Ruining Music For Everyone.

 Pedantry isn't so much a hobby as a state of mind, for me, but it can sometimes lead me to interesting diversions.

 Every so often, for example, I start taking songs completely literally. It happened the other day while I was driving home. Daft Punk came on the radio and informed me (ad nauseum) that they were "Up all night to get lucky."

 Personally, I've been up all night to get lucky a few times in my life, and I can safely say that as the evening wears on and midnight gives way to the wee wee hours, your chances of getting lucky with anything even vaguely human whittle down quite precipitously. The dregs of humanity - shambling, drunken, doughy, smeared abominations gasping desperately for air in  the evaportatingly shallow end of the human gene pool - are all that remain, and if you're still determined to get laid, you're going to have to pick one.

 In reality, you want to be out until about ten o'clock to get lucky, and if unsuccessful, salvage some dignity and try again another night.

 Daft Punk don't do this. They stay up all night to get lucky, and more fool them. They may as well change the song to "We're going home with a munter."

 I changed the station and The Police informed me that every little thing she does is magic.

 That would, if you think about it, be incredibly wearying. It's not just that a couple of things she does are magic. Sting is very clear in his typically lazy and repetitive songwriting style that every little thing - every little thing - every little, every little, every little (every little!) thing she does is magic.

 Living with a woman like that would be its own kind of hell. Handjobs that finish with the sudden appearance of a bouquet of flowers. The inability to put on a hat for fear of rabbits. Having to blow your nose on really really long strings of colourful hankies. I'd probably end up stabbing the bitch.

 I got home and, as it's Christmas, was singing Christmas songs to myself as I did the washing up when I realised that Nat 'King' Cole was a little churlish. He was offering a simple phrase, to kids from one to ninety-two. Although it'd been said, many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you.

 All well and good, but if he had any relatives or acquaintances who were 93 or over, they could realistically assume they were being told to get fucked. Then again, old 'King' Cole was a petulant and shallow man. When he fell in love, it would be forever, or he'd never fall in love. This seems like an emotionally under-developed and insecure caveat, betraying an unwillingness to give freely of himself or open up to people.

 It's probably why he was single.

 Don't even get me started on the fact that there are YouTube videos with the written lyrics to a song called "Unforgettable."

 Maybe I'll stick to instrumentals for a while.

The Walking Dead Has No Braaaaiiinnns.

[spoiler spoilers fucking SPOILERS]


 Internet comedy hero Seanbaby recently pointed out that Grand Theft Auto 5, whilst being a technical masterpiece, isn't actually much fun to play. It's just too involved and detailed to actually be enjoyable.

 I'm having the opposite problem with The Walking Dead; I enjoy watching it, but Jesus, it's awful by any objective measure you care to use.

 This was brought home to me after the mid-season finale (which I've seen through the medium of time travel and not internet piracy, honest) that airs tonight in the UK.

 Spoilers ahead, obviously.

 I'm saying it one more time: Spoilers for the mid-season 4 break in The Walking Dead.

 (Hershel gets his head chopped off and Michonne kills the Governor, and the baby might be dead too. There. I fucking warned you, if you kept reading it's your own fault.)

 I had to blow those spoilers early on because I'm acutely aware of being a Walking Dead fan bitching on the internet, and even a quick trip to the IMDb message boards for the show will make you realise that Walking Dead fans are some of the most bitchy, unpleasant TV viewers out there. Also, at least some of them are forehead slappingly stupid. I've seen two threads arguing that Hershel and the Governor will come back, respectively, despite Hershel having been graphically decapitated and the Governor being left with a fatal chest wound in the middle of a field full of zombies and then shot in the face for good measure.

 So I'm trying not to be a whinging dick, but I still think this show is objectively crap, however much fun I'm having watching it. Why? I'm glad you asked!

 The end of this half of the season sees the final, apocalyptic battle for the Woodbury Prison between our heroes on Team Rick and the psychotic, one-eyed Governor who wants to steal the prison out from under them.

 Which is great, and all, except that this was supposed to be the end of Series 3.

 The third series spent its entire run-time building up a massive confrontation between the two sides, established the Governor as a credible threat that needed to be eliminated, and then in the big finish the writers took an unusual approach by having the bad guy fuck off in a van for no reason.

 It pissed me off at the time and it still pisses me off now. There was no payoff for series 3, no resolution, no catharsis. Just a damp fizzle because apparently the actor who plays the Governor wasn't busy and could do a few more weeks next year if they dragged out his arc.

 This series, meanwhile, has been a total waste of time up to the midpoint. The first half of this half-series (I know, I know...) dealt with an outbreak of a killer disease at the prison. The outbreak of a deadly virus during a show set after the outbreak of an even more deadly virus seemed to be going over old ground, at best, but what it left viewers with was essentially a fly-on-the-wall look at what an old people's home must be like in winter as everyone sat around, hoping not to die of the flu.

 Just when they couldn't flog a dead (or at least poorly) horse any more, the Governor was re-introduced and we then spent another two tedious episodes finding out what he'd been up to since we last saw him.

Kris Kristofferson tribute act, mostly.

 Having introduced a new set of characters to be eaten and shot (because AMC pays good money for the actors you recognise, dammit, and therefore refuses to kill off any more than one per series), the Governor comes back to steal the prison, this time with a tank, and we finally get the resolution of a story arc that's been causing the whole show to spin its wheels for months. We, as viewers, gained nothing except what we were owed from the shitty climax of last year's story.

 Even ignoring the fact that we've been conned into watching half a series of filler just to get a 12-month-old payoff, the writing for the Governor episodes was laughably shite. He murders one guy for asking him to help run things, then murders someone else a week later so that he can run things. At no point does anyone notice that there have been suspicious deaths ever since the new guy with the eye patch appeared, and by the end of the most recent episode he's somehow convinced everyone to form a militia. He then gets stabbed in the back in a moment of lazy deus ex machina during one of The Walking Dead's patented improbable fist fights.

 Seriously, is anyone else bothered by the fights?! A few episodes back, skinny sheriff-turned-pig-farmer Rick beat the hell out of Tyrese, a man who outweighs him by a conservatively estimated four metric tonnes. This is the same Tyrese who goes on to take out twenty zombies with a hammer, but Rick batters him senseless without any effort.

 Flash forward to tonight's episode and Rick launches a surprise attack on the Governor and knocks him down, and then, from this effectively winning position, proceeds to get his ass handed to him. Either the Governor is the one-eyed bastard spawn of Bruce Lee and Ivan Drago, or that was just fucking stupid. And seeing as the Governor lost his eye in a closely-fought battle with Michonne (a slim woman half his size) I'm going with "fucking stupid." Like everything in The Walking Dead, any character's ability in a fight is exactly what it needs to be to propel the script, coherence and logic be damned.

 Michonne gets on my tits anyway. She just doesn't look comfortable with that sword. I get that the crossover area for trained black female ninja actors is probably pretty small, but she still looks like she's trying to remember which is the pointy end every time she draws it, and it shatters all realism for me.

 Y'know, all realism in this show about a zombie apocalypse.

 Fuck it, I'm going to bed.
 

Students Have It Worse...

 Dear Dr. Jones,

 Whilst your letter of last week caused something of a stir and raised some valid greivances, it must be pointed out that your work as a teacher has been, if anything, substandard in recent years.

 You rarely attend your classes and, when asked why, give the same tired excuses. "Stowed away on a Nazi submarine" this and "gunfight in Cairo" that.

 It wouldn't be such a problem, Dr. Jones, if it hadn't clearly affected your teaching methods. Some of the work turned in by pupils of yours has been ludicrous. "Punching Turbanned Foreigners During Car Chases" should never be the title for a thesis, and neither should "Teaching Asian Children How To Drive" or "Pointy Things Best Avoided - From Poison Darts To REALLY Poisoned Darts."

