This post isn't big or clever, and certainly isn't interesting.
Nope, I'm not joking; it's really very dull.

I'm trying to make this thing a bit more searchable and integrated and other words that make it sound like I know what I'm doing.
If you had Googled the word `versive` 3 days ago then I would have come up on the third page - considering the obscurity of the word versive (not actually recognised by Merriam Webster or Dictionary.com ) that's hardly a great result, and there were two pages of results between me and the top - seemingly the medical profession at least, among others, thinks that the word is real

First thing I did, I allowed RSS feed shenanigans onto the page in the hope that it did something more than add a splash of colour. I didn't even know what the hell RSS was, or what the bloody hell those little orange boxes on news pages and homepages actually were before yesterday.

***In case anyone else was ever wondering about it too: The RSS thing is basically a way of amalgamating updates from different websites into one place, eg:
~ new blog posts from blogs you regularly read,
~ news stories about topics of your choice from your favourite news sites,
~ product updates from sites dealing with your favourite industry,
~ virus alerts from your antivirus company, video game updates, etc.
all of them together, all without having to look for them idividually. You need an RSS reader (downlaod any one of dozens for free, just search for `RSS` and then you just add what you want and remove it as needed. Now I come to explain it it's actually a really great idea if you tend to browse similar parts of the web, and would like to save a bit of time.***

The only other thing I have done so far is to add Versive to Facebook, simply by putting in the address of this page as My Website on my profile and, lo and behold, this now comes up as only the 8th result, and is therefore on the first page of google!

Whether this is a genuine improvement (and it would only be so because of the Facebook linkage at the moment, the way Google works is mostly by favouring sites that are linked to and from popular sites) or merely thanks to quirks of the notoriously byzantine Google machine, but to me it’s all good – no-one is going to stumble across this thanks to the name, but at least now if I’m out and about and I can’t remember the precise address (or more likely, no-one can be arsed to write it down) then it can be easily found.
Go me.

The other thing was my, probably fatefully, daring to try the Google AdSense program – I signed up for it and still I don’t know how it works – and, pending their approval (I hope they don’t actually read this rubbish) then I might get started in a day or two. I hope to buggery that it starts to make sense for me and I have no expectations of making any serious money, not until I take over the internet and crown myself ruler of all geeks, anyway.
I’d probably have to give the crown back, actually. If I can’t instantly grasp how an online ad program works (or recite at least 3 episodes of a SciFi series word-for-word) then I can’t truly be a geek.

So maybe it’ll be `out there` a little more as a result, and if I can make a few pounds every month (and it’ll take a massive rise in popularity and large numbers of people using ads to get that much) then it might at least cover my photobucket and blog.co.uk pro-member subscription, which amount to about as much and would be best counteracted by something such as this.

Anyway I said it wasn’t at all interesting, I’m really just thinking out loud, or leaving myself a note so in the future I can read back through this and realise how very wrong I probably was/am/will have going to be*.

*10 points for anyone who gets the reference

Day in the Life

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Didn’t even entertain the idea of a comb, damn their infernal toothiness.
Found my way downstairs and drank at least 2 cups,
Looked up and didn’t care that I was late. It’s that kind of a job.
Found someone’s coat and tied back my hair,
Walked into the office only hours late,
Found my way to my office and settled down,
Someone spoke and I burst into laughter.

(See Beatles lyrics, here: http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Beatles/A-Day-In-The-Life.html)

An entirely average start to my Wednesday, with thanks to Lennon and Mcartney. Mostly the employees of my workplace get paid to take the piss, chronically, for 9 hours a day. Although it gets annoying at times, it’s usually bloody funny, and hey, it sure beats actual work. Gotta love the old boys network-type-jobs
A photo from Harry’s (Harry aged 77, beard, glasses, bottom centre) leaving dinner last year (he’s come back since then, aged 78, because he’s bored as hell sat about all day without all the piss-taking) is below:

PLACEHOLDER NOTE THING, DAMN CAMERA’S BROKEN TODAY L

This was a day for shopping and I was looking forward to it, although I wasn’t about to do my 5th favourite thing in the world, Spending Lots Of Money On Stuff Not Needed, because it had to be done in charity shops. All I was looking for was a costume for a couple of parties at the weekend, I had settled on going as loveable dead Aussie Steve Irwin (well it was Halloween) complete with ruddy chest wound (stingray tail optional).

You simply would not believe how hard it is to find a hat that fits when you have ridiculous court-jester-style dreadlocks jutting out from your head at all angles, and it must be doubly hard to find a summer Bush hat during the run up to a British Christmas, so I can’t imagine why I thought I’d find one, but that’s the power of optimism so off I went.
It turns out I did find one but it was both too small and very cheap-looking, so it’s only a blessing really that I ended up losing it, too.

