Tighten your belts, brothers and sisters!

Or not, as the case may be.

Having bailed out the banks despite their fiscal irresponsibility worldwide, the government is signalling that you - my dear plebeian - should shoulder your burdens and not look to the government to bail you out. Austerity is in - no more handouts - and if you're unemployed, i guess that's your fault. At least, it isn't any one else's, so try to cope, all right? You don't get a red cent. Says Paul Krugman:

Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.

I've said many times that forking over money to banks to keep them afloat is a corporate welfare scheme. Okay. But it seems that personal welfare schemes are not as popular with the government.

And since you - you non-bank people- are the ones who put money into circulation, you are actually the ones who keep the economy afloat. You might think it would be beneficial if you had some money to spend, which is to say money to pay me with. But Obama, along with Greece, France, Britain, Ireland, Germany and half a dozen countries, thinks you shouldn't have it. Your lifeline, and your pension scheme should wither and die, however much you've paid into it.

If you're freaked out about deficits, here's something to be freaked out about.



Yeah, that's where the money is going.

Blue Blood

However much I may blame the blue bloods for the (now inescapable) disasters overtaking the country, I have to put in a plug for The Dead Weather, and the video for their new single, Blue Blood Blues.



Can't argue with true groove, right?

Today's weather

News headlines.

Dick Cheney's Heart Health.

This is news? The only thing that stirs me is the wonderment that Dick Cheney is believed to have a heart. I doubt it, and if the Cymothoa exigua analogue that is imitating his heart was to get out and find another gig, I wouldn't be unhappy.

The Oil "Spill"

This "spill" (gusher) is an unmitigated and unmitigateable disaster of unprecedented proportions. It's the biggest thing to hit America since the economy. The fact that most people think it's less important than the World Cup or someone's breakup on reality TV only magnifies its importance. This thing can not be capped. It will spew all 5 million barrels, or whatever BP originally estimated as the size of the strike, right into the ocean. The first hurricane of the season will pick up the water and oil, froth it, and spread it over four southern states. After which, they'll need to be evacuated. Actually, to save lives, they should be evacuated first. Is TV news telling you that? Why not?

Austerity Packages

Germany, France, Greece and the UK (and Italy to come) have sharply cut government spending, raising pension ages and taking out social programs designed to catch the poor as they fall. The thing that makes the economy move is spending. If governments cut spending, and we have no money, the economy shrinks. This is otherwise known as a recession – or if it gets worse, a depression. When multiple governments try the same tack worldwide, there's no possibility of flying over it. We have a recession. I have no desire to live through another recession, much less a depression.

Whooping Cough

There's an epidemic of whooping cough in California. It's easily vaccinated against, but it wasn't, and babies are dying. Guess who I blame.

She's Crafty

I made this last week. Nice isn't it?




Hard to photograph, though. A glass bell jar has reflections facing the camera no matter how you light it. The picture was actually taken in full daylight. The skeleton is a one-third size prop from a halloween shop and the drops of blood are little plastic 'gemstones' from a craft shop. The decoration is a wreath of fake dead roses.

The craft store nearest me is closing down. I'll check them again this weekend to see what's on final markdown. I have some other things I want to work on now.

I didn't used to do any arts or crafts but it seems to be inevitable in older females. Something to do with progesterone, or 17-hydroxy-pregnenolone. Or one of those guys.

I went to the LA antiquarian book fair a few months ago and met my first 'altered book'. (Actually, I'd had Tom Phillips' A Humument for years, but for some reason assumed it was a one-off. It never occurred to me that other people were doing it too.) Although the one demonstrated to me at the fair was nowhere near as gorgeous as some of those I've since seen on the web, it just felt right. A few days later I was altering a book on forensic science into a book illustrating Dead Weather lyrics. Having had to buy truckloads of glue, trinkets, punches, paper and other supplies before I actually found out how anything worked, I went from not having any craft supplies to having an overabundance in just a few weeks. (For instance, one type of spray glue requires you to glue both surfaces and let dry to make a strong bond. Another type makes a removable tack-only bond if you coat both surfaces and dry it. I found out the hard way that half of my pages were removable and had to redo.)

