Oct
2010
Web Curios
The problem with leaving two weeks between Web Curios, webmongs, is that I completely forget what’s happened in the world since the last one, leaving me rather shy of material for the (admittedly second-rate) opening paragraphs. I know, for example, that this week’s been particularly good for The Man (you don’t want to know why I am so aware of that, trust me), that a very rich, very stupid man was going to leave his job and then decided not to and that this inexplicably dominated the news agenda for 72 hours, that we are effectively going to have a really, really unpleasant decade (it’s true – even The Man Who Knows Gordon Best said so), and that Mexico is probably the most frightening country on earth right now (don’t click on those words unless you have a strong stomach – some very, very graphic photojournalism that way lies). Oh, and the entire nation appears to be gripped, once again, by a second-rate karaoke show and what appears to be a showcase of the very worst human beings on the planet (in fairness, though, my esteemed colleague Dave is doing a rather nice episode-by-episode blog of that).
[A brief aside - can someone explain to me, please, what the appeal of the X-Factor is? I am genuinely baffled as to why millions of people seem to find entertainment in watching music that was mediocre to start with being sung appreciably less well by people with less talent than the original artists, many of whom have fairly obvious and somewhat troubling personality disorders, on a set that looks as though it was designed by the same people who designed the wrappers for Quality Street chocolates, presided over by a group of people who, as a result of consistent public attention and adulation, are now of the mistaken belief that what they do matters and should be the subject of public debate, all in order to basically inflate the already gargantuan income of a man who's almost singlehandedly responsible for everything that is wrong with the last decade of this country's musical output? (I wonder if he and The Man are friends?) WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL ARE YOU ALL IDIOTS WHY CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT I AM RIGHT AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH. Feel free to respond in the comments if you have any arguments that might persuade me that the IQ of the majority of the UK population is in double rather than treble figures, and that that is borne out by the its televisual habits]
*Ahem*
Of course, though, that all pales into insignificance compared to stuff that people have done on the internet. Here is some of it.
