Don't Comment

Today has been probably, one of the least productive days in the history of my existence. I read a few chapters of my book, downloaded one song, engaged in a spot of light psychopathy on GTA: San Andreas (if you're unfamiliar, this is one of those games children should avoid) and now I'm blabbering useless drivel all over the internet like a chronically diarrheoa-stricken greyhound running down the street.

But I'm not the only person doing nothing. Ever been on a news website or the BBC homepage and scrolled the bottom to check out the comments? If not, you are truly blessed. I have no idea why online comment-debates attract nutjobs and people who, if saying these things in the street, would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Only certain websites leave these literary stinkbombs festering at the end of all their articles - most moderate the completely insane postings - taking out the word "c*nt", for example, or removing the posts that claim "the Jews are running the world and are hours away from turning their intergalactic crystal death rays on us all and that this country used to be GREAT Britain", as if the geographical names of places really signify a region's worth. We don't have to always have a king on the throne just because we're called the United Kingdom. Oh and none of these conspiracy theorists, despite knowing the Truth, can spell. I'd like to think that the would-be saviours of mankind can at least use the english language in a comprehensible manner.

The ones on the Guardian's website are the best - with their "Comment is Free" policy, they don't moderate unless it's reported.The commenters' register always sounds like they just walked into a gay bar and realised it's not for them; they walk up to the barman and order a pint of real ale without clicking that the only drinks on offer are appletinis. "What you lefties don't realise is that I eat meat BECAUSE it hurts the animals" might be a sample.

But let's stop and think here; this is the Guardian we're talking about. It's Britain's only quality leftwing newspaper - the website is always going to be full of "lefties" - so why do commentors sound so surprised? If you take any stock in these opinions - expressed by people who link the fact that they got unemployed on the same day that their wife left them and recieved full custody of the kids with a global conspiracy - then stop now. The people of Britain by large aren't clever enough to vote for the right party. I can't tell you which party is right because I don't know myself. It's likely we'll never know. Even if they do turn up at one stage they won't get voted in. Tough shit.

I Was Thinking This Morning

I feel nervous. This is not normal: I’m not claustrophobic or agoraphobic – there is nothing in my world to be worried about. That coursework will be done by the deadline despite my watching Valkyrie instead of writing those essay questions; the bus will let me off at the right stop. We career around the bend, I put away my book and gather my stuff. I don’t like being elevated on the bus because you can see things you shouldn’t be seeing; old people’s scalps, which bit of the Metro the other passengers are looking at, the cheap pulp fiction one of them is reading. Old people are always on buses. I think they must ride around all day and never get off, they just sit there and have conversations that consist of opening lines like “I haven’t seen you since the war!” or “there are an awful lot of pigeons about nowadays”.

I forget about the nerves because an agonising pain shoots up my right leg when I move it. Where did that come from? I didn’t bang it on a pole or a chair, but it feels like somone stamped on the inside of my kneecaps repeatedly. Christ that hurts! I’ve got to walk it off like a footballer. Or maybe not like a footballer, because when they get injured someone pays them ten grand. Maybe someone will just run up in the street and hand me a brown envelope filled with illicit cash? Could happen. Watch that car, it’s going to run me over if I don’t run out of its way. That driver looked determined to kill everyone who wanted to cross the road, maybe one of the guys on my flank egged his house or kidnapped his wife. Maybe he’s John McClane, and those two are East-European terrorists. Maybe he’s just a bad driver.

I want coffee, but I can’t go into the café. I’m still infected with cash-flow deficiency disease. That girl has coffee. I bet she’s rich. I bet she swims in a golden pool of molten pound coins every night, and then sells videos of it online to middle-aged sweaty men in Wolverhampton. I have too much to carry. Why does my english teacher want us to all bring A4 folders to every class? Is he a miniature dictator, and this is a premature totalitarian decree? This might be just the start of his coup – today, Stockport, tomorrow, the world! I bet he has those Warhammer models in his attic. I bet he plays with them every night to escape from the world, and makes explosion noises with his lips. Maybe I should write this all down and someone from a cool newspaper might read it and put it on their website and pays me £1000. I could do anything with £1000; first I’d buy some more shirts, then I’d buy some more socks. I always have holes in my socks nowadays.

