Our Un-Natural Selection

I am a great wildlife lover and advocate of being able to observe our flying little feathered things and cuddly little furry things in their natural environs, which in the UK means either flying above our heads in the sky or trotting about fields, moorland and hedgerows for our enjoyment. Most people in our animal-loving country appreciate and get pleasure from the little inter-species interaction we can garner during our high-powered, stress-filled, post-modern lifestyles. Whether this contact is taking the dog for a walk, stroking their lazy cat or putting nuts and seeds out for the birds – and thieving squirrels – that frequent their back gardens is a moot point to most of us: any dealings with the animals which surround us taps into and feeds our lost sense of belonging within the natural world, a world we seem to have separated from in our developed societies via technological advancement and obsession with monetary gain.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 2

I’m now a few blog entries on from when I first visited my local NHS surgery due to feeling slightly unwell with my grotesquely swollen Parotid glands - see "A trip to the Doctors... pt 1" for more details - and where my Doctor issued ultra-strong antibiotics along with scattergun, tablet-taking instructions which I strived to follow to the best of my ability: however, this proved harder than I originally thought it would be due to the baffled state of my everyday thought processes. This memory confusion arose within just one day of ingesting the small, red-coated Milpharm tablets and almost immediately they reduced me to a gibbering, sweat-soaked sociopath liable to instantly explode in an antibiotic-induced fury of magnificent proportions.

Youth of today? Give me yesterday's childhood anytime

The youth of today and the death of tomorrow. Is this an accurate hypothesis or am I speaking after the fact; indeed, as I’ve had and enjoyed my early years, am I justified in not equating anything I see in today’s culture as being worthy for tomorrow’s foundation due to looking back in anger across my wasted years that started half a century ago in the middle of the 1980s? We all go through teenage rebellion and we can always pinpoint particular incidences that spoke to us, helped create who we have become, for good or bad, and to recall these memorable learning curves is a fascinating experience in trying to understand your former self through post-analysis.

BT Broadband: welcome to the dribbling trickle

It is my great misfortune to live in an area within the UK that has never had fibre-optic cable piped beneath its streets during the great flurry of work which was undertaken many years ago to future-proof our communication infrastructure. With our insatiable appetite for technological wonders perpetually advancing and creating more complex design, the time has now arrived that we can truly utilise these pre-laid cables: spreading out as neural pathway tracts and connecting billions of silicon brains around the globe means blisteringly fast broadband connections for everyone, everywhere, all the time... except if your area never had the cable laid in the first place.

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.