It’s very comforting to discover that a serious social disability, such as hating all types of sporting activity with an almost psychotic passion, affects others too. So I’d like to thank Charlie Brooker for supporting the cause. I’d also like to echo his sagely words:
In summary, then: bollocks to sport and bollocks to everyone who likes it. Forever and ever. Amen.
So mote it be brother.
Ken won – no suprises there, but check the rest. The BNP got more than the Greens.
Ken Livingstone (Lab) 685,541
Steve Norris (Con) 542,423
Simon Hughes (LD) 284,645
Frank Maloney (UKIP) 115,665
Lindsey German (Respect) 67,731
Julian Leppert (BNP) 58,405
Darren Johnson (Green) 57,331
Ram Gidoomal (CPA) 41,696
Lorna Reid (IWCA) 9,542
Tammy Nagalingham (IND) 6,692
60,000 Londers voted BNP! Christ on a bike.. That’s almost double the vote they got in 2000.
I wonder if the proliferation of st george crosses everywhere you look these days has had an effect? Before anyone starts banging on about political correctness gone mad and how the English need to regain pride in their country and get their identity back, can I just point out that this is
and you really should just use your bloody head and belt up. The rabid, foam-mouthed ‘patriots’, or ‘nationalists’ as I prefer to call them, really don’t need to be encouraged and commended for blindly worshipping a symbol on a flag. We expect Germany and Japan to regret their history and learn from it, but when anyone suggests that we still haven’t learned from our imperialist history they get accused of thoughtless political correctness. Pundits, politicians and celebrities fight to be the first ones to publically defend flag waving. Even that ponce Morrissey has started wrapping his aging, worthless flab in the st george cross. No excuse. If you fly a flag, you are claiming to support what it stands for not what it is. What does the st george cross stand for exactly ?
I don’t even mind the American obsession with their flag so much, because at least it stands for something…it’s just a pity that most of the most vehement wavers of “old glory” clearly haven’t read, or just don’t understand the constitution.
Fans of George Orwell may like to read this article which describes the treatment a British journalist received on entering the US. The “Department of Homeland Security”, or the “Total Information Awarenes Project” as it was previously known, now treats foreign journalists, even from friendly countries, as a serious threat to security. Travel on the wrong visa, and you get to spend some time in the Ministry of Love. My favourite part of the article is the last paragraph:
I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. “No doubt,” he snorted. “And anything you’ll write won’t be the truth.”
Ribena are running a competition to win a donkey. I LOVE donkeys, but hate Ribena, so if anyone out there doesn’t mind the stuff, you wouldn’t win me a donkey would you ?
Well at least that warmongering simpleton Reagan is dead. Only a matter of hours (I hope) until the iron lady pisses herself to death too.
All of the recent eulogies about the moron describe someone that I don’t know. Even Gorbachev sung that twat’s praises. What ? He was a pillock! I only hope that Gorbachev was taking the piss….Reagan did indeed bring about the end of cold war. But only because he nearly brought about the end of the world as we know it. We should really be thanking Gorbachev for talking him into disarmament….that was never the idea of a cowboy after all…
Elections coming up in the UK. I’m still trying to find my cards. I’m buggered if I’m going to let our thieving bastard landlady get her dirty mits on them.
Tony Blair was nice enough to be interviewed on R4 today…on a train…on his way to somewhere more important. He was kind enough to remind me of how much I hate him and his duplicity. If only he and Jack “Two Faced Nazi” Straw could be killed in a car accident together. So many worthy lives would have been saved.
Work: shit
Life: OK
Telly: Good.
Apart from the spectacularly enjoyable goings-on on BB5, tonight there was a programme about the middle-class people who gave up their well paid jobs to become plumbers. How enjoyable to watch these morons realise what true labour is all about, by literally getting covered in turds. All the more room in the city for me I spose 🙂
Apologies for the poncyness of the previous blog.
From now on I will extend my limit on EUI (e-mailing under the influence) to include blogging and domain name registration.
Interesting argument on R4 this morning about ADHD and drug prescription. Professor Stephen Rose made a bloody good point that ADHD didn’t exist as a diagnosis in Britain up until about 1990, and now we know about it, we’re simply drugging 3% of all children…Something very wrong there.
The proponent of some new drug or other, armed with the usual dubious neurological evidence, argued that ADHD has always existed throughout history, and many successful, talented, people may well have suffered with it. Well, I wonder if they would have been quite so successful or talented if you’d been around to dope them up with ritalin ?
I have a feeling that this Stephen Rose may have worked at Goldsmiths in the past. I hope it’s the same guy, because I always thought he was a righteous bloke and a great lecturer.
Sometimes I feel proud enough about the results of my licence fee that I almost don’t mind paying for it. Tonight BBC1 (yes 1) showed a Botney artumentary about Edward Hopper. It seems that the BBC, despite being a public service, will whore themselves out for anything in the name of art. Tate Britain, Opera, Boy Bands, and “cinema” (if you count “the day after tomorrow” as cinema), the beeb will push it if you tell them it’s art.
But this was more than the usual set of trailers and hype. It was a fascinating example of what journalism should be. OK Yentob, I can see why we (the British licence payers) hired you now.
The news, local and national, magazine programmes, even “Today”, have all been hyping Hopper. Until recently I’d never heard of Hopper, although his work I’ve loved for years , and I’m not just talking about “Night Hawks”.
