THE GREATEST DAY!

And now the tireless heroes of Microsoft have put together and introduced to a waiting world their latest operating system, named Vista.
Now, come on, this must be the greatest event in the history of ever! It’s taken the selfless creators at Microsoft five years to come out with this system, and it’s the first one with a real name!
I know, I know, I forgot to mention it on the day itself, which was yesterday, and I can’t forgive myself, for but I am going to do my best, be truly penitent and atone and make amends and spread the word of the goodness and rightness of Bill (pbuh) who is always thinking of us.
Wow, or what? I mean, even Bill Gates (peace be upon him) talks of the ‘wow factor’ and is judgement is perfect and fair and unbiased and everyone must rush out to do his bidding for he knows what’s best.
In Japan they were queuing up for their midnight to be allowed to purchase their copy of Vista! It’s only fair for us to copy them.
(And I don’t like the Japanese, but that’s just my silly prejudice. A nation who created the wonder of drawings of little girls being brutally taken by monsters plants has a special place in the heart of today’s world.)
And because Bill (pbuh) love us over in the UK more than anyone else, he has given up the right to pay twice as much as those poor neglected sods in the US.
In celebration of this marvellous week, which will surely change our way of doing things in the way the death of Jesus the Christ could only hint at, I have personally provided you with links to a list of non-Microsoft programs that work with Windows, cost you nothing, either finanically or in an invasion of maleware, and at the same time don’t add a penny to Bill’s (pbuh) challengingly massive bank account, nor add a thing to Microsoft’s superior position in the computer universe.
Realplayer : Brilliant. There is a premium version which you don’t have to bother with and you can get the odd blackmail-type hassle vis a vis upgrade by paying money or your favourite radio station can vanish but well it doesn’t benefit Bill (pbuh) or Microsoft to any degree in any manner, shape or form.
iTunes : From Apple. The Maccers. What can I say? ITunes.The enemy is available on your compy and it works and there is sod all the Microsofters can do to alter it.
OpenOffice : Instead of Microsoft Office, it’s free in every way I’ve been using it myself for all my composing needs since the week after I got my compy in October 2004 and had no problems with it. It does everything that Microsoft Office does and best of all, it’s nothing to do with Microsoft and they don’t get any credit for it.
Firefox : Get Firefox! Better than IE in every way, it’s free, a lot safer vis a vis malware attacks and well, the name of the game is to slow up Microsoft’s monopoly. I’ve used it almost from day one rather than play Microsoft’s games. For a while I exchanged it for Netscape (RIP) but it just doesn’t feel the same, plus the fact whenever I download it and used it, my defence system registered the presence of nasties that Firefox avoids. Still, I’m sure there’s a cure now and Netscape has the same goal in mind, ie pulling Microsoft out of the rarefied atmosphere of top dog and down to the same level as the rest of us.

My motto : If it’s successful, don’t mention it to me. because I’ve no time for it.

But seriously, what annoyed me about this was that I downloaded the Vista Windows Upgrade Advisor just to check (because I’m a curious sort and can’t leave things alone, especially anything novel) and then I had to download several other programs for it to tell me that MY COMPUTER DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH ROOM TO ACCEPT VISTA.
Which meant I would have to purchase a totally different, Vista ready compy when mine is perfectly well and good and works and provides me with all my Net wants and needs.
I wonder if there would have been room if I hadn’t had to pack my compy memory with the doings necessary for the Upgrade Advisor to actually run?

