The Worst Game Ever

Okay, so, its like Scrabble, but with numbers instead of words. Like in Scrabble, a collection of tiles are kept in an opaque bag, and each player takes out seven tiles at a time - unlike in Scrabble, these tiles are marked with numbers, not letters - like in Scrabble, these tiles are scored according to how often they are used in common parlance, for instance, the number '2', which, as we all know, is used all the time, will only be worth one point, while the number '8', which is used much, much less than '2', shall be worth five points. After each player has seven tiles on their tray, they then place them down to create a number - if able, they will score a double word score if they use all seven of their tiles in one go!

The game will be called 'Cr4pple', and playing it will be introduced as a humane alternative to capital punishment.

Channel 4 is going downhill...

Man, have you seen the things C4 is trying to pass off as journalism these days? Tonight's 'Dispatches' program is basically asking the question 'Are Chinks trying to Murder our Children?', and the week before that was just a pile of Thatcherite house-prise-whinging. I don't know when it happened, but at some point the program just became an animated Daily Mail headline.

Sigh, but that is the curse of having political convictions - you just have to put up with living with the constant urge to punch the media in its twatty little face until it stops moving.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just acting out against C4 because they refused to pick up the third series of Lost? In the words of what passes for journalism these days, 'YOU DECIDE'!

Surrender?

Is surrendering yourself the only way to acheive freedom? A lot of schools of thought would say so: George Orwell stated (ironically) that 'Freedom is Slavery', and perhaps the vice versa is equally the case.

One of the possible translations in Arabic of the word 'Islam' is 'submission'. People say that growing up is all about learning to live with authority, to give in to its requests, more like. For animals, there are no choices, they do what their instincts command of them - perhaps that is the true definition of freedom? The inability to do anything else? On the other end of the scale, the human beings who are most obsessed with the ideal of freedom are those who have too much of it rather than those who have too little of it...

Whenever someone asks me about my politics, I refuse to answer in more than one word, (because, after all, the question is too vague to demand anything but a vague answer), and that one word I say is 'Liberal'. The word stems from the Latin word for freedom, and so really, as an ideology, it is obsessed with freedom - and so am I.

This is something that I find confusing, because sometimes I view the concept of 'freedom' as something that is profoundly real, perhaps even ultrareal, and at other times I view it as the ultimate abstraction, and illusion created by a brain with waaaaay to much time on its hands. What does it say of me that I am someone who believes in something so strongly that I can't even consistantly grasp in my own mind?

Maybe its true to say that freedom only really comes from surrendering oneself. I mean, in my own life I have found an unfortunate symmetry between the times in which I have been happiest, and the times in which others have had more say over my life. Maybe I've disgusted some people with this revelation, maybe I've revealed myself to be some kind of natural slave...

PAH! I've been thinking about writing this blog for the past few days, and haven't - somewhat because I've been busy (goram essays...), but also because I realised that as soon as I got round to writing it it would be nothing but a set of introverted self-questionnaires. But here it is nonetheless!!!

In other words, I bought a new razor. Its one of these new ones with the ninety-three blades and a soothing strip of elixir of life built in. As soon as I got it I decided to shave myself up a pair of moustachey-sideburney-joiny-uppy-things.

In any case, I think next January calls for another image reinvention.

But for the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing...

My life is astronomically unlikely.

Decades before my conception events occured that brought Great Britain into a ruinously expensive war in continental Europe, a war that put Britain on the road to financial descent and, eventually, towards decolonisation. The election of a monotesticled man in Germany was the point of no return, and from there, it became inevitable that Britain would have to go grant India its independence, as neither the troops, nor the monies, nor the will-power existed to keep it anymore. And so my mother's family, understandably unenthusiastic about being governed by those that they had been complicit in oppressing for the past century, decided to quit India. Minute fluctuations within the realm of International Politics had magnified to the point where my Grandmother had to traverse the thousands of kilometres from Andhra Pradesh to Yorkshire.

Whilst on the paternal side, my dad was ridiculously lucky. As the second youngest of five children, he survived whilst his two eldest brothers were killed in near-identical accidents. His twin sister went blind in her teenage years and succumbed to depression and morbid obesity. Whilst his younger brother squandered his natural intelligence on distructive substance abuse and familial discord. My dad, despite his dyslexia, managed to make his way through mandatory education, force his way through an Open University degree, pull and eventually marry one of the most popular Mod Chicks in Leeds and move out of a slummish inner-city area into one of the snootiest suburbs of the Greater Birmingham area...

Somewhere in that story of ridiculously unlikely events, the two component parts of my genetic make-up were splashed together.

I grew up in Solihull, and went to school there (where me gerr-gus Yerkshuh accent wers bulli'd aut'a mi - something I still resent to this day). But, strangest of all, it was somehow decided in that time that I was intelligent. How that happened I'm still not really sure, but happened it did, and that affected the way the education system treated me from then onwards.

Fast forward to when I was eleven years old. My mother decided that I should take the entrance exam for the King Edward grammar schools. I was strongly against this decision, but, being eleven, I had little ability to oppose the decision. In an act of bizarre pre-pubescent rebellion I decided to guess the answer to every question in the entrance exam. I let my pen hover over the multiple choice answers and I just let fate decide where it should fall. This is really the point of divergence in my twisted tale - literally anything could have come of this...

