Orientalism.

I think that the main reason that the west dislikes the east so much is because they are so different to us... I mean, lets have a look at this persons facebook 'likes' on their TV section... they might as well be an alien compared to the average british person...

 

 

Fucking Aliens, I tell you.

What Can Thatchers Death Tell Us About What Class We Are?

Recently, one of the most shared items on the BBC website has been the class calculator, it asks questions like: "Do you work in a mine?" and, "When was the last time you ate caviar?" or "How well do you know the Queen?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973

Obviously, people are enraged that they have fallen into the middle class category instead of their beloved working class, others are upset that they are not considered the landed gentry, and instead have fallen into the middle class category. Everyone seems to be middle class but no one wants to be.

As the world comes to terms with the news of Baroness Thatchers death, emotions are running high; never, has a British leader polarised public opinion so much. Some see her as a trailblazer of feminism, as the first female British Prime minister. Others see her as a harlot who paved the way for the privatisation of all things British, a woman who masterminded a class war against her own people, a woman who declared war over 40square miles of farmland to try to revitalised her waining popularity.

I'm obviously going to steer well clear of the politics because I don't really know anything about that sort of thing. BUT I am going to offer the people who were upset by the results of the BBC class calculator an alternative class calculating system, and you don't even need a calculator, you just need a twitter account and a basic understanding of the 5 times table.



All you need to do is to log into your twitter account and look at 20 items on your feed.

This is an example of a lower middle class tweet; Anti-Thatcher with a bit of humour, something that the working classes don't really have the time or the mental capacity to work up down to them being all tired from working in the mines.



 

This one is decidedly working class, mainly because this is the kind of joke that gets told after a hard day sweeping chimneys in the Weatherspoons, or the kind of pubs that puts down sawdust and hosts Karaoke and illegal bare knuckle boxing. The joke itself only works when being spoken, seeing as the joke's set up is in the ambiguity as to whether the word 'fucked' is metaphorical or literal, this ambiguity is lost when @_______ demystifies the joke by using the word miners (ie: people who work in mines) which has a different meaning to the word 'minors' (ie: children) Ultimately the joke doesn't work, much in the same way that the working classes don't work, because they all just claim benefits and stuff.

 



 

This is the middle middle class, sympathising with the working classes but desperate not to want to upset the upper class in the hope that one day he will break the glass ceiling. The fact that he veers more towards the working class view betrays his own deep seated knowledge that he will never be accepted by the aristocracy.

 



 



 

 

 

We are now reaching the upper echelons of the class system, this tweet doesn't acknowledge the negative legacy of the Iron Lady, he simply uses it as an opportunity to attack the left. Welcome to the upper middle class, people.

 

 









If your news feed is full of these kind of Thatcher comments then it is likely that you live on a 50 acre estate in Chipping Norton, live on fois gras and brussel sprouts and other posh food that you can't get in Iceland (the shop, not the country, obvs!) The upper class, landed gentry, whatever you want to call the 1% see Thatcher completely differently to the working classes, middle classes and all the other subclasses in between. Fortunately for Thatcher, these are the people who control the present, they are the people who write history, so for all the thousands of negative remarks about Thatcher, the voices that will be heard in the echelons of time will be people like Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith.

 

Anyway. All this is starting to sound an awful lot like commentary, I could have been mistaken for taking a position at that point WHICH I DON'T! I just want to help you guys calculate your class without having to resort to the horrid vile liberal conspirators, the BBC Class Calculator... so, here goes.

 

FINDING OUT YOUR CLASS:

 

Pick 20 Thatcher tweets in your news feed, each one of them represents 5% (please refer to the 5xTable left for you, if this confuses you) if a tweet has a spelling mistake, that falls into working class, if it is witty and slagging off Thatcher, then it's lower middle class, if it's all solemn but still critical of her then it is middle middle class, if it is simply using the event to slag off 'the left' then it is upper middle class. If it is a load of tearstained wank about losing the greatest leader of our generation then it is upper class.

 

EXAMPLES:

 

you may find that your final tally looks something like this.

 

Working Class: 65%

 

Lower Middle Class:20%

 

Middle Middle Class: 10%

 

Upper Middle Class: 10%

 

Upper Class: 10%

 

If that is the case, you've got it wrong, you have ended up with 115% which is more than you should have counted, this means that you cannot follow simple instructions or do basic maths. You are definitely working class, now get down the job centre you Dole Scrounge!

 

Working Class: 30%

Lower Middle Class: 45%

Middle Middle Class: 20%

Upper Middle Class: 5%

Upper Class: 0%

 

With this percentage, you are definitely lower middle class, you probably like Frankie Boyle because he is being ironic.

