Through the Viewfinder

Oh dear oh dear. Toys are now being thrown out of the pram and all I can do is laugh my head off.

A few months ago I made a little fopar and blogged about someone who read it and became all prickly about it. The reason was because she saw what I said as an attack on her belief in a god of some sort.

Well once again we seem to have crossed swords on twitter and being a christian as she is and full of course of christian charity and forgiveness (as the teachings of the book she holds so dear clearly states) it seems that she want to “punch me on the nose!”. How wonderfully christian that is!

And for once I am not being sarcastic. The threat of physical violence when losing an argument has throughout history been the christian way. Belief of the one true god means taking those who have a valid argument against your belief and punch their faces in.

As far back as their own written history christians have sought to dispose of all decentres by use of war and oppression. Even to the point of raising great armies to rid a far distant land of people who dare to have beliefs other than their own! Oh how the crusaders took deep notice of holy teachings as they smote all the muslims they could lay their hands on.

And in our fairly resent past we have evidence (Not a word that most god botherers would know the meaning of) of missionaries travelling to far off Africa and converting the “savages” with the aid of the whip and the gun! Not to mention of course the seemingly large number of holy men in the modern church who seem to think that the only way of bringing god to small children is to bugger it into them and then pretend that it did not happen!

I was accused of christian bashing today. This is another thing that this delusional and seemingly violent person is wrong about. I am not singling out christians in my denouncement of god. All one-god believers are raving hypocrites.

By saying “I think you are wrong in your beliefs” It seem to entitle this fanatical bible-basher to eventually threaten to punch me on the nose when she starts to lose the discussion. It is wrong for me to question god in fact. I even get told in the most patronising way that if I believed “god would talk to me”. I counter with if I believe I was Tony Blair would I then hear voices saying “INVADE IRAQ” booming out of the clouds at me? So if I counter god I am wrong and yet it is fine to slate Stephen Hawking because he offers “Proof” that god did not create the Earth …. Christians, or any of the other nutters have a hard time when it comes to evidence and proof …..

Maybe it’s because they don’t have any of their own?

PS I should add here that as far as I am concerned you can beleve in whoever or whatever you like, even the Pillsburry Dough Boy for all I care … Just keep it to yourselves and DON’T keep thrusting it at people who know better. If you want a happy easter or x-mas, then have one please, but don’t assume that everyone arround you wants to keep your holy days … Nuff said!

After the rather frantic last few weeks I am now entering a quieter patch. Even if only for a few days I have absolutely nothing planned at all, and that is rather nice to know. This gives me a chance to;

A.) Tidy up the studio (And boy does it need it!)

B.)  Catch up on some paperwork.

C.)  Take stock and plan for the future

“A” of course will never get done it never does unless I lose something really, really important, and even then only grudgingly. “B” has as yet not reached the critical stage as I can still find the phone under the teetering pile in the “In” tray. So we come down to “C”.

As I batter solidly on the door of my 51^st year I do find myself staring into the crystal ball a bit more often, trying to determine what path to take. It’s not that I am any longer adverse to taking risks you understand, I just don’t want to waste valuable time pratting about on unnecessary costly projects, when there no longer seems to be the time there once was to get things right.

And before you all jump up and down saying 51 is not that old, I know this and that is not the point I am trying to make. My point is, to me anyway, that we as a species have fucked up and wasted the last 50 odd years. We have wasted resources, wasted opportunities, wasted learned knowledge, wasted human and animal lives. I look at the way things are going on this fragile planet and think “How the fuck did we let it get this far out of hand”?

There are still places in the world today where pointless wars are going on, where the peoples, the land, the atmosphere and the seas are being killed off by man’s blatant stupidity. It’s as if humankind has learnt nothing from out tortured history.

The crystal ball staring is not so much which path should I take, as should I bother taking a path at all …

In other news I started a serious diet on the 23^nd July. It will last until the 15^th of October. It is based on the Cambridge diet, total food replacement system, and it is reported I should lose about 3 stone in weight by the end. It is followed by a food and portion re-education period alongside healthy eating classes etc etc etc. It is my aim in total to lose about 8 stones or there about over the next 18 months. Time will of course tell on this one, and even I will be interested to see how long I can keep it up before the boredom of healthy food drives me back to cheese and bacon buttys!

The blog does seem a little depressing at the moment, sorry. Normal service will resume once I can have a beer again maybe …

TTFN

My head, my chest, every single vertebra in my spine, my nose the inside of my mouth and finally what remains of my legs. What do all these items have in common? You guessed it they all bloody HURT!!! Just got off the ferry after 7 days and 1,600 miles and my body is a total shambles.

