A mildly humerous advert loosley related to books.

Here's something. I would write more but I'm busy with something else right now...Final Fantasy VI as it happens...but I want you to know that as soon as I can be bothered, I might write a longer post.

'til then here's a shamelessly American commercial to criticise or a highly entertaining, yet mercifully short, comic sketch to like on facebook - depending on your level of cynicism.

go here

Or maybe you just want to scare the holy bejesus out of yourself...

If I’d just stumbled out of a coma this morning, I’d still know what time of year it was. The air has a savage bite to it and a faint touch of sulphur. It’s getting dark a little earlier every evening and the urge to stay in bed of a morning is that wee bit stronger.

It must be nearly Halloween.

It’s easy to forget amid all of the rubber masks and plastic pumpkins filled with sweeties that Halloween is in fact the Celtic New Year. That’s right, the bountiful summer is over and the promise of a bitter winter lies on the horizon.

This was never supposed to be the time to knock on doors demanding treats – it’s always been the time for humankind to realise its place in the universe and know that nature is planning a cull. Halloween is when we remember that all things must come to an end. So in the face of death, our ancestors thought it better to throw a big party rather than hide in the shadows.

Bit of a bleak start to the blog, I know, but give me a break here, it’s bloody cold and I heard something about Siberian geese that didn’t sound to promising at all.

So, if there are any open fires left in the houses of the world, then I urge you to spark them up and get the tea on because it’s time for a ghost story. I’m not just speculating either; the publishing world will back me up on this one by releasing a flurry of spectral tales within a couple of weeks of each other.

You can always count on Susan Hill for a good old fashioned ghost story and her latest offering, The Small Hand, doesn’t disappoint. At least that’s what I’ve been told by reliable sources. I’ll get round to reading it eventually but for now, the best I can do is to recommend her previous spooky yarns, most notably The Woman in Black.

By the way, if you ever want to scare a surprise into your undies, don’t pass up the chance to watch the stage show of the same name. We’re talking old-school horror here. Think the Turn of the Screw or the Fall of the House of Usher and you’re on the right track.

Michelle Paver’s new book is full of chills too. If you’ve ever been a teenager with a leaning towards pre-historical fiction, then you’ll probably remember her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. Dark Matter is a different animal altogether as it is set in the post-tool-age era, more specifically, the 1930’s and follows an Arctic expedition that takes a turn for the weird when people start to go missing. It’s a great chiller filled with existential paranoia and a mounting claustrophobia – just what you need for the winter – but, genre aside, it’s just well paced, well written, throat-gripping yarn.

And just when you thought it was safe to into your local bookstore, Peter Ackroyd’s new book, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time, quite nearly takes the piss with its thoroughness. It’s not a ghost story as such but rather an exploration into the history of ghosts in England. In this case, the fourth wall is pretty well broken down so you won’t get the immersive dread of an actual ghost story but that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

The book itself is as much a very specific story of the English as it is a description of the ghosts they see. Not only will you learn something but you won’t feel like you’re sitting through a lecture – Ackroyd’s writing flows with a lilt of humour that makes the book a very compelling read.

Or maybe you just want to scare the holy bejesus out of yourself...

Why not try Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill. Set in modern-day London, this is a haunted house tale for the 21st century. Not only does the book deliver a strange unearthly presence wrought with doom, he also brings to life the very real horrors of modern life in the stories of the inhabitants of the block. If you think that you’ve become too desensitised by torture-porn (Saw, Hostel) to enjoy an old fashioned horror story, then maybe this is the book for you.

Anyway, hopefully none of that will give you nightmares. I’m away to carve a pumpkin onto a pumpkin. I bet no-one has thought of that before.

Book of the Day 016

No fudgin' comment...

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Book of the Day 015

The fat man isn't the benevolent chuckle-bucket you thought he was. He is, in fact, an eccentric quantum physicist with a range of future-technologies in his arsenal - like Dr Robotnik.

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Book of the Day 014

Do you like a good western? This is more raw, more gruesome and more unforgiving than anything you've seen before. Neither Wayne nor Eastwood could handle this kind of brutality. This is the Wild West with all of the good bits left in. Awesome!

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Book of the Day 013

Four of Edgar Allen Poe's most chilling stories complete with Gris Grimly's warped illustrations. It'll give you nightmares, so be careful.

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Book of the Day 012

How about this - a whole novel written without the letter 'E'. Gimmick or genius? You decide.

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Book of the Day 011

This book taught me a lot about glove-making. The rest went over my head a little bit so that must mean that it is, in some way, clever... more clever than me at least.

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Book of the Day 010

Got a problem with the neighbours? Yours is a two-word solution - 'potato cannon'!

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...if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die...

You know what - I’m really getting a bit sick of the Good Ol’ Days.

Ever since this financial apocalypse thing started, more and more people find the need to draw a parallel between now and the golden age of the ration book, back in the days when you couldn’t get sugar and your chicken was reconstituted breadcrumbs and lard moulded into a rough chicken shape.

It sounds to me like a hellish era of enforced austerity but apparently I’m in the minority. The masses seem to have come to the conclusion that they’d much rather be spit-roasting squirrels on the embers of the blitz that sitting in front of their freeview ACDCHDTVDVD iGadget wondering which button turns it on.

Okay, so I’m not old enough to remember Spam but it’s not as if I’m a cyber-child, born into a luxurious world of convenience. I’ve lived through some hard times too.

I remember when Teletext was the Internet and satellite TV was something the Americans had. Sure, you’ve got your Xboxes and Playstations now, but back in my day we had Joust and Chuckie Egg or, if we were lucky enough to have a friend with rich parents, we also had Streets of Rage.

Back in my day, a mobile telephone was a regular telephone with an extra-long cable. We used to hide the cable up our sleeve and pretend we were on Dallas. Those were the days before 4OD and BBC iplayer, when, if you wanted to watch something, you had to set your VCR to record it. You’d invariably hang around until your show started to make sure that it did what you told it to at which point you’d just sit down and watch it on the telly anyway. Just as well too because while you were watching ITV, the VCR was recording BBC1.

But I digress.

Maybe things were gentler in the past. Maybe they were simpler and less manic. Maybe there were more cows in the fields and less hoodies on every corner but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were better. The point I’m trying to make is that if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die.

‘Where has this sudden burst of indignation come from?’, I hear you ask. I’ll tell you where – Alan Bloody Titchmarch. Granted, he’s not the only culprit in the retrovolution but he’s the most persistent and the easiest to remember. His latest book, predictably entitled ‘When I was a Nipper’, is an illustrated jaunt back to his boyhood which he mostly spent on his bike delivering Hovis down the cobbles to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9.

Thank you again, Wikipedia.

Now, I would have read some of Alan’s book for professional accuracy but I was so disgusted that I just had to leave immediately and find someone to film me happy-slapping a moving statue. So, since I’m unable to quote an extract, I’ll just make a stab at guessing.

“I remember old Mr. Brown who used to own the beige van on Bland Street. I was delivering some ‘ovis to him one midsummer morning when I fell off of my bike. Some rapscallion had left an old sea-mine in the middle of the road and who ran into it only muggins here. Mrs Mustardey, the baker, was in a right tizzy when she heard the sound of ticking coming from the mine. Luckily, Mr Brown knew a chap in the Ministry of Explosions who promptly sent the instructions for disposal in a telegram. They read simply - open mine, cut blue wire, bob’s your uncle. So Mr. Brown, dutiful as always, got the old boy opened but there was no blue wire, just different shades of brown because in them days, everything was in sepia...”

