Posts by Rich Lock
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The whole 'lack of open spaces to explore in' thing bothers me quite a bit. My own parents were quite ingenious when we were growing up in suburban London. There was a large abandoned graveyard a couple of streets away that served admirably as a playground. My sister and I learned to ride our bikes there with only a minimum of stitches and broken bones from the old Victorian mausoleums. There were also a lot of blackberries in the autumn - well fertilised, as my mum used to say.
Most of the older graves were being broken up to serve as a hard base for the new docklands developments. My dad 'borrowed' a few barrowloads to pave our patio. He was quite ingenious in working the old marble crosses into the overall pattern.
I also recall once as a child expressing a desire to have a custard pie fight for my birthday treat. This was duly organised by my mother, with the graveyard chosen as a suitable venue. The fight raged all afternoon amongst the graves with no quarter asked for or given.
This....kind of explains a lot, now I think about it....
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Steve Barnes,
who needs pesky rooms of computers?
The NSA does. In Utah.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
no, they're gonna let the machines decide!
Another one for fans of 1970's schlocky dystopian future type stuff:
First ten minutes here:
The press conference from 6.20 onwards makes very interesting watching, given current events. I also remember watching this as a pre-teen, and being shocked by some of the stuff later in the film, mostly the US firing squads and summary executions.
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I feel your pain. Literally
+1. The Word of Fear in our house is 'Again!'. Demonstrating centrifugal force to Ms 3 by putting her in a basket and spinning round as fast as possible seemed like a good idea. But not when the lesson needed repeating for the rest of the afternoon. My inner ear ain't what it used to be.
We also have 'walking across the ceiling', a variant of 'being held upside down at the waist' which can only be played When Mother Is Elsewhere in order to avoid conniptions. I once absent-mindedly picked up a friends daughter by the waist, flipped her upside-down and held her above my head (hey, force of habit). We don't get invited round for playdates that much any more....
I also once desperately attempted to buy myself five minutes to check my e-mails by responding to a request to 'play music on the computer now!' by cueing up some filthy dubstep, hoping she'd run screaming. The resulting new game is called 'jumping on the bed to the monster song'. Jumping at the wrong moment is met with stern injunctions: 'No, daddy. Wait for it to drop'.
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Hard News: Friday Music: I'm Over The Edge, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It does seem like security could do with going to some courses on hospitality.
I've known a few people who've worked for security firms, and I had some very mild and tangential involvement myself in a past life. It very much depends on how much you're willing to pay and what firm you hire.
A lot of festival security tends to be outsourced to a security company who make up the necessary numbers on top of any regulars by hiring minimum wage goons and bussing them in for the day with minimal training. Them and the regulars work all day and into the evening with minimal or non-existent breaks. The result is as you would expect.
I would guess venue security is going the same way. In the UK at least, the better door firms will be accredited and certified to certain standards (there's even a kitemark: BS7960:1999, since you didn't ask). However, training and keeping up the permanent numbers costs, and I assume that a lot of firms are using undertrained temps on an as-and-when basis.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Kumara Republic,
publicly humiliating them by outing their real identity (and other dirty laundry for good measure),
Isn't that rather like a 21st Century equivalent of the stocks, though?
Personally, I can think of quite a few people who could do with an hour or two of being pelted with shit, but I seem to recall we got rid of those old-timey punishments for a reason (lousy liberal do-gooders never learn).
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to nzlemming,
(2) I'm scared of Russell. Very, very scared.
You are not alone...
It's hard to see this as anything except a veiled threat, really:
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to nzlemming,
Well, what a hairy surprise, not. It seems that it never occurred to the economic geniuses that, when you encourage globalisation and a global economy, it affects every part of global existence including crime.
Have a read of Micha Glenny's 'McMafia' book sometime if you want exactly this in detail, and mountains of it. But make sure you're in reasonable psychic health and have a stiff drink to hand to deal with the consequences. It's extremely depressing to think about too much.
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Russell, you might like this version of 'grapevine' if you've not already heard it:
http://soundcloud.com/russky6987/heard-it-through-the-grapevine
Will be spinning this in a weeks time at my gathering of the clans. If that doesn't light up the dancefloor, they're all dead to me.
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their dirty mags. There's only hundreds of millions of those floating around in the UK already.
They tend to grow well in their traditional cultivation areas of patches of woodland and abandoned buildings. This years crop has been especially strong, probably due to the hot summer weather.