The Jeremy Clarkson Saga

I'm no Briton, so I can't attest to the current climate that is taking shape there in the way of the public service strikes, but I definitely enjoy everything British -- the culture, the humor, the ridiculous way they insist upon drinking tea all the time. There is something about the idea of being British, specifically English, that speaks to me. I don't know why, but the pithy and, often times, snarkily sarcastic way that they speak and act is both hilarious and beautiful to me.

As such, I watch a lot of British programmes and series -- made all the easier by the expansion of the BBC to include an American affilate channel. While BBC-A doesn't show the every day programming that is native to its mother country, since that would be irrelevant to Americans, there are a lot of good programmes that I enjoy on a regular basis. Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, Doctor Who, and Top Gear all top my list of personal favorites. There are others of course (Luther, White Chapel, The Tudors), but they don't rank as must-see in my opinion even though they are enjoyable.

So, recently, as some people may or may not be aware, a situation has developed concerning the current strikes and a rather flippant moment of television involving a BBC presenter and his comments on the situation. And while I can understand the ire directed at the presenter, it seems to me that the demands for his job are a bit premature and somewhat ludicrous due to who it was that made the comments. Not to mention the subtext to this whole situation is, to me, a commentary on how this modern political correctness ideology seeks to make people less themselves and more autonomous; effectively it's personality facism.

Anyway...Jeremy Clarkson, a presenter for the BBC's Top Gear, made an appearance on The One Show and offered the following while discussing the on-going workforce strikes:

"I think they have been fantastic. Absolutely. London today has just been empty. Everybody stayed at home, you can whizz about, restaurants are empty... Airports, people streaming through them with no problems at all. And it's also like being back in the '70s. It makes me feel at home somehow. But we have to balance this, though, because this is the BBC. Frankly I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean, how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living."

Okay, admittedly, when you see it in print it sounds pretty harsh. However, you cannot truly believe, even if you are dumb as a hammer, that anyone would publicly call for actions that are, in essence, genocide and be serious about it. And while I can see the point of those who were offended by the statement, the reason they are so upset, it seems, is because the only portion of the clip being shown starts mid-thought (Frankly I'd have them all shot...) and this turns Clarkson into an instant demon thanks to the media. Of course, some people will have watched the show itself, seen the full commentary, and still been offended. These people are idiots, and I'll tell you why.

Jeremy Clarkson is nothing short of a brash, outspoken, and brilliant presenter. As to Jeremy Clarkson as a person, I cannot attest but would imagine that privately he is largely the same as his TV persona. And that's just the point. Jeremy Clarkson the presenter, the TV personality, the affable facade, is who made those comments. Jeremy Clarkson the private citizen was tucked somewhere behind that jowly, withering ham hock of a face while TV Clarkson did what he is paid to do by way of being offensive, yet brilliantly spot on in his ribbing of not only the strike situation, but the BBC as a try-hard non-partisan entity.

Having watched Mr. Clarkson for quite some time now, I understand what his TV personality is, how he acts and reacts to certain situations. Some people do not, and that is evident because of the copious complaints the BBC has received over this whole thing. Did he say the words he said? Yes. Did he mean them to be offensive? Probably. Did he say them with absolute conviction, devoid of any detectable sarcasm? No, but sarcasm is hard to read or even see sometimes.

Personally, I don't think he should have had to apologize for what he said at all. It was an intelligent joke that was told so convincingly that those who did get offended have only made it known that they are are intellectually the same as a doorknob. There are no boundaries in comedy, everything is fair game. And Jeremy Clarkson is a smart enough man to understand that and use it to his advantage.

I've Seen This Film Before

I really do post far too infrequently on this thing. Oh well, it's not like anyone actually reads it, except this one guy I know. Anyway, lots of happening has been going down, and honestly, I'm not sure I know where else to lay out all my extemporaneous thoughts.

