- Got dumped the other day.

- Drinking sorrows last night.

- Insides hurt.

- Ow.

- Post is three days late because of WordPress messing me around. Even more fun.

So yeah, I’m shutting Jelly Pufflemur down.

We have been at war on and off for umpteen million years, but only this morning, the despotic warlord JM Hoffman overstepped the mark by too much. Let me tell you what happened.

Out of sheer desperation, I arranged an interview for a Christmas job sorting post for the Royal Mail, a horrible job only made easier by a.) them seemingly employing anyone who can hold a pen b.) paying money. These two things meant I navigated their nonsensical application website, before being told I had an interview on Monday 14th October. Having arrranged it for 9am so I could get a decent shift, I went off to bed last night (Sunday night), alarm set nice and early, and fell asleep nice and late due to a bit of web design I’ve been working on recently.

Three hours sleep later, I haul my arse out of bed, negotiate a rushed breakfast, a crazed bus, and the unfortunate tummy that dislikes the previous two being combined. I get to the sorting office, get told to wait and someone will be right down… and no-one comes right down for half an hour.

You don’t need me to tell you what he told me when I showed him my confirmation email. It was Tuesday 14th October. So I’ve wasted a morning, and I’ve got to do it all again tomorrow.

This, of course, can only have been the work of that fiendish, dictionary-snorting megalomaniac JM Hoffman’s doing, so I have summoned my e-lawyer (Summon Parasite, casting level 15), to rid the earth of that travesty of a Tripod page. And if all else fails, I have a death lazer.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

As many of the stoned, over fifties demographic will tell you, if you put on the film “The Wizard Of Oz”, and stick on the Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon”, you have obviously smoked enough draw in the Seventies to do something so utterly pointless. Also, you’ll see an eerie synchronisation between the two. Thinking this was an awesome idea, I hunted down a mashup video off of a perfectly legal download site, then had a watch.

By sheer force of willpower, I managed just under half of the video before declaring “Fuck this”, and throwing it out the window. And by ‘declaring “Fuck this”‘, I mean ‘thinking it to myself, because there wasn’t anyone else there’, and by ‘throwing it out the window’, I mean ‘closing Media Player’. Much less exciting, but I do pride myself on my accuracy. And my good looks. And my command of thirteen languages, incluiding binary, Morse code, and whatever language light bulbs talk in.

I was expecting a marvel of weird, cross-media perculiarities. At the very least, I was expecting something that vaguely resembled a similarity. I think I got two things. Could have been a dodgy video, but I think its because, as I’ve already mentioned, there wasn’t anything better to do in the Seventies when having a spliff. Somebody tried looping them up when stoned off their face, thought it seemed a bit similar, and created a phenomena. This is not something you should do.

Case in point, coupled with another student-life story. One time in Hull, we had a bit to smoke one evening, and that means quite a bit. We then put on a DVD of a program called Phoenix Nights, which I thought to be a documentry series about the unluckiest bar in the entire country. An hours worth of what I thought were horrifying coincidences in bad luck went by, before I realised that it was Peter Kays Phoenix Nights, was supposed to be funny, and was in fact a sitcom, and in no way real whatsoever. This is the sort of mindset I refer you to.

Coupled with that, and hastening my angrily closing the video, is the fact that Pink Floyd is as boring as shit. I recall Jeremy Clarkson, an otherwise impeccably right gentleman, writing that he enjoyed his music to take its time in such a manner, and why do all songs need to be three minutes rushed along and suchlike.

Because if everyone followed the Pink Floyd method, Mr Clarkson, songs would still have one verse, then fifteen minutes of long, repetitive instumental interlude, before another such interlude, and maybe an extra line if you’re good and don’t complain, and have another half an hour of monotonous guitar as well. I don’t follow this. Prog rock is supposed to be the stoner music our fathers had before us, but even with my head submerged in liquid THC, you couldn’t make Pink Floyd sound interesting. When I smoked, you could have said my name in a different accent and had me in a fit of giggles, and I’d have still told you to turn that shit off.