And so on, and so forth. That’s what I imagine anyway, some meandering lecture about how dull the dishwater was – ‘but it were real dishwater in them days, none of your Cillit-Flash nonsense.’ But you can imagine things for yourself; you don’t need me to do that for you, right?

Too right, and you don’t need Titchmarsh and his ilk doing it for you either, because, let’s be honest, the good old days probably weren’t all that great. In fact, all of these old-school anecdotes probably didn’t actually happen at all – it’s a scientifically proven fact that most of your most treasured childhood memories didn’t happen to you – they happened to someone else

...on BBC1

...when you were trying to record ITV.

Book of the Day 009

No time to read the best books of the last hundred years? No problem!

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Book of the Day 008

This is a great book to laugh at - just because it exists

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Book of the Day 007

A horror story in which a group of animals gain self awareness and wage war on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This edition features illustrations by Ralph Steadman, rubber-stamping it 'cult'.

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Book of the Day 006

This book'll make you laugh, and then wonder why you bothered...but in a good way.

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Book of the Day 005

There are only 7 stories and this book describes them in 700 pages.

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Book of the Day 004

(@Gerrards Cross Book Fair) This is fun - a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about drugs, 50's anti-drug propaganda and great cartoons. Kept me entertained.

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Book of the Day 003

Five people come together in an airport cocktail lounge in the middle of a global catastrophe. Sounds awesome!

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Put the Book Back on the Shelf

Okay, I’m listening to a stream of the new Belle and Sebastian Album, Write About Love, (available here until the 12th of October) It’s too early to say whether or not I like it. In the meantime, I’d like to bring to your attention a few literary links you might not be aware of.

Don’t mention it.

Well, obviously, the first link has to be Cécile Aubry, French actress-turned-author who wrote the novel, Belle et Sébastien, a boy-and-his-dog story set in a village in the French Alps. It was adapted as a television show, also called Belle et Sébastien which ran on French TV from 1965 until 1970. It was reinterpreted in 1981 in the form of Japanese anime, Meiken Jolie before being recycled once again as a Glaswegian indie band.

Their song, Seymour Stein, was featured in the movie, High Fidelity (based of course, on Nick Hornby’s novel of the same name.) You remember the scene, right? Jack Black walks into John Cusack’s store, criticises the song because ‘unfortunately, it sucks ass’, then he puts on Katrina and the Waves instead.

Just to clarify, I have read the novel as well, but only the once and the whole way through, all I could hear in my head was John Cusack trying to do a London accent.

The song in question appears on their ’98 album, The Boy With the Arab Strap which is either their best album or a parody of their previous work, depending on how you look at it. I think it’s a genuine work of art and deserves to be enjoyed by everyone at least once.

The next link is Washington Irving.

If you listen to the end of track six on their 1996 debut, Tigermilk, you can hear Isobel Campbell talking incessantly in a torrent of nonsense. It turns out that it’s not just any nonsense; it’s a passage from Rip Van Winkle, Irving’s famous short story about the man who fell asleep and woke up twenty years later with a beard.

They don’t write them like that anymore.

Anybody like graphic novels? Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle & Sebastian Anthology, is a collection of comic strips based on Belle and Sebastian Songs. I’d say whether it was a good idea or not but, to be honest, I’ve just found out about it – how’s that for preparation! Watch this space, I’ll let you know.

As for the new album...it's growing on me.

Book of the Day 002

From Korean Penis Fish to curried dog on a stick, this book is filled with a whole menu of stuff you'd never eat.

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Book of the Day 001

These limited edition 70th anniversary Puffin hardbacks arrived today. Each one comes in a tidy perspex slipcase and they are priced at a meager 100 bucks. Pictured is The Secret Garden with some very fine decoupage. Check the Penguin website for more details.

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What's in your bathroom?

Back again, for another exciting episode of the Book Thing. It’s been seven long days of biting your nails down to the knuckle and abseiling from the edge of your seat, but you can relax now, the fun is allowed to continue.

Now, I know what you must be thinking. It’s a question that has been on your mind for quite some time, I’m sure and it’s only right that I give you an answer. Besides, it’s getting a little embarrassing now – I can’t walk down the street anymore, I have to wear a disguise, just so I don’t have to listen to the same thing over and over again, everywhere I turn.

“So come on, tell me, what’s in your bathroom?”

Well, hopefully, by the time I’ve finished this, you will all have a bit of closure and maybe I will have a little peace.

Obviously I don’t need to tell you that the bathroom book is a special kind of animal. Its job is to deliver a quick burst of information and amusement without going into any great depth. Nobody likes cold knees and it’s for this reason that Wuthering Heights will never be considered a bona fide Bathroom Book. Not by me, at least.

I think, when you’re in that ridiculous, yet completely natural position, a book is an excellent way to take your mind off of your predicament. Take laughter, for example...

If you like the way your laugh sounds in a bathroom, you should give Calvin and Hobbes another go. I say ‘another go’ because I assume you have already had the pleasure.

But let’s suppose you don’t know, hypothetically, like. Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip created by Bill Watterson in which Calvin is a hyperactive little boy with a wild imagination and Hobbes is his pet tiger, or his stuffed toy.

They play, they fight, they get in all kinds of mischief for which Hobbes invariably gets blamed, but Calvin just can’t understand why Hobbes never gets punished. When they finally sit still, it’s only to say something that’s so childishly simple as to be profound.

I can’t speak for everyone else, but it’s very easy to become attached to the characters. I still get choked up when I think about the time that Calvin lost Hobbes. It went on for a good four or five episodes, before finally Hobbes... actually, I’m sure you remember where he was.

It’s actually possible to become TOO attached to the characters. Sometimes, when I’ve nothing better to do, I think about what became of the duo. It breaks my heart because I know that Calvin grew up and made friends with real people. More than likely he forgot about his adventures with Hobbes who is probably sitting on a shelf in his dormitory, a silent witness to God knows what kind of depravity.

But then I remember that they aren’t real.

And that offers no consolation.

Maybe you don’t care for laughter. Perhaps you’re the kind of person so riddled with doubt that the very act of excreting waste reminds you that you are just another animal and that just fills you with existential melancholy and self-loathing.

Well, what better toilet read than our old friend Nietzsche?

I’d have to recommend a Nietzsche detour to anyone hopelessly in search of the right answer. What I would say, however, is BE CAREFUL! If you take it too seriously, you might just come to the conclusion that the human race is a collective of selfish bastards constantly lying to themselves.

If you can withstand an assault of nihilistic cynicism, you might be able to trawl through the nuggets of hopelessness to find the odd gem, like this one –

“He who lives to fight an enemy has an interest in that enemy’s survival.”

I’m paraphrasing, but the meaning is intact. That’s just one example.

No other examples spring to mind.

So, let’s say you’re one of those people who don’t see the point of humanity, but still want a good laugh. Let’s say you drift through the world, increasingly disgusted by each new fad and you just feel so alone. If only you knew that there was someone else out there who, like you, sees civilisation as a great waste of time.

Well, look no longer! You should be reading Charlie Brooker!

He started out writing reviews for PC Gamer, to supplement his marijuana supply and worked his way up the chain to where he is now – writing for the Guardian. His latest book, The Hell of It All, is another collection of witty, scathing and, on occasion, desperate columns published between August of 2007 and September 2009.

He usually talks about television but he can throw in the odd geeky reference that no one would understand unless they’d played Resident Evil 2 or watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When he’s not admitting to a legacy of wasted time, he’s been known to paint elaborate portraits of brutal accidents, Armageddon and ironic justice.

If you mix Tim Bisley from Spaced and Bernard from Black books, then delete the Irish accent, you’ve got some warped, subjective approximation that probably doesn’t even come close.

