Grave of the Fur flies

 Apologies for the bad pun in the title, though I guess it is kind of apt. Have been wading through a ton of spam in my inbox (the usual suspects here, and for some reason Norton which I've not used for over a decade) and reading books.

Sky Sabotage, which you'll probably get, soon, Private Eye's SARS 2 electric boogaloo casebook, about what should have happened when the coof arrived. And Meeting in Japan, Fosco Maraini, which the heading pertains to.

August time, so I'm guessing O-bon festival, it talks about Buddhist remembrance festivals for the fish taken and something about cats and Hachiko the Dog, bravely waiting for its master down at Shibuya.  Can remember bits from The World Ends With You where its implied he only stayed there because people gave him tidbits to eat.

Anyway, before I digress further, the cat bits and fishlore I've not heard before and as it was written in the late 50's (Italian Original) or early 60's (English Translation) maybe its the last gasp of old Japan, before the new Showa era wiped it out.

In August Buddhist monks and laymen go down the Sumida river in boats, both to say prayers for the drowned and to apologize to the fish of the river for having taken their lives with rod and line, spear, and net. At the Oizumi cemetery, and in many other places, impressive services are held for the souls of dead cats and dogs and other animals, sometimes including insects. On such occasions many people visit the graves of cats who became famous for saving their master's lives, often in highly dramatic circumstances; the celebrated Gokoku-ji and Eko-in cats, for instance. There is a bridge in Tokyo, the Nekomatabashi, dedicated to a cat which, with a somewhat under-developed sense of private property, tried to relieve the poverty of its sick mistress by stealing small gold objects from a neighbouring moneylender. 

The paragraph goes on to describe loyal doggo, Hachiko, waiting for his master's return.

Looking at English sources for this I've found very little about this gift giving cat, only that the bridge was in Koisihkawa ward in Tokyo (home of the Tokyo dome) and that the area is mostly unscathed from quakes, WW2 firebombing, and other disasters. It's also home to some impressive Tokugawa Shogunate graves too.

A monster cat lived there (Nekomata) and people were scared to cross it. There is also an Ukiyo-e print of a demon Weedle, from that area, too. I know it best from Megaten. 

There are plenty of tales of cats dragging stuff back to their owners, so maybe this is some postwar version from Japan. 

Edit. Found out what Eko-in is about, there's a shrine to cats and dogs there. Gokoku-ji is probably Gotokuji, as linked above (another cat shrine).

Funeral for a Neighbour.

Here is an odd one. My neighbour passed away in January and I took some time off work to attend his funeral. He outlived his spouse and his cat who he gifted to us back at the start of last year, when he moved into sheltered housing (which I used to clean, when it was part of my job back in the day).

He used to fight like a bastard with her and for those social justice types it was not all one way traffic, she gave as good as she got.  His nickname for her was crab I found out which is really funny.  He also used to give us stuff he'd either grown in his garden or got at the pub, which was nice of him.

As we were passing out I noticed a headstone to my old tutor on the side of the road. Its just a side thing and I didn't get many details just the name was enough. She was tough on me and taught me  how to touch type as part of a secretarial NVQ course.  I learned two things there most of the women there were bitches and how to touch type. 

Maybe a trip is in order just to see if I can find it again and get more details on when she passed on and pay respects.

Farewell

So I finally said good bye to my aunty on Monday and with some excellent if chilly weather we got down there a good 2 hours before hand.  The church itself was newly reopened after it being renovated.  A good thing about being early is that you can look around and take in the architecture before the service began. 

Wiki has a nice article on it, and its a heck of a nice church to visit even if your a secularist like myself.  The service itself was nice and what she would have wanted.  The scary thing is I felt nothing at all, I don't know if this is a autism thing but, I do miss her, its just that  I can't express it like that.  Worse through the hymns and such it kept bringing it back home to me that there really is no god, and if he is real, won't be found in some building but outside in the wild places, by the sea and over the marshes.

After the service was over  and we watched the coffin be transported away, we went to the pub for a buffet lunch. This was really nice and we grabbed a doggybag to take home.

I'll leave you with a few of the photos I took and a link to the songs used.

Intro
Ashokan Farewell Jay Ungar

J. S. Bach Excerpt  from Advent chorale

Edward Elgar Nimrod from the Enigma Variations  Originally Spiegel Im Spiegel by Arvo Part

Light rays.

Main Stained Glass Window

Conehead

R.I.P Spider

We have some sad news here. My cat passed away on Thursday. He was 17 or so, though getting an accurate age is problematic due to him being adopted from neighbours one dead and one now in sheltered housing.  He was a contemporary of my old cat Ginger, now passed and used to clean up his food that he left.  They never really fought or fell out though, even if they were neighbours and that.

I don't know how he died but could sense his decline and such, as being an out cat he spent most of his time indoors over the past week and slept most of the time by the front doors (both main and basement, where sadly he finally passed on).

Spider in better days.

The weird thing is that shortly after his passing, there was a rainbow outside and new agers always go on about pets crossing the Rainbow Bridge, whenever they die.

