Welcome, 2007.

For the past 20 years I have always had a tot of Navy Rum once a year on New Year's Eve.

It all started when I was isolated, desolated and struggling.
The fight goes on, riding high one year, dragging the floor the next.
Let's hope 2007 will be a good year.
2006 is over, and I have many good reasons to believe that this coming year will see new beginnings and the new chapter in the longer-running stories.

Good luck!

Pleasant Surprise.

The 'Kenmore' blended whisky was also excellent.
Anyway, the local moron is now playing 'the very worst of NOW' on his boom-box, with possibly as many as two people shrieking along to it; sounds like they are trying hard to have a party.

Myself, I'll wait till tomorrow, otherwise known as New Year's Eve.
Then I will take my customary Navy Rum nightcap, while listening to whatever I like on my MP3 player.
It's funny. By now I am aware that this 'neighbour' is unable to fake the sounds of enjoyment unless it is also able to believe it is inconveniencing someone, somewhere, defiling their privacy.
His 'bravery' consists of greater and greater outrage(on a pathetic scale) and I am sometimes treated to the sound of his attempts to dance on people's faces, rather like listening to a lesbian trying to force-grow a penis.

I've got some business in the Afro-Carribean quarter tomorrow morning; perhaps I'll get invited to a real 'Mash Up'?

Equal First.

I've just finished my little bottle of 'Inverey' single malt whisky.
It is from the Perthshire Highlands; I guess you could look it up on a map. Due to geological conditions the peats on the East and West of Scotland produce different coloured Whiskies.
One side is darker than the other, I don't remember which, but these bottles all look pale.

Anyway, the Inverey is equal first with the Mull Island, and yes, it is different, and yes, for the first time in my life I could tell the difference!
Inverey( a made-up Marks&Spencer name-but Perthshire is real)is sweet and malty rather than smokey and sweet/salt.
Delicious.

All I have left for tomorrow is the blended whisky.

That might yet prove interesting, but for sure, as a committed non-whisky drinker all my life, I'd definitely go for #1 or #3.

First Is Still The Best So Far.

The 'Island' single malt from Mull was very much as advertised.
I am used to sipping some more or less 'hot' whisky which just does the job and goes down with a burning sensation, but Mull Single Malt was an explosion of smokey flavour, a sort of rich salt-sweetness that filled the room from within my mouth.

Having tasted that, I now realise what it is that people see in Scotch.

On the other hand, I've just been tasting the second sample, the 'Speyside' single malt, and it is very much business as usual.

Oh well.
Perhaps Scotch #3 will be another sensation eh?

It's In The Receiving Too.

I received a delightful gift from my old Bomber Pilot uncle today.
Anybody who knows Marks & Spencer will also know that they never sell brandnames, only their own generics.
But this selection of quarter bottles of Scotch, although M&S, uses names indicative of the actual heritage of the Whisky.
Tonight I shall be trialling the 'Island', a Single Malt from the actual Isle Of Mull.
I know very little about Scotch(I'm an Ale man), but the label says a lot about smoky, chocolatey, peaty creaminess, which sounds excellent.
My second bottle willl be previewed when I report on the Island tomorrow.

Good for what ails you.

Today I'll Be Wearing My Green Shirt.

Actually it's a Canali.
Now back to Elvis.




There's a smart young woman on a light blue screen
Who comes into my house every night.
And she takes all the red, yellow, orange and green
And she turns them into black and white.

But you tease, and you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt
You can please yourself but somebody's gonna get it

Better cut off all identifying labels
Before they put you on the torture table

'Cause somewhere in the "Quisling Clinic"
There's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes
She's listening in to the Venus line
She's picking out names
I hope none of them are mine

But you tease, and you flirt...

Never said I was a stool pigeon
I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't wanna hear about that

'Cause you tease, and you flirt...

Better send a begging letter to the big investigation
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?

You tease, and you flirt...

You can please yourself but somebody's gonna get it
You can please yourself but somebody's gonna get it

Happy happy-time

Merry Chrimbo.

I got a New Pair Of Shoes!

Was He Trying To Tell Us Something?

They talked to the sister, the father and the mother
With a microphone in one hand and a chequebook in the other
AND THE CAMERA NOSES IN TO THE TEARS ON HER FACE
The tears on her face
The tears on her face
You can put them back together with your paper and paste
But you can't put them back together
You can't put them back together
What would you say?What would you do?
Children and animals two by two
Give me the needleGive me the rope
We're going to melt them down for PILLS AND SOAP
Give me the needleGive me the rope
We're going to melt them down for pills and soap
Four and twenty crowbars, jemmy your desire
Out of the frying pan into the fire
The king is in the counting house
Some folk have all the luck
And all we get are pictures of LORD AND LADY MUCK
They come from lovely people with a hard line in hypocrisy
THERE ARE ASHTRAYS OF EMOTION FOR THE FAG ENDS OF THE ARISTOCRACY
The sugar coated pill is getting bitterer still
YOU THINK YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU BUT YOU KNOW IT NEVER WILL
So pack up your troubles in a stolen handbag
DON'T DILLY DALLY BOYS RALLY ROUND THE FLAG
Give us our daily bread in individual slices
And something in the daily rag to cancel any crisis

Hello gentlemen.

Das Vampir.
Terrible things vampires.
I'll be going to the coast to visit Whitby, world renowned for several things; Captain Cook(James T. Cook no less); as the landing place of Vlad Dracul; and of course as the sole source of Jet, used in jewellry.
They do a nice line in Sterling Silver pieces.
TTFN.

Difficult

Sometimes we see good people struggling sincerely to make a decent fist of things; but they are surrounded by evil and it's machinations, sometimes so closely that there is no way of communicating with them. Their avenues are held in a common trust where the trust is all one way, and the influence of the malfeisants upon the innocents is such that they wouldn't think of trying to go outside normal channels anyway.

And so these people are used by the evil to maintain a facade of respectability, unassailable, incontrivertible respectability, behind which the malicious pursue their evil.
They are indispensible to the plan, as they guarantee the continuing flow of victims into the heart of the scheme, there to be dealt with, by threat, lie or some other form of coercion.

And the front man, gradually becoming a hollow man, wonders why his new friends keep on changing, leaving, knuckling under or shutting up.

Fact is, there comes a time when a decent human being has to make the decision to take full editorial control of his own life, and make those unlikely alliances unlikely to the point of being non-existent impossibilities.

That is the only way they can rejoin the Human race.

Hey Baby-That's Rock'n'Roll

Ever had a total eclipse of the heart?
There are people (I use the term loosely again) in this world who live in an unholy alliance of popular culture and perverted science; when they would do good, evil is present.
They bring the new Dark Age a step closer every day, with their micromanagement of the lives of those they deem to be 'of interest', people who must be controlled, broken down and up, and prevented from ever, ever, doing what they want to do.

The organisation may be vast; it may be non-existent. It may be nothing more than the 'networking' of the eighties dressed up as casual dalliance alliance.
But something is there.

Every evil has a point of delivery; when we find our feelings changing, our deepest emotions blocked in and dying, our souls being changed- we must examine the premises that brought us here.
And somehow, somewhere, we will be brought back to the inevitable realisation that somebody has introduced poison to our hearts.
They are very subtle. But there is no substitute for integrity, and never will be.

No matter how much 'good' the bastards scream at us to see.

What's to be done with Homer Simpson?

Ever had a total eclipse of the heart?

Who gave us the emotional Polonium?

So That Would Mean?

I've just defined a Bromide as some outstanding influence designed to make us stop searching.

