I couldn’t sleep.

It was the middle of the night so I got on the web. CNN.com was too depressing – full of stories of death and mutilation – so I started surfing, eventually winding up on eBay. Another flash of inspiration hit me. In the script there’s a scene where all of Moe’s acting pals are armed with video cameras. When we eventually shoot this scene I’m going to need maybe 20 or 30 video cameras of various ages – I’m going to be on a budget and I’ll need cheap ones – doesn’t matter if they don’t work. Within minutes I’d bid on 10 cameras – all costing less than 2 bucks a piece.

“I’m a frigging genius,” I thought, “Ten cameras for less than $15!”.

Now I’ll confess that this was the first time I’d ever actually bid for anything on eBay – call me old school but I’d always given the place a wide birth. Suddenly I felt I could dress the entire movie on the cheap through the web. This was going to be a cakewalk. That’s when I saw that small print about the shipping costs. These lo-cost cams all came with battery packs and chargers and those suckers are heavy. Most people were estimating around $20 for shipping. Help! My bargain basement approach to propping the movie had just leapt by over 1,000%.

First lesson of home-financed movies learned. Have patience. Read the small print. Humbled and dispirited I did what any grown man would do at four in the morning while dressed in his PJs and surfing on the web.

I bought a guitar.

POSTSCRIPT. It seems I was outbid on nearly all of the cameras. I did however get a winning bid in on one camera for less than $9 including postage. It should arrive any day now.

It’s been 15 long months since I wrote that first missive and obviously things didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped.

But maybe it’s all part of a bigger plan that I am only just beginning to apreciate. Chasing Fate indeed.

After I’d posted that first optimistic blog we all threw ourselves into the process of getting a large production underway. First came the fun dinners as the producers and the writers and myself all became friends and we all tried to establish what made each other tick. They were enamoured of my video career and seemed obsessed by Britney’s ‘Oops’ video – I loved them for their enthusiasm and their determination to get this movie made with me at the helm. We started taking meetings at the Film Company and soon we were meeting casting directors and establishing what kind of movie we were making. It seemed that our budget would be about 15 million bucks and, in my quietest moments, I was full of awe that at last I was going to be making a real movie. “Don’t screw this one up!” I thought.

With a casting director in place the casting process began and as the pale Los Angeles winter crept upon us we spent hours and hours meeting every attractive and interesting and vaguely available young actor and actress in town. It was a fascinating process. Some were enormously talented, some were amazingly beautiful, some were obviously desperate, others were just plain ordinary. But as the months passed by I became more confidant and truly felt that we were all getting somewhere.

Meanwhile the project’s announcement had hit the papers. Amazingly I found myself and a certain enormously succesful entertainment person who was involved mentioned in the same headline in a Reuters report. “This is bloody marvellous!” I thought.

As we worked away I continued making videos. On one occasion, in order to remain available for casting in LA, I persuaded a six piece band from the UK (along with their managers and their label folk) against their wishes and at their expense to fly to LA so I could shoot them here rather leave town for a week and miss some meetings. I got permission to take a long-planned fortnight’s holiday in Australia and the casting sessions were adjusted to let me go. As I sat on the cusp of 2004 and cycled along a windy beach Down-Under I was very excited about what the New Year had in store for me. Even so, having been disappointed before, I told those around me that the back-slapping was very premature and they should keep their much-apreciated congratulatory messages on hold till the movie’s release party.

By the end of January we had our cast and my lawyer was spending hours hashing out my contract. A particularly tough point was the fact that he and my agent wanted me to get a Development Fee for all the hours I was spending working on the film. A compromise was reached and a sum agreed. I started turning work down to make myself available for the movie which was going to happen at any moment.

Then the Film Company bailed.

For a number of reasons, none of which were entirely clear but mostly I think to do with dollars, they announced didn’t want to make the film. The day after word came through that they had walked their lawyer rang me up demanding to know why I hadn’t signed my contract! I did the honest thing and suggested he should speak to his superiors. On reflection I should have kept my mouth shut and signed – I would have picked up that pesky Development Fee that had caused my lawyer so much grief.

