Awwww!

My third niece was born today and I was in the same city as her mother, my sister (obviously), at the time, which doesn't happen much!

So today was spent excitedly waiting for my sister to leave hospital so that we could go and visit her and her new person.

I'm not really intere4sted in new babies; they are pretty boring frankly. And when they aren't boring they are screaming and so are even more unbearable. However, there is nothing more wonderful than a young couple with a new baby. The emotional roller-coaster they ride in the first few days (before the tiredness kicks in) is the human animal doing its thing. They are aware that they have a difficult task ahead of them and they are determined to get it right. They are also incredibly happy.

Things will probably be more routine driven and mundane for them in a few weeks so this is a precious time and I'm pleased that I got to experience the joy that is a young couple proudly introducing their first child into the world.

Oh, and we share a birthday!

That London.

I'm off to London to visit the Queen's House, the British Plunder Room and to celebrate Mayday.

In fact, I should be going now....

Cheerio!

Nearly Getting Run Over

Why is it that some couples walk along narrow footpaths holding hands and refusing to move aside to allow folk walking in the opposite direction to pass and,. as a result, forcing them to walk into a potentially busy road?

Are they so unsure of their relationship that they are afraid to let go of each other unless they wander off and never come back? Or are they simply taking the opportunity to indulge in some socially oblivious selfishness? Maybe. I have no idea.

Whatever their motivation I am simply going to ignore their interconnectedness in future. I'm going to keep eye contact and walk very confidently forward to make sure that they are in no doubt that if they don't step aside and walk in single-file for the split second it takes me to pass then there will be a collision.

That sounds extreme and possible more anti-social than blocking the whole width of the pavement, but I was nearly run over today and I'd much rather walk into an oblivious couple than be smashed into by a transit van.

He Tried To Warn You!

and the sow, though it is dividing the hoof, and cleaving the cleft of the hoof, yet the cud it bringeth not up -- unclean it is to you. Leviticus 11:7 (Young's Literal Translation)

Swine flu clearly has Jahweh's sticky fingers all over it. It conforms to His rather sloppy, brutal and heavy-handed modus operandus.

It will kill randomly but it will be a symbolic slaughter.

No one believed His followers when they insisted that US military dead were His way of telling America that gay marriage was wrong.

No one believed His followers when they told us that the devastation visited upon New Orleans was God telling His lowly subjects that He didn't much care for Jazz.

And no one believed His followers when they pointed out that this was further evidenced by His destruction of the artwork that was Jerry Springer the Opera; whose music, you may recall, was suspiciously syncopated at various points.

Jaweh hates Jazz.

And pigs.

And poofs.

He is, frankly, fucking weird. Don't listen to anyone who tells you He 'Moves in mysterious ways'; that's code for "mental' and it's best not to encourage either Him or them.

Just nod and walk off.

The Sky Pivot Forsook Me.

When I was watching the Pars losing a semi-final to Falkirk I decided that my only hope was to pray to god and ask for help.

After spending 30seconds or so decideing WHICH god I should ask, I decided that Anshar would be the best choice.

Anshar is not only the sky-pivot, which is relevant to the fact that Dunfermline were faring badly because of their "punt and pray" tactics, but also it hit upon me to be a bit sneaky and ask a parent of the supreme god (An/Anu) to intervene on my behalf in the hope that they might have slightly more clout with the most powerful of the gods than some lowly human might have. Basically, I was following the chain of command.

Not surprisingly, it didn't do any good and after about five minutes of pleading An decided to award Falkirk a penalty and made it worse.

So, my question is: why hast An forsaken me? Did I ask wrong? Maybe I was a bit desperate? Possibly Anshar or An are Falkirk fans and were playing with my feeble human emotions? Or maybe, just maybe, one of the other gods got all jealous and shit and decided to punish me for favouring Anshar?

Either way, I forgot all about this when the Cops decided to kettle the Pars fans after the game and hold them until the Falkirk fans had left.

Now, as the winning team, having just beaten their rivals and reached a cup final, the Falkirk fans took quite a while to leave. Meanwhile at least three innocent Pars fans were attacked by the police (one for assisting a slightly built female officer who had fallen over whilst the stricken officer was begging her colleague to stop attacking her rescuer).

