Past midnight, Blogging is go.

Ah. So having been suitably roused by some well-meaning idiocy in our quaint student household, coupled with an overarching desire to not-sleep, I find myself as usual in a slightly pissy mood doing what I do best at this time of the night. And I don't mean clubbing children.

GOD. Children piss me off.

Not all of them mind. Mostly only the ones I see around here. Maybe it's because the more innocuous younglings don't draw any attention to themselves and I can happily ignore them in my daily routine of wake->uni->home->eat->go out [replace 'go out' with 'write blog' as appropriate]. But, living next to a run down council estate you'd be forgiven for thinking that every sub-18 year old is a badly dressed loudmouth with the IQ of a football and the public decency of Lindsay Lohan on ketamine. You can't pass a miserable, sweaty group of the jumped up little bastards without getting insults hurled vaguely at you (or anyone you're standing near) in this sort of pathetic pre-pubescent powerplay that smacks of underdeveloped brain syndrome (medically classified as being "Fucking thick").

You know the sort. 

They potter around in their little 'cru' with their stupid hair and their stupid Adidas trousers tucked into their stupid socks, feeling like entitled little dictators. I don't believe in capital punishment for one minute but I wouldn't hesitate, if I were the parent of one of the swaggering little parasites, before branding 'dickhead' on them with a hot iron. That being said, probably the average parent of one of these respiring little shit-sacks is a fat wobbling mass of cheap lager and nicotine farting their way through benefits only stopping to occasionally piss and moan about rich people. Yes fat-cat businessmen are wankers, but at least they're wankers who own yachts and aren't going to die, writhing in chest pains from a self induced heart attack, at an age where their sole achievement is contaminating the earth with their useless effing offspring.

An aside:

I'd like at this stage to add some caveats: being as we are living in an age of very loud online groups with acronyms instead of names, if more than my customary audience of about 20 readers get hold of this and feel that I've somehow implied that all council estate dwellers are in fact bottom feeding scum, I will be summarily lynched publicly and expensively. As this is the case I'll qualify this by saying firstly that I have nothing against council estates inasmuch as I can't have anything against inanimate areas of habitation: and also that I'm somehow generalising whole groups of the population (perhaps unfairly) into a category of sub-human faeces whom I utterly despise.

This second point holds some value: it's impossible to completely generalise people. You can't even say you hate Nazis because Oscar Schindler was a Nazi and he helped a whole bunch of Jews in a bizarrely altruistic way.

However I take the view that most people clever enough to type in a web address (or at least follow a hyperlink) can also realise this themselves. In this case generalisations are useful and you shouldn't have to worry about the sort of covering-your-own-ass which I am relentlessly pursuing in this very paragraph. In short: I'm picking on the people who deserve to be picked on. If you're not a stupid little cock, and your parents aren't blundering arseholes, then I'm not aiming my comments at you and please don't take offence; even if you live/lived on a council estate. By virtue of the fact you're reading this you're a completely different league of human being.

These guys obviously agree with me. You can tell because they have sunglasses on.

To resume, then.

I haven't been alive long enough to make the kind of conceited comment that this wave of human-shaped viruses is somehow a product of the current times/government/digital revolution/water fluoridation. I imagine a large majority of the older populace does just this on a regular basis. My main question though, is why does there seem to be such a divide? This is all based on the microcosm of society that I have been exposed to in my short 21 years but you rarely find people that sit in the middle of laddish-thug and what I'd call a normal person. It's an honest question and I'd be happy for some sociologist to explain to me and then give me a firm telling-off for cheapening their science by blogging about it.

Until they eradicate the stupid gene though, we're stuck with them. We even have the word 'Chav' to encapsulate the whole nauseating class into one succinct syllable for easy conversation. We as a society have clearly hunkered down and just gotten used to the fact that they exist and aren't going anywhere except possibly the old-folks home to steal things and piss on the walls. They're going to keep yelling that bystanders are gay, keep smoking from the ripe old age of twelve, keep knocking back White Lightening like it's not fermented Demon-piss, and keep getting each other knocked up so that their kind can continue to get on everyone's tits for generations to come.

