Terrible Life Lessons (From "Bill Gates.")

 There's a lot of stupid shit I'm sick of seeing on the internet (cats, videos where something jumps out at you, cats, lists of things that are "insane/bizarre/any other buzz word", grumpy cats, that weird egg with a nipple on it to promote weight loss, cats) but every so often a particular one crops up on Facebook.

 One of the unexpected downsides of Facebook these days is that instead of getting stupid, twee shit e-mailed to us, where it can be safely ignored, we now have to have it posted directly onto a medium we're actually paying attention to.

 This little gem comes around from time to time, including today, when I was grumpy enough to actually take it to task:

 

~ Bill Gates ~

This should be posted in every school or kid's bedroom.
Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about
eleven things they did not and will not learn in school.

He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings
created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and
how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.
The world will expect you to accomplish something
BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school.
You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
 

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
 

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.
Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping:
They called it opportunity.
 

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault,
so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
 

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring
as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you
talk about how cool you thought you were:
So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent's generation,
try delousing the closet in your own room.
 

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades
and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer.
*This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
 

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters.
You don't get summers off and very few employers
are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.
(Do that on your own time.)
 

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life.
In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
 

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds.
Chances are you'll end up working for one.

If you can read this...thank a Teacher.
If you can read this in English...thank a Soldier!
And for life and everything else you have...thank God!
Now....think about this and smile if you agree and please pass this on....

If you don't agree, go stick your head in the SAND and take a DEEP BREATH!

 Where to start? The beginning, I guess.

 Bill Gates didn't say this. He didn't say anything of the sort. It's a truncated version of a list published by Charles J. Sykes. So we're starting on, at best, bad research, and at worst an outright lie. It took me five minutes to check the authorship of this list, and that's because my aging laptop suffers about four-and-a-half minutes of lag.

 We then have "Bill Gates" saying that these are things that kids did not and will not learn in school. The first item is "life is not fair." I'm pretty sure that that's ALL schools teach most kids.

 I'll paraphrase the more objectionable ones as we go.

 "Rule" 2: You shouldn't ever feel good about yourself, unless you've impressed someone else. This is in fairly stark contrast to the pro-God ending to the piece - Jesus clearly said that charity should be anonymous. It's possibly (probable, even, given the mongrel construction of the whole thing) that the religious ending to the message was tacked on afterwards in a sort of cybernetic Chinese whisper, so we'll give Charles J. "Bill Gates" Sykes the benefit of the doubt on the whole "religious hypocrisy" thing, but it's still a horrible message. Sykes apparently thinks that you should care implicitly about what the world thinks of you, and work hard to impress said world before you're allowed to like yourself.

"Rule" 4: School is so easy, you don't know how hard the real world is. This is probably why the average American high school student had the same levels of stress as the average psychiatric patient did in the fifties, right?! Kids clearly aren't suffering from a huge amount of psychological pressure. It's why they virtually never snap and shoot everyone - because it's so fucking easy being a high school student compared to having a job. Why, just the other day, my boss gave me a detention for chewing gum. Or was it running in the hall? Or walking on the grass?

 Wait, no, it was none of that shit. Because in the big, bad, scary real world, we don't force people to attend an institution governed by bizarre, arbitrary rules. Or if we do, it's called prison. One of the nicest things about growing up is that you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you like; if I don't want to go to my job, I can quit and do something else. This isn't an option in school; if you quit a school, you're legally required to go to another one. Similarly, my bosses have never once cared if I just plain didn't want to hear about tectonic plates, devaluation of currency in Weimar Germany, the underlying themes of Wuthering Heights or the length of time before two trains pass each other. They'd probably care about those things if I were a seismologist, financial historian, literature professor or train signaller, but as I'm not, I actually don't have to give a shit, and it's a wonderful feeling. It's one of many reasons why working is a lot more fun than school.

