Conflict of Interest-Free Loans!
July 12th, 2006 at 21:24

Yeah, that’s an awful and inaccurate pun for a headline. At least I added an exclamation mark to make a somewhat tedious topic marginally more interesting. What am I talking about? The kerfuffle about the “Loans for Peerages” scandal, of course.

For the unintiated: donors are giving massive loans to political parties, and are being rewarded with a Peerage. A Peerage means that they get a seat in the House of Lords, and thus can vote on laws and stuff, and they get a supervillain-esque title like Baroness Evil or Lord Rapelove.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with letting people buy their way into the legislature- its an unelected house anyway, so it’s not like the public have a say in who gets to go there… and letting the highest bidder go in will mean that they’re going into politics not to make money, as presumably they’ll have plenty already… they’ll be working for the common good… right? Right? Rich people don’t want more money, surely?!

If it’s going to happen, why not auction Peerages off to the highest bidder? Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and Stelios from Easyjet are all loaded, and are all good businessmen… surely they’d be good at running “UK plc” too? Or at least being able to vote to delay a bill for a bit, yet having no real tangible powers. The government are seemingly incapable of implementing any sort of computer systems without problems, so Bill Gates would be right at home- and Stelios could cut the crap out of public services and create value for money: schools could stop serving meals and just offer a selection of drinks including miniature cans of Pepsi for thrice the price as on the ground.

Yeah, I didn’t realise until I’d wrote this that I’m essentially putting together an argument for mega-capitalism to rule over us like the ant-sized sheep that we are.

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Flogging Molly
July 11th, 2006 at 02:02

If I told you that I’d spent the evening sweating heavily in the proximity of hundreds of other sweaty men, trying my best to join in with the jumping about, you’d think that I sound mental. Add live music to this, and its a perfectly normal thing to do.

I’ve had an excellent evening: I’ve been to see Celtic-Punk band Flogging Molly at the Carling Academy, in Birmingham. Thankfully, my friend Matt was doing the driving, as the journey, whilst awful in the first place (Big motorway into the centre of the second biggest city?! No thanks), was made worse by the fact that the junction we needed to leave at in order to be not hopelessly lost in Birmingham was closed.

We ended up driving through central Birmingham- including what was mostly a pedestrianised area, and the huge Bullring shopping centre. In the end we had to ask two police officers (“pigs“) for directions.

We got there perfectly on time, though, which was nice.

The first band on were called Twopointeight, and were Swedish. And they were excellent. I’d have bought their CD had I not been (literally) skint. Before one of their songs, they said “put your hand up if you hate the police!”- despite the insitutional racism, botched terror raids, inherrent negligence and general brutality, my hands remained down, as two very nice police officers had helped us find the venue earlier.

The second support, Failsafe, were good too.

Flogging Molly eventually came on stage and the crowd kicked it up a notch. They played all of the two songs I’d heard prior to the gig… Drunken Lullabies was well recieved by a lively crowd, and they finished their non-encore bit on What’s Left of the Flag. Fantastic. They’re quite unusual for a punk band as they have an accordianist and violist who aren’t just there as a bit of a gimmick, and are actually integral to the musical output. I wasn’t quite sure if this would mean that the audience will stand and watch reverently, as you might expect from a folk gig, or would go wild like at a punk gig. Thankfully, they did the latter, which made it more exciting.

There was a good bit when the lead singer said “this song is about someone is stupid”, and got the audience to make a “one fingered salute” gesture, before revealing that the song was about George W Bush. It was a relief that their politics are in the right place, as I’d seen another audience member with what looked like a Nazi cross tattoo, although I should have expected it, what with them featuring on the Rock Against Bush compilations.

At the end I bought a Flogging Molly t-shirt and CD, with money that I can’t afford to use, but it seems worth it.

They were dead good.

The journey home wasn’t quite as good- we took the wrong direction on the M6, and didn’t realise until we figured that Wolverhampton was in the wrong direction for home. On the plus side, the diversion meant that we went to a service station where I bought quite possibly the world’s biggest (and most expensive) chocolate-chip muffin. For £1.90.

In summary: drive, park, punk, drive, fantatic.

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Dance the night away?
July 9th, 2006 at 01:35

I went to see a local band play some live music this evening.

One of the songs they did was a cover of what I believe is called Dance the Night Away by who Google think are The Mavericks.

The thing that struck me most about this song was how implausable the singers intentions are.

According to the 2003 Licensing Act, if he wanted to “dance the night away” to amplified live music in a small venue that holds 200 or less people, such as the venue I was in this evening, he’d have to stop at 11pm. The only exception is for Morris Dancing. So if he wanted to Morris Dance the Night Away, that’d be fine. I’d imagine this would kill the atmosphere for the “swaying senoritas”, who are also present.

