Mature Students
January 29th, 2006 at 15:45

Walking around University you can’t help but notice certain people. They look and sound like every other student but there’s something different… they’re about twenty years older than the rest of us. I find these mature students both confusing and irritating.

It doesn’t bother me that they’re older than everyone else, what bothers me is the lengths they go to integrate themselves into typical student culture, which I myself am not a part of.

The most obvious sign of this attempt at integration is their appearance. They look like a typical “indie” student and no dout have a bag covered in small badges with the logos of several mediocre indie bands. They’ll no doubt list the Kaiser Chiefs as one of their favourite bands. I predict a tedious repertoire.

“Oh, you’re so retro and cool with your Rainbow t-shirt. I just love how ironic you are! That multi-coloured lever-arch file you carry around makes you fit in perfectly!”.

Grow up! (Or let me join your popularity gang)

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Blood-based economy
January 27th, 2006 at 22:59

I had a bit of a misunderstanding with JD the other day, and I ended up thinking that he’d paid for some goods or services (I can’t remember which) with blood. In the end, it turned out he’d used pounds sterling, but it got me thinking.

Wouldn’t a blood based economy be better than the current system? The flow of international capital would be quite literal, making difficult abstract business studies concepts easier to grasp, as you’d actually be able to see it happening.

Banking would be reformed- blood banks would get all of the supplies they ever needed- they wouldn’t have to worry about wimps not willing to donate… like, erm, me. Giving blood would be like donating to charity.

White-collar financial crime could be a rare occurence- the only people likely to be equipped are vampires, and the only known vampire is a respected former-leader of the Conservative party. Gun crimes and stabbings would be seen as a financial crime meaning that our maximum security become less crowded as muggers are sent to lower-security prisoners as they’re only taking money, and aren’t a real threat to society.
Things could literally cost an “arm and a leg”- people would be able to trade in their legs for a big plasma television for instance. Blood fueds between families could be sorted out financially meaning that there won’t be any erm… bloodshed. Thugs and gangsters, rather than just using the breaking of one’s legs as a threat when not paying one’s protection money, would actually get some use out of newly-knackered legs. Rather than be left with someone not paying their debts, they’ll be taking the money back for themselves.

Rather than play the lottery, we could literally put our money down the drain. Or sink. Essentially it’ll flow.
Social security will be able to be cut back without pissing off the left-wingers or the poor. We as humans will be gradually generating wealth so we won’t need to sponge off of the state. The Daily Mail might have to cheer up a bit.

We could return to our society should be and have a real aristocracy made up of people with the rare blood groups, who can sell their produce for more than us paupers.
Best of all, if we were to have another biblical plague, God wouldn’t be very effective. Rather than us panicking over the rivers turning to blood, we’d all be made rich instead.

Who’s with me?

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Heggspedition
January 27th, 2006 at 22:38

My good friend Heggs has, at long last, started his gap year. He’s gone out to Belize for six months, and he’s going to be doing all sorts of activities that I wouldn’t dare, or be physically able to do, like charity work.

Before he went, he designated me as his official webmaster, and I’ve set him up a website. It contains a blog where fingers crossed, if the Belize internet backbone is upto scratch (I believe its essentially a tin can on a piece of string), he’ll be blogging his adventures and hopefully uploading pictures to a forthcoming gallery that I’m yet to install/code/decide to do then procrastinate it for a bit.

Check it out: http://www.heggspedition.co.uk

To fill the Heggsless void, I’ll be reading up on the sciences and how to pour the perfect Guinness and I’ll try my best to insert my new-found knowledge into conversation. This will mean that someone will have to substitute me, and then someone else will have to substitute them, and so on until a point where it reaches someone who has a completely vapid persona and less personality than a sheet of corrugated cardboard, and thus they have no personality to replace. Like Richard Blackwood, for instance.

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Leicester, chav city
January 26th, 2006 at 23:19

I was walking around Leicester at lunchtime today in search of food, optical media, and analogue computers (books). As strange as this might be to picture, there were more chavs than usual.

Googling informs me that Thursday are “giro day”. Maybe this has something to do with it?

Walking past the clock tower, I saw a “crew” (”cru”?) of chavs- one of whom was pushing a baby in a pushchair. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not just liberally applying the term “chav” to anyone who looks a bit rough, these were the real deal. They were all wearing what I’d best describe as shell suits- one person entirely white, another entirely sky blue. They even had the chav walk- bending their knees just a bit to far when walking, and thus dipping up and down. And there were four of them. And a baby. They looked ridiculous.