"Rule" 7: There's a distinct implication on this one that worrying about big-picture things isn't as important as the small stuff. Get your head out of the clouds and stop worrying about global catastrophes when there's laundry to be done. Rainforests are for communists, and the real problems are entirely small-scale. That's what we should focus on. Which, followed through to its logical conclusion, implies that the self is the most important thing, not society, and therefore, kids, you ARE the centre of the universe. Wait, what?! That's exactly the antithesis of what this is meant to be about. This fucking thing is all over the place.

"Rule" 8: This seems to be saying that if at first you don't succeed, it's because you're a pussy and fuck you. Believe it or not, there are plenty of examples of people taking many, many attempts at something before succeeding. The Wright Brothers spring to mind. By this logic, if they didn't fly immediately on the first go, it's because they were LOSERS and not WINNERS. In actual fact, taking a number of attempts at a failed project (or "perseverance" as its often called by people who don't think in bumper stickers) is usually the best road to success.

 "Rule" 11: Be nice to nerds, not because of any sort of basic human empathy, but because there might be benefit to you further down the line. Aside from the fact that he doesn't understand what a rule actually is, there's fairly decent evidence that Charles J. Sykes (the "J" stands for "Bill Gates") is a fucking sociopath.

 Now we get onto the dregs. I'm really hoping these are tacked on, because although I disagree with Charles J. "Bill" Sykes*, I think he was at least attempting to do something useful. He may be a cranky and misguided old fuck, but if he actually did add the following himself, he'd be a racist, stupid, psychotic cranky and misguided old fuck.

 "If you can read this...thank a Teacher."

 Don't thank them too much. There should have been a gap between the ellipse and "thank" and there's no need for a capital "T" on "teacher."

"If you can read this in English...thank a Soldier!"

 Same grammatical errors, but what if you can read it in English because you learned a second language? Then you'd still need to thank a teacher. Why are we implying English is a superior language to any other? Is English the "correct" language? That's shockingly racist. There are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide according to the BBC, and about forty of them are only spoken by a single surviving person. Are all of the speakers of all of these languages poised to invade the English speaking nations at a moment's notice? Aside from anything else, you have to wonder how they'd co-ordinate the attacks.
 
 Then again, even if they did invade, it would be largely useless to them to try to impose a sudden change of language; when William the Conqueror invaded England he insisted his men learn to speak the local language to make the process smoother. These soldiers, again, probably learned a second language through teachers.

 Of course, the English language is only so broad because it has roots in both the Germanic and Romance languages, due to repeated invasions of England by the Romans and Vikings. So, soldiers failing is what gave us this language in the first place. Even if we take the laughable idea that we're somehow under threat of attack and only protected by our mighty army (last seen dicking about in the Middle East for reasons of profit), doesn't the fact that they're preventing an invasion imply that they're limiting linguistic development? Maybe if we added an Arabic or Chinese branch to English we'd create and even better method of communication. So don't thank them; they're handicapping progress.

"And for life and everything else you have...thank God!"
 

 Thank God for everything I have? A hang nail? A bad knee? A fear of needles? Why has God afflicted me with these things?! Why should I thank him for them?!
 I'm kidding, of course. He's fictional.

 "If you don't agree, go stick your head in the SAND and take a DEEP BREATH!"

 Wait, are we still implying that Bill Gates said this?! I'm guessing not. Still, this is a nice message to end on. "If you don't agree with this, kill yourself."

 Fuck you. Fuck whoever came up with this whole thing, and fuck their sad, terrified hatred of dissent. Fuck their faux-humble solipsism, their soldier-fellating, god-bothering, poorly-researched, worse-thought out, semi-literate harangue of others.

 Oh, and please, forward this to your relatives and loved ones, along with your Farm Heroes scores.




*Holy shit, Bill Sykes!

Palestinian Nobleman Slaughters British Wildlife.

 A controversial Palestinian nobleman has come under fire from all directions after an altercation on Friday night.

 According to eyewitness reports, the man "Entered ye taverne last Frigsday nighte, strange of garbe and foreign of tunge." Calling himself Georgios in the manner of his Greek parents, he was received with suspicion until, in the words of one onlooker "a great wingéd serpente was espied" nearby.

