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All dreams begin and end with an elipsis… …so I’m feeling a bit lonely right now. My friends have all bummed off and left me to entertain myself, except one who I’m just walking up to the top floor of the hotel to say goodbye to, before I go and find something to do. We get to the top floor, and it’s a bit like an modernist pub, with banquette seating and high windows that show arid, impossible old mountains scraping at the air. It turns out my friend is meeting a buncha people including Peter Kay, the northern comedian, so I do my balloon trick (something involving a highly-inflated balloon and pratfalls, as far as I can remember) and Peter Kay outdoes me, without even getting up, by punning about balloons, whilst doing a trick where the balloon cord is trapped under his buttocks. [more...]
To the tune of: Stevie Wonder – Happy Birthday . It was my eleventy-first birthday on Monday. Here’s what I did.
Timestamp: 12.30 a.m. OH, what a night! A quiet drink with several friends ended with me dropping my switch card somewhere and Quintin dunking my phone in his Gulden Draak. The phone didn’t die immediately – but as the heady liquor permeated its innards it gradually flickered out of life before passing away sometime during the night – which meant my alarm didn’t go off, and hence I was late for my dental appointment, so there [more...]
(This started out as a Facebook comment then I realised I could write about it for days…)
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie… it’s not so long ago that starlings, pigeons and so forth were delicacies – think quails’ eggs, larks’ tongues in aspic, and that rare Ortolan bird that French Gourmands still eat illegally
Why did we stop eating fiddly things like these little birds? Firstly, cos we killed lots of them – small things go first in the delightful brutalism of man’s kingdom, especially small tasty things with lots of meat on their bones. The ones [more...]
Alistair Darling has announced a new top tax rate of 50% for those earning more than £150,000 from next April.
Things we value; a stable society that produces the most happiness (freedom from suffering) for the largest number. Agreed? If not, no point talking. If so, read on.
Equality of opportunity offers the most likely route for the greatest number to achieve freedom from suffering. Concentration of resources in few hands allows them to manipulate systems that affect us easily, aggregating yet more resources in their hands, disincentivising others to challenge them and closing off opportunities for those [more...]
After a discussion with my brother as to why I still eat (free-range) meat, I came up with the following. Criticism and arguments welcome in the commments please!
Principles1 The most important thing in any life is to be free from pain2 The next most important thing in any life is to have your desires satisfied3 There is no life after death, for man, animals, plants, rocks or anything else4 All things die.5 A death which the individual does not forsee and is free from pain is the best death. (From 1 & 2 3.)6 A life which is free [more...]
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