'the winged menace' - seagulls frighten me

Much to my amazement, I recently tracked down this ridiculous article about EVIL SEAGULLS that I penned whilst at university for the student newspaper, The Badger. £21,000 of debt well spent. Click the thumbnail to expand!

facebook ‘places’ and why it’s evil

The pointy plectrum of doom

Picture the scene. It’s an uneventful, typically ordinary day. Perhaps you’re on the bus or train, commuting to work; or perhaps you’re sitting at home, feeling your soul slowly leak out of your ear holes as you watch another episode of Britain’s Got More Talent.

For the fifth time in as many minutes you gaze wistfully at your obligatory iPhone and/or Blackberry, hoping that someone somewhere will validate your existence by calling you or sending a text. You feel a vibration somewhere in your immediate vicinity and for a brief, shining moment you think it’s your phone – but no, it’s just the bus. Or the washing machine. Or the cat.

But wait! There it is! The unmistakable sequence of beeps that means you’ve received a message! OMG! Someone loves you! Life is worth living! Notify the Pope! You pick up your phone, a smile blossoming on your face, a thousand witty replies just waiting to erupt from your fingertips – and the message reads:

Facebook

Such and Such is at Totally Cool Venue with Some Next Person – OMG FIESTAAAA tonight is gonna get MESSY lolzzzz

You sigh. Disappointment crushes your poor, withered heart. It wasn’t a text. It wasn’t even someone posting something charmingly pointless on your wall. It was a Facebook ‘Places’ notification.  

Now, for the benefit of anyone that has been living blissfully under an enormous rock, let me first begin by explaining what Facebook ‘Places’ actually is. Basically, it’s a feature that allows you to ‘check in’ to a location, thereby notifying all your ‘friends’ that you are having more fun than them – oh, and that they weren’t invited.

There are obvious flaws in this concept. The first is that it is bloody annoying and I feel I have covered that ground quite enough already. The second is that it could lead to all sorts of upset and misunderstandings. Imagine your horror at learning via your News Feed that your besties are at your favourite bar and they haven’t invited you.

They clearly hate you and they want you to know it – but why? You haven’t done anything! Perhaps you should confront them. Interrogate them. Maybe in a secure location. Maybe in an abandoned warehouse. You’ve got some rope in the car – and so on as you spiral into madness and the plot for Saw XXI is born.

The third (and possibly more pervasive) consequence of the ‘Places’ feature is that it leads to a constant meta-commentary on life. A virtual voiceover. We can’t simply live our lives anymore; we have to make it into bite-sized bulletins. We can’t have fun without pulling out our phones to tell the internet that we’re doing it. Surely, if we were really having that much fun, we wouldn’t have the time to whip out our phones and compose a status update?

You have to wonder where it all ends. Will we start checking in every time we go to the loo? ‘Lauren is at Toilet –  LOL IT’S JUST A NUMBER ONE GUYS, DON’T GET EXCITED.’

Or when we get it on? ‘Lauren is at Her Bed with 4 of your friends – Disappointing performance so far tbh.’

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of modern times that we simply can’t live our lives without constant attention from others and ‘Places’ is just a natural fulfilment of that craving, but I can’t help but find that it bugs the shit out of me.

And, on that note, I’m going to post this to my blog. Then make a status update about it. Then cry myself to sleep.

delusion: a short dialogue

So do you think he likes me?

Well, I- I really can’t say, I mean-

Because the other day he said hello to me.

Did he, oh that’s a, that’s a good sign.

Yeah, and I think he sort of winked when he said it.

Right.

But it might’ve been a sneeze, I couldn’t really tell.

I see.

But I think we have like a really good chemistry, you know? Whenever our eyes meet when we’re walking down the corridor, and he looks away and sort of… grunts.

Grunts, right.

Yes, but you know in a sort of affectionate way, if you know what I mean.

An affectionate grunt, yes.

Of course we do have quite a bit in common too, we always get the same flavour trifle off the dessert shelf- and trifle, well. Trifle’s a very important element in any successful relationship.

Of course.

Only trouble is though, I think he’s got a girlfriend.

Oh no, really?

Yeah, you know Tracy, that slag from accounts?

Bitch from hell. Never liked her.

Tell me about it. But I’ve heard they’re going through a rocky patch at the minute, so…

So you’re practically in there.

Yep, completely. In the bag, slam dunk, I’m every woman it’s all in me, voulez-vous coucher avec moi.

You go girl.

So anyway, how’s your love life?

Well you know that guy I slept with the other night when I was wasted? I think he might call!

Oh yeah?

