Is the world crazy or am I?

It’s that time of year again, that is: the publication of A-Level results, and the subsequent accusations that the exams are getting easier. I must admit I feel a lot of sympathy with the students having to weather this stressful time, which is of course made even more stressful by the the media; politicians and armchair-experts everywhere denigrating – what is for some – a well earned achievement. I remember three years ago when I got my A-Levels and I was met with a situation a bit like many students are facing this year - in that I didn’t initially get the necessary results - and because of the competition for my degree choice I had to get a remark to be admitted; which of course is history now, as I got a remark, got onto, and have now graduated from said degree. Still this problem seems to be affecting more and more students, as A-Level passes have risen for the 27th year in a row, and this year: one in four A-levels taken this year was scored an A grade means that the problem I...

I was lucky enough last week, to be invited to London to see a new independent film called Moon, directed by Duncan Jones – the man formally known as Zowie Bowie – and starring Sam Rockwell. The film centres on the life of Sam Bell, who is on a three year contract as the solitary operator/caretaker of the Sarang Moon mining base, and to compound his loneliness a malfunctioning satellite has limited his contact with earth to infrequent pre-recorded messages. His only companion is Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) an advanced computer, who assists Sam in his day to day activates; as well as keeping him from going mad with loneliness. However, one day Sam has an accident, and this begins the unravelling of the sinister truth behind the life of the isolated moon base operator. I have to say I found the plot for this film absolutely fascinating, and it challenges it’s audience to really question what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is a bit jarring, and the film guards it’s secrets adequa...

The lurking prospect of a Swine Flu pandemic has been keeping newspapers and analysts busy for much of this year. Since the virus first touched down in the UK - in all its coughing; spluttering; cataclysmic glory - the press have been reporting it in varying tones; ranging from the doom bringing claim that “Swine flu posed a greater threat than terrorism” according to Home Secretary Alan Johnson , to the faintly ridiculous Sun Headline “ Swine Flu could be good for you .” Indeed, it has meant that the usual summer lull for the news media has been less quiet than usual, and to be fair they have had their pick of the big stories what with Michael Jackson dying, the ongoing recession and such, to keep people reading the news. Still, all this talk about the government implementing far-reaching strategies to contain the virus, such as face-masks and sending out advice leaflets to every home in the country, only makes us lose touch with the reality of the situation – namely that we’re jus...

I feared this day would come. I have become the very thing that I have criticised before, when it comes to fans complaining when a band changes their direction. However, I wonder if the time has come for me to join the herd of disgruntled followers, after I heard Muse’s new single: Uprising (which you can listen to here ). I have been a fan of Muse for a good 7 years now, since their third album Absolution came out; I have seen them four times (the first of which was accounted on this very blog), and I have been fairly loyal to them in the face of criticism, such as: they are pretentious, or they’ve gone down a poor musical direction. However, even I am scratching my head after the first play of Uprising on BBC Radio 1. Predictably, a lot of the loyal Muse fans will fawn over the latest ‘success’ of Bellemy and Co – although many of these people, I’m sure some of my friend included, would praise Muse just as religiously if the band released an album, which just consisting of Chris Moy...

Saturday marked a new milestone in my young life as I attended the first of ‘the weddings’. By this I mean I went to my first wedding for someone who is the same age as me. Being 21, I guess this was kind of inevitable (as unlike when you become 18, and you still are sort of an adult; you don’t really know what to do with the power) as now you really do enter the domain of adulthood in a meaningful way. After all, they say that you go through stages of events on the way through adulthood. Basically, it starts with people turning 18, then there’s the 21sts, then weddings, then christenings (although I know this can work the other way round as I have seen someone do recently) and then last, but in no way least, comes the funerals. This is not the first I have heard of ‘the weddings’ of people my age, as I know one or two people who have been to the weddings of people I went to school with. However, this was my first personal foray. I suppose it was made all the stranger as it was for a ...

