Isolation

Tuesdays come too quickly - so let's get all my boring updates out of the way first. Our final newsday was the best so far (see previous blogs for explanation on newsdays), and I'm seriously considering a career in radio because of it. On one of the bulletins we did, we played a clip of an interview, which lasted about 1 minute. What me and the other presenter didn't realise was that the person editing had accidentally changed the tone of the interviewer - so it sounded remarkably like Jigsaw from the Saw films. Our microphones were turned off due to the interview, but we came close to urinating ourselves with laughter. About a couple of seconds before the clip ended I managed to suck it all in, and read the next piece of news (almost) without fault. The other presenter was a little better than me, but we both received praise and our broadcasts got good feedback.

Yeah, some of my course mates are twisted
serial killers on the side. Hey, it's a hobby.

Because that is a load of my shoulders, I got into the mindset of "I've done a lot, I deserve a break" which is a dangerous place to be. Today I handed out a CVs to potential employers, and it was the first time I'd left my flat in a couple of days. Inevitably, dishes didn't get washed, and the pile of dirty clothes rapidly increased. And while I was 'cut off' from the real world, I read an article about a guy who had lived away from society for five years. Sometimes the concept of that idea really grabs me, because I have a problem with people. They are too sneaky. The other day some guy turned up at my door and almost got me to change power companies without me realising it. And the owner of a website is trying to guilt trip me into writing for his website again even though I am completely unpaid, and he accidentally deleted all my entries expecting me to write them up again. I'm way too nice, so this only helps them. But the article I was reading told me why this 'hermit' decided to re-join society and start a family. Rather than discovering himself - he gradually got more lost in his own world, making obsessive little journals about bird's flight patterns and stuff. You see, no matter how much you bitch and complain about people - their manipulation, their nastiness, their kindness, their love, their wants and needs are ultimately the real key for unlocking your full potential. Becoming insane and eccentric is overrated.

Alright, time to head out. There's a cheese and wine party at a friend's tonight (not a proper one, just a silly student one) so I'll let you know what eating 300 grams of feta and drinking ridiculous amounts of booze does to the body in my next post. Thanks for reading!

Radio Activity

Sorry, sorry, sorry and sorry. I have been reading people's blogs, but I've not really bothered with comments until today. Still dreadfully busy. But damnit, if a couple of people are still waiting for a post every week then I'll deliver. It's our final news day tomorrow, so after that I'll continue to stalk everyone as per usual. I'm one of the presenters for our radio day, and I've overcome my nervous habit of becoming monotonous, so I won't sound like a Scottish Microsoft Sam. I sacrificed a lecture to interview someone for the bulletin, and she was incredibly helpful and nice, in contrast to the angry e-mail I received last night from our politics lecturer about poor attendance. I think the right decision was made.

I hope it wasn't just me that had nightmares thanks to this video

Last week, our TV news bulletin went pretty well. There were a couple of minor problems with the camera shots I made, but they were ultimately pretty good, and there was a terrible pun based on a shot of a deep end sign I had done on the story of an Olympic swimmer. To celebrate, I went out to McDonald's to order a 'Big Tasty', a meal that has become a Wednesday ritual for me. It isn't that great, and I know it's awful for me, but it has a nice little sauce and it's filling. So I was queuing up for this slab of meat caked in floor dirt in a stale bun, when a young woman jumped in front of me. She was in crutches. I didn't exactly tell her to get lost, but should I have said something? Call me sadistic, but I don't think a Big Mac was vital for her condition. I sometimes get it with older folk too. Have they really earned to skip the queue?  This isn't an attack on disabled or old people, I'm not that stupid. It's an attack on rudeness. My brother had a mild mental disability, and he often took advantage of people who didn't know better. It wasn't their fault, but I'm basically saying that while it's pathetic to make fun of/disrespect disabled people and older people, there's no need to be over generous. More often than not, they appreciate being treated like a normal human being and not a new born baby.