His other two books (Screen Burn and Dawn of the Dumb) are just as good despite being a little dated now, but you can revel in nostalgia at those great TV moments. You can relive the excitement of the first ever series of Big Brother and watch how the excitement quickly turned to disgust.

Remember that?

That was a fun time.

Don’t close the book on reading

Wow, it’s Friday already? I’d better write something. That makes me sound lazy, doesn’t it? Well, just because I haven’t been writing, doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. That, my friends is called ‘planning’ – an important part of the writing process.

This week’s theme is books for young men who don’t read. That’s not to say women can’t read them too. I simply thought of a few of my male friends whose bookshelves are a tad on the empty side. That’s understandable, reading takes up a lot of time – time that could be spent playing video games or watching football down the pub with all of the other clichés.

To you (and you probably know who you are) I say this - Don’t close the book on reading, turn a new page, let this be the start of a new chapter in your lives, the one in which you switch the TV off and decide to give a book a go instead.
But on saying that, it’s not easy to go from watching mindless action movies to plodding through Anna Karenina or Don Quixote. One needs a transitional period. And that period starts with...

Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk

Why start there? Well I’ll tell you. You’ve probably seen the movie already so you know what happens. The last thing you want when you start your journey into Bookland is a shocking twist that leaves you with palpitations and cold sweats. Stick with the familiar for now.

As book-to-movie transitions go, this one is as good as they get. It’s impossible to read this book without hearing Edward Norton’s narration in your head. With that in mind, if you liked the film, you’re pretty much guaranteed to like the book also.
Another plus point is the brevity of each chapter. At the very least, you’ll manage to squeeze in four or five pages while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil but the chances are, you’ll find yourself starting the next chapter because, hell, it’s only a few pages.

So, you’ve done Fight Club and you feel an overwhelming sense of achievement but you’re still not ready to drift too far from your comfort zone. Why don’t you try...

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson

That’s right, it’s not just a movie, there is, in fact, a book. I don’t know why I’m being so patronising, I’m sure you know about the book by now. The question remains, why haven’t you read it yet?

The story follows the adventures of Raoul Duke who, with his attorney in tow, attempts to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. The assignment is an excuse for a colossal bender on every drug imaginable from the modest buzz of a joint to the reality-shattering trauma of adrenochrome.

The result is a disjointed narrative leaping from one farce to another where mundane situations like checking into a hotel become hideous conflicts and the most severe transgressions become lost in a drug-induced blackout.

By the time you get to the end of the books, you’ll be wondering if it’s possible to have the same level of drug-related fun elsewhere. Well, before you dial that number that you’ve been resisting for so long, go to your local bookshop and pick up a copy of...

Mr. Nice – Howard Marks

It’s not just the story of one of the most notorious drug smugglers of recent times; it’s much, much more than that. Howard Marks should, by all accounts, be languishing away in a dark cell for the protection of civilisation. Instead he is the best-selling author of one of the most fantastic adventure stories you are likely to read.

And the best thing is, it’s all true!

Howard’s import/export business found him rubbing shoulders with the IRA which, in turn led him into the service of her majesty’s secret service. Don’t ask me which one. For some reason, I have trouble remembering all of the details.

But it’s good, I remember this much, and I urge you to read it as soon as possible.

Or you can just stick to your old habits and wait for the movie to come out, which it will on the 8th of October. Make a night of it, invite all of your clichés along on a lads’ night out to the cinema after which you can toddle on down to the pub, drink lots of beer, eat lots of peanuts, fart a lot and talk about football, before starting a fight and throwing up in the back of a taxi.

(You can watch the trailer for Mr. Nice here - enjoy!)

‘Theme’ is just another word for ‘gimmick’

It’s all about books now. I just can’t get enough of them. I’ll tell you my thought progression just so you’re a little closer to understanding. I’ve had this recent ennui regarding my work. Now by my work, I mean the place I go for a few hours out of the day in exchange for money. It’s a terrible habit, but a necessary one. It so happens that I work in a bookshop and it was there that I came across a very liberating idea, in a book, no less.

Stick with me here.

All of this time I’ve been damning the fact that I’m stuck in a measly nine to five retail death-crawl. Such thoughts have plagued my mind for months giving me cause for spasms of panic and seizures of profound anxiety. But just recently, I’ve had an epiphany – and a sickeningly obvious one at that. Instead of longing for a perfect place and purpose, the healthy thing to do is to convince myself that I am exactly where I ought to be.

To put it the short way, instead of nurturing hope, it’s better to embrace despair and accept that this is as good as it gets.

Don’t try to get what you want, try to want what you have.

Resistance is futile.

There’s no escape.

So being that I spend most of my waking life surrounded by books and book related paraphernalia, it’s only sensible that I should come home and write about them too. So, here it is, a new dawn for Novelty Central – a place where I go to talk about books since it’s now obvious that I can’t avoid it.

But anyway, on to business.

This week’s theme is...hang on, I’d better clarify that I’m going to have a theme every week, why not, right? ‘Theme’ is just another word for ‘gimmick’.
So this week’s loosely-binding gimmick is ADHD. It’s a good place to start, I reckon, with the assumption that everyone else is as easily distracted as I am.

If that’s the case then I offer you my top 5 really short books.

That is if you’re still reading, of course.

All My Friends are Superheroes – Andrew Kaufman

Being that this book is barely 100 pages long, it didn’t seem like that much of a challenge but that’s not why I read it. I was promised by everyone who had read the book that it would literally make me cry with happiness.

Real tears.

Imagine my excitement at such an opportunity – the chance to feel something strongly enough to squirt water out of my eyes.

Needless to say, I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely little book, but I came away from it with dry eyes. The story relies on the assumption that the characters’ most prevalent traits are actually super-powers, for example, the Frog Kisser is a girl who always falls in love with the loser. As soon as the relationship takes off, the ‘frog’ turns into a prince and the Frog Kisser loses interest completely.

If you want it boiled down to a genre, I’d call it a Rom-Com for comic book fans.

Fup – Jim Dodge

This has nothing to do with any Fair Usage Policy. It’s actually a book about a duck called Fup, Fup Duck (spot the spoonerism). To sum it up so is to make it sound like Spot the Dog or Little Bunny Foo Foo, it’s a bit stranger than that.

The setting is a small ranch in the American wilderness where 90 year old Jake maintains his immortality with a homebrewed whiskey called ‘Old Death Whisper’. There he lives with his grandson, a giant by the name of Tiny who spends his time building fences for no good reason only to have them torn down by a mysterious nocturnal warthog.

It sounds a little wacky and to be honest, it is, but it’s also very funny and even if the ending makes absolutely no sense, getting there is a fun ride.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

This does what it says on the tin. Sum is a collection of little musings about possible scenarios you might meet after you expire. Eagleman is a neuroscientist so he’s bound to know what he’s talking about, right? As books for the attention deficit go, it doesn’t get much better than this. Each little chapter shows the hereafter in a different light, some more agreeable than others but mostly they all sound better than ‘lights out forever’.

It’s a good little book to make you think but be careful – you might just get wrapped up in the idea of a five-month spell of sitting on the toilet and attempt to weave a religion around it.

You’ve been warned.

Silk – Alessandro Baricco

This book tells the tale of Hervé, a trader in silkworm eggs and his travels to and from Japan. It’s part romance, part historical fiction and its use of language verges on poetry but if you ask me, it’s just nice. It’s a nice, delicate little story that won’t amaze you or haunt your dreams or inspire you to become a silkworm-egg merchant, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll be glad you read it.

