tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22828760078599384452024-02-08T03:55:55.276-08:00It's all a bit Pony and TrapThis is cockney rhyming slang for "crap". I think a lot of things suck, and I enjoy that. Welcome to the festival of all things shit. I'm warning you though, I swear a lot.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger59125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-7080481819102239322015-02-17T04:07:00.000-08:002015-02-17T04:07:07.916-08:00Fifty Shades of Chill the Fuck OutThe last few days, I've noticed a bit of a backlash to Fifty Shades of Grey, in light of the movie version coming out. I feel like since I went far enough when the first book came out to write an entire novella taking the piss out of it, I should add something to the debate but to be honest, a lot of what I'm seeing misses the point about the many things that are awful about the book.<br />
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In short, a lot of the criticisms are by people who are offended by the book (and by extension the movie) because of the way the relationship between the two main idiots is perceived as a love story, when it actual fact it is as rapey as the average installment of Law & Order: SVU. You know, that show with all the rape in it.<br />
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This is absolutely true. It's not a 'romance' anyone should be aspiring to, and that includes people who are into BDSM - consent and trust being essentially the most important factor in those relationships, because most fetishists are not actually turned on by the idea of being guilty of assault.<br />
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The implications of the way Christian Grey treats Anastasia Steele would be really frightening if it weren't for the fact it is impossible to think either of them as real people who might exist. And this is the real reason why Fifty Shades is horrible.<br />
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You could take the exact same story, make the pacing and characters a bit (a lot) better, and it could be a thriller about a woman who is lured in by charming, handsome man who is actually a sociopath (there are loads of stories like that, and nobody has to state that they aren't idealistic romances). The fact a fictional romance is fucked up and twisted doesn't mean it is an inherently dangerous thing to include in a book or movie. The fact that some people still find the fucked up, twisted romance appealing, is also not in and of itself a terrible thing - that is a feature of a lot of classic stories. How weird is every guy the Bronte sisters created?<br />
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What makes it a problem in Fifty Shades is that it was clumsily written by a naive author, and became popular without treatment by a proper editor who may have addressed a lot of this (due to the way it was initially self published). People read it because the sex scenes were talked about, but its position in the market as a romance made it more appealing to those who wouldn't normally look for erotic fiction or porn. It was a bit of fun for those who liked it and, much like Twilight (which Fifty Shades of Grey originally started life as fan fiction based on), for those who didn't like it it was just there to make fun of. It wasn't <i>important</i>.<br />
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Now it has reappeared on the pop culture radar thanks to the movie, it seems people have had a bit more time to digest the idea of it and what the things in the story that make them uncomfortable are.<br />
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But this book/film are not as dangerous as they can seem in some lights. And this is actually in part <i>thanks to the fact</i> they just aren't any good.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-9471482326747117432014-07-01T12:33:00.000-07:002014-07-01T12:35:34.956-07:00Luis Suarez Apologises for Biting Chiellini... And Barcelona Apparently Buy It<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On June 24th, I came to the interesting realisation that I have psychic powers. Prior to heading out to watch the crucial Group D game between Italy and Uruguay, I posted this on Facebook:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<i>'<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;">OK, Italy. Win this. But if you can't win this, at least get Suarez to bite one of you so he is suspended for the rest of the thing.'</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;">A couple of hours later, I was in a pub watching the game, and, in accordance with the prophecy, everybody's favourite horse faced cannibalistic waste of skin Luis Suarez did indeed have a little chomp on Juventus defender Giorgio Chiellini. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;">This was the third time the Goofmeister had done something like this, and by something like this, I mean something exactly like this, i.e. using his not unsubstantial teeth on another player in a competitive game of football. His previous victims, who happily don't seem to have succumbed to rabies, were Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic in 2013 where Suarez was playing for Liverpool, and PSV's Ottman Bakkal in 2010 when he was playing for Ajax. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">When Giorgio Chiellini revealed the bite mark that showed that once again, ol' Chompers had been feasting on the flesh of the living, even I, who had forseen the event in a vision, heard Austin Powers' voice in my head, like 'who throws a shoe?', 'who bites someone at the World Cup?'.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">The last time I had been so astonished that someone would do something so weird in such a crucial match was when Zinedine Zidane, in his last game before retiring for France, in <i>the World Cup final itself</i>, headbutted Marco Materazzi. You could forgive Italy for thinking they were 'always the victims'...</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Anyway, FIFA were quick to send Suarez for one of their telling offs. The Panel of 7 Elders (which is what I think it should be called - it sounds way wiser than 'a FIFA tribunal', which sounds like one of the least wise things ever) convened the day after the incident to discuss his fate, and he submitted his version of events in writing. It included the following:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
</span><br />
<div class="mol-para-with-font" style="min-height: 1px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>'In no way it happened how you have described, as a bite or intent to bite.'</i></span></div>
<div class="mol-para-with-font" style="min-height: 1px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>'After the impact ... I lost my balance, making my body unstable and falling on top of my opponent,'</i></span></div>
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</div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>'At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth,'</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
So, he fell on him. With his mouth open. And then his pitbull like instincts made him have a little bite, unpremeditated, exactly what anyone else would have done. And owwwwww, his teeth hurt and he had a bruise. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Isn't that a bit like a man, caught by his wife naked in bed with another woman, trying to convince her that he merely fell on the woman and his penis landed inside her? Like, the most rubbish attempt at a defence possible that doesn't involve aliens or ghosts?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, anyway, FIFA thought so, and taking into account his track record for similar offences, weren't having a bar of any of this 'I fell on him' shenanigans. Luis Suarez was issued with a four month ban from doing any football, and a ban for playing for Uruguay for 9 international matches. I wonder how heavily the ban on him participating in any football activities will be policed, though. Will there be a FIFA official on hand to shoot him in the face if he tries to have a kickabout with his son? You never know with FIFA, is all I'm saying.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
Uruguay has gotten behind their star player in a way that would be baffling even if the Liverpool supporters who were previously branding anyone who criticised him as jealous 'haters' did it. The president of Uruguay Jose Mujica apparently called FIFA 'a bunch of old sons of whores' and branded the 9 match ban, which it is safe to say they want to appeal, as 'fascist'. Suarez also received a hero's welcome as he returned home prematurely from the World Cup. Where else would this happen? 'Oh, you were our best chance of doing anything good in this competition but then you went and bit someone again, but don't worry, we don't blame you, mate.'. In England we'd probably pelt you with our now useless St George's cross paraphernalia, or, you know, knives, on arrival at Heathrow if you'd taken a bad corner, let alone that...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, having had some time to calm down in the bosom of his family (who he cheats against at Monopoly - I saw it on Being: Liverpool), it seems now that Suarez has suddenly remembered that he did bite Chiellini after all. Suddenly, he finds himself overwhelmed with remorse, and as we all do when we are overwhelmed with remorse, he takes to Twitter to express it. Attached to a tweet that said he apologised to Giorgio Chiellini, Suarez gave a rather convoluted new account of events, which included 'the truth'. Here is 'the truth':</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;"><i>'the truth is that my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite in the collision he suffered with me.' </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 20px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">This has generally taken as being an admission of the bite, but it is quite a vague one still, really, isn't it? It sounds like a cagey lawyer on a TV show. This week, on CSI: Montevideo: 'The victim appears to have suffered the physical result of a bite, following the incident the billions of witnesses saw where the suspect collided with him, making what could, by some, be construed as a 'chomping motion' with his jaws'...</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Now, those of a cynical mindset may be inclined to think there is some kind of relationship between Suarez's sudden urge to apologise, six days after the event, and the fact he is linked with a move to nicey nicey nicest team in the world Barcelona. Those of a cynical mindset may also say that the fact Barcelona's football director praised Suarez for apologising, even risking everyone in the world laughing at him by referring to the repeat chomping offender as 'humble', may mean that the whole apology was part of some sickening charm offensive orchestrated by both parties to make the move more palatable when it almost inevitably happens. Personally, I don't care, I am just hoping when he goes he will liven up the tedium that is La Liga by making it a bit more like watching a particularly good episode of The Walking Dead.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Now, to end on something nice, here is how Giorgio Chiellini replied to Suarez's tweeted apology:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; line-height: 15.359999656677246px;"><i>'It’s forgotten. I hope Fifa will reduce your suspension.'</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Which is a heartening example of a sportsman being classy. I do however, wish he had instead used the most memorable line from the werewolf movie Dog Soldiers, and replied with: 'I hope I give you the shits.' </span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-8417080324891601292013-11-28T16:25:00.000-08:002013-11-28T20:01:44.169-08:00Bianca Alsop and The Fact That UK Toddler Pageants Are A ThingToday is Thanksgiving in the USA. I lived in America for a while, and was there to partake of this event last year. The food was nice, but faced with the lure of an amazing discount on a really big TV I decided I wanted, I naively decided to go out and queue outside Best Buy from about 6pm to when it opened at midnight. I should explain that the day after Thanksgiving is the official start of the Christmas shopping season in the US, and is known as 'Black Friday'. If you are wondering why it is called that, so was I, so I asked a guy who was in the queue with me (well, we had a long wait, it made sense to chat). This guy, who happened to be black, put forward the idea that it was because with the heavy discounts (which are limited to a set number of products and only on that day), it was the only time the black people could afford the stuff they wanted. This says quite a lot about a lot of things in the US, but fortunately it isn't anything that stunningly racist. Actually, the real reason, I discovered later, is that this was traditionally when most stores would go from the red into the black, fiscally speaking, for that quarter.<br />
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In any case, it did not go well for me, queuing there in the cold. Just when the store was about to open, with me and my new friend in a pretty good position to get the bargains we were after, some random lady told a passing cop that we had jumped the queue. We hadn't, but the cop decided to believe her because, I suppose, it gave him something to do, and told us if we didn't leave the car park of Best Buy we would have to go to jail. Yep, a cop with a gun threatened me with the cells for trying to buy a television.. The Boxing Day sales on Oxford Street look as simple and unthreatening as the inside of Justin Bieber's head compared with this annual bloodbath. Obviously I never got inside the store, but I imagine it was the nearest thing someone in 21st century Seattle could experience to being at the Somme.<br />
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What does this have to do with the crux of this article? Well, the US has offered us many great things, but there are some things they do there that other countries should be saying 'awwww, hell no' to. Black Friday is one of them. Fox News is another. And a third is the toddler pageant.<br />
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Sadly though, there are some people in the UK who have looked at this, at best, vulgar, and at worst, soul clutchingly frightening US phenomenon, and thought 'that is fucking awesome, I totally want to dress my kid up like a drag queen and put them in one of these'. This is why there is such a thing as the 'Miss Glitz Sparkle' pageant. This pageant for male and female children takes place in that well known home of glamour, Lincoln. And fuck me is it weird.<br />
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With toddlers in ballgowns and sparkly bikinis, it is a pretty odd spectacle to begin with. I don't want to get all Daily Mail about it and start on about paedos and the sexualisation of children, but it is pretty hard to imagine who else would be entertained by that. I wouldn't. I mean when I was a kid it was a job to get even your parents to come to your dance recitals and whatnot, on account of how boring it is watching some kids ponce about, and they didn't even have the creepy undertones of us all being slathered in fake tan, body glitter and swimwear. To any normal person, this, as an evening's entertainment, sounds about as much fun as going water skiing in shark infested waters with bloody lamb shops for skis, so these things must exist solely for the benefit of the molesty types, and Britain's twattiest mothers.<br />
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The mother who has gained the most press coverage over entering her kids in this and other pageants, is one Bianca Alsop. Her four year old daughter Ocean won 'Most Beautiful' at the Glitz Sparkle pageant, in which she also entered her twin baby sons. You'll never guess what she called these poor bastards. Milan and Madrid. Whether she was going for the Brooklyn Beckham angle and was just too thick to realise that nobody would think twins could possibly have been conceived in two different cities in two different countries, or whether she is just really fucking sad, we'll never know for sure (unless she lets me interview her), but there is a lot of evidence to support both the stupidity and the sadness as motivating factors.<br />
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You may think I am being harsh here, and I'm sorry, but it's going to get harsher. You see, this is someone who likes to put her kids, the boys almost certainly too young to know what the hell is even going on, into competitions where other people judge them on their hair, their smiles (Madrid won 'Best Smile', which is pretty fucked up when you'd think his identical twin Milan would have the same smile) and their ability to do a little turn on the catwalk, in the hopes that her offspring will be pronounced cuter than some other twatty woman's offspring and she can feel good about that. And that to me makes her a fucking jerk. So let's turn the tables and judge her instead. You may feel better about all of this unpleasantness if I tell you that I have a source who was bullied horribly by her at school, so this isn't conjecture, I have it on very good authority that she is a complete fuckwit.<br />
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Now, a lot of the stuff I am basing all this on is from an interview she did with the good old Daily Mail, which you can <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2198439/Miss-Glitz-Sparkle-2012-Ocean-Orrey-4-strutted-catwalk-win-UKs-US-style-beauty-pageants.html" target="_blank">read here</a> (it also has pictures of her which may help you appreciate this article. I don't put pictures up on here because copyright law baffles me and also, as a words person, I am to photography what Mother Theresa was to shoe design). I know that means looking at the Daily Mail, however, and since I appreciate you may not want to do that, there is another story <a href="http://www.parentdish.co.uk/2012/09/05/mum-defends-her-parenting-skills-as-tanned-daughter-is-crowned-britain-most-beautiful-toddler/" target="_blank">here </a>on some parenting site or other. In the latter she says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"We've got dull, old-fashioned, apron-wearing mothers making their comments, but no one criticises them because their children are boring."</span></i></span></blockquote>
Yep. She honestly thinks the only people who would criticise her are some dowdy housewives who as far as I can tell exist only in her imagination and 1950's TV shows. Well, I'm not a mother at all, and I certainly can't be old fashioned because I've got an iPad and I know who Miley Cyrus is. And yet, mysteriously, I still think she's a cunt. Weird, huh? And besides, exactly how does putting make up on a kid make it less boring? I suppose it does make it more hilarious to look at, but it doesn't actually morph it from being a normal kid into a latter day Oscar fucking Wilde, does it?<br />
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Now, it may seem like really, this is all harmless fun and actually no different from normal stuff little girls do where they get to wear pretty outfits like dance or gymnastics or princess parties or whatever the hell the kids these days are into, and I can sort of see that argument - to be honest, when I was a little girl if my mother had said 'hey, do you want to prance around in a ballgown and full make up?' I would have pretty much been thrilled about it (yeah, it might weird you out if you know me but 'soccer girl' over here was really into Barbie). But it's the lengths Bianca and the other mothers go to to prepare their kids that makes this way more eepy-cray than your average kids' dance show:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;">"I like Ocean to be tanned so I don't put high factor sun cream on her. Instead, she sunbathes with me and I let her wear the tan-enhancing factor 15 that I use.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;">"Our family don't like fake tan but will use it on her if she hasn't been on holiday."</span></span></i></blockquote>
I bet that somewhere in her house she has her family crest with the Alsop motto beneath it: 'We Don't Like Fake Tan!'. Seriously though, I'm not the most responsible person in the world and even I think using weak sun protection on a little blonde kid is questionable as fuck. It gets sadder still though:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;">"Ocean has a sticky-out ear which she has inherited from her dad - we call it the family 'ear'-loom. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;">As soon as she is old enough to have her ear pinned back, I will be taking her to have it done. That's no big deal. In fact, I would consider that a minor imperfection that just needs tweaking."</span></i></span></blockquote>
Now, aside from that unforgivable 'ear-loom' pun, have you seen the kid? Sure, if she was walking around looking like the bloody FA Cup and had a complex about it, the surgery to pin back an ear is relatively simple, but she looks fucking fine. Just keep her hair down until she's old enough to decide for herself. If you are telling a kid at that age that they have this fault that is going to hold them back in the world of pageanting, and that that simply won't do because pageanting is a thing people honestly give a fuck about your achievements in, then what the hell is that doing to their psyche? They're going to end up as one of those twatty girls who wants a boob job for Christmas when they are 13 or... Oh, wait...<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>"I put a boob job on my Christmas list from the age of 13. Dad finally gave in and paid for them on my 20th birthday.</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 26px;">"I get birthday Botox each year - I've been doing that since I was 23.</span> "</i></span></blockquote>
Personally, when I was 13 I got an electric guitar for Christmas. I had asked for a Brazilian Butt Lift, but my dad didn't want to get me that.<br />
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Jesus fucking wept, woman. How would that conversation even go? 'Dad, my tits aren't big enough - sort it out, will you?'. Also, and this is a bit of a personal dig but if you have seen the picture of her in the Daily Mail piece, errrrr, you're 26 and you have been having Botox since you were 23? Why do you have all those crows' feet then? Seriously, it struck me as off that a 23 year old would bother to have Botox, I know some people who have it but they are all in their late thirties or early forties, but Christ, what would she look like without it, The Emperor from Star Wars? It might, possibly, have something to do with all that tanning...<br />
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You hear this kind of bollocks all the time from trashy celebrities with kids, like Katie Price or Kerry Katona or that one who's married to Steven Gerrard, but this is just some random Northern bird who used to work behind the counter in HSBC. It's fucked up. I'm trying to stay away from criticising her parenting too much because that really lacks any credibility coming from someone who doesn't have kids themselves, but I reckon there are probably crack whores out there who would nod sagely and say that this vain assed weirdo shouldn't be left in charge of raising anything more sentient than a Furby.<br />
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So, well, fuck you, pageant mums. You suck. Thank you and goodnight. Oh, and stay away from Best Buy tonight if you're in America.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-9266178931034290592013-11-12T03:37:00.000-08:002013-11-12T03:37:08.626-08:00Weird Italian Landlords<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Those
of you who have read this blog before will know I don't very often
write about my own life. This is because the only people who care
about my life are my friends, and they can read my mundane Facebook
status updates (that's a callback to my last article). However, it
was this or write about the John Lewis Christmas advert, and that
would have just been several paragraphs of jokes about how Lily Allen
singing Keane is a horrible abomination and whoever came up with the
idea should have to go to prison.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In
any case, people unaccountably love those stories about how someone
they don't know moved to Italy and had lots of hilarious, adorable
misunderstandings as they came to adjust to the local way of life,
all that Under The Tuscan Sun dreck. Because I'm a writer and I live
in Italy, people keep telling me I should write one of those books
because publishers eat it up with a spoon and people who watch those
stupid TV programmes where a smug couple buy a house abroad buy the
crap in droves. And I might just do it. But to give you an idea how
different my book would be to Under The Tuscan Sun, which I have
admittedly not read because it sounds boring, but am certain contains
absolutely no sexual harassment, I am going to talk today about my
landlords. </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">For
the past two months or so I have been living in a really nice
apartment in a small town by Lake Trasimeno (revealing my location
may not be wise just in case there are still any people left who want
to murder me for what I wrote about Liverpool FC at the start of the
year, but fuck 'em). I am bored of explaining why I moved here from
Seattle, where I was living before, so now the only explanation
you'll get out of me is that I saw iCarly do it on TV and I want to
be just like her. My apartment is huge, has many balconies where I
can smoke or pretend to be Juliet, and because it used to belong to
an old lady who died, is full of really weird stuff. It's like a
museum of old lady crap up in my crib, I'm telling you. There's a
statue of the Madonna that changes from blue to red when it's going
to rain. The first time it happened I thought it was a miracle and
was wondering if I ought to inform the Pope or try and exploit it for
financial gain, but it transpired, rather disappointingly, to be more
a kind of 'mood ring' type arrangement. Even so, moving into a place
fitted with glittery colour changing religious statues is fucking
awesome. I like it very much. There's a bar over the road, too.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">So,
you might imagine I am living quite the life, writing, drinking wine,
watching Serie A and waving my hands around a lot when I speak in
Italian. And I would be. If it wasn't for my fucking landlords.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">They
are a fairly old couple, mid sixties I would say, and they live in
the apartment upstairs from mine. Their apartment, like mine, has
tiled floors, and I'm convinced they rearrange all of their furniture
every single day just for the sheer fuck of it, because it sounds,
from dawn till dusk, like there is a fucking squash match going on up
there. 'Just sit the fuck down!' I plea in my head as I try and drown
them out with MTV Italia, which plays the same four terrible songs
over and over again. Oh good. Robin Thicke. I haven't heard Robin
Thicke for 20 minutes. I was starting to forget how that song went.
What rhymes with hug me?</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">But
the noise is the least of my worries.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">At
first, it was just the constant disturbances (as opposed to the
genuinely 'disturbing' stuff that has started happening since). I'd
be minding my own business trying to write something or dancing
around to Robin Thicke (nobody 'wants it', Robin, you look like
Justin Timberlake's dad), and my buzzer would go. Because the lady
who lived here before was 172 years old, it is very fucking loud, and
scares the b'jaysus out of me. Once I spilled my sambuca. It would
usually be 'her'. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">She
has a weird fascination with my eating habits. I always thought one
of the upsides to being an adult was that you could eat whatever you
want, whenever you want, and if that happens to be nothing until 11
o'clock at night when you might fancy some Pringles, then so be it.
