Trattoo

24/7 Information

2007-11-05T15:13:00.001Z

I just got a new phone, a Nokia 6120. It's practically a computer in its own right... it has everything on it that I'd access from my laptop: Skype, Gmail, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Maps, Blogger, Msn Messenger. It's also synced with my Google calendar, and I can read .pdf, .doc, .xls. .ppt etc.

I've started taking pictures with it and uploading them immediately to Picasa. The camera isn't the best (2 Mpx) but it takes some alright shots.

Irony

2007-10-22T18:45:00.000Z

The following... thing was a Creative Writing homework that had to use irony.

Well-yeah so I guess we’re all writers here… I don’t think you get it, man, you’re just a petty scribbler. Go drink bleach and chew crayons and vomit your masterpiece on a wall in a graveyard at 11:11pm. That’s Art, huh? With a capital A… you bet. Wallow in your own filth in a glass case wearing a George Bush mask and popping the eyes out of tender young kittens. Fill a copybook with a million commas and submit it to 15 publishers direct. You are a new talent. You are the up and coming.

Every writer has this kind of weird childhood image, like a black-marker outline of the shadow of their history on a white wall, except the outline has horns and a massive nose and god knows how many arrows sticking out of the back. Did any writer, so help him God, ever have any friends as a child? Why is it that the communicators, the literary artificers all had this kinda freaky childhood thing where they rocked in corners filling the backs of envelopes with hieroglyphic scrawls? I guess that’s what formed their unique worldview, all that skulking around with painted faces and pulling the tendons out of woodland creatures in the woods.

Ya… grow a beard, wear some stripy tights, carve in pink-edged blue biro all the way up your arm. That makes you a writer. You gotta dress the part or else you’re just a faux tortured soul.

Well, ah, where was I? Oh yeah… we’re all writers here… well, my name is Stanislaus and I’m just here to perfect my technique. Yeah, it does suck having to take History and Politics and God-damn Sociology… I came to Uni to write not to learn that stupid crap. Hey you think we can smoke in here? Nah? It’s OK… I brought chewing tobacco. Yeah, I got this last time I was in South America. Oh, you’ve never been? Viva la Raza, hombre.

Sweet God what did you think of that last tutorial? I tell you, the woman doesn’t know shit. I already have my own style… why the hell does she want me to write in a different one? What the hell is first-person…? Focalisation? Sounds like a pretty prosaic way to write. Ya know, you gotta write for yourself and you alone… it don’t matter who reads it. You gotta be you for you. Being a writer is like being the sacred High Priest of all humanity… you got the keys to the Door, man. You gotta turn on. You listen to just one piece of pop music, your brainwaves get bent by 5 degrees. Nah you need something esoteric… like whatever does it for you, dude.

Yeah, we’re all writers here… but you ain’t as real as I am. You don’t have the spark. It’s not about the marks, asshole… 40% doesn’t define me or my soul. She just don’t get me, man.

Ah, excuse me, I gotta scamper… I’m overdue at my meeting. AA. I’m no alcoholic but it’s great material, man. Yeah, OK, see you in class. Peace out…

Child Harold and the Arrow

2007-10-22T18:39:00.000Z

The following short story/nonsense was a creative writing homework assignment.

Well it wasn’t too long after the sun came up that Harold was out in the field again, messing around with his spade and without a hat on either, except I didn’t have the energy to fight him over it. He says he’s “excavating” which is a big enough word for a 12 year old, but then Harry always was the brighter the one of my sons, Leonard not being much of a one for the reading or the writing. Lenny takes after his father, God rest him, who didn’t ever read much more than the funnies and maybe the weather pages.

I’m sitting in my armchair on the porch, just knitting my way into a new sweater for the Delaney woman’s new baby, not that I like the Delaney’s, who aren’t no better than they should be, I guess, but it’s good to do some kind of charity work. I’m just at the knit one purl one, knit one purl one, when I look up and Harry is standing right up at the porch, looking at me with his eyes like two big blue buttons in his head. He looks like he’s seen a ghost and his mouth is open like he wants to say something but he just stands and stares.

“Well, spit it out, child,” I say, maybe a bit more hasty and hard than I should’ve, only he’s got me on edge just standing there like he’s turned to stone. He doesn’t say a word but instead his eyes roll up in his head and he just falls to the ground like timber.

Oh, Lord, well I jumped right up and run over to him, and pick him up and carry him in the house and lay him down on the sofa, not minding about the dirt on the cushions. He opens his eyes and I ask him what the matter is, and he just looks down at his hand, and all of a sudden I seen the blood, I don’t know how I missed it before, and right through his hand there’s this big hole, and the blood gushing out all over the place.

Well that set me up about ready to faint myself but I yelled and yelled and Lizzie come running from the kitchen and I shouted her to fetch some cloths or something and between the two of us we stopped the bleeding and she went and run for the Doctor.

When the Doctor turns up he takes a quick look and sorts him out and he says it’s alright and we did the right thing, and it’s a bad one but it’ll heal pretty quick, and then he asks me how did it happen? Well I don’t know so I turn to Harry and he’s fast asleep with the pills the doctor gave him, but in his hand I can see a kind of stick, and he’s been clutching it like it was solid gold. I pull it out and show it to the Doctor, and the Doctor he gets excited and says it’s real old, like an antique or something only older, and he takes it away with him.

Turns out it was an Inca arrow! and my Harold got to go to Washington and present it to the Smitherson or some such, and I was that proud of him I didn’t even mind about the hand, which had to get cut off in the end, because of gangrene.

Chick Lits

2007-10-22T18:33:00.001Z

The following article appeared in the October issue of the Strathclyde Telegraph, as part of a For/Against feature about Chick Lit.

I was just about to buy the most darling pair of Jimmy Choo’s, after a late lunch with the girls (lots of Chardonnay, darling), when my mother called, wanting to know if I’d found a decent man yet. I hung up and dashed into the changing room to cry my eyes out, again, over The Man Who Didn’t Deserve Me, aka The Pig. He texted me again last night, “wnt 2 meet up 4 cocktails + sautéed shrimp on my roof? tb babez luv ya xox” and it was all I could do to stop myself from throwing myself from the balcony of my superbly situated penthouse flat.

It’s a wonder how I afford to survive on my salary as an infrequent freelance contributor to fashion magazines.

I finally managed to fix my mascara and sneak out of the changing room. Suddenly all that Chardonnay was beginning to froth in my stomach, and I wanted to get home to said desirable domicile. I had an article to write, for once, about something called Chick Lit, or Chiclet.

