Monday 20 September 2010

Protest

Hello readers and welcome back to another guff filled mind trump, its the 46th Aldershot Woe and today I am looking at the right to protest in a cleverly titled piece called The Aldershot Woes episode 46: Protest.


What a bell end. That’s an off the cuff statement and it could be about anyone, as we live in a free country where, to a degree, I can say what ever the heck I blimming well like about anyone! So put that in you pipe and smoke it (just not indoors please). Yeah we live in a free society, where we are free to say what ever thoughts are flowing freely through our dumb little minds. Of course there are a couple of rules, if you say something about some ones race or religion or sexuality or age or height or weight or appearance, then that is not allowed as that is hateful… so you cant quite say anything… oh and if you are on say, a state funded national broadcaster, then you can only say what they say you can, and also if what you are saying is a complete fabrication, you cant say that either really, unless you are a politician – (take that “the man”)… but apart from that you’re pretty much golden. If you see someone doing something and you think what they are doing is stupid or wrong or whatever, you can march alongside them shouting hate slogans until the cows come home. Its aces… yay for freedom… Of course this does bring a couple of problems with it as it unfortunately gives some of the vilest, ignorantest and evilest people a voice, and a right to bombard the world with their self serving messages of hate. But that’s not to say that all protesters are evil, oh no far from it most protesters are smug delusional little do-gooders. Or if it’s may day, posho little yah-yah twerps who think the way to get back at the ills of corporations is to urinate and defile war memorials. But the little silver spoon brigade on their day of rebellion against daddy aside, the majority of hippy smug delusional protesters are a good enough breed. If it weren’t for extreme defeatism and lethargy I would join them, maybe not in the thick of the crowd as they look like a less than sanitised bunch, but I’d be there or there abouts, shuffling along side giving half hearted “yeahs” and “you tell thems”. But as most protests are at weekends I can honestly say I have far less noble but more important things to do. But its grand the way we are aloud to go to the streets en masse and have a rant, and we can do so safe in the knowledge that we aren’t about to be sprayed with machine gun fire, we may get beaten to death by peace keeping police officers who all look like they are pretending they are in Halo, but the chances of that are slim. The Pope was here last week and along side the thousands of Jesus fans trying to get a view of the Pontiff their were also hundreds of protesters, letting the pope know that they thought he was a proper dick… I saw one sign on the news and it said “The Pope is the Antichrist”, now he may be a former Nazi with a less than crystal clear policy on child abusers, but Antichrist is a bit harsh still. But being good old free to say what we like blighty, the sign was allowed to stand and was even on the BBC news, and the person waving the Damien Thorne-esque banner wasn’t thrown in the tower of London or fed to a preach of rabid paedo priests. No they were given the right to tell the pope what they thought, I am not clear whether it was some religious zealot who thought the pope genuinely was the antichrist or not, but that’s not important, what ever you want to put on a a bit of wood and wave in some ones face is A-ok… Before we were forced in to an illegal war with Iraq, something like a million people hit the streets of London in protest, which is a huge number, that’s a 6th of the population of the whole City… I mean it didn’t do anything, we went to war regardless… but still a public show like that gives a little pride to the country, it doesn’t really make up for the millions of dead Iraqis, but come on, its something… go us! Not me mind, I was at work that day lining the coffers for a corporation that makes guns made of oil to shoot the Ozone layer. So protesting is cool, if you want, but like I said you also get some royal see yoo en tees who go on the protest, and they more or less balls it up for every one. Take Andy Stephenson and Katherine Sloan, they are up in arms that they were told that they couldn’t wave pictures of dead foetuses on their Pro-Life (possibly the stupidest phrase ever) protest. And I can’t argue with that really, that’s got to be one of the cruellest things you can do, quite why they would want to do that is beyond all human understanding, they are clearly scum, and the world would be abetter place if they died, right now. But this is the problem with free speech, every now and again someone is going to want to say something people simply shouldn’t have to listen to. And then how do you define who can say what and what is offensive to whom and why… it’s a greyer area than John Majors pubes. But in order to prevent the vivisectionist bozos and the pro-life berks from this sort of thing we need to have some sort of protest approval system, where banners are deemed fit and acceptable to the wider public or not, or better than that if you want to protest anything you sign a disclaimer which means anyone who beats seven shades of doody out of you for being an opinionated ball sack can not be prosecuted. That sounds like a sensible way, let’s protest government till they approve it…

Well that was a pointless rant that managed to cloud the already merky waters of debate surrounding the issue… still Robbo were dead good today…



Woe.

Thursday 16 September 2010

3rdWoerld

Hello dear readers, and welcome back to another slice of semi retarded musings about the world we live in, its everybody’s favourite garrison town based blog, the Aldershot Woes: Episode 45: 3rdWoerld?

Repent all ye sinners, the time of judgement is upon us and all whom continue to chose the sides of evil shall face the fiery wrath of hell and the eternal damnation of your soul… Yeah that’s right, fathers lock up your daughters, the old Pope is coming to town, well not the old Pope the new Pope… you know what I mean. I am not a catholic but as I understand, it’s like C of E but with confession and a ban on Johnnies (I may be oversimplifying it a little), but I think this new Pope is creepy, isn’t he? He looks like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars which doesn’t help, but the creepiest thing is his eyes, little black vortexes of nastiness, he looks like the sort of bloke who’d kick a guide dog for no good reason… Even without taking the child abuse scandal and the whole Hitler’s Youth thing in to consideration he is still a right old wrong’en, with the Catholic church having a less than perfect reputation over the last 50 years or so I would have thought they would have chosen a pontiff with a lot more likeability, a Pope of the people with a cheesy grin and shiny teeth, rather than a guy who looks like he lives under a bridge and clubs goats to death for kicks. But like I say I aint Catholic, so it isn’t my position to say who they should have in charge, but being honest I do think he is disturbing, but seeing as how last week I was in furore over some yank defiling the Koran, it would callus of me to now bash the most important man in Catholicism (well after old JC any how) just for looking a bit creepy (I mean you wouldn’t sit next to him on the Tube would you?) so I wont, oh no, my axe to grind is with his buddy Cardinal Kasper (the unfriendly holy ghost) who has said that the British are a Godless bunch and that the UK resembles a third world country. Well I am afraid that he has crossed the line with that remark. Third world? The cheek of it, the brazen bloody cheek of it…

We need to take a stand against this ignorant antianglophilic statement, this German god botherer may think it is acceptable to make these outlandish statements about the country most consider to be Gods back garden, but we need to show him he is wrong. This beautiful happy island of dreams represents the pinnacle of sociological progression, we are a multicultural haven and an example for the world, and how he can say that we as nation are prejudice against any set of people is an outrage… I am in shock that a German of all peoples would make such comments about good old Blighty. It is no wonder so many people are in uproar against this Kraut and his racist remarks (of course this is typical of old fritz) and are demanding an apology. I mean a third world country? We may have rising unemployment, bleak outdated buildings, a Victorian water supply and sewage system, an archaic and flawed political system, a outdated greedy monarchy, a rapidly decreasing currency, an unsettled populous, lingering strikes for public services, plague riddled hospitals, mass influx of foreign unskilled workers, an ever increasing rate of violent crimes, ghetto estates run by drug dealers, increasing numbers of drug addicts, an expanding network of drug dealers and supply of class A drugs, we may have more under 16s pregnant than anywhere else in Europe, our education system may have slipped from 4th in the world to 18th in Europe over the last 10 years, we may have high suicide rates, and families in 3rd generation unemployment, increasing illiteracy, decreasing numbers of 5 year olds who can read, a welfare system riddled with holes that fails those who need it most but rewards those who don’t, so our society operates on a grossly unfair two tier system where 10 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the nations assets and money, so we continue to hold on to archaic dated hereditary piers, and we have a government exclusively ran for the benefit of the controlling top 10% of the population, so we face cuts to our already failing education system, to our incompetent justice system and our impoverished health service, so we can’t help our injured soldiers who are being risked to ensure the oil we steal from middle eastern countries is never liberated, so we send our young off to die not for honour or for our country or any righteous reason other than the continuation of wealth to the already wealthy, so we are poor, unemployed, ignorant, sick, alcoholic, homeless, dirty, criminal, downtrodden and delusional… WE ARE NOT A THIRD WORLD NATION. And I do not think the Cardinal has thought much at all about what he is saying.



Woe.

Monday 13 September 2010

2010

Hello once more and welcome back to the blog that shines a light of ignorance on to the world and then makes lewd shadow puppets. Episode 44: 2010

Ok it’s only September and usually that’s considered a little bit early for a round up of the year that has been, usually this sort of look back over the year happens at Christmas time when were all thinking “Jesus this year went quick”, before we enter a mire of misery as we contemplate our own mortality and try to work out whether the last 12 months have been an absolute waste of time or not. But it is already safe to say that 2010 is the worst year since records began, I mean October through December is going to have to bring nothing but diamonds and blow jobs for us all, for this year to even be considered remotely OK. It’s been an absolute shambles, from every aspect that broader life can be judged. We may have had personal joys, little selfish pockets of merriment, being a selfish prick myself I had a son, who is brilliant, and I know some people who have got married and some who have had holidays, but I am not talking about little micro nuggets of bliss, I am talking about the bigger picture, which at present looks like it was painted by Hieronymus Bosch on a downer… things are bleak.

In every aspect of life we are looking haggard and you can’t blame the pessimists amongst us for thinking that old mankind is on the ropes and his day is just about numbered. The world, for want of a better phrase, is going to shi!t, and society is mirroring it perfectly. I think that mankind (I mean us, not the wrestler for any confused readers) is subconsciously sabotaging itself in preparation for the Armageddon, I think we are purposely making as bigger balls up of the world as we can so when the day comes that we do all fire nuclear bombs at ourselves, or the ice caps melt or one of the other trillion ways in which life on this damp ball of earth can be extinguished, we all think “Ah well, its all bollocksed anyway”, we are currently “ragging” the planet like it’s a rental car on the last day of our holidays… The reason I believe we are on this predispositioned road of destruction is because this year for an unknown reason the UK decided it wanted a Tory Government. And we did this on the back of them, straight to our faces, telling us that they will cut the money spent on us, will increase the money they take from us and do it all in order to pay off the debts that we didn’t make. They didn’t lie, they said there will be job cuts, they said there will be public spending cuts, they said that the money they save will pay off the “deficit” in government borrowing, they did all of this right to our faces, their only trick was to smile when they told us this… and more than 50% of us thought this was a good idea and voted for them. Now they are in charge and hacking money away from where it matters most to regular people, Education (they can buy theirs) Health Care (they can buy theirs) and Justice (again, they can buy theirs). And whilst they have drastic reforms to the welfare system denying those in need and beating them on the nose with a copy of the Daily Mail like a naughty dog, they are prepared to spend a hundred times more the amount on nuclear weapons which we will then sign up not to use… And we voted for them, subconscious sabotage is the only logical explanation.

