I was at work today (duh!) and whilst I was there I overheard two bricklayers speaking about the song on their radio (Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird), they went on to discuss the band and so on; one seemed rather ignorant to the song and the culture. Later, I decided to contribute my penny’s worth to the ignorant one and point out in a some what (in retrospect:) arrogant way, telling the bricklayer that, that song was probably the best song ever written. This was all during the long instrumental toward the end. He responded: “It just sounds like noise to me!”.

It wasn’t until I was travelling home and crossed paths with a courier van which was blasting noise that sounded not dissimilar to the sound of binary on a telephone line. It occurred to me that holding such a judgement about music with such superiority, dictating that instrumental rock is the only acceptable sound on the airwaves. Whlist I’m still not a fan of binary, picks and humbars, I can now appreciate that my music can also be construed as noise and perhaps I have forgotten that it takes an aquired ear to interpret and enjoy rock instrumentals.

For Josiah:

Here is my KDE desktop on Vector Linux. I no longer use windows and haven’t done so in several months so this is all I have to show.

Obviously click on it to make it larger.

Might notice there is no alteration whatsoever to my desktop… it merely has a smaller kicker along the bottom so I can maximize the applications to use more screen space.

Also notice, that I can access my old windows files on the NTFS partition so none of my documents are lost on the transfer from NTFS to ext3.

The following entries are based from my trip to Argentina… I hope you enjoy them. (no images added as of yet)

28/03/05
Today I started my journey to Argentina. Leaving on time by telling Mum that we had to be there earlier than the scheduled time. At present I’m struggling to write this entry sitting next to two Spanish hicks who are finding the whole flight idea a little hard. Currently we are flying over Bilbao and the view out the window is pretty damned nice (even it I’m over the wing).

29/03/05
Another day another story, we are currently flying upto Mardrid to catch our flight to Buenos Aires. The weather in Spain has been fine, dad and l have done not a lot today, apart from him packing and going to see his Chinese girlfriend and he has been quite tolerable. I am told that everything in Argentina is to be cheap so I’m saving my hard earned pennies to buy myself something nice, lets just see.
Side note: I just took some impressive photos of mountain range leaving Malaga.

(good place to put a photos don’t you think)

30/03/05
Its 8:28 am and we just got to our hotel. The journey was fine and quite pleasant, except for dad and his verbal diarrhoea… He bored the cabin crew to death, telling his and his family’s history and the endeavours of his failed business. Admittedly it was quite amusing to see. Another piece of spiffing news is that, due to dad’s unending wisdom and knowledge of the world’s electric systems, he let me believe that hotels here would have European plugs extension sockety things and therefore there was no need to purchase a universal plug… now I have no means to charge my phone, pda, or camera…. Hurray!
I’m going to freshen up.
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Much, much later (17:50): I’m in the hotel again, waiting for time to pass, as we have an appointment with our family members at 8pm. We’ve abeen about Buenos Aires looking for antiques for dad. He has this wonderfull idea of buying antiques and taking them back to Europe to sell at a fantabulous profit; sadly a million others have the same idea and there is an entire industry of not cheap antiques on sale to the public.
One thing I can say good about my dad is that he taught me something useful I about women; they love compliments. So anyhow, we were in this Rolex shop and to pass the time I decided to speak to the girl working in there, asking her what perfume was she wearing and how nice it smelt on her, this was taken very possitively and before I knew it she was trying to invite me to some dance club on friday night… well it was a start!

31/03/05
Its 13:00 and I’ve had the pleasure of walking around the minicentro of Buenos Aires with dad, in which he picked up every piece of paper being handed out, I do wonder if he does this to annoy me; since he sometimes waits or even asks for the flyers. A great example of how much I’m hating his company, he was sauntering behind me earlier, when all of a sudden when I looked back he wasn’t there and the last time I had seen him he had been speaking to a prostitute handing out flyers advertising her whorehouse. I looked high and low for him and was terrified he had been mugged or god knows what. I was beginning to wonder what I should do, when all of a sudden he came from some basement alley in a rush telling me (later) that the whore had invited him in for a drink. It makes me so furious how thoughtless he is. He has also told me that we are not going to Uruguay because he has been there already and he doesn’t want to see it again.
—-
(later) I just remembered to mention about our new endeavours with Rolex, I was dressed as usual, leather jacket, chain and baggy trousers and his highness decides we have to go to an official Rolex dealer and ask about prices. There we are deadpan faced in this jewlers, pretending (unconvincingly) we had $30k to spend on a watch.

