Category Archives: Future, demented vision of

It Takes Two…

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So, what’s been happening? I’ve not been on here for a while but, luckily, the world at large has been billowing tonne after tonne of grade-A terror and misery for us all to enjoy as civilisation slides happily into terminal oblivion. First of all, Iceland started spewing most of itself into the air over Europe meaning everyone had to suffer the indignity of an extended Easter holiday abroad. It’s worth bearing in mind that Iceland is still trying to recover from almost going bankrupt last year and so has enough problems without slowly turning itself into an ash cloud. I can only speculate that, much as the monarchy is said to fall should the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, these are the sort of disasters legendarily forewarned to hit Iceland should Bjork go 5 years without making a decent album.

At least they can content themselves by now being world trend-setters in terms of catastrophe. Already BP have joined on to the end of the eruption conga and had one of their oil pipelines burst all over the southern United States. The good news here is that the US government for years has been talking about the country needing to find more oil and now everyone can get some of their own just by popping down to the beach with a bucket.

Over in Greece, meanwhile, Iceland’s mantle of bankrupt nationhood has been taken up in spectaular fashion. Unlike those polite Icelanders thought, they’ve been rioting on the streets, setting fire to banks and asking the whole of Europe to look down the back of the sofa for a spare hundred billion Euros in unmarked bills. Now they’re threatening to drag the rest of the continent down with them which means it’s good for us in Blighty that this country has finally sorted out the tricky conundrum of whose running it.

We’ve ended up, due to the fact that in 2 millenia no-one even thought about writing our constitution down on so much as a fag packet, with a country being run by a diverse combination of a 43 year old posh bloke and a 43 year old posh bloke. For those of you struggling to tell the difference between them, Nick Clegg is the one who’s disarmingly like Richard Madeley. The people of Britain seem to be strangely unsure what to make of this newly founded political double act at the controls of the country which is odd really because we’ve got a long history of embracing famous duos on this island.

Morecambe and Wise, Mainwaring and Wilson, Burke and Hare, Ant and Dec, Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef, Sooty and Sweep- we can’t get enough of the unique relationship between two men indulged in a common pursuit- whether it be entertaining (Morecambe and Wise, Ant and Dec), songwriting (Lennon and McCartney, Mick and Keef) or grave robbing (Burke and Hare, Sooty and Sweep). Now we’ve got Cameron and Clegg to enjoy; though the uncertainty about how they’ll pan out in practice may well be due to it not being clear yet which of the men will fill which role in the twosome.

Put simply, the roles in a great British duo are clearly defined and are thus:

- The pretentious, loveable buffoon (Mainwaring, Wise, Jagger, McCartney, Ant or Dec, Sweep)
- The knowing, sarcastic wit (Wilson, Morecambe, Richards, Lennon, Ant or Dec, Sooty)

The obvious answer would appear to be that Cameron is the former and Clegg is the latter though it really isn’t that clear. Maybe this is why there is so much disquiet and worry about their prospects in the country at the moment. Well, this and the potentially incendiary consequences for our still unwritten constitution and the fact that we’re sailing an untried political vessel into an apocalyptic financial storm, but ill-defined roles within the nation-helming two-hander can’t help.

So I’m proposing this- when everything inevitably goes tits up they need to take one of the following leads from a great British double act:

1. Morecambe and Wise- they need to do that old Eric and Ernie skip up to a lectern in Downing Street to the strains of ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. Then Cameron needs to say “What do you think of it so far?” before Clegg yells “RUBBISH!”. Then they skip off into the distance. Everyone laughs and cheers up.

2. Sooty and Sweep- Clegg devlops a really squeaky voice, Cameron says nothing and they spend their time spraying William Hague in the face with a water pistol. Everyone laughs and cheers up.

3. Burke and Hare- They decide to take up grave robbing. We’ll probably be so poor as a country soon we’ll need to burn corpses for heat anyway.

or finally;

4. Lennon and McCartney- They are forced to decide between them who has to get shot dead and who has to marry Heather Mills. And we all thought the coalition negotiations were tough…

Welcome to now

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So, that was the noughties.  Did you enjoy it?

No, I’m not sure either.  When you really think about it, lots and lots of stuff happened since the Millennium but all I can really remember of the previous decade is that everyone got an i-Phone and then Louis Walsh judged them.  This is probably not a suitable eulogy for 10 years that, logically speaking, should represent the pinnacle of all human achievement and existence thus far.

Actually, I do genuinely believe that humanity is constantly achieving greater and greater feats of excellence as time goes on but, unlike those who think this is represented by all those clever people and their big pipe in the ground at CERN, I reckon our species has thus far peaked with the Shea Stadium level of Beatles Rock Band played with the Rickenbacker controller.

