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Gladiators.

Friday, June 25, 2010

On Saturday, as anyone who reads this enough will know, I have to turn 20. I have to because the laws of mathematics simply state it as fact. That the time I have occupied in our linier understanding, measured roughly by the number of rotations around the sun equals to 20. Short of killing myself, or inventing a time machine so to create some sort of paradox where I can inexplicably continue on this linier path of time while altering the amount I have previously occupied, it is unavoidable. Particularly since I can’t even explain how this paradox might work, let alone invent a time machine.

I don’t really like my birthday anyway. I know, big surprise seeing how jolly I am with everything else. It’s the attention I don’t like, especially when the cake comes out. You are slowly marched towards with a large chocolate slab, slowly tempted, disallowed to go right in and eat some, forced to sit through an uncomfortable, lingering rendition of the most tired song in history, sung at you expectantly by your closest friends and family, all with their smiling faces, all wanting you to smile back, to be happy and grateful, as if you’re meant to be anything other than slightly anxious and uncomfortable in this moment. Just give me the damn cake.

This year is more shit simply because I have to stop being a teenager, which is not fair. However, in an attempt to be a healthy human being and accept that I cannot avoid being alive for longer, I have decided to commemorate my teenage years with summaries of each. Tid bits that I reckon encompass the feeling of growing up, the feeling of forever that being a teenager is, the feeling that life is so incredibly important, or something.

13 – At thirteen, after a couple years of being at high school, I rediscovered rebellion. I went to a comprehensive mixed high school that had its own sister primary school. Kids came into year 7 with their alliances, their friendships and their enemies, a social structure. I knew about three people and not very well when I started, my close knit was loose. Not only that, but coming from a Church of England primary school means that you’ve been pretty sheltered. The biggest thing that happened at our primary was one kid broke a window in year six and it got blamed on another. I only broke a few rules now and then. Like, sometimes, even though we were meant to wait for lunch, I’d sneak a Pepperami out of my lunch box at morning playtime. Cheam High School, my new stomping ground, was vast, varied and scary. So, I figured the best thing to do was keep my finger nails clean, collar buttoned, and stay out of the way. Back the fuck down. At 13, I changed my mind.

Now, I realise I have built this up slightly. In this case, rebellion didn’t manifest as arson, theft or murder. Instead, I changed my image. I loosened my tie, made it ridiculously short, rolled up my sleeves, chewed chewing gum. I put gel in my hair. Obviously, everyone else did exactly the same, and the rebellion was more like conformism, simply blending back in, but it sparked the attitude. And then I got into a fight.

There’s always one kid who annoys everyone, almost to an extent that you wonder if they go searching for the negative attention by being infuriating. These are usually the sort of people that in ten years die in allies from sniffing glass powder mixed with low levels of coke, or on the front of magazines, inexplicably adored by everyone making you question the resolve of human collective consciousness. For whatever reason, I was particularly sick of him, and the last straw came when I was playing pat ball, the only ball game worth playing in a massive walled prison where only tennis balls are allowed. He was watching. The dialogue went something like: Him – “Aw, let me play.” Me – “We’re in the middle of a game.” Him – “Gays. Just let me jump in.” Me – “No, we’re playing, we’re finishing a game.” Him – “Uh, gay. You’re so gay. Just wanna play.” Me – “Go away, we’re playing.” And then, despite my convincing argument not to, he jumped in and hit my ball. To this, I got out of pat ball stance (slightly hunched with your patting arm extended, hand rigid, and feet plated wide) and pushed him. He pushed me back. Then I went for his neck – apparently I thought the best way to get him to go away was to just suffocate him – and in response, he went for mine. We ended up in this push fight, interspersed with awkward headlocks while the crowd gathered around chanting “Fight, fight, fight.” Chants actually don’t help. If anything it drew me out of the experience and anger and made me realise what a twat I was being, particularly as I certainly would have found it an entirely dissatisfying fight as a spectator since no one was bleeding, but instead locked in a meek grapple. And I couldn’t very well force aggression and make him bleed after becoming so overwhelmed by anxiety and transfixed on my own idiocy.

Eventually, Mr Finn showed up and pulled us off each other without much trouble. I wriggled a bit, but didn’t lunge back at the kid. He looked even less believable as antagonistic. Worse was that we didn’t even get a sanction for the scramble; Mr Finn didn’t deem our pathetic attempt to be violent as anything worth punishing else it would’ve been considered excessive.  All we got was a disgraced glance before going to our next lesson.

I’ll continue my teenage years tomorrow.

PnL.x

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August.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

For the last week, I suppose, I have been pondering one thing and one thing almost exclusively (apologies to those I have ignored or cars I have unknowingly walked in front of in the process): is the Internet good?

