Killing Joke - Sanity

All across the scenes the statues crumble. We cherished the seconds, counted the days. And people move with lines across their faces. Embracing each other with a smile.

For sanity's sake, sanity's sake, sanity's sakeFor sanity's sake, sanity's sake, sanity's sake.

We'll remember distant times and places. We'll remember summer sun that yields. Shed our bodies heart and soul for love's sake. Civilizations wax and wane.

Innocence will fade away like Autumn. Likewise the dream of youth, the task. And we shall be at peace upon our parting. With the thoughts of loved ones in our hearts.

For sanity's sake, sanity's sake, sanity's sake. For sanity's sake, sanity's sake, sanity's sake.

So let the sunrise light up the distant shores. And we'll remember last days of Rome again.

Borat The Movie

What can you say about this film? In it's opening week in the USA, it grossed over $26 million. Who says the Americans have no sense of humour?

Borat, for the uninitiated, is a character played by Sacha Baren Cohen, a Cambridge graduate whose previous crimes include the Ali G persona.

Borat purports to be a reporter from Kazikstan and the basic premise of the movie involves him being sent to the USA to do a documentary for the 'glorious nation of Kazikstan.'
The film opens with Borat giving us a tour of his home town, or to be more precise, his home street (actually filmed in Romania). He introduces the town rapist, the town mechanic, who is also the abortionist, his abusive wife and his mother (the oldest woman at 43). We are then treated to a local festival; 'the running of the Jew.'

If by this stage you have taken offence, it would be wise to head for the exit, as in terms of taste, it's all downhill from here on in.
Leaving his street in a battered car steered by a teenage boy and pulled along by a horse, Borat and his portly manager take a plane to America, where Borat proceeds to insult just about everyone, without meaning to of course.

His attempts at friendliness on the New York subway are both hilarious and shocking. The abuse he meets from fellow passengers simply by trying to shake hands says a lot for big city dwellers, and the 'accidental' release of a chicken from Borat's suitcase; 'careful he bite' is merely one of dozens of belly laughs throughout the movie.

Checking into a classy hotel, Borat begins to unpack in the lift, remarking what a lovely room he has been allocated. Upon reaching the actual room, he proceeds to wash his face in the toilet.
Yes it's that sort of film -- there's a lot of toilet humour.

He proceeds to outrage a group of feminists by asserting that 'it is proved women have brain the size of squirrel's' and shocks a driving instructor by attempting to drink a bottle of whisky whilst on the road.

Having discovered 'Baywatch' on the hotel TV, he falls in love with Pamela Anderson -- 'I wish to make love explosion on her stomach' and talks his manager into travelling to California, where Pamela lives.

Unable to afford a car, they embark on their journey in a decommisioned ice cream van, stopping along the way for encounters with a gay pride parade, a US senator somewhat shocked to be told he has just eaten cheese made from Borat's wife's breast milk and a gun store owner more than happy to recommend the best gun for 'shooting Jews.' It should be noted that Cohen himself is Jewish and the central premise of the film is to reveal hidden prejudices.

Not that they needed much revealing. An American hick at a rodeo expresses a strong preference for shooting homosexuals and Jews, whilst the assembled crowd at said rodeo are more than happy to cheer Borat's assertion that the US should bomb Iraq until not even a lizard is left alive. They only start boo-ing when he mangles the national anthem.

A visit to a dinner party at a Christian pastor's home proves particularly hilarious, Borat managing to insult the pastor's wife, mistake the word 'retired' for 'retard' and producing a bag of poo at the table. He rounds off a perfect evening by introducing a large black prostitute, at which point the good folk call the police.

A major row with his manager over the subject of 'Pamela' results in a naked tussle involving a lift full of hotel guests and a hall full of mortgage brokers having a meal. Borat's manager abandons him, leaving him with only a chicken and 17 cents for petrol. Even this generous allowance runs out quickly and he abandons the ice cream van for a crazy trip with some teenage frat boys who easily prove the most misoygnist and offensive characters in the film.

Borat winds up at a Pentecostalist Church, where the footage of the worshippers speaks entirely for itself. The sight of grown men shouting, babbling, falling over and crying is one of the most disturbing scenes in the film. Having been 'saved' and 'speaking in tongues', Borat gets a lift with the 'friends of Mr.Jesus' to Hollywood, where he is reunited with his manager and manages to track down Pamela. Having failed to persaude her to marry him by stuffing her into a sack, he returns home with his footage.

So what do we learn from Borat? Well first of all it's rib crushingly funny. But on other levels, it's both disturbing and philosophical. Borat himself is deliberately grotesque, a sexist racist with no grasp of basic decorum, yet he is likeable, an innocent abroad.
His encounters often reveal the truth behind the thin layer of 'civilised behaviour' and social etiquette, exposing the small-mindedness and grubby tribalism of the human condition.