Anyway, leaving the noughties behind us it’s time to boldly embark on a new year and a new decade (technically, it actually isn’t as pedants like to point out, the new decade starts with 2011 just as the Millennium actually started with 2001.  Don’t worry about it though, people who think like this are an evil on par with ethnic cleansing).  However before we get down to it this upcoming year and decade need something really quite important.

They need naming.

First of all, are we in 2010 or 2010?  I’d probably better do that in words rather than numbers.  Are we in two-thousand-and-ten or is it twenty-ten?  Personally, I favour twenty-ten, it sounds more futuristic and and while me might not all be whizzing around on hover-boards or watching Jenny Agutter undress while we run away from a chap called Francis and the ritual of Carrousel it’s at least nice to pretend we could be by giving our years more sci-fi sounding monikers.

And it looks like the future might need all the help it can get as, not only has mankind peaked as I’ve already demonstrated, but the teenies (that’s what I’m calling this decade till I can think of something better) have already got underway with the dis-spiriting news that we’ve already started hurtling down the other side of the evolutionary mountain.  Because we’ve started getting uglier.

Yes, that’s right- our old friends at BeautifulPeople.com have been at it again, this time turfing over 5,000 people off their dating website for the aesthetically pleasant and socially retarded as they have slipped below the appropriate standard of loveliness.  The folks who have managed to get through the stringent selection process and get on the website have been doing a spot of internal policing and have complained about anyone who has posted a photo of themselves that suggests they’ve gained any weight over Christmas.

Now I don’t want to pour scorn on anyone so early in a new decade but isn’t this moving slightly from an endearingly self-absorbed form of sociopathy into full blown nutterdom?  I can’t decide if BeautifulPeople.com is now on the path to becoming either a new and terrifying cult or a breeding ground for worldwide network of slightly more attractive versions of the killer from ‘Se7en’.

Judge for yourselves by reading this quote by BeautifulPeople.com’s founder Robert Hintze from possibly the most chilling press release ever unleashed: “we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld; letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model”.

Tough call isn’t it?  That talk of how they ‘mourn the loss of any member’ is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to hear some demented cult leader utter to comfort his followers after a few of their number had been at the mass suicide punchbowl a few days before ‘The Ascension’; while the use of the word ‘fatties’ does hint at the sort of simmering anger and resentment that fuelled Kevin Spacey to get Gwyneth Paltrow’s head Fed-Exed to the middle of nowhere.

So- BeautifulPeople.com; sinister cult or club for serial killers?  Robert Hintze; the new David Koresh or the new Dennis Nielsen?  Whatever it turns out to be- it’s definitely an incredibly successful website and Robert Hintze is clearly a gifted entrepreneur and the sort of man who knows how to be a success and get some publicity in 2010.

Maybe that’s what we could call this new decade then.   Not the ‘teenies’ but ‘the we-all-just-realised-that-to-be-successful-in-this-day-an-age-you’ve-got-to-be-a-cross-between-a-manipulative-control-freak-and-a-murderous-psychopath-ies’. 

Here’s to the future.  Happy New Year to you all.