But no. She notices if she doesn't see me go to the supermarket for a
couple of days (which usually means I have enough wine), and has to
come down and bother me about whether I have eaten. This usually
results in being force fed pasta and cake. I know this doesn't sound
that bad, but it is a fucking pain in the ass when you have plans. It
is impossible to say no. No excuse will be tolerated. I tried saying
I was on a diet or going out for a big meal later or I'd already
eaten or I was doing Ramadan, and none of it stopped the feeding.
Being English, I couldn't cause offence by saying 'fuck off! I am 30
and have mastered such things as eating!', obviously, but I tried
everything short of that. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">While
force feeding me, they would sit there and chatter away at me in
Italian, and because I only understand about 50% of what they are
saying I found myself nodding politely as I wondered if what he was
telling me about a Romanian guy with two wives was a story, a joke or
a racist tirade. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Of
course, this stuff isn't that bad, it just sort of makes me feel like
I have moved into a 1970's sitcom about European stereotypes, and
that's quite a laugh in some lights, after a few Peronis or some of
their God awful home made wine. But the disruptions to my day piss me
off. I find myself in a catlike state of readiness throughout the
day, just so if the buzzer from hell goes off I don't jump so much I
drop my cigarette and burn the place down or poke my eye out with my
mascara wand. It's stressful.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I
have therefore tried to make it look as inconvenient as it is in the
hope they'll think 'hey, maybe she's busy, let's not go round and ask
her if she's happy with the curtains in the guest room she never goes
in, maybe it can wait until the next time we see her on the stairs or
something'. I spun some bullshit about working for American clients
and needing to work at night and sleep during the day and then
pretended I had been asleep every time they came round for about a
week, but that meant I had to be completely silent all day and I
missed my MTV Italia. So I started opening the door with a towel on
my head in my dressing gown so it looked like I was in the bath when
they disturbed me (because they don't actually go away if you don't
answer or shout that you're busy, they just keep buzzing), but that
just meant spending all day dressed like I was at a spa. Next I think
I might get a man to come round and just walk around in his underwear
and be all like, 'hey, you totally cockblocked me, bro' when they
show up. Though I'm not sure how that translates to Italian.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In
any case, the disturbances were just the start of what has become a
far creepier problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, the old man
has become a bit of a sex pest. To begin with, he would just sort of
stoke my hair in a creepy way while he was talking to me, which I
didn't like (really, you should only be touching my hair if you are
my hairdresser or my boyfriend. And I don't currently have a
hairdresser or a boyfriend), but which you could take as just being
affectionate. Rather than kissing me on the cheek twice as is the
custom in Italy, he'd do it about fifty times. This was annoying, and
made me uncomfortable, but I thought hey, maybe I'm just being
uptight and British and this is normal.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Then
he started telling me weird stuff like how he and his wife hadn't had
sex for 20 years because of some gross health problems I did not need
to know about, and going on about how important it was to 'make
love'. In a flash of inspiration I at this point announced that I was
deeply religious and had no interest in such matters but that seemed
to work as well in putting him off as that old ruse of pretending you
and your best mate are lesbians when some douchebag wouldn't leave
you alone in a bar worked – i.e., not at all. It was at this point
that the ass grabbing started. Whenever he'd say goodbye, he'd try
and grab my ass.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now,
I could give him the benefit of the doubt over the hair stroking and
the cheek kissing and the 'too much information' conversation topics,
but when you grab someone's ass that sends a very clear message, and
the message is that you are a lecherous little monstrosity. You can't
pass that sort of shit off as fatherly affection. You can't pass that
shit off as anything but ass grabbing. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I
was so genuinely shocked the first time it happened that I didn't do
anything, but since then I have attempted subtle evasive maneuvers of
the kind probably normally employed by men in the showers in prison.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">So
now he keeps trying to grab my boobs, which is worse. I'm not sure
why, it just is.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now,
I'm not actually scared this is going to go from your kind of Carry
On film level of sexual harassment to something worse, because the
guy is a tiny little old man and I'm a 5ft 11 young woman, I am
pretty sure I could take him in a fight or at the very least out run
him. But I'm not really sure what a good approach is to stopping it.
I can't really move out, because I only got this apartment despite
not having residency and whatnot (in Italy, even if you are from an
EU country, which I am, you are supposed to get residency before you
do anything, and it's quite the faff) because the estate agent is my
friend, and I can't really say, 'hey, can you do me another solid
because that really nice landlord guy you think is great keeps
molesting me'. And I can't really slap him, because that might cause
problems. Also, he's ex-police, so probably not someone I want to be
on the wrong side of.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I
therefore think I am going to have to solve this sitcom style problem
with a sitcom style solution, and so I am planning to get a friend to
pretend to be my new boyfriend and glare at him, in the hope that
some mild intimidation from another man will work. I got the 'fake
relationship' idea from every sitcom ever, and it almost never leads
to misunderstandings and terrible problems. It'll be fine. It's happy
hour at Shenanigans again, people!</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Still
though, this brings me, finally, to the point of today's article.
What the fuck is with old Italian guys? It's not just this guy, it's
not just Berlusconi, there are loads of them that seem to think it
isn't at all unlikely that women a small fraction of their age are
going to be happy to be felt up by them. In England if an old guy
talks to you in a pub or wherever, you assume he wants to have a chat
with someone. You do not assume he has some weird idea in his head
that you want to sleep with him. Since I moved here I've been hit on
by more people who look like they went to school with King Herod than
I can count, and where, when a young guy hits on you and you're not
interested he generally accepts it and goes off to try someone else
(sometimes calling you a lesbian first), these guys are weirdly
persistent. Some of them even offered me money. Now what the fuck is
that all about? </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I
just hope it's a generation thing because I am now concerned I may
stay in Italy forever, marry some awesome guy, and then one day, when
we're in our sixties, he'll suddenly turn into some kind of creepy
sex criminal. I'll do you a deal, future husband – you don't do
that, I won't start shuffling around in a dress like a sack.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-74080394768955419082013-11-07T00:46:00.000-08:002013-11-07T00:59:55.625-08:00That 7 Ways To Be Insufferable on Facebook Article Shazam, bitches, I'm back. I was having difficulty deciding what to write about in my first post since January, and while I did ask for suggestions from my friends, half of them wanted me to write about how Liverpool supporters sacrifice kittens to Satan in the hope it would start another entertaining war (and I'm not that much of a one trick pony), and the others came up with stuff that wasn't really in keeping with the tone of this blog, like 'how nice orange Chewits are'. I even had a little look at The Daily Mail's website, but there was nothing there worth ranting about for once, although they do claim that payday loan companies are using adverts to brainwash your children, so, you know, be scared about that if you like.<br />
<br />
Instead, I decided to revisit the subject of annoying Facebook usage. <a href="http://itsallabitponyandtrap.blogspot.it/2010/03/facebook.html" target="_blank">I first wrote about this</a> when this blog was new back in 2010, and I still stand by the points in it, though some of the trends mentioned seem to have happily fucked off - I don't remember the last time someone asked me to do anything with a farm or become mayor of Yeovil. Of course, there are new annoying things, like those really big fucking yellow faces people use in chat windows now and of course the Bitstrip (I had a beer earlier that was really hard to open. It foamed up a bit and some beer went on me. That story would by some people be deemed interesting enough to warrant a representation in cartoon form). I must admit I have only just got on the 'finding them annoying' bandwagon, at first I found them kind of cute and not that bothersome, but a tipping point has been reached and I have to say I have only seen one that I actually laughed at, and I only laughed at that because it was an in joke I was in on. I'm not saying the people who made them are unfunny people, by any means, but there is something willfully unfunny about the medium. As an experiment, I have struggled for days to think of even a single joke I could turn into one, not counting inside jokes, and I can't, unless you can just make them not be about you and be about Luis Suarez instead, then I can think of loads. The worst part is they have started to remind me of that Nemi cartoon in the Metro, a cartoon that sucked with such astonishing ferocity (probably still does, I haven't seen a Metro in over two years) that even an advert for something really useless like, I don't know, a solar powered vibrator or Jamie Carragher would have been a better use of space.<br />
<br />
In any case, another writer by the name of Wait But Why (possibly a pseudonym, though I prefer to imagine that's his real name and he just had a really batshit crazy mother) tackled the territory of the annoying Facebook status update recently in an article on The Huffington Post entitled <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/annoying-facebook-behavior_b_4081038.html" target="_blank">7 Ways To Be Insufferable on Facebook</a>. This article gained a lot of traction, and a few <a href="http://www.allparenting.com/my-life/articles/969313/7-ways-to-write-an-insufferable-article-about-people-being-insufferable-on-facebook" target="_blank">other sites have already expressed their views on it</a>. The <a href="http://thisblogisepic.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/you-might-be-insufferable-on-facebook-if/" target="_blank">ones I've read</a> were all a bit whiny ('it's my Facebook, why can't I write that I'm having a banana or that it's sad that there was some flood and thousands of people died, you don't have to read it, unfriend me if you don't like it!' being the tone - yes, fair argument, but you sound like a gimp and you are basically defending your right, which you do of course have, to be bland. Plus, there was a load of stuff about how really we should all talk to each other face to face instead anyway, which sounds like something someone old would say and has, essentially, nothing to do with anything in the Huff Post article). So I thought I'd have a stab.<br />
<br />
Wait But Why (I've only typed that twice and I'm already annoyed with him for not calling himself something proper) starts off with an example of what is admittedly, a stratospherically shit status update he saw somewhere. No problems so far, I was on board. But then he gets on to what makes the difference between a good status update and one that he doesn't like and wants to die, and this is where I do not agree with the fella.<br />
<br />
His overarching point is that for a Facebook status update to have any worth, it needs to either be very interesting or very entertaining - to everyone who will see it. Well, actually, that is true. If you are a business carrying out some Facebook marketing and targetting a specific demographic. For normal, personal accounts, it isn't even possible for most people. If I post a link to an article I find interesting about football, a lot of my friends will not find any value in it - many of them couldn't give a jet propelled fuck what Eden Hazard is up to - but then many of them also would be interested in reading it. Equally, if you post a review of the restaurant you ate at last night, chances are many of your friends will not get anything out of this either, because you probably know some people who don't live where you live. But that doesn't mean these things aren't worth sharing. Sure, you can set it up so only certain people see certain posts but who can honestly be bothered to go through the hundreds of people they know and sort them into 'people who might like reading stuff about Eden Hazard', and other such categories? Not everyone is going to get every joke or give a damn about every picture of your cat or your children, but that doesn't make them worthless in terms of what Facebook is for.<br />
<br />
He then gets into his list of seven habits of highly insufferable people. While he does acknowledge that he is as guilty as anyone of them, presumably thinking this stops him sounding all 'Ooooh, I am King Wait But Why, handing down life lessons from my pedestal of perfection' (though he still kind of does), this to me is why the whole argument he presents is kind of shit. In my 2010 article I said it annoys me when people intentionally spell words wrong and write shit like 'whoop whoop!' - these are things I don't do because I think they're stupid, and if you think they're stupid you don't do them either. These sorts of articles, the way I see it, are supposed to make the reader (if they agree), laugh and go, 'oh yeah, those things are annoying'. By going into detail about things, some or all of which just about every user does (except those weird people who only log on every few years to announce they've had a baby or moved to Myanmar or some other big development) doesn't make people feel entertained, it makes them feel a bit crappy. Are we all just annoying the fuck out of hundreds of people every day? Does nobody care that you got a speeding ticket or had a bad day at work or beat your best time out running? Does everyone secretly think you're a bit of a twat?<br />
<br />
<b>Bragging</b><br />
<br />
Firstly, he hates bragging. That kind of makes sense on the face of it, nobody likes a smug bastard after all, but what he terms bragging seems to be essentially 'saying anything at all positive about your life'. Saying you graduated, got promoted, are going on a nice holiday, or even just had a good weekend doing something fun, all of this apparently makes you quite the tosser. It doesn't though, does it? Of course it will vary according to how well you know the person how much you give a shit about their news, I'm not denying that, but have you ever honestly seen someone's post saying they got promoted (unless you were after the job yourself) and been pissed off that they deigned to bother you with their happiness? He thinks people write this sort of stuff because they want people to be envious, to craft a certain image of themselves, or simply out of vanity. I'm sure some do. But are these status updates, in and of themselves, insufferable? I say no.<br />
<br />
He does, in this section, also talk a bit about those kind of soppy status updates people sometimes post about their relationships and how much they love their significant other. Personally, I'm not a fan of these because I've seen a few people go from banging on endlessly about how wonderful their boyfriend is to a few months later banging on about what an absolute cock he is now he's an ex, and sure, you're going to be doing that to your best friends anyway but to everyone you know, all the time? Bit humiliating. Also sometimes it gets massively overdone and can be a bit gross. But again, he says people do this as a brag to try and make their friends jealous of their fabulous relationship, and that's a bit of a cynical way of looking at someone showing some affection for someone else.<br />
<br />
<b>Cryptic Cliffhangers</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The next one he talks about I don't like either - the vague, cryptic status update where you are basically just sort of fishing for everyone to go 'What happened?" and give you lots of attention or sympathy. Now, while I do find these status updates annoying because, well, they are, I don't necessarily think it's that obnoxious to be basically asking for people's attention if you are excited to share something, or to seek out a bit of support from your mates if you are sad or pissed off, so I think it is a bit harsh to say that everyone who does this, albeit quite irritating thing, is just some high maintenance drama whore. I'd just rather they spat it out in the first place.<br />
<br />
<b>Mundane Status Updates About Your Day</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
I covered my thoughts on this in my previous article so, you know, you can read that if you care. Sure, I don't think anyone in the world gives a shit about half the stuff we all say, but it's a way to while away the hours until death, isn't it? However, I think Facebook would be more fun if, when you're bored and feel the need to say something, instead of writing the things you are doing if they aren't very interesting, you wrote the random thoughts in your head. This always leads to way more interesting comments because I find people tend to be way more ready to debate whether spiders have souls or what would happen to a mosquito if it bit an AIDS infected lion (lion AIDS is a real thing and I think Bono should be doing something about it, by the way) than engage with you about how you have just eaten a pear.<br />
<br />
<b>Inexplicably Public Private Messages</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
I do this all the bastarding time. This is the one where you tag a friend in a status that doesn't really have any relevance to anyone else, or you post something related to an inside joke or secret that most people won't understand. He reckons people do this because they think they are still in high school and looking popular is important. In my case he is absolutely right. <br />
<br />
<b>The Out Of Nowhere Oscar Acceptance Speech</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
This is Whatsisname's name for when someone randomly writes something about how much they love all their friends and how they thank them for all their support and whatnot. He says people do this for attention, or because it's Christmas. I think people only do it when they've been dumped and have had some vodka, personally. Sure, it's a bit cheesy and I take his point that it could be construed as insincere because it's unlikely (unless you keep your friends list small) that you actually are grateful to absolutely everyone, but these are pretty infrequent posts so they don't reach the level of insufferability of many things he doesn't mention, like 'if you don't share this you don't support X good cause that everybody supports and there's something wrong with you and you should be in prison', or its close friend 'share this if you love your kids/mum/dad'. What, really, are there people on my Facebook who think 'hmmmm, Melanie Jones didn't share that picture I shared confirming that she thinks guide dogs are good. I suspect she is a Nazi and a psychopath.'? I don't think there are. It's usually Twitter where people form those sort of deranged ideas.<br />
<br />
<b>Incredibly Obvious Opinions</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
This one actually does bore the granny out of me I have to say. You know the drill - something bad happens somewhere, whether it's a natural disaster, an accident or a terrible crime, and your news feed is suddenly full of people basically saying that it was bad and they are sad about it. Just as with not feeling the need to repost things mentioning that, yes, I do indeed think nurses are a good thing or it's bad when babies get meningitis, I just don't think there's any point in saying that kind of thing because it's sort of obvious (hopefully) that you don't like it when loads of people die tragically. I think you need to have something more to add if you are going to bother commenting on upsetting major news events, not because it's obnoxious to care and express that you care, but because if you aren't throwing in anything above and beyond 'mass murder bums me out' you are just adding to the hundreds of other identical comments in everyone's news feeds. I agree with the concept Whatshisname is raising here, but I would once again say that the motives he suspects people who write these, admittedly, unimaginative and boring, but far from unpleasant statuses come over as a bit harsh. Yeah, I sometimes feel like certain people are a bit like 'look at me, I'm a nice person, I care!', and sure, I suppose that is in some ways 'image crafting' as he puts it, but is it really that bad to want people to think you are nice? You know, if you actually are and you're not just trying to mask the fact you're a sociopath.<br />
<br />
<b>The Step Toward Enlightenment</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Those inspirational quotes, well, they bug the shit out of a lot of people I know so maybe I'm with the guy on this one although it depends a lot on what the quote says. If it is that fucking Marilyn Monroe 'If you can't handle me at my worst...' one you can fuck right off for starters. I have to say though, that again, I think he's wrong about why people do it. It's not because they vainly think that they have the answers and want their friends to see them as inspiring people - if it was they'd post their own words not stuff anyone can find that the Dalai Lama might have said. I think generally people do it simply because they saw it and thought it was a good thing to say.<br />
<br />
In discussing these points with some friends and seeing other comments from other people who had read the article, it bothered me how the knee jerk reaction was 'well, nearly all status updates fall into one of these categories'. If they do, why do we even read them? So, I've been paying closer attention to my own friends' updates and looked back over a lot of my own, and I have actually reached the conclusion that no, they don't. While all of these behaviours do exist, a lot of what I also see from the people I am connected to on there are witty observations, attempts to voice an opinion about something, funny anecdotes about things that happened to my friends that day, creative stuff they have done that they are sharing and statuses designed to start interesting conversations, or inevitably, arguments about football. Take a look at your own friends, chances are there's a lot of good stuff there too.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-700956277325341282013-01-21T09:50:00.001-08:002013-01-21T09:50:27.120-08:00Lance Armstrong Made You Look StupidIt was a week when Luis Suarez spoke fairly candidly about the perception that he cheats (presumably in a bid to win over the public or at least stop people trying to hunt him for ivory - yes, that was a joke about his teeth - because it didn't do him any favours with his boss, football's answer to David Brent, Brendan "if you don't believe it, you can't achieve it" Rodgers), and Lance Armstrong's Oprah confessional was broadcast. In news terms, this was a week where crime and punishment in sports was a pervading theme. Well, that and imaginary dead Canadian women, but I am still far too confused by the whole Manti Te'o "Catfish" debacle to organize my thoughts into a post on that.<br />
<br />
Lance Armstrong's fall from grace has been a story that has enthralled the sporting world, and rightly so - it's an interesting one that teaches us a lot about the way certain recesses of professional athleticism operate. However, the outrage accompanying it from some camps really teaches us more about the media's need to have a narrative, heroes, villains, triumph over adversity, the whole fucking Star Wars shebang, when it comes to sport.<br />
<br />
This is why people are so pissed with Lance Armstrong, and why his punishment, which he somewhat histrionically refers to as a "death sentence", has been so much more severe than the punishments received by other cyclists found guilty of doping: he's done something far more offensive to the person on the street than cheating at cycling. He's defied the narrative created around him as a shining beacon of all that is good and pure, as a role model for the otherwise <i>morally doomed</i> children of our age, and he's made anyone who'd guzzled down that particular flavour of Kool-Aid look a bit fucking stupid.<br />
<br />
Lance Armstrong had, you see, overcome cancer, and returned to his professional cycling career, only to reach even more amazing peaks of success. And we wanted that to be true, because in the narrative world only good people ever get cancer, and if the bastarding X factor has taught us anything over the past decade, only people with a tragic past deserve to win <i>anything</i>.<br />
<br />
The thing is, first of all, cancer isn't really like that. Cancer is one of the fucked up flaws with the human body (well, animals get it too - which is super sad, especially when it's kittens - but you know what I mean), and can develop seemingly arbitrarily, in just about any organ, in anyone. In your lifetime, people you love will get it, but that doesn't mean it is some intelligent evil that preys on good people - there is just as much chance that, had he lived longer, Hitler would have got it too. The fact Lance Armstrong had cancer, therefore, doesn't tell us anything about him other than that he isn't superhuman. It was surviving it and picking his bike back up that made him one of the heroes the media believes we so badly need to keep us interested in sport.<br />
<br />
Surviving cancer depends on a lot of factors, but it is widely known that mental fortitude can have a huge impact on your chances, providing other things are in your favour too. There is a lot to admire about someone being brave, determined and tough enough not only to get through the illness and the aggressive treatment, but also to stop cancer from preventing them from enjoying life and achieving their personal goals afterwards. There is even more to admire if they take their experiences and use them to try and do good for other people going through the same thing, by getting involved with charities. But apparently, it isn't enough to admire that in and of itself and find it inspiring when it is a celebrity rather than a nice lady you know. Because once the media has got its claws into someone's "narrative", the cost of admiration is the responsibility to behave like a saint, or face its wrath.<br />
<br />
The other thing, then, is that sport isn't really like that either. Being the best at something, when it comes to sport, requires a lot of things - some inherent, some mental - but not one of them is "being a lovely person". Talent is also arbitrary, and that means that the highest echelons of sport are filled with the same complicated combination of personalities as most other populations. There are extremes of goodness and philanthropy and cuntish Joey Bartonyness, but most sportsmen, like the rest of us, exist somewhere in the middle, just sort of bodding about being human and sometimes a bit shit. And that shouldn't matter in sport. This is where this obsession with creating a narrative that fits with our age old understanding of how stories are supposed to go just shouldn't be applied to sport.<br />
<br />
You see, while talent is arbitrary, results are absolute. If a guy is the fastest, or scores the most points, or has the most skill, then he is a sporting hero. It doesn't matter whether he has Didier Drogba's record of giving to charity or Kaka's story of triumph over adversity, or whether he's a perceived asshole who cheats on his wife or gets in fights outside of nightclubs - those things don't alter the results. Sport isn't a movie where you are likely to get the ending you want. Sport isn't there to teach us how to live better lives or to shine a light on the human fucking soul. It is ultimately, just a bunch of stuff that happened.<br />
