MISTAKE ALERT!

In a previous posting, I stated that there were no lone female killers who murdered women.
I was wrong. Her name is Dana Sue Gray and she exclusively murdered women. I never heard of this woman til today (found her, as I show in the link, in the Crime Library, one of the, if not the best, Net places for true crime.)
My only excuse is that I am not obsessed with crime and criminals.(?)

As for my domestic situation, I am slowly coming round to the fact that nothing is going to change vis a vis my illness and slowly beginning to accept that the only way is down for me.

MORE BLOODY NEWS FROM ABROAD

Things are carrying on as normal in the world’s first suicide state.
Two hundred people blown away in another bomb outrage in Iraq.
And nothing is being achieved.
Nothing.
The alleged cause of all this trouble swung into eternity and out of influence at the end of last year and instead of calming the situation, it seems to have made things worse.
It seems now to be a case of who can kill the most and the fastest.
Again, I know I might be touching a raw nerve, but I can, up to a point, understand the antics of yesterday. A young man out of step with society and his single attempt to feel like everyone else, and let the object of his incursion into humanity know, which was instinctively, thoughtlessly and naturally rejected, reinforcing his belief than no one was worth anything gets revenge on a species that means nothing to him. (Although the full story is not known yet and there is still that rumour that someone else was involved, as a second shooter. Something to do with the distance between the two sets of killings and two different weapons used.)
But this daily mass murder in Iraq, not even of the perceived enemy, but of just anyone, is outside my understanding and reasoning radar.
So there is no need to add anything else to this posting.

THOUGHTS FROM FAR OFF

I remember where I was when I first learnt of the Dunblane massacre, and I recall most of all the feeling of everyone pulling together at work as the news filtered in, confirmed or denied, through the day. One man, feeling cheated and got at and thwarted gave in to his urges and killed and killed again in a shocked instance of mass murder. (The stories of him being boy-obsessed in a sexual way have never been completely confirmed, the facts seem to be that he was just an odd ball who preferred the company of male children, never harmed any of them, and they spoke of with affection and when it was discovered it was him, and what he had done, the younger boys of that location were most shocked and horrified.)
Yesterday, in a location far from Scotland, another obsessed, obsessive young man picked up a gun and took out his frustrations and feelings of not being able to fit in (people described him as a ‘loner’ who would rather have done his own thing) and over a period of two hours, thirty-three human beings died.
The facts are not fully in yet, but the trigger seems to have been this misfit young man’s failed attempts to get a woman to show interest in him. But who knows? A lot of school shootings seem to be happening recently.
More than one commentator has pointed out it was close to the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, when two young men, feeling shut out by their peers, walked into school and never walked out, and left a dozen victims in their wake. There is a small but persistant (and mostly discounted) rumour that there was more than one shooter. The blame is already being laid out, why weren’t e-mails sent to another part of the campus acknowledged, why, even when it was known that there was a shooter, wasn’t the school cleared? Why was this young man given two hours, plenty of space, to commit these grievous acts of mass murder? How did he manage to get hold of a gun? Should guns be so easily collected? And all this in a land where it’s written into the law that everyone has the right to bear arms, (to be used against the forces of government gone bad, believe it or not.)
When the smoke cleared, and the facts were fully in, I was going to write an account using a lot of opinion and employing politics and analyses. (Allow my misanthropy to show by pointing out that human beings are the only species who kill their own, for whatever reason, that doesn’t involve self defence, and yet we have the cheek to call ourselves the superior animal.)
Then I stopped and had a think;
Thirty-three human beings are dead for whatever reason.
All these human beings were individuals, and had families, and friends, they were part of a large network, both inside and outside Virginia Tech. They had dreams and hopes and loves and problems and worries, and now they are all no more. All their thoughts and hopes and concerns are at an end. THEY are at an end.
And that’s enough to ponder on for now.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LONG GONE

