Did I do anything life-altering in the last week?

Does being a US Citizen count?

Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon was cold, but over a thousand people became Americans and I was one of them. Now I get the opportunity to vote in the next election. About time, too.

But I want to spend a bit more time saying hello to John, my brother. He called and told me he has Hodgkin's Lymphoma, early stages with other complications. We're thinking of you, John.

Listen: I Pity The Poor Immigrant - Bob Dylan ... He's My Brother - Hollies.

Turkey Day is nearly upon us. Any excuse for a few days of nothing but food and snoozing. Got to love it.

Being English by birth, there's a lot of America I didn't know until I came over here. New York smells of roasted nuts at the end of October. 'Heyna' and 'pank' are real words in Pennsylvania. I even know what a suicide squeeze is in baseball (it's like knowing where the slips are in cricket, or what the offside rule is in association football). It's a good job I know this stuff about America because in just over two weeks I'm going to be one.

Swearing-in ceremony is on the 9th of December. I get to keep my British citizenship, so that's two passports and two countries I get a pension from when I retire (I worked for close to 15 years in the UK).

I hope England and the US don't get drawn in the same group in the World Cup...

Listen : Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys ... Only - Nine Inch Nails.

Guess where I'm posting this blog entry from.

No. I mean it. Go on. Guess.

Normally I would be on the Mac, connected through a modem to the net. Not today. Now I'm in the front room, with a laptop on my legs, talking with Beth about the Breeder's Cup. Any questions she has about where a certain commentator comes from or who will be riding which horse... Google, baby. All thanks to the DSL connection we have now. We installed it yesterday. Finally a part of the broadband community, and it feels good.

It has been a good few weeks for me, for us. Our House (the website I started to show how we're coming along with building a house from scratch) should have a good entry in the next few days: they're ready to dig the foundations. I was promoted at work. Two weeks ago we went to a concert of John Williams music too, which got me in the mood before Revenge Of The Sith comes out on DVD.

It's a good feeling when things are nice in life. Just thought I'd share the joy.

Listen : Duel Of The Fates - John Williams (conductor) ... Computer Love - Kraftwerk

Typical... you leave the web alone for a few weeks and the whole world goes to Hell in a handbasket.

First off, the hurricanes. Katrina whacked the Gulf Coast, Rita gave Texas a bloody nose and Tammy has just moved away from this area of the world (where we received more rain in three days than the whole of the summer). Do I think the way people in New Orleans were left to die was racist? I think it's worse: I think it was poorist. I had to make up a word for it because we don't have a word for it. The way that people will discriminate against you because you're poor. Poorist.

There was a lot of it. News crews were able to get people and supplies in and out by road easily enough, but the poor were left to fend for themselves as FEMA claimed it was news to them over half a week later. It suited some people just fine that way, keeping the people they hate oppressed and confusing the issue further by claiming they weren't racists to boot. Even though some of them were racist, like the boat owner who only rescued whites (story here) because, as he said, "a nigger is a nigger is a nigger." Oh yeah, he was racist. Poorist too, because it was fine by him to have people living in toxic swill with no money to get out. It just suited him a little more that the poor were black.

Want another example? Suburban police closed at least one bridge to keep a handful of blacks from fleeing to white areas. Both the boat-owner and police stories were reported in Newsweek. We're constantly sold this American dream where everybody is equal, but now the world can see it's not true. There are so many subtle differences that are now obvious and just screaming at us. The blacks were kept poor, and the poorists could keep them that way and claim they weren't racist. But the end result was the same. The dead were mainly poor, the poor were mainly black, the poorists still had a level of semantics protecting their fragile world-view of tax-cuts helping all.

Being poorist is sneakier than just being misogynistic, racist or xenophobic. It's more weasely, must nastier. It's really sticking it to people who need assistance. It gives nasty bastards the ability to hate their fellow man and not get called out on it. So I'm calling them out on it. They'll hide behind their coded language and their "stop blaming us" cries as they use the confusion to cement their own twisted 'I'm better that you' mentality. But we know what they are. They're poorist scum, pure and simple.

