What the hell is a two star song?
June 12, 2011
What the hell is a two star song? I really do not know. I run a music player that works off a 5 star rating and I just cannot fathom the possible use of star number two.
Star number 5 is the most obvious star. This is music that’s special to me. It is music I first had memorable sex to. First kiss. First time driving a car and first time committing a minor crime. It was music I was listening to when a cheating ex-girlfriend got hit by a car. Pinnacle moments. Special music that I connect with emotionally in a way I could never have done with people like that cheating ex-girlfriend or her small yappy-type dog.
Four star music is music I recognise as good. Music that can affect my mood. Music that I would recommend to friends. Some four star music may even be better played, written and conceived than the 5 star music but, as I have mentioned, it does not connect to something special, unfathomable and possibly disgusting and illegal in my past so it misses out on that special extra star.
Three star music is music I will not murder someone and bury them in my basement (if I had a basement) for playing. It is tolerable, background music. I am keeping it available out of compassion for guests in my home who may not consider The Offspring suitable background dinner music. It will never make it’s way into my car, though, that would be too much.
One star music sucks. The only reason one star music stays on my system is because I am petty. I paid for that damn music and I am damn well going to keep it until I encounter someone else who likes it. Then I will give them that music, delete it from my computer forever… as well as that person’s telephone number because the only person who is worse than someone who will listen to my one star music is someone who actually uses the half-star option on these programs.
No star music I just have not gotten around to listen to yet. It’s the second half of the album of that band that had one good song- and I made the truly horrible mistake of buying their entire album. It’s like buying the Matrix series of movies. You find out that what you thought was talent was just some kind of incredible fluke. Yes, I am talking to you K-OS, the makers of the wonderful song Crabbukkit and exactly fuckall else pleasant.
So who rates a song two stars? Anything less than 3 you just don’t like. How can it really matter how much you do not like it? Is your life that empty that making such a judgement is a legitimate use of your time? Unless you are as twisted and petty as me it shouldn’t even be in your collection any more. Get down to a homeless shelter and donate your time you feckless idiot. They value their lives more than you value yours. Maybe you will learn something.
The only people more disturbing than two star people are something-and-a-half star people. They must be robots. Emotionless automata made by Nazi, Stainist or Apple scientists deep inside a mountain somewhere. How can you confidently predict day-to-day, on a 10 point rating scale- how much you are going to love a song tomorrow? Are you that emotionally consistent? Get off the beta blockers and join the world!
By the way, anyone who hasn’t heard the Black Keys Album Brothers is missing out. Start with Tighten Up, Next Girl and Howlin’ For You and move on from there.
I wonder if anyone still reads this?
X-games, X-sports and X-furniture…
May 31, 2009
In local news here in South Africa a letter addressed to the ministers of health, public service, education, justice, social service, correctional services, police and finance from Cosatu, the country’s biggest trade union, admitted the terrifying reality facing their leadership: “We are sitting on a time bomb that may explode at any time.”
The President and his Cabinet had not realised the severity of the situation last week when Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said at a news conference “We call on the leadership of government at national level and provinces to act with necessary urgency to avert what is clearly a ticking time bomb.”
The Cabinet is due to hold a special session to examine the matter. “We were aware after Vavi’s comments they had a bomb problem,” said an unnamed source within the Cabinet, “but we had no idea they lacked furniture, too. Some sort of chair or box or something is probably in order so they don’t have to use the bomb for seating.”
The source went on to say that “A budget will have to be put aside and a tender sent out. In the interim we are forming a committee to look into the possibility of sending over a qualified individual to read the time on the bomb. That way, at least, the tender committee will have a time-frame to work with.”
A Cosatu insider admitted that they had not realised that, being a time bomb, reading the detonation time was an opotion.
The bomb squad is on standby for when alternative furniture has been arranged.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=nw20090521145642885C721655
Damn Puritans
April 3, 2008
Max Mosley, the 67yr old head of the FIA, has been outed by a British newspaper who got video of him enjoying a sado-masochistic orgy with 5 prostitutes- playing out Nazi concentration-camp scenes with him as both guard and victim.
There is a lot of hue and cry about this right now and, of course, the papers dredged up that his father was a fascist and right-wing nutter who had a certain Mr. Hitler at his wedding. I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for my father’s behaviour. Anyway, fascism is ‘in’ right now: look at the USA under GW.
