The empty complaints of the taxpayer.

There are many headlines you see in newspapers about certain outrages of obscene Government spending that we, as the group known collectively as the ‘taxpayer’ are footing the bill for. Every time I see one of these headlines, I groan inwardly, because it seems to me that it’s a way to be righteously furious at whatever Government you want while not making a great deal of sense. Things like public toilets for Muslims (which is entirely made up, although I think one paper ran a similar made up story), or salaries for NHS doctors. Wind farms or penthouse suites full of wide-screen TVs, free bars, limitless hookers and a cocaine dispenser for all prisoners.

As a taxpayer, you are paying for these either grossly exaggerated or entirely made up spending sprees. And yet, when I look at my wage slip, I don’t see a tax for silly things the Daily Mail won’t like. I just see tax, national insurance and student loan. I don’t have to fork out extra money when the Government decides to commission a solid gold toilet for the Prime Minister to crap in. Most of us pay tax, and our elected officials decide what to spend it on. Some people don’t want their taxes spent on paying the wages of doctors or teachers. Others have a problem with tax money going to giving prisoners basic rights like food or something to occasionally occupy the mind, or programs that might one day lead to rehabilitation, instead wanting them to fester in a dark stinking hole as a kind of medieval punishment which will in no way inspire them to contribute positively when they are released. I personally didn’t like the thought of a portion of my taxes funding a war effort I vehemently opposed from the beginning. Well, you can’t pick and choose what your tax contribution goes on. If you don’t like what the Government does with the money, instead of getting pointlessly angry about some newspaper telling you that you’ve personally funded the building of a wind farm, try protesting with your vote.

You could always try writing a letter to the chancellor beginning ‘Dear sir, I demand you spend my tax contribution on only the following list of things...’ but I doubt it will work.

Not so grim up North.

We went to Blackpool the weekend just gone. Now, the last time I went to Blackpool I was ten. That’s 22 years ago. In all that time I’ve retained fairly strong memories of it. I remember adoring the Pleasure Beach, loving the Sandcastle, watching the dazzling Illuminations, being on the Piers, up the Tower. Hell, even enjoying a visit to Madame Tussaud’s (although I was too scared to go through the horror exhibit). Feasting on rock, sugar dummies, candyfloss – enough sugar to fell a horse. The donkey rides on the beach. All those things, and probably more that I’ve forgotten. The overwhelming memory is one of joy.

It seemed that as I got older, I became aware of a different type of reputation Blackpool has. An unpleasant place full of stag nights and hen parties, where drunken fools with condoms on their heads rule the streets, a scummy beach and a sea full of, literally, shit. While I accepted that this must be the case and that the Blackpool my ten-year-old self loved so much had gone, I never forgot what it was like to visit that place as a child.

It was, therefore, with some trepidation that we began to approach Blackpool that Saturday morning, invited by family. In my childhood memory I remember seeing the Tower, and feeling the excitement it generated, and a nostalgic echo of that resurfaced upon seeing it on the road this time. Before long, also from some distance out, the Big One came into view. The Big One is around a decade old now, but is still a hugely impressive sight. I remember reading about it when it premiered – the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. I adore Alton Towers and love roller coasters, but I could well imagine myself chickening out of going on this beast. It’s no longer the world’s tallest or fastest, but it still holds the record for tallest in Europe.

The views along the promenade are much as I remember them, the Tower and the Central Pier on one side, and the Pleasure Beach, Sandcastle and South Pier on the other. I don’t think I ever went to the North Pier, and it remains a mystery to me. Yes, it’s cheesy, yes it’s typically English, yes the beach really isn’t up to much, but the giddy rush of pleasure I got from revisiting one of my most treasured childhood memories was enough to get me excited all over again, 22 years on.

It was shocking just how much the Pleasure Beach had changed. The Pleasure Beach is the most visited theme park in the UK, surprisingly more popular than Drayton Manor Park, or Alton Towers. When I was last there, the Big Dipper dominated the park, and was by far the highest thing in sight. Standing below it was dizzying, riding it looking below even more so. Now, it is surrounded by more than one ride that makes it look a little fish in a big pond. It doesn’t reach as high as Infusion, and barely stretches a third of the height of the Big One. The Revolution, which once seemed so mighty, is dwarfed and seems rather paltry by comparison to its newer cousins.

