Miraculous Hero!

Concerning the recent expulsion of spade-wielding mole-men from their subterranean dwelling in Chile, I’m beginning to get quite decidedly upset at how many times the word ‘Miracle’ is used when illustrating these events throughout the media. Poor English forever upsets me regardless but when reputable newspapers are using entirely inappropriate words on their cover headline; that’s when I get really quite… Itchy.

Correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding of the word ‘Miracle’ is that it’s used to describe chance happenings with a vastly unlikely, even impossible probability. Yes? For example, if a woman in her late twenties, walking her dog along a quiet suburb, suddenly finds her entire body inside out, swirling through a vast cosmic void filled only with the alien dialectic insults of an incomprehensibly vast space-goblin looming over her and her dog, itself now comprised of chicken nuggets and glue, then I would be inclined to choose the word ‘Miracle’ to describe this event. (You’re probably hoping for a drawing of that now. Tough.)

On the contrary, would you deem it ‘Miraculous’ if you ate a sausage. A WHOLE sausage. Like, one of those fat ones. Can you imagine?

Anyway, back to the point. What angers me is that this puerile word detracts from the effort of the human endeavour involved. It wasn’t an impossible task to drill down to fetch up the diggy men. It was a logistical challenge, sure, and a great achievement, but it was entirely doable. (Christ that’s an awful word.) Saying that the accomplishment of this task was a ‘Miracle’ is akin to dubbing me finishing this sentence a miracle… Holy crap, I did it!

‘Miracle’ is a word long used by ignorant people to describe events or subjects that defy simple explanation. Just ask Insane Clown Posse.

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Another word that’s been irritating me of late is one imbued with righteous power and exceptional selfless moral fibre;

HERO!

And, inevitably, it’s another grossly inappropriately used word throughout the media.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that some of the little people who own bits of the planet for some reason are whacking each other with bullets because they’ve got little else to achieve in their lives. Now, while I’m all for deplorable violence, war seems, to me, entirely futile and moronic. The differences people fight over are only perceived by ignorant people far too ingrained in archaic rituals, perpetuating conflicts born of fear and stupidity.

AND LO, in such a battleground we find… The Hero!

Once again, I’ll provide my definition of the word: I would describe a ‘Hero’ as one who has performed an act so courageous and selfless as to set them apart from the average person through their virtue and caring. Now, I don’t know too much about soldiers, but I would most certainly never describe them as empathic or virtuous. I would describe them as pitiful pawns with a misguided sense of duty to their ‘country’ (once again, another pointless divide in a world that should have grown out of such ideas).

But, once again, it’s the misuse of the word that upsets me most; when wounded soldiers are INSTANTLY described as ‘Heroes’. It seems that, without heed to the circumstances, without hesitation, a soldier wounded immediately becomes the subject of reverence for the newspapers and is branded a ‘Hero’. I would describe a soldier as a ‘Hero’ if he strode out into a crossfire of phosphorous mortars to single-handedly retrieve a bus-full of children from a minefield surrounded by explosive sharks.

It seems, however, that the news has a slightly more loose definition. Get shot? Hero. Step on a land mine? Man, that’s damn heroic. Accidentally slip on a soggy packet of crisps and trip over onto a carelessly placed jar of mayonnaise? Have a fucking Victoria Cross!

‘Soldier’ is a job. Stepping on an anti-tank mine and becoming a splat of yourself isn’t heroic. It’s not a display of you doing your job well; it’s a demonstration of your ineptitude. It’s like a bus driver being rewarded with a big fat bonus for driving off a bridge.

 

-Box

Please stop nubbing me.

CBeebies, the children’s TV channel, clearly wants to promote equality through it’s presenters for obvious reasons; they want the little squishy viewers to know that we are all the same, despite our physical differences. Good. Happy. Fun, fun jiggly time. It would make sense then that the BBC would strive to hire a range of people from different age/race groups to illustrate this equality. Fine. Good. Dandy.

But why… Why, oh why… Would they think it’s a good idea to hire a woman with half an arm missing?

There’s demonstrating equality, and then there’s scaring the vital organs out of kids by forcing them to view a creepy disfigured woman rubbing things with her nub.

“Daddy, why is that man a different colour to me?”

“That’s called skin pigmentation, honey. It’s perfectly natural.”

“Why has that lady only got one arm, daddy?”

“She got her hand caught in an industrial wheat thresher which ground her forearm into a mist of soft tissue and flecks of bone, sweetie. It’s perfectly natural.”

