Polko says.. Common Sense and Education.
Unfortunately, I have found that these two things very rarely surface in an individual in anything like equal proportion. If one aspect is lacking you tend to find that that person reverts to saying, "of course you see all these educated people, they have no common sense". Or vice versa.
Recently I have had cause to remind myself that education really does give you a better chance in life.
I will interject to explain a little about Polko. Polko - the real Polko now not anonymous blog Polko (although they are very much the same person in many a way!) - has a First Class Honours Economics Degree (gained when degrees were degrees), a Masters Degree from a top London University, several peer reviewed papers published in professional journals and is the author of a book (that nobody will read because its subject is so academically interesting). To top all this I have a fair amount of common sense and basic 'life skill'. I can get stuck in when it comes to plumbing, electrical work (and we're not talking about changing a plug here - I have practically re-wired a four storey Victorian office and shop saving thousands on some spotty young electrician who would have been working from the manual and from the manual only, down'ing tools when he hit a problem he'd never encountered before). Oh, and Polko possesses a sense of humour too. Well fuelled by Mrs Polko I might add.
Back to the plot.
...which brings me to this morning. This morning I looked around at the few people that live on top of my hill and realised that I am the one that has the easier life (I very rarely work 5 days a week), more frequent holidays, for what they're worth the nice cars, more hobbies and interests outside of bringing up my family and, not that it registers high on my scale, but a higher disposable income (despite having had a child with a money-sucking leach from outer space - no, really - somebody had to and this alien appeared to have a good strong and varied genetic structure).
The defining factor is quite possibly level of education - at least that's what my econometrics/statistics background tells me! Somebody else lurks a little higher up the hill. Another one like me with even more years of education under his belt. This one an eye surgeon. I have a suspicion he too doesn't work as much as people think he does (not now anyway) to live in the big house.
So, I thank my parents at least for giving me the two things that I consider to improve my score; a basic training in common sense (don't you like my builder's bum - below) and the possibility to pursue education to the highest level I could.
...which brings me to the worry that if the people that publish my son's SATS practice test papers (Coordination Group Publications Limited - where the strapline image 1 above was lifted from) can't spell, and these are foremost education consultants, then how are the teachers that have been entrusted with my son's education supposed to give him an adequate one? (Don't even get me started on the fact that one of his teachers burnt all the toast - I mean ALL the toast - on day one of the SATS week breakfast club. I don't think they teach toast making on the PGCE? But, then again, you don't need teaching, you need common sense.. equal proportion as Depeche Mode once said - Get The Balance Right).
Anyway.. I was working through a few revision papers with my son at the weekend as this is SATS week for Year 6 pupils. As I read the inside cover of the English answer booklet I noticed that they started to flip around with the spelling of practice, sometimes appearing as practise instead of with the c..? Odd I thought, maybe it was a one-off - I know I'm hard on the people that work with me for spelling and general consistency/typo errors but everybody's allowed one mistake - but it just kept coming up time and again. More strange is the fact that it changes between practice and practise throughout all the English and Maths, etc papers - no consistent error, just all over the place, sloppy practice..
Either get something right or get something wrong? The inconsistency shows me two things. That this was a true misunderstanding and not just a one-off mistake and, more worryingly (given that the page footer pronounced proudly that Glenn Rogers and Vanessa Kushner were to be thanked for the proofreading) nobody had been bothered to check through it - despite this gem of wisdom from the instructions to children!
Wherever you are out there in the real world - well done Glenn, well done Vanessa. You couldn't even do this simple task right!
Here's the paper - click the link for a larger view - wonder at the inconsistency of it all. The Maths one is unfortunately the same - but in an inconsistent way!
The English paper sternly warns: These practice papers won't make children better at English... How could they, they didn't help the people writing them did they?
So, what of the world that my child is growing up in? I fear it is disappearing down a very long but fast rotating grey vortex.
