Yo-yo's, Global Hypercolour T-shirts, luminous snapping wristbands. All fads. All shite.
Throughout the ages, various odd practices and items have become famous for five minutes as people latch onto them as the latest craze. Tamagochi, for example, or adding alcohol to beverages, and for a few months it's all you hear about. Dusty middle-aged news reporters in sensible suits talk about them and are encouraged to participate with utterly hilarious results, and normal-thinking folk like myself fail to understand what all the fuss is about and end up crying in confusion.
The latest of these crazes is 'planking' and quite frankly, it's fantastic.
The premise is to lay face-down, arms by your sides, completely still and be photographed. No, that's it. That's all you have to do. Apparently the trick is to do it in as unusual a place as possible, then upload your antics to that Internet for people to look at. Now I've seen and heard of some stupid shit in my time, but this one puts the tin lid on it.
Often, such fads and crazes are easily suffixed with "But what's the point?", but this opens up a new can of pointless wormery. I never fully understood the RickRolling business (linking to Rick Astley footage under the pretence of a genuine link) so I was unlikely to get planking, but where's the fun in it? Where's the prestige? Where's the beef?
At the end of the day, it doesn't appear to be doing any harm (save for a couple of lads who've fallen off balconies for their art) and to be quite honest I couldn't give a shit what today's youth get up to, but it's a poor do when lying perfectly still outside of your local Oddbins passes as entertainment. Give me a diablo and some Pogs any day.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Friday, 10 June 2011
Ich bin got E.coli
Far be it from me to cast sweeping jingoistic generalisations across entire nations of people.
But...
Can you think of another country more likely to blame others for an E.coli outbreak before realising it was actually their own products than Germany?
A couple of weeks ago, E.coli broke out in the Fatherland and killed 29 people. In a developed nation such as Germany that is a lot of folk, and they were quick to pin the blame on some innocent imported cucumbers, which were minding their own business waiting to be in rude films. Much stock was destroyed and bans imposed to curb the bother, while nobody noticed that the countries from where the produce was exported remained suspiciously death-free.
Skip forward to today and they've now decided to 'fess up that it might actually have been home-grown beans sprouts causing the carnage in the first place. A fabulously-named Mr. Burger has admitted as much today, although an apology to the nations who had the Jihad put on them is conspicuous by it's absence. I can hardly say I'm surprised. Someone I know works with German colleagues regularly and has noted that when they believe any blame can be laid at your door, they don't hang around in telling you. When, however, it's actually their fault that the scheisse has hit das fan, they go all quiet and pretend they're in meetings to avoid having to be pleasant or diplomatic.
Not for a minute am I suggesting that all Germans act in this way, so get off your high horse, but can anybody suggest a country more likely to blame others for it's terrible plight before looking closer to home for the cause of their ills?
Us lot in the UK? Er, yeah. Good point.
But...
Can you think of another country more likely to blame others for an E.coli outbreak before realising it was actually their own products than Germany?
A couple of weeks ago, E.coli broke out in the Fatherland and killed 29 people. In a developed nation such as Germany that is a lot of folk, and they were quick to pin the blame on some innocent imported cucumbers, which were minding their own business waiting to be in rude films. Much stock was destroyed and bans imposed to curb the bother, while nobody noticed that the countries from where the produce was exported remained suspiciously death-free.
Skip forward to today and they've now decided to 'fess up that it might actually have been home-grown beans sprouts causing the carnage in the first place. A fabulously-named Mr. Burger has admitted as much today, although an apology to the nations who had the Jihad put on them is conspicuous by it's absence. I can hardly say I'm surprised. Someone I know works with German colleagues regularly and has noted that when they believe any blame can be laid at your door, they don't hang around in telling you. When, however, it's actually their fault that the scheisse has hit das fan, they go all quiet and pretend they're in meetings to avoid having to be pleasant or diplomatic.
Not for a minute am I suggesting that all Germans act in this way, so get off your high horse, but can anybody suggest a country more likely to blame others for it's terrible plight before looking closer to home for the cause of their ills?
Us lot in the UK? Er, yeah. Good point.
Friday, 3 June 2011
Wanted: Half a chance to see the clean 'n' jerk
Imagine a supermarket where you could browse the myriad products available through that Internet and select which ones you so desired. Upon choosing your stuff, you submit your request and sit back, possibly to suck on a sweet, sweet cigar.
