Jack Of All Trades. Apparently.

 One of the great frustrations of unemployment is the sneaking suspicion that you could do most peoples' jobs better than they can.
 It used to be just the lazy, dumb jobsworths that I saw on a day to day basis that annoyed me. The woman who would ring me from the temping agency I was with was clearly stupid and often wrong about the details of the jobs she was sending me on - which were normally long, arduous tasks that she would direct me to from a comfortable seat in an office - and there are plenty of people who would be better at her job than she was. I'm one of them.
 Today, the sneaking suspicion is creeping in that in actual fact, I can do everybody's job better than they can.
 Bear with me. It's not arrogance, it's just a sort of mass ineptitude on other peoples' part.
 Everyone in Essex was panicking today because, apparently, there was a lion on the loose.
 Although "lion spotter" isn't a job, I'm already better at it than some other person whose job it isn't, either.
 Faced with what might have been a lion, they called in an expert, who according to the Guardian website, worked at a zoo as a rhino keeper. This expert went on to say that whatever had been sighted was probably a dog, although if it was a lion, it would have to be female as it had no mane.
 In actual fact, some male lions don't have manes. The notorious Tsavo maneaters spring to mind as an example.
 So, apparently, I know more about lions than the lion expert, whose specialty was rhinos. Which means I'm also probably better at hiring experts than whoever was put in charge of the "find a lion expert" job.
 In other news, at an athletics meeting in Germany, a judge was killed by a javelin.
 Now, I know nothing about javelining. I'm not even very confident that javelining is a word. I'm completely sure that you don't treat javelinning injuries with javeliniment, either, but I'm still going to use the word because seriously, where the fuck else am I ever going to put that pun?
 Anyway, I don't know what the barrier to entry is for becoming a javelin judge. I imagine you're required to be able to 1) duck and 2) use a tape measure, but there's probably a few more complexities that I'm unaware of.
 Still, I'm confident that the first, biggest and most inflexible rule of judging a javelin contest is "watch out for the flying pointy things," a rule summarily ignored by a Mr. Deiter Strack. When asked for comment, the local athletic society said that they "would always remember Deiter Strack," which seems reasonable as you're unlikely to forget the guy you saw speared to death in front of you.
 I submit, however, that I'd be a better judge of javelin contests than the people who are currently judging them, due largely to my healthy fear of sharp, airborne death-sticks.
 To recap, I'm over-qualified as a javelin contest official, a lion expert, a guy who hires lion experts, and probably an employment agent, too.
 Why can't I get a job?!

All Work and No Spray...

 I went down to Nelson street - which sounds like a line from a bad detective novel, but isn't - to check out the "street art," yesterday.
 I put "street art" in inverted commas because apparently, the shadowy cabal of arseholes who have already ruined most of the language have now taken umbridge with the word "graffiti."
 As the great George Carlin once pointed out, emotionally damaged soldiers went from suffering "Shell Shock", a brutal, descriptive term, to "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," a soft-sounding technical term that added six syllables and a hyphen to a phrase that was already working just fine.
 The same people are all over the landscape of racial language, as well, making sure that nobody is "black" when they could be more awkwardly described as "afro-caribbean."
 It's depressing, but this sort of committee thinking is, sadly, bleeding it's way into "street art" as well.
 (Seriously, who was offended by the word "graffiti" ?! Aside from tedious busybodies who are offended by anything that doesn't involve dicking about with terminology every fifteen seconds, I can't possibly see anyone who could object to a word that comes from the Italian phrase "to scratch.")
 The graffiti in Nelson street used to be great; about a year ago, they took a dreary city block and covered it with paintings and murals that were by turns intelligent, satirical, funny, anarchic and steeped in gallows humour.
 This year, they decided to do it all again, and have ended up with some pretty squiggles.
 I was really let down by the new stuff, although I don't know why I didn't see it coming. Last year it felt spontaneous and edgy. This year there was a fanfare and a launch party and a facebook campaign like it was all in aid of a new flavour of Coke.
 Graffiti shouldn't really be organised, or sectioned off, or planned by anyone except the artist. It should feel random and chaotic and - in the best cases - like it has a statement to make.
 Last year's graffiti tackled subjects like the financial crisis and the London riots. This year's street art is mostly just random images, however well painted, that say nothing except "here is a well-painted random image."
 I left Nelson street feeling disappointed, and on my way home, I jumped a fence and climbed down under a bridge where I knew there was some old-fashioned, illegal spray painting.
 It was ten times better. It was a sprawling, chaotic, senseless car-crash of images and ideas and colours and slogans, surrounded by dingy concrete and litter and soundtracked by the cars passing overhead and the leaking of a cracked water pipe.
 It didn't make any deep political statements like some of the best graffiti can, but at least it felt organic and alive and malleable.
 This is the problem; as soon as you fence graffiti in and organise it, it becomes dull and neutered. The same people that are attempting to cripple the way we speak are apparently being let loose on what used to be a legally dubious outlaw pastime.
 Turns out, the biggest threat to graffiti artists these days isn't being arrested; it's having their balls cut off and being smothered with kindness by the kind of people who think that if we don't call a spade a spade, nobody will notice that we're being buried.
 I still like Nelson street better with some colour in it, but if all we're celebrating is random splashes of colour in urban areas, wouldn't it have been easier to stick a flower bed in the area and have done with it?

