Vueling, ignoring, and passengers discrimination.

The other week I went to Spain via flights from Vueling. Spain was fantastic! Vueling however, have gone down in history as operating the most horrific planes I've experienced, and frankly, I get on a lot of planes. I'd never flown with then before (hell, I never even heard of them before), and having now done so twice the idea of a third flight is about as appealing as a romantic evening with Fred and Rose West. 

So, once I was back I decided to mention this on twitter, to which they replied and suggested I send them an e-mail with more details. I did. They ignored it completely. I can't imagine why. It's almost as though they might not like having to answer some of the questions I posed to them. Interesting.

So, for posterity, for their own publicity, and frankly as a guide to the world for how to write a complaint letter, here's what I sent to Vueling. Who knows, maybe they'll even have the common courtesy to reply once it's public. 

Enjoy!


"Last weekend I had the misfortune of getting my first flights with Vueling. On getting on the first place I discovered that not only could I not physically fit in the seat, but due to the position I would need to contort myself into to even come close to sitting down it meant that the customers either side of me were completely unable to use their tray tables for the entire flight. At fact that was quickly established once one of them rammed the metal bracket into my knee while trying to do so.

On my return flight the situation was so bad that I ended up sitting on the arm rest of my chair for the entire journey back to London. The crew were well aware of this, having already had struggled to get passed me with their trolly only to find that it was a physical impossibility for me to move out of their way, and gave me many apologetic looks.

Apparently though, the complex task of moving me to sit in one of the many free seats with extra legroom was "completely impossible" as I hadn't offered to pay an additional fare for the privilege of basic comfort.

Allow me to put this VERY simply. My height is genetic. Genetic in the same manner that my gender is. In the same manner that my skin colour is. In the same manner that any of countless disabilities are. They are not a choice. They are not a result of lifestyle choices. Your "kind offer" for me to pay more to have a basic level of comfort is discrimination. And no, before you attempt it; "common practice" amongst airlines does not prevent that statement from being true. I do however look forward to, and will expect you to explicitly address it in your response, lest this become a significantly more public blog post rather than an email, your explanation as to why you consider this to be acceptable.

Finally, you may have noticed that I've ignored the basic safety risks of being unable to sit on your planes. What would have happened had there been sudden turbulence (or worse) and I was injured due to the embarrassing state of your aircraft? Were I at my seat with no belt on then it would have been my fault. When your staff are repeatedly shrugging at me as they struggle to get passed me, it doesn't take an intellectual to establish that the blame would be entirely yours."

It's been 10 days, at the time of writing, that they've failed to reply. If Vueling ever do reply I'll be sure to update this and let you know how it goes.

Tackling Tube Strikes

So, to put it simply, here are some of my favourite comments about this month's tube strikes in London.

1) Boris Johnson signed a petition in 2008! Boris Johnson promised this in 2010! 

Awesome! Let's base all our arguments on decisions, facts, and opinions that are 4 - 6 years out of date. That'll work like a bloody charm wont it. I presume the same people complaining about this make all of their life decisions on information from that long ago as well do they? Not to mention taking extra special effort to completely ignore ANYTHING that has happened since, or any more recent evidence to the contrary. You know, in the standard intelligent manner.

Run along kids, you're no longer qualified to use sentences. On the plus side there are some brightly coloured balls in the middle of the road for you to play with if you've nothing more useful to add.

2) Empty ticket offices will make life harder! 

How exactly? We've Bob Crow himself pointing out that he rarely, if ever, needs to use one any more. Personally I actually tried to use one the other day for the first time in about 18 months, only to find that, after explaining the problem 4 times to the guy at the counter, that he couldn't actually do anything, and I needed to call someone else. Someone not in the station.

That was helpful. Maybe we should do a quick software update to the machines instead to improve their accessibility and be done with it? Hell, we could even get the machines to work 24/7/365. But then someone would probably complain that they were being over worked, underpaid, and deserved better digital conditions

3) It's to protect the workers jobs!  

To a degree this is true. But after about 10 seconds thought you realise something else. Tube workers are VERY well paid for their work. Which is nice. Unless you're a teacher, a nurse, or one of countless other professions who get sod all for much more valuable work. But the problem is tube work isn't exactly the most highly skilled of professions. The Daily Mash's parody article about passengers discovering that they can learn to drive a train themselves in 5 minutes isn't exactly far from the mark. Instead what the workers are actually worried about is simple. Currently they get paid a lot of money for not having very many skills. Certainly not having many transferable skills at least. Losing their job on the Underground means that, assuming they get another job, they won't likely get anywhere near the same salary, as, put simply, they're not qualified. As such the RMT's constant demands for more pay have created little more than a self fulfilling prophecy of strikes and problems for them.

4) It's about safety. 

No, it's REALLY not. I'm not even going to make the point here, I'll just link you to this amazing blog post about the real impact of what happens in London when the tube's on strike to "protect Londoners safety". Be warned, you will not rest easily when you read it.

5) It'll turn tube stations in a muggers paradise.

No. Again, this is beyond moronic. Unless of course all thefts in tube stations take place under the watchful eye of the staff who are sitting in exactly the same position all day, and not, say, when there are lots of people moving around away from the ticket office.

The reality of this is simple. The world is moving on, new things are coming in, the old is being replaced. It started with the industrial revolution, and it hasn't stopped yet. It never will stop until the world does. To claim that you didn't see this coming, or that you need more time to adjust isn't good enough. We've been happily buying tickets from machines for over 10 years. We've had driverless trains for longer than that. Just how much notice do you need exactly?

O2 be, or not be, O2

Dear O2, my dear dear O2,

It must be really stressful being part of the largest telecommunications company in the world. The problem is that the stress that comes with such jobs can do funny things to people. Some individuals go postal and embark on a random shooting spree, some kick back, put their feet up, and head off to a mental nirvana no longer capable of coherent thought or speech, others, such as the intellectuals at O2 have decided to take another route entirely.

You see O2, in their stress crazed minds, have noticed that customers pay them money. In fact, they pay them so much of the damn stuff that last year alone they made £332 million. Which, unless someone’s gone and changed how numbers work and not told me, is quite a lot. The problem is though, their customers still have money, and as big nasty Ofcom have rocked up and said that if you put your charges up mid contract that customers can walk away penalty free, O2 can’t get any of it. Sure, they could up their pay as you go charges, but that’d be like robbing a bank and walking out with the security guard’s wallet. So there must be a better idea.

It’s that better idea that the intellectuals O2 think they’ve struck upon.

But first some context, and a nod to Bill Hicks.

Back in the 70s it became fashionable to sue bands claiming that they’d driven someone to commit suicide. The question that was never asked was simple; What performer wants their audience dead? Can you picture the band in the studio? “Christ I’m sick of it. The money, the fame, the groupies, these people buying all my albums, t-shirts and concert tickets, giving me so much that I can have everything I want. We need to do something about this. Hey, why don’t we kill the bloody audience? That’d be great! Then I can go back to being a waffle house waiter!”

It made no sense. At its best it was hilarious, at its worse it was a sad indictment of a miserably low level of education and simple common sense on the part of the prosecutors. It has, since then, quite simply died a death. Nobody tries that kind of drivel any more, as it’s so obviously flawed it’s embarrassing.

