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We all know that when the wind is howling & the rain lashes down the kids get bored within seconds & there’s never anything good to distract them on TV, when this happens you need a new game to make the day fly by & loft fishing is a great start. We all throw stuff into the loft, it’s always stuff that we’re never going to use again but think that we might, aside from the Christmas decorations though we never do, what makes it interesting though is that we’re not alone in this. Over the years houses have many occupants & upon the day of their departure they look into the loft & despair, then they collect the Xmas tree & the baubles & set off for pastures new leaving the detritus of years behind them. After this someone else moves in & unless they ambitiously decide to convert the loft to another bedroom they simply continue to hurl things into it until either they leave or else the ceiling comes down. (continue reading…)

I mean without a plane obviously, or a helicopter or balloon or hang-glider etc, we’ve been trying for a few years now & with all the progress we’ve made everywhere else we ought to have produced at least one superhero by now. I thought most of them were created by weird accidents or pollution anyway? This is clearly rubbish since we’ve had no end of accidents & have patiently polluted the earth from one end to the others, we should have supermen flocking like starlings but have we? No, we haven’t even got the stretchy ones that have to walk everywhere but can still do some good stuff, we haven’t even got any psychic ones, it’s a disaster. Evolution may be a force of nature but aside from getting a bit taller & better at pushing buttons the human race isn’t exactly motoring along, I don’t mean to come over as expecting a freak show of epic proportions but we should have something. I’m not talking Superman, he was an alien & nothing to do with humanity as well as being fictional but we could have a webbed wonder or an invisible man or just one flying silly bugger! (continue reading…)

I’m not going to mess about here, this isn’t a post that pretends to explain whether Fridays are evil, they are & that’s all there is to it, the only real question is whether they’re evil by design or intent? I mean Fridays do seem to set out to destroy us, oh they’re great at first, when you’re sat at school first thing Monday morning the coming Friday looks like a beacon of hope in an otherwise bloody bleak world. It shines with the promise of fun & freedom where you can escape the pressures of life & just let it all go. It’s still keeping its’ glorious glow long after our school days are over, it’s still the end of the week after all but now we’re allowed out later at night & after a heavy week drudging the boards for pennies Friday & the bright lights beckon cheerfully. There’s hope attached to Friday that Monday just can’t carry off, yes Saturday always gets top billing but deep down we all know that Friday is king of the hill & that Wednesday is boring, Tuesday’s hardly a day at all & who cares about Thursday? The only reason anyone gets worked up over Thursday is because it’s Friday the day after, & so it goes on, the years pass & we’re lulled into thinking that Fridays are our friend, it’s not though, Friday is out to get all of us. (continue reading…)

Ask any parent these days & they’ll tell you that they see a lot more childrens’ TV than they’d like to, across a plethora of channels there seems no end to the animated antics or contrived sit-coms. Along with each stream of adverts & the occasional episode of something that no-one’s seen there is always someone there, someone to link the shows & make it all chummy & inviting, & they’re all nuts. I mean nuts as well, no-one is really that cheerful that early & then cheerful all the way through the day as well, having to continually spout out banal nonsense & pretend that any of it actually matters would drive anyone normal into a fit of ranting & four letter expletives. Not these men & women though, they’re always there, ever ready to engage with what they appear to perceive as a mass of uninformed stupidity who sit mesmerized in front of TVs up & down the nation. No matter how trivial the programmes or lame the repeats they sing their praises as if they offer rare jewels to kings, I can see how a continuous diet of watching the parade of awfulness could drive them all nuts but that’s just it, they start as nuts. (continue reading…)

The sexes have battled for generation after generation & although it’s been constantly proven at least to the satisfaction of the womenfolk that it’s all mans’ fault we too need someone to blame. I’m going out on a limb here & putting early man up there as a prime suspect, after all it’s obviously been ingrained for a while so it must have kicked in fairly soon after we stood up, there must have been a reason for it as well & I think I’ve found it, it was evolution. Let’s consider the facts, early man was subjected to many trials as he wended his way slowly towards the present days, back then a tough day at the office really meant something & he was probably lucky to make it back to the cave at all some days, it wasn’t a lifestyle conducive to the

Although a long way from progress Early Man was well aware of Mondays

proper regard for his partner. There was probably some resentment involved as well, if the women had to dig up roots & crack on with some general foraging & the men had go out & attempt to top a mammoth with a stick they could have seen themselves as the major player in the relationship although they could have stuck to rabbits & got over this. Even today men aren’t best pleased to listen to their spouses’ critical approach to their latest not quite successful endeavour, it can’t have been any easier for those who’ve just gone one & one with a sabre-toothed tiger, this doesn’t make it wrong for the women to complain, it just means though, that they were as much at fault as the blokes. (continue reading…)

