Heroes

I heard a story the other day. I don't know if it was true, but I do know that it holds a lot of meaning.

Anyway, there was a army photographer tagged to a GI unit in Vietnam for 6 months. Everyday for 6 months he went out with this unit on patrol, and everyday this photographer took pictures. Eventually it came to the day before his 6 months were up and he and the unit went out on patrol - just like everyday. 

The platoon were picking their way through the jungle until suddenly, the LT pushed over the photographer to the ground. From the ground, the photographer saw that same LT get shot in the head. What also happened was something that happened by pure chance. Pure luck. As the photographer hit the ground, he hit the ground, the camera went off as a result of the jolt from the impact with the ground and snapped the exact moment that the lieutenant was shot.

For 25 years, this photographer didn't show anybody this picture and didn't tell anybody of this story. He was racked with guilt, thinking that that LT had died instead of him, that he thought it should have been him that was killed. But one day this photographer looked at this photo at realised that this wasn't a man dying because of him, instead of him - but a man saving his life. It was a person dying whilst saving another persons life. 

From that moment, the photographer showed this picture, and he told the story, and he made sure people knew of this hero. I think that this just goes to show, it doesn't matter what happens, there is always two ways you can look at something. It's just up to you to decide which.

Define: Blog.

"1.) blatantly uninteresting online diary that gives the author the illusion that people are interested in their stupid, pathetic life. Consists of such riveting entries as "homework sucks" and "I slept until noon today." 

2.) a place where people whine  about their daily activities which nobody is interested in. topics like why they argue with boyfriend and how they end up together at last, daily anorexic activities like drinking blended organic fruits and vegetable for breakfast, lunch and dinner, talking about cutting themselves with a razor blade and how good they felt, whine  about their shopping activities and what they got."

No, I didn't write this, but I wish I had. I do think that the person who did write this definition may have just sat and trawled Tumblr for 10 minutes and came to the conclusion that this is what blogging is. I feel that there are a few other points that needed to be added. Like the following for Blogspot:

3) a place where traditional Christian American families can pose with their perfect prosperous lives with the persona of simple perfection posting pictures of mommy and daddy and their children on lovely days out together whilst seemingly clueless to the significant levels of risk associated with carelessly posting this information to the world.

Five out of 10 on the Blogspot blogs that I viewed at random came up with blogs matching my above description. That's HALF. Obviously this isn't a fair representation on the content of Blogspot, but it is definitely a large proportion of it's server space.

Obviously not all blogs fall within these 3 confines; there are a lot that are dedicated to cooking, faith, politics, music, film, games, cars, computers, blah-blah-blah-blah. There are blogs about literally everything. However, the above points are just a satirical generalisation to the blogesphere as a whole; much like the stereotype that all teenagers are lazy, skint, anti-social hoodies. 

Religion in society, that, and we're all going to die.

Earlier this week I saw a young Muslim chap in Sunderland with a young lady under his arm and a jacket that had the word 'Allah' on his back in Arabic. Aside from the girl, of which I'm sure there's somewhere in Islam that says that's naughty, I want to focus on the jacket.

I was fortunate enough to take advantage of my compulsory state education and during my dull Religious Education classes I was taught how the word God, or Allah, was written in Arabic. It's been a couple of years since I was at school, but after some thought about what I saw, I eventually recognised the Arabic word as God. When I realised this, I didn't look down on him, I didn't think he was a prat, I just accepted it as who he was and let him get on with it.

But this would not have been the case if I'd seen a young Christian chap with a jacket on that said God, or had the Christian fish on the back of it. I'd have given him a wide birth and came to the conclusion that he was a nutter.



Why would I have thought this? Isn't Christianity the national religion of Britain? Why do we collectively view anybody who chooses to openly advertise their religion with such scorn? I believe the leading role of this is the media tabloids (yes, them again.) They are so quick to jump up and publish stories such as "Islamic extremism creating 'no-go' areas for non-Muslims in Britain" [Mail Online] and then jumping to "Christian faces court over 'offensive' gay festival leaflets" [Mail Online].

From the outside (which is how the vast majority of people take their news) this would make it look like faith is narrow-minded, non-dynamic and all the same. The first article's headline even makes it seem like Britain is suffering an invasion! It probably doesn't help that extremist Islamics are blowing themselves up everyday in the name of a god - if there was a god, why does he allow people to so heinously commit these acts in his name?

I think another aspect that cannot be overlooked is the massive advances in social opinion towards many things that religions are against; homosexuality, marriage, abortion, euthanasia and science. As the everyday person is evolving their opinions on these matters, religion seems to steadfastly oppose it. Issues such as euthanasia and abortion could be argued to be matters of morality, but others such as homosexuality are not.

In every advancement in science, religion would seem to appear more and more false. For example, pictures such as the one of the one above that shows the residual aftermath of radiation that was left over from The Big Bang. The term 'I'll believe it when I see it' jumps to mind, and to this date, there is no modern evidence that proves the existence of a greater being.

Just because religion may be based around mythical beings, fictional stories and in some areas, backwards ideologies, it can't be denied that people that believe in a faith tend to live lives of charity. Without Christianity, many western organisations such as the YMCA and Salvation Army wouldn't exist and far many people would be far worse off.



Now on to my next point today, we're all going to die. Could you imagine living in a time without penicillin and other basic anti-infection drugs? That time could be returning soon thanks to the evolution of new super-bugs such as MRSI and C-Difficile and their tolerance to our main weapons against them. Not very many things like this worry me since reports such as this are released all the time, but this does. I find it chilling to the bone due to it being so believable. We are already in the opening rounds of the fight against these bugs; it's ever so slowly becoming harder and harder to find ways of treating them. 


