As you may have noticed, it’s been a bit quiet around here of late, what with my having let a few weeks go by with nary a tiny, microscopic hint of anything resembling a new post (of course it’s entirely possible you might not have noticed – I suppose it all depends on how observant you are and whether or not you give enough of a meerkat’s left bollock about my rants to notice when I haven’t done one). The truth is that the post I have been working on recently has proven to be a particularly tough one to write (for reasons which will become clear in due course) and so I decided to put it on the back burner until I can get my head around it enough to be able to finish it while doing the subject matter justice. In the meantime, though, rather than being all self-pitying about not being able to get a new rambling tirade out every week like the good little blogger I pretend to be, I shall instead have a massive bitching session about self-pitying, whinging fucking christians. Read more “Into Whine”
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the news this week that the twin bills SOPA (Screwing Over Proper Artists) and PIPA (Positively Invading People’s Anuses) had suffered a humiliating defeat/climbdown when pretty much the entire world told the entertainment industry to go fuck itself and stop trying to ruin the internet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiped the self-satisfied “Ha ha, we did it!” grin off my face, and then started to wonder just what kind of monstrous form the bills will take on once Hollywood and the record companies had re-grouped and returned to begin the next leg of their “Stealing Freedom Tour 1996 – 2047”. For reasons I can only imagine have something to do with my brain feeling particularly charitable (knowing that I had a blog post to write and no ideas), these thoughts began colliding with ones about the nature of religion versus science and how, as it is with content producers versus the internet, the battle is about nothing more than destroying the competition in order to protect an obsolete business model. Read more “New Model No. 15”
One of the bizarre things I’ve discovered about getting older, at least for me, is not that I find myself worrying about nature’s great, big, ticking, death-shaped clock of impending mortality cessation; nor is it that I’m concerned with checking off the list of things one is supposed to be in possession of at this point (wife, kids, mortgage, dog, massive sense of futile despair at one’s interminable existence etc.) – it’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’ve sort of always been this “age”, as if my personality were a suit that was at least 14 sizes too large and was just waiting for me to grow in to it. The suit might have had one or two minor alterations over the years, nothing drastic, but it otherwise remains pretty much exactly the same as when I first got it. As your tastes, opinions, and beliefs begin to coalesce in your twenties and thirties, you develop a far clearer understanding of who you are, what kind of suit you’re wearing, and what radio station you should be listening to. Read more “Radio 4 Radicals”
For the past few days, the news here in our rain-soaked island paradise has been dominated by one, particularly large, story. It’s not a new story, in fact it’s been around for a little while, but this week it managed to achieve a certain measure of grotesque commonality with the funeral-bound corpse of King Henry VIII. I’m thinking specifically of how, as we were all basking happily in yet another warm and sunny day, possibly commenting to one another about what a lovely day it was, it unpredictably, and unceremoniously, exploded, leaving everyone feeling very, very sick. It’s a story that we can’t even refer to as “the elephant in the room” any more because it’s now “the enormous pile of elephant shit in the room” (the elephant having fled the scene in order to calm down, re-group, and work out who best to blame for the massive, festering pile of crap it left behind). Read more “Dear Mr. Murdoch”
So, did you go? Did you see it? Wasn’t it amazing?! Such a grand and special occasion; a celebration to bring everyone together; black, white, rich, poor, we were all, for a brief moment, joined in patriotic and emotional unity as the whole world shared the most important day in the ever unfolding drama of the greatest love story of our time. The ceremony, the dress, the spectacle, the beauty … the bullshit … Read more “Fool, Britannia”
