someone make me stop watching this crap

I have become transfixed by a spectacle of such hideousness that i am now unable to go bed for fear of missing the next gawp-worthy atrocity. I feel like a cctv operator forced to stare at a fog bound motorway across which someone has constructed particularly spikey brick wall. I'd always assumed the Grammys would be an essentially harmless musical circle-jerk: dull speeches, robotic, monochrome versions of the year's most inoffensive hits and a few quick cuts as members of linkin park are forcibly removed by security. Internet, i have been hopelessly naive. They are actually trying to destroy the fabric of music.

Where do you start? The announcer sounds like a live version of my bank's automated phone system, calling out the names of musical luminaries with all the passion of an autistic belgian accountant. Then there's the insistence on shoe-horning wildly dissonant artists into blood-curdling collaborations: Justin Timberlake dragging Al Green down to his level? ghastly. not painful enough for you? how about Stevie Wonder accompanied by the Jonas Brothers? i had to break one of my own fingers just to get through that one. I was still reeling from the vindictive cluelessness that led to Coldplay being nominated for best rock album when they ACTUALLY FUCKING WON IT! Rock? Coldplay? Awesome. Seriously, well done guys. The stage set for Katy Perry's shambolic rendition of her record executive erection maintenance device consisted of various giant plastic versions of pretty much every type of fruit. except oranges. that's a subtle as the evening has got so far.

Then there's the sheer, crushing, stilted ineptitude of the whole thing. OK the Rock is never going win a prize for Best Reading of an Autocue on a Large Translucent Plastic Island, so perhaps don't make him do a two and a half minute comedy routine containing precisely one joke. don't let mily cyrus sing live, particularly not alongside someone who can actually sing. when introducing ESTELLE, singing ESTELLE'S song American Boy with Kanye West rapping away alongside, try say, introducing ESTELLE the person who's song it is rather than the idiot with Thriller hair and a god delusion.

There has been one good bit, Radiohead playing with a marching band. but you could see the embarrassment seeping through Thom Yorke's spasmodic, "i actually have talent so don't care" dancing.

I expect my pointless self-congratulatory schmaltz to at least be effectively stage managed even if the music itself is cock. that the Grammys couldn't even manage that frankly comes as a bit of a shock. and we're expecting the music industry to sort out such complex issues as copyright and file-sharing? not to mention nurturing the next generation of genuine artists? dear christ.

I'm looking forward to next year's ceremony already. if they can top this they might actually generate some kind of musical black hole, sucking the entire monstrous edifice into itself, crushing it to the size of a higgs boson and then hurling it across the dimensions never to be seen again. and i wouldn't want to miss that.

signposts to a summer

yes it is time. we have now reached the 3 weeks of the british summer where the sun breaks through and the rest of the british public, when pushed, would say that they thought cricket was really rather jolly and wasn't it a nice day out with the kids and isn't Pimm's lovely. as opposed to the rest of the time when the focus groups consistently come back with: boring, incomprehensible, elitist and rained off.

So what are the england team doing to cash in on this fleeting ambivalence? yes they're carrying on their relentless search for top-class mediocrity and "the right areas" against the South Africans. so thank god for Roots Manuva who, in releasing this video has probably done more for English cricket than Wisden has managed in 10 years. tune too.

via musiclikedirt




the other event happening around now, is the annual UK Drug Policy Commission Report. This is the yearly reminder to the government that they would generally cause a lot less pain for all of us if they just gave the fuck up, had some Pimm's on the terrace and watched the cricket. i was pleased to note that so eye-stabbingly obvious are the conclusions of this report that the bbc have simply recycled last year's article with a couple of powerpoint slides tacked on the end. i expect next year's to just read: drug. policy. pointless.

last year

this year

pass the smack, blowers.

full of the joys of schadenfreude

it's funny what can cheer you up isn't it? i mean, there are so many wonderful, heartening, warm-glow inducing things in the world: the news that your friend's long awaited baby has arrived, being given an extra couple of slices of chorizo by the cheery lady who made your lunchtime sandwich, an amusing anecdote in David Niven's autobiography. any of these things could be enough to stop you feeling sorry for yourself and remind you of the quixotic joy of life here on earth.

so, it is a sad reflection of the depths my black, heathen, smug-bastard soul has sunk to, that it was none of these things that made stop my self-absorbed strop.

it was Richard Dawkins being rude to creationists.

70 life-enhancing minutes of it. priceless. via the Guardian



as bill hicks would say, sit down and strap in.

you can see talk he actually gave here but that's just a boring mix of rational philosophy and science. nowhere near as fun as watching as his responses become terser and terser till he can eventually stand it no more and transmogrifies into a giant, raging, axe-wielding yeti and slaughters half of lynchburg in a bewildering orgy of atheistic destruction.

fantastic.

i was further gladdened by the cursory research i did into Liberty University, the source of all these imaginary-friend sharing lunatics. check out their statement of purpose. aside from some jolly reasonable stuff about contributing to a knowledge and understanding of other cultures, it contains this gem:

2. Promote an understanding of the Western tradition and the diverse elements of American cultural history, especially the importance of the individual in maintaining democratic and free market processes.

yeah, i remember Jesus being really hot on the free-market.