If you squint a bit, it looks like the central TV logo.

I don't believe in all that shit mind, so in my eyes its more like Bifrost and he's being welcomed into Valhalla, with the chosen and such.  Besides where there is food there is always cats and such, it makes sense. 

EDIT well look what has turned up on my Youtube timeline, Viking Cats. 

Coda for Sara

Sad to say this but we lost my cousin Sara a few weeks back, due to complications with diabetes (essentially a hypo).  She was a real sweet girl and slightly older than me (37), though had myriad problems in her life.  She left behind four kids and a partner.  Her funeral was friday (the day after we put up PS Pops for yo chops) down at Hanworth in West London.

I wore a suit and tie, for the first time in ages, and it was quite a nice send off.  Her kids arranged a song each, (ranging from Smiley Virus, to Michael Baal covering Celine Dion) there was a poem followed by a review of her life.  I abstained from the prayers and general god bits as I'm an atheist but sang along to Adeles Someone like you as it was the least I could do.

To be honest, I hadn't seen her for about 10 years, and sad to say my memories of her had faded to a few selected instances.   There were a few more Huckleberry friends* from the drop in she attended along with some old dude on an electric wheelchair.  My favourite memories was playing Gears of war and Assassins creed with her sons.  There was some nice food too, including some excellent cake.  All in all it was a pretty sad time for us.

*Huckleberry friend is of course from Moon River and is our way of describing anyone who is a bit 'special' or  subnormal, kinda like Timmy for South Park followers.

Twin Towers day round up.

Did you know its ten years to the day that 11/9 happened.   Ten years since extremist cunts crashed a series of motherfucking 747s into the World Trade Centre (oh and the Pentagon).  Ten years since we waged war in Afghanistan, and Iraq and we even shot Osama Top Banana for you in the name of good old Uncle Sam.   You do, and that there's been extensive coverage of it all over the TV and everything, complete with special programming with sombre music and film clips of the planes crashing and everything.  Wow.  Looks like you're way ahead of me then.
Apart from my irreverance of it all, ( lets face it there was jokes rolling in a good day or two after the WTC went down.  My favourite  lays the blame squarely at the Janitorial staff..  Well they did leave the landing lights on.) there is nothing I can add that hasn't been said a good hundred times before.

RIP Buddy you'll be missed.

Ginger bows out at 19
We celebrated our own worst day last Sunday, soon after the blog went out, (about Nazi hedgehogs we believe) when my Dad came in crying.  We lost Old Man Ginger, our cat of 19 years.  He wasn't well for the past month or two, hanging out by the cooker and not moving far.  Certainly not like him at all, he would always be in with us either tucked around on my lap or outside in the garden on the picnic table.  We got him from a neighbour about 2 years ago, they called him Tails (they owned a cat called Sonic but unfortunately he got run over when Ginger was about 5ish).  He came along to us when we had our old cat and ate her food and decided  to make our house his official second home, moving in when we lost her back in 1998.  Our neighbours got a second cat called Olly and when they decided to move to the country they said he could stay with us as he was too old to go with them and that he was more ours than theres.

The big guy always sat in with us when making film clips or music and even if he didn't like what we made he'd be there as a constant reminder, sometimes doing the typical cat thing of sitting in front of the screen and being a nuisance.   He's buried beneath the conifer tree at the bottom of the garden, with a stone tortoise marking his grave.

We finally have a PSP. 

We bought a second hand PSP this weekend for £40 and its a rather neat piece of kit.  It totally sums up Sony over the past couple of years, its flashy and shiny,  and feels like a smartphone.  Its also been hacked to buggery with both the signing keys for it and the PS3 now fully available to hackers and homebrew enthusiasts alike.  When it came out we weren't that fussed by it, in fact we were rather taken by the DS Lite with its double screens and GBA slot.  In fact for serious gaming that would be our first choice.  But over the past few weeks we've been getting into PSP emulation for some unknown reason.  Whether its the platform of choice for RPGs, (plenty of Nippon Ichi releases for the hardcore in you) or Monster Hunter (hey it revitalised the PSP in Japan) it seems that in its undeath the PSP is getting interesting.   Hopefully we'll add some custom firmware and begin Emulating some stuff.  But for now a run down on the PSP itself.

PSP overall.

Slick looking piece of kit, with a shed load of buttons, including a big power switch and back tray for your UMD discs.  D Pad isn't entirely horrible though the Analogue stick is.  Looking like some mutant speaker offshoot, the analogue stick is totally woeful, in the one game I used it, I wished there was a dpad only option its that bad.  In more strangeness you have to press the home button to return to the bios screen whenever you play a game as switching the console off merely turns the game off where you left it instead of logging out.  Its a really weird and unintuitive way of doing things, and it gets no better from then on.

