I think though I’ve found a new contender for the most depressing group yet: “I Steal Signs and Other Random Crap When Im drunk!“.

As you might imagine, it’s full of arseholes boasting about the horrendous things they’ve done when drunk. Here are some samples:

“me n a mate stole a couple of kids bikes n rode them bout half a mile home. they were in the living room the next day n we used them to get round the flat:) lmao”

A man boasting about stealing from children.

“i once stole a tug of war winners sheild out of a pub when i was steamin lol”

This goes a bit beyond the student staple of stealing pint glasses. Though I don’t even find that tolerable.

“last time me and my mates went out we managed to remove a car exhaust from a ford mundano,

none of us own a ford tho, lol.”

Horrifying.

“I steel things when im Pissed, sober or fucked out my nut on weed!!!!!! LOL !!!!!!!!!!”

So he’s a thief, alloy and a wanker 100% of the time then.

“me and my mate “found ” a zimmer frame while at a funeral, police came to the wake and took it off us!!!”

I wonder if this is actually some sort of in-joke?

“the most ramdon thing i have stoling was half a wall”

I don’t really understand this one.

“hey on my hen night my mate stole a cone his name is colin he even came 2 wedding with us then he came 2 the lakes with us”

Sounds like a classy wedding. You can’t see the cone in her profile picture, which is one of her wedding photos.

“I have a great selection of shot glasses and those orange warning lights that workmen always have at the side of the road. I am also the proud owner of some BMW hub caps!!”

It’s actually fairly interesting to try and consider where these people draw the line between “fair game” (cones?) and “actually bad theft”. I mean, hubcaps? Jesus.

“when living in bumfuck nowhere we actually just destroy stuff with our vehicles. like drive over people lawns, ram dumpsters, and every now and then the occaisional house gets hit because of drunken foolery…at least its all meant to be good old hazardous fun right?”

I mean, what the fuck?

More Facebleak:

• Status messages that are almost as irritating as when someone syncs their Twitter up with it
• Facebook groups about tramps are almost as cliched as groups parodying other Facebook groups
• A comparison of top books at two universities that is almost as depressing as the intellectual snobbery and hypocrisy on show

• International Relations Society
• James is writing about Facebook. Again.
• Political Metrics
• Cult of the vagrant
• You’re the unluckiest person in the world, mate

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Post tags: depressing, facebook, groups, misanthropy, wankers

Usually, everyone sets them to something trivial or banal – I could probably tell you with some accuracy what some of my friends have been eating lately, and sometimes they’re used for actually useful information, such as explaining where someone is. I try to make mine pithy and whimsical.

My favourite type of Facebook status though is what I’d term dramatic ambiguity. If you’re a regular Facebook user, you must know what I mean – when you read something like “James is annoyed with certain people” or “James wishes someone would stop being a twat” – when they’re used as the 21st century equivalent of bitching about someone behind their back.

I love it when this happens because it lets you wonder and speculate on what the actual gossip is.

“[Facebook friend] wants to tell certain people where to certainly go, but can’t for the sake of diplomacy.” is a pretty obvious cry for attention – what could be going on?! Oh, the possibilities!

The other great thing about the Facebook news feed is that you get to follow all sorts of events in real time. Its always entertaining to see someone go from “in a relationship” to “single”, then to “its complicated”, then “in a relationship” again… and then a week later back to “single” permanently. Its as if Facebook is charting our own personal time lines live.

When I’m out and about doing the sort of things you’d expect a young go-getter like myself to do, I update my status fairly regularly by text message. I like to think that there’s one of my hundred or so friends sitting on their computer following my movements obsessively, like some weird stalker fan. I suppose its probably a good thing that Mark Chapman didn’t have Facebook.

• Facebook
• There’s no such thing as (civil) society
• The computer works
• Nerdy blog update!
• Newsletter

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Post tags: facebook, internet, social networking, status updates, twitter

• More crap from ITV
• The O’Malley Effect?
• Things that have happened lately
• European Constitution
• Night on the town

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: earthquake, facebook

It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:

1. Nick Griffin – 274
2. David Cameron – 252
3. James Blunt – 171
4. David Mellor – 47
5. Jeffrey Archer – 37
6. Maxine Carr – 12
7. Richard Blackwood – 12
8. Richard Littlejohn – 8
9. Ian Huntley – 5
10. Vernon Kay – 3
11. Lowri Turner – 2
12. Madeleine McCann – 1
13. Adolf Hitler – 0

There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.

