Man kills man. Man dies.
April 17th, 2006 at 18:26

There’s been a lot of crime around recently- it’s almost as I’m living in St Annes in Nottingham, or the rough part of Los Angeles where all of the terrorists that try to attack it in 24 presumably live. The other week a couple were killed in a farm house not far from me- and last Friday there was a shooting in Oadby.

The interesting thing about the first two is that I’m sure I served them both during my career as a tillmonkey. This means that as a tillmonkey, I’ve met both killers, and the killed. Being a tillmonkey is practically being Jack Bauer. In terms of “OMFG I could have been in the World Trade Centre on 9/11″ syndrome, I was actually planning to go to Oadby last Friday evening- it’s probably a good job that the plan collapsed. Probably would have been quite exciting though.

This has got me thinking a bit- not about the fragility of life or the problems with the human condition, but about the media coverage if I ever commit murder. The trouble is that now I’m 18, and technically an adult, if I was to kill someone else- inadvertently or not- East Midland’s Today (I’m not big-headed enough to assume the murder would be of national significance) would use a phrase “an 18 year old man is wanted in connection with the murder of a nazi clown”, or worse still “an 18 year old man has been charged with the murder of a nazi clown”.

My point is that I’d be an evil man, not an innocent boy, lad, or youngster. Everyone would automatically assume I was guilty. I wouldn’t even get to go to a nice kids prison, and I’d be stuck in a proper prison full of nasty people- and I wouldn’t be able to rat on the in-mates to the screws because they’d break my legs with a razor blade stuck on the end of a toothbrush.

And if I ever go missing, the media won’t care. It’s no longer the story of a missing child who does well in school and has a loving family, and instead I’ll be a missing man, who’s presumed to be a drug-addicted nutter. The police won’t use their “saturate the media with information” machine that they use to spread the word about missing kids as quick as possible.
I guess the best thing to do is not commit murder- it’ll be a struggle, but I’m sure I can manage it.

Oi! You’re not looking at me funny, are you? Come closer and say that…

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Flags
April 14th, 2006 at 16:30

I hate fascists. I hate them more than I hate the change of font on News 24. Why? Because of flags. Why must the baddies always have betters flags than us (the good guys)?

It’s not just the swastika, which I discussed a few months ago. I was looking on Wikipedia to see what year Oswald Mosley died, to answer a pub quiz question from last night (1980), and the discovered he had the most excellent flag. Look: here.

How cool is that? A lightning bolt, bold colours, a circle! Like the swastika, if it wasn’t affiliated with the far right, it’d make the most brilliant of logos.

It seems that most Nazis have excellent flags- just look at the Syrian Nazi Flag. The swedish Nazis use a pleasantly coloured variation on the swastika. I say “pleasant”, but I mean “would be quite nice if it wasn’t a flag for the biggest sub-human bastards of the lot of them” (the Swedes).

It’s not all plaudits and award ceremonies for Nazi branding people though. The most evil people in history have created some of the most awful flags in history too. Look at this monstrosity. What the bloody hell is that? It’s like they tried to do a swastika but ran out of ink.

So what flags do we, the moderate centrist majority have to fight against this excellent branding? A four hundred year old clash of colours representing an imperialist past and pompous aristocracy? An unsymmetrical (including rotational) American flag? The EU flag is quite elegant, though.

It’s a good job the result of World War II wasn’t decided on who had the best flag- otherwise we could all be speaking Japanese right now.

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Highland Jaunt
April 13th, 2006 at 15:57

Yesterday I took Heather for a drive- we wern’t aiming to be anywhere in particular, so we just burnt finite oil reserves, releasing the fumes all over rural Leicestershire.

For her first time in a car with me driving, she was surprisingly at ease- even when I showed her my “going fast around hair-pin bends” trick.

The navigation, much like the controlling of the motor vehicle, was not without its flaws. I promised Heather that I wouldn’t paint the female race in a bad light in this blog update, but we somehow, with a woman navigating, we managed to end up in Scotland.

Well, sort of. There’s a tiny hamlet in Leicestershire called Scotland… and just to clarify, Heather was an excellent navigator, and the previous paragraph was merely for comedy value. Honest.

