Obama Bin Laden? Welcome to the Mail Online's Typo...

Noticed this name error last weekend (it’s dated the 16th April), while reading the online version of the UK paper The Daily Mail; basically the headline created a confused amalgam of the USA’s first black President’s Christian name and the USA’s number one Al-Qaeda terrorist’s surname name. Feeling helpful and noticing the story had only just been put online, I decided to inform the cretin who'd written the piece by submitting the first comment to the story:

The General Election: a Red turning Blue?

Across the UK, we are now within the final countdown to the 2010 governmental General Election - which will take place on May the 7th - and we all get to flex our democratic choices by using our five-yearly voting extravaganza to usher in a real change in policy in the form of red, blue or, in the event of a long shot, yellow. So, either it’ll be the same old garbage we’ve just had or a new set of morons to destroy our hopes and aspirations for the foreseeable future; either way, nothing’s going to change, we’re all going to carry on complaining about lack of money, lack of jobs and lack of freedom within our rule-restrictive society, so why even bother to vote?

A tale of two Bicycles

As mentioned in previous blog entries (see "Cycling..." for more details) I have for now - over the last 6 months at any rate - been cycling to my place of work in what I like to refer to as an “enforced fitness regime”: this phrase basically means having to use a bicycle for a ten mile round commute into my job and thus enduring a physical workout I actually have no say in. Now, please don’t get the wrong idea and think I’m complaining about pedalling hardships without gaining some benefit from all this cycling; now I’m half a year into this perpetual sloggery, at an age where the good times are long gone and my belly's future does indeed appear bleak, I’ve noticed my once slack shape has tightened somewhat and I do feel quite fit, although not quite as a fiddle.

HSBC's "Integrity" & "Responsibility": What a load of old Bank...

With the vast corruption and continual bonus-greed rife within the Banking world during the last couple of years, our Capitalist masters have now decided to give themselves a publicity makeover in the hope of garnering our lost confidence. This development can only mean one thing: our weary eyes assaulted on a daily basis by newly-devised TV adverts, keen to sell us the same old themes of trust, assurance and dependability, only with a fresh lick of monetary sheen in order to divert our gaze from the real issues. Yes, it’s just another imagining of the old street-corner “cup and ball” trickster routine from eons ago, their hands swirling in a blur to confuse and fleece us of our hard-earned cash, regardless of whether we are aware of this illusion or not. Accompanying this brazen financial deception is the now socially-acceptable mantra, “Greed is good”: uttered by the main protagonist, Gordon Gecko, in Oliver Stone’s masterful Wall Street (1987), we all have these words ringing in our ears on a daily basis now as we’ve become governed by wanton thrusting, jealous grasping and unbridled selfishness, all unavoidable side-effects from stoking the insatiable furnace of Capitalism.

Our Un-Natural Selection

I am a great wildlife lover and advocate of being able to observe our flying little feathered things and cuddly little furry things in their natural environs, which in the UK means either flying above our heads in the sky or trotting about fields, moorland and hedgerows for our enjoyment. Most people in our animal-loving country appreciate and get pleasure from the little inter-species interaction we can garner during our high-powered, stress-filled, post-modern lifestyles. Whether this contact is taking the dog for a walk, stroking their lazy cat or putting nuts and seeds out for the birds – and thieving squirrels – that frequent their back gardens is a moot point to most of us: any dealings with the animals which surround us taps into and feeds our lost sense of belonging within the natural world, a world we seem to have separated from in our developed societies via technological advancement and obsession with monetary gain.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 2

I’m now a few blog entries on from when I first visited my local NHS surgery due to feeling slightly unwell with my grotesquely swollen Parotid glands - see "A trip to the Doctors... pt 1" for more details - and where my Doctor issued ultra-strong antibiotics along with scattergun, tablet-taking instructions which I strived to follow to the best of my ability: however, this proved harder than I originally thought it would be due to the baffled state of my everyday thought processes. This memory confusion arose within just one day of ingesting the small, red-coated Milpharm tablets and almost immediately they reduced me to a gibbering, sweat-soaked sociopath liable to instantly explode in an antibiotic-induced fury of magnificent proportions.

Youth of today? Give me yesterday's childhood anytime

The youth of today and the death of tomorrow. Is this an accurate hypothesis or am I speaking after the fact; indeed, as I’ve had and enjoyed my early years, am I justified in not equating anything I see in today’s culture as being worthy for tomorrow’s foundation due to looking back in anger across my wasted years that started half a century ago in the middle of the 1980s? We all go through teenage rebellion and we can always pinpoint particular incidences that spoke to us, helped create who we have become, for good or bad, and to recall these memorable learning curves is a fascinating experience in trying to understand your former self through post-analysis.

BT Broadband: welcome to the dribbling trickle

It is my great misfortune to live in an area within the UK that has never had fibre-optic cable piped beneath its streets during the great flurry of work which was undertaken many years ago to future-proof our communication infrastructure. With our insatiable appetite for technological wonders perpetually advancing and creating more complex design, the time has now arrived that we can truly utilise these pre-laid cables: spreading out as neural pathway tracts and connecting billions of silicon brains around the globe means blisteringly fast broadband connections for everyone, everywhere, all the time... except if your area never had the cable laid in the first place.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 1

Having not been to a Doctor for many a year due to being relatively illness-free, I found it surprising that just after New Year I had to ‘phone up my local surgery and make an appointment because of a long-lived-with-and-ignored ailment which had suddenly bloomed out of all proportion. This ailment has taken on the form of swollen Parotid glands at the back of my jaw-line over the last ten years and during this time they’ve flared up and subsided so inconsistently that whenever I’ve actually sought medical attention the diagnosis is eclectic to say the least: Glandular Fever, a compressed Wisdom tooth, Tonsillitis - even though they’ve been whizzed out along with my Adenoids years ago - and even Mumps at the age of 32 have been forwarded as causes!

Windows 7 UK adverts: anyone for an anal lobotomy?

The Personal Computer. If you are like me and exist within the PC realm as opposed to flouncing around in Apple’s i-nonsense, designer wonderland, then just the mention of those three words can fill the vast majority of people with technophobic dread. It’s just the thought of trying to fix your own Windows-based system when the inevitable problems arise that brings about a spate of fevered brows, cold sweats and panic attacks across the world’s Microsoft users, much like how Apple users are confabulated when faced with the bewildering option of a second mouse button. Now obviously as PC users, we all have our own personal favourite version of Windows - which can be anything from ’95 to Millennium, ’98 to NT and even 3.1 or MS-DOS thrown into the mix - but what most people will be more than happy to be using is XP, their most successful operating system to date.