The northlondonhippy

Archive for April, 2006

After yesterday’s decon­struc­tion of all things moral and true in our uni­verse and our lack of sta­tion within it; I thought I would con­tinue in this same philo­soph­i­cal vein with some thoughts on time.

I can feel mine, run­ning out.

It’s been doing that since the day I was born; only recently I think I’ve actu­ally become able to per­ceive the tick-tock of nature run­ning its course.

It is nat­ural, in our uni­verse, in our four-dimensional world that we per­ceive time pass­ing. Time is impor­tant to us.

But I’m talk­ing about some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing more per­sonal. I’m talk­ing about my own lifes­pan; maybe what I really mean is I can tell I’m aging.

Oh blah, blah, blah, the hippy is get­ting old. Show me some­one who isn’t and you will be show­ing me a dead man; death is the only known alter­na­tive to aging.

Until they admit aging is just some kink in our genetic code that they will one day be able to re-sequence right out of your DNA, if you can afford it.

Trust me, you won’t be able to afford it. Nei­ther will I.

Time is change; I like change, but when my time runs out; I’ll miss all the changes.

I think that’s what irks me most about hav­ing a finite lifes­pan; I won’t be able to see how it all turns out. I want to know what’s going to hap­pen on the day after my death.

Even bet­ter, how about 100 years after, or a thou­sand, or even ten thou­sand! My curios­ity about the future dri­ves me crazy.

I’m not say­ing the future is going to be all shiny and golden, I actu­ally have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that it’s going to be quite bleak and in my life time, but I do so very much want to know how it wraps up.

And it is all going to wrap up some­day, when our sun goes super-nova if not before. I don’t think our species will last that long on this planet and I’d be a fool to reject the notion of inter­plan­e­tary immigration!

I’d be a fool to reject any future devel­op­ments in sci­ence and technology.

There’s just so much we don’t know about so many things, even now in our “mod­ern age”, or “our infancy as sen­tient beings” in hippytruthspeak.

There are things that we’ve yet to dis­cover that I promise you will turn our under­stand­ing of so many things, so upside-down, that you won’t know if you’re com­ing or going. I’m talk­ing about giant changes in our per­cep­tions of the vast­ness of the uni­verse to the tini­est of tiny sub-atomic particles.

And no, I don’t know any­thing about what these giant strides in our knowl­edge are; if I did I would be writ­ing for impor­tant and respected sci­en­tific jour­nals and not just shit in some blog on the internet!

And by shit, of course I mean highly enter­tain­ing, thought pro­vok­ing mas­ter­pieces that bring joy to dozens, I mean mil­lions, of course!

When I was a kid, the small­est par­ti­cles known to man were the three bits of the atom, which if my mem­ory is cor­rect are, pro­tons, neu­trons and electrons.

And then the started smack­ing atoms together in par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors and well, wouldn’t you know it, they found quarks. And I think they may have even found even smaller bits than quarks, though I will not deny my knowl­edge of cutting-edge physics is shall we say, rather limited.

Who knows what those crazy boffins will come up with next?

Let’s go back to time.

Imag­ine, if you can, that time, which is known as the fourth-dimension, actu­ally had a dimen­sion in space. The tiny meat-based com­puter in your head will have trou­ble with this con­cept, as mine does, but stay with me.

Imag­ine if this fourth dimen­sion could be mea­sured in space and mapped; as if you could phys­i­cally per­ceive it, almost touch it. Think of it as a free flow­ing river and all we’ve been doing since we started mea­sur­ing time, is gaug­ing the cur­rent of this river.

We know the speed of the time river, or rather, we per­ceive it in our lim­ited way and we know the direc­tion. That one’s a given as we per­ceive time as mov­ing forward.

Now sup­pose you dis­cov­ered this river exist­ing in a part of space that our senses can’t per­ceive, but is just as tan­gi­ble as the other dimensions.

You can pick on a pen­cil and thrust it for­ward and back, up and down, or side to side; which cov­ers all three dimen­sions, but what if you could thrust it into a fourth that exists in space, but is not vis­i­ble to you in any way.

Am I really doing your head in? Sorry, I’m nearly there.

Take the leap that some­how, some sci­en­tist has found this time river in space and he decides to build a pod to launch him­self into it.

Now, I know you’re get­ting it.

This pod could sim­ply let the cur­rent carry it for­ward, which would be the most likely out­come, or per­haps this sci­en­tist man­aged to power the pod in such a way that it could over­come the force of the river and travel in the oppo­site direc­tion. What has this sci­en­tist invented?

Time travel.

I’m not say­ing that this is likely, or even plau­si­ble, but it is pos­si­ble and it’s pos­si­ble because of our igno­rance of time…and every­thing else that we know jack shit about.

That would be nearly every­thing that mat­ters in the uni­verse. Oh, I cov­ered that yesterday.

I don’t know that I would want to travel back in time, but for­ward cer­tainly appeals to me, but again that’s down to my curios­ity about the future.

I take that back, in a sense, as lately I’ve been feel­ing unusu­ally nos­tal­gic about the past, specif­i­cally my fam­ily. I’m not say­ing my child­hood was per­fect, whose is? But if I could go back for say a day, I would.

The ques­tion is what day?