My second question is: why did the police decide to detain the losing (and angry) fans who simply wanted to go home and hold them for the entire time it took the victorious (and happy) fans to finish celebrating and finally disperse? When the sensible thing would be to hold the victorious fans and allow them to celebrate away to their hearts' content while the losing fans simply slunk off home?

Is it, maybe, because the police are fucking idiots?

Yes. Yes it is.

Tribal Warfare.

I'm off to Hampden tomorrow!

I'm actually excited.

I'm excited about watching some men kicking a ball because I think I'll get some vicarious glory if the right set of men win.

Aren't I clever?

Yaaaaar!

I wonder what I would do if I was Somali.

Would I prey on passing wealth or would I curl up and die?

I have a feeling that those would be my only options.

Something About Nothing.

I have a working 'phone again.

Yay.

It was actually a piece of cake to fix it once I had the correct part. I bought a broken 'phone of the same sort and turned it on. It froze at the very end of its boot sequence. "Fair enough", I thought "it's having a software issue."

So I plugged it into my PC to see if it would charge and to see if I could access it at all. When I did this it finished booting and was magically working again! It now boots perfectly every time. I was annoyed at first when it didn't come with a data cable as standard, but now I'm slightly less annoyed because the lack of a data cable earned me a a replacement phone at a bargain basement price since I would assume that had the original owner had the data cable and synch software that they would have tried to access it that way and would have fixed the problem.

The only problem is that it's a lovely shade of pink. Now I'm not really that bothered by the colour of a phone as long as it works, but shocking metallic pink is stretching the limits so I decided to swap the screen into mine anyway. Easy-peasy.

Now there are two proactive possibilities here; I either email everyone who's selling this 'phone with what is obviously the same 'fault' and explain that they should just fix it and get its true value, or I could buy them all and sell them on at a profit.

I'll probably just forget all about it though.

Does anyone want to buy a pink phone with no screen?

Waffle.

Religion is a schematic subset of spirituality.

Spirituality is an emotional reaction to ignorance, awe and familiarity.

Religion is when humans take this spiritual wonder and use it to achieve dominance over others. The priesthood in Ancient Mesopotamia will have held "Sacred Knowledge" including the calendar. The calendar was important to agriculture obviously, and agriculture was the basis of the food surplus which allowed the cultural centres and later the great cities.

The priesthood also controlled the cities, including Babilu (or Babylon or Babel)where Marduk ('The Solar Calf') was the patron deity and where one of the earliest known codes of law, Hammurabi's Code, was written which separated the powers of the gods (as performed by the priesthood) and man (as performed by the King).

The fates of the gods was tied into the fates of man and as cities grew more powerful then their gods would take on new aspects gained in the heavenly battle. The priesthood probably convinced the people that their god was really fighting and they fought merely to inspire him (or her - the Mesopotamians weren't sexist) to their victory and that if they lost it was their fault for failing to inspire their patron to victory. Or something equally daft.

Anyway, this practice continued (OK, maybe not in the exact form I described) until the followers of some bloke called Jahweh decided their god had won and killed anyone who disagreed.

What Googlebot Sees.

I was thinking: what with so much data stored online and web-bots creeping around the place, will the new generation of web-bots be able to read the other websites?

In effect, will one "book" be able to read all the other "books" then inform and alter itself based on what it finds? Will the internet become a massive, complex, search for truth?

That is either extremely exciting, extremely scary or both at once; depending on your outlook.

For the record my opinion (which may change depending on the findings of future web-bots) is that, like all technology, it will be a bit of both.

Screen Test.

The screen on my phone broke, or, to be more precise, I broke the screen on my phone.

It's really fucking new as well and this is one of the reasons why I shouldn't have nice things!

Another reason is glimpsed when we look into what I did next.

I decided to replace the screen. I'm good at that sort of thing - hauling things apart and botching a repair. So I toddled off to Ebay (oh what has become of you Ebay? You used to be the people's hope, the Proletariat's last hope against the Capitalist behemoth, but now you, along with your evil twin, Paypal, are that behemoth. Naughty naughty Ebay!) and bought a replacement screen.