My energetic producer was full of enthusiasm, “We’ll take it elsewhere,” he confidently predicted. But as the months drew on it seemed that no-one wanted to make a 15 million dollar movie and the cast we’d picked were too costly for a 5 million dollar version and didn’t justify the investment in a 30 million dollar one.

As the fallout became more noticable on the Hollywood Geiger Counter the script well dried up. The amazing head of steam I’d felt I was being propelled along by at the end of 2003 had evaporated and the press clippings waiting to be filed announcing our casting choices and possible start dates taunted me like old lovers who’d moved on to newer pastures. The be-suited gentleman in whose hands I had trusted my career and who’d so happily wined and dined me as we felt we were on the brink of such a major breakthrough now confessed that I was such a nice and talented guy that he thought someone else should look after my career. Let’s just translate that piece of amazing double speak into other words shall we? “You’re so brilliant, I’m firing you!”

Plainly it was the last gasp of my involvement with Chasing Fate and all I had was some memories of some fine free meals and a bunch of unrecouped Beverly Hills style parking receipts for all those hours spent in casting. For all our months of work neither myself, my manager or my lawyer had received a penny.

Next.

One Friday afternoon I was putting together a reel for someone and I found myself watching a clip from 2gether – perhaps the best script and only decent film I’ve directed. I giggled as I watched the guys do their stuff and suddenly it dawned on me. Kevin Farley was born to play Moe Jones – the lead of a script called CALLBACK – a low budge comedy I’d written with my pal Jordan a few years back.

A new plan of world domination quickly hatched in my fertile brain cell and this time I’m going public with it. To hell with Hollywood! I’m going to make another movie even if they don’t want me to. Kevin has agreed to play the lead and I’ve agreed to break the first law of film-making and I’m going to spend my own money making the movie if I have to. Moe Jones, the part Kevin will play, is a lovable but desperate actor in Hollywood, a very talented and decent fellow, who can’t get a gig. He decides he’ll do whatever it takes to get the part of the bad guy in the next Die Hard movie. It took a week for me to realise that perhaps Moe’s story, one that I’d started writing years ago, is eerily familiar to me. Hmm.

As I recall many film productions are made under the banner of a new incorporated company so that the finances of the production can be more easily handled. If this is the case I will call the company that makes Callback ‘Nice and Talented Guy’ inc.

There I’ve said it. I’m going to make the damn movie. Better get to work and produce something now otherwise I’ll look like a real wanker!

Dear Joe Record Guy (or Girl),
A disturbing new trend is making its way into the music video business and I want to vent about it. But first, for those of you not in the biz, a little bit of back story.

When people like myself are asked to come up with an idea for a music video (we call it a concept or a treatment) the label sends us a copy of the song to listen to. This is one of the many honours and blessings of our business – we get to hear a hot new song weeks before anyone else. It’s a privilege that I treat with great respect.

As we all know in the last few years MP3, Napster, iPod and other extraordinary new words have come into our lexicon and these new bon-mots haunt the nightmares of record execs everywhere. The execs are justly nervous that the music they produce, and make a living by, is making its way around the world for free. Obviously Joe Record Guy looks at someone like me as a possible deviant who will dump his hot new track onto the web weeks before it’s available to the public, thereby neutralizing its carefully structured release plans or just simply screwing up potential sales.

Fair comment.

In order to stop me from doing this Joe Record Guy has come up with a brilliant new gag. He sends me a copy of the tune but he dips the sound to 0 db (that’s no sound at all) over and over and over again during the song. He seems to love doing it at the moments when the lyrics might provide some clue as to what the song is about or when the music really takes off. I got a hot new song a couple of days ago and they dipped the sound TWELVE times in four minutes. Try listening to your favourite song and get someone else to dip the audio for you at TWELVE random times during the tune and I guarantee you’ll want to hit them. In fact I’d go so far as to say don’t try this at home at all – especially if there’s a loaded firearm in the vicinity.

The reason JRG sends me the song to listen to is so that I’d be inspired. Believe me, Joe Record Guy, this isn’t inspiring – IT’S INCREDIBLY ANNOYING! And there are alternatives. Here are some of the other methods I’ve come across from other labels to make sure I won’t rip off your precious sounds…

1) Put a threatening spoken message at the beginning of the track which says something along the lines of, “This music belongs to us. If you put it on the web we’ll track you down and make you squeal like a pig.”

