Now the Beard, as some of you may or may not be aware, possibly even at the same time for those of you enamoured by the ideas of Ingsoc, is surprisingly or not a fan of Christmas... not necessarily for the reasons for which one is supposed to be a fan, but for sinister and cynical reasons possibly better explored than analysed...
For a start, the Beard is a great fan of hypocrisy... so much so that I practice it as often as possible, and one day hope to become as good at it as most of my fellow humans... for as we must all admit, hypocrisy is possibly the natural state of our species, the great Homo Narrans... in fact, our favoured species name, Homo Sapiens sapiens is in itself a form of hypocrisy... but I digress...
The fact is that Christmas is possibly the best time to study hypocrisy, both in others and in oneself... The fact that the festival is a commercial exercise masquerading as a religious celebration is good enough for the Beard.. but then Christmas exceeeds all expectations and reveals itself to be a commercial exercise masquerading as a Christian celebration that is itself a festival stolen from another religion and thinly disguised in the hope that their omniscient God somehow won't notice... Christmas, by promoting greed and the decoration of trees actually transgresses so many of Jehovah/Yahweh's laws as to be untrue... and it's true about the decorating trees bit... honest, guv.. it's in the Bible, in Isaiah if I remember correctly... but I digress...
Apart from the hypicrisy, which admittedly is fun, the Beard loves Christmas for one more thing... the music... now, most of you out there either love the tacky disposable music or loath it... however, to the Beard Christmas music highlights one of his pet dislikes... people claiming to like songs without actually understanding the lyrics.. take for instance that now perennial favourite "Fairytale of New York..." many people claim this to be their favourite Christmas song, which I have no problem with... but then a lot of them then carry on and say that this song about the decay of an already dysfunctional relationship filled with hate and resentment in a police cell among drunks is, somehow, the song which somehow embodies the perfect Christmas.... which it possibly may, who knows.. however, the Beard suspects that, as with Alan partridge and Sunday Bloody Sunday,, that most folks have heard the title, the (admittedly quite jolly) tune, and have concluded that this is a song of joy...
Greg Lake also gets a lot of airplay... his epic I believe in Father Christmas is again one of those songs that on the surface seems to be in praise of Christmas... that opening... "They said there'd be snow at Christmas; they said there'd be peace on Earth..." But then comes the disappointment, in the third line that no one seems to have heard.. "Instead it just kept on raining..." Yes, that's right... asong about how the wonderful Christmas is a cop-out, a meaningless hypocritical load of old drivel... "The Christmas we get we deserve," apparently....
And it's not just Christmas songs either... The Beard had the strange experience once of picking up a cd apparently containing the best love songs in the world... itself a strange enough experience... and to be honest, some of the tracks on there definitely deserved to be there.... the one by Barry White in particular... but also included were some strange ones... "A whiter shade of pale," for example, and "Hotel California..." "24 Hours from Tulsa" can possibly be forgiven, as it is a man telling his partner that he's now in love with someone else and is dumping her.... but "Where the wild roses grow" by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue??? A song about rape and violent murder??? One of the best love songs ever??? Methinks someone should be looking at the private life of the compiler of this cd....
But it grows late, and as Christmas is supposed to be a time of inspiration and hope, the Beard will leave you with a story from his past...
Years ago, when the Beard seemed not so left of centre as he now apparently does, this hirsute personage was less hirsute, and studied hard t a college in the East Midlands... The principal of this college (as opposed to the principle...) was a man seen only on the first day of each school year, when he would regail the new 14 year old starters with a tale of his own schooldays.... it would seem that on this man's first day at a certain educational establishment, he had the luck and joy to be selected to play cricket.. which to some would seem a bonus, to others not so much... At one end of the pitch was a rather tall horse chestnut tree... and our one-day-to-be-principal dreamed of being able to hit the ball over said plant... for five years he tried, and tried, and tried, but never succeeded... ever.... Now, apparently the moral of this story is supposed to be, no matter how difficult the task, no matter what lack of success, don't stop trying your hardest... the pursuit of the dream is more important than the attaining... unfortunately, what the Beard and his fellows took to be the pont was this... no matter how hard you try, you'll never achieve your dreams... so why bother trying... ambiguity is a wonderful thing....
So, in the hope that you are inspired one way or the other by that small second hand anecdote, the Beard will wish you all a goodnight... and until there is peace on Earth and Goodwill to all, amd until all our Christamses be merry and bright, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
talking, stalking and walking... well, one of them at least....
Now, as some of you may or may not know, the Beard has often been a fan of what is occasionally and erroneously called soft fruit... let me tell you, gooseberries can be hard as nails... especially some of the inner city ones... but I digress.... Raspberries, of course, have always been the hirsue one's favourites, especially several of the glen varieties such as moy... but that's probably far too much information for tis time of an evening... suffice it to say that the Beard has spent many a happy hour (as opposed to Happy Hour) on his knees with Beard Junior in a field of pick your own style.... indeed the Beard once displayed his own sign in his garden of a time... "Pick your own Strawberries," it said... "And keep your hands off mine..."
But yet again I digress... soft fruit is delicious, except possibly that strange cousin of the apple, the strawberry, which I admit I have never really seen the appeal of... which is possibly (or possibly not) why, when it came time for the Beard to bow to social pressure (not for the first time in his hairy life) and get himself a so-called smartphone, a Blackberry was the obvious choice... As has become obvious in the past, the Beard is probably not the best person to trust with modern technology... so it remains to be seen whether or not this delicate piece of equipment actually survives... but so far the Beard has totally failed to break it... and he's had it for more than 24 hours now....
Communication is very important... a wise man once said that the only thing standing between humanity and destruction was our ability to communicate with each other.. in which case I feel that maybe we should at the very least be inching surreptitiously towardsthe life boats... but that's by the by... While it must be admitted that communication is by and large a good thing, easing the cogs and greasing the spokes, or whatever the metaphor is, it must be admitted that sometimes it is our worst enemy...
Partially, of course, this is to do with how amazingly bad at it we seem to be... now the Beard and Mrs Beard operate a "tell everything and be totally honest" system... at least, I'm told that we do... and it seems to work very well... because honesty is definitely the best policy... but communication it seems is the enemy, as much as the ally... we hesitate to tell people things, even when we know it is for their own good... which of us would actually say to a friend, "look, we're worried about your lifestyle, please give it up"? How many of us would even be able to articulate why?? No, we'd all be scared of hurting or annoying said person... the Beard well remembers a certain porter of his aquaintance falling over a statue because someone didn't want to say it was behind him... which shows, albeit on a small scale, just how damaging a lack of communication can be...
Now imagine this magnified multiple times, and we have the problem that the world faces now... so many people, so many languages, so few decent interpreters... for the other problem of course, is definitely that of getting lost in translation... its hard enough for a German to be understood by a French speaker... now imagine people from less related lands and languages.. to be honest, the Beard is surprised we manage at all, especially when you add into the mix the fact that all our leaders are attempting to lie through their teeth about what they really want.... for some reason, and despite all evidence to the contrary, they seriously seem to believe that honesty is not after all the best policy... which is sad, in at least one sense of the dictionary definition...
Dictionaries, of course, must take some of the blame... whilst the Beard won't go quite so far as that character in Alice who insisted that words meant exactly what he wanted them to mean, accepting instead that some form of consistencty must exist, this hirsute and bristly personage asserts here and now that the standardisation of the language (any language, but English is the one I have most in mind...) equals its stagnation... centuries ago, we spelled words as they sounded to us... to be honest, a lot of reading was guess work... Then along came the good dictionary writer, telling us all that the only way to use the language was his way... and for some reason we believed him to the extent that eventually we came to somehow accept the flawed premise that dilaectal usage was somehow wrong, when in fact it is from dialects, slang, colloquialism and cant that new words come... and that's how a language develops... if any of you really think that it doesn't matter, here's a question.. Latin was codified and rigidly structured by outside influences many centuries ago.... how many people speak it as a first language now?? Sobering thought, huh...
Sober, it must be said, is the Beard's usual state, despite what many of you out there may or may not think... indeed I can recall being drunk a mere three times in my life, and avoiding the rather obvious and annoying joke, I can say hat yes, I am rather proud of the fact.. not that any of this has anything whatsoever to do with the subject in hand, but it does make for an interesting (or not) aside... however, to get back on topic, as web forumites would have it, the Vikings among others at one point had a healthy respect and a certain fear of writing and writers... the act of being able to draw a sound (which is all writing is) was seen as special and magical... conversely, however, to write a story down was seen as somehow trapping it, preventing it growing and almost killing it... and to a certain extent the Beard agrees...but as a writer himself, only to a certain extent... although the passing of stories by word of mouth, and the altering and growth of these stories has always taken this hirsute one as being a good thing, promoting as it does social interaction and communication... and while the Beard sets not much store in the former, the latter is, as I have said, close to his heart.... it remains to be seen whether we can actually use it properly...
So until we all can communicate without implying or infering anything other than what is meant, and until we can all have a mind to speak, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!
But yet again I digress... soft fruit is delicious, except possibly that strange cousin of the apple, the strawberry, which I admit I have never really seen the appeal of... which is possibly (or possibly not) why, when it came time for the Beard to bow to social pressure (not for the first time in his hairy life) and get himself a so-called smartphone, a Blackberry was the obvious choice... As has become obvious in the past, the Beard is probably not the best person to trust with modern technology... so it remains to be seen whether or not this delicate piece of equipment actually survives... but so far the Beard has totally failed to break it... and he's had it for more than 24 hours now....
Communication is very important... a wise man once said that the only thing standing between humanity and destruction was our ability to communicate with each other.. in which case I feel that maybe we should at the very least be inching surreptitiously towardsthe life boats... but that's by the by... While it must be admitted that communication is by and large a good thing, easing the cogs and greasing the spokes, or whatever the metaphor is, it must be admitted that sometimes it is our worst enemy...
Partially, of course, this is to do with how amazingly bad at it we seem to be... now the Beard and Mrs Beard operate a "tell everything and be totally honest" system... at least, I'm told that we do... and it seems to work very well... because honesty is definitely the best policy... but communication it seems is the enemy, as much as the ally... we hesitate to tell people things, even when we know it is for their own good... which of us would actually say to a friend, "look, we're worried about your lifestyle, please give it up"? How many of us would even be able to articulate why?? No, we'd all be scared of hurting or annoying said person... the Beard well remembers a certain porter of his aquaintance falling over a statue because someone didn't want to say it was behind him... which shows, albeit on a small scale, just how damaging a lack of communication can be...
Now imagine this magnified multiple times, and we have the problem that the world faces now... so many people, so many languages, so few decent interpreters... for the other problem of course, is definitely that of getting lost in translation... its hard enough for a German to be understood by a French speaker... now imagine people from less related lands and languages.. to be honest, the Beard is surprised we manage at all, especially when you add into the mix the fact that all our leaders are attempting to lie through their teeth about what they really want.... for some reason, and despite all evidence to the contrary, they seriously seem to believe that honesty is not after all the best policy... which is sad, in at least one sense of the dictionary definition...
Dictionaries, of course, must take some of the blame... whilst the Beard won't go quite so far as that character in Alice who insisted that words meant exactly what he wanted them to mean, accepting instead that some form of consistencty must exist, this hirsute and bristly personage asserts here and now that the standardisation of the language (any language, but English is the one I have most in mind...) equals its stagnation... centuries ago, we spelled words as they sounded to us... to be honest, a lot of reading was guess work... Then along came the good dictionary writer, telling us all that the only way to use the language was his way... and for some reason we believed him to the extent that eventually we came to somehow accept the flawed premise that dilaectal usage was somehow wrong, when in fact it is from dialects, slang, colloquialism and cant that new words come... and that's how a language develops... if any of you really think that it doesn't matter, here's a question.. Latin was codified and rigidly structured by outside influences many centuries ago.... how many people speak it as a first language now?? Sobering thought, huh...
Sober, it must be said, is the Beard's usual state, despite what many of you out there may or may not think... indeed I can recall being drunk a mere three times in my life, and avoiding the rather obvious and annoying joke, I can say hat yes, I am rather proud of the fact.. not that any of this has anything whatsoever to do with the subject in hand, but it does make for an interesting (or not) aside... however, to get back on topic, as web forumites would have it, the Vikings among others at one point had a healthy respect and a certain fear of writing and writers... the act of being able to draw a sound (which is all writing is) was seen as special and magical... conversely, however, to write a story down was seen as somehow trapping it, preventing it growing and almost killing it... and to a certain extent the Beard agrees...but as a writer himself, only to a certain extent... although the passing of stories by word of mouth, and the altering and growth of these stories has always taken this hirsute one as being a good thing, promoting as it does social interaction and communication... and while the Beard sets not much store in the former, the latter is, as I have said, close to his heart.... it remains to be seen whether we can actually use it properly...
So until we all can communicate without implying or infering anything other than what is meant, and until we can all have a mind to speak, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!
Monday, 12 September 2011
Bellies, Wellies and Tellies... but not necessarily all of them...
Now, the Beard has often spoken about women... occasionally to their faces... but I digress.... despite all this, the Beard's face has remained remarkably unslapped, mainly as most women seem to fear the touch of facial hair... but one woman in particular has come to the attention of the hirsute one recently... apart from the beautiful Mrs Beard of course...
That woman is a young lady called Nancy Upton, who in a fit of pique entered an American Apparel competition for so called plus size models, and did so with tongue firmly in cheek... Nancy is what our American cousins term a size 12, which to us Brits means she's about a 14 or 16... the average size fro an American woman, and to the Beard's mind about the right size for a woman... and yet the world of fashion somehow sees this as large... Having encountered such sizeism personally, and being disgusted by how a size 14 (UK) is for some reason termed XXL, the Beard got to wondering how this all started....
Now, many many years ago, when the Beard was not even an eye in his father's twinkle, artists would portray female beauty as curvy... what would pass today as fat... look at Botticelli's Venus (ooh err missus...).... she has a belly... and rounded buttocks... now, for some reason, today these are seen as unattractive traits... but why??
Well, one thing the Beard has noticed, and so, hopefully, should you... and that is this... that there have been several times in history when thin became the thing to be... and each time, the underlying reason was the same... oh yes, dear reader, it's time for yet another of the BBeard's cock-eyed conspiracies....
Back in the sixties a young lady known as Jean Shrimpton was allowed by the fashion world to take said world by storm... here was someone very different to the Mae Wests, Greta Garbos and Deborah Kerrs of the world... gone were curves, and in was thin... then came Twiggy (who looks quite hot nowadays, despite being on the thin side... but that's a story for elsewhen...) Now, Twiggy was even thinner, and the excuse used by the fashion people was that they wanted a woman who was more like a clothes hanger, so that people could see the clothes rather than the model... so far so sort of reasonable... but with it came a whole industry based on convincing women that they were fat, and that suddenly only thin women would be able to get boyfriends...
