NY

The time of happiness and goodwill has gone on long enough, and needs a decent refreshing dose of cynicism to crush everyone's spirits. Not that I plan on complaining about Christmas, with the possible exception of everyone's drug-like addiction to a TV spot involving a gaudy LGV containing thousands of litres of tooth rotting soft drink, which is tiresome mainly for the hypocrisy of the large number of teary-eyed fans who then spout onto social networking sites about how people are "forgetting the true meaning of Christmas" (which is of course, consumerism and mass-marketing).

That paragraph aside, I generally quite like Christmas. There are plenty of minor niggles shared by (probably) a large number of people and voiced in an amusing manner by Michael Mcintyre in some stand up or other: just as he performs about every social peculiarity.

Thanks to a delay in my timetable resulting from the fact I have a life, I should now also note that I don't mind New Year either, especially when it includes embarrassing quantities of German explosives and a despicably cutting look at the previous 365 days by Charlie Brooker (a man I'm convinced deserves to be a world leader more than Nelson Mandela ever did).

So instead of insulting our arbitrary temporal celebrations, here's a new years resolution aimed at most of the Facebook generation: stop taking pictures of your face next to another face.

HEY- REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN THREE OF US HAD FACES?

Yes that's right- in our digitally saturated culture the average clueless peasant has long had at least a flimsy grasp on how to operate a camera, and with ever increasing storage densities on things like SD cards we're now finally at the stage where pointless mug shots of grinning idiots on their social network profiles now vastly outnumber their own brain cells. Clearly their nights out are so uneventful and joyless their only wish is to remember how they used to look once-upon-a-time before age kicked in and robbed them of what modicum of attractiveness and worth they used to have.

If someone wants to explain to me exactly the attraction in cataloguing the fact that you still have stuff on the front of your head each and every time you engage in social interaction, please write your answer on a postcard, addressed to my blog, and post it with £50 in cash.

Merry New Year.

-Neop

A handy print-out guide to Some Important People

Because I feel like insulting some people. Let's start with the main players in today's UK strike action and go from there.

Brendan Barber (Union Leader): Chubby communist twat who speaks like his brain has been replaced with porridge.  Hobbies include insulting anyone with money.

David Cameron (Prime Minister): Shiny-faced aristocratic bellend who thinks he can run a country. Particularly enjoys alienating the international world by being pretentious.

George Osborne (Chancellor): Satan-spawn who scientists believe is the very personification of malevolence.  Look at the evil in those eyes.

Ed Milliband (Leader of Opposition): 12 year old work experience student who pretends he knows politics.  Party trick is looking like a gormless prick.

Ed Balls (Shadow Chancellor): Scary faced android whose job it is to ensure the opposition has a reason to disagree with every economic idea ever. Also- in case you missed it- his surname is 'Balls'.

Tessa Jowell (Who knows?): Job hopping melty-faced dinosaur who stands as a steadfast supporter of hypocrisy and relationships with money laundering parasites. 

Lord Monckton (Professional Arrogant Dick): Invented a puzzle box and then decided the entire world needed to hear his racist, homophobic, climate-change denialist verbal diarrhoea. Ought to be quarantined for being so bug-eyed.

Michelle Bachmann (American): American pseudo-Nazi wench; born angry because she wasn't Sarah Palin. Gets huge kicks out of being closed-minded and calling everyone a socialist.

Galactus (The World Eater): Eh. He's not so bad.

That'll do.

-Neophlegm

The Past, The Future, and nothing in between

I'm watching a sharply dressed man holding a stick telling me it's going to get cold in the next few days.

There's more sharply dressed people telling me there are strikes which will definitely spell the end of society, and yet more sharply dressed people explaining how some famous folk have died, how the economy is screwed, and how cancer is causing global warming.

It seems that the negative-news contagion (thus far confined mainly to the Daily Mail) is spreading across journalism. At least the TV-licensing lady seems upbeat about us handing over money to twelve thousand BBC managers (and some important staff too).

After a study involving myself and my brain, I've come to the conclusion that what we need is more Tomorrow's World. Or New Scientist. Or something. You ever watch Tomorrow's World? Bet you can't remember a single moment where Peter Snow seemed unhappy about some amazing new potential invention that we could be seeing "within the next few years!".

Nuclear cars. Someone, somewhere, decided this was a good idea.

Sure, it's really easy to spend hours bitching about how it used to be better in some fictional, idealised 'good old days' when people actually met in person instead of expanding their social interaction via social media. These were the times when kids weren't distracted by their iKindles and their FacePods and people had pleasant family time and board games and played catch in the garden and bicycle rides and trees and flowers and happy storyfuntimestuff.

Rather than working yourself into a frothing rage over the (entirely fictional) saccharin past; why not read a bit about how we'll have cured the world of every possible physical and social ill in the next ten years? Let's look forward to the (still) imminent development of personal jet packs, flying cars, fruit loops that can fill out or tax forms, little fairies that eat greenhouses gases, and glasses that make ugly people look like Pippa Middleton.

