A trip to the Doctors... Pt 1

Having not been to a Doctor for many a year due to being relatively illness-free, I found it surprising that just after New Year I had to ‘phone up my local surgery and make an appointment because of a long-lived-with-and-ignored ailment which had suddenly bloomed out of all proportion. This ailment has taken on the form of swollen Parotid glands at the back of my jaw-line over the last ten years and during this time they’ve flared up and subsided so inconsistently that whenever I’ve actually sought medical attention the diagnosis is eclectic to say the least: Glandular Fever, a compressed Wisdom tooth, Tonsillitis - even though they’ve been whizzed out along with my Adenoids years ago - and even Mumps at the age of 32 have been forwarded as causes!

Windows 7 UK adverts: anyone for an anal lobotomy?

The Personal Computer. If you are like me and exist within the PC realm as opposed to flouncing around in Apple’s i-nonsense, designer wonderland, then just the mention of those three words can fill the vast majority of people with technophobic dread. It’s just the thought of trying to fix your own Windows-based system when the inevitable problems arise that brings about a spate of fevered brows, cold sweats and panic attacks across the world’s Microsoft users, much like how Apple users are confabulated when faced with the bewildering option of a second mouse button. Now obviously as PC users, we all have our own personal favourite version of Windows - which can be anything from ’95 to Millennium, ’98 to NT and even 3.1 or MS-DOS thrown into the mix - but what most people will be more than happy to be using is XP, their most successful operating system to date.

Christmas, New Year & the Big Freeze

All across the United Kingdom during Christmas and New Year, we’ve had the worst snowfall for 30 years: we’ve basically been unable to do anything but watch our newly-adapted “Global Warming” infrastructure grind to a complete halt. Obviously this has come about due to the boffins in the white coats convincing the Government over a period of time that winters as we used to know them are a thing of the past, assigned to the history books along with things like Yew tree reverence, an English national identity and the Marathon peanut chocolate bar. However, the big brains appear to have got this one wrong now, so are trying to back track and change the term “Global Warming” into the non-specific “Climate Change”: underneath this aegis of terminology, we can now rest easy in the knowledge its title will cover all eventualities, from hot to cold and all the in-between.

Social networking: rejection the easy way

With the advent of internet-based, social networking sites exploding across the world’s computers like ... like a... an infectious “virus” (Christ, that’s poor!), our interpersonal skills development has not only ground to a halt but has actually gone into a reverse gear. For people of a certain age who can remember what it was like to have a face-to-face conversation with an actual human-being before Face Space, Bobe, Twatter and My Book came along, then this isn’t too debilitating: we can still access that synapse within our brain which can create authentic speech and thus can interact, albeit on a dwindling scale. However, if you’re under 30 and your life’s governed by the above digital technology via your laptop and iPhones, then your culture’s growth - indeed your own personal growth - is becoming more restricted with each insular key-press you perform. You see, that’s all it takes now for friendships to be formed and consummated or cast aside and left lying in tatters; with no eye contact or facial expressions to judge, then our selfish, callous finger-and-thumb actions are accelerating us all towards a future culture of anti-social recidivism.

Cheap adverts and the death of TV

With the cancellation of the old analogue terrestrial signal across the UK and the advent of the new digital “Nought and Ones” signal, we as viewers are now flooded with a bewildering amount of new channels being beamed directly into our homes via various set-top boxes and televisions, either through electron-accelerated CRT tubes, plasma, LCD or even LED screens. These extra channels all look good on paper and their selling points are more choice for the consumer plus freedom to pick and choose our own favourite programs to create a weekly personal playlist we then follow religiously. Ironically, the problem with all this variety stems from the programs’ origins: it’s cost-effective to produce or even just to repeat away from the original channel and so we find ourselves being swamped by a mediocre pyroclastic flow of stale, episodic releases.

Zombies - it's all about the way they move

If someone approached you whilst you went about your everyday business and said “Do you like it slow or do you like it fast?!” would you know what they were hinting at or would you recoil in a bemused, disgusted manner at their implication? Only the fully initiated will appreciate this subtle address and if the imaginary horror of a zombie plague ever explodes across the globe, then understanding how to answer this question will be the key to your survival in the newly-undead world. To be able to dissect the subtle differences between zombies in order to discover why they are now firmly established and revered in our lexicon of post-modernity is a desirable trait and may just come in handy when you least expect it.

Join Josh's band? Pass me a gun instead...

Our pain and suffering returns with a vengeance as T-Mobile rolls out not one, not two but three new televisual, 20 second feasts of purest sh*t for us all to enjoy. Each is being shown in virtually every continuity link across all available channels, which just goes to prove they must have more money than sense if they can afford to bankroll yet another assault against our common sense; so no matter which side you flick to, you’ll always find a Solo advert waiting to rob you of your sanity...

Cycling: an enforced fitness regime

When you wake up from a night’s slumber, without any perceivable stress from the day before or untoward malice eating you away from inside, then I’m betting you probably expect a fairly easy trip through the approaching day? It’s not much to ask to just get on with a boring, unquestionable existence and strive to pass the following hours off without incident, mark them down as time well spent and slip off into a dreamland, with the hope to arise and face another fresh 24 hours, perpetually looped until your time’s up. There we are; a perfect little life.

Kingsmill Confessions

With the power of today’s media, there always appears to be a new way of dredging slutch from the bottom of the consumer barrel via some ad-agency’s latest idea, presumably thought up by their newest, hippest and Twittering whizz-kid, which is then patted into a mould and crammed down our wanton throats. From this month comes a duo of semi-hardened sculptures of slop - their thin Crème Brule crusts straining to contain their fetid stench - that are the latest exponents from Kingsmill the bread maker entitled “Kingsmill Confessions”; a collection of jovial little 10 seconds snippets which revel in the concept of Humanity’s Selfish Gene and its unerring, primordial urge to look after oneself above all else.

Just when life couldn’t get any worse... pt2

Just an hour after my fall from grace onto the pointed gravel - see "Just when life couldn't get any worse... pt 1" for more details - which had resulted in torn flesh and what felt like cracked bone, I slowly began to allow the tumble to ebb into my subconscious memory box entitled “horrible but now acceptable parts of your past” as I aimed for home and drove. The six mile journey ahead weaved along amber-dappled, darkening roads but I felt cocooned with the soothing warmth of my BMW’s purring heater and the only noticeable discomforts were my left-hand knee, which was becoming more agonising each time I pushed in the clutch and my left-hand elbow that jutted at an angle as I slotted gear to gear. “Oh if only my pre-cognitive powers actually worked” I thought as my face’s capillaries began to flush in the interior warmth, “I’d now be without a massively swollen leg and misshapen arm-bend” and this reflection continued to grow as I found myself in an increasingly painful driving position due to locked-up limbs and frozen joints.