 

Working Class: 0%

Lower Middle Class: 0%

Middle Middle Class: 0%

Upper Middle Class: 0%

Upper Class: 100%

 

If it looks like this the chances are you are going to be middle middle class, all desperate to join the elite few and doing everything you can to try to join the ranks of the Elite. you are a fucking class traitor and you sicken me. Just kidding, nothing wrong with a bit of ambition ;)

 

So anyway, with tensions running high and people arguing over the legacy of Thatcher, what better way to defuse the situation than to kill a bit of time working out what class you are? 

 

Isn't that what modern politics is all about? knowing your place?

Kim Jong wut?

With the threat of Thermonuclear war at its most potent since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is a lot of stuff to talk about. North Korea have officially declared that they will go to war with the US in the next few days; all of this is worrying and leads us to ask the question: what is going on in Kim Jong Un's head?


Judging by this picture, Un is a man who likes to sit at desks, accompanied by the military, looking at pieces of paper. Surely he is harmless?

Well, thanks to detailed analysis from camp201, we can reveal that there is a darker side to Un.
Un is one of several brothers and sisters, Kim Jong Anne Kim Jong In, Kim Jong Out, Kim Jong Do The OkeyKoki And You Turn Around and Kim Jong That's What It's All About. As the oldest of his siblings, he has inhereted the title of his father, star of Team America, Gone With the Wind and Training Day, Kim Jong Il.

Il was a long seving ruler of the military jaunta controlling North Korea and managed to maintain power for 15 years, throughout his rule he was promoted several times from the Chairman of the Communist Party, to Leader, to Supreme Leader and then took the position of God of the North Korean Communists. Un has a lot to live up to and that could explain the reason for his recent extreme rhetoric.



Hurro!

Because journalist access to North Korea is extremely limited, we can't get too much information about the new leader who is threatening a thermonuclear attack on the worlds biggest military superpower... But from Sources in North Korea, we can determine this:

His favourite sport is Basketball and is a fan of the Chicago Bulls. Would he really launch a nuclear attack on his beloved Chicago bulls?

He is obsessed with Eric Clapton. Would he really launch a thermonuclear attack on his beloved Eric Clapton?

He is pro Nuclear weapons. Would he really launch a thermonuclear attack thus reducing his stock pile of nuclear weapons. by reducing his stockpile of nuclear weapons, he would probably be seen by some hardliners as bowing to international pressure.



Because if you have 50 nuclear missiles and you fire one at a country, you will only have 49, thus reducing your armoury and that is why I said that this would be seen by hardliners as bowing to international pressure, because there is international pressure on North Korea to reduce their nuclear arsenal. It was kind of a joke that wasn't all that funny so I explained it to try to make this a little bit funnier, but I think that might have failed too so I suppose I will have to resort to just posting a picture of a penis riding a nuclear bomb as if it were a horse (The bomb, is a horse, not the penis.)



So that's three things I've written about Kim Jong Un without really knowing very much about him.

What else could I do to blag this blog and make myself sound like I know what I am talking about? Oh yeah, I asked what was inside his head at the start.

Thanks to advanced US technology, we managed to get several images of what is inside Kim Jong Un's head.



It turns out that Un's head is pretty much exactly like everyone elses so that was a bit of a dead end, so I might move on to some possible scenarios that will unfold in the next few days.

Scenario 1: North Korea will say some more things. "We are ready to launch a merciless assault on the imperialist US, we are actually doing it now by saying these words, that's right! a verbal assault!"

Scenario 2: North Korea will issue a statement telling us that their declaration of war against the US was an April Fools stunt gone horribly wrong, not least because it played out past the ettiquite deadline of the April fools prank which is midday April 1st.

Scenario 3: North Korea will inexplicably fall into the sea in a strange Deus Ex Machina which will save the world from impending nuclear war. (Take That, Roland Emerich!)


There are lots of other things that can happen of course, but when it comes down to it, humanity is just a very advanced form of bacteria clinging to a rock hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, so even if nuclear armageddon occured tomorrow, (or the day after tomorrow... see what I did there?) it would be of little consequence in terms of the fundamental workings of the universe.

And besides, there are bigger questions that need to be looked at in this situation, like: doesn't he look funny? Why haven't I compared him to Psy, singer of world wide smash Gangnam Style? and why didn't I have a poke at the fact that Koreans eat dogs?

These are not just the failings of international diplomacy, but my failings as well.

Is there a gods?

Generally, films struggle to fuck things, but any films about ethno-musicologists are physically capable according to Wikipedia. As is the fact that Jim Bowen was elected Pope, the other day.