But before this turns in to a huge anti-tory propaganda sheet, lets get back to the matter, the sh!tty old year its been, and politics are only half of the reason. We may have rising unemployment, and double dip recessions to deal with, and all hopes of us being saved by the “other side” look like they rest with 2 posh brothers who look like page boys at a dukes wedding, but surely society is doing ok? Well no, society only exists on computers and if you go outside you’ll get stabbed in the face, eaten by a Staffy and propositioned by half the England national football team, society is far from OK, and why should it be what do we have to be happy about, nothing… we have gone from sunshine happiness and affordable consumer goods to STI’s, Speedballs and 11 out of 10 British people being from Umygoomygulu land. But 2010 had the potential to be a corker, especially as summer rolled in bringing sunshine and a World Cup, but all it delivered were Rob Green, tears and more wasps than in ANY year previous. And I think we all know it is no coincidence that as misery rises so do wasps… Wasps are like the Ooze in Ghostbusters 2, they feed off human suffering and grow strong from our sadness. So 2010 brought us betrayal from our populous as we voted in the cretin brigade, disappointment from our preened ho-banging footballers and the I-phone 4. 2010 is easily the worst since records began and I really can’t see things getting any better before Christmas is done and dusted… roll on 2011.




Woe

Friday 10 September 2010

Burning Issues

How do, welcome to another Aldershot Woe this is the forty somethingth edition and comes with a free gift of a Irn Bru 10p chew bar… (if your bar is not attached to this blog speak to your Internet Provider).

Well its Friday now but by the time its Monday we could all be dead, or living some sort of Mad-Max post apocalyptic existence as world war three is all set to be triggered by some loony in the states hell bent on having “Burn The Koran Day”. Yep in a genius bid for revenge over the 9/11 attacks on New York some inbred bumpkin preacher from Prickville Tennessee has decided he’s going to have a day burning the Muslim holy book. Now this is the clearly the actions of a mad religious zealot nutbar, and the brain dead, hate filled dumb monger should be ignored like a bratty 3 year old throwing a hissy fit for a new toy. He is just a fringe nutter in a country which seems to have more than its fair share of loopy cretins, so he should have his little protest as he is in the land of free speech, but the best thing about people having the right to say what they want is that they also have the right to not listen. His book burning should have passed by and got no more attention than a cow farting, after the event people should have tutted, called him a wanker and moved on. But as to be expected people are talking about the crazy Pastor, TV news and papers across the world are joining in mass condemnation of the proposed book burning and everyone is gawping at this narrow minded prick and thinking what a C to the U to the N and the T he is… This isn’t unreasonable, he is a dick of the highest order trying to commit a highly offensive protest, so we want to take a stand and condemn him and do our best to distance our selves from the God bothering fruitloop and his crazy plan. It isn’t even obvious what he is trying to achieve with his Koran burning, I mean there are millions of Korans in print so even if his book burn is really successful he’ll be lucky to take out even a single percent of the world Korans. Chances are he just wants to send a message to the Muslim world and if that message is “hey Muslim world I am an absolute bell-end” I think he will be very successful.

The problem is now he and his little mentalist church of Hell and Hate for Jesus have had their publicity and now whether a Koran is burnt or not the damage is done. Both sets of zealot fools will use it to there advantage. The Al Qaida lot will say “America wanted to burn the Koran, they hate us” then they will say “but America didn’t burn it, because they are scared”… it’s a justification of brutality. The Christian douche bags will say that if they don’t do it then Muslims are affecting the first amendment, and even if Pastor Terry “F*ckwit” Jones decides not to have his little book burning festival, some redneck hicks are burn some copies of the Koran and then post it on YouTube to add further fuel to the pyre of ignorance and hatred that continues to burn amongst these narrow minded fools.

So erm, be nice to people… have a good weekend.




Woe.

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Untirement

Hello readers and welcome to the Aldershot Woes, a literary black spot where ignorance is cross bred with ranting to create a tiny baby of stupid wrapped in a swaddling of dumb… The 42nd Aldershot Woe: Untirement.

If you’re like me you are at work right now, and its rubbish isn’t it? Stupid work, with stupid people with ever increasingly stupid faces, I don’t want to be here I want to be somewhere else doing something fun or rewarding or meaningful or relaxing, but I can’t as I am at work, stupid, stupid work. We are all reminded by tragedy on a near daily basis that life is short and we ought to make the most of it as we only get one go at it, but then each day we get up, we get dressed we say goodbye to our loved ones, we switch off our souls and we go to work, every day, forever and ever and ever… Until you retire that is, then you are free to dish out Wurthers Originals and hang around in garden centres to your hearts content… Ah yes retirement, the grey light at the end of the work tunnel. It has always struck me as being mean that you have to wait till you’re too old to enjoy life to get a chance to even try, who ever drew up the plans which left life organised like this needs a stern kick in the gonads. Here’s how it should be we should spend the first 16 years in education, then from 16 to 40 we have retirement, a time to enjoy life whilst we still can, then 40 onwards we all work ourselves in to the grave. This makes far more sense to me, but we have a system now and were stuck with it… or at least we were, as now thanks to banks/government/rich people we are now set to lose our Twighlight years as retirement is just not an option. Apparently there is no money to offer people a pension, so you have to save your own, but you cant save your own as the cost of living is perpetually increasing, which means YOU are going to be living pay check to pay check for the next forever… You like that desk you’re sitting at? You like that shirt and that tie and them shoes? You like those walls? Well good, as you are stuck with them, all of them, forever. You are committing your life to working everyday just so you can carry on as you are, gone is the grey light at the end of the tunnel, as it stands you’ll need to book a days holiday just to attend your own funeral. I don’t know about you but this depresses the hell out of me, this is it, this is life, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed and repeat, forever… if you are lucky you will have a good holiday one year, but that’s about all life has to offer and is the best any of us can hope for, if you want to have any sort of rewarding moments make sure they are between 6 in the evening and 8 in the morning.

So what do we do? The best thing I can think of is get a job you love, something rewarding and fun that won’t make you want to staple your face to your keyboard just to prove you are still alive. But I cant decide on a breakfast cereal I’d want to eat for more than 4 days in a row, so how the flip am I supposed to find a job id be happy with for eternity? I can’t its impossible. The best we can do is look for the positives, it is rewarding to know that future generations will not have hordes of biddies stumbling through town slowly clotting shopping isles with those huge wheeled shopping bags oldies have, nope in the future those massive bags will carry laptops as Doris clocks in to work for the billionth time before she dies.

Life is for making the most of, that’s the best we can all do with it and where as before we’d have to plot for decades and aspire to grow orange and leathery on a Spanish beach by the time were 65, we now more than ever have to live for today and make the most out of work… hmmm, I may try writing illiterate gibberish and posting inane banter on sporting blogs…

Woe…

(one positive, when a cop gets blown up in a movie and was only “one day from retirement” we’ll know he lived a long life)

Monday 6 September 2010

StateOfHappiness

Hello again, its Monday morning, summers officially over, rain is forecasted, the nights are starting to close in earlier with every day that passes, the financial downturn is continuing, unemployment is rising and crime rates appear to be joining it. Life is bleak and miserable and cold and grey and dead, but don’t worry as it’s the 41st Aldershot Woe: State of Happiness.

There isn’t much us Brits do well, we can make pies, play darts, drink beer and get more of our teenage girls pregnant than any other country in Europe. But put those aside and you’ll see the one area we excel in is being happy with being miserable. It’s this unique gift that has got us through the toughest times this country has faced, it got us through the blitz, the Thatcher years, Noels House Party and it gets us through every single international football tournament. We are so used to being shat upon by the people who are supposed to lead us and bring us in to glory that we are genetically programmed to take it on the chin, make a joke out of it and carry on regardless. We love moaning, its what were good at, we like being deadpan and defeatist, the opposite being chipper and gun-ho just doesn’t wear well with us Brits, unlike Americans who can whoop and holler for just about anything in the world. Yanks get excited over pouring breakfast cereal or opening letters or tying shoelaces or closing doors, an American will seek a high-five just for breathing in and out. You know what though, fair-play to them, that’s who they are they’re loud bellowing eternal optimists and were dull grey sneering pessimists, its horses for courses. But today I have read that the government as part of its radical overhaul of the state is planning to take our misery. They have given away our jobs, taken our money, cut the funding to our local authorities, they plan to take money out of education, justice and healthcare and now they are trying to take away our right to moan about it all… I am outraged, or at least I will be until a government agent comes round and reprogram’s me to be a simpering giggling boob.

Ok it won’t quite work like that but basically what they are planning to do is have an increased focus on the mental health of the state, which in theory sounds fair enough, as all too often these problems go unassisted until eventually some one jumps off a multi-story car-park or goes loco-crazy in the Co-op with a samurai sword. But my concern is that they are introducing these measures to help people “deal” with unemployment and eternal empty pocketedness, rather than dealing with the actual matters. Helping the public adjust to having to wait for a much needed operation, offering a shoulder to cry on when you feel down as your kids can’t get in to the local school or prescribing mind altering drugs when the man who burgled your house and sodomised your goldfish is given a suspended sentence as the prisons are full rather than tackling the problem at the root, is essentially the same as jangling keys over a crying baby rather than changing its nappy. Its all a little bit like teaching a man who’s just lost a leg to enjoy hopping rather than giving him a crutch. It is all well and good making people feel better, and it is duly noted that “suicides are higher in times of economic depression” but it isn’t dealing with the problem its numbing one of the side effects. It may be terribly cynical of me but I think someone’s filled in a spreadsheet and worked out it’s far cheaper to dish out Prozac and Valium till were all happy with the utter misery of our existence than it is to actually make life better. Call me a delusional schizophrenic with severe paranoia, but isn’t this just the first step towards state conditioning and mind control? How long till any of us feeling a bit sad are offered government grade mood stabilisers and we become a zombie nation of simpering Cameronites, wondering around what-whating and chuckling like berks whilst killing foxes and patronising coloured people? I’m telling you man, they’re trying to get in to our brains, don’t drink the water that’s how they get you, that’s how it starts, this is it man were all just Tory robots conditioned to worship our wealthy aristocratic leaders, but not me man, I got my tinfoil hat and I keep my ears blocked all the time, they aint getting this old blogger no way, no how… oh… I see… I know what you’re thinking, you think I’m crazy, well that’s just what they want you to think…


Woe…


http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/09/no_health_without_good_mental.html

Friday 3 September 2010

Maybeism

Hello and welcome to another Friday edition of the Aldershot Woes, this is the 40th installation of the Woes so expect a mid blog crisis half way through the article where I start going to festivals, wearing trainers, and knobbing my secretary to prove I am still a real blog goddammit!

