Why chickens can fuck off.

So, you know how, last time I updated, I was still pissed off about being fired one hour into a job? Well, I'm still pissed off. However, I didn't want to waste all of my moaning for one shoddy employer. I'd like to have some whinginess left for old age, assuming I'm not too busy secretly taking great pleasure in telling long-winded pointless stories that go nowhere, safe in the knowledge that no-one's heartless enough to kick an old lady under a bus (obvious exception made for the case of Margaret Thatcher).
In the meantime, I've acquired a job working in a chicken processing plant. Good to see my degree wasn't a complete waste of time, eh? Anyway, have a re-cap of the first day:

03:30 Alarm goes off. Briefly consider suicide as an alternative to leaving the nice comfy bed I only managed to get to sleep in twenty minutes ago.

03:35 Stagger around flat. Body appears to be going into shock. Can early starts cause that?

04:20 Shuffle out of building, armed with just enough money for the bus, and a bag of sandwiches. Eyes blur in retaliation to my opening them before midday.

04:50 Arrive at bus stop to see my future colleagues; a miserable group of ne'er-do-wells who all look like I feel (like they've been recently dug up from the crypt). Everyone is alternating between smoking, coughing like a dinosaur in a tarpit, and gobbing on the floor.

05:00 A bloke with a clipboard tries to write my name down on the register ten times before I grab the clipboard and do it for him (my name is not Helennawrs).

05:10 The bus turns up. I squeeze myself into a seat next to the lankiest man I've ever clapped eyes on and guzzle Red Bull whilst internally bemoaning the fact that I don't have access to crystal meth or something.

05:45 Arrive at work. Everyone jumps off the bus and vanishes, leaving me to bimble around, looking for the entrance. I eventually find my agency's on-site caravan thing, and a sullen bloke called something like Grumph or Yurg shows me the way in. I'm kitted out with the following:

• Wellies (not mine; you have to basically make a mad dash for the welly rack and hope they have your size. Turns out that I should have brought extra socks, because I ended up with a size eight and a size nine, despite being a size seven).
• Overalls
• Apron
• Hairnet (all hair has to be covered, for obvious reasons; even if you have a beard, you have to wear another hairnet over your face)
• Helmet (not sure what for)
• Ear defenders (which come in an ear-shaped box, and do very little to block out the sound of machines grinding away)
• Gloves (the factory is kept as cold as possible because of food hygiene laws, and you have to handle a lot of cold, raw meat)
• Latex gloves to go over the other gloves
• Weird stretchy things that go over your sleeves to stop you from pilfering the produce (because who doesn't like working for eight hours with your sleeves filled with raw chicken?)

06:00 Walk through what looks like one of the footbath things at the swimming pool, and get my first look at my new workplace.
Have you ever played Abe's Oddysee on Playstation? It's a platform game about an ugly bastard slave thing called Abe who works at the Rupture Farms Meat Processing Plant.



Yeah. My workplace looks like a cross between that, and somewhere you'd wake up if you were a character in a Saw movie. It's a windowless, neon-lit room, with a monorail-like track running around the perimeter that has chicken corpses dangling from it. Every few feet, another bit gets chopped off the chicken corpses, sort of like a chicken corpse-whittling operation. There are loud machines with scary-looking cogs and blades pretty much everywhere. And I got started on de-boning, where seemingly the only person at the factory who speaks any English explains what I have to do.
De-boning involves being given a massive heavy pallet of chunks of chicken, and fondling each piece to check for bones. If you find a bone, you dig it out. All bone-free meat gets put on a tray in front of you. Fair enough. So, I get started.

06:20 I notice that there's a window afterall. It doesn't let any natural light in, it just looks in on the manager's office. Like most managers, he doesn't actually seem to do any of the hard work, he just sits there, looking out of the window, and timing people with a stopwatch.

06:30 The manager sends a man to shout at me in Turkish. I don't speak Turkish so I stand there gawping at him, which doesn't help matters. Eventually, he pokes at his watch repeatedly, which I take to mean "You're not going fast enough". Turns out, they want one bit of chicken de-boned and de-skinned per second, roughly. With no knife to help. And two pairs of gloves on. Makes sense.....

06:35 The bloke who told me how to do it informs me that management are "little Hitlers". I nod in agreement, and want to scratch my nose, but am not allowed to because then I'd have to waste valuable time by changing my gloves and disinfecting myself again. I carry on for what seems like three hours or so.

06:40 Thank Christ, there appears to be a clock. Sadly, this only shows me that what I thought was three hours was actually more like three minutes. Shit.

07:30 I've had Tik Tok by Ke$ha stuck in my head for a while, and I'm exhausted. As a result, I'm incredibly dazed, and keep mumbling something about feeling like P Diddy without realising I'm doing it.

08:15 My colleagues stop shouting at me to go faster for five minutes when they're impressed by my ability to lug heavy stuff around.

10:00 Lunchtime. Thank Christ. I go upstairs, strip off my several metric tonnes of protective gear, and take my humble bag of sandwiches to the canteen. There are no seats in the canteen, and I don't feel hungry anyway, having spent a few minutes washing chicken blood off me.

10:15 Go outside, just to see sunlight, and sit on a post near the steps. Grumph comes up and "has words"....
"You smoke over there."
"I'm not smoking, I'm sitting."
"You eat in canteen."
"I'm not eating either, I'm just sitting down."
"Go over there."
"Am I not allowed to sit here?"
"No. You sit in canteen or over there."
"There are no seats in the canteen. Can I just eat my lunch on the toilet?"
"No, no eating or mobile phones in toilets. Just toilet business."

10:20 Sit on toilet (without sandwiches). Consider crying, but have sweated so much under the overalls that I can't spare the moisture. Eventually, trudge back to the locker room, and start putting my textile suit of armour back on.

10:30 Back on the factory floor. Someone throws a chicken foot at my head. Guess that's what the helmet's for.

11:00 Some people are singing Happy Birthday in what I think is Russian. I'm reminded that it's my birthday soon, and I'll be spending it here. This thought makes me sad, so I think of something happier. Like cooking Jamie Oliver and feeding him to starving children.

12:00 I get a tap on the shoulder, and am told to shift over to a different department. I'm lead to a conveyer belt with a load of chicken wings and drumsticks on it. The bloke with the knife and the chainmail gloves points at the conveyer belt.
"Er.... sorry, what am I supposed to do?"
"This."
He picks up a drumstick, and puts it on the other side of the conveyer belt.
"Oh, right."
I do the same thing. He grabs it, puts it back where it was, and starts shouting in Polish whilst waggling a chainmail-clad finger at me.
Eventually, I deduce that I'm supposed to rip the remaining feathers off them, so I do. And get yelled at again. This continues for a while.

13:30 The machine gets jammed briefly. Eventually, it un-jams itself, resulting in it firing several drumsticks at my head. Thankyou, helmet.

14:00 Time to go home. Thanks Christ. Walking back to the locker room, someone steals my helmet. I hope it's not something I'm meant to keep hold of and look after. I pilfer the gloves and ear defenders (the gloves because they'll be useful, the ear defenders because I now have to go to bed at about eight o'clock at night, and need to block out as much sound as possible so I can sleep).

Conclusion? I'm going to keep looking for work.



.....yeah.

I've since worked on various different aspects of chicken processing. Including:

Cleaning
Otherwise known as gut-scraping. You get given what resembles a squeegee on the end of a very long handle. Your job is to spend your day running around, cleaning up after your colleagues by scraping innards into the drain. You also pick up any bits of chicken that fell on the floor and put it in the appropriate bin. Oh, and clean the machines. Management don't turn the machines off whilst you clean them, you understand, that's just a waste of time. So it involves frantically washing bits of poultry off something that looks like it could easily rip your hand off and convert it into nuggets.

Trussing
This one is in a seperate building, and is what I've mostly been doing. Basically, you stand next to a massive tray of dead chickens. And you truss them. And put them on a conveyer belt. That's it. It's boring and knackering, and sometimes you have to rip the innards out of the chicken when the machine has been unsuccessful, but at least you can generally switch off and daydream for the entirity of the shift.

Neck-cutting duty
Sometimes, the machines don't cut the necks off the chickens properly. You're given chainmail gloves and a sharp knife and stand in front of a conveyer belt which moves way too fast, frantically swinging the knife at the chickens. Incidentally, I accidentally stabbed my supervisor in the arm the first time I did this.

Bobbing for corpses
In one part of the factory, there is a room where the chicken corpses are scalded and defeathered in a machine. Needless to say, this room, unlike the rest of the factory, is ridiculously hot. Unfortunately, I was not told about this, and went in wearing my usual metric fucktonne of clothes necessary for preventing hypothermia in the other parts of the factory. The result? Sweating so much that my hair dye started running down my face, turning me orange, like some sort of disgusting bogbeast glamour model from the crypt.
The actual corpse-bobbing part involves standing next to a massive trench of blood running throughout the building. If I see a chicken corpse floating in it at any point, I have to hop in and fish it out. This is comedically revolting, but it gets worse; at one point, the trench started to overflow, meaning that everyone in the room ended up knee-deep in blood. Great.

Metal detection
To ensure that people don't have to eat bionic chicken, each one has to go through a metal detector. Occasionally, I oversee this by removing chickens from the machine that coats them in some dextrose mixture or other, popping them on the conveyer belt, and shitting several bricks every time the obnoxiously loud alarm goes off. Bizarrely, no-one removes the chicken from the line if this happens, so next time you find a screw/wrench/tank in your chicken, you'll know why.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm 25 tomorrow (I wasn't planning on living particularly long, so I feel I've earned the right to a mid-life crisis). If you'll excuse me, I'm going to drink turps and sob about the sad state of my life.

