At its core, our street still harbours an old-style community neighbourhood. This is the first place Michele and I have lived where we know and communicate with many of our neighbours and it’s a good thing.

The “Mayor” of our street was indisputably Mrs J; a formidable 83 year old lady, with a burgundy coloured perm, and the energy of three five year olds, who lived over the road. Every morning as we left for work she would be catching up on the last 24 hours worth of gossip with the school crossing guard and her friend at the top of the hill. We’ve recently discovered that she attended this appointment only after being up and active for several hours and having completed her rigorous housework schedule. Michele also discovered that the trash can fairy who returned our bins to the ally after the trash men had called was…Mrs J. Evidently she and her late husband lived in the area their whole lives, and in our street for the majority of that time.

One morning last week we were disturbed to find that the other two members of Mrs J’s dawn posse had abandoned their post at the top of the hill and were outside her house looking concerned; Mrs J hadn’t arrived that morning. It turns out that she was in hospital at the time. She died later that day.

We were both amazed and saddened by this – during our entire time at this house (all nine-months of it) Mrs J had been a fixture. I imagined she would always be around, long after Michele and I died. And then, with no warning, she’s gone. In the UK, one of us would probably have attended the funeral. Over here, one of us would probably attend the “viewing”.

It’s still not clear whether the “viewing” is an American thing, a Philadelphia thing or a Catholic thing, but I’ve never heard of it before. As luck would have it, Michele couldn’t attend and so I represented the house. If you’ve never heard of a “viewing” then it’s probably simpler to explain it by describing what went on at this particular instance.

Tim kindly offered to drive me to there, and then to work, as he was passing King Of Bollocks on the way to his job. Another neighbour, Mary, came with us. It took place at a funeral home up the road and the events were as follows:

1. We enter the home and are ushered into a room full of photos of the deceased and her family dating from 1923 to 2009.
2. After examining the photos we sign a guest-book which simply involves writing your name and address.
3. We then move to the next room, where a line of teary relatives of the deceased await our presence.
4. We follow the other mourners along the line, shake hands, and tell the relatives how sorry we are that the deceased is…well…deceased. I was completely out of my depth at this point, but luckily Mary did a sterling job of explaining who we were (neighbours) and how we knew Mrs J (we were neighbours).
5. Then, the main attraction: “viewing” the body of the deceased. This is just plain freaky to me. There she was! Lying in a coffin. She looked like she was going to wake up at any minute! The lighting and decor around the coffin are brilliantly designed to make the body look as normal and healthy as possible.
6. Then we leave. The whole process takes a maximum of ten minutes and on the way out we pick up a little collector card with a mellow picture of waterfalls on one side, and the deceased’s name on the other, and a prayer/poem sort of thing. I don’t know what happens if you collect the set – perhaps it’s like PG tips cards and you get sent a book to stick them in.

To me this was a very weird experience – macabre even. But it really is the norm over here and people take it as such. If you want to pay your respects to someone who has died, this is how you do it.

We’re both still slightly in denial that she really has died. The community structure of our street has lost a keystone.

We’ve both been under the weather since we came back to the fatherland and so this week we’ve been curled up at home for the majority of the time. By Friday we were well enough to venture out into the city after work, and so we took Kevin up on his suggestion of going to our favourite fish restaurant. Michele had never been there before, and I was sure she’d love it. From the outside it looks like a fish market and most people, including those who live in South Philly, have no idea that it’s a fully fledged restaurant, consequently we managed to get a table with no reservation and no notice. The menu is unashamedly targeted at fish lovers; there are absolutely no concessions for vegetarians or fish-o-phobes. As usual the food was phenomenal! Michele and I both had the platter with scallops, shrimp [king prawns], garlic mash, flounder with crab meat, fresh broccoli, carrots and garlic mash. Kev opted for scampi pasta [Brits – this is not the scampi you know – see Wikipedia on scampi] and we all shared a starter of fried oysters.
On the way back to Kevin’s we made the compulsory visit to the Mexican bakery, because both Kevin and Michele love their pastries. They really do. In fact, it’s astonishing how much they love that stuff. It’s also not fair that I’m the fatty and I don’t even eat that shit, even though it looks and smells like manna from heaven. Custard croissants….mmmmm…

Anyway, continuing our extravagant weekend of consumerism, we spent Saturday schlepping over to one of the endless, soulless, consumer paradise cum car-parks around here to do some essential shopping.

