The bits of songs that make great music...........



Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page) - stunning guitar riff immortalised in the Top of the Pops theme - even better after a joint.



Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd (Dave Gilmour) - the "live" version on Delicate Sound of Thunder is sensational with guitar you think couldn't get any higher before dogs go mad



Star Spangled Banner - Jimi Hendrix (errr....Jimi Hendrix) - Ironic patriotism? Nuff said



Bad - U2 - see the Live Aid version - tell me Bono can't hold an audience



Whisky in the Jar - Thin Lizzy (Gary Moore) - great intro, great song



Running Down the Dream - Tom Petty (Tom Petty) - the best guitar for driving to, fantastic way to finish a song



Moonage Daydream - David Bowie (Mick Ronson) - sorely missed Mick made this song with his understated guitar playing



Teenage Wasteland - The Who - one of the best intro's ever - Daltreys voice has rarely been better



Hotel California - The Eagles (Joe Walsh) - why people knock this is beyond me, timeless



Bron-y-Aur - Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page) - so you thought they were "heavy" - stunningly beautiful guitar work



Will You - Hazel O' Connor - the best, absolute BEST Sax solo anywhere, EVER. The End.



Waiting for a Friend - Rolling Stones - almost as good as above



Money - Pink Floyd - The first real sax I ever heard - marvellous, and even better live



Candidate - David Bowie - smoky sax intro, sleaxe personified in a song ..."I'll make you a deal like any other candidate, we'll pretend your walking home coz your futures at stake"



Almaz - Randy Crawford - the human female voice when it hits perfection



Paradise City - Guns n Roses - what an intro, bang that head damn you



Welcome to the Jungle - Guns n Roses - currently being used as the backing song in the ad for Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas - that should secure a re-release



Can't take my eyes off of you - Andy Williams - are you really trying to say you've never sung this when drunk? Not trendy, but fuck me this bloke can sing.



The Winner Takes it All - Sung beuaitfully by a woman with a fantastic voice and how sad is this song? Never felt like this? Liar! And for the geezers...didn't you just want to be the one to cash in on the blonde ones sorrow and show her what a real bloke was like?



Goodbye to Love - The Carpenters - Karen Carpenter's voice is so hauntingly beautiful, soppy but great.



Politik - Coldplay - this is proof that fucking good music can still be written today. Play loudly, in a car and sing, sing , sing.



Riders on the Storm - The Doors - some of the best piano/keyboard ever and Jim Morrisons voice at its best. Again, fantastic after a joint.



Liquidator - Harry J and the Allstars - not one particular piece of this satnds out but guaranteed to get the party moving



How Soon is Now - The Smiths - Johnny Marr's atmospheric guitar with Morriseys depressing tones make this a misery's masterpiece.



Later GrocerJack

Jack has been busy…….

Remember when I used to be able to post every day? Remember when I was prolifically writing stuff because my role had changed within The Company and my days were filled with so little to do that boredom and frustration allowed me to vent my feelings with real passion? Remember when my creative thread was fed by the feeling of being cast aside by The Sandman into the wilds of a meaningless and unproductive raison d’etre?

Well, now my role over that 7 month halcyon period has become very different. And it’s heading in the direction of Stress Monster Avenue. If my old role was say…100 on a scale of 100 in terms of stress (and it was ..believe me), then my new role was roughly about 2 on the same scale. Today I am thinking it’s back to about 35 and slowly but inexorably climbing upwards. I still do the Change management stuff, championing such exciting (sic) stuff as ITIL processes, and analysing the changes that we plan to make, kicking the arses of pig ignorant piss taking engineers who still think it’s OK to take down a service to thousands in order to fix a problem for the few. I find myself now actively applying the maxim “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”. Who actually said that? Nowadays I also manage our relationship with the Big Telephone Company, as well as our “outsourcing” partnership contract with the Desperate Dan Company. On top of that I am also managing a small team whose purpose completely mystifies me. I’ve tried to define the teams role but despite my best efforts the best I can come up with is “we….errrr….manage the System tools and processes”. Yep, very informative isn’t it. I guess that because I now wear 4 hats at work that might act as some sort of insurance for the future when the inevitable effectiveness re-organisation leading to the inevitable streamlining …or redundancies as we all really know them comes about. But even the language of re-organisations has now changed. We don’t call them that any more….oh no…..we now call them “transformations” which is an interesting spin to say the least. Transformation conjures up images of new exciting things, the Butterfly emerging from the cocoon, the young girl becoming the beautiful young woman, the Ugly Duckling becoming the Swan. Whereas poor old re-structure/re-organisation conjures images of shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic.

