Meanderings of a Monkey Juggler

I've put this under "Rants" but it's not really, it's more of a weary whinge.

You know that Condaleeza Rice is in Blackburn today (Blackburn!) and there are some local protests going on and so on.  Well there's a debate going on about "do you support the protests?"  There's the usual split of opinions.  You know the lunatic fringes throwing their extremes around.

"Well she's a figurehead of a terrorist government."

"Well you're clearly anti-American."

"How can a war criminal come to Britain" etc....

Well along comes the old favourite refrain of those who think they are defending freedom and democracy.  Namely

"I notice that muslims are protesting.  Do they think they'd have been allowed to protest in Saddam's Iraq?  They'd have been shot or tortured in double quick time."

I really struggle to see any rational thought behind that argument.  I'm sure people can't really use it and mean it.  The rationale seems to be

"We have freedom of speech but, because Iraq never had it, you shouldn't be allowed to protest."  Do they really feel that freedom and openness would flourish in an environment where we weren't allowed to use it because "you wouldn't be allowed to elsewhere"?  That's rather the point of a "free" country isn't it?

Have fun.

There's a thread on rec.jggling which has gone slightly off-topic (no? never!) and is now talking about anagrams.  I used to use an anagram generator to get some interesting ones but haven't for a while.

So how are these?

MonkeyJuggler

• Nuke my joggler.
• Logger me junky.
• Jungle germy ok!
• Ugly gnome jerk.

PhysioMonkey

• Sip my honey ok?
• Yon skimpy hoe.
• Hey pinksy moo (for Bear)
• Hoy my pinkoes.
• Shy kimono? Yep.
• Ye sink my pooh.

Peter Plumpton

• Potent plumper.
• Mutter "pen plop".
• Plump tent rope.

Bear-blog

• Large bob.

Clare Plumpton-Bear

• A cerebral Plumpton.
• CPR a lumpen bloater.
• Cull a barren moppet.
• A rectal problem pun.
• Cleanable rump port.

I'll get round to some more if anyone's interested.

Have fun.

"...higgledy piggledy

Ahhh-welcome-ahhh.....

To herr-varn..."

Well it's happy birthday to me today and what better way to celebrate than a concert down the Charlotte.  Me and D went to watch The Fall.  And what an evening.

"Ah know, ah know, ah know, ah know, ah know..

Hey hey hey hey!"

First impressions were good.  The place was stuffed full of men in their 30's and older.  All of them looked me and D's demographic.  A band was playing as we arrived and they were excellent.  They were a 3 piece consisting of drums, double bass and sax.  Mad jazz and mental singing do go well.

"We're not Galatasaray (Hey!)

We're Sparta FC!"

Eventually the Fall stumble onto the stage without their main man.  They get cracking and he lurches into view looking very "special".  Throughout the show I was wondering who he reminds me of.  The best I could do was "a staccato John Cooper Clarke chewing a wasp".  Not a very good description; the man's definitely a one-off.

"Azerbaija-hn! Azerbaija-hn! Azerbaija-hn! Azerbaija-hn!"

The rest of the band were excellent.  The guitarist was way off to the side and looked superficial to the mayhem created.  The bassist was smack in the mddle and looking bored.  But they have a female keyboard player who was stood quietly by and looking listless and uninterested throughout. 

What to say about the music?  If you take an amateur band and ask them to find a catchy riff they could do it but few would build an entire song of just that riff.  The Fall do this and smack you into submission by sheer repetition.  The mongaloid shrieks of Mark E Smith counterpoint all of this leaving you with a clearly unique sound.  Like nothing you've seen or heard - unless you've seen the Fall another time.

Wow.  How this band have released 27 studio albums and about 100 live and retrospective albums but remains relatively anonymous is beyond me.

Have fun.

(and Happy Birthday me)

At work today.

Seems our boss is leaving to return to South Africa.  Bugger.  Personal reasons too.

She's an ace boss and has helped develop our service into something far better than it was when she arrived.

There are some problems here:

First it means that there are no real leaders in the team now.  The one remaining senior is busy with patients as well so is unable to do the boss's job properly.  Our manager (boss's boss) is also leading the community team, the OTs, the Speech and Language team and the podiatrists.  Just how much time can she take to concentrate on us?

Secondly the boss is a nice person and she's leaving.  It's rare to have a nice boss.  Are we getting another?  If we are then will they be any cop?