Unless you’re O2. Because O2 have decided that while they don’t want their customers dead, they do want them to feel like they’re about as valuable to them as Michael Flatley with Rickets. Especially the ones who’ve been there for a while. New customers are fine, but long term ones? The ones who’ve been paying O2 for years? Screw ‘em. Apparently those longer term customers can happily have their contracted charges arbitrarily increased at a moment's notice and just have to accept it because they can’t leave their contracts early. Not new customers though, those are protected by a recent Ofcom ruling that allows them to leave if their rates are put up. So, for clarity, O2 are consciously, and deliberately singling out their longer term customer base for increased charges because they’re the ones who can’t leave. Yet. And it’s not their call costs, or their text message costs. No, those are costs that can be controlled by the customer through their usage. This is the flat rate contract price for your package. The one you have no choice about. The whole concept is little more than an acknowledgement that what they're doing is one huge motivator to their customers to leave, and publicly acknowledging the fact that that's what a lot of them would do. So, they've decided to leave the people who can leave alone, and screw the people who can't.

I guess what this really means is that their long term customers are the ones they have the better connections with.

On what's wrong with your CV

Writing a CV is hard. Really hard. Trying to show a total stranger that you're qualified, smart, personable, and capable enough to get them to actually want to speak to you. It's a hard, nerve racking experience. So why then would you send off something that reads like it was put together by a schizophrenic toddler with social issues? Because you are. Constantly. I know this because you've been sending them to me. Here's some of the highlights....

But first a disclaimer, because I'm not an idiot. I've tweaked these where required to get rid of all names, companies, and any other personal information to protect the astonishingly stupid. And me. Mostly me.

Enjoy.

1) Don't write your CV in the third person.

Seriously people, it's weird. REALLY weird. The first impression I'm going to get of you is that either a) You got someone else to write it for you, which I've caught people out for on several occasions, or b) You're about as mentally stable as Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining. Unless that's how you communicate in the real world there are no excuses. If that is how you communicate in the real world then I'm not the person you need to be applying to.

I'm seeing this constantly, bloody stop it!

2) There is such a thing as too much information.

I recently got a CV that told me the author liked to keep up with current events. Which in itself isn't exactly news worthy, but fair enough, I know why it's there. Unfortunately the author clearly realised that people get suspicious about what's on someone's CV. After all, they might be lying. The bastards. So in an effort to combat this they decided the best solution was to list some examples of "current events" because that's the part of their CV I was most likely to be suspicious about.

The same person then went on to tell me they'd just started doing Yoga. Which was nice. What I didn't need to know was that they were doing so to "make me more flexible." NOT OKAY!

3) You are not in school, I expect you to write your own CV

There was a time, when I was about 14, that copying off the internet was amazing. Homework done in seconds and the teachers too far behind the times to realise what I'd done.* It was a glorious time to be alive. Sadly, by the time I was 15 that time had passed. So, you can imagine my excitement when I received the following CV for an IT job.

"[Previous company: Fashion label] IT dept.

[Company] is a British fashion retailer headquartered in [Removed], London, UK.^[1][2][3] [Company] now sells menswear, womenswear, footwear, and accessories in 35 department stores and 65 stand-alone stores across the UK, Europe, Canada and the United States.^[4][5][6] Currently, 85% of the company is owned by [Removed].^[7][8][9]"

That's right kids! Not only did this guy simply copy and paste the Wikipedia article for one of his former employers, he also left in every single hyperlink to other Wikipedia articles too! Presumably he thought that I might become so interested in London or Women's wear from reading his CV that I'd immediately want to get myself onto Wikipedia to learn more!

Oh, and just for some bonus points, he also didn't even bother to change the font to match the rest of the CV either. Just incase I was under any doubt that he was lazy and lacking in even the most basic IT skills to realise what he'd done.

4) Get to the point!

I like the point. It's a great and wonderful place driven by efficiency and with very little time wasting. Glorious. Imagine if everything were like the point. We'd probably be reading this on Mars by now. The point in your CV needs to be gotten to, and fast. Ideally over no more than 2-3 pages. So, to the guy who sent me a 19 page CV, and to the HR department who couldn't comprehend why said no without even turning to page 2, let this be a lesson. If it takes you 19 pages to make yourself look good I don't even want to talk to you, let alone employ you.

5) "Txt spk" is glorified illiteracy.

Apparently this makes me uncool and ignorant of the way young people are creating an exciting new langu....oh you know what, I just don't care. It doesn't matter how many bleeding hearts come on TV to say that we shouldn't look down on such things. I don't care. I pay you, I employ you, your job exists on my terms, not yours. If your first day's training includes handing out a dictionary then I can promise you there wont be a second day of training. Don't like it? Fine, don't get a job then. YOLO.

6) Don't attach a photo

See point 1. It's weird. It also makes me feel excessively judgemental as human nature dictates I've already made assumptions. Also, more often than not you've sent me a passport photo. Which makes you look like a murderer, and I try to keep the number of murderers I'm associated with to as few as possible.

So let's be clear, with your CV you are asking me to be your manager. You reflect on me, if you're shit, and I hired you, I look like shit. As your manager, I am not your baby sitter, your parents, your carer, or your psychiatrist. I don't care if you 'need to work on' somethings. I expect you to have worked on it and be able to function as a useful member of a team. I DO expect to train you, to show you things, teach you new processes, and basically enable you to do your job properly. I do expect to treat you like a decent human being and understand that sometimes shit happens to people, and I need to be flexible when it does. But I do not expect to have to make you a viable member of society before you become a useful member of my team.

The nice bit

Just for balance, there are a lot of things I simply don't care about for you either. Your hair length, your piercings, your tattoos, your dress sense, and all of the other good stuff that makes you a human being. Couldn't care less about them. You're either capable of doing the job or you're not. If you are, you'll get the job. But remember, that's me. Other people are stuck in the dark ages and expect you to jump through hoops and look a certain way. So think about that before you rock up without even bothering to shower that morning. Because yes, that's happened too.

*Let's all just take a moment to remember how awesome Encarta Encyclopedia was.........Done? Cool, carry on as you were.

Cleaning up the London protestors

Good god this has been a long time coming. Finally, after years of protests, riots, and petitioning (most of them nonsense) it's finally happened. Boris Johnson, and the wider Tory Government has taken notice of the plight of the nation's protestors. Most of them are, plainly, disgusting.

"Soap dodging on this scale hasn't been seen since the middle ages." A spokesperson for the mayor's office announced, echoing the voice of the people of Highgate, Hampstead, and Blackheath. "We've heard the voice of the people, and the people are desperate. These uprising's of the unclean need to be addressed, and today we're showing that we're listening, and we're acting."

Government cut backs have already impacted on the scheme with confirmation the protestors would still be required to bring their own soap. But the general consensus seems to be that even without soap in the water, the principal alone should see London move up the list of the worlds cleanest cities.

Personally over the years I've grown thoroughly fed up with seeing legions of angry people shouting about pretty much everything, without even having bothered to take a shower before heading to the streets. Finally this means that we can protect people's right to protest, and help the homeless, simultaneously.

