, the existing monarch (Queen Elizabeth 2) has been able to advise succeeding administrative heads as to technicalities, and (I guess) to remind them, if they wish to listen, of previous practice and results.

Elizabeth (or Liz as the Yanks called her on her first visit) has won great affection in British hearts (which is really very naughty of her as the monarchy is supposed to be dying). Philip used to be admired for speaking his mind when he spotted backwardness in UK industry. But Phil (Yanks again) is thought to have been nasty to Diana, who had a hard-enough time being young and foolish without such unhelpfulness.

In the USA Jeffersonian system of democracy, the head (called President) of the administration is NOT an elected member of the House of Representatives. He is removable only with difficulty. He is elected but his cabinet members are NOT. They are proposed by him and vetted by some conglomeration of Congress-people.

The system sets the elected Congress (constituency-based House of Representatives, and state-based second-guessing Senate) against the President in a fight about which proposed laws, or parts of same, to pass or reject. Both UK and USA systems claim to guarantee freedom of, and wise government of, the people.

I think that both systems, UK and USA, need reform. We in UK could adopt the US Senate. They in USA could adopt the UK Commons. Both president and monarch features should be firmly retired with due respect and moderate gratitude. Two new museums, the White House in USA, and Windsor Castle in UK, would, I suspect, do excellent business.

The systems of democracy in Germany, Ireland and Israel employ the right model for the USA and UK to follow.

Re-written from 2007

Britain’s Got Talent… What happens behind the scenes of the game shows, and the reality shows, to ensure that the impromptu, off-the-cuff, unplanned stuff all goes according to plan…

10h28-BST Thursday 7 May 2009-CE

My ex-pat British friend in Thailand reports that Gwynth didn’t go into details but, yes, of course, her act had to be ordered to a certain extent in consulation with the production staff.

(It does not detract from her courage in stepping on that stage and exposing herself to the crowd! I do not say that it fooled me, but IT CERTAINLY CONFUSED ME, as per my recent post. I am looking forward to seeing the repeat so that I can really have a laugh. I never watch it normally.)

My friend watches “America’s Got Talent” over there, and he has seen bits of the British version in a documentary on Paul Potts that turned up on the local satellite, and on YouTube, and the whole thing is, apparently, very much contrived. (That word is not necessarily pjorative. You could say ‘engineered’.)

He will do his own post on the subject, on one of his blogs, in due course of time. I was fascinated by his insight, as an industry man as well as industry fan, into the business of making money by putting on a Good Show. “If you just let the public parade across the stage and do their thing, then edit-out the dross, you have a show, but not a GREAT show…” was more or less how he puts it. More:

START OF QUOTATION

…It can go horribly wrong though. I recall how the vintage “What’s My Line” format got FUCKED in the Uke, when the minions got SLOPPY. They tried to find seriously “exotic” vocations to test the panel – but ran onto a PROBLEM. Given a limited number of guesses, hardly ANY of these bizarre occupations were being GUESSED…

This threatened to torpedo the show, so the producer fed Bernie Braden’s wife [Barbara Kelly] with some of the answers. But HE was sloppy and a non-regular panalist overheard and went PUBLIC…

END OF QUOTATION

Read the rest of this great piece via the link to Cornelius located in my sidebar atop the Assorted other blogs…

It is an interesting study to identify the number of shows that have truly originated in UK. Desert Island Discs is about the only one. Any more recent ones that appear to be British-Made are really examples of raising the dead. Pop Idol or whatever it was called was just a re-do of talent shows in USA when I was a kid.

FIN 11h04

Doctor James Hansen is terrified of giving up his profound belief in human-caused climate variation, because to do so would reveal that decades of his life have been dedicated to a delusion based upon prejudiced computer models, so he tinkers with the fantasy, condemning Cap & Trade, praising Fourth Generation nuclear power…

05h00-BST Thursday 7 May 2009-CE

In today’s Hot Commentary Posts, provided by Word Press dot com on their Home page, the brilliant Watts Up With That? web log by Anthony Watts offers:

Jim Hansen calls Cap and Trade the “Temple of Doom”

which contains the usual excellent material rebutting the human-cause-climate-variation nonsense which is based upon faulty and indeed biased computer-models.

I found the Comments as excellent as the article:

David in Davis found two things on which he could agree with Doctor Hansen. The cap and trade is bad policy. And nuclear power is a good thing.

“…Hansen strongly favours fourth generation nuclear research and development which was terminated by the Clinton administration in repayment for support from the antinuclear environmental lobby…”

“…Thorium molten salt reactors and other 4th generation technology promise all of the benefits of conventional nuclear while eliminating most if not all of its problems including the need for pressurized vessels and the waste issue…

David recommends:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/11/28/hansen-to-obama-pt-iii-fast-nuclear-reactors-are-integral/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

Ron de Haan says Hanson is right and wrong. (Are we not all?)

“He is right about Cap & Trade which would cost the average US family $6,400 a year according to this report:

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/625/Report-Carbon-trading-estimated-to-cost-each-US-Family-6400-per-year

“He is wrong because his alternative concept would turn the US into a Fascist State. He is double wrong because all his scaremongering serves a non existing hoax:

http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/05/ocean-heat-agw-climate-models-v-reality.html

“And we can pump as much Anthropogenic CO2 into the atmosphere without any warming penalty:

http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/05/miklos-zagoni-explains-miskolczis.html

“Plus all the other arguments presented at WUWT. AGW = DEAD…”

Colin artus adds:

“…Here in the UK we have been living with high levels of fuel tax for decades; currently equivalent to about $5.30 of tax per gallon. Has this made any difference to the level of demand ? No, and this simply illustrates that fuel price is inelastic so that a dollar here or there will make no impact on demand.

“The energy density of oil is so far beyond that of any reasonable alternative that economic stimuli directed at pushing demand from one commodity to another would require truly dracononian levels of taxation. And what would happen to all this revenue? ; the UK has little to show for the huge sums raised other than record breaking budget deficits…”

My comment, awaiting moderation at this moment, is particularly brilliant and excellent:

Hansen is like a person who is profoundly convinced that there is a guy in the sky who made everything, and who offers a salvation package deal. The person is terrified of giving up that belief because it would reveal that decades of his life had been dedicated to a delusion.

So he tinkers with the fantasy, perhaps selecting physical resurrection to judgement and Kingdom, in preference to instant passing in spirit form to Heaven.

Hansen needs to give up the entire sad anthropogenic-climate-variation lie produced by prejudiced computer-modelling. Devoting sincere effort to fighting over details of doctrine inside the host of the deluded, is sadder than sad.

FIN 05h49

Gwynth! Well done for having a bash! Our Gwynth has a great career as presenter on some Sky Entertainments channel show if she decides to take it up (without the witch costume, please). WARNING: some swearing in this post…

08h25-BST Wednesday 6 May 2009-CE

My mate in Thailand sent me two U-Tube links of Gwynth whom he has known for years (and who is now copping the down sides of fame). I watched the stuff with interest. I had missed that particular episode of Britain’s Got Talent because I never watch it, except by accident. Gwynth did her sally at the funny biz in her sympathy-winning if-you-don’t-like-it-fuck-you style.

I emailed back to him my thanks and said that I did not understand why Simon was putting on the rolling-eyeballs face, and the blond lady was recoiling with alarm, at the curse. Piers did not seem to be fazed but, if you looked closely, you could see micro-movement of the eyelids and eyebrows. He tried hard and did his best.

What, I wondered, was the point? Was it pure show biz making as much as possible out of nothing? At least they came up with “there is no such thing as a witch” put-down at the end. But that is not going to change the effect it would have had on morons. ANY concession to belief in magic AT ALL is subversive to the post-Newton-Darwin scientific-rationalist age.

I hope that this “there is not such thing as ” statement is a sign that the lovey-Left electronic media morons are waking up to their error in thinking it was PC to give comfort to the crazy section of the Lesbian population who claim to be witches, ditto in regard to certain gentlemen raising their version of the SS in no-go-areas. The Left needs to be informed and serious in defence of rationalism.

The victims of witch-hunting were simply intelligent ladies. I would like to line up and shoot all the children’s writers (lion, witch, wardrobe, etc) who cater for this shite. Then I would have them shoot me for enjoying Harry Potter. I finally decided that Gwynth had indeed been a gimmick. She was never in the running for a YES vote. The big deal was her RESPONSE at rejection!

I then cycled in glorious sunshine to Staples to buy a printer. Zanussi sent me the manual for my second-hand washer/dryer by email attachment, so it needed printing. Blustery airflow from the west gave me a struggle going there, and then I had to push the bike home, with the box tied to the frame.

EDITED 07h25-BST Sunday 10 May 2009-CE

Laurence Bergreen’s book, The Quest For Mars, rocks… Carl Sagan liked wacko speculation, even if people got scientifically pedantic… Paul Allen in Bournemouth Daily Echo reports from vacation in off beat Cornwall where farm boys laugh at Angles… Steve Cook has some impressive Rock photography to show at Dorset Music Forum in Boscombe…

08h20-BST Saturday 2 May 2009-CE

The Quest For Mars by biographer & journalist Laurence Bergreen about robotic spaceflights to Mars, mentions complexity theory in which particle-physicists claim that behaviour is not explained by Physics. But the money-grubbers of the stock market deal mostly in physical products. As to toxic deals, crooks have physical brain cells. Their toxic desires and toxic ethics are both brain-based.

About the way Carl Sagan saw life on Mars despite zero evidence sent by NASA probes, Bergreen reports that Sagan “justified his fondness for speculation with a retort that was both serious and flippant”. I TOO try to be serious but only manage flipping silly! Sagan said “I think it’s because human beings love to be alive, and we have an emotional resonance with something else alive.”

Paul Allen in ECHO MAGAZINE for Daily Echo in Bournemouth, has a grumble about the resident local yokel in a Cornish pub off the beaten track. When called an emmet, Paul needs to drop into one of those made-up mumbles and if challenged say that it is, of course, the ancient language of Dumnonia (not that new Cornish) as every patriotic Celt would know, from before the Romans came.

I thought ‘Emmet’ was a phonetic spelling of “alright mate?” as pronounced by visiting English. It is the default response if a local dude asks a mystery question (in the field or on the council estate). We are told that ‘Grockle’ is the term used by Dorset country folk for visitors. I have never come across any of this. Paul needs to be less sociable. Never smile, Paul; be like me.

As for Paul’s moan about tractors blocking A and B roads, this is the fault of Green-fascism. Those jerks got the Motorway network program cut. I had a great night’s sleep and the chin has stopped bleeding. I went to see the Steve Cook exhibition at Dorset Music Forum shop (selling Opera House tickets). It was shut but I saw the fine photographs through the window. No memorabilia.

FIN 15h50

The sidewalk is harder than the chin… ken wood lennon dot blog spot is worth looking at… Aunt Mimi was Sensible and Spartan but the 1960s called for Sexy and Silly…

13h32-BST Friday 1 May 2009-CE

It was an interesting variation of the regular theme when I ran for the bus as if I was still 12 years old, and tripped, banging my chin on the sidewalk, and dripped. Funny how the spots on the tarmac were wine coloured, but the blots on the white paper tissue were scarlet as the redcoats of King George #3. I am going to wash my coat as soon as the second-hand washing-machine that I just ordered is delivered and connected.

Ye ken the noo, I had a look at ken wood lennon dot blog spot whilst editing my post of Friday 6 June 2008 on Norwegian Wood cafe. The U-Tube chat with Mary Elizabeth Smith (Aunt ‘Mimi’) in 1981, at her bungalow Harbour’s Edge, 126 Panorama Road, Sandbanks, Poole, Dorset, was revealing. Aunt Mimi said of John’s buying her stuff:

“I could have had ANY thing. But I’m just one of those people that are rather Spartan. I don’t WANT anything…”

Why did Cynthia Lennon slag-off Aunt Mimi? Perhaps it was the generation gap of those days. Was Aunt Mimi polite to some but snotty and cold in front of Cynthia?

FIN 14h04

CQ: Wil Wheaton on his Memories of the Future, and the Espresso Book Machine… Mike Lane of Press TV’s American Dream does not see that Barak Obama kissed the king’s hand…

06h29-BST Wednesday 29 April 2009-CE

Wil Wheaton, the writer and voice-actor of today, who played slender boys when he was a slender boy, in Stand By Me and Star Trek -The Next Generation, is a most amusing celebrity blogger if you do not object to swearing.

I bought the first three of his books (ordering them via Westbourne Books) when they came out, but I gave those copies away along with all my worldly goods when I went to Los Angeles in September 2008.

It sounds as if I am going to have to order Mister Wheaton’s Memories of the Future Volume One when it comes out. Check the Wil Wheaton link in my sidebar, under Assorted other bloggers, and read the full substance. Here is an extract…

START OF WIL WHEATON QUOTATION #1

I’ve talked to a few of my friends from the show about their memories from season one, and they’ve shared amusing and insightful memories with me that I think readers are going to really enjoy…

…I’m so close to letting Memories of the Future Volume One leave the nest…

…I’ve shared parts that are from the recaps, but the other half of each entry is more analysis and reflection on each episode…

…This is from Datalore, which I loved when I was a kid, but is just riddled with plot holes I couldn’t see twenty years ago…

…there are story problems that should have never gotten past the first draft…

…I hated the way they handled Wesley in this episode. He’s already on his way to becoming a hated character, and the writers cranked it up to Warp 11. It was stupid of them to have Picard give him an adult responsibility and then dismissively treat him like a child when he carried it out. It undermines both of the characters…

…Maybe the idea was that Wesley would prove Picard wrong, with a big payoff at the end when Picard apologies or something and their relationship grows as a result. But all we get is one line in the cargo bay when Picard says, “Can you return to duty?”

