Friday, February 25, 2022
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
this is it
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Another 1028160 minutes
Another birthday swings around for me and I find myself reminiscing over times gone by.
I feel the lyrics from Paul Simon's "Ten Years" sum up today quite well.
You are moving on a crowded street
Through various shades of people
In the summers harshest heat
A story in your eye will speak
until your minds at ease
Ten years come and gone so fast
I might as well be dreaming
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
A fortune rises to the sky
Ten years come and gone so fast
You are driving down an empty road
Beside a shady river
When the sky turns dark as stone
The trees begin to shiver
The grace of God is nigh
Ten years come and gone
And that flash has never been forgotten
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
How do the powerless survive
Ten years come and gone so fast
And if you look into your future life
Ten years from this question
Do you imagine a familiar light
Burning in the distance
The love that never died
Ten years come and gone so fast
I might as well be dreaming
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
Ten years come and gone so fast
Sunny days have burned a path
(0) comments
Another birthday swings around for me and I find myself reminiscing over times gone by.
I feel the lyrics from Paul Simon's "Ten Years" sum up today quite well.
You are moving on a crowded street
Through various shades of people
In the summers harshest heat
A story in your eye will speak
until your minds at ease
Ten years come and gone so fast
I might as well be dreaming
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
A fortune rises to the sky
Ten years come and gone so fast
You are driving down an empty road
Beside a shady river
When the sky turns dark as stone
The trees begin to shiver
The grace of God is nigh
Ten years come and gone
And that flash has never been forgotten
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
How do the powerless survive
Ten years come and gone so fast
And if you look into your future life
Ten years from this question
Do you imagine a familiar light
Burning in the distance
The love that never died
Ten years come and gone so fast
I might as well be dreaming
Sunny days have burned a path
Across another season
Ten years come and gone so fast
Sunny days have burned a path
Sunday, January 01, 2006
yay
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Hitting Women (by one of my alter-egos - "Dasheese") The writer Don Spears, in his 1991 literary masterpiece In Search of Goodpussy, famously put forth the question of whether or not using violence against women is ever justifiable. He suggests that this is one of those deeply personal issues, like one's position on the death penalty, and that it's up to each individual to decide. Which probably makes more sense than some of us would like to think. Certainly, relations between men and women tend to vary between cultures. For example, a Mexican dude will straight up check his wife in the store. While that might look odd (and hilarious) to us, I'm sure it's more or less normal to the Mexican people, who tend to strongly value "machismo." Here in the first world, putting your shoe on a woman is considered more or less a no-no. I don't know that it's any more illegal than hitting a guy, but it's frowned upon, socially. From the time we're small children on the playground, we're told it's not okay for boys to hit girls, regardless of what it is they might say. I'm going to go ahead and put forth that if a woman physically threatens you, it's okay to beat her the same way you would beat a man. Bottom line. No man should sacrifice his personal safety just to satisfy a woman's ego. While it's true that no woman could ever pose much of a threat to me, I don't want to take the chance of one somehow fucking my shit up by accident, Julian McClanahan-style. Beyond that though, I can't really condone any hitting of women. For example, if you were to walk in on your wife blowing the mailman, you'd probably be best off just kicking the bitch out on the street like homeboy in Hustle and Flow. I'm not saying she wouldn't deserve an ass whipping, I'm just saying don't do it. Think about it like this: A retarded kid might do some fucked up shit to you like take a shit in its hand and throw it at you. Of course, in that situation you'd want to hit the little fucker, but then you know deep down inside that it's retarded and hence it doesn't know any better. Sometimes women don't know any better, either. Still, part of being a man is knowing when to take the high road.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
1,028,160 minutes
Today is my birthday and I am 26 years of age. It has been 1,028,160 minutes since I last blogged.
Since my last blog I quit my last job and returned to University to do a masters degree and am now ironically I am back in a job doing what I was doing before I left University and for my troubles I find myself 2 years older.
