Sigur Ros is a disease to modern music. The definition of a band elevated by audience stupidity. So of course, I bought tickets to see them live in London.
And there I was, trying my darndest to get sucked into those lush, glacial synth layers, dense with orchestral ambition, as colourful arena lights and ambient fog bend around them with a melodramatic aesthetic and they begin another ghostly shimmering march that thunders louder and fuller until the elements come together into some cosmic triumph. It's the perfect formula to create artificially satisfying sounds of sentimental buoyancy. It's beautifully crafted and really hard to hate.
Indeed, it's hard to find any critical platform from which to approach it at all. For a group that pretends to be not of this world, they exist behind a wall of self-serious whitewash and starry-eyed reverence which appears perhaps a careful hoax that aims to create a heavenly image of them, immune to earthly pollution. But that sort of pretension does not offend me. Pretending to be authentic does. And any band that uses a romanticized concept to remove themselves from critical dissection evades a more faithful agreement between the artist and the audience - that naked line between creativity and manipulation. The one that allows me to embrace artists, and allows their art to represent us.
Because this is really the bloodless corporate rock of Coldplay made abstract by sonic theatrics to compensate for a musical identity which carries no social relevance. Where is the anger? The hunger for emotional catharsis? The daring to offend? The lyricism that challenges the conscience of our time? A time when every ingredient of our lives seems so irredeemably commercialized, so what could be more important than being authentic?
As they begin another song, images of sky, children, and fertile mountainsides play on an impressive lifted stagescreen as fake rain and snow fall from the flies. I hear xylophone arpeggios and and ebowed guitars imitating soaring cellos as how-do-you-pronounce-his-name croons like a wounded goat of elusive gender in a made-up language. People are suddenly inspired to hug one another like some life-affirming cult. I imagine there's a special place in hell just like this - some mock-up, simulated paradise where everything is an interminable circus of glockenspiels and pan flutes, amputated of conflict and purpose. Where you watch fawns gambol amidst horny sylphs in a saccharine nature, florid and borderless but somehow inorganic, as you lie placidly engorged on confectionery before over-caffeinated gnomes leap out of the underworld to tear at your soul until that final paralyzed heroin surrender.
The show ends and I'm covered in the confetti that showered the climax of their last song. We've been treated like people who want cheesy, overblown, emotionally facile, ornamental pabulum. It all quickly evaporates. But I look around at everyone slack-jawed and teary-eyed, keeling at what must have been the most powerful experience of their lives. And I'm left with a feeling that says music sure can be more than this. I fucking hope we need it to be, too.

Criminally below the radar, Sol Seppy's debut album The Bells of 1 2 is the best stuff I've heard in a while.

01 - 1 2
02 - Human
03 - Come Running
04 - Move
05 - Gold
06 - Injoy
07 - Slo Fuzz
08 - Loves Boy
09 - Farewell Your Heart
10 - Answer to the Name Of
11 - Wonderland
12 - Enter One

Laura Veirs is orange juice for the ear...

Fire Snakes Galaxies Secret Someones Magnetized Parisian Dream Rialto Through the Glow Cool Water Spelunking Black Gold Blues Where Gravity Is Dead Lake Swimming	Pink Light Ocean Night Song Don't Lose Yourself Drink Deep Wandering Kind Nightingale Saltbreakers To the Country Cast a Hook in Me Phantom Mountain Black Butterfly Wrecking
(Year Of Meteors)	(Saltbreakers)

So here's a mystery solved:

Dear Yeda,

Quaker did used to sell Captain Crunch in the UK about 10-15 years ago. This was made at one of our European plants in Denmark and was very similar to the US product. We still market and sell Oat Crisp which is the same product without the sugar/syrup coating.
I am not sure of the reasons it was withdrawn but it never achieved high sales, was probably delisted by some of the main supermarket chains and with the move towards healthier products these factors probably combined to its demise. Captain Crunch was also sold in Denmark and Sweden but was also discontinued there within a couple of years of the UK for similar reasons.
We rarely sell US made products in Europe except on a market trial basis because our policy is to market high volume products and it is not economical or green to transport product such large distances. Also, import taxes into the EU are high for products containing agricultural ingredients due to the CAP regime operating in Europe.
Personally I was sorry to see this product discontinued in the UK as I thought it excellent. I recently tried the US version and was a bit disappointed as it did not live up to my memories of the UK version but it was still very good.