I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t help when I got home to realise that my flat had become so chock-full of shoes that I had to get to the laptop (another dubiously acquired luxury item) via the hatstand (Luciano Fabro) and the sideboard (Louis XVI). Sitting at my chair, I powered up and set out to satisfy the dreary demands of my Editor:

CHICK LIT: Books Written For Women By Women About Women (or a type of chewing gum, I’m not 100%)

There are lots of books on shelves nowadays that are coloured pink and have all kinds of fascinating stories about young women who work for magazines and buy shoes and fall in love with lots of men but find the right one eventually and call their Mothers by their Christian names and sometimes have sex depending on which type of CHICKLIT that the author is aiming for. I read one to see what all the fuss was about and it turns out that these stories are marvellous tales about ordinary women just like You and Me!!! I like buying shoes! These women like buying shoes! It’s like the author read my mind!!! Most of the women drink lots of wine as well, even more than my friend Alecks who had to get her stomach pumped last week. (Good Luck Alecks!) There’s also all types of characters in these books, like Bad Men and Good Men and Men that look like they are Bad and then it turns out they are Good. I like Men so I was immediately a fan of CHICKLIT, and I have just got out of a relationship with a Bad Man so I could relate to a lot what the author was saying. Maybe a tall dark and handsome man will come and take me away from my dreadful life in my terrible apartment with all the work I always have to do.

In conclusion, I love CHICKLIT and you will too so get down to your local bookshop and get at least three and get one for me too!

Well I sent off my article to my Editor and would you believe she wrote back to me and said that she was no longer going to print my “garbage” even though my Daddy was the owner, and that I “needn’t bother sending in any more” of my “painful moronic swill”! Can you believe the nerve of that woman? Then she went on to say that Chick-lit was an insult to any woman who had ever tried to write any kind of serious literature. She said that it was “fluff” and that it lowered the average mental age of the planet Earth. She said she wished that women would stop prostituting themselves to Mammon and start trying to write as if they believed in themselves. That Chicklit as a genre “insolently simplifies” women’s lives and begs us to sympathise with “arrogant bitches” who we would never have as friends. She said a lot of other stuff too, but I didn’t really understand it. There were too many big words.

So I called up The Pig and accepted his offer. He really can be a darling when he shaves and smartens up, and the cocktails truly were delicious. Plus the doorman is a gorgeous hunk! I still have bits of sautéed shrimp on my new Vuitton handbag, but I guess that’s life for you.

Isn’t it?

Wheatgrass & Phonetics

2007-10-22T18:25:00.000Z

The following article appeared in the October issue of the Strathclyde Telegraph:

Well, you know, man, I just get pretty tired of that safe little corridor between Central Station and the Library, and I guess familiarity does breed contempt. For £1 you can bounce onto a subway train and head off into some pretty strange places, Terra Incognito… hic sunt dracones. Yeah, I was on a dangerous tack, and I didn’t know it. The Hell with Starbucks, I wanted to buy a Smoothie from somewhere earthy and sit and watch the sideburned velveteen-jacketed West-End denizens gimp their way along some cobbled streets. Go West, young man, Go West.

So I let my inner bohemian get me out there, and I paid £3.85 for some threshed wheatgrass lemon raspberry vitamin C explosion that looked like gastrointestinal fluid and tasted like it. I sat opposite Pär, and he’s a student out there, so he seemed pretty au fait with the whole vibe. He has a beard, anyway, and I think that must help. He was down, man, he was connected.

“Hey man, you know, I’ve got this lecture now, you wanna tag along?” said Pär and the God of Fate winked down from the autumn sky like he’d lost a contact lens.

Well, so they do lectures out there, and the casual observer might think it was just the same as back home. I was sitting in this big entrance hall filled with people in chairs placed like little support group circles, and I was starting to relax. It was quiet, but maybe they were just Freshers or something. Then I took another look and I got that kinda tense feeling like when you walk in on a couple arguing in the kitchen at a party. It was all chicks, man, I mean, like 95% ladies. There’s maybe a couple other dudes apart from me and Pär… but they look like they might be janitors or maybe crossdressers. I’m no misogynist, hell, my girlfriend is gorgeous and smart and she don’t intimidate me… much… but a whole room full of them? That makes a man check his flies and watch the ground. What if someone’s been feeding them red meat? What if they’re feminists, or a student coven?

Yeah, it was a restless few minutes till we trooped into the lecture hall. And get this, I sit down, and there’s no lecturer. Just this big screen at the front with these two blue-shirted guys with beards and matching bellies, footering about with some wires. And then POW, the screen lights up and on it there’s a rather jolly looking chap looking earnestly at a point beyond us and saying “can you hear me now?”

Well. I guess I knew such things were possible. Maybe they even do it in Strathclyde, but it was a new experience for me. Sitting there looking at the screen, surrounded by females, I had a terrible urge to break out into hysterical childish giggling. The lecturer on the bigscreen started asking both lecture halls, one at a time, to raise their hands if they could hear him, like some kind of gruesome anti-type of Destiny’s Child. Then he started into his spiel, something about language, except all my ladies were still squawking and fussing and gossiping. Without thinking I found myself loudly shushing and shouting “quiet!”

Well, boy, if looks could kill… Ever had a lecture hall full of shrewish girls in funny hats giving you the Evil Eye? It’ll be a while before I can sleep sound at night without garlic on the windowsill and rosary beads round my neck.

Luckily the man was bashing on with his topic so they all had to get their notebooks out. I have to say, it was a pretty interesting lecture. Not quite as dynamic as the Strathclyde standard, but it was a pretty tough crowd. The best bits were sheer comedy gold. This being a Phonetics lecture, he encouraged the gang to try out the various sounds. Well, maybe you had to be there, but it was a good time for all. Two girls in front of me fell asleep within the first 5 minutes and one of them drooled on the other.

And then it was over, and outside again in the darkening afternoon I watched the women disperse like guided missiles, each intent on her own personal quest. Perhaps they all had left the iron on, or the roast in the oven. They sure have a lot of energy, those Glasgow Uni dames. One particularly Gothic one cursed me as she passed, her talons clenching and unclenching, thirsting for blood. Well honey, I know where you’re coming from, and yes, I sleep with a baseball bat.