The last few weeks have been even harder than normal really because this week saw the launch of The Company’s highly expensive new Pipes, Tubes and Strings technology for which the Nanny Government striped us of £6 billion for the privilege to use. Once we had paid that money of course our shares, which constitute my only savings policy (pension aside) went into freefall because The City (I need a nickname for those freeloading scumbags) decided we had “overpaid” for the licence. Hmmm….damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Pay the price for the licence, dictated by the Governments fantastically business (un)friendly auction, or ignore it and have The Scatmunchers (nickname for The City) sit there and destroy the company, and with it my pension, savings and income for not having any future technology strategy. I am no huge Corporate fellatio provider, but The Company really could not win on this score and despite my, albeit champagne, socialist leanings, when someone threatens my lifestyle I suddenly become the most selfish bastard in the world. I

I digress. I guess my point here is that as I become gradually busier the harder it is to post. Also, the less miserable at work I am (and I am rather enjoying the majority of the activity increase) the less inspired I am to write and take the piss. It’s a bit like songwriters never writing good songs when they’re happy. You need angst, pain, frustration, anger in order to sometimes write the better stuff.

I guess the moral here is that…happiness makes you dull.

Later GrocerJack

This Weeks Work of Art - Picasso's Enfants a cheval au Roulettes. I don't know why I like Picasso, it seems so...obvious, but when I first got this bug for Art I found this stuff more challenging and I suppose it led me into my fascination for more the avant-garde works. One thing is never in doubt, Picasso's works always make the viewer question exactly what was in the artists mind when he painted it , Later GrocerJack 

Weekend observations……

Guinness is good for you: Well it must be because I went out on Friday, had a skinful, had more when I got in, went to bed at 02:00 (yup, quite big and quite clever) got up at 7:45 Saturday morning, played golf, scored a very creditable 34 points and had no real hangover worth worrying about.

Chelsea could actually win the Premiership: Yep, it is a realistic chance. We’ve played 12, won 9, drawn 2 and lost just one solitary sad little game. We have only conceded 3 goals in the Premiership so far, which is as fucking tight as possible in such a league and conceded only 4 all season, when the Champions League (sic) games are accounted for. I won’t say too much more for worry about tempting fate…….Watch out for this Arjen Robben kid we bought from PSV Eindhoven – he looks bloody fantastic.

Party Runs: So, my weekend job is to run my kids between parties is it? How much fun it was to find out on Saturday that Baby had two parties to attend, one from 18:00 until 19:30 and the other from 19:30 until 21:30. Both locations 15 miles apart. Oh what a fun Saturday night that was. Just to complete the misery, it pissed with rain. I fucking hate the clocks going back, the dark long nights, the poxy rain-sodden winter, the increased traffic.

I am a summer person. I need the sun on my back.

Berkshire Train Crash: About 3 miles from where I work. Very sad, but I find the most distasteful element the disgraceful attitude from Bob “Fucking Twat” Crow, Head of the most backward dinosaur, head in the sand union this country has, the RMT, immediately trying to pin the blame on Network Rail. He says we should replace every level crossing throughout the UK with tunnels or bridges, irrespective of cost. Last year 18 people died in level crossing accidents, all of them through the fault of the driver or person. No blame has ever been apportioned to the rail network. How can the railways cater for the occasional idiot with a death wish? Bob Crow needs a dose of reality; the man is on a singular crusade to bring the privatised rail industry back into the public ownership domain. A fine and noble goal, and one that I agree with politically, but not when he keeps linking the cause every accident on the railways to the current ownership model. It is an insult to those who died in Saturday’s crash (but not the fucking idiot driving the car).

