Young people today......

Well bonjour mes amis and welcome once again to my world of bloggy fun, after our last outing in which I got a bit heavy about mortality and creationism I thought an altogether lighter tone would be appropriate this week.

As we all know I tend to use this blogging space to talk about fairly abstract concepts and don’t tend to discuss specifics of much, however with the return of one of my absolute favourite TV shows last night, “Young, dumb and living off mum” last night I just couldn’t help myself from writing about it!

For anyone not familiar with the show it essentially takes 8 very spoiled kids in their late teens or early twenties who have absolutely no concept of what life is actually like and makes them work for their money and look after themselves in a house in London, think sort of supernanny but with adults and you will sort of get the idea. It’s also narrated by a suitably sarcastic Robert Webb who performs his role with good spirit but you can’t help but think it would be improved with a few lessons from that doyenne of sarcastic narration Dave Lamb off Come Dine With Me.

Anyway yesterday saw the curtain being raised on the second series of this show which generally just acts as a way to get your blood nicely raging before bed on a Sunday evening. This years contestants seem all to be pretty nondescript this year with a few exceptions such as the bizarre Levi who has a hairstyle that makes him look like a black Edd-The-Duck, Harri a strange young woman who appears to have flounced to bed depressed just so she could entice ladies man Marc to come and share a bed with her despite telling the world she has a boyfriend (though I’m guessing not for much longer after this airs) and my personal favourite Chloe who was sort of like a pitbull on haribo getting bizarrely angry at Harri and Marc for sharing a bed without ever really explaining why or, to be honest, what it had to do with her.

Anyway our show started with our young miscreants have to go to a local supermarket to get their shopping in but refusing to pool their money and eventually deciding that rather than pay for food that they couldn’t afford they’d just eat it in the shop instead. That was until possibly the worlds doziest security guard caught them and made two of them pay while casually ignoring the rest of the group who were doing the same thing, top quality work there!

As much as food shopping seems to be beyond these kids household chores are undeniably funny, there was one wonderful scene where rather than doing the washing up they decided to try and wash plastic placemats in the washing machine using washing up liquid. The resulting foam that engulfed the kitchen was rather amusing but you did sort of begin to wonder how these people live not realising that putting washing up liquid in a washing machine is not the brightest thing you could do.

Following the debacle of work and chores came the worst challenge so far the idea of work. They were set a challenge of working in a florists and were told they’d need to be up at half five the next day so of course they all got an early night……. Well except they didn’t they just got hammered, and how! Now I know almost all of us will have at some point gone to work hungover but these kids were still drunk when they got to the florists having only gone to bed an hour earlier. Unfortunately the florist they were to work for didn’t really seem to realise quite what he’d let himself in for but after admonishing them for being drunk/hungover he set them to work to find him some specific flowers in the market a task that didn’t go so well with one of the girls (It may have been angry Chloe) looking stunned when she was told the red tulips she was holding weren’t lilacs for the simple reason that….. they weren’t lilac “What’s lilac then?”, clearly massively intelligent girl there! Also Marc decided to be ingenious and get his stallholders to give them a discounted rate but get them to make out their receipts for the full amount allowing him to pocket the change, his mother later called it “Clever” I just called it theft personally but this is the joy of the show it makes you hate the kids and then hate the parents even more for creating them!

Anyway having got their flowers our intrepid kids were set the task of converting them into bouquets to be delivered to paying customers. Adam (a very annoying and incredibly camp individual) decided that scheduled cigarette breaks were not for him and to take a break whenever he liked and made a bolt for freedom along with Harri and Coran this ended with a quite hilarious scene where Adam had a standoff against the florist who was looking murderous and carrying a pair of pruning shears (the temptation to stab the grinning imbecile must have been immense) after a scene reminiscent of something from a camp remake of “The good, the bad and the ugly” the miscreants were punished by being made to wash vans rather than partake of floristry except for Adam who sat on a step wailing about how not being allowed frequent breaks was a violation of his human rights, seriously get me a pair of pruning shears and I’ll stab him myself.

The remaining five kids were tasked with delivering their bouquets again with hilarious results, Iman (Whose idea it had been to use washing up liquid in the washing machine) was paired with Marc who, as usual was more interested in flirting than anything else but they did at least deliver their bouquet which got the ringing endorsement of “It’s very green” from their client who then proceeded to slag it off behind their backs. Danielle (Who’s partner Adam was presumably still crying about his fag breaks at this point) was forced to deliver her bouquet alone but for some reason seemed absolutely terrified at this prospect and delivered it with the immortal line of “Yeah it’s not very good” you sell it girl! Still she did better than final pair Levi and Chloe who got hopelessly lost before giving their bouquet which ad been destined as an 18^th birthday gift to a random Chinese herbalist, well done kids!

They were given a second challenge to help the florist decorate the royal box at the Covent Garden opera house but taking no risks the now rather flustered florist decided to set them to making decorative napkin rings while he did everything else before presenting the kids to the guests of the box rather like a workhouse owner introducing his orphans, with a certain amount of distain before flouncing off presumably to do some more schmoozing.

