The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘the hippy’ Category

I’ve been doing this for six years, today.

Blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Check out my first ever post from six years ago. CLICK HERE

Happy anniver­sary, fuckers!

Remem­ber the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld?

“No soup for you!”, he would exclaim when he deter­mined some­one was unwor­thy of his tasty broth.

Ever won­der what hap­pened to the Soup Nazi since the TV show went off the air?

He works for Apple, reject­ing iPhone app sub­mis­sions. “No app for you!”, he exclaimed as he con­sid­ered an app from your favourite inde­pen­dent blog­ger and inter­net god.

I mean me.

I don’t get to have my very own iPhone app, the App Nazi says so.

Apple’s recent pol­icy change ban­ning inde­pen­dent blog­gers from sub­mit­ting apps to for pub­li­ca­tion on iTunes is still piss­ing me off.

And here’s the thing, it would still piss me off even if I wasn’t directly effected by their deci­sion. Its wrong to silence any voice, how­ever big or small. We all have a right to express our­selves, on any plat­form we choose, on any sub­ject we choose.

I chose to put an app together to bring my con­tent to the iPhone plat­form. Apple, as the provider of the plat­form, have locked me out.

I should have tried to pub­lish a fart app. Appar­ently, you can’t have too many of them.

It could be argued that my con­tent is already avail­able on the iPhone plat­form, via Safari, the iPhone’s browser. You’d win that argu­ment, its true.

All my app did was present this web­site, along with some other enter­tain­ing con­tent pro­vided and owned by me in a very iPhone friendly for­mat, via a cus­tom designed app. One tap on the northlon­don­hippy icon on your Home Screen and you’d be here, hang­ing out vir­tu­ally with me. No book­marks or URLs, just a clean, easy to read inter­face, with groovy NLH graphics.

It would have cost Apple pen­nies to host my free app. Its not like they’re strapped for cash, they’ve got bil­lions just lying around, doing nothing.

They could shut me up with a cou­ple of mil­lion. Or a free iPad.

But they don’t need to shut me up. Nobody seems to give a shit. I emailed a few tech web­sites and news­pa­pers with my sad tale of Apple app woe. Nobody bit.

Links to my pre­vi­ous entry did get tweeted around Twit­ter and buzzed across Google Buzz, or what­ever the kids are doing these days but I am still wait­ing for a groundswell of pop­u­lar sup­port which would push Apple to recon­sider this very fool­ish, point­less and spite­ful decision.

Apple began in Steve Wozniak’s garage, with Woz and Steve Jobs knock­ing together the first Apple com­puter. Blog­ging is not much dif­fer­ent than that, we’re all out here just knock­ing stuff together. Some make it into the main­stream, some toil in rel­a­tive obscu­rity, but most just seem to give up. Many blogs lie dor­mant after a brief, unsat­is­fy­ing flurry of activ­ity, but not this one.

I know I’m not the most pro­lific blog­ger, but I’m still here and have been for 6 fun filled years. Ok, they haven’t been that much fun, but I am still here.

I’ve been toy­ing with the idea of hang­ing up my hippy hat. This isn’t meant to be a threat or some drama queen strop. I’ve con­sid­ered giv­ing up before, but I’ve always man­aged to find rea­sons to keep going and ended up rein­vig­o­rated at the end of it.

Right now, I just feel tired.

The iPhone app was meant to re-inspire me and it would have, if only briefly. But isn’t that the way this works? You are con­stantly search­ing for new inspi­ra­tion to keep you going.

The weird thing is, for a niche blog that doesn’t get updated very often, I do some good busi­ness. When I look at a graph of my vis­i­tor lev­els, its always an upward incline. I make a bit of dosh too, with my lim­ited adver­tis­ing and solo affil­i­ate scheme.

I’ve recently been spec­u­lat­ing that would still be the case, even if I didn’t post any­thing new. There’s a lot of con­tent on my web­site, six years of spew­ing dri­vel will do that. I could prob­a­bly just let this web­site sit here, do noth­ing and still main­tain my reach.

Yes, I’ve been giv­ing seri­ous thought to giv­ing up and quite stu­pidly, mainly because Apple refused to pub­lish my app. Maybe there is no place for inde­pen­dent blog­gers in the world any more and Apple is just ahead of the curve. If your web­site doesn’t have a staff of 30, then no one takes it seri­ously and you might as well not exist.

What’s a self obsessed weed­head and middle-aged fail­ure at life to do?

If I knew the answer to that one, fuck­ers, I wouldn’t be sit­ting here typ­ing out this shit, would I?

My iPhone app was rejected, again. That’s twice in the last month.

I heard back yes­ter­day. This time, the app has been rejected on the basis that Apple have changed their sub­mis­sion pol­icy and no longer allow apps that “…are solely intended for an indi­vid­ual blog­ger with a small audience…”.

Isn’t that most inde­pen­dent bloggers?

I’ve been blog­ging for 6 years, my anniver­sary is next week. My web­site was never going to be main­stream, but that’s kind of the point of its exis­tence and the exis­tence of most blogs. We cater to niche audi­ence, but an audi­ence none the less.

Are my read­ers less impor­tant than the read­ers of the New York Times web­site? Every reader counts, whether its one thou­sand or one million.

Why does Apple hate me? Why does Apple hate my audience?

