Apathy Sketchpad

One of my columns last year was on the subject of the evoloution of languages, and clearly I was in favour of it. However, I feel this point now needs clarifying: I’m all in favour of the evoloution of languages, as long as it’s done right. This means that new words people use a lot are assimilated into the language, and words nobody has used in a hundred years are dropped. One would expect the dictionaries to be updated in the same manner, but unfortunately dictionaries are compiled by lexicographers, and in twenty years I have not met a lexicographer. From this, I conclude that lexicographers are small, cat-like creatures which inhabit ventilation systems and spare rooms, with no contact with the human race, and therefore compile dictionaries based on which new words they think they would say. This would explain why, although I have heard no more people say “I did a delia,” “This recipe is a real delia,” or “It’s weblish for ‘be right back’,” than I have met lexicographers, all of those words appear in recent dictionaries.

So, the question raised here is: If lexicographers have no idea which words people use, what exactly are they for? And the answer, I think, is to dilute the amount of Richard Whitely in Countdown, and the dictionaries exist purely to fund and justify this, in much the same way that while the average man on the street thinks universities exist to append abbreviations to my name, they in fact exist to invent things big companies can’t be bothered inventing themselves.

And then there’s the small matter of William Shakespeare. He is generally agreed to be the greatest playwright ever to live, by everyone except students forced to trawl his plays looking for tiny connections that aren’t there to write about in an essay which is clearly going to be more boring than all but the actual play. He is also said to have one of the largest vocabularies in history, but let me let you in on a little secret here: This is because he made up more words than anyone else in history. Now, call me pedantic if you want, but to me a truly great exponent of the English language might at least have had the decency to use it correctly. It would be nice, perhaps, to watch a play being performed and understand the words the actors are saying. And he wrote some very contrived sounding lines in a desperate bid to stick rigidly to iambic pentameter, hence the phrase “how how how how chopped logic, what is this?” appears in millions of books worldwide. To my knowledge, there is no grammatically correct construction which uses the same word four times in a row, but then, grammar was never Shakespeare’s strongest card, either.

A fair while ago now, there was a certain dispute between the WWF and the WWF, over which one of them should be allowed to use the initials. I don’t know what kind of a jury anybody thought would rule in favour of a staged fighting event over a nature charity, but it would seem the logical thing to do, since the initials WWF could either stand for “World Wrestling Federation” or “Worldwide Fund for Nature” (the name “World Wildlife Fund” having been dropped some years before). In the event, though, the case was won by the charity, and the WWE was born.

The game Lee and Adam bough last week, though, was released before all this, and is therefore called WWF: No Mercy. It is, at heart, a fighting game, albeit a bad one. Players are invited to choose between a variety of different modes, all of which are totally indistinguishable from each other, and then fight with one of about thirty wrestlers, each equipped with a blurry animation and a stupid name. I now live in hope that soon the day will come when the novelty of this has worn off, and we don’t have to play it anymore. Since the “create a superstar” feature was found a few days ago, they have insisted on creating several new characters a day, and then having something called a Royal Rumble using all the ones we have so far. The last such match lasted fully half an hour, which I find is a long time to play Wetrix, and I like Wetrix. Since I find No Mercy to be a passable game at best, I find ten minutes is a little too long a stretch, but for some reason they don’t seem to understand this. The thinking seems to be that once they have created enough alter-egos for me to play as, based on some throwaway comment or other one of them made eight months ago, I will automatically love the game and want to own a sequel.

Now, I’ve been introduced to a lot of new things since I’ve been at University. Some I’ve liked, such as Scrubs, Jeff Buckley, and Smirnoff. Others, I have disliked, such as Statistical Mechanics, Dick Steele, and that guy at the Bus Station. This game, though, falls neatly into the third category, which is reserved for those things which have been introduced to me as really rather excellent, and I have at best found tolerable, and then grown to passionately hate over time, such as Stavros, Lab, and Guns And Roses. But nobody else sees it. Everybody else is quite content (except obviously in the case of Stavros) to sit in Lab for six hours a day tinkering with some godforsaken glass tube which they know full well isn’t going to work, and if it does is sure to think of some even more ingenious way to irritate them, or listen to Guns And Roses, turn up the volume, and try to explain to me that “this is an excellent song,” but it just doesn’t take. I don’t like them, I’m not going to like them, and any attempt you make to change that will probably involve exposing me to them, and that’s just going to make me hate them even more.

