Hyper Bowl
February 5th, 2008 at 02:54

In this 21st Century multi-cultural society we’re all supposed to be progressive, modern and tolerant of other cultures. We’re supposed to all be cultural relativists, and even though we may not agree with what a group of people are doing, we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut so not to offend them and their hallowed traditions.

There’s loads of countries doing all sorts of unpleasant things, but we’re supposed to tolerate the likes of Saudi Arabia oppressing women because it is how they do things there- women not being able to leave the house without a man is part of their culture, and we should respect it. Similarly, we presumably shouldn’t complain about Russian President Vladimir Putin rigging elections in Russia because its part of Russian History and Culture to have a distinct lack of democracy.

I hate to say it, but I disagree with this relativistic way of looking at things. I think it is about time that someone came out and said it once and for all. I know I’m being courageous merely committing these words to text… but… but… the American Football Super Bowl its rubbish, isn’t it?

Sure, it’s a major part of American culture, with millions of people around the world tuning in to the highlight of the American sporting calendar… but after staying up late on a Sunday night to see what all of the fuss was about, I really don’t get it.

I should qualify this by saying that I don’t actually know how to play American football, but as far as I can tell it goes something like this:

A man blows a whistle, another man throws a ball, another man catches it, and then they stop playing again. Then they do a replay of that one throw of the ball in slow motion from a number of different angles, before cutting to lots of different shots of the players milling about or the coach talking to someone on his headset – then they’ll go back to the studio for some analysis, and then they’ll start over again and have five more seconds of play as the process repeats itself. It’s a strange ritual… but who am I to question it?

To make this even more bewildering, I think the commentators were speaking another language too – quite possibly an obscure dialect of gibberish – rather than describe what was going on, like I assumed they would do, they jabbered on about “taking the snap” or “the sack and the fumble”, whilst hundreds of different number graphics flashed about on the screen.

I realise that by writing this I’m almost literally picking a fight with men who are much more burly and numerous than I, but I can’t see the appeal of this weird spectacle of American culture. Maybe I’m just a bigot, and need to learn more about the game in order to understand it, before writing it off completely, and build bridges that way. Or maybe it is actually just a load of men in helmets bumping into each other over and over again.

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The Truman Show
January 29th, 2008 at 12:35

At risk of sounding like the most arrogant man alive… is it only me who has ever wondered if the whole world does actually revolve around me? Not in the scientific sense, of course – as fat as I may be, I still don’t have a mass large enough to make any sort of gravitational impact – but in a similar way to the film The Truman Show.

You’ll remember that in the film, Jim Carrey plays Truman, the unwitting subject of a reality TV show, where his entire life is broadcast on TV, and everything he does and encounters is controlled by TV executives. I’ve wondered with alarming regularity whether or not I’m actually a less interesting, less charismatic and more easily dislikeable version of Truman.

Admittedly, my evidence for this is pretty thin, but I’ve chosen to take the 2003 “WMD in Iraq” approach, and have reasoned that the total lack of evidence means that the producers of the programme are just really good at concealing themselves.

For example, my frame of reference here is a film – this, presumably is a massive in-joke. Here I am watching a film in which there is man in exactly the situation I’m in, with “them” even describing how they go about executing such a complex ruse, and how they script everything people say to me, and yet I’m completely oblivious to the “reality” of the situation.

Other “Easter eggs” have no doubt been planted too. It can’t be a coincidence that my favourite book is George Orwell’s 1984, and my favourite film is The Matrix – both are about living in a false reality and being controlled by higher powers in a way that mirrors the Truman Show world that I’m seemingly trapped in. Sure, you actors reading may claim that a reasonable explanation would be these shared narrative themes appeal to me and my obviously delusional and paranoid mind, but if we apply the rule of Occam’s Razor – that when faced with a number of explanations the simplest explanation is the correct one, then it is much easier to say that I am living in the Truman Show than have a complex psychological analysis of my neurosis.

But can it be a coincidence that my life is almost like a soap opera? I live through various story-arcs that overlap, encounter many varied characters, the pathos is regularly juxtaposition with humour, I’ll be funny and I’ll be melodramatic– although I must admit that I’m yet to either murder someone or be murdered, nor have encountered any corpses under my patio. Another explanation could be that soap operas reflect the foibles of life rather than the other way around… but is this really likely given the evidence that I’ve laid out?

The worst thing is that I know you’re all laughing at me now – no doubt this piece of writing is pinned up in the green room where all the actors go when they’re not on set, so that people can walk past, stroke their chin and wryly remark “if only he knew the truth”.

