Jeremy Beadle

Sad to hear about the death of Jeremy Beadle from pneumonia. Reading some of his obituaries, I never even knew he had cancer. I never understood why some people hated him, except maybe the people whose cars he pretended to blow up. I always liked his shows. Beadles About was great television, better than a lot of the crap ITV puts out these days. Actually I say these days like I am some old person who thinks everything was better in his day which of course is not the truth. ITV have always put out mostly shit tv shows.

ITV suck.

Slippery Slopes – Arguing with Idiots on the Internet

The internet makes me fear for human life.  You can find anyone to argue with you about anything.  I once got into an argument with this guy, he’s like a die-hard Bush apologist republican.  It was about gay marriages.  My position was that gay people should be allowed to marry.  My reasoning is that you have to throw out all arguments based on religion because not all marriages are religious ceremonies.  Once you do that your only real argument is whether gay couples are an accepted part of your country and in supposedly forward thinking countries like America, bigots aside, they are and so should be allowed to be recognised as such.  His position was that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry.  His reasoning was that if you let gay people marry, eventually you’ll have to let them marry animals.

What?

How does that make sense?  Why would you have to do that?  Who told him this?  How did America get itself into the situation where someone has got himself such a bargaining chip over the rest of the country?  “You can have your gay marriages, but if you do, then I get to marry this pig.”  What other loopholes have found their way into American politics?  Like if they introduce free healthcare, they have to make paedophilia legal.  They can pull out of Iraq but every new first born child has to be slaughtered.  They can outlaw guns but every round of ammunition from every gun in the country first has to be unloaded on George Bush.  Actually that last one might just work.  Now I do know that some people like getting intimate with animals.  I’ve been to Aberdeen, I know the score.  But you don’t have to allow people to marry animals.

Unless you get talking animals.  If you get talking animals that can clearly give consent then the issue should be looked at.  I know what you’re thinking.  Christmas time for the parrot shaggers.  No.  You’ll have to be smart about it.  Parrots just repeat things.  If you want to marry a parrot, the parrot should be forced to have to perform a five minute set of improv. Otherwise you’ll just have people marrying parrots to get citizenship.  I looked into the issue a bit further and this “slippery slope” argument actually seems to be used quite a lot.  I don’t know, I guess marrying animals just isn’t the hot button issue in the UK that it clearly must be in America.  We have much more important issues to worry about like smoking bans, global warming and Jade Goody.  Over here when someone calls someone else’s girlfriend a dog or a pig, it’s a derogatory term, not a statement of fact.  Now when I hear Americans talk about wanting some pussy, I’m not so sure I know what they’re referring to.  Or when they talk about their bitches.

Granted, there is possibly an issue on my end of getting the majority of my information from American gangster rappers but you can still see my confusion.

So yeah, people are idiots.

How to run over infants safely

No more pimping today.  Probably.

You all will have seen that advert on tv where the little girl has been hit by a car and her voice says “Hit me at 40mph, theres an 80% chance I’ll die.  Hit me at 30mph, there’s an 80% chance I’ll live”.  I’m actually one of the guys who used to do the tests to find out those statistics.

Most of you wont really be able to relate to me here so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that theres nothing quite like that first time you don’t kill a little girl.  The adverts only give you our findings at 30 and 40 mph but we started testing at 100.  We were pretty thorough – we had to be, little girls lives depended on it. If you drive at 100 mph, theres pretty much a 100% chance the little girl will die.  Working our way down from that – 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, you actually start to think that there is no safe level to hit little girls with cars at.  The whole thing began to feel like an exercise in futility.  But when we got down to forty and the paramedics managed to get a rhythm again on that one little girl, we all knew it had been worthwhile.  You couldn’t imagine it, you had to be there.  Even when I accidentally reversed over her and she died nothing could ruin that day.

I know what some of you are thinking, that’s terrible, running over little girls, killing them.  Don’t worry, we’re not monsters.  We only used ugly little girls.  But that job was really shit. Don’t get me wrong I loved the work, I loved killing all those little girls.  I know there’s a debate, is it Art or is it senseless killing of innocent lives but It’s an Art, it’s definitely an art.  What sucks about it is the politics.  There’s so much politics involved.  I was replaced in the end by some rich kid fresh out of Oxford just because his dad was some higher up in the company.  It didn’t matter that I had killed hundreds of little girls it was just about who you knew.  I worked so hard at that job.  I mean I was terrible at it to begin with.  My first week, I couldnt hit shit.  I ran over a few little girl’s legs, that was it.  But I went home, I got in the car and I went out and I practised knocking little girls down in the streets.  I practised and I practised until I was the best. But in the end, none of that mattered.

It’s left a bitter taste in my mouth.  I don’t tend to talk about it too much so it’s good to get it off my chest.

Remember, the optimal speed for hitting little girls with your car is 30 mph so drive safe.

