Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Yesterday a few things gave me a sleepless night.

These were - a night out in rock world and NME’s article on Morrissey.

NME first. He has every right to sue and I hope he succeeds in getting the magazine to issue a grovelling apology. But apart from my admiration of The Smiths, why did it cause me to wake up in the middle of the night curled up in agony?

It’s because people would rather save face than save the country.

Following a fashionable way of thinking is more important than the actual thinking. In fact following the fashion in every aspect of their life is the raison d’être for most of these 20 somethings. Oh - and they can’t even fucking read it seems.

Now before I tar myself with the same brush that NME tarred Morrissey let me explain the logic behind his argument.

Morrissey’s argument is that England is throwing away her national identity. When he travels to Germany, he recognises it as Germany, when he goes to France he sees the things that identify it as French, when he lives in Italy he lives with mostly Italian people. Now when he comes to England he doesn’t know where the fuck he is. Why does he think this way? Excessive immigration, he said. Whoops.

To the small minded face savers - this was racist apparently, and not something fashionable to ally themselves with. NME had a major tantrum about this in the interview and performed a character assassination while dropping constant reminders that the magazine was performing some kind of never ending self-righteous “Love Music Hate Racism” campaign. But they’re saving face rather than facing up to the facts. What he said has nothing to do with racism and Morrissey isn’t racist. It’s quite simple.

While Morrissey might be a nostalgic man, yearning for some kind of idealistic England and unable to cope very well with change - he has a valid point.

Immigration - where does it all end? Will people continue to emigrate and immigrate until every country is an equal balance of every nationality? Will constant movement and interbreeding cause unique nationalities and cultures to disappear over time? At this rate it will - the world will be come a victim of globalisation. I’ve always thought John Lennon was naive to imagine ‘no countries’. Where is the wonder of exploring new cultures and people when all the country’s are as one? That’s not unification or togetherness - thats standardisation, like what happens to a rudimentary machine part in a factory.

Why visit England if there wasn’t any English culture left? Imagine if England became even more a mixture of seperate cultures not integrated as one? Would you enjoy Italy for Italy if it was no longer ‘Italy’? If Ferrari was replaced with General Motors and if pizza were replaced with McDonalds? What about the people - would you enjoy France as much without the French? (Probably yes)

But where the petty minded face savers get confused is between this very logical argument which should be as clear as day to anybody with modicum of intelligence, and the sensationalist and completely unrelated racist mindset of “keep those bloody immigrants out”. The reasoning behind the racist’s view is warped and wrong. The reasoning behind Morrissey’s argument is rational and thought provoking - and based on a love of different nationalities, cultures and pride in his own identity. These things need to be kept separate to a certain extent. True, a lot of identities owe their existence to a mixture of nationalities, like New York’s distinctly American mix of Italian, Irish, Jewish and English, in fact everywhere is like this to varying degrees and they’re stronger places for it. So don’t stop immigration - give rights to those who deserve it. But you have to draw the line somewhere - if we are to give up our identity then we’ll lose a important part of what makes us human, not to mention our sense of belonging.

Yes the world changes - yes sometimes this is for the better, but sometimes it isn’t. The trick is to recognise what is good and where it is falling down and then say something - and then DO something. Fair enough, face savers - make every country the same, with the same corporations operating the same shops and the same mix of races milling around the same style of streets. Make the world a McWorld and take away every remaining unique treasured way of life - make everyone behave the same and believe in the same thing - and see if there is a world around afterwards to live in, because there won’t be.

All the young dudes - don’t save face, don’t listen to the kind of ‘trendy twenties’ who writes for NME - a influential magazine for a whole new generation of young people in England - listen to Morrissey instead and then we might not sleep walk into a night terror.

What else caused my night terror?

Went round to Lindsay’s last night. Next up was the pub, where in a misty eyed haze of drink I was quite enjoying the company - well, everyone apart from one girl - who seems to have an inbuilt reflex action for eye contact avoidance, conversation continuation and human empathy.

Then - foolishly I decided I wanted to continue the night so I persuaded Carrie to continue with me - and we all went on, to Jilly’s Rock World. This was truly payback time for the day I took my innocents along - friend Martin Jackson freaked out at the drug taking and long hair. I was laughing my head off at his closed mind. But tonight I was Martin. It was bollocks.

Which brings me back to 3am in bed. Suddenly, as the night terror lapsed into disturbed sleep I had an amazing lucid dream where I was David Bowie dueting with Ian Curtis and I was singing songs about past girlfriends. Some of the lyrics (which were based on true memories) were still fresh in my head and so as I woke up from the dream I typed them into my laptop.

