Ultimate Fighting Championship
If you haven't at least heard of the UFC you've probably been living under a rock. Started in the mid 90s as a spectacle for comparing martial arts against each other, the UFC has gradually developed into a bit of a phenomena across the world by spawning a sport in its own right; Mixed Martial Arts. MMA pits two fighters against each other in a cage who must win in three five minute rounds by knock out, technical knock out, submission or judge's decision. There are some rules mind, these are all fouls:
1. Butting with the head.
2. Eye gouging of any kind.
3. Biting.
4. Hair pulling.
5. Fish hooking.
6. Groin attacks of any kind.
7. Putting a finger into any orifice or into any cut or laceration on an opponent.
8. Small joint manipulation.
9. Striking to the spine or the back of the head.
10. Striking downward using the point of the elbow.
11. Throat strikes of any kind, including, without limitation, grabbing the trachea.
12. Clawing, pinching or twisting the flesh.
13. Grabbing the clavicle.
14. Kicking the head of a grounded opponent.
15. Kneeing the head of a grounded opponent.
16. Stomping a grounded opponent.
17. Kicking to the kidney with the heel.
18. Spiking an opponent to the canvas on his head or neck.
19. Throwing an opponent out of the ring or fenced area.
20. Holding the shorts or gloves of an opponent.
21. Spitting at an opponent.
22. Engaging in an unsportsmanlike conduct that causes an injury to an opponent.
23. Holding the ropes or the fence.
24. Using abusive language in the ring or fenced area.
25. Attacking an opponent on or during the break.
26. Attacking an opponent who is under the care of the referee.
27. Attacking an opponent after the bell has sounded the end of the period of unarmed combat.
28. Flagrantly disregarding the instructions of the referee.
29. Timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury.
30. Interference by the corner.
31. Throwing in the towel during competition.
Even with the rules present, the sport ends up looking completely brutal from a casual spectator's view for Ground and Pound being allowed; a fighter can attack an opponent who has already been knocked off their feet by a strike or kick or rugby tackle-like take down.
In its defence, ground and pound either leads to a quick knock out or by a referee calling Technical Knock out from a multitude of undefended punches. A quick out is probably much better for your brain than fifteen rounds of being punched by a big black guy wearing 16 OZ gloves.
So why do I like the UFC? Well the show is presented kind of like WWE for big boys. Instead of yelling our support for some loud mouthed American redneck roid lover, we're crossing our fingers for some quiet spoken Brazillian like karate expert Lyoto Machida or Muay Thai superstar Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. Instead of looking for the power bomb finish, we're egging on two technically gifted athletes who place punches right inside the pocket or put a perfect rear naked choke on their opponent. For those that understand it, ground game isn't always boring - we're looking for that perfect moment when someone finds just the right moment and technique to inflict punishment on their opponent. Of course two half naked men hugging each other looks just a little gay, which puts a lot of people off but once you are comfortable in knowing they're actually trying to hurt each other by a means other than buggery or by giving their opponent a hicky you might appreciate it more.
Another great thing about UFC Is that it's always on at silly o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That means you can either stay up drinking and watching it or you can streamed the day after in order to provide entertainment when one has a raging hangover.
In my next post I'm going to talk the upcoming UFC fight and the status of the light heavyweight division.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Friday, April 09, 2010
Clash of the Titans
A brief(ish) note on my moving reviewing system
At the minute when I review films they are only movies in the cinema. The rating I give to a movie in the cinema refers to the cinema viewing experience. By that I mean that some films were made to be big screen blockbusters and when done right they can be truly entertaining. Sometimes one of these films is so cheesy they are good. Other films were never meant in that fashion and are good because they utilize good film making technique. Michael Bay's Transformers was a terrible film; cheesy writing, mediocre acting and a paper-thin plot but yet if you watch it in the cinema guzzling down a gallon of carbonated suagar water and tossing high quantities of e-numbers into your mouth, you can break the nasty spell of a hangover pretty successfully.
Obviously this means that a rating I would give to a movie is not the same as I would give to a piece of good film. The original Terminator is in many ways groundbreaking. The use of suspense, fear and action are brilliant. It's a film I can watch multiple times over. The fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation is nothing special. There is nothing new about it. Christian Bale plays Batman.. sorry, himself - an angry young Welsh man who yells at people on set with a husky voice. That doesn't mean it isn't a half decent download-from-piratebay-get-high-and-watch-on-a-midweek-night movie. It just can't compare. I might rate them 4 stars each based on the viewing experience I had at the time but they may still mean different things.
Again, if I were reviewing DVDs, the rating system would be entirely different. A DVD has to have longevity, replay value, excellent film craftsmanship. I've got to want to spend money and space on my shelf for it to be worth it. For that reason City of God gets ***** whilst Bad Boys II gets **. If I went to the cinema to see either of them, the scores might be swapped. That being said Cidade de Deus will always be a treat. With no more confusing mumble to get through, here's my review of Clash of the Titans.
--
Movie Conditions: One joint smoked between three people, pick n' mix to the balls, pain meds to handle the circumcision (more on that in a later post), film was in 3D
Synopsis: Greek legend Perseus seeks revenge for the demise of his family at the hands of the dark God Hades and must go on an epic quest with a band of warriors who must stop the Kraken before it destroys Argost (the Greek city, not the catalogue based retail chain)
First off if you're looking for depth, look elsewhere. Just as Avatar was Ferngully in Space (or Ocarina of Time meets the Matrix), this is Gladiator meets Hercules. Yes, I am well aware that it is a remake of a 1981 film, but I never saw that so I prefer to draw comparisons from films I actually have seen. You kind of know what to expect with this kind of film. It's very much of the fantasy genre. You already know the soundtrack - dramatic bassy strings and the occasional clash of cymbal when somebody swings a sword. It's no Lord of the Rings - it's more like like live action Heroquest. If that reference is too early 90s for you then it's God of War the movie. If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, roll some percentile dice and you've found out pretty much the monsters the characters end up fighting.
That's partly because the characters are pretty much the same throughout the film. There's a benevolent princess that cares for the people and is wiser than her God angering parents, there's the warriors out of 300 who thankfully have decided to get dressed this time round, then there's some Turkish guys who go around hunting beasts and make kebabs. As for the Gods, Liam Neeson does his "I'm so wise and shiny" bit and the bad guy may as well have been referred to as "He who must not be named" Fucking Voldemort.
From what you've read, I may not sound too enthusiastic about the film but that's because there's nothing about this film that will blow you away. Once it gets over the slow start it ends up being damned good fun.
I like sword and sorcerey tales and this film gives one with gusto and solid pace. Character development is not long and drawn out; you get about three lines of backstory to each face and that's it. You're not looked upon to identify with the characters. There's no complex message about the nature of morality hidden in some dispute between Smeagol and the hobits's's's and you can't relly apply the religious themes of the film to real life. It's just Star Wars in AncieNT Greece with Chewbacca made out of wood.
My one bit of advice about this is that unlike Avatar seeing this film in 3D has no benefit to your viewing experience. In fact at times I felt that it made the film look more 2D. Ever seen one of those Christmas cards where the background is on the card itself then other stuff is stuck onto the foreground to make it look 3D. That's what this film looks like in 3D sometimes. It's as if you can see the projection of the blue screen background then there's moving pieces of paper. You can see the edge of people in a way.
I'm gonna give it a decent 3 and a half muffs out of 5.
In my next blog entry I'm going to talk more about that crazy operation of mine, show you some VLOGs and maybe review Kick Ass (which actually just plain kicks ass).
A brief(ish) note on my moving reviewing system
At the minute when I review films they are only movies in the cinema. The rating I give to a movie in the cinema refers to the cinema viewing experience. By that I mean that some films were made to be big screen blockbusters and when done right they can be truly entertaining. Sometimes one of these films is so cheesy they are good. Other films were never meant in that fashion and are good because they utilize good film making technique. Michael Bay's Transformers was a terrible film; cheesy writing, mediocre acting and a paper-thin plot but yet if you watch it in the cinema guzzling down a gallon of carbonated suagar water and tossing high quantities of e-numbers into your mouth, you can break the nasty spell of a hangover pretty successfully.
Obviously this means that a rating I would give to a movie is not the same as I would give to a piece of good film. The original Terminator is in many ways groundbreaking. The use of suspense, fear and action are brilliant. It's a film I can watch multiple times over. The fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation is nothing special. There is nothing new about it. Christian Bale plays Batman.. sorry, himself - an angry young Welsh man who yells at people on set with a husky voice. That doesn't mean it isn't a half decent download-from-piratebay-get-high-and-watch-on-a-midweek-night movie. It just can't compare. I might rate them 4 stars each based on the viewing experience I had at the time but they may still mean different things.
Again, if I were reviewing DVDs, the rating system would be entirely different. A DVD has to have longevity, replay value, excellent film craftsmanship. I've got to want to spend money and space on my shelf for it to be worth it. For that reason City of God gets ***** whilst Bad Boys II gets **. If I went to the cinema to see either of them, the scores might be swapped. That being said Cidade de Deus will always be a treat. With no more confusing mumble to get through, here's my review of Clash of the Titans.
--
Movie Conditions: One joint smoked between three people, pick n' mix to the balls, pain meds to handle the circumcision (more on that in a later post), film was in 3D
Synopsis: Greek legend Perseus seeks revenge for the demise of his family at the hands of the dark God Hades and must go on an epic quest with a band of warriors who must stop the Kraken before it destroys Argost (the Greek city, not the catalogue based retail chain)
First off if you're looking for depth, look elsewhere. Just as Avatar was Ferngully in Space (or Ocarina of Time meets the Matrix), this is Gladiator meets Hercules. Yes, I am well aware that it is a remake of a 1981 film, but I never saw that so I prefer to draw comparisons from films I actually have seen. You kind of know what to expect with this kind of film. It's very much of the fantasy genre. You already know the soundtrack - dramatic bassy strings and the occasional clash of cymbal when somebody swings a sword. It's no Lord of the Rings - it's more like like live action Heroquest. If that reference is too early 90s for you then it's God of War the movie. If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, roll some percentile dice and you've found out pretty much the monsters the characters end up fighting.
That's partly because the characters are pretty much the same throughout the film. There's a benevolent princess that cares for the people and is wiser than her God angering parents, there's the warriors out of 300 who thankfully have decided to get dressed this time round, then there's some Turkish guys who go around hunting beasts and make kebabs. As for the Gods, Liam Neeson does his "I'm so wise and shiny" bit and the bad guy may as well have been referred to as "He who must not be named" Fucking Voldemort.
From what you've read, I may not sound too enthusiastic about the film but that's because there's nothing about this film that will blow you away. Once it gets over the slow start it ends up being damned good fun.
I like sword and sorcerey tales and this film gives one with gusto and solid pace. Character development is not long and drawn out; you get about three lines of backstory to each face and that's it. You're not looked upon to identify with the characters. There's no complex message about the nature of morality hidden in some dispute between Smeagol and the hobits's's's and you can't relly apply the religious themes of the film to real life. It's just Star Wars in AncieNT Greece with Chewbacca made out of wood.
My one bit of advice about this is that unlike Avatar seeing this film in 3D has no benefit to your viewing experience. In fact at times I felt that it made the film look more 2D. Ever seen one of those Christmas cards where the background is on the card itself then other stuff is stuck onto the foreground to make it look 3D. That's what this film looks like in 3D sometimes. It's as if you can see the projection of the blue screen background then there's moving pieces of paper. You can see the edge of people in a way.
I'm gonna give it a decent 3 and a half muffs out of 5.
In my next blog entry I'm going to talk more about that crazy operation of mine, show you some VLOGs and maybe review Kick Ass (which actually just plain kicks ass).
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Stop faffing, just write
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
District 9 Review
Prawn. Its either something you eat or something you stay the hell away from because the ghastly seafood smell repulses you. Well actually now, it's a racist term.
District 9 is almost undoubtedly the best mainstream Sci-fi action film of this year. Whilst I haven't yet seen "Gamer" where Gerrard Butler plays a convict that must compete in a series of gladiatorial combat battles controlled by a kid playing a computer game (or rather it's Arny's The Running Man meets Counter Strike), I'm not hearing a lot of good things. That and District 9 is generally streaks ahead of the abysmal Transformers sequel that was only ever good whilst Optimus Prime was on screen and an enjoyable but ultimately lackluster Terminator Salvation.
Over the last few years, film producers have aimed at showing epic scenes in their trailers to try and draw in audiences. Unfortunately this often leads at viewers being disappointed that the trailer was better than the film, or that they'd seen all the best bits. District 9 on the other hand never attempted to do that. It worked on intrigue and was potentially rather confusing. I thought the film was going to culminate in an alien virus wiping out most of human life and so a small bunch of rebels were going to have to fight against their bug like overlords, to which I'd be yawning and poo-pooing it as a 50s b-movie wannabe. I didn't think it'd be a film with as much depth. Almost as a result, I want to tell you very little about the plot and might be better off making a few comparisons with the other blockbusters.
Where Revenge of the Fallen suffered from being aimed at eleven year olds with little or no effort in character development, misguided attempts at comedy (script writers take note: A) token black robots weren't funny in the first one B) there is only so many times we can laugh at dogs having sex C) Robot bollocks?) and scenes that had so much slow motion they almost went backwards, District 9 is crisp, believably written and contains depth to the scenario.
Where gaping plot holes might have deterred some viewer's enjoyment of Terminator Salvation, District 9 is about as water tight as can be for a sci-fi film. One could nitpick over bits and pieces but generally they can be overlooked if your prepared to suspend your sense of disbelief enough to watch a film about aliens living as refugees in Johannesburg.
Whilst both of these films got caught up in the standard Hollywood "destined one", what's refreshing about District 9 is that everything feels accidental. The protagonist, Wikus isn't your standard action hero; he's almost like a nervous but nice civil servant character. Whats great about this is we empathize with him as he faces the trials and tribulatons that he endures. Actor Sharloto Copley does a great job of working with the extensive blue screen being employed and the excellent CGI has its own sort of character. The prawn-like aliens have an interesting design to them and move in an intelligent way. The special effects of the weapons are also hugely entertaining and we're left wishing we had the ability to fire them ourselves even if it did mean being a little bit more extra-terrestrial than usual. From
imaginative and well thought out sci-fi universes, cult followings often bloom and I suspect District 9 will be do different due to the depth of the story and the variety of ideas being employed within it. Mixing voodoo and gang warfare into an "aliens come to earth" movie was borderline genius. One might try and say the film tries to be too smart for its own good because of it at times seems to have an underlying moral message and a broader comment on racism, politics, money and corporations (mixing apartide and aliens may also offend a few)and perhaps this is true at times but its hard to be vicious about it. District 9 is a film you will talk about after watching and you will want to watch a second time to pick up the things you missed.
For his first film, Blompkamp has ultimately done a great job. The variety in camera angles and effects adds to the intrigue and build of the film. By starting it as a documentary, using webcams, camcorders and helicopter gun sights we initially feel detached from the story and it whets our appetite. One could say that the transition from this style to traditional movie style is a bit clunky and if something similar were attempted again could be done smoother and with more gusto but at least its something new.
One other flaw you could complain about is the now almost bog standard use of orchestra used to score the film. Whilst it fits, it is almost an overly-standard Peter Jackson manuever. And therein lies my only other major gripe with this film is because of this new trend in big name directors "presenting" a film to bring in a crowd i.e. they say "yeah, I've watched it and I'll say it was good if you give me a cut". Fuck you Tarrintino for starting that.