Are there any positives?  Well the cliche is "a problem is an opportunity". What can we think about?

How about pushing certain proposals myself and trying to badger to get certain things moved forwards?  Could be necessary and will help any potential management development.  I think this would be a good thing.  I just hope I can fit the time in amongst everything else going on.

We'll see.

Have fun.

I'm interested in 2 news stories today.

The first was that girl who wanted to wear extra-islamic dress to school and has been off school for 2 years because they won't let her back without wearing the approved uniform.  Apparently the school had spent ages working with the local islamic community to figure out what they should ask for to please the community.  The majority of girls at the school are muslim and they managed to get along fine with the rules.  Now forgive me if I'm wrong but the rule in islam is for women to be modest.  What, pray tell, is modest about kicking up a fuss and becoming the centre of attention?  I also recall that there is a commandment in islam that obliges you to get educated.  Seems like an irritating teen girl wanting to get noticed to me.  Sounds very un-Islamic really.  Stupid little girl.

The second one was the study that there is no evidence that shows spinal manipulation is useful for reducing pain and other problems.  On the news this evening they interviewed some young woman who swears by osteopathy.  She was 31 and has been going to an osteopath for 9 months "and it really works wonders for me".  Really?  It works so well that you go fortnightly to a man who charges you a fortune each time and still your back is so bad that you must return?  She's a 31 year old.  She shouldn't need to carry on like this.  There's no reason at all that she should have to suffer and she shouldn't have to fork out every fortnight for "maintenance".  Go and see someone who knows what they are doing and get a cure!

Honestly!

Have fun.

Not a silly post but a plug for this website here.  It's a home page for a muslim woman writer and her beliefs.  Very enlightening and it cheered me up immensely compared with "Ummah.com" which seems stuffed full of Kevin the Terrorists ("you're all infidels and I hate you!") and their appallingly childish arguments and wet-dreams of killing people (religion of peace you say?).

Anyways I thought I'd share that.

Have fun.

Oh this is a doozy.  There's a story on the local telly news about "PC gone mad" which is actually nothing to do with PC.

Some idiot local councillor somewhere in armpitville UK decided that he was going to fly his flag rather than the (provided) St George's Cross up his village flagpole.  The council told him to take it down.  And this is "Political ....Correctness...gone....mad."  Perfectly spaced out in a pathetic attempt to demonstrate emphasis (as if this would mean he's extra clever and obviously getting one over on the "bureaucrats").

The flag he is flying is the imbecile's flag.  You know the one, it's the St George's flag but, specially for this type of idiot, it has the word "England" across it.  This is so the unwashed know what it means.  The rest of us can recognise our own national flag without having to have the name across it. In technical and legal terms he could be arrested for defacing the national flag.  Off the top of my head I can't think of any country that feels the need to write its own name on their flag. Only in England do we breed people stupid enough that they can't recognise their own flag when it's unscrawled on.

Of course the "loony-left, ultra-PC" BBC covered the story and conveniently only spoke to people who'd been given incorrect information.  All the vox-pops were from people who seemed to think they were being told to take it down 'cos it's the St George's Cross.  "It's a disgrace! It's our country blah blah blah".  That WASN'T the bloody story!  They had a guy with an Irish hat on; "They'd fly an Irish flag in Ireland wouldn't they."  Yes maybe, but the Irish aren't such divvies that they'd deface their own flag are they?

If he was flying the Union Flag upside down he'd be told to sort it out.  He's displaying a defiled and bastardised national flag.  If he's a true Englishman (and he was awfully and outwardly proud to be one) he'd never stoop to such acts of wretchedness.  How can a self-promoting "patriot" dare to disfigure his own country's flag and then claim that being told to replace it with the country's REAL flag is "PC gone mad"? Ahaha I think I spotted the clue somewhere in the sentence there.

The man's more of an idiot than anyone who feels the need to put a flag up anyway.

Have fun.

Well hasn't this week been spectacular for screened entertainment?  First off was the Freudian madman wittering on about fillums.  Then, last night P and C came round and brought a couple of fillums to watch.  In the end we only got through one of them but my word what a fillum.

