Question: what do accidentally swallowing a live tiger, tripping whilst you're carrying three running chainsaws and seeing Susan Boyle peering through your bedroom window late at night have in common? Answer: if you survive the encounter, you'll probably become such a bag of nerves that blowing bubbles with a unicorn made of ice cream and candyfloss would feel like running through a minefield wearing springy rubber clown shoes.
I mention this because, obviously, once somebody has become like this, they'll need some sort of remedy to help calm them down, especially if simply reading this sentence has sent them into panic mode and they're wildly flinging their stools left, right and centre in a vain attempt to ward off the ninja assassins who seek their lives, although in reality said ninja assassins are simply horrified commuters who have just had their days and coffees ruined. Anyway, back on point, my aunt recently gave me a 'relaxation exercise' CD and asked me to try it, simply to see if it worked. Now, before I hear you all tutting collectively and dismissing this as new-age hippie crap with a casual roll of your eyes, bear in mind that music therapy has been proven to work- I've even dabbled in making it myself, after a bit of research into the effects of sound in treating insomnia. However, note that I said 'music therapy' there and not 'music with a drawling moron dubbed over the top of it therapy'.
Unfortunately, as it transpired, this CD had one of the aforementioned drawling morons on it, and from the very instant he started talking, I knew that he and I were not going to get along. The words that emerged from his stupid, failing mouth, along with the monotone subhuman voice he spoke them in, told me exactly what he both looked and acted like. Imagine a man wearing paper-thin skinny jeans and a pretentious little moustache and goatee sipping a soy-free venti vanillawhip frappucino whilst performing yoga and attempting to channel his chakra into his iPad, which is positioned exactly in the room so as not to disturb the feng shui, all while listening to some obscure band that he'll stop listening to once they get three fans. Now imagine that there's no way you can possibly punch him in the face. That's the level of irritating contained in this CD. That's what we're dealing with.
Still, I suppose I could forgive him for having to appear on the CD. Judging from his obvious lack of any sort of education apart from a doctorate in talking an absolute waterfall of verbal diarrhoea, he must be completely unemployable and therefore has no other possible channel of income. I'm assuming that he did especially poorly in biology in school; at one point he even uttered the phrase "All the muscles in your skull are beginning to relax", at which point I stopped wondering if he was just an idiot and began wondering if he was even human in the first place. Maybe this stuff works for his species. Whatever. Also, contrary to the image he projects of himself, he'd make a woeful novelist, largely due to the fact that for the first fifteen minutes he was talking, he ended every sentence with the word 'relaxed' or 'relaxing', as if hoping to persuade us through sheer repetition that it really is working and that he's not just some trickster trying to make money from relaxation CDs.
Actually, I have a funny feeling that I may be onto something there. At one stage in the CD, he decides to count down from ten (thereby letting us know that he at least has rudimentary math skills) and tells us that for every number he counts down, we're going to feel ten percent more relaxed, and he's going to feel ten percent smarter (well, he doesn't actually say the latter, but you could tell he was thinking it). He reaches two: "You are now at the deepest level of relaxtion that you can achieve". He proceeds to one: "You are now more relaxed than you've ever been". There's the evidence, right there. The more lies you tell, the harder it is to keep up the continuity. And now he's stumbled, and his sham has been revealed. And we're only halfway through. In any sane universe, this fraudster would be hunted down and shot. Unfortunately we live in a universe where David Cameron is PM and Jedward are well-loved celebrities, so it looks like we're stuck with this berk.
Anyway, we'll forgive him his little fibs and continue on the journey he has laid out for us. Apparently, this deep relaxation that has been achieved "allows you to drift, to travel wherever you want, to be whoever you want to be". Whenever I opened my eyes, however, I still wasn't the king of Jupiter, spending a hard day defending my planet from the savage moon-bears of Io before finally coming home to party in space gold, chocolate and the spoils of war, so more lies there, I'm afraid. However, if this reality was not to be realised, it was okay, because I didn't have long to be disappointed before Captain iLatte decided to launch into another little monotone speech to help me get relaxed, this time completely jettisoning all pretense of reality whatsoever.
After telling me that I could drift anywhere I wanted, he now announces that I'm standing in front of an old house. Now, if I had the opportunity to travel absolutely anywhere I wanted, I would not say 'I'd like to go to an old abandoned house please'. In fact, the evidence keeps mounting up that this man is a twisted, pathological liar, and I would recommend that he heavily invests the profits from these CDs into therapy of his own. But I digress. After taking me through an overly long tour of the house (once again revealing his astonishing lack of prowess as a writer, using mindbogglingly descriptive phrases such as 'lovely wood' to help form a picture of a door in your mind's eye) he tells me that I'm now in a garden. And now I'm sitting down and looking at the sky. And there's a single fluffy cloud in the sky. Nice, but it's still not Jupiter, so I don't care.
This seems like the start of what would be the one true relaxing part of this entire exercise, but it's somewhat ruined by the man suddenly announcing "Your troubles and worries are bursting out of your head". The mere idea of absolutely anything bursting out of your head is terrifying at best, and if you're listening to the CD to help calm you down and your cause of distress is a madman who is currently inflating your brain with a bicycle pump he's just jammed in your ear, then the choice of wording is just downright tactless. This guy was just annoying before, but he's swiftly becoming downright sinister.