Best regards
Alain Boase
Export Manager - Quaker

I love this album,

01 - The Poet Acts
02 - Morning Passages
03 - Something She Has To Do
04 - For Your Own Benefit
05 - Venessa And The Changelings
06 - I'm Going To Make A Cake
07 - An Unwelcome Friend
08 - Dead Things
09 - The Kiss
10 - Why Does Someone Have To Die?
11 - Tearing Herself Away
12 - Escape!
13 - Choosing Life
14 - The Hours

It has come to my attention that the foremost enemy of human progress is time. That we must be vigilant against every wasteful elapse. Against the distractions and amusements which lull our actions into torpor.
For human nature, this is a difficult pursuit. Our daily life married to work, appointments, deadlines - it seems that to be carefree is to rid ourselves of this accountability. Our prediliction to idleness, boredom, spontaneity - our ability to be patient and to show foresight plays to the question of our individual potential. So that those of us with a strong sense of time tend to lead more disciplined lifestyles than those without. It follows that our use of time is indicative of character and to identify these patterns would prove valuable.
The most alarming observation is the unreasonable about of time we spend eating. The three major meals collectively consume over 10% of our day or 2.4 hours. They are also not evenly apportioned: breakfast at 2.3%, dinner 2% and lunch at 6.2% or a full hour. Why is lunch three times larger than the other meals? To answer this, I invited further investigation:

In our adult lives, most of lunches will be eaten at work. While an experienced lunch-eater can average 24 minutes and 52 seconds, including lavatory visits, it is curious why the workday lunch should extend toward an hour. The origin of the lunch-hour traces back to the early industrial revolution. In light of their challenges, the assimilating workforce received this generous recess which soon became the established intermission of the workday. But as these challenges no longer exist today, this overexpenditure of time is no longer warrantable. The manifold improvements of the workplace render the lunch-hour an inherited gratuity and accordingly we propose to revise lunchbreak strategy to a more appropriate allowance no less than 30 minutes.
By merging half our lunch-hour into the workday, we can accelerate economy. A single employee working an additional 30 minutes of an 8 hour shift is 6.25% more productive. This figure increases significantly as more workers contribute, with two workers becoming over 18.7% more productive and five workers over 50%, effectively illustrating the aggregate wealth latent in unrealized 30-minute coefficients. In present-day, with the momentum of commerce as fast as electrons and business a matter of seconds, such examples of optimized time-utilization offer compelling reasons for lunchtime reform.
But humans are great multitaskers. As was suggested by the French tradition of 'running lunches,' we are capable of eating lunch while working. To demonstrate this, I decided to try eating while reading. The results clearly indicate an increase in the rate of learning by 5% composed entirely of accumulated lunchside knowledge. Not only can we shorten our lunchbreak, we can work within it.
To accept that when reading and eating are coincident, we maximise lunchtime productivity, arouses an exciting question: what would be the effect if this were implemented on a global scale? If everyone were 5% smarter, is this no less than a forward thrust of imagination that would stimulate our patterns of thought and shape our lives, each other, our aspirations and our future?
Clearly, lunchtime optimization is a key to revolutionary impact. But the fight against lunch habits is part of a wider life science: the discovery of all habits that endanger our culture. A firm respect of time is our only weapon against this. Let's agree that we do not need to spend so much of our precious time eating. In the hope that some subdiscipline may be born wherein we measure our lives by the eschewal of improvident habits and a zen-like dedication to what is only worthwhile.

I wonder if I've ever eaten a chicken which was next of kin to a chicken I ate before.

I reckon at this rate I can buy myself a car by February.

So I made an effort and now I'm at the end. I suppose lately I often resort to mentioning my "communication problems." I do spend a lot of time sitting and thinking about how to be a part of things. But I don't think anything can cure me from... well whatever.

Why am I writing about this? Does it feel better to? Yes, it's up to me to live with my own problems. No, I don't want to be just another person who's miserable and writes about why she's miserable.

Better perhaps my life will probably become a learning to build a small happiness around smaller pleasures, but even so, I can't help but feel that every new day is just another restart of what will finally be a pretty sad experience of the world.

Sorry I haven't been posting lately. I've gotten into World of Warcraft.

