( 'if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence' )

The Worlds most ill-informed columnist is at it again!

It seems the maintenence man who has been the cause of my stress today is renowned for being 'overly belligerent', I beleive someone said.

It's not the first time he's got pissy because he's been overtaken. Someone who has expereinced his angry face beofre wondered why I didn't report him. I asked if they did, and they said 'no'.

I'll see how I feel about him tomorrow and take it from there. Chances are I'll just let it ride until he gets grouchy again, or he brings his anger inot the work environent.

Clearly, the man is a dick.

Wow, I've been awake 30 minutes and I've already recieved my first threat of violence. The conversation went

'You cut me up at the lights again and I'll knock your fucking block off''
'What lights?' I ask
'Fuck off' he replies.
'If I did anything wrong I apologise'
He wasn't listening and seemed in no mood to discuss his greivance. Let me give you some background.

I'm confused. I know my route to work. What lights indeed? He was ahead of me in the cue of traffic at the last crossroads before work - the last lights beofre work - he was the car in front of me (silver VW), I was pondering the pro's and cons of his LED tail lights.. Then for a quater mile he was the car ahead of me leading down to the turn off. We were doing about 35 in the 40 zone because of the car ahead of him. We turned off. We went past the cemetary and the road splits into three for the roundabout. He took the middle lane, I took the inside. He stopped at the line, and I carried on through seeing no traffic behind and make a left. I indicate right and move into the middle lane for the next roundabout (where I make a right and two lanes drop into one), making sure said silver VW wasn't gonna drive up my ass, because this stretch of road is renowned for some profound asshattery first thing in the morning and as a result I'm always prepared at this point to make evasive moves (I've been forced left here before). It's ok,  he took the right lane behind me. I indicate my intentions at the roundabout and carry on round.

Just to add some clarity here, my 4x4 is van. It's got no side windows, so I gotta be careful whats around me. If something appears in my mirrors as behind me, it's truly behind me. If I can't see it, I assume it's along side - its the safest way to drive.

I notice that for the last half mile said silver VW is up my ass. Yeah, people do that around here. He's up my ass as we pull inot the car park too. I park up, step out the car and start walking to my building and he kicks off. Cheers bud.

I knew where he was and what he was doing. I could see him a safe distance behind. Maybe he just didn't like a 4x4 beating his pride and joy into work. But I'd love to know which lights I cut him up at, because, fuck me, I can't think of any lights where I wasn't behind him. I can name you all four sets on my way into work.

Chances are I'll meet him in work some time, he's an electrical maintenence guy and will be in and around sorting lights and stuff. Is he still gonna harbour a grudge based on someing I have no comprehension of? Chances are yes, people are shit like that. If he wants to knowk my block off, he's welcome to try. He might even suceed, but at least the law will savage his butt on my behalf.

I don't need this kinda crap at any hour of the day. The world doesn't need people like that.

I'm now sat here analysing my actions trying to peice out how I've spolied his day, what I did that was wrong, or if I commited some unwritten road law that covered his dignity or morality. Either way, I don't deserve the threat, and I'm not happy about receiving one.

If, however, he can talk me through what I did that upset him, I will happily apologise if I'm at fault. If I did worng, I'll admit it. But I'm not sure I did anything wrong. I knew where he was and understood what his car could have been doing, and I drive to account for that (early morning asshattery and road rage and all that jazz).

I'm trying not to let it spoil my day, but at this moment, its a doubtful wish.

edit: an hour and half has gone by since first posting, and I've still got an elevated heart rate and slight shakes. I'm still analysing the journey in. I'm still convinced I'm right, but hell, you've only got my word for it, right?

I seem to have a squatter in the back garden.

He was there yesterday, and he's was there again today when I got back from work. Little bugger's uprooted a load of moss and dug a hole.

He seems to like it, so I've made sure there's some shelter for the little dude, and I'm seeing if a handfull of corn flakes are to his palate.

Seems I got me a resident red-legged partridge.

Sweeeet!

......with a blue moon in my eye.

Germany - escalated school shooting, finishes with sixteen dead including the gunman.
Alabama - escalated family shooting, finishes with eleven dead including the gunman.

.....so far

Some say the murder rate increases with statistical significance around the times of full moon.

On the basis of the above two tradegies, occuring within 24hours of each other, it would be easy to jump to the same conclusion.

Across the world people are killed by the direct and intentional actions of other. A political killing here, a car bomb there, a vicious regime somewhere, a war somewhere else. A multiple murder in Germany. Tomorrow, and the day after, people will be killed. It seems to be an enevitable consequence of mankind.