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On the subject of children…

I was having a little muse to myself after witnessing an abominable frog creature thrashing in a pram and screaming some incomprehensible nonsense; why do children talk in that whiny, drawn out way? And why do they feel it necessary to repeat everything they say over and over until someone acknowledges them? I think I have a fairly solid explanation: It’s because they’re emulating the way adults talk to them.

You see a child in a grocery shop with a parent and it notices something it believes will sate it’s lust for coloured sugar. Knowing it is in no position to buy this item itself, the child confronts it’s parent,

Imagine, if you will, that high-pitched droning inflection that children produce when talking as if the act of speech itself was a horrifying agony. They don’t need a packet of Strawberry-Simulated Shoelace Chewies. They N E E E E E E E E E E D it. Their little nubby legs aren’t tired, they’re T I I I I I I I R E E E E E E D .

Surely children learn how to communicate verbally from those around them; primarily their parents, and they will doubtless pick up on little subtleties in their elder’s speech… Such as ridiculously elongated vowels and high pitched, indecipherable cooing noises. The only reason little Stevie is currently on the floor, screaming barely understandable hootings that stretch the length of time itself is because that’s how his parents have spoken to him.

“Awww look at ‘ickle Schtevie! HE SO CUUUUUTE! DOESH SCHTEVIE WANT A BAFFY WAFFY!?”

Psychological experiment no.1:

• Have a child.
• Speak to it as I would speak to, for example, a bartender or take-away leaflet deliverer.
• Observe child’s resulting speech patterns.
• Laugh about toying with a fragile young mind.

-Box

Heil to the Bus Driver.

As a public service employee, you’d expect me to have some kind of sympathetic rapport for those in a similar situation… But the truth is that when my brain is in ‘non-work’ mode I tend to become a titanic hypocrite and generally treat other public service staff in a somewhat less than pleasant manner. Despite my insider knowledge of how serving the masses causes a vast fissure of hatred to erupt down the centre of one’s brain, I still feel like those serving me should be lovely, joy-filled cartoon people with big, shiny balloon heads who’ll pander to my every whim without question.

Somehow, even though I’m aware of how many cretinous fleshbags will have affronted the public service worker previous to serving me, and despite being aware that said employee no doubt assumes before even seeing my face that I’m a horrifying waste of life, I still get incredibly angry when they’re rude to me. I think the major factor contributing to this rage is the dismissal of a cheerful greeting. I may, perhaps, skip up to till; various meat-based goods cradled in my arms; a great, cataract-inducing grin on my face; throbbing with some inexplicable joy. I will look the vendor in his crusty, crusty eyes and pour out a greeting matched only by rainbows in it’s effervescent cheeriness. I will clutch the shopkeep by his cheeks and smile so powerfully that the skin on his face begins to dissolve from the exigent beam of pure clown-like fervour erupting from my teeth. But despite this nuclear assault of happiness, I am greeted with a graven stare of stale, flaking neutrality and a barely audible goat noise serving as ‘Hello’.

In terms of public service staff, there are two varieties that stand out to me; postmen and bus drivers.

These must be the most dramatically world-weary and humanity-resenting people ever created. But they are very different in their individual struggles to exist. Postal workers seem to be either incredibly moronic to the point where even a sausage would question their merit as a human, or so universally jaded that they basically don’t exist within the known realms of space and time. Postal workers infuriate me no end for their ineptitude and consummate lack of caring.

Bus drivers, on the other hand, often give across the aura of an intelligent person broken down to the level of an infant squid with a learning disability due to the constant barrage of humanity that assaults them every day. Buses somehow seem to be a gathering place for the lowest forms of mankind, all mixed together into one infuriating, repugnant mire of human detritus. It’s almost unbearable, and the icing on the cake is that sweating, bestial creature symbiotically joined to the front of this metal tomb; the bus driver.

I do sympathise, I truly do. But it riles me to no end when I’m treated like an idiot by someone who is essentially a glorified horse. My latest excursion on one of these towering stench-wagons saw me assaulted visually and intellectually by the meat sack controlling it when I asked him to repeat the price he had quoted. In all honesty and fairness, the request for fare was so inaudible that an eagle owl with some form of bionic fusion-powered earpiece would have had trouble hearing it, so I felt my “Sorry?” was quite appropriate. The driver disagreed. He proceeded to slump into his seat, thrust his eyes at the ceiling in an operatically expressive way and exhale so powerfully that the windscreen exploded outwards before repeating himself at an unnecessarily loud volume comparable to a PA system strapped to my face and in a tone so derogatory that I’m still now trying to scrub off the psychologically inflicted dirt it hosed me with.

The favourite tactic of recourse for these situations is to respond incredibly happily in a drastically sarcastic tone in an attempt to defeat the bus driver in this bizarre psychological battle of social superiority. I’m never sure whether this works, but it definitely makes me feel better.