The task, which I set off a week ago for on a near 800 mile southern dash, was easy. Not really work at all just pop up 6 speaker poles, add a microphone or two, and talk like a bloody loon for two days. After that take it down, load it into the landy again and then make another near 800 mile drive uphill back to my beloved Orkney. I could have done that normally without either breaking a sweat or having to put down my pint, but some slimy bar-steward added that most untrustworthy of all accommodation factors “Camping”.

Yes this barbarous excuse for a leisure activity called “Camping” that is to blame of course. So instead of 7 days of County Show type stuff, interspersed with convivial evenings over a meal and a pint or two before bed at a non too shabby local hotel. … We camped in the ruddy show field.

Oh I have done it loads of times before, but I was 8 stone lighter, 8 years younger and had twice as many lower limbs as this bloody trip out. I hardly got any sleep as the camp bed I have seems to have developed invisible rock syndrome. You know the one, just as you are drifting off to sleep it suddenly feels like you were jabbed in the ribs (Or buttock, or spine, or arm) with a sizeable chunk off the Old Man of Hoy. And the problem with not getting anywhere enough sleep is that you feel run down, it lowers your immunity to everything. You then start to suffer other types of debilitating problems, so by the Saturday I had a wee infection (Dodgy water supply) and by the Sunday a cough/sore throat (Talking for two days and sleeping in damp bed clothes). Finishing up when I left the field on the Tuesday morning with the addition of a mild chest infection ………

Also being as I was camping in southern England where they do not have the well balanced weather we have here in the Islands, I also managed to pick up a slightly sunburned nose! And to cap it all having eaten nothing but junk showground food and “Bully beef-n-Beans a-la Raymondo (Dundee born show-rigger and camp cook), which though very pleasant, is somewhat lacking in any single beneficial nutritional plus point, I have also managed to acquire two mouth ulcers.

The drive there and back reminded me very much why I actually don’t miss England in the slightest. The place is now FULL … No honest it really is! Overfull in fact. There are spots here on Orkney I can stand, turn 360* and not see humankinds bloody handprint. In England I doubt you could do that anywhere even if you were terminally myopic.

All in all though it was really great to see friends that I have worked with on and off for the past 15 years. I managed to secure a promise from 5 of them to come up here and visit (Not all at the same time though I hope LOL) and will enjoy spending time with them when I am a lot more relaxed and looking less like a Zombie attack victim.

… … … … … Standby for Important news on the 20^th … … … … …

“It’s only a game …”

Words, it seems that can invoke in some such feelings of anger and misplaced passion. I know this because I offered the same to my two visiting nephews this weekend, and the response was somewhat that of shock that anyone, especially a male could not be interested in football.

But the thing is however much you like football, to either play or to watch, it is still only a game! A game in the subcategory of sport I admit but it’s not that important in the whole scheme of things really is it?

Football used to be an amateur game with chain-smoking miners called from the pit into the daylight on a Saturday afternoon for a knock-about against the gas workers 11. Where all winning meant was you did not have to buy the first of 10 pints you would consume just after the game in the same pub as the opposition. All without either a fight or an adulterous act taking place. In this time when the word of the referee, usually a serving policeman, was truly the law and before “Players Agents” had spawned from whatever cesspool that scum hail, you supported the team closest to you, not just the one that earns the most.

Dare I suggest … The good old days?

Let’s have a look at a few facts (the veracity of which I lay no claim) trawled from the net on the subject of modern football;

The new football stadia at Wembley cost a cool £798 million and despite all this money being spent the pitch (The only bit you actually need to play football) has had to be re-laid 10 times since opening in 2007 because the structure keeps the conditions too moist!

The Premier League has been warned to face up to its financial responsibilities after it made the fifth-highest losses in Europe. A third of the teams in England’s top flight had losses of at least 20% of their income. Almost a quarter of Europe’s top clubs faced similar problems.

Despite reporting an average income per club of £122m, six of the 18 clubs in the Premier League reported large losses. Germany, Italy and Spain are its closest competitors when it comes to average club income, all three hovering around the £75m mark.

English top flight clubs spent in excess of £1.32billion on employee salaries – more than Italy’s Serie A (£0.93bn), Spain’s La Liga (£800m), the Bundesliga (£684m) and France’s Lique 1 (£615m).

