• Take off clothing and place it in a sectioned laundry hamper according to lights, darks, whites, man-made or natural.
• Walk to bathroom wearing long dressing gown. If husband seen along the way, cover up any exposed flesh and rush to the bathroom.
• Look at womanly physique in mirror and stick out belly.
• Worry about getting fat.
• Get in shower.
• Look for facecloth, armcloth, loincloth, long loofah, wide loofah and pumice stone.
• Wash hair once with Cucumber and Lamphrey shampoo with 83 added vitamins.
• Wash hair again with Cucumber and Lamphrey shampoo with 83 added vitamins.
• Condition hair with Cucumber and Lamphrey conditioner with enhanced natural crocus oil.
• Leave on hair for 15 minutes.
• Wash face with crushed apricot facial scrub for ten minutes (or until red raw).
• Wash entire rest of body with Ginger Nut and Jaffa Cake body wash.
• Rinse conditioner off hair (taking at least 15 minutes to make sure that it’s all come off).
• Shave armpits and legs.
• Consider shaving bikini-area but decide to get it waxed instead.
• Scream loudly when husband flushes toilet causing water to lose pressure and turn red hot.
• Turn off shower.
• Squeegee all wet surfaces in shower.
• Spray mould spots with Tilex.
• Get out of shower.
• Dry off with towel the size of small African country.
• Wrap hair in super-absorbent second towel.
• Check entire body for remotest sign of spots.
• Look in mirror and worry about wrinkles.
• Apply £100 worth of Special Anti-wrinkle Cream With New Formula Matifying Nano-globules And Added Polyfilla (voted best anti-wrinkle cream by readers of Gullible magazine).
• Return to bedroom wearing long dressing gown and towel on head.
• If husband seen, cover up any exposed areas and then rush to bedroom.
• Spend an hour and a half getting dressed.

How to Shower Like a Man

• Take off clothes while sitting on bed and leave in a pile on floor.
• Walk naked to bathroom.
• If wife seen, shake knob at her while shouting “Way Hey!!”
• Look in mirror and suck in gut to see manly physique.
• Admire size of knob in mirror, scratch bollocks and smell fingers for one last whiff.
• Get in shower.
• Don’t bother to look for wash cloth, don’t need it.
• Wash face.
• Wash armpits.
• Laugh at how loud farts sound in the shower.
• Wash bollocks and the surrounding area.
• Wash arse, leaving hair on soap.
• Shampoo hair but do not use conditioner.
• Make Mohican hairstyle with shampoo.
• Pull back curtain to see self in mirror.
• Piss in shower.
• Rinse off and get out of shower.
• Fail to notice water on floor because shower curtain outside bath for whole shower time.
• Partially dry off.
• Look at self in mirror, flex muscles and admire size of knob again.
• Leave shower curtain open and wet bath mat on floor.
• Leave bathroom light and fan on.
• Return to bedroom with towel around waist.
• If wife seen, pull off towel, grab knob and shout “Yeah baby” while thrusting pelvis at her.
• Put on yesterday’s clothes.

The bullets and teargas, the rifles, machine guns and night sticks being used to kill and beat the people of Libya are made in factories in this green and pleasant land. I don’t know about you, but I’m not proud of that fact.

http://llewblog.squarespace.com/electric-cars/2011/2/22/its-not-just-about-oilbut.html

But, enough blowing of the Dropbox trumpet. One thing not currently supported which I would dearly like to see added at some point in the future is the ability for a non-Dropbox user to upload a file directly into my Dropbox without them being required to sign up for an account. This would prove immensely useful in those situations where I need a friend, relative or client to send me a file too large to be sent by email.

However, a solution is thankfully at hand. I can happily recommend AirDropper (currently in free beta), a third-party service which can be linked to a specific ‘airdropper’ folder in your Dropbox and then used to send an email request to the person who has the file(s) you need. The email provides them with a link to a page on the AirDropper website which allows them to upload the files straight into the connected folder.

Very handy indeed.

The school is in Northern Karen State, Eastern Burma. Over half a million people have been forced from their homes in Eastern Burma, many barely surviving the ravages of disease and military violence.

The Burmese army attacks peaceful villages, burning homes, raping women and children, killing and torturing villagers.

Today the children are taking their exams.

…A mortar bomb goes off. There was no warning.

Three pupils are injured. Two of them, aged around 8-10 years old, were treated successfully over the following days.

Saw Raw Bee Moo, a 15 year old schoolboy has been seriously injured. He is taken to a nearby village to get medical assistance but it doesn’t have the basic equipment needed. He has to be taken to another two villages in an attempt to save his life.

It is 3am on Sunday morning – 42 hours after the bomb. Saw Raw Bee Moo dies. This atrocity happened on the 19th February 2010.

During his lifetime of just 15 years, 3,500 villages have been destroyed in Eastern Burma by the ruling military regime.

