missed

well 2005 is here and to celebrate here are some of the things i meant to write about last year but just never got around to.
so this is a big hairy arsed post - fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride... it's a dull one.

blunkett – oh so much could have been said about this affair, and in the press so much was. although one of the key questions was never raised – what did she see (geddit) in him? obviously power is an aphrodisiac, which explains why david mellor and robin cook got to shag around.
it many ways it didn’t bother me too much that he had “helped” a friend of a friend get a visa. because let’s be honest if we were in a position to help a mate we would. what galls is that the visa was for a nanny, oh hold on what i should say it was for cheap labour. for a government that wants to impose quotas on the number of people seeking to enter the country to live and to work, the idea that we can still find time to get a visa sorted out for cheap labour, sorry a nanny, is just wrong.
this doesn’t even touch on the fact that blunkett and co have pontificated on marriage and stable relationships – yet here is a man who was shagging another man’s wife and not taking steps to make sure he was protected. true david is trying to take responsibility for his possible sprogs, but if you are going to tell people how to live their lives you have to be able to live by the same rules.
i don’t expect politicians to be role models – i want them to be a little like me. what i do want from them though is not to be total hypocrites.
as for the money for the train ticket – as one wag in the newspapers pointed out the crimes wasn’t that blunkett had passed the ticket on to his squeeze but just how much the ticket cost….
(sidebar 1: it appears kimberly was not at it just with david blunkett but with some other chaps as well. must be fun being her husband at the moment. bet no one is laughing at him. nope not one person, no one at all.
sidebar 2: in canada there is a current scandal about politicians and immigration only there it is over extending visas to romanian erotic dancers. now that’s a visa policy i can get behind.
sidebar 3: blunkett also got into a spot of bother because of his biographer who reported some of his less than pleasant comments about his colleagues. i am guessing that when david fell on his sword (geddit) few tears were shed!)

geez if that was the short version of my blunkett piece imagine how long it could have been!

faith – a number of things made me want to talk about faith. there was the article in wired magazine about intelligent design, which seemed to be at first glance creationism version 2.0, the basic stance of the intelligent design brigade is that science doesn’t have all the answers and there are still things that can’t be explained and these things might be the result of a “cosmic designer” (whether it be “god” or extra terrestrials). then there were several articles about atheism (and more and more i am finding atheists to be just as much tub thumpers for their own “faith” as those they rail against) some of which argued that there was a decline in religious faith others which pointed out that religious faith had been replaced in many people’s lives with new age beliefs.
of course there has been the ongoing debate about islam and christianity. and with christmas there has been acres of print about christmas just being about mammon (most of the people who took this line seemed happy enough to go out and spend a fortune buying presents…..)
and what does any of this have to do with the price of coffee pat? you ask. well just that this year i have realised that i had lost a lot of faith in recent years, but it’s not a bad thing to have faith.
true if asked i couldn’t explain why i feel this way. it’s like trying to explain colours to the blind or cliché to the illiterate. and true i can reconcile my faith with any number of seemingly contradictory ideas (marxism, evolution and naked cheerleader websites and i know for a fact that boybands are the work of satan …..) i know that faith has not made me a better person, nor has it made me a good person, it has just made me a slightly more contented person.

olympics: still don’t want them in london. i am annoyed that london transport have been able to give the bid advertising space but have still managed to put the fares up (and the first day of the fares being up what do i get – delays!). the fact that seb coe and digby jones are involved in the bid makes me hate it even more. seb is a tory and that’s bad enough, but at least he looks like he has an idea about what sport is about (well he should he is a gold medal winner after all) but digby (also a tory) and looks like he is in training for the uk’s olympic dart team or sumo team.
having them in london will take away the magic of the games. there will be weeks of anticipation of how well our team will do only to watch all the medals go to americans, russians and australians. then there will be calls for more to go into sport to ensure that we can win more gold medals, because it is good for the country’s morale. when really all that tax money is doing is making a few overpaid athletes a little bit richer, and them a lot happier, while my 10 minute euphoria over kelly holmes winning is soon replaced with the knowledge i have to go to work tomorrow.
if you want sport to make a difference make sure kids have playing fields to play on.

