Welcome to my World
Hairy Ears
Filed in Welcome to my World at 9.28am on 22 August 11Artrockers,
The ladies like to claim the moral high ground when it comes to suffering. Sure, that monthly thing is a nightmare that can turn some ladies into nightmares and child-birth is the most painful experience any human being can go though ever, but really, none of it can compare to the horror that is limited to men only - hair in your ears. Yeah, how do you like that ladies? Not so smug now are you? You can keep your complicated child-bearing plumbing problems, we've got hair in our ears. It's something that happens to men once they pass 30, the pristine lobes sprout hair and gradually a bush appears. As a colleague just said to me, it's fascinating when it first appears, you play with it between your fingers, a new experience, but pretty soon it's growing out of your ear and you become aware that people you're having conversations with aren't looking you in the eye, they're mesmerised by the new barnet appearing from your lug-holes. And the nose hairs join in and start snaking out of the nostrils, and the eyebrows become anarchists, determined to outdo Denis Healey in the bushy brow stakes. The horror!
It's a terrible burden to carry, the gradual metamorphosis into a lychanthrope is not what you were expecting at the closure of youth, you didn't think you'd have to buy a pair of those nasal and ear clippers, you weren't expecting to ask the barber to clip your ears and you certainly didn't forsee eyebrows that grew like ivy up an old wall.
But we battle on, we don't complain, we're men. We suffer in silence as the dreaded hair takes over. It's very nearly as horrible as finding the first grey pubic hair - which is, presumably, not restricted to men. But grey hair growing out of your ears, that's male suffering right there.
Tom ArtrockerThe Riots - Think Before You Speak
Filed in Welcome to my World at 11.35am on 12 August 11Artrockers,
This may come as a surprise to some readers, but unlike many of my colleagues in the 'meeja' I am not going to rush in to the present situation with prescriptions, solutions and condemnations. I will take some pleasure in saying: 'told you so', because I have, many times, but until the dust settles I'll keep my powder dry as to who's fault it is, unlike the parade of clowns who'll be assembling in their Westminster big-top today, a bunch of jokers with about as much idea of what's actually going on in the country they claim to represent as my cat. Grandstanding and bluster is all we can expect, blame and counter-blame, threats of class based legislation, retribution and the big stick - OK, I said I wouldn't draw any conclusions today but I think we all know that the majority of the blame should got to the politicians of all parties who like to play around with the lives of the people, simply because they can and then blame those very people when the consequences of their ridiculous meddling take to the streets. Whatever other conclusions are drawn there is one stark fact that nobody can deny; we as a society created these people and now we want to kick them to death, like a nation of Frankensteins we're embarrassed by the monster we created. Of course Frankenstein and his monster faced each other across the frozen wastes, embraced and died together, Frankenstein paid the ultimate price for his folly, would that parliament might meet a similar fate.
But, as I say, now is not the time for bluster, now is the time for thought and contemplation, rushed conclusions will lead to another dangerous dogs act (don't go there), decisions made in blind panic by fools against the public good. But allow me to reach this one conclusion; those children are our children, we made them, nobody else. Unless, of course, you don't believe there's such a thing as society.
Follow @TomArtrocker
Running Away
Filed in Welcome to my World at 11.15am on 05 August 11Artrockers,
Even an urbanite like myself occasionally feels the need to look at trees, listen to babbling brooks and skim stones across the waves. In order to satisfy this desire we go on holidays. For others the desire seems so overwhelming that they actually buy a second home, away from the sturm und drang of city life. Others buy boats, some even buy planes. And while they may tell themselves that they're doing this for fun / because the can afford it / in order to look at trees I perceive a deeper, darker reason, so deep that they aren't even aware of it themselves - Escape. That's escape as in the need to flee. Why buy an additional home, equip it, pay the poll tax, install security just to spend a few weeks of the year there? Well, maybe some will say it's an investment, a hedge against hard times to come, which is of course true, but why does it have to be in a field?If it's all about long term investment I'd recommend buying your second home in London with it's ever spiralling prices maintaining the national house price average at an artificial high.
I believe that the need for a second home in the country displays a subconscious knowledge that sooner or later it's all going to go pear-shaped in the city, that the great unwashed will, at some point, realise what a bunch of soft gets they've been for allowing the establishment to get away with treating them like crap for so long, sharpen up the dripping knives and head out looking for blood. Or terrorists will let off a dirty bomb, or maybe the city will be drowned in the flood. Deep down they know that one of these scenarios will happen, so it's important to have somewhere to run to when it does. And what about the boat owners? Well, the endless marinas that now blight our coast are testament to the fact that this bunch aren't taking any chances, when the nasty comes down they'll be heading out to sea where the sans-cullottes can't follow. The boat sits, fuelled up and pointing out to sea, waiting for Armageddon.
Of course all those charlies who bought narrow boats the better to cruise that canals have fatally misread the signs, there's no escape for a boat that can't take to the sea, just cruising round and round in circles 'til the plague, or the boredom gets you.
Holders of pilots licenses and the owners of private planes are taking no chances - when the balloon goes up so will they.
