Rage Against The Machine are the UK’s Christmas number one! Yeah get in! Fuck you Simon Cowell, fuck you, we won’t do what you tell us!

Isn’t it fantastic that a small body of people can cause such a huge upset? What hope it gives us to know that a brave cadre can march victorious, safe in the knowledge that they’ve fought the good fight. That they’ve stopped the evil record industry from winning with their fakery. That they’ve really stuck it to The Man! Isn’t it great?

In a word. No. (more…)

Now as anybody that knows me will readily admit, money and me don’t get on. I don’t respect it and it does its best to get away from me as quickly as possible, complicit in this little game are the banks, so consequently I’m not a fan of them either.

However they have a place in the world and without them we’d be pretty fucked, that much is true. If we want to change the banking system we need to make sure it’s equitable and fair, with no ridiculous APRs (60% anyone?) and no ludicrous charging models (£25 per infraction, come on!).

What we don’t need to do is smash up a bank in Threadneedle Street under the misguided illusion that it’s political activism, it’s not you stupid bitch it’s criminal damage.

That’s not really the way to get the message across is it? People see smashed glass and broken bits of computer and immediately you’ve lost all credibility. It might be that you have any number of amazing points to make about the banking system and how it should be changed but because of what you’ve just done you’re just another lout.

That’s part of the problem though isn’t it? How do you get your message across? Where is the forum for debate?

Well of course there isn’t one. So you get rebellious teenage girls, who’re under some illusion that they’re the bastard love child of Che Guevara and Jeanne d’Arc, smashing up banks.

Saddest part of it is is that she’s being misled by a group of people (the people she more than likely shares her Brighton squat/commune/double decker bus on bricks with) who have as much of an agenda as the bankers and politicians she despises. She’s as much a pawn in their game as she is The Man’s.

Silly girl.

Sarah Palin is astonishing. And I mean that.

The intelligent amongst you will realise what I mean by that I’m sure.

So without further ado, watch this…

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community

Anybody confused as to my thoughts on the way I want the US elections to go?

Good.

By the way, SpillCrew rock. Nuff said.

As you may have noticed from my recent tweets I’ve just spent most of today sitting in airports and scooting up and down the country in a jet.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, when I say scooting up and down the country in a jet I don’t want anyone picturing Led Zeppelin groupie molestation style craziness or any fighter pilot nonsense.

No, no. I mean getting on a flight at the crack of dawn with other earnest young business men to fly to Edinburgh and then getting back on the reverse flight later that day.

Nothing even vaguely cool. Regardless though it’s not the jet bit that’s of interest, it’s the airports.

When Obi-Wan Kenobi (you might know him as old Ben) says: ‘Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.’, he’d clearly never been to East Midlands Airport at five in the morning.

Fuck me! I’ve never seen such a bedraggled bunch of scummy, fake Louis Vuitton toting, Crocs wearing, inbred half wits.

Every single one of them off to the sun to get shit faced, shag other equally unattractive bottom feeders and return home crawling with STDs, happy that they’d had a splendid time.

I’ll say it again because it bears repeating, it was five in the morning. Five in the morning and I saw people drinking Guinness.

I counted three hen parties and two stag do’s. I’m sure there were countless others it was just that I couldn’t help but notice the stag do’s because of their ‘Boys On Tour’ rugby shirts and the hens thanks to their ever so tasteful penis shaped deely-boppers.

There was also a birthday party flying out to Malaga. They were lovely. Over the strains of Metallica’s latest opus I discovered that Angela was ‘shagging her man’s best friend’, that her sister thought (in a sing song voice) she was going to get caught out and that ‘her Mam had give her £150′.

Remember that I heard this over the Metallica that was playing through my headphones. I could hear these people discuss their private lives over the sound of heavy metal. Classy.

What does it say about society that when I was called to board at 06:40 I had to ask people to excuse me to get through the queue for the bar?

Good grief, I like a drink but who in their right mind wants to drink Heineken for breakfast?

So we’ve made it onto our cruise ship and it’s full of fat people and stupid people. Still it’s a break from the norm and who knows I might even get a tan.

I’ve been reminded by a couple of things today, that in the event of an emergency it won’t be any of my actions that will cause me to die, it’ll be other people. I’ll tell you for why.

At 16:30 today we had the mandatory ship evacuation drill. There were three rules.

1. Keep right at all times.
2. Go to the muster station printed on your life jacket.
3. Don’t put your life jacket on

Fairly straight forward, no?

Still, what did about 50% of these chunky, brain dead bastards manage to do?

That’s right, scramble about the corridors in any old fashion headed for the first muster station they saw, with their life jackets on.

For fuck’s sake people it’s not difficult, just follow the instructions, they were clear enough.

I fear for my safety in the event of a proper evacuation, everyone of these bloody idiots will panic and start waving their flabby arms around and the whole system will fall apart.

God help us all.

I may have tweeted about this a couple of times but people, especially young women, seem to have some kind of affliction that leads them to use like way too much in regular conversation.

