Author: weeks4send

Reactions to Michael Stipe’s Tribute to David Bowie

Posted on by weeks4send

(As taken from R.E.M.’s Facebook page)

“Amazing”/”Wonderful”/”Beautiful” – Gave up counting after 90 comments.

Discussion of how R.E.M. need to come back and save the music world from Justin Bieber- 9 comments

“Love Bowie, hate tributes”/ “Go be deep somewhere else” – 8 comments

Overuse of ellipses – 9 comments

Overinvested Debbie Harry fanboy- 1 comment

Overinvested Debbie Harry hateboner guy – 3 comments

People who are pretty sure they know what David Bowie would want and it’s not this – 4 comments

Guy who keeps posting dodgy-looking movie links and quizzes – 7 comments

Quoted lyrics / lists of commenter’s six favourite R.E.M. songs – 8 comments

Support of Michael Stipe’s Bernie Sanders T-shirt – 22 comments

Frothing at the mouth over Michael Stipe’s Bernie Sanders T-shirt – 13 comments

Intense Jimmy Fallon hate – 3 comments

“Why is David Bowie more important than the countless people who die daily across the world?” – 2 comments

Comparisons of Michael Stipe’s version of “The Man Who Sold the World” to Nirvana’s – 15 comments

Beard jokes – Gave up counting after 135 comments

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Why Nobody Listens to Teaching Assistants

Posted on by weeks4send

Scene One

(A Science lesson.  The TEACHING ASSISTANT is helping the STUDENT with his work.  Occasionally, the student stops to play with his pet octopus, who he keeps in his pencil case.  After a while, the SCIENCE TEACHER comes by.)

Science Teacher:  Derek, how many times must I tell you- put that octopus away!

Student:  Sorry, miss.

T.A.:  I’m sorry, I didn’t realise…

Science Teacher:  Look, I know you’re new here, but the school has a very strict anti-sea-creature policy.  If you see a student playing with a sea creature in a lesson, you absolutely must take it off them.  Tell the class teacher if necessary.

T.A.:  I understand.

 

Scene Two

(A Maths lesson later that same day.  The teaching assistant is now with a different STUDENT.  After making a couple of attempts at his work, the student gets his pet seahorse out of his pencil case.)

T.A.: (spotting this) Ernie, give me that.

(The student not only ignores this, but opens his friend’s bag, gets out a goblin shark, and starts playing with that as well, much to the amusement of his friends.)

T.A.: Ernie, seriously, hand those over.  You’re not allowed sea creatures in the lesson.

Student:  (shoving both the seahorse and the goblin shark in her face)  Wooo!

(His friends collapse with laughter.  The teaching assistant, quite annoyed by this, goes to to the front of the room and tries to get the MATHS TEACHER’s attention.)

T.A.:  Excuse me…

Maths Teacher:  (to the class)  Make sure to check your work after you’ve finished!  (to the T.A.)  Yeah?

T.A.:  Ernie won’t stop playing with sea creatures.  I’ve asked him to put them away, but…

Maths Teacher:  (to the student and his friends)  Oi, lads!  Is that a real goblin shark?

Student:  Yeah!

Maths Teacher:  Haven’t seen one of those in ages!  (to the T.A.)  Is he hurting anybody?

T.A.:  Well…  No, but…

Maths Teacher:  Then let him get it out of his system.  He’ll get back to work eventually.  (to another group of students)  Oi, you’d better be talking about the work over there, you lot!

(He goes over to talk to them.  The T.A. goes back to her table, where the student and his friends giggle and talk about her strange obsessive grudge against sea creatures.  Luckily, a few seconds later a giant squid gets loose and eats the lot of them.)

The End

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Now That April’s Here

Posted on by weeks4send

If you’re happy and you know it, thank your ex!  All you really need in life is someone who sees the psycho you are and likes you anyway.  It’s important to be yourself.  People don’t have to like you… and you don’t have to care.

As we grow up, it becomes less important to have more friends, and more important to have real ones.  You see, I’m a nice person, so if I’m a bitch to you, you need to ask yourself why.  I don’t have a short temper- I just have a quick reaction to bullshit.  I literally love being at home, in my own space, not surrounded by people.  Sometimes it takes me all day to get nothing done.  And maybe that’s not surprising- after all, I’m so old, I can remember going through a whole day without taking a picture of anything.

And I’m sorry if anyone’s upset at finding out that the world doesn’t revolve around them.  Here, let me pour you a nice cup of Get the Fuck Over It.  Personally, though, I’m doing my part to conserve water by drinking wine instead.

