Warr Guitar Baby

More conclusive proof that I live in a musical, cultural and social vacuum - the late, great personal discovery of the Warr Guitar, about 20 years after it's invention (thanks to Norman for the tip). If I ever learn to play the normal (Peace?) guitar I might consider taking up the Warr, maybe one fine day. I also hear that somebody's invented a mobile phone, another launched instant noodles and that threepenny bits are no longer legal tender. Wow.

The other shower...

...because the current one is clearly falling apart and sadly the Conservatives despite their manifesto promises are as clueless, inept and irritating as their Labour counterparts.

Most of today has been spent repainting, regrouting, resealing, repairing and recovering from the bathroom upgrade (or deep clean as it has come to be known). The soundtrack to this highly hazardous activity was from the good old boys at Planet Rock, it was like being sixteen again: Yes, ELP, Zep one after another - it was like working in a care home.

Then out through the garden to clean up the nearby woods, carry lumps of timber across country, gingerly remove litter, tat and various discarded rusty things and then have a bonfire and a much needed beer - for relaxation purposes only. The wheelbarrow also has a flat tyre, how do you fix that? After that I headed back to the front to regrade the two tons of Flintstones quarry chips into my own sweaty version of the fast lane of the M6, smooth but with a few authentic potholes. Bored with road building I moved onto taming the Clematis, Clitoris or Cotton Candy Weed or whatever it's called that climbs across our house like an unwanted cat-burglar. It was like wrestling a drunken Glaswegian snake and I resorted to extreme measures to tame the beast, snip snip meaning painful surgery. By now I'd built a magnificent trellis type of construction so the well coiffured plant could be attached to it's new frame with some chunky tie wrap and surprisingly few major injuries for me. I'm of now to inhale some aerosol bath sealer, purely for medicinal purposes.

Below pinched from Rosie Bell's blog, from a series "After the Fairytale".

Not my manifesto

Hard to believe that this pathetic image is the cover of the Labour Party Manifesto 2010, the contents are worse, don't go there. So young families everywhere appear to be heading into or being led into either a nuclear explosion or the Golden Dawn (the darker significance of the Golden Dawn may have been lost on Gordon B) , how daft and uninspiring. This is from the party of "reform" who sadly haven't managed to reform anything despite numerous chances since about 1946. It should've been completely different, I was once a proud Young Socialist - but that dream has died and I'm an old cynic.

Start your life now

...but not by doing this sort of thing. One life affirming, positive step is to avoid the current crop of TV advertisements. Another good move is avoid the chronic, patronising glossy ads in the Sunday sups (but you cant), anyhow the top X crap ads at the moment in my humble opinion are:

1. The Volvic challenge. A dippy looking guy who looks like a reject from a bad BBC sitcom suggests in fairly forceful terms that you take the "14 day Volvic Challenge". All you need to do is drink 1.5 litres of this volcanic water every day for 14 days and you'll feel better. No, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes thank you or just drink the odd bottle of Theakstons.

2. Bing.com. MS search engines tries to engage with normal folks (?) by creating an unlikely and irritating beardy couple who search on line at supersonic speed every time the other utters a word. Bollocks.

3. Go Compare. Nauseating and unfunny, fat opera singer with a false moustache. Nobody could like this drivel. Almost as bad as the bald shouty guy doing the Moneysupermarket ad.

4. 5 Gum by Wrigley. Apparently you slip a piece into your mouth and the effect is like going into a funky roller coaster that runs through some kind of industrial fridge plant at 100mph. No it's chewing gum, you put it in your mouth, it freshens your breath a bit then it turns to Plasticine and you have to gob it out or dump it into a tissue and it makes a horrible mess. It does not equal any kind of roller coaster ride anywhere.

5. Internet Explorer and "I'm a PC". Worst of all is the guy who's proud of hiding his browsing history from his wife - so he can buy her presents he claims, yeah right. He's either on porn sites or he's a paedophile, just look at his scary, smug and insane grin. Yuck! Get Firefox.

Glad I go that lot out of my system - I'm also avoiding cooking and home improvement shows and my blood pressure is normal, I may be almost fit. Having said that I shovelled two tons of chippings today and survived without any Volvic but there are a few odd pains emerging now as night falls.