Its Friday, and as such I was thinking of writing some light hearted musings about cakes or blowing off or something equally unchallenging and brain-dead to help us all kill some time before we all naff off for the weekend, but then I read about how Stephen Hawking called the pope a liar and stupid and gave him a Chinese burn and claimed that only a man with a chewed up dog toy for a brain could possibly believe that god made the universe, so instead I am going to write about the creation of the universe and the existence of god.
Some people like to know they are being looked after, they like security, and they like harmony, so they look at the unknown reason of existence and apply this desired comfort to their outlook of it and decide it’s much easier to live thinking that everything has a purpose and a plan, that people should be good and not complete bastards and above all else there is a point to life. Ahhhhh, relaxing! Other people want to look after life, rather than have it look after them, they want to know why life is like it is and how it got to be that way. They hate the idea that life is not in their hands to control and that they are merely the moving cogs in a divine plan set in motion by some omnipresent deity, they see actions and reactions and the idea of fate scares them to death as it essentially renders them powerless in life. So they look at the unknown reason for existence and apply this outlook to it, and decide it is far easier to live life knowing that one thing only happens as a result of another thing happening and that ultimately life and what we do with it is entirely up to us… Eureka, relaxing! Both of these seem like rational enough courses to take in life, I can see how the idea of God looking after you would comfort you, knowing that no matter what horrendous thing happens ultimately it is for the greater good. I can also see that knowing we can shape and manipulate life for our own gain, knowing that we are the true masters of our destiny also provides a huge amount of relief in your day to day life. The two opposing schools of thought offer purpose of existence depending on your mindset, so every ones happy and its all good, surely? Well no it’s not, its all bloody terrible… apparently.

Science and religion are constantly bickering like brother and sister on a rainy Saturday afternoon, it’s an argument of perpetual one-upmanship, each side occasionally proves a point but eventually it comes back to “yeah butt” and “prove it” as an exercise of futility its probably up their with Heskey’s England career. And the area which creates the greatest amount of furore is existence. Not the why which strikes me as the larger question but the how, the religious say it was all god, he made the universe and everything in it as part of some huge plan we’re all to thick to really understand, but stick with as eternal bliss is waiting for us, provided were not complete arseholes. He even made man in his own image, although not in his skill set as he made the universe and your average human can’t make an Ikea flat-pack chest-of-draws. The scientists believe its all explainable, a series of causes and events for the last squillion years have resulted in our tiny bubble of life, thanks to the right steps in the expansion of the universe we happen to be just the right distance from the sun to not burn or freeze and as a result water and sticks and stuff are around, and then thanks to a fish making a choice about a trillion years ago we were set on a evolutionary chain of events that has left us now as the proud bum scratching i-phone owning leaders of the world. If I am honest neither explanation makes much sense to me. No one knows do they. I mean religious people can say it’s all in some ancient texts or an angel told them or anything really, and well as highly unlikely as it is, I can’t prove them wrong, but what they have to back them up is faith, so it’s open to scepticism. Science people though they have the big bang theory, and they act as if this is real science… but it isn’t. Its scientific faith, and is no more provable than religion. It’s a hypothesis with some manipulated evidence to back it up, and I would not be at all surprised if in 50 years time people snicker at big-bang theorists in the same way Columbus chuckled his tits off at the flat-earth berks…

I think we’d all be better off if religious people focused their do-goodness on some actual causes rather than rowing with a man in a wheel chair, and science cured cancer or gave me hover boots rather than antagonising a bunch of god-botherers. In the end were asking questions we are not equipped to answer, so all were left with is futile bickering. My stance is this, science will take us so far and help us a great deal but some questions need to remain unanswered to make life exciting, the how’s why’s and what the f*cks of life are what its all about. As such I’m starting my own school of thought “Maybeism” we have no core beliefs and anything that is not 100% provable we give it a warm MAYBE, shrug and carry on with life. (I was going to end with it being a portmanteau of religion and science called “reliance” but feared any lactose intolerant readers would die).



Woe.

Tuesday 31 August 2010

Watched

Hello once more and welcome to a post bank holiday Tuesday flavoured Aldershot Woe, god I’ve lost count of where we are but I think this is the 39th Woe and so far I am very proud to have kept a consistent level of ignorance, bias, spite, poor grammar and semi aborted thoughts to each previous Woe, I hope this one doesn’t disappoint… Aldershot Woe episode 39: Watched.


The other day I was walking back from town, it was a hot day, I was coming down a steep incline on a long boring road pushing a heavy double pushchair when I was struck by a feeling, one that could cause great embarrassment if I were in a busy street or a crowded shop, a feeling I am sure we have all experienced at some time or another and have all had to suffer as a result, I speak about that feeling whose mere mention has you shuffling impatiently and franticly in your seats, I had… an itchy arse. Its never going to be your most dignified moment, but it happens to us all, doesn’t it? And usually in somewhere completely inappropriate, which leaves us awkwardly shifting about in our own skin trying to alleviate the problem via some sort of telekinetic bum-scratch, or worse has us backing up against a wall so we can take a stealth claw to the problem… it’s embarrassing and its horrible and it is unfortunately part of life’s rich tapestry of humbling moment s of idiocy and grossness. But when you’re in the middle of nowhere, walking down a long boring road on hot day, and no ones about, go on, whose going to know, get in and sort the problem, give it a good scratch… which is exactly what I did, the relief was ecstatic, and for a few steps I marched forward with a renewed vigour. Then a car drove past from behind me and I noticed the people were sniggering… at me. For a second I thought, oh who cares, I’ll never see them again anyway. But then I was struck with a sense of absolute fear as I was hit with the realisation that, that is not true anymore, what if they had an iphone, what if they were techno savvy youngsters, it would take them about 4 seconds to publish my embarrassing bum-scratch on you tube and about 8 seconds for it to be emailed across the world as I become the latest “viral” sensation and feature in a series of witty cleverly edited bum-scratch parodies and there’s bum-scratch.com and bum-scratch t-shirts and mouse matt’s and all other spin off merchandise featuring me scratching my chad like a complete berk…

Then slowly the paranoia drifted away, but my little panic attack had opened my eyes. In the UK we are the most watched people in the world, CCTV is everywhere, and if “the man” aint watching our every movement some bell-end with a camera phone is. Last week the nation was in furore over middle aged spinster and cat basher Mary Bale, as her little prank was caught on CCTV and a subsequent witch hunt began on line for her. And with the advent of YouTube and the ever increasing number of cameras watching us, filming our every moment, the chances of YOU ending up being caught on camera acting like a knob and it being put on line for pimply chuckle monkeys to comment on and send to there mates is increasing all the time. We always had “you’ve been framed” and such shows reeling off films of us acting like chumps getting footballs kicked our faces or falling into swimming pools or being savaged by rabid squirrels, or what ever, but they were always reserved for people actually twatty enough to let themselves be filmed, now though we don’t have a choice, now our private moments of embarrassment are pinged around office inboxes and shared with the world. Gone are the days where you could fall over land face first in dog sh!t and simply hate your own guts for a minute, giggle it off, and move on with life… now you run the risk of being “Dog-Sh!t Face” for the rest of your life.

Now I suppose in the case of old Mary “puss-in-bins” Bale it’s a good thing, and let me just say as a cat owner, I thought it was hilarious, but what about all the innocent bozos who gets caught on camera having a bird plop on their heads or scratching their itchy arse on a hot day or any of the other moments of unavoidable embarrassment we’d all be better off forgetting about, what about those poor bastards?
Now as we go about our lives with a thousand tiny robotic eyes fixed on our every movement recording every thing we do, we carry the burden that when we let down our usually cool veneers and act like the ridiculous mugs we really are, even for a second, it could be recorded and we could each live in infamy of our own bone-headedness forever… or at least till an even bigger buffoon is found and filmed. (Mary Bale must be praising the stars about that girl throwing puppies in a river!)



Woe.

Thursday 26 August 2010

The Alder-toff Woes

Salutations my loyal and treasured readers, may I once more permit you welcome to the sanctuary of ignorance known by many as the Aldershot Woes, a twice to thrice weekly memorandum on the comedic reverberations of life. This week’s relation: The Alder-toff Woes.

Class, we all have an axe to grind about it, I am working class my dad is working class his dad was a layabout, but his dad was working class. I grew up being fairly poor, above breadline but by no means affluent. And for the first 5 years of my life I only saw my dad every other weekend, not because he didn’t live with us, but cos he left for work at 6 and got back from work at 9, and worked every other weekend. He struggled for us to be meagre, and that will always live with me, it’s shaped my perceptions of society it’s given me a good work ethic and an appreciation of the simpler things in life, but above all is given me an intense inbuilt and inherent dislike of middle and upper class people. The floppy haired, Land Rover driving, Barber Jacket wearing, Ski holiday taking, double barrel named, chortling, yah-ing shitbiscuits… every one of them.