I truly cannot decide. Which is annoying since, at the age of 20, I take pride that I have managed to distill a vision of the world and the universe that will be substantial until something catastrophic and core shaking happens. It’s not perfect, it’s cynical toward the individual and not all too much better toward the human species as a whole, but maintains a positive view on the world and a humbling understanding of the general pointlessness and insignificance of my predetermined life. It’s sort of manic depressive humanism.

Yet, for all the follies of man, which I can see are just inevitable steps of the grand process of evolution, and all the achievements which are simply masturbatory time killers, there is one thing I can’t decide on, despite the fact that I know it’s existence is both evolution and masturbation. If the internet is good.

What I like doing on the internet is playing a game which can be done on either Wikipedia or IMDB. Basically, you hop through pages via links, seeing if you can get from one celebrity to another in a certain amount of moves. For example, can you get from Richard Dawkins to Angelina Jolie in three moves, by only clicking through links on the IMDB pages?

Inevitably, what happens is you then end up reading some long forum thread about some actor or some film that will touch on an issue that you feel quite strongly about. The thread or a reply might include some article link that you click and waste twenty minutes reading but not actually paying attention to, and then you may be tempted to leave a comment somewhere, anywhere, because it has gripped you that much. Before you know it, it’s half seven, your coffee’s cold, and you’ve missed whatever was on TV (probably Hollyoaks, you shameless, tasteless prat) and all for the sake of saying something to someone on the internet, as if it mattered. But does it matter? Does it?

I seem to spend a lot of my time going round in this circle. Of course it matters, because I was about to say it, therefore it’s significance is inherent. Or has the internet merely romanticised the importance of everyone’s words, are some opinions actually more unimportant than others. Is the mere fact that I am questioning it uncovering it’s unimportance, or was it an inevitable comment to be made in an inevitable place and an inevitable time because of the events, all of which were inevitable, that were its precursor. Many, many of these psychologically damaging schizophrenic arguments end up questioning my own existence like a stoner who, after spending a day listening to Whale Music in his smoky room, switches to speed and listens to MGMT at full brain melting blast as lasers trace his face in some sweaty, gyrating club.

So is the internet good? I mean, an example of it’s goodness is that I don’t need to know things anymore. If I’m reading an article and am too stupid to know half the words in it, I can click the word and google tells me what it means. Great! Though, then at the same time, does it mean we’re getting dumber? Also, it allows people, myself included, to indulge in self importance, or revel in unhealthy fetishes. But, does the open enjoyment of these fetishes mean we are advancing as a species into a free minded and therefore ultimately stronger and more understanding super being? Or is open minded totally overrated…

I don’t know.

Therefore, in the summer, I have decided to disappear for a month. I’m going to get on a train and dart about Europe for a bit. I’m going to see the great, staggering, decadent, underwhelming achievements of humanity and sit under trees staring at oceans or mountains. It’s internet detox. Someone who believes in them would call it “Soul searching”. I call it getting the fuck away from actual life for a bit.

PnL.x

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Speaketh.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Apparently “because our language is so widespread — and also because there has been a dreadful devaluation and deterioration of education in our hectic, modern, digitalised world — we do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English.” I, like, totally agree. Like, everyone completely ruins it for everyone else and I’m so sick of grammer and spellin and that being dissed and not taken seriously. Its sooo out of order!!!

I quite like trying to write well. I also quite like making really long sentences with different layers, heavy use of commas and so on. Sometimes I choose use oxford commas, sometimes I’ll get a bit fun with the semi-colons, I might even delve into the realms of parentheses’ if the moment takes. Alliteration is fun, too. And metaphors. And splitting infinitives because apparently it’s bad, but it sounds exciting, like splitting atoms. Sometimes I’ll play around with order, so to be poetic, or just to mimic Yoda. So it makes me cringe that there are people who believe English must be confined to a stringent set of rules meaning that playing with it is less fun.

The thing that has always drawn me into writing is the simple joy of putting words next to each other to mean something; the ability to paint scenes, emotions, actions, all with the use of little weird symbols. Which is great for me since I can’t actually paint. Or draw. Or sculpt. Or play a musical instrument to any brilliant level. Or make the emptiness of inadequacy go away … but, uh, writing, yes, writing is for me.

Now, this isn’t to say that writing is the art for the artless. No, what I mean is that it is indeed art. And that art is all about the flow of emotions, the conveyance of a thought through the construction of arbitrary man-made squiggles. The beauty is in the freedom and absolute meaningless; the way that so much human experience and understanding can be locked within these abstract lines that mean nothing else to this entirely mathematical universe, and then be unlocked by another person. It’s the creative energy and vision that makes good writing great, not the placement of commas.

