31 Jul 2008
Posted in Juggling, Rants at 8:25 am by alby
Hah that title should have worried a couple of people who are going with me to EJC.
Anyway it is about juggling but not the EJC. The EJC will be fun.
This Vova vs Gatto spinning round like a dick competition thing. What a tedious waste of everyone’s life it is.
We have Vova’s mates hurrahing. We have Vova cheating then getting arsey when people call him on it, we have people actually giving a toss about a completely contrived “record”.
And ffs this shite is still going on?
I’ve avoided it so far but frankly it’s bunging up the juggling pages with shit and I’m now annoyed by the level of seriousness that seems to be exercising people there.
“But he’s the best”, “No he’s the best”, “No he really is the best.” etc ad nauseum. Massive stack of wank. Well done.
I like my internet and I like reading the juggly stuff but frankly the week away at the EJC will give people time to chat about something even vaguely interesting.
Well done you’re very good, now go and do something a: worthwhile, b: interesting and c: else.
[edit] I’ve just thought what this “contest” is like. Imagine a local golf pro bragging that he’s better than Tiger Woods because he can play a local par 3 quite well. That’s what it reminds me of.
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20 Jun 2008
Posted in News, Rants at 11:40 am by alby
It seems there’s a bit of a “storm” “over” some minister’s comments on his blog.
Daily Fail getting steamed up particularly. Their headline this morning “Stop being so miserable”. They missed the word “bloody” out of the actual quote. Presumably this is to spare their delicate readers the trauma of a minor swear word.
The point of his piece was that people in the UK should “stop being so bloody miserable”. And this seems to have riled people.
There is a queue of people waiting to stick the boot in about 50% increase in fuel costs, food inflation, global warming, draconian law and order laws, ID cards, immigrants, speed cameras and any one of a dozen or 2 other issues. “How dare he!?!?!?”
The minister in question was on Radio 5 last night defending his comments.
Seems people think he said that people shouldn’t be miserable. Not actually what he said at all of course but then you’d not expect the mail to report anything accurately. I tend to side with Stephen Fry when he says if he’s unsure of what to think he’ll consult the Mail and then he knows the correct opinion is the exact opposite of their view. Works for me.
In fact the minister told the nation that he’d had a phonecall from the editors basically telling him they were going to “stitch him up” in today’s paper.
What he means, as is surely obvious to anyone who actually can read, is that he was saying that we’re materially richer, we have more freedom of movement, more holidays, nicer cars, nicer stuff generally, better health, longer lives in better health, access to a wider range of entertainments and freedoms that previous generations couldn’t have dreamt of.
He’s right of course. Completely and utterly correct.
I’m no fan of the government and am looking forward to seeing them kicked out. Sadly I’d not greatly prefer the tories and it’ll be them doing the kicking out. Still that should mean no more stupid ID card scheme - although I’ll not count those chickens before I’ve seen them hatch.
But not liking someone doesn’t mean that they can’t be right.
Yes stuff has got more expensive and the world political situation is a bit shit, some people are struggling and pointless wars are being fought. But we do have nicer things and that.
Yet again I disagree with the Mail. As all sensible folk should.
And don’t forget that misery is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect to be miserable then you will be.
So why don’t you all “stop being so bloody miserable”?
Have fun.
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27 May 2008
Posted in Life, Rants at 4:50 pm by alby
After my feting of my mobile phone company for offering me an ace deal of £7 a month they’ve gone and ruined it by sending a letter explaining the deal.
At no point is there mention of £7 a month. This is, however, a rather large mention of £19.99 per month.
If they’d offered me that I’d have said no.
Hmm, time for a bolshy phone call.
Sigh.
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30 Apr 2008
Posted in Fillums, Rants, Reviews at 8:42 pm by alby
If you’ve read my previous post and seen Star Wars ep3 before you can already guess what’s coming.
OK then so what have they learned from the critical, public and my review of episode 2?
That you need a good script? That you don’t need pointless spectacle? That good actors can’t save a sack of bollocks?
After seeing ep2 at the cinema when it came out I avoided bothering with ep3. Seemed like a waste of my entry fee to the cinema.
So a freebie off me dad was a good opportunity to see it for free.