Charles Spencer Chaplin would have been one hundred and eighteen today.
Better known as Charlie Chaplin, arguably the most influential performer and film director of all time, he was born in the East End of London on this day in 1889, the second born of Charles senior and Hannah, (by the way, the Richard Attenborough film version of his life got it wrong; though they were separated while Charles was still very young, and he was dead by the time the boy was eleven, he lived for a while with his Father, a man in the film rejected in a sentence as ‘died of the drink’, although his Mother’s mental problems, and subsequent incarceration in an asylum, were based on fact.)
Although he was, undoubtedly very talented, his preference for young (illegally young in some states) women got him in trouble, though he was always good to his wives and despite his last wife, Oona O’Neill, being only eighteen and he fifty-four when they married, it was a love match and she outlived him by only fourteen years, grief at losing him turning her to the alcoholism that finally contributed to her early demise.
He was a left-hander (but then all the best people are. Hem hem.)
He was born in the same week as Adolph Hitler, which is nothing but a massive coincidence, and yet was a little obsessed with the small man who also made it big in a country not of his birth, even making a film ‘The Great Dictator’ and was later full of apologies at taking the whole thing as joke, when the atrocities of the Nazi regime were uncovered. (Yet he was no fan of the Nazis. When challenged by a member of the Nazi party as to his Jewish origins he was supposed to have said ‘I have not got that honour’.)
He spent most of his life making silent films, and fought the encroaching tide of the talkies, even miming on stage rather than doing a speech at various Hollywood meetings, and in fact only made four talkies, (if you include ‘Modern Times’) one being the serious ‘Monsieur Verdox’ which told the tale of a predatory serial killer from the side of the murderer and made him seem very sympathetic, though the Hayes Commission’s cuts took a lot of bite from it. (And yet it would be a brave director to attempt such a project nowadays, in these days when serial killers have a special hated place in the hearts of society.)
His childhood, damaged at the hands of authority, made him a hater of convention (look at ‘The Kid’, the only really evil people in it are the members of authority who try to separate them.) Convention, however, hit back in the form (among others) of Joe McCarthy’s House of UnAmerican Activities, and one of the few countries that would accept him was Switzerland, although he came back to Hollywood in the early Seventies to gain the honours that were too long in coming to him, returning to spend his final days in Switzerland.

(Rant coming up : In the Richard Attenborough film version of his life, he was played by the troubled actor Robert Downey jnr. and although it’s only a small niggle, ROBERT DOWNEY IS RIGHT-HANDED. Just like in the film ‘Ted Bundy’, Michael Riley Burke, the actor who played the killer was a right-hander, where the real Bundy was a left-hander. What, there are no suitable left-handed actors in the whole world that could be picked to play these roles?)

Anyhow, happy birthday memories of Mr Chaplin, and, of course, all the best to anyone else who shares his birthday.

And no, I’m not doing a memorial thing for Old Nasty Adolph himself (a right-hander, by the way) cause he don’t deserve one.

UNTIL DEATH. . .

I know I’ve not added to this place for a while, but I’ve got an excuse (?)

Suppose you’re in a situation where you have never committed a crime and yet are locked away.
Suppose you’ll never get time off for good behaviour and nothing will change, except to get worse and your status will downgrade to less and less freedom.
Suppose there is nothing you can do short of dying to alter this.
Suppose it’s your own body which is the gaoler and as your reading and reasoning tells you there is nothing after (no continuance of conscious life when you die) you are stuck as you are.
Suppose that this isn’t only as good as it gets but it’s going to get slowly worse.
I don’t know what’s happening, but the fact is I’ve had expert advice that this is happening with me (I’m not even forty-four yet) and though I’ll live a natural life span it won’t be much of a life as I get older and older and fade away. This has not (as you would expect) made me want to take my specialists advice and live each day to the full, instead it’s made me lose interest in doing most things.
I wonder if this is what depression is.

Ah well (and I’m quoting a joke from a Christian magazine I used to buy, about a young man who, although believed in Jesus, could not ‘catch the fire’ to use an evangelical term) at least I’ve got my trombone (in my case it’s my books and CDs).

More, maybe, one day.

AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS?

The Iran v Royal Navy stand-off has come to a successful conclusion, with the freeing of all 15 naval personell on the direct orders of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
While, across the waters of the Persian gulf, it’s business as usual for the armed forces in Iraq, the world’s first suicide state, the shambles of a nation reduced to massacring it’s own and anyone else to get it’s point across.
I wonder if Mr Ahmadinejad looked across to his neighbours and had a think, and decided;
“Oh no, no, no, not here.”
I wonder. . .