The most extreme case of Escape Syndrome (I thought of it, I can name it) though resides with the super-rich who's antenna for the apocalypse is particularly well developed - not for them the country home or boat, you see they know that it isn't going to be restricted to the cities, it will be planet-wide. So where do you escape to then? Don't worry, they're on the case, led by super-super rich person Richard Branson (who's escape gene is so well developed he bought himself an island...or two) they'll be leaving the planet. That's right. You think all this creating craft to leave our atmosphere is for fun? Do you think it's the old hippy looking to make money from space tourism? Think again, it's an escape pod for people with the cash to pay for it.
And they're packing their bags right now.
Tom ArtrockerPoetry Please?
Filed in Welcome to my World at 9.08am on 02 August 11Artrockers,
I confess, I have a guilty secret. I like Pointless ('Pointless is a game show shown on BBC One, hosted by Alexander Armstrong, with Richard Osman as assistant. It has been broadcast since 24 August 2009.' - thank you Wiki), I like Eggheads too but that's another story. There, I feel better for having got that off my chest. Anyhoo, there I was watching Pointless (while working very hard on Artrocker natch), one pair had been knocked out so we were down to three pairs of contestants, the next category was announced and it was poetry. Two lots of six poems were displayed on the board and it was down to the pairs to name the poet. Of the three pairs two were graduates in their 20s and the third pair were middle-aged housewives. The young graduates admitted to knowing none of them; "Byron is the only poet I can think of so I'll say Byron" - there was no Byron. The housewives knew them all, as did I.
What does this tell us? That poetry has no relevance for these young people? That they were science graduates and therefore hadn't spent much time on poetry? Maybe. Or does it signal a disconnect between these folks and their own culture? Perhaps it's an indication that education these days is crap, you decide. It worried me, no, that's too mild, it appalled me that our educated (?) hope for the future had only ever heard of one poet and couldn't name any of his works.
By now you're thinking "Well I'm no poetry expert myself, Tom's being very hard on these people, we aren't all English graduates" to which I say "Yes, but neither were the housewives, and they knew them all, non-graduates educated in a different age." But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I don't remember all of the poems, but here's a list of those I can;
If...
The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Paradise Lost
The Waste Land
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
How did you do? Was your answer to all of the above Byron? I'm guessing you got them all, not particularly taxing are they?
Maybe it's just me, maybe it doesn't matter, maybe poetry is esoteric and 'pointless', but I find it worrying that the flowers of our culture seem to be dying, am I alone in this?
Tom ArtrockerBring It All Down
Filed in Welcome to my World by Tom Artrocker at 15.46pm on 22 July 11Artrockers,
The establishment just don’t get it, they seem to think that holding a few inquiries, arresting a few errant reporters and hanging Cameron out to dry will solve the whole damn thing – they couldn’t be more wrong. As with the expenses scandal they seem to think that picking out a few naughty chaps and sending them to the wall will satisfy the electorate, and they can all go back to ignoring us and feathering their nests. But we aren’t that stupid. What the present scandal exposes is how little the establishment care about the opinions, lives and struggles of the majority in contrast to how much they care about keeping on the right side of the press, snuggling up to the super-rich and living in The Cotswolds. Put simply, the electorate are the last to be considered – and now we know it.
I’ve complained before about the big lie of ‘democracy’ in this country, we actually live under (and I use the word advisedly) the boot of ‘representative democracy’, the reality of which is; we vote every five years for the issues that matter most to us, which gives the politicians five years in which to do exactly what THEY want, with no reference to our opinions and with scant regard to ‘promises’ made. How is this democracy? How is this government by the people? Of course it isn’t anything of the sort, it’s an old fashioned stitch up, the establishment sold us a pup many years ago, dangling democracy over us like a fish above a hungry seal, whipping it away every time we get near to biting it. And we know it. So we like to see them squirm a bit, but the end result is always more of the same. It can’t go on.
And while we concentrate on the hacking business what is becoming more and more apparent is that virtually every institution in this country is corrupt, rotten and not fit for purpose; police ( no surprise there), politicians (even less surprise), big business, charities, the church, social services, local government... the decaying pillars of our establishment have propped up a section of society that believes itself above the mores of conventional society, well above the crowd, and has defined its positions in conversation with itself around the dinner tables of Chipping Norton (bomb it now) and in endless private meetings with the press. When was the last time you had a meeting with The Prime Minister? When was the last time he sought your opinion? (I’ll answer that one for you, at the last election, and he won’t want to hear from you ‘til the next one thank you very much, he has millionaire’s – who’s opinions matter more than yours - dinner parties to attend after all, as does Miliband I should add in the interest of balance, they’re all as bad as each other, all liars).
It all has to come down, in the name of democracy. Tinkering won’t solve it, in fact it will only exacerbate the situation. We have to take a look at what we have, keep what works (nothing that I can see) and start again. We aren’t suffering from a ‘democratic deficit’, we have no democracy in which to be deficient, it’s a big lie, we are the pawns of ambitious people who think nothing of sacrificing us in search of the king, who make decisions about our every day existence without any reference to us, the dumb, unwashed idiots who bail out banks and the Eurozone directly from our pockets while struggling to keep body and soul together.
We really are a bunch of suckers, and they know that, it feeds them.
Bring it all down.
News RSS Feed