The average Premier League footballer earns an estimated £21,600 a week or £1.1m a year. Top flight clubs each spent an average of £41m on player wages alone.

Wayne Rooney for instance earns about £90,000 per week, this does not however cover bonuses (e.g. goal bonus, appearance bonus etc.), and isn’t including the money he makes from advertising and merchandise. Ronaldo by the way earns about £113,000 give or take the odd thousand!

The average price of a ticket to watch a football match for an adult is £37.50

The point of all this rambling is thus; There is an obscene amount of money thrashing about in the name of this football game. Am I the only one who feels that it would be much better spent, in these days of austerity Britain, on the needy who are about to suffer from the wide ranging cuts due to fall on us, than on the likes of Beckham, Rooney and Ronaldo? Let alone the working time that will be lost to “Sick” employees that the 28 days of the world cup will throw up.

Football would survive after all, if the people want it to. But as it should be perhaps as amateur as it was when the shorts were longer than the number of zeros on the football clubs balance sheets.

TTFN…..

What a couple of weeks it’s been, and what a week it’s going to be this week too looking at it.

Started with an invitation to prepare a talk on disability and the media for delivery in November, a trip to Aberdeen to pick up a spare leg, then a day filming for the BBC on Westray, Kirkwall filming a wonderful Spitfire flying display, and finally my first live DJ gig in 12 years!

First of all the talk to the NUJ about disability. WTF did they ask me for? I am not famous or in the public eye, and I am sure that I am not the only disabled cameraman in the business. I know for sure that there is at least one sound engineer with only one arm. Still it is a challenge and I do like those.

The trip to Aberdeen was fun as I spent a lot of the time with a friend there and had a great time playing at being a tourist. The new leg is lighter and fits a little better but as it always is with a new limb it presses onto new parts of the stump causing a few problems. I will soon get used to it I am sure I am just waiting for a clear few days to start wearing it out and about.

The filming for the BBC on Westray went really well once the weather behaved. I was filming the “Links of Noltland” dig for a series called “Digging for Britain”. The bit I shot is just the warm-up start of the programme and I doubt it will be much more than 2 or 3 mins and the fulltime crew are coming up here in a couple of weeks to shoot the body of the prog. Still it’s getting me back in the swing of filming for Auntie and with luck it will lead to getting more from them in the future.

Deep joy was the Spitfire seen in the sky over Kirkwall. The one thing I miss having moved up here is not having a variety of classic aircraft flying over in the summer on their way to various air shows. If you are remotely interested you can see the Raw (Unedited images) here;

 http://www.youtube.com/user/SeanOrkney#p/a/u/0/WTdQvHQkJ0M

A few weeks ago I was asked by a very good friend here on Orkney if I would DJ at her birthday. I have to admit I was more than a little nervous about it as it had been a long long time since I had last spun a few disks. I was in truth very rusty and more than a little out of touch with the more modern music but I totally enjoyed every moment of it and more to the point my friend was pleased too. It is just as well really as it was an important birthday for her and I would have hated to have spoilt it.

Now I have just two days of peace before my sister and her two boys arrive for a week …

It’s all go here at Islander Towers you know …

TTFN!

Locked in a Cell

Work wise, it’s been a bit of crap year so far. Oh I know that there is work out there I would just like my clients to actually finalise things so I can plan my shooting schedule for the next month.

I know what is going to happen of course it is all going to come in at the last moment and everyone will want their filming done at the same time. Either that or I will get a call the day before and not have time to plan it properly and things will get forgotten.

So far in the book are just two days filming and one live gig for June and a live summer show in July. None of which are going to supplement the dwindling bank balance. I know it will all come out right in the end but I do worry sometimes and I thought I had left stress behind in the south when I moved up here.

In other news;

Synthetic life is in the news today as one of our colonial cousins has taken the test tubes from the average schoolboys chemistry set, and constructed the basic DNA of a single celled organism. This organism was able to replicate clones of itself faster than the Nolans during a Dublin power-cut.

As soon as this discovery was announced, there were various groups jumping up and down and prophesising the end of the world as we know it. Most of them the usual religious nuts claiming that the human race should not play at being god etc, etc, etc. Thankfully they will be ignored as they have been in the past so that any discoveries that come from it, (Growing oil for instance), can benefit the worlds population as a whole, not be crushed under the silken heal of some nut-job in a silly hat who hears voices in his head. The self same voices that tell him to cure gays and cover-up the abuse of small children by his workforce …

The one dissenting voice over this discovery that I actually have some sympathy for is that of Greenpeace. Yes there should be strict guidelines that will prevent the escape of any manmade life from escaping into the environment. And before any product made from these bugs should be properly tested etc … But let’s not stifle science when some of the things that may come from this will change lives for the better. Creating cells that might for instance grow into a functioning human limb replacement, these are the sorts of discoveries that dreams are made of.