The Queen’s English Society, however, according to the Times, are distraught by English’s treatment, as if the language is a beaten greyhound, spent after years of racing, constantly abandoned and tied to lampposts by duel carriageways before being ‘rescued’ by an equally abusive owner who continues the cycle, probably tying it to the same lamppost with the same bit of rope. “English is becoming corrupted in the age of mass communications, the text message, e-mail and the like.” English barks into the night from within its bruised and bare ribs.

I simply don’t understand this point of view. I don’t understand how a language can be abused. You can abuse your wife, your husband, your child, your pet, or yourself, but a language? (Disclaimer: of course, you shouldn’t abuse any of these things, but, conceptually, it can be done. Probably with fists.) A language adapts, always adapts. A language is a wind. It’s a force that is consistent to history only. Abusing it, no matter how hard you want to try, even if you were to speak only in vowels and use apostrophes instead of full stops, like a weirdo, is impossible.

And that’s another thing: in the Queen’s English Society – a possible future that promises to be more annoying than if Ke$ha and Justin Bieber were cloned so to make up the entire Congress of the World – a term like ‘weirdo’ would be abolished because it’s slang. Damn slang. Movements like these always hold the line that if it wasn’t in the dictionary when Shakespeare was alive, it doesn’t count. When Latin began its widespread phase out of many schools, people cried in anger that it was a travesty to kill this language off. Problem was, of course, that the language was already dead and no longer in use. Teaching such complex but useless knowledge would have been irresponsible.

And usually, that’s what it boils down to. Teachers aren’t doing their job and children are stupid. Children aren’t smart enough to learn every language and awkward maths by 8, and teachers are lazy and don’t bother teaching them the intricacies of life right from the ancient Egyptians. Bring back the cane, motivate the little buggers, give teachers less breaks, make the bastards work, and destroy the internet and mobile phones. The internet is where bad language festers and mobile phones are the vessels for this devilish tongue. The Queen wouldn’t stand for this. The Queen must be respected. The Queen must be avenged! … I hate the iPhone, but I would never have it removed from the shops and disbanded so to save technology, despite how much I may enjoy watching a fanboy drop their new iPad onto a jagged rocky surface.

Eh. To be perfectly honest, half of my disdain for the Queen’s English Society is not actually their pretentiousness and complete twatery, but due to the fact that their new editor looks like a sick hippopotamus. Kinda reaffirms my image of all of the idiots that are associated with this wicked policing sterilisation unit. Language: fascist style.

PnL.x

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Civility.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

According to the British Government, the PM is not actually that highly paid. Nah, his job is way cheaper than some of the senior civil servants out there. Theres this one guy who gets, like, loads of money. Like loads. And it’s so much more than our man Cameron. He’s way down to earth.

So, the coalition reckons the best thing to have done was publish the names and earnings of these people so we can all grab our pitchforks and be super pissed off at the arseholes who are getting rich off of a goddamn job. Like they’re bloody earning it … oh wait.

Not only have they already named and shamed the top civil servants who are pulling in more than David, but, as the Guardian reports, “The coalition plans to publish the name, job title and earnings of every civil service employee earning more than £58,000 by next year, promising to “pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power”, said the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.” That way, we get to know all of these people that are wasting our money!

Well, apart from the fact that it’s not our money. But we have a right to know, right? Well, no, not precisely. In fact, not even at all. We have a right to know the goings on of politicians earnings and expenses because, despite how much they despise this part of their job, they are directly accountable to us. We effectively hired them. However, the civil service is only accountable to the government, not to the public. They are public sector, their earnings should be private. The money they are paid with is no more the publics than is the fiver, which I paid WHSmith for a few box files and then was hypothetically given as change to another guy, still mine. Their justification is crap. Illuminating the hallways of power? Either way you want to look at it, their reasons are to divert the lynch mob.

For a year, the public have been squarely and rightly looking at the Houses of Common with disgust and betrayal. They have been turning the corrupted building inside out to try and resolve and understand why and how they were able to get away with it. I fear that this new government created concern over earnings which aren’t even that substantial (£58,000 being an extremely average wage for professionals with large responsibilities) is all an attempt to steer public scorn away from politicians so that the new government can have some fun with money jacuzzis as they masturbate to thousand pound live porn all covered by their expenses.

Even if you were to take Maude’s justification seriously, you then have to identify power and who holds it. Are the civil service actually that influential in a government that is becoming less concerned with solutions and more concerned with opinion polls and people liking them? Perhaps the earnings of the press and media should be released. Or is power actually in the hands of those who keep us alive; the doctors? Perhaps we should release their income.

The promise will no doubt receive a lot of hate from the civil service, and quite rightly as the government have no place to publicly declare these people’s price, but there should also be focus on the governments intentions, which, to this casual observer, seem to smack of paranoia and blame replacement.