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Play knifely, kids
January 14th, 2008 at 17:57

“Computer games are causing knife crime!” would be a succinct way of putting what Gordon Brown said this week whilst pandering to The Sun’s sensationalist editorial line. Quite right he is too – why would there be a complex sociological cause of knife crime amongst young people, perhaps “inequality, poverty and social dissatisfaction”, like a report by Kings College academics said, when there’s a much easier to blame, fear-inducing “man on the street” scapegoat answer?

Video games, amongst the mainstream media, always seem to get a rough ride. Despite being a bigger slice of the entertainment industry pie than the film industry, they’re derided as puerile and not a serious medium for expression, unlike books, film and unmade beds.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that games are all inherently evil and that obviously playing a game that simulates, say, tennis, is going to turn young people into crazed killing machines, given how often computer games are given the blame.

I disagree with this – as if you’re going to claim that knife crime is caused by violent video games, then why isn’t there a similar claim that there’s been massive upsurge in deaths caused by alien invasions or monkeys throwing barrels since the 1980s?

I’ve been playing computer games for years, and whilst I’m socially malnourished and sunlight now burns my pale skin, I’m pretty sure I’m not a psychopath. I’ve never felt a great desire to recreate games in real life – although after a week long minesweeper binge a couple of years ago, I did briefly for a few days after start imagining everything I saw as if it were made up of grey squares surrounded by numbers.

This all said, I think it is possible to use computer games for evil – not the obvious evils like “being violent towards people”, but some of the underlying concepts in the most innocuous games arguably have a sinister undertone…

Take Tetris, for example – on the surface it looks like a simple, yet frighteningly addictive block stacking puzzle, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that its encouraging you to create rigid order from chaos – it wants the blocks that fall, and you the player – to conform to the pre-determined system, and is rewarding this conformity with points – a proxy for currency. It is essentially a thinly veiled exercise in pushing unfettered capitalism.

Solitaire is much the same. The reason they have it on computers in offices isn’t just because its on the default windows installation – its training office workers to relinquish any creativity and become mere drones, or machines, endlessly stacking up cards in order so that ultimately every pack of virtual cards will be identical.

The most evil game though, is probably the Mario games. On the surface, they look like a delightful cartoon romp in fantasy land, but if you look at the plot of the games, they’re about an ordinary worker, a plumber, conscripting himself to go to (an albeit colourful) war to rescue the Princess and restore an absolute monarchy that wields unlimited power to the throne of the Mushroom Kingdom, crushing the brief freedom that the citizens may have encountered. The villain, Bowser, has been unfairly demonised to create a common enemy for Mario & co to unite against, preventing any internal dissent. And at the end of each level, Mario takes with him a power star – essentially the spoils of war.

In essence, Mario is preparing the youth of today for the wars of tomorrow. Maybe computer games are evil?

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Caucus Carcass
January 4th, 2008 at 22:51

Can it really only be something like 44 weeks until the American election? Its surprising how fast time flies when there’s a two year build up to an election. Unlike the British system, where we get our elections over and done with in the space of a month, America stereotypically does things bigger, more dramatically, with infinitely more amounts of faffing about. Its happening earlier than ever this year too: the parties will have their candidates decided by early February – and then they’ll have a nine month gestation period before the election, where a new President is born, and the other candidate is mercilessly aborted (metaphorically speaking).

What surprises and yet horrifies me about American elections is just how different the Presidential candidates are to the people we’d consider suitable for Prime Minister over here.

In Britain, if someone professes to be a gun nut, you’d want to keep a close eye on them, and presumably, not get on their bad side – and if they really love guns, you may label them a psychopath. By contrast, in America, someone who loves guns in the perfect candidate for President – and it’s the people who want to get rid of guns who are the loony crackpots.

The weird thing is that the people who love guns most, usually the more conservative candidates, are also the candidates who claim to be big on “values”, the obvious implication being that the other candidates are more morally bankrupt – call me insane because I disagree, but I think it’s probably hard to be morally wrong if you’re the one who’s anti-guns.

Similarly, over here if a politician said that they thought a magic man in the sky created the Universe in six 24 hour days only a few thousand years ago, and that the collective body of scientific discourse over the last few hundred years is wrong, they’d be rightly laughed out of the Westminster village. In America, on the other hand, there are three Presidential candidates – Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback and arguable frontrunner Mike Huckabee, who all reject the theory of evolution. And if you’ll allow me to grossly simplify, I find it a bit terrifying that aside from the obvious fact that they’re clearly driven by religious dogma rather than actually thinking about it, it’s a bit worrying that men who can’t grasp GCSE-level science will have the finger on the nuclear button.