And it doesn't stop there. Sergeant Biscotto goes on to describe how I'm aiming all of this negative energy at the cloud and piling it onto it. The cloud, he says, progressively turns from its white, fluffy self and becomes a darker and darker red, finally becoming black, before the sun comes out and melts it away, leaving a clear blue sky with warm sunlight spilling onto my face. And then, with a predictability that makes me wonder if his mother was a metronome, he reiterates that I'm feeling relaxed. But I'm not. I'm not relaxed. All I can feel is remorse; remorse for piling all of my troubles and worries onto an innocent cloud, then standing by without so much as a shrug as the sun murdered it in cold blood. That cloud had done nothing to me. The immense feeling of guilt inside was almost as bad as the feeling of despair I got whenever I realised that there was someone out there who earnestly believes that the sun can melt clouds.
So next time you're feeling stressed, make a cup of hot chocolate, or coffee, or whatever your beverage of choice happens to be, stick your feet up and put on some smooth jazz. Or maybe unload a bullet into the head of a baby seal and crane kick a dolphin. Anything except helping to support this dimwitted, lying psychopath, basically.
Knowing that he wouldn't be able to make more of these CDs: now, that's relaxing.
Monday, 5 December 2011
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
A Lad Called Incontinence
Hello. It's me again. I'm in a restaurant. Chiquitos, to be precise. And I'm having a good time. The food is nice, I'm with friends who I haven't seen in a while, and the atmosphere is great. General warm-hearted hubbub is just audible under energetic Spanish music pouring out from loudspeakers throughout the restaurant, accompanied in turn by the gentle sound of giggle gurgle gurgle thud giggle.
I looked up to investigate at this point. As it turned out, it was not an epileptic absorbing fifty hits of LSD and then staring into a strobe light, as I had first anticipated, but rather it was a toddler who was unsteady on his feet, exploring the restaurant with his mummy never more than a foot away, which is astoundingly more pedestrian and boring in comparison with my first assumption. Uninterested, I turned back to the table, wondering how long the main course was going to take to arrive. And that's when I saw it.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the toddler get up from its fall behind a set of steps; arising much like the kraken, except smaller, with less tentacles and without the general stench of rotting plankton. However, looks can be deceiving, and no matter how different its appearance is from that of the kraken, its soul is every bit as black and its intentions are the same. And now it had locked its gaze on me. You could practically see the crosshairs forming on its corneas. A half-gummy, half-toothy smile spread slowly across its head, and the beast began its journey forward.
Eventually, it arrived over at our table, still staring at me, still grinning at me. And that's when the panic set in. I have no idea how to react to children that age. There's no definable purpose behind what it's doing. And there's no way to communicate with it. You can't talk to it, because it doesn't understand anything except for disjointed single words, such as 'food', 'eat', 'cry', 'potty' and 'kill'. And you certainly couldn't drop-kick it off the face of the planet, because its mother was standing there, smiling away, and she'd probably get quite upset and defensive, because Leviathan Jr has her brainwashed into not realising that if I did indeed boot it beyond orbit and into the sun, I'd be doing her a massive favour. So what do I do? Do I smile back? Children are unpredictable at best, and if it doesn't like my smile, it'll start crying, and then it'll look as if I'm the monster. Pseudo-kraken is sneaky like that.
I also started to wonder if it could read my thoughts, and I realised that if it could, it would discover that I knew what its true motive was, and it was at that point that it stopped grinning and finally lowered its guard, allowing me to look it straight in its now-glaring eyes and catch a glimpse of the true cold-hearted darkness that forever resides at its very core, alongside all of the poor unfortunates it has devoured over its lifetime. So I finally decided to follow through with the only sane course of action, and I played dead until it lost interest and giggle-gurgle-thumped its way across to the other side of the restaurant in search of fresher meat. And so endeth this overly-dramatised cautionary tale.
Now, you may be wondering what the point of this all is. Well, basically, in this day and age, people are eating out far less often (a statistic wholly backed up by the fact that this entire encounter occurred in a fairly packed restaurant). Nonetheless, I have deduced that this has nothing to do with inflation or, indeed, the general state of the economy at all. Even if I could purchase a grand sixty-course feast for five pennies and a couple of pebbles, I still wouldn't eat out, largely due to the fact that I'd only feel safe eating out if I was carrying a fishing spear, an RPG launcher and a necklace fashioned out of live remote mines. I can't see it being much fun for other diners either, especially if they're about to tuck into their chimichangas only to discover that an aforementioned notsogiant squid has alarmed me into detonating my own brains up the wall. On the scale of 'Things Which Would Probably Damage Sales Levels In A Food Outlet', it's on par with an ice cream parlour hiring a lad called Incontinence who puts on a coy smile and winks every time he hands someone their chocolate milkshake.
In short, restaurants should ban children. More people would eat out if they knew that there was no chance of A) a small, semi-humanoid creature crying into their pizza and burping milky sick over the waiter, or B) being swallowed by said creature and then digested in its stomach for several millenia, before their main course has even arrived.
Man the harpoons, men, and let's finish this once and for all.