I could have done more stuff tonight in terms of preparation, but I've followed the advice of a friend and I'm not going to stress out before the big day. After getting to grips with the radio equipment (reading the news along to the melody of Take On Me) today, I'm pretty confident. Bring it on!

Come Together

Well I didn’t do a midweek post. Typical journalist, eh? To be fair I’ve been pretty busy. I went back home, and it turns out that I didn’t need a final filling, because the care of my teeth has shot up dramatically. So there wasn’t really a part four as such, just a slap on the wrist and a hasty exit back home. Our first newsday was semi-successful. Decent stories and content, but we were heavily criticized by our lecturers at the end of the day for our teamwork. I didn’t know what everyone was going half of the time, I was almost in a world of my own writing loads of stories, and going out reporting on some jazz thing that was happening during the day.

Ug and Og; Bog is taking the
 picture with his ipad 2 camera

The experience was nothing short of hectic, with the hours flying away. And after years of saying ‘it taught me the aspect of teamwork’ to teachers / lecturers / scout leaders / obese barmen in order to impress them, this was the first time in my life where I was actually telling the truth.  I admittedly waltzed in, thinking everyone could go off and do their own thing. And that simply was not the case. With an increasing amount of team-building exercises being featured in job interviews (I know many friends, and have experienced first hand, tasks such as building giraffes out of newspaper) you’d think that the importance of teamwork was a relatively new thing. Ug, Og, and Bog may have been in slightly different circumstances (perhaps killing Wooly Mammoths as opposed to making a bridges for toy cars out of spaghetti and blu-tack) but they probably faced similar situations. With Ug’s amazing craft skills, spears would be made to drive the wooly mammoth into a pit. With Og’s brute force he would lead the charge. Bog, the brains of the outfit, would devise the plan to drive the mammoth over a cliff, therefore killing it. A great team effort. Okay, maybe not so relevant. But if there’s one thing I learned from all this so far, it’s that you really have to try, without crawling up to others for a hearty pat on the back or a big ‘thanks!’. At the end of the day, everyone is in the same amount of shit as you. That takes a wee bit of getting used to.

TV news day tomorrow, and I've been chasing stories for the last couple of days because we are allowed to pre-shoot a couple of stories. I can operate a camera now pretty professionally, but I am still getting all worked up about the shots I did today because so many things can go wrong. I'm just slightly worried because we really have to make up for last week tomorrow. All I can do just now is have an early night. Thanks for reading!

Rehumanize Yourself

And on the seventh day god updated his facebook status. 'Finished making the world lol, brb resting'. The eptitome of humanity is refreshing a page to see the pointless goings on in people's lives. It irritates me a little when people claim that social media is the future of news, and that we'll no longer need journalists. Of course we get vital information from Twitter. But for every piece of original news, there will be another hundred or so people copying said piece of news. Even worse is when something gets misinterpreted, or news is simply invented. The 'I will not pay to use facebook as of sept 7th 2010' group, for example, has 13,619 members. At first you think that it absurd that so many people can be so gullible/thick. But then you look at the posts friends have made and then you aren't surprised in the least.

Relationship status - I'm being stalked by
three eighties superstars

Out of said stupid posts, there are a few different categories. There's the 'Look at me, I'm doing an essay' group. '50 words down, 2,450 to go lol'/'Arrgh dam this essay is goin to be the death of me lol'. Or even worse if a whole group of people are doing an essay. An endless conversation ensues in the posts about how stuck they are, and how they don't know what to do! Hilarious! Because actually e-mailing a lecturer or looking up more information for the piece would be a waste of time, eh? There's also the endless lovey dovery bullshit people like to publicly display. 'luv u babe xxx'/x is in a relationship with y 'oh so cute x u go great together'. My personal favourite, however, is the meaningless lyrics people put up. 'Am I going insane?/My blood is boiling inside of my veins/An evil feeling attacks/My body’s shaking there’s no turning back/don't take your eyes off the trigger'. The lyricist was probably using it as a metaphor for taking heroin (don't they always?) but yet someone on my friend's list thought that was relevant to their life. When people like a melody to a song, they tend to the take the lyrics a little too close to their heart. I like clever lyrics as much as the next person, but I'd rather you listen to it than tell me. At the end of the day, the lyricist was probably spouting a load of babble that fitted the music. Reminds me of people that interpret 'Every Breath you Take' as a love song when in fact, it's about a stalker. Hoorah.