We reached a point in the road where we had two choices- left or right. Right would lead us up a tiny, narrow, uphill dirt track, which as watched we saw a tractor come down (it was that rural), and the left had a road that was made out of tarmac.

Or so we thought.

We headed down what looked like the busier of the two roads. On one side of the one-car-width-wide road there was a tall hedge on top of a small wall, and on the other side, solid brick walls containing houses. As we went down this road, it began to dawn on us that it might not have been a good idea. The main problem with it was that it just came to an end, right in front of a muddy bog of a field. So we were trapped- there was certainly no possibility of being able to turn the car around, and driving into the field facing us to turn around would almost certainly destroy the car- afterall, I was driving a Ford KA, and not a Chelsea Tractor.

After crying, and checking the road atlas only to find the road wasn’t big enough to even be a dotted line on the map, and then crying again, I Heather decided that I had to act. I wasn’t going to let it turn into a sitcom. There would be no instant cut to nightfall with us still sitting, facing on to this field, there would be no irate farmers and no farcicle solution that was staring us in the face all along.

So I reversed about 100m- breaking almost every traffic law in existence, eventually having to pull into someone’s drive to do a three (seven) point turn.

We must have visited every little village in Leicestershire- now nobody can claim that I’ve never been to such exciting places as Tilton, Goadby and Cranoe.

There was one road (with a speed limit of 60mph) that you had to go over a cattle grid to get on to. Scarily, there were sheep standing on the side of the road, with no fence stopping them going in front of the car. It was like going through Woburn Safari Park, albeit with more boring animals.

It was a fun drive really, although I think now I’ve seen enough of rural Leicestershire to write a Thomas Hardy novel.

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Smokin’
April 10th, 2006 at 16:58

I went and played pool with an old friend of mine who I havn’t seen since Christmas, this evening. To my surprise, it turns out that he’s taken up smoking. And to my greater surprise, although shocked and appauled, I helped facilitate his horrible habit- by which I mean, I drove to a petrol station so he could buy some cigarettes.

Obligatory Nazi reference: It was like I was a concentration camp guard, and “just doing my job” is no excuse.

This is an interesting contrast to how I might have reacted a few years ago. That would have essentially been “OMG WTF Blocked”. This said, whilst I’ve perhaps become slightly more tolerant of smoking, I still can’t help but twist everything anyone says into something about the evils of smoking.
I found out that he smoked a few minutes beforehand on MSN Messenger, so I did the most logical thing possible and created a playlist for my iPod (which is played out of the car’s speaker via a casette tape adapter) made up of songs about smokers. These included:

• Less Than Jake – Best wishes to your black lung
• Less Than Jake – Portrait of a cigarette smoker at 19
• Whitmore – Nine Bar Blues (tenuous)
• Warsawpack – War on Drugs
• Minor Threat – Straight Edge (for the vague irony)

I didn’t tell him about this until we’d listened to it all and had reached the pub. He seemed both bemused and surprised.

He completely and utterly thrashed me at pool too- if smoking makes you both good at an inconsequential parlour game and an excellent journalist, maybe I should take it up?

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Wrong place, Wrong time
April 8th, 2006 at 23:26

If you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard this before- many, many times. If you only know me by this blog and the occasional self-aggrandising photos I try to promote myself with, then you’ve probably heard this before.

I have a horrible problem with saying the worst possible thing to people, at the worst possible times.

A couple of years ago now, a friend was telling me about how his epileptic uncle had been killed in a car crash after being hit by a bus. For some reason, I thought this was some sort of comedy anecdote, so what did I say: “Was the bus flashing?”. (It wasn’t).

Another friend once told me that his trumpet teacher had died. I said the most respectful thing possible and asked him if he played the “Waa, Waa, Waaaah”, sound on his trumpet when he found out. (He didn’t).

The same friend was telling me a few weeks later about how he was in a concert, in memory of the teacher. “Did he come on at the end and collect some flowers?”, I asked. (The teacher didn’t even turn up. Thankfully.)