Charity shopping is a bit of a black art and I know for a fact that many of the volunteer employees make up for the time they give by taking the most select donations away for themselves and their families. Kind of dark when you think about it, but as long as the shop still takes some money it’s all good, and they couldn’t do that without the volunteers – whether the overheads of running the actual premises turn the whole affair into something quite despicably immoral I’m not sure, I’ve had a free pair of trousers and a T-shirt because of the arrangement before now so It probably implicates me in the whole sordid affair if it does, so I prefer not to think about it.

Next up was the one and only military surplus shop left in Southampton and unless the buying public suddenly gets a mass craving for 5 gallon jerry cans it’ll probably carry on being lonely. The boots and bags and combat trousers can only go so far towards supplying the Goths, emos, urban warriors and stray nondescripts (well there must be at least a few) of the city and beyond that there’s little hope for growth.
The do sell some lovely string (parachute cord, honestly you can’t beat it) though, very handy stuff.

As I was aimlessly looking for some other thrifty boutique on which to thrust some of my pennies I wandered through the Marlands, now snazzily re-titled `The Mall` in a blaze of sense-numbing originality. It was here that I had the strangest experience of the day when a lovely girl of about my age ruthlessly snatched me from the crowd, no doubt homing in on the weird clown hairstyle in the hope that if I was too dumb to use a mirror then I was too dumb to say no to her sales pitch.

She was flogging what was essentially sea salt, plus a little moisturiser, for £35. It’s not a large quantity we’re talking about either, an average sized top brand shampoo bottle of either substance I would guess, and although it smelled lovely and apparently `exfoliated my hands, closed my pores and moisturised my skin` it was, still, about as likely to get bought by me as George W. Bush is of ever achieving a popular vote north of the Mason-Dixon line. Ooooh, topical.

I went through with the mildly suspicious ritual of scrubbing my hands with salt and washing and subsequently moisturising them in the middle of a shopping mall on a busy weekday afternoon because, quite frankly, the girl with the expensive products was quite attractive and I was curious as to how good her pitch was going to be.

It turns out the girl was, although certainly a pretty good salesperson, not going get past a dyed in the wool cynic of my calibre, not least one who was a good door-to-door salesperson themselves in the past. Interesting idea though as it pretty much revolved around name-dropping the Dead Sea and relying on most people remembering something about a lot of salt, and joining up the dots while the salesperson rattles out all the good points. Also it genuinely made my hands feel lovely, but as soon as I heard the price I almost burst out laughing for the second time that day, and had to thank her but explain I was actually about to leave the country.
We ended up having a chat about India and I found out she was in fact Israeli, and had live in India for a number of years. As she was entirely in the North of the country however, and I plan to be entirely in the South, we graciously parted.

My hands felt great for hours.

At some point in the day I also got sucked into a number of department stores, Debenhams definitely being one of them but I think BHS as well – I was loosely and stupidly looking for both the hat and watch departments and, and this may come as s shock to some of you, but BHS for one doesn’t sell watches. At all. It’s got departments for just about everything from chandeliers to knapkin rings but can’t quite bring itself to sell a fucking wristwatch. I was appalled.
Also the design of department stores seems to be something out of a certain Jim Henson movie, the various sections appear to not only overlap but actually defy categorisation completely, whereas admittedly most of the products on a given shelf or rack will be quite similar to the ones on the rack next to it, they are also virtually identical to the stuff on racks halfway across the gaping cavern that is their first floor, with no discernible label or warning as to which section is which, or where you might actually find whatever it is you’re looking for. I suspect this is a secret closely guarded by the regular customers, possibly with some kind of bonus points scheme for those who ensnare others into shopping there, without telling them how to get around or get out.

I can visualise some ambitious little evil-minded bastard in an important meeting at Chateau d’Bhs outlining his plan to make all their stores so utterly in-navigable that they will keep anyone with cheque book or credit card who's stupid enough to come through the door imprisoned within for an average minimum of 2¼ days. In the end I had to knock a member of staff to the floor and steal his staff-only ultra-violet ink map in order to find the exit.
Almost. Actually I think I relied on the age-old principle of escaping a maze by always and unbendingly turning left at every corner. I got out after an hour or so.

-

Some people may have noticed that I’ve put on a bit of weight this year, they probably still have no idea how much because quite frankly I feel like a tall and skinny woman who is 7 months pregnant. Of course this in no way stops me eating an average of 4½ meals a day because hey, I'm a gluttonous hedonist after all. I had started a few hours before at the horrendously un-PC Burger King, probably because sometimes you actually get a craving for what's essentially a life-shortening experience. At least it’s not McDonalds.

