bygjohn's blog

On Friday one of my work colleagues, Jean, retired. Lucky woman.

Friday night saw us (about 24 people) in a local restaurant going into overdrive on the presentation front, including some very silly in-joke gifts, followed by a CD and DVD specially done for the occasion. This is the music project mentioned in an earlier post.

It started with a song about Jean invented by a former colleague (Els), which got expanded when some bright spark (Julie) suggested we record it for a CD. Then I found a MIDI file of the tune (Little Donkey) with, bizarrely, a country feel, so having recorded a bunch of us singing acapella in my office one morning, I set about attaching the singing to the backing track... yes, that is the wrong way round!! Anyway it achieved a suitably amateur finish, by which time someone else had suggested doing a video. So we did a shoot one morning using a digital camera, complete with daft dancing and I set about editing it together with the finished music. At least this was the right way round!

Well, the result was mightily funny. A CD of the acapella version and the country mix, a DVD of the country version, and suitably daft covers hacked together in Photoshop.Brought the house down on the night, and Jean has a permanent reminder of just how daft her colleagues could be.

A triumph of the Blue Peter approach to media production, too!

I can't quite believe it's the last Friday of my holiday and I'm back at work on Monday.

I don't appear to have accomplished much. Still have a music project to finish off, though now it's only the CD cover that needs doing, and I've spent rather too much of the time being off-colour/ill.

I have, however seen more of my family than usual, and had an encouraging appointment with my homoeopath, who is so far way ahead of my GPs in terms of taking seriously/treating the ME/CFS.

Plus I've read a book for the first time in ages (Kathy Reichs: Monday Mourning - thanks to Julie for lending it to me). And listened to a few albums from my 25-years-with-my-employer award.

So it's not all doom and gloom

Also, the trees have started to sprout leaf buds round here, so things are definitely looking up.

Just been trawling through the BBCi text service and came across the mind-boggling news that Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson has been criticised in the Malaysian parliament for blowing up a Perodua Kelisa, with some foolish politician suggesting he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Well, I doubt that Mr Clarkson gives a tuppeny hoot about some pompous Malaysian politicians (who are doubtless welcome to their Peroduas), or that he needs me to defend him, but I venture to suggest that as he's been testing cars for decades he knows good ones from bad. Also, while I've not driven a Perodua, the fact that they're sold locally by the garage which used to be the Lada dealer, who moved into Protons and Peroduas later, makes me suspicious. Everything else the place sells has the sole merit of being cheap, so I guess that applies to Peroduas too. Certainly they're ugly little boxes, which doesn't encourage me to investigate further.

But what's annoyed me is the complaining politicians. If Perodua wants to avoid criticism, it's up to them to make better cars. Politicians should really have something better to do, frankly.


Edit: What makes this even funnier is the claim that Perodua hasn't received a single complaint from UK customers. Well, the kind of people who buy the things are the kind of people who don't care if it's good as long as it's cheap, so where's the surprise?

I've just watched what I was expecting to be an upsetting and disturbing documentary: Louis Theroux with the most hated family in America. It's about the Westboro Baptist Church from somewhere in Kansas, who make most fundamentalists seem sane. There's only about 70 of them (nearly all from one family), but they're obsessed with hating homosexuality and anything they (somewhat arbitrarily) lump together with it, including the US services. Which must be news to the gay personnel forced to hide their sexuality in the American military... Watching one of them smile with pleasure at the thought of Theroux burning in hell was very disconcerting, but by the end of the programme I'd actually started to feel a bit sorry for that particular woman: she was obviously having difficulty with the questions Theroux was putting to her, and I had the impression he'd managed to penetrate her defences slightly. The whole thing is run by its "pastor", an angry and miserable old man, seemingly devoid of compassion (I kept thinking of the grandfather in the Texas chainsaw massacre...). At least he was congruent, unlike most of them who smiled away while picketing the funerals of soldiers who'd died in Iraq (even the most ardent anti-war protester wouldn't stoop that low). Some of it was surreal: picketing a shop which sold Swedish vacuum cleaners because the Swedes imprisoned a preacher who preached hatred against gay people (if it's the case I'm thinking of, he wasn't actually imprisoned, but what's truth got to do with any of this?). But the lasting impression is one of staggering ignorance and hatred, and vileness being spewed with a smile. Oddly, it wasn't really an upsetting and disturbing programme in the end. More reassuring, in that I'm so glad to be me (with all my neuroses, fears and anger) and not them, filled with that level of fear and hate. Made my own fear and hate look like chicken feed!

It's another lovely spring day here today, and I'm having a nice day doing nothing much.

Our local Tesco seems to have sprouted a windmill. Knowing me, it's probably been there for ages, but I've only just noticed it. I find windmills cheery things, and oddly reassuring for some reason.