I looked up to investigate at this point. As it turned out, it was not an epileptic absorbing fifty hits of LSD and then staring into a strobe light, as I had first anticipated, but rather it was a toddler who was unsteady on his feet, exploring the restaurant with his mummy never more than a foot away, which is astoundingly more pedestrian and boring in comparison with my first assumption. Uninterested, I turned back to the table, wondering how long the main course was going to take to arrive. And that's when I saw it.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the toddler get up from its fall behind a set of steps; arising much like the kraken, except smaller, with less tentacles and without the general stench of rotting plankton. However, looks can be deceiving, and no matter how different its appearance is from that of the kraken, its soul is every bit as black and its intentions are the same. And now it had locked its gaze on me. You could practically see the crosshairs forming on its corneas. A half-gummy, half-toothy smile spread slowly across its head, and the beast began its journey forward.
Eventually, it arrived over at our table, still staring at me, still grinning at me. And that's when the panic set in. I have no idea how to react to children that age. There's no definable purpose behind what it's doing. And there's no way to communicate with it. You can't talk to it, because it doesn't understand anything except for disjointed single words, such as 'food', 'eat', 'cry', 'potty' and 'kill'. And you certainly couldn't drop-kick it off the face of the planet, because its mother was standing there, smiling away, and she'd probably get quite upset and defensive, because Leviathan Jr has her brainwashed into not realising that if I did indeed boot it beyond orbit and into the sun, I'd be doing her a massive favour. So what do I do? Do I smile back? Children are unpredictable at best, and if it doesn't like my smile, it'll start crying, and then it'll look as if I'm the monster. Pseudo-kraken is sneaky like that.
I also started to wonder if it could read my thoughts, and I realised that if it could, it would discover that I knew what its true motive was, and it was at that point that it stopped grinning and finally lowered its guard, allowing me to look it straight in its now-glaring eyes and catch a glimpse of the true cold-hearted darkness that forever resides at its very core, alongside all of the poor unfortunates it has devoured over its lifetime. So I finally decided to follow through with the only sane course of action, and I played dead until it lost interest and giggle-gurgle-thumped its way across to the other side of the restaurant in search of fresher meat. And so endeth this overly-dramatised cautionary tale.
Now, you may be wondering what the point of this all is. Well, basically, in this day and age, people are eating out far less often (a statistic wholly backed up by the fact that this entire encounter occurred in a fairly packed restaurant). Nonetheless, I have deduced that this has nothing to do with inflation or, indeed, the general state of the economy at all. Even if I could purchase a grand sixty-course feast for five pennies and a couple of pebbles, I still wouldn't eat out, largely due to the fact that I'd only feel safe eating out if I was carrying a fishing spear, an RPG launcher and a necklace fashioned out of live remote mines. I can't see it being much fun for other diners either, especially if they're about to tuck into their chimichangas only to discover that an aforementioned notsogiant squid has alarmed me into detonating my own brains up the wall. On the scale of 'Things Which Would Probably Damage Sales Levels In A Food Outlet', it's on par with an ice cream parlour hiring a lad called Incontinence who puts on a coy smile and winks every time he hands someone their chocolate milkshake.
In short, restaurants should ban children. More people would eat out if they knew that there was no chance of A) a small, semi-humanoid creature crying into their pizza and burping milky sick over the waiter, or B) being swallowed by said creature and then digested in its stomach for several millenia, before their main course has even arrived.
Man the harpoons, men, and let's finish this once and for all.
Thursday, 13 October 2011
No Post On Sundays
I am not an attentive man. Mentally, I'm like a goldfish with ADHD. Sit me down in front of a kriss-kross puzzle and within the minute, I'll be wondering if those words really like being put into little boxes against their will, especially when you put them in the wrong place, but carry on regardless, cramming as many letters as you so desire in a desperate attempt to make everything fit. And then I'll wonder if cats get jet lag after flying, or if koala bears taste minty, and so on, and so forth.
So it was much to my chagrin, after watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy last night, to find that the entire movie seems to have been composed to vex people with my mental condition. On one hand, absolutely nobody in the cinema had no idea what was going on halfway through, but on the other hand, it appears to be one of those high-brow movies which makes you feel like a cretin for not understanding what's going on. Or maybe that's just me.
Anyway, the first method they deploy to distract you from what's happening is the 'Ooohh, what have I seen them in before?' syndrome, which appears here many, many times over. They have the bloke who plays Ollivander in Harry Potter, the man who played Sherlock Holmes in the new movie, that bloke who... well, you get the idea. This continues ad nauseum until your brain gives in and you start noticing other characters who you don't recognise, but hey! They look like other people! One of the chief baddies looks like Brain from Pinky and the Brain. One of the main protagonists looks like Chris Evans mixed with a disappointed tortoise. Heck, that bloke over there? Bet he's the next Doctor Who.
Along the lines of people-who-look like other people, my personal favourite was a kid who looked like Dudley Dursley and Harry Potter rolled into one person. He appears gazing out of a schoolroom window whilst his classmates play the flute in the background, but my brain filtered out their racket and replaced it with the Harry Potter theme tune. The illusion is maintained as the schoolmaster literally snaps an owl's neck in front of them, and somewhere in the back of your mind's ear, you hear Uncle Vernon gleefully spluttering, 'No post on Sundays!' Magical.