I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there – every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.

And the poor other Richard Littlejohns – if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.

• Trying to get free money
• Holidays are coming
• Trust in Politics
• Exam Panic
• Dawkster Who

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Post tags: facebook, names, statistics

They’ve invented “Flash Shopping!” – a derivative of the media’s favourite buzzword in 2003: Flash Mobbing. Here’s a paste of their explanation of what it is:

“Flash Shopping involves gathering quietly close to a pre-determined shop at a pre-determined time. A bell (or other cue of suchlike) will sound and everyone will enter the shop, pick up one item and proceed together to checkout en mass! Another bell (or suchlike) will sound and everyone must look at their watch, tut, drop said item (without damaging it!) and walk out!”

So, a flash-mob basically. The thing that bothers me about this is that it seems so unbelievably cruel.

Sure, it sounds fun – flash mobbing is. The fun is in doing something silly, like having a pillow fight or whatever. No-one gets hurt or pissed off. Unfortunately, this “flash shopping” idea, which at the time of writing, 52 people have signed up to, seems to have a more sinister motive:

“Hopefully this will involve hundreds of people! You watch the shopkeepers eyes light up as they think all their Christmas’s have come at once only to find everyone just takes off!”

Yeah, great idea! Why not target a struggling independent store that’s worried it can’t compete with brand name rivals? Give them some false hope? Better still, needlessly mess with the stock without buying anything! Yeah, that’ll be hilarious!

This all just seems completely not in the spirit of what flashmobbing was intended.

And what makes this more bewildering is that it has been dreamt up as a feature for a radio show. How the hell does that work? “This is what 50 morons needlessly bothering someone trying to do their job sounds like”?

• Why politics is shit (part of a continuing series)
• Shoe Shopping
• Weakest Link on iPlayer
• 28 Weeks Later
• Column – 14/09/07

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Post tags: facebook, flashmob, rant

For example (you’ll need a Facebook account to see these): here, here, and here. And I haven’t gone out of my way to look for these, they’ve simply cropped up during my general browsing of the site.

There’s something strangely perverse about thousands of braying idiots tracking the movements of these poor individuals, who are probably homeless, or have mental health problems or whatever.

It’s all a bit weird. This one, in particular, has over 5000 members, and on an almost daily basis, there are new photos taken from afar of him. Some days I’ll get up, log on to the internet, check the group (not that I’m a member or support what they’re doing), to find new photos and sightings from earlier the same day. Its scary. And an obviously massive invasion of privacy.

What bemuses me about this is that in any normal context, these people would be avoided if they were to approach you. Put a photo of them on the internet though and immediately they become a “legend” and are elevated to celebrity status with an “appreciation society”. “Oh my god! The homeless man I avoid is seen around town a lot! What a ledge!”

The thing that worries me is the undue attention that these people are getting, despite it being completely unasked for. This “case study” group that I’m linking to, now over 5000 members strong, has had some idiot radio presenters from Leicester Sound trying to chase him down the road as he goes about his business.

One of the other “appreciation societies” posted a video to YouTube of their man, and about twenty people taking the piss out of him. It was literally them following him around, laughing and posing for photos with him, whilst he looked completely and utterly bewildered – and he was clearly mentally ill and in no way “in” on the joke. They had no intention of helping the man. Some vigilantism on the part of myself (and Katy) later, and they took the video down.

Whilst some of the people in the groups claim that its all good natured, I can’t help but feel its sneery and simply downright rude to do this to people unasked for. Its not as if they’re inviting fame like a celebrity would, they’re simply trying to live their lives.

Also: Hypocrite, moi? Well no, actually, I only write about nutters who harass me. I don’t call them a “ledge” because I thought they were about to stab me up.

• Political Metrics
• There’s no such thing as (civil) society
• Terrorist In-doctor-ination
• Slapped by the invisible hands of the market
• Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

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Post tags: facebook, nutters, vagrants

I’ve been having a look around Facebook again. One of the best features is that it splits users into different university networks, so you can see other people at your university and so on. What makes this interesting is that it makes it possible to generate statistics about the most popular TV shows/activities/etc at each university based on what people have put into their profiles. What makes this interesting is that I’ve figured out that it is possible to compare these statistics with those from other universities.

So I’ve decided to compare the Top 10 books from my university, a former polytechnic, with those from the university where I’m going to apply to do an MA next year, a “proper university” in London (whether I’ll get in there is a question for another blog entry). See if you can guess which list goes with which university.

