I dreamed last night that I was in court presiding as a Magistrate. The accused, a Mr. Santa Claus, had been accused of breaking into houses. An aggravating factor was that he did so while they were occupied at night. Given that he brought a large sack, he was obviously also "going equipped" for theft.
Mr Claus didn't take anything of value, but he did consume an awful lot of sherry that would obviously have put him well over the drink-drive limit. Given that he also drove around the world in a single night, it seems irrefutable that he comfortably exceeded the national speed limit of 70 mph even in 30 mph zones in built-up areas.
Mr Claus did not attend court and I was happy to sign a warrant for his arrest. Bail would seem to be unlikely, given that he is very likely to abscond back to his home address in a place which does not have an extradition treaty with the UK.
The accused is due to visit the UK this month and I hope the police will be vigilant and I look forward to dealing with this miscreant in due course.
Ho ho ho indeed.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Sympathy For the Gerbil
It is John Milton's 400th birthday. His poetry I find inaccessible - both because of the language he uses but also because the subject matter requires a detail Biblical knowledge and belief that I will never possess. To me he comes across like one of the original manic street-preachers.
On the same day, Oliver Postgate died - the co-inventor of Bagpuss - in my opinion a far more worthy object of study. What's not to like about a shop that doesn't sell anything and a baggy pink sleepy cat that a young girl loves despite his flaws?
It's a world where things which are Lost are looked after until they ready to be Regained. It seems to me that Oliver Postgate could have written Paradise Lost ... or more likely John Milton could have written a Bagpuss episode.
On the same day, Oliver Postgate died - the co-inventor of Bagpuss - in my opinion a far more worthy object of study. What's not to like about a shop that doesn't sell anything and a baggy pink sleepy cat that a young girl loves despite his flaws?
It's a world where things which are Lost are looked after until they ready to be Regained. It seems to me that Oliver Postgate could have written Paradise Lost ... or more likely John Milton could have written a Bagpuss episode.
The World was assembled before the window,
Summoned by the crash of wood.
Then it was that Bagpuize in shades of pink sallied forth
To investigate commotion.
Seems upon the night a gerbil came, with teeth unearthly sharp.
Had chewed the beam supporting o'erhanging ceiling.
Eden's tidy Paradise was Lost,
Now reigned Disorder in that unhappy retail space.
Bagpuize did cast his eyes around and soon discovered the cause
And cleared his throat and addressed the crowd, of Mice and Men
"The beam above was once a proud and strong right-angle.
But down it came and here it rests upon the ground"
"It's not the gerbil we should blame - it is the Fallen Angle"
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Addictions
I'm a freelance IT person and so I haven't seen many heroin addicts in my life.
Not that IT freelancers are a particularly well-adjusted lot. I've worked with way more than my fair share of alcoholics and people who indulge in what I would call "risk-taking behaviours". This covers driving like idiots, gambling, fooling around with unsuitable partners and generally doing stuff that would make their mothers cry.
My favourite example is a guy I once worked with who was making good money but who slept in his car rather than getting a hotel room. He told me he was saving up until he had £100,000 in the bank and then he was going to drive his car/hotel to a casino in Monte Carlo and stake the lot on black. If he won, he'd party for a few years; if he lost, he'd return and try and get his old job back. One day he quit and left without a word - I never heard from him again.
The addictions of IT people tend to be sociable addictions - alcoholics and gamblers can and do maintain successful careers and often you wouldn't know they were addicts unless they actually told you.
Heroin addiction is a whole different story.
A couple of the cases in the court session I observed last week involved heroin addicts. Both of them looked old way beyond their years and their skin was an unearthly glowing white - like the make-up of a geisha - like a ghost. Their lives were a mess - the cliche used in court is that they had "chaotic lifestyles", which makes it sound as though all they needed was a course in Time Management.
In fact heroin had killed these people - they just hadn't stopped moving yet. Their higher brains were dead - they had become zombies, fit only to crave more drugs and make pitifully poor attempts at petty crime to fund their habit. Meanwhile their bodies were slowly falling apart as their minds unravelled.
On my way back to my car after court, I walked through an underpass. There was a young girl, face unnatural white, slumped against a wall. She lit up a cheap disposable lighter and watched the flame with unnatural concentration. Then she flicked it off and eventually back on again and repeated the flame watching. I walked on by, she didn't seem to notice me and I heard the "click ..... click" of the lighter continue behind me.
Breaks your heart - that used to be someone's little girl before someone brought heroin into her life.
