Public Enemy #1
January 16th, 2006 at 15:38

Today’s turning out to be somewhat strange- I’m starting to be picked on again by the de-facto authority figure of wherever I am.

On the train going to University today I was interrogated by the ticket-monkey as to why I had a ticket going to Wellingborough- this was as much a surprise to me as it was to him (it seems the ticketmonkey at Harborough station had printed the wrong thing accidentally). My face was like this: “:O”. After he’d examining the ticket and pressed some buttons on his PDA ticket machine, I was ready for an argument. I had many witty retorts to his questions planned:

1) What are you going to do, chuck me off at the next station?

2) Erm..

I admit, I only had one response but it was so heavily loaded with wit that if it were a heavy goods vehicle the centre of gravity would be five metres off of the ground, what with it being so highly loaded with wit and/or sand and/or dead babies.

I could see the pain on his face as he forced himself to utter “I’ll take it as an honest mistake”- after all, the ticket was for the same value as Harborough to Leicester, but he seemed really disappointed, like I’d just stuck it to the man (ie: him).

After receiving top marks (relative to the rest of the class) on a media ownership essay today, I decided to kill some time in the library- that’s where I’m writing this right now. As I walked in, 550ml bottle of Coke in hand, I was confidently walking around, trying to look like I had a reason to be here, rather than looking like someone with nowhere to be. I heard shouts and turned around- the library security guard had spotted me and was charging towards me. Unless he’d spotted my bag with “swag” emblazoned on the side, and my black and white horizontally striped shirt, I knew he was going to say something about my attempt to smuggle Coke across the library/street border.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to drink it!”, I lied cried! Rather than do something witty like ask what I was intending to do with it he instead acted slightly sympathetic, albeit with an aggressive aura about him.

“Just make sure you hide it before you get onto the floor”

“I’m not going to drink it!”

“If you do take a sip, hide it back quickly”, and then menacingly, “we throw people out who are eating and drinking” .

Now, as I type this, the same, or at least a near identical security guard is going quite mental, shouting loudly in a “quiet study area”. “Have you got your student card?!”, I can hear him saying to one miscreant. “Right, out!”.

He came over here a few minutes ago and seemed to peer over me for a while, before walking away looking disappointed that he hadn’t caught me doing coke on library premises.

The question is though, why am I suddenly being picked on? It’s like a few months ago when I let my pseudo-beard get out of hand. I’d be wandering around Virgin Megastores (well, one Megastore), with my music on, wearing a big coat, and I’d turn around after giving up on finding a cheap CD, to find no less than three tillmonkeys standing feet away from me watching my every move. I felt like a crook, despite the only crimes I was currently committing were crimes against humanity! (Lie). So I left the shop immediately, looking even more suspicious.

Has my appearance once again changed from “lazy student” to “criminal mastermind”?

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War, what is it good for? Television.
January 14th, 2006 at 23:59

I’ve just had the most excellent evening of television viewing thanks to the fantastic More 4. It’s an upmarket channel aimed at the over 35 ABC1 demographic, so I’m clearly in the target audience. Its like Channel 4 without all of the mindless crap that makes up half the schedule: Big Brother, T4, that sort of thing. This week it seeems to have dedicated its entire Saturday night schedule to the Iraqi war- mostly with a pleasingly anti-war stance.

TV Iraqi Style was a look at the impact of satellite television on post-Saddam Iraq. It turns out, that they have their own version of Pop Idol, and gameshows of a higher-calibre than Deal or No Deal (they have to answer questions to win stuff, in Iraq). I felt quite elitist, as my parents were watching the British version of Pop Idol or whatever shit ITV figuratively spewed and literally uplinked into the sick-bucket on the south bank that is the network distribution chain. Watching Iraqi Pop Idol in a language that I don’t understand was a much more educated and elitist pursuit.

