Blog I2

Listening to some tunes I´ve downloaded, I constantly marvel at how far off people´s notions of identity run. Would you think many people regard Eric Clapton as interchangeable with Dire Straits? Some of the mixups are hilarious, some plain sad, and you may be, yourself, unaware that the rare Dylan track you´ve got is actually a Donovan, and could probably invest some time checking what other mis-identified gems are lurking in your collection. I´ve never been in a library with such erroneous content as the WWW offers, but the positive side is I´ve discovered some Ry Cooder tracks (Roy Coder?) where Taj Mahal has been sitting in, and Van Morrison doing a duet with Bob Dylan, but I feel sorry for these amazingly good musicians who somehow have slipped through the cranial cracks into identity oblivion. Can we get your list of beauties? But can we also consider giving a grading to the sources, so I can avoid the `Solid Rock between the ears´ collectors? I´ve more than paid my dues to the recorded music business over the years; I´ve seen their quality and service evaporate; now I download; Can´t we just get some onto it librarians? or has that gone to the dogs as well? Nuff said.

E4

So last night, real late, I got the call I´d been waiting for; my lady had finally found a hotel. She´d driven from Slovenia up past Maribor into Austria taking the December high road across Europe aiming for Mulhouse, (I bet you don´t know how to pronounce it; Moolooze) France, but somewhere before Salzburg the red light for the alternator came up, and she spent about five hours driving all over the frozen backroads of Austria trying to find a replacement alternator. having started at 5 am, and now on her way again at 5pm, she drove on passing into Germany, where she couldn´t find a hotel room for less than 80 Euros, and crossed again into Austria, (which you have to do, as this landscape is all mouintains) and finally, with 800kms under her wheels, she found a dreadful, smoke-stinking hotel, where she got the last room at $61 Euros, top floor, no lift, DISABLED room, and was able to get to bed by 1am. European regs insist hotels have a disabled facility, yeah right; top floor, no lift.... but next stop is France, where there are ´Formula´ hotels at reasonable prices all over the place, well signposted. (Well, after she´s crossed Switzerland, 200 kms of highways for a compulsory 30+ Euros, with the filthiest toilets.... no toilets, really, which is why they´re such a strage lot; they´re all bustin´....) So if you´d like our opinion of Europe as a destination for a bit of a look around, forget it. If you handle bus touring, we have no experience, I´m sorry, but go and live there? If you plan to be more than three months in any one country you´ll need another car, registered in that country, with a separate insurance cover. Call it what you like, I call it BLACKMAIL, and is the grossest anomaly, and is the underlying reason my lady is driving across Europe to deposit her car back on French soil, and find a bus back, WHICH WILL NOT STOP IN SLOVENIA, AND WILL PASS THROUGH TO CROATIA, NOT EU, WHERE I CAN PICK HER UP. Fucking blackmail. I know, you´ll be saying `Just pay the insurance´ but they have a special package, that costs 1200 Euros a year, bubble car or Rolls Royce. Blackmail. Europe is one unified money making machine. Too much red tape. too much shite for travellers; you know, the ordinary people in cars who have to get something done; I´ve been stuck in some really remote places of this globe; Europe is crowded, and you´d think they´d have learned to get along a bit together, but I want to remind you that this is the home of fascism, and of foreigner´s intervention in their affairs to keep it all from degenerating into chaos, (like Russia). Nuff said.

Blog M2

Very early this morning I sent my partner off on a drive to France, in our venerable R11 Renault, but not before discovering that the recently filled fuel tank, brand new, was leaking from a connector hose between the filler and the tank; when I´d replaced the tank, I´d felt it was wise to replace the tubes and other rubber components, but I kept all the old bits, so I had the original, dated, 1986 connector hose, but the official spare part, not dated, failed in a depressingly short time. I don´t know what your opinion of the motor trade is, but years ago I worked in that business, and I never had a good impression from then on, of the calibre of people thusly employed.... I have just had a call from my lady, out on the motorway system of Austria, five hours into her journey, reporting the alternator light showing bright red in her view. She is close to an Audi garage, and I have just instructed her on the likely time her car has before it fails electrically, and coached her on a suitable approach to the garage for assistance, or preferably, a direction to a nearish friendly auto wrecker who´ll have a suitable alternator to keep her on the road at not too much expense...... I´ll complete this when I get her next call. Which just came in; the Audi garage
couldn´t/wouldn´t help, so she´s nursed the car to Liezen, but the garages are at lunch.... it´s here or nothing, as she can´t move without a whole lot of help.....mind you; a proactive bloke with an auto breakers yard could have her on her way in 20 minutes....  No, the big garage, full of sixteen year olds in training only has a `new bits´ solution, so she´s attempting to get another 5kms to the next garage. Driving across Europe has certain budget limitations.... We do it more than most people, even in a convoy with all our belongings overloading us; a real adventure, and we´ve made it each time. I find the expressway trips in the latest Volvo to be exceedingly boring, with dangerous distractions from the multi level aircon control adjustments, the balance on the 12 speaker soundsystem, and the autopilot saying ´turn left immediately´...... you know the technological crap we are somehow being swamped with.... so, while some of you will be saying `serves her right, in an old car´, we´ll plump for an oldie anyday. And stand the hassles of sourcing older parts, but in zero degrees on an Austrian stretch, I´m fretting for my lady finding that friendly garage man.... Now her third call, totally in tears; all the pricks on earth gravitate to a young woman in distress; they´ve sent her on a wild goose chase for nothing; they don´t know of a wrecker/breaker, or any person helpful; the cost estimates mount, and these shit-for-brains are the same people who fix your new car; the motor trade is a mounting tragedy; buy new; the pathetic bleat of a pathetic industry; I wish the pox on them all. If you drive France-Slovenia, as we do, you´ll see ten times more shiny new cars broken down than older models. There´s a reality check for you; throw money at that one if you fancy, but I won´t line their pockets. I´ve just heard she´s found the wrecker who is now persuading a suitable alternator into place as darkness descends; poor soul, she´s got 600 more kms before France, and its a long lonely road.... Maman phoned just now to say she´d got a text from our valiant voyager; Munich was on the horizon, and she was only €40 lighter for the service by the wrecking yard, and an invitation to come by again, so that is all good, and the Kms are zipping by again. The exception proves the rule, and yeah, we found the nice guy once again, after some effort; Nuff said.

Blog P3

´ve just been talking with a friend back in New Zealand who told me how the Pacific Ocean is the only ´clean´ocean left on this planet; he may be slightly right, but in the fifty years I had in that part of the world I knew of many horrific anecdotes of accidents, spillages, and deliberate dumpings of things toxic around the shores of those Pacific isles, not to mention the extensive history of shipwrecks that the coastline has accumulated. I have deliberately avoided the active research into the truth of the ´purity of the Pacific´; I suspect it is a myth; there are enough big cynics in this world without my joining them; suffice it to say the industrialists, energy producers and military actors who´ve roved over that part of the globe looking for an out-of-the-way spot to do something irresponsible, are thick on the ground still; maybe the oilcos are using ´green´ attitudes in their new approach to being ´responsible players´ in the world energy market, but as someone who acquired a serious level of lead poisoning while just ´living an active life´ in NZ, and having to discover that
´ínadvertent poisoning´ was a likely outset of life in the Pacific, (which one could not avoid if driving long distances was part of the plan,) I have to say we are all in need of a higher level of consciousness regarding the purity of our environment wherever we are. Until relatively recently NZ had the highest levels of lead in petrol, in the world; the ´unleaded´in that part of the world STILL has lead; it is all a matter of levels of acceptability as to what half-truths we are told; the Australian Lead Association used to host annual gatherings for the motor trade in NZ, and I recall their sole interest was to sell us more lead, anyway they could; I was in the Sales and Distribution office of a large battery manufacturer, and it was there that I learnt the horrors of lead cholic, and the allied problems that careless actions around lead could create. That is one chemical we´ve `brought out in public´, but lead accumulates (sic) in our systems, and does not go away rapidly, and yet is generally not covered in blood analysis other than for exposure in the most recent weeks, whereas analysis of the hair, a medically `uncommon´ procedure except in autopsies, can show amazingly high levels of all sorts of ´unnaturally occurring´ chemicals, the side effects of which can only lead to `unsubstantiated suppositions´concerning the behaviour of the human race. (Just for the record, I had 11.9 ppm of Lead, and did the EDTA detox, and all the other detoxes known to man, and found my anger levels subsided amazingly. I think anger in society could be closely allied to lead, but what would I know?) So why I live here in Slovenia, just a stone´s throw from a nuclear power station, is that it is a truth, and I live with a lot of truths; should I be cruising the Pacific as my Marine Biologist son will do this January and February, I could check Mururoa or those other `ex-nuclear´ bombsites, and maybe assess what `pure and clean´means in terms of scientific fact. Instead I´ll just close my eyes and imagine all those dudes surfing those remore breaks under the endless blue skies. Nuff said.

Blog S3

Saturday morning checklist; Central heating? Off. Electric 'friendly as possible' heaters? On. Temperature? 14.5°C. Shopping? One of us must stay home in case the missing computer materialises. Work? The supplier didn't deliver the materials. Money? Half the slow payers have coughed up. Get more materials? The materials places with the best stocks are in the opposite direction to the shops with the best produce. Summary? We say 'fuck the world' but the world is fucking itself. It doesn't take any efforts either way by us to see that. But I don't know if anyone out there feels as we do. Does having a steady job change everything? We go to hell with a steady job? I dunno. Nuff said.