All very sensible so far, I'm sure you'll agree. I SAID, I'm SURE you'll AGREE!

Look, agree when I fucking tell you to a-fucking-gree alrighty?!

Good. Now that we're agreed we can move onto the less sensible stuff.

The screen arrived today and I eagerly dismantled my phone (as per the maintenance manual kindly furnished by Tim Berners-Lee and Al Gore), carefully laid out all the components so that I could easily replace them all in the proper order and then I finally noticed that the ribbon cable for the screen - which, remember, was the main object of my dismantling - was fucking fused to the circuit and in no way could it be replaced by a bloke in a flat in Edinburgh. So I tried anyway. Which means that now I can't re-sell the screen because I've attached it to a, now, knackered circuit board.

Also, I have since noticed that I could have got a whole "spares or repairs" phone of the same model (with a working screen attached to a working circuit board) for half the price and delivered in half the time. So, in an effort to send good money out in chase of bad, I've bid on a broken phone who's screen works.

This is another indicator of idiocy and I'll no doubt have spent more money trying to fix this phone than I'd have spent buying a new one.

Today's song has no link, hidden or painfully literal, to the entry. My phone hasn't let me down, and if it had, I'd hardly be beside the phone waiting for it. That would be flawed logic and a bit daft.

I just like the song. And the video is funny.

Resistance=Reform

Have you ever done a crime?

I have, I'm doing one now. I won't say which one, but you can rest assured that you've probably done it too.

Which begs the question; is it really a crime if the hypothetical 'everyone' is doing it? I mean surely a crime is more than just an act (or, increasingly in Britain, a thought) which breaks the written law? Surely a crime is something which goes against the interests of society?

But then, it's not that simple. Is watching a Martyr video made by a Palestinian suicide bomber going to damage society? You could argue that in many ways it could. It gives succour to those who send out confused and desperate kids to immolate themselves for a non-existent God for one thing. But then, what about when the Japanese Prime Minister visits a memorial to the Japanese dead of World War II? Is he not honouring suicide bombers?

The point I'm hoping to make is that the concept of crime and social responsibility are complex and dynamic and it would be churlish of us to say that the written law is somehow infallible and that it's our duty to abide by it simply because it exists. If that attitude had been prevalent in the past then we'd all be serfs and that would be a bad thing, right?

Thank God it's not Raining.

The story of the Flood and what it says about the mentality of the Great Sky God Jahweh has always intrigued me.

I mean, He's meant to be omniscient right? So, He created a world and some creatures who He KNEW would displease Him, - He, after all, made them so - and who He KNEW that He, God, would eventually have to destroy - using the horrific method of mass drowning.

Not only that, but what exactly had all the camels done to displease Him? I'm aware that Camels are, at best, grouchy creatures with a slightly stubborn streak, but, again, Jaweh MADE them that way. Indeed HE FUCKING DESIGNED THEM. But he drowned them for behaving as He, God, intended.

There is no way that a Deity with the powers described in Genesis would not know these things. Therefore God (who doesn't even exist) is a cunt. A petulant, cruel, wasteful cunt.

Seems strange that all the different races and nations of humanity grew, separated and dispersed in 6000 years mind you, so maybe it's not true. Maybe, and don't take this the wrong way, but maybe it's a story stolen off the Sumerians?

In the Eridu Genesis the god Enki warns the King and High Priest Zi-ud-sura (also known as Atrahasis) that the chief god Enlil plans to destroy the world using a flood and instructs him to build a boat; allowing him to survive and repopulate the earth.

Invent your own fucking stories The Judeo-Christian-Tradition.

Cunts

Do the police only ever kill innocent people?

Do they simply raid innocent people if they need a distraction?

Do they ever admit when they are wrong?

(Note for the stupid: The second link is an example of something called satire)

Or do they just cover everything up, lose evidence, invent evidence, murder citizens and walk off whistling a jolly tune?

Like I said, CUNTS!

Corrupt, self-serving, murdering cunts.

Catlessness

I'm still not really over the fact that my cat isn't around any more.

