There are numerous types of people in the world I’ve never been able to understand; take chavs for example , they baffle the hell out of me. Of all the lifestyle choices available to a member of the human race, why would anyone in their right mind choose one that involved the adorning of sportswear and the constant expelling of phlegm onto pavements? Far more baffling to me however, are the outwardly normal people who insist on endlessly spewing reams of fictitious shit in the direction of those around them. You know the type, that one guy in every social circle who insists on telling outrageously ridiculous stories that everyone being forced to listen silently agrees is the single most ludicrous narrative work since the movie Hotel For Dogs. If you don’t know this guy, odds are it’s you. But that’s beside the point, the point is that the phenomena is catching, particularly with broadband providers.
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An institution is a funny thing. If you can get into the spirit of it, then it’s an amazing thing. If you can’t however then really the institution ceases to be anything beyond a shameless exercise in rubbernecking. Guy Fawkes’ Night is a good example of the former, The X Factor however falls rather firmly into the camp of the latter. Now a veritable institution of the British television calendar, The X Factor returned to our screens this past weekend to kick off (what felt like) it’s twenty-sixth series with a very austere and buttoned-down display of sincerity, class and underdog triumph, highlighting the cream of British singing talent. Except it didn’t.
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Ask anybody – absolutely anybody in the world – and unless they’re Hugh Heffner, they’ll usually admit to hating their job with a passion only on par with Adolf Hitler and his attitude to people of a more “nosey” variety. It’s an undeniable aspect of the human condition and as a result literally 99% of this planet’s dominant species of life (if you don’t count iPods) are guilty of it. Sadly it’s also a necessary evil. In these days of global recession and the (apparent) wake of the credit crunch, employment after all is now a hotter topic than ever, especially with unemployment rates at the astronomical levels they are. It’s ironic then that from this culture of life-threatening unemployment and destitution avoidance that the story of Steven Slater should ring so true with us all.
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A mind is a terrible thing to waste. That’s what we’re told anyway, personally I think that third of a pint some people insist on leaving in the bottom of their glasses is at the very least on par. Nevertheless, they’re mostly right, a mind is a bloody tragic thing to waste and nowhere more often do you see it wasted than in a cinema. I queued up to see Inception the other night (don’t scald me, I know I’m late to the party) and couldn’t help but be horrified by the number of people queuing up to see The Karate Kid (surely cinema’s answer to a hate crime if ever there was one). Instantly it dawned on me: the public are idiots.
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To anyone with half a brain, the greatest crime ever perpetrated against the music industry was the invention of the “cover” – a feebly half-hearted effort in which a (typically) lesser – and yet strangely more currently relevant – musician attempts to perform a song pioneered by someone either older, more talented or both. That’s not to say there aren’t one or two good ones; Guns And Roses’ cover of Live & Let Die for instance is simply light years ahead of the original Wings version in terms of being a quality song and yet still a harrowing thought recently occurred to me, the realization that the greatest cover of any song ever recorded is in fact The Climb by Joe McElderry.
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In this day and age of media accountability, I’m always shocked by just how many people have never heard of Steven Glass. Glass – to the uninformed – was an associate editor for the biweekly American liberal rag The New Republic; admittedly not a title that commands much gravitas to us, the shoe-wearing shlubs that make up the general public but I digress. In 1998 it emerged that Glass had been responsible for one of the greatest campaigns of fabrication ever seen in any form of media anywhere, with literally everything he wrote being conjured out of the ethos of his imagination as opposed to anything even resembling reality. Needless to say, Glass was investigated and eventually sacked, the idea being that he would serve as an example to anyone else who would ever even consider such a heinous violation of the public trust, an example that (predictably) no one noticed for a second.
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Taking into account concepts such as string theory and quantum mechanics, it’s a universal certainty that everything, everywhere must somehow come to an end. Sometimes that can be a good thing – such as the Holocaust or this summer’s World Cup – and sometimes it can be a bad thing – the demise of Virgin Cinemas for example – either way, it’s a certainty; an absolute finite end that will come to everything in existence (you and me included) eventually. It’s only a matter of time.
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Privacy’s a funny thing. We’re all fairly protective of our own privacy (porn stars excluded) and yet we somehow always manage to feel slightly more protective of everyone else’s. Take computers for instance, I’m protective as hell of mine – not so much because I have anything to hide, more I just get embarrassed about some of the things I type into Wikipedia, or that someone may discover that I once genuinely typed “how to boil an egg” into Google. As a general rule then, I tend to be quite reserved whenever I’m using anyone else’s – sadly however, accidents will happen.
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When you get down to it, the media is rather like a twelve year-old boy: it’s confused, it has very little understanding of the people around it and it insists on leaping again and again onto the nearest popular trend. Last year for instance, television seemed to fall in love with the “five night, one week” drama – high profile examples being the BBC’s Torchwood: Children Of Earth and ITV’s Collision – a trend that seems to have gone nowhere, as we found this last week when Sky News and BBC News 24 decided to drop everything they were doing and go to war, in order to see who could muster the highest profile coverage of the first story in years to involve a Moat that wasn’t being claimed on expenses.
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Amongst the literally thousands of things I’ve never done in my life, I’ve never taken part in the construction of a building. Truth be told – beyond a basic understanding of bricklaying – I probably couldn’t even begin to tell you what’s involved. There’s some girders somewhere, a couple foundations and a lot of hi-vis jackets on display, but in reality I’m quite clueless as to the fundamental nature of basic architecture. That said, I do have an appreciation of approximately how long it takes for a building to go up, how much time and effort is put in by the dozens (sometimes, hundreds) of people involved and the pride they must take in it afterwards. With that in mind, I can’t help but arrive at the conclusion that the endless crop of wannabe graffiti artists who deface said buildings all deserve to be rounded up and shot.
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