To my point - the advert is clearly clever CGI, but this isn't - the cats are taking over - ohnoze..
Thursday 12 May 2011
The catz is takin' over
If you haven't seen the advert with the cats with opposable thumbs taking over, its worth seeking out - it is funny (particularly the West Side Story homage in the alleyway complete with finger-clicking and beany hat.) Although interestingly I can't quite remember what it advertises, such is the power of the ad men.
To my point - the advert is clearly clever CGI, but this isn't - the cats are taking over - ohnoze..
To my point - the advert is clearly clever CGI, but this isn't - the cats are taking over - ohnoze..
Wednesday 11 May 2011
Think Bike - please
I've just spent the afternoon on my bike and got snarled up in the hell that is Edinburgh's school run traffic - why don't car drivers like us motorcyclists? I'm a parent, I was out shopping for new jeans, butter and loo roll - I don't remember deciding I didn't like you based on your choice of personal transport. I'm just like you, just wetter and colder - pleased to meet you, the name's Ally - watch out for me and I'll watch out for you...
A musical interlude...
Despite having a We7 (recommended), Spotify and an iTunes store account I still feel the need to buy the hardware, you know what I mean - those quaint legacy things you can hold in your hands - CDs, vinyl and the like. There just seems to be more of a connection to the artist, in the same way an original piece of art trumps a digital image every time - and as an ex-musician I know that the artists feel this way.
One of my favourite CDs of the last 12 months undoubtedly shows my age, the sublime Manic Street Preachers 'Postcards from a Young Man' demonstrates the ability of these veteran rockers to maintain a relevance and creative talent that outshines many a fresh faced indie rocker of the new millennium - it really is hard to believe they were signed in 1990...
The band showed their usual prescience when they penned the laid back "Golden Platitudes", a perfect melancholy summary of the demise of New Labour methinks - enjoy, or not, as the case may be.
The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you
Oh what a shangri-la
Oh what a shower we are
Oh what a mess we've made
What happened to those days
When everything seemed possible
With no-one to tell you no
Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?
Born to be a communist
But then the marriage failed
As did the partnership
The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you
I fell back in love with love
I know that it might sound odd
The liberal left destroyed
Every bit of our youth
Left with the barest of bones
Leaving us all with holes
Where did it all go wrong?
Where did the feeling go?
Why colonise the moon
When every different kind
Of desperation exists?
In every single home
Where did the feeling go?
Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?
One of my favourite CDs of the last 12 months undoubtedly shows my age, the sublime Manic Street Preachers 'Postcards from a Young Man' demonstrates the ability of these veteran rockers to maintain a relevance and creative talent that outshines many a fresh faced indie rocker of the new millennium - it really is hard to believe they were signed in 1990...
The band showed their usual prescience when they penned the laid back "Golden Platitudes", a perfect melancholy summary of the demise of New Labour methinks - enjoy, or not, as the case may be.
The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you
Oh what a shangri-la
Oh what a shower we are
Oh what a mess we've made
What happened to those days
When everything seemed possible
With no-one to tell you no
Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?
Born to be a communist
But then the marriage failed
As did the partnership
The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you
I fell back in love with love
I know that it might sound odd
The liberal left destroyed
Every bit of our youth
Left with the barest of bones
Leaving us all with holes
Where did it all go wrong?
Where did the feeling go?
Why colonise the moon
When every different kind
Of desperation exists?
In every single home
Where did the feeling go?
Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?
Sunday 8 May 2011
I'm sorry Iain...
As many others did, I sat up most of the night watching the Scottish Election coverage - I know I'm sad, but it is important. As tiredness consumed me my vision started to fail, it's an age thing, the one moment of clarity was the answer to something that had been bothering me throughout the election campaign: Just who is it that Iain Gray reminds me of?
I guess there are at least 151 Family Guy fans in East Lothian.
 |
| Giggity |
In reply to Councillor Terry Kelly
 |
| The attractive and charismatic face of Scottish Labour... |
“THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.... THE B******S.” (US CANDIDATE DICK TUCK AFTER LOSING TO RICHARD NIXON IN CALIFORNIA)
(yes he is calling us bastards by proxy - click on the title to read it in fool)My rejoinder sir:
You saw what the Scottish electorate did to the Tories in the 1980s? I think that may be what awaits a now irrelevant Labour party whose death throes are compelling and grotesque - your headline is simply representative of this.So there (sticks out tongue - I'm much too polite to reply in kind)...
