How are you feeling? No really, how are you feeling? Do you perhaps feel an odd leaden feeling in your stomach? Or maybe it was a feeling of dread tucked away up inside your brain-hole? Don't panic, you don't have cancer you're just a thinking person trapped in the Twenty-first century.
Sorry.

You see there is so much to contend with that unless you're a vapid, cultureless, label-humping drone aimlessly shuffling from one shop to the other you can't help but feel the crushing inanity of what we chucklingly call modern life.

So much of our lives is dedicated to simply trying to keep ourselves from drowning in the financial shit river of life, bill after bill comes hurtling at you like chinese throwing stars hurled by souless corporation spout-monkeys. It's all very soul damaging particularly for someone like me who is eking out a 'living' on minimum wage to see all your hard earned pennies disappear like a politician's expense claim sheet through a shredder. Your standard of living comes down to Earth with an audible 'THUMP!' Anything with more than three colours on the tin? No chance! Meat that may not actually consist of only the animal's ears and testicles? Icicle in hell. Quality booze that doesn't scrape the very taste buds from your tongue? Cheerful Christmas in Walford. That DVD box set of some Sci-Fi tosh that you fancy ploughing through? Non-caucasian member of the BNP.

Now to a lot of people the above items could be refered to as 'luxury items' and I'm fully aware that there are much worse off people out there, but I'm me! They're not. They probably have something I don't posses, like a cheerful demeanour or a wig but I can only see from my own selfish perspective thus my embarrassing self pity.

Still even if you manage to find yourself whistling a merry tune when you have no money (and please stop it, it's so irritating) there's other miseries to endure like for example any woman who has every uttered the words 'I'm just mad me' in a dire attempt to scratch their way out of the darkness of idiocy and into the light of self awareness. In a pink glittery cowboy hat.

And you've seen them too hanging out of gaudy stretch limos, veiny tits potruding from every window as the bellow and bray past you drinking cheap, piss poor fizzy wine thinking it's champagne. Those women that harass you if you're not grinning lughole to lughole like a vacuous gurning moron on MTV's Spring Break, telling you to 'Cheer up for fuck sake' when in fact you've been quite happy up until that point now you're filled from head to toe with a venomous urge to stick a high pressure hose up their arse and watch as each orifice voilently erupts pink glitter fountains of French fucking Martinis.

So now you're assuming that I'm a deeply misogynistic person, I'm not. I hate men equally. An equal opportunities ranter I am and to prove that there are men that make me wish to deep fry my own head I shall point bile towards Danny Wallace.

Danny Wallace has written books and is the bastard that let Jim Carey start gurning like a VD ridden old cunt in a horse collar with 'Yes Man'. We'd started to forgive Carey after he partially redeemed himself in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' only for it all to fall apart because of Danny Wallace and that bloody film.

Yet that's not the reason for all this jaunty vitriol, it's just he is smug. Unbelieveably smug, like a smug black hole sucking all the smugness in the area directly into his smugified body. And that's a lot of smug.

In fact he is so smug that his face now resembles a puckered anus with eyebrows, in fact if I were him that's what I'd change his witless collumn in avoidable freebie car advert mag Shortlist to. It's currently called 'Danny Wallace is a Man' (how nauseatingly post modern, self aware but mostly self abusing) it should now and forever read 'Danny Wallace is a Puckered Anus With Eyebrows'

Possibly then I'd feel like the world was a slightly better place. A fleeting feeling of course because there's so much to rant about and so little time.

Yesterday's rant about the BNP was a bit on the heavy side albeit with some good sweary gags however today I think I shall show the gentler, softer side of my Fairy liquid like nature because you see I'm not hateful just bitter and twisted. Apparently there's a difference.

So today I'm going to bleat on about somethings that make life almost bareable starting with last night's Ashes to Ashes which performed the amazing feat of having a surprising and actually enjoyable series finale.