Bios. 
The firmware is actually kinda nice with a logically laid out screen that lets you scroll through all your choices.  In fact this could be the best thing about the PSP, that along with the homebrew community and its emulators.  Everything is clearly laid out and seems to run off the x button on the console itself, and its simple to get everything running from that point.  You have date and time, video, music and a built in Web browser for surfing the internet (need wireless internet and uses the useless Analogue stick instead of a mouse).To run games you need to select UMD and click on the game itself, and you can even update firmware, though it wouldn't let us downgrade to 1.50 (were running 6.20 nerd fans).

Games.

We have two games at present, first is one that came bundled with it from the bootsale stall, its Need for Speed Carbon, the other I bought for £5 and its Lumines.

Need for speed Carbon:
A thug lite car simulator that I played all of five minutes of, no thanks to it being too dark, but mainly using the horrible analogue stick and the unremitting awfulness of it all.   You end up in a car smash and after 6 months in hospital you need to get back in the racing saddle by going on illegal drift races. 
Nice bits, It uses Tubeway Army's Are Friends Electric on the title screen and there is a screen that says that the cars and people are not fully official in case you have a problem with that, (and if you do I suggest that you GTFO all games should use unlicensed likeness even the official ones).
Nasty bits everything else.
2/10

Lumines:
Box building puzzler from Q entertainment and horse poking merchants Ubisoft.  You drop bicoloured cubes onto the play area making cubes of one colour before an ever sweeping line erases them.  Its largely the same as the PS2 version, with decent music and well suited visual for the PSP screen.  In keeping with its bigger brother it takes far too long to get remotely challenging, about twenty minutes in before you are truly taxed, but its not half bad and well suited to the PSP screen.
7/10

Pachislot Funeral go go go!

Well its as I've predicted, though haven't said as much, after the funeral comes the customary dumping of peoples belongings out by the bins. An existential dumping in the bin of a persons life. Its weird poking through someones life, through whats parcelled up in a black bag. Largely Tena ladies and crockery, though we have some good stuff.

First up is a programme guide to the 1996 Benson and Hedges Snooker grand prix, (2010 event won by Mark Selby, fact fans), back in the day when you could get away with fag sponsorship, who remembers when it was the Embassy world championship, I think its now either poker or insurance that sponsors it now. Snooker players looking younger, a non grey Nigel Bond, Mark Williams in the first flush of youth and the Rocket Ronnie O'Sullivan barely out of short trousers.

There were a lot of tapes and CDs largely old folks faves, Cliff Richards and Barry Manilow. We got a stapler that didn't work and a rubber shaped like a book. Nice.

In other news a trip to Orpington we found that there's a Yatterman Pachislot stuck in the window of a carousel arcade. There's another one but largely its Yatterman that sticks in the mind here. Not that the English particularly know what a Pachislot is, (A fruit machine that you can stop each reel as it spins rather than the western one button hit) but that whenever one is spotted and they're not hard to spot, that they're stuck in the front windows of an arcade.

Lowestoft had Aruzes Surftrip in the window and that's the only other one I can think of so far.
The general jist is this, Pachislot (possibly because they are small) are never set up for play. Regular arcades have maybe one or two types of slot, a quiz machine if lucky (their only sop to proper arcade gaming) and rows upon rows of fruities, maybe a penny falls if you're lucky / at the seaside. A shame really as they really look fun.

Hey ho, it's the Griffin hill show.

Finally I've done something I can be proud about, you may remember from my last post that I railed against Anti and indeed pro Nazism in general and mentioned a bit that we were hacking Nick Griffin's Question Time debut into irrelavence. Well all that is done, and it's probably the best Edit I've ever made. We'll put it up on youtube when we have the balls to and link it here of course.

But for the meantime a brief bit on Nazi Nick. We deleted all the video clips I had of the show as well as a few bits on BBC news and the politics show with the scotch bloke in (name escapes me at the moment). I did liken him to a Right wing version of Ralph Bates, star of old sitcom Dear John, but that is kinda untrue. Repeated exposure to his weird mannerisms and voice, I now believe he's channelling both Basil Brush and Chris Tarrant from Millionaire as well.

Looking over the footage is surreal, every question is aimed directly at him, nothing to Baroness Warsi, nothing to Bonnie Greer or Jack Straw (who always comes across in my eyes like a concentration camp doctor, its the glasses, I'm sure). Questions really should have been asked at the Beeb why give him airtime in the first place, when the outset would be hardly the model of fairness and impartiality that would normally be the case.

Seeing that every question was about race and racism they may have well called it Nick's Nazi chestbeating hour and invited the audience to publicly kick him in the balls for the entire duration, possibly that is TV gold.

In fact as an antidote to this I'll go on about something else entirely. Funerals and a strange one at that. Heads up dudes, how many funerals have you seen with a hearse, a Motorbike and Sidecar and a stretch limo. Conceiveably the first you'd expect but not all three, well they had all three at the one I saw. It was an ex tenant who passed away, I believe it was the nice old lady who always asked to do her patch of landing outside her flat. She really gave no indication that she was a biker or liked motorbikes, but there you go.

There were lots of flowers which was put onto the motorbike and sidecar and the guests all trooped off into a stretch limo. It looked superb and I hope everything went well for them.