The results came back. I didn't get in. 'Well that's that,' thought I. A couple of weeks later, a change of plans: I did get in. Some kid, somewhere, decided not to take advantage of the grammar school education, and I got to take their place. I've occassionally wondered what the person was like, and how, perhaps, my attendence at the school came at the expense of the kid who could have grown up to cure cancer...

So yeah, then I went to school. And it was the worst time of my life. I didn't really have any friends and more often than not I cried myself to sleep - before that point I thought 'cry yourself to sleep' was just a turn of phrase, but no!, it is actually possible. I'm not a fan of diagnosing emotional problems as if they were fully-fledged medical illnesses - but I suppose that at that time I was "suffering from Depression".

Things got better though, I didn't get any smarter. I floated through my education. Admittedly, I didn't try as hard as I possibly could all the time - rather, I tried as hard as I felt any given task deserved to be tried, which, seeing as I'm an arrogant little sod, wasn't that hard.

I came to my GCSEs, and I barely scraped a good enough score to stay in school. I came to my A-levels and got a set of results that were actually terrible. Way lower than even I expected, and way lower than what any university was offering - and yet I was still accepted. At this point I started thinking along these kind of lines... Everything was just seeming unrationally unlikely. I came to two possible conclusions: The first, that there was some kind of grand conspiracy amongst The Establishment to see that I, personally, succeed.

Or, I'm just ridiculously lucky. I'm some kind of Statistical Surfer, surfing at the front of an increasingly collapsing wavefront of probability.

The wavefront is either going to remain stable and carry me to torturously-metaphorical shore of success - or, it'll collapse, and I'll come crashing down. When I look back over my years of good-fortune and incomprehensible success its often hard for me to believe that any of it is due to my own actions. I mean, most people have a wide catalogue of empirical evidence to support the theory that hard work breeds success - whereas when I look back on my life, due to what is probably just pure coincidence, I actually see the exact opposite corrolation: the times in my life when I remember working the hardest usually end up in miserable failure, whereas the times where I try the least often end up accumulating into extraordinary success.

This confuses the fuck out of me, because, really, according to all logic, it shouldn't be the case. So either I am just experiencing a life-long streak of heads-up coin-tosses - or I have a destiny. I'm... probably more inclined to believe the former.

In which case, I'll just hang-ten, enjoy the ride, and wait to see if my whipe-out ever comes.

Saiyonara dudes.

I Hate Walking Behind People

Especially female people. Seriously. I find it one of life's most unpleasant experiences.

I mean, there I'll be, walking down a narrow pavement, and some woman is walking in front of me, and then suddenly she realises that I'm walking behind her.

"Who the fuck is this loser?" says her back, (yes it actually does, I'm an expert body-language, so st'fu).

"What the fuck is he doing?" continues the Back, "Does he think he's going to rape me? Fuck that, this bastard isn't worthy of raping my little brother's diseases Syrian hamster. Man, I hope this fucking cunt just completely dies forever!"

Y'know, just really offencive stuff. I'm just walking around minding my own business being treated like shit and barraged with constant abuse by some stranger's shoulderblades. So then I work up the speed and shove my way past them. THAT'LL SHOW THEM!!!

Sigh.

When exactly did I become such a neurotic wreck?

Old People

Damn they're annoying. Even more annoying than children and grown-ups if you ask me! (Yes, I'm 20-years old and I still use the term 'grown-ups' get used to it).

This morning I had to get onto campus early to check to see if I hadn't accidentally (read: retardedly) paid £30 for a ticket for an event that I had then gone and missed, (it turns out I hadn't, which is grand), and what should have been a 15 minute bus journey here was nearly doubled in time by the futile attempts of old people to get on and/or off the bus. Its maddening. I was maddened.

And like, this one time, a few days ago, it was raining, and there was this old lady on the bus, and I sat and watched her as she put a Morrisons bag over her head - like it was a completely normal thing to do! And then, perhaps because deep down the part of her that used to dance the Charleston told her that this was somewhat indignified, she then wrapped her scarf around her head - mayhaps to hide her shame!! But I just didn't get it - skin is already pretty waterproof, eons of evolution have afforded us that power, it needn't be backed up with the hydrophobia of a common plastic bag!

However, a small mote of comfort embraces me. It always seems to be the women who age the worst. Maybe its 'cos of all those disgusting parasitic children that grow out of them over the years, or maybe its because the older gentlemen have had it so ingrained into them through their national service years that it is imperative that one stands upright that they are then completely unable to hunch up and wither away the way their female counterparts do. Seriously, next time you see an old couple, compare the man to his woman, the man will likely stand tall, with a sense of (now somewhat distant, foggy-eyed pride), while the woman will look like one of those mean turtles from Super Mario Brothers.

Sometimes Its Tiring To Be Right All The Time...

So, it turns out that Iran hasn't been seeking to develop Weapons of Mass Destrution, and haven't been since at least 2003.

