Series after series, it becomes more apparent that Big Brother is like Christianity; They’ve both been big in England at points, you can’t escape from either no matter where you go and it’s all down to your interpretation.

Textbook example is Emily “the-posh-student-bitch-queen-from-Bristol” Parr, who came in the house uttering the now infamous line ‘there’s this new music called indie….’ Instanty the public lambasted her, and with due logic, indie has been around for nearly 30 years. However, apart from a small number of friends and relatives we can’t be sure that Emily, say, wasn’t been a bit sarcastic or plainly just taking the piss, but, regardless, it’s now Gospel.

And, if this morning on the internet is anything to go by, she’s now either some Mr. Burnsesque racist blue blooded whore, to unfortunate victim of Big Brother Police state (that’s the actual country rather then the show). Yes, she did the very thing that can only be excused if you’re a) retarded or b) black; She used the word ‘nigger’ live on TV.

Within the space of the night, she was evicted, kicked out on her arse quicker then Michael Richards was lynched. Apparently, black people have a problem with words that connote the few hundred years we used to exploit them. This is the opinion of slap headed Guardianista Paul Flynn, who assures you that anybody under 35 won’t take offence to the word as it’s ‘street’. Forgetting two main points, that a) In this context, it’s only used between certain black people who use it as a sign of empowerment rather then a racial slur and b) Emily isn’t black.

He does have a point though, essentially he hits the nail on the head when he says ‘This is undoubtedly a dumb thing for a posh, well-educated, 18 year old girl to say.’ Anybody in the Big Brother House would have to harbour the intelligence of plankton to actually launch a racial attack on another house mate. So then, if we can assume she’s not been overtly racist, does that make it all right to call somebody by a name that has offensive connotations if they use it themselves as a term of endearment? I learned this one the hard way. A girl in my sixth form used to jokingly refer to herself as a slut, though she took offence when I greeted her with ‘Yo, sperm Dumpster’. Is she a hypocrite? It’s not a black and white issue. If black people can use it and white people can’t then that’s a kind of racism in itself.

There’s three levels of blame in this problem that have already reared their head. We’ve covered Emily. If it’s the fact that she actually uttered the word that got her banned, rather then her attitude after it, claiming that it wasn’t a Big Deal. Charlie and Nikki said that they weren’t offended (Which luckily means that Asian and Black communities in Britain have already been spoken for, then) but that it was a big deal, and to be honest you couldn’t have blamed them for saying they weren’t offended as you wouldn’t want to be a part of the race argument. If she has the ‘right’ to say it, is another issue.

What is the issue, more so then any utterances of the word, is Channel 4s reaction to it. Having been accused of deliberately pretending the overtly racist stuff didn’t exist, a huge conspiracy is at their feet. Obviously, it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that if you watch the hour edited footage there’s roughly 23 hours of action you’re not seeing, and even then with BB live and on the internet it would still be fairly easy to censor any racism, it was fairly sensible for C4 to chuck her out before much more could go on.
And then you get to the third level of responsibility, Offcom. You could argue not such a big shit stir would have happened if Offcom weren’t leaning on channel 4. And if this decision is in anyway to appease or influenced by Offcom, it gives a far more sinister image then 3,600 utterances of the n word. By evicting people for offensive language whilst, let’s face it, bullying and offending people are a staple part of the Big Brother experience, it gives out a message to the public that says ‘this is all acceptable, so long as you don’t use any obvious language’. Similar to NYC’s banning of the N word, it seems to be saying racism and prejudice only exists at the level of name calling in society.

At the end of the day, it’s a minefield. An episode of South Park managed to say the n word 132 times in the space of twenty minutes and still be considered progressive in some sense, and their pint sized Archie Bunker character Eric Cartman comes out with things that would make Emily look like Gandhi. When this programme encourages you to at least engage with the subject of racism through what the writers call ‘equal opportunity offenders’ it kind of does the exact opposite of what banning the word, be it from TV or society will actually do, which is quite obvious in the reaction to this latest mess, it keeps the divides; liberal vs conservative, blacks vs whites, power games. makes nice telly though.

nobodies emailing me back and its at least an hour and a half till i can smoke.  I like to time my toking so it doesn’t feel like ive just rinced weed all day.

Which meant I haven’t blogged much in ages.  Don’t worry though people!  The last few days of my mundane existence all blend in to about one half decent blog.

About a week ago, I talked to Dare via the magic of webcam and had a little smoke.  God bless the net, been able to smoke with people from Arkansas.  I even googled them so I could seem a little bit in the know.  Dare’s sound, he has a cool pickup truck and lots of cheese based biscuits.