 Very few of your students seem to be learning anything about Archaeology. One pupil seemed to be thinking along the right lines, only to be corrupted by your unusual attitude - see the term paper "Neanderthal Man In Northern Europe And How To Fight One If It Escapes From A Glacier."

 It's not that your work on behalf of the University isn't appreciated, Dr. Jones - you are held in notoriously high regard by almost every attractive female professor in Europe, so you must be doing something impressive - but we have to ask that you attempt to focus your teaching more on the traditional archaeological curriculum than on your outlandish exploits.

 Oh, and could you please do us a favour and try to attain the Voynich Decoder Stone? Apparently it's in remote and windswept Castle Dread in the Austrian Alps, in the hands of Baron Von Murderhoffen and his impressively proportioned adopted Swedish triplets. We'd send Prof. Higgins but he's busy with the pep rally until Tuesday.

 Best,

 Barnett College Board of Directors.

Teachers Have It Tough...

To the Faculty and Staff,

 Does anyone else have to put up with this shit?!

 Seriously, I’m a professor of archaeology and nowhere in the application process did it say I’d be required to get chased by spear-wielding natives or thrown into derelict tombs.

 I assumed everyone was suffering the same sorts of problems, until a conversation last week when I learned that Professor Morgan in the biology lab hasn’t been thrown off a cliff or shot by Nazis once this semester.
I’m beginning to suspect I’m the victim of some elaborate prank. Did anyone else actually have to pass a whip exam before starting their job?! Prof. Brody told me it was standard university policy, but I’m yet to see a single other teacher use so much as a riding crop.

 Since starting my job here I’ve been sealed in rooms full of snakes - I hate snakes! - and nearly crushed by an enormous boulder. I’ve almost had my heart torn out by a deranged Indian mystic, and been present at supernatural ceremonies that literally melted the faces of everyone else in attendence.

 I frankly refuse to believe any of the above has happened to any of the economics or English professors. If this is not, as I have been led to believe, a normal part of teaching then I demand at least a 5% raise and ideally a new hat - I’ve been wearing this one for years.

 Yours expectantly,

 Prof. Henry Jones Jr.

Nerding It Up On The Ollll' Nerdbox...

I'm Apparently Not Enough Of A Nerd.

 According to the always-reliable medium of Facebook quizzes, I've only seen 46 of the 100 films I should see before I die. Which is actually quite comforting, because it means I'm not even half way to the grave, yet.

 I've also read an embarrassingly small number of the 100 books I should read before I run down the curtain and join the choir invisible. I'm not sure what my actual score was on that quiz, but it felt like about ten titles. I was sufficiently shamed that I didn't even make a note of it, or perhaps couldn't, because I'm clearly some sort of illiterate dullard.

 (This blog is actually composed by having a room full of monkeys randomly bash some laptops. Don't act like you didn't already suspect as much.)

From one of the 100 things you really should see before you die.

 Still, the choices, at least from a movie perspective, were a little odd. "Aliens," but not "Alien," which was the reverse of the treatment given to "The Godfather," which got a mention to the exclusion of its own sequel. Presumably "Part II" was bumped off to make room for "Ratatouille" or never-heard-of-it Julianne Moore film "The Kids Are All Right."

 It could be my wounded nerd pride over my score, but I can't help but feel that the last thing the internet (especially the Facebook part of the internet) needs is another way to form cliques. Sure, it's nice when people have shared cultural experiences, but aren't these quizzes just a way of saying that we should all watch the same films and read the same books?

 Aside from making us all into pod people, expelled in our identical outfits from the hatcheries of the ubiquitous, soulless Combine*, it seems to run contrary to the very principles of online communication. Sites like Facebook, and the whole of the web in general, give us unparalleled access to things we'd never normally have experienced; people we'd never normally have talked to and opinions we'd never normally encounter. Computers allow us to talk to people on the other side of the world, and if you chose to do so and asked someone what their favourite film was, wouldn't it be kind of nice to get an answer that wasn't on some preconceived list? 

At the same time, not having seen any of the films or read any of the books would mean you were either ignorant or, worse, a hipster, but it's still worth pointing out that individuality is an important thing that should be encouraged instead of used as an online cultural guilt trip. Having read exactly the same books as everyone else you know doesn't make you cool; it makes you a religious fundamentalist. A little bit of straying from life's curriculum can do you a lot of good.

 I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it's great to have moments in cinema or literature that everyone recognises and responds to...

 ...it's also good for everyone to have their own interests and their own knowledge. Which means you should read a few of those books. And see, maybe, forty six of those movies.

 Tops.

 

*For those who got the reference, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was on the film list, but not the book list. Criminal.

I'm Really Good At Mediocre Sex!

According to a recent study by sexologists, we all have shitty jobs except them.

 According to another recent study by the self-same smug bastards, hairy palms and blindness are signs of attractiveness, especially on people with clipboards.

 ....Alright, seriously now. I'm well aware of the stigma sexologists face in their work; when Alfred Kinsey did the first serious work on human sexual behaviour, everyone assumed he was a pervert with nothing to contribute to science or psychology, when in fact we owe him a debt in both. He went on to be played in a movie by Liam Neeson which I haven't seen, but I imagine includes a lot of scowling and gunfights in between the research.

He will look for you. He will find you. He will take copious notes on your sex life.

 So sex researchers aren't all perverts (the fact that Kinsey once stuck the bristle-end of a toothbrush somewhere unspeakable is what statisticians would call an anomaly*) and sometimes they turn up some interesting stuff.

 Recently, sexologists have discovered that teenagers don't really know how to have sex, but that, counter-intuitively, they don't know how to do it in entirely the opposite direction to every previous generation's teenaged ineptness.

 I've long had a problem with teenagers looking at porn. Not because I disagree with it, but because they can do it so much easier than I could when I was their age. Guys of my generation had to work for their smut, finding it in hedges or watching it on a muted TV with the brightness turned right the way down. Kids today can just watch it on their smart-phone without lifting a finger.

 ...That might not have been the best choice of words.

 Still, there has been a sort of karmic comeuppance (again, bad phrasing...) in that I, and I'm willing to bet most other males my age, viewed porn as something rare and unusual. As a result, it took on an almost mythic quality. Kids today, it turns out, are so de-sensitised to pornography that they think it depicts what sex is actually like, and boy, are they wrong.

 More and more, according to this article, kids are trying to practice sex the way they see on the internet - mechanically, and with the sort of grim, relentless pounding that they're used to seeing. Girls, meanwhile, assume they're meant to lie/kneel there and make unconvincing yelping sounds while their lonely clitori go ignored and their boyfriends whack away at them like an industrial sewing machine. As a result, these teenagers really aren't having much fun.

 Speaking for myself, I always knew porn was artificial. I didn't feel too terrible about the fact that, unlike those guys do way up on the screen, I didn't have a ten-inch cock. I always suspected that forty minutes of relentless, gritted-teeth thrusting was slightly outside the norm. I knew porn sex was unrealistic in the same way that Bruce Willis jumping off a roof tied to a fire hose was unrealistic; theoretically possible, sure, but unlikely to ever happen to me.

 So, it's true that I might be a little bitter about how easily the kids today - even the lonely, geeky, un-fucked ones like me - can get instant access to HD quality streaming pornography, but I can console myself with the fact that my generation is having way more fun with sticky, awkward, ten minute, completely un-sexy sex than any of the kids are apparently having with their pneumatic failures.

 Sometimes, not being a teenager anymore has its benefits.




*Google it yourself, even thinking about it makes me wince

That Time of the Month...

 Christmas seems to start sometime around July these days, and consist of dazzling, twinkly-lit fanfare leading up to a crushingly mediocre experience for everyone over the age of twelve.

