Josef Fritzl, could have been identified and euthanased at age 6, as all such faulty-product needs to be, to keep high standards of quality-control. Declare Law; it is not War. Joe Brown, former fireman, then cover-artist, now Rock-star, can stoke his old Plaistow mates, locos 80078 & 80104, on Swanage Railway if he likes. Camden Council screws you via a mindless robotic machine. ‘Amazing Tales For Making Men Out Of Boys’ by Neil Oliver from: books.telgraph.co.uk is OK but Masada-method is better than white-shark solution.

TITLE

09h31-BST Friday 09 May 2008-CE

The approach I follow in this web log is to eschew the whited sepulchre stance and to admit that I am dysfunctional. I committed admittedly minor but no less real offences between 1966 and 1972. Mega-offender, Josef Fritzl, blames childhood environment for his stiff, bullying, & self-righteous attitude, plus his ultra-selfish, callous & perverted actions. But he is both nature and nurture. Faulty product stalks amongst us. Cull it pre-emptively.

A certain government in a certain country is accused by certain gentlemen of declaring war. In fact, a certain government in a certain country is declaring LAW. It is the same old struggle twixt theist-fascism and secular sanity. And the United Nations Organisation, expected at its founding to become an enforcer of all things positive, progressive and constructive, is in the hands of everybody, including faulty product, so that nobody can do anything.

A letter in the Daily Echo 8 May 2008 corrects the impression of Joe Brown (the cover star) that his first job as a fireman on the footplate exists no more. The writer, who is a volunteer driver on Swanage Railway, points out that there are more than 250 independent railways in Britain, doing steam-hauled tours each year. Locomotives 80078 & 80104 from Plaistow shed where Joe was are now active down here. Joe long ago advanced to Rock genius level.

A lady writes (page 16 of Evening Standard for Tuesday 6 May 2008) that she pulled into a pay-&-display bay at a Kentish Town Road deli and went to put money in the meter. There she read that parking was banned during rush hours so back in the car she got and drove off. A camera had recorded her and her car. Camden Council screwed her £120 which she paid. “There is no leeway with policing by CCTV. A camera has no common sense.”

A biz gent left his Daily Telegraph on the train, Tuesday 6 May 2008. I hate the stupid old broadsheet ungainliness of the thing but it is always stuffed with griff. Neil Oliver (‘Amazing Tales For Making Men Out Of Boys’ go to: books.telgraph.co.uk) seems worth reading. He praises Captain Salmond of HMS Birkenhead, 26 February 1852, for saving women and children in the boats. The sharks got the men. Wot, no guns? Heard of Masada…

FIN 09h32

Gillian Reynolds presents a false dilemma in Daily Telegraph for Tuesday 6 May 2008. Now hear this: there are more ways than one to thin a fat cat. The choice is NOT twixt bad and even worse. Ever heard of free and fair?

07h31-BST Friday 09 May 2008-CE

Gillian Reynolds, same Telegraph, covering Othello on BBC Radio 3, fatuously burbles: “All those fools who want to take Shakespeare off the national curriculum [myself included] had their rebuttal here. Even those idiots who wonder what Radio 3 is for had their answer. So don’t write to say this is minority stuff, or you don’t see the value of the licence fee…”

Here is a third view. The spear-shaking scribe can be available on the net for any kid advanced enough to dig the dude, as far as I care. But public money ought not to finance any stuff OTHER THAN the Third Programme which would be renamed ‘BBC Radio’ (the ONE-AND-ONLY programme) with Arts and Current Affairs including News. Roger Day (Trafalgar Square 1969, for RFP) said: “The BBC are good at news; let them stick to it.”

The legal extortion racket run by the Beeb ought to be ended, like all such screw-you mechanisms. For people who like Luxy, AFN, Caroline, Big-L and latter-day ILRs, the commercial mechanism produces the goods. The Beeb ought never to have been allowed to try and get with it. It is not their proper job to do Light entertainment. Normandy and such stations ought to have been brought on-shore, not imitated.

FIN 09h39

Will Self in Evening Standard for Tuesday 6 May 2008 worries whether Boris Johnson has what-is-needed to eliminate the Central-London sufferings of car-drivers and crime-victims. But I believe you DO have the stuff to do it, BJ!

07h33-BST Thursday 08 May 2008-CE

Will Self in Evening Standard for Tuesday 6 May 2008 desires the “dwellers in the doughnut” (a term he quotes from somewhere to refer to Londoners who dwell not in the inner city) to walk in his shoes because he REALLY has it tough, from car taxes and nuisance crimes, not them. He goes:

“[Boris] Johnson says he will be a mayor for all Londoners but I ask him, how is he going to surmount this paradox: he was elected by the suburbs to enact policies instead aimed squarely at improving the lives of those at the centre. How, when he was elected on the basis of anxieties, will he deal with realities?”

I buy the Daily Echo, Bournemouth, almost all the time. I occasionally buy the Evening Standard (the surviving evening paper for London) in addition. The quality of writing in these evening papers (both for sale in Poole Bay conurbation) is excellent. Just as theatre, cinéma and television all still have their niches, newspapers will survive in this age of the internet. Professional writers deliver focussed griff, like this Will Self work, to ensure it. More:

“And while [Boris Johnson] may be a genius, as his friend Charles Moore claimed on the radio at the weekend, I doubt [whether] he has what I always understood to be its true hallmark: the infinite capacity for taking pains. He can prove me wrong.” (I knew it. I am definitely NOT a genius.)

FIN 08h14

Peter Kelner of YouGov online polls, writing in Evening Standard for Tuesday 6 May 2008, explains why YouGov won the pollster test and how the rest can do a better job. YouGov were slagged-off for saying Boris would edge Ken out. But YouGov were correct. The others were sloppy.

05h43-BST Thursday 08 May 2008

Peter Kelner is the boss of YouGov which is the election pollster of the Evening Standard. YouGov accurately predicted the result of the relative positions of Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson in the election of Lord Mayor of London. The final forecast by YouGov said Boris would win by 53-47 per cent. The other polls attacked YouGov. But both Boris and YouGov won.

In a piece for the Standard on Tuesday 6 May 2008, Peter Kelner told the losers who had been dumping on their now-proven superior what they ought to do if they desired to get their ass in gear in future. Amongst his careful “advice to the traditional polling companies” (well-worth reading in full if you can find it) is a point that reflects social and technological changes:

“…Response rates for telephone polling companies in London are worse than in the rest of Britain. Well under 20 per cent of calls result in an interview. And, because telephone pollsters dial only landline numbers, they question too many people who stay at home, and too few of the many Londoners who lead socially active lives. In contrast, YouGov’s panel members can respond to our surveys at any time from any computer within a 48-hour window.”

It is very generous of Peter Kelner to reveal to his competitors why they are crashing in flames. What we see revealed in this incident is that there is no substitute for brains backed by hard work. The other pollsters perhaps think it is enough to ponce around using old ways whilst making sexy PR and image as in so much of the world of work today. YouGov has a better, perhaps older, idea: get the job right. (Gee, I wish I could do that.)

FIN 06h27

www.thepastyshop.com state that they make pasties free from artificial additives. I certainly enjoyed my cheese and onion one from them. A call from Leigh Lady who is still keeping on though the way be long. My first quarter Electric bill was not too bad at all. The theist Hell scam terrifies more victims than ever. TV news is depressing but I do not quit.

18h31-BST Wednesday 07 May 2008-CE

A most amusing thing just happened. I returned from putting the garbage and the recycs in their respective bins and as I opened my door to get back in, the CNN man said “Welcome back”, dead on time. He was looking at me too. I was glad I had my shorts on and had not gone out in my underpants. They look like swimming trunks but folk can tell the difference you know.

In my pocket, I found the paper napkin that came with my cheese and onion pasty that I bought in Waterloo Station before getting on the return train yesterday. It says “100% pure Nothing artificial added”. Then it has a web address: www.thepastyshop.com but what for I know not. I had looked at the displays on at least half a dozen stalls of various savoury or sweet snacks. They were all tempting, expensive, high quality, and fattening.

