What is best in life?

When a young barbarian was asked this very question, his reply was simply this;

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women” (Conan the Barbarian, 1982)

To each their own, I suppose. Not my personal preference, but it was certainly what fuelled Conan’s fire in his quest for happiness. (Spoiler alert: I can also recall him chucking a witch into the fire, but with less success. I digress).

What brought me here today, to this particular quote, is a rather simple observation; we need to focus on the things that make life living if we want to get through the political shitstorm we’re all in at the moment, because tearing each other down isn’t solving anything (although, it might lead to the lamentation of a woman or two).

I’ll be very brief today, and perhaps uncharacteristically rantless, but I think – with a little help from our friend Conan, portrayed by the illustrious Arnold Schwarzenegger – that the shorter length might help spread the word.

A wise person once said that you cannot change another person. This is of course a truth with some modifications, because you can absolutely change someone by treating them badly, but the change achieved will likely not be what you were after. So, in order to achieve sustainable change in a controlled environment, you will need a subject who is entirely under you’re control; yourself.

In changing your own less desirable qualities, you might like yourself more. Hell, you might even inspire and motivate others to do the same. Treat others the way you’d want them to treat you; with compassion and respect. If they fail to return the favour, there’s an easy fix; cut them loose. You don’t need to waste your time and energy on the undeserving few.

I know what you’re thinking… “But, we’ve been friends for so long, I can’t give up on them“, or, “but they’re my mum, how can I let them down?” Guess what? If you’re the only one making an effort – and it’s making you feel miserable, to boot – they’re not holding onto you for your sake. You’ve got something they need. More than likely, they’ve already taken so much from you, that there’s very little left, apart from shame and codependency.

Cut them loose. Let go of any bitterness – it’s not going to make you any stronger. If anything, it’ll make you resentful and/or unable to give what you want to someone you do want to stick around.

We can’t change how others view the world, but we can try to understand why their views might differ from our own. You might even learn that they’re more enlightened than you first assumed, and that their beliefs are the only logical option for their situation – that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. Our views, our beliefs, our truths are shaped by our experiences. Subjective truths may not always be factual, but I’d argue there is no objective truth in shared experience. You’re entitled to your opinion here, of course. This one’s mine.

My point is this:

Treat yourself and others with compassion. Sometimes showing compassion means leaving before it’s too late. Sometimes it means accepting an opinion we do not share. If we’re too focussed on who’s to blame or their shitty qualities, we’ll venture so far away from resolving the initial issue that the shitemongers will win.

Also, don’t take it upon yourself to take people down a peg as you see fit – I appreciate that most people have been raised in loving, supporting homes and communities that have convinced them that this is true for everyone, but you don’t know what sort of shit you’re stirring up within those that have experienced the opposite. They’re already down further than you can fathom and haven’t a peg to spare.

That’s it. I’ll see you next Tuesday. Until then, feast your eyes upon the glorious display of wholesomeness below.

12th May 2026 0

More is more…

A for anarchy in red on black background

Once upon a time, when the hacker was still just as elusive and enigmatic as Sméagol himself, a pointless character in a nonsensical movie franchise uttered the claim “ignorance is bliss”, a phrase that has since been quoted ad nauseam. Whilst uttering these meaningless words, said character was chomping away at a slab of beef – all the while pointing to the fact that he was aware that the steak and the whole situation in that particular reality itself was entirely artificial and bogus. Regardless of the fact, the character portrayed himself as blissful because he chose to be unaware that the scenario was being fed to him via The Matrix. Which, in and of itself, defeats the whole purpose of him being ignorant, as he was clearly aware of his existential circumstances. If you are aware, you cannot claim to be ignorant. Thus, if ignorance is bliss and you are aware, you cannot be blissful.

What’s more, ignorance is not ‘bliss’, it’s defined as a lack of awareness and foresight. To simplify – much in the vein of rock legend Yngwie Malmsteen – bliss is bliss and ignorance is ignorance. One does not follow the other in any logical way.

Yes, I know it’s just a movie, but this particular scene planted a seed… a seed that somehow grew into a gargantuan parasite that set out to infect an entire generation with thinking those words justify their unwillingness to learn. It’s given them an excuse to be selective about knowledge (something we all know is the only point in getting old and senile; you finally get to edit out the shite you don’t want to hear).