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For me, that makes it better than a movie. It's not escapism, it's real, and that means it can still surprise you. There isn't that sense of security you get with knowing that, while you can't see how just yet, good will ultimately prevail and everything will make sense - and that's a sense of security that you can't always depend on in real life. But this is something the media, especially in America, struggles with, and why sportsmen falling from grace offends people more than really, it logically should.<br />
<br />
When you build up a story about someone and get people to buy into it, sometimes it turns out to be a load of old crap, and that upsets people disproportionately to the actual crime committed, because as has been demonstrated, <i>people get really fucking pissy when someone makes them look a fool</i>.<br />
<br />
Lance Armstrong cheated, and lied, and supposedly did a whole host of other things he isn't very proud of, like bullying people who threatened to call him out on his bad behaviour. But he isn't even the only one in his own peer group to do that. Be angry with him, by all means, for denying the people who should have won the 7 Tour de France trophies that now have no winner, be angry with him for making a mockery of the grand and noble sport of, er, cycling, but don't be angry with him for not turning out to be the fucking angel you were promised he was by an industry desperate to make every person of note's journey fit a literary template.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-24794828987583422712013-01-17T01:02:00.000-08:002013-01-17T01:13:55.364-08:00Internet Tough GuysA couple of days ago, I wrote an <a href="http://itsallabitponyandtrap.blogspot.com/2013/01/pointless-twitter-arguments-with.html" target="_blank">article on here about some Liverpool supporters</a> who had been giving me grief on the Twitter after the Manchester United game. I thought this was good, funny material to use in a post, and while it would almost certainly piss off some people, well, there's not really anything on this blog that wouldn't piss off <i>somebody</i>, so if I'm prepared to rip into religions, celebrities, journalists and, er, cyclists, a bunch of Twitter lobotomites wasn't going to be the one I stayed away from.<div><br />
</div><div>When I finished the post and published it, as always I put the link out on Twitter, but I also tweeted at the people mentioned in the article so they could take a look. Sure, this was going to fan the flames a bit, but it also, I thought, gave them an opportunity to, if they were really butthurt about it, ask me to remove them from it. While the main reason I wrote the thing in the first place was that <i>I just thought it was funny</i>, and thought my readers might too, there was also an element of "well, you've been needlessly and pointlessly aggressive to me and you think, like every other time you've done that to someone, you can just go away and feel self satisfied about it. What if this time, someone called you out?". In order for that to mean anything, the people talked about had to know about it. </div><div><br />
</div><div>None of the people mentioned did contact me and ask me to remove them, but one of them did enlist the help of an "organization" (though I'm 90% sure it's just one guy who thinks he's fooling people with his multiple Twitter accounts) called The Honourables, who is, I found out, quite literally (cue fanfare) <i>the worst person in the world. </i></div><div><br />
</div><div>The Honourables, who you can get an idea of the mentality of from the comments attributed to them on my last post, pose as a group protecting the memory of the 96 people who died in the Hillsborough disaster online. That sounds like a good thing, right? Well, no. What they actually do is find anyone who writes anything bad about Liverpool supporters, even if (like my post), it has absolutely nothing to do with the Hillsborough disaster, and play the Internet Tough Guy with them, all in the name of "Justice for the 96", basically trying to use the trademark of human suffering that many people have adopted to act like a very shit thug, and claiming that anyone who doesn't like it "mocks the dead". This is why their website is always getting taken down for abuse. It was suspended yesterday, which they have been blaming me for, and I'm telling you readers, I believe in free speech more than anyone, and I couldn't really be bothered with that sort of cry baby bullshit anyway, so it was probably one of the many other people on their little "shit list".</div><div><br />
</div><div>So, what did the League of Extraordinary Fuckwits do with regard to me? Well, it started with the thinly veiled threats on the comments on the post, which are all still there if you want to see (as if I'd delete anything that funny), claiming that my post was "libelous" and that LFC would be "very interested in it from a legal point of view". </div><div><br />
</div><div>Well, I didn't buy that. You see, all I had done was take a few public tweets sent to me and used them in my post. I had taken the piss out of the posters for their basic rape of the English language and their illogical points, but I hadn't tried to find anything out about the people who tweeted them, or lied about them, or really said anything particularly contentious. If that's libel, then I am amazed I can't paper my walls with letters from lawyers for the jokes I've made over the three or so years I've been writing this blog.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Also, after the Jen Chang fiasco, I can hardly see LFC wanting to get into another PR disaster by taking me, and every other blogger who has written anything suggesting that, guess what, some of their fans are fucking wanksmiths (and masters of the trade), to task. What are they going to do, get Luis Suarez to come to my house and personally kick me in the shins? I would fucking welcome seeing exactly how seriously a Premiership football club takes the bleatings of one of the kind of fans it probably would rather do without about some blogger in America being mean about some pointless LFC supporter's inane tweets.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The comments got more and more threatening, and then took a bizarre twist when the guy told me to "stick to writing Pokemon". This was frankly baffling at first, and I just put it down to a very crap attempt at humour (as I said in my reply "I can see why you don't go in for the jokes much"), but it turns out it was something even weirder than that. You see, The Reckoning this guy had been threatening the whole time, actually involved him Googling me, in order to find out personal details he could post on one of his Twitter accounts (and if you want to see this shit, take a look at the timeline of one <a href="https://twitter.com/ANonyMousse2" target="_blank">@ANonyMousse2</a>) as he does with anybody who doesn't like him and his ragtag bunch of arsehole followers. The Internet Tough Guy thing had begun.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So, how did he come to think I "wrote Pokemon"? Well, in his "digging", he found my LinkedIn page. I find LinkedIn horribly boring, and only actually have a LinkedIn page because at the time I set it up, I was writing a book on social media and was doing some research. I haven't updated it for about two years, but the last time I did update it, I had set up a copywriting business called Ninja Mongoose. I have since stopped using that business name in my work, but I haven't updated LinkedIn because, and I can't stress this enough, LinkedIn is fucking boring. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The Honourables found the name Ninja Mongoose, and then Googled that, finding someone who, completely coincidentally, had been using the same name as a handle on a site where they wrote Pokemon fan fiction. They are a 14 year old boy. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So, The Honourables did the Honourable thing, and started telling his moronic throng of mouth breathing buffoons that I write Pokemon fan fiction posing as a 14 year old boy, thinking he had found out some dark secret. They all found this hilarious and ripped the piss out of Ninja Mongoose's work (which actually, considering it is stories about electric rats written by a kid, is not that bad - he can certainly structure his words better than the cretins I wrote about), thinking it was me and oh, how hilarious, what a sad twat. Trouble is, it wasn't me, was it? They were all ripping the piss out of an actual 14 year old kid, as well as (and this probably would count as "libel", were I to be that special kind of whiny twat who hurls that word around all the time), telling people that I like to pretend to be 14 years old and male on the internet, like some kind of pederast.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So, so far, The Reckoning had involved some light Googling and being mean to a child. What good cyberbullies they are! I felt the need, once I'd worked out where the hell they'd got the idea this kid was me, to disabuse them of this idea in a tweet, which The Honourables responded to with more of their impotent brand of terrifying menace. They had already been talking about me on their timeline, posting things they thought they had found out about me (basically they had managed to find my Facebook page, which you would obviously need some l33t haxor skills to do), including some photos, the names of some people I know and, weirdly "where my dad lives". They didn't even get the right country for that one, so again, congratulations on being the most inept cyberbullies ever. </div><div><br />
</div><div>At one point, he says to the girl mentioned in my original post (yes, the one with the "alluring" profile picture), "She has her location and her family on Facebook, what a stupid bitch". </div><div><br />
</div><div>Well no, actually. Having your location and your family on Facebook is fucking normal, if you aren't some pussy hiding behind an anonymous Twitter account or three who goes around threatening people, and you just use Facebook to, you know, interact with people you know. Implying that the fact that he managed to find this (in any case, very inaccurate) information means I am stupid implies that this information is in some way useful to him and his army of gobby little twats, but what does that mean? Are they going to beat up a guy my cousin bought a dog off of outside of a KFC? No, they're going to sit there tweeting away hoping that one of the people who reads their nonsense is enough of a psycho to do something more than just tweet at me that I am a slag or something.</div><div><br />
</div><div>He then encourages his followers to block me and "report spam". Obviously my personal Twitter account is not a spam account, I pretty much just talk about football and whatever I'm watching on TV, and joke around with my mates, so what does that mean? Well, if an account gets reported as spam enough times, it gets automatically suspended. The Honourables wants people to falsely report my account for spam so I won't be able to use it. This doesn't matter, because like him I have a few other Twitter accounts I have used for various business or writing projects that are currently idle, so it would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience to switch to a different one, hell, I recently stopped using Twitter altogether for a couple of months for no other reason than to knuckle down and get more work done without the distraction, but seriously, what a twat. </div><div><br />
</div><div>He then encourages his band of Scousers to come after me on Twitter. The ones who decided that was a good idea, in spite of the fact that it was Scousers coming at me on Twitter that caused me to write the offensive article in the first place (I actually suspect a lot of them would <i>like </i>me to include them in a post and were trying to provoke just that, but the way I see it, I picked out three examples for the first post, and the rest of them were all exactly the same so a second post in the "let's all laugh at the stupid people" vein would be redundant and gratuitous), were mostly going with "You're a fat, ugly fucking Yank so you don't know shit about football and you've never even met a Scouser". Those of you who know me, or who have been reading this blog for a while, or, I don't know, aren't completely retarded, will see the several obvious flaws in that line of insult that stopped it from having any meaning whatsoever, but I didn't let them in on the joke, it was too priceless to ruin.</div><div><br />
</div><div>One woman seemed particularly keen to get a mention on here, absolutely refusing to fuck off with her repetitive nonsense and insults. I didn't want to encourage her by saying this at the time, because seriously, she would not fucking go away, like a scrappy little Jack Russell biting away at your ankle and refusing to fuck off even though you really don't want to fight it because you could just kick it against the wall and kill it and it doesn't seem <i>right</i>, but she first appeared with a picture that made her look like a Tuesday afternoon stripper, and then replaced it with one where she looked like a Tuesday afternoon stripper's mum. God, this woman was boring, and boring for a long time. She did "educate" me about a lot of shit that I couldn't possibly have otherwise known though, what with being a Yank and spending all my time eating cheeseburgers in my Chevy pick up truck and all, like that "the stereotype of Scousers being criminals and benefit frauds went out of fashion before Chelsea FC even existed". Again, so many things wrong with that statement. She got very frustrated that I didn't want to satisfy her endless, harpylike tweets, which in my head all came through in this horrible, shrieky version of Mimi from Shameless' voice, that she put it down to me "having a lack of football knowledge" and not wanting to pit it against her "encyclopedic football knowledge". I expect, being an LFC fan, the "encyclopedia" she is referring to is one that came out in about 1988.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Anyway, I have never blocked anyone on Twitter before, because it does seem like a bit of a dick move, but I got so bored of her I had to do it. A couple of my followers had been so pissed off with the stuff she was saying that they decided to get in a row with her after that, even though I did warn them that her idea of winning an argument is just basically boring the will out of you to the point where all you can do is take an Advil and lie down in a dark room for a couple of hours until the headache goes away.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Still, apparently people should not associate with me, now I'm on The Honourables' shit list. If people talk to me now, they are apparently instantly deemed worthy of the "tweeting information about you to our followers" crap. They tweeted location and name information about two guys who spoke to me, just to be cunts. They are not crusading to protect the memories of the fucking 96 by starting on a random person who happens to agree with something I, the one who supposedly mocks the dead (I don't though, I just made a mild joke about the fucking charity record) said. They never include the person they are talking about, instead preferring to tweet screenshots of their tweets and their names, meaning that if you didn't look at his stupid timeline, you wouldn't even know they were targeting you. If you look at it, he will say you are stalking him. This guy is a grade A moron who is doing nothing more than using the tragic events of Hillsborough to be a bastard to people, and that, if you ask me, is far more "disgusting" (and illegal) than anything I or Alan fucking Davies or anyone else who doesn't agree with him, has ever done.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So, what have we learned from this? Not much. My site and my Twitter account are still up. The original post is still there, unchanged. Everybody I know is still alive and well, and I haven't heard from LFC's legal team. In fact, given <i>their </i>site is down, and I've now written <i>again</i>, exposing what a shitty operation this douche is running in the name of the victims of Hillsborough, you could almost suspect that I'm not scared of them at all, and that you shouldn't be either.;</div><div><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-67096277866042525222013-01-13T22:59:00.001-08:002013-01-13T22:59:30.695-08:00Pointless Twitter Arguments With Liverpool Fans<i>One of the best things about following football is having some fun banter with supporters from other teams. Most of the time. When they are good at it. People often ask me what it is that makes me so anti-Liverpool, and I think my experiences today go some way to explaining it.</i><br />
<br />
Today Man U and Liverpool met at Old Trafford, in a game that was never going to be friendly, and therefore promised a whole host of opportunities to take the piss. I was looking forward to it. As a Chelsea supporter, on paper a Liverpool win would have been better for me, given that Man U have been pulling away from us and everyone else in the Premiership, but fuck that for a game of soldiers. <br />
<br />
In general, I have always respected Manchester United and Alex Ferguson (though I can't look directly at him because for some reason he makes me feel really nauseous. I think it's the chewing). A good team, who back up their record historically by still being, you know, good. Manchester United are one of football's biggest teams, and not just in the minds of people who are all nostalgic for the days when footballers retired at 35 and bought a pub, but in everybody's minds. Manchester United's fans are also, in my experience, good fans to banter with. They get the spirit of it. I can happily argue for hours with an articulate Man U fan about their team and ours, and will generally end up wanting to buy them a beer rather than set fire to their dog. Of course, if an argument between a Chelsea fan and a Man United fan gets too heated, one of you can always defuse it by saying "Fuck Liverpool, though, right?".<br />
<br />
For these reasons, I have quite a lot of Manchester United supporters on my Twitter, and like many of the Chelsea supporters I talk to on there, I have a propensity to back them up in the banter against the Liverpool fans. The trouble with this is that it seems that all of the smart Liverpool fans are in a bunker somewhere working on a time machine to take them back to the days of Ian Rush, leaving only people whose debating skills begin and end with "I know you are, but what am I?", and whose imagination when it comes to finding things to have a pop at Chelsea fans about begins and ends with some nonsense about plastic flags, which I believe was first brought to their attention by that Go Compare guy looking fool who reckons he's going to manage Real Madrid when we finally get rid of him.<br />
<br />
My story of Liverpool fan induced rage begins, as these things are wont to do, with the inevitable "Munich thing". This is the single most irritating thing in a cacophony of irritating things Liverpool supporters en masse will do. For all the bleating they do about Justice for the 96 (including that bloody Christmas record, which if you ask me took the piss. <i>He Ain't Heavy</i>? For people who got crushed to death? Seriously? Why not go the whole way and do <i>Harder to Breathe</i> by Maroon 5? Actually I have quite a few of these "songs they should have done" jokes but unlike Liverpool supporters for the last 23 years, we'll move on), they think it is absolutely fine to go on about the Munich disaster when they meet with Man U. By all accounts the Munich chants were out during the game (and you could hear it on TV during the bits where the Liverpool fans weren't silently sulking), and on Twitter, #Munich was trending in Liverpool, and I don't think it was because they were all discussing the Bundesliga.<br />
<br />
Whether the other stories coming out of Old Trafford, like that there were Liverpool fans spitting on disabled Man U fans, were true only someone who was there could tell you, and I wasn't, but frankly, would you put it past them? The Munich stuff was there for all to see.<br />
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A Chelsea fan I follow on Twitter said something about Liverpool fans thinking it is fine to sing whatever they want, but crying if anyone does anything back (e.g. raising the whole "Heysel thing", you know, with the murdering and such - the one part of their "history" they don't want us to bang on about for the rest of time, because it's more than a little shameful). I replied to him, saying "90% of their songs are about Munich, aren't they?". It was a mild barb that I thought he would agree with the spirit of, nothing I thought anyone other than him would really notice, but it started this whooooole thing, which basically served as a microcosm for all of the things I hate about Liverpool fans and their lack of banter skills.<br />
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First came somebody calling themselves <a href="https://twitter.com/ILOVEFOWLER" target="_blank">@ILOVEFOWLER</a> - I have provided the link so you can see exactly what kind of semi-literate we are dealing with here, because it makes what she said all the more amusing. I know that really, saying anything remotely mean about someone who really loves Robbie Fowler and lives in, as she calls it "shit wrexham" (sic), is like beating up a retarded kid and therefore not cool, but if you're going to get all ad hominem on me over a tweet about the classless behaviour of your team's fans, then I'm probably going to write about you.<br />
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She replied with:<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-in-reply-to="290492291251052544">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/xxspionkopxx">xxspionkopxx</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/melanie_c_jones">melanie_c_jones</a> dont ever sing about them unless we're playing them!Therefore 90% of our songs aren't bout utd ya thick fuk<br />
— Sil melacrinis (@ILOVEFOWLER) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T16:23:21+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/ILOVEFOWLER/status/290494251773620226">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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<script async="async" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
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I can see why someone might think I was a thick fuck if I had done a statistical analysis of all of Liverpool's chants and reached the solution that 90% of the chants were about United (I had actually said 90% were about Munich, but we'll gloss over that for now) - that would be wrong and show me to be appalling at maths - so I explained as follows, that that was not the case:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-in-reply-to="290494251773620226">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/ilovefowler">ilovefowler</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/xxspionkopxx">xxspionkopxx</a> 90% was obviously hyperbole but you might want to learn to spell "thick fuck" before calling me one.<br />
— Melanie C. Jones (@Melanie_C_Jones) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T16:26:56+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/Melanie_C_Jones/status/290495155096653824">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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<script async="async" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
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I'd wager quite a lot of money that ol' Charm School here does not know what "hyperbole" means, and would probably, were she to try and say it, pronounce it "hyperbowl", so I know this was kind of a smug wanker sort of reply, but hey, whose go to response for being called a "thick fuk" isn't to use a long word and criticize the spelling and grammar of the antagonist? Standard. Her reply, I suspect, was also standard:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-in-reply-to="290495155096653824">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/melanie_c_jones">melanie_c_jones</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/xxspionkopxx">xxspionkopxx</a> alright then, ugly fuck! How's that<br />
— Sil melacrinis (@ILOVEFOWLER) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T16:29:09+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/ILOVEFOWLER/status/290495712494510080">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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<script async="async" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
Well, at least she learnt to spell "fuck" the second time around - I feel like one of those people who's taught a monkey to count to potato or something. Nobody's ever called me ugly before, but I am so hurt that on the back on my tiny Twitter picture this person can tell that indeed, I am a hideous beast, and presumably nobody has ever had the heart to tell me before, that rest assured, I'll be calling a cosmetic surgeon first thing on Monday morning.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Later, she despairs at the pasting all the nasty people on Twitter have been giving her for saying things like the above to me, and something along the lines of "u hit evry branch on da way out of da ugly tree" to some man (I am paraphrasing, I am not great at this spelling like a cretin thing), by announcing to her followers:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
2day iv bin called a slut by a manc and thick by a chelski plastic! Can they join forces so I can muller them together I'm fucking nackard<br />
— Sil melacrinis (@ILOVEFOWLER) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T20:20:11+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/ILOVEFOWLER/status/290553853294809088">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
<br />
<script async="async" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
Indeed.<br />
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Elsewhere, there was this guy:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/melanie_c_jones">melanie_c_jones</a> glory hunter , bet you've never set foot in the bridge<br />
— Graeme McCausland (@GAMLFC) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T16:54:16+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/GAMLFC/status/290502034204028929">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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<script async="async" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
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Incorrect, fucktard. I used to live a short walk from the Bridge and go all the time. I live in Seattle now, so not so much (though I do have a season ticket at Seattle Sounders, which apparently offends these people, who don't believe you can be a "real fan" and support two teams in completely separate leagues but fuck, what am I supposed to do, live and die within ten miles of where I was born like some kind of dark ages peasant? Give up liking football because I emigrated and get really into the Mariners instead? Become an "armchair fan" and take all their shit for that equally heinous crime?), though thanks to Chelsea's US tour last summer I did get to see them play live once in 2012, which is one more time than a lot of Liverpool fans I know in the UK. This guy is a season ticket holder at Anfield, so I'm not having a pop at his dedication, but he suggested I wasn't a real Chelsea fan because I was (heaven forfend) talking about Liverpool instead of Chelsea (on a day when Chelsea didn't play), when he has as his Twitter page background... Well, take a look: <a href="https://twitter.com/GAMLFC">https://twitter.com/GAMLFC</a> - if that isn't about Chelsea then I don't know what is.<br />
