“The path to enlightenment has been delayed due to a signals fault between Luton and Bedford”
May 29th, 2008 at 23:28

So, I was browsing the East Midlands Trains press release archive (yeah, it’s the sort of thing you do when you’re unemployed), and in amongst the tedious news about timetable updates and corporate partnerships, this leapt out at me:

“On Friday 23 May East Midlands Trains played host to a very special passenger. His Holiness the Dalai Lama travelled on the company’s 14.55 from St. Pancras International to Nottingham. His Holiness was travelling to the city to give five days of teachings.”

Christ on a bike. This means that the DALAI LAMA, must have sped through the small, unimportant, somewhat incestuous, Tory safe-seat in which I live – in fact, His Holiness must have passed a mere few hundred metres from my house. This is particularly notable, as he must be the biggest celebrity we’ve had in a ten mile radius since Frank Bruno opened the Carnival about 15 years ago.

EMT, who seem pretty chuffed with this PR-coup, posted some photos for proof:

Unfortunately for his Holiness, it looks like had to put up with the gurning East Midlands Trains chief executive for the entire two hour journey. No doubt they exchanged stories about what its like to be the spiritual leader of millions of Tibetans, and what it’s like to be in charge of an important transport artery linking London with places like Luton and Kettering. Looks like the EMT guy managed to work his magic and charm his Holiness with his dreamy eyes though:

“So the other week I was campaigning for human rights in Tibet and highlighting abuses by the Chinese occupiers to the United Nations Security Council”

“Yeah, I was having my photo taken with a sausage”

It does make you think though, what do you do if you get on the train and see the Dalai Lama. Do you say anything? Exclaiming “You’re the Dalai Lama!” would be pretty stupid, as he probably already knows that – he was discovered to be the 14th incarnation when he was four years old, so is probably well aware by now.

Similarly, sitting opposite him and just reading your book or newspaper with your iPod in as usual seems a bit of a waste – and staring at him would be even more awkward than it is when you forgot your stuff and have to just stare at the person opposite.

And what if you’d reserved a seat and when you got there found the Dalai Lama sitting in it? Do you turf him out? Actually, I’d quite like to be able to tell the story of how I kicked the Dalai Lama out of my seat.

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Outed the blue?
May 27th, 2008 at 22:02

A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of Conservatism. All the Powers of Middle England have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Big Business, The Countryside Alliance, Fundamentalist Christians and large swathes of an uninformed electorate.

Horrifyingly, I learnt today that one of my oldest and closest friends appears to have joined Conservative Future, the Tory youth organisation – judging by the Facebook groups he’s joined anyway (I’m hoping to retract this when it turns out he’s joined it to troll).

Its perhaps unfortunate that I now have an official Tory Friend. This means that every time I talk about him, he’ll be labelled with the prefix “my Tory friend”, to differentiate him from the Guardianistas I usually hang out with.

I’m not sure what horrified me more – the fact that someone I know has outed themselves as a Tory, after experiencing years of me railing against the party both on my blog, and in my sweary real-life self, or that an apparently well educated, relatively young person can be indoctrinated by Tory dogma, and actively support the party.

It’s weird – its like when you find out one of your friends is gay, only worse, as him being a Tory will actually impact upon my life in a negative way, if his votes in elections are counted – and like when you find out that someone is gay, it contextualises history and suddenly it all fits together, like explaining why someone has spent so much time kissing men.

It does all make sense now though – the lack of political views, and silence during political discussion for all those years wasn’t due to being uninformed or lack of interest… it was because he was too afraid to admit to being a Tory. Until Cameron came in, they were the Nasty Party – they still are, but Cameron has inexplicably made it acceptable. Which is why its only now he’s come out Tory. Maybe the reason his appearance at the party at the local Conservative club was so fleeting because he was scared that his two world were colliding: the one where he knows me, and his secret Tory life with his evil Conservative friends?

Who knows what is going on inside his brain now? And worse still, what does this mean for my opinions? If others think like this, why don’t I? Maybe leaving the standard of living on the poorest people to the whims of the free market is the best way to do it? Maybe the market never does fail? Maybe an overpowered, sabre-rattling military is the best way to achieve world peace? Maybe immigrants are coming over here and doing the awful thing the Dailies Mail and Express say they do?

Please, readers, tell me: has the whole world gone insane or I am the mental one?

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Eurovision Live Blog
May 24th, 2008 at 19:59

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Eurovision Live Blog Tonight
May 24th, 2008 at 12:33

Just a quick reminder, that I’ll be liveblogging the Eurovision Song Contest tonight on here. Check back at 8pm, to get live commentary on what you’re watching on screen. Who knows, I could validate your opinions, or make you violently disagree with me – either way, it’ll be better than Wogan as they’ll be much more swearing.