Why does Apple hate inde­pen­dent bloggers?

Let’s put this into a bit of per­spec­tive. I invested time and money into cre­at­ing an app that I thought would be of inter­est to my read­ers. The app is quite sim­ple, but well designed, effec­tively cre­at­ing an iPhone-optimised inter­face linked to all my online northlon­don­hippy related content.

There’s noth­ing wrong with my app, it all works smoothly, the design is clean and sim­ple, and the graph­ics are slick and pro­fes­sional. The price, there was none, I wanted to offer it via the iTunes store for free, I wanted to give it away to any­one who wanted it.

So why do Apple hate me?

They shouldn’t, I am an unashamed Apple fan boy.

Cur­rently, in the room I’m sit­ting in, there’s a 27” Quad Core iMac, a Core Duo Mac Mini, A Core Duo black Mac­Book, an iPhone 3GS, an iPod Touch, an Air­port Extreme, sev­eral Air­port Expresses, I use Final Cut Express and Logic Stu­dio and iWork, I buy apps, music and films.…

You get the idea, I own a lot of Apple kit and just because they hate me, doesn’t mean I won’t con­tinue to pur­chase their toys. iPad, you are next on my list.

And I don’t just buy a lot of Apple stuff, I rec­om­mend it to my friends and am respon­si­ble for count­less sales to many recent converts.

Apple should love me, like I love them, they’re like that girl who gave you a drunken pity hand­job once, but now looks at you with dis­gust when­ever you run into her sober and you keep hop­ing you’ll catch her a bit pissed again, but you never do. The desire is all one way and it only ever ends in bit­ter disappointment.

I praise Apple on my web­site and won’t stop just because they hate me. I can han­dle rejec­tion, I’m used to it.

In short, there’s noth­ing wrong with my con­tent, includ­ing all my weed related entries. Apple don’t have a prob­lem with cannabis and there are sev­eral mar­i­juana related apps avail­able on iTunes, includ­ing one that will direct you to the near­est med­ical dis­pen­sary. Mine’s appar­ently in Ams­ter­dam, last time I checked.

So why do Apple hate me?

Why does Apple hate all inde­pe­dent bloggers?

I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of nov­els, and was watch­ing with great inter­est to see if Apple would have a route for inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers to get books on to their upcom­ing iBook Store for the iPad, but now I am not so sure.

If Apple are cen­sor­ing iPhone apps to the point where they won’t con­sider sub­mis­sions from inde­pen­dent blog­gers, is there any point to me invest­ing more time and money devel­op­ing my eBooks for the iPad, only to have Apple change their poli­cies suddenly.

Maybe you think a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app is a bit point­less, maybe I do too, but that’s not what’s impor­tant. What’s impor­tant is free­dom of speech and expres­sion and if I wish to bring my mes­sage as an inde­pen­dent blog­ger to an estab­lished, pop­u­lar mobile plat­form, I should be able to do so, with­out any imped­i­ment from the cor­po­ra­tion who sup­plies the plat­form. What’s wrong with giv­ing the lit­tle guy a chance?

It would be like Sony ban­ning you from watch­ing home­made videos on your tele­vi­sion, only Sony Pic­tures DVDs would dis­play on the screen, but not your hol­i­day or wed­ding videos.

Maybe no one would have down­loaded my app, maybe mil­lions of peo­ple would have, but I’ll never know. Apple have killed it, dead in its tracks for no good rea­son other than on a whim they have decided to lock all inde­pen­dent blog­gers out of the app store.

Will Apple recon­sider? If peo­ple make enough noise they might. It wouldn’t be unprece­dented, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

All I wanted to do was expand my online reach, just a lit­tle. I invested time, I invested money, but more impor­tantly I invested my hopes and dreams on a lit­tle iPhone app that I could call my own. I would never have guessed that this lit­tle dream would become a night­mare of cen­sor­ship and unchecked cor­po­rate power.

Does Steve Jobs know about this? If he finds out, he’s going to be mighty pissed off.

I bet hav­ing a recipe as my top post con­fused a lot of my new vis­i­tors and that was the case until I posted this par­tic­u­larly unplanned foray into shar­ing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is some­thing out of the ordi­nary. Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed.

As I sit here, typ­ing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announce­ment. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 pre­dic­tions, one is an easy one that’s prob­a­bly true, the other is a long shot.

Pre­dic­tion one: It will be a pre­mium prod­uct with a pre­mium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expen­sive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Pre­dic­tion two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best sell­ing lap­tops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inven­tive choice. I am far less cer­tain of this one and will be pleas­antly sur­prised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted some­thing like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are avail­able though I am guess­ing it will be like the orig­i­nal iPhone, sold is the USA exclu­sively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birth­day, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to sched­ule their announce­ment on the same date as my mother’s birth­day, its a wel­come distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be online, fol­low­ing the announce­ment live as best I can and I’ll be tweet­ing my impres­sions as well. That is, assum­ing the entire inter­net doesn’t come crash­ing down to a screech­ing halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last pre­dic­tion, Twit­ter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweet­ing again tomorrow.

First of all, to avoid any con­fu­sion, there is no such thing as a “hippy crab”. If you go to your local fish­mon­ger demand­ing one, he will look at you like you are crazy.

You’re not crazy, are you?

