It's been a good weekend, got a bit of work done today and had some good workouts at the ol' LSE gym while Beth's been up in Scotland for a hen party. At the mo' I'm working on my second pint of Old Speckled Hen, a bloody good beer. I bought the new Radiohead album at the grocery store on Thursday, it's pretty good. Like the last three of their albums, you have to listen to it a few times before your start really enjoying it. I think it also helps to be slightly under the influence. Interestingly, as I get older, I find that chemicals really aren't necessary to produce altered states. Reality is far more bizarre than the constructed world presented to the inebriated mind. At least, it is in London. I love riding the tube, it is always a trip (excuse the pun). Especially on Friday and Saturday nights, I need to start bringing a diary to record the things I see on the tube. Last night when I got on around 11 to come home from a friend's house, there was a group of girls that looked like hookers making a lot of noise, then a really strange pair stepped on. The first woman was quite androgenous looking, was wearing a a cap with furry earflaps buttoned down, had coke bottle glasses, and a bright yellow vest with reflector patches on it, like the kind worn by road works crews. To top the outfit off she had two enormous yellow teeth sticking out, and a baby doll. Her companion was an enormous dragon of a woman with a sloping forehead and close set eyes that gave the appearance of a cave woman. Her ankles were so fat that her feet looked like elephant feet. The hookers went into raptures over the baby doll carried by the road-works lady. This had a knock-on effect on all the other drunks (the train was full of drunks), who all started yelling, laughing, falling about, etc. I had my ipod on as a soundtrack and really enjoyed the whole scene.

When I've got enough money to feed myself and keep a roof over my head, I really love London. It's got so much stuff going on. People everywhere of every language, breed, and class. Imposing Victorian architecture mixed with awful functionalist towers. Crazy traffic always buzzing. It's like white noise. So many significant events heaped on top of each other that its almost hard to disentangle the hodge-podge. It has too much history, it's almost like it all cancels itself out. A real post-modern atmosphere.

I've really gotten into Star Trek lately, of any variety. Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, whatever. Science fiction always ends up being utopian or dystopian or more often a mix of the two. The world of the Federation sounds great. No money, everybody wears the same thing, and the Prime Directive protects a pluralism of cultures that keeps life interesting. I'm really starting to appreciate the multi-cultural environment of Canada. I don't care what the scare-mongering Islamaphobes say. Multi-culturalism is great. No truly free country can help being multi-cultural. And it makes life more exciting, just like living in the United Federation of Planets. Richmond BC and the surrounding area is a lot like Deep Space Nine, people speaking funny languages, wearing funny clothes, and doing funny things. Right now everybody everywhere is all up in arms about tighter immigration. Whatever. I can't imagine anything more hellish than a country full of white Anglo-Saxon protestants. I'd be on the first plane to Abu-Dhabi, seriously.

With the rise of China and India (however exaggerated) the world will soon be returning to its usual multi-polar state, much like antiquity. This promises to be much more interesting and is a very exciting development, a sort of return to reality maybe (and hopefully even more like Star Trek).

Thoughts on a Friday afternoon

I hate middle class people. Not anybody who reads this, you guys are cool. And maybe things are different back home in North America, I can't remember and I don't follow the news over there. But I'll tell you what drives me nuts about the English middle classes - ethical causes (ie. fads). There's a few going around right now that I just can't stand hearing about. I hardly ever read the paper or watch the news, except maybe the Economist or Financial Times, they don't make me mad because they don't usually give a crap about the stupid things middle class people care about. That's because it is the newspaper of the rich, and they just care about making money. I like that about rich people, they will pretty much leave things alone and are content to just get on with making lots of money. They have this in common with poor people, who are too busy trying to feed and clothe themselves to care about stupid bull-crap. As for that residual underclass of criminals and welfare scroungers, I hate them too, but it is tinged with a miniscule amount of sympathy, I don't know.

Anyhow, back to middle class people. They have a few 'causes' right now that really are annoying. One such cause is the campaign against battery chickens and the related obsession for organic food and against additives, 'chemicals', etc.

For those who don't know (I didn't) a battery chicken is basically a caged chicken, as opposed to the free-range or barn chicken. Now, I don't care if people want to live solely on organic food, more power to them, I would love to be able to eat solely organic food, it tastes better. However, I can't afford fancy-pants chicken that have been provided with opportunities to express themselves creatively or some junk. I, like many others in my financial situation, need cheap protein. That's why industrial farming and agriculture rules. I don't care if the chickens don't like it, screw the chickens. They don't even know where they are anyways.

