Christmas

It is quite easy to make snide comments about Christmas. For anyone who doesn't have a nauseating amount of affection for their family it is at best boring and at worst awkward and irritating. I don't have far to travel home and can keep the whole exercise in cultural obedience within a tolerable period of time. However I think there should be a realistic movement to abandon the festival and have all champions of it made to eat kilos of revolting Christmas pudding in an over crowded Marks and Spencer food shop while listening to the same Cliff Richard CD being played over and over.

It has a terrible aesthetic, it is cliché ridden, a lot of people find it unpleasant, it is an awful excuse for sloth and indulgence and it is needlessly inflicted on otherwise happy and well balanced people such as myself.

I don't think I'm very good at making casual conversation. I find it very hard to articulate myself and to think of appropriate words to use and often seem confused. I don't even think about things before saying them and will say things that may seem quite judgemental or even rude. People say nice things and show interest but I'm somehow unable to think of things to reply with that are appropriately considerate of the fact that they might also have a boring life they would like to discuss. I'm often left with a sense that I'm quite boring and quite bored. My only interesting anecdotes are too shocking to tell strangers, at least I think they are and my comments on popular culture are likely to be negative. I often find myself around pseudo-intellectuals and find their supposedly clever banter and pomposity tiresome. I don't understand, do people think about how they choose to live their lives?

Snooker

is a dull game.

Food

For some reason people insist on eating food that from my point of view stinks and from theirs, well, I assume they don't actually think about anything beyond hunger and taste. I don't even care to try and articulate this beyond saying that people who eat fish and chips are morons.

Fuse box

Can you believe that I have old fashioned fuses in my flat. When I got up today two fuses blew before I could shower, luckily I still had fuse wire from the last time this happened though.

Crap Journalism

Something I find increasingly annoying is the badly written and ill thought out journalism that seems to set our political, cultural, social and fashion agendas. The Guardian for example seems to only care about flaunting this annoying brand of smug wit and comment that is rarely funny but most definitely appeals to a target audience of pseudo intellectuals and suckers for modern trash culture and mediocre British twiterati.

It is an ugly brand of popularism that assumes we all have ipods and care about the trite personalities they celebrate and mock pointlessly. I don't care about the latest piece of technological clutter and I don't care that the guardian has suddenly decided that internet dating is socially acceptable or that Matt Lucas isn't funny. Really, who pays for this sort of moronic preaching?

Talking to a couple of people who were heading to Optimo last night and my friend's parting words were "whatever you do; don't turn thirty." One of them had a really nice jacket.

Concert

I went to a concert last night and made the mistake of drinking too much coffee before and then feeling quite uncomfortable for the first thirty minutes. During the break I met a friend and asked what they thought of the first two pieces, apparently the second violinist was all over the place and they could have done with practising the first piece more. I have no idea how people can spot something like this without knowing the music well, it all sounded fine to me.

Question Time

If you regularly read the British news you will no doubt have seen a lot of newspaper space and television time given over to the fact that the BNP were on question time. Utterly predictable, uninteresting and sadly no Jerry Springer style tear up.

But what gets me about question time is the audience participation. The majority of responses from the public in the audience are badly articulated and often shambolic. It can be embarrassing to watch and often their point is lost, if they had one, or just doesn't make sense. I wouldn't fare much better if I had to speak on live television but then I'd avoid this situation.

One other thing about that particular program was that while it was more than appropriate to scrutinize the politics of the BNP leader and call him out on various dubious and peculiar quotes, they let the Conservative shadow minister for community cohesion and social action Baroness Warsi off pretty lightly when the subject of her apparent homophobia came up.

Blackboard jokes

Someone with utterly insipid internet garnered humour decided to write some jokes on a blackboard in the coffee room. I wrote "NOT FUNNY" in huge letters underneath, a day later someone had wiped away the "NOT" leaving the "FUNNY", way to defend your lols guys!

Blogs

It isn't funny that people start blogs but then abandon them quite quickly. Quitters!!11

Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais is not as funny as he likes to think. His early appearances on the 11 o'clock show were painfully unfunny and his stand up is just a series of mildly amusing observations with an arrogant tone. The Office and Extras were funny though, my point is that he just isn't as funny as he or a lot of other people would like to think.

National Pride

There is something I don't quite understand about national pride or national identity. People often seem proud of things associated with the nation they live in that they have no hand in actually contributing to. Sporting events, old battles, inventions and discoveries from 100s of years ago.

