The Great Satan

So another US crook has "Madoff" with everyone's money. He's 70, so spending the rest of his life in prison is no big deal. They should make him and his entire family, and everyone associated with him who ever benefited from his crooked business DESTITUTE and reduced to eking out their existence from one soup kitchen to the next. But this is America, so no chance of that happening. And they said that the Communist system was inherently wasteful and unsustainable. I remember sitting through social science lectures (not a main academic interest I hasten to add) in which the smug lecturer would illustrate with a flow chart how the need for stout boots for winter in the USSR would result in massive overproduction but offset to the extent that when the over-supply of boots finally came into circulation, summer had arrived and the boots were no longer needed. How quaintly naive that all seems in the light of one man's fraud of tens of billions of dollars with no oversight from the national regulators. Send those bastards to the soup kitchens too! Talking of boots - the Iraqi journalist should have worn a pair of steelies to the press conference, and practiced his aim before turning up and missing the little twat.

He who smelt it dealt it

You know how other people's farts are obnoxious but you're quite happy to smell your own? Well, I think it has to be conceded that curry farts have to be welcome to the nostrils, whoever the purveyor. The smell is identical to when the curry was bubbling on the stove. Oh how I wish I had some of that chicken rogan josh left over from yesterday.

VAT decrease - who benefits?

Not the consumer, that's for sure!
Retailers will derive all the benefits from this VAT cut, consumers will get nothing and small businesses will suffer. Why? Because prices posted in stores have nothing to do with the precise VAT percentage. They're always set at the psychological levels: "9.99", "95", "195" and sums of that ilk. No retailer will be encouraged to pass on anything less than a ten-per cent drop in VAT. They'll just pocket the difference, the consumer will receive no benefit and small businesses that are registered for VAT will find themselves paying more for their consumables since there'll be less VAT to recover against the net price.
So much for the Government master plan.

Dying at home - the statistics

According to a BBC survey:
"The warning comes as a YouGov survey suggests more than 70% of people would feel happiest dying at home. In practice three times more people end their lives in hospital than at home"

The same statistical survey points out that a staggering 99.9% of respondents would prefer not to die at all.

Is it because ah is?

Call me cynical, but I feel my eyebrow rising instinctively when I hear of Obama spending quality time with the ailing grandmother who had been such a support to him, blah blah blah. I wonder if he would have taken so much time off the campaign trail and made such a fuss of it if it was to tend to his black granny. As US African Americans go, he reminds me a little of Steve Martin in The Jerk. This is no criticism, by the way. It may well prove to be a very serendipitous way of getting a non-white male into highest office. If he's half-caste, at least he's half like us...

Luvvies, dahlings

Here's a little game for you. Go on You Tube and type "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" in the search line. See if you can spot me treading the boards. Eight clips to discover. Warning! They're all talking French!

Attaboy

Stan has some toys confiscated from his bedroom because he hasn't tidied them away. The next day his mum brings them back and tells him that if he doesn't tidy them away today they'll be confiscated for good. He thinks about it and then says: "Tu n'as que les confisquer". Respect. He's only four.

Everybody's gotta get stones

I bought some Cadbury's Fruit & Nut because I love the taste of Melamine in the morning.

Revelation

Gordon Brown, getting a grilling on TV off the press about the global economic crisis, IS Tony Hancock on Face to Face!

Hallelujah

I woke in the middle of the night and I found Jesus. It's true. And I wasn't even aware I was looking for him. Sleep went right out of the window but it doesn't seem to matter. It feels good. I've always wanted to believe but have never really been able to. The sticking point for me has always been the multiplicity of faiths. How can one faith claim to hold the one and only path to salvation? What about all the good people of other faiths, or none, or those who lived back in "pagan" times, who have cared for their children and tried to lead good lives? Then it dawned on me in this long moment of epiphany that this is not the question to ask. The scientists at CERN are asking questions for which they can never hope to get an answer. So they find the Higgs Boson? Lovely, at least now we have a face for the name. It still doesn't explain why everything in the universe that is "real" accounts for only 5% of what is out there. We ask questions using the only reference framework we have available. One of the images that came to me as I lay in the dark was of two ants, rubbing antennae, asking each other: "What if this is all there is?"
Despite my agnosticism I have always felt that my path has been lit in dark times, at crucial points in my life.
There are words that we can use to hint at what underlies these kinds of phenomena: like serendipity, or coincidence, or "blimey, am I imagining things"?
So I figured as I lay there, or rather it struck me, that you have to follow the path that is right for you. For who you are, where you come from, what has moulded you. It's only right for those ants to keep running round, doing what they're programmed to do, until someone pours boiling water over their nest.
And then I thought. And then I thought - should I share this? And then I thought, well perhaps I should, if only because I had the idea to, and I should perhaps see where this leads.
And as I logged on to the Internet, and opened "Blogger", I wondered what I should put in the title bar. And I thought I'd put "Hallelujah" but I wanted to make sure I fully understood the meaning of the word, and so I opened Wikipedia, and my attention was drawn to today's featured article, which read as follows:

"Anekantavada is one of the most important and basic doctrines of Jainism. It refers to the principles of pluralism and multiplicity of viewpoints, the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth. Jains contrast all attempts to proclaim absolute truth with adhgajanyāyah, which can be illustrated through the maxim of the "Blind Men and an Elephant". In this story, one blind man felt the trunk of an elephant, another the tusks, another the ears, another the tail. All the men claimed to explain the true appearance of the elephant, but could only partly succeed, due to their limited perspectives. According to the Jains, only the Kevalins—the omniscient beings—can comprehend objects in all aspects and manifestations; others are only capable of partial knowledge. Consequently, no single, specific, human view can claim to represent absolute truth."

Coincidence, or what?

As the great Dave Allen used to say, "May your God go with you".

Alternative to BBC I-Player

I sometimes wish they'd just leave well alone. They had a corking little Listen Again facility on the web for BBC Radio which worked like a dream, and then they had to go and embed it in the I-Player alongside the TV programs, which are no darned use to me anyway, since no-one abroad can access them anyway. To make things worse, it's a pound to a penny that the ruddy thing won't work in any case, throwing up a "program temporarily unavailable" message when you want to listen to the latest episode of The Archers.

Well, I've just discovered a natty wee get-around to get back to the old style re-broadcast using Real Player. You simple enter the following in the address bar of your web browser:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/xxxx_ddd.ra

whereby you replace "xxxx" with the time and "ddd" with the day of the week. So, for example, if you want Thursday's episode of a tale of country folk, you'd put "1900_thu". As long as you already have the real player application on your PC, this will generate it and set it running just before the start of the program and shut it off two minutes after it is over. So you get to hear if that night's Front Row is worth listening into. Which is nice.

Capello - what's that about??

I've just been watching that overpaid stooge Capello struggling to get through his press conference in English. We'll get beaten by Andorra tomorrow. Ten-nil.

Bush/Blair - the legacy lives on

So Medvedev sends his troops into Georgia. Who could countenance such an unprovoked brutal invasion of another sovereign state in this day and age? Oh, that's right, we've been there. I can here the tinkle of smashed panes in glass houses.
Still, I think what it really amounts to is a divertionary tactic by the Russian hierarchy to take their people's mind off the Olympic Games and make them feel they've got some clout in the world still. They're being tatered by Team GB, for goodness sake.
I do kind of like watching Medvedev on the telly, though, as I'm a great fan of Gerry Anderson's classic sixties series, the ones where you could see them pulling the strings. Here, of course, it's Putin who's the puppet-master. The invasion of Georgia: filmed in Supermarionation!

Beijing 2008

It's a load of old wank that the Games should have gone to Beijing, but now they're there I'm watching them, of course.
I must confess my admiration at the spectacle of the opening ceremony. I'm wondering how London might match, let alone top, that in 2012.
I figure that in order to get such well-choreographed excellence we'll need to install martial law at least 18 months before the Games begin, in order to get the participants ship-shape and Bristol fashion and all toeing the same line.

Strike it lucky

Ten-year old boy stabbed to death in frenzied attack around the back of his house while family parties out front - luck strikes once.
Chap wins 35 million euros on Euromillions - luck strikes twice.
Good luck, bad luck: strike it lucky.
Life - you've got to be in it to win it.

Zounds

People don't say "Zounds" any more. Not for centuries.
They say fuck shit bollocks wank, but not "Zounds".
Probably a good thing, showing how basically we are all very God-fearing, and hesitant to take the Lord's wounds in vain.