Is this self pity or whining? no just resignation to the fact I am getting older. A fact I only came to terms with late last night in a Tesco car park thanks to a 1 litre bottle of Strawberry Smoothie with Yoghurt.
Last week Monday during lunch I first bought a Strawberry Smoothie with Yoghurt and noticed the best before date was the 9th August, again last night after a late night walk in Hampton Court I dropped by my local Tesco and bought another bottle of my current infatuation which had the same expiry date although sold a week later. Was this a coincidence or could it be that they simply had the same stock ? - “bah !! neither!” I thought.
I totally understood the message loud and clear!!! it was unambiguous, “My youth was to expire on the 9th of August !!!” a point cruelly and deceptively driven home first by the delightful chilled gush of tangy strawberry followed by the bold rough stamp of a use-by-date spelling out my fate.
Instantly I dropped my head in my hands. This lasted only for a moment because suddenly I found hope, as if a light bulb suddenly shone bright in my mind. This time it wasn’t delusion but a realization that resigning myself to the fate of growing older was also to be my saving grace.
Now at 26 I no longer had to be afraid of success or hide behind the excuse of being too young to grab hold of my dreams. A new path had just opened, a second but final rite of passage.
Never before had I experienced despair followed so quickly by hope.
All that was missing was a bright light which came in the form of Classic FM playing the theme tune to The Man of La Mancha.
From despair I felt sudden over excitement. Could it be that like Cervantes’ character - Don Quixote, glory awaited me ? – I had no doubt about it.
To me Don Quixote although a hapless romantic is a brave Knight who takes a road in a quest to restore the age of chivalry, battle all evil, and right all wrongs and he was to be my model.
Suddenly I had a justification for my renewed interest in comic books. I saw it no longer as denial I was in the last throws of my youth but my subconscious embracing a more idealist me.
Right there in my car like a Knight of old I took an oath which only death will keep me from fulfilling and that will be never to seek out a girl other than out of the truest of motives…. The rest I would figure out later.
I was given a birthday card today by people at work with a picture of a woman’s bust and a badge saying “I know what women want”. After musing over this celluloid clevage for a moment or three, I chuckled. They were fools!! For they really couldn’t have been any further from the sentiments in my heart.
Well you may say I am reading too much into a Strawberry Smoothie with Yoghurt but to me it serves as a chance to prompt me to positively refocus my targets and realize my goals, which for me includes a sweeping review on everything from relationships to what I eat and surely that can’t be a bad thing.
I have decided that at lunch time today I will head to WHSmiths and buy some cookery books and also a copy of Cervantes classic novel – Don Quixote. I hope to post pics of some of my kitchen exploits here on my blog so please watch this space.
The world we live in is far from ideal kids, a point solemnly highlighted to me by the fact I also share my birthday with the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki made all the more depressing by the fact we live in a world not much more peaceful.
My dear reader, the world is in trouble, and I shall offer more of a political perspective later. … but for now let me assure you my blog is well and truly back !
(1) comments
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
A nation of spivs
I have just finished reading a really great book by Donald Thomas called "An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War".
This book really was a inisight because the second world war is rosily remembered as a time when the British people buried their differences to work together against a common enemy - a period of unity in adversity, with the armed forces bravely carrying the torch for democracy and selfless civilians building an honest and upright Home Front.
Over the years, several historians (among them Angus Calder and Corelli Barnett) have tried to correct this sentimentalised self-portrait. But Donald Thomas is the first to concern himself exclusively with the wartime criminal underclass - the spivs, swindlers, traitors, looters, gangsters, deserters, robbers, rapists and racketeers. This is the story not of the dogged British Tommy but of his dodgy brothers, Flash Harry and Jack the Lad.
