Is it Socially Acceptable to Like Yourself?

Of course, I mean on Facebook. It's socially acceptable to like yourself as a person, although if you wish to possess 'hip' qualities then it's better you skulk around in a dumpster and sing along to Okkervil River songs. If you want to think yourself funny or attractive or intelligent - feel free. This is a free society, and self-delusion is a widely-accepted form of personal repression. The moment you go on Facebook, however (Facebook is a social website where you go to see how the kid who sat opposite you in French is doing in his quest to become chairman of the student support committee for Winchester), things change. If you show any sign of being fond of yourself, people will immediately form a war commission and judge you guilty of smugness.

Why? Why do we still insist on destroying the egos of the smug and tactless? I'll admit to liking myself on many an occasion, as I make a succession of hilarious jokes and snappy one-liners on Facebook. I am endlessly fascinated by my own life, and want to make sure that as many people as possible know the extent to which I am brilliant. To investigate this further, allow me to look upon the faces of reality TV. When we watch X-Factor or Britain's Got Talent, we watch not for the struggle to be the best (most people get bored by the time of the tenth week, when everyone has started to sound alike and the main discussion is "Dannii Minogue: amazing or irritating?") but instead for the opening stages. Watching people find out they are not good at singing or being talented is where most people find their joy in the show. So what if they look sad? Did you hear that attempt at a High C? Classic!

We don't want people to delude themselves. In this age of high-class media prostitution, we require everyone to be brutally honest about their shortcomings. It may be great news that Angelina Jolie is opening up a new care centre in Africa, but did you see 'The Tourist'? Total bomb, dude! We seem to want that every act of brilliance be countered by an acceptance that there were negative side-effects. We can't be happy about someone doing something good, because their clothes clashed while they did it. Instead of celebrating the poor people who are brave enough to go on stage to pursue their dream of becoming a professional self-welder, we laugh at them for being odd or kooky. But...

Being odd and kooky is a marvellous achievement, worthy of extended merit. Facebook has that 'like' button for a reason - to celebrate individuality and silliness. Would you prefer that there was a "While proud of my achievement today, I accept that there were several drawbacks to my success which will affect me in the long-term" button? Do you want everything to conclude with a downbeat tone? Surely it's more amazing that we can say something stupid and be proud of it, aware that we're being idiots but leaving that as a subtext. I applied to be a nuclear advisor a few days ago, a job I will never get because I have no qualifications whatsoever. But it was FUN to do it! And heck, I told everyone on Facebook about my hilarious attitude towards job-hunting, and I liked the bejewelled hell out of it.


To summarise, when I 'like' one of my own posts on Facebook, it is an affirmation that I am not only brilliant, hilarious, handsome and clever... but the most individual kook you ever saw. Basically, I'm the greatest person ever. Feel free to write comments below which confirm this summary. I'll read them at my leisure, before reposting the best ones on Facebook. And 'like' them, of course.

Rage Against Coat Hangers

They make life a living hell for at least 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the World's population (What? I've estimated the percentage of the World who is me. Haven't we all done that at some point?) with their spindly wires and looped bits. I don't like to overexaggerate, yet it seems clear that coat hangers are holding back humanity and keeping us from living in a utopia of freedom, peace, and endless new episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (of season 3/4 quality). They are terrible creations, one of the worst inventions that mankind has ever come up with. Let's quickly look over the basic concept of what a coat hanger is:

a. A way to store shirts so that they do not crease.

Except that isn't true, is it? Because the hangers hold the shirt up by the arms, meaning that the lower half of the sleeves fold inwardly on themselves, thus creasing the shirt.

b. A simple device to enable quick, easy storage

Also not true. When was the last time you took a shirt off a coat hanger without the hanger gripping on like Kate Winslet to a drowning Leonardo DiCaprio? Insistent that nobody stops them from performing their duty, hangers rarely allow you to simply remove a shirt. No, instead their long arms start to bend so that they stick to the shirt. The only way to get them free is to take the coat hanger and forcibly remove one arm at a time.

c. Futuristic and cool

Not many people think coat hangers are cool, ACTUALLY. We all know that they were invented so people could collect them like Pokemon Cards or POGS or celebrity twitter feeds, and show them off whenever a guest comes round, but frankly I don't think anyone does that.


