Mid life crisis - Dragon gets a Yamaha

Look what Mrs Dracunculus bought me for my birthday.



That, if you don't know, is the mighty Yamaha DX7, really the first digital synthesizer ever to be made affordable.

Well it was affordable if you were a professional musician or had wealthy parents. I wasn't and didn't but when I was 18 and lugging my Korg Delta - all I could afford - around the occasional pub and working men's club gig this was the synth I wanted. Hell it was the synth everyone wanted and as a consequence you just need to hit one of the main bank presets, hit a key and you're back in the 80's - that tubular bell "bongggg" (preset #26) has for example graced every Enya recording ever made, that electric piano (the DX7 was very good at metallic percussive sounds) is all over "Hard Habit to Break" by Chicago. I've spent the weekend poking around on this and going "oooh isn't that what Kraftwerk used on..." or sounding like 80's backing music from Colin Baker era Dr Who (it also appears the BBC radiophonic workshop never bothered pressing any of the presets above #6!)

Mind you one thing I had forgotten about was synths of that era are very heavy, the DX7, like my old Korg, was metal cased and built to take a lot of "on the road" punishment. Unlike my more modern kit like my 90's era Kawai K1-II or the Korg Triton this keyboard comes with a weightlifting course.

I love it to bits and I haven't even started programming it yet. It's the keyboard I always wanted as a kid and now I have a lovely example. Mrs Dracunculus says she got away easy with my mid life crisis and she's very pleased I didn't buy one of Yamaha's other products that have two wheels and do 0 to 60 in five nanoseconds.

Prejudiced... we haven't even started yet

So Tory token mussie and all round gobshite Baroness Warsi has opened her flappy mouth and come up with this corker:

Prejudice against Muslims has "passed the dinner-table test" and become socially acceptable in the UK

Yes it has Baroness, and it's only going to get louder and louder and louder as the majority of British people get more and more pissed off at your co-religionist in the "religion of peace"^TM and your clamouring for special treatment, laws to protect your paedophile prophet from having nasty cartoons drawn about him, halal this and sharia the other. We are going to get more and more intolerant of you the more we discover about your antediluvian faith and its requirements and its inability to adapt and change.

In her speech, she is expected to say the description of Muslims as either moderate or extremist encourages false assumptions.

That's true enough. There's no such thing as a moderate muslim.

Baroness Warsi will say terror offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam.

The fact that muslims are actively encouraged to hate us by their sacred texts and Saudi funded religious education brands us as immoral demons out to destroy their faith and thus leads directly to said terror offences obviously doesn't happen on Planet Warsi. Maybe she needs a little reminder of what the islamic terror manual known as the Koran actually says:

9:29 Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the last day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His Messenger and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.

and how about

5:54 O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily God guideth not a people unjust.

and there's plenty more where that comes from.

And just for good measure:

But she will also urge Muslim communities to be clearer about their rejection of those who resort to violent acts.

I thought we weren't supposed to differentiate between moderate and extreme mussies Warsi?

It's a chilly night. Better throw another Koran on the fire.

Did we really write software like this

For reasons that will become clear in a later post I have had a call to download some rather old software. It didn't work at first as I needed to download an old friend, the Visual Basic 3 runtime (vbrun300.dll). My god I have not needed that file for years, I remember when we used to have to carry it round to stick on user's Windows 3.1 boxes to get the piece of crap we'd just written (which invariably was some front end to an Access database) to function.

If you were around then you probably remember VB3 applications as loads of amateurs wrote them they all looked the same: all battleship grey, a mess of MDI windows and as user friendly as a root canal operation - mind you a few "pros" wrote them like this too. This is the app I just downloaded in all its glory.



Jesus what a fucking mess!

Mind you this was probably cutting edge in 1995.

