Bloggiversary, several months late

On the fifth day of the second month of the year 2009, I celebrated 5 years as a blogger, quite without realising. Yay!

My cat...

... is rather stupid, but quite lovely.

ER

No, not the Queen, but the long-running American drama series. Just watched the last ever episode. Jen asked me why I was sitting through it; you see I hate ER, always have. It's just the kind of program I can't sit through. OK, so perhaps hate is a strong word, but I can usually find something better to do than watch it, as with most fiction on television, save for the occasional film. 

I suppose that there must be a reason for my predilection for documentary. Perhaps because so much of my time is spent in my own head playing out (sometimes literally) hundreds of dramas each day, I prefer to 'earth' myself with a dose of reality. Not too much, though, nothing too hard-hitting.

That still doesn't explain why I was watching the last episode of ER, though. For that one, we need only skim the outermost layers of my mind. I like resolution. I dislike delayed gratification, and so won't sit through a series, but will happily watch a last episode. 

Last episodes wrap things up, just like when the series started out, because there couldn't be any long storylines, because there was no guarantee they would be resolved next series - when you're doing something new, who says there'll be another series? So early episodes are little gift-wrapped self-resolving presents, without any drawn out, evolving storylines.

Last episodes are a reminder of happier, more carefree days, when it didn't matter whether or not you missed a couple of episodes, because you were unlikely to miss a crucial moment in the plot. Later on, when security has been guaranteed, the writers can go to town with the plot, and your continual attendance becomes necessary. At that point, I always switch off. 

Then I wait for the final episode. 

Coprolalia

Just discovered that the condition associated with Tourette's syndrome where sufferers uncontrolably spout profanities is called 'coprolalia', from the Greek words meaning 'faeces' and 'babbling'. So it literally means 'talking shit'. Fantastic.

Twitter

Predictably enough for me, when this Twitter thing blew up I immediately vowed to avoid like the plague. Joining in would be such a crowd-following exercise, and another sign that I'm growing more of a woolly coat every day. 

Seriously, we're meant to be fascinated by the lives of people we probably don't know (just like I'm asking you to be fascinated by my life in this blog. Kettle, thou art darker than night, and I should know for I am Mr Pot). The whole thing seemed so very 'me too!', exactly the sort of exercise I'm rather against. 

For the same reason I avoided blogging for a long time, though I must have been here nearly five years now. I tried in vain to avoid Facebook, but it caught up with me and made me pay in embarrassing pounds of photographic flesh.

And now? We'll, it's hardly rocket science, is it? I have a Twitter thingy. Account? Twit? I don't know. I do know it's here, though. And I'm following Ben Folds, and Stephen Fry, and Robert Llewellyn, among others. 

Bat Man

I'd much rather be spouting opinions on here, but sometimes you just have to tell the facts as they are and let them speak for themselves (ahem). This morning, on the way to feed the rabbit, I found a little bat on the floor. Little, as in so little I thought it was a bit of moss thrown out of the gutter by a sparrow (they're having a right laught doing that lately). Little dude was covered in dirt, etc., but when I went to pick it up for an impromptu burial, I discovered it was very much alive! Not well, but well enough to move its head, and be visibly drawing breath. It's with the vet now, after a quick call to the RSPCA. They have 'people' they can pass it on to - I don't know what'll happen to it, but maybe, just maybe, it'll make it and we'll be one mini-mammal better off.

The sad thing about people discussing Lost plotlines...

... is that they assume it has to make sense. 

The Sunshine Bus

I'm not going to hammer the Sunshine Bus or the people who run it. It's a great service, and probably invaluable for those it helps.

But something's been bugging me. If I had a severe learning disability, I don't think I would want someone to come and pick me up in something called the Sunshine Bus. There's some sort of implicit assumption in the name that the 'poor souls' it is run to help are incapable of creating their own happiness. It's the sort of misguided niceness that characterised the 1980s.

If I needed the Sunshine Bus, I'd rather some unobtrusive black Transit van turned up at my house and took me away with the minimum of fuss, unpretentious and stylish. I wouldn't want to be a moving target for abuse and ridicule by those people whose education barely surpasses that of the average houseplant (actually, that's being mean to plants...).

Like I said, valuable service and all that, but is it  actually a disservice? 

Boy aged 12 did not father baby Click here. 

I'm really not sure where to begin with this one. Seriously. 

First of all, a 12 year old kid thinks he's got his 15 year old girlfriend pregnant. The amount of weird sh*t that has to be going on for that to even be on the cards is frankly mindboggling. 

Then it turns out that the girl wasn't impregnated by this lad, but rather by another 15 year old. Which is better, I suppose, but at the same time even worse, because not only is she a cradle-snatcher, but a bit of a tramp, too. Her parents must be so proud!

You'll often hear it bandied about that such-and-such a story is indicative of the general moral decline of our once proud nation. I don't believe that sh*t, because let's face it we used to ship slaves half way around the world to grow sugar for us. Our moral compass has always pointed in a somewhat southerly direction. Nor is it even a particularly damning reflection on the state of the press in this country - fifty years ago this would still have been reported. Perhaps not as sensationally, but still... 

So if it's nothing to do with moral or factual decline, why am I so wound up by the story? Well, it's simple. That sh*t is f***ed up, dude.