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.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

AddToFreinds

Sigh, well to be honest I am only doing this out of complete and total boredom, I don’t really no why I am bothering to tell you the truth, but ho-hum here I am again typing words like a mad man, ranting about this and that, shooting off crackpot theories and such, ah well, its all a bit of a laugh really ain’t it… well no its not actually, but who gives a Tour de France as its blog number 27 from the Aldershot Woes.

Its weird init the level of communication we have these days, I mean in the last 15 years we have gone from only speaking to each other when absolutely necessary or at a carefully organised times, to now, when we flap our gums about allsorts of incessant gibberish non fucking stop. We have even invented new methods of communication to share more of ourselves with anyone who will befriend us and listen… Nowadays not content with being reachable 24 hours a day via mobile, tapping out banter all day at work via Skype or MSN we also feel the need to publish real time life updates so everyone knows what you are doing, why you are doing it and exactly how long you have been doing what ever it is you are doing. Tweets? I just don’t get it, I mean for a rare handful of people who possess debonair, sparkling wit in abundance it is great, as they can reel off one liners about what ever it is they are doing and make everyone gush and guffaw and love them like mad, cos they’re brilliant, just brilliant. But the sad truth is the majority of people are grammatically cumbersome oafs and Twittering makes this abundantly clear to all and sundry and apart from looking as dumb as a pocket full of sugar puffs Twitterers also manage to purvey the fact that they are incredibly, painfully, headsplitting-with-a-hammerly boring, and all in 140 characters or less…

There are some things you need not share, that little voice that runs around your head and judges people and makes stupid jokes and thinks everyone hates you, or loves you and wonders about all the “what ifs” in the world should be left where it is, in your head. Twitter has given the internal monologue a platform to be heard and the end result is like reading the inside of a crazy person’s brain. And that is the worst thing about Twitter, we are all crazy, self obsessed, neurotic, attention starved, psychopaths… I don’t need twitter to highlight that, thank you very much.

Another of the more bizarre forms of modern day cyber communication that is truly beyond me is “statusing”, this is for Facebook users and is a like a tweet but smaller and possibly more inane. “Gormless prick is: Watching TV, bored”. “Waster Shitehawk is: Well excited about dinner, hmmm chippies”… Facebook as far as I can tell is the devil, I did have it for a short time, but I found it horribly intrusive as it gave people I hadn’t spoken to in a decade an excuse and ability to talk to me, and in the time it takes to be “added” you have 10 years of hard avoidance and ignoring flushed down the toilet. It is true when some does “add” you, you are offered the choice to embrace the digital olive branch or to ignore and give a 64 bit cold shoulder to whoever it is trying to be your “friend”. But here’s the worst thing, everyone you know has more friends than you do, so you’re in a dilemma, what to do??? Pros: More Facebook friends mean’s I am loved. Cons: It’s a convicted animal rapist??? Oh, well it weren’t my cat… “accept”, show me the love…

Social networking is truly a bizarre phenomenon, and it taps in to the very worst parts of our thoroughly despicable human minds. It creates a completely false representation of the world and gives all of its users a chance to whoop and holla like spoilt children. It creates a friendship economy where you are desperate for followers and friends, to prove your worth to other users. You must find and add friends, people you have seen in the street anyone who went to your school, people who look like people you know, people called Kevin, anyone female, peoples pets… anyone, anyone will do, please join me, please love me, please “friend” me…

The real world is nothing like this, and perhaps that’s why we’re all such dirty friend whores online? In real world, we don’t trust or like anyone very much and it can take years to become “friends” with some one, so perhaps the inhibition free world of online friending allows an environment we can let our guard down and just all get along and be pals... I mean its not, its an excuse to get friends and attempt to be witty and show everyone that you are popular, oh yes, sat on your laptop tweeting and adding friends on a Friday night, alone, in your PJs stroking your cat and regretting your whole entire existence and hating the silence in your heart but unable to drain out the cries of misery from your head… BLEEP… ooh, another friend request!... Why certainly Mr Nick Griffin, oh yes… I am loved, I am needed, I am “friend!”…

Facebook and Twitter also appear to be completely addictive, or so I am lead to believe, people are staying in to socialise on line, ignoring their flesh based friends in favour of the text based, putting pointing and clicking over pint-ing and clique-ing, which has led the great social networking paradox, as people sacrifice the real and difficult in your face world for the cosy in your browser version. It really is just a matter of time until we are just lumps of meat whizzing around on hover chairs like in wall-e, interfacing rather than interacting… and then how long till the wasps take over?

It’s scary it has come so far in such a short time, I still remember when mobiles were revolutionary and now we can’t live with out them (how did we meet with people in the long, long ago?) and I also remember not so long ago that mates emailing each other was pretty fucking flashy, and if someone had told me that before I was 30 it would be common practice for people to announce to all of their friends what they had for tea, I would think you were mad and I’d probably kick you in the shins and run for the hills… So what’s the next revolution in needless and pointless communication? BowelMates, a digital signal alerts all your followers when ever you do a poo, leaving details on size and weight, plus a snap shot of your straining mooey as it kerplunks? Where will it all end? Arguably in wasp domination… Anyway I can’t stop here talking about you saddos on Facebook and Twitter and Bebo and Myspace… I have got a game of World Of War Craft waiting for me…


I don’t feel a follow me on twitter gag is appropriate.




Woe

Monday 19 July 2010

BigSociety

Sunday bloody Sunday, sang the twatty sun-glassed, punchable Jesus wannabe Bono… well I don’t know what he was on about as Mondays are far worse… And to add to the bitter taste of stale weekend that is festering in your gob-hole here’s the 26th Aldershot Woe… Sorry.

I am a gullible person by nature and when our new leaders took over promising big changes I fell for it hook line and stinker. Typically when it comes to politics I am as cynical as old Billy Cynical, the biggest cynic in cynic town (its Monday so expect more similes of this high standard) but when the coalition took over a part of me just wanted to believe that maybe this really could be the start of something new, something fresh and maybe even something good, but as the days passed the sea of optimism drained away leaving a puddle of familiar grubby pessimism. Well I was as wrong, as old Johnny Wrong the wrongest man from the wrongest house in the worngest town in all of Wrongland! (I warned you). Today our old pal and glorious leader Davey Dave the Rave Camer's and his sidekick Nick (The Cleggmeister) Clegg are unveiling plans which are going to improve not only the people and prosperity of this fine land but something far more precious… the society, as we get ready to have the whole thing supersized, welcome to the new world people, its BIG SOCIETY!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10680062

What is BIG society I hear you ask? Well it is like regular society but BIGGER, in layman’s terms it is a society that is larger in size than it is right now, and I think we can all agree that is grand thing indeed. As we speak society is small, it is small minded, it looks at the small picture and it has small girly hands and well, let’s just say that when society pulls up to a urinal, stage fright is not uncommon. Now some people like to suggest that “society” is an anachronism in today’s world and only exists as an abstract construct of politicians and media to help them either scare monger or make lucid fabrications about the state of the country, but it isn’t, it’s real and it’s tiny and it’s shit.

So how’s it all going to work? Simply, that’s how…As it stands society is making a right pigs-knob of everything, but that’s little societies fault, and little society is run by government and council officials, who smell like rubbers and wear badly fitting suits, which we pay for. What BIG society will do is remove the small local authorities which are currently running things and doing a bad job, and replace them with the person you call when you want a job done properly… your goddamn self.