Anyway, there you have it. On estimation, I'll say 2/3 people who watch this will enjoy it for at least something. There'll always be a snob who picks apart little things and there will always be some chav who doesn't enjoy it because it's got aliens in it. Fuck them, the film will probably win an oscar or two along the way for special effects, lighting or make-up. Go see it and worse case scenario you'll have an interesting debate on your hands afterwards.
**** (out of 5)
Prawn. Its either something you eat or something you stay the hell away from because the ghastly seafood smell repulses you. Well actually now, it's a racist term.
District 9 is almost undoubtedly the best mainstream Sci-fi action film of this year. Whilst I haven't yet seen "Gamer" where Gerrard Butler plays a convict that must compete in a series of gladiatorial combat battles controlled by a kid playing a computer game (or rather it's Arny's The Running Man meets Counter Strike), I'm not hearing a lot of good things. That and District 9 is generally streaks ahead of the abysmal Transformers sequel that was only ever good whilst Optimus Prime was on screen and an enjoyable but ultimately lackluster Terminator Salvation.
Over the last few years, film producers have aimed at showing epic scenes in their trailers to try and draw in audiences. Unfortunately this often leads at viewers being disappointed that the trailer was better than the film, or that they'd seen all the best bits. District 9 on the other hand never attempted to do that. It worked on intrigue and was potentially rather confusing. I thought the film was going to culminate in an alien virus wiping out most of human life and so a small bunch of rebels were going to have to fight against their bug like overlords, to which I'd be yawning and poo-pooing it as a 50s b-movie wannabe. I didn't think it'd be a film with as much depth. Almost as a result, I want to tell you very little about the plot and might be better off making a few comparisons with the other blockbusters.
Where Revenge of the Fallen suffered from being aimed at eleven year olds with little or no effort in character development, misguided attempts at comedy (script writers take note: A) token black robots weren't funny in the first one B) there is only so many times we can laugh at dogs having sex C) Robot bollocks?) and scenes that had so much slow motion they almost went backwards, District 9 is crisp, believably written and contains depth to the scenario.
Where gaping plot holes might have deterred some viewer's enjoyment of Terminator Salvation, District 9 is about as water tight as can be for a sci-fi film. One could nitpick over bits and pieces but generally they can be overlooked if your prepared to suspend your sense of disbelief enough to watch a film about aliens living as refugees in Johannesburg.
Whilst both of these films got caught up in the standard Hollywood "destined one", what's refreshing about District 9 is that everything feels accidental. The protagonist, Wikus isn't your standard action hero; he's almost like a nervous but nice civil servant character. Whats great about this is we empathize with him as he faces the trials and tribulatons that he endures. Actor Sharloto Copley does a great job of working with the extensive blue screen being employed and the excellent CGI has its own sort of character. The prawn-like aliens have an interesting design to them and move in an intelligent way. The special effects of the weapons are also hugely entertaining and we're left wishing we had the ability to fire them ourselves even if it did mean being a little bit more extra-terrestrial than usual. From
imaginative and well thought out sci-fi universes, cult followings often bloom and I suspect District 9 will be do different due to the depth of the story and the variety of ideas being employed within it. Mixing voodoo and gang warfare into an "aliens come to earth" movie was borderline genius. One might try and say the film tries to be too smart for its own good because of it at times seems to have an underlying moral message and a broader comment on racism, politics, money and corporations (mixing apartide and aliens may also offend a few)and perhaps this is true at times but its hard to be vicious about it. District 9 is a film you will talk about after watching and you will want to watch a second time to pick up the things you missed.
For his first film, Blompkamp has ultimately done a great job. The variety in camera angles and effects adds to the intrigue and build of the film. By starting it as a documentary, using webcams, camcorders and helicopter gun sights we initially feel detached from the story and it whets our appetite. One could say that the transition from this style to traditional movie style is a bit clunky and if something similar were attempted again could be done smoother and with more gusto but at least its something new.
One other flaw you could complain about is the now almost bog standard use of orchestra used to score the film. Whilst it fits, it is almost an overly-standard Peter Jackson manuever. And therein lies my only other major gripe with this film is because of this new trend in big name directors "presenting" a film to bring in a crowd i.e. they say "yeah, I've watched it and I'll say it was good if you give me a cut". Fuck you Tarrintino for starting that.
Anyway, there you have it. On estimation, I'll say 2/3 people who watch this will enjoy it for at least something. There'll always be a snob who picks apart little things and there will always be some chav who doesn't enjoy it because it's got aliens in it. Fuck them, the film will probably win an oscar or two along the way for special effects, lighting or make-up. Go see it and worse case scenario you'll have an interesting debate on your hands afterwards.
**** (out of 5)
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Film Review: Inglorious Basterds
If you read the last post, this one really should be a continuation of me proposing where my future may or may not lie. However, I haven't been arsed doing that for a bit and I might get back to it. Job hunting, getting fucked and going to the gym have been a slightly higher priority (although not necessarily in that order). I've also had a bit of criticism about the blog, which I'm quite happy to take on the chin. I'm not 16 any more, the stuff I write on an online soap box isn't going to get me laughed at on a day-to-day basis although pointless overthinking of my own psychology is going to have to end.
Anyway, saw Inglorious Basterds last night and I'm about to give you a wee bit of a review on it. If you haven't heard anything about it recently then I'm surprised you've got the internet connection to access this blog. Here's a clip showing a bit of a few scenes:
The primary plot is Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads the "Basterds", a bunch of Jewish G.I.s into occupied France to kill off as many Nazis as possible with their primary objective being the destruction of a German film that almost all of the Nazi administration are intent on seeing. Meanwhile the female French-Jewish cinema owner Shosanna (Mélanie) is planning the same thing. Both Shosanna and the Basterds are also trying to avoid German detection and the villanous "Jew-hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Cristoph Waltz).
Being a history graduate, I sometimes get irritated whenever films have an attempt at portraying historic events and doing them badly. I sat and laughed through Sean "ya bleedin' French twat!" Bean's Sharpe series for the fact that it's not only badly choreographed, ridiculously scriped but it's full of mistakes. With Basterds, I knew not to expect accuracy. Not only is it a Tarrintino film, but it's inspired by another fictional but war-time film Inglorious BastArds. Other influences that pop up through the film are Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, with an Ennio Moricone style riff playing in one of the early scenes. It put me in the mood for watching 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly' again.
Whilst most audience members will go without any hangups about the history shown, it could understandably be a sore point for some. The opening scene where French farmer LaPadite (brilliantly acted by Denis Menochet) is interrogated, culminates in the machine gun execution of a Jewish family. Due to the emotional nature of this scene and the fact it draws upon the audience's understanding of the atrocities committed during the war, it makes the rest of the film seems almost farcical in comparison. Especially as Tarrintino's tongue-in-cheek style of direction rarely has you develop an emotional commitment to any of the main characters, the nameless silent innocents who we only catch a few glimpses of are more important than those that actually play a speaking role.
In true Tarrintino style the film is written as a number of different character's stories that come together in the end, all with their own witty dialogue. Whilst I had naively hoped for an action-packed, high octane, fun driven movie where Nazis get splattered right across the French countryside, the film relied more on tense build ups and exchange of words between characters kind of similar to the "Kahuna burger" scene of Pulp Fiction. Of course there is the odd moment of gratuitous violence where we can draw a sadistic sense of glee from (two words; baseball bat) but sadly some of these dialogues end in non-sensical flashes of gunfire more akin to Guy Ritchie's work than Tarrintino's which end up proving anti-climactic and rather disappointing than the smirk raising that we hoped for.
As a result, the film drags in places. The unusual camera angles and interesting shots that we expect from the big T are there. We can appreciate them at the time but occasionally it interrupts the pace of the movie when all we want is the pay off of Nazis getting shot. As expected we do get a laugh here and there from the jovial use of language - especially since French, English and German are interwoven within the script. Without a doubt some of the acting in this film is marvellous. Although I found Brad Pitt's performance to be a slight let down on the grounds that his line delivery was often flat and uninspiring and at times seemed to focus far too much on getting his awkward Southern state accent right, Waltz's SS commander is brilliantly loathsome and the whole way through the film we're craving the opportunity to shoot him ourselves. Along with this we almost get to like Daniel Bruhl's shining example of the third Reich and German actor Til Schweiger's vicious ex-Nazi, delivering that cheeky spot of knife violence we were hoping to see. Lastly an honourable has to go out to Diane Kruger who not only was incredibly attractive whenever she was covered in her own blood, but really enjoyable to watch as a glamarous movie starlet/spy.
Despite the drag, the ending was perhaps exactly what we wanted, without saying too much it was a little do-over of history that must have seemed almost pornographic to Jewish actor Eli Roth*.
Overall: ***
Here's a little almost related treat:
*To steal a line off the Nev
If you read the last post, this one really should be a continuation of me proposing where my future may or may not lie. However, I haven't been arsed doing that for a bit and I might get back to it. Job hunting, getting fucked and going to the gym have been a slightly higher priority (although not necessarily in that order). I've also had a bit of criticism about the blog, which I'm quite happy to take on the chin. I'm not 16 any more, the stuff I write on an online soap box isn't going to get me laughed at on a day-to-day basis although pointless overthinking of my own psychology is going to have to end.
Anyway, saw Inglorious Basterds last night and I'm about to give you a wee bit of a review on it. If you haven't heard anything about it recently then I'm surprised you've got the internet connection to access this blog. Here's a clip showing a bit of a few scenes:
The primary plot is Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads the "Basterds", a bunch of Jewish G.I.s into occupied France to kill off as many Nazis as possible with their primary objective being the destruction of a German film that almost all of the Nazi administration are intent on seeing. Meanwhile the female French-Jewish cinema owner Shosanna (Mélanie) is planning the same thing. Both Shosanna and the Basterds are also trying to avoid German detection and the villanous "Jew-hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Cristoph Waltz).
Being a history graduate, I sometimes get irritated whenever films have an attempt at portraying historic events and doing them badly. I sat and laughed through Sean "ya bleedin' French twat!" Bean's Sharpe series for the fact that it's not only badly choreographed, ridiculously scriped but it's full of mistakes. With Basterds, I knew not to expect accuracy. Not only is it a Tarrintino film, but it's inspired by another fictional but war-time film Inglorious BastArds. Other influences that pop up through the film are Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, with an Ennio Moricone style riff playing in one of the early scenes. It put me in the mood for watching 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly' again.
Whilst most audience members will go without any hangups about the history shown, it could understandably be a sore point for some. The opening scene where French farmer LaPadite (brilliantly acted by Denis Menochet) is interrogated, culminates in the machine gun execution of a Jewish family. Due to the emotional nature of this scene and the fact it draws upon the audience's understanding of the atrocities committed during the war, it makes the rest of the film seems almost farcical in comparison. Especially as Tarrintino's tongue-in-cheek style of direction rarely has you develop an emotional commitment to any of the main characters, the nameless silent innocents who we only catch a few glimpses of are more important than those that actually play a speaking role.
In true Tarrintino style the film is written as a number of different character's stories that come together in the end, all with their own witty dialogue. Whilst I had naively hoped for an action-packed, high octane, fun driven movie where Nazis get splattered right across the French countryside, the film relied more on tense build ups and exchange of words between characters kind of similar to the "Kahuna burger" scene of Pulp Fiction. Of course there is the odd moment of gratuitous violence where we can draw a sadistic sense of glee from (two words; baseball bat) but sadly some of these dialogues end in non-sensical flashes of gunfire more akin to Guy Ritchie's work than Tarrintino's which end up proving anti-climactic and rather disappointing than the smirk raising that we hoped for.
As a result, the film drags in places. The unusual camera angles and interesting shots that we expect from the big T are there. We can appreciate them at the time but occasionally it interrupts the pace of the movie when all we want is the pay off of Nazis getting shot. As expected we do get a laugh here and there from the jovial use of language - especially since French, English and German are interwoven within the script. Without a doubt some of the acting in this film is marvellous. Although I found Brad Pitt's performance to be a slight let down on the grounds that his line delivery was often flat and uninspiring and at times seemed to focus far too much on getting his awkward Southern state accent right, Waltz's SS commander is brilliantly loathsome and the whole way through the film we're craving the opportunity to shoot him ourselves. Along with this we almost get to like Daniel Bruhl's shining example of the third Reich and German actor Til Schweiger's vicious ex-Nazi, delivering that cheeky spot of knife violence we were hoping to see. Lastly an honourable has to go out to Diane Kruger who not only was incredibly attractive whenever she was covered in her own blood, but really enjoyable to watch as a glamarous movie starlet/spy.
Despite the drag, the ending was perhaps exactly what we wanted, without saying too much it was a little do-over of history that must have seemed almost pornographic to Jewish actor Eli Roth*.
Overall: ***
Here's a little almost related treat:
*To steal a line off the Nev
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
My future, part one
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit: if you don’t know me, chances are this entry won’t be interesting. It’s a look at my future with some questions being raised.
Well now, aren’t I the one eating his words? If you read my last entry, you may have found me try to be cool, reassuring and confident that we can all find jobs and there’s no worry there.
Tomorrow my first dole payment is coming through. Now, hopefully it’s backdated eight weeks, but we’ll see if that application goes through. The grounds for it are a bit shakey to say the least.
It’s funny. I’ve never really found that much difficulty finding work during the Summer when I’m back in Belfast, but here we are in 2009 and I’m more qualified than I ever was. With a big fat 2.1 under my belt (sorry, I just feel the need to brag about the fact I got away with three years of ridiculous behaviour and still landed a half-way decent degree out of the equation) and a number of different jobs, getting work shouldn’t be any problem. Yet, it is. Last week I applied to fifty odd jobs, jobs that I have worked before or done similar jobs to, yet the competition is destroying me. I can’t even get a retail job, something that I hated doing when I was 17.
Perhaps I should be looking at this from another angle and declare myself “overqualified” and take the rejections as a sign that I should be looking for graduate employment or work over seas. We’ll see.
It is however early days. Whilst I am fearing that I’m letting the best days of my life slip by, panicking does nothing.
More and more often I’m getting ridiculous ideas.
Firstly, I’m thinking about making money off of youtube videos.
How you ask?
Not everybody uploads youtube videos purely to share the hilarity of their mates dancing around to Britney Speares.
Shock horror, some youtube users make piles of loot with their own channels.
They usually to this one of two ways:
1) They become a youtube partner and take a share in the advertising revenue. For every 1,000 hits you get around $2.50 - $5.00.
2) They post links to their website which has its fair share of ads, some merchandise, premium content or just a big ol’ paypal donate button.
I might be wrong but I suspect 1,000 hits are a lot easier to achieve if you have a video that grabs a little bit of attention. Something that raises a smile, makes you chuckle, gives you an erection, pleases your ears, gives you the need to take a dump or just generally something you can watch without clawing your eyes out. A quick search on the internet will show you the most popular youtube videos
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_youtube_videos_of_all_time.php
Most of these are professional music videos, but every so often something amateur with a catchy name (like guitar) or just plain
entertaining will garner a lot of attention.
However to have any real staying power, you need to be reasonably consistent with the videos you’re sticking out and you need to have a fan base.
Ever wonder why people say “please subscribe”? It’s because the more subscribers they have, the more people they have watching new content, the more views they have, the more money they make.