HD

I’m looking to get me some of this HD action.  I’m planning on getting a big tv soon, even though we don’t need it.  It’s just something I promised myself I would buy should I ever have the money.  And soon I will.  Yay me!

So I’ve been price hunting quite a bit, trying to get decent deals.  I wont be able to buy it for at least a month but I want to be prepared because there seems to be a lot of stuff.  I remember when it was just a case of picking the biggest TV to know which one is best, now you have all the other stuff to worry about like whether it’s i or p, contrast ratios, resolutions.

I know I need to get blu-ray when it comes out, not HD-DVD because I knew from the start there is no way that HD-DVD would win that war – purely based on the fact that it is annoying to say HD-DVD out loud.  Go ahead, try it.  Told you – It’s the oral equivalent of stepping in dog shit.

I wish the shops would put HD content on more HD tvs.  Everytime I go in to have a look they’re playing stuff that looks crap on most of the TVs.   No one wants to buy an expensive TV to watch a crappy looking picture.  As Cuba Gooding Jr once said, back when he actually had a decent career, “Show us the money”

I am also looking forward to shooting people in the head on Halo 3 in glorious HD vision.

In case you were wondering by this point, as it has crossed my own mind, I am not getting paid anything to shill HD Televisions.  Though that would be cool.  No, the truth is I am just a consumer whore who gets overly excited by stuff like this.

That’s it really.

Yes I love technology
But not as much as you, you see
But I still love technology
Always and forever.

Praise

I got praise for my writing over the weekend.  I’m not bragging.  And I’m not sure why I’m not.

I’m strange when it comes to praise.  I think I both seek it and abhor it.  Where that leaves me is difficult to define.  This site itself is set up under an alias (That’s right – my real name is not Pretentious Writer) so even if this site lives up to my unrealistic ambitions from yesterday, any praise I would receive would almost be through a proxy.

It’s nice when people pay you a compliment, and in my job that has happened a few times. But it makes me feel awkward as well, as part of me feels a fraud and guilty for having pulled the wool over people’s eyes even though in reality I probably haven’t.  Clearly I have issues.  I am not the most confident person in the world but I think there is something not quite right about feeling awkward when paid a complement.  Maybe that is normal.  I would ask someone if it was not for the aforementioned confidence problem.

Still, it was nice to hear people say something nice about my writing even if it was from people who probably aren’t the most objective critics and even if it did make me want to vomit at the same time.

Early Morning on a Saturday

Finished season 3.  Couldn’t help myself.

Getting this update in now as probably won’t get a chance to update this tomorrow.  Today.  See now, even though no one cares, few even know of this site it’s still extremely important to me that I update this every day.  And I don’t know why.  I’m thinking that I might try and set up some script or something to email in updates to this thing that I have pre-written when I know in advance that Im not going to be able to do it, like when I’m on holiday or something.  Must look into that.

Why?  Because I must.

I have had two requests to add comments.  I have declined both on the grounds that they are both spam bots.  Spam bots are not welcome on pretentiouswriter.com, even ones that offer me a bigger penis.  My mum once told me never to accept penis enlargements from anyone on the internet.  That was a strange Christmas.

I’ve been thinking about where this site is going.  I have no idea.  Wherever it is, it doesn’t seem that interesting so far.   My general hope is that I will just keep writing stuff on here every day, till eventually all that stuff will build up into a wonderfully entertaining site.  Hopefully one day colleagues at work will ask each other if they read today’s update on pretentious writer dot com and then laugh at them for reading such an unhip site but then the PW reader will roll his eyes  as he knows in his heart that the site is really great and uncool people don’t “get it”.  Oh yeah, readers of the site will call it PW (pronounced PeeDubya) because that’s cooler.  Comment-ers (Real humans not cold spam machines) will call me PW (pronounced PeeDubya) and refer to the site as PW (pronounced PeeDubya) so it will get a bit confusing at times but everyone is so used to it by then that it’s impossible to change.  I’ll probably sell cool T-Shirts based on the site, maybe other merchandise too like lunchboxes, action figures, nunchuks etc.  There will be books and a spin-off sitcom that will be critically acclaimed but will get bad ratings and will be cancelled as the networks just won’t get it.  Well they will get it because it is hilarious but they will be thinking of the bottom line.  Those ruthless money hungry bastards.  They have no appreciation for art.  Well they do in this case because as I said they think it’s brilliant, better than Spaced and The Office combined but not the clusterfuck such a show would inevitably be.  But they need to make money so they replace it with reruns of Friends.

Well I guess that’s roughly where I see the site heading.  Beyond those six months I dont have a clue.

Spaced and American Remakes Thereof

Had a slight breakthrough last night with the writing, finally seem to have a way into the story.  I just really need to get some research done on the subject matter though and hopefully things should open up further.  That’s what she said.  Sorry.  Still watching the Office.  Deep into series 3 now.  It’s brilliant stuff.  I wont ever be able to rank it above the UK version which is as close to perfect as a sitcom can get for me without being Spaced.   And apparently they are making a US version of Spaced which I have mixed feelings about.

