A Big Wrong In British Professional Sport

I dislike posting negative blog entries, but I could not let this one go without comment.

There is not a single out male gay professional sports player in the entirety of British professional sport, not a singe out gay footballer or rugby player or any other kind of pro player. It’s impossible to guess how many of them logically are secretly gay, but in all of the thousands of players it stands to all forms of reason that there is more than one. I am not saying these players should be outed, is completely their prerogative, how much or how little they talk openly about their sexuality, as is the same for all people in all walk of life of whatever sexuality. My issue is with the reason why they do not fee like they can be out, they are apparently advised, which has been said publicly by at least one world renowned PR consultant, coming out as gay would end their carers. Yet there are many players who still have careers after being convicted of very serious violent offences.

Not a single out gay player, but many violent convicted criminals.

Alan Turing – A short blog post for a man with a huge world impact

A very welcome apology for Alan Turing. Now maybe they’ll apollogise for all the others prosecuted for the same “crime”. As well as apologising for all the other volumes of terrible things done in the name of this country.

The world is incalculably better because of Alan Turing (you are reading this blog on what is at it’s heart a Turing Machine), but the world lacks all of the incredible things that he would have brought to it because he was persecuted and died too young. Think of that, those that persecuted and prosecuted him robbed the world of all that he would have brought to us.

Please think about that (yes you the Daily Mail readers) next time you bully someone, think what they won’t achieve that they might have if you’d just left them be.

The Addiction So Many Of Us Have

I have been eating pretty much a good diet for the last few months.
Nothing fancy just no sweets, very little chocolate and very little
processed food. By now I had forgotten how much better I had been
feeling than I did when eating a shittier diet.

For the last couple of days for some personal stress reasons I have
had moments of eating shit again, sweets, chocolate and for lunch just
general fridge grazing rather than making something balanced. And
yesterday was the worst of those days, in the evening after staying up
way too late for no decent reason I came over feeling really awful,
the stupid thing is it reminded me that before my recent better eating
regime I had had these moments of feeling awful fairly often, but had
just gotten used to them.

This has all gone to draw my attention to the reality that eating a
crap diet is an addiction like any other. We don’t recognise it of
course but that is normal with any addiction. We eat a diet that to
put it at its most dark is killing us, shortening our lives. Most of
us know what a healthy diet is yet we live in denial that what we eat
is not that bad and what the hay, we like it so we are going to
continue eating it.

Well to me that all sounds like an addict. Our behaviour is not what
we want it to be, we won’t give something up that we know is causing
us harm. We lie to ourselves and others to facilitate our addiction.

Bill Hicks

I wanted to write and entry about Bill Hicks, now I just think I am going to sound like a illiterte tit. I just love him, there is so much right with how he looked at life, personal experience, personal freedom, corporate bullshit etc… I can’t pretend to know what he really thought about anything, but I do beleive there was a lot of personal truth in his work.

It’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one Bill Hicks

For someone who could have been so easily miss-understood to be very aggresive to people he actually loved people, loved life, was fascinated by the human experience. He raged against what he saw as wrong with the world.

Bill said (in his act) “I like my rock stars dead” well I agree and it seems I also like my comedians dead too, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor etc. It was part of a piece on how he likes his artists to “play form their fuckin’ heart”. The greats put their total heart and soul into what they do, their pain, their loves, their fears everything, and I think maybe more than most Bill totally did this. I’d still rather love him as a current living artist though.

I loved him when I was younger, he spoke to me as a teenager, and speaks to me just as strongly or maybe stronger now.

Oh I am proud to claim one of the only jokes I have ever made up myself I found out later was also a Bill joke. “Why do Christians enjoy wearing crosses round their necks, would Christ really be keen to see any of those if he ever came back?” Bill told this joke so much better than me, but I’m proud to have once thought the same thought as him.

Breast Implants

There are not many things that make me feel the way I feel about breast implants, it brings me to tears, that women would want to do that to themselves, in some misguided idea that big tits are somehow essential to looking and feeling like a beautiful woman. Not sure I can actually talk to eruditely about this, I just long for the time when people will wake up and accept themselves as they are and not think that if only they had huge tits the guys would like them and they’d feel like a glamour model. It’s all just totally misguided and would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

(Additional Comment By The Author) I hope this post does not offend anyone, I do understand there are many reasons why people want implants. I just wish that they’d maybe work through those feelings rather than having the surgery. But hey if you want them that’s up to you, and I’m not for a moment telling you you shouldn’t or shouldn’t have. It’s just pretty clear that some have them to be liked, and that seems like the wrong reason to me.