The best was, however, yet to come as angry Chloe walked in on Harri and Marc in bed (top & Tail I may add) and gave a wonderful “I knew it!” sounding not particularly angry and more like Jessica Fletcher off Murder She Wrote. She decided this clearly wasn’t the experiment for her and tried to make a bid for freedom not realising the producers has bolted the door which she then proceded to charge out sounding rather like that bull off the Covonia advert, actually it was genuinely terrifying!

In the end Harri left presumably fed up of insane Chloe and before her boyfriend noticed that she’d probably been copping off with Marc and Chloe was kicked out for being…..well…… mad really, hopefully she’s been safely sectioned now for all our sakes!

Either way it may sound terrible but it is compulsive viewing, nothing in the world makes you so angry, so incredulous and yet laugh so much at the same time, more please!

what are the chances?

Well good evening to you all and welcome once again to my blog, my slow, ponderous rant against the various foibles and fallacies that I face in the daily hell that we chose to call existence.

Now as you know I am one who loves a good ruminate but more than that I like to discuss my ruminations with others, rather like an intellectual cow that’s now sitting alone in a field chewing its cud and wondering “Why do we eat this vile cud? And what insane deity created me to have four separate stomachs so it takes hours for me to be able to digest anything?” but having no fellow cattle to discuss such issues with. However my pantheistic bovine does neatly bring me into my discussion for today and it’s one that I think may well cause a little controversy, it’s the creationist principle or perhaps, as I prefer to call it the creationist myth. Now as we’re all well aware there are, in general terms, two camps regarding the creation of the world the sciency one that says we’re basically one giant mistake so just enjoy yourself while you’re here and the creationist principle that says a divine deity be it god, Buddha, Allah, Zeus or that annoying blonde creature from the Rice Krispies box (Crackle? I think) has decided billions of years ago that you were to exist.

The major complaints regarding this seem to be the general lack of evidence to support such a theory after all the scientists do have evidence nothing conclusive yet but who knows what this giant world-destroying machine they’ve built under Switzerland is capable of but nevertheless at least the scientists are trying. Even today we find they’ve uncovered an ancient fossil which links us to our primatical forebears and I rather like the idea that the Stepehn Hawking of the ancient ape world decided ona better way of doing things, e.g. standing upright and talking and whatnot and created us whereas the Wayne Roney of the ancient ape-world (Who ironically enough probably looked a lot like Wayne Rooney) decided to just sit in a tree scratching it’s scrotum. Yes indeed we human types, or so the scientist would tell us, are the most intelligent creatures ever we developed over millions of years to become an elite species capable of mastering complex skills like surgery, ironmongery, dentistry and that thing some people can do where they can bend their fingers right back all these wonderful things created because we are the best of the best. But none of this would be available to us without exhaustive sc ientific research undertaken by men in labs wearing holey tank tops and with breath that would make a toucan flinch. As for the creationists however they just seem lazy by comparison I mean there is so little evidence out there to support the theories espoused by theologians the world over but this just does not get mentioned or assessed. Now the “evidence” of a creator myth is interesting because it isn’t evidence as such the general idea seems to be that we should look at the world and see the fact that our planet is the only one capable of supporting life and it’s a certain distance from the sun that makes it habitable and this cannot be a coincidence but this is quite simply a self-destroying idea the reason this planet supports ife is because, as the religious types have already pointed out it’s the only planet CAPABLE of creating life. If I get 9 pads of cotton wool dampen them all and put cress seeds on one of them then come back to them a week later and bellow “Behold, this cotton wool pad is the only one that has grown cress it is clearly the evidence of divine provenance at work!” no it’s just that that the only one that is capable of growing the cress. Alternatively we could put cress seeds on all the pieces of cotton wool then put one in the freezer, one in the oven, one in a boiling kettle put one underground and leave one on the windowsill and come back again in a week and say “Lo! This piece of cotton wool has grown the cress seeds and none of the others have, fear my wrath!” apart from getting carted off to a hospital for the clinically insane for talking to cress you have to accept that the conditions for the other cress seedlings were not ambient, who’s to say life never existed on Mercury but, like our cotton wool pad in the oven, it was simply too hot to support life or maybe life existed on Pluto but, like the frozen cress pad, it was too cold to support life, we just don’t know. The simple fact though is that these ridiculous statements that the religious zealots of the world espouse have no basis in fact they’re just truisms that can’t be disproved.