 Georgios was then seen to mount his horse and charge off to kill the animal, possibly the only one of its kind in England.

 Sir Nigel de Farage, a French nobleman masquerading as an English peasant to curry favour with the serfs, was suitably outraged. "How dare he taketh work from our own noble dragon slayers?" said de Farage, pretending to enjoy his mead. "He robbeth the bread from their mouthes! Such like as he cometh only to take our jobs and dally with our wenches!"

 In spite of Lord de Farage's outrage, no English dragon slayers who may have potentially been deprived of work could be found in any tome of the Yellowed Pages, or indeed reached for comment via raven or cryer.

 Georgios himself has said that he was attempting to defend the locals from a dangerous dragon and spread the word of the Lord God, but this only led to more outrage from the D.D.L (Druids Defence League). A spokesman was reached, and quoth he:

"Mark ye my words, like, if alloweth we such foreign behaviour, yeah?, then before two score of years hath passed, right?, under the strange and fearful rule of Christianity shall we be, innit? Allowed only one wyfe and she forced to wear clothes at that!"

 Georgios has since disappeared, perhaps back to the foreign lands of his birth, or to Muslim countries where he is revered, but already a groundswell of support has been created to have him burned in effigy to protect the heritage and customs of "real English people."

New Gym, Anyone?

 Congratulations on signing up to THUNDERGYM, an exciting new fitness centre. We hope to open many more THUNDERGYMs across the country and, eventually, the world, but for now, thank you for registering your interest in our flagship branch.

 THUNDERGYM offers unprecedented freedom of access to equipment for all members - we guarantee no more waiting for someone else to finish using what you need, ever. This is because of THUNDERGYM's patented approach of only allowing two members into the building at a time, at specifically ordained times.

 Taking our inspiration from the "classic" movie Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdome, we believe not only that soul singers should make racist Australians defend the honour of midgets, but that there are enormous health and eugenics benefits to the motto that "Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves."

 Of course, we at THUNDERGYM pride ourselves on being a modern and progressive company, and as such there are no guarantees that two men will enter. Women, men, transvestites and minotaurs are all a very real possibility of opponent in THUNDERGYM.

 Due to the high-intensity nature of a THUNDERGYM workout, we guarantee results whatever your goals. Trying to gain strength? You'll be surprised how quickly panic adrenaline will see you lifting even the heaviest war hammer. Want to improve your cardio and fitness? You'll have little choice when being chased by an axe-wielding opponent, desperate to do whatever it takes to see his wife and children again. Core strength and balance need work? Battle on the precarious, tilting beams over the pit of spikes and see how fast you get ripped! Either metaphorically or to shreds - it's really all down to how much you want to see the dawn, pussy.

 By now you might be asking "Sweet Jesus, is there any way I can get out of this?!"

 Lack of motivation is a common problem in many gym-goers. This is why, regardless of whether you signed up deliberately, as part of a clerical error, or as the victim of a prank by a friend or jealous spouse, our professional team of hired goons will come to your home and drag you to THUNDERGYM once a week, every week, at your allotted time.*

 Another common question we receive here at TGHQ is "Please, I have money, I'll do anything you want." Regrettably, it is the policy of THUNDERGYM that kiss our asses, we're making way more money out of sponsorship than you could ever offer us. As soon as this shit goes pay-per-view (and it will), Simon Cowell won't know whether to shit or go blind. Those assholes on "Gladiators" with the cotton-balls on a stick are going to look like such a bunch of sissies. It'll be so awesome.

 In conclusion, thank you again for registering for THUNDERGYM. Your appointment will take place on    TUESDAY   between the hours of   11:00   and   13:00   against   Invincible Swedish giant and former strongman champion "Mad" Magnus Larsson  .

 Best wishes/Condolences

  The THUNDERGYM team.


*THUNDERGYM is closed one week in four for desperately needed cleaning.

Signing Our Lives Away.

 I'm considering starting my own social network, called e-Harangue.

 You and all your friends can sign up to it and then constantly beg, badger and cajole one another into signing an endless string of petitions and voting on things you honestly couldn't give a fuck about.