Worse still, whenever anyone tells me anything like this, the first thing I can think of, as well as the following seven or eight thoughts following, are always the worst possible thing to say at the time. I find my brain becomes unusually witty at the first sight of “serious conversation”, and I have to force myself to keep my mouth shut, rather than coming out with something that, if my life were a sitcom, would be award winning.

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Cartoon Doubletake
April 6th, 2006 at 17:32

I saw something today that I never thought happend in the real world. I saw someone do a real “comedy doubletake”.

Y’know what I’m talking about- it’s the basic joke for every cartoon ever made, and has probably happend on Friends a million times. Like if a cartoon character is watching things go past, and saying what they are out loud (perhaps a checklist before an excursion), and something like the following happens. I’m using the Generation Game conveyer belt in my example as I can’t think of any other context-free situations I can use.

“Breadmaker… Cuddly Toy… Little wooden stick man for drawing… Toaster… The decapitated heads of Lenin and SMart presenter Mark Speight, mounted on a plinth, passionately kissing… Picnic Hamper… Screwdriver set… W…W…What?!”

Unfortunately I didn’t see this exact scene- the screw driver set actually contained a number of different hammers.

It was on the train coming back from University today- the ticketman strolled past me at speed, before double-taking and slowly walking backwards, craning his neck back to look at me. Just like on TV.

Unexcitingly- it didn’t end like a cartoon, with me evading the ticket collector by running off of a cliff and floating in mid-air… although I did nearly slip on a banana peel leaving the station.

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Dixons
April 5th, 2006 at 21:00

Now, I know I’m not one to talk at length about branding, but the news that Dixons are rebranding as “Currys.digital” really has be baffled. (Dixons, Currys and PC World are all owned by the same company).
They’re not getting rid of the Dixons brand on the highstreet entirely, retaining it as an “online” brand- in other words, they’re keeping the Dixons website.

Quite why they’re taking the brand out of a marketplace where there is only three or four competitors, and putting it head-to-head with practically everyone (eBay, Dabs, Ebuyer, etc), and then removing the unique selling point of its online services- “We’re not crooks as we have a shop in town”, I don’t know. Competing with yourself in terms of Dixons Vs the Currys.digital website is a fantastic idea, too. It’s like having three kids who are similar, although they all specialise in different areas- and then breaking the legs of the child who’s more athletic so that the smart kid and the witty one can keep up. Then shooting yourself in the foot.

Worse still, they’re not actually getting rid of Dixons shops- they’re keeping them in Ireland because “broadbank take-up is lower”, and they’re keeping them in airports because they’re a recognisable brand.

Maybe they’re doing it to save money… but then why keep some Dixons stuff and create an entirely new brand to replace it with? (Currys.digital)

Don’t get me wrong- there’s nothing I love more than consolidating a brand. In fact, it’s my third favourite past-time after pointing out flaws or problems with world maps, and remarking “Snakes on a Plane” at inappropiate moments. There just doesn’t seem to be any logic behind what Dixons are doing.

Silly Dixons.

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Mum at Uni
April 4th, 2006 at 23:42

There was an economist called Hayek,

Who preferred the system of the free market,

He liked market liberalisation,

As it was best for the nation,

As big government is almost monarchic.

I performed another presentation at University today about my third favourite economist, Friedrich Hayek. It went a bit more successfully than my history presentation, as I didn’t break down into tears at the end. The reason I’m telling you this is because I wanted an excuse to publish my excellent limerick, which I spent more time on than actually researching the man.

This wasn’t the most exciting thing that happend at University today though. For some reason, my mother was on a training course in the building I have my lectures and seminars in. This meant she was invading my turf and cramping my style. I couldn’t have predicted it more accurately.

We ran into each other outside of a lecture theatre, where I, along with my University friends, colleagues and tutors were waiting for a lecture. “Woooo-oooh, James!”, she cried, ruffling my hair in the process, then proceeding to sort of put her arm around me. “Here’s my son!”, she remarked to her colleague. She was essentially being very mother-like… in front of all of my university friends who think I’m cool, and used to have infinite respect for my mysterious, yet cool demeanour.

It was quite possibly the most embarassing thing ever.

Thankfully, nobody said anything to me, but I could tell that they were looking at me with contempt. Contempt and admiration.

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