I’d say the tricky thing is making something watchable, but that’s something I’m yearning to do. Besides, you have little pricks like this guy making videos that attract viewers in their thousands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_oCyzja0sg&feature=fvw
Now I don’t know if that is a chipmonk voice (like him sped up) but I fully cannot deal with either of the things he says or the noise that’s made when it is said. Now here is a guy I’m a big fan of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG2otLyvuCQ&feature=channel_page
If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Whilst he’s expanded into doing different things (Now that's bullshit, cinemassacre etc.), he’s most famous for the AVGN series, where he reviews a ton of crap games for the NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Atari and yells at them constantly. Sometimes he’s funny, sometimes you’ve played the game and you remember just how awful it really was, how they really were a “Shitload of fuck”.
On average, these guy’s videos get about 300,000 views. Some of them have had millions of views.
That’s right. Millions.
Work that one out
1 000 000 / 1000 = 1000
1000 * 3 (for arguments sake) = 3000
For reviewing old computer games, he’s earned himself 3,000 dollars with one video. On top of that, he’s got the merchandise, his own website with more advertising revenue. For having a bit of fun and making a product people like, he’s got himself a healthy income.
What’s more is that he gets invited out to big gaming events to interview people and make a documentary out of it. Whilst James Rolfe isn’t famous in the conventional house-hold name sense, he’s got fans all over the world. Fans that cover his theme tune. He could probably find a couch to sleep on in pretty much any city he wants all over the world. Dare I say it, he could probably get laid with a hot nerdy chick off the back of his videos. I mean come on; if I got laid off giving flyers out to people on campus, I’m sure this guy can get laid from being in videos with millions of hits on youtube, even if they are about him drinking generic American beer and yelling abuse at nonsensical Atari games. For Yanks that’s probably what they consider bad boy charm.
Lastly, for AVGN he’s got a lot of flatterers. By flatterers, I mean imitators, hacks even.
There’s the Irate Gamer, Microsoft Sam voiced IGSRJ and even a Happy Video Game Nerd (who goes more for good retro games and admits his inspiration). Whilst the Irate Gamer has more people irate about him than actually like him - because of his charisma-less delivery, awful jokes, blatant theft of material from AVGN and an overzealous policing of the comments on his videos, he still has hundreds of thousands of hits.
Now just for a second, I’m going to go on about videos that get a lot of viewers. VLOGS.
Think of the diary room in big brother but real people all over the world showing you a glimpse of their life or professing an opinion of something. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I am aware but I’ve been looking through a few of them for “market research”.
Typically the ones that have a lot of money feature reasonably hot girls. I’m assuming that’s because a parents are putting child-lock filters on little fourteen year old Timmy’s computer, meaning he can’t access redtube like the rest of us and prefers to beat off to some Japanese/American girl whilst she explains her choice in fashion. If that isn’t the case it’s because women are interested. There are VLOGs that probably only garner the attention of pervy old men, wierd internet trawling chicks, or people clicking through randomly. I don’t know, youtubers are wierd, this guy gets results and all he does is point out why other youtubers and ninja turtles are “douchebags”:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheArchfiend
So that raises a few questions? Will I make some VLogs? Perhaps. I’d rather be creative, do visual some tours of Belfast, go to places that mean a lot to me. Even do things like film buskers as part of the journey. I could film comedy skits written by me and my friends in the big ‘fast one. However VLogs could go hand in hand with this blog of mine, pointing towards my own website and some other gems on that in terms of writing and maybe some random comic strips/art.
I wouldn’t want to do this youtube thing full time unless I was churning out great videos every time. If I’m going to be in Belfast for any length of time I want a job with around 20-30 hours so I can work on these projects. If I did it full time, my nature of being a perfectionist who says “fuck it, I’ll post it anyway”, would kick in and there’d be tons of videos I’d have created that I wasn’t happy with floating around t’internets. For that reason I wouldn’t want to dedicate every waking hour to videos. Even if I had a cool website with some cool merchandise, it’d be a hollow victory. I’ll not deny the fact I’ve spent a helluva lot of time in the last month on youtube, facebook, redtube, zoklet, Wikipedia and google because when I’m bored I don’t even notice. The internet somehow has bestowed itself a sense of belonging into me since I was ten because I felt like I have been doing more and learning more than simply watching bland TV shows. Really, I should have been out doing exercise or learning to play musical instruments but laziness and obsession has somehow been ingrained my personality from as long as I can remember. As has the internet.
Whilst being creative with internet submissions definitely eliminates some laziness, it also gives something back to the internet. It continues the endless cycle of bullshit videos and pointless wads of text. I’m adding to the addiction.
Time for a tangent.
Holy fucking series of tangents batman, aren’t you supposed to be talking about your future?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/03/bishop_on_networking/
The bishop of Westminister as high, pompous and pious as he probably is, made a reasonably valid comment recently. He basically pointed out the gaping flaws with the internet and social networking.
Admit it, something has struck a chord with you about how much I use the internet. You, or at least somebody else that you know spends far too much time on the internet. I’m not the only poor sap. Whilst I do spend a good bit of time with my friends IRL, so often am I keeping up with friends that I haven’t seen in so long by txt or facebook. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Just because I’m not in Denmark right now doesn’t mean that my Danish friends didn’t mean a lot to me when I’m there. Sure, we don’t make daily impacts on each other’s lives but if you fall into a group of friends and form what feel like tight bonds, you don’t want to let geographical distance separate you. Friends in England are exactly the same and when I’m away the Northern Irish ones become the ones that I speak to long distance. It’s just a way of keeping in touch with each other. Things might move on without you realizing and people may change, but there’s still a good chance if you get on well online/txt after a successful relationship/friendship offline people can appreciate that you’re both staying in touch.
What the archbishop was lampooning is the number of friends thing on myfacebotwit. How a lot of people stress about how many friends you have. We all know that we don’t talk to about half the people in our facebook friends. Sometimes when people add us, we chose to accept them. Rather than ignore, it’s easier to accept them out of politeness, or because we fear we are committing some kind of modern day social faux pas. Inevitably, you’ll end up randomly clicking through barely known friend’s pictures and getting some sort of false sense of knowing them. They might make you laugh with a witty status update and you think “wow he/she is really cool”, only to realize that in real life you just have no real bond.
That’s the issue. False bonds. False bonds are even stronger with randomers on the internet. Through forums, youtube comments etc. I’ve got the odd “online friend”. Some I have the intention to meet because I’ve done it before and it was interesting. Admittedly, you have mixed results.
On one occasion the person dealt to us and was a bit of a weirdo that’s reasonably well known in Lancaster as being just that. However, just don’t tell the person your address or real name and it should work out okay. Meet in public. If you’re a woman, don’t get raped.
To divulge a little bit more truth, the willingness to plug myself into the matrix we call the internet for hours upon hours without achieving much is regrettable. The only thing I think I’ve improved by spending long hours on the internet is my writing skill. This brings me to the two other paths in my future:
writing and martial arts.
Find out more next week.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit: if you don’t know me, chances are this entry won’t be interesting. It’s a look at my future with some questions being raised.
Well now, aren’t I the one eating his words? If you read my last entry, you may have found me try to be cool, reassuring and confident that we can all find jobs and there’s no worry there.
Tomorrow my first dole payment is coming through. Now, hopefully it’s backdated eight weeks, but we’ll see if that application goes through. The grounds for it are a bit shakey to say the least.
It’s funny. I’ve never really found that much difficulty finding work during the Summer when I’m back in Belfast, but here we are in 2009 and I’m more qualified than I ever was. With a big fat 2.1 under my belt (sorry, I just feel the need to brag about the fact I got away with three years of ridiculous behaviour and still landed a half-way decent degree out of the equation) and a number of different jobs, getting work shouldn’t be any problem. Yet, it is. Last week I applied to fifty odd jobs, jobs that I have worked before or done similar jobs to, yet the competition is destroying me. I can’t even get a retail job, something that I hated doing when I was 17.
Perhaps I should be looking at this from another angle and declare myself “overqualified” and take the rejections as a sign that I should be looking for graduate employment or work over seas. We’ll see.
It is however early days. Whilst I am fearing that I’m letting the best days of my life slip by, panicking does nothing.
More and more often I’m getting ridiculous ideas.
Firstly, I’m thinking about making money off of youtube videos.
How you ask?
Not everybody uploads youtube videos purely to share the hilarity of their mates dancing around to Britney Speares.
Shock horror, some youtube users make piles of loot with their own channels.
They usually to this one of two ways:
1) They become a youtube partner and take a share in the advertising revenue. For every 1,000 hits you get around $2.50 - $5.00.
2) They post links to their website which has its fair share of ads, some merchandise, premium content or just a big ol’ paypal donate button.
I might be wrong but I suspect 1,000 hits are a lot easier to achieve if you have a video that grabs a little bit of attention. Something that raises a smile, makes you chuckle, gives you an erection, pleases your ears, gives you the need to take a dump or just generally something you can watch without clawing your eyes out. A quick search on the internet will show you the most popular youtube videos
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_youtube_videos_of_all_time.php
Most of these are professional music videos, but every so often something amateur with a catchy name (like guitar) or just plain
entertaining will garner a lot of attention.
However to have any real staying power, you need to be reasonably consistent with the videos you’re sticking out and you need to have a fan base.
Ever wonder why people say “please subscribe”? It’s because the more subscribers they have, the more people they have watching new content, the more views they have, the more money they make.
I’d say the tricky thing is making something watchable, but that’s something I’m yearning to do. Besides, you have little pricks like this guy making videos that attract viewers in their thousands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_oCyzja0sg&feature=fvw
Now I don’t know if that is a chipmonk voice (like him sped up) but I fully cannot deal with either of the things he says or the noise that’s made when it is said. Now here is a guy I’m a big fan of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG2otLyvuCQ&feature=channel_page
If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Whilst he’s expanded into doing different things (Now that's bullshit, cinemassacre etc.), he’s most famous for the AVGN series, where he reviews a ton of crap games for the NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Atari and yells at them constantly. Sometimes he’s funny, sometimes you’ve played the game and you remember just how awful it really was, how they really were a “Shitload of fuck”.
On average, these guy’s videos get about 300,000 views. Some of them have had millions of views.
That’s right. Millions.
Work that one out
1 000 000 / 1000 = 1000
1000 * 3 (for arguments sake) = 3000
For reviewing old computer games, he’s earned himself 3,000 dollars with one video. On top of that, he’s got the merchandise, his own website with more advertising revenue. For having a bit of fun and making a product people like, he’s got himself a healthy income.
What’s more is that he gets invited out to big gaming events to interview people and make a documentary out of it. Whilst James Rolfe isn’t famous in the conventional house-hold name sense, he’s got fans all over the world. Fans that cover his theme tune. He could probably find a couch to sleep on in pretty much any city he wants all over the world. Dare I say it, he could probably get laid with a hot nerdy chick off the back of his videos. I mean come on; if I got laid off giving flyers out to people on campus, I’m sure this guy can get laid from being in videos with millions of hits on youtube, even if they are about him drinking generic American beer and yelling abuse at nonsensical Atari games. For Yanks that’s probably what they consider bad boy charm.
Lastly, for AVGN he’s got a lot of flatterers. By flatterers, I mean imitators, hacks even.
There’s the Irate Gamer, Microsoft Sam voiced IGSRJ and even a Happy Video Game Nerd (who goes more for good retro games and admits his inspiration). Whilst the Irate Gamer has more people irate about him than actually like him - because of his charisma-less delivery, awful jokes, blatant theft of material from AVGN and an overzealous policing of the comments on his videos, he still has hundreds of thousands of hits.
Now just for a second, I’m going to go on about videos that get a lot of viewers. VLOGS.
Think of the diary room in big brother but real people all over the world showing you a glimpse of their life or professing an opinion of something. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I am aware but I’ve been looking through a few of them for “market research”.
Typically the ones that have a lot of money feature reasonably hot girls. I’m assuming that’s because a parents are putting child-lock filters on little fourteen year old Timmy’s computer, meaning he can’t access redtube like the rest of us and prefers to beat off to some Japanese/American girl whilst she explains her choice in fashion. If that isn’t the case it’s because women are interested. There are VLOGs that probably only garner the attention of pervy old men, wierd internet trawling chicks, or people clicking through randomly. I don’t know, youtubers are wierd, this guy gets results and all he does is point out why other youtubers and ninja turtles are “douchebags”:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheArchfiend
So that raises a few questions? Will I make some VLogs? Perhaps. I’d rather be creative, do visual some tours of Belfast, go to places that mean a lot to me. Even do things like film buskers as part of the journey. I could film comedy skits written by me and my friends in the big ‘fast one. However VLogs could go hand in hand with this blog of mine, pointing towards my own website and some other gems on that in terms of writing and maybe some random comic strips/art.
I wouldn’t want to do this youtube thing full time unless I was churning out great videos every time. If I’m going to be in Belfast for any length of time I want a job with around 20-30 hours so I can work on these projects. If I did it full time, my nature of being a perfectionist who says “fuck it, I’ll post it anyway”, would kick in and there’d be tons of videos I’d have created that I wasn’t happy with floating around t’internets. For that reason I wouldn’t want to dedicate every waking hour to videos. Even if I had a cool website with some cool merchandise, it’d be a hollow victory. I’ll not deny the fact I’ve spent a helluva lot of time in the last month on youtube, facebook, redtube, zoklet, Wikipedia and google because when I’m bored I don’t even notice. The internet somehow has bestowed itself a sense of belonging into me since I was ten because I felt like I have been doing more and learning more than simply watching bland TV shows. Really, I should have been out doing exercise or learning to play musical instruments but laziness and obsession has somehow been ingrained my personality from as long as I can remember. As has the internet.
Whilst being creative with internet submissions definitely eliminates some laziness, it also gives something back to the internet. It continues the endless cycle of bullshit videos and pointless wads of text. I’m adding to the addiction.
Time for a tangent.
Holy fucking series of tangents batman, aren’t you supposed to be talking about your future?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/03/bishop_on_networking/
The bishop of Westminister as high, pompous and pious as he probably is, made a reasonably valid comment recently. He basically pointed out the gaping flaws with the internet and social networking.
Admit it, something has struck a chord with you about how much I use the internet. You, or at least somebody else that you know spends far too much time on the internet. I’m not the only poor sap. Whilst I do spend a good bit of time with my friends IRL, so often am I keeping up with friends that I haven’t seen in so long by txt or facebook. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Just because I’m not in Denmark right now doesn’t mean that my Danish friends didn’t mean a lot to me when I’m there. Sure, we don’t make daily impacts on each other’s lives but if you fall into a group of friends and form what feel like tight bonds, you don’t want to let geographical distance separate you. Friends in England are exactly the same and when I’m away the Northern Irish ones become the ones that I speak to long distance. It’s just a way of keeping in touch with each other. Things might move on without you realizing and people may change, but there’s still a good chance if you get on well online/txt after a successful relationship/friendship offline people can appreciate that you’re both staying in touch.
What the archbishop was lampooning is the number of friends thing on myfacebotwit. How a lot of people stress about how many friends you have. We all know that we don’t talk to about half the people in our facebook friends. Sometimes when people add us, we chose to accept them. Rather than ignore, it’s easier to accept them out of politeness, or because we fear we are committing some kind of modern day social faux pas. Inevitably, you’ll end up randomly clicking through barely known friend’s pictures and getting some sort of false sense of knowing them. They might make you laugh with a witty status update and you think “wow he/she is really cool”, only to realize that in real life you just have no real bond.
That’s the issue. False bonds. False bonds are even stronger with randomers on the internet. Through forums, youtube comments etc. I’ve got the odd “online friend”. Some I have the intention to meet because I’ve done it before and it was interesting. Admittedly, you have mixed results.