Yeah, well it said so in the horoscope.

my big fat pop song

It must be hard for pop songwriters. Having to plumb the depths of metaphor, to strive for something new and original in a genre that has been pumped, sampled and autotuned to hell/Ke$ha and beyond - to find imaginative and different ways to say 'I'm having fun in the club, DJ play my song, on the floor etc. etc.' ad nauseam. 

Perhaps that's why artists have taken to increasingly abstract themes in a bid to make their songs more interesting. Bruno Mars is blowing himself up for his evil girlfriend (he'd catch a grenade for ya), Katy Perry is getting it on with aliens in E.T. (Kanye West really knows how to woo the ladies: 'Pockets on Shrek, rockets on deck, tell me what’s next, alien sex. I’mma disrobe you, than I’mma probe you, see I abducted you, so I tell ya what to do') and Enrique Iglesias, well. He's a man of complex subtlety."Please excuse I don't mean to be rude, but tonight I'm fucking you." 

And they say chivalry is dead.

Anyway, it's all very well to mock, but could I actually do any better? Well, I tried. Using Katy Perry's E.T. as inspiration, I penned a sexy floor-filling tune about cleaning the kitchen. Enjoy.

'Fast-acting grease-removing love'

Boy, when you put on

Those marigolds

You know you set my soul on fire

Just the thought of you

Cleaning the kitchen

It’s like a hurricane of desire

(Chorus)

Oh baby baby yeah

Let’s get antibacterial

I want your, I want your

Fast-acting grease-removing love

Yeah that’s right

Make it hot

Oops I think you missed a spot

I want your, I want your

Fast-acting grease-removing love

See, my hob, yeah

It’s really dirty from that time when I cooked rice (oooooh rice yeah)

So baby, get the Fairy out

I think that it needs a scour

You and me can clean for hours

And boy, my microwave

It’s got some

Weird mouldy shit on it

Think I need another hit

Of your fast-acting grease-removing love

Oh baby baby yeah

Let’s get antibacterial

I want your, I want your

Fast-acting grease-removing love

Yeah that’s right

Make it hot

Oops I think you missed a spot

I want your, I want your

Fast-acting grease-removing love

where is the love? co-op, apparently.

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bees!!!

oh how the mighty have fallen

So, the great world powers have finally come together to show us what we all already knew: that nobody really likes each other; they especially don’t like Prince Charles, Chancellor George Osborne has the voice of a young Charlotte Church and Silvio Berlusconi is a one-man natural disaster. Isn’t teamwork lovely?

Perhaps the highlight of the Wikileaks exposé is the reaction of the US government to the very public airing of their dirty laundry – rather than oh, say, apologise for the backstabbing, duplicitous, two-faced and generally bitchy nature of their communications, they decide to cry “tell-tale” on Julian Assange and slap him with some completely unrelated yet oddly convenient sex charges. Naturally, it would be outrageous to suggest that this is a thinly-veiled smear campaign designed to Cover Their Asses, so I won’t. 

Of  course, anyone who has seen the classic Mean Girls and Cruel Intentions will know that writing bad things down about people always comes back to bite you on the posterior. Whether in the form of Ryan Phillipe getting tragically run over by a cab, or having your ‘Burn Book’ published by Rachel McAdams, there are always grave consequences for this sort of thing. Maybe teen films from the late 90s should be required watching for budding diplomats – either that or they should all learn to delete things. Hint: it’s that one there.

In any case, the Wikileaks scandal seems to have generated an exceptional amount of fuss, and whilst some of the leaked information is genuinely damaging to international relations, a lot of it is just obvious. Here are some of my favourites from the Guardian’s coverage:

“China is ready to accept Korean unification and is distancing itself from North Korea which it describes as behaving like a "spoiled child". Cables say Kim Jong-il is a "flabby old chap" losing his grip and drinking.”

…didn’t Team America do this one already?

“An official from the Commonwealth secretariat claimed Prince Charles is not respected in the same way as the Queen and questioned whether the heir apparent should necessarily succeed his mother as the head of the Commonwealth.”

No, really, Charles, you’re great. We love you. You just stay real, okay. Keep doing you. Oh, and sorry about your Rolls Royce, by the way.

“Osborne lacked gravitas and was seen as a political lightweight because of his "high-pitched vocal delivery" according to private Conservative polling before the election.”

Well, there are two options here. Pull a David Beckham and marry a Spice Girl (I hear Mel C is free) or simply have Arnold Schwarzenegger dub over all your speeches. Win-win. 

“Cameron said that under Labour "we let in a lot of crazies and did not wake up early enough."

‘Crazies’, right. So is that a technical term, or what?