Most men, of course thought that the old, curvier type woman was far sexier... but such was the pressure from the fashion and media that eventually men stopped saying this, for fear that they would seem wierd... in much the same way that, after paying to see a boring movie, most people when interviewed will say that they enjoyed it.. especially if they are told that said film has had good reviews... but of that, more later....and so women started believing that they had to be thin... etc, etc...
But, says the Beard, this is not totally a modern phenomenon... it has happened at least twice in British history before hand, and the reason has been the same each time... Think about what else was happening around the Twiggy years... and while you're at it, think what was happening in the mid to late 1800s, and the late 1500s..
The answer of course is the threat of the emancipation of women... at the time of Queen Elizabeth the first, someone was so scared of having a strong female role model, and was so scared that women would emulate the Queen and want to run their own affairs without a man, that rather than this being an age when girl power came to the fore, it was an age of restrictive dress and lead based make up that made women weak and ill...
Fast forward to Victorian times, and we have a strong female leader... and women convinced to wear corsets that stopped them breathing, and being hidden away when pregnant...
In the sixties we had the rise and rise of women's lib... and a queen on the throne again... and as it became obvioud that she was here for a while, the whole thing got more and more subtle... now, women were actually being told to become strong and independent, to have a job and raise the kiddies, so that they too could become tired, insecure and grab for themselves their own poor self image... talk about empowerment....
And so we come to the era of Thatcher, when a very powerful woman governed, and it really went to pot... now women were told to conquer all, and break the glass ceiling, and were actively encouraged to become, well, grabbing and greedy... now women could be looked down on for even wanting to be a stay at home mother... how dare they not want a career... and so on to the present day, when women's own magazines sabotage the female populace's chances of happiness by selling them such role models as the odious Cheryl Cole...
Let there be no doubt... it is the women's mags that are mainly to blame, with their airbrushing and tweaking, and promoting certai expensive ranges of clothes as "sexy," when any honest man would tell the reader that they're not... the idea being that, when wearing said garments, if ones boyfriend is not immediately turned on, then it must be the woman who is staggeringly unattractive... because the clothes are definitely sexy.. the mag said so...
Mens (or lad's) mags are to blame only by following the trend... lets be honest... men don't really care if the models are airbrushed or not... or what size they are... or even what they look like, as long as they're in a corset and stockings... hey, at least the Beard is honest!!
Personally, the Beard would like to see less of it all... what's wrong with the natural look? Ok, possibly a bit of lippy and a nice dress, but evening out ski tones on a photo just leads to disappointment all round, both for women who feel they have to emulate the look, and for men who don't get what was on the label... it's bad for everyone... so the Beard says lets all just be happy with what we've got, lets be happy with what everyone else has got, and let's ignore those who wish us to hate ourselves for their own greed... And let's support Girl Guiding in their attempts to promote good self image among not just girls, but everyone...
But it grows late, and midnight beckons... so it remains to say that until we all love ourselves and each other, Wisebeard Salutes you.....
That woman is a young lady called Nancy Upton, who in a fit of pique entered an American Apparel competition for so called plus size models, and did so with tongue firmly in cheek... Nancy is what our American cousins term a size 12, which to us Brits means she's about a 14 or 16... the average size fro an American woman, and to the Beard's mind about the right size for a woman... and yet the world of fashion somehow sees this as large... Having encountered such sizeism personally, and being disgusted by how a size 14 (UK) is for some reason termed XXL, the Beard got to wondering how this all started....
Now, many many years ago, when the Beard was not even an eye in his father's twinkle, artists would portray female beauty as curvy... what would pass today as fat... look at Botticelli's Venus (ooh err missus...).... she has a belly... and rounded buttocks... now, for some reason, today these are seen as unattractive traits... but why??
Well, one thing the Beard has noticed, and so, hopefully, should you... and that is this... that there have been several times in history when thin became the thing to be... and each time, the underlying reason was the same... oh yes, dear reader, it's time for yet another of the BBeard's cock-eyed conspiracies....
Back in the sixties a young lady known as Jean Shrimpton was allowed by the fashion world to take said world by storm... here was someone very different to the Mae Wests, Greta Garbos and Deborah Kerrs of the world... gone were curves, and in was thin... then came Twiggy (who looks quite hot nowadays, despite being on the thin side... but that's a story for elsewhen...) Now, Twiggy was even thinner, and the excuse used by the fashion people was that they wanted a woman who was more like a clothes hanger, so that people could see the clothes rather than the model... so far so sort of reasonable... but with it came a whole industry based on convincing women that they were fat, and that suddenly only thin women would be able to get boyfriends...
Most men, of course thought that the old, curvier type woman was far sexier... but such was the pressure from the fashion and media that eventually men stopped saying this, for fear that they would seem wierd... in much the same way that, after paying to see a boring movie, most people when interviewed will say that they enjoyed it.. especially if they are told that said film has had good reviews... but of that, more later....and so women started believing that they had to be thin... etc, etc...
But, says the Beard, this is not totally a modern phenomenon... it has happened at least twice in British history before hand, and the reason has been the same each time... Think about what else was happening around the Twiggy years... and while you're at it, think what was happening in the mid to late 1800s, and the late 1500s..
The answer of course is the threat of the emancipation of women... at the time of Queen Elizabeth the first, someone was so scared of having a strong female role model, and was so scared that women would emulate the Queen and want to run their own affairs without a man, that rather than this being an age when girl power came to the fore, it was an age of restrictive dress and lead based make up that made women weak and ill...
Fast forward to Victorian times, and we have a strong female leader... and women convinced to wear corsets that stopped them breathing, and being hidden away when pregnant...
In the sixties we had the rise and rise of women's lib... and a queen on the throne again... and as it became obvioud that she was here for a while, the whole thing got more and more subtle... now, women were actually being told to become strong and independent, to have a job and raise the kiddies, so that they too could become tired, insecure and grab for themselves their own poor self image... talk about empowerment....
And so we come to the era of Thatcher, when a very powerful woman governed, and it really went to pot... now women were told to conquer all, and break the glass ceiling, and were actively encouraged to become, well, grabbing and greedy... now women could be looked down on for even wanting to be a stay at home mother... how dare they not want a career... and so on to the present day, when women's own magazines sabotage the female populace's chances of happiness by selling them such role models as the odious Cheryl Cole...
Let there be no doubt... it is the women's mags that are mainly to blame, with their airbrushing and tweaking, and promoting certai expensive ranges of clothes as "sexy," when any honest man would tell the reader that they're not... the idea being that, when wearing said garments, if ones boyfriend is not immediately turned on, then it must be the woman who is staggeringly unattractive... because the clothes are definitely sexy.. the mag said so...
Mens (or lad's) mags are to blame only by following the trend... lets be honest... men don't really care if the models are airbrushed or not... or what size they are... or even what they look like, as long as they're in a corset and stockings... hey, at least the Beard is honest!!
Personally, the Beard would like to see less of it all... what's wrong with the natural look? Ok, possibly a bit of lippy and a nice dress, but evening out ski tones on a photo just leads to disappointment all round, both for women who feel they have to emulate the look, and for men who don't get what was on the label... it's bad for everyone... so the Beard says lets all just be happy with what we've got, lets be happy with what everyone else has got, and let's ignore those who wish us to hate ourselves for their own greed... And let's support Girl Guiding in their attempts to promote good self image among not just girls, but everyone...
But it grows late, and midnight beckons... so it remains to say that until we all love ourselves and each other, Wisebeard Salutes you.....
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Shame, blame, and the man with no name...
Now, it may or may not have escaped my attention (or even yours, my observant readers) but apparently the UK has been ripped by bouts of civil unrest... or as we used to call it, a bunch of pillocks smashing stuff... The Beard is not about to go into the rights and wrongs of the matter (by which you, dear reader, will immediately understand that he most certainly is about to go into just that...) except to say that an awful lot is being said about the causes of all this, and obviously the apparent solutions...and of course, the role of the police force...
Regardless of what several people have claimed as the causes, a regardless of the rights and wrongs of the police shooting in Tottenham of a suspected drug dealer, it remains to be said that the fmily of said victim behaved in a fairly decent way, protesting peacefully, and wanting to know quite reasonably exactly what had happened to their son... as anyone would... and then, just as grief gets hijacked in celebrity circles, so did theirs, by a far more dangerous group of people... now, whether this was the gangs thinking, hey, lets rob some stuff, or whether it was set up by the police to sabotage any possible cuts to their budgets, the end result was a few greedy people taking advantage and a few more just following the lead for whatever reason... lets be honest, we all know plenty of people who just go along with stuff... even whole nations have done it in the past... whether its for fear of bullying, or for lack of resistance to peer pressure, or down to a general apathetic opposition to actually thinking about what to do personally, an awful lot of people do just go with the crowd, much to the delight of the film, music and fashion industries....
But going along with the crowd is a choice, no matter how you come to it... and choice is where good and evil collide... as the Beard has stated before, societally good is choosing to go along with the mores and laws of the society we live in... evil is choosing not to... but choice it is indeed, and all those involved in last weeks thuggery made that choice to do it.. they are ultimately responsible for their actions, regardless of background and motive...
Evil, of course, divides itself into two groups... the immoral and the amoral... and it's the latter group that worries me most... you see, immorality I can cope with... it is quite simply a morality of its own, just one that goes against the societal norm... often immorality simply turns morality on its head... but immoral people do not necessarily see themselves as immoral... if the Beard may use the idiom of modernity, they actually see themselves as differently moral... for example, it was not long ago that consenting adult homosexuals were seen as immoral...they themselves had their own rules, and obeyed such laws of the land as they saw to be "good," while deliberately disobeying others.. and attempting to change those laws for their own benefit... very immoral... but notice... they accepted that morality existed, and they accepted that their morality was different to that of society... The Nazis in 1930s Germany saw themselves as moral... they never thought of themselves as the baddies... in fact, they saw themselves as doing good... luckily for a lot of peope, we didn't... Darth Vader, with his rigid Sith code was very moral... and probably saw the rebel alliance as immoral... and verse vica...
But I run the risk of digressing... as I say, one of the problems with certain alleged cultures today is a pervading amorality... that is, that these people do not believe in the importance of morality at all... as opposed to the immoral, who have their own morals which they wish to enforce on the moral, the amoral person has no rules... they just want to get rid of all of them... it's very almost the flip side to anarchy (the Beard's ideal governance system apart from Rule-of-Beard, as you may or may not recall me telling or not telling you...)in that where anarchy has no leaders, amorality has no rules, save those which the amorl can impose for a short time to get their way... as an example, just to over gild the cherry and mix metaphors further... an immoral would be ruler will have his set of rules... he may be persuaded to change these rules slightly, but his own code will remain basically intact... an amoral person will attempt to force his desires on others.. if he makes rules, he will be liable to change them on a whim for personal advantage... in other words he has no respect even for his own rules...
And therein lies the problem.. that these riots were orchestrated by the amoral.. these people genuinely don't see why its wrong that they should steal stuff, or hurt people or smash stuff... they have been taught since day one that they should have what they want, and if they can't have it then they should take it... from an early age all they do has been praised, so that they see praise as their right, regardless of what they do... they have been defended by well meaning (and less well meaning) parents to whom they can do no wrong... that's right.. in this case, as in so many others, the Beard blames the parents...
Not just the parents though... any authority or pseudo authority figure is to blame... from the auntie who buys the toy the mother has already told the child they can't have, to the teacher who lets pass bad behaviour for fear of the lack of support from those above and below, to the care home assistants who for want of an easy life choose not to enforce punishments... we're all to blame... but it stems from the parents...
In my day (Oh gods!! no!!!!!) when a kid got into trouble at school, he or she got detention... not these soft detentions they get nowadays, at break or dinnertime, but real proper "you will stay two hours after school" detentions.. if they missed their bus home and the parents had to make a car journey, or if the child had to walk home in the dark cold and rain, well, that was tough, they'd misbehaved and that was that... and in all those years, with kids walking home along unlit roads, some with no footpaths, not one of the detainees was kidnapped, murdered or run over... some parents complained, but the teacher responsible would refer them to the headmaster, the head would refer them to the education department, and the education department would send them a letter telling them how important it was that they taught their child how to behave around others... there was never any mention of disciplining the teacher, no apologies no nothing... just "your kid misbehaved... now shut up." Nowadays there would be a parent at school shouting and swearing, knowing his child's rights, demanding compensation... and unfortunately getting it... what a great example to the child... "Don't like the rules? Then don't obey them.. it doesn't matter... nothing will happen to you..."
And that's why folks... the majority of kids are well brought up, regardless of background... and again regardless of background, a minority of kids are brought up by idiots... and unfortunately its the minority that become visible...and lead the ones of the majority who either think the minority is cool, or are scared to go against them... as young Macduff said, the liars and thieves are fools...
As I say, regardless of background... it's noticable that a large amount of those being brought to justice are actually from allegedly nice middle class backgrounds... but they were probably rewwarded for such everyday stuff as putting their toys away, or doing their homework, or helping around the house... or, to take from personal experience, they were rewarded for not making too much mess for mummy to pick up, or trying hard on their homework before letting dad copy and paste, or for pretending to offer to help around the house knowing that mum will do it anyway and give you a tenner to by stuff with for offering... or even worse, were taken out on a treat to make up for that nasty teacher telling you off...
Teachers must shoulder some of the blame though... too large a proportion are only in the business because the pay is good (and it is... don't argue... nearly everyone I work with is on less than 14000 quid a year, for working 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year.. so anyone who gets a starting paypacket of more than 20,000 need not apply to the debate!)and there's very little chance of getting sacked... now some teachers are still there for the vocation, and good luck to them.. but those who care are hamstrung by regulations and fear or reprisal, and those who are in it cos it's like staying at school and getting paid, well, what do they care... most don't even care about the subject they teach (humanties graduate teaching high school science anyone??)so why should they care about discipline?? lets be honest, they still get paid...
And lest anyone think this is a jealous rant, well, it is... but at least I'm honest, and well intentioned...
Pity the same can't be said for the rioters, certain teachers, numerous parents and a small element within our police force...
Now the Beard has long been an advocate of police corruption, as long as it's openly corrupt... if we all knew how much to pay the officer to get out of a speeding ticket, well, we'd all be happier... and if these corrupt coppers were moral or immoral enough to prey on those who harm society, then really... what harm do theyu do? The beard knows, as do we all, certain elements who seem to get away with all sorts of lawbreaking simply due to lack of evidence that will stand up in court... and I won't lose sleep if certain anti social elements are banged up without the full weight of proof... as long as they definitely are a menace to society...
But the role of the police is confused, and that's why they're having so much trouble now... for so long, they've been told to try to convince an untrusting society that they are part of that society... and even worse, part of the community... a lot of people know deep inside that the beat bobby is not and never will be their friend... they don't want the bobby as their friend... and any bobby who tries to be will be viewed with deep suspicion... and then something will happen, the police will attempt to enforce the law, and it becomes very obvious that the bobby is definitly not your friend...