What annoys me is that the original coat hanger design, which is terrible, has been followed by by a half-dozen even worse creations. Have you ever seen a coat hanger which has extra hooks running along the top wires? At least two shirts I owned have been ripped by those hooks, those little gremlin hands which destroy anything they get in contact with. Two whole shirts! You know how much those cost, in this day and age? Then there are the coat hangers which have a 'bottom rung' in case you want to hang your trousers from them. These are invariably weak, and sag noticably and alarmingly whenever tasked with this job. They're a timebomb waiting to happen, and yet we, the public, don't seem to care about the risk of the plastic snapping and flying into our neck. Why?

Because the coat hanger industry is incredibly powerful, that's why. The gun lobby in America is infamously for its bewildering power over Government. In Britain, the deep fat fryer industry has a crushing grasp on the people in control, especially in Scottish Parliament. Bt the coat hanger industry is so powerful that nobody knows how powerful they really are. Why else would we keep buying these things, which manage to tangle themselves up within seconds of being hung up on a rail? I have a similar grievance with iPod headphones, but that's best left for another time. Coat hangers are the enemy here.

The original function of the coat hanger was to perform abortions on the poor. How have we as a society fallen so far that we now need every single medical tool to have a secondary purpose? Clothes hangers are inappropriate and impossible to use, being unwieldy, prone to damaging clothes, and surprisingly difficult to actually hang clothes on. Why can't we just use magnets instead, like the Japanese do? Even better, what say we ban the wearing of shirts altogether and get back to our roots as members of the animal kingdom? Shame on us.

Why I Don’t Trust The Jews

A lot of Americans recently believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and that because of this he shouldn’t be allowed to become the awesome new President of the USA (or as we call it in Europe, ‘Disneyland’). This Islamophobia is not something that the Americans alone are guilty of, though – Britain seems to be obsessed with it. At least, the papers are. Every day the worthless newspapers spread panic about how the Muslims are going to take over all our jobs because;

A: They are ASYLUM SEEKERS. Agh! Asylum seekers!
B: They are trying to destroy the very fabric of British society which first enticed them to migrate over here
C: (They do the jobs better than British workers do)

Option C is not one you’ll see the papers mention very often. We’re not too bad though, overall, just as long as you don’t visit Bradford. Ever. In the Middle-East, I’m led to believe that apparently the Muslims are getting into wars with each other and other religions! That’s quite extreme indeed. It seems that The Muslims are not appreciated properly by the World. I sympathise with you, Muslim community.

At the same time the Christians are under attack from that Dawkins feller. He doesn’t think that people should base their lives around the writing of one book, and if you read his ‘The God Delusion’, available at many good book stores, he will advise you on how best to live your life away from the glare of religion. Mostly, he is not happy with Catholics. And why should he be? Those people have been going away once a week to those sinister-looking church buildings for years and years now. They’ve got something in mind, heed my words, and for centuries now they’ve been planning it for two or so hours a week. Also, they don’t like abortions – what kind of weirdo doesn’t love a good abortion?

But I’m not here to talk about the faults of Catholics and Muslims and Atheists. I’m here to talk about the real issues. I always have been, in a way. It’s just that you’ve never understood before what my posts about ‘X-Men’ and ‘How To Get Famous Women To Sleep With You’ were really about. They’re allegorical! I think that the main problem with society today is that it is doing too much worrying about Catholics and Muslims, and not enough worrying about Jews.

For one thing, did you know that all female Jews are surgically modified when they reach a certain age? The process is called a Bat-Mitzvah, and during it the girls are given a pair of wings to use, and an inbuilt sonar system. With these powers the girls then are able to fly around at night, drinking the blood of cows and peasants. Why isn’t the media reporting this?

It doesn’t end there. One thing that’s been bothering me for quite some time are the hats that Jews wear. These hats are sanctioned whenever they go into their place of worship, and you will not see a Jew in a synagogue without one. Nobody else seems to realise that these hats are resistant to telepathic intrusion, which means that the giant satellites the Government have in space are unable to read the minds of Jews once they start worshipping. There is a mental black spot above and around each Synagogue. What is it that the Jews see or think about in Synagogue that they need to keep secret from the rest of the World? Why isn’t the media reporting this?

And finally, the thing most Jews are known for: their fame. It’s long been known that Hollywood is run by Jews, gays, and Jewish gays (who have the most power of all), and that they use their power to influence the country. They have control over the entire population of California, for one thing (not the gays: they just suspiciously lost their ability to marry recently – another Jewish plot?), and their expansion is slowly taking over the rest of the two US coastlines. They have taken over the film industry, the TV industry, the music industry, and the media. Why isn’t the media repor- oh.