I was going to photograph a page of the book, but now I come to find it, it's inside this tent.



Yes, my bedroom is a microbial hazard. And the hepa filter inside that tent is loud, man.

Forever My Queen

Queen Elizabeth the second, QEII, has been a steady figure in the background of my life. The Sex Pistols famously deconstructed her in God Save the Queen - and that was in 1977, thirty plus years ago. She's still there. And that's good, because she's a clever and level-headed individual but her son and heir is an idiot.

He blames Galileo for the ills of the world.

The Prince of Wales has blamed a lack of belief in the soul for the world’s environmental problems, and said that the planet cannot sustain a population expected to reach 9 billion in 40 years.

He said he found it “baffling” that so many scientists professed a faith in God yet this had little bearing on the “damaging” way science was used to exploit the natural world.

The Prince pinned part of the blame on Galileo. Criticising the profit imperative behind much scientific research, he said: “This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.

“This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things.

(From the Timesonline article.)

The scientists, generally speaking, aren't the ones making the profits.

The phrase cui bono? comes to mind, as it often does. Hopefully the Queen, whose job over the years has been dismantling the British Empire in the most efficient and peaceful manner she can (and she's done a fairly good job, considering) will have the fortitude to hang on until Idiot Son gives up the ghost and someone who doesn't talk to plants can succeed her.

This has been on my mind all day

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler

sung by Bud Flanagan




My dad, who fought in the war, used to sing "Who Do You Think Are You Kidding Father Christmas?" I have no idea why. (He was perfectly happy to sing the song that went

Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,
But poor Goebbels has no balls at all

So it's not like he was a traitor or anything.)

Time Is on My Side

I don't know why it is, that I am uninterested in the details of Joran van der Sloot's reported confession that he killed Stephanie Flores, five years after his link to the disappearance of Natalie Holloway, and yet I'm fascinated by the details of the death of Otzi.

To me, but obviously not to most, there's more vigor and excitement in Otzi's cold case than in the current one. Who fired the arrow that killed him - and why did they rip out the shaft later - to try to cover it up? Did they then strike him on the head to finish him off?

Why did he have defensive wounds on his hands from several days before?

What had he been eating recently, and did that indicate whether he was on the run?

And why was he 46, when people are keen to tell us the average age of death was 20 or 5 or something in those days? (I know the answer to that one. Child mortality brings the 'average age" of death down to something ridiculous. But people who survived childhood lived as long as we do - well, into their sixties, at least. There seems to be amazing pressure out there to tell people that their ancestors didn't make it to 40.)

My Fault for Being Famous

I've been thinking about posting these for a while. Two famous people talk about how crazy their fans are. Jack White takes the wounded it's-all-about-me route with a rousing singalong and Eminem produces a dramatic epic that's up with the greatest American storytelling of any genre.



The White Stripes - It's My Fault For Being Famous



Eminem (with Elton John) Stan

More on the visual arts

Epic timewaster - Mr. Picassohead (via Kate Nepveu) Draw your own Picassos and sign them.

Here's my attempt. I'm not supposed to do this, I'm supposed to save them to their gallery and just point you there. But in my country we have invented prtScrn-Photoshop-new-ok-ctrlv-crop-save as.

Beware of the Flowers

On Saturday we went to the local National Unreachable Wilderness area on a photographers' guided ramble. I bought a digital SLR camera last July and have barely used it since. STB, who calls himself a Conceptual Photographer (meaning he knows all about it but hates photographs) decided a trip with other photographers might do me some good. It was described as a 3 mile hike with a 25 foot elevation taking place on Sunday the 29th May. Date straightened out, we booked on it.

In the morning I got a thorough grounding in the theory ("'...depth of field' is often misnamed 'depth of focus'." "Yes, I know...") and three practice photographs and then in the afternoon it was off to shoot me some flowers. It was a hot Southern California day and I was woozy with heat before we even set off on the trail. Two very enthusiastic volunteer docents took us out, one leading and one bringing up the rear so that the laggards could not be picked off by the man-eating mastodons of Laguna Canyon. Every now and again we'd stop for water, a quotation about photography by Walt Whitman or Ansel Adams, and then we'd go off again. After we'd climbed about 400 feet I was feeling woozier still. Apparently the date was not the only error in the ad for the hike.