However like most inbuilt social level hatreds this exists purely in my head, it airs itself when I am watching television, or if I see some rich twat in a car park or in a shopping centre, when I read the newspaper or anything what-so-ever to do with politicians, then its there, in the back of my head bellowing fourth “posh w@nkers” and other hate slogans aimed solely at my affluent brethren. But in real life, when I meet middle or upper class types I am always open minded, non judgmental and have no more prejudice than when I meet any other human being (which to be fair is still a large amount of prejudice). In fact some of my closest friends are painfully Middle Class, they grew up in large detached houses, went to grammar schools, drive expensive cars and holiday abroad at least twice a year. I can honestly say some of the most welcoming, charming, witty and brilliant people I have met have been from the upper echelons of society, a friend of mine I consider to be more of a brother was a junior Ski Champion for gods sake, that’s surely as posh as it gets. Don’t get me wrong I do rip it out of him for it, but he in turn rips me for being a do-as-you-likey, so it’s all even. But regardless of what we actually practice in our lives, in the back of our minds lying dormant, but ready to pounce the second a floppy haired toff does anything a little bit annoying lives our classist rage. Personally I think it’s a good thing, gives us all a sense of identity and a very useful chip on our shoulders to back us up in times of difficulty. I live in a sh!tty council estate, plagued by junkies and morons and as ridiculous as it seems the thin veil of “being true to my roots” does act as a minor comfort to me and helps me handle life. So classism as far as I can see is just a tribalistic defence mechanism we all trigger to make us feel a little better about our selves, groovy…

But why did I start this meandering blog-guff in the first place? I’ll tell you why as I just read an article that got my working class hackles up about how “Country Life Magazine” or “Fox Killer” or “What Cravat?” or some other posho-toff-mag have lambasted the BBC (the BB effing C of all organisations) as being Oxbridge prejudice, as on some shows they use the terms “Oxbridge” or “Old Etonian” in a detrimental manner… what? That’s like calling McDonalds fattist as it sells salad. Ridiculous…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1306237/BBC-turns-Oxbridge-term-abuse--Shows-accused-bigotry.html

Us working class people have had to spend our lives watching former footlights make fun of us and we laugh like drains and lap it up like hungry cats… Sasha Baron Cohen does Ali G, and we make him an Icon, Harry Enfield does Wayne Slob and he’s a genius, that awful ginger woman does that “bovvered” thing and we can’t get enough. Up and down the nation people are uttering ironic “innits” and you know what, its funny. Its much better to laugh at peoples differences than ignore then all together and pretend they aren’t there or worse of all “tolerate” them… you tolerate a head ache you shouldn’t tolerate a human being you should like them or not… We’re all different so lets take the p!ss out of each other about it, beats the hell out of fighting. So my advice to those posho’s horrified by the Beebs ribbing of your privileged background and expensive education is to say to yourself “At least I’m not a stinking chav” then burn some money and guffaw like the inbred madman you probably are…




Woe (innit)

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Mosque Pit

Hello, well it’s been a while since my last affront to grammar so I figured I’d blow the dust off the old keyboard and type out whatever gibberish is currently floating around my old brain box at THIS exact second… The Aldershot Woes Episode 37: Mosque Pit:

I am an atheist and I have had a hugely unreligious upbringing, I was baptised but only for the reason most people get their kids baptised… it was a good excuse for my folks to have a party. I do not believe like some atheists that religion is the root of all evil, I think greed is a far more suitable culprit for that, and on some levels I am even envious of those with faith, as it must be a big comfort knowing your soul will live on forever on cloud or whatever, I mean it sure beats the hell out of the eternal oblivion waiting for me once I pop-my-clogs. But, there is no doubt that tooooo many people use good old religion for their own ends, and give it a bad name. In fact it’s difficult to think of the religion that doesn’t do this on some level… The most notorious religion at the moment, well since 9/11 is Islam. Yep, thanks to a couple of nut-bars the old Muslims get a pretty hard time these days and unfairly so. I mean old Hitler did his bidding in the name of God, but it didn’t lead to global condemnation of Christianity did it? Nope. So the stigma now attached to being Islamic is unfair and I should think massively insulting… So that’s that, let me be clear I think Muslims are as good as any other religious group, they’re OK in my book… the only religious group you should be wary of are Scientologists, but we’ll save that for another blog… But with all that being said having read about the furore over the proposed Mosque being built at Ground Zero, I have to say… don’t do it.

I am all for religious freedom, as far as I am concerned practice what ever you want, if you want to dress up like an Apache war chief and worship chocolate hobnobs, go for it. If you want to live naked in a tree preying to Ewok deities, well that’s all Kool and the gang with me… what ever floats your boat you should be allowed to do it with out the fear of anyone p!ssing on your parade… But that said, if what you are doing is an affront to a whole group of people or is a threat to society at large then it ought to be curbed right in… Not banned, but controlled to avoid conflict, seems fair enough to me. And as far as I can see building a Mosque on the site of an attack by crazy fundamentalist Muslim zealots, even though regular Muslims are as far detached from that sort of idiocy as your average Nan is from people like Timothy McVeigh it still aint cool. Of course they have a right to build it, that should not be in any doubt, and of course Muslims shouldn’t be punished for the act of a few brainwashed mugs, but the fact remains that a whole bunch of people are gonna be really really p!ssed off about it. And with fairness in mind, Americans aren’t famed for their open mindedness or intelligence are they, just yesterday a black guy in a skull cap was almost hanged as they thought he was a Muslim, he wasn’t he was just a black guy in a skull cap in crowd full of angry opinionated fools. All this Mosque will do is fuel the fire of ignorance by inciting an unneeded hatred from both sides. Idiot Christians will become bigger idiot Christians, and idiot Muslims will become bigger idiot Muslims, and you know what will happen, more Bin Laden douchebags will fight which will breed more reactionary Bu(ll)sh(it) imbeciles to fight back and we all end up hating each other and the world a little bit more.

My advice is build the Mosque down the road, and try to spread a little bit of that religious love around and maybe one day we’ll see people fighting over proper things like football or Tetris high scores or Pie fillings rather than religion, which is you know, all pretty far fetched any way.



Woe

Wednesday 18 August 2010

The Cakeprentice Factor

Greetings and welcome to the midweek misery of the Wednesday Woe, and a particularly miserable Wednesday it is too, so let’s attempt to usher is some sunshine with episode 36 of the Aldershot Woes: The Cakeprentice Factor.

I watched a show last night called “The Great British Bake Off”, essentially it was The Apprentice but with baking, and it all happens in a tent. They had 10 cake makers, each with background stories and cake related ambitions, each week they have to perform bakery tasks and sub-sequentially 2 of these wannabe pastry mongers get booted out of the tent… they are judged by an old lady who invented cake or something and some fella who makes buns for the queen, oh and he’s a hard arse, like a sugar-coated Gordon Ramsey… literally. Its bizarre television it really is but it was also engrossing (or I may have been hungry?) the highlight for me was when old duffer Mark (who was sh!t to be fair) cried because they didn’t like his cakes… but Schadenfreude aside it was mostly bizarre. Has television really got to the stage where a programme about something as innocent as Cakes has to be formatted in to a last man standing apprentice type show, are we now so deluded by television that everything has to be an “event” it has to have winners and losers and background stories and we can not enjoy anything unless at some point we have to see a middle age fat man cry because a bastard TV judge was mean about his cakes. What a world?

And here’s what gets me, when its group of pricks vying for a top salary job with old scrote-face at Amstrad we want to know the ins the outs the backgrounds and foregrounds of the characters involved, if they are arrogant boobs we want to boo them, if they are down –trodden underdogs we want to cheer. If it’s a group of delusional brain-dead entertainers in a talent show, again we want all the details about them, we want to know what they went through when their nan’s dog Ralphy died in 1987. And we’re at a point now where kind faced tubby bakers are at the mercy of tabloid background checks and being edited in to be complete arse-biscuits by some wang-brained producer. And not only do we have to know the contestants but we also have to listen to “experts” deride them, now granted Alan Sugars mum and dad on The Apprentice do appear to know their stuff, but what about the talent shows… We put stock in the words of people who have famous sisters, or were on Blue Peter. But for 3 months at a time we lap it up, we get stuck in and we love it. And we take it all in to consideration before we pick our favourites.

But when it comes to things and people that matter, when we should care about who our favourites are, when we should listen to the experts opinion, when we should no the ins, the outs the backgrounds and foregrounds of someone… we couldn’t care less. I talk of course about politicians, as we approach the 100 day mark of the coalition and the honeymoon period ends the nation is waking up and rolling over to see that its not only banged a minger, but put a ring on her finger as well. I know nothing about who my MP is, I know they are Tory, but I couldn’t tell you a name or anything about his/her background with out researching. And why? Because I didn’t care, although the elections coverage was on overkill on the news, it was handled entirely wrong for our generation, I mean who watches the news?… Squares and Geography teachers that’s who! So in order to cover the next election properly, and make the most of democracy, here’s what we need to do.

1. Only cover the election on one channel on Saturday nights, too many channels dilutes the emphasis, though it is an acceptable news item on other channels.
2. Have weekly background stories on the contestants, show their human side and highlight the honest backgrounds they have, an interview with “call me Dave”s child hood butler could have changed the election massively.
3. Live Studio Audience, not partisan duffers who clap at any old sh!t they spout, an audience of 12,000 chavs booing and cheering like mindless fools, give the populous a voice.
4. Judges who know f*ck all, yeah Andrew Marr might know the history of modern Britain and Nick Robinson (love your blog) might have the political insight to ask the proper questions, but a Cheeky Girl has sucked off Limpet Opalplex, that’s qualification enough the new format.
5. An ITV2/E4/BBC3 after show. No justification it is simply a staple of the format. (They even did it with the apprentice???)


Follow them rules and were sorted, maybe it wont deliver the best Government but it will at least give us one we have a clue about. And if that fails, BRING ON THE WALL!




Woe.

Monday 16 August 2010

LameHeroes

Hello, and welcome once more to the internet equivalent of an angry child scribbling messages of hate on their parents bedroom wall, that’s right its everybody’s favourite blog called the Aldershot Woes… it’s the Aldershot Woes Episode 35: Lame Heroes.