As I had first scrutinised the selection on the display at The Pastry Shop the guy said “Yes, sir, next please” or something like that. I waved up my hand and moved on. When I came back having decided that his was indeed my favoured selection from which to choose, he said the same again. But at the same time a stand-around cove who was leaning on the end of the stall goes “Really nice atmosphere in this station innit?”

Either something had happened that I knew nothing about, or he was having a go at me for not making a polite reply to the stall-holder’s first salutation. I was shattered with all that plodding on Exhibition Road and around the parts of the Science Museum. We were once allowed to call them ‘galleries’ but some PR marketer must have decreed that a ‘gallery’ sounds old-fashioned and the term has been dropped from the signage, publicity, and map.

…Here I am, back again after a phone call from Leigh Lady. Life is a struggle these days on the estates trying to keep grandchildren on the right side of the law. The 15-year-old boy has tried suicide three times, but he did not like the stomach pumping last time. He since got voluntary work at an equestrian centre and likes riding. He is getting ever better at his amateur rugby and his grandma has been enrolled to watch him…

The Southern Electric company is private, not the old state-owned ‘Board’. I was persuaded about five years ago by a doorstep sales team to switch to some other lot. But I returned to SE. Now various companies send guys to allege that I will save money with them. I would rather pay more and have no mucking about. The bill was only £63 for January to March inclusive. A note says that they held off raising prices until the warm weather arrived.

We hear about scams, but the greatest scam of all time is the one where creepy perverts in robes terrify the gullible morons amongst us by making them believe that burning alive for ever awaits them if they do not ponce around with potty rituals and put any money they have in the church plate rather than saving it up to use in some way that would better themselves. The scam still goes on in lands that lack Judeo-Protestant-Secular culture.

The decades of yore when I was expecting a nuclear war and wishing it would happen so we could all raid the no-longer-owned supplies and adopt orphans and set up little fortresses (in fact, new gangsters would rule) got me in the habit of needing to know the news. I wish I could drop TV, radio, and newspapers, so as to find peace of mind away from depressing crime news, and just be happy. The TV is off right now. I am missing a quake off Japan.

Talking about the TV made me switch the four screens back on. I have CNN, Sky News, EuroNews and BBC-World up. Gotta go…

FIN 20h27

South Kensington day out. Central and District Line signal failures. Plodding along that austere tunnel under Exhibition Road. Science Museum. Dan Dare & the Shoving Together of High-Tec Britland. Kensington Gardens. Choc treats. Cromwell Road noisy high speeder. IMAX Space Station 3D seen in full at last. I thought kids sat on adult knees on the tube. Hello Boris!

11h34-BST Wednesday 07 May 2008-CE

Yesterday I took the 07h39 train to Waterloo and the tube to South Kensington. On the Jubilee Line for Westminster, the announcement came that District and Circle lines were badly delayed with signalling failures so I stayed on until Green Park. There I had to board the Piccadilly Line but I got it into my head to be looking for “Victoria Line”. I went one way, and then came back. Probably by pure chance, South Ken found me. I take no credit.

I did that dreadful plod along the long horrible tunnel all the way to the point where the main door of the Science Museum is just up the stairs. (I forgot that it is best to avoid exiting direct from the tube station and to, yes, take the long horrible tunnel at first BUT then exit it tunnel at its first little exit which is actually by Cromwell Road so that half the walk can be in the outside air in Exhibition Road.) I made my way in the lift to the Second Floor and took thorough delight in the Dan Dare & the Building of High-Tec Britain exhibition reviewed in the post before this, below.

Then it was time to have a chocolate cookie and a cup of drinking chocolate in the Revolution Café. I nostalgicized all around the dear old Space Exploration once more. Checking at the IMAX, I found the Space Station 3D movie was not on until 16h45. So I strolled up Exhibition Road to Kensington Gardens for a sit in the sunshine. Then I came back down for a meander around South Ken snack shops and enjoyed a yummy mint choc chip cone.

As I sat in the garden by the Nasty History See’em, right by the aforementioned tube tunnel entry/exit, I heard a car suddenly take off from the lights and I swear he must have been doing 70 (mph) up Cromwell Road. When I got back at 21h00 to my flat in Bournemouth and saw the Chelsea shoot up I wondered whether it had been the same havoc-wreaker. But there are plenty of them to go round so probably not.

I am glad to have finally seen Space Station 3D. The first time I saw only a tiny part of it was through the projection windows at the former IMAX cinéma by Bournemouth Pier. My mate the movie industry technician and re-enactor (specialising in US Civil War) was showing Cool Geezer and myself around. A young projectionist was on duty. My mate had been let go. The Bournemouth IMAX was out of funds because hardly anybody went to see the mostly crap movies they could afford. I was sad when it died.

After my stroll, whilst waiting for the movie, I did the Computing History section. When they let us out of the movie, they streamed us through the Third Floor and the Flight section. I had forgotten those old planes hanging on wires from the ceiling. Getting to Waterloo for the 18h35 homeward, we were tight stuffed on the tube. I find it remarkable that little kids occupy a seat alone whilst adults stand. It uses space most uneconomically.

FIN 12h44

Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, at the Science Museum in South Kensington, with Eagle comic, Frank Hampson, 1950s, the post-blitz days of nationalisation, the post-war struggle to build houses and make appliances. Take your hat off to that big old (De Havilland Comet) jet airliner and the honourable pioneers who flew and fell. History of Computing. Exploring Space. Occasional grammatical let-downs. Again, why do we have all these irritating improvements? Oh yes, we like them. They are nice…

07h42-BST Wednesday 07 May 2008-CE

Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, at the Science Museum in South Kensington, was well-worth taking a good time about. I looked at them with happy approval, the panels reproducing Eagle comic pages from the 1950s of Frank Hampson’s fictional future space heroes, and I read every word of the story continuity panels and text-balloons of the character’s conversation. In any expanded expo: radio’s Jet Morgan from Charles Chiltern maybe?

For myself, as a war-baby and then teenager of the 1950s, there could not have been too much Eagle. For you, as a “future boy” or girl whose young days were spent after many thousands of bomb sites were cleared away, you and I both could still thrill as we saw new, real journeys, both robotic and human, into space (hardly any by Brits of course, mostly by citizens of USA and USSR). I am sure the Eagle comic content in the exhibition is just right.

I had to remove my baseball cap as I looked at the actual panel with two windows that blew out of one of the three failed comet jet airliners. It is there recovered from the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. It is part of UK’s being at the leading edge of technology spun-off from World War 2. We were the ones to cop it in the neck as it was proved that alloys had to be stronger for large, high-flying passenger planes than bombers and fighters.

But there was, I have always felt, one element of loony designer hubris. How else do you explain why the windows on the De Havilland Comet aircraft were square? The corners had a tiny bit of a curve but it was not enough (as my non-engineer lay-mind can easily see) to conduct the stress around supportably. Significantly, cracks led from the corners. Newspapers soon after mentioned it but this presentation does not specifically point to it.

I made my usual skitty self read every word of the texts tracing the birth of hi-tech UK. I thoroughly salute the approach of the exhibition conceivers. Technical progress forced during war is the same mechanism as peaceful Apollo spinoff. I noted the point made that mainland manufacturers raced ahead as they reconstructed. Our housing was mucho-blitzed but many old factories survived to be made an excuse, later, for our plodding decline.

This minor point is not original to me; it was made by Thatcherites. Today, aside from 2008’s post-privatisation woe where profit trumps service to a criminal degree, we suffer same-old, arty-design attitude. Post-war, as UK fell behind both war-tooled USA and recovering Continent, it was not only so-called ‘Contemporary’ artiness; it was surviving class-rooted dislike of speaking up against, not only management, but also State under Labour.

Even if you are not of the Eagle comic era, go to the Second Floor of the Science Museum, defy the offensive assault of the arty work that twitters endlessly from the great lit circle rising up through the mezzanine gulf from far below (being young you probably like it) and dig Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain. After all, if you are a kid now, the fictional future of Dan Dare has still not happened; it is your life to take and make!

I spent longer in South Kensington than ever before. It is worth reading every word in the ‘galleries’ that interest one, rather than just seeing the gear. I saw some bad English grammar in the Exploring Space section. And to say that gravity is “diminished in space” is a level-down. Almost as much gravity holds us when we fall around Earth (forward momentum having put us and our spacecraft container in that state) as when on the surface.