No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs

Which, as Lenny Henry once observed "made it really difficult for a black irish wolfhound to get a room"

Which leads me to the ruling today that batshit crazy christian fundy nutjobs Hazel and Peter Bull have been giving a good shoeing to the tune of £3600 for not letting a couple of guys who were on the other bus stay at their guesthouse. Bad move Hazel, not only has this cost you a shitload of cash but looking at you and your place you could really have done with some make-over advice from a couple of gentlemen who are "good with colours".

Now personally I believe that as private individuals, with a private business, receiving no money from the state that they are fully entitled to do what they want with their property and it is no business of the state who they choose to let interact with their business and on what terms. Yes and that does include saying "No blacks, no Irish and no dogs and no pufters" if they want. That's entirely their prerogative as it is mine to call them nasty spiteful homophobes who are probably secretly turned on by the idea of bottysex.

Regrettably I'm rather torn because anything that puts the boot into the religious and makes them look like the reactionary fossils that they are makes happy steam come out of my nose but on balance I think it's wrong. I would happily, for private individuals and businesses, tear up every single bit of "equality" legislation. Don't want to hire black people, well that's up to you. Mind you if you do I'll boycott your business which won't last that long as you won't be able to hire from the full pool of talent out there and your competitors will.

But as that's not going to happen any time soon forgive me if I sit here giggling and bouncing up and down on my green scaly tail whilst the Xtians whinge and moan about "we are a persecuted minority".

Yeah sucks when the boot is on the other foot doesn't it! Hang on I'll call you a whaaaambulance.

Just a little prick, you won't feel a thing

I was going to blog last week about the story with the BBC getting an "exclusive" about the guy who supplies a prison in the USA with the drugs they use for executions; you probably saw that one, the company being some plate-on-a-wall job at a driving school in Acton and Vince "twat" Cable getting his knickers in a bunch and doing that standard "I'm a liberal but I'm going to ban this" act.

To be honest I was sat here on my green scaly tail going "what the fuck is the story here"? A pharmacy company has supplied legal drugs to an organisation that has the appropriate licences to hold and use them; OK it's a prison and they are going to use them to execute someone but that the laws they have there and presumably the people of Arizona voted for and continue to support the death penalty*

I mean if they ordered a load of nails, a coil of rope and a bunch of 2x4's from Jewsons and then used them to build a gallows instead of a neat tree-house for the governor's kids would Twathead Vince still be throwing his toys out of the pram and calling for the export of nails to be banned? And if we're getting all squeamish about exporting the "Tools of Death"** then how come Vincey-boy is quite happy for EADS, British Aerospace and every other manufacturer or military hardware to sell their wares on the open market? I suspect maybe because of the millions of pounds those sales and the subsequent taxes on company profits brings into the treasury every year - a quick and lazy Google shows between 2000 and 2004 (on Labour's watch) that we flogged £631 million worth of sundry death-dealing kit to Africa alone - well all those duck houses and diversity outreach counsellors don't buy themselves.

But in an interesting twist this weekend some nutjob with a gun decides that he really didn't like America coming off the gold standard and not having Roosevelt around any more decides to take his disagreement with fiscal policy out on the local governor and ends up killing a couple of random bystanders including a kid (who, unfortunately for him when it comes to trial, has a cute school photo). Now this happened in, well by a big coincidence, Arizona so I'll lay odds that this guy is a shoo-in for a death sentence. And I'll also bet that more than a few politicians on this side of the pond would be quite happy with that, seeing at he attacked one of them.

But someone got to supply the drugs guys?




* Just for the record I don't; not because some utter scumbags don't deserve it just that I'm uncomfortable with the state having powers to kill its citizens

** Good name for a comedy heavy metal band that

So much for that resolution

OK so I didn't make a blog post yesterday and I guess that means I broke my resolution on day four. It's OK, the alcohol one isn't going that great either.

