baltic's blog: "my first ramblings spewed forth...."

So its over. I have been watching with interest (the same way as you might watch a car crash) the popularity contest that is the American presidential election. Its at this time that i usually always feel smug that we in the UK vote for the party (and we have way more than 2 that you can vote for ) and their ideals and manifestos for change. Its about conecting or agreeing with ideals and principles rather then how someone comes across on TV. However this has now changed for the majority of people in the UK, even to the point that when the last leader of the labour party stood down, people asked why there was not a general election. Sometimes I really do despair. However back to the US Election and I really was shocked at some of the people the interviewed running up to the election, especially on the republican side. I mean if it wasn't bad enough that the majority beleived Obama was a Muslim (his middle names Hussein he cant possible be Christian), and to the middle class republicans who didn't want to be seen as rascist, so obviously couldn't say they weren't voting for him as he was black, being muslim was a good enough excuse instead. However it got worse. I heard interviews with people saying that if he was voted in it would be like the LA Riots of the 80's everywhere in the US. To the downright racists hicks and some of the vitriol spewed out you jsut wouldn't want to repeat in private, never mind have millions of people on TV know you even thought like that. All in all though with Obama elected its got to be good for the US as a whole. I mean their reputation worldwide was as bad as it could get with Bush in charge, however i think just the fact that obama has been elected will mean that there perception all over the world will improve.

Women The average British woman spends two years of her life gazing in the mirror. Women are estimated to buy 80per cent of everything sold. The average size of women's breasts in Britain has increased from a 34B in the 1950s to a 36C. Food Britons eat 97 per cent of the world's baked beans The average British person will, in the course of a lifetime, eat 550 chickens and other poultry, 36 pigs, 36 sheep and eight cows. There are more than 1,000 chemicals in coffee. 27 of these were tested on rodents; 19 were carcinogenic. More than 90 per cent of kebab shop sales are made after pub closing hours. Science Humans share 35 per cent of their DNA with daffodils. Two per cent of the electricity used by a lightbulb is converted into light - the rest into heat. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would only sting a pedestrian at ground level. History Hitler was on the short-list for the 1938 Nobel Peace prize. Queen Victoria spoke Urdu and Hindi. Each successive monarch faces in a different direction on British coins. Geography Two-thirds of Britons live within five miles of where they were born and raised. Mozambique's flag features a Kalashnikov - the only gun on a national flag. EVERY day, 44,000 babies are born in China. The Eiffel Tower is six inches taller in summer than in winter because it expands in the heat. Middlesbrough, which has about 0.24 per cent of the UK's population, is responsible for 2.5 per cent of kerb-crawling convictions. Transport Seventy per cent of Land Rovers - first built in 1948 - are still on the road. There are 2.5 million pulped Mills and Boon books in the M6. The paper's absorbency helps keep tarmac in place. More than half of the London Underground network is overground. Drivers called Ben are most likely to crash their cars; Ians are the safest. In Britain, half of all appeals against parking tickets are successful, yet only one per cent of tickets are appealed against. Animals A cow expels up to 280 litres of methane per day. Rats can run 100 yards in less than ten seconds and can jump six feet. There are almost twice as many chickens alive as humans. Molly is the most popular name for British dogs and cats. Men About 18 per cent of British men have had a vasectomy. Men produce twice as much saliva as women. Sixty-two of the world's 100 richest men are married to brunettes. Celebrities On any given evening 35-40 paparazzi follow Britney Spears. While filming Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick, shot 96 takes of Tom Cruise walking through a door. Culture Charles Dickens created 989 named characters. By the end of his life, the author Kingsley Amis was drinking a bottle of Macallan single malt before lunch. People called Paul have appeared on 57 number one singles since the British-chart began in 1953; the runner-up is John with 54. Sport No English manager has ever won the Premier League. 650,000 People in South Korea have a Manchester United credit card. Politics A third of all British legislation and 70 per cent of our economic and social law originates from Brussels. 35 Ministers in Macmillan's government, including seven Cabinet ministers, were related to him by marriage. The door of No 10 Downing Street has always been black, except under Herbert Asquith (1908-16), when it was dark green. The Human Body At birth, most babies cry at C or C-sharp. About 11 per cent of the British population is left-handed - up from three per cent a century ago. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. The English Language The insults 'moron', 'idiot', 'imbecile' and 'cretin' were all once official medical diagnoses. The words 'tomato', 'coyote', 'avocado' and 'chocolate' all come from the Aztec language Nahuatl. No words in the English language rhyme with 'orange', 'silver', 'purple' or 'month'. At work Only five out of every 100,000 paper clips are used to clip paper. The average pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long. At home In 1995 there were 225 television programmes in Britain watched by more than 15 million people. In 2004, there were just ten. 58,000 BRITONS still have a blackand-white television. In Britain, trousers cause twice as many accidents as chainsaws. Money Matters In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain paid a total of £14.7million in income tax. Of this, £9million was contributed by the vacuum cleaner inventor James Dyson. The most expensive age of your life is 34. At War Explosions from the Battle of the Somme could be heard on Hampstead Heath. For every insurgent killed in Iraq, 250,000 bullets have been fired. Love, Sex and family On an average day, about 3.3 per cent of the world's population has sex. Less than 0.4 per cent of these acts results in a birth. The average age of a first-time grandparent in the UK is 49. Miscellaneous An average 1,500 immigrants a day enter Britain planning to stay for a year or more. More than 90 per cent of plane crashes have survivors. The most popular inquiry at Citizens Advice Bureaux concerns how to change one's name.

