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We’re all fully aware that everywhere local councils are slashing budgets, shutting down services & laying people off in droves in order to meet their costing targets. It’s dull, painful & depending on your way of thinking the fault of either a terrible Labour government, mad bankers or a coalition run by butchers. Amid the screaming rise of inflation & the noise of petrol tanks rapidly becoming the most valuable part of your car though there are oddities, recently I’ve become aware of one & it’s either stupid or cynical. According to Leeds City Council there is no money for anything, even if it’s important, the drive to ensure the survival of front line services is so severe that some front line services wont really survive, it’s that bad. So bad in fact that there was only enough money available earlier in the year to draughtproof one of my outer doors, & that’s bad people. I understand that times are hard & that money is a painful subject which is why I’m cutting back on everything myself & trying to only do those things that are, when you get right down to it, free. Then I go to walk the dogs & things aren’t quite as clear cut, I walk the dogs on what amounts to our local green space, it’s a nice patch of land full of rabbits, foxes etc & a great place to let the dogs have a run away from roads & people. The council have just allowed a path to be built across it, a very long path, for no actual apparent reason, there’s no gravel & tarmac available to fill in the bloody awful potholes that are endemic across the estates of Leeds but there was plenty to build a path no-one needs. (continue reading…)

Considering just how much unrest there is right now within Africa & across the Middle East it’s difficult to predict just how bad things will get. Simply predicting the next flashpoint is hard enough but there does seem to be a sense that this is a one country at a time deal. Until the insane predicament of Libya is resolved it’s probably safe to assume that the other countries will be content to call for change rather than forcing the issue. What’s becoming transparent though is that the earlier your revolution was then the safer it was as the violence & death tolls have climbed steadily higher as the wave of anger went from state to state. The violence was shocking enough in Egypt but Libya has really taken up the challenge of becoming the most bloody stupid & deadly revolution to date. Colonal Gaddafi isn’t even pretending to have a clue as to what’s going on & seems perfectly happy to instigate a civil war for reasons even Mubarak would have baulked at. (continue reading…)

It’s inane, it’s full of the same sorts of lunacy that infects Facebook & yes the 140 character limit is a bind, useless however it isn’t, without a crisis it’s just a way of chatting to the world or bitching at it if you’re that way out but with a crisis it’s in a class of its’ own. It’s main point is that it’s public, if a status update on Facebook is a way of telling perhaps only your friends list how you’re feeling then a tweet is telling the world. The jargon that goes with Twitter is still bloody annoying but you get used to it, mainly in my case by ignoring the hell out of it because even if you find the phrases childish they do suit the site & what works, works. Even better than that is that it’s completely mental, you can probably go on it & only ever be serious but this is a ridiculous thing to do when you can just go ahead & digitally litter the place with stupid. It’s great that it allows the world to home in on injustice across the globe but it’s even greater that it’s full of people who are just having fun, it’s like the dawn of dial-up all over again only with broadband. (continue reading…)

Time, that most precious of resources is a worry to all of us, are we doing enough with it? Was there more we could have done with it? Will we regret all those afternoon naps one day? We’re born with only a finite length of time & there’s so much to do every day, in fact there’s so much to do every day that people even go on courses to find out how to be more productive, is this really the right attitude though? Fine we need to hit a basic average of stuff done so that the walls stay up & the kids get fed but what then? Isn’t anything after this point just showing off? It’s our time after all, remember all the stuff you’ve done over the years that you haven’t enjoyed? I mean really remember, all of it, the boring films, the dull christenings, the funerals that weren’t even vaguely funny, the endless soul destroying times of discussing other peoples’ feelings, was it worth it? (continue reading…)

Trust me, as a target demographic the people pushing daytime TV would be better off looking into the viewing habits of corpses rather than anyone alive enough to reach for a brick. I’ve been leaving my TV on during the day, not because I’m bored & not because I’m in all that often but because my TV is awful but I’m too tight to replace it until it breaks, so I’m trying to wear it down. Sadly for me I was in the other day, since I don’t watch TV during the day there was no point roaming the full range of channels although I did check later & we’re missing nothing, I think I saw enough of TV from ten years ago about ten years ago so I’m good. This left me with ITV or BBC, this isn’t a contest, Jeremy Kyle & his council estate scrapings can go to the hell they truly belong in & This Morning is for either zombies or meat pies, can never really decide which, I was left with the BBC. People, there is nothing now that hasn’t been made into a programme of some sort or another, the first offering was Heir Hunters, this is where some people search out the estates of dead people & attempt to match them up with relatives who haven’t given a toss about them for years so that they can all share the money, it’s heart warming stuff. (continue reading…)