F3 addenda

After this morning's fiasco, the third day of telephoning the La Poste service numbers and getting shoved from phone to phone, and finding they all know nothing, or, only what WE know, (nothing), and spending this afternoon trying to get on with our project here in Slovenia, and calling the company we ordered aggregate from Monday, and being told tonight, 'ena ura', one hour, I stayed around the site, till well after dark, set up lamps so the delivery would be hassle free, and, no, with about eight degrees of frost, and a three hour wait I gave up, went home to the apartment where, with two heaters going and a power cord melting down when we switched a griller on to finish a fine cheese souffle, and the temperature just creeping over 15°C, I decided I just can't give a fuck anymore, about anything, and glimpsing on the CNN news the major industrialists of the civilised world have just put up a proposal to do something about climate change by 2050 and I think...yeah, who gives a fuck? But they stymied Donald Trump's attempt to build a golf course on a fine piece of bird country in Scotland, so, someone up there does..... I've been rained out on all my attempts to get to Scotland, DT too...... nuff said

F3

We've been awaiting the arrival of a new computer, being sent from France, for a variety of good reasons, and the freighters have a very cute blobby window which pops into our life and allows us to track our parcel; well, that's the idea, however, the tracking blob does not seem to be attached/connected to any sentient lifeforms at the other end, and for a week we've watched a 'no progress' situation develop in our heads, mainly, as phoning Slovenia and Germany, the two likely transits, get us zero, and the French end doesn't know anything at all. Wouldn't you like to be able to sell a well-decorated box of nothing to some freight giant for half a million, and go out and pose on the proceeds? There are too many such events going on for me to be content with the state of affairs. What really troubles me is having shown us an apparently 'instantaneous' update of our progress, the process of being compensated for these idiots losing our computer will take three months... you don't believe it? That's what it took to get recompensed for a digital camera sent France - Italy, when the clerk INSISTED we describe the contents, a detail specifically to avoid at all costs when sending to Italy, and which brings me to the obvious; shouldn't all our purchases be in plain brown wrappers instead of blaring to all what's inside? Well, we don't get to control how something is wrapped, but we'd sure like to change how ALL of the freight systems in Europe operate, but don't hold your breath for positive news.... Nuff said.

Blog I

'm indignant. Is this century 21? Are we beset with 'Branding' everywhere? Well, if these brands are so big and important, (to the point of seeing all the minor competitors off the adjacent shelves..) isn't there an obligation for those big names to make sure their place in the shelves is always full/well stocked/at least some stock to choose? It is not high summer where I am, but the Raid brand of 'plug in insect repellant' which I hate for it's market position, is currently out of stock in the four supermarkets I checked this morning. We are in the middle of vinyards, which are in the middle of the harvest/winemaking cycle, and on these progressively cooler evenings we are being increasingly occupied with an insect population keen on a warmer space, and human protrusions to land on make a night's sleep a bit disturbed. I personally will slap my head till my ears ring, but my partner is rendered miserably itchy for days, reacting badly to all insect bites, so in the name of peace we installed a Raid device in the next room, which deals to quietening the whole apartment, and gets us both a night's sleep. Until now, that is. The tiny bottle of liquid, half the size of the one it came with (whose plot is that?) expired too rapidly; the big bottle special is no longer available, the ridiculously expensive small bottle refill is off the shelves, and short of paying for a second plug in unit with the tiny bottle, which is in stock in one supermarket, we stew in our insect bothered sleepless nights, and Raid, bless their black little hearts, cannot be emailed in any shape or form in my corner of Europe, and yet no alternatives exist anymore. There is a malicious monopoly, and I particularly object to big names not caring about their customer(s). A similar event occurred when we needed an accessory or two for a Mac computer, and the french Mac dealership we've dealt with in the past would not send to Slovenia. (Both EU countries). I cannot start to imagine the time and difficulty involved in ordering a non-Slovenian keyboard from a Slovenian distributor, nor the complexity of detailing the connection cables between totally dissimilar language sets for such terminology. This might seem nitpricking to some readers, but let me assure you, Slovenia has no communications networks in place that even recognize Mac OS, and it is only Mac's incredibly proactive processors that allow us to operate such computers here. Yet read Technology Review, the 100+ year publication of Massachusets Institute of Technology, and their contributors hardly can concieve of a person who would continue to use a PC, when iTunes/iPhone/iEverything is rampantly dominating the technology market where it matters...(you do the math).
Am I alone here? Do you plod on with a computer handed on from your cousin, a dot matrix printer and a dial up modem? We have an A3+ HP printer, with a rack of A3 papers, cards, photographic paper, A4 ditto, plus 6x4 photopaper for snapshots, an Epson scanner, an iPod we just drove the car over, and the iPod runs the best of the bunch; we can't get the HP to print dead straight on the page, and we waste close to 50% of our paperstocks, (something I recall when I first employed specialists in desktop publishing in the early 90s), and our scanner has just been redeemed from the scrapheap (15 months new?) by a third party software upgrade, which mollifies me a little, but honestly, HP AND Epson can go whistle when we seek a new printer, and scanner, as big names in the 21st Century are 99% bullshit and 1% the goods. Nuff said.

Blog H4

What do you know about hygiene? A fair few years ago I ran a small and entertaining pub in a ski region, and had a funky little restaurant that specialised in cool jazz on the soundsystem, backgammon evenings with fondue, and some pretty crazy nights prompted by beer tanker driver strikes, plumbing explosions and other hazards of the funky pub trade. I also had a crazy local Swiss guy who brought me his backdoor special sausage which graced my pizzas, and I'm sure contained at least 50% donkey meat which, as anyone knows, makes the BEST sausage, along with a load of other secret ingredients. No one ever got sick from the food at my place; and anyone drinking up to and over a reasonable limit got supplied a free meal to keep things in perspective. So when the health inspectors came and impounded my collection of knives, all nice handmade stuff I'd gathered over a few years of kitchening, all with rosewood handles, as WOOD  was capable of harbouring GERMS, and took my superb fine grained beech chopping boards, as they were the same health hazard, and insisted I replace them all with plastic/Polyshitelene products, I got out of the trade; they even closed up the Swiss guy; Horror! Donkey meat?  I have never cooked in a commercial kitchen since. I've been a maitre d', waiter and bartender, and I did a lot of restaurant and bar fitouts, BUT ONLY AFTER THEY ANNOUNCED THAT PLASTIC WAS A HEALTH HAZARD IN COMMERCIAL RESTAURANTS. I've been a wood person all my life; sure I like a bit of hitech here and there, but if I can resurrect an old piece of wood, or age a new piece, or reuse some plank or other, I'll go for it, as I see all of that melamine/PVC/plastic imitation stuff costing way more than the real stuff every time. My partner has just complained of the stench emanating from her plastic chopping boards, but will not use the wood ones I made for her as they're too beautiful. I'll go out tomorrow and find the oldest hunk of cast aside spruce or beech I can, and trim it down to a board she will use. Expensive? Hygiene? You do the math. Nuff said.

Blog H3

Reality check; here in Europe, where there is no sense of environmental awareness AT ALL, we've had our thermostat not control the central heating for the last four weeks. The result; we've been forced to open windows to keep the temperature down to bearable, while warming the poor old universe again; now, do we pay for the two hundred litres of fuel we've used in one month? Figure another four months of winter.... we've asked, as the technician said on his second visit, 'it's all fixed', for the system to be shut down. That happened tonight. The building is cold in a matter of minutes. This apartment is owned by an electrician; there is one power plug in any room max; one in the kitchen, behind the fridge, one in the bedroom, behind the wardrobe, and our floors are criss-crossed by power boxes and leads trying to get electricity to where we need it. We also have a thousand bucks worth of perishable building materials which need storage at 19.5 - 20°C, and there is, so help me, no insulation anywhere in the structure. Welcome to YOUR reality; ours too. Forget the idea of care/education/values for the environment; you can be camped out where you like; we're on the same planet. Do you think it is worth going to the local council and asking who sets the standards for heating? Duh? Nuff said.

Blog N2

Ever had the notion to live in New Zealand? Do you have some nice pictures in your mind of those isles? I lived there for more than fifty years of my life, but fell in love with a foreigner, the process of which, naturally enough requiring to discover this new heart-course, meant I went and lived in her world for a while. Great; I'm totally happy with that; returned to briefly settle up my affairs, and now I live away from NZ; the upshot of which is a set of rules preclude me from ever getting a pension from those microcephalic prisoners of the bureaucratic gaggle of idiots known as the New Zealand Government. Which begs the question 'what happened to the IQ of the population there, and how did they let whatever intelligence they had left fall under the spell of the worthless dross who've finagled their way into control of what should have been a fine little country?'
I first had suspicions about this when I was asked to run for a political party there when I was just twenty years old, in the mid sixties. (Apparently the country needed 'people like me'...) About that time too, I read William A Robinson's book about his cruise around the world as a young man in a small yacht, where he disparaged the administration of small Pacific islands by the low grade of bureaucrat New Zealand had chosen to inflict on them. I'd also witnessed my sole encounter with assisting the NZ law, concerning some criminal activity I had happened to have a possible lead about, and saw the entire effort of the police turned upon my family. There is only so much one can take of this sort of bullshit. I took it for far too long. But I had to be living there to meet this love of my life.. Yes, NZ is a great little place, but it is totally fucked by the pricks who run it; it always was, it always will be. Visit it if you will, but don't stay there. Life's little twists and turns are not assisted by fifty years of paying them some enormous taxes. They're thieves there. Watch out. Nuff said.

Blog J2

Since I wrote Blog J, the golden girl has retired from athletics and returned her Olympic Gold Medals. New event? The Retro Olympic Ceremony? The Silvers get a Gold, and some really good athlete, unable to get a podium ever, gets pulled off the delivery truck he now drives, to get a Bronze which would have changed the course of his/her career had this all happened four years ago.... the golden girl has, of course spent all her money, soaked the contracts and endorsements, shed a tear for her honesty, and returns to her mansion in the sun. All the big time drug people I ever encountered were above the law, by being smarter lawyers, or crushed by the law, being pulled off their luxurious perches by loose lipped friends and the police special branch, or OF the law, being police in need of an extra buck and distributing their drug recoveries further downstream for a wee profit. So how much are we achieving here? The joy of watching an athlete surpass a pinnacle is a big deal; ALL the drug companies have experts formulating ALL the drugs, and ALL the regulators have ALL the athletes being tested for SOME  of the effluents of these substances. Lets forget it? Let those who want to take drugs do so; those who don't, just refrain, and those too young, just continue to do what they like, and perhaps we can have those non-drugged athletes just doing their thing because they like doing it, and those who want to be on the podium no matter what just go ahead and do it, and we can admire WHO WE CHOOSE, as long as the TV coverage just doesn't cover the first three, as, I fear, it is the media's idolatry of the front three that has caused this nonsense in the first place. Athletics needs to be mixed with money? Money needs winners? Winners need drugs? Drugs need proponents? Proponents need money? Just do the math. I want to watch athletics. Nuff said.