And there's nothing you can do about it. Goodnight.

-Neop

Thank You For Cashiers

Despite my highly persistent spate of good-moods recently, I find myself frequently let down by a few instances of humankind doing what they do best: behaving like a pack of semi-intelligent mammals with little more basic sentience than a desire for some form of sustenance. I'm probably being a little harsh in out-and-out lambasting in this manner: maybe it's because I'm tired and should be sleeping instead of typing away here.

In fairness then, what I've really noticed recently is a few minor niggles, and a few oddities which society seems to carry proudly, like a garish pink tie.

One particularly fantastic example of civilisation going utterly strange, is the traits observed in a shop. In my case, the Union shop on campus. Like most shops, it consists of things to buy, and people to buy them from, many of whom can even spell their name unaided. This fascinating crucible of abnormality is so typical in its unusuallness, as to make it almost imperceptible to patrons frequenting the premises- except for those who occasionally feel the slight pang of realisation that something about a shop, changes people.

Take for example, walking [v. Moving at a regular and slow pace, by lifting and setting down each foot in turn]. This specifically applies to our campus shop because it's not the largest of establishments. Think convienience store with more hangovers.

Most of us have long mastered the art of alternating lower limb placement in order to translate yourself spatially to your desired destination. It's about the first thing your parents actually try to get you to achieve once you've stopped dribbling your food all over yourself. But step into a shop and for some reason all prior knowledge of bipedal motion is briskly tossed aside. Confine people in a crowded store and not only will Joe McNormalguy start walking uncomfortably close to the man in front (who's curious, but just not into him), he'll start taking tiny, tiny little baby steps that in any other situation would not only look totally stupid, but probably offend anyone with rheumatism. Don't know what I mean? Wait until you're next in a queue or a crowded shop, trying to force your way to the sandwiches, and take a look at your feet. I guarantee you'll be shuffling along like a geriatric cripple on his way to his own funeral. This probably stems from the same mentality that causes people to drive in short bursts during heavy traffic, rather than cruise at a decent speed: we need to KEEP MOVING. "If I wait, until I can take a proper step, that polite old lady will LEAP into my allocated floorspace like the thieving bint that she is and steal my spot. I'd best shuffle slowly into it, to keep it mine."

Language takes an interesting turn as well. Scientists have proven (without any shadow of a doubt, or emails of a doubt [hooray for current affairs humour, and for double paranthesis!]), in over 104% of cases, people say 90% of their sorrys and thank yous inside a shop, on any given day.

Let's briefly consider the situations where you'd apologise in say, the act of sitting in... the cinema. For example. It'd probably include, apologising for making noise (eg. coughing), for getting up, or for.... well that probably depends on what else you do in a cinema.

Now think of all the reasons you might sounds apologetic in a store. Got a few? I think typically, you'd expect some sort of remorseful acknowledgment in any or all of the following situations:

• Someone blocking your view of the shelves
• Someone bumping into you
• Someone bumping into something attached to you, eg. Bag, basket, spouse
• Someone taking the last snickers bar from under your nose.... the git...
• Someone almost bumping into you
• Someone at the checkout fumbling your change
• YOU fumbling your change
• The person in front of you fumbling their change, thus holding you up.
• Someone stepping on/running over your shoe/bag/son

This list is long, tedious, and incomplete (like our government). Take the world's most hardened, angry BNP supporting racist and throw them in a shop with three dozen asians and he'll be grovelling away as soon as he looks them in the face and maybe nearly slightly nudged their shopping.

I don't understand this. For a country proud of it's identity as a whiny, stuck-up population of blue-blooded patriots we don't half crumble when we're at the grocers.

