Winter is the worst time to use public transport: Sitting beside people spluttering, sweating and sneezing up their diseases and watching numerous sticky and clammy hands grip onto the hand rails in a form of unpleasant viral pollination. Looking out the window desperately ignoring this festering can of illness you are aboard is no good either, as the windows run and drip with the condensation droplets of a thousand breaths out of bacteria glooped lungs.
A bus in winter is surely god's petri dish.
Of course, whatever the season, there are always risks riding loose on the public transport. Having to put up with annoying strangers where our paths have crossed only because we both happened to catch the same bus is one of them.
In the past few public transport experiences I have been sung to by a strange, thin, little man in his late 20’s, dressed like a marathon runner, performing fully U2’s Beautiful Day (complete with Bono lunging to-and-fro stagger in my general direction) at a bus stop then stopping to take in our (absent) adulation – at which point I would have loved to have started a round up of Gay Bar (complete with jagged arm motion on the lyric “I’ve got something to put in you” in his general direction) with the other waiting commuters. I have been suggested as a potential husband to a girl by the rest of her Romanian family of professional beggars (I don’t speak Romanian, but sometimes you don’t need to). And I have been on a packed commuter bus where two young lads were talking loudly.
One was saying that he had a “hangy, man” from drinking the evening before (I correctly ascertained this was some sort of verbalised text speak for “hangover”) and that having a “hangy” when also having to work (presumably in Top Shop) was “not good, man” and that he hated having a “hangy”. “Hangys are the worst” apparently, “but a hangy shows you had a good time, man”. Ah, the catch-22 of juvenile alcoholic self-poisoning.
His pal then talked purposely loud, for the benefit of all us other passengers, for 20 minutes about how he finishes his work “early, man”, then he is liberated: “I can go out drinking and if I get a hangy I have all night to get over it” and that, now he mentioned it, he felt sorry for everyone on the bus having to go to their “boring office 9-5 jobs” because it wouldn’t be him: “I couldn’t work like that, man, in an office”. He couldn’t understand why people would go. “Look at them all, man.” He went on (and on) “all going to their rubbish jobs, man, all of them miserable on the bus because they have to go to work in an office, ha, ha! They can’t think of anything else to do, man, they are all so boring man, with their office lives. Look at their faces, man! They don’t even want to go, man. No one is having fun like me on this bus, man. These people on the bus, man, they’ve got it bad, man. I feel for them all, man, ha, ha...”
I took a snipers glimpse of him, in his grey beanie hat and postman’s uniform.
Yes, that is the true freedom – the life of a Postal Worker. We all envy them when we watch out the windows of our cubed offices as they soar, spiralling, forever upwards, into the sky each morning, at the end of their working day. They are neither bound with limits of science nor tethered to our grim rule of law. They are only held back by their own imagination and wanderlust.
Yes young Sir, you are a regular blue thing from Avatar.
Women want to be seen with you, men to be you. But men can never be you, for they are just men, not Postmen, like you.
Monday 29 November 2010
Sunday 28 November 2010
Come to my house and eat my food and judge me superficially
It was a fortune or sorts to be able to watch an afternoon episode of the ITV show Dinner Date when on holiday recently. From what I gathered it is, essentially, the younger sibling of Come Dine with Me (C4) with the same premise of people cooking meals and others giving their evenings’ scores. However, to drop in a terribly witty cooking analogy, Dinner Date is served with a side order of seasonal “Passive deconstruction of female empowerment” vegetables.
A single man is taxied, during the week, to the homes of the single women he has chosen to eat with, based on a blind selection of their menus from a raft of menus at the beginning of the show. The women, for their part, expect to impress him enough during their evening to beat the other competing women to “win” a proper date at the end of the week.
A way to a man's heart is through his stomach and the willingness of a lady to cook nice food for their man is the important factor in finding compatibility for a relationship, are rules I would have expected more likely created if the 1950's had simply failed to run out.