Alternatively you could watch the 2007 movie based on the book but in all likelihood, that would take more time, cost more money and give you one more excuse to hate Keira Knightley. And that would be one excuse more than anyone needs.

And finally...

The Iron Man – Ted Hughes

I think I’ve saved the best for last here. So what if it’s a kid’s book, the Iron Man is a work of genius. If you don’t already know, the book tells the story of a huge robot that somehow arrives in the English countryside to wreak havoc on all of the tractors.

Some might call it a fable masking an anti-war protest but they’re just looking too far into it – it’s a modern fairy tale complete with scary space dragons (it had to come from space as all of the earth dragons were extinct).

If you’re going to get the book, don’t settle for anything that isn’t illustrated by Andrew Davidson – his drawings give the story the weird metallic darkness it deserves. The modern illustrations look like they were scribbled by a child and aren’t in the least bit scary.

So there you have it, five books that you can easily read before you...oh, that’s a funny colour...

‘Desperation’ is an ugly word...

On to business. You’ll notice that there hasn’t been a whole lot of activity here of late. That’s only because I haven’t done anything about it. Don’t attempt to adjust your set; this is purely laziness on my side. Point one is that I’m going to try to spill something into this part of the internet every Friday. I figure that if I give myself a weekly deadline then I might just become a little more productive.
And there’s no room for cynicism, so keep your predictions to yourself.

Point two is that I only had a point one, so I suppose now I’ll just have to waffle on about all of the movies I’ve watched in the last few week.

Is anyone else like me in that they can abstain from watching films for weeks at a time before bingeing on whatever comes to hand?

Yeah?

No?

Whatever the case, it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve done very little in the past couple of weeks other than go to work, play with my superfantastic new phone and watch a host of movies such as...

TRIANGLE (2009)
I’m not really sure what this film is trying to say but it reminds me of an incident that happened just before I left Ireland. A couple of friends and I had gone on a mammoth mushroom picking frenzy and cooked the whole lot up in a thick, pungent stew. This seemed like a really good idea back then, but we were younger and less frightened of petty things like consequences and brain damage and psychosis.

To cut a long story short, the three of us relived the same three minute sequence over and over again for about four hours at the end of which, we assumed we’d broken reality and banished the rest of humanity from existence.

I hadn’t thought of that night in a long time...until I watched Triangle.

In this film, a group of friends are on a sailing trip when their boat is destroyed by a freak storm. As luck would have it, a huge liner happens to be passing by. They board the ship only to find that it is completely deserted, rather old and incredibly creepy.

One thing leads to another and they all die except for Jess, Melissa George’s character who leans over the side of the ship to see herself and all of her friends clinging to their upturned yacht, glad that a huge liner just happens to be passing by.

And so, the loop repeats itself...just like too many mushrooms.
It just gets stranger from there and if you’re looking for something to confuse you, give Triangle a shot. If you just want the fear without the bewilderment, then maybe you should try...

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010)
As horror remakes go, A Nightmare on Elm Street is about as inspiring as any other. The plot is essentially the same as the 1984 original – Freddy Krueger got burnt to death by a mob of angry parents who didn’t take too kindly to his paedophilic tendencies and then wreaks his vengeance by hunting their children in their dreams. It needs no further explanation.

The new version sees Jackie Earle Haley take up Robert Englund’s role as the dream demon and, to give him his dues, he pulls the role off rather well. Also, the remake lacks the cheesiness that the original had in abundance and in its place is pure darkness.

If you’re expecting an addition to the franchise, then you won’t find it here. This film lacks the tongue-in-cheek humour and takes the idea in a slightly different direction. If you are one of those people who thought the original was a little too slapstick to be scary, then perhaps the remake is for you.

And just because I like threes...

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010)
Another remake, and this time, it’s slightly more credible because Tim Burton directed it. This has everything you would expect from a Burton film including the extensive use of black and white check pattern, warped perspectives and spooky trees (not to mention the inevitable Helena Bonham Carter). In this project, you’ll find a little bit more because we have a typically weird director choosing a classically weird story written by a prodigiously weird author.

The story, as you’d expect, has been changed slightly if only to save us all from boredom. Burton’s film is permeated with a definite post-war melancholy – this is Wonderland after the apocalypse and it’s Alice’s job to rescue it from the clutches of the evil Red Queen.

It was a good experience but I found myself ignoring the nonsensical dialogue just so that I could follow the plot. That’s right, there was a plot, so if you’re used to Alice being a wild romp into random, then prepare yourself for a little more effort.

So there you go, three films to try out when you really should be doing other things. I’ll be back next Friday with something else. I’m not sure what that’ll be and I’m totally open to suggestions. ‘Desperation’ is an ugly word, but it’s the only one that’s relevant...

Pokey-Screens Über Alles

Hi everybody! That’s how I start it, good enough, no? So it’s been a long and arid week and a bit since my last post and I’ve saved up enough excuses to fill an infirmary for sick and wounded excuses. Sadly, none of these are good enough so you’ll have to settle for the old favourite ‘I just couldn’t be arsed’. Which is largely the truth.

That’s not to say my life has been a barren void since then. I’ve actually taken one more step towards completion. Now that I have my brand new not-an-iPhone-phone, I’m nearly there; I’m almost human, just like you.

The temptation to go off on a semi-sarcastic rant about the superficiality of technological trinkets is almost too great but we both know that that would make me a filthy hypocrite, a self-loathing one, maybe, but a hypocrite nonetheless.

So I’m not going to do that today. You’ve already heard my disdain-for-modernity bit so it’s time to spice things up with my new line – Isn’t the future awesome!?

We’ve made it, friends. Here we are in the 21st century and it’s just like they promised it would be, only better. Granted, they haven’t delivered on the flying cars (yet) or teleportation or lifelike robotic sex dolls, but neither have we descended into that futuristic dystopia about which we have been warned time and again.

The world is by no means perfect but there are no thought police, no genetic guinea-pigs, no palm-implanted gemstones telling us when we’ve lived just the right number of years. There are quite a few spots of Hell on the planet but I don’t live there, I’m one of the lucky ones and if you’re reading this, then so are you.

Join hands with me and sing a song about how grateful we are.

They said we’d have hover-boards and telepathic transducers by now, to say nothing of the huge space stations orbiting Alpha Centauri, but who predicted Shazam? Where are the smart phones in all the pages of Arthur C. Clarke? I’ll tell you where – they’re in his bin. Dream gadgets that can do anything you want them to were too crazy even for him.

But there it is, on my desk in front of me, its please-charge-me light flashing away, trying to get my attention. Is it a phone? Is it a camera? Is it a Dictaphone? Is it an encyclopaedia? Is it a handheld gaming device? Is it the source of all joy? The answer to these questions is yes, yes, oh god yes, a thousand times yes!

Some of you might call me shallow. I bet you’re rolling your eyes with disgust right now that I could sell my principles and join the hordes of techno-zombies jabbing at a tiny screen for all eternity. It’s okay to be jealous, as long as you remember that you’re only hurting yourself.

Of course, there are others amongst you who will no doubt remind me of my own former misgivings surrounding pokey-screen culture. To you, I say this – where is your evidence? Pokey-screens are a gift from God and I would never blaspheme in such a way, how could I? Pokey-screens do everything and if there’s anything it doesn’t do, there’s probably an app for that. Pokey-screens rule, Pokey-screens über alles. Praise to the pokey-screens! Glory be to pokey-screens!

I think that’s enough of that.

If There Is a Collective Unconscious, Then the Internet Is Where It Lives.