At the end of the day, man, it was nice to get back to a place of useful learning. I dunno what it was good for, but I don’t see me using that Phonetics lark as much more than something to tell strangers at bus-stops. Pär seemed kinda disappointed in me, but I felt like it was a good experience. I kept searching for the meaning, the angle, something to pin it up by.

But maybe there are no answers, that far West. They do things different over there. Why do they have such a gender imbalance? Will they die out if left to their own devices, rendered extinct by inept chromosomes and predatory bloodlust? Will their new technologies and unnatural practices finally topple their squalid little civilisation? Within their ancient and hallowed halls do they hold the key to Man’s very existence? Does the stench of corrupt and deviant philosophies taint the nostrils of the precious precocious Ladies of Glasgow?

Should wheatgrass make you pee mauve?

Water and Leaves

2007-09-24T18:16:00.000Z

The following article appeared in the Fresher's issue of the Strathclyde Telegraph:

Well, the last thing you want when you get to University with your new pencil case and your new clothes and your new personality is to find that all the people you meet are just like the people from your high school.

Luckily, this isn’t the case. You might have had a pretty fair cross section of creeps and crazies at your old alma mater, but University is a whole new world of Weird. For one thing, your high school probably didn’t have mature students. Bald bearded men were Maths teachers. At university, bald bearded men sit at the front of your lecture and waste time with stupid questions. For another thing, your high school isn’t likely to have had many people wandering around in their pyjamas.

Which you do get, at University, and it’s all to the good.

Depending on what University you go to, one of the first things you notice is that there is a large number of people wandering around who… look strange. You are at Strathclyde, and so most of the students are attractive and well-adjusted. Imagine if you went to Glasgow. At Glasgow Uni, the geeks and freaks and poor souls give full rein to their fevered imaginations when it comes to dressing in the morning. It is not unusual to see girls inadvertently attired after the fashion of creepy clowns, or vampire vaudevillians, or feral fairies. The male of the species strikes a pitiful figure, some kind of travesty involving either anti-circulatory skinny jeans or homeless chic. Fortunately, Strathclyde employs a strict dress-sense policy that you might not be aware of. They try not to let in people that dress like morons.

However, as time goes on, standards slip, and you get the odd exception to the rule. This means that some people start to think that they can get away with anything. Hey, this is Uni, right? Time to experiment, explore, find yourself! Time to create a new you, a you that is unique and cool and quirky.

Wrong. You bought new clothes for Freshers week, didn’t you? Throw half of them away. They simply will not do.

The reason you bought new clothes was so that you could attract the opposite sex. Don’t argue. Be quiet. That’s why you bought them. (All right, maybe you are one of the few people who didn’t buy new clothes, or who have no interest in the opposite sex. Now what?)

That could be a bit of a problem. See, all too often what happens is this: you come to Uni expecting to meet the perfect someone, perhaps having recently dumped the imperfect someone else. The perfect someone may or may not exist, but if they do, finding them amongst the crowd is nigh impossible. Sure, there are plenty of good-looking people, but some of them harbour horrible secrets. You are taking too many chances if you just… put yourself out there. From the start you are a neon target for the bunny-boilers and the fetishists.

At some point during your university career, you will pick up a stalker. Everyone gets one sooner or later. At first, you might think of it as a kind of ego boost, an indicator of your general desirability. Someone following you out of a tutorial is, whilst slightly awkward, something to tell your mates about. The fun stops when they follow you all the way into town whilst telling you about the tragic circumstances of their aunt’s preferably undisclosed illness, or the fact that all their pets just seem to… die. There is very little to laugh about when someone who resembles a badger – not just in looks – invites themselves to the cinema with you and your friends. Now, you might think it would be the act of an utter cretin to give one’s stalker a mobile number. It isn’t as simple as that. They have ways and means. Then begin the texts. Despite the fact that your stalker appears to dress straight out of a bin, they have enough money to text you every day and night for the rest of your natural life. Except that your life will get a lot less natural when you wake one morning to find yourself chained to the wall in some dank cellar wearing nothing but a pink leather vest, whilst your stalker plays Fauré’s Requiem upstairs and stirs a big pot filled with water and leaves.

These things happen to the nicest people. There will be no witnesses. You will simply disappear into the ether. There may or may not be a note left. It will be plausible.

There isn’t really any moral to be found here. Except, perhaps, Dress Conservatively and Beware Eye Contact. Good luck.

Sometimes...

2007-05-30T00:58:00.000Z

...I turn off the lights and listen to Mozart's Requiem very loud, and pretend that I'm a serial killer in a blockbuster movie.

Hey, Jude

2007-05-10T22:13:00.000Z

Jogger was a big man on the edge of midlle-age, with a snaggle-toothed snarl and forearms that looked like horrible knotted snakes. He ran around the corner and into Hal...

...soaring high above the white-tipped waves in his chariot of beeswax and polar-bear fur, both chosen for their mystical properties. The runes on his hand were glowing brighter now, and they hurt, like...

...spilling a cup of hot coffee, Henry Stern crashed his big fists down onto the polished surface of the desk. It was made of oak, maybe, or one of those expensive woods, and I reckoned that Mr Bellow wasn't going to be any too happy. "God Damn you, Bubba," yelled Henry, right into the yellow jowls of the man on the other side of the desk, who smiled up at him placidly, tapping his...

...slender fingers across the keyboard, like some kind of computer savvy goddess. She grins back at me and blows a raspberry, and I'm suddenly even more in love with her. All at once there's a beep from the computer, and her eyebrows lift in consternation. "Shit! They know we're here!" Suddenly alarms begin to go off somewhere else in the darkened building. Grabbing the bag and her hand, I pull us towards...

...the bright blue and red lights of the police cruiser as it slowly moves down the highway, Officer Red at the wheel, sipping on his usual double chocolate milkshake. Suddenly a voice crackles over the radio. "All Units! All Units...

...drop what you're doing right now and get over here! This is crazy!" Little Jojo's voice breaks as he pops his head round the tree and gesticulates at us. Me and Carl run towards him, brandishing our...

...letters in the post. And then one day, no more letters came. Just like that, they dried up. Some days I sit and wonder what happened to him. Other days, I just live my life.

$breakfast

2007-04-04T08:11:00.000Z

I paused, the fork midway between the saucepan of chili con carne, and thought, "this can't be entirely normal..."

Breakfast is the seminal meal of the day. Most people don't eat bread and chili con carne for breakfast. It's embarrassing when you realise that you're living entirely beyond the pale, in a completely mundane way. Breakfast this morning was unexcitingly unusual.

