September 2005

I climbed the stairs to the top deck and found a seat near the back, tripping over beer cans and the detritus of a take-away session on the way. Some unbelievably crap ring-tone from a dodgy mobile burst out in front of me. Mentally, I had called it already.

A foreign language. Japanese this time. I looked arond. One English newspaper. The only person not making a racket was someone who could read English. A minority, irritated as me, perhaps?

For a few years now, I have been dumbfounded and much to my surprise, irritated by the sheer number of foreigners in London. Foreigners who just don’t speak a word of English. I hear Polish, Russian, Romanian, Czech (it’s mostly East Europeans), Portugese, Arabic, Spanish and sometimes even Australian (kidding!). Of course, there is another foreign plague of a language - that crass cross between Chav and Jamaican Patois. The least honest accent of all.

“And she was like, chnaa meen?”
“Iz it?”
“Ja get me? N I woz like, I ain’t avin it, yeah? Coz it’s like, he’s in my face, init?”
“Iz it?”

Where does this bastard language come from? Is it not possible to communicate without littering every sentence with “like”? Is nothing what it actually is anymore? Is everything, even reality, reduced to metaphor?

Let’s get this out of the way; if it’s a Jamaican speaking in a Jamaican accent, fine. I actually miss that too. But if you’re second or third generation, you really should be speaking English now. Same goes for South Asians. A little bit of defloration of the language is acceptable too. I guess I’m just getting old and irascible, but standards are part of values and we are sorely missing both.

Every time I get on the bus it’s the same. Crap languages, foreign languages. Some honest cockney, some Queen’s English, even some cleanskin/brownskin trying to speak English, even if in the old “bud bud ding ding” accent would actually be nice. Foreign languages and crap cross crass shouted inconsiderately down their permanently connected mobile phones.

What happened to orderly queuing anyway? You don’t get queues at bus stops anymore. You get throngs. Then you get a scrum for the front as big lads, black, white, brown, English, foreign, makes no difference, they all barge past the pregnant ladies, the women with prams and the elderly. This has happened in twenty years. Two decades ago, we had order at bus stops. Now, we have town centres that can’t be visited at night without a police escort or an AK-47 and no English speakers on a bus. Not even the bloody driver.

(Thanks for sending this pic in A!)

Why haven’t the thieves in the Whitehouse been sacked? Are they, like Tony Blair, untouchable?

If you have time, check out this Flickr photo set from the Astrodome.

And for a stunning perspective of Earth as viewed by the Messenger craft slingshotting its way around our planet towards Mercury, see this movie composited out of a day’s worth of still images taken by the craft’s onboard wide-angle-lensed camera. Stunning, and spooky.

Salaam.

The ruling elite in America are completely losing touch with reality and humanity. They are the laughing stock of the world. They would do well to keep their mouths shut if they are to keep uttering offensive garbage like Barbara Bush, former First Lady came out with:

Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them.”

Death of loved ones, loss of everything they ever owned, post-traumatic stress-disorder worse than that experienced by many soldiers, deadly disease and refugee status, all caused by your family, business partners and friends, is working out very well for dem poor negroes, ain’t it ma’am?

President Bush visited the scene of the devastation yesterday.

“All levels of the government are doing the best they can,” he said, before flying on to visit another devastated community along the coast in Mississippi. “So long as any life is in danger, we’ve got work to do.”

You’re too late. The time to save lives was a week ago, but then, you knew that. You have blood on your hands Mr. President. You need to be executed by your own laws.

Don’t the Americans put murderers to death? Don’t they hold their leaders accountable any more? America, you must impeach and imprison this man or forever lose your dignity, and your soul.