Forest Gump

Today's current post is done from the university library once again. The wonder of free, unlimited internet, has once again become a glamorous dream because something fucked up. The majority of us have been in a position where we've been on the phone to a call centre with someone barely able to speak English on the other end. For those of you unfamiliar with the scenario, there is nothing satisfying about trying to unscrew a phone socket that has been stuck to the wall with an unholy force, while a voice tuts and clucks impatiently into your ear as you struggle to understand their most basic commands. Predictably, none of their advice helped. So I decided to wait until the end of the call where an automated voice asked how I had found the service, and if the problem had been resolved. I answered with "shite" and "useless" respectively.

Something we can all learn from. Apparently.

In times like those, I loose my respect for humanity a little. So to discover a little about the world away from humans, and to pass the time without internet, I invested in the complete series of Planet Earth for a measly £11. Which I think is pretty impressive for 15 hours of David Attenborough narrated goodness. I've only dipped my toe into the collection so far, so I don't really have material for a full blown review. But nevertheless I'm going to dither on about how breathtaking it can be. Planet Earth took over 5 years to film, with a £16 million budget. On that information alone, it's nice to know that not everything on television is a rushed pile of shit. And in the 2 hours that I watched it, I started to care more about the environment than I ever have done in my 19 years on this planet. The series never directly grabs you with U C THat PoloaR br? itz dieYing from gloBal warminG!!!11 but watching a Snow Leopard desperately trying to make a kill actually makes it seem more real than it ever was in a leaflet posted through my door or a speech make by Al gore (Poet and I didn't know it etc). Overall I'm very glad I'm a human. If you look around, you can see we have achieved stupid amounts. And it's thanks to humans that I've been able to watch Planet Earth. But when things aren't in our own interests, we get absurdly lazy. And we are still a crazily prejudiced (myself included at times) race. In the first episode of Planet Earth, an exotic bird in a rainforest does a display for a female. The female turns away in disappointment.
"It's hard not to be deflated when your best isn't good enough" observes Sir Attenborough. But, unfortunately, in the case of the human race, the same thing cannot be said - we don't exactly try our best all the time.

On a lighter note, I've volunteered for Hospital Radio, and I should be starting that in a couple of weeks. As well as getting me some experience working with radio equipment, it should be fun being able to create my own playlists. If I was a more twisted individual, I'd have the perfect music collection to potentially inflict more misery into patient's lives -
"For the man in ward 16 recovering from that brutal mallet attack here's Peter Gabriel's mega hit, Sledgehammer!"

What I'm currently listening to > \The Who - Quadrophenia/

Thanks for reading.