Beasts at large

I always tended to think that the UK didn’t really have any large predatory animals roaming around, but the fox I saw running across the fence yesterday morning reminded me that we might just have one.

The foxes we get around our way tend to be larger than the urban ones I have seen around towns before, probably because there’s alot more open spaces and fields around, and the foxes have a greater variety of food rather than just rubbish scraps.  I wonder if they have attacked anybody unprovoked before?  This one I saw in our back garden yesterday was pretty big and I imagine it’s claws could do some real damage.  They do have quite small mouths though don’t they - they might be the size of a small/medium dog but their mouths are mush smaller I think.

All I can say is, it’s a shame they don’t hunt in packs!  It could be like having wolves roaming the moors or something - very cool unless you were cornered by them.

Train Patterns

Do you have a train journey you take every day and see the same old people?  My journey is quite long so I see a variety of repeat offenders, making me think about who they are and what they do for a living.  Here are a few I see:

• Guy looking like a strange gestapo agent, with his shiny face and slicked down hair - quite reminiscent of the Nazi gestapo guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Woman who gets on and 90% of the time pulls out some sort of garment or fabric and continues her needlework.  Quite sweet really.
• Trendy bloke who wears all the right clothes and amount of facial hair of someone who spends his summer in Pascha, Ibiza.
• Sad looking guy who calls someone in the morning and evening.  I don’t think he is sad per-se but looks like he’s stuck in a rut of monotony with his Daily Express.
• Man who walks along the train when he gets on at Tonbridge searching for something/someone each day.  By the looks of it, I don’t think he’ll find what he is looking for.

Sitting here, my mind drifts as to what their lives are like.  Does the gestapo guy go home (he looks like he lives with his mother) and read up on the downfall of the Third Reich over a plate of beef stew?  I’m betting the needlecraft lady has at least 5 cats at home.  Isn’t it terrible how we (I?) stereotype??

I have taken this trip for not far off 2 years now and it’s funny how you see the people change all the time, seems like folk change jobs or routine quite often.  Anyway, it makes you think how our lives might be vastly different in some respects but in the end, we are still on the same train going in the same direction.

Postal Strike

The Royal Mail postal strikes go on.  It’s a Monday morning and we are into the second week of postal strikes, meaning we won’t be receiving any mail until Thursday at the earliest.  Does this piss me off? Yes it does, however, not 100% for the same reasons as everyone else.  I am in the mood for a complete rant now.

I hate strikes for utility and useful(?) services, I really do.  They disrupt everyone to some extent but I suppose that is the general idea.  However, have a think about how you would feel if your hours were changing, you were ending up with less pay overall due to some system changes, your pension is looking very shakey due to modernization and there is the possibility that you might even be made redundant soon.  Stuff like this is all happening to the postal works right now so it’s not surprising they are a little pissed off, however, are the unions just trying to orchestrate an overture that the Royal Mail cannot realistically perform in this day and age?  I don’t know all the details so it is very hard to comment on who is right and who is wrong here. 

One one side we have the unions - I loathe the union monster, they have their place but they have far too much power.  Instead of being just a voice to the worker (something I agree with), they often have the power to dictate company policy in regards to workforce and can quite easily bring a company to their knees.  All this while the ‘leaders’ roll around in their fancy cars paid for by subscriptions and ‘donations’.

On the other side is the company.  Companies nowadays are a beast, especially public companies.  Driven by the obligation to their stockholders, they must do everything to provide a profit, even at the expense of their workforce if (and often is in their eyes) necessary.

Now, my beef with the postal strikes is that the Royal Mail should not be pushing so hard for a ‘profit’ in that they have to almost completely neglect their workforce!  This should be a public service, using the money it makes to do it’s job properly and that is delivering mail and parcels to people and businesses.  I understand that there is a lot of competition now from couriers etc, but these are companies that need to make a profit to pay out to shareholders etc.  Surely a company that doesn’t have to answer to shareholders and provide a larger profit all the time (I don’t mean make a loss either) can be competitive and yet provide a good service doing what it does best?