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The glory hunter thing came up a few times, and seriously, it is deeply meaningless when it comes from Liverpool supporters from places like "shit Wrexham". These people have no idea how long I have supported Chelsea (it's since about 1994, when I first got into the sport), but in any case, to assume that a team that was consistently top six before Roman (I got told off for calling him by his first name in a tweet as well, so I'm doing it again) bought them, which featured great players like Gianfranco Zola, and had success in the FA Cup and European Cupwinner Cup had no supporters at the time is just assinine. In reality, Liverpool's non Liverpudlian fanbase comprises almost nothing but glory hunters if you think choosing a team that win things and has players you admire when you're a kid is a bad thing, it's just that the kids that picked Liverpool in the 80's have now grown up to find the glory isn't coming, and they are so butthurt about it they have to knock people who made better fucking life choices, and consequently not only get to enjoy watching good football, but also don't have to pretend to like Luis Suarez or that they don't find the Scouse accent as horrific as everybody else does.<br />
<br />
Check out this guy:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-in-reply-to="290497526308696064">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/19att92">19att92</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/melanie_c_jones">melanie_c_jones</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/ilovefowler">ilovefowler</a> yea yea quiet you glory hunter !!!<br />
— DC (@theRedsfan1892) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T16:38:08+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/theRedsfan1892/status/290497970871336960">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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His Twitter backdrop says he wants to be buried at Anfield, because that's where he was born and where he will die. He called me and a few of my friends glory hunters. Pretty tough talk, I bet he's Liverpool through and through, probably lived there his whole life and... No, wait, he's from Canada. The French part too.<br />
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Good football banter is about the players, the culture, the managers, the topical stuff going on. It is imaginative, funny, and somewhat tongue in cheek, and you get into it fully prepared to take a "mullering" yourself from time to time. You get to crow about it when you win, but when your guy skies it, or you lose to fucking QPR, you know you're going to get it in the neck and you have to take that with good humour. You don't cry, you don't say "it's disgusting for you to say that X player was a bad buy because of X tragic thing that happened a really long time ago", you don't refer anyone who criticizes your team to some arbitrary point in history when you were good, and you don't have a hissy fit and start making baffling and unfounded personal insults. And you certainly don't do this:<br />
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Munich 58? Let's hope there's a madrid 13 and they crash the plane again an all the little munich twats die! <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23dodgypilots">#dodgypilots</a><br />
— Matty Brett (@Matty_Brett) <a data-datetime="2013-01-13T15:38:16+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/Matty_Brett/status/290482905195614208">January 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
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Follow me at <a href="https://twitter.com/Melanie_C_Jones">https://twitter.com/Melanie_C_Jones</a> for more of this.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-64808232439303763272013-01-07T23:56:00.002-08:002013-01-07T23:56:19.125-08:00Football AwardsI have to admit, I wasn't expecting a lot of surprises from the FIFA awards, especially not for the main award, the coveted Ballon D'Or (which is French for "ball of gold" or "golden ball", and is the name FIFA have given to the trophy, as well as, as we all know, the singular name for what David Beckham's scrotum houses a brace of). I was thinking before it was announced that it may as well have been called the "Forgone Conclusion of the Year" really (you know, only in French), because with Messi having beaten the all time goal scoring record previously held by Gerd Muller, and apparently also possessing the ability to make the blind see, anybody else winning would have looked fucked up and, FIFA don't do fucked up things (insert your own list of fucked up things FIFA have done here)...<br />
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There was the potential that the Women's Player of the Year award could have thrown up some surprises, if Abby Wambach had perhaps turned up wearing a J-Lo dress held on with toupee tape, but no, as expected she looked like she'd raided KD Lang's wardrobe circa 1995.<br />
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Still, watching the "gala", which was <i>much </i>gayer than Abby with its shirtless karate dancing men and weird "guy in an armadillo suit" mascot, I did find myself very surprised indeed to discover that overnight, every football league in the world except for La Liga had blinked out of existence. That's La Liga, the league that has become marginally interesting this year because it now has three teams instead of two, but is generally about as exciting from a competitive point of view as the SPL before Rangers went the way of the pear. That's right kids. It's just possessionball and tiki-taki (which is what all the houses that look just the same are made out of, isn't it?) and players with just one name from here on out. Everyone else is dead.<br />
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Sure, the players in the FIFPro World XI are all fucking great, but they are all from Real Madrid or Barca except for Radamel Falcao, who despite the media trying to link him with moves to everyone from Chelsea to Heart of Midlothian and Exeter City, plays for Atletico Madrid. And that kind of pisses on the Bundesliga, Serie A and the Premiership, and I imagine Zlatan Ibrahimovic's normally present erection withered in seconds when he heard. Christ, I bet even Heskey was a bit gutted he wasn't considered, now he is enjoying kinglike status in the A League, where his Newcastle Jets, last time I looked, were in a healthy 7th place (out of 10 teams).<br />
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So much for the players then, what about the managers? Well, the three finalists were Del Bosque, who lead Spain to win the Euros (despite employing that weird "we don't need a striker" strategy - not that that is a bad strategy when your best striker is Fernando Torres), Mourinho, who I quite honestly worship as a God but who they all hate at Real Madrid, and Pep Guardiola.<br />
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So, er, Pep Guardiola. For what he did in 2012. Well, at the start of 2012, Pep Guardiola was manager of Barcelona, who just about everyone agrees is the best team in the world, and featured The Great and Powerful (but quite short) Leo Messi, as well as fellow Ballon D'Or nominee Andres Iniesta, and over half of FIFA's World XI. With that team, in 2012, he won exactly <i>fuck all</i> trophies. Mourinho's Real, in stark contrast to this season so far, bettered them at every turn, and RDM's Chelsea managed to break his winning formula with their defensive tactics, knocking Barca out of the Champions League which as we know from experience, UEFA really, really like them to be in the final of. Pep then basically had a nervous breakdown and fucked off to New York, mumbling something about Andy Warhol. He is currently still on his little sabbatical, allegedly waiting for Fergie to retire so he can manage Man U (which I imagine is a bit like being Prince Charles, waiting for the Queen to die). Likes a challenge, then, our Pep.<br />
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Basically, the whole thing may as well have been called the Bola de Ora and the ceremony just have been replaced by an hour long broadcast of Sepp Blatter noshing off the King of Spain while a man in an armadillo costume pranced around awkwardly at the side. Though, in fairness, then we would have missed Pia Sundhage's surprisingly good country singing. They didn't even bother translating all the acceptance speeches that were in Spanish (though at least Cristiano Ronaldo telling kids to be "humble" if they want to become great players like him was in English, so no kids watching it in the UK or America have any excuse not to become legends of the sport now), and I was watching it on American TV - they give us subtitles to help us get through Being: Liverpool (and rightly so given Jamie Carragher's voice sounds like someone going at some pig iron with a chainsaw).<br />
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Given how the awards were a bit bollocks, then, I have decided to name my own award winners. There are no trophies and no gala, and no armadillos. I can do any dance off of Dance Central 2 on medium difficulty - you can picture that if you feel there absolutely needs to be some dancing.<br />
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Note - I'm not doing the women's ones, because a) I basically agreed with Pia Sundhage and Abby Wambach's wins, and b) other than Abby I can only name about five female football players, all of whom are American. Abby is my favourite. Mostly because she plays like a man and men's football is much better.<br />
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<b><u>Ballon D'Or</u></b><br />
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This should be <b>Messi</b>, as I said before, it'd be fucked up if it was anyone else. Grant Holt has been doing quite well for Norwich, though... No, Messi - it's Messi. Having said that, as amazing as Messi is, he isn't the type of player I tend to like best from a personal taste perspective. I like the big, terrifying Drogba type players. In the same way as a lot of people will tell you boxing at lighter weights is much more impressive, and I will tell you I still prefer watching bigger guys hit each other. It makes a nicer sound. This is why I am looking forward to the future when Belgium dominates instead of Spain and I can give this award to Romelu Lukaku.<br />
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<b><u>Manager of the Year</u></b><br />
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I would like to give this award to <b>Roberto Di Matteo</b> for doing what nobody else had managed to do and winning the Champions League with Chelsea, as well as for breaking Pep. It might seem a bit mental to give the Manager of the Year award to someone who was only actually a manager for a part of the year though, so I offer up a couple of other names for those of you who don't agree with me to choose from:<br />
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<b>Roberto Martinez</b> - A lot of clubs have tried to lure him away from his beloved Wigan, but he's not having a bar of it. He's just bloody adorable, isn't he? During the Euros, he appeared on American coverage to let us know what was going on on the scene like the BBC's Kate Adie in the first Gulf War, reporting with her army hat on from some shithole. It was great. Granted, that's partly because it meant Michael Ballack wasn't talking. Ballack is a lot more boring than you expect when he speaks, even when arguing with Alexei Lalas. By the way, Alexei Lalas doesn't like it when people say "cunt" on Twitter. Use that information as you see fit.<br />
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<b>Alan Pardew </b>- I just like him.<br />
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<b>Roy Hodgson </b>- Clearly attempting to troll Kenny Dalgleish, he attempted to do well in the Euros with King Kenny's (sorry, what is he king of exactly? Mount McTwattybollocks?) sorry assed Liverpool team. The Liverpool team in question, when reduced to only its English members, being the saddest thing imaginable. Did better than most people expected. Comes across like a nice uncle who might give you a fiver when you go and visit him.<br />
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<b>Paolo di Canio </b>- Fucking mental, and therefore amazing.<br />
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<b>Jurgen Klopp </b>- Will nobody think of the Bundesliga?<br />
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<b><u>World VI of People Who Don't Play in La Liga</u></b><br />
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<b>Goalkeeper: </b><br />
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<b>Joe Hart (Manchester City, England)</b>, even though he's been a bit crap lately. Not as crap as Reina has been, but you know... He gets extra points because he's English, and we were despairing (and that's not hyperbole - it was genuine despair) that there might never be a good English goalkeeper again after David Seaman, and we'd be condemned to use Rob Green forevermore.<br />
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<b>Defenders:</b><br />
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<b>Ashley Cole (Chelsea, England)</b> - The best left back in the world, and one of the hardest working players. Sure, he likes putting his Nokia where no Nokia should have to go, up his actual arse, but he saves both Chelsea and England's metaphorical arses just as regularly.<br />
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<b>Jamie Carragher (Liverpool, England) </b>- HA! Just kidding.<br />
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<b>John Terry (Chelsea, England) </b>- I know it's a bit predictable that a Chelsea supporter would choose JT and Ashley Cole (hell, why not throw a Gary Cahill in there for good measure?), but Ashley really is the best left back in the world, and JT adds a level of leadership you really miss when it isn't there (especially when Frank Lampard isn't there either). He is also one of the most hated and divisive players in the world, and that's <i>cool</i>.<br />
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<b>Mats Hummels (Borussia Dortmund, Germany) </b>- Will nobody think of the Bundesliga?<br />
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<b>Vincent Kompany (Manchester City, Belgium) - </b>Belgium is TEH FUTURE. But Kompany's pretty good now. Very tall too.<br />
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<b>Midfielders:</b><br />
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<b>Juan Mata (Chelsea, Spain) </b>- Little Juan Mata <i>is </i>Spanish, but he doesn't play in La Liga so he can be in the "anti FIFA XI" XI. In a team in a league full of excellent midfielders, Mata is still one of the greatest and most reliable guys you could ever want on your team, and his patience trying to feed a struggling Torres shows what a team player the little 'un is.<br />
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<b>Andrea Pirlo (Juventus, Italy) </b>- Just fucking outstanding in the Euros, and for Juve, Pirlo shows that if you treat a player in his mid thirties well, he can outplay other guys in their prime. This is something Chelsea's board should pay attention to - Andrea and Frank Lampard are roughly the same age.<br />
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<b>David Beckham (formerly LA Galaxy, formerly England) </b>- If you're reading this in the UK or elsewhere in Europe and aren't all that familiar with MLS, perhaps believing Piers "the cunt" Morgan when he compares it to a pub league, you're missing out; it's actually pretty fucking tough. Beckham's now former team, the LA Galaxy, won a second consecutive MLS Cup in 2012 despite fierce competition (and as a Seattle Sounders supporter I am still pretty butthurt that we didn't get past them in the Western Conference final, but it's Beckham, and you can't stay mad at Beckham, it's like kicking a puppy), and while he did have a lot of help from Landon Donovan (while he wasn't off writing emo poetry and generally having a sad) and Robbie Keane (who in America is somehow really good - like actually good, not just perceived as good like our Heskey down under), Becks was still in a class of his own. Neglected by Stuart Pearce for a spot in the Olympics, Beckham deserves some recognition for what will probably end up being his last year in a major league, so here you go, mate!<br />
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<b>Bastian Schweinsteiger (Bayern Munich, Germany) </b>- It was a bit of a toss up for me (and the one person I discussed this list with - see, I have a panel, just like FIFA) between Schweinsteiger and Arjen Robben, and in league and Champions League play both had serious merits. However, Robben and his whole team were a bunch of arse in the Euros, and Arjen was simply unable to score against his former team, Chelsea, in the Champions League final, so that decided it.<br />
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<b>Strikers:</b><br />
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<b>Robert Lewandowski (Borussia Dortmund, Poland) </b>- Lewandowski was on fire in the Euros, and the link to Manchester United that never came to fruition over the summer sounded like it was going to lead to some pretty terrifying things. Man U probably don't mind too much given how well Robin van Persie has bedded in so far (and if I do one of these next year, it's going to take a quite horrific slump between now and then to keep RVP off the list), but Dortmund's Polish striker would be a tasty proposition for any top flight club.<br />
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<b>Edinson Cavani (Napoli, Uruguay) </b>- While a lot of what made Cavani so impressive in 2012 at Napoli was his partnership with Lavezzi, who has since left the club to become a feature in the Paris St Germain menagerie, even alone his work rate and prolific scoring mark him out as one of the stand out strikers of the year.<br />
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<b><u>Goal of the Year</u></b><br />
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<b>Papiss Demba Cisse </b>for Newcastle, against Chelsea on May 2nd 2012. Why? Well, because I remembered it, so it must have been the best one I saw all year. Flawless logic. In any case, it was better than that Neymar goal that was on FIFA's shortlist.<br />
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So there you go. Feel free to argue with me below if your favourite player/team/manager wasn't represented.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-73665617116266840112012-12-07T11:52:00.000-08:002012-12-07T11:56:41.955-08:00Australian DJs Causing SuicidesRegular readers will know that I love it when people who are as mad as spoons start sending death threats to people in the media. However, in this case, it isn't the Liverpool supporters threatening to decapitate somebody and do a poo down their exposed gullet for saying the Hillsborough single (which is called "He Ain't Heavy", so is presumably not a ballad about Steven Gerrard) is fucking dreadful (I haven't heard it, but I feel fairly confident that I can say it's dreadful without actually listening to it - everybody knows charity records suck, though I suspect it might be intentional... If the songs were actually good people would download them illegally and they'd never raise any money).<br />
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This time, it is a bunch of other people who I can't seem to find a cohesive group name for other than just, you know, "nutters", threatening some Australian DJs because they made some poor woman top herself.<br />
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So this is the story. Aussie DJs Mel Grieg and Michael Christian (Mel Grieg is a lady Mel, like Mel C sort of is, ish, rather than a male Mel like Mel Gibson sort of is, ish) do one of those radio shows where they make the odd prank phone call for comedy purposes. They phoned up the King Edward VII hospital where Kate Middleton (oh, I know you're supposed to call her the Duchess of Cambridge but nobody fucking does, just like nobody calls the guy made of sewn together corpses Frankenstein's <i>Monster</i>) was being treated for, I don't know, the vapours or whatever, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles.<br />
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Now, on account of how they are comedy DJs rather than insidious hardcore journalists, they didn't go to any real lengths to be convincing as the Queen and the Prince of Wales, instead going more for, well, comedy. They spoke with dodgy, comedy English Royalty style accents, and even had their mate (let's call him Bruce) barking in the background, pretending to be a corgi. Mel Grieg was not exactly giving it the full Helen Mirren as Her Maj, referring to Kate as her "granddaughter" (rather than as "K-Middy", which is what the real Queen would have called her). All in all it is quite clear that they were just planning to have a bit of a laugh until whoever answered twigged that it was a wind up and shouted at them. That being the usual format of that kind of bit.<br />
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Things didn't go to plan. The phone call was answered by a nurse called Jacintha Saldhana, who was on reception at the time. Rather than joining in the reindeer games and doing what Greig and Christian were probably expecting - getting comically irate at them for wasting her time - she treated the call as genuine and put it through to another nurse who was involved in treating Kate Middleton, who as we all know, is pregnant with the world's first human baby. This was kind of dumb, but fuck it, if I was a nurse working my arse off looking after posh women with a bit of morning sickness I doubt I'd be that bothered with playing gatekeeper, as if I was a corporate receptionist dealing with people wanting to sell my boss toner cartridges. Fuck all that, just bang them through.<br />
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At this point, Grieg and Christian must have been thinking "awesome, let's see how far we can go with this!" - these sorts of calls so rarely pay off with anything much but when they do it is often comedy gold. So they spoke to the nurse, who they also somehow duped, and who unexpectedly revealed all sorts of details about Kate's condition. Kate, apparently, was fine, by the way.<br />
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And that was that. All rather embarrassing for the hospital, and a bit worrying in terms of, well, if a couple of Australian clowns doing a bit on a radio show can get that kind of information, what could someone who was actually <i>trying </i>find out? In a world where journalists tap phones... But still, no harm, no foul.<br />
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Until Jacintha Saldhana was found dead, that is. Now, Saldhana was just the first person they spoke to who put them through to the Duchess' nurse. She didn't reveal anything she shouldn't have, and her role in the whole thing was relatively minor. But she committed suicide, we are told, and obviously this was because of the prank call and therefore Michael Christian and Mel Grieg are worse versions of Hitler and should be tarred and feathered.<br />
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Please people, let's think about this rationally. Would a mother of two off herself at Christmas time because she'd made a minor cock up at work that had lead to some personal but not very interesting or scandalous information about Kate bloody Middleton being revealed on Australian radio? This isn't Japan in the time of the Samurai, where people commit ritual suicide for bringing shame upon the hospital where they work or dishonoring the emporer's son's daughter in law. In reality, the tragic suicide of Jacintha Saldhana was probably the result of other, much more personal issues - perhaps the kind of issues that might distract a person and make them drop the ball a bit at work...<br />
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You can't blame Michael Christian and Mel Grieg, or the radio station they work for, for this turn of events. They have been taken off the air for a while, which is probably for the best while this blows over, but any more serious repercussions than that don't make sense.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-57410366992442145142012-10-30T07:29:00.002-07:002012-10-30T07:29:42.304-07:00Referees with Ideas Above Their Station<i>If you're a supporter in any of the world's big football leagues, chances are you can name a few refs from current or recent seasons, and have a strong opinion on whether you would want them officiating when your team plays. In a job where the key criteria for success are being balanced, fair, observant, calm and competent, why are the personalities and behaviours of referees becoming more and more of a matter of attention?</i><br />
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If you pay any attention to the Premiership whatsoever and haven't spent the last few days in "the hole" in prison (and I'm not sure if prisons really have those or if I just got the idea that they do from something that happened on basically every episode of Oz), chances are you have read, heard or spoken about Mark Clattenburg quite recently. If I myself had spent the last 24 hours in "the hole" I'd probably have spent a fair bit of that time thinking about him, and I mean that very much <i>not </i>in a dirty way before you get confused.<br />
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The controversy around Clattenburg would probably have stayed in Chelsea circles and blown over as these things always do if it had just been about the questionable sending off of Lady Diana Torres and the fact Man United's winning goal was a bit on the offside side. That sort of thing happens, Chelsea weren't the only team to suffer from inaccurate decisions this week and at the end of the day unless decisions like this knock you out of an important cup on their own, you just have to grumble about it but move on, or you sound like a whiny little bitch and people start singing "Always the Victims" at you.<br />
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Certainly you can notice patterns with certain refs and their treatment of given players and teams that are evident of something far more sinister, and biases like that can seriously cost teams, but losing one game a season over something like this as an isolated incident is usually just an unfortunate part of this or any other sport - nobody can get it right every time. Well, unless they have technology to help them (and make it possible to verify they're not just, you know, lying about what they saw), but that's a rant for another day.<br />
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Instead, the story took a bizarre twist when after the game, Chelsea alleged that Clattenburg had racially abused Mikel, calling him a "monkey" and not in the way you might call a mischievous nephew one, I'd wager... Or even Gareth Bale, who does, you have to admit, sort of look like one. No, in the racist way - the way that only seems to exist in football. You never hear of someone who's up for racially aggravated assault doing it - they tend to favour different horrible racist slurs. It's always some cock at a football match.<br />
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He also apparently called Juan Mata a "Spanish twat". This brings up the question of slurs involving nationality and whether they should be treated as the same thing as those based on colour. They should, really, because of the way they are intended. Poor little Juan Mata probably felt bad for being called a Spanish twat even though being Spanish is about the coolest thing to be in football at the moment and certainly something Mata is quite proud of, so therefore a shit insult, if you think about it.<br />
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Obviously some might say nobody should be calling anybody a twat, a cunt or a bell end of any sort because it's mean, but when it comes to the <i>players</i>, then you're getting into the sort of territory where everyone will have to wear bras and hug like in South Park's Sarcastaball NFL episode (which like all episodes that feature my hero Randy Marsh was very good). Good sportsmanship is all very admirable and the ideal, but at the end of the day it's a physical sport and people get angry and have "heated exchanges" - people piss and whine that they get paid a lot and should be professional and saintly at all times as a thank you for all that money <i>nobody is forced to pay them</i>, but I don't think I could <i>not </i>call someone a big diseased dog scrotum if they tackled me dangerously or disallowed my blatant goal, and I'm probably a lot less hot tempered than the average Mario Balotelli (note - there isn't really any such thing as an "average Mario Balotelli"). It's when it crosses the line from run of the mill handbags to something intensely offensive or genuinely threatening it needs to be punished, and that's the referee's fucking JOB. You can't command respect from players and tell them not to be behaving in certain ways and expect any good to come of it if you are calling them twats, Spanish or otherwise.<br />