After being not unpleasantly mugged by the Israeli girl I thought I should probably keep up appearances and did so twofold by going to the rock & metal bar, The Firehouse, and ordering rum. Yes, I suppose I am still a bit of a metaller, and a bit of a pirate, and I get the chance to sit on a beach drinking rum (and boarding any Spanish ships I can find) in the near future then I for one am happy to carry on the charade.
They have a little gimmick now if you buy Sailor Jerry rum (which is undoubtedly the finest drink known to humanity) in that every shot also gets you either a tattoo transfer of one of the great man’s original designs (Sailor Jerry was the guy who, allegedly, invented the `sailor style` of tattooing. You know, all the stylised anchors and dice and black cats and playing card motifs) or a CD with a whole range of probably quite unrelated and only dubiously appropriate tracks.
Needless to say I have a) not listened to the CD yet and b) have the entire range of designs and several CDs.

Of course, one pub is never enough so I went on the Goblets, more rum, a vegetarian full breakfast (identical to the other kind except for veggie sausages (delicious) and hash browns (supremely delicious, as always) instead of black pudding. Sometimes it’s a lot nicer not to have anything too heavy to digest, it’s only a shame it was so enormous, otherwise it would have worked.
After that I foolishly decided to go out for the night and, after checking into the Hobbit for a few hours and losing all my day’s purchases, I went to the Dungeon and, the fools, the let me in.
Wednesdays at the Dungeon is when they will actually hand over a large shot of Vodka WITH COKE for £1, a double at £2 actually contains at least enough booze to make even the hardest drinkers realise the day has now begun, and gods help me I think I spent about £40 in there.

The hangover on Thursday was among the worst I have ever experienced, even my patented 5-Step Cure (optional 6-Step Cure also available, depending on circumstances) didn’t manage to break through it until the early evening. I know for a fact that not a drop of water touched my lips since I left work at about 10:30am and I went into the Firehouse about 1pm, so it was hardly surprising. I shall have to invest in some kind of intravenous water bottle contraption.

I eventually got my stuff back at the Hobbit too, which was nice.

For those of you without time to waste, here’s the quick itinerary of my trip, as planned, probably not as it actually happens:

India, for about 6 months.

Vietnam or Laos or Thailand for a week, possibly the Andaman islands instead.

Hong Kong, for a week.

Singapore, for a few days.

Borneo, for a week or two.

Bali, for a week.

Australia, for about 6 weeks.

New Zealand, for about a year!

Madagascar, possibly, a week or two if so.

South Africa, for a month or so.

Argentina for a few days.

Brazil for a month or so.

Bolivia for about 3 weeks.

Brazil again, for another 2 – 6 months I guess.

Columbia for a week or two.

Venezuela for at least a month.

Panama possibly, for a few days.

Jamaica for a week or two.

Cuba for a week or two.

Mexico, for a month.

The USA for about 2 months, maybe more.

Swim back home!!

When I tell my friends, family and anyone else I accost that I'm going travelling, then of course the first thing most people ask is where it is I'm going. The fact that most of them subsequently tune out as soon as I've mentioned 3 countries is testament to my ability to bore any human being rigid within 5 seconds, and to the fact that it's a bit too much to take in all at once.
This is because I have a problem, a serious problem that really has required medical attention in the past and will likely lead to much silliness in the future: I can't do things by halves.

I heard a simply brilliant quote a couple of years ago; once upon a time Oscar Wilde said "Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess" or something very similar anyway. It's been a rule to live by, although I must admit I've been living like that for a lot longer, ever since I heard the simpler version "if something's worth doing, it's worth OVERdoing" around the age of 15.
Maybe I would have turned out quite different if I'd heard something else, but who knows.

Like most things I have a bit of time to plan, this holiday travelling scheme has become something quite monstrous, which is all the better as far I'm concerned. So far the loose plan (and I'm well aware that plans are pretty damn loose, as someone said in the pub last night `before you know it you'll be in China`.
I have no intention of going to China.
Not that this counts for much, it seems.

The itinerary that I would LIKE to follow goes something like this:

India, for about 6 months. Flying into Mumbai (formerly Bombay) then onto Goa after a week or so, get wasted up for a month or two in the party capital of the country, then go touring across Southern India to eventually reach Chennai (formerly Madras).

North Vietnam, Laos or Northern Thailand for either a few days, or a few weeks. This one is a bit sketchy ‘coz it all rests on whichever I can get the cheapest flight to - might get a boat to the Andaman islands and another one on to Thailand though if it's cheaper still, and then take trains and buses through the Thai countryside until I get somewhere nearer to:

Hong Kong, just for a week unless I can stay cheaply for a few more. Fat chance!