Well that's all I can say for now.

As I approach 20, I begin to worry about retiring into some state of thinking that will stay with me for the long-term. I don't engage as others do with the world. The everyday things that are so matter-of-course, by some strange reason, tend to avoid me.
So I sit on a bench and my mind wanders. The latest daydream is about being a sniper. Me atop a rooftop, and the moving heads below - I can picture myself with a long-range rifle squinting through the scope, centring crosshairs on some random being. The murderous grace of this. Good snipering demands a sober mind and keen focus. A raw sense of duty, stripping away the layers - moral, personal, fallible - to find that state of serenity. Disconnected like something mechanical and deadly precise. I don't know why I think about it.
No big deal, turning 20, but as good a time as any to reevaluate my life. Why the older I grow, the more everything turns less colourful. I just hope my own floating progress isn't too late and I haven't missed something important.
Behind the bench, in the foyer of the library is a high brass plate with six-hundred and thirty-one names. Of them, John Arthur Flowers, who once grew up on the same block where I live now. In the first World War, he was Second Lieutenant 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment in the 24th Division. He was 20 years old when on August 31st 1916 he was killed by a sniper. He has no known grave.
Loneliness is feeling like the bench you sit on. Knowing there's some inner crisis en route to the open. But never more than halfway there. It's not enough to kill myself but just enough not to care if I were shot by surprise from long range.
I should stop thinking about death as a state of serenity. And people like John Arthur Flowers. Then if he sat with me, I'd offer him a cigarette. Just because I like small measures of hospitality. That they bring an unfixed friendship, which, however temporary, might be just enough. And we'd talk about whatever people talk about in nondescript hours on a bench. Maybe the war. Or he'd ask about me. Yes, I couldn't tell him in the right words - the way I noodle out life - as I'm only halfway there. Though I might have mumbled something.

So Israel had a pretty bad year. But now, a strike back: in response to escalated rocket fire since the Hamas takeover this summer, Israel has begun to limit Gaza's fuel supply.
Understandable, but certainly not humane. Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, 75% of which are refugees. With 1.2 million Gazans receiving emergency food rations and 860,000 people fed by UN Relief. Of the 4,000 rockets fired into Southern Israel over seven years, only 12 have been killed. To look at the numbers is to wonder why this two-sided argument is overrun by small integers.
A step towards comprehending the fubar Mid-East is recognizing how much they are at odds with the pecking order of Western governments. Unlike the US, where unfriendly action is accountable to one President - the man with the launch codes, the polo garden and a private petrol pump - characteristic of the Middle East are nations in which a farrago of pocket zealots kill and destroy on their own directives.
Can any peace-loving statesman control diplomatic posture in these conditions? Not when he has to answer for the three lone men with Qassam rockets in his backyard. Israel's hurtful sanctions prove this true.
Surely the collective punishment of so many will only further radicalize Gaza, with more forced into unemployment and greater dependency on aid. Eygpt has shut its borders as well and now Gaza exists cut off from the world.
This unending conflict demands a less short-sighted approach. Maybe one where there's finally a chance for leaders, and not martyrs, to set the tide.

"By incorporating the latest laser and radio frequency technology, snoring could be a thing of the past."

This very "whaa?" sentence featured in a Times ad today. Presenting the private clinic in London, cleverly called "The Private Clinic," which offers some cringe-inducing treatments to unfortunate snorers.
For them, the problem is the uvula, that fleshy bulb-like muscle hanging from the back of your mouth, cramping your bedtime mojo. Bipolar radio frequency thermotherapy involves numbing the uvula and sticking an electric pen into it where an applied radio frequency heats it up. It scars and tightens. There is a low risk of bleeding.
Ouch. But I love my uvula! To think that I would ever cook it because my bedmate wouldn't buy earplugs. Not that I snore or anything. And you male snorers will be glad to know that some ladies even enjoy the sound, to know that you're near and that you haven't died.
Or you might opt for the more popular Laser Assisted Uvulopalatoplasty. This is where the surgeon uses a laser beam to scorch and whittle down the uvula to a nub. Because you don't really need it anyway.
Maybe, though it wasn't me who said it, snoring is something we evolved. Back when the sound would reverberate out of our caves and ward off hungry predators. Makes sense? That's up to you.
This all led me to disturbing exhibits of uvula piercing. Oh you'd ask yourself what sort of muffin-headed deviant would choose to do this. But aside from occasional throat edema and the trappings of food, the procedure is quite tame. Remain still. Avoid gagging. Don't drop the needle. Rinse. Allow two weeks for healing and a mild sore throat.
As future President of the Internet, I'll probably endorse uvula piercing. A safe choice for those of us who seek a more modernized, nonconformist and creatively decorated uvula. Though there is a low risk of snoring.