 I'm not going to rail about the commercialisation of Christmas, because I'm not religious, and I'm not going to complain about the shitty music, because I think Slade probably need the income at this point. Everyone is sick of the hype already, so I have nothing to say on that score, and while I'm at it, yes, it is cold out, and no, that's not newsworthy.

 Generally speaking, even someone with my seemingly superhuman bile duct can get a bit jaded about being jaded about Christmas, so it's with some gratitude that my hackles have been awoken from their festive hibernation by a recent phenomenon, imported from the States.

 Depending on who you ask, there's a very specific, doom-laden moment in the run-up towards Christmas. Referred to as "Black Friday," it is the American tradition of having a massive sale at the end of November in the run-up to Christmas. This has been adopted by people in the UK as being the last shopping Friday before Christmas, because the stores are comparably nuts on both days. The internet, not to be outdone, has decided that Black Friday is the last Friday when things can be ordered online with a guaranteed Christmas delivery.

 And I'm here to call those people pussies.

 Christmas shopping is always a nightmare, to the point where anyone shopping in the week before the 25th should list "shotgun and riot shield" as their first purchases. Even my own risky strategy of doing all my holiday shopping at 11:59pm on the 24th of December in a motorway services has seen some pretty long queues, I can tell you.

 Still, shops are busy all through Christmas and again in January, and it's to be expected. There are some of us, however, who know a different Black Friday. A darker Black Friday. A Friday as pitch black as the darkest night of a lost soul in an Anaretian coal mine.

 I'm talking, of course, about the bar staff.

 For years in Britain, if not America, Black Friday was known in the hospitality trade as the last drinking day before Christmas. It was (and is) an absolute nightmare from start to finish, as every office and 9-5 business decides to go out on the town in the festive spirit before their week off, and people who should never, EVER have been let in on the secret of booze decide that it's party time.

 This is the night that a thousand people in a thousand bars decide that it might be fun to experiment with these so-called Jagerbombs the kids drink. This is the night when every man who wants to be Don Draper decides to punch his boss and fuck his secretary, or, if he's drunk enough, vice versa. This is the night Doris from accounting has her first sherry since 1977 and immediately vomits it all over the floor, walls and a plethora of irritating festive-jumper-wearing assholes. (Every cloud...)

 Of course, in the morning, these people will be hungover, remorseful, and, at worse, fired.

 Then they get on with their lives, while the bar staff spend the next day cleaning, nursing injuries and finding random objects and bodily fluids in new and unusual corners of a public saloon. They also don't get a week off over Christmas in which to recover from it.

 Black Friday in a department store is busy and tiring. I know. I've worked it. Christmas shopping is frustrating and exhausting, too. But it also has an end-point. It doesn't drag on until 3am and finally implode in a series of sobbing damsels in laddered tights and the sozzled jousting of battered knights. I know about those, too, because I've worked plenty of them.

 The "Black Friday" store-workers think of is easy. It's a whelp. A runt. It's a pretender to the throne. American bars, being full of Americans, probably don't even have an equivalent night because they drink like old people fuck, although god help the poor bastards who have to man the pumps if Americans ever decide to try a night of British-style bacchanalia.

 The real Black Friday - the hardest Black Friday - belongs to the bar staff and bouncers in every bar in Britain, and I think it's about time we took the phrase back. You think your shopping was hard work? Try working in a bar. You'll have to get it all done in desperate snatches before nightfall.

 When the real work starts.

Because This Meme Hasn't Been Done Enough...

First They Came For The Superheroes...

 Here's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever type: I'm quite looking forward to the new Captain America movie.

 This was unlikely for a number of reasons. Firstly, Captain America is, without putting too fine a point on things, a bit crap. There's an old joke that Action Man is the perfect American symbol because he has fifty guns and no dick, and Captain America is worryingly close to that trope; having been injected with the the Super Soldier Serum, he's as strong, fast and agile as it is humanly possible to be, which is basically just a fancy ad for steroid abuse. In reality, steroids replace the male body's need to create testosterone, leading to shrinking testicles in users. Whatever they shot Cap up with, he must have balls like raisins.

 "I swear there used to be something down here..."

 Steroid use and naff, star-spangled jingoism aside, it's also fair to say that the first Captain America movie of the modern era sucked. (For past eras, check out movies about Captain America and his rocket bike, or the ultra-low budget early 90s debacle with J.D. "Catcher in the Rye" Salinger's kid as Cap. Go ahead, I'll wait.) Chris Evans' first outing in the role was a thinly plotted World War 2 pastiche that somehow managed to be more cartoonish and silly than the other Marvel movies about buff Norse gods in Mexico or drunk playboys with rocket boots.

 To take a story set during an actual, real world conflict with history-changing ramifications and have it seem so utterly silly felt not just wasteful, but mildly insulting. Captain America is, at his best, a character rife with notions of patriotism and old fashioned values, and to have him involved in laser battles during the forties with Agent Smith from The Matrix wasn't really up to scratch.

 Fast-forward a few years (well, about 70, from Cap's perspective) and with the epochal success of The Avengers, it's time for round two of the individual Marvel movies, and this time, they're actually in danger of doing something interesting with Captain America. Dispensing, mercifully, with the period setting, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" seems, at least from the first trailer, to be addressing some important questions. Should America be allowed to police the world? What is the real price of freedom? How far are we (the western world) justified in protecting our interests?

 Cap's ideas on this are refreshingly simple and actually come across as quite shocking to modern ears. When Nick Fury points out how many threats the U.S. Government "neutralises" before they become a problem, Cap warily points out that punishment is supposed to come after the crime, not before. In another tense exchange, we hear him tell Fury that America isn't running the world through freedom, but through fear.

 To hear issues like this being debated on the big screen by a character that can all too easily be a mindless shill for "the American way" (lookin' at you, Kal-El) is refreshing and, to my mind, actually quite exciting. Although in the interests of fairness to writers past, this isn't the first time Captain America has been used as both an idealist and a man out of his own time to deal with controversial topics. Comics writers were accused ten years ago of turning Cap into a "traitor" by sections of the right-wing media in the States when stories saw him trying to address more than just the gung-ho, flag waving side of the War on Terror. Still, it's nice to see deeper themes being explored by such a populist and potentially lightweight character, albeit explored in a movie with super powers and giant explosions.

 Incidentally, pretty much the whole internet has pointed out that in the trailer, someone brings down the S.H.I.E.L.D heli-carrier. This is the second gigantic, invisible, flying super-base S.H.I.E.L.D has lost in as many movies. Who's funding this?! Tax-payers in the Marvel Universe must be asking some serious questions.

 Unfortunately for everyone not living in the Marvel Universe, the themes which the trailer is hinting may lie at the heart of "The Winter Soldier" might be too little, too late. It's been said that armies have a habit of perfecting the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one, and it's broadly true - how many impressive tank divisions did NATO and the Soviet Union build by the end of the cold war, only for everyone to piss off and fight the sandy desert where they couldn't be used?! Along these lines, Cap might be asking the right questions a generation too late.

 What's certain is that level-headed skepticism by those who appreciate the true cost of war would have been useful sometime around September 12th, 2001. Due to the terrifying march of history, however, that was twelve years ago and we (Britain, America et al) decisively fucked the War on Terror in almost every available direction. This includes the War on Iraq, which didn't have much to do with terror but was kind of in the neighbourhood and seemed like a nice place to drop bombs, anyway.