For meaning, that is.
Does this mean that a Bromide has to remain a dull, worthy, innocuous and mild-mannered influence then?

Does it Hell.
A punch in the face is the cliched and time-honoured method of blinding us.
It is used by every thug and would-be oppressor either by habit or quite by surprise, hopefully surprising us, but frequently surprising the perpetrator also.
So. The punch is one method.
And it's a Bromide.
Another is the 'friendly' warning. This is a message which almost always has nothing to back it up, but relies on, hopefully, our experience-conditioning from the times when it actually does.

Like my 'Double-Take' posting of a few months ago.
Where we acquire the virtue of courage is when we know that the danger is real, yet we persist.

If only they gave medals for living, not dying, eh?

Anyway, the whole purpose of all this low-key violence is to put us back in our boxes, to tuck us up tightly under the covers like good little bunny-rabbits, and leave these bastards the world in which to do their evil-well, not very much at all, truth be known, unless they get organised like the Nazis.
They want to be respectable cannibals.
They organise because there comes a time when there are too many people of ability forced into subservient roles by whatever predominating social bigotry exists at the time, and in rebelling against this they throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The victims become the oppressor in the moment they seek political revenge. They become their own enemies when they represent the evil which surrounds them in the pit into which they have been thrown.
Straightforward defiance, even to the point of violence, serves one main purpose, namely to equip us mentally against the trial of strength that society will impose upon us if we fail to recognise our places.
Remember this the next time some creep starts playing a team game based on you and your life.

Truly the devil finds work for idle minds.

What Is A Bromide?

Bromide.
I first came across this word outside of formal Chemistry in descriptions of additives put in military tea(allegedly) to suppress sexuality, to remove libido in all-male communities.

The second occurence was in certain works by Ayn Rand, and I found the use of this word, while precise, to be inelegant and cumbersome.

But what is a 'bromide', taken on her terms?

I can remember scenes, pictures and sounds from the 70s and 80s which are and have been regarded as iconic. Like the picture above.
The original power of the bromide was in its ability to acquire a particular meaning to the majority of the population-specifically unspecific, meaning different things to different people, but always being capable of endless interpretation.

So a bromide has to be vague. Vague and portentious, something that makes people sit up and take notice-but not noticeable itself.
It needs to make people sit up and take notice then disappear from the perceptive threshold, leaving a vacuum that the weasels of the world can fill and use.
Against us. To keep us quiet, to keep us contented, to sell us the illusion that all is going well.

So this is a bromide.
Not an illusion.
Not a neutral icon.
But something that actively makes us stop seeking.

Distinct Progress.

Early results are in.
Visits average 11 per day without tracking.
That's up from 6 before.

Living Monochrome

Of course, living here in the English People's Kingdom, when they would do evil, evil is present.
Here, they don't actually try to help.
At least, unless the help is an insult designed to make us think we had a chance but 'blew it'.
No.

Here they try to hinder.
In a country without guns, we become criminals as soon as we try to defend ourselves against the legion of oppressions that tries to batter us down every day.
We could submit; but I have a feeling that these creatures are the kind of cowardly scum who would simply be encouraged by this into ever greater atrocity.

Altogether now-"Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours, with a little understanding, we can find the perfect blend....
Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours, that's when good neighbours become good friends."

Let's face it, the North American version of help doesn't.
But it is supposed to.
The British version doesn't either.
But it is supposed to make Britain look good in North America.

Living Color

"And when they would do good - evil is present!"

That is a line from a song written at the dawn of the modern age, that abortion of bastard sentiment which is carefully hidden from the modern eyes of the modern age.

When the New Jacks(the Haters of Rule) implement their nasty little schemes, it is always avowedly for our good, our own good, and the 'good' of society.

They try to help by using the gentlest of influences to steer us in beneficial directions.
In other words, they mutilate our ambition, decide for us what is possible(permissible) and create micro-managed psychological holocausts to do the 'steering'.
In other words, they condition us by violence to accept influence by residual psychological coercion in order to include their pet psychopaths in society and rule us with latex-blooded kindness.

In the instant they help, they violate.

When they would do good, evil is present.

When they talk of 'reverse spying' when we look at them, they reveal that we are being spied on.
When they say we are 'beyond the curve' they reveal their Marxist thought on the nature of our identity.
They are products of the thirties, come to fruition now.

Octopussy-And Other Elint

So. Another tale from the nursery.
What is it about nurseries - all nurseries - that creates sick little freaks that live to exploit and harm others?
What is it that in the course of a couple of generations has replaced open and free association with secretive machination involving people of unknown ranking in their own unknown schemee of death?
The rankings are variously interchangeable; they are quite willing to let merit decide who wears, however temporarily, the mantle of leader. Merit meaning in this case the most devious and vicious formulation of what used to be known as crime.
Crimes not against mere property or person. But crimes against humanity, crimes designed to destroy the very essence of humanity in their victims and leave an apparently functioning drone in its place, something that dances to the puppet-string prompts of the secret society.
The secret society is not particularly secret.
They are very open-about some things.
They wear a smile-as long as they are creating wreckage.
They scream at us to 'choose life'-their life, the one they are prepared to tolerate seeing us live-or die!
And they think that they are free, that when we are governed by their psychological molestation(child molestation) we also are free.

They pride themselves, god help them, on being able to crack open and up the toughest of the tough.
Yet they feel safe.

Well they aren't.
More and more people are becoming wise to them.
Through experience, through deduction, as a duty; and we are able to remind them, from time to time, that their miserable little case studies and analyses of our souls amount to shit if they cross the line.

As will their safety.

Curiosity Didn't Kill The Cat.

It was murder.
Years ago in my youth, as an adventurous carpetbagger, I found myself at a disadvantage; people (again, I use the term loosely) would look at me and suffer from a common and instantaneous delusion that they understood me.
One thing they certainly did understand was that I am the sort of person who is always curious, in my case, the worst sort of curiosity.

What is the worst sort?
I'll tell you. The worst sort of curiosity is the sort which concerns itself only with those things which it finds curious itself.

In other words, interest in yourself.
The scum can appear quite human, and will tolerate any transgression, even murder, as long as you are curious about them.
But if you aren't-yet still display curiosty- then these same people will degenerate like a dully exploding rotten fruit into a state of offended hatred, whining with cheated pride, cheated by the sight of some poor bastard, usually penniless and downtrodden, who has been touched by god and is now trying to travel to some sort of worthwhile destination.
Obviously, apart from the overt hatred to be found in England, there are the cultural delusions which serve to preserve the precarious 'sanity'(at least clinically), of these creatures.
Delusions such as 'the poor will always be with us', or homilies about the duty of the virtuous to suffer, or how money can't buy you happiness; these serve to confirm the status quo which guarantees the mediocre a slice of pie while the people who cooked the pie get screwed up, screwed down, and screwed out of even a crumb of pastry.
"The status quo, that's me!"
And lo, a conformist is born.

Curious people sometimes find answers.
I don't like 'magic' shows.
Smoke and mirrors are the tools used to divert our curiosity into dead ends, so saving them the necessity for murder, which used to be so inconvenient in civilised society.

But subtlety is a dying art, as the barriers to outright oppression tumble like the walls of Jericho before the braying trumpets of bigoted 'outrage'.

There may not be any future in England's dreaming; but nightmares now, that's another matter.
And it matters everywhere.

Don't Worry....Be Stupid.