 

(Edited to add:  This was an April Fool’s joke.  Those Facebook memes sound really aggressive when you string them all together.)

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The NHS versus the Weasels

Posted on by weeks4send

I’m going to have to repeat what I said on Facebook:  What fuckery is this?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/richard-grimes/government-moves-to-consider-nhs-user-charges

Now, I’m not stupid- I know this isn’t exactly an unbiased source.  I know this article was written last July, and a lot of things have changed since then (Jeremy Corbyn things!).  I know my Facebook feed is largely made up of hardcore left-wingers, which means I’m probably primed to accept any story that makes David Cameron look bad.*  And I know these quotes could easily have been taken out of context- maybe every other peer in the room responded with shouts of Eh?  What are you smoking? and the article just didn’t mention it.  But a) I doubt the writers made these quotes up out of whole cloth, and b) the fact that they were even brought up with a straight face should provoke howls of rage in the citizenry.

I mean, just look at these things.  It’s not even just the Tories:

 Another Labour peer, Lord Desai, suggested bizarrely that patients should be issued with an “Oyster card” which is deducted whenever a patient uses healthcare, and patients should receive a “bill” at the end of the year, saying this would “help make it clear to people that a free National Health Service is not a costless one.”

In other words, “let’s charge sick people for getting sick.”  You know, the exact thing the NHS was created to avoid.  (Also?  “Free” and “costless” mean the exact same thing, numpty.)

It’s a terrifying vision of a dystopian future- attempts to take away our rights couched in weasel words like “begin the process of helping the public engage in a discussion,” just to add insult to injury.  But luckily, Britain is still a democracy, and our MPs all have email accounts.  Let us join forces and spam them into submission.

 

 

* Although David Cameron himself hasn’t exactly helped in this regard- not one of us saw Piggate coming.

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The Tale of the Bisected Snake

Posted on by weeks4send

(A story I wrote with my friend Pippa a few years back.)

Once upon a time, there was a snake in the middle of the desert.  Although he was a beautiful creature with bright green scales, he was sad.  You see, some time ago, an explorer walking through the desert had put a tentpole through the snake’s body, cutting the end of his tail in half.

This made the snake feel victimised, so he went to see his lawyer to see if he could claim compensation for the injury, as he felt he was not to blame. However, the lawyer said that he was silly, as he was bright green, and this was not a very good colour for a desert snake. As he was not even trying to blend in with the desert, he was to blame for the incident, for being a vain and ignorant snake.

Feeling that the lawyer was not being sensitive to his needs, the snake promptly ate him.  He then went on his way, looking for other methods of revenge.

Coming to a square in the centre of town, he saw a protest against the use of the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” on TV.  The protesters claimed that said word was too long and nobody knew what it meant, making millions of innocent people feel stupid.  The snake watched them wave their signs about, and felt a tear come to his bright yellow eye.

“These people are the victims of unfairness, much like myself,” he thought, “I shall join them in their quest for justice!”  And with that, he swung from a lamppost onto a nearby statue, and began to sing a selection from Les Miserables.

Unfortunately, this was the wrong choice, as the crowd was against anything related to the theatre, which meant he had to slither away as fast as he could and hide up a drainpipe until the mob (who had somehow found pitchforks and lit torches) had passed.

Even more unfortunately, the split in his tail meant that he could not hide himself fully in the pipe! The bisected part stuck out the end! Some eagle-eyed member of the mob spotted this, but could only persuade his group of five friends to come with him to investigate it, leaving the rest of the mob to pass by and  fall into the river which passed by the end of the road.

Not wanting to be caught by these six ruffians, the snake slithered out of the drainpipe and ate the ringleader.

“Gasp!” yelled his friends, “You ate our friend Cliff!”

“Yes, I did!” snapped the snake, “He was going to kill me just for singing showtunes!”

“But…  But…  We loved him!” wailed Cliff’s friends, their eyes brimming with salty tears.

“Listen!” said the snake, “You think you’ve got problems?  An explorer cut my tail in half, and then my lawyer…”  But the rest of the snake’s sentence was drowned out by the ruffians bawling over their dear departed friend Cliff.

“Shut up!” yelled the snake. And he regurgitated the clothes the gang leader was wearing into a heap in front of the rest of the group. As the five big, burly men stared, tears drying on the cheeks of their shocked faces, he knew it was time for a quick get-away.

With angry (but somewhat watery) shouts echoing along the alleyway behind him, the snake sped off, taking as many twists and turns as he could in an effort to lose his pursuers. As luck would have it, he turned around a corner and saw his salvation.

