If you go to the Blogger homepage – the site of the people who facilitate Charging Through The Midfield – you will notice that they are linking to an article in The Onion about the pitfalls of having one’s mother discover their weblog. Sadly, the link doesn't work. However I have few problems with this as my Mum is a regular visitor to the site anyway. Naturally she pretends either not to understand or ignores much of the stuff I post up here, but she is still happy to play along with my ridiculous games.

So, as promised in an earlier incarnation of this site, I got her to carry out a tarot card reading for Charging Through The Midfield (CTTM). As you will have no doubt previously read, I am planning to make changes that will utterly transform the nature of this site. So what would the cards say?

Let me just point out at this point that I am probably the most cynical person you could ever meet when it comes to this sort of thing. But CTTM readers aren’t necessarily so, so this is for all of you who hold these sort of things in high esteem. Take astrology for instance, now I know the visible universe has at least four dimensions, but common astrology only seems to take two into account. Fuck depth in astrology, if a collection of stars appear to be next to each other from Earth’s perspective in space, then it doesn’t seem to matter if they are on opposite sides of the universe in reality. What is so special about the Earth? Obviously astrologers are extraordinarily arrogant forms of life, and would clearly be considered even more xenophobic than Daily Mail journalists by any visiting alien cousins who we might encounter. How then can I possibly take it seriously? And I haven't even began to mentioned the other more obvious problems with astrology. Tarot at least doesn’t have such blatant and fundamental difficulties.

My mater, as she once signed herself off as on an email to me once, had recently acquired some new cards entitled ‘Messages From Your Angels’, so she first suggested we have a look at these.



I think this was a bit of an experiment for us both. This reading would tell me “what my angels want me to know”. The booklet informs us ‘You cannot make a mistake or choose the “wrong” cards during a reading, as the angels are supervising the process, and their power prevents an incorrect reading.’ I keep my mind open – although like an underground train’s door in transit, it struggles to remain shut. I can suspend disbelief for standard tarot cards (‘this is isn’t poker, this isn’t poker' is my mantra as I try not to think about randomised cards and odds), but this is a tricky one. Angels my testicles.

If my empirical mind is so out of kilter with the postulated reality of heaven, god, angels etc, and angels really do exist, then surely if they wanted to communicate they wouldn’t wait around for Hay House Incorporated in New South Wales, Australia, to come into existence and print a bunch of cards. (‘Must open mind, must open mind… repress lateral thought, repress lateral thought…’). Eventually I settled it: “This reading is for CTTM. The opinions of CTTM do not necessarily reflect those of the author. It doesn’t matter what I think.” I blanked my mind and let myself become CTTM. Its energy would flow through me. And it bloody did as well.

CTTM would have four cards drawn for it. The first card drawn signified the general theme of the day or situation. It drew “Oceana”: ‘Take action. You’re in touch with your truth in this situation, and you need to trust your gut and lovingly assert yourself.’ Further reading reveals that ‘there is no need for more research or time'. ‘You already know what to do about the situation, and you have made up your mind to take action. I am here to validate that your decision is on the path of light.’

The second card told CTTM about a possible block to its intentions. And the card “Astara” was drawn. ‘You deserve the best! Reach for the stars with your dreams and desires, and don’t compromise.’ This card tells CTTM that it has been reluctant in the past to ask for help, perhaps because it felt it didn’t deserve good, or that it would be taking away from someone else (another website’s counter statistics?). Its block was that it did not act selfishly enough. CTTM was told, ‘humans are the only ones who believe in scarcity.’ CTTM agrees with this statement and laughs at all these lowly humans. It thinks that this is a rather existentialist point, and a well made one at that. Not that the good people at Hay House, Oz, would agree with this last, and rather atheistic, point.

My third card informed CTTM how it would avoid said block, and sadly bought me out of my CTTM energy trance (not too much of a barrier as I had already drawn all of the cards). You see, I had pulled out “Patience” and I felt it contradicted what had gone before. I had visions of some Australians sitting in front of a computer saying, “it aull wurks niycely mayte, except if you pull arrt th’ caarrds in wone partickulaarr combinayshon.”

“Flamin’ galaaaahh.”