I honestly can believe the whinging that’s going on at present over the credit crunch, how we are heading for a recession etc etc. In my opinion we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We in the west have caused the problem in the first place, and for to long we have lived above our means as if it was some divine right that we should be able to have whatever we wanted. The way I see it there are 2 reasons for the current problems we have in the west. The first one is a current problem. Since the late 80’s we have got greedier than ever as a people. We have seen no problem with living outwith our means, borrowing huge amounts of money to buy houses, cars etc etc. We would borrow as much as we could, not really looking into the fact that if the economic climate changed we could have problems repaying it. All it has taken is a slight rise in Interest rates, food and oil prices and people can’t afford the repayments. House repossessions have rocketed and it’s no wonder. Instead of doing the sensible thing when buying a house, of working out how much you wanted to repay each month, then asking how much of a mortgage that would get you, Mortgage companies were telling people they would give them huge sums, and people were taking it. It seems a case of people were willing to take what they could get, and not realising how much they would have to repay. And the worst of it is the banks are now complaining. Surely they must have realised people wouldn’t be able to pay them back? I can’t believe the nerve of them that for years they have been making huge profits, they have a bad year or two and they go cap in hand to the govt to bail them out. How many other businesses would be able to do this? It really does sicken me the way that the economy is run now. We as tax payers are bailing out the fat cats who have made a mess of things. Yet how much do we see when they are making huge profits? If I was a shareholder of a bank I’d be asking them to repay their huge bonuses they got to help pay for the mess. That would be a good way of fixing the credit crunch. Onto the second part of the problem. If the credit crunch wasn’t bad enough, the rising food and gas prices top it all off. Again, we in the west are the ones that have caused the problem. About 500 years ago China and India were 2 of the most powerful countries in the world. However some how we managed to turn them into backwaters as we continued our march to dominance financially. However in the last 20 years there has been a huge change and these 2 countries, with there massive populations are now starting to flex there muscles on the world stage. As we all know there is only a finite amount of resources in the world, and for to long we have had it easy in being able to get what ever we wanted. However as there is now huge amounts of buying power in these countries, and a demand for things like grain, oil, metals etc it pushes the price up for everyone else. It’s a classic case of as demand grows, so does the price. From my perspective it’s a case of China and India getting back to where they should be on the world stage, and we are just going to have to deal with the fact that maybe, all the things we used to take for granted, may just go back to being luxury items. For some people under 30 say, they probably want really remember what its like to have to save for things, or not get what you want, but for those older, im sure they can all remember things were very different growing up. It’s looking more and more likely that things aren’t going to get much better in the foreseeable future, if at ever at all. I can just see it being a more level playing field in the foreseeable future, but with us in the west dropping down, just as much as other countries catching up.

