Posts Tagged ‘i call bullshit’
Behind the fallacy: 2012 in review
December 21st, 2009 | 
Author: 
As this chart not-so-clearly illustrates, the Sun will ascend into the tropic of Ubiquity around this time in 3 years. We will fly into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, which will crush us down to less than the size of a satsuma. The whole process will take about two hours, twenty minutes.
Everyone loves a happy ending. Just yesterday, researchers unveiled that the end of makeshift cancer treatments is in sight. And on Friday 18 December 2009, Terry Wogan’s reign of breakfast radio terror came to an end as he was overthrown by employment law and common sense.
Oh, what’s that? Some people love peril and confusion to dominate the human psyche? One such person is Roland Emmerich?
Update: most cinema goers have a hard on for disaster.
Thejamtart saw 2012 ages ago, and although the plot, script, cast and premise left much to be desired she recommended it for a December cinema outing. Having seen a trailer for 2012, I was enthralled by the prospect of seeing (in modern cinema crikey-vision™ no less) the dome of the Sistine Chapel steamroll over a bunch of Catholics on Saint Peter’s square holding a doomed vigil, including a fictional Italian president. Reduced to the heretic subatomic particles of which they so readily and vehemently discredit the existence, I can’t help but guffaw at the irony like an inexcusable expenses-claiming Labour MP.
Why iTunes sucks
It's over, I'm sorry. It's not me. It's you.
Because I have an iPod, I use iTunes on my computer. And it regularly pisses me off, to the point where I’m giving up on it.
I mean, doesn’t Apple have a reputation for creating user-friendly stuff that’s free of bugs when they release it to the public? Where does that reputation come from? Because it sure isn’t from iTunes.
Here are all the stupid things it does to me…
Compendium of quirky calendars for non-conformists
I’d like to apologise to our readers and my blogging colleagues for the unannounced and prolonged downtime experienced over the last couple of weeks. I have resigned from the finance department and a chimp equipped with basic numeracy and organisation skills has been found to usurp me.
Ostentatious debutantes eviscerated for your year-round delectation
Somehow we have entered December, after what feels like only a few months into 2009.
Tesco and all the despotic UK retailers have been ready for Christmas since minutes after Halloween fizzled out, merchandising decorations and the like everywhere you turn.
Marketers love spinning sales off the back of the seasonal festivities that pepper the calendar year. September is the ideal time to buy back-to-school home and contents cover. DFS love to drive home the importance of getting a brand new sofa every December, “the ideal family Christmas present”. (That of course relies on you having not already bought one every bank holiday so far this year. But make sure to leave room under the stairs for just one more settee which you’ll inevitably rush out to get at 12:01am on Boxing Day!)
One thing you’ll find in nearly every shop around now is 2010 calendars. There’s a calendar for the usual tastes out there, from cute West Yorkshire terriers to marine life photography. Yay! Dolphins frolicking about in enclosures in the Dominican Republic, secretly plotting our demise…
For all the hormonally addled teenster there’s calendars of Hollyoaks hunks or The Bill babes. Mm, Roberta Taylor in a negligee in January.
But that’s all a bit run of the mill. For more select tastes, you can gawp at goats that’ve climbed trees to gain a better picture of the surrounding pastures.
Or, if you’re a loathsome sadist, there are 12 captivating photographs of non-descript beasts with their viscera caulked all over the highways of America.
Have you got a hilarious idea for a calendar? Are you set to appear in one, in a reputation-shattering compromising situation? Let us know!
Stupid ways to earn a living #4: top-flight footballer
“He could turn on a sixpence” goes an old and remarkably unrealistic football-related maxim. A more contemporary interpretation would go something like “he could turn on fifty grand”.
It all but knocks me out cold that Ben Haim of financially struggling Portsmouth earned something in the region of the abovementioned figure to benchwarm at Manchester City with his Nike Pro+ sweats. Meanwhile, NHS nurses fight over bean sprouts.
Regress Australia Fair: Victoria state in morality time-lapse
Screw you guys we're off to Sydney
In The Time Traveller’s Wife, the protagonist keeps losing children as they teleport in and out of her womb before she can carry them to term.