Borneo, mainly to see the Orangutans (if I can) and the rainforest, just for a week or two.

Singapore probably just for a couple of days, and really just to get some good pictures, as it is hugely expensive.

Bali for about a week. No prizes for guessing what I'm doing there

Australia. That big ol’ prison we used to delight in sending all the underwear thieves to. I’ll probably survive about a week talking like that over there, but hey - technically I've got 3 months on my Visa but, unfortunately, I’ve learned it's bloody expensive to live, and the ONLY work (that they give to unskilled foreigners) is fruit picking - Fuck. That.
Not that I mind hard work, but it's hard work for almost no money, in bad conditions, and it’s not like it’s helping to save the planet!
Therefore I’m using up half the time on my Aussie visa to go through the countries mentioned above!
So; Australia for about a month or 6 weeks or however long as it takes to see Darwin, go overland to the East coast and get down to Sydney.

New Zealand for a year, or as close as possible to it - got a working visa for that much time and the work is more readily available there, so I'll probably be a bar schlep of coffee boy for 12 months but I'll be in freakin' New Zealand! Woooo! Looking forward to a quiet year, taking stock and making plans.

Possibly Madagascar, depending on costs and whether I can do some of the travelling by sea. They call the island `the Eighth continent` because of its abundance of totally unique wildlife, and it would be awesome to see some of it.

South Africa for a while, no idea how much of a while whatsoever. Probably fly into Johannesburg and travel overland down to Cape Town, but if I can get a good deal together then I'd love to go into the Kruger National Park - a game reserve the size of Wales - and see what I can see of all those famous African animals J
From South Africa to South America;

Probably flying into Buenos Aires in North Argentina to start with, only for a couple of days then:

Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. I'll stay as long as I reasonably can. It's here, and Brazil in general that I want to learn to either sing better, dance properly, or both. Going from there into the interior, to the actual capital, Brasilia (no, it's not Rio anymore ) and basically mooching through the Amazon rainforest for as long as I can and in as much depth and sheer revelry as possible. The rainforests of South America are the main reason I'm actually going on the whole trip.

Bolivia, La Paz and the salt flats, probably 2-4 weeks, then;

Back into Brazil again to work North, through the Amazon basin proper, then up into Venezuela to see Angel Falls – which has been a dream of mine ever since I learned it was a whole kilometre high, and that the water doesn’t actually splash because it is actually rain by the time it reaches the bottom.

Possibly Columbia as I'd love to sit on a porch in Bogotá sipping rum for a few days.

Panama, possibly, and just for the Canal, if not then into the Caribbean and;
Jamaica, maybe, hopefully around Christmas 2009.
Cuba, and a party in Havana for New Year '09/'10

Mexico, anywhere and everywhere, then if there's any money left at all;

The good ol' USA. I want to see Vegas at night, Chicago during a storm and New York with about as much daylight as physically possible!
I feel New York gets a bit of a bad rep though, it’s probably nearly safe to go there without an armed squad of bodyguards nowadays

Phew, bloody hell, and I honestly doubt I’ll get to see it all in this trip but hey: aim high as hell and you’re gonna do a damn sight better than if you just planned sensibly, I always reckon.

I get the sneaky feeling I'll have run out of money by this time though, and will need to work my way back across the Atlantic to get home. A pretty cool concept as it is – of course I could stop anywhere along the way if I find somewhere that’s just THAT freakin’ good.
That’s what everyone keeps telling me anyway, not that I can’t take a hint or anything *sniff* *sob*

Death Valley, California: some clever buggers photographed most of the entire sodding galaxy that we live in, and compiled this lovely panaoramic shot for our viewing pleasure.

So good I just had to share - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/70/Deathvalleysky_nps_big.jpg

I, Tim the apparently evil hippy, do hereby formally apologise to any and all people who have been irritated by my constantly harping on about going travelling, and to all those who have called me a bastard I acknowledge your hatred and loathing, and know precisely how you feel.

After spending the last year thinking about and mentally organising this little venture, I'm left like a kid at Christmas now that I've only got a wee bit over a week left (from today!) before I leave. A day or so ago I woke up around six thirty, and walked around the chilly, empty house for 2 hours with the same gut feeling I remember from all those years ago when Christmas day was still guaranteed to be the best time of the year.