Saturday, not in the park, and it definitely wasn't the 4th of July, I uncovered information about my sister. If you have read much of this blog in the past, you know the one of whom I speak -- the bat shit crazy bitch who long ago abandoned reason for madness. Well, that harlot is pregnant...again. By the same beast that done did her in the first time. Can't say that I'm surprised. Once you decidedly throw away your life to live as a concubine to the white trash revolutionary king it becomes sort of a given that you will constantly be pregnant with degenerate and inferior genetic material.

And I could wax idiotic about all the same things that were wrong with this the first time around, but that would do little to assuage me. I am forever stuck in this middling ground. I want to care because that bitch is my sister, but I'm sick of continuously getting no reciprocation from the other side. I want to see her do better for herself and her (now 2) kids, but she fucked her way into this problem and burned every bridge along the way.

And then there is the sadistic side of me which, in all honesty, very well might win out. Yes, I've considered torture but I don't mean that. With Christmas coming up, I believe that even though I have to put up with my whore of a white trash sister and her brood of degenerate Idiocracy cast memebers, I can at least gain some sort of pleasure from it.

I think I'm going to order 500 condoms and FleshLight and give them to my idiotic, cock hungry slut of a sister and pray that maybe she will get the message. It's just unfortunate that I can't obtain a prescription for birth control pills or I would include that as well.

Fucking Dubstep

I officially hate my next door neighbor. This is a relatively new development being as he has only just moved in last month. The first month was peaceful enough. I never saw him, he never saw me, and he was fairly quiet...until last week.

Last week, I discovered my neighbor has a great, umm, talent(?) for music. It's not so much a talent as it is a penchant for playing music, really really ridiculously annoying music, very loudly. Nightly selections range anywhere from terrible scream-o selections to god awful 70's disco - basically anything that makes it sound as if non-sedated women are repeatedly getting back alley abortions with a hacksaw. That's fine, it's a mild annoyance at best, and I can drown it out with my own musical tastes or by hopping on the old Xbox, putting on the Turtle Beach headset and shooting people.

Tonight, however, my dear neighbor has struck a particularly deep nerve of mine. I don't know if it is intentional or by preference, or perhaps he fancies himself an audiophile who wishes to break into the music business, but my dear neighbor has found the one thing that makes me more insane than anything else -- dubstep. I can usually tolerate, and somewhat appreciate, most musical genres, but dubstep gets on my last living nerve to no end. I will never understand the attraction to listening to electronic machines thumping, whirring, and generally carrying on in an atonal hot mess.

But, oh, that my plight ended there! Because of neighbor's sudden interest in dubstep, and the fact that he owns a computer, he has taken this to mean that he should start trying to create some dubbed up remixes. Standard fare for this, from what I can gather is popular in the club/rave scene, is typically early 90's trash pop mixed with idiotic and annoying beats, buzzes, trills, and nonsense. But that is not good enough for neighbor. Oh no, he takes it further.

Tonight's playlist has included dubstep remixes of Boston's "More Than a Feeling", Dexie's Midnight Runner's "Come On, Eileen" (a song title I think someone should license to make a bukkake film), Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4", and the smash hit "Barbie Girl" by Aqua. While I care nothing for the final song, the other three are dear to me. I grew up listening to those songs, no I'm not that old but my father is and passed along his great taste in music to me. So, to hear them chopped and screwed, tweaked, and brutalized almost beyond recognition really fucking pisses me off. Not to mention the fact that all of them sound as if they have been done on a first generation Macintosh dot matrix printer.

Dubstep sucks. My neighbor sucks. And he is ruining the World Series even though the Rangers are winning right now. That is all.