 

 

 In a world where Wikipedia is proof and where anything without proof is without value, I have to come to terms with the fact that although Jim Bowen is the new Pope, the God that he serves does not exist.




In the big debacle that rages between Atheists and Believers on a daily basis, one of the most valued weapons of the Atheist is this: There is no proof that God exists and as such I don't believe that God exists.

Personally, I find the burden of proof a little bit of a red herring. If a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around to hear it then it is a fallen tree and noise and stuff or whatever the philosophical question answer type thing is.

There are hundreds of gods, that isn't me confirming the existence of gods, perish the thought. I would be taken to task by the Dawkinites for creating all the wars and perpetrating racism, slavery, the spread of disease, only it isnt actually religion that does this... it is humans that do. There is a lot of evidence that will back this up.



But there is evidence that all of the bad things done by humans are done by humans.

The next line of argument here is that all of the bad things done by humans have been done in the name of religion... there is evidence to suggest this.



This is the main evidence that Atheists go for.

By doing this they neglect the fact that Stalin was an Atheist and killed twice as many people.





And it ignores the fact that people do good things in the name of religion too. The red cross for example began as a christian institution, as did the salvation army.

Of course, all this is well off the point of whether there is a god or a supernature of some description or other, but this is generally where the arguing goes. Mud is slung and it all gets heated, although neither side admit that they are frustrated both are.

If proof is necessary to confirm the existence of a supernature then I would have thought that the other side of that coin would be to deny its existence would need the same amount of proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

As John Locke said, lack of proof does not equate to proof itself.

The worst thing about these arguments that occur every day on the battleground for humanities soul... (or the internet) is that religion and atheism are simply fronts, both of them, to do what the person who changed the Wikipedia entry on Jim Bowen did: To troll. The arguments that routinely pop up are completely pointless and counteract each other. Like electrons and protons in a nucleus.

Neutrons are also found in a nucleus and although they don't seem to have a purpous if you listen to the teachers in C1 GCSE (there is very little discussion on Neutrons apart from the mention that they are in the middle of atoms and have no charge and that they are the reason isotopes exist) well they hold atoms together, if there were just a load of protons with a positive charge in the middle of an atom then the positive charge will repel all of the protons in the nucleus and the atom will just cease to exist.



If electrons, which contain a negative charge, are atheists and protons, which contain a positive charge, are theists, then I am probably going to fall into the category of a neutron, someone who doesn't really give a shit either way; by finishing off on comparing the belief non belief and agnisticism to an atom, I have veered off the point that I was initially trying to make, but both believers and atheists do that as well, so why shouldnt I?

The 1% of you that have a heart will share this.

 

 

Facebook is a rich tapestry of the lives of everyone you know, but how well do you know yourself? Well recently someone posted this on my feed and I can confirm that I 'am not funny at all'

 

Having found this out from reading the large text in red, I delved deeper into the smaller print. ' The boy you called lame' it says. I don't recall using the word lame, it's not really the sort of word I would use seeing as I am not a teenage girl from the film 'Clueless'.



Lame.

Well anyway, he has to work at night to support his family. So it turns out that the witty comment that I made at him wasn't a very nice thing to say, although I don't remember saying it. Although in being falsely accused I have called the tragic actress who died of a prescription drug overdose 'lame'. So I guess I am a bully, it turns out that the text posted on my facebook feed is a self fulfilling prophesy. It has the supernatural ability to delve inside my mind and predict things before I even know that I am going to do them. But apparently facebook is very good at this because it looks at your 'likes'



The girl I pushed down today, she is already being abused at home, I'm not even going to deny it, because last time I did I inadvertantly called someone lame while denyong calling someone lame, I am just going to defend it instead- How was I supposed to know that she was being abused at home today? How do you know? how do you know that I pushed down a girl today? I have been awake for less than an hour and don't remember doing this. I'm not denying this, I'm just saying I don't remember.

The girl I called fat? 'she has disease and starving herself'. Wait a second... I don't mean to be funny but if you are going to accuse me of all these things that I didn't know I was doing, could you at least do it coherantly. Don't get me wrong, I understand what you are saying but there is a chance that with a lack of clarity in the message, that I might not realize what I have done, in fact I am almost certain that this has happened because I still don't realize that I have done these things that I am being accused of in my facebook feed.



Then comes the killer blow...

'You think you are funny? guess what... You are not funny at all.'

They didn't even bother to use an exclamation mark at the end of it, they didn't feel the need to emphasize it because it is already so obvious. As I read this, the wafer thin ego burns up as if in some kind of oxidising reaction with fire, I look into the sky and it has changed colour, the rivers turn to the colour of blood, my skin turns to glass and shatters, the paint on the walls begin to melt, or at least change to a really bland shade of beige. I try to scrape up the chared remains of my psyche before realizing that I am trapped inside my own metaphor. No wonder I lash out at people.

