Harry Potter and the Facebook group

Rubbishlisters, Harry Potter is more than rubbish, he’s a big pile of shit.

Unfortunately due to my suspicion that suggesting JK Rowling to be an unimaginative cash-whoring dipshit might well be libellous, I’ve limited the Harry Potter post to this site’s sister Faceboook group.
The fact is that’s my honestly held opinion and is not malicious, unless wishing horrid bum-diseases on an overstuffed poobrain is malice, I’m sure it’s not. Anyway, suing me would only make me richer, perversely, as bankruptcy would kill my student loan repayments off.

Anyway, if you wish to read the Harry Potter post you can go to the Facebook group ”The following things are rubbish“.
Facebook is also rubbish, for trying to pretend that it’s not just another advertising channel or for having so many optional “applications” as to make veteran pages mind bogglingly confusing to look at.

I’ll see you there.

Red Bull Extreme Sports

Red Bull ‘extreme’ sports such as “Flugtag” are among the more annoying aspects of the potentially sick-inducing fizzy red caffeine-pop.
The drink itself is an overpriced miniature can of what could loosely be described as “Tizer Espresso”. It is bought in pubs by people falling asleep under the weight of their friends conversations as a method to prevent their eyelids from closing . In order to reinforce its “Might just keep you awake” energy-boosting power, Red Bull has associated itself with some of society’s crappiest, most unwanted and unwatched sports.
So Flugtag, which sounds almost nouveau-German chic like Fussball (Table football, directly translates as ‘pinball for wankers‘) is a Red Bull ‘extreme’ sport, and people are invited to create their own flying machines and be launched off a pier into the sea.
It all looks innocent enough but the Red Bull version of Flugtag betrays the sport’s roots. Flugtag is German for their annual “Idiot push”. Idiots would be rounded up and herded off a high pier, tricked into agreement by being told they were about to fly away in a bizarre shed-like contraption for shits and giggles. In fact, they were being erased from existence by a society intent on destroying the subhumans who were still voting on television talent-shows and lacking in German efficiency.
So when this societal medicine sport reached the UK, far from thinking how delightfully jolly the participants looked in their Heath Robinson contraptions, I initially wept with joy that the government had finally begun to tackle our nations growing ‘idiot problems’.
It was not to be, the vastly pointless event is in fact REAL, and plays up to the “Red Bull gives you wiiings!” slogan. I immediately ceased weeping for joy and began weeping in despair.
The event had gone from the joyous – “let’s push these retards into the sea once and for all!” to the hellish realisation that none of the event marshalls were shooting the survivors as they bobbed grinning next to the wreckage of their shed-planes. Oh, shit and fried eggs.
There they were, clambering out of the sea. Like normal cretins, only slightly damper – and still alive.
Red Bull had reinforced itself as the pumped-up can-crushing goon’s beverage of choice and our nation’s idiocy pandemic continued for another day.
The same happened with the damn “Air Race”. Middle-class, middle-aged people in their miniature flying machines poncing around above the Thames doing “death-defying” turns and such between giant coloured flags. Well whoop-de-shit! The sort of people who go to the pub for a ‘real ale’ after a race and talk engines were now being celebrated by a company desperate for wing-related sports to fit their brand. Well they can cock right off, all their sports are rubbish.

Dinner for one

Many traps are set in the modern age to dishearten even the most steadfast and diligent member of society. Carbon Footprints remind you you’re an overconsuming planet-wrecking luxury-whore, DFS adverts are designed to make you guilty you don’t own more sofas and history reminds you that everyone who’s ever existed before you has had a much, much worse time of it than you ever possibly could.
Another bad thing about history though is that it succesfully places your worries at the bottom of the all-time worry tree. Chief amongst modern worries is the “I’m far too single” worry.
Dinner for one is a debilitating, torrid modern phenomenon. It’s ok to grab a sandwich (rubbish food) on your own of a lunchtime, it’s even ok to decide you’re not that hungry and have just a bowl of cereal for tea. All of that is fine and not THAT rubbish. No, the real emotional suffering comes about from either purchasing or creating a generous, rich single portion dinner for your self again and again, night after night for weeks on end.
The ultimate super-bad is cooking a Marks and Spencer single portion of steamed chicken with a bagged salad, a steak and ale pie or quiche for one from a box. You’ll have been enticed into buying it by the sultry tones of Dervla Kirwan doing her disgusting food-porn adverts. You know the ones, everything in Marks’ range is shown either having gravy/raspberry sauce poured on it very slowly or being dug into with a ridiculously shiny silver fork.
Essentially the whorish description of the food along with the masturbatory images have lulled you into associating it with sexy. In reality it’s twice as good as anyone else’s food because it’s exactly twice as expensive and thus, you get what you pay for. It still doesn’t stop it being soul-destroying to eat good food on your own.
Dinner for one on a regular basis is rubbish, it’s a sign you’re dead inside and out.This is particularly true if it is accompanied by sustained television watching You’re treating yourself to something you don’t deserve because for whatever reason you’ve shunned society or they’ve exiled you to your own home. It can be solved though if people just adopt this simple rule; after seven nights you HAVE to be accompanied. Even if it involves chiding old friends, making new ones or treating some homeless panhandler to a full meal. You have to. Society benefits from being more cohesive and you benefit from not being a certified cave-dweller. Either way, the rubbishness of dinner for one just grows exponentially as your sole-dining streak grows. Let’s end it now.

