NEWSFLASH - CELEBRITY NOT YET ABOUT TO NOT DO SOMETHING

We love a good bit of celebrity news, don't we? Yes we do. First we liked hearing what celebs were doing. Then we liked hearing about what the pampered little arsetards weren't doing. Now, we get to hear about what they are not doing to do, but haven't got round to not doing it yet. Thank goodness I heard about it before I went ahead and actually did something. Something that I regretted. Thank you, The Media:

Radio BBBPPP Strikes Again

Oh look, another radio podcast. Aren't we all lucky duckies?

Bang Bang Bang Pow Pow Pow - 21 Jan 2010 by Bangbangbangpowpowpow on Mixcloud

NEWSFLASH - THE MOON IS ON THE EARTH

I was reading the highly informative feature section on the MSN website. Travel Editor, Simon Busch was feeling whimsical enough to compile a list of the most boring places on Earth. Fair enough, some places are pretty boring, but in the grand scheme of things even Coventry is pretty luxurious, with its lack of starvation, relatively adequate sanitation facilities and abundance of roundabouts. Just because somewhere doesn't provide all the vim and vigour that one may personally require to make their own beige existence more acceptable to them, that doesn't mean to say it's all Slough's fault. I think people should make their own fun and quit whining.

Still, kudos to Simon for thinking out of the box on his feature:



The issue being that, as far as I'm aware, the moon isn't 'on Earth'. In fact, the picture itself shows the moon as a different entity to Earth. Is a picture editor having a quick chortle to himself here? Or does Simon know something we don't?

To be honest, making fun of MSN's editorial frontliners is a bit of a low blow. Most of these people are operating on around 12p an hour, having to churn out 'content' which is 'accessible' to a 'wide audience' under 'demanding time pressures'. All of which combines to make for pretty atrocious reading. And I haven't even started on the comments below the articles, which I shall refer to as 'ENGAGE GUFFHOLE'.

Still, there lesson here is pay peanuts, get monkeys. Not that Simon Busch is a monkey, but the readership is certainly being treated like one. A bulbous, collective monkey brain, babbling incoherently about Katie Price while gyrating against the activity play area in their local park.

You Autocomplete Me

Following a previous foray into searching for something on the information superhighway, I discovered the apparently popular phrase 'Fancy a rank?', thanks to Google's unintentionally hilarious Autocomplete function. Autocomplete is like purposefully leaving sentences unfinished in front of a hyperactive autist, so desperate to solve the quandary of your half-utterance that they resort to suggesting that you were meaning to talk about the Third Reich, daisy-chaining, or well, both.

Anyway, there are a lot of clever people out there, like the clever person who pointed me in the direction of Autocomplete Me, a blog which highlights exactly these esoteric autocomplete results. Here's a taster:



A big shout out also goes to the clever people who unfortunately thought up the idea of this blog before I did. Kudos, dudos. In other news I have been using my powers of the Russian language for the questionable purpose of helping friends to get a bit of lady love, and hand-crafting the most intricate and boring spreadsheet known to man.

Ice Hockey Hair

Now I don't know about you, but Liverpool bores the cake out of me sometimes. There might be a few things a week that I'll go to, gigs and films and whatnot, and that's great. But being a roving bastion of activity, I need things to do every hour of every day (I don't sleep). If I don't get this I turn into a house price-obsessed, traveller-hating, homophobic, racist bigot (only joking). So for a short time I became rather interested in ice hockey.



Oh lovely. One of the best things were the regional adverts. Each team has a regional TV network that will show its local games, what with the USA being quite big and all, and this naturally gave rise to some rather esoteric advertising slants:



Here's a clue - he's not selling chicken or ice hockey sticks.

Another thing that struck me as particularly absurd occurred when watching a game at the Joe Lewis Arena, home to the Detroit Red Wings. In an interval, the hospitality wheeled on a Country and Western singer, which I guess makes sense because Country and Western is rather a Big Thing in the states. The act was a fellow called John Rich, formerly of Lonestar, currently on hiatus from Big and Rich, but this chap looked to be a bit of both, the bigness and the richness being logical extensions of the marketability of Country and Western in the US:



However, more baffling was Big Rich's track selection. Being a man with the kind of face that has a story to tell, he decided to opt for his recent smash 'Shut Detroit Down'. In Detroit - Land of the Structurally Unemployed. It'd be like sending Margaret Thatcher to Rotherham to sing 'We Are All Bourgeois Now'. Most baffling was the generally positive reception to Mr. Rich's thinly-veiled putdown. The people of Michigan, clapping their foam fingers, supping on their $6 beers, must have been so in awe of everyone's favourite half of Big and Rich that they wouldn't have cared if he had have cranked out his latest hit smash 'Motown is shit, so is Eminem, as well as the White Stripes, and I love getting on eco-friendly municipal transport'. Still, when you think about it, Mr Rich does look rather familiar, doesn't he?