01/04/05
Had a bitching session with dad this morning about how I always knock his ideas down and how I am not a listening and how I ought to do all the things he believes he does, like: reason with an idea, be the big man by not responding in a confrontation … and so many other things that just made me smile and stay quiet as it was a polite way of dealing with the absurdities he saying.
Having said all this I am now going to tell you all about what I have been doing today. After breakfast… I changed some money up to pesos, followed by a hike around looking for the Ferry company’s ticket office (to Uruguay) found it then discovered I was not able to make the booking without my passport. Started walking back to the hotel and found dad (still ranting to himself), so we took a walk around the west end of the city, where he was tempted by some glasses that where being sold as 1940s European, although I’d struggle to believe they where 1980s … Anyhoooo, we walked a bit further to some army surplus and I bought a nice Japanese lock knife for about �2 (new). Since then we have struggled our way back and he is now crashed on on his bed… And I’m off to buy my ferry tickets to Colonia.
—
One thing I’m finding rather strange about this place is that people are using their cellular phones as walky-talkies with the hands-free on and with intermitant beeps jumping in when possible.

02/04/05
It’s been a funny old day today. Started off meeting Toto and going to a suburb or district of Buenos Aires called: Boca. There we looked around at the shanty style shops and stalls mostly selling antiques and pieces of art. From that we followed onto looking for a place to eat, the place is infamous for tango and I couldn’t leave without trying to tango and of course we would have to dine in a tango serving restaurant ..which was fun. After that, we took a stroll along the river till we got bored of walking and caught a taxi to the oldest cafe in Buenos Aires called: Tortoni; which was rather bland.
Much later and after parting company with Toto, we went to find something to do. After deciding on Houdini the musical (in Spanish) instead of some queer tribal dancing spectacular or the overly buxom broad in the show that had no name; we found a restaurant to eat whilst we waited for the show to start. To our amazement we reunited with the whole restaurant crew of the previous restaurant (dancers and all) walking in for a group meal at this restaurant. They were as polite and pleasant as they were when they served us (and there I was thinking that they were just doing it for our money).
So I went expecting another crappy musical and was pleasantly surprised ..what can I say? It was good! Made me chuckle at many occassions, particularly at the comencement of the show… we all had to stand up and sing the national anthem of Argentina….any ideas how that goes?

07/04/05
Sitting waiting again and now I have time to write down my thoughts again. I’m currently waiting for my plane in Aeroparke airport (domestic flights only), I’m heading off to Calafate for a couple at nights before going to Ushuaia. I have just done something truly ingenius, I was looking around the toilets trying to find the urinals… It wasn’t until two women with indignat faces walked in that I realized I was in the ladies. Yesterday was a little uneventfull, although I did buy myself some nice clothes for this trip. I also have now got trapped in this jewelery selling scheme, lets just see how long this one lasts.

08/04/05
After arriving yesterday at windy ”El Calafate” (I should point out it is El…) airport, I was picked up by some agency people and told about the many excursions available, I decided on taking the 4×4 excursion up to the ridge of the mountains over the town of El Calafate. Which took us up to about 1100 metres above sea level, the view was to die for and the wind was to die from (about -10C windchill at about 70 mph), when we parked up the Land Rovers were rocking almost over from the mere strength of the wind.
Today however, I went on a slightly different excursion to see the glacier of “Perito Moreno” (Argentina’s largest and consequently most famous glacier), this too, was gorgeous and I have decided no photograph of what I’ve taken will do any of it justice.
Tomorrow I’m off to Ushuaia…keep you posted.

10/04/05
Here in Ushuaia the scenery is pure death! (moreso than El Calafate). Today I went on a excursion to the lakes. These excursions are really making me sick, trapped with middle aged idiots who film and photograph anything and everything so stagnantly that it really kills the location. Anyhow, we had a small stop at a Husky breeding place was really quite speshal.
The hotel I’m staying at (hotel Ushuaia) is superb; very comfortable double bed in which my feet do not overhang the end, a view that overlooks the town/port and the Chilean Andes (on the other side of the Beagle Canal). The walk into town is about 25 mins down hill but that is fine by me as I need the exercise.

12/04/05
On my way back home now. Ushuaia vas truly beautiful, highly recomend the place.
A lesson I have learned today has been about personal space. I have come to notice that people are arrogant cunts, what this means is that when out of courtesy I offer space for someone to adjust themselves whilst getting on the airplane the people take full advantage of this and push further…(writen presently)… I ended up sitting next to this fat man on the plane who occupied the whole arm rest with his gut, I alighted that plane with an ache in my neck and shoulders and lower spine from sitting twisted next to this whale of a man.