It's rare to find a film that makes you laugh out loud yet makes you think as well. A triumph.

Harbour View Japanese Restaurant Belfast

Our neighbour recommended this restaurant, so we thought we'd give it a go.
Tucked away near the Waterfront hall, the Harbour View has an absolutely stunning harbour view, so well done whoever thought the name up.
Attentiveness is the watchword in this establishment -- the moment you walk in you're greeted by two staff members who show you to comfortable chairs complete with er harbour view (sorry I'll stop that right now).
Menus are presented and jaws are dropped. Confusing? Expensive? You've come to the right place. How about a nice set meal for one? £50 OK for you sir? Sir? Hello?
Much scratching of heads later, we dived in with a tentative order. My wife and brother-in-law went for the woosy option -- chicken and steak respectively. Being one of approx.three people in Northern Ireland who appreciates sushi, I went for the 14 piece sushi plate with a Japanese side salad to start. Our six year old daughter just had to hope for the best as children's menus are not an option here.
We were shown to our table, which was unusual to say the least. It was more like a small private bar with seats arranged in a semi-circle round a large hot plate. Our chef was actually going to cook our food at the table. Just like Burger King. Not.
He was a large friendly Japanese gentleman, armed with a couple of knives and a spatula. The meal commenced with a juggling display which delighted our daughter. The chef threw an egg into the air, caught it on the spatula without cracking it and threw it again, this time onto the cooking surface. He chopped some garlic and commenced cooking, adding ingredients from the large plate of raw meats, noodles, rice, vegatables and fish he had brought. At least you were getting to see exactly what you were eating.
My side salad arrived -- more of a main course really -- delicious. Stuffed with salmon, prawns, avocados and lots of Japanese veg, it was mighty tasty and mighty filling.
The chicken, salmon, prawns and squid (!) were excellent and my sushi platter superb.
For the finale, the chef produced a bowl of fruit pieces and ice cream, which he proceeded to set on fire. It was delicious too.
A very different dining experience and highly recommended.
The total bill came to £78 which wasn't bad considering the initial menu shock, and the service was second to none. Great stuff.

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

I've just finished reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins, the surprise Autumn bestseller (over 50 thousand hardback copies sold in the UK in barely a month).
Needless to say, Mr.Dawkins comes up with few earth-shatteringly new arguments against the existence of a deity, but the sheer volume of his material, coupled with a deluge of scientific fact and a highly readable style prove to be a quite devestating combination against a subject that is, after all, an absurdly easy target.
Personally, I've never had a problem with anyone harbouring the notion of a deity within the privacy of their own brain, but unfortunately these ideas have had a tendency to escape into the real world, wreaking havoc, guilt, genocide, bigotry and intolerance.

'When one or two people have a delusion, it is classed as a mental illness -- when millions share a delusion, it's a religion. It doesn't make it any less of a delusion.'

I've just read in the Sunday Times of a wedding party in Baghdad literally blown apart by a car bomb. 23 entirely innocent people were murdered and dozens more injured in an act which defies any logic. Unless of course you factor in religious belief. The people targetted were Shi'ite Muslims -- their killers were almost certainly Sunni Muslims. It was an act depressingly familiar to the Northern Ireland experience -- terrorists claiming to represent the Roman Catholic community slaughtering innocent Protestants (and receiving a substantial electoral mandate) and vice versa.
So much for the idea that the religious somehow have high moral standards derived from God.

Dawkins stated that an argument frequently thrown at him is that non-believers can have 'no moral standards', as these are set down in the Bible or the Koran or whatever other holy book you fancy. Barbaric acts such as those above, which although carried out by a handful of fanatics, are tacitly supported within many devoutly religious communities, give the absolute lie to this statement. For any long-term conflict to exist, there is a necessity for complete demonisation of the 'other side'. Religious belief fosters this inherent notion of tribalism -- the 'safety in numbers', the 'we alone have the truth' idea. Imams and Christian preachers, as well as Sikhs and Hindus preach the absolute correctness of their own doctrine and the absolute errancy of all others. Then we throw up our hands in mock despair when Protestants and Roman Catholics, Sikhs and Hindus and Sunnis and Shi-ites clash in ever more bloody and dangerous conflicts.

Dawkins rightly criticises the western societal notion that religious leaders and their beliefs should be given creedence in the mainstream media and political spheres. Religious representatives are wheeled on to pontificate on such issues as stem cell research and euthanasia, whilst no-one thinks to ask the same questions of say, the local Star Trek fan club.
Somehow one group is more qualified to profess on moral issues than another -- deity believers are somehow better citizens than sceptics. But are they?