Matthew 12 vs 34: "Jesus sat down with the temple money changers and discussed the possibility of increasing their margin by introducing a traded exchange for sacrificial currency and perhaps diversifying their portfolio to include sacrificial property."

this venerable institution was setup by none other than Jerry Falwell, baptist bible-thumper extraordinaire. after the September 11 attacks he came out with the now classic, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen."

thanks jerry. we are feeling the love.

one of the other purposes of this bastion of educational rigour has been to provide academic justification for intelligent design. and they even have some "3000 year old" dinosaur (or as they call them: dragon) fossils dug up by this joker to help prove their point. to give you an idea of the strength of his argument, here's a sample quote:

"There is just no way that the theory of evolution can be reconciled with the truth of creation as recorded in the Bible."

well that's that dealt with then.

so yes, i'm a lot happier now. there's nothing like a load of intelligent, educated people spending millions of pounds, willfully disregarding logic and the accumulated knowledge of the panoply of human scientific endeavour in order to create a scientific basis for a bronze age creation myth they had the dumb luck to be brought up believing, having the piss ripped out of them to put a smile on my face.

hurrah!

now coffee...

still grumpy...

well wrap me in magnesium foil and set fire to me with a blowtorch if i am not the grumpiest bastard alive. i have been moping around since my last post making H's life hell and generally finding the glass not just half empty, but with the wrong pissing stuff in it to start off with so take it back and give it to someone who gives a haemorrhaging fuck. the reason for this stream of super-heated, petulant man-bile? anyone? bueller? exactly. nothing. not the slightest genuine ripple in the smooth-flowing stream that is my life. and yet. and yet.

i've been tagged to tell you 5 things you probably didn't know about me and i will once i've calmed down enough to type past the glowing red mist that currently envelopes me. however, in the meantime, i will treat you all to 5 things that have absolutely made my blood boil last week:



1. these 3 prematurely louche, denim-ridden cock monkeys were about 14 weeks old. dressed to a man as if they were speed-tottin', hard-livin', groupie-fuckin' roadies with no conception of anything beyond summer 1982, they were walking down regent street in a manner that suggested their band had just scored a 24 date world tour supporting the Ramones. feet at 90 degrees to each other. shoulders rolling like someone with dentures eating a caramel baguette. conversation so drawn out that any normal person would have had to have recorded it and then replayed it at twice the speed in order to catch anything vaguely intelligible, let alone comprehensible.

then they went into macdonald's. and one of them's mum rang. presumably to remind him to drink his breast milk. god i hated them. so much i could hardly hold the phone steady as i chased them down the street.



2. Ruth Kelly. i mean. really. never mind the fact she looks like henry kelly's lesbian sister, this woman is responsible for our govt's flagship made-up Dept for Communities and Local Govt. to quote from the number 10 website: "DCLG will be the successor department to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (that's the one they had to take back off John "Moronic Fat Twat" Prescott for being an incomprehensible philandering knob-jockey). It is an expanded department with a powerful new remit to promote community cohesion and equality." the irony of her being a member of cartoon-villain catholic sect Opus Dei was presumably lost on our dear leader when he gave her the job, seeing as Opus Dei are as much about promoting ecumenical understanding and community cohesion as they are about handing out free condoms and smoking crack. now she's undermining some pretty reasonable legislation on gay equality by lobbying for her catholic chums to be exempt from bits of it they don't like. THE POINT OF EQUALITY LEGISLATION IS THAT EVERYONE HAS TO ABIDE BY IT OR THEY'RE BEING DISCRIMINATORY YOU CLUELESS HARPY. AND YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LET YOUR PERSONAL RELIGIOUS VIEWS EFFECT THE IMPLEMENTATION OF GOVT POLICY. aaarrrgh. matron! bring me laudanum, a pint of absinthe and an illustrated copy of the Da Vinci Code.

3. anyone living in London who complains about it being cold. if you are cold in london, either you are not wearing enough clothes or you're dying slowly of blood loss. with 10 million ppl all smoking marmoset and cranberry frappacinos, carrying round their own personal patio heaters and burning 4x4s to keep warm, even on the rare occasions when some vaguely less than warm air heads our way, it's still only about as cold as a chain-store coffee about 30 seconds after you get it. shut up.

4. the coaching Jade Goody received for her CBB exit interview. yes i know, but by this point my rage was such that i was deliberately seeking out sources of annoyance in order to fuel my fires of hate. i am not so naive that i think the whole thing isn't a massive pile of hastily pre-arranged cock, but at least, C4, try and maintain the illusion. try and carry out the whole thing with a teensy amount of skill or forethought. remind the bigoted, kebab-flashing bimbo you're exploiting to not start sentences with "when they told me, i mean when i just saw..." or edit it better. or just fuck off.

5. my inability to write blog posts i am in anyway happy with.


there. i feel better now. oh. no i don't. grrr.

big, hairy arsecakes.

today, i am powerful with the grumpy side of the force. fear my peevishness. however, H has put a smile on my face by doing an excellent impression of dennis the menace given female form and promoted to wicked witch of the south-east.



check these puppies out:




for the record, she has asked that her hair is not included in order that any girls reading are not instantly driven into a frenzy of jealousy that casues them to damage their computers. in some way.

anyway, i'm so angry i nearly did an overly long and doubtless unnecessary post about the deeply unfunny slabrity big brother racism controversy. thankfully (for you that is dear reader), as i do so often in these situations, it thought, "what would linda smith do?" and the answer was painfully obvious.

she once said: "i don't really want to talk about jeffrey archer because i don't want to give him the oxygen of publicity. in fact, i'm not really certain i'm happy with him having the oxygen of oxygen."

this sums up my feelings on the whole matter so well, that i am relieved from commenting further.

it does, however, suggest an incredibly satisfying solution to the whole affair.