History of Computing is just along from Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, on the same level. As I looked at the clunky contraptions, valves and frames, and read about why on Earth they came to be made, I felt love for the geeks-of-their-day who began it all. It made me ashamed to slag off that infuriating cell phone sitting within arm’s reach, and this dratted PC that I must use …and yet, still I muse: come back childhood, most is forgiven…

FIN 11h26

Bank Holiday Monday, The Times NASA story Astronerds needed, Edwin Aldrin, Michelle Henry, Brats much nicer than Long-Tall-Barbie, Xu Kangping and Yang Ning so charming on CCTV 9 Dialogue, 1947 twin-state solution, Grand Design Show triumph of deckchair party, Natalie Cronin of NSPCC learning TV-talk fast, Labour defeat looms and John McDonnell plays the old game “evil Gordon aint SO bad actually”, HMG spends billions to bash enterprising incomers, Everest torch madness.

08h58-BST Monday 05 May 2008-CE

I intensely dislike Bank Holidays. I have never liked them even when I was working. But at least, these days, the shops open over the midday. I must buy The Times when I nip out to post this, because the Papers on Sky News have trailed an article about Astro-NERDS wanted by NASA but ‘space cadets’ need not apply. Is the right stuff for 2008 different? I recall reading that fit Edwin Aldrin did vital work on trajectories. Moon guys had it all.

Michelle Henry was the cafe-au-lait lady who was with Eamonn doing the Papers. Mattel are trying to own Brats, as well as their own ugly, skinny, long-tall, Barbie. An ex-employee invented Brats which have more normal limb proportion with an infant-style head which is large in proportion to the body. I say: that fashion models are gruesome. Barbie is an ugly freak. And Mattel are ectomorphic-fascists. Michelle and Eamonn are not too bad.

Watching CCTV9, I loved the way interviewee Xu Kangping turned to fellow interviewee Yang Ning rather than the moderator and interviewer whose name I forget, but he is utterly brilliant. The young man Xu was younger than the young lady Yang. He agreed with one point, and then turned to her to check what else she said. It was so cute. The moderator let things ride. I love that show. It is Dialogue, of course. Watch it!

The Land was declared by the UN in 1947 to be twin states. But since 1882 at least, the theist leadership of both antithetic cousin faiths had been spewing hatred so extremists inside, and circling nations, outside decreed that the tri-faith peace-loving people themselves had no chance. We are in the last chapter as the gangster grabbers of G-land slowly enlighten. I think S ought to be handed to P by E. Size matters. J and S are the heartland of I.

BBC News had a piece on the Grand Design Show in the docklands. It was comical to hear the lady going “…we have a very buoyant market and even if there should be a slight downturn…” This was LIVE today mark you, not a clip from six months ago! What a sales-person! Of course, she may be on it. Up-market residences may be doing as well as ever. As for me, I am happy in my Dave Wells flat in dear old Poole Bay City. Sod Old Father Thames.

Natalie Cronin, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Inspector, was helped beautifully by the lady interviewer (whose name I did not catch) on BBC News 08h20. It was a classic example of the art. Natalie went into a bland generalisation. She did not answer the question. The Beeb lady gave the answer, and led the next question. And so on. Natalie finally lost her preoccupation and got into a good-enough stride. Better next time.

John McDonnell was yapping that he thinks Gordon can be saved from crashing in flames. Hello! Who were the back-seat pilots who got the bloke IN this mess? You back-bench loony-Left Marxist-fascists mate, that is who! Apparently, this bloke JMcD tried to stand for leader last year. I think he is the item I referred to in a previous blog when I called him hard-faced. This time, a twitch of humour came at the end. I quite liked him. Damn!

We are told that it might cost billions of pounds to find, and export, illegal immigrant workers. I am on the side of the workers myself. They must be needed. The business of government would be making sure that these people (who have the initiative and courage to treat Earth as their home, not just their land of birth) are paid well-enough, work in good-enough conditions, and are not exploited slaves. Be part of the solution, HMG!

They idiots are waiting for better weather before running up Everest with a flaming torch. Once again I quote Robert Anson Heinlein (I hope that the late Master of Science Fiction and Space Fantasy is monitoring in agreement that this case applies) “Nothing is harder to believe than human stupidity”. In any case, I hate tectonic damage. All this silly pointy things need to be cut flat and the stuff used to fill the silly fiords. One day people will be like me.

FIN 10h28

The Leader, the would-be bandwagon against crime, robust Buddhism, East End kid, Young Communist, Oswald Moseley & the Mitfords, British Mandate in ‘The Holy Land’ so-called, Channel Isles police, Trafalgar Square, Bournemouth Pavilion, Town Hall Annex, Westover Road YMCA, Blandford, Southport, Cornwall, Hounslow, Safeway’s, failure, Prohibition, destruction on the Promenade, Miami Beach, Muc-Off chain cleaner…

09h54-BST Sunday 04 May 2008-CE

A story in the newspaper in the mid 1970s first brought the man to my notice. He was calling a meeting of any citizens who might be concerned about crime. I attended and was bemused to discover that there were two themes. Not only did he have a lot to say on the main subject that I could agree with readily, but also he went on about Buddhism.

I spoke to him after the meeting and opined that he needed to drop the religious-type stuff and concentrate on the condemnation of government weakness on dealing with the criminals. It turned out that he accepted my point because, soon after, he changed the name of the group appropriately. I started going to his public meetings, and private ones at his house.

He had been an East End kid and done his share of taking wooden street paving blocks, whilst the road was dug up, to keep the home fire burning. He had joined the young communists. Then he had moved to the Oswald Moseley group and had risen high on the security side. He had shared a dining table with the leader and various Mitfords.

He had done military service in Palestine under the British Mandate, and served as a police officer in the Channel Isles. Finally, he found Buddhism, but his instinctive desire to be a political leader in his own right remained. He envisaged a balance between the vegetarian pacifism of the prince who found enlightenment under the tree, and war to topple crooks from power over the lives of innocent people.

I attended several of his activities designed to gain publicity and recruit members. Their degree of success was not quite zero, I found myself one evening sitting in a chair at his house, dramatically confronted by the inner circle (him and three others), and questioned up to the point where it would obviously have been either “do not call us, we will not call you” or “come and join us”. I passed and was unceremoniously but soberly sworn in.

I do not recall at which point I ceased to tag-along and became a committed member of the embryonic Party, but it was during a sequence of his events. I attended his Rally in Trafalgar Square. At some point he gave me the job of Security. I have always looked hard, despite being what lanky men call ‘short’. But I knew nothing of the task he assigned me.

I was doorman at his dance where an outstanding citizen was honoured in the Pavilion. I was on the door at his Town Hall Annex concert at which a Polish children’s singing-&-dancing group unsuitably shared the bill with a minor local rock band that whacked up the audio, assaulting the ears of the family audience. I became disillusioned. I achieved physical separation by moving to Blandford with my father who, soon after, moved to BC.

I returned to Bournemouth having blued the proceeds of my house-owning period, and you can read about the incident at the YMCA in Westover Road in a one-post Page of my sidebar ‘Afterlife: natural’. The man is definitely hugely gifted. Sadly, he adds a superstructure of nonsense upon his foundation of basic wisdom and insight. He gave credence to the idea that the Nazi thug in chief was a great leader who was let down by evil sidekicks. No way! I have to say that, as things turned out, I was wrong about taking the political channel to influence. The faith-based group would have had more chance, I now see.

Four years later, my father returned to UK, Southport this time. I moved to be near the place that was looking after him. My father died in Fall of 1985 and I returned to the West Country. I popped around between Hounslow and Cornwall for a few years and finally I landed back in Bournemouth in 1995. I went to Safeway’s on the second day and there he was, shopping. The other members had quit too. There was no pretence that it was not all over.

I met my old friend and former mentor again, by chance, in his beach hut as I rode along the Prom in the Summer of 2006. He admitted “I failed”. In fact, he had an influence on public opinion, along with similar campaigning voices. But crime will grow ever stronger whilst Puritan Prohibition (of mind-altering substances) enriches low life trash, and sabotages efforts to moderate and regulate use of the happy-herbs our ancestors discovered. Search ‘rendering’ on my sidebar for the full case. He could never see that. I failed to convince him on the issue, and also that he should write his autobiography, allowing me to transcribe tapes to WP if need be.

