The Festive Spirit

*** NOTE ***

Well it’s Christmas. And as a Christmas present to my readers, I’m going to give a happy blog. Yes, while you may look to this as your weekly dose of conflict and hatred, this week you are disappointed. This is going to be a blog focusing on something positive.

Well that was the plan anyway. It became clear pretty soon that this was not going to be the case. Whenever I thought of something, it was impossible to make it even barely interesting, let alone funny. So I thought a bit more and decided that this blog was going to be a comparing one. “YES!” I thought, “That’ll be vaguely neutral at least, and I could probably make it funny as well”. This also came to nothing; since there was nothing that I could think to compare that would interest you, or be relevant in any way. So I simply thought “fuck it” and decided to do my usual thing of focusing on all the crapper bits of life. This time: Christmas.

While I know that this is supposed to be a time of love and giving, and it does indeed do that in places, there are also a lot of things to piss off the innocent festive celebrator.

So here’s the top 3 things that piss me off at Christmastime (because if there’s anything people like reading, it’s a good list)

3. Tags

Yes, kicking off the list at number 3 is tags. The midgety little bastards that hang off the present as if to say “Merry Christmas asshole! I’m here to make sure you can’t open this properly!” I mean, sure they let the people know who sit around the tree who the present is for, but this could be achieved much easier by sorting into piles, or even put in bags so they can easily be handed out. And it’s much worse for the poor wrapper, having to write out 22 tags saying almost the exact same thing does not make Christmas the happiest time of year.

2. Pointless Cards

The idea of a card is good. It’s an amuse-bouché to the big scene, the presents. But then communism is also a good idea, and that doesn’t work either. Every year I open a card and find nothing but “to Luke, from Gran”. Bloody hell, if you’re going to go to that little bother, don’t do it in the first place. You don’t even have to write your own Christmas message, because it comes free with the card. And while you might argue that the picture on the card might be nice, I doubt this is why the person bought it. Every year all I do is grab some 29p suitable cards from card factory and hope they’re okay. So it’s probably the same story at the other end. The way I like to get around the pointless bit is to… annotate them a bit. For example, when my sister opens her card this year (I’m writing this Christmas Eve so it’s in the future tense) she’ll see a creepy picture of Nixon with his arms in a V shape and a creepy smile, with some text that says “FROM THE PRESSSSIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERRRICAA”. Full credit to Amir for thinking that up J

1. Tradition

It’s the big one, tradition. And its not just Christmas traditions that piss me off, it’s all year round. “We’ve got to do it this way because we always have” is the bane of my existence. Brussels sprouts for instance, which are essentially crap onions, are supposedly tasty. Fine. But if these shitty little fart bombs are so nice, why don’t we have them all year round? The answer is simple. Tradition. It doesn’t help that I have a passionate hatred for sprouts either. Another fine example of this is the dreaded Christmas CD tracks. While they might be good the first few times round, after 15 years I have come to loath them. While my ITunes is full of the likes of Lamb of God and Sepultra, I firmly believe that I would detest these songs even if I wasn’t a metalhead. Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade was good the first time round. The second was enjoyable as well. But not the 80^th. People need to know that enough is enough for these songs.

To finish I just want to say that I do like Christmas, but like everything else, there’s still a big gaping hole that screams “FUCK YOU” for 12 glorious days. Hope you have a good Christmas, and enjoy whatever bits you can.

***NOTE***

Next time is blog number 10. Any ideas? 

The Fires of Hell and A £2.50 Bargain Bin

Normally I don’t like to bore you with the stuff that goes on in my not very interesting life. Getting up, going downstairs and eating cereal might be good for me, but it doesn’t make a good blog. I know of one internet blogger called “Faceless” who makes a daily post about what she does. Which isn’t much. Imagine big brother, but more repetitive, and without any weird challenges to break the endless monotony.

But occasionally something happens that is worth telling you about, such as my adventure in the dangerous and hostile land that is Wandsworth Primark.

I of course knew things weren’t going to go well from the start. I had a budget of £5 to buy someone a Christmas present; I won’t tell you who in case she reads this and yells at me for being a cheap bastard. Anyway, I therefore knew that the present was either going to have to come from the pound shop, which sells big bags of sweets, or Primark, which sells T-shirts. Primark it was.

