The northlondonhippy

Archive for March, 2009

Shot with my Polaroid Zi6 video cam­era attached to a Gorilla Pod, which was hang­ing upside from the rear view mir­ror of my car as I drove around north London.

Edited on iMovie ’09 in less than an hour. I sped the footage up as much as I could, which turns out is 800% or 8 times nor­mal speed.

The music is some­thing I recorded years ago which just sort of worked.

I still have way too much time on my hands.

And thus with his six-hundred and eighty-eighth post, did the northlon­don­hippy mark this most aus­pi­cious occasion.

Yep, fuck­ers its true, today is the fifth anniver­sary of me post­ing crap on the internet.

I con­tem­plated an elab­o­rate fire­works dis­play along the Thames tonight, with a one-hundred piece, live orches­tra to pro­vide the back­ing music, but then I thought, naaaaah.

I’ll just write some­thing quick, off the top of my head that marks the day with­out adding any­thing to the greater under­stand­ing of the human condition.

I also con­sid­ered all sorts of other things; con­tests, a cir­cus per­for­mance, a live human sac­ri­fice or even a long, drawn out, over-wrought post which reflected in great detail on the last five years of my life.

Naaaah!

This web­site and what­ever it is I do here exactly, isn’t like that. Never has been, prob­a­bly never will be.

Instead, I like to think of it as a cool place to vir­tu­ally hang out, where you can read some shit what I wrote or just stare at the smi­ley face on my ban­ner. As long as you like being here, I don’t mind what floats your boat.

When I started blog­ging five years ago, I didn’t have a job, a future or a clue about what I was doing…five years later and well, at least I’ve improved on two outta three.

And before you ask, I have a job now and I have a clue about what I’m doing.

Oh, right.

As I estab­lished before, this web­site stopped being a blog a long time ago. I can’t remem­ber the last time I men­tioned what I had for lunch.

Or even ate lunch now that I think of it.

This web­site is my tiny lit­tle cor­ner of the inter­net, where I can do what­ever the fuck I like. The fact that peo­ple come and still read it is a tes­ti­ment not to my tal­ent, but to the over­all bleak and dreary nature of a mod­ern existence.

For a few min­utes, while you’re here, maybe you for­get about your own prob­lems and think about mine for a while instead.

And damn do I have prob­lems! Besides the obvi­ous psy­chi­atric ones.

Remem­ber I’m a manic-depressive sociopath with obsessive-compulsive, nar­cis­sis­tic tendencies.

At least that’s what it says on my doctor’s notes.

I’m a short, fat, bald­ing middle-aged, make-believe hippy and weed-head who you wouldn’t give a sec­ond thought to if you passed me on the streets. I don’t stand out in a crowd.

And that’s OK.

This web­site is where I rant and rave; where I express myself and some­times even con­fess some of my exten­sive col­lec­tion of sins.

This web­site is where I tell the truth as best I can, about what­ever topic I choose; be it weed or world events or even myself.

Espe­cially myself. While self-deception may truly be my favourite form of decep­tion, I don’t try to trick any of you, any more than I try to fool myself.

I’m free to do all of that because of my anony­mous online iden­tity as the northlondonhippy.

There’re only a hand­ful of peo­ple who know that I do this in the real world, prob­a­bly well under a dozen. I don’t mind if they find out my secrets, since I’ve prob­a­bly told them already, anyway.

And it wouldn’t mat­ter if you did know my name, I could type it right now and you would say, “So what?”

You’d be right.

I main­tain my anonymity because I spend a lot of time writ­ing about cannabis and my love of it. Until its legally avail­able, I’m stay­ing anonymous.

One of my aims here is to dis­pel the stu­pid myths sur­round­ing my favourite plant. That’s an area where I do feel like I’ve been some­what suc­cess­ful. Any­one read­ing my cannabis-related mate­r­ial would get a lot of hard, ver­i­fi­able facts, not the lies and deceit shov­elled by the main­stream media here in the UK.

I’ve been extremely hon­est about my nearly 30 years of daily cannabis use. Oh and for the record, most of its been “skunk” and I haven’t killed anyone.

Yet.

I’ve been through a lot in the last five years, but then who hasn’t?

Five years is a rea­son­ably long time to be doing the same thing. Quite frankly I didn’t think my atten­tion span was up to it, but I here I am, still typ­ing away.

