The northlondonhippy

Archive for September, 2009

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a little something here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this particular post was featured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be bothered to re-read it right now, I’ll summarise it for you: I speculated on the lengths future terrorists would have to go through to sneak explosive devices on to planes and the additional security measures that would have to be put in place to maintain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I theorised that a terrorists’ rectum would become a compartment for hiding plastique and airport security screeners would have to play proctologist to make sure all air travellers were not carrying anything up their bottoms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruction would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would certainly put flying into a brand new perspective. Making sure you wear clean socks without any holes wouldn’t seem so important any more.

It turns out, I was partially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up officials at a meeting in Saudi Arabia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it detonated and it only killed the bomber. You’re supposed to take it out of your bottom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun newspaper, under their clever headline; “Suicide Bummer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my website, so they probably worked this one out on their own. Now that this frightening and icky technique is out there, how long before airports implement new security procedures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to display your ringpiece in airports for all to see, anal bleaching is set to be the next big growth industry. They’ll even have a new slogan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

The powers that be haven’t really sold us on the coming climate apocalypse.

I’m not denying its happening, I can clearly see its effects regularly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politicians and scientists have explained it to us very well.

“Climate change” has a PR problem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a simple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Climate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regardless of the atmospheric temperature, Earth will keep spinning through space for a very long time, probably until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Supernova or whatever it is stars do and that’s millions of years away.

Climate change might kill every living thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong selling point, only we don’t really care that much about living things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans anyway, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about ourselves. Self-preservation is something we all seem to have in common.

Tackling “climate change” has to be about saving one’s self from the coming Armageddon. Fear is always an excellent selling point.

Slowing climate change will save your life and the lives of everyone you care about. Not slowing climate change will probably kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global temperature goes up, more people will die from heat-related illnesses. Remember all those old French folks who died in the heatwave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air conditioning? If the energy suppliers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t matter and you’ll still fry.

Large, currently heavily populated areas of the planet will become uninhabitable, potentially displacing millions. All those refugees will have to go somewhere, which will increase crowding in more temperate regions while stretching dwindling resources beyond capacity. Life will become more difficult to sustain.

Tropical diseases without known cures will spread out from the current hot zones to increasingly wider areas and even more people will die.

Food production will be disrupted, prompting starvation on an unimaginable scale.

I’ve read that London has only a 48 hour food supply at any given time, because of the way supermarket stock is managed. Food practically goes from lorry to shelf without sitting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local supermarkets ran dry, how would you feed yourself and your family? Even if you stockpile long-life meals, they’ll run out eventually. Think you can get a farm up and running before it does? Assuming there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and livestock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unrestrained climate change means death for you.

Its simple math really, if we don’t do something soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Suddenly, those low energy lightbulbs don’t seem so bad and separating your recyclable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world leaders are heading to Copenhagen this December to go through the motions of a Climate Change summit. Perhaps, if they adopted the following slogan, people might finally start paying attention:

Climate Change = Death

And once everyone’s paying attention, perhaps we all can start taking the right steps to slow down climate change. The life you save just might be your own.

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surfing the internet on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, preferring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defensively, trying to remember when I last posted something here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my somewhat lax standards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hoping you could tell me.

I haven’t been working that much. I haven’t been doing much of anything, if you must know. I think I am perfecting the art of being and nothingness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fictional. I could just be imaginary, living only in your mind.

You’re staring at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are seeing words written by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imaginary grammar?

See, this is what happens when you start the day with a strong coffee and a skunky spliff peppered with bubble-hash. Everyone should start their day this way.

I spend inordinate amounts of time simply lost in thought. I disappear into my own little Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my creativity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stupid Hashimoto’s Disease a couple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it probably took another year before I twigged that something was actually physically wrong with me, but in retrospect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 novels and was reasonably prolific here on my website too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fizzled out while I was writing it and remains one chapter shy of being complete. The first book was published, but I didn’t do enough to promote it and it languishes on virtual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly commissioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mistress. The guy who liked it and could have commissioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replacements were far less enthusiastic and the possibility of producing the series faded away.

