Weekly Quote - Easter Special

Again apologies for lack of content, but suprisingly I'm actually doing better than Tim for updating, which is a bit worrying since he's my blogging benchmark in terms of frequency and variety of content.

Anyway since it's easter time i though I'd whack up something to do with easter and what better than an easter song eh? While not specifically about easter modern hymn "In Christ Alone" deals with the death and resurrection of Christ and also it's power and meaning in our lives - the third verse sprang to mind as I thought of appropriate quotes.

"There in the ground his body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain:
Then bursting forth in glorious day
Up from the grave he rose again!
And as he stands in victory
Sin's curse has lost it's grip on me,
For I am His and He is mine -
Bought with the precious blood of Christ."

Wholly appropriate for the time of year I should say. And wholly appropriate for any time since Christ still "stands in victory" to this day.

Till next time

Weekly Quote Double - W/E 15/03/08

Yes I've missed a week or two I'm afraid, been busy and all that, but I'll get in quick with a weekly quote double to compensate for lack of blogage. These two quotes get in by merit of being the first and last in the dictionary of quotations.

"O what their joy and glory must be,
Those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see!" - Peter Abelard 1854 (translated from latin)

"He [the Evil Spirit] defied the whole creation...
So things of the material world appeared in duality, turning, opposites, flights, up and down, and mixture..." - Greater Bundahishn ch 4 (The Zoroastrian Scriptures)

Well...uh...there ya go!

Post 101: The Tea and Coffee rant

This post has been a long time coming, but I can't think of a more appropriate time to put it up than on the posts numbered with the number representing all hates - 101!

I have never like Tea or Coffee and I'm fairly certain I never will, even if my tastebuds did adapt to their most peculiar flavours I think by now social and other factors have accuulated such a hatred for both products that I can never seriously consider drinking one of them again.


Why don't I like them: firstly 'cause they just taste weird. Coffee products are just wrong, coffee ice cream is ignored, coffee biscuits only tolerated and coffee chocolates are always the last to be taken out of the box - so why on earth would I want a coffee flavoured drink for crying out loud. Now Tim and other caffeine addicts may be able to tolerate the aforementioned products, but I suspect that this is because they can't taste anything but coffee by now anyway!!! Tea is more tolerable, but a flavour I can't quite figure out and I don't have any particular inclination to do so. So then my initial reason for disliking tea and coffee is essentially that I don't like the taste, but is this cause for hatred - no, as always people are always behind the larger issues.

But let's stay on the product for a minute because, coloured by other factors, I have developed an extreme dislike for the stupidity of the tea/coffee making process. What idiot when he was thirsty decided that instead of taking water and drinking it to assuage his thirst he would instead boil it and chuck a load of leaves in and then when it got too hot he got some milk (another perfectly good drink by the way) and chucked that in there. What a complete nutcase he must have been, but yet somehow his invention caught on. And so around the world people actually bother to take time to make a drink when they could have downed a juivce and gone on to more fruitful activity - there's nothing worse than waiting around for people to make their cups of brown filth when you've got something better to do. The heat factor is also very irritating, why you would want to make something hot I struggle to understand. The repeated swallowing of boiled water seems to give tea/coffee drinkers a tolerance for heated food which I just don't have so people always heat their food to ridiculous temperatures that the human body, unless subjected to this bizzarre willing torture, is unable and unwilling to endure. So this means I always take longer to eat than other people and I'm a slow eater at the best of times.


But even this is not enough to generate the extreme dispassion I feel for these products, as I say, the problem is always people. Drinking hot filth is such a status symbol in Britain that you are frowned upon if you don't partake with the masses in their daily caffeine ritual. These products aren't drunk because of pleasure or thirst of their holder, they are drunk because it is seen as a social necessity to do so and those who can't tolerate it or succumb to attempted indoctrination (maybe it's genetic?) become social exiles, politely outcast by the rest of civilization. This come with the stupid preconception that tea/coffee is a "grown up drink" - since the high heat of the drinks is dangerous to give small children this is a sensible label, but people have taken it to also mean that if you don't drink tea or coffee then you are not truly a grown up.


As with other, more tragic, forms of social abuse if you are told something enough you start to believe it. You start to feel that you don't match up to the rest, you start to apologise for forcing to people to get you juice or when they bring you coffee out of assumption (yeah sorry for forcing you to make a drink that takes two seconds to make you...) and generally feel a little bit less of a person for doing so. Well I've found an outlet for these feeling - and that is pure anger and distain - no longer will I apologise for who I am or for my tastes and beliefs.

I, the Figleaf or your imagination, detest both tea and coffee and I'm proud of that - March 12, 2008

Adieu

Word of the post: Quadruple - adjective

1.	fourfold; consisting of four parts

Weekly Quote/ 100th post bonanza

Hello readers, this things which you may be reading is in fact my 100th post on this blog and as well as the slightly overdue weekly quote I'll have a quick look back over the previous 99 posts, what brought me through them to today and what is going to happen in future posts. Well first let's get the quote out of the way eh?

