Spot the deliberate mistake in this classic from up Possilpark way.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
I’ve never had any time for the late Jade Goody or the rest of the idiots that have come bubbling to the surface with the rising tide of so called reality television that infests the schedules. The vast majority of these so called stars are untalented, feckless idiots with few redeeming personality features and even fewer scruples. I’m therefore totally mystified by the sudden, and very manufactured, outpouring of national sorrow over Jade’s death at the weekend.
The papers are full of news about who will or won’t be attending her funeral. There’s full page photo spreads of the mountain of floral tributes, thousands of column inches devoted to her life and achievements and the great and the good are coming out of the woodwork to say how much of a shame it is that she died. Now I’m even writing about the whole affair in my blog and her mother has even started comparing the public reaction to the frankly baffling mass hysteria that followed the death of Princess Diana back in 1997. I can’t wait for the song that they chose to bring out in memory of the peoples latest princess.
Might I suggest this one?
Now don’t get me wrong here, Jade’s death was as tragic as the death of any human being, and she chose to embrace the media rather than shy away from them. I do however take issue with the relentlessness with which the press, and in particular the tabloids, have pursued the subject. Jade’s health has been front page news for nearly three weeks and has successfully squeezed out nearly anything else that’s happened in the world during that time. You know, little things, things like the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global financial meltdown and the murder of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland. I would have thought that they would at least have backed off a little when it became apparent that her death was imminent. I get the impression that the paparazzi would have been sitting round her bed ready to catch a snap of her last breath if they could have. Someone out there has been making a fortune off the back of Jade Goody’s misery, but I doubt it was her two young sons, I wonder who it could have been?
The life of Jade Goody should serve as a warning to a generation of fame hungry young people around the world. She managed quite successfully to live the dream that thousands of self centred arseholes around the world are desperate to emulate. You only have to watch some of the cringe worthy outtakes from the deluge of reality shows to get an idea of how self deluded some of these people really are.
I often wonder how many truly great artists that have remained undiscovered over the centuries simply because they never had the forum, opportunity or support to be recognised for their gifts. I think fame used to be like life in the wild, only the strong and truly determined manage to survive. It took determination, talent, guts and no small amount of luck to make it to the top. Nowadays however the whole process is broken and backwards. You don’t need talent to go on Big Brother you just need to be a preening self centred arsehole and hope that you manage to stay just the right side of the media to stay on the show and win the prize. There’s no talent in that, I could get a similar thing by locking a bunch of jakes in a static caravan and dropping cans of super lager in through the roof.
Now before someone comes crashing in here ranting on about those glorified Butlin’s talent shows like Pop Idol and Dancing on Ice I will admit that some shows do promote people with genuine talent, but they do it in such an arrogant and showboating style that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Prime example of this would be anything with Simon Cowell on it. The show pretends that it is about finding Britain’s Next Top (blank) or making an ordinary person a (blank) idol, but let’s be frank here: The real stars of these shows are the judges who are even more conceited than the fools that appear on the shows, and the real benefactors aren’t the hapless simpletons that win: it’s the production companies that make an undeniable fortune out of the public phone and text voting on each episode.
Far from supporting the argument that you need genuine talent to succeed on these shows I think it just highlights the sheer number of deluded fools out there that think they have that talent. Just take a look at some of the failed auditions that I was talking about. These people really believe that they have some talent you know, and worse their family and friends have probably been feeding their narcissistic delusions.
Now I’ve gone off on a rant about reality television shows, but that notwithstanding any of this I think we need to remember that behind all this crap there’s only one truly important fact: a woman with a young family has died. I think everyone should take a deep breath, say that’s terrible, and then FUCK OFF to leave them alone so they can grieve in peace.
I spotted this classic bit of vandalism today on the Kirklee Bridge up in the west end.
I assume such an outstanding piece of workmanship could only have been constructed by a student as it seems to be beyond the usual level of ned capabitilies.
Today El Kat and I took a sojourn up to the Hunterian Museum up at the University of Glasgow. I hadn’t been near the place since I was a student and it was a wholly new experience for El Kat but she enjoyed it a lot.
The museum has been heavily refurbished from the last time I was in it with a lot of interesting new exhibits. It feels a lot more bright and airy than before with a relaxed and modern layout that really shows off the collection. There are also a lot of interactive experiments in the section that deals with the life and achievements of Lord Kelvin. I’m not sure how amused the great physicist and polymath would be to see that his beloved university has turned him into an interactive spinning top though:
If you ask me it looks more like some nightmarish cyborg version of Grigori Rasputin lying in wait for Dr Who to visit the museum.
The section of medicine remains as disturbing as it ever was despite the improved surroundings and redesigned display cases. Strangely though the freakiest thing I could find wasn’t amongst the partially dissected human remains, or the horrendously evil looking so called medical implements, no it was this doll designed to teach medical students about babies in the womb.