The Galah:


Patience: ‘Now is the time to learn study and gather new information… Although you may be aching to begin a new project, now is not the time.’ This is pretty much what CTTM had been doing, so affirmation then. But the first card said ‘there was no need for more research and time.’ Confused? I’ll let you work it out. My mother told me that I should sit down and work it out (although to be fair she was fielding an incoming phone call at the time I questioned it; I’m writing a website entry, so I don’t have the time either). She specialises in the real tarot I think. And I am generally dubious about anything that tries to tell me what the angels are saying. (Although I have found that others seem to approve of them.)


Finally, my ‘probable outcome’ card was “Omega”. The paper work said: ‘Victory! Your desire is coming to fruition. Keep up the good work!’ At this point far from being excited by this card, as perhaps I should, I grew only more suspicious. I have very few deeply held convictions but one of them is: “If an organisation or person takes itself too seriously but still utilises exclamation marks then be very wary indeed. For they are in internal conflict and cannot be trusted.”

The only way I would believe any of this is if you could convince me that angels only spoke in the language of utter bollocks. The only evidence I have so far found that might contribute to this theory is that people who have claimed to have been spoken to by pixies, angels, and other fantastical creatures usually end up performing the most absurd and laughable acts. However this is all pretty threadbare stuff. Luckily I have at least a modicum of respect for proper tarot, and it was this that, if anything, I regarded as the real deal. I had it read to me and it was self-consistent, interesting, and even believable. And that reading will be detailed for you in the next riveting instalment of Charging Through The Midfield.

Marvellous.

It is sad to note that winter brings with it many discontents. Firstly there is Christmas – which only serves to benefit commercialist enterprise (and arguably children, although my side of the argument is that a happy child at Christmas is an overweight and spoilt little shit before the fruition of February); secondly there is the annual cull of the elderly (again, there is a strong argument here that points to a possible declination of the type who sit alone in their homes reading the Daily Mail and grumbling constantly about foreigners but rarely venturing out to gain subjective experiences; excepting for one morning approximately every five years on the route to a polling booth and a small black box placed next to the printed word “Conservative” – I don’t accept these arguments however as I see them as both sinisterly unfair and poorly written examples which fail to satisfactorily explain the relationship between the cull and discontent).

I need to slow down a bit here. Making a series of points to justify a statement is all very well, but it is somewhat counterproductive to detail all my opinions and doubts in parenthesis after each one.

Which is exactly my point.

This marvellously shows why I cannot write a normal weblog like everybody else.

Basically, I write far too much crap. My thoughts and sentiments usually begin to travel in one definite direction, but soon enough other pieces of acuity splinter their way into the main trunk of my plan. And, like some curious fetish, I just have to satisfy my temptation to expose it all.



You will probably realise at this point that such a habit will doubtless expose itself within a section of writing about said habit. Some might attach the label of postmodernism to this phenomenon, but I wouldn’t agree. For that to be the case, I would have to be executing my writing style deliberately. Although execution is perhaps the best thing for it.

Needless to say, I am considering ways to change all this. The problem, as I’ve intimated a gerdillion times before, is that I have too much scope to work with and too much time on my hands in which to do it. I have come to the conclusion that the weblog is far too broad a tool for me. I have to now admit publicly that I have trouble limiting myself to one simple thread. As a result I continually address only the one subject: everything. It is a rare day indeed when I sit to address a subject and end up addressing only it. For instance, today I sat down to write my entry and I ended up writing about writing. Despair reigns slightly.

To begin yet another analogy on these pages: my brain has become a sweet shop and I am sweeping great armfuls of goodies into my trolley. I just cannot help it: it’s free publishing. I can write all I want and the good people at Blogger still refuse to charge me. What would you do if you were given the keys to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and told you could help yourself? In the end you would eat and eat and eat, and you’d end up becoming obsessed with yourself and the activity of eating.



So when my friend said my writing style seemed a little bit arrogant (see previous entry for terse details), she was probably on the button. Self-obsessed nonsense is what this is. Should I really expect all of you to be interested in the internal mumblings of my self-obsessive brain?

