Late, again
Tonight I saw Insomnia. As a result, I'm looking at everything in a very disjointed way. The film is shot in a beautiful, harsh, floating way and has a very washed-out feel due to endless light. It's the only shooting style I've ever seen which, filmically, represents perfectly the effects of very very little sleep.



Another effect of sleep deprivation is that on re-reading the above paragraph, I thought it ended with "the effects of very little sheep". I'm not sure what effect tiny sheep would have on me, but they'd probably make me go "awww" and want to mother them. Perhaps this is a new form of verbal bastardisation, similar to spoonerisms and malapropisms.

Oh, my god. Here is something I never knew existed, but I guess in its own way it's just as normal as Scots pretend the Highland Games are. But the thing which surprised me most is that it's part of Jonathan's heritage. Allegedly. Him hailing from North Carolina and all.

This is interesting news, but of course I'd never be involved with anything like that, because of course I never play dirty. ;o)

Visitors
I feel 'out of the loop' but in a nice way. Ed's staying here for a few days. In fact currently he's going to sleep in ym granny's old bedroom, and I'm sitting here typing this, thinking I want to keep my feelers out there so I don't completely present a face of silence to the world because of visitors! :o)

It's the first time I've met Ed in the flesh, and we get on well. He's a really nice guy. And aside from the usual quietnesses which people have when they've just properly met for the first time, and the inevitable lessening of continuous talk because we're not on the phone anymore, it's going well.

Took him around the wonderful sights of Belfast. Explained all the usual things about Belfast, tried to dispel the usual misunderstandings people have about the place. You know, that it's a nest of terrorism, etc. And then realised that he doesn't have those misconceptions anyway. My god. I must either have done my job well beforehand, or he's just intelligent. I think it's the latter. :o) Going to bed now. I promise that when he's moved on to Scotland, and my time is emptier, and I'm surfing more, I'll put more links and pics in. Promise.

Alone
Felt bleary-eyed after reading this. But I guess as a child I wouldn't have played with him either. Which makes me feel guilty.

I'm also feeling alone, but not emotionally. I'm feeling very much alone with a great big piece of responsibility. I interviewed a leading figure connected with a paramilitary group this morning. It went very well, there was lots of information going. But now I can be counted as one of the very small number of people who have this sort of information, and I'm feeling very much responsible for making it public in a balanced and thoughtful way which will raise the level of thinking that Joe Bloggs on the street will engage in when thinking of punishment beatings, etc. It's scary.

The things people search for
I can understand people wanting to come to this site and read its wonders because obviously it's just superlative. (!!!) I can understand that this site is viewed by many people who do the odd weird search. Get ready for it.
I can't even *begin* to understand why anyone would search for this:


And they found me. I'm thinking of not mentioning things like this again. People who do a google search for THAT ought to be faced with a screen which says "You sad, sad bastard. We don't have any pages which match your search request. Search for something worth seeing."

Something potentially very significant for the future of Northern Ireland's handling of crime and the peace process in tandem could happen on Wednesday, handled more or less exclusively by little old me. It'll only be the start of things in that respect, but I'm excited. Meanwhile, however, a student at home for the holidays gets murdered with two twenty-somethings charged (the lack of sectarian motive leading me to suspect yet another example of the 'they all did it in the past, so we can' mentality under the surface here), a family in Carrickfergus gets pipe-bombed - and a large consignment of smuggled cigarettes is seized.

I don't mean to imply here that Northern Ireland is all bad. But I do mean to paint a picture of the crime everyone usually associates with the place and the extent to which it continues under the watchful auspices of the peace process, and also the type of crime which happens everywhere else - and shouldn't be happening in the first place if our police were completely up to the job, which I don't feel they are yet.

Still, life isn't all bad. Ed's visiting in a week's time (yay!), and I've got juicy links to supply. [1] - roomsixteen has a lovely lovely self and a lovely blog too. Check the boy out. [2] - a good place to get images online. If you need to get them, that is. And finally, [3] - wilco - have as the cover of their latest album (below) a picture of two towers, the exteriors of which are formed by multiple balconies.