These Are Not The Headlines (3)

[Part 1]     [Part 2]


Kristen Stewart’s New Romance
Hollywood, California

 Following her painful break up from boyfriend Robert Pattinson, professional moaning bitch and sometime actress Kristen Stewart has glummed her way into the affections of Hollywood heart-throb Taylor Lautner.
 Speaking to the Associated Press on Friday, Lautner opened his pointless, charisma-vacuuming face hole to grunt, muscularly: “I’ve always had a thing for dreary, pallid women, and ever since ‘One Night In Paris’ I’ve found that whole weird half-closed eye thing super hot,” he enthused from his swirling personal cloud of hair products and steroids, whilst attempting to grow pubic hair because he’s fucking twelve.
 Ms. Stewart, meanwhile, nearly cracked a smile over the whole thing. Almost.
 The life-imitating-art nature of the relationship has caused some scientists to speculate that the barrier between fiction and reality is now in danger of unravelling at the slightest provocation.



“Panorama” Announces Rebranding
London, UK

 Longstanding news programme “Panorama” is to be re-titled, the BBC announced yesterday.
 Known for years for its serious, hard-hitting exposés and award winning investigative journalism, Panorama had increasingly struggled to stay relevant in the modern culture of slapdash scaremongering and shoddy fact checking.
 As such, the BBC has revealed that the programme will keep its air-time, theme music and most of the titular letters, but will instead henceforth be known as “Paranoia.”
 Upcoming specials will apparently include titles such as “Everything Is Going To Kill You In The Face” and “It's Behind You Now - RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”



Weather Reports To Change Precipitation Measures
London, UK

 In light of recent weather conditions and all rain-related records being broken, the Meteorological Office in Britain has declared several changes to its forecasting policies.
 Instead of the more traditional “sun/rain/cloud” predictions, all forecasts for weather will now take place in the newly invented “What is it raining like?” scale.
 According to the new scale, weather will be “Raining like…” a series of things, from “that fine, misty stuff,” through “cats and dogs” and “it was last Tuesday”, to “fuck.”
 On the (presumably forthcoming) occasion when the precipitation level rises above “raining like fuck,” all future forecasts will be relayed through a series of strangled bubbling sounds as we all drown and Kevin Costner attempts to grow gills and drink his own piss.



Taylor Lautner Saught By Animal Control
Hollywood, California

 A large team of animal control experts were last night hunting escaped celebrity Taylor Lautner after his sudden and entirely predictable transformation into a snarling lycanthrope.
 After her recent split from pasty recluse Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart had been seeking solace in the arms of her other “Twilight” co-star until, in a shock revelation, Lautner turned out to be a werewolf.
 With Lautner currently chasing cars/postmen/his own tail somewhere in the wooded sections of the Hollywood Hills, Robert Pattinson has re-emerged on the scene to rekindle his on-again/off-again romance with K-Stew. Leading analysts are predicting that this means the entire dividing line between fiction and reality is now, in the words of professor Emmett L. Brown of CALTECH, “totally fucked,” a sentiment echoed by Dr. Doom and the Professor from Gilligan's Island.