So, soon enough, this weblog will become more like a diary. Obviously I first have to get an interesting life. But plans for that are in the pipeline (although who doesn’t plan to have an interesting life?). Between now and the realisation of my plans however you will have to put up with this. Well, strictly speaking you can do what the hell you like. As long as all the other billions of pages remain up and running, your choices remain vast. As do my personal cerebral options of course.

Anyway, winter. I used to think of a year as a living thing. In January it started off weak and unable to proffer a decent bit of weather. March would signify its teens when it would grow stronger and show the strength required to generate a decent bit of warmth. Spring would turn to summer and the year was reaching the peak of its power. Autumn and winter showed its old age. Hence winter was in two parts: pre-January 1st and post-January 1st.

I’ve always liked this method of watching the weather. On that October day, when the southeast of England experienced that infamous hurricane, 1986 was having a bit of a funny turn. One must resist the temptation to imagine that it was experiencing wind, for that would be taking anthropomorphism too far, and there is far too much anthropomorphism in the world today. It also meant I could eventually delete winter altogether.

At first I had two winters, with each half as long. It makes winter II part of one long build up of power to summer and winter I as part of a dying autumn. Then I had the debate: should it be that winter II be called winter I? For the winter that signifies the start of a year is following on from the autumnal winter. So which comes first? The existence of winter became a paradox. So I found it easier to think of winter II/I as simply the beginning of spring and winter I/II as the end of autumn. Hence only three seasons! With Christmas and New Year becoming a celebration of the old year’s death and a new year’s birth. Basically I had stolen Christmas from Jesus. Which I think is fair game considering the Christians stole it from the pagans.

None of this eases the discontent that the cold period brings. But it makes me feel better about the whole thing. I think the time to reclaim Christmas back from the Christians and the moneymen is long overdue. If Christmas is the peak of the winter than winter truly is a dismal period indeed and I am happy that it is behind me.

My long-term plan is to take Christmas back and then destroy it. Good riddance I say.

Bloody Christmas: bunch of arse.

Apologies for the little wait you had there between this post and the last. A few technical problems have been encountered, negotiated with, appeased, than treated with the relevant amount of contempt. A later problem forced me to plunder the depths of an Internet Café’s machine in order to provide something for entry. And, much to the denigration of my own writing skills, have produced some of the more enthusiastic responses recently. Having said all that, it was a good idea wasn’t it? Had I the time, inclination, or indeed the popularity, I might have considered pursuing the idea and encouraging others to scan saved documents on public hard drives. I might even have attempted to pen a snazzy name for aforesaid mentioned activity. Such as, oh I don’t know, “Drive Bombing”.

You can tell I’ve thought about this can’t you?

During the time between my most recent post and this I have also been facing some criticisms about this here site. Not that I have sought them; the holders of these opinions have sought me out and, to be fair, I have been interested to hear them.

The first came from a close female friend of mine who maintained that my writings here make me sound arrogant. Apparently I am much better on the telephone. Which is arguably a criticism that is not too constructive as the dynamic of a telephone conversation is far removed from the activity that is writing a piece such as this. Still, I do not think she was aiming for constructiveness but rather an excuse not to be expected to read the site. Perhaps I need to read between the lines a bit. Besides, I prefer to think of myself as condescending rather than arrogant.

One can always trust on one’s own mother to launch it down the middle of the alley though. “You need to find something to write about, it’s getting boring.” Such cheek after I linked to her site and everything!

I would counter that neither of these two dear associates have appreciated that there is a subtle philosophy behind this site. That philosophy is a bit like an Internet version of Existentialism. That is to say: I realise the pointless nature of this site in the grand scheme of things, but the grand scheme is in fact everything but a grand scheme. The Internet is a network of individuals and their opinions, basically undergoing the process of putting time in between themselves and the start of their existence. And what you see on the Internet is nothing more than the embodiment of this process. So, yes, there is pointlessness to it. But this pointlessness runs through life. We can turn our noses up at it and get all stressed trying to make profit off tech stocks, or we can revel in the futility and finally be free.

Clearly, I have selected the freedom option. Which is why you can still find me here. What my two lovely and beautiful acquaintances exhibited with their criticisms was what my fellow Existentialist and ex-Frenchman Jean Paul Sartre would have called a good old healthy bout of “Angst”: anxiety when faced with the truth of a reality void of any purpose.