As yes, chubby-cheeked Gary Barlow: celebrity #1 of the 1990s and renovated pop-chap in man band Take That. Indeed, it could be magic. But hold on:



He also looks like chubby-faced demon-villian Jez Quigley from Coronation Street. Who would have thunk it?

Epic Fail

'Epic Fail' is one of the most efficient turns of phrase I have ever come across. In three succinct syllables, 'epic fail' tells you all you need to know. There's been a failure, and guess what, it's pretty epic. It's like FUBAR, but not trying to be cool. It's all like 'listen dude, a car has fallen down an anus, and it's messy'. It's not like 'we need O-neg, stat' or 'man down, man down!!!'. It doesn't swagger around, thinking it's dead important. Oh no. 'Epic Fail' is ultimately matter of fact, in the matter of fucked.

http://failblog.org/ is my preferred source of epic fails. You can see the best pictorial boo-boos from around the globe, comment on them, send in your own if you're lucky/unfortunate enough to come across an epic fail in your own shabby, little existence. And, with this being web 2.0 and all, if you don't like something you can always complain and people will pretend not to read it.



I love Failblog.org because it makes me laugh out loud. Due to the quality editing, and presumable the sheer number of proposed submissions, the photos that make it up tell a story instantly. Usually, the story is someone fucked up. The essence of the humour is in that no matter how long the fail took to build up, be it weeks of hard graft:



or nanoseconds:


or, in the case of this chap's name, a lifetime of fail:


IT'S GOT TO BE WILLIAM. OR BILL, SURELY??!!!1

The actual fail, and all its history, can be traced in 1 camera flash. And that's why I like it.

My Future Of Music Is.... Spotify

Welly welly well, have you heard enough about Twitter? No? Go put your head in a cement mixer. If you're still here, forget about Twitter. It's rubbish. It's full of people who think their every fart is worth documenting. It's like they've taken the single most irritating facet of Facebook - that of the overcreative use of status update - and launched it on its own platform, assured that Twitter is such a genius idea that it doesn't need anything else, like, you know, a point. The fact is, Twitter, that the only solo project that has improved anyone's life was Paul Simon's 'Graceland'. Not even Rocky running up them steps comes close. You might as well give up. No-one's going to buy Twitter, you nincompoops. No-one. Not even the British government and they buy anything, including my (used) socks.

So forget about all this 'POWPOWPOW is currently sitting at the computer updating the POWPOWPOW Twitter account' nonsense. Get a Spotify account. It's changing the face of music, how you acquire it, how it is accessed and produced, and how revenues will be derived. Spotify is like a huge database of music. It's like Napster, in its vastness, except instead of downloading files illegally, you stream them legally. And instead of waiting for some chump in Boston to come online so you can suck up some My Vitriol loving, it's centrally planned and ready to go ON DEMAND. You get thrown some adverts now and then, say once every 20 minutes, and that's the down side. It's not really a down side, considering you are exposed to adverts:

1) On the TV.
2) On the vast majority of radio stations.
3) Outside.

So basically you're paying with the utter inconvenience of doing something you already do all the time anyway. OH BOO HOO.

My favourite bit is the ease with which you can make your own playlists, and share them. You can even make them collaborative, so if you're chatting to a friend in the pub, they can be all like 'have you heard this banger?' and you'll be all like 'no?' and they'll be all like 'well I'll put it on our joint Spotify collaborative playlist' and you'll be all like 'o rly?' and they'll be like 'yea rly!!!1'. That simple.

For starters, here's the official BANGBANGBANGPOWPOWPOW playlist for you to slap your sweaty chops around.

And try it yourself, little doggies! In the distant World Gone Right, people like you will be sitting around, talking about their first Spotify experiences. And then you can mention POWPOWPOW. Lovely.

Spotify Official Website

Internet Screengrab Deconstruction Time Again

Do you remember when I looked at that screengrab of msn.co.uk, and started dissecting its unashamed hatefulness? No? It looked like this:



Part One included the irony of persuading people to buy eco-cars in order to be ecologically friendly, and the obvious importance of Michelle Obama's clothing selections. Part Two includes a section on the phenomenon of the Dirty Pervert Curio Wankfest.

3 & 4) The Editor's Picks

The times, they are a-changing. Markets crash, social world orders turned upside down. But don't worry yourself with all that radical palarver, because The Editor is here, and they have decided what we need to be interested in. Dont forget, facts x importance = news. So, The Editor, what have you found for us?

Some men found floating in an ice box. Oh chortle chortle, what a right old carry-on. That's quite funny, chappies floating around, presumably with some cold meats and perhaps a can of Dr. Pepper. Actually, why isn't that on YouTube yet? OH THEY'RE DEAD. For some reason I'm not amused anymore by this trivial wittering and I actually feel a bit sick at the fact that 12 seconds ago I was laughing at an army of blue corpses. My bads.