You follow each woman as they prepare their 3 course meals, often with an easy listening comedy approach for the afternoon [like a local radio station's afternoon rock programme playing The Eagles] commentary from the off-screen narrator. You get to see the women fret when things go wrong in the kitchen and be relieved when things go right. You see how each woman tries their best to impress with their cuisine presentation on a variety of plates and roof slates and how they concern themselves about the man finding their meal delicious.
And all the time I am watching – there is a thought which persists that I surely can’t be the only one watching is thinking: It doesn’t matter what you cook love, he’s going to choose the tall blonde that he was with the previous night. Honestly, sweetheart, you could cook the soup equivalent of Ruben's painting of the The Massacre of the Innocents, but it aint going to make you any prettier.
And I am not going to pass much more comment about the woman who made an excellent summer berry frozen desert other than she lived with so many birds that she, almost certainly, also smelt of bird.
I wish I was wrong and that the food actually provides some sway in all this but the outcome is crushingly obvious come the time for him to stop enjoying these women serving him food and declare the winner. Will he choose the lady who created that daring and avant-garde flavour combination starter or will he go for the one in the mini-skirt?
For me though, there is a real concept high of the show. The women get to rate the man each after their meal too. They award him up to 3 stars. Ha, ha, the silly women squeezing every ounce of all their tiny brain power to think whether to give him an extra half star. In reality this counts for nothing. Their scores are just cutaway fluff and it is the man’s decision which ultimately counts for all.
When he decides, clearly on the most attractive woman – not even caring that he can’t overly remember what she cooked him [not that this matters anyway with the prize a meal at a restaurant, rather defeating the need for them to be good cooks to begin with] – or that she is way out of his league and he knows there is no future in it – he isn't bothered because she doesn’t get a say. She has to have a meal with him in view of strangers because he chose her and that’s that.
Still, we witness all 3 women getting themselves washed, dressed and perfumed for the prospective winner's end of week date. They, of course, don’t yet know his decision [Really? Not even deep down? Go on, look right down there, I think you’ll find your answer]. The 2 less attractive women get a knock on the door and are handed a microwave meal for 1 by a production flunky. The most attractive woman answers the door to the man.
That this is the Dinner Date's resolution, it feels it is one removed meal away from a man being filmed looking at a few Facebook public profiles on his laptop whilst drinking a cup-a-soup from a hairline fractured mug, then shouting "that one" at the screen and grabbing his jacket.
In another sense, Dinner Date is sad narrative of how little we have progressed… men being driven around to women who will freely feed them in raised hope of being picked for a little extra attention from them. In all honesty, it is as if the Spice Girls’ ethos brought through their musical portfolio had never even existed.
A single man is taxied, during the week, to the homes of the single women he has chosen to eat with, based on a blind selection of their menus from a raft of menus at the beginning of the show. The women, for their part, expect to impress him enough during their evening to beat the other competing women to “win” a proper date at the end of the week.
A way to a man's heart is through his stomach and the willingness of a lady to cook nice food for their man is the important factor in finding compatibility for a relationship, are rules I would have expected more likely created if the 1950's had simply failed to run out.
You follow each woman as they prepare their 3 course meals, often with an easy listening comedy approach for the afternoon [like a local radio station's afternoon rock programme playing The Eagles] commentary from the off-screen narrator. You get to see the women fret when things go wrong in the kitchen and be relieved when things go right. You see how each woman tries their best to impress with their cuisine presentation on a variety of plates and roof slates and how they concern themselves about the man finding their meal delicious.
And all the time I am watching – there is a thought which persists that I surely can’t be the only one watching is thinking: It doesn’t matter what you cook love, he’s going to choose the tall blonde that he was with the previous night. Honestly, sweetheart, you could cook the soup equivalent of Ruben's painting of the The Massacre of the Innocents, but it aint going to make you any prettier.
And I am not going to pass much more comment about the woman who made an excellent summer berry frozen desert other than she lived with so many birds that she, almost certainly, also smelt of bird.