It's the films that make sadness something poetic and compelling which stay with me the most. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a story complete in its own title. The conclusion already foregone from the start.
It's a heavy-handed, evocative peice. From the opening montage it operates like a Terence Malick meditation. Abstracted from a sober-sounding narrator, turning characters into mythology. And a work of patient understatement - the final violent act of revenge frozen without fulfillment before the end credits appear.
Becoming almost an apology for itself. Something of an edda on the death of the Old West spirit. Tired horses saddled by men measured in wounds with snow in their beards and glory unseen at the end. The rotting away of masculinity by an American frontier that has run out of sagas. It's something haunting and restrained, dog-tired with its own melancholy and insanely beautiful.

The soundtrack was released two days ago.

01 - Rather Lovely Thing
02 - Moving On
03 - Song For Jesse
04 - Falling
05 - Cowgirl
06 - The Money Train
07 - What Must Be Done
08 - Another Rather Lovely Thing
09 - Carnival
10 - Last Ride Back To KC
11 - What Happens Next
12 - Destined For Great Things
13 - Counting The Stars
14 - Song For Bob

Enjoy.

(I had a frustrating time with Amazon. Wouldn't let me buy the album due to "geographical restrictions." I tried several workarounds to no avail. It all just made me want to puncture my own eyeball. A billion thanks to cartafilis who was kind enough to purchase this for me. May there be many more like him.)

My bathroom sink makes strange noises at night. I recorded it around 3:45am today.

I've decided to run for President of the Internet.
This title is earned by way of Google. In a search for "president of the internet" the person whose page ranks topmost is declared President of the Internet.
One way Google's web spiders rank pages is based on the anchor text of a hyperlink. To ascend my ranking, please embed the following in as many places as you can:

<a href="http://shelleycakes.livejournal.com/">Yeda Safina Baksh - President of the Internet</a>

I hope you will support me.
Thank you.

In my motherland of Hinduism today marks the end of Navarati. A festival to Durga the supreme goddess. She is the remover of the miseries of life. Throughout Navarati, we appeal to her energy. That of the universe, which cannot be created or destroyed. It can only evolve.
And in the waters of the neotropics today roams a curious example of evolution itself.
The mangrove killifish is the only known vertebrate which fertilizes itself. Of its species, no females exist. Only males alongside hermaprodites. The males are useless while the hermaphrodites posses what are called 'ovotestes' - producing eggs and sperm together. This ends when after four years they lose female form to become “secondary males.” This unusual reproductive process is akin DNA cloning yet science observes that the killifish exhibits the genetic diversity of sexually reproducing animals.
And to further it's distinction: the mangrove killifish can live in trees. In the dry months each year, the fish flops out of the water and makes a home on land, inside rotting tree trunks. To retain and water and nutrients, it modifies its gills and excretes waste through the skin.
Pretty remarkable. No one knows why it does this. But it does remind us of our own fishlike origins. How skeleton-like fins once became limbs, and spiracle gills became ears.
But in the long run, who's to say wheter it will choose the land or the water? Certainly many species continue to thrive within the countless ecological opportunities of the seas. But, personally, there's just not enough Hindu festivals down there.
Navarati begins again in March. It literally means “nine nights” and is observed with rigorous fasting. The three aspects of Durga divide the worship. Three days to destroy our impurities, vices, and defects; three for spiritual wealth; and three for wisdom. She is celebrated twice a year, in the summer and winter. It is believed that in these times people undergo changes in the mind and body.
Well I changed into miserable, but I'd probably feel worse if I hadn't eaten in nine days. However, I'm no longer a follower. No longer a spiritual person.
For me, Hinduism is too old and too extravagant a faith to make sense of. What with the occasional tree marriage and the universal goddess with lots of arms, removing my miseries and granting me wealth and wisdom.
But I still think it's beautiful. Durga translates to “a difficult to reach place.” For so many people who find meaning and purpose in her, it's hard to break with this pursuit. The festival of millions against all of our miseries replaced with each of us merely as creatures of nature. Like the mangrove killifish.
Next year it returns to the land. Once from our common ancestor, and behind us as compatriots on a frontier struggle. Perhaps the new frontier is where we leave behind old ideas like we once left the water for the land. Because nature itself gives us the best kind of meaning everyday. You just need to be alive to join in. The hermaphrodite fish that lives in trees. The happy certainty that we never stop evolving.