I'm not sure which worries me more: the components of my morning meal or the fact that I considered posting a picture of the meal itself. I live out my days in an electronic haze. It's awkward.

Lists: Because I'm Boring

2007-04-03T04:50:00.000Z

Here is a list of things/people that I am almost wholly apathetic towards.

Britney Spears
The RIAA
Most "funny" clips from Youtube
Smoking related illnesses
Whether or not tap-water is drinkable
Indie bands
Buying a pair of jeans that look good
University politics
The first decade of the 20th century
The movie The Notebook
Weeds
The legalisation of weed
People who are famous for being famous (Jade Goody, Cory Kennedy, &c)
Getting fat/bald/ugly
Southern Comfort
Most football results
Celebrity biographies (includes ghost-written celebrity auto-biographies)
The addictive properties of caffeine
Filing returned essays
"Fratpack" movies
The British Monarchy
Harry Potter (also: whether he dies in the new one)
The conditions under which chickens live before they die to become my dinner
Shaving

Beep Beep

2007-03-29T00:40:00.000Z

So yeah, like, I'm walking and I hit Gordon Street, and I run out of patience to continue this blog in the style it began.

So, I turned onto Gordon Street, walking at a fairly fast pace, and I see, a little bit in front of me, a panhandler, jakie, what-have-you fringe element type. He turned towards me, hoisting his cup, ready to ask for money. Then he looked at me and instead of asking for a handout instead gave me a grin and a "sorry mate". Which confused me, because the day before I'd gotten a similar reaction from a similar guy, except that he'd said, "Awright mucker, how's things?"

So do I look that down at heel? Or do jakies simply have an innate radar for people who don't have any money whatsoever?

The Wasp

2007-03-19T07:24:00.000Z

Sometimes the sunrise ceases to represent hope. This goes against most traditional symbolism, or at least our modern interpretation of those symbols. In the murk of prehistory, when men worshipped the Sun, sunrise did not represent hope so much as it engendered fear. The sun cannot be stopped from rising, (which might be a shoddy paraphrase of scripture) any more than Time can wait for any man. The perpetual reoccurence of the rising of the sun represents the march, hell, the gallop of time. To the ancient man, the Sun represented something vast and uncontrollable.

And so it is this morning. Beautiful as the sunrise is, it drives home the inescapable fact that I have not yet finished writing an essay that I absolutely must get in this morning. I have a hell of a day ahead of me, and some sleep would be pleasant, but sleep is a luxury.

As if on cue, Jim Morrison chimes in: "I'll tell you this... No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

Thanks, Jim. Good luck in Paris.

A Waste Of Time And Space, And Space-Time

2007-03-15T17:24:00.000Z

There is so much rubbish on the internet. Just think of all the trillions of bits of information that serves no purpose whatsoever. It's all sitting somewhere, on some server or hard disk. Waiting... biding its time. Soon, raw information will take over the world. Until then us fleshbags will maintain our tenuous rule over our silicate subordinates.

In that vein: here's a useless nugget to take up some more space on some server somewhere (and in your cache, too)

So, here's how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool

Opening Credits:
Michael Jackson - Thriller

Waking Up:
Something Corporate - Punk Rock Princess

First Day At School:
The Doors - Roadhouse Blues

Love Song:
Superchick - Hero

Fight Song:
The Frames- What Happens When The Heart Just Stops

Breaking Up:
Nick Drake - Way To Blue

Prom:
The Doors - The End

Life's OK:
Bob Dylan & The Band - Million Dollar Bash

Mental Breakdown:
Rolling Stones - Tumbling Dice

Driving:
David Bowie - It Ain’t Easy

Flashback:
Ben Folds - Late

Getting Back Together:
Three Dog Night - Mama Told Me Not To Come

Birth of Child:
Bob Dylan - Stuck Inside Of Drummore With The Memphis Blues Again
(NB: not the original song title.)

Wedding:
The Mamas And The Papas - Go Where You Wanna Go

Final Battle:
Tom Petty - Last Dance With Mary Jane

Death Scene:
Jefferson Airplane - Let Me In

Funeral Song:
ELO - Don’t Bring Me Down

End Credits:
Buffalo Springfield - Rock And Roll Woman

Dreams I Awoke From And Laughed

2007-03-15T00:57:00.000Z

This morning: comatose, around 10am.

Scene: Kate Winslet and Benicio Del Toro are lying in bed staring up at the ceiling. This is an advert for a board game based on a movie. A psychiatrist (Winslet) falls in love with Del Toro and discovers that he has already lived an entire life til death and has somehow been reincarnated as a 30 something. Using a complicated board game she unearths the details of his entire life, from birth to death at an old age. The movie is a box-office smash-hit.

As I say, the dream was an advert based on the movie, for the board game. Just before I awoke, the tagline flashed on my consciousness: "Go Now and play the game with every old person you know!!!

I woke up giggling like a schoolgirl dosed with PCP. The whole thing happened, with backstory intact, probably within about 30 seconds. Hopefully tonight I might get to see the movie.

A Series Of Unexciting Yet Novel Events

2007-03-07T23:40:00.000Z

In the past 24 hours, three unique things have happened. To me.

1. I called someone "buddy".
2. The man next to me on the bus lost control of his bladder.
3. I bought a bottle of high-class mineral water.

I don't know why I called him "buddy". It was one of those perplexing moments where the mouth seems to act independently of the brain. I know a lot of people for whom this seems to be a frequent occurrence, but it was relatively novel for me. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was a supermarket security guard, but I'm struggling to make the connection.

Nor do I know, in fact, why the man sitting next to me on the bus decided to relax to the point where he was no longer watertight. Continence was not previously a quality I actively looked for when choosing a seatmate on public transfer, but it is now. Oh yes, it is now. It might be remotely related to the fact that he was stinking drunk. This was not apparent when I sat beside him, but later became transparently clear.

The third item was due to faulty programming of the vending machine in the place where I live. I requested Coca Cola, and received Mineral Water, something called "drench". This infuriated me almost to the point of hyperventilation. I have always been wary of vending machines. There is no way to argue with a faceless retailer. What you get is what you get. Vending machines are like life. As a matter of fact, wetting yourself on the bus is like life, too.

εν αρχη ην ο λογος "salad"

2007-03-04T04:17:00.000Z

I've had writers block for 21 years now. It's embarrassing. Occasionally the fog lifts long enough for me to violate the keyboard with some petty bullshit from the frazzled ether. Not so often, these days. I work under pressure... deadlines have a galvanising effect on the roiling mush of tapioca that long since replaced my brain. I'd like to say that I've never missed a deadline yet - but that would be a shameless lie. If nothing else, I still retain my shame.