I wish I was wrong and that the food actually provides some sway in all this but the outcome is crushingly obvious come the time for him to stop enjoying these women serving him food and declare the winner. Will he choose the lady who created that daring and avant-garde flavour combination starter or will he go for the one in the mini-skirt?
For me though, there is a real concept high of the show. The women get to rate the man each after their meal too. They award him up to 3 stars. Ha, ha, the silly women squeezing every ounce of all their tiny brain power to think whether to give him an extra half star. In reality this counts for nothing. Their scores are just cutaway fluff and it is the man’s decision which ultimately counts for all.
When he decides, clearly on the most attractive woman – not even caring that he can’t overly remember what she cooked him [not that this matters anyway with the prize a meal at a restaurant, rather defeating the need for them to be good cooks to begin with] – or that she is way out of his league and he knows there is no future in it – he isn't bothered because she doesn’t get a say. She has to have a meal with him in view of strangers because he chose her and that’s that.
Still, we witness all 3 women getting themselves washed, dressed and perfumed for the prospective winner's end of week date. They, of course, don’t yet know his decision [Really? Not even deep down? Go on, look right down there, I think you’ll find your answer]. The 2 less attractive women get a knock on the door and are handed a microwave meal for 1 by a production flunky. The most attractive woman answers the door to the man.
That this is the Dinner Date's resolution, it feels it is one removed meal away from a man being filmed looking at a few Facebook public profiles on his laptop whilst drinking a cup-a-soup from a hairline fractured mug, then shouting "that one" at the screen and grabbing his jacket.
A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
In another sense, Dinner Date is sad narrative of how little we have progressed… men being driven around to women who will freely feed them in raised hope of being picked for a little extra attention from them. In all honesty, it is as if the Spice Girls’ ethos brought through their musical portfolio had never even existed.
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Against Martian reservations
NASA is advertising a job of a lifetime. Or more accurately: a job for life. Or much more accurately: the job of life. On the planet Mars.
NASA believes that it is now technically possible to send a group of people to effectively colonise Mars.
The 9 month trip is a one way ticket affair, however, as a return journey would be both prohibitive in cost and complexity to undertake. The Mars colony will instead be expected to survive and grow in relative independence and be maintained through regularly dispatched deliveries of provisions. Such as, I would assume, air.
All this, of course, opens up two polar lines of thought. One - of human existence beyond Earth, where the potential to expand the reasoning and the infinite beauty of our position in the universe can finally begin to be fulfilled. And the other - The alien quadrilogy. Yes, wicked Martians, malevolent computers and the wrathful Khan are all conjured up when thinking about branching out into living on other planets.
But what the outcome to the manned Mars mission will be, to my mind, lies somewhere nearer in-between Lost in Space and Capricorn One. Financial cut backs.
Even if it gets the all systems go [that's a NASA analogy there] I can see NASA quickly outsourcing the rockets fired to Mars stuffed with the air and magazine subscriptions. Times are hard for NASA. And once the colonists are launched the euphoria will likely dissipate as quickly as the plume from their shuttle thanks to our generation Y lifestyles, so who will notice a couple of corners cut? Apart from the Mars Colonists. And they won’t really get a say. They are glorified dog cosmonauts – we have to send them air in rockets, for heaven’s sake.
The hippies will stop protesting in their tie-die fashions and no longer hold hands around the launch site and run out of daffodils to stick into the exhausts of the booster packs. Songs with the words “Mars” “Spaceman” and “Stars” in the lyrics will swiftly fall of the Radio playlists. It will still be pretty exciting for the colonists, don’t get me wrong there. Those guys will still be still very excited for most of this, I am sure. I mean - come on! MARS! But for the people back on Earth the Mars colony after a month or two of them landing will be nothing but a no longer clicked internet bookmark for a sponsored Mars bio-sphere webcam site when it becomes all too apparent an ancient alien race are not about to hunt the colonists as game.