38 Degrees of separation

I can’t bloody stand 38 Degrees. Not the idea that is. The idea that people can do something that isn’t setting fire to stuff to raise legitimate issues for consideration by the powers that be is, well, quite good really. What I can’t bloody stand is how it’s actually used. You know, in the real world. Where people live. And by people, I mean idiots.

PETITION ALL THE THINGS!

Literally, all of them. Don’t like something? Start a petition. Have a hair brained scheme that you rehashed from an episode of Pinky and the Brain that you watched during a depressing, Special Brew fuelled, YouTube evening? Start a petition. Sick of writing angry letters to the Daily Mail to complain that you’re, curiously, not in charge of everything, and that other people have the nerve to disagree with you? Start a petition.

38 Degrees has basically turned into Twitter with signatures and frankly it’s making us look like a bunch of morons.

My current favourite is this stunningly clever idea that Michael Gove should spend a term teaching. 

Let’s break this little gem down shall we.

Michael Gove, a politician, a man with no discernible capacity to do his own job, let alone someone else’s, should, according to about 100,000 people, spend a term teaching. Should he? Really, should he? Michael Gove is, quite clearly, a dribbling moron who’d struggle with the responsibility of looking after an Ice Cream in an Igloo, let alone the education policy of a nation. And you want him to be in direct charge of actually teaching Children? Not the hypothetical way that he comes up with policies, but in an actual standing in front of a class of eager young minds imparting wisdom and helping them develop their critical thinking way.

You bloody don’t. You don’t want him anywhere near where Children might “learn” from him. What you actually want is for him to get fired for being an inept window licking moron with the intellectual capacity of a Cat Flap and be consigned to a footnote in the county’s more embarrassing history books. But, instead of that, almost 100,000 people have decided he should spend a term teaching in order to be able to do his job properly.For people who like lists (or keep reading BuzzFeed), here’s some numbered points….

1. Michael Gove is, sadly, an MP. A man with an existing job. A full time job. A job that were he not doing it full time you’d also been complaining about. A job that he won’t be doing at all if he’s teaching in a school.
2. What type of school? Or do you just mean the one that specifically applies to your child, and your own specific needs. Because having the Minister in charge of Education focussed solely on your own little niche is of literally no use to anyone.
3. Michael Gove is not a teacher. Which means that he's never had ANY teacher training. Which, to my mind at least, means that teaching isn't really something he should be doing. But don’t let that little technicality get in the way of your irate shouty genius.
4. By creating or signing this spurious nonsense, what you’ve actually done is legitimise those in charge to completely ignore online petitions entirely. After all, if it’s famous for complaining about things they plainly don’t understand, are making ill informed petitions consisting largely of plainly unworkable ideas, why would anyone who wasn’t taught by Michael Gove want to listen to it?

So there you have it. Well done you. You've successfully turned what could have been a powerful tool of the people into an easily dismissed haven for those who didn't watch enough Sesame Street as kids. Thanks for that. Here's a round of applause for you....

I really am very sorry.

By virtue of some unlikely circumstance, I recently spent a curiously prolonged period of time with someone who, among many other things, can be most accurately described as 'American'. As an Englishman, this inevitably led to an avalanche of culture clashes, casual imperialism, and pointing out that, at least from an administrative level, the US is still technically a British colony, and it might be an idea for them to remember that once in a while.

But more than anything else it led to apologising. Constantly.

At this point you're probably thinking: 'Good! Bloody Americans, it's about time they started acknowledging a few things.' You would of course be completely wrong.

You see, as any good English person will tell you, it's entirely reasonable to compose a sentence that's comprised of 70% apologetic terms. 80% if you're being polite. Which you should be. Always. For an American this is frankly incomprehensible. After all, how on earth can I spend that much of my life being that upset about things that in their (savage?) mind I shouldn't even have acknowledged?

I have apologised for being in a slightly inconvenient position (for them), doing something entirely legitimate, but thus putting them through the trauma of having to work around me.

For not predicting their precise need to intake fluids, thus forcing them to actually have to ask for them in the first place.

For having the audacity to attempt to engage them in casual conversation.

For trying to be helpful (I apologised for this a lot).

And for them bumping into me. As frankly I probably shouldn't have been there in the first place.

This was met with a constant procession of confused expressions, and an awful lot of "wait, did you just apologise for that?" Which made me feel awkward. So naturally I apologised for that too.

The only thing I'm worried about is that I might have left something out. Or not apologised enough. Two thoughts that frankly keep me awake at night wondering how best to apologise for that.

One thing I'm not apologising for though is my manners. Which are clearly impeccable. I'm sorry, but I'm just not prepared to call that into question.

The best things about the British summer

As a few people have seen fit to point out, it's summer in the UK at the moment, and for a change we mean that literally, and aren't just optimistically attaching a badge to the 3 months between Spring and First Winter.

So, in commemoration of this once in a lifetime event (there are now an entire generation of children who never had a proper summer when they were at school. Seriously nature, what's up with that?), here's the best things about exactly that.

1. A whole new kind of complaining

We British are a curious type, a nation that comes together over the common understanding that literally none of our infrastructure was designed to work in the environment it's in. For years we've sat there, quietly tutting away at train companies who get caught out by snow in Winter, leaves falling in Autumn, and the concept of rain falling anywhere in the country. But now, now we have something new. It's now too hot for them to run the trains!

We're still complaining, it's still because of the weather, but it's from a DIFFERENT KIND OF WEATHER! Do you have any idea how exciting this is? Do you? I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

2. British summer fashion

We have none. We never have done, and likely never will do. Which is quite predictable really given that we've next to no use for it in the first place (excuses for other seasons will be provided in due course). So simply setting foot outside in this weather is hilarious. Don't believe me? Have you seen Hipsters trying to work out how to ironically wear a sweater and skinny jeans in 90 degree heat?

3. Queuing for 30 minutes to spend £5 on an Ice Cream

It's just like normal queuing; which is amazing, obviously. It's also just like paying massively over inflated prices for everything, as usual (we only do that to see the look on the faces of tourists, just in case you were wondering. And yes, that includes northerners in London). BUT it's in the SUN. Everything's better in the sun.

4. British Beer was designed for exactly these circumstances

You know the moment, the moment where you've been sat in the park with your friends, having a picnic, maybe a couple of drinks, and you reach over to grab another Beer. Grab that can, hear that reassuring hiss as you pull on the ring pull, that moment of expectation as you put the can to your mouth for that first glorious, cold, refreshing taste. Only to discover that rather than the amber of the Gods, what you're now drinking is horrifically warm, and likely the product of building a brewery next to an animal refuge with particularly lax security.

Not with British Beer. We thought ahead. It's meant to be warm. It's literally impossible for it to be ruined by the heat. Amazing.

5. Doing anything is an extreme sport

There is one simple over riding fact of living in Britain. At literally any given moment it could absolutely pour down with rain. We know this, and 9 out of 12 months a year we're completely prepared for it. But in summer? No chance. If you've not attended a BBQ in Britain and had to spend 20 minutes sprinting around the garden trying to get the food covered, find the Dog, and get the garden furniture back in the shed before everything is ruined you've not lived.