I just a read a story that has me worried as a parent, and the main reason it worries me is because I think the polar opposite to it. The story was about a report US scientist Sharon Lamb has just published in which she states that today’s boys are at risk from too many “macho” heroes and that essentially today’s cartoon/comicbook/TV/movie heroes are to violent and not human enough, and this is effecting the modern boys progression in to adulthood, unlike the heroes of yesteryear… Well surely that’s a steaming pile of doody-logs? I am more concerned about the opposite, that today’s yoots have no “hard” roll models to follow and that my son will grow up cheering for softy emotional types and will look at me like a caveman who has just clubbed a puppy to death for entertainment when I try to introduce him to the Predator or an early Chan movie…

Today’s roll models are a bloody shambles and they have been for a while now and I think this is the key reason that so many kids these days get to 16 and start knifing the sh!t out of each other. For the last 8-10 years who has been the biggest “hero” for young kids… Harry Potter. When I was at school if you had a bowl-cut and glasses and your best mate was ginger, you were in for a bloody hard time. But no, a generation of kids have grown up thinking that the nicey-nice Hogwarts world of cuddly funny-spelled wonder is the pinnacle of entertainment. And low and behold they get to 15 the hormones kick in, they watch a bit of Commando one night on Bravo get over excited and stab someone in the face the next day in the playground… because they are not taught from a young age that violence is really cool in films and stuff but is really sh!t in real life. As they have never been introduced to it and desensitised to it they can not process it properly, they go from broomsticks to breadknives… What is scarier is that now the kids getting to the stabby age were raised on Tellytubbies as toddlers, then they went on to Harry Potter and now they are cuing up outside cinemas to watch vampires being done all wrong in the eyebrow-centric Twilight saga… Its no wonder kids are all flipping mental.

When I was a boy though my heroes were brave fighters, who used violence to resolve their problems rather than words, but by doing this by the time I was 15 I knew that jamming a screwdriver in to someone’s gums was a bad idea, as I had a glorified comic book notion of violence to fall back on which separated clearly reality and fantasy. Kids now though are nanny state handled to the point they can’t play Conkers with out goggles or Marbles with out 13 inch thick nuke-proof suits on… No wonder the second they get some freedom they have some excess fury to work off, usually in the form of a big old knife to some poor unsuspecting mush’s chops.

We have lost the real-life roll models for boys, footballers, as they are all now fancy Dan, high life tarts who dive over like drunk ballerinas the second they are tackled, so all that is left to encourage a bit of toughness in to your sons developing years and a bit of saneness in to their early adult years is fictional tough guys… So if you are a parent and you care at all about your boys development, sit him down and make him watch the entire 80s Arnie collection, at least 5 Steven Seagal films and anything else with good old fashioned mindless high-gore violence in. When he is getting laid at 15 instead of shedding blood he’ll thank you…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10957590

So there you go for more parenting lessons send a £45 cheque and an SAE to Aldershot Woes, The Internet, Aldershot, and I’ll send you the guide to teaching your kids the importance of not being to gullible…


Woe.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Let It Go

Easy now, welcome to the 34th edition of what the Greeks called the “Chaviscum Tragicus” or to what is know to me and the other 5 or 6 people who read it as The Aldershot Woes. An indigestible capsule of festering ignorance and spazza grade literacy… today’s Woe: Let it go!

Like everybody my age I was born in the 80s, and like a lot of other people of varying ages, I remember them well(ish). 2 things which were part of my life in the 80s carried on way past them and in to the early 90s and beyond, one was an irritating cube of frustration which has bested me at every attempt since I first picked it up and the other was well, more of an oblong of frustration that bested me at every chance, I talk of the Rubik’s Cube and the NES.

In around 1987 we acquired a Rubik’s Cube from somewhere, probably a jumble sale and from then on it appeared to haunt my toy box, appearing at random intervals of my childhood to tease and frustrate me, at one point my brother did the trick of moving the stickers and making it seem as if he had completed it, but alas with in minutes it had been fiddled with and was back to being a conundrum block of misery again. I think finally one afternoon during a loft clean out or room tidy we finally destroyed the fiddly bastard which presented a moment of extreme joy but also one of complete sadness as I now knew that I would never complete the blasted thing, cest la vie… One far less annoying and far more brilliant piece of my childhood was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), my neighbour had one before me but a huge part of my life was spent playing Super Mario Brothers, Excitabike, Duck Hunt and the extremely awesome Donkey Kong. To this day I would argue till my last breath that the NES is the best console of them all, mainly because it has led to a generation of people who when faced with any technological problem simply take the offending article, blow it, and try again… if your heart surgeon is in his early thirties, beware!

But why am I boring the tits off of people prattling on about things I liked when I was kid, isn’t this all hideously self indulgent? Well yes it is but I am getting to my vague point. This week I have read 2 stories, one was how a group of mathematicians have crunched numbers to breaking point and found what they call “gods number” the number of moves in which you can complete a Rubik’s cube. They are sure that any Rubik’s cube, with it’s 20 billion-billion combinations can be completed in less than 20 moves… Bullsh!t I say… I know I’ve tried over 20 billion-billion combinations and never got more than a couple of sides done! But alas a group of grown men have spent 20 years compiling the data and they have found that 20 moves or less is all you need to do a Rubik’s Cube… we’re no closer to a cure for cancer but at least the fun has been taken out of the Rubik’s Cube. Yay science.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10929159

The other story which tickled my fancy was about a chap called Billy Mitchell from Hickville, America, although he looks like a hybrid of Joe Dirt and Napoleon Dynamite this guy has dedicated his life to Donkey Kong and achieving the world’s highest score (about 70 zillion) he has had an ongoing feuds with a couple of other arcade junkies, but he has overcome the odds and the repetitive strain injuries to earn the crown of “best at Donkey Kong”… the thing is this battle of his has been raging since the game came out in 1982.. Jesus, that’s nearly 30 years, back then I was but a squint in my father eye, 30 years is lifetime it really is and all for Donkey Kong… I just hope no one gets this guy a PS3 and Grand Theft Auto…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)

These uber dedicated fools and their 30 year crusades to dominate 80s pastimes has led me to think what other hapless mugs are we going to see crawling out the woodwork over the next few years? Are we going to hear about Li Fung Ching, the Chinaman who spent the last 13 years doing the longest Budweiser “Wasssssup” in history? Will we be regaling our office colleagues with the story of Tempest Bedfudge, the New Orleans grandmother with her 45 year old Tamagotchi. Will there be people coming out of the shadows for getting to level 17 billion of Worms on the Amiga 500? Will Nintendo be issuing long service medals and Arthritis medicine to anyone who can take Tetris to level 40,000? How long till we hear about groups of Magic-Eye enthusiasts all going blind, and how long till Suduko fans are all locked up as numbers have taken over their brains? Will we be hearing in 25 years tales of people who have NEVER left Facebook? People right now, that you know, could be embarking on 30 year Guitar Hero Battles that will end only in death (which lets hope comes swiftly)…

The most tragic thing is, this will happen, there are enough Fads and more than enough simpletons and obsessive compulsive savant autistics to make sure of it. So if you find your self unable to walk away from Call of Duty, if you still dig our you old Nokia and have a bash at Snake occasionally and if when you lay in bed at night and all you can think about is your top score on Wii Sports Bowling, please for the love of god, just let it go.


Woe.

Monday 9 August 2010

BabyRobots

Hello once more, and welcome to another week of Aldershot flavoured comedy Woes. I have received literally no comments about the newer condensed Woe form which leads me to believe it’s a good thing or at the least a thing people don’t care about. Anyway, on with this the 32nd Aldershot Woe which is cleverly titled Episode 32 of the Aldershot Woes: Baby Robots.

When I was little I watched Transformers and played with the toys and basically thought it was the ess-haych-eye-tea! Then as I became a teenager I fell in love with nerdy Japanese cartoons about big robots with enormous guns. And now I am a parent and a grown up with responsibilities and all that jazz, but still the thought of anything robotic awakens the immature youth in me and I start day dreaming about mech-suits and photon blasters like an 8 year old… The trouble is I can’t let go, and the reason I have these robo-nostalgic attachment issues is I have been lied to.

Tomorrow’s world, now simply a clip-show guide to how flipping stupid we were 15 years ago, but when I was 8 that was the future and it constantly promised robots and jet packs and hover boards and ray-guns and space cruisers and it hasn’t delivered on anything! (I’ll admit perhaps I am making up a large percentage of what Tomorrows world did “promise” but so what, its my inner child that is being let down so I’ll allow myself to be petulant this once). Nope, here we are in the future, and rather than ultra cool alien fighting warriors with robotic best friends, the people on the cusp of technology are the boffs that paid attention at school. And to think I thought that by drawing robots instead of making notes I was genuinely preparing for the future… pish! Anyway, today I still have a fascination with anything robotic, and when I see a story that has anything to do with the emergence and progress of robots I read it in the hope that rather than an interview with some white-coated crack pot prattling on about firmware codes, its about a rogue android going skitzo and blowing up its lab and escaping to crush its human creators… but alas it is usually the former. Anyhoo, today I read a story about a new robot that has the emotions of a 1 year old human, this captured my interest as it is a) about robots and I love them and b) I have a one year old daughter so I know just how absolutely mental they are.

Now I am sure that there is no intention behind toddler-bots and this is just a step in the progress of robo-emotions but the more I think about this the more potential to be hideously dangerous it becomes. As well as being absolutely hilarious and painfully cute, my daughter (16 months) is on an emotional rollercoaster 24 hours a day, when you are that age you do not stop absorbing information and as such emotional responses are usually extreme, which is fine for a human child. Obviously they get upset when they are told off for putting things in the toilet, but this teaches boundaries, respect and rules, and a human toddlers resulting tantrum is handled easily by a cuddle a little chat and if need be some chocolate buttons. But now imagine the hissy-fit a terminator would have when it was time to leave the park? Bloodshed… And when it comes to bedtime and you have to leave Ed-209 (Robocop for anyone not as hugely geekish as me) in his cot screaming like a banshee, well get ready to be sprayed with machine gun fire. And whoever it is that volunteers to change Megtron’s sh!tty arse, is a hero in my book!

Yep when we get to the future and its Matrix style robo-dominance and a life of oppression and Keanu reeves is mans salvation, chances are rather than some suave ultra evil rogue programme or ghost in the shell downloaded corrupted psyche file leading our robotic oppressors, it will be a robotic toddler that we told off for playing in the cat litter tray.

Robotic toddlers, bad idea!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1301512/Meet-Nao-The-robot-able-develop-emotions-form-bond-humans.html




WOE

Thursday 5 August 2010

Breath and Count to Ten

Hello, another day another Aldershot Woe, and fingers crossed I don’t waffle on to much and can keep it in its new condensed form, I like to think of these new smaller Aldershot Woes like little tiny owl pellets of misery, bad taste and ignorance. Anyway Aldershot Woe 32: Breath and Count to Ten.


