One of those days

Everyone is in for it today.

I woke up at 5am, the internet depressed me with stories about arguing nuns and some idiot who kept his amputated leg in a smoker.

I thought I was about to pull through but have gone to the cupboard to make a cup of coffee to find that in a careless moment the coffee has been thrown away. Thrown away.

I now have to wait until I get to work before the first cup. I have to arrive at my workplace unmedicated. I haven't done that in years and have no desire to start.

I do hope my colleagues are reading this and can take the appropriate measures. Bribery with caffeinated goods and bacon sandwiches always works.

Dear Microsoft...

Let the fun begin!

Being just an ignorant end-user I was under the impression that the updates that my computer periodically downloads from you were meant to make my computer more secure and work more effectively. In this first regard your most recent set have most certainly succeeded. If I can’t do anything with it how could it ever get malicious software on it?! It is a stroke of genius, a triumph of lateral thinking on which you are to be congratulated. Little was I to know that the update process was also a game of deduction and reasoning to educate users and keep us on our toes. Again I congratulate you on going well beyond what would normally be considered customer service to provide education and entertainment, as well as just a reliable and thoroughly useable product.

At the outset, I must admit, I had some small concerns about the second point above. The effectiveness of my computer post installation was initially somewhat reduced, in as much as it would give the appearance of working as normal and indeed for the first twenty seconds to a minute of use would operate much as before. Unfortunately, after this time it would pop up a warning window with an incomprehensible message on it referencing some abstract section of code that it was attempting to use and that it could not locate. Distressed, I attempted to come to its’ aid, alas to no avail. I found that my computer, plucky little thing that it is, had struggled to its eventual demise.

I will confess to being a little disheartened at this point. I began to wonder how I was to reinstate my poor PC without being able to access the internet, or run any of the restore functions or check the hard-disk for errors. So began the game! Feverishly I hunted for information, I consulted with friends and colleagues, I scoured the internet for information at work, I read countless articles detailing where I might find the error - many of them saying that no further updates or support would be available for my machine. That was a cunning move, and one I hadn’t seen coming! Surely, I thought, they can’t want everyone to upgrade to Vista already. Therein lay the solution to my problem! Self evidently this could not be a cynical ploy to force people to install a new operating system, that would be marketing suicide. Why would any company cripple its’ most widely used and compatible product to try and make people buy a new version of it, a ridiculous notion!

More fantastic updates!

I set about finding an answer, keeping my wits about me. If, as was seemingly the case, the crippling update was, as it could not be, a fiendish scheme to make me upgrade my software, then perhaps these articles telling me there were no further updates to be found were a double bluff and there were in fact additional updates to download. It hit me, a cry of elation escaped my lips and my colleagues cast wary glances in my direction, but I cared not for I had my answer! I had merely to wait and the solution would come to me. There were updates, useful ones, still to come and all I had to do was make sure that the computer had space for all the temporary files it needed. The instant I got home I deleted all the useless bloatware that I had installed – you know the type of thing, photo management software, the suite of software that makes my mobile telephone work with the computer (how could I have installed that hopeless frippery? After all it wasn’t a Microsoft product how could I have expected efficacy?). This cleared space for my poor computer to download its necessary updates and attempt to install them, something it achieved at only the fifth crashed attempt! Remarkable.

Imagine, if you will, my delight today to find that my work computer is now asking me download and install fresh updates. I can hardly wait! What delights of research, what twists and turns of analysis and logic am I to experience now, what intricate subtleties of compatibility am I to learn now? I could not be more pleased, though I wonder if my employer shares my glee. I suspect he may wish the process was perhaps a little less entertaining, the spoilsport!

Keep up the good work!

For you Mr Blair

It's a good thing I can't get on the net to vent my spleen. I would like to rail against Tony Blair but I can't. Instead I shall simply remind everyone that it was a man calling himself a socialist that enforced student loans and ignored 2 million people on the streets of London to go to war illegally. He has today said that he thought he was doing the right thing.

Edit: How will history judge Blair? - more on this later.

Crap Tuesday

Tuesdays are crap. I got up feeling better than normal. I didn't even have my regular morning tantrum about having to go to work instead of sitting in the sunshine. Things went rapidly downhill from there. For one thing I arrived at work which always puts a downer on things. Then I realised I only had the most tedious tasks left to do, having done the more interesting on Monday and late last week.
Then we had a fire drill and on the way back to the 7th floor I got stuck in not one but two lifts. This would never have happened on a Friday...

Being stuck in two lifts for ten minutes apiece my mood blackened to the point where I can only think about the fact that I am now engaged in two of my least favourite activities for the forseable future: house hunting and job hunting.