The which sounds rather "Scarlet Letter", but is assuredly nothing of the sort. The Scarlet Letter, if memory serves, was "A" and at the moment mine is "D".

Life seems to be a never-ending series of imperceptible changes towards some kind of ideal of adulthood. Case in point: salads. Of late I've been purchasing (from the ubiquitous Tesco) Chicken Salads. This is merely a financially sound decision: for £1.89 the particular salad I patronise yields upwards of 800 calories. That's bang for your buck. Not only that, it tastes good, too. It seemed a rational move, and it was, but recently I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity. "Wait a second," I thought, "I'm eating salads." Six months ago I would have sneered at the notion of actually buying salads. It's altogether a little too bourgeois, too yuppy, too adult.

Hell, come to that, the whole area of calorie counting is profoundly outwith what a younger I might have considered my domain. In my case it's inverted, I seek out foods with high calorie counts, but it is still calorie counting.

I begin to disgust myself. What comes next? A mortgage? A rocking chair and the Sunday papers? An electric blanket? Male pattern baldness? The mind would boggle if it possessed the energy.

The Hard Corpse

2007-02-08T03:43:00.000Z

If you ever get the chance... I recommend that you watch "The Hard Corps" (2006) with Van Damme. It has some of the weirdest bits of acting I've ever seen.

Highlights include:

Van Damme moving awkwardly through a hip-hop club
a minor villain who looks exactly like a kid that went to my high school
more ebonics than you could shake a diamond encrusted finger at
a guy feeding another guys liver to some dobermans

The piece de resistance, though, has to be a scene with Van Damme and the romantic interest:

She: Have a drink!
He: No, uh, I...
She: Oh, go on.
He: No, uh, I, uh, used to have a problem with that...
She: Oh, ok, sorry for asking.

She then proceeds to pour him a shot of water from an Evian bottle. Literally half an inch of water in the glass. Amazing. The film is full of little things like that... just slightly unsettling, nothing that's impossible, but lots of "Wha...?" moments.

Needless to say, Van Damme is pretty much typecast for the role he plays as an emotionally withdrawn shellshock victim.

Smoking

2007-02-07T00:40:00.000Z

I've been thinking about giving up smoking.

That's about as far as it's got. I've cut down pretty substantially over the past couple of weeks, but to be honest that's only because I'm so skint.

I can't think of a single good reason to smoke apart from that it's enjoyable, relaxing, cool-looking, and appetite-suppressing.

But no! No, I hear you cry, it doesn't look at all cool!

But it does...

A Night At The Cell

2007-02-03T06:25:00.000Z

“Your jacket, man.”

“What?”

“Your jacket, open your jacket.”

“Why?”

“I need to search you, man.”

This, apparently, is default entry procedure for the Cell, a small pub/club in the south side of Glasgow. “It’s for your own protection,” the bouncer told me as he ran his hands down my sides in a clearly perfunctory fashion. Conservatively speaking, I would have had to have been hiding at least an AK-47 under my jacket for him to notice. One ponders.

And then one gets inside, and it becomes a little clearer. It would take at least a couple of magazines to make this place bearable. If one had a smaller gun, say a Glock 9mm, (or if one were feeling ironic, a vintage Luger) you wouldn’t be able to get off more than a couple of shots before the beasts were all over you.

The Cell on a Friday night is teeming with human detritus, curious monuments to how far the race can degrade given the right combination of genes. Great hulking jellies of testosterone poured into popped-collar polo-shirts lumber around the floor, eyes dully gleaming deep in their cro-magnon foreheads. The linoleum is slick with their drool. They hunt in herds of anything from 2 to 8. If one listens carefully, under the pounding beat of the music one can hear their livers sob. Their poor abused livers.

This is fairly standard for Glasgow clubs, as are the… women that jerk around the place. Nauseau-inducing expanses of shivering orange flesh, they gyrate woodenly to the music, in some vague approximation of rhythm. Some callous swine somewhere must have told them that it was an attractive sight. They also move in packs.

The whole experience is definitely predatory. This is not a comfort zone. It only gets worse when one ventures to the bathroom. This is presided over by a tall African man, who has a whole arsenal of deodourants and creams laid out beside the washbasin. I had to wait about 5 minutes to wash my hands, as a mildly cretinous gentleman alternately jabbered at the attendant and preened himself. I might have told him that it was a lost cause, but he looked dangerously unsettled. At any rate, who can tell what attracts the members of the opposite sex that frequent the Cell? I spurned the make-up and aftershave and left as soon as I could.

Back in the main body of the club, there was a fight taking place. Possibly some territory issue. I sought refuge outside, thinking a cigarette in the cold air might clear my head and reinvigorate my trampled senses. I was horribly wrong. The smoking area was full of a true cross-section of those inside, and not only that, their conversations were now audible. These people lead horrifying lives, “murder and all-bran, and rape.” I felt like an interloper on a vast sub-strata of society, bubbling under the surface.

It was time to quit the Cell for good.

Paranoia & Scrapping

2007-01-11T23:40:00.000Z

I was perusing the crisps at my local Tesco with no more than a cursory interest, whistling quietly, when a large man, all flaky skin and dirty green overcoat, jerked a packet of Doritos of the shelf. He turned to me and got close enough that his fetid breath gently ruffled my cilia.

“Don’t do the whistling, pal,” he snapped. “I don’t like the whistling. I’ll take you outside and leather you.”

Whoo. Welcome to Glasgow city centre. As he lumbered away a pimpled sales assistant regarded us with bovine bewilderment. I can only imagine the bizarre relationship he conjectured between the Raincoat Mafioso and I.

I was not particularly taken aback, myself. Incidents like these are common when you live in the thick of things, as it were. Roughly 27% of people in the UK “think that people deliberately try to irritate them”. [1] Many of these people are to be found stumping suspiciously around the city centre of Glasgow, mumbling to themselves and eyeing strangers under beetle brows. (That is, their eyes are under beetle brows, the strangers are not crouched under beetle brows. That would indeed be genuine reason for paranoia.)

Statistics aside, the place is teeming with violent Freaks and Weirdos of all descriptions. If one wants to fund organised crime, all one need do is linger in the streets after dark. Soon enough, someone will be along to relieve you of your wallet. It’s no trouble at all.

