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.
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