Profile for Lapsed Pacifist:
A man in his late twenties who knows more about the inner workings of cars than is strictly healthy. Or socially acceptable.
Ho hum.
Recent front page messages:
none
Best answers to questions:
- a member for 20 years, 10 months and 13 days
- has posted 1 messages on the main board
- has posted 0 messages on the talk board
- has posted 0 messages on the links board
- has posted 3 stories and 0 replies on question of the week
- They liked 0 pictures, 0 links, 0 talk posts, and 3 qotw answers.
- Ignore this user
- Add this user as a friend
- send me a message
A man in his late twenties who knows more about the inner workings of cars than is strictly healthy. Or socially acceptable.
Ho hum.
Recent front page messages:
none
Best answers to questions:
» Worst Record Ever
"Barbie Girl", by Aqua. And "Saturday Night" by Whigfield.
This, as well as being my first meaningful post on b3ta (hello, by the way), is liable to mutate into a particularly bile-sodden, splenetic rant. Apologies if this does, in fact, turn out to be the case...
My nomination for "worst song ever", indeed my nomination for "most excruciating aural torture ever devised by man", is the foul and reprehensible atrocity that is "Barbie Girl", by Danish popsters Aqua.
My deep-rooted and potentially pathological hatred of this song isn't limited to its kindergartenish melody, simian rhythmic structure or feculent lyrics. Although they do contribute.
No, the real reason for my soul-deep loathing of this song is that it reminds me of my whining, irritating, immature, militantly Northern flatmate when I first moved to London. Nicola was a perpetual student, led a largely nocturnal existence and only emerged in daylight to paint her toenails, cook beans, watch Corrie and moan about how shit London was. "Barbie Girl" was, I fear, her favourite song. Her bestest tune in the whole wide world. Which, I think, says a great deal about why I wanted to kill her and distribute bits of her body around Kent in an assortment of supermarket carrier bags.
I'd put Whigfield's "Saturday Night" up here as a close second. Interesting Danish collection here; frankly I think the Danes may as well set aside all pretensions to neutrality when the next War comes. They deserve everything they get, after inflicting both of these eye-wateringly awful bits of nusic on the world.
(Wed 3rd Dec 2003, 16:49, More)
"Barbie Girl", by Aqua. And "Saturday Night" by Whigfield.
This, as well as being my first meaningful post on b3ta (hello, by the way), is liable to mutate into a particularly bile-sodden, splenetic rant. Apologies if this does, in fact, turn out to be the case...
My nomination for "worst song ever", indeed my nomination for "most excruciating aural torture ever devised by man", is the foul and reprehensible atrocity that is "Barbie Girl", by Danish popsters Aqua.
My deep-rooted and potentially pathological hatred of this song isn't limited to its kindergartenish melody, simian rhythmic structure or feculent lyrics. Although they do contribute.
No, the real reason for my soul-deep loathing of this song is that it reminds me of my whining, irritating, immature, militantly Northern flatmate when I first moved to London. Nicola was a perpetual student, led a largely nocturnal existence and only emerged in daylight to paint her toenails, cook beans, watch Corrie and moan about how shit London was. "Barbie Girl" was, I fear, her favourite song. Her bestest tune in the whole wide world. Which, I think, says a great deal about why I wanted to kill her and distribute bits of her body around Kent in an assortment of supermarket carrier bags.
I'd put Whigfield's "Saturday Night" up here as a close second. Interesting Danish collection here; frankly I think the Danes may as well set aside all pretensions to neutrality when the next War comes. They deserve everything they get, after inflicting both of these eye-wateringly awful bits of nusic on the world.
(Wed 3rd Dec 2003, 16:49, More)
» The last thing that made me cry
Battlefields
De-lurk. Hmm. Last summer I went to France and Belgium to visit the Western Front battlefields there - partly because I'm interested in history, and partly because I felt like making a pilgrimage of sorts... Anyway, to travel from Mons to Ypres to Passchendaele to the Somme takes only a few hours by car, but the scale of the slaughter that took place in this small space is staggering. But it didn't make me cry. The memorials (French, German, British, Canadian, and many more) are so dignified and wonderfully-kept that it's hard to feel any real, immediate emotion. And so it went, till I visited the Newfoundland Memorial, at Beaumont Hamel on the Somme. This was the site of some of the worst carnage of the Somme offensive, and takes the form of several acres of parkland, largely preserved as it was at the end of the War - all the trench lines, crates and so on are still there.