Blog P2

Years ago I was always fascinated by the cartooning ability of Giles, always a dry and cockney accented wit of observation, and THE image of his, that is indelibly printed in my grey matter, is of an arab sheik in a Cadillac convertible, followed by a fleet of totally veiled wives on motor scooters, and his shouting 'once more around the block oh loved ones, we've got to use this stuff up somehow'...... and of all the mixed up images I hold in my head, the promotion of Dubai as a sports venue, with western women, especially, in their regular clothing, going about their professional golf and tennis for staggering amounts of prize money, while the wives of any spectators of a local variety will be invisible by their absence, and if you are so lucky as to see one, she'll be head to foot in black; a prospect of 'interest' I place at the absolute bottom of my scale of things I must see in my life. I've been to Egypt, Aden, and a fair whack of muslim countries elsewhere too, and nowhere do I see the woman so morbidly represented as in the oil rich countries. I love watching WTA Tennis; there are few 'steroidal' sights there, and I love track and field, and have watched it with interest for fifty years; I've seen Abebe Bikila, Kip Keino, and Heike Drexler, and where and when are these arab nations going to show us that their women measure up to ours? Every time you fill up your tank you are supporting repressive regimes; largely Muslim in nature, though I haven't assessed Brazil yet and THEY'RE getting bigger in oil; how about repression? I think they can't control the beaches, if you watch the volleyball, but the rest of the nations in oil are absolutely no fun; and I mean NO FUN. I used to hang out with anyone; numbered South Afrikaaners, arabs, knuckle hard South Carolinians, Kiwi motorcycle riders, Australian cons and car salesmen, black soul singers, Singaporean electronics aces, ethical drug salesmen, AND a Mr Big, (who ended headless and handless in a Yorkshire quarry) and all had that element of fun in their lives, but nowhere did I see an arab woman in any social context, and while the odd Balkan lady raised an eyebrow to me, in an only slightly Muslim atmosphere, the majority of my life has been denied the prospect of a dialogue with an arab woman. Power. It's another form of fascism. It's alive and well, despite heavily subsidised acts of world war to eliminate it, and everytime I think of Giles' picture, or Dubai Golf Classics, I realise very little is changing, and it needs to, I'm afraid. Nuff said.

Blog N2

Since my first 'news' blog, there's been another classic snafu in Bangladesh; people dying like flies, unaided, unreported, unadministered, villages with '70 daeths' have over 500 dead, unburied, or perhaps in a shallow grave in a nearby field; have you seen the Bangladeshi Parliament? Go look. I say, give the people cellphones, let them call their own salvation, as there is more good stuff happening with cellphone technology in third world countries than between ALL the ears of the administrators. Give these people a voice; not CNN. Give them a way of calling out; you'd be amazed what a peasant can do with a cellphone, and don't give me any shite about 'support'; check the number of cellphones in the hands of peasants now, and check what they are achieving with them. I'm not going to give you the references; you go look; you go get involved; you be amazed. Nuff said.

Blog Z2

Spent Sunday across the border in Zagreb; for years I've heard jokes about cities in the South Pacific being 'closed' or 'put your watch back ten years', but on the fringes of Europe, Sunday, not a decent cafe/snackbar open; a petrol station offers as much as is available in the rest of Zagreb on a Sunday. I always wondered why the incredible supply of Catholic churches in this region had so little patronage on a Sunday, yet the rules of the land decree everything be closed. The region is brimming with modern cars; why not some modern life? We found an unmemorable cafe with a couple of yesterday's pastries for sale, the tables wobbled, and the other tables were occupied by chainsmokers; we were clipped about ten percent on the change, which my partner , always accurate, corrected them on, but this land is queueing up to be let into the EU. Slovenia, already in, has a bit more on offer, at least the very low priced restaurants are open Sundays, but it doesn't take long to exhaust the possibilities culinarily around here; we've got a couple of favourite places, but they test us regularly with poor quality; regulars deserve a bit extra I reckon, but we get the opposite. So we dine in; treat ourselves when we can to the good comestibles, which are NEVER regularly stocked, and keep our treats for the odd trip to Italy or France. But if you are in the Balkans, cancel sunday; unless you enjoy spending time in a church sharing the incomprehensible with the incomprehensible. Nuff said.

Blog H2

This is an afterthought of Blog V2; last Tuesday, after two successful removals of the vet's row of stitching, we finally created a dressing/truss which Holly, our superactive little rat, could not rapidly remove, and hence, we have been able to supervise the so far successful healing of the large scar left from surgery, to remove a growth that these little critters are prone to. Now I have to watch in awe as she contends with the maddening itch that lurks under every dressing; we have replaced it once, after day two, with a slightly less restrictive truss, but she, a four legged beastie, still has to suffer the destabilisation of her front half. Add to this the hopeless task of reflexively scratching her itches through the dressing, and you start to get a picture of the burden this little creature is coping with. I am filled with admiration. Cats and dogs, being bigger, withstand and take human style dressing proceedures; I've seen dogs and cats live with plaster casts and all sorts of encumbrances by just taking it easy; not so for a rat. You object that I add the lowly rat to the 'man's best friend' notions propagated for cats and dogs? Considering the shorter lifespan of rats, and having a sixty year history of a few dogs and many cats, I rate Holly as equal to any of them for fortitude, stamina, and sheer determination to be her hyperactive little self; she almost never relaxes, but has succombed to some sympathetic little massages since the surgery, and I hope she will continue to be so soothed after this is all over. But being herself is her strong point. Her sister too is a character of totally different perameters, and only goes to underline the amazing variety of personality one may find in this perrenial rodent. ('Rongeur' is the French term; I prefer it.) It is the constant, (almost) concern for this little critter's progress that has had me design a dressing system for tiny beasties, which is formed from virtually indestructible thread (stronger, more resistant than Kevlar is available now) in a series of four point adjustable loops, which can be set to anchor accurately the dressing on said tiny body, but allow full movement, the space to continue to scratch and groom, and, when it finally gets chewed through, can be replaced with an identical, low cost replacement. (Aha! low cost? I hear you crow? Can I describe the investment in time and effort to get this process reasonably right the THIRD FUCKING TIME?) Dear readers, necessity is the mother of invention. I have the material readily available from European sources. I have overcome our crisis, as getting this material would take longer than the healing of Holly entails, but I'd like to work with a Vet Supply Organization to get a suitable product into the surgeries of the world. Small stuff; great purpose. I will try. Nuff said.

E3

We don't use buses very much for getting about, but if we have a major voyage to make we always check the buses out, and this is a big shout out to EUROLINES, a French company who cover Europe, and for the three years we've had them on our list, have made fucking sure our chances of actually making any successful contact with them are fraught with failed emails and more unresponsive telephone lines than any organization we've struck that actually have a website up there in cyberspace. I presume these fuckers have identified a market amongst PEOPLE WITHOUT ANY OTHER FORM OF TRANSPORT, and have chosen to exercise there microcephalia on them, and any normal, sensible, 'alternative option'- conscious people who feel it is worthwhile to seek something other than a five dollar jet ticket are fair game for their ultra-studied indifference.
The trip in question is Paris-Zagreb, which pretty much passes by our door, in Slovenia, BUT THEY WON'T LET YOU GET OUT THERE. Instead THEY TAKE YOU TO THE NEXT COUNTRY, where I have to drive, through three toll/customs gates, EACH WAY, and fight my way through a congested, polluted city where the bus depot is. (Needless to say, there an't a bus....)
We can do the air trip, cheapest €35 option, but it goes via London, with a long wait for the connecting flight, and as my partner will be carrying a new Mac desktop computer, (read WMD) the thrill of hanging out in a London Airport for several hours, (you've been there recently? No luggage facilities anymore; you piss where you sit or you take the computer boxes with you into the cubicle, in the john, two floors and several kilometres from your departure area) and one starts to realise just what a hold those pricks in Eurolines have over you.
I feel like I am in the real 'war on terror', and it is only the impossibility of owning a couple of vehicles in Europe that causes us this angst in the first place; we'll take a car back to France, sell it there, and bring the money back to buy a car here; re-homologation we have done once, an astounding experience requiring detailed contact with all the thicknesses of bureaucracy here or there, and we'll avoid doing it again. This is one Europe, but it is controlled by the motor trade/mafia who want you to have as much contact with them as you can possibly imagine, and the insurance? Don't ask...while we see the future, OUR future, as having as little possible contact with these cretins as possible, as the only viable way to survive into my children's dotage....
But the problem remains; we need to get from there to here, and short of following my partner in a second motorvehicle, there is no logistical way of making a sensible, brief, (24 hours for 1500kms?) trip in this century, and RAIL say three days, and that is TWO hotels, FOUR taxis, and godknwswhatfuckingabout, so..........
Where do you think your future is headed? Do you think living in the South Pacific might be a safe number? Free of environmental catsarsetrophy there are we? If you have a permanent job somewhere, please look closely at how you do it, and please, if you deal with the public, remember they chose to come and see you (probably) and in that case it behooves you, as a paid member of this muddle we live in, to give them an easy run; it will go on down the line, I can assure you; good news spreads fast too y'know.....
Nuff said.

Blog G2

Great Burdock Oil; someone told me it was good for a dry scalp, which I get, and while in Ljubljana I spotted an industrial size pharmacy, and asked the bright tight thing for the aforesaid oil, and she went straight to it, which is commendable in comparison to the average staffer in the average pharmacy. I paid my seven Euros, or somesuch, and tried it out; yuck! Not good! I felt contaminated! So I got my magnifier out and read the label. Not the title, which was clearly redable in 2 languages in 15 and 10 point type, but that tiny stuff; about one or two points in size; I can just make it out under a ten times magnifier; parafinum liquidum; olea europaea; isoproply myristate; arctium lappa; tocopheryl acetate; rosmarinus officinalis; lavandula angustifolia; propyparaben; propylene glycol; BHT; ascorbyl palmitate; glyceryl stearate; glyceryl distearate; citric acid. So, a little miffed, I checked Wiki for some info, and 'arctium lappa' is the name of the plant in question, OK, but there is no actual reference to the oil of said great burdock being in the bottle. I definitely asked for the oil. The label in big type says it; the small print has no valid reference to it being in the mix. I don't go to Ljubljana very often, but Slovenia is the only country I've ever lived in that has no allowance for ANY alternative medicines, not even homoeopathy or biochemics, (yet a big 'wellness' tourism industry?) but anywhere in this world where I ask for an oil of a specific variety I expect to get it; not some trumped up concoction that I would not put on my rusty pliers, let alone my precious noddle. I look forward to a curt, well-directed tirade and a refund. Nuff said.