Non-believers do not commit any more crimes, large or small, than believers, and the court and prison statistics prove this beyond all doubt. Non-believers are not uniformly cruel, totalitarian, self-centred monsters devoid of a moral compass. We have the Fundamentalist Muslims and Christians for that.

Dawkins rails against the indoctrination of children into particular beliefs, at an age when they are entirely unable to give any subjective analysis of what is being thrown at them. The US docu-film; 'Jesus Camp' is one of the most terrifying films you are ever likely to see, because it's all true. Children as young as six really are being brainwashed into believing that they should be prepared to die for Christ, that evolutionary theory is evil, that all other religions are wrong and should be destroyed, that abortionists should be shot and bizarrely, that global warming is a lie.
Whilst this type of 'camp' is the extreme, the phenomenon of faith schools is no less harmful and divisive, and ostensibly secular countries allow this curious form of child abuse at their peril. Northern Ireland wouldn't be what it is today without faith schools, neither would 7/7 have had it's potential breeding ground of hatred.
The idea that children must automatically follow their parents' faith is a very strange one. Very few parents expect their children to follow their professions or eating habits -- that's something for the child to decide on as they grow up -- why should faith, particularly when there are so many valid (or invalid) choices available, be any different? At best, it's indoctrination, at worst it's child abuse.

Richard Dawkins is of course, a Darwinian scientist, a powerful supporter of evolutionary theory. He sets out a highly complicated subject in a readable and understandable manner, effortlessly blowing apart the fundamentalist Christian notion that evolution means that we all 'came from a rock' or that 'I'm not related to a monkey.' This blithe dismissal of a subject that most religionists know little or nothing about is every bit as insulting as stating that 'brain surgery is just messing about with a piece of meat', or (as a relative of my own seriously suggested) that a 'GPs job is nothing more than patting a patient's hand and giving out tablets.'
I personally don't pretend to know where we came from or where we're going, but I would be inclined to believe that evolution in some form is a more likely explanation than the simplistic burblings of creationism. The very fact that the religious right in America are pushing a spurious idea of 'intelligent design', which basically accepts that evolution has occured, but under 'God's guidance' is proof enough for me.

Dawkins states that the sight of a woman in a burka is 'one of the unhappiest sights on our streets today' and of course I would agree with him. What he doesn't acknowledge however, is that a large proportion of Muslim women, particularly in the west, wear these objects, and various variations of them, entirely of their own free will. Such badges of subjucation and delusion are testament to the awesome power of religious ideas to twist our perceptions of reality, to blur the lines between superstition and common sense. We may (in most cases) have been able to divest ourselves of the notions of astrology and witch burning, but the notion of a male deity who doesn't much like women remains steadfast.

Ultimately of course, it is impossible to talk anyone in or out of faith. Objective argument with a religious person is simply not possible, any more than it is possible to talk a child out of the notion of their 'imaginary friend', and indeed Dawkins includes that notion in his book. Ultimately the child must choose to retain or relinquish their imaginary friend, the difference of course being that an adult with an imaginary friend would be considered at best odd, at worst mentally ill, whereas an adult conversing with an invisible deity (inevitably a man) is considered perfectly normal.

Perhaps most depressingly of all, despite the extraordinary enlightenment on the human condition introduced through scientific progress in the last few centuries, organised religion is making a comeback. A highly dramatic, though statistically insignificant event -- 9/11, appears to have acted as a catalyst for the resurregence of religious tribal enmities. Suddenly Muslims are a dangerous fifth column of potential psychopaths, right-wing Christians are obsessive, moral jihadists in all but name and rational secularists are the scum of the earth.
Watching the downright terrifying recent Channel 4 documentary; 'The Doomsday Code', which revealed much of the USA (the most powerful nation on the planet) to be in full belief of such fanciful notions as angels, the 'end-times' and becoming 'rapture-ready', I was reminded of the line from Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 1984 hit 'Two Tribes' -- 'it's enough to make you wonder sometimes if you're on the right planet.'

Ultimately what Dawkins book proves beyond doubt is that man is a deluded animal. And woman is quite happy to go along with him.

More vicious attacks on religious belief than Dawkin's have (and will) be written, but his strength is in coming across as a decent, rational human being, the sort of person you would be delighted to have a chat with over a cup of coffee. Whether you might be as tempted to chat with an American Pentecostal preacher or a fundamentalist Imam is of course a matter of taste. But unlike the voices of radical and unquestioning belief, I'll let YOU decide.

Veils

Abdula: 'Hey everyone guess what I've just invented?'

Everyone: 'Dunno. What?'

Abdula: 'It's called Islam right? And it's stuff that God says you have to do.'

Everyone: 'OK cool. What like eating loads of stuff and snogging?'