"It's easy for a man to smile when life rolls along like a song. But a man is a man who can really smile when everything's going wrong." - Adolf Hitler 1945 (courtesy of Barry Cryer)

So, blogging eh? I was informed by friends that this was the thing to do, and I cautiously dipped my toe into the wonderful world of writing for millions to see, and two or three to actually read. I remained cautious over letting the potential millions seeing what I though and felt and initially kept my postings to a small "Space" provided as part of my MSN account where only verified contacts could read it. This provided me with the security I needed and so I was free to write, to complain, to tell stories and generally jibber jabber online - I was soon hooked.

Eventually I decided to spread out to the wider world and accessed blogspot.com and got myself an account. I still stuck to limited content, more or less just copying content from my still current MSN blog to the somewhat awkwardly titled "RE-blog: the home of C 'n P" so named for the fact that was essentially a remake of an existing blog I liked to Copy 'n Paste content onto it: I'd done a joke about R 'n B remixes being more like C 'n P and it went down well at the time, unlike most of my jokes so it seemed worthy of the title space.

So the somewhat awkward balance between private and open blogs remained until my favour started to slip towards the blogspot one, mostly due to the fact that people actually read it! And soon this blog became the current one and the MSN one became redundant. I still C n' P'd content onto it up until recently, but it's purpose has been served and it's death was, I think, officially realised when this blog took on it's moniker "The Place that is."

I'm still fairly reserved, and I'm cautious about posting photos of myself or others on here - though Facebook has given me an outlet for such activities, again secure that most of the people who view my pictures I should know personally. On my blog I've declined to share personal information and released no image other than a shillouette, why - just a general feeling that one should be better safe than sorry while surfing and I guess it also lets me blog and say things without feeling it has to be about me or that I have to let people know what I'm up to. While it is a thin layer the anonymity lets me at least feel that I can say what I want and write whatever gibberish I feel like writing without it being my fully stated personal opinion. Like I say it is more of an illusory placebo than an actual reality the effect is still there.

Of course anonymity would mostly be helpful if I had a mass of readers, which I don't. I had a decent amount of readers to begin with, but I think people lost interest due to my posts being long winded and only sparsely updated. By the time I took the advice of having shorter, more frequent posts, regular commenting had more or less died out. I guess this brings up another issue, one I call blogger vanity - to assess one's worth in the amount of comments one gets on one's blog. Now I'm aware that I do have semi-regular readers now, which is encouraging, but without some kind of measure of visitors to the site unless they comment it's hard to know if they look or care. I could get some kind of hit counter, but i think that would fuel my vanity more so I'm afraid to consider it.

This is starting to turn into a lengthy uncommentable post so I'll wrap it up methinks. As for the future I merely plan to continue as I am, and maybe gain a reader along the way, but not feel too bad if I don't. I've had various ideas along the way, but always get disapointed when they don't turn into the massively popular, underground star createing projects I imagine them to be so I think realistic goals and just enjoying the fact that I can write and occasionally have people read what I write is pleasure enough and I will do my best to treasure that.

You've been a maervelous audience - goodnight!

Word of the post: Crapulent - adjective

sick from gross excess in drinking or eating.

Shotton Solutions

Hello dear reader, and how are you?

This post concerns the town of Shotton, which is nearby to me and which I drive through regularly for work, church and to visit friends. Unfortunately driving through Shotton can be a hard event to go through because of the horrendous traffic there which will frequently jam up even during the middle of the day when no one should be driving really! This is partly due to a network of side streets which wind around and take time off your journey, and since evryone knows them it doesn't often speed things up to take them.

Aerial photograph of Shotton














This, unfortunately, drives almost all traffic onto the main street. In terms of covering distance it is the most efficient way to get round the town. Unfortunately it is a very efficient way to get to lots of other places too as it leads to and from several other towns in more or less a straight line. This means that half the people in Shotton are actually trying to get out of it, often with little success. The non local traffic don't know the side routes and the locals can't be bothered taking them so it can make for a very frustrating journey indeed.

Photo of main street - ironically taken on a quiet day
















Various solutions to this have been proposed, including stopping buses from stopping in the main street, but this merely drove more people onto the roads and those who chose to walk home just caused road rage because they were actually travelling faster than the cars. I would like to propose an alternative solution to the problem and that is to create a large overpass which would literally let cars skip over Shotton and carry on to other destinations and at the same time letting local traffic continue as normal, albeit with a few buildings missing and not being able to see the sun as much.

Artist's Impression














Such an overpass would in my opinion facilitate a much better way of life for people driving through Shotton, those outbound could pass over the town at a comfortable 70mph which lical traffic could carry on beneath with little or no interruption to their journey. I do feel that something like this will be necessary since Shotton is developed and spread out so there's nowhere to put a diversion road without going miles out of the way which is why people still go through Shotton even though they expect heavy traffic, something needs to be done - who will step up?

Disclaimer: Of course most of the facts in this post are made up and for the purposes of a joke, if you don't get that you're a bit thick really and you probably won't even read this but I'm putting it here anyway. This post is purely about the traffic situation in Shotton and means no slight to the town or the townspeople, well only a slight slight at least, the very slightest of slights I should say. All in all this has been an interesting experiment and when it comes down to it I think we will all agree fundamentally that the average price of a can of Coca-Cola should be no more than 50p.


However, when experiencing the actual reality of Shotton traffic myself and one or two other have often mentioned an alternative solution...
















Thank you for your time

Word of the post: Congealed - adjective

solidified by cooling