But when I got there things looked pretty bleak. Everything seemed to be above budget, or socks. But after some scavenging I managed to find the £3 table. Great, I thought, I can buy 2. Except I couldn’t.

Everything was for guys. There were the inevitable Ché Guevara shirts, random plain t shirts, and of course our favourite, the random drummer one that isn’t intended for anyone and only comes in extra extra large. But it seems that it isn’t only the drummer tops that come in XXL, whenever I found anything that might be good for this person, it was in the wrong size. I can only assume every girl who buys from Primark is 6 foot 4 and weighs 18 stone. At the 5 minute mark I was starting to panic, if Primark had failed me on cheap things, that would mean I would have to find the even backer back end of town (which in Wandsworth, is not hard to find at all) and hope that they sold novelty female Christmas gifts. But my inner perseverance meant that I was eventually able to find something good.  

It was a space invaders shirt. I was immediately wary of getting this, even though it did have a lot of pink on it. Space invaders is of course a video game, which I never really thought girls liked. But no matter, it was in my hand, in a good size, and ready for buying.

So I went to find the queue. Which was enormous.  

I counted and it was almost 16 meters long. That’s huge. It was like everyone in Wandsworth has suddenly decided that they needed cheap Christmas gifts and had flocked to the only good shop (relatively speaking, it’s Wandsworth) in town. It was stupid.

But with a keen ear I even managed to make this (vaguely) interesting. I kept note of other customers, who had clearly been flown in from mars.

Take the people in front of me in the queue (I had plenty of time to listen in) and there was a family of 3. Fine. But there was inevitably something messed up about them. Take the teenager. He was wearing jeans that had huge holes in. While this is supposed to fashionable apparently, it was -2 degrees. Who gets up on the second coldest day in the month, -2 degrees, and thinks “I know, I’m going to put on jeans that let the cold in”. I mean what the hell. He also had 2 earrings, which in itself is stupid enough, but someone had obviously forgotten to remind him that he had 2 ears, so he had put them both in the same one. What a fucking pillock.

Then there were the people behind me, stereotypical black people. The mother had a fit (I think) when her son wandered off, and she shouted in the way only a black person could “Don’t you run away from me boy ‘cos I will chase you around the whole of pree-maaarrrk”.

At this point I was starting to think that it wasn’t worth it, ditching the shirt, just to get out of pree-mark alive.

But my sanity lasted just about long enough to get me to the till. Where a sour faced Lithuanian woman served me. Except she was plainly part of the spetznaz, and had taken much time out her life to learn the cruel KGB stare we’re all terrified of. I wish I was joking here but I’m not. It really freaked me out.

But at last, after all that, I managed to escape. Christ that place was messed up. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I could come home, write this, and hope that they read it so that it makes their life miserable. On an end note, I saw the earring pillock later that day with a dazed look on his face. He didn’t have a Primark bag. Seems he didn’t last as long as I did. 

A Really Good Half Page Space Filler

*NOTE*

I wasn't going to post this on blogger, i was just gonna keep it to Tumblr. This was me saying that i couldn't write anything so i was just getting out what i could.

Its still awesome

I first want to point out that it’s been a real struggle to get the blog done this week. On the page before this is a plan about how Christmas has now become commercialized. But somehow I can’t get anything written. I simply stare at the keyboard hoping for something inspiring to come from it. Even writing this intro is bugging me out.

As usual I have a weird explanation for this. The last week has been that of my mocks, every day was a pressure on my brain and most of the time I kept going and hoped for the best. I feel I did well. However, on the Friday, I came home and was a dumb shit. What I think happened was that I was thinking so much that I ran out of all cleverness and turned into a useless pile of crap.

When I was talking to my friend about something, I should remember but I can’t, whenever he told me to do anything I would either do the wrong thing, do the right thing at the wrong time, or nothing altogether. This made him quite angry. Normally I would have put a joke there about this but I really can’t think of anything.

Some would say that I should just wait until I get my thinking back before writing. But since it might be a while, I figured I’d just do something and hope for the best.

This isn’t anywhere near the best. This is shit.

But in a good researching way, I’ve looked into why this might be. Eventually I came across biorhythms. These are things that apparently control the Zen of our spirits or some weird Chinese zodiac shit like that. Turns out that on Friday, the day of my transformation from keen journalistic human into a brainless jellyfish, my physical one was down, and after that my intellectual and emotional ones went down. They are due to get back somewhere good again on Thursday, the day after I’m writing this.