Blind Ferrets In Switzerland

In medieval times I would have been assigned the role of the village idiot. Forever falling into wells and tripping over the King's retainers, I might have been a lot like Happy Smurf. This is the general feeling I get when I step into the Cornerhouse in Manchester - an exclusive arthouse cinema/indie café/contemporary art gallery tucked in between Chinatown and the city centre. I have a generally anti-mainstream outlook when it comes to film, so the stuff they show is right up my street - today I saw A Serious Man, the new flick from the Coens. But as much as I'd love to be a member of the high-brow culture club, the liberal intelligensia - I'm not really cut out for it. 60% of my thoughts are along the lines of "What if a polar bear and a visually impaired ferret had a fight with David Gest...?", not, as required to be a true hipster; "The films of David Lynch really inspire me". That's not to say I don't like David Lynch - I recently watched Lost Highway - it just means I'm far too easily distracted to keep up.

Someone from the London School of Economics called Simon Hix (I'm imagining a francophobe version of the Nutty Professor) complained in a Guardian article that the EU would "it would rather be a super-sized Switzerland". There's one problem with this comment: Switzerland is awesome! Apart from its somewhat ridiculous-sounding name, it is the perfect model for just about any country. They never go to war, they don't get bullied by America, they get to speak whatever language they want, and they always have a white Christmas. On top of that, they have an excellent democratic system and famously efficient trains. Our trains are shit, and they smell like old people's urine. Does Mr Hix really want to trade the quaint utopia of the Alps and Lake Geneva for council flats and the Birmingham ring road?

This is why I should never enter professional politics - however much you love me for it, I'm an idiot.

**Update - Switzerland is no longer perfect, since they voted to ban minarets. You can look at this either way - I can't be bothered analysing why and what effect this will have on Europe, but needless to say it's taken the edge off the Alps for me.

Misinterpreted

Has anyone noticed he's sitting down?

Predator vs ITV

"I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" has returned to our screens, giving W-List former models and 70's popstars the chance to find a book deal and giving Ant and Dec the opportunity to annoy us even more. Have you seen those ridiculous Nintendo adverts? They seem to follow the Grange Hill alumni around Britain as they break into middle-class houses and, at gunpoint, ask the homeowners about their love for Supermario or Zelda, like a sick version of Home Alone.

Whenever I've been unfortunate to catch a glimpse of the jungle ventures of people I've never heard of, I have always wished that Predator would turn up and hijack the show, transforming it from an light entertainment programme into an Orwellian rainforest arena of death.

He's out there, biding his time until the really harsh Bushtucker Trials begin - and then - bang! The cameras will short out for a few seconds, and when transmission restarts, all we'll see on our screens will be the skinned carcasses of Ant and Dec, swinging above a swampy pool of shocked alligators. Imagine the end-credits of Apocolypse Now, only with Samantha Fox in the place of Marlon Brando's Kurtz. Basically, the entire premise of the show is what Malcolm Tucker, the swearbox Director of Communications played by Peter Capaldi on satirical comedy The Thick Of It, would call "arse plasma from the hideous mirrorworld of fuck". 'Nuff said.

Terrier Paté

I don't like dogs. Specifically, they don't like me. They'll always single me out for knocking over (I'm fairly light, so it's not hard), or mauling - so I don't like them. But I'm beginning to like technology even less. My computer took 30 minutes just to load this interview on the Guardian website, partly because Tweetdeck, the desktop app for Twitter, decided to update itself at that exact moment. That's the problem with software that does stuff automatically; it chooses the least opportune moments to annoy you with a bug fix or virus scan. McAfee is constantly stalking me, like a little yapping terrier begging for food, constantly. I won't feed it though. I'll lock it in a broken fridge, then leave it on abandoned wasteland somewhere, for a metal-detector enthusiast to find and uncover the reeking skeleton in about fifty year's time.

If it's not being slow and not telling you, it's being fast (not fast like the Millennium Falcon, fast like a hit-and-run driver) and telling you in a loud voice. Windows, for one, is constantly prompting you to do things. Do you want to save? Fancy switching me off? Do you want the toilet? And unlike the updates, you can't ignore the prompts. The only solution is the big red, lovely X button in the top-right hand corner of all the progams. In dog-violence terms, it's the equivalent of kicking the terrier repeatedly until it's a bloody mess, then smearing it like paté on your ex-girlfriend's car bonnet.

But the most annoying thing about computers? When they get in a tizzy with you, they just nod off - "not responding" is the Windows-term (sorry I'm not mentioning Macs or the other OS's, but I have trusty XP at home and Macs just behave like Nokia mobiles from circa-2007). And when that happens, I see red. Well actually, I see this:

Anyone would get pissed at that kind of disrespect. If this were Compton, I'd have shot the monitor by now. To use the canine reference a third and final time, "not responding" is the real-life manifestation of being slapped with a keyboard by the terrier, having been set free by the RSPCA and sent back through time to take revenge.

