Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I've been busy with my brothers Stag Night and in a state of blizz with CoD6. Normal service will hopefully be resumed next week.

I'm not denying that men do terrible things to each other here. But the word 'inhumanity' has to be the most stupid word ever for describing them.

Think about the most common things 'inhumane' is used to describe: war, torture, genocide, slavery and tell me when, if ever those things have ever been undertaken by any species other than man. Got any examples?

It doesn't happen. Badgers don't round up other badgers, put them in a camp and work them to death. Squirrels don't build laboratories in which they try to figure out which germs are most lethal and how they can make them even more lethal and Chickens damn sure don't break out the AK's and roam from coop to coop gunning down other chickens because they took the piss out of their beak. This shit only happens when humans get together.

So how can something that only men do be inhumane? If anything, looking at history you have to say that the defining characteristic of mankind is an overwhelming propensity, some might even say talent, for thinking up new and more efficient ways to make each other's lives as miserable as possible. Rocks, knives, spears, swords, bows, guns, tanks, planes and finally nukes. They aren't testaments to how brilliant we are at inventing things. They are testaments to how great we are at inventing things to make killing easier. Science is at it's peak when there's people to get killed. Just look at WWII, we went in barely out of using bi-planes and we came out with jet fighters and nukes...

We like the bad times so much that every time someone comes along who looks even remotely like furthering the cause of peace and understanding we kill the fucker. So how the hell is it that humane, is a good thing but bestial is a bad thing. Animals kill for food, they don't kill because they don't like the look of each other or because those other zebra's around the corner believe in growing their stripes at a jaunty angle instead of straight up and down.

Seriously if they want a word that best expresses the ability of man to brutalize, oppress and otherwise ruin his fellow men then 'humane' is that word. Being human means being extremely good at being bad. So maybe we should try being a little more like animals for a change. Maybe a bit of lounging around in the mud is exactly what the doctor ordered...

I don't know if anyone else does this, but I assume that they do. The shuffle feature on my iPod is rapidly becoming the ultimate arbiter of all difficult but largely unimportant decisions I have to make. I've always been terminally indecisive so anything to smooth the decision making process is a win. It works like this. First think of a question second hit shuffle. Read the title. If there's no obvious relevance move on to the next song. You can go as far as 5 songs and if you still don't have an answer assume it's a no.

Answers can be graded according to where they appear in the order. If the first song is a perfect answer to the question then you've got a definite answer. So for example when I asked if I would ever be rich and I shuffle pulled up the song 'Humble peasants' by 'The Most Serene Republic' I counted it as a resounding no (damn and I was going to buy that ivory backscratcher as well). If the first song makes no sense but the second song does then it's a yes but less committed, 3rd is a 'yes... but' and so on.

So here's a few of my most recent searches.

'When will I die?' yielded nothing on the first and second songs but hit on the third song '13 months in six days' by 'The Wrens', so I'd better look into buying some Playmobil viking ships and working out how to glue them together in readiness.

'Will I get an LJ spotlight?' got me 'Build me up Buttercup' at first hit which seems a fairly solid no and finally 'Will I get anything good for christmas?' which got me 'Tiger in my Tank' by The Eels first result, sounds pretty awesome to me.

Of course there is a logical flaw in all this insofar as I don't really have a huge amount of overly optimistic music floating around on my ipod because it makes me want to kill people (is it odd that happy music makes me angry and angry music calms me down?) but nevertheless it serves me well enough for making the kinds of unimportant decisions that nevertheless chew up cast amounts of time in indecision.

'Is Michael Jackson alive?' got me 'Your light is spent' by 'Final Fantasy' on the second entry which must be a huge relief to children everywhere.

Despite the obvious useful uselessness of the ipod shuffle decision maker though, important decisions still get made by cointoss and I'll explain the reasons for that in a later entry because it deserves a post of it's own.

So anyway making decisions with the ipod shuffle feature. The worlds secret shame?

I swear there's a whole industry based around filming fat people eating in the street for TV news reports on obesity. I can barely turn on the TV these days without seeing some secretly filmed footage of some of my fellow chubbies chowing down on some variety of fast food, usually McDonalds.

There must be patrols of film crews wearing 10 gallon hats with cameras hidden inside secretly filming in nearly every food court in the land. I assume this because otherwise where do they get all the footage? It's possible I suppose that they have 10 of us on staff who they pay to eat while they film but I doubt it, why spend money on something you could get for free?

