High street fashion chain, Next, have admitted that offensive comments and death threats posted on Facebook came directly from them, not a hacker as first reported.
The comments were posted as the chain launched a Facebook page to find two new baby models, and were directed at the parents of the 'really fucking ugly' babies.
'The standard was appallingly low,' states a Next spokesperson. 'We had to swiftly address the issue. Every morning we would check Facebook, praying for a sexy little mite, only to be faced with skinny, ugly fuckers. Nobody wants to buy clothes that have been modelled by a fucking ugly, probably bastard, child. They should actually die.'
The mother of one of the 'fucking ugly' children says resignedly: 'Yes, Lambreeney is fucking ugly, I very much appreciate being told. I have now drowned him.'
Karina Evans 2010
Showing posts with label genius. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genius. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Government in licence discussion with BBC
Government ministers are in talks to force the BBC to pay for pensioners’ television licences. The talks came about as it was realised that old people are much more important than young people, therefore deserve to watch the television more than they do.
A government minister last night confirmed that ‘young people are mostly wankers, which is why we have only ever paid for old people’s licences'
Government research indicates that middle-aged people won't mind paying an extra £20 on top of their existing television licences, and are happy to be forced to share their hard-earned money with old people. This will absorb any cost to the BBC, thus making them a bit happier about the whole thing.
The government minister continues 'Old people are our favourite type of people; they are all well-behaved and have good taste in clothes. However, we are going to stop paying for their stuff, because we think it would be a nice gesture if someone else did it for a while’.
The DWP, who currently pay the fee, are at loggerheads with the BBC, who are reluctant to dent their budget. The DWP justify this move by likening it to 'it being your turn to call your mother. If you forget, she will likely never speak to you again'.
A BBC spokeswoman uneasily commented ‘We might now be forced to pay for the old buggers' television licences. I’m not particularly fond of old people anyway, so it makes me angry that the DWP people told us it is our turn to give them stuff. They smell of cabbage and lavender; that’s not a myth, it is actually true; I smelt one on the bus the other day’.
The BBC make a paltry income of £3.49 billion from licence fees, an income which, their spokesman states, they can ill afford to reduce. A breakdown of costs reveals that last year they spent most of it on buying an enormous red sofa and some costume jewellery for their news presenters.
‘They have to spend at least £2 billion on shiny stuff for me’, says news presenter Susanna Reid. ‘And they have to buy me stuff to make my tits look bigger too’.
A government minister last night confirmed that ‘young people are mostly wankers, which is why we have only ever paid for old people’s licences'
Government research indicates that middle-aged people won't mind paying an extra £20 on top of their existing television licences, and are happy to be forced to share their hard-earned money with old people. This will absorb any cost to the BBC, thus making them a bit happier about the whole thing.
The government minister continues 'Old people are our favourite type of people; they are all well-behaved and have good taste in clothes. However, we are going to stop paying for their stuff, because we think it would be a nice gesture if someone else did it for a while’.
The DWP, who currently pay the fee, are at loggerheads with the BBC, who are reluctant to dent their budget. The DWP justify this move by likening it to 'it being your turn to call your mother. If you forget, she will likely never speak to you again'.
A BBC spokeswoman uneasily commented ‘We might now be forced to pay for the old buggers' television licences. I’m not particularly fond of old people anyway, so it makes me angry that the DWP people told us it is our turn to give them stuff. They smell of cabbage and lavender; that’s not a myth, it is actually true; I smelt one on the bus the other day’.
The BBC make a paltry income of £3.49 billion from licence fees, an income which, their spokesman states, they can ill afford to reduce. A breakdown of costs reveals that last year they spent most of it on buying an enormous red sofa and some costume jewellery for their news presenters.
‘They have to spend at least £2 billion on shiny stuff for me’, says news presenter Susanna Reid. ‘And they have to buy me stuff to make my tits look bigger too’.
