My blog and occasional comment on current affairs.
Well, I’m back. I apologize for not writing recently but I have been on a minor European tour. First off, I’ve been to Bruges. In Belgium. Like the feckin’ movie. It was a lovely place and is one of the most perfectly preserved medieval cities in Belgium. It’s full of cobbled streets, cafes, statues, old…
Except it isn’t really is it? I just felt like stealing a headline that appears in nearly every Daily Mail issue ever. What is pretty fucked though is the underground and the post office. I’m sure there are lots of other things wrong but these affect me. When either of these two groups of “people”…
I’ve been up to fuck all recently as I just seem to work all the time. As I work freelance and am going on holiday to Thailand on the 10th of November for a month, I have been forcing myself to accept nearly every shift that comes my way. Which is crap. In addition to…
There used to be a lot more newspapers lying around the places I work but that seems to have changed. Now it just seems to be the Metro which I will already have read. My work commute takes me 24 minutes which is coincidentally the exact time it takes me to read the Metro. As…
Halting State is set in the not too distant future. Scotland has devolved (in a political not Darwinian sense), gained independence, and the world is even more saturated with information technology and computer nerdiness than ever before.
In my youth alien planets were desert but today they are forests. To be specific, in my youth they looked like the Vasquez rocks outside LA and now they look like a Canadian forest.
I missed two marches in London I would like to have seen.
You may have guessed by now that I get pissed off by conspiracy types that claim we haven’t been to the moon. What they have done is look at all the stuff NASA has put out and rather than construct any decent arguments, have simply picked holes in the ‘proof’.
Although over 95% of the Thai population are Buddhists, there is also a strong belief in Animism or spirit worship. Ghosts and spirits (known as Pii) abound and are found everywhere from offices and homes to haunted trees and fruit groves.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this book is a ‘Russian classic’, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is truly worth a read.
My favourite has to be: (from Metro) ‘George Osborne charged the taxpayer £47 for two DVDs of his own speech on Value For Taxpayers’ Money.’
It’s now 6am and I am at work. There is something wrong with the way my life is going. Working in TV as a freelancer is a bizarre way to make a living.
Colin Martin worked in construction, had his own small business, and was married with kids. An almost clichéd idyll that makes the subsequent fall all the more compelling.
JG Ballard died of cancer aged 78 on the 19th of April 2009. It is sad to think he will never release another book. He was usually labelled a Sci Fi writer but he frequently strayed from this label to write unique, often dystopian, scenarios that sort of/kind of/might just happen.