Essex Six Packs.

Well that’s the last time I play ‘The Only Way is Essex’ manslut for Mothermouse. Whilst attempting masculinity she accused me of looking like I was gay signing, as in like for deaf people. Let me tell you these supple wrists are from years of aesthetic sensitivity not ‘OMG look at her packed into that dress’ effeteism. For US readers The Only Way is Essex is similar to your Bonking Paradise Island progs where half a dozen strip-o-grams of both sexes immerse themselves in an emotional maelstrom of make-believe affairs and painful break-ups. In Essex though it’s been transcribed into normal life where ‘six pack’ refers to both their abdominal muscles and the number of brain cells they’re equipped with. Their facility for the facile stretches the mind in wonderful directions. But it has to be said they’re enjoying their, er, equipment on the whole. Contrast that with a painful letter to a more reflective discussion group re a situation lasting several years that concluded, “I see and acknowledge my ……, I say hello and welcome it.” In the spaces of this repeated sentence was “anger, pain, fear, guilt, vulnerability and sadness.” OK it’s important to recognise these feelings but to, “say hello and welcome” them in seems a little over friendly. What if they take up residence? It’s not denial to focus on welcoming in more positive forces like strength, spontaneity, humour and joy. Even with their six-pack of brain cells Essex girls and boys seem to manage it. And if you’ve got more than six it’s all there for the taking. Have a ball: Acstentuate the Postitive.

Glee or Gordon?

OH FUCK ME YES! ‘Gordon Ramsey’s US Kitchen Nightmares’ is back. England’s famous gestalt ‘fuck’ chef is back terrorising podgy, lazy US restaurant owners. It was so nice after watching Mr Schuster’s earlier sweat sentiment that he, ‘couldn’t crush the Glee Club kids dreams.’ Screw that mush Schooy do it; crush them till the last drop of dream blood has left their young firm thirty-year-old bodies. Chainsaw their frontal cortex till all they have left is plain, stark, painful reality. Watch Gordon’s victims and see where their dreams will get them, one foot in the bankruptcy court and the other in la la land. Tonight’s restaurant owner couldn’t make the light-speed jump to reality, his ego, in a death struggle with Gordon, could only offer him the limp threat of a swamp burial. It lost and ran away. It will no doubt return refreshed and living on some distant planet orbiting Uranus. No, dreams are mostly beguiling monsters unless, that is, they inform your actions in the present moment and the next. I’m guessing The American Dream was like that to begin with; practice, play and work hard now and just maybe you’ll get somewhere, but maybe now it’s a little ahead of itself, just dream and it’ll happen. Dream of running a restaurant and, when it hits the skids, consider, ‘do I invite Mr Schuster or Gordon?  You decide.

The Price of Jam.

So why do wild blackberry bushes insist on undoing your shoelaces? Is it a childish prank or exacting some retribution? I mean new age folks who ask vegetation for permission before picking fruit should reconsider and adopt a more, “You mess with my boots mate and I’ll rip your roots off” attitude. If you ask a bush it’s more likely to reply, silently, “Whatever you like mate but if I could just get my thorns on your footwear I’d be out of this fucking field before you could say soft fruit purée.” And why is it you pick one blackberry and all the others flap about in a tizzy trying to avoid capture? Is it nerves or just being perverse? Anyway I set off for home with 2lbs of blackberries and happened on a herd of Alpacas. Now alpacas are very fond of shagging. When they’re not shagging they like to play shagging. Charles comes up to Roland and says, “Fancy a shag?” Roland replies, “But you’re not gay.” “No I just fancy a game.” “Oh alright then.” Shag shag shag etc. I mean they even look Italian. So there’s this big black one standing right by the fence and I engage it in pleasant conversation. It chews, considers and then spits at me, Pthwat. You bastard! So I spit back. I’m not having some half domesticated animal from Albania or wherever they come from projectiling cud at me. So we become involved in a spitting match. I notice the small movements that precede his retaliations, the chewing and rolling it round in his mouth and decide, being the more intelligent, to present him with this winning insight and proving I had the capability to devise an extremely elegant early warning system. “You’ve given the game away mate. First you chew and then roll it….” Pthwat. “You bastard! You got me again.” I decide this game is beneath me and besides that I’m losing to a four-legged woolly Albanian. I get home and boil the fruit. I add the sugar and get out our trusty old jam thermometer. With the old cookbook and pre war thermometer I’m transported to my childhood and the pure simpler world of Mrs Beaton. I see ‘JAM’ is marked at 105*C and then notice at 155*C it says ‘CRACK’. What!? Were my bastions of respectability into cocaine production? OK I made six jars of blackberry jam but I’ve had to lie down what with bushes that steal your shoes, losing a spitting match to an Albanian and Lloyd George on amphetamines, it’s all been too much.