Really? That’s it? How about,

“Hey, can you kiss my ass, Captain? How does that work for you? I was right about everything, bitch!”

…It’s not all bad, of course. The art direction in this episode is some of the best we’ve seen so far….

END OF WIL WHEATON QUOTE #1

I saw the piece on TV (Sky News, Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC World, I do not recall) about the book machine. The price per page puts me off (was it 4p?) Wil Wheaton ran a piece on it:

START OF WIL WHEATON QUOTE #2

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London:

[That line is in blue, and you can click it, on Wil's clever blog but now I copied it onto mine, the damn thing is painted black. -Cy]

…The Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait…

…”This could change bookselling fundamentally,” said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. “It’s giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon … I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that’s pretty compelling.”

END OF WIL WHEATON QUOTE #2

On Press TV channel yesterday, on the show American Dream from DC, hosted by Colin Campbell (one of my ancestral clans), Michael Lane of INTELEPHANT STRATEGIES was still claiming that President Barak Obama merely bowed deeply to some guy! I saw the clip and I have NO doubt whatsoever that Obama kissed the man’s hand. Ye who have eyes to see, wanna engage the brain?

It is excellent and wonderful that the Right can condemn perceived Obama errors of policy and applications and NOBODY, not even the Far Left, is so silly (and inaccurate) as to accuse them of any kind of prejudice. The matter simply does not arise. All the racist dogs have died off. Such guff is not a part of our life anymore. The USA has grown up. (Still got other ways to catch up.)

FIN 07h14

CQ: Downtown Bournemouth: The Square, Westover Road, The Triangle, The Lansdowne, Old Christchurch Road, Holdenhurst Road, clubs, pubs, cafes, fast-food…

16h55-BST Wednesday 29 April 2009-CE

The Central Gardens, with the Bourne stream running through, joins the two sides of downtown Bournemouth. The gardens run south and end down at the beach. The town itself did not exist until 1810, when holiday houses began to be built by wealthy people.

To the east of Bournemouth is Christchurch (formerly Twynham) with its harbour for yachts in its River Stour.

To the west of Bournemouth is Poole, in Poole Harbour, through which a channel is kept dredged for the roll-on ferries carrying cars and trucks, to and from France.

The heath, which used to exist between Poole and Christchurch, is now all built over with Bournemouth (and northern Poole). The conurbation comprised by these three independent boroughs of Poole, Bournemouth, and Christchurch, might function better if it were united into a city but each borough clings to independence.

Downtown Bournemouth is small, with old buildings rising to six floors at the most. It is centered on Bournemouth Square (with Debenhams, Borders, Smiths and Boots) set across the Central Gardens.

Also downtown is Saint Peter’s Church where, in the late morning and midday period, you can buy the lowest-price cup of tea or coffee in town, and various cakes and biscuits also cheap in price.

If you are very lucky, you might catch a recital going on, with some person singing a fine old ‘Sacred’ work. I generally prefer Rock and Pop, and I know that there is no ‘Creator’, but a change for the old songs is a refeshing treat.

East off the Square, leads Old Christchurch Road (with Dingles, MacDonalds, and Beales).

West off the Square, leads Commercial Road (BHS, Marks and Spencer, and Currys).

Many cell phone shops are present at one side or the other.

On the east side of the Gardens is Gervis Place leading to Westover Road where the two cinema multiplexes, Odeon and ABC, are located, and one of those big modern video games places, plus the Pavilion Theatre.

On the west side of the Gardens is the Bournemouth International Centre where shows and conferences take place.

Everywhere are cafes, especially down the side streets. But my favourite place to have a coffee is on the fourth floor (aka level 5) restaurant of Debenhams store. You can sit by the windows and overlook The Square, which is a pedestrian area with the Bourne Stream (a tiny little trickle until a rainstorm comes) running in a tunnel underneath.

I find the downtown area of Bournemouth very useful, despite the fact that most people now go shopping by car to the out-of-town supermarkets such as Tesco on Castle Lane, or the Castlepoint shopping mall (with Sainsburys and Asda) also on Castle Lane.

A very useful thing about Bournemouth Square is the fact that lots of regular bus routes serve it. As far as the buses are concerned, the conurbation IS a city, with downtown Bournemouth at its centre. I use the buses on cold or rainy days. On fine days, I ride my bicycle everywhere.

The Travel Interchange (on the eastern edge of downtown) is a fancy name for the Bournemouth Railway Station, from outside of which the National Express buses also run, east to London, and west to various places including Plymouth.

On the way, is The Landsdowne where six roads meet. There is a KFC, other cafes, and bars. Bingo is just beyond the College.

You can go to the links in my sidebar under Bournemouth Area Links to learn more about this conurbation. There are no gigantic high-rises, but it is a pleasant place to live, or take a vacation, provided, of course, that you have sufficient money to pay for a hotel room or apartment!

I have not mentioned The Triangle, just at the western edge of downtown. It is the ‘gay’ quarter.

Right from The Square, up through Old Christchurch Road to The Landsdowne, and along Holdenhurst Road until just past the Travel Interchange, are the clubs, pubs, and fast food places where the night-life takes place…

As for crime, it is like the rest of the Western world. I go out in the daytime only. On the rare occasions when I go out at night, I take cab home. I am one of the lucky mjority who have never been targeted.

And all this violence cuture is caused by politicians stupid enough to think that Prohibition #2 will work where Prohibition #1 did not, and weak enough to let violent criminals stay on the streets.

FIN 05h53
EDITED Monday 08 June 2009

Pontiac sinks suddenly in the west… I can never remember those funny Pacific Rim names (except Honda)… Never mind, we can see the old motors in the Petersen Museum on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles… Another car-place to visit is the Beaulieu Motor Museum in Hampshire, UK… Weirdly, however, I actually dislike cars except the styling and prefer to ride a motor-bike or push-bike…

06h40-BST Tuesday 28 April 2009-CE

I feel sad to see yet another American automobile marque disappear. But I am silly to feel sad. Those USA brands that will be left, if I get this right, are:

Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick

Chrysler, Dodge

Ford, Mercury, Lincoln

When I was a teenager, taking a free look in Saturday Evening Post at W H Smiths (3/6 to buy) the ads in the Fall aka Autumn, there were also:

De Soto, Studebaker, Plymouth, Oldsmobile.

Before 1940 when I was born, there were other greats names that died:

Duisenberg, Auburn, Cord…

As to UK cars, we had Sunbeam-Talbot, Standard, Humber, Hillman, Austin, Morris, Riley, Singer…

I am aware that I have forgotten many more than I remember, and I am aware that there were many more than I ever knew in the first place. I loved discovering pre-1940s motors in the Petersen Automobile Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, in September 2008.

But Pontiac was a particularly sexy auto. It had the parallel bands on the hood aka bonnet. Only the big bullet shaped protrusions from the chrome bumpers of many US makes, and the bullet holes along the sides of the Buick were more sexy. Then Pontiac did Trans-Am for a while and I thought that they were definitely safe. But recent sales are what matter. So-long Pontiac…

FIN 07h11

CQ: Radio Caroline commemorative exhibition on the Isle of Man in Peel, reports Frank Gallagher… Sparky Mac just discovered Radio Caroline for the first time…

18h40-BST Sunday 26 April 2009-CE

From

frankgallgher.wordpress.com

you can get information about the Radio Caroline commemoration event will take the form of an exhibition, begining in August in Peel on the Isle of Man. The blog comes with this fact-filled gem of a post:

START OF QUOTATION #1:

Radio Caroline started life in Greenore Port (north County Louth) in the winter of 1964 when the 35 year old, second-hand MV (merchant vessel) Fredericia was, under the noses of the authorities, fitted out as a floating radio station and re-named “Caroline” by Ronan O’Rahilly, son of the then port owner Aodaghan O’Rahilly, and grandson of Michael (”The O’Rahilly”) the famed 1916 rebel.

The station remained on the air until 1968 when Westminster made it a criminal offence to supply, service or advertise on Caroline. The radio ship then found itself with a diminishing income-stream and unable to pay it’s bills. The Caroline ship was then eventually impounded by a Dutch tug company to whom it owed money, causing it to cease broadcasting.

The Radio Caroline commemoration event will take the form of an exhibition, begining in August in The House of Manannan, Peel on the Isle of Man. It will also encompass a Radio Caroline Weekend that includes a special Caroline Conference, guided coach trips to Ramsey Bay and around the Caroline exhibition in Peel.

To coincide with the commemoration on the Isle of Man, which runs until next February, island-based author, broadcaster and event management consultant Andy Wint has just published a book entitled “Manx Giant – the story of Radio Caroline 1964 -1968″ The publication, which has been extensively researched, is now available and is being hailed as “the definitive history” of Radio Caroline (North).

Andy’s beautifully presented work has already been the subject of much acclaim. The research and publication of the Radio Caroline story, as well as the Radio Caroline Commemorative Exhibition, featured on (ITV) Border Television recently.

Here in Ireland, LMFM’s Mid-Morning Show (Daire Nelson), on a couple of occasions over the summer, had Andy as an interview guest to speak about the commemoration event and the publication of his book, which generated much interest and feedback from listeners around the north-east region, including Greenore, County Louth – the birthplace of Radio Caroline.

For more information and purchase details, check out:

www.manxgiant.com

END OF QUOTATION #1.

Also you should see:

http://sparkymac.wordpress.com

START OF QUOTATION #2:

I’ve a new love in my life. Her name’s Caroline. But it’s an open relationship and I’m eager to share her.

Okay, I’ll turn down the creep factor a couple of points and say that I’m talking about Radio Caroline, Britain’s legendary pirate radio station. Now on the more legit side, it can be found on that incredible worldwide web at

http://www.radiocaroline.co.uk/

where it broadcasts an amazing array of rock and roll, what we Yanks might call AOR.

You can listen online and I suggest you do if you want an alternative to the commercialized crap found on your radio dial. In the past few hours, I’ve heard old favorites I haven’t heard in years, tunes I’ve never heard before, and album tracks that I’ve never even heard on radio. It’s brilliant!

END OF QUOTATION #2.

Sorry, there is no easy-click way to make the above addresses go blue so that they become a link that you can click… I am not a geek. I NEED easy.

FIN 18h52
EDITED Thursday 18 June 2009

Susan Boyle needed a talent show 25 years ago, but at least she now has the support of a good family, West Lothian, Scotland, the UK, and a goodly party of the English-speaking world… War Cry from Salvation Army applauds some guy called Gordon Brown for telling the G20 what we have all (and/or he has) been doing wrong…

08h37-BST Saturday 25 April 2009-CE

Susan Boyle looks so nice, bless her. The news media are all on her side I am glad to say, and so they should be! She is the brave, inspiring, singing heart of Blackburn, West Lothian. Her brother Jerry said, in Daily Mirror for Friday 24 April:

“…It goes quiet when Susan sings, it always does. She always has that effect…”

I wish the audience of Britain’s Got Talent would follow that same rule! It was good of them to acknowledge a new star when they heard her. But I do wish they could have sat down after a few seconds, so we could all listen. I am going to have to buy the CD…

The Sally Ann man on Poole Hill (where I used to work for Dixons in the mid-1970s) sold me the War Cry for 11 April. I liked the Comment entitled Global Action.

Apparently, there is fictional Wall Street trader, Gordon Gekko, on TV, who embraces an “amoral money-making philosophy” but the salvationist leader-writer commends Gordon Brown who spoke at G20 in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

You all know that I have contempt for people who believe in a guy in the sky with a silly salvation package deal but I do admire the Salvation Army for their dedicated compliance with the suggestion of the man from Nazareth, even if, as I believe, he was just a Love & Peace guru, not a super-naturally generated phenomenon. The War Cry Comment went:

START OF QUOTES:

The gospel according to the first Gordon is that greed is good. The message from the second Gordon is that greed is bad…

“…Instead of a globalisation that threatens to become values-free
of and rules-free, we need a world of shared global rules founded on shared global values…

“…Through each of our heritages, traditions and faiths, there runs a single powerful moral sense demanding responsibility from all and fairness to all…”

In Westminster the mantra among MPs is that ‘you can’t legislate for morality’. No amount of law can make a person less selfish, more considerate, crueller or kinder. The law can influence actions. The law alone cannot change attitudes…

END OF QUOTES

The Comment winds up with the predictable claim that we need an act of their alleged sky-guy to change hearts and minds. But you see, my dears, the thistle-caster in Genesis with the roast-lamb fixation, despite his later conversion to human sacrifice of innocents, is fiction. The whole ethics deal is as we secular, humanist, non-theist folk say, up to us…

FIN 09h37

Pseudo scientists and environmentalists, deluded that human civilisation causes the climate of Earth to vary (from some imagined ideal state) have gullible politicians passing senseless laws that demand big public spending, and sabotage human civilisation, just as did insane religions of the past practicing human sacrifice…

17h20-BST Friday 24 April 2009-CE

On my sidebar under Mindkind Links and Politics Links is a link to the site Watts Up With That? by Anthony Watts. This superb site is often linked to on the WordPress.com Home page.

From a guest post by Steven Goddard on the Watts Up With That? web log currently we have the following quotes:

…

START OF QUOTES

Marko L:

21 April 2009, The Fraser Institute, Vancouver, BC

New Report Details Over-Looked Scientific
Evidence Against Simplistic Climate Alarmism

A 110-page report by an international team of climate experts published today by the independent Fraser Institute examines critically-important scientific evidence that has been overlooked or omitted in government reports that blame climate change on carbon dioxide emissions.