The next ploy they use to make the audience wonder if they shouldn't have stayed at home silently weeping in a corner instead of coming to the movies is the time shifts. Things flit between the present and the past with absolutely no warning or even an indication that it's happened, and the end result is confusing to say the least. I'm not even sure how far in the past it was supposed to be, or even if the time kept changing with each flashback. I managed to follow the latest series of Doctor Who down to the most minute details, which is a miracle, given my attention span, but I was at a loss here. If I was the Doctor, I might have been able to follow the movie. But I'm not, so I couldn't. Although, if I was the Doctor, I'd also go back in time and leave myself a note to go and see The Lion King 3D instead.
It ends with a prolonged artsy sequence which shows what happens to everybody who appeared in the film, accompanied by some French ragtime music warbling along in the background. I'm not sure exactly what he was singing about, but I'm pretty sure the words 'Je ne comprend pas cette film' made an appearance. Although that may or may not have been my subconcious crying directly into my ear.
Overall, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. On one hand, it was entertaining, if only because you can sit and pick out all the people you know, and it ends up feeling like Crimewatch meets Little Britain meets Harry Potter meets Shutter Island meets Shelock Holmes meets The Polar Express meets Everything Else Which Has Ever Existed (incidentally, The Polar Express is only in there because of a gentlemanly guard with a glorious moustache). On the other hand, it's confusing, badly shot in parts, and I can't help but think that repeatedly slamming a stapler into my face would have been a more productive use of my time. But I also feel like an idiot for not understanding it. That's what it boils down to, really. Three hours of 'Wait, so what's happening now?'
Which isn't to say that it was entirely unenjoyable. My favourite scene in the entire movie was one where they're talking with a man to enquire some money. Said man is buttering a piece of toast. He talks for a while and takes a bite, and BAM! That is one marvellously crunchy piece of toast. You'd hear that for miles. Bet the resulting shockwaves reduced buildings in Australia to smouldering piles of rubble. It has to be heard to be believed. But it's a telling sign that I'd rather watch that crunchy toast looped for two and a half hours than watch the entire movie for the same length of time.
And if that last paragraph made it sound like maybe the movie isn't too high-brow, and maybe I'm just simple, well, you may be onto something. But if you find yourself sitting, earnestly paying attention to the movie, and your mind suddenly perks up and says 'Wow, that is one crunchy piece of toast', you can't say I didn't warn you.
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
About As Ghetto As The Wombles
Ears. They're flipping fantastic, aren't they? Tirelessly taking in horrendous sounds such as a baby's crying, or the sound of nails scraping down blackboards, or the sound of nails scraping down crying babies and dying seals, and yet our ears never complain. Until now. Ladies and gentlemen, I present unto you: Swagger Jagger, the horrendous crapfest by Cher Lloyd. I could barely hear myself thinking 'What is this?' over the sound of my own ears throwing up. Tentatively listening through the brief intro, I though this was going to be a huge dirty dutch house track, until it hit the first verse, and it all runs downhill from there.
And dear goodness, she's a cocky one, isn't she? The first verse begins with 'You can't stop looking me, staring at me, be what I be, you can't stop looking at me, so get off of my face'. For a start, not only would it be weird if anybody was actually stuck on Cher's face like a facehugger out of Alien, the only reason that we can't stop looking at her is because she's tried her very best to look and act like Cheryl Cole, except she doesn't, and ultimately ends up looking like Cheryl Cole stuck midway through a transfomation into one of Balrog's testicles. And, occasionally, a meerkat who's just spotted a predator three feet away, since at the end of every sentence she seems to feel the urge to make wild hand gestures and pull a face like a man who's just dropped soap in a prison shower.
She then goes on to tell us about how "you can't stop clickin 'bout me, writin' 'bout me, tweeting 'bout me". Firstly, you can't click *about someone, love, you click on them. And yes, people are tweeting *about you and I'm writing *about you right now, but that doesn't make it good, especially since 99% of all the writing about this song and Cher in general basically boil down to 'Well, this is a bit crap, isn't it?' But, whatever makes her happy. The attention whore.
What really, absolutely takes the biscuit though, is the chorus. "Swagger jagger, swagger jagger, you should get some of your own" she bleats, throwing the cameras knowing looks. I would get some, Cher, expect I don't know what on earth 'swagger jagger' is. Is it regular swagger? I've got plenty of that, you know. You're acting like you're the sole proprietor of swagger, just like Justin Timberlake claimed to be the overseer of the world's supply of sexy, bringing it back like a more desirable Wispa. Except he did it in a catchier way, is immensely more likeable, and got away with calling everbody nasty names at the same time. Or maybe it's a special kind of swagger reserved for rhyming geniuses. In which case I'd like to stab her with my swagger dagger for even coining the phrase in the first place.
Another phrase I'd like to stab her for is that we apparently can't stop 'youtubing' her. Yep, she used youtube as a verb. Good grief, she's like a one-woman army hell-bent on destroying sensible language, in a vain attempt to look ghetto, even though she's about as ghetto as The Wombles. In fact, she even looks like a womble, whenever she's pulling her surprised face. Google it. It's true.
She then goes on to explain that we'll definitely, unequivocally have her "on repeat, running this beat", even though the only desire I remotely have of running this beat is running it over with a bus. And reversing. And pouring petrol on it an setting it alight, then dancing round it as it goes up in flames.
Kind of like Cher's musical career after this song, really.
