Sunday Blues

So I've just returned from a quick tour round the area after the crowds have disappeared into the ground. Cops are everywhere, as usual, and tooled up to the hilt. Every available space on road and pavement is taken up with parked cars. Extremely tough looking men are walking around, and you can't tell if they are the goodies or the baddies. Old blokes selling badges, t shirts and paraphernalia stand about on street corners - their patch - calling out to no one in particular, smoking tabs. Bootleg gear of all sorts is doing a brisk trade. The smell of burnt charcoal burgers fills the air, and all the women seem to be very overweight. Broken bottles are strewn all across the main road, and mounted police patrol up and down, their horses leaving a trail of dung pressed into the tarmac. I'm taking pictures of everything I see, and the police are giving me a second look, making sure I'm not sizing up the area for some terrorist activity later. A group of small boys, scruffily dressed, have gathered round the main entrance to the ground, and are harassing the Gateman. He waves them away, but they don't go far. As daylight gives way to dusk, the floodlights beam out from over the main stands, and we can all hear the roar of the crowd inside, as play hots up.


When you take a good look at all the people going into the match, you can see how much it costs them. Most are 'low income bracket' people, and yet it is at least £25 a ticket, and over £1000 for a season ticket. Whole families go, small children in tow, everyone dressed in their team's colours. When a football shirt is the most important thing you buy, you don't care how much it costs. Once the match has started, the atmosphere becomes a little more friendly. The police relax, as they know most of the troublecausers are inside the ground, and for a while at least, they can ease up. I see one copper devouring a bag of Macoys, and another eating a burger. But there is no escaping the fact that they are tooled up for a riot, should one occur. Very menacing. The whole time helicopters have been hovering overhead, in fact, they have been overhead all day and, along with the Budweiser Blimp, have got the whole place covered.


We make our way through the entrance towards the huge merchandise store, and have a good look around the front area of the ground. Even though I have lived here several years, I have only been inside this part of the ground two or three times. Of course I've never been inside the actual ground itself, but I used to watch matches from the overground catacombs in the nearby graveyard. If you stood at the far end, you could see the last third of the pitch, until they finished off the new stand, so that now you can't see anything.

Funnily enough, I've never been that much of a football supporter, but when you see it all close up, the people, the occasion, the atmosphere, it really is quite intoxicating. Shame it always ends up with such a lot of violence.

After the match has finished, I go for a short walk to the corner shop to get supplies, and am surrounded by rough looking young men with their girlfriends. Several of the men, [and a few of the girls], are shouting : 'BOOT RIGHT ROUND YOUR HEAD, GET A BOOT RIGHT ROUND YOUR HEAD', to the tune of 'Upside your head', the funk classic. I am ashamed to share the pavement with them. I pause as I turn into my street, and watch some mounted police on their huge horses gallop up the main road towards some 'aggro'. The sound of many police sirens fills the cool night air.

Rainy day

Its raining a lot outside. This is London, and the rain has not rained for many many weeks, we actually have a water shortage. Now the rain wont let up. It just keeps on coming. Over the summer, it was so hot, you couldn't use the underground, it was 120 degrees down there. Thousands of people all breathing each others breath. Yummy. Last week it rained enough rain for 5 weeks in 2 days. My bay window has started to leak. The gutter at the back of the house broke off in a high wind, and now flaps uselessly about, not having been repaired by the landlords.

Tommorrow a huge football match is going on round the corner from me. It is Chelsea versus Man United. This means thousands of wild pissed up lunatics will be let loose on the area later on in the evening. It will not be safe to leave my house alone. The Headhunters will be out in force. And Man U thugs are no better. I hear they've banned Burberry from the 'Nightclub Dress Code', as too many thugs wear it.

I had hoped I would be able to go up town, but as the rain is not letting up, I will stay in and think. This is always a bad idea, as too many thoughts lead to dissatisfaction. As ever, I feel disappointed about life. Appliance play in the background, their sad little tunes hanging forlornly in the air.


May post again later.

Last post

Ok this is a learning experience. I'm new to this whole blog thing.

I'm looking for interesting news items that contribute to the alienation of people. Big topic, a lot to choose from.
weather/technology/defense/attack/business/money/trade/
politic/environment/agriculture/science/space.

any suggestions?

Second post

more news to be going on with::

I could not believe how tragic this news item was:::


Fri Nov 21

US Detonates 'Mother of All Bombs' in Florida Test
33 minutes ago Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Air Force cargo plane dropped the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal onto a Florida test range on Friday, producing a fiery blast and huge cloud in the last developmental step for a nearly 11-tonbehemoth dubbed the "mother of all bombs."

Related Links
• Massive Ordnance Air Burst (MOAB)

An MC-130 Combat Talon dropped the 21,700-pound satellite-guided GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, onto a test range at Eglin Air Force Base in northwestern Florida, said Jake Swinson, a spokesman for the Air Armament Center at the base.


"It looked like a big mushroom cloud filled with flames as it grew and grew and grew," Swinson said after the afternoon test. "It was one of the most awesome spectacles I've seen." The MOAB, the most powerful nonnuclear U.S. bomb, carries 18,700 pounds of high explosives, detonating just above the ground when the tip of the 30-foot-long bomb hits the earth, Swinson said.


Swinson said it was the final of four developmental tests for the MOAB -- nicknamed the "mother of all bombs" by some in the military -- but only the second in which it was detonated. The previous live test on March 11 followed two inert tests.


The United States in the past has had larger conventional bombs, but none are as big in the current U.S. arsenal. The MOAB is envisioned as a successor to BLU-82, the 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter."


The "Daisy Cutter" was used to clear helicopter landing areas in the Vietnam War and then was used in the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) and in 2001 in Afghanistan (news - web sites). In the latter two conflicts, U.S. commanders used the "Daisy Cutter" partly for the psychological effect on the enemy of such a massive blast.

First Post

ok.
the idea of this will be to keep notes for the book im hoping to mish mash together, thats like a blog, but part made up, part real. Ill preview passages from the book now and again, and if anyone reads them, its a bonus.

heres some more news to be going on with::

BOSH NEWS ---- BREAKING------
THIS IS ALL TRUE AND APPEARED ON REPUTABLE NEWS SITES RECENTLY

03.

Solar Hurricane Hits Earth in Repeat of Oct Storm
Fri Nov 21, 8:28 AM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Magnetic solar hurricanes like those that wreaked havoc last month have hit Earth again, confusing satellites and causing aurora borealis displays as far south as Florida, Finnish meteorologists said on Friday.


AP Photo



"The storm has already begun, and last night it grew incredibly strong," said Heikki Nevanlinna, research manager at the Finnish Meteorological Institute told Reuters.


"There have been solar flares from the sun, and my estimate is that this weekend will see a lot of atmospheric disturbance."


Magnetic solar storms, caused by a burst of charged particles from the sun hitting the Earth's magnetic field, caused technical glitches around the world at the end of October in some of the most intense storms ever detected.


The current storm stems from the same giant sunspots that caused last month's solar flares, but is clearly weaker than the October storm, Nevanlinna said.


Nevertheless, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers have already experienced disturbances, as have mobile phone networks, Nevanlinna said.


"(GPS receivers) may give bad coordinates or it may take them an extremely long time to get data. This demonstrates that the intermediary substance in which the signals are traveling is in a very disturbed state," he said.


Solar storms can interfere with satellite paths, causing them to fly off course. They can also damage electricity grids, and last month a blackout that affected 50,000 people in Sweden was suspected to have been caused by these storms.