Sunday, August 19, 2007

Poet or plank?

There were a number of things I thought about writing today, all of them rants, because they have come to my attention in the last few days (slow middle lane drivers on the motorway, the endless roadworks to install those utterly useless 'driver information systems' which only serve to tell you that you are in a traffic jam, like you hadn't already noticed, or to distract you with patronising messages and pointless estimates of how long it will take you to drive an arbitrary distance. Quite how we managed before all this technical wizardry is a mystery to me). However, something I have just read changed all that in an instant when it made my sides hurt with laughing.

The subject of this humour is none other than Pete Doherty, the smack addled and talentless pikey du jour. For those not in the know (and who can't be arsed to read the wiki link), Doherty first came into the public eye as the front man for a (at the time) little known indie band called The Libertines. Essentially, they were a re-hashed and re-branded punk outfit who stole mercilessly from those who had been before but for some bizarre reason they were heralded as the next big thing and even more inexplicably, Doherty was touted as some sort of musical genius.

To be honest, I'm amazed he can sit on a toilet the right way round. He is a skinny, acne infested waster who spends his entire time filling himself with more or less any substance which might just give him a bit of a buzz and he most certainly is not any kind of genius - quite the opposite in fact. Somehow he has ended up doinking Kate Moss, herself no brain of Britain and no stranger to a bit of Bolivian, and the tabloids love it. The Libertines eventually saw sense and booted him out of the band because he rarely bothered to turn up for gigs anyway (and they had produced only one track that was even vaguely worth the effort, although naturally that didn't deter NME from declaiming them as some sort of messiahs and spouting reams of bad prose about them. Sadly this is normal for the NME - a bunch of washed up hacks with their heads so firmly entrenched in their own arseholes that they would struggle to recognise a decent tune if it bit them on the balls) but he was soon back with another band called Babyshambles, and a shambles they certainly were. A real low was reached when, during a television interview, Doherty squirted a syringe full of his own blood over the camera. Even his own band mates were disgusted but that didn't bother Doherty one little bit. The music they produce is boring, unoriginal and mostly sounds like they can barely be arsed to play it (and many people certainly wish they would go the whole hog and just give up) and the only thing keeping Doherty going now is tabloid notoriety.

However, it seems that our Pete has actually learnt to write and has made a book out of his 'collected writings' so now those odd people who are fans of his can fawn over his sub-teenage (ahem) 'poetry', which is fair enough if you're into that sort of thing, but a little snippet about this book on the legendary Popbitch made me laugh rather a lot. It was a review of his book (or an excerpt thereof) and it was safe to say that the writer was not a big fan of the book or the man:


A review of Pete Doherty's writings on Amazon: "I have ordered 53 of these books as I understand that they are written in his blood. According to my calculations that should use up about eight pints of it and hopefully bring an end to the adolescent dribblings of this smacked-up sub-Dickensian tossclump."


So, I decided to take a look at all the reviews on Amazon and nearly wet myself. They are either starry-eyed sycophants who sound like they want to crawl up his arse or people who have seen the book for what it is - the outpourings of someone on whom the moniker of 'idiot' would actually be an insult to idiots everywhere. Needless to say there are some colourful phrases involved but it is well worth the effort of reading them because they're really rather good overall. Enjoy!

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Please, oh please...

Rapper 50 Cent (or 'Fiddy' as he is know by the dribbling retards that listen to him) has apparently threatened to not release any more solo albums if his next release is beaten in terms of sales by Kanye West's new album which is launched on the same day. Now, I'm no Kanye West fan but his music is pretty inoffensive and melodious and if there is any justice in the world then his record will do better and the odious ex-crack dealer will fuck off for good and never come back.

For those who don't know, 50 Cent is a former drug dealer from (I think - I don't really give two shits either way) Philadelphia who seems to be very proud of the fact that he ruined a lot of lives by peddling that filthy shite to the needy and desperate. Not only that but he thinks he's a hard man because he's been shot nine times. Now hang on a minute. Being shot nine times doesn't make you hard, it just means you're bloody careless and that the person or persons shooting you were fucking useless with guns. He likes to rap about his bitches (or maybe hos - whatever they're called this week) and how he has lots of bling and how that obviously means he's better than you.

Look, I have no problem with rap - Public Enemy and Nas, amongst other, feature in my music collection - but I do have a problem with rap that doesn't say anything at all. Rap was originally heavily politicised and often conveyed a message to a disaffected youth. Whether that message was perceived by outsiders as good or bad is irrelevant, the point is that it had, well, a point. 50 Cent is the most banal, pointless gimp going. Not only that he has an appaling voice and looks like he'd struggle to find more than a couple of brain cells to rub together. Quite what kids (mostly white and from the underclass in the UK) see in this gormless mouth-breather is quite beyond me, although I freely admit I am old beyond my years and quite grumpy with it. But the fact remains that with a bit of luck this talentless tosser might just bog off for good and never trouble the airwaves and music charts again.

Please, just this once, let something said by a celebrity in the heat of the moment actually come to pass (I'm still waiting for that tedious short arse Paul Daniels to fuck off as well).

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Mind the bandwagon

Alright, I'll come clean: I'm one of those slightly snobby middle class types who tries to buy organic food wherever possible. This isn't because I'm conviced it's better for you or because it's not doused in chemicals that will make my spuds shrivel up or my hair fall out (or whatever it is they do), I buy it because, to me, it tastes better. Yes, really.