Jean Paul Sartre:


But should you agree with the females do not fear (is the assertion that you are in fear hyperbolic or penetratingly accurate considering the topic at hand?), plans are afoot that will revolutionise this tiny corner of the Internet. As yet I cannot tell you what this is, but be notified that such is the enormity of this transformation it will occur only after months of planning. The first tentative steps have already been taken; the first of those months is underway.

This is not a denial of my Existentialist credentials, oh no. As you will eventually see, it will be an exercise in freedom. And when I say “freedom”, I separate it’s meaning from that banded about by annoyingly over-patriotic Americans who don’t really seem to know what it actually means. I simply claim that if you find this site boring, empty or meaningless, you might, as a result of the changes, find it more interesting, informative and, yes, even exciting. One might think that my Ma would doubtless overturn at least one death card in relation to this site. Death means change in the Tarot world: the death of one way and the birth of another. And yes, I do have plans to ask my Mum to give Charging Through The Midfield a Tarot reading. Here’s to death.



If you want to understand Existentialism, don’t look to me for an explanation you indolent sods.

You are currently on the Internet, try looking it up.

Grrrrr! Had a post all lined up on a floppy and the fucker has gone all faulty on me.

And rest assured it was the greatest piece of prose ever written by a man. I cry at this misfortune, but I at least possess a memory of the great work, whilst you, poor creatures, will never experience its influence.

However, in my determination to provide you with some sort of matter to stick your well kept - but yellowing - teeth into, I thought I'd take a look in the 'My Documents' folder on the machine I am currently on in an Internet Cafe inside the obscenity that is Elephant & Castle shopping centre and post up a bit of writing that I have found within.

And here it is in unedited format:

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What is wrong in ‘ staying home to mind baby’
All social groups have developed a division of labour by sex. Thus on the basis of sex we allocate certain roles to men and women. However there is no natural or fixed order to that division whereas the allocation of tasks varies cross culturally. Therefore when is comes to the conception of ‘Femininity’ different societies have different conceptions about what constitute ‘Femininity’ and thus allocate certain specific tasks for women.

When it comes to the women’s role of being a mother, again it’s the society which has imposed a stereotypical that a woman should be perfect mother and thus the primary responsibility of rearing a child rests on her shoulders.

Despite this motherhood mystique, today mothers are highly likely to combine mothering with paid work. Women work for different reasons varying from financial gain to personal fulfillment. Although there are both costs and benefits of being a full-time homemaker and the multiple-role potions, the cost to homemaker seems greater.

To point out the disadvantage of being a fulltime homemaker, in an interesting study of alumnae from a prestigious college, fifteen to 25 years after graduation , Judith Birnbaum (1975) compared groups of homemakers , married professionals with children and single professionals. Of the three groups homemakers had the lowest self esteem and sense of personal competence, even in the areas of child care and social skills. These women felt least attractive, expressed more concern over issues of their own identity and often indicated feeling of loneliness and isolation. They missed challenge and involvement in their lives, while insisting that mother must always put others needs ahead of their own.

Thus it is clear that there are many disadvantages of being a full-time homemaker. Here it is important to point out the advantages of being a working women.

---

Interesting I think you'll agree.

But not as interesting as this document brilliantly entitled To whom concern.doc. I have blanked out the phone number to protect the innocents. That is to say, I want to stop any repercusions of idiots phoning them coming back to me, a nice innocent boy.

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To whom concern




Alexandra and I have now been happily married for over a year
“We got married 10-10-02”. Alexandra permits to stay for her first year
Runs out on 7 of January and now, she will apply for her permanent residence.

We both are visiting Colombia over the Christmas period to have our religious wedding Alexandra is going to Colombia on November to make the preparations for our wedding.

We are returning on early January. In those circumstances please could you ground Alexandra residence permit now, so we can deal whit this chive in good time if you need speak to me could call me in day time to my office 0207xxxxx00



Yours sincerely

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Yet none can beat car.doc:

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car






stret car

And so here we go again with more fleetingly conceived yet mindfully chosen words mainly published in order to gently nudge the outside world towards my way of thinking and thus make my life that tiniest bit more bearable should I ever encounter one who has been converted (even if it is by the most vanishingly minute fraction of a transformation).

