When Will They Ban Facebook?

I used to loathe Facebook.

I'd sneer at it. Snarl at it. Use it sparingly, use it begrudgingly and know that I was being a hypocrite.

It seemed to embody the worst of social media: aggrandizing the trivial; making monoliths of minutia. It encouraged its users to market themselves as "social product" whose worth was tied into the value of their status.

I saw it as evidence of society's degeneracy; proof that any promise of revolution was being bought off with the sop of funny pictures, in-jokes, soft porn and distracting memes while Rome burnt beyond the little bubble of our individual internet connections.

Maybe though that was just me? Maybe I was only seeing the pretty lights on the surface; the Angry Birds, the Photoshopped pictures of celebs, the wool over my eyes?

Frequently when I log into Facebook now I am pleasantly surprised at how politicized it is. My updates are rife with international satire, news of causes, plights and global injustice. There are petitions. There is shared outrage. There is a sense of movement and speaking out. Of things not being allowed to be swept under the carpet. Illegal evictions in Kenya appear alongside stories of dodgy banking deals in the UK and the yet further developments of Operation Yewtree.

Somehow Facebook has become a news source.

Again, maybe that's just me?

Facebook, like anything I suppose, can be as trivial or an meaningful as the individual makes it.

I can't believe I'm going to say this but, thanks to Facebook - or rather thanks to those who use it - I feel a little more world-aware than I have been for a long time. I'm not saying I'm suddenly an activist with a balaclava and a wine bottle filled with petrol... but that little bubble of my internet connection seems wider and a little more all-encompassing than it once was.

As clichéd as it is: I feel connected. Connected with people who are as dissatisfied as me.

On Facebook we snarl now at a politicians. Take our celebs to task. Castigate lazy and misinformed (and misinforming) journalists. Share the traumas of people in far away countries that we will never meet but whose trauma touches us. People are speaking out. Shouting. Demanding.

Maybe society isn't as degenerate as I feared?

But I worry.

Despite the appalling behaviour of our journalists the conclusions of the Leveson Enquiry are, nevertheless, a blow for freedom of speech. Yes, there need to be checks and balances but the press also needs a certain amount of freedom to pursue those in power who are doing us wrong. I worry that as the gags start to be applied, where will it end?

Social media - our voice - is already no longer as free and unfettered as it once was. People have got into legal trouble on Twitter and elsewhere.

How long before the censors start carving up what we can and can't satirize on Facebook? How long before they stop us sharing information, our stories, our opinions, our Photoshopped pictures of David Cameron morphed into Iggle-piggle?

How long before the powers-that-be ban Facebook altogether?

Do we really want to go back to a blinkered life playing Angry Birds while the politicians and corporations stalk the streets outside armed with fire brands and petrol?

Gag

Blogs. I wrote a few. But then again, too few to mention...

Well. That’s not factually true.

Since I began this on-line journey into the egotistical sublime back in the heady days of 2006 I’ve managed to rack up a mind-numbing 920 posts. I’ve been pretty darn consistent too. 3 posts a week for much of it, covering a wealth of subjects that have ranged from TV shows, politics, news events, social issues, home life and whatever doe-eyed beauty off the telly that I happened to fancy in any given moment.

But most of you won’t have failed to have noticed a gradual tailing off of productive output. A creative brewer’s droop. A distinct lessening of literal vitality.

My Bloggertropolis mojo is all but spent.

It’s time to draw a line beneath, put an end to and snuff out the guttering candle that is Bloggertropolis.

Oh hush your wailing. The end has been nigh for months now and the writing has been on the wall for longer than that.

The rot for me began when my blog was outed and touted by those who know me in real life (as opposed to just virtually). Without going over old wounds it caused upset and strife and made life difficult. Mostly for me (and I have to say my life is the one that I’m most concerned about). Certain subjects became taboo. Certain emotional chakras were suddenly blocked. Despite my best efforts I found myself gelded and my teeth pulled and a whacking great gag shoved into my mouth. Sure I kept going. Kept the writing production line rolling. Desperately tried to search out loopholes and ways round the restrictions... but euphemism and metaphor can only express so much.

Suddenly I woke up and found that Bloggertropolis had lost its bite, its bile and its balls (though thankfully not its alliteration).

I had become the blogging eunuch.