F2

I am astounded that any white man could deride the badly named 'Bollywood' film industry when the 'original and best' Hollywood has such an output of unmitigated, relentless crap.
Maybe the 'made for TV' industry is estranged from the big H, but where I live I get a non stop homogenised supply of not even B grade American movies on my redily available Slovenian and Croatian TV channels; tonight, true to form, three military films, one a series, but uniformly (pun intended) pulp literature on celluloid, low grade half hearted war films with great prejudice displayed... I'm sorry; I have the remote; off goes the TV. If I can be bothered waiting till after midnight I might cop an early Jim Jarmusch, or another B&W gem from way back, but these never get aired when my brain is up. I'm starting to realise an early to bed routine which I was never known for. If I had a choice, I'd plump for the Wim Wenders/Werner Herzog/Lars von Trier style of films; there is a ton of distinctive talent out there that cannot be replicated by the Tom Cruise/Nicholas Cage/Harrison Ford style of same old same old, and yet we have a supply chain drizzling this turgid effluent into our homes every night, without anyone crying 'Stop!' CNN have a similar mindset, and they are a 'news' channel, yet, repetition of yesterday's news is, to my mind, not; OK, they're Time Warner; Ted Turner was a brash and pushy bloke when I met him in the early seventies; now he has allowed his product to become the very shadow of what he set out to create; Ted's a yachtsman, but you'd hardly know that any sailing boats were currently engaged in a variety of really fascinating races; that one of the big names in yachting had retired in the face of a doping scandal, and that there are more life threatening challenges being overcome every day on the waves, if you relied on CNN for your daily dose of sports coverage. So call me sour if you like, but I cannot imagine a bigger network of people than the CNN crowd being 'everywhere' on this globe and specifically avoiding most of the interesting stuff, and specifically targeting the mundane and tediously repetitive low interest nonsense that they manage to fill our day with. (And will someone tell me that a pair of 'anchors' is necessary to deliver this drivel, with their bright smile at the intro of every fresh disaster?) There is a new software coming up now called 'Twitter', a term describing the utterly lightweight chat that emanates from low intellect social butterflies of the 20th century. Facebook I can understand, but from hanging out with the slacker crowd a few years back and hearing the perennial question 'what're you up to?' and the standard 'nothing' or 'not much', as acceptable dialogue between acquaintances, I think it is fair to assume we have seen the death of creativity as we knew it, and we now are well on the path to blinding, grinding mediocrity. Nuff said.

Blog V2

I've known a few bods in my time with the desire to be a vet; vocation and viability is often a questionable factor; in France, you have to be 'connected' to get into a veterinary school; I've known people achieve a double degree in Veterinary Science, but, having spent the best part of a day getting a dodgy lump removed from one of our two rats, with six visits to two vets, and just completing a return trip to the successful vet to have the stitches renewed, as small furry animals seem to be more active than even vets imagine, I am beginning to reflect on all these folk who want to care for animals, and if I could ask one thing of veterinary science it would be to get the art of dressing wounds down to a more precise science than I have witnessed today. Perhaps I am a pioneer in the field of casual observation of veterinary problems, but I'd wager I'm not the first to be assured of a traumatic evening as we collectively try to keep a dressing on this little rat. I have taken in all the advertising on the walls of the waiting rooms and surgeries; take it from me if you haven't been in one recently, there is a huge market out there that the companies are identifying and targeting; Pfizer, Hills, Eukanuba, Bosch, they're all there, so please, can we get this 'effective dressing' system sussed befor I get much older. Perhaps I am meant to be the one who pioneers it; I'm just raising awareness, as I'm fed up with the hundred odd kilometers and the many Euros I've shelled out today for what I can only describe as a job uncompleted and mischievously lacking in finesse. Whatever product or service you plan to build your life around, for chrissakes make sure you complete the job; I don't want to labour the point, but if you want to put men on the moon, meals on wheels, or bandages on bodies, please assess the whole picture FROM DAY ONE, and continue to review the results of all that investment in your time and effort, and GET IT RIGHT. I've had spray on dressings on my many injuries and repairs for at least the last twenty years; today's experience with the rat was the worst of this twenty first century that I can recall, and if we are going back to bog primitive, can you at least make your bills reflect the last century too?
Nuff said.

E 2

Called up an old acquaintance on the other side of the globe yesterday; I needed some electronic data and he blathered on for an hour about a new pogo stick, and a vertical takeoff aircraft for personal use with four hundred horsepower.
I need to create a wind generator system for my new house, and he's telling me I need More Watts; whereas I see a future where we all learn to get along with less, he sees a future with more; and if his enterprise doesn't offer the 'mores' and 'pluses', (he thinks) he'll lose customers.
I searched hundreds of TVchannels this afternoon and could not find one programme with environmental interest; no wildlife/conservation/seascapes/global warming/Cuddly-animals-in-disappearing-trees/altenative-energies/solar-challenges........nothing to tell me anyone else is waking up to a dreadful new day with no future for our children. Do any of your children work in environmental sciences? I've got a Marine Biologist, and a Change Management Specialist. And a hospitality management graduate. Two out of three ain't bad, but what do we all want? Is the 500 HP Porsche Cayman still your objective? Really? There's a man with a gun pointed straight at your children's head. What will you do? Have the .0001% of concerned population got to do the whole job?
Extreme futures need extreme measures.
Conservative futures need conservative measures.
I feel the world needs to be a bit more realistic; a hundred bucks a barrel for a product just pumped out of the ground? Fucks the ground, but what oilco puts the earth back to pristine after he's raped it? So who's costing 30% of that barrel for reparations to the globe it is polluting? Who wants to be accountable? Who should be accountable? Is there any correlation with the christian work ethic and the nation that consumes the most of these resources and the motto 'in God we trust'?? Is some hopeful character praying out there???
I love technical fabrics; I wear the whole gamut of sport technical clothing; layers 1,2,&3, and yet I know that duPont is one of the guiltiest polluters on this globe; they built their factories before and during the second world war, (parachutes were an early synthetic) and their investment is in the delivery of the new; the old production facility pollutes enormously; they won't change it, yet their product evolves constantly; can you explain that to me? They don't bother; they think I only read their advertising; I refuse to read the advertising; fucking hypocrites. But my fabrics come mostly from China, I'm sure, and trying to find an A+ clean producer is tough. We buy A+ refrigerators; why not grade the cloth factories too? (You DO read the labels, don't you?)
We're in the market for a new washing machine; I emailed the manufacturer of the one I fancy asking for a spare motor; no reply. Imagine him getting my business? Maybe he'd sell me a washing machine WITH a spare motor? What does it take to get service and attention? Our money is all?
Which do you really want? 'The Good Old Days' are gone; in every sense. No new value has any other attachment than the much vaunted 'bottom line' and who controls the bottom line controls the top, too, and you think you live in a free country? You who have a computer and the time to read this? The prison is self imposed and lives between your ears.
Nuff said.

D 2

I'd like to give you my personal, reflective, historic viewpoint on that old favourite substance; Dope. I can't remember every variety I've tried, but I gave them all a pretty good workout, and, unlike a lot of the youth of my day, I held down a good sequence of executive jobs and didn't end up in any limbos, while socialising to the full and observing my fellow tokers with a keen but sometimes blurry eye. The biggest drawback I can see with this stuff is what goes on at cellular level in the participant's body; it coats the cells, that THC oily substance, and it doesn't want to shift; I say this as, after a lengthy involvement, I decided to go clear, and needed the help of a homoeopath to affect a total clearing of that ligering influence. You can guffaw at this; fine by me, but the same scientists you are listening to were really cool about tobacco for too bloody long for my liking; sure, I used to smoke tobacco too, but only the cleanest, preferably export to Japan grade tobaccos, free of the nefarious shit that every tobacco company sees fit to foul their product with; the Japanese rejected shiploads of top brand tobaccos, and it was their attitude that woke me up to being careful what one inhaled. So yes, I got clear of the influence of THC, but still socialised where a lot was being smoked, and the passive participation still needs clearing on a regular basis. Since going clear, my decisionmaking processes have hardened up; I don't accept second grade options in my life, and I don't regret being clear about all that. I know, above all other impressions of dope and its adherents, that even a casual user will develop a fixity of outlook that absolutely spoils their chance of a great view of the world. Compare this to the LSD crowd, who had the acid break down the cellular boundaries and open group consciousness to unprecedented levels; often to a level that average intellects find hard to encompass, and you have suddenly two fringes, supposedly similar, who are; a) too wide eyed to comprehend anything deeper than the 'geewhizz' factor, or; b) too fuzzled to see anything that isn't already 'far out' and clichéd beyond belief.
I've got a few acquaintances who still smoke; I don't see that it improves the quality of their life; whether it is physical or intellectual, there is nothing I've found that cannot be matched and exceeded 'straight', and as a pretty fast and furious skier, there is only one memory I retain of an awesome experience; I was given one of the first Walkmans in the country, a tape of Santana 'Borboletta', and a tab of unidentified LSD, to experience off the top of one of New Zealand's more exciting skifields; that was a fine day, but I just need me and the mountain; keep the rest; the experience is very simple, and mostly between the ears, and we kid ourselves greatly about what makes it great for us.
Nuff said.

C 2

I haven't had a cold for at least ten years. And it is nearly thirty years since I went to a doctor with an ailment; he asked 'what do you want me to do for you?' and I am now cured of doctors. I think my successful avoidance of the surgery is because I don't eat much in the way of cow products; someone once told me that milk as we usually know it would fatten a baby optimised for that liquid, at about 8kgs a day, and if we must insist on consuming milk derived products we should milk something more in the weight range of ourselves, like a sheep or a goat. Since then, at often enormous inconvenience, I have sought out and only consumed a little of the best in goat and sheep cheeses, an experience, now I am living in Europe, that approaches the sublime. A friend has just been staying nearby at his holiday house; he was quite unwell, and didn't benefit much from the break. He always leaves us his surplus perishables, and this time several cheeses were included. Now I don't know how long it takes you to cotton on to what tastes good, but we forced ourselves to eat a little of these 'luxury cheeses' every day, and the immediate increase in output from the mucous department tells us the benefit (?) of 'flavour' is not enough to justify ruining the body's balance. We are back to a really subtle Italian goat cheese, and a sheep fetta, and the nose is drying out as I write; not a cold; its just like putting a litre of diesel in your petrol tank; the car still runs but the exhaust is worse.... and our friend does not repond to the advice; he's determined that what he is told is good for him, from the mainstream noise machine that life can become if you let it, is what he'll rest with; regrettably he's having a bigger job resting than he deserves. I think homo sapiens are a little more basic than the TV ads suggest; try shaving with the opposite of the noise; I've now been shaving successfullly with the cheapest throwaway shaver since 1988; that's 19 years of single blade, economical, throwaway after one month (yes, I get a month) shavers, and the enormous fortune I've amassed via this economy allows me luxuries like the cheapest Coenzyme Q10 moisturiser I can find, for my fair complexion thanks to a Dutch mother and the consumption of only the finest cooking chocolate - unsullied by those nefarious flavour enhancers that chocolate NEVER needs, and a really nice Argan oil skin tonic (from internet, Fair Trade and all), and I don't for a moment believe a five bladed shaver with a battery in it has a place in my life OR yours, but someone is paying for those ads between the boys' favourite TV shows....... So when will you work it out? Nuff said.