Perchance to dream

In my dream it's a kind of post-apocalyptic world with feral young people running riot. I find myself seeking refuge from the rampaging hordes, pursued by a rabid youth who forces me to escape by jumping into a hole. As I look up, he starts to transform into The Hulk - but a brown one. He's going to kill me, I know - it's real nightmare time - and as he turns his back and squats at the edge I know how I'm going to die: he's going to do a massive Hulk shit and I'm going to drown in it. With that I wake up - Phew! Pick the bones out of that, Freud.
I wonder now, though - have I just dreamt the plot of the new Hulk movie? I can't wait till it opens here, to find out.

britishexpats.com - serving expats wrong

Having subscribed for 350 USD to a sports streaming site for a year (liveuktv.com), and been in sportsfan heaven for four or five days tuning into all Sky Sports and Setanta, it all went belly up to my horror barely a week in. First there were some solicitous replies to my queries, stating they were "having routing problems", then 48 hours later the site was taken down altogether, replaced by a summary notice from the hosting company (Global Media Group) declaring the site's illegality (which is ripe, considering I'd been buying the streaming to individual events from the site for over a year).
I started to delve around for a way of either getting my telly or my money back, and a spot of Googling threw up a forum on a site called britishexpats.com where others who had been had were having their say. Only trouble was, they weren't the only ones.
For those not familiar with the workings of a forum, here's how it goes. When you visit a forum it is generally because that forum caters to a particular interest. Within that forum there are usually a number of topics being discussed at any one time, or that may have been discussed in the past. You can trace these topics and the interchanges via a thread, which corresponds to the subject line in an email. If the thread is still alive, you can contribute to it. This is what I did for the thread: "What the frig's happened to liveuktv?", or words to that effect. There were a few contributors who had a similar experience to myself, and were wringing their hands and seeking advice, too. Unfortunately there were also a bunch of oafs going on about something and nothing, at a complete tangent to the thread, and scumbags with nothing to offer but abuse. So it is that, for a forum to work properly, it has to have a moderator. The moderator is meant to keep everything in order. The idiot moderator on this site - pseudo Bob - dictatorially declared that the thread was being closed down because it was going around in circles. No doubt since I'd signalled to him my opinion that he couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery (couched in far more diplomatic language, I might add), I wasn't surprised to find he'd cancelled my forum login. So why was I trying to log in, might you ask? It certainly wasn't because I wanted anything to do with this poxy forum stroke community ("Pwease can I be your fwend?"), but it just so happened that I'd discovered a way to get a full refund, and I would have liked to share the solution with the other poor suckers who'd fallen foul of the siren of liveuktv. Thanks to Bob the Shite Moderator of Britishexpats.com, those poor suckers are going to have to find out for themselves.

John Cooper Clarke

I've just been listening to the Paul Morley documentary on John-Cooper Clarke on Radio 4, and the talk of how he deflected hecklers with humour reminds me of when I saw the estimable punk poet supporting Be Bop Deluxe at the Manchester Apollo. A rather geeky chap I was with (no names, no pack drill, Jonesy) yelled out half way through his number: "We want Be-Bop!" Quick as a flash, Clarke riposted: "Just Ships in the Night". Sure enough, who remembers Be-Bop Deluxe these days? Meanwhile, JCC is up there on a cultural plinth, being fêted on the tranny.
Incidentally, some time around the time I saw him in concert, I remember being on a school outing to the Goethe Institute in Manchester with my A-level group when I spotted JCC outside a shop. I pointed out to those around me, not particularly loudly, "Hey, look, it's John Cooper Clarke". Noticing that he'd been spotted, he seemed to take fright, turn tail and march off smartly. Maybe that was the period when he was heavy into heroin with Niko, and we looked odd and menacing through the druggy haze. Maybe he thought we were monsters from outer space, just landed with his ex-wife, pursuing him for alimony.

Liz Collins RIP

I've just discovered that Liz Collins (BRGS, 1972-1979) has passed away, but I don't know any more details. I did my A-Levels with her and liked her a lot, she was very intelligent and vivacious. The obit says she was married to Stephen Wilkinson, also of BRGS. The name rings a bell but I can't place him. A Crackerjack pencil will go to the first person to send me a photo of Stephen or let me know what poor Liz died of. I am curioz orange.

The things they say

Stan: "J'ai assez fait de la voiture, je vais prendre mon bébé et faire le hibou."
("I've played enough with my car, I'm going to get my baby and play at owls.")

Stan (pulling a tricycle with a hoop hooked around the handlebars, negotiating some garden furniture): "Vache! Fais attention à la chaise!" ("Cow! Mind the chair!").
Alice (twenty minutes later): "Je vais traire ta vache." (I'm going to milk your cow.")

