Saw Tony Blair today coming from Deansgate. Not only has he involved us in unjust wars, he also held me up in traffic as I was rushing to the library. Can he get nothing right???

I thought of flipping the smirky twat but I had a rucksack on my back, and with my swarthy good looks I might easily be mistaken for a Brazilian.

On the application front, I was writing “…and would be excited to be invited for an interview…” when I decided to replace the word ‘excited’. My options according to Word?

• Keyed-up
• Animated
• Energised
• Wound up
• Bored (Antonym)
• Provoked
• Overwrought
• Hot and bothered
• Upset
• Calm (Antonym)

That’s halfway between somebody who markets stuff and someone who tells you how to wet Mark.

I have applied.

I hope there’s no-one called Mark at that place.

Another email says “Boost your skills with a charity role”

Underneath which are:-

1. Women’s Aid
2. MacDonalds

British Library (“The World’s Knowledge”) has collected loads of British accents from all over England and Wales. Over 30 hours of stuff to listen to. Real entertaining stuff. Go to the Collect Britain website.

Apparently he said

“I just don’t worry about vindication or standing. . . . You’ve got a lot on your plate on a regular basis. You don’t have much time to sit around and wander, lonely in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, ‘How do you think my standing will be?”

I somehow get the feeling that’s exactly what he’s been doing.

 

I always read exceprts from the big compendium called ‘The Oxford Book of Humourous Prose’ to cheer up, and have decided that my favourite author is this “Ibid” guy who keeps cropping up (with a remarkable variety of styles and indeed from a remarkable number of centuries).

According to New Scientist. Which means people who have problems dealing with emotions (in this study it was due to brain dmamge) make moral judgements different from those made normally.

But didn’t we know this??

In every blockbuster movie, the villian makes unusual moral judgements. And he is also emotionally retarded.

The study uses some of the usual questions of men working on railway tracks. Which are interesting questions, so I’ll describe them for you.

Imagine you are standing at a railway switch. You see a speeding train headed toward a fork in the track. Just beyond the fork stand six workers, five straight ahead and one on the left. If you do nothing, the train will go straight on and kill the five workers. But if you pull the switch, the train will turn left and kill a single worker. Do you pull the switch?

Now imagine a second scenario. You are standing on a bridge above the track. You see a speeding train headed toward five workers on the track. They have no hope of avoiding the car and will surely die. But there’s a fat man next to you who’s big enough to stop the train if he were pushed off the bridge. Of course, he’d die, but the five workers would be saved. Do you push him off the bridge?

Most people will pull the switch, but not push the fatso. Unless they hate fatsos. This is because we often make irrational decisions based on emotions.

Thank you Jill, I have never laughed so hard and that is not hyperbole. Take a look at Karate Party

This is a list of the 100 worst names for karate films from 1960s onwards. The dry humour of the list compiler just cracks me up. And they keep coming as you scroll down. As a sampler I give you Number 73.

73 – Hard Way to Die
This title is beautiful. It’s not that it’s hard to kill the hero, the hero has just found a really difficult way to go about dying.

There’s also The 100 worst horror movie names

I see it’s been a while since an update. My neighbour seems to have cottoned on to my internet pilfering; the connection’s still there, but I can’t ride the wagon!!

Had an interview yesterday that went ok, except for the fact that I’ve never used Citrix and Novell systems before. So I’d be like a duck playing basketball while balancing a cornetto on its beak when it came to helping other people use the systems. I saw a competitor coming in as I was exiting the building (exiting, not exciting) and he looked like a propah South Indian I.T. boy replete with deep-sea-diving specs and funny accent (he was on the phone).

The book ‘Tell me no lies’ is a real eye-opener, and it’s amazing that what’s actually happening out there is so well-masked by politicians, it’s as if the public want to believe the lies. And those of you who may think the book is a bunch of conspiracy theorists spouting crap, it’s not. Because I says so.

Damn windy out there.

 

Okay, now I’ve seen it all. May I present to you my sister Yasmin’s blog, all the way from Bangalore. It’s a long way to go, but please make the effort and visit her. Life Drumming

Something Jillan Jeh said about chalk marks reminded me of my college days in Bangalore.

I used to regularly bunk classes (or be unceremoniously ejected from them) and started frequenting pool halls. I’d like to think that, along with my mates who introduced it to me I was responsible for starting a pool mania that swept through St Joseph’s College and contributed generously to the local economy.

One sure sign of having been playing pool is the chalk on your bridge (left) hand, and we’d vigourously rub the green stuff in so it’d stay on all day, thereby granting superior staus to us cool cats whenever we met other strays around town beacuse we’d stiffed it to the Establishment (in the form of Rev. Father Clarence D’Souza, (now there’s a name from the past!) a long-suffering gentleman).

We soon got to drinking dark rum neat as well, hoping the smell would carry on our breath in cleverly-staged conversations with peers, elevating us even higher up the hierarchical ladder.

My registration number (I am not a person, I am a Number!!) was 971299, but I was infamous to all lecturers and the anti-hero of many a staff room story as, simply, 99!