That Was The Year That Will Be

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It’s that time of the year again where every newspaper, website, magazine, pamphlet, TV show and idiot-with-a-keyboard in whatever field produce their end of year awards or lists.  You know the sort of thing- ’50 Best Albums of the Year’, ’25 Best Movie Scenes of 2009′, ‘The Top 10 Shows Which Are A Bit Like Flash-Forward, But Aren’t Flash-Forward’ and, being a decent sort, I’ll sum them all up for you right now and save you the time of actually reading them.
The Resistance by Muse, Jade Goody R.I.P., Roger Federer’s French Open Final, That Scene From ‘Bruno’ On The Talk Show, Roy Cropper in a Canal, Michael Jackson, Thierry Henry’s hand, Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, The 4th Series of 30 Rock, House is in a Mental Asylum!, A Creeping Sense of Existentialist Dread, Michael McIntyre, Jedward, Jedward, Does Anyone Else Feeling This Gnawing Emptiness?, Fucking Bono.
There you go.  Done.  That was 2009 which, if it had a unifying theme, was essentially 2008 with more resonant celebrity deaths.  And now that it’s out of the way and I’ve summed it all up for you we can get on to job of dishing out next year’s awards- a process rendered infinitely more fun that for 2009 as it’s based on a combination of idle speculation, crackpot brainstorming and desperately chased hunches.  And so, ladies and gentleman, 13 months early, I present The ItSaysHere 2010 Awards…
Album of the Year- ‘Susan Boyle’s Second Album By Susan Boyle’- Susan Boyle:  Boyle won 14 Grammys, 8 Brit Awards and sold 47 million copies of this, her 2nd album, on which she presents a stirring collection of touching but powerful cover versions of her favourite touching but powerful Leona Lewis cover versions.  Bonus Track:  Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle cover Will Young and Gareth Gates’ cover of ‘The Long And Winding Road’.
Film of the Year- ‘Paedophil’- Sascha Baron Cohen trawls across America’s deep south in the guise of a convicted child sex offender called Philip.  Spends all his time making incredibly insensitive comments about any children in his vicinity and offering to buy an hour of delirious sexual pleasure with any passing kids by negotiating with thier parents in a thick Belgian accent and outrageous hat thereby making a point about the reactionary nature of many Americans but actually just proving that Baron Cohen can do funny voices and is happy to risk getting his head kicked in.
TV Show of the Year- ‘The X Factor Election Special 2010′- Hosted by Dermot O’Leary and David Dimbleby, the nation goes to the polls to decide who will occupy 10 Downing Street next year with a mandate to ease Britain through difficult economic times and increasing European intergration as well as a 1 year record deal with Simon Cowell.  The public vote and Peter Snow’s ‘Swing-o-meter’ will decide the final two before they go before the judges panel (Cowell, Louis Walsh, Cheryl Cole, Diane Abbott MP, Ian Hislop) for a vote-off.  They both get to make one final impassioned speech to the nation, highlight 3 manifesto policies of their choice and perform their favourite Rod Stewart song before the winner is announced and the Queen joins them onstage to plug her latest single and ask them to form a government.
Sportsman of the Year-  Thierry Henry- Redeems himself for his handball against the Irish by not only guiding the French to World Cup glody but also winning Strictly Come Dancing- beating Greg Wallace from Masterchef in the final foxtrot round- and also starring in the greatest Gillette advert ever with Tiger Woods who everyone’s been looking at a bit funny since that car crash.  Not that anything happened in that car crash, you understand.  I’m just saying.  I mean, they don’t crash themselves do they?  And what was he doing out at that time of the night anyway?  Two words- Geroge Michael.  That’s all I’m saying.  Just that.
Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Flags and Giraffes’ by Eileen O’Murray- Utterly pretentious load of shit which features no discernable plot whatsoever, has hardly any interesting or likeable characters, is sprinkled with swear words and descriptions of drug taking to try to seem edgy, and is mostly told from the perspective of a narrator who is needlessly cryptic and moany.  Is easily battered in terms of originality, ideas, interest and sheer story-telling ability by every single comic produced this year but everyone on Newsnight Review is terrified that they’ll be struck of the list of pretentious clever-clogs for even admitting they’ve heard of Superman.  Throughout 2010 comics will remain so hopelessly uncool that not even Will Self will pretend to like them ironically to annoy The Guardian.
Non-Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Battered in the Pants’ by Jim Hell- A publishing milestone as, after years of misery memoirs clogging up the nations’ bookshelves and being bought by an apparently multi-million strong population of unsettling voyeurs, this represents the first book to be written by someone who actively set out to get abused as a child knowing the lucrative career that would follow as a writer in later years.  This particularly harrowing tale of constantly going to the vicars house in a tight shorts and a vest top to take showers while asking for help in finding the soap will move even the most hardened psychopath to tears.
Celebrity of the Year- Robbie Williams- Scores a major hit in all the celebrity magazines and websites by finally reuniting on stage with Take That.  His decision to patch things up with Gary Barlow was, he says, a really special moment for him and not in any way to do with the fact that they now sell more records than him and is entirely unconnected to the reality that he’ll suddenly get a bit of an attention spike in a career that was rapidly plummeting downhill while his former bandmates about whom he’d not shown the slightest interest in the last near-decade were suddenly the biggest act in Britain again.
News Event of the Year- The End of the World As Gabriel’s Trumpet Sounds, The Rivers Run With Blood and War, Famine, Pestilence and Death Stalk The Land.  All in HD on Sky News!

It’s that time of the year again where every newspaper, website, magazine, pamphlet, TV show and idiot-with-a-keyboard in whatever field produce their end of year awards and lists.  You know the sort of thing- ’50 Best Albums of the Year’, ’25 Best Movie Scenes of 2009′, ‘The Top 10 Shows Which Are A Bit Like Flash-Forward, But Aren’t Flash-Forward’ and, being a decent sort, I’ll sum them all up for you right now and save you the time of actually reading any of them.