Foreword:
Based on the previous post, I’ve decided to complete an article I comenced weeks before I travelled to Argentina, I hope the latter paragraphs live upto the first few.
Further to this, I’d like to mention that this following article is not aimed at encouraging or promoting descrimination, I am writing to express a plausable explanation for the worlds unbalanced ways and perhaps encourage you the reader to develope a progressive solution to the possible problems.

Unbeknown (previously) to me, there are two views on human evolution to explain the different races that we find on this planet. The one I disagree with, which follows the idea that at one single point in history man stopped being an ape and thence on, forked into different races with all our perculiar attributes.

I however, I personally see that this step from ape to man occurred at different times on several occassions and/or from different breeds of ape the outcome is what you see. Look at some of these hidden far and rare species of ape that are so close to making that very step now that you could in fact just say they are in the progress of making that step.

To me, evolution is much like growing up. From childhood you go through many processes of learning, albeit factual/objective, philosophical, chemical or merely just adaptation to your own kind. For example:

Firstly you learn to use your muscles to move and make sounds, you then refine this movement into a more dexterous capacity and soon you learn how to close your fingers to hold and clap and coordinate your body to a final stage of being able to move with some agility e.g. crawling then onto walking.
From there on, you start learning to communicate and this process of intensive learning really does take a considerable amount of your early years.

I’ll keep the rest of this short, as I know, I could drivel on for hours about this…

For the rest of your life after growing up you adapt and develop and with any luck by the end of your life you’ll be considered a wise old fart. The thing I really am trying to get at, is that being human is not the final stage of evolution. I do believe we’ll progress with no end.

Some cultures/races on this planet have been keeping record of their history for thousands of years, whilst others only hundreds. It is therefore my honest opinion that those who have been keeping record the longest have been that walking the earth the longest, since the others cannot prove otherwise.

Maybe I should elaborate through a different example, though getting at the same point:

You have 3 children, a three year old, a twelve year old and a fifteen year old. You cannot expect all three children to be at the same level of understanding. From this, you can also say that you cannot treat all three children the same. You cannot expect that the 15 year old would want his older peers to look down at him and go “Whoooooose a big boy then?”, nor would you expect to speak to the three year in a manner in which implies that the child has any responsibility for itself.

From having said all this, it would be fair to assume that I am suggesting that every different race of human is at a different level of evolution and much like the different aged children we deserve to be treated with equality although accepting evolutional differences. Whilst some may have developed attributes that others have not, it is not to say that what I condone is some devine race to a finish line of superiority, since we have already agreed that there is no end to development. The world is at a fearfull state of unbalance, which is much like a primary school with no teachers; there is chaos with nobody to assume responsibility, those being in control ought to be the ones being controlled and everyone has their idea of what they want to do.

So what I am saying really, is that we aren’t all equal. We are not in all the position to state “hey, thats unfair, we deserve the same privelages as you”. As with the child example; you would not want to give a very young child the same pocket-money as an older child (not saying that 15 year olds know what they’re doing any better than 3 year olds), but there is a logical stage in which you can justify and perhaps say: £5 a week pocket money needs to turn into £15. Granted, I was never given pocket money and I have my own hang-ups about that, but I’m dealing with it..hehe.

I’m certain that there must be some of you there going this is starting to sound like “four legs good…two legs better” (quote: Animal Farm) and you’ll be perfectly right. The only problem being is that, you’ll forever be trapped in an idealistic world in which you cannot accept the concept of hierarchy.

Post submission comment:
I realize this article can somewhat advocate racism should that be what you’re trying to find. This is not the intention of this article, I merely am trying to transcend to the reader that in the great scale of things, who is in the position to say what they need. Surely there ought to be a proven elder that can govern such decisions. Wait!! this sounds worse… OK, well put it this way… developed nations who have “stable” societies and advanced technology and missle defence systems sell their weapons to “unstable” developing nations. I think this is going horridly bad. Let me clarify with an example:

Lets for a moment imagine children and adults in a hardware shop. Now lets not bring in, psychos and minority exceptions that would prove this example flawed. You have a hardware store that sells all sorts of products that could be used potentially to harm others or oneself. Children if sold any of the above mentioned items could quite easily do damage.