Wimbledon

Firstly, Sue Barker. A Marks and Spencer cardholder looking somewhat like Jack Nicholson in full Joker makeup, Barker is one of many of the BBC’s specialist white middle-class presenting team. She knows her tennis from having been a pro before, but it’s strange that in the age of ASBOs, terrorism and knife-crime, Sue Barker still has a job.
Always looking like the bank manager’s wife at a village fete, Sue Barker’s presenting style whether it be live sport or A Question of Sport (Note to BBC: END IT!) is that of a woman who has led a life without worry and just sort of mumbles on about tennis because it keeps her happy.
Increasingly out of touch with a robbing, stabbing debt-addled nation of alcoholics it seems that Sue is just the figurehead for a sporting event so preposterously rubbish it makes you wonder why anyone turns up. Cliff Richard, Strawberries and cream, Tim Henman, orange barley water and a scoring system based on multiples of 15, until the end where it goes up in 10s – it’s a catalogue of rubbish. If they scored it 1,2,3,4 then people would soon realise that all the ‘love’ and ‘deuce’ crap is just another way of saying ‘nil’ or ‘draw’.
Essentially there’s two people, each trying to knock a ball somewhere the other person can’t get to it. So that means once you ‘ve seen it go to one side of a player, or behind them or once they’ve reached for it but couldn’t get it you’ve seen all the permutations of tennis there ever will be. Doubles is similar but with twice the ponces on court, thus half as exciting.
The reason wimbledon is still on television at all is because in Britain it’s quaint to see an outdated sport like tennis given some national coverage. It’s a window on the 1950s almost, except “eagle-eye”, (it should be called “Judgement laser”) and the Sue Barkers of this nation need their hands held and to be told it’s alright to watch tennis in England, it REALLY is the greatest contest in the world. Cliff Richard is still a big star, there’s no immigrants in rural Buckinghamshire and John McEnroe’s pathetic tantrum made him the “bad boy” of tennis, feared by all.

Society’s lack of a modern Jim Henson

People who’ve got no love for bearded uber-mensch Jim Henson and his many creations are going to hell. No doubt about it, an eternity being poked up the arse with a trident by a muscly red-man with hooves. Yes people with no Henson-love are going to burn in a very strict, inquistion-era catholic idea of hell and I’m going to pay their damn train fare to make sure they get there.
Nobody’s replaced Henson, not even Brian, his son, who had a bloody good go for a while. It seems some of the things Brian puts out get ignored by a harsh general public, but they shouldn’t cos they’re at least ok. Thing is when Jim did it, back in the day, it was much more pure. Muppets were new and kids brains weren’t so rigorously controlled to reduce possible future anarchic thoughts. Disney bought Henson out after his death, so I guess it’s all gonna be shit for ever more.
What are the alternatives these days? There’s nothing comparable to the original puppet-variety show. Lazytown? Get real, it’s Scandinavian salad-fascism. What’s wrong with burgers Sportacus? Hmmm? What’s next, the fucking Sportacus youth? The Swedish chef would never agree.
There was a day when bearded guys pulling faces with children weren’t paedos, but it looks like they died with Henson. Jah bless Jimbo.

Modern visits to the cinema

All cinemas these days apparently employ professional ass-hats to interrupt the film for other people. Whilst other cinema-goers are busily trying to concentrate on the flashy reflective screen in front of them the ass-hats are just trying to get their popcorn to move gracefully through the air on to other people’s heads or giggle as though they’d somehow used a secret handshake to get the usher to sprinkle crack over their bucket instead of the usual salt or sugar.
If the ass-hats aren’t enough then the people who genuinely want to see the film they’ve paid to see are then threatened by the film companies that they will be sued or imprisoned or something if they were to set up a tripod and a video camera at the back of the theatre to sell a dismal copy of the overblown crap they’ve just witnessed on a car boot somewhere. Not really an option, as most people will wait for the Americans to do it at some random preview and Bittorrent the shit out of things that aren’t quite worth paying nigh-on £7 to go and see.
The increasingly humourless Orange film funding adverts are far more entertaining than the traditional ‘turn your phone off’ graphics, and thus people increasingly forget to do so as the message is lost. Text messages and even calls are being taken in screens like never before…by wankers of course.
The films themselves are now so overblown and self-important that few major releases last under two hours, testing your bladder and ass-cheek numbness resilience to the max. Food is so prohibitively expensive that it’s cheaper to drink outrageous cocktails from a hollowed-out monkey skull at a beachfront casino in Monaco than it is watery sprite in a cardboard tube at your UGC, Odeon or Vue.
The fact is that the cost of visiting the cinema for the pleasure of all this bullshit that in ten years time everybody will have just saved all their money and bought a huge high-definition TV. Initially they will invite friends round to share their films on the massive screen with them, but the ultimate end for most will be a pasty bleary-eyed shell of a human, watching films in his pants alone surrounded by crusty tissues and pizza boxes waiting for the next online DVD rental to arrive. A brave new world.

