BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Art prankster sprays Israeli wall: "Secretive 'guerrilla' artist Banksy has decorated Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side."

He must have been saving that one up since 1989 and the Berlin wall...

The BOOK Spoiler

I need never read another page (though, obviously, I'm going to anyway.)

Got locked out again on Wednesday. I’ve spent less time in my flat than I would’ve liked over the last month, mainly through being locked out, late nights drinking and trying to move stuff around. Absolutely shattered all the time – just want to lie down in the sun and have the grass grow over me.

In other news, I went and did karaoke last night and kinda enjoyed it. It’s the mutual back-slapping adulation I think rather than the singing itself, which I’m sure I’m awful at (though was mildly enjoyable). I’ve got no stage presence whatsoever. (Eugh. I just shut my eyes and the inside of my eyelids are like kaleidoscopes, all shifting tessellating patterns moving in time, with zooming rough rings of light. Makes me feel quite queasy, but absolutely hypnotic.) I sang The Penis Song

The place was weird though; an unsigned basement with a bar and a maze-like series of closed chambers, waited on by black-clad girls. The rooms themselves are intimate and small; there were twelve of us in one of the larger rooms, and we were squeezed into the padded seats. Terrifying to see Will Porter doing a version of Linkin Park’s big sweary song and was surprised to hear Ben Talbot singing with a fine voice (but then he comes from Wales, that land of close harmony singing and Tom Jones).

Also, chiarina knitted me a bunny! When I get my review PC back into the office, I’ll put some pictures up here. Meanwhile I’ll have to revert to the classic Cheston.

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Different shades' of Judaism:

"What I'm most proud of is that I've managed to combine being a rabbi with being a father. I've seen all my three sons survive being a rabbi's son."

Weird, I think this is my old school friend (I think friend; he was a very lonely guy) Yossi's dad.

Graaaagh!

Go, see, my little friends. (Cackles evilly.)

THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE:

"THE SPIDERS TOLD THE DEEP-SEA CREEPS ABOUT THE SPAGHETTI DINNERS!! THE CREEPS ARE ON THE SPAGHETTIS!!!
THE CREEPS ALSO FOUND ULTRA-BEAN'S BREAKFAST!!!!
LISTEN TO ME, DEEP-SEA CREEPS!! GET OFF THE PLATES!!!!
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!!!!!"

Dream of cars - blur. cars, roads = symbol of independence. I want to walk, that sygnifies freedom to me, but trapped by encircling tarmac. Dream of day when world so wired never need to worry about escape more about what's in the place we're escaping to. Return to adventure, end of mollycoddling.

So. My flatmate got me some keys cut, so I didn't have to hide in the bushes until he got home anymore. Whichh was nice. Until I got steaming drunk friday night and got home to find they weren't our keys. After trying a few local locks in the spirit of Lord Lytton, I ended up sleeping on the landing, where one of new neighbours found me at 3a.m. and offered me a bed (inflatable).

The messages on my flatmate's ansaphone must have been enjoyable though ranging from the initial "the keys don't work" to the drunken "I'm sleeping rough, do give me a call." to the desperate "I've been picked up for vagrancy, I'm getting hung in the morning." and the final "ten minutes left until they stretch my neck, and you're my only phone call. Tell mother my last breakfast was kosher."

Then, then, I got up at eight, wandered off to Bath, gave away sofas and bookshelves (got locked out again, at which point a monkey-man with a t-shirt on saying "world's best dad" appeared and scrambled over the precipitious gap to the open window, letting us), packed my dad's car so full we had to tie a chair and a welsh dresser to the roof (she wasn't happy), and at about 9 got back to my new address in West Ealing. At which point we unpacked and went out for a prohibitively expensive Nepalese meal (they must have brought it down the mountain especially) and then I went to sleep in a junk-filled room.

(Couple of weeks old, but my mobile blogging technology's proving difficult to get up and running...) Just finished Jon Ronson's book 'THEM'. It's about conspiracy nuts, their crazy theories about how there's a group of the most powerful people in the world who meet up regularly. The most malicious, nasty of the lot was certainly The Rev.d (spits) Iain Paisley, a raving power-hungry bigot but overall it had about as much impact on my life as Foucault's Pendulum.

Y'see, I'm sure that there are millionaire financiers running the world, and I'm sure they socialise. At these gatherings they reaffirm their shared beliefs like the Lords' shared belief in the supremacy of aristocracy back in the C19. They have the power to enforce their world view, if they remember and can be arsed. So what? Their world view is confused, incoherent and unplanned, which is fine; they're just big kids dressing up in the woods and worshipping a stone owl. More interesting is their accessibility, that Ronson got that close to them and they were complacent and unbothered; the idle rich are hard to enthuse, so there will be no great plan to save the world, neither positive from my viewpoint (e.g. an liberal green utopia) or negative (facist world state). Seeing the latter as worse than the former, I'm glad they're complacent.

God, I love trains. Not in the trainspotting sense, which is the same drive that impels numismatists to pinion stamps, entomologists to net our decllining butterflies or card sharps to buy one more pack of pokemon. No, my love's aesthetic and entirely prideful. I love these great bolts that shoot from one great interlaced quiver to another, in the way a termite might love the great progresion his race had made, were he ever to consider his hive. It's an entirely subjective love to do with organised complexity on multiple scales, from the pneumatic sibilance of the opening doors to the steel backbone s of Brunel's indestructible hangars.