I avoid the Prom as much as possible. I love it, but it is barely ride-able now. The rebuilding (Miami-Beach-style) went way too far. Great wads of sand now make the way arduous for pedestrian and cyclist alike. I tried it again recently and, despite my efforts with Muc-Off chain cleaner, the system of my bicycle sounds like it is getting ground-out again. Silicon grains (unlike silicon chips which are an unmixed blessing?) infiltrate and destroy…

FIN 11h53

Nim’s Island astonished me so the trailer must have been just right. Am I wrong to fear what they are planning for Big-L? Cool Geezer could not get help from the spreading hive of Contract World. Doctor Alixe Bovey ‘In Search of Medieval Britain’ is not doing too badly. Will NOC Party really box any chocs or is it all a dram?

08h31-BST Saturday 03 May 2008-CE

Nim’s Island is indeed the title of the movie I saw yesterday. In the previous post I had to call it Nidl Nadl Noo. Oldie folk will recall the dated work of Milligan, Sellers and Seacombe. I needed to see a movie, never expecting stuff as brilliant as the adventures of Nim turned out to be: pets in acceptable snips, events not depending on stupidity, the right-thing being done, people knowing technology and having cool attitude. To miss is to diss …yourself.

A couple of days ago, the Big-L DJ said of the station: “hopefully, soon, bigger and better and brighter”. I SO hope that this is a promise of wider and more powerful signal distribution, like taking over a Beeb-hogged AM frequency, and not a sad warning of take-over by the phoney PR arty-farty design-specialist con-crap comprehensive red-brick generation. Much as the previous paragraph lauds Now Generation, I like my Big-L Sixties-style.

Cool Geezer phoned me with an insight. He was up by a regional Beeb hive and spoke to the lady at the desk. He showed his professional creds hoping to see the duty engineer (on a new tech, as before) but she no-could-do. The poor lady let out the whole maladroit situation. She was depressed with the selling-off because she could no longer contact departments. (Yet the lovies have the legal right to demand we finance expanding narcissistic posturing.)

Doctor Alixe Bovey ‘In Search of Medieval Britain’ seems to get it just right. UK and USA history is common until their UDI, and our going our separate ways. She has every right to seek amongst the ruins here and to remark upon what she finds. I loved the idea of being able to shoot-on-sight anyone legally declared to be an ‘outlaw’. That is JUST what we are asking for. Softies who kiss-up to the crooks are outlaws too. Soon, baby, soon…

I noticed when I popped in to see the elections coverage that NOC Party were doing OK. I had never heard of them but I did somehow get the impression that they were rather a grey lot, I do not know why. Then I twigged that I was looking at an abbreviation for ‘no overall control’. I have no overalls. I am retired. I liked the white ones I had at Cadburys in the early 1960s. All along the high-walk, we white ghosts were walking.

Whenever somebody expresses a willingness to believe in astrology I ask them to tell me my birth, based on their observation of my character during the conversations we have been having. No luck so far. They need to join the National Organisation of C*nts.

FIN 10h37

Lidl in Sovereign Arcade (mall) will have tough competition from the new Aldi on Palmerston Road. Le ballon jaune et Papa. Louise Jury, Chief Arts bod, Evening Standard, report about the ‘Dan Dare And The Birth Of Hi-Tech Britain’ exhibition running at The Science Museum until 25 October, admission free. Nidl Nadl Noo Island movie opening (here in PBC) is today. Labour local swing (in the backwards direction).

04h51-BST Friday 02 May 2008-CE

Aldi on Palmerston Road opened yesterday and was packed. It is quite a big store for Aldi. The car park is an awkward shape. There are chaining bars for five bicycles. Lidl in the Sovereign Centre had its balloons, primrose yellow with red and blue logo, filled with helium and tied in triplets to bottles of water placed all around the place. The Lidl offer of £3 off if you spend ten on non-food goods only, seemed to have quite a few takers.

A boy of about seven had just checked out with his mother and he was eyeing the back of the guy in the corner who was inflating more balloons using the helium bottle. He let them float to the ceiling where he could reach the ribbon dangling from each. I was sad that the man did not notice, behind him, the boy and his obvious desire to have a balloon. The boy made several sallies forth in the direction, but eventually off he and his mother went.

After I finished packing my back-pack on that useful shelf that Lidl has (Aldi do them too) a man, with the boy following, came striding into the store. He must have been waiting in the mall getting some sanity whilst the wife and the boy shopped. So the polite little guy got his free promotional balloon. Now he knows the deal. Balloons are available to have. Next time he will be not afraid. He will ask and one shall be given unto him.

Louise Jury in the Evening Standard, Wednesday, did a small piece as Chief Arts Correspondent about the ‘Dan Dare And The Birth Of Hi-Tech Britain’ exhibition running at The Science Museum until 25 October, admission free. I will go by train or coach. It covers the post-war research & development boom. Advance is best driven by threat (Henry #8, US Civil War, WW1 & WW2) but NASA Apollo Program, a peaceful version, giant-leaped us more.

I must see Nim’s Island today if possible. I ate too many well-ripe Kiwi fruit yesterday morning and had the trots. I went and ate some more yester-eve and woke at 03h00 (2½ hours ago) with a touch of the same condition. Labour is riding the pendulum swing away from power, as is to be expected after ten years. A hard-faced, loony-Left Marxist-fascist was doing the “we are being punished by the People for abandoning our roots” usual crap.

FIN 05h48

The annual commemoration is observed, but a few dishonourable morons defy the Holocaust Day siren. Ephraim Hardcastle & Stu Rose are wrong, Jeremy Paxman is correct: M&S underpants are no longer fit for purpose. James Whale puts in a good word for sanity. Mark White on Brainwashing. Silly Sandra Pearce stomped. Brian Masters on Josef Fritzl. Allison Pearson is unfair to Miley Cyrus.

08h07-BST Thursday 01 May 2008-CE

Seven minutes ago we had the annual siren in The Land to commemorate those of the Tribe of Judah murdered by the Hitler gang of racist-fascists during World War 2. Slavs, intellectuals, Christian evangelicals, gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, and handicapped people were also murdered by the Nazi scum. CNN showed it live, and Euro News came in at the end. The usual scattering of dysfunctionals jerks defied the custom and kept moving.

Ephraim Hardcastle, in Daily Mail yesterday, reported Stu Rose (M&S boss) sneering at Jeremy Paxman, the BBC TV anchor whom I normally find to be a pain in the chest, but it seems he pointed out a situation that I had noticed also. About 3 to 5 years ago I bought a whole set of Marks and Spencer’s underpants and they were superb. When they wore out, I went to replace them, about six months ago. The new ones were crap. Pax is on it for once.

James Whale did the Papers for Sky News this morning. He can be a tiny bit wild, and he can skid off the mark, occasionally. But mostly he nails it as today. When he said “…variation in climate is a natural, normal thing to happen…” joy came to my blood pump wot I have twixt my tits (to put it poetically). Absolutely, Mister Whale! Keep up the good words!

Mark White covered the subject of Brainwashing on Sky News. The ex-victim interviewed explained the power of the brainwashers as “scripture and their charisma”. The professor involved in study of the phenomenon does not desire to curb religion, but governments need to be aware. I DO desire to curb theism, and governments need to act faster against the evil excesses of so-called ‘faith’ which is actually fascism.

It is so satisfying to read good news! A silly lady pet-lover was trampled to death by Simmental cows, naturally alert and defensive with calves. Sandra Pearce had failed to dominate her useless, yapping shit-producers. Dogs look for a firm leader of the pack. They can, and ought to, be made to proceed in quiet order. They were, however, described as being “feisty and boisterous” as they ruined the peace & quiet of South Elmham Farm estate. (Daily Mail)

Brian Masters in Daily Mail yesterday gets it right about Josef Fritzl: “Such men are incapable of feeling whole, as we do when we weep at a funeral. There is a crucial element of humanity missing in them -the [need] to be part of a common ethic or set of moral principles… …disgust would be foreign to him… …private fantasy life kept for his own perverted delight.”

