When I'm in charge, there's a few offences that will be punishable by swift death. As a little service to you, those of my friends kind enough to read about me here, I am choosing to let you know - ahead of time - what these things are. That way, when I take control, you won't be left trying to plead ignorance in the face of my heavily armed correction squads, for believe me now - ignorance will be no excuse. Read on and take note, for these are the things that you shall not do: - Drop litter of any variety anywhere except in a bin. This includes spitting chewing gum from your mouth, you savages. I can only imagine that smokers will be particularly hard-hit by this ruling, as they seem to think it their right to drop cigarette butts everywhere they go. Oh well.
- Let your dog crap on the street. Similar to the above, this will also result in a swift execution. As a sidenote - cats will still roam free and may still defecate in your garden. You may not like this, but you can whine about that when you successfully depose me from my seat of power and take charge of the country.
- Leave used tea bags in the sink. Words fail me sometimes, they really do. Put it in the damn bin. Good grief.
- Play music at an offensively loud volume in your house, such that I am forced to listen to it while relaxing in my garden.
- As above, for music played in a car or other motor vehicle.
- As above, for music played on your mobile phone while walking down the street. This problem is only compounded by the fact that you're probably listening to R&B. Luckily for you I've not yet made bad musical taste a capital crime, but you have been warned.
- Drive a car that has been "modded" with an absurd exhaust. No one thinks your mum's Clio has a V8 engine, no matter how loud it is. You better hope it's modded to withstand sustained RPG fire.
- Swear in public, especially in earshot of children. Just shut up, huh? No one wants to hear you punctuating your sentences with the f-word.
- Engage in any unsolicited marketing activity, including but no limited to spamming, cold calling, junk-faxing, pop-ups and spyware.
- Sell crap food. For example: Nescafe is not coffee; sausages should contain meat that wasn't pressure hosed off the carcass; hydrogenated vegetable fat is not a valid substitute for the cream in ice cream; low fat yoghurt is a travesty; citric acid, sugar and carbonated water do not constiture lemonade; Sunny Delight and Fruit Shoot are revolting. We'll eat real food when I'm the boss.
- Stop on double yellow lines to use a cash machine or similar. You may get lucky and simply find your car stolen while you get your money, but I wouldn't chance it.
- Show off your underwear. Now, some people think that women showing off thongs is sexy. I am not one of these people. I don't want to see it, and you will stop showing it to me. There are extremely rare occasions on which underwear on display can be highly intriguing, and this will be permitted, but 99 times out of 100 it is just plain ugly. I am, however, prepared to act as judge, jury and executioner in these borderline cases.
- Write truly terrible song lyrics. Recent offender: Fergie's track "Big girls don't cry" includes the line "And I'm gonna miss you, like a child misses his blanket." Not only is this line unwieldy and tenuous, but the next line shockingly fails to find anything to rhyme with blanket. Seriously, just shut up.
I'm sure there are more things that will spring to mind once I oust Gordon from No. 10 in my impending coup, but I think that's enough planning for now. I trust you all feel better informed. Tread carefully.
Answer me this, if you can... Are the majority of women so easily manipulated that they will buy a perfume "endorsed" by Sarah Jessica Parker - a woman who almost certainly had no hand in designing it or manufacturing it, but was in fact just paid a wedge of cash to be photographed holding it - believing that by wearing said perfume they will somehow attain the style, success and sex appeal of the fictional character that she played in Sex And The City? I hate advertising. The sooner Boots take down those 10 foot tall posters of her ridiculous grinning face, the more pleasant my walk to work will be.
