Sunday 9 September 2007
She's The Star / I Take This Time
I've only got 17% battery left and I haven't the energy to get up and go into the next room and plug the laptop back in. I'll just type and type and type until it gives up. And then realise I've ended it mid-sentence and then have to go and plug it in and finish anyway. On friday I finally deleted my Myspace account so I no longer have to look at an infinite number of pages of peoples egotistical "check out my life and how, like amazing it is John, just like yours isn't!" dross. I looked at the page for my first ever girlfriend the other day. We went out for a week. I went to sleep that night happy that I'm at least several percent responsible for the tattooed, vile, insipid waste of space she has ultimately become. I also deleted my facebook account because I am a child, although I then realised that I can't now keep in contact with al the people that I actually DO want to remain friends with, plus there's a faint possibility that one day I can take cheap pleasure from anyone that I went to school with who might one day be droolingly bored enough to try and adding me, doing so, so that I can turn them down and pretend for the half-second it takes to click the mouse that I might actually be better than them.
Sunday 2 September 2007
Radio Nowhere
This afternoon I watched a particularly bad episode of the X Files and listened to the radio simultaneously. Not wanting to state this simple and frankly expected tedious Sunday afternoon activity as any kind of triumph of mankind, but I did come over a big H.G. Wells queer because what I was doing was such a late nineties past time, that I felt like I’d momentarily opened a time wormhole back into the end of the last decade. If you ignore the fact I was watching X-Files online on a laptop, I was listening to Stephen Merchant on a digital radio, and eating a flavour of Pot Noodle that only people watching the 1996 Olympics could dream about in apocalyptic nights of terror, then part of it was true.
The X files episode was ‘Roland’ a twins-channelling-energy-post-mortem shocker in which a scientist who’d popped his clogs early into some massively boring laboratory experiment into the speed of sound could ‘live on’ (despite being cryogenically frozen in a vat of gases) through the acts of his ‘special’ twin brother, Roland. By special, I mean thick as a plank at a Kasabian concert; when the twins had their IQs divvied out at birth, captain dead arse clearly got the lion and tigers share, whilst poor Roland ended up with the cranial capacity of a yodelling potato. This didn’t of course stop the spooky shit going down X-style, so Roland was sent on a mercy mission to exonerate every other scientist involved in these massively boring laboratory experiments by getting half of them to have a closer look at a wind tunnel with their faces, and the other bundling head first into some liquid nitrogen and then standing on his ear. So far so good. The innumerable number of flaws in this episode are made apparent by the acts of Mulder and Scully, who do a stupendous number of “calming down” interviews with Roland all of which made my mind shut down the second they started. Then of course, you have the major downer that the one character you want to speak out is held back by the fact that Scully flushing her toilet makes a closer approximation to the English language than poor Roland does. The climax of the episode comes when the parody of a stereotype of a parody of an English tea-and-crumpets professor (the action-packed one because he doesn’t wear glasses, of course) tries to shoot Roland only he doesn’t. The sheer fact that this episode is rehash of episode shown literally only weeks earlier goes to prove what a mish-mash of underwhelming bits this episode was. And to think, when the good doctor with the beard got sent to meet his maker on a prop from a Backstreet Boys video during the teaser, I sincerely had my hopes up.
No such problems over on the radio though, as I dedicated more than ten minutes of my life to it for the first time in what felt like months. There were several good things that came from it, which might have otherwise gone a miss. Radio Nowhere by Bruce Springsteen, is precisely the sort of comeback single you want from The Boss. Now, I enjoyed Devils and Dust as the pretty-good-but-still-one-of-his-worst stop-gaps that it was, and enjoyed the Seeger Sessions for what it technically was; a big piss-up round Bruce’s that probably went too far but was a bit of a laugh none the less, but the meat is obviously in a new E Street band collaboration, which Radio Nowhere clearly has slapped all over it’s chops like a child stinking of candy floss. Unashamedly macho, but sadly closer to The Rising than any of the nitty, gritty seventies top-of-his-game Boss, but for something I was admittedly reserved about, consider it job done, now let’s hope the rest of ‘Magic’ works just as well. There were also good tracks by Georgie James, who I thought was going to be a boring woman signed to Saddle Creek who would ultimately have as little impact on my life as the two faceless voids that used to be in Azure Ray would, but I pleasantly found them out to be a duo featuring the drummer from Q and not U. Who I don’t have an opinion on. Who else features? Oh, After Steven Merchant finished, Stuart Maconie took over, and what’s brilliant about his show on Radio 6 is that he does generally play the most pleasant inappropriate music for Sunday afternoon possible. For example, his ‘tribute’ to Tony Wilson, (who I’d readily admit I have no fucking time for whatsoever because of his red handed responsibilities in ‘Step On’ by the Happy Mondays still being on general rotation in shitty indie clubs across Britain) was to play the full 17 minute version of Elegia by New Order, which consists of about four notes, no vocals, predated Spacemen 3 by about four years and would still sleep with your sister. Awe-some. There was also something by Flowers of Hell, which is essentially the cooing lady vocals from ‘Girls’ by Death in Vegas overlayed onto a lost Belle and Sebastian album closer, and if as a band they’re not regulars in the same greasy spoons and lending libraries north of the border as Camera Obscura, Ballboy and B+S then I’ll eat my kilt, sporran and pathetic little tartan bobble hat.
