I'm Bill Murray, You're Everybody Else...

Why hello there my little Slights-of-Hand.

Yesteryesterday I went to Manchester. It was a pretty impulsive thing to do. I like doing impulsive things. Indeed, I often feel like I have a duty to do impulsive things when I consider all the people in the world who are stuck with loads of committments and responsibilities and all that lame stuff, surely if I have the ability shake off all my plans and head over to Manchester with little over an hours notice, then I should. Otherwise I'd be like one of those flightless birds, being envied for my possession of wings yet never actually bringing myself to use them.

So off I popped, over to Manchester. I was the honoured guest of a certain Mr Luke McLeod, (whom I had very recently deleted as a friend from Facebook on account of I couldn't remember the last time I spoke/saw/remembered him - which made me feel a peculiarly 21st Century style of guilt). We went to see films, (me, Luke and his other honoured guestette, and loyal commentee of this blog, Sarah), the first film we went to watch was Be Kind Rewind, directed by the super-fun Michel Gondry, and starring the coolly-stagenamed Mos Def and the overrated Jack Black. This was a really good film, especially the scenes showing them reenacting classic films, ('what's this turning thing? huh? what? how is that supposed to be Men in Black? oh-OH! I see... that's clever!). The film was smile-enducing, yet not schmultzy, which equals a win in my books! The viewing was somewhat ruined however by the gaggle of dump-faced shitscapaders right behind us who would just not shut the fuck up - they eventually got thrown out but not before we missed what were probably some very important plot points.

The second film we saw was Jumper, now, I know I have a tendency to be quite lenient in my reviews of things, but Jumper was absolutely terrible and I have no reservations in stressing that point. Firstly, the origins of the powers were never really explained, which they should have been - that's one of the essential rules of the Superhero genre - all it says is that there have been Jumpers around since the Middle Ages, (as you would expect, it was pretty cold back then and people wanted to keep themselves warm! A word of advice, if you see this film, take the piss everytime someone uses the word 'jumper'), and that every since they emerged they had been hunted by rapid Papists... seeing as the Jumpers only weakness, as it happens, is huge amounts of electricity, I do wonder how 14th Century monks managed to kill any of them...

Ultimately, the film suffers from Captain Scarlet-syndrome, i.e. the inability to convince you that any of the characters are actually in any kind of palpable danger. Scarlet was completely industructible, and no matter how many times an episode would cliffhang with someone would point a gun at him, everyone but the most moronic of idiots would know that he would be perfectly fine by next week - the same with this film, the Jumpers always see the Paladins, (that's what the baddies are called... I know, its stupid...), coming, and its always cockiness on their part that stops them from disappearing at the first sign of danger.

Which led to another problem. You want the heroes dead. They're all a bunch of annoying twats, swanning around having all the fun in the world... they're not even antiheroic, they're just annoying. It almost makes me wish that Hollywood's recent vogue for casting Catholics as sinister murderous conspirators were true... as far as I see it, the Papacy is clearly the lesser of two evils here.

So, went back to Luke's flat, watched Ricky Gervais' new stand-up, (its not very good), and I went to sleep on an erotically hard floor. The next day I went to go take the train back home. Alas, my platform at the station was closed, so I had to go ask the Mancunians how to get home - unfortunately, all Mancunians are rude little tosspots and told me in their snarly little nasal voices to go get on the wrong rail replacement bus. So then I was stuck at the Airport, where another gobshite told me to wait for another half hour for another bus.

Anyway, I eventually got onto my train and decided to put my Open Return to good use: by stopping off at every station of interest. So yesterday I had a quick wander-round both Bolton and Chorely, ('Comin' In Your Ears', it alarmed me to learn, is actually the town of Chorley's unofficial motto).

Bolton was alright. There was a gay bar right by the train station, but it was shut. Further into the town they had a working replica of the first steam-driven machine ever run in Bolton, I stopped to look at it for a bit and read the plaques. While I was doing so, a group of 14ish-year old girls accumulated around me and their leader asked me, "Why are you looking at that wheel?"
I replied, (and this is a reply I'm actually quite proud of), "Because I've never seen it before."
The girls then went on to request shaggings. It was at that point when I politely made my exit.

Chorely was also alright. Its actually quite beorgeois, especially by Northern standards. I found a bar that was completely empty - not just slightly empty, but completely empty.