It seems that not a year goes by without some sort of natural disaster where hundreds of thousands are killed. In the last month we’ve had 2 biggies, an earthquake in China and a flood in Burma. Although Burma was partially avoidable (i.e. if the hadn’t destroyed huge amounts of mangrove swamps in the delta) nothing really can be done to prevent disaster like this happening. And it’s probably going to get worse as the population grows. As we as humans kill of the rest of the living world (roughly 25% of all species disappeared in the last 10 years) it seems the world is getting its on back and trying to redress the balance. It’s amazing to think that in the 400,000 years or so the human species has grown from nothing to over 5 billion, from living only in Africa up to 100,000 years ago to now populating ever corner of the earth. Yet what price has this come at. For the majority of that time, man was in harmony with nature, killing only what was needed to survive, and hardly changing the natural world at all. However that all changed only about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of farming. We somehow went from a species that co-operated to survive, shared resources and tried to look out for our fellow humans, to one that was greedy and selfish. With the ownership of land, buildings and resource we seem to have degenerated into some sort of self centred creature, only looking out for our own. With the advent of farming brought the ideas of ownership. Now land, animals and crops belonged to someone, and we decided that the best land was worth fighting over. In fact not just the best, any land. Property and material goods became more important than the life. What triggered this new morality, this hunger to have more than anyone else? Was it always part of man’s psyche or was it something new? Its always been thought that in the days of the hunter gatherer was were all equal, like one great Marxist dream of cooperation and doing things for the greater good not the self, but was this true? Could it rather have been an altruistic move on our ancestor’s part? Instead of trying to look after everyone and the survival of the species, could it have been instead, the knowledge that if you look after the sick and vulnerable now, they might afford you the same luxury at a later date? If you couldn’t go out and get food for whatever reason they might get it for you, by way of returning the favour. Also with the use of objects or tools, if you are living a life constantly on the move, you don’t want to each have to carry a full set of stone tools, but if you each have a set one, and share, the weight is distributed about the group. However as soon as you live a settled life, you each have your own little area to store tools, store food etc so the compulsion to share is less? Maybe, maybe not. But back to the point in hand. In shaping the world as we have, we are obviously causing problems for later generations. What problems to building large cities on earthquake fault lines cause? Does anyone know? In these fragile areas does adding the stress of the mass of these buildings of today’s cities cause a problem? I don’t know but I would suggest it doesn’t help. Do mines affect the land, or the buildings of giant dams? Its been proven that dams effect the environment, by causing new ecosystems and weather patterns, and destroy natural habitats etc. Surely it’s about time that people sat down and looked at the bigger picture. We are not the only ones that inhabit this planet, but until we take a look at what we are doing we may soon well be. Obviously we cant stop countries developing as that would just be denying the rights to those that don’t have what we have, and keeping them down is not fair. Instead we in the western world should be helping them, while cutting back ourselves, and stopping the exploitation of the resource in these countries. We should be looking at what impact our actions have on a bigger scale. And not blindly destroying even more of the world.

