Drugs, don’t you just…

So Mr Nutt, the advisor for statistically proven fact, failed to grasp the governments need to send out a moral message. And the moral message is? Well, less harmful ganja is more immoral and thus requiring of greater legal penalties than more harmful tobacco and alcohol. Simple enough. Oh like slapping someone with a fish, less harmful, requires a higher sentence than murdering them, more harmful? Or leaving dirty finger marks on someone’s cherished Porsche is more morally reprehensible than stealing it and selling it in Dubai. That’s somehow not the way my father explained it to me. So now the public are confused. The government is steering us towards more harmful tobacco and alcohol and away from weed. The answer is of course tax. Tax has always been the government’s way of appreciating how much we like something. It’s their way of joining in with our happy moments. Alcohol and tobacco, yes, mental illness and rain, no. So what about weed? Well it’s not taxed, because it’s too immoral for the government to even contemplate its existence, but we do and we like it. It has to be Class B to stop its retailers being out on the street in their thousands and jeopardising Benson & hedges. Evidently the rule is, if people like something we can’t tax, it must be made illegal. Prostitution and historically homosexuality are/were illegal for just such ‘moral’ reasons. So why not just come clean and tax all our moral indiscretions? Legalise everything and tax it according to the harm it does. Cannabis, 200%, skunk, 300%, heroin, 500%, crack, 1000%. LSD, 0% as it would come under the category of further education. People are happy, the chancellor is happy. The only people who would be well upset would be pimps and drug dealers. I consider that a result. But then the two main parties may decide voting Lib Dem was a moraly taxable indiscretion.

What’s new in Hip Hop?

Hip Hop reminds me of fractals. However much they grow and change they always end up looking the same. This one is a million times larger than that one and look, it’s exactly the same. That’s amazing. It’s like watching me slowly turn through 360 degrees and, bingo, I look exactly the same as when I started. Truly magical. And it’s the same with Hip Hop. Over twenty years of constant change and development it hasn’t changed a bit. It’s still true to its roots, keeping the faith, not sold out, still in the hood, same. A unique first that appears to defy Darwin’s theory of evolution. No small feat. Where mainstream pop has chased ever-changing fashions, new romantics, punk, metal, glam rock etc; where hemlines rose and fell and now seem to be disappearing altogether Hip Hop has remained true to Hip Hop and bling. Where in the nancy world of pop can one find such rich statements of, “I got so much money and everything you desire I treat them like shit, you poor downtrodden bastard”? That’s just the blood of the hood brother.
You may by now be detecting some white elitist cynicism here. Let me challenge you. Who in the thirties, forties and onward was the evolving force in popular music, introducing new energy, harmony and rhythms? Who today are playing a rich variety of world music from Senegal, South Africa, India and South America? Who wanted and wants to take music somewhere new and exciting, to explore their own ability and technique? My argument is about neither colour nor elitism. It’s about breaking Hip Hop out of its cycle of “Got no money, get some money”. It’s about raising the horizons of ‘the hood’ to encompass riches far more valuable than wealth.
Ignorance has always had an allure; it’s easy and built within the most magnificent defences but it has one drawback. It never changes or evolves. So here’s to Hip Hop’s evolution into new directions, new lyrical forms and classy musicianship.

American Psycho.

Teacher and obvious grandmother of Sarah Palin comes to England to grace our TV screens with her version of aversion therapy for racists. Apparently all us whities are scum, halleluiah save the Lord. But this lady is SS concentration camp guard not zealous preacher. Thirty-year-old video footage shows her first experiments with kindergarten kids teaching the brown eyed ones to hate the blue-eyed ones and by so doing showing them they’re all latent racists. It’s frightening to imagine she’s been propagating her particular brand of brutality for so long, especially on the young. In Blighty though she finds complexity. One woman imbued with an English sense of fair play exposed her purposely fiddling the results to cause division. But sure enough those of other colours were quick to point out she was white and thus obviously racist, which if you think about it is kind of ironic. By the end of the day it was evident she had managed to induce racism in her motley band of experimentees but more importantly she had, as a person, given us a perfect example of fascism at work. By incessant belittling, bullying and over powering abrasiveness she showed, for me at least, a perfect example of what The Third Reich was built on. And that's a valuable lesson to put on television. It sure proved racism is about an individuals prejudice, bigotry, ignorance and bullying, not colour.