Oh, and if I hear one more scheming politician complaining because they're being investigated for illegally handling more money than most of us will ever see in one place I'm going to be sick. You're meant to invite transparency, you're meant to be a supporter of openness... and if you're innocent, why the song-and-dance routine? Got something to hide?



Here's how I see it. If you got caught with your sticky fingers in the jar, suck it up and take what's due to you. Start using some of that "personal responsibility" you preach about to the oppressed for a change instead of complaining about how the judges are out to get you. It makes you sound like a petty crook, for Pete's sake.

Rolling Stone magazine did a great piece on Katrina, by the way. Read it here if you have ten minutes to spare. They were there, so I'd take their word for it over some political hack.

In other personal news: the house-building can now commence after the discovery of a sewer-pipe stub on our land. I have decided that the blog will be full of too much house news and not enough of my thoughts (this is, after all, an online diary) so I have started Our House. It's a step-by-step guide for anyone brave enough to want to build their own dream home from scratch. Or, in my case, to have a team of professional builders do the heavy listing for us!

I occasionally talk about web design in this blog (some people make cuckoo clocks for a hobby, I like messing with animated GIFs and HTML). There was a vacancy posted at work for someone that can write training material and knows web authoring software. Hey, that's me! So I applied for it. Apparently, they want someone to make a company intranet site that houses all our training material. I'll do it!

Listen : New Orleans Is Sinking - Tragically Hip ... You Could Have It So Much Better - Franz Ferdinand ... Circuitry - Project 86.

Last Wednesday was a sad day. We buried Beth's gran. She was 96, which is a pretty good stretch for anyone. She was ill for a while, and wasn't mentally with us for years. She reacted to my voice when we visited her in the hospital, but I guess only she'd know what she was trying to say.

So life has to go on.

As it did yesterday. We went to Yankee Stadium to see the Toronto Blue Jays get beaten 6-2. Rivera closed the game, home runs by Sheffield and A-Rod sealed the victory, and the outfield (Matsui especially) were outstanding. Beth was there, Beth's brother Mike, her parents, our brother-in-law and varoius friends of friends. We were enough of a voice that you could hear us chanting for certain players. The game was replaying in the evening when we got back and hearing us shouting out "Ga-ry Shef-field" surprised me. We were LOUD!

It's going to be close for the end of the season. Fingers crossed for the Bronx Bombers.

Listen : Baseball Cap - Faithless ... Babeball Bill - Echo & The Bunnymen.

Every seven years, my life gets interesting. I'm 35 now. Hold on tight, it's about to get interesting again.

First of all: we went camping and did a bit of sight-seeing. When it comes to the great outdoors, there's one thing that Nature has always known.

I am the King of Insects.

Small insects love me and want to in my general vicinity at all times. That usually involves biting me. I used to use DEET-based stuff which was smelly and sticky, so I'm glad for a substance called 'picaridin'. Cutter Advanced™ is the only insect repellent available in the US with this stuff in it. It smells faintly of Bailey's Irish Cream, which is nice, and works great. I'm happy to give it due props here.

The mosquitoes have asked me to abdicate. Maybe I'm not the King of Insects. I'm not the Lord Of The Flies either.



We also visited picturesque Longwood Gardens and I took this picture. It's actually four pictures all 'Photoshopped' together.

So what's the interesting stuff? We put a deposit down to build the house. The bank has our mortgage application and it all starts in earnest from next week. Whooo boy.

Listen : Let's Play House - Snoop Dogg ... Mr. Mortgage - Peter & The Test Tube Babies.

Two things I just wanted to mention today, neither of them connected at all.

First of all: the bombings in London a week and a bit ago. I used to work in Kings Cross railway station. Not near it: in it. I did over five years at King's Cross Thameslink (formerly KX Midland) and St. Pancras too... and when I say I was a Secondman at Hitchin TCSOP when I started in '86 and an R/S 'B' at Royston when I left the job in 2001, anyone that worked in the offices of the old British Rail will know this isn't bullshine.

Taking all that into account, I'd have to say that I have a pretty good idea of what happened down there on 7/7.

