Back from the pub..

I have tried to write this entry seven times so far...
I'm a little drunk...
I'm tired...
I'm just alone...
I really wonder what is the point...
I get morbid when I drink, I did tonight, then I thought about a summer morning in London....
Last summer, early on a Sunday morning I got up and descided to go walking about central London. I walked from Waterloo station down to the tower bridge, back to Waterloo and then into Trafalger Square... all as before 10am. The world was quite, peaceful and clean... And that is what I think of when I'm down.
The warm sun shining on the Thames...
The bright white stone of Waterloo bridge...
The glass and steel of the city...
Why is it that the British cannot see all the good that this city holds?
Why is it that the people who have gone all over the world, left an impact that will probably never be removed underestimate what it is they have in their own backyard?
The think that makes most depressed about Britian is the British!!!
We have a great country, an accepting culture, when we want to be.....
I really dispair....
So what is the point??
I really don't know anymore.... except when the sun shines on a sunny summer sunday morning on the Thames...

I only hope this makes sense in the morning...

What a crap weekend...

Well boys and girls have I had a crap weekend...

• Friday night I sent mostly being sick after eating something.
• Saturday I felt awful still from Friday night.
• Today the washing machine broke down.

But there where two highlights to the last 60 odd hours;
First my football team won for the first time this month... Huddersfield Town 1 Blackpool 0.
We are now 14th in the league, we are going in the right direction... YES!!
Second, to take my mind off just how much I wanted to be sick on Friday night I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I must admit when a friend lent me the DVD I wasn't very hopeful. Ok so it's a Charlie Kaufman script, but Jim Carrey in the lead!! Jim Carrey trying to do REAL acting, yer right..
But I was pleasingly surprised... It's a really great film.
Watch it... Buy it... Beet your friend around the head until they let you borrow it....
We have all had bad times when relationships collapse, I've had my fair share, but it made me re-evaluate my feelings for those people who I have left behind now our lives are no longer so tightly bound.
I don't promise you laughs, explosions or sex... But I promise, if you let it, it'll show you that very few relationships are all bad, and to take what you can from every experience.

Found a new toy

Well I finally got my hands on one a few weeks ago, a second hand Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. It's not new, Sharp have even stopped selling the whole range anywhere but Japan, but I don't care, I love her.
For the techno geeks out there (like me) it's a SL-5500, running OpenZaurus 3.5.2/Opie 1.1.8, has a 512MB SD card and a NL-2511 wifi card.
This is not the first PDA I've owned, I've had three palm pilots before this, but for some reason this one has really struck a cord. It could be the fact it has a little keyboard and so this makes it a little more easy to entry data into, or the fact I have a wifi card and so can surf the web with it, I'm not really sure.
I've always been intreged with the idea mobile and instant communication anywhere in the world. The PDA and Smartphone seem to give people this without the need of a laptop. I find the whole area so interesting. How much more personal can you get for the average young adult than the mobile phone, iPod, PDA, etc. Your phone makes as much a statement about you as your haircut, clothes and jewelry. So much more interesting than corperate software (my day job).
So you people out there who need to write blogs, instant message, email or play games, get a PDA or a smartphone they are a bloggers dream.

Religion... Do the world a favor...

Oh god it's Sunday and I have to go to work in little under 9 hours...
The real issue here isn't work, although as I have decided to quit in the summer I just waiting around, the real issue is the couple of "born again" Christians I have to work with...
I don't know why it is, but I find religious zealots REALLY annoying. It's strange, but just knowing that a person is a believer is like a red rag to a bull. It's not that I want to make everyone believe what I believe, it's just that I cannot see how an intelligent, thinking person can just give up their own will in that way.
The closest I can get, I think, is if you found out that your friend had had the opportunity of becoming a professional footballer and hadn't gone for it just because he couldn't be bothered, and you are crap at football, but love it all the same and would give anything to have that talent. Just imagine the total frustration, announce and anger that would create within you. That's like what these peoples attitude to the world makes me feel.
Totally irrational I know...
The thing that really started it with the new person is a comment he made a few weeks ago. I am not a practicing Bhuddist, but I surpose that the teachings of Bhudda have come the closest to my value system. So this person made a comment when as couple of us where talking about Bhuddist teachings that Bhudda was "So liberal he could do anything". I asked him to expand on his theory, which he could not, and soon admitted to not having read anything to do with the teachings of Bhudda.
And I think this is where the core of my problem with these kinds of people lays, how can a person make a comment like "The Christian God is the only God and every other religion is wrong" if they haven't even read a little about what it is that an other religion is based on!! It's like claiming the world is flat because your not willing to look at a globe...
It's stupid..... If God does exist, he/she/it gave you a brain.... USE IT!! If after you have read a bit about other religions you don't like what they have to say, then fine, but do the research....
It's like buying a car and not reading any reviews or brochures.... You deserve all you get....