man cannot advance spiritually unless he fulfils his obligation to planet earth, and through planet earth to the solar system. He must “pay the debt of his existence” by nurturing that which nurtured him. For man’s cross is a twofold spiritual destiny; to evolve as an individual, but also to serve the evolution of kingdoms other than his own, lives other than his own. Out of the friction these opposed drives generate, said Gurdjieff, there comes a transcendental third, the birth of conscience. This suffering of the tension between the opposites is the law of true religion and is alleviated only by the awakening of the mediating force inherent in the soul; that is, conscience or love. The Sufi theory of world-creation and world-maintenance – “a new master idea for the coming age,” as Bennett called it – has become increasingly relevant as the planet’s ecological crisis has worsened over the decades; and now, looking back from our vantage point in the new millennium, we see how it has indeed become the hallmark of our time, perhaps the key to its essential meaning. Wherever the next civilisation is centred it must be where the third and reconciling power can operate; where conscience can find a home. That is the prime Sufi message for our generation, as it was Gurdjieff’s.

ok a few things are pissing me off today so i thought i'd rant about them here. Firstly, why do me have pics of women as there profile pic? Its jsut so wrong on so many levels. Firstly as a man, you see a pic of a woman and you go i'll click on that to see her profile, and you start reading it and find out its some bloke. WHy do it. Is it because you are gay and want loads of men to look at your profile, or is it because your so desperate for rates you need to lour men in? Secondly, if i hear one more goth saying the dress in black because they want to be different i'll scream. Why dress the same as everyother goth if you want to be different. Your jsut fitting in to a different group, looking for aceptance etc etc. If you really want to be different dress completely different. Why not try bright orange instead of black, a nice mauve maybe?

Ok I'm finding it increasingly amusing how annoying people are in the mumm's. I mean some of the comments are just ridiculous. The thing is everyday you get 101 mumms about oral / anal etc etc which are just basically polls with a chance for women to comment on how much of a slut they are. Do people bash who makes them? Do they get told they are polls not mumms? Not particularly. But you post what i think to be pretty funny in an ironic / sarcastic way and the retard mumm police are on you in a second. Is it because these people don't have the capacity to think past I'm horny? Are they so lacking in sex that they have to post on every mumm saying how much they love sex, although it sounds like they cant remember the last time they got any? I do post intelligent mumms, but again people don't seem to get them as its to much effort to read something, although on the counterside they can sum up the effort to respond with a long winded comment on why they couldn't be bothered reading it. I post joke mumms, and the amount of people that think they are real is untrue. I mean, the number of comments saying "wow you need to get a life if you did that". People that bash just for the sake of it. Its like, I have no life so I'm going to bash others because it will make me so much better about my sad pathetic life. Get a life people, if you don't like something just skip to the next, why even bother commenting?

Ok, i know its the lowest form of wit, but i love it. I do tend to be sarcastic a lot, however, what annoys me is that some people just dont get it. And the internet makes it worse, as you cant hear the way its said which you really need if you are being sarcastic. I mean i posted a sarcastic mumm with the title BBW (as there had been loads of threads on them that day. I asked if people thought normal sized people were hot or not, but people jsut didn't get it and thought I was having a dig at BBW's, which i wasn't at all. Seriously though, all of the mumm's ive posted have been jsut for comedy value really, but i seems people take them all so seriously. maybe its just me, and nobody gets my sense of humour

I really want to know what the current fascination with shaving is. I mean whats wrong with a bit of body hair? Its meant to be there, if it wasn't it wouldn't grow in the first place. To me you have to blame the porn industry for the fact that every women know things she has to be completely bald down stairs. And they are only doing it for a) hygine (i mean one money shot and your there for hours trying to clean it out your hairs) and b) so it doesn't obscure the filming. I mean its the same reason that there is a huge fascination with anal sex. Its in Porn so all men think its normal and expect there women to do it. But porn isn't real life, so why copy it? to paraphrase David Ducnovy from Californication, when im eating a girl out I like to know shes actually passed puberty. Im not talking some 70's afro, but nicely trimmed is so much better. And its starting in men now as well. I mean if your a cyclist or swimmer or whatever, then yeah shave your arms legs etc, but if your not its just wrong. I mean with my friends if you did it you'd get accused of being queer (nothing against the gay community etc etc) but it does look really effiminate. Even with the girls i know its getting to 50/50 between hairy chests being sexy. Im not talking about looking like the yeti's long lost twin brother, but a normal ammount. Think Sean Connery in Dr No etc. Maybe im old fashioned by surely that looks better than some hairless nancy boy?