Courage.
That is all we really need.
Properly applied, courage is a close relation of stupidity.
In a world which is forever claiming to know what's good for us, we have to be brave.
We have to choose not to care what is good for us until we actually know ourselves and can believe it.
We have to be stupid.
Stupidity can get us a very long way in life-and it helps us to cheat death.
When we are no longer frightened enough to let our intelligence be driven, driven by the social swirls, whorls and sinks, then, and only then, will we begin to steer our own course through life and to see what is true and which things really matter to us.

When that happens, the daisy chains of daisy people will find themselves filled with hatred of our straight courses through the whirling dervish fever of the game, and will hate us with a passion.
In England the passion is cold and dead, because in England the pansies have been safe in their flower beds for so long that they only need to imitate indifference and ignore us, leaving us to waste away on the fringes of a land too ingrained in its wickedness to even know how much it needs us.

Fortunately we are stupid.
Stupid enough to acquire the best defence against this indifference, the ability to survive, the ability to subsist and resist the best way we can, by being their equals in ignorance.
Like the Black Economy, we flow and make our ways through the obstacle course, using our Smooth Noodle Maps to get where we belong.
Even if that is only the comfort zone of eternal denial and defiance.

And the world watches. And listens. And bides its time, all the while paying false service to its own apologists for the reign of Hell on Earth.

They say escape is impossible.They even try to pursue us into our own minds.

Be stupid.
Make your mind a jungle.
And your thoughts the guerillas.

FYI

You might notice that I've put in a little hit counter below the links.
This is still an untracked site, and there are no private statitistic collectors that I know of on Owls Aren't Wise.

Perhaps we will see if more people come when they remain anonymous.

Recommended Reading

Take a look.

Against The Grain.

Or, once upon a time in the East.

Having been told that my enemies were, bizarre as it seems, my 'friends', I found that the local pimps seemed to want me to screw their poor old Eileens like a good 'un.
It started as the obsession of one particular gangster with whom I'd had a disagreement, and spread to become some sort of sport.

The more that they tried to put Humpty together again, the more they failed.
To me, the recipient of all this 'assistance', in the form of dodgy,doggy women appearing under all circumstances and at all times of day and night, all trying to perform a honey trap, sometimes cracking up and revealing what part of town they'd come from and who sent them, the more the attention made me sick.

Unsubtle innuendo followed, the implication being that I was supposed to be pimped by these scum into being their pet porn star in some mission to attack some woman or other.
Truly I was exposed to an underworld solicitousness that was worse than emnity-and was supposed to be.

Of course, the local morons, even in Leeds, joined in with alacrity, trying to give me the cure.
Hardly a word was heard, or a tune played, without the implication being that via some magical process sticking my todger into some unesteemed fake who offered herself to the game would heal society's ills and result in my being left in peace.

I sat back grimly and with magnificent stubbornness ignored this.
Then people really did start to show concern.
Which was just as bad as the fake blandishments of the criminals.

Obviously, I like girls.
But I can sniff out a trickster a mile off, and I hate the game with all my strength and passion.

Sometimes, now, if I am relaxed, and in my favourite pub, I'll see a woman and think about getting a life.
Then the day after, and the day after that, for the first time ever(in ten years) another one will walk in and start giving me the eye as if some cunt has stuck a sign on my back, and I'll know that the bastards are trying to 'help' again.

Fact is, I'm scarred. And the essence of my scar is, that I do a Coogan's Bluff when pimps are about.I'm sure that some of these girls must have been on the level, but in any case I'm not particularly bothered.
You either find someone special, or it doesn't matter from day to day.
And if, like me you are not married, you will be ready to get to a completely free and clear situation when Dark Helmet isn't playing dollies wiht you and your life, before committing to any Sheila that walks through the door.

Concern stinks.
MYOB.
Or in my case, MYOFB!

What Goes Around, Comes Around.

I like the cut of this man's jib!

The Dirty War

Otherwise known as 'A Cell Is Born'.
International bright young thugs like to keep afloat by networking.
They network in the sense of being able to seek out kindred minds, the sort of minds that form alliances.
The reason that they form these alliances is to try and establish Deadly Dull control over their immediate social environment. Not having any sense of safety themselves, they prefer to believe that, together, they can trash the safety zone of any other person, hopefully removing that person's ability to perceive the very crimes they commit against him.

If a girl is beautiful, they will know that they have no chance; but if they actually rape her, it may be possible to convince her that she is the recipient of an overwhelming passion.

Having read the Fountainhead, and perhaps inspired by Cyrano De Bergerac's artifice, they will see a particularly fine woman as a challenge, someone that they can acquire for the group by the means of creating a single hero - one that has been practising on prostitutes - who consummates the fictional 'love' while guarded against intrusion by any number of his allies.
The woman will then be passed around the group until they finally tire of her and send her to make money on the streets, or maybe just give her an overdose.

Strangely, her original suitors will find themselves locked out, rejected, unlucky or just plain given the bum's rush.

Groups such as these are commonplace.

What is not generally known though, is that these groups pervade all levels of society, from the lowest travelling trash(not Gypsies particularly-they would slit throats if anybody tried)to the highest party apparachniks in governments, local or otherwise.

Another game variation that these people like, is the abuse of good people to disabuse them of their propensity to see the truth.
They want to blind us.
And if we see - and act - we will find that the groups mesh like a gearbox, and virtually the entire public face of societies will become an engine, an engine of our destruction.

The more we stand up to them, the worse the storm gets, until we either get killed (as a warning), or we are driven to the shelter of an insane asylum.
Which they like, since when we are there the real lunatics can rest.

Of course we can try to outlast them; real society has limits of stomach, conscience and time; they have to get on with their lives eventually, and so the gears stop turning.

But they still remain, and the man who sees will ever remain their enemy.
'I Just Had To Let It Go'.
That was Lennon's suicide note.
Once in, in forever.

Me?
I've never been interested in games. Except Wargames. And to me, 'Games Without Frontiers, War Without Tears' is a very honest song.
And these games are frequently just that; an attempt to manipulate our perceptions so that we are operated on by what we believe to be the truth as if by some kind of grotesque, non-corporeal scalpel, cutting away our consciences, destroying our convictions and leaving us forever vulnerable to the machinations (and borrowed implications of threat) that these creatures use to spice up their sold-out, jaded 'lifestyles'.

The trick, once we have witnessed the very worst sort of game, is not to confuse implicators with violators.

Oh, and by the way, the reason they want to take our guns away is because they want us to be vulnerable to the thugs. Thugs use muscle.

A Ward Of Isolation

I spent six years in the eighties and nineties without television or radio, and with very little music.

When, grudgingly, polite society welcomed me back into its folds (on the understanding that I was a very junior ne'er do well), I was able to plan and control my own re-entry into the spheres of influence of what we now call the Mainstream Media.(MSM).

There would be some more-or-less filtered product exposed to a mentally enslaved population, and they would set off chattering about it like turkeys in a shed before vaccination time.

There is a thin line between shared interest- and being led by the nose like some uber-flock of super-active sheep.
In the nineties on my return, it seemed that this line had been crossed.
Compared to then, the modern rash of conspiracy theories is overt, benign and innocent.


Then, I was rather frightened by the apparent obsession with, for example, 'Eisenhower's Driver', a girl at that time in the 40s, but who was now the covering subject for an apparently endless (and unfocused) speculatory inference about persons unknown who were even then supposed to be bringing about great changes through the turbulence of Eastern European events. People had unwittingly crossed the line whereby nothing was said in the open, to the point where nothing sensible was said at all.