COMEDY FROM ACROSS THE ATLANTIC : MORE THOUGHTS PLUS TALES FROM A PERSONAL ANGLE

As I stuck in a previous post, the main difference between UK and US telly sitcoms is the use of understatement, and how the British characters carry on when all is falling about them with as little response as possible and the Yanks characters carry on in a fit of extreme emotion when the slightest thing goes a-kilter. I also added that it wouldn’t work, have the same comic effect if it was the other way around.
I’ve been thinking about this further and then I came across a perfect example of how I was wrong. ‘The Kid In The Hall’ is the programme that straddles the humour of both sides of the Atlantic, a totally adaptable hybrid of both styles of understatement that fits in well.
But then, ‘The Kids In The Hall’ are Canadian, and the Canadian mentality itself, being north of the US yet living under British law, is a well-working satisfactory hybrid of both UK and US mentality.
Off the subject; ‘The Kids In The Hall’ series mean a lot to me. My Dad died in the January of 1998, his heart struck him and he lived for hours, lay on a cold pavement behind some shops, and died just after they found him in a back and got him to hospital. He died just after my Mother arrived at the hospital after a night of worry wondering where he’d got to culminating in a phone call from the A&E when my Dad’s address was found in his inside jacket pocket in a little plastic bag to keep the weather out just in case. Both my younger sisters had long since moved out, our dog Sally died at eleven in the April and it was me and my Mother, along with big gentle gawpy Dispy, the traumatised rescue cat, whose gentle heart gave way at the age of seven in the May of 2004, after six years of being cared for by us could not fully outweigh the legacy of abuse from his kittenhood. (The vet examined his little body and said that his heart had given out, and speculated it was due to the cruelty he had been forced to endure, which the vet had already had been told about, on Dipsy’s first examination on being brought to safety, and his heart had been weakened by it. He then added that it was a wonder he had lived so long, and it was thanks to the TLC he got from me and my Mother! Makes it all worth while, that.) and then we were joined by Jessica (who is still around) for a good while then in October 2001 when my Mother was struck by her sub arachnoid haemorrhage, after spending a while in hospital she came home and at her request I made a bed up downstairs for her and stayed by her side while she dozed and the telly kept me awake and focussed and amongst the crazy late night fayre, where surreal was the norm, including clips from the WWF and episodes of Jerry Springer, as well as crazy grown-up cartoons, was ‘The Kids From The Hall’. It was that that brought me great comfort, and although I didn’t find it funny then, the whole set-up appealed and I watched it with great interest and it did more for me that prayer and Bible reading ever could.
By the way, my Christian friends couldn’t be bothered to even come and see us, maybe because it was due to their prejudice as my Dad died an Atheist and my Mother rallied and explained to them what they could do with their talk of heaven and my Mother herself was well known for her unashamed, unrepentant, unshakeable Atheism.
Maybe the Christians were so confident in their faith (sarcasm) that a few well-chosen words from an unrepentant Atheist could tear them away from the truth of salvation and spiral them into an orgy of anarchic sinning til god left them to their own devices. (scary word that, for a Believer. Atheist. Too challenging. Especially when any attempt at conversion is successfully reasoned against, and from a working-class woman with a small formal education but great intelligence, a very liberal outlook on life, a strong regional accent and a cutting wit, too!)
The truth probably is, I suppose, that if they couldn’t win another soul for Jesus, they had no use for you. I, one of Christ’s own, could have done with a little back-up, you know, being driven into town for the shops and a bit of reassurance that practical assistance was forthcoming instead of ‘read your bible and pray and you’re never alone’ which really didn’t do much to help my domestic/financial situation. I mean Jesus wouldn’t appear and carry my shopping up home and no one from church would, either. Getting back to the notion of late-night showings of ‘The Kids In The Hall’ providing more comfort than any word of the Bible, it was another nail in the coffin of a faith that told me god loved me like a Mother loved his child and died for me to be given another chance if only I believed.
I mean, I’m not being funny, but where was this almighty all loving god, who would allow me to drift away from the truth and put his word to one side and wait with anticipation for the late night serving up of the secularist, daring, semi-blasphemous ‘The Kids In The Hall’ for my comforting moment. I mean, my eternal soul depended on it. Could it have been that. . .He. . .didn’t. . .exist. . .that. . .I. . .was. . .living. . .a. . .lie?
This was the end of 2001 beginning of 2002. My Mother (who, by the way made a total recovery, which is something that does not happen, so much so that people who have had experienced with head bleeds can’t believe she went through one, and without a corrective operation to patch it all up. She says it’s due to my care and attention) was ill in bed til the Febuary, and started going out again in the summer months of that year and I was also party to a secualr revelation, that god did nothing, that it was the doctors and nurses and my care that got her through, plus her own powerful constitution. And yet, I believed enough to fear and it took another revelation, that there is no afterlife, mostly because I strived for peace and to rest and an afterlife meant more studying others, to actually buck me up. I then met my ex and there was a lot of teaching of a more wordly, intimate erotic kind from him and god became an irrelevance and a an appendix dangling uselessly from my philosophical body and right up to me jettisoning it, finally, when a combination of reason and experience, reading and thinking and listening all lead to the point that Biblegod is of the imagination of men I had no choice but to turn to secularism and Deism. The attempts of my Christian friends to help me were reduced to ‘pray for him to reveal himself to you.’ or ‘you’ve got hidden sins that are blocking the passage of your spiritual growth’ (Which I am afraid made me and my Mother giggle, as we share a royal trait, a puerile sense of humour). According to believers opinions, it was all my fault and no one conceded that I might have it right, that biblegod is made up and Jesus is as real, as my Mother put it, as Robin Hood and King Arthur.
(Back to the blame game. When my Mother was in bed and I was caring for her, I can’t call the Christians for their non appearance, even The Family couldn’t be bothered to pop and see she was well.)
This has totally turned into a reverse testimony, how I lost god and was happier and freer for it, and there will probably be more of this, but now I must away.