Abdula: 'Er no not exactly. Chandari you're a woman right?'

Chandari: 'Yes.'

Abdula: 'Well God says you have to cover up.'

Chandari: 'Eh? But I've got a dress on.'

Abdula: 'No no. God says he's very offended having to look at you and you need to cover up completely. And if you don't I get to beat you with a stick.'

Chandari: 'Sayed! Have you got that strait-jacket you invented? I think Abdula might need to try it out.'

Abdula: 'Less of your lip. My friend Ezekiel the Christian said if I'm going to invent a successful religion I need to subjugate women. In his church women have to shut up, cover their heads and make the tea.'

Chandari: 'So God invented women but he doesn't want them to be seen or heard?'

Abdula: 'You got it. And there's more. My friend John-Paul says that you can't use contraception and abortions are a complete no-no.'

Chandari: 'That's it. I'm out of here.'

Abdula: 'Oh come on Chandari. Everyone? Hello? Come back!'

In Praise Of Autumnwatch

The great thing about UK TV these days is that there's so much of it. With a simple freeview digibox you can get 30 channels of junk instead of just five. But nestling in amongst the dross of 'Big Brother' and 'Emmerdale', you do still find the odd gem.

Enter 'Autumnwatch', a programme which looks like somebody made it up on the back of an envelope, and lavished a budget of £43 on it.

I'm old enough to remember when Bill Oddie was a third of anarchic 70s comedy team; 'The Goodies' (and who can forget Graeme's Garden's wooden performance of 'The Funky Gibbon' on TOTP?) and rather worryingly he looks exactly the same today as he did then.
The show consists of Bill making observations about British wildlife, humoured by his long-suffering lady co-presenter, with some contributions from various sidekicks shipped off to the Outer Hebrides to watch stags rutting and seals frolicking.

Doesn't sound like a good TV format? Maybe so, but by gum and ecky thump it works.

In this digital age of micro-celebrity and the global village, it's almost a shock to discover that there's a whole world out there that doesn't revolve around the minutiae of human existence. Rather like the Americans ignoring the world beyond their borders, most of humanity is blissfilly oblivious to the other occupants of the planet, and it's just great to see programmes like Autumnwatch attempting to redress the balance.

Migrating birds, swans, seal pups and roe deer, all portrayed in their natural habitat, tribal spats and all. It put me in mind of a cartoon I once saw of several giant seal-pups armed with cudgels swaggering into a kids dormitory after lights out, with the delightful caption; 'it's about time we culled these little gits.'

Autumnwatch is a great little programme and actually worth some of the licence fee. On the other hand, that useless prat Jonathan Ross, whose salary would keep Autumnwatch running all year round, would be the perfect subject for a BBC cull -- I'll take the first swing.

Humans? Who needs 'em?

Kent Hovind -- Charismatic Preacher or an Interesting Wacko

''One world government is coming very soon. I think they are going to worship Lucifer. And I think there are not very many people who realise that the Catholics, and the Muslims and the Masons are all tied together at the top. It is just a few hundred people running all three organisations and they're all Satan worshippers. All of them - Luciferians - even George Bush is involved in that - worships Lucifer.
Truth Radio 11 July 2006 @ 14:40 (Tape 1)''

Where do you start with this one? The man is clearly delusional, paranoid and attention-seeking. He needs professional help.
His university 'degree' (why he calls himself Dr.) is a degree in Christian studies -- he has no scientific qualifications. He refuses to pay income tax because he is 'working for God' -- he does not however live in a tent on bread & water.
He advocates gun law (plenty of crazy quotes available), not to mention killing abortionist doctors and doing away with democracy.
If this man told me that it was raining I would have my doubts.

He is adept at trying to make sense from nonsense -- his idea for instance that Noah took two of every TYPE of animal rather than variety of animal into the ark is laughable -- but let's just say that we accept it for a moment. Noah was living in the middle east -- how did he manage to get penguins and sealions? How did he catch all those types of birds? How many cages did he have to build to seperate all the various species that would eat each other? How did he prevent disease? Where did all the excrement go? And where did all the flood-water go afterwards? That amount of evaporation needed would require a heatwave lasting years.

And if God was able to create all the hundreds of species of dogs (dingoes, wolves, Irish wolfhounds, corgis etc) from just two animals in only a few thousand years, this could only be described as evolution. Not that that actually happened of course.

Mr.Hovind's claim that there are dozens of 'flood myths' all over the world conveniently ignores the fact that most of them are completely different in content and were written / originated at wildly different times. There are also dozens of vampire and werewolf myths but he doesn't mention those conveniently.

Surely it's better to accept the flood myth as a biblical allegory, rather than insult everyone's intelligence by dressing it up as literal truth?