It was apparent to me that some great sickness had covered the land like a plague, a massive, shared delusion that consumed the imaginations and aspirations of what was then the last gasp of a cohesive society.
And it came to pass that I did not know whether the delusion(at that time) was mine or theirs.
They were feverish in their desire to bury me under a welter of vicious lies, hatred and plain bullshit.
I simply did my job, fixed up my car and listened to the Stranglers('Peasant In The Big Shitty') while attempting to filter and make sense of all the televisual overload.
I'd given up on the radio;the pure truth was that I was the victim of cultural generalities, the muted witness to the atrocities which were being perpetrated on an unsuspecting populace by the MSM and stirred up by those few who could tolerate no departure; I won't say that they put me in a mental hospital; they drove me mad first, then had an excuse to put me in a mental hospital.

I simply lost my tolerance for the myriad games, their Argots, and their consequences.

I was caught in the culture clash of reality versus fake, and when fake has the upper hand, murder is always on the cards.

A Ward Of Isolation

I spent six years in the eighties and nineties without television or radio, and with very little music.

When, grudgingly, polite society welcomed me back into its folds (on the understanding that I was a very junior ne'er do well), I was able to plan and control my own re-entry into the spheres of influence of what we now call the Mainstream Media.(MSM).

There would be some more-or-less filtered product exposed to an enslaved population, and they would set off chattering about it like turkeys in a shed before vaccination time.

There is a thin line between shared interest- and being led by the nose like some uber-flock of super-active sheep.
In the nineties on my return, it seemed that this line had been crossed.
Compared to then, the modern rash of conspiracy theories is overt, benign and innocent.


Then, I was rather frightened by the apparent obsession with, for example, 'Eisenhower's Driver', a girl at that time in the 40s, but who was now the covering subject for an apparently endless (and unfocused) speculatory inference about persons unknown who were even then supposed to be bringing about great changes through the turbulence of Eastern European events. People had unwittingly crossed the line whereby nothing was said in the open, to the point where nothing sensible was said at all.

It was apparent to me that some great sickness had covered the land like a plague, a massive, shared delusion that consumed the imaginations and aspirations of what was then the last gasp of a cohesive society.
And it came to pass that I did not know whether the delusion(at that time) was mine or theirs.
They were feverish in their desire to bury me under a welter of vicious lies, hatred and plain bullshit.
I simply did my job, fixed up my car and listened to the Stranglers('Peasant In The Big Shitty') while attempting to filter and make sense of all the televisual overload.
I'd given up on the radio;the pure truth was that I was the victim of cultural generalities, the muted witness to the atrocities which were being perpetrated on an unsuspecting populace by the MSM and stirred up by those few who could tolerate no departure; I won't say that they put me in a mental hospital; they drove me mad first, then had an excuse to put me in a mental hospital.

I simply lost my tolerance for the myriad games, their Argots, and their consequences.

I was caught in the culture clash of reality versus fake, and when fake has the upper hand, murder is always on the cards.

What Do You Want To Know?

Are you tested?
And have you been tested?

Into every garden a little rain must fall.
Still, if you found that a storm of acid rain fell each time you went to the back door, night or day, year in year out, you might reasonably deduce that some determination by force was taking place.


Paranoia is one thing.
But crass stupidity reaches levels whereby continuing denial only degrades and demeans us all.

We are forced to conclude that there are people-I use the term loosely- people who seem to live for one purpose and one purpose only; namely, to evaluate our every move and analyse our (ordinary) behaviour, seeking through their demented obsessive-compulsive persecutions to relieve whatever demons control their imaginings by proving once and for all that we are safe.

They break our marriages to prove that our love can be destroyed; they manipulate our social surroundings to send us subliminal influences.
They don't just hide in the shadows; they try to convince us that there are no such things as shadows, and nothing to hide.

There may be many groups of such people; in competition with one another, in alliance, in co-existent neutrality.

But in the New World Order, they have all been busy trying to carve out their new roles, their continuing spheres of influence on which all can agree.
They were tolerated during the Cold War, possibly because they rendered what appeared to be no small service in the destruction of the Soviet Union, but more likely they jumped on the gravy train that was being driven by the real agents of change, and now they live on sentimentality while Rome burns and the rump of Russian aggression resurges.

Meanwhile, what of the individuals who's lives they destroy?
Well, we sometimes pretend that we belong to other, even more powerful groups, which frightens them.
We are only pretending.

Of course.

But here we still are, eh?

And of course, in the land of the (untracked) blog, who knows who and where the consumers of our truths are?

We are members-of the group called the public. And the public is not always useless.
As the Causescus could vouch.
Or not.

The fact is, 'dangerous liaisons' is the realm of cod psychology, and it is in order to study us and learn more about the truth, so making themselves more dangerous, that they continue to study us with their insane patience.

Not surprisingly, they even get bored with themselves.
Hallmark trait?
The surprise 'conflict'.
Believing that they know what constitutes our 'values'(they have read our books), they attempt to face us always with the intolerable.
They always leave an escape; an alleged choice that to take would destroy us entirely, a choice so absurd as to be a monochrome outrage, something that in all honesty isn't supposed to be an escape at all, but a subversion of our consciences which permits them to implant the seed of failure guilt in us for 'not trying hard enough'.
The ultimate joke is to set us in competition with their chosen ones. Obviously, these reach our objectives by their rules before we can struggle through, and so, yet again, we learn our lesson.


Except the lesson is this:-

It's all fixed!

The Game's The Thing.

So why doesn't the whole world rise up in furious rebellion against this system of checks and checks?
Why is it that so many people 'play the game'?

Well, the game is supposed to be binding to all sides, and therein lies the devil; the illusion is, that while the people at the top of the tree may think they rule, they not only subborn but are subborned by the other players.
And of course, once you learn the rules, and abide by them, there is every chance that you will prosper under the safety of the fear, the fear of living outside the rules.


By such means the arbitrariness of such rules grows to replace Law with Order, leading to a magical rose garden of obedient serfs.


But wait.

Who's that laughing?
Why, it's the Deadly Dulls.
Because the rules provide no real guarantee. And they know that rules were made to be broken.
They know it's only a game.

Which means that the game can be replaced by an outburst of naked violence at any time, at which the children may well go to the police, but not knowing how to do it, they are disappointed by the response.
Still, as long as they don't, enough of them will be left alone long enough to feel their false security blanket wrap around their minds again.

Don't believe me?
Look at Russia.
Look at the shootings, the poisonings, always of people who don't want to play the Russian version of the game, even in foreign countries.

Think of this next time somebody demands your disarmament.

The reason that I am poor is because I don't play. I wouldn't know how. It used to be a moral thing.
But when they won't let you feel, it just becomes a matter of staying alive. And eventually you learn that no game gives you that.

How To Be Officially Insane.

Watch out for the game.
The game's the thing.
Play the game.
The game hints at things nobody should know.
They should accept the hint, then shy away in fear for their lives.
The fear should be a mortal dread that knows no reason or cause; but it should be there nevertheless.
By such means we are controlled.
By such means we are shielded.
By such means we are blinded.
And in our blindspots walk the Deadly Dulls, the creatures that think that they have a better hint than us.
They are controlled too.
They are controlled by need. By drugs. By fear, too.
Yet they feel superior because they can move around our perceptions without registering.

Because we have all been blinkered.

When the haters of rule want to make our lives into a sick joke, they commit their forces and role-playing gamesters to violations so obvious that we can't miss.
They try to teach us lessons.
We can either fight back, or we can scurry back to our burrows.

If we ever do fight back, they will pursue us to our burrows and blitz us till we burst.
But we don't all burst.

Some of us see. And think. And realise. Maybe we'd even feel, given half a chance.