Rory Bremner’s Beneath Iraq and a Hard Place was also fantastic. It was Rory and his “alright” impressions talking about the war. It touched on so-called alternative history, which I take an interest in.

Finally, yet another programme about the run-up to the war, this time with acted bits of people pretending to be Blair and Bush. They hadn’t gone as far as getting exact body doubles or trying to do impressions- they just did up “Tony”’s hair and got a vaguely gnome-like bloke to play Robin Cook. They spliced in real life footage of the real life people which made it inconsistent.

What I’m essentially getting at is although war is usually a bad thing, it makes TV much more watchable. I for one cannot wait for the liberation of Tehran.

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Gadget Fun
January 13th, 2006 at 23:45

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Dignity
January 13th, 2006 at 21:42

As you might well know, I’ve got quite a lot of dignity. There’s a lot I won’t do that’ll make me look vaguely silly, and it really is quite restrictive in what I can do- no breaking into song to illustrate a point, for a start.

This means that the hundreds of additional cast members who only appear for the musical scenes of my life are perpetually sitting in the wings. It’s too late to get the audience rhythmically clapping along to me meeting Kilroy or collecting my A-level results for instance. On the plus side, not much rhymes with Kilroy, so getting hundreds of people to simultaneously compose and execute the same song and dance in perfect time would be tricky, anyway. Swillroy?
Dignity is annoying though. A few minutes ago I was miming the drumming to the Gollum of the heavy rock world that is Audioslave, (of all things) and getting quite into it. I was nodding my head with vigour, and I had the volume on “loud”. Then it hit me. I was flailing my arms about wildly to an audience thankfully composed of no one, moving my arms as if I was playing the drums- despite not knowing how to play the drums nor the beat (or whatever) that the drums in the song make. If I was seen by someone who was deaf, or from outside of my bedroom window, I’d look demented. How hideously embarassing!
The trouble is, I’m always confronted with choices where I have to decide which option will allow to retain maximum dignity.

Yesterday at University I was vaguely late to a lecture and wanted to sit within bantering distance of Mickey and Shaz- rather than simply jump over the staggered desks like a lunatic, I forced my way along the isle of seats (Isle of Man, if you will, haha!), causing everyone in the row to stand up and watch me squeeze past them, me pushing my bag into each and everyone of their faces. With the benefit of hindsight, and in retrospect (ie: hindsight), it would seem that simply jumping the desks would have caused me to lose less dignitons.

Dignity restricts my capacity to explain, as well as my physical capabilities- as you can imagine it makes discussing music near impossible, especially as I don’t know any technical music terminology in which to subsitute for “waa waa waaah”, which I’m not willing to sing or hum. “Have you heard the new System of a Down album?” “Yeah, I like the song with the… guitar… and… drums in it”.

Maybe it’s a class thing? Maybe I’m trying my best to be as “upper-class” as possible, despite having only modest (as opposed to extravagent) material wealth, and being opposed to fox hunting, unrestricted capitalism, and upper-class cunts.

I bought a monocle about a year ago to try and raise myself about my station, and I wore it to school one day. This was very conflicting for me in terms of dignity- I was damaging my dignity by wearing a “silly” (£14!) prop, but at the same time, I was trying to increase my dignity by acting all upper class. I even adopted the posh accent, mannerisms and phrases. I called my classmates paupers and told them to “get back to the colonies”, among other things. Contrary to my expectations, this didn’t make me more popular, and a girl on the table opposite the James Gang table started actively blogging her dislike of me. Bizarre.
Will I retain this dignity? Will I get into hilarious scrapes that will compromise my dignity? Tune in next time, folks.

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Political Crisis
January 11th, 2006 at 16:51

I’m not sure what to do. I’ve always supported the Liberal Democrats as I’ve considered them the least evil of the three main parties- and they’ve always struck me as a nice bunch of people. The trouble is this fourthcoming leadership contest leaves me confused, baffled and hungry.