6. Confusing Australians

There's nothing quite as magical as seeing the look on an Australian's face when you talk to them about a heatwave in the UK. The only other way to get a similar reaction is to start a conversation speaking Klingon, and finish it by urinating on their shoes.

7. Ordering flavoured Cider without having your sexuality being silently assessed by the bar staff

The fact of the matter is, unless you're ordering a Strongbow (and seriously, why the hell would you?), there's no way for a man to order a Cider without immediately putting his sexual orientation up for debate in the process. In summer however it's simply accepted that you've just order a pint of cold, that comes complete with blocks of extreme cold to make it colder. Essentially announcing yourself as the Ranulph Feinnes of the beverage world. Manly.

Just pants.

Aren't bookstores great! They're full of books. Proper books. Books that make you feel like the intellectual you always hoped everyone else would mistake you for. Books that people will see upon walking into your flat and suddenly be overcome with the thought that they like to have sex with people who like books. So, as someone who recently purged a vast array of DVDs specifically to create more space on his bookshelf to fill with said books, I just pointed myself in the direction of the Plaza's glorious Waterstones store to do just that. (The book buying bit, not the casual sex with other bibliophiles bit. This isn't about to turn into some kind of book based dogging. Mr Cameron would never approve of that)

Which is when it happened. The boundless joy of nosing through the shelves in the kind of chaos free oasis that, in central London, only a bookstore can provide came crashing down like a, well fine, I can't think of a good enough metaphor for once, but trust me, it hit the ground hard.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just witnessed something that should simply never have been allowed to be. Something that was not only terrifying, but that as a man I have literally no frame of reference point over how to deal with.

While happily nosey through a collection of, inevitably alluring, fantasy books, I casually turned my head and saw, well, frankly there's no good way of putting this. In fact it's so far from being right that I'm going to devote an entire paragraph to the sentence to describe it.

Three teenage girls, wearing jeans, with their knickers on over the top of their Jeans!

Seriously fashion, what the actual fuck was that? Normally at this point I'd love to share a photo with you as evidence, but as I'm not a complete moron, I realised pretty much instantaneously that attempting to photograph this monstrosity had somewhere between slim and no chance of not landing me with a lengthly jail term. So you're going to have to take my word for it. But there it was. 3 teenagers going about their, largely unfathomable, lives, wearing some very large pants, over some reasonably baggy Jeans. Just, just stop for a second, and picture that.

I know fashion's had it's fair share of train wrecks over the years. Shell-suits were liable to spontaneously engulf their owner in flames. Emo hair was the equivalent to voluntary cataracts on one side of your face. Skinny Jeans was fashion's least subtle effort to sterilise the male population. And I was once a Goth. But this, this just defies explanation. It's bad enough that many men under the age of 30 have seemingly gotten so bored with getting dressed that they give up half way through pulling their trousers up, but at least they've remembered the basic order in which to apply clothing!

I've literally spent the past 45 minutes trying to comprehend why a person would do this. My best idea was simply that it was a bet. They were all young enough to be on some school trip. So it might have been a joke. Some glorious youthful hijinks that they'll have a good chuckle about later.

Then I came back to the office and saw this on Twitter:

No fashion. No. Even Superman's gotten past this now.

*NB Tweet stolen from the excellent @peachesanscream who you should probably follow.

Film Review: The Worlds End

I'll get this clear from the outset. I bloody love Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. If I were starting life with a brochure of people to pick my mates from, they'd be top of my shopping list. I imagine I love Edgar Wright too, but for some reason I don't tend to make that association between him and the films so there we go.

Equally, I bloody loved Shaun of the Dead, Spaced, Hot Fuzz and Paul (told you I didn't make the Edgar Wright association), in all of their hilarious, often quite mental, glory. So I had high hopes for The Worlds End. How could they possibly get it wrong? It's basically a take on combining the best bits of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, ageing the characters to a sensible degree, and rocking on with the concept.

Which is why it sucked when I discovered that it had all gone a bit wrong really.

The first half of the film is reiterating the same point over and over again, Gary King (Pegg) has never grown up, lives in the past, and desperately wants to reclaim his long lost youth in some desperate final act of rebellion. All of his mates have grown up, become everything that every teenage boy swears they'll never be, are now basically annoyed with him, but decide to come along come along anyway. Now rinse and repeat that concept until we're a few pubs into the crawl that provides the crux of the setting.

The problem is, that while there are some genuinely hilarious moments, you spend the entire first half of the movie constantly expecting it to get going, and it never really does. The tragic life of Gary King is played up over and over again, to the point at which you start to wonder if there was really any point to any of the rest of the cast not called Nick Frost. So by the time the Alien Robots finally show up you're almost longing for a distraction. It does get better at that point, and it REALLY makes an effort to come across all Shaun of the Fuzz, but there's still something that's not quite there. You see, we've seen this film. I know I said at the outset that taking the best bits of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead could only ever be a good thing, and I stand by that. But what they've turned out at the end of it is really an exercise in taking the good bits, and making them quite, well, mediocre really.

The Robot vs Human fights scenes are brilliantly shot, but lack the charm of their SotD counterparts (something that can probably be explained by actually having a special effects budget on this one). While the 'all to perfect' town is so perfect that it completely lacks in any of the character that Sandford mustered in Hot Fuzz.

The final scenes get better, and get back to what we know they're capable of producing, but the very end of the film just seemed to me to show how cool a film they could have made, if they'd not wanted to do a very British pub crawl first.

A few people gave up and walked out on this when I was watching, and it's certainly not bad enough for that. Hell, it's worth a watch and I certainly don't regret giving it one. It's just a classic case of the whole not being as good as the sum of its parts.

David Cameron on Porn

Dear David Cameron,

It's a nice idea isn't it; a perfect world where our children are protected from anything that we might consider to be bad for them. I can see it now, little Timmy merrily skipping off to school wrapped in a limitless bubble of joy and naivety. A bubble the stops all of life's little nasties from getting at him. Porn for example. You know Porn, that overly exaggerated past time of having a camera in a room while human beings do things that human beings tend to do when given half a chance, and then showing it to other people. Now, in the name of fighting the good fight you've decided that the Internet should block it by default, lock it away somewhere cold and dark, and help keep little Timmy's bubble of joy that bit stronger.

Fair enough. It's a plan that's about as intelligent as putting a Cat Flap in an Elephant house, but hey, it's a good way of making it look like you're doing something good for a change. Let's face it, there's not a Daily Mail reader in the land who won't weep tears of joy over the concept alone!

Now, I'm not here to argue the morals, and I'm not here to argue the psychological science or otherwise behind viewing such things. Hell, I'm not even here to point out what might happen if you suddenly decide that other things are now bad as well and should be locked away too. And of course, because some book dodging halfwit will inevitably assume it if I don't say so; no, I don't want to expose little Timmy to porn. No, I'm simply here to point out that you're idea is so utterly flawed at a basic level that I'm staggered you even got this far through the thought process to start with. Let me tell you why.

First up, any teenager with half a brain can use a proxy, and happily bounce themselves around anywhere else in the world online instantly bypassing the entire thing. Total effort involved? Less than it took me to write this sentence, and in an instant all your litigation and effort has come to nothing. China can't keep it's people behind their great firewall, Egypt's previous rulers had to cut off the internet entirely for the whole country to keep them quiet (and it STILL didn't work). So what chance exactly do you, a man with FAR less practical power than either of those regimes, have?