…is a compilation of the best of investigative journalism since 1945. Edited by John Pilger, whom you might have heard a lot about in these pages, it’s a pretty hefty book. I’ve already finished reading Anna Politkovskaya’s dispatches in Novaya Gazeta about the Chechen conflict. Anna is the Russian journalist you may remember was murdered in October last year just before she was due to publish a damning report on a Russian general involved in the Chechen atrocities (I think; check the facts out yourself).

I’m looking forward to some of the exposes here, as they are unlikely to have made the popular presses due to swift political “intervention” or outright suppression.

Oh, and check out this light-hearted review of the new Sci-fi film ‘Sunshine’ by the folk at New Scientist

Have you ever wondered about sex change in animals? When there is an overwhelming imbalance of males to females, in some species the issue is resolved by some males turning into females. Now, this in itself is remarkable, but I wonder even more about the process by which the decision is made which of the males undergoes the chop, so to speak. 

If it’s voluntary, then I imagine the discussion goes something like this:-

Chopper:- Ahem, it looks like one of us had better do the right thing.

Choppee:- Well, it’s no secret that I’ve always fancied a bit of rough-and-tumble with the guys. Many’s the night I’ve lain awake hopping to get buggered. If this is what it takes…

If it’s involuntary, then the person who gets the chop is perhaps the one with the least to lose. (There had to be a joke about penis size. I had another one about the shortest straw drawing the shortest straw)

• Looking forward to United playing Europe XI today, what a cracker!!
• Have an interview for next Monday, the job’s very close by home.
• Was Gareth’s birthday yesterday, I hope you all knew.
• Hungry now

Later:- What a crap game! I’d be incensed if Id’ve bought a ticket for that crap! The “Europe” team had has-beens Stelios Giannokopolous and Diouf (Bolton), Fowler and Zenden (Liverpool), and some No Name defenders. But worst of all, Fuckin’ Materazzi!! No Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Juninho, etc. And United in the second half fielded an equally crap side with Eagles (not the band), Cole and others.

Nothing like a drippy nose to get your spirits down. But I’m rather enjoying annoying people with my slurping snorts.

“Wont you look down upon me, Jesus
Youve got to help me make a stand
You’ve just got to see me through another day
My bodys aching and my time is at hand
And I wont make it any other way”

Fire and Rain – James Taylor

Went to the Salford Uni climbing wall with Jillian Jeh, Nabeel, Simon and Ali on Thursday under the protective wing of the University of Manchester Hiking Club (thank you). Had a great time although I couldn’t do any diificult climbing myself due to a gash in my finger trying to fix Sha’s car. But I was the “elderly & informed instructor” and with my own harness, shoes and belay device managed to look like an old hand. Luckily remembered the knots, but it’s like cycling; you never forget.

This weekend is football weekend; I played on Friday as usual (lost by 2 goals), then on Saturday Man Utd played Middlesborough away (2:2 draw), and today Chelsea v Tottenham, not to mention giants Watford v Plymouth!

Named after William Spooner, who was an Oxford Don methinks, this is the swapping of the beginnings of two words in a sentence with comic result.

For example, instead of “My Lord is a loving shepherd” we can have “My Lord is a shoving leopard”

And “He struck a crushing blow” becomes “He struck a blushing crow”

Make your own!

This is a phrase that often crops up in my mind. It was used by two corrupt cops in the beautifully under-stated BBC comedy called ‘Early Doors’ about regulars at a typical Manchester worker’s pub called The Grapes talking about their day. 

Though I’m a big fan of Shameless, it seems to have got carried away somewhere along the line and become too convoluted and unreal; unnecessarily so in my opinion. Whereas Early Doors had that authenticity and Northern Humour that is typified by the title phrase; for example, these afore-mentioned cops come in the back door of the pub and talk to the landlord about how some rotten fink was caught making fake tenners and then pull some out of their pockets – “You can pass these over the counter, nobody will notice on a Friday night”. The landlord, not averse to fixing the odd pub lottery himself, is continually amazed and disgusted by these two, but needs them as cop buddies, just in case. 

As the two finish their double brandies and head back to duty in their police car, one goes “Got to get going” at which the other dutifully chimes in “Crime won’t crack itself, you know” 

Exquisite! 

And the book by Michael Cook sure lives up to its name.

I’m really enjoying this brief but comprehensive view that quilts together the separate patches of development in human history (were talking roughly 30,000 years to present).

Of course he has a say about human cultural tendencies, amongst which he has this line for monotheism.

“But if we are to pick out a single aspect of monotheism in this connection [its longevity], it might be less what monotheism embraces than what it rejects: other gods and the people who worship them. It is in the nature of montheism to pick a quarrel”.

This means that “There is only one god” actually has the subtext “…and that god is MY god, of course! And if you nincompoops don’t switch over, why I’ll have to bash your heads in till you believe! Persecute!! Kill!!”

Something else mentioned in the book reminded me of the film “Drop Dead Gorgeous” shown on BBC 1 on Wednesday night, where Denise Richards sings “I love you baby” to Jesus as part of her talent show in the beauty pageant and dances with a puppet on a cross!! Hilarious stuff!!