As it stands every month we each pay hundreds in council taxes and that money is used to pay government people to do a job, from collecting your rubbish to educating your children, the local authorities look after everything, so when it goes wrong it is their fault, so you complain about them and worse of all government, which makes government look bad, which is in turn bad for the country… Now then, with BIG society you pay hundreds every month in council taxes but rather than that money being sent to a wasteful council office who’ll piss it all up the wall by paying trained and skilled professionals to do a job, it is just left alone and you have to do everything your goddamn self. It’s very simple, yet utterly brilliant. This way when your rubbish is not picked up, or your 15 year old son doesn’t know the alphabet, rather than getting mad at local councils or governments you get mad at you, as you should have done it your goddamn self. This is good for us as it will teach us respect and responsibility and the importance of hard work, it is also good as it will no longer be the governments fault, which I should imagine will free up the governments precious time to do more important things rather than wasting their time mollycoddling every Thomas, Richard and Sally Anne in the country.

Like a 9 year old with a new pet rabbit if we do not do our job properly the country will fall in to a state of disrepair and will starve to death in its hutch, or be left out and eaten by the greedy foxes. But not only will this excellent and revolutionary new scheme teach us all about the importance of BIG society and doing-things-for-our-selfness it also saves us trillions of pounds. Think about it, every month you pay your Council Tax and in return you get a bunch of services which ensure you have an acceptable standard of living, but now we are living in BIG society the money you pay will not be used by councils, it will just sit there lining the coffers of parliament, as you will have to do everything your goddamn self, so every month we are saving billions of pounds… it genius.

BIG society will bring us together and make us BIGGER, as the title of it suggests, and it is a full proof method of sorting this country out. Some cynics have said that the whole scheme is just a half arsed attempt to make huge budget cuts in local spending seem reasonable, well if you are thinking that, then shame on you, you Nazi! What BIG society does is keeps the cornerstone of taxation in place but relieves governments of the responsibility of running the country, all in all this leads to a richer country with a successful smoothly run government, which, if were honest, is what we all want. Big society leaves Government inculpable of making mistakes as it will not have to do anything, and even government can manage to do nothing properly, and with our new infallible local governments we will see an end to government incompetency. We will be able to finally see the fruits of a coalition government, as having cake and eating it are brought together for the first time, for the good of the reputation of the government, which in turn is good for the country so its good for you, I mean come on were gonna be BIGGER (take that Germany!).

But plans should not stop at BIG society, oh-no-siree bob, this is just the starting block for a BIG country, there are many more BIGs which could help people have power over their fates and save the country millions, buy having more tax money it isn’t spending. BIG hospitals, where costly Doctors are replaced and the people are free to remove their own tumours and perform their own heart by-passes, saves money and cuts embarrassing waiting lists. BIG fire brigades, where we can cut the cost of these fire-fighters and simply put fires out ourselves, enough people with enough buckets of water can do it. BIG social services, so abused children can be taken in by their own abusive parents, this way the child stays with its family and the abusive parent is taught responsibility by having to look after an abused child, the money this would save each year could bail out countless numbers of banks. BIG police forces, no more having to wait for police officers to turn up, the law would be in your hands and peace can be kept cheaply, and the criminals can be taken to BIG court where rather than an expensive judge making decisions, you’d call the shots, and if the BIG human rights said it was ok you could have a BIG execution. The power, the responsibility and the burden of your life are entirely in the hands of you. BIG freedom, at a BIG price… so here are some BIG thanks for our leaders who are in no way just a pair of BIG bell-ends.




Well BIG society you probably didn’t hear it hear first, but this is probably the biggest load of crap you have read about it. But as of today we live in BIG society, which I can only assume is some old Etonian way of saying FUCK SOCIETY…


You can now follow me on BIG twitter its like regular twitter but all responsibility for me to update it is passed to you, so you have more power over what I twitter and when…





Woe

Friday 16 July 2010

ParentHero

Well 4 in a week it is then, I fucking spoil you lot… by you lot I of course mean the written word, and by spoil I mean desecrate with my ignorant childish and often hate filled and petty rants… But seeing as how it is Friday, what the heck-a-roo, lets do It all over again… Welcome to the 25th Aldershot Woe.

A little while ago I wrote a blog which was essentially mocking very sick children, but it was OK as the thing killing them was fat and not cancer so it was ok to laugh, titter-titter-tee-hee. Well it appears that I am not the only one to have noticed the increasing plumpness of our children and the gross waste of nugget meat they have become in the last decade. Techno boffins over at Microsoft have developed the solution to the problem of our bloated off-spring, they have developed a fake computer child… Milo.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10623423

This new computer based lad has been in development over at Microsoft for a while now, and though a previous incarnation of the digital littl’un was revealed back in 08, a brand new finished and more boy-like version has been unveiled this week, at some great fucking gadget-jizz fest. The hi-def electro-kid is to be launched on the Xbox using their new Kinect technology, which is designed like the Wii, it picks up your movements and then relays them to the computer box. This is meant to make the Wii look like a load of shit crammed in to a white box, as the censors will pick up entire body movements (not just stick waving), so even more flummoxing about like a complete prick in your living room… aces!

The child they have made is called Milo, and each Milo will be entirely different says creator Peter Molyneux, who looks like a cross between Vince Cable and some eyebrow remover… Milo is in essence a new Tamagotchi for the 21st century, but instead of an LCD puppy, which is mildly amusing to starve to death, you have a full grown child at your mercy. And it may have just been the less than perfect resolution on the picture I have seen, but he looks pretty ill as it is, the skin tones on the graphics make him look grey and pasty, still at least there’s a chance you can get your new computer son to some good footy matches with the Make A Wish foundation…

But your new computer sprog unlike a tamagotchi will respond to your facial expression and body language, and apparently flap his gums incessantly like a real little boy. Which offers users to be just like real parents, well in as much that you can pass on your neurosis, force them to live your dreams and crush there spirit daily… The temptation to spit on a hankie and wipe his big screen face must be huge. Peter Molyneux the designer is pretty bloody pleased with his kiddyware, and he seriously thinks this is the beginning of a new dawn in home entertainment… "Films, TV, even hallowed books, are just rubbish because they don't involve me," he said. "It's a sea of blandness."… Well, given the look of him and the fact that he is a software designer who made his name in 80s text based business simulators, its pretty good for books and film that they aren’t about him, I dare say if the protagonist of the T2 was a software designer/Larry David lookalike sent from the future, John Connor would have been royally fudged. But though Mr Molyneux comes across as an odious little twat-smear, I get the distinct impression that Milo will be a big hit and I imagine that next Christmas (or when ever it comes out) living rooms all over the world will be fill of people talking to their cyber kid and getting all schmaltzy as it learns there name or smiles back at them, vomit. Of corse this nauseating scene will be neutralised by the creation of digital bullies who make poor little Milo cower as they threaten him with violence and psychologically scar him with constant put downs…

This sort of thing is all well and good, and Milo represents the pinnacle of a long emerging technology but where does it all end, and who will look after Milo once the shine rubs off and you think "fuck talking to this little goit, where’s Halo 3?" I still feel for my wife’s “Nintendog” Terrence who she cruelly abandoned as whistling and calling his name made her look like a twat, heartless woman…
Well I wish Milo all the luck in the world, and fingers crossed he goes to a good home when Milo 2 comes out, my kids wont have it, I’d prefer they had real friends, call me old fashioned. I just hope this is not the beginning of a “parent-hero” craze, where groups of twats upload their sprogs and have digital toddler groups… Just me being cynical I am sure…

Well there you go, short woe… hope you enjoyed it, have a good weekend.
You cant follow me on Twitter, so please stop asking.