It's not so much that I'm consciously forgetting hat she's gone, but I have little subconscious moments like when I'm unlocking the door after having been out for a fair while and on some level I'm expecting her to be waiting. Or if I half catch some black and white cat shaped object lying on a chair or something I often process the object, briefly, as the cat.

And noises. When she was around I'd assume that all those little creaking and rustling noises were cat-based. Now I briefly dismiss them as that then, especially if I'm dozing or half asleep, the realisation that it can't be the cat is quite jarring. Kind of like the dream thing I wrote about a wee while ago.

Oh, and I still look at chairs before I sit on them!

My friend R said that they have such large personalities for wee creatures and she's right.

I miss my massively brilliant wee pal.

The 96.

YNWA.

Freeeeedom!

I spent a huge chunk of today playing 'Freeciv'; a Civilisation clone for Linux.

It's so fucking addictive! It's one of those games where 'I'll just do x before going to bed/eating/taking a breath' seems to be the mantra. There's a lot to do in running a civilisation; from sorting out research priorities to making sure your cities have enough food to cruise-missiling your enemies.

I'm getting pretty good at it on easy now - so much so that my current game, where I'm Gilgamesh great leader of the Sumerians naturally, is becoming a procession. I'm so far ahead in terms of technology that nobody can stop me (cruise missiles and bombers against cavalry and galleons) so I know I've won already and it's only a matter of time before the other nations realise it.

So, in my next game I think I'll try to win without fighting anyone.

I'll use espionage instead.

Then, maybe, I'll give it a go on 'normal'.

Worth Reading.

Brutality?

Inspirition?

Justice?

Fertile Tributaries.

What is 'mainstream media' and what makes it mainstream?

Well, as far as I can tell, a media outlet is mainstream if politicians will talk to it.

So, I would have to conclude that if politicians refuse to talk to it then it will stop being mainstream and, as a direct result, lose advertisers and stop making profit.

The inference being that media outlets have to follow the same basic agenda as our political masters if they are to remain in the profitable, advertiser friendly, mainstream.

And the agenda IS the debate.

A Joke.

Surprisingly chilled weekend so far.

The Pars lost again and I made soup.

Oh and I wasn't surprised to hear that there was no CCTV footage of Ian Tomlinson being beaten by police. Just like there is never CCTV footage of such incidents. Even when the CCTV operators (at, say, Stockwell tube station)swear blind that there WAS footage.

Funny that.

Maybe they 'lost' it?

This is Not a Riot.

The Met has a division called FIT (Forward Intelligence Team) who's stated job is to spot trouble makers at demonstrations.

One would assume that part of this job is to rule out folk who are not causing trouble -say, for example, when they are walking away from police with their hands in their pockets?

Which is why we should all be interested to note that FIT officers were present at the G20 protest and were seen, on the Guardian and the Channel Four footage, just standing around as if nothing was wrong. They also appear to have colluded with the assaulter in a conspiracy of silence for the week following the death of Mr Tomlinson.

This is because the officer who attacked Ian was NOT a bad apple, he was following Met tactical policy. As far as the Officers present were concerned there was nothing wrong with what was happening. It was a perfectly normal way for an officer to behave.

The fact that a great many front line officers in these circumstances hide their identities by covering their faces and removing their ID numbers is not a 'wardrobe malfunction' either. This too is common practice and allows individual officers to whack whomever they like, whenever they like.

Last Wednesday was NOT a riot. 5,000 protesters were kettled into a small area and (mysteriously) a branch of the most despised banking institution in the country was left unguarded. This is suspicious. What's less suspicious is that 3 or 4 of the angrier protesters smashed it up. Watched by a few dozen photographers, who chose to show this 'action' rather than the footage of side streets were innocent people were being beaten by the police. The fact that this footage (mysteriously) appeared when someone died is also suspicious. Why was this footage (which it is very much in the public's interest to see) not shown AT ALL until a man died?

Anyway, it wasn't a riot, it was a peaceful protest and the vast majority of the violence was perpetrated by the police against innocent members of the public.

I think I Heard it Ping....

As far as I'm aware the police in the UK first started using "kettle lines" during the 2001 Mayday protest.