The X files episode was ‘Roland’ a twins-channelling-energy-post-mortem shocker in which a scientist who’d popped his clogs early into some massively boring laboratory experiment into the speed of sound could ‘live on’ (despite being cryogenically frozen in a vat of gases) through the acts of his ‘special’ twin brother, Roland. By special, I mean thick as a plank at a Kasabian concert; when the twins had their IQs divvied out at birth, captain dead arse clearly got the lion and tigers share, whilst poor Roland ended up with the cranial capacity of a yodelling potato. This didn’t of course stop the spooky shit going down X-style, so Roland was sent on a mercy mission to exonerate every other scientist involved in these massively boring laboratory experiments by getting half of them to have a closer look at a wind tunnel with their faces, and the other bundling head first into some liquid nitrogen and then standing on his ear. So far so good. The innumerable number of flaws in this episode are made apparent by the acts of Mulder and Scully, who do a stupendous number of “calming down” interviews with Roland all of which made my mind shut down the second they started. Then of course, you have the major downer that the one character you want to speak out is held back by the fact that Scully flushing her toilet makes a closer approximation to the English language than poor Roland does. The climax of the episode comes when the parody of a stereotype of a parody of an English tea-and-crumpets professor (the action-packed one because he doesn’t wear glasses, of course) tries to shoot Roland only he doesn’t. The sheer fact that this episode is rehash of episode shown literally only weeks earlier goes to prove what a mish-mash of underwhelming bits this episode was. And to think, when the good doctor with the beard got sent to meet his maker on a prop from a Backstreet Boys video during the teaser, I sincerely had my hopes up.
No such problems over on the radio though, as I dedicated more than ten minutes of my life to it for the first time in what felt like months. There were several good things that came from it, which might have otherwise gone a miss. Radio Nowhere by Bruce Springsteen, is precisely the sort of comeback single you want from The Boss. Now, I enjoyed Devils and Dust as the pretty-good-but-still-one-of-his-worst stop-gaps that it was, and enjoyed the Seeger Sessions for what it technically was; a big piss-up round Bruce’s that probably went too far but was a bit of a laugh none the less, but the meat is obviously in a new E Street band collaboration, which Radio Nowhere clearly has slapped all over it’s chops like a child stinking of candy floss. Unashamedly macho, but sadly closer to The Rising than any of the nitty, gritty seventies top-of-his-game Boss, but for something I was admittedly reserved about, consider it job done, now let’s hope the rest of ‘Magic’ works just as well. There were also good tracks by Georgie James, who I thought was going to be a boring woman signed to Saddle Creek who would ultimately have as little impact on my life as the two faceless voids that used to be in Azure Ray would, but I pleasantly found them out to be a duo featuring the drummer from Q and not U. Who I don’t have an opinion on. Who else features? Oh, After Steven Merchant finished, Stuart Maconie took over, and what’s brilliant about his show on Radio 6 is that he does generally play the most pleasant inappropriate music for Sunday afternoon possible. For example, his ‘tribute’ to Tony Wilson, (who I’d readily admit I have no fucking time for whatsoever because of his red handed responsibilities in ‘Step On’ by the Happy Mondays still being on general rotation in shitty indie clubs across Britain) was to play the full 17 minute version of Elegia by New Order, which consists of about four notes, no vocals, predated Spacemen 3 by about four years and would still sleep with your sister. Awe-some. There was also something by Flowers of Hell, which is essentially the cooing lady vocals from ‘Girls’ by Death in Vegas overlayed onto a lost Belle and Sebastian album closer, and if as a band they’re not regulars in the same greasy spoons and lending libraries north of the border as Camera Obscura, Ballboy and B+S then I’ll eat my kilt, sporran and pathetic little tartan bobble hat.