But he ends weakly: “It is everybody’s business to consider and ponder how he was able to perpetuate such loathsome crimes. No, Brian; it is our biz to get on with demanding a state-run system of social sanitation. Inferior stock can, and must, be identified between the age of 3 & 6. The precise system of isolating, supervising and making positive use of, these born-bad individuals might be designed by pragmatic zoologists used to handling violent animals.

Allison Pearson, Daily Mail, got snotty (no, not necessarily jealous at all) yesterday about the unfortunate and entirely blameless Miley Cyrus. The kid was fooled into agreeing to some pictures being taken. There was no strategy involved. In another context, I have personal experience of how easy it is for photographers to deceive youngsters, and mothers. Alison needs to condemn the Hollywood machine, not the victim of it. She slags both. That is not fair.

FIN 09h44

Barak Obama states his case in gentlemanly fashion in respect to the sad phenomenon of Jeremiah Wright. I would call dear old Barak ‘the Big O’ but Roy got there first. I am still trying to work ‘wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom’ in here somewhere. But Barak is a serious dude that I am getting to dig the more I mention the man. Percy Sledge on Big-L.

09h45-BST Wednesday 30 April 2008-CE

Barak Obama has, despite what critics assert, responded perfectly to the problems created by the unfortunate, obsessed, needle-stuck, hatred-filled, repetitive, yesterday’s-news, silly Jeremiah Wright.

Future-President Barak Obama does not need any time-machine to undo any mess that is bound to occur as people such as Rev (it-up) Wright open the throat throttle.

All Barak Obama needs to do is what he does already. He waits patiently for a while and then gives his response in a calm (presidential, actually) way. It may not suit 24/7 news TV commentators who like a novelty each hour but it suits the need, and it suits me…

This morning I woke at seven having gone to bed at 23 hours. It is so good when I get a perfect eight hours kip. Big-L was playing Mister Wilson Pickett (I believe) resolving that he would wait until the midnight hour. This is an honourable and civilised approach, rather than doing it (in my case, trying to do it) all day through.

‘She Is Not There’ followed. All I can think of is Shane Fenton who, I learned only recently, is really somebody else. ‘The Seventh Son’ is silly but one cannot help listening to the good bits. Then Adrian John came on with his Weather which is not going to be very nice.

I use a lot of banal, adolescent rhyme in my rubbish. This is a sure sign of literary mediocrity. Am I missing a lot of good stuff because I cannot make it rhyme? Or is that excuse an effort to hide the fact that I have nothing of worth to say? More likely, this trite tripe (alliteration is fave too) is merely the same self-infatuated ego-trip that Ug used to do in his cave rave.

Sheffield and London, 12 and 13 July, Percy Sledge concert mentioned on Big L get tickets via 0208 348 1083 the DJ said.

FIN 10h27

RCI try to enforce bilingualism. Trade-union magazine UNITE #356 reports some moderate, patriotic, Left takes on well-intentioned Tory privatisation approaches and policies which are, in practice, counter-productive, but which Gordon is still failing to reverse, or to modify creatively.

08h28-BST Wednesday 30 April 2008-CE

Today is yet another day when I personally have nothing worthwhile to say, so here goes. I am listening to RCI-1 on Hotbird. Before long it will switch to French in an effort to force me to be bi-lingual and at that moment I will say “ça suffice” and MAKE it go away by switching to another channel, or another sat. Although MY brain is barren today, OTHERS have something useful to say. For example, the trade-union magazine UNITE #356:

START OF FIRST QUOTATION

POST OFFICES are central to community life in cities and villages. Rather than close them down the [UK] Government should be looking at ways to make them sustainable.

That was the message from CWU General Secretary Billy Hayes when he spoke at UNITE’s annual conference in Blackpool…

…the amount of Government money being put into the post office [is] a ‘drop in the ocean’ compared to the bail-out for Northern Rock bank.

END OF FIRST QUOTATION

I have this copy of UNITE from Cook Lady who worked in the BT phone exchange canteen. I used to be a GPO (General Post Office) phone operator full-time but did not keep in touch. I like the point above about saving the money of investors whilst letting car-less folk struggle without a post office. From a person in Saint Albans, there is a fascinating letter that the sub-editor has headlined: DIRTY TRICKS TO SABOTAGE THE POST OFFICE.

START OF SECOND QUOTATION:

I joined the GPO in 1944 as a boy messenger and ended up, 44 years later, as Acting Head Postmaster. During most of that time, telegraphs, telephones and counters all operated at a loss, which was offset by a small profit made by posts. The GPO was a public service and everyone was relatively happy, until the Conservative Government of 1979 decreed that everything had to make a profit.

As a postmaster I was sometimes ordered to provoke my staff into going on strike to save man hours because the new budgets were based on staff hours and numbers of letters handled and it was more important to count the letters than to deliver them. I always refused.

The current fuss about post offices losing money is a smokescreen. It is simply not possible to make a profit selling stamps and paying pensions and the Post Office and the Government must know it.

Was it a deliberate plan to destroy the system? Postmen are criticised for working practices, but the real saboteurs of the Post Office over the years have been the various chairmen and members of its board.

END OF SECOND QUOTATION

FIN 09h33

Diana Henderson, Daily Echo: Back Channel bridge money snag. I say the design would put cyclists in peril (remember tramlines?) and it would warp. Stephen Bailey, Daily Echo: Prof Colin Pritchard & Tony Sayer BH Uni, conclusions in British Journal of Social Work, some bad guys are REALLY bad. We knew that. Nature Conservers dodge being proved wrong in their lifetimes. My blog will have its (extremely brief and limited) day, one day.

16h36-BST Tuesday 29 April 2008-CE

Diana Henderson in Daily Echo today reports that the housing market state makes it less likely that the plan for an unnecessary lifting bridge over the Poole Harbour Back Channel will come bear fruit. The join in the two sections is not square across the road but diagonal for arty motivations. It will be dangerous for cyclists to ride over and those of us with experience of life fully expect that the damn thing will get damaged by wind and wear.

Stephen Bailey in Daily Echo: Professor Colin Pritchard, Bournemouth Uni, and someone called Tony Sayer, publishing in the British Journal of Social Work, conclude that offenders of the ‘Ian-Huntley-type’ should have to prove they were no risk to the children before they were released. I say that there ought to be no release for his type. My experience suggests that robust counselling of low level offenders, can work but can we trust the system?

If afterlife is a real (and therefore natural) phenomenon, we might discover after meeting quite a lot of people out there in the cosmic energy field that the mythical guy in the sky was based on a real dude. He used to be a bossy so-and-so (the story might go) always cutting off everybody’s nose to spite his face. Seeding vegetable plots with thorns and thistles being one of his favourite little tricks. “Get out and hunt, you cissies” he would shout.

I notice that Green-fascists are becoming more cunning in their propaganda content. In a Nature Conservancy advertisement, they say the “experts predict that within 100 years…” (you name it). In 1970, they used to say “by the year 2000” (no gasoline, no steel, no raw materials at all, and the whole lamentation of woes to be visited upon us sinners who dare to enjoy a ride in a car, or any other product of industrial civilisation.

My blog will only have any meaning at all (and trivial at that) when I publish my final post and let it all come out. Then the boring daily blah will be just a context in the study of my case. Only happily married people (once you have carefully confirmed them as such) can be trusted at all. Single people and unhappily married people are a danger to society. This is another in the series of things I say we ought to do something about but nobody agrees.

FIN 17h33

Jon Gaunt doing Papers on Sky News with Eamonn Holmes. McCanns DID admit to Unintended Neglect very early in the case when Kate said “How COULD we have thought that would be safe?” Josef Fritzl is ENTIRELY easy to understand; there is NO puzzle: anyone (usually a lady) who looks at an old guy and automatically sees Father Christmas is cut-off from reality.

08h57-BST Tuesday 29 April 2008-CE

Jon Gaunt did the papers this morning again with Eamonn Holmes on Sky News. Jon was slagging the McCanns and calling them bad parents for leaving their kids alone in a residence. He was right. Eamonn was declining to throw the first stone. Jon was saying that he would be more understanding if Kate and mate had confessed to neglect earlier, but he was wrong. My recall is that Kate said on day three that she would never forgive herself.