Jewish people must be stopped.

Meet The Saturdays

“Meet The Saturdays – Rochelle, Vanessa, Una, Frankie and Mollie. They’re the new girls on the block and on a mission to bring pop back to the charts! It’s not gone unnoticed that music’s needed a bloody good kick up the arse for some time now. Indie and R&B are all well and good, but what the hell are we supposed to dance to? Well wonder no more, because The Saturdays are about to throw themselves headfirst into your consciousness like a five-woman whirlwind, and bring back some much-needed, shameless fun to the charts.”


Hot from the factories of identikit moptop pop bands come 'The Saturdays', a group of sassy young women who in no way haven’t had their entire lives redesigned and dictated to them by marketers in order to catch the eye of young girls. Nope, this band are fresh and new and “on the block”, and they use the word 'bloody' to describe their attitude because they have something no female band have ever had before: girl power! Oh, wait.

They’re being marketed to us as a throwaway pop band, but is that any excuse for the poor music they’re making? I mean, let’s just take a look at their music video for the first single they’re releasing, ‘If This Is Love’. It takes many of the clichés about female bands and… continues them.

Here’s their video.




And here are ten things we noted.

1: The first thing we see are the band being primped and dressed up. During these opening few seconds, we are subjected to around eleven or twelve different smug poses of the girls admiring themselves in the mirror. The worst offender is the girl who sings the first part, who is so taken with herself that she can’t help but smile at how pretty she is. Twice.

2: Time taken until the producers activated the robotic voice-modulators: 22 seconds.

3: People are dancing in front of the window that the girls are due to appear in, before the girls actually appear. So their music is so powerful and funky that it will make strangers dance in the street? You have a powerful gift, girls - and we hope you use it for good instead of evil. Just imagine how dangerous your abilities would be if they fell into the wrong hands…

4: The chair that the girl dressed in purple is writhing across looks like a very painful chair to try and writhe across. Of course, it can’t help that she isn’t allowed to do anything more than lightly spasm, lest the band lose their child friendly appeal in the face of sexual dance manoeuvrings. Expect the slutty dancing to kick in with the next video, if they get to make one.

5: “You think I’m crazy/I’m not, I’m your baby” – yes, this does not sound stalkerish and wrong. We have now gathered that this song is about deluding yourself, which is gleefully ironic… although we’re not sure what ironic really means, so it might not be.

6: Does anyone else find it disturbing how the two ethnic members of the group have been painted white using makeup? “Don’t worry black/asian girls! We have a black and an asian girl in our band!/I know how you hate to see black and asian girls in your girl groups, white girls… so don’t worry, we’ve turned them into white and black/asian minstrels for you, so if you squint they don’t look so ethnic anymore.”

7: The girl dressed in blue gets a phone number from a guy! Wow! But of course, because she is so female and grr! girl power and independent and strong, she refuses to accept it or read it. Because you don’t need a man in your life, girls. Not while you’ve got your four best friends who don’t look like they hate you during choreographed music video shoots, you’ll be fine.

8: The sight of five women making ‘o’ faces as they pretend to sing a song which is obviously being piped over their miming is apparently enough to stall a small crowd of young people who suddenly proclaim the band to be their favourite and the best band of all time… Well alright, we’ll give you credit for realism there.

9: They leave before their performance is over, but the music keeps playing, thus revealing their miming to the entire crowd.

10: They go off and sign autographs at the end. How modest! They are obviously just like us, despite being locked away from the general public for the entirety of their mimed show. Why put in the autograph section anyway? They break off finishing the song to go sign things for fans, so are they really that needy for attention that they can’t finish a performance due to their craven need for acceptance? And to do so when they aren’t even a famous band yet? You can actually feel the marketers breathing down your neck whenever you watch that part of the video.


So which one is your favourite? Up-herself Saturday (in yellow), coy Saturday (blue), bendy Saturday (green), stoned Saturday (orange), or hopelessly lost in the deluded belief that her career with this band is going to last two songs Saturday (pink)? We should mention at this point that the background of the song is a sample from Yazoo, and that you can also find a hilariously off-key version of this song recorded live on Youtube.


Needless to say, we totally support the band in their endeavour to save us all from poor pop music.