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It hasn't been proven whether Clattenburg said either of these things, but it is a very strange thing this story exists. In breaking news as I write this the Met Police have been called in to investigate. Given the current constant coverage of various stories big and small and usually somehow involving Rio bloody Ferdinand about racism in the game, why would anyone want to invite any more of it, even if you were a massive arsehole and really in the mood for a spot of racially abusing someone? Do you want the police and the courts and the FA on your ass right now? Especially at a match between Chelsea and Man Utd, two of the teams involved (albeit in different ways) in some of the biggest racism stories, as well as one of the most attention grabbing fixtures anyway?<br />
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It's no secret that I love Chelsea, and I think RDM is too classy to merely be trying to discredit a referee who cost him a game, especially when the media almost unanimously agreed that Chelsea were wronged in the game itself, damaging Clattenburg's credibility anyway. I therefore can only hope Chelsea are telling the truth, even though it just seems like such an insane thing for Clattenburg to do. The only possible motivation I can think of is fame and an overblown ego - and this wouldn't be the only time recently that a referee has seemed motivated by these factors in his actions, although it may well be the most controversial.<br />
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And this is where I come to the point of today's rant. Referees in the modern game have in too many cases developed ideas, or at least publicity and notoriety above their station, and seem to want to command as much media attention as the players. This is wrong. We shouldn't be talking about Mark fucking Clattenburg. In the MLS, I don't know how much time I've spent talking about Ricardo Salazar, but it's too much. Howard Webb and Graham Poll shouldn't have endless jokes about them. We shouldn't need to know or care who these people are. Sure, in special cases where a referee is especially <i>good </i>and well respected they deserve to be known about and appreciated (the obvious case being Pierluigi Collina, who was famous before all of this weirdness started and who I would say deserved that car commercial, bless him), but when you're just famous for being biased, incompetent or even racist, and people are talking about you because you have a negative impact on the game, you deserve nothing but the sack.<br />
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Referees do an important job, but it's one that can only be done well if you take your own ego out of it and act in a fair and unassuming way. Controlling the game, commanding respect and making difficult calls is only possible if you are doing it because it's right, rather than because having a sense of power over a bunch of rich, famous guys and the outcome of one of the most watched sports fixtures in the world gives you the horn. You are part of the football world but only in the same way other vital supporting roles are - and you don't see the physiotherapists all clamouring to make the headlines or deliberately fucking up Suarez's leg just because they work with footballers and think this makes them Jack the fucking Biscuit. We don't have time to look at you because we're watching the game, and we don't want to have to worry about you doing something wacky to ruin our day - that's the other team's job. You earn 70k a year, not a week. You don't drive a Maserati, you drive a fucking Honda. What the hell makes you think you have the right to act like a prima donna when you're supposed to be the one keeping the people we actually came to watch in check and making sure we get the good, fair game we are all hoping for?<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-77031137757269723472012-07-11T03:32:00.000-07:002012-07-11T05:12:37.735-07:00The John Terry TrialA few points before I get into the meat of this article about the John Terry trial:<br />
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Firstly, to the various people moaning that he will "get off more lightly than Suarez" - i.e. Liverpool supporters - not for the first time, you are being preposterous. He lost the England captaincy, and is facing criminal charges. I'm sure he would have preferred a simple ban, even a record breakingly large one (which I thought was excessive in Suarez's case too - possible verbal racial slurs are bad and deserving of punishment, but surely not the worst thing <i>any footballer ever</i> has done) to standing trial. I know I would. Oh, I guess people in Liverpool are so used to going to court it no longer seems like a big deal to them...<br />
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Seriously, a ban would have been more palatable to just about everyone, even if JT is innocent (which Suarez may also have been in some sort of a way), because at least that would have been keeping the whole thing within the FA and the sport where it belongs. And, indeed, where it would have stayed, had whatever hoopy earringed slapper Anton was banging at the time and Rio stayed out of it, and had Ferdinand's PR man not supposedly put pressure on the police to make a big deal of it under threat of going to the media and saying the cops are all racist too and a "white man's word means more than a black man's"... Don't say the cops are racist, it leads to people breaking windows and stealing TVs out of William Hill. Evra obviously doesn't have a cunty PR man who'd do something so obviously provocative, so the Suarez business was dealt with within the sport.<br />
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Secondly, to the newspapers whining that people tweeting about court cases could be deemed to be in contempt of court, because tweets could sway jurors, and how it is unfair people can tweet about stuff they can't write about - the solution to this is obvious. You can ban jurors from using the internet during the trial. This is easier than trying to deal with a contempt of court situation every time someone tweets about a trial by jury. It is easier to prevent jurors from logging in to their social media accounts than to prevent them from accidentally seeing a newspaper headline. Of course, the John Terry trial is in a magistrates court and therefore has no jury, so it is unlikely anything will be done about Rio's tweets because honestly, I don't think magistrates would be swayed by the barely literate crap he tweets. Speaking of which, I think that <i>Liar, Liar</i> tweet had nothing to do with the John Terry trial, it's just that <i>Liar, Liar</i> is Rio Ferdinand's favourite movie. Not because he's a liar, I mean, but because he's thick and that movie has a very simple plot...<br />
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Now then, onto the main event. The John Terry trial is underway, and despite how entertaining following the few hilarious bits, like the exchange where Terry had to explain different footballer insults on a scale of "handbags" to "unacceptable", and the bit where when told he was a supreme athlete JT said "I used to be" has been, I hope it ends very soon with the whole damp sqib being kicked out for lack of evidence. And you can replace "lack of" with "no" there.<br />
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The deaf people serving as lip reading experts at the trial have said that it is impossible to conclude from the video (which we've all seen) whether the exchange took place as Anton Ferdinand's corner says it did, with JT straight out calling him a "fucking black cunt", or as John Terry says it did, with him responding to an initial accusation from Ferdinand that he had called him that with something along the lines of [in disbelief] "did I call you a fucking black cunt? You fucking knobhead...". So, that video evidence is basically worthless.<br />
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The only other evidence would be that of the witnesses. Anton Ferdinand himself and QPR football club on the whole supposedly didn't want much to do with the trial, and apparently were not at all cooperative with the police during the initial inquiries. That doesn't make Ferdinand sound like the best witness in the world...<br />
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In fact, from what I can surmise from various reports I've seen, Ferdinand and Terry had had the discussion about whether or not Anton had thought John had called him a "fucking black cunt" immediately after the game, and Anton had said no, and they'd both sort of left it on good terms. Then Anton Ferdinand's "girlfriend at the time" as she keeps being referred to, supposedly showed him the video on YouTube on her Blackberry. So she's a fucking Blackberry cunt then (duh-dum tssssh!)... Nah, really, I hate those bloody things - who has a Blackberry unless it is a work phone you are made to carry around until you lose the plot and throw it out of the window of a commuter train? Anyway, I digress...<br />
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It really sounds like Anton Ferdinand's reasons for getting into a court case situation may not be entirely clear cut. I don't like the bit about the PR guy and the cops, that to me sounds very sinister. Is this case just a big performance to show the Met takes racism seriously?<br />
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I think we can safely say that John Terry is not fundamentally racist. If he was, I think it would have come up long before now. He has had a lot of good relationships with a lot of black players over the course of his career, and he also notably (and he raised this in the case) has done charity work in Africa for Marcelle Desailly and Didier Drogba's charities. While the whole "I'm not racist, I've got loads of black friends" thing is a cliche everybody pretty much tries to avoid these days, in this case I think it is a valid point.<br />
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JT says he is horrified that anyone would think he was a racist, and sadly for him, now a hell of a lot of people do. This case needs to be thrown out so we can move on, but I fear there could be permanent damage to JT's reputation, and the harm of him losing his England armband and the ensuing Capello debacle cannot be undone even if there is some kind of Cheryl Cole style mass hypnosis thing where everyone forgets there ever was a racism controversy associated with him.<br />
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I know a lot of people aren't fans of John Terry, but if you're reading this, please, read the facts about the trial and tell me honestly whether you think, from a legal perspective, there could be any excuse for finding him guilty in this whole farce.<br />
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Anyway, I kind of agree with what he indisputably <i>did </i>say that day - Anton Ferdinand is a "fucking knobhead".Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-19885035988961610192012-04-15T23:46:00.002-07:002012-04-16T00:12:53.118-07:00Alan Davies' Liverpool Death Threats<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hillsborough 1989. This was Liverpool FC's 9/11. Except unlike 9/11, which was ten years ago, it is too soon to make any form of joke about anything even vaguely related to it.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Today, Chelsea played Tottenham in the FA Cup semi final. Prior to the game there was scheduled to be a minute's silence, no, not for the Italian player who died during a match <i>yesterday</i>, but for the 23rd anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Around 2000 Chelsea fans reportedly brought this to an early end with distasteful chants of "murderers". Now, by anyone's standards that is bad behaviour, but I've seen a number of reactions to this that are just plain ridiculous, claiming that Tottenham should have won by default because a minority of Chelsea fans (that's fans, not players) were disrespectful and also because of a dodgy goal being allowed (by the referee, you know, the bloke who awards the goals, not by Didier Drogba or anyone else in a blue shirt. If Chelsea players could just allow themselves goals, we wouldn't be fighting to finish in fourth). So, for things that were not within the players', manager's or overall club's control then? Yeah, that sounds sporting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm sorry, but sometimes goals that aren't goals are allowed. Sometimes, this gets Liverpool into the final of the Champions League and allows them to win something they can then bang on about for the rest of time. Other times, it just makes a game end 5-1 instead of 4-1. In the latter case, who really gives the tiniest part of a tiny rat's ass?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And just as referees will quite royally fuck things up, supporters will make distasteful chants about teams they hate. Here are some examples:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">People screaming, are you listening?/</span></span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: inherit;">Fences rattling, bodies clattering/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: inherit;">Oh what a wonderful sight/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: inherit;">We're so happy tonight/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: inherit;">Walking in a Hillsborough wonderland</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">That charming little ditty is attributed to some Manchester United fans. Poor Liverpool. Here's another one:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">1 Scouse 2 Scouse 3 Scouse 4, all got crushed on a Sheffield floor/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">96 dead bastards was the final score/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">But we're still not happy 'cos we all wanted more</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Awwwwww. Horrible, isn't it. Another one?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">Who's that choking on their vomit/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">Who's that turning fucking blue/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">It's a scouser and his mate/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">Crushed behind the Hillsborough gates/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">And they won't be singing Munich anymore.</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Those Man United people are out of control beasts, relentlessly going on about Liverpool's 9/11. But wait, what was that last line? They won't be singing Munich anymore? What does that mean? Er...</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">An M, a U, an N. An I, a C, an H/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">There was an air disaster in 1958!/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">They went to Red Star Belgrade and crashed the fucking plane/</span><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">And when they play in Europe I hope they crash again!</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">What? The Scousers were singing about Munich? But that was the Mancs' 9/11! Does nobody respect anyone else's 9/11 here? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm a football supporter. If you're reading this, chances are you are too. A lot of us are total bastards with quite remarkably sick senses of humour. It's part of the culture. A fun part, really, in a dark way, and as long as we all just keep responding to any other team's supporters' attempts to bait us by going on about our 9/11 distastefully by going on about their 9/11 distastefully, or, if they don't have a 9/11, by saying their wives have massive vaginas (for some reason, Chrome's spellcheck is telling me "vaginas" isn't a real word, and now I'm actually questioning whether it is or not. Maybe it should be "vagini"? No...) everything will balance itself out, and we'll all be equally bad people and none of us will be hypocrites.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, if that's the tacit arrangement between football supporters, what is it that makes Hillsborough the one taboo? Why is it the only one of the many horrible things that have happened in the history of the sport that can't be touched, even nearly a quarter of a century later? This is where we come to the Alan Davies situation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It turns out Jonathan Creek there is a big Arsenal fan, and talking on his football podcast <a href="http://thetuesdayclub.libsyn.com/" target="_blank">The Tuesday Club</a> he had a bit of a rant about Liverpool FC's annual refusal to play on April 15th. Here is what he said:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'Liverpool and the 15th - that gets on my tits, that shit. What are you talking about "We won’t play on the day"? Why can’t they?'</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'Do they play on the date of the Heysel Stadium disaster? How many dates do they not play on?'<br />
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'Do Man United play on the date of Munich? Do Rangers play on the date when all their fans died in that disaster whatever year that was - 1971?'</span></blockquote><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Weird, I thought Rangers' 9/11 was, well, this season. But anyway, in response to the above, Alan Davies received death threats from Liverpool supporters. Seriously. </span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He wasn't joking about the disaster. He wasn't joking about the victims, or saying anything that was particularly offensive in terms of Hillsborough itself. All he did was express annoyance that due to Liverpool's insistence that they won't play on the anniversary, an insistence which is unique to the club compared with other clubs who have tragedies associated with them, Chelsea were forced to play their match on the Sunday, leaving less recovery time before the Champion's League semi-final against Barcelona on Wednesday. That's an Arsenal fan worrying that something isn't fair on Chelsea right there, which is pretty bizarre, but not worthy of death threats.</span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Still, surprised by how offended people were, as you bloody shouldn't be if you are suddenly vilified by the quite alarmingly sensitive Scouse, Alan Davies offered a 1000 pound donation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign by way of an apology. They told him (figuratively, not literally - don't sue me) to shove it up his arse, saying they would rather he "<span style="background-color: white;">genuinely tried to understand why the decision never to play on the anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster is so important.". He does understand. He thinks it's bullshit. It's just that that isn't a view you're allowed to have, evidently.</span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">It seems this isn't even the first time Liverpool supporters have got their panties in a bunch about a mention of Hillsborough that is anything other than simpering. In the list of controversial Hillsborough related incidents, there was an issue of Australian FHM pulled, a Liverpool player dropped, some unpleasantness involving Jeremy Hunt, and an apology from the BBC because of, of all things, a line Minty Peterson said on Eastenders. Come on, really? Minty? The most lovable of all the Eastenders characters? Even he can't mention it? There weren't any death threats for Minty, happily, though whether that is because people were scared Phil Mitchell might come to Minty's aid in a fight or because, you know, he isn't real, we can't know.</span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Look for any similar controversies relating to Munich, or just about any other tragedy you can think of, even those which happened a lot less than 23 years ago, and you will find them few. Come on, Liverpool - do you really want to be seen as the only team that will dish it out but won't take it back?</span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span> </span></span></div><div style="min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Please post your death threats below.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-40961748138551428352012-03-05T00:46:00.000-08:002012-03-05T00:46:49.499-08:00Andre Villas BoasWell, he's finally been sacked, so let's take some time to look at what a colossal douchebag Andre Villas Boas truly was at Chelsea.<br />
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If you read my column on excellent sports blog <a href="http://dodgykneesanddirtyballs.com/football/another-season-another-manager/" target="_blank">Dodgy Knees and Dirty Balls</a> at the start of the season, you may remember that I had quite high hopes for AVB. I had no idea that rather than the Special One, we'd got ourselves a Special Needs One. I know that's quite a cheap shot, but seriously, while he managed to deliver the worst record since Glen Hoddle, he was also quite obviously trying to compete with Hoddle on the "being completely mental" front too.<br />
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It seems that prior to AVB getting fired, he was displaying some very odd behaviour. On Saturday night, prior to the "ludicrous display" against, oh, who was it, West Brom or somebody, somebody terrible anyway, AVB slept at the training ground in a "Japanese style pod". What the tits is a Japanese style pod, for a start? Is that just a way of trying to make the fact he was curled up in the foetal position, rocking inside one of those little tents you see those guys who hate their families hiding out in on riverbanks, ostensibly fishing, sound glamorous? Did he have anyone there to protect him from the countless people who undoubtedly wanted to rape him like he raped our team? Because if I'd known about it, I'd have been first in line with the piece of rusty lead pipe.<br />
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He'd also become obsessed with what time the players turned up for training. This is the classic behaviour of a boss in trouble. If you don't know what you're doing, one way to look like you're in control is to start getting really anal about that sort of shit. "Oh yeah, I can't make a 4-3-3 work, but I can make Ashley Cole pull the Nokia out of his ass and get to work five minutes early. I'm good."<br />
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He would watch out of the window of his office, making a note of what time everyone showed up. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave, working at least 12 hours, every single day. Seriously, would you be spending that much time away from your wife if John Terry was in the vicinity? I don't actually know if he has a wife, but still, if he does, I bet he can't satisfy her sexually. Sorry, another cheap shot. I am very, very angry with him.<br />
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The stress wasn't just taking its toll on him mentally. The last person I remember aging as quickly as Andre Villas Boas apparently was had been poisoned with polonium, and I know Abramovich probably has the contacts but I don't think he'd go that far. The person before that was Tony Blair. Thinking about it, Tony Blair was the AVB of politics. Young, initially popular, turned out to be shit and ruined everything...<br />
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There were other things that were annoying about him. The way sports announcers couldn't say his name without sounding drunk. That stupid fucking coat. But the worst thing, even worse than trying to play tactics that quite blatantly were never going to work with the players he had, was how much of a dick he was to the players. Apparently when Anelka and Alex were on their way out, he wouldn't let them in the first team facilities, and Anelka wasn't even allowed to come to the annual team Christmas dinner. I know having a giant sulking Frenchman at the table doesn't really scream "festive fun", but the guy had been a huge part of the team and deserved better. I'd have given him the bloody <i>leg </i>if he'd wanted it.<br />
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Imagine it, all of the Chelsea squad sitting down for their Christmas din-dins together, with AVB at the head of the table, his paper hat askew, telling Bosingwa off for trying to play with his new Lego TARDIS playset at the table while Mereiles sharpens the knives he was given when he completed his training as a Spetznaz assassin (seriously, doesn't he look like some kind of soviet special forces guy?) ready to carve the bird, when little Juan Mata pipes up "Daddy, where's uncle Nicolas?". AVB launches a bowl of sprouts at little Juan Mata's head. "I will not have that name mentioned in this house!"... Fernando Torres begins to sob quietly, he can't bear to see his one true love little Juan Mata attacked in this way. Daniel Sturridge stares mutinously at AVB - he's missing the Eastenders Christmas special for this and he's not happy, and he's supposed to be meeting Gareth Bale on XBox Live for a game of Mortal Kombat in ten minutes, and he's just learnt Sonya Blade's fatality. Everyone sneaks a look at John Terry, wondering if he's going to do anything, but he's ignoring everyone, tapping away at his iPhone, texting Jose Mourinho - "CAN WE COME AND LIVE WITH YOU AND MUM? DAD'S DRINKING AGAIN." It's powerful fucking stuff, right?<br />
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Why did he show such a lack of respect for the senior players? Was he just confused? "If Drogba's too old, and I'm too young, how does that <i>work</i>?" he would mutter to himself, staring at the back pages of the Daily Mail in bewilderment.<br />
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Still, with AVB sacked, at least we can revive that old chant from the nineties, where you go "D. I. Matteo" to the tune of D.I.S.C.O. - that was always a good time. But after that, can we please, please just stop the silliness and reinstate Jose Mourinho? What the hell is this nonsense about fat Spanish hotel keyboard player Rafa Benitez in line for the job? There is only one man who can fill the hole and teach Fernando Torres to love again, and it's Jose. Abramovich - make it so.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-913455800443790832011-12-15T03:22:00.000-08:002011-12-15T03:22:03.831-08:00The British Sense of HumourAs regular readers will know, I have, through no fault of my own, been in Italy for the last six months.<br />
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Italians, when you talk to them, have perfectly intact senses of humour, although they see no comedy value at all in the fact that here, the worst swearing you can do, is to call God a "cat in the snow" or a "frog with glasses". Honestly, this is the truth. You can use all the disgusting sexual and scatalogical weapons in your verbal arsenal and nobody cares, but say "God wolf" and the reactions vary from horror to the kind of gigglish awe that you would dare utter such a thing that you got from your mates at infant school if you said "boobies".<br />
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However, while you can have a laugh with the people, their television comedy is completely atrocious (I have been wanting to use the word "atrocious" since yesterday, when I was thinking about Mary Poppins and how she gave those kids such poor financial advice. Feed the birds instead of putting it in the bank? With the economy like it is? Stupid bitch. And as for being "positively perfect in every way", who does she think she is, Jose Mourinho?).<br />
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There is a show called "Gli Sgommati" which is basically a very low budget version of Spitting Image that we had in the 80's, and seems to focus solely on making Angela Merkel out to be sweaty, and this awful thing called "Colorado" which is like what Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway would have been like if it was written by the woman who invented the Teletubbies, and which goes on for about five hours because face it, who's in a hurry? It is hellish.<br />
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So, you would expect, with their homegrown comedy being as funny as taking your dog to be put down, they would seek their laughs from other countries. And they do. Half the channels here show nothing but imported shows, which are brought in and dubbed or subtitled from the country with the best comedy in the world. Britain.<br />