After all, I was also on 2200-0600 on the night of the King's Cross Underground fire, when they had to get 31's and 47's to pull the 312's, 313's and 317's out of the platforms because the 25kV was cut and there was smoke pouring out of the grates in the Euston Road. I was the Sunday office CO2 at Thameslink when the Bishopsgate bomb went off near Liverpool Street, and everyone in the station looked outside because it sounded for all the world like a car-crash without the squeal of brakes. I can't remember the number of times I was involved in evacuating a railway station in almost 15 years on the job, but it was well into the double-digits.

With all that said, I have a message for anyone that thinks bombs scare Londoners. We've had bits of London blown up since the Luftwaffe, so your point is...?

In fact, the part I found as disgusing as the bombs themselves was the vitriol from 12 of the 13 letter writers in the next day's New York Post. All but one of them had used their letter to justify Mess-O-Potamia, bash the "liberal elite" (who they would later punish by awarding them large tax cuts... I wonder if any NeoConservative ever wondered why they fight so hard to make the "elite" even more elite? That would be like giving pedophiles access to children because you say you object to sexual deviance, but that's what the Catholic Church did for decades and they helped get the vote out for Bush/Cheney in 2004 so you never know), argue against treating the environment as something more than your own personal urinal and promising to fight the terrorists to the end (without having the balls to actually see a terrorist in the flesh, never mind raise a weapon against one). The New York Post is the all-American newspaper that's owned by an Australian who once took a comedian author to court (and lost) because another of his holdings had registered the phrase "fair and balanced" so they could legally use it without acually being it, and the comedian used it too. You can see why I was disgusted by this, while simultaneously acknowledging that life is not without a certain amount of irony.

The second thing: The Dukes Of Hazzard. The man that used to play 'Cooter', who later became a politician and now runs two museums dedicated to the "good ol' boys", said the new film is a "profanity-laced script with blatant sexual situations that mocks the good clean family values of our series." You can see the full story right here.

Dukes Of Hazzard as "good clean family values" ...I'll let you think about that for a few seconds. Good, clean, family values. Don't let that picture of Daisy Duke on the right sway your opinion.

It got me thinking: weren't they moonshiners? And wasn't Daisy one of the first examples of overt crumpet on the boob tube (OK, you can look at the picture now)? And didn't Bo and Luke get in a fight nearly every week at the Boar's Nest Bar? Which brings to mind this question: why the hell were they running moonshine if booze was legal? Wouldn't the legal availability of booze cut down demand for the hooch and kill the Duke's profit margin?

If that was "family values", isn't Tatantino's 'Pulp Fiction' a little bit Disney?

Listen : Kings Cross - Pet Shop Boys ... We Have Explosive - Future Sound Of London ... Not Afraid - Sisqo ... World, Shut Your Mouth - Julian Cope.

Happy Fourth Second of July from the land of good news.

First of all, a big happy 35^th birthday to Beth. Happy birthday, love!

Now for the headlines. I got promoted at work. I'm now training new recruits the job I've been doing since 2001. More money, company laptop, salary (so I get a better vacation deal too). I'd rather be designing web pages, truth be told, but it looks like I may get to do that in my spare time for a few dollars anyway (thanks Gene... maybe I can get your web site polished up for gratis!).

If you have a quick read of the last posting, you'll see that we had no fun with one builder but were lined up to meet another. Well, good news again because this one designs the houses he builds, we've fallen in love with one of the designs, it's within our budget and this time we got a detailed run-down of everything involved in the construction. Frost block? Sewage permit? Even factoring in the cost of blasting hypothetical bedrock, should we need it? We know how much it'll all cost. The beauty of it all is that we know someone that went with them (I think I mentioned it last time around) and their detailed run-down has been nicely accurate.

So as we look forward to another summer of barbeques, getting out and about in nice weather (and hopefully a great summer of music leading to an end to world hunger after the Live8 concerts), I'll be detailing the progress of Chez Seabrook in the months to come.

Listen : Feel Good Hit Of The Summer - Queens Of The Stone Age ... Blood Red Summer - Coheed & Cambria ... The Sun Rising - The Beloved ... Happy Birthday - Altered Images.