Woe

Thursday 15 July 2010

DoesNotCompute

Hello again, right hopefully this will work, I have written 4 intros already today and every time I have had some great fucking meltdown between the version of Word I am using and the version of Office I am using. I don’t know why, its never done it before, but every time it has happened it has sent both programs spiraling wildly out of control, which in PC terms means frozen bollock still… anyway, seeing as how I have already written 4 different shite-stained intros, I shall dispense the usual formalities and cut straight to… Aldershot Woes Episode 24: Technology.

I am a fairly chilled person, this is for a few good reasons, firstly I was literally stoned off my face for a solid decade, and though I grew up and left the gangee in the past, the mellowness has left its footprint in my eternal soul, another reason is I am generally to lazy to get worked up about things, it requires a tremendous amount of effort to be enraged by something, and I really don’t have the time for it. The last and probably biggest reason I hate getting mad about things is, and this is true for everyone, you look like an absolute cock when you do. You get hot and bothered, usually sweaty, you say things that are pretty abhorrent and instantly regrettable, and once you have shouted your mouth off and kicked and punched and head-butted and gauged and spat at what ever it is that has got you all worked up like a Guardian reader at a meat and pollution expo, hosted by Jeremy Clarkson wearing a George Dubbya Bush T-shirt made of misappropriated foreign aid money and dead polar bears, you are left shaking like a leaf as the adrenaline surges through your body and you come to the realization that the hell of the last few minutes was in public and you could well be the biggest boob that has ever lived and you want to drown in a lake of your own complete prickishness! All public shows of real emotion are an embarrassment but the over riding wang-factor that goes with raging is just too much to even contemplate… But as I have found out this morning technology is able to coax me out of my shell of chillaxation and lure me in to the lime light of being a complete dick-shaft all too easily.

Technology is smug shiny bright flashing beeping twat of a bastard, and if we all lived in caves and beat dinosaurs over the head for our tea and wore shitty fucking saber tooth tiger tunics I would be far happier than I am now lost in a sea of twattish useless technology, that I am not only being told I cant live with out I am now being forced in to a situation where I actually can’t live with out… well unless I go and become some sort of hermit, but I’d get lonely and end up scribbling hate filled tirades of bad grammar and anger on the wall of my cave (not a million miles from where I am right now)… Technology, urghhhrrrr.

The worst part of my relationship with technology is this, given my age I should be on the fucking cusp, I should have an I-phone and know how to set up my broadband properly and I should be able to download shit for free rather than pay for it like a mug. I ought to be able to watch streaming football matches and I ought to know how to get my laptop to stop loading a zillion different things I don’t want when I start it up... Why do I have so many different Anti-Virus things start up at once? MacAfee are telling me I need to update NOW, Norton are assuring me if I don’t renew or install the full version my family will be killed in their sleep by Nigerian fraudsters. It’s completely befuddling, and once that’s done Real Player is trying to log on to my internet to offer me updates I have to download and telling all about the latest MP3s and a whole host of other shite I have no interest in, then as soon as that’s done, a Nokia app I thought I had to install to see the pics on phone pipes up, then I-tunes and they all start fighting with each other because WMP is the set media player and I really ought to change to another one as they all start vying for me attention… anyway 50 minutes later, my laptop which is still newish and good(ish) is in some sort of working order… God it’s a tremendous fucking bore just to find the footy results as the wife is annoyed at me checking via the “Red-Button” every 2 seconds… But this infinite technological headache is made a thousand times worse due to the fact I have NO excuse for not being a techo-wiz-kid like the average 9 year old.

I am 27, when I was at school the internet was still in its infancy in terms of the number of people who had it, I had a few mates who were well off and they had the “NET”. But I had no interest in it and no chance of any home based technological influence as my mums idea of technology is usually a fucking Camping gadget (“it’s a knife, fork, spoon, bowl, and plate all in one, it saves us precious packing space!!”) and my dad up until 2 years ago was still fighting this newfangled devil disc called a CD??? But I do remember going to my friend’s houses and seeing first hand the marvel of the internet when I was about 15 or so, and I was not impressed at all. All it seemed to be was an endless string of chat-rooms and incredibly shit games. Look were playing Ski3, but with some one in Denmark!!! Wowsers… I honestly thought it would go the way of the bar-code battler or the game of Scatch (remember that the Velcro padded tennis ball catching game?)… But it didn’t get old and boring, apparently I did. My family did finally get a PC at the very end of the last millennium, just in time for my dad to be sure it would kill us all at the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve as Y2K kicked in and the shitty Gateway PC we had grew arms and strangled us in our sleep thanks to the dreaded Millennium Bug. What the fuck was all that about? “beware all as on the start of the new millennium your PCs internal clock will rollover and start at zero, casting society back to the days of Christ!!”. Anyway, I was dumfounded by the thing but I did learn how to watch highly amusing videos of frogs in blenders, and I also managed to navigate my way to websites where you could see honest to god real dead celebrities… the internet was very shit for a long time.

Badly animated 80s cartoon parodies and dead celebrities aside, I found little or no use for the internet at all. In the distance I can hear readers cry out loud the word “porn”, as though I have missed the great keystone of the internet, but alas the world of late 90s uber slow to load dial-up modem internet porn never tickled my fancy… and with good reason. The newly purchased family PC was located in the dining room, not ideal territory for knocking out a sly one, especially as my dad was camped out with a baseball bat watching the computer with growing paranoia and impending sense of new millennium doom. Although unfortunately my elder brother felt no such qualms in partaking in left handed mouse usage, although his less than IT savvy mind didn’t see fit to hide his trail of internet grub, which led to my mums first foray online beginning in clicking wildly at the address bar in Internet Explorer and ending on a video of Japanese girls getting covered in midget jizz… She hasn’t been online since bless her. Nope, not one good thing about the internet could be found by me… So I more or less ignored it and waited for the next fad to come in. But whilst I was in technological limbo the internet and all its high powered micro-processored buddies were gathering followers and strength, until we are where we are today, the fucking future, and rather than the hover boards and ray-guns we were promised all we have is shiny stupid phones and the ability to tell people what we are doing 24 hours a day, it is not the bright utopia we had hoped for, still at least the Martians haven’t taken over, thank heavens for small mercies.

Now apart from having been born as part of the silicon generation and still not having clue one about how to use a pc, or an i-phone or an i-pod, in fact almost all the entire i-range is beyond my simple grasp, the i-pad has me shitting it, there is another reason I should be good with this techno stuff… I have worked selling IT for the last 6 years! Yep, I have advised multi million pound corporations on what servers they should go with, on what software they need to buy, I have reeled off the marvels of multi-core processors to government agencies and made serious recommendations about power supply back ups to police forces, I have made heart felt pleas for people to look not only at their data storage, but how they store it, their RAID configurations, and then how they erase the fucking stuff once they’re done with it, safely. And the whole time I have not had an iota of an idea on how to turn “sticky keys” off on Word, or how to install a printer or load songs on to a bastard i-pod… a total hypocrite I know, and all the while still to lazy to actually learn how to do any of this stuff. And now I am a dinosaur before my time, and in a couple of years my kids will be coming home from school and plugging their homework in to the surgically attached i-ports in their heads and virtually whizzing around the world in hi-def super 4D technology and they will look at me like I am a fucking caveman, as I sit there scratching my arse reading a book or playing darts, can you believe it real hold in your hands like a troglodyte darts, not shiney bleeping techno darts… I am an embarrassment.