Adventure
Things I’ve learned upon visiting Alton Towers for the first time in 2 years.
At any given time, at any given opportunity and doing any given activity to fill their days, the majority of the people present are going to be terrible, awful examples of life. For instance, you could stand in a queue for any ride at a theme park, sit on your riding partners shoulders and survey the surrounding 360 degrees. You could fit the number of good specimens of the human race on the underside of your shoe. Thick-lipped black holes of personality sucked inwardly like every waking second is like having a sour lemon dripped slowly into an ulcer. Impatient sloths who think because they’ve managed to squeeze out of their womb, a pair of tracksuited Russian dolls out of their family tree, this entitles them to special privileges not bestowed upon anyone queuing who did manage to keep their legs shut during their brief dalliance with adolescence. Also, loathe as I do to stereotype, but most people there were washboard-rattling buck-toothed northerners who have to push-start their car
Queue-jumping DOES happen. Any when it does, it’s all very exciting. When I say exciting, I mean of course ‘mildly diverting. Three stereotypes-on-legs of the great yoof of Britain hopped over a fence in the line-up for The Corkscrew. The Corkscrew, for anyone who’s ever been to Alton Towers (or anyone who ended up in a neck brace after a car accident who can safely admit they’ve had the same experience) is one ride that most of the day has no queue. When you’ve got at least 10 other rides and even a McDonalds which offer less painful and dangerous thrills than the Corkscrew, you tend to avoid it. The criminal fraternity, upon committing their terrible act of degradation, were on the receiving end of a PA announcement saying “Alton Towers does not look kindly on queue jumping” in a semi-ridiculous “name and shame” system crossed with the demeanour of a boating lake. The fact the announcer sounded like the entire male cast of Coronation street having their balls slammed in a door didn’t aid the situation. So what happens? They tried to hot-foot it on The Corkscrew, they were subsequently denied, and so they decided to throw twigs at the man
Even as you grow older, the act of sitting in the back seat of a car and starring across fields to unidentifiable cities, whilst power ballads spill from the stereo never gets any less romantic or melancholic.
The McDonalds 99p saver menu is brilliant and dare I say it, phenomenally brilliant. Admittedly it ticks all the “ugh McDonalds” categories by basically being gift-wrapped turd burgers. BUT, the chicken wraps have chicken in them, and are a wrap, and Lord praise be to Ronald and the Hamburglar, there’s no fucking tomatoes in the wrap. Stick that in your “fajita” and smoke it, Boots the Chemist. Also, the “Big McBarbecue” or whatever idiotic pseudonym they’ve given it, but it’s basically a big round burger with onion and shit in it. But it tastes EXACTLY like the sort of burger after you’ve tried to cook it on the barbecue, and slapped a few Kraft slices on it, and poured the leftovers from the fridge into two buns and then found out it’s too big to eat properly. If you’re left with a healthy dust-pile of lettuce, ketchup and meaty crumbs in the bottom of the box at the end, you know you’ve eaten good, and eaten well. I won’t discuss the clientele of the joint, as the majority of them can be slotted into the above pigeonholes. Here’s another facet of Alton Towers customers though, the amateur couple who have been together for two years and have utterly run out of the things to do or say to each other, so they go to Alton Towers even though neither of them like the idea, but feel like they should because it’s somewhere to go, and if they might have kids later in life, then they might you know want to take them out somewhere. These are the sort of 100% motherfuckers who ask the gob-driven berks behind the till in McDonalds what they vegetarian specials are, and “excuse me, what’s in the salad?” Not nice.
Air is a good ride, but only if you go on it before Nemesis, and only if you approach the ride with low expectations. It has a million and one limitations – the first being that the first ten seconds involve you looking directly at piss-piddled puddles, rat poo and crisp packets with the offending items dangerously close to your face. The second being that you ‘swoop’ out over the car park and get a eagle-eye view of oceans of grey and miserable vehicles staring at you, as opposed to say, The Great Pyramids of Giza or Lake Michigan, which would be preferable.
Don’t drive. The first two times I’ve been have been weekday coach packages entirely catered for people inadequate at arranging anything (IE myself) and these have worked out spot-on because you get dropped off right outside the main entrance, and you don’t have to get the fucking monorail with all the families, skinheads and Mancunians, and then queue with the same losers to buy a ticket. It’s one thing to queue to be hurled three thousand mile and hour into space strapped into a seat, but it’s another thing entirely when you’re queuing with dead beats in order to fork out more money, and then to find out they haven’t got any of the good tickets left. It saves a lot of time and patience not to drive. Plus, the inevitable shambles that comes at the end of the night when you have to pay your £4 for the privilege of having to get their stinking monorail in the morning, they’ve run out of the token, and it becomes a mad panic, simply for the act of buying an overpriced piece of paper. And then you get in the wrong queue leaving the car park, and then you drive in a ditch and die.