I'd seen a similar tower in Croydon, memories flashed, I thought the cover was pretty, so had to show you. Photo's pretty too.

And finally...

a scan of (I think) a cat's arse. Don't ask. Because I don't know. Okay?

BUSH COMPARES US-IRAQ STRENGTHS

"And you can see that Theodore's mustache is far better than that sand-nigger Saddam's."

IRAQ SHOCKED: HUSSEIN DEFIANT


MARX: INSULTED

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."

Oh, and an essential update to my amateurish coverage of the whole September 11th thing below: Jonathan messaged me from the US to say: "Here I suspect it will be hard to spot the anniversary. There are as many flags today as there were on 9/13 last year. Of course, many of them are in shreds."

To properly read that, you have to look between the lines. There's a lot between Jonathan's lines. Always.

Police involved in the UK search for the two girls missing from Soham, Cambridgeshire, have today found 2 bodies near RAF Lakenheath after a couple, the local school's caretaker and his partner, were charged early this morning with the abduction and murder of the pair. While the news reports and papers are being coldly circumspect about whether the bodies are those of the girls, the police rush to the airbase suggests very clearly that the girls are in fact dead.

What bothers me, as well as a massive amount of other people I guess, is not that the girls were abducted per se - although that's awful enough - but that as usual we're all being presented with another playing-out of the oft-repeated mantra that it's always someone known to the victims. It's like a nightmarish villanelle. Like everyone else I'll be paying attention to the reports of how exactly they were killed. There'll be a morbid fascination there. I just can't imagine how the families must feel. They probably want the heads of the arrested couple. It's all so pathetic that last night as I watched the news item about the case, I felt like crying.

Shock! As news of sex emerges, Diocese spokesman says "If it's true, it's disgusting."

Horror! Bush spends £5 million on assistance for Saddam Hussein's opponents.

We're coming up to the first anniversary of September the 11th. Actually, that's not strictly true. I'm not sure exactly when the very very first September the 11th WAS, under the calendar system. One thing is certain: this is not the first anniversary. But academic points aside, that date this year will be the first anniversary of the atrocities which happened in various parts of the USA. And everyone's starting to talk about it again, wondering if another attack will be made elsewhere in the world, wondering whether the FBI et al will get there in time - or whether they have planned everything so well this time that they have already caught and foiled an attack and kept it quiet.

The really disquieting significance of this year's anniversary is its proximity in time to the present controversy over an impending war with Iraq. How easy it would be for Bush to garner popular support by choosing September 11, 2002 to launch all manner of ultimatums. Documentaries will screen showing the collapse of the towers, the hole in the Pentagon etc., and Patriotic American Hearts all over the world will flame against Iraq with even more determination.

It could all turn out to be a world of shit.

Far from that date being the beginning of a more aware and safer world, it seems that things have gone (very easily, as they would) the other way and we're now more paranoid, less peaceful and more apt to assume and lash out. Cut to American newscasters: "Gee, Dave, seems like quite a lot of innocent Iraqi people will get killed!" "Yes indeed, Gina, but let us not forget that they killed all those people... in our army who invaded their... villages... and now for the rest of today's news."


There's a reason that big strong lion (from the British Museum, excellent bas-relief) is dying and puking blood. It's because it took on more than it could handle.

Back to the slightly more real world of my here and now, and the safer confines of familiar and unfamiliar blogs, I was looking at the whole Twin Towers thing through the eyes of the copydesk and in a way, that's a good method for sprinboarding to other topics and other sites. So then I visited notsosoft which has a particularly interesting and infuriating posting here. Poor girl, having her own damn copyright the victim of an attempted abduction.

So, Chris and Ciara are away. Apparently what happened was that Chris got his visa at 8.30 this morning but Ciara didn't get hers until second post came at 12.30 so there was lots of panicking on her part. I hope she squeezed her willy for support.