2) Send out a CD with an individually encoded watermark with my name on it. If I dupe it or download it every copy will have my name running through just like that actor who allowed his DVDs to be pirated. You won’t have to track me down – you can just come straight over and make me squeal like a very fat pig.

3) Send me a really bad cassette copy that no-one will want a copy of. Luckily I still have a cassette player.

4) Make me sign a disclaimer and return the CD after I’ve written the concept. The lawyers really like this one because they get to charge for coming up with the disclaimer. It’s a drag for me though because I don’t get to keep the free CD which is what normally happens even if I lose the treatment-writing contest. Bummer.

5) Don’t give me a copy of the song. Make me go to a studio and listen to it there. The added bonus with this approach is that I get to meet some really miserable assistant studio engineer who’s had to come in early just so he can watch me under my headphones staring at my lap-top waiting for inspiration to strike.

6) Don’t let me hear the song at all. Incredibly this has happened to me a couple of times recently. They tell me it will be uptempo and give me 48 hours to write. In one instance the song hadn’t even been recorded.

Dear Joe Record Guy – these six options all work. The sound dipping version DOESN’T.

What the sound-dipping thing does though is tell me that us video directors have really slipped off the edge of the respect map. After all these years of writing countless concepts for free and taking it like a man on set and in edit suites you’re now telling me that I can’t be trusted? I’m the guy who sees your artists undressed, taking drugs, getting drunk, having affairs, bitching and whining about you and yours and I keep it to myself and I don’t talk to the press.

And I can’t be trusted with four minutes of music?

Dear Joe Record Guy, this is my business too. I love music, I’ve missed births, deaths and marriages because of music.Believe me you can trust me with your four minutes of music. The worst that can happen is that I’ll play it to someone else and encourage them to buy it! End of Vent.

I’ve been deluged with people wanting to know the results of my geography quiz (scroll down to Geography – 17th April). To back-track for a second I took it upon myself to travel the high-ways and by-ways of this land asking the simple question: “In which country would you find Mount Everest?” The purpose of my poll to was to obtain data to support or disprove my much-discussed and over-simplified cod-political theory that U.S. Foreign Policy is in a shambles because most Americans know nothing about the world beyond the borders of our country. I assumed that if there was one Geographical item Americans would know about then Everest (the world’s tallest mountain) would be it.

Wrong.

22% of the people I asked replied: “I don’t know.” When I suggested they might like to hazard a guess they couldn’t even think of the name of another country. These people need to return to school immediately.

Astonishingly 22% of the people I asked believe that Mount Everest is in the USA! It appears that if it’s big it must be American. These people need to be given a good clout over the head with a large atlas (that’s a book full of maps by the way) and sent to the back of the class to join those people who can’t name any other countries. On conclusion of their studies we’ll see if they should be allowed to vote ever again.

20% got the answer right: Nepal. These people should report to Washington straight away and replace all politicians in charge of foreign policy.

One person said: “It’s in Nepal, though that’s not a country.” Another said it’s in Tibet which also technically correct as the summit ridge is on the Nepalese-Tibetan border. Another person said China which, depending on your feelings about Chinese politics, is a vaguely correct answer too. These people should do revision after school on Friday and can then apply for any remaining jobs in Washington.

5% thought that Everest was in India (someone else thought Burma) which is close and they’ll be forgiven – but they’ll have to do extra home-work first.

5% of those polled believe Africa is a country. Another 5% believe South America is a country. These people need to take a special needs class along with the person who believes Washington is a country (!) and will also be getting the Atlas treatment listed above.

One person thought Everest was in Switzerland. Well it has mountains so I guess their lateral thinking is good. This person can go work at the UN in the Five-fishes world hunger program.

One grip I worked with looked at me and said “Who gives a $#@%.” Took a drag out of his cigarette and walked off. If I didn’t espouse global peace and understanding between nations and I didn’t give money to the Brady Center to Control Gun Violence I’d have this man shot.