I made this for NonFish.

At the Polk County Child Abuse Prevention Council, October is Turn Off the Violence Month: an encouragement of American citizens to abstain from violent television shows, movies, video games and music.
It's the grassroots censorship movement. But the "glorification of violence" is just another theatrical cry in the manufactured drama of modern politics. There is no more violence in our society but what features in every period since time began. And if our own Roman amphitheatre now exists in our televisions, then aren't we all the better for it?
You can thank the violence of the sixties. The riots, the revolutions, assassinations and the first televised war. When America faced its own organic evils with unprecendented upheaval. No one can deny how much we are indebted to the changes achieved.
This aim for morality-based censorship reflects a sad hope that there is such a thing as no violence. Human nature is violent. The effort to reconcile this with selfhood is what informs our ethics and values. To remove us from this discipline is a fault that will only make the world a more vulnerable place.
If history teaches us anything, it's that to disguise the unpleasant only postpones the answers to real social reform. False peace never lasts. We owe a better solution to future generations than to simply change the channel.

New Radiohead album In Rainbows.


01 - 15 Step
02 - Bodysnatchers
03 - Nude
04 - Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
05 - All I Need
06 - Faust Arp
07 - Reckoner
08 - House Of Cards
09 - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
10 - Videotape

Today, I woke up and needed coffee. Alas! No milk. I dressed, walked to Tesco and bought some. Meanwhile on the River Thames, Jason Lewis crossed the Greenwich Meridian where he left in 1994. This completed his human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth.
Tommorow, regulus occultation occurs in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. I will be making pancakes.
G'day.

Of Stars And Other Somebodies by The Silent League.


01 - Canary In The Coalmine
02 - Victim Of Aeroplanes
03 - Kings & Queens
04 - Before You Started
05 - Let It Roll
06 - Character Assasination
07 - Tolka, Not The Liffy
08 - Untied
09 - Out Of Reach
10 - Second Canary Test
11 - Prayer For The Nihilist
12 - Dry Hallway

The first in a series.

Went to the library today. Returned three books. I expected to see the nice man who works there again. He's handsome and must be smart to be on enquiry/circulation desk duty.
(The local library doesn't open on Mondays, which is strange, but you can nerd out 9 to 7 on Tuesdays. It's not as exciting as, say, the Lancaster library with its mini-concerts for funky myspace bands. Terrible bands actually. Harry and the Potters? The whole idea strikes me as yet another anti-conservative-let's-try-to-hip-up youth-centric urban community planning trumpery. Why can't we just embrace the peaceful Nerdvana of the public library?)
Michael Argyle's The Psychology of Social Class explores connexions between lifestyles and class differences. Sociology and psychology are introduced as two distinct but related fields. The book attempts to combine them in pursuit of answers to differences between classes in many areas such as IQ, sexual behavior, happiness, etc.
The most interesting chapter reminds me why I hate the way I sound because I don't want to sound foreign. It explains why speech style conveys status and the shifts in way-of-speech that occur en masse and spread throughout social networks. As this happens almost unconsciously, it makes for a compelling read.
(A famous example presented in 1972 by American linguist William Labov - whose website strangely gives his home address - concerns changes in vowel sounds on the island Martha's Vineyard. To differentiate themselves, residents resisted the New York speech of tourists. Ironic that the Vineyard was once famous for its deaf communities, which I find pleasant to think of. The small way of life. The quiet people in their gingerbread cottages.)
Secondly, Graham King's Good Writing Guide. A compilation of eight books. While grammars hardly make casual reading, the author found a humourous way to assert his passion for words.
('Connection' should really be spelt 'connexion'. Correctly, the noun derives from the Latin connexio, not the past participle connectus.)
An Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications is a worthwhile dip into what ticks behind those percentages and ICM numbers spattered in the broadsheets. I read it first, but I can't seem to recollect much. Something about binomial distribution, z tests, and groovy factorization magic that flowered into every possible combination. But don't ask me about my math background. However, I like to think the nice man at the desk was impressed.
(To illustrate why correlation is not causation: 1933 Damascus - when yo-yos obsessed the people and drought crippled the region. The preists devised that it must be all the yo-yo-playing drying up the skies and so advised the Sheik Premier who immediately decreed a nationwide ban of all yo-yos. Well, on the next day, it rained!)
The books were some days overdue. I paid the fine. Never seems natural - I imagine public libraries as a kind of socialist institution.
(Fines are imposed in accordance with the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1964. Maybe it's tacit hypocrisy to bitch about late returns when surely my accumulated fines must serve a necessary element of their budgetary needs. Here, authors are paid to permit library access to their works - our Public Lending Right program. The US hasn't yet adopted one.)
The nice man at the desk gave up a receipt and took no further notice of me. I didn't hang around to browse the shelves. How many unread books do I possess?
Walking home, it occured to me that, so much more than what I have already, my life is made up of the things I've missed. I am someone who is just a feature of the world and who lacks a certain meaningfulness as a person.
And here I find it difficult to complete that explaination because the feeling itself is incomplete. I can tell you that I want to try my way out of being excluded, to enter the life of someone else.
Next time, I'll tell that nice man at the desk how much I like him. So I'd be that much closer.