Would I choose some­thing cheesy like that one birth­day when my par­ents sur­prised me with a brand new bike; or maybe I could go all smaltzy and pick one of the rare occa­sions when my father told me he loved me.

Or maybe just go the obvi­ous route and select the day I smoked my first joint and got high.

It wouldn’t be any of those; it would actu­ally be a day that I think is going to make my younger brother laugh when he reads it. It’s not even a spe­cific day and even more sur­pris­ing, it’s not even a day I would have thought at the time would mean so much to me now.

I’m not even sure of the year, but I would ven­ture a guess to say the late 1970s, in the sum­mer. My father had a boat and rather than take an annual hol­i­day, he would use his leave a cou­ple of days here or there, every week for the entire sum­mer. Mainly he took off Mon­days and/or Fri­days so we could go out deep-sea fish­ing on the boat.

Ok, I had a slightly priv­i­leged child­hood, but noth­ing com­pared to the super-rich of today. Trust me, I’ve more than redressed the bal­ance as an adult.

We’d all go out on the boat for the day, my father, my mother, my younger brother and yours truly, your favourite northlondon-based hippy.

My father would make sand­wiches and pack a cooler with soft drinks and we would cast off early then spend the day at sea; maybe catch­ing fish, maybe not; argu­ing, laugh­ing but mainly just enjoy­ing being a family.

It was all just so sim­ple, so care­free. I can tell you right now, that I doubt I’ll ever expe­ri­ence that feel­ing again for as long as I may live.

To gen­uinely have no wor­ries, no respon­si­bil­i­ties, to know that every­thing was all right and as far as you could tell it would always be that way is a feel­ing that only really good drugs can reproduce.

And even then, they wear off, you come down and you’re right back where you started.

I miss my fam­ily so much some­times it hurts, but the only way I could ever get back to that moment, that feel­ing, is if some­one really does invent a time machine and I can order one from the inter­net on my Visa card and that just ain’t gonna happen.

And if you told me on one of those fish­ing trips that I would be sit­ting in front my a com­puter in my north Lon­don lair nearly thirty fuck­ing years later, bawl­ing my cunt­ing eyes out as I share my deep­est thoughts with any­one who hap­pens to stum­ble on my blog online on the inter­net, do you know what I would have said?

What’s the internet?

Ok, besides that, I would have told you that you were talk­ing crazy! I believe I actu­ally did actu­ally say that, to my mother, on the many occa­sions when she told there would come a time when I would feel this way and I rejected the very thought.

And now, I can’t even tell her that she was right because I haven’t spo­ken to her in around three months for no good rea­son except that I talk a really good game, but I’m a piece of shit too.

I never said I was perfect.

Ok, I did actu­ally, many times.

I was lying.

Let’s get back on track, wipe those manly tears from my eyes and return to the sub­ject at hand.

If you told me 30 years ago that I would have this amaz­ing device in front of me that could edit video, audio, text, and pho­tos as well as being con­nected to the rest of the world, I wouldn’t have believed you.

And if you told me way back then that any­one with one of these magic devices could pub­lish any­thing they wanted in such a way that any­one else with one of these amaz­ing boxes, any­where in the world could read it, I would have thought it was the stuff of sci­ence fiction.

And that’s only hap­pened in the last thirty years!

Just imag­ine what’s amaz­ing treats are in store for the peo­ple still here in the future.

Imag­ine being able to travel through time, or the­o­ret­i­cally liv­ing for­ever, if you don’t get run over by a bus or shot by a jeal­ous husband!

And that’s at the root of this hippy’s dis­pute with time. Mine is going to run out before a lot of really cool shit hap­pens and that makes me very sad.

If I could live long enough, maybe there would be a way for me to make it back on that boat, even if it was just for five min­utes. It’s a jour­ney I would will­ingly take, if I could.

Is your life as fucked up as mine? Are your thoughts as twisted? Email me let me know your secret for not going com­pletely insane!

As ever, I remain your ever faith­ful, ever loyal, ever twisted, northlondonhippy!

Like the title says, I’ve been think­ing about the ques­tions that will never have answers; I’ve been pon­der­ing the imponderable.

What do I mean, exactly?

What I mean is sim­ple: I’ve been think­ing about the stuff that we, and I mean humans, earth­lings, what­ever you would like to call us in the col­lec­tive “we”, will never ever know the answers to such sim­ple ques­tions as:

“Why are we here?”

“Where did the uni­verse come from?”

And more importantly…

“Do good hip­pies from north Lon­don go to heaven?”

Ok, I can answer that third ques­tion myself.

Hip­pies from north Lon­don, just like every other liv­ing crea­ture, just cease to exist when we die.

There is no heaven.

Any­one who claims oth­er­wise is quite frankly, full of shit.

Any­one who claims to the know the answers to the first two ques­tions is, espe­cially if they answer them with some sort of reli­gious mumbo-jumbo, also full of the same shit.

I’m smarter than all of those believ­ers, because I know that I will never know the answers to those first 2 ques­tions and fur­ther more, I’m very cer­tain that no one who is alive today or any­one that is born in the future will be able to answer them either.

That’s one of the things that makes me smarter than many peo­ple; I know there’s a lot more that I don’t know, than I do. No mat­ter how old I get, that will always be true.

I don’t know why we’re here, not for sure. No one ever really could.
If pushed for an answer, I would sur­mise that we’re here for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, we just are. I take com­fort in that rather bleak assess­ment, because it is so lib­er­at­ingly honest.