The Resistance by Muse, Jade Goody R.I.P., Roger Federer’s French Open Final, That Scene From ‘Bruno’ On The Talk Show, Roy Cropper in a Canal, Michael Jackson, Thierry Henry’s Hand, Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, The 4th Series of 30 Rock, House is in a Mental Asylum!, A Creeping Sense of Existentialist Dread, Michael McIntyre, Jedward, Jedward, Does Anyone Else Feeling This Gnawing Emptiness?, Fucking Bono.

There you go.  Done.  That was 2009 which, if it had a unifying theme, was essentially 2008 with more resonant celebrity deaths.  And now that it’s out of the way and I’ve summed it all up for you we can get on to job of dishing out next year’s awards.  Yes, just for you, I’m going to get the jump on absoultely everybody else on the planet and give you the highlights of 2010 before they even have a chance to happen.  Doing this is a process rendered infinitely more fun than doing it for 2009 as it’s based on a combination of idle speculation, crackpot brainstorming and desperately chased hunches.  And so, ladies and gentleman, 13 months early, I present The ItSaysHere 2010 Awards…

Album of the Year- ‘Susan Boyle’s Second Album By Susan Boyle’- Susan Boyle:  Boyle won 14 Grammys, 8 Brit Awards and sold 47 million copies of this, her 2nd album, on which she presents a stirring collection of touching but powerful cover versions of her favourite touching but powerful Leona Lewis cover versions.  Bonus Track:  Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle cover Will Young and Gareth Gates’ cover of ‘The Long And Winding Road’.

Film of the Year- ‘Paedophil’- Sascha Baron Cohen trawls across America’s deep south in the guise of a convicted child sex offender called Philip.  Spends all his time making incredibly insensitive comments about any children in his vicinity and offering to buy an hour of delirious sexual pleasure with any passing kids by negotiating with their parents in a thick Belgian accent and outrageous hat, thereby making a point about the reactionary nature of many Americans but actually just proving that Baron Cohen can do funny voices and is happy to risk getting his head kicked in.

TV Show of the Year- ‘The X Factor Election Special 2010‘- Hosted by Dermot O’Leary and David Dimbleby, the nation goes to the polls to decide who will occupy 10 Downing Street next year with a mandate to ease Britain through difficult economic times and increasing European intergration as well as a 1 year record deal with Simon Cowell.  The public vote and Peter Snow’s ‘Swing-o-meter’ will decide the final two before they go before the judges panel (Cowell, Louis Walsh, Cheryl Cole, Diane Abbott MP, Ian Hislop) for a vote-off.  They both get to make one final impassioned speech to the nation, highlight 3 manifesto policies of their choice and perform their favourite Rod Stewart song before the winner is announced and the Queen joins them onstage to plug her latest single and ask them to form a government.

Sportsman of the Year-  Thierry Henry- Redeems himself for his handball against the Irish by not only guiding the French to World Cup glory but also winning Strictly Come Dancing- beating Greg Wallace from Masterchef in the final foxtrot round- and also starring in the greatest Gillette advert ever with Tiger Woods who everyone’s been looking at a bit funny since that car crash.  Not that anything happened in that car crash, you understand.  I’m just saying;  I mean, they don’t crash themselves do they?  And what was he doing out at that time of the night anyway?  Two words- Geroge Michael.  That’s all I’m saying.  Just that.

Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Flags and Giraffes’ by Eileen O’Murray- Utterly pretentious load of shit which features no discernable plot whatsoever, has hardly any interesting or likeable characters, is sprinkled with swear words and descriptions of drug taking to try to seem edgy, and is mostly told from the perspective of a narrator who is needlessly cryptic and moany and who you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.  Is easily battered in terms of originality, ideas, interest and sheer story-telling ability by every single comic produced this year but everyone on Newsnight Review is terrified that they’ll be struck of the list of pretentious clever-clogs for even admitting they’ve heard of Superman.  Throughout 2010 comics will remain so hopelessly uncool that not even Will Self will pretend to like them ironically to annoy The Guardian.

Non-Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Battered in the Pants’ by Jim Hell- A publishing milestone as, after years of misery memoirs clogging up the nations’ bookshelves and being bought by an apparently multi-million strong population of unsettling voyeurs, this represents the first book to be written by someone who actively set out to get abused as a child knowing the lucrative career that would follow as a writer in later years.  This particularly harrowing tale of constantly going to the vicar’s house in tight shorts and a vest top to take showers while asking for help in finding the soap will move even the most hardened page-twitching psychopath to tears.