But we know.
And then everybody gets scared. Because Number One sees all and is the maddest of the lot.
And if we see Number One, we might become hyperactive.
So we have to recognise when to stop.

But they don't. They never stop.
Their fear knows no limit. Their fear turns to obsession.
And the persecution goes on.
Aided and abetted by the little people, the people who are used to the comfort zone.

They are the blasted woodland around the blackened stump of every individual that was ever singled out for the treatment. They are the lightning that strikes in simulation of omnipotence, the actuality of secrets sustained by group loyalty and violence.

And we who have learned to see without seeing, know without knowing and hate without malice,
we are declared insane.




Like Anatoly Scharansky.

How To Be Officially Insane.

Watch out for the game.
The game's the thing.
Play the game.
The game hints at things nobody should know.
They should accept the hint, then shy away in fear for their lives.
The fear should be a mortal dread that knows no reason or cause; but it should be there nevertheless.
By such means we are controlled.
By such means we are shielded.
By such means we are blinded.
And in our blindspots walk the Deadly Dulls, the creatures that think that they have a better hint than us.
They are controlled too.
They are controlled by need. By drugs. By fear, too.
Yet they feel superior because they can move around our perceptions without registering.

Because we have all been blinkered.

When the haters of rule want to make our lives into a sick joke, they commit their forces and role-playing gamesters to violations so obvious that we can't miss.
They try to teach us lessons.
We can either fight back, or we can scurry back to our burrows.

If we ever do fight back, they will pursue us to our burrows and blitz us till we burst.
But we don't all burst.

Some of us see. And think. And realise. Maybe we'd even feel, given half a chance.

But we know.
And then everybody gets scared. Because Number One sees all and is the maddest of the lot.
And if we see Number One, we might become hyperactive.
So we have to recognise when to stop.

But they don't. They never stop.
Their fear knows no limit. Their fear turns to obsession.
And the persecution goes on.
Aided and abetted by the little people, the people who are used to the comfort zone.

They are the blasted woodland around the blackened stump of every individual that was ever singled out for the treatment. They are the lightning that strikes in simulation of omnipotence, the actuality of secrets sustained by group loyalty and violence.

And we who have learned to see without seeing, know without knowing and hate without malice,
we are declared insane.




Like Anatol Scharansky.

It's At Times Like This I Wish I'd Listened To What My Mother Used To Say.

I don't know what she said unfortunately. I never listened.
But I remember all too well the paranoia of my family; when I encountered mental difficulties back in '92, I lost my job.
I used to get drunk in towns all over England.
I used to imitate-utterly convincingly-all sorts of people who coincidentally spoke a variety of English.
But the money would always run out and I would find myself once more pinned in my pig-pen, unable to move, paralysed by the weight of the unseen malice all around.

I wanted to escape.
Even from myself.

My father was slaughtered by the opinion of a single shrink, one which comforted his prejudices and criticisms of my conduct; mother, ever the victim of authority/trust/masculine role models, fell into obedient place. Hell, she even started going to 'schizophrenic support groups', which wondered what she was doing there when I was described.

I was supposed to forget everything. The drugs were supposed to kill my mind and leave ashen peace.
They didn't. But I am not in difficulty anymore, I grant them that.
In 1999 the shrinks were pressuring me to find a girlfriend.
My employers were pressuring me to take the drugs.
The problem was not that I was delusional.I was, but they didn't know. No. The problem was that I had been to Canada for a whole month, including two days in upstate New York.

My mind had certainly been raging; it had taken longer for me to get to America than it took to put two men on the moon.
I'd sat down in the gardens in the Sun in Niagara(USA) and felt at peace; my aunt was a psychiatrist, and when I was staying with her in Canada she noticed a very sharp improvement in me.
Without drugs.
When I got home?
I more or less told everybody to leave me alone.
Paranoid man-of-action father, he stole my passport.(Paranoia rising).Then one day I came back from the laundry to find three police cars waiting for me.

Responsible adult, did I hear someone say?
The bullshit prejudices saw me locked up for two weeks in hospital.
I simply had to comply; but I was most amused by the shrink lying and saying I'd been talking to myself.
They were not amused when I threatend to sue them for wrongful imprisonment and various other infractions of code.
They let me go.

The 'episode'(theirs, not mine)was funny in parts. I kept asking for an escort so I could go and pick up some music tapes from home; they said they couldn't spare anybody.
So one day I smuggled a dinner knife up my sleeve(just like in Doctor No), and used it to pry off the trunking cover for the electronic fire door lock.
I pulled the wires out, shorted the entire fire system, and went to sleep. At four in the morning I pushed open the door, and went and got my tapes.

I was back before they called the police.
(For some reason the loonies were afraid of me-maybe there was a Dracula thing going on?)

So anyway, I had my music.
And they let me go after two weeks when the standard incarceration was three months.
I went back to work.

Now, back in 1991 I had been unable to distinguish between general outrages and specific persecution, and had felt that people I loved were the targets of this evil, the means to make me suffer.
Compliance would be impossible, since I had been living apart for so long, but the powerful would not be able to comprehend this.
My previous girlfriend had returned to Europe.
Much of the pressure to which I had been subjected was intended to evince the identity of others I knew, potential victims of rape or other violence, people who could be used to hurt me.

In 1991 I could see it coming. I wrote to my friends, telling them to have nothing to do with anyone claiming to know me.
In 1992 I even went to Rotterdam to try and find her. Whether I did or didn't is my secret.
The money ran out. I was deported back to England. I hung around the port for a week then went back to my dissection slab of a flat.

But I found out after they had weened me onto official drugs that she was indeed safe.
The messages(psychological poison) were unconvincing and had the flavour of frustration.

Whether they were real or not, she was out of their reach.

And today, although she is married and busy and unaware of me, I know she is safe.
I know that whatever storm wrecked me did not touch her; fate has been kinder, or my prescience worked, or I'm just an irrelevance.

But the bastards didn't get to anybody else through me.

Ils ne passant pas!

It's At Times Like This I Wish I'd Listened To What My Mother Used To Say.

I don't know what she said unfortunately. I never listened.
But I remember all too well the paranoia of my family; when I encountered mental difficulties back in '92, I lost my job.
I used to get drunk in towns all over England.
I used to imitate-utterly convincingly-all sorts of people who coincidentally spoke a variety of English.
But the money would always run out and I would find myself once more pinned in my pig-pen, unable to move, paralysed by the weight of the unseen malice all around.

I wanted to escape.
Even from myself.

My father was slaughtered by the opinion of a single shrink, one which comforted his prejudices and criticisms of my conduct; mother, ever the victim of authority/trust/masculine role models, fell into obedient place. Hell, she even started going to 'schizophrenic support groups', which wondered what she was doing there when I was described.

I was supposed to forget everything. The drugs were supposed to kill my mind and leave ashen peace.
They didn't. But I am not in difficulty anymore, I grant them that.
In 1999 the shrinks were pressuring me to find a girlfriend.
My employers were pressuring me to take the drugs.
The problem was not that I was delusional.I was, but they didn't know. No. The problem was that I had been to Canada for a whole month, including two days in upstate New York.

My mind had certainly been raging; it had taken longer for me to get to America than it took to put two men on the moon.
I'd sat down in the gardens in the Sun in Niagara(USA) and felt at peace; my aunt was a psychiatrist, and when I was staying with her in Canada she noticed a very sharp improvement in me.
Without drugs.
When I got home?
I more or less told everybody to leave me alone.
Paranoid man-of-action father, he stole my passport.(Paranoia rising).Then one day I came back from the laundry to find three police cars waiting for me.