There is one Presidential Candidate who we wimpy, secular Europeans can relate to, I think. Dennis Kucinich seems pretty cool – he’s all for universal health care, ratifying the Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon emissions, getting out of Iraq, getting rid of the death penalty and increasing gun control – the sort of things that we’ve got used to assuming politicians have as their policies (can you imagine the PM saying the environment isn’t something we need to care about?), so he sounds great.

Unfortunately for Dennis though (yeah, that’s right, we’re on first name terms), is that the Americans think that he’s a nutter. In the Iowa Democratic caucus, he won a staggering zero percent of the vote. And you don’t need to be an electionologist to realise that’s not very good. Poor Dennis.

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New Years Resolutions
January 1st, 2008 at 17:57

Happy New Year, everyone! New Year is an important time – we have to celebrate an arbitrary passage of time, buy replacement calendars and breathe a sigh of relief that we’ve lasted another year without ice caps melting and drowning us all. New Year is also a time for self improvement – it’s the point in a year that “I’m on a diet” sounds most plausible even when uttered by the fattest of people. It’s when New Years Resolutions begin and fail.

I’ve been trying to come up with some New Years Resolutions myself, but given that I’m pretty much perfect, it leaves very little room for self improvement. Sure, I could resolve to be a little more modest or realistic when evaluating myself, but resolutions are supposed to be achievable. Pipe dreams are all well and good – but it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m no plumber. It’s why I spend my time writing drivel rather than fixing sinks and that sort of thing.

So anyway, instead, I’ve been considering some New Years Resolutions for some other people.

For a start, how about United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) of 10^th December 1948, otherwise known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and China have been putting this off for years. I mean, sure, I guess oppressing women or torturing people or whatever has become something of a tradition for these countries, but if they want, this year could be the year that they decide to get their act together. Maybe King Abdullah could do with losing some weight too – that absolute power must mean he never has to lift a finger.

Another resolution the same countries, as well as loads of others could try and stick to this year could be resolution A/RES/62/149 – which as the exciting codename makes obvious, is the recently passed United Nations resolution about getting rid of the death penalty. Its not legally binding, because it was a General Assembly Resolution rather than a Security Council Resolution (ie: because the poor countries get to vote on it, it doesn’t count), but New Years Resolutions never are – you’re supposed to just have a damn good go at it anyway, and then inevitably share anecdotes in mid-January about how you’ve broken all of your resolutions. But you have to try in the first place, and that’s the main thing.

So there are just two resolutions that a few countries could try. The thing is though, is that I don’t think my ideas are going to have any effect… because annoyingly, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China, all have entirely different calendars to us. As everyone knows, Chinese New Year is in February – apparently this year the human-rights oppressing Olympic hosts will be Year of the Wolf (In Sheep’s Clothing). And Iran has its own Persian Calendar – which I guess is useful as if anyone complains that “the oppression of women in Iran is like the Middle Ages”, they can reply “well, it is literally 1386!”

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Winterval
December 10th, 2007 at 16:58

Its Christmas soon, which means that the “War on Christmas” has begun once again, as secularists, atheists and non-Christians are all attending secret meetings around the country to plot against middle England, and try to abolish Christmas once and for all.

That’s right, we’re the same secret organisation that made wheelchair access mandatory and gave women the vote: we’re the political correctness mafia. Our next big target after Christmas will be really sticking it to the stuffy traditionalists by getting cravats banned and demanding that pets seeking asylum shouldn’t be quarantined.

It really winds me up to see people complain about Christmas being “banned” and political correctness going mad – because from my vantage, perched atop my high horse, it looks like political correctness has stayed the same, and its just the people who complain about it who have gone even more insane.

Nobody is trying to destroy Christmas – it is just there are people joining in who don’t believe that two thousand years ago there was a bloke with magic powers who said and did some pretty weird stuff that, by David Blaine standards, is pretty tame.

I don’t think secularising Christmas is a bad idea at all – everyone loves receiving presents, so why don’t we extend this so that everyone, regardless of religion or cultural background can join in? If we’re feeling mischievous we could call it “Winterval”.

It could still retain all of the good parts of Christmas – the presents, the Doctor Who special, the family stuff and the peace and good will to all men thing – basically the important bits. We could even keep Winterval crackers containing crappy toys and worse jokes, I mean, if you really want to.