After all, isn’t that what all writers are about? Changing the world? It is a conceited outlook I know but if only everyone thought like me, the world would be a better place. And I defy any self-confident reader of this particular entry to take a good look inward at him (yes, and her) self and conclude any differently. It’s just that writers are people who firmly believe they can achieve this change on a fundamental but admittedly superficial level (no, I don’t believe these are two contradictory descriptions). The same goes for editors of publications, directors of films and plays, and, at a more dramatic intensity, religious leaders. Only they have been changed first and commissioned to pass on the changes (the gullible idiots - if you find this last bit controversial then look away – I’m only here to write my opinion and do my own share of people changing. At least these are original sentiments...).

And so via a short but well-observed process of deductive logic, we can come to the remarkable conclusion that the politicians among us are the only humans who are honest enough about what they are attempting to achieve. Although of course such a feat would not necessarily stop the self-important ones from acting cynically or corruptly should they so choose.

Excuse me, just ate lunch there. Wow. Time travelling. You just jumped forward seventeen minutes in the few seconds it takes your eyes to traverse the distance between that last sentence and the next.

Anyway… Oh damnation, I’ve lost my train of thought. Hmm, I think the point I have been attempting to communicate has something to do with the way humans try to leave their mark on the world. And although we don’t like to openly admit it to ourselves, we all know the most meaningful way in which the world exists is within the minds of us people. Yes, yes, this sounds like a shower of pretentious sputum, but we do get a bit of meaning in our lives by invoking some sort of spirit in others. An engineer, a biologist, a musician, a poet and all these other abstract human things; these are people who work to produce a thing that they find has beauty and meaning and they hope their work will conjure up something similar within others. A writer might as well just say it straight: “Here is the world as I see it, listen to my admittedly bias argument; drink thirstily from my swollen teat of opinion; and understand the world through someone else for a change; i.e. me.”

Which is why I cycle back to another vaguely interesting variation of the same old opinion: The advent of the weblog is like a behemoth female pig, lying on its side, effectively inviting us to suckle on a teat. Pick on any teat you want: the selection goes on for miles and miles. I could take this metaphor as far as you could want – way beyond any reasonable standard of boredom. For instance, some teats vend almost entirely bile, some direct you towards other teats, others require payment, and some teats can squirt into many different heads at once as their hit counter spirals ever upwards, etc, etc. And as you can now see I actually created a pretty shitty metaphor, but I have never laid claim to competence.

Now that the selection of teats is many and varied, us humans can be evoked (I’ve just decided to use the word ‘evoked’ in an entirely novel fashion. If Dickens can do it I’ll be damned if I cannot.) in many more ways than ever before. Here’s to evocation. And by evoking and being evoked we can learn many new things about ourselves.

For instance, I’ve learned that I can sit down and just start writing and writing and in the end I’ll produce an oddly original and thought provoking piece which has no meaning whatsoever. Which I’m quite pleased about really.

The premise upon which I first based this entry is faulty of course. Although there may be a grain of truth in my claims, the overriding motivation for us humans is of course simply the reproduction of our genetic material. What we haven’t yet realised is that we are simply vessels for our genes, who are the true owners of this Earth. If and when aliens do visit, they will recognise our genes as the inhabitants of this planet and not us. And so the variation of species’ will be of little importance to them (except in that some are better at maintaining their genetic inheritance than others). They will see (as our scientists do now) that some genes have survived for billions of years, way, way, way beyond the memories of our ancestors. They will see (as geneticists do now) that we rank our families depending on the amount of genetic material we share with them. If asked to choose who they would save from a burning building – apart from the partner who they intend to combine their genes with – the overwhelming majority of people would prioritise their siblings over their cousins; their parents over their grandparents. It sounds obvious because we have always lived with it – but think.

Basically what I am saying is that we do it all for the sex. All our motivations come down to one thing: will it help us pull? Which is of course why pretty girls never amount to anything. Unless they were made to believe they were ugly of course. Which leads one to conclude that a good parent of a pretty girl should either a) slash her face; or b) tell her she is ugly. Either should do the job. But no parent with a sound mind will ever do the former because that would reduce the chances of half their genetic material being reproduced later on down the line.

