Pig Sty Avenue

My consolation prize for having to endure another ten weeks in bloody Libya is a... Well, what should one call it? It's not an iPod because that's a different make. It's not really an MP3 player because it plays .wma files too. It's a Creative Zen thingummy and it's also the dog's bollocks. It's a Libya-survival device: the big problem out there is the sense of cultural isolation - one's in a society which is very alien to Europeans. Carrying around this thingummy means I've got a whole load of my culture, so far as it can be condensed into audio form, with me. The Smiths, Tom Waits, A Clockwork Orange, Under Milk Wood, Mozart... Psychic defence.

pity that the wording on the old tyne-tees steam shipping company sign isn't clearer

If you read what that malleable blighter was saying, carefully, the advice he gave on the 7th March 2003 was: "Don't be daft! You can't bomb the shit out of people just like that!" Apparently, ten days later he said "Oh, alright then." A mathematician went for an interview for some Big Cheese kind of job somewhere and the interviewer, a big cheese himself, had hit upon what he thought would be a good lateral thinking question to sort the wheat from the chaff. So the last question was: "How much is two plus two?" The mathematician thought about it from every angle, and eventually said: "four!". A philosopher went for the same job, and was hit with the same question. She eventually wrote a book and made a packet on the whole malarkey, but for our purposes her answer was "four". A lawyer was up for the same job and got the same tie-break question. He stood up to check that the door was locked; closed the blinds; then he s...

Don't go into that barn! 

Spring blossoms along by the Don 

...here's some Omaha Indian Music . Good fun, and I bet you'd struggle to buy it in the shops.

Election fever continues unabated in rain-sodden Jarrow the day. We got three more leaflets through the door, all together, this morning. The Liberal Democrat candidate is Bill Schardt . UKIP have Alan Badger (jokes about other people’s names are always foolish and unfair, but ‘Vote For A Badger!’?) We get a bit of originality with Roger Nettleship , who's standing for Safeguard the Future of the NHS! (I think that the exclamation mark is all part of it).