The more worrying contingent of the Dangerously Insane are those to whom money is no object. I have lived in several major cities, but Glasgow is the only one where it’s likely that someone will stab or beat you for no apparent reason at all. The joy of the brawl is often an end in itself… which is naievely beautiful, in a way. Good clean fun, none of your filthy lucre. Mano a mano, the thrill of the thing… fisticuffs as an art-form.

There is a philosophy that asks, “how much can you really know about yourself if you have never been in a fight?” Which is very possibly an excellent question… but self-knowledge is cold comfort if most of what you know involves your broken ribs and cracked kidneys.

Detroit The Beautiful

2006-12-31T23:38:00.000Z

This has a bit of weak ending, but I’m not quite sure what else I could have done (and as a matter of fact the deadline forced me to cut it a little short.) Endings are one of the hardest parts of any kind of writing, I find. (This isn’t fiction. Influences may become clear.)

The thing about living in America, besides the Superbowl and Thanksgiving and all that other crap… is the certain knowledge that statistically you are bound to rub up against the Second Amendment sooner or later. The Second Amendment is a short sentence with a long history of debate and litigation, but in a nutshell it highlights the need for “a well regulated militia” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”. I don’t pretend to know much about well regulated militias, but I know all about the second part.

It will be a cold day in Hell when the Second Amendment is junked - too many people have too much at stake, and it allows for some very big business. It was a cold day in Michigan when I had my own particular personal experience of the fruits of that wonderfully twisted piece of legislation.

It was a cold day, and the sun was crushed by a harsh expanse of hard blue sky, painful to look at. The sidewalks were solid as diamond underfoot, and here and there the glint of black ice. I was walking through an area of Detroit that the VisitDetroit people would have you believe no longer exists. Maybe one house in three had windows instead of plywood or trash bags… because as a rule Drug Dealers don’t require much light to work by, and windows are for faces to look in at.

I was on my way to the nearby Homeless Shelter, where I had a voluntary position as General Food and Clothing Dispenser, an often dangerous and intimidating position for a short white kid to hold. There are only so many arguments you can present to a seven by four foot black man, with a crazy glint in his eye and visible halitosis, as he tries to rip you off for an entire box of sports socks. Things start to turn ugly very soon, and if you don’t keep between him and the door you might as well forget getting out of there without at least a stab-wound or two.

I was walking fast… although the area had a certain picturesque “crack-haven” appeal, I was pretty certain that it wasn’t somewhere to linger. I walked this route just about every day, and I had a nasty suspicion that the odds were mounting against me. I usually took the precaution of carrying a $5 dollar bill in my pocket, it being the case that if you claimed to have no money on you at all, a mugger would roll you just to make sure. For sure, police response times were supposedly fast in this area, but that necessitates someone actually informing the police. I wasn’t confident that anyone apart from me would really want to go out on a limb and bring the cops into this neighbourhood. Hell, I wasn’t sure that the cops themselves would want to venture into the area without waiting for at least a tank as backup.

I turned a corner and saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary. A row of battered cars, “hoopties”, probably personally commissioned by Henry Ford himself. A large man staggering in the middle of the road, smacked out on his drug of choice. Another shitty, depressing street in inner-city Detroit. I started up it, walking with the recommended “potentially hazardous situation” walk: shoulders squared, eyes in the middle distance, a walk with purpose.

As I came towards the man in the street he stopped his mumbling and brought his red eyes to bear on me. Shit. Keep walking. He slouched over to the sidewalk and stood there swaying a little, staring at me silently. I slowed up… what was there to do? It would look really pointed now if I crossed the street. I tried to pass between his villainous bulk and one of the cars which angled up on the sidewalk where someone had parked in a hurry, or maybe too messed up to have any depth-perception left.

Suddenly he erupted into movement, blocking me with a swift sidestep that belied his bulk. He started crooning in a disturbing falsetto, “Yo honkey, I know you got some money for me, you gotta help me out man, gimme some, gimme some…” I didn’t trust my voice not to crack, so I silently pulled the five from my back pocket and handed it over… he let it drop to the sidewalk without even looking at it, still staring at someplace above my eyes. He was too far along the Night Train to be satisfied with mere pocket-change. His particular trip required something special… wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He didn’t want one pair of sports socks, he wanted an entire clothing line.

“C’mon honkey, don’t gimme that shit… I know you got more than that…” He was starting to get louder and whinier. I wasn’t feeling great about the whole situation, I didn’t have a backup plan if the $5 didn’t cut it.

“I-I-I don’t have any more money, bro…” I stammered. Calling a black man “bro”” is only wise if you are, in fact, a brother. They do not see it as a sign of solidarity. To them, it is demeaning… and in America just about the last thing you want to do is demean a black man. To my extreme relief, he didn’’t seem to notice. I was only relieved for a very short while.

He reached inside his coat and pulled out The Gun. Holy Shit. That’s what a gun looks like up close. I hadn’t actually seen one this close before. He waved it in my face slowly, letting me catch every detail of its shit-crusted exterior. “Why you gotta play with me man? You want I should just pop you? Huh? Huh?”

Just about the only thing I was glad of, at this point, was that I’d gone to the bathroom before I came out. I shook my head slowly… I was deeply confused and uncertain. There were no precedents in my sheltered life for this eventuality. It was not as glamorous as one might have expected. The idea of being “popped”” was no longer as amusing as it had seemed back in Scotland. We stood there looking at each other, out of options.

It was then that something entirely wonderful happened, from my perspective at least. The moment shifted, the demons inside his head collided, and he lost interest. Just like that. A light went off behind his eyes, and he focused behind me and lumbered past slowly, muttering to himself under his breath. I headed in the opposite direction at Olympian speed.

There are many illusions on the street. For a moment, as I had stared at him, he was a God… he had the power of life and death. Chances were that the gun wasn’’t even loaded, but the illusion was the thing. This is what the second amendment boils down to, and to a certain extent the illusion of power is the defining characteristic of being American… “I’m an American citizen! You can’t arrest me! I pay my goddamned taxes!”

I don’t expect that the gunman had paid much taxes in a while, but for a while he was the Big Man. Might is Right, in the jungle and on the international political stage. Two weeks later I was sorting underwear and wondering why anyone would donate a thong to a homeless shelter when he stumbled in the door. Our roles were reversed. As I kitted him out with the regulation allotment of pants, shirts and sundries I wondered if he would recognise me. I was a little nervous… for the moment the power balance was in my favour, but it could change in a second. I held the underwear, but he could easily trump that with his firearm.