-Box

Enslaving ourselves.

I’ve just received a lovely letter denying my application for my dream job, and thus have slipped into another bout of apathy towards future careers. Not only am I finding it nigh-on impossible to find a new job, but my current job is becoming more and more obsolete by the day. Due to robots of course.

Self-service checkouts. I’m torn on these things. On the one hand, it’s great as a customer to not have to interact with anyone (even the voice given to personify the machine can be pleasantly silenced) and it’s a brilliant way to scam shops out of money/coupons etc. It’s also sublime fun to watch other till-users attempt to get to grips with this shiny new technology and fail horribly, slumping their weight onto one foot in the obligatory fashion and letting out an audibly exasperated sigh in an attempt to get some mostly unwanted human attention from one of the staff members who roost among the machines.

On the other hand, as one of the bat-like harpy creatures that attend their robot masters, the machines are somewhat unnerving.

My job involves serving customers and taking out stock. The former, I am quite inept at, mostly because I despise people. I can say without regret or apology that the self-service robot voice is a lot more polite and easier to get along with than me. And sometimes a little bit faster, since I have no urge to complete any given work task in any time frame shorter than ‘whenever’.

We already live in an overpopulated world where the only available jobs are public service jobs. It only takes one graphic designer to design a piece of print for millions of people to buy; but it takes a million people to serve a million other people their morning Pepperami. Now that those jobs are being filled by robot badness, what jobs will remain? As soon as they manufacture machines capable of taking stock from the warehouse and onto the shelves, my job will be entirely obsolete. And then of course, for the robots,  it’s just one small step from there to total world domination and the enslavement of humanity.

-Box

The hunt for a better distraction from mortality.

So I’ve been browsing jobs. As you may be aware, my current job is a sort of throbbing cancer on my life akin to a giant cybernetic lamprey made of sulphur attached to the underside of my eyelid. Or something equally horrible…

…Like that. Wow, I’m really hungry right now.

There seem to be countless job sites all over the internet with endless lists of possible jobs, and this plethora of opportunity at first fills the prospective worker with a warm hopeful happy sensation deep in their joy glands that makes their eyes water from relief and their mouth salivate from some disturbing lust for affirmation. The employment hunt begins and our jobless wonder types in his criteria: “Anything, Anywhere, Please god” and the lists roll out. The first 3 or 4 pages don’t hold much promise, but our man isn’t discouraged. He’s determined to find his dream job. The next 30 or 40 pages go by and our man is still hopeful, if a little greasy. After 100 pages the realisation that this particular website holds little besides totally irrelevant and meaningless managerial work sets in, and our hunter moves on to the next prospective site…

Six hours later he is barely recognisable. A hunched shambles of a man, writhing and twitching amongst his own filth. Hands twisted and misshapen, temporarily blinded, he slumps onto the floor and exhales a weighty smog of disappointment, regret and hopelessness.

It seems that 99% of all jobs advertised on the internet are for a ‘Recruitment finance telemarketing control systems analyst manager executive sausage roll’, or something equally baffling and meaningless to the vast majority of people who, ya know, have a skill they want to bring to a job. Are the only available jobs for people who already have a job and want a slightly different job where they get a slightly larger coffee mug? Honestly, what the hell is an Administration Manager and what does he do? It sounds like a job for a flavourless moron with a wannabe superiority complex. It seems like the only skill employers are looking for is the ability to tell other people what to do, drink coffee and cultivate your ego/backside.

Sigh. In short, gimme an arty job or I’ll never stop whining about it.

-Box

You like these things.

I’m always staggeringly amazed at how little the majority of people think. I wonder about ‘popular’ culture and what makes it popular. One could argue that, for instance, football is really, really awesome. But do you really think it’s awesome? Or do you like it because everyone else likes it and it’s what you’re TOLD to like by the transdimensional supercrab known as the mass media? If we grew up unaffected by what our parents enjoy, what is thrust upon us as the new ‘in’ thing, without advertisements screaming at our faces, we would find pleasure in things that we ourselves have discovered, grown to love and truly want.

The vast majority of the population seems to be a blank slab of cretinous clay, soaking up society and transfusing it into their being without ever stopping and questioning what it is that they, as an INDIVIDUAL, want from life. Think about TV; it’s a big filter that only shows the creative output of the people chosen by the diabolical television daemons and then edited beyond recognition so that the viewer only sees what said demons want them to see. If you grow up suckling on popular media, you never become a person. You simply grow up into a shapeless, faceless, pointless splat of boring.

YOU LIKE FOOTBALL.

YOU LIKE THE X-FACTOR.

