The Amazonian Blues

It's definitely the most memorable photograph of the week. However, in between all the nonsense being spouted on the news about "Lost Worlds" and all the living Oompa-Loompa jokes, the photo made me feel very sad.

Firstly, these people are now completely fucked. Now that they have been outed you can almost guarantee that there is some stupid TV producer somewhere who is saying: "Hey, let's lead a documentary team in to meet them! It'll be the scoop of the century!".

The organisation that took the photos claimed that they did it because they wanted to show that these people were losing their habitat to loggers, unfortunately loggers might become the least of their problems now. There will well meaning but ultimately destructive eco-tourist groups and let's not forget those Christian missionaries who will no doubt be having nightmares about the Lucifer colored body paint.

The second thing that made me sad is just stupid but still....

The photo with them aiming bows and arrows at the plane more or less confirms the permanent place that violence has in the human psyche. It is of course idealistic and complete madness for me to assume otherwise, but somehow I liked to pretend to myself that if I somehow lived in a bubble away from other human contact then I would not need weapons and we would all live at one with nature.

A stupid assumption of course, since I would starve to death very quickly or get killed by something.

It still made me feel a bit sad though and it made me think of the scene in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: Space Odyssey" where the the fore-runner of man starts clubbing the skulls. Violence is a natural survival instinct and occurs in evolution whether we like it or not. It has to.



Evolution has been very much on my mind lately as I am reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos". A great book that really makes you look differently about, not only, how we evolved as a species but also how we evolved a lot of our social rules and regulations as well.

Vonnegut really turns your perceptions of society upside down, and in a way that allows you to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. I wish there were more people on the planet like him, it would make it a much nicer place to live. So it goes......

Thoughts on Barack Obama

No matter who wins the next election here in the States, the long nightmare that has been the Bush/Cheney administration is almost over and this is something that I think the ENTIRE world will rejoice at.

Well maybe not the ENTIRE world... I don't think Osama Bin Laden will be celebrating as they have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

It feels to me like can finally see light at the end of the tunnel. Even if McCain wins the White House (Which I don't think he will), compared to the Bush administration, a McCain administration will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Initially I didn't really care who the democratic nominee was but now I'm rooting for Obama. In fact I was secretly rooting for him right after I watched his victory speech in the Iowa Primary back in January but I didn't want to jinx his chances. The man is a fantastic speaker. People say speeches don't get things done and that statement in itself may be true, but speeches do inspire and inspiration gets things done.

Obama is the best bet America has of trying to normalize its relations with the rest of the world. He understands that you don't achieve anything by excluding your enemies from the negotiating table as America has done for so long. He has said that he will normalize relations with Cuba and end the ridiculous blockade that has been going on for 40 years now. He has said that he will talk to Iran and North Korea without pre-condition. This to me seems like common sense but to the GOP it is tantamount to treason. Well, [adopt sarcastic voice] their way has worked really well so far.

Voting for Obama as President will also send a message that it is actually possible to succeed in America if you are not white. This is a country that is only a few generations removed from Jim Crow, if a Black man can become president in those few generations then it could show humanity that perhaps the American democratic system does work after all, something that was definitely in doubt after Bush/Gore.

In America Obama has the potential to be this generation's FDR (a new deal program that moves the country to green technology anyone?), and in the rest of the world he has the potential to be this generation's Ghandi. I know, I know, Ghandi is a bit much, but I am pinning a hell of a lot of hopes on the poor guy, I really hope he doesn't let me down.

The world really needs someone like that right now. Please let it happen.......

Connecting with the past

I've been remembering weird things lately, I think probably because I've been trying to drag myself back into a bit of a more organic existence and work on my fear and loathing issues.

What fear and loathing issues are theses? Well... where do I start?

I'm a confessed news junkie, I'm supposed to be, it's my job. Unfortunately, this means I get to see a lot of the lowest acts of humanity, unedited and uncut, definitely different to what you see on the 6 o'clock news.

This has more or less chipped away at my optimism over the years and I find it very difficult to look at ANYTHING anymore without having to question it. If you read this blog often enough you can see this in my anti-religious rants, add this to my Scottish DNA and you get the genesis of my favorite PG Wodehouse quote that adorns all my emails:

"It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine".

Anyway, getting back to memories. I heard a song called "I Can't Afford Top Care Anymore" by the Scottish band "Doll by Doll". The song is written by Jackie Leven and talks about women walking through town ringing a bell for sailors who have drowned, something that happened all too often in the fishing villages of Fife where he grew up.