Another thing going right now in England is this demonization of the big grocery stores for selling cheap booze. Apparently, this is a terrible problem which troubles middle class people. The poor are getting drunk and being uncouth to their own detriment. The solution: to make booze expensive enough so that only people of the correct social standing can afford it. Grrrr!!!

It's much the same with every sort of environmental campaigns. If I hear one more middle class person telling me off for not recylcing my piddly amount of waste or for not using energy efficient appliances I'm going to snap. These people spend all their time flying everywhere and buying tons of junk and then what time they have left they spend whining about how much they waste, fly, etc. etc. and how nobody else should do it. I am poor, and your carbon foot-print is bigger than mine, so bog off.

Honestly, these people have the stupidest problems - they have too much, they have wrinkles, they fly too much, etc. This all boils down to a preoccupation on their parts with minding everybody else's business. "We already chopped our forests down, but your dirt poor country musn't do that because it makes us sad." Or, "stop clubbing seals" because they are cute or something. The singer Morrissey won't even come to Canada because Canadian club seals, what a tool. Who cares about the stupid seals. I could understand if they were going extinct or something, but their not.

This busybody trend is supposed to be an effort at transcendence or something, but it ends up being just a bunch of loudmouths squabbling over stupid garbage and screwing things up even worse. Case-in-point: humanitarian interventions. These are motivated in large part by the same sort of concern to make the world perfect that drives people to ban smoking, raise the price of booze, and all sorts of other crap that general does nothing but add to the existing level of human misery. Some government starts killing its citizens, usually incited by some rebels who were hoping to achieve exactly that result. In a small minority of cases, once enough stupid celebrities get concerned, a Western intervention begins - a NATO or UN force breaks in to the country, undermining what little authority the state's government had been clinging to. Sometimes, like in Iraq, the government is taken out of the picture completely. Now, instead of eeking out a miserable existence under some oppressive government, they get to live in the hell that is stateless/government-less anarchy (eg. Iraq, or Afghanistan). Now they pay tribute not just to one bloody tyrant, but a myriad group of gangsters, warlords and criminals. Depending upon who the 'liberators' are, the people of the oppressed country may also have to deal with being bombed, tortured, incarcerated, etc. etc. in addition to being harassed, kidnapped, extorted, etc. by local gangsters. If the 'liberating' powers do finally manage to impose democratic processes on this unlucky country it usually takes the form of factional parties aligned on ethnic divisions. The majority ethnicity then sees that advantages lies in kicking out the minority ethnicity so that they can consolidate their 'democratic' advantage.

Anyways, that's enough ranting for one afternoon. Time to start drinking my cheap beer before some well meaning temperance group manages to jack up the price and take away my cheap chicken.

Crikey, I've lost me mojo!

Well, it's been awhile since I updated my blog. I was a bit worried that google might have cancelled it actually. Anyways, I suppose an awful lot has happened since I last updated this thing. I haven't felt the urge to blog for ages because I've been on a nice high dose of SSRIs. Last spring and summer were pretty rough. After finishing my coursework I ended up with nothing to do except work part-time at the vegetarian cafe, which was nice, but left me with a lot of free time and not a lot of money, a bad mix. Thankfully I had some good friends in Leeds to hang with and they made sure I never went thirsty (or hungry!). I played a lot of cards and pool, and it was all good until I moved to London in July, then things went downhill. All sorts of things went wrong, we had no money, no furniture, etc. etc. London is a terrible place to be poor. Anyways, with no friends, no money, no job and nothing to do, I found myself smoking way too many cigarettes and drinking way too much whiskey so I figured I better start pulling myself up out of my tailspin, this involved upping my dosage significantly. I meet lots of people who tell me (very innocently) that they don't believe in treating psychological problems with medication. That's fine. Personally I have no scruples about it. Anyone who has ever been on a bad drug trip knows that mental fortitude and strong will can be blown away like whisps of smoke with the help of a tiny amount of chemicals. I'm not a solipsist, I believe in an objective reality, but if your brain is screwy it can be mighty hard to see. If you've never taken drugs, the best illustration is probably the feeling you have when you half wake up from a really weird or scary dream, imagine feeling like that all the time. People who are against (legal) drugs usually point to its addictive nature and are in favour of psycho-therapy or counselling. Having tried both, I can attest that people get at least as addicted to counselling, which is both far more expensive and far less effective. People spend their whole lives trying to resolve their 'issues' or face their 'problems' or some crap. For some this is what the really need, for many it is a total waste of time and money.