The new peer-reviewed report’s seven chapters investigate published scientific literature on issues such as the effects of ocean oscillations and solar variations on climate, historical climate variability, statistical challenges in climate analysis, uncertainties in climate modelling, and quality problems in temperature measurement systems. The report leaves no doubt that the science is far from “settled” on climate change.

…

Rick:

It would seem that if one had a quest (say, to reduce global warming) that one would have both an objective (an optimal temperature) and a means of measuring when that objective has been reached.

Has anyone seen an AGW [anthropogenic global warming] scientist even posit an optimal Global Mean Temperature, or what they would do if the temperature fell beneath that? Would they start promoting CO2? Does the lack of thought on this issue indicate that they never intend to actually solve climate issues?

I recently had a brief blog discussion with a climate professor at the University of Washington, who said he was attempting to reach out to non-scientists. There were probably 2 dozen good, solid questions (like the one above) asked of him by several non-scientists.

The poor guy never had a chance. Once he saw how hard it was outside his insulated little world, he, dumbfounded, refused to even acknowledge most of them, and the answers he did give had largely been dismissed years ago, showing an alarming degree of ignorance of the world outside academia.

If anyone else wonders why they keep pumping out the same stuff, it’s because each unfounded claim they accept as truth serves as an unquestioned baseline for the next step. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend why the rest of us didn’t accept his beliefs as proven fact. I weep for science, too.

…

Robert Bateman:

The Sun will expose them for the polyscience agenda they are running.

You can’t hide the Sun.

You cannot remodel it’s output that is seen & felt globally.

You cannot pass legislation or policy to force it to do something else.

You cannot blame the Sun on [humankind].

You cannot explain the Sun’s behaviour by CO2 levels on Earth.

You cannot squeeze blood out of a turnip any more than you can create Green Energy out of nothing while the Sun threatens to drop it’s output.

It’s the Sun, stupid.

Even the ancients knew better.

…

Robert Bateman:

What was that I studied in Early Astronomy?

Oh, yes, the Mayan Rulers and their priests practiced a religion of control claiming to appease and guide the Sun & crops & Hero Twins with their sacrifice. Until they fouled up the very ecosystem they depended upon for their bounty of Maize by overuse of fuels to make their shiny lime plaster.

Nobody told them about energy conservation.

Nobody told them to stop doing things to the land.

It wasn’t the C02 from burning that destroyed them, it was the ecological system they wasted.

AGW is blowing smoke up tailpipes.

Go back to your superfund thing, it was working.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

…

Frank K.:

“…I’ve also been pondering why we see so many inane and conflicting AGW alarmist stories in the media. It seems that some group or other has a global warming-based press release almost every day.

Well, I’ve concluded that it is all due to the *** billions *** of dollars being poured into the Global Warming Industry by governments (i.e. your tax money) and private benefactors. It has become the modern academic/scientific gravy train. The antics of the Catlin Survey stunt team are a prominent example this connection between the money and the AGW industry…BTW, guess who’s going to get rich when Cap and Trade is enacted…

…

Don Owen:

…here is the full passage from Eisenhower’s Farewell Address – read and weep for science.

“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.

In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.

Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Also, I believe the capture of government/science/media by the left has advanced to the point where cognitive dissonance among the AGW crowd is creating the sort of incoherence displayed in Steve Goddard’s example at the top of the post, and especially in Ms Stroeve’s remarks.

It’s as if people like Stroeve only understand one thing: the consensus must be preserved no matter how ridiculous it may sound to folks like readers of WUWT.

END OF QUOTES

I have quoted these comments at length in case some visitors here to my blog might not yet have discovered Watts Up With That? Please try it if not! Anthony Watts is invaluable! We simply must not allow Earth to slide back into superstition, and science to decay back into religious nonsense, and the Green-fascists to win their war against reason and progress.

FIN 18h28

CQ: Tony Blackburn of Poole, joker, mast-climber… Russel Cotes Museum is security conscious now… Cook Lady at Coffee Republic… Cool Geezer on the prom… The future City of Winton…

10h02-BST Thursday 23 April 2009-CE

Tony Blackburn was raised in Poole, the ancient port to the west of Bournemouth. To the east of Bournemouth, is Christchurch, a charming abbey town. To the sensitive soul, easily woo-ed into a romantic mood, quaint Poole and Christchurch whisper faint echoes of sea traders from Atlantis or Phoenicia.

But the real centre of attraction around here, the main game, the boss town, the proper place to be born, founded in 1820, is Bournemouth. If and when, one fine day, the three towns are merged into a city, I hope they call it after the northern district of Bournemouth, Winton.

Tony was raised on the very shores of that wide, sandy, muddy valley, drowned when the ice melted, called Poole Harbour. If you measure every little wiggle of reedy marsh edge, you can call it a large harbour, even though most of it is mud at low tide. Tony must have seen thousands of boats when he was a boy.

The lad came to be a DJ on Caroline. I would have been a fan of his except he was on daytime Caroline, later Radio London Big-L, and I lived in Plymouth (1964-1974) where even the most powerful of the free radio ships were only heard in the hours of darkness. Tony was not on when I could listen.

When the Labour Government of Harold Wilson killed off the free radio stations, Tony Blackburn (whom I had never heard before, remember) and a crowd of other DJs, joined BBC. They were to be heard on Radio 1, or Radio Wan as I spelled it. It was a pale and insipid reflection of the free stations. It was Aunty Beeb doing the knees-up, ersatz, contrived, artificial. I loyally hated it and its DJs.

But Tony Blackburn was the big star on the “wonderful” insulting BBC offering on 247 metres. I never wrote to Tony to tell him that he ought to be ashamed, prostituting himself by serving the vile, synthetic, arid, plastic substitute. But many offshore fans did. The poor guy got masses of hurtful mail, mixed amongst the big support.

Sun Worshipper, who, along with myself, stood watch in the streets outside Radio Free Plymouth broadcasts, with walkie-talkies belonging to Old Man of the Sea, one of our DJs, sought an autograph from Tony when he visited Plymouth for a show.

Our tanned Sun Worshipper, with the curly black hair, the blue eyes, and ready grin, proffered a Free Radio memories type of book for a scribble. Tony Blackburn, UK’s #1 DJ, glared red and said:

“You’re not one of those FREE RADIO people are you?”

“No… Who are they?”

In the late 1980s, I saw Antonio on Lifestyle Channel presenting the cooking with a lady (who was doing all the work). I was won over immediately because

(1) he was not on BBC, so I was freed from the complusion to loathe, despise, and detest him, and

(2) he was intelligent, fluent, quick, and funny.

Daily Mail for Saturday 28 March 2009 had Tony Blackburn reviewing THE BOAT THAT ROCKED movie and his life on the offshore stations. He finds fault with the film:

No ladies used to come on board the ships he was on. But, Antonio, the movie is about the FICTIONAL Radio Rock ship, so poetic licence is OK. He says:

QUOTE:

Without Radio Caroline, there would be no Tony Blackburn which, I realise, is something that some people will never forgive it for. Even the studio equipment used in the film is spot on. The right sort of mike and turntables, volume controls to fade the music and voices in and out…

…when a rope got tangled around the transmitter on day and the owner, Ronan O’Rahilly, offered £50 to anyone who would climb up and fix it, I was up there like a shot -determined to get Radio Caroline back on air and blithely unaware of just how high 130ft was. Looking down from the top, I realised what an idiot I’d been…

…the simple truth is that, without Radio Caroline -the boat that really DID rock, I’d never have been there, and my 45-year broadcasting career might never have begun. So thank you, Caroline. For everything.

UNQUOTE

Tony Blackburn mentions in the Daily Mail piece that he sang for three years with the Jan Ralfini band, at the Pavilion in Westover Road, Bournemouth.

He successfully insisted that Chris Moore and the auditioning Caroline executives, who offered him a job starting the next day, wait another 24-hours whilst he gave notice to the band back home in this city-in-waiting in the Poole Bay. Good for him.

I think Tony was no idiot for climbing the mast, simply a good bloke who took his moment without fuss and went for it. He is well-educated. He never makes you cringe with bad English. His jokes are spot on, whatever self-deprecating remarks he may utter.

So, I apologise to him for having hated him.

Yesterday, I went to the Tourist Information Centre in Westover Road to obtain local Tourism website addresses. When I opined that the three towns, Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch, ought to be merged (like Plympton and Plymstock were merged into Plymouth in the 1960s) she went cold! “No! They are all different!”

Soon after, Cook Lady and I met at Coffee Republic, Holdenhurst Road, opposite where Hotel Metropole was flattened in the blitz with a hundred or so servicemen killed. The Metropole pub on the site is a great modern bluesy live music venue.

Then I rendezvous-ed with Cool Geezer, visiting Bournemouth. We went to the superb Russell Cotes Museum to look round and have a coffee. But I hated the re-arranged reception area! The men at the desk wanted us to deposit our backpacks. This was not acceptable for Cool Geezer. He carries several phones for industry traffic, so we gave it a miss and had coffee on the prom instead.

In closing, I was whistling in the Dalkeith Arcade branch of Lidl, on the vehicle-free Old Christchurch Road, in downtown Bournemouth (the heart of the future city of Winton), when an old gent spoke to me. I was doing the tune that he opens his show with every evening.

How pointless is that! I mean: my mention of the incident! I cannot remember the name of the band, or of its leader, or of the song! It was one of those exquisite numbers from Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, from the 1920s and 1930s… before I was born… As Time Goes By? Autumn Leaves? They Can’t Take That Away From Me?

FIN 12h09
EDITED Monday 15 June 2009

Panorama did not mention the core truth, the essence, the perfidy regarding Job Centre Plus targets and manipulation… The generation gap betwixt old warriors and shame-faced kids in their 60s like me… John Craig of Sky News does a silly thing… Green-fascists whistling hard in the dark of their own madness… The rule of the fool supervises our nation’s dying days…

09h10-BST Monday 20 April 2009-CE

Claire, ex-staff member of Woolworths, was on BBC Panorama being put through the Job Centre Plus SCARE treatment. The JCP tries to deter as many incomers as possible by mentioning over and over what they are NOT entitled to, but mentioning, minimally and vaguely as the interview is being wound down, that “…any other benefits to which you might be entitled would be a matter for…”

The name of the supplier of the “other benefits” is changed often so that new claimants have not heard of it. The aim is to cut the number of people signing for Job Seekers’ Allowance (another new name) so that the JCP targets look good and the Departmental raison d’être is won. If they can be deterred from going to Benefits Agency, this is a personal-ego-trip bonus for the interview clerk.

Claire needs to stop being silly and let her house go. If she were in privately-rented accommodation, like me, she could get Housing benefit to pay the rent, Council Tax would be paid for her, and she could get her other benefits. But she must get a good landlord. Dave Wells in Poole Bay area is excellent in his assisting with all the complications.

Sadly, however, by the end of the program, Claire had the misfortune to be offered a job and, in some moment of craziness, she took it, completely missing her chance to become normal and happy like me.

I would like to add a remark to my piece about the Military Channel’s The Final Days of World War 2 program. Those gents of today who are in their 80s and 90s, although regarded by younger generations as being in the same category as myself, that is ‘old’ are entirely a far-removed item from myself.

Just as I, in 1945, was a 4 to 5 year old kid, and they were warriors, splashed by bits of their mates’ brains and blood, so they still remain: way ahead of me. It has been the way all my life. I missed call-up by 3 months. They abolished it just before my 18th birthday. I never volunteered for military service. I have , decade after decade, felt like a right pudding next to these heroes.

“Don’t shoot, Yank!” called the Brit, in one account.

“Cor blimey, Limey!” the Yank could have called back, getting into the spirit of being “over here” which had once been “over there” (I had better stay out of that complicated stuff).

John Craig of Sky News, reporting on the Labour Party alleged email smear campaign (or humorous speculation about same) used a video clip that was unrelated to the story. His justification for the intrusion of a chef chopping vegetables on a board seems to have been his use of the phrase “…accused of cooking-up…”. Such kid stuff is tolerable on a silly blog, but not in a professional report.

I just thought (during one of the heinous, vile, TV Green-fascist dumps on our common sense, and attacks on our civilisation, that the extent of human effect upon the weather is like a whisper at a Rock concert. Lost in the noise of volcanism, earthquakes, and wild fires.

I also thought that it is fine and socially correct to accord human rights to us oiks, oafs and morons of the species, rather than our being enslaved as before 1945, BUT, if we are put in charge, as we are now in councils, media, business and even some parts of the Civil Service, it is the extreme of counter-productiveness; it is insanity. But our nation, the UK of GB and NI is not going to last for ever, All things pass. I must get reconciled to that.

FIN 10h15

Military Channel is excellent but not perfect… Revenge is the business of avenging… Max Hastings never dies. He does not even simply fade away. Good for him… Young drunken thugs of these violent video days need conscripting and using in free-fire zones… Common sense has no chance against so-called politically correct idiocy of these post-education days…

19h34-BST Sunday 19 April 2009-CE

Military Channel returns me to the real world, and centres me back to my own personal focus, with its Last Days of World War 2. This is despite the fact that I (born in 1940) was a little boy at the time that the action took place (1944-1945). I used to listen with the rest of the family to the BBC radio news at 21h00, without any idea of what it all meant in detail.

What a pity that the voice-over of the documentary, made in 2004, is written by modern era people who (in the way of today) are poorly educated in the English language. The narrator says “revenging” when he means “avenging”. Max Hastings looks so young too. When I read him in Daily Express in the 1950s, thinking him to be old, he must have been in his 20s. (It is always possible that I am totally mised up about this.)