I was lucky. He didn’t appear to have any recollection of our little incident. I watched him warily as he left with his bag of goodies. I was safe, for the moment. I never saw him again, as it happened… but he left an indelible mark on my psyche. I was not scarred by Fear, because the whole thing was too remote from everyday life for memory to be triggered. Besides, I came out on top, in a sense. $5 is a very cheap price to pay for a quick jolt of that kind of adrenaline rush.

No, the mark he left was subtler, but deeper. My natural buoyancy, the sense of control and superiority that I pampered, was tempered by the realisation of how quickly power can change hands. Sure, I was on my way up, and he was on his way down… but it would be foolish to assume that this was a constant. There are no constants, especially where the second amendment is concerned. An idiot, or a dangerously crazy bum, can kill you stone dead whilst suffering from illusions of power…… and the only way to avoid this is to keep a clear head, and have no illusions yourself. Even this may not save you, in the final clinches, but at least you will know what is happening to you.

I have always seen myself as one of the lucky ones. I was lucky then, but I learned my lessons. One of these was “Don’t Expect To Walk Around The Ghetto And Not Get Shot,” but the other was far more important and timelessly relevant. You never know what the other man has in his pocket, and you should never assume that you and your well-being are just as important to him as they are to you. This does not mean “trust no one,” but it does mean that you should know exactly who you are dealing with at all times, to the best of your ability. If you must make assumptions, let one of them be that everyone has some kind of gun in their pocket.

Beyonce & Ice Cream

2006-12-11T23:36:00.000Z

Imagine staying in a hotel where the staff are rude, there is no bar, there is no cleaning service and the other guests are generally noisy, intoxicated and cretinous.

Welcome to Student Halls of Residence.

I wonder if the guy in the room next to me is bulimic. He makes vomiting noises once or twice a day. It’s deeply unsettling, especially late at night.

I wonder what all the emotional shouting matches that my flatmates have are about.

Living in Halls often fills me with blind rage. I wouldn’t mind that my flatmates play music so loud, except that their taste is viciously corrupt.

Why must they make so much noise? Why, Lord? Why must they torment me with their sickening idiocy?

There’s an ice cream van that comes around some nights. It’s sinister, hearing the fairground music so loud under your window. They must be selling drugs. This is not ice cream weather.

Pine for pine?

2006-11-30T23:36:00.000Z

There’s a Christmas tree in my lobby.

Is it Christmas time? No. Someone has messed up. The wires are crossed. The “commercialisation of Christmas” doesn’t bother me, insofar as it means that I get stuff. It would be plain foolish to deny that the accumulation of “stuff”, whilst not my primary aim in life, is one of my favourite hobbies. Everyone likes “stuff”.

No, I don’t mind that at all. But what kind of warped calendar are these people working on? Christmas does not begin on the 30th of November. Since Sextus Julius Africanus published that jolly little pamphlet Chronographiaia in 221AD, it’s been the 25th of December. Who are these illiterate tinsel-sniffers to argue with Sextus?

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this particular tree.

Pro:

They’ve gone slightly further in their dubious justification of the obscene cost of living here.

Con:

It looks like a prepackaged piece of trash.
Its position means that its impossible to make any shots from about a 30 degree radius round the pool table.
There are no presents under it.

I can’t actually see much thought to it. It looks terrible. Is it there to remind us that Christmas is coming? People in solitary confinement with nothing but a bit of chalk could have worked that out for themselves.

I’d prefer that they wasted my money in better ways than erecting meaningless symbols. They sure as hell aren’t celebrating the birth of Christ, and I don’t notice a big movement back to Saturnalia either. If it is a pagan religion type thing, then I’d far rather see some sacrifices. Ritualised bloodletting would be preferable to (and far more exciting than) this shoddily decorated concession to blind tradition.

I think it was put there by the same people who manhandled a new fridge into my flat at about 6am this morning, cursing and farting. I’m out of sync with these pigs. This entire building has a very poor spirit. The staff are disgruntled drones who clearly despise students, and the residents are bland and uninteresting, traits which skyrocket with every sip of poof-juice they ingest on their nightly revels.

Damn it, let them have their tree… but I want my share of whatever it cost to install the thing.

Flatline [Deadline]

2006-11-27T23:35:00.000Z

I have very little patience with people who fear deadlines. These people are fools, because they misunderstand the intrinsic beauty of the temporal context. With enough time, you could write entire novels and sagas and epic poems and many essays… which is the blinkered view. The point is, with enough time, you would never write anything.

The beauty of the deadline is that it forces you to choose an ending. Endings are the hardest things to write… possibly because they are never really endings, after all, merely convenient exit points. A story has its characters, and they will live an infinite amount of time after you have written them. If a character is purely conceptualised, even in the most wooly tangent, life has been breathed into them. An essay is merely a tiny mouthful of the ocean of material, an ocean which is increased by the essay, and which will continue to grow indefinitely after the essay has been printed. The sum of all knowledge, in other words, is like a constantly spreading cancer, feeding on itself. It is impossible to kill anything, in the wider sense. If one could remove something completely from existence, erasing all trace of its past, present and future… then nothing would have been removed.

Confused ramblings indeed… the approximation of wisdom. Seemingly unneccessary tangents make up a good deal of University, and are the key to a happy career in procrastination. Which brings me back to deadlines.

I understand from the vague correspondence that I received the other day that an assignment due later today has had its deadline put back to sometime in December because its wordcount had been slightly increased. Reading between the lines tells me that this decision was a result of the recent Student-Staff liason meeting. Upon further investigation I discovered that one student had spoken to the student liason, asking him to bring it up in the meeting. It could be argued that “one student” wouldn’t exactly comprise a massive population in any kind of student opinion survey.

The thing that bothered me was the fact that someone actually cared enough about the extra two weeks to mention it. It’s just plain aggravating that someone will actually use those 14 days… and then get a mediocre mark. From what I can see, people that spend four weeks on an essay generally tend to get the same marks as people who do it the night before. Why is this? It seems unfair.

That’s the thing about the deadline thing… in the real world deadlines can never be put back like that. You can’t ask people to put back deadlines just because you “don’t think it’s fair”. The only way to evade deadlines and still get paid is to do it completely brazenly… and this will work seldom, if ever. What are we learning here?