On one occasion the person dealt to us and was a bit of a weirdo that’s reasonably well known in Lancaster as being just that. However, just don’t tell the person your address or real name and it should work out okay. Meet in public. If you’re a woman, don’t get raped.
To divulge a little bit more truth, the willingness to plug myself into the matrix we call the internet for hours upon hours without achieving much is regrettable. The only thing I think I’ve improved by spending long hours on the internet is my writing skill. This brings me to the two other paths in my future:
writing and martial arts.
Find out more next week.
Monday, July 06, 2009
I can’t believe it’s all over. Apart from graduation, there is nothing left for me uni-wise. I keep thinking I’ll have classes to go to in September or October, but I have to remind myself that unless I want to mope around my parents house from now until the end of days, I have to go and face the big bad world. I’m going to have to sober up a little too. I may have managed to last three years being a wreck-head and still end up with a 2:1, but I’m left with a lethargy and a curiousness that I need to replace with energy and just going out and doing things. After all, a man who has too much time to think will think far too much. I could write about my plans for the future, save for the fact I do not know what they are. Teaching English around the world; perhaps.
Writing a book or a novel would also be great save for the risk factor in struggling to get it published and the potential that it could be absolute jank. I’m sure a lot of us uni-grads are in the same frame of mind. We believed that over the three or four years of doing a degree (and especially those doing humanities) we’d know what to do with our time but as it turns out we’re even more confused than we were before we began. What we need to realize is that unlike our parents time, or our grandparents time before them we have a lot more time to decide what we want to do. Yes, the world economy might be in a right state and we might live in a state such as rip off Britain where every service available to the public seems geared to overcharging us and fining us with incredulous small print (here’s a big fuck you to the landlords, the campus accommodation, BT and the National Rail who perverted the miniscule student finances of all of us) but it’ll bounce back eventually and we can drift between this and that for a few years. Unless we have mad ambitions of making lots of money, of saving the world or becoming an incredible artist/musician/actor/Ultimate Fighting Championship brawler, we have time. Not time to waste though. If you don’t enjoy this time, then that’s exactly what you are doing; wasting the time you have. A lot of us worry that the words of Pink Floyd’s Time will come true. If you don’t know the song I refer to, go out and buy yourself a copy of Dark Side of the Moon, potentially the most complete album ever made, here’s a bit of Time’s poetry:
“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”
I reckon this is a pretty good way of summing up a lot of people’s fears, at least I do but you can’t life with this fear. You just have to go out and live it. All being well, it’ll all click into place. I hope.
Anyway, enough amateur philosophising and acting like a guru of life, I’ve got completely sidetracked talking about one thing when I’m meant to be talking about another: the pros and cons of Lancaster. Basically this will act as a guide for those thinking of going to university and a piece of truth for those who have been.
The cons are basically the cons. There are those who will try and con money out of you. £90 for campus accommodation is pretty expensive and like I explained in an earlier article, UPP can be a right scheming organization that knows the ins and outs of the law to the point that they can scam a whole £90 off of you for stains in a mattress that would cost about £25. They probably haven’t even replaced it.. Then you might be landed with a knifing Birmingham-Pakistani (I’m not being racist, but our landlord played up to every stereotype that British people have of these type of characters) landlord who fixes every problem badly with duct tape.
Then you have the fact that the campus bars and the student union nightclub charge £2.40 on average per pint. Whilst all of that money goes back into student stuff and is imperative to keep the university running, it’s still considerably expensive for a student bar.
The reason to these high costs is, and I’ll quote an old tutor of mine
“Everything on the campus has to make profit”
During the 90s, the university ran into massive debt to the point that they could no longer afford to pay tutors wages. Even if you don’t like your tutor, you have to give them credit that they deserve pay just as much as the next working person does and really, the uni can’t run if nobody is around to teach. Still the prices seem a bit over-zealous, but you learn to live with them unless you’re scandalously poor.
Money price problems aside, another issue with the uni lies with the nightlife and the music. A lot of people can go out in Lancaster and have a good time. For another bunch of us we can go out and have a good time, provided we’re blind drunk. I can listen to cheese and laugh at it, but to really enjoy it I need to have consumed a metric fuck gallon of alcohol. Even then, some songs will have me running to the bar requiring another drink. For some reason, I have always hated Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams and to counteract its audio rape upon my ears, I must assault my liver with excess alcohol. Usually balances me out in some respect.
I like a lot of different types of music. When I’m in my favourite pub back home (Laverys), we get treated to either live music or reggae/rock, well chosen from the 60s/70s/80s. You don’t get that sort of treatment in Lancaster too often. When I go out, I usually want to hear the latest electronic stuff. I’m slowly developing a taste for dubstep, drum and bass, electro, techno and house. Nights for this kind of stuff is few and far between. Occasionally N-Type or Rusko will appear on the scene, dropping the dubstep bomb. Occasionally you’ll get a DJ such as DJ Dirty Dan O’Donnell (cheeky shout out to my old housemate), or the guys from Muddled will put on a minimal set at Mint. Sometimes, there’s a secret illegal rave in a forest right under their noses, paused only by the police looking for some crazed suicidal girl. Like I said though, these nights don’t happen too often.
Likewise, there aren’t too many live band nights. When they do happen, they’re in some bar or old man pub that none of your friends want to be bothered with, so unless you have the money and time to go drinking on your own whilst your friends are having a good time without you. If you live on campus, this would be slightly more aggravating as transport becomes an issue. However If you look though, you will find a gem from time to time. The Robert Gillow and The John O’Gaunts are both quite good for this. Metal heads and rockers might be better off looking in the Yorkshire House or the aptly named The Pub.
The extravs though can be fantastic. For those that don’t understand, each college in Lancaster runs a concert at the end of June featuring a bunch of different acts. Whilst Pendle often sucks as a college, it has a great reputation for good music at their extrav. In first year the talented but often forgot about Nizlopi played for a good hour or so and this year had an excellent line up of old school rockers and reggae artists, closing with a great DNB/Dubstep set. Despite the lack of greatness in the year, at least you have something to look forward to at the end of it, even it does involve stumbling around a bar wearing a bed sheet as a toga because it’s a Roman theme.
Lastly, there is the drug scene, which compared to Belfast is usually great but compared to the rest of the country is perhaps quite lacking.
Now, I’m aware I should treat this discussion with some sensitivity, after all not everybody gets high and some would consider a town with fewer drugs a nicer place to live but I am fully aware that drugs will always be part of some student cultures, whether openly flaunted or underground.
To get any Class A, one has to know the right people from the get-go. Rather than Manchester where it is a lot easier to figure out how one acquires these substances, contacts are key. Ringing and ordering well in advance is a must. With weed the situation is similar, though there is rarely a day when there isn’t at least one dealer holding. The problem is the bags are rarely anywhere near the accepted 3.5 for £20 and you’re often likely to be a gram short and the tree being wet. Believe you me though, when it’s good, it’s star-seeing phenomenal.
Back to the pros:
Well for one, the university is ranked pretty highly within the UCAS tables. When you get a degree from Lancaster it’s supposedly going to hold some weight with employers. Now I can’t say the same for every course but the history course is excellent. The tuition is excellent and there are a wide variety of time periods on offer to study. I did everything from the 1300 years of Islam through to the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Pretty impressive I thought.
Secondly you’re right in the countryside, if you want to you can utilize those beautiful Summer days to walk up by the canal, traipse into surrounding forests or start a camp fire in a field. Heck, a train ride would get you into the Lake District. It’s an amazing feeling sometimes knowing that you can just breath in some fresh air. The town itself isn’t too bad and whilst simple has a few great things about it. The indoor markets are usually pretty amusing and there are enough shops to supply you with everything you will realistically need.
Thirdly and finally, the most important thing though is the friends you make.
Unlike Manchester Metropolitan, where my friend suffered from a poor social life, in Lancaster it is so easy to meet new people. The college system and relative openness means that you can meet people from different flats and befriend them easily. You can also meet loads of people on campus and it’s not unusual to start conversations with randommers and get on with them well. Most of the societies are easy to join, so if any sport or wierd hobby takes your interest, they will usually encourage you to make an appearance if you speak to them long enough.
I met my friends and housemates through random parties in kitchens and a love of similar things and I’m glad I did. I’ve had a damn good three years with them and a messy three years at that. I’ll probably behave myself a lot more now that I’ve left university but I’m glad I did my misbehaving with those guys and they know who they are. I’ll be thankful that I got pissed up a field with them and smoked the reefer till the sun rose and I hope that others like me get to experience the same kind of excellent characters as I did. They were the ones that influenced me into liking new movies, new music and new games. I think in some ways we all grew as people throughout the three years, influencing each other in different ways and showing how there is more than one way to catch a cat (catting requires a whole other article I feel).
Soppy I know, but I’m a sentimental old fool when I want to be.
There you have it: easy ways of making friends with excellent people, average drug scene and not such a bad academic reputation. If you’re looking for somewhere to study, consider Lancaster. If you’re half way through your degree, enjoy it; work hard, but play damn well hard. Then of course, if you’ve just finished it, remember the good times and don’t worry too much about the future. Think with your hopes, ambitions and intelligence, using only your fear when you have to.
Here's to attempting to take your own advice.
Writing a book or a novel would also be great save for the risk factor in struggling to get it published and the potential that it could be absolute jank. I’m sure a lot of us uni-grads are in the same frame of mind. We believed that over the three or four years of doing a degree (and especially those doing humanities) we’d know what to do with our time but as it turns out we’re even more confused than we were before we began. What we need to realize is that unlike our parents time, or our grandparents time before them we have a lot more time to decide what we want to do. Yes, the world economy might be in a right state and we might live in a state such as rip off Britain where every service available to the public seems geared to overcharging us and fining us with incredulous small print (here’s a big fuck you to the landlords, the campus accommodation, BT and the National Rail who perverted the miniscule student finances of all of us) but it’ll bounce back eventually and we can drift between this and that for a few years. Unless we have mad ambitions of making lots of money, of saving the world or becoming an incredible artist/musician/actor/Ultimate Fighting Championship brawler, we have time. Not time to waste though. If you don’t enjoy this time, then that’s exactly what you are doing; wasting the time you have. A lot of us worry that the words of Pink Floyd’s Time will come true. If you don’t know the song I refer to, go out and buy yourself a copy of Dark Side of the Moon, potentially the most complete album ever made, here’s a bit of Time’s poetry:
“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”
I reckon this is a pretty good way of summing up a lot of people’s fears, at least I do but you can’t life with this fear. You just have to go out and live it. All being well, it’ll all click into place. I hope.
Anyway, enough amateur philosophising and acting like a guru of life, I’ve got completely sidetracked talking about one thing when I’m meant to be talking about another: the pros and cons of Lancaster. Basically this will act as a guide for those thinking of going to university and a piece of truth for those who have been.
The cons are basically the cons. There are those who will try and con money out of you. £90 for campus accommodation is pretty expensive and like I explained in an earlier article, UPP can be a right scheming organization that knows the ins and outs of the law to the point that they can scam a whole £90 off of you for stains in a mattress that would cost about £25. They probably haven’t even replaced it.. Then you might be landed with a knifing Birmingham-Pakistani (I’m not being racist, but our landlord played up to every stereotype that British people have of these type of characters) landlord who fixes every problem badly with duct tape.
Then you have the fact that the campus bars and the student union nightclub charge £2.40 on average per pint. Whilst all of that money goes back into student stuff and is imperative to keep the university running, it’s still considerably expensive for a student bar.
The reason to these high costs is, and I’ll quote an old tutor of mine
“Everything on the campus has to make profit”
During the 90s, the university ran into massive debt to the point that they could no longer afford to pay tutors wages. Even if you don’t like your tutor, you have to give them credit that they deserve pay just as much as the next working person does and really, the uni can’t run if nobody is around to teach. Still the prices seem a bit over-zealous, but you learn to live with them unless you’re scandalously poor.
Money price problems aside, another issue with the uni lies with the nightlife and the music. A lot of people can go out in Lancaster and have a good time. For another bunch of us we can go out and have a good time, provided we’re blind drunk. I can listen to cheese and laugh at it, but to really enjoy it I need to have consumed a metric fuck gallon of alcohol. Even then, some songs will have me running to the bar requiring another drink. For some reason, I have always hated Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams and to counteract its audio rape upon my ears, I must assault my liver with excess alcohol. Usually balances me out in some respect.
I like a lot of different types of music. When I’m in my favourite pub back home (Laverys), we get treated to either live music or reggae/rock, well chosen from the 60s/70s/80s. You don’t get that sort of treatment in Lancaster too often. When I go out, I usually want to hear the latest electronic stuff. I’m slowly developing a taste for dubstep, drum and bass, electro, techno and house. Nights for this kind of stuff is few and far between. Occasionally N-Type or Rusko will appear on the scene, dropping the dubstep bomb. Occasionally you’ll get a DJ such as DJ Dirty Dan O’Donnell (cheeky shout out to my old housemate), or the guys from Muddled will put on a minimal set at Mint. Sometimes, there’s a secret illegal rave in a forest right under their noses, paused only by the police looking for some crazed suicidal girl. Like I said though, these nights don’t happen too often.
Likewise, there aren’t too many live band nights. When they do happen, they’re in some bar or old man pub that none of your friends want to be bothered with, so unless you have the money and time to go drinking on your own whilst your friends are having a good time without you. If you live on campus, this would be slightly more aggravating as transport becomes an issue. However If you look though, you will find a gem from time to time. The Robert Gillow and The John O’Gaunts are both quite good for this. Metal heads and rockers might be better off looking in the Yorkshire House or the aptly named The Pub.
The extravs though can be fantastic. For those that don’t understand, each college in Lancaster runs a concert at the end of June featuring a bunch of different acts. Whilst Pendle often sucks as a college, it has a great reputation for good music at their extrav. In first year the talented but often forgot about Nizlopi played for a good hour or so and this year had an excellent line up of old school rockers and reggae artists, closing with a great DNB/Dubstep set. Despite the lack of greatness in the year, at least you have something to look forward to at the end of it, even it does involve stumbling around a bar wearing a bed sheet as a toga because it’s a Roman theme.
Lastly, there is the drug scene, which compared to Belfast is usually great but compared to the rest of the country is perhaps quite lacking.
Now, I’m aware I should treat this discussion with some sensitivity, after all not everybody gets high and some would consider a town with fewer drugs a nicer place to live but I am fully aware that drugs will always be part of some student cultures, whether openly flaunted or underground.
To get any Class A, one has to know the right people from the get-go. Rather than Manchester where it is a lot easier to figure out how one acquires these substances, contacts are key. Ringing and ordering well in advance is a must. With weed the situation is similar, though there is rarely a day when there isn’t at least one dealer holding. The problem is the bags are rarely anywhere near the accepted 3.5 for £20 and you’re often likely to be a gram short and the tree being wet. Believe you me though, when it’s good, it’s star-seeing phenomenal.
Back to the pros:
Well for one, the university is ranked pretty highly within the UCAS tables. When you get a degree from Lancaster it’s supposedly going to hold some weight with employers. Now I can’t say the same for every course but the history course is excellent. The tuition is excellent and there are a wide variety of time periods on offer to study. I did everything from the 1300 years of Islam through to the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Pretty impressive I thought.
