Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

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Morbid but strangely fascinating; Texas inmates' last meals. Most reinforce the stereotype of the final fast food blow-out, but some are unexpected (e.g. 1 apple, 1 orange, 1 banana, coconut, and peaches) and one in particular rather affecting; "None. Last minute he decided to eat a hamburger at his Mother's request."

I found myself wondering, as I read fried chicken and nachos again and again, how much the menu tracks the ethnic make-up of the prison population. Also, I noticed that Dr Pepper seemed to be the beverage of choice for the soon-to-be-deceased. Kind of ironic, given the brand tagline - 'What's the worst that could happen?'

Documentary with Gladstone Small which asks "Is cricket in England a white sport dominated by class?"

Take a look at the current England cricket squad and you're unlikely to see a black face amongst the line-up. From street level to test level, cricket is losing both black players and black fans.

Birthday boy Tom with drunken domestic goddess Delia on his arm, sharing a few bottles of vodka at the Capital Canaries Annual General Meeting in London last night. Nick also reports that, on a day of swirling Ashton transfer rumour, the Carrow Road big cheeses retreated from the flesh-pressing later for an animated and serious discussion in the corner. What could it mean?

The connectivism blog asks, "When technology manages the complexity, can we become reflective"?

Our restlessness is a challenge to learning. We rarely slow down enough to begin to use our advanced thinking skills. Instead we skim the surface of knowledge, learning to distrust our own intuition and cognition.

Technology can free us for higher level thinking but only if effectively used, and for that we need to reflect on how we use it.

Take the email system at work. Every time you get new messages, an icon pops up in the toolbar to tell you its there. For me, this always used to prove a constant distraction, and now it's going to get worse with the pop-up new message preview in Outlook 2003. I think it may (further) reduce productivity of the organisation as a whole, especially given that most people don't have the skills to disable such features. For what claims to be a knowledge workplace, it's a paradox.

It's easy to avoid reflection in modern life given that so much of our time is saturated with information and sound. Even if, like me, you're fortunate enough to have a long and scenic commute, the serenity is often lost to the jangling of an iPod or laptop DVD. That's why not having a TV at the moment is almost an interesting social experiment. There's still an urge to reach for it as exhaustion takes over after the watershed, though, like the sensations from an amputated limb. I'd like to think this idealised state could be maintained, but it would be foolish to ignore the value of keeping the kids occupied at around six in the morning.

Green makes a fair point:

We've come out of a season where we haven't won many and we've got to get that winning mentality back quickly. (Position 17th)

Available on 1Extra, the video of 'Welcome to Jamrock' by Damien Jr Gong Marley (one of Bob's kids). The track attacks the corruption and violence that plagues the poor of Jamaica;

To see di sufferation sick mi
Dem suit nuh fit mi, to win election dem trick we
They they don't do nuttin at all
Come on let's face it, a ghetto education's basic
A most a di yutes dem waste it
And when dem waste it, dat's when they tek di guns replace it

It's a crackin', crackin' tune, too. The video was shot on location in some baddaass part of Kingston. Requires Real Player. I also found a link to an MP3 download of the track (legality and permanence uncertain). Enjoy.

Perfectly timed to coincide with yesterday's anti-Stockport rant (see below), I took a bus ride through town centre last night at about 2.30am.

Oh. My. God.

As the Heaven and Hell nightclub spewed out its punters onto the dreadful Grand Central (aka Chav Central) shopping precinct, it was, rather appropriately, like stepping into Danté's inferno.

An ambulance was parked up outside the kebab shop patching up the participants of some Stella-fuelled brawl as they sat on the pavement amidst what must have been either blood or chilli sauce.

The flashing lights of three police meat wagons lit up the crowd with frantic blue strobe as a few poor police officers struggled desperately to keep apart the many raging drunks who seemed absolutely bent on tearing each other to pieces.

Also foaming at the mouth were a couple of girls out on a hen night who sat in Stockport's prime social space - the high street bus stop - catching their breath after a good, hard vomit. The balloons and party hats were a nice touch, I thought.

As our bus pulled away to the sound of a scream and a bottle smashing on the street, more police vans tore past us with sirens blaring and I had a sense of déja vu. It took a moment or two to make the connection but then I realised - it reminded me of the scenes you see on TV in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Iraq. Relaxed licensing laws? What are we thinking?

Another one from Mike. This happened a while back but it still makes my heart sink and sums up the small-town, white-trashness of Stockport, 12th crappest town in England;

A gang of 40 students, hooded and wearing balaclavas, have tried to storm a school in Greater Manchester. It was one of a series of incidents that have included attacks on pupils, at the Stockport school. Read article...

Every time I see the kids around here I start making escape plans. Heaven forbid that Yani's peers in her teens are these zit popping, Woolworths shopping, souped-up Ford Fiesta driving, pram pushing, fake Argos gold jewellery buying, polyester tracksuit Fred Perry shirt burberry cap wearing, WKD drinking, shaved head havin', soap dodging bloody chavs. I reckon we have about 5 years, before Yani starts to want to hang out with them.