 I'm kidding, of course, as we're all already signed up to that exact service, by its original name.

 For those who are slow on the uptake, I'm talking about Facebook, and the fact that most people use it as either a gaming platform, political soapbox or desperate attempt to make acquaintances envious. Sometimes all three.

 I'm probably as guilty as anyone - although my facebook posts tend to be sarcastic observations about my day, or surreal thoughts that I can't voice to anyone while I'm alone, I've also become a fan of a Boggle-type game that relentlessly posts updates about my scores to my timeline without my asking it to. I'm not going to name the game because of this, as I'm already doing enough free advertising without consent.

 There used to at least be the option to keep your scores to yourself, and I did, because I'm aware that nobody except me gives a fuck what my highest score is.* In the same vein, I get at least one request a week from a family member asking me to play some other game or another. I'm not going to. Ever. On principle.

 There is at least some consolation to be had from the thought that a lot of these games post the updates automatically and that it's therefore possible that my family aren't really this annoying. The same can't be said for what feels like the most recent of the endless waves of Facebook requests, the petitions.

 "Click here and add your name to this petition, calling on the government to end child poverty/cancel third world debt/reform the entire lineup of S Club 7," as though the government was capable of doing any of those things at the drop of a hat and had only neglected them so far out of some sort of collective amnesia or ignorance. "Oh, people DON'T like fracking?! We shall stop it immediately and to hell with the vast sums of money it lines our pockets with," said no politician in the history of anything, ever.

 By far the most offensive for me are the campaigns asking people to comment "Amen" under a picture of something terrible. I saw one the other day asking Jesus - as though Jesus spends his time on fucking Facebook - to heal children with skin conditions, accompanied by a picture of an infant with horribly blistered skin.

 It's not the head-thumpingly dumb hypocrisy of religion that gets me so wound up in these cases ("Dear God, please cure people of the terrible blights that you've inflicted on them for - we can only assume - your own amusement") but the absolutely stunning level of narcissism evidenced by the people who post them in the first place. It's bad enough that a lot of people are still blinkered enough to think there's a God at all, or even that, most perverse of all, such a being is benevolent, but vanishingly few people can seriously be stupid enough to think that God pays attention to Facebook. This means that whoever is posting these things is almost certainly only doing it to see how many comments they can generate, in the process exploiting the stupid using the less fortunate as a shield. It's downright sociopathic.

 The people commenting, meanwhile, are so dumb or deluded that they think they're influencing anything in reality by typing "Amen" under a digital photograph. This is the basic problem with religion. It's reserved for the stupid, cowardly or lazy. The only reasons to believe in a god are that you're a) afraid to face your own mortality, b) too lazy to do anything for yourself and think prayer is an acceptable substitute for effort, or c) you've never thought about literally any of the implications of a being so powerful it could create and maintain an unimaginably vast universe. If such a thing existed, there is mathematically no way it could give a fuck about something as small as you, in the same way that you're incapable of caring about individual neutrinos.

 The fact is, we're on our own down here. There is no god, never was, and as a result all we have is people. This, bizarrely, is the reason I often do sign the petitions that crop up on my timeline.

 God isn't going to do anything to influence anything, and although I'm always wary of signing something, I try my best to look into the background of the cause I'm being asked to support if it catches my eye, and I usually end up signing. I'm not naive enough to think it does much, but more than anything it's evidence that I existed and that I believe in something.

 So yes, the constant petitions are annoying, and no, I won't sign every single thing that people ask me to. But in five hundred years, if I sign a petition today because I genuinely believe in the cause, someone will know that I was alive, what my name was, and what I was willing to stand up and be counted for. I actually find that quite comforting.

 And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a game of Boggle to get back to.







*2,400 since you asked.

All That Glisters...

 I've been listening to a lot of CDs, lately.

 This would make me cutting-edge and hip if it were 1984.

 Of course, if it were 1984 we'd have a ruthless Tory government, an aggressively posturing Russia and Kate Bush on tour.