digby: i don’t really know digby jones so it is probably a bit rich of me to say this: but i hate him. i hate him for all he stands for and i hate him because invariably he is on radio 5 first thing in the morning and the people who interview him never ever question him and just let him spout.
it doesn’t help that he has now been made a sir and is involved in the olympic bid.
it’s digby’s job to save that business is wonderful and that government and the unions are evil. he does it very well and he does it often.
so there he was going on about outsourcing (that’s moving work from the uk abroad because it is cheaper), its good for uk plc says digby because it means that british workers can get better jobs, assuming that they can 1] find them 2] have the necessary skills for them. that’s ok they can retrain…. the only jobs that never seem to be outsourced are the senior expensive mangers and board members. why can’t they be outsourced to china and india – i am sure there are loads of competent people there who could do the job just as well and for a tenth of the price. hell most of their staff are there.
digby is one of those people who believes the market is right, at all times. and as long as shareholders are making a profit that is all that matters. what invest for the future? pay a reasonable amount of tax so that we have schools and health service that is more than adequate for everyone. why on earth would we want to do that.
as if that wasn’t enough he shares the same birthday as me. sometimes life does suck.
porn – i was going to write about porn because there were two news items that made me wonder about the whole subject. first off there was the story about larry flynt’s hustler empire opening up a store in the uk, birmingham. then there was the news that boots the chemists were planning on offering sex toys in their stores as something special for the ladies, (echoes of the old style barbers who would offer gentlemen “something for the weekend”..)
now i like porn, i like it a lot. so my shock and outrage at the stories were nothing to do with being a prude. it was more of a case of hold on a minute porn isn’t something that should be easily available (hey that’s why in newsagents it’s on the tops shelf!). porn by it’s very nature needs to be a little bit seedy, a little bit sleazy. a lot of the fun of going out to buy porn is in the fact that you are going into a semi den of iniquity. it’s like the first time you bunk into cinema to see an x (well as it was in my day, you youngsters just have 18s), or the times when you go into the pub to buy your first underage drink.
so that frisson you get when you enter a porn shop could soon be replaced with the dread i always feel whenever i enter a supermarket.

hunters – i know i know i should just let it go but….. there have been several more stories in the news about this, culminating in the boxing day hunts, the appeals to the court of human rights etc. i am sort of hoping that the hunters do cause a civil disturbance because i have the solution for it. generally hunters strike me as being all part of the hang ‘em , flog ‘em brigade, who warble on about the decline of standards that would be rectified with the return of national service.
so if hunters break the law they should be publicly birched. the younger ones sent off to do a year in the army. repeat offenders could be branded with a h. or they could also be made to run from the hounds and hunt saboteurs could be employed to chase them to ground. if they get to their hole in time then no national service for them..

galloway – just a simple aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh and uuuuuuuuuurgh will service.

identity cards – they are going to cost lots of money, the contract is going to be given to a private company who will promise much, under deliver and over charge, the system will not work . it is an infringement on civil liberties (oh no i am turning into a bleeding hunter..) and what’s worse there is no proof that is going to stop terrorists in anyway shape or form.
it’s another of those bad ideas that the government has that will not go away and they won’t kill it off like they should do.
instead we will have to listen to them try to justify it time and time again until the darned cards are with us. i won’t be any safer, but i will be out of pocket!

star wars: no not the movie the continued desire of the bush administration to have a space shield, a strategic defence initiative. again all the proof goes to show that it is unlikely the usa will ever suffer an intercontinental ballistic missile attack from anyone. so the idea of creating a defence for a threat that is not there is so typical of the fighting the last war mentality.
and surely if there is one thing that 9-11 proved is that all you need to do is fly a plane into a building and you have done the deed.
but no they are pressing ahead with it. so recently they had a test of it, well they were going to but the weather was bad so they had to postpone. well that’s ok then i am sure most nuclear threats will only take place when the weather is good, so you can combine the launch of a wmd with a bit of a picnic.
i have to say i am not sure that i am ready to trust a system that is going to be based the technology that *ahem* found saddam’s wmd programme….. yup that’s a nuke lets launch…shit it’s a passenger plane, no worries its aeroflot……. works for me.
(sidebar: of course tony has stepped up to the plate and agreed to allowing this system to have some of it’s necessary tracking devices based at fylingdales. of course this means if there is such a threat then we have just painted a very big bull’s-eye on ourselves. and what do we get for this gesture of solidarity, of standing shoulder to shoulder…. mmmm nothing, not a thing, nada. that tony he bargains hard!)

well there you go some of the pieces i was going to write and never did.
however if i had of written them at the time they would have been wittier, better edited and more interesting. but on that you will just have to take my word.