Here are a few appropriate tunes, only one of them a Eurovision contender...
I know you won't have time to listen to all those, but there's some cracking tunes in there. More reasons to go back into Europe!
Showing posts with label Bis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bis. Show all posts
Friday, 7 August 2026
Neverending Top Ten #7.5: Eurovision
Wednesday, 14 May 2025
Teacher Songs #3: Home Economics
I don't remember my Home Economics teacher at all. Not her name, nor what she looked like. Maybe this explains why I'm hopeless in the kitchen and can only just manage to sew a button onto my shirt after stabbing myself in the finger a few times.
I can remember most of the other teachers I had at school by either name or face, but there's just a blank when it comes to Home Economics lessons. I vaguely remember having to take ingredients in when we were doing cooking... maybe we made an egg salad one time? Something with pastry? The only thing I definitely remember making was a blancmange. And it was horrible. I've not eaten blancmange since. Does anybody still eat blancmange? When was the last time you had one?
I wish I had paid more attention in Home Economics. I wish I'd taken it past the second year. Nowadays, boys might be more likely to do so, but back in the Neolithic era, it was very much seen as a girl's subject and the other kids had more than enough ammunition when it came to targeting me, I wasn't going to give them an easy goal like that.
Because I don't remember the name of my Home Economics teacher, I guess we'll have to call her Mrs Fucking MacMurphy...
Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Self-Help For Cynics #33: Boredom, Boredom, B'dum, B'dum
Imagine you’re standing in line in a coffee shop, waiting to be served. It’s a long line and all the people in front of you are ordering those silly drinks that involve whipped cream, caramel syrup and heart attacks. What might you do to entertain yourself?
Now imagine you’re sitting at a bus stop and the bus is
late. These days, lots of city centre bus stops have those little clocks fitted
which tell you how long you have to wait till the next bus arrives. Only
instead of counting down, that number just seems to be stuck… or even getting
bigger. How might you pass the time?
The Soundtrack Of Our Lives - Wheels Of Boredom
Finally, imagine you’ve arranged to meet friends in the pub,
at the cinema, or somewhere in the centre of town. Only they’re running late
and you’ve got nothing to do but wait. Or… is there something else you could be
doing?
If your answer to any of those questions involves checking
your phone, then you’re suffering one of the major symptoms of the modern
malaise. And hey, maybe you’re not going on Tiktok or Snapchat or the book of
faces… maybe you’re doing some online banking, trying to crack today’s Wordle
or reading a fascinating blog post about how many different bands there are
called The Jerks (quite a few, in case you’re wondering: I’m sure I’ll get to
them in due course). Whatever it is, I can pretty much guarantee you’re not
doing what you would have done in this same situation 30 or 40 years ago.
You’re not allowing yourself to be bored.
And your brain is suffering because of that.
We’ve talked a fair bit about the mental health dangers of internet and social media addiction during this series. Part of the problem is ease of access. When the internet arrived on the scene about 30 years ago, you had to sit down at a computer, dial it up (which could take up to 5 minutes in my house) and then crawl around a clunky, always crashing cyberspace with limited options and plenty of built-in frustration.
Bis - Dial Up Internet Is The Purest Internet
Remember
watching slowly while every image on the page downloaded like one of those
novelty pens you turn upside down to watch the lady slowly lose her clothing?
(I don’t know why that particular simile popped into my mind. It’s not as
though anybody ever used the internet to look at naked pictures.)
The Divine Comedy - Anthem for Bored Youth
That’s all changed. Today, we carry the internet with us
wherever we go, so every possible distraction is available instantly, any time
we want it. Queueing up in a coffee shop, waiting for the bus, killing time in response to ever-delayed friends… we need never be bored again! You see it everywhere you look.
Whenever people are alone with nothing to do, out comes their phone. They don’t
even have to be standing or sitting still. They’re even using it as a
distraction from the interminable emptiness of walking down the street (watch
out for that lamp post!).
And our brains are suffering because of this.
Paul Armfield - Why Should It Be That a Man Gets Bored?
In a 2018 article in the Grauniad, Psychotherapist Hilda Burke explains...
“It’s good to be bored sometimes, to have that dead time. That’s when ideas come. If we’re on our phone checking Facebook, we lose some precious time that previously we used for daydreaming: gazing out of the window and having ideas blossom.”
Manic Street Preachers - Happy Bored Alone
In his article, Roose explains how he went about a full digital detox...
If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing. So during my morning walk to the office, I looked up at the buildings around me, spotting architectural details I’d never noticed before. On the subway, I kept my phone in my pocket and people-watched — noticing the nattily dressed man in the yellow hat, the teens eating hot tacos and laughing, the kid with Velcro shoes. When a friend ran late for our lunch, I sat still and stared out the window instead of checking Twitter.