SONG TO END THE WEEKEND ON : ‘RICKY DON’T LOSE THAT NUMBER’

This weekend’s song to end the weekend on is another song that has a meaning for me personally.
I used to work at a place where the boss was called Richard and he was only little, not much taller than me (I’m only five foot and he was about five six tops) and yet he was such a brilliant boss he could intimidate much larger men into doing what he said (his second in command was called Don and he was a massive bloke, six foot six or seven, and broadly built with it, whose wife had run off with a woman and therefore was a little bit bitter and sometimes leaned towards misogyny and Richard used to look up at him and say a word and shut him up and shut him down.)
Anyhow, every time I hear this particular song, and it’s gentle plea for Ricky to stick around, it reminds me of Richard and to really appreciate it you have to have known him, but then most people know the type. Likeable. Attracts people in a non gender specific and non sexual way. Even an old misanthrope like me enjoyed his company and I enjoyed working for him and he was one of only two at that place who I regret leaving and would have stuck around for.
So enjoy, and always. . .
Have the best week possible no matter what it brings you.

IT COULD BE WORSE

My periods have dried up, and I thought at last I was safe from the questioning as to my lack of fertility til I came across this.
It’s not something from one of those off the wall fake newspapers that talk about aliens being considered for Parliament or Jesus Christ being seen on the moon. It’s legit. Which means the questions will probably start up again.
Ah, well. only another twenty-four years to go before The Family stop hassling me as to why I haven’t got any kids of my own.

Although I wouldn’t be alive without it, sometimes I bleedin’ hate science’s way of winning the victory over the frail human condition

COMEDY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC : THE DIFFERENCE

I’ve stopped the typing now, as I seriously have to wind down (?) and get out into the real world for my shift tonight and I’ve been thinking about comedies and how people from different sides of the Atlantic (the US and the UK) who share a common background and a common language (if only the Yanks didn’t need to corrupt the good old Queen’s English to show everyone they really are different and not reliant on us for everything, including laws and most of the founding fathers being actually Brits. And before I go on (and I am going to go on and on) you Yanks did not WIN THE WAR, either war. In fact, us and the Russkis had done most of the work and you came in and swept up and got the glory. And if your President hadn’t sprung the Unconditional Surrender clause at Casablanca in front of the world’s press, without first even mentioning it to our Prime Minister, you’d have had even less time to get the glory. But then I suppose you had to prolong things to look good when us and the Russkis had done ALL THE WORK.)*
Anyhow, the main comedic difference between US and UK sitcoms is the use of understatement.
Take ‘Friends’, the popular US comedy. The characters get into a total screaming panic over stuff that doesn’t matter, like a tuxedo being the wrong colour or someone sitting on your seat at your favourite cafe. It’s a clever use of understatement in reverse, getting worked up and emotionally upset over the slightest kink in life. Where us, we are the opposite. In something like ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’, someone is sitting in a studio and looking at the camera and talking calmly while all sorts of outrageous things are happening behind him and he doesn’t blink.
See what I’m saying. It won’t work the other way. Panicking even if your house is on fire and your are in it is not the British way, and yet the touchy feely overgenerous in the emotion department Yanks call us Brits names for not being in touch with our feelings.
Any attempt at wildness and generating excitement in comedy from a Brit writer does not work, and if an American writer would write something where everything is falling apart around a character and his response is a calm one, no one would laugh at all. Writers have tried it, US writers have attempted to use the Brit style and vis-versa. It doesn’t work.
If you think I’m talking out of a certain hidden orifice, then have a look yourself. Watch something US made and then something from the UK. From almost any era as long as it’s from off the telly originally and from the country of origin (not a remake tailored to US audiences, like ‘Stamford and Son’ or ‘The Office’, but something home grown.) You’ll see what I mean and you’ll see the difference between what we and the Yanks find funny.
But I wonder why that is? Whoever said, the US and the UK, separated by a common language, is talking a lot of sense.

