A Clear Victor!

I'm a fan of smart, funny, engaging, gripping, entertaining and, above all, well written television and living in the UK I get the opportunity to sate my appetites at many a table. Aunty Beeb supplies me with not one but four outlets of creative genius from the Doctor on One, through Two's charming Mr Paxman, Three's incredible Being Human all the way to BBC Four, the stomping ground of the ever impeccable Mr Stephen Fry. Similarly Channel 4 supplies a veritable televisual feast through it's many outlets... they even let Charlie Brooker make a fictional prime minister fuck a pig. Even good old Five supplies my habit in the form of the superb Five US. Ass to all this the plethora of digital delights as well as the heady joy of my Sky subscription and I am awash with televisual wonder. In point-of-fact everyone in British TV industry is doing a tremendous job, consider my hat doffed in your direction... 

Bravo sirs, bravo indeed.

...well except ITV. Long ago ITV gave up any pretence and descended into a nightmarish freak-show. I was seriously considering get the listings for today's excretia but I'm not going to bother it's easy to guess what's on the menu...

The disappearance of this logo marks the exact point ITV stopped giving a fuck.

• 06:00-10:00 Good Morning from the Uncanny Valley. A circus of the benile hosted by a parade of not quiet human present-o-bots and Lorraine Kelly
• 10:00-12:00 TV to hat humanity to. A series of talk-shows where the worst specimens of a species you already felt uncomfortable being part of are grabbed from the streets of Dagenham and corralled into subhuman screeching matches by Jeremy Kyle or similar.
• 12:00-13:00 Idle gossip disguised as news.
• 13:00-14:00 Yet more idle gossip this time from a bunch of thoroughly objectionable cunts who need to have a power-tool shove into their respective uteri.
• 14:00-15:00 A psychic makes things up at 'celebrities' who are such non-entities you'd have trouble pulling them out of a line-up minutes after they'd raped you, which this being ITV they might.
• 15:00-18:00 Attempting, and failing, to capture children’s attention span long enough to sell them food and toys that will eventually kill them. They might as well call CITV the Kiddy- Smack-Push-A-Thon.
• 18:00-19:00 More 'news' for dimwits.
• 19:00-22:00 Corrie and some bullshit show where they you behind the scenes of whatever their latest circus of reality freaks happens to be.
• 22:00-23:00 Hey look it's the only bit of news that might not be shit, oh no, someone 'famous' has had a problem and is pretending it's a social issue so they champion it and repair a recent PR disaster.
• 23:00-00:00 Jordan or Peter Andre being a twat.
• 00:00-06:00 Cunts in a jungle... I'd prefer it if they just showed Teletext like back in the nineties.

There was a time when this was the best thing my TV did.

Given that I was particularly surprised to learn that there was going to be something on ITV that I wanted to watch...

No... watching this with adverts merely high-lights how nightmarish the world we live in is.

Now for those of you who aren't entirely clear on my feelings towards lovely, lovely Adele, I'll clarify. Adele's voice is one of the greatest things to happen to music in years, it is one of the greatest wonders of the modern age. In addition to that every time I see her being interviewed she seems funny, smart and down-to-earth. It doesn't hurt matters that she also happens to be absolutely fucking stunning.

Pictured: A woman who could hunt down and eat Kate Moss and still have the energy to shag.

I'm listening to 21 as I write this, it's not planned it's just how I spend about 10% of my time. All of these combined means I was really looking forward to watching Adele's acceptance speech at the Brits, her victory being a foregone conclusion to anyone with fully functioning set of ears. Some of you probably get where all of this is going. Here's Adele's acceptance speech from the Brits...

… 33 seconds, that's how much time she was given to express what was clearly going to be a heartfelt and speech and then ITV made James Corden hate himself by cutting her off. What was the reason for this. To cut to the news. The lead story of which would clearly have been Adele winning at the Brits. They knew they had a time limit and they knew that Adele was going to be greeted by rapturous applause why not fucking move things along earlier. Cut a bit of Blurs set... or in fact just about anything else. Well Done ITV you've made me choose between you and Adele... smart fucking move, whilst Adele just gave ITV the finger making me fall in love with her even more... which I didn't even think was possible at this point.

eddie <where is ITV HQ I want to set it on fire>

Sweet Soul Music

When people talk about the best music of their youth the key factor always seems to be the phrase 'I listened to that song over and over again' followed by a detailed story of how they spent an entire summer locked way in their room/creepy attic/sex dungeon listening to that one track non-stop. Usually it's some embarrassing eighties atrocity that everyone up to and including the original artist would rather forget. I'm looking at you Phil Collins. However I arrive at the whole 'music of my larval stage' thing from another angle entirely. The song I listened to more than any other through out my childhood was this one.