For there, in a yellow suit and hat, stood the very explorer who’d bisected his tail in the first place!  The explorer was cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new wing in the hospital, so he was completely distracted.  The snake grinned.  Vengeance would be his!

With a strangled cry, the snake launched himself off the ground and at the explorer, jaws wide open in preparation for the extremely satisfying meal he was about to have, when suddenly…

The explorer turned, alarmed by the commotion caused by the arrival of Cliff’s gang. Seeing his imminent demise in the shape of the bisected snake, hurtling towards him with reckless speed, the explorer drew a katana and the whole crowd went quiet.

The explorer and the snake froze, looking at each other, watching for the signs that indicate impending movement. Suddenly they were both distracted by an appearance from the lobby of the hospital.

“What is the meaning of this?” bellowed Pythia, the goddess of snakes, who had just materialised in the lobby.

The snake bowed (which was more difficult than you might expect, since he was floating in the air mid-jump).  “Your holiness, this man cut me in half with a tent peg!  Ever since then, I’ve had to go around with a bisected tail, which makes it hard for me to hide in drainpipes, among other things.”

“Is that so?” asked Pythia, turning an angry eye on the explorer.

“How was I to know that there was a snake underneath my tent peg?” the explorer exclaimed defensively.

“I’m bloody bright green, aren’t I?” the snake roared, turning an angry eye on the explorer. “I should be easy enough to see in a desert, shouldn’t I? I’m not exactly camouflaged!”

“But I’m colour-blind!” wailed the explorer.

“I think I can see a way through this predicament.” This was hesitantly said by the new leader of Cliff’s gang (who was named Philip), as he picked his way through the crowd to the steps in front of the lobby. He looked nervously at the still-floating snake as he did so, as if expecting him to swallow him whole for daring to speak.

Which he did.

“Oh, that’s just great!” said the explorer, “He was about to solve all our problems!”

“Well, I’m sorry!” said the snake, “I was just going by my instincts!  And as for you, you allegedly colour-blind twit, I think I’ll eat you for dessert!”

Meanwhile, Pythia had been thinking.  “You know, snakey, if the explorer couldn’t see you, then that renders your lawyer’s argument completely invalid.  It didn’t matter that you were bright green, and therefore you can’t be blamed.”

So the snake and the explorer joined forces to sue the lawyer’s surviving family for a million pounds, completely bankrupting their law firm and sending them into the poorhouse, and then moved to the Bahamas and lived happily ever after.

The End

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“Shut Up and Sing”

Posted on by weeks4send

I decided to write this post after seeing the front page of yesterday’s Sun (where they told Emma Thompson to “shut (her) cakehole” for daring to express an opinion contrary to theirs), but the subject matter’s been a sore point with me for over a decade.  Ever since the end of 2004, when I read a letter in Q about R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Green Day’s attempts to stop George W. Bush from being re-elected.

The letter-writer talked about the “crushing inevitability” of the US election result, and how there was “nobody more delusional” than a musician who imagined he could somehow influence political matters.  He concluded by telling the three bands in question to “stick to the music- it’s what you’re best at.”  What really got to me, though, was the editor’s reply: “They all care deeply about the issues.  The fact that they all had new albums coming out had nothing to do with it.”

Never mind that R.E.M. and Pearl Jam had both been deeply political for most of their long careers (the former even including voter registration forms in the liner notes of Out Of Time in 1991.)  Never mind that Green Day were at the height of their success in the mid-to-late 2000s, and therefore probably didn’t need any extra publicity.  Never mind that all three bands lived in the USA and the result of the election was quite likely to affect their day-to-day lives.  Clearly, the only mature way to react to adversity is to accept it as a “crushing inevitability” and ignore it.

I hate the “shut up and sing” argument.  Hate it like burning.  People talk blithely about how sick they are of hearing about politics and how they listen to music (or, say, watch Emma Thompson movies) to relax and forget about the world, but all it amounts to is, “Stop reminding me that you’re a human being with thoughts and feelings instead of some kind of ambulatory jukebox designed for my entertainment. “

That’s one version, mind you.  The other version is less “shut up and sing,” and more “stop disagreeing with me and sing.”  That’s the version we got on the front page of the Sun yesterday- if Emma Thompson had come out in support of leaving the EU instead of staying in it, they’d probably have started a parade in her honour.  Similarly, if, in 2003, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks had told the crowd how proud she was that the president was from the same state as her instead of how embarrassed, there’s no way she’d have got nationwide boycotts and been forced to apologise in the way she did.  Some people just get nasty when you disagree with them.  Instead of telling you why they think you’re wrong, they deny your right to have an opinion at all.

