Headline in the ‘Mail Online’ :: “We need protection! Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt show off guns at home admitting they feel unsafe from crazed fans”.

Who the hell are they? I’ve never heard of them! What do the do? Act? Sing? Dance? Why do they need protection from “crazed fans”? I think it’s Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt who are the “crazed” ones. It’s just an excuse to play with big boys guns. You only need one handgun to protect yourself with.

Let’s face it. You would have to be crazy to be a fan of theirs. I thought fans worshipped the ground their idols walked on, not set out to harm them.

Read more. . .

Why is there only three disabled parking places at the local doctors surgery, and yet there are twelve disabled parking places at the local Gym?

The first time I played it I thought it was entertaining, but it was not quite the kind of video I would watch over and over. I like cats, they can be a great source of entertainment themselves, but not enough to watch that video too much.

How wrong I was! When the DVD finished and I took it out of the player my cat, Dinky, who had obviously been watching it from her vantage point on the arm of the chair went crazy. She kept meowing at me until I played it again. Then there was peace and quiet until it finished again. I think I must have played it four times that first night just to keep her quiet.

Now every time I switch the computer on she fully expects to see her video as it as now become. Sometimes I have to put her out so that I can get on with some serious gaming work.

Now whenever I want some “me-time” I just sit her in front of the computer and shove her DVD into the slot knowing that I will have ninety minutes without her asking to be fed every ten minutes! Bliss.

I’ve never known a cat to be a telly addict and couch-potato before. I did think of giving her a bowl of cat biscuits to nibble while she watched the video, but I think that would be a bridge too far. . .

After reading this post you may think I have callous indifference to the suffering of others. I admit that when I see pictures of the starving children in Ethiopia, pictures the Holocaust children in the Warsaw ghetto dying on the streets, the small children in other third world countries being ill-treated and living rough on the streets, it doesn’t upset me any more.

I have been upset and angry in the past with the people who cause all this suffering, usually the the name of the Great Gods of Power, Wealth, and Religion and care nothing about the consequences of their actions.

Over the years I have hardened myself to the fact that I can do nothing about these events. Now I can look at those pictures without getting upset and frustrated, and complete indifference to what they represent.

At least I thought so, until I came across the picture below taken by a world famous photographer from a top magazine. This picture disturbed and upset me. Maybe because I could read into it the utter despair of this poor little kitten plodding down the road to nowhere. Dirty, disheveled, with matted fur and eyes just staring blankly at the ground. Is that dried blood on it’s neck? The passersby’s feet shows that nobody cares or even notices the cat.

I just hope the photographer did something to help this poor creature after he got his award winning shot. To me this picture sums up what a cruel world we live in.

I read the following poem in the Letters Page of a recent magazine which I thought sums up just what the kitten must have been feeling.

What is the use of staying alive?
What is the purpose of my life?
When I am always living with so much strife.
I can’t go on living this way.
Just watching my life waste away.
You haven’t been there, you haven’t seen
The disaster my life has been.
I know death is part of living, but all I know
Is that I will be quitting my life,
which has no meaning.
I want death to take over,
Knowing what I am doing,
Aware of where I am going.
I will go quietly, no one will know
Just let me sleep, and not wake up tomorrow.
I want to die, don’t want to cry, no one understands my sorrow…

Just before Christmas a friend informed me that she had lost her chequebook whilst out shopping. “Not to worry” she said, “I’ll just get another one from the bank”.

I told her she should phone the bank immediately to get the cheques in that book stopped and order another. “Why? Nobody can use them without a bank card and they are not signed anyway” she replied.

I then told her what happened to me earlier this year.

I went to a local computer shop to buy a new hard drive for my laptop, the original one having died on me.

The shop was fairly busy and there was only one young girl serving. I told her what I wanted and she ran into the back of the shop to fetch my hard drive, came back a few minutes later and handed me a small box in a red carrier bag (that’s a clue to the name of the shop).

“Will you take a cheque?” I asked. “No problem” she replied. I wrote the cheque for £199 ($321) and handed it to her whereupon she gave it a quick glance and put it into the till. “Thank you sir, have a nice day” and turned to serve another customer.

“Just a minute” I said, “You didn’t ask me for any form of identification”.

“Well, you look like a honest person so I thought it wasn’t necessary” was the reply.

I told her that I could have been using a stolen cheque book for all she knew, and she had no right to assume that I was honest. Cheek! Anyway I showed her my driving licence just to emphasise the point.