Far far better would have been to leave the police alone to say, "You know what? We're not anyone's friend. We don't want to be part of your community. We are here to enforce the law, nothing else, and that's what we're going to do... regardless of whether you like it or us or not..." And then they should have been left alone to do it... the role of the police should be to help society... society as a whole.. the policeman shouldn't be the guy in the stab vest who tries to play footie with th eyouth, he should be the guy who tells the youth to stop bothering the shopkeeper... but he should also be the guy who the youth can go to if he's had his phone nicked by a bunch of amoral thugs... It would help us all out...
But the Beard, as is his wont, grows tired of ranting, as I'm sure you grew tired many paragraphs ago... so it remains to be said that choice is good and bad, and so is the law, and morality is a two sided coin... and until we all learn to make our own choices instead of following those around us, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Regardless of what several people have claimed as the causes, a regardless of the rights and wrongs of the police shooting in Tottenham of a suspected drug dealer, it remains to be said that the fmily of said victim behaved in a fairly decent way, protesting peacefully, and wanting to know quite reasonably exactly what had happened to their son... as anyone would... and then, just as grief gets hijacked in celebrity circles, so did theirs, by a far more dangerous group of people... now, whether this was the gangs thinking, hey, lets rob some stuff, or whether it was set up by the police to sabotage any possible cuts to their budgets, the end result was a few greedy people taking advantage and a few more just following the lead for whatever reason... lets be honest, we all know plenty of people who just go along with stuff... even whole nations have done it in the past... whether its for fear of bullying, or for lack of resistance to peer pressure, or down to a general apathetic opposition to actually thinking about what to do personally, an awful lot of people do just go with the crowd, much to the delight of the film, music and fashion industries....
But going along with the crowd is a choice, no matter how you come to it... and choice is where good and evil collide... as the Beard has stated before, societally good is choosing to go along with the mores and laws of the society we live in... evil is choosing not to... but choice it is indeed, and all those involved in last weeks thuggery made that choice to do it.. they are ultimately responsible for their actions, regardless of background and motive...
Evil, of course, divides itself into two groups... the immoral and the amoral... and it's the latter group that worries me most... you see, immorality I can cope with... it is quite simply a morality of its own, just one that goes against the societal norm... often immorality simply turns morality on its head... but immoral people do not necessarily see themselves as immoral... if the Beard may use the idiom of modernity, they actually see themselves as differently moral... for example, it was not long ago that consenting adult homosexuals were seen as immoral...they themselves had their own rules, and obeyed such laws of the land as they saw to be "good," while deliberately disobeying others.. and attempting to change those laws for their own benefit... very immoral... but notice... they accepted that morality existed, and they accepted that their morality was different to that of society... The Nazis in 1930s Germany saw themselves as moral... they never thought of themselves as the baddies... in fact, they saw themselves as doing good... luckily for a lot of peope, we didn't... Darth Vader, with his rigid Sith code was very moral... and probably saw the rebel alliance as immoral... and verse vica...
But I run the risk of digressing... as I say, one of the problems with certain alleged cultures today is a pervading amorality... that is, that these people do not believe in the importance of morality at all... as opposed to the immoral, who have their own morals which they wish to enforce on the moral, the amoral person has no rules... they just want to get rid of all of them... it's very almost the flip side to anarchy (the Beard's ideal governance system apart from Rule-of-Beard, as you may or may not recall me telling or not telling you...)in that where anarchy has no leaders, amorality has no rules, save those which the amorl can impose for a short time to get their way... as an example, just to over gild the cherry and mix metaphors further... an immoral would be ruler will have his set of rules... he may be persuaded to change these rules slightly, but his own code will remain basically intact... an amoral person will attempt to force his desires on others.. if he makes rules, he will be liable to change them on a whim for personal advantage... in other words he has no respect even for his own rules...
And therein lies the problem.. that these riots were orchestrated by the amoral.. these people genuinely don't see why its wrong that they should steal stuff, or hurt people or smash stuff... they have been taught since day one that they should have what they want, and if they can't have it then they should take it... from an early age all they do has been praised, so that they see praise as their right, regardless of what they do... they have been defended by well meaning (and less well meaning) parents to whom they can do no wrong... that's right.. in this case, as in so many others, the Beard blames the parents...
Not just the parents though... any authority or pseudo authority figure is to blame... from the auntie who buys the toy the mother has already told the child they can't have, to the teacher who lets pass bad behaviour for fear of the lack of support from those above and below, to the care home assistants who for want of an easy life choose not to enforce punishments... we're all to blame... but it stems from the parents...
In my day (Oh gods!! no!!!!!) when a kid got into trouble at school, he or she got detention... not these soft detentions they get nowadays, at break or dinnertime, but real proper "you will stay two hours after school" detentions.. if they missed their bus home and the parents had to make a car journey, or if the child had to walk home in the dark cold and rain, well, that was tough, they'd misbehaved and that was that... and in all those years, with kids walking home along unlit roads, some with no footpaths, not one of the detainees was kidnapped, murdered or run over... some parents complained, but the teacher responsible would refer them to the headmaster, the head would refer them to the education department, and the education department would send them a letter telling them how important it was that they taught their child how to behave around others... there was never any mention of disciplining the teacher, no apologies no nothing... just "your kid misbehaved... now shut up." Nowadays there would be a parent at school shouting and swearing, knowing his child's rights, demanding compensation... and unfortunately getting it... what a great example to the child... "Don't like the rules? Then don't obey them.. it doesn't matter... nothing will happen to you..."
And that's why folks... the majority of kids are well brought up, regardless of background... and again regardless of background, a minority of kids are brought up by idiots... and unfortunately its the minority that become visible...and lead the ones of the majority who either think the minority is cool, or are scared to go against them... as young Macduff said, the liars and thieves are fools...
As I say, regardless of background... it's noticable that a large amount of those being brought to justice are actually from allegedly nice middle class backgrounds... but they were probably rewwarded for such everyday stuff as putting their toys away, or doing their homework, or helping around the house... or, to take from personal experience, they were rewarded for not making too much mess for mummy to pick up, or trying hard on their homework before letting dad copy and paste, or for pretending to offer to help around the house knowing that mum will do it anyway and give you a tenner to by stuff with for offering... or even worse, were taken out on a treat to make up for that nasty teacher telling you off...
Teachers must shoulder some of the blame though... too large a proportion are only in the business because the pay is good (and it is... don't argue... nearly everyone I work with is on less than 14000 quid a year, for working 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year.. so anyone who gets a starting paypacket of more than 20,000 need not apply to the debate!)and there's very little chance of getting sacked... now some teachers are still there for the vocation, and good luck to them.. but those who care are hamstrung by regulations and fear or reprisal, and those who are in it cos it's like staying at school and getting paid, well, what do they care... most don't even care about the subject they teach (humanties graduate teaching high school science anyone??)so why should they care about discipline?? lets be honest, they still get paid...
And lest anyone think this is a jealous rant, well, it is... but at least I'm honest, and well intentioned...
Pity the same can't be said for the rioters, certain teachers, numerous parents and a small element within our police force...
Now the Beard has long been an advocate of police corruption, as long as it's openly corrupt... if we all knew how much to pay the officer to get out of a speeding ticket, well, we'd all be happier... and if these corrupt coppers were moral or immoral enough to prey on those who harm society, then really... what harm do theyu do? The beard knows, as do we all, certain elements who seem to get away with all sorts of lawbreaking simply due to lack of evidence that will stand up in court... and I won't lose sleep if certain anti social elements are banged up without the full weight of proof... as long as they definitely are a menace to society...
But the role of the police is confused, and that's why they're having so much trouble now... for so long, they've been told to try to convince an untrusting society that they are part of that society... and even worse, part of the community... a lot of people know deep inside that the beat bobby is not and never will be their friend... they don't want the bobby as their friend... and any bobby who tries to be will be viewed with deep suspicion... and then something will happen, the police will attempt to enforce the law, and it becomes very obvious that the bobby is definitly not your friend...
Far far better would have been to leave the police alone to say, "You know what? We're not anyone's friend. We don't want to be part of your community. We are here to enforce the law, nothing else, and that's what we're going to do... regardless of whether you like it or us or not..." And then they should have been left alone to do it... the role of the police should be to help society... society as a whole.. the policeman shouldn't be the guy in the stab vest who tries to play footie with th eyouth, he should be the guy who tells the youth to stop bothering the shopkeeper... but he should also be the guy who the youth can go to if he's had his phone nicked by a bunch of amoral thugs... It would help us all out...
But the Beard, as is his wont, grows tired of ranting, as I'm sure you grew tired many paragraphs ago... so it remains to be said that choice is good and bad, and so is the law, and morality is a two sided coin... and until we all learn to make our own choices instead of following those around us, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Cocoa, Rococo, and Rococo Cocoa
Well, it seems that a lot has happened in the last seven days or so... a massacre in Norway, the death of Amy Winehouse, and Morrisey saying some unwise things... again... now, I'm not going to agree with Morrisey's take on the Norway happenings, that worse things happen in slaughter houses every day, mainly because this reasoning is true only if you believe that all life is sacred and that all life is equally important... if you do, and of course the Beard respects your opinion as he respects all such things, then the slaughter of cattle is exactly the same as the slaughter of people.. but the beard believes quite happily, and with no diminishment of his character, that some lives are in fact far more important than others... for an example, I really don't care much about the life of a potato; only so much as to want it to continue until it's big enough to cook and eat... and the life of a chicken to me is less important than my own... sorry guys, but at least I'm honest...
Strangely, its been found that if a person's behaviour can be proved to conflict with that person's own self imposed moral code, then that person is actually more likely to change their moral code rather than their behaviour... which comes as no surprise to this hirsute blogger at all... which is possibly a good explanation, but fro what I'm not too sure...
Which sort of brings me to Amy Winehouse... now, it must be sad for her family to lose her, and I mean no disrespect to them, but we see her yet again the sad modern disease of people mourning her who really shouldn't be... after all, we didn't know her... all we ever saw was what the papers showed us... personally, I didn't think she was that great... I can listen to Back to Black, but nothing else she did stirred or moved me... in the Beard's eyes, a female pop artist needs to be either very talented, or rather good looking... and to me, Winehouse was neither... sorry guys...
But the Beard's main problem with Winehouse was this (and he admits that this was not altogether her fault...); that she was held up as some sort of role model... it was almost at times that young girls were being actively encouraged to be like her... just as the equally untalented Lily Allen was held up to us.. in the case of Amy, the message given out was this... get drugged up, behave badly, run yourself into the ground, and everybody will love you.. you'll get a recording contract, loads of money, and you will be a success... but she wasn't was she?? Unless success to you means being a drug addled loser with lots of money who dies at 27.... the Beard hopes truthfully that she'll be a better role model in death than she was in her short life....
Now, as I say, the Beard holds others than Amy responsible for this... ultimately, of course, she could have just said no... ultimately the responsibility was hers... but after a while, the drugs start to take over, and it becomes harder and harder to make that choice for the good... and the people who were in a position to help refused to... lets be honest here.. sending a star to rehab is just good publicity.... and it's very easy to solve anything with hindsight... but someone could quite easily have pulled the plug, withheld payment from her music, frozen her accounts, and told her "we won't give you any moey, airplay or anything but proper help until you get sorted..." They could have sent her back to her parents who could have then kept her from some of the bad influences that were affecting her, and they almost certainly would have helped her... instead she just got pushed down the same old line because it sold newspapers and records.... as I say, I was not a fan, but Amy could still be working now, singing for those who did enjoy listening, if it wasn't for greed and this awful awful respect we have for personal choice... and then to cap it all, as happened with Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, her mourning was hijacked by strangers... it must have been an awful time for those who actually did love her ( by which I don't mean the fans... you actually just found the music activated the pleasure centres i your brain, which is a different sort of thing...)
An awful time had by the people of Norway too... but the thing that truck the beard about the whole thing is the way that the blame was apportioned.. the earliest reports definitely claimed that this was an act of Islamist terrorism... despite no evidence of such a thing... and when it became clear that it was actually the work of a deranged Nazi, then it all became the fault of Islam for encouraging terrorists and immigrants for coming to live there.... because as we all know, if it weren't for that, this man wouldn't have felt that he needed to blow up and shoot people... well, get with th e programme, as our American brethren say.... that's the same argument that says it was the battered wife's fault for not boiling the eggs properly, or the woman's fault for wearing a short skirt... this man would have found someone else to blame, and would still have killed.... he may just have found different targets.... but personally I doubt it... but it all came down to freedom of personal choice yet again... whatever his beliefs and motives, he chose to do it, just as Amy Winehouse chose to take drugs... and choice is where evil lies... choosing to do harm rather than good is what evil is.. it's not down to devils or gods, it's down to us... to quote from Granny weatherwax... "There's only one sin, and that's thinking of people as things...." An associate tries to tell the witch that there are plenty of worse things, to which Granny replies, "Yes... but they all starts as thinking of people as things...." Which I think says it all... or maybe not... but whatever, a lot of it also starts with thinking that some lives are more important than others, and that some ideas are ore important than other lives... mainly when the person doing the thinking believes that none of the said lives are as important as that of the thinker him or her self....
Now, those of you who know the Beard will know of his love for open spaces, and yesterday saw him and Mrs Beard driving through the lovely Gloucestershire countryside to the amazing Painswick Rococo gardens... now, I'm sure that Paul Hervey-Brooks, the bod in charge ish won't mind me saying that the gardens are a fantastic mix of colour and dubious taste... set up many years ago by what passed then as new money, the gardens are full of strange little nooks and crannies, pools, enclosures, a maze and all sorts of malarkey... its the sort of place that the Beckhams of the 18th century would have set up just so that their old money neighbours could marvel at the expense and bad taste.... but taste is a strange thing, as tuna proves, and the Rococo gardens are that thing that, in a Beard's opinion, gardens should be... fun.... and they're getting better and better every year.... last year the Beard was privileged to watch a bunch of artists setting up their sculptures in the grounds, and this year was even more privileged to be invited to the preview evening of the sculpture season... even more sculptures than last time, varying from rusty metal birds, to giant dandelion parachutes and enormous conkers hanging from the trees... also a parade of possibly comforting, possibly disturbing designs lining the beech walk... now, the hirsute typer of this esteemed blog is a great fan of sculpture and art in locations like this... it makes the whole thing more accessible, which is, in my mind, a good thing... whether the viewer likes it or not, at least they have the opportunity to like it or not like it... too often art, like classical music, is seen as elitist... yet art is all around us... from the photo of the twins on the beach, to the grafitti on the railway arches,...not enough people go to gardens, and not enough see art... which is a shame... so, next time you're tempted to take a trip to some adrenalin soaked overpriced fun fair full of queues and idiots, don't.. just for a change, go and visit a park, or some gardens... there are plenty around... Painswick is a good place to start... and see if the kids enjoy it... if you approach it correctly, they almost certainly will... and you don't have to be a rabid horticulturalist... the Beard doesn't know the names of most of the things they grow nowadays, but anyone can decide whether a flower is pretty or not... give it a try...