...which brings me to the Public sector. As the Director of a company I received a notice a few weeks back asking me to check our current accounts position with a local authority that shall remain unnamed (in Lancashire and begins with B - there are a few but it's one of those!). So, given we have an environmental policy we filled out the form and e-mailed it back to them. Problem 1: the form stated we had to do this by Friday 9 May 2009. Now unless my year planner has been hijacked in some cruel hoax I think Friday was the 8 May don't you? Error one. Maybe Vanessa or Glenn now work at B? Problem 2: When e-mailed a bounce back occurred about five minutes later, the postmaster@b_.gov.uk telling me that the address I had used did not exist. Error two. Now I have some friends who work in the public sector that constantly moan they don't get paid as much as others (whilst almost in the same breathe deriding anybody who appears to get paid a lot without really knowing the stress and strain that others might go through in their jobs). Don't get me wrong, not all of these people moan. But some do. I have only one thing to say about it: pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Clearly b_.gov.uk are following this recruitment method.
...which brings me to the end. For now. I sincerely hope I spelled everything correctly today. And my son too as he's going into his English SATS just about... ... ...now.
Towards the third quarter of the 19th Century, when the West was busy being won, travelling 'salesmen' used to roam Arizona, California and Nevada - the so called tri-State area. Of course, the States were not as they are now but the principle still applies. These salesmen or Travelling Medicine Shows as they were known used to wander from town to town with wooden crates packed full of oil of mysterious properties and a bunch of henchmen that would testify to the healing properties of the elixirs. This ointment would solve any health issue you can name, it was also sold as a general cleaner, perfect for use with animals or as a bringer of health, wealth and good fortune all round. The idea was an old Chinese one (with some medical credence for alleviating rheumatism), but mis-used in the new land of opportunity that was opening up by the 1880s or so.
Roll up, roll up come and try our new improved, even better than before, Snake Oil! If you ain't ill, it'll fix your car (a particularly good Big Audio Dynamite line that I'm lifting to make the point!).
The salesmen are still around - in fact they exist everywhere in the world. These days they can be found fronting a whole industry of homeopathic medicines, so called tinctures drawn from root 'holy water' containing one part in ten billion or so of some mystical active ingredient. They are also found wherever you place your money, offering higher and higher rates of return for doing absolutely nothing. Give others your money and they'll give you your very own franchised snake oil sales operation with 'unlimited earnings potential' through addressing envelopes or selling people 'water purifiers'.
In the UK we have a particularly large and organised snake oil sales team, selling people their lifestyle products - from food to clothes, car insurance to bank accounts, children's remedies to funerals. (As an aside my next door neighbour appears very pleased with her new shirt bought from this Medicine Show, and it only cost about £12 apparently? That and a load of chinese child sweat in some unregulated hovel in Quangdong Province luvvie - maybe you should send one of your two daughters there for a while and she can bring you back some more shirts?)
This particular Medicine Show just posted a record £3bn+ profit figure today.
Every little clearly helps them.
To paraphrase and mis-quote another famous line: Ask not what Tesco can do for you, but what Tesco will do you for next?
...for some interesting modern snake oil remedies see Wired's page here
Easter break. we just had my son's friends over for a sleepover - at 11 they act like 14.. but I guess that's life these days.
The alarming thing is his friends ability to try and spend money like it's water. I live on a hill, 2 miles from the nearest shops but even before we got there with his friends for the first time, they were asking about how far we were from the nearest shop to buy things? One of them had £35 in his pockets (for a one night stayover?!!?) and the other (from what I'd say judging the house they live in - just round the corner from where I used to live - a less well off family) another £15...
Thank god I brought up my son to know about money - where it comes from, how much effort goes into the people who send me cheques, how much studying it took for me to send out those invoices, you know... the whole cycle of try, win, work, get paid, go to cashtill...
Seems his friends haven't a clue. I don't know who's right, but I'm happy with the way I've done it so far. And it almost-half-pains me (given her own greediness) to say, his mum is also doing the right thing too it would seem. How many of these kids are gonna get a right old shock when they hit the real world? Not mine. And that's all that matters I suppose.
As the sleepover progressed one of the kids was going on about how his dad has this new fast convertible car.. da di da di... bla bla blah... and it's a BMW too. woo hoo!