For some rea­son, I sud­denly feel I need to men­tion my par­ents, I guess because I lost them both in the last five years; my mother just last xmas and my father in Sep­tem­ber of 2004. I used to write more about them, but I don’t so much now.

I miss them.

I should also men­tion two more peo­ple, start­ing with my younger brother, who is also the designer and web­mas­ter of this site. None of this would be pos­si­ble with­out him and I owe him a great deal of thanks.

And Mrs. Hippy, whose love and sup­port I rely on every day and have done for well over a decade. I don’t know what I would do with­out her, but luck­ily I won’t have to find out.

And then there’s me, weed-head, media-whore, sin­ner & saint. I pro­claim my insignif­i­cance in the uni­verse with a per­verse sense of pride.

I’m a mes­siah for the new mil­len­nium, it says so at the top of this page, so it must be true.

I’m the biggest inter­net celebrity you’ve never heard of.…until now…

So gimme a yippeee, I’m the northlondonhippy!

And what do the next five years have in store for the northlondonhippy?

Fuck me, do I really have to keep doing this for another five years?

I’ve been try­ing to get my head around the steady, con­stant stream of fol­low­ers who come and go like the tides. It seems I’m just about gain­ing and los­ing them in equal num­bers and its all rather random.

I’ve been look­ing at the data com­piled at TweetEffect.Com, which cross-references your tweets with the gains and loses in your fol­low­ers. In look­ing at my data, it seems the same tweets attract and repel at the same time.

Con­fus­ing!

It got me to think­ing about the best ways to instantly attract a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter. I came up with ten ideas that I thought I would share:

1) Be famous already — If you are already famous, you have an estab­lished fan base and an instant fol­low­ing. Of course, if you’re already famous you don’t need my help.

2) Imi­tate a celebrity — This is sur­pris­ingly effec­tive, but can be short lived. Oh and point­less, now that @Valebrity and @CelebsWhoTwitter are mak­ing efforts to ver­ify them. That said, a fake Tina Fey has over 100,000 fol­low­ers, you could just change the account name and sell it on eBay for heaps of cash.

3) Get endorsed by @wossy or @stephenfry — Your Twit­ter name men­tioned or rec­om­mended by either of them, or any other celebrity with a large fol­low­ing will attract scores of new fol­low­ers. Whether or not they remain loyal to you is another question.

4) Take a photo of a com­mer­cial air­liner in the Hud­son River or of one crash­ing near Ams­ter­dam — If fate puts you some­place where some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is hap­pen­ing, doc­u­ment it as best you can. Take pho­tos if you have a cam­er­a­phone and tweet them, tweet about what you see. If it is impor­tant enough and you are there soon enough, every­one will want to see what you cap­ture next.

5) Fol­low every­one and hope a large per­cent­age fol­low u back — This is the equiv­a­lent of throw­ing as much shit as you can at a wall and hop­ing some of it sticks. And like shit and des­per­a­tion, this one smells bad too, don’t bother.

6) Swear pro­fusely — Thanks to CurseBird.Com, the more you use bad lan­guage, the higher your rank on that web­site. I like it.

7) Require a res­cue — This one would be good as long as you sur­vive, but if you don’t, its a bit point­less. Hope you’re never in a posi­tion to find out!

8) Offer peo­ple a free lap­top — I don’t know if this works, but I do seem to get fol­lowed by a lot of peo­ple who want to give me a free Mac­Book Air.

9) Offer to tweet your credit cards num­bers if u hit 1,000 fol­low­ers — Guilty! Yes this one’s from me. I’ve still got a long way to go.

10) Be refresh­ingly orig­i­nal & enter­tain­ing — it couldn’t hurt!

The Econ­o­mist, a rather con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion, has come out strongly in favour of the legal­i­sa­tion, tax­a­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of drugs.

All drugs.

The arti­cle I am refer­ring to is RIGHT HERE and is well worth a few min­utes of your valu­able surf­ing time because it lays out a very ratio­nal, sen­si­ble and per­sua­sive argu­ment for this rad­i­cal suggestion.

As the UN meets in Vienna to decide the next decade’s drug pol­icy, why won’t they lis­ten to the experts?