You’ll also be able to submit your comments live and join in and stuff. It should be terribly exciting.

So come back at 8!

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Democracy doesn’t work: Economics special!
May 23rd, 2008 at 20:05

In what must be about part fifty of my “why democracy doesn’t work series”, I’m doing the unthinkable: I’m going to sort of agree with the government line. I realise this is unfashionable and makes me a bad journalist (unless I’m Michael White), but they sort of have a point this time.

When trying to explain how they got obliterated in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, the government have been moaning about how everyone was voting Tory because they economy has gone to shit (that’s economic jargon) – and the interviews with the general public on the telly seem to back this up, with the “man on the street” bemoaning the spectacular price of petrol.

But… why punish the government for this? What are they supposed to do about the macro-economic circumstances? We live in a globalised world, where transnational capital flows can’t be stopped by one nation – economic policy these days is merely reactive. If the PM wanted to get the price of oil to go down, he’d have to figuratively do what King Canute did… and would have about as much success in the process.

Unfortunately, this is where democracy fails: the general public are too stupid to understand this. In fact, there was even a candidate in the by-election from the “Cut Tax on Diesel and Petrol” party, who I assume spends more time cutting up people in his white van than studying basic economic theory, such as the laws of supply and demand.

Reducing the tax would merely increase demand, which considering that unless Gordon discovers he forgot about a massive deposit of crude oil in his constituency, would then push up prices, and instead of the cash going to the government to pay for stuff, it’d go to needy oil barons and corrupt dictatorships. And as much as I dislike the government, I’d prefer them to get the money rather than the Saudis.

All the government can do to is fiddle with the tax and the interest rates – and even with these tools they don’t exactly have a free-hand at deciding what the economy does. Tax too much and all of the economic activity dries up, tax too little and there’s no money for hospitals and illegal wars – put the rates up and no one will spend any money, put the rates down and everyone will borrow money and get into stacks of debt. The unfortunate fact is that our entire economy, and by extension, our decadent way of life is entirely down to the whims of the market.

Don’t get me wrong, I find this a bit depressing too, but its true (and something else we can partially blame Thatcher for, excellently). So, like, lay off the government, everyone! Its not their fault they have so little power and influence in reality – they probably already have a complex about feeling powerless, and we’re not helping.

The problem isn’t the government, but the government and its lack of power. And that’s why democracy doesn’t work.

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Over and done for
May 22nd, 2008 at 22:48

Today was quite a significant day. I had my last ever exam and have now finished university – which means that now, instead of being able to blame my laziness on being a student, I’m now technically unemployed. I might go and sign on tomorrow.

Because I’ve not been organised enough to line up a job or a masters course yet, this means that I’ve got quite a lot of free time all of a sudden. So if anyone wants to go to the pub or something and needs to know when I’m free: I’ve got nothing on for the rest of my life.

As someone who is now technically unemployed, I guess I should start acting like it. I should probably grow a beard, and start going to the pub during the day regularly. So, er, not much change from the usual then. I guess I just need to do a bit more wandering around the town centre without purpose, and appearing vaguely threatening to people who have purpose in their lives – but I’ll be able to walk much slower when doing this, as I’ll have nowhere to be.

Seriously though, its actually a bit weird to comprehend – as we’re approaching the summer it just feels as though another summer holidays is approaching – but as it turns out, I’ve got nowhere to go in October. Now I know how Lou Bega felt in September 1999.

I got a weird feeling as I left the exam hall today though. Not just the usual feeling of a great weight being lifted off of my shoulders, but suddenly I felt this great contempt for students. Mooching off of the state, spending the tax money that non-students like me work hard for. They’ve never done a hard day’s work in their lives – unlike the working people!

It was enough to make me sick. And enough to make me really want to get on to a Masters course somewhere so I can be a student for a bit longer.

(Hey, if you’re an important person reading, why not pay me some money to do (non-weird) stuff for you? If you’re a post-grad admissions tutor, why not e-mail me and beg me to apply to your university? james (at) jamesomalley.co.uk)

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New Project: Two Minute Hate!
May 18th, 2008 at 14:48

I’ve started a new project: Two Minute Hate.

The idea is that every day they’ll be a new Enemy of The People, which we can all sneer at together.

So go on, take a look, give me some feedback, suggest some names, and if you could give it a plug on your website I’ll love you forever.

(I’m obviously going to keep blogging on my proper blog here – this is just a side-project – so don’t worry, James O’Malley fans!)