I don’t nor­mally post recipes, but in the real world, I’m actu­ally a pretty damn good cook. I’ve been cook­ing for decades, hav­ing honed my skills by watch­ing TV chefs over the years and mix­ing and match­ing the tech­niques I’ve picked up along with com­bin­ing inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents. Its like art with food, only hand-eye coor­di­na­tion doesn’t play as big a part.

I’ve seen crab risotto on restau­rant menus, but I’ve never tried it. That doesn’t mean I can’t make a good one. And if I have noth­ing to com­pare it to, then it must be per­fect already.

What fol­lows is my made-up recipe for crab risotto, with help­ful hints along the way. I have cooked risotto many times in the past, so I am not a total beginner.

You’ll need:
– one medium yel­low onion, chopped
– 2 fresh cloves of gar­lic, chopped
– but­ter and olive oil
– 500g Arbo­rio Rice (its meant for risotto)
– 1.5 litres of stock (chicken or veg­etable)
– 20cl white wine (appx one glass)

For fin­ish­ing:
– 100g white crab meat (some­times called lump meat, its already cooked)
– 10g chopped chives
– 10g chopped tar­ragon
– juice of one fresh lemon
– cream or creme fraiche
– 50g freshly grated parme­san cheese
– 50g frozen peas
– 10cl sherry (not cook­ing sherry, the real stuff)

Here’s a photo of the main ingredients:

(Miss­ing: Yel­low onion, frozen peas, sherry, but­ter, olive oil)

You need a large sauce pan (or pot if you pre­fer) and you will only need the lid at the very end, so put it to one side.

Put the saucepan on the hob over a low heat and let it warm up a bit. Cover the bot­tom of the pot with a bit of olive oil and a bit of but­ter, basi­cally enough so when you add the onion and gar­lic, its cov­ered and coated with it. You don’t need to use extra vir­gin olive oil, cheaper oil is fine. Extra vir­gin is cold pressed, so its a bit point­less to use when you are going to heat it up. Save it to dress your salad!

Sweat the onions and gar­lic until they are soft, ten­der and a bit translucent.

While the onions and gar­lic are cook­ing, mix up your 1.5 litres of stock. I use Swiss Bouil­lon Veg­etable Stock, but you can use any­thing one that you like. You can do this in a sec­ond saucepan, but my method is to mix 500mls at a time in a pyrex mea­sur­ing jug and an elec­tric kettle.

You can’t just use any rice for risotto, Arbo­rio is the best. The rea­son is the high starch con­tent, which is what makes it thicken.

Once the onions and gar­lic are soft, turn the heat up high and add the 500g of Arbo­rio Rice to the pot, stir­ring con­tin­u­ously, so it doesn’t burn, for around 2 min­utes. You want the rice to be infused with the flavours and oil.

After 2 min­utes, lower the heat and then can begin to add your hot stock. The nor­mal advice is to ladle it in grad­u­ally from a sec­ond pot, and as the rice absorbs it, add a bit more, but I don’t do it that way. Instead I add the stock a 1/3 at a time, in 500ml incre­ments. The heat should be on lower, so the stock simmers.

Whether you add the stock in a lit­tle at a time, or in stages, its impor­tant you keep on stir­ring. Also add the 20cl of white wine. From here, it will take about 20 min­utes for the rice to cook and for the tex­ture to become creamy and sauce-like.

Once the rice is cooked, give it a lit­tle taste to see if it has the cor­rect con­sis­tency. If it is still too firm, cook it longer, but the rice should not become too mushy either. Al dente is what I am look­ing for, it should have a lit­tle bite, but not be too hard or soft. You’ll know it when you taste it. That’s the basis for all risotto recipes, from here you can mix in what you like.

Now, time to add the addi­tional ingre­di­ents to fin­ish the dish. Add the crab meat and stir it in, fol­lowed by the lemon juice. The fresh white crab meat is the one lux­ury ingre­di­ent and I’ve used Cor­nish because I know it is sweet and very tasty. You could eas­ily used tinned, or a mix of brown and white meat.

Once its all mixed through, add the frozen peas, they will quickly defrost and heat up. Then add the juice of one fresh lemon and the sherry and mix them in.

Time for the fresh herbs, toss the tar­ragon and chives into the pot and stir them in too. You can chop the tar­ragon with a sharp knife, but its rec­om­mended you use a pair of kitchen scis­sors to cut the chives.

Finally, add a large spoon­ful of the creme fraiche and a the grated parme­san cheese and stir some more. Put the lid on the pot, switch off the heat and let it sit for a few min­utes, so every­thing is at a nice even tem­per­a­ture. Give it a final taste, to check the sea­son­ing. I’d add freshly ground black pep­per at this stage, and salt only if I thought it really needed it. With the cheese, crab and stock, the salt will prob­a­bly be OK, I don’t use much salt when I cook, so its up to you.

The dish is now fin­ished and ready to serve, you can hold back some chives and grated cheese to gar­nish the top once its on the plate.

Serve it with a fresh green salad and warm crusty bread. Yummm.

And that my friends and hip­py­fans is Hippy Crab Risotto. If you cook it up your­self, email me and let me know how you make out! Enjoy!

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new cal­en­dars and you aren’t still writ­ing 2009 on your cheques.

Do peo­ple still write cheques?