The Single Greatest Love Song Ever Ever Ever

Kate Nash – “Birds”

She was waitin` at the station he was gettin` off the train he didn’t have a ticket so he had to run through the barriors, again.

well the ticket inspector saw him rushin` through he said, girl you don’t know how much i’ve missed you, but we better run cause i havent got the funds to pay this fine, she said … fine

so they ran out of the station and jumped onto a bus with two of yesterdays travel cards and two bottles of bud and he said you look well nice.

well she was wearin’ a skirt and he thought she looked nice and yeah she didn’t really care about anything else because she only wanted him to think that she looked nice and he did

but he was lookin’ at her yeah all funny in the eye she said c`mon boy tell me what you’re thinkin` now dont be shy, he said alright i’ll try

well the stars up in the sky and the leaves in the trees all the broken bits that make you trip up and grassy bits in between all the matter in the world is how much i like you

she said what?

he said let me try and explain again right birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head yeah they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel so scared but when you look at them and you see that they’re beautiful … thats how i feel about you

right birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head yeah they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel so scared but when you look at them and you see that they’re beautiful … thats how i feel about you, right, thats how i feel about you

she said what?

he said you she said what are you talking about?

he said you

right birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head yeah they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel so scared but when you look at them and you see that they’re beautiful … thats how i feel about you

right birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head yeah they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel well scared
but when you look at them and you see that they’re beautiful … thats how i feel about you

right thats how i feel about you

she said thanks i like you too

he said cool

Truth, Trust & Friendship

If a friend of mine lies about something serious I don’t care, I trust my friends and they can lie about whatever they feel they need too, I simply presume they had their reasons, that is not to say I would not be hurt by a lie but that I would always forgive it. This makes me in some peoples eyes a bit of a looser or someone asking to be walked all over, if it does then so be it.

I just don’t see it’s possible to have a friend you don’t just trust as a matter of course, otherwise how can I have a conversation with anyone, if you don’t take your friends at their word then you can never have a meaningful conversation.

Also I very much believe that trust begets trust, if you offer unsolicited trust you receive it back.

Enviromental Behaviour Theory

Being a world of people most of whom believe that the world and therefore nature was made by a hand, was manually put together, they have this underlying attitude that it can also therefore be fixed by hand, because they do not recognise the unique and massively delicate version of events, that would have taken billions of years of evolution to make the world we now have. They see nothing wrong in it changing so rapidly, because to them it was built in 7 days so therefore surely it can be fixed in a similar if not shorter length of time, as opposed to it taking billions of years to build so any rapid changes, e.g. destroying the fish populations of the oceans in as little as a hundred years of insanely aggressive fishing, 100 years to them is a long time, where as 100 years to an environmentalist or a geologist is less than a blink of the earth’s eye. Not the mention the issue of there being a parent figure so we can all act like irresponsible children to the world, just playing with it till we break it, as opposed to non religious people who take the role of guardians of their earth, a fragile and beautiful place that is the only home we can hope to have for a very very long time. So my question to non environmentalists is “exactly which planet do you have picked out once you have finished wrecking this one?”

More great writing

Someone just reminded me how much we need good writing in the world, and also how tomorrow is too late to start something. This lead me to notice I had not written anything for a couple of months.

I have mentioned this once before how I love the phrase “saving the world by doing what you’re good at”. Stephe Fry talked recently about how it is better that places we occupy and the tools we use are beautiful. I feel these are similar issues. That if we just try and bring something good into the world, whatever we do, whatever we enjoy, whatever we are good at, we must do it, do it with honesty and frankness.

What I am trying and failing to say is if we have something to add we should do it, and do it well.

Dealing With Upgrade

Just had a conversation with someone about the problems she has almost everytime she does her operating system version upgrades. So it’s inspired me to want to explain how I do mine.

I run my system with the /home folder running on a seperate partition, this is a little tricky to do but with a little Google research it’s perfectly do-able. Then I have a few small partitions – 10gb is enough but i prefer a little more – and these little partitions are where i host everything else, i.e. the operation system and installed programs.

By running this way I have more than one version of ubuntu to boot into with them all using the same /home folder. This is most useful at upgrade time, when upgrading I isntall a fresh install into an empty partition, this way I can still opt to boot into the old OS if I can’t yet get all things working on the latest OS upgrade.