If I had to chose where was best, (which I do), I guess I probably would pick Bolton...

A Man What's Bin A Beenman...

The other day I was thinking about what to do with myself if I actually do manage to graduate from this hellhole.

I'm thinking of taking a job as a binman. Down in That London. The 'being in That London'-bit is due to several factors: 1) that's where the Foreign and Commonwealth Office lives, and if I want to get a job from them, it would help if I lived within pestering distance, 2) fun people live there, and after three years of perpetual loneliness, I figure it'd be fun to have a social life again and 3) That London is cool.

'Shut up Tom', I hear you all saying, 'we may be idiots, but we can at least understand why you'd want to live in That London, (why do you keep calling it that?), but you better give us a rational reason why you want to be a binman, or we'll send you to Bedlam!'

Well. Um. Err. Binmanry, I feel, would be a very rewarding vocation to vocate upon whilst waiting to get my better, dream job. I would imagine rubbish collection would be a very humble job, and honestly, I feel the human race could do with a bit more humbleness, so I'll lead by example! Secondly, I think I'd be alright at it: so far in my working life I've fumbled around in offices and worked behind a bar, both of these, if I'm being objective, were things I was shit at, so I think it'd be nice to do a job that I may actually have a chance of being alright at, and where I don't have to pretend to be nice to douchefaced customers or twatty employers.

But, the main reason is that I would really like to able to say at some point a decade down the line that I, Tom Deery, used to be a binman. It'd really boost my proletarian street-cred and make younger people feel uncomfortable around me. Both deserve yays.

Fairwell yon Blobs, we hardly knew ye...

BBC3 did a bit of a relaunch last night. Seeing as I have no life, this was a relatively big deal for me.

One thing that was on was a thing called 'Phoo Action', I'm going to talk about it for a bit: Phoo Action is like what a cop drama would be like if Noel Fielding scribbled all over it with crayons. Its set in 2012, (officially the most futuristic sounding year since 1996), and it follows the mutant-fighting 'sploits of Terry Phoo and Whitey Action (see, there names are the show's title, as the genre would demand). It was... alright, I guess. The BBC kind of has a problem where it seems completely unable to assign a coherent tone to its dramas, case in point, Torchwood. Phoo Action looks and feels like it belongs on CBBC, the main bad guys are a bunch of mutants and, while I'm sure their design looked good on paper, in real life they really only look acceptable to the eyes of children.

However, the female lead frequently wears very small pants, and sits with her legs wide open - the show is basically worth watching just for that. That, and pretty colours and what may turn out to be a decent double act, (hopefully).

Another thing that was on was 'Lily Allen and Friends'. This was as pleasantly surprising as the 'Charlotte Church Show' when that was first aired, and will probably get old just as fast. The twist with the show is that its content is in-part decided by Lily Allen's MySpace friends, which is 'interesting', if by 'interesting' I mean, 'I fucking hate young people'.

And this concludes the portion of the blog where I talk about Telly.

Tonight I'm going to go see the Subhumans. It will probably be the oldschooliest punk show I have ever attended. Yippee.

In other news. My laptop is still broke, and will continue to be broke for a long while and, when it finally does undergo the transition from broke back to not-broke, it will probably end up costing me around £200. Stupid technology...

"All the time the ladies be asking me: 'Tom D, what's one of your favourite things on the web?', and I say, 'Ladies! Ladies...'"

I love the Wikipedia Reference Desk service.

Its completely brilliant.

Basically, for those not in The Know, the Reference Desk is a big ol' wiki page, where passers-by can ask a question, and wait for Wikipedia's most knowledgable contributors to turn up and spill their brains over their query.

The Reference Desk is split into 8(-ish?) subsections: the Language Desk, (probably the single best free translation service on the entire interwebs, while far from instantaneous, it will always translate exactly what you want it to); the Computers and Shit Desk, for computers and shit; the... um, I don't know, the Pie Desk... for like... questions about pie; about a handful of others, and, my favourite, the Humanities Desk.

The Humanities Desk is there for questions relating to Art, History, Politics and et cetera, so already its piqued my interests. Its a great place to learn. Its home to the kind of people who manage to appear charasmatic via a textual medium, (I don't know how that's done... probably witchcraft...), and who are thus quite entertaining when they start typin' on about 18th Century Scotland, or the kinky exploits of Mao Zedong.