It's called "The Happiness of the Katakuris" another of the Japanese fillums of Takashi Miike (director of Visitor Q, Audition, Ichi the Killer and more) so you'd expect a scary fillum. Well it wasn't really.  But it was a tad odd (this is understatement).  The DVD box says it's "a cross between The Dawn of the Dead and The Sound of Music".  It's close-ish but not quite accurate.  I'd link the "Sound of Music" with the family atmos of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

The start got things off on the right foot.  It was a plasticine style animation of a little demonic "Morph" like creature biting the uvula out of a young lady who was wanting only to eat some soup. "Aargh! My uvula!" said the subtitles.  The little critter then runs off to enjoy his feast of uvula.  Whilst doing this he gets eaten by a crow.  Somewhere soon an egg gets laid then it cracks and another little demon critter is born from it.  Then it's eaten by another crow and the cycle is expected to start again.

But as the crow is flying away a gardener gets angry at it and hoys a stick (miles) and thwacks the crow which falls to the ground and the show then follows the gardener (now in real life).  He's grandpa Katakuri the eldest of a family who have bought a remote guesthouse.  They have had no guests yet and they feel it's because they are so remote.  There are the usual tensions between them.  Then one night there is a tropical storm and up steps a visitor.  He dies overnight.  What to do with the body?  Tell the police?  No!  This would give us bad publicity. So they bury the guy in the garden near a big lake.

Then a couple arrive a few nights later.  He's a huge sumo wrestler, she's a dot of a young lady.  They get a room and shag noisily (heard from the rooms downstairs).  No sign in the morning so they investigate and there's a dead sumo wrestler.  Moving him (with difficulty) they find a dead dot of a young lady who's been smothered by the wrestler.  So they go to bury these as well.

So the story continues.  People come into their house and die.  They don't kill any of them but things just conspire against them.  I just thought about this.  I wonder if the devil-Morph is giving his revenge.

The most bizarre thing about the fillum was the music.  It's a musical so there are songs about cleaning up death scenes, digging holes as well as a couple of love songs. As I said it's rather odd.

Having said all that the fillum did drag for me.  I spent some time wanting more dramatic impulse forward.  It just felt like it was meandering forwards instead of being impelled headlong.  Still worth a look though.

Have fun.

Last night saw the show that's entertained me more than any other in recent months.

It was called something along the lines of "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" and had the most wonderfully accented Eastern European doctor of Psychology presenting it.  The enjoyment came from lots of clips being analysed by this slightly odd Freudian.

So we start with a fillum from 1933 which switches from normality to something far more cinematic as an ordinary girl walks down a street then watches as a train passes and you see lots of little individual stories pass by.  "Za character becomes ze viewer in a way zat has not been done before."

Then we cut to that scene in the Matrix where Whassname offers Neo the blue or red pill.  The red pill stopping the "ride" and "If you take the blue pill; I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes".

Cue presenter:"I do not want one of zees pills.  I'm not interested in stopping ze ride nor do I wish to see the reality behind ze illusion.  I wish to see ze reality OF ze illusion".

And on it went like this for the whole show.

"Psycho is like ze Freudian parts of the ze consiousness. Ze action takes place on 3 levels.  Downstairs ze ego is in charge so ze behaviour is outvardly normal.  Upstairs, where ze mother is, the superego is in charge so der is conflict between Norman and ze mother.  In ze basement ze Id is in charge, dis is where ze acts of brutality are engendered....."

What a wonderful show! Putting Alien and Charlie Chaplin fillums next to each other.  Comparing the Marx brothers to the 3 parts again (Groucho is the Superego, Harpo the Ego and Chico the Id).

Then he's wittering about "ze change in reality where you no longer feel comfortable" as a mechanism in fillum.  He uses a David Lynch fillum (I think it was Mulholland Drive) where someone is singing live and then collapses but the song goes on.  It's a very surprising clip.

Highly entertaining.

Have fun.

[edit, 'cos I just remembered] "Ven ve flush za toilet ve expect not to see what we flush again.  It has gone, as it were, to anaza place, a parallel world if you will.  Za unreality of cinema is like when you flush and za shit comes back out of za toilet and zis surprises us.  When ve sit in ze cinema is ze screen not a toilet and are we not seeing ze shit come back out and surprise us?". Fantastic!

This I think is a story that shows just how barmy some folk are.

The BBC's charter came up for renewal yesterday and they got another 10 years guaranteed continuation of licence fee and public service remit.  They put a "Have Your Say" about this and you wouldn't ever have believed the imbecilic nonsense that people are spouting about the organisation.

