Johnny Cash and me.

At last I find that I had something in common with the great man. Oh noo, I have none of the voice or the presence or the charisma of JRC but for three years he worked as a radio intercept operator in Germany, taking down Russian morse code - whilst I was sat in GCHQ at Cheltenham analysing it.
Rock on John, and I hope you are with your God whoever he or she may be.

Gord Brown

Flock - the new kid on the block.

Flock Developer Preview is now available.
Our code couldn't wait any longer to be free!
But! This preview ain't for the faint of heart! If you're the bleeding-edge type and don't mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.
We've got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we've done right how we could improve. And we've got a lot of work ahead of us!
So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now.
Wanna keep tabs on what we're up to? Check out FlockRadio, broadcasting our blogs around the clock.
Other Flock sites and content:
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Gordown interersting.

MI5 - I'm quite flattered - they visit this blog every day - see details

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I thank you
Gordon Brown

eBay mega expensive. Paypal a rip off.

Time was when you could get a bargain, but rarely these days. They have all caught on to the internet. Tesco, mower nerds as a way of making a quick buck. Forget it - go to your local charity shops - not only can you examine the article, you get guaranteed delivery and a refund if it isn't what you expected.
Many of those on eBay and Paypal are rip off merchants who swindle you. 'Nuff said. Today I purchased a brand new hugo Boss jacket for £1.50 in an animal charity shop. On eBay it would have been £50 at least plus the usual postal charge swindle of £10.

Gordon the bargain hunter.

Birmingham City Blues - ELO - recorded it - I'm in it

The BLUES have had their usual spectacular rise in the Premiership. Not middling but bottoming this time.
An enormous bunch of genuine, nice and decent people, have for a century and a quarter endured a side that is mainly magnificent in defeat. We've won nothing, done nothing and, I'm sure, will never acheive anything.
Our present manager blames everybody but himself for our terrible performances this season. No matter that he purchased them , picks the team and decides on the tactics. I will soon have lived, nearly a century, please someone rescue us.
Gord Help Us!

Gunnislake 2 Sticker 1

Our defence doing sterling work. 

The Internovella is now discontinued -

I've lost the plot!

Gordon Wasting Away.

Saddam was given millions, plus arms, by the USA

and the British when he waged a terrible war against Iran, where hundreds of thousands died.

His crime then, he didn't win. So when you back a horse and he fails you claim retribution. The British and the Americans, along with Sad Dan should be in the dock for war crimes against Iran. As Gorbachov said tonight - big mistake - keep out of the middle east. Which of course we don't, because we want their oil. But they will carry on proping up the undemocratic and cruel Saudis - bet your bottom dollar!

Gordon Oiler

Thatcher - her hero worshippers called her, "The Iron Lady"

ironic that - see below - although she was an executioner of large swathes of our green and pleasant land. I will remain alive until I dance on her tomb.

The Iron Lady
By Phil Ochs
Am F Dm
Have you seen the iron lady's charms
Am F Dm
Legs of steel, leather on her arms
Bb Gm
Taking on a man to die
Am Dm
A life for a life, an eye for an eye
Bb Gm Dm C
And death's the iron lady in the chair.

Stop the murder, deter the crimes away
Only killing shows that killing doesn't pay
Yes that's the kind of law it takes
Even though we make mistakes
And sometimes send the wrong man to the chair.

In the death row waiting for their turn
No time to change, not a chance to learn
Waiting for someone to call
Say it's over after all
They won't have to face the justice of the chair.

Just before they serve him one last meal
Shave his head, they ask him how he feels
Then the warden comes to say goodbye
Reporters come to watch him die
Watch him as he's strapped into the chair.

And the chaplain, he reads the final prayer
Be brave my son, the Lord is waiting there
Oh murder is so wrong you see
Both the Bible and the courts agree
That the state's allowed to murder in the chair.

In the courtroom, watch the balance of the scales
If the price is right, there's time for more appeals
The strings are pulled, the switch is stayed
The finest lawyers fees are paid
And a rich man never died upon the chair.