Rhyme intended (just so happens I have a 50 yr old classic engineered to exacting tolerances that BMW would die for - and that his dad probably hasn't got the brains to have ever heard about in his life.. add to that the fact that I could go out tomorrow and buy a brand new Bee-em-double-shit if I wanted to - cash I might add, no down payment and monthly debits here). Don't get me wrong - this is NOT how it reads, I really hatew it when people get impressed by what someone's got - I've got a load of nice things, so f*cking what? Don't change who I am.
The real revelation is that my son at 11 years old already knows (and appreciates) that it doesn't really matter what you've got - my work could dry up tomorrow (and certainly nobody is going to pay me for doing nothing, I can't go "on the sick" and still get paid for weeks on end) and I could lose the cars, the lifestyle etc but the thing is if the shit went down, i mean, really down, I could walk away from this pile of stone and roof and head out into the hills and live. Trap, eat, drink, etc. Food, clothes and shelter. That's all that matters. Full stop.
And all that you can really give kids is a realisation of the world as it is - and the means to put food, clothes and shelter in their reach. That doesn't mean putting almost fifty quid or so in their pocket and telling them to piss off out of the way for the afternoon and go and buy some trainers made through exploiting less fortunate kiddies than themselves.
The next day we marched said kids out on a four mile walk - a bit tame by 'family Polko' standards but they had stayed up til the early hours. These kids couldn't even put one foot in front of the other without stumbling and falling over - they just don't have what it takes off a pavement (and probably have trouble with kerbs, traffic lights and urban street furniture let alone rough-ish moorland). To their credit they finished without a moan and seemed to enjoy the quiet and wilderness of it all.
Now as I sit here on my hill thinking, as I often do, I'm suddenly struck by the thought that for someone who hasn't got a clue about kids, I've probably done alright with my son making it up as we go along. He has enough life skills to whoop ass on plenty of adults already. He's 11, roll on another few years and he's gonna be runnin' like nobody's business.
One happy Polko this evening - in the kitchen eating home made pasta and listening to New Order - Dreams Never End - discounting the fact that Mrs Polko is at her friends and not by my side - but we all have to have our space.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder... other things tend to grow on the return too... but that's another story?
A long blog but worth it, trust me.
I just read this at PirateBay's website and feel the need to post it here too - from a collection of emails they regularly receive trying to stop them sharing a variety of material with other people on the web (despite pirate bay not having any actual content on their servers whatsoever). But hey! you knew that already. Being a reader of my blog you know all about file sharing don't you? don't you?
It makes the complainant look a right dick.. as well as grey as can be.. which is always welcome in my book:
>Subject: Copyright Claim
>Date: Saturday 15 April 2006 07:12
>From: email1@prophecyhouse.com
>To: tiamo_prq.se
>
>Please acknowledge receipt of this message and that it my claim is being
>addressed:
Uh? Please rephrase that. "that it my"?
>To whom it may concern at PRQ.se,
>
>1. I have placed the words "Copyright Claim" in this message's subject
>line (see above). I personally (Timothy J. Huckabay) am the legal
>copyright holder to the book The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea
>(registration number TX-4-880-636) AND ALL VIDEOS RELATED TO IT WITH TIM
>COHEN (MY PEN NAME). I am also the owner and President of Prophecy
>House, Inc., which is the publisher of the book AND RELATED VIDEOS; you
>may visit our web site at www.prophecyhouse.com, where the book is
>previewable AND THE VIDEOS ARE SHOWN ON OUR ORDER FORMS, and see our
>order forms here: http://www.prophecyhouse.com/order (make sure you use
>a browser that has JavaScript enabled). THIS EMAIL MESSAGE, WHICH IS
>FROM WWW.PROPHECYHOUSE.COM (PROPHECY HOUSE'S DOMAIN), CONSTITUTES MY
>LEGAL ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE. However, if that is not sufficient, you may
>provide a fax number to me in your response, and I will fax a printed
>copy of this message with my written signature at the bottom of the
>fax. You may also call me directly at Prophecy House to address any
>questions you may have or any further information you feel you may need:
>303-693-6399.