Arrest the Pope

I'm too busy to wonder why I cannot put the salt and pepper away in different parts of the cupboard, they must stay together at all costs and the sauces must be in a line and the pickles together. Sometimes however the pickles get mixed withe the jam and peanut butter. For some reason that doesn't bother me so much. Meanwhile in the fridge the cheese has a new neighbour - salad, worse than that wretched forgotten salad. (The salad is now in the compost heap.)

In a busy, sunny weekend of whole hearted house painting and half hearted gardening (on my part) I estimate that I must have washed my hands about 75 times and I'm not in the least OC.

Moving into more serious matters Mr Dawkins now wants to arrest the Pope. Can't wait for the Sun's headline if that ever happens. If he succeeds there could be a long line of others - the usual suspects, start your list now.

Cheesy pasta again

I was dreaming of cheesy pasta in that dumb, unthinking way you dream of things you badly want to like. Not sure why I really want to like cheesy pasta at all but the spark of misguided suggestion is in there somewhere. Eventually the feast was prepared with the addition of some hot dog related items, ones that were on the cusp of freshness and possible botulism. It ate it because I was hungry but I knew I wanted to feel different about the pasta but that I didn’t, it was pasta and not very good pasta. It’s always the worst kind of disappointment to experience, wanting badly to like something because you like it in some under served, abstract and unenlightened way and then facing up to the plunging kick in the balls that reality invariably delivers. There are some leftovers for later, maybe about half past six or never.

I cant be easy for old people to really regard themselves as Avant-garde. You Dada folks and Situationalists, how are you doing? Are you better or worse than old punks?

Always an odd experience getting text messages from Credit Card companies.

Politicians and economics. This is not a good mix. Nobody in any party seems to have a handle either on the numbers or the answers to the country's numerous financial problems. Perhaps some professionals from a proven part of the finance industry should have a go - Macdonald’s franchise owners, car boot entrepreneurs and the management team from the Cooperative Bank.

35 bits a week

Once again a popular theory has been debunked and defrocked, confusing and disillusioning the chattering classes. All that awful fruit stuff I've been eating for the last 8 years, 5 a day, 35 a week, 1820 a year: a grand total of 14560 crispy, stringy, juicy, sticky, yucky bits of coloured fibre. I so wanted to live long, prosper and avoid cancer and this was the keystone of my strategy. I feel badly let down by the governing powers and I am considering voting Conservative and going on a Port, sweet cured bacon and Stilton diet, at least till 6th May.

It's about time there was a news blackout or a total ban on the publishing of government funded research resulting in "helpful theories", "pointless and stupid ideas" and "patronising advice given from the assumed heights of good sense but with no brains", one fine day we'll all just die from having too much of what was good for us.

As time goes whizzing by...

...and green buses wait for the arrival of their missing cargo the clouds gather as clouds do. Elections, Popes and pop songs come and go and who can tell what difference the really make to the man, woman or animal in the street? Anyway I'll do my duty as a good, upright citizen and vote but not for the Pope or any pop songs. Four weeks of impotent media hell and fiery hailstones are about to break over us all, so wispy, blue and undiscovered islands of remote lonely pleasure with no TV or newspapers beckon. Could this private bus take me part way there?

Seafield daily photos

Speeding through Seafield on the way to the horse racing event at Musselborough yesterday, everything nicely distorted by the car wobbles and my hand wobbles. A wonky pub and bins appear out of the corner of my eye.

Sheds, yards and car dealerships that I'm never likely to visit. Good luck to them all, some day crowds of people will come.

Some battered piece of beach, the Fourth of Fifth and faraway Fife and a broody sky that eventually delivered some broody rain on the race track.

Cars for sale if you can be bothered to shop around, any colour of silver you like available for £100 down.

In real life this fence is pretty straight but as the camera never tells fibs who knows? Meanwhile back at the racing we made some cash but lost more. It was great fun and a valuable social experience and information gathering exercise. Nice beer too but the plastic pint mugs have some serious design flaws. .

New Dr Who a nobhead?

Artist's impression of an impression of shopping for Cheesy Pasta on acid. Note repetitive and demented bar code motif.

Many things seem to have happened in the last 24 hours but it would be tedious but blogger friendly to list them. So after a few Fife based rendezvous involving seed potatoes, a mattress and depositing Easter Eggs with various grandchildren the Saturday rain came as is the custom. This resulted in a garage clear out and a long and winding up struggle with a stubborn two stroke engine that refused to start. After the almost total collapse of my upper body muscles it finally did and ran like a Swiss watch, well a rather petulant Swiss watch as I looked on almost grinning and definitely sweating.

