Nlogaxical – What am I doing here?

Rant time.

Disabled man in wheelchair wants to catch a train home.  Somehow, for some reason, the station staff refuse to put a ramp down to let him board.  Man films this, puts it on YouTube, then goes to media with the story.

Look at the DigitalSpy Forum thread where the chap relates his sorry tale.

Somehow, a small subset of the good people of DigitalSpy [are continuing to] fill a single forum thread with every single example of conjecture, pedantry, exaggeration, bollockery and counter-bollockery known to Internet Forum Man and Woman.  Arguments about the whys and wherefores of the situation dissipate and spin off into their own little eddies and vortices of angst and drama, and in the end the whole sorry affair looks like an Eton Mess of frustration and complication blended through a random number generator and thrown against a pebbledashed wall.   Read the thread from soup to nuts and the actual situation is barely decipherable.

After we’ve passed a point where the arguments traverse ‘Your last post was incorrectly spelled and your user profile smells of wee’, Godwin’s Law is the inevitable consequence.  Make your bets when the entire discussion becomes so heavy with bullshit it collapses in on itself.

A small footnote to today’s World Cup drivel.

Watching England play in serious competition is akin to English food in the 1970s. Grey, lumpen, lukewarm slop served in a cracked bowl. There’s no flair, no passion, no purpose, no point. Until the English team and – more generally, English football – sort out a LOT of stuff on and off the pitch, there’s no way any England fan should expect anything serious of the national side when the pressure’s really on.

What today has done has reminded me that I’m no serious football fan, and that any disappointment was fleeting. It certainly helped not having any expectation to begin with.

(and now we return you to your regularly scheduled lives).

We’re now four days beyond the Election (and what feels like four weeks since we heard anything from Gordon Brown). I’m still excited and enthralled by it all. For the first time that I can remember, people seem to be having real, meaningful debates and conversations about the state of Britain’s democracy. The electorate has – inadvertently – created a situation which invokes total uncertainty and unfamiliar process, and which may possibly redefine the nature of our bizarre and flawed democratic process.

And yes. Inadvertently. Any pundit that infers the British public knew exactly what they were doing to get us to the current situation (and yes, many have inferred just this) really overplays our collective intelligence as an electorate. The outcome is a result of people not being convinced enough to turn in any one specific direction. No set of voters bought into any one party’s arguments more than any of the others.

Politicians just didn’t do good enough a job of persuading people to vote for their cause. Maybe the Tories made such enemies in their last stint in office that our memories run too deep to give them another chance. Maybe Gordon Brown’s reminders that the entire universe is in recession and not just the UK have gone unheeded. Maybe Nick Clegg worse a naff tie on the third debate and voters wimped out when it mattered. Nonetheless, the attempt at post-election shutting of the Westminster stable door after the horse has bolted is hilarious. The political parties – or at least two of them – are suffering because of the electoral system they deserve to have and refuse to change. I hope these thrills last until the very end.

That David Beckham, he’s so talented. First a footballing legend and now a genius at the keys?

Oh. PECKHAM. Nevermind.

Sitting on VS01, two seats plus two windows all to myself on a spring evening. Entertainment is a little spotty. I audibly yawned during the first ten minutes of Avatar (so that went well) and gave up on everything bar Family Guy. Sorry, yes, Family Guy. In ten whole years it’s not gotten old.

Anyway, there it is. In a few hours I’ll be safely back in the choked armpit of Newark, NJ. When I was younger, VS01 was the winged doubledecked bus I used to commute on to the east coast. Haven’t been on it for many years now, yet some stuff never changes here in the cheap seats. The wine still flows, the babies still scream in your ear and the cabin crew ponder about the guy in 49F who moved seats and now can’t remember if he really ordered the vegetarian meal or not. I missed the experience. Though back then we didn’t have the “volcanic ash will be 20,000 ft below us” reassurance. Shame – it would have added a little geological frisson and spark to the whole adventure.

Listening to OK Computer all the way through, just when I first flew this service way back when. “Let Down” is the tune that binds me to the flying along the turnpike and into Newark Airport. Even relevant in the lyric department.

–

And we’re back. First time in this specific part of country for a long time. Would like to say “it all feels so different” but I can’t, because one of the first things that I wanted to do was go find my car in the parking garage and drive it home, or what used to pass for it. Even now I forget. All the smells, the sounds and sights are so stupidly reassuring and familiar. Anyway. VS02 comes Sunday night. That’s the second half of the old story. It’s quicker than the flight out and with fewer daylight hours. In the meantime, loads of friends to see and a fair bit of catching up to be done. And shopping. I nearly forgot about the shopping.

The ONE downside about not living here anymore. Not getting to pop through the ‘US Residents’ aisle at immigration. Queued for an hour in the waiver line tonight, that’s how I remember I’m back on the other side of the tracks once more. No big deal, just bloody tiring.