It turns out, the LibDems can be a bit right wing when they want to be. I was watching Mark Oaten on The Daily Politics today and he was all “yeah, let’s legalise (or keep legal) fox hunting and smoking in public and that”- I’m paraphrasing as he’s not quite that casual and ‘down wid da kidz’, but I disagree with this a lot. As far as I’m concerned they ought to be progressive and work their way towards banning alcohol and threatening-looking patrons in pubs, and offer subsidies to public houses proportional to the number of pool tables. They could enforce this by the use of undercover, or secret police. School’s could encourage kids to grass up their parents, and we could bring back hanging in public as a way to dissaude people from drinking alcohol near a poolblic house. (I’m very, very, sorry.)
On the other hand, I like the LibDem anti-war agenda and the “lets help poor people, abolish tuition fees and stuff” and the general being nice about things. I guess it’s down to who they pick as leader though. Charlie Kennedy looked like a friendly chap who’d do nice things- he looks like he could be your best mate in the whole wide world forever, in fact.

I was most disappointed to see Lembit Opik, Oaten’s campaign manager is slightly shittier than I thought he was in terms of “conforming with my views”- according to the infinatetly reliable source that is erm… a Westminster-insider-type blog, he’s pro-fox hunting among other things. He’s big on protecting the Earth from asteroids though, which is good. Anyway, my point is, isn’t “campaign manager” just a token title given to the person who’s running’s friend so they don’t feel left out?

If every childrens TV show that involved some sort of “Class President” election ever is anything to go by, then no doubt Lembit will be trying to get Mark to go against his principles to win votes, as he’ll suddenly be the world’s greatest PR man. Mark will try and do the populist thing that’ll get him elected, but feels it goes against what he believes, so will either have an impromptu speech at a campaigning event (“Stop everything! I can’t do this anymore!”) where he tells a heartwarming tale about morals and principles, and he’ll win, or the breakdown will happen out of the public eye and he’ll lose.

(Presumably see: The Simpsons, Hey Arnold, Arthur, Recess, Drake & Josh, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Kenan & Kel, et al… essentially anything American that has scenes set in school).

Will Oatan, whom I’m now going to mention Hitler in the same sentence as because of his vaguely right wing tendancies, fall foul of dirty campaign tricks? And what of the others? Ming and Hughes- who despite having a name containing the word huge is about as well known as the fact that Bolivia is the world’s biggest exporter of tin.

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Audioslave
January 10th, 2006 at 21:47

For the past week or so, I’ve been listening to Audioslave on a loop, in order to force myself to like them. The problem is, they’re technically shit.

Why am I doing this? One of my favourite bands is Rage Against the Machine, and unfortunately for me, they’d done the band thing of splitting up and falling out before I’d even discovered them. Not in the talent scount sense, you understand- they were already famous and that, but before I added them to my music collection. I would like to be a talent scout, though.

What’s the link? Three quarters of RATM are now in Audioslave. The trouble is despite the rich political rap-metal heritage, audioslave are about as lively and political as Ariel Sharon. And like Sharon, they don’t have clever guitar noises, hip-hop or shouty political lyrics, either.

They’re just a bit depressing really, compared to RATM. At least when RATM got pissed off they Killed in the name of, or knew their enemy- they didn’t act like a stone, or whatever other pretentious-o-bollocks that I’m going to have to read the lyrics sheet for. Cheer up for christ’s sake! Audioslave are shit.
I’ve just bought their second album.

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Today’s Paper
January 10th, 2006 at 20:17

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Old school data protection
January 8th, 2006 at 16:15

I’ve finally got back my data after sending a data protection request to my old school. In case you havn’t been keeping up: you can write to any company or organisation and demand all of the information they hold about you. They can charge you upto a tenner to do it, but it’s certainly worth the money.

