timboblog

Naked people! Bucketloads of naked!

Sometimes you find yourself surrounded, nay, invaded, by amorphous blobs (read 'other people') who flagrantly disregard you, your personal space, your companions, your conversation. Generally, YOU. And that's something I find annoying. Maybe I'm the only one? I don't know.

Then at other times you get totally surrounded by shitloads of naked people, cycling about, making all sorts of noise, and generally being TOTALLY NAKED with all their bits out on display. Right there. And the weird thing about that isn't the nakedness or the being surrounded by a whole bunch of nakedness. It's the fact that it's, well, more normal (and natural) than anything else and yet paradoxically totally abnormal to see that sort of thing because of the 'rules' that our society dumps upon us and the embarrassment factor that makes it so weird and great and celebratory.

So to conclude, more nakedness please! And I don't mean that in a dodgy way, I just think, you know, that it's a good thing. Personal freedom, expressiveness, a distinct lack of twattishness... It's all good stuff.

The moral of this story is that open-minded people are great (although if they play the bongos and sing really badly, yet obviously think their singing is THE BEST, then they don't count), and close-minded yobbish thugs (essentially the stereotypical flag-waving van-driving Sun-reading British male - it's only a stereotype because it fucking exists!) can go swivel. Although whoops! Silly me! I'm not being very inclusive here. Let's also include every person who makes no effort whatsoever to move even slightly out of your way while walking along the pavement, even forcing you to walk into the path of oncoming traffic, such is their disregard. And let us not forget practically every smoker ever, who without fail, WITHOUT FAIL, will always flick their fag butt into the street, and drop the foil and wrapper from their packet of smokes on to the ground despite there being a bin conveniently placed about 2 feet from them. AND any person who while walking along stops dead in their tracks to have a look around and have a sandwich/insert anything you like here frankly, then acts surprised that you nearly walked through their sandwich and had to make a frantic avoidance manoeuvre and ended up in a pile in the gutter as a result. They're crap too.

This one could go on and on, so I'll save more for next time. If anybody feels like having a cathartic moan or alternatively a big old celebration about nakedness in the comments then be my guest.

FYI - The nakedness was all to do with World Naked Bike Ride Day. Check the relevant link for all the info. Nakedness + Good Cause = perfect for Brighton. Although I'm still not 100% sure exactly what being naked has to do with anything, but still, MORE NAKEDNESS!

Shout out

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/07/zimbabwe1

And the international community stood idly by...

At least the common man can focus on an (apparently) unextinguishable flame in order to make his feelings known about another oppressive regime. What can he do about Zimbabwe?

Nb. Back soon, with pictures.

That's me told

Okay. I've had a stern telling off.

No rabbits.

Yes, it's official. THERE WILL BE NO RABBITS ANYWHERE IN THIS POST.

Apart from in those last two sentences.

Promise.

Everything else is allowed though, so it's time for some links and music and general bollocks. I was going to do a post about 'something' for Clair, but seeing as that 'something' is banned I won't be doing that. Clair, I'll email you. It's all good.

Right, first some linky stuff.

1) Everyone has to go and peruse and comment on and generally be a fucking huge avid fan of Big Blogger. Why? Because it's my baby and I've devoted what seems like a ridiculously huge chunk of my time to making it all run smooth as clockwork. Plus bloggers are tempremental creatures at the best of times and keeping 15 of them under control and on schedule is a fair old mission, so I deserve some kind of award or (preferably) substantial monetary dispensation for my troubles. Be nice and come and say hello.

2) Re the above, do it, or I'll find you, tickle you a bit, and make you watch endless repeats of Casualty and Holby City. It will not be pleasant.

3) I've also gone all new age, sci-fi, wi-fi, web 2.0 or whatever the fuck you wanna call it, and have set up a Big Blogger Fartbook group. So this means you all have to sign up for Fudgebook and then join the group. By doing this I shall be able to monitor your every move , thereby making it far easier for me to accomplish number 2.

4) This programme/series has been a great watch, although the one all about Pink Floyd and Genesis could have done with a lot less Genesis and a lot more Syd Barrett, but what ya gonna do eh? Some Barrett is better than no Barrett. Time to go and re-listen to Madcap Laughs and those early Floyd LP's...

5) That judge who sent Paris Fuckwit Hilton back to jail is offically the greatest judge, if not human being, ever. Most judges only seem to do stupid things like releasing serial killers into the community because they've got mental issues (like, yeah, obviously you knob), or sending old ladies to jail for not paying their council tax, which I'm pretty sure everyone has agreed is a totally shit tax and yeah, jail will sort those old bitches out alright. But no, this guy actually did a good job, went against the rule which says that if you've got enough money you can pay your way out a situation, and sent that braindead streak of piss back from whence she'd come, crying like a big fat baby. Which means that this goes down as one of the photos of the year. Mr Judge, I salute you.