I do, some­times, but that really doesn’t have any­thing to do with any­thing, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diver­sion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the lat­est news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actu­ally kind of big news.

Dig this, I sub­mit­ted “the offi­cial northlon­don­hippy iPhone app” to Apple yes­ter­day, it should be avail­able on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surf­ing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my lit­tle funny wind-ups, its an hon­est to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fuck­ing scale of cool­ness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be dis­cov­ered by nor­mal folk. Once the app is avail­able, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app deliv­ers in an iPhone friendly for­mat, all of my inter­net con­tent. If I pub­lish some­thing, it will mag­i­cally pop up on the app. You will receive my lat­est posts from this web­site, as well as hav­ing easy access to my busy Twit­ter feed. I’ve also included my Twit­Pics and YouTube videos, which are all eas­ily acces­si­ble inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be avail­able to down­load for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the num­ber one northlon­don­hippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlon­don­hippy app avail­able, at least offi­cially. I’m sure all the other kids will be cre­at­ing their own ver­sions to com­pete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a web­site called www.appmakr.com which auto­mated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judge­ment on App­Makr until I see my fin­ished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the ser­vice they pro­vide. You will be too once you are rock­ing my app on your mutha­fuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watch­ing for my announce­ment con­firm­ing that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some ten­ter­hooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process peo­ple to what­ever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birth­day this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birth­days? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too both­ered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I sup­pose a lot has to do with the awk­ward­ness of my impend­ing age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd num­ber in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stu­pid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mor­tal coil is get­ting dis­tinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my mus­cles tell me, my world weary expres­sion tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumb­ing the depths of mid­dle age.

I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing hav­ing my very own mid-life cri­sis, but I can’t seem to set­tle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
– a hair trans­plant
– 3 months of Swiss shin stretch­ing
– a small, red, con­vert­ible sports car
– a sex­u­ally expe­ri­enced 19 year old girl on the side
– a men­tal breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life cri­sis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pur­sue them with gusto.

Trekking any­where is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair trans­plant just sounds messy and expen­sive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20–30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suf­fer­ing worth it. You only gain a cou­ple of inches in height any­way, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The lit­tle red con­vert­ible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfor­tu­nately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door rag­top. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Fer­raris (or Corvettes if you are state­side). And all this time, you thought they were choos­ing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nine­teen year old girl seems on the sur­face to be an easy option and if I was a mem­ber of the Rolling Stones they would be queu­ing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be inter­est­ing, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am hon­est, the only way I am going to get a hot lit­tle 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I cer­tainly couldn’t afford the care and feed­ing of one full time and I am a hippy on a bud­get, so this is out too.

A men­tal break­down? Don’t I mainly have them on the inter­net or as it is oth­er­wise known, a run­ning blog.

This web­site is my ther­apy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a ques­tion, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of uni­ver­sity and med­ical training.

Email me for your cer­tifi­cate or degree from the Uni­ver­sity of North Lon­don (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.

As part of my never-ending quest to seek noth­ing but the truth, I’ve decided to pro­vide the only gen­uinely hon­est review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fuck­ing sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nick­name is pathet­i­cally lame.

The decade started with the Mil­len­nium, which was sup­posed to be the biggest cel­e­bra­tion of all time. I spent the night in cen­tral Lon­don, on the River Thames, broad­cast­ing live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broad­cast tent near Lam­beth Bridge, block­ing people’s views of the fire­works and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major dis­ap­point­ment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spec­tac­u­lar and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to wit­ness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, col­lec­tive, “is that really it?” in my life.

Lon­don crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Mil­len­nium was no excep­tion. As the clock struck mid­night and I was trans­mit­ting live on behalf of four dif­fer­ent for­eign broad­cast­ers, some­one unplugged our gen­er­a­tor cable and every­thing went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the tech­ni­cians man­aged to get it recon­nected and it all worked, though the cables were cov­ered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleas­ant for the engi­neer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expen­sive TV gear. I can remem­ber smack­ing peo­ples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fire­works began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a pecu­liar glitch in some older com­put­ers that pre­vented it for han­dling 4-digit years, mean­ing some unpatched com­put­ers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the tele­phone net­work to col­lapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets fly­ing overhead.

It didn’t hap­pen, noth­ing hap­pened, cri­sis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were cri­sis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the elec­tion and became the most pow­er­ful sub-normally intel­li­gent per­son in his­tory. His pres­i­dency dom­i­nated the decade and his poli­cies made the world a much shit­tier place.

Think for a sec­ond, if Al Gore had claimed the pres­i­dency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Prob­a­bly not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush pres­i­dency was built on the foun­da­tion of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire econ­omy melted down to near col­lapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stu­pid, his advi­sors no smarter. They dug one stu­pid hole after another, each a lit­tle deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th Sep­tem­ber 2001 took place, you couldn’t imag­ine a worse com­man­der and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your num­ber one choice.

9/11 changed every­thing, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin tow­ers come crash­ing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remem­ber when the World Trade Cen­tre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the obser­va­tion deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to dupli­cate again today with­out a helicopter.