Coronation Street, like all other soap-opera dramas, plays on our basest stereotypes to make the characters appeal to a wider audience. The cast of EastEnders is packed with cockney villains, Hollyoaks is filled with cliquey teens and lazy students, and Neighbours has lots of blonde girls and surfer boys who constantly barbeque and never grow up, like 1950's Californian Peter Pans. But as I was watching "Corrie" (not my choice) today, I noticed that about 90% of Sally's (blonde, short haired wife of mechanic Kevin) lines were "Don't you speak to my Kevin like that!". Even when the shopkeeper handed back change, or a customer said "hello" in the garage, Sally would launch a thermonuclear verbal tirade against them, like a nightmarish, squawking jack-in-the-box. Poor old Kevin never actually gets the chance to stick up for himself because Sal's in there first - before scolding him for not beig a real man and fighting his corner. It's no wonder he's having an affair, really.

Red Army

I support Manchester United and it's brilliant. We always win, and we get to wear the colour red. Everyone knows that the red car always finishes first. Most football supporters hate United, mainly because we beat their team and they'll always come up with a lot of sore-loser excuses to explain for this - up until last season it was "Ronaldo does all the work" which loosely translates into them being jealous because we've got better players. However - I'm not a very good football supporter. I genuinely love it when my team win and I've followed them since I can remember, and so has my dad; they play fantastic, entertaining football and the tickets, in context, are cheap. But I haven't been to a single game this season and I only watch football on the telly if it's United. I know people that will watch any team, any time, purely for the joy of the sport, yet for some reason I just can't find it interesting if I don't want any single team to win.

I don't want the English international team to win in the slightest either. Partly because I don't want Peter Crouch to smile but partly because I find it hard to turn off the part of my brain that generates hatred for the other team-players (i.e. Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard), so I only want 1/3 of the team to win. Aren't I the little mercenary. When you add in the fact that they only ever seem to play versus Croatia or Ukraine - instead of say, France or Brazil or USA (those teams, I want to see beaten!), I don't even want to see it on the television. England are boring.

The final thing that makes me a rubbish supporter is that when I'm at Old Trafford for the live games, I can't ignore the fact that I'm standing in a crowd consisting mainly of middle-aged, slightly inebriated and badly dressed men shouting at 22 young, sweaty, part-time male models running about in silly clothes after an expensive golf ball. The atmosphere in the Stretford End, however electrifying when United score, is far too similar to the atmosphere in the Poll Tax riots, or a domestic abuse incident. Most of the guys come every week to escape their nagging wives and let off some steam - and in the olden days, this energy would have been expended by beating their children or brawling in the street, so obviously club football plays a fundamental peacekeeping role in modern British society. But I'm not locked into a stagnant marriage or up to my eyeballs in mortgage payments - I'm 17. And as an optimistic, bright, enlightened student, I just can't find it in me to shout at an athlete for running too slow, when I know very well that Nemanja Vidic might hunt me down and stamp on my face and I wouldn't be beautiful anymore. Those studs are lethal, I'll have you know.

Maybe I'm just not masculine enough. I should go and man-up. I could embark on an overambitious DIY project or pay too much for a corporate paintballing trip or even go for a nice, relaxing shopping-mall shooting spree. Those are definately blokey activities. Come to think about it, men are rubbish! We can't multitask, we injure, maim and kill, we care more about the movements of little green bits of paper more than the meaning of life, the universe and everything - and we're nowhere near as pretty as girls. And to top it all, they are much cleaner than us.

Tonight, We Dine In Hell!

So last night I finished christening my new TV with the HD premiere of 300. I think it's an awesome film, blending spectacular visuals with explosive action scenes, as well as the best soundbites since Anchorman. But, it occurred to me half-way through watching Leonidas battle the uber-Immortal (and yes, the character is actually called that), that he wouldn't be a very good peacetime leader. At the slightest provocation, he leads his men into certain oblivion, and kicks a guy into a bottomless pit. Sure, he's the greatest warrior-king in Greece, and he can give a good Henry V speech, but he'd be useless when it came to dealing with climate change or electoral reform. To any taunt from a protestor, he'd just shout "This is Sparta!" and slaughter everyone in sight.

You can hardly imagine him at the upcoming Copenhagen Summit on climate change, sitting amongst Gordon, Nicholas and Barrack in his loincloth and armour. "Carbon neutral!? This is madness?!". His reaction to the EU would surely be along the lines of "Give them nothing but take from them everything!".

