Tuesday Walkabout

Urgh, I left the college too early and realised all the little uncivilised pricks from the school were out for lunch. So I went for a little diversionary walk for 15 minutes until they all fucked off and I could get into the local tobacconist's hassle-free:

The college circled in blue, the shop in green.

What New Hell is This?

Well, after finishing [some of] those college essays, my prediction that another batch would come along has been proven sadly correct. Plus, I failed Psychology A... not that I care.

So you can expect that odd post at 4AM when I've completed some to-hand-in-the-next-day essays. Failing that, wait till Winterfest when the workload will [not] disappear.

What was I going to write about, again?

This is not the usual standard of posts I make, but Bowie's Berlin trilogy's made me go all minimalist... Expect a raft of proper 1000+ word essays to appear on Dardanelles next week.

What Didn't Make The Blog [September-November]

19/11

One step closer to Ben Elton's Popcorn?
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28/10

Why does Israel think it has the right to condemn Iran, when it should have been expelled by the Security Council long ago for providing Apartheid South Africa with nuclear materials and building its own illegal weapons, on top of annexing Palestinian land?
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19/10

I think the Greens need to recognise, as Marxists do, that [environmental] change cannot come through a political process dedicated to preserving the businesses that fund the parties.
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19/09

I await the fictionalised account of Harry's career in, Harrybo: First Blood

A Man's A Man If You Strip Away the Legend

To declare that I live in Scotland when on holiday or speaking to someone over the borderless internet, generally inspires truly cringeworthy stereotypes in that person's mind.

This need to distinguish ourselves from England went OTT long ago - resulting in the awful Burns Night. Apart from the fact I've never been able to coherently read half of his poetry, he's always appeared to me to be some two-dimensional character designed solely to prop up the notion of Scottishness.

When I was in my last year of Primary school, I was the person bringing the haggis in, and the narrator for the play Tam O'Shanter after the meal. I noticed two things: 1) I'm carrying some ground up meat, why are we standing when it enters the room and addressing a speech to it? 2) No-one listening to this play (including myself) has any idea what the play is about beyond the literal.

I'm the embodiment that you can be a nationalist (and like McDairmid, also a communist) without the ridiculous ceremonies, most of which were invented by the English only 200 years ago.

Anyway, I stumbled onto the Burns page at Wikipedia whilst following various links as I do at 2AM. It would seem the same forces that invented the "traditions" also neutered Burns, the revolutionary republican, into a twice-a-year romantic devolutionist.

So dump your incorrect notions of Burns and start thinking about what he had to say.

[248]

Instantly, Utterly, Not Relevant?

It's that time of year again, when I don't buy a poppy. I already know how crap war is without having to engage in the mass-empathy of 'we'll never forget those who died' that's only one step removed from the disgustingly-American hysteria following the death of the People's Pricess (sic).

But apart from the above; is WWI, with its number of veterans approaching 0, relevant to what war is like today? The four years of that war clocked approximately 4.5 million military casualites (most reliable, since these are also the best recorded). The approaching 3 years of the Iraq War and Occupation has killed 2085 (1).

"War" has come a long way in the 91 years since the beginning of WWI. Now, it does not necessarily entail megadeath - it's a much more detached form of conflict, no more hesitating to shoot because you can't actually see who you're killing anymore.

I propose we replace the poppy with a patch of sandpaper - symbolising the new style of war débuted in the Second Gulf War.

[185]

Out of Touch

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/sun-says.html

Am I supposed to take this frontpage (never mind the "newspaper") seriously? (Note the top-right corner)

If I'm out of touch for not supporting the slippery slope, so fucking be it. I refuse to associate with this sort of lazy, biased and dangerous "journalism".

African Night Flight

You might actually see some of the posts I promised two weeks from now. The first bloc of my course finishes next Friday, followed by a week in which to remediate any problems with the outcomes.

Let me share some of the highlights for this week:
Tuesday 8PM - Wednesday 3AM: Writing a 1000 word essay on German Unification
Wednesday 8PM - Thursday 4AM: Writing a 2000 word essay on Sociological Perspectives on Education
Tonight: ~8PM - 3AM: I will be writing a 1000 word essay on Memory for Psychology (with the added bonus that it was for last Friday)

I have a number of demands, namely; don't give me all the essays at once, slow the Earth's rate of spin to 1 in 30 hours (15 hours of sleep, 15 awake), genetically engineer me to function without sleep, increase the neural impulse speed between my mind and my hands when typing, and when I do succumb to sleep, pause the time - it's going to waste.

Just waiting for the soothing weekend to get some sleep...

Getting Older

Just listening to The Clash's 'Remote Control' brings back memories of tieless, aviator, black jacket, suspension-seeking, underground anti-school writing, last-time I saw my long-time fancied, when I was 17, free period, indoor-wall political grafitti, days of the last year of secondary school - even if I did hate it.

An extract from my Holiday Diary, Written in Albufeira, Portugal - 20/07/05