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.