This is an amazing picture of a new planet the Hubble telescope found. Of course it could be a firework. But then again they reckon that a load of white dots and squiggles on a black background proves Einstein’s Guess – sorry Theory of Relativity is right, and furthermore that the Universe is thirteen and a half billion years old. Not sure about the Quantum Guess, or String Guesswork. All a load of scientism, scientology, science, or perhaps just wild guesses and stabs in the dark. Might as well pick a horse using a pin, it’s just as valid as any of the guesses. Anyway nice picture.

Mars – Amazing

It looks like an orange that’s been dropped from the second floor onto the pavement and split. A meteor hit it some time ago now, and the Martians being clever people new it was coming and came to the Earth to live, you see we’re all Martians really, that’s why Mars fascinates humans: we build high towers, and pyramids, and obsess about space travel, and hanker for something that’s just beyond imagining, and want explanations for everything.

Because we want to go home.

Bookhabit.com, in association with the New Zealand Poetry Society, are staging an international poetry competition that celebrates written and performance poetry. US$2600 in prizes Free EntryWritten, audio and video submissions receivedAll categories, ages and countries. The competition began on 22 September 2008 and entries must be submitted before 2 November. Each week 100 poems advance to the second round, so don’t wait until the closing date to submit your entries. Full entry details from below.

www.bookhabit.com Bookhabit Poetry Competition

I met the Diet Mentor on a cold day in August 1993 on Hampstead Heath. I wasn’t so sure about the venue, and felt nervous. It’d been raining and the leaves looked like they’d soon be turning. It had been a strange year: a washout. Much like 2007, poor old Tewkesbury Upon Avon turning into Tewkesbury-in-Avon. I felt so sorry for those poor folks. Anyway it’d been raining all day and at about four o’clock in the afternoon the light had begun to fade.

I stood shuffling from foot to foot pondering on the nature of diet. I was extremely over weight at the time and was actually rather hungry, looking forward to my third Big Mac of the day. All of a sudden a huge elephantine man came walking towards me. He had a big bushy beard and wore a hat like Gandalf’s, the beard was somewhat grey and tobacco stained. He smiled widely beneath the bristles showing yellow stained teeth. He carried a part eaten and part wrapped burger in one hand and a carton of coke in the other. His dark green tweed jacket was so big the weight of the cloth made the pockets hang half way down his tree trunk thighs. These looked more tree like than they otherwise might given that they were cocooned in dark brown corduroy that flapped as he walked. The sheer size of him reminded me of a chestnut tree.

He stuffed the burger in his mouth and then stretched out his hand to shake mine all the time nodding. He quickly withdrew his hand and methodically chewed before he emptied his mouth, then as he raised up the empty burger-wrapper he slurped on his coke. With a dramatic gesture he wiped his mouth with the greasy wrapper, before throwing it to the ground.

“Hi, pleased to meet you, I am The Diet Mentor,” he said, again shaking my hand enthusiastically.

My quizzical frown was sufficient to launch him into a well-rehearsed story.
“Look, you don’t have to be thin to tell people how to lose weight. Look I don’t want to, but that’s me. I know it’s bad but I can’t help it,” he said through the chewing.

I couldn’t help but notice the glint of sunlight that reflected from a the top of a brick wall just behind the small copse. It seemed to bounce off the ketchup stains that adorned his large silk tie that hung loosely from beneath his chins, the top button of his splattered silk shirt looked like it had never been fastened. He sweated profusely even though it was cold and seemed to pant, even after the slightest of movements.

I considered my own girth in the light of my astute and journalistic observations. Yes, I’m not that fat I’d thought naively. I considered myself to be rather clever at that point. The Mortgage Mentor clearly had many issues unresolved. Why, I thought, a man of at least thirty-five stone a Diet Mentor. He can hardly walk. And he could not: he walked, no staggered, for about fifty more yards and then headed, as if with an urgent purpose, one arm out stretched, the other grasping his flapping jacket, towards the nearest bench. He collapsed in a heap both great arms placed either side of him.