First newsday tomorrow! Been hyping this up for ages so *gasp* I may actually do a blog post about it afterwards. It's online news tomorrow for our group, and I'm going to be sitting back at the university typing up stories, as some of the others in our group find stuff to report on. We (me and one other person out of 10) have had found a couple of events that are happening tomorrow that we can report on, but we'll be relying on someone getting stabbed on the day or something for some exciting updates. Lunch now, then a final group meeting before tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

The Prisoner

Did anyone see the Oscars? I didn't, so there isn't going to be a post about it. I was happy that the King's Speech won a bunch of awards, and then I thought, why do I care? I've been wanting to see the King's Speech for donks and I like the look of it, but for all I know it could be terrible. Even the BBC had described it as a 'great British win' to make us tea-sippers happy. But why does it actually matter? It's not like everyone in the country helped make the film. It just happened to made mostly by a bunch of people who were born on this bit of land. It's the same with sporting teams, when people say 'Hah, we beat the fuck out of you last night'. Sorry to dissapoint you, but you didn't do anything to me. A couple of Italians, a German, a Russian...whoever (certainly very few actually actually come from the team's area) - they just happened to beat a team I support. IT WASN'T YOU AARGH UNHAPPY.

He's a 'wizard' storyteller!! Sigh. 

On a lighter note, I had a dream last night which I remembered for a change. There's always that delirious moment when you wake up  and you rush to the door, or begin to phone  a friend to tell them Pythagoras' theory before realising that said events didn't actually happen. I haven't remembered my dreams for a while, so this morning I did panic for a second. And what is perhaps even odder is the fact the dream I had last night made a bit of sense. It wasn't a constantly changing LSD fuelled Salvador Dali inspired crazy-fest - y'know, the usual. So I was in prison. And prison didn't seem so bad. I became friendly with the other inmates and the prison guard after giving him a bit of my baguette. Daniel Radcliffe narrated the story - "The guards may have been numerous, but they were fat. We had fitness on our side" The scene changed to one where we were running in the prison grounds to keep our fitness levels up. But then the prison guard wanted us to join in the football game. I thought "Why not?" I put my all into it, and we did well. We promptly turned into anthropomorphic dragons and resumed playing as normal. Okay, it wasn't that sane, but I've had worse. If dreams tell you about what you are thinking, then I'm rather clueless.

Looks like this blog is going to be weekly now, but I will try and make it slightly more frequent. Thanks for reading!

Snobbery, Assault and Battery

I had a 'group meeting' with some of my course mates over a pub meal today, which was quite a nice experience.  It was nice to have a decent meal fairly cheaply and to have a single pint as opposed to 3 litres of cider and a couple of tequila shots. Before the conversation turned to business, some of us had a little moan about one of our course mates. Bitching about someone can be therapeutic, especially when the person in question is a bit of an idiot. But you do have to watch it doesn't get ugly. You can have no opinion on someone. Until they do something particularly annoying or stupid. Either you get over it, or more likely, you hate them for every little thing they do. You didn't clean your dishes? Dickhead. Breathing too loudly? Twat. You like Mumford and Sons? Fucking kill yourself etcetera. And sometimes they deserve it. Other times it just gets a bit silly and there's no real justification.