I think a US version would be a funny show.  I could see them making a show that falls someway between Scrubs and Family Guy which would probably be decent.  I don’t know if they would be able to capture the feel of the original though.  There aren’t too many shows I’ve seen where you can clearly tell that the entire show is a labour of love for everyone involved.  To really come close to it’s UK counterpart, the US version would have to try to recreate that aspect of it, and it’s the single aspect that you can’t really actively recreate.  It’s catch 22.

There are people who are very unhappy about the idea.  Even Edgar Wright, the director of Spaced, went public (very quickly as no one bothered to ask him if it would be alright – technically they didnt have to, but still, it would have been nice)  about being opposed to a remake.  As big a fan as I am of Spaced, I’m happy enough to wait to see what happens.  I was proven wrong over the office so hopefully I will again.

Apparently the writer working on Spaced also wrote for Will and Grace.  It’s going to be a fucking disaster.

Just stuff

There is an opticians in Edinburgh called ‘Opticians For Eyes’.  Yeah.  I have tried to rationalise this many times in my head but I still cannot figure it out.  As plain old ‘Opticians’ were they constantly being asked if they could fix people’s backs or sort out gammy legs?  Perhaps one day they just couldn’t take it any more and called the sign makers (Shop Signs For Shops) to end the nightmare once and for all.  It is my dream to open a shop next door to them called Hats For Your Head or something equally as redundant.

This week has been a washout on the writing.  I’m still bashing around that idea I talked about.  There are definite holes in the story that I need to think about it and figure out how I am going to patch them up.  Also a lot of the stuff that is going to get covered is an area I think my girlfriend will be able to help me out with so I need to speak to her about it.  I want to be able to make it work because I think it could be quite a quirky little story.  We shall see.

So far with this whole blog thing, I think we’re definitely leaning towards a year of not getting much at all accomplished.  Which should be interesting to read back over in a really boring kind of way.  Good stuff

Heath Ledger

Like most people, shocked to hear about the death of Heath Ledger today. It looks like it was possibly suicide which is pretty sad if it turns out to be true. Suicide amongst young men is unfortunately too common, especially here in Scotland. I know plenty of people will look at the situation, note he has a daughter and write him off as being selfish. I think that’s an incredibly simplified view of the situation. Ive never felt suicidal myself, thankfully, so I wouldn’t presume to understand the mindset of someone prepared to take their own life. But I can figure out that if someone is in an emotional state to the extent that they feel the only way to end their unhappiness is to end their life, that person needs our sympathy and help not condemnation.

Never really understood the cowards way out angle at all. I don’t know about you but death scares the shit out of me. No more anything? Just… nothing. That’s pretty frightening. I don’t believe in an afterlife on the grounds that i’m not a child. And I’m pretty confident in that, so I tend not to take the whole being alive thing lightly. I don’t think anyone else should either. So imagine getting to the point where you feel that life – all there is – is not worth it and making the decision to no longer exist. That’s an action taken by cowards? That’s an action taken by people who need urgent psychological help. The way some people talk about suicide you would think its equal to knocking off early on a Friday to go to the pub.

The Calm Zone is a good link if you’re looking for more information about suicide.

On the other side of the coin, Tom Cruise reckons that depression is a made up phenomena.

Tom Cruise is a fucking idiot.

The Office

Well, the writing is going slow.  By slow I mean non-existent.  What isn’t going slow is me watching the US version of the Office.  I avoided this show for ages based on my narrow minded prejudices of Americans not being able to understand the subtleties that made the original series so brilliantly funny.  And I was right!  But also wrong.

The show itself is very, very funny.  I am about midway through the second series now.  Steve Carell might have an extremely patchy fim career but in this he excels as the deluded and ignorant Michael Scott, the US equivalent of David Brent.  The rest of the cast I am still not completely sold on.  Sometimes the American Tim, cleverly changed to Jim here, and the American Dawn, here called Pam, can border on annoying rather than endearing.  I also don’t think we have had the chance to get to know Pam’s boyfriend well enough yet, though admittedly the show does run much longer than the UK version so this probably should be slower burning.  The American Gareth, Dwight, has his moments but sometimes they take his character too far down the farcical road like in the episode where he goes into a depression because Michael is spending more time with a newer employee.

The big thing that keeps cropping up that I really don’t like is when they treat the audience as being dumb by spelling things out for them.  Like when the American Chris Finch, Todd Packer, shows up for the first time, Jim’s talking head tells us that he really doesn’t like him.  In the UK version, Tim doesn’t have to explicitly say that to make it obvious that he hates Finch, it’s clear that no one but Brent and Gareth like him.

I found that you have to forget about the UK version and try to enjoy the show on it’s own merits.  It’s not the same show and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Though saying that, the UK version is still the best.  Suck it America.