Eejits.

Hold on tight, I can smell a rant coming.

I currently find myself living in a country that seems to have some sort of vexillology fetish. If, for any reason whatsoever, there’s cause for getting a flag out, out it shall come. Hoist that fucking rag (brilliant Tom Waits song, by the way), regardless of said rag’s connotations, be they political or similarly sinister in nature.

Here, they love marching for no apparent reason. They’ll gather at the town hall and walk around in circles, waving their flags and shouting messages whose origin no one really took the time out to figure out. They just like the feeling of doing something good. They like the word solidarity, but haven’t a clue what it means.

It’s as meaningful as claiming to support ‘the troops’, without knowing what troops they are supporting, what they are fighting for, or from whence the fuck they’ve originated, for that matter. They boast about their support of one nation’s leader and proudly post about their hostility towards another on social media, not even realising they are two sides of the same coin; evils, where neither is the ‘lesser’.

They hang flags in their windows in support of a nation they know nothing about. Without thinking, they do what the Internet tells them to. Do they even know what the flag stands for?

Will they admit that they didn’t even care about any conflict. That, truth be told, it wasn’t even on their radar until it started affecting their cost of living? The energy prices have skyrocketed, so you must blame someone. Anyone. Did they think the flag they bought off Temu, that wasn’t the exact colour but close enough, was going to bring down the price of petrol?

My meaning here is not to point fingers at anyone picking sides… I think any desire to solve conflicts with warfare – cold or not – is abhorrent. No, what I mean to say is this; educate yourselves enough to know how these things can be avoided, or at least subdued. Or, worst case scenario, you’ll know enough to morally decide which side to fight on if push comes to shove. Fighting for what’s fair shouldn’t have to end in bloodshed or everlasting war.

Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is the beginning of the end.

If I’ve not scared you off for good, I’ll see you next Tuesday.

Listen to Bad Religion!

5th May 2026 0

No such thing: The urgency of agency

No matter where I go or what I do – or don’t – these days, there’s no escaping the constant bombardment of someone’s voice, whether that’s an actual voice, an advert or a poorly written – and often grossly and/or grammatically incorrect – public announcement. Whenever I apply for a job, being able to adapt your writing to their tone of voice is at the top of their wish list (where it should be, to be fair).

Please forgive my need to insert the slightly superfluous ‘constant’ in front of ‘bombardment’ – a word that per definition already alludes to a sustained activity – perhaps I was having a mini-stroke, and that it for a millisecond fed/refuelled/resuscitated my aversion to anything less intense than extra extra.

Anyway…

Whenever I turn on the telly, there’s always some beige blob waffling on about some non-topic, seemingly fearful of its own demise lest its non-message gets out everywhere, all at once, despite its obvious lack of talent, knowledge and/or personality, its trivial theatrics drowning out any relevant or important messages that might have accidentally and concurrently gotten onto the airwaves somehow. The Voice! A whole enterprise void of fucking significance, other than being a platform for the beige to celebrate the beige…

Voices, voices everywhere, yet not a speck of inspired insight within the vessels from which they’ve escaped…

Which makes everything seem so trivial, so insignificant, so unfathomably meaningless.

I do fucking love a perfectly placed superlative.

Although, not to a lecherous degree. Enough with the digressions. Despite what you might be thinking, what I wanted to write about today was not voices. No, sir. Today, I write about the message. That’s not to say that the voice or its owner is not important – far from it – but they remain empty. Nothing but conveyors of the all-important message.

We’ve all heard the saying, ‘don’t shoot the messenger’. But, although I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldn’t be going around shooting (most) people, I certainly think that the messenger should be held accountable for any misinterpretations/misrepresentations, and/or the delivery of any messages written with nefarious intent, where there is reason to believe that the delivery of said message will be catastrophic for the recipient.

Speaking of messengers, the pigeon in the post’s header was already far beyond saving when I discovered it on my way to the subway. I played no role in its seemingly grotesque beheading, which I can only imagine to have been some sort of ritual sacrifice to please the rush hour gods. I’ve named him Alfred, my he rest in peace, this eternal half-pigeon of subway lore – perhaps the last of Mike Tyson’s messenger pigeons. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, he had failed to deliver his message and this was his punishment?