6) drD maketh me laugh with his wit and superb photoshop skills.

7)  "We're doing a feature for Country Life. Survey of rural types: farmers, travelling tinkers, milkmen; that sort of thing."

If you don't know what film this line is from then you are officially off my Christmas card list.

I couldn't find a clip though, which is total bollocks if you ask me. Bastard YouTube.

*Interlude*

*Sips on his Guinness which isn't from a pub so isn't the greatest, but it's still Guinness so that's okay*

And now for some moozak, presented in the style of Tony Green from  Bullseye:

IIIIIIIIIIIINNN ONE! (I'm From Barcelona - Oversleeping)

IIIIIIIIIIIIINNNN TWO! (The Concretes - On The Radio)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNN THREE! (Elbow - Buttons and Zips)

AND BULLY'S SPECIAL PRIZE! (Thievery Corporation - Shadows of Ourselves)

Piles of crap

As a postscript to my last post about rubbish, binmen, etc, I thought it would be best to provide an example of what I'm talking about.

This pile of crap (below) has been inhabiting it's current home for a good six months, as evidenced by the size of the plant that has been able to grow from within it. Some lazy arsed bastard just dumped a couple of bags, someone else dumped some more stuff on top of that, and before you know it the pile suddenly consists of up to twenty sacks, all containing God knows what and among which there will breed terrifying hordes of mega-flies intent on taking over the Earth. It could happen.

There were more piles like this, but most of them disappeared when workmen turned up to renovate half of the buildings on the same side of the road. Nice workmen.

The most annoying thing about all of this is that the binmen just will not get rid of it. They won't. They ignore it because it's not within their jurisdiction. It's not technically household rubbish because it's not out the front of a house, and it's not been placed on the pavement ready for collection. I wonder, if I were to sneak out on Sunday night and move all the bags onto the pavement under the cover of dark, would they take it? I'm not going to find out because I'm not going to move the bags. Doing so would only result in me catching typhoid or malaria or some other horrifying disease that no-one in Brighton has ever caught before, and that would be a bit poo.

So, well, no.

Nb. Kate has also written about her 'rubbish experiences'. A haw. A haw haw.

Blank, because I can only think of contrived titles involving the word 'rubbish'

Filth, scum and council tax.

In short, three things which get right on my tits.

Well, two things really, because filth and scum are pretty much the same thing; at least, they are for my purposes. To be even more specific, I'm talking about plain old-fashioned rubbish.

Rubbish is smelly. Very smelly. It looks horrible. Ugly in fact. It attracts all sorts of weird beasties that you really wouldn't want hanging around anywhere near you at even the best of times, and I'm not talking about the local chavettes, surprisingly. It is also a given that the tax-paying individual (you and me) is not responsible for disposing of his or her own rubbish, because that is the job of the rubbish collecting services (binmen, for that is their title) who kindly and quietly do what must be a very shit and stinky job, because we, as taxpayers, get a large chunk of our earnings diverted to the local governement, whereupon it is distributed in various directions and for various tasks, one of which is in paying these poor sods to collect our mouldy old stinksacks every week of the year, and forever and ever, Amen.

It used to be the case that the council paid these men themselves, but for some reason (money) the government decided that was too fruitless and that too much money was being needlessly wasted on paperwork and bureaucracy, and so the binmen were privatised, and the responsibility for the collection of the rubbish was shifted onto the shoulders of private companies who were now being paid, using our taxes, to collect the rubbish for us, on the council's behalf.

Now, there have been numerous occasions, not least in Brighton (as kindly pointed out by Ms J Burchill in last weekend's Grauniad) where this process has gone properly tits up due to the private company or companies screwing with it's employees until they went on strike, thereupon resulting in the afore-mentioned rubbish not being collected for quite some time, until a resolution was reached and the binmen returned to their jobs and removed the offending articles from under my incredibly offended nose. When this happened in Brighton, the binmen offered to go and collect the rubbish for free because they were nice like that, but the council stopped them just in case it upset the company they had hired to pay these men to collect the rubbish in the first place! Ironic, no?