It appears this guy (Brian Drysdale, 48, a chef at Wokefield Park Golf Club) was determined to die – if it hadn’t been at Ufton Nervet then it would have been somewhere else. I just wish people who want to commit suicide would take a bottle of pills, drink a bottle of whisky, lock themselves away and die quietly without killing or injuring others as well. We had a “jumper” near a bridge on a motorway by our village a few weeks ago – he was hit by a lorry, but the resulting accident caused quite a few cars to come off the road or collide with others. No-one else was physically hurt, luckily enough, although God knows what scars the lorry driver will carry in his mind for the rest of his life. The sickening thing was the fucking shrine of flowers that his undoubtedly upset friends and relatives made on the bridge. One wonders what world these people exist in, but would they have done the same if jumper man had killed others in his act of desperation and utter selfishness?

Later GrocerJack

Scary stuff......



Now I used to be a big conspiracy theorist but over the years my cynicism had become dulled thus removing one of the last allegedly slightly rebellious stances I had. Yes, we did land on the Moon and not in a Hollywood Studio, yes Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot JFK from the book repository despite Oliver Stone's claims in his excellent film. Princess Diana did die in a car accident at the hands of a drunken Frenchman and not because of some sort of Secret Service plot. All of the counter- theories for these incidents seemed plausible to me, after all we believe what our eyes tell us and we form beliefs based on the evidence presented to us, which for the most part is via the press or Broadcast media. I had at one stage thought that the Internet would be a strengthening cause for those of us who questioned what we were being told, but no.....even the impetus of that seems to have died in a sea of abject Apathy. At least I thought this had died in my mind until I saw the superb BBC's Power of Nightmares programme last night. In fact last night was the last of three episodes and was a damning indictment if just how apathetic, gullible and malleable we as a society in the West have become.



The basic premise was that politicians over the years have met with more and more disinterest and disrespect for their powers of government. Effectively they have failed to deliver what they have promised which has led to the people becoming disillusioned. Ultimately the importance of politics within our lives became marginalised, and with this the power the politicians held became less and less. Of course, politicians only enter this line of work because they want power, no matter how altruistic they make it sound about wanting to improve society/lessen poverty/ drive down crime etc etc. Ultimately to try and execute these altruistic and honourable principles you need the power to implement them, which means you must be greedy in some way to gain power and then implemt your priciples, even against the will of large numbers of people, because as a politician YOU know best. Especially if you're a Labour politician. Labour politicians know that it is wrong for consenting adults to watch porn (fuck each others brains out, for sure, but don't watch others doing it), or gamble in casino's (because apparently we're all a bunch of latent fuckwit gambling addicts - oh and lets not forget if Labour had been in power there would have been no National Lottery - all the good causes would have been funded by higher taxes imposed on unwitting hard working overtaxed people like me) , or drink (because at 22:55 I am old enough and responsible enough to drink in a pub, but at 23:01 apparently I am no longer capable of drinking responsibly). I could go on but I think you all known how much it pains me to be essentially socialist and yet have to put up with the fucking Bleeding Heart Nanny Government we have now, full of do-gooders like Clare MiseryGuts Short, Frank Twat Dobson , Austin "people can't be trusted" Mitchell et al. All of them chips off the old "we know whats best for you, better than you do" block.



Anyway, I digress. The point is that the programme put the view across that to really gain power, the various governments had to do something. And so, the Neo-conservative, fundamental Christian power base in the US gained favour. They had one problem though, since the disintegration of the USSR, there was no real enemy anymore. They could no longer assert their power by giving good God Fearing US citizens something else to fear in God's rather prolonged absence from our view. Enter Stage Left - Al-Qaida. There was so much detail in last nights programme it would take a blog of monumental proportions to explain the intricacies. The essence was that Al-Qaida themselves were only "formed" because of the failure of Osama Bin Laden and his mentor (whose name I forget) to instigate hard line Fundamental Islamic revolutions in the Middle East and Europe. OBL and his mate decided that Muslim minds had been poisoned and brainwashed by Western culture and lifestyle, and as such declared the new enemy to be those very influences, primarily America and her allies, but Christians and Jews in general as well. However , all OBL has ever been capable of doing was assisting with funding and all the evidence seems to be that the US built Al-Qaida up to be a cellular, hidden, effective, clever and well organised network of terrrorists hell bent on destroying the West.



They had their new enemy!