This is once again referring to my low opinion of my fellow adventurers at Alton Towers, but it bears repeating how bleatingly fuck-faced these buffoons really are. The interesting point, and this is interesting in relation to the aforementioned Corkscrew incident, which is that for all the chunder-headed intellectual vacuum’s meandering outside the hot dog stand and parping away on the arcade machines outside Oblivion, every single one has had to find upwards of £30 for the select opportunity to be there. Alton Towers isn’t a community funfair, with candy floss, ring toss, and that girl you hate from your science class knobbing the white-vested pitbull giving her ‘extra spins’ on the waltzer. It’s an expensive places to ‘hang’, dribble your milkshake and throw twigs at the photo seller.
People who like Alton Towers and roller coasters are idiots. This is the best link to go and look at for cheap thrills and a better feeling about your own daily activities. http://forums.towersalmanac.com/lofiversion/index.php?f3.html. Personal favourite on here (and trust me, it’s well worth trawling through the high-density of insipid nerd-speak to get to these) include a bitter character called “Roller Coaster Tycoon” who does next-to-nothing except moan about how Alton Towers is complete crap and nothing could ever be as good as when he went to Islands of Adventure. This point is reiterated in almost every single post he makes “ride X at Alton Towers is isn’t a patch on ride Y at Islands of Adventure! Ps I’m a twat” etc etc etc. Other highlights are instances where people on the forum have “amazing” ideas on what changes Alton Towers should make to their existing rides, and what changes they should make. These ideas are generally preposterous and unrealistic, and include things like “they should add two loops to the runaway mine train” and “where the black hole was, they should build a smaller version of Oblivion” and “they should get rid of ride X/Y/Z and replace it with (insert name of unspeakably expensive concept-ride / nonsensical creation thought up by forum poster which doesn’t and couldn’t exist in a physical context, EVER. Even better than this, is people submitting their ‘visions’ of new things and features, which they’ve drawn on paint. Fantastic.
At any given time, at any given opportunity and doing any given activity to fill their days, the majority of the people present are going to be terrible, awful examples of life. For instance, you could stand in a queue for any ride at a theme park, sit on your riding partners shoulders and survey the surrounding 360 degrees. You could fit the number of good specimens of the human race on the underside of your shoe. Thick-lipped black holes of personality sucked inwardly like every waking second is like having a sour lemon dripped slowly into an ulcer. Impatient sloths who think because they’ve managed to squeeze out of their womb, a pair of tracksuited Russian dolls out of their family tree, this entitles them to special privileges not bestowed upon anyone queuing who did manage to keep their legs shut during their brief dalliance with adolescence. Also, loathe as I do to stereotype, but most people there were washboard-rattling buck-toothed northerners who have to push-start their car
Queue-jumping DOES happen. Any when it does, it’s all very exciting. When I say exciting, I mean of course ‘mildly diverting. Three stereotypes-on-legs of the great yoof of Britain hopped over a fence in the line-up for The Corkscrew. The Corkscrew, for anyone who’s ever been to Alton Towers (or anyone who ended up in a neck brace after a car accident who can safely admit they’ve had the same experience) is one ride that most of the day has no queue. When you’ve got at least 10 other rides and even a McDonalds which offer less painful and dangerous thrills than the Corkscrew, you tend to avoid it. The criminal fraternity, upon committing their terrible act of degradation, were on the receiving end of a PA announcement saying “Alton Towers does not look kindly on queue jumping” in a semi-ridiculous “name and shame” system crossed with the demeanour of a boating lake. The fact the announcer sounded like the entire male cast of Coronation street having their balls slammed in a door didn’t aid the situation. So what happens? They tried to hot-foot it on The Corkscrew, they were subsequently denied, and so they decided to throw twigs at the man
Even as you grow older, the act of sitting in the back seat of a car and starring across fields to unidentifiable cities, whilst power ballads spill from the stereo never gets any less romantic or melancholic.