But seriously wtf? When did it get OK to secretly perve on the eating habits of fat people just because they happen to be fat? You don't get hidden camera footage of children's playgrounds every time there's a news story about Michael Jackson, so why film the poor fuckers chucking down a quick lunch at McDonalds every time there's a new drive on to fight obesity?

It's not just fat people either, smokers get stalked by news agencies as well. If they can't find a chunky to film they'll happily film some smokers gasping down a bit of hard earned nicotine in their 5 minute break from the grindstone. What a lame way to make a living.

As a superfat smoker it's surely just a matter of time before I end up on the news with a pasty in one hand a smoke in my mouth and the hand other pulling up my trousers. As sure as I am going to eventually die I am going to eventually end up as the cautionary whale on BBC news 24. The odds are better than good. On a long enough timeline I'd say it would be what scientists call 'a shoe in'.

I hate this social engineering shit. It's OK to invade our privacy simply because consensus at the moment dictates that in the absence of real news it's time to restate the fucking obvious that smoking and obesity are bad for you. Tell us something we didn't know for fucks sake. Besides they aren't putting the news articles on to save lives. They are putting them on to give the Jeremy Kyle (Americans think Jerry Springer) watching public some freaks to look at to stop them changing channel. It's unimaginative journalism and whether the condition is self inflicted or not, it's downright rude. I'd call it offensive except that word is very overused and always comes out sounding like 'waaaaaa'.

Religion is self inflicted, but if you criticise that you're likely to get arrested but hey fat people are jolly, they'll be cool with getting all the shit.

TV 'journalists' just one more group that are getting chucked down the well when I get into power...

I would muster all the money I could, travel to wherever Bono is currently staying and choke him to death with his own intestines. No sense wasting your last opportunity do do the world a favour.

For obvious reasons I would have to do this alone to avoid incriminating my loved ones and I would imagine that my last meal would be a disappointing one of tofu and wheatgrass or whatever happened to be in Bono's fridge, I mean apart from his head anyway.

I can prove it and in the process possibly explain the bizarre choice of picture I've chosen for this thread.

A while back I wrote one of these on the subject of fashion. It was read, as far as I was aware by 2 people and possibly a dog. I didn't really have any readers at the time (Feyrieprincess and her coconut suave aside) and I didn't really think anything more about it.

But last week I was bored and so I googled my livejournal page to see if anyone had linked to it and look what I found:

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:aE0qL_hGgAoJ:www.greenfashion.eu/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_rubberdoc%26view%3Ddoc%26id%3D11%26format%3Draw+savageparrot.livejournal.com&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari

Scroll down to page 3 and you will see what I mean about strange and disturbing. There, at the head of a slideshow advertising a conference on sustainable fashion, before all of the serious research and knowledgable quotes is a quote from me, front and centre in pride of place. Granted it's after a page where there's a picture of a thousand or so naked people walking through a street but still it's a quote from me all laid out as if I'm someone who has the slightest clue about anything do to with fashion.

But seriously,it's a quote from me. Look at me. Do I look like the man to be taking fashion advice from? I mean if I had to pick 20 topics to discuss on which I could be assured of knowing at least 1 interesting thing about, I'm reasonably certain that 'green' fashion wouldn't be one of them.

But that's the thing about the internet isn't it. We're all so conditioned from years of schooling into thinking that everything written down in a text book is necessarily informed that we've automatically carried that on into how we look at the internet. But the internet is not a text book. Text books at least get checked over by other people to make sure they contain at least some fact and newspaper columnists have to at least have some foundation in the area they are writing about. Not me though, my article on fashion was checked over by precisely no-one and came from no greater research than 5 minutes chuckling to myself while driving El Cid (the new name for my car) back from work.

Maybe I'm being unfair, maybe we are more cynical than that. It's possible that we exploit the size of the internet and the fact that no-one has time to look really thoroughly at the sources we use to just pick the quote that sounds most like what we personally want to say and then window dress it as a supporting argument. As it happens I have a huge amount of sympathy with sustainable fashion. Clearly any group that uses me to kick start a conference is something that I want to get behind, but still I can't help thinking that they could have found someone better to quote. I'm not selling myself short but I'm not exactly heavy weight political commentator material. I called Bono a cunt...twice.

What's next? The communist party quoting my blog post on capitalism in their manifesto (oh god I would love them to call bankers immoral dick slaps), or national geographic picking up my post on hippos for their next edition?