Both sides seem to be seriously shooting themselves in the foot.  Royal Mail seem to be on a big decline now - shutting post offices left, right and centre and providing an inferior (in my eyes at least) service that what we have been used to in the past.  The workers (and unions) on the other hand are holding the company to ransom but seem to have already pulled the trigger.  Amazon have already pulled their plug on using the Royal Mail as their primary delivery option and after these few weeks, I’m sure they will lose other lucrative contracts.  Less large contracts will of course mean less money flowing in and so the downward spiral continues - Is it too late?  Carry on unions, soon your workforce will be out of work completely.  Will the companies they go to allow you to dictate as you have in the past? I doubt it - soon the gravey train will be over.

I, for one, would like to see the Royal Mail survive, but in their original state.  Prices go up, of course they do (transportation costs must have rocketed), there is no denying that, but is there any need for this crazy size thing we have to adhere to?  It’s gotten to the stage where I have to shove a few stamps on an envelope, knowing I have overpaid as I haven’t got the time to find the exact measurements and try and find out what payment bracket the item now lies in!  Where are our post offices? If we are lucky, in W H Smith’s now.  Where did the 2nd post go?  Oh, that’s right, there is only one delivery each day now, and that is normally at about 11am where I live.  I hear Saturday delivery will also be scrapped soon…  Bring back our old postal system!!!  I am not blaming the postal workers who are going on strike for these changes by the way, but management decisions.  I am sure the delivery guys (when they actually work) do a fine job.

The alternative to all this will of course be the corporate behemoth.  A company like Deutsche Post will take over contracts and we will be at the mercy of a system held accountable to the shareholders (if it isn’t already) who will do anything to make a profit, at the complete detriment to the customer.  It seems to be this way already, but why?  Quite probably there will be several companies in control of the system - one for collections and deliveries, one for sorting and another for business accounts.  There will be absolutely no turning back then…

State of our Media

I am fed up with the complete rubbish that adorns our newspapers each morning!  I pick up a copy of the Metro each morning at the station and flick through it on the way to Tonbridge, most days getting annoyed at the complete drivel contained within.  Because of this, I feel the need to make note of some of the total w**k I find.

Today, on page 25, there is the ‘heartbreaking’ story (which takes up half a page) of Alan Jenkins.  Alan, in all his wisdom decided to have a tattoo of his wife and 2 children across the whole of his back.  The main picture shows Alan standing with his back to us, proudly displaying his hideously expensive artwork with his wife and 2 children peeking round him.  The man is even smiling, obviously very pleased with the ‘art’ on his back.  Now, the crux of the story is that his wife, Lisa, has now left Alan for someone who works at her sports centre.  Poor old Alan bleats ‘Lisa may left me, but she will always be with me thanks the the tattoo’. 

There is a 2nd picture to the story showing Lisa with her new beau, however the picture was obviously taken at the same time as the other picture showing the smiling Alan, Lisa and their 2 children.  She is wearing the same clothes, earrings seem the same, hair is EXACTLY the same and the background trees are the same.  Wife runs off?  What a complete crock of shit.  Where is the story here?  That Alan was such an idiot he paid nearly £900 for a tattoo of his family on his back?  No wonder she left him!  I would normally skip this type of story but the ‘Wife Runs Off’ type of headline and the 2 pictures showing her with 2 guys that were taken at the same shoot caught my attention.

This type of claptrap is something I would have expected from The Star or The Sport.  Anyway, I am at Tonbridge, time to get off the train (after going through the whole paper and typing this up, shows how much content there is).

PS3 - Welcome to our Lounge

A few weeks ago I (stupidly?  I can’t really afford it right now) splashed out on a PS3.  Tracey was clothes shopping and I did my usual look around the other shops.  Saw this new deal where I get everything I want for not much more that when the PS3 came out and my Debit Card made an appearance, I guessed the right numbers on the chip & pin keypad and they gave me a bag filled with a PS3 and other goodies!

Anyone who tells you it isn’t great is lying.  It’s great, it really is.

