Random Scribblings in the Margin

Dammit, 27 Club, keep your grasping claws off my favourite musicians!

Amy Winehouse has just died. Circumstances are so far unclear but not, I suspect, unpredictable.

Fuck it, I liked her. As a singer, not as an interesting car crash. 'In My Bed', 'You Send Me Flying', 'Amy, Amy, Amy', 'Rehab', 'You Know I'm No Good' - some of my favourite songs. Her cover of 'Valerie' was way better than the Zutons' original. I love me some raunchy blues-rock, and she had a great voice and great presence. And I never got to see her live.

What kind of fuckery is this?

Cracked: 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor.

4th dan (ie, a higher grade than my instructor). Got her black belt in 1993, when I was nine or ten and still in primary school.

I'm very, very glad I didn't have this information before I fought her. I was nervous enough. I saw one of the other competitors backing up so fast she fell off the edge of the mat, and was determined that whatever happened, I wasn't going to do that. And I didn't. This fool rushed in.

And obviously she wiped the floor with me. I have never been so drastically outclassed in my life. I think every single point she got was by punching me in the face. But suddenly, I'm not feeling so bad about that.

Yes, indeed, when you are using faint orange font on a white background, you have certainly made every effort to make the Bikeability website accessible and easy to use for everyone, no matter what browser you choose to use, and whether or not you have any disabilities.

My bleeding eyeballs would like to offer you a cookie. A cookie flavoured with purest STUPID.

Bet you never thought you'd see that sentence.

It was the system the Conservative Party used to choose David Cameron as leader. Cameron's Conservatives are now campaigning against it. I see two possibilities:

1. They honestly think it's not up to scratch. In which case, Cameron should stand down and they should re-elect their leader using First Past The Post.

2. They think it's awesome, but in a wonderful combination of hoarding and hypocrisy, don't want you to have it. It's their precious. You're not good enough for it.

But while it is, in fact, illegal, DON'T GROW IT ON MY ALLOTMENT, YOU MONUMENTAL ARSEHOLES!!!!!

So the wife was weeding up the far end of my allotment today, while I was digging out bindweed roots and planting spuds. And she says "Er, there's a plant with seven leaves down here." Well, there were two. With marks of watering, and potting compost still in their roots.

Some fucker planted cannabis on the overgrown end of my allotment. I pulled it up in a rage, and I was going to dispose of it somehow (hadn't planned that far ahead), and the Voice Of Reason (also known as the wife) pointed out we should probably contact the police. So we did.

I'm not in favour of the war on drugs. I think drugs should be legalised. I don't give a damn if someone smokes weed (although if you drive stoned, you're an irresponsible potentially-murdering fucker and you really should be arrested, just like if you drive drunk). I disagree with arrests for possession. I also think growing your own is better than giving money to organised crime.

But here's the thing: it is still illegal. When you possess or grow weed, you are taking a calculated risk. And you don't get to make other people take calculated risks without their knowledge or consent. You don't get to plant - no pun intended - drugs on me. Take responsibility for your own fucking habit, and grow it on your own fucking property.

Also, I know you can't tell because it looks like shit, but I work hard on that allotment. Clearing a couple of cubic feet of stones and invasive weeds takes me about an hour of sweating and hayfever and sunburn and backache. You don't get to treat it like an abandoned piece of waste ground that's yours for the taking. Fuck off.

And then things took a turn for the weirder still, when the police did show up and tried to convince us it was just mint! What species of mint has long, thin, serrated leaflets arranged in three pairs leading up to a single long one? What species of mint smells like the top deck of a bus that goes through Handsworth? And who the hell goes to that much trouble to cultivate mint where they think it won't be found?

The police were also singularly unhelpful when we raised the issue of my stuff being trashed in revenge for destroying the plants. "Did they see you pulling them up?" Well, no, but I think they'll notice that they're not there any more! And when they do, I'd quite like my garden to stay in one piece.

Elisabeth Sladen, aka Doctor Who's Sarah Jane Smith, has died from cancer.

BBC tribute here.

When I was a kid, female characters who were helpless and got rescued made me so angry. Well, they still do. Major shouting-at-the-TV. I wanted women who kicked ass and got stuff done. And now there's one fewer, and the world is a bit less awesome.

Via skibbley: Equalities Act is being debated on the Red Tape Challenge website. Because ensuring equality for the vulnerable and stigmatised is OMG RED TAPE BUREAUCRACY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD.

Particularly since the Equalities Act, er, pulled together all the different pre-existing legislation. It was not, in fact, a brand new Act bringing in a bunch of new stuff. Fucking morons probably should not be talking about scrapping something if they don't know what it is.

That means that the senseis think my performance of enpi kata is adequate to grade on. (You have to get three tips on your belt, for combinations, kata and semi-freestyle sparring, before you can grade.) I wasn't even going for any tips. I just did the course because it was compulsory for brown and black belts. At the start of the course, I didn't know all of enpi and I couldn't do the jump.

This course really brought home how much fitter and stronger I need to be, as a brown belt. Afterwards I was just exhausted. I sat on the floor, drank Lucozade and ate cake for twenty minutes until I had the energy to get up and get changed. (Much like after the Halesowen Aquathlon, where I spent twenty minutes sitting on the changing room floor, eating cake, rubbing moisturiser into my chapped belly, and staring into space.) In a year or less, I'm going to have to do that, plus a four-to-six hour grading afterwards. Oh god.

OKAY! Now I'm off to the gym.

bethanthepurple is 27 today! Woohoo!