We’re learning that lecturers cater for the lowest intelligence percentile in the class. We’re learning that hard work counts for nothing. That life, like the lecturer, wants you to “pass”. That one persons opinion can change the fate of an entire class.

Well, apart from the latter, none of these are helpful lessons. The latter is only helpful in a sort of “inspirational poster” way.

The thing which we might learn if we thought about anything other than grades and drink and sex and Eastenders is the most important of all… People have an ingrained sense of something being either “fair” or “unfair”. University is supposed to be when one is at one’s most open-minded and receptive of new ideas… and yet the vast majority of students refuse to even try to account for the fact that they have an inbuilt system of morality, or “fairness”. The few attempts at explaining this, without being completely un-pc and accepting that there may be some kind of Higher Power, are laughable byproducts of half-understood pop-philosophical crap. If I had the mental stamina, I would try and detail the main ones, but to be frank it would pain me.

The problem with refusing to think on an elevated level is that this is the one Question for which there is a Final Deadline. This is the only deadline that we need fear. The Great Scorer may or may not increase your personal deadline… but for that to happen you need at least to give the question some thought. Your deadline could be in five minutes… there is no time for procrastination.

I, Love, Philo

2006-11-23T23:34:00.000Z

If Hume were still around, I’d be one of the first to ask him, “What the Hell was the deal with ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’?”

There’s this Demea character, he’s a Theist, and there’s Cleanthes, who’s a Deist. I understand the distinction, and I’d be willing to read a dialogue between them, if not exactly thrilled.

Then Hume throws in this third guy called Philo… and he’s a real hoot. He mostly just floats around telling the others that their arguments are pointless, and changing his position every few pages. He’s the kind of person you’d love to punch in the face. If Hume had had any kind of eye for closure or reader satisfaction, there would be a final chapter where Philo gets stabbed… and possibly a romantic subplot. As it is, it’s unlikely that it’ll ever be adapted for the big screen.

Hume didn’t seem to recognise that Hollywood is where the money is at. It’s a pity, because if I’d seen the movie I wouldn’t sound like an uneducated simpleton when I open my mouth in class. Even Locke managed to inject his ideas with a little drama, allowing them to bastardise and mutilate his philosophy and put it in Lost.

The key to philosophy tutorials, as I see it, is to listen very carefully to what everyone else says, draw a simple conclusion or two, and then restate it as your own theory. The other trick is to read what it says on the handout and then rephrase it so that it sounds like you came up with it independently. If you can top this all off with a kind of knowing smile whenever anyone else talks… you’re made.

Memoir

2006-11-21T23:29:00.000Z

A noisy night on the outskirts of the East End… the Man Utd vs Celtic game kicks off soon. There are shiny jacketed cops everywhere. I feel very safe.

Today in class we were going over the first draft of our memoirs, a 1500 word assignment due next week. I found myself extremely confused when we talked about memoir in general. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the genre, and in fact most didn’t seem to like it. Terms like “arrogance” and “factual inaccuracy” floated around. Why would one write a memoir? Is it worthwhile? Is it a worthless genre? Was Eva Hoffman’s memoir a self-indulgence waste of paper?

I can’t really see anything wrong with the whole thing. If I could write 70,000 words about my favourite subject, (myself) and get paid for it… what’s the problem? In any case, assuming writing about one’s life is an act of arrogance, isn’t it just as arrogant to write fiction? In that case, just about everything one writes for publication is arrogant. Or does the level of arrogance depend on how much of your own life is in the book? Generally it’s best to write what you know. Isn’t it more arrogant to write about something you’re not immediately knowledgeable about?

As you can see, I was very confused.

Blogging: The Stigma

2006-11-19T23:25:00.000Z

What happens if those monkeys we’ve all heard about abandon trying to plagiarise Shakespeare and instead get internet connections?

Well, blogging is what happens.

Blogging is surely the lowest, most ridiculously inane publishing medium. Even the Sun has some measure of Editorial control. These braindead infantile keyboard strokers give the written word a bad name. I’m no better, but at least I’m aware that my blog is of no worth. I’ve just spent about 5 minutes randomly going through blogs on Wordpress… and it was a bizarre, depressing, and unsettling experience. The notables that I encountered were stereotypical of what one might imagine:

The family orientated blog. These things discuss Junior, “Hubby” and various “vacations”. They are about as dry as the surface of Mars. It’s as if some jaded housewife was suddenly asked to give a detailed alias about where exactly she was and what she was doing… since 2002.
The Political blog. “I have an opinion about the Democratic/Republican party, and I’m going to make outlandish statements that Ann Coulter would think twice before expressing.” A foul perpetuation of polemic views that you could work out from first principles, (Democrats/Republicans are Bad) encouraged in their lamentable idiocy by screeds of comments essentially making a big business out of saying “I agree/disagree strongly”. Strong argument in favour of America becoming a colony again.
Some truly poisonous little poems… if one takes the term at its loosest. The site I saw was all about inner emptiness, futility, despair… etc. If I wrote poetry as bad as that, I’d feel a bit down, too.
The Hobbyist. Yes, they have a hobby, and they’re going to write about it. It’s a boring hobby, and they are a boring person. Guaranteed to put one off having a hobby in general.
The Linker. Somebody reads lots of online newspapers and blogs, and just has to share the little gems with everyone else. Maybe one link in 50 is worth clicking on… the rest will make you want to saw off your mouse finger with a credit card.
The Boring Social Retard. Maybe the fact that you don’t have any friends in real life might have clued you in to the fact that your shopping trips/reading material/personal appearance/pet isn’t something anyone wants to hear about. It didn’t? Welcome to the blogging world! Here is your big bag o’ unneccessary punctuation! Lol!!!1
The Completely Incomprehensible. I’m sorry… but surely a blog is something that other people are meant to read? These blogs look like someone has worked out some amazing code in order that they can publish their thoughts online and still have them secret… or maybe a Parkinsons sufferer without fingers has been strapped in front of a computer.

These are a few of the more obvious categories. There may be many more, but my frontal lobe was starting to swell against the inside of my skull, and I judged it better to stop whilst I was still capable of functioning on a basic intellectual level.

It has to be noted that there are a couple of types of blog which are actually worthwhile:

The Practical. The blog is actually used for some practical purpose. Few and far between, to use a boring phrase.
The Well-written. Well written blogs, written by people who will sooner or later get paid for their writing, and are genuinely interesting to read regardless of subject.

Of course, I’m well aware of the irony of my position on this whole blog thing… but then, the only person who reads it is my mum… so…