Strike!
January 31st, 2007 at 03:09

Today, the PCS Union, which I’m a member of, has gone on strike. This means that I’m on strike too- what an excellent boost to my left wing credentials!

As you might expect, they’re fighting the power by complaining about wages and job cuts and so on. I’m in full support of my colleagues sticking it to the man, but I won’t be joining my colleagues on the picket lines. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going into work, I’m just not going to stand in the cold. However, to show my solidarity for my comrades, I have set up a picket in my bedroom. I’ve got a burning oil drum to keep me warm, unprofessional placards and have adopted a gruff northern accent for the duration of the picket. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a live webcam so you can watch me strike live…

Workers of all countries, unite! Although just British civil service workers will do.

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Big Issue
January 30th, 2007 at 01:05

I bought a Big Issue today because my headphones have broken, and so I couldn’t even pretend that I hadn’t clocked the homeless guy and was coincidentally giving him a wide-berth on the pavement.

The seller was dead friendly, and as the transaction was completed, he tried some light conversation, telling me that he only had three left. I’m not very good at light conversation at the best of times, so talking to someone who’s had life pretty difficult is going to be something of a challenge- after all, the most difficult struggle I’ve experienced thus far in my life is trying to acquire a Nintendo Wii.

I responded with a sort of feeble yet cheerful laugh and then, predictably, put my foot in it. What’s the worst possible thing you could say to a man who spends his nights in shop doorways?

“Do you get to go home when you’ve sold them all?”

No. I didn’t just say that… did I?

I think the only way I could have made my comments worse is if I’d then explained how I was born into a vaguely middle-class family and have life easy by default. And then got the banknotes out of my wallet and rubbed them all over my face in a “do you want them? do you?” motion.

Incredibly, he didn’t stab me up or point out my stupidity, but remained friendly and cheerful, telling me to have a nice day.

I think being a Big Issue vendor must be like a seal of approval on who are the friendly homeless people. A bit like ‘rose awards’ and static caravan parks.

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Frank Turner
January 29th, 2007 at 02:28

This evening I went to see Frank Turner, formerly of Million Dead, playing at The Social in Nottingham. He’s a bit different to the stuff I usually listen to - he’s all acoustic and moderately gentle… the sort of thing JD likes. I basically decided to go on the premise that I’ve seen a couple of videos of him on Youtube covering punk songs by bands like Propagandhi and NOFX. And I like ‘Thatcher Fucked the Kids’, which Frank wrote himself.

You’d think that getting to a major music venue is easy. We even had the SatNav to help us out. I put in the postcode and away we went, and it was working fine until we got to central Nottingham, when we might actually need it. It was giving us some strange instructions, trying to get us to disobey the laws of the road. At one point when it was egging me on to drive the wrong way up a one way street (which I, er, did), I’m sure it said “go on, dare you”.

It was weird- whatever we did, we just couldn’t get to the venue. We kept circling around with about 0.3 miles to go, unable to get any further. In the end, we hit a dead end and it dawned on us: they’d pedestrianised the road.

“FFS!”, I cried as I took the rite of passage and became a proper motorist. It turns out that I’m strongly opposed to the pedestrianisation of city centres. I think this is the culmination of my slow transformation into the sort of person who joins the Association of British Drivers and pops up on the news complaining every time some sort of sensible environmental measure is proposed, and who will never be happy until every inch of countryside is tarmacked over and given an unlimited speed limit.

Thankfully, we eventually got parked- that’s probably a good thing, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to hear my expert opinions on the musicians that I saw:

Beans on Toast was, despite the numerically questionable name, wasn’t bad. He was just one bloke with a guitar who sang vaguely comedic songs. He stood on a stool for the entire performance. At one point he asked the audience if any of them had done Cocaine today. Two of them had.

Dive Dive were… hard to define. I can’t figure out what genre they were, but that’s because I’m terrible. They were quite good though. They also doubled as Frank’s backing band.

Frank Turner himself was good. I’m a bit disappointed that he didn’t play any covers- not even any old Million Dead songs. It would have been excellent to see him play Propagandhi’s State Lottery in a gentle way. He did play Thatcher Fucked the Kids though, which went down well. I’m not too familiar with the rest of his material but it was all enjoyable.

It was good, really. In summary: music!

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“United in the goal of victory”
January 28th, 2007 at 02:10

I stayed up to watch the State of the Union the other night. Aside from the whole “we’re going to try and emulate Britain’s pompous faffing about at the opening of Parliament, only without a monarch and old-timey clothes” vibe that it was emitting, something in the actual speech bothered me.

“We’re united in the goal of victory [in Iraq]“, President Bush said, in a very Cameron-esque way.

Yeah, it’s the sort of thing politicians come out with- its not as if he’s going to say “I hope we lose”, but just who was he referring to by the phrase ‘united’? The Democrats? The insurgents? As, I’m pretty sure their goal is victory too.