In which I find employment, and lose it again.

Good news, folks! I managed to find a job. After nine months of tolerating the following:

- Recruitment agencies who always claim not to have any work going, despite the massive sign in the window saying "LOADS AND LOADS OF WORK GOING!" OK, it didn't actually say that. It said "LODES OF WURK GOIN!" Pffft, like recruitment consultants can spell.

- My eyes slowly melting out of my head after spending several hours attempting to squeeze my entire employment history into a box the size of a postage stamp in order to prove myself worthy of working as one of those people at festivals who write your name on a grain of rice. No, wait, my mistake. That was the travel agents application form.

- Being too overqualified for McDonalds, too underqualified for "real jobs", and too underexperienced for everything else. Apparently, the following positions, like martial arts, require years of intense training under your sensei:
Checkout girl, coffee maker, cleaner, carpark attendant, barmaid, warehouse grunt, burger-flipper, t-shirt printer, lollipop lady (yes, really), Premier Inn receptionist, masked vigilante (OK, so the last one was justified).

I eventually had an interview for Oaklands Community Care, who help people with mental health problems and/or learning difficulties to live independently.

They interviewed me off the basis of my CV, and hired me off the basis of my interview, sending me an application form over the weekend to fill in "just as a formality". So, I filled it in, and handed it over on my first day of work. And then they fired me on the spot. In less than an hour. That's epic levels of underachievement right there.

As it goes, the form demands in big scary letters and court threats that you have to state any time you've either lost a job, or recieved a disciplinary. So, I wrote down the following:

1. Getting a disciplinary from Egg for failing a call monitoring. And later not having my probationary contract renewed for failing another one. I like to think this proves that I have a soul, and am not, in fact, a cybernetic organism. You'd think that would be of some comfort to them, but apparently not.

2. Same thing with Sitel, another call centre (this time, tech support). So far, not amazing, granted, but all that shows is that I'm not very good at being a headset jockey/emotional punchbag for the world.

The woman in charge (whose name I forget, I was gawping in disbelief at the fact that she looked like a white Trevor McDonald in drag) then proceeded to bollock me for not telling them about this sooner.

"I notice you didn't put anything about written warnings on your CV. It just doesn't add up."
"I'm sorry, I honestly wasn't aware that you needed this information beforehand."
(What I meant to say was "Of course, silly me. It should have occurred to me that the one thing my CV is missing in its quest to make me look employable was a list of my failings".)

"I initially thought you'd just had bad luck; I mean, you went to Uni, and you travelled a bit. But this changes everything."
(Why? I still went to Uni and bummed around Thailand for a bit, you sanctimonious hag.)

"You didn't even mention it in the interview. We don't appreciate being lied to."
(I also didn't mention that birthmark on my left buttock, does that count as lying too? Honestly, in an interview that appears to be going well, why would I ruin it by saying "Oh, and by the way, four years ago, I did call centre work and wasn't very good at it"?)

I asked if they'd like to confirm with the ex-employers that my disciplinaries were just for being shit at headset-wearing, and not because of any henious crime, and they said no. Because they'd already rang up someone else and she was on her way to....er... take my job.

Moral: people in the Care sector are not very caring.

So, off I went to Remploy, to see my long-suffering advisor Jamie, who got me the interview in the first place by forwarding my CV to them. He was possibly even less impressed by their general arseholery than I was. But by this point, I'd cancelled the benefits I recieve, and actually preferred the idea of a god-awful job to dealing with the dunderheads at the Job Centre again. So, I went to an employment agency, and asked if I could, pretty please, maybe work in a chicken processing plant. And I should be starting that as soon as the nurse clears my medical form.

The job, apparently, involves standing there in wellies, a boiler suit, an apron and a little showercap-type-thingy, watching chickens being ripped asunder by machines, and then chopping them up and packaging them. The only good thing about it, other than earning a bit of money, is that I get to wear chainmail gloves, which will make me feel like a knight. And they're kind of needed. According to the lady at the agency:

"Don't put your hands near machines. Man did last month, he lose hand."
I'll file that under "Important Stuff I Need To Know", like, apparently, "Steps slippy. Be careful.", and "No eating peanuts, even in the canteen."

I never thought I'd use this acronym, but..... FML. Seriously.

In Other News.....

So, since then, I've mostly been sulking. The world, however, has moved on as usual. Here's what's been happening.....

The Political Hydra

So, David Cameron, despite facebook hate pages (let's be honest, the most they've ever achieved is getting Rage Against The Machine to Christmas number one instead of Cowell's newest equivalent of a checkout operator), has managed to become Prime Minister. I don't trust him solely on the basis that he is blue of blood and weak of chin. Chinless types bother me. Everyone else has a chin, why can't they?
On the plus side (for me, anyway), Nick Clegg is now deputy prime minister. I like to hope that he'll keep Cameron in check. I can imagine it going something like this:

Cameron: Nick! Nick! Come here, I've had the best idea ever!
Clegg: What is it?
Cameron: What if... and hear me out..... we get all the poor people on Britain, right, and dress them up like the robots on the Small World ride at Disneyland? Thus solving both the unemployment crisis, AND the....er..... "Britain not being anything like Disneyland" crisis!
Clegg: What have we talked about?
Cameron: (shamefaced) Not dressing up commoners for my entertainment.
Clegg: Aaaaand?
Cameron: Not making Vince Cable warm up my toilet seat for me.
Clegg: Good man. Have a lollipop.
Cameron: It's lemon! I want a blueberry one!
Clegg: YOU'LL GET WHAT YOU'RE DAMN WELL GIVEN!
Cameron: .....OK. (Licks lollipop)

In fact, I think they should be forced to live in a small flat together, surrounded by hidden cameras. Because politicians aren't known for their charisma ("charisma", in politics, means "At least managing to sound vaguely sincere when buying a pint or something"), that could be used as the basis for a sitcom, rather than a reality TV show. I reckon it should have Clegg as the slovenly liberal, and Cameron as the uptight conservative. He'd come in to find Clegg having a wild party; Miriam dancing on the table, David Laws having a drinking contest with Danny Alexander, the works. There'd be a massive keg of beer painted yellow and everything. And Cameron would put his hands on his hips and shout "CLEGG!" in a manner similar to Superintendant Chalmers from The Simpsons.
I'd prefer it if parliament was like that.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown left number 10, still resembling a mixture of a blobfish, and Shrek in human form.



Hmmmm.

Celebrity Dads Of The Year revealed.

Enough with this cleverclogs stuff about unemployment and politics (I'm clearly so well-informed about our government that I resort to coming up with "hilarious" sitcom scenarios as opposed to giving any political commentary). What we're all interested in is the answer to the question "Who do I think is the best famous Dad in Britain?"
Obviously, this is going off cold, hard evidence, folks. Like Closer readers pointing at the pretty pictures and going "I like him, he's pretty, he MUST be a good Dad, despite the fact that I've never met him, or seen him at home with his kids."

So..... let's have a look:

1. Ronan Keating. Best known for being the simpering, human equivalent of porridge. And also for ruining various Tracy Chapman songs.
2. Peter Andre. A man whose sole redeeming feature is that he was marginally better at playing the PR game than his equally loathesome ex-wife. I still have no idea why he's got off so lightly. This is a man who sells pictures of his children to crappy pap mags (on off-weeks where no female celebrity has had the audacity to gain or lose weight), for Christ's sake. A man whose voice sounds exactly like a mosquito aimlessly buzzing around your ear, and yet, has a "music career." Surely I can't be the only one wishing he'd piss off already?
3. Mark Owen. You know, that bloke from Take That who cheated on his wife with a fucktonne of women but somehow gets away with it because he's "pretty". And writers for Heat liked Take That as teenagers, so surely he can't be a bad man?
4. Vernon Kay. Did exactly the same as Mark Owen, but via text. I can't decide if that's more or less pathetic.
5. Jeff Brazier. Had kids with Jade Goody. I guess he deserves to win on account of not letting said kids near orange rapey stepdad Jack Tweed.
6. Ryan Thomas. I had no idea who this was, so had to google it. Apparently, he's on nobody's favourite "Doom, gloom and pints of bitter" soap Coronation Street. And recently shitcanned the mother of his sprog.
7. Gordon Brown. Has anyone ever even seen him with his kids? I've only ever seen him looking like a rough portrait of Mickey Rourke drawn onto someone's anus.
8. David Cameron. His horsey wife is currently days away from shitting out yet another MechaTory. It would probably be a jolly wizard idea, wouldn't it?
9. Frank Lampard. Currently nobbing walnut-in-a-wig Christine Bleakley from The One Show, having shitcanned his ex, who has custody of the kids.
10. Wayne Rooney. I guess at least he can identify on an emotional and intellectual level with his baby son.

The point being, how can we really tell who is a particularly good parent? In the world of celebrity, you can't just go off "We once took a photo of him with his kid in the park". For God's sake, Kerry Katona won one year. A woman who has since admitted to having a nanny look after the kids for most of the time, while she stayed in her room doing huge amounts of coke for three days at a time. The whole "best celebrity parent" thing basically amounts to "The Award For Excellence in Posing With Your Kid In Magazines."

Aaaaand that's yer lot.

Shit-but-compelling TV and the worst writer ever.