Technology, it has me over a barrel and has left with no choice but to embrace it with open arms, this is mainly because it actually has some good stuff, well it has slightly updated stuff to when I first saw it, more funny videos (I am tempted to say Virals to sound cool, is that what they are???) and rather than dead celebrities it has alive ones 24/7 and the news is great and comment sections on articles and blogs show the best most wacky and impressively deranged members of the online community. And though I am not a technophobe I will always the sort of person who can put up a brick wall but be fucking clueless with a firewall (surely it can’t be as cool as it sounds?). To an extent I have embraced technology for what it is, part of life and one that is increasingly unavoidable, I wont buy an i-phone and my laptop will always take forever to turn on, but I know enough to spout this gutter shit and put it somewhere unsuspecting member of society can read it ONLINE, which is progress. (infact I only started this blog by accident trying to log on to leave inane comments on Robbos blog!).






Well there you go another day another Woe, you can’t follow me on Twitter as I can’t use the fucking thing.











Woe

Tuesday 13 July 2010

elderly

Back again so soon? Well yeah I am bored and need to extrapolate some of the mind trumps which are spewing out my thinker at an alarming rate… that’s right its 2 in 2 days of the blog equivalent of eating a turd sandwich, it’s the 23rd Aldershot Woe.

Well the Woe-seekers, we have explored all sorts since I started writing this murky thought dribble I call the Aldershot Woes a lot of important things have happened in the world, governments have been formed, world cups have been boring, simpering idiots have been locked in a house with their fate in the hands of members of the public, but I already mentioned the government being formed… hahaha, ohhhh sweet, sweet satire. But we here at the Woes haven’t looked at any of those things, rather than doing what the man has said we should do, we have walked our own rebellious path of retardedness and today is no different... so where as I could bring you an insightful piece of writing about global economics or the wrongs of war or drugs or the increase in teenage mortality rates in inner city communities I am instead going to moan about a far more serious problem… Old People!

I love old people, I just couldn’t eat a whole one… the words of Barry Munton a man who was arrested last month for semi digesting an elderly man in Eastbourne, and though his actions have been wildly condemned by the greycentric media, his actions are gaining support from many corners of society… And why? I’ll tell you why old people are becoming a nuisance…

Medicine it’s great, it enables people to live to 80 and be fit and healthy and never have to suffer, sounds like the shit to me. But what about those over 80, is medicine doing the right thing for these leathery, skeletal members of society or is it abusing its power and playing god, keeping those that should have long since passed on alive and well, and crotchety and smelling like cabbage and wee…

Old people are everywhere you go and if they are not close to death and seriously depressing they sitting on busses talking loudly about their grandchildren or trying to partake in conversations with strangers and making everyone they do speak to feel bloody awkward. “You’ll be old too one day” I hear may people say, yes and I’ll be a depressing annoying drain on society, only fit for handing out Wurthers Originals or buying lottery tickets. Well its about time we did something about old people as they are set to become the vast majority of us, which means that the depressing bitter near-to-deaths are going to have more power than ever… and do you want that?

No.

People are going to live longer and longer, right now in the UK we have more over 70s than we do under 16s, and given that the vast majority of our under 16s are pregnant, by the time our under 16s become our over 70s the average age of people in the UK will be 300. And given the fact that we will all have to work well in to our early hundreds before we can even think of retiring, society will transform and a grey dawn of the knitted regime will be upon us. The over 70s will be fitter and more affluent than ever before, and society will be forced in to line with its blue-rinsed majority. Lawn bowls will get all the lucrative sponsorship deals, and its best players will be forced in to the limelight and paid millions for their trade. Gucci will start making colostomy bags and Louis Vuitton will design those large shopping bags on wheels old people have which take up all the cocking room on the bus. You’ll get “Smart” mobility scooters and I-phones apps which make it easier to bore the fuck out of people in the post office with pictures of your fucking grandchildren in Australia. Society will be upped an age group and MTV will launch MTV-Wrinkle, a 24hour Sir Cliff and Daniel O’Donnell nitemare, you’ll wear “Incontinence, by Calvin Klein” cologne, and social networking sites will be replaced with anti-social networking sites, where any groups of young people online socialising together have the police called on them and ASBOs issued. All forms of media will need to stop kowtowing to the young and imbecilic and embrace the old and the decrepit, Heat magazine will swap its search for cellulite for a search for liver spots, Nuts will swap fake tits for false limbs and teeth. Otex don’t organise Meat Raffles but if they did they’d probably be the best Meat Raffles in the world. God, all of advertising will swap humour and sex appeal for hard fact and comfy jumpers. The Linx effect will be swapped for the “Old Spice” effect, and rather than being “Tangoed”, people will be “Dandilioned and Burdocked”… Where will it all end.

The orthopaedic shoe will well and truly be on the other foot, the younger facets of society will be forced down the social food chain as gangs of dangerous yoots are swapped for hoards of urban bee-keepers (who in fairness have an excuse for their hoods) and drug dealers are forced out of town as the contraband home made jam mafias move in... it will be us too scared to leave the sanctuary of our homes for fear of abusive groups of seniors, cussing us down in their OAP slang, calling us “Lollygaggers” and “Jacanapes”, rolling around the estates in convoys of pimped-out mobility scooters and accessory laden walking frames. We shall be the intimidated and the scared and the confused, we will be the ones making long ambling phone calls to our parents asking how to set up a game of bridge properly. We will be the ones complaining as elderly neighbours blare out Flanders and Swann at all hours of the day and night. We will be the ones outraged by the scandals on the Archers, and writing to Points of View about the reckless and dangerous behaviour of those trouble makers on 15 to 1. We will become the crushed minority as the grey revolution gathers momentum unless we act now to stop it.

The grey menace is readying itself and everyday its numbers grow, they are preparing for the day to overthrow their young masters, and when we least expect it the air will be filled with the smell of ear medicine and shit, the hum of stair lifts will rage in the distance like a swarm of angry wasps and on that day the balance of power will shift to the elders, and we will forever be lost to the regime of the fogeys.

We must act now to save our selves from the future that awaits us, of having to say everything at least twice and all of TV sets being set as loud as they can go. So the next time you see an old person, try and surprise them to trigger a heart problem, remind them that all young people carry knives and please, ensure they read the daily mail so they know exactly how many foreigners are being paid by the state to rob and terrorise the elderly. It is up to us to stop the “Perminators” from rising.

Good luck, you’ll need it…




Well E23 of the A-Dubs is done and I am actually calling for the blood of senior citizens, a new low even for myself. To be honest I think of the elderly like I do the rich “I will hate you till I become you”… And they are not all bad, although I did, and this is no lie, see an old lady just squat and take a piss in the middle of the carpark behind our flats not long ago… so they aint all good neither!


You can’t follow me on Twitter as I don’t know how to use the laptop, my granddad was meant to show me, but I didn’t really understand it…




Woe

Monday 12 July 2010

Positive

So here we are once more, the weekend is gone and it has taken the world cup with it for another four years. And now as the hangover of the last 4 weeks sets in we find ourselves rolling over to see what football has become in the cold light of sobriety, and good fucking god, we’ve just been banging a minger for the last four weeks! What has footy become, that’s the shittest world cup in my life easily, even worse than 94 when we all supported the fucking paddies for a fortnight… and that was the cocking yanks putting that one on. But who cares about that anyway, leagues back on soon enough and to fill the tedium of life between then we have the 22nd edition of the Aldershot Woes…. Fuck, we are in trouble!