Conclusion: Theory proved. If more Americans knew where Mount Everest was we wouldn’t be in Iraq. It’s obvious isn’t it?

By the way the Nepalese for Everest is: Sagarmatha and the Tibetan: Chomolungma. For more info on this fine piece of rock history go to http://www.mnteverest.net/history.html
Useful reading: “What Every American Should Know About The Rest Of The World” by M.L. Rossi

(Spoiler alert – if you’re under 18 or offended by very naughty words please don’t read this diary entry).

On a recent visit to Ireland I found myself laughing at the breakfast table. An article in the Sunday Tribune (apparently Europe’s best designed weekly newspaper) caught my eye. It’s headline was: “Fucking villagers vote against name change.”

The article continued: ‘Residents of an Austrian village called Fucking have voted against changing the name. The 150 or so people who live in the village debated the issue after road signs kept being stolen – many by British tourists. A spokesman said: “Everyone here knows what it means in English, but for us Fucking is Fucking – and it’s going to stay Fucking – even though the signs keep getting stolen.”‘

The article concluded with this useful final sentence for people interested in Austrian cartography: ‘Similar votes on a name change have recently taken place in Austrian towns Wank Am See and Petting, as well as in Vomitville and Windpassing.’

Of course you’d NEVER find an article like this in the Sunday paper here. And if you were offended by this you certainly don’t want to hear what the Irish think of George W. Bush and his mob. Note to self: get a subscription to the Sunday Tribune right away.

I don’t smoke and I’ve always been annoyed by those who do. Most die-heard smokers will tell you that seconhand smoke is not really harmful. Oh yeah?

Check out this little article I recently found in Time. “The health risks posed by secondhand smoke are well documented but…what is sure to fire up the tobacco lobby was a small study out of Helena Montana. When the city passed an ordinance banning indoor smoking in 2002, Helena’s only heart hospital recorded a 40% drop in the number of heart attacks. What’s more, when a court order lifted the ban half a year later, the heart-attack rate bounced right back.”

Um…for those of you who don’t know Brits call cigarettes fags.

Apparently Saturday June 12th will be World Naked Bike Ride day. The crazy folk who are planning this have a web-site (www.worldnakedbikeride.org) to give us full details of their upcoming plans. (Beware – home page features not very sexy meat and two veg. shot).

Can someone tell me why, if they plan to ride naked, they are selling T-shirts?

I got an e-mail from a mag in England the other day asking me to select a joyous piece of music that others should hear that might not appear on the usual top 100 album albums list. There was a deadline and I picked three memorable singles at random…

KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE – QUEEN
Every Tuesday night was OGWT Night and we would crowd into the Student’s Union (about five hundred of us) to watch one TV and listen to Bob Harris whisper his way through the off-chart sounds that would formulate my future musical tastes. One night over a dusty animated cartoon (Felix the Cat?) he played this short, frenetic, intense guitar anthem. Brian May’s crazy home-made axe, the many layered Mercurys, and them pounding Taylor drums did what the funny looking pills did for my drug-taking friends and raised my blood pressure and sent my pulse racing. Next morning I was on the bus to Woolies to relieve myself of an evening’s drinking money so I could get this 7″ slab of black dynamite.

And now thirty years later I ask myself why was it so special? And I realise I haven’t got the faintest clue what Freddie was on about. Something about a “Belladonic haze” more stuff about “tea on silver trays.” I would just yell out the words I knew and mumble the rest: “Keep yourself alive, keep yourself alive, something, something, something, honey, keep yourself alive.” In retrospect it wasn’t so much what it was about as what it wasn’t about. Paul Rodgers, my other adolescent hero, would sing about what he was getting plenty of and I wasn’t getting any of: girls or rather women (even better) and lots of gratuitous sex. Freddie and his lot had sprinted right past that and were already onto some higher plane and looking into some exciting future (with their first single!) that would lead them ultimately to Radio Ga-Ga and Flash. Heck this was even better than Zeppelin who were still lost in their mouldy netherworld with echoes of Tolkein and Aleister Crowley.