I'm thinking probably not. I'm thinking this is the kind of bizarre shit that only happens on the interweb...

In all honesty I would never pass a driving test now. I've forgotten how to do the stupid shuffle the steering wheel thing they like, I don't check my mirrors every 8 seconds (wow there's a car there, ooh it's still there etc.) and I refuse to do a three point turn in a road wide enough to just turn around in one. I also don't think I could avoid swearing for a whole 30 minutes, I'm not sure they could fail you for that but it's not likely to weigh in your favour. I would unquestionably fail.

But the thing is that's fine. None of those things are going to kill me. None of them have any real bearing on public safety so how did they make the test anyway? Call me stupid but shouldn't the test be focusing on the really crucial skills? Curing the really big killers through preemptive training. Here's a preliminary list of skills that I think new motorists should be taught:

- Changing the radio station/CD/cassette at 60 miles an hour.

- Removing a sweet/CD from the glove compartment at 20 Miles an hour while avoiding pedestrians.

- Lighting a cigarette with the cigarette lighter and then replacing the lighter without dropping it and burning a hole in the carpet.

- Winding down the car window at speed in order to throw food at a friend you've seen walking along the side of the road and then holding the car steady as you flee the scene when you realise it wasn't him.

- High speed rabbit/deer/badger slalom.

- How to deal with sudden cramp on the motorway without twatting into a lorry and getting beaten to death by the illegal immigrants that you inadvertently woke up.

- How to break erratically in order to scare the jackass tailgating you into think he might scratch his BMW and backing off to a sensible distance.

- Holding a straight course while looking sideways into the eyes of your passenger who has picked the moment you are passing through a busy junction to tell you something that you can't ignore without looking like an utter bastard.

- Changing a tire in the rain while hoping the police don't offer to help and find what you have hidden in the trunk of your car or noticing that the spare tire is covered in blood.

- Changing gear while reading the number on a your ringing cellphone to decide whether or not the person is important enough to risk getting a fine if the police catch you talking on the phone.

Lets face it if life and the movies have taught us anything these are the things that are going to get you killed. In the face of this waterfall of potentially lethal and yet everyday occurrences the driving test's obsession with making sure you know 3 different ways of parking seems sort of defunct. They need to get with the times and make sure that new drivers are really ready for what is going to face them. Kamikaze badgers are everywhere just trying to take you down when you swerve to avoid them...

I'm serious. The guy that invented the snooze button was pure evil.

In the good old days, when sliced bread may actually have been the pinnacle of technology, you'd set the alarm it would ring and you'd get out of bed. You'd only have one shot to get out of bed so you wouldn't take it lightly. The alarm would go, enough of your brain would wake up to register the importance and some adrenaline would take care of the rest.

The snooze button destroyed that. The snooze button made it so that instead of waking up when you intend you wake up at the last possible second before it's too late. You aim to get up at 7 but you actually get up at 8:09 because you catch sight of the clock and realise that you are now officially running late. Then you have to brush your teeth on the crapper and shave in the shower to try and make up time.

Some people think that this is a good thing, 'Without the snooze button' they'll say 'you wouldn't have woken up at all.' These people are idiots. The snooze button doesn't help you wake up. The snooze button makes it acceptable to not get up. You don't have to get up with the snooze button, you can sleep late because the snooze button has your back. The snooze button masquerades as your friend, telling you not to worry and that you need the rest and all the time it's stealing your life away 7 minutes at a time.

It's not just that either, you don't even get quality sleep in the time you waste using the snooze button to facilitate your waking up procrastination. You can't dream, you don't really sleep, you just switch on and off getting more annoyed every time the alarm goes off. Half the time you can't even remember pressing the snooze button, it's not a conscious choice you are making you just lash out and because the snooze button is always so unreasonably massive it's the first thing you hit. The snooze button is the mechanical equivalent of that one relative at christmas that keeps poking you and laughing when you try to grab that post dinner kip which is the god given right of everyone when stuffed with food and booze.

You know what would be better than a snooze button? A giant button that just made the alarm louder every time you hit it, or one that gave you a static electric shock, or one that turned the lights on. That would wake you up for sure, proper awake as well, none of that cloudy headed zombie type awake that you get from snooze button waking up.

Nope, it's official. Snooze buttons are hugely over-rated. Over-rated and also evil.