The idea is to pen in (or, if you prefer, illegally detain) protesters, press, innocent bystanders and anyone else who happened to be there so that no-one can enter and no-one can leave the pen; resulting in an inevitable build-up of pressure until the police would be 'forced' to push back and use batons, resulting in the crowd being contained in an ever-smaller space for hours on end without food, water or toilet facilities.

On the surface, and leaving the civil liberties angle alone for now, this seems like a sensible tactic from a practical point of view. It stops trouble from escalating and reduces property damage. However, it was inevitable that, eventually, someone would lose their life as a result of this tactic since it always involves getting folk who really don't want to be there trapped in a hostile and frightening environment. Most protesters are young, fit, have had some training in how to deal with these situations and are ideologically motivated.

During the G8 protest in Edinburgh for instance I witnessed the Police charging and baton bashing a middle-aged, tweed wearing gentleman who had merely been in a bookshop (I saw him leave the shop holding one of their carrier bags) and wanted to go home. He approached the police lines (from outside the kettle-pen) whereupon he was baton-charged, surrounded and ushered INTO the kettle. Huh?!

I'm sure he's OK, but it must have been a horrible experience for someone like him who was neither prepared nor willing to experience the atmosphere in there. But, through no fault of his own, he was trapped. That particular kettle was moved around but remained in place for a good three hours. I hope he didn't have a weak bladder.

I don't know how many bank windows are trade-able for a human life in the modern market. Can't be all that many judging by the popularity of the tactic.

The fact that it has taken the death of an innocent man (whether or not it was as a result of the tactic is unclear at the time of writing. It definitely didn't help) to bring the brutality of this tactic to public attention is shocking. The press were all over every protest where the tactic was deployed. At many points in Edinburgh there were more photographers than protesters and every time a police line appeared the cameras were snapping away like nobody's business yet none of them chose to report on the police tactics. That, apparently, doesn't sell newspapers. Unless someone happens to die; then it might. Although I have still seen scant few reports mentioning it. They mostly publish pictures of angry mobs containing blood-dripping from one or more faces and/or people the police might want to arrest. As a result the press will be resisted more at future demos I fear, as protesters become aware that the photographers are hindering them in their task. This won't make it any easier for the demonstrators to get their argument out to a wider audience.

The health and safety risks from the kettle tactic are not its only fault however. It is a morally bankrupt notion to treat everyone present at a scene, for whatever reason, as terrorists, criminals and vandals for one thing. For another, it is simply a denial of the right to protest. A right which has slowly been eroded to almost nothing in the past 20 years or so. Also, it is mass-detention of mostly innocent people exercising their right to protest peacefully.

I've heard reports of people in tears, begging the police to let them leave the kettle on Wednesday, including one woman who was desperate to get out so she could collect her child. They were all, of course, refused.

If someone was actually breaking the law then they should be arrested and THEN detained. If they are not causing trouble then they should be free to carry on with their business - the police should have no right whatsoever to detain anyone without first arresting them and charging them with a crime.

The mood in the anti-capitalist subculture seems to be getting heated and differences are being forgotten as they all start to notice who their real enemies are and work together. This, coupled with the inevitable increase in support they will gain from the formally apolitical (who will become increasingly aware of their powerlessness as a result of their troughs suddenly being empty due to the banking crisis), means that we might well be in for an interesting summer.

Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto

Except for the stupid ones that is.

Some folk need to stop behaving like fucking plankton.

"Oh the whale is just looking out for us. Protecting us from fishy terrorists"

No it's fucking not. The whale wants to eat you you fucking planktonian turd. The whale wants to whack you on the back of the legs and watch you die. It wants to shoot you seven times in the head. It wants to watch porn using your money and it wants to sell you shite that you don't fucking need.

Fuck the whale, fuck it in the leg whacking, head shooting, porn watching, shite selling blow-hole.

A Perfectly Good Aeroplane.

I've decided to do a parachute jump this summer.