HELL YEAH JETPACKS

Who knows? The time may even come when electronics are glued directly into our brains? That way we could engage in meaningless virtual time-wasting and procrastination (such as blogging) without ever getting out of our sweat encrusted beds? We won't even be aware that we're all fat, flabby blobs of wastage which could just as soon be minced up to feed livestock.

Yay future.

-Neop

Shove it in my face

Dear The Internet:

I've been your friend for some time now, but thought I'd help you out with something I've come across. We all have our foibles, but few of them fill me with incandescent rage as much as this.

You know those videos we like to watch on the web? You know how you periodically have adverts pop in at the bottom or (at worst, but increasingly often) force us to sit through some guff about a new hair mower or lawn comb? These things do not make me want to fork out money for a product I don't need, they make me want to brain someone with a brick.

People can be a thick bunch, but how often have you honestly sat in front of your favourite weekly video clip and thought (just as you click play) "Damn! I don't really want to watch this video, I want to think about buying home insurance in case my house explodes or plunges into the sea".

Intrusive adverts: imagine getting hit in the face by this car. THAT'S YOU, INTERNET. THAT'S WHAT IT'S LIKE.

What's even more infuriating is when you have to watch the same advert for every single keyboard-smashing video you click on. Adverts like this are like shouty angry weasel-children with ADHD; popping up on your screen every 2.5 nanoseconds to cough up some puss about a crap toothbrush that now wiggles in four dimensions to help scrape all the enamel off your teeth.

Here's another one that makes me wish I had the power to implode peoples' skulls just by hating them enough: you'll have just clicked on a link, when suddenly you hear a cheery voiceover and some background music blaring out of your speakers about why your excrement will feel better if you eat yoghurt; and there's no immediately obvious source for this aural assault. Frantically you search the page for the impostor, and often find it buried at the bottom in a tiny flash-player advert which starts automatically as soon as the page loads. Worse still is when it's opened in a new, hitherto unnoticed, window cunningly concealed behind the news article on a serial killer which you actually clicked on.

"Going forward, we can offer blue-sky thinking to apply leverage to our markets in a synergistic, seamless and diverse portfolio of business solutions"

What's most worrying is that somewhere in a posh office in London is a room full of suits wrapped around some people who think this kind of intrusive shit is a good thing. Picture it: amidst a torrent of meaningless business-speak involving too many uses of the word 'synergy' these robots decide that the best way to market their brand is to hurl it forcefully in the face of their target demographic (and every other demographic, just for good measure).

Here's an idea to introduce this kind of unwanted product-peddling into other media: insert spring-loaded stamps into magazines and books with your company's logo on it. Then, when someone opens the literature: SMACK. They get a 20mph logo stamped onto their head in permanent ink. I'm sure they'll remember it after that. If you make it poisonous so it kills them, you'll even get news coverage.

One other thing, Internet: stop distracting me from my degree.

Yours Sincerely,

-Neop

Dead Dictators, Pointless Protests, and Awful Alliteration

Great hollering badgers! It's about time for another prosaic piece of pointless prose.

Funny thing is I wrote this title weeks ago and can't remember for the life of me what I was actually going to comment on. Presumably something about Muammar "Meltymeltyface" Gadaffi and his new hobby of being a corpse.

NHS treatment finally killed him

I also appear to have had the intention (I hate second guessing my past-self) to make some cutting comment on the Starbucks sipping camping fad which has kicked off in the middle of London. In case you're living under a rock, or you only watch news about things that are making some tiny iota of difference, a bunch of very keen Millets enthusiasts have been trying to break the record for World's Most Protracted Tent Show outside Jesus's London residence. They've been at this game for some weeks now since the trend spread from america like a particularly virulent form of flu, and; in a demonstration of the efficiency of self governing anarchy; have decided after several months that they do actually have a few demands which all centre around looking at the City of London's finances.

Given that the majority of these people seem to be self proclaimed anti-capitalists, I'm imagining a financial report will be to them as silver is to a werewolf, and there will shortly be a neat pile of communist corpses littering the grounds of St Pauls. At any rate, that's what they're demanding and since we've long seen the efficacy of protests, I'm sure the powers-that-be (sorry Jesus, I meant the ones in the City) will acquiesce.

Small groups of committed people, and asteroids.

Right- now that I've given a pithy summary of literally everything important going on in the entire country, you can continue about your evening safe in the knowledge that you've become a little more educated. I do perform a service, you see. Society as a whole has had some kind of collective seizure and decided that anyone with enough money to afford Tesco's Finest needs to be immediately shaken upside-down until relieved of all their change. Better put back that black forest gateau you hedonistic piece of human sputum. 