B 2

Just having a morning coffee break and Queen from our immense 'bibliotheque' gives us 'Radio Ga Ga', and how long ago was that? We listen but don't hear? What does it take to make you hear? Al Gore, a wannabee politician/hero gets the Nobel Prize? The BBC is 'restructuring for the 21st century' and culling heaps of staff, to produce what? A whole fucking nation owns the BBC, and for the best part of a century it has done an excellent job; what pack of finely dressed suits is laying that trip on that nation? And what does anyone care? I had to rely on a BBC transmission from thousands of miles away to be informed of the most important news of my life, and now with the fucking useless satellite coverage, fucking noise/pollution/broadcast TV/radio, and the rest of the crap communications we are sucking up as fast as our vacant heads can suck, (short break?) I'm running out of brain power to remember just where I was; we are going to lose possibly the last decent source of sensible information supply. Who cares? Well, with all this internet connectivity we wallow in, how about surprising me and communicating severally, forcefully and promptly to get these knife hands at the BBC to back off. And to cap a thoroughly flattening day, I watched the technological wonder of an unprecedented amount of remote, overhead camera coverage of an extremely mediocre rugby final, where, thankyou wizards of the remote camera mentality, I was successfully removed from identifying who (you know, faces?) was doing what (yay, slow rotation of the camera, yay!) and it must have cost a bomb. Yeah, 21st century Bozos. (Are you proud of them? Do you enjoy that kind of irrelevant investment in worthless technology?) Nuff said.

A 2

That spastic decoupling from reality; 'Air Guitar' seems to me to be what ambition has become, as talent really disappears from our world propelled by the electronic 'feature creep' of every device offered to elevate our enjoyment of life's experience. OK; Imogen Heap, maybe pulls it off; Tom Waits pulls it all back again. I love music and musical instruments; a Buffet Crampon bassoon, in pearwood, is a thing of absolute joy and beauty, and a Bruno guitar, with its plain wood body painted in 'trompe l'oeil' rosewood grain, adds remarkability to a very plain thing, but to have the talent and sheer ability to get a decent sequence of notes out of either is being drawn away by the electronic marvel of the keyboard/synth, to the detriment of my children, and yours, too I expect. (I see the 'progress' in Korea and shudder for that view of life.) I have more guitars than children, and my children have always been given a copious supply of instruments to enjoy/investigate, but despite being thus encouraged, the violin, cello, oboe, and guitar tuition they have asked for and received has gone nowhere; (I'm told that putting down the violin, doing better at school, and being rewarded with a windsurfer is the way to go...) Now in the fullness of life, they play nothing. Did they really drop this pleasurable study to improve their education? I regret I have more qualification than all but one offspring, and so I regularly address this issue, as a natural observation of the youth of today and society's continued evolution. 'Popstars' is of course a different sort of talent quest, and I leave it to the proponents. My admiration goes to the pair of bods who dreamed the concept up in the first place, and there goes the truth of it; dream something up and make a global hit of it; there will be a short attention span for such stuff, but you'll get your fame better, with a bigger chance, than that clever, clever lady with the cello 'twixt her thighs... Nuff said.

Blog ZZZZZZZZ

I have been here in this little village for a while now; each morning, lying in our snug bed, we evaluate the pressures and priorities of the day, and I am interested to see how a good  lie in prevails in the presence of so many things to do. We have been battling to make progress here; now we accept the inevitable slowness of the Slovenian process, and lie in easily, rarely getting up early unless an appointment somewhere has been ordained by some official. Everything starts at 7am here, as, in our timezone, we're among the first countries to get the rising sun; so the working day usually ends at three for the office workers and administrators; it makes one wonder at daylight saving in a timezone as wide as Central Europe....but that is one of the useless facts of life... and I just looked at the time on this computer and it read 23.23.23.... and we need to get up early tomorrow to 'work instead of play', as there is the annual wine parade, where you pay €8 and get a glass and walk around the entire region with your engraved glass and drink EVERYONE'S wines, and some of them will be only 3.5 weeks old, and I frankly prefer to try them in a year or two, but there will be between 600 and 800 people on this walk, and I just don't fancy being the linguistically challenged drunk that I'm sure will be the fate of most folks tomorrow.... so we'll mix concrete and do heavy work and feel self righteous about it I'm sure.... Nuff said.

Blog Y

One of the advantages of living in central Europe is that one has the chance to exist in an environment divided and accessed by the prevailing geography; taking a 'short cut' from our little village to one town, requires that one confronts a lot of Y intersections, and, contrary to the common sense of A to B, it is essential to take the opposite branch to the sensible one, as the sensible turning is coming up in another 300 metres..... as these trails 1000 years ago just got bigger and bigger, and avoided the switchback and chose the easy incline...though mountain biking it all is a pretty good challenge still.....and following instincts while motoring with 'short cut' in mind is really, REALLY timewasting, and dreadfully hard on the fuel consumption. Many of you will wonder why I don't have a better map; well they've been doing maps here for a while, and we have them in three different scales, and even the biggest and best of them, (which cannot be opened out inside anything as small as a car) has a level of innacuracy that can only be described as scandalous, with crossroads often being in fact a four way roundabout with another road (which you need) being 100 metres up one of the other roads)..... Others of you will wonder about signage? Signage is ruled by local councils, and they are ruled by local yokels (Blog Y) who figure that those going Sromlje - Krsko will of course choose the Zdole OR the Artice route, and by the time you've achieved either of those villages, you will of course be looking for Pleterje OR Dolenje Vas. Both these towns have signs for Krsko. The others don't, and therewith lies the future of this planet; our mayors don't have global issues close to their hearts at all; every autumn and spring they bonfire their surplus vegetation, they drive 100 metres to talk to their neighbours, and at the local choir practice, seventeen tenors drive seventeen cars even though they all live on three roads, and the math defies me, but saving anything is a distant prospect here. Do I worry? Should I walk or cycle? Should I get rid of that second motor vehicle? My contribution here is insignificant; every day I am sorely reminded, when even the train causes delays to enormous traffic flows at every railway crossing, sometimes the traffic not clearing before the barrier arms come down again. The arms descend to the Timetable; automatically. They raise when the train has passed, often more than five minutes late. It's called 'living in Europe', and is really cool, but could someone start waking up to the tiny picture, as two hundred years is too long for change, and they've only had cars for 100........ Nuff said.
But.... today our petrol is the cheapest since we've been in Europe,  yet yesterday oil reached $90 a barrel.....er.....and demand is at its highest level yet? You explain it; I can't.

Blog X

Well, I'd hoped to have a better X word to spring my blog from, but having just had total strangers from local contractors come onto our property and cut a heap of our favourite newly purchased forest down, and having had a youngster from the neighbour's family tell us 'No, this is our land', and having tested the databases of the local council and the local surveyors to reaffirm that this happened on our land, not theirs, and having presented said neighbours with that emphatic proof, to be treated with an offhand 'maybe', gives me rise to affirm that even in the European Union, with their 2 million population's president about to be president of the EU, 'xenophobia' must also be expanded to include fear or distrust of new or strange spaces in mental scapes that these xenophobes are now confronting. There are people who cannot think beyond what they've always thought was right; the flat earth society; jehova's witnesses; Exxon Corporation; I disqualify George W,  as he shows no signs of having vital energy between his ears at all..... but to hear someone offer a platitude like 'Telekom have the right to come on your property every few years and cut down any trees that are close to their precious line' is the proverbial red rag to me, and my partner, unable to find an ally in this awful affair, is becoming ill with the stress of not knowing who will attack our tranquil space next?  I can go over to Zagreb and give someone a modest amount of money and my neighbours will cease to exist. Switch on TV and that happens all the time, from any country you choose, the silent reality is more of these mysterious events happen and rest unsolved than are famously thrown up on TV as more, good, effective detection results in more arrests.... I'd happily swap the life of one of our rednecks for that lovely 37 year old tree anytime; but you can't get them back, whereas the rednecks continue to reproduce and enlarge relentlessly.... Relentless. Why can't these fuckers relent just, say, for one extra day a week? Could we pass a law for the relentless to relent? I fear they are as hooked into this behaviour as any wino, junkie or child molester, and inability to stop is perhaps a greater opportunity to turn this dross into fertiliser, and would not hurt the world as we pass 6.5 billion in our population. Who needs 'em? Nuff said.

Blog W

I started this epistle last night but the dark forces intervened. Today, I have to report, regrettably, that fascism truly reigns supreme in our little corner of Slovenia, and in the name of telecommunications, and the neighbour's desire to do some additional construction on his property, a fabulous 37 year old specimen of Slovenia's national tree was cut down, along with about 50 square metres of our newly cared for forest, and there is no one prepared to step up and take responsibility. A gang of blokes, armed with chainsaws, and on our newly purchased property, in the name of Telekom.si....... Sheeeeeit. We are bereft. Someone is going to have to tell them, show them, that being in the European Union is not just a documentary thing; it's a change of life and attitude from peasant to citizen, from ignoramus to concerned member of a larger community, from country bumpkin to polite inhabitant. We don't think we'll be here long. Not with the low level attitude that prevails; the Police failed to get them to permit us to have our team's flag up for the Rugby World Cup; the fact that there are laws permitting such displays is completely inconsequential here, so tonight in the spirit of the season, I will carve a pumpkin into an effigy of Hitler, and sit it on the commune building, along with their newly hoisted Slovenian and EU flags. I've been on this planet since WW2. I've seen enough of this to prefer Ghana or Lebanon to what is going on in our neck of the woods. If they don't want foreigners, why advertise a property on internet?; we'd never read a Slovenian rag; we can't comprehend the lingo; would we be here now? Great country. Let's exterminate the people. Nuff said.