This is where I insert my usual thing about not updating because I've been doing important stuff. In this case, trying to console my laptop after it was brutally raped by a trojan virus thingy, being turned down by three McDonalds branches when applying, which is truly a new low, and then visiting the family in Devon, which is my usual low.
I'll try not to bore you too much about my family (especially given that they read this), but I shall sum up my stay in bullet points.

• I got yet another "chat" about contraception from my Granny. Now, my Granny is a nice, monobrowed Cornish lady who sweats profusely, speaks with the most rural accent in existance, and has a nun-like habit (no pun intended) of waggling her finger at you when lecturing you on something. Finger wagglings that day broke family records; first-off when bollocking my brother for considering voting Labour (she wasn't much happier at my decision to stick by the Monster Raving Looney Party), then going throughout the day until it reached the invariable conclusion of telling me to use condoms. Apparently, despite being 24 and having yet to add yet another squalling shitbag child to this overpopulated planet, she thinks I still have a 15-year-old's mindset of "You can't get pregnant if you do it standing up/if it's your first time/if he pulls out quickly/if you do it in the bum" (OK, the last one does work as a form of contraception, but will leave your farts sounding like one-note panpipes if keep it up).
  
• I had my hair cut. Exciting stuff, I know. It was shoulder-length, it's now a pixie-crop. Naturally, you probably don't give a shit, but in case you do, here's a before shot involving a dog (and a Jack Russell), and an after shot involving the Myspace angles. Basically, according to my folks, I look less like Neil from The Young Ones now, which is always good.
  
• I went out drinking with my 20-year-old brother and his burly, rugby-playing friends. Great idea, Ellie. I woke up the next day with the usual dry mouth, nausea, dizziness and pounding headache (according to my Mum, I got up, and shuffled straight to the tap for water in slow-motion), but also with a massive bruised lump on my head from where I vaguely recall an over-enthusiastic dancer elbowing me in the face. Other memories include being in Subway, being in a bar called Bohemia (the least bohemian place on the planet, incidentally. £6 for a double jack and coke? Fuck off), arguing with someone over whether or not there was a point to the existance of Myleene Klass, trying to help some trollied bint to find her handbag (and failing), and the taxi driver making me hold my brother's girlfriend's sandwich because she couldn't be trusted not to pick at it in the taxi. Mardy bastard.
  
• For some reason, I ended up watching The Sound Of Music with my Mum on Good Friday. If there's one thing that film teaches young women, it's that marrying someone who treated you like crap for a bit, is a shit father to his seven kids, has evident issues over the death of his ex, and has literally, minutes ago, DUMPED HIS FUCKING FIANCEE, is a fantastic idea if you include musical numbers and an insufferable troupe of brats who decide the best way to mourn their mother is to call their step-mum of five minutes "Mother" instead.
  

So, in other news recently, I accidentally saw pictures of Peaches Fucking Geldof naked (her middle name is not actually "Fucking" by the way, although it should be; her full name is actually Peaches Honeyblossom Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof. Because clearly, if there's one thing kids need, it's five middle names)
Peaches, for those fortunate enough not to know, is the daugter of half-arsed sanctimonious Gandalf lookalike Bob Geldof, and late TV presenter/writer Paula Yates. And an internet user calling himself "thatcoolguyben" reckons they shot up together and had lots of unattractive, pale, skaggy sex. Hot.

Phwoar.

Anyway, now she's been ditched by Ultimo, classy lingerie range aimed at people who think they're too classy to get to buy their synthetic, thrush-inspiring kecks from Primark, for actually having a one-night stand, rather than just standing around in frilly underwear aimed at teenagers.
Now, I don't dislike Peaches because of this. Quite a lot of people have an ill-advised one-night stand at some point or other. She's just been unfortunate in that she's fairly well known for some reason or other.
The reason I dislike her is that she's well-known for being a complete waste of oxygen.
Basically, this is a girl who is known as being a writer and TV presenter. Well, in Geldof-Land anyway. In the UK, she's known as "irritating dung-faced daughter of that Live Aid cunt".
Let's have a look at her writing and presenting ability, shall we?
Writing
Just..... just click here. Dear sweet Christ. This is the best NYLON can do? I know fashion magazines aren't exactly known for being able to churn out up-and-coming talent in terms of their writers; just being able to point out what's "vintage, now and soooo stylelessly cool" is generally enough. But this does sound like an overprivilaged teenager yapping on about how their gap year was "like, totally the making of me, yah?"

The sun glows a burned orange as it sinks behind a skyscraper, a car horn screeches irritably, the wind whistles through the acres of willows in Central Park: New York, the most offbeat and eccentric city in America, is my new home.
I love it here. I live with my husband, Max, in Williamsburg, home of the plaid shirt and vintage Mecca Beacon’s Closet.

The first paragraph alone is actually worse than most creative writing that I heard at the University of Derby, where I studied Creative Writing. And that was a place where I heard the following poem in Creative Writing Workshop:
I cry when I'm happy
I cry when I'm sad
I cry when I'm angry
I cry when I'm mad
Basically, the University of Duh-by has yet to produce any particularly talented writers. And yes, I'm including myself in this wave of talent voids. I'm not a writer, I'm a stroppy fucker with a superiority complex and access to the internet.

Max and I settled on New York because I go to University here now, and of course work for my favourite fashion magazine, NYLON. Marvin, my great friend and the editor here, introduced me to the girl who would soon become one of my closest friends, Cory Kennedy. We present NYLON TV together, and it is the most irreverent, off-the-wall, and creative show I have ever had the pleasure of presenting. And I’ve presented a lot of television in my time.

Oh, good for you, Miss Geldof. Which brings me to:

TV Presenting





..... there's nothing I can add to that, except that, if you can watch this without wanting to introduce a crowbar to her head, you're an infinitely more patient person than I, and I suggest you work for the complaints line at DHL (which I used to do, and quit for a bloody good reason).

Anyway, moving on from oxygen thieves to....er....more oxygen thieves.
Now, as an unemployed person, I watch a lot of rubbish telly. Not as rubbish as NYLON TV evidently, but close. Here's yet another list, this time of my top five rubbish reality shows.

1. Four Weddings
Frequently referred to as Come Dine With Me with weddings. The premise is that four brides-to-be go to each others' weddings and bitch about them, and the person with the best score for the happiest day of their life get a honeymoon. Lucky them.
There are the usual weddings, with a registry office, a lukewarm buffet consisting of quiche and chicken drumsticks with congealed fat on them, and "Oops Upside Your Head" playing at the reception. There are the token "whacky" ones, like a nudist wedding, or a medievel-themed one, or a Pagan handfasting. And then there are the fancy ones that must be boring as fuck to sit through; cathederals, long, vomit-inducing speeches by a ludicrously henpecked groom, talking about how in love he is with his new bride (in a nervous mumbling style that implies she's holding a cattle prod to his back), having to wait an hour in between courses of Fancy Shite (tm), that kind of thing.
Of course, like Come Dine With Me, the best bit is hearing the brides banging on about how their rivals' weddings were all boring/cheap/generally shit compared to theirs. It's a bit like being at school, where you could frequently hear someone bitching about someone behind their back because they bitched about them behind their back and... oh forget it. Anyway, point being, watch it. It's astounding. Nothing is guaranteed to kill off excess braincells quite like it, other than What Katie Did Next.

How Clean Is Your House
Usually put in an evening slot, but generally repeated on daytime TV, this is something I watch purely to make my own life seem marginally less scutty.
Now, I live in a bedsit. Quite a small one, at that. There's a cupboard with a shower and toilet in it, but other than that, I do everything in the same room. As a result, it tends to get a bit grimey, to say the least. I have a lot of useless clutter I can't quite bring myself to throw out, and a habit of only doing a "proper" wash up (ie: not just rinsing out a mug because I want a cup of tea) when I'm reduced to eating food off a DVD case because there are no plates left. There is a pile of clothes between my bed and the wall (it's a floordrobe), which I refuse to move on the basis that there needs to be something to stop my pillow from falling off the bed and getting lost in the gaping void under it.
However, I am practically OCD compared to some of the people on this programme, in which Kim and Aggy, who seem to share the personality of your Mum when she visits your grotty student dive of a house (a mixture of tutting, affectionate clucking, and abject horror), descend on some grubby bastard's crib for a severe talking to and the household equivalent of an enema.
There are people who use worn socks as dishcloths, haven't seen their own bed in decades, and live in a knee-deep quagmire of cat hair and trinkets. Each episode is the same; after ten minutes of horror movie-style orchestra hits and Kim and Aggy shrieking in disgust at the mouse graveyard under the couch, they show us some helpful household hints (all of which involve either vinegar or bicarbonate of soda. Or both) that I always mean to remember but never do. At the end, courtesy of a good scrubbing and a decent interior designer, the house looks inhabitable. At this point, the prole responsible for the mess in the first place either shrugs and acts ungrateful ("Where's all my stuff?"), or, even worse, cries. This seems to happen on all daytime TV shows at some point or other. I don't know why it's still considered to be endearing, to be honest. If someone cleaned and sorted out my hovel for free, I'd be pretty fucking chuffed.