What's the difference? Seriously, where does murder end and lawfull killing begin? Or 'collatoral damage' start. Or 'Casualties of war' commence? I can't answer that.

Is it when a 'higher power' gives permission or orders for death? Who's to say who carries that authority? Who can really say who can justify the extinguishing of anothers life? 'Higher powers' and 'greater goods' can be argued for just about every killing I can imagine on a micro, macro or meta-scale, and beleive me, I can imagine a lot of killing. At the end of the day every death is about the ulitmate ascertion of someones will over another. Don't give me all the bullshit about 'gods will' or 'fighting for the rights of the many', they're all esoteric concepts stemming from someones belief. There's no irrefutable law of the universe that dictates or controls these things. Moral high-ground won't be found by cracking quarks in the LHC; the Z-machine won't show us social order.

Take the reactors, the syncotrons, the linacs, toroids, any of the chopping blocks and axes of modern physics and reduce anything to it's ultimate building blocks and eventually all you end with is energy. You won't find one trace of the philophies of men or dogs. No morals, no conscienciousness. No dreams, no love, no hate. No stupid bloody reasons for humans to perpetuate campaigns of 'involuntary euthanasia' against each other. Those really are the children of men.

So I'll mourn for the students and people of Winnenden and for the people of Geneva County. But I'll also mourn for the people of every damned civilisation on this planet who have lost their lives to some pitiful excuse.

Doesn't matter to me if it's on gods authority, political authority, or simply because someone didn't like Mondays, or wanted your sneakers. Chances are there was no point for it.

Chances are, there never will be, regardless of astonomical cycles.

...becoming

At one with my geekiness.

I would like to thank mrph for introducing me to yet another complusive daily web-comic read. This time its 'PvP'. Truly a nerd-fest made entirely with a combination of love, awesome and win. Curse you - you are evil, I tells ya, evil!

My daily reads now consist of Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Pearls before Swine, 9 Chickweed Lane, The Duplex, Sheldon, Starslip and of course, PvP.

So, thanks dude; between web comics, plotting acts of extreme extortion and extraordinary violence for my Sinergy character, and reading LJ I manage to remain an unproductive member of society for just a l'il bit longer each morning.

Guess I better go weld some shit, now.

Speaking of which, look up 'laser welding' on Wikipedia. Thats my toy top-right. Ain't she a cutie?

This is a new time, with a different kind, they are the future


Kiddies television - like lots of things in early life, it should teach play, exercise and (secretly) help the development of life skills all under the guise of inoffensive entertainment - as long as the parents buy into this and don't just treat the fracking 'Box' as a cathode-ray nipple. 'Here kids, mommey couldn't give two tugs of dead rats cock about you right now, go suckle from the 48" wide-screen wet-nurse'. It's a TV, it ain't no subsitute for parenting.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking - Greta's having another turn in charge of the pack, and your probably not wrong. But bear with me and prepare to be exhasperated.

On kiddies TV in my country, there's a presenter who does inserts in the 'close of the day' slot - bedtime stories, little morals, that kinda shit. She's pretty, articulate and can relate the simple joy of a story with depth and feeling. As an irrelevent aside, she's missing everything on her left arm from the wrist down. 'So what?' you say.

Inclusivity is great. People should be readily able to take the jobs they're capable of doing reagrdless of just about everything. Okay, lets face it a quadreplegic probably won't make the best mountain climber, so I'll accept  that everything tends to a limit, but whats the issue with someone who is good with pups presenting a 'idiots latern' prog for youngters?

Indulge me for a mo, here. Pups ask questions. Questions like 'why's that dude a different colour', 'why is his hair ginger', 'where has daddy gone', 'why are you crying' etc. All question that parents have to face up to and answer. So, what is the problem when a kids asks 'daddy, why has that lady only got one hand'?

I can't answer that, but this poor girl, who is intellegent, bubbly and a star at narrative has been the subject of over a hundred complaints from parents, because she's 50% down in the paw department.

Some of these complaints are herioc in their blind stupidity  - "I didn't want to let my children watch the filler bits on The Bedtime Hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter's mind and possibly caused sleep problems"

Well, here's a news bulletin for you, at some point little 'Lucielle', or 'Clarice', or 'Chadonnay-Pinot-Noit' or 'Mixed-fruit bowl' will have to face a stark reality that some folk are just different. I ain't judging the kids here, because kids ask questions. Who I'm jugding here is a certain demographic of parent.

Some people just don't deserve children. Some children simply don't deserve their parents..........