Secondly, define Porn. Sure, RavingLesbianNymphs.com is probably a pretty good place to start, so that can be on the block list, but what about say, Facebook? Or maybe Twitter? YouTube? Flickr? (I was going to say MySpace as well, but let's not let this become ridiculous) Because what exactly would it be that would stop me uploading something Porn based to one of those sites? Nothing, nothing at all. Now seeing as it doesn't take an awful lot of thought to realise that it's impossible to validate everything ever posted on the internet we can be pretty sure of one thing. It's still going to be distributed just fine.

Sure the Facebooks and Twitters of the world would take it down reasonably quickly (once they've been told about it anyway), but that's the thing about the internet, block something in one place and within 15 minutes the whole thing is back again, hosted in another country and doing exactly the same thing. Total cost to the user: fuck all. Total cost to the Government & various ISPs (or whomever else) to plough through all the legal proceedings: A lot more than fuck all.

Not to mention all the false positives that will come up from this. Sexual health clinics? Countless entirely legitimate sites that happen to discuss things around gender or sexuality? Charities? What about written porn? Slash fiction? The fucking Discovery Channel? We could even bring up that great piece of internet based folk lore and talk about the people working at Pen Island. Or are you going to fix it so we're all provided a list of things that we are allowed to look at, read, learn, watch, and things that we're not? Unlikely if you ever want to be voted for again.

Dave, let's keep it simple here. You don't really know how the internet works do you. It's a nice idea this whole protecting the children thing, and I get where you're coming from, I really do. But it won't work. It'll never work. The ISPs and search engines know it wont work, and that's why they want no part in it unless you force them by law. Now, I don't want to alarm you here Dave, but perhaps if you spent a few more minutes listening to the experts, and few less listening to irrational screaming Daily Mail types, you might just save yourself a hell of a lot of time and effort, and save the rest of the country a hell of a lot of money.

Alternatively, we could always encourage people to do some bloody parenting once in a while?

The joys of air travel

As I type this I'm cruising at about 30'000 feet, (which is quite high, even by my standards) somewhere over Siberia, on what feels like a flight that could only get worse if the cabin crew asked us nicely if we wouldn't mind popping our arms out the window and flapping them up and down for a while.

Suffice to say, this, as with pretty much everything else on this blog, is going to be a bit ranty. So buckle up and get comfortable, as the emergency exits are only painted on, and you're going to be here for a while.

Air travel is shit. From the moment you get to the airport, to the second you leave the next one. You arrive at security where you're asked to strip practically naked, be casually groped by someone so unappealing that you're pretty much certain that their job satisfaction comes from a less than conventional angle, and then someone waves something scary at you, and empties your bag on the floor. Thus completing an experience that I was promised wouldn't happen again once I stopped  doing PE at school.

So why? Security apparently. They don't want you taking explosive death fluids on planes. Which, on the surface seems entirely reasonable, until you notice what they do with them. 

Once your vicious looking bottle of middle class mineral water has been removed for being the threat that it is, this, supposedly highly dangerous, and/or explosive mixture is, quite literally, thrown in a massive bin full of other explosive highly dangerous things right in front of you. Don't believe me? Then you've never flown from Gatwick. They literally fling all these potential bombs into one massive container, or super bomb if you will, right next to the security check point, and expect you not to realise that they're taking the piss. Frankly at that point they might as well drop their trousers and start slapping you in the face with something floppy and ask if you'll blindly accept that too.

Right now you might be thinking that it's for the greater good. Fair enough. You're an idiot, but at least you've made it easier for the rest of us to spot you. That of course is because the actual stupidity started 24 hours earlier with the concept of the 'online check-in'. Where we're basically asked by an inanimate object to promise not to put any nasties in our luggage, on what can at best be described as history's most laughable honor system. Let's face it, humanity stopped clicking on anything other than 'I agree' the second iTunes started its ceaseless T&Cs barrage, and nobody has ever used the Internet for anything that wasn't at best a mask for something morally dubious.

So, hand luggage is a mockery, checked in luggage is laughable, body scanners are staffed by perverts, and not once when I've been quizzed about bringing on any weapons or general pointy things with me has anyone ever asked if I'm a Ninja.

How's that secure feeling working out for you?

Lets get on the plane.

You're spending 12 hours on a metal tube hurtling through the sky. 60% of the other passengers are on day release, 20% are under the age of 5, and the remainder have locked themselves into the one working toilet. Then finally you find yourself sat next to someone who's last shower was apparently administered when they were walking under a window in Victorian London (that was clever, look it up if you don't get it). Then at some point a homosexual will ask you what you'd like to eat, pay literally no attention to your answer, and present you with something that looks like it was originally prepared in the mess room on the Ark, and has just this second been reheated for your culinary pleasure. What a treat!

This is usually the point where you give up, and turn to that last bastion of hope, the in flight entertainment system. In my case being one of the 5 people on this flight for whom it works, initially left me feeling immeasurably smug. But as I said, right now I'm writing a blog on a plane, and not, obviously, enjoying a selection of Hollywood hits. That, quite simply is due to one very simple thing. I clicked on 'movies' and the first thing it deemed to present me with were the words "Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Part 1."

The 12 best things about being tall

Apparently there are 32 bad things about being tall, which, for the Hobbits amongst you, you can find here, if you need to feel better about your tiny little lives.

Unsurprisingly, and despite those being largely, well, true, there are a truck load of benefits of being tall. Which, for the sake of your education, and my own overblown sense of superiority, I'll run through now!

1) It doesn't matter how confident the other guy is, their threats are never going to be anything other than hilarious.

Ever had that worrying moment when a group of "young people," as I believe they're called, take one look at you from a distance, size you up, pull up their hoods and masks and walk over? I have, a few times. And then they got closer, and closer, and I watched them visibly shrink before me, and slip off quietly to the other side of the road. Threats therefore, are always going to be funny. Pick on someone your own size Frodo.

2) Gig tickets are 100% value for money

When I spend £50 on a gig ticket, I get to both hear AND see the band. What is it like seeing your favorite bands through the back of another persons head anyway? I have, over the years, bent down to other peoples levels at gigs to see what it's like a fair few times. As a result I have literally no idea why any you bothered buying tickets. The words "restricted view" mean nothing to me.

Look, it's a band, and they're playing music! How many times have you seen that? Exactly. None.

3) Clothes shopping is really efficient

On average how much time do you spend shopping for clothes? Trying stuff on? Making decisions on what to get? Do you know what I do? I use the following conversation:

Me: "Excuse me, what's the longest leg length you do?"
Shopkeep: "34"
Me: "Thanks, bye."

Job done. Off to the Pub.

As for if they say 36"? Well, then it's still a job done. I have saved hours of my life on this fact alone.

4) Studies have shown that taller people progress further in their careers, and faster than their shorter counterparts

Yup, it's true. In fact the biggest problem I have right now as I type this is the fact that my mattress that I happen to be sitting on is a little lumpy as a result of the VAST QUANTITIES OF CASH STUFFED INTO IT, such is the enormity of my earning potential.