The supermarket tells you not to worry about payment right away; just make sure you've got enough brass in your account and within the next 6-8 weeks, we'll take a random amount, depending on how much of the stuff you wanted is actually available in stock.
But wait! After waiting the required time for your stuff, you don't actually have it. Instead, all you have is an email saying 'you've got some of the stuff you asked for, squire' and a hole in your bank balance with no reference to the products you've ended up with.
Skip forward a few more weeks and you finally receive your goods. But what's this? Where you asked for toilet paper, you have soap. Where you asked for a roast chicken, you have a single stock cube. Where you asked for a £15 bottle of Merlot, you have half a bottle of Lambrini with the lid missing.
'Shambolique', as the French definitely say.
OK, so such a supermarket probably doesn't exist, but this analogy more or less reflects the way in which tickets for the 2012 Olympics have been allocated. Put simply, you request all the possible tickets you might want, make sure you've got enough money to cover them all, then sit back and wait for fuck all to turn up. If you are one of the lucky ones, you get an email saying "Well done there, you have tickets" and your bank balance is shorn of the necessary funds. But they don't tell you what you've ended up with (almost certainly because you requested the 100 metres final and ended up with diving heats) so you have to wait until they turn up to find out how much of a swizz it was.
Surely there was a better way of handling this? Why did you have to put all your eggs in one basket and have enough money to cover every eventuality? Why couldn't you have a ranking system, where you put a 1, 2 or 3 against the tickets in the order of preference, and they tried to allocated priority 1 tickets first, then 2, then 3, instead of giving you everything available and assuming you've got the money to cover it? Most people cottoned on to the fact that the chances of getting anything were slim so requested just about everything, leaving them open to the possibility of tens of thousands of pounds being withdrawn, although naturally, that never happened.
For a games which has been touted as the greenest, as well as being ahead of schedule (although nowhere near budget) I find this element of the process pitiful. The organisers seem to have come up with the easiest possible system for them (to get rid of the tickets as quickly as possible) without actually considering the people behind the requests. Alright, there are 50-odd million of us in this country, but surely there could have been a better way of distributing them than this? You might as well have just stood on top of Nelson's Column, chucked all of the tickets into the air and shouted 'Scramble!'. At least there would have been a modicum of chance involved then. Shysters.
The supermarket tells you not to worry about payment right away; just make sure you've got enough brass in your account and within the next 6-8 weeks, we'll take a random amount, depending on how much of the stuff you wanted is actually available in stock.
But wait! After waiting the required time for your stuff, you don't actually have it. Instead, all you have is an email saying 'you've got some of the stuff you asked for, squire' and a hole in your bank balance with no reference to the products you've ended up with.
Skip forward a few more weeks and you finally receive your goods. But what's this? Where you asked for toilet paper, you have soap. Where you asked for a roast chicken, you have a single stock cube. Where you asked for a £15 bottle of Merlot, you have half a bottle of Lambrini with the lid missing.
'Shambolique', as the French definitely say.
OK, so such a supermarket probably doesn't exist, but this analogy more or less reflects the way in which tickets for the 2012 Olympics have been allocated. Put simply, you request all the possible tickets you might want, make sure you've got enough money to cover them all, then sit back and wait for fuck all to turn up. If you are one of the lucky ones, you get an email saying "Well done there, you have tickets" and your bank balance is shorn of the necessary funds. But they don't tell you what you've ended up with (almost certainly because you requested the 100 metres final and ended up with diving heats) so you have to wait until they turn up to find out how much of a swizz it was.
Surely there was a better way of handling this? Why did you have to put all your eggs in one basket and have enough money to cover every eventuality? Why couldn't you have a ranking system, where you put a 1, 2 or 3 against the tickets in the order of preference, and they tried to allocated priority 1 tickets first, then 2, then 3, instead of giving you everything available and assuming you've got the money to cover it? Most people cottoned on to the fact that the chances of getting anything were slim so requested just about everything, leaving them open to the possibility of tens of thousands of pounds being withdrawn, although naturally, that never happened.
For a games which has been touted as the greenest, as well as being ahead of schedule (although nowhere near budget) I find this element of the process pitiful. The organisers seem to have come up with the easiest possible system for them (to get rid of the tickets as quickly as possible) without actually considering the people behind the requests. Alright, there are 50-odd million of us in this country, but surely there could have been a better way of distributing them than this? You might as well have just stood on top of Nelson's Column, chucked all of the tickets into the air and shouted 'Scramble!'. At least there would have been a modicum of chance involved then. Shysters.
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