*By Reason, if this doesn’t attract any sort of business to my comments section, (defunct through lack of use) then I am no true blog writer.

YES, I KNOW. . .

In case you’re wondering, I have been away from the Cyber world for a bit for a couple of reasons, one being last Sunday I was so miserable and feeling got at because it was my ex’s birthday, I ate a pie and a cake, (savoury and sweet) taking mouthfuls alternately, washed down with a full two litre bottle of diet Pepsi. Now, if anyone even looks at my gut in a certain way I feel sick, and this self-punishing gesture was still affecting me in a miserable way on the following Tuesday.
Apart from that, I’d had my head down and got some typing done. I’ve located and dusted off an old idea that I’ve had on hold ever since my Jessica stepped on the keyboard and wiped the story clean while I was typing it first time around. (VERY demoralising, that.)
It’s about a Mother-obsessed serial killer who kills to get rid of the pain on the death of his elderly Mother, with whom he lived, just the two of them, when he was forty-nine.
(Bit like Norman Bates, with a bit of Ed Gein thrown in and small amount of pop psychology. The main police inspector who is on the case also is a middle aged man who was brought up in a repressive atmosphere by a virulently religious and loveless widowed Mother. One went to the bad and the other to the good. There’s an exploration of the dualist philosophy of two gods, one good and one evil, equal and opposites, running the planet, with a distant, unconcerned creator keeping aloof from it all. You get the idea. A bit cheesy, I know, but it’s my way of exploring psychological traits and mythology from a safe distance.)
It’s set in the Eighties for various reasons (mostly due to his method of trawling for victims which in this day of instant communication and mobile phones would not be valid.) and it’s one in a trilogy of killer tales, one which has already been written and ready for sending to a publisher, and one on hold (unlike many disciplined writers I can’t write to order, I have to write when the inspiration takes me, which would be a problem if ever I got the guts to send a tale off and it was published and writing became my only source of productive spondulicks earning.)
Actually, I’m surprised and delighted at how much I’ve managed to get out.
So now you know.
I’m definitely going to add a ’song to end the weekend on’ tomorrow evening, though.

BIRTHDAY

It’s the 21st of January, which means it’s my ex’s birthday. He will be fifty-six today. He’ll probably celebrate in the usual way.
That’s if his ex wife and (grown up and living away from home) children allow him to.

BEYOND TIME AND FOUR BABIES

Here’s pictures of my babies;

JESSICA MOONBEAM

DOMINO BASSET

HAYLEY SWEET

OLIVER CAT

These dear ones constantly fascinate and delight me. They know things without having to be told. They know the time and yet can’t read a clock. For instance, every night at around the same hour, ten forty-five or so, they come to me, climb on my computer table, and rub their faces against me, because they know it’s their supper time. How, without being told? You could say it’s because they are hungry at a certain time because they are fed at a certain time and their bodies have done digesting their food so they need more input at the same time every evening. Maybe so, but I did a little experiment. I fed them at the wrong time, an unusual time, gave them an extra meal, and yet still, at round about ten forty five p.m. at that night they came to me for their suppers. They never cease to challenge and delight and amuse me.