 We're so far past the point where questioning the wisdom of U.S. (or western) millitary action will do any good that we're all, as a society, into the post-game analysis, and what it's revealing isn't pretty. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, whose whistleblowing revealed fifteen thousand ignored civilian casualties from U.S. actions, not to mention vast numbers of hushed-up "friendly fire" botches, is now in jail for daring to make a stink. Barrett Brown, who founded a think-tank designed to make sense of the mountains of troubling information being leaked about just what-the-fuck western millitaries are up to, is currently in jail and looking down the business end of a hundred year sentence. Julian Assange, the poster boy for trying to tell the world just how much illegal, repugnant shit governments (particularly the U.S. government) get up to is probably going to spend the rest of his life in hiding.

 Despite Captain America's entirely rational and much needed objections to the war on terror, the truth is that the game has moved on, and now it's becoming the war on people. Were he not a fictional character and a superhero asking questions in a millitary base and, instead, a real-world reporter, Cap's questions about the nature of crime and punishment and ruling through fear could be enough to get him locked up. The only person who seems to have gotten away with publicly asking American intelligence agencies what the fuck they're up to in recent years is Angela Merkel, and she only gets to ask questions because people would probably notice if the leader of Europe's biggest economic power went walkies to Gitmo in the middle of the night.

 It's quite ironic that the only major figure who seems to share Captain America's concerns about American intervention is the leader of Germany, a position that the good Captain hasn't always been in such strict alignment with.

 Whilst I'm heartened by the more serious tone of the new Captain America movie, and glad that someone has had the balls to raise intelligent, liberal questions in a smash-bang popcorn movie, I can't help but feel that things are so much worse than Cap fears. The more terrifying aspects of defense policy in the western world are no longer aimed at third-world nations, but instead at our own people. We have throwaway drones and long-distance missiles with which to blithely maim unsuspecting shepherds, but it takes the full might of our governments to make sure anyone who objects to that is silenced.

 By the time Captain America gets around to worrying about what western governments are doing to their own people, he'll probably be sharing a cell with Chelsea Manning.

On The Perils Of Internet Dating.

 Even in the future year of 2013, when rocket cars and human cloning are common, there’s still something of a stigma about internet dating.

 It can’t be because it’s geeky; the whole world is now officially the geekiest it’s ever been. We’re all using the internet at any given moment, and there are lost tribes in the darkest Amazon jungles that still made the effort to see The Avengers.

 Maybe it’s because online dating smacks of desperation. It’s basically an admission that you’re incapable of meeting people in the real world because you’re socially inept.

 There’s a kernel of truth in all this, but more on that later. First and foremost, I have excuses to make, namely that I work nights in a bar, so seldom get to socialise in the evenings.

 As a result, I’m on an internet dating website, and I’m here to tell you people that it’s every bit as soul destroyingly awful as you suspect it would be.

 This is because…

1. The Only People Who Message You Will Be Hideous Swamp-Donkeys.

 I doubt that I can solve every issue besetting modern feminism in one drunken blog post, but one of the most frustrating things about women’s liberation is the constant, defeatist hypocrisy. I ended up shouting at my car radio the other day because a plumbing advert aimed at women said that they should call whatever firm it was “if the man in your life is too busy” to fix a leak. Clearly, this is because women are too stupid to understand the concept of a spanner, and because they probably lack opposable thumbs.

 In the non-patronising world outside of advertising, women are capable of doing plenty of things off their own back, including sending the first message on a dating site. But damned if they will. They’ll sit there like a group of preening Sirens, luring in the desperate, stupid, horny men of the internet – otherwise known as “the men of the internet.”

 The only exceptions to this rule are the women who aren’t getting any attention, due to what could politely be described as unfortunate genetics. These women will sally out into the wider online dating world and send the first message, meaning that as a guy, I’ll often get an e-mail saying “Hefty101 wants to meet you!”

 The response to this is almost always the same. My first thought is “Oooh! Cool. Someone wants to meet me,” followed by my clicking the link and then “My eyes! My eyes! Sweet Jesus, my eyes! How badly did that woman offend the God of Faces to earn such punishment?!”

2. It Makes You Feel Like A Hideous Swamp Donkey.

 When messaged by such shudder-inducing HippoCrocoPigs, there’s an immediate moral dilemma. On the one hand, basic politeness compels you to respond to someone who has taken the time to send you a message. On the other hand, responding to the message would only prolong the encounter with someone you have absolutely no intention of dating, romancing, or not-chasing-out-of-town-with-a-pitchfork.

 Most people, faced with this crisis, ignore the messages from people they’re not attracted to, which is perfectly normal and understandable.

 It’s also crushing to your own self-esteem when you send messages and hear nothing back. You start using these sites as a normal person, only to slowly become a gibbering, paranoid mess convinced of your own hideousness and the hopelessness of your ever getting laid again unless it’s at a conference for blind, deaf mutes with head colds. You’re clearly only on an internet dating site because you’re pathetic and unloveable and now you can’t even manage to attract a member of your own worthless, date-proof kind because you’re too short and have a shitty job and- heyy! A message! I wonder if-

 Nope. Swamp Donkey.  

3. It Turns Everyone Involved Into Objectively Horrible People.

 I’m willing to bet that even the most hard-hearted of people wouldn’t point-blank ignore someone who was speaking to them unless there was a good reason. Even if a member of the terminally aesthetically challenged struck up a conversation in a bar or at a bus stop, it would be bad form to just quietly back away without making eye contact.

 As established, dating sites foster exactly this kind of behaviour, and it makes everyone, male and female, into judgemental dicks. I refuse to message anyone who uses the word “banter,” just because it gets on my nerves. I’ve personally implemented a “no Welsh people” rule just because it’s £6.50 to cross the bridge and I can’t be arsed with paying it. It’s only a forty minute drive to Cardiff, but no, I’m too cheap, and next time someone says you can’t put a price on love I’ll be quick to correct them.

 If the fact that everyone involved in online dating was encouraged to be shallow, cheap and judgemental wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the people who are stunningly deluded. Women who are 5’ 2” and a size sixteen list their body type as “average.” They may well be average for their lumpen, pendulous, wheezing families, but to the rest of us they’re kidding themselves.

 Men are even worse in that they’ve managed to weaponise this type of delusion. I’m told of male profiles that list the exact details of the women who will be considered – “nothing above a size eight” etc – and these profiles almost always belong to a bloke with a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb.This kind of ridiculousness makes everyone else feel justified for being an emotionally numbed asshole, and the whole cycle starts over.

4. It’s So Fucking Laborious.

 Have you ever tried to flirt with someone over what is, essentially, e-mail?! There’s a reason we largely stopped doing that as a species. It’s slow, there’s no guarantee that the other person will actually get your message in anything like a timely fashion – turning a sharp, clever comeback into a day-old non-sequitur – and sending someone a more honest message (“I like the looks of your face and body, you don’t seem retarded and I promise I’m not a serial killer, can I have your number?”) doesn’t seem to yield many results.

 This means you often find yourself wading through awkward flirting and stilted, written-word conversations towards a distant shore of maybe buying someone a drink, and all of a sudden you’re nostalgic for the good old days of your youth when a Bacardi Breezer and a smile would earn you a fumble with an orange-skinned dullard from Essex. 

 In short, internet dating is a horrible, judgemental, soul-crushing slog that serves only to remind you of how cheap, shallow and unattractive you are. It’s an exhausting, grinding, frustrating, emotionally sterile facsimile of the romantic experience, and the really worrying thing is, it might actually be the future. As we all work longer hours, spend more time communicating solely via apps and work ever harder to surround ourselves with our impersonal technological cocoons, we might soon enough all be reduced to internet dating.

 Take my advice. Go and hit on someone in the pub before it comes to that. For old times’ sake.

What Obi-Wan Was Really Like...

I'm Getting Into Red, Skintight Leather...

 Back when I was still young enough to buy comics with a straight face, I read the Marvel vs. D.C. comics crossover series. It was a tame and entirely rigged match between superheroes from Marvel (responsible for every successful movie hero of the last ten years) and D.C. (Batman, Superman, nobody else.)