The nation seems like quite an artificial and mainly political construction with a sense of national identity being promoted for the sake of obedience and cohesiveness. So what is it that people are actually proud of? The history? The national psyche?

The English seem quite proud of the fact that England once had a large empire whose existence caused the deaths of more people than the Third Reich. The Scottish seem quite proud of what is essentially a "200 year PR exercise" aimed partly at tourists. Other than this they seem quite proud of the fact that they make the English language incomprehensible to the rest of the world, that they eat trash tasteless food, that they look down on education, that their capital city has been made to look like a shortbread tin and the violent reputation.

People will actually talk with pride about the violent reputation Scotland and in particular Glasgow has. The type of violence that generally happens is really quite pathetic; drunken one sided knife attacks by an uneducated and marginalized underclass.

I often hear Scottish people go on about how you should be proud of where you are from with no way of qualifying this. I think it shows a lack of thought and character that you attach much of your ego to such a poor construct.

Stop Thief!

I caught someone going through the pockets of my jacket last night.

I somehow spent £70 last night and have nothing to show for it other than cold pakora.

Sleep

Two hours sleep last night and then some mid-seminar snoring today.

Rob Gnarly and the Bailers

Can someone explain why this is funny? I don't get it but for some reason it is funny.

Supermarket

The supermarket close to my house is closing and is running their stock down. I do not know where I'll shop for food when it closes.

I could just go for stale bread, off milk and microwave meals from Spar.

I could shop at the fruit/veg shop and have a diet consisting of mainly these.

I could eat out every night.

I could order groceries online.

I could move to a flat with a supermarket nearby.

I could stock up on frozen and tinned food and try and last until it reopens.

The Hangover

I did not intend to watch this film. Someone told me it was funny. It wasn't.

The film is worse than not funny it is ignorantly offensive and irritating. There were (unfunny) jokes about rape, homophobic jokes (also unfunny), (unfunny) racist stereotypes, (unfunny) jokes about social isolation, there was a cameo from a convicted rapist, and just a general sense of idiocy and catering to idiocy.

There is a section of American society that throws around the word fag and revels in "getting wasted". The whole premise of the film was celebrating people like this going to Las Vegas, a cultural embarrassment and moron magnet.

The only reason I kept watching it was the plot which was ultimately resolved in a clumsy way.

Rain

Walking across town in the rain to eat food in a chain pub when we could either have gotten a taxi or just eaten in the bourgeois West End.

Lifestyle change.

I have made some radical lifestyle changes lately.
I've stopped eating meat, or at least I'm keeping it to a minimum.
I've stopped reading and watching the news.
I've started playing the piano a lot more, to the point of having sore fingers.
I've stopped doing any work.
I've started listening to mainly hiphop:

.

Travelling

There seems to be a bit of a fad for travelling these days. When people say travelling what they usually mean is going on holiday. People go with little agenda and love to talk about it at social events.

Everyone is a travel bore these days. You got a Ryan Air flight to somewhere and did what there? Drank the local tourist beer? Went to a shit night club? Fooled yourself into thinking that you broadened your horizons? Uploaded countless boring photos of yourself to facebook so that everyone can see how well travelled you are and how exciting your life is. Yes, you are practically Jack Kerouac.



Fuck off.

Books

There is something quite awkward when authors speak with the air of having known great character and try to paint images of people with character traits borrowed from people they found interesting and perhaps admired as this often falls flat. I think such character studies often suffer changing times but quite often it is just down to lack of awareness of their limited life experience. I find this utterly exacerbating in Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. It mainly consists of endless descriptions of characters who frankly I would describe as bores, chancers and those obsessed with social standing. There are so many of them too which means you get little sense of any of them and they don't help draw the protagonist either who is left equally confusingly constructed.

I should point out that I've only read 100 pages of this book and could easily decide to give up on it after another 100 pages.

I'll contrast this with Salter's creation of Verne Rand in Solo Faces who is sharply realised to his peak as an obsessive, determined, able, accomplished and revered young man and then past this.

My point is that a lot of so called classics are just self indulgent and overly long ramblings and reading them because they are classics is idiotic and not funny.

Curry Base Sauce

Here is my latest batch of curry base sauce. This is similar to what they use in British Indian restaurants.

