When I was a kid the library was my sanctuary. I would spend hours wandering the stacks looking for interesting books. I was in love with the pure joy of walking up and down the aisles absorbing the titles until one spoke to me. I would ease the book from the shelf and examine the front and back cover with slow eyes. I loved the feel of the book in my hands and the smell of old paper as I opened it.

Back in those days, you would have most likely have found me in the science section. I was fascinated by a whole range of topics, but science was my passion. I fancied the idea of being a microbiologist, a chemist, or an astronomer. I would gaze into the stars at night with my telescope or look through my microscope at the single celled organisms I had grown in an old jam jar. And once or twice my mom would yell at me because of the foul odour wafting from my room as a result of some concoction I had made with my chemistry set.

Later, in my teens, my love of adventure edged out my love of science and I went off to West Point to learn how to be a good soldier and a leader of men. While my love of science receded, my love of books did not. I replaced science with history and literature.

I love technology. I love the Internet. But the thought of libraries loosing their sacred status to Google makes me sad. In the UK, some 600 libraries are under threat of closure and many have closed already because they couldn’t find enough volunteer staff to run the library.

Librarians are being replaced by machines. Even checking out and signing in your books can be done without human intervention. The card catalogue, what is that? Now it’s all computers. In my local library, there aren’t even any stacks for me to walk up and down. The books are on these portable book stands on wheels, I guess so they can configure the library to make use of the space when the library is not open.

The air of sanctity is gone. The revered librarian as guardian of knowledge is fading.

To help save the libraries please sign this e-petition:

https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1269

Regardless of what you think of Apple products, this documentary is well worth a watch.  It’s inspiring to say the least. It also made me think what the hell have I been doing all this time.

Here’s to a true visionary:

The holidays are officially winding down now. I say officially because we’ve just spent two and half hours traveling back from Bristol, a trip that normally only takes us about an hour and a half. The M5 was shut from junction 11 to 9. Early reports say the motorway was shut after a man’s body was found on the carriageway near junction 10 just north of Cheltenham. No other details have surfaced yet. It meant we had to take the long way home, but hey, we made it home safely, so no complaints from me.

All in all, we had a great Christmas and New Year break, the in-laws have gone back from whence they came, and we’re back at home settling down to some sense of normalcy. Granted, I have to put up with the kids for another couple of days before they go back to school. But that’s cool, I can cope.

What’s the safety zone for continuing to talk about new year’s resolutions? I usually start thinking about what I want to do with the new year in the last two weeks of December. My theory is if I work it out in December, I can hit January running full speed. Not much is going on in the last couple of weeks in December anyway because most people are too busy thinking about Christmas and racking up hundreds if not thousands of pounds of debt buying gifts for their loved ones and friends. I’m lucky that Ruth is frugal and I waste money all year long thus saving me the need to rack it all up at the end of the year. You don’t notice it as much if you spread it out over the year.

Anyway, if you haven’t made your resolutions or goals for 2011 yet, here are my last words on the subject. All you slackers out there will like this. According to a study conducted for the Department for Work and Pensions, one in six of us is going to live to see our 100th birthday or more. The problem with this, as you can imagine, is that there is simply not going to be enough space for us all. It’ll be like that episode of Star Trek where some alien race captures Kirk and tries to make him mate with their princess, a beautiful blonde of course. It turns out that their planet is suffering from overpopulation because they’ve found a way to eradicate disease and such like, meaning that people simply lived extra long lives, so much so that there wasn’t enough space to even move around anymore. So they wanted Kirk to mate with this princess and give her his germs so that they could all start dying again.

The moral of the story is that if we listen to Jamie Oliver and his ilk and keep getting healthier by all this green, yogurt, granola, broccoli eating living, we’re likely to be begging for population relief in the future. So in defence of the future of our society, I encourage you NOT to make any resolutions about getting fit, quitting smoking, eating more vegetables, and drinking less alcohol. If ever you needed a reason to live hard, eat grease burgers, and lead pies, and drink alcohol like a fish drinks water, this is it – you are helping to secure the future from over population. Any excuse will do eh?

OK, that said, it’s time for me to go do my civic duty and drink shots of Jack Daniels for the rest of the evening.

I wonder what was going through Tommy Sheridan’s mind as he stood clutching his wife outside the courthouse, where he had been found guilty of perjury, while she gave a canned speech about standing by her man.

A man who had been outed by the News of the World as being a swinger and a serial adulterer. Why that was news to anyone is beyond me. Politicians have been doing this kind of thing since forever. It seems to come with the territory. Power and sex go together like salt and pepper, peanut butter and jam, ham and cheese, well, you get the point.

What I don’t get is why he thought he could get away with it in the first place. I guess power has a way of making people think they are invincible. I mean if you go to a public place like the swingers’ club Cupid’s in Manchester with an entourage of people, one of whom is a journalist, how could you not expect to be outed? I guess Tommy thought the old Shaggy line, “It wasn’t me,” would be enough to give him plausible deniability.