 Despite the overall laziness of the story, each issue was the best chance the respective companies would have to sell comics to "the enemy," ie: people who bought comics published by the competition. D.C. attempted this by showing adverts for things you wouldn't understand unless you'd been reading comics since the thirties. Marvel did it with bold, brilliant one-page posters outlining the basics of their characters. The Incredible Hulk, for example, pictured under a screed in which his dialogue changed from GREEN VIOLENT CAPITALS ABOUT SMASHING THINGS to much smaller, frightened text as the rational man inside tried to control the monster.

 One that always stuck with me was Daredevil. His ad consisted of an image of the character, surrounded by the combination threat/promise: "I know all about your hidden guns. I know your knives before they're ever pulled. I know your arsenic lies before they squirm free from your sweaty lips. I know all this and I'm not afraid. You may have escaped the law, but you won't escape me. The man without fear is back."

 This was, I hope everyone will agree, a great piece of writing and completely bad ass. It gave me a soft-spot for the character even though I never actually read Daredevil comics. I still took the time to find out who he was - a blind lawyer by the name of Matt Murdock who, due to typically magic toxic waste, lost his sight but gained supernatural hearing, smell, touch, balance etc. He knows your arsenic lies because he can hear your heart beating and knows that it beats harder when you're not telling the truth, for example. Like most Marvel characters, he was flawed and interesting, and with the intro I'd seen, how could he not be cool?

 The answer to "how could Daredevil not be cool" came in 2003 with a painfully bad movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck. Pretty much everything about it was terrible. Lazy plotting, glaring continuity errors, and casting that was way off the mark and faintly racist - Michael Clarke Duncan played The Kingpin, an enormous, obnoxiously wealthy crime lord. In the comics, this huge, corpulent, corrupt figure is a white guy because stinking rich, crooked, fat businessmen always are. They cast Duncan instead because he was "the only actor big enough," which was clearly bullshit as Duncan was actually a relatively normal 6' 5". Having stamped the subtle social commentary out of the Kingpin by casting a black actor, they set to work making Daredevil as boring as possible. They also tried to portray his powers to us, the viewer, on screen., which was never going to work as Daredevil's powers hinge on the fact that he can't view a screen himself. Trying to visually convey what it's like to be a blind superhero is an idea so stupid I think just typing it has automatically qualified me for the next series of Geordie Shore.

 Ten years down the line, and with nerds now angry at Ben Affleck for other reasons, Marvel has announced a new Daredevil Netflix series, and, because the internet is fueled entirely by outrage and porn, people on the internet are outraged. And probably naked, but one problem at a time.

 Fans seem to be annoyed that such a high-profile Marvel character has been demoted to TV. He joins other second-string Marvel heroes like Iron Fist, a largely forgotten martial arts hero, and Luke Cage, whose powers included not having a code name, dressing like a gay backing dancer and baffling, faux-pimp dialogue:

 Compared to characters like these, Daredevil does indeed seem to be getting short shrift, but in actual fact, TV might be the best thing that could happen to Daredevil.

 One thing fans need to realise is that his power is objectively bloody stupid. He's blind. If you put him in the hacky old "cut the red wire to defuse the bomb" situation, he'd be fucked.* Sure, he has a kind of bat-like sonar and spatial awareness, but as mentioned above, it's impossible to portray that in a visual medium without looking ridiculous. His limitations have always made Daredevil a small-time hero, and that's actually part of his charm.

 In the comics, he comes off as a Robin Hood figure, living and working in the Hell's Kitchen area (this was written into his character before Hell's Kitchen was gentrified and became an artist haven) and often representing the poor free of charge in his legal practice.

 Comedian Reginald D. Hunter (amongst others) has pointed out that Batman is inherently right-wing, using his vast wealth and technology to kick the shit out of purse snatchers and street-level junkies. Daredevil doesn't suffer this criticism because he's a man of the people, and behaves as such. He works best when he's prowling the streets and brawling, instead of saving the universe in a histrionic mega-budget spectacular. He's not a Norse god or a billionaire in a rocket suit; he's a handicapped lawyer trying to make a difference.

 The recent renaissance in quality TV means that it's no longer a medium to be dismissed, and shows like "Arrow" prove that superheroes can be done small. If anything, a large number of the more human, real-world superheroes might benefit from smaller scale, character focused outings. Did we really need a Punisher movie with John Travolta in it?

 Instead of howling about their hurt feelings over some perceived mistreatment of their character, Daredevil fans really should be giving this one a chance.

 Daredevil is going to be on TV. It can't be any worse than the last adaptation. It's being made by Marvel, who know what they're doing. I know all this, so I'm not afraid.

 The man without fear is back.


*Why don't more bombers use wires that are all the same colour?!

Sometimes Even I Don't Find Things Funny.

 In case you're a functional human being, and not a constantly simmering pot of barely contained, Daily Mail-reading moral outrage waiting for the chance to boil over, here's a story about some kids being stupid that most people will find genuinely offensive:

 Two students at the University of Chester went to a fancy dress party as the Twin Towers, complete with exploding plane motif. They won a prize for "best costume."

 Obviously, this is distasteful. Repugnant, even. I'd go so far as to say that they both deserve a slap and to be ostracised completely by their peers. To my mind, they dug the hole a lot deeper with their statement, which ran:

"We never meant to be offensive, but we apologise if any offence was caused. The idea was to depict a serious, modern-day horror that happened in our lifetime and was not intended as a joke."

 This is obviously a cowardly attempt to avoid blame and recrimination when they suddenly realised that most people don't find mass death within recent memory particularly funny. Go back and look at the picture - is that two young ladies making a serious political point about terrorism, or two pissed tarts feeling smug about how "edgy" they're being?

 The brain-shattering stupidity of the average student aside, however, a serious point has inadvertently been raised. Namely, at what point does it become alright to laugh at a subject? Prince Harry was pilloried in the press for turning up at a party dressed as a Nazi, but it's worth bearing in mind that he arrived at that party thirty seven years after Mel Brooks released "The Producers," which deals in part with an all-singing, all-dancing celebration of the Third Reich.

 What's the difference? Is it that The Producers was deliberately meant to offend? The same argument could be made for Harry's costume. Is it that Mel Brooks is a Jewish war veteran, and Harry is a member of an unelected ruling class of German descent? Somehow, this makes it feel like Brooks has earned the right to make the Nazis a subject of fun, whereas Harry, long removed chronologically, is still somehow too close to the subject for most people.

 The only possible defense I can see for the University of Chester students is that, if they are eighteen years old, they would have been six years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks. They probably don't remember, and honestly may not fully grasp the horror of the event because they're young and too ignorant, which once again speaks volumes about the education system of which they are still currently a part.

 By this same logic, much like Prince Harry, they haven't earned the right to make jokes, yet. Whilst I'm all for making jokes about basically anything, a key point is that a joke should actually be funny. In times of crisis, gallows humour sees a lot of people through. This means that even during the worst circumstances imaginable, people are making jokes about them. These people, however, are actively involved in the situation and as such aren't going to cause any offense. They've also earned the right to trivialise their experiences, if indeed they can, simply as a coping mechanism.

 Dressing up like an historical atrocity isn't funny in and of itself, and it takes a special breed of pinheaded, vacuous bitch to think otherwise. Whilst there is not, and should never be, a law against wearing a costume of any kind in public, those who choose to wear unpleasant or insulting costumes, slogans, placards or insignias should be prepared to be pelted with fruit and heckled by others.

 They sure as shit don't deserve to win gift certificates, as the girls above did, and in case anyone else finds that morally insulting, the competition was held in a club owned by the Stonegate Pub Company, which means I won't be going to the Cider Press on Gloucester Road for a while.