The first stop was Nickelodeon Land, newly opened this year, as it was really for Katie we came. Katie’s current favourite TV show is Dora the Explorer, so it was to Dora’s World Voyage we headed first. Rach took Katie on while I stayed with Emily. I did feel quite bad for Emily who had no choice but to sit there and watch everybody else have fun. Katie had been buzzing with excitement for days, so finally getting to try a ride out made her grin from ear to ear. What I’ll remember mostly from this two-day trip is Katie’s blissed-out smile barely leaving her face. As we moved from Spongebob Squarepants-themed rides to a Rugrats-themed log flume, Katie looked like she couldn’t have conceived of a place where it was possible to have so much fun. Meeting Dora left her quite stunned, so we had a bit of a break there, lest we break her and spoil her for good. Also, it started to pelt down. As we walked off, it was quite funny watching a three-piece girl band come on after Dora and with no audience whatsoever due to the pouring rain, launch into Walking on Sunshine. There is almost nowhere in the Pleasure Beach to shelter from the rain, so we all got thoroughly drenched, including poor Emily who, thanks to her absent-minded parents, had no rain cover for her pram.

After drying off and waiting for the rain to ease, we ventured back out, where Katie tried the biggest ride so far, the Flying Machines. They work a bit like the Flying Dutchman, and, obviously, Katie loved them. We moved on to one of a few carousels, which moved rather fast, had horses that were bloody difficult to hold onto and made me very nervous trying to ensure nobody fell off. Katie was oblivious, totally fearless and loving every second, shouting “Giddy up Horsey!” and “This is the best ride ever!” as we flew round.

I had been staring at it all day, and I was eventually persuaded to go on the Big One. The thing about roller coasters is the build up. The nervous excitement as you get pulled up the ramp, and the way your stomach flips as you go over the crest just before plunging down the other side. The Oblivion at Alton Towers is particularly cruel, as it pauses for a moment right on the edge of its vertical drop, just to extend that terror. And then, you’re over and the adrenaline rush comes. It’s addictive. The Big One is so high that much of the joy of the anticipation dissolves, leaving you with a terrifying pit in the middle of your stomach. The climb is horrifying. It lasts forever. The signs don’t make it easier, helpfully informing you when you pass 100 feet, then 200 feet and you just keep climbing. The view is astonishingly spectacular, and is something you would usually only get from the window of a plane or a helicopter. Going over the crest is sickening. Mercifully, it doesn’t pause at all. Then comes the 205-foot plunge and it all makes sense. When the anticipation is that much worse, the adrenaline-fuelled pay-off is that much better. It is incredible. My body was buzzing so much from the release of chemicals that my legs had gone warm. After all of that fearful build up, your stomach doesn’t flip over as much as you expect – not even as much as it does on the Oblivion. The rest of the ride is also very good, including a second crest nowhere near as high as the first, but still higher than anything else in the park. It’s also much longer than I’m used to. The rides at Alton Towers are great, but they are over extremely quickly. The Big One gives you an extended ride after the initial drop.

After taking Katie on a few more rides, we headed back to our hotel. We walked back through the Illuminations, which Katie did enjoy, but as she was already an hour past her bed time she was a little too tired to really enthuse about them. Emily, on the other hand, after a cold and wet day suddenly came alive, and was utterly mesmerised by the sea of flashing colourful lights. The Tower looked particularly impressive.

The next day we took Katie to the Sandcastle, which is the largest indoor water park in the country and just over the road from the Pleasure Beach. Katie loves going to swimming pools and playing in the water, but this was the first time she had seen something like a water slide and that look of surpassing happiness became once again fixed on her face. There are few things that please a parent like that kind of face on your child. We started gently, with the smaller slides, and gradually got to the bigger stuff. Each time we went down a slide, she would jump up and down in excitement and shout “Again, again!” Even Emily could have some fun this time.

Afterwards, Katie was utterly knackered, and we made plans to set off, but not before experiencing some of the other side of Blackpool. We had lunch opposite the Central Pier in ‘family friendly’ pub Uncle Peter Websters, with shit-stained toilets and menu with almost nothing available, which didn’t appear very friendly to our family at all. We then had a quick trip onto the beach, as the weather had been sunny and warm all day, the polar opposite of yesterday’s downpour. Well. Maybe it’s because we were so close to the Central Pier, but the scummy brown foam coating the tidal pools and being washed up on the beach was certainly in line with the reputation Blackpool’s beach has got itself. I do wonder about parents just letting their kids play in the scum pools. I do not lie; there were kids playing in the scum pools.

