Accents

I was listening to the BBC World Service the other day and they were interviewing a guy from Newcastle, a "Geordie" as they are called, or a "Scotsman with his brains kicked in" as Jackie Leven calls them.

I always had a hard time understanding a thick Geordie accent, and I know I haven't heard one in a while, but this guy might as well have been speaking Punjabi. I could not understand ONE SINGLE WORD.

I've been away from the UK for 8 years now and I guess I've lost the ear for it, but it amazes me how such a small country can have such an amazing array of accents and ways of speaking. In the States, with the exception of the Deep South, you pretty much can't tell the difference between a person from New Jersey and a person from Minnesota, a distance of 1200 miles. In Scotland, you can tell immediately whether a person is from Glasgow or Edinburgh, a distance of 45 miles. Go another 20 miles North of Edinburgh into Fife and you are in another accent zone altogether.

I miss the small idiosyncrasies about living in the UK; the fact that some places offer you salt and vinegar on your chips while others, just down the road, are salt and sauce. This doesn't sound like much but it keeps life interesting and has the effect of staving off the homogeneous existence that is being forced on us all by Mainstreet USA/UK.

It's been a while

I hate cell phones. I really really hate them. I have one for "emergency purposes" but as we found out during 9/11 and the blackout, in a real emergency the damn things don't work.

I have a 200 minutes a month plan and probably use about 25 minutes. I spend more time doing text messages than I do speaking. It's not because I prefer text messages, it's because I do not need to pollute the air with my voice.

How many times have you heard some guy next to you on the train calling to say "Yeah Honey, I'll be home in 5 minutes", or "I'm on the train".

My response to these statements is: "Good for fucking you!".

If you are going to be home in 5 minutes, surely your wife/husband could wait that extra 5 minutes to see you without unduly wondering where the hell you've got to. Just GET THERE for feck's sake and stop wasting time on the phone!

And yes, you are "on the train". So what! Does this validate you screaming that information in my ear? I'm on the train too and since you cannot be heard over the background noise, you have to honk like Pavarotti on helium! It's annoying and no-one gains anything from the precious oxygen you just used up.

I know I am starting to sound like Victor Meldrew here but it really does seem to me that life does not have to be like this. It is becoming impossible to switch off. I can now check my work email from home and at least half of those calls on my cell will be job related - often when I am on my way home or on the weekend.

I look around at the people on the train in the morning and every face I see has an unhealthy grey pallor to it. They just got on the train, cell phones are open, PDA's are being punched, minutes for the meeting at 9am are being read. I feel sad for these people. I feel sad for me that I am sharing a rush hour train with them!

On the home front the Wee Yin has reached 6 months and is babbling, blowing raspberries and sitting up on her own. It's great to watch her develop, she is getting strong and will already grip your fingers and stand up on her own (albeit in a kind of Shakira-like bum shaking style). This weekend she is taking her first swim class.

I just finished watching the documentary "Friend of God" by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of the new Democratic speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It is a film about the lives of the evangelical Americans and the parallel world that they live in.

You'd think that Pelosi's family background would paint her as a female Michael Moore but she has managed to make a remarkably balanced film and how you view it will depend on the belief of the viewer. As I am that viewer in this case, I gotta say these people scare the living shite out of me, they make the Catholic Church look like a bunch of wimps in the nutty-for-Christ category.

The film includes Christian pro-wrestling, a drive-thru Church, Christian rock concerts and Christian stand-up comics. If you get a chance to catch this film try and see it.

The Urge To Surge

Greg Palast is one of the few people in the media who makes any sense to me. Below is an email he sent to his mailing list today:


WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY
by Greg Palast
Thursday, January 11, 2007

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Been there. Done that. In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,

Lyndon Johnson told the nation
Have no fear of escalation.
I am trying everyone to please.
Though it isn't really war,
We're sending 50,000 more
To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis.

There's always a problem with giving a junkie another fix. It can only make things worse. Our maximum leader says that unless he gets to mainline another 21,000 troops, "Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons," and terrorists "would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people."

Excuse me, but didn't we hear that same promise in 2003? Nearly four years ago, on the eve of invasion, this same George Bush promised, "The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed."

Instead of diminishing the threat from terrorists, Bush now admits, "Al Qaeda has a home base in Anbar province" -- something inconceivable under Saddam's rule.

Four years ago, Bush promised us, "When the dictator has departed, [Iraq] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation." Just send in the 82d Airborne and, lickety-split, we'd have, "A new Iraq that is prosperous and free."

Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Here's my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?

We know the US military didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)

We know the Iraqi government didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).

So who wants the occupation to continue? The answer is in Riyadh. When the King of Saudi Arabia hauled Dick Cheney before his throne on Thanksgiving weekend, the keeper of America's oil laid down the law to Veep: the US will not withdraw from Iraq.

According to Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi who signals to the US government the commands and diktats of the House of Saud, the Saudis are concerned that a US pull-out will leave their Sunni brothers in Iraq to be slaughtered by Shia militias. More important, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shia-majority government in Iraq controlled by the Shia mullahs of Iran. A Shia combine would threaten Saudi Arabia's hegemony in the OPEC oil cartel.