Another of my favourite albums, 'Neon Golden' by The Notwist.


01 - One Step Inside
02 - Pilot
03 - Pick Up The Phone
04 - Trashing Days
05 - This Room
06 - Solitaire
07 - One With The Freaks
08 - Neon Golden
09 - Off the Rails
10 - Consequence
11 - Scoop
12 - Propeller 9
13 - Formiga

“A sensitive person receives 50 impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; the more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalised, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.”
- Marlon Brando

As a sensitive person, even the most innocuous situations can unsettle me. I am always on a tightrope, always falling off, and always in need of someone to repair me.
It sounds painful but don't forget that sensitivity can be a talent. It can mean being conscious of the most latent truths and intimate details about life. It can mean experiencing literature, films, and music in heightened ways. In fact (and it should come as no surprise) many artists are simply overly sensitive people with the ability to release their feelings in ways which inspire and move others.
I'm no artist, but surely this is an important ingredient in society!
The downside is cruel though: I can't exist without support and there are very few people who can put up with me. I would say the ones who really deserve the credit here are those who do - the few unfailing friends in my life who give and give and give so much patience and support that I just want to say “Stop. It doesn't count for anything. You're putting me back together when I'm just gonna get broken again. You're all suckers and sadists.”
I think they would respond, “It doesn't count if it's easy.” That's nice. It's just plain old Nazarene kindness that always wins anyway. It's more than I can attest to some unique and extravagant deeper nature.
In truth, I can't give anything back because it's hard enough just being me, which you understand because you don't expect anything back except me being my sensitive self, which doesn't feel fair to me but I suppose it's like life, which doesn't count if it's easy.

"Dear Cesar,
You always amaze me.
After some Christmases,
You write asking me about Florette,
And your letter arrived the day she died.
I had just been laying her out.
That's why I didn't answer sooner.
I don't think she left much money.
Her husband died six years ago.
And she lived well on what he left.

In any case, her son will inherit.
His name is Jean Cadoret,
And he must be about.
He's a tax collector.
But I don't know where.
The notary will surely locate him.
Tax collectors are never hard to find.
He's married but, unfortunately,
by God's will, he's a hunchback."

- Jean De Florette

It's the way Montand reads it. I really love this scene.

Supervening my plans for a sportsy weekend, the front gear derailleurs of my miserable discount bicycle are broken. God help me.

Variously these past few months, I have been trying to uncover the secret location of cinnamon tictacs.
In my experience, people usually respond "I didn't know they made cinnamon tictacs!"
Oh yes they do! They started in the seventies!
But where have they gone now?
I have chased the rumours. I have travelled to underground carnival concessions. Made perilous guerrilla hunts into Ferrero confectioneries. Been laughed at by the mint and orange+lemon enthusiasts! In the end, nothing. Deprived. Pining. Hopeless!
I know I'm not alone and that one day all cinnamen and cinnawoman will unite to call on the creators of this magical candy to finally produce as much as we crave and make available to all of us who have fallen under its spell.