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No, not really. It's America.<br />
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This brings me to the main point of today's rant. In Britain, we have always had this belief that we have some strange understanding of what is funny that nobody else "gets". Irony. Banter. Del Boy falling through the bar. And we are wrong.<br />
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I am not saying we don't have some brilliant comedians and hilarious shows, we patently do. And we have mastered the comedy panel show genre with shows like Have I Got News For You, QI, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and They Think it's All Over - they just don't have stuff like that anywhere else. Our stand-ups are great. But this is not an argument against the quality of British comedy. This is an argument <i>for </i>the quality of American comedy, by a British person.<br />
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So many people have said to me that they don't like American comedy. They find it cheesy. But this is because they have only ever been exposed to the cheesy, melted fondue end of it. They put Friends on around the clock in the UK, and sure, it has its moments, but it is comfort watching material. Nothing all that bad ever happens in Friends, and it's a big deal if anyone gets drunk or smokes. The comedy is kind of wholesome and everybody loves each other and it's nice. The same goes for the newer US shows we get in England now, like Modern Family. We're not going to think it's edgy and modern because there's a gay couple and an old guy married to a young Latina woman, they had that sort of shit on Eastenders when we were 7. So it's just nice, predictable, family comedy. This is the stuff they buy in for us, and so this is the stuff we believe America makes. Feel good, entertaining, gentle jokes, but ultimately unsatisfying. According to Jim. My Wife and Kids. Sentimental dreck where someone learns a lesson in the end. Yeah, I can see why people think it is all overly cheesy based on that.<br />
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But what we don't get, for no obvious reason, are the genuinely groundbreaking, clever and funny sitcoms coming out of the US. Or, if we do, they are on at some stupid hour of the morning when nobody watches them. I remember years ago during a bout of insomnia catching shows like Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm, both of which are innovative and dark in a way that is funny but hard to describe, and wondering why they weren't on at prime time.<br />
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If you don't think Americans can do non cheesy, ironic, intelligent comedy then just try watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You will get more laughs out of one episode than out of a whole season of Gavin and Stacey, Black Books or Green Wing, and those are all decent shows. Or try The League, or Community. These shows are the only things I download and watch here because I genuinely think that they offer better comedy for my cheapskate 3G modem's downloading buck than anything I could be watching in the UK.<br />
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Additionally, while we may have got the hang of the panel shows, where are our cartoons? We have nothing to compete with The Simpsons, South Park, or Archer, let alone the rapidly diminishing Seth MacFarlane shows (Family Guy, American Dad and the bloody Cleveland Show). I remember one in the 90's called Stressed Eric, but since then, have we produced any good cartoons aimed at a grown up audience? 2DTV was good, but that was years ago.<br />
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And as for satire, we make good weekly shows but can we really compete with the Daily Show? We haven't had a decent daily comedy show since the 11 O'Clock Show in 1999.<br />
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British sense of humour? Yes, it exists, but we don't own satire or irony or dark comedy. If you have been put off of US comedy because you think it's all moralistic and cheesy, take a look at some of this stuff, then tell me I'm wrong.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-2826200879315947132011-11-26T11:56:00.000-08:002011-11-26T11:56:16.055-08:00Fifteen Year Old Pregnant by Eleven Year OldSurprisingly, I read this story in the Independent. I realise it sounds more like the kind of thing one would read in the bible than in the Independent, but there it was. A fifteen year old girl named Emma Webster from Bedfordshire (I know right, I was expecting it to be up north as well) is up the kennel after eleven year old next door neighbour Sean Stewart, who in my head looks like Harry Potter in the first film, apparently convinced her he was the same age and banged her. Blimey.<br />
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I don't want to get all judgmental and Daily Mail about this, I'm sure plenty of girls who end up pregnant in their teens end up being perfectly good mothers and all that and I'm pretty sure one more doesn't constitute the actual downfall of society, but this Emma kid, well, I have to say it, she's bloody stupid. Either that or Sean Stewart is some kind of mad tween superstud and the next time we hear of him will be in a month when he announces his engagement to Sienna Miller.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">"It was not until I said I was pregnant to his mum and his mum turned around and said 'how can an 11-year-old be the father?' that I knew," she said. "I was shocked and I wanted to know why he had lied to me about his age."</span></blockquote><br />
See. She's fucking stupid. Nobody who isn't stupid ever uses the expression "turned around and said", for one thing, because it's fucking stupid (imagine if people really did turn around and say things, it would be ridiculous), but there is plenty of other evidence of stupidity there too. She didn't know that the boy who lived next door who she was having sex with was 11. I mean, he's 11. You know when someone's 11. Even if he looked and sounded like Brian Blessed, he's bound to be into 11 year old boy stuff that would give it away. Wrestling, for example. They love that, the 11 year old boys. I'm not even sure how he managed to do it with her, biologically. Everyone knows that an 11 year old boy, if he even hears the word "boobies" let alone sees a pair, will be giggling too hard to do anything at all, yet this one faced out the boobies and managed to impregnate a person. It's a scientific wonder.<br />
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Then, she doesn't understand why he lied about his age. What is there to understand, you mouth breathing dummy? He wanted to get laid. People lie to get laid all the time, it's just that usually, when they are 11, people don't believe them. "I've got a Porsche.", "I definitely haven't got chlamydia.", "I am not 11." These are all things people will say to try and get you to have sex with them (well, not now, obviously, nobody is going to touch you now), and you mustn't believe them, you poor, ridiculous child.<br />
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This story does raise a lot of questions. Did this 11 year old boy become interested in tricking girls into having sex with him because of what Rihanna wore on the finale of the X Factor last year? That's one, obviously. All those people who complained about Rihanna and her skimpy outfit - bloody hell, if they were right about that then maybe I should stop calling them assholes all the time. Also, the couple are still together (Christ, Emma - have some self respect. When I was 15 I dumped people all the time, for no discernible reason. Everyone did. For lying about being 11, well, you'd be more than justified in, as those large women on Rikki Lake so often and so eloquently put it "kicking him to the kerb", love.) so when she turns 16 will she get arrested for shagging a kid? Also, real paedophiles - do they need to start worrying about birth control? Baffling doesn't begin to describe it.<br />
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Speaking of little boys having sex, has anyone noticed that in the current season of the Simpsons, there are quite a lot of jokes about Bart getting laid? Like in that Avatar spoof they did? It's funny, but in a way that creeps you out. Anyway, I digress.<br />
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Emma has decided to keep the baby (they always do, don't they), and her parents will look after it when she returns to school (where she will be bullied mercilessly I expect. I know, it's terrible. But you would, wouldn't you, when you were 15, have bullied a kid who shagged an 11 year old and then talked about it in the Independent.). They don't explain whether they plan to do some kind of delightful, Eastenders-esque thing where they tell the child that Emma is it's sister until it all comes out one drunken night after a curry in the Argee Bhaji, maybe they haven't decided about that yet, but Sean is going to support Emma as much as he can. Which isn't much. Because he is 11. It would be funny to have an 11 year old dad though. You could do "Shit My Dad Says" style Twitter feed about it. I'll leave you to imagine how that might go.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-53533148716632305692011-10-27T08:03:00.000-07:002011-10-27T08:03:03.578-07:00Manchester CityIt's all getting a bit out of hand, isn't it? Manchester fucking City I mean.<br />
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Throughout history, there have been only two reasons why anybody supported Manchester City. Either they wanted to make a statement about how much they hated Manchester United, or they didn't really like football but when pushed, opted for City because they liked the colour of their shirts. Seriously, you often hear that all real Mancunians support City. This isn't true. In Manchester, support for the two teams is split about 50/50, and up until recently, those that supported City seemed to be vastly more interested in whether or not United had lost on a given week than whether City had won (my research being broadly based on the brief period when I was a bookie in the North. Don't ask.).<br />
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Now, however, Manchester City have achieved something pretty difficult and special, which they have every right to be proud of. By which I mean, they have achieved the status of most hated club in the English Premier League.<br />
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Regular readers will know that I hate Liverpool, almost (but not quite) fervently enough to get the words to "In Your Liverpool Slums" tattooed on my actual arse. There are other teams I hate too, some for obscure and quite personal reasons (don't get me started on Reading). But at this moment, nothing makes my blood boil more than the mention of Manchester fucking City. And I would wager the Greek national debt that you're the same.<br />
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So what is it that makes them so fucking diabolical? It's not the fact that they have a lot of money. Well, it might be for you, but I can't very well be seen saying that on the internet, I'm a Chelsea supporter. In fact, I had always said that if a businessman wanted to recreate the Chelsea effect then rather than fucking about with the likes of Portsmouth, they should look to buy the second biggest team in a major city, thus guaranteeing a decent home following as well as the option of international promotion for their merchandise (face it, nobody in Asia has heard of Portsmouth, so you will have a job convincing the kids in South Korea it is a very cool place and they want to wear shirts declaring their affinity with it). Manchester City would be the obvious choice.<br />
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For the first couple of seasons, they were annoying but harmless. The strategy seemed to be the same one we all employed when we were kids, trying to fill our little Panini sticker albums with all the big names so they looked really cool (actually, the last time I bought a Panini football sticker album I was about 24, but it was right by the checkout in the McColls shop and I was mildly drunk), but with no real thought for whether or not you had twelve strikers and no goalkeeper. And none of the players seemed to really give a toss either. Who can forget Robinho's press conference where, after a last minute offer right at the end of the transfer window, he announced how happy he was to be going to Chelsea. I like to think that after that plucky journalist pointed out that he was actually going to Manchester City, he punched his agent square in the face. It was all quite the laugh.<br />
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Strangely though, they started to actually look, well, almost good. They won the FA Cup, and then this season, actually began to look threatening in the Prem. The players however, still didn't give a toss. Tevez, who is quality because he makes it so apparent that he hates Manchester and everybody in it, decided he would rather not actually play for them in the Champions League and as a result is being fined £1 million.<br />
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And this is where the hatred of a Chelsea fan can in fact, be very much justified. The situation is totally different. They are soulless, we are not. Don't believe me? Well, it's like this:<br />
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Chelsea may have been widely despised when Abramovich came in and allowed them to buy some new players and in the second season of his ownership, employ god himself as their manager and win some stuff (and this isn't the time and the place for me to explain that we had been a top six team for a long time before that and whatnot), and that I could live with. What would you do if the team you had always supported suddenly had loads of money, great players, a cool manager and were winning trophies? Would you go, "Oh, fuck this, I'm going to go and support Fulham - this is too <i>mainstream</i>" just so the Man U supporters who drink in your local in Reigate aren't mean to you? Of course not. What I didn't like, was people assuming I'd only started supporting Chelsea when they got "good". Like some sort of glory hunter. Ironically, this usually came from Liverpool and Man U fans from the South who had started supporting their teams in the eighties, but it was an easy mistake to make as suddenly, a lot of people were supporting Chelsea.<br />
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So where are all the new Man City glory hunters then? Why isn't everywhere from Bristol to Brighton awash with pale blue shirts? I think I have the answer. In starting to support Man City now, if you never have before, you would be opening yourself up to a lot of abuse, but you wouldn't really be getting the glory. There is no sense that the players are excited to be at the club, that they are working together towards something they can be proud of on behalf of their club and their fans. Can you imagine the open top bus celebration if City won the Prem? Sure, they would all be happy to add some silverware to their personal CVs, as any player, anywhere would, but Tevez would be cowering downstairs on the bus in sunglasses so he didn't actually have to look at any Mancunian people, and Balotelli... Well, Christ knows. The rest of them would probably lift their City shirts to reveal t-shirts saying "CHAMPIONS! OPEN TO OFFERS FROM BARCA". This is the thing. Chelsea may have had "no history", but there's no real sense that City have a future as this existing team. It looks like it will be a revolving door for big name players, with nobody for fans to really attach themselves to who feel like they truly belong to that club. Without Terry, Lampard, Cech, Drogba and the like Chelsea would have no identity, and would be no fun at all to support. All the other big clubs are the same. But City has nobody you can identify as being "of" Manchester City, and nobody you feel wouldn't be happy to fuck off to Spain or wherever at the first chance.<br />
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And it is that, and not the money, the sponsorship deals or any of the corporate stuff that makes them soulless.<br />
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If you have enjoyed this or any of my other articles, why not buy my ebook. It contains literally no opinions about football, but does take the piss out of a lot of other stuff. And it's cheap. And it'll work on your iPad, Kindle or, I don't know, Toshiba Handybook. <a href="http://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fBuyContent=11784582"><img alt="Support independent publishing: Buy this e-book on Lulu." border="0" src="http://static.lulu.com/images/services/buy_now_buttons/us/orange.gif?20111025004813" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-91998967036249721952011-10-26T03:32:00.000-07:002011-10-27T08:16:53.837-07:00The Eurozone CrisisThis is the first new article for a couple of months, as I have been pretty busy with other projects (including the first in what I hope will be a series of Pony and Trap ebooks, which I will love you forever if you <a href="http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/the-pony-and-trap-guide-to-social-media/18367276">buy</a>. £2.99 is pretty cheap for the love of another human being, it's certainly less than I would charge for sex, so you know, buy it.) and while I've been busy with other projects, I've been living in Italy. This came about because of a whole bunch of stuff, and I'm moving again early next year to the States so it isn't a permanent arrangement, but what it means is that I am reporting to you now from the <i>actual Eurozone</i>. My wallet has Euros in it. I spend them on wine in 2 litre cartons and these weird two tone biscuits called Ringo that I only buy because Kaka advertises them on TV. I'll buy anything a footballer endorses, except the services of elderly prostitutes, or the bible.<br />
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Italy is pretty pivotal in terms of the Eurozone Crisis. It is the third biggest economy in the Eurozone, and is also considered to be the next one likely to get into serious shit. And being here for any length of time you can sort of see why. Italians have their way of doing things, which all the Under the Tuscan Sun expats you meet seem to accept as a fair trade off for the agreeable climate, surroundings and "way of life", but for me, is a constant source of rage.<br />
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The town I live in is popular with tourists from Germany and Holland, who come in the summer months for the good weather and whatnot. Unfortunately for them, at the peak of the tourist season in August, the proprietors of all the local businesses decide that they too would like to go on their holibobs, and fuck off to the coast without arranging anybody to cover for them. So even during the arbitrary few hours a day when shops and other services would usually be available, they just aren't. Would a business owner anywhere else in the world completely close down their operation during the most profitable period of their entire year? Hell's to the no. They'd open around the fucking clock and take their holiday afterwards, going somewhere much nicer with all the extra readies.<br />
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Everything here is a massive inconvenience, customer service simply doesn't exist, and you get the distinct impression that nobody wants to take your money. Which is fine for them. In Northern Europe, if we are given the choice between making some money and not making some money but to make the money we have to do something not all that back breaking, like say, sit in our shop between the hours of 1.30pm and 4.30pm, we'll choose to make the money, or our bosses will choose to make the money and force us to do the work. Italians take the other path, and that's their lookout. As an individual, I can accept that if I don't like it, I can fuck off.<br />
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The difficulty comes, as it already has done with Greece, when the countries who work their pasty asses off and have very little fun, like Germany, have to bail out the guys who have been sitting in the sun drinking wine and sleeping all afternoon for all of time. Think about it, nobody moves to Germany for the agreeable climate or "way of life", do they? You might move there to make money though.<br />
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This is the problem with the Eurozone, and why it is proving so difficult for the leaders of the member countries to come to any agreement with each other (well, it's also partly because some of the member countries are run by cartoon 'Allo 'Allo type characters it is hard to believe actually exist outside of a farce writer's imagination, let alone hold any power on the world stage). Culturally, Europe is so insanely diverse that it just doesn't work. Whether you chop it up East to West or North to South, it doesn't make any sense for the countries at either end to be part of anything together. In fact, the only thing I think would be worse than a shared economy would be if people from the corners of the Eurozone formed a rock band. I'll leave you to imagine how that might go.<br />
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In the good old days, the differences were fun and you'd travel around and enjoy the good aspects of all of them, but now shit's got real, well, you can't blame the leaders of the different countries for resenting each other and the fact that now, they are going to have to pull together and come up with something that is unlikely to be fair for many tax payers in different Eurozone countries, because the alternative is even worse.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-85595429394932087592011-07-26T11:17:00.000-07:002011-07-26T11:17:52.520-07:00Tributes to Amy Winehouse that aren't really...Before we begin, I'd like to make it clear that the purpose of this article is to judge someone and find them lacking, and pick apart and crticise something they have done, rather than to pay tribute to Amy Winehouse. Why dress something up as being a tribute to Amy Winehouse when it is actually just a smug and hate fuelled commentary on somebody else's inadequacy?<br />
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Well, actually, that is the very question I would like to ask the subject of today's rant - some jive ass Clyde at the Daily Mail called Amanda Platell. <br />
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Platell's article is entitled "Genius, but Amy's was not a life to admire". I can't quite figure out what that even is. Is it patronising? Did she think that before she bestowed that wisdom upon us we were all greeting every one of life's problems by contemplating, "What would Amy Winehouse do?"? And what is with the "Genius" bit? Don't get me wrong, I bloody loved Amy Winehouse, but even to her biggest fan that is hyperbole, surely? In this context, it just sounds kind of insincere and apologetic, the dead rock star equivalent of when your boss says something nice to you just before the bollocking. "Amy was a good singer, but in no small way responsible for the downfall of society" would have been a more honest way of saying what she clearly bloody meant.<br />
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Because you see Amanda Platell thinks that Amy Winehouse has damaged us all, damaged the very fabric of our fair nation. She opens by saying that a friend of Amy's had commented that although Amy had had her problems, she never harmed anyone else. Fair point, you might think. Well, Amanda Platell didn't think so. I'll let her take over here, because I can't find the words to describe how annoying what she said was without going Orwellian and calling it "doubleplus sanctimonious":<br />
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<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">If only that were true. The packets of cigarettes and bottles of vodka, beer and rum left outside her home in Camden, North London, by adoring fans bear testimony to how much she affected vulnerable young people.</span><span style="font-size: 1.2em;"><br />
</span></div></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">Along with flowers and farewell notes, this was their way of saying goodbye to a woman they worshipped and emulated — not just because she was a musical genius, but also, I suspect, because of her car-crash lifestyle.</span></div></span></blockquote>Ignoring the second appearance of the "g" word, I'm sorry but how fucking retarded does she think "young people" are? I bet you know lots of people who bought Back to Black, but I bet you don't know any who promptly went out and "emulated" Amy Winehouse by injecting heroin into their little pinky toe. If you had asked any of Amy's fans before she died what they thought of her I'd more than wager they wouldn't have said "It's so cool how she's all addicted to drugs and has a debilitating alcohol problem. That's my favourite, that is. How she's really ill and all. I'd totally get hooked on crack now she's made it look all awesome." any more than a Kylie Minogue fan will tell you they thought it was super cool when she had cancer and they wish they had cancer too. No, just like Kylie's fans wanted her to beat cancer, Amy's fans wanted her to overcome her addictions and get better.<br />
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As for the tributes, well, maybe the booze and fags could be construed as being a little tasteless but the intention was pure: to leave something that Amy would have liked. A few years ago I was in Mexico when it was the "dia de los muertos" or "day of the dead". People build little shrines to dead people, normally relatives and friends but sometimes celebrities, and place on the shrines things that that person would have liked, the belief being that at midnight on that date, the soul of the person can return and enjoy their favourite things once again. At the hotel I was staying in, for reasons that my sub Dora the Explorer level of Spanish wouldn't allow me to discover, they'd done a shrine for Pavarotti. And on it was the motherlode of all pasta. It made perfect sense. If you were going to do one for Amy, what would you leave on it - did she especially like Toblerones? Or those Scampi Fries you only see in pubs that smell like wee? Nobody knows. Give the girl some vodka, it's not going to hurt her now. That, I think, was the kind of thinking going on.<br />
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Amanda Platell (I kind of want to call her "Amanda Twatell" but I try not to go too far into that base sort of territory - "Daily Fail"? My, how droll...) for a moment forgets she's not writing for the Daily Express and muses how far downhill society has gone since the days when people laid flowers at Kensington Palace as a tribute to Diana, before continuing down this bizarre route of blaming Amy Winehouse for ruining the lives of "countless" imaginary young women she's made up in her head:<br />
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<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">Her life was a lesson in self-destruction. The tragedy is that it wasn’t just for her, but for countless other young women who hero-worshipped her.</span></div></span></blockquote><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">The result was that, for the vulnerable and impressionable, I fear Amy Winehouse made crack cocaine cool. She made alcoholism attractive. She made abusive, violent relationships exciting.</span></div></blockquote>So, er, where's the evidence of this, Amanda? Which young women, specifically are you talking about? Because if you're going to rather tastelessly blame someone who's just died for having this horrific influence on a large group of people, you'd better have something to qualify it or it's going to look pretty bad for you. Oh, you do have evidence? Well, let's hear it then!<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">For an answer, you have only to visit any High Street on a Saturday night to find countless wasted young women so drunk they don’t care what man they go off with, so out of their heads on drugs they’re anyone’s. </span><span style="font-size: 1.2em;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">And why should they think this is anything other than normal behaviour when their idol Amy Winehouse downed six shots of tequila for breakfast?</span><span style="font-size: 1.2em;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">For all her talent, she was a role model of the worst kind. And her eight years in the music business mirror a shocking increase in alcohol among women. </span><span style="font-size: 1.2em;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">Figures published in 2009 showed 250 girls were arrested every day for violence, mostly fuelled by alcohol. One in four were aged between ten and 17. </span><span style="font-size: 1.2em;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 1px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 1.2em;">In the years Amy was a star, a generation of ladettes was born, out of their heads and out of control, but thinking they were oh-so-cool.</span></div><span><br />