 Or to Chester University.

Jorah Mormont, P.I.

 One of the more distracting things about Games of Thrones - ASIDE from the gratuitous inclusion of bouncing tits at every possible juncture - is the number of semi-forgotten British actors who crop up in supporting roles. Barely an episode goes by without an appearance by that guy who used to be in that thing, or what's-his-name from thingummy. I'm giving it one more series until Jimmy Nail turns up.

A crocodile shoe, the feared banner of Ser Spender of Tyne.

 One of the more startling moments for fans of the series is looking up the actor playing the sarcastic mercenary knight Bronn, only to realise that it is in fact half of mid-nineties pop duo Robson and Jerome. The half that doesn't currently have a fishing show.

 With Jerome Flynn suddenly famous again, the BBC were quick to cast him in new drama Ripper Street, and apparently they weren't the only people to find one of the craggy, aging knights from the land of Westeros to front TV series.

 Step forward Iain Glenn, the artist formerly known as Ser Jorah Mormont.

The spell check keeps insisting that this is Norah Mormont, which gives me an idea for an amusing spin off...

 Glenn has been cast as Jack Taylor in an adaptation of the novels by Ken Bryan. Taylor is a Galway-based private detective who is, if this series is anything to go by, the most cliched character in the world.

 Taylor is an ex-cop who has been drummed out of the force for breaking the rules, and has a drink problem. He is contracted by a mysterious woman to find her missing daughter, with the help of his crazy sidekick who might not be trustworthy.

 On the upside, my next destination for a crime spree is probably going to be Ireland, because, if this show is anything to go by, the police there are terminally stupid. A string of young girls turn up dead on the same stretch of beach, and nobody except Drunken Mormont, P.I. is suspicious. It later transpires that the killer has been offing these girls in  bath tub and dumping the bodies, implying that Irish pathologists don't ever think to check the lungs of drowning victims to see if they were full of suspiciously clean, Imperial Leather scented water.

 Luckily, with Jack Taylor on the case, there will be justice for all. Albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace. Five minutes after he is introduced, Taylor's crazy sidekick mentions that he misses his time as a paratrooper because he liked the killing so much, but it takes Taylor another hour or so to suspect his friend might not be on the level. The dialogue aims for hardboiled noir, but instead comes off as pretentious leaden and amateurish, like Father Ted attempting to solve a crime, only way less fun. At one point, after a drinking binge, Taylor wakes up with a priest standing over him and actually utters the line "Father Malachy! ...What... Where... How long was I out?!"

 Say that line to yourself and try to find a way to make it not sound ridiculous, and you'll soon see what Iain Glenn is up against as an actor.

 The plot is a mix of the thuddingly predictable and unfailingly nonsensical - at one point, Taylor leaves a murder suspect who has already threatened to kill him with the corpse he has just finished torturing to death, and goes to have an angry confrontation with the femme fatale he's shagging instead of doing something sensible like calling the police. When the bad guy is finally shot (in the back, by the love interest, just before he can kill Taylor, because there is literally nothing original going on here) Jack's former police colleagues arrive, kick the body into the sea and cover the whole thing up for apparently no reason.

 I haven't read the source novels, and it's possible that this series is doing them a grave disservice, but it's worth pointing out that another popular literary crime fighter, Jack Reacher, has now descended into cliché. The Reacher novels started in 1997, and author Lee Child said that Reacher was designed as an antidote to all the burned out, alcoholic ex-cops who were clogging up the genre. Ken Bryan started the Taylor series three years later in 2000, and is apparently content to continue clogging indefinitely. Jack Taylor is such a stereotype that characters invented to combat this lazy archetype have themselves now become stale.

 It's a shame to see Iain Glenn, a decent actor with both charm and gravitas, wasted in such hacky material, but there's very little to recommend Jack Taylor. We'll just have to wait until someone else from Game of Thrones gets a detective series. Let's face it, who doesn't want a sarcastic midget P.I.?!

I Had Mail.

[FUN FACT: If you send junk mail back to companies, they have to pay the postage.]

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Or Happening At All.

 So, Russell Brand thinks, according to his recent interview, that we should all do nothing as a means to affect social change, and that this will somehow lead to some sort of apathy-based revolution.

 The kids seem to like Russell Brand, which is largely because kids are fucking idiots. He's a preening pseud who seems to think he knows what "real life" is like after spending the first half of his smacked out of his tree on heroin, and the second half as a millionaire comedian and actor, just like absolutely none of the real people he claims to champion.

 He is also guilty of spectacular intellectual cowardice, demanding to be heard and then, when questioned, falling back onto his "oh, don't listen to me, I'm only a comedian" defense. He wants us to listen to his opinions, as long as we don't take them seriously. Or maybe we're meant to take them seriously, but only if we blindly agree, and if we question, then it was all a joke. Or was it? He's the socio-political equivalent of the irritating drunk who calls you a cunt and then adds "just kidding" to try to look blameless.

 Also, like a lot of hippy idealists, he's absolutely convinced that there's going to be a revolution, like people were absolutely convinced there was going to be a revolution in the sixties, and in the early eighteen-hundreds, and all the other times that a revolution failed to materialise.

 The truth, sadly, is that whilst Brand may be right that politicians are useless corporate lackeys, he's wrong about everything else. Conditions in this country aren't anywhere near bad enough that people will take to the streets. We are all apathetic, and lazy, and too well fed to rise up from the sofa, let alone rise up against the ruling classes. We are, in the words of another champagne socialist, "doped with religion and sex and TV," and most people are happy about that. Orwell said that if there was hope, it must lie withe the proletariat, and a quick glance at the proletariat proves that we're all conclusively fucked.

 Proof that we'll never cast off our shackles came, oddly, in the form of AMC's The Walking Dead. In the new series of the zombie soap opera*, the main characters are sheltering from the undead in an abandoned prison. According to the writers of the show, they had planned to have the characters dig a moat for safety, but the ground around the prison where the show is filmed was unsuitable and the idea was nixed.

 Meanwhile, on internet message boards, people have reacted to this information by starting long, tedious arguments about the mechanics of digging an anti-zombie moat, the number of workers required to do it, suitable depths, breadths and dimensions, and a hundred other things besides. The arguments dragged on for several pages, proving that most people can't even agree on the best way to dig a hypothetical moat around a fictional prison which the writers have already ruled out. When people can't even organise "imaginary ditch digging" without descending into an arguments and backbiting, there's little hope for a grand social upheaval.

 So Brand's Glorious Revolution won't happen, but this is a good thing. Despite what Russell thinks, it's impossible to teleport ourselves magically out of whatever shit we're in. When asked about any sort of overarching plan for change by Jeremy Paxman, Brand claimed that a brief TV interview was not the correct format for a complicated manifesto, but he also singularly failed to produce any sort of cogent ideological thesis when given an entire issue of the New Statesman in which to do it. Beyond platitudes ("don't destroy the planet") Brand doesn't have much to offer.

 In truth, as every journey begins with a single step, the only way to fix the system which Brand not-unreasonably calls broken is to do it in increments. Incremental change is what democracy is all about, and although this can prove frustrating, it is, as Churchill pointed out, "the worst possible system of government except for all the other ones."

 I admit that I didn't vote in the last election, largely due to the self-same disaffectation and apathy that Brand describes, but having now seen the colossal, cataclysmic damage done by another Tory government, I'll be first in line to get Labour in on the next chance. That's not to say that Labour isn't a party riddled with career politicians and stooges to big business, but dammit, they're a step in the right direction, and that's what counts. Taking one step at a time is necessary to affect any sort of lasting change, personally or socially, and this should be crystal clear to a reformed addict like Russell Brand.