TV won't happen to you.

Disregarding the fact that 20% of the time (yes 20%) it’s telling you your life is unsatisfactory unless you buy something, and programs about the Second World War for reasons that will become obvious, nothing you see on TV will EVER happen to you. Unless you’re old enough to remember the Second World War, in which case you won’t want it to happen to you again. Are you really likely to move to a place where every mid summer people start murdering each other? Or the East End where, in amongst the general day-to-day backstabbing and misery, people murder each other? Or places where they have Crime Scene Investigators, or France, or be plane crashed on a desert island and all the other places where people murder each other? No.
Is it likely someone will come up to you in the street and ask, “In Oliver Wendell Holmes seventeenth century poem, ‘The Deacon's Masterpiece’, what was the object he was constructing? Christ’s, Smith.’ No. (a ‘One-hoss Shay’ just in case this unlikely event happens, and your name is Smith)
Are you ever likely to have five totally decent friends, who incidentally never murder each other? No. None of this will ever happen to you. Even if you sign up for X Factor or Big Brother you will most likely end up doing obscene things with a bottle in your own back garden or pegging out in the queue before you ever get to see Simon. No, your only chance is as a drunken blurred out face in a carefully edited police video, living proof that you, me and 60 million others can’t have a good time without jeopardising the fabric of society. Or you’re murdered by some fiendishly clever vicar getting even for some long forgotten ecclesiastical parking violation. In reality none of this will ever happen to you so why watch it? You may though find yourself strangely attracted to shopping at Asda, buying Weetabix and a Peugeot 305. That will happen to you.

Do cows flirt?

To clear up any confusion I’m talking about the four-legged moo type. Can any farmer out there write in to confirm my suspicions, because I think they do. I’m walking in the country. A field, some cows. The majority are far off occupied in the many stages of digesting, but maybe one is by the fence ruminating on less tangible things. She glances my way; our eyes meet. This is not a blank gaze; not some dumb animal stare at an incomprehensible object, this is soul to soul; an M&S look. She looks and looks away. Maybe she moves her head, angles it and looks again. I mirror and return. We say nothing; there is nothing to say. I smile with my eye and she, unblinking, accepts it feeling no automatic need to return it. Her eyes wander again but the slow movement of her head shows she is still in relationship, contemplating the timing of her next look. This reoccurs time and again but never breaking off the continuousness of being together. Under her muzzle of hair she blushes slightly. I feel accepted, accepted by an un-human presence, a presence far more gentle than my own frantic humanity. I am calmed. She eats some grass and returns to our conversation of looks. I enter her world with gratitude; a much simpler world of standing, eating and producing methane. Where standing is enough, owning nothing is enough and being used for the farmer’s needs is graciously accepted. That rain on a wet back just is. That now is enough. I thank her for our brief affair and walk on. So yes, cows flirt, beautifully. If you take the time.

Don't be unfair to brains.