Responsible adult, did I hear someone say?
The bullshit prejudices saw me locked up for two weeks in hospital.
I simply had to comply; but I was most amused by the shrink lying and saying I'd been talking to myself.
They were not amused when I threatend to sue them for wrongful imprisonment and various other infractions of code.
They let me go.

The 'episode'(theirs, not mine)was funny in parts. I kept asking for an escort so I could go and pick up some music tapes from home; they said they couldn't spare anybody.
So one day I smuggled a dinner knife up my sleeve(just like in Doctor No), and used it to pry off the trunking cover for the electronic fire door lock.
I pulled the wires out, shorted the entire fire system, and went to sleep. At four in the morning I pushed open the door, and went and got my tapes.

I was back before they called the police.
(For some reason the loonies were afraid of me-maybe there was a Dracula thing going on?)

So anyway, I had my music.
And they let me go after two weeks when the standard incarceration was three months.
I went back to work.

Now, back in 1991 I had been unable to distinguish between general outrages and specific persecution, and had felt that people I loved were the targets of this evil, the means to make me suffer.
Compliance would be impossible, since I had been living apart for so long, but the powerful would not be able to comprehend this.
My previous girlfriend had returned to Europe.
Much of the pressure to which I had been subjected was intended to evince the identity of others I knew, potential victims of rape or other violence, people who could be used to hurt me.

In 1991 I could see it coming. I wrote to my friends, telling them to have nothing to do with anyone claiming to know me.
In 1992 I even went to Rotterdam to try and find her. Whether I did or didn't is my secret.
The money ran out. I was deported back to England. I hung around the port for a week then went back to my dissection slab of a flat.

But I found out after they had weened me onto official drugs that she was indeed safe.
The messages(psychological poison) were unconvincing and had the flavour of frustration.

Whether they were real or not, she was out of their reach.

And today, although she is married and busy and unaware of me, I know she is safe.
I know that whatever storm wrecked me did not touch her; fate has been kinder, or my prescience worked, or I'm just an irrelevance.

But the bastards didn't get to anybody else through me.

Ils ne passant pas!

It's At Times Like This I Wish I'd Listened To What My Mother Used To Say.

I don't know what she said unfortunately. I never listened.
But I remember all too well the paranoia of my family; when I encountered mental difficulties back in '92, I lost my job.
I used to get drunk in towns all over England.
I used to imitate-utterly convincingly-all sorts of people who coincidentally spoke a variety of English.
But the money would always run out and I would find myself once more pinned in my pig-pen, unable to move, paralysed by the weight of the unseen malice all around.

I wanted to escape.
Even from myself.

My father was slaughtered by the opinion of a single shrink, one which comforted his prejudices and criticisms of my conduct; mother, ever the victim of authority/trust/masculine role models, fell into obedient place. Hell, she even started going to 'schizophrenic support groups', which wondered what she was doing there when I was described.

I was supposed to forget everything. The drugs were supposed to kill my mind and leave ashen peace.
They didn't. But I am not in difficulty anymore, I grant them that.
In 1999 the shrinks were pressuring me to find a girlfriend.
My employers were pressuring me to take the drugs.
The problem was not that I was delusional.I was, but they didn't know. No. The problem was that I had been to Canada for a whole month, including two days in upstate New York.

My mind had certainly been raging; it had taken longer for me to get to America than it took to put two men on the moon.
I'd sat down in the gardens in the Sun in Niagara(USA) and felt at peace; my aunt was a psychiatrist, and when I was staying with her in Canada she noticed a very sharp improvement in me.
Without drugs.
When I got home?
I more or less told everybody to leave me alone.
Paranoid man-of-action father, he stole my passport.(Paranoia rising).Then one day I came back from the laundry to find three police cars waiting for me.

Responsible adult, did I hear someone say?
The bullshit prejudices saw me locked up for two weeks in hospital.
I simply had to comply; but I was most amused by the shrink lying and saying I'd been talking to myself.
They were not amused when I threatend to sue them for wrongful imprisonment and various other infractions of code.
They let me go.

The 'episode'(theirs, not mine)was funny in parts. I kept asking for an escort so I could go and pick up some music tapes from home; they said they couldn't spare anybody.
So one day I smuggled a dinner knife up my sleeve(just like in Doctor No), and used it to pry off the trunking cover for the electronic fire door lock.
I pulled the wires out, shorted the entire fire system, and went to sleep. At four in the morning I pushed open the door, and went and got my tapes.

I was back before they called the police.
(For some reason the loonies were afraid of me-maybe there was a Dracula thing going on?)

So anyway, I had my music.
And they let me go after two weeks when the standard incarceration was three months.
I went back to work.

Now, back in 1991 I had been unable to distinguish between general outrages and specific persecution, and had felt that people I loved were the targets of this evil, the means to make me suffer.
Compliance would be impossible, since I had been living apart for so long, but the powerful would not be able to comprehend this.
My previous girlfriend had returned to Europe.
Much of the pressure to which I had been subjected was intended to evince the identity of others I knew, potential victims of rape or other violence, people who could be used to hurt me.

In 1991 I could see it coming. I wrote to my friends, telling them to have nothing to do with anyone claiming to know me.
In 1992 I even went to Rotterdam to try and find her. Whether I did or didn't is my secret.
The money ran out. I was deported back to England. I hung around the port for a week then went back to my dissection slab of a flat.

But I found out after they had weened me onto official drugs that she was indeed safe.
The messages(psychological poison) were unconvincing and had the flavour of frustration.

Whether they were real or not, she was out of their reach.

And today, although she is married and busy and unaware of me, I know she is safe.
I know that whatever storm wrecked me did not touch her; fate has been kinder, or my prescience worked, or I'm just an irrelevance.

But the bastards didn't get to anybody else through me.

Ils ne passant pas!

Wipe Out!

A marvel of organisational skill was my interview fest of a few weeks ago.
I had a week's holiday-five interviews in five days.

Total wash out.

But I'm getting the hang of this one. I applied for five fresh jobs this morning on my specially tuned internet search engine.
I had three-out-of-five phone calls today.
That's a sixty percent hit rate, which is phenomenal for internet activity.

Shortly I'll be working again and in a position to rebuild my reserves.

Which will be welcome.

Goddamn Blair

I visited my favourite uncle this weekend.
He is in his eighties and flew over 70 missions over Germany in WW2, winning the DSO and DFC;he was shot up several times, and he and his crew saved each other's lives in crashes on landing at the home base.
Sadly his crew was sent off without him when he was in hospital, and all killed.

In the sixties Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caught up with him, but that's another story.

He turned to his wife and remarked about the fact that the Royal Marines killed in the 2003 Iraq campaign were given an official state burial with much fanfare, but had to be buried again privately when all the remains were finally returned.
They were buried twice because Blair's government demanded pomp and circumstance.

They wanted to put a patriotic spin on death and have an excuse to wear their best bib and tucker to the funerals while arranging their facial expressions for TV.

Incredibly, my uncle's eyes were moist and his voice was choked.

Congratulations Blair.
In the name of lying, you have violated an old man's conscience and made a genuine hero cry.

The Times They Aren't A Changing.

Shortly I will remove my ambitions from the realm of 'please' to the realm of 'yes'.
If I haven't found an employer who isn't unwilling to take me on as anything more than a driver, I will start making money as an independent man of affairs.


