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.