Have you seen the iron lady's charms
Legs of steel, leather on her arms
Taking on a man to die
A life for a life, an eye for an eye
That's the iron lady in the chair.

We have murdered through state authenticated orders thousands of innocent men and women.

Gord help us!

Birmingham City F. C. and pain.

Today the Blues have lost at home to Aston Villa, who probably deserved their victory. We have not won at home this season. This is the poorest start in the Prem. that we have ever made.
Our manager is clueless but the board and our chief exec. , having appointed him, after sacking a better manager don't know what to do. They would lose face - and so they should - most of them deal in pornography.

They are embarresed and look like headless chickens - which is what they are. Football clubs should not be owned by rich ego seekers - they should be owned by the fans. In this country Exeter City and York City belong to the fans - in Europe Barcelona are owned by their fans. It is time for a Blue Revolution - the fans must take over BCFC. We have had 130 years of disaster - time for a change.
Gordon Fuming

We'll keep thr red flag flying here.

 

Little insect - big bloom!

 

Blues v Aston Villa and the BBC

This Sunday, at some ungodly hour, the two teams from the second largest city in the United Kingdom will do battle. Because we are not based in London or the north we seem to be totally excluded from the television companies agenda.
If you don't support; Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, Manure, Liverpool or the barcodes = you do not exist. The vast majority of supporters who will never abandon Swindon or Cheltenham Town or Scunthorpe or Carlisle or Argyle or Portsmouth or Wrexham or Burnley or Nottingham Forest or Blackburn or Bristol Rovers cease to exist in the minds of the addled popinjays who decide what we will watch.
In the meantime I will watch my own village team, Gunnislake F.C. and get more fun and enjoyment than those who run ther BBC will ever know. Elitist bastards I call them - get football back to its roots - don't chase wild young men earning more than it takes in a week to feed someone from a third world country for all of their lifetime. Get your priorities right - the majority of foootball supporters do not exist in London or Liverpool or Manchester - refuse to pay your licence - let's all go to jail.
Gordon Midlothian

Crazy Horse? Somewhere in China. 

Drink beer, tea is dangerous stuff - William Cobbett

The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer) If you have ever wondered about which is better: tea or beer, this piece should put your mind at rest. It is extracted from William Cobbett's Cottage Econony, published in 1822. His reasoning is hard to challenge.