"Reject the voice of the people when it's against you and embrace it when you win" - that's cynical and futile. Socialism in Scotland needs a fundamental overhaul, it needs to amalgamate under a Scottish Identity - not the National Labour party which inflicted more harm than good on the Scottish populace during its glory days. It simply took time for the utter mendacity of the party and its representatives to be revealed to a loyal Scottish electorate.
The National Party of Scotland V2.0
Politics are life; therefore those who have grown tired Politics have grown tired of life, infallible logic? Up until that astounding victory of the SNP, I had grown tired of politics and perhaps life, things certainly looked bleak. This sea change has stirred what had become a stagnant cesspit of un-representative democratic politics in Scotland - pity the English voters who are stuck in their unrepresentative democracy, still victims of their automaton like voting habits.
Perhaps nothing is more interesting and entertaining as the super-decimation of the Labour party in Holyrood.
At last we have seen perhaps the worst offenders of the politician-trust-paradox routed, the entitlement mentality encumbered Scottish Labour have its comeuppance, and not before time. Second rate monkeys who weighed votes throughout Scotland have been delivered an almighty kicking at the polls, what is surprising is that it took so long for the Scottish electorate to get the measure of the tartan bedecked socialist mafia. An electorate who were fleet footed and sophisticated enough to deliver a sudden and permanent death blow to the Scottish Tory party in the 1980s took an inexplicably long time to untangle the aggressively marketed tissue of lies that reinforced the increasingly hard to justify belief that the Labour Party was the defender of the downtrodden, disadvantaged, working class and progressive liberal voters. All gone in an instant, crushed in one memorable day by the impressive SNP "all-Scotland party" approach to politics - and the final buy-in by the self-harm prone traditional unquestioning Labour voters. Although it was not just themselves that were harmed in their lack of discrimination; we all suffered under the tutelage of the never ending stream of second rate politicians foisted upon us by a Scotland dependent Westminster centric Labour party. Did their national executive committee really believe that the Scots were eternally stupid, never to recognise that the emperor was naked? If Scotland and the north of England were so important to them why did Bliar's glory years fail to reverse the destruction of Thatcher's boot boys?
What really staggers me into an exaggerated parody of a Scottish drunk is the speed of their decline - Labour once stood alone, the great reformers, a progressive party whose 1924 and 1945 parliaments delivered significant change as the party invested its energy in righting the inequalities of generations . It looks like entropy has finally dissipated that momentum; reflected perfectly in the grotesque death throes we've witnessed in the media over the last few days - an ugly sight as the masks are peeled off in snarling bloody recrimination. The previous National Party of Scotland is now surely dead - Scotland in the 21st century is a de-industrialised, financially destitute, unhealthy land of marginal opportunity thanks to the Labour Party and the default voting habits of many voters.
The SNP have the opportunity of a generation (generations even,) the naysayers - that unholy alliance of Tory, Lib Dem and Labour whose imagination was limited to rejecting anything that wasn't their idea are now gone in this moment.
One last work of caution (ever the optimist me) - it is worth bearing in mind that anybody who seeks power over others should be viewed with a suspicious eye, to be trusted at your peril - an observation that three decades of healthy suspicion (I am that old) has reinforced. I can only hope that the newly elected all-inclusive National Party of Scotland includes me and you - who would we vote for otherwise?
Perhaps nothing is more interesting and entertaining as the super-decimation of the Labour party in Holyrood.