As Thomas says with understandable nervousness at the outset, it's not his intention to deny the heroism and self-sacrifice. But so comprehensive is his demythologising that you begin to wonder whether there was anyone who wasn't on the fiddle. The criminality came, in part, from the privation. With so many basic items subject to rationing - meat, butter, clothes, paper, petrol and cigarettes - even men and women who were instinctively law-abiding found themselves turning to theft and fraud. Everything from paint to coffin lids was subject to pilfering.
When goods belonged to the state, no one was hurt by them going missing; when "fair shares" weren't being given, they had to be grabbed; when nobs were stockpiling provisions, proles had every right to use the black market - so the justifications for dealing and stealing ran. But it wasn't just the poor who ended up in court or prison. Among the celebrities who ran foul of the law were Noël Coward, fined the equivalent of £64,000 for failing to declare investments, and Ivor Novello, sent to prison for four weeks for the private - and therefore prohibited - use of his Rolls-Royce.
Burglary, offences against property, GBH: all increased during the war, with an especially sharp rise in crime as hostilities drew to a close. The average citizen was 85 per cent more likely to be a victim of violence in 1945 than in 1940. But the vast majority of transgressions were minor (counterfeit ration books, over-charging, goods falling off the back of a lorry), and many offences wouldn't have been offences at any other time. The applauded peacetime profit-maker became the derided wartime profiteer. There was more lawbreaking because there were more laws to break.
One of the more bizarre crimes under the Defence Regulations was the spreading of "alarm and despondency". A Mrs Rycraft of Wood Green was found guilty of this in 1941, after telling her local housewives' club "we will never win the war" and encouraging them to demand bigger rations; a Mrs Hayward of Brighton was fined £25 (no paltry sum when the average weekly wage was £4.50) for remarking to a shop assistant, "we do not get true news in the newspapers because journalists are all crooks". Undaunted, Mrs Hayward was soon back in court for uttering pro-German sentiments and was sentenced to a month's hard labour.
Some offenders were shopped by their neighbours. But the state also appointed its own snoops and narks, whose methods smacked of Stalin or the Gestapo. "I am suspected, inspected, examined, informed, required and commanded so that I do not know who the hell I am and where I am, or why I am here at all," one small trader complained to his MP.
Shopkeepers took the brunt of the petty officialdom. The attractive young woman inveigling the butcher to give her an extra ounce of steak might turn out to be from the Ministry of Food. The sneakiest example of entrapment was the army car driven round London with a union flag on its bonnet and only the driver inside - anyone failing to "salute the flag" would then be arrested by the military police following behind.
By today's standards, punishments were severe: hefty fines, long sentences, even execution. Though rape was not a capital offence under English law, the Visiting Forces Act gave the US power to administer its own code of justice, and eight American servicemen were hanged for raping British women. The darker their skin, the less forgiving the authorities.
One example that for some reason caught my attention was the case of Leroy Henry, a black truck driver from St Louis, Missouri, was courtmartialled and sentenced to death for raping a 33-year-old married woman near Bath, though the evidence suggested she was a willing partner; it was only thanks to a campaign by the Tribune and the Daily Mirror that Henry was reprieved.
(0) comments
I have just finished reading a really great book by Donald Thomas called "An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War".
This book really was a inisight because the second world war is rosily remembered as a time when the British people buried their differences to work together against a common enemy - a period of unity in adversity, with the armed forces bravely carrying the torch for democracy and selfless civilians building an honest and upright Home Front.
Over the years, several historians (among them Angus Calder and Corelli Barnett) have tried to correct this sentimentalised self-portrait. But Donald Thomas is the first to concern himself exclusively with the wartime criminal underclass - the spivs, swindlers, traitors, looters, gangsters, deserters, robbers, rapists and racketeers. This is the story not of the dogged British Tommy but of his dodgy brothers, Flash Harry and Jack the Lad.
As Thomas says with understandable nervousness at the outset, it's not his intention to deny the heroism and self-sacrifice. But so comprehensive is his demythologising that you begin to wonder whether there was anyone who wasn't on the fiddle. The criminality came, in part, from the privation. With so many basic items subject to rationing - meat, butter, clothes, paper, petrol and cigarettes - even men and women who were instinctively law-abiding found themselves turning to theft and fraud. Everything from paint to coffin lids was subject to pilfering.