And dear goodness, she's a cocky one, isn't she? The first verse begins with 'You can't stop looking me, staring at me, be what I be, you can't stop looking at me, so get off of my face'. For a start, not only would it be weird if anybody was actually stuck on Cher's face like a facehugger out of Alien, the only reason that we can't stop looking at her is because she's tried her very best to look and act like Cheryl Cole, except she doesn't, and ultimately ends up looking like Cheryl Cole stuck midway through a transfomation into one of Balrog's testicles. And, occasionally, a meerkat who's just spotted a predator three feet away, since at the end of every sentence she seems to feel the urge to make wild hand gestures and pull a face like a man who's just dropped soap in a prison shower.
She then goes on to tell us about how "you can't stop clickin 'bout me, writin' 'bout me, tweeting 'bout me". Firstly, you can't click *about someone, love, you click on them. And yes, people are tweeting *about you and I'm writing *about you right now, but that doesn't make it good, especially since 99% of all the writing about this song and Cher in general basically boil down to 'Well, this is a bit crap, isn't it?' But, whatever makes her happy. The attention whore.
What really, absolutely takes the biscuit though, is the chorus. "Swagger jagger, swagger jagger, you should get some of your own" she bleats, throwing the cameras knowing looks. I would get some, Cher, expect I don't know what on earth 'swagger jagger' is. Is it regular swagger? I've got plenty of that, you know. You're acting like you're the sole proprietor of swagger, just like Justin Timberlake claimed to be the overseer of the world's supply of sexy, bringing it back like a more desirable Wispa. Except he did it in a catchier way, is immensely more likeable, and got away with calling everbody nasty names at the same time. Or maybe it's a special kind of swagger reserved for rhyming geniuses. In which case I'd like to stab her with my swagger dagger for even coining the phrase in the first place.
Another phrase I'd like to stab her for is that we apparently can't stop 'youtubing' her. Yep, she used youtube as a verb. Good grief, she's like a one-woman army hell-bent on destroying sensible language, in a vain attempt to look ghetto, even though she's about as ghetto as The Wombles. In fact, she even looks like a womble, whenever she's pulling her surprised face. Google it. It's true.
She then goes on to explain that we'll definitely, unequivocally have her "on repeat, running this beat", even though the only desire I remotely have of running this beat is running it over with a bus. And reversing. And pouring petrol on it an setting it alight, then dancing round it as it goes up in flames.
Kind of like Cher's musical career after this song, really.
Monday, 4 July 2011
The Netherworld Speaks Japanese
Of all the things that a person could experience in everyday life, dying is not the most pleasant. Yet for some reason, I can't seem to stop doing it. Recently, I died no fewer than ten times. This was partially due to me dying a little inside after realising I'd left myself logged in to Facebook and coming back to find that my brother had posted all manner of statuses from my page, but it was mostly due to chain mail. Chain mail. Chain. Mail. Chain flipping mail. In the past, a fairly sturdy and somewhat reliable form of armour. In the present, one of the most annoying social phenomenons that the advent of the internet has ever given birth to.
Forget the myriad possibilities that the internet showers upon us, like a widening of our cultural lenses, or the opening of vast communication channels, or huge amounts of information, so vast that it would make our tiny human minds explode like an unopened tin of baked beans on an overheated barbeque: you don't have time to even contemplate these gifts, because Jessica, aged 10 (hobbies: lurking on forums, long walks on the beach and coming back from the dead), whose parents never loved her and whose randomly mutilated body was found by police in a stream in a forest near a nondescript suburban housing estate after being murdered by the local troubled witch-child, is coming to kill you in your sleep at 1 a.m. Tonight. Why? Because she's a vengeful little git with a penchant for murdering internet citizens who read select paragraphs, apparently. Oh, and because you didn't pass on the message about her little killing spree to five other hapless victims. Silly you. Look what you've done.
What strikes me as most concerning is that the people who write these messages, evidently in a vain attempt to save us by warning us of our impending doom but ultimately luring us into Jessica's wrath, seem to have very little grip of the English language (either that or the netherworld speaks Japanese, bearing poor translation), and subsequently the details of what is going to happen are often rather obscure, and tend to get more and more vague as the message progresses, which can only lead to more and more helpless people viewing it and spending their last moments simply being wildly confused and not knowng what to do, like a group of kittens with a thousand laser pointers flying round them all at once whilst a volcano erupts 50 feet away from them. Here's a sample I found earlier, broken down and analysed for your convenience:
"Tonight at midnight your true love will realize they love you."
Oddly specific. Creepily specific, you might say. But so far, so clear. This *is* going to happen.
"Something good will happen to you between 1-4 pm."
Getting more vague, aren't we? Just 'something good' (that could be anything, from finding a pound in the street, or being gifted with a blimp by a benevolent millionaire) and what's more, there's a three-hour scope for it to happen in.
"Tomorrow it could be anywhere."
Insanely vague. Understanding what on earth the implications of this prediction actually are would be like trying to decipher what Charlie Sheen is saying after banging seven gram rocks for three days straight, if his brain was also made of egg noodles and baby seals. I don't even know what's going on by this stage, which is presumably the point.
"Get ready for the biggest shock of your life!"
Oh. That was a sudden change of mood, it threw me. I'm even more confused. I'll brace myself.
"If you don't post this to 5 other pages. You will have relationship problems for the next 10 years."