The school’s certainly reacted slightly differently to my former employers, whom I did the same thing with. After not responding for about two weeks, I went up to the school to investigate, and it turns out they were trying to out-trick James O’Malley! They demanded the tenner in the same sickeningly “haha, I’m so clever” way that I demanded my data.

It can’t be a coincidence that a big two page spread of information on the data protection act appeared in this week’s school newsletter, can it?

Yesterday morning I was delighted to find a huge package had been sent to me through the post- it contained around one hundred A4 pages about me- approximately one metric tree. Most of it was photocopies of old school reports, although like with my former employers, there was some other gems:

The letter that my former employers sent to the school asking for my reference, and the form my head of house filled in on the return:

As you can see- aside from my head of house not putting much effort into filling out this form for my former employer, I’ve got hold of some strictly private and confidential information! It’s a shame I wasn’t a little bastard (industry term) whilst at school, then this would have been much more exciting “James throws chairs at teachers”, “James is so tough and threatening that we just debit the cumulative lunchmoney of all the students in the school to his bank account monthly”.Better than this though, I got back the secret teacher bit of the UCAS form that they refused to show us last year when we were applying to University. All of the teachers wrote reports on the students which were then forwarded to UCAS… and I have what they have to say about me! It’s so very damning:

Key quote: “He is an intellectual who loves to learn”. Yeah, that’s me. Have you seen my post about Big Brother? Or all the ones where I go out drinking, and steal the inevitable traffic cone?

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Channel 4 in “doing what their remit says” shocker.
January 5th, 2006 at 23:44

Minutes ago I received no less than an instant message, a text message and my dad physically entering my room to inform me that George Galloway is in the new series of Celebrity Big Brother. Why is this important to me? Because I met the man last year.

If you’ll allow me to stray into “pretentious-o-blog” territory for a moment, in which I’ll speak purely about what I think about politics, as opposed to talking shit about gingerbread men or whatever, pretending that my opinion matters, but I think this is the worst thing Galloway could have possibly done.

Switching on Channel 4, Galloway was walking up the steps towards the Big Brother house, shouting “stop the war!” to the morons who were there to see one hit wonder from the eighties and erm, Michael Barrymore by the look of it. Obligatory swimming pool joke. etc etc.

But why is Galloway doing this? He’s an elected MP and should be sitting in Parliament on Monday morning voting on the issues of the day, representing his constituents who elected him on the back of racial tension, deseating one of the only black, female MPs in the process. Instead of allowing a democracy to function, he’ll be trying to complete an assault course whilst dressed as a pantomime horse or something. What about DENTAL REFORM, George?! Did you think of that?! DENTAL REFORM?! (Or whatever they’ll be debating next week, anyway).
I think the worst thing about all this is the bad television it will create- as Galloway’s obviously in there with an agenda: “rant about how awful the war”, he’s going to try and turn every conversation into one about hyper-leftist politics. At the end of the programme when it cut to a live shot of him, he used the phrase “Nicaraguan solidarity movement”, when speaking to what looked like a transvestite.

It’s not even as if the typical Big Brother viewer is likely to care or vote… to be honest, I can’t even imagine them being able to read. Maybe if George had gone on Newsnight with a coherent argument that put his points across, he might have a larger degree of success, rather than having to rely on tabloid opportunism, like he has done in the past.

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What… the… fuck… ?!
January 3rd, 2006 at 20:28

This is unbelievable. I think I’m cursed or something. This is insane. What the fucking fuck is happening here?! I apologise for the strong language, but when I explain myself I hope you’ll join me in some group swearing.

You might remember that a while back I spent a lunchtime photographing silly shops with Mickey from Uni. It later turned out that they’d both closed down only days later.
Last Thursday I went bowling with my friends. It now turns out that the day after I went there (this link is the one you actually want to click, it’s new material) The Bowling Alley closed down too!

What the bloody hell is wrong with me?! Why does everything I touch turn to liquid(ated assets)?

PLEASE do not let me near the CocaCola factory!

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