Saw Raw Bee Moo died and thousands in Eastern Burma suffer on a daily basis because of the brutality of the Burmese regime. The dictatorship blocks aid, including medical supplies into many areas of Karen State.

Want to help? Go to www.burmacampaign.org.uk

The book is written from the perspective of a man and his son as they travel for 17 days across the United States by motorcycle and involves a number of philosophical discussions, or chautauquas, on the subject of “quality”. What I like most about the book is how it covers a very deep subject in a way that makes perfect sense. I also like how the relationship between the man and his son adds a very human element to the book; one which I was very much reminded of when reading The Road, recently.

Anyway, as the title suggests, the book uses motorcycle maintenance as a platform for this discussion of quality, a very basic version of which can be summed up as follows:

There are two types of quality; romantic, that which appeals on a visual or artistic level, and classical, that which appeals on a functional or useful level. In the context of the motorcycle, it can be perceived to have quality both because it looks nice (has aesthetic style) and because it is a well-engineered and well-maintained machine (has good functionality).

The book obviously goes into much greater depth than that but Pirsig’s philosophy is that a unification of perception of these two types of quality can bring a feeling of harmony and contentment to the person who achieves it. Being around 18 years old when I read Zen, and therefore full of questions about life, the universe and everything (to quote Douglas Adams), and not subject to the closing of the mind which later adulthood can sometimes bring, the idea of simultaneously appreciating things because they look nice (a tree in autumn, for example) and because of the way they function (the way that same tree converts CO² into oxygen) really appealed to me.

A few years have passed and I am now a biker myself and the proud owner of my very own motorcycle and last night, after work, I was outside with the bike up on a paddock stand, tinkering with the chain adjustment. Suddenly the thought struck me (with some force, I might add) that, while I previously liked the philosophy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on an intellectual level, now I understood, in a practical sense, exactly what Pirsig was talking about.

When I first bought the bike I thought it was the best looking bike in the world – the shape and stance of it, the gleaming chrome and the freedom it represented – but now I also know how it works. When I pull the brake lever, I know what is happening mechanically to cause me to slow down and if things aren’t working as they should I can often tell why just by the ‘feel’ of the bike (and I usually know how to fix it). It’s difficult to describe what a wonderful feeling that is; to not only appreciate the bike for how it looks and feels to ride (romantic quality) but to also be attuned to the mechanics of how it moves, how it stops, how it turns and to know that one of the reasons it does so smoothly and correctly is because of the maintenance I perform on it (classical quality); now that’s a great feeling.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to rush out into the woods and hug a tree in order to achieve oneness with it. But I can see that not only does this duality of understanding and appreciation bring contentment (a zen state, if you will) in a very real sense but it also brings with it an ability to discern true quality from “bolted on style”.

So, the next time you see a McDonalds with all it’s bright plastic signs and it’s fake brick cladding, think about the quality of the building underneath and whether it will still be there in 10 year’s time. Then look at an old church or university building and think not just about the decorative detail but also about its amazing construction and the time and effort that went into creating it. And take a bit of time to understand how and why your car, motorcycle or pedal bike does what it does (and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t).

I guarantee it’s worth the effort.

After about a minute of edging towards the gap in the hope that the lorry driver would back off, the woman gave up and moved past the BMW which the truck was following, in the hope that she might be able to move across in front of him instead. It was apparent by now that she was starting to worry that she would not be able to make it across to the left-hand lane in time to exit the motorway.

What dismayed me was that the BMW driver did exactly the same thing as the lorry driver, accelerating to close the gap and hovering dangerously close to the back of the car in front, in order to prevent the woman from moving over. After another couple of attempts at edging towards the gap it was obvious that the woman in the Polo was starting to panic and she started waving at the BMW driver who, after making her wait a few more seconds, did eventually back off enough to allow her to move over.

What absolutely astounds me about these events is not just how pathetically childish the lorry and BMW drivers behaved, or how completely pointless it all was (as we were already moving at a reduced speed it would have cost the lorry and BMW drivers nothing whatsoever to have allowed her to move across) but how that pointless and childish behaviour made what should have been a simple lane-change manoeuvre into a potentially dangerous situation.

I’m starting to notice more and more how driving often shows people as they really are, the anonymity and perceived protection which the vehicle offers allowing them to behave in a manner most of them would never consider (or, I suspect, dare) if they were in a face to face situation. It’s depressing to see just how many people take pleasure from bullying others, how many will risk their own lives, and the lives of others, for a few inches of tarmac.

I’m beginning to see the morning commute as an allegory for human behaviour as a whole. Stripped of all the niceties and false bonhomie which society dictates, human beings are engaged in a vicious and pointless race against each other. The bullying and childishness of the school playground played out again in adult form.

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming. But something — more than just sleep, though that’s critical too — is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose. Boredom.

…

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These “wasted” moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital. They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

Amen to that.