But on that note the Beard notices that it has grown early yet again, and work and Scout camp beckon tomorrow... so it remains to be said, make your choices wisely, and regardless of your own importance, remember that others are just as important as you... so until all our cocoa becomes Rococo, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Strangely, its been found that if a person's behaviour can be proved to conflict with that person's own self imposed moral code, then that person is actually more likely to change their moral code rather than their behaviour... which comes as no surprise to this hirsute blogger at all... which is possibly a good explanation, but fro what I'm not too sure...
Which sort of brings me to Amy Winehouse... now, it must be sad for her family to lose her, and I mean no disrespect to them, but we see her yet again the sad modern disease of people mourning her who really shouldn't be... after all, we didn't know her... all we ever saw was what the papers showed us... personally, I didn't think she was that great... I can listen to Back to Black, but nothing else she did stirred or moved me... in the Beard's eyes, a female pop artist needs to be either very talented, or rather good looking... and to me, Winehouse was neither... sorry guys...
But the Beard's main problem with Winehouse was this (and he admits that this was not altogether her fault...); that she was held up as some sort of role model... it was almost at times that young girls were being actively encouraged to be like her... just as the equally untalented Lily Allen was held up to us.. in the case of Amy, the message given out was this... get drugged up, behave badly, run yourself into the ground, and everybody will love you.. you'll get a recording contract, loads of money, and you will be a success... but she wasn't was she?? Unless success to you means being a drug addled loser with lots of money who dies at 27.... the Beard hopes truthfully that she'll be a better role model in death than she was in her short life....
Now, as I say, the Beard holds others than Amy responsible for this... ultimately, of course, she could have just said no... ultimately the responsibility was hers... but after a while, the drugs start to take over, and it becomes harder and harder to make that choice for the good... and the people who were in a position to help refused to... lets be honest here.. sending a star to rehab is just good publicity.... and it's very easy to solve anything with hindsight... but someone could quite easily have pulled the plug, withheld payment from her music, frozen her accounts, and told her "we won't give you any moey, airplay or anything but proper help until you get sorted..." They could have sent her back to her parents who could have then kept her from some of the bad influences that were affecting her, and they almost certainly would have helped her... instead she just got pushed down the same old line because it sold newspapers and records.... as I say, I was not a fan, but Amy could still be working now, singing for those who did enjoy listening, if it wasn't for greed and this awful awful respect we have for personal choice... and then to cap it all, as happened with Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, her mourning was hijacked by strangers... it must have been an awful time for those who actually did love her ( by which I don't mean the fans... you actually just found the music activated the pleasure centres i your brain, which is a different sort of thing...)
An awful time had by the people of Norway too... but the thing that truck the beard about the whole thing is the way that the blame was apportioned.. the earliest reports definitely claimed that this was an act of Islamist terrorism... despite no evidence of such a thing... and when it became clear that it was actually the work of a deranged Nazi, then it all became the fault of Islam for encouraging terrorists and immigrants for coming to live there.... because as we all know, if it weren't for that, this man wouldn't have felt that he needed to blow up and shoot people... well, get with th e programme, as our American brethren say.... that's the same argument that says it was the battered wife's fault for not boiling the eggs properly, or the woman's fault for wearing a short skirt... this man would have found someone else to blame, and would still have killed.... he may just have found different targets.... but personally I doubt it... but it all came down to freedom of personal choice yet again... whatever his beliefs and motives, he chose to do it, just as Amy Winehouse chose to take drugs... and choice is where evil lies... choosing to do harm rather than good is what evil is.. it's not down to devils or gods, it's down to us... to quote from Granny weatherwax... "There's only one sin, and that's thinking of people as things...." An associate tries to tell the witch that there are plenty of worse things, to which Granny replies, "Yes... but they all starts as thinking of people as things...." Which I think says it all... or maybe not... but whatever, a lot of it also starts with thinking that some lives are more important than others, and that some ideas are ore important than other lives... mainly when the person doing the thinking believes that none of the said lives are as important as that of the thinker him or her self....
Now, those of you who know the Beard will know of his love for open spaces, and yesterday saw him and Mrs Beard driving through the lovely Gloucestershire countryside to the amazing Painswick Rococo gardens... now, I'm sure that Paul Hervey-Brooks, the bod in charge ish won't mind me saying that the gardens are a fantastic mix of colour and dubious taste... set up many years ago by what passed then as new money, the gardens are full of strange little nooks and crannies, pools, enclosures, a maze and all sorts of malarkey... its the sort of place that the Beckhams of the 18th century would have set up just so that their old money neighbours could marvel at the expense and bad taste.... but taste is a strange thing, as tuna proves, and the Rococo gardens are that thing that, in a Beard's opinion, gardens should be... fun.... and they're getting better and better every year.... last year the Beard was privileged to watch a bunch of artists setting up their sculptures in the grounds, and this year was even more privileged to be invited to the preview evening of the sculpture season... even more sculptures than last time, varying from rusty metal birds, to giant dandelion parachutes and enormous conkers hanging from the trees... also a parade of possibly comforting, possibly disturbing designs lining the beech walk... now, the hirsute typer of this esteemed blog is a great fan of sculpture and art in locations like this... it makes the whole thing more accessible, which is, in my mind, a good thing... whether the viewer likes it or not, at least they have the opportunity to like it or not like it... too often art, like classical music, is seen as elitist... yet art is all around us... from the photo of the twins on the beach, to the grafitti on the railway arches,...not enough people go to gardens, and not enough see art... which is a shame... so, next time you're tempted to take a trip to some adrenalin soaked overpriced fun fair full of queues and idiots, don't.. just for a change, go and visit a park, or some gardens... there are plenty around... Painswick is a good place to start... and see if the kids enjoy it... if you approach it correctly, they almost certainly will... and you don't have to be a rabid horticulturalist... the Beard doesn't know the names of most of the things they grow nowadays, but anyone can decide whether a flower is pretty or not... give it a try...
But on that note the Beard notices that it has grown early yet again, and work and Scout camp beckon tomorrow... so it remains to be said, make your choices wisely, and regardless of your own importance, remember that others are just as important as you... so until all our cocoa becomes Rococo, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Hacks, Hackers, Hacking, and lack of Backing...
So, the apparent scandal of the phone hacking continues... now, the beard is no fan of the red tops, being as we all know or don't, a committed reader of the i... but I'm afraid that regardless of it all, and apropos to nothing in particular, I don't actually see the importance... after all, we all know that governments are corrupt, and that papers will do everything they can to get a story, and we all know that Rebekah Brooks is one of those strange women who really really ought to be at the very least fanciable, but somehow contrives to be not so... but does any of it make any difference...??? The Beard thinks not... after all, taxes will still rise, wages will do whatever they do, and most people's lives will remain roughly the same, despite not having that cowards alternative to the porno mag, the News of the World on the shelves... for Mr Murdoch (any of them) is not as powerful and important as anyone wants him to be.. quite literally..
Which brings us to a real scandal, hidden away in a few column inches of the qualities... and this si something that does affect real people... the fact that 5.3 billion quids worth (and yes, that is a b not an m!!) of equipment has gone missing from the MoD stores over the past few years, and that the said supplier of all things military has failed its audit on more than one occasion... now, while this may not be directly related to the other story, that yet another soldier has been killed in Afghanistan, it is at the very least indirectly linked to the appalling loss of life in war zones... an ill equipped soldier is an ill prepared soldier, and even worse is a demoralised soldier... and surplus to this, someone out there is making moneyt out of stealing from brave men who are doing a difficult and thankless task... now, doesn't that put a bunch of millionaires trying to buy a tv station into perspective....???
Of course, News International has supported these men, give credit where its due... so maybe by possibly and maybe though not necessarily provably hacking the phones of these same soldiers the NotW was providing some sort of dubious public service and taking its payment for said help, who knows.. I for sure don't... but I digress....
And talking, or indeed writing, though obviously technically the Beard is typing rather than doing either off the other two, not that it matters in the long or even short run, of dubious public services... a question raised itself in what passes for the brain of your possibly favouritish hirsute blogger... what if journalists illegally hacking someone's mobile phone had, for example, overheard a government plot to cause rioting in the middle east?? Or what if, hacking the voice mail of a hypothetical missing schoolgirl, they had found threatening or incriminating messages from the girl's relatives that implicated them in her disappearance?? Or what if by stealing someone's private emails these same journalists had discovered the identity of a serial killer and stopped said killer in his or her tracks?? If this sort of information had been uncovered, and used wisely to prevent further harm, or solve awful crimes, would we now be hailing the hacks and hackers as heroes??? Who knows.... but perhaps the telling thing is that this defence has not been used... but yet again I get caught up in the whole digression thingy...
Personally the Beard has better things to think of, such as Mrs Beard, Beard junior and the two Step-Beards... and of course the soon to be here Charnwood 2011 International camp, a place of worldwide Scoutery and Guidery... and the fact that the possibly excellent Tori Amos has a new album coming out at the end of the year, on, sort of surprisingly, a major German classical label.... which promises to be good... Now the beard has, as most of you know, except of course for those of you who don't, been a fan of Tori for many years... ever since hearing the disturbing acapella "Me and a Gun" on the Annie Nightingale request show one Sunday night way back in the early 1990s.... this was followed by a close encounter with the was-b-side-later-a-side "Silent all these Years," and the purchase of "Little Earthquakes," the debut solo album... ever since, the Beard has chased Ms Amos, restraining order notwithstanding, acquiring ever more cds, and even managing to encounter the "flame-haired and tempestuous songstress" as she was once described, in Nottingham (scene of a quite well handled security breach) and in Bude... but enough of my ramblings... suffice it to say that I am looking forward to the forthcoming disc of music, and looking forward even more to boring Mrs Beard et al with repeated playings of such... and I'm sure they're all looking forward to it too... or possibly not...
Now, it would seem as though the Beard was about to make some sort of point durring the last paragraph, and, to be honest, I was, but fortunately for most of you, especially those of you who have totally failed to read this far (you know who you are... remember there will be an exam on this at the end of term...) that point was totally forgotten... or at least partially totally, which is an amazing phrase that the Beard actually heard uttered by a member of that class of people known as "management" and pitied by the rest of us...
It is of course a scientifically proven fact that managers forget passwords far more often than most people... which explains a lot... and if recent studies are correct then this problem will get worse and worse... apparently, its not the difficulty of your password that matters, but its length... a random string of stuff such as £$fd>ign is apparently as easy to crack as would be theboss1, or indeed any string of eight characters... the trick is, or so we are now told, to choose a code at least twelve digits long... it would seem that aaaaaaaaaaaa is far harder to crack than aaaaaaaa, despite what our alleged brains tell us... so managers, who often fail to string two characters together consistently, are well and truly... now The Beard, as you would expect, has taken this advice to heart, and is currently changing all his passwords from whatever they were to the entirity of james Clavell's Shogun... the idea being that even if someone does crack it, they will take so long typing it all in, that by the time they get to the bit with Fujiko and the pistol, they'll have decided that it really isn't worth it after all.... whereas normally they would break in, examine the state of my financial affairs and realise that it definitely wasn't worth it... truthfully, the Beard is hoping that someone steals his identity... it can only improve his credit rating....
The Beard is currently working on a script for a hollywood adaptation of the current NotW scandal, entitled Murdoch and the Hackers... and in true Hollywood style, the plot has been changed for dramatic effect, and now tells the story of a mad ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot and A-Team member, and his involvement with a certain British PM who once held the role of Minister for Administrative Affairs... now who should we cast as Bernard Woolley...???
Any way, the hour grows early, and a shopping trip beckons, along with a shower and a session at the other laptop... so it remains to say that until all our words pass, and all our hackers get hacked, and until the day comes, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Which brings us to a real scandal, hidden away in a few column inches of the qualities... and this si something that does affect real people... the fact that 5.3 billion quids worth (and yes, that is a b not an m!!) of equipment has gone missing from the MoD stores over the past few years, and that the said supplier of all things military has failed its audit on more than one occasion... now, while this may not be directly related to the other story, that yet another soldier has been killed in Afghanistan, it is at the very least indirectly linked to the appalling loss of life in war zones... an ill equipped soldier is an ill prepared soldier, and even worse is a demoralised soldier... and surplus to this, someone out there is making moneyt out of stealing from brave men who are doing a difficult and thankless task... now, doesn't that put a bunch of millionaires trying to buy a tv station into perspective....???
Of course, News International has supported these men, give credit where its due... so maybe by possibly and maybe though not necessarily provably hacking the phones of these same soldiers the NotW was providing some sort of dubious public service and taking its payment for said help, who knows.. I for sure don't... but I digress....
And talking, or indeed writing, though obviously technically the Beard is typing rather than doing either off the other two, not that it matters in the long or even short run, of dubious public services... a question raised itself in what passes for the brain of your possibly favouritish hirsute blogger... what if journalists illegally hacking someone's mobile phone had, for example, overheard a government plot to cause rioting in the middle east?? Or what if, hacking the voice mail of a hypothetical missing schoolgirl, they had found threatening or incriminating messages from the girl's relatives that implicated them in her disappearance?? Or what if by stealing someone's private emails these same journalists had discovered the identity of a serial killer and stopped said killer in his or her tracks?? If this sort of information had been uncovered, and used wisely to prevent further harm, or solve awful crimes, would we now be hailing the hacks and hackers as heroes??? Who knows.... but perhaps the telling thing is that this defence has not been used... but yet again I get caught up in the whole digression thingy...
Personally the Beard has better things to think of, such as Mrs Beard, Beard junior and the two Step-Beards... and of course the soon to be here Charnwood 2011 International camp, a place of worldwide Scoutery and Guidery... and the fact that the possibly excellent Tori Amos has a new album coming out at the end of the year, on, sort of surprisingly, a major German classical label.... which promises to be good... Now the beard has, as most of you know, except of course for those of you who don't, been a fan of Tori for many years... ever since hearing the disturbing acapella "Me and a Gun" on the Annie Nightingale request show one Sunday night way back in the early 1990s.... this was followed by a close encounter with the was-b-side-later-a-side "Silent all these Years," and the purchase of "Little Earthquakes," the debut solo album... ever since, the Beard has chased Ms Amos, restraining order notwithstanding, acquiring ever more cds, and even managing to encounter the "flame-haired and tempestuous songstress" as she was once described, in Nottingham (scene of a quite well handled security breach) and in Bude... but enough of my ramblings... suffice it to say that I am looking forward to the forthcoming disc of music, and looking forward even more to boring Mrs Beard et al with repeated playings of such... and I'm sure they're all looking forward to it too... or possibly not...
Now, it would seem as though the Beard was about to make some sort of point durring the last paragraph, and, to be honest, I was, but fortunately for most of you, especially those of you who have totally failed to read this far (you know who you are... remember there will be an exam on this at the end of term...) that point was totally forgotten... or at least partially totally, which is an amazing phrase that the Beard actually heard uttered by a member of that class of people known as "management" and pitied by the rest of us...