It’d be an improvement on the Christmas we have at the moment, as schools could choose to do a production of stories that actually have a compelling narrative, rather than the Nativity. A school production of Lord of the Rings would be much better – if not a little agonisingly long.

One of the big events at Winterval could be a worldwide “Secret Santa” that includes everyone in the world, and this would do more to encourage peace and love in the world than, say, a billion prayers or approximately ten thousand John Lennons. It’s hard to hate someone who’s just given you a present – even if it is something you didn’t really want. Like one of those interactive DVD games hosted by an aging TV relic who’s trying to squeeze the last remaining drops out of their career.

Countries should also have to give each other Winterval presents. Not only would they have to put on a brave face around the table at the United Nations as America claims that socks are “just what we always wanted” when unwrapping Iran’s gift, but the whole system of world affairs might shift from “who can build the best weapons?” to “who can come up with the nicest gift?”, and there’d be competition to see who can be nicest to each other rather than most horrible.

I think building a gigantic cake is the sort of “war effort” I could get behind.

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Futurology
December 4th, 2007 at 13:47

I’ve been doing a lot of futurology lately. Its dead easy – anyone can do it, and it must be one of the most lucrative career paths in terms of workload. All you have to do is imagine what it’ll be like in the future and say it in an authoritative way, and you officially qualify as a futurologist.

So that’s what I’ve been doing – speculating what the future will be like – and I can’t lose. If I’m right, we’ll all have jetpacks, live in space and wear clothes made almost entirely from tinfoil, which will be cool – and if I’m wrong, I’ll still be remembered by generations yet to come, when I’m featured on some sort of BBC nostalgia documentary in footage of what people in the olden days thought what the future will be like.

Sure, future people will be sneering me and arrogantly saying “Hoho, weren’t people years ago utter idiots, thinking that the future is like that?”, but my futurology will get me remembered for longer than say, all of those generic boybands from the 1990s, whose contribution to society is already (thankfully) long forgotten.

So what do I think the future will be like? Good question.

Unlike futurologists of the past, who thought we’d all be living on different planets, I’m hesitant to speculate the same way – scientists these days tend to be a lazy bunch, and we haven’t done any big new space things in years, annoyingly. And in my uninformed, reactionary newspaper columnist opinion, I think they should get a move on. I think they need to put more money into space. I mean, into like research and development and so on – not literally blasting cash into orbit, as that’d be stupid.

Maybe in the future, a robot Tony Robinson will dig up the remains of what used to be what they assume are our societies place of worship – these buildings are all nearly all identical, and contain the same symbol: golden arches. They may also discover the remains of a false idol, the so-called “Burger King”.

What if future people discover our holy books? The “Marvel Comics”, full of tales of men who have incredible powers and are capable of performing extraordinary things – and like even older holy books, the ones from our society are riddled with internal contradictions sparking endless debate about the canonicity.

Maybe future television programmes will include a series where a slightly eccentric presenter in a loud shirt travels around the country trying to uncover “What Adam Hart-Davies did for us”?

Maybe they’ll be semi-historical mythical figures, like the fabled “Robin Hoodie”, a weapon-wielding law-evading bloke who will become, appropriately enough, the mascot for the city of Nottingham?

Hopefully though, in the future they’ll finally figure out some official protocol for what to do in those awkward situations where you step aside to avoid walking into someone, only for them to step aside too, and then the both of you step back, continuing to block each other’s path – the future government could just tell everyone to stick to the right.

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Ancient Conspiracies
November 21st, 2007 at 01:43

These days, you get the occasional crackpot claiming that they don’t believe that man has landed on the moon – nobody believes them, of course, because of all of that pesky evidence, like rockets, flags, and the involvement of thousands of people in making it happen. The only thing that these conspiracy theorists are good for is being one of the handful of people who really do deserve a punch.

The thing that makes conspiracy theories persist though is that they have the remarkable ability to sound vaguely credible for the first few seconds after you hear it, before the faint whiff of bullshit becomes overpowering and induces retching.

It makes you wonder though: surely, hundreds of years ago, when people had a greater propensity towards believing utter bollocks, there must have been loads of conspiracies? All we hear about these days is modern things, like the moon landings, Roswell and Richard Madeley being a government experiment gone wrong that they can’t hush up because he just keeps talking.

