Bad Applez

I really am struggling with the present day definition of “value” as determined by Ebay and, I suppose , by the “market”.

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Above is a bike I have recently put on Ebay. It is a cracker. Immaculately maintained, ready to ride and give years more comfortable service. I have listed it twice and no one will give me £80 for it. I should not be surprised, because someone has also just given me this Trek bike below, that was sitting in their garage because someone had given it to them. Nothing needed doing to it except a dusting and a bit of air in the tyres. I doubt if I could get anyone to give me £80 for this on Ebay either.

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What is this object, I hear you ask?

It is a click-in bracket for fitting a basket on the handlebars of the Trek bike…the basket is lost so it is of no use to me. I put it on Ebay and sold it for £7.50.

I bought this in a boot fair a couple of weeks ago for a quid.

Because it said Laguiole on it and people on Ebay are potty about Laguiole. Some Laguiole products are very nice. Others are rubbish. This  is rubbish, really. You can see it is. Someone paid £21.00 for it.

I really do not understand.

Estwing 16 inch Camp axe

It all started with a Skype call from the Sage of Withington. He wanted something, of course, just like almost everybody who ever calls me. This time he asked if I could scour the Web and obtain for him a particular  axe  to take camping. He wanted an Estwing 16 inch Camp Axe. He is a joiner and has used one of their indestructible hammers for years. Now..the Estwing is a formidable piece of kit. All one lump of forged steel from one end to the other. You would be lucky to find one for under £40.00….but…

……..if you are looking for axes…you have got to go and have a look at Ronnie Sunshine’s web site. I told him I would get him his Estwing if he really wanted but not until he had had a look around Ronnie’s.

He came back some time later with a decision. The Granfors Bruks Small Forest Axe, a Norse Saga of an axe. A beautifully balanced poem in hand-forged (each axe head is individually initialled by the craftsman who made it) razor sharp Swedish carbon steel and oiled hickory from a firm with a 100 years of history in axe-making. It cost him an extra £20 more than he was originally going to spend but what do you reckon?

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Visit the forge.

This has been my first post relating to sharp edged pieces of kit….it will certainly not be the last.

Recently I have developed a penchant for Batchelors Pea and Ham Cup of Soup. Grind a bit of black pepper in there and add a dash of Encona pepper sauce and you have a Cup of Soup that almost tastes of something someone might have cooked. Put it like this..if a put a few pieces of chopped ham in it and served it to you with a crouton or two and in a nice earthenware bowl, you might just be fooled….

But that is not important right now.

What has been exercising me is the reality of the following state of affairs.

The supermarket I usually buy it from had run out and , later, when I got back home,  I idly typed “pea and ham cup of soup” into the Amazon search box and , lo and behold, for the price of £9.00 I could buy 9 packs, a three week supply, and have it delivered. This is less than I would have spent if I had bought it in the supermarket. Purchase was as simple as it always is….a few mouse clicks..and the parcel turned up two days later. Packed in a stout re-useable carton and with a bunch of re-useable packing. (I sell stuff on Ebay so I am always in need of packaging materials, and frequently have to buy them.)

No wonder the High Street is dying.

Oh, look. The kitchen bin lid is suddenly yet again precariously perched upon a pile of malodourous  waste within, allowing an unpleasant reek to escape notwithstanding a few hours ago it was only  half empty and well sealed off from the outside by its deliberately snug fitting lid. I suppose I had better empty it, as this is a task that no-one else who has EVER lived in my house ever felt they might possibly undertake.

Oh,look. As is frequently the case,  the bin also has a thin layer of stinking liquid which has made its way through the bin bag and settled in the bottom. The task just went from a 30 second task to a ten minute one….

I am going to spell it out to all of you useless and thoughtless fuckers out there who believe in a bin fairy:

1. Stuff does not disappear when you put it in the kitchen bin. It endures. You may believe it has gone from your life but it is still there, but now it is in the bin. It can still stink and smear. You might consider wrapping up sloppy stinky stuff before throwing it away in a receptacle we  are sharing living space with.

2. Kitchen bins have a limited capacity. At some point they need to be emptied. A hint that this might need doing is offered by the inability for you to be able to replace the lid properly leaving the effect of the lid as jaunty little bonnet.

3. A bin liner is made of thin plastic, not reinforced concrete. Razor sharp tin lids, kebab skewers, even angular packaging can rupture this delicate membrane, especially when forced into it at pressure. This makes pouring noxious liquids into a bin even less of a good idea than it already is.