It is of course a scientifically proven fact that managers forget passwords far more often than most people... which explains a lot... and if recent studies are correct then this problem will get worse and worse... apparently, its not the difficulty of your password that matters, but its length... a random string of stuff such as £$fd>ign is apparently as easy to crack as would be theboss1, or indeed any string of eight characters... the trick is, or so we are now told, to choose a code at least twelve digits long... it would seem that aaaaaaaaaaaa is far harder to crack than aaaaaaaa, despite what our alleged brains tell us... so managers, who often fail to string two characters together consistently, are well and truly... now The Beard, as you would expect, has taken this advice to heart, and is currently changing all his passwords from whatever they were to the entirity of james Clavell's Shogun... the idea being that even if someone does crack it, they will take so long typing it all in, that by the time they get to the bit with Fujiko and the pistol, they'll have decided that it really isn't worth it after all.... whereas normally they would break in, examine the state of my financial affairs and realise that it definitely wasn't worth it... truthfully, the Beard is hoping that someone steals his identity... it can only improve his credit rating....
The Beard is currently working on a script for a hollywood adaptation of the current NotW scandal, entitled Murdoch and the Hackers... and in true Hollywood style, the plot has been changed for dramatic effect, and now tells the story of a mad ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot and A-Team member, and his involvement with a certain British PM who once held the role of Minister for Administrative Affairs... now who should we cast as Bernard Woolley...???
Any way, the hour grows early, and a shopping trip beckons, along with a shower and a session at the other laptop... so it remains to say that until all our words pass, and all our hackers get hacked, and until the day comes, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sunday, 3 July 2011
Inspired by Inspectors.....
Now, a week or so ago (really, the preposition in question should be "then", but now seems somehow clearer or more poetic... or possibly not... but I digress...) the Beard, if his paranthesis has not got in the way of your understanding, went to see the imaginively entitled sequel to "The Hangover," "The Hangover 2".... now, I've nothing against the tagging of numbers onto the original title in order to express sequelhood; it must be admitted that it does clear up confusion... who among you would have guessed that "Die Hard" was a sequel to the much earlier film "The Detective"... which technically makes Die Hard 3 into "The Detective 4", but that's by the by... in fact, if done skilfully, it disenables confusion from even reigning in the first place, just as Prince Charles's emittance of Prince William has disenabled a certain other Navally inclined prince from doing... possibly... although, when our American cousins are involved, their ignorance of all things numerical does get them confused... "Madness of George 3," anyone...??
Regardless, as is the way of sequels, the Beard went with an open mind, despite his long held acceptance that sequels tend not to be on a par with originals... the few exceptions that spring to mind are those where the sequel has embraced an entire new genre of film,such as "Aliens"... of which more later... Now, don't get me wrong... I have nothing against sequels per se, but it does seem that quiet a few are made not because the film needs or deserves one... indeed some most definitely do not... "Grease 2" springs horribly to mind... some films stand up better on their own.. "Cube" for example loses rather than gains by the addition of its se- and pre- quels... but rather they are made due to some innate need on the part of film companies to separate people from their money and their homes... the Beard is not alone in believing that the increased length of films these days, coupled with the longer period of advertising in the cinema is actually designed to give the government more time to bug your house and feed the cat while you're away... or possibly I was the only one to believe this... but probably not any longer.... but yet again I digress...
To get back on topic, as I'm informed I must say in this allegedly digital savvy world, "The Hangover" was rather a funny film, involving a particularly bad night out ending in Mike Tyson's tiger, or so I recall... my recollection is hazy... So the Beard arrived at the cinema expecting more of the same, but at a slightly lower standard, and was not necessarily disappointed... the film was, put bluntly, nowhere near as funny as the original... and the Beard knew this before the titles had even finished rolling... "How?!!" I hear you ask... well, with true Beardy benevolence, I will illuminate...
There is one phrase (or possibly a clause, the Beard being unwilling to consult his grammar book) that, when sighted at the beginning of almost any production, be it film, tv show, book or stage play, should cause the heart to sink, and the bottom to rise from the seat in search of a new pursuit... and that is the dreaded "Based on Characters and situations created by..." This invariably means that the original writers realy didn't want to do a sequel, and have been convinced by the sweet talk of money or the legalism of a badly worded contract to allow the sequel to be penned by several people who saw the original when drunk and didn't really get it at all... It is worse by far than the far better "Inspired by characters, etc...." This lattermeans that someone has taken someones work, and changed it into something that they think will be more amusing than the original author's attempts... for example, Patrick Swayze in King Solomons Mines, inspired by Rider Haggard but moved forward in time slightly and turned into a Saturday afternoon romp... fine... any modern day relocation and reworking of Sherlock Holmes... the list continues... but Based on... that means that someone somewhere wants a sequel doing quick and doesn't really care about the result...
A favourite case in point is Inspector Morse... now, the Beard is actaully a fan of Colin Dexter's morose copper, and was pleased when John Thaw portrayed him on television, despite them youthing Lewis and making him Geordie, and changing Morse's Lancia into a Jag... such things, along with showing the episodes out of order, can be coped with... when the Beard soured on the series was when, for various reasons, the producers decided to get people to write new stories for the series... all of whom got Morse's character wrong!! They had obviously seen a few episodes, not really understood anything other than "does crosswords, drinks beer, bullies Lewis, chats up a younger woman, solves crime..." and then wrote an episode... a bit like Peter Jackson claiming to be a Lord of the Rings fan, then changing or omitting THE most important bbits of the book... Elves at Helms Deep??!! No Scouring of the Shire??!!! Very much a WTF moment, or so I'm told such things are called in the vernacular... but yet again i digress, which must be a record even for oneself...
But anyway, when the Beard sees such caption, the Beard immediately knows that the film will be a half hearted copy of the original with no real understanding of it... a bit like the US presidency, perhaps... surfice it to say, the Beard really ought to walk out on such films, and dreads the day when he sees the words, "based on blog posts created by Wisebeard.." They'll probably be attached to some dire comedy film about Vikings and half of a comedy double act, and the main character will be hairy, wise, insightful, witty and charming... as I say, it will get the main character totally wrong... but anyway, the hour gets late, and after a night of babysitting and the Dirty Dozen ( but thankfully not babysitting the Dirty Dozen) with the beautiful Mrs Beard, and with a rather horrifying concert by the rather less horrifying "Notorious," one of whose players is a definitely non horrifying (dare I say otherwise!) lawyer of the Beard's acquaintance, to look forward to, all I have left to say is that, until our lives are all inspired by rather than based on, Wisebeard Salutes You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Regardless, as is the way of sequels, the Beard went with an open mind, despite his long held acceptance that sequels tend not to be on a par with originals... the few exceptions that spring to mind are those where the sequel has embraced an entire new genre of film,such as "Aliens"... of which more later... Now, don't get me wrong... I have nothing against sequels per se, but it does seem that quiet a few are made not because the film needs or deserves one... indeed some most definitely do not... "Grease 2" springs horribly to mind... some films stand up better on their own.. "Cube" for example loses rather than gains by the addition of its se- and pre- quels... but rather they are made due to some innate need on the part of film companies to separate people from their money and their homes... the Beard is not alone in believing that the increased length of films these days, coupled with the longer period of advertising in the cinema is actually designed to give the government more time to bug your house and feed the cat while you're away... or possibly I was the only one to believe this... but probably not any longer.... but yet again I digress...
To get back on topic, as I'm informed I must say in this allegedly digital savvy world, "The Hangover" was rather a funny film, involving a particularly bad night out ending in Mike Tyson's tiger, or so I recall... my recollection is hazy... So the Beard arrived at the cinema expecting more of the same, but at a slightly lower standard, and was not necessarily disappointed... the film was, put bluntly, nowhere near as funny as the original... and the Beard knew this before the titles had even finished rolling... "How?!!" I hear you ask... well, with true Beardy benevolence, I will illuminate...
There is one phrase (or possibly a clause, the Beard being unwilling to consult his grammar book) that, when sighted at the beginning of almost any production, be it film, tv show, book or stage play, should cause the heart to sink, and the bottom to rise from the seat in search of a new pursuit... and that is the dreaded "Based on Characters and situations created by..." This invariably means that the original writers realy didn't want to do a sequel, and have been convinced by the sweet talk of money or the legalism of a badly worded contract to allow the sequel to be penned by several people who saw the original when drunk and didn't really get it at all... It is worse by far than the far better "Inspired by characters, etc...." This lattermeans that someone has taken someones work, and changed it into something that they think will be more amusing than the original author's attempts... for example, Patrick Swayze in King Solomons Mines, inspired by Rider Haggard but moved forward in time slightly and turned into a Saturday afternoon romp... fine... any modern day relocation and reworking of Sherlock Holmes... the list continues... but Based on... that means that someone somewhere wants a sequel doing quick and doesn't really care about the result...
A favourite case in point is Inspector Morse... now, the Beard is actaully a fan of Colin Dexter's morose copper, and was pleased when John Thaw portrayed him on television, despite them youthing Lewis and making him Geordie, and changing Morse's Lancia into a Jag... such things, along with showing the episodes out of order, can be coped with... when the Beard soured on the series was when, for various reasons, the producers decided to get people to write new stories for the series... all of whom got Morse's character wrong!! They had obviously seen a few episodes, not really understood anything other than "does crosswords, drinks beer, bullies Lewis, chats up a younger woman, solves crime..." and then wrote an episode... a bit like Peter Jackson claiming to be a Lord of the Rings fan, then changing or omitting THE most important bbits of the book... Elves at Helms Deep??!! No Scouring of the Shire??!!! Very much a WTF moment, or so I'm told such things are called in the vernacular... but yet again i digress, which must be a record even for oneself...
But anyway, when the Beard sees such caption, the Beard immediately knows that the film will be a half hearted copy of the original with no real understanding of it... a bit like the US presidency, perhaps... surfice it to say, the Beard really ought to walk out on such films, and dreads the day when he sees the words, "based on blog posts created by Wisebeard.." They'll probably be attached to some dire comedy film about Vikings and half of a comedy double act, and the main character will be hairy, wise, insightful, witty and charming... as I say, it will get the main character totally wrong... but anyway, the hour gets late, and after a night of babysitting and the Dirty Dozen ( but thankfully not babysitting the Dirty Dozen) with the beautiful Mrs Beard, and with a rather horrifying concert by the rather less horrifying "Notorious," one of whose players is a definitely non horrifying (dare I say otherwise!) lawyer of the Beard's acquaintance, to look forward to, all I have left to say is that, until our lives are all inspired by rather than based on, Wisebeard Salutes You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Is it a bird, is it a plane???
No, apparently it's Super injunction, a pair of words that the Beard is getting slightly sick of hearing... now, as you may or may not know, and almost certainly don't care, the Beard is a not a big fan of freedom... but wait, I hear you all say, with resounding echoes from the bathroom walls, we're sure we've heard the Beard use his freedom of speech to stand up for the freedom of the speech of others... and you'd be right... but let me just point out that the Beard is also a great fan of the public interest, and of society as a whole, but is a greater fan still of the great art of the compromise...
Some of us may be interested in the fact that some footballer of whom the Beard has never heard had some sort of sexual relations with some apparent celebrity of whom the Beard has also never heard... and, without meaning to sound uncynical, it does seem like a very good way to garner public interest and possibly kick start a career in Hello magazine... But sometimes common sense should prevail in these things...
Now, the hirsute one is no fan of deceit, but occasionally it can come in handy.. for instance, if everyone had been open and honest about their intentions between 1939 and 1945, the War (the one we apparently don't mention when the Germans are in the hotel) would have traced a very different course... and even now, deceit saves lives... but there are more ways than one to save a life...
I'm no fan of footballers either, but I accept that these overpaid shorts wearers have taken the place of famous generals and war heroes in our national subconcious and have become the role models for an entire generation... young men all over Britain buy overpriced trainers and support the hair gel industry as a result... which is, so I'm told, good news for everyone... if only it stopped there... but these men are role models in other ways...
The argument of the tabloid press, along with many others, is that if these role models misbehave, then they should be revealed and shamed for the public good, as some sort of object lesson in morality... which is all well and good, until you realise that it actually has the opposite effect... which the Beard feels may be deliberate, which brings us into the realms of conspiracy theory... but I digress...
When our young, tracksuited football fan learns that Strike Dribbler, or whatever our imaginary footballer is named, has messed around with someone he shouldn't, master Tracksuit immediately withdraws his support from that person, and lobbies the team to get rid of him, then determines that he won't do the same... correct?? Well, sorry, but no... more likely, young Tracksuit will still buy the season ticket and the Strike Dribbler shirt, and conciously or unconciously mimic the behaviour of his hero... especially when the oman in question is later "revealed" by the same tabloids to be a money grabbing fame hungry publicity seeker....
If the tabloids exercised restraint, however, and kept to the spirit of the law as well as its letter, then the scenario is quite different... Strike Dribbler is the clean living footballer who doesn't get drunk and smash up hotels, and is faithful to his wife and kids... now, who's going to suffer if young Tracksuit grows up emulating that behaviour..??
Of course, the whole thing would rely on discretion, particularly that of the participants... now, the beard is not laying all the blame at one door, as it most definitely takes at least two to tango, but at least half of the blame lies with the other party, the money-grabbing, fame-hungry etc etc... if they were to maybe have a quiet word in the right ear and get paid off, well, surely the better for society... but then of course they wouldn't have the fame that is theirs by right, and is of course the only thing that young women should be aiming for in their lives according to those founts of all wisdom that spread the word... as we all know, the only way to feel worth anything is to be famous...
But, I hear you all yell, wouldn't this all just be dishonest? well, the beard's favourite teaching mechanism, Lies-to-Children (of which, more later) should tell you that sometimes the truth is less important than you may think, and is certainly often less useful... and who knows, maybe some of these overpaid celebrities would see tales of their virtual, perfect lives and think to themselves, actually, maybe I could have fun behaving like that... and the problem would solve itself... but it would need people to act responsibly, and we all know the chances of that occuring...
But the beard grows shaggy, and the clippers beckon, so, with a kiss blown in the direction of Chelsea and the lovely Mrs Beard, it remains to say that until we all become responsible, and all our injunctions take on superness, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some of us may be interested in the fact that some footballer of whom the Beard has never heard had some sort of sexual relations with some apparent celebrity of whom the Beard has also never heard... and, without meaning to sound uncynical, it does seem like a very good way to garner public interest and possibly kick start a career in Hello magazine... But sometimes common sense should prevail in these things...
Now, the hirsute one is no fan of deceit, but occasionally it can come in handy.. for instance, if everyone had been open and honest about their intentions between 1939 and 1945, the War (the one we apparently don't mention when the Germans are in the hotel) would have traced a very different course... and even now, deceit saves lives... but there are more ways than one to save a life...
I'm no fan of footballers either, but I accept that these overpaid shorts wearers have taken the place of famous generals and war heroes in our national subconcious and have become the role models for an entire generation... young men all over Britain buy overpriced trainers and support the hair gel industry as a result... which is, so I'm told, good news for everyone... if only it stopped there... but these men are role models in other ways...