At about nine in the morning I came THIS close to cooking a Christmas pudding I'd bought on the cheap, and gorging myself on it for the rest of the day. I might do that tonight anyway, it's still feeling pretty merry around here )

It's a funny thing, going off travelling. You feel very scared and very excited at the same time and if, like me, you haven't actually booked anywhere to go for when you get to your (first) destination of choice then you're also wondering what the bloody hell you're going to do about that, and whether you might end up splashing out needlessly on some overly lavish hotel, at the risk of staying there too long and spending too much money... uh oh. Better pick some people's brains about this one first; the Lonely Planet books not only have their real-world papery presence to help us out but also the Thorn Tree forums, here at: http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/
Anyone thinking of going off somewhere themselves could find a lot worse places to start ;o)

But yes, the fear and expectation, the mild unease and the huge potential for anything and everything, and all it takes to get started is the right motivation because honestly, if I can do it then anyone can do it too.
My motivation was threefold:
1) a need to do something big and difficult and exciting because I'm painfully aware of how shy I am in certain ways and how little I have lived (although I can still tell a story or two).
2) a need to see different people and environments because frankly, 9 months per year of grey skys and half-arsed rain in this country are really starting to piss me off, after 25 years. Gimme a monsoon or a desert or a piste, a tropical beach, better yet a tropical rainforest, a tundra, a coral reef, a redwood forest or an inland lake - better yet give me all of them, as much as is physically possible to have.
3) I needed a distraction and to get away from my life because of... something personal. You don't need to know what but there are times when the best thing you can actually do is run away, not from a conflict or confrontation, but from everything that you've already done so you can go and live a whole new life for yourself, and end up feeling that you're doing everything for the first time again.

Now, reasons 1 & 2, well, we all have those in common, I think. They should be motivation enough to get going in the next year or so, but if you have any further dislike for things around you, or feel the need to get away from the same old - same old drudgery of English life, or want to be well away from things that just bring about bad memories then start saving NOW, and work out how to make money as you go, and get a plan together and get the fuck out of that door!!

All you need to do is minimise your expenses and be harsh to yourself for a year or so, no treats or presents, no drinking benders (hey, I did my `be harsh to yourself` thing a few years ago, alright! ) and you really don't need any material stuff around you seeing as you'll be off pretty soon, so sell what you've got and don't buy anything more, and you'll soon be on your way.

Bus stops. As thrilling as they are very few people can work up enough `give-a-shit` juice to bother them with a second thought, especially since everyone except myself and Steve Hawking drives their own car.

But in show of solidarity with paraplegic astrophysicist genius’ everywhere I choose not to drive, a fact which has nothing at all to do with me managing to get invlolved in 2 car crashes within 90 days of getting a license, one of them within the first week (go me!)
So I use the train for everything and buses when I absolutely have to, and a glaring error that’s been painfully obvious for ages is that none of the bus companies, not one, is able to provide any usable details of any of it’s bus routes for anyone not already totally familiar the area. How bloody stupid is that?

Now we have the internet it would seem to be pretty much priority #1 for bus operators to get both their timetables and routes online, in an easy to read format
Not so, apparently.
The sensible thing would be to provide helpful websites that give, perhaps, just perhaps, an actual geographical bona-fide, Ordnance Survey-like map-style map of bus routes so that the public; their customers; could plan a journey!

I mean honestly, how hard is that to realise? I’ve specifically not used buses dozens of times because I was going somewhere new or unfamiliar and just couldn’t see which roads the bus stops were on without walking the whole route out myself (which kind of invalidates the need for the buses) nor was it possible to know how far from a particular place any given bus stop was.
Most irritatingly, I didn’t have any way to plot the route on a proper map (those Undergound-style line maps are less than useless) and as a result I’ve been forced to blag lifts everywhere for the last few years - many of them from you guys who are reading this – so let us unite, my friends, and rise up against the foul beasts, blackhearts and wrongdoers at Fortress Solent BlueLine!!

Errm, no actually, because Google have sorted it.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=romsey&sll=52.960246,-1.148372&sspn=0.007161,0.017209&ie=UTF8&ll=51.500168,-0.126815&spn=0.0074,0.017209&z=16&om=1

Yes, everyone’s favourite search engine (well everyone except the most cynical Linux programmers ) has once again stepped into the fray and released a free product that does other people’s jobs better than they can do them themselves**. This is bound to be copied by everyone else now it's out there, and it’s hardly important enough on it’s own to warrant any more than a few mildly exasperated raised eyebrows from the Googlonians, but it’s a such useful and simple thing that it really, really should have been done a long time ago.

All they have done, and I can’t believe it was so bloody simple, is plot the location of every bus stop and station (and they’re covering the country city by city) onto Google Maps vis a cute little icon depicting the last view of a slow pedestrian (-the frontof a bus with no sky around the sides) and making it even more useful with a little box detailing which buses use that stop – and, genius manoeuvre of the week – included with most of them the times of the next 2 buses for each route from that stop. Now how easy was that?!!