Secondly you’re right in the countryside, if you want to you can utilize those beautiful Summer days to walk up by the canal, traipse into surrounding forests or start a camp fire in a field. Heck, a train ride would get you into the Lake District. It’s an amazing feeling sometimes knowing that you can just breath in some fresh air. The town itself isn’t too bad and whilst simple has a few great things about it. The indoor markets are usually pretty amusing and there are enough shops to supply you with everything you will realistically need.
Thirdly and finally, the most important thing though is the friends you make.
Unlike Manchester Metropolitan, where my friend suffered from a poor social life, in Lancaster it is so easy to meet new people. The college system and relative openness means that you can meet people from different flats and befriend them easily. You can also meet loads of people on campus and it’s not unusual to start conversations with randommers and get on with them well. Most of the societies are easy to join, so if any sport or wierd hobby takes your interest, they will usually encourage you to make an appearance if you speak to them long enough.
I met my friends and housemates through random parties in kitchens and a love of similar things and I’m glad I did. I’ve had a damn good three years with them and a messy three years at that. I’ll probably behave myself a lot more now that I’ve left university but I’m glad I did my misbehaving with those guys and they know who they are. I’ll be thankful that I got pissed up a field with them and smoked the reefer till the sun rose and I hope that others like me get to experience the same kind of excellent characters as I did. They were the ones that influenced me into liking new movies, new music and new games. I think in some ways we all grew as people throughout the three years, influencing each other in different ways and showing how there is more than one way to catch a cat (catting requires a whole other article I feel).
Soppy I know, but I’m a sentimental old fool when I want to be.
There you have it: easy ways of making friends with excellent people, average drug scene and not such a bad academic reputation. If you’re looking for somewhere to study, consider Lancaster. If you’re half way through your degree, enjoy it; work hard, but play damn well hard. Then of course, if you’ve just finished it, remember the good times and don’t worry too much about the future. Think with your hopes, ambitions and intelligence, using only your fear when you have to.
Here's to attempting to take your own advice.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Two Day Guide to London
It’s fair to say I didn’t arrive in this city on the best of forms. In the nature of all last nights in Belfast, one needs a piss up. In the hour and a half before I entered the venue of that evening, I had guzzled four tins of Bavaria. The rest of the evening had been no different. Unfortunately, since my Dad had made the crazy decision to get us on a flight that left at ten to six in the morning that gave me approximately two hours to sleep. Those two Godless hours were slept through in my clothes. After the painful trawling with heavy baggage through tube and train station that followed the quick flight between Belfast and Gatwick, I wasn’t allowed the pleasure of even a brief nap. Even a greasy spoon meal from Whetherspoon wouldn’t make up for that and with the alcohol rumbling around my inner organs; my stomach was turning and my head was in a state that I can only describe as buhhhh.
To add insult to injury, Friday’s weather was cold, damp and grey. A walk around Hyde park, as big and impressive as it may be just didn’t seem to be helping. Despite this, I still managed to take in the most impressive Prince Albert memorial. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it can be only described as a large dome with maybe somewhere around forty statues of great philosophers, scientists, artists and poets of ages gone by.
Apparently the government spent millions restoring it and it shows. I imagine it looks just as good as it did back when it was first constructed. Compared to what I was to see next it was breathtaking.
Near Hyde park is a famous spot called Speaker’s corner. Brief wikiapedia-ing of it would probably tell its history, but the general idea is anyone can go there and voice their opinion to the wandering general public, maybe give a valid rant or two. Right now the corner is marked by a large metal container - one of those eight foot tall, fifteen foot long constructions, kind of throwing a spanner in the works of me getting to hear a good rant, or give one for that matter.
What I visited after the Albert Memorial was the Serpentine Gallery. A small somewhere in the middle of Hyde Park, its main attraction was its admission price; free. Maybe its because of my disinterest in modern art that I failed to get any real enjoyment out of it. I, like a lot of people I just don’t see the point of many modern pieces, perhaps because often enough there is none. Some don’t seem like they require a lot of time or effort to make. A bulbous mound of unfired clay is neither particularly impressive in its design, or is it anyway aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, miniature red floruescent lights curled around badly sculpted pieces of clay don’t really add up to too much either. Lastly, I just don’t think there’s that much need for seemingly meaningless phallus shapes. Maybe there was one real gem in that place and its not something that ever could leave the gallery. A bronze work piece with a bronze saw embedded into it was great did have a kind of cool factor to it.
Otherwise calling that place an art gallery was a bit of a stretch of the imagination. Thats perhaps why its called the Serpentine gallery; because of the deception involved. The Large bookshop that also had a host of computers advertising a badly designed online game called Second Life would be a little bit better. What was even more scandalous was the prices in that bookshop. A scalpel used by some random artist who’s name wasn’t recognized by me or my History of Art studying mother, £100. Can this artistic blade cut through diamond? Does it improve your ability to sculpt by 50%?
Next to it was a set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers going for £55. What were special about them? One had heroin written on it and the other had cocaine written on it. Now I’m sorry, but unless these condiment dispensers are filled with the class A substances specified on them, I don’t get it. For that amount of money, I want to be able to skag up my steak and sprinkle my chips a lick of coke and vinegar.
By that point, the hangover had me condemning London as a town made for wankers. I had texted a friend asking for his advice on what to with my parents to do in the capital that wasn’t going to have me scraping out my eyes with a rusty spoon. The answer lay in a town called Camden.
I loved it. The place had that bohemian feel that made Chrstiania such an interesting place in Copenhagen albeit with about 240% more character destroying consumerism. Not to sound like a capitalist hating pussy liberal but one has to admit, when money is involved in something, it can destroy the easy going alternative lifestyle vibe that gets one excited. Of course the whole point of the place is that by its name and nature, Camden Town is a town and what makes it interesting is the various shops and cafés. Given some time on my own I probably would have left the place with a nice new shiny bong and a crystal catching grinder, but I didn’t want to have to explain to my Dad what the purposes of these counter-cultural creations were designed for. That being said, those multiple shops with the overly large collections get a bit tacky after a while. As do those tourist catering shops with the slogos of “My sister went to London and all she brought me was this lousy t-shirts. Almost every big city in the world has got these sorts of places. Barcelona is no different in this aspect and you’d expect it out of them; people come to Barcelona and London for touristy purposes - sightseeing, that sort of thing. It just means you’re slightly more unlikely to get a real London experience, although if that involves getting stabbed on some dodgy council estate, I’ll stick to seeing art museums and parks.
After seeing Camden town we went back to the hotel. The hotel was pretty standard, kind of like a travel lodge minus half a star for everything being noisy and the bed not being as comfortable as it could have. What made it worse was that whenever I checked into my room, some self absorbed bastard before me had left on the radiator for what must have been hours meaning it was nothing short of roasting. To a hung over body it was like being twatted with a radiator. I got some kip and went and got myself a mixed shwarma from a Lebanese restaurant called Beiti whilst my parents were off having a fish and chip dinner in some pub they didn’t really rate.
The next day I managed to get my lazy, still slightly hung-over ass up in time for a free 9 am breakfast. Croissant, toast and a bowl of cereal that I can only describe as muesakes. Being a connoisseur of cereal, I have a long tradition of mixing different types of cereal in my quest to find the greatest combination. Muesli and cornflakes isn’t a bad mix. Not quite as good as banana and pear yoghurt mixed with chocolate chip muesli, but good none the less.
Anyway, the fact I had a hang over two days after the drinking session is a sign of how bad it has got ladies and gentlemen, at the age of 22 I’m about ready to hang up my drinking boots. Not only are hangovers life ruining on the day after session (I mean questioning my obligation to be on this planet) but they are somewhat detrimental the day after that.
I’m going to interrupt this post to say that I’ve just been stung. Four weeks ago when I was booking the rail ticket from London to Lancaster, it was priced at £30. I had to go back a few steps to add my rail card and in the space of time it had almost doubled in price. Adding my railcard brought it down to £39.90. I had booked it for 15:25 because I thought that’s when I was going to end up leaving London. Having to check out of my room earlier and wanting to avoid hanging around London with my baggage in tow meant that I decided to hop on an earlier train. I just got ticket checked and then for my reservation and the smarmy little prick of a ticket checker added on £7.60. So in total for one rail journey I’ve paid £47.50. For a fucking train ride?! Apparently it can cost up to £250 for that ride. I could have a full scale hydroponics grow operation for that!
I could get a fucking return flight to the middle of Europe and back, taxes included for that. British rail charges are amongst the highest in the world and it needs to stop. Somebody needs to punch the minister of transport in the mouth until he wakes the fuck up and realizes we’re sick of this shit. I’m going to lie to every ticket checker I ever meet on a British train until they do. There’s probably some law limiting our free speech that suggests we can’t encourage unlawful behaviour, but hell, I suggest you do the same. Do what a friend of my does and hide in the toilet whenever ticket collection comes around.
Anyway, back to the story about London. That day my Mum, my Dad and I went and visited the Imperial War Museum. If you’re as big a geek as me, you’ll be amazed - even by the two guns outside of the museum, once belonging to some old British warships. Inside the place is filled with tanks, artillery pieces, planes, bits of submarines, weapons, armour and just general artefacts collected from the beginning of the First World War. You could almost spend a day on each of the floors, examining everything from holocaust inspired art to the above mentioned -stuff-. The amount of information at hand does just cause a brain overload.
After that, we stopped by a Spanish themed pub who’s name escapes me. One thing you have to admit about London is it has variety. Kaiser Wilhelm II was so cocky about winning the First World War that he declared “Lunch in Paris, St. Petersburg for dinner”. If you’re in London that’s not impossible, you could go through every regional cuisine. It’s probably the reason why The Times tends to write so many guides on where to go for a good meal in London, especially on a budget. Having all the money could get you whatever you want. In Lancaster I can comfortably live off £80 a week. In London I’d probably have to stop myself from spending that in a day. Hell, probably even in an hour.
After that we went off to the National Gallery to see the Picasso exhibition, which is only £6 with a student card. Not that I was paying, I am all too well catered for by my very loving parents. It was interesting, but in the time that we were waiting to get in, we checked out the classical paintings upstairs. Maybe this is just another expression of my distaste of modern art, but I was far more impressed with the vivid colours of Turner and Rembradt than I was with the loopy natured cubism of Pabs. I’d quite happily trip my balls off in those halls, just taking in the beauty and brilliance for hours. I felt I learned a few things anyway, I’d trade one of those audio things for the conversation of my madre any day. Aren’t I a sweet, culture loving boy.
Once we were through with that, we went outside to enjoy the sunshine and watch some Dutch bands playing. There was some Holland Festival outside of the museum, maybe as some sort of drive to encourage tourism. Stalls were set up selling Heiniken, pancakes, waffles, and tulips. I was wondering where all the coffee shops and bicycles were though. Surely that’s the whole point of going to Holland?!
We returned back to the hotel for a brief break. During that time, I put on the new Prodigy album on my iPod full blast and watched some David Attenborough documentary about African Wildlife. Take me the Hospital, Otter vs. Crocodile remix. Immense. Somehow I managed to collapse asleep for an hour after that. A knock on my door awoke me to get me up and go for the reason that we were in London in the first place - Van Morisson’s Astral Weeks tour. Father is in avid fan of Van the Grumpy Old Man. If he’s in any room in the house that has a CD player or L.P. for more than five minutes he’ll probably stick on some Van. There are a few other things that he listens to but if he had an iTunes, 85% of his top 25 list would be Van. Quite sad, I know, but this is the middle aged Northern Irish man. Go to any chippy on a Saturday night and you’ll probably have some drunken forty seven year old give you his rendition of Brown Eyed Girl. I can almost guarantee it.
Anyway, the concert was in the Royal Albert Hall of all places, we had a balcony seat, equipped with its own little bar to pour the drinks you’d purchased downstairs. A couple of glasses of red wine in me and I was enjoying it almost as much as he was. A lot of Van’s music has a mellow bluesy feel to it, meaning I sort of go off and day dream in true pothead fashion. With a bit of vino rogue in me I’m positively bouncing to the rhythm of Baby Please Don’t Go and Moon dance. Not quite as much as the guy from Bangor in the booth beside me who had seen Northern Ireland’s visually un-impaired Ray Charles 35 times and was convinced this was the best performance the old cunt had ever belted out. What amused me about this was that a couple in the booth on the other side of them offered them a bottle of red wine to not be so noisy after the interval. To which the man replied “I’ll take your wine, but it’ll be no guarantee I’ll be any quieter!” Once again, that is typical Northern Irish behaviour. Don’t expect any better. Despite the fact you’re in one of the most renowned musical venues in the world, we’ll still belt out
G
L
O
R
I
A
G-L-O-R-I-A, GLORRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAA! G-L-O-R-I-A, GLORRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIAAAA!
After that we returned for late meal in Beiti again, which I’ll have to find the website for as I firmly recommend it, for anything from a take out kebab to an actual meal. My parents had their reservations but the quality food and amiable service soon put a stop to those.
I think I was destined to be in London that weekend because on both nights before I went to sleep I got to see two films that I’d seen the start of but never the end, almost picking up where they left off. Inside I’m Dancing on Friday, Lord of War on Saturday. I slept, woke and had the same jam covered breakfast as I had the day before, packed and after a mocha chino from Bella Italia, got on this train. Giving my parents a few hugs before doing so.
If you’ve managed to stick with me this whole time well done. What was meant to be a guide was pretty much a diary entry. If its been entertaining, then I’m more than happy.
If I had taken pictures, I’d post them and give you a Where’s Wally index. Most of you are unlikely to have picked up a Where’s Wally book in years, although I’m sure you still remember the banging theme tune of its animated representation. However, if you think back there was always an index of crazy things to look for on each of the different pages if you got bored of just looking for the stripy jumper wearing nerd. If my life had one of those index, it would probably give you pictures of evil grey squirrels, the view on the train ride to Lancaster, noisy Northern Irish people, the seemingly endless supply of beautiful women in London (there must be at least two gorgeous girls on every tube carriage, I remember a girl making eye contact with one over the tube tracks, realizing we’d never meet again and romantically imagining our live together in my underground lair), a barbar shop trio in Hyde Park, chalk graffiti by artistic buskers at Camden lock and the expression on my face when it finally clicked with me that London is actually pretty fucking cool.
Glad to be back in Lancs though.
Ratings
Beiti ****
Check that tasty Lebanese shit out! Even my parents reservations soon went away once they got food put in front of them and it was also the best of a bad situation; its hard to get fed after eleven unless one wants to lower themselves to an AIDs infested cheeseburger. Turned out all the better.
Imperial War Museum ****
For any true geek you’ve got go to see it, even just to marvel at the collection of old stuff and learn a few quotes from the Kaiser along the way.
National Art Gallery *****
Pablo Picasso was still a ridiculously cool and talented artist that wanted to break boundaries even if his stuff isn’t as pretty as Turner’s classical artwork of the 18th (?) century.
Serpentine Gallery **
Avoid if you can unless you really want some books on art or want to test out Second Life by flying around a room of bad, linear graphics.
Apparently though, the exhibitions change every so often so I might have just been unlucky.
Van Morison’s Astral Weeks Live ****
I’d probably say I still would go to an Easy Star All Stars gig, but the old man still has it after all these years. Talented fucker can play the sax, guitar, piano, harmonica and sing and that’s just from what he was whipping out on stage. As long as he’s not grumpy he can put on a show.