The argument of the tabloid press, along with many others, is that if these role models misbehave, then they should be revealed and shamed for the public good, as some sort of object lesson in morality... which is all well and good, until you realise that it actually has the opposite effect... which the Beard feels may be deliberate, which brings us into the realms of conspiracy theory... but I digress...
When our young, tracksuited football fan learns that Strike Dribbler, or whatever our imaginary footballer is named, has messed around with someone he shouldn't, master Tracksuit immediately withdraws his support from that person, and lobbies the team to get rid of him, then determines that he won't do the same... correct?? Well, sorry, but no... more likely, young Tracksuit will still buy the season ticket and the Strike Dribbler shirt, and conciously or unconciously mimic the behaviour of his hero... especially when the oman in question is later "revealed" by the same tabloids to be a money grabbing fame hungry publicity seeker....
If the tabloids exercised restraint, however, and kept to the spirit of the law as well as its letter, then the scenario is quite different... Strike Dribbler is the clean living footballer who doesn't get drunk and smash up hotels, and is faithful to his wife and kids... now, who's going to suffer if young Tracksuit grows up emulating that behaviour..??
Of course, the whole thing would rely on discretion, particularly that of the participants... now, the beard is not laying all the blame at one door, as it most definitely takes at least two to tango, but at least half of the blame lies with the other party, the money-grabbing, fame-hungry etc etc... if they were to maybe have a quiet word in the right ear and get paid off, well, surely the better for society... but then of course they wouldn't have the fame that is theirs by right, and is of course the only thing that young women should be aiming for in their lives according to those founts of all wisdom that spread the word... as we all know, the only way to feel worth anything is to be famous...
But, I hear you all yell, wouldn't this all just be dishonest? well, the beard's favourite teaching mechanism, Lies-to-Children (of which, more later) should tell you that sometimes the truth is less important than you may think, and is certainly often less useful... and who knows, maybe some of these overpaid celebrities would see tales of their virtual, perfect lives and think to themselves, actually, maybe I could have fun behaving like that... and the problem would solve itself... but it would need people to act responsibly, and we all know the chances of that occuring...
But the beard grows shaggy, and the clippers beckon, so, with a kiss blown in the direction of Chelsea and the lovely Mrs Beard, it remains to say that until we all become responsible, and all our injunctions take on superness, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Dictatorships, democracy, and other lies....
Lying is often a force for good... or so the Beard has been told several times in his life.... or possibly not... but it does remain to be said that the truth often hurts, and who wants to hurt anyone...?? As some of you may be unaware, the Beard acknowledges that the best teaching method known to what we like to call humanity is that system known as "lies to children..." for those who don't know, this involves giving deliberatley wrong answers that see to make sense simply because the truth is basically incomprehensible without first accepting the lie... for example, take gravity.... we all know as kids that it is some strong force that holds us to the ground.. as we progress, we learn that it's actually quite weak... then we find that actually, it's not a force like a magnet, but a dent in space-time that we fall into... and all because we won't be able to instantly understand from a young age that actually all it is is a probability curve of ingenious type...
But I digress.... lies are also, says the beard attempting and failing to get back on topic, the best way to govern a people... after all, as a famous man with an even more famous mustache once said, people would sooner fall for the big lie than the small one... and that the best place to hide a lie is between two truths... but who really wants to know the truth.... as that fascinatingly able civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby once said, "all the people want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies..."
And now we are told taht one of the major baddies is apparently dead, assassinated by the US, and dumped in the ocean... which at first glance seems a good thing... but it isn't... now, whether or not you actually believe in the official Al Qaeda story (and it's on record that the Beard, arch skeptic that he is, strangely does not) it seems very strange (to overuse the word simply due to lack of thesaurus and of willpower to get up and find one...) that the US a) decided to treat him worse than the Nazis, who at least got some sort of trial, b) made the possibly late Osama bin Laden a martyr for the cause, and c) got rid of the evidence that actually backed up their claim... leaving the door open for claims of "He has risen!" or even of "He wasn't actually dead!"
Now, thinking this strange is in itself strange... a wise-ish, but Beardless man once told me that if you want to know whodunnit just look to see who gains most... so who gains from this?? Well, on the face of it, you'd think the ranks of so-called Islamic fanatics would.. they've got a martyr or a mistake, and a reason for revenge attacks... which will just serve to alienate them even more from the people they claim to represent... lets be honest, Al Qaeda was never pro muslim... well, it was definitely anti Shiite... and the average Muslim is like everybody else.. the last thing he or she wants is to strap a bomb to themselves and kill folk... most just want to get on with the day to day business of life without causing trouble while sticking to the rules of their God... who promotes pacifism and tolerance if you read the Quran... which has got to be a good thing... and looking like a bunch of fanatical murderers does very little to swell the ranks of any faith... all it does is attract the sort of people that you really wouldn't want in heaven, regardless of any amount of sherbert and houris....
The people who really benefit from this live nice quiet lives in the USA... lets be honest, an unstable world allows them to keep oil prices low, the dollar high, and gives them a fair amount of licence to move in and mess around with "hostile" countries.... as an aside, was I the only one to notice that the US moved into Afghanistan just after a large amount of hitherto unexpected mineral wealth (molybdenum if I remember correctly) was discovered there.... but yet again I digress....
The Christian church in the US also benefits... both in new converts desperate to get saved from these fanatics, and because since the US did far too good a job on Russia, they are desperately in need of a new Beast from the East to act as antichrist... and Islam fits the bill...because as we are all told, the hordes of Islam are just waiting to rush over the world, bringing fire and the sword to the infidel, just like they did in the crusades, where Christianity only survived by the skin of its teeth and by sending thousands of bloodthirsty armed men to rape, pillage and otherwise upset those disgusting, religiously tolerant people who dared to live where Jesus did...
I think it's fairly clear from other news what most Middle Eastern Muslims actually want, and it ain't the theocratic, pseudo religious despotism preached by the likes of bin Laden et al, for whatever reasons... it would actually seem that they want democracy...
As you may know, democracy is yet another entry on the list of "stuff that the Beard don't believe in..." along with human rights, the abolition of slavery and the postman... its not that I'm against it per se, just that having never seen it in action, I fell unable to make a judgement on the matter.... it's like communism in a way.. lots of people advocate it, someone tries to instigate it, then it all gets bogged down halfway through and doesn't happen... so we all end up under despotism of one kind or another...
Not that despotism is all bad... I mean, I've lived in a despotic system all my life, and it doesn't seem to have harmed me... several of you are now rising to your feet, saying "But I've just voted! I must live in a democracy..." Sorry to disillusion you all.... although we in the good old UK have the trappings of democracy, like the vote, and a parliament etc, when was the last time you saw the majority in charge?? All we have is the dubious choice of which minority we want to dictate to us.... as a great man once said, "Government never changes... only the faces..." and lets be honest, that's as true as it gets... just because our particular despot is a group of people, some sort of gestalt being, forever mutable but essentially unchanging, rather than a single person, it doesn't make our system any fairer... even if the voting system gets changed, the same parties will be in parliament, doing the same things in slightly different ways, and nothing will really change... I think I've mentioned before that Orwell's 1984 is not a warning about some future totalitarian state, but an expose of the current totalitarian system that we in Britain live under.... so, the Beard for one hopes that the Arabs and north africans get there democracy... it will be nice to see if the system works in practice...
And to be honest, once they've got it, they'll probably realise that they don't want it... after all, true democracy includes a element of choice, and of responsibility... and who really wants that... the Beard is reminded of a man from Romania, who, after the fall of Ceaucesceau decided to emigrate to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, because he felt more comfortable under a dictator... and are the Russians really better off now they have pseudo democracy and capitalism?? Ok, there were shortages under Communism, but at least the gap between rich and poor was usually quite small... its the old lie of Capitalim, and one of the most effective... work hard, and you can be rich and comfortable... when in truth the way to get rich and comfortable under capitalism is to get others to do the hard work and skim stuff off the top... to put it the way I was told years ago, it is the constant promise of jam tomorrow, so you won't notice the lack of bread today... personally, I'd rather have the bread... the jam'll probably turn out to be cheap strawberry stuff with loads of seeds anyway...
Now, I was going to bore you with my conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, but the time ticks on in its interstitial and interspatial way, and even those as hirsute as oneself need to sleep... so it remains only to be said that democracy is as good an aim as any, but few of us can aim at all, so until we all get the choice and ask someone to take it away again, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!
But I digress.... lies are also, says the beard attempting and failing to get back on topic, the best way to govern a people... after all, as a famous man with an even more famous mustache once said, people would sooner fall for the big lie than the small one... and that the best place to hide a lie is between two truths... but who really wants to know the truth.... as that fascinatingly able civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby once said, "all the people want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies..."
And now we are told taht one of the major baddies is apparently dead, assassinated by the US, and dumped in the ocean... which at first glance seems a good thing... but it isn't... now, whether or not you actually believe in the official Al Qaeda story (and it's on record that the Beard, arch skeptic that he is, strangely does not) it seems very strange (to overuse the word simply due to lack of thesaurus and of willpower to get up and find one...) that the US a) decided to treat him worse than the Nazis, who at least got some sort of trial, b) made the possibly late Osama bin Laden a martyr for the cause, and c) got rid of the evidence that actually backed up their claim... leaving the door open for claims of "He has risen!" or even of "He wasn't actually dead!"
Now, thinking this strange is in itself strange... a wise-ish, but Beardless man once told me that if you want to know whodunnit just look to see who gains most... so who gains from this?? Well, on the face of it, you'd think the ranks of so-called Islamic fanatics would.. they've got a martyr or a mistake, and a reason for revenge attacks... which will just serve to alienate them even more from the people they claim to represent... lets be honest, Al Qaeda was never pro muslim... well, it was definitely anti Shiite... and the average Muslim is like everybody else.. the last thing he or she wants is to strap a bomb to themselves and kill folk... most just want to get on with the day to day business of life without causing trouble while sticking to the rules of their God... who promotes pacifism and tolerance if you read the Quran... which has got to be a good thing... and looking like a bunch of fanatical murderers does very little to swell the ranks of any faith... all it does is attract the sort of people that you really wouldn't want in heaven, regardless of any amount of sherbert and houris....
The people who really benefit from this live nice quiet lives in the USA... lets be honest, an unstable world allows them to keep oil prices low, the dollar high, and gives them a fair amount of licence to move in and mess around with "hostile" countries.... as an aside, was I the only one to notice that the US moved into Afghanistan just after a large amount of hitherto unexpected mineral wealth (molybdenum if I remember correctly) was discovered there.... but yet again I digress....
The Christian church in the US also benefits... both in new converts desperate to get saved from these fanatics, and because since the US did far too good a job on Russia, they are desperately in need of a new Beast from the East to act as antichrist... and Islam fits the bill...because as we are all told, the hordes of Islam are just waiting to rush over the world, bringing fire and the sword to the infidel, just like they did in the crusades, where Christianity only survived by the skin of its teeth and by sending thousands of bloodthirsty armed men to rape, pillage and otherwise upset those disgusting, religiously tolerant people who dared to live where Jesus did...
I think it's fairly clear from other news what most Middle Eastern Muslims actually want, and it ain't the theocratic, pseudo religious despotism preached by the likes of bin Laden et al, for whatever reasons... it would actually seem that they want democracy...
As you may know, democracy is yet another entry on the list of "stuff that the Beard don't believe in..." along with human rights, the abolition of slavery and the postman... its not that I'm against it per se, just that having never seen it in action, I fell unable to make a judgement on the matter.... it's like communism in a way.. lots of people advocate it, someone tries to instigate it, then it all gets bogged down halfway through and doesn't happen... so we all end up under despotism of one kind or another...
Not that despotism is all bad... I mean, I've lived in a despotic system all my life, and it doesn't seem to have harmed me... several of you are now rising to your feet, saying "But I've just voted! I must live in a democracy..." Sorry to disillusion you all.... although we in the good old UK have the trappings of democracy, like the vote, and a parliament etc, when was the last time you saw the majority in charge?? All we have is the dubious choice of which minority we want to dictate to us.... as a great man once said, "Government never changes... only the faces..." and lets be honest, that's as true as it gets... just because our particular despot is a group of people, some sort of gestalt being, forever mutable but essentially unchanging, rather than a single person, it doesn't make our system any fairer... even if the voting system gets changed, the same parties will be in parliament, doing the same things in slightly different ways, and nothing will really change... I think I've mentioned before that Orwell's 1984 is not a warning about some future totalitarian state, but an expose of the current totalitarian system that we in Britain live under.... so, the Beard for one hopes that the Arabs and north africans get there democracy... it will be nice to see if the system works in practice...
And to be honest, once they've got it, they'll probably realise that they don't want it... after all, true democracy includes a element of choice, and of responsibility... and who really wants that... the Beard is reminded of a man from Romania, who, after the fall of Ceaucesceau decided to emigrate to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, because he felt more comfortable under a dictator... and are the Russians really better off now they have pseudo democracy and capitalism?? Ok, there were shortages under Communism, but at least the gap between rich and poor was usually quite small... its the old lie of Capitalim, and one of the most effective... work hard, and you can be rich and comfortable... when in truth the way to get rich and comfortable under capitalism is to get others to do the hard work and skim stuff off the top... to put it the way I was told years ago, it is the constant promise of jam tomorrow, so you won't notice the lack of bread today... personally, I'd rather have the bread... the jam'll probably turn out to be cheap strawberry stuff with loads of seeds anyway...
Now, I was going to bore you with my conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, but the time ticks on in its interstitial and interspatial way, and even those as hirsute as oneself need to sleep... so it remains only to be said that democracy is as good an aim as any, but few of us can aim at all, so until we all get the choice and ask someone to take it away again, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Back again....
So, the Beard realises that he's spent nearly two whole months incommunicado... but just as you all are breathing a possibly collective sigh of relief, he goes and spoils it all by posting....
Now, the beard has had a lot on his hands and mind recently... for one thing, there is no longer a Future Mrs Beard... yes, to her horror and ultimate regret, the Beard has attempted to do the nearly decent thing, and the FMB is now simply Mrs Beard... the soon to be step beards are now fully fledged members of the Beardiness collective... yes, teh Beard and his lovely beautiful betrothed are now married... and are enjoying it all immensely... which is good....
It's definitely a time of newness for the Beard... not only does he have a beautiful new wife, but he has just returned from his first trip to Continental Europe, where he and his bride enjoyed a fantastic honeymoom in the old capital of the HRE and the current capital of the Czech Republic, Prague... the whole experience of which has led the Beard to despair at the literacy of banking staff, who, despite Prague being an incredibly popular destination, were not only wrongly convinced that the Czech currency is the Euro, but upon insistence that it was in fact the Czech Koruny, searched their little computers and were unable to find any reference to such a monetary unit... mainly down to their insistence on using the spellings Check and Cheque.... surely the hirsute one of Wiseness cannot be the first to ask for this currency... or do British holiday makers invariably find themselves having to change their Euros upon arrival....??
