OK, so on Monday I posted the final TMA for my OU course, A103: An Introduction to the Humanities. It was long, and broad, and mostly very good (though don’t get me started about the History of Science block). So now I have my life back: I can read whatever I feel like reading, and not just coursework and the texts I’m studying; I can write what I want to, and not just the essay for the current assignment.

You have no idea — or rather, I had no idea — how much reading time a thing like that takes up. I do most of my reading while commuting nowadays, and sure enough, I did most of my studying while commuting. An hour each way makes ten hours a week. Subtract the times I didn’t do that, and add in the other time I spent, and I suspect that’s about the average time I spent overall: ten hours a week. Which is probably more than I did as an undergraduate 22 years ago. Well, OK, not counting going to lectures and stuff.

Musings on my academic choices follow…

Nobody tells me anything. Here I am. slaving away at the bitface, all the world’s information only a mouseclick away, and only today — today, mind — do I discover that Mick Jones has a new band: Carbon/Silicon; with Tony James, formerly of Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.  And, more significantly, of the London SS, with Mick Jones.  Here’s an interview with Mick.

I had to learn this from NTK.  It just seems wrong, somehow.

Then rhubarbfool  told us about a new Joe Strummer exhibition, and from that BBC site I found various other pieces of Clash-related information, like one about a tape of Joe from before the 101ers.

It’s kind of customary for me to miss out a whole month of posting (in that I missed out on July last year); but two?  That’s really very poor.

Oh well.  I cite summer holidays and OU work, as well as general everything else in life, as excuses.

I’m posting now mainly to express my surprise at seeing a review of the new album by the mighty Drive-By Truckers in the appalling Metro daily freesheet that litters London transport of a morning.  Short, but positive, too.  I can’t find it on the site, or I’d link to it. 

So, anybody got it yet (the new album, obviously, not Metro)?

Moby is prone to quoting entire articles from other sources in his blog.  I worry that he’ll be charged with many copyright breaches.  However, the latest he quotes, Conservative for Kerry, from the Orlando Sentinel, shows that there is some sanity on the American right:

People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won’t fool me twice.

Good to see that some people in America remember the Reagan years as we experienced them: Reagan’s Punk Rock is an article about the punk bands of the time, and their present-day successors:

But no band inveighed against the president with the intensity of the Rock Against Reagan tour’s headliners: San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys. The DK’s first record, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, was an eclectic and sardonic take on late ’70s California. Reagan drained practically all the subtlety out of the band. In 1981, they released their greatest post-Fresh Fruit offering, the raw and furious EP In God We Trust Inc. The sleeve featured a gold Jesus crucified on a cross of dollar bills.

Who’d have thought Tony Wilson would have been so sensible? Just watching the election results on BBC1, and Anthony H was interviewed in a Manchester bar, saying, Stick with what you believe in … Blair made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and probably even he realises it now … we’ll get a bloody nose, but we’ll still be breathing. All downright good sense from where I’m sitting.

Which reminds me, I must see Twenty-Four Hour Party People.

In my last post I mentioned my uninjured right leg, but I realise that most people reading won’t know about my injury. A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, I fell down from a raised area in our back garden. I landed with pretty much all my (not insigificant) weight on my left leg. and twisted my knee quite badly. The consultant thinks I’ve busted my anterior cruciate ligament, but I’m still waiting for an appointment for an MRI scan to confirm the diagnosis.

So I’m hobbling around with a crutch and a knee brace, mostly annoyed with myself, because if I’d stepped more carefully, or been wearing different shoes, it probably wouldn’t have happened. The offending, extra-slippery trainers have been cast out into the recycling bin where there will be weeping, gnashing of teeth, and, hopefully, recycling. But it’ll be a long time, I fear, until I’m cycling again.

Back on politics, who are these people who, apparently, want Britain to leave the European Union? What kind of madness is that? I mean, aside from the probable contribution of the EU and its predecessors to keeping peace in Europe for the last fifty years, and the advantages I listed here; aside from all that: who the hell do they think we’d trade with?