Talking of which, I have to say that I am not the only Black Sheep in the family; my step-relations are very young, and very ambitious, possibly perversely so.
The females seem to hold me in some sort of regard, possibly because they like tilting at windmills.
Obviously they are far too young.
But they are getting older and I am probably going to have to be quite firm.
One already has a consort older than me, but that is not the point.
My obscene pride holds me aloof from such doorstep shenannigans, but being a mean character these years past also means I am liable to change my mind just to prove a point.

Which point will probably be the original one, taking us both back to square one.

Meantime I have plans.
I am saving my coffee money for any contingency that may arise, such as a holiday in Vancouver.
Never been.
Hear good things.
Plenty of pastures fresh to be explored in that neck of the woods.

But I've got to say, one of the reasons I may have been rejected for employment so often is this blog(and others) which have presented a rootin', tootin', shootin' fightin' view of past situations, giving ammunition to any secret detractor(or open) who may have wished to frighten prospective employers away.

I have friends who have done the same thing, and they are similarly confined to a not-so-comfortable 'comfort zone', unable to progress or to stop.

As a result I have privatised the archive, so that the documentary evidence serves me and only me as an aide-memoire.

On the plus side, I did some work with Windows XP today, and was really very impressed at the ease with which a screwdriver, a few old bits and a phone line could be used to get someone operational again on the internet.

As far as unitary engineering is concerned, personal computers are becoming a mature and excellent technology.

Drinking To Absent Friends

This is the last remnant of a pint of Kelham Island 'Easy Rider' beer.
Brewed in the famous Leicester Squares according to an old Central Swiss formula.

Delicious to the last drop.

My Old Dad

And other fascinating fictions.
He resides in Leeds, Yorkshire.
In 1991 I came home from an extended stay abroad.
I'd just broken up with my third girlfriend in as many years, and was trying to get settled down back in the North.

I stayed with dad for about four months while building up a deposit on a flat.

Thing is, I'd been living out East with no TV or radio to speak of, and I was not au-fait with the idiom of the day.

It was a struggle.
I tried to confide.

What I got was the free pass to paranoia and delusion;never a day went by without being asked whether I 'had noticed anything' when confronted by everyday sights, as if there was anything to notice.
It was almost as if I was being subjected to subtle psychological grilling in order to discover something.
There was nothing to discover, but the lunatic delusions persist to this day.

Not in me, but in the fact that there are still people who actually believe I am 'Canadian', or there is a 'dark woman' waiting to take me away from my family, and of course, the old madman's refrain from ages past, 'what about the money', and 'what are you going to do with the money'?

I have been alleged to be mad, with some cause, but the catalogue of insanity from those around me at that time was enough to force me to reject all contact with the disgusting delusion that bound me to Yorkshire life.

When you couldn't go into the Prince Of Wales pub without hearing the same tune being played on the juke box whenever you entered, week in, week out,or the Templar Pub by the ABC Cinema, and any of the other thousands of digs from an apparently closed community which has been subjected to a false dawn of lies by some unknown malice, in order to persecute lost sons, outcasts, or anybody that wasn't there when the web was spun, in order to sew a field of hatred, then you start to build a rage, a rage that knows no bounds.

And has no target.

At this stage it is quite possible that the malicious achieve their ends, and your mind becomes warped.

Their cure is confinment and drugs.

My cure is escape. Even if only back to the wilderness.

Sure, and their games might have obscured some central importance at the time , and maybe not.
But the persistence of persecution of the individual, blasting forests of individuals aside or into compliant flatness in order to find the one, that is the malice, the cold calculation that damns the whole effort to hell in the eyes of any rational world left anywhere.

In the face of this, toughness is not enough.

I was not tough enough at any rate.
But I will be taking my chances again, on the far side, with or without friends, with or without family, and doubting forever the judgement and perception of all around me.

But without questioning it.

I Mean....

"I always knew it."

Meanwhile...

back at the Potemkin centre...

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

And So It Is Written

As Ayn Rand's character Howard said:
"the man who invented the wheel was promptly stretched on the rack he taught his brothers to make...."
Our friends in the North could probably do with a little remedial reading, eh?

Or, as one might have said of them, "been there, done that."Provided, of course, one had actually read the book with his eyes open.

Times Are Hard.

But not all that hard.

Sometimes...

Sometimes I just have to admit that I don't really know or understand what is going on.

In which case why worry?

Goodnight.
I hope to have good news this coming week.

On R&R From Keeping Russia

This warm scene is of a pint of Deuchars IPA in a Bomber glass.
Splendid on a quiet,cold afternoon in Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, nothing to report.
Except this:if you ever meet the people at London Ontario, do not be confused or misled by their apparent friendliness and enthusiasm.
They are not friendly.
They are simply trying to impose mediocrity by whatever means possible, details of which I will be happy to supply privately.

I told them a pack of lies, which they repeated and amplified in an attempt to damage.
I believe that the problem was growing for a while. The source and motivation are amusing and difficult, but I imagine that there are ways of dealing with difficult people everywhere, and I am the first to admit that I am difficult.
Missed again, I'm happy to say.

Come One Come All......

I've been very busy the last week or so, and this means I haven't been blogging.
This will probably continue, but in the meantime I have removed all logging so that this is now an unmonitored site.

That means anybody can visit and nobody will pay any attention.

If you want to mark your visit by leaving a comment of some description, you're welcome to, but, as I said, for the time being there won't be too much going on here.

Unless, of course, I finally get that dream job, in which case I'll let any readers know of new arrangements.

Final Evidence.

This is a David Brown agricultural tractor .The initials 'DB' were applied to the Aston Martin sports cars after David Brown bought the company.
The current Aston Martin is the DB9, but as it is produced by Ford, the 'DB' is rather meaningless.

A Week In Politics

The Great British Worker!

I believe the card game is called 'Crash'. Very appropriate for transport workers.

If you have a lisp, you might think that a Schindlers Lift is connected to Steven Spielberg in some way.....
Finally, an example of 'joined up government'.
This bridge is over what was the line from Leeds to Tadcaster and York via Wetherby and Thorner.
Note that Wetherby and Thorner are now dormitories for Leeds despite the closure of the line in the sixties; never mind that Tadcaster has three breweries.
What I want (as an engineer) to draw attention to is the bridge span.
It is newish welded steel, and must have been erected at some cost and difficulty when the line was already scheduled to be closed.
They could have just infilled the cutting.

Paper Scoops Saturday

I always regard software as a somewhat formalised type of invention, rather like Classical Music.
But it is a form of invention.
It does new things in novel ways, linking intellectual produce directly to results.

Not so, says the report in Saturday's Financial Times.
British courts have ruled that software devices cannot be patented.
Apparently it is allegedly all down to the European Patent Convention, which excludes 'programmes for computers'.

So I guess I'll publish the code for my inventions sometime, so that any bum can use them for nothing.

Also in the FT, the Lib-Dems may have to repay £2.4 million to Michael Brown as the electoral watchdog is considering information that will make his donation 'impermissible'.

Meanwhile in Saturday's Yorkshire Post there is a report that the government is arbitrarily seizing property belonging to relatives of Abu Hamza in order to recoup the £200,000 costs of his unsuccessful court action to stay in the UK.
Apparently, they can kick him out, but the guilt extends to more fortunate relatives who are allowed to stay.
Nice little earner.
About as rational and righteous as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
But not the Boston variety.

Building.

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See me and the boys we don't like it
So were getting up and going down

Hiding low looking right to left
If you see us coming I think it's best
To move away do you hear what I say
From under my breath

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
Some of us won't survive
See the boys and me mean business
Bustin' out dead or alive

I can hear the hound dogs on my trail
All hell breaks loose, alarm and sirens wail
Like the game if you lose
Go to jail

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So woman stay with a friend

You know it's safer

Breakout!