Of course, since there's a random full stop in the middle of that sentence, not only is the first half of the sentence an unfinished threat, leaving my peace of mind hanging somewhere in limbo, the second half of the sentence is now declaring that I *will* have relationship problems for the next ten years. Guess that's the shock. Well played, Jessica, well played
And so, emerging from the confusion-trap with my love life thoroughly condemned, I shall end this investigation, preferably before I die again. And, because I'm a shameless self-promoter, if you don't send a link to this blog to at least ten of your friends before exactly 2:43 and 56 seconds this afternoon, Tommy, aged 7, who suffered the loss of both arms in an explosion, and whose body was found emaciated and withering in his local playpark (he died of starvation after somebody pushed him off the swings and he couldn't lift himself back up again) will appear at your bedside at roughly between 1-4 a.m. and smother you. Or rather he would, but he has no arms. Jessica's still out there though. Sleep tight.
Forget the myriad possibilities that the internet showers upon us, like a widening of our cultural lenses, or the opening of vast communication channels, or huge amounts of information, so vast that it would make our tiny human minds explode like an unopened tin of baked beans on an overheated barbeque: you don't have time to even contemplate these gifts, because Jessica, aged 10 (hobbies: lurking on forums, long walks on the beach and coming back from the dead), whose parents never loved her and whose randomly mutilated body was found by police in a stream in a forest near a nondescript suburban housing estate after being murdered by the local troubled witch-child, is coming to kill you in your sleep at 1 a.m. Tonight. Why? Because she's a vengeful little git with a penchant for murdering internet citizens who read select paragraphs, apparently. Oh, and because you didn't pass on the message about her little killing spree to five other hapless victims. Silly you. Look what you've done.
What strikes me as most concerning is that the people who write these messages, evidently in a vain attempt to save us by warning us of our impending doom but ultimately luring us into Jessica's wrath, seem to have very little grip of the English language (either that or the netherworld speaks Japanese, bearing poor translation), and subsequently the details of what is going to happen are often rather obscure, and tend to get more and more vague as the message progresses, which can only lead to more and more helpless people viewing it and spending their last moments simply being wildly confused and not knowng what to do, like a group of kittens with a thousand laser pointers flying round them all at once whilst a volcano erupts 50 feet away from them. Here's a sample I found earlier, broken down and analysed for your convenience:
"Tonight at midnight your true love will realize they love you."
Oddly specific. Creepily specific, you might say. But so far, so clear. This *is* going to happen.
"Something good will happen to you between 1-4 pm."
Getting more vague, aren't we? Just 'something good' (that could be anything, from finding a pound in the street, or being gifted with a blimp by a benevolent millionaire) and what's more, there's a three-hour scope for it to happen in.
"Tomorrow it could be anywhere."
Insanely vague. Understanding what on earth the implications of this prediction actually are would be like trying to decipher what Charlie Sheen is saying after banging seven gram rocks for three days straight, if his brain was also made of egg noodles and baby seals. I don't even know what's going on by this stage, which is presumably the point.
"Get ready for the biggest shock of your life!"
Oh. That was a sudden change of mood, it threw me. I'm even more confused. I'll brace myself.
"If you don't post this to 5 other pages. You will have relationship problems for the next 10 years."
Of course, since there's a random full stop in the middle of that sentence, not only is the first half of the sentence an unfinished threat, leaving my peace of mind hanging somewhere in limbo, the second half of the sentence is now declaring that I *will* have relationship problems for the next ten years. Guess that's the shock. Well played, Jessica, well played
And so, emerging from the confusion-trap with my love life thoroughly condemned, I shall end this investigation, preferably before I die again. And, because I'm a shameless self-promoter, if you don't send a link to this blog to at least ten of your friends before exactly 2:43 and 56 seconds this afternoon, Tommy, aged 7, who suffered the loss of both arms in an explosion, and whose body was found emaciated and withering in his local playpark (he died of starvation after somebody pushed him off the swings and he couldn't lift himself back up again) will appear at your bedside at roughly between 1-4 a.m. and smother you. Or rather he would, but he has no arms. Jessica's still out there though. Sleep tight.
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
And He's Got An Axe In His Spine
'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.' Hold on to that notion for a second, because I'm trying to go somewhere with this.
Sheep seem fairly innocent, right? They just stand around in fields, munching on grass, occasionally pausing only to bleat, or stare uncomprehendingly at country ramblers who for some insane reason think that they can communicate with sheep by baaing at them. I can't remember the last time I saw a sheep punching someone with a shovel, or kerb-stomping a newborn baby kitten. Unless you've seen the movie Black Sheep, where sheep turn carnivorous and try to eat people, you'll probably have never seen a sheep appear aggressive or antagonistic at all. But it does happen. Some sheep are simply wolves coated in wool.
The point I'm trying to make is, stalkers are kind of like sheep. At least, my stalkers are. The stalkers in question are a group of third year girls at my school. Years ago, I would never have noticed them. Nowadays, I try to keep to the shadows, fearing for my life every time I blindly turn a corner. Describing them as a group of casual admirers would be possibly the almightiest understatement in recorded history. They're not a group. They're a cult. A voracious, co-ordinated pack, dedicated to hunting down the 'Awesome Hair Guy' and touching his head. They probably sniff the air currents to find out if I'm in the immediate vincinity. I don't simply state this as a possibility, it's pure unadulterated fact. They show up anywhere and everywhere, around school, around Belfast, around wherever my scent leads them. There is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. There is no escape. As if the initial encounter wasn't disorientating enough (it raised questions such as 'Who are you?', 'Do I know you?', 'Why are you touching my head?' and 'Where is the nearest office where I can procure a restraining order?'), their uncanny ability to repeatedly locate me is considerably more impressive/blood-chilling.