I’m point­less; we all are.

We, the col­lec­tive we again, don’t serve a sin­gle pur­pose, unless the rap­ing and pil­lag­ing of the planet, and each other is our pur­pose, in which case we are kick­ing some seri­ous ass!

We add noth­ing to the uni­verse at large.

We may do things that enrich the lives of oth­ers, or our­selves, but that doesn’t ben­e­fit all of exis­tence, does it?

I can appre­ci­ate a Van Gogh paint­ing as much as the next guy, or a great song or a well-made film, but so what? Our lives and the lives of even the impor­tant, tal­ented and cel­e­brated of our species don’t mean shit in the con­text of the universe.

Life on our planet has only been around for a blink of an eye in cos­mo­log­i­cal terms. Intel­li­gent life has been around for a frac­tion of a frac­tion of that blink.

And by “intel­li­gent life”, I mean us and yes, I am using the term very loosely in this context.

In the scheme of the uni­verse, we are all noth­ing but flot­sam and jet­sam, or as Kansas once put it so suc­cinctly; “We are all just dust in the wind.”

How does it feel, hav­ing me tell you that you don’t mat­ter; that no one mat­ters? Do you hate me for speak­ing the truth so plainly?

If Jesus’s mes­sage were bleak as mine, would any­one still be fol­low­ing him today?

Where’s the hope, hippy? Where’s the hope?

I’m com­ing to that, because of course, my mes­sage actu­ally is, one of hope.

As I sit at my desk, in the mid­dle of the night, strug­gling to keep my eyes open and my brain engaged, I think about these things. I don’t know why we are here and it dri­ves me insane that I will never have the answers I seek.

I could seek them in reli­gion, for many peo­ple find com­fort in the fairy sto­ries offered by the major and minor reli­gions of our world.

But I won’t, I can’t; I’m not will­ing to accept the delu­sions of oth­ers mas­querad­ing as fact.

Think about your reli­gion if you have one, then apply some sim­ple log­i­cal think­ing to it and then ask your­self this ques­tion: Does it sound like some­thing made up by peo­ple for peo­ple, or by a god for people.

Every­thing I know about reli­gion smacks of man. Men invented all of the fables we are sold as fact. And I’m being very gen­der spe­cific in this ref­er­ence, because men are respon­si­ble for most, if not all that is fucked with our earthly existence.

Reli­gion, all reli­gion, was invented to keep peo­ple in line. If you don’t do what the bible says, god’s gonna get ya! He’s gonna get you but good!

Bull­shit!

Look up to the heav­ens right now and say the fol­low­ing out loud:

“Hey, god. Yes, you god. It’s me, the hippy (use your own name, dummy). You know, the one from north Lon­don (and use your own loca­tion!). You know what I think, god? You wanna know what I think?

I think you are a right fuck­ing cunt.”

Don’t worry; I’ve done this myself. Many times; often with an audience.

Actu­ally, it’s always bet­ter with an audi­ence and my dream is to one day be on a stage, deliv­er­ing a lec­ture or speech (upon accept­ing my sec­ond Pulitzer prize I hope), when I utter those offen­sive words, shout them really loud.

And then I sud­denly drop dead of a heart attack, live on stage!

Wouldn’t that just put the fear of our imag­i­nary god into everyone!

Hey, if I’m wrong and there is a god, I bet I get that sec­ond Pulitzer. He’ll do it just to show he’s got a sense of humour.

The point of this lit­tle oral exer­cise is a sim­ple one, to prove that god, whether he exists or not, doesn’t give a shit what you say or do.

Peo­ple do really get away with mur­der in this world and there never is divine retribution.

There is no god in my opin­ion, but if there were, he would be noth­ing like the way you pic­ture him. You couldn’t ever pic­ture him, because his form, shape, being, what­ever you would want to call it, is beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of the tiny lit­tle meat-based com­puter in your head.

Here’s the thing, if I’m telling you we won’t know the answers to any of these ques­tions, ever, then how can I be so sure there is no heaven? Isn’t that a hubris­tic contradiction?

Nope. Guess again.

There is no heaven. Heaven is an inven­tion of men; it doesn’t exist; it couldn’t pos­si­bly. You need to ask the right question.

Is there an afterlife?

Maybe, but I highly doubt it. It’s awfully unlikely, don’t you think?

Has any­one seen one shred of gen­uine evi­dence that our minds con­tinue on after our bod­ies die?

Notice I didn’t say “spirit” or “soul” because again, these are false con­cepts cre­ated by men.

I would love for some­one to prove that there is some form of life after death, but I think I have a bet­ter chance of those super-duper boffins com­ing up with a way to down­load my mind into a supercomputer.

And by the way, where can I sign up for that? I’d love to be hard­ware based, as long as I had a vir­tual tongue and cock, I’d be all set for eter­nity! And bring on the vir­tual spliffs!

Believ­ing in any of this requires some­thing I decid­edly lack and that’s faith. I have no faith, not in god, not in any­one else, not even in myself. Hey ho.

But where’s the hope?

I’m get­ting to it right now. Hope comes from free choice and free will.

You have the choice between being a decent per­son and being a bas­tard or bitch. You have the choice on how you view the world and how it views you. You alone have the abil­ity, the con­trol to choose a direc­tion for your existence.

