Category: General

Once upon a time, I told a lie.  Not a white lie.  Not one of those little untruths we somethines use to grease the wheels of the daily round.  A big lie.  A dark lie.   A lie to try to conceal a mistake that could have had fatal consequences. read the gruesome deatails

Heard at 11.15am in the City of London.

Market trader on mobile phone in Great Winchester Street area :

“I know your business is good, but is it legit?”

Don’t you just love an oxymoron.

Following a Rolfing session in New Paltz, New York today, I stopped for a bento box at one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants around, also in New Paltz.  In their entryway were an assortment of brochures from local intrepeneurs, charities, arts orgs and schools.   One was the informational brochure of a hypnotist.

I made an appointment with him for Wednesday the 10th.

Volume two of Mesmerized will follow…

Bearsy, thank you for the blog roll. I thought I’d better post something on mine, since you have now provided a link to it.

So with that in mind I have posted a poem.

Maybe if the MyT site collapses under the weight of fighting-fool feuds, the ‘Creative Writing’ posts I have on there could find a home over on my word press blog?

Will we or our followers look back at this time and regard it as the ‘Golden Age’ of communicating with each other, a last burst of collective imagination before the shutters come down on human endeavour. ‘They’, whoever ‘they’ are cannot be far from introducing the invention that will rock the world, end war, end strife and keep the population satisfied beyond it’s imagination and imagination will be the key. The pixels that are gently glowing on your screen are the afterwash of my mind and my fingers, it is  the digital pixie dust that I have conjured up for you to read, or ignore, it makes little difference to me, the joy is in the creation and the afterglow that comes from a large number of comments is the cherry on the top.

So if we accept the fact that the electrical impulses from my brain have caused a mechanical action in my fingers to press keys which then turn the keystrokes back into electrical impulses, when ‘they’ develop a way of cutting out the mechanical part and hardwire my brain to the computer, everything I think will appear before me on a glowing screen. Now lets extrapolate that, let my mind run riot with every fantasy that I have ever wished to see before me. Now give me a total immersion suit so that every move, every caress, every explosion of lust and perversion (this is for illustrative purposes only, I’m just taking it to its logical conclusion) will be laid before you, every wish will be your command. You wont need drugs, you wont need booze, you wont need porn, just think it and it will happen. The streets will empty, travel will stop, who needs to pay to go to Las Vegas, just imagine the strip and you will always be a winner from the comfort of your own home. It will cause massive problems as no one will want to work, what good is money when you can live the lifestyle of the rich and famous from the comfort of your fifty bed mansion in your minds eye, Sounds fun eh?

My other half has warned me, time and time again, against the perils of it. But I’ve never been the suspicious type.

So when strangers come knocking at the door, be they double glazing salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses or gas men,I usually end up being cornered.

I don’t know if it’s just me – it usually is –but lately I’ve noticed a slight shift, in what you might call quality of cold callers.

When I was a child, in Wigan, it was Jehovah’s Witnesses. Always, every Friday night, without fail. Our estate was virtually split down the middle – Catholics one side, Proddies, as we called ’em, on t’other. Being on the Catholic side, I was bewildered enough by the Protestants. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses were aliens to my eight year old eyes.

Fast forward ten years and it was the TV licence men. They would systematically trawl the university halls of residence in Sheffield. They were merciless and even followed a friend in a cab one night as she tried to foist the incriminating evidence – her granny’s old TV – onto her boyfriend. I escaped lightly; the only telly I had ever had was the broken black and white one sitting in Wigan, complete with coat hanger aerial.

Continue reading “Cold Callers”

On the 1st of March 1954, the USA produced the biggest ever man-made explosion so far in the Pacific archipelago of Bikini, part of the Marshall Islands. One of the atolls was totally vaporised, disappearing into a gigantic mushroom cloud that spread at least 100 miles wide and dropping back to the sea in the form of radioactive fall-out. The Atomic Energy Commission announced this was the first in a series of tests to be carried out in the area.

The bomb was up to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and was so violent that it overwhelmed the measuring instruments, indicating that the bomb was much more powerful than scientists had anticipated. Continue reading “On this Day – 1st March 1954”