We were dev­as­tated by those attacks, fiendishly sim­ple, yet exe­cuted to max­i­mum effect. I remem­ber think­ing that this was the begin­ning of the end of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and soon we would all be crawl­ing through noth­ing but rub­ble, drink­ing brack­ish water from pud­dles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a life­time ter­ror strike from a group whose suc­cess exceeded even their own expec­ta­tions. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so rad­i­cally as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keep­ing us secure became the num­ber one pri­or­ity, the cost being a dra­matic reduc­tion in our lib­erty and per­sonal free­doms. Any extreme, rad­i­cal action taken by a gov­ern­ment could and would be jus­ti­fied by tag­ging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to mon­i­tor all tele­phone calls and email mes­sages? No problem.

Do you need my bank­ing and credit his­tory before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all sim­ply adapted to these new real­i­ties, we made hardly a peep as our civil lib­er­ties were sys­tem­at­i­cally stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in Lon­don you prac­ti­cally can’t even take a pho­to­graph in a pub­lic place with­out the police swoop­ing down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scop­ing out another attack.

Think that’s good for busi­ness and tourism? Think again?

Ter­ror is not the only thing that’s been scar­ing us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any gov­ern­ment declar­ing war on cli­mate change, even though its prob­a­bly more of a threat to more peo­ple than ter­ror­ism could ever be.

The effects of cli­mate change are appar­ent to any­one who can be both­ered to look, yet there are peo­ple out there in the world who try to deny this inevitabil­ity. If you tried to deny the threat of ter­ror, you would be labelled a trai­tor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its prob­a­bly too late to slow down cli­mate change because we pissed away the last decade argu­ing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copen­hagen Cli­mate Sum­mit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, espe­cially the two major con­flicts insti­gated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was jus­ti­fied with false pre­tences and bla­tant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intel­li­gence avail­able to our lead­ers. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of non­sense any way.

I can remem­ber being the only idiot in the world who thought that Amer­ica and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I gen­uinely believed they had no grounds to ini­ti­ate a con­flict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launch­ing that ille­gal and point­less war.

George W (for War Crim­i­nal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sit­ting in prison cells in The Hague, await­ing their tri­als for crimes against human­ity, but no one has the fuck­ing balls to send them both there. The Inter­na­tional Court should have charged them already, even if extra­di­tion would never hap­pen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many inno­cent lives have been lost in that point­less war? Iraq was far from per­fect before the “allies” invaded, but the elec­tric­ity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an edu­cated, func­tional mid­dle class.

I’m not a Sad­dam Hus­sein apol­o­gist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repres­sive, iron fisted, unpleas­ant and vicious. But so what? Lots of coun­tries are lead by shit­bags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid rea­son for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Sad­dam Hus­sein got strung up in a hastily organ­ised hang­ing. There’s mobile phone video of it on the inter­net, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undig­ni­fied end for an odi­ous, hor­ri­ble man. Though back in the 1970s, Sad­dam was friendly with Amer­ica and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a dif­fer­ent shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the ter­ror bases and train­ing camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama some­thing or other.

They had the chance to cap­ture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the bor­der area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The prob­lem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fight­ing the Tal­iban. Big coun­tries like Amer­ica are crappy at fight­ing insur­gen­cies and guer­rilla wars, see Viet­nam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil con­flict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a law­less basket-case of a nation, with a cor­rupt, inef­fec­tual gov­ern­ment at its cen­tre and pow­er­ful war lords scat­tered through­out the country.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is end­ing with him announc­ing fur­ther deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speak­ing of America’s first black pres­i­dent, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stu­pid­ity, mis­takes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s poli­cies or not, hav­ing a mixed race pres­i­dent in Amer­ica is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my life­time, and like most peo­ple I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3–7 years, when he’s fin­ished and I’ll have enough infor­ma­tion to form an opin­ion. Clearly, I wasn’t a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Per­son­ally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my par­ents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered mid­dle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diag­nosed with a stu­pid ill­ness and I had a sus­tained period of unem­ploy­ment while I was between jobs.

The ill­ness, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, is allegedly under con­trol and I did man­age to secure gain­ful employ­ment, for which I am very thank­ful, but nei­ther period was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant for me.

The progress of tech­nol­ogy is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned cur­rently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the lat­est a 27” beast with a quad-core proces­sor that is light­en­ing fast, its like hav­ing a styl­ish super­com­puter parked on my desk.

By far, the most amaz­ing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gad­get of unri­valled beauty, power and use­ful­ness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s rev­o­lu­tionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imag­ined and its abil­i­ties just keep grow­ing with every app I install.

Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism came of age in the noughties, with web­sites sim­i­lar to this one spring­ing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are mil­lions of them.

Blog­ging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago dur­ing my dark and depress­ing period of unemployment.

Blog­ging gave me some­thing to do, some­thing to focus on, some­thing to make me feel like I was still a func­tion­ing mem­ber of soci­ety. I had a way to con­tribute, a way to par­tic­i­pate. Some­how, I still mat­tered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blog­ging may have saved my life. I would have con­tin­ued to sink deeper had I not dis­cov­ered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

With­out an audi­ence, blog­ging is a bit point­less and while I am still not and will prob­a­bly never be main­stream, I’ve had a level of sup­port and inter­est that still astounds me. I’m thank­ful for every vis­i­tor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

With­out all of you, I’d just be some guy writ­ing long­winded essays for my own amuse­ment. Ok, even with you all around, that state­ment is true, but its still bet­ter for hav­ing you all here.