On the whole, the weekend was as expensive as a week in a caravan park, and at times the Blackpool I hear people talk of in disgusted tones definitely made itself known. However, the memory that will mostly remain is again one of joy – some mine, most Katie’s. And I did come home with some rock and a sugar dummy.

Maybe we should go easy on Hollywood.

Hollywood has got a pretty poor reputation these days. Gone, the days of Monroe, Wayne & Heston, or Capra, Hitch & Wilder. What we get now is Tatum, Pattinson & Worthington, and Ratner, Harlin & *shudder* Bay. No more Some like it Hot, no more The Apartment, no more Vertigo or Casablanca. Now we get Transformers, American Pie: Band Camp and all manner of sequels, prequels, re-imaginings, adaptations, remakes, or films based on comics, fairground rides or toy lines.

All too rarely does an Inception, a Pulp Fiction, or a Wall*E come along. The truth of the matter is recently I would have agreed with that view, but recently a friend recommended a video to me. The video make me re-evaluate the Hollywood machine, and showed me that things are so twisted, so messed up over there, that it really is a miracle they make anything worth watching at all. Ever. It’s an anecdote told by Kevin Smith about the time he was asked by Warner Bros to write a script for a new Superman film and the things the producer made him include in it. Smith has a real talent for writing and speaking to audiences, and the 20 minute anecdote is truly great.

It’s incredible that with producers like that Hollywood ever manages to release anything of quality. So give Tinsel Town a break – any release that’s even half-way decent is a minor miracle.

Wading in to another pointless debate.

So, I overheard a conversation while out in the world. That conversation was regarding circumcision. A woman was talking about her little boy who she is taking to get circumcised for medical reasons – didn’t hear it all, plus I was trying to enjoy a cup of tea at the time, so I didn’t really want to hear the details – there are apparently problems with the foreskin being too tight and rubbing the little fella’s little fella painfully.

There were two or three other women around this table who then chimed in to the conversation. One of them declared that her husband’s looked so much better so she had her boys subjected to it. Another, whose husband was circumcised for religious reasons, admitted that it was better, and easier to clean (can he not clean his own?), although she couldn’t bring herself to do it to her son.

I sat there, drinking my tea, saying nothing. I was rather proud of my self-restraint. Wouldn’t want to make a scene. I did feel like asking the woman who thinks it looks better whether she was circumcised. Did she think lopping her clitoris off would result in a minor subjective cosmetic improvement? Or her daughter’s, were she to have any? No, that would be barbaric, wouldn’t it? Go ahead; mutilate your boys, no problem. I also felt like turning to the other woman and pointing out that my own uncircumcised knob is very easy to clean – it simply requires washing regularly, just like the cocks without hats. And that having it done for religious reasons is staggeringly bizarre, and further comfort for me in my wholly atheist standpoint. How is it possible that an omnipotent, supernatural creator of everything would give a gnat’s fart whether it’s creations went round with a bit of skin over their bellend or not? Why create it that way if it needed to be cut? If it was decided god didn’t like fingernails, would they have to go as well? If you thought people looked better with only four toes, would it be alright to snip the little one off without waiting for the child to be old enough to be able to make their own decision?

Of course not, so why is this OK? I don’t know, but it's none of my business, so I stayed quiet, finished my tea and decided to moan about it here while subjecting you to altogether too much information.

Dear Capitalism.

