Stop press

And the end of the post below was meant to read "so if anyone is a hugely rich and powerful movie producer email me." Thank you. Sorry about the confusion. My inept HTML skills let me down once again...

Forgive me, for I have sinned

How could I have neglected my blog so? I am an awful human being, and shall try to rectify the situation in the very near future, in case anyone actually ever reads this tripe. So, rants ahoy, as we journey back into the world of the world wide blog.

I've actually spent the last few months writing screenplays, so if anyone is a hugely rich and powerful movie producer 0 comments  

Speak back to me!

Oh, and this is my new email address...Please use it.

In case anyone is reading...

As regular readers will have noticed, there has been a conspicuous lack of activity on this site over the last few weeks. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

The job ended, you see. The wonderful job with the people I loved with all of us striving for the same thing, which looked like it was working. The corporate world decided it didn't like us, so we were squished. Not that I'm bitter. Oh no.

Still, it'll give me some time to spend on this, I s'pose.

Click here to see what they've done to our baby. It's a crying shame.

Ors-play

Apologies for the title. I realise it's probably the worst I've ever written, and I am feeling the shame, but the link is well-worth clicking on.

Prince thought is was sad when doves cry. I happen to think it's sadder when great people get fat, old and do advertisements for frozen peas. This clip shows that there is something in the old man's head reminding him that he is, after all, Orson Welles, and that there is something wrong with the [picture in which he sits hawking frozen food-produce to the brain-dead of the world. Consider it a cautionary tale, kids...

So, click here, and remember why it's better to be James Dean than Marlon Brando.

The day it all went weird

There's a moment like it every campaign. One where the normal rules of society appeared to have been abandoned altogether, where suddely a weird, twisted momentum takes an electoral campaign, where it moves out of the hands of campaign managers and press spokespeople, and suddenly the whole thing takes on a life of its own. Election campaigns, my friends, have lives of their own; they are gigantic, slathering beasts, with the blood of the fallen (and someone always falls) dripping from their yellow fangs.

It's bound to happen, as a band of tired-looking old white men troll around the country asking us to put marks on paper near their names, that things suddenly get beyond their control, no matter how much their 'people' can do to prevent it. Instead of sticking to the nicer points of policy, at some point everything, and I mean everything, goes surreal. All we see for days on end are ashen faces, reacting to the latest outbreak of insanity around the country, trying desperately to get the things they want to talk about back on television rather than the avalanche of preposterous freakish accidents that dominate coverage of an election.

You can see it in their eyes. Each and every one of them knows this is true. Just a little nudge and it could all be out of their control. That, dear friends is why none of them is serious in calling for John Prescott's resignation. None of them really want him to go. Every empty head is filled with the softly repeated words: "Next time it could be you..next time it could be you..."

Strangely Poe-esque man-monkey attacking people in Delhi...

Is this John Prescott again? I particularly like the description: "short, dark and hairy, with human legs and an ape-like face". Another frightening twist in your wall-to-wall election coverage, kids?

Float like a waterlogged hippopotamus, sting like a flatulent grandmother

And for those of you who may have missed it, here is a wonderful picture of John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister of 'the birthplace of democracy', underneath a pile of people.

What surprised me was quite how violently people have reacted to what was, in essence, a little slap. We all knew John was a bit of a bruiser, you don't make your way through the trades unions in the '70s and '80s without being a little bit handy. Personally, I think we should abandon the electoral process and decide the whole thing by having tha bastards wrestle naked, with only electric eels for weapons. Go on, you know it makes sense.

This is complete gibberish

This is complete rubbish, written by monkeys at my computer...

More scary DNA ramblings...

A story in The Guardian today gives more information about the DNA samples the police are allowed to collect. Now, call me a hoary old conspiract-theorist (I love it when you use the word 'hoary', it sounds so dirty!), but is one were to take these DNA samples, and, for example, cross-reference them against the results of a compulsory questionnaire issued to every household in the country, giving a number of personal details (Let's call it a 'census'), then that might prove to be quite an interesting and rich data source, mightn't it...?

Damn you, Kropotkin!

He exists! And he writes early twentieth century eco-anarchist tracts! Now if only there were a political theorist called Scaramanga....

Big Brother doesn't have to bother watching you...

So, even Radiohead's Thom Yorke is a little worried about government files on his activities. And why shouldn't he be. After the herding of peaceful protestors into Oxford Street on Mayday, and the apparent randomness that governs whether or not the police can take DNA samples from you, it would be a little silly not to be. When even the New Scientist is getting worried, that, I think, is a sign that we shoudl maybe have another look at what's going on...

Child Trust Funds (Better Than Pocket Money?)

This is an article I just wrote for one of the websites I help edit. It's about government proposals for trust funds, I hope you enjoy it...

If not, let me know why not...

A disturbing beginning to a blog

This report is disturbing, but, I think, important. To us, the English, the whole idea seems distasteful, that people's deaths should be broadcast. That was until an editorial in Brill's Content (a sort of sequel of this article) made me think about whether or not a state should be too squeamish to display its own actions. "We'll kill people, but we're not able to watch the results of our decisions." Anyway, this stretches what I'm willing to listen to, but, if we are prepared to do these sorts of things to people, surely we should be aware of what it is we are doing. If tapes like these make it more difficult for us to sentence people to death, then surely that is a good thing. Anyway. I wish this hadn't started here, but it has...