Basically, don’t go playing Dark Side with Oz, or you’ll fall asleep, knock over the ashtray, set you house on fire, then sue me for giving you head trauma. I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t have money. I have some blue cotton thread I found on my desk when I tidied it up earlier. Please don’t do it.

Its probably about time I wrote something here, seeing as I can’t remember offhand the last good thing I wrote that wasn’t made with Ctrl-C and Crtl-V in MS Paint. And since I’m helping a relative shunt stuff into their first grotty student digs tomorrow, it made me go all wibbly wobbly, in such a way as one does when remeniscing about studenthood.

In my case, however, the result of my three years of university study seem to be a huge debt, a pretty yet useless cetificate, and a hermit-like existance similar to a dweller of 4chan. Still, I made some silly videos, which I shall reference as necessary.

1.) When times are hard, you can make a delicious meal out of anything. Even when times are plentiful, like the end of the year…

1 and a half.) However, not everything you try will be a triumph of culinary prowess, or even edible.

2.) Make sure you work hard, hand in your essays on time, done to the best of your ability. It may seem boring and pointless at the time, but will result in a better scoring degree, which will be more useful. Do not waste your essay writing time filming yourself taking your shoes off.

3.)  Don’t spend all your time working, however. Make sure you take some time out to have fun with your friends…

4.) If you’re going to play your music godawfully loud, make sure its good, or at the least, will not inspire people to gut you like a fish.

Also, don’t invite your boyfriend to live with you and your housemates, then spend a year have screaming arguements.

5.) If someone doesn’t do their washing up, literlly beat them black and blue until they do it. No video here, but seriously.

6.) When you enter student accommodation in the first year, bring a bottle of something alcoholic to help make new friends. Then let the real you shine out.

7.) If you can record your own message on your doorbell, quote Dinosaur Comics when you’re drunk, and see what people say about it.

8.) Smoke lots of pot.

9.) Have a ridiculously posh-sounding voice. Failing that, have an uneering resemblance to Mick Jagger.

10.) Don’t take anything people on the Internet say seriously.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll do something like this properly, without using it as an excuse to whore out my MePipe videos.

…

Evidently, I have no idea. I hate driving lessons.

On reflection, Twitter may well be more useful than a sack of sycamore leaves in a toaster, based on some Canadian-based commentry I recieved. I still maintain, however, that a guy who’s already shackled up to a computer 20/6 an doesn’t do anything intersting doesn’t need it.

Now, onto the main item of business. Half of you who used to read this will have vacationed here from Night Life, and will know that once in a blue moon, I stick up an article in their Crappy News section. Basically, the idea was that once a day, a bizarre news article from somewhere gets stuck up and critiqued. Nowadays, its mostly just stuff in the news that pisses Barend off, but I do throw my hat in there. So an article I found was about to go up there, but I decided to see if I can get a full days ranting out of it myself.

Just for the record, this is the article in question. The short summery is that British nursery groups are being told to keep an eye out for pre-school kids making racist comments. A fine idea, until you actually read the article, wherein you discover that “this could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.”

Now, I’m well aware there is a conspiracy theory that the world is being run by a race of lizard creatures, and I’m now quite sure the National Childrens Bureau haven’t actually interacted with any kids longer than to try and devour them whole. But kids that small are honest, but essentially stupid. Yes, they’re quite prepared to turn up their nose at something they don’t like. They’re kids! Its hard enough to get them to eat a spoonful of peas if they don’t want to, let alone the goddamn tandoori chicken they’re evidently trying to stuff down these kids. But what gormless twunt thinks a small child is going to think “this food doesn’t taste good BECAUSE A PAKI MADE IT”? They wouldn’t even know who cooked it without ten minutes sitting in the kitchen being told in the first place. They simply don’t know any better, and they’re going to spit it out because they don’t like anything but Willy Wonkas Sugar Coated Mega Chocolate Whizz Puffs for breakfast, no matter how many overpaid white men in suits are wetting their pants over what we laughingly call “racism”.

