A big week.

It was my lovely baby daughter's first birthday on Monday, a year ago she was handed to me by a nurse 00:33 after a really difficult birth. Eyes closed and crying. I can't remember which one of us that was, could have been all three of us I suppose. A year later she is an inquisitive child full of laughter and with a marvellous generosity of spirit. As she was born in England at 00:33 and we are in Canada where 00:33 GMT is 19:33 EST, and is the product of not only my demonstrably superior sperm, but also my beautiful Canadian wife's DNA and gestative care, she got two birthday parties. One on Sunday with her cousins where her emergence into the cold dry post-natal world was toasted at 7:30pm and another the following day.

She took her first few unaided steps today. So not only has she had a lot of loot from friends and relatives as birthday presents, she has also learned to walk. A big week indeed.

In other less important news, the United States of America have, for the first time in 8 years, elected a president who is not an asshole. Barack Obama, has, throughout his election campaign, acted as a statesman, a gentleman and an inspirational man of great vision. I truly hope he lives up to the great expectations that the whole world has for him. Lewis Hamilton has also won the F1 drivers championship, so perhaps the white liberal middle class pricks at the BBC can stop blaming absolutely everything bad that happens in the world on white on black racism. The BBC do not recognise races other than white and black, where white just includes Caucasians and Sir Trevor MacDonald, while black includes North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans (all tribes), Asians (oriental and from the Indian subcontinent), native Americans, Eskimos, non-Jewish Semites, indigenous Australasians, people from every island in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Arctic and Indian Oceans and visitors from other galaxies.

Airport Security

I was just checking in online for an Air Canada flight to Toronto and I think their taking the security questions a bit far.

It's the third question that concerns me. "Do you have anything in your hand baggage which is sharp or pointed or any item that could be adapted to cause an injury to another person?" I was thinking about taking a magazine on board, but as Jason Bourne used one as a cosh in The Bourne Supremacy and even an amateur could give you a vicious paper cut with one, I now doubt whether any reading material is allowed on-board.

My SLR is also a no-no as it has a long strap and could be employed as a very expensive, single use mace. More or less anything can used to cause an injury by a malevolent person. Perhaps I should turn up chattel free and naked, as clothes could in theory be used to smother the unwitting fellow traveller.

Or maybe the governments and the dicks that works for them are just taking themselves and their own cleverness a little too seriously.

Don't forget to vote America!

Except all you people in the Jesusland states in the middle, you don't go worryin' yer purdy little heads about it!

Food

Laura and the baby are in Canada at the moment, the washing machine needed a few days relaxation. I am just cooking myself a roast pork joint (with lovely crisp crackling), roast potatoes, runner beans and brussels sprouts which I shall wash down with a little Sauv blanc. While unpacking the shopping earlier I came across this:

I bought it for Laura, but she won't eat it. Probably for the best. I don't want her getting a taste for Authentic Jamaican Cock Flavour Soup.

Last assignment in Amsterdam.....

Due to a merger at work, there is a lot of re-organisation and unfortunately, it looks like I have spent my last trip in Amsterdam for the foreseeable future. I love this city and would love to live in it.

Arriving on Wednesday night, the hotel welcomed me, as always with a little present. No-one has ever used this word combination to me before.

"Your present is cheese" seems also to some up what I believe were the unspoken words of the important person in my command chain who made the decision that I should look after some big budget stuff in London, rather than the small budget stuff Amsterdam where I am generally far more content. Laura wants to give him a kick in the Edams.

On Thursday night I had a few drinks with some colleagues in Amstelveen, a few more at De Bekeerde Suster in the old centre of town and a few more at Bourbon Street with some of the hotel staff after they finished work. These are places I will miss, as I will Castell, which you must visit if ever you are in the city. I've eaten here a dozen or so times this year. Their prime rib is superb and the meat falls from the bones on their ribs by giving it a hard stare. The last time I went their my palate had an orgasm.

Whilst on a postprandial stroll through the market in Amstelveen on Friday I noticed this:

I've used a Dremel before but never an ass blow case electric grinder.

After boarding the Fokker 50 at Amsterdam Schiphol to fly home to London City on Friday it all went wrong. London City was closed and all of the passengers from the 16:10 flight to City were herded on to the 18:15 to Heathrow. KLM staff in Amsterdam very kindly lied about our luggage coming on the flight with us and KLM staff in London lied about it being delivered to our home addresses on Saturday.