Despite Michele’s best efforts to break the house into tiny pieces, so far the casualties total a few window frames, a dishwasher (which we replaced using our home insurance), a microwave (which we are about to replace with tuppence ha’penny as that’s all they cost nowadays) and a gas-powered clothes dryer (which isn’t covered by our poxy insurance.)

We lived together happily for 14 years in the UK without a dryer or a dishwasher, but we have become so used to them now that the absence of either one seems catastrophic; this is how capitalism works.

By the holy cock of Christ, I’ve just realised that I’m writing a blog about buying a cheap Bosch hammer drill and a clothes dryer. The drill was cheap, and the dryer we got on interest free credit. That’s it. That’s as exciting as it gets. Is this the world’s most bollocks blog post ? I’m sorry. Really. What’s happening to me ? There is possibly nothing more uninteresting in the world than a clothes dryer…well apart from a hoover I suppose, so why the bloody hell would anyone consider blogging about buying one ? Jesus, this is madness. Sorry again.

Over the past few centuries the word “pirate” has been used in a very similar way to “terrorist.” You can apply either to “the enemy” and win instant support from the masses.

People who speak out against the the status quo have been labelled “terrorists” for hundreds of years, even if the most terrible thing they ever did was to suggest that the rich should give more money to the poor. Likewise, “piracy” has been applied to everything from armed robbery, to kids recording copies of “Manic Miner” on cassette tapes after school.

Perhaps the most beautiful abuse of both words can be illustrated by this 2005 poster, about which I have previously blogged. In a nutshell, if you copy a DVD, you are not only a pirate, but a terrorist. Brilliant.

So the recent tales of invincible “pirates from Somalia” have confused me. How can this happen in the 21st century ? I’m sure we’ve all made jokes about them having one leg, a bunch of parrots, and making the victims walk the plank, but perhaps that’s significant; we have no idea what pirates are, or even were. “Pirate”, like “Terrorist”, is a word that is more emotive than descriptive. So what is actually going on ?
Here’s an article that may muddy the waters even further, but it’s thought provoking if nothing else.

Some quick thingies:

• The Top 500 Worst Passwords – if your password is in this list, change it, then slap yourself about the head with a brick.
• The inevitable rooting of the G1 with RC30 – there was never any need for panic because xda-developers are powered by win.
• Charlie B’s Screenwipe Review of the Year – is right good.
• Religulous – Atheists needn’t bother. Agnostics, lapsed catholics, and the confused, need only to watch the last five minutes, but they need to watch it over and over again. Religious people just need to see the film once because if it didn’t make a difference the first time then they’re clearly unable to process simple logic and are doomed to a life of slavery.

Back to work tomorrow…oh bollocks…

Now that we live in the future, a week can be compressed into less than a minute. Consequently, our eight day trip to London lasted around 85 seconds from start to finish. The memories are still intact but feel more like a dream than anything real. Oddly, while we were in London we felt similarly about the life we left behind in Philadelphia; it surely can’t have been real. Quotidian events, like taking a bus along Lee High Road, emphasised how real and normal that life was compared to the obviously ethereal dream of a life on a different continent. Now we’re back in our home, with our birds and our own settings on the thermostat. In a typical autistic male style, here is a list of some of the things we did while we were home/away:

• Got ill. We both managed to have at least two days of snotty, hurty, coughy misery while we were there. Of course, we’re still ill now, but it’s just that tedious phase of permanent dreariness that lingers on for months after the main viral assault has been impeded. On the upside it’s quite a nice feeling to know we’ve smuggled in some foreign cold germs into America without getting caught by Customs or DHS.
• Christmas day and Boxing day! Too much food, too much drink, and an excess of quality telly! The Christmas Radio Times still gives me goose bumps when I get to the pages that eschew the day and date in favour of the magical titles “Christmas Eve”, “Christmas Day” and “Boxing Day”. It’s like normal life and time are suspended for a while, and instead you are encouraged to veg out in front of the TV watching christmas specials and old comedy films. BTW Brits: stop banging on about how crap the telly is these days. Alright, you have some tremendously banal shit available to you these days, but it’s still orders of magnitude better than what our American shit-pump has to offer.
• Lying in a bath listening to Radio 4. Sublime.
• Curry! Oh god we had a couple of arse-kicking curries while we were over there. Literally. In fact we spent our last night at home with my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend, eating a superb take-away and watching a tribute to Humphrey Lyttleton…could it have been any better ?
• Seeing friends. Actually we didn’t do nearly enough of this. But it’s indescribably enjoyable to meet up with people you really, really miss, and talk bollocks with them. The sad part is that on a short trip you end up spending all your time catching-up and never get a chance to chat the way you would if you lived back there. I miss the everyday after-work chats over a pint or two…
• Pubs! Ever tried “Oyster Stout” ? It is the perfect lubricant for social interaction in a warm, welcoming, boozer.
• Bletchley Park: Mecca for geeks. There were 15 of us, plus two children, and it was fucking ace. I can’t describe how excellent it was to see everyone again.
• Air travel via Terminal 5. Call it modernism if you will, I call it being too tight to buy plasterboard/dry-wall. 50 years ago I can imagine it being thrilling to see the inside of a lift as it goes up and down, but nowadays it just looks like they couldn’t be bothered to finish it properly. And the architects really need to be reminded that their artwork also needs to function as something beyond a big glass shed. It feels like a month before completion, one of the junior architects ran into the office in a panic shouting “Oh no! Where are we going to put all the aeroplanes ?” and was answered by the senior architect with “Oh yes, how tiresome. Couldn’t we stick them on the back somewhere, out of the way ?”
  How can anyone design a brand new air terminal, the purpose of which is to connect passengers with planes, so badly that it still depends on buses and trains to get the passengers from the departure lounge to the actual bit of airfield where the planes are ? It’s almost as if the architects have their heads stuck so far up their arses that they don’t know what the fuck they’re supposed to be doing.

Nice to be home though.

Our little Humph used to really relax herself whenever we played Air. It would appear that “wor Leo” reacts in the same way. I wish he and Humph could have met – they would have loved each other.

We’ve had a week or so of Christmassyness and it’s feeling good! And that doesn’t even include the excitement we both feel about going back to London in two days time! How did that happen ?

Last Friday was our staff “do” [Americans: “do” means a party sort of thing] and it was most amusing. We went to a huge bowling place at 11am, that had a working bar. Nuff said. A couple of hours later we went to a bonkers Italian Family Theme Restaurant and got arseholed whilst talking bollocks and eating some vaguely Italian food. That’s a good day, especially when the company picked up the tab. So much better than my experience last year when I worked for Shiti.

We’re both really excited about coming back to London, but Michele may be even more excited than I: she hasn’t been back for over a year.

Arses – there were loads of things of axis-shifting proportions that I wanted to rant about. Be thankful for my crap memory.

For many, many years I have harboured a deep grudge against printers. Apart from the old text-only models, that were astonishingly expensive and astonishingly reliable, all printers are shit and exist solely to make the world a worse place. Evidence as follows:

1. They are scabs. Printing is a very skilled job and very esoteric. Some of the greatest minds of human existence have been printers (e.g. Ben Franklin, Gutenberg, the Wright Brothers etc). When you need something put to paper for anything other than a few quick notes, go to a proper printer! It’ll be far cheaper in the long run than buying some $30 nightmare from Best Buy.
2. They don’t work. No-one, to my knowledge, has calculated the total cost printers create to the economy, but I suspect that the current economic “crisis” could well be down to wasted hours in every office in the world caused daily by printers not doing the only job they were created to do: printing shit out.
3. They’re almost never needed. 99.9% of the world’s printers aren’t needed. If you want to print photos, go to a printer’s shop. If you want to print out your emails, you should be arrested.
4. They’re way too cheap. Everyone buys one and then calls me when the fucking thing breaks.
5. They are a rip off. Oh, they’re so cheap to buy – what a bargain. When you run out of ink next time, work out how much it would cost to get a new printer compared to replacing the cartridge; bearing in mind the printer comes with a cartridge. The mechanics are so cheap and crap that they will break within a year.
6. They are so annoying! You ask them to do their job and they sit there beeping at you to press their buttons for no reason and then they jam up.