Prague, as stated, is a wonderful city... the Beard, being a fn of such things, loved the fuctionality of their public transport... why we can't have a similar integrated reliable and clean system over here is beyond me... but then so are a lot of things... and the Newly crowned Mrs Beard loved the place too, even the Skoda museum... but the Vltava, teh castle and the Vysehrad were spectacular... The Beard expresses great pleasure that his first ever journey by aeroplane and his first visit to the continent were to such a lovely place, and accompanied by such a beautiful young lady... and dave Themonkey of course....
Apart from the Beard's, another wedding apparently took place recently, between a certain Prince and his allegedly common girlfriend... now, the Beard has nothing against the pair personally, and if you were one of the millions who took some strange pleasure in watching the nuptials of two complete strangers when the weddings even of your closest friends actually (if you're honest) bored you to tears, well, I'm happy for you... personally, I went shopping... not due to any vehement anti-royalism ( for the beard believes in monarchy, of a sort) but simply because of a lack of interest in a strangers wedding... I often wonder why we can somehow summon up such emotion for people we have never met, when the deaths, births and marriages of those on our actual personal periphery, indeed, sometiimes of those fairly close, affect us so little... perhaps there is something in us that tries to keep some imagined weakness from the group, while allowing its release in safer surrounds... or maybe we've been brainwashed by the celebrity mill for far too long... after all, most of us probably spend more time with Katie Price and Cheryl Cole in our living rooms than we do with our aunt Vera... so probbaly we do actually feel closer to these vacuous and not so vacuous celebs than we do to our own kith and kin... but I digress...
My main problem with royalty in this country, or at least one of them, is that of cost... now, I'm not neccesarily saying that the queen et al should get a job... after all, she should leave them for those that need one... but when it comes to that monstrosity that is the civil list... well... am I the only person who thinks that maybe the Saxe Coburg Gothas (or Windsors, if you prefer..) don't actually need any more payments? Maybe, even just for five years, the list should be suspended, and they could live on the millions they've alreday got... after all, thats what a lot of poorer millionaires do... then the money could be spent on something worthwhile... like an integrated public transport system, perhaps...
But it grows early... the beard is tired, Mrs Beard is breathing softly in her marital sleep beside him, having retained her job, her honour, and, against all odds, her sanity... it remains only to say that defenestration still seems like a good idea, that married life is suiting the Beard down to the ground, and that until we can all integrate somehow, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, the beard has had a lot on his hands and mind recently... for one thing, there is no longer a Future Mrs Beard... yes, to her horror and ultimate regret, the Beard has attempted to do the nearly decent thing, and the FMB is now simply Mrs Beard... the soon to be step beards are now fully fledged members of the Beardiness collective... yes, teh Beard and his lovely beautiful betrothed are now married... and are enjoying it all immensely... which is good....
It's definitely a time of newness for the Beard... not only does he have a beautiful new wife, but he has just returned from his first trip to Continental Europe, where he and his bride enjoyed a fantastic honeymoom in the old capital of the HRE and the current capital of the Czech Republic, Prague... the whole experience of which has led the Beard to despair at the literacy of banking staff, who, despite Prague being an incredibly popular destination, were not only wrongly convinced that the Czech currency is the Euro, but upon insistence that it was in fact the Czech Koruny, searched their little computers and were unable to find any reference to such a monetary unit... mainly down to their insistence on using the spellings Check and Cheque.... surely the hirsute one of Wiseness cannot be the first to ask for this currency... or do British holiday makers invariably find themselves having to change their Euros upon arrival....??
Prague, as stated, is a wonderful city... the Beard, being a fn of such things, loved the fuctionality of their public transport... why we can't have a similar integrated reliable and clean system over here is beyond me... but then so are a lot of things... and the Newly crowned Mrs Beard loved the place too, even the Skoda museum... but the Vltava, teh castle and the Vysehrad were spectacular... The Beard expresses great pleasure that his first ever journey by aeroplane and his first visit to the continent were to such a lovely place, and accompanied by such a beautiful young lady... and dave Themonkey of course....
Apart from the Beard's, another wedding apparently took place recently, between a certain Prince and his allegedly common girlfriend... now, the Beard has nothing against the pair personally, and if you were one of the millions who took some strange pleasure in watching the nuptials of two complete strangers when the weddings even of your closest friends actually (if you're honest) bored you to tears, well, I'm happy for you... personally, I went shopping... not due to any vehement anti-royalism ( for the beard believes in monarchy, of a sort) but simply because of a lack of interest in a strangers wedding... I often wonder why we can somehow summon up such emotion for people we have never met, when the deaths, births and marriages of those on our actual personal periphery, indeed, sometiimes of those fairly close, affect us so little... perhaps there is something in us that tries to keep some imagined weakness from the group, while allowing its release in safer surrounds... or maybe we've been brainwashed by the celebrity mill for far too long... after all, most of us probably spend more time with Katie Price and Cheryl Cole in our living rooms than we do with our aunt Vera... so probbaly we do actually feel closer to these vacuous and not so vacuous celebs than we do to our own kith and kin... but I digress...
My main problem with royalty in this country, or at least one of them, is that of cost... now, I'm not neccesarily saying that the queen et al should get a job... after all, she should leave them for those that need one... but when it comes to that monstrosity that is the civil list... well... am I the only person who thinks that maybe the Saxe Coburg Gothas (or Windsors, if you prefer..) don't actually need any more payments? Maybe, even just for five years, the list should be suspended, and they could live on the millions they've alreday got... after all, thats what a lot of poorer millionaires do... then the money could be spent on something worthwhile... like an integrated public transport system, perhaps...
But it grows early... the beard is tired, Mrs Beard is breathing softly in her marital sleep beside him, having retained her job, her honour, and, against all odds, her sanity... it remains only to say that defenestration still seems like a good idea, that married life is suiting the Beard down to the ground, and that until we can all integrate somehow, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Underdogs....
Now, the Beard, as you may or may not know, and why should or shouldn't you, has always been a champion... well, more of a supporter of the underdog against what we shall call for no good reason other than the law of opposites, the Overcat.... This may lead you to the illogical conclusion that it would please the Beard greatly if equality were to prevail, and the underdog were to become a thing of the past, with each man's responsibilities and privileges (if you recall my stance on rights...) becoming the same as any others, and each of us being listened to and given the same opportunities...
But you'd be wrong (as I say, remember the Beard's stance on rights...)
The Beard is, as I say, a great supporter of the underdog, right up to the point where he defeats his opponent ( the underdog that is, not the Beard) and joins the Overcat society, thus enabling himself to create more underdogs.. and this is a good thing... because by creating underdogs we assure our survival...
How so, I hear you gasp... quite simply... it is the underdog who struggles, who strives, and makes the world a better place by doing so... the overcat of course doesn't have to struggle... and it is the strugglers and strivers who create the new... it is their belief against the odds that their idea, their viewpoint, their ideal, is worth so much that they can take on insuperable odds and somehow super them that does so much for the world at large... and to promote that struggle and advancement, we need more underdogs, not fewer...
Of course, in a society such as ours today, that will never be a problem, designed as it is to ensure that people are either elevated beyond all reason or pushed down into the dirt... Now, it doesn't take a genius to work out what the scene is... oops, slipped into a bit of Kirsty MacColl there... no comedians, please.... but it doesn't take a genius to work out that the Beard, (who famously asked who Andy Murray was the other day, believing that when the Future Mrs Beard mentioned such personage she was referring to a facebook friend... of which, more later...) is not a big fan of the whole celebrity thing... personally I can never see myself as being the sort of person who doesn't read the "i" because it didn't mention what Cheryl Cole or Jordan were up to... you know who you are...
Now, the Beard, being a minor celebrity himself (so minor, in fact, that he has slipped out of the far side of famous, and is rapidly approaching the top of the pile from the other end, in a relativistic, quantum sort of way) knows just how fleeting such status is... and hopes that eventually we go back to being the sort of society where it becomes fleeting again... famous for fifteen minutes I can stand... but when some of these people who, quite honestly, deserve four minutes and fifty seconds at the very most then cling on with their fingernails to the duration of fame formerly reserved for quite good actors, or clever physicists, or war winning generals, then I believe that it points at a rot deep deep in the heart of society.... And it's unfairly robbing some of you of your own fifteen minutes.... which may be grounds for suing Jordan... or maybe not....
And that heart, lets be honest, is not all that deep... without wishing to overuse the honesty bit, well, lets be honest, society is all we've managed so far... civilisation, at least in so far as we would want the word to mean, has passed us by for millenia.... of course, we and the Romans, and the Greeks, and the Sumerians, and whoever there was whenever, all pretended to believe that we had achieved civilised status... but to be truthful all we as a race have ever achieved is bigger tribes than anyone else... and this has been so successful that the big tribes have split into smaller sub tribes, admittedly with flexible membership, but with a big big problem... unable to really see themselves as part of the big super tribe, and with liited space to carve out their own territory and break from the big group, they are left alienated, confused, and almost certainly tempestuous, if not positively warlike.
We would all like to think of ourselves as civilised, of course, but we're not.. one small scratch reveals the animal beneath... and it's only going to get worse... humans aren't supposed to live in big groups, nor is any animal... we've done our best to make sure that there are resources enough to feed us and so on, in an attempt to quell internicine strife, but it hasn't really worked.. as usual, the bigger, more advanced tribes have ganged up on the weaker to withhold the stuff of life... and have attempted to channel any violent, tribal urges into apparently safer pursuits like the football, X-Factor loyalties, FaceBook feuds, bullying and limited warfare... but it's fooling no-one guys... and one day, it's all going to blow up in our faces.... perhaps it already has...
Unfortunately, the Beard has to hope that this scenario is true... after all, his "Gaian Man as antibody" theory relies on it... if you are not aware of the theory, a quick synopsis... man is not a cancer, destroying the environment, but an antibody whose purpose is to raise global temperatures etc and then get wiped out, with the satisfaction of a job well done, so that the good old earth can safely enter the next stage of its life cycle.... which is a comforting thought, possibly... or possibly not...
But the hour is getting short of minutes, the Beard's cold is wearing him down, and bed along with the Future Mrs Beard beckons... so it remains to say, that until fame is as fleting as it deserves to be, Wisebeard Salutes You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But you'd be wrong (as I say, remember the Beard's stance on rights...)
The Beard is, as I say, a great supporter of the underdog, right up to the point where he defeats his opponent ( the underdog that is, not the Beard) and joins the Overcat society, thus enabling himself to create more underdogs.. and this is a good thing... because by creating underdogs we assure our survival...
How so, I hear you gasp... quite simply... it is the underdog who struggles, who strives, and makes the world a better place by doing so... the overcat of course doesn't have to struggle... and it is the strugglers and strivers who create the new... it is their belief against the odds that their idea, their viewpoint, their ideal, is worth so much that they can take on insuperable odds and somehow super them that does so much for the world at large... and to promote that struggle and advancement, we need more underdogs, not fewer...
Of course, in a society such as ours today, that will never be a problem, designed as it is to ensure that people are either elevated beyond all reason or pushed down into the dirt... Now, it doesn't take a genius to work out what the scene is... oops, slipped into a bit of Kirsty MacColl there... no comedians, please.... but it doesn't take a genius to work out that the Beard, (who famously asked who Andy Murray was the other day, believing that when the Future Mrs Beard mentioned such personage she was referring to a facebook friend... of which, more later...) is not a big fan of the whole celebrity thing... personally I can never see myself as being the sort of person who doesn't read the "i" because it didn't mention what Cheryl Cole or Jordan were up to... you know who you are...
Now, the Beard, being a minor celebrity himself (so minor, in fact, that he has slipped out of the far side of famous, and is rapidly approaching the top of the pile from the other end, in a relativistic, quantum sort of way) knows just how fleeting such status is... and hopes that eventually we go back to being the sort of society where it becomes fleeting again... famous for fifteen minutes I can stand... but when some of these people who, quite honestly, deserve four minutes and fifty seconds at the very most then cling on with their fingernails to the duration of fame formerly reserved for quite good actors, or clever physicists, or war winning generals, then I believe that it points at a rot deep deep in the heart of society.... And it's unfairly robbing some of you of your own fifteen minutes.... which may be grounds for suing Jordan... or maybe not....
And that heart, lets be honest, is not all that deep... without wishing to overuse the honesty bit, well, lets be honest, society is all we've managed so far... civilisation, at least in so far as we would want the word to mean, has passed us by for millenia.... of course, we and the Romans, and the Greeks, and the Sumerians, and whoever there was whenever, all pretended to believe that we had achieved civilised status... but to be truthful all we as a race have ever achieved is bigger tribes than anyone else... and this has been so successful that the big tribes have split into smaller sub tribes, admittedly with flexible membership, but with a big big problem... unable to really see themselves as part of the big super tribe, and with liited space to carve out their own territory and break from the big group, they are left alienated, confused, and almost certainly tempestuous, if not positively warlike.
We would all like to think of ourselves as civilised, of course, but we're not.. one small scratch reveals the animal beneath... and it's only going to get worse... humans aren't supposed to live in big groups, nor is any animal... we've done our best to make sure that there are resources enough to feed us and so on, in an attempt to quell internicine strife, but it hasn't really worked.. as usual, the bigger, more advanced tribes have ganged up on the weaker to withhold the stuff of life... and have attempted to channel any violent, tribal urges into apparently safer pursuits like the football, X-Factor loyalties, FaceBook feuds, bullying and limited warfare... but it's fooling no-one guys... and one day, it's all going to blow up in our faces.... perhaps it already has...
Unfortunately, the Beard has to hope that this scenario is true... after all, his "Gaian Man as antibody" theory relies on it... if you are not aware of the theory, a quick synopsis... man is not a cancer, destroying the environment, but an antibody whose purpose is to raise global temperatures etc and then get wiped out, with the satisfaction of a job well done, so that the good old earth can safely enter the next stage of its life cycle.... which is a comforting thought, possibly... or possibly not...
But the hour is getting short of minutes, the Beard's cold is wearing him down, and bed along with the Future Mrs Beard beckons... so it remains to say, that until fame is as fleting as it deserves to be, Wisebeard Salutes You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Monday, 17 January 2011
Hoods.....
and possibly the boys in them... or maybe not... Now, as those of you who know the Beard, and several of those who don't, can attest, our hairy friend is incredibly averse to controversy and confrontation, as this blog proves.... I have always attempted to steer clear of subjects that may cause offence, and my opinions have always been fairly average... from the support of ID cards (if free), the reintroduction of fox hunting, the advantages of battery farming, and the use of dangerous criminals for medical experimentation, the Beard's views are obviously quite mainstream... as is his position on human rights...
Don't worry, faithful Beard followers, I'm not about to launch yet again into the reasons why human rights should be abolished, but I'm afraid the subject is comig to the fore as I watch a Panorama about so-called Feckless Fathers....