Thanks very much for stop­ping by, you’ll always find a warm wel­come here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the hol­i­day sea­son. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Mag­a­zine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 min­utes long, so enjoy!

Weird things hap­pen around the hol­i­days, often unex­pected and not always pleasant.

I don’t know what got me on the sub­ject in my head, I was think­ing about duck and before I knew it, my crazy brain started remem­ber­ing weird shit from my childhood.

The duck con­nec­tion: I am cook­ing a small three-bird roast for xmas dinner.

For those of you who’ve never heard of such a con­coc­tion, it is quite sim­ply, a whole bone­less duck, stuffed with a whole bone­less turkey, then inside the turkey is an entire, bone­less pheas­ant. Larger ver­sions start with a goose, but I’m not serv­ing enough peo­ple to make that sensible.

I’m not sure how the farm­ers get the birds to grow inside the other birds with­out bones, but get­ting the feath­ers off must be a bitch. I guess it has to do with genetic engi­neer­ing, by I digress. I want to talk about duck.

When I was very young, an elderly rel­a­tive lived with us for many years, my Aunt Ger­tie, short for Gertrude. She lived to be 95, died in the mid 1970s and was part of the fos­ter fam­ily that raised my orphaned father.

Yeah, I know, get out the violins.

Aunt Ger­tie lived in our house for four or five years, until her per­sonal care became too much for my mother. Up to that point, her pres­ence meant we didn’t do very much out­side of the house, as she needed fairly con­stant super­vi­sion, even more so when she started falling down frequently.

After my par­ents took the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to place Aunt Ger­tie into a rest home, things changed for us and we had some free­dom again. The very first night she was gone, my father took the fam­ily out to a fancy restau­rant for din­ner. This would have been around autumn 1972, so I would have been nearly 9 years old.

Now, here’s the fowl con­nec­tion, that night in the nice restau­rant, I ordered Duck l’Orange for the first time in my life and it was the most amaz­ing thing I’d ever eaten. It was a half duck, still on the bone and the wait staff actu­ally helped me strip the deli­cious meat from the bone.

Its a fairly vivid mem­ory, and I can still remem­ber the four of us, me, my par­ents and my younger brother all feel­ing slightly guilty that we were able to enjoy such a fine meal, only because Ger­tie was in a care home.

Aunt Ger­tie lived for sev­eral years in that care home, slowly, grad­u­ally los­ing her mind. Up to that point, she was scar­ily sharp and didn’t miss any­thing and it was only in the last year or two that she started to become con­fused about things. She passed away just a cou­ple of weeks before xmas, at the same time my half-brother’s wife was deliv­er­ing her first child in the same hospital.

The last time I saw Ger­tie in the hos­pi­tal was about 10 min­utes before I saw my nephew for the first time. Even at the age of nearly twelve, I realised there was a weird con­nec­tion between new life and death.

Ger­tie died the next day, two weeks before xmas.

But that wasn’t the only death to darken a fam­ily xmas, a year or two before, my father’s fos­ter brother, my Uncle Jack, died unex­pect­edly on xmas. I was prob­a­bly around 10 years old.

I always liked Uncle Jack, he was very much an out­doors­man, he liked to fish and hunt, which are the sort of cool things that impress a young lad like me. He died on xmas eve, my father woke up to the news on xmas day.

Again, I have vivid mem­o­ries of that morn­ing. My brother and I burst down­stairs, ready to attack a pile of presents left by santa, with enthu­si­asm, but our mother’s face told a dif­fer­ent story.

We both imme­di­ately knew some­thing was wrong before she told us about Uncle Jack. She explained how upset my father was, he had not come out of their bed­room yet. I’m sure it was silly early in the morn­ing, my brother and I were both chil­dren and prob­a­bly didn’t sleep a wink the night before.

It was one of the few times I saw my father with real tears in his eyes. He was a strong, impos­ing man, think Hem­ming­way with­out the booze and it shocked me. My dad wasn’t sup­posed to cry, ever!

It was a very low key xmas that year.

All of this is remind­ing me of the scene in the movie Grem­lins, when Phoebe Cates char­ac­ter explains why she hates xmas and tells the story of her father dress­ing up like santa and get­ting caught in the chim­ney. They find him still there, dead, a cou­ple weeks later. Talk about a hol­i­day downer, I bet the stench would put you off your dinner.

Last xmas was eas­ily one of the worst of my life, my beloved mother passed away unexpectedly.

I was at work, ready for a long hol­i­day run of night­shifts when I got the bad news. I found out at 6am on xmas eve that she died.

The thing about deaths around the hol­i­days is that it doesn’t just bring down the rel­a­tives of the deceased, it has an effect on those around you too. It dis­tracts oth­ers away from their enjoy­ment of the sea­son. My sud­den, griev­ing absence from work had an impact on many peo­ple and that upset me even more.

Last year’s xmas was very depress­ing. That’s an under­state­ment, it was dev­as­tat­ing. You get the idea.

When you sit down for your big turkey (or 3 bird roast!) din­ner on xmas day, spare a thought for all the peo­ple whose hol­i­days have been blighted by unex­pected bad news and whose future hol­i­days may be coloured by these events.

