Hey! Yep it’s been a while since I’ve added to the blog, I apologise for that, let’s say I’ve been too busy making tees to write about them! Anyway for my next crazy installment - check out the Junk Food T-Shirt.

It was inspired by a recent TV program that dealt with how much food we throw away these days. It made me think, better than eating the junk, but that’s not the point. The point is food must be really awful these days if we will all buy it but not even eat the stuff. Then again consider all the crap many of us choose to eat everyday, I include myself in that category, I’m lucky, I don’t really have any weight problems, maybe a few pounds on and off somtimes at Christmas, but mainly I take after my dad, I am a skinny sod at the best of times. But Christ, doesn’t junk food screw you up? It must be my age, I just can’t process that stuff after a while. There are certain burgers that give me wind and stomach cramps and their buns taste of sugar, their shakes give me a headache, and their fries are so salty I get heart pangs from the sodium build-up.

I was a veggie once, I was even an activist for an animal protection group, but I was only 12 years old, very impressionable, and recently moved to a new school after Mum and Dad’s divorce. The point is I wanted friends, and if they were veggies, then I was, if they were activists, then I was. I spent two or three years living of Beanfeast and Soya, it was so ironic, I’d just spent over a decade detesting vegetables and now here I was trying to be a vegetarian.

At first I went the whole hog, veganism is a very tough regime, no dairy, nothing. I became rather ill and slipped back to vegetarian so I could eat a few cheese sandwiches now and again, it got worse. After a year or two I was one of those awful veggies who ate Tuna. Eventually I became as close to a carnivore as you can get. I’d been so starved of just about every edible treat known to man.

Even now I can’t resist a bit of junk. Sweets mainly. Chocolate. Perhaps I have my brain all wired up wrong, are males suspposed to get a buzz of chocolate? Anyway, I was always getting the munchies in my late teens and Student years, I wasn’t so bang on all the fast food junk as much as crisps (US - chips) and sweets. I know I’m paying for it now. A rather wise friend once pointed out that there is a balance. If you eat healthy food and you hate it you really aren’t receiving all the benefits. Your body won’t process it as efficiently, and you will rather skip meals than face another bowl of lentils and a detox tea.

It’s true, fruit, veg, if it’s healthy I have trouble with it. I’ve learned over the years to trick myself into enjoying a rather more stable diet these days, I hardly touch caffeine in the day. I’ll eat yoghurt crunchies instead of sweets, when I actually find them in the shops. I probably have less than ten takeaway meals a year now which is progress I suppose.

What still gets my goat is the occassional vegan or even worse (I knew a girl who lives on fruit and nuts!), badgering me about the healthy advantages of a meat-free diet. To be honest, they look ill, kinda defeats the whole point I’d say.

Do what you like within moderation seems to be the best advice. Anyway, who the hell wants to live forever these days. People die from jogging, people get run over, people who never smoke or drink, or eat meat or dairy, who exercise everyday die from cancer. I don’t know, I’d say the healthiest thing to do is stay as happy as you can, and make sure you keep up a diet of healthy cynicism too.

This accidentally came out as a rather Japanese Manga style tee. It’s inspired by all the sleeping businessmen I saw at Budapest Airport recently. I started to imagine what a wannabe tycoon would dream of and made a sketch. I only found it again recently and thought it’d be a great t-shirt design.

To be honest I so hope I’m wrong about businessmen’s dreams, sexy ladies, fun in the sun, the good old days, anything but master plans for world economic domination. As a kid there were lads who pulled the legs of insects, tied cans to cats’ tails, shoot birds with air rifles. I found it horrifying, I didn’t mind a fight, I used to watch ‘Monkey’ - an old 1970’s dubbed Japanese Kung-fu proggy for kids. I bought a bamboo stick like the kid next door and we used to fight on top of a garage. But he was my equal, it was a challenge.

The difference with most people and businessmen who want to dominate the world is that they have a different attitude to competition. Destroy the weakest, the poorest, those with the least influence in the world, and then work your way up.