For some of us anyway ………..

So we are all friends now then. The playground is once more a place of peace and quiet. The posh boy’s gang have asked the hippies around to tea and whilst we know they still want to steal the hippie’s dinner money (And everyone else’s for that matter), they are at least being nice for the time being.

Not invited to the tea party of course are the lot from the council estate, they are now all stood around in a circle shouting “Fight, Fight, Fight” as they decide who is going to be the senior bully to run the gang after the summer break. The old top bully has had to go away to lick his wounds having been beaten in a scrap with the posh boys gang. Not that the posh boys won you understand, just the bully boys lost. And as is the tradition is all playground fights the world over, once a gang leader loses a fight he has to stop being leader and eventually leave the school altogether.

Meanwhile of course those of us not in a gang just look on in bewilderment.

And so the country has spoken, nay it has shouted. And what has it shouted? I hear you asking. It has shouted “Bugger off the lot of you!”

Whilst the dust is still to settle all I can see out there is that the population has had enough of the current voting system. We all want to know that the vote we cast will count for something. Proportional Representation has to now be brought into play whichever of the two old parties tries to rule in the short time we have before they realise they have to go to the country again in a couple of weeks.

In other news …

The weather today is calling out for a one legged cameraman to grab his fishing gear and get the hell down to the pier to dangle his spinner. So if anyone feels like an hour or two in the setting sun this afternoon in St Marys, talking bullshit and drinking coffee let me know before 15:00.

Right let’s start then … No, no, no! Not this blog post but this script I have to write. Well ok maybe it is going to turn into a blog post as I am crap at writing scripts as I think I have mentioned before.

The thing is I have this desire to enter a contest in the video making world, and part of the rules are that you have to do everything yourself. Camera, lighting, sound (not the voices) and most importantly the script! The reason I entered is because it has to be a film shot totally in … Lego!

Yes I am reverting to my childhood and playing with kids bricks for a few weeks.

The thing is that it obviously has to be animation with Lego. Stop motion animation at that which is enormously time consuming and as frustrating as hell. I keep looking at the calendar and know that my chances of getting this done before the deadline is as slim as the chances of Gordon Brown being leader of the Labour party by this time next month, so this might well be an entry for next years comp.

So whatever year this gets entered, it is still going to be the perfect excuse for a grown man to be found in his place of work building things out of multi-coloured nursery bricks.

It’s a tough job this but someone has to do it …

Last night Mark Steel (Radio 4) was doing a recording of his show “Mark Steel’s In Town” here in Orkney. Excellent it was, a real treat to end the week on. The actual show will be broadcast on the 12^th May at 18:30 on radio 4 of course. You will listen, you will enjoy trust me …

The one problem of only having one leg and living on an Island is that when time comes to have a new leg made, you have to go over to the mainland to be measured up etc. If you choose to fly, and undergo the indignity being scanned, strip-searched, robbed of anything sharper than banana and generally treated like you were filmed on the grassy knoll holding an M16 loaded for bear, you can just about complete your 45 min appointment in one 24 hour period. If however you drive over (Providing the SNP have not sent your ferry service out on a blatant electioneering cruse to Norway) it will take you 2 days at least.

Grabbing the 11:00 ferry to Scrabster will leave you enough time for an unhurried drive to the outskirts of Aberdeen to locate a hotel for a one night stopover ready for your appointment at no later than 10:00 the following day (Later than that and you will never make the return ferry in time). Now my views on UK hotels are well known to my loyal readers so I won’t go over once again the bastard, greasy weasel, smelly arsed, rip-off merchant hotel owners idea of “Good value”, but I will suggest to you this; Never, ever, ever stay at the Kintore Arms in Inverurie. It is a shit-hole of the first order. £60 fracking quid for an airless, sweaty, noisy room with no window. I have seen better appointed prison cells than that hotel room! I would rather sleep in the bloody car than go back there.

Did I just rant again? I am sure I said I would not when I started this blog right? … Sorry

By this time next week we will have a new government leading this country into the future. Here is a little prediction for you, my vision of the future … As I look deep into my crystal ball I see ………… Bugger all changing … That and another election before the end of the year.

Just remember, you heard it here first.