Anyway, in all the time I've been here, things have been pretty much acceptable. Aside from the Christmas holidays, where the binmen take a deserved rest, the rubbish collecting schedule changes due to God knows how many bank holidays getting in everyone's way, and I forget to put the rubbish out, everything has run as smoothly as can be expected. We don't have wheelie bins round here because there are so many flats that you'd need four bins per house, which would leave no pavement for anyone to walk on. Plus it's so near town that they'd probably be nicked, set on fire by a group of marauding eleven year-olds, or used by some skanky bastard to wheel their shopping home in. Or as a makeshift pram. Whatever, we haven't got them. So we, and our neighbours, who all live in flats too, have to store our rubbish up every week, then dump it out on the pavements on Sunday night for collection on Monday morning. Luckily, our landlord is a good chap, and has provided our house (made up of four flats) with some bins, which have been placed in the cellar outside our front door. Amazingly, none of the other flats bother using them (I've no idea why) so our rubbish always has a safe and sterile home until collection day comes.

Therefore, I can't imagine what would happen should the equilibrium be shattered by the government's frankly preposterous plan to make rubbish collections fortnightly rather than weekly. Firstly, the neighbours WOULD DEFINITELY start using the bins our landlord provided, and secondly, as I'm pretty sure that the landlords of all the other houses in the square aren't half as accommodating as ours is, the square we live in would almost certainly be full of piled-up binbags. Almighty slagheaps of filth would sprout up all over.  The seagulls would have a field day! There would be mouldy chicken legs, yoghurt pots, dirty nappies - all sorts of filthy shit - strewn all over the place, and WE would have to live in this tip.

Apparently doing this would not be unhygienic. Well, sorry, but I beg to differ. This idea may be sort of okay if you live in a nice big house, with lots of lovely wheelie bins (probably with smiley faces on the side) and a recycling truck that drives round twice a week with a nice friendly driver called Kevin, but for anyone who lives anywhere near the middle of any modern British city (actually, any modern city, anywhere) then this idea is totally ridiculous. The cities are overcrowded and dirty enough as it is, so the last thing we, as it's inhabitants, need is to be surrounded by our own filth 24 hours a day.

Is this the kind of thing I pay over one thousand of my hard earned pounds every year in order to fund? Council tax is a terribly unfair form of individual taxation anyway (and I can totally understand why vast numbers of people were, and still are, up in arms about it), but whenI don't see the crime rates reducing, or public areas such as the seafront getting revitalised, I have to ask; where exactly does my money go?

If they do eventually introduce this hair-brained scheme I'd appreciate it if I can get a rebate on my tax, after all, they won't be using it for anything much.

100% should just about do it.

No good cause

It's four years since the war in Iraq started. Thousands of people have died, lost loved ones, been made homeless and/or live in constant fear as a result of the decisions of a couple of people in the US and UK's governments. Bush has conceded that there was no legitimate security-related reason for invading the country, yet Blair and co. haven't yet stated that they were misguided in their assertion that Weapons of Mass Destruction existed within Iraq.

With no end in sight, no peace, and with our government failing to admit their mistakes, how on earth can there be any resolution to this terrible and destructive situation?

Visit Blue Witch for more info and links about this.

This is a warning

Twas the work Chrimbo night out last night.

I imbibed a solid amount of plonk, and also heartily digested a sterling quantity of food that was not really very Thai at all considering that it was the output of a Thai restaurant. The soup (see above picture) was the most Thai thing on offer, and I wolfed that down with what can only be described as reckless abandon. The duck, chicken and beef - plus some veggies - that followed went into me with the same gusto but weren't really up to scratch in all honesty. The pudding, although edible (and mine appeared to be the most edible on the table) was not really terribly good. It was some sort of tapioca-style lychee and condensed milk concoction. Not. Great. Luckily enough the wine was alright. I would have been super pissed off if they'd managed to balls that up as well.

THEN the naughty staff at the restaurant tried to take advantage of some sadly not very drunk people (sad for me, as I was the only one of us that was properly pissed - what a boring bunch not taking advantage of  free booze!) by trying to double charge us for the food. Cheeky beggars. They actually crossed out  the original order on the ticket (not very well as it happens, as it was still visible - duh) and then tried to argue the toss. They lost, and we got fourteen meals for the price of seven. That'll teach them to fuck with us again, not that we or I will be going back there. There are far better Thai places in the very near vicinity that I will be much happier to frequent, so bollocks to them. So just so you all know, DO NOT go to Sawadee on St. James Street in Kemp Town. Instead take Timbo's recommendation and DO go to The King & I on Ship Street. A much nicer establishment, where the food is most certainly Thai rather than any of this fusion rubbish, and ignore what some of the people say on that website; the staff there are possibly the nicest people in Brighton, and every time I've been there it's been lovely. I haven't a clue what those moany old scrots are on about.