They’ve just announced that UKIP have won a council seat in Hull. Mental. Ooh, the BNP have lost a seat in Burnley. Good.

I’m writing this on my Psion (surprisingly hard to find a decent link for that nowadays) while sitting watching the TV. Said Psion broke down the other day. I sent it to POS in Streatham to get fixed.. It came back today, and it has turned green (from being black before). There was no explanation, but I assume that what they’ve done is, rather than repair my one, they’ve transplanted the guts of it into a reconditioned body. It’s quite fetching, really.

I like the mood of the discussion on election-night programs: it’s serious, of course, but there’s a ligthness. You get a bit of banter between the presenters and the guests. Of course, it was a lot bleaker during the dark-blue days of the eighties and early- to mid-nineties…

I don’t understand why there’s so much fuss over the postal ballots this time: we had them for the last two elections here in Hackney (first London Mayoral and local council). This time it’s back to proper polling booths, though. I much prefer it that way. How to increase turnout: let polling go on for, say, three days, and/or make polling day a national public holiday, as someone was suggesting in The Guardian the other day.

It is my custom (or has been at the last two general elections, at least) to broadcast, shortly before an election, to those I know, my thoughts and advice on the forthcoming event.  Should the mood take you, you can look back at what I wrote in 1997 and 2001.  Back then I did it by emailing a load of people.  Nowadays we have blogs.

This time, though, I haven’t managed to get my thoughts out in advance.  Then again, it’s not a general election.

I’ve voted Labour at every election since I’ve been able to vote.  Oh, I think I might have thrown one of my transferrable votes to the Greens in the London Mayoral and Assembly ones last time, but basically its been Labour all the way.¹

This time, though, I wasn’t sure.

You know the reasons, I’m sure: Iraq; ID cards; err, that’s enough, really.  Did I still wan’t to support the part that I hadn’t been entirely happy with since it got the “New” tag?

But what are the alternatives?  The Greens, I’ve been thinking recently, are too luddite for me.  Obviously we shouldn’t pollute the environment, and we should do all we can to reduce energy use and carbon emissions; but I fear the Greens are largely anti-technology, and worse, are bordering on the being the type who put animal rights above human rights, which I can’t countenance.  Note that I have no hard evidence to hand for either of those concerns, but I could probably find some with a little research.  if not, and I do them a disservice, well, I’m sure they’ll live.

I thought about the Lib Dems, who are clearly the most pro-Europe of the parties.  I’m sure they’d be fine in many ways.  But in London, for example, they don’t want to increase the size of the Congestion Charge zone.  I think it should cover the whole city.  Or at least come out as far as Hackney.  Anyway, despite my Labour concerns, I was always going to vote for Ken for Mayor again.

I would cut off my uninjured right leg before voting Tory, of course (hey let’s see who says they would scrap the Congestion Charge: Tories, BNP, UKIP; hmmm, is there a common theme there?)  And none of the smaller independents really seem to have it.

Last night I decided. and today I went out and voted.  Labour, in all available boxes.  Because the London Mayor, and Assembly and MEPs aren’t Tony Blair or David Blunkett.  And when it comes to the next general election I’ll probably conclude that Brian Sedgemore, my MP, isn’t them either, and vote for him.

If you haven’t been to your friendly local polling station or postbox today, get on out there.  Remember: all those D-Day heroes that were on the telly recently died so that you could.

For what it’s worth. Continue reading →

Oh, go on then. A lyrics quiz based on the first twenty tracks that a randomised playlist turns up. This is an old-school quiz: no poll, no screening, just argue it out in the comments.

Oh, and it’s bloody hard: I think that, if I were to look at it next week, I wouldn’t get half of it. To help, though, three-and-a-half bands or artists turned up twice. Or three came up twice and one came up one-and-a-half times, you might say.

Edit: Bonus point details and hint added for number 17.

Continue reading →

I wish Ken MacLeod had comments enabled.  His Midnight Fathers piece is just genius, and something we should all try to live by.