The last Woes have been, well… woeful, which despite the title isn’t necessarily what we go for around here, the aim generally is a witty insight in to whatever hits my thought box at around this stage of writing whatever it is I am going to write, so bollocks to the doom and gloom for today. I mean so what if humanity is up shit creak, in a boat made of shit with no paddle, as that was also made of shit and has fallen in to the creek of shitness as it was all slippy and nutty, and now not only are we stuck up shit creek in a boat made of shit with no paddle our hands are all covered in shit as well, ahrgh, and now we have an itchy eye and the only way to scratch it will result in having our eyes pasted in shit! It’s not a big deal really is it? Of course not… well probably not. Anyway let’s remove the permanent anchor of impending doom and get ourselves a well earned dose of happiness and frivolity as we put on a wacky t-shirt, talk in silly voices and skip merrily through the world of…. Positivity.



I am an incredibly annoying person for many reasons, as it would be obvious to anyone familiar with this blog, but the most annoying thing about me is I am chirpy in the face of any adversity. It grates on my wife’s nerves something rotten, and I completely understand why. When you are in a stooper nothing is worse than someone being merry and reasonable, it is the worse thing in the world… I know this as I do occasionally go in to seething rages, but over the most flippant things, tv remotes not working, burning toast, my tea getting cold, losing my page in a book, and all the other petty, stupid things men get in to micro-rages about… You know them 2 minute hissy-fits which leave you looking like a total prick, but are completely unavoidable… but when in a mini-rage the worst thing in the world is someone trying to cheer you up or explaining that you shouldn’t be in a rage, and then detailing why you shouldn’t, just to heighten the level of prickyness you already feel. But when it comes to big things, serious problems, financial strife, illness, family problems, deaths, births, marriages, anything that actually matters, I approach them all with a simpering cheeriness that would make you want to cave my skull in with a lump hammer. And apart form my inane and winsome grin trying to smile my way to a resolution, I also embark on a series of completely inappropriate jokes to help the situation along, “Chemotherapy’s not all bad, now you’re streamlined you’ll knock precious seconds off your 100 meters breast-stroke”…followed by my own self satisfied chuckles. How I have not been murdered or at least seriously beaten remains a mystery.

For the longest time I believed I acted this way out of some nervous defense system, “Lookout, life’s coming, make a joke or it’ll get you and make you cry… like a little girl… in front of everyone you know!”. I actually dreaded it and lived in constant fear of the next time some thing important happened to someone and I ruined it and get a great mouth full of Stan Smiths. This led me to just do nothing when someone told me something big, my best mate could be telling me that his wife is leaving him and I’d just sit there and try to be nonchalant and wait for the moment to pass, so I don’t unintentionally make the situation about a trillion times worse, however the problem with that is that me trying to look nonchalant looks more like I have a brain condition and am trying to do long division. That is arguably worse than the chuckle and barrage of bad jokes I’d have bottled up inside me. But as I have gotten older I realise that my gallows humor is not a bad thing at all, an inappropriate thing maybe, an annoying thing almost certainly, but not a bad thing… no siree not bad at all.

I do my best to live by a simple code for life, and it is this “Laugh or Cry”. Basically life is always going to have goods and bads these are unavoidable despite our best efforts, and though it is cheesier than a Frenchman dipped in Brie wearing a Camembert hat and Emmental de Savoie shoes, being upset about things for an unreasonable amount of time does nothing to make anything any better ever, so what’s the point… turn that frown upside down! I also strongly believe the best way to deal with any problem is make a joke out of it, no matter what it is as long as you can find comedy in it you can find hope. Its really an old cliché that the world looks better through a smile, but like most clichés it has deep roots of truth, so despite the fact that you may want to cut my face off and throw it like a Frisbee for your dog when I chuckle like a madman at your problems and make a series of highly inappropriate jokes, I shall continue to do so, with an honest comedic sense of good intent in my heart.

Positive, unless were speaking HIV, it’s never a bad thing, and though there are times it is far easier to weep like a fat girl at a salad bar rather than guffaw like a blunt minded nincompoop watching a Will Farrel movie, in the long run it is always better to have hope over despair, and if despair is all you have got then make a joke out of it, like the Jews or English football fans. Life is far too short and tragic to ever really be taken seriously, so what’s the point in being upset about it? It is always better to just love what you have and hope for the best rather than to constantly be sad and bitter and covet all you do not have. That is why Morecambe is Happier than Wise, why Ren is sadder than Stimpy and why you see great seas of blissful simpering morons littering the streets of this country laughing like drains at all they see, yeah they have no money, their mum and dad are cousins and they have 7 toes on each hand, but when an excuse to whoop excitedly and celebrate giddily arises, they wrestle it to the floor, feed it crisps and beer and snigger like banshees. Even over the most mind numbing shit like people getting evicted from Big Brother, although that in itself is a deeply depressing thought, its that ethos of laughing and enjoying life like a relentless prick that will lead to a better life, so see happiness everywhere and seize it in a kung-fu grip. All you can ever do in life is laugh or cry…. Seems like a pretty easy choice to me.





Well that was happier than the last load of bollocks I wroted on the intynets, and somewhere it its garbled hybrid of bad English and confused ranting’s is a message, a
message of hope, of positivity, of always looking on the bright side of life no matter what old lady fate tries to trip you up with. Life is a terrible thing and the only thing that can make it worse is wasting it being a miserable guff-monger of doom. I mean people who take life too serious spend all their time being outraged at what might happen they lose all site of what is happening. And well that’s just a great stinking turd of a way to be if you ask this sniggering, simple minded, grinning imbecile… LOL.



For today only, as I am in a good mood you can follow me on twitter, just don’t dampen my buzz man!




Woe

Friday 9 July 2010

Truth

So then, its here at last, the day we all wait for, Friday, and what better way to celebrate the Smokey Bacon of the Walkers selection pack that is “the week” than another mosey through the half-baked, semi retarded, quasi bastard, octo-readable, hexiteenthed wordage, that is the Aldershot Woes… How’do?

Today with the advent of the 21st Woe we enter a world of official adulthood and with an air of newfound maturity on today’s Woe we are going to be taking a look at a subject that is hard to define and is sought as hard as it avoided. It is an unfathomable quantity completely created by man, it is definable through perception alone and means something wholly different to everyone who comes in to touch with it. So with no more delay we put on our crumbiest tweed jackets, shine up our leather elbow patches, stroke our goatees with a look of controlled bewilderment and puff jauntily on our pipes as we take a look in the confusing world of… The Truth.

Honestly.




The truth… what is it, who wants to know and why ever would they want to? Its something we all wonder about constantly, even if we don’t know we are doing it, we are… even right now probably. We use it to define ourselves in both our eyes and the eyes of others, it is the self inflicted bench mark of humanity and the cruel thing is not one of us has a bloody clue what it is… ever. We have built our entire society around this principle, and though the search for it remains a catalyst for human endeavour it is also a huge bloody anchor around our necks. By looking for universal truths and meanings we will never be contented with the simple blessing of existence. Looking for the truths of ourselves in terms of origin, for me, is the biggest waste of time ever, for centuries nerdy guys have locked themselves in laboratories using extreme mathematics and algorithms to predict not only the when but the how of the universe itself. By studying rock patterns and lunar projections and hypothesising the size shape and distance of the universe these boin-dexters have wasted their lives looking for a suitable explanation of how it all began, and even after a life time of study and research the answers are little more than over educated guesses. What a futile waste of human brain power and resources and life. If you woke up one morning surrounded by piles of money, would you spend the rest of your life trying to work out where it all came from or would you get straight down to the old coke and hookers department of your nearest John Lewis??? But again the human obsession with truth enthrals these undoubtedly brilliant minds in to wasting the chances they had of making genuine changes in the world. And if we ever did have concrete evidence of what came before us and how it all happened it would probably be a great fucking disappointment like the StarWars prequels, and would make us more depressed then we are now anyway…

