don't forget to remember

I guess a lot of people drink to forget. This is a theme that occurs particularly in country and western songs, I think. I can't remember any, so that means.....

...no it doesn't, how about Tonight the bottle let me down?

These exceptionally random thoughts were stirred while I was just then brewing up batch no 16, a Coopers Australian Pale Ale. In fact what initially got me thinking was trying to divine Mrs VVB's objectives in buying the brewing kit in the first place. Is she trying to get me to drink myself in to an early grave? Or just out of her hair? Or just keep me off the streets? Actually, in that last instance, it's the failure to win Lotto that has been the bigger factor.

Anyway, we await with much anticipation how the Pale Ale will work out. Next weekend we can test the latest batch of ginger beer - the first batch was grouse.

If you needed help in trying to forget things, then alcohol is a first best alternative compared to what seems to have happened to this bloke - a high ranked US soldier who volunteered for what he thought was a job that had to done in Iraq, but instead found himself in a morass of corruption and rampant self-interest that simply undermined the very reason he volunteered in the first place. It's hard to imagine the torment he must have gone through. OK, he wasn't a battle-hardened soldier in the first place, but...

The figure that stuck in my mind was the 22 suicides out of 846 US military deaths in Iraq in 2005. Not a figure that's hit the papers anywhere, I imagine and not good for those 'selling' the war. Via Political Daily Review.

And via SciTechDaily, a link back to a local article about creating more ideal working conditions in cube farms by cancelling out ambient noise, a technology already available for headphones. This reminds me of a time when I was about to lose my very official, status-related office and said to the team that I looked forward to moving out with them. They were horrified because I was "too noisy" and they'd only let it happen if there was a cone of silence around my desk. Of course the machinations of the traditional hierarchical organisation meant that I had to keep my office anyway and they were not in any danger.

Interestingly enough, only a couple of years after that incident I went to work in an office where a whole bunch of us were plucked from our hermetically sealed, status-related offices and flung together in a project environment. Were we noisy? Well, no more than most and we got the job done. And all of us, as I recall, really enjoyed being out from behind glass and whatever that tacky stuff is that they make offices out of, and into the open environment. Good fun all round.

And finally. I'd line up with the Tory MP who said that banning little kids from singing about pigs for fear of offending Muslims was 'bonkers'. This to me is the original type of political correctness, and in retrospect it was a short greasy slope from changing 'chairman' to 'chairperson' until we got to the particular type of lunacy highlighted in the story.

The next two weeks are going to be exceptionally busy for me so the rate of posting is going to decline even further. Which could be a shame as, we hope, our feudal overlords continue to disappear up their own fundamental orifices, creating all manner of opportunities for snarky stories. Damn.