NATO Big Brother House/What does your car say about you?

No FFFFPFF this week, sorry - I was busy yesterday having fun in Bournemouth and getting thoroughly tipsy.

I've noticed Greenpeace are doing more and more viral ads and interactive things to engage people with their campaigns. Amusing, with clicky potential too, good stuff!

This is fun:

NATO Big Brother House
Evict 'Missile Guy' - he's rude, aggressive and he never washes up.

And this is absolutely hilarious (contains a few rude words):

What does your car say about you?
You drive a big off-road car in the city. You've got 300 percent more power. You're putting 300 percent more pollution into our overheating world. So how cool are you?

Fank Fun it's Friday Fantastic Photo Foolery Fest - 21/07/06

I can feel a FFFFPFF in the air tonight! Oh yes, your captions are invited please, for the last in the current line-up of tennis related entries.

Incidentally, I have been mostly rather poorly this week (that'll teach me for not having had a cold for what seems like ages) and although I have still been trying to earn a crust, blog-entry-ness has been thin on the ground, unfortunately.

Anyway, without further ado, your entries please!

Will all the terrorists please put their hands up?

What a week. I imagine nobody has missed the fact that the Middle East, specifically Israel and Lebanon, are going through the age-old neighbourly ritual of beating the crap out of each other. I know little of this conflict apart from what I have heard on the news for what seems like a lifetime (oh yes, it is a lifetime...), however I have heard recent developments likened to if we had bombed the crap out of Ireland because of the IRA. I dare say it is nothing like that - or very little like that - although I think it is difficult for many of us to get a suitable frame of reference.

It is easy to say that a wealthy and well-armed Israel has reacted disproportionately to Hezbollah's attacks. It is also easy to say that progress is not going to be easy when organisations in, or the governors of, one country, like Lebanon, refuse to accept another country's right to exist.

Like many, I expect, I flinch at Israel's idea of 'precision' bombing because it seems exactly as precise as the bombing that has resulted in the tens of thousands of civilian deaths carried out in our name (the UK, US etc.) in Iraq. I have also found the response of the UK and US to be (perhaps characteristically) easy-going on Israel. Of course, Hezbollah's strategy seems to be as precise as just hitting something.

Personally I think the only people rubbing their hands with glee at the moment are, as ever, those whose pockets reach deep into the arms and power trade - because a further destabilised Middle East is very much in their interests. Disregarding the minions, wherever these people live and whatever diverse backgrounds they come from, I guess they have certain things in common, like being utter bastards, with scruples that extend no further than their own desires.

Let us once again put our conspiracy theory hats on and understand this war is good for such people and no mistake. I mean, look how we have bombed the shit out of Iraq and what good money and power was to be had there - not least in the oil interests and munitions - but also in the rebuilding.

And, as in Iraq, we can be sure those paying the greatest price in Israel and Lebanon will be those with very little money and power of their own.

Fank Fun it's Friday Fantastic Photo Foolery Fest - 14/07/06

It is the required time for this week's FFFFPFF! I got rather carried away with finding funny pictures to do with tennis, so I'll keep going with them for a bit. This week, your captions please for this furry little fella. Pimm's anyone?

Greenpeace Catches Tony Blair Trashing the World's Rainforests Again

From Greenpeace UK:

As you read this email, Greenpeace is taking action to expose the use of illegal and destructively logged timber on yet another Government building site. Despite years of promises by Tony Blair to only use legal and sustainable timber, Greenpeace has found illegal rainforest timber on a Government building project for the third time in four years.

New Greenpeace research has revealed that the refurbishment of Admiralty Arch, home to both the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, is using tropical plywood as hoardings around the site. This plywood contains timber sourced from the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, where ruthless 'robber barons' are plundering the rainforest with impunity - their crimes ranging from illegal logging, to corruption, torture and rape.

In 2002 Greenpeace exposed the Government for using illegal and destructively logged African rainforest timber in the refurbishment of the Cabinet Office in Whitehall and again in 2003 we exposed its use of Indonesian rainforest plywood in the construction of the new Home Office in Westminster.

Please fax Tony Blair today!

Tell him to tighten up his timber procurement policy. He must immediately introduce legislation banning the import of illegally logged timber - the only way to stop this destructive trade.

You can send a fax, free of charge, to Tony Blair from our website
at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests/takeaction/pngaction.html

With your help, we can build pressure on him to make sure that the government only uses timber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council to ensure its from well managed forests and ensure he introduces legislation to ban all imports of illegal timber into the UK.

Thank you,

Belinda Fletcher

Forest Campaigner
Greenpeace UK

Incidentally, on the same subject, I don't spend a lot of time looking at garden furniture, I prefer sitting on it (I wish!), however I was looking recently and didn't realise Greenpeace do a big survey of where the UK chains like B&Q and Focus etc, source the timber - it's quite an eye-opener - clicky here to take a look.

P.S. I'm not always getting the chance to blog what I really want to about stuff like this, so for the time being, at least, rather than not get around to it I am just going to paste in and link to stuff of interest, as above.

Nuclear Reaction - No Thanks!

So, Tony Blair has published his energy review and, lo and behold, new nuclear power stations are on the list.

Click here for what Greenpeace thinks (if you like, there is also a link so you can send a letter to your MP).

Catch up on some of my musings about this so far - here and more lately here.

You can also clicky and download this, if you like, and stick it somewhere festive (it's a 516KB jpeg):


Quite frankly I can't say any more about this today because I'll get really annoyed rather frustrated.