Great. So all I had to do was wait another day. Impatience for the win.

And The Winner This Year Is... Simon Cowell

Over the years many people have failed. There are politicians, actors, newsreaders and even bin men who have failed so spectacularly that they have left lasting imprints on all of us. Yet none of their fails is even comparable, as insanely epic, or as groundbreaking as the fail that is… The X Factor.

 Yes on first impressions, this show has it all: Voiceover by E4 guy, Special effects doing the credits, and of course Simon Cowell. However, if you look below the surface, you find nothing but cheap primetime entertainment thought up by Simon Cowell and his haircut to extract money from phone lines.

Let’s start with the opening.

You start off with a presenter announcing over dramatically that we are about to watch a singing talent show. He even throws us a cheesy metaphor: Its time… To Face… THE MUSIC!!!! He didn’t exactly bother himself with his lines did he? He simply wrote down the first musically inclined thing that came into his head and barked it into a microphone.

However his crap puns do help a bit though. They help lower your expectations to a level suitable for the profit driven drivel that you will watch for the next hour, 2 hours sometimes. 6 years later, once the E4 voiceover man has finished his puns, you get the opening credits, which look like something you’d find in a Jeter Jackson movie. Complete with a soundtrack ripped off a 90’s pop flick. While this in itself is bad enough, would someone please tell me what a huge X hitting the earth has to do with a singing talent competition?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We’re assuming it can actually be called a show and not a televised karaoke night.

Oh wait it is. How it gets 21 million viewers is unbelievable. That’s a third of Britain.

But after the edifying spectacle of the X meteor, we get into the meat of the thing.

First stop for an ITV phone show is Ant and Dec. But since they bailed 3 years ago, we have to make do with crap understudy Dermot O Leary.

Now we get the judges. Inevitably we have record producer Simon Cowell, whose only claim to fame is that he’s a prize winning bastard. Next to him in Danni Minogue. Who doesn’t so much have a surname as a drunken Australian spelling mistake. Her claim to fame is that she’s the sister of real celebrity Kylie Minogue. Of course she had her own short career, but it was crap.

Then we have Cheryl Cole, star of Girls aloud. While she says she can sing, she has to mime at her performances. Even when she appeared on her own show she had to mime. So I’m sorry, but I’m a little sceptical as to whether she can actually sing or not.

Then, oh my god, you have Louis Walsh. The stereotypical Irishman stuck in at last minute to please Labour Commissionars on the grounds of race discrimination.

Ok. We have our (somewhat) competent panel of judges, so what about the contestants. As we all know, the audition stages are awash with idiots who are told by their fat sucker mums that they have unique angelic voices. The eye of that beholder obviously has their eyes shut though. Christ they’re awful.

But move onto the live rounds and you have a line-up mostly made up of people who can sing. Of course there’s always a joke slung in to please the stupid, or as was the case with Wagner, to please the commissionar, but there are many who could be envisioned with a vaguely successful career.

Too many actually, when I saw it I felt that each song was way too rushed, and I had no idea about any of the contestants. Surely if this was a movie it would fail without characterization, but there you go.

I am slightly wrong though; with all his wit, Cowell has realized the obvious and randomly assigned each person a back story.  

There are 3 choices. You’re doing this for your kids, who live in poverty, you’ve come so far in such a short time, or you simply have a life devoted to singing. They’re all good.

I could go on for so long about this program, but I haven’t the space. All I can say is that it is the worst thing ever imagined for TV. Not hopeless re-runs of failed 80s shows on Dave, documentaries for the old on BBC4, or even Jeremy Kyle come close to this. Everything about it feels like it was designed to torture the weak, to suck everything in your mind and replace it with stupid.

All with that all that’s left is to stop is to stop pretty boy cardle getting xmas number one, and instead buy Corey Taylor’s “X-M@$”. I know I have. Best of all, the money generated is apparently going to charity, rather than to finance the next series of what is undoubtedly Simon Cowell’s worst fail yet.

No But We Have It In Pink. Is That Ok Sir?

As I write this there is a huge debate going on about the future of university tuition fees. Fearing that there will be 1000 posts about this event, I decided to finally get around to writing my Blog about buying a phone.

When I first came to secondary school, I was given a phone. Of course I was ecstatic about it. It was the first I had ever had so I obviously thought it was awesome.

