pointless post about a non-sad search

you’ll never believe what my top search term is right now?

nowt freaky.

‘witchy woo‘ is currently in pole position (not in any terpsichorean way obviously). admittedly she is hotly pursued by the refreshingly enthusiastic ‘big penis wow great’ and the frankly humdrum ‘bigpenis‘ (no time to hit the space bar, there might be some hot porn out there getting cold). which i think proves that even in the warped world of the intatoobz a good witch beats 2 large knobs.

hurrah fer witchy again.

25 years too late

watching footage of the g20 protest, it seems the media has decided the police have a bit of a thing for beating the crap out of unarmed members of society.

two thoughts spring to mind.

one – orgreave. the footage was there. it was no secret. i saw it and i know lots of others did. the media were pretty quiet about it. not the sort of story they wanted, i suppose. not like the miners who dropped the concrete on a taxi taking a striker to work. that got lots of play. they moved heaven and earth to show it. fair enough, that was murder (or a perfect piece for the news, depending on how you look at it), but chasing unarmed men over a mile on horseback armed and in riot gear isn’t exactly the hallmark of a healthy democratic society. brown people do that and we send in the un. 25 years and they start to worry about police violence. even the dinosaurs thought quicker than that.

two – when i saw the footage on the news tonight it bore the imprint of sunday times tv. call me a cynical old sod but when did they get this stuff of police hitting people with riot shields? it’ s been a while since it happened. still, i wouldn’t want to accuse the press of jumping on a bandwagon.

all the bad stories coming out of westminster are about the government. it can’t be they are the only ones doing crap things, can it? it seems murdoch and the other press barons who feed us with the news they need to warp our opinions and make sure the government we have is favourable to their interests, has tired of labour. my friend dave will be delighted. i called to tell him but sam said he was off down the ‘undefined embarassing disease clinic’ and then claimed fran was on the other line bitching about her sham marriage. frankly i have no idea what all that was supposed to be about. hope she hadn’t been at the cooking sherry. again.

still, if annoying people tell you the government is politicising the police, just smile and say ‘orgreave’. freaks the fuck out of them.

but do remember. plenty of people fought very hard to stop all that ‘armed cavalry riding down (unpopular) members of the public’ shit. they’ll be happy it’s come around again and this time with acceptable victims. not scum like the miners who wanted to plunge us into a second dark ages. and maybe feed their families, selfish buggers.

oh yeah… and that crap about those who forget their past being doomed to repeat it. or as brecht would say: ‘the bitch is in heat again’.

the best search

‘china girl love bic penis’.

entirely in two minds.

typo? normal person? or very very weird???

you be the judge.

a post about sex (wahey)

no, i lied – it’s about g20.

now i like an acronym as much as the next person.

assuming the next person spent three years at university buggering about, getting up late and reading the occasional book, as opposed to doing a real degree like law where you were supposed to end up knowing stuff. or – gawd help us all – just got a bloody job when they left school. (shudder – more than 20 years and i’m still valiantly managing not to achieve what some real people did aged 16).

‘flotus’ doesn’t mean something that got chucked off a boat or even a fart in the bath (unlike edward woodward). it would appear to mean ‘first lady of the united states.’ michelle o (not the big o), the lady who asserted her importance in a truly feminist way by telling barry (he and i tell jokes about how stuffy big dave is) to get the hell out of her closet. (no snidey jokes please; snickering about homosexuality hasn’t been mistaken for funny since 1979). (actually i’m not sure i have been mistaken for funny since about 1979 either but hey…)

now both the things i know about flotus have been culled from reclusive leftist (one of the best blogs in this life and the afterlife – but how can you not know?) so i must simultaneously acknowledge the great and truly learned dr socks as my educator and spare her any responsibility for the views that follow.

it’s never good when the heads of the g20 nations descend, the good the bad and silvio berlusconi. but what makes it almost the equivalent of hearing that the place where you live has been chosen to host a garden festival (consett and ebbw vale were the first two in britain – you with me now?) is that with these overdressed monkeys come the wags. partners you imagine have something better to do with their lives than get stuck in london’s traffic have to hug each other, pose for photos and errr well that’s about it really cos they are 95% women (apparently herr merkel found something to do and we do hope it wasn’t downloading tedious ‘adult’ (oh please) features on expenses). so what did they do? they shopped and went to the opera.

well fuck that.

how much more proof is needed that the world continues to view women as some kind of designer accompaniment to us, the men what make everything happen (hmmm credit crunch? nice work, us!)? of course herr merkel is a quantum chemist and looks dreadful in floaty floral prints, so had to miss this beeno. angela also feared he would be embarassingly ignorant on the subject of eyeshadow and urged him to stay at home lest she be shown up. it could have been his unconvincingly-dyed hair and there at least, i agree, ange has a point.