5) Air travel, is indeed shit. Initially.

Until you request an upgrade as you don't fit in the seat. At which point the airline will probably say something along the lines of; "You know you could have paid extra for the premium seats." Which you immediately follow with the statement "Why am I being charged more due to my height, that's a form of discrimination," and BOOM! Welcome to Business class.

6) Easily being found.

Every time I go to, well, anything, there is one simple plan; meet by me. What does this mean? I am always in the right place. By definition it's completely impossible for me not to be. I can't even get in trouble for it if people can't find me. Nobody panics, nobody has a tired panic because they can't find their friends. The whole event is made better for everyone because of me.

7) I walk faster than all of you

Why? Because not only do I have long legs, but I can see the gaps in the crowd, so while you lot are bumping into each other and going nowhere, I've already got where I'm going, stuck the kettle on, and made myself a nice cup of tea. Let me know when you catch up.

8) You can, quite legitimately, completely ignore small people

Now, this can be delicate, but to put it bluntly, I genuinely don't notice a lot of people until they either speak, or I've walked into them. It's not deliberate, always, but it's completely true. Sorry my little leprechaun friends, but you're either going to need to put a flashing light on your head, or pay attention to where you're going. As for the line "why don't you look where you're going!?!" Well, I was, what I wasn't doing was staring at the floor, so please, tell me again what your point was?

An artists rendition of my recent stroll down Oxford St.

9) Walk tall, walk straight ahead, and the seas will part

You've probably been told that if you walk and act with confidence people will naturally move around you. Well, that goes double for tall people. Head up, walk straight forward with confidence and I have genuinely seen people leap out of my way. I, boys and girls, am basically a modern day Moses!

10) You can never hear people at parties. If you want to.

Everyone alive has been in this situation. You're at a party, and you've found yourself next to the terminal bore of the evening. A couple of minutes of being generally polite to someone has turned into the kind of experience that makes you want to take a Cheese Grater to your eardrums and scour away at your hearing forever more. Feigned deafness, is, frankly bloody handy. It breaks a conversation's flow, throws off the other party, and basically offers you escape routes a-plenty. If I've ever done this to you, well, then this is awkward.

11) Being heralded as a God in Asia

I was once mobbed by a group of 50 Vietnamese businessmen at Ha-Long Bay who insisted on having their picture taken with me and measuring themselves against me. It might have been a little random, but it was stupidly entertaining. Similar, if somewhat more restrained, experiences also took place in Thailand and Laos. As for Japan, well, I'm just going to walk around Tokyo in a few weeks wearing a Dinosaur mask. Trust me, you'll hear about it :-)

12) Everything they said about the size of someones feet is completely true.

My shoes are also fucking huge.

Film Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

As I've just been to see the Hobbit, and seeing as everyone is going on about it as though it's single handedly going to save us all from the decline of Capitalism, such is the vastness of it's money making bosom, I suppose it merits a review.

So, here it is. Put quite simply, the whole thing could have been done in a third of the time if Gandalf stopped asking bloody short people to do the job of proper fully grown men! Look at it this way; at a guess I take one step to the average Hobbit's three, ergo rudimentary logic dictates that my pace is 3 times faster than that of stumpy. Probably more so when you consider that a flight of stairs is a negligible obstacle for the likes of you and me, where as half-pint and friends have to whip up a rope ladder to get anywhere near the top, and still need to allow for a 30 minute break on route. It was at roughly the half way point in The Hobbit that I realised that the whole thing is a little like one of those Channel 4 documentaries produced to raise awareness of the plight of people with an unusual genetic condition. Too small enough to be classified as a Dwarf? 35 years old and haven't graduated from the Children's clothing department? Don't worry, here's the Hobbit to let you know that little people can lead exciting (if barely noticeable) lives too!

Don't believe me? Fine, well here some more proof...

Here on the left we have Bilbo and some Dwarfs, getting ready to head out complete with loads of bags and some sticks. The latter presumably just incase they have to wade through a puddle without drowning or something. While on the right we have me, carrying EXACTLY the same amount of stuff (less stick, as I don't need to fear puddles), and a razor apparently, on my own!

Seriously, the whole quest could have been done by Gandalf and a couple of regular sized humans, and it would have taken significantly less time. Just make sure the party's made up of tree hugging hippy types so the Dwarf's gold doesn't get nicked at the other end, and it's job done.

It's the time though that makes one of the key parts of the movie. Or rather 3 movies. This short story has already been widely criticised (by the people that include it's own cast!) for being split over 3 films, and from what I saw, rightly so. The first hour of the Hobbit is basically unused footage from The Fellowship of the Ring (resulting in it getting so bogged down in it's efforts to point out that it's actually a prequel to LOTR that Peter Jackson might as well be sat next to you dishing out lessons is basic chronology), some dinner, and casual singing. As a result it goes pretty much nowhere in the process. Once we finally leave the Shire it's just a collection of loosely strung together battle scenes, culminating in a colossal plot hole that points out that they could have just been flown to their destination and saved everyone a whole lot of trouble. Christ, in the 'end' they actually get dropped off by some Eagles, look out over a valley, and go "oh look, that's where we're going, over there in the distance," and NOBODY has the nerve to point out that they could have just been fucking flown there on the back of the birds who just carried them across miles of forest mere minutes earlier! The only way I can see that they can pad it out enough to cover 3 films is going to be to spend the entire time constantly pointing out how hard it must be to be tiny. And believe me, 15 minutes after leaving the Shire, we fucking get it. Seriously, the whole thing plays out like some kind of 'social awareness' advert promoting equally opportunities for people who stopped growing after their 10th birthday.

So what can we learn from the Hobbit? Well, if you need someone to get at those hard to reach places under the shelves of supermarkets, get yourself a Hobbit. Need to go foraging around cracks in a cave? Hobbit. Want to move around barely noticeable to the rest of the world because you forgot to put a flashing light on your head when you left the house? Hobbit. For anything else, and anything useful, get someone tall enough to see over a hedge and the whole exercise will be complete in half the time.

Oh, and one last thing....

Exercising some deamons

According to the BBC (here) some people in this country have taken to dismissing the notion of going to the Doctor when ill, and decided that what they really need is an exorcist. As you do.

So apparently thousands of years of medical advancement, and countless proven treatments for multitudes of conditions, hasn't managed to break through the notion that waving some incense about, and muttering phrases from long dead languages probably isn't going to cut the proverbial mustard.

Except of course that it has. Completely. In-fact the notion of exorcism requires such a fundamentally flawed belief system that you would have to have made a conscious decision not to be educated, not to learn things, and to never, under any circumstances, attempt to figure out the terrifying voodoo behind the concept of cause and effect, for it to make sense.

At this point, you're probably expecting me to pen some quip about fools and money being parted, or sit there tearing into the business practices of a bunch of charlatans who have managed to convince people that they know special magic words that will make it all better.

I'm not going to though. Not even a little bit. Partly because it's too easy, and party because if you're reading this, and, well, you have enough education to be able to read this, I don't think I need to. After all, it doesn't take a lot of time at school to realise that there's a very clear difference between knowing things because we can asses and measure them, and "knowing" things because someone, somewhere, might have once said something, that might not have been mistranslated numerous times over thousands of years, that might be true despite a total absence of evidence, and assuming that it still remains valid in a world where we know about, well, stuff.