I wouldn't be surprised if NASA outsourced to Parcel Force: A Mars colonist finding a Failed Delivery card behind the bio-sphere air lock. The little scientist shaking his fist into the web-cam, “I was waiting in for it all day! You all saw!”
But no one did.
So yeah, good luck getting your air supplies, space losers.
NASA believes that it is now technically possible to send a group of people to effectively colonise Mars.
The 9 month trip is a one way ticket affair, however, as a return journey would be both prohibitive in cost and complexity to undertake. The Mars colony will instead be expected to survive and grow in relative independence and be maintained through regularly dispatched deliveries of provisions. Such as, I would assume, air.
All this, of course, opens up two polar lines of thought. One - of human existence beyond Earth, where the potential to expand the reasoning and the infinite beauty of our position in the universe can finally begin to be fulfilled. And the other - The alien quadrilogy. Yes, wicked Martians, malevolent computers and the wrathful Khan are all conjured up when thinking about branching out into living on other planets.
But what the outcome to the manned Mars mission will be, to my mind, lies somewhere nearer in-between Lost in Space and Capricorn One. Financial cut backs.
Even if it gets the all systems go [that's a NASA analogy there] I can see NASA quickly outsourcing the rockets fired to Mars stuffed with the air and magazine subscriptions. Times are hard for NASA. And once the colonists are launched the euphoria will likely dissipate as quickly as the plume from their shuttle thanks to our generation Y lifestyles, so who will notice a couple of corners cut? Apart from the Mars Colonists. And they won’t really get a say. They are glorified dog cosmonauts – we have to send them air in rockets, for heaven’s sake.
The hippies will stop protesting in their tie-die fashions and no longer hold hands around the launch site and run out of daffodils to stick into the exhausts of the booster packs. Songs with the words “Mars” “Spaceman” and “Stars” in the lyrics will swiftly fall of the Radio playlists. It will still be pretty exciting for the colonists, don’t get me wrong there. Those guys will still be still very excited for most of this, I am sure. I mean - come on! MARS! But for the people back on Earth the Mars colony after a month or two of them landing will be nothing but a no longer clicked internet bookmark for a sponsored Mars bio-sphere webcam site when it becomes all too apparent an ancient alien race are not about to hunt the colonists as game.
I wouldn't be surprised if NASA outsourced to Parcel Force: A Mars colonist finding a Failed Delivery card behind the bio-sphere air lock. The little scientist shaking his fist into the web-cam, “I was waiting in for it all day! You all saw!”
But no one did.
So yeah, good luck getting your air supplies, space losers.
Addendum blog 7th November
Hello you true truth seeker of the truth. Did you see the panic caused with the unicorn blog revelation? Only 2 weeks since the Blog was published, The Papacy released the news - or should that be "unicorn smokescreen"? - that condoms might not be all that against the Catholic faith after all. In certain circumstances. [Like when the real reason is revealed about why all the magical unicorns are dead]
The mainstream news all picked up on it. It was huge, worldwide news. That's how major an announcement it was.
But we know what it really means.
Let's say no more. But I'll know you by the masking tape put in the symbol of the X across the front of your woolen jumper.
The mainstream news all picked up on it. It was huge, worldwide news. That's how major an announcement it was.
But we know what it really means.
Let's say no more. But I'll know you by the masking tape put in the symbol of the X across the front of your woolen jumper.
Sunday 7 November 2010
Noah killed all the Unicorns
Step away from the Dan Brown books about coded religious messages in paintings, encrypted biblical texts, holy bloodlines and secular cult secrets placed deep within a labyrinth of tunnels [but watch the Google hits rocket for this blog now! Clever Greville, very clever] because I have made an actual Theobibcalogical discovery. Now I think you'll find no one has said it is of "Jesus: Lost King of Atlantis" proportions. No one has mentioned that. I didn't hear anyone talking about that, did you? No. No you didn't. Best keep it that way. Because the truth is, of course, too powerful to go to the authorities with. It is, naturally, far too mind blowing a truth to publish to be simply bought indiscriminately by the mere public to give me unaccountable wealth. Far better to put it here, on the head of this needle, to be read by only those whom seek the truth in the... [sigh] haystack... of zombie alien approved "information" and their rubber stamped "facts".