Wow, that's a lot of text to read. You like to brag, don't you? "I am the owner",
"I am the president" and so forth. That's very nice. We don't really care.
I'm the president of my make-believe country The Pirate Islands. Oh, and I'm the
owner of my old Peugeot 205 (1989 year model) as well. Once we filmed that car
while I was driving. I guess I'm the owner of those tapes as well. So we have
ALOT in common! That's nice. But you brag about it, that's so not cool! :(
>ThePirateBay.org has posted and is permitting downloads of an illegal
>electronic version of MY VIDEO ON The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea at this URL:
>http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3439729
They are? I seriously doubt that they actually posted that torrent. I guess some
of those fellons using that evil site posted it, darn :(
>. You may contact me, the complaining party, here:
>
>Tim Huckabay
>Phone: 303-693-6399 (Prophecy House) or 720-284-7707 (my personal cell
>phone number)
>E-Mail: email1@prophecyhouse.com
>Prophecy House, Inc.
>P.O. Box 461104
>Aurora, CO 80046-1104
>USA
Hey wait a minute, this isn't a Copyright claim now is it? This looks more like
a personal ad! How about checking out some of the local press instead of trying
to pick up people in other continents? Actually, being in different countries
(even on different continents) means that we don't have the same laws here.
You know, in Sweden, it's still legal to do a lot of things. Elks can have sex
with eachother without being prosecuted for instance. And people are allowed
to copy. It's quite natural, both of them, don't you think?
>I, Timothy J. Huckabay, as the legal registered copyright holder of the
>said work (The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea AND ALL VIDEOS RELATED TO IT
>IN WHICH TIM COHEN / HUCKABAY APPEARS), as the author of the said work
>(under my pen name Tim Cohen), and as the publisher of the said work
>through my company Prophecy House, Inc. (www.prophecyhouse.com), HAVE A
>GOOD FAITH BELIEF THAT USE OF ANY MATERIAL -- TO INCLUDE VIDEOS IN WHICH
>I, TIM HUCKABAY / COHEN, APPEAR -- WHATSOEVER FROM THE ANTICHRIST AND A
>CUP OF TEA (ISBN 0966279301, LCCN 98-84509) BY CONSPIRACYCENTRAL.NET OR
>ANY OTHER PARTY NOT EXPLICITLY AUTHORIZED BY ME AND PROPHECY HOUSE,
>INC., IN WRITING, IS NOT AUTHORIZED AND IS IN FACT ILLEGAL AND A
>VIOLATION OF ALL APPLICABLE COPYRIGHT LAWS GLOBALLY. FURTHERMORE, I
>HAVE A GOOD FAITH BELIEF THAT THEPIRATEBAY.ORG AND PRQ.se, AS THE
>HOSTING SERVICE, ARE BOTH INFRINGING MY LEGAL AND REGISTERED COPYRIGHTS.
You write with big letters, it make my head hurt. Come again, you're sending
us an e-mail telling us how wrong you are?
>ALL INFORMATION PROVIDED BY ME, TIMOTHY J. HUCKABAY, IN THIS EMAIL
>MESSAGE TO PRQ.se IS STATED UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY. I AM THE LEGAL
>AND REGISTERED COPYRIGHT HOLDER AND OWNER OF THE ANTICHRIST AND A CUP OF
>TEA BOOK AND ALL MATERIALS RELATED TO IT, TO INCLUDE VIDEOS, DVDS, CDS,
>ETC. THIS COMPLAINT IS GENERAL TO ALL VIDEO AND AUDIO MATERIALS IN
>WHICH I APPEAR OR PARTICIPATE THAT ARE RELATED TO THE ANTICHRIST AND A
>CUP OF TEA.
Bla bla bla.. those big letters again. Brag, brag, brag..