Not that IT freelancers are a particularly well-adjusted lot. I've worked with way more than my fair share of alcoholics and people who indulge in what I would call "risk-taking behaviours". This covers driving like idiots, gambling, fooling around with unsuitable partners and generally doing stuff that would make their mothers cry.
My favourite example is a guy I once worked with who was making good money but who slept in his car rather than getting a hotel room. He told me he was saving up until he had £100,000 in the bank and then he was going to drive his car/hotel to a casino in Monte Carlo and stake the lot on black. If he won, he'd party for a few years; if he lost, he'd return and try and get his old job back. One day he quit and left without a word - I never heard from him again.
The addictions of IT people tend to be sociable addictions - alcoholics and gamblers can and do maintain successful careers and often you wouldn't know they were addicts unless they actually told you.
Heroin addiction is a whole different story.
A couple of the cases in the court session I observed last week involved heroin addicts. Both of them looked old way beyond their years and their skin was an unearthly glowing white - like the make-up of a geisha - like a ghost. Their lives were a mess - the cliche used in court is that they had "chaotic lifestyles", which makes it sound as though all they needed was a course in Time Management.
In fact heroin had killed these people - they just hadn't stopped moving yet. Their higher brains were dead - they had become zombies, fit only to crave more drugs and make pitifully poor attempts at petty crime to fund their habit. Meanwhile their bodies were slowly falling apart as their minds unravelled.
On my way back to my car after court, I walked through an underpass. There was a young girl, face unnatural white, slumped against a wall. She lit up a cheap disposable lighter and watched the flame with unnatural concentration. Then she flicked it off and eventually back on again and repeated the flame watching. I walked on by, she didn't seem to notice me and I heard the "click ..... click" of the lighter continue behind me.
Breaks your heart - that used to be someone's little girl before someone brought heroin into her life.
Friday, December 05, 2008
What a bunch of totters
I sat in on a traffic court today, and it made me realise that The Law is a big softie when it comes to drivers.
It allows you to accumulate ("tot up") twelve points in any three year period before there's any question that you will lose your licence.
Get caught doing just over the speed limit once ? Pay a modest fine and have three points.
Get caught "forgetting" to renew your insurance ? Have six points and a bigger fine.
But as long as you keep your nose clean for three years there's no further action taken - the points fall away and are forgotten like bad dreams.
People end up in magistrate court with their licence at risk either because they have committed a more serious no-no (e.g "Driving While Disqualified") or because they have accumulated 12 point and over and have become "Totters".
Anyone want to share the road with serious lawbreakers or persistent minor lawbreakers ? Thought not.
The presumption is that someone with twelve points is likely to get banned for six months plus. The exception is where the magistrates are convinced that banning someone would cause "exceptional hardship".
This is a poorly understood concept, for example the fact that the driver will likely lose their job is not usually considered exceptional.
One tip - get a lawyer. In court today I saw an intelligent articulate man make an absolute hash of it. I felt for him because he was a fellow freelancer and losing his licence is going to affect his business at the worst possible time. But under questioning he had to admit that his wife could drive, his kids were old enough to be independent and no-one else in the world would be inconvenienced even slightly if he couldn't get back in his 4x4 for the next six months.
Don't feel too sorry for him - he had chances and he blew it and now he'll have to study the bus timetable for a while.
It allows you to accumulate ("tot up") twelve points in any three year period before there's any question that you will lose your licence.
Get caught doing just over the speed limit once ? Pay a modest fine and have three points.
Get caught "forgetting" to renew your insurance ? Have six points and a bigger fine.
But as long as you keep your nose clean for three years there's no further action taken - the points fall away and are forgotten like bad dreams.
People end up in magistrate court with their licence at risk either because they have committed a more serious no-no (e.g "Driving While Disqualified") or because they have accumulated 12 point and over and have become "Totters".
Anyone want to share the road with serious lawbreakers or persistent minor lawbreakers ? Thought not.
The presumption is that someone with twelve points is likely to get banned for six months plus. The exception is where the magistrates are convinced that banning someone would cause "exceptional hardship".
This is a poorly understood concept, for example the fact that the driver will likely lose their job is not usually considered exceptional.
One tip - get a lawyer. In court today I saw an intelligent articulate man make an absolute hash of it. I felt for him because he was a fellow freelancer and losing his licence is going to affect his business at the worst possible time. But under questioning he had to admit that his wife could drive, his kids were old enough to be independent and no-one else in the world would be inconvenienced even slightly if he couldn't get back in his 4x4 for the next six months.