In my hirsute opinion, this labelling is never a good thing... not teh labelling itself, which does possibly serve a purpose in highlighting a problem, but the method of labelling.. this awful, mock-humourous tabloidy stuff... lets be honest, along with Joy Riders, and Happy Slappers, and other such foolery, these labels serve to somehow make light of the problem... I'm not a dangerous car thief, I'm a Joy Rider... I'm not a vicious violent attacker, I'm a Happy Slapper... I'm not an idle, irresponsible selfish c**t, I'm a Feckless Father....
Lets be honest, the real reason why there is this apparent correlation between male unemployment and absent fathers is almost certainly because the same men who can't be bothered to get out of bed to take on a job because they'd rather play on their x-boxes and get money from benefits, are strangely unable to be bothered to look after the kids that they've spawned... Now, the beard will admit that the benefit system desperately needs an overhaul, and that single parents are often better off not working (the Beard himself earns less from employment than his benefits would total were he a single parent... it was only the tax credits (benefits themselves) taht allowed him to keep his (admittedly large) head above water... but there is no excuse for these idle peopel to not go out and get a job... lets be honest, Eastern Europeans seem to be able to get jobs quite easily... and more power to them... so why can't young English people?
Aha, I hear you say... that's because all these Eastern Europeans are coming over, taking the jobs from the young natives... just like the blacks did in the fifties... but this is putting the cart before the horse, or some other such mis-applied metaphor...
The reason we employ migrant workers is the same now as it always has been... a subculture of idleness masquerading as pride... "I'm not emptying bins/ picking orders/ sweeping floors/ washing cars for the minimum wage or just above... what sort of job is that for a man.... " The Beard has even heard people in job centres exclaim "I'm not working 40 hours a week for 8 quid and hour!" Well, the Beard would... he currently works for less than that.... and so would lots and lots of people... what they actually mean is "I can't be bothered to do that... I'd rather stay a kid, play games, sleep and get some pocket money and never have to wonder where it comes from... and if someone's foolish enough to let me, even better..."
But recognising the problem is only a small part of this... the main thing is to try to suggest and implement a solution... and there is one, an easy one, but so far no one seems to have the backbone to do it... mainly due to worrying about the infringement of so called human rights....
Simply put, make people work for their benefits.... how many times are we told that hospitals are dirty due to lack of money, roads are in bad condition due to lack of money, and so on, when the real problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of manpower.... get some of these Feckless fathers scrubbing wards, digging holes, clearing rivers, and not just as a brief, short-lived community project for volunteers... make it a condition of their getting benefits... pay the benefits in the form of housing, food and leisure activities at a basic level, rather than in money... make sure that people in "proper" jobs get more than they could on the benefit system, and let anyone who doesn't want to work starve in the streets... trust me, they won't form wild, dangerous bandit gangs... it'll be too much like hard work... Hands up who wants to pay a nineteen year old to father kids and play on the x-box.... now hands up who wants to pay the same person to make sure the roads are clear of snow....
I think the ayes have it.... or possibly not... who can tell... all that is certain is that this will probably not happen in our lifetimes... which is a pity... perhaps this approach might even give some of these idle persons a sense of real pride... or maybe not...
Related to this is the problem of fathers who refuse to look after their offspring.... now, as a father and prospective step-father, the Beard struggles to understand any father not wanting contact with their kids... some lose contact through the action of vengeful women, true, but a lot simply have the same can't be bothered attitude that they have towards work... this is a far harder problem to solve, as to be honest, forcing fathers to see their kids could end up doing more harm than good... possibly the solution is a probationary system... once the first child is born, the father is observed... if he fails to support his progeny, in any way at all, he should be sterilised... this also would help decrease the surplus population, Ebeneezer, and solve innumerable other problems... but that's for another time...
It remains to say, Captain Beefheart and Pete Postlethwaite, belatedly rest in peace, and to those of you who can be bothered, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't worry, faithful Beard followers, I'm not about to launch yet again into the reasons why human rights should be abolished, but I'm afraid the subject is comig to the fore as I watch a Panorama about so-called Feckless Fathers....
In my hirsute opinion, this labelling is never a good thing... not teh labelling itself, which does possibly serve a purpose in highlighting a problem, but the method of labelling.. this awful, mock-humourous tabloidy stuff... lets be honest, along with Joy Riders, and Happy Slappers, and other such foolery, these labels serve to somehow make light of the problem... I'm not a dangerous car thief, I'm a Joy Rider... I'm not a vicious violent attacker, I'm a Happy Slapper... I'm not an idle, irresponsible selfish c**t, I'm a Feckless Father....
Lets be honest, the real reason why there is this apparent correlation between male unemployment and absent fathers is almost certainly because the same men who can't be bothered to get out of bed to take on a job because they'd rather play on their x-boxes and get money from benefits, are strangely unable to be bothered to look after the kids that they've spawned... Now, the beard will admit that the benefit system desperately needs an overhaul, and that single parents are often better off not working (the Beard himself earns less from employment than his benefits would total were he a single parent... it was only the tax credits (benefits themselves) taht allowed him to keep his (admittedly large) head above water... but there is no excuse for these idle peopel to not go out and get a job... lets be honest, Eastern Europeans seem to be able to get jobs quite easily... and more power to them... so why can't young English people?
Aha, I hear you say... that's because all these Eastern Europeans are coming over, taking the jobs from the young natives... just like the blacks did in the fifties... but this is putting the cart before the horse, or some other such mis-applied metaphor...
The reason we employ migrant workers is the same now as it always has been... a subculture of idleness masquerading as pride... "I'm not emptying bins/ picking orders/ sweeping floors/ washing cars for the minimum wage or just above... what sort of job is that for a man.... " The Beard has even heard people in job centres exclaim "I'm not working 40 hours a week for 8 quid and hour!" Well, the Beard would... he currently works for less than that.... and so would lots and lots of people... what they actually mean is "I can't be bothered to do that... I'd rather stay a kid, play games, sleep and get some pocket money and never have to wonder where it comes from... and if someone's foolish enough to let me, even better..."
But recognising the problem is only a small part of this... the main thing is to try to suggest and implement a solution... and there is one, an easy one, but so far no one seems to have the backbone to do it... mainly due to worrying about the infringement of so called human rights....
Simply put, make people work for their benefits.... how many times are we told that hospitals are dirty due to lack of money, roads are in bad condition due to lack of money, and so on, when the real problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of manpower.... get some of these Feckless fathers scrubbing wards, digging holes, clearing rivers, and not just as a brief, short-lived community project for volunteers... make it a condition of their getting benefits... pay the benefits in the form of housing, food and leisure activities at a basic level, rather than in money... make sure that people in "proper" jobs get more than they could on the benefit system, and let anyone who doesn't want to work starve in the streets... trust me, they won't form wild, dangerous bandit gangs... it'll be too much like hard work... Hands up who wants to pay a nineteen year old to father kids and play on the x-box.... now hands up who wants to pay the same person to make sure the roads are clear of snow....
I think the ayes have it.... or possibly not... who can tell... all that is certain is that this will probably not happen in our lifetimes... which is a pity... perhaps this approach might even give some of these idle persons a sense of real pride... or maybe not...
Related to this is the problem of fathers who refuse to look after their offspring.... now, as a father and prospective step-father, the Beard struggles to understand any father not wanting contact with their kids... some lose contact through the action of vengeful women, true, but a lot simply have the same can't be bothered attitude that they have towards work... this is a far harder problem to solve, as to be honest, forcing fathers to see their kids could end up doing more harm than good... possibly the solution is a probationary system... once the first child is born, the father is observed... if he fails to support his progeny, in any way at all, he should be sterilised... this also would help decrease the surplus population, Ebeneezer, and solve innumerable other problems... but that's for another time...
It remains to say, Captain Beefheart and Pete Postlethwaite, belatedly rest in peace, and to those of you who can be bothered, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Saturday, 1 January 2011
A new year for some...
but not for others, as the Beard is often called upon to explain to those who adhere totally to the standard western calendar... As an example or several, we have the Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Pagan new years yet to come... which is of course how it should be....
Now, as you may or may not know or care, the Beard of course adheres to all sorts of sticky things, not least of which are honey, treacle, Airfix glue and the belief that the world began with darkness and cold, meaning that the year should also... now, to those of you who wish to point out that it just has, well, the point I must concede to a small extent, whilst simultaneously mentioning that it has been dark and cold for quite a while, and the days are actually getting longer and lighter.... so the Beard is going to wish you all a Happy Newish Year, smug in the knowledge that we are already just over two months in....
Months, as i have mentioned (or not.. the choice is yours) are strange things... allegedly following the phases of the moon (hence the name... honest guvnor...) they actually don't... at least in the commonly used 12 division calendar that most of us know and love... or at least use.... common sense tells us that unless the moon occasionally has a lie in, then his travel around the good old Earth is actually very regular... no 30 and 31 day months for him... oh no.... and, I must admit, they're not for me either...
No, the beard here admits that, werewolf-like, he lives his life according to a regular, 28 day cycle... and not one on which the gears clash and the chain breaks.... no, the Beard begins each month with the new moon, and finishes accordingly... which gives him 13 months in each year... at least....
Now, this actually ties in quite well with my employer's "Lunar Payroll" in which we get paid once every four weeks... meaning that most years we get 13 pay days, and in what you lot out there know as 2010, we actually managed 14... but I digress....
this obviously has advantages and disadvantages.... for example, direct debits can be, if not a nightmare, at the very least a slightly uncomfortable dream which ends with a sheet half off and a slobbered on pillow, as actual pay dates alter every month, and can seriously overtake the dates bills are extracted... but, as most bills seem to be paid every calendar month, it does at least mean that in one pay packet a year, there are no bills to be paid... which leaves you no better off annually, but does work as a sort of savings scheme...
But again the Beard goes off at a tangent.... as I say, 13 months in a year makes sense to me, but not to others... "Aaah!" I hear you say... "Aaah! But 13 lots of 28 doesn't add up to 365, and the new moon doesn't always occur on the last day of the year.... to which I reply, maybe your year doesn't end with the new moon.. and maybe the beard is flexible enough despite his great age to have a 13 month period independent from the 365 daily cycle of the sun.... which, strangely, I am.... it seems to make sense to me.... if not to anyone else...
But all this is by the by... or possibly not... who knows... certainly not me... and definitely not the Beard, who, with the help of the Future Mrs Beard, the soon-to be-Step-Beard, the Elder Almost-Step-Beard (and his lovely assistant)and not least the mighty Beard Junior, has been spending his Yuletide fitting a kitchen in his new home.. yes, that's correct, the Beard has taken the plunge, and is now definitely, obviously and certainly a resident of the West Midlands, and is looking forward with anticipation and eagerness to the joyful day in April when the FMB becomes MB at last.... all he needs is a suit... and a speech.... and all sorts of stuff to be honest... oh yes, some rings would probably come in handy... but enough of that...
The Beard is phenomenally happy, and he has a sneaking suspicion that the FMB is also... at least, she hasn't hit him for several weeks, either with or without a blunt instrument... but there is still time... and at least the kitchen looks good... Dave the Builder and his crew have done a great job so far on the extension (ooh er!!) and the new cooker cooked... which is only to be expected... apparently...
But the hour grows latish, and bed beckons... a walk is on the cards for tomorrow, weather permitting, and the Beard is yawning, so it is time to once again wish those of you who have had one a happy newish year, and say that until all our new years become resolute, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, as you may or may not know or care, the Beard of course adheres to all sorts of sticky things, not least of which are honey, treacle, Airfix glue and the belief that the world began with darkness and cold, meaning that the year should also... now, to those of you who wish to point out that it just has, well, the point I must concede to a small extent, whilst simultaneously mentioning that it has been dark and cold for quite a while, and the days are actually getting longer and lighter.... so the Beard is going to wish you all a Happy Newish Year, smug in the knowledge that we are already just over two months in....
Months, as i have mentioned (or not.. the choice is yours) are strange things... allegedly following the phases of the moon (hence the name... honest guvnor...) they actually don't... at least in the commonly used 12 division calendar that most of us know and love... or at least use.... common sense tells us that unless the moon occasionally has a lie in, then his travel around the good old Earth is actually very regular... no 30 and 31 day months for him... oh no.... and, I must admit, they're not for me either...
No, the beard here admits that, werewolf-like, he lives his life according to a regular, 28 day cycle... and not one on which the gears clash and the chain breaks.... no, the Beard begins each month with the new moon, and finishes accordingly... which gives him 13 months in each year... at least....
Now, this actually ties in quite well with my employer's "Lunar Payroll" in which we get paid once every four weeks... meaning that most years we get 13 pay days, and in what you lot out there know as 2010, we actually managed 14... but I digress....
this obviously has advantages and disadvantages.... for example, direct debits can be, if not a nightmare, at the very least a slightly uncomfortable dream which ends with a sheet half off and a slobbered on pillow, as actual pay dates alter every month, and can seriously overtake the dates bills are extracted... but, as most bills seem to be paid every calendar month, it does at least mean that in one pay packet a year, there are no bills to be paid... which leaves you no better off annually, but does work as a sort of savings scheme...
But again the Beard goes off at a tangent.... as I say, 13 months in a year makes sense to me, but not to others... "Aaah!" I hear you say... "Aaah! But 13 lots of 28 doesn't add up to 365, and the new moon doesn't always occur on the last day of the year.... to which I reply, maybe your year doesn't end with the new moon.. and maybe the beard is flexible enough despite his great age to have a 13 month period independent from the 365 daily cycle of the sun.... which, strangely, I am.... it seems to make sense to me.... if not to anyone else...
But all this is by the by... or possibly not... who knows... certainly not me... and definitely not the Beard, who, with the help of the Future Mrs Beard, the soon-to be-Step-Beard, the Elder Almost-Step-Beard (and his lovely assistant)and not least the mighty Beard Junior, has been spending his Yuletide fitting a kitchen in his new home.. yes, that's correct, the Beard has taken the plunge, and is now definitely, obviously and certainly a resident of the West Midlands, and is looking forward with anticipation and eagerness to the joyful day in April when the FMB becomes MB at last.... all he needs is a suit... and a speech.... and all sorts of stuff to be honest... oh yes, some rings would probably come in handy... but enough of that...
The Beard is phenomenally happy, and he has a sneaking suspicion that the FMB is also... at least, she hasn't hit him for several weeks, either with or without a blunt instrument... but there is still time... and at least the kitchen looks good... Dave the Builder and his crew have done a great job so far on the extension (ooh er!!) and the new cooker cooked... which is only to be expected... apparently...
But the hour grows latish, and bed beckons... a walk is on the cards for tomorrow, weather permitting, and the Beard is yawning, so it is time to once again wish those of you who have had one a happy newish year, and say that until all our new years become resolute, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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About Me
- Kirk Wisebeard
- Well, about me.... in the words of Gag Halfrunt, "Wisebeard's just zis guy, you know.." My official biography reads "Kirk Parsons is." Once i die,which I plan to do at some point in the future, this will become, "Kirk Parsons isn't." But for those who really want to know, the answers are all in here somewhere....
