Well I finally gave in and got my hair chopped off. It was nice seeing it go all curly but it started to bug me by getting in my eyes. It had to go but now my neck and ears are cold. Grumble.
The Information Superhighwayman
I am small and I don’t eat much…Superhighwayman.com
This is Michael Lawrie's Weblog. Despite years of hating "Blogs"; I have decided that these things are a nice way to present random rants and observations. Calling it a Weblog makes things easier.
Why Superhighwayman? Well why not! The only good thing to come out of the Harrods Case was the British Press christening me the "Information Superhighwayman". I liked the name, so I will use it.
Browsing Posts published by Michael
Well Sherrie has a book page, so I thought I would too. Of course, that means I will probably never get around to filling it in but I started out with good intentions.
It struck me; whilst sitting here munching on some lovely thick buttered toast with Blue Wensleydale on it, and sipping on one of Douwe Egbert’s new squeezy breast like coffee pod contraptions that much as I don’t like weblogs, I do tend to spend a lot of time talking about food. I am perfectly happy to talk to myself about food so by no means do I expect anyone else to read this. It’s here for me; for when I am hungry; for when I get the urge to go out and buy some more of these revolting coffee things and for me to type in whilst I am waiting for the Cornish Pastie in the oven that I mistimed the heating of. Since I only seem to be able to update it with comments, then it shall be so.
Eat, Drink and be Merry; for tomorrow I get bored of this blog!
Well… Chavez is back as president of Venezuela, Pinochet is still on his deathbed and Britain is still a nuclear power.
Kofi Annan is still saying that Iraq and a mess, and he wishes he’d done more and Hezbollah is still causing trouble in Lebanon (which oddly, is no longer called The Lebanon). America is still torturing people in prison camps and holding show trials, the British government and security services are alienating Muslim communities just when they need their co-operation most, trains are not running because there is “too much dust” and gyppos are still nicking copper wire from train tracks and electricity substations.
I guess everything is back to 21st Century normal after the little aside of the last couple of weeks; that seems something of a shame. It was fun for a while anyway.
I just received an email out of the blue which somewhat surprised me.
I think it is possibly the writer’s equivalent of a Hendrix fan receiving a mail saying “I was Jimmi’s assistant for 18 years and have his favourite guitar still. Do you want it?”. In my case, it wasn’t Hendrix, it was Sir William Connor (Cassandra) and it wasn’t a guitar, it was his “Tripewriter” on which he penned most of his articles.
Anyone who knows me well will know that Cassandra was my biggest influence in writing and indeed, in quite a lot more so it is a fair thing to say I am quite pleased about this. Although it has reminded me that I am really not making much progress on the biography of him that I was mean to be writing. We’ll gloss over that for now though, won’t we?
What an odd couple of weeks this has been in England as far as Terrorism and Espionage is concerned.
The first and most obvious event is this whole Alexander Litvinenko poisoning story. A former spy, poisoned by highly radioactive Polonium-210 hidden in his Sushi with a deathbead claim that it was the Russian President wot did it. All this followed by geiger counter weilding policemen finding various signs of Polonium on his trail, in hotels, on British Airways planes and inside the stomachs of a larger than life, publicity seeking Italian Security Expert.
Almost missed in the shadow of this true-life competition for the new Bond Film was Michael Stone’s attack on Stormont (The Northern Irish Parliament). Stone, a very well known Loyalist terrorist from the old days entered the building carrying six to eight “fairly amateurish” bombs, a gun and a knife and was pretty much stopped in the first few seconds by civillian security guards and disarmed. One assumes he will now get 30 years in prison for carrying a knife and a few extra years added on for the other stuff.
Whilst all of this has kept the newspapers and telly amused for hours it has provided a nice little flashback to the times when terrorists were people with proper names and causes that were at least understandable. A time when the Spy Game at least seemed to make some sense and was more concerned with spying on foreign agents than spying on the population as a whole.
It was quite a pleasant flashback, oddly. But I bet it won’t last.
I wonder… Would theiving a “Theftproof Wallet” from a shop; just to make an ironic point, be morally wrong?
Sometimes, fate just has a habit of making it obvious that you should be friends with somebody. Rarely have I ever stopped to capture the event on film. This may well rank as my personal choice for the best photograph I have ever taken but I very much doubt many people will either agree or understand. On this issue, I don’t care.
I don’t like weblogs. I have never made a secret of this fact but I have decided that maybe I should have one for ranting in or something. I may use it, I may not but it has to be easier than using my old rants site.
I started this one on November 27th, 2006 at http://lorry.wordpress.com/ so that I could evaluate WordPress for the UKnet site (Actually re-evaluate, we used to have it last year but it was shit then) – Unfortunately the only way of testing this properly is to use it a little and I failed to con anyone else into doing it for me. So far it’s not looking too bad and I decided to give it an onsite trial and moved it across here on December the 4th.
We’ll see; I guess!
I learned a useful thing this week when researching the origin of Quince Cheese. It all rests on the definition of the word cheese, which includes
Cheese:
A mass of pomace, or ground apples, pressed together in the form of a cheese.
From now on, every time I fuck up my jam making and make it so hard that you can barely stick a knife into it, I will declare it to be cheese. I have 5 kilogrammes of plum cheese in the cupboard, I am happy about this.
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Apart from the rather cryptic “She made me tea.” posted at 06:43 on August the 18th, 2003 and a prior posting on March the 20th, 2002 at 01:29 which simply said “Poo” (my considered review of Livejournal, I believe) – This is the only thing I ever really wrote in my previous weblog. I figured I should move it over to here anyway.