I take solace in the fact that several pieces of spam appeared in my blogspot comment page which help rebuild my self confidence...

Juѕt ԁesire to say your article is аs surρriѕing.
Тhe сlaritу in your poѕt is just excеllent and i can asѕume you aгe an expeгt on this subјect.
Fine with yοur peгmission let me tο snatch your feеԁ to
stay up to ԁate with coming near near ρost.
Thanκ уou 1,000,000 and plеase continue
the grаtifyіng ωork.

(It goes on to tell me to click on a link, but I am prepared to overlook that... in the same way that I overlooked the fact that I didn't call anyone names or make fun of people I was accused of in the other bit of spam.)

Very great рost. Ι sіmply stumblеd upon уоur blog and wished to mention that I haѵe гeally еnjoyeԁ ѕurfіng around your
blog poѕts. After all I will be subscribing in уouг fеed anԁ I hοpe
you wrіte oncе more soοn!
Again, it told me to click on a weird link. I didn't.

Then there was this...

Mу sρirіt mοveԁ absent abοut 3 yеаrs in thе past mу ωhole bоdy had the brаvenеss
to laѕt оf all clоse this saga,
and I ԁid uneaгth Ι was grеatеr
received in thе mеtrорοlis I laѕt
but not lеаst situаteԁ
tо and as for the fantaѕtіc fоrtune I was tryіng to get, ӏ stumbled on what Joseph Camρbell wгοte was valiԁ: &#8220Youг
full physiсаl prоcess
is awагe that thiѕ іs thе way to be alive іn this soсіetу аnd thе
wау tο giѵе
thе terrіbly lеaԁing
that you hаvе to inсlude.
Obviously the spambot had to take it too far, in exactly the same way that the first bit of spam implied that people who don't share don't have a heart. they do, but at the very least, at least it had the decency to allow me to do the rule of three, the other one just gave a big and long drawn out list which would probably have lost most peoples attention very early on.


Having been accused of being a bully, I guess I can't be against bullying. For this reason, I couldn't bring myself to share it; it would make me a hypocrite. Although I have to say that it isn't just 1% of people who see a post like this who have a heart. The heart is an extremely important organ.

I think the long and the short of it is that the internet is fucking with me today. Trying to convince me that I am a genius one minute and a bully the next.

Put a little glove in your Fart.

One of the more spectacular views on the London skyline or of the Shard; it towers over London as a new boy in town dogging down canary wharf and telling anyone asking it to move out of the way so that people can see Saint Paul's Cathederal to 'Go fuck yourself'. The Shard has been a forboding presence over London since its construction over the past 3 years. It is a place which has opened just in time for Valentines Day so that people could get a romantic view of one of the most amazing cities on earth. The only thing that would have made the view of the shard more romantic was if the owners of the building called the building the 'Shart' instead. Because what could be more romantic than doing a fart and accidentally following through with a watery and occasionally a slightly nuggetty anal leak. not with blood in it, that would be disgusting, it is just shit.




With Valentines day a week ago, well too late for me to be talking about; millions of people world wide are going to be have been receiving heart shaped boxes, heart shaped cards and other various heart shaped things. Hearts tend to be simplified versions of what they really are because they look fucking discusting, all coated in fat and covered in blood and various pieces of conjuole. What happened to make the heart the symbol of love? Do you want to know? well I am going to put a picture of a real heart below and then I am going to google the question and come back to you with the answer.



Well, according to Wiki Answers it has something to do with Aristotle, who as an intelligent Greek Philosopher, scholar, maths man and guesser of how things worked: made the assumption that the heart was where love comes from, well he was wrong, and as such, everyone who has ever thought of the heart in association with romance is also wrong, and an idiot.

The heart is, however, the hardest working muscle in the human body, or in fact the body of any animal with a heart, so I don't want the heart abolished or anything, because it really goes out of its way to keep us alive for as long as possible, I would just be happier if people gave credit to the human brain to creating the chemical conditions necassary to feel love.



Hearts as we know them, the simplified ones, have existed since around the 15th century when they became one of the suits in a deck of cards, and proved such a popular shape, that it is instantly recognisable in most cultures as the symbol for love. It is here that I stop talking about it because I realize that I have run out of ideas, but what I will do for you instead is give you a valentines day mixtape, which you can make yourself via spotify or illegally downloading, but instead of using the proper names, I will replace the word Love with Glove and Heart, with Fart. Because they rhyme.

