Emailing Chris White MP... Again

Chris White, Conservative MP for Warwick and Leamington didn't see fit to respond to my previous email (which you can read below). What a dastardly fellow. My genuine concerns as a member of the big society have been shot down by a middle aged white man with an MBA, to my infinite surprise. As such, the only way forward that I can see is to annoy him as much as possible until I get a response. My second email is below - maybe this will be more successful.

Alex

*******

Dear Mr. White,

Despite my concern that you have not yet replied to my previous email, I appreciate that you are indeed a busy man, especially with what appears to be a peaceful revolution scheduled on the streets of our glorious metropolis this coming Thursday. I hope and imagine your preparatory time is being spent staring contemplatively at the education funding motion, and considering a) the importance of the bill, b) how it will affect your responsibility to your constituents and c) the three line whip which is surely attached to your free and public voting behaviour. Your rather romanticised choice, then, lies somewhere between going down in history in Hansard as the guy that rebelled, or taking your career and isolated interests as having priority.

On the off-chance that you choose to address the concern of your constituents, I must how it is, exactly, that you intend to represent your constituency despite a lack of contact with its residents?

As I noted before, I have little knowledge of your private affairs, but thought you may be interested in hearing about the situation of one member of the big society who, I am proud to say, has done relatively well despite adverse circumstances.

Indeed, despite the lack of priority placed on funding the social sciences, I have been lucky and persistent enough to reach the level of PhD researcher in politics, as I hope was obvious given the content of my previous email. However, in order to fund this, I have resorted to working part time, detracting from my research, on a wage which is not considered by the government to be high enough to live on over any great period of time. Given the number of people in my situation - particularly in a town with a high student population - I am concerned as to the measures you are taken to combat the widely acknowledged tax evasion of large companies such as the Arcadia group and Vodafone.

As we are now all members of the big society, I am of course not considering this in the light of my own personal financial interests, but rather those of the children I don't have yet. Indeed, it is possible that your children, if you have them, may find themselves in a similar situation, as will the children of the policeman that will probably give me a jolly good rap on the head with whatever weapon he sees fit to use on Thursday afternoon.

Of course, my expectation that you will choose to represent the people, as opposed to the party whip, is not high, particularly given your record of representation on proportional representation voting systems. However, I hope you at least find the time to reply, as the current electoral system is liable to see you returned to Parliament for as long as you see fit, giving you more than enough time to occasionally address the concerns of the society you represent.

Mr. White, I look forward to your reply. Should you see fit to meet me personally, you will in all likelihood see me in the middle of a police kettle on Thursday wearing a T-shirt outlining my right of Habeas Corpus and generally making a little bit of an inconvenient racket. I hope your hearing has not degraded the way your political foresight evidently has.

Yours concernedly,

Alexander Hoseason

Bringing the Noise - DIY Microphone

So after chasing around for that down and dirty blues sound a la Jack White, and seeing some of the interesting microphones he used, I decided to make my own out of an old telephone, a guitar cable and a 'choc block' (in the absence of a soldering iron). An hour later and I ended up with this:

It's capable of some pretty epic feedback, and I haven't tried singing with it yet, but it has that lo-fi easy to drive sound that should be absolutely primo for some desperate sounding blues or old-school punk. Let me know what you think.

By the way, the total cost of this was £1 (I was given the phone and the cable was lying around the house). Not bad, all told. As it stands, this is pretty much the extent of my electrical 'knowledge', as opposed to my brother, who to my eternal pride is now a fully qualified helicopter-fixer-guy. He probably would've made this video with less feedback, anyway :)

In other news, apologies for the beard. It was a dare.