Riots and Rioters

THROW

AWAY

THE KEY.

GZS

Hey kids! Wanna be just like Rastamouse…?

Wagwan, irie? Me wanna lickle toke on da reefa. Me is tree-year old, bo.

When this dubious excuse for a cuddly kids character came out I realised right away that someone somewhere was really trying far too hard. But I was also outraged as a parent, because as a parent we all (well, most of us….)  try to steer our children away from drugs and culture that is linked to drugs. We tell them that characters on the TV who smoke cigarettes are ‘hurting themselves’; we gently lead them away from the paths that can lead to smoking cannabis and becoming a brain-addled drop-out who uses the word ‘like’ sixteen times in one sentence because their vocabulary was stunted by ‘da weed’.

So, things are going well in the land of innocent youth… And then along comes the BBC with an animated character called ‘Rastamouse’. If you look up Rasta and Rastafarian on the web you’ll easily confirm what you already know: the Rastafarian ‘religion’ practices the use of cannabis as a tool for worship. [Wow - now there's a terrifying thought: a mind infected with religiosity with a heavy dollop of psychoactive sauce for good measure just to help things along a bit.]

Does BBC stand for ‘Babies: Buy Cannabis’ now? I really really really don’t want my children growing up saying ‘ting’ instead of ‘thing’; ‘irie’ instead of ‘happy’, or ‘wagwan’ instead of ‘what’s going on?’. As they grow up, they’ll soon realise that the only people (especially white people) who speak like this invariably do so with a mega-spliff hanging out of their gob as they amble to the job centre to sign-on so they can “like score more like weed for like later, innit” before returning to their luxury squat. Remember, this isn’t a tenuous link or rampant knee-jerk stereotyping - just look up Rasta on wikipedia – Rastafarians and use of cannabis are intrinsically linked.

So, I’m expecting the following characters to pop up on BBC in the next few days (no doubt under the same nicotine-stained banner of ‘multiculturalism’):

Scientolophant
 Fridays, 4pm, CBeebies Channel.
Watch the hilarious antics of Scientolophant – he’s every kids favourite cuddly Elephant who just so happens to be a devout follower of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology cult. In today’s side-splitting episode, Scientolophant empties the contents of his bank account into Elron the Elephants piggy bank in return for a self-help CD which promises to put him in touch with his ‘true self’. But a concerned Squirrel-Dawkins scratches the CD on purpose and ruins everyone’s day.

Peyote Coyote

Tuesdays, just before baby’s nap time, CBeebies Channel.
This week, Peyote Coyote follows the village elder into the desert in search of Chief Ticktocks lost beachball – but imagine their surprise, young kiddies, when, instead of the missing ball, they actually find a sacred peyote cactus and proceed to eat it to honour The Great One. But can his friend, Dorkins The Dormouse, piss on the impromptu peyote picnic before it’s too late? Um, no he can’t – because he’s mistaken for a chipolata by a coyote on a peyote trip.

Beelzebeetle

Monday-Friday, just before beddy-byes, CBeebies Channel.
Join Satan-loving rain-beetle Beelzebeetle and friends as they explore the deep dark recesses of the cellar at number 666 Lucifer Lane. This week, Beelzebeetle stumbles across the seventh gateway to Hell inside an upturned flowerpot and, driven by The Voices, drowns all his bug-buddies in a thimble-full of petrol before denouncing the Teletubbies, defecating on a doll of Iggle Piggle from In the Night Garden, and spending the rest of the 12 minute episode ‘speaking in tongues’.

GZS

The Bullshit Society

Welcome to the Bullshit Society: a UK citizen in the year 2011 is subject to it daily.

The news is presented by smirking gits who obviously practice their ‘each…and…every…over…enunciated..word’  style of delivery in front of the mirror each morning while they brush their teeth with super-cheese-E-smile toothpaste. Then, they climb into their roving reporter BBC-issue jacket and stand in front of a care home for the mentally retarded and, in all seriousness, present something like this:

“Yes, this care home, once home to over 30 patients, was closed down seven weeks ago after the BBC’s Panorama programme uncovered serious abuse upon patients by care centre staff. A report by the governing body has concluded that the care home staff neglected to meet the needs of the patients in their care and that the entire home showed systemic failure in looking after their residents”

Now, you can probably hear the appallingly stilted and bizarrely intoned standard BBC delivery of that piece in your head, so no need to go into the Dalek school of schlock and awe journalism that this post is on the edge of addressing.

