On holiday in Afghanistan with friends. I decide to take a walk out into the market, and begin to sense danger. Thinking about bombs, I avoid vehicles and crowds like the plague. One bus appears out of nowhere and I just manage to run out of the blast radius before it explodes. Men run out from the alleyways and the wreckage shooting into the backs of people running away. I manage to get back to the hotel to warn fellow travellers of the danger, none of whom take me seriously, until I show them the shrapnel wound on my hand.
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There are a few things France is famous for, for example a lax attitude to health and safety, and patisserie. There are a few things England is famous for, such as health and safety fascism, and obesity. The thing the countries have in common: mutual banter. The rivalry between the nations is probably the highest between any two European countries, but I’m sorry, Britain’s just stabbed itself in the foot, and can go hang it’s head in shame. Yesterday I was at the university canteen, and I saw a lone pain au chocolat, (for those uninformed, scroll to the bottom of this page for a photo). The dialogue went something like this:
Satisfied, I take it to the till, and ask for a bottle of Fanta. The lady informs me that the fridge isn’t working, so it wont be cold, I tell her that really doesn’t bother me, and pay for the drink and pain au chocolat. After a brief awkward silence:
I’ve never willingly had a cold pain au chocolat in my life. I love how it goes soft and chewy when microwaved, or crispy when grilled, and however cooked, the molten chocolate oozes out at one end as you bite the other, and burns your lap. Like pizza, they’re made to be hot, only cretins like them cold; to have one cold is a disappointment I suffer only as a survival option.
Looking back, I’m wondering how, with this “everything must be the right temperature” policy, she got away with selling me a warm Fanta. Now, I do travel to France quite a lot, and you’d be right in saying that the French don’t really cook their pastries. In fact, at a service station near Paris I had to explain to them that by “pain au chocolat chaud” I wasn’t being a retarded tourist asking for a loaf of bread with hot chocolate. The reason for this is, in France, especially the south where I go, the bakeries present the food on a stall outside the shop. Down there in the Mediterranean heat, you can’t NOT have a warm and crispy pain au chocolat, oven or not. It turned out the woman was Romanian and had no idea what a pain au chocolat was either. Her French supervisor told me this himself, while putting it in the oven. Several months before, and back on English soil, I was at a service station and made the same request. The pimple face on the other side of the counter looked at me horrified, and went to ask the manager. I thought it was maybe his first day on the job, and he wanted to know how to use the microwave. Wrong. He came out, and told me no, it can’t be done, for health and safety reasons. Either way, I just opened up the pain au chocolat, the very one she sold me, I put it in the microwave, blasted it with 800 watts for 30 seconds, and devoured every last crumb. It tasted awesome; I don’t appear to be dead yet, I’ll keep you informed of the side effects.  Crispy molten goodness. Mmmmmmmm... TL;DR: Health and Safety regulation wont let me have pain au chocolat- a food made to be heated up- heated up. Maybe its a conspiracy to get people off continental breakfasts and back to fried bread, aka. shit. NB: side-note: Fried bread is what the military feeds us before expecting us to go on a 1.5mile run. It caused me to throw up the first time, and now the sight of fried bread makes me queezy. I think I’ll up sticks and join the Foreign Legion.There are two envisioned futures about man’s relationship with machine. A common sci-fi theme popular with Hollywood is that one day titanium robots will have AI, bullet proof alloys and mechanics capable of overriding their Human masters and enslave the entire carbon-based population. This has never scared me because as a technoliterate, I understand that robots cant do what they aren’t programmed to do. The other more likely and thought about dilemma is that putting computers in control of vacuum cleaners and fighter jets and anything in between will make humans redundant and jobless and ruin the entire global economy and mankind will ironically be returned to the stone age. Again, as a technoliterate, this idea has never particularly bothered me either, the more computers there are in the world, the more job openings there are for my kind. Last week however, I realised the despair of the robot future. Coming home from London Euston, I realised the train was running late, and that I was going to miss my connection at Warrington. This meant I wasn’t going to be in Manchester in time for the meal with friends, and I had a feeling that my due connection was the last train of the night. As the train finally arrived in Warrington, the driver announced apologetically that we were late because of vandals throwing stones at the trains further up the line, which didn’t make me feel any better about the delay, but at the same time, not much worse about it either. As I hopped off and wandered the platform in the rain, a tannoy announced that it was sorry for the inconvenience, this is when I got angry:
This (with a swearword inserted at every other syllable and mostly thought up in uppercase) is the moment I realised why I don’t want robots taking our jobs. Because you can’t yell at robots. I actually prefer the Hollywood robot future, where robots become sentient and take over the world, because at least they can genuinely apologise for what they’ve done. If our future to be built by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation then I’m not interested. I’m reminded now of an idea for a comic book a friend came up with back in college. What we need is a computer to be in charge of the world, and the computer is to be powered by happiness of the people, and itself feel happy to not be shut down. It’s a con I first witnessed over a decade ago, a message saying Hotmail would start charging for its service unless people signed the attached petition and passed the email on to all their friends. Since then, I’ve seen the scam attributed to practically any free online service, but the truth is, the contents of the spam are very rarely ever true, and its more often the case that someone’s playing dirty tricks with your emotions. This morning I logged into FaceBook and witnessed an all new low. People, people who I previously considered quite intelligent, were joining a group titled “I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010!“. Now I’m going to resist explaining for the umpteenth time who I can tell just from face value that the group’s a con, because quite frankly, if you’re still falling for this tripe after being raised by the internet itself, I believe we’re past the point of convincing you otherwise. So anyway, I step through the door- with a pocket full of posies- to see what blighted doom lay on the other side. The answer? Football. Suddenly everything is explained, and from this point on, I’m going to find it very hard to express myself; I am officially speechless. A single post by the groups creator reads:
OK, so lets take it one step at a time. As I write this, there are currently 2,043 “likes” and 5,325 comments. At first I expected the usual 50:50 split of people whining in hysterics about how they’ll never conform (oh the irony), to people trying to explain that it’s all a hoax and there’s nothing to worry about. Then I re-read the initial post, and thought maybe there’d actually be some discussion about football. Again, I was amazed. Firstly not a single comment about football; people were actually responding to a post they hadn’t even read! Less amazing was that my initial ratio prediction was way off. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off all the way beyond the Urals somewhere. Not a single sceptic to try explaining the hoax. Maybe like me they’ve realised there’s just no hope any more, and they have better things to do (like blog about it - hah!). I was staring at 100% hysteria, examples (named and shamed), I’ve picked out the most amusing, ironic and moronic:
Though in humanity’s defence, I have just seen this, and can breathe once more:
Peter Davis, a high-five is being fed-ex’d to you right now. I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010! has over 1 million members, and no where does it explain that FaceBook has or has not made such a proposition, and a quick check on Google (who I refuse to pay 10p per search for, starting next month) shows that FaceBook never did make such a proposal. This is a perfect example of how the masses can form a mountain of opinion from a molehill of something which barely even qualifies as rumour. It makes me cringe. The truth is, companies like FaceBook and Google make their money by being free for the end user. By being a free service, anyone with an internet connection has access to it, which makes the site more attractive to investors and advertisers, which combined make more revenue than a market equilibrium on the end-user’s side could ever achieve. To charge as much as just a few pennies would be detrimental (think of the huge ratio of users who are probably too young to even have a card to make the online payment with); £3.99 per month is, as 1 million people have just demonstrated, suicide, which is exactly why it would never happen.
Day 1: I have no trousers! quick sprint to the shops before meeting the gang at South Mimms. 75% off a £100 pair somehow makes £33, but still, not bad! Day 2: 0030hrs, just woken up in Paris, and wow, its that factory which always looks strangely beautiful in the night light.. feeling so nostalgic, the lights, billboards, Renaults and Peugeots zipping by at the speed of sound.. It’s been a while since i last came here.. Day 3: Snowed 20cm, any trace of last nights snowball fight gone. Button lifts. Quick refresher then and afternoon in the green runs. Is this what you call ice? It seems terribly steep. Permission to cack myself sir. Day 4: back on yesterdays green runs. Ice with no powder seems even worse. We try a blue run. Suddenly the steep ice at the end of the green seems like nothing. This book I’m reading says that ski slopes are a good place to pick up girls. Apparently the symptoms of fear can fool a person into thinking they’re falling in love. Day 5: Taken the morning off, I can’t get my ski boots changed until midday. Sigh. Pool with Falicia before she steals my bed, guess I’m taking a nap in the dining room. Taking the lift on the left eh? This goes on for miles. Miles… more miles. Mega steepness eh. C-Party. Go out to find every ATM in the town is still out of order. This probably saved me a lot of money, but how does this town not get bankrupt with no money? Staying in at the bar, birthday girl wants to dance with us.. uhh. Day 6: Moar ski. Mt Blanc run. Again for good measure. Paid €11.80 for Powerade and plate of chips. Night time: Aquatic phys, rock climbing and ridiculous changing room system. Herrero deliberately slips over in the ice and smacks Nigora in the face, KAPOW, blinding her for a whole 30 mins. Come home to chicken n chips. Best chicken ever. Day 7: MT Blanc plus more. Rave night, shove these flashing white and red torches under this wig: I am the Disco Police!Epic pickup fail, sometimes I don’t get girls… Day 8: Final ski day. Went up en mass, beginners and pros in same group. Found ourselves on a red slope, which didn’t seem all that tough. Half pipe through the woods was awesome. Descended into Val D’Isere, not a single celebrity spotted, but can has BSP now :D. Afternoon plans foiled by a blizzard. Come on lads, we can do this.. no? aww… Day 9: Adj doesn’t seem to understand there’s 3 stops but only 2 sides to the coach. Chee vs Becky in chair war.. lol. Screenwash frozen. Rob, are you piping yourself on again? Stranded in Folkstone? Nope? OK good. |
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