We all do.

It doesn’t mat­ter who you are or where you are on the face of this planet, you can choose to do good and be good in every­thing you do.

I don’t care if you are the rich­est or the poor­est, the tallest or the short­est; the colour of your skin doesn’t mat­ter either; nor does the shape of your gen­i­tals, it all makes no dif­fer­ence.
In your own way, in your own life, you can choose to be a force of good.

Ok, tell me that is not hope­ful. Tell me that’s not life affirming!

Think about it; let it sink in, really deep.

In your every thought, your every action, you can strive to bring some­thing pos­i­tive to this world for the sim­ple, sat­is­fy­ing rea­son that it’s your choice to make!

Imag­ine if this was the “Ser­mon on the Mount” or if we could replace the “Ten Com­mand­ments” with this sim­ple approach.

Imag­ine if you heard this sim­ple mes­sage every day from when you were young. Imag­ine if we all did. What a won­der­ful world this would be and yes, Sam Cooke said that first.

Threats from god don’t stop peo­ple from lying, cheat­ing, steal­ing, killing or cov­et­ing thy neighbour’s wife, but my phi­los­o­phy might.

Do “good” because you can. Choose “good”, because there is really is no other choice; be good because it’s the right thing to do!

Imag­ine if every­one thought this way. We might actu­ally be able to turn things around before it’s too late.

We might be able to reverse global warm­ing, sort out all inter­na­tional con­flicts, ban­ish poverty, famine, dis­ease, small-mindedness and the stu­pid, point­less pro­hi­bi­tion on weed!

A hippy can dream.

So you see, I know it took some time, but we reached the hope­ful bit. Now, the rest is up to all of you.

Believe in your­selves, even if you have no faith.

Know that you are just as val­ued in the uni­verse as any­one else on the planet, no more and more impor­tantly, no less. Live your life as if oth­ers mat­ter; we share this planet.

In every­thing you say, every­thing you do, strive for there to be a ben­e­fit. Give more than you take, always.

Choose to be good, choose to do “good”, because the choice is yours alone to make. It’s what really sep­a­rates from the animals.

You see, that tagline at the top of your browser isn’t an idle boast. I truly am a mes­siah for the new millennium.

I think I’m ready for a spliff. I’ve earned it! Catch ya next time!

I’ve had a few hip­py­fans con­tact me to point out that my love of all things RooR, while admirable, does not come cheap.

Of course, they are right. I know that full sized RooR pieces are pricey and not every­one has my sort of wildly over­paid, media job to afford them. Not even me for the high end goodies!

But as the title says, own­ing your own RooR piece doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

RooR’s Steam­roller pipes are extremely well made and very afford­able; the cheap­est one, the mini only costs £5.95 and I can tell you it’s a great pipe, since I own one myself. I use it a lot, actu­ally and it hits like a dream.

The come in three other sizes, each one a lit­tle big­ger than the last, so you can choose one that’s just right for you.

And to get the most out of your RooR Steam­roller, you need to get a glass gauze. I rec­om­mend this one, the glass jack, which fits the mini Steam­roller per­fectly. It’s only an extra £1.50, but it’s worth it. You don’t want a mouth­ful of ash or worse, your favourite herbal expen­sive smok­ing mixture.

Once you see how great the Steam­rollers are, you will want to save you pen­nies for more of their fine glassware!

And while I’m rec­om­mend­ing things to smoke, have you checked out Spice yet? It’s a mix of herbs that tastes nice, rolls nice and makes you feel even nicer. Yes, it really does have an effect! It’s the first herbal mix­ture I’ve ever tried that actu­ally works and the high is very pleas­ant and mellow.

Spice also blends very well with weed, which makes it good for any­one who is try­ing to give up tobacco.

Of course, who am I kid­ding? Every­thing goes bet­ter with weed; espe­cially me!

Happy tok­ing!

Hey ho hippyfans!

I’m alive, but just barely, hav­ing worked 10 of the last 12 nights. My bank account loves me, even if the rest of the world is giv­ing up on me!

My younger brother, the inter­net wiz­ard, has sug­gested that I try to make shorter posts, more often, even when I’m work­ing, just to keep the blog alive and breathing.

He’s got a point.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be giv­ing up on the lengthy, humor­ous and thought-provoking essays, but what it does mean is I will be try­ing to post more fre­quently, start­ing right now.

Carl Bern­stein, as in “Wood­ward and Berstein” has writ­ten a very inter­est­ing arti­cle on IMPEACHING George W. Bush and while quite long and full of big words, is wor­thy of your attention.

Mr. Bern­stein, helped bring down Richard M. Nixon in the sev­en­ties through his inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. Maybe you’ve seen the film, “All the President’s Men”? Bern­stein was played by Dustin Hoff­man; Wood­ward was played by Robert Red­ford. Do you remem­ber now?

Bush’s crimes are many and var­ied and I would even go one step fur­ther than Carl Bern­stein. I would sug­gest that Mr. Bush’s var­ied and numer­ous crimes against human­ity have earned him a trip to the War Crimes tri­bunal in The Hague. He deserves to be held account­able for his actions.

And I believe there’s an empty cell all wait­ing for him, since Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic croaked! So what are we wait­ing for? Let’s ship his sorry ass there asap!

