Apologies for radio silence

Ok, so this has been something of a false start. I have my reasons, a tosser always has his reasons. Personally I put my blogging inactivity down to bad timing, I admit that this is a pretty piss poor excuse but then again I am a tosser!

I was suffering something of a momentous event hangover. The entire capitalist system seemed (still seems) to be collapsing around us. The news continues to serve up generous daily portions of rapid rises in unemployment, home repossessions and numerous other financial disasters and assorted doom mongering (Robert Peston, take a bow). Our great esteemed (read clueless) leader saw fit to give the very people who seem to have largely caused this dreadful mess many hundreds of billions of pounds of public money. This appears to have been syphoned with unexpected efficiency directly into various executives various Swiss bank accounts. Thus the very rich get richer and every body else gets brutally sodomised. Low and behold the status quo is rectified. Happy days indeed.

The watery wintery sun shone slightly brighter in early November when America voted an actual bonafide deity as it's next president. I was, like most of the rest of the world, rather pleased by this. My pleasure is mildy tempered, and remember pleasure is only ever fleeting, by the fact that if you thumb back through only a couple of pages of British history you arrive at the apparently wonderful spring of 1997. Substitute "Change we can believe in" with "Things can only get better" (perhaps the most dreadful slogan in the history of politics) and you might see some fairly obvious parallels, mainly huge great dollops of shallow rhetoric eagerly fed to a desperate population by a fawning media. And just look at how all that turned out.

Come my people's revolution it is Murdoch who'll be first against the wall. (Just to clarify i'm talking about media moguls not members of the A-Team)

Anyway his devine holiness Obama can sleep easily knowing that he still has the benefit of my doubt for now. His speech in Chicago (a great city I have very fond memories of) on that night was certainly very impressive. Three hearty cheers for the speech writers. In my experience though adulation generally turns rapidly to disappointment. Maybe, just maybe.

Around this time the British nation lost it's collective marbles and worked itself into a frankly ridiculous frenzy, almost entirely engineered by the odious Daily Mail mobilising the "moral majority", over the fact that a couple of puerile, but reasonably funny comedians and radio presenters broadcasted themselves leaving a slightly rude message on an aging actors answering machine in which they discussed the fact that one of them had slept with his granddaughter (One of them actually had). For the purposes of proper outrage said actor was turned into a "national treasure" There were 2 complaints, from people who'd actually heard it, the day after this moderately tasteless item was broadcast. A week later after the Mail had properly outlined this outrage, and the rest of the media had jumped unedifying onto the bandwagon, complaints numbered well over 30,000, from people who hadn't actually heard it. The fine institution that is the BBC was publically flogged, resignations and suspensions ensued. Our clueless Prime Minister passed dour judgement. Questions were even asked in Parliament for fucks sake! It all ended well though when the granddaughter in question, a member of a vampiric burlesque show called the Satanic Sluts, complained bitterly that all this attention was hurting her grandfather. She even managed to maintain her righteous indignation as she hired a publicist and sold her "story" to most read tabloid newspaper in the country. (Mr. Murdoch, again I salute you)

Anyway all this is irrelevant. I missed the boat. It's all been discussed endlessly. Since then things have been a touch mundane or just a case of same old, same old. And that has left me a touch impotent, blog wise. This is of course no reflection on my own personal life, which is actually looking quite promising right now, and I may or may not choose to mention aspects of it at certain points as I see fit. These are things that have bothered or interested me and may give people a bit of insight into how I think about things. Right that's it various rants over with.

On a lighter note I have just finished reading a rather good book. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. He wrote it in the 60s but no one would publish it. He suffered depression as a result of this and killed himself at the age of 32. A rather tragic story, his mother believing in her son's talent persevered until it was published in the 80s. It subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. I can heartily recommend it. It really is very good and very funny. Incidentally it was also Bill Hicks's favorite book, which may or may not put you off.

Right i'm tired now and need fine wine, so i'll say goodbye. Until next time.