It's something I've wanted to do since I was about seven. I remember sitting in primary school bored, staring out of the window and envying the parachuters (is it parachutists? spellcheck seems to think so!) as they drifted slowly and gracefully to the ground. My teacher (Mr Hughes) may well have noticed them too (although, to e fair, he was far more boring than us, so how he found the time to stare wistfully out of the window when he had 30 seven year old children (no we weren't all 37 years old, that would be stupid) to entertain him is beyond me, so, thinking back, he probably just saw me being distracted) because he set us an exercise where we had to write a factual account of something. He told me to write about parachutieres.

I was pleased with this task. It gave me an opportunity to put my heart and soul into something, to express my love for the freedom that, to me, these parachuterists embodied. So I set to work. Then I realised that it was a factual exercise and that I knew no facts at all about parachutering, I was going to have to make it up and fluff it with opinion and emotional waffle.

Of course, it was rubbish. Mr Hughes called me over to his desk and told me so personally. Nevertheless, it was my first attempt at an essay style which would later serve me well with a little fine tuning and minimal research, so I have my ignorance of parachutaneering to thank for that.

So the parachuterer has, for 30 years now, represented both freedom and imagination so I reckoned it's about time I gave it a try.

If only I could find the embodiment of 'twisting the question to fit your answer' I'll have both my essay writing techniques covered.

Said the Joker to the Thief.

If you have a wee look on the post 'mysanthropy' you'll notice that there is a comment from a photographer complaining that I 'stole' his work.

At first I was tempted to reply with something like 'I couldn't resist it because it was the ideal representation of a cheap cliché I was using ironically' and going on about how he should be pleased that I was getting his work out to a (slightly) wider audience. But I resisted and instead decided to reply with an apology.

But it seems that I can't reply to this blog as myself for some reason and although duality of self has been a recurring theme (or as much of one as can be established in such a short time) I think that multiple personalities would be stretching it a bit.

So I wrote this entry instead.

Just to let Chris know, his free advert for his photography site (check it out and let me know what you think) will be allowed to stay on this blog for as long as his photo was allowed to stay. I will delete his comment after that.

I also think he might have worded his request in a slightly friendlier way. I'd have been happy to put up a link to his website and create a permanent advert for his work for instance. I'd even have been happier had he not said that I'd 'stolen' his work. I didn't steal it. It's more analogous with sneaking into his garden and playing on his swing than sneaking into his garden and taking his garden gnome.

I accept that I shouldn't have used the photo without permission. I blame the ease of use of google images, and I'll be more careful in future. For one thing I WAS stealing bandwidth from his website because l used the copy of his image from there. That was wrong of me.

I should have downloaded the image and re-uploaded it to imageshack or some-such: then he would have been none-the-wiser!

Bleaurgh!

I didn't post anything yesterday because I was feeling uninspired and instead of sitting down and forcing myself to write something (sorta like what I'm doing now) I decided to leave t until later when I was feeling up to it.

That's a mistake since it was clear that I wasn't going to feel up to it at any point yesterday.

I've been sleeping really badly of late so I've been more scatterbrained than usual, which is normally an indication that I should do nothing more taxing than read or watch a film. This, however, does fall into that category since it's basically typing out whatever comes into my head.

Perhaps after the last few entries I was simply worried about what might come into my head!!

Why I'm Never Bored.

I forgot my headphones this morning, so I had to go on a train journey with only my own thoughts to entertain me.

Which is handy because one of those thoughts was the realisation that it is possible (although unlikely) that I could, one day, become Pope.

The Vatican City is the only nation where I have any chance whatsoever (in theory) of being head of state. Even in my country of birth (the UK) I have zero chance of attaining the position by dint of my not having had the foresight to have been born to the correct parents.

I'd have to lie and scheme a fair bit if I was to stand even the slightest chance.

Take the Dream.

I have a great deal of trouble with sleep. It's not just that I'm an insomniac: all sorts of weird/annoying things happen even after I do manage to nod-off.

An example of this is sleep paralysis, a fucking weird experience and no mistake. I experienced this quite regularly for ten years - I'd say from about age 12 or 13 up to about 23 or 24 and it was only relatively recently that I found out what it was - the power of the internet and an imaginative search-string holding the key - so at the time when it was actually happening I had no fucking idea.