Irrelavantly, also whilst there I had a go with the ‘82ASK’ text message service- you can text them any question and they’ll text you back with an answer. I asked “Who is the British James O’Malley?”. A few minutes later I got the following reply:

“James O’Malley has a popular blog at http://jamesomalley.co.uk/ commenting on anything from politics, football and window cleaning“.

“Excellent”, I thought, as I realised I’d paid a pound to have someone Google my name.

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Changing Church Rules
July 8th, 2006 at 15:56

Word on the street is that loads of Churchy people are having a meeting to decide whether having women bishops is “theologically justified”. Apparently they’re going to have a look through the Bible again and see if the pros out-weigh the cons.

I’m fully supportive of female bishops, and I know that in Church circles, my opinion counts for a lot. I can’t see anything wrong with letting the bishop preach about feelings, cloud the big theological questions with needless indecision (“I can’t definately come and see you on Sunday, God, I’ll just act confused and say ‘I don’t know’ a lot, until something I can use as an excuse comes up, so I can’t see you anyway“) and get pissed off when someone happens to say something that might possibly be considered almost disagreeing with their irrational opinion slightly, in a very round about way.

It just strikes me as slightly… hypocritical, that the whole establishment can change their mind over something they’ve harked on about for centuries, when they havn’t had a message from God, they’ve just re-read the same book they’ve been reading for hundreds of years and come up with a different conclusion. It’s like when you go to see a film and think you really enjoyed it, but when one of your friends says that they hated it, and you’re too embarassed to have a different opinion to them, so force yourself to hate it too. Like The Matrix Reloaded.

It’s not even as if the Director’s Cut of the Bible has just been released, and God has stated unequivocally on the commentary that he thinks women bishops are alright. Followed by an anecdote about how they had trouble getting Moses to betray Jesus, as he was busy working on The Torah, so Judas had to step in at the last minute.

Apparently the sticking point is that the traditionalists reckon that Jesus only picked male disciples- and so there could only be male bishops. It strikes me as odd that they’re picking up on this one characteristic. All of the disciples wore old-timey clothing- why don’t they only let people who wear bathrobes become bishops?

Surely the fact that various tedious issues like this can change through time undermines the entire religious establishment? All of these morals, rules and stained-glass windows weren’t handed down by God as a series of absolute values and ways to live, but are merely pantomime that people only sit through as it’s tradition- like sitting through yet another football tournament where England go out on penalties? I’d be very surprised if God could care less whether or not I spent an hour or week in Church singing old songs- I’d hope he’d be more fussed about all of the murders that I have or havn’t committed.

Then again, what’s to stop the Church people reading the one book that’s important to their job again in a few hundred years time and discovering that two thirds of the way through, during the bit everyone skips as they give up reading and just read the last page, it says “Thou shalt plunge thy knife unto thine face of thine innocent pedestrian, as it’ll make a good happy slapping video. Go on, it’ll be a laugh!”?

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Unfair Football
July 5th, 2006 at 23:57

Now I don’t claim to know anything about football. In fact, I pride myself on my ignorance- making a point of saying something like “So they can’t touch the ball with their hands, right?” everytime I’m in a conversation with people discussing it, just to be marginally more irritating than I already am.

I’ve been thinking about international football lately (I’ve no idea why), and I think that I can safely say, having done no research on this before writing about it, or watching any of the non-England football matches, that aside from the inherent unfairness of having a bigger population, and thus a bigger pool of people to pick your national team from, nobody seems to have worried about nationality issues.

For example, to play for a national football team, you merely have to be a citizen of that country- this sounds pretty obvious in the context of being say, British or Spanish, but what about Israeli? The Law of Return means that anyone who is Jewish can automatically be an Israeli citizen. This surely means that Israel can put together an incredible football team comprising of all of the world’s best Jewish players (I assume there must be a fair few scattered around in other countries?). Presumably this is why the law exists- I seriously doubt it has anything to do with history, past atrocities or being an ancient homeland.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Germany granted citizenship to all East Germans as soon as they crossed the border. Presumably the best players in the East German football team could have just jumped ship, and assuming they weren’t shot on the way, joined a better team?

No wonder America are rubbish at football- their immigration laws are dead strict. If they let Mexicans become citizens more easily, they might perform better in international competitions.

And every two years the nation is dissappointed that England when England lose on penalties… why not change our immigration laws so that anyone can be a citizen? Suddenly the Brazillian (French? Italian?) team could become English, and solve all (one) of life’s problems!