On Saturday, went on a mini mini pub crawl.  In Leeds, there’s a road called the Otley run, which stretches for a good few miles and connects student land (Hyde Park/Headingly) with the town centre.  On it, there’s about six million pubs so ‘the Otley run’ is a famous Leeds pub crawl where you end up drunker then a fish on absinthe.  We started about 3/4s of the way through after watching England bow out like the pussies they are, so needed a few drinks to take the sting off.  Turned out getting really wasted, trying to vault the Leeds Uni Halls of residence gate that’s near where I live, pulled up a potted plant and gave it to the takeway guy and stopped about sixty people to inform them that my friend does indeed bum foxes.  Woke up with a hangover the size of France and not a lot has happened since then.

It’s that reason that  ended up learning l33t.  Internet game playing at that time was a bit different to your modern day myspace style social network site.  No flashy videos or spinning pictures and video blogs, in those days it were a simpler time, yes it was.  A lot of the more common internet clichés, such as ‘lol’  & smilies etcetera, was born out of online gaming.  Though it’s more articulate and clever to type standard English on sites like EC it was a different kettle of fish in online games.  My usual type, which revolve around you been a person on a team of people killing other people, were usually quite fast paced; and if your team mate has just farted and accidentally grenaded half the oppositions team and you type ‘gee Gerald, that unexpected explosion was rather humorous’ then by the time you’ve got half a plate of shrapnel in your eye.  A lot of phrases was born of people trying to save their arses with one hand and tell a fifteen year old to fuck off, IE ‘STFU’.  Another reason was that message boards would only have one name field when you registered, so if you had an online persona you wanted to keep alive in another game and your name was John Smith you were fucked or you spelt your name j0n S/\/\1FF!!”11 Because it’s slightly better then johnsmith200000000202344.

And I know you smart arses think your been well cool with your ‘shocked fass’ and the like.  Well, you’re not the first, I can tell you!  A lot of l33t sp34k1n  was a direct piss take of other people.  Mainly two types, people who couldn’t spell (l33t came from, as far as I remember, a lot of tweenagers who would come on and beat your arse all night but could hardly spell, IE ‘beet you all im a leet’.

Though today, it’s mostly butchered by a bunch of text speaking apes from across the pond.  Ah well, it meant something once.   It’s also a kind of unspoken code, if the right type of person on the net types ’1za g0|- d4 1337 5|< 111za 5tFU n00bz’ you know you shared a corner of time and boredom together.

Last night, when heavily stoned, I did a stupid thing and got into a large argument about cat burglary with my flatmates.  I say argument, it consisted of one laughing at me whilst the other tries really really hard to give a sarcastic remark to everything I say.

To say my flatmate  Amy pisses me off would be like saying a few Jews died in the Holocaust.  On and off, it’s pretty much been this way since I moved into the house.  At the end of my first year, after nearly moving in with a few friends of mine but ending up not on the account that they realised they’d actually have to pay for rent and instead decided to stay with their parents.  I met up with Amy and Max, who already lived togather and wanted another “”friend”", over some internet housing site,  desperate for a house in the last week of Uni and as I went to meet them I said to myself I’d sign with them unless it was obvious they were planning to steal from/kill me.

They didn’t, but not through lack of trying.  The first couple of months saw a rugged initiation ceremony of some sorts.  I didn’t enjoy it too much, spent most of the nights smoking into oblivion to ignore the wankers sitting next to me.  To my defence, you try getting insulted nightly by somebody who sounds like Butch Dingle farting in the wind.

Max eventually gave up with it, and to be honest I think it’s his wily Yorkshire way of working out if I was a twat or not.  Amy, however, became visible by her absence, and spent most of the winter speaking to her boyfriend in Glasgow online.

Most of the second year went that way.  Third year bought about changes.  I lived in Northants for the summer, and Max and Amy hung out in the house. Ages ago, whilst Amy was single and Max had a girlfriend, he’d make sure  he would stay in and talk to Amy.  Amy didn’t do the same when she got her new boyfriend and Max’s girlfriend was living in Nottingham, he spent most nights on his bill.  That, and the fact that she had moved into the house about the end of June and when I arrived in September she still had most of her shit in the front room (amy and max get large rooms and I get a glorified broom cupboard to add insult to injury.  We weren’t her biggest fans.