Celebrity of the Year- Robbie Williams- Scores a major hit in all the celebrity magazines and websites by finally reuniting on stage with Take That.  His decision to patch things up with Gary Barlow was, he says, a really special moment and not in any way to do with the fact that they now sell more records than him and is entirely unconnected to the reality that he’ll suddenly get a bit of an attention spike in a career that was rapidly plummeting downhill while his former bandmates about whom he’d not shown the slightest interest in the last near-decade were suddenly the biggest act in Britain again.

News Event of the Year- The End of the World As Gabriel’s Trumpet Sounds, The Rivers Run With Blood and War, Famine, Pestilence and Death Stalk The Land. All in HD on Sky News!

There Is A Light, It’s Going Out…

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Imagine careering through a portal and ending up a few centuries in the future. Go on, imagine it. I’m not going to sit here and describe in searing detail the mind-boggling sensation of hurtling through time. Sod that. You’ll just have to imagine it for yourselves instead- it’s about time you lot started doing some of the work round here. Go on.

Done it? Good. Just so we’re all singing off the same hymn sheet- when you arrive in the future you’d feel something like Charlton Heston does in Planet of the Apes. Only without the apes.

Now imagine wandering down the future streets in your future shoes past a future Starbucks as future teens play future music on their tinny, nasty future mobile phones (some things, alas, never change). As you walk along you happen upon a big imposing building cheerily proclaiming itself to be a ‘Museum of the Past’. It could be doing this via the medium of a great big sign or the building itself could be proclaiming it by talking directly to you through some big masonry mouth. This is the future after all.

Intrigued, you wander through the entrance, past the gift shop, and take a look around. What would you expect to see when you happened upon the area dedicated to the early 21st century? What would they be commemorating from the Noughties? While you ponder this, bear in mind that museums often adopt a faintly patronising tone towards the obsolete practices and artefacts of the past- almost chuckling with incredulity at, for instance, medieval doctors trying to cure the plague with a bunch of posies and a big stick and wondering why they didn’t just google the answer instead.

This is what I think you’d see: a waxwork figurine of Jeremy Clarkson playing tapes of him doing lots of those pregnant pauses he does….. at the end of sentences; an X-Box 360 with Guitar Hero III on a constant loop of Leona Lewis songs; a mock Hygena kitchen featuring male and female figurines crying over a mortgage statement to the strains of Dizee Rascal’s ‘Dance Wit Me’ and, in a sealed, alarmed vial protected by lasers and guns, there’ll be a tiny amount of genuine, precious water as a testament to the time before it was all used up and people had to start using a system whereby rain and nourishment are downloaded off i-Tunes.

And in amongst all this there’ll be a large display dedicated to a strange human phenomenon that will have been finally killed off around the year 2010. It’ll amuse and baffle the residents of the future who will never have experienced the particular sensation described within and will merely be able to read the accompanying notes- all the while gazing upon a vista that contains details not only on how this thing felt but also how it was battered out of existence around the turn of the Millennium.

And the title of the exhibit will be ‘Romance’.

Let’s be perfectly honest with each other here- romance is very nearly dead. It’s as outdated and outmoded as steam engines, smallpox and bands with ugly but talented drummers. This state of affairs is a particular tragedy in this country as, despite what the French or Italians would have you believe, the Brits were once the most romantic nation on Earth. Just look at our movies if you don’t believe me. I dare you to watch ‘Brief Encounter’ or ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ or ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ or ‘Gregory’s Girl’ or ‘Room At The Top’ or ‘The Go-Between’ and tell me that the understatement so traditionally inherent in the people of this island- our charming brand of emotional retardation- didn’t make for romance to be, quietly, a central pillar of our very national existence. I say quietly because romance doesn’t scream from the rooftops. Instead romance creeps up on you from nowhere, romance whispers sweet nothings, romance is- in the nicest possible way- just a voice in your head. Romance, most of all, is mystery.

And mystery just can’t be tolerated any more.

Take, for example, The Jeremy Kyle Show- a daily chavapalooza of screeching involving couples comprised of alcoholics and the eletcronically-tagged arguing over the parenthood of their children. I know a number of people who say they love the show and if you’re one of those people and, whether you’re being ironic or not, I want to address this next bit directly to you:

You are a pillock. We may be friends, we may have spoken warmly in the past and shared good times but, and I really, really mean this, you’re everything that’s wrong with the world and you should be uttery ashamed. Seriously. If this is what you call entertainment then you are single-handedly reversing 2 million years of human evolution. You are that dumb. You are that pathetic. You are everything that is wrong with everything. And you owe me a tenner.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show (I’m talking to everyone again now. Welcome back. How’ve you been? You didn’t miss much), it often features a couple from a council estate going through a DNA test to prove how much bovine sex the man (and I use that term loosely) or woman (and I’m barely adhering to that term at all) of the pair has been having. I don’t know about you, but a DNA test really takes the romance out of a relationship. In terms of loving gestures it’s on a par with spending three solid weeks bellowing into your partner’s ear that they smell of eggs. But Kyle’s Bear-pit Theatre is merely the most denegrating part of a recent movement which has lead me to picture romance being nothing more in the future than a museum exhibit referenced in an overlong introduction by a man who loves the sound of his own keyboard.