HUMOUR, UNINTENTIONAL

It’s funny how people say and write things that are comical without meaning to be. One example, At a church near where I live, on the notice board were the words;

Give thanks for children in distress.

And I thought, at least it’s honest.

And I recall another time I gave into my sense of adventure and rode on a bus to an unfamiliar place, and wasn’t sure of the bus return times. It was a pretty countrified area, a private estate layout backing onto the moors, where I found a bus stop where there was a lady and I asked her what time the buses were back to where I wanted to go.
“Well,” she said, “you’ll have to wait a bit with it being out-of-the-way.” And then, “I’ve been here for twenty-seven years now.”
And I thought, these country types certainly have bags of patience.

And that’s your lot.

A RANT CONCERNING A SELF IMPORTANT SUBJECT

(Before I begin properly, I am fully aware of the business of the Royal Navy v. Iran, but I’m not going to make any comment on it til something real happens. The BBC website will give you all the info you need to know on this deadly serious matter. Now, onto the rest of the post.)

So, prescription charges are going to rise again.
I will pick my prescription up and take it to be filled in on Tuesday, and I will now be forced to pay over £20:00, for the simple reason I am on the wrong medication. That is, the law says I have to pay for my tablets, even though the chemicals in them literally keep me going (most of the time) and allow me to live a fairly normal and almost totally healthy life. Which means, without them I would either die or have to be constantly fastened up to a drip feed forcing the necessary chemical into my body.
If my tablets, or my condition was on a certain list, I would get my prescription for free. This even counts if you’re working, or even if it’s not for the tablets.
Sometimes, you can be waiting in the chemists and you get people who, because their illness is on the government list, are passed great bags full of medication free, even stuff like indigestion mixtures and pain killers, over-the-counter stuff they’ve persuaded their doctor to write a prescription for.
This is because I live in England. If I lived in Wales, I would be forced to pay the grand total of nowt, no matter if my condition was a government designation illness for which prescriptions are free.
I’m going to have to have a word with my doctor, ask her to make my next prescription out for three months, as more than £20:00 every month is bloody expensive for someone on the minimum wage. One of my previous doctors did just this, but again now, government rules see to it that a person is only allowed so much medication in one go, even if it is proven they are not a wild druggie, going about getting prescriptions for medications that get them high. You see, if my doctor writes out a prescription for three months supply, the excitement and temptation might be too much and I might suddenly go against character and shovel the whole lot down my throat in one go, which would be about the same amount I’m taken when boosted up to get me through an operation. It would probably make me hallucinate a bit, but not much else. I don’t think it’s possible to get high on factory manufactured cortisone. (For those of you who make your own, put yourself through a really exciting or scary experience, like riding on a massive fairground ride or playing an exciting video game or even watching a scary film, and hold it like that for a bit. A violent adrenaline rush of emotions and all it’s attendant sensations. I don’t think it’s possible to hold that level long enough without fainting or wanting to run away or something, but just for a second you should get what an overdose on my tablets could feel like. Not nice and certainly not worth a repeat performance, which is why they would never sell as street drugs.)
But enough of this. . . My point is, this government makes it harder and harder for ordinary disabled people to live a normal enough life without interfering. They talk about new deals for the disabled yet don’t help us get on if we’re willing to try.

The more I think about it, the more I wish I could step out of this old machine of a body of mine and pick a new one, with a self making cortisone section that actually functions, without having to shut it all down first, as the reincarnationist believe.
Sill, at least I’ve enjoyed a bit of ‘me’ time and am basically ready to get back into the fray of everyday work living.

If you’re still with me, you’ve probably worked out yet again there is no song to end the weekend on. Next week though, maybe. It’s more difficult than I thought locating a site that allows links to the actual song and which doesn’t vanish without warning. It’s got me wondering if I could get some of my own songs, from my own massive CD collection onto my compy then I can provide a link. We shall have to see.

Now, that’s your lot.