When goods belonged to the state, no one was hurt by them going missing; when "fair shares" weren't being given, they had to be grabbed; when nobs were stockpiling provisions, proles had every right to use the black market - so the justifications for dealing and stealing ran. But it wasn't just the poor who ended up in court or prison. Among the celebrities who ran foul of the law were Noël Coward, fined the equivalent of £64,000 for failing to declare investments, and Ivor Novello, sent to prison for four weeks for the private - and therefore prohibited - use of his Rolls-Royce.
Burglary, offences against property, GBH: all increased during the war, with an especially sharp rise in crime as hostilities drew to a close. The average citizen was 85 per cent more likely to be a victim of violence in 1945 than in 1940. But the vast majority of transgressions were minor (counterfeit ration books, over-charging, goods falling off the back of a lorry), and many offences wouldn't have been offences at any other time. The applauded peacetime profit-maker became the derided wartime profiteer. There was more lawbreaking because there were more laws to break.
One of the more bizarre crimes under the Defence Regulations was the spreading of "alarm and despondency". A Mrs Rycraft of Wood Green was found guilty of this in 1941, after telling her local housewives' club "we will never win the war" and encouraging them to demand bigger rations; a Mrs Hayward of Brighton was fined £25 (no paltry sum when the average weekly wage was £4.50) for remarking to a shop assistant, "we do not get true news in the newspapers because journalists are all crooks". Undaunted, Mrs Hayward was soon back in court for uttering pro-German sentiments and was sentenced to a month's hard labour.
Some offenders were shopped by their neighbours. But the state also appointed its own snoops and narks, whose methods smacked of Stalin or the Gestapo. "I am suspected, inspected, examined, informed, required and commanded so that I do not know who the hell I am and where I am, or why I am here at all," one small trader complained to his MP.
Shopkeepers took the brunt of the petty officialdom. The attractive young woman inveigling the butcher to give her an extra ounce of steak might turn out to be from the Ministry of Food. The sneakiest example of entrapment was the army car driven round London with a union flag on its bonnet and only the driver inside - anyone failing to "salute the flag" would then be arrested by the military police following behind.
By today's standards, punishments were severe: hefty fines, long sentences, even execution. Though rape was not a capital offence under English law, the Visiting Forces Act gave the US power to administer its own code of justice, and eight American servicemen were hanged for raping British women. The darker their skin, the less forgiving the authorities.
One example that for some reason caught my attention was the case of Leroy Henry, a black truck driver from St Louis, Missouri, was courtmartialled and sentenced to death for raping a 33-year-old married woman near Bath, though the evidence suggested she was a willing partner; it was only thanks to a campaign by the Tribune and the Daily Mirror that Henry was reprieved.
Friday, August 22, 2003
Its been a long day today and I had a sudden "demand" made on me for some code. I've never known my boss to panic so much, but anyway I got some code working so he can go on holiday next weekend with some peace of mind.
I will need to get alot done in the next few days to ensure I don't have to panic before I head off to Nigeria next month. Its been 4393 days since I last put foot on Nigerian soil and despite the large hole it has made in my pocket I find myself smiling without control at the thought of going home. Although I have to say I have a bit of an unresolved crisis when asked where I'd consider home.
This is because I've come to realise the "patriotism", of those still with crusader like mentalities who believe God or destiny appointed them to "civilise" the "uncivilised" do not tolerate criticising shameful aspects of their countries past and that doesn't appeal to me, neither does the racism that hides behind the pretentious pragmatism of "taking care of your own" against foreign entities bearly able to feed themselves.
If home is where the heart is, my heart tends to roam, but if asked where I'd like to finish off I'd have to say Nigeria.