Starbucks

The fact that so many people drink coffee in places like Starbucks is not funny. The place is full of people tweeting about how wonderful macs are. Morons.

Charming Holly Valance

Something painfully unfunny is the insistence of some people to play poorly conceived adverts masquerading as games on msn messenger. For example this loser, Mr Happy, has been wasting a lot of time trying to find answers to utterly inane questions in the game "Charming Holly Valance". The outcome of answering these questions as being able to view five videos, which our friend Mr Happy has failed to do so far.

Anyway, here are links to all five videos and images from the videos Mr Happy failed to reach:





Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Video 4
Video 5

Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson is a dick.

But the word ASBOlutely is a nice construction.

And there is this,

Volkswagen

"The Volkswagen was invented by a famous sorcerer called Hitler to transport the German masses to Valhalla."

TV

It isn't funny when comedian gets so much TV exposure that they run out of jokes and just stop being funny. For example:

Stewart Lee, stopped being funny around the second program of his six program series, the first one was hilarious.

Charlie Brooker, was really quite funny in screen wipe. A few series later, another TV program and Guardian column and his shtick seems more forced and contrived than instantly witty.

Billy Connelly, went from comedy gold to just saying "bum" and "fuck" a lot.

At least they were funny once though, unlike a lot of so called comedians.

Blogs and Builders

Even though my tone may suggest otherwise, I'm not someone who is convinced that their life is full of amusing events that need to be shared with the world. Neither do I think my prose is witty or clever. There are a lot of these blogs and generally they tend to be quite uninteresting and awkward to read.

Aside from this, people often use a blog as a vehicle for their malformed personality and it's painfully constructed, artificial internet manifestation.

Anyway, what isn't funny is being woken up on a Sunday morning by builders, don't they know that it's God's day of rest?

Music

Teenagers dressing in a way that suggests their musical taste is understandable.

Adults clinging to a media created image of hiphop, punk rock or probably the worst offender, reggae. This is not funny. Usually this comes with some kind of nerdy arrogant pride in the fact that they like a certain type of music. Fuck off.

Yokels

Someone told a really crass joke that I'd heard before. I asked him if him and his friend were from the countryside and he took offence; "are you calling me a yokel?" he asked in a yokel accent.

Maybe I'm just uptight and conservative but I don't really find crudely sexual jokes that funny, it is a bit of a crutch.

T-Shirt

I saw a girl today with a T-shirt that said "I only date musicians." I didn't find this funny but I wonder if she has only dated people who have been in shit bands. Or more probably it wasn't true and she has, at most, made a token attempt to learn the guitar herself. Rock and roll mother fucker.

Other T-shirt slogans which I didn't find funny include;

"I listen to bands you haven't heard of?", not sure if this one is meant to be ironically funny or if it is just annoyingly pretentious. Also I don't understand the question mark.

"If found please return to bar." This one is very common and very unfunny, seen a few people at airports with these. Not sure that I can think of anything that screams "I'm a dickhead" more.

Jammin'

I was at work a few years ago and a machine I was using kept jamming, my colleague starting singing the Bob Marley song "Jammin'". I laughed at this.

Fridge

My computer seemed to be overheating, I took the side panel off to let the air circulate better and it seemed to fix the problem. A friend of mine suggested I would need to put the computer in my fridge. I laughed, out loud even, and no, it isn't funny.

Not Funny

Sadly a lot of things that are unfunny are also about people who wouldn't want chatted 'bout on the internet.

I feel like being mean.

I sometimes buy lunch at one of those mini supermarket places. I hate to admit it but I sometimes eat ready-made sandwiches and sushi made from canned fish. What I find unfunny about this place is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that being even slightly hungry makes me quite irritated.

So this is it, probably sounds utterly inconsequential but, there is someone who works at the checkout who is quite enthusiastic. Enthusiastic in that American style of customer service where they ask how you are that day when really they don't give a shit.

He barks these sort of greetings at everyone like a horse racing commentator without really making eye contact and I suspect that it is his way of dealing with a job he probably finds quite soul destroying, either that or he is actually mental.

I hate it. I am desperate to avoid being served by him and the uncertain prospect of it irks me and I have been determined to tell him to "put a sock in it". When I actually get served by him I don't say this, I want to and might do it one day but it will create an awkward situation.

The other staff seem capable of being pleasant while ringing up an entire weeks shopping for people with bad enough taste to eat food almost exclusively from somewhere like this, so why can't he?