Jesus, why did I ever agree with my brain when we had a nice cosy chat about the possibility of a 2 week vacation right away from any form of modern technology on a hot, sweaty island, with only mosquitos and sunburn for company?

However you look at it, holidays can be very weird things...it takes a forced break from a set routine to make you take a step back and realise just how sick and twisted certain parts of your life have become....for instance:

"It's been 7 hrs and 16 days, since you took your love away (aaaa-aaahhh-aaaaaaaa), etc"... I dunno why, but the words from the classic Sinead O'Connor song are feeling pretty damn apt right now regarding my withdrawals from my beloved internet, who is, as I am beginning to slowly and painfully realise, my eternal mistress and main addiction in my life.

....and ,trying to stay on topic, but veering off ever so slightly (due to the fact I'm on holiday and the 'lack of connection' shakes are kicking in) .....just as a little sidenote.......'Nothing Compares To You' is one of those music videos that captures a precise moment in history for me, when my brain realised it should probably press the record button and store what I was experiencing at the time for future nostalgic recount.

Because in some small way it was like nothing that had ever come before it (ok, so Bono and U2 sort of did it first a few months before, but they were dudes and anyway, this was totally f#cking different. This was a music video containing one very cute chick (at that time...its amazing how u go off someone big time later on down the line) with an amazing haircut, or lack of (Skinhead O'Connor?), who was clearly upset and needed a hug while she was doing this full frame head shot video-thingy, in one take, about her boyfriend pissing off somewhere and leaving her all alone and a bit moody, and just when you thought it couldn't get any hotter she starts crying as she is singing and it suddenly felt as if it were just you and her on the planet and she was saying these things just to you.....kind of.....I guess you had to be there, or be me....whatever!

....or maybe at the time it reinvoked a very recent memory in my head that had taken place a couple of weeks before Sinead was doing her thing on MTV, when I had to deal with the girlfriend of my best buddy, who had just been dumped by said friend at a party, and was doing something very similar to me, in my face.

...and I felt an overwhelming urge to hold her and tell her it was gonna be ok, walk her home, see her to her front door and promise her that would talk to my best buddy, tell him what a dick he was being for hurting someone so god dammed beautiful and in some way, make it alright again and put the world back on its axis.

...at least that's how it was meant to go....how I ended up undressed in her bed ten minutes later and how I thought that was gonna fix everything is still a bit of a mystery to me to this day, but I guess at the time it must have made some mad kind of sense.....Either way, whenever I hear Sinead wail out that song it presses play on my brain recorder and that event plays out and I can remember exactly what I was doing and where I was when those tears started flowing down her cheeks (and also how life never works out quite as u expected it would).

In exactly the same way (kind of), I can remember just where I was, what I was doing, and even what I had for tea when the whole world watched as Neil Armstrong climbed out of the lunar module and descended the luna ladder (?), before planting his footstep and saying those unforgetable words from my tv, while I sat transfixed as I witnessed history taking place as Neil became the first astronaut to be filmed live on tv walking around in a cold Nevada desert at night......it's true....it has to be....my grandad told me the moon's made of cheese and of coure, if it just doesn't happen to be so, then the rest of us know its inhabited by space Nazis......obviously!

.....so, (sorry about the slight tangent), maybe that's what being addicted to the internet does to you, it makes you question pretty much anything that seems important to you, or anyone else, and offers an 'alternative' point of view (scientology anyone?), to the point that it leaves you not knowing what the f#ck the truth is anymore.

...still, i just know, just like the rest of you, that if I wanted to prove to myself that 1 + 1 = 3, or that Dubya was actually a pretty decent guy (or Hitler for that matter), that 99.9% of what came back from good old Google would probably support my case.

The internet's like that, if you want to view life from a perspective, slightly left of surreal, then someone has already been there, done that, bought the tee shirt, written the postcard and posted a webpage/blog/rant/comment/thingamajiggy about it already.

...so it kinda saves you the effort of feeling like a total jerk whenever you question dogma, and the world (read as, 'your friends') laugh in your face and hint that you are either totaly dumb, or borderline insane, and you can smile back at them, safe and secure in the knowledge that somewhere out there is at least another person(s) on exactly the same wavelength as you....kinda makes me feel all warm inside knowing that!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, 'it's been 16 1/2 hours and 7 days since you took yor love away (ARRRRRRGHHHHHH ARRRRRGHHH-AAAAHHHAAA) - OMFG....I'm never gonna make it to 14 days without at least a tatse of some 56k (god, I'd even settle for 28k).

Submitted by Alpha Dog

 

My dad's getting old, he's past 60 and he's beginning to look tired. When i was a kid I was always amazed at how strong he was because he had a wirey frame but he seemed to have just focused the strength of a tank into 5 foot 8 inches of sinewy muscle.

That sense of condensed power is starting to drain out him and its being replaced with a frailty that his body was always probably designed to have.

He still works as a mechanic and driver for a locally owned coach company where he's still lifting things that would give a health and safety official a stroke but the walk home used to take 5 minutes and now its closer to 10.

For the first time ever, I've started feeling sorry for him and he knows it.

When I'm in the pub in my hometown all the old guys still call me "Wee Eddie" even though I'm a good 4 inches taller, considerably better built and actually named Steven. That used to drive me fucking nuts. Its only recently that i realised that I could be a gargantuan steroid pumping hulk and I'd still just be "Wee Eddie" because my old mans reputation casts a shadow that I'd need a taxi to get out of.