Her strict Catholic upbringing prohibits her from taking steps to minimise the damage done by repeated miscarriages. In the meantime, the time traveller, Henry, makes no effort to save her as he is repeatedly confounded in even the most innocuous fate-altering experiments.
The Australian state of Victoria has set itself apart from the free world and is intending to send all its citizens into the past in its decision to allow religious groups to discriminate based on sexual orientation or family situation.
Host your own Windows-themed parade of forced corporate tastiness!
Don't worry! Just mash Ctrl+Alt+Del twice if you're in a hurry...
Microsoft can’t be arsed to take Windows 7 to exhibitions or expos this year. Instead they encourage their beta testers to invite everyone to their house and have a Windows 7 themed party.
The hammyness is only occluded by the strained range of genders, ethnicities and age groups on display here. The idea is to gather the most unlikely bunch of “friends” on the planet, and instead of playing Ring of Fire, Spin the Bottle or Rude Guess Who? let’s exchange lessons in desktop customisation and taskbar organisation. WOOHOO SPRING BREAK!
“We’ve all had a head start” gushes the soccer-mom typecast in the promo.
“You may want to begin installing Windows 7 a few days in advance” the plaid shirt and thick-glasses clad barely palatable techie guy meaningfully warns us.
Top travel tip: go to Rome before the world ends
I just wanted an excuse to show off my awesome photo, so I wrote this article
I was in Rome last week. I’d never been on holiday before, let alone to Italy, because I’m poor and usually have to sell the cheesy nodules from between my toes just to buy food, so my girlfriend and I adamantly hauled our sweaty arses round every tourist activity we could find, checking them off one by one.
Coliseum? Check. Pantheon? Check. Eight million largely identical but incredibly pretty churches? Check. Ate a pizza? Check. Ran for our lives every time we tried to cross a road (or even go near a road, or look at a road, even through the corner of our eyes)? Check, check, check.
The Vatican? Oh, check with a cherry on top.
What happens if you look up Pixie Lott in the thesaurus?
As everyone knows my favourite genre of music is blond female vocalist. I just can’t get enough! Growing up my mother would always listen to Debbie Harry and the odd breathy rendition by Marilyn Monroe.
In my formative years Christina, Britney and Shakira owned the charts. This all contributed to my fervent hankering for the recent onslaught of pseudo-modest soulsters.
But in the last year I’ve become so overwhelmed with mid-20’s female breakthrough artists with blond hair that I can’t tell them apart! Can you help me sort Pixie Boots from Lady Duffy? What sets Duffy apart from Hilary Duff, apart from the former being a diminutive of the latter?
Further postal delays, still no-one cares
Industrial action, also known as avoiding work
Significant delays in sending letters and parcels to the UK through the Royal Mail are happening again. While only London staff are involved in industrial action this week, there is rising fear over a looming national strike, causing mild to negligible panic among aunties and luddites.
Members of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) will ballot tomorrow in between mid-day bowls of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut about whether to escalate their action to a national walkout.
While the details of why they are striking or if they even understand the implications of their facetious and consistent industrial actions remain unclear, one thing is certain: no-one cares.
Tags: employment, i call bullshit, ignorance, media, money, morons, opinion, royal mail, strikes | 
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Ticketnovice, or how to completely avoid ever going to a single gig
I want to go to a gig, but I can’t because TicketMaster is intent on keeping me at arm’s length from any ticket at all times.
Browse to Ticketmaster.co.uk and try to book something. It needn’t be anything particularly popular. Try getting the unreserved standing tickets. Proceed through loads of pointless questions that could definitely wait until I’ve committed to a couple of tickets. Decipher the faux-typewriter Captcha words and reproduce them in the text field provided. Find out that the tickets aren’t available. Repeat.
Despite that I choose the “just find me a fucking seat, I don’t care where” option, infuriatingly it states that my anally stringent gig-attending criteria are preventing it from finding any tickets to sell me, so I have to go back and try looking for tickets to see the same band in Dusseldorf or Montreal.
Guys, look – I’m a big boy, if the damn thing is sold out, just tell me – I can take it!