My brother says home is wherever we happen to find ourselves. I tend to agree.
I am emotionally reserved (cool I like to think :P) though I don't know how I'll react when I see old faces and smell the warm humid air in Lagos. I guess it will be cool to see my room preserved in the time warp of an 11 year old's world. I hope to come back more appreciative of things I take for granted although I have seen no evidence of such humble mantra from friends who have visited Nigeria recently.
I have been to Nigeria twice now. I was too young to remember my first encounter with Nigeria, I was 2 yrs and all I'm told of it was that I got ill and almost died. I wasn't surprised to hear that Nigerian doctors made things worse by trying to feed me water through my head. My dad suspects they were trying to prolong my stay in hospital and thus increase the hospital bill.
Nigerian "healthcare" is terrible to say the least. My younger brother just shared a story with me and told me how a Nigerian doctor broke his finger. Private hospitals are an alternative but considering most Nigerian can't afford the cost of state hospitals, this is the preserve of the well-off.
To paint you a picture of Nigeria's health crisis, if you needed a drip to keep you alive in a Nigerian state hospital, you'd first be marched to the pharmacy in a semi-conscious state to first purchase the drip.
I have to also mention Nigeria boasts the worst roads you'll find, constant petrol shortages and frequent power cuts.
All this is hard to accept considering Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer and the world's 9th largest and the fifth-biggest source of US oil imports. Despite this, it has to import oil to meet domestic need whilst it sells its own to the powers that be.
The recent strikes in Nigeria suggest this is even harder to accept by Nigerians who consider affordable petrol their birthright from a state that does little else for them.
Nigeria has a history of military dictators who have stolen billions of petro-dollars and hidden them in Swiss bank accounts whilst borrowing from the world bank to the tune of $30 billion. This has been the ongoing story since the 60's and as oil has kept flowing criticisms have been few from western governments who have continually sold arms to successive ruling military juntas.
At one point there were rumour that Nigeria's new "democratic" government might stand up to the IMF and demand to know why it lent money to non-existent projects and would demand to see evidence of these project before making repayments.
However these proved untrue after Obasanjo himself went cap in hand to the IMF requesting more loans to "safeguard its return to democracy".
Obansanjo can be pretty confident he'll get it since IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus promised IMF aid if "Nigeria demonstrated that it is fully committed to reform" which Nigeria has already begun by selling off state companies such as the power and telecommunications utilities and oil refineries.
I think its only a matter of time until the IMF dictates Nigeria's state hospitals consider extracting and selling patients healthy body parts to western clients in some sort of exhange program whilst in hospital to pay for drug treatment.
Somehow the idea seems very free-marketish.
I am sure its the sort initiative they would applaud and might even guarantee Obasanjo further IMF loans.
Furthermore imagine in true capitalist tradition (like the terrordaq index the pentagon proposed), the prices of organs were floated on some organ stock market, so despite only seeking treatment for a yeast infection, if kidney prices had plummeted you'd have to sacrifice a kidney, 12 pints of blood, part of your liver and some marrow.
George Monbiot (www.monbiot.com) makes an interesting point, he says "Poor nations possess an invincible weapon. If you owe the bank $100 you are in trouble. If you owe them $100,000 the bank is in trouble. What if you owe the bank $2.5 trillion. If you defaulted on your debts at once you could bring down the entire global financial system. The point of possessing a terrifying weapon is that you don't necessarily have to use it. The fear alone can be sufficient to get results. Nowhere does fear do its work more effectively than in the great concrete towers of the financial markets. We should seek then not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution."
(0) comments
I will need to get alot done in the next few days to ensure I don't have to panic before I head off to Nigeria next month. Its been 4393 days since I last put foot on Nigerian soil and despite the large hole it has made in my pocket I find myself smiling without control at the thought of going home. Although I have to say I have a bit of an unresolved crisis when asked where I'd consider home.