I think this lazy script writing just shows how the War on Terror has lost its way. After the amazing visual spectacle that was 9/11, and the Afghan sequel, the Bush administration just became obsessed with the spin-off, to the point where they’re focusing on that rather than the core franchise. Face it, Iraq is Torchwood- it’s never going to be Doctor Who (the ‘War on Al Qaeda’)- just a weak immitation aimed at the wrong audience.

At least we haven’t seen (in public) Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have a homosexual encounter that wasn’t necessary to plot.

I think they should just give up and give the people what they really want: more extra-judicial killings of innocents by pilotless drones on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border… and not Iraq!

Maybe the Americans should cut their losses and try a reboot of their franchise, like they did with James Bond? By the end of Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan was driving a physically impossible invisible car and using a zimmer-frame in the scenes where you could only see above his waist- they had to reinvent Bond and make him cool and realistic again. I think they should declare war on another concept.

What about a War on Nature? Someone needs to get those bastards who caused the Tsunami back, after all.

(I can’t believe I’ve just described American foreign policy with a Doctor Who analogy either.)

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Columnist
January 27th, 2007 at 15:16

Hello, what’s all this then?

It would appear that I’ve had a proper column published in a real newspaper. Seriously. I’m not joking - the lovely people at the Northamptonshire Herald & Post decided to publish nearly half a page of drivel. They printed an adaption of my post about medical ethics. I think it must have been a slow news week.
As you might imagine - I’m a bit horrendously pleased with this, as I’ve now achieved one of my life goals before I’m 20. Now I only have the following things left to achieve:

• Achieve the three minute mile (so I can see the look on that arrogant twat Roger Bannister’s face)
• Slap Richard Littlejohn (with no legal or violent repercussions)
• Swim with dolphins

I will begin work on achieving these three things: tomorrow.

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Pessimism
January 24th, 2007 at 01:48

Is there any more depressing people alive than pessimists? I mean, aside from manic depressives and old people. And poor people. And ugly people.

I think I’ve always been an optimist. Or at least, I like to think I am, as I’m nearly always upbeat. I think I can look any situation in the face, metaphorically speaking, and say something positive. I mean, a funeral is still a day out doing something different from the norm- even if the pyrotechnics at the end are a bit disappointing.

The trouble is that pessimists sort of have a point when they’re brooding about what a waste of time everything is. Any happiness is only a side effect of our meaningless existence, so it isn’t as if there’s some sort of karma that will balance out the good with the bad. If I was some sort of pseudo-philosophical ponce, I’d probably talk about the relative nature of good and bad right now. Oh!

I just can’t stand it when the second something is over, pessimists are instantly complaining about how terrible it was… I’d at least like to be under the illusion that I enjoyed whatever I just did, at least for a brief few minutes. Hell, I even tried to put on a brave face after seeing The Matrix Revolutions.

The worst thing about pessimism is that it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, a bit like everyone going “ooh, a think there’s going to be a recession so we better stop spending money” will lead to a recession, or thinking “I wonder if I’d be beaten up if I implied the crowd of hooligan skinheads over there were homosexuals?”.

Its slightly bizarre that some people are so pessimistic though, as the forces of optimism (I’m implying that there’s a massive ideological battle, although there clearly isn’t) have one trick up their sleeve that even evolutionists and international relations liberals don’t have: scientific evidence.

Is it really a coincidence that every single SI unit is a measure of how much stuff is there, and not how much stuff isn’t there? The glass is half full and that is scientific fact.

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Tingh ghey woar epay shway
January 23rd, 2007 at 02:16

Last night, I tried an experiment for the second time. I wanted to see if I could learn whilst I slept by listening to an audio book. My thinking was, er, sound: if I could take in new facts and knowledge whilst asleep, then I could double my productivity- and potentially strangle myself with a headphones lead at the same time!

My first attempt at sleep learning was a few months ago now. Unfortunately, it didn’t go exactly to plan. The only audio book I could find was a royalty-free low bit-rate recording of, er, Mein Kampf.

It was being read by a man with the creepiest Russian accent I’ve ever heard. If Saruman from Lord of the Rings lived in the Urals and wasn’t a massive fan of Judaism, that’s what his voice would have sounded like.

The experiment failed when I failed to fall asleep. As I lay there trying to get to sleep with the most evil book every written flowing into my ears, I became terrified that I’d accidentally wake up a Nazi. Rather than simply learn about the ideological origins of one of the most evil and pivotal men in history, I was worried that I’d wake up in the morning and carry out tasks with ruthless efficiency, goose-step about and set up a concentration camp in my back garden. And I don’t mean the summer-camp for kids with ADD sort of concentration camp.

So I abandoned the plan- it turns out that my MP3 player was on shuffle mode anyway, so I would have ended up getting Kampfed in the wrong order… shooting myself in the head before invading and occupying most of continental Europe would have been less effective, I think.

Last night I tried to see if I could learn in my sleep again. Thankfully, I’d managed to get hold of a slightly more normal audio book. A beginners guide to Mandarin Chinese.

I’d love to be able to tell you that I’m now fluent in conversational Mandarin, being able to say something sickeningly banal to a tillmonkey, such as “does that mean I get it for free?” when whatever I was buying failed to scan, but, alas, I only managed to pick up one line. I can say “please give me a bottle of water”- the Chinese for which is in the title heading.