If there is someone out there who can help. Please understand my pain. Kindly send me a few boxes of cinnamon tictacs for Christmas.

"Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childood in it, - if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgegrows - the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"

- George Eliot

Britain's honorific binge-drinking, bong-loving ethos is now linked to its recent accession as the unrivalled centre of sexual deviance in Europe.
This year, the country sat at the bottom of Unicef's league table of industrialized countries for children's well-being. Britain sports the highest rate of STI (sexual disease infection) and under-18 conceptions in Europe. More under-15s have sex here than in any other country worldwide and over the past twelve years gonorrhea has increased by 200%, HIV by 300%, and syphilis by 2,000%.
In a recent report, Professor Mark Bellis of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, aims to describe the “indisputable link between alcohol, drugs and risky sexual behaviour.” The idea is that people use drugs such as cannabis, amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy to prolong sexual pleasure and that “people knew their sexual behaviour was unsafe and used the drugs to help them forget about the sexual health concerns and enable them just to have a good time.” One in every three of 650,000 people aged 16-24 who use ecstasy take it for sexual effects, and one in three have had unprotected sex afterwards. Britain's teenagers are the third-biggest users of cannabis and under-15s here drink more than in any other country. They are three times more likely to have unprotected sex when drunk.
Schools and the media are the political punching bags here. Professor Bellis points the finger at both while not forgetting the reality of young people wanting to experiment and explore. The problem is the disparity of positive and negative messages reaching our youth. Bellis calls for a crackdown on alchohol advertising and “increasingly sexualised children's toys and coverage of 'disastrous' celebrity role models for exposing young people to confusing and 'distorted' messages on sexual health" versus, say, the strict rules banning the advertising of condoms before 9pm or of showing pictures of condoms outside their wrappers before 10.30pm. Where personal social and health education are outside the curriculum and at 'bare minimum,' he proposes a statutory duty on schools to provide sex and relationships education.
Citing the example when Durex ran billboard adverts featuring condoms spelling out "Roger More" that was banned “after a few complaints,” Bellis believes the present limitations describe a reluctance to engage with what he calls the “promiscuous 10%” in society. His study reveals this fraction of the population becomes sexually active by age 14. They are less likely to use condoms and usually have multiple sexual partners.
But, anyone who's been a kid knows that drinking, drugs and sex are interrelated. We don't need the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health to tell us that. We don't need to be told that the media isn't looking out for our best interests, that schools are a delicate place to talk sex, or that 10% of our friends are pill-popping fuckbunnies. What we do need is to understand that a closer link exists between our self-destructive behaviour and divergences undergone in this generation.
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I don't find newspapers cheerful. More readily, the news certify the unpleasant realities of the world and for many is just another ingredient in depressing morning routines - coffee, commuting and a good dose of political cynicism. That's why it's such a relief to read about Jan Grzebski.
He was a Polish railway worker who lost consciousness when hit by a train in 1988. From then on he lived in a comatose state until he awoke in late April this year. A 19 year timespan which fits rather neatly - beginning the year I was born and ending well-nigh of my last birthday.
Mr Grzebski slept through the events that shaped my lifetime - the gulf wars, grunge fashion, prozac, serbian death camps, 9/11, etc. He remembers the meat rationing and petrol queues under communism, and, though no one could of guessed it at the time, he missed the fall of the Berlin Wall by just a few months.
Today, he awakes to a present of democracy and market economies. It amazes him that shops are open on Sundays, that they offer more than tea and vinegar, and he wonders at "people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning." It's certainly a better world than it was then, and one where 65 year old Grzebski can start a new life with fresh undaunted optimism.
A new life entirely owed to the commitment of his wife. When doctors gave him only two years to live after the accident and some suggested euthanasia, Mrs Grzebski took her husband home, and for 19 years of remarkable devotion she changed his position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections and even wheeled him to family gatherings. She never lost hope. Imagine the look on her face to see him emerge again and to tell him that their four children had all married and produced eleven grandchildren.
It's a rare and inspiring story. A cheerful reminder of how far we've come in our history and how much we can be rewarded by love as strong and as steadfast as Mrs Grzebski's.