michael lambe

So it’s been over a week since my last entry. I am of course back at work which means my life is no longer my own, again. This curious pink building is the people factory I’m at now. I have to write two lesson plans and a test by tomorrow and naturally I haven’t a clue what to do. So in a brave attempt at putting it off till the last minute, (which is when I get all my best ideas anyway) I’m writing this instead.

Anyway, here are some interesting links:

First an article from the Observer about Ray Winstone, famous for his hard-case roles in “Scum”, “Nil by Mouth” and erm… the beaver in the Narnia movie.

“Maybe, I wonder, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd? The News of the World once ran a photo of Winstone, aged 24, surrounded by a gang of jailbirds, who all seemed to be his best mates. One of them, Joey Pyle (six years for cocaine dealing, acquitted of murder), was quoted as saying, ‘I like to think Ray got a lot out of being out and about with us. He never seemed uncomfortable with what some of us had been up to.’ Did he really mix with all those gangsters? Winstone objects, ‘I don’t like the word gangsters.’ Well, criminals, then? ‘Yes. I went to school with criminals or people who turned out to be criminals. People you’ve liked don’t always do the things in life that you agree with. It’s a funny old world out there, you know? We didn’t live in Surrey. We had a community of people where it was fucking hard. I was born in 1957, 12 years after the Second World War, but there were still bombed houses round where I lived, and it wasn’t till the 1960s that they moved us all out and built those shitholes they call flats. It was just after rationing, the black market and all that. People want what they can’t have, and the only way to get it is on the black market, which creates villains.’”

More of that here: LINK.

And it seems that George Bush has a sense of humour…LINK

Oh, but then again, maybe he don’t…
LINK
Ouch!

And this looked kind of hopeful…(http://www.westpointgradsagainstthewar.org/)
…but there seems to be only three of them.

So I had this idea for all you budding writers. As those who know me are well aware I have a part-time job at a mental clinic on Saturday mornings. What I usually do each week is prepare some flash-cards to teach vocabulary items, then use them in card games and finally get the patients to build stories together using those same cards. So I was thinking, in the spirit of Italo Calvino’s “Castle of Crossed Destinies” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156154552/sr=8-1/qid=1147668522/ref=sr_1_1/002-1161996-3530412?%5Fencoding=UTF8), we could do something similar and I could put the best stories up here… Well, anyone who is interested, let me know and I’ll either mail the first set of pictures to you. Or maybe post them up here….

I suppose I’d better work now. Sheesh.