Tonight there's gonna be a breakout
Into the city zones
Don't you dare to try and stop us
No one could for long

Searchlight on my trail
Tonight's the night all systems fail
Hey you good lookin' female
Come here!

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be trouble
So woman stay with a friend

There Is Hope!

I've just seen a CTV-produced film called 'Plague City-SARS In Toronto'.

No punches were pulled.The ruling administration was portrayed as lying, incompetent, corrupt and deeply, deeply evil.
The health professionals( who were the biggest death demographic from SARS) were, fairly, portrayed in accordance with the facts, namely that they volunteered to go on working extended shifts against a lethal disease that nobody understood.

The chief nurse in Toronto Memorial was portrayed by one of my favourite actresses, Kari Matchett, who played many characters as an ensemble cast member on 17 episodes of Nero Wolfe.
My guess is she didn't need too much persuasion to represent the case of the health workers.

How anybody can seriously say that Canada is a sick culture when this kind of film is being produced, is indicative of a somewhat jaded outlook.
And an unrepresentative one at that.

The Calm Before The Storm.

I treated myself to a beer today.
I'd earned it.
Today I obtained some free time, and next week I will be taking four interviews, two of which are second interviews.
With a bit of luck, this beastly, beastly war will finally start going my way.

Oddly enough it's around the 64th anniversary of the Battle of El-Alamein.

The beer is an Archer's Autumn Mist.
The veranda of the pub looks out across Wharfedale; the River Wharfe is about a mile away.

Meanwhile....

A cold one was waiting for me in the pub close to paradise.

No.
It isn't Guinness.
It is an Archer's Dark Mild, a 3.5% Porter beer which relies on burnt malt flavour rather than alcoholic strength.
An ideal sipping beer on an Autumn afternoon miles from home base.

Of course, Guinness was copied from traditional English Porter-type beers by the Irish and always brewed in London until last year, when the West Acton brewery was closed in favour of concentrating in Dublin alone.

But Guinness, though tolerable sometimes, is merely a beer done in the style of porters.

Whoa, man, it's too much like EFFORT!

So.
On Friday I had yet another interview.
I was not looking forward to this one; I am a serious engineer, and the potential employer was a games company.
In fact, when directed to their website, I froze in horror, having never seen such a childish, facetious site.

But my agent has worked hard for me, so I did the polite thing, got into my rejuvenated car and drove down the motorway to the appointment.

When I got there, there was nowhere to park at first until I hunted around.
Reception contained about twenty or thirty takeaway pizzas and cans of coca cola.

Let's face it.
'Everybody knows' that to keep programmers happy you need to give them pizza and coke, right?

I mean, cowabunga, man.

So there were all these kids, being treated like battery chickens in tee-shirts, and I was supposed to join?
I think not.
I tried the technical test.
Frankly I have only ever used hexadecimal numbers as constant values in the implementations of C API functions going back to MFC 4.2, so I was not particularly inclined or able to demonstrate hexadecimal arithmetic.
Likewise I didn't feel like doing a C-implementation of RLE on a big number.
Especially on paper.
If god meant us to write programmes on paper he wouldn't have given us IDEs.

Then there was the usual question about Assembly language, which I have never claimed as a skill and so should never have been asked about.

The questions about which computer games were my favourites were hopeless of course, as I don't really 'do' games.

And so I came home laughing and rather wishing I'd hooked up with the beautiful mature blonde who was hanging around me in the hotel I'd stopped for lunch at.

But hey.
I had an interview to go to, right?

Talk about embarrassing. I felt humiliated to have considered it for even a moment.

Paper Scoops Saturday

In Saturday's Financial Times: The UK has the highest proportional property taxes in the world, at 3.35% GDP.

Oft complaining Canada comes in third, at 2.72%.
Oddly, the USA is second at 2.79%.

The Netherlands is way down at 0.86%, just a little more than Italy.

Austria is 0.24%.


And from the pages of the Yorkshire Post('Yorkshire's National Newspaper'), we have a column written by one Clare Beckett, a doctoral teacher of 'social policy' at Bradford University; she claims that 'Thatcher was the first woman prime minister in a Western Democracy.Ever'.

Were you to mention Golda Meier, Beckett would probably emit noises to the effect that Israel is not a Western Democracy but some sort of failed criminal state; so no surprises there, eh?

Needless to say that the subversion of reason is such that she can believe herself to be right when she is just spectacularly wrong.

China-Red In Tooth And Claw.

So what if 3000 Chinese Christian families pool their savings and build a church.
So what if the Communists send 500 police and a large paramilitary force and destroy the church on the day of consecration.
So what if the Communists are sending Christians to forced labour camps.
So what if Chinese journalists are punished for reporting these facts?
Never mind.
'China' says that they have religious freedom; especially since the 80 million persecuted Christians outnumber the Communist Cabal.
China says-because China silences anybody who tells the truth.

You've Got To Laugh,eh?

So this housewife is going out; she's been blissfully married for twenty years, and she goes out to do the shopping.
Opposite the supermarket is a trendy winebar.
Who does she see but hubby carrying on with a young blonde?

She keeps quiet.
She goes home.
Prepares the evening meal.
Along comes hubby.
She says nothing. He eats the meal.Has a couple of beers.Catches the game on TV.
He goes to bed and sleeps.

She goes upstairs in a white rage, with the carving knife.
She grabs his dingle in her left hand and swipes it off with one cut.
He wakes up screaming and shouting wildly.

She panics and runs downstairs and gets into the car and drives.


She goes past a Patrol Car doing eighty, and they set off in hot pursuit. She is still holding hubby's dingle.
They follow her onto the motorway.
"Doesn't look like she's going to stop sarge!"
"Don't worry son, we'll catch her!"

She notices she still has the dingle in her left hand, so she opens the Sun roof and throws it out. She sees it strike the police car's windscreen.

"She's still not slowing down, sarge!"
"Never mind that!Did you see the size of the prick on that fly?"

Feck! Arse! Gurrrls! Drink!

Hello Sorehead. A little feedback from the interview in Great Yarmouth on Thursday. They said you8 came across as a very clever guy....

Drink!

...but they had a candidate who had already done the job as a contractor.....

Arse!

....and they felt that you didn't quite gel on a personal basis....

Feck off!


...oh.Alright.


Feck!Feck!Feck!Drink!

What's This Look Like?

So U2 is performing in Glasgow;
Bono asks for absolute quiet.

He gets it.

Then, slowly, he starts to clap his hands.

"Every time I clap my hands a child dies in Africa!"

Somebody at the back shouts:"So stop fucking doing it then!"

On R&R From Keepin' Russia.

Work finished for the week;


So here it was. A pint of Theakston Best Bitter.
Followed by?A pint of London Pride.Fuller's London Pride, brewed in Chiswick on the South Bank of the River; I used to go walking along the river bank at low tide where you could see the occasional freshwater oyster, and the District Line trains crossing the Richmond Bridge.
This is what it looked like when it settled; the Theakstons hadn't been a particularly good one, but today's Fuller's was a winner.
Meanwhile, youth meets age when this gentleman petted the pub's baby dog.
The dog had a limp due to playing too rough with the locals.

Thought So...

As soon as I had heard that North Korea had set off an atom bomb, especially underground, I thought that the particular timing was too good to be true.

As with all Soviet-style 'propaganda coups', this was probably staged to create the illusion of 'surprise' progress into any particular field of endeavour, by hook or by crook.

As it turns out, it was by Crook!