In addition, seeing as its a wiki page, its completely editable. So often, if I'm feeling in a brain-boxxy mood, I'll edit it. Help out some 14-year old Californian on their obvious questions, its pretty rewarding. But mostly, I like submitting replies that are slightly obtuse and sardonic - not unhelpful mind!, with some skill, it is possible to be obtuse without being unhelpful.

So yes. That's why I love the Wikipedia Reference Desk. In other news, the title is a HomestarRunner.com reference.

I have two things to say:

Here are two things that I had to say, but didn't have anyone to say them to:

1) It was snowing earlier. It was great.

2) I saw a man sporting a Souvarov moustache identical to the kind I was sporting months ago. Seeing as nobody has really sported one of those since 1912, I came to assume that he must have seen me walking around with it before Christmas and become inspired. Yippee.

In other news, February is Moustache Month. May I politely suggest to my hairfaced readers that they start shaving all of the bits of their lower head that are not their upper lip? I know I will be!

Crapfully yours,
Frida Livery

Strangerous Times!

So yestereve, I was over at the Bobbin, thieving their Wifis, (the Bobbin is a rather nice little rock bar where Old Rosie costs less than Strongbow and where the TVs are more likely to portray the All American Rejects than the Manchester Uniteds), just, as the old cliché goes, minding my own business.

And then this guy came up to me, really quite drunk, and demanded to use my laptop. Understandably I was all like, 'um... no?'

But then he explained himself, he said that he was some kind of Internetman, and that he ran some kind of Internets, and that he had just been scammed out of several hundred thousand pounds by some wily Nigerian. I pointed out to him that pretending to be scammed is actually a fairly common way of commencing a scam, so then he said that it would be alright if I did the typing-and-clicking and he'd tell me what to do. No harm in this, thought I, although he did distract me from some rather promising games of Scrabulous... So we went through the motions of checking his Internets, he rang his friend, I talked to his friend, passwords were exchanged, yadda yadda. At some point, he asked me whether I drank, and I said "yeh, Old Rosie if you're buying." He accused me of being cheeky, but I still maintain that was rather reasonable.

So then, then crisis was averted. He came back to my table and handed me a pint of Old Rosie. 'Result,' thought I. Then he started being all weird. He turned to me and started asking loads of vague, yet intimate, questions, like 'who are you?', and 'what do you not do?'.

Now, I'm not one of those people who views their life as being particularly purposeful. Maybe that's quite tragic? Personally, I find my lack of any long-term ambitions quite liberating - I take enough pleasure from having a simple lie-in on a Wednesday morning without having to feel the need to constantly achieve some kind of dream. Then the man, (who's name was Damon Wright, as, I have just realised, I am under no obligation to protect his anonymity), started getting really angry. He started ranting at me about how I have to justify my existance.

I said, "Of course I fucking don't. Not to anyone, especially not some random drunken twat in a pub."

Then he started pulling the post-colonial guilt card. He accused me of 'having paid for my clothes', and being a 'middle-class white boy'. Now. All in all, being a middle-class white boy is pretty beneficial, indeed, probably the only thing wrong with it is occassionally being called a 'middle-class white boy', because unlike other prejudicial abuse you can't simply reply 'yes I am, and proud of it!', without appearing like a complete and utter Tory. Like, if I had been someone of the negroid persuasion, and he had called me a 'middle-class black boy', I'd be quite able to express some righteous indignation. Alas, no, I was not stuck shouting at some drunken twat having to justify having ever taking part in an economic exchange, (with my 'bought and paid for' jeans), and, indeed, my life itself.

I gave him my all time favourite fact about the so-called evils of free trade, that today, after decades of globalised free trade, there are more obese people than starving people. He said, yeah, in the West. I said, no, that's a global average. He said, show me one fat person in a natural environment. I said, the concept of a 'natural environment' is bullshit, human beings are civilisation-builders and globalisation is much more concurrent with human nature than the prehistoric hunter gatherer lifestyle. He pointed out that Western society 'overproduces'. I said, how is 'overproduction' even possible in a civilisation that thrives on the production of surplus. He asked if I'd ever even read a newspaper. I told him to stop being a patronising cunt. He claimed that he wasn't. I told him to fuck off.