A fairly recent idea is that the bible is literally true. Even the Roman Catholic Church have never claimed this, as indeed have many branches of the Protestant church. And that's not surprising because it isn't literally true, and to try to prove that it is means tying yourself up in the sort of knots that Mr.Hovind finds himself in.

The bible quite simply can't be literally true for several reasons.
Firstly it was translated from Greek and Arabic. No translation is ever perfect and 10 translators, no matter how skilled, will always come up with 10 slightly different translations.
Secondly, many of the books included in the bible are of dubious date and origin. Many others were left out of the original 4th Century bible, as they were considered 'heretical' by early Christian scholars. Amongst these scholars was St.Eusebius, who had a less than glowing reputation for honesty. Some books were included in the Roman Catholic bible, but omitted from the Protestant one. Why should we suppose that the Protestant bible, after translations, interpretations, early church subterfuge & error & middle ages 'reformation' is the perfect article?

It simply isn't and never claimed to be. It was clearly written by ordinary men and is a mixture of ancient myths, lineages, archaic laws, conflicting accounts of the life of Jesus and various pronouncements and letters from Paul, topped off with a delusional almost psychedelic rant called Revelation.

As a snapshot of the life and beliefs of those writing it, it is a fascinating document. As a historical volume of the time, it leaves much to be desired. As an infallible book supposedly chronicling the word of God, it simply doesn't work. The very fact that there are so many branches of the Christian church, all differing on some point or other of doctrine, indicates that this could not be the pure word of God. If it were, it wouldn't be as vague or open to interpretation as it clearly is. Unfortunately for Christianity, it's all there is.

I suspect that Mr.Hovind will be consigned to the dustbin of history in a short time, dismissed as just another attention-seeking crackpot with wacky ideas.

My Top 100 Albums -- Surprisingly Most Are From The 80s

Position
Artist
Title
1
KILLING JOKE
BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS
2
MARILLION
CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
3
PINK FLOYD
THE WALL
4
ULTRAVOX
RAGE IN EDEN
5
FISCHER-Z
RED SKIES OVER PARIDISE
6
SILENT RUNNING
SHADES OF LIBERTY
7
MARILLION
FUGAZI
8
BUGGLES
THE AGE OF PLASTIC
9
KATE BUSH
THE DREAMING
10
TALKING HEADS
REMAIN IN LIGHT
11
ENO & BYRNE
BUSH OF GHOSTS
12
SIMPLE MINDS
NEW GOLD DREAM
13
GARY NUMAN
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
14
SIMPLE MINDS
SONS AND FASCINATION
15
KILLING JOKE
OUTSIDE THE GATE
16
GARY NUMAN
NEW MAN NUMAN
17
SISTERS OF MERCY
FLOOD LAND
18
ULTRAVOX
VIENNA
19
BUGGLES
ADVENTURES IN MODERN RECORDING
20
TALK TALK
IT'S MY LIFE
21
NEW MUSIK
FROM A TO B
22
KILLING JOKE
PANDEMONIUM
23
MARILLION
MISPLACED CHILDHOOD
24
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
LIVERPOOL
25
ULTRAVOX
LAMENT
26
TALK TALK
THE PARTY'S OVER
27
KATE BUSH
NEVER FOR EVER
28
JAM
VERY BEST OF
29
TEARS FOR FEARS
THE HURTING
30
GENESIS
DUKE
31
PROPAGANDA
A SECRET WISH
32
TUBEWAY ARMY
REPLICAS
33
ABC
THE LEXICON OF LOVE
34
NEW MUSIK
WARP
35
HUMAN LEAGUE
TRAVELOGUE
36
NEW MUSIK
ANYWHERE
37
PETER GABRIEL
3
38
SISTERS OF MERCY
FIRST AND LAST AND ALWAYS
39
MERCURY REV
DESERTER'S SONGS
40
THOMAS DOLBY
THE GOLDEN AGE OF WIRELESS
41
VISAGE
VISAGE
42
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
THE RISING
43
GARY NUMAN
PURE
44
EWIGKEIT
BATTLE FURIES
45
KILLING JOKE
DEMOCRACY
46
A-HA
SCOUNDREL DAYS
47
FAITH NO MORE
ANGEL DUST
48
TALK TALK
THE COLOUR OF SPRING
49
ULTRAVOX
QUARTET
50
SISTERS OF MERCY
VISION THING
51
DIE KRUPPS
THE FINAL REMIXES
52
TEXAS
WHITE ON BLONDE
53
MADNESS
COMPLETE MADNESS
54
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
BEST OF
55
SOFT CELL
THE ART OF FALLING APART
56
BLUE NILE
A WALK ACROSS THE ROOF TOPS
57
PINK FLOYD
THE FINAL CUT
58
GENESIS
A TRICK OF THE TAIL
59
POLICE
GREATEST HITS
60
MINISTRY
TWITCH
61
GENESIS
AND THEN THERE WERE THREE
62
DANSE SOCIETY
HEAVEN IS WAITING
63
YELLO
STELLA
64
MARILLION
SCRIPT FOR A JESTER'S TEAR
65
MERRY
THOUGHTS PSYCHO CULT
66
TUBEWAY ARMY
TUBEWAY ARMY
67
U2
ZOOROPA
68
KILLING JOKE
NIGHT TIME
69
KATE BUSH
HOUNDS OF LOVE
70
VISAGE
THE ANVIL
71
DEF LEPPARD
HYSTERIA
72
ADVENTURES
THE SEA OF LOVE
73
POLICE
SYNCRONICITY
74
SISTERHOOD
GIFT
75
FUN BOY THREE
WAITING
76
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
A CHILD'S ADVENTURE
77
ERASURE
I SAY I SAY I SAY
78
MOBY
PLAY
79
ERASURE
THE INNOCENTS
80
GARY NUMAN
BERSERKER
81
DURAN DURAN
RIO
82
CHAMELEONS
WHAT DOES ANYTHING MEAN BASICALLY
83
WAS NOT WAS
WHAT UP DOG?
84
SHREIKBACK
OIL AND GOLD
85
YELLO
ONE SECOND
86
NEW ORDER
LOW LIFE
87
SHREIKBACK
JAM SCIENCE
88
ELO
DISCOVERY
89
KRAFTWERK
THE MAN MACHINE
90
SKIDS
THE ABSOLUTE GAME
91
ASIA
ALPHA
92
HUMAN LEAGUE
DARE
93
OMD
ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY
94
SIMPLE MINDS
EMPIRES AND DANCE
95
TEARDROP EXPLODES
KILIMANJARO
96
FISCHER-Z
GOING DEAF FOR A LIVING
97
BLUE NILE
HATS
98
OMD
ORGANISATION
99
TEARS FOR FEARS
SONGS FROM BIG CHAIR
100
U2
THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE

9/11 Conspiracy Theory

When I worked at the local Sunday market, there was a bloke in the next aisle who operated off a van. He would gather a small crowd round him and then invite people to give him a £10 pound note. Hardly anyone did. One bloke who did was immediately rewarded with a portable TV – a second got a stereo system. The crowd started to get interested. A third person got a digital camera. ‘Who else will trust me with a tenner?’ shouted the bloke. Several dozen tenners were shoved at him and collected by his helper. Each person got a big package. Inside they found a pen or a minature radio, retailing for about £1. The bloke disappeared inside his van and a couple of bouncers made sure nobody complained too much.

This happened several times each Sunday, week after week, month after month. The people who got the ‘good stuff’ were all working for the guy in the van. He was raking in the cash. He’s now retired to somewhere sunny.

How did he do it? Well he certainly had the ‘gift of the gab’ all right, but that wasn’t it. He knew the basics of people’s personalities. Looking around at the people throwing away their tenners, they weren’t all ‘knuckle-dragging low-lifes’ – most of them were perfectly normal members of the public. What the guy in the van knew was that people would suspend disbelief in an attempt to get a bargain. Those people wanted to believe this wasn’t a scam. They wanted to believe they’d stumbled on something special, where they were going to get a £150 TV for a tenner.
I found the whole thing very entertaining and watched it regularly. I quite missed the guy when he left. He once said to me ‘ you’ll never go bust if you appeal to the stupid side of people’s natures.’

And he was absolutely right. Just look at the thousands of religious cults that are thriving all over the world. Look at the Indian caste system. Look at people buying lottery tickets every week. Look at the conspiracy theorists. Whoops.

Let’s have a look at the 9 / 11 conspiracy theory. Broadly speaking, this is what they reckon happened:

The US govt or it’s agents decided to carry out a massacre of it’s own citizens, for reasons best known to itself. It ‘dummied up’ several cruise-type missiles to look incredibly like passenger airliners and sent them, at different times, to three high-profile targets. The first one hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre at 8.46am – only one film had been released of it striking the building. The second one hit the south tower at 9.02am and was filmed by literally hundreds of cameras from various angles. The third one hit the Pentagon and caused a relatively small amount of damage. The two towers collapsed, due to controlled explosions in the lower floors. A third building WTC7, collapsed later that afternoon. A fourth missile, also looking very like an airliner was shot down over a field by US fighter jets. The End.

The gaping hole in all the above is two-fold. Firstly, there’s no evidence that this was anything other than a highly successful terrorist attack. Secondly, there’s absolutely no motive for the US administration to have done this.