Because that's what the point is. If you've forgone education and rationality enough to ignore all evidence, science, teaching, and common sense, to come to the conclusion that what's wrong with you isn't a recognisable medical condition, but the fact that you're possessed by the ghost of grandma's dog from the 70s, then I'm genuinely VERY happy for you to visit an exorcist.

After all, why waste everyone else's money? £60 of your cash an hour to keep you out of the NHS, out of Doctors surgeries, and, on a long enough time scale, ultimately away from anyone else who can breathe, is a good thing. It's the cycling of the intellectual world. To do otherwise is just an exercise in standing in the way of natural selection. We don't need you. You're holding back the species, and the rest of us have better thing to do.

Idiots die out because they bring it on themselves, nonsense belief systems die out because over time the weight of evidence to point out that they're nonsense becomes over powering, and there are only so many ways in which you can 'modernise' them before you start to realise that the only similarity of what you believe in now compared to what you used to believe in is the spelling.

Incidentally, this is pretty much how I feel about homeopathy as well. The chief difference being that, for reasons I don't even want to contemplate, we apparently consider that particular variant of making shit up to be good enough to merit public funding. Which is even more worrying, as if we can use the excuse of patient choice as an excuse to fund something that's backed up by precisely nothing, then we're really not far off funding exorcisms either.

Let's talk about Tax baby...

Let's talk about us and them, let's talk about all the good things, and the bad things that may be, let's talk about tax.

Shall we? We might as well. I mean everyone and their dog in this country is currently devoting an exceptional amount of time to extracting their toys from their prams on this one. So come along, let's talk about tax.

Fucking Starbucks! How much money do you make? Seriously? I didn't even know numbers went that high! And how little of it are you taxed on? And you Apple, I don't care how shiny you've managed to make your product, or how much I'm over come with lust of a horny Sex Panther just to set eyes on your latest shiny shiny thing, pay some damn tax! As for you Jimmy Carr, oh how dare you not pay much tax via an entirely lawful system. You utter utter bastard.

That sounds about right doesn't it? All of these people screwing over us poor worker bees who have to pay our taxes like good little boys and girls. Look how hard done by we are. Look at our worried little angry heads. LOOK AT US!

Except for the fact that that's complete crap. Because literally none of us are paying any attention to the reality of what we're doing.

No, we don't all earn Jimmy Carr's salary, or make Hyper Global Mega Corp levels of profit. But every, single, one, of us, is at it in the best way we know how.

Lets see shall we?

Do you have an ISA? Interesting. So, how guilty do you feel about that £5640 a year in tax free savings?

Were you a Student? Did you have a part time job? A part time job where you're taxed NOTHING at all on your salary?

Did you buy a house over the past couple of years? Your first house? That's interesting. Did you take advantage of the Stamp Duty holiday? Interesting. I know I did. That's approximately £3500.00 I didn't pay in tax. At all. And I don't even have to in the future either. And you can't have it. Ever. I like to think it's come straight out of the big pot of cash that was ear marked for providing puppies that would cuddle up to poor children keeping them warm at night.

How about the army of contractors out there? I know bloody tonnes of them! These are the people who have no option but to set themselves up as their own businesses as part of the process of getting work. You all know that they can claim the tax back on their travel to work every day right? That's an average of between £1250 - £2000 a year in London, and there's that £1300 per year food allowance, that, yup, they can claim tax back on too! And I'm not even mentioning anyone else who's self employed writing various things off as business costs. Or maybe they just have separate PCs, Cars etc that they use for non-business reasons, so that's probably fine.

Pensions, we all need them right? And if you work for, well, most businesses really, you can pay into yours via a salary sacrifice system. What's that then? Well, it takes the money out of your PRE-tax pay, to maximise your input, while reducing the amount of tax paid on the rest of your pay.

But I'm sure none of you have any of these things do you.

Because then you'd have to think about how committed to this premise you really are.

Then you'd have to ask yourselves are you actually angry that some people have gotten lucrative tax systems, or are you angry that yours isn't as lucrative? You made your decisions in life, you decided on your career path, you decided on the effort you made, you decided on if you wanted to sacrifice A for B. So don't you dare sit there and complain about it when people more successful than you have more money than you.

Tax, is doesn't have to be taxing.

Update - 08-11

So, apparently nobody gets the point here at all, and thinks that this is entirely literal in it's comparison between Joe Average and Starbucks. Apparently you think, that I think that a company making billions is actually being measured against someone making thousands. So, in an effort to spell this out just a little bit more allow me to explain.


What I'm getting at is very simple. Every single person is avoiding paying tax as much as is humanly possible for them. Christ, even on our death beds we're being creative with our estates to ensure that we avoid paying as much inheritance tax as is possible. In short this is a national past time that we are all doing to the best of our ability. We might not be as good at is as the Greeks are, but believe me, we're damn well trying.

The simple fact of the matter is what everyone is actually annoyed about is that other people are avoiding paying more tax than they themselves are avoiding, and given half a chance they'd all be doing it too. Because, quite clearly, we all think tax avoidance is fine, just so long as we can only do as much as your knowledge of the system allows. Heaven forbid we should pay someone with more knowledge to do a better job of it. Just imagine what the world would be like if people were paid to do work based on their ability? Fucking mental!

So, finally, why, when we've collectively engineered a society that tries to avoid paying tax in anyway possible, are we surprised when that's EXACTLY what happens?

EU Prison Posturing

The EU want us to give prisoners the right to vote. Because, and this is truly something magical as far as logic goes, we, as a nation, are infringing on the rights of people who broke the law, and were locked up for it, and what we should do, is sit them down and ask them how they think the country should be run.

Yeah, that'll go well. I can't think of a more qualified group of people to help set out the way the country should be run.

I tell you what, lets take the notion, and crack on with applying it, and move onto reforming the rest of the legal system:

Break into someone's home and steal their stuff, don't worry about prison, we'll just give you some money so that you have the right to buy nice things too.

Committing casual fraud? Don't worry, we'll just change the nature of reality so the world will bend itself around how you think it should work.

Do you see how this logic works?

I'll make this very simple, if people take from society, just like with people in the real world, you don't, ever, give them something in return.

It comes from this whole crazy concept of mutual respect. Pull up a chair, I'll run this one by you, lets see if it makes sense. You, as a functioning respectable member of society get a right to say how it is run, as does everyone else. You helped build it, you help make decisions for it. With me so far? Good. If you do something to, oh I don't know, break the laws of said society, you get something that's called "punished". Now being "punished", isn't nice. Which, largely, is the point. While being "punished" you lose many of these rights you had as a decent respectable member of society. Why? I hear you cry. Simple. Because of the one over riding rule across all existence. If you act like a cunt, you're gonna get fucked. It's what you deserve.

On the photogenic properties of a sandwich

Are you a food photographer?

As in one of the professional ones, the ones who perform the miracle of making a Big Mac look like something more than a tumour trapped in some soggy bread, or who manages to find a way to make lettuce curiously sexual?