As for the stalkers themselves, they're possibly one of the most random groups I've ever seen in my life. There's no cohesion or regularity that I can see whatsoever, at least in looks. One of them looks like a confused goldfish trying to comprehend how quantitative easing works. Another looks like a hamster and Seth Rogen have collided into each other at the speed of light in a wig factory and have merged into one semi-sentient being. Another still looks like a visual representation of the words 'Well hello, sugarpants' being said by the campest man on the planet. And there's not much consistency in how they communicate with me either. Requests vary from 'Can I have a hug? It would make my day' to 'Can I rape your hair?' There's no similarity, the cult actually only exists because two heads are better than one and it's much easier to track me down if they're all on the lookout. I don't even know if they need to be on the lookout, I'm thoroughly scouring all my possessions for homing devices as I write this.
Now, you're possibly wondering what on earth this has to do with passive, fluffy farm animals. Well, they're essentially the same, aren't they? Sheep appear harmless, but (citing the Black Sheep example), appearances can be decieving. The aforementioned group of third years (and of course by 'group', I mean 'pack', and by 'third years' I mean 'vicious, relentless, creepy, horrific, ravenous monsters) seemed completely innocent at first glance, yet time revealed them to be utterly more terrifying; much like a unicorn-shaped pinata that you break only to find that it's filled with blood, entrails, dead puppies and that kid from just down the street that the police have been searching for for the last seven months. And he's got an axe in his spine. An old, blunt-edged rusty axe with a picture of Hitler carved into the dried-in blood. It makes me shudder just thinking about them.
So there you have it. Stalkers are like sheep. And bizarre pinatas. I'd love to write more, but I'm going to have to go. Three of them have scaled down the side of my house and are scrabbling at my window with their woolly hooves, trying to get in and bleating their little heads off. I'm going to sneak out the front and run for the hills.
And I'm going to set fire to the bushes in my garden on the way there, just to make sure.
Sheep seem fairly innocent, right? They just stand around in fields, munching on grass, occasionally pausing only to bleat, or stare uncomprehendingly at country ramblers who for some insane reason think that they can communicate with sheep by baaing at them. I can't remember the last time I saw a sheep punching someone with a shovel, or kerb-stomping a newborn baby kitten. Unless you've seen the movie Black Sheep, where sheep turn carnivorous and try to eat people, you'll probably have never seen a sheep appear aggressive or antagonistic at all. But it does happen. Some sheep are simply wolves coated in wool.
The point I'm trying to make is, stalkers are kind of like sheep. At least, my stalkers are. The stalkers in question are a group of third year girls at my school. Years ago, I would never have noticed them. Nowadays, I try to keep to the shadows, fearing for my life every time I blindly turn a corner. Describing them as a group of casual admirers would be possibly the almightiest understatement in recorded history. They're not a group. They're a cult. A voracious, co-ordinated pack, dedicated to hunting down the 'Awesome Hair Guy' and touching his head. They probably sniff the air currents to find out if I'm in the immediate vincinity. I don't simply state this as a possibility, it's pure unadulterated fact. They show up anywhere and everywhere, around school, around Belfast, around wherever my scent leads them. There is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. There is no escape. As if the initial encounter wasn't disorientating enough (it raised questions such as 'Who are you?', 'Do I know you?', 'Why are you touching my head?' and 'Where is the nearest office where I can procure a restraining order?'), their uncanny ability to repeatedly locate me is considerably more impressive/blood-chilling.
As for the stalkers themselves, they're possibly one of the most random groups I've ever seen in my life. There's no cohesion or regularity that I can see whatsoever, at least in looks. One of them looks like a confused goldfish trying to comprehend how quantitative easing works. Another looks like a hamster and Seth Rogen have collided into each other at the speed of light in a wig factory and have merged into one semi-sentient being. Another still looks like a visual representation of the words 'Well hello, sugarpants' being said by the campest man on the planet. And there's not much consistency in how they communicate with me either. Requests vary from 'Can I have a hug? It would make my day' to 'Can I rape your hair?' There's no similarity, the cult actually only exists because two heads are better than one and it's much easier to track me down if they're all on the lookout. I don't even know if they need to be on the lookout, I'm thoroughly scouring all my possessions for homing devices as I write this.
Now, you're possibly wondering what on earth this has to do with passive, fluffy farm animals. Well, they're essentially the same, aren't they? Sheep appear harmless, but (citing the Black Sheep example), appearances can be decieving. The aforementioned group of third years (and of course by 'group', I mean 'pack', and by 'third years' I mean 'vicious, relentless, creepy, horrific, ravenous monsters) seemed completely innocent at first glance, yet time revealed them to be utterly more terrifying; much like a unicorn-shaped pinata that you break only to find that it's filled with blood, entrails, dead puppies and that kid from just down the street that the police have been searching for for the last seven months. And he's got an axe in his spine. An old, blunt-edged rusty axe with a picture of Hitler carved into the dried-in blood. It makes me shudder just thinking about them.