'The Flying Dutchman' was until recently the name of the KLM frequent flyer programme. As anyone acquainted with the legend knows, the Flying Dutchman is a ship doomed to sail the oceans for eternity. Much it would seem, like my luggage.

Stating the obvious

Back in January I wrote an article on the Eskimo and the BBC website has finally caught up with me and done the same. Apparently, the Eskimo have 37 words for snow. Unsurprising when you think about how much of it they have and the preeminence of this substance in their lives. Less known is that they have no word for beer, for which we, in England are blessed with thousands of words. No wonder then that while they invented ice fishing, we invented the worldwide web that has enabled us to order a curry online and a couple of bottles of Kingfisher to wash it down.

Attention Deficit Disorder

I have just started watching Pink The Series it is the first 'TV' series I have seen that was written from the outset for web broadcast. I get it via the Vuze network in HD but it's also available via YouTube. The production quality is superb, the acting, great, in a film noir comic style. It's about a female yogic gym addicted assassin in her late thirties or early forties who has agreed to do a series of government hits in return for being released from prison, which she wants to do so she can find a nice man to have a baby with as she's worried about her biological clock ticking. Each webisode segues between a scene in the present where our heroine Natalie Cross is either topping someone or being disappointed about the dearth of worthwhile boyfriend material and a flashback to her childhood with daddy teaching her to shoot, track, knife fight. For reasons I don't truly understand she reminds me of my friend Amanda.

The downside to this series and the reason that I probably won't continue to watch it is that each episode is about three minutes long once the initial commercial, credits and title sequence have been subtracted. So a series each episode of which is the same duration as a standard commercial break. A new episode is released once per week. On this basis it would take about three months to air an episode of Dexter and over twenty seven years to see the whole of the Sopranos. Life is just too short. I think I'll have a beer with Amanda instead, once down the pub, she always stays for more than three minutes and is, in general, much less likely to kill anyone.

Sarah Palin, 'doencha' just love her?

Err...... no! What a terribly cynical ploy by the GOP to capture the popular vote of the idiocracy which is the United States. As if being a Republican isn't bad enough on its own, she is a young earth creationist and an anti-abortion zealot who hadn't left North America until her VP candidacy appeared. If McCain gets in and dies of old age, this vacuous bint could be leader of the free world. But it's OK for the Jesus crowd because she knows where Russia is located and can kill and cook a moose. Really! If that's all that's required they should install Crodocile Dundee in the Whitehouse immediately!

You just don't see this in the UK....

I snapped this window display in a shop in Amstelveen last week. You just would not get this in the UK. You will note the two little boys are having a laugh, drinking what looks to be whisky and smoking a big fat cigar. This sort of thing makes me really angry, it is not the smoking drinking thing, which is fine, it's that French and obviously gay moustache the kid has drawn on his upper lip. Next thing you know Charles Aznavour will be touring schools and singing Village people numbers. This sort of thing must be stamped out, we should not be encouraging our children to be French, it's just not natural.

A big thank you must go to my pal Joe. It was Joe who introduced me to the phenomenal Hopes and Fears album by Keane ; The Killers' Hot Fuss ; the TV series Flight of the Conchords, The Riches and most recently the excellent Breaking Bad.

I am missing Evelyn and Laura. Laura will look about the same when I see her next, Evelyn has grown substantially and just had her first spoon or two of non-boob food and I am missing out on all this.

The Scottish Parliament (the one in Westminster)

I read an article from the taxpayers alliance today, it summed up my thoughts on this government. The Labour Party's Scottish Presbyterian Leadership has decided that they haven't had any positive press recently and are going for the eco-idiot demographic with proposals to ban supermarket plastic bags that people use as bin liners. Leadership or incentives to switch to biodegradable bags has not occurred to them. They can make some new laws and any chance to make some new laws and look strong and clever, must never be missed.

They sense the opportunity for more legislation and another way to make England more closely aligned to the moral values of tax funded champagne glitterati of New Labour.

The machinations of thought are already conjuring dreams of a Plastic Bag Tzar, a raft of news plastic bag laws that will put a halt to the evil supermarkets giving away free plastic bags that end up in land fill and force people to buy plastic bin liners that will end up in land fill.

As if there isn't anything more pressing going on in a country where no-one can afford a home, where immigration is running at +500,000 per annum, where the hospitals can't cope and the schools pump out illiterate children with qualifications that mean nothing because every year the exams are made easier to keep the statistics sweet.


They truly are vacuous parasites, spending their time and my money dreaming up new ways to piss me off.