There’s no doubt about it, we're getting angrier, we're more stressed, we're over worked, we're underpaid, and the entire world is at its tethers end. This wasn’t always a big problem for us, we’ve always been angry but previously we just got in to Basil Fawlty-esque comedy rages, hitting Mini’s with trees or screaming at inanimate objects, even kicking furniture breaking our toes and jumping up and down like characters from a Tom and Jerry cartoon… yeah for a long time rage was A-OK, a bit of harmless fun which helped channel anger in a comedic and therapeutic way, but things seem different now.

Rather than flying in to momentary rages to help us deal with life’s problems more and more people are letting it build up till the venomous rage spews around their body, filling their souls with compressed bile and hatred, contorting their view of life until pretty much everything is an unbearable misery, constantly seeing life through shit-tinted glasses. Until one day, over something mediocre and trivial the rage is unleashed and descends upon them like a cloud of fury and the nearest person to them falls foul of their built up anger and gets stabbed in the face with kitchen knife. And the shit thing is this is happening more and more every day, for as long as I can remember, every week there is a story about a debt ridden misery guts, or a spurned lover flipping their lids and murdering or battering completely innocent people… It’s tragic, see today’s news for proof of that but its also mind-breakingly absurd and hugely avoidable.

I think a large part of the problem is that now-a-days society is incredibly image conscious, people believe that how they look is what defines them. This has resulted in 2 sets of people emerging, on one hand we have cool people, not people who are cool, but people who actually want to be. The desperation of wanting to be “cool” means putting up a huge front, and a considerable part of that front is not looking like a prick. The other set of people are the ones who are constantly aware of how un-cool they are, they feel the burden heaped upon them by society unnecessarily and do there best to not stand out, to just exist in the shadows of “cool” people and a considerable part of being unnoticed is not looking like a prick. (I should note here that for cool, think wanker).

It’s these socially repressed people who end up exploding like a shaken can of anger-pop and spraying there fizzy rage all over innocent dolts, usually in the form of a blood bath. So here is the crux of today’s Woe, if you want to NOT one day come home, see your wife has ruined your favourite work shirt in the wash and then consequentially hack her to pieces with a bread knife before caving your own brain in with an ornamental statuette… don’t be afraid to look like an ignorant, mad, raging Neanderthalic, narrow minded, angry prick once in while. You will feel better and no one gets a screwdriver through their throat for being a tiny bit annoying, or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong rage.

So today, if your kids annoy you, bellow at them like a cartoon madman, if the cat is sick on the carpet, boot it up the arse, if your bank unfairly charges you for being overdrawn, ring them up and tear who ever you speak to a new one (big flipping whoops if it aint their fault, they work for the bank so its fair game!). Please stop the madness, and be a prick.



Woe.

Tuesday 3 August 2010

Clone

Well, welcome to the new generation of slimmed down woes, what I am hoping to do is cram the same amount of uneducated, ignorant, rant in to a far smaller and hopefully more insulting blog. Although this is only the first paragraph and already I am waffling like a drunken uncle. Any way, Aldershot Woe 31: Cloning.


For some reason, far beyond my comprehension cloning scares the bejebers out of most people. But not for a sensible reason like the fear of the human race being taken over by an evil army of hick clones knocked up in a lab by US military scientists which cover the earth like a mulleted plague, stomping out humanity and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd. And no one is worried about getting cloned and not knowing about it only to come home one day and see a doppelganger playing with your wife and kids, but before you can confront the maniacal clone your bundled in to a sack by government agents and shipped off to an island never knowing why or what the clone you is doing with your family!!!

Both of these situations scare the elbows off of me, but when you try to have a debate about cloning, these aren’t the issues being discussed. Apparently the worst thing about cloning is that it can be used to produce food… dear god no! Just this week there is an uproar as it has been reported in the New York times that a British dairy farmer is selling Cloned Cows Milk on the British market… This led me to ask a very serious question: am I the only one not remotely bothered by this? At the moment we cram moo-cows in to tiny sheds, attach automated nipple-sucks and drain the creatures of their milk as well as their dignity. We treat these creatures with no respect, they are merely tasty commodities to be traded bred, slaughtered and gobbled down. I am sure a couple of vegans or even worse “organics” may come on and say that there are better ways and you can get milk that has been wilfully offered by a cow who lives in field and has a really nice shed with an X-box and trendy artwork. (a picture of a barn with a swastika stencilled by Banksy or something?) Well bollocks to that, as I do not want to spend £20,000 on a pint of milk, I’m a realist and a carnivore, give me animal products and as cheap as you can sir… If any vegans do want to leave a message of complaint you are welcome to, but did you know that your Keyboard is made out of animal fats and mouse bones? You murderous bastard!

Anyway, as I like tasty meat and milk and cheese and anything else you can scrape off a dead animal and shove down your gullet, the idea of cloning to me is bloody good one. If you can tinkle about with some cow DNA and make a boneless ball of steak the size of a car then get on with it I say. Some people say that cloning for food production is unethical, usually the same people who say it is an affront to god, I think the exact opposite. Put your self in gods shoes for a moment, if you had created all life on earth and you treasure all of your creations equally, who would you prefer gets locked in a shed, executed and sliced up to feed chubby round-faced men folk? Would it be the ones you made and love, or the ones that were knocked up in a lab by a man with wearing sandles with cornflakes in his beard, and had absolutely nothing to do with you? If it were me I know who I’d pick.

The raucous that cloned and “GM” foods creates has me bewildered, I think this technology along with stem-cell research and any other DNA jiggery pokery should be embraced with open arms, lets be honest its this “playing god” that will feed the starved, cure the terminally ill and create an England team of genetic super freaks who can get passed the last 16 of a flipping world cup.

We’re already playing god, almost everything we do is an affront to nature, but so what, it makes life better, its not natural that we can have images beamed in to our living rooms, or have high speed broadband or Nintendo Wii but you don’t see a bunch of hippies and god botherers getting in a tizz about them… so why get in a big huff over cloned foods? It’s no more or less ethical than our current system of concentration camp intensive farming, and I don’t see that free range and organic is any better, if anything that’s worse, let the animals run around and think life’s all dandy and sweet, then one day fry its brain with a cow-prod and chop him up for some mushes burger meat…

If it were up to me I’d have huge labs growing steaks and fried chicken plants, we’d all have loads of food and the whole world would be a happier place. So please if you are going to be scared about clones please make it a for a good, sci-fi-esque world domination reason, because honestly what’s worse a yummy cloned meat burger washed down with a cool glass of clone milk or the fear that one day someone could clone an army of Gary Nevilles…


Woe.

Friday 30 July 2010

WeNeedFreinds

Hello there, it’s a big day for the Aldershot Woes as today we hit a BIG number, yep the old three-zero… personally I have 2 years 8 months and a few days till I’m 30, so it wont be a BIG depressing coming of age, when did I get so fucking old type blog, no-sir-ee, in order celebrate the landmark 30th episode of the Aldershot Woes I’m going to be taking a sideways glance with a squinty eye at FREINDSHIP… as I just read this thing about it (link below) and I think its marvellous… simply marvellous, but also terrifying and dreadful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10775086


To briefly summarise the story, a new US report has proven that by having a good network of friends you will increase YOUR chances of survival by a whopping 50%, which is brilliant if you are a social person, but now for the terrifying bit… “They calculate that having few friends is as damaging to survival as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being alcoholic” … What the fuck, as if lonely people don’t have enough to deal with already, now they are being told that social awkwardness is as bad as smoking or being a dunk, now what if you are a smoker and a drinker and also a loner… well you may as well stove your head in with an ashtray right fucking now!

Now on to the bit that actually matters, ME. I have always been a social person, I have been lucky to have made some great friends in my life and for that I will always be grateful. I had always enjoyed being part of social networks (real not virtual), going out with mates and having a laugh, drinking and smoking and getting in to all sorts of trouble… good friends, good times. But that was then, this is now… Now I am happily married and a father to three incredible and wonderful children, another gift from life I will be eternally grateful for, but I NEVER go out and I never SEE my friends. Chat on the phone, exchange emails, the occasional text yeah, but I don’t go out, I don’t see them and as a result the emails, calls and texts are becoming fewer and further between. Now I accept this as part and parcel of marred life and parenthood, plus, no offence to any of my friends but the time I spend with my wife and my children means a hell of a lot more to me than going to the pub, getting drunk and talking absolute shit (which as my blog tells you, I am a master at). It doesn’t help that my two youngest are so close together and still tiny, 16 months one and 6 weeks the other, it just isn’t easy organising any time to see anyone… even if I wanted to, I have a responsibility to stay in and get pooped on.

I have always told my self that once the kids are older then I can re-start my life and see friends and socialise and be a regular grown up again, but lets be honest there is no guarantee that this will happen, and if I am honest some more its pretty bloody unlikely that it ever will happen. My friends will have moved on, and by the time my kids are old enough, my friends will just be starting to have kids of there own (I am the young dad out of my mates, who still booze and club and have nightmares about dying lonely and unloved with no kids), or they would have moved to other countries, or worse still they will be exactly as they were when I last saw them. They’ll try to engage me by telling me the things that mattered to me when I was last social with them, many years before, regaling me with tales about whose shagged who and who to get the best weed off nowadays and what festivals and clubs they have been to, and I’ll be bored off my tits. And worse for them as I’ll be showering them with tales of first days at school and how developed and wonderful my kids are (I am terrible with this, my son is 6 weeks and I am already prattling on about how fucking awesome and advance he is as he can hold up his own head already…. But come on 6 weeks, that’s pretty incredible, he’s going to be the first England captain to win the world cup and the PDO world championship in the same year!). Anyway, the end result is us both being bored to death and thoroughly depressed about each other and ourselves.

If am honest even more, which is now a ridiculous amount of honesty, I think I always knew it’d end up this way from the moment I knew I was gonna be a dad and I was always cool with it, but now I have learned that by trying to be responsible and a good dad, I am cutting my chances of survival by %50… and if I am dead I will be failing my children… this is a catch 22 if ever I have seen! And what makes it worse is pre-fatherhood me drank like a fish and smoked like a rasta, but I quit both (ok I do have the occasional booze, but no smoking at all) in order to be a better father… as soon as I knew I was going to be a dad I felt overwhelmingly guilty when ever I smoked, I just couldn’t enjoy it… fucking kids ruin everything!. But now I am being told that the steps I have taken to ensure I am around for as long as I can to help my children and be a good father is all a great fecking waste and is actually killing me. I could have spent the last few years as drunk as judge and blazing the crop like a, absolute madman and I’d be no worse off… It’s all making me think I need to re-assess the situation.


