If You're a Man Who 'Online Dates', You're the Worst Person in The World

I like Facebook, I really do. Alright, so it lets people bombard me with persistent requests that I hug them, bite them or rate them on some sort of crush-o-meter (sorry Dan, you just don't do it for me), and of course I could pick up the phone and actually call whoever it is I want to go for a swift pint with, but for the psuedo-antisocial among us who's refusal to organize parties is due to laziness rather than any deep-rooted dislike for people, it's a wonderful discovery. The sort of invention that means I'm only ever three clicks and a 'Select All' from a pint of beer. I love it.

The problem was that it just didn't really know what it was. There is a pale, nerdy and slightly podgy school of thought out there that suggests Facebook went downhill around the time that it opened its doors to everyone instead of just college students, and you needed to know your own college email and the college emails of all your friends before you could get an account and add them, the creators obviously not realising that everyone that knew all their friends by email address probably never went outside in the first place, and if he did he could just email all his friends inviting them to the pub without having to go through a slightly awkward and badly-coded middle-man.

The concept of a social networking site that didn't allow any sort of social networking outside your own pre-existing peer groups didn't really take off, for obvious reasons i.e. not even college students are that stupid. MySpace ate the proverbial lunch of Facebook for three or four years, at least as far as anyone can tell, largely because it allowed fourteen year old girls to wear big girls clothes, upload forty-eight million poorly-lit strangely-angled boob shots per day, overload the internet and give Chris Hansen a heart attack, while Facebook was only just starting to let you pretend to be a badly-drawn werewolf and annoy your friends. The irony of there probably now being an application that allows you to play a 'Jerk' who goes around 'annoying' in the same way the 'Werewolves' went around 'biting' is almost too delicious to avoid searching for, were it not for the fact there would be forty-four thousand people that thought the whole idea was hilarious and in no way even more tedious than the zombie werewolves via the inclusion of the dreaded meta-joke would be far too soul destroying for me to bear.

Yes, the age of the Facebook applications was upon us, and as soon as they pulled their finger out and released an API, there were suddenly thousands of them, and everyone loved every single one. I know, because everyone I know seemingly added every Facebook application on the internet, and every single one took it upon itself to invite me. The whole business has come full circle in that now MySpace has added an applications section in order to compete with Facebook, and is fighting a losing battle now that it's the latecomer rather than the former grand champ that has the most available applications for speeding up the process of leering at nubile young girls on the internet. A cursory search for 'rate' or 'dating' on Facebook's application directory reveals far too many results for me to bother sifting through, and serves only to prove that Facebook has, at last, found an identity, and one that has all but crushed all other social networking websites on the web; it's a boob-viewing machine. At least, that's what the guys know it as. The girls are largely under the impression that these applications can be used to find A Nice Man, which is frankly impossible as I am the nicest man on the internet and I'm a complete bastard.

But even though I share a sex with the grunting masses that have probably passed through the profile of every woman on the internet, touching themselves through their work trousers and secretly hoping they're the pretty one on the left, and even if I am an absolutely awful person with no redeeming features whatsoever, I can't help but feel slightly sorry for the hordes of women that really do think that these applications can be used for anything close to real dating, and not for the sort of grubby comment about your tits you're likely to get in your inbox as your only form of communication from the male side of the internet. I know all sorts of accusations could be bandied about pertaining to womens' unrealistic aspirations of romance and the belief that their very own Prince Charming is just a click of a mouse away, but surely they deserve better than constant sexual harrassment on the part of the average male dating site member, ergo a self-employed gas fitter who's view of female sexual behaviour is the fevered product of internet pornography and an overactive imagination.

The problem is, the internet seems to make people drunk. It drains away the inhibitions that stop us from acting like a soft-headed toddler with a hard-on in public and replaces it with the sort of complete personality failure that you only see in shark feeding frenzies and nightclubs at chucking-out time; slurring, neanderthal beings crashing around, pointing at women's chests, shouting loudly about being 'bangable' and generally being about as enjoyable and complimentary for the women in question as setting their tits on fire. If alcohol is the excuse then they're doing a national service as the minute they stop their constant heroic consumption we're all going to drown in a terrible Stella Artois flood engulfing Britain from stem to stern, but I sincerely doubt that it is, and attribute the entire thing to the sort of sheer bloody-minded obnoxiousness that can only flourish in the toxic environment of the internet.

