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