Still, maybe The Editor is having an off day. Maybe he missed the bus. Maybe he's on a fixed-rate mortgage. Maybe his accumulator failed him on the last bet. What's next? A girl gets raped? She's 12? He's 15? Why is this in the curio section? Why isn't it in the straight-up news bit. Is it because it happened in a leisure centre? Is it because the chap was a chav? WHY IS IT DIRECTLY NEXT TO A LINK TO A SELF ESTEEM TEST?

I would like to know if The Editor is like this in the pub. I would also like to know if his Content Management System has a sick sense of humour. In fact, I feel a lot more at ease with the world convincing myself that some deranged web publishing robot is putting tales of pre-teen rape next to RAF application links, rather than some editor, who is presumably picking up a payslip in return for his efforts.

Epic Fail #1

I am partial to a bit of football. I don't even care where it's being played. I happened upon a Serie B game between US Sassuolo and Brescia, which for some reason kicked off at 3pm Italian time on a Tuesday afternoon. Taking the ungodly hour, as well as the dreadful pitch and weather into account, and a low attendance was always going to be on the cards:

But don't blame hosts US Sassuolo, oh no. They're playing their home games at Modena's Stadio Alberto Braglia, which has a whopping capacity of 20,507, as opposed to their native Stadio Enzo Ricci, which holds a paltry 4,008. Presumably this is due to the whopping demand for Serie B football on dank Tuesday afternoons. More interestingly, visitors Brescia have been in Serie B for a record 53 seasons (ie the cream of the crap), whereas US Sassuolo are at dizzying heights for them, this being their premier foray into the glitzy second tier. For this empty stadium, Serie B, you get a FAIL.

Internet Screengrab Deconstruction Time

I loves me some Photoshop, me. Check out the flagrant boxes I whacked on here. It's a shame you can't draw boxes in Comic Sans.

This screengrab belongs to the United Kingdom offshoot of Microsoft Shit Nozzle (msn.co.uk). It's a hotch-potch of sensationalism, dour social self-improvement articles and 'lazy journalism' (read: journalism by perfectly able journalists who have been given 17 seconds to write a story in the middle of a 52-hour day).

I have a very close relationship with this web page because I do a lot of my communicating via Hotmail, and the Hotmail cyberbouncers throw you into the grim, cold, grey environs of this particular nuclear holocaust in HTML. You see, most people communicate using their faces, but I use Hotmail. So Hotmail is my face, which makes msn.co.uk the inside of my eyelids. Let's have a little looky at the boxes, shall we?



1) Token attempt at being green

It's not easy being green. The hemp trousers, the Great Unwashed look. Comparisons to Bill Bailey and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The slack-jawed look of agoggedness in Tesco. You're trying to save the world so that we're not all swimming around in our own cack and people take the piss out of you. Well, worry no more, as msn.co.uk is on the case, telling you about all the latest green cars that - GASP - are not as rubbish as previously thought.

Well, firstly, msn.co.uk, thanks for reinforcing the idea that eco-cars are meant to be pants. It's a poorly-founded theory which is damning the world to watery apocalypse. You along with Jeremy 'Let's Make Some Jokes About Murdering Prostitutes' Clarkson think it's cool to assume that these cars are somehow inferior due to the fact that they don't spunk out CO2 like a braindead pornstar. Perhaps it's time you realised that the whole need for things like eco-cars, recycling collection points and solar panels is related to the fact that people like you think they deserve to own 3 cars, jet to the Cayman Islands every 4 months and use up the world's oil supply on replica Jeep buggies for your stuck-up excuse for offspring.

Secondly, how about you don't tell me to buy a new car? I don't care if it runs off pure happiness, you've still got to suck the steel from the foundry and all the other precious stuff that to be honest, you don't need to extract because we've got enough cars as it is. Take a trip to Michigan, they've got plenty sitting around there. In fact, you can get them super cheap! Do that! Make it into a holiday! It's more fun than skiing, honest! And while you're at it, die. You don't need any more cars.

This is the point where you look back at the picture and go 'hang on... it doesn't actually say anything about saving the planet.' Yes, that's true. It only says something about saving money. Because we're in a credit crunch, see, and we need to save money. So, for you, here's a great money-saving tip. Tell everyone you know. It's brilliant. BUY LESS STUFF.

2) Era-defining analysis

I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but there's going to be an African-American president in charge of the USA, for like 4 years. It's monumental stuff for reasons that are much better explained by other people. But forget about all that, it's all pretty trivial. Just because people are saying it's amazing now doesn't mean that it's going to last very long. It could be a flash in the pan.

Oh no, if you want the real legacy on this story, you'll have to delve deeper than that. You have to delve deep inside First Lady Michelle Obama's wardrobe. What is she wearing? Why is she wearing it? I'll admit that there are socio-political consequences of anything that Michelle Obama might do/say/wear, but let's face it, no one was going all crazy about Barbara Bush. Which makes this particular parade a reinforcement of the 'Empowered Female Icon'* construct. Forget the politics, the foreign policy, the global economic meltdown. That girl got class, y'all.

* who happens to be fit.