If it's gonna cause a problem - turn the damned thing off and actually spend some time explaining the world to your offspring - with luck they might learn more than you did. You handed parental responsibility to an inamite grey box of electronics - take some responsibility for that. For once.

To all those parents out there who treat their pups with respect and teach them tolerance, who spend time with them and love them - you have my sincere respect and gratitude. You're pups will be the future of our great pack. They will see the world in hues and colours we can only dream of. Their dreams of the future won't be fettered by our schims and shadows.

To the others, however, there is sufficient ignorance in this world. Please try not to add to it. Teach your children not your fears, but the real things in life that they will need to be frightened of - a world run by people like yourselves.

Don't ensure that your children grow up to be as ignorant as yourselves, eh?.

......are you mother-fuckers ready.......

( ...for the new shit? )
That is all.

..... you're part of the problem.

( A news article lifted from IMDB )
Oh dear, they really haven't grasped the problem, have they.........

A long time ago, in Bethlehem,.......

( ....so the holy bible says...... )

Peace out

It Christmas time, and there’s no reason to be afraid.

Actually there, is. ‘Tis the season for every half baked and hair-brained celebrity to get on there high horse and inform us that there are those in the world less fortunate than us. As if we’d forgotten.

Maybe the hotshots had. You know, it’s easy to preach from the bar-stool, in your Hollywood mansion about the poor, speaking your words of sad sorrow through mouthfulls of Bollinger and Caviar.

Hey Bono, wanna hear the little news? Want us to end world poverty? Some of us have got very little to give that the bank doesn’t already own. You, however, have about a quarter of a billion in the bank. You are worth significantly more than many starving nations. Fuck, dude, you’re probably worth more than a few first-world nations at this moment in time.

You ask us to give money. To give money for what? End world poverty? Or to give some corrupt tribal regime a better oppotunity to buy guns? And to think, it used to be the British that specialised in the subjugation of the indigenous.

You ask us for money. To feed the poor. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Buy him fishing tackle and he’ll starve to death because his rivers evaporated years ago. He might get shot because a different tribe owns the river when it does flow. Bit of a shit, trying to grow crops in a desert.

Great, send ‘em aid and it’s a temporary stop gap. What happens when those aid trucks that can get through the minefields finally turn-tail and haul their empty asses home? The poor bastards starve again. The lucky ones might get taken out by some virulent disease (you know, the kind of thing eradicated in the West decades ago) – a quick death in an otherwise painfully slow pace of life. The unlucky ones will be left to struggle until next Christmas when you tug at our heart strings again. They might even make it, just to have to suffer and struggle on for another year watching their young perish and their cattle drop dead onto the scorched earth.

You ask for money. I’ll be blunt. It isn’t a problem of my making. It won’t be a problem of my solution either. So, talk, and ask, and plead for us to ‘send us your fookin’ money!’ Talk is cheap. Getting people to give money is easy. But use your millions, and your contacts and your fame to actually find a workable solution for once.

‘Oh Bono, you’re a saint’. For what? Pretending you’re making the world a better place by getting people to provide a stop-gap solution that you alone could better? Oh, I’m sorry, you perform at concerts and waive your fees. Very noble. I mend peoples cars for shits and giggles, you don’t see me getting canonised. But as you hob-nob with the decision makers and the politicos, the presidents and prime-ministers does this mean you influence the politics? It probably means that they get to soak some of your reflected glory. They get to appear hip to the jive with the rock-and-roll generations. 'I’ll vote for the man, man, he hangs out with Bono – he gotta be a dude’. All your vote are belong to us.

An embittered rant? Possibly. Uncharitable? No.

Read the above, these are not the words of dog that doesn’t care about the poor and downtrodden, the starving and the sick. These are the words of dog that realises that the problem needs a significantly bigger solution than just a cheque and the photo opportunity it will provide. It needs a paradigm shift in the politics of Africa, and that requires a shift in the politics of the world. Oh, we can influence that, but it takes time.

The world needs to wake up. Iraq was invaded to ‘kill a bad man’ – ‘to stop a regime’. Or so we’re told. Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, therefore the Western world couldn’t give two shits about the spiralling state of desperation in which the peoples of that nation now find themselves. I don’t see the West sending anyone to sit outside the presidential mansion in Harare with a CheyTac Intervention and a box of ‘408s. So what hope for countries that don’t even have sustainable agriculture?

So here’s a deal, music-man. I’ll give a few sheckles, and share my kibble with the needy, if you use your fame and fortune for changing the politics of the planet.