(Also, I’m liveblogging Eurovision again on Saturday, if you’re into that sort of thing)

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Literally the most pedantic post ever.
May 18th, 2008 at 14:35

I’ve got a confession to make, everyone. I think that I’m a Grammar Nazi. Don’t worry, that’s not too much like a real Nazi – if you’ve ever been on the internet, chances are you’ve met a Grammar Nazi. Grammar Nazis are those people on message boards and chat rooms who will complain and discredit you based on whether or not everything is spelt correctly and is grammar perfect, rather than the actual calibre of your argument. I only realised that I was a grammar Nazi when I realised that I was judging people on this criteria.

There are certain grammatical traits that, almost as a reflex action, will suddenly make me switch from a point of respecting someone to actively reviling them.

If you were to misuse the word “random”, my respect for you would drop so rapidly that you could admit to being a card-carrying supporter of Robert Kilroy-Silk and I wouldn’t think any less of you – because it wouldn’t be possible to go any lower. What bothers me is that people – lets be honest here, exclusively teenagers – tend to use the word to describe exclusively non-random things. Run a Google search for “it was totally random” to see what I mean. I think perhaps the only sentence in which the word “random” can be legitimately applied, given the causal nature of events, would be “My random number generator generated me some numbers… they were totally random!” – But for some reason, you never hear teenagers talk about their random number generators.

Talking of “strategy” in situations when there is no “strategy” involved bothers me too – Deal or No Deal being the worst offender as contestants’ talk of their strategy at picking boxes at random (maybe this is the only other acceptable usage of the word ‘random’?). I struggle to watch sport on television for similar reasons, because whenever they interview football players and talk of strategy, as when they say “we’re going to try and get in early and put some goals away and outflank the other team”, or whatever, all I hear is them saying “We’re going to try and score more goals than the opposing team”. This isn’t so much a “strategy” as it is “explaining the rules”.

Its things like this that make me literally fume with anger. Well not ‘literally’ fume- as that’s my third point. I really hate it when people misuse “literally”. This is most toxic when its misused in conjunction with a figure of speech – for example, “I’ve literally just let the cat out of the bag”, would cause me to ask why you were keeping a cat in a bag in the first place.

The horrible and unfortunate thing about misusing “literally” is that I do it – it started when I began deliberately misusing it in conversations for “irony”, but because I’ve done it so often its worked its way into my every day vocabulary – I literally cannot help myself.

Ten points to anyone who picks grammatical errors that I gone done in this post.

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If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
May 12th, 2008 at 15:37

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra:

Start spreading the news,

I’m in it today,

I am a part of it, New York, New York [Times]!

Apparently, my old nemeses as GodTube have received an investment from a London hedge fund – and as this is newsworthy, I got an e-mail from John Metcalfe at the New York Times who was writing an article about it, and he wanted to know more about what involvement with the site, given that I was one of the first people to be banned. And so in today’s business section… I’ve been quoted in the NEW YORK TIMES. Y’know, the paper from the movies! The American paper of record! Here’s what they said about me (I added the links in myself):

Mocking Christianity is definitely not allowed [on GodTube]. James O’Malley, a 20-year-old from Leicestershire, in Britain, posted a series of videos last year that jeered at evangelical theology. During a videotaped walking tour of the Natural History Museum in London, he referred to a plesiosaur fossil as a “liar-saur” and noted that volcanoes tended to erupt in non-Christian countries.

“The first couple of videos, where I spoke about Biblical infallibility and homosexuality, remained on GodTube and were treated like any other video,” Mr. O’Malley said. “It was only when I posted a third video suggesting that the earth was flat and that astronauts were part of the ‘round earth’ conspiracy that they finally cottoned on to the fact it was a hoax, and I was banned.”

So now I can say I’ve been in the New York Times. I cannot tell you how amazed I am about this.

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Universally disliked layout in “slightly less ugly” shocker!
May 9th, 2008 at 23:50

I’ve been doing some incredibly nerdy things today, and I’m blogging about it because it took bloody ages to get right, and I want to create the impression that it wasn’t entirely futile. Remember before when everyone hated my blog layout? Yeah, everyone hated it, with the Twitter bit to the left getting some particular stick. So I’ve tried to remedy it by making it seem slightly less cluttered.

I’d go into detail and explain what’s changed, but it is unbelievably tedious to describe (ie: I don’t really know what I’m talking about either). Here’s a diagram instead:

Basically, its crudely showing how things that I witness in real life eventually end up as something you ignore and scroll past on here. I’d like to say the lesson here is “look and appreciate how much raw electricity is wasted transmitting James O’Malley’s thoughts across the world”, but really the lesson is probably something like “James likes making non-standards compliant flow charts”.

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