Miami Ink
..... or London Ink, or LA Ink.
It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a tattoo parlour, and the people who flock to it in order to get ink drilled into their skin. Sounds ace, right? That's what I thought. As much as I love tattoos, I still mostly dislike the people they're attatched to. Basically, each show features the following:

• The Memorial Ink. In which someone decides that they'd like a tattoo to commemorate the passing of their friend/relative/pet, regardless of the late friend/relative/pet's opinion on tattoos. It's not entirely uncommon to hear "My Grandma passed away when I was four, but even though I can't really remember her, I'm going to cry convincingly for the cameras while I get that sick tattoo of a skateboarding Grim Reaper I've always wanted. But.... um.... she was Italian. So I guess you should put the Italian flag on the Grim Reaper's back. Yeah. Grandma would have LOVED that."
• The Navel-Gazer. Invariably female (although you get the odd bloke who happens to have gone through some trauma or other). Usually gets something every other fucker on the series has, like a lotus flower, or koi carp. They'll make the effort to make it seem like they're very deep individuals deserving of such a tattoo though, and tend to come out with something along the lines of "I just think that a lotus flower represents ME, and all I'VE gone through, and how I'VE developed as a person and started thinking more about MYSELF, and ME ME ME ME ME ME" (at this point, they become so aroused by how AWESOME they are that they tend to trail off).
• The Temptress. Similar to The Navel-Gazer, but more superficial. Tends to, again, be female, and stroll in wearing nothing but a bikini, asking for a tattoo of, for example, a poisonous octopus "Because I'm beautiful but deadly, I break so many hearts, etc". Usually flirts with the tattoo artist, and seems genuinely surprised if he doesn't flirt back.
• The Nervous First-Timer. Either a middle-aged woman thinking "I may as well see what the fuss is all about", or a teenager who has "like, totally wanted this sick tattoo forever". They make a massive fuss about how much it's going to hurt, and then just sit there gritting their teeth when it's being done. Occasionally they cry and ask the tattooist to stop. This is exceptionally funny when they're having a small tattoo.

The Jeremy Kyle Show
If you haven't seen this by now, you've presumably been living under a rock, in which case you've probably met most of the guests on it anyway.
Every week, dead-eyed sociopath Jeremy Kyle attempts to sort out the issues of slack-jawed cretins who think that daytime TV is the perfect place to harp on about how they don't know who their babydaddy is. He mostly does this by exploding into a ball of vitriolic rage. Observe.



To be honest, it's a bit depressing, although, at the same time, strangely empowering, because no matter how pathetic my life gets (let's face it, it can't really get any more pathetic), at least I will never end up screaming "SHUT YOUR MAAAAAAAFF!" at a skanky-toothed convict in front of an audience of sanctimonious swinepeople.

Loose Women
Otherwise known as Dragon's Den, but with less begging for investments and more pointless wittering. Basically, you know how, when you were little, you'd be in town or at the shops with your Mum, and she'd bump into a friend of hers and stand there for ages discussing the most boring subjects she could possibly think of when all you wanted to do was get home in time for Superted? Yeah. That's exactly what Loose Women is like. Except it's even longer and televised. And it also partly resembles a middle-aged woman's hen night. When they get a male guest on, you can tell it's taking every inch of restraint not to shriek "'ERE MAUREEN, INT HE LOVELY? POLICEMEN ARE GETTING EVEN YOUNGER! COME ON LUV, LET'S 'AVE A SQUEEZE OF THAT LOVELY BUM...."

Moral of the story? I am in no position to make fun of these people when I spend enough time gawping at their onscreen antics. Dear God, someone employ me.

It lives!

Evening folks.
So, I've been away for a bit. I went backpacking in Goa and achieved spiritual enlightenment. Fucking good acid out there.

I'm kidding, I've been in England the whole time. But I haven't been wasting my time. Oh no. I've been incredibly busy, as it goes. For example, yesterday, my friend Emma and I watched the entire 10th Kingdom box set. That's about seven hours of telly-watching, which isn't quite a personal best (that accolade goes to that time I watched all three series of Arrested Development in one go; say what you like about my leathery hide, but don't question my dedication to sitting around until my arse gets repetitive strain injury), but is still fairly impressive.

I also inexplicably acquired a boyfriend (no, that's not the reason for my absence, he's a very busy boy with college and the like). His name's Tom and he looks like McLovin from Superbad. And, having spent all of yesterday perving over Wolf from The 10th Kingdom, I'm going to attempt to persuade him to start wearing a tail.

Huh. Wonder how I was single for so long?

Anyway, I've mostly been partaking in my usual pastime; job-hunting.

OK, so, when job-hunting, especially in this....er.... thriving financial climate, you have a few choices:

The Job Centre
Most job seekers will end up, unsurprisingly, on Job Seekers Allowance. On average, you get somewhere around the fifty quid a week mark. Doesn't sound too bad, but gets boring very, very quickly once you deduct bills, food, and other annoying shite you forget about, like tampons and bin liners and washing powder.
Anyway, having gone through the eligability assessment (which consists of ringing an 0845 number and answering about a billion questions; this usually results in you sat there on the phone going "No.... no...... no...... no...." like you're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder), you'll generally be hauled into your local Job Centre for a little chat with their friendly and helpful advisors, who mostly check your details (and still manage to get it wrong), and proceed to "help" by asking you what kind of work you're looking for. So you tell them, and they print off job descriptions. Despite the fact that you can easily do it yourself at one of the job points. So basically, they do a grand total of fuck-all in order to help you find work.
They may tell you that you have to bring four bits of evidence in each time you sign on to show that you've been trying to find work; a letter confirming a job interview, a filled-in application form, even an updated CV. They have never once asked me for any of these. Instead, you turn up (apparently you have to turn up 15 minutes early; they don't actually tell you this, assuming instead that the unemployed are a magical, mythical race who can read minds), hand over your little booklet, and they sign it and grunt whilst pointing to the job points. That's literally it. All they really do is drag you along to a "back to work seminar" every six months or so, which is generally some bloke going "Go on. Get a job. Please? You'll have more money. How about if I give you a muffin?"
All in all, it's a futile waste of time, but a tiny bit of money is better than no money.

The Local Paper
This is fairly easy, to be honest. Just get a copy of your local rag, and look in the job pages. It's mostly either very specifically skilled jobs (teachers, train drivers, that sort of thing), or the kind of advert you usually see sellotaped to a lamp post ("EARN £££££££S FROM HOME WITHOUT EVEN GETTING OUT OF BED! CONTACT BIG FUCKING JIMMY ON 07834675490). Your day will mostly consist of excitedly taking the cap off your pen so you can circle an entry like they do in "finding a job" montages in movies, but then realising it says "must have SPECIFIC EXPERIENCE IN THIS AREA", and putting the cap back on the pen with a disappointing "click".

Employment Agencies
This is more of a test of resilience than a way of finding a job, to be honest.
You start off by going into an employment agency. There will be a couple of twenty-something girls called Claire and Helen, and a couple of middle-aged women called Maureen and Wendy. Helen and Claire's work stations will be decorated with pictures of them being kerazee and random on nights out (by doing such wacky, groundbreaking stunts as wearing fluffy deelyboppers, or sticking their tongue out), and Maureen and Wendy's desks will be adorned with a computer buried somewhere under a fucktonne of pictures of "my grandson, Jack", all in oversized Winnie The Pooh photo frames.
You'll usually stand there for a few minutes before anyone acknowledges you. Eventually, someone will say "Can I 'elp you?", which is when you forget what you came in for in the first place and just go "Um... I... uh, want a job? Please?"
Their automatic reaction is to ask you for a CV. You hand one over. They roll their eyes and say "No, you have to email it to us, then one of us will be in touch."
So, you go home and email it to them. A week passes. Still nothing. So, you go back.
"We ain't got anyfin' at the moment, can you call us on Monday or Tuesday?"
So, you wait until Monday or Tuesday, and ring them.
"Have you got any work yet?"
"Oh... er.... what's your name?"
"Bob Smith."
"OK, we've got your CV, but you haven't filled in the forms yet."
"I had to fill in forms?"
"Yeah, can you come in tomorrow morning?"
So, the next morning, you fill in roughly a metric tonne of paperwork for them, and one of them decides to finally be helpful and look at jobs. This results in one of two outcomes:
- They tell you they'll call you as soon as anything comes in. They don't.
- They're actually helpful and get you a nice, cushy job on an assembly line in a place you have to get up at three in the morning to walk/drive to where you're not allowed to sit down for the entire fifteen-hour shift. But it's work, right?

The Begging Spree
This involves photocopying your CV as many times as you can afford, then trekking around your local town/city/village/hamlet/enchanted forest, begging for a job. Remember, dignity is for the workshy.
The responses you recieve will vary. I got the following:
"Sorry, we're not looking."- From pretty much everywhere. Extra points were awarded for a sarcastic "In case you hadn't noticed, there's a recession on."
"Sorry we're not looking."- This deserved a double listing because, in this case, it was from people who had signs up in the window stating that they want staff.
"I can see you're bright enough to have made it thus far in life without being killed off, but unfortunately, you have no specific experience in using a till/placing a pasty in a paper bag and handing it to a customer, and that's the kind of skill that can't just be taught."- Greggs, Argos
"We don't use application forms anymore, you have to go to the website, search for jobs in Derby, then apply online."- Boots. Incidentally, when I went on the website, there was nothing going.
"Sorry, I know your CV has all the information I could really need to know about you, but I'd like you to take this twenty-page long application form which asks you for details you can't even remember, and write them in tiny lettering on this pointless application form. And despite going to all that trouble, no, I will not be sending you a letter saying thanks but no thanks."- Every agency I rang.

After all that, I have a job interview on Wednesday. If it goes well, I could be....er... a burger monkey. As long as I get to wear a hat, I'm happy. Wish me luck?

Happy Annual Forced Affection Celebration Day!

On Valentine's Day

Are you in a relationship? Do you love your partner more than anything and want nothing more than to preserve their happiness for as long as possible? Do you lie awake at night, watching them sleep, counting down the hours until you can wake them up with breakfast, cuddles and gentle-but-intense lovemaking? You do? In which case, you'd better pull your finger out by Sunday, because unless your other half walks in and automatically trips over a pile of rose petals, it's all fucked.