The park contains a number of small cemeteries, including Hawthorn Ridge (photo here), where the headstones are lined up touching each other, instead of the regulation spacing. I had a look at the CWGC register, which told me that the original battlefield grave had consisted of two trenches, with the bodies' arms linked as the men were all from the same battalion and were killed on the same day.
THAT made me cry. That little bit of solicitude and humanity shown by men burying their comrades made me weep for the millions of lonely, terrified, painful deaths died on this small patch of land. It made me weep for the thousands of men who disappeared, and for the anonymous bones buried under headstones reading "known unto God". Every one of the names on every memorial and grave register was a life, a person like you or me, with the same ambitions and hopes.
I have been back again this year, and I suspect I shall continue to visit. It's all over and forgotten now, but I feel it's still worth some tears.
Apology for the lack of a flippant cock-size-related apology.
(Fri 15th Apr 2005, 15:19, More)
Battlefields
De-lurk. Hmm. Last summer I went to France and Belgium to visit the Western Front battlefields there - partly because I'm interested in history, and partly because I felt like making a pilgrimage of sorts... Anyway, to travel from Mons to Ypres to Passchendaele to the Somme takes only a few hours by car, but the scale of the slaughter that took place in this small space is staggering. But it didn't make me cry. The memorials (French, German, British, Canadian, and many more) are so dignified and wonderfully-kept that it's hard to feel any real, immediate emotion. And so it went, till I visited the Newfoundland Memorial, at Beaumont Hamel on the Somme. This was the site of some of the worst carnage of the Somme offensive, and takes the form of several acres of parkland, largely preserved as it was at the end of the War - all the trench lines, crates and so on are still there.
The park contains a number of small cemeteries, including Hawthorn Ridge (photo here), where the headstones are lined up touching each other, instead of the regulation spacing. I had a look at the CWGC register, which told me that the original battlefield grave had consisted of two trenches, with the bodies' arms linked as the men were all from the same battalion and were killed on the same day.
THAT made me cry. That little bit of solicitude and humanity shown by men burying their comrades made me weep for the millions of lonely, terrified, painful deaths died on this small patch of land. It made me weep for the thousands of men who disappeared, and for the anonymous bones buried under headstones reading "known unto God". Every one of the names on every memorial and grave register was a life, a person like you or me, with the same ambitions and hopes.
I have been back again this year, and I suspect I shall continue to visit. It's all over and forgotten now, but I feel it's still worth some tears.
Apology for the lack of a flippant cock-size-related apology.
(Fri 15th Apr 2005, 15:19, More)
» Slang Survey
The Judeo-Christian tradition...
Seems to play a big part in my current selection of expletives.
"Sweet baby Moses in a bulrush basket!..." - a good one for when a situation is so surprising that other words fail you.
"Jesus suffering FUCK..." - useful for similar situations which actually require profanity.
"Skin chimney" - um. Ladybits. You know. Down there. [blush]
"Change at Baker Street" - to make the transition from the pink line to the brown one. Or from the skin chimney to the Hershey highway.
"What the yellow rubbery ARSE is going on here?" - splendid, if blatantly stolen from Stephen Fry. But it has a mellifluity all its own.
Then there are the legions of examples from management NewSpeak. My favourite is the euphemism "Sub-optimal", as in "this department is performing sub-optimally". It really means, "this department is abject shite, and everyone working in it is a shit-brained, mong-fucking oxygen thief who should be sacked immediately".
(Wed 4th Feb 2004, 20:11, More)
The Judeo-Christian tradition...
Seems to play a big part in my current selection of expletives.
"Sweet baby Moses in a bulrush basket!..." - a good one for when a situation is so surprising that other words fail you.
"Jesus suffering FUCK..." - useful for similar situations which actually require profanity.
"Skin chimney" - um. Ladybits. You know. Down there. [blush]
"Change at Baker Street" - to make the transition from the pink line to the brown one. Or from the skin chimney to the Hershey highway.
"What the yellow rubbery ARSE is going on here?" - splendid, if blatantly stolen from Stephen Fry. But it has a mellifluity all its own.
Then there are the legions of examples from management NewSpeak. My favourite is the euphemism "Sub-optimal", as in "this department is performing sub-optimally". It really means, "this department is abject shite, and everyone working in it is a shit-brained, mong-fucking oxygen thief who should be sacked immediately".
(Wed 4th Feb 2004, 20:11, More)