 A new, democratically elected government would not be the full, sunburst, revolutionary dawn that Brand wants. But it would be a chink of light in the darkness. A star in the night by which we might set a compass.

 And it will never happen unless we all get out and vote for it.




*That actually makes the show sound better than it is...

Movie Review: "Escape Plan."

 It's been a bad year for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone. Or at least, as bad a year as it can be for two enormously successful movie stars with legions of fans.

 Arnold's most recent movie, comeback attempt "The Last Stand," made significantly less money than the average Hotdog Stand, and Stallone's "Bullet To The Head" proved about as popular with movie goers as a Kick To The Nuts.*

 With their reputations suitably bruised, the two have teamed up for "Escape Plan," a movie that was originally entitled "The Tomb," until, presumably, someone worked out that if it died at the box office the headlines would just be too, too easy to write.

 For the unaware, "Escape Plan" sees Stallone playing a security expert who specialises in escaping from maximum security prisons in order to test their effectiveness. After being double-crossed, Sly is incarcerated in a supposedly perfect prison and left to rot, teaming up with Arnold's veteran convict to hatch a Tomb. ...Sorry. "Escape Plan."

 Having sat through "The Last Stand", personally accounting for about 20% of its ticket sales in the process, I can safely say it was amusing, but also an objectively terrible, terrible film. "Bullet To The Head" was rumoured to be even worse, but, like me, Stallone's character in the movie was a fan of Bulleit Bourbon (geddit?!) so when watching it I began playing "drink along with Sly," and as a result can't remember much of what happened. It's accurate to say I've sat in front of "Bullet To The Head" for its duration, but I still haven't actually seen it.

 Either way, going into "Escape Plan," I had pretty low expectations. Was I wrong?

 Surprisingly, I was. At least a little.

 There's a lot wrong with "Escape Plan." Vinnie Jones and 50 Cent are both in it, for starters, making Arnie and Sly look like classical thespians in the process. The script is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and occasionally goes too far into the ridiculous - without giving anything away, you'd be surprised what Stallone can do with a ballpoint pen and a stolen pair of glasses.

 The morality of the story is also a little worrying, at times. The Tomb (the nickname for the unbreakable super-prison) is supposedly home to extremely dangerous political prisoners whom the world's governments would like to see vanish. Ignoring the fact that when a government wants someone to disappear, they usually just assassinate them, we are asked to sympathise at times with a devoutly Muslim inmate. Whilst it's nice to see Hollywood attempting to play a laborious "not all Muslims are evil!" note, one wonders whether any sympathy should really be saved for someone who is almost certainly, based on the evidence, a terrorist bomber.

 Whilst I'm generally not a fan of the idea that viewers should switch off their brains during a film, I do accept that it would be asking a lot for a Stallone/Schwarzenegger team up to be meticulously plotted or ponder the intricacies of the geopolitical scene too deeply. With that taken as read (or at least taken as explained by someone literate), there's actually a lot to like about the movie.

 The word that kept coming back to me again and again was "timeless." Not in the sense of a timeless masterpiece, as this is resolutely not the case, but in the sense that this film really could have been made in the mid-to-late eighties. Sure, the stars have aged, Stallone seeming to have come off the worst over time, or at least seeming to have the less gifted plastic surgeon, but the film is unapologetically fun in the style of... well, a Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie.

 For the first time in recent memory, there is also a refreshing lack of age jokes. Both men are still believably fit, and seeing them run a hundred yards or climb a ladder or punch someone in the face doesn't remotely stretch credulity. Rather than making tired old "we're so tired and old" references, the stars just go about their business of making an action film. Indeed, far from playing the burned out Sheriff in "The Last Stand," Arnold's true comeback moment seems to be at the end of this film when he turns in slow motion and does something that can only be described as Schwarzeneggeresque.

 In fact, "Escape Plan" may even mark a bizarre high-point in Arnold's career in that, for the first time ever, he actually succeeds as an actor. Interestingly, this moment comes when he is speaking his native German, but in his own language he conveys genuine emotion. It's quite surprising, and makes me wonder if, in another time and place, he could have actually been a respected actor in Austria instead of a dramatic punchline in English.

 It would be disingenuous to say "Escape Plan" is great, but it really is pretty good. Marketing is probably going to kill it stone dead - the previews before the screening were all for CGI-heavy hokum like Keanu Reeves' awful-looking "47 Ronin" and a pointless sequel to "300," neither of which appealed to the viewing audience who had turned out to watch aging meatheads crack skulls in a prison. But, if you're one of the dwindling group of people to whom aging meatheads cracking skulls appeals, then "Escape Plan" gives you exactly what you want. It's a lot like finding an Greatest Hits album by a band you'd forgotten you liked - often familiar, and never revolutionary, but still a lot of fun.



*Yeah, there's no way I'm not starting work on that screenplay as soon as I'm done here...

Church Morality.

 Due to the rapid-fire, instant nature of modern news, headlines often have to be abbreviated to within an inch of their lives.

 I remember being amused several years ago when country musician Buck Owens died and The Sun, rather than focus on his legacy as a guitarist or songwriter, or his influence on the Beatles, went with the ultra-curt headline "Buck Stops."

 Today I noticed a headline that ran "'Stars Treated As Sex Objects,' Says Church." I considered ignoring it, but clicked on it anyway to see why religious people were getting their panties in a bunch this time.

 As it turns out, the truncated headline was actually referring to singer CHARLOTTE Church, who was, admittedly, getting her panties in a bunch about not showing a bunch of panties.

 ...I'm probably not making things clear.

 Charlotte Church has come out against sexualising young women in music, having been a victim of it herself. In the process, she becomes the second most famous Church to be interested in sexualising minors, after the Catholic one.

 She weighs in on the whole Miley Cyrus/twerking debate, because you're not allowed to voice an opinion in the media these days without referencing that incident, and admits that she was constantly pressured by record execs to show more skin and behave with more faux-promiscuity.

 While all this is obviously horrible, she seems to miss the point somewhat when she complains that pop music has an adolescent mindset.

 Ignoring the fact that the target market for pop music is, of course, adolescents, Charlotte also seems oblivious to the wish-fulfillment aspect of music.

 Here, to illustrate a point, is Mick Jagger riding a giant inflatable cock:

I do not wish, for the record, to ride Mick Jagger's cock...

 There's a reason you never see the London Philharmonic doing something like that - although god knows I'd like them to for sheer comedy value. Rock'n'Roll, and by extension, pop music, are fantasies. Hyper-sexualised, high energy escapism for the masses. Pop isn't just about sex, it's about giant, inflatable cock sex with impossibly attractive partners. It's not about driving, it's about driving a Mustang at 90 miles an hour with the top down and a beer.

 In the same way that most of us will never shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, or even probably tell someone that you've just met that this is crazy, but here's your number, so call you, maybe, we turn to music for an escape from the humdrum, tedious lives we tend to live. We'll never get to trade in our wings for some wheels and pull out of a town full of losers to win, so we turn to pop stars to tell us about it.

 Pop is meant to be catchy and energised, and do for our bodies and hormones what classical symphonies do for our higher functions.

 In effect, this makes even "adult" pop music into an adolescent medium. It speaks to the childish, restless parts of us that wants to be sexy and young and free and wild, and our pop stars work best when they seem to embody those qualities. 

 Whilst the exploitation of young women in pop music is shameful and degrading, I fear Charlotte Church is too far inside the bubble to really understand the appeal. She's too close to the tree to see the woods. 

 It would be impossible to ever take the sex out of pop music (or even to take sex out of jazz or the blues or folk, although god knows folk is trying its hardest), but what's wrong isn't the sex so much as the way it is portrayed.