Today is an excit­ing day. Today is the day I announce the win­ner of the big bong giveaway!

That’s right, kids! One lucky hip­py­fan has just been sent an email from yours truly, let­ting them know that they’ve won my old bong!

And it’s not just any old bong, it’s a BLACK LEAF, one of the best acrylic bongs on the market!

Thank you to every­one who entered the con­test; the qual­ity and stan­dard of your emails was very high. It made it much harder to choose only one winner!

I only wish I could send each and every one of you a bong of your own, but I’m not made of bongs!

Ok, let’s get straight to the excit­ing, nail-biting finish!

Can I have a drum roll please!

Con­grat­u­la­tions to the lucky win­ner, and that win­ner is:

Mark (aged 23 ¼) from Norwich!

Well done, Mark! Your new bong will be arriv­ing some­time next week, once I receive the deliv­ery details. I’ll be per­son­ally tak­ing the bong to the post office and send­ing it myself. It’s my per­sonal assistant’s life time off.
I’ll even spring for first class deliv­ery because that’s just the kind of hippy I am!

And here is Mark’s win­ning entry:

“Hello you crazeeeeeeeeeeeeee hippy!

Please send me your old bong as I’m a poor stu­dent and
cur­rently resigned to smok­ing from an impro­vised pipe
made out of an old flu­o­res­cent light tube and it’s
tear­ing my lips to pieces!!! :/

Go on help one of the social under­classes out!!

Mark (aged 23 ¼)
Norwich”

So that now con­cludes my most recent wild and wacky contest.

You see, peo­ple really do win with the hippy, but let’s be hon­est; you’re already one of life’s real win­ners if you’re a hip­py­fan anyway!

Watch out! I’ve got another wild and wacky con­test up my sleeve already! I’ll be post­ing all the details in the very near future, so be ready to enter!

If you thought the bong con­test was some­thing spe­cial, just wait till you see what the prize is next time!

Tick tock, time is run­ning out! This Thurs­day is the dead­line for the big bong give-away! Click here to find out more!

Hey ho hip­py­fans. I don’t have to ask; I know you’ve been miss­ing me!

It’s good to be respected, adored and dare I say, wor­shipped as a liv­ing god! Thanks for send­ing me all of your love!

Ah-hem.

Enough about how won­der­ful I am, I’ve actu­ally logged in and blogged on for a rea­son; to scare the liv­ing shit out of you!

Sey­mour Hersh, one of America’s best know and most respected inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists has come up with a real humdinger of an exclusive…

Amer­ica, more specif­i­cally George W. (for War war, what is it good for? Appar­ently rais­ing poll num­bers!) Bush is con­sid­er­ing a full-on attack on Iran, includ­ing the use of tac­ti­cal nukes!

I am not mak­ing this up; you can read my favourite news­pa­per, the Guardian’s ver­sion of the story RIGHT HERE. Go on, read it now, just make sure you have a change of undies to put on after you lit­er­ally shit your­self! Go on, I’ll still be here when you come back.

I can tell you’re cheat­ing. Now! Go read it! Be well informed!

Thank you!

Ok, here’s the thing; Amer­ica wants to nuke Iran because they are wor­ried about Iran’s nuclear pro­gram. Amer­ica is wor­ried that Iran might nuke another coun­try so they are going to nuke them first. Am I the only per­son on the face of this god­for­saken planet who sees the irony in this?

Amer­ica is the only coun­try to ever use a nuclear device in anger. Whether you agree with it’s use dur­ing WWII or not (I do, actu­ally), you can­not deny that the first sen­tence of this para­graph is true. Now they want to nuke another country?

Once you’ve had a lit­tle taste of those radioac­tive iso­topes in action, you want more, you crave more; your fin­gers just instinc­tively reach for that big red button.

Accord­ing to what I’ve read, Iran is ten years away from hav­ing a nuclear device of its own; though in the inter­ests of fair­ness, I have also seen it said that they are two years away. For the pur­poses of this dis­course, I’ll take the aver­age and go with 5 years.

So Iran is 5 years away from hav­ing the bomb. So what? Does any­one actu­ally think they would use one against another country?

What would hap­pen if Iran fired one off at, oh I don’t know, let’s say Israel? Amer­ica would level Iran with a nuclear bomb­ing cam­paign unlike any­thing the world has ever seen and that would be that.

I’m no fan of the gov­ern­ment in Iran and I do think Ahmadine­jad is a bit nuts, but I don’t think he would risk the total anni­hi­la­tion of his own country.

Sup­pose Iran built a nuke and turned it over to a ter­ror­ist group. They hit Israel, they hit Amer­ica; they hit some­where. Again, Amer­ica has to retal­i­ate, so they go after Iran in kind and it’s bye-bye Tehran. So how likely is it that they would hand one over to the bad guys?

Every­one on the planet is fun­da­men­tally the same. We all eat, sleep, shit and fuck; we all want a bet­ter world for tomorrow.

Bush wants regime change in Iran; Bush says Ahmadine­jad is the “new Hitler”; Bush says that Iran is devel­op­ing WMD. Iran is a threat to the secu­rity and sta­bil­ity of the world.

Now, where have I heard that before? Change the “n” in Iran to a “q” and Ahmadine­jad to Sad­dam and it sounds a lot like I’ve stepped into a time machine and it’s 2002 all over again!

