Getting rid of the voice saying 'Don't make me do stuff'

Experience and epiphanies come in all shapes, sizes, places, states of undress, degrees of sobriety, degrees of intoxication and shades of fatigue. They can strike you, with short term frustration, during the first-thing wake-me-up solo fumble under the bed sheets just as equally as they can pause you mid-sip of your fifteenth 'cup o' joe' and just as potently strip away any other thought or factor you were paying attention to.

In this aspect they are like ruthless and inexplicably succesfully efficient toddlers. The other thing they share with the fledgling, wailing, sticky-fingered semi-humans is that once they have your attention whatever they are trying to show you is often incredibly and insufferably annoying, if only because you should have seen the life milestone/ dead amphibian in your kids hand (and, imminently, mouth) a lot sooner.



Such an epiphany hit me recently. Everything I have known

On the replacement of skill with luck in the modern gameshow

Right, prissy and pretentious 'essay title' style heading aside, let's got on with this shall we? You haven't got all day.

Gone are the days when you could win money for knowing things or being good in a field such as retaining knowledge/ intelligently matching answers with answers popular with the public/ intelligently deciphering a clue or puzzle or catchphrase. This sort of actual skill, brain power, concentration and logic has, unfortunately, been sidelined to National Lottery spin off shows, normally on air while people leave the TV alone to have dinner, the gap preempted by Doctor Who and any number of talent shows and closed by Saturday night dramas and the film at nine.



Now you have to rely on, without fail, luck

The curse of a good book

Reader, I apologise for being so abesnt over the last months. I promised myself that I would not, could not allow anything so pithy as a degree and the work I had to undertake thereof to stall my frequent harranguing of the proverbial ears you lend me. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, had I not been so Preometheanly chained to the rock of higher education while my coursework pecked at my internal organs, there is no way in which I would be able now to nejoy the respite with any way near as much gusto. It is this freedom, the liberation to read and write what I like now while merely dabbling in this strange trifle called revision, which bring us our next topic of grumbling.

I have a, at times unfortunate, love of books. Can't help it, that's that, it's the way my mother put my hat on (cheers Rob), etc. And now that I'm free to read what I want, I am- with some brilliant and some more tarnished results.

Cut the head off the snake and find it's a hydra?

Negativity isn't normally what I set out to broadcast to people, honest. Personal pessimism, maybe, but negativity isn't my default setting. I just try to point out the glaring flaws in a lot of peoples' celebrations sometimes, with a touch of what I like to call common sense.

I should note, before I go any further, that I am not talking about, nor will I mention again, the mass hysteria with which 24-hour rolling news would convince us the nation was gripped in the run up to Friday. Most people don't care and were sick of it, so I'm going to leave it well alone.



This morning I awoke, having spent last night sat in a pub which advertised a quiz (there was no quiz), watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead and my perennial favourite Stephen King film Misery and then spending hours writing because I was unable to sleep, in a sort of fuzzy haze. My stereo alarm was blaring at me at the regular time of 6:30 despite being on a volume of 5, and the grey dawn filtering through my skylight was burning into my corneas. It was that sort of stumbling, fumbling wake-up, until I heard a news story which snapped me right into conciousness and alert attentiveness.

Osama Bin Laden (not to be confused with one of the perpetrators of his downfall, President Obama- I'm looking at you, Fox News) has died

The rise of the rhyming advert

Twenty two days without a post? Blimey. Anyone who thought the recent summer glory would have mellowed me, sorry, but I return with a resounding fanfare of two words. Stop it.

Here's a quick list of those involved so far- Jenson Button, Harvester, a 118 radio ad, that stupid dog training TV show after extensive research, it is called A Different Breed- I'm not sure if that's in reference to the dogs, the team behind it or the owners), and Cuprinol's 'Wood Preservation society'. Also, the "For dogs who BLANK a lot" dog foog ad- Oh, Philip Glenister, how could you?

'500,000 on sick are fit to work'

Oh, dear god.

If this is true, as one minister suggests, then every single one of these 500,000 people need to get going. Or move abroad so we don't have to deal with them sitting around and cheating everyone else out of what they could be doing.

I'd like to turn to a recent piece I wrote to be published in my college magazine, The Bowland Lady. If you're ever in the North West of England, seek it out. The piece was entitled

Grit your teeth and get on with it- that ridiculous sense of entitlement in the job market

and I think it's a bit relevent here. It reads as follows:

If I wanted to take part in a scrum I'd have gone to a midnight rugby game.

This is a shout out to all the shitheads out there who love to make queueing at the bar a physical war. I do not want to go to a nightclub to get my upper body workout, or any sort of exercise for that matter, aside from occasional "dancing" which may cause other people on nights out to question both my sanity and whether or not I've got some sort of permanent problem with my nervous system. I want to drink copiously, bellow along to songs which should have been left in the past and generally have a good night.



Having to take part in the ebb and flow of people that becomes a gigantic, braced scrummage with dozens of individual three and four man teams all heading in the same direction and, apparently, attempting to widen the club twenty metres by pushing the bar and back wall away is not my idea of a great way to spend twenty minutes.

And the upshot of it all?

Ink-redible idiocy or deliberately printing money?

A minor gripe inducing piece of stupidity occurred to me today as I was sat, working away like a good little boy on my essay rather than heading outside into the sunshine which has decided to grace us and bake the interior of the library. I was tapping away at the slightly tacky keyboard as you do and decided to print out what I had of my essay so that I could hand write the links required and refine my argument somewhere away from a computer screen. I can't think when I'm staring at one, not a bit. And it was hot. Really hot.

It then occurred to me I might not have enough printer credits to print off all three pages as I needed to.

It's alive! Frankenstein's Wedding- Review

You shouldn't have to force yourself to sit through the first twenty minutes of a show to wait for it to get good, or even get really good and have an emotional pay-off at the end to reward your patience at the start, but with Frankenstein's Wedding if you did stick with it that's exactly what you got. A phenomenal piece of live musical theatre which succeeded in updating the Frankenstein tale, keeping all of its emotional clout and upping the heartstring pulling idea of The Creation all in one evening of entertainment.

An open letter to the people of the country Libraria

Dear all,



I have noticed recently that there has been some confusion over what constitutes being a colossal dickhead in the nation of Libraria and what does not. Allow me to clear a few things up for you, but first may I just say that yes, it is your fault that I have become that guy, and no, I'm not happy about that, either.