Winter comes, and she transforms into superuberbitchplusone.  With her b/f, she’s in very little at the same time/in the same room as us, which she starts trying to use to her advantage.  About way through the term me and Max had to start making mental tabs of the washing up: She’d eat food/drink in her room, leave the cups/galsses/plates there to go moldy, take them downstairs when we wern’t around and then complain about the state of the room  She never did anything around the house, me and max been the only ones that would actually clean/wash up, and she’d have a go at us because she felt she was the only one who did anything around the house.  Two times she pissed me off loads (well three, she implied that a friend of mine who died last April deserved what he got).  First, I have about 12 glasses that I’ve bought over the time.  She bought down nine of them from her room (I thought I had lost them all and was going slowly insane), left them moldy (and I mean trees growing out of them).  I resorted to hiding my glasses, she then demanded to see where my glasses were.  Like I would tell her.  She already banned my from using her stuff after the 2nd time she really pissed me off, which happened before the first time.  She had a go at me for been a messy twat, to which I left my mouth hanging open and pointed to  a moldy pasta bake dish that she had used for her b/f (without asking me) about three weeks ago.  She just stormed off after that.

I’ve stopped talking to her, or anything like that, as the few times she sits downstairs she pisses me off more then a buss load of creationists.  ‘Amy audio commentary’ is a phrase I’ve coined in my head that refers to the way she has an opinion ON EVERYTHING ON FUCKING TELEVISION.  From the annoyingly mundane (‘Look, she had half a cigarette in her hand now it’s a full one’ during Pulp Fiction) to sarcastic comments (‘yeah, like that would happen’ WHILST WATCHING DR FUCKING WHO) or generally demeaning everything I like or hold dear.  Sometime she looses the plot of her argument half way through and emerges with some new viewpoint, like she doesn’t even listen to herself speaking.

To the argument then.   Basically, the whole crux of my argument is that a cat burglar exists in real life, as in there are actual people who refer to their selves as ‘professional’ cat burglars.  (I’ve been reading a lot on organized crime lately and I really like the idea of the cat burglar, he might be a dick but he’s got skills and doesn’t resort to blowing your kneecaps off) Not a real hard argument there, as any normal right thinking person would probably realize that not only there’s a good chance they doesn’t know everything like they pretends to,  that the term had probably been used, in some archaic world or remote corner of the earth, and that arguing against it would so arrogant it would probably hurt.  She acted like a demeaning arrogant cow and I would have stormed upstairs if I would let my emotions get the better of myself.  Instead, I just pour all the fustration into this blog.  Amy, FUCK OF AND DIE.

I have another bindhi, can and a redbull for novelty value (which has a taste similar to shoving pennies in your mouth) and walk towards the shabby Brudnell Social club in Hyde Park.  It’s got a bit of a retro northern feel to it, like a Pulp Music video.  Beer is cheap enough so before the first band has even come on I’m about as drunk as Father Jack and half as coherent.  On come the first band, a Primus tribute band, who manage what a lot of tribute band don’t and actually manage to sound like the band they’re mimicking.  They go through some of the better Primus tracks, like my name is mud and jerry the race car driver, and it takes me back to driving around fields getting stoned at sixth form at lunch, where we’d just play about three different primus tapes for about half a year.

On come the Rage tribute band, fronted by a girl that sounds a hell of a lot like Zach de la rocha, and everybodies up and jumping so I get up as well and it’s not long before I’m dancing like a loon.  This is where my bight ends as far as my memory allows me, though I remember bits of a coaster and a bearded guy, and throwing a slice of anchovy pizza at a cat.  People get annoyed on nights of drunkeness when their memory plays up on them, but I reckon it’s a favour.  Ignorance is bliss.

The story involves the one who looks a little bit to smug for his own good.  Now, partly due to the fact he’s a gimp he’s spent most of the series so far symbolically pissing on the faces of his friends, girlfriend and random rich people.  Well, the aforementioned rich people decide to capture his sister and start on a bunch of un realistic young people goofing around scenes because they’re rich and weird.  Meanwhile, smuggie sits at home, his friends have had enough of him and he’s bored of his annoying, Harry Enfield cameo parents.  Cue generic hollyoaks style pity  scene where he mopes around his house feeling sorry for himself with some nondescript indie twoddle in the background.  Now, i’d normally be pissed of at any programme that tries to make me empathise with some snooty smug bastard who looks a little bit too much like an elf for my liking but the fact that he’s moping after ACTIVELY PISSING OFF ALL HIS FRIENDS.  This continues as the series takes a dive of implausible avenue right into ‘you’ve got to be taking the pissville’.  Not satisfied with a fifteen year old girl smoking crack and having no problem with a needle in her arm (like many of the middle class bristol kids do, or so I’ve heard) the rich kid gang start to act a lot like some NME new rave imagining of the gang from a clockwork orange, as we go to their hideout, and old sports centre (which also happened to have a power supply for a million neon lights and a DJ booth), they meet the rich kid, smuggie gets his his just desserts and the well needed moral for today’s youth is ‘don’t take naked pictures of  girl, steal her brother’s phone and send the pictures to the girl he likes or he might be pissed off’ and seeing the smug wanker mope about when surely anybody would have retaliated to having their sister put in hospital.