Reasons to be Cheerful

What a strange weekend. After a troublesome day yesterday, today has been much better, thank goodness. Perhaps it's the heat? I don't think we deal very well with high temperatures in the UK, seeing as the moment the sun comes out we tend to dash outside and get burned to a cinder. Although I've been quite sensible the heat is definitely affecting my sleep at the moment and there's normally very little chance of anything doing that. That has also led to more bizarre dreams, although Sven has not made another appearance, thank goodness.

So, Wimbledon is over, the World Cup is concluded with penalties (it seems to have been penalties all the time in this World Cup, which rather makes a nonsense of the whole thing, in my opinion) and now I can return more of my attention to the garden.

The veggies are coming along with varying states of success. I think the weather has been a bit difficult for them too, notably for the peppers (the sweet ones are a bit of an outside experiment this year), although everything is heading in the right direction. My pak choi has done incredibly well in a very short space of time and I am looking forward to sampling some of the thinnings in the next couple of days. Courgettes and tomatoes are not far away too, I think. Yum!

Things are at the stage now where there is lots of feeding to do. My organic approach this year has so far consisted of seaweed meal, which you can just dress around everything (and has the added benefit of making your garden smell like you are at the beach!) and some bought in organic tomato feed. I have also started off my comfrey bin, which should provide me with nearly all the liquid feed I need in future. The first batch should be ready in two to three weeks (I should have started back in April really.

Basically, comfrey is amazing stuff. I posted a picture of one of my plants in flower in my garden post a few weeks back.

Once the plants are established - I planted mine last year, so they are just about ready now - you basically start (normally from April) to crop them back to within a couple of inches of the ground and use the leaves for a variety of purposes. The plants grow back in about a five weeks and then you crop them again, so you can get four or five goes out of them every year.

As I've said, my primary objective is feed. The plants decompose really quickly into a black sludge which is a fantastic feed when diluted down. There are a couple of ways of doing this, however I have gone for the 'comfrey tea' approach.

For this, you need one suitable bin type container:


I have drilled a hole in this and added a water butt tap as this was considerably cheaper than buying a proper water butt. It also has a nice tight fitting lid which is good, because this stuff is going to stink to high heaven once it's rotting down!

Because the comfrey gets sludgey, I made a simple filter from some wire, hopefully to stop the goo heading straight for the tap and bunging it up:


Finally, crop your comfrey and add the leaves to the bin (my five young plants still gave me a good half a bin full), then add water:


With this approach, the idea is to just keep adding the successive crops into the bin and topping up with water. This way I only need to clean it out once a year. It's been going a couple of weeks now and is already rotting nicely, so I'm expecting things to be ready - and seriously whiffy - by the end of the month.

Just to give you an idea of the scale I have gone for this year, I have over 35 tomato plants and over 30 pepper plants, let alone everything else - so I need lots of feed!

Anecdotal Evidence No.16

You know you are down when the things that used to lift you don’t even touch you. When beautiful things make you cry, not just because they are beautiful, but because they seem so far away.

What a strange day. I can’t remember the last time mere existence was so emotionally painful it brought me to tears. I guess I realise this occasionally, but I’ve realised today how long it’s been since I was in love. It now seems so difficult. And the lack of hope has almost crushed me. I know there is hope and fight left in me – and I know there are countless things more important in this world than my own happiness – but you’ve got to be there, haven’t you?

There was a time – and perhaps too formative a time, for me – when I thought that to be happy, you first had to be happy with yourself. I now think this was folly. Why shouldn’t others contribute to your own happiness? Isn’t human life itself all about entities coming together to create something? Creating something bigger – and hopefully better – than you can on your own?

I refer to love, of course, but children figure in there too, right?

For many years, my peers, perhaps with less lofty ideas than me, have been pro-creating at will, furthering their genes, while I spouted guff about not wanting to bring children into a world so fraught with bad things. I think it’s a worthy thing to admit you are an idiot, if you have been, and I most definitely have. Now, perhaps, I just need someone to love. Any ideas?

Fank Fun it's Friday Fantastic Photo Foolery Fest - 07/07/06

I could ask where this week has gone, but I won't. Suffice to say I have had some good ideas for posts, forgotten them and squarely failed to remember them when I've been near the computer. General shenanigans really. Apologies if you have been expecting exciting posts from me and they haven't turned up - I have really had the best intentions, but I guess this is what summer blogging can get like. An outrageous amount of daylight hours and distractions and I'm sure time away from a keyboard can actually be healthy, damnit... Ho hum. Anyway...

There's another FFFFPFF on the way! Yes, Wimbledon is still going on and I've run out of tennis quips after last week's veritable plethora of related puns. So, without further ado, here's more fun with dogs and tennis balls, seeing as they seem to get much more enjoyment out of them than most people do. Your captions, please!

Event Security Gone Mad...

On Saturday, some of my folks went to see Elton John play at Bournemouth football club. It was all very exciting apparently, Elton arrived by helicopter and they showed the England/Portugal football game on big screens before the music itself. Not entirely my cup of tea, however he put on a good show, apparently - and swore a lot too.

Anyway, the thing that amused me most was the fact that the security at the gates were clocking through everyones bags confiscating 'dangerous' items. One item deemed inadmissible was a small aerosol spray for soothing mosquito or other insect bites. I really couldn't fathom why. Was this for Elton's safety or the rest of the viewing public? What did they think was going to happen?

I can see the headlines now, "ELTON JOHN ATTACKED BY TINY FLAMETHROWER - Escapes with singed eyebrows, piano a write-off..."

Of course, that would also have needed a lighter, which I don't think anyone had, and I think smoking was okay. They obviously weren't concerned about people throwing fags at him.