Dot com millions

Could I be the next dot com millionaire? I don't know if I should be sharing this, since I've done nothing to secure the project as yet, but I've just discovered that the domain: Ihadarightgoodpooh.com is still untaken! I'm thinking of squatting on it. I don't know precisely what to do with it yet, but one thing's for sure: anyone who signs on to it as a subscriber will be feeling good about themselves, and when you feel that way you're tempted to treat yourself. I know I am.

Nanterre Massacre

At the start of the school year I began taking my little girl, Alice, to rhythmic gymnastic lessons. She loved it! Every Wednesday afternoon I'd drop her off at the gym, just five minutes walk from our front door, and go and pick her up an hour later. I'd generally arrive some five or ten minutes before the end of the lesson, and watch all these eager little girls being put through their paces with hoops, balls and clubs. A dozen or so of them having a great time! Then, one day, we got a phone call out of the blue saying that it was cancelled. The mayor's office was turning the gym over to a long-term exhibition of archaeological relics. Relics. In a gym. In the UK, people who are disgruntled about what is going on in their local neighbourhood have a useful outlet for their grievances which bypasses the bureaucratic channels. It's the local press, and sometimes grievances expressed in this way can build up a head of steam. Around our way, there's no local press. No "Nanterre Evening News". What happens in Nanterre is, well you probably remember... On March 27, 2002, Richard Durn opened fire in the town hall at the end of a council meeting. Eight councillors were killed. Cor blimey, that's six years to the day! I wonder if someone at Nanterre Town Hall has a suicide wish?

Will Absent of Volition

I was travelling along on the Metrolink from Bury to Manchester, only to be pricked every few minutes by the feeling that something was wrong. It was like a voice in my head. What could it be? Then I realised: the voice was external. It was telling me that we would soon be arriving at Besses O'th Barn. But it didn't ring true somehow. And yet there we were, Besses O'th Barn station, just as announced. So what was wrong? And then it came again: "The next station will be Prestwich." A woman's voice, quite mellifluous. Factually true in what it conveyed, as the next station was, sure enough, Prestwich. So what was wrong? Why did I feel there was something amiss? And then it hit me. Omygod it's the multiverse! At the front of the tram I could see through the driver's window, dead ahead. There seemed to be two sets of tracks, running in parallel, one for each direction and yet... as we approached each station there must have been points, maybe invisible, maybe spectral, offering maybe two, maybe more, maybe an infinity of possible bifurcations! "The next station will be Heaton Park". Literally, the voice is keeping us on the straight and narrow! In the old days, before the multiverse, the voice would have said: "The next station IS Heaton Park."! The same uncanny phenomonenon occurred on the train from Manchester Piccadilly to Mcr Airport: "Then next station will be Heald Green". Thank goodness the voice imposed that outcome, otherwise I might have ended up missing my flight!

No More Hairies Any More

Such was the designation of France's World War One veterans ("les Poilus"), and the last of the hairies - a clean-shaven 110 year-old as it happens - has finally shuffled off his stubbly mortal coil, so that the only remaining memories of WWI are now those consigned to the history books.
I wonder if there are any of his peers left in the UK, or elsewhere in the world, or is he really the last of his kind?
Rumour has it that his last whispered utterance was: "They don't like it up 'em".

Ticka-ticka timex

Well it's that time of year again when the stress levels rise and I start to wish I had an accountant to do all the dratted paperwork for the end of year returns. There is just never enough time - what with sitting round watching the TV and playing games and all. To quote David Bowie: "Time it flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor." Then again, his lyrics don't really bear much scrutiny. Not like Sting, for example. God knows, every women I've ever known has only ever wanted "De-doo-doo-doo, de-dah-dah-dah" from me. Finger on the pulse, Sting, man. Respect.

Return to the Shire

And so, after years of absence, the Wanderer is due once again to set out with the faithful merry brethren on the pilgrimage Holcombe-ward, where many a drop of mead will be supped and spilt in Ye Shoulder of Mutton over tales of yore - of foolish imps making cack in buckets, and of naked fauns striding through chill woodland streams. The days of such elvish merriment may be past, but their memory lives on.

Lord Slags Nurse Sluts

The esteemed Lord Mancroft used his podium in the Second House to decry the state of nursing in the country, having witnessed the slatternly chatter of dirty-fingered young nurses chatting about their night on the town, across his bed, as they tucked him in, sick and elderly as he was, not paying any attention to him as they thrust their cleavages so close he could see the goosebumps on their bosoms, not paying any attention to him - a Lord of the Realm - who in the prime of his life could have pulled any of these bitches. Damn them! I'll have my revenge, said the wizened old man.