Next as dusk and more rain was falling civil war broke out between me, a honeysuckle resembling Jack's beanstalk, 3 large posts and a newly acquired trellis. Newly acquired things tend to bring unplanned challenges that act as fierce time bandits marauding across the weekend scape. This was no exception but it was claw-hammer time and I was destined to be beaten back albeit with the conflict ending with me having a bright idea, but the plant world won the day.

A new Dr Who person appeared in the lounge just as a fish based tea was being served, he seems ok and will no doubt carve a niche for himself with the ladies. I did fall asleep midway through his timely performance but woke up to see the tumultuous CGI ending and a nicely compiled series of plot spoilers to wet the viewers by now highly confused appetites, we'll see. The borrowed bow-tie does make him look like a bit of a nob head though.

Indifferent Friday

How can anyone resist an emporium such as this? Howard's Storage World (I had to add the apostrophe) Livingstone gets 10/10 from me. I didn't bother to go in however in case the dream was shattered by cheap reality.

It was a peculiar experience yesterday to travel over to the heart of our great county, the town of Livingstone, and see the many melting glacial deposits lying part frozen across roads and piled on verges and car parks. We seem to live in a Brig a Doon area where we get mists, frosts and mud slides but avoid the extremes of the weather, well last week's passed us by. Perhaps in this Holy Week we are simply avoiding the wrath of God with our good natures or maybe he in his weather controlling wisdom is completely indifferent to us. That's the thing, you never really know. Whatever ever way I quite like the pointless extremes of Easter, chocolate shapes and big eyed rabbits and a cultural mish mash of 21st Century trash that we adapt to suit whatever takes our marketing fancy - and you get a few days away from work.

You can tell a lot about a place by the "Greggs Density Factor" (GDF), how many of the mighty steak-bake suppliers there are per mall, town or high street. The Wallmart bit in Livi has 3 at about 200 metres apart giving it a GDF of 66.6, Dunfermline scores 333.3 and Broxburn comes in at at 600.0, says a lot about our eating habits and dietary needs. Further research is required on this one. I myself went for a regular latte, a Mexican chicken roll and a sugary tart containing some unknown fruit substance and more sugar. Still tastes better that anything Costa or Starbucks can conjure up but I can feel the arteries thickening in my chest wall. Time for another slice of Easter egg.

Big Pants

Small picture of big pants but not the kind I mean.

How is it that a small man such as me has to wear large pants? What a strangely sized world we live in or what a strangely sized person I am or am I buying pants at the wrong places?.

If I was younger I'd become a Steampunk for Easter. However that seems a pointless thing to do at my age and nothing whatsoever to do with Easter. It won't happen.

A young man comfortable within his own space, sense of self and with his big pants .

Avoiding the wrong hell

The inner sanctum and heart of Dunfermline Abbey. Optimistically built in spiritually better days some might say. (The spellcheck wants to make Dunfermline "downfallen" oddly enough).

As alternative holy week lumbers on and the confectionery industry applaud and German priests quake I offer the following advice for the seasonal searching masses and lost souls everywhere:

"In mathematical terms, if it were to be assumed that the existence of some god is certain, and if there are a number (n) of inconsistent faiths one could believe in, each with a corresponding Hell and no way to tell which one, if any, were true a priori, the probability of having chosen to practice the correct religion (through upbringing or by making Pascal's Wager) cannot be greater than 1/n. Therefore, if there are only two inconsistent faiths, then the probability that a believer of either faith is correct is 1 in 2 (50% or 1/2). Four inconsistent faiths result in the probability dropping to 1 in 4 (25% or 1/4). If there are five mutually exclusive faiths, then there is only a 1 in 5 (20% or 1/5) chance that the correct religion would be chosen and its believer would go to that religion's Heaven rather than to its Hell. In practice, there are hundreds of religions in existence, which makes it less than a 1% chance that the true religion would be chosen."

The problem of "avoiding the wrong hell" is an acute one for those earnestly seeking the truth. Good luck to you all, the odds are against you.

Back at the ranch it was fish finger sandwiches, what a marvellous warm feast to savour as we look out at the ongoing results of global warming and the start of British summer time.

The door to the afterlife

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor.

Easter egg torture

Free the Chocolate Three: Half eaten eggs and bunny, all in the name of a religious festival.