Let also remember with youth you have arrogance and self electing responsibility which is not deserved or warranted until proven otherwise. So you have a situation of an obstinate person exclaiming that he or she is to be trusted and yet is not… which if you return to what I’m speaking about (evolution, incase you forgot)…. some cultures/races are somewhat in this very same situation… and that is why there is (back to the hardware store example) age limits on products such as knives, solvents, etc.
What I’m trying to say is, that should there be a form of system for governing who is “evolved” enough to be trusted with…..

I know, I am not a fully “evolved” enough person, to fit in with today’s social system and do not by any means think by writing this makes me superior; for that would be a great misconception. I merely have the point of view that there is a great unbalance with evolutionary maturity that for some imbecilic reason is governed by equality.

Lastly, this is my opinion….. what is yours?

Hi all! It has been a fair old while since I have written anything worth reading here. Which can be best explained through the medium of hand signals.

I’ve been actually been contemplating this notion and came to the conclusion that, I’m not thinking in a clear enough mental language to myself, to be in the position to be writing anything of any intellectual or literary interest, for an of you readers to take in. Many ideas for articles have come and soon vanished, not owed to lack of interest or even insufficient time. I am currently experiencing one of those motivational crisises that one gets. Having returned from the Argentina has really pooped me out, having returned to a very busy and stressfull workplace where I’m merely grasping at things just to keep up with everything else, which is quite unlike how I left things where I was always ontop of the game.

I have also noticed my oral abilities have deteriorated substantially, I’m speaking utter nonsense most of the time, which I am really ashamed to admit. Hang in there, I’ll get it together soon.

I did keep a journal of my travels whilst I was away, I’m contemplating how I ought to put it down on here. Suggestions please.

I am back!

Photos are still in the process of being sorted and uploaded, but you can have a mosey through those that have been thrown up so far. Click here to check out my holiday pics.

Seems redudant mentioning this as I know there really isn’t that many people who read this; and even less who even give a flying whatsit. I’m going to Argentina for a few weeks today, for all the following reasons: to take some photographs, get out of this god forsaken city and finally to spend some time with my father… although the latter is more of a chore than blessing. I hope to come back with hundreds of photographs and millions of things to say.

Ciao!

Having being told in December by Chloe how I reminded her of the main character “Ignatius Reilly” from the book “A Confederacy of Dunces”; I was forced to read up some reviews of the book to see what this character was supposed to be all about… and it was then that I took the insult to heart.

A few months have now passed and curiousity about this character continued so I have started the book. Already by chapter two I am able to identify myself with this monster. I originally started off being very insulted in a sense of denial about how such a comparrison could be made, but now I’m started to see that I am somewhat like this moronic imbecile.

I have recently started feeling good about myself owing to all the positive things that I have been doing, but ever since I have started reading this book I’ve just hit a big downer. Everything that I am is depicted in this book and I am ashamed of now more than ever of who and what that person is.

Although, whilst feeling this, I know there is little I can do to change. I am a judgemental person with extreme ideas. There are a lot of things I disagree with and find fault in, it is in my nature.

I guess that the author too identified himself with the main character and consequently killed himself especially after finding it impossible to sell his own caricature as a comedy for people to read.

Read the book, its good as long as you don’t identify yourself with the main character.

Coming home from the youth group I attend, I caught the bus with two other members and we sat at the near the rear of the bus chatting. The two members comprised of a female and a degenerate idiot whom I wouldn’t spare half a second for in any ordinary condition. However, I stayed engaged in conversation with them for the duration of my bus ride. I should however mention that the female is a very well educated and well spoken female so worth the time of day to speak to. Anyhooooooo… the cretin and I alighted at the same stop, and it so happened he was catching the following bus with me, so we stayed engaged in a further conversation in which he enlightened me with the knowledge of, well at least confirmed knowledge that the pack of hoods sitting at the rear-rear of the bus we were previously on were thinking about mugging me. He explained to me that he used to do it and consequently understood their “talk”, I however I had sensed it since I was sitting ahead look back at him whilst on that bus and was able to sense their hostility behind the cretin.

On reflecting upon this, I think karma has worked in a somewhat ironic way for me, I spent the time to speak to a degenerate who wasn’t worth a second of my time and in so doing I saved my own back from being mugged. Maybe there is a deeper more philosophical meaning to this (which I doubt); although in all honesty, had I of been sitting where I usually sit with the demeanor I generally express, I would have never of raised attention to myself that I had by sitting at the rear of the bus smiling like an innocent idiot that I am.

It is a sad world!