There are quite a few examples where things have gone tits up, merely due to a person’s lack of grasp on punctuation and its function, or they’ve simply failed to adhere to the concept of time and arrived too late (or too early), managing to almost cock up the future of an entire empire.

Research tells me there’s no evidence of punctuation errors having (as of yet) been punishable by death (contrary to popular belief), but I remain hopeful that one of the more reasonable of our world leaders will at least organise some sort of consequential punishment of the monetary variety, to prevent any future violations.

Nevertheless, understanding history is important, in some cases even crucial, but understanding who wrote it and why some things were thoroughly documented whilst others merely mentioned, is equally as (if not more) important, for hear me when I say;

there is no such thing as a neutral messenger.

The messenger may not have an agenda per se, but more often than not when that is the case, they will have been hired by someone who most certainly does. We see this in politics, religion, fahrking reality shows… who can even tell the difference between those three these days?

The media, i.e. us journalists, had one job; to report the news of the world, document both sides of a story to present the general public with the unbiased and honest truth, so that they would be able to form their own opinion based on actual events.

However, it’s been a long time since the media gave a fuck and a half about integrity. It’s all ’bout the money, it’s all about the dumb, dumb, dumb-bah-dumb, dumb. Or whatever Meja sang, way back when. I’d argue that the art of reporting died the second the first Netflix “documentary” aired, presenting one side of a non-story to make it seem as if there was one. This, again, led to a global lapse in judgement across the aforementioned general public, and they somehow started believing everything the internet fed them to be the absolute truth.

Idiocracy had somehow become our reality. Every headline serving up piping hot truths – or, at least, the A/B tested version of someone’s not-so-fresh take on their version of it – made the same article mean different things to different people, based on what type of headline their sordid little selves clicked on. If you’ve spent even a day past fresher’s week in uni, you know just how useful quantitative research is without its qualitative equivalent…

The sociopathic fiend that decided this was something that should be used by the media should perhaps meet a fate similar to that of our avian acquaintance Alfred. Because they have made a villain out of the messenger. The once trusted reported has become a joke, a parody, a liar and a prostitute. They’ve made the world into a place bereft of trust or hope. No wonder folks are fleeing to outer space on a pocket rocket.

If the men in the white coats fail in their attempts to locate my lair, I shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, enjoy this fabulous tune (quite possibly one of the weirdest gems to find in my dad’s cassette collection, squeezed in between E.L.O. and Gary Moore):

28th Apr 2026 0

The chains of Kakistos

Mind that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Buffy and the Scooby gang battles the vampire demon Kakistos? That episode, for some reason, reminded me of a very short (yet impactful) scene from Home Alone in New York. I always wondered why, until I learned the definition of the word kakistocracy.

Knowing Joss Whedon’s writing, the demon’s name is no coincidence. Whether or not my suspicions carry any merit, the definition remains;

“A kakistocracy is a system where the least qualified people hold power”

Chew on that one for a minute. Also, according to the Buffyverse Wiki, Kakistos means ‘the worst’ in Greek. Remind you of any unfit world leaders, perhaps?

This is definitely not going to be the longest post in the world, but that, in and of itself, decreases its chances of being Kakistos. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and seeing as I’m just now ending my workday, I thought I might try to get some kip tonight.

I wonder, though, if the worst doesn’t deserve a post all of its own. What do you think? Or perhaps I should focus my energy on something that would actually benefit society and quite possibly myself as well? It’s in your hands now and, as you know, I am a woman of my word. Perhaps I’ll take you behind the scenes of a recording session that took place this weekend, or maybe I’ll write about why horses seem to like to flap their penises about whilst grazing… Dropping, it’s called.

Good grief, how on earth will I do any research on that without getting myself into trouble?

… better yet, you can read about that in the Veterinary Compendium.

Nevertheless, I shall leave you with these last words, before the inside of my eyelids catch on fire, and a lovely we video below. See you next Tuesday, muchach-hoes!

14th Apr 2026 0