No? I suspected not. That's fine, frankly the majority of people aren't, so it's not a big shock.

At least it wasn't, until world + dog took it upon themselves to hide the day to day tedium of their existence behind a ceaseless chain of images of their bloody lunch!

Now, and I do want to ruin this for you so please, read on.

Nobody, since humans invented fire and 5 minutes later the BBQ, has ever cared about what you're eating. And this counts double for what you're eating if they're not there at the time. Sure, if you've just ordered something a little different and your friend is sat next to you, that might be interesting, to them, for about 3 seconds, but otherwise, nothing. Ever. To be frank they don't even care that you are eating! Unless they did really badly at school I can promise you that your friends should be pretty damn certain that you're eating. After all, if you decided to kick that particular habit then it wouldn't be too long before you moved on to fertilising the cow's lunch, rather than chewing on it's rump.

So why, of all the things in the world, has the internet suddenly taken it upon itself to photograph and share it's every meal with a near limitless supply of total strangers? Is this the legacy we want to leave from the early years of the digital age? I can just see historians in years to come complaining about how much more advanced society would be if only the people of the early 21st century, who should have been absorbing more knowledge in a week than everyone in the rest of human history had access to in a life time, weren't using that power to show each other pictures of Cabbage!

And why that particular part of the process? Why not the cow in the field? Why no close ups of your mouths and stomachs, or  a quick shot down the pan once the whole thing's really over and done with? Isn't that what you're really telling us is going on anyway? "Look everyone I'm alive! I eat food! I turn food into poo! ADMIRE ME FOR IT!"

And for crying out loud, there are a thousand ways to take and share beautiful, and incredible images on the internet, but I can promise you, you won't get notoriety from a sandwich!

Lib Dems Bash Boobs

News just in, Boobs encourage violence. Which, is among various things, interesting. At least it is if you're Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone, who seems to have become convinced that the existence of page 3 encourages abuse against women.

Now, I don't want to alarm anyone, least of all the random family members I have who are likely to pass by these digital diatribes, but over the years I've seen a few boobs. 5 of them to be precise. In amongst those long faded memories of fumbling with buttons, getting flicked in the eye by an errant strap, and the inevitable nervous minutes spent in the Psychologists waiting room afterwards, one resounding memory survives; not once did any of these 4 women find themselves on the wrong end of a beating as a result.

I guess I must be odd.

Maybe I didn't spend enough time sneaking a look at page 3 when I was a teenager. Or rummaging around in the woods looking for the legendary porn stash that, for some inexplicable reason, always gets left there. Maybe my mind wasn't warped at a young age to believe that anyone with a slightly different arrangement of chromosomes to myself was fair game for a spot of in-house boxing. Maybe I am an exception to all the evidence that Lynne Featherstone has amassed to validate her opinion. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a little simpler than that, and I'm just not a complete Cock? I mean, it's got to be possible right?

So, let's look at this from the other side. How about Ms Featherstone spend a couple of minutes thinking about at what point it became her business to dictate what someone can choose to do with their own body in front of a camera? And how about she should spend a little more of her career as an MP looking at ways in which society can actually address the issue of domestic abuse, rather than wasting everyone's money with a crock of headline grabbing drivel.

Who works for who here?

Cabinet merry go rounds

So, yesterday was cabinet reshuffle time! Or, as those of us who aren't complete morons like to look at it, it's time to rotate the retards. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't an arbitrary Tory hating post, were it anyone else in the top job we'd just have a different colour of retard. But they'd still be retards.

But this isn't just pointing out that they tend to be utter bastards, this is more about the fact that what we're getting is a collection of people who are woefully unqualified for their jobs, and being given terrifying levels of power to make decisions that they lack even the basic level of intellect to make. Lets run through the numbers shall we.

Jeremy Hunt, society's favorite display of rhyming slang, has been moved to the auspicious role of Health Secretary. So, that'll be someone who knows something about, well, health then right? Well, no. He's someone who believes homeopathy is a valid form of treatment, and something we should spend the NHS budget on. He's someone who therefore willfully ignores the overwhelming evidence that homeopathy is Bat shit mental, and he's managed to convince David Cameron that he's the best man to look after the countries health. Seriously, is this any more than replacing hospitals with kissing it better centers? But hey, let's not let's not let facts and evidence get in the way of incompetence here. Or indeed anywhere in the reshuffle....

Which brings me on to David Laws. No less than a homosexual! Crikey. But, naturally, that doesn't make a blind bit of difference to his ability to do anything. Unless of course you think like David Laws, and believe that the best way of proving that point is through gratuitous lying about it and hiding it from everyone. Grow a backbone David. Some people are Gay. Get over it. Although in fairness, I can kind of understand his problem, as he's also the cabinets resident God botherer, a group who are renowned for their support for the Gay community. But it begs one legitimate question about his new job as education minister. Given his belief in cloud faeries will he be teaching us that scientific research proves nothing, that we should all just assume stuff based on thousands of years of mistranslations and casual editing, and take it on 'faith' that things are magically true? Then we can start to eliminate the notion of critical thinking from our day to day lives completely! Hallelujah! That's the guy we want to lead the country forwards on education! But then I suppose it's always been the case that some people are stupid, and I should probably get over it.

But at least his religion will give him a strong moral compass right? Sure, so long as you don't mind him committing casual fraud and stealing from public funds at any given opportunity. What a guy!

So, who else then? Well there's the perpetually lovely Maria Miller, our new equality minister, who, well, isn't really that into this whole equality thing. Well, not for gay people anyway. Or women, oddly. Or pretty much anyone who isn't white, because let's face it, at the end of the day racism is just a form of freedom of speech. Obviously. I'm pretty sure this wasn't what my Mum had in mind when she was telling me about the type of woman I should consider to be 'something of a catch' as a kid.

So, everyone of these people is now sitting there happily in charge of areas at which they are terrifying unqualified for. It's literally staggering that it's even allowed to happen. Can you imagine any other area where a recruitment process like this would be allowed? If one of these people even got as close as having their CV put forward to me they'd be out the door in a matter of minutes, and the recruitment consultant would be getting a bollocking for their efforts.

So what's the solution. Well, fortunately I'm not 14, so I'm not about to promote the overthrow of the government, or suggest we start putting gun powder under central London buildings. I'm also not one of those middle aged types angry that their dreams have died because the world refused to jump through hoops for them when they fucked up their choices in life. What I want is simple. I want jobs to be done by people who are fucking qualified to do them! I want fairy tales to be resigned to peoples private lives, and not used as a basis of making decisions on a national scale irrespective of evidence, logic, or other beliefs. And I want some damn accountability when those in charge turn out to be little more than well dressed thieves with intellects comparable to that of a Cat flap. And I genuinely don't care which party they come from either, because lets face it, until we can manage these simple requirements, voting in anyone else is just pissing in the wind.

*Edit* 

A quick update since I started writing here. According to the Telegraph here Hunt actually supports homeopathy on the basis of patient choice. So maybe he's just doing his bit to promote natural selection? In fairness, I'm all for that. Just not at the expense of spending money on idiots that could be used to help someone who doesn't believe in magic pixie dust!

Finally, here's an excellent blog by Ben Goldacre on the nonsense of homeopathy.