</span></span></blockquote>Ok, well that all seems reasonable and scientific, doesn't it. Those drunk slappers you see in town on a Saturday night are all part of this strange, cultish horde of Amy Winehouse fans. That's why they go and get wasted in Flares - because they play a lot of Amy Winehouse up in there. And getting wasted on a Saturday night is exactly the same as being an alcoholic, after all. You know, except instead of having the horrible withdrawal symptoms every day that can only be alleviated by say, having six shots of tequila for breakfast you just wake up on Sunday in need of a bacon sandwich. It is exactly the same otherwise. This is the bit that really pisses me of - this inability to distinguish between addiction, which is a truly horrible state to find yourself in and in no way fun, and hedonism, which is quite the laugh. Comparing Amy, who had addiction problems so serious that they killed her, to someone who drinks twelve Bacardi Breezers at the weekend and has a bloody good time, is just screamingly ignorant, and to try and find some sort of causality there is insulting, both to addicts, because you're belittling their problems, and to party girls because you're implying they have some that they don't.<br />
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So, Amy's eight years in the music business mirror a shocking rise in alcohol among women, ergo she has had a sinister influence on the White Lightning consumption of girls who would otherwise no doubt be spending their Saturday nights working in a soup kitchen? Well, that is interesting, given that your very own article also contains the pictures showing her decline throughout her career, and those indicate that actually, she was doing OK health wise until around 2005, which was only six years ago. How about that - Amy Winehouse was making imaginary women become alcoholics before she even became one herself! The very nerve of the woman. While we're on the subject of those pictures, it's not very classy to publish the ugliest pictures you can find of someone who has just died, is it? And as for the one where she's a little kid in a Minnie Mouse costume, what the Hollyoaks omnibus is that all about? And all the snidey comments about how the fact she had a load of tattoos meant she was going over to the dark side, because obviously only doomed people on a self destructive downward spiral have tattoos? Really? Better start writing the "tributes" for Cheryl Cole and David Beckham then, hadn't you?<br />
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The term "ladette" was coined in the mid 1990's, when Amy was still at school, to describe the culture of young women who enjoyed binge drinking and clubbing and all of those sorts of shenanigans. I'm not sure who the girls back then were emulating, or how this could possibly have happened while Diana was still among us, but it definitely, definitely did happen. A few years later, when I was 15 I used to go to a club where drinks were 20p for women before 10pm and everybody was hammered - some of the best nights out I've ever had. And even if Amy had tried to influence us back then, I wouldn't have listened because at the time, she was 14, and what kind of loser gets peer pressured by a kid in the year below, huh?<br />
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I don't know what kind of life Amanda Platell has lead but it must be quite a fucking joyless one (certainly not one fun enough to warrant that self satisfied countenance she wears in her picture), if she doesn't know the difference between a crippling addiction and a night out on the lash, and can't see why anyone would even want to go for a night out on the lash unless a singer they liked had done it first. And <i>that</i> my friends, is not a life to be admired.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-84784633807759056712011-05-15T13:58:00.000-07:002011-05-15T14:47:03.727-07:00BritishnessIn light of the fact that it seems like the Scottish want to piss off and do their own thing, it seems like a good time to discuss the idea that maybe nobody really wants to be British. As a warning, this article may contain obscenely reductive national stereotypes.<br />
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I have been wondering about this for a long time. You often see it on forms, the old national identity question. Do you consider yourself "British", or do you prefer to be considered English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh? I tick the English box. It annoys me when my American friends call me a "Brit". And this is because I am not sure what being a Brit would actually entail, though admittedly, I do like being called a Brit better than being called European, because fuck that. They use that to mean you're either a pervert or you're hairy.<br />
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David Mitchell wrote a column in the Observer today saying that he very much considers himself British, and believes that if Scotland secedes and there is no longer the same concept of Britain, his, and many other people's national identity will be gone forever. David Mitchell's Observer column is a bit of a bugbear for me, because I like him, but I fucking hate that newspaper with a passion usually reserved for hating the Twilight saga. Sunday newspapers are the worst ones anyway, with the horrible horrible supplements with their reviews of fucking frying pans and interviews with people off of Waterloo bastarding Road in them and no bloody news whatsoever, and a Sunday version of the Guardian, well, I'd rather climb into the lion enclosure at London Zoo wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress than read that, and I thought that dress was really unflattering. Every Sunday though, Mitchell puts his little link on the bloody Twitter and I grudgingly go and have a look at the damn thing. Sometimes I send him a pissy reply of the "look what you made me do!" variety - you know, the kind of thing wife beaters say after they've pushed a woman down the stairs. If you want to see this first hand you can follow me at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap">www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap</a>. That's what the Observer does to me. It makes me want to hit people I am usually quite fond of with frying pans. It's like Stella Artois for the eyes.<br />
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Anyway, he says that he feels British because his mother is Welsh and his father is of Scottish descent. Which makes sense. But then lots of people have all manner of crazy combinations going on in terms of their parentage, and there isn't even a name for the majority of those. I know a bloke who is half German and half Iranian. So he's Geranian I guess. Then there's a guy who is half Kosovan and half Swedish, who I like to call Skosovanavian. I used to be jealous of people with interesting sounding genealogy at school. Those kids who'd be all like "oooh, I'm a quarter Dutch and one sixteenth Fijian" or whatever. I was just bloody English. It was almost as bad as being the only only child in the French lesson where they teach you how to talk about brothers and sisters, and having to pretend your dog is your sister just so you have something to say and don't fail... Pets are not children, and you should not have to start pretending that they are until well into your thirties.<br />
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The thing is, Wales and Scotland are quite different countries in many respects. Wales has its singing, and its rugby and its, I don't know, Torchwood, and Scotland has its heroin and its disgusting food and, er, kilts. Welsh rarebit may contain some of the same ingredients as a battered, deep fried pizza, but I don't know anyone Welsh who would eat the latter. They are not the same as each other, and they are not the same as England either, where we have a far lower ratio of ginger people to normal people and are theoretically reasonably good at football (we're not though). Yes, they are close together and maybe more similar to each other than to their next nearest neighbours, the treacherous French, but so are Spain and Portugal and they don't have some collective name for themselves to give to half Spanish, half Portuguese kids. <br />
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The concept of Britain as a thing doesn't really take into account that none of the countries that make up Britain really, if we're entirely honest, like each other very much, either. <br />
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If England and Scotland both qualify for a World Cup, the English used to have Scotland as their second team by default, but we don't do that so much ever since the time in 2002 when we played Argentina and all those Scottish people supported them instead of us. The Welsh and the English get on slightly better (in the land of colossal generalisations where this article lives) and I don't know what the Northern Irish think of us but Christine Bleakley seems to like Frank Lampard and he plays for England, so I reckon they must think we're pretty cool. <br />
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Still though, we're all different countries and I honestly believe we would all rather have our own teams in the Olympics to support and our own appalling entries in the fucking Eurovision retard song contest. That aberration was on last night, and I watched it with a Welsh bloke and an American bloke. Well, I say watched it, we sort of looked it up a bit while we were getting drunk and playing FIFA '11, where, like a bunch of 10 year olds, we re-enacted the FA Cup final, including the bits where Micah Richards and Mario Balotelli swore and Carlos Tevez <i>hilariously </i>put the lid of the trophy on top of his hideous head . I just think it would have been more fun watching it together if Wales had had their own entry. And come to think of it, America too. I know they're not in Europe, but neither are Israel and they won it once with that ladyboy creature. Poor Wales would probably end up in that regrettable situation Ireland used to find themselves in back in the nineties where they kept winning and having to host the damn thing, what with being good at the old singing and all. Anyway, I digress. My point is, I think people get more excited about supporting their own actual country's team or representative in a sport or competition than some kind of "Team GB". Sure, those curling ladies were representing Britain, but they were, when all is said and done, Scottish, and therefore not from the same country as me. Maybe that was why I didn't care, or maybe it was because I didn't know, at the time, what curling was, all I know is, come a World Cup I will quite merrily paint a St George's cross on my face and wave a flag around like a total chav, but there have never been any conditions under which I have felt entirely comfortable waving a union jack (yes, I know it is really called the union flag, but it's easier just to say the union jack for some reason, just like it's easier to call the BBC timelord guy Doctor Who and the monster with the bolts in its head Frankenstein even though you know those are wrong too. It's just how it is. Deal with it, pedants.)... The St George's cross flag makes me feel like I'm supporting a football team, the union jack makes me feel like I'm on my way to some sort of BNP meeting or something to shout "don't unpack, you're going back" at the man who runs the kebab shop. I don't know why that is.<br />
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It is for these reasons I think that the majority of people in the UK have a personal national identity that is affiliated not with Britain, but with the country or countries they and their family are actually from. Of course you can have more than one, lots of people do, but the fact that some people are a combination of more than one home nationality does not explain what it is to be British or justify keeping things as they are if Scotland decides it isn't working out for them. If you want a divorce, nobody is going to tell you to stay together for the kids, are they?<br />
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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-89445951175145041022011-05-11T14:40:00.000-07:002011-05-13T13:23:35.010-07:00Killjoy Cyberbullying FearsTwo posts in one night? Oh monsieur, with these Rocher you're really spoiling us! Well, I can't go to the pub, since <a href="http://itsallabitponyandtrap.blogspot.com/2011/05/train-companies.html">my wallet is probably in Glasgow</a>.<br />
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</div><div>Continuing the technology and social networking theme I seem to have inadvertently adopted this week with my coverage of the <a href="http://itsallabitponyandtrap.blogspot.com/2011/05/super-injunctions-and-twitter.html">super-injunction leaks on Twitter</a> and <a href="http://itsallabitponyandtrap.blogspot.com/2011/05/microsoft-buying-skype.html">Microsoft's transparently desperate purchase of Skype</a>, I have noticed that this thing I only found out about a few days ago has been attracting a bit of interest in the UK media. Well, there was a brief thing about it in the Independent anyway, and that's good enough for me.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Formspring has apparently been popular among American teenagers for a few years now. I only joined on Tuesday (<a href="http://www.formspring.me/PonyandTrap">www.formspring.me/PonyandTrap</a>), but I'm 28 and English so for my demographic I think that makes me an early adopter. Oh yeah, I have my finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Not that the zeitgeist has a pulse, being a ghost and all, but you know what I mean. In fact, the proof of this is in the fact that despite there being 23 million people signed up to the service (which is more than Facebook's entire UK membership), when I searched for Facebook friends to connect with on Formspring only four people came up. One was American, and one was a teenager (I groom teenagers on the Facebook. It's just the way I roll. Not really of course, he's my best mate's little brother). I have a lot more than four Facebook friends. Even my dad has more than that. But only four are on Formspring. </div><div><br />
</div><div>This suggests either that a lot of UK adults haven't heard of Formspring, or they have heard of it and gone "Balls to that for a game of soldiers". I strongly feel that it is the former, and I will tell you for why. English people are really fucking nosey. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I used to work with a woman called Jo, who would routinely interrogate everybody every day about the minutiae of their lives. You wouldn't eat a sandwich near Jo, because she would need to know what was in the sandwich, where you bought it, how much it cost, and whether it was "nice". She was like the CID of banal things. In all other respects she was very nice, but the fear that you might get waterboarded so that Jo might know what time you went to bed last night made the whole experience of working with her a bit "edgy" </div><div><br />
</div><div>There are Jo types everywhere. I'm sure you know some. But if you go to the North, <i>everybody </i>is fucking like it. When I lived in the North, I deduced that the legendary Northern "friendliness" was basically the product of some deep seated need to be right into everybody's business. Someone in a pub might ask you where you lived. In the South, it would be sufficient to just say the area, or kind of near the station or the university or the brothel or whatever, and then you could move on to talking about something else. Do that in the North and I will bet you all the money I've made off of Google AdSense (which is 2p, because they keep advertising things based on the words I use, and I only write about things that nobody likes... And until Google develops an engine that understands irony it will ever be thus. And they're too busy working on ways to make us live forever as concious data files to look at that. To be honest, I would rather live forever than have AdSense that wasn't weird, so you crack on, you crazy autistic genii) that the next question will be "Which 'owse?". </div><div><br />
</div><div>It's like some kind of Tourette's. They don't need to know. You're never going to see this person again, let alone invite them round for one of your candlelight suppers. They're not going to judge you on it, because that is what a Southerner would do. There is absolutely no reason for it. But they bloody have to know. This made conversations a bit boring, because you basically felt like you were filling in a loan application. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Formspring is perfect for Jo, and everybody in Northern England, because it invites you to ask people anything you want. You can even do it anonymously without being a member. You could sit there in your 'owse in 'uddersfield with 25 million people to ask about boring shit. Or, given you are given free rein to ask <i>anything </i>you could just ask all 25 million for their card number and PIN. Throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick, my grifting friends.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The idea and the site, like Twitter (follow me at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap">www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap</a>) is very simple. No apps, no sharing of things, basic profiles for users. You just ask questions, answer questions, read other people's answers to questions by following them or searching, and if you enjoy someone's answer you click a button that says "Smile" which works like a "like" on Facebook. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I can see a lot of uses for this beyond satisfying your need to know which flavour of Kellogg's Nutri Grain bar someone who sits across the office from you was eating this morning if you are mental. Serious applications, like perhaps MPs using it to respond to constituents' questions, business applications, like maybe it could be used in place of a "queries" form on your company's website, or for market research, and stuff that would just be a really good laugh.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It's the stuff that would be a really good laugh that is concerning people. Or at least the few people that know about it. Or at least, someone at the Independent.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Apparently, people have been using the Formspring to engage in a spot of cyberbullying, and that is bad. We don't want that here, it's really bad. Keep it in America, where at least the kid that's getting cyberbullied can gun down their antagonists. What are they going to do here, pelt them with scones? </div><div><br />
</div><div>Obviously not, they would stab them, I was just playing up to my American readers there.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The thing is, I just don't buy it. On Facebook you could bully someone in a way that could be quite destructive, due to the ability to share all kinds of content. If you are handy with Photoshop or you have access to something that would be embarrassing to them like a very personal email or some spectacularly bad poetry they wrote (and is there any other kind, written by 14 year olds?), sure, you could humiliate them and even if they deleted their own profile so you couldn't harrass them directly, you can still share whatever you like <i>about </i>them with other people. You know, if you were a bit of a dick. Or they had it coming.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Formspring does not offer anywhere near as many opportunities to systematically destroy the weak and the ginger. Sure, you could ask some mean questions. But those questions will just appear in their inbox, and they can delete them if they don't want to respond and nobody else will ever see them. You can't comment on people's answers either, you can just read them, so there is actually no way I can see of really bullying anyone beyond just harrassing them with nasty questions, and you can do that with anything, even email. And we had that when I was at school and none of us killed ourselves.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I think more people should give it a try. But only interesting people. Because nobody, not even the most bullied of teenagers, is that grateful for any glimmer of attention that they will keep returning to answer questions about chocolate.</div><div><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-85091425655968761312011-05-11T10:12:00.000-07:002011-05-13T13:23:35.094-07:00Train Companies......actually, not just train companies - bad customer service in general.<br />
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</div><div>Today's rant, just as a bit of a change of pace, was inspired by something that actually happened to me today, rather than anything topical. I don't usually do this kind of thing, but I reckon that if you can't relate to this theme then you live some kind of charmed life and your address is probably on Christmas Pudding Lane, where you live with your magical puppy that smells like the shampoo at a fancy gym and pisses tequila, because it is fucking ubiquitous.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I have to say, the events that transpired were triggered by me making a cock up. Basically, I left my wallet on the train on the way to work. Of course, I wouldn't have got my wallet out if the over zealous bloke who insists on checking your damn ticket (even though the station has ticket barriers, so either you have to have a ticket to get to the train, or you have spent enough time and effort masterminding a way of getting past the barriers without one that you have, in a fair world, earned the right to travel for free) hadn't come to distract me from reading about Nick Clegg and Fergie in the Metro just to check there was no chance of fining me a few grand. Still, really, you know, mea culpa. Hey, at least it was my wallet, not, I don't know, a memory stick with your personal details on it, but yes, I am an absent minded twat, and I did formerly work for the government so yes, they do hire the kind of person who could probably end up doing that.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I noticed it was gone when I went to get a cigarette out after getting off the train. "Bollocks", I said. Still though, I thought I would just be able to call the train company, get them to radio the guard (AKA "the bloke" I referred to earlier) and tell him to leave it with someone at my local, fairly large station when the train made it's way back through there. No big deal.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So, at the office, I looked up the train company I thought operated the train. Southern. After explaining my situation to a lady with a horrible accent, I was informed that "we can only radio the guard in an emergency". I proceeded to explain that I didn't actually want them to stop the fucking train, like they do when there is a fucking squirrel on the line or other such emergency scenario, I merely wished them to get a message to the guard. No. The guard's work is very important and he must not be distracted with helping people, lest he fuck up and cause havoc by say, not noticing that the guy whose ticket said Reigate stayed on the train all the way to Redhill, which should have cost him 30 pence more. No. Instead of having that five second conversation with the guard, the idiot woman instead opted to have a five minute conversation with me, explaining that the best thing to do is call their lost property office in Bristol (which accounted for the horrible accent) in three days as that is how long it takes for lost property to be "processed". This gave me upsetting images in my head of my poor little wallet in some kind of Bristolian version of Auschwitz for wallets, phones and MP3 players, waiting to be "processed". My poor little cards, even that Boots gift card I still had seven quid left on, being cut up by some awful jobsworth who talks like a farmer. I explained that this "solution" would be far less convenient for everybody involved than my suggestion. Even tried to appeal to her lazy nature by pointing out that my way also meant no paperwork. But she was having none of it. It was only after this lengthy exchange that she noticed that the train I had said I was on was not even operated by her company.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It seems two companies run up and down that route, and the one I was on was a First Great Western train. Well, silly me for not fucking noticing the branding on the fucking train. If only I had read the fucking safety poster or the free magazine with Stone-fucking-henge on the cover, then I would have realised I was on a First Great Western train, not a Southern train. It's not as if it's all the fucking same or anything. It's not as if I don't give a flying fuck about your fucking branding, I am just trying to get from the town I live in to the town I fucking work in and a train is just a fucking train... At this point I began to feel I could method act the Michael Douglas character in a remake of Falling Down.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So I called First Great Western. They were even less helpful, and the guy I spoke to seemed to have been in India. I had said I had literally just left my wallet on one of their trains. He asked me, when I said the time the train left from my station, if that was "in the morning or at night". He didn't seem to have ever heard of Reading. He told me to phone Network Rail and ask to speak to the station at which my train terminated.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Feeling a bit futile, I did that. They put me through to a man who I think was called Craig (if he was, and you're ever at Gatwick Airport station and you see him, tell him I hate him) who was supposedly the Duty Manager. This man was a wanksmith, and a master of the trade. He said the train didn't get cleaned out at his station, it would go all the way back to Reading before that happened. "Very well," said I, "transfer me to your counterpart at Reading". I think I actually said something slightly angrier than that, but I didn't call him a cunt or anything so I was reining it in. He said that he couldn't do that. "Never mind," said I, "if you would be so kind as to give me his number I will call him myself". </div><div><br />
</div><div>He said he didn't have it. He only had an internal number. Which, as we have established, he couldn't transfer me on. I asked if it would be on the internet. He said he didn't have the internet. I said that I did have the internet, I just wanted to know if the number would actually be on their site, or whether it would just be the number for customer bastarding services, who were the ones who had put me through to his worthless self in the first bastarding place, because evidently they didn't know where the train got cleaned, or that he was neither use nor ornament (three days in a row I've used that - there are just so many people for whom it is appropriate), or in fact anything that a customer might find fucking helpful. He said he didn't know, but he reckoned it probably wasn't on there. At this point I had gotten a bit sarcastic, much to the amusement of guys who sit near me at work. But I still hadn't called him a cunt or anything. He suggested that actually, what I should really do, is call the train company. Normally I would have had a few suggestions for him about what he should really do, maybe something involving getting dragged behind one of his stupid fucking trains until he either dies or himself gets to fucking Reading, where the fucking train gets cleaned, whichever comes fucking first, but I was too shocked that he had even said such a thing. "Are you trying to make me have some kind of stroke?" I asked him. Then I hung up.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I gave up on getting my wallet back. I cancelled my cards (had to speak to Santander - no article about bad customer service would be complete without a mention of good old Banco Bastardos! "I've lost my card". "OK, what is your card number?"), grieved for my lost seven pounds of Boots credit (now i will have to spend real money on boring old razors, damnit), and felt hungry because I couldn't buy any lunch, but it wasn't the end of the world. </div><div><br />