however, michelle o (short for ‘oh for fucksake’) did not fritter away her time here in the uk. she chose to visit a school and talk to some female pupils. feminists may briefly take their heads from their hands – she urged the benefits of education and the role of women as leaders of a society (in a metaphorical sense, you assume). but she said lots of good stuff about being all they could be. she went on to say (re-insert heads in hands and assume brace position) she had met some truly inspirational women while in britain: there was the queen, sarah brown and … maggie darling, all of whom were doing great work. now you may be scratching your heads (makes a change from banging them against the brick wall). i was.

even i remember who the queen is. i can spot sarah brown as gordon’s other half, but it took me a moment to make the logical leap that maggie darling is alistair darling’s wife. now, she is a journalist and has the misfortune to be labelled as feisty (ohmigod, scary – woman with a job) – and mrs o may or may not know she seems generally to be referred to as maggie vaughan (i’m not going to lambast her for that – i didn’t know either). none of that is particularly important.

what does strike me as significant is that the only people michelle was allowed to meet were other women (though probably not merkel as she’s busy talking serious stuff with the boys). and the role models she chose for the young women she urged to build our future were: one who matters by dint of being someone’s daughter and two who are someone’s wife. i’m sorry if she really is some kind of burning feminist beacon but ffs, why didn’t she just add some pole dancers and glamour models while she was at it? still, i imagine her dress looked nice.

i was reassured to hear one of the girls wasn’t too sure what the queen did (join the club) knew sarah brown but was totally in the dark about maggie darling. should go far.

sad search – short post

‘big piens’

oh dearie dearie me.

another year another 365.25 dollars

the fear-inducing dateline 1 jan 2009 stared out at me from my mobile phone.

what have i done with the last 365 days? why did i not earn a dollar a day? was my hair really that grey when this year started?

i learned things, some of which i was actually conscious of learning, i sat in the hall where twelfth night was born – walked in a place where shakespeare definitely trod and listened to the immortal words of lawyers in that place. i guess you can’t win ‘em all. i gained a qualification – which after 20 years away from formal study was almost a shock. i failed to gain a job, which after many years of never growing up and doing what people might regard as a real job was less shocking. i was frustrated by how antiquated the bar truly is and humbled by how kind many of the people in the profession are.

i had another year of laughter and tears (often simultaneously) with two children who might make a man believe in the divine and who would test the patience of a saint. i frequently wished there was a saint whose patience they could try trying. i was reminded at least 365 times how much i owe the clp for all her love and how much richer life is with someone of such unfailing kindness in it. many many times i thought i must call my mother to tell her something glorious or mundane and remembered i couldn’t any more.

i breathed, i ate, i drank, i appealed for stumpings – some of which were given. i lived. and it was bloody good.

i hope you had 365.25 days of wonder of your own. i hope those you love enriched your lives as mine has been enriched. i hope you lived and hoped and laughed and that we will all of us get through another year of this joyful, incomprehensible – and frankly rather daft – mess. i hope, if your year has been one you are glad to see the back of, that next year will see the seeds you have sown bear fruit, that you will feel the wheel turn and raise you up; if you have lost people dear to you, that their love and legacy remains and grows as the emptiness of loss dulls and dwindles; if your year has been full of shit, that next year’s flowers will grow fuller and sweeter. i hope for all of you, the love you put out there will shine back at you so brightly it reminds you of why you bother. and i thank those who have shone some of that love and kindness my way – you are the greater for it.

and if you ended it as i think i have, more confused, amazed, and thoroughly in awe of how fucking wonderful the whole shebang really is, i hope you will find that next year is even … more.

and most of all i just hope.

enjoy.

your wondering chum

xxx

he’s back and he’s making a better world

mayor bidswick blitherington-browne (you know the one: posh bloke – pointlessly-expensive, polluting car – mayor of kensigton and chelsea as featured in my post of Aug 8 last year; whaddya mean you don’t remember it! i thought it was a particularly good one. oh…) is back.

well, i say he’s back… he has hit those advertising sites on the side of bus shelters with a vengeance! plastered all across the royal borough (average cost of property £1,298,447 this August) is his cunning plan to fix homelessness.  it’s a goodie!

the posters remind people it’s a bad idea to sleep rough or drink on the street and if they insist on doing it the police will have a jolly stern word. and here’s the genius bit. they write it in english and then what looks like polish to catch yer bloody builders who would presumably be crashing everywhere after a couple of bottles of tyskie.