INQUIRY

Well, the murder victim is laid to rest, the perpetrator is safely behind bars, and now the inquiry starts.
The latest in this legal farce is the inquiry into the murder of little Joe Geeling of Bury, a northern suburb of Manchester.
The lad, who did it, Michael Hamer, was fifteen at the time, and was tried, found guilty, and locked up. He did it because he was an odd one, and therefore, like all children, was attacked because the others could sense he was different. Like a lot of victims, he became a victimiser, and little Joe Geeling was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A terrible tragedy which could not have been foreseen. End of discussion, right?
No way. Now Bury Safeguarding Children Board (that is their name, honestly. Follow the link and you shall see) have decided an inquiry is needed. NOT, as a local councillor insists, to apportion blame. No one is to blame. We just want the facts, just the facts, ma’am.
Well, what the hell is the point then? A lot of people in a room nodding and pontificating and tutting and looking through papers and meanwhile the bullying and persecuting of those considered different, and therefore fair game, by their peers goes on, and the true innocent walk into the line of vision of the disturbed victim and he hits out. It won’t achieve a thing apart from reiterating the facts of the case. And as everyone knows, an inquiry isn’t an inquiry unless there is someone to blame at the end of it.
I could stop bullying tomorrow. Hang a few of ‘em. From lampposts on the public streets. With a sign round their necks, something like; I AM A FOUL BULLY AND DESERVE WORSE. Cut their throats first, so the blood drips onto the rope hanging them. Arrange it so they suffer a while. Hang anyone who tries to intervene on their side. That will cut the bullying statistics down to nowt instantly, I guarantee. And also, perhaps stop cases like the Michael Hamer/Joe Geeling murder from ever happening again.
But no, we have to be civil. We have to treat these monsters, these demons in human form, gently and with consideration. We won’t form a lynch mob. We shall have an inquiry. We shall form little groups and give them caring names and we shall meet in committee and we shall have an inquiry. An inquiry called by the councillors elected by the people, who did not call for an inquiry in this case. Or an unelected body who realises that they are a total waste of space, and that others who pay their wages for being wastes of space, are beginning to twig onto the same, and therefore wake up to the need to be seen to be doing something.
And who shall pay for this? Who shall fork out the spondulicks? Not the Caring for Children Society or whatever the hell they have labelled themselves, but us, the tax payers, the poor ordinary sods who fork out massive amounts of their earned income and maybe now and again are reciprocated by having their bins emptied and are noticed once a year by their elected reps via a printed Season’s Greeting card coming through their door.
It isn’t even a case of them in north Manchester being flaming gormless because they are closer to the original Lancashire and it’s effected their mind, giving them delusions of grandeur which allow them to call an inquiry every time they feel like it. I know it’s not the same group of people, but it’s the same type, they all share the same mentality. Country wide. Committees. Groups. Women’s Institutes. Councils. Churches. Governments. All piss in the same pot, as the dear, confused lady I encounter as the bus stop stop sometimes, puts it. They are all working together to pretend they care and listen to the people when they do not give a flying horse who does what to who and when and how often as long as no one disturbs their round of tea drinking, playing with rubber bands, and passing laws that no one wants, and forcing the poor ordinary sods to pay.
And those who have the power to actually pass the laws are just as bad. They don’t listen. They say they are acting for us, the people. For our own good. From the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the imposing of laws that make it as big a crime to look at certain web sites as it is to get into a car drunk and mow down a woman and child on a crossing, to letting out murdering paedos because forcing them to be locked up is messing with their human rights, all the way to the calling of an inquiry every time someone stubs their toe the wrong way or something.
Ah well. I suppose all these laws, these impositions, will give the types who get pleasure from calling inquiries something do to for the next hundred years or so. I can see them rubbing their hands and saying, ‘ah, look. More troops in Afghanistan. The police hindered by red tape. Putting the human rights of the criminals first. More laws, more pressure, I can see an inquiry brewing.’
And meanwhile, those of us who actually pay keep our heads down and have less and less of a say as our liberties are removed chunk by chunk and we end up government drones, frightened of speaking out and speaking up, as it’s for our own good, and you can get time for doing so anyway.
I don’t like it. I think I shall call for an inquiry. . .