Instead let’s consider for one moment just what the hell this ‘news item’ was actually telling us. Yes – that a report on a care home (a care home that we’ve already been told has ‘failed to care for it’s patients and systematically failed to prevent abuse’) “failed to care for it’s patients and systematically failed to prevent abuse”…

We all paid our tax money into a so-called governing body so that they could spend SEVEN weeks compiling a report on what went wrong. A report which even the BBC couldn’t draw any more sensationalism out of. Do we really need reports and costly ‘enquiries’ which all too often tell us EXACTLY what we already know? How many times have we heard something like this on the news:

“Today a report came out on the train crash that happened last year in which a carriage was derailed when it ran over a concrete block placed onto the line by vandals. The report concludes that the train derailed when it came into contact with the concrete and suggests that better measures are taken to keep vandals off the line”.

Really? Really? I mean fucking really? Do we really need to be told this, let alone by a reporter who sounds like he’s constipated.

You can add to that massive insult to the intelligence of the species with 998 other channels all covering variations of the following:

The Best and the Shit (AKA: The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice USA, Masterchef, Celebrity Mastershef, Ramsays Kitchen, Strictly Dancing bollocks, Talent,  X Factor, etc etc etc ad nauseum)
There’s even a new one called ‘Show us the Funny’ where wannabe comedians ‘battle it out’ for some top prize or other whilst doing some irrelevant ‘who’s the best at this’ task. Is this what society in the UK is all about now? The VERY BEST and the UTTERLY SHIT? You’re fired, you’re hired. You’re the best chef in England, and you on the other hand can fuck off back to the family chip shop. Are these the values we want our kids to grow up with? Totally cut-throat, black and white, do-or-die, shit-or-godlike, mega-success or total failuredom. Nice world to live in, that. The headlines are going to fill up with teenage suicides and leftover notes which say something like ‘if Simon Cowell thinks I’m crap then it’s not worth living’.

The Police, Ambulance, Drunk & Disorderly, Joyriders in A&E Caught on Camera Show
Need I say more? Cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap programming. What does this do to the brains of our youth? Half the audience will be despairing over the collapse of society whilst the others make notes on the best way to TWOK a car and try to spot themselves on the telly later.

Find or Tart up Your Old Shit and Sell it For Cash in the Attic at an Auction Gameshow StyleThingie
Yes – you too might be sitting on a pile of cash. Who knows, that painting of the green oriental lady your grandad shoved up into the loft in 1973 might be a Monet! Or, bloody not. Anyway, lets’ split you up into meaningless teams and make you buy/sell/swap all this shit and we’ll add up every last 50p of it until we get to an equally meaningless ‘winner’. Perhaps some viewers will even get out the stepladder and venture into their loft in search of old priceless family heirlooms… and then paint over the fucker with plasticote and screw on some MDF just so that Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen can pin a ‘I am the Beeb’s Daytime TV Bitch’  badge onto your sweaty winner’s forehead.

The “You Eat/Dress/Act/Shit like a Twat – So Let’s Fix You By Inviting Members of the Public to Take the Piss out of you before Staging a Humiliating Makeover” show
This is just another breed of the ‘you’re not good enough for anyone unless you measure up to an impossible standard’ show. The only function of these shows is to make huge portions of UK society feel inadequate. Those that are inspired by these shows will always fail because, unfortunately (for them…) there is no personal trainer, no Gok Wan, no personal stool-inspector like Gillian Whatsername, to step in with camera teams to make you look superficially good by the end.

The Police/Hospital/Murder-in-a-sleepy-village Gritty Drama Show
Why are these so popular? I don’t care if you start calling the characters silly names like Jack Frost or annoying wordplay type names like ‘Doc Martin’ (“ooh, now I think about it, he is just like a curmudgeonly old boot  isn’t he – he’s so moody he’s always giving people a ‘good kicking’, just like you can with a doctor martins boot!” etc). Once again, they’re cheap to make. Loads of ready made costumes and easy, modern sets or locations. Look, chances are we’re all going to spend far too long in A&E or hospital ourselves at some point in our lives – why in the merry fuckville would you want to spend hundreds of hours in TV hospitals worrying about the health of fictional people for several years – before you finally end up there for real and wish to hell that the BBC camera crew trying to film an expose of falling hospital standards would just fuck off and leave you and your colostomy alone.

