David Mitchell on speed cameras

David Mitchell wrote a pretty much flawless article about speed cameras in the Observer a few weeks ago. Including gems such as the following:

"British drivers who think the speed limit is unjust are blessed with a democratic system within which to campaign for its reform. The proper way of going about that is not just breaking the law you don't like and then moaning – that's what the French do."

I'd strongly recommend you follow this link and read the whole thing.

Animals Which Should Get Extinct, Part 1: Domestic Riversystems

I love nature, I really do. Almost nothing makes me happier than wandering the tracks and footpaths of my native Isle of Wight, amid the dusky whispers of the evening breeze and the chill crunch of a walked in Hunter on twigs and moss, spotting our noble friends brock and reynard going about their ancestral ways so blissfully ignorant of the hubbub of our soul-less modern world. Or perhaps the silent kestrel, floating ethereally on the downy winds; maybe the powerful stag beetle, enforcing the laws of the copse unto his quadropoid bretheren. I find it all totally magical.
Which is why, I wonder, the world must also be home to some of the most unspeakably sickening creatures ever to avoid the big chop. Perusing the internet for my daily dose of wildlife anecdotes, I came across the Alligator Snapping Turtle. Regular Snapping Turtles alone are pretty bad. Think of a Tortoise; pretty good, no? They’re slow, sort of chubby, they eat lettuce, and they sit in the front baskets of bicycles in the lanes of Northern France. Snapping Turtles are like the disgraceful working class cousin of the Tortoise. They’re moody, they stink bad, and they bite when aggressed instead of just nobly cowering away like any half sensible humanities undergraduate. For the Alligator Snapping Turtle, times this by about a thousand. There is just no need for them to be alive. They’re massive, can weigh easily over 200 pounds, terrifying looking, and they can kill and eat alligators. A TURTLE EATING AN ALLIGATOR. What else is there to say? They will devour basically anything you put in front of them. This could include a baby, or a priest. They have no qualms about their shocking guzzling, and even have a peculiar red protrudence in their mouths to act as bait for unwary prey. How incredibly cowardly. They will think nothing of comitting the most abhorrent waterway atrocities with their curved bird-like beaks. Once they have their demon spawn (luckily the only reason they venture onto land), they have basically no parental care system, somewhat like their humanoid equivalents again. Oh and they live for around 70 years. THE WORLD HAS CHOSEN THAT THIS MONSTER COULD LIKELY LIVE LONGER THAN ANYONE READING THIS. Horrific.
But perhaps not as bad the Snakehead, or a member of the Channa family of fish. These little bastards are carnivorous and destructive to the eco-systems of waterways they invade. “Surely a human error!” I hear you cry, “Who are these rogues spreading them about the rivers of North America like some kind of conscious nightmare fish epidemic?” Wrong. In their adolescent phase, Snakeheads are obligatory air-breathers. This literally means that they have to breath oxygenated air, and they can survive on land for up to four hours. They can also move about out of the water, and can thus leave their natural habitats to join other natural waterways, potentially infesting and destroying unprepared permacultures. The Sun, that bastion of high journalism, even reckons they can devour people, but they also cover Britain’s Got Talent with more fervour than the North Korean nuclear farce so that’s about that.

Next up: Jumping spiders, barking tarantulas, sea scorpions, and dinosaur sharks. Seriously. Til then wildlife haters! TH

Boyle-ing Over/On The Boyle/Boyled Egg etc...

Given the title of this blog, it would be remiss of me to let the latest 'celebrity' outburst pass without comment. That's right, I'm talking about furious virgin crooner Susan Boyle (left), who has blown her Scottish top about something or other.

The only problem here is that when it came time to do any research for this piece, I immediately lost interest and started thinking about something else. I was reading about the story in the turgid freebie London Lite on the way home, and I decided that I should keep it so that I could refer to it later. But moments later, through a combination of force-of-habit and sheer subconscious good sense, I discovered that I had thrown it in the bin.

Then when I arrived home and started to read about the story on the interweb (now despised by my colleague Fred) a similar thing happened. Without realising it, and within seconds of starting to cast my eyes across the article, I had timeslipped into another marathon innings on time-wasting classic Little Master Cricket Game.