Was it an isolated incident?
In terms of scale (so far) yes. But Al-Qaeda had already carried out several attacks on US interests and have carried out others since, equally as barbaric (7/7, Bali, Madrid), just smaller in scale.

Did Al-Qaeda have motive?
Yes. They have shown themselves more than willing to carry out suicide bombings before and since. They hate US foreign policy on Israel & the Middle East. They regard the US as a corrupt, aggressive super-power and would be happy to destroy it.
The hijackers mainly came from Saudi Arabia, where extreme Muslims regard the presence of US troops on Saudi soil, particularly female ones, as an insult to Islam and against the teachings of the Koran.

Did the US administration have motive?
Hardly. Since 9 / 11 they have attacked and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither aggression required 9 / 11 to be carried out. Neither have gained the US anything. They have in fact weakened it.

Carrying out the crazy scenario detailed above would have required incredible ingenuity, technical compotence, imagination and risk, all in front of the world’s media & the biggest audience ever. To achieve what? You tell me.

But the conspiracy theory makes for good fun reading, particularly in the US where it was a shock to many citizens to discover that the rest of the world actually existed, never mind could successfully attack them. The US is an insular state and many seek insular solutions.

The conspiracy idea, when looked at carefully, is every bit as much of a joke as the idea of people handing over their hard-earned tenners to a market trader in exchange for a 50p biro pen.

1980s Music

OK call me an old fart. And I'm sure you will. But back in the 1980s, music was important.

Take 1981. There were three TV channels -- BBC1 which featured the Two Ronnies, the 9 o'clock News and the test card, BBC2 which featured the Open University and ITV which featured Coronation Street and lots of adverts.
Not even the most imaginative sci-fi writer had thought of the internet, computer games consisted of a ball pinging round a screen and pocket calculators were hi-tech and expensive. So expensive in fact that my dad paid £16.00 for mine one Christmas, and so hi-tech that Kraftwerk wrote a song about them.

In short, there was nothing to do. So when The Jam or Motorhead released a new single, it was genuinely exciting. And when Shakin' Stevens or Bucks Fizz released one, it wasn't.

There was nothing to beat the thrill of trekking to your local record shop and forking out £1.10 for your own personal choice of 7" single., complete with full colour picture sleeve, and (if you were really lucky) coloured vinyl. Then off home to play it to death, check out the B-Side, and wonder if the LP might be any good.

Nowadays of course, everyone under 25 downloads their music or copies it from their mate's CD in 60 seconds. Blank CDs retail for about 20p and when you're sick of the music on it, you throw it in the bin and forget about it.

In the 80s, 'home taping was killing music.' Actually it wasn't. You taped your mate's LP, wrote the track-listing on a crappy little inlay card and more often than not ended up buying the LP anyway.

But was music actually better in 1981? OK you had the New Romantics, Synth-Pop, The Jam, David Bowie's last decent year and some good quirky indie singles, but was it really any better than the Arctic Monkeys and the Scissor Sisters? Well no probably not, but the difference is that it was cherished. Balding blokes in their 40s still cherish their record collections, but kids nowadays just see it as downloading data and having a temporary background noise. And even when you look at the physical format of the CD, the supermarkets have turned them into baked beans. All the little record shops are closing, hit by downloading, copying, online sales and Tesco's selling chart product at below wholesale price.

But against all this, vinyl is making a comeback. Yes vinyl! That stuff that was declared dead and buried 15 years ago. Check E:Bay if you don't believe me. CDs that barely fetch a fiver are fetching over £30 for their vinyl equivalent. Why?

It's simple. The vinyl LP is a 'proper product'. It can't be downloaded or easily copied. It's a great big chunk of 'something' in your hands -- something that is both pleasant on the eye and the ear. Look at artistic LP covers like Genesis 'A Trick Of The Tail' or ELPs 'Brain Salad Surgery'. On CD they looked like postage stamps, on LP they were a work of art.

And the LP has that 'hands-on' feel to it. Rather than clicking a mouse or watching your CD disappear into a tray, the LP has to be manually cued, and turned over halfway through. And of course there's the whole 'warmth of sound' debate too.

So in some ways, the past is coming back. Kids are actually seeking out vinyl (sometimes by new artists, sometimes by old) and getting a kick out of owning real physical product. What this means for the future of the CD is of course less clear.

But one thing IS clear -- people of all ages still want music, and there's still room for all formats. Well apart from the 8 track cartridge. Whatever that was.

Are Religious People 'Crazy?'

I formulated this reply in response to a question asked by one of the contributors on the 'Slugger O'Toole' blog.