Having had a lot more time to myself, I have become a fan a few daytime TV programmes. One in particular I have become quite addicted to is the cringe-fest that is Come Dine With Me. Come Dine With Me follows a simple format where four or five complete strangers take turns over the course of a week to host a dinner party for the others , after which the others score the food, entertainment etc out of ten privately and the highest scoring person wins one thousand pounds. However, things often don’t run smoothly as dishes don’t turn out right and arguments often erupt between the guests, mainly considering the producers and researchers seem to have done their utmost to select a handful of clashing personalities. The guests usually consist of one or more of the following: Snide Self Conscious Cunt: This sort of person normally tends to be the bitchiest, although in a subtle way. Expect to see them not doing much to enhance the conversation, before becoming jealous of one of the mo...

Today I'm going to introduce a new occasional theme in this blog, which is Rubbish Kids TV! For the first installment in this new chapter, I'm going to look at Peppermint Park, a VERY cheap public access show from the good old USA. I have never heard or seen this show before so I review this as an objective first time viewer. Now in all my years I have seen some dire children’s television shows. As anyone who has seen the footage of the Junior Christian Bible Science Lesson will attest, poorly made shows present a frightening and quite frankly weird thing to sit your kids down to. Peppermint Park is by no means the worst show I have ever seen, but it still has all the hallmarks of something which is more frightening than charming. To begin at the beginning, we have the opening sequence which looks like a spying paedophile’s home movies, having fallen into the hands of the TV station, and hurriedly having some jaunty music played over the top. I mean this guy wasn’t even very g...

Returning home from uni, after three years of tooing and froing between Cardiff, is a bit of a bewildering experience. The town I left seems to have become even quieter than I ever remember it being. This isn't a totally bad change as the chavs who used to wander the streets pretending like they were in the Detroit ghettos or from broken homes (when in reality they lived in rather nice suburben semi's with quite nice, well to do parents)seem to have upped sticks and gone. Just vanished! I have no idea what's become of them, and I hazard a guess they might have in a misguided move actually moved to Detroit or LA to live their dream properly. Maybe they have destroyed each other through gang warfare? Or more likely they have just matured and moved on from that phase. I have also noticed a more pronounced lack of the elderly. They used to appear in droves during the daytime hours, before disappearing around mid-afternoon not to be seen again and until the next day. These peopl...

Advertisers have tried many tricks over the years to con us into buying their wares. Sometimes they fire meaningless scientific jargon at you, or attempt to convince you that a product is good because some influential celebrity happens to drink, eat or otherwise use said product on screen. However water company Volvic has managed the greatest con I have seen in some time with their aptly named “Volvic Challenge”. To add a bit of context, the “Volvic Challenge” is basically a challenge to drink two and half litres of their bottled “magic” for 14 days. The idea is that because, scientists have proven that water is good, and that Volvic is supposedly amazing that it will make you feel really good. This sounds like a good thing of course, everyone loves to feel healthy and good, but there are of course a few minor setbacks to this. Firstly, bottled water is unnecessarily expensive, and a litre and a half a day exclusively of Volvic is sure to have the company directors rubbing their hands...

I’m going to talk today about something which is a particular pet peeve of mine. It is a Tattoos. I absolutely despise the things, and often recoil on viewing them. The sad fact of life being the bitch that it is is that more and more people are getting them. Indeed it seems that trend-setting celebrities, and relaxing standards of acceptance (not all a bad thing although in this case I find it personally a problem) means that all the kids are getting them now. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind them so much, who knows I may have even got one myself, if it wasn’t for the fact they were permanent. That isn’t to say of course they aren’t removable but that requires considerable cost, and it sounds quite painful. The permanence of a tattoo just leads me to accuse people with them of ruining their bodies. I suppose the key word in that sentence though is “their”, as their body is theirs to do what they want with, but for some reason it always seems like there is a naivety involved in the decision to ...