The Ballad of Audley Harrison

 I think my Olympic cynicism has been well documented enough that we needn't dwell on it.
 For the record, I found myself watching some of it, and it was entertaining.
 But I couldn't reliably tell you which parts, because they weren't all that important to me. (Also, it's 3am and I'm drunk. Suck it up, readers, you should be used to that.)
 As most people who know me will attest, I follow no sports at all, with the exception of boxing.
 I love boxing. I think it's a pure distillation of sport, in the same way that wrestling would be if it weren't a) choreographed American horseshit or b) dull homo-erotic grappling, depending on the version you see.
 I have respect for tennis, for the same reasons as boxing. Two people compete and the better man (or, officially as of this Olympics, woman) wins. I like sports distilled down to the personal level. You either beat the other guy, or you don't. There's no blaming the goalie.
 So as a boxing fan, you'd expect me to be happy about Anthony Joshua's last minute gold-medal win in the heavyweight final.
 You'd expect me to be, but I'm not.
 Because I've seen this shit happen before.
 First and foremost, I'm not knocking Anthony Joshua. I physically couldn't. Even a solid right hand on my part would probably only inconvenience him for a few milliseconds.
 What bothers me, though, is that I can remember the last time we had a great heavyweight Olympian, and his name was Audley Harrison.
 Audley Harrison was, quite simply, everything you could ever want out of a heavyweight fighter. If you sat down with a pad and a pencil and designed a heavyweight boxer, he was exactly what you'd end up with. Six feet five inches, with arms like an ape, he had the height and reach to launch awkward, long-range attacks that were hard to avoid. At the same time, he had big, broad shoulders that denoted natural physical strength, letting you know that he was capable of heavy power shots whenever he felt the urge to land them.
 In 2000, his ludicrous physical advantages secured him a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics, and the BBC fell over themselves (in a situation that presumably led to the brief creation of the CBB and the BCB) to offer Audley money and fame in exchange for exclusive rights to his fights, as well as his commentary on other bouts. He was given a million pounds straight out of the gate.
 What nobody had noticed, sadly, was that Audley Harrison was about as brave and talented in a real boxing match as Scooby Doo would have been in a scene from "The Exorcist."
 Audley Harrison, put bluntly, was scared of fighting.
 For a huge, powerfully built boxer, this was at best an unusual character flaw. After he turned professional, straight after Sydney, he had a few fights with easy opponents. I can't recall the names, but neither can anyone else.
 Audley, already, was picking easier fights than a mid-eighties Jim Davidson. He probably asked his manager at one point if Ghandi was available to spar. Audley Harrison attacked more bums than hemorrhoids. He couldn't get enough of easy, under-qualified fighters. It was Joe Louis' "bum of the month tour" without any of Louis' skill or, y'know, heavyweight championship belts.
 The fans quickly tired of this. Commentating on Harrison's meteoric rise to prominence and immediate lack of drive, the great Marvin Haggler pointed out that "It's hard to get out of bed and run in the morning when you're wearing silk pyjamas." 
 The BBC dropped Harrison about 0.9 milliseconds after the fans did, but he managed a second career phase; not content with being a disappointment, he managed to get publicity as a figure of outright ridicule.
 At 29, he was no spring chicken in boxing terms when he won the gold in Sydney. With a string of bums under his belt, he had, in the words of Kris Kristofferson, got nothing but "older and around."
 It was at this point that Audley decided to start playing the "there's still time" card, insisting that, despite his advancing years, he still had time to be the heavyweight champion of the world.
 What followed was a tedious and embarrassing litany of.... well, of tedium and embarrassment. He fought a few times, never looked dangerous or hungry, but was still genetically gifted enough to stay afloat.
 In 2009, he won the reality TV series "Prizefighter", largely because he was six-feet five and had a massive reach and some professional experience. The series was a British take on the American show "The Contender," which was masterminded by Sly Stallone, a man who, in the words of the great Jerry Boyd "couldn't even spell 'fight.'"
 With that loose victory on his side, and at the age of 39, Audley Harrison went on to engineer a farcical display against David Haye.
 I'm not exaggerating when I say that Audley Harrison was officially recorded as landing one punch in the entire, three round fight.
 Three rounds. Nine minutes, with breaks.
 And he only landed one punch.
 I'm not exaggerating when I say I could do better.
 I'm also not exaggerating when I say that David Haye was probably hit more times with a speed bag in training than he was by Audley Harrison during the actual fight he was training for.
 To make my position clear: Audley Harrison is such a pussy that if you ever shook his hand, you would legally qualify as a gynaecologist. He's so afraid of punches that he can't drink Um-Bongo with his eyes open. He panics so much at the sound of a bell ringing that he once soiled himself during Songs of Praise.
 And he is also, lest we forget, our last heavyweight boxing gold medallist.
 So, to sum up: Good work, Anthony Joshua. I congratulate you on your medal, and wish you all the success in the world.
 But I'm not getting excited just yet, because Jesus Christ, look at what became of the last guy that was in your position:

                                           

"Ted" Talk.