They got it wrong last time kids and they are get­ting it wrong again! They are fuck­ing with the future; your future, my future, everyone’s fuck­ing future!

Don’t believe any of this is true. Please don’t think there is any moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for attack­ing Iran nor is there any good rea­son. Attack­ing Iran will only give the rest of the world more rea­son to hate the west and don’t they already have more than enough jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for despis­ing all of us already?

I know that this is unstop­pable; I know there’s noth­ing one crazy hippy in north Lon­don can do to pre­vent what­ever hor­rors will be com­mit­ted in the name of “freedom”.

What I can do is always tell the truth. What I can do is see through the lies. What I can do is con­tinue to be scep­ti­cal and cynical.

What I can do is ques­tion author­ity and isn’t that what being a hippy is all about?

Oh yeah, and tak­ing drugs!

Who will win my old bong? Will it be *you*? Only if you click *here*

Right now, I’m hav­ing more fun than you…

But that’s because I have more fun than everyone!

Think I’m jok­ing? Think again!

Right now, one of my most wild and wacky inter­net schemes is finally bear­ing a bit of fruit, but shh­h­hhh, I can’t say any more than that, just yet.

I won’t be able to say any­thing for years! Hahahaha

Let’s just say I’m a patient lit­tle hippy and good things come to those who wait!

Could I be any more fuck­ing cryp­tic? Sorry.

Also, I’m a bit stoned. No sur­prise there, but it’s mak­ing me even wilder and wack­ier than usual! Must be all this excitement!

The big bong con­test is rapidly com­ing to a close; I’ll be noti­fy­ing the win­ner a week today. There’s still time to email me your entry and the stan­dard is quite high now, so you’ll have to make a real effort!

Don’t worry; this bong is worth it! It has a retail value of about £38 includ­ing my spe­cial mod­i­fi­ca­tions. That ain’t no chump change, sucka!

Of course, as a prize in a pro­mo­tion, here at Hippy plc, it’s a busi­ness expense, so I will be deduct­ing it from my income tax; much like I do with all the drugs I take, as they are all research expenses for this blog. Dig it, fuckers!

Posts are going to be a bit thin­ner than usual for the next week or so, because I’m work­ing like an absolute slave start­ing from tonight. Don’t worry, I’m well paid, so all my effort will be hand­somely com­pen­sated for! Yipppppeeee to that!

Remem­ber, if you visit my page and there’s no new post, you could always take a ran­dom chance and dip into my hippy archive. Ok, so some of my old posts are shit, but some of the rock da house.

See how lucky you are. Here, I’ll give you a hint. Try search­ing my site using the fol­low­ing three words: “ass bombs euros”. You will be glad you did!

Bing, bang BONG! Free bong! For you to win! No joke, no lie, click here and keep those entries a’comin!

I’m scared.

Fright­ened.

I might even very well shit myself.

Why?

I just fin­ished read­ing THIS ARTICLE, in my favourite news­pa­per, the Guardian, about a par­tic­u­larly wor­ry­ing trend in America.

It seems like acad­e­mia is under attack from the crazeeee chris­t­ian right-wing nut­ters in Amer­ica and I don’t like it.

I think it is fuck­ing dis­gust­ing with an accent on the fucking.

Basi­cally, stu­dents are being encour­aged to spy on their school teach­ers and uni­ver­sity lec­tur­ers, look­ing for any “anti-American” state­ments they might be mak­ing in class.

In this con­text, “anti Amer­i­can” is defined by any­thing that is con­sid­ered lib­eral or crit­i­cal of the Bush regime (for it is a regime, isn’t it?).
What it really is, is an attack of free­dom of thought.

I was taught to “ques­tion every­thing”; to let my thoughts and my imag­i­na­tion run free. To tell stu­dents any­thing other than that is tan­ta­mount to child cruelty!

There’s an old say­ing in Amer­ica goes some­thing like this: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Could some­one tell me, approx­i­mately, when this par­tic­u­lar ten­ant of Amer­i­can free­dom passed away? I would have sent flow­ers and a card if I knew.

The fact that more peo­ple aren’t pissed off about this is quite frankly, shock­ing to me.

Uni­ver­si­ties have always been the tra­di­tional home of rad­i­cal thoughts and ideals. The rea­son for this is sim­ple, edu­cated peo­ple are smart and we under­stand that a lib­eral, free think­ing soci­ety, is a healthy one.

Notice my use of the word “we”?

Amer­i­can soci­ety is far from healthy; if it gets much sicker, it might be time for a spot of euthanasia.

Oooops, I bet­ter be care­ful what I say, or I’ll be accused of encour­ag­ing ter­ror­ism because I made an oblique, satir­i­cal ref­er­ence to the elim­i­na­tion of America.

I don’t want Amer­ica elim­i­nated; far from it. What I want is the Amer­ica I used to know, back the way it was. Please.

Amer­ica is sup­posed to be the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Here in the infancy of the 21st cen­tury, it is neither.

There is noth­ing brave about the way Amer­ica con­ducts itself in the world, unless you think tyran­ni­cal bul­lies are brave. In which case, you might like to find out more about a guy named Adolph Hitler.