Blog V

The vicious vine struck last night. We live above a basement filled with the basic kit for wine production; something every man, and a few women, of this region have, for the 11.5 month supply of liquid intake they prefer to all others. While we may have developed quite an attitude to varietal preference, these people have the disconcerting habit of mixing several varieties, white and red, to produce a pleasant quaffing number they drink as soon as it has created alcohol; last night the landlord deemed it was on, and we joined to drink countless jugs from his first barrel, (a stainless steel number these days) to my immense regret today, as nights as jovial as that on three week old wine, are to be taken only once a year or even less frequently, for me. We've got a jug of the stuff in our refrigerator right now, and I'm tempted to pour it down the sink; I do like a drink to be taken slowly, in a decent glass, with a thoughtful meal, even a nice snack, but knocking back tumblers of this stuff is a test for me; I can do it; I just need to find some other way of managing the morning after...
Yesterday we achieved a bit of a milestone with our renovation project we are so engrossed with here; we found a Slovenian factory prepared to make exactly the insulation material we wanted, which is a great change from the frustrating battles we've had for every small step in this project; three months to get power on, where a generator would have had us well closed in by winter, instead of winter closing in on us, and countless disappointments with the timbermills to get wood suitable for the exterior, and NO luck getting the natural poles I had wanted to match the ceiling structure we have; I am faced with using 50% of the old rafters, and I really wanted all new, but unless I become a thief and steal the countless poles I see lying at the side of the road awaiting the firewood man, I'm lost.... but when you enter the house, you'll see the old stuff alright, and the new structure will be in the bedroom loft only. My most annoying test has been to use a 'plug together' system of PVC drainage pipes, with flexible gaskets and no way of gluing the system into its correct orientation; doglegs and junctions constantly shift slightly, and that means one has to forever test the system to see that it isn't trying to go uphill at some point when you've been adding sections downstream. I get the feeling they've always had something like this here, and I wonder what they had before that, as I've never seen any sign of a solid, substantial drainage system in the region, and then I realise, with the deep aroma that pervades the region, that 'muckspreading' with tanks of the endless manure from the dairy sections of most farms around the place probably includes the miniscule (in comparison) daily domestic output too...... I figure 'getting used to' the simplicity of the way things are done around here will take a while, but I regularly wonder when and how the methods might change for a future with a more urgent set of conservation values. Values. We're still up in the air on that one. Nuff said.

Blog U

My friend disagrees with me; he's been struck by shingles recently, but for me, it's a kind universe. All sorts of people have all sorts of attitudes to life, and in my humble opinion, you just need to be clear about what you WANT out of this life, and you'll get what you need, and if you're lucky, a little bit more. Many is the time I've listened to someone listing all the stuff they don't want.... and it took me a good few years and a lot of introspection to get onto the right track. Now, I'm nowhere near perfect, and I don't know anyone who is, but I'll trust this one; be absolutely positive about what you want, down to the last detail, and be surprised but grateful, when the exact package arrives. I recall putting my son through this process; he wanted a big yacht to cruise the Pacific in, from New Zealand to West Coast North America. I insisted he be absolutely sure of what sort of yacht he wanted to be on, and we strolled the marinas of Westhaven, Auckland, rejecting most of the vessels, but we saw some pretty flash big ones, mega millions, and he seemed pretty keen on those. We went and put notices, on bright blue paper, on all the Club noticeboards, and left it at that. Three days later he telephoned me, suggested I come down to the marina and scope his ride out. Wow! He was sailing next day, him and the skipper, 70 feet of luxury; pearwood interior, leather upholstery, engraved crystal glassware, the galley stocked with the owner's choice of good New York restaurant's meals, all prepacked and frozen, widsurfers lashed up for'ard, inflatable speedboat on the stern davits, scuba gear in the lockers..... I turned to my lad, moaned that we'd forgotten to specify colour; it was bright flame red! Still, it was a pretty nice voyage I hear, he learnt a lot, and now he skippers big yachts whenever he wants. It all came from the kind universe, and that is the easy bit. The hard bit is being sure what you want. When we learn what ego is, we maybe get a handle on reality. Some people I know of never realise their real self; they live a life of someone/everyone else's ideals, always striving for another level, never attaining, it seems, that peaceful plateau of satisfaction. Others like me, always have the dream of another sunrise on another scene of wonder, and while this earth is big enough, I haven't seen all of it, and I plan to see a few more amazing places, and if I'm lucky, I'll have someone at my side, like now, but first I have to remind myself to get this blasted renovation closed in, by winter, so I can get some decent progress on the inside without freezing to death; I renovated in France right up till the 31st December and it was cold, so cold, and I'm hoping/asking for a loooong indian summer. The roof insulation arrives tomorrow; not some bullshit fibreglass nonsense but some dense polyurethane foam sheets 4.1 metres long; I'm trusting my concept of a new technique in fitting insulation will get the top half of the house pretty straight first, and it is getting what I need through the language barrier which is my biggest test. But at the end of each day I remind myself, as my partner passes me a very tasty Munich black beer, and says 'dinner in ten', it's a Kind Universe. Nuff said.

Blog T

This weekend; Friday 5th to Sunday 7th October, welcome to the twilight zone. It is a funny thing how several institutions can be rattled to their foundations at the same time; what association you have to synchronicity/serendipity/happenstance is almost irrelevant, but, just out of whimsy, what sort of weekend was it for the supernatural/crop circles/weird weather afficionados? I saw the looming typhoon over the Shanghai race track, and expected the worst. The remarkable rookie, Lewis Hamilton got the dark forces in his tyres and failed miserably; a little further east, the tennis in Tokyo was being turned on its head; Stuttgart saw a nineteen year old brightly coloured youngster shake tennis's number two in the WTA, and she is, as I type, shaking the world's number one. Rugby saw the dullest team of the World Cup take an easy game off the Australians, and the famous All Blacks, more suitably now called 'the All Greys', went down in a match with the French controlled by a partially blind referee; I hold no prejudice against handicapped people; they have risen to great heights in my world; it's the ones who only see one side of the competition I loathe, and dark forces indeed put these people in the wrong place at the right time. However, in the face of dark forces, it pays to have a good loud laugh; they can't stand that; so ho ho ho to all you winners who lost; it was real amusing, especially the bloke who wagered $5,000,000 the NZers would win the Rugby World Cup; perhaps the dark forces came from the bookies? I have a scientist friend who is the greatest disbeliever in such nonsense; however, he was strolling in the Oxfordshire countryside early one morning and came upon a crop circle; he was the first on the scene, and was able to inspect its form and doubtless authenticity/inexplicability, which bemuses him enormously to this day.... whether he's changed how he approaches his science is dubious, however, but he is my source of the information regarding the dark forces at work in the agricultural world.... I just have to frame my questions in terms a scientist understands and can easily respond to.... Yeah right; have you ever noticed (I might have asked this before) how all the scientists in your class at school were the most dysfunctional members of the school; never good at sport, not good mixers, probably shy/ugly/geeky/obsessed? I don't know where they are now, mostly, but those I do know of did some strange research which includes mashing the brains of lab frogs, (cannulating, I think it is called) and observing the results. So I've always been a little dubious of most science; the stuff MIT publishes is pretty good, consumer orientated of focussed at the drug companies; say yes/no to drugs; dark forces indeed, and I have no need of side effects personally, as those are dark forces I can control by avoidance..... a bit like TV.... surprised myself to get emotionally involved in an eccentric episode of an always weird medical drama last night; it's fiction, after all, and is just some director playing with my attention span; so I surfed the channels and got a replay of the All Grey's defeat by France, and they showed NZ's Prime Minister lurking in the shadows of the grandstand; I'd hate for those dark forces to be at my big game. Nuff said.

Blog S

How do we get 'Shanghai' into our language in so many ways? What does it mean to you? I know I used a shanghai catapult as a kid to put small rocks where they shouldn't ever go, stupidity at it's commonest; and I think more than once my fortunes have been shanghaied, and several of my acquaintances have had the same, negative experience, but, having said that, I also spent a fair amount of time in that bizarre grey city, where east really meets west, where I was denied a room in the Shanghai Mansions, my favourite piece of pre WW2 architecture, even though I was brimming with money, as these people have an inherent fear of how to dispose of my body if I should die on their premises.... no kidding; I had to stay instead in a nearby hotel where there were no showers, and one was obliged to go outside, round the block, and up a steel stairway to a strange commercial showerhouse, where you paid for a locker, undressed totally, put the key round your wrist, collected a towel from the indifferent concierge, and stepped into a low concrete room with twenty showers around the walls, the floor ankle deep in soapy water, and, abluting oneself under the agreeably hot deluge, one became aware that every chinese who came into that space was pissing directly into the water as he arrived at his shower space, and with never less than fifteen people showering and pissing, I was amusingly preoccupied with how I could step out of that space and assure myself that the urine of the locals was not between my toes still...... I needed, too, some film for my camera, and calling at the only photographic shop I could find, was only able to buy black and white film, looking remarkably like a Fuji product , but bought his entire stock of film, for a very modest price, and shot the lot in three weeks of walking around this strangely conflicting environment, but, upon reflecting about the place as I departed, chose never to develop that film, but carry it all, undeveloped, in an Xray bag, to this day, and maybe, should the chemicals be handy, I might just push the thousand or so images out one day and hang them in a flash Chinese exhibition hall to remind them of where they were not so long ago. Because I watched the Shanghai Grand Prix, with a typhoon looming over the new millennium architecture, in the reclaimed swamp of precious wetlands, and wondered if it could be any wetter than the Japanese one, which should have been stopped, and marveled that the enormous run of grandstands was completely packed with what must be entirely new fans for this weirdest of sports, and what do they get out of seeing the embodiment of 21st Century technology, when so little of it actually comes out of the Asian environment. Sure, Bridgestone is Japanese, Honda and Toyota are there, and a pc board or two will have semiconductors and resistors sourced in Asia, but, when you see how the masses of these people get about on a busy day in their corner of the world, and the immense gap between the man with a Mercedes ant the millions with a bicycle, and how they are so excited to be in those grandstands watching motorcars representing the pinnacle of performance and attainment, then, well, you do the math, we are all shangaied. Nuff said.