On a heavier note, it's bloody awful about these girls getting murdered in Suffolk. I'm from Felixstowe and was born in Ipswich, and apart from one time when a girl (who I went to school with as it happens) was murdered about seven years ago, nothing like this has ever happened in that area. In Hackney you expect this kind of shit, but not in Felixstowe. The Old Felixstowe Road, where the last two girls' bodies were found, is a road I must have been down about two or three hundred times in my life, and I once attended a Cub Scout camp just up from Levington on the River Orwell where one of the bodies was found. It's quite out on a limb there and such a tight-knit community too, so I can only imagine how scary it is for everyone there right now. It might even be the case that whoever is doing this has killed more girls before, if this report is anything to go by. I only hope the police find the killer before some other poor person, or persons, gets killed.

Film 2006 with Timbo

An Inconvenient Truth

Casino Royale

Sometimes you see something that really affects you deep inside. A film or TV program, or even an article in a newspaper or magazine, some form of media with a message that hits you so hard that you wonder why you didn't know all there was to know about it in the first place. This accurately sums up how I felt directly after watching An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary movie that is basically a filmed version of the many lectures that Al Gore gave over the last few years, and continues to give to audiences all over the world about mankind's impact on the planet over the last half century.

It is a deeply affecting film. Gore doesn't go in for histrionics or drama. He doesn't need to. He merely states the facts and the facts that create their own drama. It is uncomfortable to see how much we as a species have destroyed and continue to destroy the world that we live in. I mean, I knew that things had gotten pretty fucked up, but I seriously didn't think that within my or my children's lifetime we might be looking at raised sea levels and the possible loss of at least one of the polar ice-caps. It may not happen as quickly as that, but it might, and it will definitely happen unless WE do something collectively to stop it, or at least slow it down.

I find it disgusting to still see the US government rejecting the Kyoto agreement, despite the fact that practically every first world nation has ratified it, and I am also appalled at the mainstream medias continued refusal to spread the agreed scientific line about how in danger the world is. I have to take my hat off to the BBC though. They do a great job in regards to this. As, quite astonishingly, does Tony Blair. I cannot trust a word that comes out of this mans mouth after Iraq, but he is at least facing in the right direction in regards to the environment. New forms of power, lower emissions, more efficient cars, more public transport... It's not all good though, as he could also raise airport tax and reduce flight numbers, sort out recycling in the community, stop trains being so fucking expensive, and kick George Bush directly up the arse a bit seeing as he's his bestest chum and all that. But it's a start at least.

So anyway, if you haven't seen this film then PLEASE SEE IT. And PLEASE tell all your friends and family to see it too. Then tell them to tell all of their friends and family, etc, etc. The more people that realise how fucked the planet is then the more chance we have of fixing it before the damage is irreversible. I hate preaching, I really do, but this is just the most important thing in the world. It IS the world. I've even switched to green energy today even though it's slightly more expensive, am flushing the toilet after every second piddle rather than every first (this doesn't apply to poos, seeing as that would just be disgusting), using less water in the bath, turning off the heating when it's unecessary, turning off lights when they are unecessary, and will be buying some energy saving bulbs tomorrow. We're gonna try and recycle stuff too. The collections round here are non-existant, but we have to try. I am also going to lobby my employers so that they make every employee turn off their computer when they leave at the end of their shift. Currently they actively encourage people to leave their PC's on at night; restarting them rather that shutting them down so that they can 'update'. Surely they don't need to be on for this to happen? By doing this they are not only wasting money but they are wasting precious energy, and for a company with almost a thousand staff rammed into two massive buildings that is an awful lot of energy.

SO, there is a Pledge thingy at the top of my sidebar. Please sign it, then see the film. That is all.

I also saw the new James Bond film and in a totally unexpected turn of events it turned out to be  absolutely fucking brilliant. Cheesy in bits? Check. Slightly lame script in places? Check. Ridiculously glamourous locations/cars/women? Also check, but then that was to be expected. But it was just bloody good FUN. The opening extended chase scene with the crane and the building site was spudthwackingly ace and made the film on it's own. Luckily the rest of it was alright as well. I was quite literally glued to my chair, my mouth hanging open with a slither of dribble escaping from the corner. It was that good.

So you have my permission to see that one as well, if you fancy it.

Kawai! (?)

Images from Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd... Me like.

The most upsetting and mind-boogly-ingly thing I've read today is this. Some people haven't got two grains of rice to rub together, and then there are others who earn ONE MILLION DOLLARS AN HOUR!! We live in an awfully frigged up world. Then again there are some who appear to want to do good. Initially Branson's pledge appears amazing - loads of dosh to help the world! Yeeaahh!!! - but it's not just the knee-jerk charidee thing that everyone (whoever everyone is) seems to think is necessary. It's actually a positive step towards a realistic end product, so good for him. Cheers Rich.