Location:Parker Rd,Hastings,United Kingdom
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Round and round and round
I am at work. 'What a stupid time to be at work', I hear you cry, and I am inclined to agree. This is for three main reasons: the first being that it is four-oh-fucking-five in the morning. The second is that I have had to bloody well drive all the way to Eastbourne for the 'pleasure', and the third that I have been temporarily demoted, thus have to walk round and round in fucking circles every sodding twenty minutes to look at people who are, quite sensibly, asleep. Operation Shawshank, for the love of God, will you HURRY UP...
Monday, 14 June 2010
All the best laid plans
Right. Fairly productive morning, as I have already completed the following tasks:
Inadvertently shown the meter-reading man my nipples
Had a cup of coffee
Decided what I am going to do for the rest of the day.
That brings me nicely to the tasks I must complete:
Finish poem that I never should have started: it is the poetry equivalent of emotional bulimia, thus is eating my brain
Finish doodle article
Eat crisps
Sleep
Go to work
Get changed into more substantial clothes, lest I scare the postman.
All the best laid plans...
Inadvertently shown the meter-reading man my nipples
Had a cup of coffee
Decided what I am going to do for the rest of the day.
That brings me nicely to the tasks I must complete:
Finish poem that I never should have started: it is the poetry equivalent of emotional bulimia, thus is eating my brain
Finish doodle article
Eat crisps
Sleep
Go to work
Get changed into more substantial clothes, lest I scare the postman.
All the best laid plans...
Location:Parker Rd,Hastings,United Kingdom
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Curious oranges
I used to quite like a programme called 'This Morning With Richard, Not Judy' in which there was a curious orange. The orange was rather cynical, much like myself, and therefore I insist that if anyone decides to liken me to a fruit in the future I am likened to a curious orange. The only problem being that I do not have banana fingers.
PS. Today I was forced to write poems about blue strawberries and sweaty socks. I feel emotionally violated.
PS. Today I was forced to write poems about blue strawberries and sweaty socks. I feel emotionally violated.
Location:Parker Rd,Hastings,United Kingdom
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
The whereabouts of my pies
I have the following pies:
Short story pie in Australia
Short story pie at the BBC National Short Story Pie Competition
Volcano pie gathering dust on two agents' desks.
That's it for now.
Short story pie in Australia
Short story pie at the BBC National Short Story Pie Competition
Volcano pie gathering dust on two agents' desks.
That's it for now.
Location:Parker Rd,Hastings,United Kingdom
Sunday, 14 March 2010
Longer, thus more boring
A MUSICAL ROLLERCOASTER
‘Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory’ proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1891. Whether this covered the self-inflicted pain of listening to music to induce tears and helplessness was left unsaid. If you were in pain or discomfort, would it cross your mind to do something that would exacerbate the situation? If you stubbed your toe, would you then hobble to the toolbox to retrieve a hammer with which you could hit it, to make it hurt just that little bit more? Clearly, this would neither assist the situation, nor induce a calmness to deal with it. So, why do we do it? Why do we listen to those songs that take us to an emotional place that, given the opportunity, we would not choose to revisit in person?
Many theories regarding ‘musical expression’ exist, and the title of such research speaks volumes. Perhaps we are listening to these expressive songs as an outlet: an emotional purge. Are we unable to vent these emotions without an aid? Maybe sitting on a doorstep, listening to an emotive song is a therapeutic outlet for emotions that would otherwise remain festering inside. ‘There is no doubt that [people] can be profoundly moved by perceiving, performing, or imagining music, and consequently music must touch on something in their emotional life that brings them into this state of excitation’ states Paul Hindemith- composer and author of ‘A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations’- before continuing ‘but if these mental reactions were feelings, they could not change as rapidly as they do, and they would not begin and end with the musical stimulus that aroused them’. This implies that an emotional change when listening to music is not real: merely a temporary and false expression of nothing more than a reaction. ‘We often catch the emotional ambience of our environment or of those around us’ argues Stephen Davies-‘Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion’- and that similarly, when listening to music, the emotion exuded through the music is infectious, similar to that of a bad feeling, fear or excitement in a crowd. Is it that we feel an empathy with the artist who has written, or is singing, the song? Perhaps we find it comforting that someone else is experiencing the same pain as we are, and that person is able to express his or her feelings in a way that we are unable, thus enabling us to ‘reflect’ our emotions upon theirs? Jerrold Levinson-‘Music and Negative Emotion’-states that our emotional response to music ‘mirrors’ that of a response to a real emotional situation, yet the ‘music-emotion’ differs to a real emotion in that it is not directed at an actual object. An arguably more direct theory from Colin Radford-author of ‘Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists’-states that ‘listening to sad music does make people sad. To deny this is itself paradoxical because it involves the cognitivist maintaining that when people say this is what happened, they are mistaken’. So, when you find yourself turning into a quivering, sobbing wreck each time you hear the rousing opening bars of that song you call ‘your song’, you could perhaps argue that the emotions are real, the moment is real, and not simply a weak, empty reaction to something that, essentially, means nothing.