However, in 20 minutes I had figured out it wasn’t awesome. Upon my recent research, I’ve found it was the first release from the new Nokia “Superbasic” range, The Nokia 1110. Most phones from this era had a colour screen. Mine didn’t.

Eventually I was given an upgrade, The Nokia 1600. This was also from the Superbasic range. In fact, when James May emptied his pockets for an MMR scan on “James May’s 20^th Century”, one of the things he took out was my phone. I also saw it in the hands of an old woman when I was in Guernsey.

So after 4 years, I have finally convinced my mother that I need a good phone. So immediately I went to my network provider’s website to find a new one.

Fine, except my provider is Tesco.

Tesco is fine when you’re looking for potatoes or chicken. Their own brand crisps are especially good. But for electronics, look elsewhere. While I know I could use another network provider, Tesco are the cheapest. So they’re staying.

I selected a phone I liked very much. I don’t remember which one, but I went to the store to buy it. When I got there, I found that there were in fact 6000 phones available rather than the 2 advertised on the website. This meant it was impossible to find the one I wanted.

So I went to see the guy at the desk. He said that he didn’t have the one I wanted, but there was another, almost identical one available. When I asked for him, he said he would be happy to go and get it, and slouched off to the back room. When he returned, 10 minutes later, he reached under the desk and pulled out the phone I wanted. Christ knows what he was doing in the back room. But I took a look and it turned out that the phone was on T-mobile, not Tesco, and would therefore cost a billion pounds. On further investigation, the same phone was at least £10 less on nearly all other networks. Vodafone was the cheapest. But the guy didn’t have one on Tesco.

He went to get another one, and came back with one that was indeed on Tesco. It fitted all my spec, except for one key issue. It was pink. What sort of idiot brings a guy a pink phone? After a call around, he said that the phone I wanted was in fact in stock. But only at New Malden, which was 15 minutes away by car. In an irritating sort of way, he also added that Tesco closes in half an hour. Thanks for that.

So me and my dad drive like hell to New Malden to get this phone. When we get there, a man asked us a list of about 40 questions, none of them had anything to do with the phone or our account. He then produced the phone I wanted. But it wasn’t, it was in pink. After 10 minutes argument, he told us the store was closed and we would have to leave. I am not joking.

I swear that Tesco has some kind of passion for pink phones. I looked at their website and almost all the good phones are in pink. There’s a few in black, but they’re all crap, or £80. I had a budget of 40-50 and there’s nothing that I want to buy in that group. Once you get past the crap ones, it’s a sea of pink, or ones with tiny blackberry buttons that won’t work because my fingers are too fat.

I’ve looked at other websites and they all seem to comprehend that a phone needs to be in multiple colours. So why can’t the second biggest supermarket chain in England understand that?

So as I write this I’m stuck with the Nokia 1600, in grey. Thanks Tesco.

Slipknot is a Culture, Says Slipknot Member

Today I was going to write this blog about trying to buy a mobile phone. I wrote up a plan, and had all the elements perfectly fitted together. But then I saw something on my homepage that changed everything. The headline was as follows:

Slipknot is not a Band, it’s a Culture, says Percussionist Clown

To put this into context, in May Slipknot their bassist, Paul Gray (RIP), due to an accidental drug overdose. So nobody knows what’s going to happen to them, whether they’ll continue with a new bassist, or if they’ll pack it in altogether. Since Slipknot call themselves a “family” and Paul was their “brother” many people say that they won’t want to carry on without him. And now some band members are coming together saying that they are going to make new material. But the rest of the (ex nine piece) band are backing out. Which is fairly stupid since all of their side projects are either crap or unknown. Except for (DJ. Yes, for some reason they have a DJ) Sid Wilson, who I hear, has a fairly large cult following in China.

The article was essentially one of the (many) band members glorifying his band. By the way, the Percussionist Clown wears a clown mask and hits beer kegs. I’m serious; they have a fully paid up (founding) member who runs around screaming and hitting beer kegs, for “stage presence". I looked up his kit list and his other drums cost £849, £799 and £249. That’s extraordinary. What makes it even more absurd is that he is only 1 of 2 members who hit these things. They also have a regular drummer. However, I do like Slipknot’s music, even if they are a bit… unusual.