1.Don't go breaking my Fart- Elton John & Kiki Dee
2.Quit Playing Games with my Fart- Backstreet Boys
3.ScatterFart- Bjork
4.Fart Shaped Box- Nirvana
5.Achy Breaky Fart- Billy Ray Cyrus
6.Groove is in the Fart- Dee Lite.
7.You'll be in my Fart- Usher
8. Bad Liver and a Broken Fart- Tom Waits
9.Total Eclipse of the Fart- Bonnie Tyler
10. Listen to your Fart- Roxette.

Everything here, the fact that a blog about Valentines day has arrived a week late, that I have replaced the word heart, with fart in almost a dozen love song, that I think of hearts as fatty organs, pumping blood round the body to stop people from dying; all these things highlight the fact that I am an emotionally retarded and referring to Aristotle isn't going to save me.

As well as this, the fact that I have managed to cut and paste together three different unfinished blogs either makes me a total cunt or the Paul McCartney of blogging, or perhaps both, because neither are mutually exclusive. But at the same time, I can't just leave half finished ideas to rot in my drafts page, and there is something better coming... I promise.

What looks coolest falling down a flight of stairs?

Another month brings another near miss from an asteroid, except this time it missed by less than 25000km. which is just over half the circumference of the Earth. This is the distance between the UK and Mongolia. It was the size of half a football pitch and is probably made from iron and other rock, instead of ice, which is more common. According to Yeomans, asteroids of this stature comes within striking distance of our planet every 40 years, but strikes only occur every 1200 odd years.

This can mean only one thing: This close shave from an asteroid is a warning from God about the legalisation of same sex marraiges. It is unlikely that God would have been as worried about the legislation that has been passed in certain US states concerning gay marraige because he doesn't really pay too much attention to America anymore, particularly Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington as well as the District of Columbia.

It is exactly the sort of thing that God would do though. People often think of God as some kind of creator or omnipotent being, when in fact, he is more like Samuel L Jackson's character in the film Pulp Fiction.



He will strike down with great vengeance etc...

In Genesis, for example: Lot was identified as the only man in Sodom and its neighbouring town Gomorrah (a place, probably in the middle east somewhere) worth saving, after God decided to end the entire area under a heavy bombardment of fire and brimstone. The city itself was named after the homosexual act of Sodomy, so it is probable that God doesn't like homosexuality and doesnt find it homosexy at all. further to this God actually finds the act of oral sex sinful and that is the sort of thing that they used to get up to in those days and in those kind of places.

So, going back to Lot, having being identified as being the only rightious man in either Sodom or Gamorrah, he was told to leave by God in some form of vision or other and along with his wife told not to look back. When his wife broke the cardinal rule and looked back at her beloved home that she worked very hard to make nice with furniture purchased from the Ikea just off the Gommorah junction, God turned her instantly into a pillar of salt. Luckily, Lot had packed some of his belongings, and among them was a salt shaker which had been purchased from the same Ikea. Lot never had to buy salt again.



The only logical alternative to the meteor coming from God is that the meteor itself is actually formed from homosexual love.

On yesterdays 'The Big Question' (a program on BBC2 on Sunday where a panel of people are asked excruciatingly long and pointless questions by an audience) during a discussion on gay marraige, a young man told a lesbian that her love came from satan.

The above being the average response from the twitter community...

And this being one of the less average ones.

Hail Satan!

This leaves us with two possibilities, that homosexual love comes from Satan, who is simply a potato with bits of plastic added to him to give him more humanoid characteristics... OR that the man on The Big Question was misheard when he said Satan, perhaps he said 'Saturn' I will quickly examine both options starting with the Satan one...

If Satan created homosexual love, and he is literally just a Mr Potato Head (it said it on twitter, must be true) Then his equivalent binary opposite, God, is probably going to be something as simple as one of those toy slinky springs that fall down the stairs and probably incapable of mustering an asteroid made of iron to warn man not to allow same sex marraige to become law in England...



Praise the Lord.

If on the other hand, homosexual love does come from the planet Saturn, then it is probably just a naturally occuring force, beyond our control and trying to stop its progress would be as futile as trying to stop a sea tide, we might be able to slow down its progress, but ultimately it will erode the shores as all land eventually falls into the ocean to pop up somewhere else millions of years later. It all becomes relative to whether you are a person open to religion or not.

Out of these two options (and having weighed up the balance of all probability, I have ruled out every other method of explanation successfully and logically) I believe that Satan probably is a Mr Potato Head and that God is simply a spring that gets placed on a top step and is clever enough to climb down stairs whilst looking cool. I mean you could throw anything down a flight of strairs, a slice of toast, a bowling ball, a roller skate, a gay man on rollerskates or even a homophobic man on a skateboard. But none of them look as impressive as a slinky when they fall down the stairs. And after all, isn't that what the whole same sex marraige debate boils down to?