A teacher that is men­tioned in the Guardian arti­cle that I’ve linked to, said some­thing sim­i­lar in the class­room, only he fol­lowed it with it with a qual­i­fi­ca­tion; say­ing that he didn’t hold this view him­self, nor did he expect his stu­dents to adopt it. He only wanted them to be able to be able to think and con­sider oppos­ing viewpoints.

I offer no such qual­i­fi­ca­tion or apology.

Amer­ica right now is a lot like Ger­many in the early 1940s, only with­out the effi­ciency. Just look at the unholy dis­as­ter that is Iraq.

If the Nazi’s had invaded Bagh­dad in 2003, just imag­ine how smoothly the take-over, occu­pa­tion and exter­mi­na­tion would have gone. Amer­ica can’t even do world dom­i­na­tion right!
But it’s what’s going on inside Amer­ica that is so incred­i­bly unpleasant.

A uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor or aca­d­e­mic, should not have to watch every word they say for fear of offend­ing the regime. Unless you are in North Korea, or Saudi Ara­bia, or some other fucked up, shitty lit­tle country.

Amer­ica is a fucked up, shitty big country.

So hey, you Amer­i­cans who read my blog. Yes, you yankee-doodle, I am address­ing you directly.

Wake up!

They are tak­ing the coun­try you love away from you and turn­ing it into some­thing that it should never, ever be!

They are steal­ing your free­dom at every turn!

They are com­mit­ting acts of state ter­ror­ism in your name!

They want you asleep; they want you to be a zom­bie. As long as you’re spend­ing your hard-earned cash, you are ful­fill­ing your role in society.

There is more to life than shop­ping and eat­ing! No, I don’t mean fucking!

Every­one, in every way, should be doing some­thing to make this world a bet­ter place. I don’t care how big or how small what you do is, as long as you do it.

Maybe it’s pick­ing up some stray lit­ter you see on the street and deposit­ing it in the near­est bin.

How about call­ing on an elderly neigh­bour, just to ask if they are alright or need some­thing from the shops?

Per­haps you’re work­ing in a lab­o­ra­tory and it will be you that cures can­cer, or AIDS or some other hor­ri­ble disease.

Maybe you write non­sense on the inter­net and pre­tend it makes a difference.

Oh wait, that’s me. Well, it’s some­thing I guess.

There’s one other story around today that upset me, but not in the same way as the pre­vi­ous one. It’s one of those amaz­ing tales that we hear more and more every day, because we well and truly live in the future now.

A team of sci­en­tists have suc­cess­fully grown replace­ment blad­ders for peo­ple in a lab­o­ra­tory and implanted them in peo­ple. CLICK HERE to read the Guardian ver­sion for yourself.

It is absolutely amaz­ing that they can do this now and they say in the future, they should be able to use this tech­nique to grow other replace­ment organs for us, like hearts and kid­neys and livers.

But why was your favourite north Lon­don based hippy sad­dened by this rather impres­sive news?

About a year and a half ago, my father died as a result of blad­der can­cer. Hey ho.

Had this pio­neer­ing pro­ce­dure been invented 10 years ago, per­haps he’d still be alive today.

Other major devel­op­ments like this will come in the field of health, of this I am cer­tain. Not every­one who is alive right now will ben­e­fit from these giant leaps in science.

Just imag­ine being the last per­son to die on the day before they dis­cover how to make us all immortal.

Talk about bad timing!

Do you dream of win­ning a slightly used bong? Well, click here and be one step closer to real­is­ing that dream!

Hello kids, how’s life out there in inter­net­land? We’re vir­tu­ally neigh­bours, here!

I’ve just arrived home from work on this rainy and grey Sat­ur­day morn­ing, hav­ing just briefly seen the most amaz­ingly per­fect rainbow.

Ya see, how can life be bad when you’ve just seen a per­fect rainbow?

Christ on the cross, but am I a proper hippy some­times or what?

Or what.

The main rea­son I’ve logged in and blogged on is that now that I’ve spent some qual­ity time with all my new RooR good­ies, I thought I might pro­vide you with my more con­sid­ered impres­sions of this finely crafted glassware.

And that’s where I stopped writ­ing on Sat­ur­day morn­ing. It’s Sun­day morn­ing now, a full 24 hours later.

Ain’t time travel amazing?

I’ve just arrived home from work again; only today it’s sunny and bright, but you didn’t come here for the daily north Lon­don weather report, did you?

You want to know about RooR!

My first pur­chase from RooR was the “Mini Steam­roller”, which is a very inex­pen­sive piece and is well within reach of every­one read­ing this. It costs less than seven quid. All you need to add to that is this glass gauze for another £1.50 and you have one of the smoothest hit­ting small pipes I’ve ever had the plea­sure of smok­ing from!

My next pur­chase was the RooR “Pocket Friend” which is admit­tedly on the pricey side, but an amaz­ing look­ing pipe. My ini­tial reac­tion to this pipe was slight dis­ap­point­ment, but now that I’ve had a bit more time to really get to know it, I can say that it too is quite good. Con­sider that my con­sid­ered, revised opinion.

But is it worth the sev­enty quid price tag?

That, my friends, is a mat­ter between you, your per­sonal god and your per­sonal accountant.

I thought I was your per­sonal god, anyway!

I think the crafts­man­ship and func­tion­al­ity are both top-notch and one does get what one pays for, but I do appre­ci­ate for a touch more money, you could buy a full sized bong.

Ok, it’s a lux­ury, but not a necessity.