Fuck. Yeah.

That is the music from the first stage of Sonic the Mother-Fucking Hedgehog, yo! I can honestly say I have never before or since spent as much time on a single level of a game. I had to take that music off of my mp3 player as it fills me with an overwhelming urge to sprint like a lunatic. It's not alone either. The most heart-breaking melody I know is this one...

... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...

… Sorry if that stirred up some painful emotions... Damn you Sephiroth she didn't need to die... WHY!?! Anyway the reason I wanted to talk about these bitchin' tunes... sorry the nostalgia made me go a little bit nineties... is because they have been, in my opinion, unfairly dismissed. They never turn up on 'Top 90s' compilations, despite being more universal, more personal and more emotionally charged than anything *Nsync could ever even secretly dream of. I've been carrying he burden of *Nsync hate for a while... feels good that off my chest, I actually have to admit that Mr Timberlake is indeed quite the triple-threat... I've meandered a bit haven't I. Oh that's right computer game music charted many more triumphs than the standard fair ever could. I have saved countless princesses, worlds and universes to these tunes, they stir up more emotions and memories than November Pissing Rain ever will. Those emotions range from the ridiculously joyful...

… to the strangely melancholy...

… to the plain terrifying...

… So next time someone asks you what your favourite music was as a child answer truthfully and say that it was the fucking righteous Tetris music.

eddie <there is a song of storms dubstep mix on youtube... it is awesome>

WTC

(I wrote this within a few minutes of visiting the WTC site)

I'm writing this sat on a bench at an intersection about 3 blocks from the most surreal tourist attraction New York has to offer, the 9/11 memorial site. It seems wrong that what was once the worlds largest building, then the worlds largest mass grave and then was finally world's largest crime-scene is now bathed in the flickering light of a thousand flashing cameras. I think that says more about us as a species than the attacks themselves ever could. The events of September the 11^th 2001 were a tragic display of the phenomenon of six degrees of separation, everyone was in some way connected no matter how loosely. I myself had visited New York on a school-trip in February of that year and I'm certain some of the people I was served by in various gift shops at the Towers died that day. The human mind doesn't like to confront death as such the attacks were incredibly other worldly, they seemed too big to happen even as they did. Even now over a decade later people can only process it through the lens of a camera-phone. The combination of the bizarre and the pedestrian makes visiting the site one of the oddest experiences of my life... still I got some good photos.

(The following I write sitting at home in the UK)

Whilst in the states I met up with an old friend and, having been to visit the WTC site, conversation turned to the events of 9/11. I don't think that it's the easiest subject to discuss even with the benefit of the amount of time that has passed since it happened. I think it is very easy for us to overlook how much that single event hanged the world and for those of us in our late twenties it's easy for us to overlook how lucky we were to have lived in the world before it happened. It's easy to be glib and to be dismissive and pretend like it was no big thing. I remember the feeling of dread that hit me that day and it wasn't dread at what had happened but dread at what I knew was coming next. The reaction to the events of that day has been the overwhelming factor of the political climate ever since. It's hard to overstate the impact that one event had on the world we now find ourselves in and that makes it easy to forget that 9/11 wasn't just a political event or a terrorist attack or a shift in the global political system. It was also the day that 2996 people died. I think that's as much as I'd like to dwell on what is an essentially gloomy subject.

eddie <the skyline still looks weird as well>

Linsane In The Membrane

OK I'll start with a flat-out apology to my american readers. Yes I am writing a blog about Jeremy Lin, and yes I am aware that it's been covered to death however it's not really been covered outside of the US so this article is more aimed at the rest of the world. So rest of the world you are not going to believe what in the name of shitting-crikey has been happening in the NBA. Now before you all leave please remember that basketball is one of the good american sports and also please have faith that I wouldn't waste your time with something that wasn't awesome.

I rest my fucking case.