I have a dream.

I have just woken up after sleeping in being snowed in all day, during this sleep I have had one of the most vivid dreams I have had in a long time.


I was looking out at the snow and it all melted in front of me, then I got a phonecall saying work was going to open and I had to get in quick, and then I was there, except school was a really big skyscraper office type thing, and it had a massive archive and top secret section, and then it was a boat, and one of the teachers was complaining that school was open, told one of the students to give a note to the head teacher, the note said FUCK OFF, but the head teacher was Armando Ianucci, then I had a meeting with Armando Iannucci in the cafe section of the school/skyscraper/boat but he didn't know why he wanted to meet me, so I had to have a meeting with his assistant so that we could piece together why it was that Armando Iannucci wanted to have a meeting with me and his assistant was Agnetha Faltskog and then the snow came back, and then I was outside the boat, except it wasn't a boat anymore, it was the Barbican Centre in London, but it wasn't because it was somewhere else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fucking all over the place.

 

I woke up not knowing why I was supposed to be meeting with Armando Iannucci, writer of Alan Partridge, the Day Today, the Thick of It and headmaster of a cruiseliner; as well as this, Agnetha Faltskog is less standoffish when you meet her than you would believe due to the medias portrayal of her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dreams

 

This occurs on the day that people celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. This is celebrated by a Federal Holiday in the States and is known, quite imaginatively, as Martin Luther King day.

 

Martin Luther King's most famous speech is 'I Have A Dream'. This is a little bit of what he dreamt about:

 

"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." 

 

 

Martin Luther King jr, has probably done more for the civil rights movement than me, he has done more for changing the minds of mass consciousness in the 20th Century than I probably will in the 21st.

 

I am alright with this, because my dreams are much more interesting than his.

The Myth of HMV

Having already written a blog in the last week where HMV was the main subject line, some might think that I am either obsessing or that I have little else to write about, and they may be right, but on the other hand the Greek Playwrite Euripedess wrote two plays about about Hippolytus in his lifetime, and he is still revered today thousands of years after his death and I am a better writer than he is.



Hippolytus, being trampled to death by horses after they were scared by a giant seamonster.

Having had a week to think about the situation with the highstreet chain a few things come to mind. Why did the HMV directors not take a look at the situation with the Poster chain, Athena?



Arty.

Athena were at one point, giants on the high street. If you wanted a poster of a topless man holding a baby, men eating sandwiches on a steel girder suspended hundreds of feet in the air or a woman scratching her bum while playing tennis, then Athena was the place to go. When the internet came to the fore, poster sales dropped; people began to download their posters or stream their posters from legal poster streaming sites like Spotiposterfy. Supermarkets started selling posters at a loss in order to get poster loving shoppers. Ultimately, the value of a poster became negated and Athena had no choice but to go administration.



Another store that HMV should have taken heed from was the toy chain, Zodiac. At one point Zodiac was the place to go, go. It's face adourned every highstreet, its isles full of children throwing temper tantrums because their parents couldn't afford the latest transformer toy. However, with the dawn of the internet, sales plummeted. People began downloading toys from illegal torrent sites and from Streaming websites like Spo'toy'fy. In a vain attempt to diversify, Zodiac stopped selling toy cars and started selling real ones, stopped selling toy horses and started selling real ones, stopped selling trains and started selling real ones, stopped selling rocking horses and started selling real rocks. Started selling Petrol, Footballers, Chainsaws, Goldfish, Dogs, Cats, Rats, Bats, Matts and DAT tapes.

The biggest problem facing Zodiac was that it had lost its identity as a shop and had started to resemble a zoo or at the very least, a petshop that also sold machine guns. Eventually the administrators were called in and the store closed.



They actually went crazy. The staff would eat their own shit.

Rattners was another highstreet casualty, it's chairman famously penned a speech saying that his shop sold shit jewellery, and while HMV didn't actually say that, they undervalued their stock at such an alarming percentage, that it gave them the customer that impression.

So now I have done a rule of three to question why HMV were not more aware of their changing environment, I need to crack on with the rest of this blog, because I am now worried that I shouldn't have started a second blog, much in the way that Euripedes did with the Hippolytus all those thousands of years ago.

I can see why the Hippolytus myth may have been something that made Euripedes want to visit it again and again. Hippolytus was a beautiful teenage boy who decided to become chaste and dedicate his life to the hunter goddess Artemis. Much in the same way that HMV was a beautiful teenage biy that decided to dedicate its existence to selling formats that were used to play masic.

Hippolytus spurning physical love angered the goddess of love Aphrodite, who cast a spell on Phaedra, who was Hippolytus's stepmother.



