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.]