Despite the fact that Alex the Wonderdog was attacked a few good months ago, the repercussions of the event still ripple around like a pebble tossed with mindless abandon into a still lily pond. My mother reported to me that Mrs G, the missus of MG, the owner of the mastiff that attacked Alex, had visited her shop again. She was prepared for the worst and Mrs G gave her both barrels – sounding off and complaining about the fact that my mother has been warning every dog owner in the area about them and their beast of a dog.
“How would you like it if your dog had attacked another dog and was being spoken about?” she asked my mother.
This provided us with light relief because my mother’s dog is a tiny Yorkshire Terrier called Cappy and the idea of him taking on the mighty Dwarf the Mastiff (for that is the attacking dog’s name) is both ridiculous and quite surreal. The mastiff is the largest dog I’ve ever seen and its back easily comes up above my waist. Meanwhile, Cappy the dog is short than the length of my forearm. Hardly an equal fight is it? And besides, we aren’t that daft as to let our dogs off the lead in a public place and let them attack other dogs, but that’s by the by.
My mother told Mrs G that she wasn’t going to discuss the matter in her place of work and retreated to the stock room, allowing her manager to take over. He saw the horrific damage done to Alex the Wonderdog and asked the lady to leave peacefully. The funny thing is that my mother keeps hearing stories of how this dog has attacked various other canines in the area. One lady told of how her son had been playing with their Doberman in the driveway of the house when Dwarf the mastiff ploughed in and ripped its face. Her son was in shock and the dog clearly in a state, but the lady got in her car and tore after him. When approached, Mr G flipped the blame back her way, accusing her of not having her dog on a lead. Clever bloke, eh? Wonder where he got that gem from?
But the fact of the matter is that Mr G is still letting his dog attack other animals. He won’t muzzle his animal and has bugger all control over it. They certainly don’t like my mother warning all and sundry about what’s happened. And so, I write this entry in the hope that someone whose dog might have been attacked in the area might come this way courtesy of Google – or any other fine search engine.
If you live in the Loughton or Debden area, specifically in the Rectory Lane/Willingale Road/Colebrook Lane area and have had your dog attacked by a large Mastiff – easy to identify because it is probably the biggest dog you’ll ever see – drop me a line because I have the name, address and contact details of the owner. If you have been affected by this moron who can’t control his dog, you must report him to the local dog warden and RSPCA, because if we keep on doing it, Mr G might just listen and muzzle his dog. While I am not particuarly pleased with him or his animal, I wouldn’t want the dog put down because of the owner’s stupidity and macho posturing. Now the following words are for the search engines so don’t freak out:
large big dog attack attacked debden loughton mastiff fight muzzle kill bite bitten tear torn ear
Category: Diary
Recently, I’ve been cutting and pasting the various reviews I’ve done at “The Site That Cannot Be Named” and included them on this site. You could see this as a sign of the divorce coming through. I’ve packed my things and left, moving on to a new home. I’m not going back and I shall not waste any more of my time on it. Cast pearls before swine, etc etc etc. And so I am here now. To help people find the things, I’ve upgraded my filing system so that when you enter the archives you can see the various titles of postings. Clever, eh?
Yesterday was a good day. After much fruitless noodling, I realised that “Sweaty Betty” was good enough for inclusion into Disc 2 of my 4-CD boxset. It acts as a bridge into “Miranda Inspired” and it works very well, even if I do say so myself. Disc 2 is a 41 minute experience of 18 interconnected instrumental tracks. I like it – it has been a labour of love…a horrid laborious labour of love, with love turning to hate and then cold indifference. Of course, I jest.
Look…a shiny disc of wonderment and joy – guaranteed to send you to sleep in 20 minutes – or your money back!
My guinea pig came home from work and so I decided to give The Missus the premiere of the CD. She’d heard bits of it but not the whole thing. Unfortunately, she fell asleep 20 minutes in. I’ll take it as a compliment. Oh well, what’s the point, eh? So today, I sit down and work out what to call the eighteen songs. That’s a challenge, innit?
And so we move onto the endgame. Get yer pen and paper out to scribble some lyrics, fool.
Mr P arrived nice and early to collect his missing wallet. He was a short fellow in his fifties and had a tan better than my own. He waved a ten pound note in my direction as thanks. I smiled gratefully and told him not to be so silly. All I asked was that if he was to find my wallet, he’d return the favour. My reward was the feeling of a job well done. Of course, done think me so honest. If the wallet had no ID, I would have spent the cash in the pub, because I do believe in finders keepers. But if you can trace someone, that’s an entirely different matter.
At the moment, it has been hard to record anything. It’s too warm. My fingers keep slipping off the fretboard. But despite the heat, I’ve managed to record a short doodle called “Sweaty Betty” – the intention of this is to use it as a bridging piece to splice onto “Miranda Inspired”.
At the pub, we were talking about plans and ideas and I got it into my head that it might be cool if I could so live performances over the web. With broadband being the norm, doing something from the studio and webcasting it is very feasible. I just need some volunteers to watch/listen. Anyone out there? Anyone?