There are so many intel­li­gent, edu­cated, thought­ful mem­bers of respectable soci­ety who believe legal­i­sa­tion is the only solu­tion. There are loads of senior police­men who believe this, many civil ser­vants and politi­cians do too, but they are too afraid to speak up because of the false hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the issue.

David Cameron, most likely the next Prime Min­is­ter of this coun­try is sym­pa­thetic to the idea of rad­i­cally chang­ing our approach on the sub­ject as men­tioned in this, another well writ­ten and thought­ful piece on the sub­ject from politics.co.uk

I’ve always thought we’ve had more of a chance of chang­ing the laws under a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment, because it takes a strong party to take deci­sive action.

If David Cameron would take one key step in that direc­tion, he could have my support.

Mr. Cameron, I implore you to shift your pub­lic posi­tion based on facts and sci­ence. Please con­sider decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis as soon as you are in power.

Finally, a gov­ern­ment drug pol­icy I agree with completely…

Ille­gal factory-style cannabis farms should be closed down.

Check out THIS REPORT from the BBC.

Fac­tory cannabis-farms are often set-up in rented accom­mo­da­tion, with the land­lords none the wiser until they receive a phone call from the police telling them their income prop­erty has been trashed.

Ille­gal cannabis farm­ers steal elec­tric­ity from neigh­bours or from the an energy sup­plier; either way its theft and its wrong. Safety is ignored and fires are not uncom­mon. And sad­dest of all, they are fre­quently staffed by ille­gal aliens trapped in a type of hell­ish inden­tured servitude.

Where I split from the gov­ern­ment is their choice of solu­tion; police raids won’t make the prob­lem go away, it will only make it relo­cate to yet another unsus­pect­ing venue. The trade is far too lucra­tive for those involved to give it up. Raids are sim­ply a cal­cu­lated risk bal­anced against a very reward­ing return.

Its sup­ply and demand, the very cor­ner­stone of our cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. To ignore or deny this very sim­ple truth, is to be blink­ered and ostrich like.

There’s a bet­ter way.

There’s always a bet­ter way, but it would involve our lead­ers shift­ing their cur­rent posi­tion, which is one of dis­in­for­ma­tion and lies, towards a more open and hon­est approach.

Its time to legalise the indus­try and take it out of the hands of crim­i­nals. Its time to reg­u­late and tax cannabis, bring the mar­ket under some sort of control.

To be against a legal cannabis indus­try is to be against the very heart and soul of capitalism.

Don’t let the con­di­tion­ing the media has been force-feeding you colour your view on this. They’ve been sys­tem­at­i­cally try­ing to dis­credit cannabis and per­vert your per­cep­tion of it for quite some time now.

Why?

Its easy to score points with the pub­lic by appear­ing tough on drugs. Also, it diverts your atten­tion from more impor­tant issues, like Iraq, cli­mate change or the economy.

The time is now for this unadul­ter­ated bull­shit to end.

Back when Blair and Blun­kett were in charge, cannabis was down­graded and they even toyed with a police pol­icy of mak­ing arrests for pos­ses­sion of cannabis the low­est pos­si­ble pri­or­ity. Things were finally mov­ing in the right direc­tion, the gov­ern­ment was lis­ten­ing to advi­sors and sci­en­tis­tis and using a bit of com­mon sense.

Mean­while in Amer­ica, the “war on drugs” was still going strong, along with fed­eral raids on med­ical mar­i­juana clubs and impris­on­ment for pos­ses­sion. This wasn’t that long ago.

Under Obama, things have already changed with an end to fed­eral raids and an offi­cial pol­icy that secedes power to indi­vid­ual states with regards to cannabis.

Cal­i­for­nia is now con­sid­er­ing legal­i­sa­tion and tax­a­tion, because the state is nearly bank­rupt. Des­per­ate times clearly call for cre­ative mea­sures, this one will bring Cali an esti­mated annual tidy sum of $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) dollars.

Many other states have decrim­i­nalised pos­ses­sion and have made it the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing priority.

Our out-of-touch, out-of-step gov­ern­ment is about as un-Obama as possible.

If peo­ple won­der why Obama didn’t make more time for Gor­don Brown, they’re not really look­ing closely enough. They couldn’t be more polar oppo­sites when it comes to gen­uine lib­eral thought and policy.