But I think I have devised a plan to allow me to pursue my fatherly responsibilities, but also ensure I have a network of people to care for me and help me out in my twilight years (I mean when I am old, not when I have been bitten by a gay vampire). Its simple, and if you’re an unsocialite like my self I suggest you do the same… When you get to about 45-50 make friends with some teenagers, not real friends obviously as teenagers are wankers, just make them think your their friend, buy them a 3 litre bottle of White Lightning or something, anyway maintain this friendship for the rest of your life, it’ll be simple just bestow some fatherly experience or hook them up with some drugs every now and again, and by the time you’re actually old you’ll have a team of easily maintainable “friends” many years your junior to help you out and keep you alive… a full proof plan I think you’ll find and no one will even know what your doing, as there is nothing suspicious about a middle aged man befriending some teenagers and getting them drunk…



Well then, who would have thought socialising was ever going to be worthwhile? Be honest, no one did, ever, but a study has proven it is and it even goes as far to say "When someone is connected to a group and feels responsibility for other people, that sense of purpose and meaning translates to taking better care of themselves and taking fewer risks" so being good to others is also good for you!!??? One step at a time though…



Woe…



*ok you'll note i have done 2 thirties, this gets me back on track for the missing 13th woe that never was...

Wednesday 28 July 2010

Whinge

Moan, moan, moan that’s all I seem to do with this blog, bitch about this, whine about that, blah, blah, blah, “oh no, I’m too thick to use an I-phone!!”… “oh no, kids are getting fatter”… “oh no the fragile human psyche is flawed on every level and we are seeking a fabricated happiness that our minds have no real capacity to understand and all of our actions are controlled by selfishness as is dictated by the human condition, wah wah wah!”… Well it is called the Aldershot “Woes”, so if you were expecting anything else you clearly have some sort of brain malfunction and you should be thrown in sack, smashed against a wall and thrown in to a river of poo… and used ladies things!............... Yeah it’s episode 30 of the Aldershot Woes…


You know what’s wrong with the world? Everything. That’s one of the worlds biggest problems, even things that are good end at some point and occasionally when you go back to a good thing it has been changed and is no longer good at all. Life’s a dirty cat-shit as it does this frequently, and as a result you NEVER know if what you are going to do will be a good thing or a shit thing. Well a good thing anyway, there is plenty you can do which you know will be shit, brushing your teeth with screwdriver, apple bobbing in Christopher Biggins fat folds, going down on a dead fox, watching anything with James Corden in, putting your nuts in a garlic crusher, going anywhere on a bus… well there’s plenty is what I am saying… But good things, they can stop being good and start being shit at any time. Take a holiday for example, should be brill, you plan for months, you save for years and when you get there, the kids are a nightmare and you spend 2 weeks in one long argument with your missus. But the ultimate I would guess for readers on here is sport (footy), you never know if you are going to be on top of the world or under a bus (a metaphorical bus of misery) when you go to a footy match. Life is a long series of ups and downs and the only thing that gets us through it is the eternal silver lining of shitness, once you have experienced something shit you can complain your bollocks off about it…

In Britain we moan a lot and rightly so, we live in a never ending shite-hole of greyness and depression, if you weren’t able to moan about life in Britain you’d want to chew your feet off at the ankles just to relieve a bit of tension. But the whle world moans and so does everyone in it, even rich people moan, but unlike US they invent things to moan about, like immigrants or global warming, then they moan about how poor people don’t moan about the same things they do. That’s because poor people have real things to moan about, you know actual real life things, like feeding their families and keeping them clothed and housed… honestly some poor people would rather have a functioning telephone than save the Siberian Womp Rat, selfish is what it is. Anyway, where was I, oh yeah moaning, we love it, it makes everything bearable I honestly think it is the most natural of all human emotions, which tragically says an awful lot about what a misery bollocks I am…

But complaining if done correctly can be a powerful tool, and one my wife has become addicted to. Last summer we went to a “Brewsters” family restaurant, pre-kids we used to go there loads, but now only as an occasional treat. I know its not like a proper restaurant and its essentially just muck heated up by a spotty youth whose only GCSE is in Food Tech (Home Ec, to people with O levels), but I don’t care, its nice. You get a half chicken and chips and coleslaw and mushy peas and a beer and a pudding and you don’t need to speak to a financial adviser to do so. I like it, the kids like it, the wife likes it, its corny as hell but bollocks, give me corny by the bucket over pretention any day. Anyway, last summer we went and it was one of the worst experiences of my life, it took an eon to get our order taken, then another millennium for the food to come, and when it did it was shit, really shit. My wife had to ask to have hers taken back as there was an disturbing orange stain all over her chicken (I shit you not) and then rather than bring a new meal back they forgot about us. My eldest daughters pizza was burnt and my gammon and eggs had 2 of the most horrendously undercooked eggs your likely to see, it was like jizz on thick bacon… all in all it was an absolute shit of meal and an experience I would not wish on any one, not even my mortal enemy (you know who you are!). Afterwards we felt violated and angry so much so that we decided to complain, in writing… a big step, as we really love that place. Anyways, my wife penned a letter of disdain we sent it off and got on with our lives… Then a week later we got a letter, a very nice apologetic letter assuring us that they would take steps and speak to the staff and make improvements all around, but who gives a shit about that as also included was a £20 voucher… Get in!

We won, we made a complaint, they accepted our criticism and gave us a reward for doing so, for years like everyone else my wife just put up with shit and thought cest la vie, but the whole time she could have bitched about it and got a reward (the temptation to add a marriage risking joke is strong, but I must resist). Now she stands for nothing, and if something is shit, she reaches for the pen and the pad and writes up a letter of wrath to the perpetrator, and hell hath no furry like a woman scorned, and trust me women take consumer rights far more seriously than they do marriage. In the last year we have had free Coffee from Costa as a result of a “watery” Frappacino, free nappies from Pampers courtesy of some broken tabs, £20 from Pizza hut, for a similarly shite experience to the one Brewsters gave us… You name it, if it has been even slightly shit, she’s kicked up a stink and gotten some free shit as result. She has gone a little power mad though I think, now she saunters in to establishments looking for faults like a cross between the Hotel Inspector and Kim and Aggie, and if anywhere does fail to meet her ever increasing standards… Get ready with some vouchers!

Complaining is empowering and fun, you can be mean about things and not feel bad and it makes the grating nipple cripple of existence bearable and as long as you survive an experience with your larynx intact, you can bitch your tits off to the world about it, and you never know you might even get some free stuff as a result. Just as a warning, you will be tempted moan about this blog in the comments section below, and rightly so, its rubbish, the grammars poor, I am no where near educated enough to be writing anything other than a benefits form (D at GCSE… twice) but if you do complain the only thing your likely to get for free is another blog, and the cycle will continue till we’re all dead and the wasps have seized control of the planet.



You can’t follow me on twitter as its shit, and I can’t be bothered with this running joke, like all running jokes they have to fall down at some stage (see Theo Walcott for further proof).




WOE.

Monday 26 July 2010

StopDoingItWrong

Well it is Monday again, which means you are back in the office, back typing boring emails, making boring phone calls, shooting the breeze with people you hate “good weekend?” “yeah… and you?” “yeah…” scintillating stuff… back to staring at clocks or getting in to a massive tizz about work issues, which is horrible, work steals enough of your time and now its taking your emotions too… the bastard. Well rather than babble on about work as that’s just depressing lets do a blog about “Remakes”, and call it Episode 29 of the Aldershot Woes.


Well it’s Monday again, which means we are back in the office, back typing emails in HD whilst being blasted by space cannons and diving out of harms way as bullet time Matrix style photon blasts narrowly pass us by missing us by microns but being close enough to, in fine detail, tear through the fabric of our work shirts. Back making 12.4 mega-dolby super surround-sound speeches in to the latest I-phones with frequent close ups of the poxy apple logo. Back to talking in quick snappy unrealistic “Friends” type banter with photo-shop enhanced work colleagues, none of whom are old and shit all of whom are young, and if male completely henched out of proportions and if female have boobs big enough for a family of squirrels to lay safely nestled through out a cold winter, all with teeth so white you need those special glasses they have for looking at eclipses to look directly at them. All the clocks are cool “24” style countdowns, and if you get in a tizz about something it ends in a highly improbable angry movie love situation, as obviously its all just a big boiling pot of hot unrealistic sexiness. And that’s not fair as work is already taking your time, but this summer…. It’s taking your soul too, in 3-D, starring Miley Cyrus and them walking eyebrows from the teenage girl vampire saga.


Remakes are shit. In fairness I could just end my blog there and I would be justified in doing so, then I could get Hollywood to remake it but instead of words it would just be a huge 3-D spinning bit of poo and a soundtrack featuring Lady Gaga doing a cover version of your favourite song (just imagine it, and shudder). But I won’t leave it at that I will go briefly in to the subject, as I need to vent my spleen over the advert for the new A-Team movie which I saw for the first time this weekend, as it was just all completely wrong. They have got the deep-voice “this summer” movie guy recreating the intro to the A-Team (you know, in 1973 a crack team of commandoes etc etc…) and he just gets it all wrong. It sounds wrong, he says “soldiers for hire” instead of “soldiers of fortune”, the whole delivery is off and well, its just plain wrong… I feel like a Christian who’s bought an audio CD of the bible only to find out it been read by Joe Pasquale and Bobcat Goldthwaite. Now some people may be thinking “well, what’s the big fucking deal?” my wife certainly didn’t understand why I leapt up and started punching the television or why I was sobbing like a madman for hours afterwards. But this is just the latest in a series of Hollywood remakes of my childhood memories, and I really don’t know how much more I can take?

Like everyone who is my age, I was born in 1983 so all my first childhood memories are from the genuine golden age of cinema. Star Wars was a BIG part of my life and like all sane men between the ages of 45 and 23 I watched the films religiously and can recite most scenes at will, but it was the unparalleled popularity of these films and the unrelenting greed of its creators that sparked the recent obsession with remakes.