I’ve heard if you ask Google to google Google you’ll bring down the Internet. I don’t think it’s true. You’ll probably just get Google. Maybe if you asked, ‘What is the last decimal digit of pi?’ because pi has an infinitely long number of decimal places. It’s the sort of number that just can’t make its mind up. That’s why it’s called an irrational number. It’s like, “Oh a bit more than that, OK, now a touch less, ah but more than, yes but just a tweak less” and so on. And on. Google may, in the twink of an electrons heartbeat, deduce the first hundred, two twinks for two hundred and so on, and in fifty years it would still be churning out digits. It takes a long time to do the impossible. So why do we set our brain to solve imponderable, impossible problems. It’s fabulously capable but that’s just nasty. Yet every day we wonder, “Should I have...? Could I be…? Will it be OK when…? What will happen if…? Why do they…?”
They’re all questions that could bring down the Internet. There is no answer. Google might just manage an error message, “Can’t cope. Question impossible!” before it fizzles into digital oblivion. Unfortunately your brain won’t provide you with a simple error message, unless you count sleepless nights, headaches, hair falling out and forgetting where you are. So stop it! Stop asking your brain impossible questions; you’ll melt the poor thing. Evolution has only designed it to make sense of your senses, i.e. see lion > vacate area > move legs rapidly, that sort of thing. Simple question, der,der,der, simple answer. ‘Txich. Simple’, as the meerkat says.
So next time you find yourself asking your brain to solve an impossible question, don’t! Ask it any number of simple, tangible questions to get you closer to what you want. It’ll answer them all without breaking sweat. It really is ‘Txich, that simple.’
Try googling Csikszentmihalyi on ‘Flow.’ It won’t bring the internet down though his name does resemble decimal pi.

More anger please.

Bankers pay themselves £6 billion in bonuses. The X Factor audience is herded into the simplistic emotions of cattle. The cynical make jokes. Politicians learn to be unanswerable and the public learn that critical thinking is useless. And no one gets angry. Each adult, be they destitute, student, single parent or struggling newlywed will pay several hundred pounds towards bankers earning millions. And no one gets angry. Pensioners who fought in the war and created the countries capital over half a century are left to freeze, and no one gets angry. Youngsters have no prospects other than to mortgage themselves in higher education. And no one gets angry.
I don’t have a dream, I just have an anger for the stupidity of the thoughtless masses who have been bribed by flat screen TVs to be quiet and sit in stupor on their couches. No great dream of emancipation or freedom, because dreams have become centred on much lesser things sold to us on catch phrases and fake pictures.
“Wow Stiffdog, I don’t think the public want to hear this, it will hurt our readership. It’s pointless! Make it more emotional, more personal.” Wuff, OK.
Last night this old woman shit herself because she was so cold she couldn’t get out of the chair and didn’t have any money for the gas meter. And a man beat his wife up because he was scared he couldn’t pay the bills. Or these kids who got so smashed on cheap alcohol one died and the others beat a father of two senseless. How’s that?
“No, it has to be more cheerful.” Wuff, OK.
Everything is fine, but some people are acting stupid. Better?
“Just cut the last bit.” Wuff, OK.
Everything's fine. "Excellent." Wuff.

Photoshop me.

Is it really true Britney Spears is a dog? Well you never know. Use the Lasso tool to replace fur with skin, dodge out the tail and numerous nipples, elongate the paws, re-shape various parts and ….. Beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder or the beheld, it’s the province of the Photoshop artist. With over 90% of all celeb pictures ‘improved’ to some unattainable perfection are our impressionable youngsters being depressed, caught up in their own personal blemishes? Cut to Nick in ‘Come Dine With Me’. Nick is a social disaster. He dominates the conversation with stories of his own self-involvement. He is one of those nice people you would, for some unaccountable reason, like to murder. And, presumable because no one has taken a knife to him yet, is blissfully unaware of his shortcomings. So are we impressionable or blissfully unaware? At this point I have a terrible self-realisation. I’ve been Photoshop-ing myself since my dawn of self-awareness. I have various points I am happy to expose and others, though clear for you to see, are in my eyes airbrushed out. I’m imagining Britney Spears with beautiful eyes and breasts and a backside the size of a small town. To the observer this is an unfortunate combination but to me as Britney, if you see what I mean, everything’s fine. This is my cherished self-Photoshopped concotion of me, and like Nick I’m not going to let it go without a fight, because “it’s true God damn it!” So should we ban Photoshop to save our children? Or is it good to have something out there that constantly reminds us there is a reality hidden underneath our doctored imaginings?

Exams eh.