And I’m not normally one to hate things. It takes a lot. Mostly, though, it takes a lot of time. I have almost never seen something or someone and instantly took a strong dislike to it (with an exception for a variety of reasons being the MOBO Awards). But if I’m around something for too long then the familiarity, as is its wont, breeds contempt, and it goes downhill from there. I can usually put up with most things for quite a while these days. Hence it took MTV Base, and a whole horde of idiotic kids to make me hate almost all black music. It took year nine music class to make me hate Indian music. It took a year living away from home to make me hate McDonalds, though I have always had certain moral issues with the RMCC, on what I consider to be the rather reasonable grounds that it claims to be a charity, but instead of being registered as such, it is in fact registered as a private limited company. The sheer amount of money in those things is insane. I mean, I’m all in favour of charities, but Ideally ones like Cancer Research UK, or the NSPCC, which have an actual cause associated with them as opposed to being the “Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities”, whose cause seems to be to help the poor starving children whose last request is to see a poorly paid man in an ill-fitting red clown suit funnelling their money into a huge faceless multinational corporation.

Of course, it would be entirely wrong of me to suggest that McDonalds are actually evil. Certainly they don’t care about the quality of their food, and certainly they will employ people who plainly should be on the streets. Nobody is going to leap to their defence if I say that they have been in the news several times, and never once to congratulate them, and I doubt if I’ll receive angry emails if I say that they make a lot of profit and hold something of a monopoly. In fact, I’m not sure what my point was, now.

But the most amazing thing is the Happy Meal. The Happy Meal is in no way happy. It consists, as far as I can tell, of the smallest possible amount of food, with the cheapest possible toy thrown in at the last minute, loosely connected to whatever promotion is on that week. Last time I was in there, the promotion was based on a TV show called “Clifford The Big Red Dog”.

I have never seen this programme, but I have seen enough stills to know this much: Usually, if you heard the phrase “big red dog”, you would imagine a large dog, say about three, maybe four feet high, in a bright, reddish shade of brown, because that’s what size and colour dogs are. Clifford, though, is rather bigger and redder than he is dog, and in fact is blood red and the size of a house. The effect given is rather like that which the inhabitants of the tiny green houses in a Monopoly set must experience, but without the knowledge that once the last tycoon has been bankrupted their entire city will be swept up and put in a cheap plastic box.

There is a new cartoon on TV at the moment, which you may have noticed, or even watched. It goes by the unlikely name of “Spongebob Squarepants”, and makes exactly as much sense as one would expect from a programme with that name, that is, none at all.

I’ve been told it’s very good, but unfortunately I cannot physically sit down and watch it without being sarcastic. As far as I can tell the eponymous hero is a sea sponge (with arms and legs and eyes, but I’m not going to criticise that, since it’s a cartoon, and because there are far more important things to criticise), who works in a burger bar at the bottom of the Pacific. So let’s start there. Water is an excellent thermal conductor, and therefore it would be impossible to grill underwater. That isn’t a problem, though, because you don’t have any burgers to grill, since there are no cows at the bottom of the sea. Those, however, are details that people without my scientific education might miss (I learned about the cows on National Geographic), but don’t fear, the writers and animators have kindly added lots more mistakes which are more accessible to the ignorant masses such as yourself. SpongeBob’s boss routinely lights cigars underwater. SpongeBob, when he manages to get into difficult situations, will break into an underwater sweat, in which the sweat forms crisp droplets, and falls downward (since sweat is denser than seawater). In real life, the sweat would of course disperse in a very pretty but very hard to animate kind of a way, but then in real life a SCUBA kit does not allow rats to live underwater in perpetuity, so today’s lesson is that real life has nothing to do with SpongeBob SquarePants.