Chris Difford - On My Own, I'm Never Bored
Since starting my new job, I finally find myself in a privileged position of being able to do nothing at certain times of the day. I mostly teach students 1:1 or in small groups, and in English that will often involve setting a lengthy task (creative writing is best) and then letting students get on with it. In my old job, I would have used that time to circulate the room, answer questions, help people who were stuck... and if time permitted, maybe catch up on a bit of marking or paperwork. In my current job, I get to stare out the window. How wonderful is that? I realise, I'm very fortunate. Most teachers would kill for the same opportunity. I wish I could give them all the gift of boredom... the profession would be in a much healthier state if it was full of bored teachers rather than teachers on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Although, to be honest, I'm not really sure boredom is what we're talking about here. If you asked me if I was ever bored, my first response would probably be: never. I always have a million and one things I want to do... or think about. The only time I do feel bored is when I'm stuck doing something I don't want to... like a lengthy meeting or an interminable online training session about something I already know. When I talk about giving the gift of boredom, that's not what I want to offer. What I really want is to give you all the chance to get busy... doing nothing.
Bing Crosby - Busy Doing Nothing
Richard M. Sherman - Busy Doing Nothing
Allowing our minds to wander can be hugely beneficial to our wellbeing, our imagination and our creativity. Surely this is great news for everyone - doing nothing is good for us!
Friday, 17 November 2023
Conversations With Ben #30: Bobby Ewing In The Shower
Anyway, I was rather amused by the aged cultural reference, so I shared the image with my work colleagues on our Whatsapp group. Being teachers, they're a bunch of politically-minded so-and-sos who regularly carp on about the malevolent excesses of the Tory regime, so I figured they'd find it funny.
Only one person got the joke though. Everyone else just thought I was sharing a picture of a naked David Cameron. If they didn't think I was weird already...
In despair, I decided to consult another young person about my faux pas. So I messaged Ben.
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
Someone asked me, "Why is youth
Blow up your TV
Along with the Salad Fingers and Burnt Face Man stuff. They were all shared the same way those early emails used to contain funny pictures. Or the earliest meme: "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog".
I should also point out that a few days earlier, I'd sent Ben a disgusted message regarding the Hollywood remake of 80's TV favourite The Fall Guy, starring Ryan 'as much charisma as a plank of 2x4' Gosling in the Lee Majors role and Aaron 'Oh my god, why does this guy keep getting work?' Taylor-Johnson as Howie Munson. To say I was horrified at this desecration of my childhood is a gross understatement.
Ben replied that he'd never heard of The Fall Guy. Worse still, he was less than complimentary when I sent him a video of the opening credits featuring the classic Lee Majors-sung theme tune. Frankly, he's lucky I was still talking to him.
Popular culture no longer applies to me.
Rol: As a 30-something who's never seen The Fall Guy, do you understand the cultural reference in this?
Ben: David Cameron at uni with his pig-lover in the shower?
So you're not aware of Bobby Ewing in the shower and what that represents?
Dallas or Dynasty? Is that the who shot JR bit?
I'm aware of these things existing in a loose form.
Or is it the this is all a dream bit?
Dallas. They killed Bobby off. He was dead for a whole series. Ratings dived, so they brought him back to life. The explanation was, yes, the previous season had all been a dream. His resurrection happened with his wife waking up and finding him in the shower.
I kinda got there with some help.
Did the ratings return?
For a while, yes. But a lot of people were pissed off that they'd watched a whole season that was just a dream.
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
Abba - The Day Before You Came
Thanks though. You answered my question about how well this would be understood by a young person.
Hate to break it to you, but as I'm in my mid 30s, I'm not sure I class as a "young person".
You'll always be a young person to me.
Someone asked me, "Why is youth
Wasted on the rude and uncouth?
Blinded on cheap vermouth
A would be poet in Duluth
Long on time, short in the tooth
Fantasies of John Wilkes Booth
Come back when you're younger
See you had that, but I grew up in the early days of the internet where shock tactics were the shared things that are now cultural flagstones. Ask anyone my age what "goatse", "lemon party" or "meat spinner" are and you'll get nostalgia for an internet before it became corporatised. None of those are pleasant things but it represents the wider culture of the internet as a mysterious entity prior to it becoming standardised. The rise of these standardised sites can be attributed to places like blogger, Tumblr and myspace who sought tohomogenise how the internet looked and was consumed before the rise of the true current social media spaces. You just got shit telly.
That last line is a complete reduction, but I felt it hit as a good punchline.
Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try an' find Jesus on your own
Don't google those things by the way.
I won't. But I feel like I've just seen a Lynchian glimpse behind a curtain I don't want to look behind.
Was it like the dark web?
I think dark web is exaggerating quite a bit, yet excessive gore, violence and stuff of a sexual nature was pretty much everywhere. But it wasn't for consuming content the way we use the internet now, it was just for shock. If that makes sense?
So people weren't hunting it down for kicks, it was just randomly placed to cause upset?
Elvis Presley - How the Web Was Woven
I spent a lot of time online in the early days of the Web. Why didn't I stumble across this shit?
The websites were passed along like folklore. The internet wasn't monetised at that point so there was no impetus to drive traffic.
Was this widely shared by your whole generation though? I wonder if it's comparable to the collective consciousness from my generation regarding the TV shows of our youth, even the ones we didn't watch.