So here's the deal. Jeremy Lin is currently the best player in the NBA and you've probably never heard of him. That's not massively uncommon, after all there is something of a delay on our acquisition of american 'culture' and we don't really watch basketball so it's bound to take a little while for this news to filter across the pond. So how long has this behemoth bestrode the top levels of the game I hear you ask... 12 days. Seriously 12 fucking days. So let's fill you in on the back-story surrounding this young chap as it represents everything that is good about sports.

Formally represented by dogs playing sports in Disney movies.

Jeremy Lin is originally from Palo Alto, California although his parents originally hail from Taiwan. He was an excellent high-school player leading his senior year team through a 32-1 season. So he obviously leapt at the multiple offers of scholarships being offered by some of the best sporting universities in the states. Except that he didn't, you see the Ivy League don't offer those kind of scholarships and Lin had his heart set on Harvard. Lin's not an obviously athletic or flashy player so it took scouts from a Harvard a few trips to see him play before they promised him a place on the team if he could get into Harvard through the regular channels... which he then did. So the end of college rolled around and Lin found himself with a degree in hand awaiting the fickle pick of the NBA draft...

A lot like this but with less fatties and gingers.

... where he was completely overlooked. After being kicked around various training camps and coaching programs Lin found himself playing for the team he'd followed in his own childhood. The Golden State Warriors... yup I've never heard of them either. Whilst playing for them though Lin acquired a cult-following among the Asian community of the area and due to his high-level of education and deep understanding of the game was requested for interviews more than any other player. However none of that really covered for an unimpressive first season and next season Lin found himself on the inactive list, basically the Warriors owned him but had no intention of playing him. So he started looking for other options, and that's how he found himself playing for...

This logo is bitchin'... that's pretty much all I have to say about this.

The Houston Rockets... well he never actually played for them as the Rockets wanted to free up space on the roster for another player and that's when he caught the eye of... no-one but one of the Knick's players was injured and they need a quick buy to make up the roster so they grabbed Lin as a professional bench warmer. Eventually the Knicks had the good sense to... loan him out to the Erie Bay Hawks in the D-League, where he finally got a shot to play a game and got 28 points and was recalled to the Knicks within 3 days. He then got a start for the Knicks. Game 1: 25 points, Game 2: 28 points, Game 3: 23 points, Game 4: 38 points, Game 5: 20 points. His first four starts in the NBA are the highest scoring first four starts in NBA history. His Jersey has been the Knicks highest selling since the beginning of February. The guys nickname is Linsanity and he got all this out of nowhere just because he worked his ass off and never gave in...

Pictured: Hero.

Jeremy Lin, I salute you!

eddie <adding linsult to linjury>

Excuses

I'm going with honesty here. I'm pretty fucked it's still early and I've got nothing... Sorry. I promise a extra hilarious serving of dick-jokes on Thursday.

Are you an idiot?

It has recently come to my attention that the either the amount of idiots in the world has increased or the idiot community is becoming increasingly more vocal. This is a major issue. You see the more numerous and vociferous a group becomes the less shame is attached to being a member of that group. This was great in the case of homosexuals and, to a lesser extent, geeks, but if you are an idiot you should be ashamed. You see being an idiot is a choice. Intelligence is not genetic, unless you have the misfortune to be born with a mental disability, intelligence is, in point of fact, a choice. The mind is like any other part of the body; it develops rapidly in early life, it needs to be used regularly to be maintained and it’s never too late to start taking care of it.

Unless you listen to this man in which case... Kill yourself. 

People don’t like to accept this fact for a simple reason. It is wrong to mock people for things about themselves that they cannot change… if they’re not close friends. If someone is in a wheelchair you better have an epic amount of faith in the state of your relationship with them to start knocking out cripple joke. It is absolutely fine and dandy however to mock some for their dress-sense, hair-cut, opinions and personality. Or to put it another way it’s entirely fine to attack someone for the way they play the hand life’s dealt them just not the hand itself. Idiots would have us believe that they had no choice in being an idiot. This is a lie. Every single day that they woke up and went to school with no intention of learning a damn thing they choose to be an idiot. Every time they open their mouth without pausing to think about what they’re saying they choose to be an idiot. Every time they make the choice to watch anything with celebrity in the title rather than the news they make a choice to make the world a little bit less intelligent. Well I’m taking a stand I’m saying that enough is enough.

This is what I look like when I take a stand... it's hard to type with the chainsaw.