List #1

1. 1984
2. Lord Of The Rings
3. Pride And Prejudice
4. Memoirs Of A Geisha
5. Wuthering Heights
6. Lolita
7. Harry Potter
8. To Kill A Mockingbird
9. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
10. Rebecca

There’s loads of “classics” listed there. Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and so on- the sort of thing I wouldn’t read but would like to create the impression that I would tolerate, as it’s a high culture thing. It has 1984 at number one. People at this university must be excellent.

List #2

1. Harry Potter
2. Da Vinci Code
3. Angels And Demons
4. The Bible
5. Lord Of The Rings
6. 1984
7. Pride And Prejudice
8. Dan Brown Books
9. Cosmopolitan

A children’s book, three trashy Dan Brown novels, the most evil book ever written, and a magazine.

Have you guessed yet? The first list in the uni in London, and the second is my university. The disparity in… high culture… really is that clear.

What makes this more depressing is that I have not made a mistake on the second list above – there really is only nine entries in my university’s top ten books.

I’m not trying to slag off my university here, as it’s alright really. I just think its an interesting comparison – almost as if there is still a class divide between universities and polytechnics. If I were a better elite hacker, I’d write something that compares every university. But alas, I’m not.

In summary: Statistics are fun!

• The Da Vinci Code
• No Fun in Fundamentalism
• Nutter of the week #2
• What the book?
• 251 is the magic number. Sort of.

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Post tags: Books, comparison, dmu, facebook, kcl, statistics

My justification for using it is that its useful for keeping in touch with old friends, as well as what is generally going on at university – usefully it splits the membership into individual university “networks”, meaning that normal morons can’t see what I’m up to, and it hopefully provides a sort of cretin-filter that prevents the great-unwashed who are too stupid to go to university from accessing it.

I don’t like using it, because I mean, why on earth would anyone want access to a list of my favourite bands or TV programmes? What possible use does anyone have for this information? When is there ever going to be a medical emergency when I’m lying unconscious and the paramedic says “Does anyone know what James’ favourite book is? Find out! Hurry! This is a life or death situation! Reading passages from Richard Littlejohn’s Essex Girl Jokebook is just sending him into a deeper coma… we need a more accurate book type match!“

It concerns me that I’m getting really into it too- I’ve uploaded a couple of photo albums, presumably to subconsciously boast about what an excellent social life I have. I’m finding myself checking back multiple times per day to get the latest news on what my friends are doing: “Oh my god! Heggs is eating a grapefruit!“

One of the worst things about Facebook is that allows me to see who my university peers are and mercilessly judge them based entirely what they’ve written on the internet, without having to go through the effort of awkwardly making conversation with them. Facebook has over 3000 people from my university registered on it, and at risk of making a gross over-generalisation and sounding sickeningly self-righteous, without exception they all appear to be morons. I don’t know if this is an accurate reflection of them, of course. I imagine I come across as a right self-important twat if judged exclusively on how I described myself. Or, er, this rather angry blog entry.

It’s just that the vast majority of users on there seem so far removed from who I am. If you look at the “activities” or “interests” on anyone’s profile, and the list invariably consists exclusively of “drinking” and “clubbing”. Maybe “sleeping”. Are these people’s vacuous lives so devoid of anything more noteworthy? You see on the lists of recent activity every few days yet more photos of pissed students in nightclubs are posted as if the photos are radically different from the last time they all got drunk.

It doesn’t help that despite being students, and by extension the assumed learned people of society, students seem to insist on typing exclusively in lower case, using text slang and so on. I know its clichéd to moan about this, but it really irritates me- when reading it I imagine it being said in the voice of an idiot child. I imagine if we all used Cyrillic keyboards with a backward-R key then the writings of students would be near indistinguishable from that of a five year old because of all the backwards letters and illegibility.

I’m always vaguely amused as well as intensely depressed when in the “favourite quotes” section of someone’s profile, rather than being something witty, clever, or amusing or whatever, it’s something like “ur a twat!!!!” attributed to another pointless moron.

Have I missed something? Have I completely got the wrong end of the stick with regard to university? Where are the people who don’t define the quality of an evening by the number of shots they had? Where are the people who will appreciate the learning experience rather than see it as something to do whilst the clubs are closed? Seriously, it’d be useful to know.

• James is writing about Facebook. Again.
• Top Books
• My Space
• Globalizzzzzzzation
• The Next Great Invention

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Post tags: confession, facebook