A Few Days Away

So I'm back...
Just spent a long weekend in my favorite city of Rotterdam (Nederlands or Holland to the rest of us). Had a chance to see a number of films that where showing in the 34th International Film Festival Rotterdam and my favorite had to be Un día sin Méxicanos or A day without Mexicans for the non Spanish speakers among you.
I must admit I was not holding out a lot of hope when I first read about it, but it is a VERY funny look at what would happen if all the Latinos in California where to disappear. It confronts the myths and truths of the immigration argument (some thing you my have guessed I have strong views on), is filled with a number of interesting facts and informational pieces (such as not everyone who live south of Texas is a Mexican, there are Brasilians and Argentinians down there as well) and generally makes you come out feeling like you've spent a worthwhile time in the cinema.

However there was one down side to it... There where two short films as support. I have to say I'm not a big fan of short movies as a rule, always seem to but a bit pretenious for my liking. The first one was unmemorable in it's pointlessness, no I really mean I can't remember a thing about it, it was that pointless. The second... It was five minutes of a horse standing by a road as trucks drove by, at night and then the camera started going in and out of focus. WHY!!! It doesn't mean anything, and if it's surposed to, well it's lost on me and the rest of the audience.

So in short:
Un día sin Méxicanos - Excellent.
The two short movies - pointless art-house dribble and a waste of film.
Lastly, if you haven't gone to the Netherlands, go.... and make sure you spend time in Rotterdam and not just Amsterdam.

Oh I love what you want to do with my country

Oh Micheal Howard what a lovely person you are. Wanting to shut the door on all those undeserving asylum seekers. But wait, didn't your family move from Romania in the 1930's because of the rise of anti-semitism? Now I'm sure your family deserved to come, unlike all those other freeloaders...

Now don't get me wrong I think we should keep an eye on how many people come into the country, I think we should help them become part of the British culture, help them learn English and learn the rule of cricket (ok, maybe just football and rugby). I also think we should learn what we can from them.
Britain is a mongrel nation. We have been invaded, accepted immigrants, invaded countries and traded with most of the world. There are very few places you can go to where you won't find one of us. Assimilating other cultures is one of the things we seem to be able to do well (better than play football anyway).

My own family is part Huguenot (French Protestants) who moved to London from France to escape persecution. They brought with them weaving skills that led to birth of the British garment industry. Should they have been left out in the cold because the quota had been filled for that year? Should the likes Micheal Marks (Founder of Marks & Spencer) and other entrepreneurs who came from our immigrant communities have had the door slammed in their faces?
Immigration can be and should be a two way street, with the new commers bringing new idea's, skills and cultures and us blending them into our society. The best of both worlds. People forget that if it wasn't for our trading links with India, washing and Pajamas (from the Hindi "paejama") would be alot less popular here.

I know what Mr Howard, lets put through a law where anyone who's family cannot trace it's self back, say 100 years in the UK gets kicked out?
Well that's you gone for starters, and good riddance!

Guardian article on Mr Howard's father

Muggers, Yobs and Adicts

Have children always been the cruel evil yobs, muggers, drug adicits and murders that the press tell us the world leaders of tommorrow are? I can't believe that humanity has changed so much in the last 20 years, since I was a kid, that we are now surounded by miniture Charles Mansons. Maybe, and I know this sounds radical, it's us, the "Children of the Eighties" who are the ones with the issue. I'm sure when I was young that drugs, football violence, punks and many other things where the issues of the day. Does that mean we all turned into phycotic killers? No. Does it mean we all got out unharmed? Equally, no!! Some of us where damaged but the majority are alive and in most cases well.
What I think has happened is that the children of the eighties have become the sad, old and misserable adults of the new millenium. This has led to a number of us, mostly in the media and politics it seams, to get into that standard grumpy old man syndrom. What I think is that these people have forgotten how to have fun!!
I have radical message for those in power, both elected and unelected (the press):
GET A LIFE AND STOP MORALISING!