"Thank you"s come in droves too. Most of these occur at the checkout. In the process of paying, people say thank you an obscene amount of times. Get given a bag? Thank you. That's fine. Small talk? Always finish it with thank you. It's polite. Cashier gives you your stuff? Thank you for my stuff. You hand your money over: thank you. They hand you your change, thank you for my change, and thank YOU for thanking me for your change, and as you leave, they thank you again (for leaving, presumably, so that they can continue thanking the next person in line).

I always find it hard to honestly thank people in shops more than twice. It begins to lose meaning after that. Besides, why would I thank someone who thinks the best way of dealing out change is to make a neat little bloody tower of it, with the note at the bottom, and dump it into my palm? Thanks. That's awesome. I'll use my third hand to awkwardly try and pick the coins off the fiver and stuff them into my wallet, which is in my second hand underneath my shopping, then grabbing the fiver from my third hand with my second hand with the wallet in it before putting the wallet back into my first hand which is now mysteriously empty of any shopping and sliding the note into the middle, cunningly tipping my change all over the floor, dropping my milk, and annoying the cashier: who says "Thank you" angrily. All this takes place in under one second- because if you take longer than this, you'll find that the next shopee has parked themselves on top of you, with all their shopping, because the cashier has noisily barked the beautifully obscure question of "can I help you?" to the next in line. "Yes. Yes you can help me. You can quietly, without question, scan my items, tell me how much I owe, thank me ONCE, give me my change COINS FIRST, then give me some tiny amount of time to sort my life out so I can get out of your way for the next person, instead of feeling like I'm in some currency-fuelled time trial to piss off out of the doors in the least possible time, but without ACTUALLY committing theft."

In summary, shops are like black holes for social norms. Give it a few years and they'll be thin veneers for fetish clubs, underground political movements, and people who like The Cheeky Girls.

What do you mean, cynical?

I think maybe I shouldn't read so deeply into things.

-Neop

A shout out for a shut up

My pet hate this week.

Lets talk music. That strangely hostile subject which results in agro between friends and, if you're in Norway, death.

I am tremendously judgemental about music. I think everyone has every right to be... within reason. Personally, I hate with a burning passion the faceless, pathetic whiney nobodies infecting the popular music scene with their repetitive, repugnant crap.

The standard seems to be:

1. No more than THREE notes may be sung in any one song. Penalty is death.
2. Your backing track must be one riff which plays continuously for five minutes.
3. You can't sing normally. You have to either have a piercing, nasal cacophony of vocal range; or else a ridiculously forced ethnic accent (this includes all you try hard cockney Indie get-ups).
4. Despite all the above, the drooling, zombie minded public will fall at your feet like dominoes and practically fornicate the ground you walk on.

La Roux, for example, sounds like someone strangling a cat that's had its lungs inflated with helium. I would rather take a cheese grater to my own face than listen to this particular catastrophe of sound. Rap is another no no. That some chavvy, goggle wearing social retard gets paid more money than is owned by Switzerland to speak into a microphone about how much he's getting laid makes me want to stab pencils in my ears. What is the attraction here? How many 'songs' about bitches, hoes, guns, and asses can you physically tolerate before you start evolving backwards into a big, insecure sperm? Why the hell would you pay your own money to these bastards, to have them do nothing more than speak in time with some god-awful computerised thumping noises?

Clearly then, these particular brands of sonic-effluence appeal to a very special kind of moron, hitherto referred to as "The Public". Cynical? I certainly bloody hope so. An industry which prizes itself on moaning like a hungry 2 year old whenever somebody turns on Limewire deserves every single verbal smack in the mouth it can get. People who rise up from society's asshole and perpetuate their talentless, mindless drawling to a salivating fanbase are just as much a parasite and a waste of organs as so called 'psychics', 'mediums' and homeopathists who similarly make money out of people's utter, unending stupidity.

All this being said, this is not the point of this entry.

What I want to say, is that despite the above, I don't give two ounces of dirt what sort of music you're in to.

I don't care.

At all.

Go ahead, listen to this rubbish.