Anyway – they had many talking heads on this programme including Sam Mendes (director of American Beauty) and Jonathan Miller (general all-round clever bastard). Until this evening I’d always hated Miller because he seems to know too much to be real, and because his “intepretation of Alice in Wonderland” was pure bollocks, in my humble opinion of course. And I loved Jan Svankmajer’s version of Alice by the way. But I just wish Jonathan Miller would stop being so perceptive and….RIGHT. Everything he said about Hopper’s paintings made me look at them differently and he certainly had a point.
Whereas…Sam Mendes…I loved “American Beauty”, but Mendes was so, so, wrong, in everything he said tonight that I’m now concerned about my value judgement of AB. Maybe he just rolled a 6. Maybe I’ve been wrong about him all along. Maybe he was just talking bollocks about Hopper. Maybe I should stop blogging when I’ve had a bottle of 2-for-a-fiver vino collapso. Hmm.
Anyway – back to the diary.
A day in Birmingham with some Moodlephiles was suprisingly enjoyable, a pint in a pub with the world’s most uptight landlord notwithstanding. The Selfridges building (I’d give a link, but they really need to know about web accessibility) is even more bizarre in real life BTW. Do a Google for it – it’s sick and wierd.
Quote of the day goes to Edward Hopper:
“If you could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.”
Nightyall
Well, Leo, the SMTP server is back up. In reality, if I’d followed my instincts rather than go along with Dell’s (admittedly excellent) tech support, it would have been back up on friday…ho hum.
Today, a few of us tested wireless access to the Student’s Union. It was good enough for me to spend a while working on the mail server with negligible problems. The best thing about working up there, apart from the food and drink, is that I can’t hear the office phone ringing with queries that are either not important enough for a call, or down to plain stupidity. I actually managed to get a lot done there. By 6pm Leo was back up and seemed to be working ok. It was probably ready way before that (about 3pm) but I wanted to test the wotsit out of it before putting it live. Good boy Leo 🙂
Tomorrow I have the pleasure of going to Brum for a meeting of a few people who are are attempting to improve educational teaching in the UK and at the same time benefit the open-source community. As those who know me can imagine: I dig that.
C yall.
From the outside, religions appear to me to be a bizarre collection of paradoxical, nonsensical beliefs. I really want to understand where I’m going wrong, because surely there must be something I’m missing, or misunderstanding.
So, this morning I was reading a few on-line articles about “the Fall”, in an attempt to understand the subtleties that have obviously eluded me, and led me to the erroneous conclusion that it’s all a load of bollocks.
But now, it’s all so clear!
You see Adam and Eve eating the “apple” was a deliberate part of God’s plan, because otherwise Adam and Eve couldn’t have had children and would never create “humanity” in the way God wanted.
“It was part of the Father’s plan, being both foreknown to him and essential to the human family”. So God deliberately planned the whole thing! From the moment Adam and Eve were placed in the garden, God knew they would eat the apple and knew that he would then be forced to cast them out of the garden because he was so angry (oddly it turns out anger is one of the seven deadly sins..but that’s another story). Without this masterful plan, God would never have been forced to send Jesus in. In turn, Jesus would never be able to “voluntarily” fulfil the pre-ordained plan of giving up his life for mankind.
Well now that’s all sorted out, I’m off to church.
In the UK we are lucky enough to have a channel whose remit is to:
Tonight’s schedule:
21:05 Big Brother
22:15 Friends
22:45 Friends
23:20 Friends
23:50 Friends
00:15 Friends
00:50 Friends
01:15 Big Brother
A truly bollocks week. One long round of battles with morons, and general frustration with everything, topped off with a dollop of creamy crap on Friday when what should have been a simple reboot of the main SMTP server at work revealed that for the last 191 days it has been running, it has been slowly corrupting the filesystem. This is because of a known bug in the (redhat) kernel we were using. Oh for regular downtime.
Back home, we got the 550 quid from the landlady, and so now it’s just a case of getting back the remaining 200 quid the bastard thinks she’s stiffed us for.
No, I’m not happy at the moment. Work is pissing me right off, as is not being at work, because all I can ever see is life and money dripping away…
After a crap night’s “sleep” which mainly involved being awake, I got up and decided to have a cup of tea and watch some crap telly. The power switch on the telly seems to have broken. The lid was stuck on the milk. I know these are all petty things, but they’re just little annoyances that make the “stable” parts of life seem less stable and more irritating. And yes I got the lid off the milk in the end (with a knife) and yes I managed to jam in the power switch on the telly with a biro lid…
So what shall I do today ? One of the many tasks for my main job that I couldn’t do during the working week because I was too busy dealing with bloody rubbish that isn’t even my job…or maybe it is…I haven’t got a clue what I’m actually supposed to be doing these days.
Or perhaps I’ll do some of the work for other companies that I’m forced to do because money keeps disappearing, despite the fact that I’ll be taxed at 40 % on it and end up…oh god I’m sorry, I’ll stop whinging now.
Some good things:
P.S. – thanks to reader ‘al’ for explaining why there are two videos for Laura: “The band didn’t like their performance in first one with the hands and the
lightning so they made another one…..”
For the last few days I’ve been feeling more tired, achey and in pain. Today it was too much so I stayed at home and tried to sleep as much as I could. It has made me feel a lot better although day-time telly made me feel a lot worse, despite Des and Mel now being off the air.
There are probably loads of things I should blog about, but really I can’t be bothered. The reason for a long inter-blog distance is either being too busy, or ennui. I’ve had both, so in order to make life quicker and simpler, here are the things I would have blogged about if I could be arsed:
Ah well, good night.