Don't feel too sorry for him - he had chances and he blew it and now he'll have to study the bus timetable for a while.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Covers
After a long day I'm a 200 miles drive from home and I can't sleep. So I'm greedily hogging the hotel's free wifi broadband and listening to cover versions on YouTube until I'm ready to drop.
It all started with yesterday's posting about Stevie Nicks' "Dreams" and how The Corrs' version was so woeful. This led me onto her "Edge of Seventeen" which is wondrous, while Lindsay Lohan's version is predicably awful.
Although, to be fair, Stevie Nicks swiped the bass and drums from "Bring on the Night" by The Police for "Edge of Seventeen", so it's almost a cover version in itself.
Not all cover versions are a bad idea, but in most cases you do wish someone could have had a quiet word to try to talk them out of it.
For every good one (Gnarls Barkley's version of Radiohead's "The Reckoner") that add something worth hearing, there are six thousand bad ones (the Gregorian monks version of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams") that go through the motions and stamp over everything that was good about the original.
Some just puzzle me. Take Radiohead's version of The Smiths "The Headmaster's Ritual" - it's technically well done by a talented group at the height of their powers but it spectacularly falls flat. For starters, the line "Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools" needs Morrissey's Manc twang, not Thom Yorke's public school Oxfordshire vowels. But mainly it's a case that this song has already been done Mr. Yorke - kindly please go write another one of your excellent experiments in sonic melancholy.
You do forget sometimes that some of the greatest pieces of music of all time were cover versions. "Wild is the Wind" was written for Johnny Mathis but his version was a soppy cheesy unlistenable mess while Bowie made it damn well soar.
I don't have the patience to include links but here's my incomplete list of cover versions that I didn't even know were cover versions :-
Thankfully The Clash, The Bangles, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix didn't think that doing a cover version was anything to be ashamed of.
Finally some of my guilty favourite cover versions.
Johnny Cash doing U2's "One"
Travis doing Britney's "Hit me Baby One More Time"
Arctic Monkeys doing Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good"
And so to sleep, with a force of nature singing a 27 year-old song in my head
"Just like the white winged dove...
sings a song ...
Sounds like she's singing...
whoo...whoo...whoo, "
It all started with yesterday's posting about Stevie Nicks' "Dreams" and how The Corrs' version was so woeful. This led me onto her "Edge of Seventeen" which is wondrous, while Lindsay Lohan's version is predicably awful.
Although, to be fair, Stevie Nicks swiped the bass and drums from "Bring on the Night" by The Police for "Edge of Seventeen", so it's almost a cover version in itself.
Not all cover versions are a bad idea, but in most cases you do wish someone could have had a quiet word to try to talk them out of it.
For every good one (Gnarls Barkley's version of Radiohead's "The Reckoner") that add something worth hearing, there are six thousand bad ones (the Gregorian monks version of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams") that go through the motions and stamp over everything that was good about the original.
Some just puzzle me. Take Radiohead's version of The Smiths "The Headmaster's Ritual" - it's technically well done by a talented group at the height of their powers but it spectacularly falls flat. For starters, the line "Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools" needs Morrissey's Manc twang, not Thom Yorke's public school Oxfordshire vowels. But mainly it's a case that this song has already been done Mr. Yorke - kindly please go write another one of your excellent experiments in sonic melancholy.
You do forget sometimes that some of the greatest pieces of music of all time were cover versions. "Wild is the Wind" was written for Johnny Mathis but his version was a soppy cheesy unlistenable mess while Bowie made it damn well soar.
I don't have the patience to include links but here's my incomplete list of cover versions that I didn't even know were cover versions :-
- "I Fought the Law" - The Crickets
- "Hazy Shade of Winter" - Simon & Garfunkel
- "Twist & Shout" - The Isley Brothers
- "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" - Otis Redding
- "All Along the Watchtower" - Bob Dylan
Thankfully The Clash, The Bangles, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix didn't think that doing a cover version was anything to be ashamed of.
Finally some of my guilty favourite cover versions.
Johnny Cash doing U2's "One"
Travis doing Britney's "Hit me Baby One More Time"
Arctic Monkeys doing Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good"
And so to sleep, with a force of nature singing a 27 year-old song in my head
"Just like the white winged dove...
sings a song ...
Sounds like she's singing...
whoo...whoo...whoo, "
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