Reasons to hate job hunting:

• You have to pretend you are still doing your job properly and are devoting your full attention to it


• Your free time is sucked up in long rounds of pointless letter writing and making phonecalls to agents to discover that they have advertised the post really very badly indeed


• There is honestly nothing out there worth applying for


• Job websites are blindingly obvious on your computer screen to anyone walking past your desk


• Recruitment Agents are by enlarge a shower of bastards that promise one thing and deliver ...er... well whatever suits them really


• You rapidly lose the will to continue breathing

Reasons to hate house hunting:

• You are going to have to move house


• Everything you like has already been taken


• You can't afford the ones you really like

Other people have absolutely no taste whatsoever and it's difficult not to tell them that when you're in their house

• Estate agents are a shower of bastards, without exception


• There are almost no furnished properties to rent in Oz - we are going to have to buy everything

Reasons to hate Tuesday:

• More people kill themselves on a Tuesday than any other day


• There are still three more days to the weekend


• You aren't allowed to winge about it because it isn't Monday


• If you Google "facts about Tuesday" among other things you get a list of links about adult star Tuesday Weld. Crap Tuesday has even cursed my lazy blog posting. I'm going back to bed.

On a brighter note: Smurfs village bombed by warplanes

Street performers

There are an unnatural number of street performers on Circular Quay which means there is always something to watch whilst you eat your lunch. Street acts are one of many things in life that tend to polarise people, you either like 'em or you don't . Generally - this will come as no great surprise - I don't. I do not subscribe to the theory that they enliven and add colour to a bleak and forbidding urban landscape as they tend to congregate in the most open and pleasant areas and get in the way until you give them money, ruining the pleasant stroll you were having. Having said this some of them are quite good but they vary in quality from pointless semi-gentrified begging through one-trick-pony and bizarre sideshow all the way to bloody hell! Circular Quay has all four...

Pointless Semi-Gentrified Begging
My objection to this isn't so much the begging as the fact that the performers in question are attempting to pass off something which is badly thought out, requires very little effort and would be illegal begging if it weren't masquerading as performance. This seriously detracts from other performers who are actually trying and should be punishable by a year at a Grotowski based theatre school.* There are a few contenders for the title in this category, mostly of the if I dress up like something stupid people might give me money type, but the one that springs immediately to mind is:

• Bad Effort at a Pantomime Horse - A one man pantomime horse, badly executed or at least he should be. Maybe not so much a bad panto character as a one trick pony, his entire act is being dressed up as a crap pantomime horse but without the comedy of there in fact being two people inside. What else does he do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He could have a poorly made toy jockey on his back with a carrot suspended from a fishing rod which he could chase around. He could find a friend and make a proper pantomime horse that has a back end that attempts to move in the opposite direction. Maybe he doesn't have any friends or maybe he just isn't trying at all. I found this act so bad thast it confused me. In a daze I sauntered over to a trio stood not so far from Bad Effort at a Pantomime Horse and started staring at them waiting for them to do something with the odd collection of sticks and strange wheeled vehicle the had with them. Snapping out of it I realised that they were in fact three old people, one in a wheelchair, waiting for the minibus driver.


• Dress Up Like a Ten Foot Dickhead Man - At least I think it's a man, you can't tell under the costume. Again not so much of a performer as a clothes horse (can I get any more bad GeeGee gags in this post I wonder?). This one has not only a stupid costume but a stepladder. He looks a bit like a character from a Japanese mythic painting, face-mask and all. Apparently welded to the back of the painted mask is something that looks like a metal peacock. Under the highly coloured and decorated robes the "performer" is a not so cunningly concealed stepladder on which he is standing, giving the "amazing" illusion that he is ten feet tall. For some reason this is supposed to want to make you give him money. The stepladder renders the idiot standing on it immobile if he wishes to stay inside his costume meaning that he is limited to gesturing at people as apparently wearing an elaborate costume and standing on a stepladder renders you mute.

For once and all: if you are going to wear a stupid costume at least do something whilst wearing it, otherwise you may as well be a mannequin and mannequins don't get paid.

One-Trick-Pony
A category reserved for performers who can do only one thing (often in a stupid costume). Such as:

• Paint Yourself Silver and Pretend to be a Robot Man - He has bought a child's face mask and covered it in tinfoil, ruined a suit with silver paint and has mastered the art of standing still for long periods of time and occasionally moving in a jerky vaguely mechanical fashion. I have several objections to this:
  1. Robots, like mannequins, don’t get paid, ever.
  2. Animate Robots don’t exist and if they did they would scare small children too.
  3. This is performance is a cross between a mime artist and a clown, which on it's own is reason enough not to attempt it, it also has a sci-fi theme, requires large quantities of silver paint and could be easily put together by a children's TV presenter. None of these things in themselves constitute a red flag but all three together is a serious warning.**
  There seem to be several of these and they differ only in the tint of their paint. Some paint themselves white and pretend to be statues, how startlingly original.