PnL.x

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Singsong.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I make a coffee and I stick on some music – currently playing: Arcadia (Acoustic Version) by Ash – before uncomfortably crawling onto my falling-to-pieces IKEA chair and trawl through the internet for an early evening browse. Before I’m even slightly tempted to check Facebook, I see the BBC’s article about the formula for creating the winning Eurovision song and, it being Towel Day and my admiration disallows me to panic or engage in panic inducing news, give it a 2x-click. Apparently, all the song needs is “love”.

Bullshit.

I haven’t done the research to substantiate my claim (the BBC used Wordle as their number cruncher and entered every winning lyric) but I would say that that is fairly representative of just about every chart hit, perhaps every song ever made. Love is so over referenced in music, or at least in mainstream music, that it has almost become synonymous. Strip apart a metal song and you’ll probably find love is the momentum too, behind all the blood, screaming, and imagery of hell.

The word cloud also includes words like “baby” and ”eyes” as prominent, as well as some rather more ambiguous words like “just”, “let” and “like”. Helpful.

Fine, okay, you may say that the BBC’s article was clearly a bit of mock journalism, a bit of light web-based amusement. However, the Eurovision is one of those times of year when the British National pride is dented somewhat, and all we can do is take solace in the bumbling narrations of Mr Wogan, now Mr Norton, to smirkingly chuckle at the other stupid nations. Ha, silly countries with their different ways. Norton sitting in his little sound proof box; us sitting in our little unloved country. “Come on, come on Ireland, give us some points, just some … Yeah! 5 points, get in!”

Do we care about Eurovision? No. But we care a bit about what other countries think. And either way you call it, music contest or a political reflection of the modern Europe, they don’t like us.

So this year we are rather uncaringly chucking some kid onto a massive stage in a strange country he probably doesn’t know in front of a bunch of foreign people, and telling him to sing a song written by Pete Waterman – owner of Europe’s largest indoor model railway, if I’m not mistaken. I wouldn’t sing a Pete Waterman song in a post-apocalyptic world where I’m the only person alive just in case Zombies heard me. Fuck, I wouldn’t even sing one in the shower.

Basically, the BBC resources should extend past Wordle and instead they should be getting science people in laboratories to figure out an actual winning formula for the songs that goes further than suggesting maybe make it about the most universal and eternally thought provoking theme of love and how we identify, construct, understand, and deal with this seemingly arbitrary word that is almost exclusive and integral to the human experience. What aspect of love? What tone? One of happiness or of loss? What about the sexual connotations? Would a song about love be as sure fire if it revolved around the love between two masochists? Or the love for an object? We need answers BBC team!

The song we have submitted does include “love” you’ll be relieved to know. However Josh only ‘sings’ it couple of times, in between a chorus that so blatantly rips off “Blame it on the Boogie”. I reckon, in accordance to BBC findings, instead of this…

How do I begin to imagine all the happy faces I’d like to see?
The final destination, the sounds of celebration
If I could find the opportunity

The opening of the song should like be this…

How do I begin to love all the lovely faces I’d like to love?
The final love love love love, the sounds of love love love love
If I could find the love love love love love

And continued thusly. Sure fire, right?

Nevertheless, love, I feel, is overdone. If the ‘statistics’ show anything, then that’s it. Instead, we should tap into the one thing that Eurovision winners haven’t. Fear.

The modern Eurozone is not, collectively, a place of love. It is a place where economics is dictating the political tone causing countries to employ double standards and sparking riots in city centres. The deficit that has consumed some countries is a foretelling warning of what could happen to the others. Love, for many people, at the moment, is a reminder in the evening after a day of worry, a reminder that says not only is the financial world complicated, but so is the personal. Fear.

So, applying the same logic to our current entry, I have devised this, admittedly, perfect version of Pete Waterman’s pile of shite. In all honestly, not many of the lyrics need altering. Sing along to the song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0vHnZDX1GI

How do I begin to imagine the terrified faces I want to flee?
The final destination, sounds of a crying nation
If I could escape the falling debris.

So I wonder, who can I turn to?
Who can save these people from this decay?
Without you there beside me, since we became bankrupt.
The divorce was finalised today.

So the sky is rid of sunshine, we’ve forgotten good times
Sent to the slaughter, can’t afford to feed our daughter
I don’t know about you but that sounds shit to me

I can feel it coming closer
All the fear has built inside my hateful soul
There’s nothing left to do now, gonna end it all now
Don’t wait because the future is empty

Oh lord, the sky is rid of sunshine, we’ve forgotten good times
Sent to the slaughter, can’t afford to feed our daughter
I don’t know about you but that sounds shit to me …

=D

PnL.x

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