Rather than continue to plug away trying to do something with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthusiasm for the project, but in truth, it was probably my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of anything since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my output is not even close to the levels I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Disease and my doctor is still adjusting my medication levels. If they ever get it right, I should feel better and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll continue to distract myself with my vivid imagination and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 minutes of your life I just wasted, not me.

I’ve had my geek on for the last week. I successfully updated all three of my Macs to Snow Leopard and I swapped my iPhone 3G for the new 3GS.

Snow Leopard
——————–
The upgrades were very smooth and simple, though I did have some hardware trouble with my three year old Mac Mini. The Snow Leopard installation DVD would not mount in the SuperDrive, instead it would try to read it, then spit it out. A healthy dose of canned, pressurised air sprayed into the DVD slot cured it and I was able to complete the installation.

The changes with Snow Leopard are subtle, but welcome. Expose and Stacks are noticeably improved and more useful, the Finder tweaks are also quite cool, especially the icon sizing and preview functions. Mainly, everything is a lot faster, start-ups, shutdowns and especially sleeping and waking. When I wake up my iMac now, it reconnects to my network almost instantly.

The best thing is the amount of hard drive space I got back on each computer, around 10-12gb. Streamlining is a good thing!

I bought the family pack version of Snow Leopard, which cost £39, so that’s thirteen quid per computer. A bargain!

I haven’t had any serious issues so far, all of my regular software is working fine. Safari seems especially fast and launches like a rocket. Oh and maybe I’m crazy, but the screen seems sharper, like they’ve improved the graphics card drivers, or the way it renders images, I don’t really know.

iPhone 3GS
—————–
I’ve had it in the back of my head that if I didn’t get a new iPhone by the end of the summer, I would leave it until next July. I’ve tried to buy one a couple of times, but they haven’t been in stock. They are apparently still in great demand.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would buy the iPhone outright, getting it on Pay As You Go, rather than getting it as a contract upgrade. By doing it this way, I will then be eligible for a subsidised upgrade next Summer, when the next model comes out.

What finally pushed me towards acting is a friend of mine lost his iPhone 3G and needed to replace it. O2 wanted silly amount of money from him for a new one and he offered to buy mine. I agreed, if I could find a black, 32gb 3GS on PAYG.

O2 didn’t have any, the Car Phone Warehouse didn’t have any, but the online Apple Store said they were shipping them on 5 days delay. I went ahead and ordered it last Tuesday.

It shipped on the Thursday and arrived in my hot little hands on the Friday. Wow, that was fast!

Swapping phones was an absolute breeze. I popped my contract SIM out of the old 3G iPhone, then popped it into the new 3GS. I connected the 3GS to my iMac and it instantly appeared in iTunes. It was activated in seconds, then offering to restore it from my most recent back-up, done an hour before. It restored and synced my media quickly. It was set up just like my old iPhone, even my apps were in the same places.

I did have to re-enter a few passwords for email accounts and tweak a few settings, but I would say 98% of it happened automatically.

Wiping the old phone took longer than setting up the new one. The old iPhone switched on and worked without a SIM card and I was able to reset all settings with a couple of clicks. Be warned, it takes around 2 hours to wipe a 16gb iPhone.

So what do I think of my new iPhone 3GS?

I’ll say this right now, it is not an essential must-have upgrade. I’ve gained a few useful and welcome features and a lot of speed, but that alone is not worth the money.

The increase in speed is obvious, the entire phone is faster and more responsive. Apps launch almost instantly, there’s no lag at all.

The video camera is good, not great, but better than no video functions at all. The tap-to-focus feature is very cool and really works. The compass is also a nice thing to have, especially if you use the Map app to get around on foot, it really helps to orient yourself in new surroundings.

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

I’m sure I will sell my 3GS next summer when the next iPhone upgrade comes, it will still have considerable value then. If the 3GS is considered an evolutionary upgrade, then next summer hopefully we will see a revolutionary jump in iPhone technology. At least, that’s what I’m gambling!