The idiot scourge, for a scourge it is, is incredibly problematic because of idiot behaviour. I fall into the physical category of ‘weak as piss’ this is due to a series of incredibly poor lifestyle decisions involving drugs, booze, drugs, laziness, cigarettes, drugs and crisps. I am aware of this, I mean to correct it in the not so distant future, and it means I defer to those stronger than myself when it comes to tasks involving lifting, pushing or hitting things. Idiots have no such qualms about using their admittedly weak mental power. You see as a moderately intelligent fellow… actually fuck it, this is my blog so fuck modesty… as a man of staggering colossal intellectual prowess I recognise my own limitations, yes I have limitations don’t let the revelation shock you to much gentle reader. As such I defer to others when needed.

Pictured: Some of my team of experts.

For example I have not done the necessary research to confirm that the planet is warming up as a result of human interference. However I find it incredibly easy to believe that it is happening because of the massive consensus of people even more intelligent than me who have devoted their lives to studying this. Idiots instead choose to ignore this because they don’t understand it and they don’t want to change their lifestyle. I don’t fully comprehend every single step of human evolution so I, once again, defer to the intelligent people who have devoted their entire lives to the study of evolutionary biology and have, once again, arrived at a massively overwhelming consensus. Idiots, again, choose to ignore these facts because they are too mentally lazy to shift their way of thinking. Finally I don’t really have too much of an idea how exactly we know that the universe is approximately fourteen billion years old but, again, I choose to defer to the vast consensus of highly intelligent people who have devoted there life to studying this field. Idiots don’t do this.

Because they are idiots.

So the next time you meet an idiot don’t try to reason with them, don’t point out flaws in their logic or attack their ideas just rip them to shreds… mock them until they cry ask them why they chose to be stupid and then destroy them for it. Hopefully by bringing back a healthy dollop of shame to being an idiot we can move away from a world of creationists, climate change deniers and Kardashian’s and move back in the direction of not being horrifyingly ashamed of the society we find ourselves. If you are an idiot try having a mooch around ted.com, khanacademy.org, wikipedia.org, boingboing.net or any one of a million websites that will help your brain develop to average or better.

eddie <shooting passers-by from my ivory tower>

Everything I Know I Learnt From Computer Games

If at first you don’t succeed you might not have the right power-ups.

You only get health-packs before the boss fight.

Without the right ammo even a rat can kill you.

Even an army of a thousand henchmen can be killed one at a time.

The stronger you get the more things you need to carry.

Going the right direction is the best way to miss-out on stuff.

Why jump when you can double-jump.

Talk to strangers if you want to but they will want you to do stuff for them.

Practice makes perfect but pure dumb-luck makes awesome.

If you aren’t willing to desecrate someone’s corpse then you aren’t truly angry.

Anyone can survive a long fall, but few people can swim.

Focussed rage is the most powerful force in the known universe.

There is no limit on how much ammo you want, need or can carry.

Food exists entirely to fill your health bar.

The three most important things in life are health, stamina and mana.

Power is nothing without control.

There is no upper limit on hatred.

Everything has a weak-spot.

Sidekicks are annoying and pointless but friends are invaluable.

Crime pays.

Doors are fucking invincible.

Stairs are boring.

No matter how important something is it’s never as important as a mini-game.

You never know which quests are a waste of time until after you’ve done them.

Bosses have all the coolest stuff.

The police are just better equipped henchmen.

No matter how epic the quest all you need to leave home with is your wits.

When you only have one life shit’s serious.

Dying to get the extra life is pointless.

There’s always another air-bubble.

Always be prepared to lose everything, except your starting weapon.

Science is at best a gamble. At worse it destroys the universe.

Sometimes you just need a massive hammer.

If something doesn’t look right investigate.

Hearts are valuable.

The best weapon is the weapon you make yourself.

Just because something looks cute that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.

There is no such thing as too fast.

Grinding sucks but levelling up rocks.

The more real it is the less you can carry.

Just because you’ve done something a million times it doesn’t mean you’ll do it now.

There are no games like the games you invent.

Everything is multiplayer with the right people.

You cannot drop quest items.

You don’t have to like a girl to save her from the bad guys.

War is hell… but so is the mushroom kingdom.

… and finally

Everything is easier if no-ones watching.

eddie <digitise to philosophise>