*SPOILER ALERT!* After Gene hunts accidently shoots her down in 1982 Alex awakens to find herself back in the present day and is reunited with her daughter (who has made her a get well soon card that was a poster plastered all over the place in 1982, nice touch that) A collective cheer erupts from the audience for D.I. Drake is back where she should be when all of a sudden Gene Hunts appears on the television in front of her infroming her he's 'On the lam' because the powers that be think Hunt shot her deliberately. As Alex stumbles from her bed Gene's image appears on every screen she passes growling for her to wake up.
Wonderful. That scene alone succeeds in turning the whole series on it's head and all bets are off. You see in hollywoodtelevisionland too often are we subjected to non too subtle scripts where any twists are just the opposite of what's been happening up to that point, also as viewers become more and more sophisticated they're able to guess where the writers are going far too often.
However it's not always the case and last night's episode shows that hollywoodtelevisionland still can pull off a satisfying surprise even for these tired old jaded eyes. So that's back slap one!

Back slap two has to go to the makers of the new version of Battlestar Galactica which although has now finished in the States and has just had it's final episodes released on DVD I'm still ploughing through due to the recent purchase of a huge twenty disc box set. Now this is an almost flawless sci-fi programme, last night I made my way through a chunk of the second season including the almost unbareably tense three episode story about the discovery of another Battlestar, the Pegasus.
The writers seem to take an adult apporach to the stories and setting it close to reality as a show about big spaceships fighting nasty robot buggers can get. The acting is for the most part solid (At times I'm not hugely conviced by Starbuck, too actoryshcoolish), the production values are pleasingly high and there's some very lovely documentry style special effects for the ships in flight and battle. If there is one thing that still bugs me about the programme it's that being a hollywoodtelevsionland affair they're not allowed to say the grown up sweary words and as such have to substitute 'Fuck' for 'Frak' which they use. A lot. Not exactly sure what they would substitue for 'Cunt'? Maybe 'Crunt'? 'Clunt'? 'Piers Morgan'?

Last back slap of the day would HAVE to go to good old David Dimbleby for his obvious contempt of Nick Griffin in this clip - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8088501.stm

It must be difficult for an intelligent person like Uncle Dave having to question hatebags like Griffin and then trying to take what they say seriously when all he wants to do is decimate them with probing questions and leave their dough-ish bodies quivering like a housewife that just seen a Take That concert on a hen night.

So a big back slap to Uncle Dave!

Just one thing before I trot off regarding the BNP and one of the many reasons I dislike them so. A few years ago in the city I live in a boy was kidnapped off the street, tortured and killed. The boy was caucasian and the killers of Asian origin. It was a terrible time for everyone particularly in the predominately Asian Pollokshields area of town where the kidnapping took place and where the boy lived. Tensions were running exceptionaly high and a lot of people were in shock that such a horrific crime could take place within their community this is when the BNP hate wagon trundled in to stir things up. They took to the very spot that the boy was kidnapped megaphone at the ready concerned with preying on people's fears, trying to turn a tragedy to their advantage. How many people turned up or even listened to them?

None.

It was elating to see them meekly pile their paraphenalia back into their cars and slither back from wence they came. A wasted journey for Nick Griffin, then we got to see his best side. His back, as it walked away, the only acceptable view of him if you ask me.

Join me soon for more swearing, rantling and downright jolly fun.

It's cool. It makes a 'Cool List' It's for the young music lover and it's been going for decades, it's the NME and it's become a shallow pond.

Yeah, yeah everyone a bit past it moans about how the NME isn't like it used to be, it's apparently part of growing old, you complain about the bands they cover and how they're not a patch on 'your' bands and the writing isn't as good. Is it because new music becomes more and more trivial to a growing human being? Life becomes more complicated and the twist and turns along the way make you see such things as the NME as a relic of your own personal history, is this why I can't read the NME the way I used to?

Nope.

Make your own nose-dive sound here because it's not your age and it's nothing to do with growing up (and it's certainly nowt to do with Morrissey being pissed off at them again) it's to do with the fact that the magazine just doesn't have the same voice, or if it did it's voice has nowhere near the same volume as it once did have. And even if you could hear that voice it's saying nothing whatsoever of value.