Although only one person had brought a professional-looking camera (the others having point and shoots), I still didn't feel like displaying any lack of skill so I didn't actually take any photos until the guide told us we were facing a horehound bush - it was an omen! Jack Himself had planted a bush for me to photograph! When I leaned in closely, it didn't look like horehound, but I snapped it anyway. Looking at the photograph today, it plainly isn't horehound, unless that's a local term. Both Marrubium and Ballota horehound look like herbs - they have that basil/mint/dead nettle look to them, which is not surprising as they are all in the family Lamiaceae together.


I had to ask what this was and was told hemlock. Of course - it grows all over England. I should have known that. This one looks like a hogweed rather than hemlock to me, but I guess it's the same thing. Hey, I took a photograph!

Anyway, the ice was broken and I subsequently took many ill-focused and hastily-composed pictures of flars. STB borrowed the camera and took a few shots of things which illustrated that I'm not very good at it and he is. (We looked at them all as a debriefing today.) I noted that he did not take pictures of flowers, which are not intrinsically very interesting, unless you put them into Photoshop and change the colors around a bit. I will bear this in mind for the next trip, which will be to a multi-story parking structure or something else with a bit of an edge to it.


This is a local cucurbit called something like Spiny Cucumber. One member of the party described them as looking like kiwi fruit with issues. Pretty leaves.

I did learn the names of many of the local plants I see every day. A magnificent flowering Dudleya, the parasitic Dodder (I'd always wondered what this explosion of red hair over other plants was), Monkey Flower, and a big soft plant like a floppy-eared rabbit's ear, which is a Lamb's Ear. I can now tell a coastal sage from a white sage. And I had no idea that pack rats build those huge nests - six feet or more long - you occasionally see at the foot of trees. (Apparently males build them up in the trees and females at the foot of the trees.)


I didn't take this on the trip - this was taken a few weeks ago, under the eaves of my house where there are several hummingbirds' nests. The tree leaves look unnatural, and that's not actually due to amateur photography problems. It's a plastic tree. Trees don't grow in the shade so I have the World's Largest Gallery of Artificial Plants under there.

Piper Maru Eyes

Excellent day today. Following a conversation with a friend a few thousand miles away and three hours ahead (I love the internet) in which we discussed the joys of crab for Sunday lunch, we made a trip to Newport Beach and the world famous Crab Cooker.

We had smoked albacore and calamari and soft shell crab and king crab claws with their local-style potatoes, a sort of lump of mashed potatoes baked with cheese until crispy. Mmmm king crab claws. Oh and their lovely bread loaf. STB had coleslaw while I had the relatively difficult task of ordering the tomato slices. (I forgot to say 'tomayto' the first time and got a does-not-compute look.)

We went for a short walk to look at the ocean. There is a storm blowing through So Cal today and the cold wind was whipping onto the shore, depositing a fair amount of the beach sand between my teeth in that annoying way wind does. Really, I haven't faced such a bracing wind at the beach since the last time I was at Blackpool. (But you can't get rock or deep fried black pudding at Newport Beach.) We did see one person on the promenade being treated by the Lifeguards for Copious Bleeding - there's always one, isn't there? - and attempted to walk down the pier but were beaten back by the winds. We went to the more sheltered dead end road by the Crab Cooker that looks into the marina and found a drunk shirtless guy leaning over the wall attempting to coax his equally drunk and shirtless friend, who had fallen into the marina, to fly or levitate or something the ten feet from the waterline back up to the road. Both of them were bleeding from various grazes, so it must be the height of fashion at crazy old Newport Beach.

No one could pull him up so we encouraged him to swim to the wooden-floaty-walkway-thing to which the yachts were moored, but he didn't seem to have the courage. So his friend jumped...agh no!...into the marina and swam to it. Encouraged, the first guy made it to the slip. Being very fit, he soon pulled himself onto the floaty thing. However, his encouraging friend, not being a natural athlete, was unable to pull himself out of the water. His friend dragged him to a mass of piping and other slippery items that would lead to this being even more difficult for him and then left him to his own devices. He eventually made it out of the water. Meanwhile, back on land, their designated driver was walking up and down by the wall, staring in horror and occasionally saying, "Should I jump in too?"