Sublime to ridiculous

Spending a few days in the rural heart of Brittany, I went for a stroll around town - a town that I have been returning to for many years - and it turned into a stroll down memory lane as I walked past the Chapel of Rest and remembered a well-loved aunt of my wife who was laid out there for us all to bid our final farewells. A very poignant memory. Then I got an image in my mind of the delivery of a nubile young female's corpse to a similar chapel of rest, and one of the employees whispering to another: "Looks like we've got an eater, here." Yet I can't figure out if it's a scene from a film or a book or a joke, and it's bugging me.

The things they say

When a child reaches the age of acquiring the "Why? Why? Why" syndrome ("Why am I a boy?", "Why is blue blue?", that kind of thing), the exasperated French parent will often answer: "Pour faire parler les curieux" ("To get the curious talking.").
Stan's take on this was rather more off-the-wall: "Pour faire parler l'écureuil" ("To get the squirrel talking").
You couldn't make it up, could you?

Dwayne's survival of the fittest

It would seem I got my facts wrong, and although Chambers has been picked to run for Team GB he won't in fact be eligible for the Olympics on account of his drugs record. The man himself can't get his head around the levels of opprobrium heaped upon his inclusion in the team. When asked for a reaction, he is quoted as saying: "Is it because I is black?"

Dwax and Dwayne

So a drugs cheat gets picked to compete in a corrupt nation's Olympic Games.
The only way Dwayne Chambers could redeem himself in my eyes would be to walk around the track after his 100 m final in Beijing with the Tibetan flag draped over his shoulders, when he comes in third (come on, he's British, he's not going to win!).

The nation's hangman

I was on the blower to me old mam and she told me that she had just found out from an uncle of mine that we're related to the man who was the country's hangman at the start of the twentieth century, responsible for pulling the lever on the likes of Dr. Crippen, to name but one.
The wonder of the Internet of course meant that, as we spoke, I was able to look up details of the man himself and read her what I had found, and then to find the book he had written of his life as executioner on Amazon and order it before the conversation was over.
She was of course very pleased that I was able to come up with all this, and told me: "Isn't it a coincidence that you were looking into this too?"
Truly worthy of Mrs Brady, Old Lady! Nice one, mum!

Paroles d'enfant

(Brisane, 3 ans, menton écorché)
- Tu t'es fait mal, Brisane ?
- Oui.
- Tu es tombée dans la cour ?
- Oui.
- C'était aujourd'hui ?
(Stanley interrompt) - Non, demain.

Paroles d'enfant

("Cérébrale Académie" = "Big Brain Academy" [Wii])

Stanley : On peut jouer à Abracadémie ?

Paroles d'enfant

Maman : "Stanley, tu veux venir avec moi, je vais déposer des vêtements pour les pauvres."
Stanley: "Les pauvres quoi ?"

Cinderella - the Truth!

I just discovered something very interesting today. The Cinderella story is a fabrication! She never actually wore a glass slipper! It all comes down to a confusion of the homophones "verre/vair" in French (the latter meaning leather, from some kind of base critter). I just knew it was all bollocks! I shall never trust the veracity of a fairy tale again.

National Popularity Survey - Top 10

Have you ever wondered which nation and which nation's people are respectively most and least admired? You probably have your own ideas.
I've conducted an informal, non-exhaustive survey on the Internet which offers a statistical answer to this question.
Using a popular Search Engine, I entered the query: "F*cking !!!!!! C*nt" (replace * by vowel and !!!!! by national identity - English, French, American, etc.). The results were as follows, in descending order of number of hits:

1) American: 418
=2) English: 116
=2) French: 116
4) Irish: 76
5) German: 74
=6) Scottish: 51
=6) Welsh: 51
8) Foreign: 16
=9) Japanese: 4
=9) Chinese: 4

So the Americans seem to be most despised, while the Orientals tend to be looked on most favourably. It's refreshing to note that the levels of general xenophobia would seem quite low, with only 16 hits for "effing foreign c***".

Entertain me

Well, Xmas has been and gone, we've got our Wiis and our video games and our HD TVs and our broadband access, and I'm drawn to remembering how dire Sundays used to be when I was a kid and there was literally nothing to do.
As the rain spatters the window pane, I recall how we'd be reduced on a Sunday afternoon to betting on which raindrop would reach the bottom first. Wait a minute, I must concentrate on this. I'm sure the one on the left is going to win.