A few years ago there was a programme on channel four called Nathan Barley, about  journalists working in the centre of London which I would like to imagine smuggie from  skins will grow up to be.  They have a lot in common, apart from looking like they just walked out of a  topman  window display the series concerned itself with bumfaced media types that are all about style over anything meaningful.  It was cynical, very pessimistic as the protagonist Dan slowly got sucked into the idiots world of bad music and worse fashion sense you kind of felt the same was happening to the nation’s TV.  Well, Nathan Barley never got a second season, presumably because channel four couldn’t think of any way to make it shite, whilst Skins will  probably be on tele long after I die.  Ah well.

People first started to hear about what seems like way back in December, where channel four viewers  were blitzed with new adverts for itin a similar fashion that our war torn ancestors were blitzed by the Germans for 6 years, except the bombing probably was a bit less annoying and didn’t have many beautiful people involved (apart from Gurbles).  Speaking as a person with a face that looks like a freeze frame of a frog exploding sexy people get very annoying very quickly, so I was getting ready to hate it more then I hate Roz (and that is a Hell of a lot) .

And around it comes, and it strikes me as an initial let down.  It feels like it was born out of many a late night Hollyoaks meeting (gee, I wish we could get young people swearing and the like) where people can show their breasts and smoke and stuff, but it still seems to be happening in Wrigley’s Extra land.  Apart from dull looking afore mentioned beautiful people (like the main guy, who manages to tick both boxes of been a smug upper middle class person and a completely unlikeable cunt and the same time) there’s a bunch of ‘crazy kooky’ type people who will probably end the show with shrapnell in their eye.  The problem with this type of yoof programming is that because of some arcane PSB law that basically reduces humans to chimps meands that obviously they’re not allowed to look like they’re advocating millions of young people to go out and do viagra pills and nob your Welsh psych teacher, so all these people are going to end up punished somehow from the narratives.

It does have some good points though.  One interesting thing is that, for once, it shows adults as self obsessed retards, the welsh psych teacher is shown as incapable of anything apart from sleeping with students, crying and getting caught naked, the history teacher is like some Alan Partridge clone  who manages to be a little bit of every damned teacher I’ve ever had.  It’s nice to see kids relying on each other for a change rather then some pug faced adult who comes along to save the day.

Though that’s where the good stuff ends, really. The series soon abandons all pretences of ‘speaking for the youth like man’ when the class go off on a impromtu trip to the middle of fucking nowhere, Russia (just to sum up this trip included a guy who’s parents have left, had lost his house to a squat and was currently living in sheltered student accomodation with a goldfish in a pint class and a back of viagra to his name) and seemed to have been booked an executed in a week (history teacher: Had you thought we’d be here this time last week? welsh teacher: no!) and then an endless freefall of homosexual loving, kidnapping semi naked russian peasents and taking them into the forest, which is pleasing but ultimately pointless.  I suppose if you’re a happy go lucky twenty something it’ll prove as an interesting way to see what them darn kids are up to these days but as a twenty year old who spent most of his childhood along similar lines covered in the show it’s got no sould or meaning to it.  It says something that I relate more to the Sopranos or Peep Show, the first about a middle aged Mafia boss in NJ the latter about two twenty something people in London,  to this supposed ‘yoof programming’.

You were there and things were good

I never left the neighborhood

Or did anything except

Sit wide eyed at my desk.

Oh how I would spend my days

typing ‘Fuck you’ on the religion page.

But to quote that famous song

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Monday morning and I endure the terror

Of an IP address conlficting error

Lazily sulk around my room

thinking ‘oh, it’ll start to work soon’

Monday turned to Wednesday night

And I wouldn’t give up without a fight

Slouched over IP settings new

Shouting ‘What in Christ do you want me to do?’

I started to think this was the end

And I’d ever see ‘connected again’

And now you work, and all is grand

Because James helped me treat my computer like a MAN

I’ll surf all day, and I know when

I get bored of EC, myspace and friend (ster)

At the end of the day, and in the end

I’ll never take you for granted again.

(seven minute guitar solo)

Co-incidentally, this is also why I usually shun anything that requires any kind of creative talent.