I overheard some young people, males and females, in The Square by the yellow 2 bus stop, discussing the weekend arrangements, and one jerk was saying “…I suppose you know there’ll be violence…” The drunken young thugs enjoy punching and kicking weaker people into hospital or the morgue. Any of them CAUGHT RED HANDED guilty of violence needs conscripting.

I am against conscription (the draft, the call-up) for the general population, but for the natural-born warrior, genetically programmed for killing, compulsory military service for the complete duration of their 20s is the answer. He will not volunteer for the forces, and would not pass any psychological test for sanity. But in free-fire zones, infested with certain gentlemen, he is gold.

We have a democracy, so common-sense solutions cannot be enforced. Loony-Left propagandists stir up moronic-media and posturing-politicians, as well as the mass of voters, against common-sense solutions. Common sense has no chance of being implemented…

FIN 20h03

East or West? Which do you prefer? This is a question we can ask about North America, the geopolitical world, and Southern England…

05h15-BST Sunday 19 April 2009-CE

Florida, and the entire East Coast of USA, including New York City, became possible vacation destinations for British, holiday-makers when the DC-8 and 707 jet airliners, carrying 100 or so passengers per flight, brought down the price of air travel from the late 1950s. The West Coast, which I prefer, was not much dearer. Cool Geezer has vacationed, and researched radio, in Florida…

START OF QUOTATION:

…I was in Miami but drove across the everglades to Naples on the Gulf, Lower gulf coast looking out on the Gulf of Mexico. A hang-out for snowbirds and a few celebs in winter.

The area between north Miami and South Fort Lauderdale is called Hollywood. I did not drive to F/L and take the alligator alley expressway across the glades like most folk. I went on the lower route across the lower glades on the old Tamiami Trail.

When you hit Naples don’t make a turn just go straight across the traffic lights into Seventh Ave, I think it was, and the road comes to a dead end as there is a hedge and a small footbridge over the hedge and, WOW, you are on the beach looking out at the gulf.

If it were not for the low-life and criminals attracted by the warm weather and kool location, It would be heaven…

END OF QUOTATION

I always found that phenomenon of a great long highway suddenly ending without ceremony, neatly, just as it were any other road or street, at a T-junction, to be hilarious. It happens to Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, and the others at Santa Monica. You say “What do we do now?” or “Don’t we get a certificate?” or “Where is the Mayor and the cheer-leader girls!”

In Canada, Highway 1, the Trans Canada Highway, hops over the Straights of Georgia by ferry to Vancouver Island and carries on to lose itself in, I think, downtown Victoria, but I may be wrong…

As to this land of my exile, I was very fond of Cornwall in the far west, and the east, whether Kent or Essex, had great advantages during the 1960s for reception of the offshore
radio stations, but here in the centre, at Poole Bay, and at its centre, Bournemouth, I seem to have found the best bit to live.

However, it is Sandbanks Ferry (or Haven Ferry) to the west of the conurbation where I sit and chill out.

As the Pacific Ocean gets smaller and the Atlantic Ocean gets bigger, over the coming aeons, and America caroons into Asian, perhaps we humans will have moved on, and be out there debating whether the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy is coolest, or the Eastern Spiral Arm is the most sophisticated.

FIN 06h03

That H war never happened. It was so disappointing. We had the survival in the ruins all planned. But peaceful co-existence broke out. WW2 and WW1 were much more exciting… “Mammy, who is that man?” (1946) “You mean the old man with the grey spats, jacket-tails, and a top hat? He is shell-shocked. He was in the First War…”

06h33-BST Saturday 18 April 2009-CE

Thru-out the 1950s and most of the 1960s, we were expecting World War 3, with hydrogen bombs and radiation, but it never happened. Both USSR and USA, we discovered, preferred peaceful co-existence over a war between Communism and Capitalism.

And, as it happened, the West won anyway, and the Soviet Union simply ran out of steam (1992). It was completely amazing to me. Some people, including myself, have taken to calling the Cold War, between USSR and USA, World War Three (WW3).

I was a kid in WW2, and York in the North of England was not so badly hit. Military vehicles were very common. We had the Headquarters of Northern Command in York. At the behest of Hitler and his racist Nazi Party low-life-trash, the Luftwaffe aimed for the barracks, the railway station, the gas works, and the power station. Around those targets, a lot of houses were hit.

A single house in the next street to us got hit by a stray bomb, and a couple more fell a few rows further on. That was all, near us. As a kid, zero to nearly five years old, I knew there was a war happening, and planes were dropping bombs. That was the full extent of my understanding. I was told that “God will look after us” and I believed every word!

After the war, it was my time to go to school. There was a big round water tank on Campelshon Road on our way to Knavesmire School. It would have been full of water during the bombing in case the mains water got broken.

As to WW1, which was over 22 years before I was born, my mother’s step-father had been buried alive in dirt as a shell fell right by him. His hand was sticking out and his comrades pulled him free. He was very deaf as a result of that earlier war.

Also, a few doors away from us on Bishopthorpe Road, lived a man who always dressed in Edwardian gentleman’s dress, complete with grey spats, jacket tails, and a top hat. He would come out of his house, putting his gloves on and rubbing his ear. Some body said his ears were ringing from the shell-fire at the front. He was mad but harmless.

The above war-related auto-biographical seven-paragraph shot is from my email traffic, triggered by the question “What was [it] like?” For 55 million it was, like, a hideous way to die. For me it was perfectly normal. I liked the food. The coal fire in the Yorkist range was the focal point. The wireless was a mystery but played some nice tunes and some ITMA jokes that grown ups understood.

The USA Folk Tea Parties across the nation is a most interesting phenomenon. I liked the remark that “They are lining their pockets with our children’s money.” They, the big-earning legal-rip-off-trash in charge, are raising kids to be slaves. As for my privileged life, my skull is stuffed tight like cotton-wool with facts I cannot remember and crass mistakes of my own that I cannot forget.

FIN 07h03

Hong Kong is busy… Mistakes are like gold… Somebody please tell me if 99 years is really 100 years by the end of it… I hope nobody knows who I am… Chatting via virtual reality, in the cosmic energy field, when you have quit being mud, muscle, blood, skin, bone, a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong…

09h43-BST Thursday 16 April 2009-CE

My young friend in Hong Kong confirmed that people there have to work really hard for long hours day and night just to survive, except for the really rich ones. But it is even more sad when the little ones are left at home without their parents and the love from them. Families who are too busy at work will hire maids and helpers to supervise with the children.

In response to the discussion about subjective perception of the passing of time, and how it usually varies with the age of the individual, followed by my remark that if you are kept rushed off your feet in your job you have less time to brood on errors you have made, this response:

“I’m sure there could be mistakes throughout our lives and it’s
significant to get the experiences. They’re like gold.”

The question arose as to why UK borrowed Hong Kong for 99 years, rather than 100 years. All I could reply was that I do not know why the lease agreement on Hong Kong was agreed to be for “99 years”, not “100 years”.

I am not good at Arithmetic. Numbers confuse me. However, what I CAN say (although I do not know whether it is relevant or not) is the following: I am aged 68 but this is my 69th year. In my first year, I was not aged in years, my age was counted in months. So I was not “one” until my first year was over. If I were to live until my 100th birthday, I would, on that day, be starting my 101st year.

It is good if people can talk on the internet without consideration of age or gender. It is also good if people can talk, mind-to-mind, without any knowledge of how good-looking or plain a person is. Face-to-face in real life, people’s attitudes are influenced by looks.

If there were to be a future life (“in Heaven” as some believers in God hope for, or “in the cosmic energy field” as scientific-spiritualism aka natural-afterlife would say) then we may presume that spirits would talk mind-to-mind.

If, as spirits, we were to have the power to generate a sort of natural virtual-reality for ourselves, one could make other people look any way one desired!

I try to not reveal either my real name or my present appearance because I hope to prevent people’s tracing me, or recognising me in the street.

I would encourage everybody in the world to do the same, unless they are a wealthy celebrity able to hire security guards.

10h13

Fictional characters cast no thorns and thistles, are not placated by any roast lamb, save no souls, and create no atoms in the first place… Quotes from an excellent web log, De-Conversion, and an excellent commenter Bipolar2…

08h42-BST Thursday 16 April 2009-CE

I left one of my routinely mundane comments on

http://de-conversion.com/2008/07/13/atheistic-attacks-on-christianity/

(I wish I knew how to make that go blue so that you could click it)

and a person called bipolar2 had also commented:

START OF QUOTATION:

Dealing with those mystically inclined, the ‘I-feel-god-in-my-heart’ crowd, and in general all irrationalist believers, requires a different approach from dealing with rationalists.

Their usual spiel: I know that my god exists -but he/she/it cannot be described, or is beyond human understanding…

…Having an opinion that gods do not exist cannot mean that one has an opinion *about* gods. There is no so-called ‘god’ in reality, according to the atheist, about which to have an opinion.

However, I can have opinions about a fictitious character named ‘Hamlet’ as presented by Shakespeare in his play, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet.’ I can also have opinions about a fictitious character named ‘God’ as presented in the synoptic gospels of ‘The New Testament.’

All I can know about these characters is what I read in allegedly sacred primary sources directly devoted to them. I can no more find *God* by doing cosmological research than I can disinter *Hamlet’s* bones in a chapel at Elsinore.

No interpretation of Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” makes some character called ‘Hamlet’ more likely to have existed. No interpretation of the synoptics of the “New Testament” makes some being called ‘God’ more likely to exist. As for theology, it is fifth-rate fan fiction.

Bipolar2 © 2008

END OF QUOTATION

Beautifully, in fact superbly, put! I trust that my quotation of bipolar2 is sufficiently brief as to not infringe copyright.

FIN 09h25

CQ: 1950s records & cars ARE the best… It is NOT just my teenage memories… High rise for Derrys Cross in Plymouth… Sweeping up glass shards on Haven Road in Poole… Emailing trans-time-zone and trans-generation…

16h34-BST Wednesday 15 April 2009-CE

I only just realised that there is an exact similarity between the way I love passionately Doo-Wop and Rock ’n’ Roll of the 1950s just because I was a teenager at the time, and the way I love American automobiles designed at the time. It never struck me before. I can never PROVE that 1950s music and cars are the best ever. But I truly BELIEVE that it truly is so!

Cool Geezer suggests I check online for the plans of the application in Plymouth for a 30-level high-rise on the site of former Westward Television studios, Derry’s Cross. I hate to say it but this is just what we need in Bournemouth too. The Round House on the Lansdowne looks so silly with only 6 levels.

I took a brush from a dustpan-set with me on my ride to Sandbanks Ferry today. On Haven Road, just after the Canford Cliffs roundabout, I found the patch of glass shards that punctured my back tyre on Monday. I swept them tight into the kerb.

It may save some cyclist a puncture but gets me no Kool-Dood of the British Empire medal. Only one guy, in a van, shouted anything rude at me. What a great result! I thought I would get whammed up the butt by a truck.

Here is an edited sequence in an exchange twixt myself (I am honoured) and the excellent young person on the Pacific Rim, starting on Monday morning:

ME
Today I shall take advantage of the lovely sunshine, and mild temperature with no wind, to cycle down to the Sandbanks Ferry. I love to sit there and watch the chain ferry go across the mouth of Poole Harbour. Also, the yachts pass in and out. And at certain times the big ferries to France, carrying cars and trucks, pass through. Hong Kong, of course, is about one hundred times busier than Poole!

HONG KONG
Hong Kong is a busy, busy place.

ME
I got a puncture in the back tyre part way to the Ferry. I was able to ride back on the flat via the promenade home to my flat. I am so pleased we have good weather for the visitors today. The beach was packed. The park opposite here has lots of kids playing soccer on the grass, or using the swings. There is an actual soccer stadium on the far side with a match going on at the moment.

HONG KONG
I like the way you describe the things around you, with details, creativity and good imagination. I like swinging as well, it’s a relaxing activity where you get a chance to chill out.

ME
I loved to use the swings too, when I was young. The place near us, in York, was Rowntrees Park, paid for by the chocolate people, who were Quakers. I guess it is 50 years since I last sat on a swing. If I win the lottery I should buy a house with swings in the yard.

Today, there are many electronic space-age toys and tools for us to benefit from, but simple play-park swings, slides, and roundabouts are still the same. They probably date from 5,000 years ago! The parks now put a safety foam on the ground so people are not hurt if they fall.

HONG KONG
No matter how old we are, we can still enjoy the things we used to love.

ME
Your remark reminds me that not only people of my age have nostalgic recollections. I can recall, when our family was living in Saint Paul’s Square, in York, looking back in regret at the old days when we kids used to play in Rowntrees Park. The grass in the Square was way not the same!

Yet it was only a matter of two years previously at the most. When you are 12, two years is a lo-o-o-ong ti-i-i-ime…

HONG KONG
Why do you think 2 years can be a long time? I rather think that 2 years goes too fast, although 1 year is a lot faster.

ME
When I was a child, a year (from one summer to the next) was, to my subjective perception, vastly longer than a year is to me now. I am surprised by your report that you, at 13, have a different perception.

Everything since I became 30, in 1970, seems without substance, a thin and crumbly dream. But the good-time young-days before 1970 seem to play in my mind like a brilliant, giant-screen colour movie, with high-fidelity sound.

HONG KONG
I have a busy life and sometimes I am unconsciously forcing myself to hurry and do things faster because I’m living in Hong Kong, so maybe the time seems to me can be really fast. When I eat or other people get their meal, we usually eat no more than 3 minutes.

When we do other things, we’re always reminding ourselves that we have to hurry all the time. It’s frustrating and I couldn’t change my habit since I have to fit into this society.

You maybe have another perspective that time is not THAT fast…

One funny thing: There can be times when I have spare time. I always feel like rushing and it seems like you’ve nearly hit the dead line.