whence came this blinding flash of light into the otherwise untroubled brain of a tory? …

the mayor has given the chauffeur the day off, turned up the eminem and is doing the ton round notting hill; he burns off a few chelsea tractors (casually flicking the v’s to yummy mummies picking up the kids at pembridge hall) squelches a few inconveniently-placed pedestrians in the process and suddenly like galileo observing the moons of jupiter or the bloke who invented pork scratchings, he is struck by the fact that random bodies littering the streets could seriously affect property prices. a real headscratcher, this one. he lights a capstan full strength and it all becomes clear. he will have a serious word with these inconsiderate people! eh voila! (though he generally regards filthy foreign words as a brussels-sponsored plot)

the day after the posters go up all you can hear in chelsea is the sound of the homeless (having realised the mayoral foot has been put down – hence the increasing road fatalities – and rough-sleeping mullarkey will no longer be tolerated) dashing to the nearest estate agents, picking up details of a few reasonably-priced apartments and sorting themselves out.

simple yet brilliant. i’m amazed nobody came up with this before. next week mayor bidswick blitherington-browne sparks up a fatboy and solves the global recession. my mate dave will surely be having a word any day now.

no jokes – but some sparkle

a friend has set up an e-petition asking that rape be officially recognised as torture and persecution.

sparklematrix has kindly put up a post about it with a link to the petition site. please sign it – even i managed to do that!

sparkle is in my blogroll but if that’s too tricky and in the unlikely event that you don’t know her excellent blog, you can find her at www.sparklematrix.wordpress.com

thanks

and this is what i want to do for a living????

it was effectively confirmed today that women who drink are just asking to get raped. it emerged that an award to a raped women was reduced by 25% because the woman had been drinking. and it was one of 14 such cases last year. i have no words, but i heard a female voice on the news (may have been the woman herself) say:

drinking isn’t a crime. rape is a crime.

bridget prentice the appropriate minister says ‘a victim of rape is not in any way at all culpable due to alcohol consumption’. it would be nice if this reflected real life. apparently the person who made the decision to reduce the award ‘received advice’. and a slap.

fortunately, the tories (you remember them, they were something in the eighties…) have sorted the problem with the legal system. they reckon it’s them bloody liberal pinko commie faggot subversive judges (you know the ones) who are randomly giving people bail. and then they all go and murder people. well, bail must stop. lock em all up now. before they murder again. or at all. end crime at a stroke – lock us all up.

good job somebody has a grown-up approach to criminal justice. i blame the bloody human rights act / europeans / immigrunts etc. [please delete as appropriate]

and in the spirit of juxtaposition, i wanted to share the best search i have ever had and one which made me feel complimented by it having found me, because it must say something good about the blog:

sing her name is love is sweat

damn, i wish i’d written that! thanks, mystery searcher and i so hope you find what you are after.

or what you need.

august – a moment

i had almost forgotten summer. the last of the broad beans were gathered this weekend and already they have been replaced with late potatoes. who knows if or when they will come up, but i shall enjoy the wait. i have remembered what it is to sit in the garden and stare at the vegetables in the vague belief it affects how they grow. the earwigs enjoy my company, though they do not say as much. i like the earwigs; they eat the bean leaves and leave the beans. they are good sharers.

so much has happened already this year and yet i have my boys’ birthdays to come and the start of a new year at college – a course so expensive it could be made from iridium personally crafted by bill gates. i am fortunate that a rich body has seen fit to assist me with a  rather large scholarship and yet more fortunate that in these credit crunch days i can thoughtlessly extend my borrowing from the bank secure in the knowledge that i have as yet no particular way of paying it back. still; you gotta gamble (or gambol…).

i walked to the stream with firstborn son today and we played pointlessly with some stones that blocked what flow there was. when he was done, the dam was broken and the stream streamed along no less happily than before. and he was as alive as only a five-year-old who has just mucked about in a small body of water can be. me too. two five-year-olds in a stream, one grey, watched by sheep who probably wondered why. i am not the only simple wonderer in the village.

past lughnasa and still the wheel turns and the year provides – beans … scholarships…  and i know gratitude, surprise and ignorance. and the greatest of these is ignorance. i found a bottle of wine last night from my parents’ stock and we drank it and thought of them drinking wine in that undiscovered country. it is a time of gifts. fidel – i wish i could write you a melody so plain that would hold you dear friend from going sane; ehj – i wish you all the joy of your new love and that she shares that space at the foot of the tree with bodhi. let’s meet for a drink in the boathouse soon.

time, it seems is still working, unlike me.