Hangover *
Buhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Tube rides and general London ignorance *
Not to make sweeping statements, but people in London can be self serving pricks that don’t see people and only see routes through them, especially when involved in the tube. The underground is busy for sure, but it shouldn’t allow for ignorance. Same as any other town as well, when you see some 24 year old women dressed like a fourteen year old girl listening to metal at full blast with no sound cancelling headphones on public transport you really feel like having a go. Best not bother too much really.
Overall weekend in London rating *****
I might have to write a version of this post with the swearing and drug references edited out so my parents can know I’m thankful for the things they bring me to and the times that we have. The only way I could have made this better is if some London savvy friend of mine had taken me out to a cool club or bar, one that didn’t require me to get blind drunk just to enjoy.
Thanks again to anybody that read, shoot me any questions and comments the usual way.
Much love.
X
CC.
It’s fair to say I didn’t arrive in this city on the best of forms. In the nature of all last nights in Belfast, one needs a piss up. In the hour and a half before I entered the venue of that evening, I had guzzled four tins of Bavaria. The rest of the evening had been no different. Unfortunately, since my Dad had made the crazy decision to get us on a flight that left at ten to six in the morning that gave me approximately two hours to sleep. Those two Godless hours were slept through in my clothes. After the painful trawling with heavy baggage through tube and train station that followed the quick flight between Belfast and Gatwick, I wasn’t allowed the pleasure of even a brief nap. Even a greasy spoon meal from Whetherspoon wouldn’t make up for that and with the alcohol rumbling around my inner organs; my stomach was turning and my head was in a state that I can only describe as buhhhh.
To add insult to injury, Friday’s weather was cold, damp and grey. A walk around Hyde park, as big and impressive as it may be just didn’t seem to be helping. Despite this, I still managed to take in the most impressive Prince Albert memorial. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it can be only described as a large dome with maybe somewhere around forty statues of great philosophers, scientists, artists and poets of ages gone by.
Apparently the government spent millions restoring it and it shows. I imagine it looks just as good as it did back when it was first constructed. Compared to what I was to see next it was breathtaking.
Near Hyde park is a famous spot called Speaker’s corner. Brief wikiapedia-ing of it would probably tell its history, but the general idea is anyone can go there and voice their opinion to the wandering general public, maybe give a valid rant or two. Right now the corner is marked by a large metal container - one of those eight foot tall, fifteen foot long constructions, kind of throwing a spanner in the works of me getting to hear a good rant, or give one for that matter.
What I visited after the Albert Memorial was the Serpentine Gallery. A small somewhere in the middle of Hyde Park, its main attraction was its admission price; free. Maybe its because of my disinterest in modern art that I failed to get any real enjoyment out of it. I, like a lot of people I just don’t see the point of many modern pieces, perhaps because often enough there is none. Some don’t seem like they require a lot of time or effort to make. A bulbous mound of unfired clay is neither particularly impressive in its design, or is it anyway aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, miniature red floruescent lights curled around badly sculpted pieces of clay don’t really add up to too much either. Lastly, I just don’t think there’s that much need for seemingly meaningless phallus shapes. Maybe there was one real gem in that place and its not something that ever could leave the gallery. A bronze work piece with a bronze saw embedded into it was great did have a kind of cool factor to it.
Otherwise calling that place an art gallery was a bit of a stretch of the imagination. Thats perhaps why its called the Serpentine gallery; because of the deception involved. The Large bookshop that also had a host of computers advertising a badly designed online game called Second Life would be a little bit better. What was even more scandalous was the prices in that bookshop. A scalpel used by some random artist who’s name wasn’t recognized by me or my History of Art studying mother, £100. Can this artistic blade cut through diamond? Does it improve your ability to sculpt by 50%?
Next to it was a set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers going for £55. What were special about them? One had heroin written on it and the other had cocaine written on it. Now I’m sorry, but unless these condiment dispensers are filled with the class A substances specified on them, I don’t get it. For that amount of money, I want to be able to skag up my steak and sprinkle my chips a lick of coke and vinegar.
By that point, the hangover had me condemning London as a town made for wankers. I had texted a friend asking for his advice on what to with my parents to do in the capital that wasn’t going to have me scraping out my eyes with a rusty spoon. The answer lay in a town called Camden.
I loved it. The place had that bohemian feel that made Chrstiania such an interesting place in Copenhagen albeit with about 240% more character destroying consumerism. Not to sound like a capitalist hating pussy liberal but one has to admit, when money is involved in something, it can destroy the easy going alternative lifestyle vibe that gets one excited. Of course the whole point of the place is that by its name and nature, Camden Town is a town and what makes it interesting is the various shops and cafés. Given some time on my own I probably would have left the place with a nice new shiny bong and a crystal catching grinder, but I didn’t want to have to explain to my Dad what the purposes of these counter-cultural creations were designed for. That being said, those multiple shops with the overly large collections get a bit tacky after a while. As do those tourist catering shops with the slogos of “My sister went to London and all she brought me was this lousy t-shirts. Almost every big city in the world has got these sorts of places. Barcelona is no different in this aspect and you’d expect it out of them; people come to Barcelona and London for touristy purposes - sightseeing, that sort of thing. It just means you’re slightly more unlikely to get a real London experience, although if that involves getting stabbed on some dodgy council estate, I’ll stick to seeing art museums and parks.
After seeing Camden town we went back to the hotel. The hotel was pretty standard, kind of like a travel lodge minus half a star for everything being noisy and the bed not being as comfortable as it could have. What made it worse was that whenever I checked into my room, some self absorbed bastard before me had left on the radiator for what must have been hours meaning it was nothing short of roasting. To a hung over body it was like being twatted with a radiator. I got some kip and went and got myself a mixed shwarma from a Lebanese restaurant called Beiti whilst my parents were off having a fish and chip dinner in some pub they didn’t really rate.
The next day I managed to get my lazy, still slightly hung-over ass up in time for a free 9 am breakfast. Croissant, toast and a bowl of cereal that I can only describe as muesakes. Being a connoisseur of cereal, I have a long tradition of mixing different types of cereal in my quest to find the greatest combination. Muesli and cornflakes isn’t a bad mix. Not quite as good as banana and pear yoghurt mixed with chocolate chip muesli, but good none the less.
Anyway, the fact I had a hang over two days after the drinking session is a sign of how bad it has got ladies and gentlemen, at the age of 22 I’m about ready to hang up my drinking boots. Not only are hangovers life ruining on the day after session (I mean questioning my obligation to be on this planet) but they are somewhat detrimental the day after that.
I’m going to interrupt this post to say that I’ve just been stung. Four weeks ago when I was booking the rail ticket from London to Lancaster, it was priced at £30. I had to go back a few steps to add my rail card and in the space of time it had almost doubled in price. Adding my railcard brought it down to £39.90. I had booked it for 15:25 because I thought that’s when I was going to end up leaving London. Having to check out of my room earlier and wanting to avoid hanging around London with my baggage in tow meant that I decided to hop on an earlier train. I just got ticket checked and then for my reservation and the smarmy little prick of a ticket checker added on £7.60. So in total for one rail journey I’ve paid £47.50. For a fucking train ride?! Apparently it can cost up to £250 for that ride. I could have a full scale hydroponics grow operation for that!
I could get a fucking return flight to the middle of Europe and back, taxes included for that. British rail charges are amongst the highest in the world and it needs to stop. Somebody needs to punch the minister of transport in the mouth until he wakes the fuck up and realizes we’re sick of this shit. I’m going to lie to every ticket checker I ever meet on a British train until they do. There’s probably some law limiting our free speech that suggests we can’t encourage unlawful behaviour, but hell, I suggest you do the same. Do what a friend of my does and hide in the toilet whenever ticket collection comes around.
Anyway, back to the story about London. That day my Mum, my Dad and I went and visited the Imperial War Museum. If you’re as big a geek as me, you’ll be amazed - even by the two guns outside of the museum, once belonging to some old British warships. Inside the place is filled with tanks, artillery pieces, planes, bits of submarines, weapons, armour and just general artefacts collected from the beginning of the First World War. You could almost spend a day on each of the floors, examining everything from holocaust inspired art to the above mentioned -stuff-. The amount of information at hand does just cause a brain overload.
After that, we stopped by a Spanish themed pub who’s name escapes me. One thing you have to admit about London is it has variety. Kaiser Wilhelm II was so cocky about winning the First World War that he declared “Lunch in Paris, St. Petersburg for dinner”. If you’re in London that’s not impossible, you could go through every regional cuisine. It’s probably the reason why The Times tends to write so many guides on where to go for a good meal in London, especially on a budget. Having all the money could get you whatever you want. In Lancaster I can comfortably live off £80 a week. In London I’d probably have to stop myself from spending that in a day. Hell, probably even in an hour.
After that we went off to the National Gallery to see the Picasso exhibition, which is only £6 with a student card. Not that I was paying, I am all too well catered for by my very loving parents. It was interesting, but in the time that we were waiting to get in, we checked out the classical paintings upstairs. Maybe this is just another expression of my distaste of modern art, but I was far more impressed with the vivid colours of Turner and Rembradt than I was with the loopy natured cubism of Pabs. I’d quite happily trip my balls off in those halls, just taking in the beauty and brilliance for hours. I felt I learned a few things anyway, I’d trade one of those audio things for the conversation of my madre any day. Aren’t I a sweet, culture loving boy.
Once we were through with that, we went outside to enjoy the sunshine and watch some Dutch bands playing. There was some Holland Festival outside of the museum, maybe as some sort of drive to encourage tourism. Stalls were set up selling Heiniken, pancakes, waffles, and tulips. I was wondering where all the coffee shops and bicycles were though. Surely that’s the whole point of going to Holland?!
We returned back to the hotel for a brief break. During that time, I put on the new Prodigy album on my iPod full blast and watched some David Attenborough documentary about African Wildlife. Take me the Hospital, Otter vs. Crocodile remix. Immense. Somehow I managed to collapse asleep for an hour after that. A knock on my door awoke me to get me up and go for the reason that we were in London in the first place - Van Morisson’s Astral Weeks tour. Father is in avid fan of Van the Grumpy Old Man. If he’s in any room in the house that has a CD player or L.P. for more than five minutes he’ll probably stick on some Van. There are a few other things that he listens to but if he had an iTunes, 85% of his top 25 list would be Van. Quite sad, I know, but this is the middle aged Northern Irish man. Go to any chippy on a Saturday night and you’ll probably have some drunken forty seven year old give you his rendition of Brown Eyed Girl. I can almost guarantee it.
Anyway, the concert was in the Royal Albert Hall of all places, we had a balcony seat, equipped with its own little bar to pour the drinks you’d purchased downstairs. A couple of glasses of red wine in me and I was enjoying it almost as much as he was. A lot of Van’s music has a mellow bluesy feel to it, meaning I sort of go off and day dream in true pothead fashion. With a bit of vino rogue in me I’m positively bouncing to the rhythm of Baby Please Don’t Go and Moon dance. Not quite as much as the guy from Bangor in the booth beside me who had seen Northern Ireland’s visually un-impaired Ray Charles 35 times and was convinced this was the best performance the old cunt had ever belted out. What amused me about this was that a couple in the booth on the other side of them offered them a bottle of red wine to not be so noisy after the interval. To which the man replied “I’ll take your wine, but it’ll be no guarantee I’ll be any quieter!” Once again, that is typical Northern Irish behaviour. Don’t expect any better. Despite the fact you’re in one of the most renowned musical venues in the world, we’ll still belt out
G
L
O
R
I
A
G-L-O-R-I-A, GLORRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAA! G-L-O-R-I-A, GLORRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIAAAA!
After that we returned for late meal in Beiti again, which I’ll have to find the website for as I firmly recommend it, for anything from a take out kebab to an actual meal. My parents had their reservations but the quality food and amiable service soon put a stop to those.
I think I was destined to be in London that weekend because on both nights before I went to sleep I got to see two films that I’d seen the start of but never the end, almost picking up where they left off. Inside I’m Dancing on Friday, Lord of War on Saturday. I slept, woke and had the same jam covered breakfast as I had the day before, packed and after a mocha chino from Bella Italia, got on this train. Giving my parents a few hugs before doing so.
If you’ve managed to stick with me this whole time well done. What was meant to be a guide was pretty much a diary entry. If its been entertaining, then I’m more than happy.
If I had taken pictures, I’d post them and give you a Where’s Wally index. Most of you are unlikely to have picked up a Where’s Wally book in years, although I’m sure you still remember the banging theme tune of its animated representation. However, if you think back there was always an index of crazy things to look for on each of the different pages if you got bored of just looking for the stripy jumper wearing nerd. If my life had one of those index, it would probably give you pictures of evil grey squirrels, the view on the train ride to Lancaster, noisy Northern Irish people, the seemingly endless supply of beautiful women in London (there must be at least two gorgeous girls on every tube carriage, I remember a girl making eye contact with one over the tube tracks, realizing we’d never meet again and romantically imagining our live together in my underground lair), a barbar shop trio in Hyde Park, chalk graffiti by artistic buskers at Camden lock and the expression on my face when it finally clicked with me that London is actually pretty fucking cool.
Glad to be back in Lancs though.
Ratings
Beiti ****
Check that tasty Lebanese shit out! Even my parents reservations soon went away once they got food put in front of them and it was also the best of a bad situation; its hard to get fed after eleven unless one wants to lower themselves to an AIDs infested cheeseburger. Turned out all the better.
Imperial War Museum ****
For any true geek you’ve got go to see it, even just to marvel at the collection of old stuff and learn a few quotes from the Kaiser along the way.
National Art Gallery *****
Pablo Picasso was still a ridiculously cool and talented artist that wanted to break boundaries even if his stuff isn’t as pretty as Turner’s classical artwork of the 18th (?) century.
Serpentine Gallery **
Avoid if you can unless you really want some books on art or want to test out Second Life by flying around a room of bad, linear graphics.
Apparently though, the exhibitions change every so often so I might have just been unlucky.
Van Morison’s Astral Weeks Live ****
I’d probably say I still would go to an Easy Star All Stars gig, but the old man still has it after all these years. Talented fucker can play the sax, guitar, piano, harmonica and sing and that’s just from what he was whipping out on stage. As long as he’s not grumpy he can put on a show.
Hangover *
Buhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Tube rides and general London ignorance *
Not to make sweeping statements, but people in London can be self serving pricks that don’t see people and only see routes through them, especially when involved in the tube. The underground is busy for sure, but it shouldn’t allow for ignorance. Same as any other town as well, when you see some 24 year old women dressed like a fourteen year old girl listening to metal at full blast with no sound cancelling headphones on public transport you really feel like having a go. Best not bother too much really.
Overall weekend in London rating *****
I might have to write a version of this post with the swearing and drug references edited out so my parents can know I’m thankful for the things they bring me to and the times that we have. The only way I could have made this better is if some London savvy friend of mine had taken me out to a cool club or bar, one that didn’t require me to get blind drunk just to enjoy.
Thanks again to anybody that read, shoot me any questions and comments the usual way.
Much love.
X
CC.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Prepare for a rant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7412852.stm
If you haven’t heard, a bunch of French fishermen are being wankers. They’re complaining about EU quotas being put on the amount of fish that they’re allowed to catch.
Do these people not realize that these quotas are set for a reason? Do they think that the EU are sitting around in their assemblies having conversations like:
“What do you want to do today?”
“I dunno, fuck with the happiness of French fishermen?”
“Brilliant! Get to the quotas Barry!”
They’re there for a reason; so as to prevent over fishing, so as to prevent certain types of fish reaching borderline endangered species. Arguably they’re there to protect the very industry that these dumb asses are worried about losing.