A brief rant today about TV. Of course, it being the Easter weekend and all, there were a lot of big things on TV aside from the usual biblical epics and family classics rolled out as a matter of course. However one of those things represented something close to my heart. That thing is Red Dwarf. I have been a fan of Red Dwarf from around the age of 8, and got into it at the time when series VI was showing. This was a bad point to become a fan, as it was at the time of the split between the writing partnership of Grant Naylor, and as a result the series had already peaked in quality. Still I remained a fan and also having slowly viewed the back catalogue of episodes I remained so, in spite of the two later and rather fan testing series. However this weekend represented another test of my mettle as a fan, as the series was brought back to life again for the first time in 10 years. Now, I was under no illusion that the stunt was to try and get a new series commissioned but the way the 3...

This week has marked a further sign of how low the tabloid news and glossy magazine industry will sink. I am of course talking about the release of the OK! ‘Jade Goody Tribute edition’, which comes complete with a photo-history of the stupid tart, a massive heading of “in Loving Memory” and Jade’s ‘final’ final interview. I’m almost certain she did her final interview a couple of weeks ago, but then memory seems to be short in the world of the tabloid media. Now some of you may think that an entire tribute dedicated to the dubious character that is Goody is debatable in itself, or that she is an important figure-head for Cancer (All I can say is I think I know what Cancer is thank you very much, don’t bloody patronise me) and should have one, although I’m going to steer well clear of that discussion. The issue was launched on Tuesday and was publicised on the TV and in the press. Naturally a tribute edition, launched when the person being tributed is still alive, albeit only just (alle...

I had the rare honour yesterday of attending a preview screening to an upcoming film, in which the director was also present. The film in question was The Age of Stupid , a docudrama about climate change. The films approach is quite unconventional, as it partly set in the speculative (based on current scientific theory) dystopian future of 2055, where the earth has suffered run away climate change, and partly in the present era. This is all weaved together by Pete Postlethwaite (Brassed Off, Romeo and Juliet, The Usual Suspects) who plays ‘the archivist’, a man who trawls through news, and film footage of the past to try and demonstrate how we knowingly destroyed ourselves and our planet. The present day footage all centres upon current disasters, changes in the planet’s usual patterns and some of the human rights injustices committed in the name of the oil industry. There are six people all interlinked by the archivist, and each tells their own story in different episodic chapters. Fo...

I wish today to talk about an evil. It’s not a conventional evil such as terrorism or paedophilia, or anything else the red top tabloids whip up panic about normally. No in fact it is one man, well whether he can be called a man or not is up for debate. I am of course talking about Ronald “Big Mac” McDonald, the McDonald’s corporation’s symbol of terror and authority. Now while it might be true that he looks innocent enough, after all he is a clown and seems too much of a fool to be any threat, but remember the devil is able to take many forms. Why have rants about Ronald McDonald you may ask? Well I’ve been studying this crafty character for a couple of weeks now, and have managed to build a damning case against him from his portrayals in adverts. First of all he is guilty of stealing children from their homes, and seemingly luring them to his headquarters (McDonalds naturally). What will he do with them when he’s got them there? Well I’m sure it doesn’t take a huge guess as it’s prob...

I don’t know about anyone else but I am sick to death of the Student Union elections. These two dark weeks (which is ironic as they occur at a time of year when the weather is more favourable) are marred by a rag tag collection of fools who hover about Park Place, screeching their cries, and forcing leaflets into your hand. It is a daily chore to pass these loud and annoying creatures, but it is not the end yet, oh no. You normally arrive at a lecture and you find they have followed you in. That’s right, just as you thought you were free (until you pass park place again) they pipe up with their shite slogans and surprise you with their complete lack of political material. I wouldn’t mind these pests so much if they maybe had some compelling or novel policies behind their campaign slogan, but that is often too much to ask. Instead we are fed the idea that we should vote for someone because they are dressed as giant cat (get it, her first name is Cat so she has themed her campa...