Another Dream for the Ages

The title says it all, I think. And I think you'll agree from my last dream that you are in for a treat. This dream was a bit more tame, by my standards, and definitely more linear than the previous one I posted but it was still incredibly odd. Let me set the scene...<flashback-y synthesizer music>

There I was standing on a stage, a lone spot light illuminating the space around me, and I could hear the sounds of an audience collectively breathing heavily. I peered into the darkness, searching for a face, a hand, anything recognizable that I could latch onto and ease my troubled mind. As the music began to play, I found a friendly face in the crowd and launched into my performance of Alfredo's aria from La Traviata juxtaposed against the pulsating rhythm of a dub step mix.

Soon the music died out and I was left holding out the final note until my lungs caught fire and my voice faded into nothingness. Standing there, in the light and the stillness, the echoes of my song dying softly, I heard the thunderous applause and I walked off stage and down to my dressing room. Once there, I stripped naked and changed into a baseball uniform and slipped behind a curtain draped over a portion of the wall that led me to an underground tunnel.

Inside the tunnel, someone was waiting for me, someone from my past, and she wanted me to escape with her. I was in imminent danger, she said from the stifling darkness, and I needed to follow her and help her find something along the way. As I didn't see the point in arguing, I agreed and we set off in the musty blackness toward whatever and where ever we needed to be going. The farther we walked, the more curious I became about exactly whom it was I was following. Naturally, I reached out and grabbed at whatever my hands could find which just happened to be hair.

The hair was no good to me, it could be anyone, even a fat guy in wig, so I worked my hand down to the shoulder trying to figure out who was leading me down into the earth. The skin was soft, so I was reasonably satisfied that it was indeed a woman and not some feminine sounding man. Suddenly, a light appeared at the far end of the tunnel, and as we drew closer I could work out more features. 'Twas my old hooker friend Tiffany, and the light we came into illuminated her features and our current surrounding.

She had led me to a sewer. Typical, I thought, now she was going to rape me in the rat infested pipelines of the underground. Once I took in the fact that we were in a sewerline, Tiffany explained to me that we were now on the run from the Nazis and in search of a long lost shoe. Great, I thought, I'm Baron von fucking Trapp. Since we were officially on the run, we did next that which is only logical and stripped down naked so as not to leave any traces that we had been where we currently trod and set about the business of climbing through the muck toward a distant set of confusing pipes.

As we plodded through the foul smelling poop water, Tiffany further explained that the shoe we were after was the mighty and mythical Golden Chuck, a shoe so legendary and powerful that he who held it would wield the strength of 1 million gibbons. I hate basketball, is all I could say. And we pressed on.

We soon came upon a ladder leading up toward a platform, and being the consummate gentleman I let Tiffany ascend first. Once we reached the platform, I spied a small opening in the wall with a faint glow coming from within. I lay down in the grimy, slimy, wetness that coated the rough concrete and peered through the hole. I grew excited, not visibly (that would have proved painful in my present position), and marveled that we had found our quest. As I reached my hand slowly into the breech, Tiffany began humming a tune that was familiar to me but I couldn't quite place it.

With my fingers beginning to fumble with one of the laces of the Golden Chuck, I suddenly remembered the song being hummed behind me. It was Dies Irae, and as the large stone cracked down on my skull, I cursed at myself.

Apologies, This Is Probably Longer Than Your Attention Span

First thing's first, my attempt to avoid any and all trite, over-televised, over-politicized meet-and-greets masquerading as a 9/11 "memorial service" was a resounding success. Even though I did not stay away from the television as I had thought I would (come on, it was opening Sunday of the NFL season), I have a keen sixth sense about when someone is going to do or say something that I don't want to hear and was able to deftly mute any and all who sought to thwart my peace bubble.

I also decided to take an extended hiatus after my last posting to get some affairs in order, namely to finish reading the Vince Flynn novel I had been putting off and rabble rousing with the locals; there was much rabbling, far too little rousing, and a maddening plot that didn't resolve itself by the end of the novel leading to my procurement of the next in the series.