I've probably mentioned it before, but I find it tough to buy CDs. I'm usually pretty short for cash, and I tend to buy everything second hand on ebay, but I still have to be really selective in what I pick up. I hate to feel like I'm wasting any money on non-essential things like music or games or whatever, because money isn't exactly abundant... I get frustrated trying to pick CDs, because it's so hard to find anything that really grabs me - something really outstandingly different or inspired or inspiring or even just really impressively talented. I listen to the radio most days, and while I love the variety of music, there's just so little that I'd ever actually buy and listen to again once I got bored of hearing it on the radio. Sure, the Kaiser Chiefs are pretty good, and the lyrics are quite smart, but is the music really any more impressive than anything I've heard before? Yes, Flourescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys is a great single now that you mention it, but I don't care about the rest of their work because it all just sounds deliberately grimy and underproduced, and apart from the drumming they don't sound wonderfully talented - more like they were just in the right place at the right time. Hey There Delilah by the Plain White Tees is a beautiful acoustic number, but wouldn't I be better just buying a Simon & Garfunkel best of? Hell, even that Kate Nash single is pretty catchy, but I hate Lily Allen so that probably wouldn't work out too well. There's even the odd dance track here and there that's good, but I can't listen to an album of that, God help me. The only band that's really grabbed me of late are The White Stripes, and that's probably only because it's the first time I've been exposed to any blues music. Even then, though, I'll probably just buy up their back catalogue and won't venture further than that. So, in a bid to widen my horizons, I turned to... Amazon. Perhaps their recommendations would be able to inspire me? So I sat and browsed the list, let it know I already owned a few things it was suggesting, and then had a look at what remained... Well, as I like Electric Light Orchestra, I'm apparently supposed to want to buy something by Wizzard or Prefab Sprout. Hmm. This is not off to a flying start... Ooh, here we go, something that got recommended because I like Belle & Sebastian, that might work. Oh, it's Isobel Campbell's solo album after she quit the band due to breaking up with the lead singer. Sorry, no sale, I don't think that's going to work. There's a slew of other bands from Glasgow, but again I'm not sure that's the best criteria on which to suggest CDs. Ugh... Oasis albums, recommended because I like Blur. As someone who was around at the time, this seems quite ironic. Pantera, because I like Rage Against The Machine; Keane and Kasabian because I like Muse; endless Ben Folds records; Enya records because I bought my dad one of her albums as a present years ago... It's probably just a mercy that Amazon doesn't know I like Green Day and Blink 182 or I'd be wading through NOFX albums and other "real" punk that I'm really not into. This isn't working for me. Sure, a couple of albums turn up that I might look into, but there's far more that I definitely am not interested in.
It all seems to be borne out of people buying 3 albums that happened to be released in the same week, and people like me buying up a bands entire back catalogue such that everyone else is expected to own all their records on the basis that they bought one 10 years ago. In the end I got fed up and bought a Kanye West album. Rap music. Not exactly home territory - certainly something different. And sure, the albums got some good singles and a couple of other good bits on there, and he's very talented in his field, but it's just not something I can access terribly easily. The swearing that I can handle on a Green Day record bugs me here, and every other word seems to be nigger, which will probably always be a bit weird for my white ears to listen to. Time to crawl back to another damn guitar band...
In the past week I have both read Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and seen Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix at the cinema. Both were enjoyable, but each was also somewhat disappointing in it's own way. I'll deal with the book first... J.K. Rowling has some brilliant ideas. The world she has constructed over the course of seven books is full of imagination and is brimming with detail. Huge amounts of thought has gone into the world she has created. The characters and their situations are exciting and compelling. From a purely conceptual point of view, the stories are brilliant. The downside, however, is that J.K. Rowling is a truly terrible writer. Her sentence structure is terrible - rambling all over the place. The characters dialogue is truly terrible at times. She clearly owns a "word of the day" book, as the same words turn up several times in the space of a few pages, then disappear without trace. She is prone to waffling and filling the books with tedious back story, then skipping over other details from the past books in the blink of an eye, leaving you groping for the relevance of something, wondering whether you can really bothered to dig out a copy of the old book in question, or at least search Wikipedia to figure out what she's talking about. The book is badly written, and was also clearly badly proof-read - probably in a bid to minimise the risk of this sort of thing. For someone with a decent understanding of the English language and how it should be written - a group I would like to think I belong to - the book is positively frustrating at times, such is it's poor quality of writing. It is quite the dichotomy... The story is brilliant. The writing is terrible. I felt like I was having to compromise or compensate in reading it - letting Rowling off for her writing on the basis that the story and the ideas were just so good. I wonder whether Rowling might have been better off dictating her ideas and the story to someone more capable, and letting them write it for her, or at least just getting a decent editor to sort out the more glaring problems. Still, I loved the series start to finish, and she's made a tidy pile of cash, so I doubt anyone can really be that bothered by it. On a related note, the films have been similarly frustrating, but for different reasons. The stories have benefited from their transition to the silver screen, presumably because the screenwriters have had to condense the story to a manageable length. The special effects are pretty special, and some of the acting is brilliant. The problem? Well, it is quite simply that some of the acting is terrible. Dear goodness, it's painful at times. The reason being - they're a bunch of kids! Sure, they're hitting their stride a bit more now that they're five films in, but even so it's still pretty patchy. There are many scenes that are carried by the abundantly capable adult cast (and what a cast - Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Ralph Fiennes, Imelda Staunton... I could go on) which is all well and good, but for the fact that the story centres around the kids who just can't act all that well. Once again, I was compromising and letting them get away with it because the effects were just too cool and the rest of the acting just too good. Book? Great story, terrible writing. Film? Great to watch, terrible acting. Still, this is what one puts up with sometimes when one partakes of mainstream entertainment... Said the snobbish grammar Nazi. Join me next time, when I will be complaining about the idiocy of letting a fancy database decide what CDs I should be buying.
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