And so my ability to write on any subject without any prior research or thought continues apace. And what is more I have no allergies and my family has no history of heart disease. Also, my Dad reckons we are the direct male descendents of Ben Hur. I’m dubious about this last one, but apparently my family used to have the surname Hur and considered itself a clan. This is all true (it is true that my Dad claims it). Hence my well-founded opinion that my genetic material is truly worthy of all female worship directed towards it and in particular my Dioxi-ribose Nucleic Acid dispenser.


And kneel...

In the ongoing attempt to provide reading matter for you, the casual visitor to my site (that’s only according to my casual publishing rate of course), I again signal my prior intention to pass you off with not-quite-meaningful-enough Internet fodder. What follows is the online equivalent of an unexpected Women’s Page in a daily newspaper, or a five minute television feature on old men and their domestic steam-driven machines. Happily at this site, we do not throw the equivalent of manipulative and bastard loan commercials at you. Nor shall we patronise you to the hilt in the style of Good Morning, who would spend fifteen minutes of valuable airtime explaining how to send text messages from one mobile phone to another. At which point I would weep.

But please do not imagine for a moment that I am to embark on such an undertaking wielding only the most bluntest of pens, oh no. I shall be as sharp as a diamond coated porcupine, dressed in Armani’s most fashionable of clothes, delivering previously unheard witticisms written especially for the occasion by Noel Coward in an especially spiky mood.

Actually I still haven’t figured out a topic for today. Which is admittedly a problem, and a persistent one at that. The basic reason for a weblog, one might feel, is that it can be used as a chronicle of one’s life. Unluckily however, I’m a fairly private bloke and don’t want to publish my life story for all and sundry to read. My most regular topic it seems is the difficulty in writing this weblog of nothingness. Mainly these pages serve as a template for writing experimentations and the odd rant. So you could say that this site provides merely a diary for my mood and creativity. Which is a bit shoddy really from your point of view.

Nevertheless newspaper columnists write comparable and original pieces at least as regularly as I do here. So why should I struggle to find topics? Well, basically, newspaper columnists are cunts (with a very few exceptions – Bernard Levin in The Times always wrote an enjoyable half-page) and I don’t intend to be (much of one). I genuinely use the following example as the nearest columnist I have to hand as I write, so it is therefore a randomly chosen cross-section: “ShelleyVision” in Tuesday’s Mirror; Jim Shelley’s column on television.

To be fair to Mr Shelley, he is writing in a popular tabloid about a medium that has the potential to be unbelievably superficial. Would he keep his job if he took a realistically scathing view of many of the programmes on, say, television’s Lowest Common Denominator Channel (that’s ITV for all of you who don’t know the industry slang)? Well, probably, but then perhaps a real newspaper might employ him. Sad really that the only decent newspapers are broadsheets. Perhaps the advent of the Independent in tabloid format will change this forever. More sadly still however, the Independent is about as exciting as dry toast.

Before I continue here is my view of the three national dailies that I hate the most:

The Daily Mail: Bastion of middle class suburbia, the Mail prides itself on always being anti-government and ridiculously moralistic. If the Daily Mail were a person, it would be Mary Whitehouse. The Daily Mail knows its main audience: White Anglo-Saxon, usually female, upper or middle class, over thirty, suburban or rural. It always loves to have a go at the asylum seeker: “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port in the country is becoming an outrage.” - The Daily Mail, 1938. This newspaper is evil. You couldn’t pay me to read this divisive vat of toss.

The Sun: With the editorial seemingly always in line with the views of a certain Rupert Murdoch, only an utter fuckwit would take the news stories and opinions contained within seriously. Sensationalist, celebrity obsessed pap, the Sun has a penchant for chasing sales, which means it’ll fuck over anyone it can to achieve them. Add to this the inconsistent views from one day to the next (depending on public mood – i.e. England team are scum on Friday; heroes on Monday) and a disgusting level of nationalism that occasionally breaks into xenophobia and you will realise why I never buy this rag. Besides, Murdoch doesn’t need my money and he’d much rather manipulate my opinions anyway so fuck buying that.