Legal­is­ing weed would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs, for legit­i­mate farm­ers and dis­trib­u­tors; jobs that already exist in the black econ­omy, fuelling a rather size­able black mar­ket that exists out­side the tax and social secu­rity system.

A legal and con­trolled indus­try would insure that safety stan­dards were met at the point of pro­duc­tion, for the facil­i­ties, the staff and the prod­uct. You would know the weed you were get­ting was pure and unadul­ter­ated. You would know the per­son who grew it was paid a rea­son­able, tax­able wage.

As much as I wish to see these dan­ger­ous and ille­gal cannabis farms closed down, I’m smart enough to realise that police raids alone are not the answer. If you really want to end the ille­gal cannabis trade, there is only one prac­ti­cal, work­able solu­tion: Legalise!

Even the UN may come to this con­clu­sion as they pre­pare to finalise an agree­ment this week in Vienna, but as this report in today’s Guardian sug­gests, there are still deep divi­sions with some EU and Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries favour­ing a more ratio­nal approach, with the US pre­fer­ring to con­tinue the point­less “war on drugs”.

Oh Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama, are you lis­ten­ing? The “war on drugs” has been an abysmal fail­ure and many knowl­edge­able and respectable peo­ple believe its been worse than the actual harm caused by the drugs them­selves. Could you please call your min­ions in Vienna and sort this sorry mess out?

If you want to know more, please check out my Cannabis Truth Series

Hav­ing a some­what point­lessly devi­ous mind means you occa­sion­ally spot things that are meant to be used one way, but can just as eas­ily be exploited to be used another way.

Every user account on Twit­ter offers you the chance to receive the tweets it gen­er­ates via an RSS feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, click right here.

If you have either your browser or a news­reader app con­fig­ured to deal with RSS feeds, all you need to do is click on the RSS link and its mag­i­cally added to your sub­scrip­tions list.

The link on Twit­ter pro­files is easy to find, its just below the thumb­nail pho­tos of the peo­ple being followed:

Once you’ve added the link to your RSS reader, every time you refresh it, you will receive the tweets from the selected feeds, assum­ing they’ve sent any­thing since the last time you updated.

All that’s fair enough, but what if you wanted to fol­low some­one with­out them know­ing you’re fol­low­ing them. Per­haps an ex-partner, maybe even your cur­rent one or your boss or your best friend or your worst enemy, whoever?

You can use this method to accom­plish just that, stalk­ing with stealth on Twitter.

If you fol­low someone’s tweets via your RSS reader, you won’t appear in their fol­low­ers list. You won’t appear any­where and only you will know you’re receiv­ing them.

Sneaky and cool, eh?

Now, I know there are peo­ple out there who might use this rel­a­tively sim­ple tech­nique for nefar­i­ous pur­poses, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Right?

Promises, promises. Politi­cians make them all the time when they are cam­paign­ing, only to con­ve­niently for­get about them once in office, but not Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama.

This week, US Attor­ney Gen­eral, Eric Holder con­firmed that fed­eral raids on Med­ical Mar­i­juana facil­i­ties would end and indi­vid­ual states could deter­mine their own poli­cies regard­ing my favourite plant. He said this is “now Amer­i­can policy”.

How cool is that?

This is a huge shift in the way the law deals with weed in Amer­ica. I wish the UK could be equally enlight­ened, but the gov­ern­ment here works very hard to be as un-Obama-like as possible.

And they don’t want to stop there either. Leg­is­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia are now con­sid­er­ing tak­ing it one step fur­ther, with a pos­si­ble plan to fully legalise and tax cannabis to help bale out the finan­cially des­ti­tute state. They say it could bring in $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) in tax rev­enue to the state annually.

That’s a lot of green­backs for a lot of green­ery! Its com­mon fuck­ing sense! Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work, never has, never will. If you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.

Obama’s motto through­out his cam­paign was “Yes, we can.” Now that he’s in office, the new motto is: “Yes, we cannabis!”

Roseanne Barr, domes­tic god­dess, come­dian and now radio talk­show host is sell­ing some very cool tee-shirts in Amer­ica with that very slo­gan on them, Yes, we CANnabis.

We should all order our­selves one to show our sup­port for this long over­due change in pol­icy. Let’s hope that it spreads out from Amer­ica to the rest of the world.