So anyways, the medicines did what they are designed to do and my life took a very positive turn. I got a fun job, uni started, and I've been exercising at the gym instead of drinking and smoking, life has been great. Unfortunately, the meds also caused me to lose my mojo. My academic performance has been lacklustre and I knew exactly why it was. So I've had to lower my dosage significantly in order to get back my intellectual fire, the effect has been almost instant. The world is no longer the beautiful place it was a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, as if to bring the point home, I saw one of those sights that really drives into your brain how screwed up the world is. As I walked across St. Clements chapel to LSE I saw a fat man with a white beard sprawled on his side. He was wearing a huge backpack and was quite inebriated so that he kind of flailed a bit like a turtle on its back. He was cloaked in a Union Jack flag, which he was wearing like a cape and on his face he had clown make-up but it was all smudged up and greasy. He also had a stuffed clown tied to his back pack. He was laying across the foot of a statue of Lord Gladstone, trying to open a can of tuna with a crappy tin-opener. Man, that whole scene was just so sad, irrational, and generally screwed-up that I almost turned around a went home.

So anyways, my serenity is gone, and once again life is strange and sometimes terrible. However, I'm getting my mojo back. I've learned that, at least regarding academic work, I can either be happy or productive, and right now I have to be productive - which often makes me quite happy. Also, I've got some raging insomnia to boot. Insomnia is a form of madness all its own. I don't know what it is but at 4 in the morning life seems very different. It's a sort of zombie existence.

So there it is, the blog is resurrected. Who knows how long it will last!

It's good to be me :-)

Hello friends and family,

well, it's been a hard slog: 3 years and some 50,000 words or so of essays and dissertation, but as of yesterday, it is finally over. On Wednesday I broke a personal record, penning a 3,500 word essay in one evening. I didn't procrastinate or anything, it took me a heck of a long time wrap my head around the subject (the social theory of Jurgen Habermas).

I handed it in yesterday, along with another essay which isn't actually due until Monday. I met a friend at the old 'hand-in box' and we headed down to the student union for a pint. He had more work to do so I made my way down to one of my favourite 'solitude' pubs. I had a coffee and a pipe (something I won't be doing after July 1st thanks to certain fascist b*&%^$rds - sorry) and started reading Robert Louis Stevenson's South Sea Tales. Then came home, had a lamb korma from my local takeaway (only £2.99 - comes with home made nan). Chowed than down, kissed my pretty wife, and then I went and called on my neighbour, and good buddy, Jakob. We headed down to the pub where we met another neighbour, Matt, and we all played cards and drained pints, and smoked pipes (July 1st, I can't believe it, goodbye liberty - grrr) until we got kicked out (the pubs here close at 11 or so, cuz all the Brits are staggering drunk by then).

So here it is, Friday at 1pm, and you'll find me in my pyjamas, coffee in the mug, pipe in the mouth, Jorge Ben (the father of Samba) on the stereo. After I get off my computer here I'll go through the Economist which just came through the letter slot and then pick up where I left off with Robert Louis Stevenson on the beach of Falesa. Then a bit later I'll go up to Matt's apartment and we'll play FIFA 2007 and Star Wars Battlefront II on his Playstation for awhile. Then work at the Cafe at 5 (which I positively enjoy these days). We had so much fun playing cards last night that I think we're going to repeat the experience this evening.

Most of the past three years have been lonely and draining, but since yesterday afternoon I can definitely say that it's good to be me. :-)

Ranting and Raving pt.3

I'm sick of hearing about global warming, and people who want to 'ban' stuff. I'm really sorry to continue on this theme, but it seems that - at least in the UK - all people ever talk about is banning stuff. It's as if political progress is rated by how much stuff is banned. Universities have 'banned' Christian Unions because they won't let non-Christians sit on the elected board of leaders. What a load of crap. The Co-op bank recently closed down the bank account of my brother in law's church because they preach that homosexuality is wrong. Everybody is so damned busy minding eachother's business, and it's driving me crazy.

The inspiration for this post was a BBC story which reports that Cheryl Crow and Laurie David (wife of Seinfeld's Larry David) are on a campaign to ban toilet paper, or rather to impose a limit on its use to one square per 'session'.

Anyways, I'm think I'm going to stop reading any news aside from the business press. I am just so tired of 'causes'. The long term goal is to move to Montana or Idaho and where there won't be any chance of my neighbours spying on me to see if I am recycling properly and using biodiesel.