I’m not saying I’d want to be in their shoes, but their concerns are ridiculous. If they love their job so much why don’t they go fishing elsewhere. The money one can earn from fishing in Alaskan waters is ridiculous and probably on the same level of danger. If they try and pull the “It’s family tradition to be a fisherman,” story they can piss right off. It’s a shitty argument, if someone said “Oh my father was a paedophile, I’m going to bugger small children as well” you wouldn’t feel bad for them. Quite the opposite in fact.
Alright that’s a bit of a tangent as one is clearly detrimental to society and comes from psychological defects, some perhaps genetic and some social but you get my point.
I just don’t see how these fishermen can have the gall to blockade ports, preventing people from getting them from where they want to go. You don’t see English fishermen creating widespread disarray over the fact the French fishing in waters accepted to be British. On top of that we’ve all got it bad at the minute with the credit crunch, inflation and the general state of affairs in the economy. Being a third year student I’m as worried about getting a halfway decent job after my degree as the next guy, but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna start interfering in the running of other people’s lives for the sake of a few fish.
Maybe it’s a case of one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist but I dunno, I still think these guys should accept the government’s promises and stop getting in the way of progress.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7412852.stm
If you haven’t heard, a bunch of French fishermen are being wankers. They’re complaining about EU quotas being put on the amount of fish that they’re allowed to catch.
Do these people not realize that these quotas are set for a reason? Do they think that the EU are sitting around in their assemblies having conversations like:
“What do you want to do today?”
“I dunno, fuck with the happiness of French fishermen?”
“Brilliant! Get to the quotas Barry!”
They’re there for a reason; so as to prevent over fishing, so as to prevent certain types of fish reaching borderline endangered species. Arguably they’re there to protect the very industry that these dumb asses are worried about losing.
I’m not saying I’d want to be in their shoes, but their concerns are ridiculous. If they love their job so much why don’t they go fishing elsewhere. The money one can earn from fishing in Alaskan waters is ridiculous and probably on the same level of danger. If they try and pull the “It’s family tradition to be a fisherman,” story they can piss right off. It’s a shitty argument, if someone said “Oh my father was a paedophile, I’m going to bugger small children as well” you wouldn’t feel bad for them. Quite the opposite in fact.
Alright that’s a bit of a tangent as one is clearly detrimental to society and comes from psychological defects, some perhaps genetic and some social but you get my point.
I just don’t see how these fishermen can have the gall to blockade ports, preventing people from getting them from where they want to go. You don’t see English fishermen creating widespread disarray over the fact the French fishing in waters accepted to be British. On top of that we’ve all got it bad at the minute with the credit crunch, inflation and the general state of affairs in the economy. Being a third year student I’m as worried about getting a halfway decent job after my degree as the next guy, but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna start interfering in the running of other people’s lives for the sake of a few fish.
Maybe it’s a case of one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist but I dunno, I still think these guys should accept the government’s promises and stop getting in the way of progress.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Back when I started this blog during my school days, I used to have a habit of posting a 'website of the day', along with a 'song of the day'. Back then I was an even bigger nerd than I am now, coming home at four o’clock for an avid session of button bashing on the Nintendo Gamecube and a post-school shank over Sabrina the Teenage Witch or even a Countdown wank. I can attest that anyone who hasn’t had masturbated over the number crunching minx that is Carol Vorderman simply hasn’t lived. The beautiful veteran mathematician certainly gave me something to look forward to on a cold winter’s afternoon. Since this is a standard entry to the blog and not a special edition where I theorize ways to improve the world or write letters to evil corporations sponsoring acts of terrorism such as ringing you every three minutes demanding you sign up to their broadband, I shall make with the goods:
Website of the day: www.cracked.com
This website is a humorous bunch of articles about all sorts of things. It particularly has the best lists of things you’ve ever seen. Channel 4 might have thought it cornered the market with shows such as 'Top 50 Annoying Songs' or 'Top 10 Air Guitar Classics' but in comparison to Cracked’s 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy But Won’t, they don’t have shit. Some of these are amusing, some are damn near close to life changing..
Song of the Day: 'Bust-a-move' - Infected Mushroom
This is song lasts about eight minutes, but builds up subtly, crescendo-ing into a masterpiece. I was blaring this at full volume from my room back home and my Mum came in and said 'Who is this?' At this point, I thought she was going to give me an old person's 'It's awful', I told her who it was and she said 'I should get some of this, it's very good'. Apparently she could detect the musicality of it. Amazing.
Game of the Moment: Displaying my nerdiness in all its colours, I give you 'Mafia Wars'
Yes, this is a pointless text based game on face book, but it gives me something to do on top of checking my narcissistic social networking websites and spam-filled e-mail accounts whenever I wake up and before I go to bed. If it isn’t your cup of tea, then try face book poker. I was bent on making top five out of my friend in number of chips, but unfortunately I got a bit reckless with my betting, chasing non-existant flushes and banking on low pairs, ended up with almost nothing to my name. I often become rude and impulsive playing, insulting other players with lowest common denominator insults. My play habits became wild and immature. If anyone’s feeling really frisky with their nerdiness though I recommend playing a pen and paper based roleplaying game. To pass a dreary Monday afternoon four of us picked up our strange shaped dice and began rolling our way through the streets of Mos Eisely in a Star Wars based game. Even one friend who was convinced he wouldn’t enjoy it loved every second of it as we added a mix of humour, intelligence and problem solving into the fold. And people wonder why I don’t have a girlfriend..
Readers do beware: The following will contain a few rants about my life, they are written in hope that you can relate to them, or understand where I am coming from. I do ponder if I ever become whiney, self-absorbed. Those that know me should make no heisitation to remind me when I do this. My writing style can only ever grow better from good critique.
So I want to know what the ideal way to spend an Easter holiday is. This time last year, I was in the mythical town of Copenhagen. The ten days I had been home involved scaring my mum silly (she was for ringing hospitals miles away from where I live) after not returning from a hardcore drugs rave until six in the evening, dating a really good looking blonde girl who I’d met on said drugs rave and schooling my Belfast friends at getting high (we went through a period of competing at who could smoke the most weed, like that‘s not childish!). This holiday is rather dreary in comparison.
I left Lancaster in order to seek employment and managed to score a couple of shifts here and there doing temp jobs, washing pots and chopping sticks of brocolli. Ideally I’d have a few more shifts, but I suppose it’s just a symptom of this economic climate. Work isn’t steady for anyone in this recession era, just like everyone else we hear about the disruption caused by layoffs and the discontent brought in by the whole thing. Of course, the usual outlets of work are closed to me if I am to use honesty and confess that I am a student with aims to return to University once my holiday is over. On top of this, I don’t really want to get a fatigue inducing 9-5 job which will only cause stress and an enforced rigidness during the time I’m home. I’d rather spend the time talking of nonsense with my mum, attempting to study and just enjoying the nice weather. On top of that, I should be utilizing my time to understand the interwar economy of Britain for part of my course. Doing so might actually explain the aforementioned economic crisis of today. Instead I’m getting drunk on Friday nights and dancing round the streets at 2 am by myself listening to psytrance blaring on my iPod and going to the park the following day to savour the fresh air and the passable levels of sunshine.
It is a strange life that I’m leading at the minute, but I think it’s a sign of how Belfast has gone. Drinking in clubs seem to exist only from the hours of 11-1. By 2 all clubs are shut. Those that stay open either do so illegally, are expensive or are so far out of the way that they are irrelevant for my needs. When I have been in clubs they just haven’t been the same either. Girls just don’t seem interested any more. Have I grown less charming or more ugly since the last time I was home. I’d like to think not. What I feel has happened is that girls have grown more snooty, more close minded just like the rest of the UK.
As this becomes the case, the interesting exciting girls tend to stand out from the crowd. This has its pros and cons, whenever I meet an easy going, open minded girl, I two things:
A) 'This girl is awesome, great craic and fun to be around. I’m enjoying myself'
B) Then comes the confidence sapping - 'She’s lots of other guys interested, is she interested in me or just being herself. Is she flirting with me deliberately or just being friendly, or worse still is she being attention seeking?'
In part to some of those reasons, Belfast to a certain degree has lost its charm to me. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my home, friends and family. I can quite happily return to a good meal and good conversation with the elders. I mean, I might even go to church next week so I can enjoy the community of happy Christians. Perhaps part of me does so in the knowledge I am keeping the ‘rents happy, or that I love the sound of my own voice when singing (its true), or even a chance to imagine fornicating with one of the beautiful girls in another row. But if the Abrahamic God is real, maybe he can just take comfort in that I am there and I’m sort of making time for Jesus whilst waiting to go back to Zen meditation classes.
However due to the repressive drinking hours and lack of available, attractive women, on top of limited access to magical plants, I’m a little disenchanted with what I have here. I know I should be constructive with the lack of debauchery by attempting to learn a musical instrument, write more, study more and do some exercise but as I mentioned before what I should be doing and what I end up doing are often very different. I’m a born procrastinator and to justify my lack of doing things, I’ll say I’m a thinker not a do-er. With so much disposable entertainment at our fingertips, its sometimes quite difficult to motivate ourselves to do things. Such is one of the curses of modern society..
Despite failing to get all this done though, I cracked it on the pudding front and I should tell you about is a very special recipe that I invented when I was… sober.
Conor’s Hunger Ender
For this you will need:
Utensils: One bowl, one desert spoon
Ingredients: One banana, two hobnobs, 1 tbsp honey and some double cream
Method: Chop banana, mash up the hobnobs, drizzle honey and cream over. Mash to desired texture.
Enjoy. Next week, I’ll spit out some film reviews and a guide to mental disorders.
P.S., I might have to start a blog ring for the Lancaster crew. If you hadn’t done so already, check out:
Jewface’s www.jewbao.blogspot.com
And
KB’s http://kb-log-acollectionofcerebralfaeces.blogspot.com/?zx=272e9c8357e7a3b
Website of the day: www.cracked.com
This website is a humorous bunch of articles about all sorts of things. It particularly has the best lists of things you’ve ever seen. Channel 4 might have thought it cornered the market with shows such as 'Top 50 Annoying Songs' or 'Top 10 Air Guitar Classics' but in comparison to Cracked’s 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy But Won’t, they don’t have shit. Some of these are amusing, some are damn near close to life changing..
Song of the Day: 'Bust-a-move' - Infected Mushroom
This is song lasts about eight minutes, but builds up subtly, crescendo-ing into a masterpiece. I was blaring this at full volume from my room back home and my Mum came in and said 'Who is this?' At this point, I thought she was going to give me an old person's 'It's awful', I told her who it was and she said 'I should get some of this, it's very good'. Apparently she could detect the musicality of it. Amazing.
Game of the Moment: Displaying my nerdiness in all its colours, I give you 'Mafia Wars'
Yes, this is a pointless text based game on face book, but it gives me something to do on top of checking my narcissistic social networking websites and spam-filled e-mail accounts whenever I wake up and before I go to bed. If it isn’t your cup of tea, then try face book poker. I was bent on making top five out of my friend in number of chips, but unfortunately I got a bit reckless with my betting, chasing non-existant flushes and banking on low pairs, ended up with almost nothing to my name. I often become rude and impulsive playing, insulting other players with lowest common denominator insults. My play habits became wild and immature. If anyone’s feeling really frisky with their nerdiness though I recommend playing a pen and paper based roleplaying game. To pass a dreary Monday afternoon four of us picked up our strange shaped dice and began rolling our way through the streets of Mos Eisely in a Star Wars based game. Even one friend who was convinced he wouldn’t enjoy it loved every second of it as we added a mix of humour, intelligence and problem solving into the fold. And people wonder why I don’t have a girlfriend..
Readers do beware: The following will contain a few rants about my life, they are written in hope that you can relate to them, or understand where I am coming from. I do ponder if I ever become whiney, self-absorbed. Those that know me should make no heisitation to remind me when I do this. My writing style can only ever grow better from good critique.
So I want to know what the ideal way to spend an Easter holiday is. This time last year, I was in the mythical town of Copenhagen. The ten days I had been home involved scaring my mum silly (she was for ringing hospitals miles away from where I live) after not returning from a hardcore drugs rave until six in the evening, dating a really good looking blonde girl who I’d met on said drugs rave and schooling my Belfast friends at getting high (we went through a period of competing at who could smoke the most weed, like that‘s not childish!). This holiday is rather dreary in comparison.
I left Lancaster in order to seek employment and managed to score a couple of shifts here and there doing temp jobs, washing pots and chopping sticks of brocolli. Ideally I’d have a few more shifts, but I suppose it’s just a symptom of this economic climate. Work isn’t steady for anyone in this recession era, just like everyone else we hear about the disruption caused by layoffs and the discontent brought in by the whole thing. Of course, the usual outlets of work are closed to me if I am to use honesty and confess that I am a student with aims to return to University once my holiday is over. On top of this, I don’t really want to get a fatigue inducing 9-5 job which will only cause stress and an enforced rigidness during the time I’m home. I’d rather spend the time talking of nonsense with my mum, attempting to study and just enjoying the nice weather. On top of that, I should be utilizing my time to understand the interwar economy of Britain for part of my course. Doing so might actually explain the aforementioned economic crisis of today. Instead I’m getting drunk on Friday nights and dancing round the streets at 2 am by myself listening to psytrance blaring on my iPod and going to the park the following day to savour the fresh air and the passable levels of sunshine.
It is a strange life that I’m leading at the minute, but I think it’s a sign of how Belfast has gone. Drinking in clubs seem to exist only from the hours of 11-1. By 2 all clubs are shut. Those that stay open either do so illegally, are expensive or are so far out of the way that they are irrelevant for my needs. When I have been in clubs they just haven’t been the same either. Girls just don’t seem interested any more. Have I grown less charming or more ugly since the last time I was home. I’d like to think not. What I feel has happened is that girls have grown more snooty, more close minded just like the rest of the UK.
As this becomes the case, the interesting exciting girls tend to stand out from the crowd. This has its pros and cons, whenever I meet an easy going, open minded girl, I two things:
A) 'This girl is awesome, great craic and fun to be around. I’m enjoying myself'
B) Then comes the confidence sapping - 'She’s lots of other guys interested, is she interested in me or just being herself. Is she flirting with me deliberately or just being friendly, or worse still is she being attention seeking?'
In part to some of those reasons, Belfast to a certain degree has lost its charm to me. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my home, friends and family. I can quite happily return to a good meal and good conversation with the elders. I mean, I might even go to church next week so I can enjoy the community of happy Christians. Perhaps part of me does so in the knowledge I am keeping the ‘rents happy, or that I love the sound of my own voice when singing (its true), or even a chance to imagine fornicating with one of the beautiful girls in another row. But if the Abrahamic God is real, maybe he can just take comfort in that I am there and I’m sort of making time for Jesus whilst waiting to go back to Zen meditation classes.
However due to the repressive drinking hours and lack of available, attractive women, on top of limited access to magical plants, I’m a little disenchanted with what I have here. I know I should be constructive with the lack of debauchery by attempting to learn a musical instrument, write more, study more and do some exercise but as I mentioned before what I should be doing and what I end up doing are often very different. I’m a born procrastinator and to justify my lack of doing things, I’ll say I’m a thinker not a do-er. With so much disposable entertainment at our fingertips, its sometimes quite difficult to motivate ourselves to do things. Such is one of the curses of modern society..
Despite failing to get all this done though, I cracked it on the pudding front and I should tell you about is a very special recipe that I invented when I was… sober.