Can anyone really be surprised by the news of this lady going a bit mental? Some of the most rational, reasonable and hitherto composed people have been driven to distraction by media manipulation and/or circumstances beyond their control (Sir Isaac Newton, Phil Brown and Jesus Christ to name but three). And, let's face it Susan Boyle is at the very least one bollock short of the full scrotum (although, in fairness, that has not interfered with Lance Armstrong's inalienable right to 'tweet'). Let the woman get pissed-up and go mental. Just don't start moralizing about it, or being any more patronizing than you already are.

With any luck, Boyle will go the full nine-yards and get axe-murderous on our asses, starting with the repulsive, Les Dennis-jilting vacuum Amanda Holden, moving onto chinless muppet Piers Morgan, carving a chunk or two out of profesional c*nt Craig 'Revel' Horwood and finishing off with a countrywide massacre of all the morons who have talked down to this woman, tried to manipulate her appearance and lifestyle and made her a commodity when she is so obviously ill-equipped to cope

Jesus, I do care after all... AC

How the internet makes everything that is amazing, really terrible eventually

I love you internets. But I also hate you. Why? I have come to realise that every moment of brilliant comedy gold that you feed me is invariably tainted by the fact that it will evolve into some kind of nightmarishly popular and unavoidedly ubiquitus internet meme that will proceed to infiltrate almost every aspect of my life, until the original humour has been so distilled, that instead of making me laugh, it will knock another dent into my decreasing faith in humanity, slowly accelerating my progress towards a point where I am forced to launch a pathetic failed suicide bid, which David Hasselhoff may or may not find hilarious. That's why.

Look what you've done to poor Rick Astley:



You've turned his whole life into a joke. Rick Rolling went too far. Look at him barging that stooge kid, who is likely getting paid the same as him, out of the way so that he can sing and get the hell out of there. Look at the the pained, forced smile on his face, concealing the emotions of a man thinking 'was it worth it? Keeping the same haircut for twenty-two years. All for this?' If you look carefully at his eyes I'm pretty sure he's crying.

Another nadir was reached when internet users voted him 'Best Act Ever' at the MTV awards. The sight of a matching tweed trouser and tie wearing Perez Hilton announcing that 'Rick Ass-ley" had won but wasn't there to collect the award was devastating. Especially as we all knew that, as Perez spoke, Rick was backstage, sitting in a locked toilet cubicle, almost passed out from embarrassment, with a shotgun in his mouth daring himself to use his big toe to pull the trigger.

It's the same with everything that starts out good online. And I almost exclusively blame this on the rise of real grown-ups learning how to use the internet. The following pictures will show that I use the term grown up with no reference to age:


The FMyLife and Texts From Last Night websites were pretty funny. But then they were taken over by people whose sense of humour has been so dulled by the exigencies of working 9 to 5 in some corporate hell hole, that they have no idea when to let a good joke die. Look at this post:

Today, I went to the Verizon because my phone was broken. It hadn't rang or received a text in 3 weeks. So, I got to the store they check out my phone. There was nothing wrong with it. No one had called me in 3 weeks. Then they charged me $30. FML

That's not funny. It's just plain boring. It's also a lie. Thankfully, the web has had the grace to throw up a delightful parody site in the form of MyLifeIsAverage. But God damn you internets you're going to make that rubbish soon aren't you. I hate you. FC

ps. Love you really

A few pointers for the general public on the bus.

1) When the electronic display (handily placed both upstairs and downstairs so that everybody on the bus can see it) bears the legend: 'bus stopping', this means that the bus is now (or will soon be) stopping. You need not, therefore, repeatedly push the bell once you see the display read 'bus stopping', for the simple reason that the bus cannot be any more stopping than it already is.

2) When you have a conversation on your mobile phone, you need not broadcast the contents of said call to everybody else on the bus. Believe it or not, they might not actually be interested! Furthermore, you need not subscribe to the unwritten rule that the volume of your voice increases exponentially with the inanity of the conversation.

3) In the morning, when you are seated on the top deck of the bus at the back, and you have already flown in the face of traditional notions of personal sound concealant (= headphones), why not try blasting out something relaxing or light-hearted instead of your more outre confection of gabba, bashment, reggaeton or auto-tune daddy Akon? Perhaps Jordy, who is fast becoming a Hot Rant staple.