It took me back to Fife as well. We used to have a holiday home in Pittenween. We would drive 2 hours from our house after work every Friday and then back again on Sunday night. Fife felt like the 3rd World compared to the relative sophistication of Glasgow. It was all farmers and fishermen.

The house was above the Cooperative store run by a nice old guy called Bill Balfour and his wife Peggy.

I specifically remember the bathroom in this house. It was a cast iron bath (which my parents hated and ripped out and replaced with a crappy shower) that had the wash hand basin directly above the bath itself. There was no waste pipe, the water drained from the sink directly into the bath. I can only assume it was designed before the advent of indoor plumbing when water was a precious thing because it certainly had no hygienic value.

Each room in the house also had a fireplace and mantle. although since my parents installed radiators none of them were used any more.

Bill Balfour managed the store and we would go in there for our 1p Fizzy Lizzy's and Refreshers. The shop was always very sparse with a lot of empty floor space and not a lot of product. There wasn't any of the overwhelming advertisements or muzak that you get in todays supermarket. It had a dusty veneer to it.

Bill was a really handy guy. In the back behind the store was a huge garage where the Coop van was kept. In the garage Bill was always building stuff, one time he built a motorbike for his nephew that had made from cannibalized parts from other bikes. He also built a bogey cart (a go kart) from some old wooden boxes and pram wheels that I would happily ride round and round the Coop yard for hours.

They say it is unhealthy to wallow in nostalgia but to be honest, I find it easier to connect with the present if I can connect with the good things in the past.

It's a good thing to do some mental spring cleaning every now and then. Turn off the telly, stop reading pananoidcrazies.com and look at some old photos. Remember how things were before the internet, ATM machines and mobile phones. Days were slower and longer and people had more time to be kind. Let's try to get back to that.

The Luggie

I remember when I was a kid, there was a burn (a stream) about a 25 minute walk from our house. It was really called "The Luggie" but we would just call it "The Burn", and every weekend Me and my brother Mike would take walks down there to mess around and climb across the post-industrial waste that was left scattered around.

To get to the burn we used to have to walk across the railway tracks using this old grey metal bridge that was covered in graffiti reading "FTP" (Fuck The Pope) or "FTQ" (Fuck The Queen) alternatively. The path on the bridge was tarmac and the joints in the tarmac had this rubber tar-like substance that held them together. On hot days we would crouch down and press our initials into the goopy stuff with our fingernails.

There was also a bridge that crossed the Luggie but it was gradually stripped away by the Scottish weather and the local vandals. Pretty soon all that was left was a pipeline that had run under the bridge and that became the only way to cross the burn.

We would walk across this pipeline like it was a tightrope (in reality it was probably a foot or two wide) and to my 6 or 7 year old self this was a death defying stunt that only the likes of Evel Kinevel would have considered taking on!

Sometimes the burn would be clean and you could see minnows and sticklebacks and newts swimming around, one of these sticklebacks would eventually find their way to my other Brother's fish tank where they would end up putting a hole in the head of his goldfish when it swallowed it. I seem to remember both fish survived.

At other times it would run red with, what I presume was, industrial waste from some factory or other. It looked like rust and could have been bauxite run-off but the fact that there were still things living in there says otherwise.

One time I was down at the Luggie with a friend from school, we were probably about 11 or 12, and he was catching newts and putting them in a plastic bag that he had partially submerged under the water. This was at a time when there was a rumor going round our town that there was a bogeyman that lived in the woods who was killing children (it might have been true but I doubt it). Suddenly we heard a rustling in the woods and saw the shadow of some "big guys" (You had to watch out for "the big guys" as they would take your football or bike or beat you up) coming through. Someone shouted: "IT'S THE BOGEYMAN!" and panic erupted like a cat surprising a flock of birds.

I slipped off the rock I was standing on and fell arse backwards into the water getting soaked. My welly boots filled up like the scuppered battleships at Scapa Flow. At the same time my friend picked up the bag and threw it on the bank, there were probably about 6 or 7 newts in it. As I was struggling back to my feet, I looked over and saw my friend jump on to the bank and instead of picking up the bag and running, or throwing the newts back into the water, he stamped down on it with his boots several times crushing anything that was inside.

Later, once we had escaped the imaginary killers, I said: "What the fuck did you do that for?"

He said: "I don't know".

When I got home later that day I took off my sodden wellys and noticed, for the first time, that there were hairs growing on the back of my big toe. The water in the Luggie had been pretty red that afternoon with factory crap and I presumed that I had somehow damaged my toes and now my feet were going to turn hairy like werewolf feet. Little did I know about anything called "puberty".