Firstly there are swathes of people ranting about the "Anti-America, Anti-Bush, Anti-Blair, Pro-PC, Far left, Pro-Muslim, Communist, so called 'news' output" of the Beeb.  I'd take serious issue with that opinion.  The BBC recently got castigated at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague by Milosevic for broadcasting "anti-Serb propaganda".  They were castigated at home at the time of the war for being the "Belgrade Broadcasting Corp" ie pro-Serbian.  When the same organisation is accused of bias against both sides you know that something is working well.

I'd like to see ANY evidence of an institutional bias in the BBC.  Every news story has a slant it is true.  One person's unbiased is another person's outrageous propaganda.  We can see this very well exposed in Italy at the mo.  Berlusconi controls pretty much all the news media in Italy and some may see this as an abuse of power at worse or conflict of interests at best.  He even walked out of an interview on state TV citing the "fact" that the interviewer was a far-left leaning person therefore the interview can't be unbiased.  Idiot.   You can show a report that the Palestinians live in squalor and many will feel that the article is an outrageous slur on Israel and demand apologies for alleged anti-semitism. 

Secondly they complain about the BBC "censoring" views they try to post that "are against the editorial slant of the BBC".  Outrageous!  How dare the BBC censor people's views?  Well duh!  Idiots!  You can't put views that are libellous so they're out.  You can't incite any violence, so they're out.  You can't write drivel, they're out.  This is why your "perfectly sensible" attitudes are not broadcast to us.  Articulate and argue don't be strident.  Besides this if they go to the radio pages there are message boards that allow open discussion so use them.  The "Have Your Say" bit is for people's views not discussion, hence it's not called a discussion board.

Thirdly they witter about the BBC's self-censorship.  "Why didn't you show those cartoons" they cry.  "Treat us like adults please!"  Have these people never heard of the concept of "being realistic".  The BBC is a global news operation and lots of the important news now is coming out of the middle-east and they need to have reporters there.  If they did show the cartoons then they probably wouldn't have any reporters there for much longer.  Therefore we get no news and these folk are free to live out their lives in blissful ignorance of the potentially world-changing news coming out of the region.  Hmm?  Which is better?

Fourthly they complain that the BBC does not represent their views.  Well boo-hoo.  If you want a corporate yes-man then don't watch anything that may interfere with your well-set and obviously open-minded view of the world.  Wouldn't it be just awful if you were made to think and try and see something that doesn't correspond to exactly the way you feel about something?  And where would you stop?  Perhaps a news story that GWBush was the most saintly man on the planet would not be enough for some, perhaps you'd think any that didn't deify him was tantamount to communist propaganda.

One of the things I want from a news organisation is them to make me think.  I don't want to be told, "there there don't fret the world's just like you want it to be."

Fifthly does asking hard questions really count as criticism?  Why should politicians not get asked hard questions about vast amounts of our money being spent, or members of our armed forces being sent to waste their lives in an illegal war?  Why shouldn't they be asked why they haven't invaded Burma, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, North Korea and China on human rights issues when that's the current reason for going into Iraq and deposing Saddam?

The fact that "Saddam was a bad man" is true but doesn't mean it was a good reason to invade a sovereign country.  Be a bit more grown up about things will you.  Politics is hard and black and white rarely figure.  I know you struggle to comprehend any subtleties and you just want to "hit it with a stick" but the rest of have evolved past unquestioning support for people in power.  If they can't answer hard questions well then I guess they have something to hide or are just incompetant (and therefore I want to know about it so I don't vote for them in the future).  And I want the news organisation that I pay for to ask those questions.  I want them to ask such questions of any government no matter which side of the spectrum they are on.  The opposition doesn't seem to ask too many hard questions so it's up to the media to do it for them.

Sixthly:  just how is a commercial organisation (answerable to the owner who will probably have his own agenda, see Berlusconi again) supposed to be impartial?  Look at Fox to see the disgusting bias there.  People who disagree have their microphones switched off or are shouted down.  But perhaps that's "fair and balanced" in your world.

The BBC is biased.  Well only in so far as all humans have an opinion and are therefore biased.  Show me any examples of bias on the beeb and I'll show another example from the beeb putting the opposing view on the same topic.  When an organisation is attacked as biased from the Tories, New Labour, Real Labour, Muslims, Christians, athiests and more then I say that organisation is probably doing things right.

Have fun.