But the thing that really smacked me about the article wasn’t the article at all. It was the comments. Nobody was talking about the article. It was all bitching about Slipknot, with people berating them about their image. Calling them “grown men in Halloween masks” and other general insults, nothing about the article. Even worse one of the people (Kanthras) had commented 15 times. That’s exceptional.

Why do these people do this? When you think about it, the Slipknot-Hater needs to click the article, read it, think up insults, and then post them. Who has the time to do this? These people had also rated the column 4/10 even though there was nothing in the article to warrant such a low grade. I thought it was well written, and was sufficiently detailed to clearly give its point.

When I see an article about Green Day or Keisha I simply don’t read it. I see no reason to look through it, dreaming up insults for the readers. What reason is there to do this? There are many things I want to do, or need to do. I can only assume that these people have such empty lives that they think it’s a good way to spend their time. I can sum these people up in one maxim:

A person who goes to extreme length to prove a point, even when there is no point to be proved. They believe they are elevated mentally above regular people, and spend long periods of time attempting to support this.

This is derived from the dictionary definition of a sociopath. And that suits everyone nicely. Since sociopaths have a large capacity for aggressive behaviour, they should not be exposed to the public. Using this logic, anyone who puts dumb comments onto the internet should be imprisoned. That way there is no more comment spam, or street stabbings, because the people who do these things are all in prison. Everybody wins.

BREAKING: I Just Stepped In Dog Shit

In 2 days I’ve got my mock exams. I’ll be tested in almost every subject, and come out the other side with a gleam of satisfaction, an inner beacon of hope for my future, about how I performed.

Or rather, I won’t, because I haven’t revised enough. Some might say I have, and that I just have no idea how much time I should revise for so I don’t know if I’ve done enough. But I suspect the real culprit for taking away my time is Facebook.

Boring old people who fear the internet almost as much as the onset of _____ feel Facebook is an all consuming disease, which steals young lives and sucks them into a dangerous world of ones and zeros. But since I’ve never really cared what octogenarian technophobes think, I believe Facebook is pretty good. A hub of activity, where you can access anything and (almost) anyone, anytime you like.

However, herein lies the problem.

Whereas I see Facebook as a worthy part of life, some people see it AS their life. There are strange people out there, people who spend their whole time re-reading people status updates, killing time as they wonder who to “poke” next, or on those special occasions, “superpoke”. Usually it’s the same person.

To back this up I did a little research. I shifted through the far reaches of the Google search index and found a site devoted to Facebook news feeds. A site for people with strange habits who browse through Facebook home pages to stick the stupidest ones online, just so people can stare at them and think “wow, look at how empty that bastards life is, he’ll be blogging next!”. What a faggot. But here are some the statuses:

¾    I’m eating my tea

¾    Boo… Its raining

¾    Is Wondering What To Do

¾    A dog chewed my sandals while I was in the shower

¾    This chicken tastes funny

And my personal favourite:

¾    BREAKING: I just stepped in dog shit

How empty must that bastards life be if stepping in shit is breaking? People like these should all bugger off to twitter, where they’ll be a damn sight easier to ignore and ten times more likely to fit in.

But maybe I have this all wrong? Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking why people have famous Facebook addictions; perhaps I should be looking at why they’re actually on Facebook in the first place? I know from experience that they’re not there because of its usability, every time I get used to the layout and style of the thing, they decide to go and change it. Great, except when they do change it, all that happens is that they make it worse. I came in 3 versions of Facebook ago and I thought it was pretty good. Simple, and everything was where you hoped it would be. But then they bought out another one and buggered it up. When I got used to that, they changed it again. I don’t know how many times Facebook has changed, but I know in 2 years it’s changed 3 times. Since Facebook was started in 2004, I guess it’s changed about 9 times as of 2010.

How can a website that changed so much have 400 million users? It makes no sense to me. But after some thought, I’ve got it. There’s simply no alternative. As far as I can determine, it has few competitors. Twitter, MSN, Bebo, and Tumblr. That’s about it. Twitter is for people who do almost nothing with their lives but think they’re the centre of everything. MSN is made by the people who brought you Vista and Internet Explorer. Tumblr doesn’t have chat. But that still leaves Bebo, which is almost the same as Facebook but doesn’t have any apps, so it’s right out.

That must be why Facebook survives then. Not because it’s good, or because its somehow more appealing, but because everything else is crap.