>So, in this section, I have a) provided PRQ.se with the necessary
>electronic signature, b) I have identified the infringed work to which I
>hold the copyright as the book entitled, The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea
>AND ALL VIDEO AND AUDIO MATERIAL RELATED TO IT IN WHICH I APPEAR OR AM
>HEARD, c) I have provided PRQ.se with the precise location on
>thepiratebay.org's site where thepiratebay.org is permitting the world
>to download an illegal electronic version of my VIDEO ON The AntiChrist
>and a Cup of Tea (i.e., http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3439729
>), d) my complete contact information as the complaining party, e) my
>good faith statement that my personal copyright of The AntiChrist and a
>Cup of Tea VIDEO ITEM is being infringed by both thepiratebay.org and
>PRQ.se, and f) my penalty of perjury statement that I am the legal and
>registered copyright owner of the said book and related materials as well.
In sweden we had a cool tv-show once. It was called "Vi i femman" (means
something like "we in the fifth grade") and it was a lot like your letter.
People answer questions about meaningless stuff. I'd like to answer like them!
On a) our answer is; "pannkaka" (google for it), and on b) we answer "congratulations".
Regarding c) our answer would have to be "hope you like the site" and on d)
"we understand your desperate needs".
Wow, a lot of questons, let's continue:
Our answer on both e) and f) is that we don't really have any faith in you, nor
do we actually believe that you are who you say you are. Can you please
send us a signed picture of yourself?
As a bonus answer on d) we would like to help you out, we understand the
severe problem you must have finding other men like yourself when you actually
try to hook up with random people in another continent like this!
So please go to http://thepiratebay.org/ and login. We have a quite large
porn section I guess, and since we are of such high moral we actually filter
the section for non-logged in users. So register (it's free!) and check it out!
>2. It is now PRQ.se's legal responsibility to to remove or disable
>access to http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3439729 , where my
>copyrighted WORK is being infringed. Further, should this material be
>posted again on thepiratebay.org's site, while PRQ.se is
>thepiratebay.org's hosting service, we will be obliged to take legal
>action against both parties at that time.
Uuuuuhh.. no it's not. We don't infringe on anything, now you're getting a bit
too personal here! We might start to cry when you threaten us, and we don't
have anyone to take care of us. Is that your mighty plan?
>3. CONSIDER THIS TO BE APPROPRIATE EMAIL NOTIFICATION, PURSUANT TO
>COPYRIGHT CLAIMS IN THE DMCA AND PRQ.se'S OWN POLICIES. NOW IT IS
>PRQ.se'S RESPONSIBILITY TO FORWARD THIS WRITTEN NOTIFICATION TO
>THEPIRATEBAY.ORG, THE INFRINGER, AND TO TAKE REASONABLE STEPS PROMPTLY
>TO NOTIFY THE INFRINGER THAT IT HAS REMOVED OR DISABLED ACCESS TO MY
>COPYRIGHTED WORK'S MATERIAL (
>http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3439729 ).
Consider this to be a letter that replies "fuck you" in an ironic yet subtle way.
Oh, damn, i just wrote it straight out!
>Sincerely,
>
>Timothy J. Huckabay
>President and Owner, Prophecy House, Inc. AND Legal Copyright Holder to
>The AntiChrist and a Cup of Tea book, etc.
Sincerely,
The Pirate Bay crew
presidents and owners, The Pirate Islands AND A 1989 Peugeot 205 GTI (the one with
the large engine) and copyright holders (*fnizz*) of the movies we shot during some
driving with it.
In the middle of the 80's I used to buy the Sunday Times religously. This might not be strange in itself given it was a Sunday when I did it. Nothing special there you might think? Only, I was 16 or 17 years old and I guess it's not the usual thing you'd expect someone of that age to settle down to read. Especially given that I wasn't a nerdy 6th former type at the time (not me - not then, not now, not ever!). On the Saturday night you'd usually have found me dancing around to the latest synth-pop electronic music at my local nightclub, driving around the town with my mates eyeing up women or, a year or so later, taking my girlfriend out.
So, what was I doing with the Times on my knee each Sunday afternoon. Tucked up happily in a suburban house somewhere, essentially nowhere (but that's open to debate) in the east of the country?