Times are hard folks, land is scarce & expensive, funerals costs are a joke & people just wont stop dying, no matter how good the advice is, no matter how much or little exercise they do they still insist on dying. It’s a bit much to be stung with a bill for thousands right after you’ve already been upset by a death in the family, I don’t know how undertakers have the nerve to charge so much, how much can a spade cost for crying out loud? There’s always cremation I suppose but that’s a lot of money for what basically boils down to a really crap barbeque, has anyone ever enjoyed a cremation? Admittedly this leads to the question has anyone ever enjoyed a funeral anywhere? But this is fine, of course they have, it just depends on who’s died & in some quite sad cases, how. It’s got to change people, we’ve got to find another way to both remember the dead & to deal with them in a proper & dignified way, & a whole lot cheaper as well. It’s not as if gravestones are all that unique anyhow, if nothing else we ought to be able to bring our own rock in & chip away at it on the cheap, the bloody things fall over after fifty years anyway & they wouldn’t if I was putting them in because I know when a job’s screaming out for cement. I know we can all join a plan that will shell out a few quid to put towards the pointless send off but who wants to save up for that? The old folks would be better off saving up for strippers & become legends of the care home regardless of whether they survive the experience or not. (continue reading…)

We all worry about the stuff our children may be exposed to while growing up, we study the news avidly & go out of our way to encase them in a woolly little world that bears no relation to the terrible, wonderful world in which they’ll be expected to live in one day. We do all this apparently for their own good yet I’m not convinced that it is, the fuzzy wallpapers full of dressed up animals is odd enough in its’ own right but the stories we tell them are far & away the screwiest form of literature ever. Happily ever after? What were we thinking of? Who do we know that lived happily ever after? Forever? Until some further tragedy overtook them presumably, it’s ridiculous & yes I know that they’re for children & not to be taken seriously but have you actually read them properly? Have you noticed how many of the cast are villains? This has got nothing to do with the fact that going to the woods in fairytales is akin to suicide although given the amount of bears, wolves, witches, woodcutters & attendant mad old bats in there it’s a wonder anyone lasted long enough to locate a cottage. (continue reading…)

I’m not meaning to imply that scientists aren’t in the main quite clever people who spend their lives attempting to make the world a better place, more that they haven’t thought it all through yet. They get up to all kinds of fascinating & bewildering stunts in their laboratories & every now & then prove that X doesn’t always equal Y but what happened to the job of bettering the lot of Humanity? Why are they always so relentlessly bloody

" All that time growing an ear on a mouse & she still wants a valentine? "

serious all the time when a bit of light-hearted scientific endeavour is what the world has always needed? Instead of just pondering the mysteries of the Universe & plodding on with only fiddling with those bits of it that they’re interested in why can’t they spend a few days a month looking into what we actually want them to do? Okay so they do cure the odd disease which you’ve got to commend them for but in a very selfish view this generally only helps those people who have the disease in question & are lucky enough to be at a stage of it where the medication works, this is all very well for them but what’s in it for the rest of us? (continue reading…)

From time immemorial people have fought the laws of physics to see if it’s at all possible to travel in time, well, in another direction apart from forwards at least, forwards we’ve got sorted. Backwards though has always been the interesting bit & also the tricky bit as well, the physics does seem to suggest that it may even be possible & this tantalises all of us but it wont work.I’d love it to work but it’s not going to, those clever boffins

Don't kid yourself that you wouldn't if you could, you so would

can drone on forever about wormholes & the curvature of space time but I’m telling you now that it wont work, it hasn’t ever worked in the past & it’ll never work in the future. I’m not even going to mention logic either, I don’t have to, sadly common sense will do the job for me & I aren’t all that happy about it, I’d love to have gone back & lobbed rocks at Vikings. I could have found out what Stonehenge really was as well & all kinds of great stuff, seeing the Pyramids as first built, checking out Helen of Troy to see if she really was all that, the possibilities are endless, & also ended, as I said, never going to happen. (continue reading…)

The rumours have started again, it’s almost the year 2000 again with the warblings of doom spreading across the globe said to be inspired by both the Bible & the ancient Mayan culture, like they’d know anything about it. The Mayans were big on calendars by all accounts & spent much of their time attempting to divine the future, who knows, if they’d spent their time doing something useful there might be a few more of them about to check the doom laden details. As for the Bible, well, it’s a damn fine book but it’s not all that hot on giving much away concerning the actual date for Armageddon or indeed what exactly will occur now that Armageddon itself isn’t all that big a deal compared with what we can do these days. More to the point why is the human race so bloody convinced that the end of the world is just around the corner? Why when things are already fairly ropey do we have some prime directive to assume that it can & will be so much worse shortly? Are we really in that much of a hurry to embrace oblivion if it’s perfectly clear that nothing else survives the cataclysm & we go out with a bang? (continue reading…)