In run-up to the 2005 UK General Election (i.e.- the one immediately after the disappointing US one), an advert ran on TV with the slogan, “If you don’t do politics, there’s not much you do do.”  The advert pointed out that a lot of things in everyday life- traffic, litter, graffiti, prices at the supermarket- are inherently political.  It’s ridiculous to expect anyone to stay out of the political arena when you can barely say a sentence without touching on one issue or another.  If you disagree with somebody, say why you disagree with them instead of just telling them they’re not worthy of expressing an opinion.  And if you really can’t stand to be reminded of the world outside of yourself in the course of your entertainment, even for a second, then just piss off and watch CBeebies with the rest of the toddlers.

 

 

The advert in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zruGBWLk9s8

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Secondary School is Frequently Awful

Posted on by weeks4send

I wrote this article just over a year ago:

http://womenmakewaves.co.uk/targets-detention/

I still stand by what I said at the time, but every time I reread it, I think about other things I should have added.  Granted, if I added everything I’ve thought of, the whole thing would be novel-length, but I think I can work out a bit of an appendix here.

A major problem with secondary schools (from the point of view of the students, anyway) is that children aren’t that hot on long-term planning.  You can tell a twelve-year-old at the start of Year Eight that they only have six years left in school, but six years is half of their life so far.  Your average twelve-year-old thinks of their eighteenth birthday in the same way religious people think of the afterlife- they have faith that they’ll get there one day, but it’s so distant and so removed from their current lives that it’s hard to get a meaningful picture of it.  As far as the twelve-year-old is concerned, school might as well last for the rest of their life.  In a way, it does- the eighteen-year-old who leaves the school will be a very different person to the twelve-year-old who’s still stuck in it.

The child’s parents might encourage them to think of university or career possibilities, but those are too distant to mean much.  If they really enjoy a lesson, they’ll be motivated by that, but mostly, they’re going to be motivated by “what will and won’t get me yelled at.”

You get yelled at a lot when you’re twelve.  For my Year Eight class, it all started on the bus to school in the morning, where we could get yelled at by the bus driver for not moving down the bus, or move to the back and get yelled at by the older kids who’d claimed it as their territory.  Then it was time for registration, where you’d get yelled at for making too much noise or not having your homework diary signed, even if it was because a relative had been rushed to hospital the night before (because you should have seen that coming and got it signed earlier in the week).  When your lesson had been unexpectedly moved to a different classroom, you got yelled at for being late.  When your lesson had a supply teacher, you’d get yelled at for behaving in the way your usual teacher expected you to instead of the way the supply teacher did.  If you waited at the same bus stop as the boys from the school next door, you’d get yelled at by them (half of them telling you that you looked like a man, and the other half calling you a dirty bitch and ordering you to shag them as soon as they learned how).  Then, finally, you’d be off home, where your parents may or may not have found a reason to yell at you as well.  In a case like that, your only options are to scurry about like a frightened mouse and hope nobody notices you, or to hit the surly, “I hate everything” stage of adolescence and decide that, if you’re going to get screamed at no matter what you do, you might as well behave as badly as you like.

All of which is to say that, at that stage of life, it’s difficult to concentrate on a lesson even before you factor in the cramped classrooms and the target sheets.

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The Six Daughters of Celine Cooper (part 2)

Posted on by weeks4send

(Warning- extremely unpleasant subject matter)

 

By this time, Celine had married Love and Angel’s dad,

A man who knew just what he liked, and liked to have it now.

Celine said it wasn’t too hard to keep him from getting mad;

She took delight in pleasing him, and knew exactly how.

 

Love was born, then Angel, in the space of just two years.

Their father loved his daughters; his stepdaughters, not so much.

The older three soon grew used to his temper and his leers.

They’d spend their days avoiding him and shrinking from his touch.

 

When Vanessa was fifteen, things soon came to a head.

It was the kind of trouble that just simply grows and grows.

Her stepfather decided to get her into his bed;

She told him to fuck off and die, and so he broke her nose.

 

Van left for her uncle’s house, and took young Sam along,

Social Services forbade Celine to try and get them back.

Celine still had her husband, but things started to go wrong,

He dragged his daughters home to Durham, barely bothering to pack.

 

Celine was left with Lucy, and proclaimed she didn’t care,

Her daughter was worth ten times more than any lousy men.

She took her daughter shopping, bought her makeup, did her hair…

But one day she met a new man, and Celine was off again.

 

Emmy was nineteen now, and lived countless miles away.

She studied History in a city that her mum had never seen.