Blog R

I remember in the seventies, the Eagles' songline 'there are no more new frontiers, we have got to make it here', and last night I had my garden shredder at my friend's place trying to dispose of a huge heap of old prunings, which regrettably were too dry to get through the razor sharp blades in my machine. His neighbour came over, asked what I was doing, he replied that in Slovenia 'we burn everything' and I explained that Slovenia had just had €200,000,000 damage from unprecedented rainfall, floods and disasters, and I was trying to make a start to stop that. He started rationalising the electricity I was using against the benefits of just burning, and I explained that burning was the same as driving his car a thousand kilometers, and he then got on the subject of cars, and when I said I liked old ones he described how none of the extensive features on his VW Golf worked any more and he was happy to have five gears and a motor, and I explained how we can't buy a car that simple anymore, and we're flat out making bullshit, and paying too much for crap we don't need, and he asked me to come and drink his new wine, and I stayed with a beer at my friend's kitchen, and went home with the feeling I'd just gotten nowhere again. My friend has his house here as a retreat from crazy life in Britain, but he was pretty flattened by the fact that every time he requested something to be done, it was either ignored, done poorly, or not followed through. Reality is that not many people identify what an opportunity is; few people can see beyond the little shell they are huddled in, and the big picture that there are so many opportunities to create positive pathways through this quagmire of indifference is left to those few people with the constitutional fortitude to win against all odds. My friend actually has the identical experience in Britain, at grossly inflated amounts of pounds sterling, and he's spent his life not acquiring the 'do it yourself' mentality that has been my principal motivation in getting something decent for myself. You see, I REVERSE every bit of publicity I hear; transparent government is the opposite, open learning just doesn't happen, surround sound does not provide the accoustic experience that good old stereo does (Yamaha have gotten it down to one speaker...) flat screen TV is generally not a patch on a decent old fashioned cathode ray tube, that tube of 'soft and natural' contains engine degreaser, the box of orange juice 'with added Vitamin C' had zero vitamin C in the first place, and the nutritive value of coloured water, you try it; take any story on any publicity and inspect it objectively; the people being coddled in business class in the big jet are HATING to fly yet again across the Atlantic, the babe by the swimming pool with the iced tea is anorexic, the happy family have just had their mortgage renewed at increased interest rates by a bank poised to sweep their world out from under them, and would you really want to dance because your toilet is whiter than ever before? How about your toilet paper? Soft Dream Floral Bouquet to wipe shit with? (How about Finger Proof!?) and, really, you have to laugh, because the flashest Ferraris out there are being driven by the biggest winners at pulling the wool over your myopic eyes, instead of you, who should have siezed the opportunity with a future attached to it. Just REVERSE it all. Reverse, do the world a favour. Nuff said.

Blog Q

If I asked you to shut everything down to see if you could arrive at complete silence, would you be able to get to a state of absolute silence? Absolutely no noise? I used to hang out with a whole lot of DJs who did a lot of dance parties and raves, with pretty big sound systems, most of which were not high grade peices of technology, and the distortion and ear-damaging pressure levels were best approached with earplugs firmly in place. So when I asked them if they could find silence, I got a universal 'no', which brings me to beg the question; 'is there value in total silence?' I used to regularly go to a silent place in my head, especially in the eighties, when I laid off the recreationals, and studied the process of detoxing my body, to try and eliminate the odd annoying maladies that came my way. That was a good process, and once I'd achieved some noticeable improvements, I decided to investigate where else I could focus and 'retune' my body. When I again moved into the executive echelons of industry, I was marketing computing/IT/networking systems to corporate New Zealand, and, for want of a better place to carry it, wore a Motorola 'Brick' phone stuck in my belt. The flip 1500 model then came along and I was happy to have it in my pocket. Those phones didn't perform very well, and the networks were still fragmented, so I leapt at the chance to have a Blaupunkt mobile that one could switch to double the normal power, to 1.2 Watts, in fact, to increase performance in fringe areas. Great; I could even get signal in tunnels! But I found that my quiet place in my head had gone, replaced by a mixture of high frequency hisses, which have stayed with me to this day. I got rid of the phone, and, apart from a brief use of a MicroTac about six years ago, have done without the cellphone in any shape or form, till I came to Europe. I've had several phones here; regrettably they've never worked in the places I've needed them to work, and the quality of these flash little products, often badged 'Sony Ericsson' which, I would have presumed was a decent indication of quality, has meant that a lot of my time was spent returning great distances to the office where the contract was signed, to get a replacement. I have thrown them all away now; my partner has one, but my need for this annoying technology has completely disappeared; she can puzzle over the missed calls; I pay it no mind, but the constant reminder of the price I paid lingers in my ears. It is on my mind a little because I have had my attention brought to the fact that Slovenia is the home to Kuzma Audio, and as I spent many years of my life in the HiFi business, and prided myself on having the bestest sound system imaginable, the idea of a visit to Kuzma Audio, to 'audition' their astounding collection of record playing equipment, has me wondering if there would be any point with my residual low fi 'noise' in my ears constantly.... (and for those of you asking 'records?' let me assure you that you'd have to sell your sportscar to afford a CD player even attempting to approach a record, 33rpm, vinyl, in quality.) 'Deafening silence', is what it's all about. I challenge you; in your head, on your hifi, in your home environment; I've been there; am working on getting there again.. Quiet....How about you? Nuff said.

Blog P

It begs the question 'why do these people still have this puppet in the top job,' when George W just vetoed a bill that both sides of the house of representatives were united on, to protect their ten million most vulnerable children, with a health plan that the state would administer? This prick has everyone under his thumb? You do the math. That's enough on that subject; I'd like to write a positive article on something out of the USA, but can't find the germ of a kind word; why is that? I love the technology they're fostering there; my only magazine subscription is to Technology Review, from MIT, but what those beancounting suits will squeeze and deform those technologies into, has me sneering and shaking my head. A friend of my partner's now lives in the USA and she blithely describes the place as the 'land of plenty', without any notion, I'm sure, that the cost of that is enormous, and unsustainable, and where and when will people arrive at an awareness that a radius of two metres is not enough to be concerned with? I look at CNN's website and I find their gestures to the environment pathetic. But I also see Google researching a fleet of 'plug-in' hybrid motor vehicles, $11,000,000 for 100 vehicles,(that's $110,000 per vehicle.......) and I think I could run a vehicle on mosquito farts for less... and remember these are PETROL vehicles, just with bigger battery packs in them, AND THEY ARE NOT A SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEM. (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority will convert their state's hybrid fleet to bigger plug-in batteries - $10,000,000 for 500 vehicles - that's $20,000 per car, AND THAT AIN'T A SOLUTION EITHER.) But someone will be feeling way better about something with all those battery sales, and CRASHES will be so much more spectacular with all those extra chemicals to burn with the petrol these liabilities STILL run on......  I have only twice in my life been close to a steam car; I don't remember the analysis of the carbon footprint, but one of them had a single piston motor of 2.25 inches bore and the same stroke, and it could spin the wheels of the old Ford it was in, to one helluva speed, and later powered a bus, and the other was the Gvang, the Australian supercar, fast as a Ferrari, that disappeared to anonymity forever after repeated arson attacks on the constructor's garage..... so, dear readers, let me assure you that little changes, the cars are still being fabricated by the motor trade, which is still staffed by the same sorts of people that it always has been stuck with, and nothing is going to change till you stop patronising these dinosaurs. Nuff Said

Blog O

I just typed 'organic' into my search engine, and the first up was 'Organic Inc' who are, amongst other things, 'excited by the new Mitsubishi Lancer launch'. They also had some great diversion with a klutz in the back of a taxicab, for twentysomethings to entertain themselves with. I kind of miss the concept of organic as describing a natural thing; OK that carbon based chemistry gets in there; we all need to know what carbon is and isn't doing in our lives, and that the tree huggers have adopted the term for chemical-free agriculture, but where do I get chemical-free rainwater, or chemical-free air to breathe, as my plants (actually my partner's plants) would probably like to consume? This week we will do four trips from home, twice the norm, one to collect friends from the nearest airport, and one to collect specially manufactured insulation materials to lower the carbon footprint of our house renovation project.... but we have gotten to hate the act of going anywhere; the risk of a collision, the risk of failing to achieve the objectives of the trip (empty shelves in the supermarket and hardware stores? A real possibility, regrettably) the delays of queueing in traffic at railway crossings, (where the train might be efficient, but not with the barrier down five minutes for the twenty seconds event of the train passing, and our being the only motorists to turn their engine off, as we don't have AC to keep in equilibrium) and our little valley is pretty pleasant to hang out in, if life has to be slow, which, I fear, is what organic is all about. But I fail to see the rest of the folk in our little village being so laid back. Marija is busy killing all the insects, bugs and wriggly things of the region...(we were impressed to see her traps for hornets, but we now learn that they are an endangered species,) while we have taken a liking to our snake population, which can attain two metres in length, though we have only seen half that size, and only once, but we regularly husband a clutch of odd shaped eggs, and found a cache of 37 quite large empty shells, so we're hopeful of seeing a lot more, and are even planning a snake pit to help them winter over without choosing our domicile as the better alternative..., but I am mostly disappointed that the timeline of our organic house will be doubled by sheer human inefficiency; five hardware stores offer the same limited stock of materials; anything outside that is a special order, which runs from impossible through three days to really almost a month, for a 30° bend for a sewer pipe, for example, as they all stock only 90° and a few 45°, and tool accessories are one mainstram German brand, all packaging and information, but five times the price of world brands who compete for shelves elsewhere. I've been building in my spare time since the 1950s, where the hammer really was all one had, and if you were no good at driving nails in the really decent hardwoods that were still being stripped from our forests, you'd get nowhere fast a bit like I am today..... same old same old. What I'd really like is to eventually disconnect from the power supply. I think 'organic' really means that; there is nothing as polluting as our need for Alternating Current, be it 110 or 220, and while our place will have a very low draw on the mains, eliminating it will be my only true peace of mind, as, while I live a dozen kms from a nuclear power station, this country is still dependant on imports, as is EVERY country in the developed world, and as I can't rely on you to do anything, I will have to double and redouble my own efforts. Nuff said

