The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

Fidel Castro has died! Those were the exact words of a tweet from Donald Trump. What has amazed me about the aftermath of the Cuban leader’s death is the way so many people have used it to try and make a political statement. First, context. Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and dictator. He ruled the country from 1959-2008 when his brother Raul Castro took over. In the fifties Cuba’s government was corrupt but a revolution led to Castro turning the country into the only communist state in the West. This led to huge problems during the Cold War and nearly led to nuclear destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He ruthlessly ruled the country but it’s now in a stronger place than it ever was. That’s the thing about Castro. He was a dictator and did some really horrible things. But as dictator’s go he wasn’t  that  bad and took down a crime ridden government and I think most people would agree that Cuba has got a lot out of having him as leader. Basically, it’s compli...

It’s been a tough week online for the comics industry. The brilliant comics writer Chelsea Cain was tweeting about her disappointment at the end of her  Mockingbird  series, canceled by Marvel. She shared an alternate cover for the final issue: Then the abuse came. This is Chelsea’s take on it: Overnight, I had lost thousands of followers. (I’d gone to bed with about 8500.) I had gained a thousand new followers. I had been tagged thousands of times. Comments were coming in, fast and furious, every second. I’d never seen anything like it. I saw a few of them – a lot of support, a lot of people yelling at one another – a lot of people mad at me for being too quick on the block button or too critical of comic book readers or being too feminist. A lot of them just seemed mad at women in general. I deactivated my account. I got up. I walked my dogs. You might not believe that in 2016 this sort of thing happens. It does. Here’re a completely real screenshot of just one pe...

You may have seen the news of gorilla Kumbuka escaping from his enclosure at London Zoo. The male Western Silverback got out into a secure keeper’s area and was quickly tranquilised. The public was never in danger and the situation seemed to have dealt with very well by the London Zoo staff. The events have led to an organisation called the Born Free Foundation releasing a statement saying “it could have ended very differently” and was a “startling reminder” of the risks of keeping wild animals in captivity. The organisation wants to see zoos phased out, something which I disagree with. In terms of their opinion of the events of the London Zoo incident, it seems frankly wrong. It was extremely unlikely that it would ever have ended any differently thanks to the zoo’s safety procedures. The animal never escaped into a public area, the public were evacuated quickly and the gorilla was tranquilized and moved back to his enclosure remarkably quickly. It seems clear to be that London...

You may have seen, intentionally or not, the latest news about Kim Kardashian. She was in Paris and was robbed at gunpoint. I’m not full of sympathy towards her. OK, that’s not entirely true. I have sympathy in terms of the fact it must have been a traumatizing experience and one I wouldn’t wish on anyone, even someone I don’t like.  I really don’t like Kim Kardashian. I struggle to think of one redeeming feature for her. Everything about her is image and that’s not what life is about. She has become a millionaire on the basis she is good looking. I don’t even view her as good looking because it’s impossible to tell what she would actually look like without the various fakery which makes her look like she does. She doesn’t appear to have any personality whatsoever. She chose to marry perhaps the most arrogant man in the world. I could go on.  It puzzles me that she has become something of an idol to so many girls and young women. They want to be Kim Kardashian and that’...

The Summer holidays are over and after some training days last week work begins properly again on Monday. It’s always a bit of a shock to the system but after two years at least I feel comfortable in my job.  I discussed friendship earlier in the summer. I had seemed to reach a point where I simply didn’t see any friends but I endeavoured to do something about that. This led to wandering through the New Forest, spending days in London and Winchester and going to a music concert on the beach. It was fantastic to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for ages.  Actually I should discuss that beach music concert. We went to see the headline act, the Kaiser Chiefs. There were other acts on first, up and coming artists Imani Williams and Callum Scott and the older rockers Travis. It was all quite enjoyable but nothing particularly special. The Kaiser Chiefs were about to come on when it was suddenly announced that they had been cancelled because the tide was coming in. I know, th...