As I guessed. It’s up to the rest of us, as usual.

....cracy, crazy, crazy nights

Last night I slept badly - not that thats anything unusual, but this time it was differently bad.

At one point I awoke sat bolt upright staring at my wrist as the imagined agony subsided. I may dream, I may dream those wonderful dreams of chasing rabbits or parked cars or (god forbid) frisbees. I may dream, but I won't remember. Oh, not last night!

There was a snake sliding around my lower arm, an endless succsssions of reptilian curls and knots. I don't mind snakes, usually, and from a distance. But this one had a malevalence from the start. It meant sinister things. I don't know how, to be fair they're lacking in facial expression - it could have been as surprised as me, but without eyebrows, how do you tell?

Anyhoo, this fella (oh yeah, I knew it's sex, trust me) was all hisses and gaping mouth and big, drippy fangs and it seemed to be taking a perverse delight in staring me out as it thrust is hideously sharp, barbed penis into the flesh at the base of my palm, breaking skin and splitting tendons. And it fucking hurt!

......aaaaand not it good way, either. It was excrutiating and terryfying. It kinda woke me up with a start.

I eventually fell back to sleep.

Only to be woken an hour later by another bout of raging heartburn. By 0545 I'd given up. By 0640 I was in work.

D'you ever get that feeling that sometimes bed just doesn't want you in it??

......is it all you want it to be?



Interesting, not what I would have expected. Mainly because it rings very true......

......my head got lost along the way


It seems, that some folk are not alone out there in having heinous trouble with the LJ 'cut' system.

Write a post, add a cut, preview the post - all is good.

Post post (that makes sense, right?) and find that half the killer question you wrote has gone, making the last part of your post just meaningless.

Wonderfull.

Apologies to those that read the post and thought 'wtf??'

In other news, I fell over a pro-nuclear website this morning, extolling the virtues of mini nuclear reactors for local power-gen applications. One justification for this potentially hair-brained idea was 'dependence on foreign oil'.

Uh, last time I looked 7.9% of the Uranium used in US reactors came from the US itself. Most of it? Well that was sourced from Russia (about a third), Austrailia and Canada. So, about this dependence on imported fuels.....

I  have discovered how to restore some of my standing in various territory. I simply turn up.

Staggering, huh?

There was a forum, someone else was using it so I had decided that they could have it and I would leave. Then I thought 'bollocks to it, I like being there, why should I feel I can't be there?'. So I appeared. The concerned has since removed themselves from that forum. Territory reclaimed.

Do I feel guilt? No. Should I? Again, no. Why should I stop doing what I want because someone else deems that their cause is more worthy than my own? Simple answer, I shouldn't. They had a choice to be there. They choose not to be. The fact their choice was based on me being there is irrelevant. They still made the choice. I like dealing with cowards.

Actually, in some respects I'm pleased that the concerned has started to take that kind of responsibility for their actions. They want to disown me (because I had the gaul to raise a question regarding my own survival) and now they are taking the responsibility for that by basically clearing the hell out my way. Good on 'em. The evil in me would say 'lets see how far I can hound these others out of my life', but the logical side of me wins by saying 'don't be greedy, just live your life how you want, and if they can't stand to be part of that, then they choose to remove themselves from it'. Well done folks, this is the first step of your very long healing process

Here's a funny one. The concerned removed their personal belongings from my territory yesterday. They posted an email stating that the matters twixt them and I were now at a conclusion. I felt a certain smugness in responding and informing them that there was the little matter of my belongings that they were in possecion of. I've given them 48 hours to return them. I didn't say what would happen after 48 hours though. For instance I could get legal on their ass or I could go round to their den and collect in person. It's not the value of the property that bothers me (maybe a couple o' hundred dollars max), but the principle that someone feels they can end a partnership soley on their terms. My X did the same thing I didn't accept that either. If I'm being honest now I just want what I've a right to, and if either of them get reduced to rubble in the process, then that is a decision of their making, not mine. I'll not be making compromises because they are ill, or because they feel I should. I only want what I have a right to have. No more, but on that hand, no less.

So, this is me. Part cannine, part human. But complete bastard? No. Bit of a bitch? yes. And thats the bit I'm proud of.

Pull my tale, I'll bite. But don't blame the dog. You did the pulling.

Oh, on other news, in theory my legal bind to my previous life-mate was finally cut last week, but I'm awaiting confirmation.

Here's another splat of writing I've done for somewhere else. It's here as a catalogue of the the kinda stuff I witter on about.  ( More motorsport......... )