Additionally, we use music to motivate ourselves; we generally listen to upbeat songs whilst we undertake physical tasks, such as vacuuming and working-out, whilst we tend to err on the side of the more down-tempo song for those evenings when we turn the lights down low and indulge in a relaxing bubble bath. Swap the genres around, and we may find that the housework takes a lot longer than anticipated, the work-out is not quite as exerting as we had hoped, and the relaxing bubble bath turns into a pre-cursor for a night out ‘on the town’.
The aforementioned theories reflect the reality that we do feel emotion in music. We listen to the lyrics and feel the beat of the song, we use it to vent our own feelings, to reflect our pain onto something that can absorb it, mix it up, and spit it back out at us using sounds and words that we have not contemplated, or are unable to express. We know that our brains react to music, yet we cannot definitively test our cognitive reactions to emotive music, simply because the areas that would be aroused in our brains during such a study could potentially be reacting to something else-to a thought, a memory, a hope, or even a fear.
Consider that perhaps ALL these theories are correct: consider that, as Hindemith theorised, the emotions are experienced, yet are not real: a sort of play-acting. This in itself could be a therapeutic outlet for an emotion hidden inside, and as much as faking a smile cheers one up, perhaps exhibiting a ‘music-emotion’ could, in fact, be a coping strategy for those unable to vent their sadness at particular life events. Consider it a bonus that these emotions are short-lived, for as quickly as you can turn off the song, you can carry on with your daily life, and with the bonus of a weight of the ‘tears and memory’ removed from your shoulders.
‘Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory’ proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1891. Whether this covered the self-inflicted pain of listening to music to induce tears and helplessness was left unsaid. If you were in pain or discomfort, would it cross your mind to do something that would exacerbate the situation? If you stubbed your toe, would you then hobble to the toolbox to retrieve a hammer with which you could hit it, to make it hurt just that little bit more? Clearly, this would neither assist the situation, nor induce a calmness to deal with it. So, why do we do it? Why do we listen to those songs that take us to an emotional place that, given the opportunity, we would not choose to revisit in person?
Many theories regarding ‘musical expression’ exist, and the title of such research speaks volumes. Perhaps we are listening to these expressive songs as an outlet: an emotional purge. Are we unable to vent these emotions without an aid? Maybe sitting on a doorstep, listening to an emotive song is a therapeutic outlet for emotions that would otherwise remain festering inside. ‘There is no doubt that [people] can be profoundly moved by perceiving, performing, or imagining music, and consequently music must touch on something in their emotional life that brings them into this state of excitation’ states Paul Hindemith- composer and author of ‘A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations’- before continuing ‘but if these mental reactions were feelings, they could not change as rapidly as they do, and they would not begin and end with the musical stimulus that aroused them’. This implies that an emotional change when listening to music is not real: merely a temporary and false expression of nothing more than a reaction. ‘We often catch the emotional ambience of our environment or of those around us’ argues Stephen Davies-‘Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion’- and that similarly, when listening to music, the emotion exuded through the music is infectious, similar to that of a bad feeling, fear or excitement in a crowd. Is it that we feel an empathy with the artist who has written, or is singing, the song? Perhaps we find it comforting that someone else is experiencing the same pain as we are, and that person is able to express his or her feelings in a way that we are unable, thus enabling us to ‘reflect’ our emotions upon theirs? Jerrold Levinson-‘Music and Negative Emotion’-states that our emotional response to music ‘mirrors’ that of a response to a real emotional situation, yet the ‘music-emotion’ differs to a real emotion in that it is not directed at an actual object. An arguably more direct theory from Colin Radford-author of ‘Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists’-states that ‘listening to sad music does make people sad. To deny this is itself paradoxical because it involves the cognitivist maintaining that when people say this is what happened, they are mistaken’. So, when you find yourself turning into a quivering, sobbing wreck each time you hear the rousing opening bars of that song you call ‘your song’, you could perhaps argue that the emotions are real, the moment is real, and not simply a weak, empty reaction to something that, essentially, means nothing.