‘Real’ humour

“Real Humour is 1000 times funnier than anything you could script” used to be the old adage. Whilst this may always be the case with series like Little Britain and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, some scripted programmes will always be almost infinitely funnier than their shit-flinging ‘real humour’ cousins.
Did it start wth Dennis Pennis? I don’t care. His celebrity interviews were the cultural high-point of the genre that most recently gave us the idiotic Balls of Steel and the cultural shitstain that is the Borat movie. Pennis acknowledged completely that mocking people face-to-face requires a brash, loathsome host swanning around in a purple suit. Pennis was supposed to be an asshole, he was.
Much ‘real humour’ takes a loosely-defined script, known only to a select few actors, and uses it to annoy people, y’know, for shits and giggles.. It offers us the entertainment equivalent of televised “Knock-a-door run”, complete strangers having a metaphorical burning turd left on their doorstep and we watch as their house fills with the tang of toasted poo, all the while being told that yes, it’s OK to laugh; this isn’t rude, it’s funny.
The presenters of Balls of Steel, far from having Balls of Steel have miniscule ice-cold chick-pea testicles, wanked into premature uselessness as they planned how to tell their parents about their career choice. “Mum, I’m going to be really, really annoying. Professionally.” Mum was just glad they’d found something they were good at.
Never are we allowed to linger on the lasting societal damage done to individuals or the sense of humour of Britain’s younglings. Needless to say, happy slapping is a direct product of techno-minded scrotes looking to recreate the entertainment they’ve seen on television and have a lasting memory to show their children that they too were once comedy genii.
Borat plays to the ignorant xenophobe market in its “Stupid little foreigner’ performance from Sacha Baron-Cohen. Enoch Powell would have been in stitches and, had he been alive now, would have almost certainly written “Did you see that Borat? That’s the kind of darkie-wogs we should be deporting!” into his “Rivers of Blood” speech. So firmly would the Powellists grip the strange-foreigners zeitgeist they would almost certainly have won him every election they entered. We’d be closing the borders and putting migrants on the next bus back to Albania, and we’d do it with a smile.
In five years time, when teenagers stab pensioners and/or immigrants openly in the street for a TV Comedy hour special, we’ll probably be sitting at home, hooting with joy as the newly dead corpse falls lifeless to the floor and ‘lands all funny’. We’ll dip our hands into artery-hardening buckets of foreign food and drift off to sleep, dribble down our triple-chins.
As we sleep foggy memories of a tall man in glasses and his diminutive wig-wearing sidekick skipping and singing in a giant brightly-lit studio drift into our thoughts and a gurgle of delight emits, momentarily, from our lips. A smile spreads, just for a second, and goes again as the two dance away, never to return again.

Gameshow tension music and accompanying ‘heartbeat’ sound effects

In the last ten years or so gameshows have evolved from their gaudy tinsel-encrusted 1980s high-camp peak to develop a much more stern, authoritative tone. The Who Wants to be a Millionnaire school of gameshows does away with klaxons, bright lights and innuendo replacing them with uncertainties, risks and failure.
Since Chris Tarrant first screwed his giant custard-skinned face up into a mangled frown, gameshows have offered contestants either  life-changing sums of money or public humiliation. Studios are now dark, lit only by the occasional halo of a blue spotlight on a contender.

The quiz now reflects the society it lives in. A cuddly toy and a washing maching are laughable prizes, and a late-1990s entertainment industry looking to distance itself from the naff, decided that life-changing money could be offered instead, forcing people to take them seriously.
A by-product of this was the development of the gameshow tension chord and accompanying heartbeat sound effects. Every gameshow in the lineage of Millionnaire uses it through “Deal or No Deal” to “For the Rest of Your Life”. At a moment when perhaps the contestant didn’t want to remind their frail physical corpse was close to cardiac arrest with the tension of their imminent failure, the chord arrives, lights go down and Chris/Noel/That Dickhead Off Watchdog start asking them if they’re sure. Are they sure this is the answer/box/lightbulb. The chord and the heartbeats prolong the tension, the show and the tedium.
Who Wants to be a Millionnaire, if filmed in an open field on a balmy August Day, would look like the shambolic high-stakes pub quiz it really is (Henry VII? No, wrong. Bye!). Deal or No Deal would be over in two minutes (box 11? £20 Box 9? £50k, unlucky…Box 3? 1p…hometime!) with Noel free to make embarassing passes at any contestant he wanted.

We, as a nation, gain nothing from the silly ’bmp-bmp’ of the heartbeat noises or the accompanying chord. It’s just rubbish.