BUT.

Don't you dare inflict it on me.

This, is where I'm going: I am sick to the nipples, of having to justify to other people, my particular tastes in music. I cannot stand the apparent stigma associated with certain bands that I like. Yeh, some people might get just as angry about Fall Out Boy as I have about La Roux, but that's something for you to moan about in your spare time when I'm not within earshot. Dear anyman, why does it bother you in the slightest to learn that I like FoB? Why is this suddenly a cause for you to disapprovingly shake your head as if you've found out I occasionally partake in bestiality? It's just a goddamn band. I don't tie you to a chair and force you to listen to my iTunes library- so don't hold it against me.

You know what? I do like Fall out Boy. A lot. I also like Simple Plan (despite their inherent Emo properties) and hey, what about the odd Emo song now and then? It's not like I slit my wrists to it and bloody up your lovely clean floors. I like most Punk groups (fine- not much problem in society's eyes of liking say, Green Day or The Offspring) but now and then I get the strange urge to listen to Daniel Bloody Powter- and you can't do ANYTHING about it. So stop trying.

I have a playlist with Mika songs in it.

I see nothing wrong with Abba.

Or the Lighthouse Family.

Or Panic! At the Disco.

Any of this bothering you yet? If it is, I seriously suggest you grab the nearest blunt object and propel your skull into it with whatever strength you have. You deserve the injury if my life concerns you that much.

Grow up.

Get a life.

And if you want to moan, keep it on the internet and away from my face.

-Neop

A piece of evening inspiration

Here's something from The World According to Clarkson (bought by an extremely thoughtful girlfriend):

"Boredom forces you to ring people you haven't seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to red not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf."

All too true, it seems. I thought this little smidge of wisdom might provide some brain food for the bored-er people out there.

To be honest, this book seems a pretty good read for anyone who's bored, not-bored, happy, sad, literate, strange, or otherwise just wants some alternative amusement. For those less informed among you, it's simply a collection of rants from the ever-so-famous curly haired tall man of Top Gear fame (/infamy).

There seems to be an all too rare breed of humans who sit down and think a bit about the world and how it works, and Jeremy seems to be one of those people. Ok, fine, granted, in truth, and at the end of the day, (sub-clause cliché record broken?) I don't agree with everything he says. Light aircraft ARE fun, BMWs ARE for fat knobs who can't drive, and global warming WILL kill everyone (although I sometimes wonder if that's altogether a bad thing. If you've driven through Guildford in rush-hour, I guarantee you'll share that same occasional sentiment for mass genocide). But so what if he has different opinions? I'm not about to model myself after somebody else in a thoroughly clone-like manner, especially when one of the things I admire Clarkson for is his opinionation; HIS OWN opinions mind.

The point is, that here's a man who's all for freedom of speech, freedom to take-the-piss, and freedom to throw yourself head first out of a plane without some bloody health and safety "executive" telling you "you might die".

Sadly, reading through this I'm finding it hard to fully convey my meaning. I'll leave you with a short thought.

We're increasingly engaged in a society where idiots, chavs, and general social-degenerates are no longer killed off at a young age and removed from the gene pool. It's easy for stupid people to sail through life, blissfully unaware that they're making it thoroughly unpleasant for those who do, actually care. Far from saying you need to have an IQ of 130 to be socially acceptable, I'm pointing out that people who never stop to think about wider consequences, about the world as a whole, and about society (and what they're doing to it), don't deserve to be a part of it [gasps at harsh reality!]. Clarkson, like many other great speakers, isn't afraid to speak out against this sort of social liability, or to voice an actual opinion, on any number of matters, that so few people are even capable of FORMULATING. And whether or not you agree with him, you can't possibly deny that if everyone thought a little harder, maybe shouted a bit louder, and used their common sense a bit more, there'd be far less Health and Safety executives and the world would (probably) be a shinier place.

With more adrenalin.

And less hippies.

Ah well...

"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel." Horace Walpole