Because there was far less choice, there was much more shared cultural knowledge back then.
These things were the early version of memes. Links sent to others in msn messenger, written on each other's schoolbooks, typed into a friend's computer in the computer room at school (before siteblocking).
Like sharing pages from the porn mags we found in the woods?
Exactly.
Bis - Dial-Up Internet Is the Purest Internet
Because you have to remember, my generation is the one that grew up in the world you mentioned whilst also growing up in the early days of widespread internet, meaning the habits from the former informed the way we used the internet.
Sam's generation however will experience a curated internet.
Not quite the same then. I'm consistently surprised by the lack of a shared cultural knowledge by today's teenagers. Like how many of them don't know who Homer Simpson or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader are. I know they're all older generation examples, but I knew about John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart when I was a kid. Everything is fractured now, little pockets of knowledge but very few shared cultural touchstones.
Look, the internet now is curated along two distinct lines...
1) a company wishing to monopolise visits to the internet (i.e the platform).
2) content curated by the ways in which Sam will view the internet ( i.e. logarithms).
I feel like you're just sending me pages from your thesis now.
My last point ties directly into yours though: the internet now is so curated towards likes and viewing habits (down to how long on average we stay on a single image or video, so as to then recommend more of the same to keep us engaged) that a level of shared culture isn't possible anymore.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
The internet doesn't show you content about what you *think* you want to see anymore. It gives you stuff that you *do* engage with (positively or negatively). It needs you to stay engaged. And the data which it uses to provide you with this is based on hundreds of thousands of hours of billions of people's viewing habits.
So whilst it sounds utopian, it's not driven by enjoying, just engaging. You take a second to read how terrible that Daily Mail headline is on your Google news feed? You engaged with it. It'll show you more. But it needs time to work out why you engaged with it. So it shows you soft politically biased things in that area to see if you engage with those. If you do, you might get some alt-right stuff. It knows you're male based on how you view and men engage with alt right stuff more than women. Not engaging with that stuff enough, it'll move to testing your engagement with things until it finds where you are.
This is how so many young men end up engaged with alt right stuff. Once they begin, it'll start flooding their feeds with it. Cars - sports cars - luxury cars - alpha mindset - Andrew Tate. Comic books - whining about certain aspects - woke comics nowadays - anti woke - Andrew Tate. And it's not set up to force people into certain beliefs, but because of how we engage with the internet and the "need" to monetise it, it's the conclusion.
Populist beliefs have become far stronger across the western world since the late 90s and increase year on year. That means it gets engagement so is viewed more. And on the internet, views = money, so notoriety and fame are the same thing. As a result, people who want to be successful express extreme opinions. Those get views. People want to make money, so they replicate those views.
They Might Be Giants - Youth Culture Killed My Dog
By no means am I saying Sam is destined to end up with those views. You're too decent a person and I know he'll learn from you. But he will be exposed to it. A lot of it. Without ever searching for it. His friends will. And some will identify with it. And people are trying to blame particular websites or certain heads of the hydra instead of dealing with having to have difficult conversations with their kids.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
It's more that it's not monetisable, so the people who do read it or come across it will always be a small group, but they will have a level of interest in the subject matter that equals yours.
I was hoping for a better punchline than that.
Sunday, 10 February 2019
Saturday Snapshots #70 - The Answers
10. Dishonest types don't go home till Autumn.
They look a bit Dodgy, don't they?
Dodgy - Staying Out For The Summer
9. Presidents of the USA (or Stranglers) get back together with the Tijuana Brass.
The POTUSA & Stranglers both sang about Peaches.
Herb Alpert had a Tijuana Brass.
Get them back together and they're...
Peaches & Herb - Reunited
8. An 'O' Level in Religious Education won't make the truck go any faster... but it will make me adore you forever.
You got an 'O' in RE?
Video of the week! I wish contemporary pop music still looked like this.
REO Speedwagon - Keep On Loving You
7. Shoes too big? I am ready and inclined to swap them.
Little Feat - Willin'
6. Twice, again, take a different route home.
In musical notation, bis means do it again or twice.
Bis - Detour
5. Dr. Rodent Dung has an epiphany.
Dr. Rodent Dung is an anagram.
If you have an epiphany, you see the light.
Todd Rundgren - I Saw The Light
4. So, Phoebe's brief history of time makes me want to sell my soul for a night of passion...
So, Phoebe = Sophie B.
Stephen Hawking wrote The Brief History of Time.
If you sell your soul, you're damned.
Sophie B. Hawkins - Damn, Wish I Was Your Lover
3. American cereal found in pubescent bin-liner.
Wheat from the U.S.
Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag
2. Noisy Scottish dog hears a solitary goodbye.
Jimmy! Ruffin! Get it?
I'm wasted here.
Jimmy Ruffin - Farewell Is A Lonely Sound
1. Sob... boom! Here's your prize...
Took me a while to find a picture where Julian Cope wasn't immediately recognisable.
Against All Odds, Saturday Snapshots will return next week. No Jacket Required!
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