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.