As much as it has tickled me to be a thorn in the side of so many for so long I have to admit to myself that the pale reflection this blog has become is now more of a thorn in my side than anybody else’s. Simply because it is not doing what I want it to do nor allowing me to express myself in the way that I would wish.

So, my old muckers, mateys and fellamelads, ‘tis time to say goodbye. Time to sign off and let the blogging underwriters evaluate my creative credit. I have other projects planned. Some of them not involving world domination or getting into Professor Alice Robert’s handsomely scientific knickers. Some lucky few of you will receive an email from me soon describing ways in which we might stay in touch.

The unlucky few can kiss my blogging ass.

This is how my blog ends.

Not with a bang (alas). But with you whimpering.

Midday Express

I went for a lunch time meal with mates the other day.

We tried the new Wagamama’s that had opened in town a month or two ago.

My experience of noodles up to this point had been constrained to the dry stuff that you buy in supermarkets and boil for about 10 minutes or the occasional visit to a Thai restaurant. I figured Wagamama’s fell somewhere between the two with its noodles being cooked by professional chefs but cooked in a kitchen belonging to a restaurant chain as opposed to a little Thai family who emigrated here in the 80’s and opened up a family run restaurant in a shoebox.

I was quite impressed by the Wagamama experience. There was an energy about the place that you don’t normally find in restaurants. The waiters and waitresses were visibly busy. As opposed to being invisibly busy where you cannot see them but charitably suppose them to be about the business of another diner.

The food was good but as this is not a sponsored post I am not going to wax lyrical about their fresh spring onions or the tenderness of their chicken breasts. Instead I am going to focus on the tables.

Wagamama’s in Leamington has long trestle tables that span the entire width of the eating environment. Down the centre of this table glides a metal dividing pole with a small strip light installed into the top of it so that one side of the trestle table is divided from the other by close quarter lighting from above.

Maybe to those of you who “do lunch” regularly this is old hat. Those of you who are more cosmopolitan possibly eat from loveseats suspended 8ft above lotus flower strewn water and consider the novelty of long benches and tables to me as being rather twee. To me, however, it was new. And unfortunately my diseased mind could only conjure up one reference point with which to normalize the experience.

Midnight Express.

The bit where Billy Hayes has been locked up but gets a last visit from his girlfriend and attempts to connect his slobbering, sobbing lips with her pert breasts through about two inches of bullet proof, knife proof, definitely penis proof glass.

Mentioning this out loud probably explains why the conversation between me and my two female colleagues stalled momentarily.

This aside I was impressed by the amount of young kids that were about the place merrily tucking into steaming bowls of eastern-esque cuisine.

Haven’t us proles come a long way since I was a kid?

Back when I were a lad (by ‘eck) it were a big thing to eat out at a Berni Inn let alone somewhere that sold sushi and noodles and expected you to mop the lot up with a pair of chopsticks.

Such marlarky was for rich toffs – those who holidayed in places other than Weston-super-Mare and Scunthorpe and instead pushed the envelope out to the continent and ate at an El Berni Posada in Spain.

The world has very quickly got a lot smaller.

Though, of course, this could entirely be down to an optical illusion caused by the size of the tables...

The World's Favourite Banker

I didn't set out to watch Gary Barlow: On Her Majesty's Service, truly I didn't. I was just waiting for The Apprentice final to begin and found myself pitched in at the half way point.

About five minutes after that I wanted to retch up my spleen.

Oh I know the whole premise of the show was a huge Royal arse-kissing exercise with Gary Barlow puckering up his nice-boy-next-door lips and wiping off the residue with a napkin but I was gobsmacked at just how far the ex-Take That frontman was prepared to go in service to Her Majesty.

And can I just say right here, at the top of this mountain of invective, that I genuinely have no beef with The Royals. I am not anti-Royalist by any means though at the same time there is a noticeable absence of bunting from around my domicile this Bank Holiday weekend. I am a jockey who quite spectacularly rides the fence named "Couldn't Care Less Either Way".

I can only suppose from the title of the show that we were meant to see Gary as some kind of James Bond character, travelling the globe on a "mission impossible" to sample as much musical diversity as humanly possible armed only with a state-of-the-art laptop and a boom mic operator. In the last half hour that I saw Gary skipped his way across Africa, Jamaica, Australia and The Solomon Islands.

James Bond he wasn't. Suave and sophisticated he most certainly wasn't.