Don't Get Too Patriotic

A little unsubtle, but it gets across a point which has become increasingly more sharp and... I dunno... pointy, as the years have gone by. This sharp and pointy point that I refer to is that there are no English tennis players left. And, with the oddly muscular exception of Andy Murray, there are no British players left. The four main tennis players in Britain are:

Andy Murray
Alex Bogdanovich
Anna Keothavong
Elena Baltacha

If you look at the surnames here… not a lot of Britishness there. That’s the problem with our tennis squad. Much like with our manual workers, we’ve hired out Eastern Europeans to do all the work for us. In a country which is obsessed with football, is there any space for us to have tennis players anymore? Every year the papers insist that we should have better tennis players – what are they doing to stimulate this? They don’t give a damn about tennis until Wimbledon comes round. So my point here is that kids should start playing tennis, even though it will make them unpopular.

Go for it!

Dear Timbaland

I do not understand you. You are the hip-hop producer who has worked with most of the leading American rappers, including Missy Elliott, Pharrell, and Jay-Z, all of which is fine as far as I am concerned. What I don’t understand is why you feel the need to produce work for people like Nelly Furtado. She had an interesting thing going on until you took her and made all her music into sexist nonsense about being promiscuous and all that. She never used to write songs all about having sex with strangers until you came along. But at the same time, her career was rapidly going nowhere and you are a famous producer. So taking her on, in your opinion, was a way of helping to promote her work and keep her famous and in the business. That was a very nice thing of you to do… but then her music suffered as a result. Your beats and production are good, that can’t be doubted, but your focus meant that Nelly Furtado was no longer Nelly Furtado. She became ‘anonymous woman’.

Admit it, Timbaland. You and Justin Timberlake decided to get together and stop interesting female singers, didn’t you? You started off by turning Nelly Furtado into a weird person who mimes in Nickelback videos and who goes to clubs. She was perfectly fine before! Dressing up in odd dresses and walking round in European fields, and all that. She used to be Canadian, for goodness sake! Now she’s an American who you can’t tell apart from any others. Despite this, I do like that “Say It Right” song. But Timbaland, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, now. You should’ve known that nobody can stop Bjork, despite your best attempts. And Madonna was already completely obliterated as a musician long before you took over and turned her into a glorified backup singer for your little pal Justin. So what did you do?

I’ll tell you, because this is a rhetorical letter. You were asked to produce a song for M.I.A., another female artist who you have absolutely no hope of ever turning into another one of your pop puppets. You accepted the offer, though, and you must’ve read and listened to her lyrics, which discuss the way people go on after all the badness and violence that have happened in Sri Lanka, where she has family. She happens to have lived through a civil war, and her song mentions aspects of this and how she lives on despite it and tries to enjoy herself as much as she can. It’s a clever approach to the song. You know this, and you are tasked to provide a beat for it – and you do. A good one, one that suits the vibe of the song. But then what do you do?

You try to hit on her. And not to mention, you tell her you want to go to her ‘teepee’ to go have sex. Do you even know what Sri Lanka is? It’s a country NEXT to India, Timbaland. Oh, and… Timbaland? India is NOT where native Indians come from! Indians are their own culture altogether, people who live in houses and have rickshaws and the Taj Mahal and food that everybody around the world thinks is rather good. They do not wander round hunting tigers and living in teepees, worshipping a giant totem pole. This is a mistake you have made here. You also call her, frequently, ‘baby girl’. If you call her baby girl, Timbaland, then you are really not going to be allowed to ‘hit that’. Your attitude towards the song is off-putting and ruins the whole thing. You have helped her to sell more copies of her album, which was a great piece of work you-aside, but in the process you have attempted once more to turn her into a lesser person than you. You seem to have something against women, Timbaland. You didn’t even need to rap on the song, you were simply tasked to provide the production, but you could not help yourself. I do not understand why you feel the need to do this.

By all means, destroy Madonna or The Pussycat Dolls as much as you can, because their reputations are already mostly based on their ability to be a series of off-putting sexist mannerisms instead of real musicians. Just keep away from the Sugababes. I noticed you have been working with them, and with Beyonce, and with Jennifer Hudson. Please do not work your sexist magic on them too, or else we will have an online ‘beef’ – and this will not end well for you, for as far as I know my use of grammar and ellipsis is far more educated than yours. I may not know how to create a great piece of musical backing, but my superior use of compound sentences will be the end of you.

This is my warning.