There is, quite simply, too much stuff in the world that needs to be filled. It used to be a couple of television channels, a few newspapers and the occasional book that needed creative input but now everything’s gone digital and, alongside all the stations on your Sky+ box, there’s also a great big internet out there which constantly expands to accomodate an ever growing torrent of irrelevant, pointless cack. This used to just mean a dishonourable band of ham-fisted blogs but now sites like MySpace and in particular the one you’re reading this on have lead the tiniest minutiae of everybody’s life to be broadcast through the ether as though anyone else honestly gives a flying one.

Don’t get me wrong- Facebook is a good thing in so many ways. It’s allowed me to find out which of my schoolfriends grew up to be hot or work in I.T. and the opportunity to see photos of my nearest and dearest having much more fun that I ever seem to do is always likely to warm the cockles. But should I ever need to find romance again this website would kill it off with all the dead-eyed efficiency of Predator on performance-related pay.

Let me put it this way- I’m old fashioned. Without going into too much detail, my relationship with the missus began with a genuine courtship; much like they tend to do in Jane Austen novels and contrived American sit-coms. It’s a period of my life I look back on with intense joy as a time when two people slowly got to know each other and realised that something, somewhere, somehow seemed to make a connection. And that, my friends, is what happens when you embrace a bit of mystery in your life.

If we were to meet now, however, only the first couple of days would be the same as we started chatting over a bar in Sunderland. Then, in 2008, we’d simply add each other as friends on Facebook and, within mere moments, be able to see each others’ political views, religious beliefs, favourite books, status as of 5 seconds ago and previous performances on copyright-infringing Scrabble games. Years worth of discovery would be packed into a quick browse around a webpage and then, if this was you, where could you go from there?

I’ll tell you where. You’d miss that period of finding out about your beloved and then start inventing things to find out about them that didn’t even exist. You’d ponder if they’re actually a convicted sex offender, or an abscodned member of the Thrid Reich with a talented plastic surgeon, or one of those lizard people David icke keeps banging on about. Then you’d be just a small step away from claiming your significant other has banged everyone you share a postcode with and before you know it you’d be sat in front of Jeremy Kyle’s cackling bovine audience as he lorded it over you with the results of a DNA test.

This is the future. I hope you’ll be happy.

To Hell In A Handcart, By Any Means…

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If I’m honest, I wasn’t really taking the global financial crisis seriously. I’ve been far more interested in my new job- which, for those who are interested, remained a novelty for about 4 days before my superiority complex kicked in and ruined everything- and the U.S. Elections which have now essentially boiled down to a scrap between Denzel Washington and a man who seems more and more to be a facsimile of George W. Bush. Although actually this is unfair on Bush- he was a much better pilot than McCain.

The financial crisis seemed to revolve mainly around various rich people who were interviewed coming out of offices in the City of London looking terribly flustered before slinking off to their mansions while the stock market lost more points than Newcastle United. And to be fair, it’s hard to take a monetary panic seriously when it revolves around stocks losing ‘points’ rather than tangible pounds and pence. If they equated the loss of the stock market in a day to a real value, like ‘The FTSE lost 4 million pints of Stella today’ or ‘Panic in Tokyo today as the Nikkei dropped by a thousand Nissan Micras and Andrei Shevchenko’ then everyone would start taking things seriously and dutifully cacking themselves.

Luckily though this step will not be necessary as something has happened to bring to the world’s attention just how much the bankers have pushed us to the brink. Iceland’s gone bankrupt. Not the supermarket. The country.

A. Whole. Chuffing. Country.

Now I’m no economist but I’m pretty sure that’s not meant to happen. The forces of capitalism and the free markets are desinged to cause various weak businesses and organisations to fall by the wayside as time rolls merrily forward but when it’s a nation going down the swanny it’s hard not to think it’s time to start mainlining smack directly into our eyeballs and find out just what bumming sheep is actually like. Truly, these are the end of days. Once Iceland have sold Bjork they’ll be out of assets and then the finance devils will come looking for the rest of us.

