5 = Monster

I was thinking: it's remarkably easy to make the number 5 into a monster.

The 300(th)

Although only 267 posts remain (including this one), this is, according to Blogger, the 300th post on my blog*. In all that time (over 6 years now), I've been angry, confused, melancholy, and bored, in roughly equal measure. I've tried to be funny, and also made a bit of a stab at clever, but nothing seems to work quite so well as writing nothing at all. So, here's to another 300 posts - may they all be as blank as my mind!


* There have, therefore, been 33 casualties - a fairly high rate of attrition! 

Election Fever Entirely Fails to Grip UK...

There will be a general election in the UK on 6th May.

The BBC News website devoted a full-width banner headline/picture combo to the story.

The last time I checked, the story was only 6th Most Read, and 5th Most Shared.

Epic Giving-a-damn-about-politics Fail. 

About Face(book)

I'm not sure I fit in at Facebook. Although I understand that social network sites are what you make them, and I'm prepared to use them as tools with which to maintain certain channels of communication, I find myself unable to use Facebook in particular in the manner with which others seem so comfortable.

Before I begin attacking them, its worth noting that my 'friends' on Facebook are all people I'm interested in knowing. There has been no sympathy "friending" (oh, how annoying it is that the spellchecker didn't pick up 'friending', but was reticent about 'spellchecker'), and no-one has yet earned sufficient wrath that I have wished to "de-friend" them.

However, and let's be blunt about this, I really don't give a flying fuck about the fact that a friend of mine is about to head to the pub for the afternoon, or about any other similarly inane snapshots of their life. Why do people think I'd be interested in knowing this? When did it become acceptable to be so fucking bland?

I know, there are stale old arguments which run along the lines of "well, don't read it then". Rubbish; I need to read it in case something genuinely interesting happens, like the wife of a friend, who is very pregnant, gives birth, and an announcement is made through this happily convenient, widely available channel. I don't have a choice, because in among the news that someone is clipping their fucking toenails are nuggets of pure news gold.

So, what is the solution? I'll tell you what: boring flags. Every time someone writes something so mind-numbingly dull that it brings you to tears, simply ping the boring flag. Three boring flags in a 24h period and the user is banned from posting for a day.

Problem solved. Now, I'm off to close the bathroom window...

Brainzzzzz

Dogfight!

Facing south from St Mary's churchyard, Tatsfield. 

Gorillaz in 'rather good' album shocker

News reaches us today that the Gorillaz (the pseudo-artificial pop group side project of Blur's Damon Albarn) appear to have released a third album of surprisingly high quality.

Plastic Beach, featuring such delights as Superfast Jellyfish (probably the best thing since Clint Eastwood) and White Flag, is a sort of big, musical hug. It really could have been different, because the second album, Demon Days, whilst brilliant in places, really wasn't a match for their eponymous first release. The downwards trend, however, has been inverted, and their latest work grabs you in a multi-music-cultural embrace and squeezes until your eyes bulge like a hamster in a child's excessively loving grasp.

Good news, then, for those of us who like their music to wee all over genre definitions. Thank goodness for that. 

A Couple of Things

Anyone familiar with the Sterling currency will recognise the impossibility of the following, at least since the mid 1980s:

The other thing is nothing special, just a slight amusement discovered in a client's offices recently:

Formula 1 is back today

Yeah baby!!!

Lovely Sunset