The Independent front page was quoting some naive soul who said that you would never have believed that crinkly old Josef Fritzl could have done such vile things. Sorry, but this is one of the occasions when I have to defy WebSense and risk being chucked out of the library membership by saying Bullshit! Utter bullshit! Absolute bullshit! Shut the fuck up you silly twat. You are the sort that votes against capital punishment. You have no clue!

When each of us is born, we have a unique genome which incorporates all our potential. We may then receive (or fail to receive) adequate intelligent care from family and society to cherish, encourage and develop the positive, creative, constructive, healthy and vital potential, and to exclude, eliminate and inhibit the negative, destructive and pathological potential.

In my ‘Boys to Beasts’ Page on my sidebar, I make an amateur effort to help anyone who has come through puberty and adolescence in the West to see just how our mono-theist tradition fails us if we are unlucky enough to be born introverted. A secular tradition (not the present confused mess) would ensure facts of life on demand through childhood; also that when the sex urge comes, it be enabled a positive route to healthy development.

FIN 09h35

Peter Osborne, Saturday Essay, Daily Mail 26 April 2008, Margaret Thatcher versus chattering Establishment snobs, USDAW in Plymouth Guildhall opened my eyes to Union-fascism, my background.

08h40-BST Monday 28 April 2008-CE

Peter Osborne, in his Saturday Essay for Daily Mail 26 April, used a term that I have heard a lot but never used much if at all because I was never sure to whom, exactly, it applied. Here is a quotation from his piece about Margaret Thatcher:

“The chattering classes, trapped by narcissism and decadence, could hardly bear to acknowledge that she existed.”

I was faintly worried in case “chattering classes” might apply to ME albeit as a primitive and unworthy specimen. I do, after all, yap inconsequentially on this web-log. And I used to yap in Mensa SIG-zines where I was correctly identified as a quasi-religious ranter. And I so love myself. I have said many times that I wish I had been born one of two identical twins. And I expect that I am decadent in spirit, even if nothing happens in the body.

But then I realised that ‘chat’ is a TWO-way thing. My yapping is mostly a ONE-way, ruminating, masturbating, ego-tripping thing. So I will carry on using my favourite term ‘loony-Left Marxist-fascist’. Whilst I value certain portions of the fundamental socialist analysis I reject the loony and fascist solutions the self-perceived righteous ones proffer. My vote floats as years go by. This makes me perfect, politically. Psycho-sexually, I am a wreck.

To understand how much Margaret Thatcher achieved, Peter Osborne says, you need to have lived through the 1970s when both liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum accepted that UK was hopelessly in decline:

“Margaret Thatcher refused to accept this fatalism. She knew Britain has been a great country and she was determined to make us great again. She did so practically single-handed. It was not just that the Labour Party disagreed. So did the British Establishment -the Civil Service, the Foreign Office, the publishing houses and the universities all despised and ridiculed her passion and her belief…”

“The snobs who shaped fashionable opinion ridiculed a woman whom they saw as a ghastly, common, provincial upstart. They hated her with extra venom because the bedrock of her support lay with the lower middle classes -always the most despised section of British society.”

You ought to go to the Daily Mail site and find the piece by Peter Osborne on Margaret Thatcher. Whilst I was undecided back then about her exact privatisation approach (and now regret much of the results) I always praised her Argentina curb and her Unions correction. I was the single Pro-Sunday-Trading voice in an USDAW meeting of 500 in Plymouth Guildhall, mid-1960s. The platform declared their Anti declaration unanimous. I woke up.

My background can be said to be lower middle class. There was shop ownership, clerking, small-farm ownership, Scottish nobility (gangster) land-owning roots, fishing-boat ownership roots, labouring, domestic service, marriage of cousins, and progency of laird-servant probably by rape. Us lot are hated by the unskilled-working-class for allegedly claiming to be superior (we ARE superior, but it is a lie that we mention it, it just shows).

The upper class (gangsters) hate ALL the middle class as nouveau riche. They fear being exposed as the inheriting thickies that they mostly are. The upper middle class see the lower middle class as the would-be risers up the scale of income. I think the chattering classes are the people of little ability to innovate. They fear change because they are never able to cope, and those who have flexible, pragmatic, adaptive ability zoom past them.

FIN 10h26

The Times of London, WILL HODGKINSON, the electric guitar and the Rock Riff. The London Guitar Festival 2-5 May 2008 is at the Southbank Centre London SE1. The Monster Riffs Guitar Lesson is at 11h00 on Saturday 3 May 2008. Grammar-Teds harked the lark but Riffs and Delta was the untold story.

09h08-BST Sunday 27 April 2008-CE

Let me quote from The Times (of London) for Friday 25 April 2008:

START OF QUOTATIONS:

Sounds

timesonline.co.uk/music

May the riff be with you

It may be no more than a repeated series of notes, but the guitar riff is the cornerstone of rock -and WILL HODGKINSON would sell his soul for one

…The rock riff is the product of a misuse of the electric guitar. The instrument was invented as a way of making the acoustic guitar sound louder so that jazz and country players were not drowned out by their fellow band members.

But when a generation of Southern blues guitarists such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf moved to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s to perform in night clubs they frequently used small amplifiers turned up too loud, producing distortion as a result.

The only way to stop the guitar from making white noise was to play it simply, usually harmonising only two notes at a time, and the riff was born…

[The Monster-Riffs-Guitar-Lesson begins at 11h00, on Saturday 3 May 2008, as part of the London-Guitar-Festival, 2 to 5 May 2008, at the Southbank-Centre in London South-East-1.]

END OF QUOTATION

Will Hodgkinson has answered half of the Great Question that has haunted me since I first heard Frankie Lymon sing his OO-AH SONG. Everything grew from there for me: Elvis and his ‘Do Not Be Cruel’ up until the present day. It took me ages to catch up with the Delta-Chicago electric continuum because BBC did not play that stuff during the 1950s and 1960s. It was in the control of guys who had been teens and twenties in the 1930s and 1940s and they only liked Jazz and Swing.

Nor did Caroline and Big-L play Blues, at least not in the hours of darkness during which I in Plymouth could resolve a signal from the far away coast of East Anglia. The other half of the Great Question, now that I know about riffs, is uncertain but I will know it when I see it, when it occurs to me. Oh, I know: Why were the school songs I sang 1945 to 1957 watery soup, and yet, using the same physics, Blues, Rock and some Pop is something else?

The teachers in Music period, Pragnell then Porter, at Nunthorpe in York, gave us “hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings, and Phoebus ’gins a rise, his steeds to water at those springs on chaliced flowers that lies” or something, but not until today have I got the need-to-know griff. So I thank thee, Guru Hodgkinson, mate -sensational!

FIN 10h13

Jeff Goodell, Larry Brilliant, Rolling Stone #1050, Google give-away, Jerry Garcia, San Francisco v Los Angeles, Siliconia v Fernandia, human “saving” of System Sol from Galactic Warming is a not-so-brill wheeze that is not going to happen, and that giant sycamore weed goes green again as the night closes in…

07h47-BST Sunday 27 April 2008-CE

Jeff Goodell writes about Larry Brilliant in Rolling Stone #1050:

“Larry Brilliant, the man anointed by Google to give away hundred’s of millions of dollars of the company’s money in the next few years, admits that he’s a deeply flawed human being…

“…he is not talking just about his late-1990s turn as the head of a couple of Silicon Valley companies that vaporised $100 million or so. And he’s not talking just about his failure, which he knows is not his alone, to keep his friend Jerry Garcia from killing himself with drugs and excess.

“He’s talking about deeper things, like the mismatch between doing what he WANTS to do for the world and what he CAN do for the world. He is talking about our tendency as human beings to be distracted by money, glamour, sex and personal glory.”

Thank you, Jeff. I did not know that. I would LOVE to have been sufficiently talented to have made money, manifested glamour, experienced a little more sex than that six-month affair in 1963-1964, and discovered what personal glory was; it sounds odd. But listen, all ye that seek, cop a copy of RS#1050, chum, and pull a thrill through your eyes, and into your brain to tingle your skull, by learning of yet another crazy-cool American.