My favourite of all these applications is still 'Hot, Cute or Okay', which I covered in a previous post referring to the rediculousness of not being able to rate someone 'ugly', and perhaps that's the reason these sort of people continue to be encouraged; if the worst someone can possibly say about you is that you're OK, or skip you, you can continue to shout 'OY OY' at them until they rate you at least 'Okay' just so you shut up and fuck off. My new favourite thing about the whole place, however is the fact all comments - not private messages, but that takes an extra click and these people have hormone-laced declarations of lust to hammer out, perhaps by slapping their semi-flaccid member off the keyboard - are out in the open. You are only ever one flick of the mouse away from the adolescent gibberings of the sort of men that don't have the brain power to type with one hand and fruitlessly masturbate with the other - has any woman, unafflicted by WKD and crap dance music, ever fallen for 'dam u look hot bbz'?

In any case, I'm not going to link you to it, you can find it yourself, but it's definitely worth it. You might even find me on there, and get to call me a name. Just for the comedy, though. As for actual dating, try a pub or something. Never, ever the internet.

Goodnight.

I Hope You Catch Fire

Noel Gallagher should shut his whiny little trap.

Now, I know there are many, many different occasions when such a phrase would come in hugely useful - every time Oasis decide to release a 'new' album, for example - but this time it's being used to describe my feelings towards his frankly ridiculous defence of Troll-doll 'media personality' (Read: Professional Cunt) Russell Brand after his disgusting and now infamous answering-machine prank played on ex-Fawlty Towers advert Andrew Sachs. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm as immature as they come. It barely takes a couple of beers on a friday or saturday night before farts and wee become the height of comedy again, and if I was the only one in the whole of Christendom to blow a raspberry every time Arsenal defender Gael Clichy slipped and fell to allow Tottenham to set up their equalizer, then I'm afraid that it falls to me to crown myself a King amongst men. It's just I, despite having other things to do to support myself and not getting to spend all day being paid a ridiculous amount of money to think up ways to be funny, just don't make it my business to go around upsetting septuagenarians.

Gallagher, however, has shown just how great the divide has grown between the entertainment and the audience, and not for the better. The Oasis guitarist and backing singer has come out in saying "It's so typical of the English in general - 10,000 people get outraged, but only five days after it happened. You know what? There's now a massive divide. Them and us". Yes Noel, there is a divide. We pay you, you entertain us. You seem to have forgotten which way around this relationship works, as if you should be granted the freedom to attack photographers and defend Jack Sparrow knock-offs with obnoxious haircuts without mockery or recourse, just because you and your equally gargoyle-faced brother have managed to fool everyone into buying your adolescent and barely-disguised attempts at remaking every Beatles song ever written. 

Still, given the presence alongside this one of a story about The Beatles having their work featured on an upcoming Guitar Hero game, perhaps Noel has finally gotten what he wants - he's been mentioned on the same page as McCartney and Ringo. Now maybe he can go back to touching himself over that instead of touching the rest of us with his pompous idea of celebrity.

Oh, and I do hope Russell Brand catches fire. Not because of any particular incident, although this was particularly heinous. I just don't like the odious little scrote.

Goodnight.

Bad Good Movies and Good Bad Movies

As we all know, there are bad movies and then there are BAD movies. There are bad movies that are bad in the sense Snoop Dogg would describe them, meaning - confusingly - good, and then there are films that are bad in the sense used by men who can't get away with wearing their hair in pigtails, in that they're not very good at all.

The truth is, all of us realise that, sometimes, films can be so bad, so atrociously and joyfully hopeless, that you can't help but be endeared. The sort of film we all think died a death in the late 80s but all secretly hope is still living on like one of it's own badly made-up creations. Shambling zombies with cornflakes stuck to their faces with PVA glue, still tormenting bad actresses in too much make-up and not many clothes. The sort of film we love precisely because, well, it's a little bit shit. Like The Wrestlemaniac, which I sat down and watched last night with the sort of childish, hand-clapping glee usually reserved for teenage girls watching High School Musical.

The film's premise is based around a film crew - one of whom looks like a knock-off version of the fat curly one from Lost - and a trio of wannabe pornstars - one of whom looks like a knock-off verson of Jennifer Esposito, which was a much more enticing prospect - having their van break down in the middle of an old Mexican ghost town inhabited solely by an insane masked wrestler played by current WWE star Rey Mysterio's dad. The insane lucha libre'er (is that even a word? - Ed) was apparently dumped in the town when he started killing people, and now whenever someone happens upon his little corner of the desert, he rips their faces off - actually poorly-made papier mache masks with the actor's real faces underneath, smeared with what looked like blackberry jam - and leaves them to die.