But hey, Hong Kong is a place like that. And I have no idea why.

ME
I had no idea that Hong Kong is quite as fast as you describe. I suppose it dates from the time after the last war when people had to work really hard for long hours just to survive. The place fought its way up to being a major producer of goods in the world.

Being rushed off one’s feet can give one no time to think. This has the advantage of giving one no time for regret, about errors or bad things in the past, or even for worry about decisions or problems in the present…

FIN 17h25

Links thinks… What the links categories are all about… Highly cute little yaps not to be wasted… Here they are…

14h45-BST Tuesday 14 April 2009-CE

Whilst I was installing Categories for Links to replace my single Blogroll, I wrote descriptions which I assumed would appear if the pointer was hovered above the titles (Assorted other bloggers, Bournemouth area links, Celebrity links, etc.) This did not happen but, in order not to waste my magnificent efforts, here are a selection…

Bournemouth Area links…

Information sources for intending visitors, and interesting contacts in Poole, Bournemouth & Christchurch (the Poole Bay area) whilst staying here.

Celebrity links…

I am thinking. There must be other celebrities to add. But dear old Wil Wheaton has stuff to keep one busy all day.

Cycling links…

This category has sites useful to cyclists, in the Poole Bay area in particular. Cyclists are part of the population. Anyone can be a cyclist. Note the family cars and vans, in vacation areas, loaded with bicycles.

Journals links…

Magazines and newspapers, including titles in localities where I have lived, or visited.

Los Angeles & USA links…

I love USA but I adore LA! Since 1954, I took it for granted that I would visit Los Angeles. In 2008, I kicked myself up the rear and went. Here are some useful clicks.

Mindkind links…

I invented the term ‘mindkind’ in about 1989 to mean

(1) intelligent lifeforms, both organic and robotic, throughout the cosmos, as well as

(2) fortunate people with the ability to think, as opposed to the poor souls who, for whatever combination of nature and nurture, cannot, and need our help, and also

(3) theoretical ‘dead’ dudes, passed-on people, spirits, souls, free-floating patterns of consciousness modulating upon the cosmic energy field of ethereal matter, as a natural phenomenon, as opposed to owing their existence to a supreme being, (in both of which phenomena I do not believe).

These sites are mostly from non-theists like myself, countering nonsense from ever-threatening theists.

Politics links…

I regard myself as neither loony-Left nor rabid-Right but, rather, Militant-Moderate. I dig the social-ist agenda of fighting for fairness and justice, against both gangsters calling themselves aristocrats, and morons calling themselves experts. Plus I dig the good life that capitalists have brought forth under regulation. But I hate the rule of the fool; and most politicians, and the journalists supposed to be keeping score, quack like pretty fine fools.

Radio links…

Links to radio stations that are your favourites, or ought to be, plus those that relate to places I have been to. Too bad some of the Vancouver and Seattle Top 40 stations that I loved in 1968 and 1979 have fallen to the theist thugs promoting their preposterous piffle.

Rock & Pop links…

I do not like hipping & hopping, or rap crap. I am old. I like the music that made me jump when I was young. For the offshore radio stations and Rolling Stone magazine, go to Radio and Journals respectively.

Science Fiction links…

I love Heinlein, Asimov, Douglas Adams, and Harry Harrison. I was electrified by Charles Chiltern with his Journey Into Space. I could not believe SF fans’ luck when, on TV, Star trek, then, at the cinema, Star Wars. came along. It astounds me that Science Fiction (as well as Fantasy) is now the norm.

Stage links…

I have a love/hate thing going with live shows. But if sponsorship can be private, and NOT come out of Council Tax or general taxation, I am prepared to dig it -provided it is not negative, nihilist, destructive, corrupting shit from socially perverted and anarchistic assholes. Hopefully the sites here might be quite nice.

TV links…

‘T.V.’ stands for tele-vision. (It is the preferred term, not to be confused with ‘telly’ which the poor uneducated folk use.) This new technology, that poor old Baird was messing up whilst Sarnov got it right, has great potential, provided that it does not fall into the wrong hands… (fast-forward 70 years) Er… Oh, Hell!

Young-Needs links…

Any site that relates to our rights, as new citizens of Earth, to be cherished, supported, enabled, informed, encouraged, facilitated, socialised, entertained, and stimulated, and all of these things in a positive way, is welcome here. Suggestions please.

FIN 15h01

Wall Street Journal is either getting sloppy or turning farther Left… We H-FOR-HOPE that Barak Obama will take USA into Sanity Street and ally with Russia and China against pirates and other enemies… Daily Echo of Bournemouth passes-on the Vancouver, WA, story about the supposedly-green local-government polluting the storm drain… Louise Dunderdale of Daily Echo writes-up the one about Highcliffe Cannabis-Sativa growers in now-trashed rented-private-home…

13h50-BST Tuesday 14 April 2009-CE

Wall Street Journal headline in W H Smiths this morning says: Ships Prepare for Pirate Reprisals. This is loony-Left terminology, deliberately distorting the truth. The criminals of Somalia have met their match in attacking USA and may now decide to escalate their violence. To call that reaction ’reprisal’ is to imply that USA is at fault. In fact, timid USA has the ‘H’ for ‘hope’. With Russian Federation & PRC in alliance, we can H all enemies of progress.

WSJ disappoints me in their careless, Marxist-fascist writing of headlines. They were one of the few anti-Prohibition, pro-Repeal journals to document the counter-productive nature of the so-called drugs-war. Clearly WSJ disapproves of Obama’s tough action in the Horn of Africa area. But the President needs to get way tougher. Ally with Russia and China and it WIIL work!

Daily Echo of Bournemouth, in today’s Strange But True feature, on page 2, makes me laugh. In Vancouver, Washington state, USA, the Green-dominated local-government offices were found to be guilty of discharging foul water into the storm drain. Try the municipal main sewer In future! I am 100% FOR reduction of pollution, but AGAINST mad Green-fascist claims that climate variation (actually driven by our star, Sol) is anthropogenic.

Louise Dunderdale in Daily Echo today reports on the couple who rented their house out for six months, apparently without using an agency with experience and insurance. The tenants turned out to be those business people who ignore Prohibition laws. They have just quit the scene and left the property with ventilation holes in the floors and ceilings. The furniture has been stolen. Only Repeal and institution of Intelligent Regulation can stop this 1920s Volstead-style insanity…

FIN 14h28

All I have to do is dream a happy dream, but my dream content is beyond my control… Beware of being seduced by a quasi-religious political movement. Never give up your right to write… Southport is better than some dumps I know, but it cannot compare with Bournemouth… The word ‘twaddle’ is pronounced “twoddle”…

02h06-BST Tuesday 14 April 2009-CE

Why is it that some nights your brain runs a routinely scary dream in the low-fidelity virtual-reality theatre of your sleeping head, and occasionally runs a really, especially, exceptionally scary one? It must have been the item I saw on TV about the enslavement of an 8-year-old girl to an old man. Perhaps I had been reminded subconsciously of the time in my 30s when I got swept up in a movement.

But there I was, in the dream, about to give it all away. I found myself about to give up all that I had, not to the poor, but to the leader. My younger sibling, or just friend, in the dream, was in the same boat. I woke up, in the dream, to the reality, to the enormity of what I was about to do, to the voluntary losing of precious freedom, and planned to run away. But then I awoke from sleep.

In the 1970s, which were my 30s, I did not have the backbone or moral courage to tell the leader I had changed my mind and now saw his movement as a waste of time. I moved to another town. My excuse was that I wanted to be near my father who was returning from Canada to live in Southport at a residential care home run by his evangelical Christian sect.

As chance would have it, the only other such care home was right here in Bournemouth. I could have tried to get my father accepted in the Bournemouth home, but I chose not to. Southport is all very well, with its Botanical Gardens and its Lord Street, but it is not the Poole Bay conurbation, which has a beach where you can see the waves breaking on the beach, rather than take them on trust.

One day, the old boroughs of Poole to the west and Christchurch (formerly Twynham) to the east, will be forced by the laws of economy of scale to merge into new Bournemouth, which has only existed as a growing settlement for two centuries. But whichever area within ’Poole Bay city’ that you live, you have a wide range of ’beauty spots’ within convenient striking distance.

I am now twice as old, and ready to clock out of this silly life. In my dream I was ready to give up possession of my pen, my clothes, my documentation, my entire right to run my life. And why does my brain decide that this night will be one of those where I awake after only four hours sleep? Fortunately, nobody is forced to read the twaddle that I write as a result…

FIN 02h48

PS

I hear way less from the loony-Left, these days, about the rights of certain people to run their own ghettos according to their own culture. What a shock for the Marxist-fascists to realise that rights for girls and ladies do not exist in that culture, and in those ghettos! They must feel that they have copped a right smack in the kisser. “Did we not share and enjoy?” (Correction: “…tolerate and fawn upon…”)

Bank Holiday Monday in Poole Bay. Beautiful sunshine and crowds of happy workers taking a well-earned break, bless their hearts. Maybe I ought to do some work to try out this break business.

16h10-BST Monday 13 April 2009-CE

I found that I had a puncture at the foot of Haven Road hill down to Poole Harbour on the way to Sandbanks Ferry. The edges of the roads are smattered with broken bottle glass these days. I pulled out a little granule of glass from the rear tyre. I had to give up but I was able to ride back home on the flat along the beach promenade. It makes me feel like giving up cycling…

It is a holiday for the workers today, in UK. I am so pleased we have good weather for them, here in Poole Bay (Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch). The beach and promenade was packed.

Back home, the park is quite busy too. Children are using the swings. I used to do that, about 55 years ago. The place near us, in York, was Rowntrees Park, paid for by the chocolate people, who were Quakers. If I win the lottery I should buy a house (in Los Angeles) with swings in the back garden.

There are so many electronic space-age toys and tools for us to benefit from, but simple play-park swings, slides, and roundabouts are still the same. They probably date from 5,000 years ago! The parks now put a safety foam on the ground so people are not hurt if they fall.

Any readers of this blog hitting me via the nano-net trans-cosmos sub-ether-warp-thingy, will be glad to know that Earth is still free-falling around Sol. We still have ice-caps, sadly; nasty cold slippery zones of waste space they are. However, you are welcome to visit us and get drunk. We have lots of booze. Tudor Rose quasi-sherry is only £2.50p at Sainsburys…

FIN 16h38

What YOU would do if YOU were the ‘Creator’? On the basis of the good things YOU would do, to INSTANTLY end suffering and ignorance, you then need to ask yourself “Would such a being as the Thorn-Caster-of-Eden deserve my RESPECT if he or she existed?”

14h31-BST Saturday 11 April 2009-CE

Here is an extract from what I said to my young friend around the world. I was asked why I did not believe in ‘God’. Those of you who have read my stuff before, will have heard the following already:

I first accepted my parents’ teaching about a guy in the sky named ‘God’ but by the age of 13 I knew that their particular evangelical sect was neither the exclusive holder of the truth, nor exclusively destined for ’salvation’.

Then I came to see that the Salavation Army were far better at doing what Yehoshua (Jesus) ‘commanded’ by way of way tending to the needs of poor people, etc.

Next, I rejected the ‘Christian’ doctrine of original sin, plus need for redemption by sacrifice of the innocent. I see that idea as pure evil excrement fouling the minds of poor gullible people! I see the spread of SUCH a ‘gospel’ as vile crime against humanity.

I speculated that with Budhism might be OK, without knowing much about it.

Then, by age 18, I rejected all formally-defined religions as silly nonsense from the minds of people unable to tell the difference between what was likely and rang true, and on the other hand what was unlikely and sounded like made-up nonsense.

I dallied with a loyalty to commune-ist, social-ist ideas. But the Readers Digest and an organisation called Moral Rearmament helped me see that Communists, Marxists, and extreme Socialists attracted criminals who then just grabbed and abused power.

Finally, I was working in the chocolate factory, Cadburys, at Bourneville, aged 21, when a middle-aged man (very nice guy) heard me say “There has to SOMETHING out there controlling things.”

“No”, he said, “There isn’t; there’s nothing.”

The next day, as I walked down the street, under a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, ‘God’ went “POP” and the sky was empty for me. I saw the real truth: only objective study of what exists can establish the truth. Any beliefs dating from the past, when this scientific method of study did not exist, is likely to be mere superstition.

In other words, all scientifically-derived (derived carefully, honestly, logically, rationally) knowledge has to be regarded as the best we can do and subject to corrections and amendments as time goes by and new evidence is found.

One thing which is helpful is to ask yourself what YOU would do if YOU were the ‘Creator’. On the basis of the good things YOU would do, to INSTANTLY end suffering and ignorance, you then need to ask yourself “Does this being deserve my RESPECT? Or do I see in his alleged nature a reflection of self-infatuated MEN I see all around me in life?” He is a fiction! He is the product of nasty old men’s imagination.

An afterlife there could be, may be. I see it as unlikely. But, science can at the moment neither endorse nor deny its existence. Particle Physics does give a slight comfort to those who desire to believe in afterlife.

They speculate that the consciousness has a separate physical existence, as an energy field, a structure of nano-scopic bits, that ALREADY is created and simply slips away from the discarded body through the cosmic energu field of which all things are parts.

I do not see it, myself. But in 1992, I encouraged a boy of 11, dying of a brain stem cancer, to believe it. After all, it MIGHT be true. The other ‘God’-based old tradition clearly IS NOT true.

Now your parents will be angry at me. Please hold to your beliefs until you are adult, and THEN decide. You have plenty of time.