More impor­tantly, I sin­cerely hope its not you and yours who is the recip­i­ent of any­thing unto­ward. How­ever, if it is you who draws the short draw and catches some­thing unpleas­ant, know that you’re not alone, it can hap­pen to anyone.

And if it is your turn, just remem­ber that it will get bet­ter and I hope you have plenty more fes­tive sea­sons await­ing you that might in some ways, make up for it.

From every­one here at the northlon­don­hippy, we wish you noth­ing but the very best of the holidays.

Oh wait, its just me here on my own, but the sen­ti­ment very much remains the same!

Memo to self: Must try harder!

I don’t really write myself memos, that would be stu­pid and prob­a­bly a bit too neu­rotic and tight-assed even for me, but that doesn’t take away from the message.

To be fair on myself, I had a very busy Octo­ber, work­ing more last month than I have in a very long time, nearly 18 months. That’s a year and half to nor­mal people.

This is going to be one of those ram­bling posts with no set agenda or dom­i­nant topic. Its the blog­ging equiv­a­lent of singing scat. Be bop be bop wow.

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t use the word “scat” on my web­site, as it does have other mean­ings out­side of the world of jizz, I mean jazz. Too late, so let’s just for­get about it.

I’ve got a few days off, which is always wel­come and I am hop­ing to receive my very own Eigen­harp Pico. When I ordered it a cou­ple of weeks ago, they said it should ship out today!

What’s an Eigen­harp? Its a brand new elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ment, its avail­able in 2 mod­els, the Alpha, which is the pro­fes­sional, full sized ver­sion which is pricey as fuck and the Pico, its more afford­able baby brother.

Rather than have me try to explain all this to you, why don’t you CLICK HERE and check it out for your­self. Once you get there, go to The Road­show sec­tion and watch the short You Tube video. But be care­ful, you will end up want­ing one yourself.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

I have no idea what exactly I am going to do with an Eigen­harp Pico, but I am plan­ning on using it when I finally record the northlon­don­hippy album. I know, I know, I’ve threat­ened to do this before, but I feel ready to invest the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to do it now.

I’ve upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio, I’ve updated the dri­vers for my Roland UA-25 inter­face, I’ve got a decent micro­phone, a midi key­board, a Fender Tele­caster and soon my Pico. Now, if I can find some tal­ent some­where inside me, I’ll be laughing.

And don’t worry, my plan remains the same…to record 10 songs which you can down­load for free, burn onto CD, put on your iPhone or iPod and just groove out with the hippy.

To give it the full title, it will be called:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins: 10 songs about sex & death”

The seven deadly sins are my make believe band. I don’t really have a band, but if I did that’s what they would be called. And they would rock hard and be tight as fuck, but mainly they would do every­thing they could to make me look good.

I’ll prob­a­bly never really have a band.

“10 songs about sex & death” is rather self-explanatory as ulti­mately they are the only 2 things in life that really mat­ter. All the rest is just to kill time in-between.

I reckon I’ve got at least one album in me, but then I think most peo­ple do if they knew how to tap into it. Its the same with nov­els, screen­plays, what­ever. If I can tap into it, it should be fun.

And I’ll say it again, if I get one mil­lion down­loads, I’m book­ing Wem­b­ley for a con­cert. Not the Sta­dium, but the Arena. I’m not com­pletely crazy.

I won’t get a mil­lion down­loads in a mil­lion years, so I think I’m safe. And let’s face it, if a com­plete nobody like me can rack up 1 mil­lion down­loads, then some­one will wanna spon­sor and pro­mote my big Wem­b­ley gig.

Tick­ets won’t be free, but they’ll be afford­able. The real money will come from the con­ces­sion stands, tee-shirts and northlon­don­hippy sou­venirs, as long as my fac­to­ries in China can keep up with demand. If they can’t, I’ll just have another school closed and bring in more chil­dren. They work for candy.

Do you keep up with my musi­cal tastes on Last.FM? You should, because every song I play, at home or on the move, is scrob­bled to my account there. User­name is: n_londonhippy

I used to have a Last.FM wid­get here on my web­site, but it broke after a recent Word­Press update. I will get it replaced as soon as there’s a work­ing ver­sion of the plug-in again.

You might have caught that cannabis has been back in the head­lines here in the UK as the government’s chief advi­sory on drugs pol­icy was sacked for telling the truth. Well, a truth that com­pletely con­tra­dicts the gov­ern­ments own policies.

I’m not going to re-hash (see what I did there?) the whole thing now, because it hasn’t reached its con­clu­sion yet. I expect there will be some move­ment tomor­row, as the Home Sec­re­tary who sacked the chief advi­sor is meet­ing with the rem­nants of the advi­sory board to dis­cuss its future.

In a nut­shell, since 1971, the Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs has been advis­ing the UK gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No sit­ting gov­ern­ment has ever ignored the ACMD’s advice, until a cou­ple of years ago when they returned weed to Class B from Class C, against the rec­om­men­da­tion of the panel.

The only thing that changed by rein­stat­ing cannabis’s Class B sta­tus is the penalty for pos­ses­sion, which at that level is 5 years in the slam­mer for even a small amount. That’s madcrazybatshitstupid.

Polls have shown that the major­ity of peo­ple think a 5 year sen­tence for sim­ple cannabis pos­ses­sion is too much, but the same polls also say the pub­lic wanted to see cannabis returned to Class B. Guess why? Because no one explained that Class B meant 5 years. If you don’t give them all the facts, then how can your poll be accurate?