And while we’re on that subject…
The Reality Hospital/Vet/Estate Agent/Lorry Driver/Boss back to the Shopfloor/Day in the life of a Turd Polisher Show
Cheap cheap cheap-o-vision. Stick a camera anywhere, including up their arses, down their sewer, in their company car, in a shop, in a restaurant – anywhere, and the great British public will sit and watch it.

This is the Bullshit Society. A place where entertainment and the mundanities of real life are indistinguishable. Where our kids learn that there’s only superstardom or super-failuredom and NOTHING inbetween. Where the grimness of life is brought to the fore and any enlightenment is shoved onto BBC4 at 1:30 in the morning for fear that too much knowledge might actually make people switch off the TV and read a book. Do we really need to be told what to care about by the news editor of the BBC/ITV etc? And then have it spoon-fed at us like the news equivalent of a soggy Farleys Rusk? I don’t want Mister ‘I End All My News Reports A….Lot….Like…This’  to tell me what I should find important or dramatic. Or, are we getting the media that we deserve I wonder?  If so, the Bullshit Society is here to stay.

GZS

Google Facebook Twitter Apple iPad Blogs (and Richard Dawkins)

I thought I’d make the un-bracketed part of title of this post something hip, trendy and contemporary – and then ditch it for something altogether more interesting. Why? Because tags don’t seem to work in blogs anymore, so I’m going to see what happens if the title of a post results in more hits if it just so happens to be peppered with ‘webby’ bollox.

So, back to something more interesting: Rationalist and pro-Atheism campaigner Professor Richard Dawkins.

There’s a season on Channel 4 at the moment called ‘Richard Dawkins’ Age of Reason’. Oddly (or perhaps not) one programme in this season, ‘The God Delusion’,  is actually a re-packaged version of the two-part documentary ‘Root of All Evil?’ which aired around 3 years ago. Still, it makes engrossing and thought-provoking viewing, with the emphasis of Dawkins’ argument being firmly on the irrationality of faith. What I like about Professor Dawkins’ approach is that, despite the fact that he’s dealing with what is arguably the polar opposite of science, he still employs a rational and scientific methodology to de-construct the (frankly, non-existent)  argument in support of God(s) and religious belief; instead examining the sociological, psychological (and even biological) reasons behind the ‘mind virus’ that is religion -showing that, whilst morality and the human predilection towards faith have been advantageous for our species in evolutionary terms, it  has now become a divisive and counter-productive negative force in the world. From faith schools and the soft indoctrination of our children into ways of thinking that limit their appreciation of the wonders that the natural universe provides, to the religious fundamentalists who pass on their tit-for-tat ideological and theological religious wars to their junior jihadists – Dawkins’ builds an impressive case for a world built on science and reason.

The only difficult truth here is that the programme will probably only find it’s audience in the converted. Those people ‘of faith’ who care to dip a toe in the waters of rationality (something they may be frightened of doing, since thinking for themselves is usually drummed out of them as children by religious schooling and parenting) may find themselves rightly questioning the basis for their own faith (which is, by definition, believing in something without any external demonstrable evidence to back it up). But, sadly, I suspect that the religious worm squatting in the minds of the infected will crush any thought of indulging in a programme like this around half a nanosecond before the thought consciously occurs.