Hippolytus spurned his step mothers advances who then went on to accuse him of rape. His Father, Jason, cursed Hippolytus, who after being banished from Jason's kingdom was bucked off the carraiges carried by horses who were scared by a giant Seamonster who was summoned by Poseidon, although I am not sure why. Hippolytus fell off and was crushed and trampled by the horses.

You may have noticed that Initially I started to compare the plight of HMV to the greek myth of Hippolytus, partly in an attempt to draw a comparison between myself and Euripedes and justify me writing about HMV twice in the same way that Euripedes did, but I am now very confused. If CD's are the goddess Artemis, then should I compare the internet to the Goddess Aphrodite? Should I compare the sea monster that scared the horses to the Supermarkets that sold CD's at a loss, or the other way round? Should I compare the reaction of the horses to the reaction of HMV bosses who tried to match the Supermarkets prices even though it couldnt afford it? Maybe we could look at the arrogance of Hippolytus in spurning physical love in a similar way to the HMV bosses who priced the back catalogue CD's at inflated prices. Maybe Hippolytus's arrogance could be compared to the bosses who felt the need to overspend on the look of the stores, rebranding, overdiversifying and essentially bankrupting itself by purchasing music venues and paying over the odds.



Or perhaps I am out of my depth and should cut my losses and just finish up this blog.

Ultimately, Euripedes was obsessed with this tragedy; HMV's plight is also a tragedy, and one that I may be a little obsessed with, having worked there for most of my adult life. Maybe I was overreaching when I tried to compare the myth with the retail chain, but Rumbalows or Blockbuster going under doesn't have the same cultural impact as HMV going under. It was a place where people talked music, talked about bands and films, spread the love. It was a place for music obsessives to go and burn their money. None of this fits in with the Hippolytus myth at all, but that doesn't make it any less sad.

Performance Enhancing Sideburns?

As a cyclist on London’s roads my odds of surviving the year are probably a lot shorter than yours, unless you are one of the nuclear clean-up workers from Fukushima, a sword swallower or you are terminally ill with cancer. If you are one of these then YAY! The chances are I am going to live longer than you! But if I don’t I will probably die in the road with little dignity in a pool of blood surrounded by people all staring at me, it will be very dramatic. And the worst thing is, as a cyclist, I will have no respect from the people surrounding me, because everyone will assume I am a drug cheat.

Armstrong: Coming clean.

I don’t cycle to work to gain any respect but I don’t want my name to be brought into disrepute because of something that Lance Armstrong did.  I have never taken EPO or had blood transfusions to improve my performance as a cyclist. I just want to get to work on time. Armstrong has not only made pretty much everyone on the planet jump to the conclusion that everyone on a bike is a performance enhancing drug user, but that everyone with the same surname is also a liar.

More people believe that the lunar landings were faked since Armstrong’s admission, simply because the first man on the moon shares the same surname. People don’t believe that the Lead Guitarist from Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong exists anymore, and sales of the action toy Stretch Armstrong have fallen dramatically.

 

Was Stretch Armstrong a drug cheat too?

 

When people go on Oprah these days it is usually to make a twat of themselves. Toni Braxton claims her career was damaged by appearing on Oprah and Tom Cruise made a twat of himself jumping on her sofa, declaring his love for Katie Holmes. However all of those pale into significance when placed next to Lance Armstrong admitting he was a drug cheat on her show. Not only do we know that Armstrong has no testicles due to having his balls cut off after having cancer, but he had to endure the extra humiliation of admitting that he was rubbish at cycling too.

 

 

Was Tom Cruise a drug cheat too? or a closet homosexual perhaps?

So what does this mean for other cyclists? Well most of Britain’s gold medals at this summer’s Olympics were from cyclists, so naturally everyone assumes that every British athlete is a drug cheat. All Lance Armstrong’s fault. Bradley Wiggins goes as far as to claim that Armstrong's admission writes off the entire sport of cycling in the 1990's as doping was so widespread in the sport Wiggins does not endorse the use of performance enhancing drugs although he has been accused of sporting performance enhancing sideburns.

 

Performance Enhancing Sideburns?

 

In Armstrong's Oprah interview, he trys to justify his position by saying it was because he had cancer and because he had one of his balls removed. Well Hitler only had one testicle and at no point did he blame the fact that he was the architect for the hollocaust on it. so in effect what Armstrong did makes him worse than Hitler. 

 

 

Hitler: Not as bad as Armstrong.

This also leads us to speculation that other people in the public eye were also on drugs. There are rumours that Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays also took performance enhancing drugs to make him better at singing. Rumours are also rife that Jeith Richards from the Rolling Stones took performance enhancing drugs to make him more cool, although who made that allegation is unclear, experts are looking into it to see if there is any truth in it; bob Marley may have dabbled in drug use too. This shatters the illusion of the perfection of many role models.