Al-Quaida on the other hand, found their cause getting world wide publicity thus gaining them new followers to the idea of fundamental Islam, although the programme proved that their alleged sophistication was non-existent, and that the infamous cave bombing exercises in Afghanistan for example, were based on an article written in The Times by a knobber journo claiming these hidden cave hideaways were complete with sophisticated computer systems, air conditioning, secret exits and entrances, planning rooms, accomodation etc. Yep, it turns out they were in fact just...caves! And another lie smashed last night - the myth of the devastation caused by a "dirty bomb". Yeah, the conventional bomb lined with radioactive material that we hear about almost evry week. Apparently people would die from the bomb explosion, but the radioactive material would be so widely dispersed by the explosion that barely anyone with a decent Geiger counter would notice the difference between the fallout of the bomb and a particularly sunny day in Brighton! No bomb site would be closed for very long because of radiation, and in fact anyone nearby would more than likely have any radioactive debris removed by simply having a shower.



And so for the past four years we have a had the most powerful nation on Earth run by a neo-conservative, fundamental christian government, playing a deadly game against an artificially created enemy of convenience whose creation was formed from similar circumstances as that of the US Government. Christians disillusioned at the moral collapse of Western society and the appeasement of other religions and cultures, Muslims disgusted by the apathy and apparent corruption of their own societies and people because they believed they could reconcile their beliefs with Western lifestyles.



The overriding point of the programme seemd to be that if politicians create a climate of fear amongst the populace then they have restored their power over us. They create a climate of fear by peddling an incessant stream of stories of doom, terror, economic hard times, environmental crises, we then fall in line in order to be safe and sound. The line is now "vote for us, do as we say, and we will protect you from the evil ones". No matter that the alleged evil may be a tiny risk to all of us, or even non-existent. Of course, we're not that daft or gullible are we? Unless of course you see the result of the US Elections yesterday, in which a sizeable majority (the biggest for some time) voted Dubya back in. His campaign was based on what? Yep, how he was the only one capable of protecting the US from the evil of terrorism. And is there any doubt Tony Bliar (sic) will get in next year? No credible alternative and his sizeable majority will not be overturned, especially when Middle England picks up the message of "protection from evil".



My faith in well written and thought out conspiracies has been truly restored by this marvellous programme.



Later, unless of course someone's out to get me, GrocerJack the Great Protector

Penis Requests a Raise

I, the penis, hereby request a raise in salary for the following reasons:

I do hard physical labour

I work at great depths

I plunge head first into everything I do

I do not get weekends off or public holidays

I work in a damp environment

Sometimes I work in a smelly environment

I don't get paid overtime

I work in a dark workplace that has poor ventilation

Sometimes I have to work in a very claustrophobic, drier and tighter place

I often have to work in a place where teeth exist

I work in high temperatures

My work exposes me to contagious diseases

Sometimes I have to work through the whole night

I often have to work at very short notice

Sometimes I have to work after having had a drink

I am constantly fiddled with by my owner

I spend a lot of time coiled up in a hot, tight pair of briefs

I am constantly having the piss taken out of me

Dear Penis,

After assessing your request, and considering the arguments you have raised, the administration rejects your request for the following reasons:

You do not work 8 hours straight

You are often not very clean

You fall asleep on the job after brief work periods

You do not always follow the orders of the management team

You do not stay in your allocated position, and often visit other areas

You do not take initiative - you need to be pressured and stimulated in order to start working

You leave the workplace rather messy at the end of your shift

You don't always observe necessary safety regulations, such as wearing the correct protective clothing

You'll retire well before reaching 65

You're unable to work double shifts

You seem very eager to work for other people

You lied about your size on the application form

You sometimes leave your allocated position before you have completed the day's work.

And if that were not all, you have been seen constantly entering and leaving the workplace carrying 2 suspicious looking bags.

Sincerely,

The Management

My thanks to CG for this

Later GrocerJack

If only.....

Health & Fitness - The Facts:



Q: I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?

A: Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it...don't waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; that's like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.



Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?

A: You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system.

Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.



Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?

A: No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made out of grain. Bottoms up!



Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?

A: Well, if you have a body and you have body fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.



Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?

A: Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...er...Good



Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?

A: YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!!. Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they're permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for

you?



Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?

A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.



Q: Is chocolate bad for me?

A: Are you crazy? HELLO ...... Cocoa beans ... another vegetable!!! It's the best feel-good food around!



Q: Is swimming good for your figure?

A: If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.



Q: Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?

A: Hey! 'Round' is a shape!



Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets and remember, "Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Beer in one hand, chocolate in the other -- body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming - WOO HOO! What a Ride!"



Later, GrocerJack