FIN 14h35

Is USA finally going to become a weak loony-Left has-been? …In Canada, science is under attack as arty-media-fed metaphysical nonsense becomes the popular view…

15h20-BST Friday 10 April 2009-CE

From Gayle on Blog America, this:

START OF QUOTATION

…Democracy was born on July 4th, 1776 when we declared our independence from Britain. Our land, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” has been welcoming immigrants to this country ever since, a practice that has -for the most part- been very beneficial to us. All of our ancestors migrated here from another country, and they did it legally…

Accepting illegal immigrants ahead of legal immigrants simply isn’t a fair practice and will hurt this great country… …as you watch the hard left doing it’s ever-loving best to turn America into a socialist nightmare, in which we will only be one step away from communism…

END OF QUOTATION

I cannot argue with any of that. But I just hope that Barak Obama will be remembered not only for breaking the old order of pink-rule (with brown folk excluded) down, but also what he did to move USA a little bit towards the centre. A little bit is OK…

From the Balloon Man blog:

START OF QUOTATION

Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said…

“…The traditions of science and the reliance on testable and provable knowledge has served us well for several hundred years and have been the basis for most of our advancement. It is inconceivable that a government would have a minister of science that rejects the basis of scientific discovery and traditions…”

END OF QUOTATION

The latter was apropos of the Canadian minister for science that refuses to discuss Evolution versus Creationism. I must say Canada is weird. For all that I love things French, I have to say that modern French political policy is distressingly loony, and it is Quebec that has been responsible for the Canada of today.

Quebec ought to have been kicked out of the federation before Pierre Trudeau got anywhere near power. Anything-goes for the Left and the non-pink skinned, seems to be the policy. Enemies must be OK, say the loonies, if they are brown.

FIN 15h53

CQ: The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (Beaconsfield 1954) on Film 4, with both David Kossoff & Alphie Bass, who took turns at Lemmy in Journey Into Space from Charles Chiltern… Freeway chase thru Long Beach and Orange County south of LA live on Fox News…

14h43-BST Friday 10 April 2009-CE

I just watched the movie The Angel Who Pawned her Harp on Film 4 (1954 Besconsfiled). It was interesting to see both David Kossoff
and Alphie Bass in it.

David Kossof played the comical Cockney character, Lemmy, in the first year of the successful 20-part SF serial, Journey Into Space, from the marvellous mind of Charles Chiltern, over BBC Light Programme radio in 1954.

Alphie Bass took over the Lemmy character in seasons 2 and 3. I did not like the change. I never do.

Robert Maudesley died during his time playing the character Walter Gabriel in the daily 15-minute serial, The Archers, on BBC Home Service radio.

Chris Gittins took over the part and I stopped listening. It had lost all conviction for me.

Fox News Channel is showing a live freeway chase from Long Beach and Orange County south of Los Angeles and I, being a revolting low life jerk, am watching avidly.

Back from ad break, FNC are showing us what we missed. Very eventful. Going contra-flow on the carriageway. Indecisive doughnut-turns on the grass. Cops following contra-flow. They have done a swipe on the back. Bumper is off but the vehicle is not stopping. Off again. I cannot find highway 241 on my LA maps, only 231.

Just HAD to go to the loo. Washing hands heard the take-down. Some body says it is a lady driver, but the person looks more like a guy to me. Some sort of domestic violence is said to be involved and the female ran for it. Does not make sense to me. Just another LA chase and we will never hear any more about it.

Bullies and sadists need to be shot on the spot, is all I say. In many cases, they are caught red-handed. All police interventions ought to be on video. In such caught-red-handed cases, it should be bang! Goodbye problem Lady and children safe. Problem over.

I will now put away my Lonely Planet books, and maps, of LA.

FIN 15h08
EDITED Saturday 13 June 2009

The perfect way to spend forever… Easter is not like it used to be when I was a child… The loo is playing up but, as a non-theist, I know I am not being tested… Back to simul-viewing… Nursery rhymes and Good/Bad stuff… DNA needs to be fixed so sex is a thing of the past…

07h19-BST Friday 10 April 2009-CE

…would be to sleep without dreaming, waking up momentarily without the need to pee, turning over happily knowing that it was not time to get up yet, still needing sleep, and nodding off again. There would be NO embarrassing faux-pas-type memories. There would be no guilt and shame over psychosexual offences. In fact, of course, death is almost as good. Roll on death.

It is blinking Easter again. We have to put up with the usual disruption to the schedule. Bus-running and shop-opening times are all over the place. Fortunately, I have a bicycle, and the corner shops (all in those new franchise chains) are run by foreign guys outside British Christian tradition. You need to be willing to pay higher prices than loss-leading supermarkets.

In the new flat, the loo does not flush without a fuss. I bought two bits of batten to slip in between the cistern and its lid. This enables the lever arrangement connected to the flush handle to operate and not snag upon the underside of the lid. I seemed to have the knack of flushing. Now it is defying me seven times out of ten. This is despite the fact that I show respect. I do self-confident but humble.

I have gotten two TVs now. The picture from the Sky box works perfectly. The picture and sound from the box belonging to the BBC-Dominated Free-View system is breaking up unbearably. I will have to wait until next month to send for my favourite antenna engineer to come and look at the terrestrial antenna. I only need the Free-View box for Smooth Radio really.

One of those twisted, weird, perverse, archaic nursery rhymes that were shoved out when one was a kid, was about a child who, when she was good, was very-very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid. At the time, I was an idiot, born & being raised in Northern England. I hated the word ‘horrid’. It was a Southern word, much used by Enid Blyton who also used ‘hols’ short for ‘holidays’.

This mixture of good and bad is in all of us. Do not kid yourself that the Love & Peace dude, Yehoshua of Nazareth, was different. He could not resist confronting the established religious authority of the day. It got him executed. The Jekyll & Hyde tale, by Robert Louis Stephenson, clinches the phenomenon. It is about sexuality. When we are quiet, we are nice. When we are aroused, we are vile.

Only when the study of DNA has enabled us to re-design our species so that we are stable in the sexuality aspect, and can go about the business of making babies without all the damn fool emotion, will there be any hope of establishing a peaceful Earth and System Sol. Songs about teenage angst, & old age regret, will be a puzzle. “What the heck was THAT all about?” we will ask.

FIN 08h37

Bob mucks up the job. Bye-bye Bob… There is an equally simple answer to the big picture. It is an end to the rule of the fool, and its replacement by the happy medium twixt hanging for stealing a loaf of bread on the one hand, and on the other hand letting vile enemies go free on lawyer-game technical-niggles. It involves the survival of those fit, and the end of those unfit to share our paradise in progress.

05h52-BST Thursday 9 April 2009-CE

Bob is an example of paranoia deprivation. If he were paranoiac as I am, he would be conscious all the time of possible ways in which he could be got at. He would try to cover his ass on everything. He would certainly cover his damn documents as he parades in public. If he were more aware and intelligent he would know about telephoto lenses and what can be done with clean-up technology, CCD or whatever.

Nobody can be an effective chief cop IN THE UK OF TODAY with its casual attitude to enemies (arrest, give fair trial, declare evidence inadmissible, let-off). But you, or I, or a ten-year-old kid could make an effective chief cop and dictator if only there were a magic wand to wave (find, give lead lunch, declare The End).

Why should the enemy have all the best answers? They laugh us to scorn, in our smoochy-poo, cricket-on-the-green weakness…

FIN 06h42

The secret of a happy life… Monsters roam amongst us, protected by the loonies… I would do it my way… Nice to see you -to see you nice… Cy for King -for King Cy…

14h28-BST Wednesday 8 April 2009-CE

I was on the bus and something made me think of the deep-dyed thugs roaming around in our society and not being shot on sight, even when they make no effort to hide themselves. The cops merely arrest. The courts merely warn or give a short term in the university of crime.

In Marvel-type comics and movies, you get werewolves and other rampaging baddies who appear to be human by day, but they are transformed into monsters in the cover of the dark. The cops go after these monsters and gun them down. How come real human monsters do not get the same happy deal, the same good old lead lunch?

It is because we have a society in which human rights are taken beyond logic and reason, as the politically-correct loony-Left suck up to thugs. Once these thug-favouring Marxists have destroyed sane society, they impose their own monstrous fascism. Under the Red rule, the crooks are the cops, and the free-thinkers become the inmates. There has to be, and there IS, a middle way to be found.

The short cut to this middle way is to elect me dictator with powers of War Emergency Martial Law and I promise to fix things. First, I will Repeal Prohibition. Then I will shoot all neighbours from Hell and violent inmates. Then… wait a minute! Why should I give away all my secrets?

FIN 14h39

Poole Bus Station looks quite nice now… Priests, and certain modern-age equivalents, love to do-to-death those who relish life-&-learning… Where does the paedo type come from and what optimally could be his or her healthy role, if any?

07h35-BST Wednesday 8 April 2009-CE

I made it on the yellow 1 bus to Poole Bus Station yesterday and the new paint job on the ceiling was better than heralded. Daily Echo (of Bournemouth) had published an impression, before the work started, which was minimalist and sports-related-boring. The job as done has a full coverage of the surface (wrapped around the edges) and the images are helpfully difficult to identify. One does not even bother. OK. Mostly harmless…

Before civilisation developed, and before priests could organise on the big scale torturing anyone who dared to think, there were witchdoctors getting themselves equally cushy numbers in the point-and-kill biz on the one-village scale. New Guinea has little to show us of the imaginery noble savage.

I just wonder, apropos of this subject, what was the survival value, or natural function, of the individual with what is seen today as the curse and crime of fancying kids, not grown-ups? It is at all times sick to commit sex acts involving pre-sexually-mature young people. But was there, or can there be, a function, in a fully-supervised society, where the ‘paedo’ type fulfils a healthy role?

Obviously, a line drawn by law defining the age of consent is to a certain extent arbitrary. But the majority of the population understand that an unmistakable type of person exists who wants to mess around with kids and that this is a sickness. Is there is a healthy role into which benign upbringing, environment, nurture ought to be steering such sickoes? What is it?

FIN 07h53

BRIAN LANGSTAFF sees that today is like the era of Al Capone and Prohibition of Alcohol. And? Yes? Go on? Say it! Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is REPEAL the word you are looking for, Brian?

07h10-BST Wednesday 8 April 2009-CE

Brian Langstaff is a judge and he just told the 29-year-old Manchester gang leader guy he was jailing for lots of years that:

“…you were involved in gang-related activity which is all too reminiscent of Al Capone in the era of prohibition…”

Can you beat these mother-fucking dick-head dudes in authority? Out of his own mouth cometh the answer! Hello!

THIS is the era of Prohibition TWO. Same deal! All over again!

Wakey wakey!

Repeal of Prohibition of mind-altering substances, and its replacement by Intelligent Regulation. This IR to involve blank-front stores, lined with posters and video screens giving health facts, selling via pigeon holes a product of predictable strength and zero adulteration.

Each type of M.A.S. (canabis sativa, erythroxylon coca, papaver somniferum, etc.) to have it own store chain. Stores first State-owned, with the big four supermarkets drafted by law into being contractors.

After one year, government to withdraw and allow free market, but maintain strict regulation of quality and display.

Needless to say: no advertsising or any other promotion; no glamorous packaging; no fancy brand names. AND BOOZE AND FAGS TO BE BROUGHT UNDER THE SAME PROTOCOL.

Only blank-fronters, no supermarkets or corner stores.

Perhaps Brian Langstaff already accepts the above? Speak, Judge; the suffering population listeneth!

FIN 07h24

I have often successfully resisted the temptation to collect Akismet pitch lines before clicking Delete All Spam , but here are my most recent four…

07h15-BST Tuesday 7 April 2009-CE

I have to trust Akismet but the wording these alleged (and possibly even guilty) spammers use is sometimes a bit clever and slightly seductive…

“Great site this mydigest.wordpress.com and I am really pleased to see you have what I am actually looking for here and this this post is exactly what I am interested in. I shall be pleased to become a regular visitor.”

“…It is the best comment upon news consumption I have read. I have felt the same “panic and depression” after a shot of TV news of which John Bird s……”

“!Oh hubba hubba! Forget the sportscar, been there, done that, got the T shirt, wore it out, gave it to goodwill.”

“Never married lady with blue eyes and blond hair.”

…And yet, reading such stuff is a lot like reading Beano and Dandy… You ought not to like it, but you read it, and afterwards you feel bleak.

For those who ken not, Goodwill is the North American equivalent of a charity shop. I saw a great big wooden box in the Nanaimo Co-op car park in 1979 marked GOODWILL.

07h40

The Quest For Mars by Laurence Bergreen (2000) remaindered for 99p in the shop next to Sainsbury’s in Boscombe… Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Leicester University pro-Robotic-Spaceflighters have learned to speak better of Human Spaceflight as they realise that Selene Farside will have observatory jobs one fine day…

23h30-BST Monday 6 April 2009-CE

I saw the new remaindered book shop today and I just had to look. The Quest For Mars glowed at me, a jewel in the wilderness. At 99p, what was there to decide? But the greatest good fortune came when I got home because, in moving the TV so that I could see the screens of both it and this computer, I caused the TV to go on the blink. (Yes, that IS literally.) Now I am free to read, without TV temptation. I can listen, but I had better not desire to watch. If I listen, it mostly sounds like Caroline. It IS Caroline. And it sounds fine.

Eagle comic carried a cut-away diagram of the Explorer satellite that the USA would launch into orbit around Earth, some time in the International Geophysical Year, which included part of 1957. No sooner had I seen this, and decided that it was the most boring centre spread the Hulton publication, edited by Marcus Morris, had ever come up with, than Sputnik happened.