In an entirely un-planned link which ignores the adjective in the blog title preceding the word 'Alliteration', I enclose the below, since the happy campers seem intent on re-enacting the film from which it is taken. Enjoy!

-Neo "Ideas are bulletproof" phlegm

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villian by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengence; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

Blimey! Those bankers are bloody buggering bastards. 

The World Today

Wow- a shiny new blogging interface. It feels like Christmas came early in an orange colour scheme.

Whilst it's unusual for me to do a geography-based rant, I've been part of a number of conversations recently centering around how depressingly few countries there are which I'd genuinely like to live in. When you start taking current-affairs-following to an almost addiction-like level you begin to realise that the wonderful cultures and interesting people you learned about in widdle baby school are almost certainly corrupt autocracies run by a deranged dictator and his fifty seven illegitimate offspring.

Let's have some examples so you don't mistake this for a bout of xenophobic paranoia.

My sister recently did a school project on India. Here, they at least had the decency to include slums as part of the teaching. Far from being a rich culture of colourful clothes and the Taj Mahal, it might be more accurate to think of it as the land with a wealth-gap the size of the Universe and who's most notable feature is a prominent quantity of diarrhoea.

"Indian culture is rich and diverse and as a result unique in its very own way.

All people are alike and respecting one another is ones duty."

Slumdog Millionaire (despite having a lead character with as much charisma as a bowl of porridge) does a pretty good job of summing this up. Watch that film and tell me you'd really like to live there. YOU personally might have enough money to employ a few of the local plebs and live a comfortable life. Let's just hope you have a gaping void where your conscience would otherwise be.

 

Note the similarities

China would be no good. All the history, scenery and tasty food in the world won't change the fact that you're going to get arrested for so much thinking of the letter 'd' together with 'e', 'm', 'o', 'c', 'r', 'a', 'c' again, and 'y'. [Apparently that also rules out 'car comedy', 'a mercy cod', and 'cry me a doc']

"Chinese people are peaceful, hardworking and easily contented. They respect elders, love children and are patient with their fellows. Chinese in general are reserved and humble. They believe in harmony and never look for confrontation."

South Africa's full of murderers, Brazil is full of kidnappers, France is full of the French, and even the USA is curiously backwards, at least in the southern states. Who'd have guessed there'd still be areas of the developed world where you're frowned upon for reading George Orwell? These are the back waters where the hard-line Republicans will cry murder if you mention the word 'evolution'. Fairness dictates that these anti-science types be deprived of everything produced as a result of the scientific method, reducing them to cave-dwelling homeopaths with large art collections. 

You're cordially invited to a bonfire celebration in New Mexico. Bring warm clothes, marshmallows, and unholy, godless literature like Harry Potter. 

Don't get me wrong I'd love to visit pretty well all these places for a holiday; but there's a big difference between sight seeing for two weeks and having a job and a family somewhere. You're lucky enough (unless my readership extends orders of magnitude further than I could hope for) to live in a country where you can avoid getting electrocuted by the police, live with someone the same sex, read communist literature, moan on the internet about immigration, and post pictures of the Prime Minister with a willy drawn on his head on your favourite image sharing site. 

Next time you feel like moaning about the state of the economy, the government, or how much of a prat your bus driver is; just remember it could be so much worse.

Then moan anyway. If you stick it on a blog, people might even read it.

-Neop

Returning from a month long sabbatical

As a great man once said, I'm sorry for the delay.

My 6.5 readers must be positively furious at my sluggishness in producing another posting for you to feast on with your semi-sarcastic-literature loving brains. Working in a public-facing job certainly gives you a new perspective on life: one filled with the vacant, dopey grin of your average prepubescent science centre visitor rampaging around the venue with all the restraint of an angered mammoth, gleefully crashing into exhibits and thumping exposed buttons and levers with whichever bit of their anatomy is most convenient; before thundering off towards their next target when the machine they've just assaulted doesn't function correctly because it's now broken.

A mammoth skeleton. I'd be pretty damn angry if I was dead.

Such experiences, whilst certainly drawing a degree of my aggravation, apparently do not lend themselves to immediate blogging: and instead take some time to digest and form into coherent thoughts, lest this monologue descend into thirty five paragraphs of obscenities and death threats.

I plan shortly on writing to His Grand Awesome-hatted Holiness The Pope directly, in order to inform him he is looking for saints in all the wrong places. True saints are those that can confront one of these Tasmanian devils with a cheerful smile and kind words, day in; day out, without so much as thinking of braining them to death with a sledgehammer. All power to them.

Anyway, I hope to follow up with some more lengthy posts in the coming weeks. I have a certain TV game show squarely in my sights: which I feel wins the award for "Most Inane Piece of Drivel Ever Excreted From Simon Cowell's Production Company"- a prestigious award indeed. No prize if you guess what it is. Or what colour it is.

See you soon.

Neop