In fact, after a quick read through a news section or two (back then the Sunday Times was even bigger and heavier than it is now.. or maybe my hands are bigger?), I used to spend most of my time browsing the Jobs pages, focused mainly on City of London type jobs, and the Cars and Houses pages stuffed full of ads for Bentley's, exotic Italian sports cars and Thames-side apartments that were going for £100,000... imagine that £100,000! (I'll have 3 of those these days). I used to amaze myself at what some people were selling - not becuase of the fact that it was a real life Lamborghini like I'd grown up with on my bedroom wall, but more because I realised that some people were on the other side of the transaction and had the sort of money that most people could never ever dream of having (back then credit wasn't thrown at you like in recent times and if you drove a nice car you were not leasing it). I even set myself a target of being a millionaire by the time I was 30 and driving a Porsche 928S. Don't ask me where that particular dream went, but come and go it certainly did despite a move to London and a really well paid job for a while - I think I know what happened along the way but that's for another blog post..
Hmmm... What brought this retro-rant on you might ask? Last week I was completing some work for a client listening to The Pet Shop Boys 'Please' and the various 12 inches associated with it in the background. Listening to Opportunities or Love Comes Quickly brought back a feint whiff of my mindset and aspirations at the time. Like a lot of kids in the 80s I did have the Lamborghini Countach poster on the wall alongside Debbie Harry wrapped provocatively in a plastic sheet (focus, Polko, focus!). So, mine was a typical UK upbringing of glorification of material items and money-making and Thatcher was in power and people were indeed making lot's of money.. some people anyway, and my world was touching on that little group through girlfriends and family businesses so what did I know of others in Merseyside or elsewhere that were actually not making anything at all.? That was to be changed a few years later in the episode where Polko ventures west from his home town.
Nothing wrong with a bit of dreaming though if you ask me. People were still social, people still talked to each other. These days almost everyone is unable to talk sensibly to you as they are tapping away at the text keys of the latest mobile gizmo - a disease that started sometime in the 90s and has subsequently come into its horrible own in the first ten years of the 21st century. Even if they did start a conversation today it would probably be about some minor celebrity on tv last night, their latest BMW 3-series lease car, football or some other drivel wholly unrelated to how they were really feeling or thinking. Almost certainly not the state of the Middle East or about something with a little more meaning than kicking around a piece of leather that is meant to symbolise a pigs stomach for some unknown reason.
Give me the 80s any day - to (mis-)quote Depeche Mode, back then People Were People...
...oh, and the winning Euromillions Lottery numbers this week would come in handy to buy some of those things I used to look at too. I'd still drive that white Lamborghini Countach (if only to disgust my current girlfriend!) but might pass on the London flat for something a little more rural, and a little more French.. with horses darling!
Dream on.
An abstract thought, but I hope interesting nonetheless.
I was driving in a town near me the other day and kept reaching the traffic lights next to a security van. Time after time it was me and the security guards looking into each others vehicles (my car is a 4x4 so they could see me and I them). This carried on for four or five sets of lights around the ring road and I felt like they were looking at me and becoming suspicious - not that I routinely look like a gangster or ne'er do well but I had been out the night before with a friend and was unshaven and hungover so probably looked a little rough at the edges to say the least. If only they knew I was at that very moment listening to Wham's Greatest Hits in my car! I'm guessing this is hardly your average gangsters choice of music while on the job.
I got to thinking what is statistically the most significant day of the week for security vans to get done over / blagged / held up - you choose the dialect and accent depending on where your from. There must be a specific day that more vans get done over than any other? Friday's, and this was a Friday that I am speaking of, have got to be up there as a prime candidate? End of week wages blags and all that? And, taking this further, there are probably regional variations in preferred days of operation of the scumbags, preferred vehicles and methods of operation.. Now, if you could collate all that information into a database and analyse it spatially you would have a great - and profitable - line of business. Advising the security firms of when to go out, what to look for and which vans to have tagged and followed by others/Police etc?