“An extra scene, fuck off… in New Hope, with Han and Jabba? No way… I have to see this”. This was everyone in 1998 when in warming up for the triple-shit of Star Wars prequels George Lucas re-released the original trilogy in CGI wanker-vision. It would take genuine espionage to make these films bad, like CGI-ing Nick Cleggs face on to Darth Vader or replacing the John Williams score with soundtrack to Mama Mia, and the revamps weren’t bad, they were just wrong. The extra scene with Jabba was shit, if something is not good enough for people in 1976, chances are 20 years later it will still be shit. The occasional shot of a CGI Bantha or a shinier X-wing aside, there was very little point to the re-release, it just took some original charm away from the movies and replaced it with what now looks very dated special effects. But millions of people went to see them again and it made a whole heap of money, and remember this is art, so that’s all that matters.

At that moment a financial epiphany hit the creative minds of Hollywood, rather than trying untested ideas which take thought and an element of risk, “let’s just re-hash old ideas?” This is, from a marketing view, the absolute bollocks… fans of the original will want to see it, the characters are established so you can forgo expensive “actors” and have grinning morons with shiny teeth, it just becomes a paint-by-numbers franchise exercise, which is guaranteed to make “x” amount of dollars, regardless of how shit it is. However from an artistic or entertaining aspect this practice is stunting the industry and denying future generations their own Star Wars… But if I am honest I am not worried about the artistic integrity of Hollywood, Star Wars is a rip off of a bunch of Japanese films anyway, what I do care about is the reformatting of MY childhood memories… for the love of god Hollywood, just stop doing things wrong!

Now in the last 10 years there have been too many shit remakes to list them all, and also so many have been so shit that the memory of them has already evaporated from your mind… Dukes of Hazard, The Pink Panther, Alfie, The Italian Job, Godzilla, St Trinnians, Any Horror film you can think of, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Shaft, and there are thousands more, and the common bond is none are as good as the originals. I am sure at least one must be any good or at least viable, but I’ll be damned if I can think of it now, Reservoir Dogs is a remake of a scene is some Korean film, but that’s kind of different (cue letters from angry Koreans). The overwhelming majority of these remakes are just soulless cash cows, and I am not against the remakes in principle, it’s just that now when you look at the big movies for the coming year, at least half are remakes, and most of them are crushingly disappointing.

“One shall stand, one shall fall”. The greatest line in one of the greatest films ever made, Transformers the movie. I love Transformers, I loved the cartoons, the comics and above all the toys, giant robots fighting a massive war, who can turn in to cars and planes and shit, fuck yes! Now like most people my age, a real-life Transformer movie was the stuff of geeky wet-dreams, and when I heard it had actually happened and been made and was coming out for real in my life time, the cynicism fell away and I was like a child at Christmas. I was so excited I broke my first law of movies and went to a cinema to watch it, yep I organised a loan to by the tickets and sold my organs on the black market to fund a tiny flat cup of ice with some Coke splashed on top and a thimble of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. What followed was 2 hours of “what, no, that’s shit. Oh come on, what, it doesn’t even look like a transformer. Oh fuck off, no, what, really, god no, just finish, just shoot me, no, no, no, no, no, no!” Easily one of the worst films I have ever seen, and before the Megan Fox brigade jump on, yeah she is attractive, so what? How could anyone make such shit looking robots, what was with there faces looking like the inside of watches, why did they take so long to transform, why was it so confusing to watch, why was Bumble Bee (the gayest robot since the bum-o-tron 4000) the lead robot character, how did someone think this would be good in anyway? But who cares, it made fifty billion trillion squillion pounds at the cinema and a dozen sequels are planned, and everything cool about my Transformers is forgotten and replaced with new utter, utter shit.

Remakes are here now and unbearably popular, add some CGI and a bird with some big norks and that’ll do, just throw a dart in to Blockbusters and what ever it hits, BAM remake that bitch… “Oh, Scarface… right cast Ashton Kutcher as Tony, CGI up a chainsaw, replace the machine guns with photon blasters, set it in space and have it so he learns a lesson at the end of the film and rather than dies he chases Elvira to the airport and stops her getting on that space cruiser, and he gets married and Manny is his best man and they all dance like eejits to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s rendition of “White lines don’t do it” by grandmaster flash and Melle Mel.



Well that’s my spleen vented, remakes are a load of shit though, and they are always done wrong as they just shouldn’t be done in the first place, if you are going to see the A-team, then you are an idiot, it should be boycotted and we should all Jihad its makers, but I suppose you never know it might be good like the remake of erm…. Err… yeah.


You can’t follow me on Twitter, but you can on Twitter 2010, it’s a remake of previous tweets with better graphics and bigger tits.




Woe

Thursday 22 July 2010

TomorrowsYesterday

Hello once more, all is well I hope… this is the 28th episode of the Aldershot Woes, and it’s dead good.


Today is not only today, it is also tomorrow as I have decided that we pretty much live in the future… Some people have been living in the future for years, my dad for example has been in the future since about 1976, everything impresses him and scares him in equal measure, which as any fan of Sci-Fi will know is essentially what the future is all about, and once your there, you’ll know it. My father gazes in wonderment at his George Foreman grill, and a man who spent 59 years with out ever cooking a meal is now a home grill connoisseur, he boasts of its ability to all who will listen and he has upgraded four or five times (his current grill can cook a whole pig in 4 minutes flat). This simple 2 heated bits of metal technology knocks the socks off my old man, he has embraced it to his heart and he genuinely doesn’t know how he ever lived with out it. But some of today’s (and tomorrows) other technologies scare the shit out of him, you should see him use a PC for example, he does that single finger long armed type that old people do, where they look like the next key they hit could trigger some doomsday device. My old dad types an email with the same look in his eye as a military bomb disposal expert. He is also petrified of the internet and is sure that if you have 2 windows open at once Nigerien fraudsters can climb through the one you’re not looking at and nick the telly. Sat-Nav, which was forced upon him by his work, he has fallen in love with but if you asked him to play a song on an MP3 player or take a picture using a phone or buy a CD from Play.com he’d crumble under the pressure and run screaming like a man from the Twighlight Zone, whose realised he’s woken from a 20 year coma and all human life has been replaced by mechanoid android-o-bots.

He is in bewilderment of nearly everything, it either impresses the hell out of him or scares him shitless, and that is because he no longer understands what is going on, I don’t mean in a he’s lost his marbles kind of way, I mean because nothing is like how it was in terms of technology, he doesn't and never will understand the digital age! He understands cogs and cause and effect, but to my old man binary code sounds like some sort of Gay Club etiquette. For the last 30 odd years, music, film and all other contemporary medias and technological platforms are confusing and shit to my dad, he knows his time well and all else is the future. And the scary thing is… I am entering my own future with each techno filled day that passes…

Television, since I was a nipper I have been an addict. If I were to add up the amount of my life watching television, and were then to compare it to the amount of time I have spent doing anything worthwhile, I would probably get so depressed I’d want to jump in to a wood-chipper nuts first. But I am addicted, not in a fat middle aged woman watching every episode of Buffy kind of way, but in the sort if way that I can quite happily spend a day watching utter mind rot, only moving from the sofa for snacks and toilet breaks… I have always as long as I remember loved telly, its where I learned everything I know, which granted isn’t much but it did a far better job than my shitty comprehensive school did. But today in this scary future even my beloved TV has gone all tomorrows world on me and left me feeling like a complete Luddite. I can not pause live TV, I can’t rewind it, I can’t record one channel whilst watching another (not since the VCR packed in), I can’t see things On-demand, I can check football scores via the red button, but as soon as the BBCi screen appears, my typical cocky remote control slinging antics are washed away and I am there, long arm button pressing like my dad tying to find www.theinternet.com using Microsoft Word. I’m waiting for me to press the wrong button and consequentially getting arrested by the telly police for doing it wrong. The whole time wishing I could just switch it to the analogue and confidently go Ceefax>Push green for Sport>Page 316>Footy Results…. Yes (or no, I am an Aldershot fan)… But alas, TV has left me right in the lurch, and as for Hi-Def (or is just HD now?) I am just too scared to bother, because what’s the point, how clearly do I need to see the MOTD panel, plus I am a little scared that the detail on Noel Edmunds shirts on Deal or No Deal will make my eyes implode in Hi-def (HD?).

But its not just TV that’s left me looking like some sort of 90s throwback, now phones have done it as well, no one has a regular phone anymore, they have ultra sleek pocket PCs, which look like tiny marble coffee tables, and they have screens that tilt as you move them around, and they have apps? When did this happen, I see people drinking virtual pints, or swinging virtual light sabres. Apps, honestly when did this happen? I am still getting excited as I managed to get GhostTown by The Specials as my ring tone, mean while people next to me have an app that assimilates my dino-phone to their hyper-mobile-comu-infotainment-device and they extrapolate the data like a techno pocket vampire, so now they have GhostTown saved on there phone with detailed liner notes and 15 remixes… Cunts. When did I get so left in the dark? I was one of the first people I knew who had Snake 2. And I am petrified to get one as they look too awesome, and in order for me to learn how to use it I would have to spend a week feeling like a toddler with some mega blocks, and I am just not prepared to go through that.

And that is the crux of it, in my mind I got to the edge, I was up to date and modern and I knew what was what, and now I am far to stubborn to go back to being a novice, rather than be a student of today I prefer to be a scholar of yesterday. Want to set a timer on a VCR to record Re Dwarf whilst your on holiday, I’m your man. Want to know the quickest route to the bamboozle quiz on C4 teletext, give me a shout. Want to get top score on Snake 2, holla at me. Want to get swear words out of the type and talk program on an Amiga 500+, shout me out. Want to rewind live HD 3-D red buttoned hypervision then transfer it via USB 3.8 to an I-phone 7… you’d have a better chance speaking to my 16 month old daughter, we’d both dribble and poop ourselves trying to do it, but she’d get there far quicker than me…


So then that about wraps up today’s little Woe, I started writing it cos I was reading about this new military exo-skeleton which is being tested now by the US Army, and like all fans of Aliens the Exo-skeleton is something I really wanted to happen in my life… and that made me think, wow I’m in the future, and that exited me and scared me shitless all at once… Gulp.



You can’t follow me on Twitter as it has been replaced with new Twitter-HD, the same inane shit, but at a billion dpi resolution…



Woe.