She phoned her gran on Sundays, but she never came to stay.

Truth be told, she didn’t want to run into Celine.

 

She met a trainee surgeon who was handy with a knife,

She was surprised to fall in love, but happy when she did.

They got engaged at twenty-five, and planned a happy life,

With one condition- Emmy said she never wanted kids.

 

Soon enough, Celine got word of Emmy’s solemn vow

(Her mum passed on the news, but soon regretted that she had.)

She said she’d bring Em to her senses, and she meant to do it now,

She booked herself a ticket, and dashed down there like mad.

 

Emmy’s gran had phoned to warn Celine was on the way,

So she and her fiancé had a few hours to prepare.

They came up with a schedule to get them through the day,

But when Celine wanted to spend the night, Em did not think this fair.

 

This led to an argument.  Celine burst into tears.

She’d expected a warm welcome, and all she’d got was strife.

What’s more, she wanted grandchildren, and she’d begun to fear

That Emmy wouldn’t know the joy of children in her life.

 

Celine told Emerald that there was nothing that compared

To cuddling your babies from the day that they were born.

To laugh along with them and comfort them when they were scared.

They helped you see the value in every golden dawn.

 

She told her that true happiness could not be found in books.

Em would end up sad and lonely, and that was a cold hard fact.

Em and her fiancé both exchanged a funny look,

Then they told Celine to leave and never dream of coming back.

 

Love and Angel’s dad made every night start with a row.

Lucy dabbled in cocaine and acid, topped off with some wine.

Van still kept an eye on Sam, though they were women now,

And Celine soon found that she was pregnant for the seventh time.

 

She said he was the bright young son she’d wanted all along,

She named him Edd after her father, and he was her little man.

But Celine’s attention span had never really been that long,

And- wouldn’t you know it?- young Edd was raised mostly by his gran.

 

The End

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What Happens in “The Almost Moon” by Alice Sebold

Posted on by weeks4send

Helen the narrator gets a phone call in the middle of the night, asking her to come and take care of her awful mother, who suffers from dementia but is still awful.    While trying to give her mother a bath, Helen gets fed up and suffocates her mother with a towel.  Then she washes the body and thinks a bit about the neighbours, her mother’s career as a model, her father’s long-ago suicide, and the time her mother dropped her grandson on his head.  Then Helen’s mother’s neighbour knocks at the door.  Helen doesn’t answer, and the neighbour goes away.

Then she tries to get in touch with her ex-husband, who left her because she broke his dragon statue by mistake.  That is a leading cause of divorce.  She gets him on the phone and tells him that she’s killed her mother.  He promises to come over and help dispose of the body.  He also tells her to stay in the house until he gets there, but she doesn’t feel like it, so she dumps the body in the basement and leaves.

Helen drives off to her best friend’s house, where she sleeps with said friend’s son on a whim.  In fact, she does a lot of things on a whim over the course of the book. Then she thinks about the time the neighbours tried to lynch her mother for not calling an ambulance for a boy who was hit by a car.  (She also remembers the nice neighbour who taught her to drive, and her father saying they were going to move but eventually deciding not to.)

Back in the present, Helen’s ex-husband shows up.  He tells her off for moving the body to the basement, and then they talk about his job.  Then they drive up to Helen’s mother’s house, and they talk about why they got divorced.  Apparently, it wasn’t about the dragon statue after all.  Who knew?  They see police cars surrounding Helen’s mother’s house.  The nice neighbour from the flashback comes up to say hi, and then Helen’s ex-husband drives her to work (she’s a nude model).  You’d think she’d call in sick today of all days, but you can’t argue with work ethic.

Then the police come along to question her, and, at around the same time, her best friend finds out about the sleeping-with-her-son thing and gets angry.  Then Helen and her ex-husband get her house ready for when their daughter arrives, and Helen thinks about the time she threatened her daughter’s abusive boyfriend with a baseball bat.  Then her daughter arrives, and Helen tells her that she slept with her best friend’s son and also killed her mother.  The daughter is somewhat nonplussed.

Then Helen gets a text saying that the police want to search her house.  She sneaks off and meets up with her best friend’s son, who she sleeps with again.  Afterwards, he tells her he knows she killed her mother, because that’s his idea of pillow-talk apparently.  Then she borrows his car and drives to an art gallery she once went to on a date.  Then she drives back to her mother’s neighbour’s house (not the nice neighbour from the flashback; the recently-deceased neighbour who’s been mentioned about twice so far) and writes a suicide note.  Then she finds some of the neighbour’s writing and decides not to commit suicide after all.  Then the police show up.  The end.

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