But it isn’t just the truth of exactly who and why and what we are that fills the minds of our species we are also obsessed with social truths, the truths that tell us all how to live and behave and judge others. These truths are entirely manmade and are contorted and shaped to society’s trends, but by and large it is the truth that you should be good and work hard. However this area of truth is where it is most confusing.
Society is a great tug-o-war between bullshit and honesty, and more over the bullshit side is pulling honesty through the mud along his face. People by their very nature are bullshitters, which despite how it sounds is not a bad thing. It is the single greatest defence mechanism of mankind and with out the ability to bullshit the world would have been in ruins long ago. Although our egos would like to believe other wise all compromise is the art of bullshit, with out the skill for 2 opposing parties to bullshit to each other all disagreements would result in eventual conflict. All day everyday people live honest lies for the greater good of themselves and the people they love. Be it going to work or taking the kids to school, eating a healthy breakfast even just getting out of bed in itself is a huge mountain of bullshit most days. Life unfortunately for all of us is a series of shitty tasks performed in the faint hope that one day you will be justified in performing them, and by and large that hope is met. But that does nothing to make doing these things any less bullshit and dishonest. The great paradox of the social truth is the more of a lie your life is, the greater the betrayal it is to the things you want to do and the person you are, the more honest it is. Transversely those that are the most honest in society, those that live by their base desires and put the wants of themselves before all else are the most dishonest in society. Sacrifice is made by all decent members of society all the time, a few monetary sacrifices are thrust upon us by the world we live in, like taxes, but the vast majority of sacrifices we make are completely of our own devices. Having kids is a huge sacrifice, as is serious commitment to someone you love, going to work is a sacrifice, getting along with people is more sacrifice, helping others is another, as is asking for help, caring is a sacrifice, making friends is a sacrifice, walking to the shops is an enormous sacrifice, getting on a bus even bigger than that, putting up with people you simply detest for your job or your home is a sacrifice, living in a world which forces you to be part of it and gives you no power to change or speak or do a damn thing about it is a sacrifice… Life is a crappy series of sacrifices all for the benefit a greater good we don’t understand, but in doing so it enables society to strike a balance that works and grows and occasionally shows the faint glimmer of happiness (ok more than occasionally, but it has to sound bad for my long winded analogy to work). But all of the hardships life throws up are controllable through bullshitting, by turning the other cheek and telling yourself it doesn’t matter, by smiling through gritted teeth, by saying hello to your neighbour when all you really want to do is smash their stupid face in for playing fucking techno at 3 in the morning. Without bullshit being an intricate part of who we are society would explode in a sea of anger. By denying our lazy shitty base human desires by effectively lying to ourselves we are able to achieve things and be part of a society which does fail massively in some areas but could be (and we forget this all to often) about 6 trillion times worse. If we all start being honest with society we embrace the bad nature, and one of the worst flaws of man is the fact it takes no effort at all to be a complete shit sack but to be a decent person you have to work unbearably hard all your life, and even then there is no guarantee.

Wow the truth of society is long and boring and my argument is fractured and made poorly, but I’ve written it now and so it stays, plus I sort of almost make a point half way through. Anyway now on the bit about truth we all care about, how much of a putrid waste of skin, bone and shit are you? Yeah it’s the best till last… the everyday personal truth, and where we search drastically for the truths to the great unknowns and are trapped in a paradox by the truths of society when it comes to personal truths we all start running for our lives like extras in a Godzirra (is that racist?) movie!
Shut up, fuck off and don’t judge me… pretty much the rule of today’s world like contestants in a twisted game show we all do our best to hide our ugliness and general ignorance and every other rancid trait we have, and the best way to hide just how appalling we really are? It’s easy, just cover them bad boys in a thick skin of bullshit, and hope for the best. We all lie, from great big whoppers to tiny little white ones, its just every now and again we have a desperate need to fib like a naughty kid. We usually do this out of social inadequacies or to protect ourselves from some hideous embarrassing truth, that if it ever reared its head would have us chased out of society by an angry crowd with pitch forks! Silly lies like this usually get us in the shit eventually and can spiral rapidly out of control and before you know you’re in some farcical Larry David type situation, we all know that kind of lying is either stupid or in some cases plain cuntish. The lies that go with personal truths though are far more interesting, and less hideous and deplorable. Often the truths we wish to hide, especially for men, are the most endearing ones, as for some reason these are seen as signs of potential weakness. Men have to lie about being tough all the time, and it is shit. I had the bad fortune of growing up in a crap town and unfortunately as a result when I was younger I got involved in fights, I have both beaten and been beaten and numerous times when not been involved in some stupid act of mindless violence I have witnessed the horror and the misery it inflicts at close quarters. I can assure any one if they have any doubt that being tough and fighting is completely shit. Nowadays I, like all other sensible people avoid violence at all costs, yet as a big stinking liar of a human, if some one gives me the evil eye when out and about rather than shy away I will stare back with insincere anger… and why, coz I have to be moron… It’s stupid, men especially spend all our time giving each other dead legs and arm wrestling, when the truth is we hate it like crazy! Women on the other hand put up huge walls of bullshit, in ways that baffle and confuse my simple man-mind. The area that women are least honest it appears to me is with their friends, if you put 2 woman together they will gaggle on for hours about any insipid topic you waft in front of them, they will laugh raucously and seem the very bestest of buddies. But the truth is every woman everywhere hates everyone of her friends intently. Another grey area for truth with women is their appearance, I wont go to in to this for it will sound like a shit stand up, but I will highlight the problem briefly as it is actually a truism for all humanity… and the thing is this. A woman always asks for the truth, but they do not mean the truth, they mean “what do you honestly think I want to hear”. And when it comes to personal truth that’s how we all are, we all know the truth, we know were fat and lazy and dreadful and ugly and stupid, but we desperately want to hear a “truth” that tells us otherwise.

So to summarise we have a confusing and twisted view of the truth, we all seek it when we don’t need to, ignore it when its bad and run from it when its ugly. But I think the biggest problem is that truth is purely down to perception, and though it is measurable for something’s it is meaningless for others, and rather than worry about what others think or how society judges us or exactly why we are here, we need to embrace possibly the only real truth of life. We live, then we die, and we get no second chances… So embrace life to its fullest and make as many pie jokes as you possible can.







Fucking hell, I have written some contrite shit in the past but what was that all about, I don’t know I’ve just been at work tapping bollocks away as I am so desperately bored between doing bits of actual work, I’m also tired as anything and not in the jolliest of moods… Ah well, at least I have some good honest as the day is long bollocks written, cor what a load of shite though, and whats with the end, very corny indeed…. Anyway it’s the weekend so who fucking cares, I’ll try and be funny on Monday!



You can follow me on twitter if you want but I am very honest and I will call you a cunt-sniff.





Woe

Wednesday 7 July 2010

NewsOfTheWoe-rld

Well once more here we are… same old shit just another day, I say some bollocks about stuff, you read it blah blah blah, how predictable and boring! Honestly I might as well just smear bogies across a computer screen for all it actually matters, I mean really why does anyone do anything ever, we’re only going to die one day anyway so what’s the bloody point… well I’ll tell you the point me laddo, coz its better than fucking working… so holla at me dawg… It’s the 20th Aldershot Woe.