Aren’t exams stupid eh? It’s like someone who knows loads but gets stressed does poorly and dumbo does well because he’s chilled. I mean how fair is that? They’re like really, really stupid and should be banned. Of course in real life it’s not what you know, it’s what you can deliver under stress that counts but anyway ditch exams. Much better is course work. When you’re judged on course work it’s a completely different story. No stress see. No, you take it home and get parental help. In fact as a parent I did some of my best work getting my son a GCSE. And he wasn’t stressed. In fact he didn’t do much at all. So course work favours students with eager, intelligent parents, which isn’t a lot of use to students when they go away to university. I know, continual assessment. That should do it. Students are assessed week by week on every small element of their subject by teachers who see tick boxes in their sleep. This week we’re completely focused on subject x, level y, section z. By Friday everyone can do it, wahhoo, end of. Of course by the end of next week spent focusing on q, p and r, only a small percentage has any recollection of x, y, z, and by the end of the year they’re only really good at what they did the last week of term. So that’s not too good either. No, what we need is a way of testing students on their long term knowledge and understanding of their subject that they can deliver under the stress of normal life. How about an exam? Yeh exams, they’re like a really good idea.

All your iTunes in one basket.

Ipods and iStore are great. They appear to sell you stuff, that you then appear to own. Imagine then a burglar creeping into your home one night and stealing your CD collection. Not nice. You appeared to own it and now it’s gone. Funny thing, appearances. At least the law, if it was enforced, would be on your side. But if your computer crashes, which is not unheard of, your CD collection is gone just the same. Or put another way, you wouldn’t buy CDs that would only play on one player thinking, quite rightly, if that player broke I’d be sunk. It’s called ‘bottleneck’ marketing or elasticated selling. To combat the publics refusal to recognise that to create and record music actually costs money iTunes have created intellectual property that will always in the end return to its owner like a well trained dog. You’re left with the temporary privilege of owning it for a short while like enticing said dog with a 70p morsel each time. Now I’m not against feeding dogs and cats but I do like permanent ownership of the things I’ve bought. There are three morals here. 1/ back up your iTunes collection onto DVD or such like, or 2/ buy CDs and 3/ lock yourself in at night with a big dog.

X Factor.

As the X Factor logo yet again falls to Earth like some hapless alien spaceship I experience emotions I haven’t felt since the last time I needed a pee and couldn’t get upstairs in time. In Dubai the dirty snorts of Alice the camel, not Alistair Campbell as I first heard, stole the show as Danny and Sis axed the girls. Stacy’s impersonation of Catherine Tate goes down a storm, ‘let’s hear it for Essex Stace!’, as does Welsh girl and the one who’s hair has unaccountably slid to one side. The judges begin their “you will, you won’t” summing up which is like enticing baby mice to play under a guillotine. Joy and misery unbounded, truly reminiscent of getting to the loo in time. Or not. Walsh, Cole and Cowell follow flailing like Attila the Hum in MFI’s kitchen department laying waste to dishwashers. It will ‘kill’ Eathan, Dwain will return to north London to become a victim of knife crime, Candy Rain, if they hadn’t got through, would have continued to take off, their cloths, aesthetically. Jamie will come back minus afro; no one wins X factor looking like a recently shampooed dog, and John and Eric will prove that factor X is based on pure loathing and be voted off by a hail of bullets from the cast of The Wire. Stiffmouse will not be competing due to being genetically incapable of cueing, emoting and having the unbridaled confidence to believe one could be bigger than, well everybody in the entire history of recorded music. Remember every day can change your life; you don’t need to be standing in front of Simon Cowell.

You know this already.