4. A swing lid on a kitchen bin is not a sort of chute down which you slide whatever you are throwing away on its route to the interior. It should be swung out of the way. That way it remains more aesthetically pleasing. Fascinating as it may be for me to be able to tell at a glance that you had spaghetti bolognese for dinner…

5. If you have been forced somehow into tidying up your own life by collecting up some rubbish in a sizable plastic bag all on your own..or you are throwing out any sizeable object….consider taking the extra 12 steps and putting it directly in the outside bin rather than putting it in  the virgin, recently emptied kitchen bin and rendering it half full again immediately.

6. Collapsed plastic 2 litre bottles and cereal packets enclose a lot of empty space. This space remains empty even when you put these things in the bin. No, really, they do. They then take up valuable space which could be occupied by rubbish. If you never empty the bin yourself I can see how this may not be an important concept ….nevertheless, I mention it as a topological thought experiment for you.

One day, someone who shares this house with me will take it upon themselves to notice that the bin is full enough to need emptying, empty it, swill it out with a bit of hot water and bleach, clean the lid, even on the underside and install a new bin liner in the correct way. I might be able to restrain myself from falling upon their neck and kissing them passionately but at the very least I will probably rewrite my will to include a handsome provision for them. Far more likely is that one day I will, after having done just this myself, return to the bin a few minutes later to find that someone has decided that their own , slightly smaller, bin has reached the end of its useful life and they have managed get it out of their life by fitting it , filthy, overflowing and copiously leaking, exactly into my kitchen bin.

All right. I’ll come clean. I do read the Daily Mail. It is on-line and it is free and it has photographs of Kim Kardashian’s tushy. One day I hope to find out who Kim Kardashian is.
However, I read it in the same way that Agent Kay read the National Enquirer in “Men in Black”. Not so much because it contains any truth but it can contain clues to what is going on, even if it cannot get anywhere close to reporting it correctly.

So it will be with this story.

Now, I am by no means sure that ADHD and all its alphabet soup of related “disorders”  , “syndromes” and “deficiencies” are entirely made up medicalisations of bad behaviour, low intelligence or  lack of a guiding morality, but I suspect a lot of it is , especially when the medical diagnosis comes with the qualifier “borderline”.

Even if this is the case,  personally I am reasonably comfortable with parents, should they prove incapable or unwilling or unable to curb their children’s behaviour,  going along with the idea of medicating the apples of their eye, even if there is a fair chance they will as a result be medicated in some way for the rest of their lives and that the rest of us will end up having to pay, handsomely, for that outcome.

No, the thing that causes me concern is that no real wider debate was ever held as to whether this was a GOOD THING generally, or not. And so here we are where we are…hundreds of thousands pilled right up…every day.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of young people…the “War Against Drugs” is rigorously (or perhaps not so rigorously…but that is another matter) pursued.

The Zimmerman Trial seems to be having its Judge Judy moments. Most of the people commenting on this trial have made much of this young woman’s testimony and demeanour and are shocked, shocked…..but those of us who have watched a bit of Judge Judy are already completely familiar with the type. They come in all colours , too, so do not be accusing me of being racist.  Inarticulate to the point of incomprehensibility in their own language, bored, entitled, unable to concentrate. Drugged up, even, and not in a nice way. I am an overweight fat bastard myself and would be the first to admit it but she is only 19 years old, FFS.  No one should have to be that fat at that age…..it is really going to wreck your life.

It is probably not her fault.  If there were only one of her it would not be a problem. At the risk of being accused of being nationalistic, I reckon our English underclass is a cut above, if a lot worse dressed and turned out.

I do not really know what I am trying to say either. It just makes me sad. Sad for them and sad for the rest of us.

I am going to try not to steal too much from other peoples blogs but this little lesson from The Slog is too good not to pass on. In an effort to keep it simple, he gives us this depressing picture.