Yep, it's that time of year again where thick people measure their love for one another in how much they're willing to pay for a pink bit of cardboard, less thick people acknowledge that the entire thing's a scam, but grudgingly fork out anyway lest they be deprived of sex later on, and people with an IQ that's at least in double figures sit around bitching about it in a self-righteous manner. Which is exactly what I plan on doing.
Luckily, this year, VD (haha) falls on a Sunday. This means I can spend the day in bed, sleeping and ignoring my own inability to find love and acceptance. There is nothing worse than being forced to leave the house and socialise on Valentine's Day. Well, actually there is. Like someone performing surgery on you as you sleep so that your legs sprout from your shoulders and your arms are where your legs were. Or.....er...... living in Haiti at the moment. But more on that later. My point being, Valentine's Day is designed specifically to make you feel a bit shit if you're single, and to make you feel borderline-suicidal if you've recently been dumped. For example, take Valentine's Day 2008. I had just started a new job answering phone calls to people who didn't know my name or anything, but nonetheless knew that I was personally responsible for all unpleasantries in their lives. And I'd recently been unceremoniously shitcanned by a grown man who still thought it was acceptable to dump someone by ignoring them for two weeks, then telling their friend to text them and tell them it's over. As such, I was too busy doing important things like wallowing in self-pity to realise what day it was until I walked into work to find that some turd had decided to decorate the place with red paper hearts and streamers.
Interesting thing about working in a call centre full of women, incidentally: women are fascinated by flowers. Not from a botanical aspect or anything, but when a bunch of flowers arrives in an office, everything with ovaries within a five-mile radius will run over to see who it's from. And, as luck would have it, my computer was next to that of a girl who brought in a truckload of cards, flowers, boxes of chocolates, dead cherubs and still-beating human hearts that had been ripped out in admiration of her existance, resulting in spending most of my day shouting "WHAT? SORRY, CAN'T HEAR YOU!" into my headset over the collective babbling of a crowd that was 75% menopausal hag, 25% empty-headed youth. Said girl did nothing to help matters by spending the entire time squawking "Oh, I'm soooo embarassed, isn't my boyfriend soppy? How soft of him! This is mortifying, it really is, I don't want attention, all I want is to get on with my work...." despite having brought her veritable furlong of mulch in from home. Bah.

If the above sounds like I'm being petty and jealous, it's because I am. It makes no sense; I'm a fully-formed human adult with at least a small amount of common sense who knows that love is not measured in money. I think maybe it's to do with being left out. It's a similar feeling to being in primary school, and watching a classmate give out invitations to their swimming/bowling/five-a-side/Laser Quest (if they were posh) birthday party, only to realise that the only people in the class not invited are you, the teacher, and that special needs kid who smells of arse and breathes too heavily through his nose. That's basically the message of Valentine's Day: if you don't have someone, you're not invited. Seems like a bit of a sinister way of going about flogging several thousand cards if you ask me. Luckily for me, at the moment, there are only three of these events a year that cause me to retreat into my flat like a particularly scutty turtle: Valentine's Day, Mothers Day and Fathers Day. The latter two only get on my nerves because it means you can't go anywhere nice without small shrieking children running around and burbling "MUMMY, JOSH JUST PUT HIS FINGER IN HIS BUM!" over and over again until Mummy appears to pay a suitable amount of attention.

That said, I bet it's only a matter of time before we have Apple Day, in which people buy their iPhones or iPads or iPricks pretty accessories and take them out to the world's biggest charging station for the day. Which brings me nicely onto my next topic (I'm good at linking stuff), the iPad.

On The iPad

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this, but what in fuck's name is it? As far as I know, it's a big iPhone. Or a little, keyboard-less laptop. Or the bastard offspring of one fateful night in which a backwards, small-town laptop met an alluring, sexy iPhone at a bar, and they decided to challenge convention, Romeo and Juliet-style, by making a little baby horrifically deformed thingy.
According to Wikipedia (aka that site I go to whenever I'm unsure about something or just want to win an argument), it is:

a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. It is similar in function to an iPod Touch, with nearly eight times the display area and five times the number of pixels. It will allow multi-touch interaction with print, video, photos, and audio; connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi and, on certain models, 3G; and will run apps designed specifically for the iPad as well as most iPhone OS apps.^[1] The device will have an LED-backlit 9.7-inch (25 cm)^[5] color IPS LCD display and uses the device's multi-touch screen to provide a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard.^[1] The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010, and pending FCC approval, is to be released in March 2010 (WiFi-only models) and April 2010 (WiFi + 3G models).^[1][6]

OK, so there's a bit of iPod in there as well.
Anyway, it's being whored out as the most amazing gadget you can possibly get your grubby mitts on. Other Steve Jobs sycophants will be able to look at your choice of hardware without whining on about how PCs are just so past it, and Macs are so much better for graphic design (99% of people who have used this argument to get me to switch have about as much of a clue about graphic design as I do: absolutely fuck-all).
However, to be honest, I don't see the point. Everything it does, something else already does without the inconvenience of no USB ports, no Adobe Flash, and an incapability to run more than one application at a time. There's also the fact that it can only run software purchased from the App Store. Although, in the words of a Mac Prick: "It's not restrictive, it's tailored!"
Oh, and there's no camera either. To be honest, most people have either a camera or a cameraphone anyway, so it's hard to imagine why it would need one.
Basically, the only people to buy these things are people who have a fair bit of money and an inferiority complex. Fin.

On The Haiti Single

I'll keep this short because I can't project my usual bile at this song on the basis that it's for charity. And if it raises more money for a good cause than I could afford in several lifetimes (my crappy little donation will probably not go very far), then so be it.
All I'll say is that it's a cover of Everybody Hurts by REM, and it sounds exactly like the original except with more X Factor-style hystrionic warbling, and less emotion.

To be honest, it seems a bit of an odd choice, what with Michael Stipe himself admitting that it was aimed at teenagers as a sort of "it's OK, we've all been there, it gets better" song. Yeah, cheer up Haiti. Your homes will get rebuilt. Eventually. They may as well have just gone with nobody's favourite whiney nu-metal anthem.

Still, I urge you to buy it. Let's be honest, no-one buys charity singles because they're good, do they?

Also this week.....

- Facebook changed its layout. Again. It still hasn't sorted out the problem of messages popping up saying "Oops! Something went wrong! Teehee! Sorry about that, I'm soooo ditzy!", mind, which makes it seem even more like a work experience girl than usual. Anyway, as always when it changes the layout, once I'd worked out how to use my news feed, it was clogged up with people moaning about how shit the new layout is. Well, it is shit, but no more so than its predecessor.

- Everyone has been on Amber Alert for snow. It doesn't help that we alternate between clear blue skies and sunshine and apocalyptic-looking clouds and blizzards. You can sense the panic as one solitary bit of white stuff falls from the sky. People gasp, women hold their children close to them, the Co-Op 24 Hour Garage over the road gets looted... you get my drift. I bet the nation won't wet its collective pants on such an epic scale should zombies uprise.

- The Katie Price witch-hunt continues. This time she's pissed people off by getting married to The Thing from The Fantastic Four.


This, naturally, made Lovely Pete cry. Now, there is nothing funny about a devastated man who is being grilled by a self-serving news reporter regarding his ex-wife's hasty re-marriage and the possibility of his kids being adopted by an orange bloke who appeared in what is basically rape porn.



Also, I only included that video so you could see how not-funny it is for yourself. Honest.

As well as angering Lovely Pete's legions of fans, la Price has also pissed off PaedoSpotters. You know, the kind of people who would ensure that children had the same light-bending camouflage as Predator if they got their way. They believe that their kid is so incredibly sexy, that paedophiles have set up surveillance teams around their house on the off chance that said kid goes outside wearing something that shows off a flash of scabbed knee or whatnot. So naturally, they weren't massively happy at her youngest kid, Princess Tiramisu or whatever she's called, being given a makeover.



This is apparently the worst thing anyone has done in the name of child safety since Gary Glitter decided to go travelling for a bit. Apparently, the kid looks "like a whore". I disagree. If anything, she looks like a Furby.
Plus, what people are forgetting is that pretty much all little girls play with their Mum's makeup. To be honest, the only thing particularly worrying about this is whether or not it's safe to glue fake eyelashes to a toddler's eyelids.
What I want to know is how she got a two year old to stay still long enough to have those things put on. I had to apply fake eyelashes to a friend who happens to be 25 last Halloween, and it was fiddly enough with her.

That's all for now, I've run out of steam. And, more importantly, beer. Now, piss off, I have a TV to stare brainlessly at.

Ellie vs. Beautiful People

Apologies for not updating this sooner. I've been..... actually, sod it, I haven't been remotely busy, just astonishingly lazy.

So, on with "Wot's been going on lately".