You know it, I know it so why don't we talk about it? Wine critics are full of shit. Well maybe not shit, but definitely pretension. I know what they are definitely not full of and that's wine. I don't know about you but it seems to me that anyone who drinks something only to spit it out again kind of missed the point.

I'm not saying all wines are equal either, they aren't, but the experience of wine is not made better by having someone wank on and on about how they are 'getting hint's of raspberry ' and then hocking it back out into a bowl. Correct me if I am wrong but wine is meant for drinking.

Take this review for example shamelessly nicked at random from Bob's wine reviews.

"Deep, rich and warming red with strong plum, berry and a slightly milky influence. Quite dense. Fine firm tannins. Cedar."

Now apparently Bob (and I'm picking on him because he happened to be the first one Google put in my sights) is one of only 264 masters of wine in the world. Whatever that means. Clearly being a master of wine has something to do with the ability to conjure up a wide variety of shit imagery to describe what is, and always will be a glass of fermented grape juice.  What the hell is 'slightly milky influence' supposed to mean anyway? Does that mean it's a bit cloudy or goes well in tea or was he just trying to think of something clever to say in his review so that he could sneer at lesser non 'wine masters' when they only say that it's quite fruity and with a strong bouquet. As for 'Fine firm tannins' that to me sounds like one hell of a euphemism...

What's the process for becoming a 'master of wine' I wonder. Do they have to perform some set of tasks or do they, as I'm more given to suspect, just have to know the right people? If you put 264 masters of wine into a room, how long would it take for one of them to get stabbed with a broken bottle?

Wine critics are just one more of those arrogant little cliques that think that just because they say that something is, it therefore must be. Woe betide anyone that actually just thinks wine is for drinking. It's like modern artists, it's art because they say it is and if you even try to disagree then clearly you must be either an idiot or a philistine. There's hints of Raspberry in that wine and if you can't get that then it's just because your palette is refined enough.

I don't really mind snobbery where there's merit. I don't mind Opera singers sneering at x-factor because really good opera singers train incredibly hard from a very young age to get what they have (a voice that can shatter eardrums). I don't mind when university professors sneer at TV documentaries for being too low brow, because they might be right. But making shit up to exclude people from the fold is a trouser leg full of lame. If you want to look down at people go out and do something important with your life. Don't do it by picking on them for not caring that the wine they are drinking came out of a box while drinking your Chateau La Fite that cost more than their car. That just makes you look like wankers...

It's all about over intellectualisation as a method of exclusion, and it's bollocks. Just because you like to put way too much thought into something which is fundamentally meaningless doesn't mean that everyone who just takes it at face value is beneath you, it just means you probably need to actually try swallowing the wine and think about starting a new career.
 

I was going to do another post about new words for the english language as I've had a few suggestions but then I thought 'Knadgers to it I should just make a community' and cut out the middle man.

This way I can add new words when they pop into my head and people can also add their own words. I also don't have to double post it on my list of things we don't talk about so I don't have to get obsessed about how I messed up the Fung Shui of my list of taboos.

http://community.livejournal.com/youspeak/

If you're interested. 

Honestly I'm not a fan of beauty pageants. I regard them in pretty much the same way I regard freak-shows. They are in effect anti-freak shows. The principle is still the same though people come to gawp at the collection of ladies on display to admire how they conform to the current accepted standards of beauty instead of gasp at their extra collection of limbs*.

Personally I think they look a bit too airbrushed to be really attractive. Kind of like the families of politicians, sure they look perfect but you just know the wife is on Xanax and the kids are going to end up in the papers for being caught in the back seat of a Hummer with a bag of cocaine and an entire football team between their thighs.

Anyway getting to the point, they aren't supposed to be smart. That's not me being chauvinistic by the way, I'm not saying they can't be smart or that they are all necessarily thick as a whale omelette, I'm just saying that the purpose of a beauty pageant is essentially as shallow as it is possible to be. The inclusion of tasks to prove their intelligence is not only hypocritical in the extreme (when you also have the swimsuit requirement) but also if you think about it kind of cruel. It's an exercise in making a pretty shallow and stupid occupation look more acceptable to the modern world but actually it's not all that fair on the contestants.

Take miss South Carolina for example. I'm sure you've all seen the viral so I won't post it again. Basically she gave a really dumb answer to a question on dumb americans not knowing where they are on a map. What followed was months of cruel mocking, imitations and insults directed with fury at her for not being smart.