Blog N

I've noticed that the images of Darfur seem very much absent of late, and Israel gets 95% of the coverage in the Palestinian dispute, and the truth of both is far from correctly reported, and do you 'watch the news' on a regular basis? and if you do, why do you accept this crap as the 'news' when in fact it is the spin/hype/warp/concealment of the reality that many of us are really distressed to know you're watching? Did you know that one BILLION people will jump on an airliner this next year? 40% of them will have a non-scheduled 'event' in that experience, too, and that is my extrapolation; between customs holdups, checkin snarlups, takeoff delays, security scares, maintenance emergencies, flight emergencies, terrorist intervention (that'll get .0002% of the action) and WEATHER.... don't forget the weather..).... plus if you plan to cross the United States of Anal Retentivity, you can double your chances of a snarlup, and New York? treble it.... So there's a bit of news for you; air travel is going to be more a hassle than driving, but, in the wisdom of putting smaller airliners on routes with more frequent flights, (completely contra the Airbus A380 behemoth that the French have so succinctly created,) we have allowed all that is grossly inefficient in human nature to stab another great wound to the heart of this fragile globe of ours, while Darfur and Palestine go to the spin doctors too. Might I suggest we frequent flyers make a resolution to include one diaster zone to their list of destinations? I actually have seen a few in my life, and have deliberately tried to access the Vietnamese Highlands, for example, which is the scene of one of the least reported ethnic catastrophes of the world, only to be rebuffed by that very prevalent institution in disaster areas; men in uniforms; wherever I go with a negative outcome in the 90%+ probability range, men in uniforms have the whole action sewn up. You do the math; can we honestly allow military agents to uphold law and order in the world? The answer is an absolute 'NO', and the aforesaid USA's privatisation of the foreign security business is an even worse scenario; 'Thugs in uniform'; who, in every event I have ever witnessed, and a lot I've seen covered by independant docos, (e.g.'Lessons of Darkness', Werner Herzog) are the very worst representation of foreign interest in the many unfortunate countries of this world. So, you who are informed of sweet fuck all by your personal choice of news coverage, can you start to show a little innate intelligence; a little 'personal involvement' in world affairs? Can you line up with the masses at a Burmese rally, or help out in a food delivery run to Darfur, or, for my preference, try to stop the displacement of the aboriginal natives of the Montagnard Highlands (the true Vietnamese are NOT Asian, OK?) from their very fragile predicament in Pleiku Province? I know very well that in Pleiku Province all the money action is illegal, criminal and corrupt; a totally forsaken borderline between no man's land and hell, and no one goes there as you'd have to be a bigger warlord than George W to even think of it. How do we stop that? Same way we stop Afghanistan and it's drug and crime ridden wastelands. Oh, tfff tfff tfff sniff sniff sniff, have another pain killer... Nuff said

Blog M

It was dusk last night when we walked down into the vinyard to our private 20 metre line of table grapes; four varieties, including the big, blue black Hamburger, which are still ripening, gleaning a bit more lusciousness before we pick them. There are some black grapes overripe and shrivelling, and my favourite is to fossick amongst these till I find one or two fat examples just on the brink of rotten; Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. We'll have hopefully another couple of weeks of this rare pleasure; I used to love well chosen grapes from the supermarket; now, I am spoilt for life with this easy to adjust to delicacy. Breakfast this morning will be thirty percent grapes, thirty percent Abate pears; you know the long ones with the graceful bend, that are so easy to dribble with.... and last night we slept well undisturbed by mosquitos, because we'd searched further afield for the refill of our anti-insect diffuser, and still unable to find the Raid product on any shelf, we found the 'Bengal' copycat, half the price, at a decent discount supermarket, and bought enough to never EVER have to rely on Raid having their act together again, and we both feel better now after three sleepless nights..... I also spent a fruitless day in the hardware stores of the region trying to glean parts for our badly worn concrete mixer, and came home empty handed and determined to scrounge through all my toolboxes, and found all the little pieces of brass and flattened them into shims to take up the wear, and Bingo! that worked, and we can mix concrete again for a while, so the positive prevails, and progress will happen again. Meanwhile.... my partner struggles to get a Dreamweaver file across into Joomla! and/or CSS, to get a nice and functional webpage working without all those annoying zoomy bits that designer/developers seem convinced we need? An egg in the beer if ever I saw it; give me clean information with readable typefaces and good contrasts and you can save the fireworks for the inspirationally challenged who mull over everything seeking a stimulation not from within.... and leave the side bar menus in place on the next page I go to please, so I don't have to go back to go elsewhere..... that'll do; breakfast awaits, Nuff said.

Blog L

Do you use your computer much? Do you leave it running all the time, just in case there's an email to read? Do you Skype? The world's computing devices use 125 terrawatt hours of electricity annually, and that's about the same as burning 350 million tons of coal. And while there are a lot of people developing energy saving software and techniques for computing, there is a bigger group of people developing power hungry applications to give us all a bigger experience. Which do you need? Can we circumvent the compound fracturing of our future world by lightening up a little? My partner earns her living on a computer; and I can go a whole day without being able to access an interesting looking email, but I can get this blog away while she showers. I have minimal use, in fact, for this machine, and she searches the net better than I, and saves a multitude of energy wasting by being a good online researcher. But I sense in everyone who has access to the current computing world, an abnormal need for detail and unnecessary facts/tidbits/gossip, let alone the burgeoning need to share with everyone that set of crazy photos someone sent you. This is trivial use of a vast resource; I don't have the facts about the post offices of the world; we certainly aren't economising on paper, a claim I've heard since I started using IBMs in the 60s.... but we are getting obsessive, and I would like everyone to think about that each day as they make their decisions what to do at each computing moment. Of course you may be the type who just has to have everything at your fingertips... well, you too, lighten up. All the achievers I've ever hung out with have NOT used computers in any major way. (John Britten, the motorcycle designer, was one of the few I've seen embrace the computer as a great tool, and pay no mind to its smallminded capabilities.) Michael Jackson probably never had a computer, or the time to use one, but he did teach us all how to dance; now there are more websites devoted to pulling him down, turning him over, spitting him out, and, yes, they could lighten up too; stop wasting precious time please. If you think I'm too busy knocking people, I'd like you to know I have literally hundreds of good ideas every day; I find a paucity of people to share them with; John Britten was the last guy I really brainstormed with; now with internet I have to subscribe-to-contribute, and I much prefer 'zero-knowledge-proofs' to get connected with people; regrettably people want more than my input; they want my demographics, and I don't have any demographics I need to share with anyone. Now there are plans to make the cellphone a social networking tool; which will come first; the misuse of the system to commit a physical offence with a participant, or an actual theft of an identity to achieve god-knows-what? And do we need Netvibes and other egocentric media that badly? If we all put limits on our acceptance of enormous files, the egos might be forced to lighten up too? Nuff said.

Blog K

Yup, this one is for knuckleheads; you know who you are; humiliated in class, streamed into the 'trades' and third grade skill set, you found your stodgy niche and stayed there. Some of you may have been stuck with a rich and ambitious father, and your foot up the ladder was easy. Others of you will have developed that cunning that allowed you to progress well into local government, and some of the really ambitious and useless amongst you got to be big time politicians. I've been on this planet long enough to have lost the surprise I originally expressed at the progress of you turkeys. I recall once being in charge of a school group at a ski lodge, where one particularly hopeless case was a boy totally unable to keep out of trouble, who'd fuck with the generators so we had no electricity, and break up and annoy every happy group, and years later, languishing in hospital with a smashed shoulder from a motorcycle accident, I discovered this 'brilliant surgeon' of the same name; the ambitious and wealthy father had made sure his son had gotten well up the ladder, but upon hearing his name I promptly discharged myself from that institution and sought surgery elsewhere. Whew! Have you had a negative experience from an issue of major importance to you? Did someone mess with your justifiable complaint and get you left out in the cold? There are specialist of this ilk in every walk of life; some have the universal password to suitdom; the MBA; the qualification for this is; no track record; time spent in the fringes of business; a pocketful of money gleaned however you like; 20-30 hrs a week spare to attend lectures and study. I know some really good people from all walks of life who've found the break they needed to higher executive roles, but there is a majority of the graduates who have gained solely a license to practice their connerie at a totally different level. I once challenged, informally, a professor of law I happened to be rubbing shoulders with, and he wryly admitted that 95% of his graduates weren't up to scratch. I also knew a lawyer who'd, for a bet, graduated in six years instead of five, WITHOUT READING A SINGLE BOOK. I passed my first management exams without attending a single lecture, principally because the basics are common sense, and amongst the others from my company scored, to their chagrin, the highest mark. Common sense is a natural process. Regrettably the higher etchelons of the law and science and medicine are getting away from that, and the knucklehead factor starts to skew the results, and we have immense wastage of our precious resources in the research and quests for the mindless and banal. Hey, turn on TV; these people are a population segment with an immense power to control or influence or entertain or inform, and what do they give you? You do the math; 400 channels and maybe, just maybe, one will be a reasonable supplier of factual, realistic, educational material; the rest are serving you a vast heap of rubbish; for better or worse; and hopefully a sports channel you can relate to is in there too... but I digress; this factor of life that is the bane of the human race, and will keep us from every sane move for the good, is present right up to the head of the United States; he's in the pocket of every sleazy business shark who ever made a trillion; there are a few of them, and to have him back senseless technologies, and blind alley paths of problem resolution, IS OUR FUCKING DESTINY, unless you can see a way to wake up the USA..... I know there is a huge show of Al Goreism in the world, but whose interest is he pushing really? And the good news this week is that the polar ice melt will open up the North West Passage for the first time in centuries, allowing greater frequency of larger ships with boatloads of PRC shite to get to the EU/East Coast USA market quicker! Are you in, for more shite, quicker?We'll be amazed in five years to look back and see the continued stupidity that curses our corridors of power; the way is possible only to klutzes; why? Intelligence, and the ability to think outside the square is frowned upon; I know; my two brothers were top of every class, top of their schools, between them they achieved amazing academic performances, scholarships awarded only on evidence of true brilliance.... Today, they are both nowhere; in limbo; discarded, ignored, rebuffed and anonymous, this resource of really great brainpower has contributed zero to the progress of the world. I on the other hand, chose not to cast my pearls before the swine of this world, and indulged my every whim in employment and research for the interesting and amazing, and have done a great deal of what I ever fancied to do. That's it; Fancy; and let me tell you, when this world falls into the polluted swirl of sludge that is its destiny, I will be there too, but I will have this rich resource of memories of the awesome, the wonderful, the soul-satisfying glories one can seek alone or with a special one, while you have stuck to your fucking mind numbing inside line to the predictable future you all justifiably deserve... or am I wrong? Will you actually become one of the possible billion voices saying 'enough'? Does your intelligence quotient actually allow you to put your hand up and speak out? Or did you push it down in anticipation of someone else speaking up? No more mate; Nuff said.