At last we have seen perhaps the worst offenders of the politician-trust-paradox routed, the entitlement mentality encumbered Scottish Labour have its comeuppance, and not before time. Second rate monkeys who weighed votes throughout Scotland have been delivered an almighty kicking at the polls, what is surprising is that it took so long for the Scottish electorate to get the measure of the tartan bedecked socialist mafia. An electorate who were fleet footed and sophisticated enough to deliver a sudden and permanent death blow to the Scottish Tory party in the 1980s took an inexplicably long time to untangle the aggressively marketed tissue of lies that reinforced the increasingly hard to justify belief that the Labour Party was the defender of the downtrodden, disadvantaged, working class and progressive liberal voters. All gone in an instant, crushed in one memorable day by the impressive SNP "all-Scotland party" approach to politics - and the final buy-in by the self-harm prone traditional unquestioning Labour voters. Although it was not just themselves that were harmed in their lack of discrimination; we all suffered under the tutelage of the never ending stream of second rate politicians foisted upon us by a Scotland dependent Westminster centric Labour party. Did their national executive committee really believe that the Scots were eternally stupid, never to recognise that the emperor was naked? If Scotland and the north of England were so important to them why did Bliar's glory years fail to reverse the destruction of Thatcher's boot boys?
 |
| We can only hope... |
What really staggers me into an exaggerated parody of a Scottish drunk is the speed of their decline - Labour once stood alone, the great reformers, a progressive party whose 1924 and 1945 parliaments delivered significant change as the party invested its energy in righting the inequalities of generations . It looks like entropy has finally dissipated that momentum; reflected perfectly in the grotesque death throes we've witnessed in the media over the last few days - an ugly sight as the masks are peeled off in snarling bloody recrimination. The previous National Party of Scotland is now surely dead - Scotland in the 21st century is a de-industrialised, financially destitute, unhealthy land of marginal opportunity thanks to the Labour Party and the default voting habits of many voters.
The SNP have the opportunity of a generation (generations even,) the naysayers - that unholy alliance of Tory, Lib Dem and Labour whose imagination was limited to rejecting anything that wasn't their idea are now gone in this moment.
One last work of caution (ever the optimist me) - it is worth bearing in mind that anybody who seeks power over others should be viewed with a suspicious eye, to be trusted at your peril - an observation that three decades of healthy suspicion (I am that old) has reinforced. I can only hope that the newly elected all-inclusive National Party of Scotland includes me and you - who would we vote for otherwise?
Ae Fond Return
I'm looking around up down and sideways and this is what it is - a big empty dark echoing blog - so here goes; my first shout into the dark.
This return to blogging, hence the Burnsian title, after my previous attempt, which wasn't exactly covered in gravy, is rather intimidating - though hopefully gives me an alternative to bursting a blood vessel, or shooting the TV - both of which have seemed likely prospects recently. I understand Elvis's TV modification frenzy; although in my case I was only stopped at the last moment as I swung my trusty ice axe towards the family idiot box. I intend for this blog to be my therapy, a preventative treatment to protect TVs, radios and computers everywhere.
What a time to mount the ramparts and proclaim: The ConDem alliance, the repainting of Scotland's political map in SNP Yellow, our increasingly infantilised society, celebrity cultchur, a crazy mid life crisis involving motorcycles and the continuing war against an abstract concept should all prove fertile inspiration for a frustrated social anarchist. It's not that I lack things to rail against, as I mentioned my life to date has been punctuated with explosions of frustration direct at the various embedded multimedia sources close by - I'm reliably informed that my streams of obscenities aimed at unresponsive assemblages of technology are not exactly flattering and tend to frighten the cheeldren... This is my sweet catharsis I guess.
So I now have a space where I can shout back, and appropriately without response - that's an apposite solution, aren't it?
What a time to mount the ramparts and proclaim: The ConDem alliance, the repainting of Scotland's political map in SNP Yellow, our increasingly infantilised society, celebrity cultchur, a crazy mid life crisis involving motorcycles and the continuing war against an abstract concept should all prove fertile inspiration for a frustrated social anarchist. It's not that I lack things to rail against, as I mentioned my life to date has been punctuated with explosions of frustration direct at the various embedded multimedia sources close by - I'm reliably informed that my streams of obscenities aimed at unresponsive assemblages of technology are not exactly flattering and tend to frighten the cheeldren... This is my sweet catharsis I guess.
So I now have a space where I can shout back, and appropriately without response - that's an apposite solution, aren't it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)