The Daily Express: Much like the examples above, the Editor of this rag knows fully well that a good old asylum seeker story on the front page will add up to forty thousand sales (sad indictment of our society that. A Beckham headline has exactly the same effect in terms of sales increase. This may or may not be even more distressing). So on goes another irresponsible and morally bankrupt line of thinking written especially to stir up the pot even more. Luckily however not too many people read the Express: it is laughably shit. Really it is an absolutely awful read, covered from front to back in tepid worthless trivia (rather than news). Whilst I hate the Sun and the Mail, I regard the Express like a domestic cat might regard a scratching post bought for it by its owner to stop it ripping up the sofa. I ignore it, I think it takes up valuable space, I would consider wiping my arse on it.

Jim Shelley then, and our Jim, who stares pleadingly over his sunglasses at us from the top of the page, has a piece on the acting faculties of Ray Winstone in ITV’s made-for-celebrity ratings chaser “Henry VIII”. His headline is “King Ray Axe His Socks Off” which sits atop an argument stating why Ray Winstone’s performance as the portly Henry VIII ranked high in the TV echelons. Luckily, or perhaps I should say unluckily, I saw said performance and I sadly cannot agree with the statement that the casting of Winstone “worked so brilliantly.” What in fact was provided to us by the soon to be defunct Granada was Ray Winstone playing, well, Ray Winstone whilst all around him (including ITV drama stalwart David Suchet, or Poirot as he his better known – has he ever appeared on any other channel?) attempted to act as if they actually were in the 17th century. Perhaps it’s just my warped opinion here, but the father to Queen Elizabeth, the pointy nose Monarch who saw off the Spanish Armada, probably did not have an East End London accent and is unlikely to have ever clinched his fist and gruffly whispered “Yeessssss!” when things went his way. Still, one must admire Ray’s photo-realistic belly.

Like me you may have spent the last 201 words of this piece asking yourself why the published picture of a television critic should depict him wearing sunglasses. Good question that. Perhaps they serve to disguise a face weathered by the prospect of having to watch, nay, closely follow and understand, our culture’s many utterly shit soaps, dramas and feeble attempts at situational comedy. I think I might prefer to read the Daily Mail than sit through that torment. Poor fucker. I have seen young to middle-aged women from Hampstead sitting around trying to work on sitcoms for the BBC. These women have a similar but still worse sense of humour than my mum and her friends. Sorry Ma, I give with one hand, I take with the other. If you are wondering why we are failing to produce even half-passable sitcoms, come to my work. See how BBC staff culture influences the comedy that everyone else thinks is substandard filler material. It is really amazing how television created to induce mirth can actually bring on depression. People will write theses about that one. And I will weep.

Of course one of the reasons we were so frequently able to hear our Mr Winstone raucously explaining, “I’m the King of Engerland!” was because the production was partly funded by American broadcasters and who may well change the title from “Henry VIII” to “Henry VIII: The eighth English King named Henry not the eighth part of a drama called Henry” in an attempt to further patronise their audience. Presumably the American’s got the drama at a cheap price seeing as the staff at ITV will soon be under their employment now the government has practically made it inevitable by merging Granada and Carlton.

If ITV does become American owned, don’t expect an end to sickeningly superficial pop programming in addition to the shoddily produced “public service” programmes as legally required in the ITV license. Also, expect continued shameless self-promotion within aforesaid mentioned “public service” programming such as news stories telling you about a ‘great weekend of sport’ on the Friday before a weekend of live events on the channel. And don’t give to hope the prospect of finally seeing an end to the insultingly appalling policy of producing programming based on (talentless) “stars” rather than, say, a good script or a fine idea. Try praying for an end to Ant and Dec – it cannot do any harm – but expect the pair, who are as inseparable as testicles in a ball sack, to continue sucking the black worm jism direct from Satan’s cock on live network television. Also continue to expect dramas to be shamelessly written only as vehicles for well-known faces in the hope that as many people as possible will tune in. And then you can weep.

These viewers are of course the very same people who give the Sun and the Express their circulation figures. You can here the chatter of their television sets at night along with the flickering glow in council estate windows up and down the country. As their baseball-hatted stepchildren hang around in groups on street corners, the ITV watchers continue to build up their massive reserves of fat by shoving Big Macs and TV dinners down their throats and dream of an appearance in the studio audience of Stars In Their Eyes. These are the silent majority. The people who think that the Beckham’s wedding reception wasn’t incredibly tacky, who plan their social life based on the TV schedule, who think that wearing any clothing with a well known label emblazoned on the front is the height of style. These are the overly fertile buffoons who bring their young and impressionable children to protests outside of a court of law and hand them placards advocating death to a person yet to be tried.