It was heartening then, when I saw this amazing poster linked in Digg.

[singlepic=441]

So it is an epidemic!

Nottingham station is currently undergoing a bit of refurbishment, consequently helpful signs have appeared dotted about, warning us busy commuters of the dangers of restricted access to footbridges and the like.

It was with great ire that I spotted one the other day at said:

Keep to left
Footbridge Access
as been moved

Now, aside from the bizarre use of capitalisation and the lack of the definite article before ‘left’, the wordsmith behind this piece of free form poetry masquerading as a sign, has committed one of the most irritating modern sins.

That sin is using ‘as’ when they mean ‘has’. For fuck’s sake, honestly how hard is it?

Before I boil up again I must reveal the silver lining behind this grubby, laminated cloud. There were two signs! The second had been helpfully annotated.

[singlepic=429]

I’m not alone!

You know what would really impress me during a Ouija board session? If the glass were to move by itself.

Yeah that’d do it for me.

You see, that glass, or planchette if you really want to give your made up shit some authority, is in fact moved by what is known as the ideomotor effect. Tiny subconscious motor movements that you don’t even register.

Perhaps they’re not enough to fling a glass across a room, leave that to the charlatan running the show, but certainly enough to move it a few inches.

So I repeat, if you want me to believe in your silly little ghost stories, I want that fucker to move by itself.

I had written the bit that follows as an entirely straight faced rant on how English as a language was in decline because of misuse by The Youth Of Today™. However on reading it back I decided it said more about me than them.

Have a read and see what you think.

If I hear one more person describe something as being blatantly obvious, I’m going to kill myself. You see I’ve reached the end of my tether and the breaking point came about this very afternoon when I had the misfortune of sitting across the aisle from a couple of teenagers on a train to London.

During this journey I had the great honour of hearing every word of their conversation. Having said that I could probably have heard it from the other end of the train given the volume of their incessant squawking.

Anyway, I digress, as they sat there opposite each other at the table seat, each of them with their feet up on the seats, their bags strategically placed on the seat beside them so no one would encroach on their personal space, they began talking about their friends relationships.

I managed to find out that Jeremy was dating a girl and whilst he was praised for this because she was like, really pretty he was (unbeknown to him I suspect) being given very black looks in the social circle because she was really, really young.

I have no idea how old the girls on the train were but given their description of Jeremy’s girlfriend I can only assume she was a foetus.

Anyway, I’ve derailed myself again. Where was I? Oh yes, abuses of English.

During their conversation I managed to note the following examples of sloppy English usage:

• Blatant/Patent
  At one point Girl A (who looked astonishingly like Noel Fielding) turned to Girl B (who looked a bit like an anorexic version of Big Suze of off Peep Show) and said that something was blatantly obvious. As we all know the correct term is patently obvious (although this ass clown clearly doesn’t).
• Random
  On several occasions both girls used the word random incorrectly. The choicest use of this modern day gem was when, describing her previous night’s escapades, Noel told Big Suze that she had been brought a drink by some random guy.
• Brought/Bought
  See above.
  Unless of course said random guy was a waiter who had in fact quite correctly brought the girl her drink, not having paid for it himself. Although of course this would almost certainly preclude the gentleman in question from being described as random, unless waiters in the establishment they were drinking in were despatched to tables in a sequence that was decided by the roll of a die or some type of Wheel Of Fortune style rotating device of course. You never know.
• Like
  I was like, so pissed off, cos she was like, completely in the wrong and I was like, no way and she was like, shut up and I was like…
  Enough!
  I think I’ve made my point clear with that one.
• HRT (High Rising Terminal)
  Every fucking word that came out of their mouths sounded like a question? Which after about two seconds became very irritating? I don’t know how they can listen to each other?

Of course there were more abuses than that, I think my mind switched off after a while though.

See what I mean? The upshot of this is that I have decided that I am going to buy a pair of slippers, a cardigan and a nice pipe and never leave the house again. I’ve clearly become a grumpy old man.

In fact I should have seen this coming ages ago, something’s changed in my head. If you want an example, look no further than this recent episode.

Earlier in the week whilst driving home from work I switched on the radio but instead of getting the soothing tones of Eddie Mair it had been left tuned into Radio 1 and all I got was a noise. A loud noise.

The noise in question was so offensive to my ears that I began muttering under my breath that modern music was shit, that it all sounded the same and that when I was a teenager we had proper rock music, etc, etc.

It was at that point I realised I was listening to the middle section of Paradise City by Guns ‘N’ Roses.

Anyone fancy a mug of cocoa?

My post the other day about the anti-piracy ads on DVDs reminded me of this spot on piece from the IT Crowd.

That’s about the size of it really isn’t it? These overblown pieces of propaganda are obscene, why should I automatically be labeled a potential movie thief for buying a DVD?

Whenever I buy a magazine, which at £4 for Sci-Fi Now is the same price as most of the DVDs I buy, I’m not forced to watch a mini documentary with a voice over warning me that photocopying is a crime, do I?