Only it wasn’t free. It wasted an hour of my life. My life is worth far more than this waste of my time.
You may notice I say “an hour”. Yup I gave up. I’ve rarely given up on a fillum or anything else.
I remember a time in Germany where I went to see an outdoor classical music concert. The headline piece was Orff’s Carmina Burana. But there was a first half to get through first. I didn’t like the omens. People at this concert seemed to feel that walking around and eating bratwurst was better than bothering to listen to the music. And the path between the rows of seats was gravel. Just what you want is some fat german crunching his way to the hotdog stall as you try and listen to some music. And as it’s outside you also had traffic noise, plane noise, people outside the venue shouting to mates inside etc… I spent the intermission wondering whether it would be a bigger waste to stay or leave. After seeing the dreadful “dancing” they insisted on foisting on this innocent classical piece I chose to leave. Definitely the better choice.
And this was repeated today. No germans, no crunching just sheer unadulterated poverty of vision, acting, plot, script and even the visual effects were ropey.
So I’ve given up on ever getting to the end of the second trilogy. I’d rather spend my life ooh I don’t know picking my toe nails, cleaning something that doesn’t need cleaning or whatever else.
Utter shite. Well done George Lucas. Take a classic franchise and kill it in a blaze of vacuous effects. You’re a moron.
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Posted in Fillums, Rants, Reviews at 3:35 pm by alby
OK so I may be a little non-contemporary but it’s annoyed me.
My dad lent me all 6 of the Star Wars DVDs. I’m through 5 of them and I’d like to make an observation.
Number 2 is really crap. I mean really totally awful.
Actors? Hayden is appalling, Natalie has gone so far down in her career since “Leon” I feel embarrassed for her, Ewan is struggling to maintain his accent and Yoda a coherent sentence together can’t string.
Plot? Utter shite. Dreadful rubbish leading to a big fight. Harks back to the B&W days when the Keystone company made fillums that had no particular plot but just needed to end with a chase.
Holes? Loads of them. One that stood out was Natalie’s character shouting at a soldier to get her to “that hangar” despite there being no possibility of her even knowing about “that hangar” as she’d fallen off the craft that went there a good while before any of us even knew about any hangar.
And when the hell did R2 ever get the ability to fly?
And where the hell has Queens who can only serve “2 terms”? Utter tosh.
Tying things together? Some fillums in serieses try to make all the strands tie together. This is not a major problem for me but I do occasionally like mystery. This fillum however tries to construct ties that just don’t need to be there. Do we really need to know who’s drawing up the plans for the Death Star? Do we really need to have R2 and C-3PO in these fillums? Why is it important to have them here? It just isn’t.
Preaching? One scene stood out. Obi-wan is in a bar trying to track down some random killer and sitting having a drink. Someone offers him “death sticks”. These look suspiciously like cigarettes. Cue the jedi trick of convincing him to go home and “rethink his life”. Oh cut the moralising please.
I’ve never seen episode 3. I do hope they had the budget to employ an actual screenwriter for it though because they seem to have done without in episode 2.
Bag o shite.
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09 Apr 2008
Posted in News, Rants, Work at 1:19 pm by alby
Before commenting on something.
A valid lesson for the majority of people over on the BBC comments board re the NHS today.
A typical comment (and at time of writing top on the “recommended comments” list):
The problem with the NHS is there are far too many “Managers and administrators” and not enough beds and nursing/care staff.
Utter crap.
Anyone in the NHS round here at the mo knows that the lack of admin support is killing us. We have 9 physios as of today (hello new staff member). And 1 admin lady supporting us. She has to deal with all the admin, all the phone calls, dealing with staff sickness (IE cancelling stuff), sorting out management stats and that, plus prolly some more. She is paid shamefully little. If she wasn’t there we couldn’t do our job. This regularly happens, she’s ill or on her hols the appointment system struggles with no support; no patients can get in touch, new appointment letters can’t go out, complaints aren’t dealt with and so on.
But on the stats the news see she’s “management”.
We lost our team leader (”manager”) and now have someone helping out from another team so is unable to give us all the attention we prolly should have; she’s good but not one of our team, nor a musculo-skeletal specialist.