1. OPENING JARS - She's struggling. You take it from her hands, open it effortlessly and pretend she loosened it for you. She didn't. Jars are men's work. 2. CALLING SOMEONE 'SON' - Especially policeman but even saying it to kids makes you the man. 3. DOING A PROPER SLIDE TACKLE - Beckham free kicks - camp. A Stuart Pierce tackle is the pinnacle of the game, simultaneously winning the ball and crippling the man. Magic. 4. SHARPENING A PENCIL WITH A STANLEY KNIFE - Blunt, is it? Hand it here love. No, I don't need a sharpener, I've got a knife thanks! 5. GOING TO THE TIP - A manly act which combines driving, lifting and- as you thrillingly drop your rubbish into another huge pile of other rubbish - noisy destruction. 6. DRINKING UP - Specifically, rising from the table, slinging your coat on and downing two thirds of a pint in one fluid movement. Then nodding towards the door, saying, "Let's go" and striding out while everyone else struggles to catch up with you. You're hard. 7. HAVING A THIN BIT OF WOOD - in the shed, solely to stir paint with. 8. HAVING A HANGOVER AND THICK STUBBLE - When birds have been partying they just whinge. You on the other hand have physical evidence of your hardness, sprouting from your face. "Big night?" Grr, what does it look like. 9. NODDING AT COPPERS - A moment's eye contact is all it takes for you to share the unspoken bond. "We've not seen eye to eye in the past",it says, "but someone's got to keep the little scrotes in line". 10. USING POWER TOOLS - Slightly more powerful than you need or can safely handle. Pneumatic drilling while smoking a fag? Superb. 11. KICKING A FOOTY AGAINST A GARAGE DOOR - Clang-g-g-g-g-g-! Stick that Becks, I kick so hard I set off car alarms. 12. ARRIVING IN A PUB LATE - And everyone cheers you. It doesn't mean you're popular, it just means your mates are pissed. However, the rest of the pub doesn't know that. 13. NOT WATCHING YOUR WEIGHT - Fat is a feminist issue, apparently. Brilliant. Pass the pork scratchings. 14. CARVING THE ROAST - And saying "are you a leg or breast man?" to the blokes and "do you want stuffing?" to the women. Congratulations, you are now your dad. 15. WINKING - Turns women to putty. Doesn't it? 16. TEST SWINGING HAMMERS - Ideally, B&Q would have little changing rooms with mirrors so you could see how rugged you look with any DIY item. Until then, we'll make do with the aisles. 17. TAKING OUT £200 FROM A CASHPOINT - Okay, so its for paying the plumber later but with that much cash you feel like a mafia don. The only thing better is peeling notes off the roll later. 18. PHONE CALLS THAT LAST LESS THAN A MINUTE - Unlike birds, we get straight to the point. "Alright? Yep. Drink? Red lion? George, it is then. Seven. See ya." 19. PARALLEL PARKING - Bosh, straight in. First time. Can Schumacher do that? No, because his cars got no reverse gear which, technically, makes you the worlds best driver. 20. HAVING EARNED THAT PINT - Since the dawn of time, men have toiled in the fields in blistering heat. Why? So when it's over we can stand there in silence, surveying our work with one hand resting on the beer gut while the other nurses a foaming jug of ale. Aaaah. 21. KNOWING WHICH SCREWDRIVER IS WHICH - "A Phillips? For that? Are you mad?" 22. HAVING SOMETHING PROPERLY WRONG WITH YOU - Especially if you didn't make a fuss. "Why was I off, nothing much, just a brain haemorrhage".