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.

End of an Era for HMV?

The news of HMV going into administration has brought up all kinds of memories as a former employee. The main one being the tradition at my local store of placing pubic hair in leaving cards. I worked in a local HMV in a leafy north west London suburb. One of the traditions of this store that we started was trimming our pubic hair and taping them into the leaving cards of fallen comrads. It was classy, we were young and we had the world at our feet, we were the coolest kids in the highstreet, the men in suits working above us made some bad decisions and it had to end.



But does it? In 2008, RBS, an ailing bank, recieved a bailout of 850 billion. It was failing and had made a massive loss, in much the same way that HMV were. Leaving it to fail would have left 140,000 out of work and lots of people with savings effectively buggered: not only would there have been a massive shortage of pubes in over 100,000 leaving cards, as well as a massive dip into recession.



That is where RBS would have gone (Note the pubes on the seat, we would have taken them and popped them in a card as well as shaving off our own.)

If banks like Barclays and RBS can be bailed out to the tune of billions, then why can't the government bail out HMV? Nationalise it, it is already a British institution. It dedicated vast resources into the war effort while it was part of EMI diverting its factories into making parts for the bombs that we dropped on Dresden, while it could have been simply making a profit. Surely that counts for something. For the whole of the war, workers placed their pubes into bombs that were dropped on Germany.



Where were you during the war?

One of the reasons that HMV has failed was because of internet piracy, streaming , and competitors like Amazon. Now this is all well and good, companies should be able to fail if they are not as good as their competitors, but Amazon have had an unfair advantage inasmuch as the fact that they have not paid 234 million in corporation tax. Surely this isn't fair. If the government was to force Amazon to pay their tax, they could use the proceeds to pay off the 176 million in debt that HMV have accumilated, while playing by the rules. Alternatively they could completely write off any corporation tax for the previous 5 years like they have done with Starbucks, Topshop or Amazon, this would make up 50 million.



Green: "I don't pay any corporation tax!"

If the British taxpayer owned HMV then it would shut up the seeming millions of customers who have suddenly started piping up lamenting its loss on social networking sites. They would effectively own a record shop and what would be cooler than that?



Bonzer!

If a back catalogue CD costs £15 but was brought at £7.09 then the economy would be sorted in no time, and David Cameron would be able to take credit for not only saving Nipper but saving the livelihood of an honest company that although has overcharged for its product in the past, has been essentially honest and not diverted millions in profits into offshore accounts.

We could talk about the gap that HMV will leave in the highstreet, or the human cost, or even the cunt customers who are moaning about the giftcard situation and failing to empathise with the staff they are shouting at who are at no fault and are probably going to lose their jobs. No, the real tragedy is that 4000 leaving cards have to be filled with the pubic hair of at least 40,000 people, which will create a shortage of hairs being left on toilet seats, and surely, that is what makes Britain great?!



Good luck HMV.

Feminists vs Transexuals.

In the Observer this week, battle lines were drawn when Julie Burchill led a fierce ground attack on the transexual community. This was following last weeks accidental airstrike on the same community by Suzanne Moore. Of course, this is all metaphoric and there isn't really a proper war involving guns and missiles and shelling like there is in Israel and Palestine, but it would be really funny if there were; I am in fact using an analogy to help your tiny little minds understand what is going on better.

Moore is, (according to her Wikipedia entry) born of an American father and a working class mother. From this you begin to understand how the class system works, that it is impossible to categorise an American man into the class system. Furthermore, the combination of a working class mother and American father is almost always going to produce women who are veermently transphobic (Transphobia is the fear or irrational hatred of either transport systems or transexuals, but usually both.)



Julie Burchill looking sexy on a beach, only don't think that, because she is a feminist and does not want to be objectified by horrible bastard men.

Why are you telling me, you ask? In truth, it's because I haven't written a blog for a long time and couldn't really think of anything else to write about and was worried about becoming completely dormant as a 'writer'. AND because of the twitstorm that was created by her defence of Suzanne Moore, I am aware that this is getting longwinded so I will get to the point. Last week, Suzanne Moore was saying something or other about body image because it had just been Christmas and everyone was a bit fat, and she said, "I'ts alright, don't worry about it, we need to get away from the idea of female perfection as being a Brazillian Transexual."

I think this is discusting for two reasons:

Reason A, or 1, I haven't decided which yet: men don't want to think of the women that they are objectifying to be post op men.

Reason 2: Suzanne Moore is legitimizing the womans right to be fat, which they should not have. They already have the vote, in a few years they will have equal pay, they have the right to work, in short, they already have a lot of rights.

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And this should not be one of them.


But all this is academic anyways because Moore upset a group of people more vocal than me, and that is the transexual community. The transexual community is a small area just north of Hainault on the edge of London. It has a transexual community centre, a transexual garden centre and a transexual alotment. They do a really nice job in keeping their community in check and working well; in short, it is the perfect example of David Cameron's big society. It is for this reason that the left leaning Observer Newspaper launched such an audacious attack on them.



Cameron, explaining that he too considered gender realignment surgary, before realizing that it would make his breasts big and cause extra strain on his back.



This of course is only one theory, and when you look closely at the situation it becomes clear that this is not an attack by proxy on the Conservative party, but that feminists are simply jealous of transexuals. After all they usually have nicer bodies because they have had lots of surgary than proper women, they have bigger and better boobs, and most importantly, they have their own community, the transexual community, complete with its own community centre, community play area for transgendered children and a transgendered park where transgendered people can get together to walk their transgendered dogs. It's actually really nice and is pretty much the only reason I can think of that Julie Burchill would attack it.



I bet you are wondering why that last line is italicized don't you? Well it's because I accidentally hit shift and a button isn't it, but I quite like the effect of it so I am leaving it there. As someone who is quite confident that no one else reads this I can get away with doing things like that, but if I were a columnist, and my actual job was to spew out wanky opinions week after week, it would probably be more important to worry about the effect of my writing, say, accidentally italicizing lines, or saying something offensive about the transgender community would have more of an impact if I were a collumnist at a paper like The Observer. I would expect some comeback if I offended a minority group for a cheap laugh. Unfortunately I am not a woman so I wouldn't be able to hide behind the banner of Feminism in the way that Suzanne Moore has. Similarly, I am not protected by the eloquant, balanced and liberal mind of Julie Burchill, so I would be even more fucked.

The only question I have left to answer is which side of the fence I am on. I seem to have taken a position defending Transgendereds over columnists, but to be honest, I don't really give a shit, I just said it to fill a gap. Which I suppose makes me closer to a collumnist than someone with sympathies for the transgendered community.