Going past Waterstones (they wouldn’t have been in the bookshop itself, of course), there was another group of chavs. I crossed the road to avoid walking past them, only to encounter more chavs on the other side. They’d gone the whole-hog and even had the Burberry caps.

I’m sure I had a point to make about these awful people.

Bloody everyone.

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People who remind me of me
January 24th, 2006 at 23:28

I know I’ve complained in the past about people not being enough like me- that’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t cope with living at university. Today I experienced, and not for the first time, how horrible it is when there is people who are, at least superficially, a bit like me.

Waiting for my train home I noticed that a few metres away from me on the platform there was a few other individuals, all of whom were wearing coats similar to mine, had similar trousers to me, and like me, stood apart from all of the other commuters, in a similar position to my trademark slouch.

These people clearly had some common ground with me- should I have tried to make conversation with my fellow commuters? They wern’t single mothers or generic daytime nutters, they must have been lazy students.

Getting on the train made it even worse- I’d made the strategic decision to board the train after everyone else, so I could grab one of the fold down seats by the exit. Unfortunately one of these other people got the seat on the opposite side of the walkway to me. My iPod’s playlist had run out of songs to play so I was listening to the glorious sounds of silence, but I didn’t dare fire up a new track because this person just metres away from me was doing the same thing.

I didn’t get my book, The Cold War out of my bag until around five minutes into the twenty minute journey. I wanted to make sure that this other person didn’t have a book, especially a book about the history of the latter-half of the 20th century. THAT would have been embarassing.

Luckily, he didn’t appear to have one, but as I sat there reading about how non-aligned states had shitloads of leverage because they played the superpowers off against each other, I was constantly concious of the fact that there was someone about a metre away from me going out his way to be similar to me.

When the ticket collector arrived, it was horrible. We both reacted in the same way. We both first initially ignored the ticket man to see if he’d just go away, before caving in and producing our tickets after feigning surprise. The fake me must have been playing my game! The bastard! I invented that!

“Mind the gap at Market Harborough!!!!!” (he used that much punctuation himself), the scarily jolly ticket collector told me before waltzing into the next carriage, pleased that he’d just owned two people at the game.

After what seemed like an embarassing lifetime of humiliation and social awkwardness- essentially living the life of the elephant man for those awful twenty minutes, the train stopped in Harborough and I ran off as fast I could. I didn’t look back, but he was probably running too. The bastard.

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The Opticians
January 21st, 2006 at 00:25

I went to get my eyes tested today, as I’m back on my mum’s car insurance. No, really. I am. I’ve so far driven around the block three times.

Long story short, my eyes are ace.

On arrival at the opticians, I was the only customer in there. The tillmonkey woman had her back to me whilst standing near a selection of glasses- rather ominously she peered at my reflection in the mirror and looked at me as if I had to say something. Considering I wasn’t wearing glasses and was in a shop that has only one purpose, I’d have thought she’d anticipate the fact that I’d got an eye test booked. She took me to my desk and gave me my exam paper, and I had an hour. The first question was “label this diagram of an eye”.

Very shortly after this written exam that didn’t happen, I had a practical test.

Entering the room I sat down on the chair shaking with nerves as I hadn’t revised- in retrospect I should have cheated on the way in, and looked at the board with letters on before I sat down.

Horribly, I wasn’t best mates with the optician, yet I still felt the need to have a “light” conversation with him. I struggled to remember back to my days as a tillmonkey for inspiration. “Would you like a bag?”, I cried, before nodding my head in a patronising manner as if to look interested in his confused response.

Essentially, I just told him about how I was at University and how it was a doddle. I actually said “doddle”. I think this was because my subconcious told me that saying “piece of piss” would have been inappropiate- he could have had a history of disgusting bowel problems for all I know.

And so it began. “Have you any medical problems?”, “Has anyone in your family got diabeties?”, “Is anyone in your family a four-eyes?”. For a brief moment I flirted with the idea of inventing a conjoined-twins for uncles. Technically they’d have four eyes and so he’d have to write it on his card, in what I could see was only a small space. Yeah, that’d show him. Show him for being such an optician.

The thing that worried me slightly was when the optician tried out a series of lenses on me, and got me to say whether a red or a green backlit circle was more focused. I had no idea whether or not I was giving the correct answer, but I told him what I thought he wanted to hear- specifically: “2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ,2″.

He continued to do eye-related stuff. At one point he switched the lights off and bought his face closer to mine. With all the news about Ruth Kelly about, and my charm and good looks, I was quite worried about what he was trying to do. In the end, he shined a bright light in my eye and stared at me from close range for a bit. I think he must need glasses if he needs to be that close to me.