But here's the thing, first up the irony of a country (the majority of which cannot place themselves on a map) getting high and mighty because a young girl doesn't know the answer to their own lack of knowledge is absurd. You try giving an answer to that question that doesn't sound unpatriotic or patronising (both of which I'm guessing would get her marked down), it's not as easy a question as it first seemed is it? Secondly she wasn't there because she was claiming to be smart. I'm all in favour of smacking some sense into people that claim to be what they are not but it was a beauty pageant not a general knowledge championship...

There's an added chuckle which is that based on the sheer number of people passing it around and the average IQ of 100 a good percentage of the people laughing at her for being dumb are bound to be less intelligent than her. 100 is not that smart, the fact that it's average means that there are some insanely dumb people out there.

If you put the situation into reverse and started criticising triple first graduates of Oxford university because they had a una-brow you'd be universally reviled so why is OK to do the same thing in reverse?

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't jump out of the bushes and ask my postman questions on the succession of Anglo-Saxon kings only to laugh in his face when he gets the answer wrong. I could, but what would be the point? Personally I'd rather retain the high ground by not attacking people's obvious weaknesses so that I can keep for myself the warming glow of righteous indignation when they criticise mine. Besides people always have less obvious weaknesses with which you can twist the dagger so much more effectively.

I can practically guarantee you that this will be the last time that I will defend either the 'beautiful people' or dumb people at any point in this list.

(*Children's beauty pageants you can safely call actual freakshows. Whatever they do to make those kids look like little garden gnome versions of themselves they should stop doing it...)

Someone mentioned it on whatdoyouhate and it was on my list so I thought I might as well get it out of the way.

Sleep Paralysis is rank. The first time it happened to me, besides nearly crapping myself with fear, I thought I was being attacked. I don't know if you get it or not but if you don't it's best described as waking up but being unable to move at all and feeling for all the world as if someone is holding you down. It's nasty. Well when you don't know what it is anyway. Once you get used to it it's less of a problem but the initial shock coupled with the fact that, when you are finally able to move you think you are going yumpy makes for quite a cocktail.

No-one talks about it. I've never heard it mentioned in conversation or anything and if it was for the internet (Wikipedia <3) I'd probably still think I was being haunted or something equally absurd. It seems like something you should be warned about. Never eat yellow snow and look out for when you wake up and some weird ass invisible gremlin is trying to kill you, that's just sleep paralysis. I don't know about you but those both seem like pertinant pieces of advice to me.

I mean imagine if you kept blacking out, you'd want to know what the hell was going on wouldn't you? I bet no-one would have a problem discussing that but talk about waking up an feeling like someone is going to kill you and suddenly no-one wants to know.

Well bollocks to that. Sleep paralysis, Just one more thing we need to talk about.

Matchboxes with sandpaper strikers on both sides of the box.

Ok I get that not having sandpaper on both sides of the box saved them a lot of money. I get that they slimlined their expenses and maximised profits. I just don't care. Matchboxes with two strikers were better, they didn't fall apart as easily due to the added rigidity and you had a back up striker in case something happened to one of them. Especially on safety matches which you can't strike on anything else, if something happens to the striker you are bollocksed which, the cynical part of my brain says, is probably why they invented them. After all if you can't light them you'll just have to buy another box won't you?

Even assuming that you didn't use one of the strikers the fact that it was there was nice. It was like having the door opened for you, a small consideration to your needs at their expense. Then they took it away and nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that we were still paying the same price but for less. Nobody cared. Which is sad really because removing the sandpaper from one side of the box remains one of the most insanely miserly things that has ever happened in business. Not just that it's also indicative of the landslide of minor savings at the customers expense which inevitably leads to packing up production and moving it somewhere really cheap where you can screw the indigenous population over wages and your former employees over jobs in the same manoeuvre.

It's a flag bearer for the drive towards manufacturing mediocrity. The lead runner in the drive to make things that cost less to make and last less long because that way you can cream profit off both ends of the process. A pioneer in shaft-them-all economics...

So here's to you double sided matchboxes, RIP little buddies.

I don't know if everyone is the same but everywhere I go I go with a soundtrack. I don't mean I go everywhere with my iPod, I do as it goes, but I don't need it. I carry a soundtrack with me, in my head at all times anyway.

My soundtrack is pretty specific as well and not always a conscious choice.