Ooooh, things certainly change from one post to the next.

First off, the house building. The guy from ...you know what? I'm not going to say the same of the company. Fuck 'em. The guy from the building company didn't get back to us for nearly a month. Eventually, when he did, he quoted us a price for construction that was 25% more than what we'd talked about. He then said he had no recollection of talking prices with us. Motto: get them to write down prices or it'll end in tears. Beth got to talk to the head honcho and she asked why the price was so steep. Any viable explanation that sounded reasonable would be accepted at this point.

"It just is," said the head honcho from the nameless building company.

Well, stuff them and their chances. We found a building firm that gives quotes, and uses stain-quality wood (not just paint-quality) on their woodwork. This nicer firm was recommended by a work collegue of Beth's... and at a party last weekend it turns out that a friend of ours used to be a roadie for their boss's band, back in the days. We need to set up a meeting with this man.

Beth is still taking the Enbrel, and I'm extremely delighted to say that she is in the 60% group that it works for. She has more movement and less pain.

The films. Hitch-Hiker's Guide was good, but as a purist of the radio show, books and TV show I was a bit miffed that Arthur Dent finds love in this film. With Trillian. He's not meant to find love until the third book. Film. Whatever. And he's meant to have a kid with Trillian but only because... look; it's a long story, you'd just be better off reading the five books that make up the whole general mish-mash of things that constitute the Hitch-Hiker's Guide universe.

And then there's Star Wars.

Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt.

Have you ever seen "The Godfather"...? If you have, you remember the bit where Michael Corleone's in the church and the heads of the other families are getting whacked. Minimal sound effects, maximum music. Remember that scene? There's a scene in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith that is AS GOOD AS THAT. I won't give away any secrets, but watch out for the "Execute Order 66" part of the film.

I've seen a lot of sci-fi, read a lot of it too. Until this film, my all-time number one science fiction film was Aliens, with the Director's Cut of BladeRunner a close second. This one is now my all time number one sci-fi movie of all time. Kudos to George Lucas, he made himself a masterpiece.

Listen : First Of The Gang To Die - Morrissey ... Duel Of The Fates (TechScapers Remix) - downloaded from the web ... I Am Chewbacca - DVDA. You get the idea.

Science fact and science fiction. Those are today's two topics.

Fact: time, Einstein said, is relative. You can spend a few years with things happening pretty much in the same way they always have. Then life speeds up. Things happen. Life-defining events. Here are the facts...

I had the snip (I really should self-edit this blog because I seem to have no shame!) and I had my first test. It was a success: zero sperm count. There's a second test to come next week, and I am pretty confident that it will scientifically show that I will be unable to father kids for the rest of my life. Which was, if you think about it, why I had the operation in the first place.

Beth's stiffness and general body pain has been scientifically diagnosed as Ankylosing Spondylitis. The body's defence mechanism feels like a displaced soldier, fighting a war that ended years ago. Maybe it was a germ, maybe it was an allergy to pollen, maybe it was something eaten. Whatever the reason, the body ends up producing too much TNF and it has nothing viable to fight. So it attacks the body that produced it. This leads to inflammation of the joints and whole body pain. There's a drug that was released less than two years ago that seems to work wonders in 60% of cases: Enbrel. Beth has to inject herself once a week and she feels 100% better. She has more range of motion in her neck, she has more energy, she can bend down to pick things up again and she's eating more. We're keeping our fingers crossed that this will be the stuff that gives her more pain-free days.

In other factual news... we're finally lighting the fire under our home building. We downloaded a few floorplans for houses that we liked and tweaked them to make a coherent dream house blueprint. We met with our builder and he was impressed. Most people just turn up with a general idea that they want to build a house, but with no ideas regarding cost or design elements. It turns out that we did half the work! Hopefully, we'll be in our house for Christmas.