-

It took google, not the bus companies who stand to profit, nor the local authorities who have vast budgets to improve public transportation and yet further vast budgets to improve environmental conditions on their patches, to actually do this.
It probably seems like a hugely trivial and pointless thing to you if you drive, but bear in mind the less harmful effects of using combined, massed transport, and besides road-traffic-accident magnets like myself that there are a LOT of elderly or ill-healthéd people out there who can’t drive, and who completely rely on buses to live out their lives.

Think how much more they could get out of it if they knew where and when they were going.

**Yes, I know they pinch their fair share of technologies from other (usually smaller) companies themselves, but it was such a pretty sentence.

Did you ever not fit in as a teenager? Did you feel like rebelling against your parents, school, queen and country? Didn't we all - some are still doing it and in some ways I am too, but ever since it became fashionable to unfashionable (oh, how I want to kill the followers of fashion sometimes!) the very personal journey each person should make into adulthood has become a mass-marketed brand; the emo is rising!!
*chants something from `funeral for a friend` or `my bloody, weeping, sobbing creeping, emo valentine` or somesuch band*

http://members.aol.com/Valdes379/EmoGame.html

Not that the emo (or Emo®) trend was the first fashion wave that idolised or exploited rebellion, because the rock/metal scene was starting to become a fashion at the start of the millenium - did anyone else shudder with horror on first seeing Mötorhead T-shirts in the window of New Look? - but the emo trend is now THE main fashion for young folk, although by the time of my writing this and hitting `enter` it will probably have changed again. We can only hope, anyway.

And it's not that I dislike anyone looking like an emo kid because a) it's your life to do whatever the hell you please and b) we all looked stupid at some stage in our lives, and it's not like I didn't do something pretty similar when I was 15-18yrs in the form of a pretty half-hearted metalhead, and it's not even that I think this is the first time teen rebellion has been capitalised on, but it is the first time it has represented such a mind-numbing irony to the world, and personally it's just about all I can do to stop the stupidwaves leaking into my brain.

Being an emo is about being misundersood and miserable about how bad it all is (i.e. being a hormonal adolescent) living your painful, well-funded middle-class life, and how damned, damned terrible everything should be if only we could make it bad enough to justify painting every item of furniture in the house either black or purple (pretty much the same as being a metaller in the late 90's then, but at least we had real metal tunes, and good drugs - comedowns probably explained a lot of the self-pity in fact) yet the whole emo gig isn't actually based on any style of music that existed beforehand, and is nothing more than a marketing concept created by record labels working in conjunction with clothing manufacturers, using cross-referential advertising campaigns and good product placement (as well as implementing such enviable money-spinners as brand recognition and brand loyalty: in a social grouping that likes to rate `anarchy` as it's political party of choice - what the flying fuck?!!!) to make a whole lot of poor, impressionable youngsters spend all their available cash.

And all that nasty, global-level marketing is driving a culture that tells itself and is told by it's architects that it is subversive and subcultured and is all about being yourself.

Is anyone else foaming at the brain about this?

