Master Chief, the cure for rainy day blues?

It's raining today, not just your standard wet rain, no this is a very windy, wintry rain. A rain of the kind that bites at your fingers and makes your knees stiff.

Winter has for the most part been mild this year, the last time Copenhagen had a winter like this was, funnily enough, last year. We were talking about it at lunch today and the collective lunch table remembered that  in two days time and a year ago, we had a snowman build-able snow storm, complete with traffic problems and train delays. So now we wait and see.

What does this have to do with rain and me? Nothing much except I need summer. I am cold and wet and sitting in a misted up train coupe needing sun. I will get sun this Xmas, proper Durban Sun with a capital DS, but that's a year away almost.

I digress, last years summer was crap. Really, it was just bland and with the exception of maybe fifteen mediocre days of luke-warm mildness, it was shitty.

So here I stand on the metro platform (line 2), with my coat tails blowing around, in the icy rain, with the prospect of last years weather cycle on the verge of making a repeat comeback and I am almost depressed.

It won't be a bad summer, I will learn a form of black magic and put out some calls, but it still doesn't lighten my current frame of mind.

 

On the plus, I kicked ass in halo 3 last night. I have a wonderful girlfriend and two bomb cats. Life is good, just so long as I get into some warm dry clothes and boot up some master chief.

"burn things to show you aren't violent"

There is an area in Copenhagen called Vanløse. I know this as I catch the metro there most mornings and then catch a train to WMdata where I am working at the moment.

Anyway there is nothing special about this place per say, but this morning I was using my iPod on the station platform and I got access to a wireless network. No hacking or anything "funny". The catch? Well nothing other than that the Vanløse public library is next to the station and it has a free wireless network for surfing or searching for books.

This got me thinking, in a country with a proper democracy, a usable social system and a high standard of living, how can there be ghettos and 15 year old kids, who hate society so much they run around at night stabbing people, burning cars and physically attacking the civil servants, who are just doing their jobs and trying to protect the rest of us.

I am by nature rather politically opinionated, and I happen to agree with the opinion that unprovoked violence can only be solved by using bigger guns. I am sure someone somewhere knows why these kids are so far gone, but I know it can't have started with them. This is conditioning. Their parents or piers are bitter and are manipulating situations into grounds for social misbehaviour.

In a county were freedom of speech and equality is praised, I think things have gone to far. I am a guest here and I know some people don't like that my "kind" is here either, but I follow the rules. Why can't everyone else. I am all for the Swiss way of managing integration: if you don't contribute and follow their rules, then you and your family can sod off to where ever your DNA originated from. And that's fine, that's how it should be.

It isn't always black and white, but handle the easy cases like that and scare the shit out of the difficult cases.  Worst case scenario, last I checked there is plenty of space on Greenland.