Thanks, but no thanks. No thanks to The Apprentice and Dragon's Den. No thanks to a never-ending parade of wannabe pricks using their bottomless supply of innovation in greed in an attempt to impress the 'Dragons' or Sir Alan 'Sir Alan' Sugartits, who having established their own uber-prickness and obscene greed, now seem to think they have the right to sit in judgement of others. (Amstrads: among the very worst computers ever made. Who are you to fire anyone?) Fuckers. No thanks to millionaire, tax-avoiding chancellors making unnecessarily harsh decisions to forward their own regressive ideology, regardless of what it does to millions of others born (through no fault of their own) into lives unimaginable to the chancellor and his privileged friends. No thanks to being forced into propping up an unsustainable global economic system to keep the richest richer at the expense of basic human rights for others - who seriously thinks that a system based on constant and unending growth is really supportable? Who seriously thinks that if Thatcher and Brown, or the bankers and the hedgies had made different decisions, the system would work perpetually? Dicks, that's who. No thanks, IMF. No thanks to forcing poor countries to open their markets to international corporations, the only possible outcome of which is to make Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, Wal-Mart and others more profit and leave the average person or local small scale trader even more destitute. No thanks to charging compound interest on Third World debts, making them pay back many times the amount that was originally borrowed. No thanks to near genocidal economic policies of debt repayment - Nicaragua spends a quarter of the amount it repays servicing debt on health. One in five children in Mali die before the age of five, and yet Mali spends more on debt repayment than it does on health. Zambia spends more repaying debt than it does on health and education combined. In April 2002 the IMF forced Malawi to sell 28,000 tons of maize to repay debts. Three months later three million people were facing starvation. No thanks to compound interest on Third World debt, which causes much unnecessary death and grief. No thanks to China's special brand of communist capitalism. No thanks to a horrifically corrupt nation exceeding the West in all kinds of markets, filling every space of their country with motorways, buildings, hotels and restaurants. No thanks to arms dealers propping up revolving African despots, bestowing cash loans and palatial homes on the new dictators. No thanks to the overproduction of products, flooding the world with tat and baby clothes, driving down the cost until nobody can afford to do anything but work. No thanks to a West which is, of course, morally outraged by the human rights atrocities carried out daily in factories, sweatshops and copper mines (but obviously not outraged quite enough to stop trading - they make so much stuff! Think of the money we could lose! What's basic human dignity and enough wages to prevent workers from starving compared to that? 'Cunt' is an insult that barely scratches the surface of just how cunty subscribers to the idea that this is the only rational way to behave are.) No thanks to the Chinese Communist Party - essentially a ruthless money-hungry elite bleeding its country and its people dry. No thanks to a communist state less socialist than Germany. No thanks to a communist Government spending less than half its GDP on its people, allowing 120 million migrants to work without welfare, actioning mass state redundancies, with a beating or a jail term for those who might consider striking. This is a demented communist state taking the global capitalist economic model and just running with it to ridiculous extremes, on the verge of eating the world. No thanks to hedge funds. I would rant about them for a bit but even after researching them I, much like the FSA, don't really know what they are, only that it's money for nothing like Knopfler could never have dreamed of and that when they go tits up, banks and countries the world over get fucked. So, in conclusion, dear capitalism, go fuck yourself hard in the eye. Love, Dave.

Sources:
The Little Earth Book (3rd Edition), James Bruges.
Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit? Vol. 2, Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur.

To 3-D or not to 3-D? Not to 3-D. Mostly.

So, new 3-D technology has revolutionised the cinema experience, granting us more immersive environments and more amazing effects. Only, it hasn't, and it doesn't matter how many times directors or studios try to tell us it has. Mostly, it's a gimmicky and pointless effect, and now that the novelty has worn off it's becoming annoying. First off, it's not true 3-D - you can't look behind you and see more of the film; you still see seats and people eating popcorn. It just fools your eyes by projecting additional images that, when viewed through the glasses, make it look as though some images are separate from and in front of the flat background.

The first film me and Rach watched in 3-D was Pixar's Up, and we were actually very impressed - rather than pointlessly throwing things out of the screen in an attempt to make you go 'oooh', it added a depth and clarity to the picture that made the film look gloriously and intricately layered. We have since bought Up on Blu-Ray and although the 3-D was impressive, the film loses nothing in 2-D.

Then came Avatar. There is no doubt where the rumoured $400+ million budget went - James Cameron's film simply has to be seen to be believed. Effects like nothing ever seen, Cameron intended on 3-D from the film's early inception. He conceived, designed, developed and built the technology used to make it. As such, Avatar is the pinnacle of modern 3-D technology, even (just) managing to cover the cracks in the undercooked and cliched plot, to the point where it would probably scrape a 9/10 if I was ever to review it. Striking, subtle, incredible; if you didn't see it at the cinema in 3-D, you'll probably never really understand. As with Up, while the initial impact will always remain, provided you managed to catch it on the big screen, very little is lost re-watching it in 2-D.

Smelling cash, studios have begun to embrace 3-D in earnest, to the point where they'll give 2-D films post-production botch-jobs to make them 3-D-ish and then market them as genuine 3-D - Clash of the Titans, hang your shitty fake 3-D head in shame. As we had been so impressed with the 3-D in Up, we caught Toy Story 3 in 3-D, and either the 3-D wasn't as good or the effect had simply lost the initial impact. It added nothing. Not a thing. Toy Story 3 is such a wonderful film anyway, however, the extra cash we forked out for the 3-D that we may as well have pissed away didn't really annoy us all that much.