What, exactly, are they angry about? None of the papers I read state what country this actually happened in so we don’t know if prostitution there was illegal (as it still is in Britain) or whether it happened in a country where it is illegal to show the Nazi flag or symbol in public… in which case I don’t think Mr. Mosely is in trouble anyway as it all took place in a dungeon not in the middle of a Berlin Shopping Mall. It might have been important enough for a news story, I suppose, if the women had turned out to be real Nazi’s intent on recovering the Holy Grail and setting the Nazi Empire back on course but all early reports indicate not.
It’s not like Mr. Mosley only tried on the Nazi uniform and played guard, either. This is a man who wanted to try both sides of the game and played for a little submission as a victim, too. This is really not a big deal. Really. Yet the Prince of Bahrain has asked him not to attend the Bahrain Grand Prix and some people are calling for him to resign. What a load of old tosh.
I think, though, that in all this Puritanical frenzy we are all missing something terribly important here: the financial windfall that Viagra has brought to the prostitution industry. Here was a man who could take on not just one, not two, but five women at the age of 67! At the tender age of 35 I would feel less than confident at my ability to take on a whole handful of the opposite sex but here is a pensioner knocking them away like it’s Sunday afternoon croquet (with Nazi’s) and then relaxing afterwards with a cup of tea.
I imagine that all his father could have done with 5 female Nazi’s at 67 would have been play croquet and he probably did.
It’s really time we got over all this stuff about people’s sex lives. Unless someone is hurting someone else (who doesn’t want to be hurt) or is preying on those deemed incapable of making choices for themselves through age, mental incapacity or being President of the USA they really need to be left alone unless they post it all on YouTube.
And this prostitution thing being illegal has got to stop, too. What a man and a woman and another man and a midget in a dress carrying a squirt gun filled with oil do to earn money in their own time with their own bodies is their business unless, again, they decide to post it on YouTube.
Go Max!
Decent People
March 8, 2008
In months where I have had few heart- warming thoughts there has been one: people are fundamentally decent.
I lie, there has been more than one heart warming thought but all the others are either pornographic or involve ideas for elaborate practical jokes- one in particular needing access to 1005 garden gnomes and a thermonuclear warhead.
But as far as sensible, heart-warming thoughts go (or sensible thoughts at all) it can be, pretty much, whittled down to just the one. In case you have already forgotten it is that people are fundamentally decent.
The proof is in Democracy. In order to get people in a democracy to support ideas that are not fundamentally decent you have to lie to them (or blackmail them, bribe them or offer them sex). The failings of modern democracies like the USA, the UK and some of the European countries comes down to information. The gathering of it, the access to it, the dissemination of it and how much it is valued by people. You and I are being lied to every day and most of the time we don’t realise it.
We are never taught, either by our parents or in school, how to value information. We are not shown how to look at and absorb information we find abhorrent and that conflicts with our world view. We are not shown how to look for jewels of information in sludge or great ideas from those we dislike or hate.
We are taught to reject ideas or thoughts based on the people who presented them to us rather than the merits of the ideas. It is possible that one day Paris Hilton will say something insightful- possibly off a cue card. It is possible that George Bush will be vindicated by history- possibly on mental grounds and it is possible that, one day, the world will look back on Donald Trump’s hair as the beginning of a fashion trend. Yet these are things I just cannot accept in my reality. It’s a bit too far beyond “The Matrix”. But I try to keep that mind open.
What school needs teach is a critical mind. Less regurgitation of the traditional national exports of Mongolia and more thought on whether what their tutor just said is utter bollocks.
People are basically decent. But we are also basically ignorant and the ignorant cannot choose a government because their “choice” isn’t theirs. It belongs to whoever fed them the information.
But, then again. Perhaps I am wrong.
Maybe there is someone out there willing to offer me money or sex to change my opinion… it’s worth a shot. I am a flexible guy.
Sex and KFC
November 27, 2007
We can no longer trust our major media to report the news properly any more because of corporate interference trying to sell us hot pants and fast food which, you would think, are fairly mutually exclusive items*- if we’re lucky. The other area where it affects us heavily is medicine. It was pointed out long ago by concerned research scientists that if you put combating disease in the hands of profit-oriented companies alone without having government labs involved what you will get is only treatments- not cures. A cure, after all, is only for Christmas- a treatment is for life.