We also have a manager above her who is currently running about 4 services and is rushed off her feet. This will now be worse as her PA (another “administrator” so obviously no worth to the NHS) has left now. She struggles a bit to keep up with the day to day news of the team (not her domain) but that means that stuff we’re worried about she doesn’t get to hear. If she deals with stuff we don’t hear about it either.
So the lack of the team leader is prolly the single biggest area where we feel we’re missing out. No news goes up (that we hear about) and no news comes back (that we know about). And that is the reason we’re all hacked off. Why bother working your heart out to get no feedback, praise or whatever?
But there’s a quick “too many managers” comment to make. Get a new record, that one’s old now.
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02 Apr 2008
Posted in Juggling, People, Rants at 9:00 pm by alby
See previous post for background.
The FB group just doesn’t get any better. Even after my post and Mini’s post as well there’s been someone dim enough to come up with the following:
I’ve heard a lot of talk about norwich, but how the hell are a lot of people from up north going to get there? It’s a long, hard train journey which I’m not going to be up for as I hate train journeys (no matter how smoothly rochdale to doncaster went). The other option is to drive it, but the only way that’ll happen is if we have a really late easter and I take a fast track driving course, but I’ll still be iffy about a 4 hour motorway drive.
How about somewhere in the midlands?
Oh dear oh dear.
Hence:
Here’s a thought. Try reading the thread before writing anything.
If you want a BJC in the Midlands then organise one. They don’t just happen.
Read some of the comments above and then figure out that it’s not some team that do it every year. It’s a new group every year that decide they want to. This year a group from Norwich decided they want to have a go at it. Nobody else did, hence nowhere else has been considered. It’s remarkably straightforward. You want it somewhere easier to get to? Then do it yourself or convince someone else to do it.
If Norwich hadn’t offered then there’s a damn high possibility that there wouldn’t be a BJC next year.
Bloody young people.
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01 Apr 2008
Posted in Juggling, People, Rants at 9:37 pm by alby
Someone on FaceBook’s BJC group is complaining about the location of next year’s BJC. Apparently Norwich is too far away for the poor soul.
Someone suggested that that may be because Norwich people got together and organised it (or want to).
He got grumpy and commented:
Yes, two of the biggest conventions are in the south, and Brighton is in the south. But is the point of BJC (and, may I add, the main reason it gets funding) not to SPREAD circus arts? Keeping it in the south is NOT spreading it.
Surely that’s reason enough to deliberately hold the convention somewhere WITHOUT a ’scene’.
While I’m all for the convention moving around and having a new location and a new team each year, I don’t think it’s fair to make people needlessly travel ridiculous distances to reach the ONLY event of the year they can go to. At least for people in the south that can’t afford travel to BJC, there’s Bungay and Bristol…
Get over yourself..
Oh dear. Cue reply writing:
So there’s a big scene in Cornwall is there? Nope just some people who wanted to put the event on and did a grand job doing it.
If you want a BJC in Liverpool then offer one, spend a year or more organising it, then have a hectic week where you run around like a mad thing and get no juggling done ‘cos you’re too busy panicking about the crap that comes out of nowhere but might just derail your perfect plans (see Erik’s hassles re his stuff disappearing). No-one’s going to do it for you. And no-one is going to commute hundreds of miles a week for a large portion of that year just so you don’t have to travel just the once.
The problem with holding it somewhere “without a scene” is that there’s no-one there to organise it.
Re North vs South. I’ve been to BJCs in Edinburgh and Durham. I missed Perth but you could hardly complain that that’s too far south.
The event needs to be self-funding - Perth had about 400 people show up (I think), Doncaster had plenty over 1000. Which would you pick if you wanted to not even make a profit but just to break even?
And to complain that it’s the “only event” you can go to is ludicrous. What about the Scottish? How about the Manchester convention? What about the Durham convention? Just because they’re not as long as the BJC doesn’t mean they’re not worth the trip.
I’d also hardly call Bungay one of the biggest events. It’s certainly long but rural Suffolk is a bitch to get to and for 7 of the 10 days there’s barely more than 50 or 60 folk there anyway. There’s certainly nothing like a BJC show happening at it either. It’s a different kind of thing. Rather like saying “Well Glastonbury is too far south so move it north because the south also has jazz clubs”.