The one thing, though, that puzzles me above all else about SpongeBob Squarepants is: Who came up with it? Presumably at some point somebody had to say to their boss “I’ve got this idea for a show. It’s about a sea sponge with square pants, who works in a burger bar. I call it SpongeBob SquarePants”. And presumably their boss must have said “That sounds like a good idea”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s not a good programme. I’m just sure it’s not as good a programme as the people at the Church of Spongebob think it is. They have put in a lot of effort, and seem to be part way through the arduous task of turning every episode into a holy text. So, if you’re ready, eddy, eddy to join “a church that finds joy in the little things in life, and isn’t afraid to say so,” then feel free. But if Spongebob turns out not to be God, you might look rather silly. Still, probably better that than you join the Church of Bubble, whose site hasn’t been updated in the last two years, due largely to their Lord’s total and complete failure to do anything of note since leaving the Big Brother house.

Earlier today, myself and two of my housemates were sat around chatting. Most of our chats recently have begun from an awkward silence, which has then been filled by talk of, for some reason, Gay Bar by Electrc Six. Today, by some process understood only by those who have spent years studying student conversations, this led to Lizzy announcing that the perfect girl for me is Daria.

I didn’t think that was probably the best news, since she is after all American, two dimensional, and imaginary, but it did at least remind me the show existed. I haven’t seen it for a long time, but it was always more entertaining than flipping through the music channels that were actually showing music (or at least music based entertainment). But I was bored, so I typed her name into Google to see what I could find. The results were, to say the least, disturbing. The first page I clicked on was a “which Daria character are you?” quiz, which I filled out, despite that fact that I could only name one Daria character, who I promptly turned out to be. This, of course, raised a huge moral dilemma. I was now, apparently, my own perfect girlfriend, and I don’t really see how that would be all that different to what I’m doing now.

There are some things one expects from the internet. One expects Harry Potter or Pokémon fans to be the sort of fans who would write fan fiction about their favourite TV characters. It’s normal. One would expect Daria fans to be the sort of fans who would hang around the fan fiction websites writing snide comments about the Harry Potter and Pokémon stories. It’s human nature. But no. Someone has written Daria fan fiction. Quite a lot of it, actually. One person has even written a Daria-stroke-Doctor-Who crossover story (entitled “Doctor Who Gives A Damn“) in which the Tardis lands in Daria’s town and aparently saves the world with an automatic strawberry literally moments after the reader loses all interest.

The third page was more disturbing. I hit the image search button. And would you believe someone has made Daria porn? Exactly why anybody thinks we want to see inexpertly drawn pictures of Daria and Jane locked in a naked embrace will hopefully remain a mystery, but if there’s going to be anything between us I may have to ask her to take those images down.

Update (20070826):

It is rather depressing just how many hits this page gets from people searching the internet for Daria-based pornography.

Happy Sixteenth Birthday. You are now allowed to have sex*. Now, while this process would usually involve seeing a naked women (or men), photographs of them constitute pornography, and are illegal for another two years, unless the photograph has at least one nipple obscured (or, if it is a man, unless he is… let’s say unprepared), in which case legally it becomes art, and is fair game. Then you’re allowed to have a drink to celebrate your wedding, but I don’t know where you met this girl, since you can’t buy a drink at your local pub or club (or frequently get through the doors) for another two years. So you’re sober, and bored, but don’t worry, while the dangers of alcohol abuse are twenty four long months away, you are quite at liberty to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke your way to cardiovascular failure on the way home. That’s okay, you are the sort of person who is ready to make that kind of big decision. But you can’t vote. You’re not “adult” enough to vote, or get into adult clubs, but you’re “adult” enough to pay adult price for every single thing there is. I suggest you look forward to your eighteenth, when things start making sense again.

*Until recently this would only apply to heterosexuals. Gay men would have to wait a while longer, and the lesbians were quite at liberty to do whatever they want, at whatever age they work out how.