My friend got the message and promptly phoned the bank. It was probably a 100 to 1 chance it could happen to her, but for the sake of a phone call it’s not worth taking a chance. The next day a taxi driver returned the book to the bank, she had dropped it in his cab and another passenger had found it.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” — Marcus Aurelius

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Seneca the Younger

I’m a adult. It’s not appropriate for me to have imaginary friends. People keep telling me to have faith. To me “Faith” means believing in something which you know is not true.

Yesterday I watched the BBC Antiques Road Show from the National Maritime Museum on iPlayer. They produced a big steel sea chest that the presenter, Fiona Bruce, said that it was very old and hadn’t been opened in living memory because no-one could undo the two built in locks.

Now I found that hard to believe because over the last few generations there must have been some locksmith somewhere who could open it. Fiona Bruce went on to say that they had found someone who could and would open it during the show.

Subsequent clips showed the locksmith filing, making and trying the keys which I suspect were already finished but they were waiting until the end of the show to find out what had been hidden in the strongbox for the last hundred years. Ms Bruce stated that something was rattling inside whenever the box was moved and it probably contained treasure.

At last the great moment arrived. The two massive keys were slowly turned, one at a time. The crowd surged forward to get a better look. The handle slowly turned and the lid was opened to reveal . . . nothing!

Well, not quite. There was one small item that had been causing the rattling noise for the past god-knows-how-many years. Fiona Bruce learnt forward and picking it up she held it aloft to show the watching crowd.

It was a broken red BIC ballpoint pen cap!
True!
I kid you not. These pens first became available in 1950.
Now this presents a real life mystery. Did some time-traveller from the future, or from the BBC, go back in time and remove the gold and jewels from the box, and accidently drop the top of his pen into the box before locking it and throwing the keys into the sea? OR did he bring the keys back to our time and pretend to be a locksmith to retrieve the top to his BIC Cristal pen from the box?

I have always said that reality and ‘spontaneous interview’ TV programmes are carefully scripted and rehearsed beforehand. There is certainly a lot of truth in the following video.

I read the following on Oxfams website.

“More than 13.5 million people in Britain live in poverty. That’s more than one in five without enough to live on, discriminated against, and with more barriers to achieving their potential than anyone else.
 
Many people can’t afford essential clothing, or to heat their homes. Children go to school hungry, or to bed without enough food. It’s no coincidence that people in poor communities are in poorer health, and have a shorter life expectancy.”

I don’t doubt that what they say is true, but I think they could have chosen a better picture to illustrate the fact. Obviously the food at the local Soup Kitchen is very fattening!

Albert Einstein once said: “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.”

I agree with him. When I look at the present younger generation I think to myself “These are the people who one day will rule this country?”. I glad that I won’t be around to see it.

Having a Coffee…

Get-together in a restaurant…

Enjoying the beauty of an art gallery …

Pleasantly chatting in a cafe …

Enjoying a day at the beach …

At the stadium supporting the team …

A couple spending quality time together …

Appreciating the city …

A traditional way of life is fast disappearing from the British scene. I’m talking about the English pubs.

Ever since smoking was banned in July 2007 in public places, which included pubs, restaurants and the like, people have drifted away from them. Another factor is that VAT (value added tax) was increased and greedy brewers have hiked up the price of beer, wine and spirits. The rent and Council Tax that the landlords and landladies have to pay rises every year, as does the cost of gas and electricity.

Even as I write this pubs are closing. Take a look at the widget on the right, when I started to compose this post the number was at 11,000!

I love to spend an evening or two with friends in local pubs especially ones with a good atmosphere, like the one in the video below. This particular pub, “The Bluebell”, in a local village is one of my regular “watering holes”. I know that folk music is not to every-ones liking, but I find it invigorating and it works for me.

The girl, Ann, playing the flute is the daughter of my current lady-friend. I know most of the rest of the group too. Some of them used to play at pubs and clubs in my village, namely “The Plough”, now a private house, “The Cricket Club”, which closed down two weeks ago, and yet another pub not far from my house is finding it hard to keep going and have stopped paying for live music. In the last few years a total of four public houses have closed in my town.

More and more people are buying cheap booze from supermarkets and staying at home in the evening watching mind-numbingly boring TV programmes like X-Factor, Big Brother House, Soap-operas etc., instead of getting out and about.

Here is another example of a popular pub that closed down a while back, “The Merrie Monk”. I used to go every Sunday lunchtime to meet John G of “Publog” (he’s the handsome chap in the wheelchair). After it closed it became an Indian restaurant, and John told me recently that has closed and the pub is again up for sale. I now go to the “Hollybush” about once a month to meet John and swop stories.

Now the Government have latched onto the fact that supermarkets are doing a roaring trade in canned beer and wines they are trying to introduce higher prices and taxation to match the prices paid in pubs!