It was extremely frightening the first few times. Who wouldn't be shit-scared if they suddenly found that they were paralysed for no apparent reason! That first time the shock sort of jolted me out of it (or, as I now know, I woke up) freaked out and very very sleepy. So I probably fell asleep and forgot all about it.

Until it happened again about a week later. This time I wasn't so shocked, so I didn't wake up as soon as I realised that I couldn't move. I just sort of lay there experiencing an increasing sense of what wikipedia calls an 'acute sense of danger'. It was probably the most frightening experience of my life that second time. Not only did the shock not wake me but I had the other instance as a sort of reference - it happened once for a very short time and now it's happening for longer.

'What the fuck! Am I paralysed now? Because if I am I'd like to point out that I'd rather not be if that's at all possible'. I possibly might have mused.

Eventually I calmed down a little bit.

Ok, was I really paralysed? I tried to move stuff. Really fucking tried with force of will to move stuff and eventually my toes wiggled and the 'spell' broke. I turned over in bed, relaxed and drifted off to sleep,,,,

...except I soon noticed that I couldn't move again.

'Fuck!' I probably thought and put all my mental will into to wiggling my toes. It worked pretty quickly that time! Woohoo! I can escape at will! Now that I am in possession of that nugget maybe I can play around with this and work out what's going the fuck on.

It didn't happen for a few nights, but when it did I went with it a bit. I took in the experience with no sense of danger , cute or otherwise (well maybe a wee tiny fear, bit nothing overwhelming), and it must have been when I fell asleep and dreamed that I'd fallen out of my body.

That's right folks, I fell out of my body and landed on my bedroom floor - all the while thinking I was not only awake, but also paralysed - and the sense of un-cute danger returned with a vengeance.

'Shit-on-a-motherfucking-stick' I probably pondered, and the shock again pulled my out of it - I dreamed that I was 'sucked' back into my body and when I reached it I noticed that it was no longer paralysed.

The atheist in me was confused. I was convinced that it wasn't a dream - it seemed so real - so I discounted that far to quickly (considering it was the truth) if the best result was finding out what the fuck was going on. And I did want to know that, so I kept it pretty much to myself and developed an interest in Sumerian Mythology instead.

It's probably a good thing that I did dismiss it though, because for the next wee while it was great fun playing with it. The best trip you ever had. Literally dreaming whilst you are fully concious! And being in complete control of the dream (but not the environment: the illsion of reality of environment was crucial to making it work I suppose) at the same time!

Take that LSD!

Fuck you peyote!

Kiss my skinny arse ketamin!

I missed it when it stopped happening.

The reason I mention it is because it has recently (within the past 3 years) been semi-reprised with a new weird mid-sleep sport: lucid dreaming (apparently you can teach yourself how to do this). Lucid dreaming is nowhere near as weird or scary though.

It tends to start when something familiar looks out of place. My lucid dreams normally start off in my flat because my unconscious (or the part of me that creates the dreams) seems to work on general-ism and archetypes so there are usually things that the me who experiences the dream can pick out that are out of place.

(I'm not really sure what part of me creates the dreams and what part experiences them, and therefore uncovers the sham, so forgive the vague language and/or pronouns.)

The realisation that I was dreaming woke me up the first few times, but after that I only wake up when something fucked up happens and I want to leave the dream.

I quite enjoy the odd lucid dream, even though they are less 'controllable' than the sleep paralysis hallucinations, so I turned the light switch in my bedroom upside down.

Another fucking non sequitur Mark?

No. I turned the switch upside down because I suspected that the dream-creating-me was too stupid to remember (or even know) that I had done it.

And I was right, that light switch initiated more lucid dream adsventures than anything else.

Although, unfortunately, my cat is beginning to take over that role o late. I wish my fucking unconscious or whatever would get it it into my thick head that my cat is dead and that it is rather rude to jolt someone out of a dream with a vision of his not long dead cat miawing at him. That just ruins it and I end up waking up immediately and annoyed. Then writing this blog entry.

I think that sleep hates me. It even fucks with me when I'm not awake.

G20

I'd like to wish Barack Obama and the other world leaders the best of luck for their summit.

I for one will be very disappointed if their important work is allowed to be undermined by thoughtless protests.