So, right now, at about 10.30, they'll be either hanging around Heathrow or up, up and away en route to Singapore. Arriving in Singapore the equivalent time of about 3 in the morning our time, I guess. It feels weird still, but I know that it'll really hit me they've gone when we finally set up a broadband gaming sesh, and Chris frags me, and I look up thinking we're just networked and I can shout "you bastard", and then I realise he's not in the room. That'll really get me spooked!

Anyway, I'm going to shut up about it now. :o)

It's weird. Chris and Ciara are going away tomorrow, for what seems like forever but which is in fact just marginally over a year. But at least Ciara went red one final time. We bought her a stress-busting squeezable willy on a keyring. She went red. We said that since she didn't want Chris's big massive manly one, she could have that instead. She looked at it and went even redder. :o)

So, when talking pda stuff last night and discussing which one she should buy, Ciara said that she'd like to go for a slimline one like Chris Beattie's. Chris 1 (Bleakley) said "Sure, I could just give you mine" and Ciara replied "But yours is a big massive manly one, I don't want that".

Hmmmm. Riiiiiiiiight. So, Ciara doesn't want her boyfriend's big massive manly one. If I was him, I'd be offended. But I can just see the new ad campaigns for the older pdas right now: "The MANLY pda". "The best a man can get". "You'll be so comfortable with it, you'll almost forget it's there." etc.

:oD

Woohoo! First weird referral to my site from google. Someone was looking for "19th-century porn" and was directed to (among others!) this site, the one you're looking at right now.

At last. Maybe if I type something really stupid here, someone really, REALLY misguided will come to this site when they're looking for other weird stuff, like 'chinchilla sex', 'pics of young boys forced to put food down their underwear', or 'muslim porn'.

Hmmmm. I have an idea....

Chinchilla sex margaret thatcher chinchilla sex hairy nostrils chinchilla sex rotting pavlova chinchilla sex chinchilla sex. Ha!

Muahahahahahaaaa. :oD

Okay, you know the way I'd enthused about America and the superb aesthetic qualities of a lot of its citizens in the last post? Well, here's how fucking mad some of them get. There's this guy in New York who arranges kidnappings / violent abductions for people who want to get a kick out of the experience. What the hell?!?!

Maybe the people who buy into this shit would like to come over to Belfast and talk to someone who has been abducted and beaten? Hmm, maybe not. Maybe, instead, post - 09/11 America is still a place where people can buy into the thing as if it's a great piece of fun which doesn't really happen in the real world and gives you this little pleasureable feeling of being scared like you get at the cinema when you see a building exploding. Doesn't really matter and we get fun out of it. Sheesh.

The people who pay money to do this are stupid twats, even though it might well be their own money they're stupidly pouring into this enterprise. Twats, I say again. Twats. So, turning to another of them...

And you might call me a twat for putting this here, depending on where you are at this moment. hehe. ;o)

This guy seems to be exactly the cup of no-milk, gently sweetened and with-a-lemon-twist tea I like. His site is really well-designed, he looks cute, he has a line down the center of his chest, he has links to almost every single brilliant photo-art website out there, and his own is rapidly climbing the ladder too.

But like about a zillion other people like this, he lives in the USA. So along I trundle, sans sexual impulse, to blogstalker's place which seems at first glance to be an excellent digest of really good stuff. Unfortunately for my sense of worth, it turns out upon closer investigation to be exactly that, and a complete antithesis to this piece of crap.

The only good thing my pride will allow me to say about other sites such as this one - and this one - is that at least I'm picking up plenty of ideas and tips and just awareness of what makes a website good, and what can make it better. So when I finally get my finger out of my arse and my head into dreamweaver I'll be able to do something which will make at least me happy with myself.

I'm getting worried about Jonathan. He hasn't called in ages. Maybe he decided to stay in America. Then again, maybe not! :o) But I want him to send me photos of his new place in Greenwich so I can share it here. It's already sort of a part of me. "Oh yeah Pete, like someone else's house is a part of you, go fuck with someone else's head." No really. I can't describe it. I just felt good there. I felt... myself there.

But mostly in the bathroom when nobody noticed.

;o)