His mates still love to tell the story about when they went to see Manfred Mann at the Concert Hall in Larbert. They came on the stage, played two songs and said "Right we're not playing to this bunch of hillbillies" and walked off.

They had nearly made it to their tour van when four drunk and angry young chaps fae tha Plean ran through their roadies and kicked the sh#t out of them. They had to cancel their next couple of tour dates and it could have been worse because my dad was hopping towards their equipment van while trying to stuff a sock into his half bottle of vodka to make an impromptu molotov when the police arrived. (He denies this. Others comfirm it.)

He worked on the railways for 20 years and when Prime Minister Thatcher demolished them he volunteered for redundancy so that some of his older workmates could keep their jobs. He knew the meat-hook realities facing a unemployed 40 year old but he knew that they were a hundred times worse for the 50 year olds. As it turned out the Tories free-market uber-alles meant he didn't save anyone, just prolonged their slide onto the scrapheap.

A few years ago, he'd be late fifties at this point, he waded into three younger guys who were having a go at one of his mates and took a few sore ones. He'd broke his hand and had a fracture in his eye socket so he ran. Straight to his car boot and ran straight back swinging his heaviest wrench.

My generation talks big, we love to soliloquise about all the wrongs we see, my generation will tut and shake our heads from a safe distance whereas my old man would march straight up, clench his fists and dare the f#ckers to try it, go on, just you f#cking try it.

The failure of my dads era was the inability to see the things that really needed to be fought and how to fight them, the failure of my era, yours too, is that we don't have the f#cking balls.

My dad was never special, all he did was work hard and never let go no matter how hard bastards stamped on his fingers, well I'm not even 30, not even half his age and I'm struggling.

I hope I still get called "Wee Eddie" for a long time.

(Story submitted by By Jingo)

 

While the world press mutters and rumbles about Beijing's smog giving marathon runners lungs tuberculosis, or the Chinese government not letting the cream of the world's sporting press view hardcore pr0n sites the IOC, a corrupt autocracy, ruled by a homophobic lunatic, encourages a stray animal genocide and a Hitleresque eviction and extermination of the homeless. This is all the done while selling a myth of wealth and job creation for the poor underwritten by a reality of corporate land-grabs and endemic corruption.

Of course i should first say that as a Scot it's part of my national culture to hate the Olympics. Any true Scotsman who is seen to cheer on a British team would be on the receiving end of a severe malkying*, but I've always thought that rational people of any creed (Scots being the best obviously) should shudder in horror at the doping, the child abuse that represents the "ladies" gymnastics and the trite middle class nationalism they parade on our televisions.

Pray that THE GAMES never come to your city. An extensive study of the seven most recent cities (Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London) chosen to host the Summer Games conducted by the Geneva based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) reveals the true atavistic face of the games, the governments who court them and their matchmaker, the IOC.

The COHRE documents estimate that 1.5 million Beijing residents will be or have been displaced making them world champions by almost matching the 2 million who have already been displaced in all the other host cities since 1988. Electricity and water had been cut of to encourage people to leave prime sites for "redevelopment", rubbish collection was stopped so that the seeds of a sterile tribute to humanities strive for athletic perfection would be sown in a cesspit of garbage and disease.

The jackboot and the games have a happy history, South Korea "redeveloped" by hiring private security forces who utilised rape, arson and beatings aka "Re-Education Through Labor", to ensure that community resistance didn't spoil the party. Atalanta was far less brutal but just as insidious. Its "sanitized corridor", a euthamism that Goebbels would be proud of, meant that cops were issued with pre-printed tickets with "African-American," "Male," and "Homeless" already filled in. Real-estate speculation and ballooning rents pushed out the rest of the undesirables. Even animals aren't spared. 30,000 to 50,000 dogs were poisoned in Athens to help create the necessary ambiance, and Beijing has followed their Olympian example.

The benefits that the games bring are mirages. Lord Coe believes that London's wining bid will encourage the British to get off our sofas and out there pommel horsing or something but the Secretary of Sport, Tessa Jowell's department concluded in a 2002 report that, "hosting events is not an effective, value for money, method of achieving . . . a sustained increase in mass participation." If you want to get me away from the computer how about some of the £2.35bn (original estimate cost of the London games. Current estimates are heading toward £9bn) up my neck of the woods and clean the dog shit and broken bottles out of the football park that's right beside my house. I'm not so sure I'll get much use from a shot-putt enclosure 500 miles away. Or how about a another sports complex so that booking a hall for 5-a-sides isn't like trying to get tickets for Glastonbury?

The Institute of Public Policy Research, one of Labour's favourite think-tanks, examined the claim that the games bring a lasting economic boom and found that, "there is no guaranteed beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic Games . and there is little evidence that past Games have delivered benefits to those people and places most in need." and the London Assembly concluded that "longterm unemployed and workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job prospects] by the staging of the Games in each of the four previous host cities".

While the games are on, turn off your TV, don't watch that fake bullsh#t. Try and find a copy of Panorama's "Buying the Games" and discover the corruption of the IOC, find out how much of your tax money has been or will be used to exploit and brutalise the poor or gone in bribes to Jacques Rogge and his cronies.

"Citius, Altius, Fortius." Bullshitus.

(Story submitted by By Jingo)