I know it’s expen­sive, but if you want a nice RooR pipe for chill­ing out while watch­ing tele­vi­sion, this is the per­fect one!

The rea­son it is so good, I think, is two fold; firstly, it uses a nor­mal RooR bowl and glass gauze, which are extremely good, and sec­ondly, because of the large cool­ing cham­ber and smoke path, it hits like a dream!

Mainly, it really fucks you up and lets face it, isn’t that why we all smoke dope?

We do all smoke dope, don’t we?

I was just using the Pocket Friend and I am quite nicely toasted. That’s gotta be wor­thy of a yippppeee!

You know, I haven’t requested a “yipppeee for the hippy” in ages. I can’t remem­ber the last time I did actu­ally. So how about one for old time’s sake?

Go on, gimme a yipppeee!

Thank you, I really needed that.

We now resume the reg­u­larly sched­uled programme.

After the Pocket Friend, I went for a full-on bong, the “Lit­tle Sista Ice Mas­ter 5.0” which I’ve now used a few times.

I can state, cat­e­gor­i­cally that it is by far the best bong I have ever smoked from and that’s really say­ing something!

Part of the rea­son my Lit­tle Sista is so good is that I added two optional bits of kit. I bought this RooR Dif­fuser and this Molino Pre-Cooler, which dra­mat­i­cally changed the way this bong smokes. It hits like heaven must feel!

If there was a heaven.

The dif­fuser soft­ens the smoke as it comes through the down­pipe; it is the down­pipe, only the end is sealed and then punc­tured with lots of lit­tle holes, which is what soft­ens the smoke as it passes through the water in the base of the bong.

The pre-cooler slots into the ground glass joint of the down­pipe and holds a small amount of water, into which its own down­pipe resides. And at the top is the bowl, filled with my favourite smok­ing mixture.

Ok, it’s pure, freshly ground, skunky bud, but you could use any­thing you wanted.

Why would you want to use any­thing else?

The pre-cooler, as the name sug­gests, adds an addi­tional level of cool­ing, as well as fil­tra­tion. It also catches any ash that might fall into the down­pipe, keep­ing it from clog­ging up the base of the dif­fuser and also keep­ing the water in main cham­ber of the bong fresher, longer.

I do like the Molino Pre-Cooler, but I am think­ing of order­ing the RooR ver­sion, called the RooR Ash Catcher 5.0 Black. Again, it’s not cheap, but it would be hand­made to a very high stan­dard. Mainly, I am think­ing of get­ting it because it is clear, which would make it eas­ier to see how much smoke is in it.

Plus, it would match the Lit­tle Sista bet­ter and RooR is as much about style as it is functionality!

All of this praise is to serve as an approved endorse­ment from the northlon­don­hippy for all things RooR.

If you smoke dope, you owe it to your­self to invest in some of this fan­tas­tic glass­ware. It will last you a life­time and pro­vide you with years of smok­ing pleasure!

And if you are feel­ing really rich, per­haps you could order the new RooR cus­tom, “Lit­tle Sis­ter White Lines 5.0” which sells for a cool £360, but is a work of art!

And please note, though I do love my new RooR good­ies, obvi­ously other bongs and pipes work too.

For exam­ple, the Black Leaf bong I’ve quite gen­er­ously offered as the prize in my lat­est wild and wacky con­test. It hits like a moth­er­fucker too! Who­ever is lucky, nee, blessed with win­ning this fine bong will have years of smok­ing plea­sure ahead of them too!

I started a rather labo­ri­ous task last week and that is fix­ing all of “my clas­sic entries” from my old blogspot blog.

When they were imported here into my fancy new blog, they arrived with­out titles or cat­e­gories. They don’t even say they were authored by the hippy! Oh the horror!

The older entries don’t have titles, because I didn’t give them any; like­wise with the cat­e­gories. Bum­mer, man.

That means I have to go into each one and add a title and cat­e­gories myself, then repub­lish. I’ve only done one month so far, out of the last twenty-five months of blog­ging, so I have a long way to go before I’m fin­ished. Though, once I’m done, get­ting around this site will be much easier.

And I’ll be able to pick my top five entries much eas­ier, since I’ll be read­ing every word I’ve writ­ten over the next few weeks. See, I didn’t forget!

And finally, I want to send out a huge “thank you” to all my hip­py­fans, both old and new, for mak­ing the month that just fin­ished, the best month for hip­pyvis­i­tors ever! I did big-time, business!

I might not be able to claim I’m under­ground much longer! Oh the horror!

Know­ing that the num­ber of you hip­py­fans is grow­ing every day cer­tainly makes writ­ing this blog much more fun!

Ok, I’m an atten­tion seeker, lovemelovemelovemeloveme, but only online.

In my real life, in the real world, I con­tinue to remain anony­mous, invis­i­ble and unno­ticed, which is how I like it. I even had my hair cut quite short last week, a num­ber seven back and sides! Until then, it was down past my shoul­ders, thick and curly.

I looked like a rock god!

Ok, a short, fat and bald­ing rock god, but a rock god none the less.

Now, with short hair, I can move amongst you mor­tals even eas­ier. I could be peer­ing over your shoul­der right now, as you read these words and you wouldn’t even know I was there!

Does that creep you out?

Don’t worry; I won’t fon­dle you, unless you fon­dle me first.