 We need our pop stars to be virile, youthful and sexy, and the real problem is that people have come to confuse the phrase "sexy" with the phrase "tits out." Pop stars were sexier when they purred and inferred and cajoled their audience than they are when they're yelling and gyrating at us.

 We'll always need pop stars to be hot, and pop music will always be juvenile. This doesn't make it okay to try to make juveniles hot, but it does explain the real reason that there are a lot of young girls wearing not very much in the charts at any given moment; it's not that pop music is inherently misogynist so much that pop speaks to the fourteen year old in all of us, and fourteen year olds just aren't very good at understanding sex.

 It's not really Miley or Rhianna or even their record execs we should be scrutinising. It's whatever part of ourselves gets off on base, cartoonish sexuality. And that's something no Church has ever been qualified to fix.

Just Don't Look.

 Pop culture, much like bacteria or most species of vermin, is everywhere. We can't always see it, but it surrounds us at all times.
 As a result, and much to my own frustration, I know who Harry Stiles is, despite never having heard any of One Direction's music. I don't even know if they've released any songs. I'm told they have, but I've never heard them, and the whole "1D" phenomenon (named after the depth of the band members' personalities) seems to have just been manufactured overnight as a deliberate fad. They're the aural equivalent of POG.

At least Pogman had charisma...
 

 The ubiquity of pop culture tat, and the weird way in which it bleeds into our consciousness, was brought home to me today when I ended up reading a short piece about some asshole who won The X-Factor, saying that he'd auditioned for The Voice but had disliked the show and felt like it was rigged. He went on to say that he'd ditched The Voice and gone on to "win a bigger show," as though he's accomplished anything at all.

 Anyone who knows anything is aware that this gloating tit will be forgotten by Christmas - I've already forgotten his name and can't be bothered to look it up, but he has the sort of tattoos that make you want to punch him in the face and the sort of face that makes you glad you listened to the tattoos.

 In the interests of some semblance of fair play, I gave him a chance and watched a video of one of his songs, "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You," which was embedded at the bottom of the pointless article. I did this mostly just to check that Dean Martin hadn't risen from the dead and started working for Simon Cowell. It was awful, not just musically, but sonically. It had all the melody and charm of a chainsaw hitting a nail during a tourettes sufferers' logging competition.

 I'd go so far as to say that of all the unpleasant things I've put into the holes in my head - and I once got the top of a biro stuck up my nose for fifteen minutes when I was a child, because children are stupid - this song won the "worst thing put in my ears" category comfortably.

 Somewhere around here I also began tracing my own movements. How had I ended up mindlessly reading this shit, much less listening to the song? I realised that the link had come via my Twitter feed, because I follow Digital Spy, a mindless "celeb gossip" type website that occasionally has information about films I might like or musicians whose work I actually enjoy.

 The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the ratio of trivial, painful bullshit I don't care about (interviews with X-Factor "winners," plot details to upcoming Eastenders arcs) to things I'm actually interested in was about 99-to-1. 

 So I unfollowed Digital Spy. I'm also, from now on, planning to stop clicking any links that have "Daily Mail" anywhere in them. I'm going to make a concerted effort, for the next few weeks, not to pay any attention to this new media horseshit about dull, manufactured subjects. 

 And maybe, if I ignore this stuff, it'll all go away.

 Wish me luck.

"The Walking Dead" Promises "Even More Racism" For Series Four.

 Over the past three series, The Walking Dead has come under considerable criticism from viewers for what has been perceived as racial and cultural stereotyping - the Korean guy is nerdy, the Southern characters are racist hillbillies, the female lead wanted to be a housewife from the fifties, etc.
 Perhaps the worst indicator of this was the black character, T-Dog, who, aside from being named T-Dog, only had about four lines in the three series he appeared in. One of these was "aaargh!" when he got eaten by zombies, and at least one of the others was something about going to church. The other two lines weren't memorable, but might well have been some variation of "Day-um!" or "Tha's whack!"
 Attempts to redress the balance in the upcoming episodes by giving more screen time to new African-American characters Tyrese and Michonne have hit a snag with news that these characters will be opening a shoe-shine business in the Woodbury prison and bringing other characters meals at regular intervals.
 In an exclusive interview, co-producer and writer Col. Honky Asscracker spoke to us from his verandah in Georgia, over a mint julep.
 "We've always supported having black characters in the show," he drawled, "but I believe they should be in scenes and not heard!"
 Asked if his views were outdated or if he was some sort of time traveler, the Colonel revealed that he was all for showing off the wealth of talent that black performers brought to the show, possibly by "having them perform charming musical numbers" amongst the zombie slaughter and over-riding message of man's inhumanity to man.

An Open Letter To Nuffield Health.

 Dear Nuffield,

 What was wrong with the old field?!

 I'm kidding. In actual fact, I applaud your promotion of healthy living. As a qualified nutritionist myself, I frequently try to prevent others from binge drinking.

 I do this by going out and trying to drink all the alcohol I can find before anyone else can get to it, which I think we can agree is both noble and a shitload of fun. During one of these sojourns, I came across an advertisment for your health club that, I must say, I objected to.

 Despite my heavy drinking, Nuffield, I like to stay in shape. I like running long distances and lifting heavy things, and whilst it's unfair to blame a health club for the decisions of marketing companies, your new poster pissed me off.

 The poster, showing a monochrome image of a huge bicep, in an almost perfect mirror image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the promotional art for "Pumping Iron", bore the legend "That Picture You Have In Your Head Of Gyms. We're Not That."

Okay, fine, Arnold's is still bigger, but he is working right-handed, here...

 What this tells me, through a stark image, is that you're the gym (or, rather, health club) for people who don't want to work too hard.

 The image on the poster is over the top, sure, but who can honestly say that they don't want it? Who lifts weights, with the intention of getting bigger muscles, without thinking of the kind of huge arms on display in your poster?

 In the same way, who runs on a treadmill in an attempt to lose weight without envisioning, in some secret part of themselves, a perfect, toned, slimline figure?

 Your poster implies that you are the "health club" for the middle ground. For the people who only ever want to look average, rather than great - who want to achieve the bare minimum - and it speaks to a larger problem in society.

 Many times over, I've heard people who either don't work out, or who exercise in a different discipline (eg: distance runners) claim that weight lifting and body building are only for the vain.

 This is entirely a one-way street, incidentally. Bodybuilders and power lifters don't sit around bitching about marathon runners only doing it "to stay skinny," possibly because they're not insecure. It would be unfair to call distance runners and cyclists a bunch of spaghetti-armed pantywaists, so I won't, but I will, because they are.

 When it comes down to it, every single thing that every person does is down to vanity. If you're reading this with clothes on, it's only because you're too vain to be naked. If you've ever run, or lifted a weight, or played a sport of any kind, or learned an instrument or any other skill, it's always been out of self-fulfillment and self love.

 This is because anything in which a person can lose themselves - be it art, or music, or the zen of letting your body run while the mind wanders, or the focus of forcing a muscle through a hard rep to the silencing of all else - is a form of meditation, and this is essential to the upkeep of the human soul. People without hobbies - people without something in which to lose themselves - are the ones who are truly lost.

 Because of this, nobody should ever judge another person when it comes to hobbies, or dreams, or ambitions. And for you to say that "We're not a gym where you can get huge muscles - we're a gym where you can embrace the mediocre" is to cut the balls off of everyone who ever struggled through their fist chin-up with dreams of looking like Arnold, or every fat person who really wants to work it off and be thin.

 Like I say, Nuffield, I know individual branches aren't in charge of marketing, but get a grip. I go to the gym to work out. Not to play out, or to stretch out, or to lay out. Stop advertising yourself as the gym for people who aren't going to give it their all. Advertise yourself as the place that can make you look like this:

 [Picture is of the one and only C.T. Fletcher. 54 years old, steroid-free.]