Sit down, shut up, and listen to my weekend.

I have been uncharacteristically detached from the news this week, despite reading the papers and watching some news, I haven't really absorbed any of it to really take any notice or even have anything news worthy to tangibly speak about. Apparently Libyan rebels have 'captured' Gaddafi's home town [The Guardian], and 250,000 people had a march in London about cuts or something [The Telegraph]. The latter resulted in a minority of people predictably shooting themselves up to the eyeballs on testosterone and break a few windows. And again, for some reason, the Star thinks that a front page headline about Jordan is more important for people to know about than what is the domestic news  headlines this weekend; if anybody can be bothered to look up today's Star headline you would probably reel in disbelief. I hope poor Alex doesn't read it. Most papers have a political orientation, the Star has a celebrity orientation.

Oh, and apparently Michael Barrymore was booed off stage in a comedy comeback attempt [Mail Online]. The highly talented and respected individual, Daily Mail Reporter, publised this. Of course backed up with the usual onslaught of degrading and embarrasing photographs. Like this:



Did I do that properly?

Anyway, due to me presenting the absorbtion qualites of a wet sponge last week regarding the news, I find myself with nothing important to face you will other than to attempt to make you jealous at how packed full of jam that my weekend was.

Thursday and Friday night was punctuated with lovely midnight adventure walks with a friend who I spoken to properly for a while with her new dog. I use the word 'dog' lightly, it's an Old English Sheepdog puppy; that shows every bit of intellegence of your average Essex bimbo. Was still  nice to just blabber the toss about nothing in particular in the darkness of the night.

Saturday's dull starchy sustinance was work. But it was polite to fly over and with the one bliddy time that I actually arranged to meet somebody outside the doors after my shift, is the one time where management decided to keep us all back 30 minutes to tidy the mess that was left by lazy, ignorant and stupid customers whom seemingly fail to possess the simply ability to hang something back up properly. So yeah, me and The Persistance of Memory eventually met, and under the false pretence of having a pint at the pub, the deceptive shit brought another one of our mates along and we ended up going to see a Faith No More tribute band, Faith No Man. Apparently this was what was planned all along, she did well to keep it from me. But then I have been mincing around in my own little bubble of late, so that probably is more my fault.

Faith No More were a pretty damn decent band back in the day, and this tribute band went a long way to doing them justice. Despite only knowing 'Epic' and vaguely recognising 'Falling to Pieces' from Black Hawk Down (I told you that it was in that film, guys)  I was severly impressed at how well they played. Good vocal work, and some pretty nifty finger work from the bassest and guitarist brought through the vibes of the classic rock band nicely. Furthermore, the drummer managed to flawlessly beat out the puccussion with enough politeness to vibrate the bones you stood with. One thing I would like to point out, would be that the keyboard player seemed to be there just for show half the time.

Bumped into a couple of people of whom I hadn't seen for a while, one of which I was really hoping I hadn't, but fortunately, it was only in passing. But the night was remembered by the absolute legend of a DJ that put on a whole host of songs so old-school my Gran would've been happy pulling some shapes to them - Jackson 5, that's right.

Didn't actually get around to going to sleep until 4.30am- I mean, 5.30am. The clocks went forward, did I mention that? I didn't know for sure until the Taxi driver confirmed it.

Sunday was easily one of the worst days of work in my life (so far), but I did buy a funky new shirt and a banging Thomas The Tank Engine cap for the bairn because he's suddenly developed a well placed love for the little blue engine, just like his daddy when I was his age.

So that's my blog about the key news events of the past week. You know when you've been informed. Thank you and until next time.

Some things are better not being known.

Let's just get this out the way first. I am a firm believer of freedom of speech. But all this malarkey that Julian Assange is doing is just ridiculous and in light of the start of his court trial, I thought I'd type a blog up about it and how I feel about this whole affair. If you can't access this blog in the future, it's because 4chan have found me and killed me with an email bomb.

Granted, perhaps the Swedish government probably didn't handle the whole alleged rape claims very well. But I believe that this was purely because of the amount of pressure they were getting from the US to get Assange in a place where they could get to him.

Did the founder of Wikileaks rape these women as alleged? We won't know until the judge makes his decision. But either way, he does look like a seedy and grimy sort of fellow, with a little bit of the banker breed thrown in for good measure.

Julian Assange

There have been calls from fair right American's for him to be executed. Which is frankly barbaric, however it doesn't excuse the fact that some of the leaks that he has been responsible for have been totally and unjustifiably unwarrantable, and dangerous for the national security of America. 

Leaks such private conversations between members of the American government about their opinions of certain countries and War Logs of both Afghanistan and Iraq. It's not just America that he's attacking either with these publications, but other countries that approach him with illegally gotten information. It's all on the same par with treason, and anybody who is caught doing it should be treat in the same way as somebody who is caught selling information to a foreign state. There is always talk of somebody being a traitor and posing serious risk to the country every time a somebody is caught selling secrets to the Chinese, Russians, Koreans. So how is this any different? 

There is a reason why governments don't publish this information. Granted some of it is because of self preservation; nobody wants bad PR, no matter how honest the government is. However, some is genuinely for the  public's best interests and safety, and to upkeep sometimes fragile relationships with other countries to keep the peace and maintain the best interests of their country at heart. Who doesn't want their country's best interests put first?

To callously put all this information up for world wide viewing is completely wrong. Some of it can be justified - SOME OF IT. And Julian and his crew at Wikileaks need to be able to strike the balance between what the public have a right to know, and what the world DOESN'T need to, and has no business knowing. 

Half the people up in arms about this probably never even heard about Wikileaks before August last year. And probably never even bothered their arsed to read through the 400,000 files in the Iraq war log. I know I sure as hell didn't, I have better things to do then stick my nose into things that don't concern me, and be safe in the assumption that if there was anything that the media thought the public ought to know, it would be published.

The argument of free speech is a ridiculous excuse for the justification of the use of offensive comments. The boundary lines of this is pushed to the absolute limits by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Star - the latter of which published an anti-Muslim front page headline, and then manage to misspell the word heroes whilst printing the story right next a flesh abundant picture of a woman. And they wonder why Muslims can be so hostile toward us. Anyway, here's the online article. At least the Star had the decency to disable the comments section on this page. Impending racism thwarted. 

[Insert a picture of this front page here....anyone?]

It would appear that I can't in fact find a picture of this. But whilst I was searching through the archives of the Daily Star, I was absolutely flabbergasted by how much space Katie Price has taken up on their front pages in recent weeks! All space wasted for actual real news. 

Until next time, folks.