Is this just a medical phenomena caused by humanity and it's overzealous use of antibiotics, or is it Mother Nature's answer to culling the human population that is plaguing the planet? 

How do you define the purpose of something that has NO purpose?

I have to do a specification for the game that I am programming at college. As you may have already learnt, I am appalling at programming, so this is quite a challenge. The following specification is the one that I would love to be able to submit. I really have no idea how I'm supposed to write a purpose for a game, since the reason why people play games is because they have no purpose.
I've written the actual specification which includes massive straw grasping, but here is the one that I would love to have submitted in its place.




Purpose (~100)

I have made this game because I have to. I don't especially want to, and I'm not especially good at it. That doesn't exactly explain the purpose, but I do kind of hope that this game is such a solid choice that it would survive a nuclear apocalypse and provide extreme and prolonged entertainment of the survived and mutilated humanity that remains. Perhaps in a similar circumstance to Fallout 3, by Bethesda.

Description (~400)

The game [Breakout] was originally developed by Atari in 1976. It was influenced by the earlier game, Pong, also by Atari, which is fitting, because I own an Atari t-shirt. I nearly wore it today, but instead settled for my high collar polo.
The game itself consists of rows of ‘bricks’ that occupy the majority of the players screen that must be ‘broken’ by a square that can be bounced from a paddle to keep the square in motion.

If the square was to miss the paddle then the player would lose a ‘life’ but they would generally have already lost their lives by playing this game in the first place.
I know right? Seriously advanced for its time.

User Requirements (~300)

A single finger and an eye-ball. Could the user be stretched to a basic computer use ability? It's okay if they can't, we can always get somebody else to turn it on.

Target Audience (~200)
Anybody that can be bothered to be killed via boredom and extreme monotony.

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.

Waging a crusading war of Hitlerism!




Loyalist tanks attacked

Watching eagerly how the events are unfolding in Libya, it would seem that last Friday, the UN finally made the decision to sanction the No-Fly-Zone over Gaddafi's plot of North African sand. This all came together on Saturday when the French for once actually took some military action and lead the assault on the country by launching an air mission against Gaddafi loyalists whom were carrying out an assault on the rebel held city of Benghazi - which, it would seem, has perturbed the Americans because an attack on ground forced themselves apparently lacked international approval. This opening hand was then followed up by a huge salvo of 112 cruise missiles from US warships and a British submarine on Libyan anti-air and command infrastructure. These opening attacks were then chased by a 3000 mile round trip from Norfolk by British Tornados on a sortie on yet more of Gaddafi's anti-air network. Needless to say, despite being at work, I don't think I have watched rolling news this avidly since the Coalition invation of Iraq in 2001.

It would seem that the UN backed No-Fly-Zone is already facing small amounts of criticism from the Arab League, and it would appear that China and Russia are beginning to regret their decision to not veto on Friday. This however this is drowned out by the sound of the bombs and the thankful voice of all the anti-Gaddafi supporters in Libya and around the world.

Muammar Gaddafi

What is perhaps the most curious aspect of this whole situation is the propaganda campaign that is being waged by the Libyan government. The vast majority of it really is so bad, it is just comical to believe that anybody would be indoctrinated by it; but when twined with the air missions from the coalition, Gaddafi loyalists do seem to be influenced by it. I mean, it is understandable for the government to be trying to keep Libyans onside, but when he's piping up with crap like "this is an unjustified aggression" and calling the UN coalition "terrorists", I honestly don't understand how he is going to be able to keep up his rhetoric for much longer. Gaddafi, do us all a favour, ressurect Goebbels and ask him to teach you how to do propaganda properly. Oh, accutually, forget that. It's us that are waging a "crusading" campaign of "Hitlerism" - you can't have him.

I know it may sound a little arrogant to scoff at the propaganda being spread, but does Gaddafi seriously think that he stands even an iota of a chance against two of the most experienced and biggest military mights in the world? He has even called us the "Coalition of the devil".

America and the UK haven't yet ruled out the possibility of a deployment of ground forces onto Libyan soil, and Cameron is discussing the whole situation in parliament as we speak. How that and the rest of this 'conflict' turns out will be firmly in the hands of the powers that be, and how they are willing to react to each others actions.

Now this is need-to-know world news.

Yeah, forget the tragedy that is unravelling in Japan right now, a Gypsy 'war' in Manchester is what the Daily Star thinks that the British public are far more interested in right now. This quite frankly disgusting piece of journalism is well on par with the Daily Mail's spectacle of a few days ago. Does the Star's questionable PR department (if it even has one) even think about how its paper would look when displayed with the other papers of the day? Because to be frank, when I saw this lined up with the other tabloids such as The Sun and the Daily Mail, it just looked so ignorant to have a small subline regarding to the Japan tragedy, that doesn't even refer to Japan; only mentioning that 4,000 Brits have apparently died in a quake. Which one? New Zealand? Haiti?

Funnily enough, low and behold, in the matter of seconds I spent stewing and contemplating my annoyance, your typical Daily Star reader stereotype picked up a copy and bought it. The sort of person you expect to see in the Black Garter in Newcastle's Granger Market - Grunting for communication whilst hydrating and sustaining himself on pork scratchings, peanuts and Special Brew. 

Honestly, I didn't bother actually reading past the front page; the idea of physical contact with the disappointing tree by-product wasn't appealing to me.

It isn't like this is something that this tabloid looks at occasionally, the past half month's front pages have been literally plagued by 'news' such as this, and Jordan - oh, and that Muslim's are a disgrace. 

I'm a fan of the free press, but it has to have its boundaries when aspects of the media are publishing hate educing and racist stories? It only leads to increased ignorance, increased intolerance and increased fear throughout its uneducated, easily influenced reader base. To say that readers of the Star have the intelligence of a slug, is disrespectful to the slug.