Maybe our leaders need to be a bit more like King Leo - I for one would love to see Gordon Brown duke it out with Dimitry Medvedev or Kim Jong Il. I mean, he's got nothing to lose, right?

Just Sayin'

I passed my theory test Tuesday - in probably the most innocuous looking-building in the history of architecture. Kingsway House is the default office-block model in Stockport; grey, uninviting and about as picturesque as a man urinating in the street. The test-centre was completely hidden away in the bowels of the building, and although their were signposts to other offices, I didn't anyone else going in my direction, so I very nearly got very lost. Anyway, I found my way into the waiting room, and after registering with the guy on the desk, I took a seat amongst an amusing little collection of characters.

Firstly, there was a intimidatingly-masculine girl directly across from me - you know the sort: sweatpants, a Gio-Goi hoodie and Nike 6.0's, hair in a PE-teacher ponytail. With a frown like that, she was more of a boy than me. There was a very blonde, sunburnt lad with his father - apparently from the countryside (ahem, yokel), wearing a plow-scarred gillet and checked shirt - not the Topman type, but the 1950's All-American posterboy type. I think he was going for his Combine Harvester Proficiency test. His dopey smile (and missing teeth) could have only been completed with the addition of a stalk of wheat protruding from his mouth. Next to him was a eastern-european lady who could speak English but not listen to it. When the man behind the desk said she had to turn her phone off and put it into a locker, I feared for his life (she wasn't the sort of lady you'd want to meet in a dark alleyway).

Finally - and the couple that got me laughing - an obviously married couple. The husband walked in first with a purposeful stride, whilst wifey dithered with the door. She was the one holding the identity/registration papers - and whilst it's entirely possible that it was genuinly her first try at driving, the look of barely-concealed contempt on hubbie's face and the matching shame playing out inside his significant other said it all. Specifically, it said that his darling had been on the phone to her girlfriend about something mind-sappingingly boring, and wrapped his Porsche, his baby, around a lampost at 60 miles-per-hour.

David Cameron was embarassed this week, after his "cast-iron" promise, made two years ago in a front page article for The Sun - was shattered. The inevitable ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by the Czech government means that the controversial legislation will be incorporated into EU law. This is just the latest treaty in a line of divisional propositions that continue the process of pooling sovereignty. That means that, with each treaty since the EEC was formed(changed to the EU in 1992), power has gone from individual national governments to the multinational one in Brussels. Personally, I like the EU. It makes for greater cohesion amongst Europe; and, forgoing the language barriers - we're all very similar, and intrinsically linked.

However, it does take a lot of powers away from the UK; the latest estimates said that 70% of our laws are made in the Strasbourg parliament. This therefore gets a lot of people red-necked and angry; as only one of 27 member-states in the Union, we don't get a massive say, and since we are one of the bigger nations, with an above-average GDP, we often bear the brunt of leglisation that benefits say, Norway or Poland. But in the long-term I think it's worth it; Europeans have to recognise that for better or worse, each country's fate is linked to the others; nobody can ignore that most of our trade comes from Europe and that the EU makes this a hell of a lot easier. And it's one more step to world-peace. Would a single, federalised European state be that bad a thing?

I've got a big suspicion that the man-on-the-street's opposition to membership comes from an in-built mistrust of those Frenchies across the channel (always surrendering, you know! And they eat frog's legs! Not like us sensible British. Black Pudding, anyone?). British people, for reasons only known to themselves, have always disliked Europe. We don't want to be friends with them. Most people would just be happy if our little island was completley isolated from the world and if we heard fake news reports about how the Glorious Empire had annexed Denmark or Indonesia, led by the Black Prince. The fact that for 200 years, we held an Empire upon which the sun never set doesen't help; since the Battle of Trafalgar we've had a massive amount of hubris and therefore our ideas about Britain's status in the 21st-century world are a little outdated.

However none of this detracts from the fact that our political masters (and I hate to use such a bandied-about term) have refused to give a referendum. Should we stay in the EU? Yes or no? It's pretty simple. The institition is unpopular, inefficient and not accountable enough. Maybe this is our own fault; we have turned the European elections from our chance to have our say, into an opportunity to vent our anger and vote for protest parties, which isn't right. I agree with the fact that a referendum on Lisbon itself would be equivalent to shooting ourselves in the foot (we'd piss off the rest of the continent, and for what?) - but we should have had a vote in the first place. Attitudes have changed since 1977 and the British electorate have the prerogative to make decisions for themselves, however sensible. That's democracy - it doesen't matter if we make the wrong decision, as long as it's our decision to make.