Alright, enough. But it was a life affirming experience when I watched Office Space for the first time and realised I wasn’t alone in my hatred of these ridiculous devices.

If Bernard Madoff had been British, and had prospered in the UK, don’t you think the papers over there would have made far more use of puns ? I mean the guy’s name is pronounced “Made Off” – it’s a headline writer’s dream. But so far I haven’t seen a single paper taking advantage of it. Maybe they all think it’s too obvious. Well that never stopped The Sun. Perhaps they all think it’s too serious to joke about. Well that never stopped The Sun.
Regardless, I’m in awe of this guy. He made an absolute fortune by ripping off not just the ultra-rich, but the most grasping, greedy, odious, ultra-rich, snobs he could find. He even had selective entrance requirements to weed out the people with too little public-image or [I’d love to believe] not enough to lose. Either way, the guy was very clever and could easily have ducked out earlier, taking all of the money and disappearing…but he chose not to. You can’t put this down to plain greed, because we’re talking about billions of dollars. It can only have been boredom or guilt. Perhaps the guilt he felt actually turned him on all of these years, in some sort of S and M way. Perhaps when he confessed, he finally managed to come.
Either way Bernard, I salute you.
Nicola Horlick sounded almost rabid when she criticised the American Government for failing to regulate his egregious liberties. Communist bitch.

Recipe for a shit day

1. Live in a country full of people who think that redistribution of wealth is an evil idea at the same time that they avoid doctors visits because they don’t have healthcare.
2. Make sure the sky is “England Grey” and that there’s a perpetual drizzle all day.
3. Get out of your comfy bed, unsnuggle your comfy wife and deal with going to work.
4. Ensure you have to drive along I76, because then you can watch some of the most appalling drivers try to understand why they have just crashed and are having to stand in the rain.
5. Listen to the radio on the drive. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to the pathetic, sponsor ridden, parochial NPR, or a “breakfast” programme with pedestrian crap music and a couple of jocular cunts trying to break boundaries in the most humourless, unimaginative way possible; either way it will help you get depressed.
6. Ensure you have a career in software development, are working in a cube, and have written some code that seemingly does nothing but crash in creative ways.
7. Get your wife to convince you the house is full of CO. You can then spend most of the morning attributing your tiredness and general feelings of malaise to the CO poisoning…until your wife calls back to tell you the fire department have been and found that everything’s ok.
8. Work in a business park district that has no street lights, no pavements, and no drainage, so that walking to the bus stop in the rain involves getting soaked, covered in mud, and nearly killed three or four times.
9. Ensure the bus also travels on I76 so that you can enjoy the rocky facade of the hillside as you nudge past it at 4mph.
10. Get home at 7:30pm, eat, watch a bit of “The Da Vinci Code”, realise it’s shit and then realise it’s bed time.

Actually, now that I’m sitting in our warm house, laptop on my lap, parrot on my shoulder, glass of red wine in my hand, and crab spag-bol in my belly…it all seems pretty good again.

Weird shit is afoot.

The Democrats are trying to bail-out the rich whilst closing libraries, swimming pools, and fire stations. At the same time the Republicans are trying to stop them. Someone has swapped their manuals.

Meanwhile, at the top level, the “new hope” is being accused of not being eligible for presidency by a bunch of die-hard wingnuts with loads of money instead of brains.

And on the ground, Citi have started to fire the wrong people; rather than go for the outrageously expensive decision avoiders that got them into this balls-up in the first place, they’ve started picking off the people on the low rungs who actually do some work.

I can only hope that all who were involved in the decision to cover Citigroup’s arse with $300bn will die in a fire.

Anyone who works for a company that has gone out of business recently would be well advised to tool-up, break back in, and turn on the machines. Make the shit you were making before, but keep the money. It’s patriotic.

[P.S. The only station we can find over here reporting the Greek riots is the BBC.]