Well, I tried, I thought I’d see just how easy it is to get out of the online rat-race & just hang out with reality for a while, I took a week off, or had a go at any rate. It’s just not that simple though, oh you can just switch everything off but that doesn’t really work, it might be possible to go & live in the woods without taking any piece of tech with you but it’s cold out & anyway, who wants to live in the woods? So it was a week of trying to stay off Facebook as much as possible, blogging in patches & attempting to get as much done as before but this time in a real world setting. I didn’t want to see how things were like before online came about, I lived there, it had its’ moments but on the whole it was pretty dull compared to here & now, what I wanted to know was whether I could go back to the dial-up days when the net was an addition to life but hadn’t as yet consumed it. The first problem I hit was the news, with events across Africa & the Middle East unfolding at breakneck speed it was impossible to rely on the TV & radio for coverage, they’re just not quick enough to do anything other than offer a round-up of what had happened rather than a view of it actually happening which is what the net delivers. The second problem is that travelling anywhere without my Blackberry is almost painful, I know, it’s pathetic but true, seeing that I had a major problem right here I immediately ring-fenced my mobile because I’ve got kids & only bad parents go AWOl, lame yes, chance would be a fine thing, but I was keeping the phone. (continue reading…)

I don’t think that any of us were expecting this year to be all that easy but it hasn’t been too bad yet. It’s getting there though, visiting the petrol pumps is now causing even the most light hearted to shudder as they pay more & more for less & less. The chances of this changing are almost nil unless it just continues to go even higher as the unrest in the oil rich belt goes on. This will then help the rise in the price of foodstuffs as time goes by, the only way is up & all that. Yes I’m moaning but not about the price rises, they’ll get worse no matter how much I moan, not even about the politics, we were always in line for some cuts, what I’m moaning about is how I’m meant to feel. (continue reading…)

With the chain reactions of revolution screaming their way across the world right now we’ve all been holding our breath & waiting for the disaster to happen. Egypt was bad & we fully expected it to get worse but we were spared that horror as bad as it did get, & we weren’t even in Egypt. We’re not in Libya either but we now know just what we were scared of now, it hasn’t even taken weeks of serious protest to bring it about either, we’re not eve3n talking about rough security forces here, we’re already up to air strikes it seems. The whole horrific campaign is going to come down to just how fast the revolution in Libya loses heart against just how quickly Gaddafi can lose every bit of support that he has. I’d have thought we’d have got there with the apparent machine gunning of funeral parties but it seems not, since he’s also not squeamish about launching air-strikes against his own cities the death toll is likely to rocket. This is what it looks like when the true nutters are threatened, Iran went the same way except with a pretence at legal structure, Libya has opted for the instant death technique, & although it’s a safe bet to reckon he’ll be living somewhere else soon that’s unlikely to help the dead.

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Have you ever wondered whether all the clever people are playing stupid just to be annoying? It’s real easy to state that we spend a hell of a lot of money on welfare & that it would be nice if we didn’t have to, it’s not as easy to make this come about. Okay so it’s easier if you’re a tory & think that this can be achieved simply by removing the money & expecting that everyone will accept that the game’s up & go get jobs. The welfare state is a pain to pay for & a pain to live on but all of the proposed messing about don’t seem to acknowledge this, they just want as many of those living on it to get jobs, even if there aren’t any. Oh there are plenty of vacancies in the Jobcentre but so what? With the amount of people unemployed right now the chances of an employer taking a chance on someone who’s been out of work for years against almost anyone they want are slim to non-existent. The initiatives planned to help the long term unemployed are also flawed simply because there just aren’t enough jobs available to shoehorn them into, this makes it fairly unlikely that the firms involved in helping people find jobs are going to be that concerned about who gets shoved where. To an extent this is understandable since it’s no time for anyone to be overly fussy about what they’re willing or unwilling to do when it comes to a job but it will mean inevitably that a lot of people will ricochet back into unemployment & find that it’s all gone horribly wrong. (continue reading…)

As Tunisia & Egypt have shown it’s difficult to govern once the people don’t want you to & impossible to do so once enough of them get together & refuse to back down, bearing that in mind though why aren’t any of the autocrats still in power trying anything different? It must be hard to learn anything after a few years of absolute power but it’s surely not impossible? As new waves of protests rise up across Yemen, Libya, Bahrain & even Iran though it’s glaringly obvious that learning isn’t yet on the agenda. So far it’s a continuation of the autocrats’ guide to trouble from the masses, step one, tell everyone to go home while blaming anyone but the rulers for the problems, foreigners are an easy target here. In recent weeks this has worked a total of no times, once the crowds are big enough & angry enough, they don’t go home, even when they’re told to. At this point you’d think that some sort of dialogue would break out, but it doesn’t, admittedly this is a steep learning curve especially for those who’ve ruled with an iron fist for decades but surely they’ve got the internet by now? It’s an important question to ask because real people are really dying because of this stupidity & sadly it appears to be contagious. (continue reading…)