Personally I find the whole idea of creationism also to be ridiculously pressurised how can anyone who truly believes live under such conditions. If we take all the humans on the earth and we use the latest figures that suggest the population is about 7 biliion people and you add in all the animals and plants and other living flora and fauna on the planet the number you get would be uncalculable. I mean there are about 24 billion chickens in the world which means you were four times more likely to be born a chicken even more fun there are over 10 QUINTILLION (18 0’s I believe) insects on this planet so you are over a billion times more likely to have been born a beetle than a human (that’s just a beetle not even an insect in general) even with the luck of that German octopus you are talking incredibly slim odds and yet some higher power has decided that you were to be born. Even of the world was just insects, humans and chickens you’re still talking about a 1 in 1,428,571,433 chance of being born a human how can you possibly live with yourself knowing that god has forsaken that many lives as insects and chickens not to mention the thousands of sloths, giant pandas, blue whales out there just so you can sit there eating an éclair?

The alternative is to think of it in the scientific way to say that no-one has decided that you were going to be born it’s just a glorious mistake. Bear in mind that the chances of winning the lottery are about 1 in 14,000,000 just by being born human you have basically won the lottery 102 times now isn’t that a nice thought for your evening?

This week Matt:

• Discovered a very pleasant bottle of red and inadvertantly drank it all in one evening.

• Had an amazing time listening to some wonderful jazz in amazing surroundings.

• Decided he officially needs a holiday before he goes mad(der)

Did you hear????????

Well greetings all and welcome to my bloggiest of worlds, I was all ready today to launch into a tirade about that vile snake Piers Morgan, though I’m sure that blog will get written at some point, be longer than war & peace such is my vitriol reserved for him. However while browsing through the online papers (Except for The Times Online, you’re go to charge me for the news now????) I noticed a story about an office in America that has decided to ban gossip!

Now anyone who knows me well, or indeed vaguely, will know that there is absolutely nothing I love more than a nice gossip, I mean to be honest I think anyone who’s ever worked in an office knows that all anyone there wants is gossip. Honestly if you’ve never had someone come to you on the pretext of offering you a cup of tea just to ask about who was seen going home with who the previous night then you have absolutely no right to say you have existed!

Now for me there are some absolute golden rules about gossip, first of all you have to accept that people are going to gossip about you, if you’re under some misguided impression that the second you leave your desk people aren’t instantly sniping and bitching about you and that also even at your desk there will be, at a rough estimate, at least 5 people in that office bitching about you at that exact moment. If you can’t live with this then you should not be in an office because quite simply gossip is the only thing that keeps any work place going. The second major gossip rule is to be very careful who you are gossiping to, if someone makes a good gossip buddy you can be damn sure everything you tell them will get disseminated to their circle of other gossipers (particularly if said is gossip is particularly juicy), so be aware that if you spread gossip the liklihood is that the gossip will reach the person you are gossiping about so just be careful!

Anyway I seem to have moved somewhat off topic as this blog was supposed to about the practicalities of running a gossip-free office. Well this American firm that has outlawed gossip has brought in a three strikes and you’re out rule, though does this apply to when someone gossips to you? If that was true you could just arrange for three separate people to e-mail a not very well liked colleague with gossip and that person could be sacked before they’ve unpacked their coffee mug and Newton’s Cradle! Though maybe if you were particularly ruthless that could be an excellent way to get promoted by getting everyone else sacked! It just strikes me that should any British company ever introduce such a gossip ban by the end of the morning they’d have no staff left, I mean generally the British office is based on tea, bitching and a nice custard cream, sometimes all three simulatenously and if you ban gossip chances are you aren’t going to have staff for very long. Maybe it will be like when offices started banning smoking and set up dedicated smoking rooms, could we have a “Kvetching Room” or something where for ten minutes four times a day staff just go there and vent their spleens about their colleagues!

More to the point how does one go about policing such things? Are employers going to employ “gossip scouts” to sneak around reporting all evidence of gossiping to their superiors? Would we all be forced to become like Winston Smith looking for a convenient antique shop with a loft we can use for private gossip and then finding that, like Winston, the antique shop owner shops you for gossiping? Maybe Orwell actually forsaw all this and that’s what Nineteen Eighty Four was really about?

Could we perhaps get around this system by maybe developing some kind of in built code? For example rather than running across the office to say “Oh my god Anne is having an affair with that guy in the kitchens” we could perhaps say, “Did you hear that Anne is considering a career change and going into gastronomy, but she’s only able to learn in five minute sessions” or maybe rather than saying “Did you know Jimmy’s stealing staplers?” perhaps say “You know how that Theo Paphitis from Dragon’s Den owns loads of stationary shops, I think he might want to look at hiring Jimmy” see you can still gossip freely but it’s a bit more subtle and is not likely to get you sacked!

I suppose though this is all a moot point anyway because, as I have said, should any office over here even try to reduce gossip let alone ban it they’d be forced to sack almost their entire workforce within the hour, gossip is just simply a staple of British office life. Whatever happens with the world you can be certain of a few things in life and one of those things is simply if you work in an office you will gossip and be gossiped about, it’s just what being a British office worker is about!

This week Matt:

• Made his first, and last, trip to Birkenvegas

• Made a bakewell tart for the first time.

• Celebrated the return of University Challenge with a glass of red and some cheese & crackers.