As I've mentioned before in a slightly elongated rant about supermarkets, most of the fruit and veg varieties stocked by supermarkets tends to be chosen for their high yields, long shelf life and uniformity of appearance and not for flavour or quality. Organic varieties, however, tend to be more flavoursome in my opinion and the same goes for milk - organic is far better than the ordinary homogenised stuff. With meat, I'm not so fussed but I will buy free-range rather than ordinary stuff. Yes, I know I'm being stung for it but hey, that's my choice.

So it was with interest tonight that I spotted an organic chicken korma ready meal in Sainsburys. I realise that a korma is pretty feeble but I just didn't fancy a spicy dinner tonight. Now I know ready meals are generally crap, full of fat and bad for you in every way, but this one was an organic product at a premium price so I assumed it would be OK. Oh dear. That was mistake numebr one. Mistake number two was actually eating it once I'd seen it. Granted, the sauce was edible although it was riddled with chickpeas, something that, while I have no overt dislike of I'm not terribly fond of either, but the real shock was the chicken. Or at least I think it was chicken. It might have been cat. Either way, it was absolutely vile and I just couldn't eat it. It's a shame that the premium price didn't extend to getting you some premium meat.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that once again I have been given a solid reminder that ready meals are universally shit and I should know better. It's just a shame that some company is rather crassly jumping on the bandwagon and palming off a rather inferior product on unsuspecting consumers. Not that it's unusal by any means but still - be wary of buying something just because it says it's organic. So is gangrene, technically speaking, and you wouldn't buy a pot of that now, would you?

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

You dope

Unless you are dead (or perhaps American, seeing as a certain L Armstrong esq. has retired from it) you can't have failed to notice that the Tour de France is in full swing. Now, let me say from the outset that I have nothing but the utmost admiration for these chaps because they ride something like 100 or miles per day every day (more or less) for about 3 weeks. Nothing gets in the way: Mountains, weather, spectators - it's just part of the race. But as it seems happens every year, numerous riders have managed to fail dope tests and have been disqualified (as have the teams in some cases), the latest being a pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov *.

Call me old fashioned, or possibly just naive, but there's something funny going on in the world of long distance road racing. A quick search of the BBC News website for 'tour de france doping' provides at least 10 pages of results with storied for every year back to 1998 about cyclists testing positive and being disqualified or teams being disqualified for doping their riders. Google brings back more than two and a half million results and I'm sure they go back much further than 1998.

So with all this previous history, why the bloody hell do teams and riders persist in this activity? You'd have to be monumentally thick to think you're going to get away with it. So are the riders, team managers, doctors and all the rest really that dense? Are they all so convinced of their own genius that they believe they'll not get caught? Well, maybe some of them are but I can't believe that all of them are that dim-witted and narcissistic. I'm sure it can't be cheap to enter a team in the TdF which might have a realistic chance of winning so why risk it?

Of course, there's always the possibility that the testing system is rubbish and insecure, but you would think that by now that would have been found out if it were the case, so the only conclusion I can draw is that a not insignificant number of professional road racing cyclists and their teams are total dolts. I'm sure that one argument which might be put forward as justification for this cheating is that there's a limit to how fit one person can be (and for sure these guys are amongst the fittest on the planet, no question about that) so they have to try everything to get an edge on their rivals.

Sure, I'll go along with that but using performance enhancing drugs? Sorry but that's not how it works. Let's take that argument to it's ridiculous extreme, just for a chuckle:

Let's assume you took the German everyone loves to hate, Mr M Schumacher, when he was at the top of his game in Formula 1. He was nigh on unbeatable. Sure, there are technical differences in the cars but they are usually so small as a result of the stringent technical regulations (something that sterilises the sport and makes it dull) that they're not worth talking about. Especially if you compare Ferrari with, say Honda. They both have very deep pockets for their teams so there is no reason why one should be so much better than the other car wise (engine failure and the like aside). Now, let’s take Jenson Button, once billed as the next big things and the Great White Hope for British Racing (shame he turned out to eb an also-ran). There's no denying that they are both extremely good drivers - the top flight. But, as far as I'm aware, in a straight fight where both men finished the race, Button never beat Schumacher (F1 buffs please correct me if I'm wrong!).

How does this compare to TdF doping scandals? Well, what if, just to get an edge on their rivals, Honda had slyly added a nitrous oxide kit to Jenson’s car? Or maybe upped the cubic capacity on the quiet giving them another 100bhp? Would that be fair? No because it's against the rules and it wouldn't be the man doing the winning but the machine. But the crux of the matter is that Honda wouldn't do it. Oh, I'm sure that it would cross their minds if they were certain they'd not get found out but they know they will so it's a pointless thought which isn't entertained.

So why on earth do cyclists still do it? Only the riders and teams can answer that. Athletics used to be riddled with doping years ago but it ahs cleaned itself up and it is now very rare to hear of a top flight athlete being caught using performance enhancing drugs, but you can bet your last penny that when the TdF rolls around again, there will be at least one rider found to be doing something naughty. Perhaps cycling ought to take a leaf out of their book now and clean up its image before it's too late because eventually, the public will tire of it and what happens when the crowds don't bother to turn up any more?





* Worth noting that Vinokourov didn't actually take any drugs, it seems that the evidence points towards him having had a blood transfusion. I'm guessing more blood in the body means a better metabolism of oxygen and energy thus providing a performance boost.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Thrill me

The is quite possibly the coolest thing I have seen in a long time. More than 1500 inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines, re-enacting the classic Michael Jackson Thriller video, complete with extremely ugly ladyboy. Man that rocks!