 ...Alright, fine. But at least it's not the book "1984." If it were "1984" we'd all be under constant surveillance from security cameras and... Alright, I'll come in again.

 I've been listening to a lot of CDs, lately.

 Partly this is the fault of my car, which doesn't have any way to connect to any sort of USB device. As we all know, flash cars are for men with small dicks, and based on that logic, my car implies that I can do an improv version of Jake The Peg at a moment's notice.

 The other reason for the CDs, which has probably escaped the attention of anyone under 65, is that "Gold," the oldies station, has gone off the air.

 Gold was a hideous, fuzzy sounding parody of a station. A monument to everything that was ever wrong with old school radio. Bad signal, tedious, waffling presenters, the ad breaks peppered with life insurance salesmen and Stannah stairlift pitches and long, dreary discussions about conservatories.

 A typical night listening to Gold involved a DJ having an opinion on something he knew nothing about (I remember one of them opining that clearly Paul McCartney and Heather Mills were never going to work out, some four years after they divorced and at least three years and three-hundred-and-sixty days after anyone stopped giving a fuck about Heather Mills) before taking a call from a frail-sounding nonagenarian in some grey and windswept corner of the nation who could vaguely remember the name of a song from 1952 and was calling to request it for the edification of her cat.

 These sorts of conversation (which could have been handled by an intern with a note pad instead of being broadcast to the public) were invariably as snappy as you'd expect as the product of a tortured back-and-forth between a senile caller and an idiot. Often, it would involve a story about how the caller met their partner, as if anyone listening at home gave a fuck about how two strangers bunked up to a Ritchie Valens number sometime just after Korea split in half.

 And still, I kept the station on my pre-sets, because the music was great.

 I've never liked contemporary music, even when I was a kid. It results in some of the more patronising questions I get asked (along with the slightly disbelieving "so is this your full time job...?") People say "How come you listen to this kind of music?! You weren't born..." by which strange logic I should also be incapable of enjoying a painting from before the mid eighties, or a book written any time before my conception, or a movie made outside of my lifetime. People like what they like, and the whole point of recording music is to make it timeless.

 So I kept listening to "Gold," despite it's general policy of assuming I was in a nursing home and hiring DJs to talk to me as such. Now, with the station being taken off the air due to declining listener numbers (it wasn't even that cold a winter...) I find myself adrift. I can't find any stations that play songs I like in anything like the same quantities.

 There has to be a market out there for people like me, who enjoy rock 'n' roll but still have their own teeth and organs, surely?

The Secret Truth About Bruce Springsteen.

 I've been having some odd thoughts about Bruce Springsteen.

 This is where those of you who know me say "Oh God, he's finally going to admit to his gay crush on Bruce Springsteen!" Well, nice try, suckers, but I'm never going to admit to being behind the critically panned novella "Dogging on Thunder Road: A Love Story."


 [NB: This is where I was going to mock up a cover for what that book would look like. After ten minutes of trying to find dogging pictures that were "funny" rather than "disturbing," I gave up and went to take a long, retching shower.]


 No, my current weird thoughts about Bruce are of a cleaner and more medically worrying variety.

 Bruce is many things; a working class hero, a rock'n'roll messiah, and a voice of hope and comfort to the working man. He's also, by my reckoning, the longest running case of un-diagnosed amnesia in medical history.

 Like a lot of un-diagnosed conditions, it's not immediately obvious what's wrong, but here are some examples of clear cut evidence that other sites aren't drunk, crazy, or legally fearless enough to bring you.


1. Who's Mary?!

 Throughout Bruce's career, there have been a disproportionate number of Marys in his songs. From "Mary Queen of Arkansas" on his debut album, through the Mary who's dress waves as the screen door slams on the opening track of "Born to Run," to the Mary the narrator got pregnant on the title track of "The River," Mary the doubting spouse of an ex-convict in "Straight Time," the matriarch in "Mary's Place," to... look, there's a lot of fucking Marys involved, alright?! And it's never the rhyme. It's not like he ever needed it to finish off a line that was a counterpart to "scary" or "fairy" or "antiquary." He genuinely seems to only be able to remember one woman's name, which is a little disconcerting considering he's never been married to anyone named Mary.