He was a stiff Englishman in a pair of shorts. And as patronizing as all hell.

But in a nice way. I need to stress the niceness of it actually. He was nice. He went out of his way to be nice. To be above and beyond nice. To stretch nicety to the point where a normal human being's mind would bow and bend and finally snap itself into the irredeemable realm of psychopathology.

He told a group of African musicians who had fashioned their own instruments from rubbish that their music was nice. He told an Aborgine classical guitar player that his music was really nice. Really, really nice. Hey, he was really pushing the boat on that one. The Aborigine guy had an English interpreter, prompting Gary to ask of the guy spoke English. Yes, Gary. He speaks the Queen's English better than you or I, the interpreter was there to convert his 1950's BBC tones into Mancunian slang the better to swing the meaning past your cloth-eared brain. After recording the quite superb guitar playing, Gary turned knowingly to the camera and said that he reckoned Mr Aborigine knew more English than he was cracking on... Gary nodded sagely and lowered his voice an octave to show that a great pearl of wisdom was about to drop out of his beared maw, "Just like the French."

Christ, if that is James Bond abroad then the British Secret Service is truly fucked. Musically we've been buggered for years.

And the end result? The masterpiece cobbled together by all this globetrotting?

They played it to the Queen with not only Gary present but also Andrew Lloyd Webber. I'm guessing his face was there to provide effective distraction from the music. The Queen sat tense and stiff like she was passing a gall stone. And that was before they'd even started playing the CD.

The song was bland. The song was forgettable.

It was... nice.

Gary had tried to capture the music of the world (or to be exact the Commonwealth) in the hope of coming up with something original and groundbreaking.

Instead all he produced was the background music to a bank advert or British Airways.

As the final notes faded out, I expected the voice of Sir Michael John Gambon to intone "HSBC - The World's Favourite Bank", just before the visuals cut to a stylized atlas highlighting all the cities of the world where you can get really appalling service from your bank.

The song said nothing about the Queen or the Jubilee or Britain or anything. The only thing that was Royal about it was one sample of Prince Harry slapping a tamborine about halfway through the song, and to be honest, I don't think Fairport Convention are going to be in a rush to sign him up.

What an enormous waste of money, energy, time and life. For you, for me and for The Queen.

Next time, Your Maj, might I suggest Engelbert Humperdinck?

Get Out Of The Way

Sometimes you just want to get home. Sometimes you just want to get from A to B through C (A = morning, B = evening, C = work / life / society) with the minimum of fuss and upset. You want to take the shortest, quickest, easiest route. The path of least resistance. As the crow flies.

Because you’re (to quote Shrek) a donkey on the edge. You are a Hadron collider of disenchantment molecules. One more straw on your back and you are going to get mediaeval on the world’s ass.

It’s not that you have anything against the world. No big beef. No real big issue. It’s just there. Today the world is there and you would much rather it not be there. But if it’s going to be there the least it can do is shut the fuck up and play ball.

That’s right. I want the world’s ass to play ball. Don’t get picky with my metaphors, I’m not in the mood.

So why is it, on these days, on these days when your mind is a hurricane of venom and antisocial energy that people, things, get in your way?

You’re just trying to get through to the other side as peacefully as you can but they – them – they get in your way. Constantly. Deliberately.

The phone call you know you shouldn’t answer but you do and it braindumps another load of crap onto your ass just before you’re about to go home. The people who insist on stopping immediately in front of you when you are rushing through town on an irritating, shit-kicking errand and they just stop dead and flounder and flummox and flop about wetly blocking your way even though they know you are there. The car at the junction that slows down in front of you not to let you cross but because they can’t be bothered to rush too much and so they slow but not slow enough for you to be able to cross in front of them and it’s raining but now you have to wait until Mr Air Conditioned Leather Car Seat and his kajillion decibel sound system on wheels rolls past you before you can cross. The shops who choose this moment – this exact moment – to run out of whatever essential item you need to buy on your way home when they have it every other sodding day of the year but no, not today, not at this hour, and now you have to go out of your way, walk longer, encounter more people, just to get this one solitary item from another shop which you don’t even like and which isn’t going to make your life any better but will feel like some kind of victory if you do actually get it.

Why? Why do all these get in your way?

Why do they choose today of all days to get in your face?