In my defence however I did try and make a post on the way home from The Netherlands on the pride of Stena's fleet, the Stena Brittanica which since its upgrade to a "superferry" (which I suppose means it can leap bulk crude carriers with a single bounds) boasts "free WiFi"

Well yes and no. It did have wifi, my iPhone found it just fine and after about three minutes managed to log on but after that pretty much zip, it didn't even manage to load Google's home page. Not to worry, they have four or so computers in one of the lounges, I'll use them. Nope, same thing, only with added disgruntled fellow users complaining that it would be faster to send mail by carrier pigeon. OK so it's satellite internet and having got that installed myself I know it's pretty sucky in poor conditions but there was hardly anyone on the boat and at this point we were still very firmly roped to Holland so there's really no excuse.

OK so a bit of an inconvenience but no great drama, it's a night sailing so I'll just go to the bar, down a Heineken or two and go to bed; if I'd have been on the daytime sailing though I'd have been more than a bit miffed.

Still I'm thinking of having a moan and seeing if I can get a discount next trip.

Mind your own business.

You might remember that back in 2001 there was a national census and for the first time it asked you what religion you were and many of us went "feck you arseholes" and wrote in "Jedi" just for the lulz.

This time around there's a campaign I think I'll be supporting. Basically you just say "None of your business" on the optional (so far) question about religion. The original census was in 1801 and was for the purpose of finding the number of men of fighting age (we were fighting Napoleon at the time) but governments of all stripes just love information about their citizens, knowledge is power. And the more they know about us, and this information extracted at the barrel of a 1000 pound fine, the more powerful they feel.

I would be tempted, sorely tempted, to write "FUCK OFF" in nice big red letters on the whole form and let them see if they could get their database to accept that. However not having 1000 quid to burn I guess I will stick to saying "None of your business" on the religion question and see how many others I can tick "Other" on or just simply "forgetting" to answer some questions.

I would urge you to do the same.

The Silver Screen

I'm staying with friends in The Netherlands at the moment and last night we all trundled off to the movies. Now I haven't been to see a film at the cinema (or "bioscoop" as they call them here) for, well, ages. I think the last time was when the first Lord of The Rings film came out.

Now people do tell me that the "experience" is what the cinema is all about, the big screen, the sound system and the guy behind you eating a packet of crisps loudly during the quiet bits.

Well OK but I have a nice sound system at home, regrettably when it gets above "15" on the volume control the dogs start getting upset and howling and OK I can't quite do the several metres wide screen thing but then again I can see things quite adequately on my flat screen telly and probably in just as good resolution now I've got blu-ray. The seat was comfy sure enough and there was a shop where you could get popcorn (I hate popcorn) in the intermission.

So I can kind of see why people watch their movies at home these days. Mainly because I can think the good people of Hoogezand would have been a bit put out if I'd sat there sprawled out over three seats and paused the movie to go to the bog.

Oh and the film was Harry Potter 7(a). Not at all bad to be honest, just turn the brain off.

More new year resolutions

Whilst on the subject of new year resolutions one I'm making a booze one this year. You maybe know how it is, end of the day you come home and crack open a bottle of wine to have with dinner with Mrs Dragon. You're having a nice time and oh dear wine's finished, maybe we have another little glass...

... next thing you know, and it is the next thing because it creeps up on you when you're not looking, you're drinking a bottle of wine a night, every night, and maybe a nightcap or three at the weekend. I did a little tot up the week before and I made it 75 units. Now I know the government pulled those unit limits out of their arse but even I can realise that that's a bit too much and if I keep this up my liver is going to be applying for a transfer to the ghost of George Best.

So I think a bit less wobble juice would be in order.

Dragon's new year resolution

OK so I have been a lazy dragon and not keeping my blog up to date. Bad dragon!

So this year, 2011, I've decided that I'm going to make a blog post at least every weekday. Moreso it'll be a post of incisive wit, clever political commentary and intellectual rigour...

... ah crap. No it won't, it'll be me cursing and swearing and setting random motherfuckers on fire.