I’ve been absent for a while and the only excuse I have is my pathetic addiction to facts. Don’t get me wrong, in the last week, I’ve sat down to write something, on average, four times a day but the sequence of events is always the same. I’ll open up the laptop, waggle the screen around until it stops flickering before losing my mind with impatience and plugging in an external monitor (some users of Fujitsu Siemens Amilo series will be familiar with this highly irritating defect).

When I finally get to the point were I can see what I’m doing, I start the first sentence only to realise that I don’t know what I’m going to write. So I open Internet Explorer with the honest intention of finding a news report or a movie trailer or anything at all really, so long as I can create a cluster bomb of my collected discoveries for you, dear reader, to enjoy.

The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that I’ve turned into some kind of infomaniac, tirelessly pursuing knowledge only to discover that knowledge is a wholly elusive creature, especially when you’re trying to find it on the internet.

You’ll know that, of course, because here you are, on the internet, faced with the evidence. That’s right, this blog is the internet on a small scale. It’s an unloved mongrel of opinion and filler and it’s only after digging through the whole thing that you actually learn anything.

And what do you learn?

I’ll tell you what - you learn that your time would have been better spent reading a book.

Naturally, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the internet itself. This is a matter of self discipline and my lack thereof. Users of the human brain MKI will be familiar with this highly irritating defect.

If you’ve read Generation X by Douglas Coupland, you’ll be aware of a condition known as Option Paralysis. It’s a simple concept - imagine it’s 1989 and you’re in a village shop looking for biscuits for the tea. Modernity hasn’t really spread this far yet and you have a choice between only Rich Tea or Digestives. On top of that, it’s four-thirty and the shop will close in a half and hour. It’s a bleak old premise, I know, but on the plus-side, you’ll walk out the door of said shop in under five minutes with a packet of biscuits and before long, you’ll be dunking them in your tea and having the time of your life.

Now flash forward to the year of our Lord 2010. You’re in the biscuit aisle of some 24 hour super-Tesco. You have all day, and tomorrow as well, to look through a universe of biscuits in all manner of colours and flavours, different grades of chocolateyness, encrusted with whatever nut, raisin or toffee-chunk takes your fancy, wrapped up in fancy packaging, shouting ’pick me, pick me, don’t look at the others, it is I who shall be the perfect accompaniment for your brew…’.

After ten minutes‘ trying to decide, you start to get a little impatient. Another twenty minutes pass and you’re reduced to a quivering wreck with still no biscuits in your hand.

Just to keep sane, you convince yourself that you have the world of biscuits all worked out before realising that this aisle continues around the corner into another aisle twice the size of the one you’ve just been soaking with tears of desperation.

The next morning, the biscuit aisle is cordoned off by the authorities because your shrivelled corpse is scaring the children and someone has to mop up all four of your humours before someone slips.

And your tea has gone cold.

This, dear friends, is Option Paralysis. When faced with an infinitude of choice, the tendency is for the brain to lock down, leaving the subject to vibrate, on the spot, between all possibilities, never to make a decision at all.

If you compare option paralysis to AIDS, then surfing the internet would be akin to swan-diving into a swimming pool filled with used needles. The internet contains virtually everything that humankind has thus-far thought about and much more besides.

If there is a collective unconscious, then the internet is where it lives.

Here, you can find anything you like - howler monkeys, solar flares, all-night taxidermists, bowler hats, candy floss - you name it, it’s all there.

So, with an ocean of choice such as that, is it really any wonder that I haven’t been able to decide what to write about? I hope my argument convinces you more than it does me. Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, I’m off to Tesco to buy some biscuits. I may be some time…

The Bastard Love-Child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses

Just a quick question for the literate public - why haven’t you read The Third Policeman yet? If you have, then congratulations, you get to stand with me and harass everyone else. As for the rest of you, what’s taking you so long?

I’ll give you the benefit of ignorance and assume that it has simply passed you by. I suppose that’s understandable. Brian O’Nolan, AKA Myles NaGopaleen, AKA Flann O’Brien is the shrinking violet of Irish literature. If he were a film, he’d be Falling Down, that Michael Douglas film which nobody remembers even though it was awesome. Although he is often overlooked, no one can deny that Flann O’Brien belongs around the top of the list, not far from Joyce himself.

His writing style is playful and drunken. He was a man who, with his associates, the likes of Kavanagh and Behan, defined the stereotype of the drunken Irish writer. Whatever sense his books lack is compensated tenfold by a natural humour that allows you to suspend your disbelief just long enough to get to the next volley of lunacy.

Published posthumously in 1967, The Third Policeman centres around the unnamed narrator whose life takes a dramatic turn for the weird when he goes to retrieve Mathers’ box. He finds himself in a strange little plot of nowhere in which he comes across a ‘completely false and unconvincing’ police station. Here we meet two of the three policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Sergeant McCruiskeen, two men of the law more than happy to solve any crime as long as it is related to bicycles.

The story then meanders disconnectedly along a ludicrous journey that can only be compared to the bastard love-child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses. We find a spear so sharp that it can cut you before it even touches you and a carved wooden chest with an infinite number of smaller wooden chests resting inside each other and some strange element called ‘omnium’.

Just when things look irreconcilably daft, Flann delivers a delicious little twist which, although a tad predictable by today’s standards, still offers enough satisfaction to pay off the preceding debt of confusion.

Just to be even more mental, the main text is periodically interrupted by footnotes regarding the work of DeSelby, a fictional mad scientist. Some of these footnotes are so long as to spill into two or three pages, thereby overshadowing the main story. Scholars often question the significance of this practice - I think Brian O’Nolan just got a kick out of making people squint for longer than necessary.

The main talent in the Third Policeman is it’s humour. The author was a prodigy of the pun and if you like to laugh, this is the book for you, but be warned - this laughter isn’t free. The price for a chuckle is a chill. Funny though this book is, it’s undeniably creepy. Every scene is edged with the blur of uncertainty like a dream that explains the meaning of everything for a split second before you wake up.

If it were adapted for the screen, there would be no end to the difficulties that would arise in portraying something that is intrinsically impossible.

And there are plenty of those.

You want an example?

How about Sergeant Pluck’s Atomic Theory of the Bicycle?

It goes like this - there’s a great danger to be had with the riding of bicycles. On a bumpy road, the seat of the bike makes an untold number of collisions with the person riding it. Over time, bicycle-atoms are transferred into the person and human-atoms are likewise transferred into the bike. This results in some very bicycline humans (who have trouble standing still without falling over) and some very human bicycles (who are prone to raiding the scullery).

Of course, Flann O’Brien says it better than me.

Another Shining Gem of Outstanding Brilliance

Research. There’s a good word and one no writer should be without. For any writer, the greatest excuse for procrastination has to be that it was all in the name of research. I’ll redirect your memories back to the first season of Spaced in which Daisy Steiner passes off her inactivity as research into the psyche of the unemployed - vital research for an article which she had planned to write. Writers have as many great ideas as they have means of wasting time.

So, in order to justify watching episode after episode of Doctor Who, I’ll impose a retrospective mission upon my past self. I wasn’t just wasting time - not me! I was actually trying to discover, for YOU, dear reader, which episode was the best one.

And I found it, by God!

If you’ve never watched Doctor Who, I’ll bet that it was for one or all of the following reasons:

- It’s childish.
- It’s silly.
- It’s low-budget, poorly-plotted, two-dimensional pap.
- It’s another excuse to sell more lunch boxes and pencil cases.
- It’s hard to get emotionally involved when you know that any potentially fatal situation can be escaped by adjusting the settings on the Sonic Screwdriver.
- The TARDIS’ capacity for all-encompassing salvation is equally unbelievable.