I've got to say, I don't even know if I believe in global warming. If it does exist, there's not much to be done anyways. Like I've said before, a world of 6 billion people can't live on wind power and organic food. I say just use it up until it's gone. What I can't stand is anymore celebrities jet-setting around the globe and consuming 1000 times more than me telling me to stop hurting the environment. They should be fired out of a cannon into the sun.

Don't forget - big brother is watching you.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm too poor to pay taxes. Apparently, in an effort to enforce the smoking ban which is coming into effect in England on July 1st, city councils have been given 29.5 million pounds to hire and train secret agents to scour pubs, garages, and workshops, catching out deviant tobacco smokers. These anti-smoking spies "will have the power to enter premises undercover, allowing them to sit among drinkers, and will even be able to photograph and film people." I hope I'm not the only one who gets the chills from reading that story. Next it will be mandatory calisthenics in front of the televiewer every morning. You'll be sitting in a restaurant and a plain-clothed police officer will bust you for putting salt on your food. I'm not kidding: another public health story on the BBC website stated that "The ideal daily intake of salt is no more than six grams and ministers want everyone to achieve this by 2010". Come 2010, you may find that salt is a contraband - after all, reducing salt intake lessens your risk of cardiovascular disease by 25%. At what point did it become a government mandate to monitor my salt intake?

I hate to belabour the point, but I don't know anyone who has died from the effects of 'passive-smoking' (to use the ridiculous phrase). Actually, statistics indicate that about one in 60 thousand die from 'passive smoking' each year. One in 60 thousand!!!!!!!! I see at least 3 or 4 advertisements on my daily bus ride into town, alerting me to a risk which affects 1 in 60,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is psychotic! (statistics taken from this article) On the other hand, I know a number of people who have died or suffered very serious injury from automobile accidents. My boss nearly died last November when a 4x4 backed over him. He is still bedridden. Was he a victim of 'second-hand driving' or 'passive-driving'? Ridiculous. Nobody is allowed to get sick or die anymore. If you die, it is because of some abnormality which needs to be identified and controlled. Somebody or something must be held responsible. "It's the tobacco lobbies!". "It's the automobile manufacturers!", "it's the smokers!", "it's the additives in our food!". I shocked and offended my 'green savvy' classmates the other day when I suggested that a world with 6 billion people can't live on subsistence farming or organic foodstuffs.

Another funny thing I saw the other day - a poster in a pub with a very alarming picture of a person caught in a fire. The poster said that "40% of people who die in a fire were consuming alcohol that day". Basically, taxes are being expended to put up messages in pubs which say "if you drink, make sure you don't set yourselves on fire, you dumb plebs." There's a great website dedicate to exposing and ridiculing ridiculous scares like this called spiked. Check it out. Basically, since politics is dead we now have a political class with nothing better to do than monitor the minute details of our lives.

Here's my new slogan - "Passive driving kills!". "Second hand driving seriously harms you and those around you!". "Protect your right to clean air: ban farting!".



You will be happy

You will be healthy

You are being watched


Have a look at this article if you want to get an idea of how crazy this anti-tobacco trend is.

Anti-tobacco, get stuffed. Smoking is cool.

Today we went out for a meal courtesy of my lovely in-laws. We went to one of our favorite place in Leeds, the Sahara. For for £7 you get turkey platter piled 6 inches high with lamb and couscous. Awesome. It is a delicious restaurant and also a 24-hour sheesha bar. Sheesha is a tobacco/fruit mash that you smoke out of these massive hookahs (like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland). It is tasty and immensely relaxing to have a sheesha and recline on the dumpy sofas and listen to Arabic music. They also serve a delicious mint tea.

However, because of the current tobacco paranoia (funded largely by pharmaceutical companies who sell very expensive nicotine patches) the UK is going to have a tobacco ban starting in July. That means that a whole industry of sheesha bars in going to be shut down in a Nazi-style clamp down. That is lame, really lame. The sheesha bar was a sort of weekend safe haven for normal folks in Leeds. Downtown Leeds is a scary place on weekends, the best comparison I've heard was my lecturer who compared it to the opening seen from Space Odyssey: 2001, when all the apes are smashing each other up with rocks and bones. Anyways, prohibition sucks. I am beginning to seriously worry that things like milkshakes and cheeseburgers might soon be contraband. I have no desire to live forever (at least not in this body), so public health should leave me alone dagsnabbit!