But best of all was that guitar. All those layers and all those fingers and a solo I could sing to even if I couldn’t play it yet. And then to discover that Brian May was an Astrophysics graduate and had built his guitar from a fire-place! Wow. How bloody cool was that? All I needed was an old fireplace and a saw and I too could be a guitar hero. And if I could plug myself into the mains I could have a haircut like him as well.

It was clever, it was complex, it was mysterious and confusing, and I couldn’t work out the words, and I couldn’t figure out how it all fit together, and I had to keep playing it over and over to see if I could unlock its secrets. A bit like my first girlfriend really. And at the end as the song faded Freddie told me, most importantly, the words I desperately needed to hear as I struggled through those frightening and bewildering times: “You will survive, you will survive!”

F*** OFF – WAYNE COUNTY AND THE ELECTRIC CHAIRS
After eight long years in prison (I mean boarding school) they let me out of the home and I slowly emerged from my shell a frightened middle class kid who underneath it all wanted to be Jimmy Page but somehow was pretending that a future in the building trade was really where it was at. Then punk happened and, though I was already balding and couldn’t grow the right kind of mohican, I flowered and one day purchased this 7 inch slice of delicious sleaze. I would happily sit on the tube and look at the poor office-locked bastards looking down their noses at me with my earring and my Lewis Leathers leather jacket and sing to myself: “”you say you’re hot s**t so I’ve heard – well you ain’t nuthin’ but a cold turd!”

HAPPY TALKING – CAPTAIN SENSIBLE.
Basically I should hate this song and everything it stands for but…When I first moved to London I worked as a motorcycle messenger at Stiff in a prehistoric era that pre-dated cell phones. I would call into the office in Westbourne Park from somewhere in the West End to ask if there was something else for me to do before I would ride out back to the office. Quite regularly the phone would be answered by The Captain (the bass player of the Damned of course) who, thinking my surname was the worst punk affectation he’d ever heard of, would scream: “DICK? DICK? DICK? F*** OFF…” down the phone at me before hanging up. Of course further calls would result in yet more insults and profanities. Strangely I never hit it off with the Captain. However when he left the label and went to A&M and this single came out and I couldn’t get enough of the damn thing…I even bought a copy which I still own. And that keyboard solo still makes me smile. Go figure.

In which country is Mount Everest?

A clue – it’s not in Europe…

This simple question might provide us with an insight as to why it is that the USA has such a problem understanding foreign policy issues. Yesterday I was stuck in the morning commute on the way to my latest starring performance in a motion picture. I was headed towards a sleazy office in Van Nuys and I was quite excited. Before you assume that I was about to appear in a porno (with a name like Dick you’d think I’d be a shoe-in wouldn’t you?) I must admit that my role was that of a hotel manager called Monty Freedman and there were no buxom lovelies with knee pads scheduled for my appearance on set.

I digress. So I’m in the car and listening to Mark & Brian who are two popular morning drive-time radio hosts who specialize in schoolboy phone stunts and sycophantic interviews with has-been actors. Recently they have been running some kind of competition in which two listeners are bombarded with general knowledge questions and the winner receives the ultimate accolade – a chance to do it all over again the following day. After every morning’s competition the likely lads ask each other left-over questions and of course we, the stuck-in-traffic listening public, can’t help but pit ourselves against the combined brains-trust of Mark, Brian and their lesser paid co-hosts. Which brings us to Question Five.

Question 5: In which country is Mount Everest?

There was a moment of silence and then one of our super panel chirped up: “Austria.”

Austria? They had to be joking right? I nearly drove off the freeway when someone else said: “Switzerland.” The final genius of the airwaves pitched in: “Peru.” No-one in the studio seemed even remotely aware how ludicrous this was. Nobody was close – not even the right continent!

If five vaguely intelligent Americans don’t know where Mount Everest is how can I be surprised that most Europeans feel that the biggest threat to world peace is…the United States?

I shall be conducting a thorough but admittedly un-scientific poll of everyone I meet over the next week or two to see how many people get this simple Geog. 101 question right. I shall report back with the results of my survey. Until then I’ll give you another clue – it’s in Asia.

Dear friends, a message of hope.