Let’s face it, with all of his toys, the Doctor is pretty much invincible. Even if he does happen to die, he just morphs into somebody else and carries on like nothing happened, thereby making the franchise itself endless.

Remember Doom? Remember how much of the appeal was lost once God Mode was activated?

Without the possibility of death, life has no meaning.

That said, I’ve been told that a Time Lord can undergo a maximum of 13 regenerations.

Is that true?

Anyone?

I’m straying from the point, however.

My point is that the best episode of Doctor Who, since it’s revival in 2005, has to be ‘Blink’, the tenth episode of the third series and the only one in the series written by Steve Moffat, winning him a Hugo and a couple of BAFTAs.

It’s my firmly-held belief that even the greatest critic of the show would find this episode compelling, frightening and very, very clever.

To my limited knowledge, no other episode has used the possibilities of time travel to their full potential in the way that Blink does.

The story revolves around Sally Sparrow who must defeat four statues. It doesn’t sound that difficult, but these statues are actually the Weeping Angels, a race of quantum-locked humanoids who cease to exist when they are being observed.

According to the Doctor (in this case, played by David Tennant, the best Doctor so far, in my ignorant opinion) they kill in the most humane way possible - by transporting their victim back in time where they are allowed to live to death. Meanwhile, the Weeping Angels feed off of the potential energy in the years that would have otherwise been lived.

You’re safe enough as long as you are looking at them but as soon as you avert your gaze, they’ll be on top of you faster than …well… the blink of an eye. Next thing you know, you’ve landed in 1920, with no hope of return.

That’s beside the point though.

The real genius of this episode is the way in which timelines are manipulated. The first victim is Kathy Nightingale, Sally’s friend, who disappears at the exact moment that the doorbell rings. When Sally answers the door, she finds Kathy’s grandson bearing a letter, written by her decades previously, explaining what had just happened.

To say much more about the story would be to spoil the experience but that is just a taste of how messed up this episode eventually becomes before, inevitably, making perfect sense…in a messed up kind of way. If you’re not already convinced, it’s only because I’m not explaining it properly. I urge all of you Doctorsceptics out there to give it a shot, if you only watch one episode in your lives. If you really hate the Doctor that much, you’ll be glad to hear that he’s virtually absent for the whole 45 minutes.

So, there you have it. Your intrepid researcher has trawled the depths of the TV mire to bring you yet another shining gem of outstanding brilliance.

Don’t thank me.

I’m just doing my duty.

It Ain’t Real Pain Unless You Want to Kill Someone

As if things weren’t bad enough, I’ve been listening to a hell of a lot of country music lately. Since I tackled the vocation of ‘writer‘ yesterday, I think it only right to continue my handy series of articles with my guide to becoming a country music star.

It suffices to say that city-folk are at an immediate disadvantage. It helps, when you decide to become the next Hank Williams, if you actually come from the country.

If you can’t change the past, then the least you can do is work on your accent and scale your world-view down a notch. You’ll never hear a country music song borrowing lines from Camus or comparing heartache to a broken iPhone so, in order to succeed, you must forget about these things in favour of more earthy similes.

Assimilate meaningless drivel like ‘honky-tonk’, ‘hoochie-coochie’ or ’achy-breaky’ into your vocabulary and refer liberally to your pick-up truck, the juke box and Jesus.

Get your wardrobe right. This might seem like an obvious point but to overlook it is to doom yourself to weep outside the doors of Carnegie Hall. Three chords and a heart made out of hay and cow-shite won’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t have your boots, your blue jeans and your Stetson. And if they ain’t made in America, you might as well wear an Osama Bin-Laden costume (use the word ‘ain’t’ a lot too, that’s very important).

The next important point to observe is that real country music is about pain. Now, we’re not talking about a paper-cut or banging your funny-bone against the handle of a door, we’re talking about the real thing. This is the kind of pain you feel when your hoochie-coochie woman takes her love to town leaving you at home, in the trailer, to drink moonshine and think of all of the ways that you could put her in the ground.

City-folk know nothing of pain - it ain’t real pain unless you want to kill someone.

Think about marriage too. Think about everything you know about this institution and then forget it completely. If you’re a country music star, the only reason to get married is so that you can get a divorce and spend the next two or three albums whinging about that no-good devil-woman.

I’ll take the time now to acknowledge the existence of female country singers. Not all country music stars are misogynist hicks - some of them are sassy country gals whose reaction to pain is a whole lot different. You’ll notice that as soon as her man leaves her, the subject of the song will cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and cry… until they die.

If she survives the crying process, she’ll more than likely go off on a hedonistic binge in an attempt to find a man as good as the one she just lost (Honky-Tonk Merry-Go-Round).

But whether you’re a cowboy or a cowgirl, it is crucial that you are unlucky in love, possibly an alcoholic and preferably a gun-wielding psychopath.

However, even if your chosen subject is heartache, you’re bound to run out of material eventually. Worry not, because you are free to sing about agricultural processes(Amarillo Sky), regional topography (Black Hills of Dakota) or even the acceptance of a questionable stereotype (It’s Alright To Be a Redneck). Use your imagination, by all means, but not too much - you don’t want to look like a faggot.

…Metablogging at it’s Finest

Okay, how about this for an experiment. I’ve got one hour in which to write whatever the hell I like, be it good, bad or completely nonsensical. This is a fairly simple experiment and I’ve had the good will to let you see the results.

Just to set the scene, I’m sitting at my desk, with a pose-able lamp shining down on the keyboard, adding a very noir atmosphere to the proceedings. I feel I should be smoking a cigarette and slugging from a fifth of bourbon. But I’m not, because I only have an hour and it’s not for me to waste time.

I’ve done enough of that already.

It’s been one of those weeks in which nothing happened. That’s completely my own fault so I can’t really complain, but consider it a stated point. Since nothing has happened, or rather, I haven’t done anything, I find myself at something of a loss when it comes to writing some content for this god-forsaken blog.

I could tell you about the two and a half seasons of Doctor Who that I shamelessly watched, but I know you don’t care and if you did care, you have probably already watched them yourself, so no need for a synopsis.

I could tell you about the….the, um…oh my God, all I’ve done is watch Doctor Who and go to work for a week. I’d be really depressed if I thought it was a complete waste of time but I rather like Doctor Who, and even if I’d seen the majority of the episodes before, they were just as entertaining the second time ’round.

But this is a new week, a fresh start and from here on in, anything can happen. That’s either optimism or extreme paranoia, I haven’t decided yet.

…10 minutes gone…

…12 minutes gone…

That’s what they call a fugue state. It’s a period of time in which the subject loses all awareness of their surroundings and either allows another personality to run the show for said time, or stares blankly at a point in space, returning to reality only when they feel spit trickling from the sides of their mouths. I fall into the latter category.

Come on, man, think, you’re losing them.

Okay…

…17 minutes gone…

God this experiment isn’t going too well.

If I just keep on typing, something is bound to happen, that’s how it works, right? Well, maybe not, I’m sure that a real writer would have a topic chosen before sitting down to write anything. Not only that, but they would have done countless hours of research to make sure that they have their facts right and don’t have to prattle on for, say, an hour, without accomplishing anything.

Okay, problem number one has been defined.

This is progress.

So what I need is a subject.

The subject of today’s entry is, in fact, today’s entry. It’s metablogging at it’s finest. In today’s entry, I have decided to write about writing the entry that I intend to publish today. So far, it has been an enlightening experience. I started out full of juice and with very good intentions but, as you have seen, it didn’t take long for me to realise that I was severely unprepared, having neither cigarette, nor bourbon.

Problem number two, defined.