We had a discussion this week about the accuracy of the BBC docu-drama, Hiroshima, which was shown to mark the anniversary of the dropping of the H bomb. My colleague, Mike, claims it misrepresented events, in particular by depicting the Japanese leaders refusing to bow to pressure to surrender in the days that followed and bringing the Nagasaki bombing, by implication, upon themselves.

According to him, the Japanese actually approached the Americans through secret diplomatic channels before the 2nd bomb was dropped with the intention of surrender but the Americans didn't want to talk. Apparently, their prime motivation was always the testing of their new technology; both towns had been protected from earlier firebombing in order to better evaluate the destructive power of the device, and they were already committed to trying out a second bomb of a slightly different design at Nagasaki.

The following article which he sent me after this discussion makes shocking reading. It argues in some detail that the Americans' intentions in dropping the bomb were to reimpose racial supremacy in Asia and to demonstrate to the world their power, in particular to the Russians in anticipation of the coming Cold War;

The racial dimension made the Japanese a very different enemy from the Germans. The Japanese posed not just a military threat to the old imperial order, but a political challenge to white power that could spark the fires of Asian nationalism. The leaders of the Allied powers saw the Pacific War as a life-and-death struggle to salvage the prestige of the Western elites. They had been humiliated by 'Asiatics'. As a consequence they were fighting a race war, in which the enemy had to be not just contained, but crushed if the white powers were to retain any authority in Asia. The extent to which they saw the Japanese as different was reflected in the ruthless attitudes and actions adopted by Allied governments and forces during the Pacific War, culminating in the decision to drop the White Man's Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Read more...

Picked up a copy of the Independent on the train today and was reminded what a quality publication it is (if one has time to digest that much stuff on a daily basis). One interesting article was about something I'd seen in the States before, but which has recently acquired a contemporary name and become highly politicised; freeway blogging.

(The highways of the United States) are the domain of the freeway bloggers, a breed that have invented a tangible concrete and tarmac version of the internet to make their feelings known about George Bush. The messages, posted from overpasses, bridges and verges, are short, pithy and very, very rude. Read article...

The online version lacks the photos of the big centre spread in the paper, but you can see some good examples of the craze at Freeway Blogger. My favourite, on a sign outside a church reads 'Jesus Loves you. Bush Doesn't', although I was mighty pleased to also see 'Mandate My Ass', a reference to a Gil Scott-Heron class called B-Movie;

Well, the first thing I want to say is mandate my ass! Because it seems as though we've been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate – or a landslide. 21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running. B-Movie Lyrics...

I think I just heard the sound of a bubble being burst. Still, pretty much every club that's come down in recent years has failed to respond and we're no different. Could be a good time of the season to get the big kick up the arse out of the way.

Enjoying the Ashes today, I forgot we were even playing and I realised I'm not ready for the return of football just yet. One sport at a time, sweet Jesus.

My running up and down stairs between web pages and wickets got me to Ceefax just in time for the familiar sensation of three wasted points. The mood isn't improved discovering in the match report that Doherty started ahead of Shackell in our leaden central defence. Plus Ça change. Plus la même chôse. (Quote of the weekend from the Guardian; "Gary Doherty looked every inch a liability. Unfortunately he is six-foot-two.")

For a while I dozed on the sofa last night waiting up for Match of the Day on some kind of muscle memory - maybe seeing Ashton in action would rekindle the enthusiasm - but our new Division One reality dawned on me about 10pm and I drifted off to bed instead, ready to sleep the sleep of Doherty. (Position: 11th)

Sony have been caught bang to rights making up positive reviews about their movies and fined nearly a million pounds. Is this really that big a deal? Most of the reviews you see in the mainstream are written by tabloid hacks who are on a drip feed of perks like attending launches and they're not going to bite the hand that feeds by writing anything sensible anyway. Bullsh*t.

Making my way down to the Old Trafford trophy room on the stadium tour (disclaimer: I was with a visiting friend from New Zealand who wanted to go), I came face to face with an iconic figure in the world of madness. No, not Alex Ferguson but David Icke.

To jog your memory, he's the former sports presenter who went nuts a number of years ago, started dressing in turquoise tracksuits and claimed that a secret group of 12ft lizards from Mars were among us and controlling the affairs of our planet. Notable members of this group include Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, the Queen Mum and Bob Hope(!).

Anyway, he was just on the tour like us, taking his lad round. It was definitely him because we could hear him telling his son about occasions on which he played at the ground when he was a goalkeeper at Coventry. Consequently, I missed most of the football-related stuff they talked about because I was busy most of the time trying to wangle a good picture of me and David, with my friend Chris strategically positioned to get the shot.

We got a few but the best was one of him standing in the players tunnel. I captured a look on his face that seems to perfectly capture his paranoia and suspicion. I like to think that he's just spotted Roy Keane getting out of his car and that he's a lizard, too.

(I quite like the picture of me in the players' tunnel, but it would have been the picture of a lifetime if I'd had the foresight to wear my Norwich top. Doh!)

In the days following I checked out more about David Icke on the web. I expected to discover that he's out of work and scraping by as a grocer or something since the public humiliation and ridicule he suffered in the past, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Apparently he's still out there doing the lizard stuff, and doing pretty well out of it - lectures around the word (especially popular in Canada and Japan), books, videos and more.