Okay folks, this is a long one.
I have a chip on my shoulder, an axe to grind, and a spanner in my works (ooh err) about this one, so sit back and enjoy the vitriol =D
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We all argue about religion, one way or another, and some (most?) of us have at some point argued on the internet with complete strangers and, of course, while this gets us nowhere at all it does feel like you’ve really said your piece about something you usually never get the chance to.
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Religion is my favourite sport, Christians of the genus `Catholica` are my favourite quarry, and it rarely does any good arguing against a certain type of this beast as all they do is quote chapter and verse from the bible at you – pretty fucking pointless when the chap they’re doing it at doesn’t like fairy stories, generally knows what they are going to say anyway and has actually reasoned out proper arguments in the first place.
Nice try though I admire their fire and zeal, but it’s not like I haven’t heard it before, or that I’m religiously ignorant – I went to the damn masses/ceremonies/rituals for over 10 years, after all.
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Most people reading know my Dad is about to be a Deacon. For those that don't know (or care) a deacon is the married equivalent of a priest in the catholic church, they can conduct weddings, funerals, I think baptisms, can bless bits of cracker and that rather inferior wine you get and can probably give the last rites, although would be better employed doing so preemptively to the bulk of their congregations, generally speaking. It takes 7 years to qualify for this gig - you can get to be a bleedin’ doctor in less time, which says a lot about the bureacracy of the church.
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He also, I'm sure just to be a complete smartarse, graduated with a degree in Theology this year, and you might even be aware that he plays the organ at many of the various church services throughout the week and he and my Mum have either run or taken part in the choir at church most Sundays and other nights for the last 20 years or so, at whatever church they were haunting at the time.
Holy buggers ain’t they? ;o)
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The point of mentioning all that is to highlight that I myself have had a decent amount of influence in this area and have been talking to and, yes, arguing about the nature and origins of the catholic church with someone who doesn’t just believe in it, but has genuinely studied it in depth and now even teaches it, in a manner of speaking. So when I say that I have never had a satisfactory answer to either of the points in my following spiel then maybe anyone currently believing in any god or gods might like to try seeing things slightly differently. Perhaps. I'm not really holding out much hope though, to be honest.
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Oh and before you might think I'm out as a missionary of the antichrist or I'm trying to de-convert people or anything, I'm really not. All I am doing is the same as every other mainstream religion has done, just from the opposite point of view - I'm putting one explanation of life out into the world, and it's there for anyone to take or leave as they please. Actually all mainstream religions except Buddhim have rather forced people to take their own explanations, usually at swordpoint, which makes me slightly more righteous than them on balance (although its hard not to be more righteous than a bunch of demented cainophobes getting a bit handy with the red-hot knives.
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In point of fact, seeing as it's worth mentioning this in any god-bashing piece as it's a pretty good sweeping example of just how wrong religions can be, just like the Spanish inquisition wasn't exactly the highlight of the church's career, likewise the missionaries of Christianity largely forced the Word Of God down the throats of people to whom it was about as welcome as a red hot poker up the arse. I mean they'd only been practising and preserving their own beliefs and getting on with the messy business of survival when along came a bunch of pale blokes to tell them that no matter what they do, as long as they hang onto their own unique way of life they're gonna be spending an unimaginable eternity in the company of the biggest bastards in the universe, and said bastards would all have both a) a personal vendetta against each and everey one of them, and b) lots of hot, sharp things.
Joy.
I bet those missionaries really patted themselves on the back every time they ruined our worldwide cultural diversity (terrifying yet more innocent strangers into a life of miserable delusion in the process)
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Mind you, it's not like you should stop believing in things, because frankly there is as much chance of there being a god (or gods) as there isn’t (and I mean that most literally - it's 50/50 - no-one has the answer the only real question left), and it is so incomprehensible to understand what, how, or if that it makes as much sense to worship a big beard in the sky as it does to sit in a cellar and deny the existence of anything outside your own head.
Still, my personal philosophy is that no-one should believe in anything, and should just get on and accept that ignorance is sometimes the only valid option.
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This is my reply to someone’s preachy, Christian intelligent design argument: a nice preachy piece of Tim Brand rhetoric that we can all enjoy =D
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"If you have religious Faith then read this, and please try to actually think about it instead of spending the time scanning the lines preparing another set of bible verses for me, eh? I’ve had about 20 years of getting your point of view inflicted on me so the least you could do is read and think about it a little

First, there is no point going through all the ways in which you have missed the point or getting into enough detail to explain the human eye, cobwebs, human social behavior etc. because there are likely and consistent explanations given through science for just about every single event and feature of the universe all the way back to the start of the it all, and that's apparently just one theory levelled against the other that God or god or gods or whatever guided the entire process - personally I find it hilarious that scienctific thought has had to come up with all the ideas and proofs and theories and independent thinking, and then religion basically just says that whatever we think of ourselves was either made or guided by god - funny, but he never fucking mentioned it until we found out!!
Also, he's never actually mentioned it at all in fact; seeing as he hasn't made any appearances for 2000 years all that we have to go on is actually the word of Man, not God.
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It's very much as if the various churches just shout "yeah we meant that too" like a schoolchild who's been caught out, every time something they previousl stood for has been rubbished, but hey. Like I said, all you lot ever do is say "me too" without doing any actual thinking for yourselves. So;
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2 different ways of looking at it - seeing as there's no way to talk to some people properly I'll keep it simple - are these:

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1) Everything you have ever known about your god or gods was told to you by.... people. If anyone thinks their holy book is the word of god then who, according to legend, first wrote it down? A human. A human, with their wonderful tendency towards imagination and storytelling.