It makes you wonder if the person that designed it had actually seen a human baby before.
For the last week or so I’ve been listening to some of the rarer Big Country tracks that are lying around my flat in various formats. One of my favourites is the Braes o’ Killicrankie which is a cover of an old Scottish Folk song. I was quite pleased to find a video of this Youtube as well:
For those you not blessed with an ear for a guid Scot’s tongue here’s the words in the original Scots:
Whare hae ye been sae braw, lad?
Whare hae ye been sae brankie-O?
Whare hae ye been sae braw, lad
Cam ye by Killicrankie-O?
Chorus
An had ye been where I hae been
Ye wad-na been sae cantie-O
An ye had seen what I hae seen
I’ the braes o’ Killicrankie-O.
I faught at land, I faught at sea
At hame I faught my auntie-O
But I met the devil and Dundee
On the braes o’ Killicrankie-O.
The bauld Pitcur fell in a furr
The Clavers got a clankie-O
Or I had fed an Athol gled
On the braes o’ Killicrankie-O.
O fie, Mackay, what gart ye lie
I’ the bush ayont the brankie-O
Ye’s better kiss’d King Willie’s loof
Than come to Killicrankie-O
It’s nae shame, it’s nae shame
It’s nae shame to shank ye-O
There’s sour slaes on Athol Braes
And deils at Killicrankie-O.
I’ve been playing a lot of valve’s zombie survival game left4dead during my recent enforced convalescence. Somehow a desperate fight for survival against a numberless horde of disease infected monsters seemed a fitting thing to fill my time with.
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled over the high degree of cooperative team play required to succeed at the game. The four survivors absolutely must work together if they want to last more than a few moments against the infected. Left4dead isn’t a traditional first person shooter; you can’t mow down all the enemies and stop to rest, there aren’t dozens of health packs lying around and worst of all you can’t predict what The Director is going to throw at you next.
The odd thing is that even with the steam voice chat turned off the good games where people work together just seem to flow and work perfectly. If you’re incapacitated people help you up without a word of complaint, they cover you and you naturally want to cover and help them. In short it develops into a very good shared experience that is a cartload of fun.
I’ve had a lot of very variable experiences in the games that I’ve played over the last few days; so much so that I’ve started to keep a note of the ratio of good games to bad. Surprisingly out of twenty-seven games started around half were ruined by the actions of other players. Here’s a few of the highlights:
Loaded in only to find that my character was already dead, no big deal, I can be resurrected by being rescued by the other players. The AI can be fairly dumb so it’s not really a surprise to find your character incapacitated, low on health or even dead when you spawn. In this case though I quickly realised that one of the other players was a being an arsehole. He had decided to shoot everyone else while they were still in the starting safe house. Friendly fire is on by default in left4dead, it’s another one of those small things that makes team play all the more important, you can’t run around blasting without stopping to think. If another survivor is in need of rescue it’s often the case that charging in all with all guns blazing and turning the place into a scene from the Wild Bunch can actually do more harm than good.
Medical kit hogs are another game breaker. In left4dead they are a rare and valuable commodity, each character can only carry one at a time, and they are consumed when used. The player has a tactical choice every time they take it out: either heal themselves, or heal someone else who is more in need of it. In the better games people were healing each other right, left and centre. As a result we usually made it through the levels in far better shape than if we had been selfish. In one game we were doing however we had a bad combination of an idiot that kept throwing Molotov cocktails and grenades right in amongst us and hording the kits. When we finally reached the end o the campaign, and the last stand against multiple waves of infected he was the only one with a medical kit. The rest of us were down to less than 25% health and he had over 90%. So naturally he promptly healed himself up to 100% and the rest of us got wiped out in second.
Possibly the worst of all games I had occurred when I loaded into the game with what can only be described as a bunch of Rambos. They absolutely refused to stay still and defend the exit until the escape route arrived. As a result we were quickly surrounded and isolated by the infected and wiped out.
I suppose though it’s a well known fact that you get arseholes in every game you play. I bet there were arseholes when chess was invented, and there will still be arseholes when we’re playing four dimensional rocket hockey. The key thing is to have fun and vote with your feet if someone is being an arsehole. I highly recommend left4dead if you’re after some fast paced team play action and if you want a game come find me on steam.
I regularly read a blog called /film which deals with movie industry news and gossip as well as humorous short parody films found around the internet by the writers. It’s content has recently begun to annoy me, although it’s not the blog itself that I’ve found fault with: it’s the Hollywood Movie Machine. /film reflects the movie industry, and as the movie industry seems to be currently suffering from a high imbalance in the talent to toe-rag department. Frankly it’s currently churning out piles of shite in desperate search of dollars and worse than that it’s dragging the English language down with it.