They say everything comes in threes. Cut back to yesterday afternoon:

1) 2.30pm…I was driving in my car to pick up my newly repaired Alessis Quadraverb (don’t ask) when the radio chirped up with the news that for the first time since 1935 Kodak would no longer be listed as being on the Nasdac 500 – or some other financial top 10 list – because it was felt that its performance was no longer a reflection of the current business and financial marketplace. My translation: Everyone’s buying digital cameras and the K-people are fighting a losing analogue battle against the digital tide.

2) 3.25pm…Back home with my newly repaired and cuddly Qudraverb the e-mail kicked up with two messages. The first was that 4 people I knew who worked as video commisioners and had at various times given me jobs that put serious amounts of cash in my bank account had got the boot. The second was from a dear friend in London, who’d just been let go from Virgin U.K. – I told him to go and drink some beers and destroy all his Mike Oldfield albums. By the time my message arrived it appeared he’d already beaten Ommadawn into a pulp and was using Tubular Bells II as a beer-mat.

3) 530pm…The morning’s post arrived as it always does at my house late in the afternoon (Go Postal!) and with it my Daily Variety with the headline: EMI faces music – label cuts 1,500 jobs.

Do you feel like me that we’re at a huge crossroads in our industry? I think it’s safe to say that the business to which I’ve dedicated 40% of my life is in the worst state it’s been in since I walked excitedly through the front door of Stiff Records in September 1977. It’s monstrously depressing and I can hear fear in the voices of everyone I speak to. It’s even possible that things could get worse before it gets better. What should we do?

Perhaps there’s nothing we can do…except believe. When I started my motorcycle messenger gig at Stiff all those years ago I got paid fourteen pounds a week. The hire-purchase repayments on the bright red Suzuki I needed to do the gig were seven pounds a week. The other seven quid went on rent and food. I was deliriously happy. But after a month with the company I realised that the place was a financial mess. Every week it seemed we would go under and would never re-surface. But quickly I realised that my paltry wage was paltry because I wasn’t being paid to worry about bankruptcy or the tax man or Ian Dury’s album sales. So I quit worrying and things got better and I worked there for five years.

Moral: Dear friends, we’ve come this far and we can continue if we believe. Most of us are not paid enough to worry about the solutions to our ailing biz. We do great work, we just need to keep believing.

For myself I know if it comes down to it I can go back to being a motorcycle messenger or a cab driver as I once was. It’ll be a kick in the balls but I’ll certainly have some wicked stories to tell: “The airport? Of course Madam, which terminal? Would you like to hear a story about Slash & Kenny G?” Last week someone told me to check out a hilarious web site called True Porn Clerk Stories and the quote that made my day was: “The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be the best possible video clerk I can be.”

O.K. everybody back to work. We can get through this.

P.S. Tubular Bells II is a really, really crappy album. It doesn’t even deserve to be a beer mat. And I should know – I bought a copy.

AND HERE’S A REPLY TO MY POST FROM MY OLD PAL PHIL BARNES…

All I know is I treasure every moment I’m able to earn a buck in the music industry (or associated to it). Since I bought my much beloved MP3 player (some 5 years ago) my love for music has been nhanced ten fold – and I listen to more than I ever did. I have bought more music in the past 5 years than ever before. There is more music available out there (if you look) than ever before – and some of it is really fantastic (both from old gits and young kids). With any luck, one day, the record industry will figure out how to make money out of those facts. In the mean time we have to watch them stumble through all their piracy paranoia whilst they embark on their usual periodic culling spree. It has been proved time and time again that the music industry listens to the money men (to their detriment) from time to time – then realises it’s made a mistake and listens to their heart and soul. New exciting labels will (hopefully) be born out this mad multicorporate take-over. On-line sales are growing – new artists are learing how best to get their music to a wider audience. The music industry (as ever) will be the last to respond.

If we stay youthful in our approach to the new industry (because the digital music indusrty is a new industry) then, with any luck, we’ll not get hacked down during the cull! Music and visuals now go hand in hand – however you end up listening or watching it (TV, iPod, PDA, DAB, Internet, DVD, 3G whatever…). Onward and upward… personally, I can’t wait for the next revolution. I just hope it doesn’t revolve around gangs, bling and slappin’ yer bitch up. My daughter deserves an intelligent and rebellious voice. There’s one out there… somewhere.