Conor’s Hunger Ender
For this you will need:
Utensils: One bowl, one desert spoon
Ingredients: One banana, two hobnobs, 1 tbsp honey and some double cream
Method: Chop banana, mash up the hobnobs, drizzle honey and cream over. Mash to desired texture.
Enjoy. Next week, I’ll spit out some film reviews and a guide to mental disorders.
P.S., I might have to start a blog ring for the Lancaster crew. If you hadn’t done so already, check out:
Jewface’s www.jewbao.blogspot.com
And
KB’s http://kb-log-acollectionofcerebralfaeces.blogspot.com/?zx=272e9c8357e7a3b
Thursday, March 26, 2009
As most of you who read this know, I go to Lancaster University. Lancaster is a small town in North West England, an hour away from Manchester and about an hour and a half away from Liverpool. It’s generally pretty quiet, being that its economy seems mostly based on students and old people. That’s not to say that there’s no families around, there are a few. It’s just that you can’t go into any shop without having to wait for old women to count their pennies or for students to decide how they’re going to destroy their overdraft.
There’s not really a lot to do most of the time, though its location lends itself well to getting trains out to surrounding towns and the countryside. One could feasibly go to the lake district for a nice little dander any day with half decent weather. That or head to Morecombe for some cockle picking if you’re feeling suicidal. I don’t mean to rinse Lancaster that bad because in all honesty I’ve had a great three years. Made some great friends, had some brilliant nights out and I’ve definitely had one toke over the line old friend. This is something I’ve become renowned for.
You can’t go to a small English university as loud as I am, with a thick but charming Northern Irish accent, a pair of pretty blue eyes and get wasted on a regular basis without gaining some kind of reputation. It’s like being the lad about town. In fact, a couple of years ago when I was heavier in both fat and muscle mass, there was little danger of getting into a fight. In my college bar at the height of business there was a bit of confusion about who was in the queue. Some guy was giving me jip and in turn, aided and abetted by alcohol my arrogance was spilling over into the realms of “Go fuck yourself, I own this bar”. Whilst he was getting scrappy and I was for going outside and punt kicking him through a glass window, his friend was grabbing him and going “Leave him dude, it’s not worth it. He’s a lot bigger than you and he’s Irish”. That to me was a victory. I was such a prick back then.
Anyway, I decided last night I would make a guide to the University on the blog. Just.. Not yet. I want to do one on the boat or plane on the way home from graduation. I want to be equipped with every experience before I tell people whether or not to come here for sure. What I do want to do is make a guide for those already at Lancaster and it’s not something I can do in one shot. I’m sure given a couple of days I could have a God damn dissertation written about the town and university. What I’m going to do now is make a comparison between town and campus. Here are six things I don’t miss about campus:
1) Porters - If anyone doesn’t know what a porter does, it’s basically the voice of authority for each college. Not the governor or principle of it, more like the policeman. These guys during the day walk around to check everything is in order or give you the parcels you were looking for. This is handy enough as they’re always there to sign for your package and there’s no where else to get mail.
At night, they can turn from day-time heroes to overzealous demanders of early bed times. That is to say that the very nature of their job is often a hinderance to students. No student ever wants to be told that they need to stop their party at 11 pm because other people might be trying to sleep. I understand that the noise needs to be turned down if people complain, but all too often I’ve been either fined, or told to go to bed by a balding middle age man who was never a student in his life.
In honesty there are cool ones, but its only in relative to the shit job they have to do. Being told to keep the noise down isn’t so bad when they ignore the fact you could be skinning up a fatty (hey, that happened once!) In town you have a lot more freedom, provided your neighbour doesn’t have a family and a job, you can get away with a fair bit of noise. In the case of the 12 Blade Street crew, we now have to keep our noise to a minimum until somebody buys the house from this guy. He is in fact a dick who writes far too many letters for noise we haven’t made in about a month. Trying to get the council involved is just not cool though.
2) Being told to tidy up the mess - In Pendle college, our entire flat got a series of money taking threats from the head of housing. This was all about the mess in hallways and in the kitchen that was preventing the cleaners from doing their work.
For a start, the only thing cleaners ever did was wipe down surfaces and mop the floor when there was already stuff on the floor. Rather than sweep up the mess, they just made a floor dirty by rubbing bits of meat into the ground with a mop. Then when they couldn’t do that, there were fines threatened of £80.
In town, you don’t have to deal with that sort of bullshit about hygene. You’re free to risk getting food poisoning from the stack of dirty plates you’ve accumulated in every room. When you have a dissertation to write, you kind of get used to having a mess in every room. I could not deal with false figures of authority telling me to clean up my mess or face a fine. When you’re sharing a house with friends, you can share the mess, not have to worry about it affecting people that should have no concern in your life.
3) Fire alarms - Oh how I grew to loath the fire alarms. In houses, I can deal with smoke detectors that whinge until you fan the smoke out of its way, but fire alarms that get out around a hundred people from their rooms at 3 am because the extractor fan doesn’t work and some cunt left the grill pan in the oven. Similarly in town if one wanted to go back to bed after a 3 hour seminar on a Wednesday morning, they could do so without being rudely awaked by a fire alarm they know works fine, but feel the need to test for four hours.
4) Poo days - This is the name given to those fine Spring and Summer days where some denizen of society decided to leave a manhole open, or I don’t know.. Send a dozen laxative dosed cows to take a dump all over South West campus. Whatever it is, it smells like the aborted foetuses of the queen of shit. Its like Bastard man unleashed his peduran in the middle of Pendle quad. Smells like bacon cooked in piss..
5) UPP - When I signed up to go to Copenhagen, I was under the naïve belief that the university would take care of my housing contract and for the third term, cancel my contract or at least let me off my rent. For months, I was worrying myself silly over the thought of being financially fucked in the middle of a Scandanavian country because I would have to pay the rent for a room I wasn’t going to be using. Luckily I ended up paying only £220 because some random goth girl needed the room for the guts of the third term. This scandalous manuveour was performed by the people that look after the halls of residences, not the university. UPP as you will learn from whenever they wake you up on a post-Carleton Thursday morning to change some random bit of shower head or light are a literal shower of bastards. I don’t mind the guys that fix things up, but the people at the administrators are absolutely useless whenever it comes to looking after the students. So much so that they should change the company name to Unidentified Profiteering Pricks.
I still lost my deposit despite the room being fairly good nick (okay, it needed a damn good clean but that’s about it) because they’re absolute twats. /Rant
6) College spirit - Okay, I’m going to qualify this. There’s a lot to love about college life. I love the social scenes that go with houses and halls on campus. I go down to Manchester Metropolitan to catch up with a friend every now and then and it’s just not the same. He’s sort of friends with his flatmates, but not like I was with mine, not even how I was with my other housemates. It’s not that he’s more socially inept from me, in fact probably the opposite, it’s just at Lancaster you’re not afraid to show your personality and we all have this feeling of being in it together. At other universities, they stick to their anonymity, finding it a lot more difficult to develop a good friend base. Part of this is the closeness of the college bars to halls, the competitions and an involvement in things.
Anyway, what I don’t miss is being awake at 3 am in the morning and some cunt’s still yelling “I’M PENDLE TILL I DIE!”. Mate, it’s Spring term, it’s about time you shagged your way around the different colleges to the point you shouldn’t be able to give any less of a shit. I’ll be honest, in the first week, I was the biggest college loving head case around. I caught on quick enough that it was a metric pile of balls and was neither funny or amusing unless you have the personality of a dead catfish.
However for every Conor Charlton there’s a twat who tries to start a fight outside of some club because he thinks his college pool team is harder than ours. Christ sake, leave me alone I’m trying to enjoy my drugs without you killing my buzz. Bowland pricks. I had to shake my head at everyone’s favourite balding 34 year old Lonsdale enthusiast as he was chanting his college nonsense in Holland. Bad times Skanky.
That’s about it for now. I feel you are now equipped with the relevant information to realize that there’s a load of shite you have to deal with on campus that you could do without. On the upside to campus, there’s the beautiful convenience of everything, the social life and well the proximity to Spar - Obviously as it is easier to obtain Spar Baguettes if you are on campus. This doesn’t need explaining, I’m not going to write another 500 words about how damn good the humble Spar Baguette is. Don’t be ridiculous, just check it out on face book - Temple of the Spar Baguette
Now I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but having your own house is great, try it some time.
There’s not really a lot to do most of the time, though its location lends itself well to getting trains out to surrounding towns and the countryside. One could feasibly go to the lake district for a nice little dander any day with half decent weather. That or head to Morecombe for some cockle picking if you’re feeling suicidal. I don’t mean to rinse Lancaster that bad because in all honesty I’ve had a great three years. Made some great friends, had some brilliant nights out and I’ve definitely had one toke over the line old friend. This is something I’ve become renowned for.
You can’t go to a small English university as loud as I am, with a thick but charming Northern Irish accent, a pair of pretty blue eyes and get wasted on a regular basis without gaining some kind of reputation. It’s like being the lad about town. In fact, a couple of years ago when I was heavier in both fat and muscle mass, there was little danger of getting into a fight. In my college bar at the height of business there was a bit of confusion about who was in the queue. Some guy was giving me jip and in turn, aided and abetted by alcohol my arrogance was spilling over into the realms of “Go fuck yourself, I own this bar”. Whilst he was getting scrappy and I was for going outside and punt kicking him through a glass window, his friend was grabbing him and going “Leave him dude, it’s not worth it. He’s a lot bigger than you and he’s Irish”. That to me was a victory. I was such a prick back then.
Anyway, I decided last night I would make a guide to the University on the blog. Just.. Not yet. I want to do one on the boat or plane on the way home from graduation. I want to be equipped with every experience before I tell people whether or not to come here for sure. What I do want to do is make a guide for those already at Lancaster and it’s not something I can do in one shot. I’m sure given a couple of days I could have a God damn dissertation written about the town and university. What I’m going to do now is make a comparison between town and campus. Here are six things I don’t miss about campus:
1) Porters - If anyone doesn’t know what a porter does, it’s basically the voice of authority for each college. Not the governor or principle of it, more like the policeman. These guys during the day walk around to check everything is in order or give you the parcels you were looking for. This is handy enough as they’re always there to sign for your package and there’s no where else to get mail.
At night, they can turn from day-time heroes to overzealous demanders of early bed times. That is to say that the very nature of their job is often a hinderance to students. No student ever wants to be told that they need to stop their party at 11 pm because other people might be trying to sleep. I understand that the noise needs to be turned down if people complain, but all too often I’ve been either fined, or told to go to bed by a balding middle age man who was never a student in his life.
In honesty there are cool ones, but its only in relative to the shit job they have to do. Being told to keep the noise down isn’t so bad when they ignore the fact you could be skinning up a fatty (hey, that happened once!) In town you have a lot more freedom, provided your neighbour doesn’t have a family and a job, you can get away with a fair bit of noise. In the case of the 12 Blade Street crew, we now have to keep our noise to a minimum until somebody buys the house from this guy. He is in fact a dick who writes far too many letters for noise we haven’t made in about a month. Trying to get the council involved is just not cool though.
2) Being told to tidy up the mess - In Pendle college, our entire flat got a series of money taking threats from the head of housing. This was all about the mess in hallways and in the kitchen that was preventing the cleaners from doing their work.
For a start, the only thing cleaners ever did was wipe down surfaces and mop the floor when there was already stuff on the floor. Rather than sweep up the mess, they just made a floor dirty by rubbing bits of meat into the ground with a mop. Then when they couldn’t do that, there were fines threatened of £80.
In town, you don’t have to deal with that sort of bullshit about hygene. You’re free to risk getting food poisoning from the stack of dirty plates you’ve accumulated in every room. When you have a dissertation to write, you kind of get used to having a mess in every room. I could not deal with false figures of authority telling me to clean up my mess or face a fine. When you’re sharing a house with friends, you can share the mess, not have to worry about it affecting people that should have no concern in your life.
3) Fire alarms - Oh how I grew to loath the fire alarms. In houses, I can deal with smoke detectors that whinge until you fan the smoke out of its way, but fire alarms that get out around a hundred people from their rooms at 3 am because the extractor fan doesn’t work and some cunt left the grill pan in the oven. Similarly in town if one wanted to go back to bed after a 3 hour seminar on a Wednesday morning, they could do so without being rudely awaked by a fire alarm they know works fine, but feel the need to test for four hours.
4) Poo days - This is the name given to those fine Spring and Summer days where some denizen of society decided to leave a manhole open, or I don’t know.. Send a dozen laxative dosed cows to take a dump all over South West campus. Whatever it is, it smells like the aborted foetuses of the queen of shit. Its like Bastard man unleashed his peduran in the middle of Pendle quad. Smells like bacon cooked in piss..
5) UPP - When I signed up to go to Copenhagen, I was under the naïve belief that the university would take care of my housing contract and for the third term, cancel my contract or at least let me off my rent. For months, I was worrying myself silly over the thought of being financially fucked in the middle of a Scandanavian country because I would have to pay the rent for a room I wasn’t going to be using. Luckily I ended up paying only £220 because some random goth girl needed the room for the guts of the third term. This scandalous manuveour was performed by the people that look after the halls of residences, not the university. UPP as you will learn from whenever they wake you up on a post-Carleton Thursday morning to change some random bit of shower head or light are a literal shower of bastards. I don’t mind the guys that fix things up, but the people at the administrators are absolutely useless whenever it comes to looking after the students. So much so that they should change the company name to Unidentified Profiteering Pricks.
I still lost my deposit despite the room being fairly good nick (okay, it needed a damn good clean but that’s about it) because they’re absolute twats. /Rant
6) College spirit - Okay, I’m going to qualify this. There’s a lot to love about college life. I love the social scenes that go with houses and halls on campus. I go down to Manchester Metropolitan to catch up with a friend every now and then and it’s just not the same. He’s sort of friends with his flatmates, but not like I was with mine, not even how I was with my other housemates. It’s not that he’s more socially inept from me, in fact probably the opposite, it’s just at Lancaster you’re not afraid to show your personality and we all have this feeling of being in it together. At other universities, they stick to their anonymity, finding it a lot more difficult to develop a good friend base. Part of this is the closeness of the college bars to halls, the competitions and an involvement in things.
Anyway, what I don’t miss is being awake at 3 am in the morning and some cunt’s still yelling “I’M PENDLE TILL I DIE!”. Mate, it’s Spring term, it’s about time you shagged your way around the different colleges to the point you shouldn’t be able to give any less of a shit. I’ll be honest, in the first week, I was the biggest college loving head case around. I caught on quick enough that it was a metric pile of balls and was neither funny or amusing unless you have the personality of a dead catfish.
However for every Conor Charlton there’s a twat who tries to start a fight outside of some club because he thinks his college pool team is harder than ours. Christ sake, leave me alone I’m trying to enjoy my drugs without you killing my buzz. Bowland pricks. I had to shake my head at everyone’s favourite balding 34 year old Lonsdale enthusiast as he was chanting his college nonsense in Holland. Bad times Skanky.
That’s about it for now. I feel you are now equipped with the relevant information to realize that there’s a load of shite you have to deal with on campus that you could do without. On the upside to campus, there’s the beautiful convenience of everything, the social life and well the proximity to Spar - Obviously as it is easier to obtain Spar Baguettes if you are on campus. This doesn’t need explaining, I’m not going to write another 500 words about how damn good the humble Spar Baguette is. Don’t be ridiculous, just check it out on face book - Temple of the Spar Baguette
Now I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but having your own house is great, try it some time.