San Francisco is supposed to be the intelligent place, whilst Los Angeles gets on with it and ignores the squeaks from higher up the map, I know, but I must pause from my Fernando Valley fantasies, and pay mind to the Silicon one, as Jeff lets it out that Fortune magazine did a din-dins “at a swanky restaurant at the foot of Mission Street” for high-flyers aged 30-50 “who had spent their lives surfing the ever-cresting wave of progress in the Valley”.

Jeff Goodell doth tell that the purpose of the dinner, “according to one insider” was to “create a high-level salon to give people a chance to share thoughts on what’s happening in the tumultuously changing technology and internet business.” I have never used the word ‘salon’ but I have just looked it up in the Oxford Concise and I was right: I aint gonna need it. I do not receive people, design ridiculous togs, cut hair, or show pictures.

Sadly, Larry ‘Doctor-Optimist’ Brilliant is one of those goo-goos who claim that human activities cause the natural phenomenon of climate variation on Earth (which is a direct product of our star Sol, in its fluctuating according to galactic clouds falling by) and that human activity (especially if it goes along with loony-Left, Green-fascist, quasi-religious ranting and beating of breasts with rope-soled sandals) can “save it from global warming”.

Aside from that, the man is brill, and the piece by Jeff is brill too.

Riding the bus or the bicycle in the last few weeks and days, I have been watching the usual springing and flourishing of the vegetation out of cold sleep into giving it one more bash just in case it stays warm this time. The sycamore type of giant weed at our back is the sort that is always the last to shove its leaves out. Here they come at last. Another week and the great galooting thing will block out the sky.

Here comes the electric storm (08h57).

FIN 09h05

E-mail and blog on the same domain. “HELP is no help ‘cos I’m a fool…” (sung to the tune of the similar song by Norman Wisdom).

I went via HELP into ‘email and blog on the same domain’:

It used terms like ‘map’ ‘Domain’ ‘DNS’ ‘MX’ ‘top level’ ’sublevel’ and others the meaning of which I know not, so it was useless to me.

In another sad story: I want to be able to make a web address go blue inside the text of a post (by wiping over it with the little thingy) and then click a single button to make it go onto to blogroll. The geek gentleman most kindly explained, in terms with which I was unfamiliar, how to do it. This was no good to me. This was ages ago. I have found my level. There is no point in trying to learn more.

Cy, live at the library.

Brian Hiatt, Mick Jagger, Rolling Stone magazine #1050, Shine A Light movie, The Times, promotional supplement on Hull, WW2 blitz, young Brits today will prove equally unswayable, for we unlike sheep are not going astray mate, Sky-TV remaking Blake’s Seven with no winking lights I hope, The Charlie Green Moment on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ had me doing Restart! I never use the term ‘pants’ because it is… whatever it itself means.

08h38-BST Saturday 26 April 2008-CE

Brian Hiatt interviewed Mick Jagger in Rolling Stone magazine #1050 about the Shine A Light movie, which I have decided not to see because of the close-ups, as mentioned in a previous post. Magger said of the lingering shots: “It was a little bit too much, I felt… …I didn’t care for it too much. Boring…” Maybe a new cut can be made in some future re-release. I love this bit from the Mag in the interview:

“…The thing about rock & roll is that it is expected to be real, sincere and heartfelt, or something -it’s not supposed to be manufactured. Pop music is allowed to be silly and saccharine, and nobody minds as long as they like the tune…” The Stones, Mick Jagger said, are not stuck in classic-rock mode. They have lots of other facets. I hope RSM gets to be loved by young Brits of the current generation. It has everything. Go to rollingstone.com

The Times had a promotional supplement on the city of Hull, once called Kingston-Upon-Hull (in full) which is slightly dull. Certain gentlemen, who think the Brits of today will cave-in and start head-banging (in any sense other than on the dance-floor, to a Heavy Metal beat) need to learn about the recent War in which I was born. This is a relevant clip by Jayne Dowle:

“It has been a long struggle for this historic port on the Humber. During the Second World War, Hull was bombed more than any city outside London with 95 per cent of homes being damaged…”

I am glad to see Sky-TV remaking Blake’s Seven (an SF serial on BBC TV from 1978 to 1981 written by Terry Nation). I watched it for the excellent character conception & execution. Sadly, some out-of-touch Beeb-bod in Properties RUINED IT by representing computers with plastic junk and flashing lights when jets, ICBMs, and the Apollo Moon Program had already hidden away micro-electronic parts in smaller and smaller plain boxes. Go to: timesonline.co.uk/tvand radio

I hate the Opportunity Knocks type shows because of the mockery element. But surfing along yester-night I cleanly caught Charlie Green being ushered on stage and performing. I have no clue whether this show was live, a first, second, third, fourth, or millionth repeat, or what. To ME it was a brand new surprise and utter delight. THAT is the stuff any sane person would want to see in ‘Britain’s Got Talent’: a superbly talented star ZAP out of nowhere!

I have long disliked the term ‘pants’ to describe something of which the arty left-wing disapproved. I saw it as something David Letterman had invented. But on CNN this morning, in the Truth-o-meter feature with Bill Adair on the Jonathan Mann show, all become clear. It is an abbreviation of “pants on fire” so it means simply: an obfuscation, moronic mal-perception, or untruth. It is a useful enough slang term. But it is far too late for me to start liking it now.

FIN 10h24

The shining compassion of Doctor Alison Cronin, director of Monkey World, is recognised by an award from the self-styled ‘supreme master’ Ching Hai. Is Sky 887, the Supreme Master Channel, mostly-harmless? If so, is the harmful-part bad, really bad, or as bad as all the others?

06h34-BST Saturday 26 April 2008-CE

Doctor Alison Cronin, director of Monkey World between Swanage and Weymouth, received a relatively modest but useful donation of money, along with a dust-catching, but no doubt sincerely-intentioned, thing to put on the mantelpiece. It is called the “Shining World Compassionate Award” from a lady who encourages people to call her “Supreme Master Ching Hai”. This was reported in Daily Echo yesterday by Jim Durkin,

I had no knowledge of this theist and vegetarian organisation entitled the “Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association” before I read the Daily Echo piece. But, as pure chance would have it, I decided yester-eve to check one-by-one through my Sky free-to-air TV channels and was bemused but entertained to find # 887 the ‘Supreme Master Channel’. It seems to be one of those Formosan deals. You can go to: suprememastertv.com

Any regular reader of this web log will be aware that I am not a theist, and that I regularly slag theists off. But on the surface, if we are to judge by the output on Sky 887, SMC TV might possibly be “mostly harmless” in the phrase of Douglas Adams. Caution: pacifists thought that the house-painter Adolph Hitler, who called himself ‘the leader’ and demanded, then received, slavish obedience, was harm-free. They were wrong. He meant what he said.

The periodic SMC station identification (ID) stated that the channel puts out on various other satellites around the geostationary orbit (that the late Arthur C Clarke put in the Suggestion Box of mindkind when I was a war baby) and covers Earth completely. I ignore theist and sales channels and had probably flipped by SMC earlier but I kept it on my screen-2 for the hour. I had TNG (on Virgin 1) on my screen-1. CFN was on my screen-3. npr (sic) was on my screen-4.

What I like about SMC is the technique for addressing (by prepared lectures) people who speak any of-up-to-20 languages: the spoken word is heard and a translation appears on screen cut into phrases, and these are shown in four vertical, and sixteen horizontal, lines of text. The sequence is fast, not for the slow reader, but I found it possible to follow. Far from being only fairy-folksy idealism of the hippie, the sentiments expressed are focussed-on-reality and convincing.

What is excellent, and appeals specifically to me (so much so that I have a déjà vue like conviction that I thought of it myself, ages ago), is the way she, her nibs, the self-perceived supreme boss, congratulates governments and organisations on their doing the right, humane, decent thing. This is an excellent public-relations tool. What I have not yet sussed 100% is whether this evidently ecumenical show-gang is basically Buddhist.

FIN 08h11

Cell (aka mobile) phone conversations out loud in public. Tory Minister found himself to be against the trend. ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is by Clay Shirky (not Hal Chalky as I at first remembered wrongly; but that sounds like a DJ). Jimmy Witherspoon. Television did not put mirror-makers out of business. Sitting on the loo is boring so we all look forward to the invention of teleport (it would have to be really accurate).