And then today, all day, at least up until about an hour ago, it rained. That's right, rain. That most precious of liquids squirting from the sky and covering the land with what I have always imagined to be God's favorite sexual act. Even with that stunning visual, I still very much enjoy the rain. It makes me happy, makes me wish I was in London, makes me want to prance like Legolas through Middle Earth. And don't try to tell me he didn't prance, he did. "Light of foot" is just a nice way to say prancing homosexual with big, misshapen ears frolicking about in tights....but I am dangerously close to getting off topic.

I love rain. I love the smell, I love the feel, I love that it makes dirt not kick off the ground straight into my eye. As much as I love the rain, and all that goes with it (rainbows, wet dog smell, unemotional self-love with the windows open), I hate what it does to people - particularly in a drought striken area...in the Bible Belt...of Texas. People around here routinely lose their minds when anything wet falls down from the clouds. Of course that's not to imply that they hadn't already lost their minds before, most of them already had done and are batty as fuck. But rain makes their mental disorder that much more apparent. They forget how to drive, they forget how to walk, they even forget how to be civil. And I understand, this year especially, there has been no substantial wetness for the better part of six months around here. Believe me, I understand that - I live here, too. But to completely go bat shit crazy and not be a decent human being is insane. Aside from that I have noticed something that, while not completely categorized as crazy, bothers me for some reason that I don't think I can accurately explain.

Whenever it rains, whether it be the first in a long while or the tenth day straight, the air becomes choked with the same sentiment of praise to God. Granted, I think God is probably praise worthy and I won't ever stop someone from doing so, but every single time that it rains there is a veritable shit storm of the exact same words either IRL or on the book of faces or the annoying bird noise announcement maker. And I can only take hearing/seeing/reading it so many times.

"God is ever faithful"

Hmmm, cute platitude. Shitty cliche. Even shittier basis for praise.  This one is usually in reference to how God is always looking out for his people and taking care of them, faithfully doting upon them and showering them with kindnesses. Interesting thought, but completely weird to me. If he were ever faithful, why let things get into such a precarious position in the first place? Isn't the benefit of omniscence and omnipresence that you can be everywhere, know everything, and take precautionary steps to prevent harm to those whom you steward? And yet, God seems to be some sort of sadist, constantly drumming people and killing them off or slowly torturing them with fire, famine, and fear.

"God answers prayers"

Another cute indoctrination quip. I get that prayer is the tool in which people 'talk' to God, and I understand that God 'answers' prayers in some people's minds. What I don't understand is how people think that the coincidental alignment of what you desire and some arbitrary action that somehow magically precipates this is the answer to a prayer. Especially interesting is when coincidences don't line up, and people throw out the contigency gem

"The answers come in God's time."

What the fuck? No, no, no. Now you're just adjusting your belief system to placate yourself because if you lose faith you think you will die and rot in Hell. Yeah, I do actually think that time has something to do with it but not in how it relates to selfish desires requested to God in the guise of it being beneficial to someone other than you, you selfish twat. To say that things come in God's time also bothers me for one other reason - it's ALL God's time. There is no ownership of time by humanity, no rent-to-own policy, no timeshare. Time just is and you are stuck in it, an insignificant carbon bubble in the stream. Therefore, most things will NEVER get answered and you will die having changed your beliefs and views on God simply to assuage your delicate sensibilities.

And of course, I will undoubtedly have touched many nerves, might even get a couple pieces of hate mail or some lovin'. I prefer lovin' but won't shy away from hate, since hate actually makes me happier to know that I have power over someone. Simple fact is, to me, rain is rain. It comes down, greens things up and I am generally happy about it. I don't think it's the answer to a mass prayer-a-thon, weather patterns change and eventually all cyclical things come back around. I'm not intentionally trying knock people for whatever they think but I'm sick of hearing about your shit. Think what you gotta think to fake yourself happy, but don't fucking proclaim it ad nauseum because I might just stab you one day. Who knows, I could be the answer to your prayer of not wanting to have to go to work every day if I paralyzed you. It could be a win/win.