# Saw the black swan nutter at the reservoir again this morning. Fortunately, he'd roped in some other passer-by to listen to the account of his dog's medical troubles. The dog seemed much happier, presumably because it no longer has a stone stuck up its arse. Now it's got one stuck in its paw.
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# Anyone who tries to manipulate XML documents in any kind of meaningful way using VBScript needs their head examined. I had a dentist examine part of mine this morning. He said I was the picture of dental health, so it must some other part of me that's not working properly. VBScript is a shockingly shit language, especially and bizarrely when it comes to web application development.
Have switched to JScript. It's still less than fab, but it's loads better.
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# Took the dog and the little bean for a stroll around the reservoir yesterday afternoon. The reservoir was constructed to supply water for the Wolverhampton canal by Brindley (or Telford - can't remember) and is like a little oasis in the city. The sun was warm, and the spring leaves on the trees made a light, airy canopy over our heads as we toddled round. It was fab.
Along one end of the reservoir is a dam wall, and we crossed it we saw another fellow with a dog. He was standing in a pose I have come to recognise as either "my dog isn't well socialised so might have a go at yours, but I'm ready to shout at it" or "I'm paranoid that your dog is a viscious bastard and you left it off the lead for laughs". Badger trotted up to this fellow's dog, a moth-eaten looking Bedlington and gave it a bit of a sniff. The bloke was unmoved. The dog was unmoved.
I've found the best way to reassure other dog owners is to talk to your own dog, rather than to them, so I called "Come on Badger, that dog's too small for you to play with".
"He's got a stone stuck up his back passage."
"bleugh?" I said.
"He's got a stone stuck up his back passage," repeated the bloke, "he's going to the vet tomorrow for a whatdyoucallit, an enema."
As I walked past him, he turned as if to fall into step with me. OK, I knew what was going on now. He was a nutter. You get them quite often at the reservoir, for some reason. "And even if he was big enough, he's not really in the mood!" I called to Badger. I stopped walking and turned back. The dog did look pretty sick.
"They've been stuffing whatsit, liquid paraffin down him," continued the nutter, "and I brought him out to see if he'd go. I took him to the vet earlier, and he said to bring back tomorrow." Badger had left the dog alone, and I saw my chance to get going again as he walked up. I hummed and harred in a sympathetic way.
"The black swan's gone," said the nutter, apropos nothing at all.
Wha...? He really was a nutter. Was he talking about a pub or a bird? I hadn't expected this, most nutters are fairly one track - their dogs, how evil geese are, how homosexuals are okay but they wouldn't want their daughter to marry one, how their wife ran off with a black man. This guy was multitracking. He had me rattled.
"The black swan's gone," he said again, fixing me with a stare.
I still didn't know where this was going. I made a conscious effort to look even blanker than I already did.
"There was a black swan here yesterday and the day before, but it's gone now. I reckon the canada geese scared it off." He spoke very slowly, as if to a child. Eh? Now he didn't sound completely like a nutter, but best not to take any chances. I explained, briefly, that I didn't walk the dog up here very often and that it was shame I'd missed it. I hoped his dog would get better, turned on my heel and strode manfully off.
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# There are several ways to let people know you're an idiot who hasn't got two brain cells to rub together.
One is to put a sticker in the back of your car that says "Free Enterprise Works". It plainly doesn't - the evidence is, and always has been, all around us. Left alone, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand isn't a positive force for good lifting us all up to a wealthier and (it's implied) happier existence. Quite the contrary, it becomes a devisive force to concentrate wealth and power with fewer and fewer people, leaving the rest of the population to get by with less and less.
The Thatcherite "trickle down" theory is a lie. On the other hand, in Britain, we don't seem to have the will to have a major go with Socialism. Although, let's face it, nowhere else in the world that has had a go has managed to make it really work. As much as I would like to see capitalism exposed as the amoral, unjust force that it is, I can't say I have a better alternative that the "mixed economy" we seem to have arrived as the default mode in Western Europe. It's slanted too far to the right in this country at the moment (the National Grid, for example, should be nationalised), but it does seem to work reasonably well.
An equally good way to show-off your empty headedness is to pretend that kicking a branch of MacDonalds is a major blow against the forces of global capitalism.
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