God 20 already, where does the time go ay, its seems like just yesterday this blog was in its infancy, making all sorts of mistakes, shooting wild theories off like a mad tramp, nothing researched or based on any sort of fact, and now look at it… Nothing has changed at all, well it’s about time I grew up a bit and started writing about real topics, not just “holidays” or “fat kids” but real, cutting, hard edged, in your face, on the pulse, in the news topics… So please join me as we put on our greyest suits, use our finest public speaking voice and adopt a stern but approachable look as we enter the world of… NEWS

Here’s the thing with news, it’s almost always bad, just a simple look at the days newspapers is enough to make you want to cut your own throat (or have a wank if it’s the Star) a brief perusal of the headlines on televised news has us all reaching for the cyanide capsules and if we have the bollocks to go on line to read the very newest news we may well die out of the shock of knowing that we could well die of nuclear-cancer-immigrant-terrorist-celeb-AIDS before we even have a chance to tie a rope round our neck and go with a bit of dignity…

But news isn’t always bad is it, I get good news occasionally and I would definitely say I smile a hell of a lot more than I cry, and I live in Aldershot, the devils rectum so why is no one delivering this good news to the nation? Why is the top story never about how were all going to live 40 years longer than our grandparents did, or how a stranger helped another stranger in a precarious situation, or how it was a nice day, or how good it is to have freedom of speech, why do we not celebrate how good we have it? I mean life has it’s shittyness in abundance it has its unavoidable miseries, its heartbreaks and tragedies so why do we force this extra misery upon ourselves in daily doses of news? I mean I would be happy if the news just took a glass half filled approach to reporting its daily gloom “A bus full of young nuns crashed today in to an orphanage, leaving 100 people dead, but hey, fifty nine million nine hundred and ninety thousand and nine hundred people were completely unharmed by it in the UK alone, so its not all doom and despair”… would a little positive spin hurt them???

A lot of people believe that the constant bad news dumped on us by the all powerful media bodies is some sort of elitist conspiracy, to keep us all in order by keeping us too scared to do anything at all apart from stare at the latest death toll on Skynews.com whilst constantly hitting F5 and praying that our meager souls are not part of the refreshed death-list appearing on our laptop screens. Well it’s a theory I suppose, and when you hear Marilyn Manson droll through this theory in a monotonous all-knowing tone as he does in Michael Moores film “Bowling for Columbine” it’s quite a convincing one. But a few things bother me about that, firstly its Marilyn Manson who is saying it, now I have nothing against the extroverted singer, not my cup of tea (the kind of stuff is like Kryptonite to my funksouljazz heart) but I think the guy is cool enough is his own way as an artist. I have a problem with it because the guy was like a gizzilionaire long before he was even 30, so what the hell does he know about the conditioning and respective mind state of the common man, not a great deal… I mean seriously what’s Marilyn Manson’s biggest problem on a day to day basis “Damn it, I wanted my Bentley painted murder black and they have sprayed it plague black!!” The other problem I have with the sincere sounding condemnation of the media by Manson is he is talking to Michael fucking Moore! I mean for (anti) Christ’s sake that’s one of the biggest douche bags on the planet, and to make matters worse he is a guy that has made a career out of embellishing bad news and horror by using scaremongering knee-jerk reactionary tactics… I read one of his books (actually I have read 2 of his books but I don’t like to admit it) and he just rants for hours and prints lies (nothing like this blog)… he dedicates a whole chapter of a book to how Germany hasn’t paid for the war yet, what a cock… the guys a fucking loonytune. But I only mention that interview as it gets quoted and sampled a lot, but the theory of using media bred fear to control the masses of the western world is a popular one… But I do not buy that for a second. I really don’t see how a populous with shot nerves, advanced paranoia and a feeling of impending doom is going to be easier to control than one that is content with the status quo. I also do not buy in to the theory that the scared public will want to spend more and that the harbingers of plight that are our daily news outlets are really the dark heart of consumerism, I mean sure if their was a sudden surge in weapons, pro plus pills, tinned foods and jars for bottling urine, then I would see the direct results of a fear led spending spree… but come on, people buy tat because its there and they can, and we are, lets be honest, greedy and competitive by our nature. I don’t think it’s really fair to blame the ills of humanity on some elitist media induced conspiracy, we are just a bit shit.

That same shitness is fused to humanities DNA and is, I think, the real reason we crave and bask in the nastiness and misery of the world. We don’t have news crammed down our throats as many complain we do, we simply love knowing the latest and murkiest information the world has to offer. That is the reason we stalk online news sites and 24 hour news channels, and buy newspapers everyday, it is not because we have been programmed out of fear to seek and absorb the news, it is plain and simple Schadenfreude, a part of our minds loves to hear bad news... Its open to debate the reason why this is, it could be out of empathy, or it could be the satisfaction of knowing “at least someone’s having a shitter life than me” who knows, all we do know is it is there, gawping at bad news like no chinned do-as-you-likey at the scene of an accident.

News has simply grown around this human trait and commercially exploited this to its own gain. They are catering to a human need, not brain-washing people to obey the overlords or do the bidding of the Illuminati, people simply want bad news. And the reason for so many outlets in today’s society is because different choices need to be catered for, as different people want different bad news. People who read the Mail want to be outraged and angered, by the lesbian midget immigrants who use OUR tax money to open up brothels made out of drugs in school playgrounds. People who read the Independent want to know that the earth will be destroyed by green house gasses and melting icecaps and that unless we all recycle everything right now and use electric cars and green light bulbs then we will all be dead by tomorrow. We can’t blame the media for exploiting our want for misery no more than you can blame the Simpsons for exploiting our want to laugh. Unfortunately people just like bad news, that’s why people gossip and twitch at their windows when the police vans turn up to arrest drug dealers or abusive husbands (maybe just my estate then?) we all bathe in misery and scrub ourselves with the soap of despair and we always will, so news will never be happy or cheery. And if they ever did “good news” you’d end up with a load of shite, (not directly referring to matey from Mock The Weeks show on BBC3, but its true) who wants to hear about the happiness other people are enjoying, especially when you’re stuck at work and poor and angry and miserable and its probably all someone else’s bastard fault? No one that’s who, so happy people fuck off and comeback when you lose a limb or have some morbid negativity to share with the rest of us…





Right then, that was all about news, rather than the news which I think I said I was going to do, ah well, who cares I think I made a point and managed to get some bad news in there, we’re all morbid and shit just because were morbid and shit, its not coz some rich overlord has made us that way… hahahahaha!

Anyway that wraps up the 20th Aldershot Woe, or the A-Dubz as they call it on da street, and if you have just read it you will no doubt have a tale of misery and wretchedness and despair to pass on to the next person you see…






You can follow me on Twitter if you like, but scientists have just revealed that using the popular networking site makes you 50 times more likely to be a terrorist immigrant with cancer and cellulite, plus Twitter melts icecaps and kills baby seals.


Woe

Monday 5 July 2010

GetAway

Well then, here we are, Monday… again! Someone much smarter and funnier than me once commented that Mondays are a dreadful way to spend a seventh of your life… and who ever it was who said that was right, and now just to make things worse I open the doors to the 19th edition of the Aldershot Woes, a blog that is so consistently dreadful it has labelled me the Phil McNulty of Comedy Blogs…

But much like our proud Lions, even in the face of mounting criticism after a string of dreadful performances, I refuse to say sorry and carry on regardless of how much of an absolute shit I am, it is the new English way (ok maybe not that new). But as we now look towards the Semi Finals in the aftermath of some true World Cup greatness we can finally wash our hands of the English performance, that was last week this is this week, until next week when it becomes last week or last week when it was next week, but right now it is now all the way up until its then, which isn’t for some time now. And with that in mind I welcome you all to slap on some factor 50, roll up your trouser legs and paddle playfully through the exciting and often controversial world of… Holidays!

