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!