So there you have it. Stalkers are like sheep. And bizarre pinatas. I'd love to write more, but I'm going to have to go. Three of them have scaled down the side of my house and are scrabbling at my window with their woolly hooves, trying to get in and bleating their little heads off. I'm going to sneak out the front and run for the hills.
And I'm going to set fire to the bushes in my garden on the way there, just to make sure.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
It's A Top Class Facility
Modernity. A word which, no matter how much they persistently claim to have achieved, will never spring to mind when thinking about the BRA sixth form centre. Why? It just flipping isn't.
Apparently, they seem to think that if they reiterate their point often enough, we'll all be brainwashed into thinking that it's 'a top class facility'. I think they have a point. I mean, what could be more top class than a wobbly table that you have to balance with a stray chess piece which you find lying around the floor somewhere? What could be more luxurious than unexpectedly falling through the springless cushion of a chair that's possibly more broken than the Irish economy? And, once you've paid a pound for a cup of hot chocolate that actually mildly resembles a cup of finely sifted mud and froth that is virtually tasteless until you reach the wad of sediment lining the bottom of the cup, you'll feel so regal that after using the MIDDLE SIXTH ONLY! toilets, you'd half expect the queen to come in and wipe your backside for you, whilst she weeps tears of joy at the sheer privilege of it all. Oh, and you'd look down on her while she was doing it.
But sadly, I've made it sound better than it really is. It's disappointing, the way they present it to us, and the reality in comparison. It's like they've promised to give us a chocolate bar, but in actual fact, we've recieved a thinly veiled lump of excrement. However, it's a thinly veiled lump of excrement that we're apparently supposed to keep highly polished and fragrantly scented, in order to keep ourselves sufficiently busy enough to not realise it's a load of crap. Never mind the broken furniture, the widely scattered chess pieces and the occasional stray cup of Oh Dear Goodness What Is That, what would the peasants think of us if they saw this litter?
As it turns out, it's not the peasants we have to worry about (although it is jolly good fun to take potshots at them with our hunting rifles of privilege, eh what?). No, as it turns out, what you really have to watch out for is Albert Creighton. Normally he's calm. Serene, even. However, if even so much as a waft of litter reaches his finely tuned nostrils, a nuclear reaction begins in his mind, bottles up and eventually bursts out in a massive explosion of famine, war, pestilence, and generally not being able to sleep because the sixth form centre is dirty. Litter makes him an angry, angry man, kids. In fact, if a newborn baby seal dropped a bottle cap in front of his children, he'd probably waste no time in pulling out a handgun, shooting it fourteen times in the head and dropping its barely breathing carcass down a disused well for being a bad influence.
And don't even think about saying the cleaners will clean it up. That is not their job. No, contrary to popular belief, they are actually paid to stand around, smoke, and occasionally backhand first years for kicks.
And if you don't like it, you can go somewhere else.
Apparently, they seem to think that if they reiterate their point often enough, we'll all be brainwashed into thinking that it's 'a top class facility'. I think they have a point. I mean, what could be more top class than a wobbly table that you have to balance with a stray chess piece which you find lying around the floor somewhere? What could be more luxurious than unexpectedly falling through the springless cushion of a chair that's possibly more broken than the Irish economy? And, once you've paid a pound for a cup of hot chocolate that actually mildly resembles a cup of finely sifted mud and froth that is virtually tasteless until you reach the wad of sediment lining the bottom of the cup, you'll feel so regal that after using the MIDDLE SIXTH ONLY! toilets, you'd half expect the queen to come in and wipe your backside for you, whilst she weeps tears of joy at the sheer privilege of it all. Oh, and you'd look down on her while she was doing it.
But sadly, I've made it sound better than it really is. It's disappointing, the way they present it to us, and the reality in comparison. It's like they've promised to give us a chocolate bar, but in actual fact, we've recieved a thinly veiled lump of excrement. However, it's a thinly veiled lump of excrement that we're apparently supposed to keep highly polished and fragrantly scented, in order to keep ourselves sufficiently busy enough to not realise it's a load of crap. Never mind the broken furniture, the widely scattered chess pieces and the occasional stray cup of Oh Dear Goodness What Is That, what would the peasants think of us if they saw this litter?
As it turns out, it's not the peasants we have to worry about (although it is jolly good fun to take potshots at them with our hunting rifles of privilege, eh what?). No, as it turns out, what you really have to watch out for is Albert Creighton. Normally he's calm. Serene, even. However, if even so much as a waft of litter reaches his finely tuned nostrils, a nuclear reaction begins in his mind, bottles up and eventually bursts out in a massive explosion of famine, war, pestilence, and generally not being able to sleep because the sixth form centre is dirty. Litter makes him an angry, angry man, kids. In fact, if a newborn baby seal dropped a bottle cap in front of his children, he'd probably waste no time in pulling out a handgun, shooting it fourteen times in the head and dropping its barely breathing carcass down a disused well for being a bad influence.
And don't even think about saying the cleaners will clean it up. That is not their job. No, contrary to popular belief, they are actually paid to stand around, smoke, and occasionally backhand first years for kicks.
And if you don't like it, you can go somewhere else.
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