BLOGS

If your life was so dull and uninteresting that you had nothing better to do of an evening than sit down and write about the entirely uneventful day that you’ve just had, then you’d probably think twice about putting said banal, naval gazing views online for the entire world to see or, as is more usually the case, ignore. This hasn’t, however, stopped the seemingly unstoppable rise of the blogging phenomenon, which has turned the internet into little more than a collection of self obsessed musings on what the blogger had for dinner and why X doesn’t fancy them, which is clearly not what the internet is supposed to be about: I.e. the world’s biggest and most varied porn repository.

Blogs can, along with their inability to provide anything interesting to the person writing it, let alone anyone reading it, be recognised by the writers’ idiosyncratic approach to spelling and a refusal to grasp the fundamentals of punctuation. Full stops, commas and semi colons appear irregularly, if at all, which is in sharp contrast to the exclamation mark, which turns up everywhere, whether required or not, and such is their enthusiasm for the symbol that it will generally appear in groups of about three or four at a time. The apostrophe can be considered as a lost cause as most bloggers appear to labour under the delusion that the point of it is to indicate that a word ends in an s.

It’s not just the world of teenage angst that has been revolutionised by blogging, however, as many blogs are set up by individuals keen to showcase their expertise and knowledge in certain specialised areas, or by those keen to correct a perceived bias in the mainstream media. For example, many Conservative supporters have launched a number of blogs in a bid to get their side of the story across in defiance of the left wing bias they see in the newspapers and television. The fact that there’s an equal number of blogs set up by Labour party members who want to react against the right wing bias they see in the newspapers and television in no way undermines this argument. These blogs are, however, a godsend for the newspapers, no matter which particular bias they may or may not be displaying, as lazy journalists can happily mine them for ill-informed opinions for which to fill up their papers, rather than coming up with ill-informed opinions of their own.

Most blogs exist for an average of a week before the writer realises that it actually takes a lot more effort than they might have thought to churn out this sort of nonsense. This realisation normally dawns at roughly the point the weather starts to improve. Or they get a boy/girlfriend. This has lead to blogspot being used for little more than a graveyard of abandoned sites, the sort of thing that would be a treasure trove for historians in the future. Or at least it would be if any of them actually had anything interesting to say.

MONORAIL

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from a wasted youth spent watching rubbish sci-fi TV and films is that we should really have spent more time outside. But if there’s two things we’ve learnt then the other is that in the future everyone will wear silver and will spend much of their time when they’re not fighting space aliens/whiling away the hours until death in a bleak dystopia travelling around by monorail. Given that it has officially been the future since midnight on January 1st 2000, it’s been a constant source of disappointment to us that we have yet to travel by monorail. Indeed, it’s now a part of our routine to go out on New Year’s Day, searching the streets despondently in a search for a monorail station that we’re convinced should have sprung up overnight, only tiring of this quest when we the constant stream of catcalls, rude comments, and threats of violence made towards the silver catsuit that we’ve worn, naturally assuming that from this day this will be the dress of choice of all citizens of this planet, and not just Lovefoxxx from CSS, get too much for us and we go home sadly, once again let down by a world that fails to live up to the expectations a multimedia childhood has given us.

Our disappointment with this state of affairs isn’t just limited to our life’s refusal to become more like a TV show, but because we can’t understand why our enthusiasm for a monorail network has failed to catch on. Swift, sleek, and shiny, the only real drawback with the system is that the only real journey’s you can make on it are ones which involve going round in a circle. One way. But as virtually all journeys, unless you’re eloping, have just committed a murder or are a very unlucky bungee jumper, involve ending up back where you started anyway, we fail to see why this is a problem. If anything they’re more efficient as you get to travel straight from A to A without having to deal with the whole B thing, and as ‘B’ is, on a day to day basis, work, most people would be happy to fly straight through. In fact, according to our copious research, the only people who would be upset about the lack of B’s would be honey connoisseurs and apiary makers and these, frankly, are people who shouldn’t be allowed a vote in the most minor of matters, let alone the important world of monorail construction.

Sod it, we’re moving to Seattle. They now how to do mass transit properly, even if the only places you can go to from the station positioned outside your local branch of Starbucks is other branches of Starbucks.