I took the old number 4 big red bus from our house on Fulford Road, near the Gimcrack pub, down to Nessgate. It was 5 October 1957. I was 5 days into being 17. I no longer delivered the Yorkshire Evening Press every evening. The newsvendor’s placard on the corner of Ousegate said RED MOON ORBITS GLOBE. My brilliant brain twigged at once. A Soviet satellite, the one that we had all laughed at, was in orbit.

How boring! I did not even wish to know it! The news I wished to hear was that Dan Dare, Digby, and Flamer Spry, created by Frank Hampson of Eagle comic, or Jet Morgan, Mitch, Doc, and Lemmy, created by Charles Chiltern freelancing for the BBC Light Programme, were in orbit, singing There Will Always Be An England, Probably, or Knees Up Mother Brown.

What really bugged me, in the months and years that followed, especially as the future arrived (the 1960s), was that some jerks in USA began to knock the very idea of sending guys and gals into space. To these Johnny-come-lately spacers from the world of Astronomy or Space Science as it came to be called, desired only robots to be sent. They lost no chance to slag-off human spaceflight in news media releases.

The robotic spaceflight scumbags got Congress largely on their side. Never mind the fact that human spaceflight would need the creation of far more jobs right here on Earth. Never mind the fact that robotic spaceflight & human spaceflight were complementary and mutually vitalising. Never mind the vaster range of technology advances that research and development of life support systems would demand, with concomitant spinoffs…

There peevish, petulant, poncers at places such as Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and universities with big Astronomy departments, remorselessly attacked the Human Spaceflight proposals AND SUCCEEDED ONLY SETTING POLITICIANS AGAINST THE ENTIRE SPACE BUDGET, ROBOTIC AS WELL AS HUMAN.

But the moron in the street, with encouragement of the morons in the news media, feared Soviet spying or bombing from space and demanded that USA be Number One. The rest is history. But all through the history of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programme, jealous JPL dug the graves of their own projects. Politicians could not judge twixt Human and Robotic. They are ignorant plonkers.

But with the L5 Society, the National Space Institute (founded by Verner fon Brown), then the National Space Society as the two aforementioned merged, carried the flag of co-operation. Space exploration, and development as an extension of the human habitat, depends upon full use of both robots & humans in their appropriate times and places. Slowly, roboticists twigged.

The book THE QUEST FOR MARS by LAURENCE BERGREEN is a medium for my personal achievement of peace of mind on the war. The war is over. Very few idiots still exist at Leicester in England, or JPL, who still hang on to long rubbished nonsense of antipathy and rivalry. I can now feel comfortable in reading about the triumphs of robotic spaceflight scientists and engineers from whose celebrations I have so long felt excluded.

But a quaint mental dysfunction that afflicts our dear American cousins in general, also afflicts space stars in particular. There was Apollo 8 reading from Genesis. There was Buzz on Apollo 11 breaking and nibbling bread and sipping wine. And here, in THE QUEST FOR MARS, is Jennifer Harris.

Her father had tested missiles for NASA, and a rocket cast its influence from a picture on the wall of the den. She had ideas about becoming a missionary (one of those people who indoctrinate the gullible into believing there is a guy in the sky with weird demands on the inhabitants of Earth). For the while, she took after, and copped, a major in Aerospace Engineering.

After winning a job at JPL, Jennifer, took a leave of absence. “Please, miss, may I take a leave of absence, miss, please miss?” Here is me using all these academia terms as if they were second nature. As a non-academic who quit grammar school half way through sixth form, I know nought of universities and their ways. To me, they are places to pop into for a coffee, as I buy a book.

Laurence Bergreen tells us about Jennifer’s Crimean misssionary mish mash:

“…where the conditions were unbelievably grim. There was no hot water, and [the people] lived in cement buildings that were always cold and damp. A lot of the population were flat-out atheists…”

How pathetic! How can a scientist believe in sky-guy and still function? We default people who are non-theists are the norm, Jenny. You theists are the variation from the default. More:

“…it seemed to her that Russia, or at least her speck of it, was run by the Mafia, the politicians, and the church, all in bed together. After a while, she wondered if she was meant to be doing missionary work, if it was really the best use of her abilities. Was this what God wanted her to do?”

Oh it is pitiful! It took me until the age of about 21 to get this load of shit off my back. What a feeling when I suddenly, walking down Maryvale Road in Bourneville, knew that the blue sky above, and all beyond, was empty of any mega-plonker with a thing about thorns and thistles and original sin and redemptive roast lamb and all the macho human male SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! madness. Laurence quotes Jennifer:

START OF QUOTATION

“I feel like God has blessed me in my career,” she once wrote, “and I would like to glorify Him by exploring His wonderful creation…”

END OF QUOTATION

Sad, or what! How do you get through to such people?

The details of the Pathfinder job are thrilling. I recommend the book. It is published by Harper Collins. The ISBN is 0 00 257030 0 and I write this review (make that “this blather”) part way through. I am risking the possibility that he writer Laurence Bergreen might start slagging-off the Human Space flight budget in the next pages.

FIN 01h01 Tuesday

Jade and the saving power of papaver somniferum… Thoughts as the funeral service plays on Sky News…

12h30-BST Saturday 4 April 2009-CE

I have been watching Sky News and its coverage of the funeral of Jade for at least an hour now. We see little video clips of Jade waving and happy in recent days. What sickens me is the hypocrisy of the authorities who laud papaver somniferum, the sleep poppy, when it is given the label of “morphine” and supplied by doctors to a person who would otherwise be in agony.

But when people, allegedly living in a free country, seek to benefit from the sleep poppy which grows wild on Earth, in order to ease their angst, they are condemned as heinous criminals. Then, the sleep poppy is given the label heroin, or opium. Jade was pain-free for much of the time as the canker wrecked her, thanks to the blessed herb which is only a curse as moronic prohibition causes adulteration and unpredictable strength.

12n49

CQ: John Bird, the Founder of BIG ISSUE, reviews Jade Goody, and echoes a thought many people have: the News culture is all about frightening the life out of you, not preparing you…

19h37-BST Friday 3 April 2009-CE

BIG ISSUE 840 had Founder John Bird saying:

“…the vitriol levelled at Jade Goody for being just loud girl. It was a new high, or a new low. And then she became ill, and it was made known it was terminal. And then the complaints seemed to be withdrawn. Goody had slipped into the significant enclosure. Her illness and impending death made her special…

“I was interviewed by a newspaper the other day and they asked me what I would be doing for Spring, in order to keep resolute and positive about the year. I said I shall be carrying on with my practice of not reading the papers. And not watching or listening to the news, which always has that irritating voice of urgency, instilling fear.”

The next four paragraphs are superb. Get hold of a copy (it was last week’s) and read it for yourself. It is the best comment upon news consumption I have read. I have felt the same “panic and depression” after a shot of TV news of which John Bird speaks: “…our news culture is all about frightening the life out of you, not preparing you…”

(This text promoted from previous post into a post in its own right.)

FIN 19h40

King James Authorised Version soothes Pan-Anglia into buying alien theist garbage… Rolling Stone 1075 flaunts a disgusting cover, but Matt Taibbi pins down economic-criminal con-tricks, & David Fricke updates me on Van Morrison… Daily Echo here in BH lets a timid person pose as having no recourse…

06h12-BST Friday 3 April 2009-CE

I like to say Yehoshua and his dad Yusef in order to get the nearest I can (given my pitifully small knowledge) to the original names of Biblical characters, in the hope that sky guy fans will be nudged a little off comfort zone. It was so easy, when I was an indoctrinated kid, to accept theist nonsense as familiar, cosy, & English. It is, in fact, a Mid-East mental mish-mash; with aliens in our greenery.

Rolling Stone 1075 racked up on the shelves of Borders downtown yesterday. I do not like demeaning shots of ladies like the one Terry Richardson has contrived. I am not turned on by the sight of the inside of a lady’s mouth when she is pretending to eat ice cream. As to the completely unseen and superfluous set, we are told it is designed by Andy Harman. Designers (and consultants) are parasites.

Matt Taibbi (RS 1075) in his THE BIG TAKEOVER piece gets the nearest so far to getting my feeble brain to understand what the financial crooks have done to us. I hope they will be hunted down like Nazis, fellow-fiends of Hitler. Do any money crooks, yapping the obfuscation “we are clever”, believe their own spiel, like theist theorists? Most, I guess, know us suckers for what we have been.

David Fricke relates the stuff I needed to know on Van Morrison. I remember Brown Eyed Girl in 1967, but there were many names and I was doing time as a shop assistant (store clerk) with no way to study important things in life. I had no idea who George Ivan Morrison of Belfast (stress 2nd syllable) was. His group Them did Gloria. Now that IS a classic song.

Daily Echo (Bournemouth) Monday 30 March 2009 used a letter from a lady who works but whose husband is lately on Job Seekers Allowance (dole) with no extras. (Until UK goes bankrupt, I get ALL the extras, being single, and on pension.) Why do the lady and her mate not get divorced? It would solve all their problems. She even knows it but timidly refuses to do it:

“We too would be better off if I kicked my husband out of the marital home. I would get all the benefits as a single mum and he would get income-based job-seekers allowance and housing benefit…” Can you beat these whingeing Poms? These two twerps are still being good little boys and girls, denying themselves what they desire because a dry old book demands sterile self-sacrifice.

FIN 07h57
EDITED 19h42 Friday 3 April

He is NOT a zealot! He is a very good boy! He just gets misunderstood, that’s all… Non-theists, traumatised in childhood by the Christian brand of theism, do not spend much time attacking the idea of fairies at the bottom of the garden…

22h16-BST Thursday 2 April 2009-CE

Here is a Comment exchange on my recent post “An extract, edited, from the series of email exchanges with a young person…” between Loose Associations (who, if I may say so, has weird sectarian dogmatic interpretations off-shoot-ed from Christianity) and myself. I feel it is worthy of promotion from Comment-realm obscurity to Post-realm relative visibility.

I had gone on about Yehshua, the poor bastard from Nazareth, with a carpenter step-Dad. He became a guru, reputed healer, critic of established religion, and was mistaken by the multitude for a zealot who would lead Judea out of the Roman Empire…

…

START:

From Loose Associations…

His father and mother likely named Him Yeshua. He appointed specific apostles to carry on His work. The New Testament was mostly written by these apostles, as well as the apostle Paul, whom Jesus also specifically ordained.

Jesus also wrote the Old Testament, and fulfilled the prophecies in His life on this earth.

You are right, many people have corrupted the teachings of Jesus and committed atrocities in His name. All the more wrath is heaped upon them than if they had not trampled His name.

…

[I replied at 13h00 on 31 March 2009:]

I thank you Loose Associations.

Of course, you and I have different standpoints. I see the man as a guru or teacher as wise as Mohondas Karamchand Singh Gandhi the Mahatma -a human born of a lady with an unknown father. You accept the gospels’ take on the man.

I do not believe that the Damascus Road epiphany was any more than dehydration. Saul of Tarsus was a fanatical murderer. Paul the apostle does not command any respect from me. He had the nasty misogynist attitude that still poisons human society today.

I have no doubt that Yehoshua believed in Yehova but it was to be expected in those days of minimal science. I do not believe that he wrote the many books of the Old Testament. I spent 12 years in Sunday School having sectarian dogma shoved at me.

You and I agree about the evil done in the man’s name. I am glad we chime on that point. I will terminate the discussion at this point.

Thanks again for visiting.

…

[But Loose Associations came back at 18h59 on 31 March 2009:]

Hello Cy,

Correct, Saul was a murderer, and he’d be the first to admit it.

And if I’ve ever hated anyone, I’m also a murderer.

This is what’s so amazing about regeneration.

It’s better for your father to teach you than for Sunday School to teach you. That’s kinda why God planned that children would have parents.

Take care.

…

[I, of course, had to respond: at 20h34 on 31 March 2009:]

Your point comparing one’s father and Sunday Schools has drawn me back into the chat, briefly. Interestingly, as it happened, my father was the brother who started the Sunday School at our ecclesia.

His Superintendentship was taken away from him by ‘Arranging Brethren’ because it was thought that his partly missing fingers would disturb the other kids. We, his own children, accepted his dear hands as normal.

My father was a somewhat saner believer than the other ‘uncle’ who took over and who was a rather melodramatic man, expecting an angel to tap him discretely on the shoulder any minute and quietly spirit him away to discuss a new job in The Kingdom.

…

[Inevitably, Loose Associations added something at 21h47 on 31 March 2009:]

Cy, I suspect that the most evil in this world occurs on Sunday mornings as “Christians” gather for church. People who claim to be Christian will be held most accountable before God.

– thanks for the chat –

…

[I went to http://looseassociations.wordpress.com and found a post that said:

START OF QUOTATION

“…most atheists just can’t drop their fascination with Christianity. It’s interestingly similar to how the Pharisees couldn’t understand a thing about Jesus, yet continued to engage in conversation with Him. They knew something big was happening, but they were completely blind about it.

“I’ve had more practice talking to these snakes than I’d like. The only way to deal with them is fairly rough. They’re strangely drawn to the light, but will not accept it. You cannot be gentle with them, if there’s any hope at all. These are not average ‘unbelievers’… these are witting blasphemers of God…”

END OF QUOTATION

…

It was my fault that this, sadly fruitless, exchange went on for so long but in answer to:

“…most atheists just can’t drop their fascination with Christianity…”

I must say that, OBVIOUSLY, since most non-theists in UK and USA were brought-up Christian, it is inevitable that they are going to attack the specific dogma aka bullshit that harried them during their childhood!

It was not Marxist-fascism. It was not Ancestor Worship. It was one of the brands of theism. OBVIOUSLY the Christian brand of theism cops it in retaliation for the misery that it put them (including me) through in the Anglo-Saxon world, in Pan-Anglia.