If I am bored then the soundtracks to 80's televisions slip into my mind. It's a situation everyone at work is aware of as well so when I start humming the A-Team they know it's time to move on to a new topic. It's not just boredom that has it's own theme tune though. If I'm depressed I tend to go everywhere with Radiohead in my head ('I think you're crazy, maybe I think you're crazy, maybe. I will see you in the next life'). I'f I'm happy then it's christmas tunes. The christmas tune thing is interesting as well because I get SAD like crazy so the times when I am cheerful enough to randomly hum christmas tunes tend to be smack bang in the middle of summer, which would be fine if I was an Australian but makes me look a proper weirdo in the UK...

Feeling whimsical gets me to hum 'happy feet, I've got those happy feet'. Angry gets me stuck with Rage Against the Machine bouncing about my skull. Infatuation, gets Ash in my head ('And on nights when the north wind blows through your heart, Dream of a new age') and awkwardness puts Homer Simpson in my head humming the Odd Couple theme tune.

I'm assuming everyone is the same in this respect, not in which tunes but in having set tunes for set things. We don't talk about it so who knows. I think the soundtrack of your life is possibly one of the most interesting things about a person, but then I tend to put too much importance on music anyway so it could be my inner music geek showing through. It's interesting though that certain tunes seem to be linked into my psyche even though I wouldn't particularly say that I liked them.

Oh and for the record when I get frisky...it's always James Brown.

Ok I don't get twitter. I admit it, it makes no sense to me. I understand the principles, I know how to works it but I am clearly missing something. Why am I supposed to care what my friends are doing at any given point? I mean unless it's significant I'm just not that interested frankly. I'm not callous I just think that anything that matters enough for me to care probably needs more than 140 characters.

Facebook is going the same way. Frankly the sheer number of twitteresque status updates coupled with the spam from the thousands of applications and the endless repeats of funny videos you 'have to see' that turn out to be 5 year old virals that you've seen a thousand times before mean you pretty soon lose the will to even bother reading. These days I log on and scan the list for updates from the people that I actually care about, share a bit of banter with anything worth reading and completely ignore 90% of what people have said. Which is kind of the point really. Most of my 200 odd friends on Facebook aren't actually friends. I barely know half of them and of the half I do know I haven't spoken to half of them in years so terming them friends is optimistic.

This was all fine before facebook went all twitter on me. I could safely keep them on my friendlist and ignore them. We could share the occasional offhand conversations about the past but in reality we all really knew we were just using each other to pad our friendlists as a way to keep score. But now I can't ignore them. Every time I log on I have to read page after page of how 'Alan is eating a cheese sandwich' and 'Susan is thinking about buying a new microwave'. It's annoying. I don't care. I never cared. Why would anyone think that I would care what they were having for lunch?  

But what do you do? You can't remove them from your friendlist without looking like a right bastard so you are stuck. Stuck forever reading small and poorly punctuated text messages telling you minor details you didn't want to know about other people's lives.

Which is why Live journal is better. For starters you don't have to read anything at all if you don't want to. You can log on and post, check your mail and piss off without ever getting subjected to the barrage of spam from the endless procession of games that want to take your money in exchange for meaningless advantages. Then of course if you are in the mood for reading you can choose what to read. Which group of friends you feel like reading etc. 

People also take more time with their posts on Livejournal. There's a kind of undefined sense of permanence about what they are saying. Because unless they delete it it's going to sit there forever a lasting testament to what they were thinking at the time. 'Is eating a cheese sandwich ' might seem relevant now but not in 3 years so it never makes people's journals. Which means right out of the gate journals are more interesting. 

Basically what I am saying is that Facebook/twitter are fine for the instant hit of feeling connected to the outside world, but they are also incredibly dull and pretty vacant. To use a crappy analogy (is there any other kind?) Twitter is sending a text message, Facebook is sending a picture and Livejournal is picking up the phone and actually having a chat.

Livejournal, where you can use more than one percent of your brain...

It's one of those standard movie clichés that bugs me. The police get a call from a call box and then start some ludicrously over complicated machinery which attempts to pin down the location of the caller but just seconds before they are about to nab him they fail because the devious criminal hangs up too soon.

This is a Phenomenon that only really makes sense in the 70's. I mean it's not that hard to find out the number of a landline that is calling you especially when that landline is either the number of a cheap motel or a payphone, both of which are not exactly well kept secrets. My phone cost me £20, is made out of cheap plastic and earwax. Even this the most pathetic creature of the telephone species has call screening as a feature.