• Oriental Fiddle Man - This is too culturally different from Australia's largely European musical roots. The far greater use of minor tones in Japanese music would put a lot of people off on its own. If that doesn't do it then the instrument of choice almost certainly will. The Japanese two string fiddle, whilst capable of some beautiful tones when acompanied, takes on a sonorous and rather grating quality after a while. As the fiddle has only two strings, its timbral range is very restricted and it is tough to know when a new song has begun or even if the player has finished tuning up. When a performer saws away at it all day and half the night it becomes just plain irritating. Shame really, it's very different from anything else round there.

Bizarre Sideshow
There are a few of these, they tend to be musical in nature and confound your expectations. I have no real objections to this brand of street performer they tend to stay out of the way and they at least cover the noise of the traffic.

• The Sensitive New Age Economic Realists (actual name) - A small band made up of retirees (not to be mistaken for The Sensitive New Age Bluegrass Cowpersons, who are from Perth and perform rock hits in bluegrass fashion, All Along the Watchtower is particularly good as I recall). They have guitars, violins, a squeezebox and not once have I ever seen them play them. They normally seem to be sat around in the sunshine drinking beer which is what I plan to do with my retirement. How they make any money or if they even intend to I cannot tell.


• Rasta in White - This guy is pretty cool. He is extremely black wears a very white suit and has long greying dreadlocks. He plays pop hits from the Eighties on his steels drum including Love is in the Air, Lady in Red and Brown Eyed Girl. Good but weird.


• Sammy Davies Jr Jr - An Afro-Caribbean guy with a pretty good voice who rather sadly has a face like a 1950's stereotyped charicature of a black man - big lips 'n' all. He dresses like he is in Run DMC and sings Frank Sinatra songs to a backing tape. He is either being unbeleivably ironic in a post-modern manner that would have Baudrillard breathless and afraid of a genius capable of such brash sweeping statements, or he just happens to be a black man that likes to sing Frank Sinatra songs. At any rate Ol' Blue Eyes seems a little different in his latest reincarnation.


• Didgeridoo Techno - A troupe of Aboriginal Australians that play traditional instruments over a dance soundtrack. Not bad, but not unique either.

Bloody Hell!
Normally circus performers, typified by a guy I saw at the Edinburgh festival and again in Covent Garden. For his closing piece he would lie on a bed of nails and get people to drop a bowling ball from the top of a step ladder to crack concrete slabs held on his bare chest. The next two performers make the audience keep their distance with the aid of that most robust of safety devices - a length of rope on the ground. They treat this like a magic circle, performing the most amazing feats of skill and dexterity with hot stuff and sharp things in the firm belief that the rope barrier will protect the audience. Strangely it seems to work.

• Fire Eating American - Not Bill Hicks reincarnated but an actual fire-eating American. You can feel the heat from his act from the other side of the walkway. I have no idea how he has managed to retain facial hair, surely this can't be safe for a fire breather.


• Token Brit - There's always one. This guy is a real showman, he spends quite a while talking to the audience whilst laying out his kit. As his kit includes many sharp things, including a chainsaw this attracts a fair bit of attention. His closing piece is eating an apple whilst juggling machetes whilst riding the tallest unicycle I have ever seen. He does it all in the name of proving that he is "not a pom", despite his pronounced Bristolian accent. You could be forgiven for thinking that he is trying too hard.

There aren't any pictures of the performers themselves to go with this post as if you take a picture of them they expect you to give them money, an expectation that summarises my main problem with street artists. In the main they expect to get money for doing the absolute minimum. If you are a musician sell your CD or play a variety of tracks, if a mime artist or performer be entertaining - I don't mind you asking for money if you are entertaining - but put some effort in or you don't get nuffin' you dole bludging waste of silver paint.

*For anyone who doesn't know about middle-european physical theatre - i.e. everyone - Grotowski's theatre school was more of a Gulag designed to weed out the uncommitted so for the first year you would probably have been getting up at 5am to sweep the corridors and clean the toilets for ten hours being fed only on a thin soup. If you were very lucky and looked like you had really got to grips with cleaning toilets you would be rewarded with a 3 hour lesson in the most physically and vocally demanding avant-garde theatre practice that a serious-minded Polishman could think up. Now that's what I call punishment.