4) Popular deodorant brands include Sure, Lynx and Right Guard. They can be purchased in all good chemists, supermarkets and even cornershops. The application of said deodorant prior to a bus journey ensures a happier time all round.

5) Not everybody is psychic. If you require the person sitting on your outside to move to allow you to get out, why not ask them nicely! Not everybody interprets a grunting noise and a death-scowl to the back of the head as a request to slide over.

Any top tips on how not to behave on the bus that I have missed are covered in the following seven-minute epic - the 'Stairway to Heaven' of African men arguing on the bus, if you will...



AC

Metro Station

I just can't believe it. When I think about how some bands get international recognition from perpetrating these kind of audio visual crimes, it just cuts me up. Metro Station are just horrible. Ugly, ugly teenagers peddling lazy dancey pop-punk with no sign of shame or referential knowing to anything that is right or good in popular music anymore. At least Jordy had integrity and sang with a true passion and insight for the trials he was living through. It's no surprise the French banned that kind of hardline truth-telling.
That Metro Station's video for Shake It (oh god, just the name makes me want to die) was the worst thing I saw on 100 channels of Egyptian and American cable television drivel on a recent family holiday to the Middle East speaks volumes. This is a country (delightful in so many ways save ludicrous swine flu contingency plans and, you know, human rights discrepancies) where every single damn music video is of a man in sunglasses and a white suit, covered in hair gel, moaning dross over early 90's quality keyboard string banks. EVERY SINGLE DAMN VIDEO.

The sheer number of cringeworthy facets of the song is hard to believe:
- The inital call to arms of 'LETS DROP' seguing into the most underwhelming excuse for a hybrid indie / dance beat imagineable.
- The senseless, banal lyrics about ugly teenagers touching each other and 'shaking it'. Seriously, the chorus is so pointless and awful that the lyrics genuinely lose any understandable meaning by the end of the song, like when you say a word out loud until it doesn't mean anything anymore.
- The singer's ghastly, terrifying autotuned sex offender-priest sigh-singing, gloriously backed up by the other chap's atonal nasal blurts.
- The damn breakdancing nerds.
- The 'singing' at the camera. So, so, so smug.
- The gangly fellow's diseased looking pierced face. And his name's Chase. Lordy!
- Just everything. The horrible guitars, boring drumming, Pro-Tools'ed everything.

It makes New Found Glory sound like Springsteen.

You stupid kids want good new music?: http://www.myspace.com/dinosaurjr.

There. God. TH

The concentrated insanity of Japanese cultural taste

I use the word 'insanity' in the above title because 'Balls-to-the-wall one-small-step-for-man cat-on-a-hot-tin-tin-roof slap-me-round-the-face-and-call-me-Tina unbelievable-awesomeness' was probably a bit too long.

While our culture mandates that the majority of adverts must be safe, inoffensive dross, with across-the board appeal, the Japanese are busy creating some of the best minute-and-a-half moments of beauty ever to grace a TV screen. Take for example computer game adverts. Something we have a history of doing very badly (see Morcambe and Wise and Trevor Brooking trying to sell the Atari). Over here, the Nintendo DS launched with one of the most yawn-worthy and stale moments of boyfriend-girlfriend flirty interaction ever seen. Meanwhile, in Japan, a Wii game is launched with the following campaign:


We get: a smug Lee Ryan lookalike cooing 'that's definitely a keeper' as his overly hot girlfriend digitally alters a photograph so that their skin looks blue. Blue I tell you! Oh how we laughed.

The Japanese get: constellations in the shape of muscles; near naked body builders running through walls; a startling array of rainbows, sheep, aliens, rhinoceroses and penguins; a polar bear in speedos; and a digital representation of Hulk Hogan when he's eighty doing the wanker sign as an over excited man shouts "NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY, NICE MUSCLES' over the top. All soundtracked by some lovely female sung Japanese pop.

HOW IS THIS FAIR?

This horrible mismatch continues in every field of advertising and entertainment. We have Duffy advertising Coke. The Japanese have Arnold Schwartzenneger advertising something that may or may not be a drink. In the west, our game shows all now seem to involve an array of talentless buffoons listening to odd members of society cry and sing opera. In the east all their game shows seem to involve members of the public being submitted to humiliating and terrifically painful ordeals, all the while maintaining their good humour:



So who's up for moving to Tokyo with me? FC