I can understand how it might be hard these days to track down a cell phone number or the location of someone uploading to a website via proxies but I'll be a monkey's uncle if it takes more than 30 seconds to track down a landline. Especially when that landline is a payphone. Surely there must be in a database that's pretty easy to get at, if the police don't have one I imagine Google could probably hook them up. I mean it's possible that private landline numbers could be harder to trace but hotels and payphones are not going to be even slightly challenging. Less challenging than having a drinking contest with a 7 year old I'd say. Those seven year olds are rubbish at keeping down the whiskeys...

"We've got a call incoming"
"What's the number?"
"55755"
"Ok lets Google that, (*keyboard tapping sounds) yup there it is. He's using the payphone on the other side of the street, want me to call up a picture on street view?"
"This tracing malarky is so easy, I mean can you imagine if we'd tried to track him down using signal strength and a process of traiangulation? How long would that take? It'd be like a minute..."
"Ha ha but that would make us idiots."

Even, and it's a big even, if I did accept that there's some reason they need to 'run a trace' as opposed to using caller ID then I still don't want to see the scene again in any movie ever until the end of time (or until I die, which is the same thing anyway if you're into solipsism). We've already seen the exact same scene in 500 other unimaginative episodes of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder etc. and we really don't need to see it again. How about some originality? If you don't know what that is it's what happens when you don't steal all the memorable bits out of other people's work to cobble together a third rate film that everyone guessed the ending for 2 minutes after the film began...

Ok so I have been reading a book called HappinessTM which keeps going on about untranslatable words. I mentioned one of them, Mono-no-aware, earlier if you were observant. Anyway I got to thinking that actually it wasn't just foreign words that we aren't able to translate without a whole sentence. There are whole situations that need their own English words as well. We need to invent some new words to fill the need. Here are a few of my suggestions:

Arguversion: The act of realising that you are wrong half way through an argument but deciding to carry on arguing anyway through a misguided and stubborn desire to save face.

Estrolling: When you post something innocent to an internet forum but it gets misinterpreted so badly that you are annoyed and decide rather than to explain yourself to dig the hole deeper just to annoy the militant idiot that couldn't understand that what you originally said was a compliment.

Singking: When you are singing in your car and you pass another car or pedestrian and immediately sing at less volume and with your lips as closed as possible to avoid detection.

Trousilemma: When you are walking through a public place and you can feel your trousers slipping down but you aren't sure whether it's worse to risk total slippage (while you search for somewhere less obvious to pull them up) or to just pull them up straight away and take the small embarrassment over the potentially greater one.

Slyding: The act of Hiding an object you swore that someone else lost but which you later found in your pocket.

Enesia: Adding people to Facebook via your email and then forgetting where you know them from or who they are.

Ezophrenia: Forgetting which one of your internet personalities you are supposed to be at any given time and having an awkward conversation while you try to establish who they think you are.

Etroduction: The conversation in which 2 people chatting on MSN try to remember who they are because they only actually know each other by their online gaming name and not their actual name which is the name on their email account.

Blizzappointment: The realisation after getting you character to the top level in Wow that you have wasted 3 months of your life and will never get them back again.

Blizz:The state of blissful unawareness that stems from playing a truly addictive computer game. This is usually punctured by the urgent need to take a piss or by an arrhythmic heart flutter as your body tries desperately to wake you up because you haven't drunk anything in 8 hours and have developed bladder stones.

Clim-Ex: Either the state of having just received really bad news while at your own birthday party or the moment when the afterglow of sex gives way to the fact that you are now in the damp patch and getting chilly.

Feel free to suggest some of your own. I just plucked these off the top of my head.

I'm sure you've all been there. You are at a meal. Everyone is happy and relaxed, there's a general sense of being comfortable with one another and you're all looking forward to kicking back and enjoying the company of friends. Then bam! Out of the blue someone chides one of their friends, or family members for doing something that at least 2 other people at the table are also doing and suddenly the atmosphere changes. It goes from a laid back happy meal to a tense fraught affair where people are carefully avoiding any social faux pas and those who had their elbows on the table are suddenly a bit upset by the judgement that has been passed on them by implication in the initial and pointless demand for obedience to the 'rule of manners'.

It's been a favourite game of families for hundreds of years now. Like some little internal power struggle in which everyone accepts that the rule enforcer is probably right even though they weren't bothered in the slightest by the fact that their niece had her elbows on the table.

