Saturday, June 30, 2007

A C5 for the naughties

I generally avoid sweeping statements of hyperbole, but I think I'm on fairly safe ground here.

These are truly the saddest fucks on the planet. Their lives must be an awesome gaping void if they can get this excited over a phone that also has an MP3 player.

Personally, I hope it goes the same way as the Sinclair C5.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

If only I hadn't been exhausted

I met an interesting character last week in Pismo. A pleasant enough place, Pismo, famous for it's clams and it's scooter trash*. The highlight of last year's Pismo Car Festival was the appearance of a couple of dray horses, which I am sure invites comment but I can't imagine what.

Anyway, it happened late at night, as so many of these encounters do, but I wasn't drunk or even in a bar. In fact, I was checking into a hotel after a long day, thinking of nothing beyond a few hours sleep. Without provocation, or even any apparent sequitur to the conversation, the desk clerk turned to me and asked if I knew that the the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al Quaeda but were actually part of a CIA conspiracy? Inwardly I groaned, and prayed (in vain) that my companion would stop laughing. In my experience any kind of response, even laughter, only encourages these people, and as I have said before lunatics always seem to catch me at my most vulnerable (in this case from sleep deprivation). Whether emboldened by my companion's laughter or in spite of it, he went on to explain how the Twin Towers were demolished. He then informed me that the whole of Iraq is contaminated by the minute shrapnel from depleted uranium shells, and that then irradiated aerosol cloud was making its way around the globe. His parting shot was an admonishment not to own a cell phone, since they can listen in on you, even when it's switched off. An informed man indeed, who truly has his pulse on the .

Being exhausted I felt unable to engage him further and ask him the burning questions posed by his peculiar tirade, so I set them down here in the hope that one of my readers can go to the Pismo Lighthouse Suites and ask him themselves.

1. If a government is capable of slaughtering 3,000 of its own citizens in a complex plot that involves the silencing of hundreds of skilled demolitions workers, air traffic controllers, eye witnesses and security personnel, how come they've allowed him to stay alive and spill the beans to any random tourists passing through the Californian Central Coast?

2. Consider that any airborne particles are washed out of the atmosphere after about two months unless they reach the stratosphere/upper troposphere, and consider also that depleted uranium (being dense enough to pierce modern armour) can't get that high in the atmosphere without the aid of either a major volcanic eruption or a nuclear strike. How, then, is this DU cloud supposed to have just sat in the atmosphere for four years? I think we would have noticed a volcano or thermonuclear explosion.

3. If my cell phone is out of range, can they still listen to me? What about if I'm roaming, or if I just forget to pay my phone bill?

He has a website you know. I can't be arsed, but feel free to check it out.


Pismo - famous for clams, scooter trash and mentalists



*Note for British readers: Do you have dirt in your arches? Do you like to unwind with a 12-gauge and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Do thoughts of the unspoilt wilderness evoke the smell of two-stroke mixture in your nostrils and the gentle scream of a kawasaki in your ears? If so, you're probably scooter-trash.

Monday, June 25, 2007

I'll have a tall latte, but go easy on the Louis Armstrong

When did listening to Ella Fitzgerald become a necessary adjunct to enjoying a coffee? I can't remember the last time I went into a cafe and they weren't blasting some 1950s easy listening through the speakers. This isn't just the big chains either; the so-called independent local places who think they're completely different from Starbucks because they buy their coffee direct from one-legged ethnic Kenyan farmers and bake their own bagels are just as bad. A word of advice to any local coffee shop owners who are desperate for brand differentiation - take Nina Simone out of the CD player and stop putting up self-important notices about how the care and attention you take is just to 'enhance my coffee-drinking experience'. How these people can claim to be completely different from the big corporations when they use language like that defeats me.

Mostly, I drink coffee because caffeine is a stimulant. I could get caffeine from another source, for example tea, but I to be honest I've never understood what the big hoopla about dried leaves and hot water is anyway. I could be really modern and drink Red Bull or Rockstar or Mindfuck or
whatever the latest buzz-in-a-can is called, but they all taste like shit. So, I drink coffee. Maybe, late at night when my work is done, when I have time to relax and reflect on the events of the day, I might consider the soothing tones of Louis Armstrong or Myles Davis before I
go to bed (or at last I would if I was a pretentious, new-media dickhead with a straggly goatee). During the middle of the day, however, I drink coffee purely because I don't want
to relax.

If you find somewhere that plays Zodiac Mindwarp and The Cult on the sound system, and describes it's fare in terms such as 'it's just fucking coffee, do you want one or not?', then please let me know. In the meantime, I'm going to boycott all locally-owned coffee shops for the cardinal sin of hypocritically aping the packaged ambiance of the big chains and then feeling all superior about it.