But before an apocalyptic global meltdown comes and snaffles us all it’s probably a good idea to have a sit down. (Personally, as much as I admire how much Shakespeare contributed to the English language, I doubt the Bard ever summed up the English better than the first man to turn ‘sit down’ into a noun). When having the aforementioned sit down we’ll probably end up watching the telly and, if you time it right, you’ll catch a show that’ll make the oncoming economic catastrophe seem like blessed relief. If you’ve watched Charlie Boorman’s ‘Dublin to Sydney… By Any Means’ you’ll invade Wall Street and start short-selling like a madman just so you can send the planet back to the Stone Age before the next episode is broadcast. It might just be the worst programme in television history and, considering it’s transmitted just a day after BBC 1′s extraordinary ‘Hole In The Wall’, that’s quite some achievement.

The premise of the show is that professional hanger-on Charlie Boorman, shorn of the star charm of ‘Long Way Round/Down’ co-star Ewan MacGregor, travels from Dublin to Sydney by any means of transport he can find FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHATSOEVER. He isn’t following a historical trade route, or retracing the adventures from a book, or sticking to any particular geographical feature- he’s merely taking your licence fee and taking his preposterous little beard across four continents for no better reason than the fact that he just can. And not only does he drag a film crew along with him, he then dedicates half the show to detailling how hard it is to make the kind of show he’s currently dedicating half of to pointing out how hard it is to make this kind of show. It’s tough not to think that if he dumped the camera crew and made the trek by himself it’s be a whole lot easier for everyone involved but then we’d never catch a glimpse of just how difficult it is for a bunch of jumped up media fuckwits to get a stack of expensive digital video equipment up the Khyber Pass on a 70 year old bus. And there’d also be no-one there to watch Boorman take patronising local residents to stratospheric heights.

Boorman clearly comes from the school of gap-year twatism that believes that anything being done by a peasant in Indian bandit country is worthy of gasps of delight and breathless tales of how “simple the life is there” even though the peasant in question is weighing up whether or not to infect the Europeans with cholera or sell them to the local bandit leader and pinch their i-Pods. He schleps from country to country and village to village eating terrifying meats in everyone’s front rooms and taking part in rituals that the locals clearly made up on the spot just so they could get on the telly. Then it’s time to move on though, instead of a travelogue, we’re greeted to another 20 minutes of some work-experience girl in the London office struggling to get Charlie and his crew visas to get over the next border. They genuinely believe we give a flying fuck about any of them and their preciously challenging documentary shoot when, in fact, we’re sitting on our sofas watching Boorman piss out licence fees up the walls with gay abandon. If the show’s premise was changed to an eight part series of Charlie and his team brutally chronicaling the difficulties of getting a film crew up to a Scottish island to burn our collective licence money in cash a la the KLF it would be no worse. In fact, the locals in this case would be Scottish rather than backwater peasants which would be infinitely more entertaining- especially when Boorman desperately tried to condescend his way through a visit to a local chippie for a deep-fried Twix and a fight.

Luckily, once Charlie’s finished filming his latest intercontinental mid-life crisis, James May potters onto our screens with his show ‘Big Ideas’ to remind us that, imminent global financial catastrophe aside, the future might be a good place to be after all. Like Boorman he travels around the globe but, instead of wasting time with people who haven’t even bothered to get out of their hovels and buy a widescreen TV, he meets scientists and inventors who are at the bleeding edge of everything. Encouragingly, this has so far involved bespectapled chaps in white coats who spend their time perfecting either a) robots or b) jetpacks. While this may seem like simple Boys Own fun he is actually, in the current climate, giving us all a glimpse of a world worth fighting for. One that we will all enjoy if all the bankers of the world stop trading in money that doesn’t exist and whisking us promptly back to the Great Depression. He is giving us something to aim at, a world to aspire to. Forget Barack Obama- maybe Top Gear’s shaggy-haired third-wheel may actually turn out to be the 21st century’s Franklin Roosevelt. As a side-note, he also manages to shoe-horn the fact that he’s actually a pretty nifty pianist into proceedings which at least demonstrates he has a talent beyond being mates with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Maybe I’m being harsh on Charlie Boorman. He might be squandering the licence fee on his self-indulgent trek but at least his folly hasn’t managed to bankrupt an entire island. Mind you, much like the Masters of the Universe on their trading floors, he’s failed to think of things in the long term and that’s to his eternal discredit and demonstrates what makes James May a much more worthy TV presenter. After all, imagine ‘Dublin to Sydney… With a Robot on a Jetpack’.

Who wouldn’t want to watch that?