This is because I've come to realise the "patriotism", of those still with crusader like mentalities who believe God or destiny appointed them to "civilise" the "uncivilised" do not tolerate criticising shameful aspects of their countries past and that doesn't appeal to me, neither does the racism that hides behind the pretentious pragmatism of "taking care of your own" against foreign entities bearly able to feed themselves.
If home is where the heart is, my heart tends to roam, but if asked where I'd like to finish off I'd have to say Nigeria.
My brother says home is wherever we happen to find ourselves. I tend to agree.
I am emotionally reserved (cool I like to think :P) though I don't know how I'll react when I see old faces and smell the warm humid air in Lagos. I guess it will be cool to see my room preserved in the time warp of an 11 year old's world. I hope to come back more appreciative of things I take for granted although I have seen no evidence of such humble mantra from friends who have visited Nigeria recently.
I have been to Nigeria twice now. I was too young to remember my first encounter with Nigeria, I was 2 yrs and all I'm told of it was that I got ill and almost died. I wasn't surprised to hear that Nigerian doctors made things worse by trying to feed me water through my head. My dad suspects they were trying to prolong my stay in hospital and thus increase the hospital bill.
Nigerian "healthcare" is terrible to say the least. My younger brother just shared a story with me and told me how a Nigerian doctor broke his finger. Private hospitals are an alternative but considering most Nigerian can't afford the cost of state hospitals, this is the preserve of the well-off.
To paint you a picture of Nigeria's health crisis, if you needed a drip to keep you alive in a Nigerian state hospital, you'd first be marched to the pharmacy in a semi-conscious state to first purchase the drip.
I have to also mention Nigeria boasts the worst roads you'll find, constant petrol shortages and frequent power cuts.
All this is hard to accept considering Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer and the world's 9th largest and the fifth-biggest source of US oil imports. Despite this, it has to import oil to meet domestic need whilst it sells its own to the powers that be.
The recent strikes in Nigeria suggest this is even harder to accept by Nigerians who consider affordable petrol their birthright from a state that does little else for them.
Nigeria has a history of military dictators who have stolen billions of petro-dollars and hidden them in Swiss bank accounts whilst borrowing from the world bank to the tune of $30 billion. This has been the ongoing story since the 60's and as oil has kept flowing criticisms have been few from western governments who have continually sold arms to successive ruling military juntas.
At one point there were rumour that Nigeria's new "democratic" government might stand up to the IMF and demand to know why it lent money to non-existent projects and would demand to see evidence of these project before making repayments.
However these proved untrue after Obasanjo himself went cap in hand to the IMF requesting more loans to "safeguard its return to democracy".
Obansanjo can be pretty confident he'll get it since IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus promised IMF aid if "Nigeria demonstrated that it is fully committed to reform" which Nigeria has already begun by selling off state companies such as the power and telecommunications utilities and oil refineries.
I think its only a matter of time until the IMF dictates Nigeria's state hospitals consider extracting and selling patients healthy body parts to western clients in some sort of exhange program whilst in hospital to pay for drug treatment.
Somehow the idea seems very free-marketish.
I am sure its the sort initiative they would applaud and might even guarantee Obasanjo further IMF loans.
Furthermore imagine in true capitalist tradition (like the terrordaq index the pentagon proposed), the prices of organs were floated on some organ stock market, so despite only seeking treatment for a yeast infection, if kidney prices had plummeted you'd have to sacrifice a kidney, 12 pints of blood, part of your liver and some marrow.
George Monbiot (www.monbiot.com) makes an interesting point, he says "Poor nations possess an invincible weapon. If you owe the bank $100 you are in trouble. If you owe them $100,000 the bank is in trouble. What if you owe the bank $2.5 trillion. If you defaulted on your debts at once you could bring down the entire global financial system. The point of possessing a terrifying weapon is that you don't necessarily have to use it. The fear alone can be sufficient to get results. Nowhere does fear do its work more effectively than in the great concrete towers of the financial markets. We should seek then not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution."