For some They Live wasn't just an audaciously great film.
I was minding my own business, looking at a 19th century tract - we've all been there. I turned to a page where the author proposed the only possible plan which Noah must have followed to harmoniously house all the animals in the world together in a big boat. Or Ark, if you will. Or as the author seems to have willed, a large floating shed, with one slot at the side for air.
One of the boxes immediately caught my eye. In it were animals which appeared to me as recognizable as they are non-existent: 2 unicorns.
Unicorns
UNICORNS
What was going on? There was definitely some hidden message here: Could it be a subtle sign left for a future person, such as myself, to interpret when some form of superinformationhighway had been invented? I think I can speak for everyone that this is the only rational thought we have open to us.
I don't know if you have done much theological research into the absence of the unicorn in jungles, or wherever they should be, in todays world, but with - would you believe? - only the briefest of Google searches, I found, what I gather are, all the theories handily detailed in this (possibly) government/zombie alien funded website, [which, let's be honest though may be maintained by a woman in her 40's wearing a self-knitted full body unicorn outfit, should not nessecarily count against it's content], and each start with the view that the Unicorns never made it onto the Ark.
It was clear to me that the 19th century author had this secret message: the Unicorns had made it onto the Ark after all! And from this, it is obvious to anyone what happened.
But one question remains: why did Noah slaughter the Unicorns?
I prefer to think that it was always in Noah’s plans to not come back with Unicorns. Although, I also prefer to think of Noah as played by Smokey and the Bandit era Burt Reynolds.
In any case, with his neighbors mocking him as he made preparations – he needed an answer to their disparaging questions:
“So, Noah, you’re going to put all the animals in the world on this boat, nice joist work by the way, with you and your family living along side them until the diluvium flood your God will inflict upon this sinful earth to kill us ordinary, everyday, simple, idol worshiping, copyright infringing folk retracts?”
“Yip.”
“But how, dear Noah, will you feed all these animals?”
“Plants.”
“But what of the flesh eating animals, Noah? They must also eat on this long and arduous test of your faith.”
“Unicorns.”
“Unicorns?”
“Yip.”
“Hmm, fair enough.”
And I can just imagine the Unicorns waiting in line at the gangplank:
“Hey, Debbie, have you noticed?
“Noticed what this time, Neil?”
“The Javan Rhinoceros, only two of them. Only two Long-beaked echidnas as well. Tigers, Gorillas, panda bears, even the Marmosa andersoni… just 2 each! In fact all the other animals, they're only getting on the boat two-by-two. And now look at us! 26 of us! We are the chosen ones, alright, Debbie! It's because we can talk. Things will be different when we get on board, you’ll see! We’ll be at the Captain’s dinner table every night.”
Later, as the film, below, harrowingly reveals through the medium of song, Noah came up with some vague story about them free wheeling unicorns going off frolicking instead of getting on board and "nothing he could do" when they "floated off". Yeah right. Like that sounds plausible. But until now, laughably, that is what people actually believed.
The fact is, Noah was spot on to choose the Unicorns: For, I’d like to imagine, they turned out to be the most delicious of all animals in God’s kingdom and their horns were actually those coloured marshmallow twirls.
Of course I would also like to imagine that the ark was less of a boat and more of an articulated trailer. And the flood more of the state of Texas. And the animals were not so much placed in a deliberate matrix for optimal harmony between species but jammed into wooden freight boxes. And the animals were bottles of illegal Hooch.Are you watching Car. D'gan? - this is real blogging.
Now, introducing Mr. Jimi Hendrix.
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