Luckily she resisted this impulse. One thing we hadn't thought of was that the door from the slipway to the outer world was locked, so the last glimpse we had of them was of them attempting to climb a gate in bare feet and wet clothes. Hopefully DD thought of calling the marina management to get them let out. Now that they were out of danger of drowning, we didn't feel too bad about leaving them to it. It's all in a day's fun at the beach, isn't it?

Then off we went to Second Spin to look through the vinyl. I got an old Donovan record - Barabajagal - which seems in very good condition (and is described on the receipt as 'generic vinyl' - gee thanks). Oh, and a MGMT CD. And also some of this Blood Energy Potion.



People are strange, aren't they?

B+ isn't actually my type, but I guess it'll have to do. The bag's sitting beside me right now and it's doing really good job of looking like blood. I worked in a blood bank for years and artificial blood in movies really bugs me if it isn't right.

(I said that on this blog once before and Anonymous wrote in to say, "What if they don't want it to look right?" which I thought was a bizarre thing to say. Why aren't movies acted by papier mache heads on lollipop sticks in front of a bedsheet if they aren't meant to look like what they're pretending to be?)

The Dead Weather played a secret show in Chicago last night. 'Secret' must have changed meanings recently as the show was announced on Tuesday or so. The location was not revealed until Saturday, but that's still not a secret show. A secret show is booking yourself into a club under the name the Bell Ends or something (that's probably already taken. But I did think of a great band name today which they can use if they like. The Talkupines! Like a porcupine but chattier! Isn't that a good name? And it wasn't found on a Google search today so it's mine all mine. (This opinion has not been vetted by an attorney.)) and then when the Talkupines come on stage, it's actually them, in all their monochrome glory. That's a secret show.

My other band name from yesterday was Blogger's Banquet. Or perhaps that can be the Talkupines' first album title. Alas I wasn't the first to think of that but I can't at the mo see an actual band with that name. My acting great band name is actually The Soul Dead Brothers, a mis-spelling of the Soledad Brothers I once saw in an interview. I'm currently working on The Soul Dead Brothers' first single which will be called Piper Maru Eyes.

Piper Maru eyes are ones swimming with black oil, as in the X-Files episode of the same name.

(From Piper Maru, the X-Files)

A friend used it to describe the blacked-out eyes of the Dead Weather members on the inner of Sea of Cowards.



(Copyright is not mine. Scan by KD)

It needs its own song. Black Oil eyes may be the next vampirism.

The Ghost Who Walks

As pointed out by Mike, Karen Elson's new album Ghost Who Walks is streaming here at the Guardian.

For the cynics among you, no, I probably would never have heard it if it wasn't for her husband, Jack White. But having heard it, I like it. I will be buying it on Tuesday, in fact.

Although Karen lives in Nashville and sings in an American accent, being British she lacks that dreadful whine that most white American folkies bring to the mic. I don't know which it is, a cultural difference or a hearing preference, but when American folkies tell me how bad life is, I switch them off and hope their remedies include shooting themselves, but when English (or Irish or Scottish or black American or even Chinese or Tuvan) folkies do it, I drink a sad toast and wish for all our lives to get better. (Dylan and Neil Young get to be honorary Tuvans, here.) The self-consciously depression-era songs I find less successful than the (pseudo)autobiographical songs, but she'll learn as she goes along. Her voice is so pure and haunting she makes even trite lines sound intriguing. In a way she's a latter-day Sandy Denny, and I know that's powerful mojo to spray around.

It's not that I understand where she's coming from - I'm from a close analog of Oldham and understand why it's a hell hole, but I'm a foot shorter and twenty pounds heavier, and no one ever called me the ghost who walks at school. She just moves me.