Stuff Wot Is Going On Lately
Well, we're halfway through the Annual Depression. By which, I mean "January and February". Seriously, there is no fucking point whatsoever in these two months. Think about it. You round off the end of the year with December, which, due to Christmas, is basically a month-long piss-up. You spend it gorging on whatever delicious, high-fat snacks come to hand (Quality Street, pigs in blankets, stuffing....), drinking your bodyweight in booze because "it's festive", and spending a fucktonne of money on gifts, nights out, etc. Occasionally, the annoying little bastard in the corner of your brain (the same one that tells you to go to bed when you've been up all night streaming Japanese game shows) pipes up and goes "Er.... sorry to bother you, I can see you're terribly busy sticking your face into a vat of mulled wine, but I can't help but notice that you have a liver that looks like ET, a waistline that requires its own wheelbarrow to cart it around in, and so much debt that Bono's been in touch, asking if you want him to organise a concert to help write it off."
But you ignore the annoying little bastard (who looks a bit like Dr Christian Thingy off Embarassing Bodies) and continue to eat until your nipples leak goose fat. And then the alarm clock goes off. Usually in the form of having to put up your calendar for the new year. And you realise that it's going to take you til June to detox, lose weight, and pay off your overdraft/credit card/loan shark.
January, for this reason, is generally spent in a pit of despair. And then February rolls around. "Oh good", you think. "We're properly into the new year now, I can start functioning as a human being again, and greet people without having to ask about their Christmas."
Unfortunately, February isn't much better. There isn't anything to look forward to. It's cold, wet, grey and depressing. Like my Great-Auntie Sue (she was a miserable old bitch before she went senile, so no-one in my family could be bothered to find her a decent nursing home). There's only one public holiday that anyone pays attention to, and that's Valentine's Day. And even if you were looking forward to that, you won't be by the time it actually arrives, because everyone you know (me included) will be harping on about how it's a waste of time, it's all about marketing, if you love your partner that much, why not get them cards every day, etc. So you're stuck with two options: ignore it altogether and risk offending your partner, or get in the spirit and have your single (and not remotely bitter about it) friends telling you precisely what a mug you are for spending £3 on a neon pink bit of cardboard with a teddy on it.
As for me, I intend to spend most of February hiding in my bedsit and sulking because I forgot to get a boyfriend in time. I don't particularly want one, you understand, I just want something to parade around so I can convince myself that I'm a normal, high-functioning person. To be honest, I think a pony would suffice. Ponies are noisy, smelly, irritating, and mostly owned by girls who think they're the only person to have ever owned one. It's a perfect substitute for a bloke.

Anyway, in my own long-winded way, I was getting to the tale of Beautiful People.
For those of you who don't know, BeautifulPeople.com is a dating website exclusively for the very... exclusive (read: shallow). It's for those people who don't quite have the personality required to find a partner in real life, but can't possibly go on the normal dating websites because there's ugly people out there, for God's sake.
The site works by asking new members to submit photos. Once those are uploaded, "proper" site members have to rate them on a scale of 1-10, based on how attractive they think you are. If, after two days, you get over 5/10, you're in.
Personally, I'd never heard of it until reading about how they took the New Year Detox one step further, and got rid of any members showing signs of having gained weight over the festive season. Seems harsh, doesn't it? Well, no. As the article states, there are genuine reasons behind it, honest.

"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," said site founder Robert Hintze.

"Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded."

Ah, that's OK then. I like how he refers to "letting fatties roam the site", like they're merely a common pest. Personally, I had to get the exterminators out the other week because I had a fattie nest at the back of my block of flats. Mars bars spiked with arsenic works best, incidentally.

Anyway, I was so amused/fascinated/slightly horrified by this story, that I decided to have a go myself. I got about a four out of ten, and was promptly booted. Bugger. There go my dreams of modelling.
It was to be expected though. For a start, my photos were in colour. I was only wearing makeup in one of them. And on top of that, I have a face like a sack of perineums. It was never going to go well. But I did notice that a lot of these "Beautiful People" seemed to have studied at the Myspace School Of Flattering Photography, which operates on the following principles:

1. Holy camera angles, Batman! If you take a photo from just above your head, it will make your eyes look larger, your initial chin look smaller, your extra chins look nonexistant, and it also makes your hair look fairly shiny, as the camera flash bounces off it. Otherwise known as the "SIF" angle (Secret Internet Fatty, by the way). Also, if you're a girl, this is the perfect opportunity to make sure that viewers are looking anywhere but your face.
   
2. Pump up the contrast. It makes colours brighter (and thick people will always say "OMG YOR EYES R SO BLU!" because they genuinely haven't noticed the difference between an altered picture of you, and how you actually look), and also does a remarkable job of hiding your acne and dark circles.
   
3. Black and white is flattering.
   
4. So is Sepia.
5. If all else fails: Photoshop.
   

Consider yourselves told.

A bit more stuff wot has been going on.

• Alex Reid won Celebrity Big Brother. In all fairness, he came across as.... OK. Nice-but-dim, basically. You get the feeling that, at home, Jordan wins every argument by jingling keys in front of his face, whilst he drools, claps and giggles like a toddler in front of CBeebies. Speaking of the devil, on his interview, she made an appearance. You could practically see her pupils turning into £ signs.
  Besides, I was rooting for Basshunter, who came up with the immortal line "I did touch bass, and I definitely hunted something". The man's a poet. Someone get him to re-write the national anthem please.
  
• I've noticed that Susan Boyle and John Prescott have yet to be seen in the same room at the same time. Hmmmm.
  
• Not content with being the corporate equivalent of Myleene Klass (ie: absolutely fucking EVERYWHERE), Virgin have decided to get a bit more aggressive with their advertising. In this case, Virgin Active Gyms, not content with just advertising in papers, magazines, on billboards, etc, decided to really get people's attention by...er.... sending out a scrote of students ("scrote" is now the collective noun for a group of students, by the way) to shout through megaphones about getting fit. At 8:00am. In a residential area. And more importantly, they woke me up. Fuckers.
  So, I did the decent thing, and wrote a snotty complaint to the gym in question. I don't usually DO complaining. I'm not very assertive. My Mum is, and I spent most of my childhood curling my toes with embarassment when she went through her reciept at the till in Sainsbury's and inflicted her wrath on whichever poor drone was stuck with serving her. I spoke to someone who worked there during the peak of her reign of terror. Apparently, if the manager saw her come in, he'd make a point of hiding a few streets away for a couple of hours until he was sure she'd gone.
  But in this case, they woke me up. That's generally not advised. So I sent an angry email, telling them that this is an area in which there are new parents, people who work night shifts, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, etc, and people who just don't appreciate being woken up by slack-jawed cretins shouting through megaphones about some overpriced hole full of meatheaded posers. I also told them that this was doing nothing to dispell the stereotype of all gym-goers being obnoxious, braying twunts who love nothing more than bellowing about how much they can bench press, whatever the fuck that is.
  The next day, I got a phone call. Now, I am a fucking pansy. Like most internet nerds, I am happy to have a go at someone behind a wall of text, but not over the phone or face-to-face. So when the bloke said "I'm the manager of Virgin Active...", my automatic response was that of sphincter-spasming terror.
  
  "Um... hello."
  "Hello. Now, I recieved your email earlier, and just wanted to apologise."
  ".....really?"
  "Yes. I understand that the megaphones were a bad idea, and you are right, it wasn't the best area to do it in. We just wanted to be motivated, you know?"
  "OK, and I get that, it probably would have worked OK in the city centre."
  "Perhaps. Anyway, we don't want you to think we're....er.... meatheads, as you put it. And we'd like it if you could come down and see for yourself that we're not like that. Would you be interested in guest passes?"
  
  And there we have it. Moral of the story: being a mardy bitch occasionally gets you somewhere. OCCASIONALLY. Didn't work too well for Heather Mills. Over and out!
  

Things to do in Derby when you're broke.

Fact of the day: I'm skint. I know I am because of the following:

1. I'm trying to choose between buying bin bags and buying milk.

2. I ate a crisp sandwich earlier with the two end slices of the loaf, and some Salt & Vinegar crisps that have probably been in my cupboard for about a year.

3. I've emptied my "change jar" (in my case, it's a gourd given to me as a flatwarming present) to see how many 1p and 2p pieces there are in there, and if there's enough to buy a can of lager to cheer myself up, and if there is enough money for said tin, will the lady in the shop look at me like I'm a disgusting alkie?

4. I've been reduced to seeing if tinned mushy peas go well with pasta. They don't. In fact, the resulting mixture looked like the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth.

5. As much as I love/obsess over my DVD collection, I think I may have to flog a few of them tomorrow just so I've got enough money to keep myself sort-of-fed for the next week or so.

As such, I'm bored, so have retreated to the safety of the internet. No matter how many painful, sober hours you have to wile away before it's an acceptable time to go to bed, the internet is your friend. As I was thinking of doing regular "top ten" lists on here anyway (for those days when I feel like I should write something, but can't be arsed to do a coherent entry), I may as well start with.....

Top Ten Ways of Wasting Time Online

1. The Wikipedia Jump. Basically, look something up on Wikipedia. It can be anything; a film, an organisation, a breakfast cereal, a bizarre sexual practise... whatever. For example, in this case, I put in something in my direct line of vision: an ashtray. Quite interesting what comes up; did you know, for example, that it used to be commonplace at dinner parties for each guest to have their own small, personal ashtray just behind their wine glass? I certainly didn't. Anyway, from the ashtray page, I clicked on "cigarette". That was fairly boring, so I clicked on "cannabis" from there. Turns out that cannabis plants can sprout both male and female flowers, thus making the plant even more confused than the people who smoke it. From there, I went onto "Gateway drug theory", and from there somehow ended up on "Sweden". You can easily keep this up for at least twelve hours.
   