In other words, it's about the oil.

So what's the solution? What's my plan? How do we get out of Iraq? Answer: the same way we got out of 'Nam. In ships.

But can we just watch from the ship rail as Shia slaughter Sunnis in Baghdad, Sunnis murder Shia in Anbar, Kurds "cleanse" Kirkuk of Turkmen and so on in a sickening daisy-chain of ethnic atrocities?

No. There's a real alternative. And it isn't more troops, George.

Let's imagine that somehow we could rip away the strings that allow Cheney and Rove and Abdullah to control our puppet president and he somehow, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly grew a brain. His speech last night would have sounded like this:

"My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn't collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I've just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them.

"My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It's time your 16,000 princelings got out of their Rolls Royces and formed the core of an Islamic Peacekeeping Force to prevent mass murder in Iraq. The American people are tired of you using the 82d Airborne as your private mercenary army. It seems like the Saudi military's marching song is, 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'

"Well, King Ab, we're out of here. We're folding tents and loading the wagons. For four years now, Saudis have been secretly funding the berserkers in the Iraqi 'insurgency' while the Iranians are backing the crazies in the militias. Well, we're telling you and the Persians: you're going to have to stop using your checkbooks to fund a proxy war and instead start keeping the peace. It's time you put your own tushies in the line of fire for a change."

"If the African Union nations, poor as they are, can maintain a peacekeeping force to stop killings in Sudan and Senegal, you Saudis, with all the military toys we've sold you, can certainly join with your Muslim brothers in Jordan, Iran and Turkey to take responsibility for your region's peace.

"And when you get to Fallujah, don't forget to drop us a postcard."

Well, that's my fantasy. But instead, War Junkie George will get his fix of another 21,000 American soldiers.

It reminds me far too chillingly of a Pete Seeger tune written when LBJ was saving Vietnam from Vietnamese. It was based on the true story of a US platoon in training, wading into the rising Mississippi, whose commander order them to keep going, deeper and deeper -- until they drowned.

We're waste deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Blown away by "The Road to Peace"

I haven't heard any new songs in ages that literally make me fall out of my seat and hit the rewind button just to check that I heard that right. "The Road to Peace" by Tom Waits is the first one in a while You can hear it here.

Tom Waits "Orphans" is the best album released last year by a mile. Forget the crock of crap that was "Modern Times" by Bob Dylan which is being paraded by every newspaper as the best album of the year. In my opinion it was a crap Dylan album and a passable honky-tonk album that, if it had been made by Merle Haggard, we'd have probably ignored it (and I like Merle Haggard). Because it is by Dylan, and because we need the "Hard-Rain's a gonna fall" Dylan now more than ever, "Modern Times" landed in my CD player like a unwelcome turd in my beer.

Ain't no cure for the Christmas time blues

It was a quiet Christmas and New Year as the relatives on this side of the pond are not big on drinking and I am not big on being drunk around sober people. Yes, we all agreed to go the lobotomy route and feed the kids toys while the adults talk DIY (men) and kids (women). This sounds like a horrible generalisation but thats how it really seemed to me and I guess it is a mark of how much my life has changed in the last 12 months that I don't care anymore. Now that I am a home owner I'll talk drywall and power tools with the best of them. Christ.... please shoot me!!!!!

It was all downhill from there I'm afraid. Our ginger cat TT has been sick for a while and in the last two weeks of the year he started leaking water into his abdomen and became horribly bloated. We took him to the vet but they could not find out what the problem was, he just got sicker and we made the decision to have him put to sleep on December 30th. He didn't make it.

My wife found him the night before face down in the basement. She thought he was already dead but when she called my name to come down, he moved his head so she wrapped him in a blanket and brought him upstairs. She held him as he swallowed a few times and took a couple of last gasps for air and died with both me and her stroking him. It was heartbreaking and strange. He must have been down in the basement for a while but somehow found the strength to see us for one last time.

I don't mind admitting I cried. He was an old cat (we think he was about 12 or 13, we inherited him from a friend who found him as a stray, we had him for 7 years) and no doubt his time had come. He came into our life when our friend took a trip to Australia and asked us to look after his two cats, X-10 and Momo.

X-10 is a terrible name for a cat, especially one with an outgoing personality like he had, so his name kind of morphed into Mr Ten, then Mr T, then TT. Most cats I've ever owned were stand-offish and cold, TT was a true gentleman and a dreadful cat in that he was really crap at things that cats do like jumping and hunting. I once saw a cockroach run right across his belly while he just watched it run under the cooker. In his older days he would sit in my back garden and stare at the squirrels less than a foot away. The squirrels destroyed our veggie garden this year so needless to say we were not very encouraging of this behaviour.

When you came home from work TT would come running to greet you, if you were arguing he would come and check on you, he just seemed to genuinely care about people and things and I'm glad I knew the little guy. Rest in Peace little cat.

TT (1994?? - 2006)

In a year when my Mum passed away and our daughter was born. I do not need anymore drama. Good riddance 2006, bring on a quieter 2007.