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Political bet, anyone?
July 5th, 2006 at 20:19

I want to try and make a political bet with someone- unfortunately, there’s no one “politically aware” online (ie: my contact list are all morons or foreigners), so I’m having to resort to posting on my blog.

I’ll wager two English pounds (approx 74 yuan) to anyone reading now that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott will not be in his job by this time next week. Any takers? Post in the comments section below. (Yeah, I’m a bit skint at the moment).

What’s my reasoning behind this? Well, aside from the whole casino thing, it turns out that the bloke who’s ranch Prezza stayed at, and the guy who wants to turn the Millennium Dome into a big casino is a massive homophobe- even more so than me!

Then of course there’s the whole thing about Prezza and his affair. No, not that one! There’s been a massive cover-up in the mass media, and news that he’s had an affair with fellow MP Rosie Winterton. There’s also speculation about another affair, with the British Ambassador to China, or someone like that (could be Hu Jintao himself for all I know).

I reckon that at least some of this news will break tonight- Iain Dale’s on Newsnight, and surely he won’t be able to resist leaking it? I can foresee a situation like what happend with John Leslie ages ago, where he was “accidentally” named as an awful rapist on The Wright Stuff, and the press went literally mental (not literally), and he ended up losing his job. I’m assuming being Deputy Prime Minister is essentially the same job as presenting This Morning. And that an alleged affair is as bad as an alleged rape. Cough.

A week today he won’t be in a job. Mark my words… or link me to this post in a week’s time and publically humiliate me.

I realise I’ve just spent the last few paragraphs trying to convince you, dear reader, not to bet against me, by rationally explaining my argument. Unfortunately, I’m rather historically bad at betting- I’ve had various celebrity death bets with friends on the Pope, Yassir Arafat, and Michael Jackson… unfortunately they lived that little bit too long. So knowing my luck, Tony Blair will announce tomorrow that he’s stepping down, and Prezza will become uncontested Prime Minister.

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Power Cut
July 4th, 2006 at 23:28

I’ve just had the most unbearable three quarters of an hour of my life.

I was sitting on my laptop and my mum was watching Richard and Judy, when all of a sudden a fading “Woooo” noise was heard as the electricity around us died. It was a power cut, and it demonstrated in an awful way just how dependent on electricity I am.

I had to endure the following atrocities:

• Reading a book
• Talking to my mother
• Passing the time of day
• Sitting quietly

It was horrible. It was like being back in the olden-days, when the only entertainment was a metal hoop and a stick. And I don’t even have a metal hoop and a stick.

Eventually, my mum found a radio that runs off of batteries, so we tuned into The Home Service (ie: Radio Leicester), sitting around the radio as a family. I half expected to hear Neville Chamberlain announce that Great Britain was at war with Germany. Or perhaps more likely: Portugal.

It’s hard to explain just how besides myself with boredom I was… I had literally nothing to do, because everything that I do do involves electricity in some capacity. I can’t even post on my blog without electricity… madness!

Thankfully, after 45 long and painful minutes, the electricity returned in a vaguely literal blaze of glory (ie: things lit up a bit). It turned out the power cut affected a rather large area- probably at least twenty miles big.

Thrilling stuff, this.

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Dogs
July 1st, 2006 at 20:28

I consider myself an animal-lover. There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching yet another video of an animal doing something amusing on YouTube. There’s just one animal I’ve never really understood though: dogs.

I’ve never liked dogs. They’re just too big. They have massive teeth, claws, and are domesticised wolves. You could say that they’re like a wolf in dog’s clothing.

I’ve never understood why people love dogs so much either. The night before last, I was in a quiet countryside pub with JD, Fundar and Charlie. For some inexplicable reason, someone had let a dog into the pub. Charlie spent about twenty minutes petting this dog, stroking its stomach and letting it jump all over her, rather than listening to the live music on offer.
The smell was over-poweringly awful. The dog didn’t smell very nice either.

From where I was sitting, it looked as if Charlie was passionately kissing this dog. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She later claimed that it was just licking her face. Horrible.

I’ll be honest: for as long as I can remember, I’ve been scared of dogs. I think this was perpetuated when I was about seven years old and on holiday at a caravan site in Cornwall. I was playing on a swing made from an old tractor tyre, no doubt having the time of my life, when suddenly a huge sheep-dog (that’s a dog that herds sheep, not some sort of hybrid creature) ran upto this swing and started barking in a violent way. Terrified, I ran as fast as I could back to caravan, but unfortunately for me, the dog chased after me. I could hear it scraping away at the door, like some sort of crazed serial killer.
It was like a film- I only managed to get the door closed seconds before the dog got to the caravan.

I think I just need a dog to save my life to balance this out.

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