And I weep.

Finding a subject to address is an unending and highly challenging task for publishers of weblogs everywhere.

And it is this very struggle that brings these words to you.

For no subject today has been brought forth, except that which unfolds before you now.

Please find forgiveness if it appears the details are being dragged out a bit more than usual.

The Weblog is the ultimate publishing tool for the people.

As remarked upon here previously, it could be responsible for the Universe’s first examples of organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter expressing themselves on their own terms.

The Universe is the term used to describe everything we know exists and beyond.

The word “Universe” is a noun.

Nouns are names for things.

It might be better if organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter considered the word “Universe” to be a verb.

Verbs are words that indicate an action, state or occurrence.

It would mean that the “The” from the term “The Universe” would disappear.

Then organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter might regard themselves as part of Universe rather than Universe being a separate and distinct “thing”.



Because of the efficient organisation of society, many organised assemblies of evolutionary matter have lots of time to themselves.

Bored bits of organised intelligent grey matter and free web space equals self-exploratory thinking.

Large media companies inform assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter about the state of their slightly less chaotic section of Universe.

Companies are teams of intelligent organised evolutionary assemblies of matter who work towards set goals in exchange for money.



Many assemblies of evolved intelligent matter say that the personal accumulation of money can make their existence more happy and meaningful.

Money is a means of bartering.

Some assemblies of organised evolutionary intelligent matter say that they only want to use money that has a particular illustration of an individual wealthy and influential assembly of organised evolutionary matter.

They say they do not want to barter with organised assemblies of matter who collectively consider having a different history from them: unless those organised assemblies also use different money from them.

History is the study of things that organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter judge to have once happened and which seem important in the present.

Study is the way that organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter become more intelligent.

The best way to study is to read published material.

Those assemblies of organised intelligent matter whose ancestors had a successful history generally have better access to publishing than those assemblies that don’t

Whether a region has had a successful history is a difficult thing to define.

However a flourishing publishing industry is usually a sign that historical successes were common on that part of the Earth.

To define success, one can look in the Oxford English Dictionary. Published in the famous University town of Oxford, England.



Publishing on the Internet gives assemblies of organised intelligent evolutionary matter random insights into the states of other bits of organised intelligent evolutionary matter.

Some assemblies of matter hope that by doing this they will really be able to fully understand each other at last.

Never before have the humble electrical signals of, for instance, teenage bits of evolved assemblies of matter that in themselves collect small eruptionary masses of puss and grease been available in a self-interpreted electronic form to so many so easily.

Nor in fact the digitised images of external membranes and reproductive organs of evolved assemblies of human (and occasionally animal) matter for that matter.

This is known as pornography.

Pornography is the public performance or recording of sexual intercourse.

Sexual intercourse is the method by which organised assemblies of evolutionary matter evolves.

Evolution is the natural process of organising matter into appropriate forms in a struggle to ensure the continuation of particular sets of organised matter.

A politician is a profession that some assemblies of organised evolutionary matter choose to be.

Politicians say that seeing recordings of assemblies of evolutionary matter practising the evolutionary and organising process is harmful.

Daily Mail journalists are organised collections of evolutionary matter who speak like politicians but who hate everybody including all politicians with the exception of Margaret Thatcher.

Politicians pretend to like everybody except criminals. Although they still pretend to like politicians who are criminals.

Margaret Thatcher is an organised assembly of evolutionary matter who was once Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Margaret Thatcher was especially renowned because her sexual organs were different to those of all of the previous Prime Ministers before her.

However they are also identical to those of half of all the organised assemblies of evolutionary matter on the Earth.

Many organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter say that Margaret Thatcher was an evil bitch.

This seems to be regardless of the state of their sexual organs.

Most organised assemblies of intelligent evolutionary matter who publish weblogs run out of things to say after about 821 words. They cannot…