Scribblings

Starting From Now (MP3)

My first outing in Fruity Loops, 5mins 07 seconds of music to make you move.....

Recipe of the year. Surely..

How to make (and enjoy) Ardour; a single part story

For this 'pleasure' you will need: Lightly toast bread, I'd opt for a toaster or standard grill, although tests have confirmed a blowtorch will achieve similar results provided the distance / power ratio is correct.
Grate cheese, lots of it - don't be shy.
Chop chives quite fine - mix with the grated cheese, by which time your bread should be ready.
Apply cheese 'n' chive combo to the lightly toasted bread, apply loads of Worcestershire sauce, all over it (like Craig David) and then place thinly sliced tomatoes on top
Place under a grill for around 10 mins maybe less, on almost full heat
Remove, rip up fresh basil leaves and lob on.
Enjoy. And that is, Ardour.

Burial

Music that is rarer than a steak you ordered that turned up blue, with an uncooked egg lobbed on top and a couple of frozen chips sat next to it.

The teachers could save us, and the importance of being honest

Are you famous?
It's probably a question that can be answered as easily as "do you own a flat screen tv?" these days. If you're not, you will certainly give behaving like a celebrity a go. Why are sunglasses so big? Why does everything glitter? Why does everyone drive black cars? some go to the pretentious extent of blacking out the windows on their Porsche Cayenne or similarly useless 4X4 - presumably to protect their children from the ever prying eyes of the sidewalk bound paedophiles, or maybe it's to draw yet further attention to yourself. You know which is true but prefer to hide it.

Sustainability is the problem, we're seeing casulties from it all already, it'll only get worse. Like a 3 year old convinced he has the aptitude and skill to manage a building site, people are behaving in ways they shouldn't, and forever getting way out of their depths - financially. So Beckham bought a new type of car, does that mean that's now your new favourite? That's the new goal to head towards, "when I get this / that / other I will be getting one of those"... what - win the lottery?

I read a story on the BBC website of a mid twenties man in london, who'd go out at the weekend and blow up to £500 a night on champagne and entrance into VIP lounges in bars and clubs - for what? Attention, admiration and, with a bit of luck, sex. All well and good one may think, why shouldn't he go out and enjoy himself in this way if that is the way he chooses to enjoy himself - the only problem was, he was working as an admin person in a company earning around £16,000 a year and living with his parents.

It's the magazines, the TV and the whole american lifestyle that's forcing people into a corner and putting pressure on them to act and behave more and more like the fake people we see in the media. Another classic example was a girl I met one time, we were sat in a bar, I asked her what her ideal job would be she replied "Footballers wife" - to which I initially was impressed I'd managed to strike up conversation with a girl with a good sense of humour, that was until, I realised, there was no sarcasm in her voice. Her dream job was in fact, to be a footballers wife.
Consider for a moment that that is now effectively a career in itself, something you can work towards, to aim for and to be proud of. After all, if you have a Gucci handbag dangling off your wrist you MUST be a success, where it came from? Don't matter does it - the fact is it's there.

It will have to end somewhere, and people shouldn't see it as black and white as either living like a cheap celebrity or change your name to 'Little stream trickles softly' and live in a hippy commune just outside of Bristol, simply understanding the difference between need and desire is the first step.

So what about the teachers, are they the only people to help this scary situation? - perhaps. Perhaps they can go some way to convince children in a modern way, that money doesn't make a person a success, there is nothing that anyone can buy ever, that could bring eternal happiness. Something bigger, faster, shinier or cleverer will always come along.
One would hope we will eventually come to our senses about all this, but until then, there will always be people for whom image comes above all else, like a business who asked me to "somehow get in on the Green angle" when designing for them - despite having no idea what their 'angle' really was, but simply knew it may help to engage customers and shift their more of their product.
That's the world for gods sake, what next? How can I cash in on disabled people?