I’ve just read that Iron Maiden, who released their first album somewhere back around the time that dinosaurs still walked the earth, are still making money. Before going straight to the bottom line let’s just examine the scant facts as we know them.

1) Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer, only sings with the band part time – he’s more often found in the pilot’s seat of executive jets shuttling other rich people around Europe.

2) I can’t remember the last time I heard an Iron Maiden track on the radio.

3) I’ve seen a bit of a part of their most recent video on Headbanger’s Ball.

4) I think they had a new album out last year – I was sent the single and some artwork and asked to write on a video which I didn’t  get. (See #3)

5) They’re not exactly getting the column inches like Metallica still do or The Darkness have been recently.

6) They have an inflatable mascot called Eddie.

Um – that’s as much as I know. So I would have concluded that in the fiscal year ended 31st December 2003 they might have pulled in about half a million.

Which only goes to show what a dickhead I am. Apparently last year they came 9th in the top ten rock earners in the UK pulling in a staggering 17.9 million pounds. That’s over $32 million! That’s quite a part-time job old Bruce has going for him…

Turn on your Righteous Anger Indicator: this is going to be a rant. A political one.

I have heard recently that GWB is considered the president with the worst environmental record in US history. That’s quite an indictment don’t you think?

The other day I read an article entitled ‘THE ALASKA CHAINSAW MASSACRE” by Osha Gray Davidson (Feb. 5th Rolling Stone) in which he describes the way that in 2002 the US economy paid $35 million to build roads into a unique and priceless piece of Alaskan wilderness so that the timber industry (friends and supporters of you know who) could harvest $1.2 million worth of lumber.

Do we need timber this badly? Apparently not. Davidson writes: “Tree farms in the lower forty-eight provide plenty of wood to meet the country’s needs, and a worldwide glut of timber has been forcing prices down for years. Today there are only 200 timber-related jobs left in southeast Alaska.”

It appears that these trees our governement is so happily helping to cut down to ship to Asia and turn into mulch aren’t just any old trees either – many of them are Sitka Spruce trees that are at least 600 years old. That means, as Davidson so eloquently puts it, these trees were “already 100 years old when Columbus set out to find a new route to India.”

Let’s face it this one piece of environmental insanity is just a pimple on the bottom of our incessant industrial greed. Why are we doing this to ourselves and more importantly to a world that Bush’s twin daughters and you and yours will have to live in? I don’t have kids. By the time all this insanity comes home to roost – and there are too many people and pollutants and not enough food & water to go around – I’ll be pushing up daisies. Assuming that the environment will support them of course.

I think we all need to think about what we have in this enormous and bountiful world that we live in. Davidson makes this very crucial observation about our forefathers and how we’ve changed the face of America & the world in the last 200 years: “From the moment they set foot here, European settlers mistook ‘vast’ for ‘infinite’ and ‘abundant’ for ‘inexhaustible.'”

We’re getting to the point where infinite and inexhaustible are perhaps no longer applicable to the world in which we live. In the months to come and as the election approaches please make sure this is an issue we all discuss.

(P.S. Please feel free to track down that article and tell me I’m wrong. It would make my day to find out that everything’s hunk dory out in the woods.)

(P.P.S. It’s not just about the woods either. Try tracking down CRIMES AGAINST NATURE by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 12/11/03 edition of Rolling Stone.)

(P.P.P.S. About eighteen months ago our dear leader agreed to repeal a decision made by the Clinton government that would make the Big 5 Detroit Auto makers produce cars that were vastly more fuel efficient. I think the goal was to produce cars that would average 25 mpg. The Big 5 said they couldn’t do it in the time alloted. Being an oilman GWB said OK and scrapped the law. I’ve just discovered this piece of trivia in the Harper’s Index column of an old edition of Funny Times: The maximum number of miles a 1912 Ford Model T could go on a gallon of gas in 1912 was 35 miles. Such is progress that the maximum number of miles that Ford’s most fuel efficient 2003 car can drive on a gallon of gas is 36 miles!

Progress eh?)