Fiction: I've been a fan of science fiction since I was a kid. I remember reading sci-fi short stories when I was five, I was fascinated with Star Wars trading cards when I was seven and eight. I devoured Douglas Adams and the Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy on radio and in printed form when I was ten and eleven. It all finally comes full circle over the next four weeks with the cinematic releases of "Hitch-Hikers' Guide" and the final episode of the Star Wars saga "Revenge Of The Sith". I already have my ticket for Star Wars. Midnight showing, day of release. I mean, come ON. I've waited since 1977 to see the thing wrapped up.

Listen : Finding Out True Love Is Blind - Louis XIV ... Don't Panic - Coldplay ... Cantina Band - Ash ... Banquet - Bloc Party.

Just been thinking about that whole Terri Schiavo thing, where a US President that shall remain nameless said he cautioned on the side of life (as a baby died in a Texas hospital because a law he passed cautioned on the side of profits). How Tom DeLay cried like a kid with a burst balloon about "activist" judges as activist "Christians" planned to murder / trespassed on private property / threatened the family on the side of legally proven right, by 'phone, over the issue. The fact that DeLay is under investigation for gross criminal misgivings has nothing to do with it, I'm sure. Just like when petty criminals cry foul over the legal system that caught them in the act has nothing to do with their petty and peurile opinion either.

So here's my wishes. It may not be on paper, but I'm the only person that knows my login to this blog, so it shows it comes from me.

I, Shawn Orlando Seabrook...

love life, especially mine. If I'm in any accident where the possibility exists that I could still communicate in a manner that leaves no room for the interpretation "is he really communicating with us?", even by the most convoluted of artificial means, then I want that to be made available to me so that I can communicate my wishes. Not the wishes of opportunistic politicians, or rich people that make their money by selling religious dogma to the masses. My wishes. If I'm in a compromised physical condition, but still have the chance for mental aptitude in future, then hook me up to anything that keeps me alive long enough to recover from my physical distress.

don't believe, however, in fighting a hopeless fight. If I'm ever in the situation where I will never recover from something that mentally debilitates me, then I don't want to be kept needlessly alive. If two independent medical experts have confirmed that I am not in any cognative state beyond pure reflexes, and will never be anything more than a biological food processor, then let me die. Use any part of my body for medical and scientific purposes after I'm gone. I believe it's just a shell and I won't need it anymore.

trust in my wife if there's any situation that's not clear cut. If I'm not in a position to make a decision, and I didn't cover the bases in the two paragraphs above, she's in control. She's the boss, and what she says is final.

believe in timely resolutions. The maximum time I should be left in a debilitative state, one where I'm artificially kept going, is 36 months from the time of the first life-saving procedure. The only exception to this rule is if I'm in a coma, and all I need is artificial hydration and feeding, and medical experts agree that I could still be mentally active within my coma. In tht case, please refer to the paragraph regarding my wife.

That's it. Dated the 3rd of April, 2005. Me.

Listen : Believe - Chemical Brothers ... Medical Love Song - Monty Python's Flying Circus ... It's My Life - Talk Talk.

In January, we went to see the comedian Mitch Hedberg live (Stephen Lynch too). Read that post here. I warned the world, I really did. I even sent a version of this posting to the local 'paper and they printed it on the Letters page. Today I discovered that Mitch died in a hotel room at the age of 37, and his family acknowledge that he was a heroin addict for some time.

I know: Terri Schiavo (the woman with the feeding tube in Florida) died, the Pope could very well be dead now too. They might just be waiting for the morning in Vatican City so they can announce that he died in his sleep. Neither hit me as hard as the Mitch Hedberg death.

Rest in peace, Mitch. You were truly a wreck on stage when we saw you, but we didn't ask for our money back so you weren't that bad.

Listen : Interstate 5 - The Wedding Present ... Narcotic Influence - Empirion.

We'll not be coming to England this year.

I need to email you all (I'm talking to the family here), but it comes down to one fact. Money on airfare and the stay itself would leave us with no closing costs for the house we want to build... and I personally want us to be in it by Christmas. Partly because of the whole "it's our present to each other" sentiment, but mainly because manually digging out parking spots after a foot of snow covers the street (only to have some Lexus-driving social moron take it when you're at work) and having seven apartments share one water heater meant for five is wearing a little thin in the winter months.