Additionally, we use music to motivate ourselves; we generally listen to upbeat songs whilst we undertake physical tasks, such as vacuuming and working-out, whilst we tend to err on the side of the more down-tempo song for those evenings when we turn the lights down low and indulge in a relaxing bubble bath. Swap the genres around, and we may find that the housework takes a lot longer than anticipated, the work-out is not quite as exerting as we had hoped, and the relaxing bubble bath turns into a pre-cursor for a night out ‘on the town’.
The aforementioned theories reflect the reality that we do feel emotion in music. We listen to the lyrics and feel the beat of the song, we use it to vent our own feelings, to reflect our pain onto something that can absorb it, mix it up, and spit it back out at us using sounds and words that we have not contemplated, or are unable to express. We know that our brains react to music, yet we cannot definitively test our cognitive reactions to emotive music, simply because the areas that would be aroused in our brains during such a study could potentially be reacting to something else-to a thought, a memory, a hope, or even a fear.
Consider that perhaps ALL these theories are correct: consider that, as Hindemith theorised, the emotions are experienced, yet are not real: a sort of play-acting. This in itself could be a therapeutic outlet for an emotion hidden inside, and as much as faking a smile cheers one up, perhaps exhibiting a ‘music-emotion’ could, in fact, be a coping strategy for those unable to vent their sadness at particular life events. Consider it a bonus that these emotions are short-lived, for as quickly as you can turn off the song, you can carry on with your daily life, and with the bonus of a weight of the ‘tears and memory’ removed from your shoulders.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Assignment 2
I have been far too busy and important to blog, due to writing the following pile of words. I am still unsure whether or not they make sense, but have submitted it for marking anyway:
A MUSICAL ROLLERCOASTER
‘Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory’ proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1891. Whether this covers the self-inflicted pain of listening to music to induce tears and helplessness is left unsaid. Generally, when a human being is in pain or discomfort, the last thing they would consider doing is something to exacerbate the situation. If a stubbed toe were throbbing, hitting it with a hammer would neither assist the situation, nor induce a calmness to deal with it. So, why do we do it? Why do we listen to those songs that take us to an emotional place that, given the opportunity, we would not choose to revisit in person?
Many theories regarding ‘musical expression’ exist, and the title of such research speaks volumes. Perhaps we are listening to these expressive songs as an outlet: an emotional purge. Are we unable to vent these emotions without an aid? Maybe sitting on a doorstep, listening to an emotive song is a therapeutic outlet for emotions that would otherwise remain festering inside. ‘There is no doubt that [people] can be profoundly moved by perceiving, performing, or imagining music, and consequently music must touch on something in their emotional life that brings them into this state of excitation’ states Paul Hindemith- composer and author of ‘A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations’- before continuing ‘but if these mental reactions were feelings, they could not change as rapidly as they do, and they would not begin and end with the musical stimulus that aroused them’. This implies that an emotional change when listening to music is not real: merely a temporary and false expression of nothing more than a reaction. ‘We often catch the emotional ambience of our environment or of those around us’ argues Stephen Davies-‘Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion’- and that similarly, when listening to music, the emotion exuded through the music is infectious, similar to that of a bad feeling, fear or excitement in a crowd. Jerrold Levinson-‘Music and Negative Emotion’-states that our emotional response to music ‘mirrors’ that of a response to a real emotional situation, yet the ‘music-emotion’ differs to a real emotion in that it is not directed at an actual object. These theories reflect the reality that we feel emotion in music. We use it to vent our own feelings, to reflect our pain onto something that can absorb it, mix it up, and spit it back out at us using sounds and words that we had not contemplated, or were unable to express.