YOU THINK CELEBRITIES ARE BETTER PEOPLE.

YOU LIKE FLAVOURLESS MUSIC CRAFTED BY CHIMPS.

YOU LIKE CARLING BECAUSE YOUR BRAIN CAN’T HANDLE TASTE.

But don’t worry about it. Soon enough Steve Jobs’ utopian vision for the future will come to fruition and we’ll all be blank nub-people incapable of thought, emotion or human interaction of any kind.

Now that I’ve drawn that, the floaty happiness orb seems almost too awesome for Apple…

-Box

CloneAttire ™

I… I don’t know where to begin on the subject of SuperDry. Any all-encompassing, Nazi nametag-reliant brand is bound to send me into a spiral of despair when I encounter said brand emblazoned across the chest of nigh -on every person I see, but there’s something about SuperDry that I simply can’t let slide. And I think I know what it is… It’s not the obnoxious plastering of their name onto bland clothing which instantly turns any consumer into a gargantuan capitalist tool doomed to spend eternity displaying to the world how intensely unimaginative and flavourless they are. It’s not the way they pepper their propaganda with entirely pointless and most likely nonsensical Japanese lettering and a spectacularly misguided conviction that their clothing is ‘vintage’. It’s not the fact that a glance into their store reveals a swathe of tartan vomit bound to make anyone’s eyes disintegrate…

It’s simply the name itself. SuperDry. It’s hard to put enough emphasis on this via text but,

WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEEEAAAAAAAN!?

SUPER DRY!? What in sweet Jesus’s name is this mindless idiocy supposed to portray? WHAT is it that’s SO splendidly arid? Are their shirts made from sand? Dusty, dusty sand? Do they absorb the liquid from their wearer via some form of diabolical osmosis? OSMOSIS!?

I cannot fathom what backwards thought process caused whatever moron conceived of this brand to regurgitate such a bafflingly idiotic theme. And then cannot possibly grasp why everyone suddenly accepts that having some nonsense emblazoned on your clothing is the height of chic. Maybe I’ll make myself a shirt with ‘EXPONENTIAL WEDNESDAY SAUSAGE’ on it. See if it catches on.

Also… I don’t know what these are but there’s a disturbingly large number of them around at the moment and they’re making me uneasy. Someone please tell me what they are and how I can make them go away:

-Box

And I was like…

According to World-English.org the word ‘like’ is the 64th most commonly used word in the English language… I suspect they perhaps didn’t do their research too thoroughly.

Speak to any average git on the street and the conversation will, like, almost certainly be peppered with entirely superfluous and nonsensical “like”s. Some language-raping people manage to fit this word into their daily verbal droning so much that the original sentence is entirely lost and you may as well be listening to a ham sandwich.

Personally I would rank ‘like’ in today’s society as number 2 on our top list of words, second only to that leviathan of literature, the word ‘Uhh…’

It infuriates me no end the amount of times people punctuate their speech with meaningless grinding sounds. If your atrophied little brain can’t keep up with the conversation, have a silent pause for a moment, don’t stand there drooling and mooing at me.

“Hey, how’re you today, Phil?”

“Uhhhhh I’m alright.”

JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!

On that note, how many of us have answered an offering for a bag for our shopping with “I’m alright for a bag”? Deconstruct that sentence… I. Am alright. For a bag. Essentially… I’m a bag, but it’s ok.

I promise this won’t all be about work… It’s just my main source of rage at the moment. And bags.

-Box

The Human Resource

I spend a vastly disproportionate amount of my life in a job that I loathe beyond comprehension. I’d like to say my continued service for said workplace was a neccessity, but the truth is that i’m just too lazy and despondent within the job-hunt crowd. Now, the problem for a socially inept and thoroughly miserable fellow like myself is that public service work doesn’t quite fit my personality. I wasn’t always this cynical and miserly; I blame my facade on the grinding degradation of my job on the deepest core of my being. You see, I would like to be seen by those not familiar with me as someone worth knowing, however the jaw-clenching horror of my profession results in first appearances that are somewhat disagreeable…

Several hours of being bombarded by non-stop ignorance and inanity from across the tills results in a truly distateful visage upon myself that simply serves to repel those few in the crowd who might possibly be ‘alright’. Of great concern to me recently is the increasingly difficult struggle to scrub this ‘you are all scum’ expression from my face once the work day is over. I find the ratio between the ‘real me’ and the ‘work me’ to be increasingly favouring the latter. I’m convinced that if I don’t find a real job soon, I may very well become some kind of hideous, mishapen troll living between the shelves, feasting on cookie crumbs and mushroom stalks.

…On the plus side, I’d get some awesome hooves.

-Box