The War on Dumb.

Worst. Terrorist. Ever.



Wanted man. Caught at a checkpoint. In a wedding dress. How did anyone think that was a disguise?

The Welsh are Coming.

Jeff Minter is upset. This doesn't happen often, as he's a happy-go-lucky scamp. He spends his days frolicking in the Welsh hills, popping home every now and then to tend to his llamas, ingest mind-fucking quantities of mind-fucking psychotropic drugs, and program unplayable videogames.

Says Jeff:

"OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, ***** arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying."

Jeff's upset because an old, ***** arcade game, Frogger outsold his latest game, Space Giraffe by 10 to 1 last week. Jeff thinks it's unreasonable that no-one wanted his nice 'new' game. Jeff's new game is essentially another remake of Tempest, an old, ***** arcade game, but with different enemies and a more complicated scoring system.

It seems churlish to point out that people may have bought Frogger because they weighed up their options, and went for a game that doesn't make your brain slough away and trickle through your nose in fleshy chunks. But I did it anyway.

***** means shite, by the way.

That's Good Newsing! We Done News!

For some reason, I feel myself compelled to read pretty much any time I possibly can. This means that if I'm left alone for more than two minutes, I fire up the web browser on my phone and start reading the news. Unfortunately, there are only certain sites you can access for free on my tarriff, so I'm pretty much restricted to reading the ITN news portal for mobile browsers.

As you might expect, this is some pretty lousy news. I'll use the first story I read today as an illustration (apologies for lack of linkage, but I've no idea where to find it in a standard browser, and can't be bothered looking). The headline is 'Beowulf Premiere Hits London', and these are the edited highlights, with translation:

Quote: "Beowulf battles three enemies, Grandel (Newcomer Crispin Glover)..."

Translation: Despite having 45 screen credits, including the Back to the Future trilogy, The Doors, Wild at Heart, and the Charlies Goddamn Angels movies, as well as 2 directing credits, none of our staff have heard of Crispin Glover, who started his acting career in 1981.

Quote: "The image has been digitally enhanced using the latest animation techninques, giving Jolie's natural curves a bit of a boost."

Translation: The film is entirely CGI.

This is where I get most of my information about the world from. Explains a lot.

Speaking of Duality...

New competition. I now want song titles that are really fucking good song titles, but genuinely appalling names for porn films. And when I say appalling, I mean that they will, like medication bought from unsolicited emails, induce vomiting. I'll get the ball rolling, with the first track from The Wombats album:

Tales of Girls, Boys and Marsupials.

The gauntlet is down, folks. It is down.

Stealth Atheists - Secular Ninjas.

So, this December the His dark Materials trilogy is getting a movie. From what I've seen of the trailers, I'm not optimistic. But then, I'm never optimistic. I'm a grumpy old man. But that is beside the point.

The books have been perceived as anti-religious, and that's certainly one way of reading them. I take that with a pinch of salt, as I say worse things about religion before my first cup of coffee, then faster and more perceptively after. What they are is humanist - they promote a shared humanity that is far more important than any text. The 'villains' of the piece are those who lose sight of that - those who would harm people for their own ends. Sometimes those ends are religious, but the forces seeking to end religion (which has a palpable presence in the world of the books) also do terrible things to acheive their ends.

What the movie has done is reignited the supposed controversy over the books. From the IMDB, on the Catholic League:

League president William Donohue tells America's Entertainment Weekly magazine, "Parents might be inclined to say, 'Hey, our kid really enjoyed the movie, why don't we buy him His Dark Materials for Christmas?' (It) introduces the kid to atheism. (It's) a stealth campaign."

Excuse me, but how in the name of living fuck do you introduce a child to atheism? I'm sorry, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a child is born an atheist. The water you sprinkle on it's head doesn't change that for a moment. A child is basically programmed to believe whatever it's parents say. A child also has an inherently dualist mentality - it's very hard for a child to realise that the voice it hears when it thinks is generated by a couple of pounds of electrically charged tissue. So religious notions fit very straightfordly into a child's worldview. I think if you raised someone to 18, with a normal education but no word of God, then presented them a bible, you'd still have an atheist.

Apologies for the stunningly obvious nature of this argument (to most), but the idea that there's a stealth atheist agenda makes me very, very angry, quite amused, and with a peculiar itch to start one.

Vital Information.

For those of you who have an interest in the American political process, or more specifically just how painful it is to watch it from within, then may I direct you to the mighty Gin and Tacos. Funny and savage, it's well worth a read. Observe:

"... I would like to recommend one of my favorite pieces of public opinion research, one that goes a long way toward understanding why our national political discourse is one step above a throng of retards slap-fighting in a mud puddle."

I've learnt some important things today, myself. One is that the new Wombats album is pretty fucking good. It has all the handclaps, la la la's and closed harmonies I expect from pop-leaning indie, along with some spiky guitars and amusing lyrics about doing stupid things and getting dumped for it. I proclaim it to be delightful.

The other thing I've learnt, and will pass on in case it's any use to anyone is this: if you've split your middle finger in two with a blunt knife, it can't hurt to lower your typing speed. It doesn't make you any less of a man. Knocking bloody chunks out of your hand though, quite literally, does.

Movie Time.

Despite a late entry from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang with:

Shot In The Shoulder / Narration / Black Comedy / Corpse / Breasts

the great 'dumbass keywords' debate was never going to be won by such half-arsed attempts. So, ladies, gentlemen, may I present:

Toupee / Group Vomit / One Night / Lifting Person In Air / Blender

Goonies = for teh win!

The Right to Bear Arms.

This man is a true American hero.