The drink which has come to supply the place of beer has, in general, been tea. It is notorious that tea has no useful strength in it; that it contains nothing nutritious; that it, besides being good for nothing, has badness in it, because it is well known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves. It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards. At any rate, it communicates no strength to the body; it does not in any degree assist in affording what labour demands. It is, then, of no use. And now, as to its cost, compared with that of beer. I shall make my comparison applicable to a year, or 365 days. I shall suppose the tea to be only five shillings the pound, the sugar only sevenpence, the milk only twopence a quart. The prices are at the very lowest. I shall suppose a teapot to cost a shilling, six cups and saucers to cost two shillings and sixpence, and six pewter spoons to cost eighteen pence. How to estimate the firing i hardly know, but certainly there must be in the course of the year to hundred fires made that would not be made, were it not for tea drinking. Then comes the great article of all, the time employed in this tea-making affair. It is impossible to make a fire, boil water, make the tea, drink it, wash up the things, sweep up the fireplace and put all to rights again in a less space of time, upon an average, than two hours. However, let us allow one hour; and here we have a woman occupied no less than three hundred and sixty five hours in the year; or thirty whole days at twelve hours in the day; that is to say, one month out of the twelve in the year, besides the waste of the man's time in hanging about waiting for the tea! Needs there anything more to make us cease to wonder at seeing labourers' children with dirty linen and holes in the heels of their stockings? Observe too, that the time thus spent, is, one half of it, the best time of the day. It is the top of the morning, which, in every calling of life, contains an hour worth two or three hours of the afternoon. By the time that the clattering tea-tackle is out of the way, the morning is spoiled, its prime is gone, and any work that is to be done afterwards lags heavily along. If the mother have to go out to work, the tea affair must all first be over. She comes into the field, in summer time, when the sun has gone a third part of his course. She has the heat of the day to encounter, instead of having her work done and being ready to return home at an early hour. Yet early she must go to; for there is the fire again to be made, the clattering tea-tackle again to come forward; and even in the longest day she must have candle light, which never ought to be seen in a cottage (except in case of illness) from March to September.
I have here estimated every thing at its very lowest. The entertainment which I have here provided is as poor, as mean, as miserable, as anything short of starvation can set forth. And yet, the wretched thing amounts to a good third part of a good and able labourers' wages. For this money, he and his family may drink good and wholesome beer; in a short time, out of the mere savings from this waste, they may drink it out of silver cups and tankards. In a labourer's family, wholesome beer, that has a little life in it, is all that is wanted in general. Little children that do not work, should not have beer. Broth, porridge, or something in that way, is the thing for them. However, I shall suppose, in order to make my comparison as little complicated as possible, that he brews nothing but beer as strong as the generality of beer to be had at the public- house, and divested of the poisonous drugs which that beer but too often contains; and I shall further suppose that he uses in his family, two quarts of this beer, every day, from the first day of October to the last day of March inclusive; three quarts a day during the months of June and September; and five quarts a day during the months of July and August; and if this be not enough, it must be a family of drunkards. Here are one thousand and ninety seven quarts, or two hundred and seventy four gallons. Now, a bushel of malt will make eighteen gallons of better beer than that which is sold at the public-houses. And this is precisely a gallon for the price of a quart. People should bear in mind, that the beer bought at the public-house is loaded with a beer tax, with the tax on the public-house keeper, in the shape of license, with all the taxes and expenses of the brewer, and with all the taxes, rent, and other expenses of the publican, and with all the profits of both brewer and publican; so that when a man swallows a pot of beer at a public-house, he has all these expenses to help to defray, besides the mere tax on the malt and the hops.
But I look upon the thing in a still more serious light. I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, and engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age. In the fifteen bushels of malt there are 570 pounds weight of sweet; that is to say, of nutritious matter, unmixed with anything injurious to health. In the 730 tea messes of the year, there are 54 pounds of sweet in the sugar, and about 30 pounds of matter equal to sugar in the milk. Here are eighty four pounds instead of five hundred and seventy, and even the good effect of these eighty four pounds is more than overbalanced by the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers of the tea.
It is impossible for anyone to deny of this statement. Put it to the test with a lean hog: give him the fifteen bushels of malt and he will repay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts. But give him the 730 tea messes, or rather begin to give them to him, and give him nothing else, and he is dead from hunger, and bequeaths you his skeleton, at the end of about seven days. It is impossible to doubt in such a case. The tea drinking has done a great deal in bringing this nation into the state of misery in which it now is; and the tea drinking, which is carried on by "dribs" and "drabs", by pence and farthings going out at a time; this miserable practice has been gradually introduced by the growing weight of the taxes on malt and on hops, and the growing penury amongst the labourers occasioned by the paper money.
It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness. The everlasting dawdling about, with the slops of the tea-tackle, gives them a relish for nothing that requires strength and activity. When they go from home, the know how to do nothing that is useful. To brew, to bake, to make butter, to milk, to rear poultry; to do any earthly thing of use they are wholly unqualified. To shut poor young creatures up in manufactories is bad enough: but there, at any rate, they do something that is useful; whereas the girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her.

A wee dram helps as well - try it instead of coffee.
Gordon Brewing

Kick ASS and ABBA

Much to my surprise, in my formative years I learnt, that young ladies sized a man up on the shape of his ass. Arse, buttocks, rear-end, bottom (in polite circles) and backside are other terms used to describe this part of our anatomy.