Eventually, by which I mean, immediately after the end of the test, I got the results. As it turns out, my eye sight is fantastic- my left eye is more rubbish than my right, but only slightly, and I’m vaguely long sighted. It’s a shame really, as I’d liked to have got a proper lens for my monocle, which at the moment is just buried in my bottom drawer as a momento of an initially funny gimmick that got old fast.

Reading this post back… what the fuck has a simple eye test done to me to make me talk this much shit?

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Whale Update
January 20th, 2006 at 17:30

BBC News 24: “Can you name the whale? Text us now!”

Sky News are stiill rolling on this one story- the presenters trying to ask insightful marine questions yet clearly not knowing anything about whales. Not that I do, of course.

There’s also apparently another whale in south end, and another at Canary Wharf. Whales are invading and making excellent television!

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Whale!
January 20th, 2006 at 15:46

I’m having the most amazing afternoon of TV viewing. For the past two hours I’ve been watching a whale swimming about in the Thames, right in the middle of central London (next to Parliament, in fact), and it’s ace.

Sky News have cleared their schedule and dropped advert breaks to cover this amazing event. The BBC have moved on to other stories now, but they too ran with it for a good hour or so. They’re going a bit over the top- not that I mind. They’ve all got helicopters up there, have correspondents on the ground and are begging viewers to send in photos. Sky have even had a vox-pop in a pub which essentially consisted of this:

“Yeah, I came in here for a drink and saw the whale on the telly. It’s great to see.”

“Fuck me! It’s a whale!”

The weirid thing is that this is strangely compelling stuff- the whale isn’t doing anything yet I’m still watching. They ought to have 24 hour animal news channels for this sort of thing. “Breaking news! Cat stuck up tree!” I could watch for hours.

Conspiracy theory of the day: Blair put the whale there to distract the media from the education bill he’s shitting up on (technical term). Why else would it be right outside of the Commons? Hmm..?
In short: Animals… hooray!

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Texting likes its 1999
January 19th, 2006 at 20:51

I’ve had a very retro day today. This morning I had a history lecture and discussed the past, and this afternoon I worked myself up into a panic about how the Millenium bug is going to kill us all and our lovely computers Even the Geo-safari! Then my third retro-event occured.
I received an old viral text message from a friend- I won’t name her as it’ll embarass her. Let’s just call her Charlene… to obvious? How about Sharlie? The text was as follows:

“this text cost 10p. 10p could have been used to feed an asylum seeker for a day. send this message to everyone in your address book and help starve the fuckers“.

1999 called, they want their viral text back! My point is though, this text message raises a number of awful yet oddly sweary questions:

1) Where the fuck did it originate?

Well, judging by the theme, some Daily Mail readers must have sent it. Quite why any normal person would think its funny and forward it on is beyond me. Certainly some sort of ignorant racist, although I’m not confident enough to pin it down on any one individual (in fact, you can see in this same paragraph, I pinned it down on one publication instead). You can tell that it’s old though because SMS costs 12p now.

2) How long have O2 been paying to feed people fleeing civil war and persecution and shit around the world?

Either we’re living in 1980’s pre-privatisation British Telecom world that has mobile phones of the future (ie: today), or  O2, T-Mobile and its MVNOs, Orange and Vodafone have some sort of “feeding the needy” subdivision. I didn’t realise that their profits were for the common good. In fact, sending the message may very indirectly feed more asylum seekers. Presumably the 10p includes some form of VAT, and you’re helping the companies stay afloat by using their services, and they’re paying corporation tax. The government will have more cash to give to asylum seekers in terms of food vouchers. There’s probably an equally tenuous link to the text message making it worse for asylum seekers too, mind.

3) Is the costing accurate as fuck?

Clearly, no. Sending a text message is a “virtual” transaction- the physical cost of transmitting the data will be a fraction of a penny- the 10p is clearly mostly fat profit for the companies involved and is a nice earner considering that a text uses less bandwidth than a phonecall, and you need more of them to make the same point than in a phonecall.
Oh, and you show me where you can get a day’s food for 10p.

4) What conclusions can you drawn from all of this shit?
I think Charlene (ie: Sharlie) is in fact adding to the asylum seeker problem!

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Audioslave Update.
January 18th, 2006 at 22:44

A few weeks ago I hated them. Then I bought the albums.

Now I’ve been there, done that and bought the t-shirt. Literally.

Damn.

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