1. All governments overspend. This is because it isn’t their money.
2. All bankers invent ways to make paper seem valuable. This is because they don’t understand wealth creation.
3. All interesting people are bored by finance. This is because it is interminably boring.
4. Tediously sociopathic crooks take advantage of the boring dimension of finance to cheat people.
5. When governments overspend, bankers come to their rescue. When bankers screw up, governments bail them out. It is a mutually beneficial relationship that leaves the taxpayer out completely…until it comes to paying the bill.
6. Once upon a time, insurance and pension providers did not invest in the stock markets: they put our money only into things like government bonds, which were rock solid.
7. Once upon a time, governments didn’t piss away taxpayer monies, and so their bonds were rock solid. Then they got grandiose ideas about spending on stuff that could never pay back. And then insurance and pension providers began to invest in stock markets. And beyond then, insurance and pension providers spread their risk by investing in both bonds and stocks. This was a little like hedging between the Titanic and the Lusitania.
8. Pretty soon, sovereigns, institutions, companies and banks began saying they had to do profoundly bad stuff – because they had to consider the shareholders….aka the insurance and pension providers.
9. Into this melée came the hedge funds and light-speed traders, to overlay profusion upon confusion. And at a height somewhat above them, people slicing up promissory notes called derivatives were busy making two acres of a Kansan maize crop worth $3m to a small building society in Scotland.
10. And so we arrive at today, where everyone buys and sells everything. Or, to be more precise, everyone bets on the value of everything – knowing only too well that at least half the time it’s worth three-fifths of nothing. This applies mainly to the stock market, but also to the bond markets. Betting on the bond markets is theoretically good, because if the issuers default, there’s always the insurance to bail you out. Those are, however, the same insurance companies up to their necks in 8 and 9 above. And if the defaulter is Greece, the ECB won’t admit it’s defaulted, and thus tells you to go screw yourself. So everyone is angry almost all the time, and pretty darned discouraged when the ‘essentials’ that are supposed to guide the prices and yields turn out to be not just awful, but also completely unrelated to the prices and yields.
The trouble with elegant simplicity in 2013 is that it gives the game away every time. Only complicated, multifaceted, hypothecated, quantitative, and derivative can keep the troupe on the road just one step ahead of the creditors. Big and complex is bad. Small and simple is good.

The Slog’s general pessimism makes me seem like a Pollyanna, but I think he has nailed it here. When I get round to producing a list of blog sites I recommend…this one will be one of them. If I do get shafted by the financial system even more than I have been already, it will not be because the Slog has failed to warn me about what it may yet have in store. He has quite categorically told us that we are mad if we are keeping any large sums of money in a bank. I have no large sums of money so this is a warning of no real use to me, and I am not going to take any kind of responsibility for passing on such a message in recommendation. However, he is always a good , if somewhat dispiriting read.

I am not going to join in generic banker bashing on this blog, much as many of them undoubtedly deserve it. If you have had a “regulatory” system in place that allows people to steal money while undertaking no personal financial or other risk you are going to get what we got. I do reserve the right to single out individuals for a “two minute hate”.

P.S. The Slog also has a 32 ounce bee in his bonnet about paedophilia and corrupt sex practices amongst the power elite (slightly more restrained than David Icke but there is not much in it) and if even a tenth of what he suggests is true it is ugly, very ugly. So ugly I cannot really believe it…but that does not make it untrue.

Next…kittens!

Sly Stone and Mickey Rourke discuss their last and next “procedures” while browsing for motorcycles. (Nicked from the Daily Mail)

Are these two scaly old dinosaurs among the last of the Hollywood ugly macho men?

 Discuss.

The News on Radio 4 this morning had a short segment reporting the death of the “blues” singer, Bobby Bland. It was a name I was familiar with, but I had never considered him to be a proper blues singer. Proper Blues singers have, I believe, now completely died out and it must be that there is no conceivable way that there can ever be any more.

The circumstances that brought the great bluesmen into existence…..the oppressive poverty and isolation of the Mississippi Delta and the vibrant juke joints of Chicago during and after the Great Migration are never going to re-occur.

Blues fans could spend many hours arguing who was the last of the proper bluesmen. My suggestion would be that it was “Pinetop” Perkins. Perhaps not in the first rank of the immortals, but his pedigree was immaculate.

Great blues music continues to be made and performed but the classic bluesman is gone. I feel privileged to have shared some of their era with them and I probably should be more curious about what it was about the music that spoke so directly and powerfully to a 14 year old schoolboy buried in rural Cumberland to the extent that the first long-playing record I ever spent my own money on was a compilation album of John Lee Curtis “Sonny Boy” Williamson and “Big Bill” Broonzy.

Over the years I have read a fair few articles discussing Presidential security in the USA; the Secret Service men, the motorcade, the Beast and all that but I am not sure I understood the extent of the measures involved. At least, until now,  according to the Washington Post…and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

When President Obama goes to sub-Saharan Africa this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances.

Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The elaborate security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander in chief on trips abroad.

Washington Post

Depending upon your own particular attitude to personal safety and your perception of risk…this whole palaver would either make you feel very secure or very, very fearful.

A little bit of cost/benefit analysis might be in order, as well. The USA is running the largest deficit in its history and can ill afford the expenditure, whereas there is absolutely no shortage of wannabe mediocre Presidents.