Buy Now.

Well the US have finally got a Captain Kirk phaser. It’s not a hand-held yet but no doubt it’ll soon be an app for an iPhone. It’s a six foot contraption that emits a ‘pain ray’. I guess it’s more humane than the current death ray hand-helds that fire bullets but, and perhaps for that reason, the army in Afghanistan has rejected it. So it’s back in the US being ‘evaluated’ in a state prison somewhere with the long-term aim of making it too painful for democrats to vote. I feel sorry for republicans though, they’re so often depicted as money grabbing sociopaths and only because they’re already wealthy enough to be completely disassociated from ordinary people and the only desire left to them is to become even wealthier. It reminds me of the Prince of Burundi or somewhere who, having adequate resources to pursue his chosen habit, was smoking 200 a day. At that rate he wouldn’t have time to cough. No it’s all about the convenient notion of trickle down. Money supposedly trickles down from the wealth creators to the ordinaries in a process of benevolent spending. The billionaire gets a new Olympic sized swimming pool and his newly employed pool attendant gets a supply of 7-Eleven pizza tokens. So it makes sense to make the billionaire even richer. Except of course when the billionaire hasn’t room for his fourth swimming pool because his ten acres of real estate is already full of tennis courts. Now should this fourth unemployed pool attendant become unreasonable about his inability to receive his supply of 7-Eleven pizza tokens due to no fault of the said billionaire the latter has good cause to resort to defensive measures. Enter the US Phaser Corporation. When you look at the world from a republican point of vie it all makes sense. I’d buy some shares while it’s still in development.

Democratic Ends. Shortly.

US presidents are elected every four years. But then there are also mid term elections. Preceding both are lengthy election campaigns. It’s being said that the US democracy has become predominantly electioneering not governing. Similarly in Europe at any one time one or more of its member states are immersed in wooing its own electorate. Meanwhile the markets act like over excited kids with Aspergers running amuck while their parents argue over how best to please the next-door neighbours. Neither markets or governments are concerned with creating the future they and we want but rather trying to avoid the future they don’t want, but it’s a proven axiom that focusing on what you want to avoid is a sure fire way of hitting it. Recently a UN I think survey showed English kids are bought more ‘stuff’ than other European countries and spend less quality time with their parents. This inculcates a desire for stuff and our current crop of stuff is all about distraction, iPods, iTunes, Facebook and TV etc. Stuff needs paying for but distraction reduces the capacity to earn and learn so the result is debt. But our money has already gone to our chosen resources. Compare our lavish corporate headquarters, banks and Apple stores with the shabby huts of youth clubs, social services run out of dumpsters and the under funding of care homes. Those have been our choices. Even in places where money has been spent, on universities, schools and hospitals, the same theme of ‘give them stuff not quality time’ devalues their worth. Our governing social dichotomy is no longer left or right, workers or owners, but up and down, corporate ‘stuff’ versus individual ‘quality of life.’ 

I must get out more. So should I buy a Ducati Monster, 650cc USD forks twin radial front brakes 80hp 161kg of Italian style or give my ageing Yamaha SZR some TLC and a new chain and sprocket set? Answers on a postcard.

Fictional Economic Reality.

Apparently the UBS bank lost £1.3billion, not in a tea break but in around a second. At that rate they could have lost the cost to the world of World War II in a couple of days. It was due to a ‘Black Swan’ moment, a moment when something inconceivable happens. The Swiss France suddenly dropped 8%, which then must have kicked in an automatic sell, and poof, all gone. This begs the question, have you ever seen a black swan? I’m guessing only in fiction, as there’s no such thing. But this black swan moment did really happen, like in reality. Which begs a further question, did this really happen or did it happen in a fictional reality? Obviously there are real accounts on real computers and real people on real chairs and we normally envisage fiction and reality as oil and water, but is this apparent clear differentiation in itself a fiction? Do we live in an emulsion of the two? If mysticism is the technical term for this emulsion then in a sense computers are the mysticism of our age. Instead of cutting the throat of a goat to cause a good harvest, two real but unrelated occurrences connected only by a socially accepted fiction, we can by the merest mouse click wipe out the combined value of several thousand lifetimes in a second. That’s fiction, but it really happened. In a sense there’s a war on between fact and fiction. Governments are dealing with fact and traders are dealing in their own contrived mystical fiction and fiction is winning. This week there is unprecedented cooperation between US and European governments to avoid a fictional Armageddon, a catastrophic crop failure because we haven’t killed enough goats. Unfortunately thus far governments have been suckered into using the preferred mystical weaponry of the traders. Lets hope this time they use the authority of reality to move the battle to firmer, more favourable ground.