Writers smoke and drink. Fact. If I want to be a writer, I must act like a writer. Now, contrary to popular opinion, a real writer spends hardly any time writing. Instead, they linger in dark rooms waiting for someone to come along and photograph them holding a cigarette somewhere near their face.

Observe.

 

Now, if  they’d been writing at the time, they wouldn’t have been able to hold the cigarette and thus, would cease to be writers.

I hope you’re all taking notes, because this is important.

So, you have your topic ready, your glass of whiskey sitting beside your ashtray, what now? You need a pen, right?

WRONG!

You need a gun. Because nobody will take you seriously if they don’t think that there’s a possibility of you blowing your brains out at any time. People like a writer who isn’t afraid to die. If they get the slightest whiff of impending suicide, they’ll rush to the nearest shop to buy your first edition hardback with the intention of forging an autograph inside and flogging it on eBay before your gun stops smoking.

What?

Proof?

Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway…

I was going to use Yukio Mishima as an example too but he didn’t shoot himself -  he decided to go traditional and performed emergency surgery on his stomach without ever planning to stitch it back up.

Well, here we are at the end of the hour. Hope it was as fun for you as it was cringingly awful for me. I welcome any suggestions for a topic that I can hack to death over the course of an hour for the next fun-filled entry.

Enrich Your Life #001

What if all of my strawberries rot in Farmville?

Today was a beautiful day, complete with sunny sun and happy little birds sharing bird jokes we’ll never understand. Somewhere, a kid was flying a kite. Somewhere else, a group of happy metrosexuals were drinking cold, rattling glasses of Magners and exchanging epic anecdotes about their respective gap years.

I’m not bitter - just jealous.

I’m jealous because I have missed the whole glorious glory of the day having been stuck indoors, a slave to my own inertia. It hasn’t been a complete waste of time because I’ve discovered something very important - I have got to stop playing video games. It’s taking over my life.

Although I should accept that all of those hours are now lost, I can’t help thinking about what I should have done. I should have gone to the park with a book and a bag of cans. Hell, I could have sat on the sofa and watched re-runs of Come Dine With Me, even that would have had a greater sense of involvement than watching the seconds tick by until I had enough energy to Steal a Tanker Truck in Mafia Wars.

God, it’s sick - I actually feel sick right now, like I could puke for days on end in a multicoloured orgy of self-loathing and the worst thing about it is that I’m still thinking about Mafia Wars - oh, I wonder how many energy points I have now? I probably have loads, it’s been, what, a whole hour and a half since I last checked - that’s a lifetime in Mafia Wars. I could probably make it to level 19, get my energy bar completely refilled and master the Soldier tier in New York.

Disgusting.

Count yourself lucky if that means nothing to you.

What I should do is ban myself from playing video games full-stop. Even now, I’m wondering what I could have done with my life were it not for all of those hours (and there must be at least a couple of years when you add them up) keeping my thumbs exercised. I’d be a really successful accountant by now I’m sure, but no fun at parties. Not that I ever go to parties because I’m too busy earning fucking achievements.

Just for the Hell of it, I’ll try it for a week - no video games week. Here’s a list of reasons not to, just so you can see how utterly pathetic it is -

1 - If I don’t use my energy points, who will?
2 - What if I don’t bank all of my money and it gets stolen?
3 - What if all of my strawberries rot in Farmville?
4 - What if I leave Final Fantasy VII for so long that I forget what’s going on and have to start all over again?
5 - What if someone beats my high score in Crazy Cabbie?

And so on, and so on. Meanwhile, I’ll grow old and useless and drop off the face of humanity like a leper’s nose into a bowl of gruel.

The bottom line here is that Mafia Wars is a purely diabolic creation. I don’t care how much of the proceeds go to Haitian disasters, it’s some sick bastard’s way of making money by exploiting the boredom of millions of technoholics.

The real evil genius of the thing is that in order for the players to succeed, they must invite more people to join their virtual mob. So, you look through your contact list for the people whose lives are just as meaningless as your own and, bingo, you now have enough witless zombies in your entourage to take on fifteen other lost souls in a battle with no ultimate conclusion - everyone lives to fight again and the only thing lost is a piddling amount of money that you never had in the first place.

Your list of Mafia Wars accolades isn’t likely to help you find a better job, or improve your sex life or bring you closer to discovering who you really are, so why waste your time with it?

‘It’s fun’, say the level 300 über-mafiosi who can’t understand reality unless it’s framed in a monitor. The painful truth is that it’s not actually fun at all, only addictive. This is what Mafia Wars sounds like -

Click...

Click...

Click...

Click...

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

It involves no skill, no thought, so, by definition, it’s not even a game. It’s just a mindless process of clicking and waiting and clicking some more until the next aimless set of mouse-related tasks is unlocked.

And therein lies the appeal and the great sin of game developers nowadays. So many games on the market today, aren’t even played for fun. The fun disappears after the first 12 or 14 hours. The only reason people continue is to unlock this achievement or that achievement or to find the secret area or the hidden item.

The creators know the mind of the gamer. They know that unless every little thing has been accomplished to 100% completion, this lonely soul will feel a great sense of emptiness.

With Mafia Wars, all of the fun has been erased leaving only the compulsion to unlock things, earn achievements and thus, eliminate emptiness.

Basically, it’s a really sick joke.

But if nobody played the ‘game’, it wouldn’t exist. Millions of people keep it alive and keep the creators swimming through pools of naked women drenched in Dom Perignon, laughing at the hapless fools who awarded them such a fortune.

Laughing at me.

How I’d love to wipe the smiles from their faces. The tragedy is that I’m too lazy to get up off of my ass and kill them for ruining my day. Why can’t I kill them? Because there isn’t a fucking button to click that will do that.

Fair play to them.

Clever guys.

So there you go - my day amounts to me digging a hole in which to get stuck, and then shouting at the spade.

I wish Red Forman was around.

I could sure use a foot in my ass.

Festering In My Own Disdain

Greetings, everyone, from the real world. I’m back again, back in the nine-to-five humdrum of getting up, going to work, and then inevitably returning home to bed. This goes a long way to explaining my lack of blog-related activity, or any other activity for that matter. For this reason, I don’t have anything to say except that I’m not sure I really like the real world anymore.

The whole not-being-at-work phenomenon gave me a delicious taste of what it would be like to be unemployed. Sure, you can’t really afford to eat properly, or live anywhere, or wash, but once you look over all of these little details, unemployment affords an amazing sense of freedom.

Of course, this notion is made completely out of fantasy and it wouldn’t take very long for a person to die of said freedom, but wouldn’t you rather live for a few days, enjoying boundless liberty than spend scores of years locked into some pointless struggle for survival?

Is that a stupid question?

Don’t mind me. I’m just a little sore at having to return to ‘normal’ after a fun-filled couple of weeks of Facebook, guitar, Dr. Who, Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil 4 - the rest of the time, I just wasted. My disappointment is partly caused by God’s bastard-ass decision to hide the sun away for all of that time, only to whip the cloth off on the evening of my last day of idleness.

So now, the weather is lovely and I’m enslaved from nine until five in a bookshop with an inflated opinion of it’s own importance. On the plus side, the shop has air-con, so I don’t have to enjoy the warmth at any point of the day. I can close my eyes and pretend it’s November, merrily whistling Here Comes Santa Clause to the confusion of the sweating public.

I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve returned to an atmosphere akin to Stalin’s Russia, with some angry force on a mission to find and destroy all dissenters. This is all due to an anonymous opinion survey, some less-than-favourable results, and a management with bruised pride who would much rather delete those with an unsavoury point of view than address the issue in question.

But you don’t care about that.

What you really want to know is what I’m going to do about it, right?