What Loose Associations (who has a blog photoz@rushpost.com by the way, which makes his comment on my blog faintly spammish, but I tend not to object in the case of a blogger who presents a constructed case, however unacceptable to me) needs to awaken to is the fact that it is non-theists who are the default accepters of the apparent, not theists.

It is us non-theists who do not have to disprove the indoctrination that soiled our minds as innocent kids, which we naturally resent intensely. It is theists, Christian or otherwise, who are the asserters of the wild, un-provable, unique fantasy.

My parents particular assertion was that the founder of their sect could ‘prove’ their dogma. The sect offers quasi-intellectual Sunday lectures for this purpose. But if a person has a straight-thinking mind, or if a person acquires a straight-thinking mind as he grows up, as in my case, he requires a higher level of proof than that presented by people who believe that a hyper-genius who created the atom would also muck around as Moshe alleges did Yehova in the Garden of Eden.

The sad, pathetic believer (no more intelligent than a conspiracy theorist, no less gillible) does not even see the ludicrousness of the postulation that is presented in Genesis. When they present an even slightly scientifically more respectable concept of a creator, it will be interesting to listen to, for half a minute or so.

He will be a creator who is, perhaps, like Doctor Frankenstein: well-meaning but apparently powerless to stop his creation from running away from his control into calamity… No, there is none such. Observably, there is just a natural process of cause and effect, with an as-yet unknown origin. Cy

…

END

FIN 22h26

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED is larger than life and Tony Blackburn who says it is inaccurate should remember that the ship RADIO ROCK is fictional. The movie drama THE BOAT THAT ROCKED takes elements from fact, uses the fiction tool, and makes merely larger-than-life into EVEN-MORE-MEGA than life.

09h35-BST Thursday 2 April 2009-CE
EDITED 07h47-BST Monday 27 April 2009-CE

Cool Geezer tells me that Tony Blackburn was on the TV saying that THE BOAT THAT ROCKS movie is inaccurate. How can it be inaccurate, Tony? It is about a fictional boat!

I later learned that Tony was referring to the presence of sexy young ladies visiting the Radio Caroline ship. They never did, says Tony. It would be possible that the ladies came on board when Tony was off duty, but I do not think that is the cause of confusion. More likely, the movie maker is using artistic licence, or basing the scene on what happened only once or on another ship.

Tony was raised here in Poole Bay City. When he was a young man starting his radio career (see another, later, post on this blog) he proved his extrovertion was not all show. He stepped up to the line when fate said get up there, climb that mast and untangle that rope from the transmitter.

The mast-climbing theme is made into a major exciting feature, but with an excellently diverting twist, in the THE BOAT THAT ROCKED movie.

That is what you do when you make a movie! You take something that is mundane and make it larger than life, or (as in this case) you take something that is larger than life, and you make it into something that is even more so.

I was living in Plymouth during the General Election when Ted Heath got in. During day-light hours, I could not receive Radio Northsea International, the come-lately and much welcome pop-radio ship from the two Swiss guys Bollinger and Messier. And, anyway, I tended to do two jobs (both low-paid!) so I did not listen to radio so much.

But my mates, of the by-then-retired Radio Free Plymouth, told me about the anti-Labour propaganda that RNI was pounding out, especially during the daytime, and swaying the electorate over to the Conservatives.

One of our team, the Old Man of the Sea, who had been one of our three DJs on RFP and who was always a treasury of knowledge about Radio and Music, and who worked in the heart of communications at the Dockyard, used to drive up to the east coast often in order to listen to and record the offshore stations based in the North Sea.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED makes use of the rich potential for sexy comedy but it does not take the theme into the region of the boring. It gets it just right, with another rich bag of twists. It is, for example, far away from the Carry On cliche.

Strong human themes are mined from the possibilities of the situation involving a bunch of creative, and not necessarily quite sane, young people (with one or two not-so-young doing their admirable best) outside the reach of law.

Here is a part of an email (text slightly re-engineered) about THE BOAT THAT ROCKED from my ex-pat-Brit mate in South East Asia. You remember him? He is the ex-London-cabbie, DJ, and all-round electronics engineer, who DOES remember the Sixties AND WAS THERE, so there…

START OF QUOTATION:

Purists will say:

“But the ships were not 24-hour! Big L closed at 21:00! And they would NEVER have done all that. And the REAL reason the LEFT-wing goverment brought out possibly the most FASCIST law on the books was to avoid what HAPPENED when RNI went political in 1970. This would not have HAPPENED if the ships had been left in peace…”

But the truth ain’t SEXY!!! And from what I’ve seen on the trail, this movie IS!!! I’ll get to see it EVENTUALLY…

END OF QUOTATION.

In reponse I reported my memory that Swinging Radio England was 24-hour from the start, for their brief life in 1966, and Caroline went 24-hour but I cannot remember when. I do remember getting a lift home from the boss of the Mayflower Street bowling alley snack bar in the small hours, along with the rest of the staff, and he played SRE on the car radio, sometimes Caroline.

Let us all, in the spirit shown by GOLD a week ago when it went Pirate Gold and played 1960s all week, (thank-you GOLD!) make THE BOAT THAT ROCKED into the Number One hit it deserves to be!

Come on everybody, get your chassis into the cinema. It will be no tough assignment. It will be pure joy! Go thou and sin some more… I did not ought to have said that because THE BOAT THAT ROCKED is NOT naughty, except a little tiny bit. It is just joyful!

FIN 10h00
FIN EDIT 08h30 Monday 27 April 2009

CQ: The Boat That Rocked is powerfully successful! I was so afraid of being disappointed but it is the best! Here is my review…

17h50-BST Wednesday 1 April 2009-CE

The movie The Boat That Rocked was much better than I hoped for, and I hoped for brilliant. I knew from the trailers that there were going to be sloppy bits. These always make me feel embarrassed, being as I am long since such a non-player in that field. But it actually all went off well, with angles and twists far different from anything I expected. I was constantly being rewarded by unexpected denouments.

It was so good to hear those 1960s records over the big movie theatre speaker system! I have long respected the work of Bill Nighy but now I actually LOVE the guy. Surprise after surprise is what it was. I do hope that, not only every single offshore radio fan goes to see TBTR, but also every movie fan who loves a damn good story! It was superb. The biggest unanticipated wrinkle of all, was stunning!

I recall Tony Blackburn doing a bit of heroic stunt-work-for-real on one of the ships. And in respect of incidents like that, I loved the way the movie brought together into a single, fictional radio-ship story, every inspiring and tragic real event of note you could find from those years. The events on and around Radio Rock, the fictional ship of the movie, are completely convincing as a result. None of my secret fears of being bored were fulfilled.

The Boat That Rocked may be destined to become a cult movie. I cannot see how it could avoid that happy fate. Can the movie also become, in parallel, a smash hit A-List movie? It deserves that result absolutely. I just call it a mega-movie. It had much more than mere everything, for me, and I am just this anorak oik. For the cool class, they ought to be right there with it, whilst I worship from afar.

The boy in bed crying over his tranny, as the Labour government appeared to have won the vile and unnecessary, hate-filled, Vogonic, unimaginative stomping, was precisely real and true to life. I met a girl of nearly 15 at the Free Radio Rally in August 1968 and she had listened live to the Radio London Final Hour at 14h00 to 15h00 on 14 August 1967, crying her heart out.

Every single action and dialogue piece of the jigsaw of The Boat That Rocked movie was spot-on. It was utterly as it would be, as it should be, and 99% as the essence of the era was. Not only Radio Caroline’s, later, scarey beaching, but also New Zealand’s Radio Hauraki calamity, are built in. Radio from a far away place is always a thrill, but I had forgotten what an emotional adventure it became.

The Music was magnificent. At the time, it was an astonishing evolution of Pop and Rock in all their genres. Now, I have to reassure myself that I am indeed a nostalgia-soaked old freak, and that it was not a dream. We really DID witness, and live-through, the Four Best Years of the awesome cavalcade of talent that was taking us from electric-guitar blues, big-band swing, doo-wop, Rock’n’Roll, Brill Bldg, Psychedelia to Classic Rock.

The minimal fictionalising used in The Boat That Rocked to bring the screenplay up to strength, is for superb effect, and is all closely teamed with recorded happenings, and benefits, from consultation with DJs who worked on the ships and forts. It is all in the spirit of the era. I find it all in the best possible taste, in the ideal sense of the phrase! Given the poor judgement sometimes occurring these days, TBTR had the potential to fall and apall. But it was just cool.

The echo of the little ships of Normandy had me sobbing. The one bad call in TBTR is when bitchy, mocking-behind-the-back DJ behaviour is aired. So this happens, does it? Well, what harm would it do to show a good example to the young, and show the DJs 100% sincere in their mutually-supportive teamship, regardless of the status on Cool-or-Fool-rating any given record-spinner might win?

The movie THE BOAT THAT ROCKED is a happy personal completion, or closure, of the offshore radio story for tranny-tuning me. Suddenly, in 1964, it happened. I had no idea about previous ships and/or forts outside territorial waters in the 1920s and 1930s, nor did I appreciate that pre-war radio stations, on the Continent, broadcasting in English to UK, came under the definition of ‘offshore’.

But I was thrilled. It was exciting to listen, from Plymouth,to Radio Caroline, Radio London Big-L, and Swinging Radio England coming through the snap-crackle-pop atmospherics from the North Sea. The fall of the stations as the Labour Government killjoy-mob made it illegal to work-for, supply, or advertise-on the off-shores, was a saga that raised only anger at socialism, and admiration for free-enterprise rebels.

The 1970s brought occasional boosts such as Don Allen with the Caroline Revival Hour from Radio Andora, Tommy Vance with Radio Monte Carlo International, and Radio Geronimo from the same transmitters.

Then Caroline came back, and a whole next generation, this time of Album format listeners, became aware of offshore.

Laser 558 in the 1980s was terrific, but it could only fail to pull in ads. Then it fell into disrepair. Cool Geezer visited the ship near the end. The DJs were acting as engineers. Only a weak signal was going out. A modulator (I think he said) was missing.

We have not mentioned land-based unlicenced stations in the 1970s such as Jackie and Kaleidescope, or the Irish land-based free stations in the 1980s such as best-station-I-ever-heard Nova.

Many other low-power local land-based free stations, such as Radio Free Plymouth, also had a bash. The, a new generation, of mostly students, brought their own agenda and music into play.

Go and see this dynamically entertaining and cheering movie!

I stayed through all the credits at the end, and loved the record and the little pictures. I intend to order the sound track (on Mercury).

Best line in the movie is the boss saying “…there were so many decades…” Exactly…

FIN 19h28
EDITED Thursday 2 April 2009
EDITED Sunday 14 June 2009

London demo. If my mother and father were rising from the dead today (which is of course impossible) and needing me to meet them at, say, Hounslow West by the tube, I would ask the angel to arrange it for next week. No way am I going anywhere even NEAR the smoke today. Russell Brand was on the street & on Sky News: “Because I live here.” Fair enough. -and now to downtown Bournemouth to see The Boat That Rocked. Gotta be good.

11h45BST Wednesday 1 April 2009-CE

Russell Brand, live on Sky News, in the crowd in Central London said he had come to observe and participate. He answered the question as to why by saying “Because I live here.” He was very calm and I was on his side, on this occasion, in regard to his reaction to the Sky News on the spot commentator and the routine pokey, provocative questioning.

I am off to see The Boat That Rocked at the ABC down the old Westover Road. I do not expect to be disappointed. I shall be giving it the full benefit of the doubt. I am fawningly grateful that the topic and issue of Offshore Radio, second only to the NASA Apollo Moon Program in my life’s greatest interests, is being give a promotion.

FIN 11h59

Windows Live Spaces and all that young-folk stuff is not for those of us born in 1940. But you might like to have the following address:

06h19-BST Tuesday 31 March 2009-CE

I have received this message:

Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. It’s easy! Try it!

http://perfectionistgal.wordpress.com/
cool-interactive-youtube-video-play-now-on-blog/

I am too computer-illiterate and old to be able to use this, but some of you out there may like to have the information.

FIN 06h20

Anthony Watts (up with that?) is right-on about Green-fascists and their lies about anthropogenic climate variation. Crosspatch has the answer: Fargo and such soggy cities need to move their ass out of the damn river. Outward Bound is still doing its stuff. All the young dudes these days are computer-literate.

15h48-BST Monday 30 March 2009-CE

It is a superb sunny day in South Dorset! I had my bicycle given her free service after 4 to 6 weeks and she is zooming along.

In the blog by excellent dude Mister Watts (See my Blogroll) comes a post about the Green-fascists, and their news media running-dogs, who blame Fargo floods on the imaginary anthropogenic ‘climate chaos’. Climate variation is what we have enjoyed for four-and-a-half billion years. As the Earth accreted from the agglomeration of debris of the new star Sol, she became a molten blob.

Eventually, she cooled a bit and a crust formed, then water gathered. After about a billion years, I believe, an observer on the surface would see that Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. But as the volcanic fumes thinned, lo, there was light. There was day provided by our star Sol. And half the time, our twin planet Selene was visible from any given part of Earth: by day hardly noticable; by night brightly reflecting Sol starlight.

Crosspatch made a Comment:

“…I have a suggestion -if you don’t want repeated disasters year after year, move [affected urban areas] away from the river, move the levees back a half mile on each side, allow the river to spread out and slow down.

“Trying to maintain a city that is for all practical purposes built in the middle of a river bed is dumb and you deserve to get wiped out year after year. We should stop paying to rebuild from ‘flood disasters’. Move the [cities] out of the flood plain…”

The young lady I have been exchanging emails with reported having been to Outward Bound for 11 days. I asked if this was the same Outward Bound t