Minus 20 Degrees.

I’m not sure a week in Crete in early September is a good idea. The stock Market may have lost £49billion but I’ve just lost 20 degrees Celsius! And I’ve got half a swimming pool in my ears and enough wax to over winter bees. But we had a lovely time and thanks to the swimming pool found a new basis for our relationship; Mothermouse can’t see me without her glasses and I can’t hear her with my ears full of water. But the Altea Village Hotel was a dream, built to a plan that was obviously torn up and haphazardly reassembled like a Bowie lyric. We fed the cats, tickled the dogs and laughed about otters, having become quite adept at mimicking the latter doing magic tricks with three stones on our chest, hilarious to us but confusing to fellow diners. Of note was the canine beauty parlour where the Greek owners had found the perfect English phrase to encapsulate the essence their establishment, “Doggy Style.” And then in the glaring sun above Manchester, well the glaring sun above the clouds above Manchester we dipped and landed in autumn England and all I’ve got to remind me is a gorgeous new black lighter that’s already showing signs of being faulty. And today UBS bank lost £1.3billion by a rogue trader, probably in a tea break. It reminds me of the time someone purchased 12.000 widgets and, due to the purchaser’s over punctilious use of decimal places we received twelve thousand. In the strange way of unintended consequences computers, our bastions of all things digital are making numbers meaningless, as they have with cut and paste music and CGI film. It appears when one can create anything it has the value of nothing. All I know is I’m twenty degrees colder.

Leona Rabbits on.

Just read an interview with Leona Lewis on the loo. Oh that’s not Leona and I on the loo together, I’ve never met her, or that the ex X Factor winner was interviewed where one is normally solitary, just that that’s where I do most of my reading. In fact the only double loo I know is in Sweden and it would be way too much trouble to ring Leona in LA and arrange to meet her in a forest in Sweden that’s over four hours drive from Malmo. Although she could get a flight to Goteborg and hire a car. But I’d still have to drive. No, no it wouldn’t work out. Anyway she seems a very good sort rescuing bunnies from hapless vagrants etc. It struck me re her and other recent winners that the X Factor at least does help people ascend the greasy pole without getting greasy, which is a good thing. Ordinary people talented enough to warrant a world stage yet still ordinary. You just never know standing in that queue longer than a 1945 Berlin soup line what’s going to come of it. Isn’t that just a spiffing metaphor for life. Which in itself raises the question, should rhetorical questions end in a question mark? Anyway isn’t it just one soup line after another, one time watery gruel, the next caviar enriched truffles. Just like Leona’s new bunny.

I’m 125 Years Old.

OK 125 is in mouse years; in human years I’m half that. All right slightly more than half if you want to quibble. This is how it works courtesy of the BBC’s excellent prog ‘The First 1000 Days.’ The egg that I’m created from, unlike sperm, which is made on the day, originated when my mother was born. As she developed in her mother’s womb my mother’s lifetime’s supply of eggs were formed in hers; I just happen to be one of them, in fact the only one that met a tall dark handsome wiggler. So me as an egg began life in 1915. Now my egg of 1915 was created in her mother’s womb that dates back to 1886 when her mother was born, so although I wasn’t around in 1886 I was originated in a womb that originated then. I mean don’t ask me to remember any of it I’ve got a terrible memory. So I’m 125 and still going strong. The reason I raise this impressive longevity is its effect on my health. As well as considering my history of bad habits I need to consider my life as an embryo and before that as a dormant egg, and before that as the womb housing its imminent life. So far so historical, but I have sons and they, should they show any inclination in that direction, which doesn’t look likely at the moment, and which if I was a Jewish mother I’d be sorely disappointed about, will also have offsprings. And when they arrive they’ll already be around eighty! Their womb housing will have been formed before the war and subject to rationing, bombing and blackouts. Their egg will have passed sleepily through the Beatles, Flower Power and The Clash, and the final breathing part of their existence will arrive just in time for our economic melt down. The First 1000 Days tells of our intimate connection with this long, normally overlooked preamble. And not just on the mother’s side, the wigglers have history too.