The first truly awful science of my generation was the way AIDS was handled in the 80’s. Cargo-cult science from a doctor of dubious repute connected a retrovirus to a syndrome and transmission to sex and we were told, with the usual enthusiasm of the tabloid media, of the bodies piled high on the streets come the year 2000. Sex sells. Sex kills. Those alive, paying attention and not out shopping for hot pants holding a bucket of KFC would have caught, at the time, the BBC Panorama documentary which questioned the science and pointed out that the odds on contracting the HIV retrovirus, should it exist, from sex was thousands to one**. The threat increased to one in hundreds only if both partners had an open wound on their genitalia. I personally lack the commitment to have sex hundreds of time with my penis bleeding profusely and even if I did I lack the charm, I feel, to talk another person into rigorous sex whilst suffering from severe blood loss.
Lunatic fringe thinker, I, joined only by Nicholas Regush of ABC News, Harpers, a few Nobel Prize winners for chemistry and around ten thousand scientists outside the USA whose income is not dependant on companies making billions from HIV treatments in thinking there is some less than robust thinking here are now re-joined by the BBC.
The method that has been proposed (but never proved) by which the retrovirus kills our T-cells has as much credibility as a trial lawyer representing OJ Simpson or Robert Downey Jnr. according to, for all my dissing Americans, a study led by Emory University in Atlanta. In reporting the story the Beeb, though, fearful of the American treatment of the English language, decided to get a quote from a trustworthy British scientist at Imperial College, Cambridge. Professor Jaroslav (very British) Stark said: “Scientists have never had a full understanding of the processes by which T helper cells are depleted in HIV, and therefore they’ve been unable to fully explain why HIV destroys the body’s supply of these cells at such a slow rate. Our new interdisciplinary research has thrown serious doubt on one popular theory of how HIV affects these cells, and means that further studies are required to understand the mechanism behind HIV’s distinctive slow process of cellular destruction.”
What’s worrying is this: they decided HIV causes AIDS by killing T-cells without ever understanding or proving the process by which it happens. Then how do you know that HIV is doing it, exactly? There is a word for this kind of thing: it is called a guess. Guessing, as you may conclude, is not great science. Guessing is what loses you huge amounts of money at the track. Guessing is what you do when you try and win the lottery. Guessing is not something you want from, say, a person packing your parachute, deciding on the length of your bungee cord or sending you to a foreign country to find weapons of mass destruction. So filling yourself with toxic chemicals to kill a retrovirus which may be sitting around, chilling, and generally showing the activity and work ethic of a procrastinating grandma on a weeks break in Torremelinos based on a guess may be considered to be less than smart.
The problem is the way we demand answers from medicine. Other sciences get to dabble around and have fun trying to make the universe accidentally fold up or putting new elements together to see how big a bang we can get. We, as individuals, don’t really care so we place no pressure on them. But we want to be cured of every tiny ill. Since none of us really believe in heaven any more we are afraid of death, otherwise we would let ourselves be “taken” at the first opportunity. Lying there, measle-infected, “See God,” we could utter, “it’s not suicide- just your will. See you in a minute- put my sexy birds on ice and pour me a Martini.” So we believe in something new: we have faith in medicine. Which is dumb. Medicine is reason and evidence. And profit. When we substitute reason and evidence for faith we end up with faith and prophet. Possibly one called Mohamed, or Jesus, or Dave The Amazing Faith healer. Or GlaxoSmithKline.
It is really our fault. Our brain seeks conclusions to problems and it seeks them quickly. We are designed to suffer anxiety about the unknown because early humans who were not quick to decide the best option when faced with, say, a large and pretty kitty with sharp teeth and savage claws, never got to decide anything ever again… least of all who to accidentally get pregnant at the prom.
So we get betrayed, every day, by our Selves. Our Selves are not something to be trusted. They will fuck with us at every given opportunity making us think our hair looks bad, our hot-pants don’t suit us and make us buy another bucket of comfort-KFC. We tend to believe what will make us happy and accepted rather than what is inconvenient and, quite possibly, true.
One of those things is: you’re going to die. Get over it. Stop worrying about it. Get laid. And use a condom not because you think you’re going to die from some random infection but because you’re considerate, because you are careful, and because if you have kids they will want you to send them to school and college and will want to borrow your car- which will eat into your drinking money and destroy your social life. Who wants that? Honestly.
*- bridged by the diet supplement market.