Sadly I have had considerable experience of religious people down the years, and I can broadly group them in three sections:

1. The ‘learned it by rote’ brigade. Brought up with it, went to school with it. It’s second nature and not something you question or rave about. It’s just there. On the surface this group are fairly harmless. Many will refer to themselves as being ‘lapsed’. Underneath they’re deeply tribalist and feel that any attack on their faith is a personal attack on them. Whether or not they are regular attenders at mass, church or mosque, they remain indelibly stamped with their tribal marking.

2. The ‘late convert’ brigade. These people have generally had little or no experience of religion in their formative years, but ‘discover’ religious faith later in life through marriage, peer group or a life-changing event. They tend to over-compensate for their ‘former life’ by seeking to convert everyone in sight to their exciting new findings. This group tends to be more suggestible to extreme ideas.

3. The complete fanatic. Driven by an insatiable urge to ‘live’ their faith, these people are often relatively normal on first meeting, but tend to be obsessive to the point of mania in matters of religion. They refuse to acknowledge any other viewpoint, see their holy book as being infallible and impose their particular ‘moral code’ on their immediate family and anyone else within their sphere of influence. In my opinion, they represent the ultimate, perhaps logical conclusion of that strange phenomenon called religious belief.

Whether all religious people are ‘crazy’ is a highly debatable point. Having had regular experience of an individual with acute paranoid schziophrenia, I was struck by the similarities of the more bizarre psychological aspects of their condition with the unquestioning spiritual ideas of the religious. Obviously this is itself proves nothing, but several scientific studies have suggested that religious experiences can be induced by manipulating various parts of the brain, as indeed of course can mind-altering drugs.

None of this is intended to suggest that all religious people are ‘crazy’, but it is rather puzzling that ‘miracles’, prophets and intense religious experiences such as documented visions have almost entirely ceased since the early centuries AD. It must be remembered that a vivid dream in biblical times could be interpreted as a vision from God, a natural phenomenon such as a flood or earthquake was considered to be aimed at ‘sinful’ mankind rather than being a random occurence and that organised religion was a highly effective tool in controlling an often lawless and volatile population with promise of cake tomorrow for good behaviour today.

Rather like alcohol, religious belief is relatively harmless and can even be beneficial in small doses. However, when it begins to seep into government, schools and hospitals and forms itself into a world-view, as in violent Islam or fundamentalist Christianity, it becomes a malevolence that is closed to reason.

In my view, it is the duty of government to ensure that all religious belief is kept well away from the statute book, and that men, women and sexual minorities are given equal standing in all matters. Children should be allowed to be children, and the classroom is not the place for dispensing one-sided religious dogma. If the chosen ‘faith’ of the parents is really as strong as their church leaders would contend, there is nothing to be lost in providing all children with a well-rounded secular education and allowing them to experience religious ‘instruction’ outside school premises.

New England Goalkeeper Following Croatian Result

England have announced the identity of their new goalkeeper for future fixtures. The challenging position has been awarded to a large cardboard box. Apparently the box has proved immensely successful in recent training sessions. It's secret is the ability to blow unpredictably across the goal mouth and has saved every shot that the best English strikers, plus Wayne Rooney, have tested it with.Manager Steve McLaren revealed that of 20 penalty shots from the English strikers, 10 had gone over the bar, 6 had gone wide, 3 had hit the post and the one on target was saved by the cardboard box 'no problem.'He refused to comment on reports that the original proto-type had been destroyed by Wayne Rooney when he lost his temper after failing to get anything past the box. 'Wayne very rarely gets anything into the box, never mind past it' said Stephen Gerrard, who wished to remain anonymous.FIFA have welcomed the move, pointing out that it will save a fortune in wages, make the game more competitive, and stop people complaining that there are too many foreigners in the premiership. 'We're using a Bovril box made in England' revealed McLaren, 'and the added bonus is that I'll be able to sleep in it when I get sacked next week.'FIFA also revealed that the box will have more charisma than the rest of the team put together and that there is no way for a ball to run over the boxes foot and into the goal, as 'boxes don't have feet.'In a seperate move, we can reveal that the application for the entire England team to join Northern Ireland has been turned down. 'None of them are good enough' said manager Lawrie Sanchez. 'If any of them played for Hartlepool reserves like our lads, we might consider it, but they're all in poncy clubs like Man U.'England's crisis deepened as David Beckham ruled out a return to the squad, revealing that his tears in the final world cup match against Portugal had been because 'I broke a nail' and 'one of those foreigners stood on my toe. I'm not going back never never never.'Former manager Sven Goran-Erikkson, speaking from his palace in the south of France, confirmed that the team's problem was 'they were a bunch of wimps and mummy's boys, not hard and street-tough like me.'England's next fixture is against San Marino reserves. Steve McLaren warned the nation that they should 'brace themselves for a heavy defeat.' The cardboard box was unavailable for comment as it was 'getting it's hair done.'