Hello?

Well, screw it, I’ll tell you anyway.

I’m going to wander off into the wilderness like Christopher McCandless, except I’m not going to eat the wrong berries and end up dead - I’m going to wrestle deer to the ground and spit roast them up a mountain somewhere. It can’t be that hard.

Actually, I’m going to play the lottery, because you never know…

Well, what I’m really going to do is just sit here festering in my own disdain. Check me out this time next year. I’ll be the one complaining about my job and wishing I was unemployed.

If I’m really, really lucky, it’ll be the other way ‘round.

No Survivalist's Wet-Dream...

I didn’t read anything last night, except subtitles - but I’ll come to that later.

The Road has been out on DVD for a few weeks now, so I was a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but jump I did.

For those who don’t know, The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, follows a father and his son as they try to survive in the wake of an unnamed apocalyptic event.

It’s grim, it’s grey and it’s harsh as hell.

This is a world in which nothing grows and the only signs of life happen to be other survivors who have lasted that long only by killing and eating the weak.

In such a brutal climate, you have to wonder what possesses the characters to stay alive but it’s not long before you realise that this urge is there conditionally. The father, known only as the Man, carries a revolver holding two bullets, one for him and one for his son, and the question is ever present - will he be able to pull the trigger when the time comes?

Although the many concepts in the film are nightmarish, much of the horror depicted in the book has been omitted in favour of placing the focus on the Man’s struggle to protect his son at all costs. Also, since the Man is clearly dying, it’s up to him to teach the boy how to live in his absence.

But it is the boy, ultimately, who is the teacher. His simple, polarised view of the world is a constant reminder to the Man that they are supposed to be the Good Guys and forces him to consider the moral cost of their survival.

I’ve always been a fan of apocalyptic fiction but unlike George A. Romero’s Dead Saga or the Mad Max series, The Road is no survivalist’s wet-dream. Survivalists barely come into the equation in this near-future dead world - here, God’s forgotten children simply pass the time until their inevitable starvation and the matter isn’t ‘how shall we continue to live?’, it becomes ‘when everything dies, what do we live for?’

Needless to say, once the credits rolled, I was pretty bummed out. I had to find something to lift my spirits and I found it on BBC4.

Storyville is a strand of international documentaries and this edition featured the trials and tribulations of the Swedish National Male Synchronised Swimming Team, hilariously entitled ‘Sync or Swim’.

The film follows Welsh film-maker, Dylan Williams, as he struggles against adversity in his new life in Stockholm. He’s about to hit 40 and all of the associated mid-life anxiety is crashing around him when he decides to pursue meaning with a group of similarly disenchanted Swedes.

Who cares, right?

Why on earth should I give a damn about a bunch of old men splashing around in a pool?

Trust me, I thought the same thing for the first ten minutes or so, but once you’re past that hurdle, you begin to warm to these underdogs and when they qualify for the World Championship in Milan, you start to wish you had a Swedish flag just so you can wave it around in support.

Check it out, it’s not a bad way to spend an hour of your life and if you don’t mind subtitles, it’s certainly more uplifting than watching the world slowly die.

A Portable, Moral Compass

I haven’t finished any books since the last one and it’s becoming a matter of extreme urgency that I do. Everything is becoming, in some way or another, an analogy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. This monomaniacal tendency must stop!

Right now, I’m reading two books.

The first is A. C. Grayling’s the Meaning of Things which I highly recommend to anybody eager to attach some philosophical significance to their lives.

The book spawned from his column in the Guardian, the Last Word, in which he turned his attention a different topic each week. He deals with all aspects of life from love to hate, prudence to intemperance, and explains the ins and outs of each in a very common-sense, matter-of-fact way.

Among it’s virtues, the biggest selling point, for me, is the brevity in which he tackles these subjects, rarely stepping over the three-page mark, making the Meaning of Things an excellent bathroom book.

Furthermore, you can read the entries in whichever order you prefer and, if you’re that way inclined, you can use it as a reference book for life or, if you have none of your own, a portable, moral compass.

Grayling’s CV is impressive, to say the least. With a shelf-load of other books to his name and an extensive list of academic achievements under his belt, there’s little reason at all to doubt a single word he says.

I’d go further than that, actually - I may just abandon all free will and leave my every future decision in his hands.

Therein lies the problem with philosophy - something I’ve been meaning to rant about for a while.

For every problem you encounter, if you’re a regular person as opposed to a world leader, you can find, in philosophy, as many arguments for a decision as you can for it’s contrary.

If you take this too seriously, you end up considering the ‘philosophical connotations’ of every little thing to the point where the only remaining action is no action at all.

In extremes, philosophy amounts to little more than a cause of inner turmoil and an excuse for sheer bone-idleness. For this reason, 99% of the world’s philosophers remain unknowns, conscientiously avoiding employment whilst sleeping under bridges.

Rant over.

Book two on the bedside table is Bad Blood by Colm Tóibín, in which a lone Wexford novelist goes for a walk along the Irish border in the wake of the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1994.

In many ways, the book concerns a past which, touch wood, has been banished to the annals of history, when Ulster still said ‘No’ and you could still smoke in the few pubs that hadn’t been blown up or purloined by the British Army.

But I’ll come back to that once I’ve finished it.

That just about wraps this entry up but before I go, I’d like to make a formal, public apology to Robert Green for selling him those new, experimental gloves. In my defence, Robert, you were forewarned that the technology hadn’t been properly tested and any unfortunate consequences are largely due to your own impatience.

So, no. You can’t have your money back.

No Happy-Ever-After...

Yesterday, I finished reading Teach Yourself: The Middle East Since 1945 which, as you might expect, ended on something of a question mark. There’s no happy-every-after, especially when you refer to the Middle East.

Having read it, I still don’t feel informed enough to choose sides. Is Israel the promised land of the Jewish people or is it just a piece of land given to them by the West as compensation for the Holocaust? Are the Palestinians an isolated, homeless people or just a fundamentalist pest?

These questions are a might too serious for my liking and I’m not even sure I’m asking them properly so I’m happy here, on the fence, shrugging my shoulders.

But is that enough?

Is it not the duty of we free people to join together and help the poor savages of the desert? Well, arguably it’s thinking like that which helped create the chaos we see today but now that the mess is there, and we’re in such a comfortable position, the least we can do is to ensure that they have all the benefits of televisions and wi-fi and 24 hour Tesco without the fear of angry, exploding people.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book, and a pretty overarching, non-specific one at that. I’ve seen the news too, once in a while, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the situation is far enough developed to render the news reports virtually meaningless - like walking in on a random, five-minute snatch of a Steven Segal movie - there’s a lot of violence and explosions, but plot…?

It’s war, at the end of the day, so you can excuse the senselessness of it, but you can at least make a blind stab at what’s happening without doing too much homework.

At the risk of being too general, we have at least two different sides who all want the same land and the same resources. They can’t share because they have each placed the annihilation of the other on their to-do lists. They can’t trust each other because every time there is a ceasefire, some nutter decides that it’s time for some target-practice.

We have, ladies and gentlemen, legions of ignorant puppets led by a minority of angry leaders, hell-bent on having their own way. Somewhere in the middle are thousands of ordinary civilians trying to put bread on the table but they can’t do that because there’s no bread in the shop, the table is in the house and the house has just been blown up.

That’s probably why it’s so hard to choose sides.

Who do you support when you have, on one hand, a manufactured state constantly defending itself with pre-emptive strikes, and on the other, a group of religious fundamentalists who would gladly bulldoze the infidel into the sea? With a choice like that, you really have to question the sanity of anyone who claims to know which side they are on.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book.