Today is the 8th anniversary of our marriage. Of course, this coming 5 September, me and The Missus have been stepping out together for a phenomenal 18 years. The scary thing is that neither of us can figure out where the time has gone. It still seems like yesterday that we were working together at Woolworths in Bakers Arms behind the record counter. When she got another job at Boots The Chemist up Wathamstow Market, I plucked up the courage to go ask her out. On the way back, I popped into Our Price in the arcade and bought Robbie Robertson’s first album. Those were the days.
So we keep any celebrations simple. We enjoy the sun and go to the pub. Sad, but even after all this time we can still go and natter for good three or four hours without getting bored of each other’s company. On the way to the pub I found a wallet in the curb. Normally, when I find lost money on the street, I trouser it. But because this was a wallet and there was a credit card inside, it actually belonged to someone and could be traced.
I had no luck in the phone book looking for Mr P, but I had the clever idea of phoning the credit card company and asking them to pass on my phone number onto him. Ten minutes later, Mr P phoned up and was very grateful to hear from me. He had my details and thanked me for being the only honest person in the world.
If you can’t do good things, what can you do?
I am not sure if you remember my post about the dead bluetit chicks a while back? Well, I was watching a wildlife documentary on BBC2 tonight and I saw a clip of footage that might just explain what happened. Of course, the following clip is copyright of the BBC.
Blue Tit Massacre set to “Atom Heart Mother”
Actually, I found that footage a bit hard to watch when it came on the screen. Yes, I know it is silly to get emotional about wildlife programmes, but it took me back to opening the nesting box and seeing the dead chicks. At least, I could see a possible reason to how they came to pass. As it says in the documentay, the bluetit was only a small meal, not the difference between life and death. But that’s the brutal gnashing maw of nature, I guess. Also, I’ll never be able to listen to “Atom Heart Mother” in the same way again…
In the heat of the garden, we picked some of the miniature wild strawberries that had been growing. In previous years, they had been bitter and unpalatable. This year, despite their diminuitive size, they were incredibly tasty. Of course, this might have something to do with Alex the Wonderdog widdling religiously on them. 🙂
Hmmm…tiny berries watered by the loins of a jumbo Westie
Booze & Berries
Well something’s going on…checking the monthly stats for June, it seems that this little domain pushed out a whopping 57Gb of data. 57 Gigs. Five…Seven…Gigabytes. I can’t believe it. There were three days last month where something gobbled up an awful lot of bandwidth by repeatedly download my video podcast – a total of 1617 times, equally 34Gb of traffic. I can’t believe that video can be that popular and it seems that something or someone out there is upto something. Whether it is nefarious or innocent, I cannot say. It is all rather odd though. To put it in context, an MP3 like the “Cloistered Space 1” which I posted a couple of weeks ago has had a total of 248 downloads, equalling just over 1Gb of traffic . Now this is reasonable as it is also on my podcast RSS, so you can understand how this could happen. Something smells odd and it ain’t my feet in this hot weather.
Last night, something happened that made me very angry, so I decided to take my rage out on my guitar. One thing I am not noted for is my adeptness on the fretboard. I am a more pedestrian player, preferring feel and melody over lightning licks. I used to do that stuff when I was a younger player, because you think it is a sprint, when in fact playing the guitar is a lot like a marathon. You have to pace yourself. Anyhoo, I added an angry guitar solo to the end of “Miranda Inspired” and hopefully it works. It’s not particularly fast, but the intention is there. I will listen to it a couple of times over the coming days and decide whether or not it is fit for inclusion, needs reworking or whether to just continue to use the vanilla Miranda. Here it is for your own sonic audit process:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Meanwhile, my hayfever is making my sinuses hurt. Mornings and late evenings are not pleasant at the moment, but I mustn’t grumble. It’s not that bad.
Operation Clear-Out sees a number of classic progressive rock T-shirt for sale. Oh yes, all these items have been collected from various gigs I have attended and are unlikely to be worn by yours truly again. Of course, I kept my King Crimson T-shirts as the rules of the clear-out allow me some dispensation. 😉
Just when I thought the Internet had lost its appeal, I find a website that totally made me fall in love with the WWW all over again. The site in question is 419 Eater and it is dedicated to the ancient art of Scambaiting. The idea of scambaiting is simple: the next time you get one of those dodgy Nigerian emails promising you a share in millions, set up a fake email address and respond, stringing along your mark and generally disrupting their campaign of conning the hapless. There are some great stories on the site and some of them are so hilarious I was weeping, yes weeping, with laughter. There’s Derek Trotter’s Art Emporium who gets this stupid scammers to sent him artwork they’ve supposedly create in order to qualifiy for a fake arts grant – they end up spending their cash on expensive DHL shipping or Arse Bandits United where the scambaiter convinces the scammer that he’s looking to invest in Nigerian football or The Great Penis Caper where a lusty scammer tries to marry his mark for money – there’s a catch, he’ll have to supply pictures of his penis first.
Yes, it is greatly juvenile. Yes, it is a phenomenal waste of time. But it keeps the scammers busy. And while they are busy, they aren’t conning your Auntie Gladys out of her life’s savings in a bogus lottery scam. It is your public duty to join the crusade. It’s not particularly time-consuming – the idea being that you waste their time, not your own. Of course, scambaiting is an art and you should take great care with these criminals because lesser men have ended up robbed and dead with a bullet in their head on the dusty streets of Lagos. Even if you don’t get involved, I think you’ll agree that some of the stories are hilariously funny.
The baby mollies have almost tripled in size…