I wonder what was going through Tommy’s mind when he called up his pals Andy McFarlane, Gary Clark, Katrine Trolle, and Anvar Khan. I count three men and two women. I wonder if he invited Gail along or was she stuck at home looking after their daughter?

I don’t condemn Tommy for doing the swinging thing. Hey, to each his own. What bothers me is he didn’t want to man up to his actions and tell the public and his constituents that yeah, he likes to swing every now and then. So what. You know how it is when you’re a married man in your mid 40′s and feeling a bit bored, sometimes a little swinging can put the swing back in your relationship.

It’s funny that Gail describe Tommy as “boring” and that he would rather play Scrabble than have sex. I guess Scrabble was his front. Or maybe he was doing what he thought she wanted him to do – you know, be a domesticated family man playing Scrabble as a gesture of spending quality time together, when actually all he probably wanted to do was jump her bones. And she probably wanted him to jump her bones, but he missed the signals, like men are prone to do. We find it hard to read women.

Maybe it’s the communications barrier. We all know we want sex. So why all the drama? Why not just get busy, like we did when we were horny teenagers groping each other in the park after dark or in the cemetery where we knew no-one would find us. I guess romance replaces horniness. Women want romance or at least that’s my perception. Men, we want to knock the boots with no fanfare. But then we’re made to feel guilty thinking of women as sex objects, a receptacle for our lust. So instead, we opt out of sex with our partners altogether and turn to extra-marital shenanigans. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown alluded to, some times gentlemen prefer whores because its easier, like going to the grocery store and buying any other product.

It’s a shame Tommy boy didn’t just own up to his sexual shenanigans. Now if things don’t turn out in his favour in January, he’ll have to hope his girl will pay him a conjugal visit. Although, judging from her past actions, she’s more likely to send him another postcard from Barbados saying ‘Hope you and Bowling Bag Bob are having a good time in cellblock four.’

I’m going to reveal to you, dear reader, a secret that I have never ever told another soul. It’s a secret shared exclusively to the readers of my blog (and by default, my twitter, tumblr, and facebook readers). But first…

The whores and the gossip mongers are turning tricks again to get the inside scoop. Amazon, afraid that some of the dirt might rub off on them, have ditched Wikileaks from its servers. There will be consequences for such cowardice. Nobody likes a rat that jumps ship at the first sign of trouble.

Is Julian Assange really a modern day Robin Hood stealing from the information-rich to hand back to the poor? I don’t think so. I think he’s just another dude with an axe to grind who has found fame by becoming the U.S. Government’s cyber-enemy number of one.

People love dirty little secrets. Assange has found fame by trading in the dirty little secrets of governments and big corporations. He doesn’t steal the information. Disgruntled employees leak the information to him and he has the balls to publish it on the Internet for all to read. So I don’t see what the problem with Assange is. OK, the U.S. Government is claiming he’s putting lives at risks. But is he really? If he were hacking into secure systems and stealing the information, then yes, I’d say he was an outlaw akin to Robin Hood. But since he gets his information from malcontents, then hey, don’t shoot the messenger, find the dirty rat bastards putting the stuff in his lap and shoot them. They are the ones putting lives in danger, if indeed any lives are in danger. The U.S. Government has been known to exaggerate from time to time. Remember all the lives at stake from Iraq’s huge stockpile of WMD?!

The U.S. Government’s latest beef with Assange is the release of more than 251,000 American diplomatic cables, mostly unclassified but including many labeled “classified” or “secret”. Here’s an example:

Karl Eikenberry, the current US ambassador to Afghanistan, in a 2009 cable describes Karzai as “insecure” and a “paranoid and weak individual”.

“Indeed his inability to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state-building and his deep seated insecurity as a leader combine to make any admission of fault unlikely, in turn confounding our best efforts to find in Karzai a responsible partner,” Eikenberry said.

Eikenberry added that Karzai continually blames the US and its allies for Afghanistan’s problems rather than looking at the problems of his leadership, and that his attitude was unlikely to change.

For me the real culprits are the snivelling puppies who leak this stuff. Assange is just the delivery boy along with all the other misfits, drunkards, and failures who are mired in the low trade of journalism (or in the even lower trade of blogging, like me.)

OK, so here’s my dirty little secret that no-one else knows. I once, out of fear, squeezed a parakeet to death. I was 7 years old at the time.

Yeah, we’re fucked.  Our civil liberties, if ever we had any, are on the verge of being stripped right from underneath our noses. The Home Office is hell bent on pushing a piece of legislation through that will allow 653 governmental offices to have access to every phone call, text message, email, and website we visit.  Agencies like the police, local councils, the Financial Service Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

What’s really insidious about this gig is that these folks will not require the permission of a judge or magistrate to get our information.  All they’ll need is permission from a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head at a local authority.

