shift
I feel a paradigm shift happening in my life right now. I'm becoming more intense about giving rather than taking. Just yesterday I was reading on the BBC news webpage about some woman in a camp in Sudan that lost her husband to the army and civil war there, had her eldest daughter taken when she was 13 by the army for 'cleaning duties', has 4 other children, none of who can attend school, she works cleaning rich peoples' houses and spends the money on bread for her kids. What a fucking shite existence.
The report told of a local school run by a charity there that can provide places for children to go to school but the cost for a year is 25 quid. Disgusted with myself for not doing anything to help for a long time, sitting here with my computer, and car, and nice clothes and food in the fridge and all the other trappings of materialism that I dislike, I called the fundraising officer in the UK and gave him the cost of her 4 kids schooling for a year - a measly 100 quid. He was overjoyed. We had a good chat and decided that we would try to set up some correspondence between me and the school and the kids there. I was really interested to see where my money was going and how exactly it was going to be spent and he promised me that it would go directly to the school I mentioned so that everyone there could benefit from it. I'm really excited about doing something like this. It's amazing what so little cash can do for people and how genuinely grateful they are that someone cares about them.
I'll try and post stuff here when it arrives, letters and photos etc.

Go out and give something to someone....it really does make you feel better and it doesn't take much effort. Even something as simple as getting the shopping for an elderly neighbour or doing some reading for the blind, anything, no matter how small, is better than nothing.
Peace.
ferg

fucking amazing
Now you have no excuse for being stupid, sitting there at the computer chatting about shite, doing nothing to improve your or anyone else's life - go educate yourself for free at the Mass. Institute of Technology (MIT) for FREE I said! Download all the coursework for nothing. What an amazing gift to the world. This is the place that produced people like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, plus many, many more very intelligent and newsworthy people. Take a look at least.....

when is enough?
Fuck this incessant drive to generate more and more money. Why is it that when people get a whiff of (or not even cash but the promise of) cash wafted in front of them they throw all previous moral arguments out the window and jump on the band wagon? Recently I've seen 2 of my friends change for the worse in my opinion. One of them has always been money driven, even through university although I do think the parents pushed them more in that direction. They moved to the States a while ago and we kept in touch although I have to say that she sounded just like my parents over the years, telling me my life can't continue like it has and that I would 'have to grow up' one day, while she worked 14 hour days in a huge office building/prison. Lately we had a little spat regarding moeny and politics and out came the line 'I actually think George Bush is doing a great job.' This saddened me no end; the most conservative Republican, anti-environment president the USA has ever seen and she suddenly supports him from her nice big house in the 'burbs. Must have been the tax breaks for his already rich supporters that helped change that one. Sick. As long as I'm ok then fuck what he's doing to the rest of us. Therein lies the power of propaganda-based American TV. Watch out. The other friend is using all the flimsy defence arguments to try and cover up their real intentions. Don't get me wrong I'm not against 'money' per se but this constant craving to keep generating more and more makes me sick. Especially when it changes people from what I liked before into something I don't know if I can continue to connect with. I'm not a material person anymore. I don't want 5 houses and 3 cars, a big TV and a fitted kitchen. Fuck all of that. Have 4 houses and give the money from the 5th one to help homeless people or something. People are losing sight of the shit that's around them and the other people in this society that need help just to make themselves richer and richer. Puke. Make money your servant, not your master. You want to contribute to the get-rich-quick side of the world, fucking people over just to get yourself more money in the bank - go right ahead. Don't expect me to like it though and don't expect me to be around it for long.

fanny magnet
I seem to be attracting the female variety at a quite alarming rate. I haven't been such a fanny magnet for ages, eons even.
Maybe the gentlemen reading this will be grinning to themselves and taking their own wee trip down memory lane when once their attraction to ladies surpassed the heady levels of Brad Pitt in his day (or so they thought - 'beating them off with a shitty stick I was').

The ladies on the other hand may well be wondering how the fuck a skinny, pierced, tattooed, drunken Scotsman abroad could do anything other than attract Police attention at a rate Ronnie Biggs would be proud of.

Unfortunately for me the magnetism I seem to be exuding attracts only the female variety of fucking mosquitos! It's only the females who bite and boy is there a mosquito party at ferg's house this year. I have mesh to cover the windows and doors but somehow the little fuckers are still getting in. Either that or they're slipping into my pockets outdoors and eloping in that way.
Summer has failed to materialise over here in any great shape or form this year so the rainy season has just continued. It's still humid but wet with it - a veritable joy for the biting bitches. I also blame it on the pedigree Scots blood but no one else seems to believe that part.

I see the weather in Scotland and the rest of Europe is continuing to stop trains (eh?!), start fires, force people to call in sick with that 'terrible diarrohea' or 'dodgy stomach/food poisoning' that always surfaces when the temperatures go over 30C and cause general mayhem with the ice-cream supplies.
Good luck, enjoy while you can and don't get too burnt.

ferg
x

shut the fuck up
Just did 2 lip sewings in 15 hours - one for a 'performance' show/club night in Tokyo and one for a 'special photographic adventure' on a rooftop in the Tokyo evening sun with a very interesting photographer - to follow later with photos - promise.
And yes I'm still swollen, still sore, still happy with myself and still extremely thankful to 2 very important people who made it all happen for me.
Happy ferg. :) More soon.

anomaly
The scars are now healing very well.

I had a 2 hour skin peeling session in Tokyo about 3 weeks ago (as you can see by the main picture). Imagine cutting into the skin about 2mm deep and peeling off the small piece of flesh and the skin on top.

Scalpel skill and painstaking, pain-numbing perseverence were the order of the day, couped in a small hotel room in the south west of the busy metropolis. I'll try and put up a gallery of the photos soon.

I also got 3 small lines cut into my face on my left cheekbone. They have turned into small grooves but I expect them to heal over later and become flat. Eventually they will turn white like a normal scar.


Japan is a great place but I've been here too long doing the same boring, mundane, unstimulating job for far too much time. Seeing the same drones day-in-day-out is killing me from the inside out. I've been here for 2 and a half years now, a wee bit longer than I had originally planned. Finally paid almost all of my debt from the last 4 years just in time to rack it up going to university (again) next year in Australia.

Ho-hum.

Gonnae no dae that
This morning's Herald made me laugh with a twinge of 'why I love Glasgow' and a wee grin to go with it.

"SCOTS slang insults, such as "wido" - a rogue - could be included in a new version of an English dictionary.
There are calls for the words "binraker" - a scavenger - and "bamstick" - a foolish person - to be included in the updated Collins English dictionary. The phrases, including "tube" - another term for a foolish person - could be added to the seventh edition of the dictionary, to be published in 2006.

The publishers are also to consider introducing "tracksuit ambassador", a politically correct term for a ned, and "Paisley briefcase", a jocular slang word for a plastic shopping bag, into the pages.

And here is the most important part for me:

The heavy industries might have gone, but there is a distinctive Glasgow culture. People seem to have more fun in life and that comes across in a sense of playfulness with language.
They have a very black sense of humour that expresses itself in language and allows them to laugh at things much more."

Ahhhh yes, the stuff good memeories are made of. :)

ranting joy
Just in case you needed a wee reminder to get out and do stuff instead of sitting there talking bullshit about it for the rest of your life, you never know when you might just drop down stone dead like this poor footballer in France.

Remember the headline:
Footballer dies during game

You have been warned.