I love this modern idea of streaming albums. I've listened to this three times through, which is enough to know that I'd like to buy it. You could never hope to hear something like this on the radio these days, and even if they played the lead track, the radio would never play the weaker tracks. Streaming gives you a chance to get over the awkwardness of the first listen in your own house, on your own terms and on your own schedule. I listened to Sea of Cowards for a week on NPR, even though the vinyl was winging its way to me at the time, and I've enjoyed this one too.

Hopefully the people who authorize streaming will at some point sit bolt upright during an otherwise undisturbed sleep and think, "Of the people who torrented the album from Pirate Bay, all the ones who liked it eventually bought it, and those who listened three times and didn't buy it wouldn't have bought it anyway. Pirate Bay cost me nothing."

Because that's the way it works.

Holy crap

Sorry, can't think of any other title. The new British government is showing signs of understanding the interwebs.

Bring my smelling salts.

According to Boing Boing

*We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
* We will outlaw the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission.
* We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the
DNA database.
* We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
* We will further regulate CCTV.
* We will end the storage of internet
and e-mail records without good reason.
* We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
* We will create a new "right to data" so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
* We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband across the country. We will ensure that BT and other infrastructure providers allow the use of their assets to deliver such broadband, and we will seek to introduce superfast broadband in remote areas at the same time as in more populated areas. If necessary, we will consider using the part of the TV license fee that is supporting the digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach.

I'll believe it when I see it, but man...even seeing it written on a page is impressive.

Je suis le grand zombie

Maybe the operation didn't go as planned..I'm currently living on 3 hours sleep a day - and feeling fine the other 21. I went to bed between 9 and midnight but ...now I'm up and chatting and surfing.

Doc 40 points out Zu Zu Mamou, a Dr. John masterpiece. I have to pass it on.



If you come to it cold, it might look kitsch. Believe me, it wasn't kitsch when we first heard it.

The Fyootcher revisited

Oh, come on Las Vegas something.com!




Not everyone wants to have Facebook authenticating their ID, as Facebook is completely incontinent with personal data. Pretending that folks would prefer to sign in with Facebook rather than yourselves, Open ID, or Google is just stupid.

I wanted to reply to something in one of your articles, but I'll just wait until tomorrow and phone you up, since you give a phone number on your site.

Las Vegas Weekly 2360 Corporate Circle Drive Fourth Floor Henderson,
NV 89074
(702) 990-2550

Perhaps my alter ego Barry Bollocks should get a Facebook account just for events like this? If I signed him up, who would friend, I mean like, Barry Bollocks? I'm sure my other alter ego Miss Demeanour would. Anyone else? All in favor say aye!

__*__

I have a number of friends who believe that the world is being forcibly moved away from a cash economy to a credit economy. Some of them believe this is to hide the essential fact that non-gold-backed dollars are worthless. Some of them believe that it's to hide that, plus the antichrist requires everyone to carry the mark of the beast in their hand before they can trade. Some think it's because it's important to Big Brother that they can track all purchases (but don't worry - if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide, right?). Boing Boing reports on a tale of a disabled woman on a fixed income who managed to save enough cash to buy an iPad.

Except you can't buy an iPad for cash, because Apple says so.

I suspect that William Gibson's cyberpunk future - which is about thirty years late at this point - is about to fall with a clang. We should get ready to barter our skills or our wares, because greenbacks will not be accepted (and in many arenas, like during flights, already aren't). And credit is ephemeral, if not imaginary. Disabled people will not be the only folks refused credit cards, you can be quite sure.

On a recent bout of flying, American Airlines told me twice that since May 1, only credit cards would be accepted (even for things like $2 headphones and $8 pillows (because, yes, now they charge for pillows). On the third flight, I was on a small plane, an American Eagle, which explained as how they could never accept credit cards. Cash only. On the fourth flight, after the spiel about credit cards only, being confused I tried to tender cash for a miniature bottle of wine. "Credit card only," the stewardess (or whatever they're called) warned me sternly. I explained about the previous flight. "Apparently American Eagle only accept cash," she said, in partial shock, to the other juice jockey. He shrugged.

Corporate's the same everywhere, isn't it? Mine too.

Welcome to the fyootcher.