Consider that perhaps ALL these theories are correct: consider that, as Hindemith theorised, the emotions are experienced, yet are not real: a sort of play-acting. This in itself could be a therapeutic outlet for an emotion hidden inside, and as much as faking a smile cheers one up, perhaps exhibiting a ‘music-emotion’ could, in fact, be a coping strategy for those unable to vent their sadness at particular life events. Consider it a bonus that these emotions are short-lived, for as quickly as you can turn off the song, you can carry on with your daily life, and with the bonus of a weight of ‘tears and memory’ removed from your shoulders.
------------------------------------------
There are references here re quoted research, but they don't like being copied and pasted.
Wibble.
PS. I am soooooo not in Broomgrove Road.
A MUSICAL ROLLERCOASTER
‘Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory’ proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1891. Whether this covers the self-inflicted pain of listening to music to induce tears and helplessness is left unsaid. Generally, when a human being is in pain or discomfort, the last thing they would consider doing is something to exacerbate the situation. If a stubbed toe were throbbing, hitting it with a hammer would neither assist the situation, nor induce a calmness to deal with it. So, why do we do it? Why do we listen to those songs that take us to an emotional place that, given the opportunity, we would not choose to revisit in person?
Many theories regarding ‘musical expression’ exist, and the title of such research speaks volumes. Perhaps we are listening to these expressive songs as an outlet: an emotional purge. Are we unable to vent these emotions without an aid? Maybe sitting on a doorstep, listening to an emotive song is a therapeutic outlet for emotions that would otherwise remain festering inside. ‘There is no doubt that [people] can be profoundly moved by perceiving, performing, or imagining music, and consequently music must touch on something in their emotional life that brings them into this state of excitation’ states Paul Hindemith- composer and author of ‘A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations’- before continuing ‘but if these mental reactions were feelings, they could not change as rapidly as they do, and they would not begin and end with the musical stimulus that aroused them’. This implies that an emotional change when listening to music is not real: merely a temporary and false expression of nothing more than a reaction. ‘We often catch the emotional ambience of our environment or of those around us’ argues Stephen Davies-‘Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion’- and that similarly, when listening to music, the emotion exuded through the music is infectious, similar to that of a bad feeling, fear or excitement in a crowd. Jerrold Levinson-‘Music and Negative Emotion’-states that our emotional response to music ‘mirrors’ that of a response to a real emotional situation, yet the ‘music-emotion’ differs to a real emotion in that it is not directed at an actual object. These theories reflect the reality that we feel emotion in music. We use it to vent our own feelings, to reflect our pain onto something that can absorb it, mix it up, and spit it back out at us using sounds and words that we had not contemplated, or were unable to express.
Consider that perhaps ALL these theories are correct: consider that, as Hindemith theorised, the emotions are experienced, yet are not real: a sort of play-acting. This in itself could be a therapeutic outlet for an emotion hidden inside, and as much as faking a smile cheers one up, perhaps exhibiting a ‘music-emotion’ could, in fact, be a coping strategy for those unable to vent their sadness at particular life events. Consider it a bonus that these emotions are short-lived, for as quickly as you can turn off the song, you can carry on with your daily life, and with the bonus of a weight of ‘tears and memory’ removed from your shoulders.
------------------------------------------
There are references here re quoted research, but they don't like being copied and pasted.
Wibble.
PS. I am soooooo not in Broomgrove Road.
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