**- “Male-to-female transmission was approximately eight times more efficient than female-to-male transmission …The constant per-contact infectivity for male-to-female transmission was estimated to be 0.0009 [Meaning that female-to-male would be 0.00001125 or about 1/10,000]…We observed no seroconversions after entry into the study…No transmission occurred among the 25% of couples who did not use their condoms consistently, nor among the 47 couples who intermittently practiced unsafe sex during the entire duration of follow-up. This evidence argues for low infectivity in the absence of either needle sharing and/or other cofactors” Padian NS et al. Heterosexual Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Northern California: Results from a Ten-Year Study. Am J Epidemiol. 1997 Aug;146(4):350-7
Bi-cycle
November 1, 2007
A man in the UK has been placed on the sexual offenders list with, note, rapists and paedophiles for “having sex with a bicycle”. When I first heard of this I thought “sure, okay, you don’t go around doing that sort of thing in public- it can put people off their lunch.”
But it wasn’t. In public I mean. It was in a locked hotel room*. Assuming the bicycle was his I really do not see what the hell this has to do with the court system. He has been convicted of “sexual breach of the peace.” Unless he was being particularly loud or the bicycle had not been oiled in an awfully long time I do not see this at all.
What people do in private is their own business, surely, unless it causes harm to others. Unless he can be proven to be deliberately luring the cleaners who came across him** into the room for an audience I fail to see what he did wrong. Besides, if he wanted an audience simply filming it and placing it on YouTube will do the business.
Perhaps the old fella just needs a bit of education in the ways of the modern world. I would like to ask him, though: are bi-cycles hotter than uni-cycles, just like women?
*From The Telegraph:
She said: “They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.
“They [the cleaners] used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white T-shirt, naked from the waist down.
“The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”
Both witnesses, who were extremely shocked, notified the hotel manager, who in turn alerted the police.
** sorry
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/26/nsex126.xml
Overweight? Try lying to yourself.
October 30, 2007
The important thing about modern western civilization is successful lying. Not only to others but yourself. We spend all day being bombarded with lies so outrageous that we become immune to recognising them: this pill will make you thin, this dress will make you gorgeous, that car will get you laid, Iraq/Iran/Israel/ The Disney Corporation is your enemy, Crocs are so comfortable people will forgive you for looking like a moron, that Presidential candidate is completely different from the others and will represent your best interests and these sunglasses will protect your eyes whilst making you look cool and not at all like some half-bug-half-human from a ‘B’ horror movie.
If tasty food full of sauces and decadent pastries make you fat why do the French have one of the lowest obesity rates in the western world? If those sunglasses make you look so cool why wasn’t anyone wearing them 5yrs ago? Fashion is not new technology. If that Presidential candidate is so much your bitch- who gave them the money to run their campaign? Was it you? Didn’t think so… tight-arse.
But the first point (about the French) is true: they consume lots of all the food you shouldn’t eat, they have no worries over “low fat” options and what do you get? Not Texas, surprisingly. You get a country that is in shape despite having the same affinity for gymnasiums as the Bhurka- wearing women of Iran do for the beach. The French do have the advantage of having none of their food created in labs. This is, after all, the country where a terrorist organisation bombed a McDonalds not because they were anti- American but because they thought the food was offensive to the French Culinary Tradition. These are my kinda terrorists: clear thinkers. Why hate a group of people you’ve never met? Hating bad food. That is smart!
The difference between the French and the rest of us is the size of our TVs. The French spend less time working and worrying about acquiring material possessions and more time hanging out with family and friends, having tasty meals and remembering that their boss is just another arsehole who can go jump because, quite frankly, the whole of London will not freeze to death if his company’s line of pullovers arrive a day late. More is the pity, she thinks, as the English are notoriously dour.
So, you’re overweight because you work too hard.
If a comment like that would, as in my case, result in everyone you know falling down in fits of paralytic laughter there is another excuse. That is: more than 50% of you is not even “you”. You see, you are not just a product of your own DNA but a super-organism made of streams of bacteria that have sweet f-a (the technical term) to do with human genetics. You have a kilo of bacteria working for you in your gut, alone. There are 100 trillion cells of “not you” and only a few trillion that are.
This is why you are overweight: it’s not you, it’s them, and it may be time to break up. The bad news is you need this bacteria to survive. Without it you die. This will guarantee thinness- if that’s what you’re into.
It also explains why people who use anti-bacterial soap always look a little anaemic.
The USA needs heroes…
October 26, 2007
There is one guy running for President in the USA worth anything. He is a whistle blower, releasing the “Pentagon Papers” (information on the Vietnam war being kept secret by Nixon) and the man who effectively ended the draft in the USA during the Vietnam war. The Senator for Alaska is in no-one’s pocket and was just dropped from the Democratic Nomination debates on NBC for not doing things he did and not being rich enough. This would be the second televised debate that he will be excluded from. Gravel is against the war and vocally for substantial cutting the USA military. NBC is owned by General Electric*, the USA’s biggest arms contractor and the second biggest company in the world. The USA spends more on military than the rest of the world combined (even excluding the cost of the Iraq war).