Or, given the millions involved in this line of business, maybe this already happens?
Anyway... onto something a little lighter... as if! This week I am finally going to dig out my copy of the Ruthless Rap Assassins 1991 release Th!nk - It Ain't Illegal Yet. One of my all time favourite UK conscious rap releases, and all done in a flat in Hulme - now sadly (in a strange way?) pulled down and 'regenerated' into an entire district of Lego houses all resplendent with an array of 'To Let' or 'For Sale' signs on them, inhabited by grey students whose only act of rebellion these days is ordering the Grandé Cappuccino at Starbucks not the Regular, or perhaps sprinkling a little more cocoa powder on there than usual? These kiddies would shudder at the thought of the student squats that used to stand where mummy and daddy have bought their little box in the city, sorry I should use the term apartment. There, does that make you feel better for paying so much for it?
The link is this. The Ruthless Rap Assassins, three black kids who grew up North Hulme, Manchester in the 80s wrote some amazing lyrics about how life was getting a little duller each day, people's minds becoming numbed by everyday celebrity tat and how the US and UK governments (along with many other of their cronies) was marauding the world in the honest name of capitalism and democracy! This was 1991. This was the age of the Gulf War. Who knows what happened to Anderson, Kermit and Carson (and if you do, please get in touch as I'd personally love to buy 'em all a drink and ask them to start writing this stuff again) but their lyrics are now more salient than ever in describing the trajectory that this country has found itself on.. from the students who now live their Wi-Fi broadband-enabled Diesel-clothes-clad lives where the Assassins flat and those of others such as A Guy Called Gerald once stood to the countless hordes of suburban families in Barratt Homes feeding off a diet of cheap Tesco food, Hello! magazine, Celebrity This And That on TV and shopping centres filled from floor to ceiling with all the latest stuff you never knew you didn't want.
I'm not a Celebrity, Get Me Outta Here..
Here's a short excerpt of those lyrics written at the emergence of the 90s housing market crisis, 1st Gulf War and post-Poll Tax/Public Utility sell-offs please do take time to think, it really ain't illegal.. yet..
excerpt: Think (Hinds/Hinds), 1991
Britains in a mess because the government stinks
Does anybody care what the poor man thinks
Interest rates rising 'til they can't rise no more
You know the shit was heavy 'cos they started a war
You know who got the blame, they called him insane
But just who was it sold him the weapons and planes
The National Health's in trouble, lack of money is why
But still they spent millions sendin' people to die
Too many people scared to stand up and rebel
You listen to the government and you buy what they sell
They made the cuts and the nation bears the scars
Sold power to the people when the power was ours
And now you're an owner but something ain't right
'Cos if you don't pay your bills they still cut your light
Companies going under and the government say
To keep inflation down that's the price we have to pay
They sold shares in gas and telecon
Most people on the street couldn't get none
Worked like a slave to buy your own house
But when you heard the shout you were gettin' thrown out
Got no bread, can't afford the water
Can't meet the bills at the end of the quarter
Poverty is hell and most are on the brink
You let it happen 'cos you didn't stop and think
Bringing Colour To The Grey People
Having just celebrated (?) my 40th birthday I guess this is an illogical next step.. but then, those who know me would expect nothing less..Polko has been getting increasingly irritated about people accepting less than their fair share of life lately. Is it really the hidden meaning of life to simply accept where you are, what you do and not strive to do something different each day? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy in my place but I know there's more that I can do. I just think life is a little monochrome without targets and obstacles to hitting them. I'm not saying inner peace is a bad thing. In fact, it's only when you are really happy inside and with your station in life that you can realistically tackle those obstacles and achieve the more difficult things you want to do. It's just that I keep meeting people who just don't want to do anything more than they are doing right now? Or, much worse still, are those who can't see that they could do anything more than they are doing. The way I see it, local or global the state of the world is really only a product of the state of people's minds who live in it.We were not put at the top of the evolutionary pyramid (allegedly. lol.) to sit on our arses all day now were we?Don't Fade To Grey... Please...