The “government” says it needs this kind of easy access to help fight terrorism.  Please!  That old chestnut!

They, and I’m using ‘they’ deliberately because there doesn’t seem to be any names associated with the ‘they’ in government who are pushing so hard to strip our liberties away.

The Home Office did a six month consultation to find out if they had any support for this idea.  Only a third of the respondents approved.  50 percent of the folks believed that the scheme lacked sufficient protection against the abuse of our personal data that these yahoos would have access to.

This new level of access would fall under the foul Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) or as I call it, the Rest in Peace all of our privacy Act.  Communications companies will be forced to keep all of our emails, phone calls, and every web click for a year.  And guess who has to pay for all of this?  Yes that’s right – Us, to the tune of £2 billion over 10 years.

There are a couple of sane people in government who are opposing this move vocally.  Chris Grayling has been quoted as saying “The big danger in all of this is ‘mission creep’.  This government keeps on introducing new powers to tackle terrorism and organised crime which end up being used for completely different purposes.  We have to stop that from happening.”

To give you an idea of what it would be like to have your information out there in the open, I pilfered someone’s mobile and this is what I found:

Bob: so what have you been up to today?

Sue: well….sending you emails…reading some Keats letters!! No idea how I ended up there…but i did…an unplanned interruption…reading some book about how to teach your dog new tricks…called management and organisational behaviour!!

Bob:  keats as in john keats? one of my favorite poets

Sue:  it seems if you give your dog – errrr – workforce treats they perform better

Bob:  will you be able to teach me some new tricks?

Sue:  what do you want to learn?!!

Bob:  hmmmm… dangerous question

Sue:  mmmm, yes.

Ok there is no Bob and Sue, but you get the point.  Our private conversations are at their mercy, whoever they are.  You would hope that they would use our private information responsibly, but what guarantees do we have?  Who will be watching the watchmen?

I have existed from the morning of the world, and I shall exist until the last star falls from the heavens.  Although I have taken the form of Clay Lowe, I am all men, as I am no man – and so, I am a God. – Clay Lowe 2.0

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

From a poet to her Internet lover:

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways. I’ll get my husband to eat horny goat weed and promise him sex in the woods.  Once there, I’ll slash his throat and stab him in the chest.  Then we can run away together.

That’s what Joanna Hale did to her husband Peter.  She was found guilty today by jury.

I know poets are suppose to be passionate, but this is passion on crack.

A young lady of 15 has written a letter to the local paper. She is lamenting about the rampant sexism in her school. She says she often hears “lads saying how amazing a girl’s behind is or her breasts.” She is quick to add that she is being polite in her description of the boys’ actual words. She wants to know “How can men treat girls as meat?” In her world “It is quite obvious that any dignified girl or woman will never set foot near a guy who is obsessed with her chest and can’t keep his eyes off her behind.”

It is odd that her letter raging against sexism should appear just below a picture of a Vivitar movie camera advert with a young blond girl holding the camera while sitting on the floor in just her underwear. I like to read about the latest gadgets. Isn’t it funny that a magazine that is 100% about gadgets has, on every single cover, a picture of a beautiful young lady in a swimsuit? Well perhaps not funny, but certainly a commentary on the use of sex to sell products to men. We seem to have a switch that regulates our rational thinking and diverts the energy elsewhere at the sight of an attractive woman. The less she is wearing, the more we revert back to being like our simian primate cousins.

Our young lady goes on to ridicule the boys she hears utter childish words like: “I’d tap that.” She goes on to wonder why her school does nothing to promote the fair treatment of women. “I suppose it can’t exactly be taught. Guys just need to grow up,” she concludes.

I would like to tell her that we will grow up, but I know that we won’t. In every man there is an adolescent boy trapped inside and a ranging simian wanting to get out. You need only play fly on the wall to any group of men, regardless of class or status, and let a beautiful young lady walk by, and you will hear the men groan, “man I’d like to tap that.” If they don’t say it with their voice, they will say it with their eyes.

I am  in the business of helping people help themselves, or at least guiding them through a journey of self-help.  One of my bones of contention with the self-help, positive psychology industry has been the dumbing-down, over optimistic approach to achieving the good life.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out that addresses this issue called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America She was compelled to write the book because of the deluge of positive psychology she received after finding out she had breast cancer in 2000.  She said all that shiny optimism was “like sitting in a warm bubble bath for too long.”  You can read the full interview of her here.

I like to think that my approach to the industry is more about challenging people to think for themselves and in doing that, to focus on what they can do and what they do want and not the opposite.  And maybe my thinking is left over from the “can do” attitude the army instills in you, or from my mother who beat it into me that “if you want something, go get it. Period!”