The summer holidays have begun and I should be happy. I’m doing a few days work here and there but I have somewhere in the region of 40 days off. Don’t get me wrong, I needed time off and don’t particularly want to be at work. But I quickly wondered how on Earth I was going to fill those days. Work is a fantastic distraction from the reality of my life. During the work week most of my thoughts are about things that are going on at work. But when suddenly I have six weeks off that distraction is gone. The familiar thoughts of worthlessness and failure have soared to the surface once more. The trouble is I still haven’t really got over failing my final teaching placement two years ago. It took me a long time just to get over the mental trauma of it all. I quickly, perhaps too quickly, accepted the fact that I just don’t have the skills to become a teacher. But I haven’t ever got over the shame. To everyone who knew me before that placement I was a young man with a good career ...

I recently read Neil Gaiman’s collection of non-fiction,  The View From the Cheap Seats,  and one of the many brilliant articles in it was sharing memories of four bookshops. This is my version of that. 1 The Ashley Bookshop was the place I demanded my parents take me at the weekend when I was very young. Located in Boscombe (Bournemouth) it was an unusual place. My memories of it are fairly limited. I couldn’t tell you for example if it sold new or second hand books. I do know though that in a former life it was a church but the pews had been removed and replaced with long rows of bookshelves. My main goal in visiting was to buy a  Blackberry Farm  book. They were stories of anthropomorphised animals on the titular farm. I would read the list of titles in the series on the back of the books over and over again and be hugely satisfied when I filled in a gap. Sadly at some point the bookshop closed down and I never had the opportunity to look for more grow...

I’ve popped up a day early because today is World Blood Donor Day. It’s a cause that’s very important to me and I’ve donated blood since I started university six years ago. Most people are horrified at the thought of giving blood. The very idea of a needle being stuck into your arm and blood flowing out of it is not pleasant. Even as a regular blood donor I can’t say it’s pleasant. I find the actual process of giving blood uncomfortable and still can’t actually bring myself to look at my arm when it’s happening. Physically though, it’s not really that bad. There’s a slight pain but it’s nothing compared to standing on a plug for example. There’s a lot of things which are worse. There is a reasonable chance that you’ve had a blood test or at least an injection before. It was probably unpleasant but the vast majority of people will cope with it OK. Giving blood is the same and the more you do it the more you get used to it. I don’t feel I have very much to offer to the world. I do...

The wilderness months are over. I’m back. I lost my blogging inspiration back in the latter stages of 2015 and this blog was neglected. It evens turns out some people miss it. But suddenly it’s late spring of 2016 and I want to write. If this blog was a TV show (an unsettling thought), this is the start of a new season after a hiatus. Like a new TV show season, there is a slight change of direction. It’ll still be ostensibly the same but I’m thinking that the blog will focus less on what I’ve been doing and more on my opinions on things. On which note, time to talk about what I’ve been doing. For a start, I’ve written a novel. An actual 50,000 and a bit word story that you can actually download as an eBook anywhere in the world. I still find it a little odd that I can actually say that. I wrote a short post about the book and how you can get it  here . I am still in the same job, a teaching assistant working with children who have autism. If anything it’s more fulfilling tha...

How an astronaut helped give me a new perspective on life We’re already a fair chunk of the way into 2016 so I thought it was about time I updated things here. As you get older time seems to pass ever more quickly and it stuns me that it’s the 13th February 2016 already. It’s been an eventful year for me so far, though internally rather than externally. It is impossible to begin a new year in the modern world without being surrounded by people embarking on the idea of “new year, new me”. I suspect by this point the majority of new year’s resolutions will have fallen by the wayside. Since becoming an adult I have ignored the idea of new year resolutions and this year was was ostensibly no different. Somehow though, I think a little bit of the sudden increase in my peers attempting to improve themselves rubbed off on me. Whilst I didn’t have a concrete resolution I began to think that 2016 should be the year I sorted myself out. I gave up on the idea of becoming a teacher...