THE SEARCH IS ON

Did you know that fashion of landlords buying up houses and renting them out to suitable people is now so common that it has it’s own acronym? BTL or Buy To Let.
Some are private landlords, just one person who scrapes enough money together to buy a place and then rents it out, and then using the rent (generally housing benefit) to get another one. Some, however, are large national companies with offices and dwellings across the nation.
It’s usually older people or those who can’t pay their mortgage or those who want a quick sell who generally sell up, and these BTL’ers are only too keen to get their hands on cheap housing. Then they rent them out.
Flats, terraced houses, semi detached, anything. (Nothing very large though) And each BTL’ers has their own method of renting. Some rent to anyone who can scrape a deposit together. Some make sure their own families and associates are first in line. Some are so selective that a person has to provide mortgage details (someone else’s, obviously) and have a list of references before they are considered. Some refuse those on benefits (no DSS). Some refuse to allow any species apart from the human one over their thresholds.
Yet it’s cheaper and you’re more or less guaranteed a decent deal with the BTL’res. (Rachman is dead, remember, and so is his kind. Well, mostly.)
So, you’d think someone like me, who is after a new place because getting up and downstairs is getting to be a real chore, so is aiming for a flat, and who has a part time job and references (I have had the beggars years. I think that the people who gave them me are dead or moved on or something by now. But seriously) would have the BTL’ers queuing up, jostling one another, waving agreements for me to sign.
No way.
First of all, I need a place close to my place of employment. I really want to go home, back to the town where I grew up. Then I need everything on one floor. I need a fair rent. I need enough room for my cats to stretch out, and a small bit of land for them to play and explore in the warm, lighter evenings. I COULD scrape together a deposit though it isn’t easy. (I do make more than I did on the dole, but surprisingly not that much more to be honest, though compared to the government’s handouts, it’s a four course feast compared to bread and water.) I have no one willing to give me their mortgage details. I also want to deal with a landlord known for renting clean dwellings who is willing to do any repairs when they are necessary. (The landlord I’ve got now is brilliant. A bit back, my boiler stopped working, so the water was cold. They sent a chap on my phone call, who not only relit and reset my boiler, he showed me what the problem was in case it happened again, and also clean out my gas fire and re lit it! All free, well in with the rent.)
I have been getting hold of local papers and ringing my phone bill into the stratosphere trying to get a place. The restrictions are;
No cats in our flats.
Or
Unless you can provide the mortgage details, we can’t except you.
Or
Get a deposit together and come back.
That is, every landlord I’ve spoken to has at least one of these conditions, ie one might say you can have pets but we want mortgage details, or one might say, we’ll accept you without your cats. You know. None I’ve spoken to so far have none of these rules.
The larger BTL’res, the national companies, have a points system, and because I am adequately housed, I’m at the bottom of the list.
If I was alone (I mean totally alone, no furry babies to care for) I could get hold of a decent bedsit, in the place I call my home town, within weeks, but there is no way I’m going to leave them behind. I love them too much. No favourites, but Jessica has been with me since forever, (I rescued her from a rotten situation at six months of age and she is eight this year) Domino is half blind, very slow witted and would be lost without me, Hayley Sweet is poorly and always having fits and I’m the only one she’ll come to (hides when anyone else turns up) and Oliver is just getting used to being with me and other cats after years of being cared for but not loved and not allowed to mix.
I think I’m going to have to go back to my present landlord and ask if they can suggest something.
Til then, I’ll carry on searching.

SONG TO END THE WEEKEND ON : ‘SCHOOL’S OUT’

This weekend’s song reminds me of one of the best times in my life. When I left school for the last time, walked away and never had to go back.
Hated school, me. Even now, twenty-eight years later, I can sing this and especially the line ’school’s out for ever’ with a sort of triumph that comes from knowing I will never have to endure again those stinking days of the classroom.
Anyhow, no more commentary. As usual, enjoy, and have the best week possible, and for those of you who have to go to school, I know, bloody horrible, innit? Doesn’t last for ever though.

SATIRE ALERT!

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie’s maiden name is Booth, and she is the daughter of actor (Ha, ha, ha, ha. Right. . . ) Tony Booth.
Am I the only one who experiences a vague discomfort at the idea of saying my own Dad’s name in bed?

NOT JUST A WESTERN PROBLEM

All right, so maybe most serial killers and mass murderers come from and operate in the Western nations, but not all of them.