 So, I saw "Ted," tonight.
 Was it any good? No, not really. I thought it was alright, but overall, I was disappointed. It's about on a par with a mediocre Family Guy episode; a few decent laughs, but a lot of gags that fall flat and a lot of pointless surrealism. If you want my advice, wait for the DVD.
 Or, y'know, just download it, like you probably already did.
 That's my short review, but the more I think about it, the more it strikes me that one of two things is going on: Either I'm getting old, or comedy is getting shit.
 Ignoring the implications of the former being true, here's what bothers me about the latter:

1. Not just anybody can do comedy.

 Mark Wahlberg, despite his recent attempts, doesn't work for me in comedies.
 He's got a lot going for him; a likeable screen presence, a ludicrous movie star physique, some solid hits under his belt, but he just isn't naturally funny.
 This is something that needs to be understood a lot more thoroughly these days.
 Comedy, despite its poor relation status, is one of the hardest things for an actor to do.
 Think about all the actors who were known as comedians until they turned in great dramatic performances. Tom Hanks was just that goofy actor from "Big", one upon a time. Steve Martin got excellent reviews for his dark turn in David Mamet's "The Spanish Prisoner." Robin Williams (the artist formerly known as Mork) was genuinely creepy as a deranged stalker in "One Hour Photo." Billy Connolly in "Mrs. Brown." Richard Pryor in "JoJo Dancer." Nobody took the Fresh Prince seriously until he was in "Ali."
 The list goes on and on, but now turn it around and try to think of a respected, classically trained actor who has given a genuinely funny performance.
 I liked Brian Cox in "Super Troopers," and John Gielgud said "cock" in the original "Arthur."
 After that, personally, I'm tapped out.
 Groucho Marx, amongst others, said that if an actor can play comedy, they can play anything else with ease. Or, to put it another way: Peter Sellers could impersonate Laurence Olivier, but Olivier could never have played Clouseau.
 With all this in mind, it's time Hollywood stopped giving comedy roles to non-comic actors. Wahlberg is supposed to be a slacker and a loser in this movie - that doesn't really fly when you have 5% body fat and 15-inch biceps. Already physically miscast as a result, he just doesn't have enough natural comic ability to carry a role that already has a lot of weak lines.


2. Something happened, therefore it's funny, right?

 There's a horrible, cringeworthy idea in comedy these days that as long as we acknowledge an event in popular culture, it creates a joke.
 Seth MacFarlane has a lot to answer for on this one, but ultimately I think whichever drunk primates created the "Spoof Movie" movies are the instigators.
 Ever since the whole "Meet the Spartans/Superhero Movie/Disaster Movie" cycle of celluloid diarrhea, audiences have been taught that as long as we show something recogniseable on screen, then that's funny.
 "Ted," like some of the worst Family Guy moments, seems to agree.
 At one point, the movie lifts an entire scene from "Airplane!", shot-for-shot.
 They don't do anything different with it, they just show it to us again, recreated to the tiniest detail with different actors.
 It's not funny, any more than that scene in "Meet the Spartans" is funny where they - for no real reason - show the clip of that androgynous person who was upset that society wouldn't leave Britney alone.
 Acknowledging that there are things in the collective human awareness is not the same as saying something funny.
 I'll prove it.
 Knock knock.

 (Who's there?)

 
 Not only do these pointless non-sequiturs fall totally flat for me, they also prove distracting. The "Airplane!" scene made me wish I was watching "Airplane!", and it also made me think...


3. Audiences are treated like idiots.

 Part of what bothered me about the "Airplane!" sequence was that some people were laughing because they'd never seen it before, which was hugely frustrating. Not only was the reference not funny, but a lot of people didn't understand that it was a reference in the first place, which means the movie was getting a few sporadic laughs off of someone else's work. That's plagiarism, plain and simple.
 Aside from this, MacFarlane - who is clearly not a stupid man - is worryingly okay with giving his characters the same "ignorant and proud of it" attitude that makes his alleged intellectual opponents (people like Bill O'Reilly or Sarah Palin) so unpalatable.
 At one point, Norah Jones has a cameo, and Ted refers to her as "half Muslim." When she corrects him "Half Indian," he shrugs it off by saying "Whatever; thanks for 9/11."
 I'm struggling to find any context where that's not a comment which, taken to it's conclusion, blames all brown people for terrorism.
 I'm not against a little working class pride, by the way. I love Al Bundy and Marty Crane from "Frasier", but the glorification of the blue collared slob has apparently now become so desperate and tapped out that it has sunk to the level of glorifying racists and morons.
 Like I say, MacFarlane isn't an idiot, but maybe that's his problem. When trying to write "average guy" characters, he clearly doesn't understand that the average people who make up his core audience aren't actually a clump of overweight bigots with substance abuse problems. Ironically, his assumption that we, the blue collar audience, are all knuckle-dragging beer-swilling rednecks is, in itself, shockingly elitist.
 MacFarlane, apparently, thinks he's better than his audience.


 If someone would just make a movie where the jokes are funny, the actors delivering them are comedically talented and the audience isn't assumed to be stupid from the word "go," we might actually end up with... Shit, I don't know.
 A comedy, I guess.