I went to the MoneyChimp website and worked out how much mortgage payments will be for us, based on the down-payment we'll have and the probable percentage rates. They have a nifty little Pop-up Financial Calculator to work out a lot of financial information. Interest rates, compound savings growth, and (most importantly for us) you get to see your house put into real numbers. Go on, give it a go. See how much house you can have instead of paying rent!

The Philadelphia Eagles lost the Superbowl to the New England Patriots on Sunday. For our non-American readers, that would be like Belgium losing in the World Cup Final to Brazil. Everyone expects Brazil to win, but that doesn't make it any easier on the Belgians. For all American readers, please insert joke linking Donovan McNabb's throwing up and his commercials for Chunky Soup here.

Listen : Killamangiro - Babyshambles ... Somewhere In The Universe - Spacetribe ... Come Home - James ... Eagle - Abba (lot of music listening).

Stephen Lynch and Mitch Hedberg. Scranton Cultural Center. January 20, 2005.

First up on this comedy double bill; Stephen Lynch was funny as humanly possible. New songs ("I'm Satan, Whoo Hoo!!!" was excellent), new material added to older songs (college years added to the song "Special Ed"), and good interplay with the audience. Buy his merchandise at all good retailers (and probably a few bad ones).

Then came Mitch Hedberg, and it was a different matter altogether. The man that many have called the new Stephen Wright (deadpan delivery), the man that has the line "...if carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be all fucked up..." did not turn up at the SCC. What we got instead was a man that arrived drunk (and possibly as high as a kite) and proceeded to get more wasted through his set. Not on carrots either. Hedberg was a mess, unable to hide behind his usual 'laid back' stage persona.

Audience members were trying to help him, shouting out the beginnings of some of his routines to help him remember his own act. He would mumble incoherently at times, remember parts of his act from the prompts, laugh at the joke before he got to the punchline (the "koala infestation" joke was one example of this) and by the end of his set was return-heckling the audience members that were rightly disappointed in the man's performance. He died up there, and finally started prompting the crowd to cheer louder at his next "set piece" so he could leave on a high note.

Outside in the freezing cold, a man was selling screen-printed Mitch Hedberg t-shirts foir $5 and was probably wondering why business was so slack.

Watching the one-man train wreck that unfolded before our eyes, it sadly reminded me of Lenny Bruce. Another comedy genius that pushed the boundary of what was deemed acceptable, Bruce died of a drug overdose at the age of 39. Mitch Hedberg is only three years younger and it looks like, unless he gets himself cleared up, he could be emulating the "live fast, die young" performer that had his life cut short in the sixties.

Listen : The Way It Is - Prodigy ... Craig Christ - Stephen Lynch.

I have an announcement to make. Having a vasectomy makes it really difficult to walk on half-icy snow.

I've known for years that I didn't want kids, and my wife has felt the same way for years too. Kids are OK, they're the best thing for the future (as far as the species goes), but I was always responsible enough to know I wasn't responsible enough. I know how the world works, and the way the world works is this: if you want kids because you think they'll make you happy, you might want to work on the happiness thing first because you seem to have a joy issue, not a lack-of-kids issue. If you want kids because you think it's a guaranteed way to make that man of yours stay with you, it's probably best to work out the relationship thing first. I'm happy and confident enough without children, my relationship with Beth is strong without children, we're happy without progeny. I come from a big family with lots of nieces and nephews and mankind isn't going the way of the dodo. Well, not unless the planet gets hit by a mountain of an asteroid. So we talked about it, and me having a vasectomy was by far the best decision.

I had 'the snip' on Friday. I'm still saddle-sore, and I have to give samples in a few months, but that's it. No biological primogeniture for me, for us. One less thing to worry about.

A small part of me would love to say I had it done as a protest to a Government or a world that tries to impose its own values concerning reproduction on its people. That's not why I had it done... but if you want to have your vas deferens snipped as a statement against people that want to tell you what to do with your body, be my guest. Just a word of warning: it hurts like the Dickens!!

Listen : Pregnant For The Last Time - Morrissey ... Snip & Lick - Funki Porcini.