http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2554828,00.html
£350,000 would buy you a speedboat capable of going 70 miles per hour and carrying up to six tons of drugs which was virtually undetectable.  Just what every fisherman needs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=RKVX2IHBRMVYNQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/01/19/wspain19.xml

A whole Spanish village is suspected in the murder of its unpopular mayor.  Fago is the second smallest village in its region and its mayor of 12 years was in fear of his life and contemplating standing down when he was shot multiple times on his way back from a meeting in another town.  This sounds like the plot to the sort of film Gerard Depardieu would appear in.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml;jsessionid=RKVX2IHBRMVYNQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/portal/2007/01/19/ftshop119.xml

How Green is your supermarket?  Following Tescos and Marks & Spencers’ announcements, the Telegraph tests the big four to see how they’re doing at present.

http://www.geni.com/tree/start
Flash based family tree thingy.  Mum’s doing the family tree at the moment, but I think she’s a long way past this level of complexity.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/19/ndress19.xml
Dissolving dresses as a metaphor for throwaway culture.

I was just pondering the whole “Piracy funds terrorism/drug dealing” line. I bet, backed up by a little research, it would be easy to find a list of entertainment executives who donated to NORAID (I started doing this, but the first site offering a list of donors was stormfront, a self confessed white supremacist site. My days of surfing hate sites from work are long gone.) And it’s well documented how many musicians do drugs.

So how about a Tshirt with a picture of Pete Doherty on the front and a slogan along the lines of “Record sales fund this man’s drug habit. For his sake- download.”

(White Lines, Grandmaster Flash)

I never thought I’d be reading, or recommending, a self help book.

A couple of months ago, whilst reading around the subject, I realised that I’ve been having bouts of depression since my teens. Failure to recognise this sooner had left me without developed coping mechanisms and no doubt held me back on occasion. It was only because I was in the worst spell I could remember that I ended up doing anything about it.

My GP recommended Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, but admitted that it would be at least six months before I could expect to see someone on a one to one basis. He gave me a couple of web addresses to check out in the mean time.

Most informative of the sites was Mood Gym. It was whilst reading this site that I began to recognise my history of depression. The site is meant to introduce Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and seems biased toward university students (it is running on an edu.au domain). There are also a few exercises to help you to help yourself.

Mood Gym isn’t perfect. The exercises didn’t always save properly and its insistence on referring to “Warpy thoughts” grated. However it did Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and drove me to look for a more in depth resource.

I decided to move on to bibliotherapy. The third result on Amazon for “Cognitive Therapy”, after Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies and Mind Over Mood: Cognitive Treatment Therapy Manual for Clients was Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Despite having fewer stars, the reader reviews were, for me, more convincing. I’ve been working my way through it for the last few weeks.

The theory behind Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is quite obvious. Before chemical imbalances or external influences, it is what you think that affects how you feel. Negative thoughts make youfeel bad, bad mood leads to more negative thoughts, and so it continues.. The trick is to recognise what the author calls Automatic Thinking (“warpy thoughts” if you’re an Australian undergraduate) and counter it. There are other factors, for example depression makes you feel that you can’t do anything, so you don’t, thus reinforcing your feelings of uselessness. Unsurprisingly, the answer to this is to do something, because you’ll be surprised how good it feels to get even the simplest job done.

This all sounds like the sort of advice friends and family try to give you- “Pull your socks up”, “Snap out of it” etc. The problem is that, no matter how well meaning, the drive can’t come from outside because you’ll just react against it.

There’s more. Advice on dealing with criticism and guilt and controlling your anger and other things that can bring you down. There’s also a large reference section on all the drugs you might be prescribed, how they act and what side effects may occur so you’ll be better informed if your doctor prescribes them.

Is it working for me? I think so. I’m still not the happiest person you’ll meet, but I am learning to cope and to cut off the negative thoughts before they put me in a funk. I’m also forcing myself to do stuff, no matter what. It may not be focussed exactly where it should be, but it all helps. Soon enough I hope to be back to full working order, growing Spinneyhead’s tail and looking to the future.

Technorati tag: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Apparently Blackberries are as addictive as drugs. I’ve never even seen one of these mythical mobile email devices, so I guess I don’t live in the ghetto.

Technorati tag: Blackberry, Addiction

If you’ve missed the TV adverts recently, you may be unware that Bez has picked his favorite songs from the Madchester era and released them as a double album. The music itself is a great selection and the only thing stopping me from buying it is that I have most of the tracks already on other albums or compilations.

What’s currently amusing me though is the sheer number of tracks on the album which in one form or another are about drugs or are heavily associated with the drugs scene!