Internet On The Go using Nokia Bluetooth

I have never had a problem using internet on my laptop via bluetooth and my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile, but I soon ran into troubles when 2 people at work asked me how to do the same thing with their Nokias on Vista.  Here’s what I found out…

The K800i is compatible with something called the Personal Area Network straight out of the box.  Just connect turn on the bluetooth on laptop and phone, select to join Personal Area Network  on the laptop and Bob’s your uncle!  The Nokia didn’t seem to allow this, a lot of problems stemming from the Nokia Suite software wanting a ‘modem’ which it didn’t recognise (even though there is a Nokia modem driver installed)

In the end, I found out to skip using the Nokia Suite completely and use the dial up networking feature of Vista.  Simply set up a new connection under Networking in the control panel and select Dial-Up Networking.  Make sure you choose the Nokia Bluetooth modem and simply use “*99#” (without quotes) as the phone number!  You should be able to select this to connect anytime you get an internet signal on the mobile.

Back in the Blog!

I got incredibly lazy and completely neglected my blog!  Time to get all active again on it and use my time on the trains to good use (I have a 2.5 hour commute each way each day)

The Cramps play in a mental hospital

Check out this vid of the punk band The Cramps playing live in a mental hospital!

Road Trip

Check out details of our road trip to the USA from last month at:

http://tonesroadtrip.wordpress.com/

Derren Brown - Live 2007

I went to see a preview of Derren Brown’s 2007 tour last night in Redhill.  He uses these few dates as a chance to try out new tricks on a paying audience, so it can’t really be a 100% accurate portrayal of what the actual tour will be like.  Saying that though, a tour based on what we saw last night would be something I’d recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in seeing a showman or a bit of illusion/’magic’.

Derren Brown seems to have gotten stranger and stranger on his TV shows of late (as anyone who saw the episode of ‘Trick or Teat’ with the ventriloquist’s dummy will probably agree with), but his stage show is still ‘toned-down’ so to speak and is more of an entertainment act as only Derren can perform.

I won’t go into the specifics of the acts he performs, as some of them he may not use on the tour and I wouldn’t want to spoil any of it for anyone planning on going to see him.  Last year’s tour saw him use quite a few props, such as walking on broken glass, hammering a nail into his head and probably some other stuff I can’t remember right now but this year, it seems like he may be relying less on these and instead wowing us with ‘mind reading’ powers and more traditional forms of illusion and ‘magic’.  I use ‘magic’ in the loosest terms as Derren always tends to explain that what he does isn’t magic but is derived from techniques that he has learned over the years.  The tricks he performs however seem even more unbelievable this year than they did on the tour last year!  Some of the stuff he does will leave you either in complete awe of the guy (and very very scared) or have you sitting there going ‘those people just HAVE to be plants’.  Derren makes a special point of saying at the start of the show that he doesn’t use plants at all in his show, but you can’t help wonder.  I had some people sitting around me take part in the acts and they seemed like paying customers to me, either way, the entertainment isn’t lost at all.

This live show didn’t seem to use as much ‘hypnotising’ on an audience member as I seem to remember him using before, only employing the technique once and that was only short and to make the lady forget something.  It’s the hypnotising stuff that really freaks me out, and the reason I changed my orange t-shirt to a blue shirt so I didn’t stand out so much in the hope I wouldn’t get picked out to fall under his ’spell’! The lack of this technique is quite refreshing as we have all seen people like Paul McKenna basically make people do whatever he wants so I think Derren knows this isn’t the way forward, he just leaves that to his TV show where he can really freak you out with elaborate setups that can’t be done on stage! Plus, if he picks you out, chances are he’ll take the piss out of you in some way

I have never seen things like ‘levitation’ in a live setting before, just on TV with people like David Copperfield, but I was never too impressed by the huge amount of build-up, light shows and general razzmatazz that is usually associated with such ‘vegas’ style shows.  Derren however tried a little levitation of sorts in his ‘Victorian showman’ section and it worked extremely well.  This however might have been enhanced by the fact we were only sitting about 4 rows from the front and the Harlequin Theatre in Redhill is quite small and intimate - a far cry from a David Copperfield show!

Derren is, simply put, a very good showman. There are people who won’t like him and maybe think him too arrogant, but I think you need to be to stand out in what can be a very unfashionable profession.  His little quirks, such as his little head twitches and blinking to making you think things might have gone wrong all add up to give you a most unusual show of it’s type!

del.icio.us tags: derren brown, live, magic, illusionist