Anyway, after about ninety minutes of wonderfully predictable murder and mayhem - in which the fat Lost-alike is bodyslammed to death by a middle-aged wrestler jumping off an oil drum - the bemasked lunatic has killed them all and stolen their van, riding off to what we assume is some sort of major population center, and the only one who hadn't had her face ripped off was the fake Esposito, who ended up with a spike through her instead. Which was a shame, as the idea of Jennifer Esposito smeared with blackcurrant jam had been moving steadily up my favourite mental image charts for the previous hour and a half.

None of it was very good, but the charm of the entire film was that it was completely and utterly aware that it wasn't very good. While not exactly played for laughs, the entire thing was so completely campy from beginning to end that you really couldn't help but cheer for the masked mentalist every time he hoved into frame, tossing pornographers and giggling starlets in all directions and smothering them all in breakfast condiment. The gore was there and pretty much everyone ended up completely soaked in either their own blood or someone else's, but there was no real sinisterness to any of it, and everyone involved clearly understood the rediculousness of Rey Mysterio's dad pulling people's faces off in the desert, and just ran with it.

The best part is, however, the film was released in 2006, so it's only 2 years old. The B-movie is alive and well.

Contrast this to another film that I've been getting bombarded with lately, Saw V. Their entire advertising campaign - on the sides of buses, at least - centers around the fact that their original poster submission was banned for being too graphic. I don't know how many of you have seen any of the preceeding forty-eight hundred Saw films, but they have been described elsewhere as 'torture porn' and it is completely correct. As someone who can sit down and watch a wrestler kill porn stars for an hour and a half and laugh myself stupid, I genuinely cannot see the appeal of watching 'Man walks into a room, gets eviscerated, repeat' for the best part of what feels like about nine days.

It's the unrelenting gloom that gets to me. There is simply no entertainment other than the violence and pain being portrayed, and if I was going to make a film solely based around those elements, I'd save an awful lot of money by just running around a slaughterhouse with a camera punching Fresians. Is there even a plot? I've been totally thrown. I thought the bloke controlling that odd little puppet had died of cancer, and his assistant who used to play the dumb one in Becker - clearly a talented actress, as it has to be difficult to play the dumbest person in the room when your co-star is Ted Danson - had gotten her head shot to bits. I'm told I won't believe how it ends, but the only interest I have at all is in seeing what sort of rediculous deus ex machina they pull out to lead on to the inevitable and in fact already green-lit Saw VI.

I know that it seems slightly hypocritical of me to complain about the lack of realism involved in Saw's seemingly indiscoverable warehouse full of atrocities that is both big enough to house all these traps and yet completely undiscoverable - someone has to have built those things, right? - while singing the praises of a film about a mad wrestler pulling people's faces off, but the difference is that The Wrestlemaniac was clearly meant to be rediculous, whereas Saw aims to be so serious it makes your head want to explode. It doesn't want to make you jump and giggle, it just wants to make you feel sick and I genuinely cannot see the appeal behind it, and it's all a little bit Year of the Sex Olympics to me, sitting around watching torture-porn.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, just be glad you've never seen Leonard Rossiter in a dress.

Goodnight.

One More Thing...

Before I go, I thought I'd just add this, simply because it's a story so rediculous it just has to be commented on: Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan, a Muslim cleric from Saudi Arabia, has called for women to be restricted to wearing a one-eyed-veil, as veils with two eyes visible 'encourage them to wear seductive make-up'. Before we consider al-Habadan's offer, consider this: why stop there? Surely there's more sinful flesh left to cover. Why not have them restricted to covering both eyes, and forced to see out of little holes like Victorian pinhole cameras?

Why not force them all to live in tiny concrete cells where blind guards can feed them breadsticks through a little keyhole, you collosal tit?

You have to wonder what the sort of people that come up with this kind of thing have to do all day, other than sit around thinking of new ways to hate. I suppose if you've dedicated yourself to a life where touching yourself for too long in the bathroom damns you to hell for all eternity, your only remaining pleasure is to find ways to ruin everyone else's fun.

Doesn't mean I don't want you to die in a chemical fire, though, you frothy-mouthed fundamentalist cock.

Goodnight.

Passing Comment

Well, fuck it. In case you were wondering where I've been during my relatively long absence from all things bloggingly self-indulgent - and I'm the first to admit you probably weren't - I've been away, writing. I know it's nothing and any old bastard can sit down and bang out some guff about the government that might pass for satire at a playschool party, but I like to show off and flounce around my own private corner of the internet telling all and sundry that I'm a writer, and as such, I occasionally go out and write things, so that's where I've been.