Then, with the advent of tight jeans and Levis and ladies wearing trousers - a rare event in my youth, men forsook boobs for the shape of a ladies bottom. They are fat, thin, rounded, oval, and flat in my experience. I like them rounded and tight and therefore I was greatly surprised when the blonde ABBA girl won the ass of the year prize sometime ago. Her's were oval and not at all conspicious or rounded and did absolutely nothing for me. So, dear reader, what was all the fuss about?
Rearguards
Gordon Brown

The Internovella - Chapter 2 - continued

did not. A damp and heaving, sweat and blood stained ark of ribs for a hull, and patchwork sails. A slave trader - blacks in from Africa, but little to take back except tobacco, potatoes, cotton and whatever else they could pack down below. In the captains words, "Scum in and scum out".

Mary felt uncomfortable, the ship leaked and smelt, the rope was rotten, the crew were threatening. But her Dad had made a brave and decisive decision: America was not for them. It was not to be - the New World which was a phoney conundrum, run by gangsters and zealots was finished with, he had decided to make a return to the values, morals and principles that he had grown up with in that damp and misty island.

The Internovella - Chapter 2

that was a coded meaning for Irish Earls who raised mercenary armies to go and fight abroad. The politics and the morals were of no concern - wild geese needed to be fed only on money.

But she had read of the mist, the dew, the desparate poverty, and the cruelty of Cromwell and the English. The famines, through a reliance on an entirely rotten foreign vegetable, called the potatoe, which blighted a nation that, for thousands of years had lived on wheat and barley.

What would she find there now. In a few weeks it would be home. But there was another side that she had learnt about Ireland - her resistance, her pride but most of all the ability of this small nation to make music, to sing and to laugh. Laugh at a corpse, not to feed upon it, but to celebrate its rising from the dead into a new world where people frolicked and held hands, and cared, and looked into one anothers eyes and say I will always care for you my dearest brother or sister. In one word Ireland stood for: unity.
She went to sleep that night, not happy, but with a calmness and a certainty that things would improve. And improve they

Beyond this canyon, the sea of dreams and nightmares. 

LENNY.

Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore
By Phil Ochs
INTRO: G/C/G/C/G
C G C G C G /C/G/C
You laugh at the people who walk outside on the sidewalk
G C G
And you talk to yourself so much
C G /C/G
when you see other people you can't talk
Am
This time it's true
D7 G G /C/G7
The charade is through
Bm C /D7
And you can't seem to run away from you
Away from you
Am D7
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
G C G
Stands rejectedly by the door
C G Em Am
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
D7
Are you sure?
You sit at the desk
To lose your life in a letter
But the words don't seem to come and you know that they're(?) better
and it's all so strange
Pictures lose their frame
And I'll bet you never guessed
There was so much pain
So much pain
Until the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The moon, she shines too soon and simply sadly
You loved your love so much that you'd strangle her madly
And it's all so slow
Time has ceased to flow
And the whistling whore knows something you don't know
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
You swore you'd store your love for one time only
Now you searched the books in vain for better word for lonely
And you're torn apart
No other love will start
And you, you'd like to steal a happy heart
A happy heart
Then the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The fat official smiles at the pass on the border
And the hungry broom makes sure that the room is in order
You pull the shade
All the beds are made
As your lips caress the razor of the blade
Of the blade
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The soul of the sun shines just outsde of the winter
The shoulders charged, the boards of the barricade is splintered
Now at last alone
The flashlight is shown
Hello inside is there anybody home?
Anybody home?
It's the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Standing rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
Are you sure?
Are you sure?

Gordon

Nomes.

The infirm on their daily outing - disguised as nomes!
Rock fairies who serve the Nome King. The word nome means "one who knows." They are so named because they know where all the precious stones and gold and silver are hidden in the earth

The Internovella - Chapter 2 - continued

Off to Ireland. A land of fighters and poets. But it is impossible to be one without the other".

Mary thought about the future, some say the past is gone; forget it, it is history. She at once remembered her history teacher that had tought her, repeatedly, that what had happened would happen again unless a human mind had learnt from history and was determined not to let it happen again. The mistakes of our forebears need not be repeated, but that comes from learning and experience.

She had often read of the invasion of distant lands by cruel invaders. The English, the Spanish, the French - the list is endless. And Ireland too had her wild geese

Gunny trouble - the first of four. Bad day by the river! Every credit to St. Column Major - good team.