Friday, June 08, 2007

Except for me, every single man on the internet is a liar

The interweb world is agog with the comings and goings of Paris Hilton, as if being banged up and banged out is a new experience for her. Personally, I don't really give a toss what happens to the tedious cow, but what I am infuriated by is the amount of bare-faced lying that's going on.

The so-called news has inevitably raised our Paz's profile, inevitably prompting such high-brow discussions as 'would you shag her', and 'will she get some hot lesbo action in the Big House'. Apparently, almost every pundit on the internet (and you just know they're male) thinks she's hideous, skanky, and would not touch her with a long stick.


99.8% of male internet users find this woman hideous


Who on Earth are these people trying to deceive?

Are my sexual predilections really so deviant that my aesthetic is completely unrepresentative of the male population? Actually, it's well known that my I'm a sexual deviant, but I'm fairly sure that my perversions don't stretch to my view of what is and is not physically attractive. The woman clearly has her faults (i.e. she's an overly-sheltered, self-absorbed and vacuous bint), but I hardly think that being physically hideous is one of them. I am quite sure that I would find a five minute conversation with her absolutely unbearable (although she's probably not that much more stupid than the average collegiate athlete, and they're supposed to university material). Would I have sex with her though? After deep reflection, my personal status at the time notwithstanding, and considering the fact that she's a physically attractive young female, I would have to say that fuck yes, I would gladly and happily bang her.

I suspect that in reality the same is true for all these naysayers. Are these men really such connoiseurs of the female form that they actually find her ugly? Of course they aren't. They're just saying that they wouldn't in case their fat, ugly girlfriends are looking over their shoulders as they type, and they want to make out that the physical aspects of sexual attraction aren't important to them. Well I have news for any woman reading this that might be convinced that their male partner is unswayed by physical attraction - he's lying. When a heterosexual man, every heterosexual man, meets a woman, a barometer in his crotch stands to attention or limply droops depending on whether she looks good or not. If the barometer stands proud, it doesn't mean that he needs to have sex with her, or that he will have sex with her, or that the attraction will completely define all their future interactions. It does mean, however, that given the opportunity he would sleep with her.

These sad, faux-imasculated men can make these mendacious claims, fairly sure that they will never be proven wrong, because of course they know deep in their soul that Paris Hilton will never ever have even the slightest interest in sleeping with them. So instead they're stuck trying to prove to their fat ugly partners that they've somehow evolved beyond the most basic and defining mammalian instincts.

Jesus Christ, I never thought that I'd write a post that was even slightly defensive of Paris Hilton. I feel dirty. And I think I like it. Mmmmmm...

Monday, June 04, 2007

Shopping online is like wandering the streets of Cairo

One of the greatest benefits of the internet has been, in my opinion, online shopping. It is cheaper and more convenient than the real-world alternative, and most importantly it means I don't have to sully myself by rubbing shoulders with the monstrous proletariat. The one drawback is that to buy anything one generally has to become a 'registered user', so committing you to a future of being informed of the latest bargains.

For those of you who have never been to Cairo, to walk in the streets is to subject oneself to a constant barrage of desperate solicitations. The moment you are marked out as a foreigner (and this takes just a matter of seconds), you can expect a dismal litany of retail opportunities.

'Taxi? Trip to Pyramids, new tombs, very good, special price. Chess sets? For your sister, for your girlfriend, for your wife?'
'What, all three of them?"
'Ha ha, very good, very funny joke. Now we friends, come, take tea. Carpets, perfume, very good, very cheap. Special price, friend price....'

So it goes on, in every Souq on the Nile Valley, endlessly and repeatedly. Every time you venture into the streets, you will be surrounded by a pack of these people, swarming around you like flies around a turd. It is possible, and even normal, to pass a rank of twenty identical taxis and have to individually reject each and every one. In Aswan, I once asked number twenty in why, having seen me refuse nineteen of his competitors, he thought I would impulsively decide that he was the taxi I had been waiting for all my life? In retrospect his reply was predictable. 'Aha, where from? Welcome. Friends, take tea? Camel ride? Tombs? Woman? You like woman?' In the good old days, foreigners were able to assure of a themselves peaceful stroll through the streets by employing a hefty local with a big stick and a vicious streak. Nowadays, the local authorities seem to take a dim view of club-wielding tourists. Believe me, I tried.

Amazon.com are just like that. I am constantly getting emails telling me what I might like, what I should buy, and how I've been selected as a 'special' customer, like a Cairene pimp pretending to be my friend. They even send me mail if I haven't bought anything for a while. 'Habibi, why you no buy something, you no love me, my heart it breaks. Here, Dynamic Meteorology by Holton? Latest edition, for you special price'. At least in Egypt you can slink into a bar and take a breather from this cacophony of peddlers. From Amazon.com, there is no escape.

I've just received another email. 'Pedlosky, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics? Special price, friend price. Latest McNab? Chess set? Taxi? You want girl? I get you girl, clean girl, she my sister. You prefer boy?'