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2) Why did you first start BELIEVING in a god? Because you either never heard anything different and were institutionalised from too early an age to ask questions and think about it freely, or, and this is more likely, because as you grew up you realised your Death was totally inescapable, and you needed some sanity insurance in the form of an afterlife/reincarnation to hope for and an assurance that there isn't REALLY an oblivion, when in truth that is almost certain BUT YOU'RE TOO SCARED OF DEATH TO EVER CONFRONT THIS!!
Faith becomes people's shield against their own fears, which is why anyone truly believing in a religion cannot be shaken by any argument, because they have blocked out their own fear of death with their religious faith, in the same way an abuse victim might block out a brutal trauma.
I'd pay for regression therapy or whatever for some of the more offensive and/or evangelical religious folk, just to see their smug outward personalities reduced to neurotic anxiety-wracked and near-gibbering terror, without barriers or defenses, and force them to rationally confront the same fear that a lot of atheists conquered in their teenage years.
Now I don’t intend anything bad to happen to anyone, I’m one of the biggest tree-hugging hippies around, philosophically speaking, and I’ll get on with anyone even if they try to be offensive, but I’ve never yet met someone with faith in a religion accept the possibility that any other religion or any explanation other than their own has any merit in it. And that to me is the most blinkered and ignorant worldview imaginable.

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Plus, the evangelical bible-quoting brigade wouldn't respond to anything other than a full psychological meltdown or a lump of Oak across the back of the head - remember that these are the Christian types that in the US of A generate the Klu Klux Klan and that sensible, albeit it genially deluded religious academics and most of the priesthood themselves think are whackos. No-one believes in Christian fundamentalism outside of Utah USA, or mental asylums.
I'm also sick (good rant huh?) of hearing bible quotes and the frankly pathetic reasoning from people who have never looked at the world as their own person, a unique person who is living their own life, and doing so without stooping in some kind of apologetic thanks to an idea that was created thousands of years ago to cow and humble the uneducated masses into mindless obedience.
You have nothing to be thankful for because there is no-one to thank – but still you have every reason to do the best you can for yourself and anyone around you!
And if you believe that a religion that was cooked up a thousand years ago or more to answer questions that were then impossible is applicable to everyone today, when we have answers to all but one** of those questions, then you really should open your eyes and try seeing the light for what it is – a 93 million mile journey for a whole lot of photons; fantasy tales not needed any longer.

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**You might think there are more questions to answer but really there aren’t, the big ones all come down to this:
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1 - Where did the universe come from?
2 - Where is it going?
3 - What happens when we die?
4 - Why are we here?
5 – What’s the best possible flavour of ice cream in the whole universe?
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1) this is the one question that is left.
2) This is just an extension of the first question – If the answer really is a god thing then you should consult your bible/torah/qu’ran for the 2nd answer. If it's not then the start of things should give us a pretty big clue ;o)
3) Utter oblivion, or the afterlife of choice depending on your religion. I'm betting on oblivion, personally. Shame I'll never be able to collect the winnings...
4) That’s entirely, completely, 100% up to you ;o)
5) Mint choc chip with rum pistachios."

Okay, this is so cool I can hardly contain it - even though it will inevitably end up being overexpensive and probably wont come anywhere near to punching a whole in the ecological nightmare that is our planet's future, but it does at least look cool as hell: http://www.bestblogsite.org/blogs/permalinks/8-2007/incredible-renewable-energy-powerhouse.php

I don't usually get preachy about the environment because, quite frankly, I'm usually either so nihilistic I can't be bothered to save the world or so narcissistic I can't think of anything outside of my own head, but these buildings not only look funky but could potentially make whole tower blocks of people pretty much neutral in their consumption of natural resources, and if the building where they all worked did the same thing... pretty cool for the rest of the world eh?

N.B. Something I often wonder about wind turbine energy though: if there were, say, half a million wind turbines around the world then could they actually disturb the various global air currents and streams? I know they tend to be way up high in the sky but if there was anything in the `butterfly effect` thingy out of chaos theory (watch Jurassic Park for the dumbed-down 3-second technically-misleading explanation) then it could happen.
And changing those streams dramatically enough would alter the climate of most of the world.

Made me wonder if anyone with any expertise has done any work on this.

Hello to one and all, or none and all, really, as no-one knows about this yet.

Still, lets get on with things shall we?

I'm Tim and this is the account of my travels, soon to begin (leaving blighty for India on November 5th, 2007) and long shall they last, I bloody hope.
The title - the title is a silly thing I thought of when I was pissed off the other day and once you've created the name and web address for these things that's it, no going back and changing it. Yes, I could have made another but laziness is one of my best features, so you'll have to deal with it just like me.
It means (in my head anyway): `the opposite of subversive` because I was annoyed at something at the time (see below) and is also an admittedly slightly shit play on words to do with verse as the form of writing. Seeing as it's all going to be in prose (and god help you if I start writing poetry) it's hardly accurate or true, either.

Also because the opposite of subversive is something along the lines of `conformist, conservative and agreeable` I am actually nothng but a fabricator of cheap words and a damned liar, too, so I probably should have started that other blog and thought up a better title.

Oh well, too late now.