This is something I've been saying for years - actual years. It just would not make any sense for Iran, the most strategically ascendent nation in the region to put that it has acheived over the past decade in jeopardy by so openly flouting international law and inviting international intervention, (the explodey kind of intervention).

People may then say, 'Ah, but that would only apply if Iran were a rational state, but they're not! They're not, they're crazy fanatical towelheads!' - to which my response is: 'No they're not. They're the God-Damn MIGHTY PERSIAN EMPIRE. They assembled one of the largest empires the world ever saw while Western Europe was still burning people on suspicion of witchcraft - they clearly know what they're doing.'

In fact, I'm going to come out and say this: I'm a bit of an Iranophile. I think its a pretty great country, and it deserves any successes coming to it. Granted the current government is a bit shitty (although the West is primarily to blame for the election of Ahmadinejad, the man is widely hated by his own people, but then, when you find your nation being subjected to years and years of false allegations and very serious threats, you're obviously going to vote for the guy who shouts the loudest back at them). And yes, the state itself has some pretty serious human rights issues... although, it is a lot more liberal by far than most of our so-called allies in the region, and anyone in the government who claims that Britain refuses to have good relations with Iran because of its human rights record - while simultaneously selling military equipment to the fucking al-Sauds!? Well, it whiffs a bit of hypocracy.

If I were in charge of this kind of stuff, I would dumb all of Britain's support for the absolute monarchs and petty dictators of Arabia, and throw our lot in with Iran. Because the Iranian people, unlike most of their Arab counterparts, actually quite like us. In Arabia, democracy is something to be feared, because if it were acheived you would basically nation upon nation governed by Bin Laden wannabes. Iran, meanwhile, it already a fairly well-established and stable democracy.

But alas, geopolitics and neoimperialism being what it is, the West urgently needs to oppress any independent oppositional voice from the Third World whilst simultaneously backing any pyschotic bastard who promises to tow our line.

Oh, and yes, I do recognise the irony of writing a defence of a state that denies the legality of the State of Israel, and whose current president is probably a Holocaust-denier, on the day before Hanukkah...

Have a Tovful Hanukkah by the way, (he said Hebrew-butcheringly).

Happy Dodecember

Hey everyone. First things first, happy Dodecember! I hope you all enjoyed your small morsel of chocolate today, I know I did!

Hey, so, has anybody ever seen this thing 'Heroes: Unmasked' that they show on BBC2, usually straight after 'Heroes'. Its basically the worst thing ever.

Essentially, its a 15 minute programme dedicated to informing you 'how awesome' the show that you have just deliberately taken 45 minutes out of your lives to watch just was. Sounds redundant? WELL THAT'S 'COS IT IS! And, additionally, to get you psyched up about the next episode - which is by this point almost farsical, as the season finale of Heroes was first broadcast weeeeeeeeeell over a year ago now, and does nothing but illustrate how slow the Beeb was to jump on the Heroes bandwagon. As it is, I'm not sure whether this terrible excuse of a quart-hour of broadcasting is a BBC2, licence-fee-payer-funded, production, or whether its a slight repackaging of a pre-existing US version of a similiar thing, (but with the voice of Anthony Head (whatever happened to the Stewart?) played over it).

I don't know.. maybe its part of a wider culture of these modern epic TV shows, like, I know Doctor Who makes a similar straight-afterward-behind-the-scenes-slash-awesomeness-recap show, that I, I admit, have occassionally watched. But this 'Heroes: Unmasked' thing is just terrible. Firstly, its devoid of a lot of the backstage stuff, (and the stuff it does have is universally unimpressive, "Look! We've made Los Angeles look like New York! How the fuck clever are we!?" and "Look! We're using a thinkputerbox to make a thing look more..." yeah, yeah, yeah whatever, you get the picture, unimpressive), and so, without that to fall back on, they rely on retarded interviews with actors.

Now, television actors are all basically idiots. But there are two kinds of telly-acting idiots for the purpose of this rant: the kind who knows shit-all about their character, refuses to let that on, and just rambles moronically and the kind who knows slightly more than shit-all about their character but who still ramble moronically. The two actors who appear most frequently are the actors who play Professor Poindextinder and Douchey Governface - the latter gives all of his interviews dressed in a NASA flight jacket and a cowboy hat, now, just imagine, for a moment, someone dressed in a NASA flight jacket and a cowboy hat... Don't you just want to beat them untill they stop moving, "SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU'RE NOT A FUCKING ASTRONAUT, AND YOU'RE NOT A FUCKING COWBOY!!!"

What he actually is is an actor in a over-financed, under... -goodnessful TV show. Yet he thinks he's God's gift to female Space-Cowboys.

Sigh. I don't like 'Heroes'. Basically. Also, 'Heroes: Unmasked' is stupid. There, okay, I think that's my basic points carried across.

(In other news, its essay-season, and I'm thinking that it would be really great to be able to end all of my essays with tirades against pretentiously-dressed, shit-talking Hollywood pricks, and then conclude with the blatant lie that the preceding block of text actually expressed a coherent argument.)

Once again, Happy Dodecember buoys and grills.