Why can’t they just stay the fuck away?

You know what I need?

A gun. A gun like Dirk Deckard had in Bladerunner. A huge fat jumbo jet sausage of a gun that shoots bullets the size of coke cans. Cos’ when Dirk pulled that piece and shouted, “get out of the way” people did. They got out of his way.

Well, that’s what I need. That’s what I want. It’s not a luxury. It’s an essential item. It’s survival, people, survival. I will die without it.

And it’s nothing personal. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt you. Truly I don’t.

I. Just. Want. You. To. Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

Out Of Africa

A short while ago – in zestful arrogance – I wrote a sarcastic email to some poor enterprising con man in Burkina Faso. I took the mickey out of his risible attempts to get me involved in a multi-million dollar scam and scoffed at the very idea that my Great Aunt Matilda could have enjoyed sexual congress with a tribesman of that region a century ago producing an off-shoot of the family tree that would, in 2009, name me as a the sole heir to his dubiously misbegotten fortune.

Of course I was aware of the scientific theory that we all ultimately descended from a single tribe in central Africa many thousands of years ago but ignored it in favour of cutting edge satire and a cheap joke about Kunte Kinte being my long lost cousin.

I now bow my head in shame.

Dr Alice Roberts (if my doctor looked liked her I’d become a hypochondriac) has investigated and, to my mind, proven the theory as fact beyond all shadow of a doubt. Her programme, The Human Journey, has been essential Sunday night viewing for the last 4 weeks.

And what a terrific gig for Dr R.

She got to sashay her pert little tush across every continent on the planet and got her hands wrapped around some amazing looking bones. Lucky girl.

But it wasn’t all sun screen and sultry pouts to camera for Dr R, Oh no. She worked bloody hard too. She risked a night alone in the African bush, fingered lots of ancient skulls in dusty museum store rooms and correlated and produced a work of such superlative televisual research that it stopped me mourning the absence of Lark Rise To Candleford.

It seems that we did indeed – all of us – descend from one single tribe that emerged out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. A tribe that gradually worked its way up into Europe, jogged across into Asia and Australasia and finally made the big leap into the Americas about 14,500 years ago – spreading its bounteous seed like wild oats as it went. Genetically the theory has also been proven. Undeniably. Irrefutably. The men in white coats say so. Their scientific barcode thingies prove it.

We are all of us related.

You are all of you – including the con man in Burkina Faso, including Dr Alice Roberts – my brothers and sisters.

Technically we’ve been inbreeding for years.

No wonder the planet is in such a God-awful mess.

The Decline Of Western Civilization

Is this the end of the West? The end of Western supremacy and prosperity?

I don’t pretend to know much about global economics or international stock markets but with all the talk of “credit crunch”, “fluidity” and “the shoring up of financial institutions” even I can suss that things are possibly going tits up in the world.

America is panicking. We’re panicking. Europe is flapping about and looking to Gordon Brown for advice (I’m panicking).

Could this be the end of the world as we know it?

Quite possibly. There’s no money, There’s very little oil. Our military forces and those of the US are stretched tighter than Sarah Palin’s fake smile and Bruce Forsyth is plainly losing it on Strictly Come Dancing...

All in all things are looking bad.

With a couple of youngsters gambolling about the house I’m finding that I’m worrying more and more about what the future holds (or rather what it doesn’t hold). The world they may come to inherit may be far more constrained than ours ever was:

• No more easy travel as oil prices have rocketed skyward. (Or rather have floated upwards like a hot air balloon as no-one can afford the fuel for rockets). People now have to work locally as no-one can afford to commute.


• Food prices increased so much that we start receiving aid packages from Zimbabwe. Suddenly everybody has a vegetable plot in their back garden and those who paved over their gardens to park two extra cars and a gazebo are now desperately digging them up again in time for planting.


• House prices dropped to new affordable lows but no-one can afford to hire the removal men to make a change of address worthwhile.


• Everybody on crap wages that are taxed to death in order to pay for the mistakes of the suited buffoons whose irresponsibility with the nation’s money led to this recession in the first place.


• Bruce Forsyth, now well over his first century, continues to fluff his jokes on Strictly Come Dancing and throw in the odd tap step to hide the fact that nobody is laughing.

I’d emigrate but there’s nowhere unaffected by this chaos to emigrate to.

Whatever happened to “the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades”?