OK. Back. See FlashForward last night? Everybody in the world blacks out and falls over for two minutes and dreams of next April 10th. The world of inanimate objects takes over and many things crash into other things being devoid of pilots, drivers and general bounciness. Which raises a serious design issue; should we be building in far more bounciness into our products. I mean trees sway, frogs jump, salmon leap and even elephants dump about and rebound off each other. But you can’t play squash with an iPod or let a 747 loose on its own without it trashing itself against a building. Unfortunately nothing was made of this important aspect in a supposedly cutting edge drama even though it will require three series and eighteen episodes to cover the same story line as a single 45 minute Doctor Who. Because Americans can spin things out like Rapunzle. Why? Because it takes on average a $2million advertising budget to insert a two word phrase into the American consciousness enough for them to physically respond. So it’s important that the two words thus implanted should cover as much product as possible. That plus in the time it takes to switch a machine on and off again it’ll have produced 10,000 of whatever you asked it to make. So anyway FlashForward is equivalent to reading the last two pages of a book first. You know the denouement, you just don’t know how the book got to it. Except a caught on CCTV man in black, unrecognisable as they always are…I hope I’m not spoiling it for you… is seen walking about during this two minutes silence. Which as everyone knows is just not on. I’m guessing the story will unravel like Lost and the audience, if not lost along the way themselves, will find in the final episode what they knew at the beginning and thus be non the wiser but considerably older. So there we have it, the subtext of TV. It will make you older but no wiser. But I guess you knew that already.

Where’s Bush?

Do you want to know, really, do you really want to know, I mean really? Well when I interviewed him recently for CWBNTV he was depressed. What does the most powerful man in the world do once his kryptonite is exhausted? “Doggy,” he would say, (I ignored the pejorative term) “there was so much more I could have done you know given the time.” I pressed him. (he liked that) “Well nuke Iran for a start. And North Vietnam. OK we learnt a lot about suppression from that guy but he never buys from us, you know. We got the best nukes and we need to show him that. Health care. No strategy. Should be ‘spend your money on useless snake oil and then you die.’ I mean what use are cures? You just last longer as a burden on everybody. No, the only good drugs are illegal. 1/ they make you dumb, 2/ better profits than our inflated pharmaceuticals, and 3/ you die. Bingo, perfect. What else? Democracy. Would have loved to have moved more towards the Chinese model.” And what about the financial crisis? “Wow yeh, never saw that coming. But Barack, or is it Borat, well anyway, he’s your man. Chose him well.’ You mean the American people? “Hell no.” You mean the Republicans!? “No, us…” “Time for your tea Sir. I think you should stop talking to this dog.”

How the world turns- bad.

Being a developed county we, here in the UK, want to give aid to those less fortunate countries containing black people. We are noble and they are poor, but you don’t need to be Einstein to realise you can’t turn a profit from poor people. One, they have no money and two, they would only spend it on enjoying themselves eating and such like. And lets face it we need the money too. So aid must never ever go anywhere near poor people. Luckily though politicians are not poor, they just have to appear compassionate. So Tony Blair whilst in No 10 fulfils his agreed aid commitment by giving x million to Ugandistan. Well the politicians in Ugandistan are equally aware that squandering money on the poor would only lead to education, higher aspirations, and ultimately rioting. And who wants their people to suffer in that way. No, they must keep the peace and what better way than buying armaments. Which the UK government will be happy to supply for, don’t tell me, x million. Tony contacts BAE Systems, or maybe it was the other way round. “Yes, we’ve got some obsolete military air traffic control equipment. Been trying to sell it for years.” Tony contacts Ugandistan, “Lucky for you we just happen to have a state of the art military ATC system.” “Tony, I know we said military but, you know, it can’t be seen to be ...” “No problemo, say it’s civil, improved infrastructure, tourism, that sort of thing. It's not suitable but no one will know.” “And what about, you know, er encouragements?” “You’re new at this aren’t you. No, simple. We just overcharge you. BAE gets extra profits and you keep the difference. Couldn’t be simpler. We get our money back, you get well, encouraged, and we both look good.” “Ah Tony, no wonder England is a great country.” Wuff.
“So what do you think?” “Too serious.”
"Wuff."

Stiffdog joins team.

Whilst jaunting down the Eccelsall Road and popping into ‘Help the Aged’ with my wonderful wife, as we do after buying fresh fish, our prairs were answered. Meet Stiffdog. No more temps, thank God. Stiffdog who is fluffy but extra stiff will be doing in depth reporting of World News and insider dog views on the Stiffmouse Corporation. Please note that his reports may contain the odd Wuff as stipulated in his terms of employment. So welcome Stiffdog, we look forward to your contributions. “Wuff.”