Was Ryder on drugs too?

But most of all, the thousands of cyclists who have taken to our streets now have their reputation in tatters because everyone assumes they are on EPO, a bizarre doping system which is almost impossible to detect, when in fact most of them are just trying to save on extorionate train and bus fares, and not trying to win the Tour De France. So next time you see a cyclist, don't snear, they are just trying to get on, and it is a few bad eggs like Armstrong that spoil it for the rest of them. Like I said, I am just trying to get to work on time... now where is that syringe? I have to race a bus in the morning!

Nice weather.

One of the cornerstones of British conversation is the discussion about the weather, Australians don't tend to have this conversation because it is usually always hot, Russians tend not to have this conversation because they are either being racist against black footballers, or breaking into churches to protest against Vladimir Putin.



Ironically, Carlos's freaky free kick against France in 1997 was described as a banana shot. but you shouldn't be ironic in the face of racism.

Anyways, racism is a topic that is off topic for British people who are essentially strangers. The weather, however, isn't.

So, its a bit nippy at the moment, and as such strangers up and down the country are all saying this to each other. the next stage of this of this is to start complaining about how British infrastructure can't deal with snow.



Like what this picture is trying to exemplify.

What most people fail to realize is that Canada, which has far more snowfall than britain, has had no choice but to spend hundreds of millions on dealing with its conditions, wheras in Britain it is cheaper to just take an ecconomic hit for a few days.

So we know that Russia and Canada and Scandanavia and lots of other countries are better at dealing with snowfall than Britain, and that their train timetables are largely unaffected by it, but how would transport systems be affected on other planets?

Lets start with Mercury, the nearest planet to the sun. Mercury doesn't have weather, so snow would not affect it, but unfortunately it has no atmosphere so the trains would have to deal with ionizing radiation which Earth is largely protected from due to it's atmosphere. It's surface temperature ranges from 400oC to -179oC, both hot and cold weather have been known to disrupt train journeys. It is also unprotected from meteor showers which means you could be on the train home and your carraige gets pulverized by a piece of falling space debris made of lead, iron, or one of the many other pieces of rock floating around in the universe. The trains would probably run better in the UK.



"What about Venus?" I hear you ask, well: Venus has a constant surface temperature of 500oC, thanks to a 97% carbon dioxide atmosphere. This means that train carraiges would be stuffy and very uncomfortable. Also, as this BBC report from 2007 reports, heat can affect electrics, causing signaling failures, closing doors and other problems. Although the melting point of Aluminium (the main material that the exterior of a train is made from) is 663oC it is the people on the train who would probably burn up in a ball of flames. You are better off staying in the UK and braving the delays.



Man on a commuter train on the planet Venus. I tried to warn him.

Everyone knows about Mars because we have sent probes there, it is not so much the fact that the trains wouldnt run very well but there is literally fuck all on Mars. No libraries, Discoteques, shops or bowling alleys, so to be fair, it isn't even worth setting up a tube network there.

Jupiter is a whole other kettle of fish. not only is the surface temperature not hot, but as a gas planet it would be impossible to lay down railway tracks or build train stations. As you get closer to the centre the gravitational pull is strong enough to create a pressure that turns Hydrogen from a gas to a metallic liquid, so Aluminium trains would ultimately be crushed into basic matter, it would also crush any humans on the train. this would probably cause delays to your journey. If you thought that you could build a better train network on Saturn instead, then you are mistaken, it is also a gas planet, comprised mainly of hydrogen and helium.



This service is subject to severe delays due to its surface being mainly made up of Hydrogen and Helium.

I won't talk about the problems that train journeys would face on the planet Uranus, because it would be impossible to talk about the planet Uranus without at some point doing a crude joke about YOUR ANAL cavity, and to be honest, I am far too classy for that, I don't even scratch my balls with my right hand anymore because thats the hand that I use to shake other peoples hands when being introduced to them. See? Classy!



Man scratching balls. not his anus.

Neptune is also a gas planet made up of Methane, Helium and hydrogen, therefore even if you somehow managed to circumnavigate the problem of it being made entirely of gas, the train carraiges would always smell of farts. Furthermore, with winds of up to 1290 miles an hour, this would almost certainly damage the overhead power lines and stop trains from running.



An average day on Neptune's equivalent of Kings Cross station.

So there you go, you may not like how weather affects trains, roads and transport, but if you hate it that much you should move to Jupiter where you will probably get turned inside out by the pressure, alternatively, stop fucking whining. It's just a bit of snow.