The McDonalds 99p saver menu is brilliant and dare I say it, phenomenally brilliant. Admittedly it ticks all the “ugh McDonalds” categories by basically being gift-wrapped turd burgers. BUT, the chicken wraps have chicken in them, and are a wrap, and Lord praise be to Ronald and the Hamburglar, there’s no fucking tomatoes in the wrap. Stick that in your “fajita” and smoke it, Boots the Chemist. Also, the “Big McBarbecue” or whatever idiotic pseudonym they’ve given it, but it’s basically a big round burger with onion and shit in it. But it tastes EXACTLY like the sort of burger after you’ve tried to cook it on the barbecue, and slapped a few Kraft slices on it, and poured the leftovers from the fridge into two buns and then found out it’s too big to eat properly. If you’re left with a healthy dust-pile of lettuce, ketchup and meaty crumbs in the bottom of the box at the end, you know you’ve eaten good, and eaten well. I won’t discuss the clientele of the joint, as the majority of them can be slotted into the above pigeonholes. Here’s another facet of Alton Towers customers though, the amateur couple who have been together for two years and have utterly run out of the things to do or say to each other, so they go to Alton Towers even though neither of them like the idea, but feel like they should because it’s somewhere to go, and if they might have kids later in life, then they might you know want to take them out somewhere. These are the sort of 100% motherfuckers who ask the gob-driven berks behind the till in McDonalds what they vegetarian specials are, and “excuse me, what’s in the salad?” Not nice.
Air is a good ride, but only if you go on it before Nemesis, and only if you approach the ride with low expectations. It has a million and one limitations – the first being that the first ten seconds involve you looking directly at piss-piddled puddles, rat poo and crisp packets with the offending items dangerously close to your face. The second being that you ‘swoop’ out over the car park and get a eagle-eye view of oceans of grey and miserable vehicles staring at you, as opposed to say, The Great Pyramids of Giza or Lake Michigan, which would be preferable.
Don’t drive. The first two times I’ve been have been weekday coach packages entirely catered for people inadequate at arranging anything (IE myself) and these have worked out spot-on because you get dropped off right outside the main entrance, and you don’t have to get the fucking monorail with all the families, skinheads and Mancunians, and then queue with the same losers to buy a ticket. It’s one thing to queue to be hurled three thousand mile and hour into space strapped into a seat, but it’s another thing entirely when you’re queuing with dead beats in order to fork out more money, and then to find out they haven’t got any of the good tickets left. It saves a lot of time and patience not to drive. Plus, the inevitable shambles that comes at the end of the night when you have to pay your £4 for the privilege of having to get their stinking monorail in the morning, they’ve run out of the token, and it becomes a mad panic, simply for the act of buying an overpriced piece of paper. And then you get in the wrong queue leaving the car park, and then you drive in a ditch and die.
This is once again referring to my low opinion of my fellow adventurers at Alton Towers, but it bears repeating how bleatingly fuck-faced these buffoons really are. The interesting point, and this is interesting in relation to the aforementioned Corkscrew incident, which is that for all the chunder-headed intellectual vacuum’s meandering outside the hot dog stand and parping away on the arcade machines outside Oblivion, every single one has had to find upwards of £30 for the select opportunity to be there. Alton Towers isn’t a community funfair, with candy floss, ring toss, and that girl you hate from your science class knobbing the white-vested pitbull giving her ‘extra spins’ on the waltzer. It’s an expensive places to ‘hang’, dribble your milkshake and throw twigs at the photo seller.
People who like Alton Towers and roller coasters are idiots. This is the best link to go and look at for cheap thrills and a better feeling about your own daily activities. http://forums.towersalmanac.com/lofiversion/index.php?f3.html. Personal favourite on here (and trust me, it’s well worth trawling through the high-density of insipid nerd-speak to get to these) include a bitter character called “Roller Coaster Tycoon” who does next-to-nothing except moan about how Alton Towers is complete crap and nothing could ever be as good as when he went to Islands of Adventure. This point is reiterated in almost every single post he makes “ride X at Alton Towers is isn’t a patch on ride Y at Islands of Adventure! Ps I’m a twat” etc etc etc. Other highlights are instances where people on the forum have “amazing” ideas on what changes Alton Towers should make to their existing rides, and what changes they should make. These ideas are generally preposterous and unrealistic, and include things like “they should add two loops to the runaway mine train” and “where the black hole was, they should build a smaller version of Oblivion” and “they should get rid of ride X/Y/Z and replace it with (insert name of unspeakably expensive concept-ride / nonsensical creation thought up by forum poster which doesn’t and couldn’t exist in a physical context, EVER. Even better than this, is people submitting their ‘visions’ of new things and features, which they’ve drawn on paint. Fantastic.
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