Mike Gravel asks inconvenient questions like “are you genuinely talking about dropping a nuclear weapon on Iran?” Particularly important for Americans since Putin, yesterday, assured Iran that any attack on its sovereignty will be seen as an attack on Russia.
Come a hero: a young multimillionaire, Gregory Chase, who agreed, if necessary, to simply hand NBC the $1million they say Gravel needs to be taken seriously as a candidate and allowed to debate. He says he is happy to buy advertising on their network for Gravel to that amount if but will hand over the money gratis if required. Chase, a man who seems to understand “sound-bite” culture, said: “We could put it (the &1mil) in a fireplace and burn it for all I care, as long as he gets in the debate.”
Chase has also put up $25,000 for the person posting the Mike Gravel YouTube Video that gets the most hits before January 1st 2008.
Oddly enough this story has been missed by The BBC, Sky and CNN.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bryan-bissell/gravel-supporter-puts-his_b_69789.html
*- GE was convicted in 1990 of defrauding the U.S. Department of Defence, and again in 1992 on charges of corrupt practices in the sale of jet engines to Israel.- wikipedia
On the high side of life
October 26, 2007
Just as the British government is considering reclassifying Cannabis a class 3 drug after decriminalising possession some years ago a report is released showing possession amongst 16-24yr olds is down 7% in the last decade. This is hardly a shock to anyone who remembers being young. If any enterprising innovators want to cut out recreational drug use altogether they should make it a compulsory lesson in school. I’m betting just before calculus would be best. Sure, it sounds like it would be fun at first but, in truth, by the time you turned 12 the novelty would have totally worn off.*
But governments aren’t famous for their clear, innovative, well- balanced decisions. Neither are musical artists but Radiohead have reportedly sold 1.2 million copies of their new album inrainbows in the first week by offering it to you for whatever you want to pay- even nothing. A western world sick of capitalism apparently, voluntarily gave an average of $5 for the downloadable album meaning the band did about 5 times better than if they had sold it through a record company.
This is what happens when you give people who take drugs power over their lives: they get all touchy- feely and believe people are just, like, “fundamentally good and generous and shit”. They go and annoy all of us by making millions proving it right. Piety and wealth! I say we burn them at the stake. The album’s quite good, though. I paid $5.
For all those who think that artists taking drugs/ living it up/ driving too fast and dying young is a bad example for the youth I give you the comparison of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Which do you think is a better role model, Mad Liz or the man who said “dream as if you will live forever, live as though you will die today.”? Imagine if Michael had died in a rollercoaster accident before he was accused for the 17th time of being a kiddie fiddler. If Paul McCartney had never joined “Wings”. How much better would our lives be?
Thank you Jimi, Kurt, Janis, John and, of course, James. From a time when artists were more considerate of their fans.
*- what the hell is an 11yr old doing calculus for- that is madness!
Modern Consumer Technology
October 24, 2007
Every day the efficiency of capitalism brings us new, joyous innovations in it’s drive to take us to a future utopia where robots do all the washing up, we no longer have to go to work and have more time to devote to family violence, shopping, drinking and messing up the minds of the next generation.
My favourite all-new, brilliant, fantastic innovation is the all-new, brilliant, fantastic juice carton. Gone are the days when you had a vague dotted line with “tear here” loosely associated with some perforations designed to make the carton almost entirely impervious to any sort of tearing whatsoever. That is unless the person doing the tearing was a body builder or your mom in which case it gave quickly and unexpectedly leaving juice all over you, your mom and, when available, the body builder.
Then she gave you a couple of bucks to bog off and not tell your father that there had been a strange man in the house so you ran off and bought cola instead. Anyone short of a mom or a body builder eventually resorted to scissors or, if brave and co-ordinated, a knife.
Nowadays there are no such troubles. You unscrew a convenient plastic cap under which there is a convenient plastic ring-pull attached to a surgically clean, medically sound, save-the-children foil seal. A quick pull disconnects the ring lightly and easily from the foil, having no useful affect whatsoever, and is discarded in a bin before taking a knife and piercing a convenient hole in the top of the carton.
Which is good news as 30 years on your mother is now in a home and the body-builder is running California.
Utopia- not far now!
the world's officially appointed jester 