2. Start a fake Twitter account. Let's be honest, Twitter isn't that great. I started one myself, clicked the wrong thing, and accidentally became friends with Tim Westwood, for God's sake. It's just the "status" bit from facebook made into a stand-alone site. So, why not start a fake one? Obviously, it helps if it's a fairly prominent public figure. Someone got it (almost) right last week when they pretended to be Kerry Katona announcing her fifth pregnancy (true or not, I'm convinced babies just literally drop out of her by this stage). It fooled a few celebrity websites, anyway, and made me fear for the future of the planet when I heard about it. So go for it. Start one pretending to be.... I don't know, how about the rumoured-to-be-a-transexual one from the Vengaboys? Obviously, it helps if you try to make it believeable, so you have to build it up over time, but the payoff might be as great as having your fake account mentioned in The Sun's Bizarre section.
   Failing that, you can always go down the "lOl WhAcKy StOoDeNt" route and come up with one for that annoying cunt off the Go Compare advert or something. Up to you.
   
3. Think of a film you had strong feelings towards (eg: something you either loved or hated, nothing where you were like "...meh"). Google reviews of it. See if critics agreed with you or not. If they did, pat yourself on the back and feel smug that you have such excellent taste. If critics mostly seem to disagree with you, I recommend downloading Good Luck Chuck. You'll probably love it.
   
4. Go through your facebook friends list, putting everyone in a group. I tried it myself, it took fucking hours. The more pointless the groups (eg: "People with freckles", "People I secretly detest", etc), the longer it takes, and the more time you've wasted.
   
5. Try to catch a paedophile. Like foxes, they've become wilier over time, so it'll provide a bit of a challenge for you. Just go into chatrooms going on about how much of a dick your Dad is for not letting you go out wearing such a short skirt, you're thirteen and can do what you want, etc. It's essential not to type like a normal person during these exchanges, by the way. I've yet to meet a thirteen-year-old who doesn't appear to type with their arse. Go with lots of ALL CAPS, no caps at all, too many exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and above all, don't forget to type "lol" after pretty much everything, regardless of how unfunny or even tragic.
   In all honestly, I should probably just have put "I hate thirteen-year-olds and everything they stand for" for that point. Which brings me to:
6. Troll a message board. Not just any message board you understand; you have to pick one wisely. First off, you need one where the mods aren't too strict, and aren't likely to be able to spot a troll straight away. Avoid forums populated by internet-savvy types who view cat macros as "soooo 2008"; they can sniff a troll out at two hundred yards. You need a forum populated almost entirely by thick people. As such, I recommend music messageboards. Band-specific ones, at that. Band-specific messageboards are riddled with people who have never had to develop a personality of sorts, because they have a band they really, really like instead. As such, they're the most fun people you could ever hope to argue with.
   The idea is not to be too obvious. Going in and saying "lolololol fallout boy suck!" will either earn you a banning before you've managed to piss anyone off, or, God forbid, faux-pity from the fans of said band for not "getting" it. Instead, what you must do is go in pretending to be a borderline-obsessive fan. You then come out with a completely ridiculous claim; for example, if you were trolling the McFly messageboards, you could type something like "omg i just saw dougie outside hmv in swansea n he shouted at a lady wiv a buggy and kicked da buggy cuz she was in his way!!!!!!!! i used to be there biggest fan but now im dissgusted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! shame on u dougie!!!!!!!!!"
   Everytime someone disagrees with you, get more and more insistant that that is definitely what happened. Occasionally throw in something like "its lyk dat tym he throwed a stone at a pidgin" or something equally unfounded and stupid. At the very least, you'll be able to confuse a few people. At the most, you might be able to convince people that Dougie from McFly does in fact have some anger issues towards toddlers and pidgeons. For this reason, it's best to troll the messageboards of a band who are just fucking awful anyway. Bring Me The Horizon, for example. Plus, in their case, you could make them out to be responsible for genocide around the world and people would probably believe it, either because it's "the devil's music", or because they saw that article about the lead singer bottling a girl who wouldn't shag him (allegedly).
7. Watch entire seasons of poor-quality video on various streaming sites. Regardless of the fact that it was probably made up from the cuttings on the Family Guy writing room floor, I watched the entire first season of The Cleveland Show in an attempt to stave off boredom. Be wary though, there's a good chance you'll eventually get into it and find yourself babbling on about iCarly to your friends the next day. Shortly thereafter, you will have no friends.
8. On a similar note, if you're in the mood to have your childhood shattered, write down every film or cartoon you loved when you were little. Then look for it on Youtube. It took me til the other week to find out that Maxie's World was incredibly shit. Seriously, for all the fond nostalgia, most cartoons age horribly. Captain Planet, Superted, Bucky O'Hare...... all shit. I feel so empty now, but ready to move on and do adult stuff, like finally take down those fairy lights around my window that have been there for a couple of years now.
   Stoppit and Tidyup is still ace though.
   
9. See if you really CAN earn $20 per hour by filling in questionnaires online. If it turns out you can, let me know. My time is worthless, so the thought of being offered however much $20 is in pounds per hour for it is appealing.
10. Porn. I wasn't going to put this in because it's fucking obvious, but nothing kills time (and calories, weight watchers!) better than the art of one-handed typing.
    

Oh, and following last entry's pondering regarding whether or not my hamster can swim, no luck on that front. I filled the sink, and she refused to come out of the cage, presumably aware of what I was up to. Clever little critter. That said, she has grown really long strands of fur behind her ears and on her arse, so she's now dragging around a load of fur like a kind of shit train on a particularly fuzzy wedding dress. And from the front, she looks a bit like Pai Mei from Kill Bill vol. 2. Weird.
Over and out.

My first ham-fisted attempt at blogging.

OK, so not strictly my first attempt. I have a Livejournal, for example, but I've kind of neglected it recently, like an annoying toddler who keeps going ON and ON at you when you just want to bloody well sleep whilst doing the ironing and it's not like you can afford a nice Polish lady to do it like Maureen next door because your husband says it's a waste of money even though he doesn't seem to think twenty pints a night followed by a taxi back at 2:00am is a waste of money, oh no, and then you're expected to ignore him burping into your mouth when he tries to kiss you and.....

Well, to be honest, that's what I imagine married life is like. I wouldn't know, I've never enjoyed anyone's company enough to sign my life away to them, or indeed, shit out their babies. But back to the Livejournal/annoying toddler metaphor.

Anyway, like an annoying toddler, I'd rather just shove it in a box and put it somewhere out of the way than focus on my guilt at abandoning it in the first place. That's what I was getting at. And, unlike the Livejournal, I can't mention certain things because this is all public and my family might read it. My family are generally quite nice, respectable types who own Britta filters and that kind of stuff. They don't need to read about the time I thought a bottle of Jack and a chicken phaal would be a splendid idea (the resulting substance pouring out of me burned through steel, incidentally, and has since been used by jewel thieves as an aid to getting into safes).

So, what with this being my first entry and all, I may as well start off by commenting on current affairs. I don't mean anything highbrow, I just mean "stuff that is occurring at the moment".

Stuff Wot Is Going On, #1
It hasn't escaped my notice that, for 24, I'm fairly immature. I'm one of the few girls from my year at school whose genitals have yet to be troubled by squeezing out mewling spawn, I can't resist sniggering to myself when anyone says "Are you coming?", and, overall, I still have no fucking clue what to do with my life. So far, I've come up with the following ideas:

• Review every film ever made in alphabetical order (upside: it'll keep me busy for a while, downside: it'll keep me busy forever, what with new films being released all the time. Also, it'd mean watching New Moon, something I've managed to avoid thus far)
• Just face up to the likely scenario and become a serial killer. I shouldn't have to wait until I'm sixty to start making a sculpture of Lady Gaga out of dismembered bits of trucker/call girl/student.
  
• Become a hobo. I don't mean one of the cashpoint-dwelling, Big Issue-selling types, I mean a proper hobo, with a shopping trolley full of rubbish and empty bottles and dead cats, and a name like Stinky Fergus, or Moldy Mildred. That way, I get to do what I do best (shriek my opinions in a terrifying, inarticulate manner at passers-by) without having to worry about stuff like P45s or whether my lightbulb is a screw job or a bayonet one.
  
• Re-train. Well, technically, this wasn't my idea, it was everyone else's. I have no idea what to re-train as though. I have a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Duh-by, but that's not exactly a useful vocation. So I spent a good three hours soul-searching, shuffling around the park, and picking my bum, before coming up with "Enbalmer" as a possible career choice. Luckily, my Mother knows me well enough to realise that it doesn't take much to distract me from something, and somehow I appear to have applied to do a BTEC in Animal Care. On the plus side, that's my future decided for me (I can't remember who by, presumeably a mixture of my family and the mental health authorities). On the minus side, it would qualify me to be a vetinary nurse, and I can't guarantee I'd be able to resist juggling guinea pigs, or seeing how far I can drop-kick a chihuahua. I fucking hate those things. Either get a rat or a dog, not something in between.
  
  
  • So, essentially, I'm no closer to working out what to waste my existance on, but there's a good chance it'll involve small animals. Right then.