Its that time again, you have been saving for the last year putting away every penny you can, making sacrifice after sacrifice all for this, 2 weeks of uninterrupted nothingness! Bliss… You have booked the time off work, you have tirelessly and relentlessly planned every little detail. Like an SAS mission every last action and occurrence is taken in to consideration and back up plan after back up plan is painstakingly thrashed out and committed to memory. With everyday that passes the hollow empty misery of your life bears down on you with more force, which only serves to strengthen and compress your resolve, nothing can stop you, not even god himself, your time is nigh the wait is almost over, your going on Holiday!

To the airport or the open road, be it by air, sea or land you are on your way… No stress of work, no regular shitty boring bollocks of a life, no more shit to deal with, no more you, not shitty bollocks work and life you anyway, this is holiday awesome fun-time mega you… the best you there is! Like a full moon to a werewolf the beaming light of the holiday transforms you in to a selfish unrelenting party-goer, or a methodical chill machine that even in the midst of a full scale rabid monkey attack would not break the unyielding meditation of relaxing, “huh, what rabid monkeys, oh they’ll leave when they get bored, now stop screaming and bleeding would you, I have read that last sentence three times already”.

HOLIDAY- whoop-whoop!!!…

Be it raving our tits off in Ibiza, fishing by some idyllic lake in the highlands or just sitting by a pool reading a pile of books for 2 weeks sipping cocktails and bronzing our skin with care free abandonment playing a game of cat and mouse with melanoma, everybody seems to love the annual get-away and recharge… Everybody except me that is, as I am a grumpy bastard, or perhaps I am the only sane person left on the planet! (I’m going grumpy theory personally).

Holidays are shit, simple as that really, but unlike the England team I will put up some form of defence for my argument (breathe deeply, let it go man….). As a kid I had holidays, but not like any holidays that my mates had. All my friends went to Spain or the South of France or Disney World or some other exotic fun filled mystery land a billion miles away from the mundane mind thump of the grey pavements and shitty brick buildings and predictable lamp posts and grassy patches of mine and every one else’s shitty estates. And those that didn’t jet-away to distant sun kissed lands of wonder and come back with colour in their usually pasty cheeks and awesome stories and t-shirts in foreign languages, went to places like Butlins or Pontins or other family orientated mad-factories, where they got to play in swimming pools all day whilst their parents got drunk as judges and let them basically do what they want for 2 weeks, resulting in them coming back home and regaling me with tales of frenchying northern girls and underage drinking. Lucky Bastards all of them… they all stayed in hotels or chalets and had meals from restaurants and went to discos and did all manner of awesome naughty shit, which they never got in trouble for as they were on holiday! But mine was a different fate, as I had to endure the hell of never ending zips and swishes and gas stoves and bad backs and cold shivery nights and insect bites and all the other hellish sacks of spunk that go with Camping… Camping, fucking child cruelty is what it is!

Here’s the thing about camping when you are young it is actually pretty cool, the thrill of the great outdoors and all that bollocks, and when you are 8 years old and knives and fires are really cool, camping does rock hard, but come on, your 8 what the fuck do you know? As every year passes camping gets lamer and lamer until you get to about 13 and it is truly unbearable. And that’s not just because you have found a new way of getting the most out of spending time alone and a crowded tent is hindering that, it’s because of everything, the grubbiness, the coldness the bad back and above all the gut wrenching embarrassment of being stuck in a fucking tent. Something not helped by the condescending looks of pricks in caravans, with fucking TVs and mattresses, what a shower of bastards those guys are. But as I said at a certain age camping is OK, and for some people that childish appeal stays and they continue to camp through out there lives. Just so your clear my dad never took us camping because of any sentimental reasons, it was coz it were cheap. Now I am sure there are a bunch of people who go to nice campsites and spend their days on beaches and have a great barrel of fun, well I never… we’d go to dreadful places on top of hills and look at other hills and dry stone walls and nature, god nature is great fucking bore when your young, and we’d walk, by god we’d walk… my old man loves walking it was a genuine hobby of his, they call it Challenge Walking, and you basically just walk in a great big fecking circle, usually for 100KM. And in his wisdom my dad thought that he would have his family partake in this for there holidays… So there you go I had about 15 years of walking, looking at hills and nature and sleeping in a cold tent waking up shivering and miserable and returning home after 2 weeks suffering from exhaustion, looking generally unhealthy and walking like a 97 year old. Happy fucking days indeed. Now to be fair we did occasionally go to a beach and have regular people fun, but even that was a drawn out curse, my dad hates paying for parking, it goes against all of his inbuilt skin-flint principals, to my dad the thought of a good free parking spot is better than anything else in the world. As a result of my dads unnatural hatred of paid-for parking, when we did get to go to the beach, we would park about 5 miles away, and would be frog marched down to the beach, yet further embarrassment for me as we struggled for miles laden with cool-boxes, inflatable’s, blankets, buckets, spades and all the other tat you NEED for a day at the shitting beach… So by the time we had marched down to the beach and we were too knackered to do anything anyway. But once you have rested, eaten a warm ham sandwich and spent the remainder of the day either looking moody and aloof if you are a young teenager or by digging a huge fricking hole if you are not quite a teenager, you have to pack up and do the LONG trek back to the car carrying all the shit you carried down, back up again, but this time with the addition to sand eroding away at your thighs. God what a hell it was.

Now you may be saying that I am bitter against all forms of holiday just because of the vast cack I had to deal with on my holidays as a nipper, well so what if I am, holidays are still shit. As I am grown up now soon I will have to start organising my own family holidays and I am petrified. Luckily right now my kids are too young to bring on holiday, but that won’t last forever, soon I am going to have to take them on holiday and here is what scares me about that. When I was young I wanted to go to places like Butlins and Pontins and that sort of thing, but now the idea of it makes me want to vomit my skull out of my head. I couldn’t stand it, I would want to kill everyone I would hate it. And as for Disneyland I would genuinely want to commit Harikari if I had to go anywhere near the magic kingdom, and despite wanting to right the wrongs of my holiday hells, I will be fucked if I take my kids to any of them places (sorry guys, why am I apologising, you can’t read yet?). And the thought of being in charge and taking 3 kids on a plane and having to shout at them non-stop, god spare me… Plus I doubt very much I could afford such an exotic holiday, unless I became one of those people who saves up all year long, and I’m not one of them people, as holidays are shit.

So in a couple of years when the kids are old enough just where will I take them? Well the truth is this… I’ll take them camping, it’s cheap as anything and for the few years it’ll be an adventure for them. We’ll go to the beach mind, but I’ll be ballsed if I am paying for parking… Right now though I take my holiday and I go nowhere but home, I spend a week or so slobbing about, watching telly, playing with the kids, and being as lazy as I can (which is nowhere near as lazy as I’d like to be). If it were up to me, I’d keep holidays like this forever… I really couldn’t be happier.






Well, aren’t I miserable fucker, what was the point in all that, I’m not even going on holiday so I don’t know what I’m all whinged up about, ah well… I actually haven’t been on holiday for nearly 10 years now, and if I did go I’d probably have a smashing time, but if you want a cheery read about lovely getaways go read Judith fucking Chalmers blog… Holidays, grrrrrrrrr….

And with that gritted harrumph at holidays we rap up the teenage years of the Aldershot Woes, what will the 20th Woe bring, I never really know till I start writing, but one things for sure it will be an embarrassment to all who speak English. As ever I’m sorry.



You can’t follow me on Twitter as I am on holiday, it’s a cosy eternal get away from all forms of social networking called life.




Woe.