I’m in no position to complain. The Net, this blog, the duff laptop I’m using to write it, everything that enables me to be here is due to a competitive market. I just think it’s a little sad that for someone to get everything, everyone else must lose out. Don’t worry I’m not going all Commie on ya, I know there isn’t a political solution. Perhaps as resources become scarce (to the extreme), self-sufficiency will present itself as a medium for empowerment of the individual. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a pipe dream.

Pipe Dream

A massive Escape Button surrounded by crowds of tourists. It would be nice if we all could really get away. Another planet, another dimension, somewhere where you’ll meet few if any humans.

My partner would always point out beauty spots of the countryside whenever we travelled on a motorway. Not so much now though. I heaped a debate on her, and she wasn’t really asking for one, but I did anyway. It went something like this…

What actually enabled us to see these beautiful places, from afar, from a car. The motorway (or freeway if you want me to go all American on you - besides that’s probably a misnomer by now anyway… I mean with the amount of toll roads these days I doubt few of them are actually free anymore.).

If you can see a beautiful place from somewhere as ugly as hell, you are spoiling the view. It’s kinda difficult to quantify what spoils a view. I have no problem with Wind Turbines for instance, I know a lot of nimbys do (nimby = not in my backyard). A blott on the landscape for me has more to do with function than form. It’s not how it looks so much as what it does, or rather how efficiently. All the Post Modernists back me up on this, form and function is a symbiosis of two essential disciplines. Anything that strips one from the other is a failure as far as design is concerned.

A wind turbine is essentially a beautifully ugly thing. It’s beauty comes from the knowledge that it does little if any damage to the environment in as efficient way as possible. From the belief that it is the way of the future, anon-polluting one at that. There are areas of the UK that won’t let you put up a satellite dish because it spoils the look of a listed village, a historical town, a heritage centre. I love history, but if it meant isolating myself from the present then I’d rather give it the heave-ho. Imagine what all those nimby council planners think about solar panels and wind turbines. Here’s a quickie, how about a wind turbine on every church steeple (how many are left now?) and disguise the top with a weather vane. It would be ugly, it would be inefficient, but if it gets past the beady eye of a planning officer with a heavy historical bias then it would be worth it.

Motorways are ugly. Cars can be beautiful in their own way, from a design perspective I mean. But get a thousand in a tailback with a cloud of smog overhead and you’re not painting a Turner are you? Until cars can hover we are stuffed. Let’s face it, we won’t have any countryside to tear through within fifty years. Even if we do learn to hover, we’ll still have difficulty seeing anything through that smog. How many years does it take to clean the sky anyway?

Getting back to the point, you can’t see beauty without ruining it, if man get’s his dirty mitts on anything beautiful, whatever his intentions, he does usually end up ruining it. I know we’ve got a few National Trust parks, they still get the smog but at least they’re not twelve lane bypasses for nearby cities. But what about the rest. It takes millions of years to form a landscape, man has always played with it, digging a tunnel here, building a bridge there. But now he can flatten it, raise it, put it out to sea, you name it. By the way - how long will those ornamental islands in Dubai last now that we know the world’s sea levels are rising?

Yes, yes, this has entry has turned in to one of those awful eco-rants you read just about everywhere. I’ll stop badgering you, I’m no better. Sure I recycle, I don’t even drive, but this old house we live in could never be described as ‘ecologically efficient’. I could do a lot more to help, but as the years have passed I’ve come to accept that what I remember is so drastically different from what the next can recall that soon a tree will be a surprise for the kids growing up these days.

I was on a plane recently, first time in years, I didn’t plant a tree, I didn’t carbon offset. But when I saw all those businessmen who use planes the way I used to use buses (get a bike), it kinda knocked me back for six. There is no great escape, no getaway. Next time you think you’ve managed to get away from the world, look up, that guy in the plane staring back, he’s thinking of putting a Starbucks franchise just where you’re standing.

The Great Escape