As a result I move we excise the following Hollywood-isms from common speech:
Reboot – Several online dictionaries list the word reboot as a noun, but I consider it more likely to be a verb. You put on boots, but you reboot a computer. I particularly despise reboots – the plural form of this word that’s appeared lately in conjunction with Friday the 13th and others.
RetCon – Retroactive continuity – This is where things are added, taken away or altered to fit the current storyline. Comic books, especially in the 50′s and 60′s were particularly bad for this as they were never written from the point of view of having an overreaching internal logic. Later on as the kids who read them grew up into self obsessed nerds the writers found that they had to write stories that made internal sense or risk the wrath of the fan boys. Retconning allows the writers to resurrect dead characters, change heroes powers and generally get on with telling the story, but it also tends to degenerate into screen time that has to be wasted to avoid a fan-rammy.
Franchise – Just give it up. If a movie makes money it doesn’t have to become a deluge of action figures, novels and worst of all sequels.
Adaptation – Taking a story from another form of media for example comic books, novels, computer games or even burger restaurants and making a movie out of it. Will someone, for the love of god, explain to Hollywood that many of the things their adapting worked perfectly because they were written for the medium in which they were originally presented? No two hour movie will ever capture every nuance of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and no movie adapted to a video game has ever been good.
Sequel – I’ll admit that some stories deserve a sequel, and they do often set the scene correctly at the end of the movie, but for every one that does a hundred more are made because the original was a money-spinner. Star Wars was fine with the first three movies, the lord of the Rings needed three movies to tell the story, but the Matrix should have quit while it was ahead. If the story can be told, and told well, in one movie we don’t need to see the characters going through it all again no matter how entertaining it was, and we certainly don’t need:
Prequels – A sequel where the action happens before the original movie. WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT? The movie is supposed to be a heroic journey. The critical event in the hero/world/universes existence, but Hollywood doesn’t trust the audience to sit back and accept the world’s backstory. They’ve got to try and show it with better CGI, bigger name actors and huge special effects.
Hollywood-ism – I know I only coined this about 400 words ago, but it annoys me already.
I don’t know if you’ve all been following the news about the shooting in Northern Ireland, but I find myself outraged. This wasn’t an attack on an armed British patrol making its way through the Rathenaw Estate or a riot in the centre of town of British treatment of a republican prisoner. This was a deliberate and calculated act of simple murder directed at two pizza delivery men whom, in the course of doing their job, had to deliver some pizzas to a British army barracks. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary: they had been there regularly on a Saturday night for months, maybe years. They weren’t armed, the soldiers weren’t armed and nobody could have foreseen that a bunch of extremist maniacs would try to kill them for delivering pizzas.
There hasn’t been a British solider killed in Northern Ireland since 1997 and I’m sure everyone in Ulster had begun to believe that it could never happen again. The peace deal struck between the terror groups, politicians and the people of Northern Ireland has brought peace and stability to a land in desperate need of calm. It changed the future of Ireland and gave the people there new hope and much needed optimism. I hope that they won’t let that future be destroyed by the actions of a handful of idiots.
I suppose fundamentally these men believe they are fighting a just war against an occupying power. I think they seem themselves as cavalier heroes fighting against a faceless jackbooted tyranny, At least I hope they do, the alternative is that these people just like killing and the presence of British soldiers in Northern Ireland just gives them an outlet and a target.
Just as a last thing, something I’ve wondered about, is the difference in how the unionist and republican terror groups are treated compared to Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. If I didn’t know any better I would say that the western world is far softer on the Irish paramilitary groups. If you’re a Muslim and you even looked the wrong way at a plane you got a one way ticket to Guantanamo Bay but the paramilitary types barely even seem to get a look in. Entire gangs of people are being lifted down in England and held for days without trial or lawyer under what appears to fairly flimsy evidence. Meanwhile nobody noticed a disgruntled bunch of Irishmen complaining about Domino’s pizza delivering to the army and polishing their guns. Either the paramilitaries are very good at staying under the security forces radar, which admittedly they have had years of practice at, or the Muslim extremists need to stop publishing their plans on Face Book. Maybe the British government should have expended some of the massive amount of time and effort they’ve thrown into doing American’s bidding on tidying up their own back yard before running off to mess up other countries.
All criticism of British policy aside, I believe, as do the majority of the people and politicians of Northern Ireland, that this weekends shootings were the work of a few shot sighted fools and I have little doubt that if the security forces don’t catch up with them then elements of their fellow republicans will.
I’ve managed to pick up a particularly nasty viral infection over the last couple of days. It’s got all the hallmarks of a bad cold with stuffed up sinuses, death rattle cough and an inescapable physical tiredness. It seems my folks have got the thing as well, and my Da who usually shrugs these things off without even batting an eyelid has been off his work for the first time since 1987. It must be serious…