2. He Could Never Seem To Remember Clarence's Name...

 Clarence Clemons, the longtime saxophone player for Bruce's E-Street Band, died in 2011. Whilst many assume that such an integral figure in the E-Street sound and mythos would stick in the mind, these people don't have severe memory problems like Bruce does.

 Take, for example, 1999's "Live In New York City" album. During a sprawling, 16-minute rendition of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," Bruce took time to introduce all the members of the band before, as he so often did, drawing a blank when it came to Clarence.

 "Do I have to say his name?!" Bruce exhorts the crowd, in what many mistook for showmanship. In actuality, a slightly desperate Bruce was just checking if this giant saxophonist was anyone he needed to acknowledge.

"Who's the hell are you?!"

 "CLA-RENCE!" the crowd chant in response, but Bruce, presumably experiencing an especially intense moment of short-term memory loss (or just stymied by the noise of the band or poor acoustics in Madison Square Garden) can only respond "Say WHO?!"

"No... No, I've definitely never seen this guy before..."

 This "Clarence/Say who?!" back-and-forth continues for a few moments before Bruce gives up and returns to the song with the line "They made the change uptown and the Big Man joined the band..."

 This can be heard again and again on record - Bruce turning to call a saxophone solo and realising he has no idea who this guy is, and simply yelling "Big man!" as a cover. For further evidence, on the back of Bruce's second album, Clarence is listed as "Nick Clemons" for no discernable reason.

 Since Clarence Clemons' death, he has been replaced by his nephew, and one wonders if Bruce is aware of this fact. In the back of his mind, he's probably just worried that that big guy with the saxophone is looking thin and pale lately.

"I'm sure there's something different about whats-his-name..."

3. The Never-Ending Concerts.

 In 2012, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band broke their own (already impressive) record with their longest ever gig, clocking in four hours and six minutes and encompassing 33 songs.

 That's fucking ridiculous. It's bordering on suicidal. Many praise Bruce's dedication and energy, but for a man who was 62 years old at the time to play for four hours without a break is almost superhuman. How could he possibly stay fresh?!

 The answer, of course, is that someone with that kind of amnesia can't remember how long he's been playing for. After two and a half hours, he probably thinks he's only finishing the opening number and should stretch for time, just to make sure people get their money's worth. This is why Springsteen gigs habitually run to three hours, and occasionally more than four.

 This is only possible because...

4. He Doesn't Age.

Bruce seems to have spent at least the last thirty years looking at least twenty years younger than he is, a feat which is almost mathematically impossible.

 He claims to have never done any drugs, which could be why he looks superhumanly youthful while Keith Richards looks like a ball-sack's elbow. Or it could just be that his amnesia has progressed to the cellular level and his own body has begun forgetting to age. This is why he's still running around and jumping off pianos; he is biologically ignorant of the fact that he isn't still 25.

 For further proof, here he is frolicking in the ocean a few months back. He's sixty-fucking-four.

"I used to know a guy. Played the sax. I wanna say his name was Nick something..."

5. There's Something Familliar About Certain Songs.

 Here's "Factory," from 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

 And here's the never-released track "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" from the boxed set "The Promise," a series of songs that were left off of the "Darkness" record.

 Bruce is famously obsessive about track listings, writing far more songs for most albums than ever make the final cut, but it could just be a case of him picking the ones that sound original out of twenty songs in a row that are, in fact, identical.




 I think I've offered ample evidence that Bruce is, indeed, completely incapable of remembering anything at all, and I'm hoping that will keep me safe from the lawsuit this post might otherwise result in. The only other explanation I can find for all of the above is that Bruce is a hyper-sophisticated cyborg, built with the absolute pinnacle of mid-seventies technology. It would explain the lack of aging, and also the fact that he seems to have less memory than a ZX Spectrum. If this is the case, we can't be too far from an army of fully-functioning, high-memory robot clones.

 Soon, robot Bruce Springsteens will dominate us all.

 I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to it...