Recently the final Harry Potter movie was released. Filmed using 3-D cameras, this was to be genuine 3-D, not shameless post-production fakery. Even so, we didn't really want to see it in 3-D. In the end we had to because the cinema times were against us and we only had a limited window of time during which we could lose the kids. Not only did it not add anything to the film, now that I've also seen it in 2-D, it's clear that it actually removes a fair bit of it. The 3-D works in as much as the characters are separated from the background, but as most of the film is set in fairly lightless places, the background detail is often lost, merging into an indistinct blurry mess, in front of which only the character is in focus. In 2-D, the image is clearer, the backgrounds are sharper, and the experience is more satisfying for it.

I hope the current fad fades away soon, to be honest. 3-D TV? Shut up. They sell it on the idea of watching your favourite football team or film in 3-D at home, but really, beyond that who wants to watch Have I Got News For You in 3-D? Or Question Time? 3-D gaming might have potential, but I think the novelty will soon wear off there as well. And I hate mobile phones at the best of times, so making them 3-D will certainly fail to endear them to me any further. 3-D has officially outstayed its welcome. Unless James Cameron's doing it.

The biggest and most successful rebranding trick the right ever pulled.

One of the most common criticisms directed at left-leaning folk like myself is the moniker 'bleeding-heart lefties', or the supposedly critical 'do-gooder' (as if it's somehow better to do bad). It's also often intimated that we are immature and under-developed in our worldview; our hope that all kinds of different people could learn to live as equals a childish dream that our right-thinking betters have long outgrown. What's interesting is that this is a nice trick to disguise the real differences between us.

The point of view that we should do what we can to assist those less fortunate than ourselves in an effort to live in a shared community where everyone is valued is immature and unrealistic they say, and we should get on with the more highly evolved business of amassing wealth at the expense of others. If they can't succeed as we have done, the mature thinkers insist, they deserve to be crushed beneath the giant boots of our capitalist steel. Look out for the ones that appear to be all for ending poverty but at the same time refuse to even pay their fair share of taxes (*cough* Bono *cough* cunt *cough*), because they're worse than the ones who don't give a toss openly. This apparent uncaring attitude of the right would seem to be a sham, and much of the policy of the right looks to stem from an inability to think and act rationally, to separate the world in which others live from their own emotional hang ups.

Take the attempt to reduce the legal abortion limit - led mostly from the right. It stems from a failure to differentiate a foetus from a baby. They think they are protecting the rights of innocent little babies from the monstrous and evil medical professionals. They refuse to distinguish fact from an immediate emotional response. It forms part of an attempt to hold on to the outdated doctrine of their religious texts, which leads to a general automatic knee-jerk rejection of science and progress, a refusal to teach evolution as an established scientific theory rather than an alternative to hardline religious creator myths, and to a baffling all out rejection of climate science (however this also comes from good old fashioned greed and the need to hold on to their fortunes - the idea that there is somehow more money in carbon reduction and clean energy technologies than in the continued use of fossil fuels is laughable (although, there is, admittedly, a lot of earning potential in some areas of green technology, just nowhere near as much as the established oil and coal)). These trends, stemming from an inability to change and progress are not just misinformed, but downright dangerous for us as a species.

The general instinct of the left to invest in, and be guided by scientific research, rather than being bleeding-heart wet-blanket immaturity as the right would see us painted, is instead based on reason and rationality, which you'll find is more mature than restricting women's rights because you think doctors are baby murderers, not less. Rather than choosing to assimilate new information and revise their notions of the way the Universe functions, they instead choose to cling to their quaint stories and parables written thousands of years ago (it should be pointed out that I'm not just referring to the bible here, as other religious texts are equally outdated and nonsensical in light of what we've learnt as a species since the time of their writing), like children refusing to relinquish a treasured picture book from babyhood even though they've long outgrown it.* That they have somehow taken that inability to think or reason without letting primal emotional instincts guide them, to let go of infantile ideas about the nature of the Universe, to concede the truth about their morally dubious economic practices, lest it reduce their grossly unfair share of wealth and made it stick to the left is possibly the greatest con the right has ever pulled off. Of course, this is core ideology I'm referring to here - I realise in practice Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative, Democrat and Republican have little to distinguish them nowadays, but there are still different degrees of shiteness - a sliding scale of shiteness, if you will, with Labour & Democrat at the top and the Conservatives and Rebublicans at the bottom, and the Lib Dems positioning themselves wherever they think they'll get the most power.

*Obviously not everybody - I know both religious and right-leaning people, both friends and family who are brilliant in every way - it's aimed more at the Michele Bachmanns and Sarah Palins of this world, and there are many more of them than you'd believe; enough to be frightening.