[Content is R-rated. May contain adult themes such as 'money', 'responsibility', 'yet more responsibility' and 'oh shit what am I doing?']

This growing-up thing, I’ve been avoiding it for years. And in this financial climate where interest rates are barely higher than Gordon Brown’s approval rating, I’ve finally taken the plunge. All being well with the glut of legal and financial paperwork that my poor solicitor is wading through, I’ll be a homeowner in a matter of weeks. Plus horribly in debt to the tune of dozens of your Earth pounds.

As I sit here – my little clockwork brain doing backflips trying to figure out what the hell I’ve committed myself to – at the very top of my mind the headline thought is, ‘I’d love a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive’. Why is this? I’m told that at some point that this will hit me like a brick wrapped in a copy of FHM. When does this happen please? The anticipation is killing me, or chilling me out, or something.

Can I have my tea and biccies now?

There’s very little point to this post other than to test WordPress iPhone geotagging. Which isn’t to say I’m going to apologise and say ‘Fooled you!’, ’cause I’m just not.

Anyway, the rain’s clearing after another frustrating day at the professional wheel. At times I feel like changing career tack and selling ice cream. This would undoubtedly bring a lot more joy to a lot more people. And make them very fat indeed.

Dodgy Profiteroles [HD test - 1080p / low light] from Andy Martin on Vimeo.

Gross desserts

Holy shit. My senses have just been released from a 158 minute torture session in the annex of Guantanamo Bay know as ‘Cineworld Hammersmith’. All my own fault. Since seeing the first trailer of ’2012′, I’ve been waiting impatiently, looking forward to watching whole meaty chunks of Los Angeles turn upside down and become a sort of artificial coral reef in the Pacific. ‘Yayy’, I thought. Big stuff falling into the sea, volcanoes, tidal waves higher than mountains. Brill, bring it on.

Tonight I finally managed a viewing. Christ on a bike, what the FLYING FUCK was that?

Imagine every single nightmare scenario / apocalyptic mega film from the past fifteen years of movie history as it’s passed through a Hollywood body shop. It emerges from the garage in the shape of a 30ft patchwork limo stitched together from the most cliched of all movie scenes. What was witnessed tonight was an abortion..a complete Californian cut’n'shut disaster movie. Let’s look at some of those highlights checkboxes, yeah?

- Divorced dad who becomes hero to his family. CHECK.
- Two adorable kids. CHECK and CHECK.
- Noble US president. CHECK.
- Young scientist. CHEEECKK.
- Nasty gub’mint man in suit getting in the way of decent human acts happening. CH-CH-CH-CHECK.
- Presidential ‘Dudes, we’re all dead, thanks for all the fun’ final speech to the world. CHECK.
- Last phonecalls to family members. CHEC..uh, can’t be bothered anymore.

It was all there. Human tragedy on an epic scale, swelling strings, ‘I love you baby’ moments, bad scientific theories I’ve not seen since reading Whizzer and Chips. I could go on, but I won’t because I’m boring myself right this second. But the film went on..and on…and on. This stretched turd of a limo took two and a half hours to crawl past our faces, every panel straining with embarrassment at its own overblown presence. I don’t mind admitting there were moments when I thought to myself, “Why can’t they ALL just DIE NOW? I want to GO HOME.” By the end it felt as though I’ve been assaulted on every inch of my skull by a flailing disaster movie robot which felt the job hadn’t been done until bits of frontal lobe dribbled out of my nostrils and my pupils wore little ‘Tilt’ signs like a disgruntled pinball machine. I don’t know how I remember to walk from my seat when it finally ground to a halt, but somehow I did – two hours too late for my own good.

And yet…and yet…John Cusack still emerges from this with a modicum of cool. If this bullshit film doesn’t kill him or his acting career, it’s obvious he is a true superhero as the man is obviously indestructible.

UK mass media amuses me.  When confronted by the shocking revelation that some teenagers like stuff and dislike other stuff, it is seen as nothing less than an epiphany, a window inside a teenage skull to the sloshing, hormone-filled mind of a fifteen year old male.

Adrian MoleMatthew Robson, (aged 15 years and 7 months no less) reckons that Twitter isn’t popular with his peers, that PS3s are low down in the a typical teen’s list of preferred consoles, that newspapers aren’t popular unless they’re free, and that music is also a big factor in their lives.   I’m not entirely sure why the mass media picked up on this as some sort of Jerry Maguire moment of truth and clarity representing the ‘common teen’.  Some kids like PS3s and newspapers, some don’t, most like free stuff over stuff you pay for.  More to the point. only the tiniest fraction are interns at Morgan Stanley.   Hardly representative of a typical teenager  (..is there actually anyone who is representative?)

It’s not as if it’s been a slow news week in the land of all things digital.   So exactly why is this a story?

(yes, I’m tweeting this – do I fit the profile as a 35 year old teenager?)