Bu the rudest person in the room is not the one (or three) with their elbows on the table. Not by a long chalk. The rudest person in the room is unquestionably the person that decided to get all antsy about manners as if they were some hard and fast set of rules laid down by the great spaghetti monster at the last supper (between the ice-cream course and lemon scented towels that were customary at the time).

But manners aren't supposed to be about dogged adherence to a set of rules. In fact manners are supposed to be about the opposite. Manners are supposed to be about agreeing a set of conventions that everyone considers to be acceptable so that no-one has to be embarrassed. If they had a genesis manners sprung up to answer the question of whether or not it was OK to use a battle-axe to eat soup. They are supposed to make it so that people know what not to do to so that they don't embarrass themselves. When did people get the idea that they were supposed to govern other people's manners? You're not. In fact pointing out what they are doing wrong in anything other than the very quietest of whispers (to save them from themselves) makes you what is technically known as an asshole.

Seriously these people are the kind of people who after reading a long and emotional post about the death of a loved one will post a response only to correct one minor point of grammar. That's the level of incomprehension we are talking. If you think that good manners are about laying the smack down in a 'police camera action' stylee then boy did you miss the point...

I'm not kidding either. Not only are hippos responsible for more human deaths than any other wild animal in Africa but they also habitually open up a six pack of whupass on crocdiles and sharks. Yeah, sharks. They drag them out of the water and trample them to death. You can't get more badass than that without teaching an orangatang Bruce Lee moves with a nunchuck. They are seriously scary, seriously scary and also angry. If you put 20 Tasmanian Devils (angry angry wee beasties) in a burlap sack and then hit them with sticks they still wouldn't be as angry as just one Hippo.

Hippos could be the only thing in the world capable of taking down a Chuck Norris. Well not really but Chuck might have to break a sweat, which might well cause a flood...

They are fast as well. Those chubby little legs of theirs can push them along at a not too shabby 20mph which has got to be scary if they are coming after you. I mean unless you are Usain Bolt odds on that's quicker than you. It would be like getting chased down by a an entire football team crammed into a Hummer when you'd just yelled something about their mother at them. Hippos even do 8mph underwater, which is hardcore.

I thought they just bummed around singing about how nice mud is but it turns out they are natures homage to the film Taxi Driver. A little bit mad and very, very angry...

Have you ever met anyone that has got a speeding ticket where they weren't going 33 in a 30 or 62 on the open road?

Neither have I.

Which is pretty suspect right? Because I assume that statistically some people will have been caught going 80 in a 60. Mysteriously though you never hear about those people unless you are watching them on police camera action. They are as hard to track down as those Gideons that place bibles everywhere (you know they must have been there because you have the bible but no-one ever sees them placing the bible).

So why is it that everyone is lying? What is it about speeding that makes people think it's OK to admit to it as long as it's within a 'tolerable margin' and yet still makes people want to hide the true speed they were going.

It's not just OK to admit to it either. It's OK to whine about it as if you are the victim even though the odds are you have altered your speed down by at least 5 miles an hour. If I had a penny for every conversation I've had in my life about 'jobs-worth' policemen giving out tickets willy nilly for only the slightest of legal infractions and I could probably afford another pair of new socks to feed the addiction. But these guys are just doing their jobs. It's a law. They shouldn't be picking which ones to enforce.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that I think that the policemen who let people off a ticket because they are good looking are corrupt. That's what it is after all, corruption and prejudice. The concept that anyone deserves to get a waiver for being attractive is right up there on the Mengele scale of eugenics. Maybe the police should carry calipers to measure skulls and formalize the arrangement. To be honest unless you are racing to hospital for a huge emergency then you pretty much had it coming. Nobody forced you to to hit the gas...

Furthermore people that admit to getting a ticket for just a few miles over the speed limit are admitting to being dumb. It's right there in the subtext:

If you say you got a ticket for doing 33 in a 30 then the obvious question is why? I mean you'd have to drive for a long time at 33 miles an hour through a huge stretch of 30mph road before that extra 3mph would show even the slightest appreciable difference on your journey time. So why bother? Why run the risk of a fine to save 1 measly minute of drive time?

It makes no sense and making no sense is the key hallmark of the stupid person.

Is it just me that thinks if you are going to break the law you should at least do it in style. I mean if you are going to speed why not get naked as well. Now naked speeding would be stylish. Naked speeding is a crime you could be proud of. Getting caught doing a tiny amount over the speed limit makes you either an amateur who hasn't really thought his crime or a potential liar. In either case I'm not that interested in hearing about it...