I’m guessing you’re young but this is one of those “the world does not revolve around you” moments. And I think it’s you that needs to get over yourself. Stop whinging and do it yourself if you think there’s an omission in the juggling convention schedule. There used to be a Lancaster Uni convention. Why not help to re-start that? I’ll come along assuming it doesn’t clash with anything else. If it works and there’s a good venue then have a think about running a BJC.
If you do I’ll probably be there (travelling from the South just as I travelled to Glasgow this Feb for the Scottish) and wishing you the best for a fantastic event.
Best wishes.
Yes there’s hyperbole there (a bit) but the points stand. Does the guy think that there’s someone there to make just him happy?
I wonder.
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13 Mar 2008
Posted in Rants, Work at 5:25 pm by alby
Just when life’s seeming to be going ok.
Had our boss come to our team meeting this afternoon. Apparently our waiting list has crept over the 18 weeks limit. This is news.
Well it would have been news if we hadn’t been warning management of it for, oh I don’t know, THE LAST 3 BLOODY YEARS!
Oh and did I mention that we also figured out a variety of ways in which to deal with it? Well we did. And we’ve told them our solutions for the past 3 years!
What have they done about it? Bollocks all that’s what.
But now the waiting list hits the government’s magic 18 week wait and they decide that we’re all work shy charlatans that can’t be bothered to pull our fingers out of our arses to get on and do some work.
Our service agreement has us seeing 9 new patients per week per physio. We’re currently all averaging around 15 per week. Our service level has us accept 292 referrals per month. We’re accepting an average of 450 per month.
We upped our workload a while back to help with the growing list. What did management do? Stopped funding for courses.
Because we’d upped our workload, management decided to increase the service level (to the numbers above). Around this time 2 full-timers (out of 6 of us at that time) left. Management’s response? A ban on recruitment.
We’ve spent the last 2 years trying to grow the service, not just in terms of numbers of patients but getting junior physios in, getting students in, changing how our clinics work. Basically busting a gut to make things work better. And they are working better. We’re all still busting our guts to cram as many people through the system as possible.
There’s still no funding for courses. We’re still at least 1 admin person down. And then they notice that the waiting list is still growing.
Their response?
Lose your team meeting time and run more clinics.
Fuckers.
So not content with shutting off access to courses they’re now telling us we should have much less team time; which means less teaching time, less time to deal with any issues.
Oh very well done. Now is there any chance that there may come a time when we’re thanked in any fucking way for working our fucking backsides off?
I’ve never seen our team so down as we were today. And we’re a damn good team working damn well for average money.
“Oh we’ll hire locums” they say. What? You mean like we’ve been saying for 3 fucking years! Only we don’t want locums ‘cos they cost too much. Give us juniors and then they’ll move on to get a more senior job after a couple of years. They’ll develop, they’ll participate and they’ll help us no end. No can do.
“Oh do you want to do any overtime?” What you mean like we’ve been asking about for 3 fucking years? I cannot believe they actually had the balls to ask us this.
But they still won’t bother actually seeing that there’s no way 9 people can deal with the flood of patients that 152 GPs send in daily. Apparently just putting enough people in to deal with the work is too fucking obvious.
Wankers.
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11 Mar 2008
Posted in News, Rants at 9:46 am by alby
…allegiance to the queen?
Fuck off.
I mean really! What is it with this national symbols bollocks that seems to have hit recently?
First off we had the “Should it be an offence to burn the flag?” Er no.
And now we have “Should children swear allegiance to the queen?”
Stop it, just stop it.
Only the Americans and other insane controlling regimes make their citizens behave in anything like the same way.
If I want to be proud of the UK then it’s the sense of cynicism and rebellion that’s always there even if it’s not acted upon. So yes ok then bring it in and let’s see how inventive our schoolkids can be in warping the words to fit something more appropriate, rude or just plain rebellious.
Another thing to be proud of is precisely the lack of overt patriotic symbolism that so infects other places. We are proud of the place we just don’t need to shout about it. Who do you think we are? Foreigners?
Bloody hell.
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