</div><div>This is when it hit me. It would have been better to have just done that in the first place - just written it off. I would be in exactly the same position, but I would still be at my normal, manageable level of rage and frustration. I wouldn't have wasted time, meaning I would have been further along with whatever thing it was I was doing at work (I'm not saying that that, in and of itself, would not have also been a waste of time, but you know what I mean). </div><div><br />
</div><div>And this is the point of today's rant: it shouldn't be that way. Even if they aren't able to give you any practical help, customer service people should make you feel like they are at least trying to help you, so even though you come away no better off you at least feel like everything that could reasonably be done to help you has been done and that someone out there cared just a little bit about your predicament. You deserve that - you fund their company's continued existence (in the case of the train companies, because you have to, like some kind of uncapped "getting to the office" tax that they can arbitrarily make to be as much as they fucking like).</div><div><br />
</div><div>Honestly, look at any job advert for customer service representatives, or any other customer facing job come to think about it, and it will be asking for people with "good people skills", or even "a passion for excellent customer service". These qualities in humans must be as rare as rocking horse shit, because instead, these jobs seem to go almost exclusively to surly, arsey, lazy people who will not make themselves responsible for anything at all, or people who are just plain stupid. When you deal with a good one, someone who actually seems to enjoy helping solve problems and is genuinely sorry when they can't, it feels great, whatever the outcome. And I can guarantee that the people like that, the ones who are in the right fucking job, never go home and whine about how they get shouted at and called names all day. Because no matter how much of a bastard you are, or how much the company has pissed you off, you don't call people like that names. It would be like kicking a Guide Dog.</div><div><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-38410612004703503252011-05-10T13:59:00.000-07:002011-05-10T13:59:38.623-07:00Microsoft Buying SkypeOK, so this was actually only the second most interesting story I encountered on today's trawl through the news. <br />
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The most interesting was a little gem I found in a Metro I found on a train. I am kind of fond of the Metro, apart from that bastarding Nemi cartoon. What is the fucking point? Just don't have a cartoon if it's going to be that ferociously shit. As this phrase, borrowed from my mum, went down so well yesterday I am going to use it again: the Nemi cartoon is "neither use nor ornament". Anyway, I digress. The story was about how one of those fucking people who paints themselves silver and stands still near tourist attractions in London and for some reason think <i>the world owes them a fucking living </i>for doing <i>absolutely nix,</i> you know, one of those worthless codpieces, kicked the living crap out of another worthless codpiece, er, I mean, "street performer", for stealing his lucrative patch near the London Eye. He got sent down for GBH with intent. Apparently, tourists looked on "in horror" as a Bulgarian man dressed as a statue attempted to beat another Bulgarian man dressed as a statue to death. I bet they bloody didn't look on in horror. If they did they are idiots. The YouTube/videophone combination was invented for shit like that. A mate of mine reckons he once saw a McDonalds employee dressed as Ronald McDonald beat the granny out of a drunk guy while he was queueing up to get a Big Mac, but nobody believes him because he didn't put it on the YouTube. OK, so it supposedly happened in 1994, but that is no excuse.<br />
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Anyway, that brings us on to the less amusing but probably more important topic of Microsoft's $8.5 billion (which is 5 billion of her majesty's pounds or thereabouts) buyout of Skype, that thing that lets you talk to your bastard friends who have gone off travelling or moved to somewhere nicer than here for free. <br />
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For as much as they might say that it is a natural fit for them because it will integrate nicely with Outlook and, I don't know, proactively leverage some convergence synergies to create a new paradigm (they didn't actually say that, I nicked it from a PowerPoint presentation I will be giving tomorrow) this looks to me like a bid by Microsoft to look a bit more cool, because they are being left behind. <br />
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Back in the day, the big names in computer technology were Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft won the day, back in the day, because IBM had this bizarre cultish thing going on where they would hire graduates with certain profiles, all the same, and turn them all into grey suited boring old IBM people, and Microsoft was a lot more cool. <br />
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Trouble is, now that the internet is used for everything, everywhere, by everyone, rather than just being logged onto for a bit in the evening to check your email, ask Jeeves about something and look at some pornographic stills that take 12 minutes each to download, the "cool" technology brands are the ones that have paved the way when it comes to how the internet is used now. Web 2.0, essentially. Which is apparently in the dictionary, even though I think that probably would require a redefinition of what a fucking word is, given that "Web 2.0" is two words. And one of them is a number. This could lead to the number of words in the English language exploding to almost infinity as you would then logically have to include stuff like "Speed 2" as well...<br />
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Brands that people think are cool now include Google, who so monopolise the world of searching for everything that their name is now a verb, meaning "to search on the internet". You don't say "he was slacking , off at work, he was just sat there Binging himself?" do you? Or, "we'll win this pub quiz for sure, I'm going to Lycos all the answers on my iPhone"... Facebook, which allows us to control the pop charts like sinister puppet masters, and find out whether our old classmates have ugly children. Twitter, which I'm not entirely sure what the point of is, but which I bloody love (follow me at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap">www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap</a>)... I do sometimes, in my darker moments, suspect that the whole grand enterprise was developed by the British government to allow us to keep tabs on Stephen Fry, so we don't accidentally lose him again. They know that without Stephen Fry a new dark age will fall on this nation, where all TV shows have to be about people called Kelly or Kerry or Katie who are orange. Though to be honest they could just have done what they did with "the old Stephen Fry" Oscar Wilde and put him in prison if they're that worried he's going to run off.<br />
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According to a report I read yesterday (once again, in the Metro... I'm a bit broke this week) due to social networking four out of five people admit they have online friends they have never met who they feel as close to as their "real world" friends. Ten years ago you'd never fucking admit to that... That would be embarrassing. Even online dating supposedly isn't considered that lame and desperate anymore. Though, let's be honest, it still kind of is. The internet is all about being social, sharing stuff, making connections. Today I joined Formspring, which seems to be this thing where people can ask you any question they want, which I reckon could be a right laugh (if you have any for me, ask at <a href="http://www.formspring.me/PonyandTrap">www.formspring.me/PonyandTrap</a> - now is a good time because it's new and I want to play with it). Could be the next big thing. But probably won't because, truth be told, it's quite boring after ten minutes if nobody asks you anything interesting. "Yes, I prefer cats to dogs." "Actually, I can take or leave Marmite." "My favourite dinosaur is the brachiosaurus"...<br />
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None of that has anything at all to do with Microsoft. This is the point. I am not even anti Microsoft. In the PC or Mac argument I stand by Windows every time, even though that is not the trendy thing to do, but with each year that passes it gets just a little bit more embarrassing to say "actually, I er, prefer a PC"... And if I'm noticing that, surely they are too?<br />
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Thing is, although I use only Windows operating systems, outside of work I never use any Microsoft applications or services. Microsoft is for Office, and Office is for using at "the fucking place"... When I'm not at "the fucking place" I don't use anything of theirs. Not IE, not Hotmail, not Bing, not whatever blogging thing it is they have, because unlike their business applications they are not the best available - Google's stuff is. I have become just as smug and cuntish about the fact I use Chrome as the Apple wankers that used to piss me off so with their fucking Ocelot OS or whatever the hell it was called. <br />
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So yeah, Microsoft isn't cool because it's for work, which isn't cool. But that's OK right, that's a pretty good niche to fill, every corporate computer in the world? Well yeah. But this is where Microsoft get a bit schizophrenic.<br />
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All of their advertising seems to be targetted very much at the home user market. If I recall correctly, their current TV campaign involves scenarios such as a plain woman using her Windows PC to edit a photo of her boring looking family so it looks like her kids aren't ginger, or texting or something. The catchphrase in these commercials is "to the cloud!"... It's not what you want. You want aspirational, not accessible. Ooooh, if I use Windows, I will be like a woman with three kids who knows fuck all about computers but can still edit her fucking stupid fucking photo because Windows has the most patronising interface known to man and big Fisher Price buttons will tell me what I need to do and then make sure I'm sure with more big fucking Fisher Price looking buttons because I'm a fucking imbecile who is scared they will bring down the New York Stock Exchange by clicking on the wrong fucking thing in my picture editing software. And "to the cloud" is the gayest catchphrase I've ever heard uttered outside of a 1960's Batman movie. You can't even say it ironically. <br />
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For Microsoft to thrive they need to somehow change their image. Either go totally corporate, ironically, like IBM, or get some useful offerings and lose the family friendly schmaltz and become cool again. Maybe the buyout of Skype is supposed to be a step in the latter direction, given that Skype has millions of users all over the world, and that is why they have gambled by paying what looks like way over the odds. 70% of Skype was sold for $2 billion just two years ago, and given that its most popular service is offered for free, it will take some creativity to turn it into a big revenue generator (the same argument used to question why Twitter was valued high when it doesn't appear to do anything that would make money). If it solves Microsoft's image problem, none of that should matter - they can afford it, much like Chelsea could afford to spend 50 million pounds on Torres in a bid to solve their "our strikers are really old now" problem. <br />
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Trouble is, I can't help expecting them to launch their Skype offering with an advertising campaign showing someone in England using a Skype video call to let their kids wave to their grandparents in Australia... I can literally see it in my head. Yeah, we know it can do that, and we know that's what most people will use it for, but for the love of fuck, show us something a bit more Minority Report looking and some people with lives that look interesting using the fucker! Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-45345047483232109072011-05-09T11:25:00.000-07:002011-05-09T11:41:52.425-07:00Super-injunctions and TwitterIf you are a Twitter user, you have probably noticed that there are quite a lot of other Twitter users who are morons. Obviously you don't follow any of the morons, so you don't notice it most of the time, but if you ever click on one of the things that is "trending", or on some days, just look at the list of things that are trending, there is quite a lot of shit on there. Not shit like the shit I post, like when I get drunk and decide to type random Bruce Springsteen lyrics, but shit like - and these are just some examples I have plucked from what was trending at the time of writing:<br />
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<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><b>@justinbieber</b> stay strong Biebs. You can do better than get mad and lose your mind with those people. <b>#killemwithkindness</b></span></blockquote><br />
Which was posted by someone calling themselves a "belieber" which sounds like some new kind of menace we really should be concerned about...<br />
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<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">can i ask why is megan fox not in the new transformers ?! her and shia labeouf make a gorgeous couple !</span></blockquote><br />
Yeah. I think the bigger question is "Why is the new Transformers movie a thing that exists?" rather than why Megan Fox would not want to be involved with such a thing. You know, given that the last one was a total fucking abortion.<br />
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<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><b>#5factsaboutmymom</b> she made her own Dildoe</span></blockquote><br />
I assume the hashtag "5 facts about my mom" was trending because yesterday was Mother's Day in America, so American people, who call their mums moms wanted to pay tribute to their mothers - you know, just like we do here <i>in fucking March</i>. So why it is now trending in Birmingham (and why there is even an option to see what is trending in Birmingham in the main part of the interface) I cannot explain. But this guy, who looks to be from Newcastle, well, his "mom" is probably the type of lady contributing to the fact that "MILF" is also trending right now...<br />
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Now, hopefully that has established for anyone who doesn't use Twitter that it has been adopted by a large quantity of people who, as MY mom would say, are neither use nor ornament. You need to know that to understand the point I am now, finally going to get to.<br />
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Following the news that many, many, possibly all, celebrities have now got "super-injunctions" that prevent hookers, mistresses, rent boys and just about anyone else represented by Max Clifford from speaking out and ruining their carefully cultivated reputations as family men, general good eggs or heterosexuals. Personally I think it's great, because we no longer have to have our news peppered with horrible things like "I shagged Andrew Marr", and whenever you do see a story about a footballer and a hooker you can tell by the fact he hasn't taken out a super-injunction that it is all just an elaborate set up to cover up the fact he is as gay as a daisy. Yes Ashley Cole, we all worked it out a very long time ago. Also, prostitutes will no longer be all over the papers, causing the Daily Mail to become concerned that all of our girl children will decide "Juicy Jenni" was onto something and start hanging around sketchy Northern nightclubs in the hope of making a few quid out of sucking off Rio Ferdinand. Jesus, if we went on Rooney stories alone it might not just be the kids. It might be your nan as well. <br />
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Yes, the super-injunction is a good thing. Not because it protects the privacy of people in the public eye, but because it protects the public eye from stories about Andrew Marr's privates.<br />
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Still though, some people feel it is a right, possibly a constitutional right, maybe even a <i>human </i>right, to know whether, I don't know, Huw Edwards or Pete Waterman or that bloke that plays Ian Beale, has committed any form of indiscretion ever (disclaimer: I have no reason to believe any of the aforementioned people have taken out super-injunctions, nor am I claiming to have slept with any of them). The super-injunction deprives them of their fix of gossip about people nobody normal is remotely interested in (because all they do is present a daytime antiques show), and that's no fun! Sure, I can see why someone might be interested to know that someone extremely famous, like say, Tiger Woods, or David Beckham, or someone extremely unexpected, like John Major had been up to something juicy, but seriously, what kind of fucking weirdo cares that Jeremy Clarkson might have been photographed with Jemima Khan? I don't, and as you might have noticed, I bloody love Jeremy Clarkson.<br />
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But these very weirdos are the same morons I was on about earlier. When a canny Twitter user announced they were going to leak the names of loads of celebrities who had taken out super-injunctions, people who say "OMG" a lot were on it like, well, me on any rumour that Jose Mourinho might be coming back to Chelsea. At the time of someone else writing an article about this which I just read, they had 44,000 followers, despite the fact that most major news outlets (who are, rather ironically, informed of the details of super-injunctions so that they don't accidentally publish them - yeah, so no risk of leaks there then, you can definitely trust those guys not to get coked up and tell some random punter down the pub) are saying most of it isn't true anyway. But then they are always saying Tom Cruise is straight as well, so who the hell knows.<br />
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Some of the very best people to follow on Twitter are liars, but what on Earth is entertaining about reading a random list of names of not very exciting people who might have a super-injunction but probably don't.<br />
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Still, if you see Katie Price on the list at least then you'll know once and for all that it is total bollocks...<br />
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You can follow me on the Twitter if you should care to do so, at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap">www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap</a>. I don't out people very often... And I'm not a belieber.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2282876007859938445.post-67515820607260973372011-05-07T15:18:00.000-07:002011-05-07T17:10:29.347-07:00Talent Shows... And People Who Cry at ThemSo, my sources tell me that tonight Britain's Got Talent is on the television. I can only assume from the stuff they are saying on the Facebook and the Twitter (follow me at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap">www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap</a>) about how astonishingly moving it is, that this programme is a graphic and harrowing documentary about the genocide in Rwanda, Chinese orphanages, or those babies in Africa that get raped because it cures the AIDS (disclaimer - it doesn't). <br />
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Oh no, wait, it's not that at all is it? It's that show where people put ferrets down their trousers while David Hasslehoff watches.<br />
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The talent show genre is not a new thing. When I was a kid, it was all about Stars In Their Eyes (or, as morons would call it, "Stars In Your Eyes"... God I hate people who do that. See also "Sex In The City"... To be fair, I keep getting the name of that new sitcom Shit My Dad Says wrong and just calling it "Shit Nobody Laughs At", but that may not be quite so accidental. Honestly, a sitcom based on a Twitter feed? Seriously?) where that really tall beardy guy who might have been a paedophile (I think he was cleared of having done anything, but they still got Cat Deeley to do the kids' version instead of him...) welcomed people with mundane jobs (I remember one where a man worked in a factory that made tights, checking that the tights didn't have holes in them. Sounds like either the worst or the best job in the world, depending how "fetishy" you are) who would then be transformed to look "uncannily" like singers they fancied they could do a bit of an impression of. This very occasionally involved the use of blackface. Eventually, someone would win, and they would get some kind of trophy, and then they would kindly fuck off to wherever they came from (usually the Midlands), only to be heard of again if you were the kind of person who enjoys going on holiday to Butlins, where you could see them basking in the glory of their changed lives every night at 7 before the bingo. And that was good enough for them.<br />
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It all changed at the turn of the century (I like saying that when I mean 2001, it still kind of confuses people for a second...) with Popstars. Popstars featured a man called Nasty Nigel, who as the name suggests was a bit of a dick to everyone, and a bunch of people who wanted to be, well, pop stars. And they weren't 43 year old shop fitters from Wolverhampton who could do a mean turn as Chris de Burgh, they were young and fresh. And the winners didn't just get a trophy and a job as a redcoat in Bridgend, they got to actually be pop stars. Well, sort of - they got to be more like pop stars than other people are, but less than say, Blue or Atomic Kitten. Popstars was the first, so if you wanted to go back in time and stop Cheryl Cole from taking over the world, you would basically need to terminate this Nigel bloke.<br />
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Popstars was followed by Popstars: The Rivals, where a girl band and a boy band were formed. One of them was Girls Aloud who did very well despite having the shittest band name ever, and the other one was... Actually, I'm not even going to type their name, I'm going to let it bug you. Besides, what's the point, nobody is Googling them, not even their mums, so it won't help me any on the traffic front to speak of them here. <br />
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Then you had Pop Idol, which launched Gareth Gates and Michelle McManus (I resist the urge to make any "fat people" jokes involving the concept of launching Michelle McManus, but if you want to make any in your head, this would be the right point to do so). And it was here that the phenomenon of the sob story made its first significant appearance.<br />
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Gareth Gates had a bit of an affliction, which made the nation sympathise with him and root for him. Gareth Gates had a stutter. It only affected him when he spoke, and not when he sang, so really in a singing contest it was pretty irrelevant, but it was milked and milked and milked with endless footage of him trying to get a sentence out (it stopped just short of forcing the boy to say "I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's mate, and I'm only plucking pheasants 'cos the pheasant plucker's late" on live TV, but only by a small margin) until he won. He then got speech therapy, which cured him of said affliction, and shagged Jordan, which probably caused him to gain a few much more nasty ones.<br />
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I think it was at this point that it became absolutely compulsory for every contestant on the raft of shows that followed (X Factor, Britain's Got Talent) to have something a bit tragic about themselves if they were to stand a chance. OK, so not all of them were orphans, or had overcome leukaemia, because where are you going to find enough people like that with passable voices and who are prepared to shamelessly bang on about it on TV to make two seasons of the awful crap a year for the rest of time, but at the very least they would be a struggling single parent or someone who had been bullied at school or who had a horribly depressing job. I can only recall one contestant, a guy called Rhydian who was on the X Factor, who basically went on there and said " I am a happy, confident person with a good job, a nice family who are all alive, lots of friends, and quite a pleasant life" - I mean, he didn't literally say that, but you know what I mean... Everybody hated him and he went out, despite being one of the best, from a technical perspective, on the show. He didn't have the "ahhhh, bless" factor.<br />
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The rule seems to be that you either have to say you want to win to get your family out of crushing poverty, or dedicate each song you sing, even if it's Bat Out of Hell, to a deceased loved one. <br />
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I guess I'd pick Mewsley, my cat who died 12 years ago: "She was struck down in her prime, but she loved Toni Braxton and I'm sure she will be looking down on me in heaven where she lives with the angels... It's going to be hard to get through the song, but I'm going to try and be really brave and make her proud"... OK, so it doesn't sound that moving here, but you need to imagine the slight cracking of the voice and the brave, fighting back the tears smile. <br />
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Seriously, it would take a lot less than me and my dead cat to make the majority of viewers cry like one of those children you see looking up as their balloon drifts out of sight. Things that have made people, real people I actually know, well up on Britain's Got Talent this week have included "a kid dancing". A kid dancing is not fucking sad, is it? It could be sort of funny I suppose. Could even be impressive, if they are really good. But it's never sad. I asked for an explanation of exactly why people are bawling away in their droves and here is one response, as an exact quote:<br />
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"it's the emotional music that gets me. Lol and when you see someone like the kid tonight who has actually improved his physical condition through something he enjoys it's hard not to be a little overwhelmed with compassion and empathy"<br />
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What? So, the kid is fit and healthy and loves dancing? A fit, healthy, happy child? Yeah, still not really seeing the sad in there. As for being overwhelmed with compassion and empathy, I don't think a dancing kid on the telly would overwhelm me with anything. This person is obviously someone who flips between emotions quite easily though, given that there was a little "lol" in there for no discernible reason. Cries at children being happy, laughs at nothing. Probably mental.<br />
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I just don't get it. If I cried that easily I would be scared to leave the house in case I saw a particularly moving shop window display in Debenhams (perhaps where one of the mannequins had only one arm and three child mannequins to support with no male mannequin in sight) or a really sad queue at a bus stop... I certainly wouldn't be able to go to work because on the way to the station I sometimes see this cat that has a leg missing.<br />
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There were apparently a bunch of dog based acts as well, but those won't win, even if they do something really cool like make the dogs bite Amanda Holden's face off, because Simon Cowell hasn't yet figured out a way to make money out of dancing lurchers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4