Monday night, incessant sideways rain and the memory of a headache and a cold avoided. Even in this weather the football training is carrying on outside . That’s the Scots for you, we are a tough, stupid and determined breed. We walk our Huskies in the rain and listen to the blues on the radio, as the rain falls. We carry on struggling and though we seldom succeed we never lose the belief that one day we will win out completely and then the rain will stop.

The rain is drumming along with Albert King’s drumming, drumming the blues. It must be quite easy to be a blues drummer out of all the drumming genres and styles. Economic and blissfully alcoholic I’d imagine.

Imaginarium

This weekend has been a confused mass of fantasy viewing that, along with the sadistic habit of seasonal clock changing left me dazed and confused and tired. Friday gave us LOST, a nose dive into the predictable and bizarre; Saturday meant Tim Burton's 3D Alice in Wonderland at movies, almost wonderful; this was followed by Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on DVD; Sunday was the Australian Grand Prix on the TV and latterly on the way to the football in the car via the radio. It may be odd to lump movies in with sporting events but it's all shadows and colours running across glass in one form or another.

Apart from the expected experience of not scoring enough points in the Ozzy GP, Gilliam's opus was the most disturbing encounter. I want to love his stuff quite badly, I really do, it's weird, ingenious, mad and artistically unique but the constant barrage of dwarfs, rickety constructions, face slaps, mumbled lines and convoluted plots are hard to take in and follow. It's like reading a battered paperback novel whilst riding on a 1950s Leyland Tiger bus down a bumpy farm road at twilight - and every film of his is a bit like that. Maybe I need to watch it again and write down the amount of sad souls being culled so I can maintain a proper count. Here comes the chicken pie...

LOST goes even more crazy

Globalism
Satan shall "deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth," and shall "gather them together" to encircle and attack Israel.
-- Rev. 20: 7-9

The expansion of the European Union; NAFTA and global economics; a U.S. economy flirting with socialism and the election of an internationalist president in Obama. Don't bother buying any long winded or overly thick books or plan a trip anywhere near the Middle East.

Anyway moving swiftly on to the completely unbelievable last night's LOST teetered straight into Crazy town by delivering the line we'd all expected since fairly early on in the first series namely "this island is in fact Hell". Well of course that may or may not be the case and we'll debate that for years to come whatever the final ending. Even that desperate revelation was overshadowed by the spectacle of Jacob holding an impromptu hog roast after the ship wreck. Yum.

Continuous improvement...

...is of course a myth and beyond the reach of any human endeavour. You can try and you can succeed and that cycle will continue for so long. Then, when you least expect it you will fail, probably in a spectacular manner. Rust never sleeps and neither does sudden unintended acceleration.

Meanwhile life is quiet in this particular parallel universe, my diet of questionable foods mixed with the real good stuff i.e. pasta, artichokes, sun dried tomatoes, oils, various herbs and spices continues unchecked. I feel fine. As for alcohol I do rub in a small amount now and then. It all leads to growing old gracefully by indulging in this physical and fiscal continuous improvement.

Nice picture, dead lady. Sadly.

Roll Over Beethoven

I'm gonna write a little letter,
Gonna mail it to my local DJ.
Yeah an' it's a jumpin' little record
I want my jockey to play.
Roll Over Beethoven, I gotta hear it again today.

It's that last line that sums up what you either feel or don't feel; "gotta hear it again today". It's the sweet song of youth, loving music and needing to hear it again and again and knowing every word and squiggly note. Now when it comes to even good modern music the urge to hear it again seldom occurs, lift muzak abounds and too much of anything isn't good. Music should excite, enthral and make the hair on the back of your neck bristle and fire the imagination. Somehow I need to get back to Beethoven and roll over.

Baby Care

Now I see clearly again thanks to a decent signage regime.

What with a new baby on the way, a long shopping list and me with my bad leg there was little alternative left than to visit the peaceful environs on the shore of the Lake of IKEA in the province of Costco, Tramland. And so it came to pass that I achieved a lifetime's ambition when in a good natured queue at the buffet style cafe of HM Prison IKEA. I observed a young member of staff behind the food counter about to go on a break but filling a bowl of thin chips and ladling them over with the legendary elixir of tan meatball sauce before heading off behind the lines of shining Hobarts. Transfixed by the sight I said to the other girl serving "I'll have whatever she's having", and I did.

Earlier in the day the bonfire failed to light thanks to too much green wood and not enough dry wood. Prior to that debacle I had the unhappy task of dispatching a distressed pheasant. One short sharp blow...