He removed his Gandalfian hat to reveal a head as bald as a billiard ball. It shone, indeed gleamed, decorated as it was with a patina of sweat. It had a red tinge to it. His hair began about two inches down the side of his head and flowed in grey locks to below his shoulders. His chest heaved at the effort and he belched sotto voce numerous times before I sat down beside him, moving the hat to accommodate my slighter girth. Notebook in hand and pen poised I began to speak.
“Are you gay?” He asked me.
“Erm, no, I’m married actually,” I replied. I felt instinctively defensive in the presence of the Mentor.
“So you want to lose weight, right?” He asked, eyeing my stomach that struggled to break free of my starched white shirt.

“Well no actually I’m here from Lose The Gut the diet magazine, you left us a message to meet you here,” I’d said, now wondering as to The Diet Mentor’s motives for meeting me in this place,
“Oh I thought you were from Slap The Fat, the contact mag,” he said, then sat back open mouthed.
I dropped my pen before he started to laugh.
“Lighten up man,” he said then smiled as he threw the empty carton of coke over his shoulder.
“What do you need to know?” He asked me.

Today in the Telegraph Philip Johnston writes about Marx. Now most right wingers who write about him in these terms haven’t read a word of the source material and get their ideas from other writers who write about him and haven’t read much of of it either. So it’s probably just an impression. He argues that we should not let the left win the argument. Sorry matey but it is the greedy bankers what lost the argument, not the loony left. The system has imploded and left a residue of smelly stuff in the wake of all the bankers, brokers and sundry corporate reptiles who are now gloating on the beach. They won’t be reading Karl Marx.

Karl Marx

Surely he protests too much? Marx was pretty astute. He understood that humanity would win out and that capitalism was simply a stepping stone on the path to humanism. The problem that Popper and other philosophers have with Marx is that he attempted to formulate what would come after capitalism and that National Socialism and Communism were born. However this divergence from the path does not make him wrong in his analysis that capitalism would implode.

It’s not the markets stupid, it’s alienation. Alienation from the product of our labour and each other.

We just don’t care about each other, or ourselves, any more. Hiding in our houses, scared to go out at night, wishing we didn’t have to go to work, having to fill in endless forms and comply with hundreds of annoying rules. It’s this that Marx could see. He didn’t predict half the population would be so depressed that they’d comfort eat themselves to death mind. Freud did, nearly, his idea of over civilization and mass neurosis is bang on the money.

Greedy Banker

Where Marx went wrong was trying to extend the logic of his argument beyond his brilliantly intuitive analysis of capitalism. Because of the brilliance of his analysis and the fact that most who study his ideas of alienation empathise with them led those same folk to credit his arguments in favour of socialism/communism with the same brilliance and embrace it. Hence Popper and other philosophers reject his historicism and socialism as nothing more than scientist, which it is.

It will be interesting to see what will actually emerge from this and where the path will lead.

Boris Johnson writes in the Telegraph today, he seems to be seeking to excuse the behaviour of dodgy bankers. No not the Tories’ fund raisers but actual bankers. He seeks to use a parable (he’s related to God) to compare being bitten by a random dog with the alleged dishonest conduct of many banks. In other words it’s all just a rather nasty accident that’s no one’s fault, a bit like a rapist thinking no means yes I guess. Check out the story here.

I think it means we need less wrong-headed politicians and a few with brains. The reason for banks closing is greed on the part of politicians just as much as bankers.

The parable is daft, there is nothing accidental in banks colluding with valuers and brokers to push up values and make borrowing easier; it was done to generate commissions and charges. The writing was on the wall fo them when folk took the law into their own hands and started issuing proceedings to recover dishonestly high bank charges. Again the politicians collude in defence of this by kicking the cases into the long grass for years.

Coincidence and accidents? Not likely fella.

Boris Johnson strikes me as Caliban to Gordon Brown’s Prospero, not sure who David Cameron would be.