One final thought: As adults (and even as children) we measure ‘reality’ by observing the world around us. We all know that if you throw a ball up into the air, it’ll come down again. The reason we all believe this is because we test the theory in practice (we throw the ball) and compare our findings with our peers (we talk about what happened when we threw the ball). And so a consensus reality is formed. And it’s been that way for thousands of years, before even the word ‘science’ was coined. So, when we’re asked to believe that a man can walk on water, several hundred mental alarm bells should naturally start ringing – after all, we’re only a successful species because we learn the rules of reality, predict how things will react when we interact with them, and so harness and develop the world around us. However, faith short-circuits that entire thinking process and tells us to ‘just believe’, with religious texts actively promoting hell and damnation for all non-believers. And therein lies one of many sizeable contradictions in the whole pro-religion argument: God will damn me for not believing in Him, and yet I am a product of the world He created – nothing more, nothing less. My understanding of the universe is built upon the world around me and what I’ve learned about it – I know that I could throw the ball an infinite number of times and each and every time the ball would fall back down again. In other words, how can God blame the product of His creation for not believing in him when the very universe he created contains strict rules by which we measure reality itself. If the ball stood any chance of going up, left, right, loop-the-loop or even turning into a microwave oven, we would have a very unpredictable (and probably untameable) world – but we would at least have some reason to believe that some unseen force was at work. As it stands, God gives us no evidential reasons to believe in him, so to all intents and purposes He probably doesn’t exist. And if he does, He has no right to blame his own creation for not believing in Him – it’s His fault for creating a world with consistent rules, the very foundation of rational thought.

GZS

How to weed out the mentally ill: EastEnders

Just check this out:

DeadEnders

“An error which led to a private mobile phone number appearing on screen during an episode of EastEnders compromised privacy. Lisa Edwards’ number was briefly displayed above a text message received by Ricky Butcher from Sam Mitchell.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8644648.stm

But the single most amazing thing about this story is this part:

“Mrs Edwards says she received 2,800 messages after the episode was aired in September, some of them abusive.”

So, that means there are thousands of people who:

a) Watch Eastenders on TV
b) Watch Eastenders on TV – and THINK THE PEOPLE IN IT ARE REAL,

and

c) Watch Eastenders on TV, think the people in it are real (presumably transported into the little glowing box in their living room through electrickery and Hogwarts) AND WRITE DOWN TELEPHONE NUMBERS AND CALL OR MESSAGE THEM after the show’s over.

EastEnders is real life! Me kill you ded if you say it ain't!

Now, glue my eyelids open and make me watch soaps if I’m wrong, but there are clearly two closely connected things at work here: delusional morons and East-bloody-Enders. Unlike the search for the evolutionary ancestry of Homo Sapiens, there is no missing link here.
Mad People + EastEnders = Abusive phonecalls meant for imaginary TV characters.

When the UK population becomes 95% comprised of socially-malajusted slightly unhinged soap addicts it’s going to be Soapageddon. I say that we should waste billions of pounds of taxpayers money, not on failing banks or MP’s expenses, but on an Elite Anti-Soap-Nutter Taskforce who unbundle themselves from unmarked vans during the next episode of DeadEnders, storm these people’s houses and drag the raving morons into large Soap-free recovery insitutions. Institutions where sterilisation is mandatory and all forms of electronic communication and entertainment are restricted.  I know, I know – I’m a  soft touch.

GZS

Greedy Microsoft want to charge for BBC

It's what's on the inside that counts...

What’s up with Microsoft? Are they running low on cash? Not likely. If you have an Xbox360 then you’ll probably pay them around £30 a year for Gold Membership to Xbox Live – allowing access to premium content and online gaming. It all sounds fair enough, but with the BBC’s iPlayer already available on the Xbox’s two main competitor’s consoles – the Wii and the PS3 – Microsoft are missing out. And it’s their own fault:

Xbox 360 iPlayer launch delayed indefinitely

What don’t Microsoft get about this? Have they even heard of ‘value-add’ services? Do they have to charge for absolutely everything??

...that is, UNLESS you have an Xbox360.

The BBC themselves aren’t allowed to charge for the iPlayer – what the hell makes Microsoft think they’re allowed to just because a) they’re big bad Microsoft, and b) they have a ‘strategy’ to charge for absolutely everything. I mean, what company seriously has the balls to make a strategy to charge for everything? Oh yeah, that would be Microsoft. They really need to wake up and smell the free entertainment. The Xbox is a popular enough console, but how many extra hours do you think people will spend on their console if thy can switch from gaming to watching TV? And if, to put it in an idiotic term used by marketers, they have more backsides on seats for a longer time, this can only be good for the Xbox brand and increase it’s offering. It’ll probably get people interested in Xbox 360 who previously only saw it as a games console rather than a media centre.

Microsoft should stop worshipping the almighty dollar and give a little back to its already paying public, for once. Besides, the BBC is ours – we already paid for it.

GZS