Collision Course

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You know that special person? You’ve got one- everyone does. They might not necessarily be the person you share your bed with at night, your nearest and dearest. They might be a friend for whom your love is unrequited. They might be the one that got away all those years ago. They might be the mythically beautiful person you see on the bus every morning. You might never have even met them. But there’s someone, somewhere who gets your heart pounding and your mind racing. Someone who does for you the best thing anyone can do for another person- they make you feel, for want of a better word, funny.

Think of that person. Now, tell them how you feel. Go on. Do it. Find the way to track them down and let them know, right now, that there’s someone in the world for them and that someone is you. Tell them now, I’ll wait here for you. And be quick about it.

Because you’re about to die.

The harbinger of your impending doom, like so little else in human history, comes from Switzerland and goes by the rather bland name of ‘The Large Hadron Collider’. Essentially, it’s a 17 mile circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border which is currently in the process of being cooled to -271.25 degrees centigrade. When this is done, the scientists who run it will then start firing beams of protons in opposite directions round the tunnel and make them crash into each other, thereby replicating conditions that prevailed within a few millionths-of-a-second of the Big Bang. And the reason they’re doing all this is to test their current model of particle physics which, as they put it themselves, “is known to break down at a certain energy level”.

Let’s go through that again. A bunch of men in white coats realise that a very important theory of how absolutely everything fits together at the most minute level breaks in certain extreme conditions. ‘Extreme conditions’ being, in this case, an alternative way of saying ‘The Big Bang’. They therefore have decided to recreate those exact same conditions or ‘Big Bang’ in a great big underground tunnel and just see what happens. Oh, and it’ll all happen at light-speed.

Little wonder then that more than a few people are a tad worried that, since no-one knows what’s going to actually take place, it’s entirely possible that the experiment will do something like creating a black hole that will subsequently swallow the Earth into itself.

The scientists at the colider themselves state that this is ludicrous as “there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider”, which is frankly a bit rich from a bunch of chaps who are basically trying to demonstrate that one of their main theories doesn’t work properly.

It’s worth getting worried about what might happen when the collider goes online as boffins (a name used by The Sun to describe all those of the ilk of scientists and inventors- a deliberately light-hearted term the newspaper uses to take the sting out of sullying itself with stories of human excellence and achievement) don’t have a partcularly impressive track record with health and safety when they’re on the cusp of great discoveries. John Logie Baird, for example, managed during one of his early experiments in creating television to blow the entire power grid of Glasgow. In a similar vein a chap called Antonio Meucci- who the United States House of Representatives recently passed a motion honouring as the true inventor of the telephone- only came up with his idea after electrocuting his wife and hearing the sound travel down the wire. If this is what happened with two blokes who were only working on transmitting electronic signals across tiny distances, heaven only knows what’ll transpire when those Swiss scientists attempt to recreate the birth of the Universe.

Which is why this is probably a good time to do everything (and, indeed, everyone) that you ever wanted to. Some scientists have postulated that if the hadron collider does create a little black hole of it’s own it won’t engulf the planet instantly, but rather take it’s own sweet time going about it- which means that the whole of humanity will have a clock over it counting down unerringly towards annihilation.

Now if you’re a fan of the movies, particularly the glut of disaster films from the late-90s that featured Earth teetering on the brink of destruction from aliens or an asteroid or something, then you’ll know the drill. We all desperately try to flee the cities and get stuck in traffic or huddle up with our families by the TV and radio awaiting news of whether Will Smith or Bruce Willis has miraculously saved us all with seconds to spare. Then we all cheer, embrace tearfully and listen to a speech by President Morgan Freeman.

I’ve got a feeling that, in real life, this won’t actually happen. Ask yourselves, is that really how you want to spend your final few hours and days on this planet, knowing that the end of everything is just around the corner? For a start off- and let’s not be coy about this- who, knowing that impending armageddon will expunge all awkward consequences, wouldn’t want to give mass, unadulterated fucking-on-the-streets a bash? Just imagine a great big, winner-takes-all, grab-the-nearest-stranger, thronging mass of limbs and fluids rolling merrily up the high street and into oblivion. Like Newcastle on a Friday night. That’s a fitting way to give life a send-off.

Mind you, I did start this piece by stating that everyone should go out and find their special someone before time runs out, and it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck to dive head first (figuratively speaking) into a mass Book of Revelations orgy and happen to catch hold of your one true soulmate. But then again, a bookmaker once set the odds of Earth getting swallowed by a black hole in the next 50 years at 100 million-to-one. So things going horribly wrong in that reactor under the soil of Switzerland could turn out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us all and the chances of inadvertantly porking your spiritual muse seem tiny and easily surmountable by comparison. Or, alternatively, you could just play similar odds by buying a lottery ticket.

Either way you’d be getting screwed.