Did Columbus really land in the New World? How do we know it wasn’t just faked by the Spanish government to boost national morale and one-up the other European Superpowers? The evidence is pretty shaky after all – just like the moon landings, there are discrepancies with the photos… the discrepancy being that they don’t exist… mighty suspicious, don’t you think? And frankly, a land of technologically-backwards savages who speak a strange jibberish language that’s incomprehensible to the civilised world could just as well have been Wales. Funny how Columbus didn’t come back with a new passage to India, eh?

And even if the Spanish did invade and conquer the New World, who’s to say it was about spreading Christianity and Spanish values like they claimed? It was obviously just a resource grab. A War for Gold. The second they’d got over there and set up a puppet government, they ruthlessly exported the gold back to Spain, which is what their economy relied on to keep going.

And what about the 5/11 attack? The so-called Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament was really orchestrated by the British government, to give them an excuse to stir up anti-Catholic sentiment and clamp down on civil liberties. Guy Fawkes was just a scape goat – someone to blame. Its funny how he was being directly supported by the British government under Mary I just a couple of decades earlier. No one man could have arranged for that much gunpowder – the British government must have known about it and let it happen.

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Immigration
November 18th, 2007 at 00:26

For some reason, there’s loads of British people who are scared by immigration. Apparently people talking English in endearingly fractured English and having a surname composed entirely of the high-scoring consonants in Scrabble is something to be TERRIFIED of.

Since 2004, there’s been loads of Polish people who’ve come over here and actually done some work, threatening our lazy way of life. I was too lazy to start the Polish supermarket I always wanted to open – then some Poles went and got in there first. It strikes me as slightly ludicrous that they say that foreigners are coming over here to scrounge off of our our benefits system – why would you move hundreds of miles away just to be unemployed? If you’re going to choose anywhere to be unemployed, at least choose somewhere with nicer weather.

I don’t know why the right wingers are so worried about the Poles though – I think the real nationality we need to fear are the Germans – and not just because of their, er, track record.

The Germans are famous for being difficult – insisting on trying to stop us from liberating France in the 1940s, and even today they continue to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. They’re staying over there, not taking our jobs, meaning we have to work all the time- and they have the cheek of not even bothering to learn English! They’re expecting us to tolerate them using words like “ersatz” and “schadenfreude” whilst sitting on their arses, totally not working as casual labourers on building sites or in factories working long hours for phenomenally low wages.

I think its political correctness gone mad that we’re supposed to tolerate Germany’s lazy attitude towards contributing to our society.

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Sex Pistols
November 11th, 2007 at 13:04

“I am the anti-Christ. I am an anarchist!”

“…Except during the week when I’m actually a supply chain distribution manager for the third largest retailer of industrial printing solutions in the country, obviously.”

That’s right, on Friday Night, I went all the way down to Brixton Academy to see the Sex Pistols live, in one of the few gigs they’ve played since I’ve been alive. I went with my dad – he was the real fan. He didn’t just like them before they were cool – he liked them before he was uncool.

Its weird being at a gig where a majority of the men were bald – and not out of choice.

They were pretty good – I think they played every song they’ve ever done. Which isn’t that many. They also played a cover of… something that escapes me now, but I recognised it. They opened with Pretty Vacant, finished on God Save the Queen (complete with massive logo’d backdrop), before coming back for an encore, playing EMI and Anarchy in the UK. Then, oddly, coming back for a second encore and playing the only song they had left: Bodies.

The slightly disconcerting thing was how they’d completely sold out. Its not so much that they’ve obviously reformed for the money, or that they were playing at a corporate venue operated by a big multinational company, it was just that the t-shirts were on sale for twenty pounds and in the foyer area, there were X-Box 360s set up with Guitar Hero on them.

Their political direction was… interesting… too. They came on stage to the old-timey song “there will always be an England” and the amplifiers had England flags painted on to them. I didn’t think punk was supposed to be nationalistic – but then, I guess I didn’t think it was pro-life until I heard Bodies.

At another point John Lydon gave some insightful political commentary: “Who voted for that cunt Blair?”, he asked. In a crowd of 5000 people, there were a lot of liars, as no one put their hands up or cheered.

It was a surprisingly good gig though – the spectacle of bald middle managers forming a pit behind me, and some even flaunting the smoking ban was quite, er, something, to say the least.

The venue was pretty good too – there was a sloping floor so you got a good view pretty much wherever you stood. Its just a shame its in the middle of quite a rough area of London (we walked past Jean Charles de Menezies old house, and through the tube station he was shot at, excitingly).

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