Stuff Wot Is Going On, #2
Celebrity Big Brother. Is anyone actually watching it? Anyway, this is the final series with C4, who by this point have presumably thought "Fuck it, this show's been nothing but hassle", bunged in some fairly low-key "celebrities" and gone slightly insane with the decor. Apparently, this year's theme (they have themes?) is "Hell Lies In Others". As such, the house is decorated with flames, images of goats heads, and grotesque clowns, with mouths apparently based on those you'd find on sex dolls, at the head of each bed (as a wake-up call, they laugh very loudly; I'm guessing the producers were playing on the idea that every fucker under the sun claims to be scared of clowns).
As for the housemates, we have:

• Stephen Baldwin. You know, the one they cloned from Alec's bellybutton fluff. Stephen, like many celebrities who consumed enough booze/coke to floor Janis Joplin at some point in their career, is now a born-again Christian, a fact I didn't really notice until he pointed at a picture of a goat's head and said "You lose". And started carrying a Bible around. What I noticed instead is the fact that he's clearly a fucking lunatic. For a start, he keeps encouraging Alex Reid. Specifically, encouraging him to give up cage fighting (what, and deprive himself of the sound beating he so clearly needs?) and take up acting "properly". The man's an evil genius. The more he bigs up the egos of the other contestants, the less humility they display, and the more likely he is to win. That's the only reason I can think of, other than "Maybe he's just a nice bloke". Which is impossible. Listen to him talking. I've never spoken to a person who skins schoolchildren in order to make a fetching duvet cover (to my knowledge, although I reckon there are a few down the Job Centre), but I'm willing to bet that such a person would sound as eerily calm as Stephen fucking Baldwin.
  
• Stephanie Beacham. Sort of a cross between Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development and Dot Cotton. Doesn't appear to have done much thus far other than look around with an expression on her face that clearly reads "What is wrong with these fucking people?!"
• Alex Reid. Otherwise known as Jordan's boyfriend. Officially a "cage fighter", but has also tried (and failed) to pursue an acting career (he never got past Hollyoaks). Sort of terracotta-coloured and nobbly-looking; bit like a sweet potato, or Morph after thirty seconds in a microwave. At time of writing, he has done fuck-all of interest, other than practically wanking himself into a gleeful frenzy when Stephen started harping on about him being a real, proper actor in the near future.
• Lady Sovereign. Description varies; her official title is "Grime MC", but most people watching this will refer to her as a "chav". Despite her not really resembling a chav. She's mostly known for an ill-advised breakdown on stage over in the US, and an even more ill-advised Cure sample over here which offended po-faced goths across the land.
  
• Dane Bowers. Like Alex, he has stared into the abyss and survived (by "abyss", incidentally, I mean "Jordan's cavernous clunge"), which would imply that maybe they'd really bond, like shell-shocked Vietnam veterans. As it goes, they're doing this forced "matey" act which has absolutely nothing to do with the bruise on Bowers' forehead, which certain people in the media have implied is down to Alex. Nasty people. Dane, incidentally, is best known for foolishly granting Victoria Beckham the honour of a record without the other Spice Girls, and singing with Another Level (sample lyrics: "Jello jello goody chocolate puddy"... I'm not making this up). Joy.
  
• Nicola T. Regardless of whether it's the celebrity version or the "normal" version, Big Brother always manages to shoehorn in one slightly thick glamour model. And each and every time, the viewers start off hating her, then suddenly do a U-turn two weeks later, going on about how her dippiness is endearing and such. In the case of this particular glamour model, the dippiness is strangely forced. She sounds like someone doing an impression of a particularly thick five-year-old. There's a distinct possibility that she's actually a member of MENSA and merely has an earpiece through which her agent barks orders. "Someone just used a word more than one syllable long. Ask what it means!"
• Ekaterina Ivanova. You know, used to shag Ronnie Wood, a man who looks remarkably like a cross between a crow and something out of Labyrinth. That's literally all she's done (although, like most people who are famous for the sake of it, she's tried to come up with a career; in this case, she's apparently an artist). Oh, and so far, she's broken the fragile little heart of the one and only......
• Jonas Altberg. Aka Basshunter. You may have heard of him, and if you have, it'll be thanks to this monstrosity. That said, thus far, he has come across as an alright bloke, if only for the pity factor since being lead on, then promptly ditched, by someone whose previous chap looked as though he should be carved from stone and perched atop a Gothic cathederal somewhere. So far, he has built a snowman, refused to put sand in people's beds (don't ask), been locked in a room with Sov for a few hours and forced to listen to his own music on repeat, admitted to wanking 25 times a day as a teenager (that it? By teenage boy standards, that's pathetic), and gone for a naked run in the garden. One of the favourites to win, just for coming across as generally quite a nice chap. That's assuming you haven't seen his orgy photos. He's not doing much to dispell the reputation of the Swedes as being likely to fuck a hole on a golfcourse if they thought it had given them the eye.
  
• Sisqo. Used to be in saccharine RnB warble-fest Dru Hill before branching out on his own and scoring a whopping ONE hit with....er.... "Thong Song." Mostly known for being short. Really, that's it. I haven't seen him do anything other than be short in the entire time he's spent in the house.
  
• Vinnie Jones. Bookie's favourite to win, last I heard. If you don't know who he is, there is a good chance you've been living under a rock/in an Austrian sex dungeon. Basically: Footballer, actor, but mostly known as "hardman". There's a bit of macho posturing going on between him and Alex as well. I get the feeling Alex is going to wake up one morning to find himself minus several vital organs, all of which are being blended into a smoothie by Vinnie, who would ideally be yelling "STILL FINK YOU'RE AN 'ARD MAN, REID?!"
• Ivana Trump. Was once married to strange-haired USA-equivalent-of-Alan-Sugar Donald Trump. Hehe. Trump. Anyway, last I observed, she and Stephanie were being forced to "care" for the other housemates in a retirement home task. To be honest, other than riling Sov (which could easily be done with anything or anyone; a parrot, a roadsign, Dame Edna... literally anyone. Angry kid, that Sov), she hasn't done much. I have a theory that she was only put in because people were disappointed that Katia didn't have much of an Eastern European accent, and needed a bit of "Daaaah-link" for their buck.
  
• Heidi Fleiss. My favourite. That's not to say I want her to win, but it is a bit like watching an episode of Planet Earth in which David Attenborough excitedly whispers about a new species found in a series of underground caves somewhere. For a start, her face resembles a Bo Selecta mask. It literally doesn't look like it's correctly secured to her head. Her lips have been inflated to baboon's arse proportions. I've seen more life in an intensive care unit than I've seen in her eyes. She looks like someone dug up Jacko, basically. See? It's remarkable. Even her voice sounds like it should be croaked from a nearby Ghost Train at a funfair. So far, throughout the series, she's done fuck-all except sleep, but, in her defense, she did cotton onto the fact that Stephen is a "total idiot" from day one. She's my new favourite weird thing, replacing creepy-lookingl antiques expert turned insane shrieking transexual Lauren Harries.

So that's who we'll be hating on for the next couple of weeks, anyway.

Stuff Wot Is Going On #3
Glee. Yep, another TV show. Oh come on, I have a blog, why would you think I have anything better to do with my time than watch TV and snipe about people who earn more money in a week than I will in an entire lifetime?
Anyway, this particular TV show also answered my initial question ( namely: "What the hell is a Glee Club?"). Turns out it's a choir. And this is a drama/comedy series about one.
Basically, all the stereotypes are there. There's an inspirational teacher who lives, eats and sleeps his job, a quirky guidance counsellor, a useless sports coach, and a borderline sociopathic woman who trains the cheerleading squad (known as "Cheerios"). As for the kids, there's the goth kid, the wheelchair kid, the gay kid, the black kid, the kid who keeps getting bullied, the bitchy cheerleader and the jock who was-bad-but-is-good-now-because-he's-in-glee-club.
To be honest, I don't know what to make of it. There are many reasons I could never get into High School Musical ("I'm not ten" being the most obvious one, followed by "Zac Efron creeps me out" and "It's just shit, innit?"), and people have been toting this as HSM but for people who are allowed to stay up past nine. Like HSM, it does involve too many kids prancing around and singing in that reedy, nasally way that's presumably an American thing (can't say I've ever heard it over here). Nasal or not though, the songs are done incredibly well (have a listen to their version of Don't Stop Believin', for example), which leaves the question: is the show itself any good?
Actually, yes. Slightly confusing, in that it appears to go by the usual laws of American High School-based Drama (unpopular kids are nice, misunderstood types, popular kids are either horrible people or nice, misunderstood types, although that's only revealed once they hang out with the OTHER nice, misunderstood types.... keeping up?), but doesn't quite. For example, the character of Rachel. People leave nasty comments on her Myspace, call her things like "Man Hands", and rarely miss an opportunity to throw a beverage of some sort (usually a smoothie or a slushie) over her head. Poor Rachel. We feel sorry for Rachel, yes? Well.... no. Maybe it's my personal loathing of stage school kiddiewinks, but Christ, she's annoying. She harps on endlessly about her talent, and her dance lessons and singing lesson andzzzzzzzzzzz. I challenge anyone to watch her intro and think "Aw, I bet she'd be fun to hang out with". Now, this means one of two things:
a) That Glee is so poorly-written that they can't even make the right characters likeable, or:
b) That Glee is so well-written that it doesn't feel the need to make things as simple as popular = bad, unpopular = good. And, according to people who have downloaded the rest of it, that is very much the case.
So what else? Well, Jane Lynch (you know, the boss in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is fantastically caustic as Sue Sylvester, a coach who should never be entrusted with the self-esteem of turtles, let alone teenage girls. Assuming the character is meant to be that annoying, Lea Michele nails the "spoilt know-it-all" act with Rachel. As for everyone else? Meh. They just seem to have slipped under the radar so far. Even Will, the main character (the aforementioned inspirational teacher type) doesn't seem particularly interesting, regardless of a subplot involving adultery.

Verdict? Probably a grower.

Now, bugger off. I have important things to do. Yesterday, I solved the mystery of whether the light goes out when you shut the fridge door by putting my phone on Video Record and shutting it in the fridge (the light does go out, by the way). Today, I'm planning on another experiment: can my hamster swim? I'll get back to you on that.