So on, and so on, eventually, it became evident that he wasn't going to fuck off. The onus, it seemed was on me to be the off-fucker. However, I was only a third of the way through my free pint, and to abandon my pint would support his claim that I was just another wasteful middle-class white boy, that, and my Northern memes simply would not permit the abandonement of property. Eventually, I ended up storming out anyway, with my pint in hand. I felt guilty for depriving the Bobbin, (an establishment I still do rather like), of one of their pint glasses, but meh, they have loads, and I needed one at home anyway.

On the way home, I decided that if I ever met the Nigerian who scammed that man out of his £165,000, I would shake his hand.

Let's talk about Iraq

I am probably unique amongst the 43-posted-semi-political-bloggers in that this will be the first time I will mention Iraq.

One of the reasons I've taken this long is that I'm not actually against the Iraq war, which is something many people find shocking, but meh. BUT MEH!

This wannae always the case, in 2003 I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war - indeed, I was even interviewed by the BBC whilst on my way to the pre-War anti-War protests, and I said to the reporter lady, "if anything I do here can save a single human live, then it'd be worth it". Search it on the BBC News website, it may still be there somewhere... But yeah, at some point after the (Iraqi) general election I started to change my mind. I started to seek information about pre-War Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was a genocidal bastard, and that he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, but this campaign was stopped by the no-fly zones imposed by George Bush the Elder following the First Gulf War.

Ultimately I concluded that the Iraq War was a war intended to protect American hegemony. As, indeed, have many anti-War people. The difference is, I view this as a perfectly reasonable reason for war. Iraq, as it turns out, is (or rather, was), one of the most uniquely powerful states in the world. Iraq has one of the deciding votes on the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Council, OPEC was designed to be a body that acted in tandem to secure its own power as the virtual monopoly of oil production, and so, its own OPEC Council was designed as a body to determine when, and how much oil, should be delivered to the oil-hungry nations of the West, (indeed, the disastorous economic slump of the 1970s was caused by the (primarily Arab) nations of the OPEC decided to withdraw oil supply to the West). Before 2003, Iraq was preparing to do something much more damaging, they were preparing a coalition within the OPEC nations to overthrough the US Dollar as the primary currency of exchange within the oil market: a brief explanation: perhaps some of you have heard the term 'petrodollar' - this is because according to global law (as set down by OPEC), oil can only be bought and sold in US Dollars, so, if any nation wants to buy any oil, it has to transfer its own currency into USD before it can do so, likewise, if a nation wants to sell oil, they can oil accept prices in USD.

This gives the USA a great deal of power, as every industrialised economy in the world has to buy up their currency if they want to maintain their oil-hungry wealth producers. Iraq, pre-2003, being a nation in contempt of US power saught to transfer the sole petro-currency from the USD to the new, and quite dynamic, Euro. The Euro is unique within post-WWII history as being the only currency to pose any economic challenge to the the USD.

America would face a complete economic collapse if OPEC (if convinced by Iraq et co.) had switched the global oil-exchanging currency from the USD to the Euro, as every nation in the world would suddenly seek to sell back their vast reserves of USD, instantly devaluing the US economy.

(Such a scenario would be, in the short term, a real advantage to the Eurozone nations, and, it is worth noting, that, aside from Spain (being dominated by a single, post-Fascist party at the time), all Eurozone nations decided to oppose the Iraq War.)

So ultimately, yes, Iraq is a war in defence of American hegemony, both military, yet, more importantly, economically - the post-War Iraqi government was one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining the USD as the international currency of oil exchange.

But, however, even after this acheivement, (which probably helped secure the dominance of Western economies into this new millenium), has lead to great loss of life, (and I won't deny for a second that it has). The question is, that had Saddam had had his way, and dethroned the USD, likely many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world would have faced starvation and destitution as their economies, so intricately pegged to America's, collapsed, and basics like food and clean water became utterly unaffordable.

In the West it is easy to see economic woes as an abstraction, as we, lucky as we are, are able to live in luxury through even the worst economic disaster. But for the nations that depend on us, this isn't the case.

Anyway... I gather I'm probably wandering to far into the abstract here. The facts on the ground are that Iraq seems to be facing a good year ahead of it in 2008, and honestly, I wish the best for the Iraqi people.