From what I can remember, the audio book was a bit corny. It basically consisted of a Chinese woman and an English bloke repeating phrases, set to slightly Chinese sounding background music. The bloke kept chipping in with irritating comments like “beer is ‘peejoe‘, so I’ll just think of Joe peeing after drinking some beer!”. And he had a so-called “mind-hook” for every number. “six is ‘leo‘, so I’ll just think of Leo the lion with a six around his neck!”

At the end of each section, the Chinese woman challenged the bloke to say something, which he’d always get right, and she’d congratulate him. This just adds insult to injury when you’re already feeling stupid for not remembering a weird sort of Chinese noise that you heard only seconds beforehand.

Another interesting fact I picked up - although I dare-say I picked it up whilst I was still concious, was that in Mandarin, the sound of a word changes the meaning. For example, high-to-low “COF-Fee”, apparently means “coffee”, but low-to-high “cof-FAY” means “bad”. It could be the other way around, or even a completely different set of words, I can’t really remember, but my point is that it must be awkward to speak to Chinese if your voice is in the process of breaking.

In summary: learning in your sleep doesn’t really work. Damn.

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Newsletter Plug
January 21st, 2007 at 21:57

Hey you! Yeah, you! The one looking at the computer screen! You look like someone who likes to receive an e-mail with all of the best links from around the internet every Saturday!

Really? You’re not that sort of person? Damn. That’s actually quite upsetting, as I have this, er, e-mail newsletter that I send out to subscribers every week, and I thought it’d be really fun if you could join.

Yeah, I understand that you say that it’s not me, its you, and I know that you’re at a difficult place right now, but you really could be missing out. This week subscribers got linked to a video of a Fox News presenter going mental, and some giant rabbits.

Can you tell me that you’ll think about signing up? If you decide you want to, and I’ll like, totally respect your decision whatever you decide, you can put your e-mail address in the box at the top of the page (if you’re reading via RSS you’ll actually have to come to the real blog), and click subscribe.

Please, for me?

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Inaccurate Names
January 20th, 2007 at 03:07

The other day I was complaining about band names, but they’re not the only thing that have irritating names. I don’t like things that have inaccurate names.

For example, why are bus shelters called bus shelters? They don’t shelter the bus, they shelter the passengers. Fire exits aren’t for fire, but are for people. And I think Guantanamo Bay is more of a cove.

It’s not that I only like things that have achingly literal names like Snakes on a Plane, but why dress up ‘acid that will take rust off of metal things’ as Cillit Bang, or ‘the occupation of a sovereign nation’ as the ‘latest stage in the War on Terror‘?

I imagine this isn’t as much as a problem in German, as they tend to have words that are (approximately) a billion letters long and would describe a horse as “fourleggedmammalthatyoucanrideandhasalongface“.

Its almost as bad as when a product name is just a hijacked name from another thing. A lynx, for instance, is not just deodorant, but is also a big cat type thing. And an iPod is in fact a member of the duck family that is mostly found in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here are some new names I have come up with for some things:

1. Horse = Car that has legs instead of wheels, and a one horse power engine
2. The Daily Mirror = A newspaper printed on a non-reflective surface
3. Glass = Liquefied sand
4. Blogging = Putting your worthless opinions on the internet

Coming up with these is actually harder than it looks.

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Big Racist’s Big Mouth (Big Brother’s Racist Mouth?)
January 19th, 2007 at 02:20

Yeah, that’s the best snappy title I could come up with. Basically I’m attempting to wade in on the whole “are the Big Brother contestants a bunch of racists?” debate in order to get some hits off of the back of mentioning words like “BIG BROTHER JADE RACIST SHILPA”.

I haven’t been watching Big Brother, until today, at least. I think it was when the heavyweight Channel 4 News led on the story that I thought “yeah, I’ll join this media frenzy”. The case for the prosecution seems pretty damning, and I’d sure hate to be Jade right now. Y’know, not because of the whole racism thing, but because she’s an idiot.

And I dare say, in my highly uninformed opinion, that that’s the problem. I doubt she’s really that racist, at least in the BNP card holding “its political correctness gone mad that black people can vote” sense of the word. More likely she’s just a complete and utter cretin. I doubt she’s able to construct an eloquent argument to voice her opinion in whatever they were arguing about… she looks like she’s barely able to construct a sentence.

Channel 4 reckon there’s “cultural” differences, which I suppose is plausible. Although when I don’t know much about someone’s culture or whatever, I tend to ask questions, and, er, not try and perpetuate racist stereotypes.

Maybe she is racist? Either way, its going to be excellent television when she gets kicked out and is interviewed, and I’m saying this as someone who would sooner watch Iraqi insurgent beheading videos than Big Brother usually.

It must be annoying for Jim Davidson knowing that someone’s muscling in on his ‘celebrity racist’ act, though.
I think the most surprising thing is that I found out today that this series of Big Brother is in fact a celebrity series. I didn’t recognise any of them until my dad explained that one of them was “H” was Steps. His career outlook was looking so positive too.

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