The head of the ACMD, a smart and emi­nently qual­i­fied gen­tle­man by the name of Pro­fes­sor David Nutt has refused to par­rot the govt’s lies. He has also been quite vocal in point­ing out the many flaws in the cur­rent anti­quated drug laws. Since he was sacked, he went from vocal to angry and he’s been extremely forth­right in his rather accu­rate crit­i­cisms of the government.

Two other mem­bers of the ACMD quit in protest over Nutt’s sack­ing and the rest of the mem­bers may very well do the same, if the Home Sec­re­tary can’t sort this all out. My guess is he can’t, and the British government’s drug pol­icy will descend even fur­ther into chaos.

As you can imag­ine, I’ve been fol­low­ing this one quite closely and if you fol­low me on Twit­ter, I’ve tweeted dozens of links to news sto­ries per­tain­ing to all this.

Do I think this will lead to a break through in drugs pol­icy? Nope, but I’m usu­ally a pes­simist any­way. What I do think is its brought the debate back to the fore and that’s never a bad thing. And if more peo­ple in this coun­try wake up to the truth about weed, that’s not a bad thing either.

Even­tu­ally the drug laws will change, I just hope I live long enough to see it happen.

Like I said, I’m plan­ning to do a lot more on this rather com­plex story after tomor­row. I just want to see how it all plays out.

I think I’ve ram­bled enough now, if you’ve made it this far, well done you. You are clearly some­one of excel­lent taste, a supe­rior intel­lect and noth­ing bet­ter to do to do with your free time. I think I’ll join you on that third one, its time to go veg­e­tate in front of some fine tele­vi­sual enter­tain­ment. Fam­ily Guy here I come.

Blah, blah, blah.

That’s what other people’s excuses and apolo­gies sound like to my jaded ears. Just so much noise and hot air.

I’ll spare you mine. I don’t actu­ally have any. I just haven’t both­ered to post any­thing here.

Call me crap-ass if you like. Mr. Cra­pass. Crap­pen­stein. Crapfuckingtastic.

Just don’t ever call me late for din­ner. You can ask your grand­par­ents where that one comes from because its older than they are.

Its not that I don’t come up with great ideas for things to write about every day, because I do. Com­ing up with this shit’s not hard, sit­ting down and doing it is.

I always seem to have some­thing else to dis­tract me away from doing some­thing semi-productive and nearly use­ful, like writ­ing one of my patented hippy things. Ok, I haven’t actu­ally patented them, because some­one already beat me to it and got the patent on crap.

I’d rather be day dream­ing. I’d rather watch tv, or read or pass out in a drug induced stupor.

Alright, truth be told, its been years since I’ve been in any sort of stu­por because I don’t do those naughty drugs any more. I don’t even drink and trust me, if you’re aim­ing for a stu­por, booze is most def­i­nitely your bestest buddy.

The only rea­son I’m grac­ing you with my pres­ence now is that I popped onto my own web­site and noticed how long it had been since I both­ered to post any­thing and I thought, “fuck man every­body gonna think I be dead or some shit like that”.

Yes, I my inner voice sounds like that, doesn’t yours?

So here I am, after a night­shift and a cou­ple of spliffies, spew­ing utter rub­bish just for the sake of hav­ing some­thing semi-current on the top of my home page. Do peo­ple even call them home­pages any more?

Maybe I’m just los­ing touch. I gen­uinely had to look up some words in the Urban Dic­tio­nary that the kids are using these days, because I didn’t fuck­ing under­stand them.

Maybe I am your grandpa.

Oh yeah, we’re approach­ing my birth­day, its only a cou­ple of months away. Is it too early for me to start my annual moan about age­ing and mid­dle age and dying and death and yada yada yada?

Appar­ently not.

I was going to write some­thing about zom­bies the other day. I can sum it up for you. I saw Zom­bieland. I liked Zom­bieland. I like Zom­bies. Zom­bies scare the bee­jeezus outta me because they are dead, right, but like they’re walk­ing around and you know, they want to eat your brains, only you can’t kill ‘em, um…because like they’re already dead?

Ok, that’s not really my review of Zom­bieland, though I did see it and I did like it, but that was an actual review I over­heard on the street. I might have made up the bee­jeezus part for comic effect, but the rest is pretty much word for word what I overheard.

I was going to stretch all that out to 1000 words. You don’t have to thank me for spar­ing you that zomb­i­fied opus, just send cash or pro­vide sex­ual favours to me and all my friends.

How cool would that be if ran­dom strangers from the inter­net offered to shag my friends, just because I asked them too. I’d be the most pop­u­lar guy around. You’d want to be my friend too. I can sort you out with ran­dom hook-ups, no charge.

Wait a sec­ond, if I have ran­dom strangers will­ing to sleep with peo­ple I know, I’d be a fool not to charge some­thing. How about a han­dling fee? That sounds fair. Shall we call it £200 quid for the hour, you can talk extras directly with your inter­net date upon arrival.

You see, this is how peo­ple sud­denly become pimps. One minute, your just typ­ing some crap on the inter­net, the next you’re run­ning a sta­ble of pros.

Snoop Dogg’s life sud­denly makes a lot more sense to me now.