A tear duly shed we look at the glorious past of beat groups, hippy trippy voyages through to when the magazine really started to speak volumes turned up to eleven; the punk era. This is when a paper about popular music tugged the discerning music lover's ear and whispered sweet, incredible, urgent words. Those vital nudges to what was happening, what was in the eye of the storm and why they were deserved of you attention. This rolled with punk through to the eighties and the Joy (Divisions) that came with it, the nonsense and the utterly cherishable, they siphoned it off and led the way with wit and vigor, infused by a sheer love and commitment to new music and what it meant to the readers at home wondering how to part with that five pounds of hard earned cash, the NME gave you the information.

Again they sought out what it was to be listening to great music in the nineties with the frivolous and flirtatious Britpop movement (if indeed it was ever a movement or just a door left open by some talented bands which a flurry of opportunists burst through and burst the framework) at the same time always keeping a cautious eye on those trouble makers in the dance tent.

I read it all but there's been a serious slip on the muddy festival path and somewhere along the way someone lost their way. The no-holds barred thrust of enthusiastic journalism became writers inserting themselves into the story or they had collumns dedicated to themselves. They may be terribly interesting to themselves but to us they were just the guy that asked the questions so who cared? Now if those questions were indeed truly insightful, penetrating or they managed to break the boundries between journalist and subject down so much that unadulterated truth flowed then the masthead and potrait of their shining self would be utterly justified but we know it's just another pedantic Q and A session to promote a product.

Three recent occassions where I wanted to turn disappointment into flying bullets were, first of all a review of Keane's most recent album, now before you raise an eyebrow I'm not a huge fan, I think they're ok, alright but I wouldn't telling people "Oh, you MUST buy this album" anytime soon, however I witnessed the most tedious attempt of biutchery-as-review I've ever had the poor luck to read. The stupid girl (and I use the words 'Stupid' and 'Girl' very carefully here as she was both stupid and a girl) just used the review process to get stuck into Keane with a vicious and yet vacuous hand.
In order to top up her 'Cool List' card she swiped it through on a piece that had not a pip on what the album's contents were good or bad. Essentially it could be summed up in 9 words - "I hate Keane because I'm too cool for them"

Yet another shallow, indie cred, foul-mouthy, gutter queen or as we called 'em back in the day, Riot Grrrls. Bet you though she's from a good family that think she's 'Just so out there' no she's not because she laid down no basis for what she was being negative about and showed herself (and for that matter the commisioning editor) up for the wannabees that they truly are, ignorant. There was nothing smart, nothing interesting, nothing but a snotty privileged voice thinking they were punk. Punk would've seen her for what she really was.

I'm sure Keane's enormous sales comforted them through that trauma, if indeed they even paid attention to the fly on the hide of the great Keane marketing elepahant.

Second to unlodge my affections for the NME was their second stitch up of Morrissey. Not so much for what they did to poor old Moz but much more for the uber-PC inevitability of it all, the NME had taked a moral stance as was indicated by the editor in his note at the front of the magazine, however everyone with sense, which was about 99% of the nation sighed a huge sigh and some of us detatched from the iceberg to float into the internet where there was more choice in odd anchor-less opinions (like me) but they wouldn't be so pious or engineered and possibly more credible.

Build 'em up, knock 'em down once,shame on you. Build 'em up, knock 'em down twice,shame on all of us.

Third up was an advert for the Army. In the pages of the NME. It spoke volumes to me. Rebels no more, the words were poisoned from there on in.

So I walkied off into a metaphorical sunset (being that I live in Glasgow it's mostly rain, metaphorical sunsets are all we have) and I don't see me picking up the NME ever again, not that it will be a David to their Goliath but I could've just been too old and had happy memories instead I see a turncoat sitting on the shelf and I wonder how the kids will ever be alright in the future?