**Sci-fi theme: lots of good things have come out of science fiction, mostly athletic women in tight clothing and hangover friendly TV.
Silver paint: anything that requires large quantities of silver paint and is not a German sports car should be treated with suspicion until its' usefulness is proven.
Children’s TV presenters: have put together many good things, usually other television programmmes with a strong psychedelic element and drug habits of superhero proportion.

christmas

As I have no time to type anything new here is an oldie but a goldie. Enjoy:

I hate Christmas. Bollocks to Christmas. Newspaper hacks and stand-up comics like to write little skits at this time of year stating just how much they despise Christmas. No they don’t. Christmas has, for a change, provided them with something approaching a universal experience to witter on about. They find certain aspects of Christmas confusing but they don’t hate Christmas. I hate Christmas. I hate this time of year so much that I have taken the time & effort to write this. Written out this is a four page document comprising nearly three and a half thousand words and I don’t feel that is even nearly complete enough. That’s how much I hate Christmas. In fact there are so many reasons to despise Christmas that I have had trouble sufficiently encapsulating them at all. Christmas is a time when we are reminded that despite our distinctly privileged position as a wealthy western nation we can easily create enough problems for ourselves to turn what ought to be paradise into utter purgatory. There is no other single time of year when such avarice is displayed, when emotional blackmail is openly used as a control mechanism by your relatives, charities and as a marketing tool by every consumer product corporation that thinks it should have first call on the money you make. Christmas really only serves to illustrate just how foul we can really be and the worst part of it is if you point this out to people and you are regarded as some kind of killjoy, a freak that hasn’t understood the question, a scrooge. So not only do you have to actively take part in the worst display of the bad side of human nature you have to enjoy it as well. NO. FUCK OFF & TAKE YOUR CHRISTMAS WITH YOU. Never one to pander to people’s preconceptions I have decided to tell it like it is. This extended rant will hopefully serve to illustrate just how bad Christmas really is.

Christmas often brings out the absolute worst in people, not least in myself. There are exceptions to this but such people are so rare that they serve only to highlight the disgraceful mess around them. No good deed shows up the rest of us like a good deed at Christmas, so we give money to the charities & silently pray that they do their work invisibly. Surely that’s not how it’s meant to be. Having discovered the inherent guilt in Christmas every charity under the sun now gets the idea that I somehow have some spare money left after succumbing to the raging materialism all around. They then decide to go on a bizarre and, frankly, pointless mission to relieve me of my few remaining pennies. This I truly resent. Fine, manipulate my guilt if you really need the money but not all at once and not using the same, rather lame, justification: you’re going to spend so much on yourselves that really you ought to be giving us money to make you feel better about it. And who let the fucking kids in on this? The snivelling, spotty, snot-encrusted, money grubbing little whingers hammer on your doorbell, perform the most tuneless cursory effort at a Christmas carol and then demand money with menaces. This is just another version of the trick or treat idea, which the Americans can take back any time they like, please. Parents are plainly instilling their children with more business acumen than musical talent. I blame the Thatcher bitch, under-fund education & flog off our national assets & what can you expect from an example like that. Charities are, at least, going to do something beneficial with your money. What is that 13 year-old going to do with your cash? Exactly what you would have done with it at that age; take it to the nearest off-licence and blow it on ten B&H and as much cider as it can turn into rancid corrosive vomit in an hour.

The English language takes a pasting at Christmas. On no account should Xmas be used. This appalling abbreviation is among many Americanisms for which I would happily institute the death penalty. Crimbo, whilst native, also needs to be stricken from the nation’s vocabulary. Gratuitous use of the word "festive" becomes almost compulsory. Holly is no longer a prickly nightmare but "festive". Mince pies are also "festive", plastic snowmen are no longer naff but "festive". Even the humble robin is "festive", put a toy robin in the garden & watch as the real one rips it to shreds in a territorial homicidal frenzy. Festive my arse. Every time someone uses the word "festive" attempt to pluck out one of their nasal hairs. That should curtail its’ use a little.

Bad television programs are par for the course over Christmas and have become so much of a tradition that bitching about them is almost pointless. Nevertheless it must be stated for the record that the Christmas "special" is anything but. It is an excuse to fill time with the kind of formulaic tripe that causes irretrievable brain damage whether it be soap opera or "light" "entertainment". The only excuse to put the likes of Scilla Black, Michael Barrymore and Dale Winton on television is for the population at large to witness their agonising deaths by torture as an object lesson in how not to behave. Putting them all on a stage at once with the nation’s entire stock of D list celebrities with a teen pop soundtrack & calling it the Royal Christmas Variety Performance should rate as a crime against humanity. Although the upside of this is that at least one royal is subjected to this gruesome parade of dying career after dying career. We get to watch as the "upper class twit of the year" grin that they arrive with fades into mentally damaged grimace as their head-guts slowly dissolve as the performance goes on. The reason the royals have had such a tumultuous recent past is that each & every one of them has, at some point in the last two decades, attended The Royal Variety Performance. This has left them with all with little nervous system to speak of & a total inability to comprehend the world in terms of anything other than pantomime: "I’m not married", "Oooh yes you are" "Ooooh no I’m not".

Our barely suppressed gluttony springs into overdrive at Christmas. The usual benefits of huge food all the t