I'm back, however, because, like clockwork, just a few months after the previous world-ending disaster, once again a subject I've covered frequently has been brought to it's knees by the sheer brain-swelling insensibility of everyone involved. It's not the marvellously-named Credit Crunch, though the Lehman brothers have done a fantastic job of fucking everybody in the entire world over quite nicely, because it's Newcastle United. Forgive me if it looks like I'm reacting with glee to the entire black and white debacle, and please don't think it's because I'm anything so lowly as a Sunderland fan, but I can't help but laugh raucously to myself - and anyone else who will listen - every time I see a Newcastle fan interviewed on the telly. It's not because I enjoy the demise of the biggest club in the north east since Nottingham Forest went to the dogs, or because I feel it gives my club a league advantage in any way - it's simply because you're all such unadulterated idiots.

Mike Ashley might be a businessman with nothing but profit in mind and Dennis Wise might be a hideous little troll and of absolutely no use to anyone, but that doesn't make Kevin Keegan any less of a rediculous bottler, or Alan Shearer any less right in saying that he wouldn't touch the manager's job at Newcastle - even with a new board in place - with a barge pole. Keegan completely failed in both spells as manager to bring any real success to the club and has left under a cloud every job that he has ever taken the minute any sort of pressure shows up, and the Newcastle job has to be the most pressured job in football. I'd rather be the bloke in charge of pushing the big red 'NUKE' button if Medvedev wakes up with a headache one day and decides to obliterate Surrey than be in charge of the shambles by the Tyne, where if you don't win each game eighteen nil and have both your wingers backflipping up and down the pitch with the ball between their knees, you're out inside a month.

No wonder Shearer likes it in his nice warm studio, because you're all bloody mental. I heard a caller on Sky Sports' phone-in show about new manager Joe Kinnear being "just another member of the cockney Mafia" - he's from Dublin. How big do you people think London is? I heard another say that Londoners are all out to ruin your club because you don't want it threatening the dominance of the London teams - you weren't anyway. Not only is there no dominance to threaten - only eight times in the last forty years has the English title made it further south than Birmingham - but if there was truly a conspiracy to ruin all non-London clubs with a chance of taking silverware away from the capital, there are far more pressing targets than Newcastle. Maybe Ashley just wants to make sure a club finishes below Spurs this year, but you'll be pleased to know that's not working out so well for him.

The problem with Newcastle United, or, rather, the problem with the Newcastle United fans, is that they are under the impression that finishing second ten and eleven years ago somehow gives them the right to be up with the 'big four' and challenging for the Champions League, but the year before Newcastle's first 2nd-place finish, Blackburn Rovers won the league, and they aren't under the same sort of delusion. They finished second the year before, and Norwich bloody City finished third the year before that, and none of their fans are screaming from the rooftops demanding a free passage into Europe every year just because they were quite a good team once upon a time.

I understand the frustrations of the Newcastle fans, and I get that they think that their club deserves better, but they are going about it all wrong. The constant diet of change and upheaval means that the squad is hugely disjointed and unsettled as each manager ships out half the previous managers' players and brings in his own, and soon the dressing room is a hodge-podge of styles and signings, and with each new manager more than aware that if his team doesn't manage to beat 6 - 0 Man United away while all standing on their heads two weeks after taking over the fans will be calling for his head, it means everyone is perpetually nervous, and nobody plays to their best when they're nervous - it's why Robert Green shits himself and concedes four goals every time Fabio Capello looks at him. You need to sit back and let whoever comes in when this Nigerian/South African/Martian consortium takes over and give them a couple of seasons - they won't get success right away, even if it is 'King Kev' - you simply can't refloat a boat that's floundering as badly as Newcastle is that quickly.

Alan Curbishley would be a good choice, if he's allowed to sign his own players, simply because there's no better consolidation manager in the game - he'll get you 10th place from here until doomsday. Martin Jol would be another good pick for what he did for a club of similar stature in Tottenham, but I can't see him surviving his Spurs connections after the Ashley saga. Keegan would be a bad choice, because all of a sudden his 'messiah' appointment leads people to believe they're going to win the league by 50 points, and when they don't they will turn on the new owners as well; any new board is going to realise that the 'no man is bigger than the club' rule doesn't apply to Kevin Keegan, and the majority of fans on Tyneside are bigger fans of him than they are Newcastle United, so they would do well to keep him well away and pack him off back to his Scottish soccer circuses.

Still, whatever happens, I wish Newcastle's players all the best. I don't have any time for Ashley or Wise, because they have both been immensely stupid time and time again, but then I don't have time for the fans either - you've all been far too fucking obnoxious. If there were a way to keep your long-suffering team in the Premiership - where their talent means they deserve to be - and relegate you lot, I would. But your team can stay, so long as you still beat Spurs twice.

With billy-clubs.

Goodnight.