08h37-BST Friday 25 April 2008-CE

Noise in public places makes it difficult to hear the person you are calling on your cell phone and you assume he or she cannot hear you either. Before I got one, I spoke by landline to a ministerial assistant at the Commons soon after a Tory Minister had slagged people off for yakking on their brick sized phones in restaurants. He wanted them banned. The young man agreed with me when I said that cell phones were a great boon to business.

I was in a supermarket one time and after paying at the checkout I phoned Cook Lady to say I was five minutes away. My side of the chat went: “Hi! Sounds like you got a party going on. It is just the TV. I am at xxx. Shall I come round?” I overheard a guy at the checkout talking to the generality going “That would be a problem…” I was just popping in for a cup of tea. He no doubt assumed that I was trying to arrange something more serious.

In his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’, Clay Shirky remarks upon the way people do not seem to mind that they can be overheard as they converse intimately in the bus, on the street, on the cell phone, on social network sites, and on web logs, with their circle of contacts. Clay Shirky points out firmly that (paraphrasing the Jimmy Witherspoon blues number) “It is not the business of anybody else if they do.”

Ever since the mirror was invented, people have no doubt been musing over the frustration that one’s image is reversed left-to-right as one looks in the mirror. However, since the invention of the television camera and screen, one can see an accurate view of what one looks like giving the finger to the camera. My bathroom has a big mirror (the installation of a previous tenant) so that one sees oneself sitting on the loo, even more boring than TV ads.

FIN 10h08

Modernist C of E vicars give comfort to the flock despite internal doubts. Is it morally justified to ease the despair of feeble-minded folk at the bleakness of life, by selling them a space-age, fake-science faith about an afterlife of virtual-reality that is a natural phenomenon, allegedly revealed by particle physics? Theist delusions are mostly negative but Natural Afterlife could be blissful and believable delusion.

06h03-BST Wednesday 23 April 2008-CE

Moderate people (if any) of the millions of faiths and sects throughout human history, might be expected to allow that a faith cannot possibly be 100% accurate in its answers to questions such as “What is life all about?” New knowledge brings updates. Should there be an afterlife, mods would be justified and feel relieved at finding that, actually, none of their beliefs held up. (The extremists might simply deny that any of this was happening.)

Modern-day moderates of the Church of England sound weak and waffley when they speak of a “search for God” rather than preaching line and verse certainties. My evangelical but mild father used the common Victorian term ‘modernists’ to describe those who had incorporated Newton and Darwin into their faith. I have nothing but admiration for the modernist vicar giving comfort to the old folk despite his internal doubts.

Given that there are extreme theists with precise, definite, extreme beliefs, and given that they persist in forcing the beliefs on any that come within their power, the secular and moderate worlds might think it to be a good idea to co-operate in the manufacture of a new faith that would “do no harm but an awful lot of good” (in the words of Philip Birch at the demise of Big-L in 1967). That is what Scientific Spiritualism is about. It is not true. So what?

It is based on fantasies by particle physicists, well known, along with astro-physicists, for their capering and jaunting with fake science. So what? The point is that such guff is less dangerous than the tradition garbage about a guy in the sky whom humans are supposed to have offended. SkyGuy may be a hyper-genius, making the atom appear out of nothing and then multiplying it to make a cosmos, but he is only human. He has his pride.

For the over-reaching desire to know the difference between good and evil (that is: make out own choices) we must now suffer, shriek the theist fools. But, they simper, given SkyGuy’s smoochy-poo, lovey-dovey kindness we can escape of deserved eternal torture by loyally attending a place-of-bullshit every rest day, shoving the old spare change in the collection plate, feeling guilty, and believing the most ridiculous, specific, finicky dogma that the mind of moron can spawn.

Smoochy-poo, lovey-dovey kindness? Er, yeah, I mean, the thorns, thistles, predation, mortality, and painful childbirth were FOR OUR OWN GOOD! Have a sense of humour…

I say unto thee: start thine own Natural Afterlife sect (no deity needed, consciousness floats off on the cosmic energy field as a natural phenomenon at the death of the bod) and liberate the sad theist-dominated folk from fear. Death declared stingless after all! Head on out into space! See my sidebar for the page on afterlife.

FIN 19h16

Dick Hines, Saxon Square, RREEF Alternative Investments, sweeping away street clutter that only ivory-towered architects and design-specialists ever loved but we street-users hated. Clay Shirky in ‘Here Comes Everybody’ defines to whom the future belongs. Another suggestion-box item for geeks. Keeping the faith and changing the Church is not a trustworthy approach to perennial priestly atrocity. If only my friend and one-time mentor K would tell his story!

06h32-BST Thursday 24 April 2008-CE

Dick Hines of CDA, something to do with architects, had something to say about Saxon Square pedestrian shopping area in Christchurch. He claims that the projecting, tiled canopies were popular 30 years ago. In fact, they might have been popular with arty architects, dedicated to following the latest fashion, but so what? Perhaps the scheme got past the planning office given the quainty quality of the rain-protecting, potty projections. He goes:

“Today, these have the effect of making the mall feel very dark and narrow.” Dates, and feelings, have nothing to do with the issue, Richard, mate. The mall passages ARE dark. The solid canopies ARE to blame. It has been like that since the place was BUILT. The effect was predictable at the time to any person who was not an arty freako. In a narrow passageway between shops, solid canopies would block the light depressingly. Nobody liked it.

Glass rain canopies are to replace the previous olde-worlde ones. Another intention of the new owner, RREEF Alternative Investments, is to “clear ground level clutter” (GLC). Well come on down the Huddersfield Choral Society & give us a rousing rending of that old Happy-New-Year Chorus! NOW they get it! Arty designers called it ‘humanising art & shrubbery’. We users have always called it ‘great loads of crap’ (GLC) stuck in the f way.

Clay Shirky (I have finished reading his splendid ‘Here Comes Everybody’) says “The future belongs to those who take today for granted” (those who do not fight it but rather accept it and run with it, usually the young). He gives us www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12344564 to go to for the story of how the old phone company fought against text and image. If it had won, we could have no cell/mobile system as we now know it.

I wish the geek laddies (& few ladies) would write a gimmick whereby each specific address for a web-site (or part thereof like the npr one above) would have a parallel (unique) identification IN NUMBERS ONLY to choose to use if it was easier. Both full address & the briefer ID# (in groups of four please) could be quoted. If only ID#, the system would refer to its register of addresses, then submit the long one, filled with slashes and abbreviations.

Clay relates many fascinating examples of how social sites enabled people to fight injustices and abuses. One reaction, to the revelation (to some) that some priests of the Church of Rome fondled and/or sodomised underage choirboys, was “KEEP THE FAITH; CHANGE THE CHURCH”. How clever and politically righteous! But I say: given that these C of R salesmen betray Yehoshua’s peace message, it is not worth saving. Dump it.

The murderer Saul of Tarsus was forgiven when he became Paul the Roving Salesman of the Christian Salvation Package Deal. My friend and one-time mentor who failed to take power to rule a nation where vile criminals got their deserts, and citizens were safe, has nothing to be forgiven for. I hoped to name him and tell his story but I cannot because he forbids it. “Power corrupts only the corruptible” was his defence when I raised the issue of control of our own people and ourselves when we, actually he, attained power.

FIN 08h10

Adrian John on Big-L, listener Haley, break in transmission, maintain your tranny. Execrable quality of writing in this web log.

08h20-BST Thursday 24 April 2008-CE

I only caught little bits of Adrian John on Big-L this morning, from 05h50. He was reading a communication from Haley who never heard Radio London Big-L before and she said some things like:

“I only just discovered Big-L.”
“I did not know it was there.”
“It is like finding a little treasure.”
“There is something a little different about it.”
“It is like listening to the pirates that my Dad used to tell me about.”

After I heard CBC News on CFN and a feature on npr, I dropped back at 06h20 into where Big-L audio should be, but all was silent for a minute. Then the ID popped up and Adrian John pretended to pretend that the break in XM was out fault: we ought to fix our radio receivers. An amusing little device Mister John! His remark later about enjoying his cappuccino made me think he must have been off the desk and at the kettle.

I fantasise about editing this web