Now I’m not gormless enough to say “racism doesn’t exist anymore”. I spent an entire year with two delightful Mancunians (or is it Mancurians? Or does anyone really care?) who spent the entire year complaining about Pakis taking everyones jobs, in between berating everyone from the South. I know racism exists. I know that in most cases, and definatly if there isn’t a reason, its wrong. I don’t think, however, that panicking about every time someone alludes to the fact that someones a slightly different colour is terribly constructive. Same thing as the gender inequality thing – while I don’t agree with men royally stomping all over women, neither do I like everyone pussyfooting around while the ladies stomp on our goolies. It’d be quite nice if we tried that wonderful “understanding each other and working together as equals” things rather than “oooh nooo they’ll sueeeee” nonsense we seem to have inherited from America.

Sorry, seem to have gone off on one there. So yeah, perhaps we shouldn’t be tearing our hair out because a small child with delicate tastebuds doesn’t like a big bowl of curry, and perhaps I should get a job.

I like to think I have a finger on the pulse of popular culture. This is, of course, utter bollocks. I can muster some trivia about metal bands, and the obligatory Pretentious Rant About How Film Adaptions Of Books Are Crap. So I wasn’t too fazed by some film called Napoleon Dynamite swanning by, dropping memes and hipster T-shirts in its wake. If the box tells the truth, I was busy being drunk at the time.

Nonetheless, the time always comes when you’ve got nothing else to watch, you’re not sinking to taking the shrink wrap off of a boxed set of Lost someone thought was worth the cost of the DVDs, and your only other option is a DVD box with a guy wearing an afro.

Opinions from people I know have ranged between “Its awesome”, “give it a few plays and it’ll be awesome”, and “its shit”. All these people have, however, agreed on one thing: nothing really happens in the film. Which is sort of right. It is a story, in that it has characters whom things happen to, but there is no plot. Any goals the characters have last more than 15 minutes in film time.

What it is, thinks this pretentious pundit, is a shallow look at the life of the socially maladjusted. Everybody knew a Napoleon at school, some weird looking, weird acting guy who didn’t get on with many, if any, people, and perhaps didn’t come from a particularly well-off background, so probably smelt of beans. We didn’t know them (well, I assume not, unless the good reader was that guy), because they didn’t tell us, so we didn’t know what got them ticking. And his family doesn’t escape this banner either, his 27 year old brother still living at home chasing a girl on the internet, his uncle trying to stay flush with a desperate variety of jobs. Had a different director gone with this film, it could have been an interesting, perhaps introspective look at the life of the underdog.

But as you can easily forget, this was an MTV film, which brought us such cinematic classics as “Jackass: The Movie”, where a gang of thick Americans do dangerous stuff, and Henry Rollins drives an off-road vehicle, “Jackass The Movie 2″, where a gang of thick Americans do more dangerous stuff, but Henry Rollins does not drive an off-road vehicle, and “Coach Carter”, where Samuel Jackson is a badass scarty black man. Again. Only he coaches a basketball team while doing it.

With this fine pedigree of work behind them, they had to push out the boat to make Napoleon Dynamite a stupid film. Hence a distinct lack of plot, as mentioned, but also a bunch of pointless things like the dance routine at the end, and the whole “Vote For Pedro” thing. Even though he did have an awesome wig.

So, to ruin what was going to be a good piece of writing by just not caring about it anymore, if you’ve survived this long without seeing Napoleon Dynamite, you won’t miss much by not watching it. Unless you’re a gigantic nerd living in Idaho, in which case you might be worried by the biographical nature of the film.

You what? OK, credit to the man for passing without a single fault, but I failed my second driving test last week for not changing into the correct lane. And they expect us to believe he passed after another car pranged him? Fuck that.