The shittest mime artist around

And that brings me onto today's topic; snobbery. In days gone by, much of snobbery was based on how the upper classes hated the lower classes. Now it's everywhere. People seem to think they have some incredible power over other people for having a particular belief. Atheists and Religious people alike have this problem. Someone that shoves a bible in your face and rolls their eyes when you suggest that there are religions other than Christianity is equally as annoying as someone that loudly announces that they move the bible to the fiction section in the library. If you close your eyes you can't tell who says 'HOW CAN YOU BELIEVE SOMETHING SO STUPID'. I was almost guilty there of adding my own agnostic snobbery. 'THERE'S NO SOLID PROOF FOR EITHER IDIOTS'. See how easy it is? And of course there's PS3/360 gamers, there's people that do yoga/people that don't do yoga, people that drink/people that don't drink. Thinking about it, I'm being a snob over people that are snobs. I can't win.

I'm in a really Radiohead sort of mood just now. Their new single 'Lotus Flower' is pretty good. I've not got around to listening to the album yet. But what's up with Thom Yorke's dancing in the video? It's pretty awkward to watch. I sometimes wonder how many people have Radiohead as their favourite band. I like them, but they've never really struck me as wonderfully amazing. At least they are still a bit different. And they are another prime example of why music critics can be stupid. People said Kid A was shit. And by the end of the decade, the writers that had said this announced it as album of the decade. You wonder how people that are such hypocrites keep the same job. Oh well, thanks for reading.

Oh, you know I hate Florida!

Despite being very much into the world of sweaty men (and women) with guitars / drum-kits /basses /keyboards /triangles etc, I tend to stay away from publications such as the NME. Like any other magazine, the NME's dilemma is that it has to sell. And to appeal to buyers, it can't exactly just talk about bands whose members are either dead or in zimmer frames (although I suppose magazines like Classic Rock seems to survive through doing this), so it likes to throw a band into the limelight, strap them into a chair, and point at them, telling everybody that they are the next big thing. This has happened to a fair few bands that I like, and it's highly irritating. Because for everyone that hypes the band there are will inevitably be a bunch of people that claim that they are overrated and terrible because of this hype which is a little depressing. I know I've discussed this before, but isn't it sad that people still judge bands on their popularity?

Don't lie, you'd love to be in there

My favourite band for the past three years has been a group called Rocket from the Crypt (The Clash taking second place). They had a fairly large following in the US, providing the definition of 'cult status' for the dictionary. Followers of the band that tattooed the band's insignia onto their body got into gigs for free, and of course there were a select group of people that bought every one of the group's records and tried to attend all of their gigs. In the UK, the band were remembered for their hit 'On a Rope' and little more. To this day I skip that song whenever I listen to the band's albums. It's built around some silly catchy riff that is extremely dull. Even frontman Speedo dismissed the song as a 'piss-stain to the band's legacy'. Every band probably has one of those songs (e.g Blur - Song 2). So why do I like the group so much? Well, they didn't really bring anything new to the table in terms of a new genre. They were slightly unusual, however, in the fact that they were a balls out rock and roll group with a horn section in the middle of the nineties. Were they ska? Were they punk? Critics of course, love to put bands into silly genres, and RFTC could only be put into something so painfully obvious that it really wasn't cool.

Rocket from the Crypt's songs are all incredibly catchy and danceable, and yet they have that hard punk edge without being some overly garish pop punk band. At least in my opinion. I can't get enough of them. So why didn't they become so popular? I could name a number of reasons, such as how Interscope decided to put all their publicity and promotion funding on Marilyn Manson, and how the band were more interested in touring constantly than promoting themselves in interviews. But I suppose the reality is that it's the luck of the draw, y'know? What if 'My Generation' didn't get enough airplay? Would the Who still become megastars able to live off their past for decades to come (*cough* superbowl 2010)? Who knows. Maybe RFTC aren't so great, and maybe I'm just clutching at straws. It's hard to relate to people that don't share your obsession. But I suppose difference of opinion really makes the human race pretty wonderful.

Drunk blog #whatever

p.s - I've been wanting to do a blog on this band for forever, but I saw this and I was inspired. It's nice to know a few other souls share your opinion.