Wenny

A Mybridge animated scene
Is the backdrop for sunbeams
Coming through the trees
One by one hitting the leaves

There must be every shade of green
Present in this beautful scene
Wenny walks bare foot on the hill
Until we reach the monument

The only sound present is of skudding clouds
The sky is speeded up like in a montage
I could stay forever, only us for all around
And I exist only with her in my arms

Walking around the block just us two
Watching steamy windows in China town
Lights flash and then go out
Just as memories of Wenny do

Climbing barefoot on Solomon’s hill
Watching the clouds on the horizon pulling in still
Sunbeams flash and then go out
Just as memories of Wenny do

Strolling to meet her outside the club
And she is there reading her book
Purple lights go out and then fade in
Just as memories of Kristina do

Now travelling into some future time
Like a journey which will come to nill
City skyline shimmers brightly
Just as all my memories will

Then as the dream continued the flowery duet with Bowie evaporated and I was up on stage in front of an audience throwing bottles. But I wasn’t Morrissey with his views on immigration. I was in a Joy Division like band and I was wearing a dark coat with a high collar. Over the spitting drums and foreboding sound of the guitars I sang a song called Delinquancy. I’ve padded out this one a bit as I only remember one verse from the dream.

Delinquancy

You are not the one I expected
To take my dreams away
I will never know what it felt like
To have those dreams anyway 

I am ringed in and trapped still
If you don’t find me I’ll find empathy
You’re as unwelcome as I am ill
I am through with your delinquancy

Smiling faces come and go
Strangers pass in the night
People I don’t expect to know
My dreams never feel right

Sleeping in her warm glow
While I wake in the night alone
From dreams I never had
My dreams never feel right

I desolve like paracetamol
Shimmering fragments of pain
The tide brings me ashore
A grain of sand lost with them all

They’re coming. They want a piece of it - the dollar-sign-eyes are-a-watching.

It started with a guy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology - he set out in 2002 to create a $100 laptop for use by African school children. He has succeeded and now the big American companies are suddenly sitting up and taking notice. Fear for Africa…

While it is arguably the actions of the great but flawed Western civilisation that has left Africa in the state that it is today history cannot be allowed to repeat itself in this situation. Education is just too important for the next generation of Africans who can turn their country around.

But it seems money and politics - a gigantic global disease - will find a way to fuck it up.

For a start, the ingenious laptop uses a central processing unit from AMD who are bitter rivals with Intel. Therefore when Intel saw this they designed their own $100 laptop project in it’s entirety, wrapping the whole thing around Intel property. Corporations always act in their own interests - and that means profit and global domination. Where do they draw the line? Nowhere. In fact one executive is now perched on the board at the non-profit $100 laptop company. What for? Fuck off meddler.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology $100 laptop is not for profit. It’s to save a nation. It also uses open source software based on Linux - the idea is to spread knowledge of computer programming into the developing world, so that those who are technically minded can press a key on the laptop to view the source code behind whatever program is running. The idea is to inspire those that are that way inclined to be part of a new generation of computer experts - African computer experts. Only Microsoft don’t like this because they are creating a $100 laptop project based around Windows XP - an unreliable and closed system which will put off a new generation of kids from careers in the computer industry.

The software on the angelic $100 laptop is innovative and fun - everything Windows isn’t. Instead of an office style task bar, you have a doughnut!

It’s a long standing and widespread rumour that Nestle make huge amounts of money by selling their powered milk to African mothers who then have no choice but to mix this shit with infected viral water. Its a similar thing to what goes on in this country with Tesco Value meals accept we’re too stupid to notice and too self absorbed and ignorant to kick up a fuss. The lower class poor people in this country feed their kids cheap food and it is full of rubbish. Just look at the average school meal which prompted Jamie Oliver into campaign overdrive.

Well now the corporations, not content with poisoning people, are trying to brain wash people while simultaneously taking away their education - all in the name of making money off their backs.

It is not just the corporations who are a bunch of psychopaths though - regretfully so are most African politicians. Their short-sightedness is astounding.

Nigeria’s education minister for example:

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: “What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don’t have seats to sit down and learn; when they don’t have uniforms to go to school in, where they don’t have facilities?”

In that case then Mr Ignorant Aja-Nutcase, by the same token we shall rip down the roof on the school because they don’t have any floorboards, ban lunch time in school because of a lack of pens and tear down the climbing frame outside because of a lack of pencil cases?

His argument that they should spend $3 million on the basic foundations of education before they spend it on life-changing laptops (complete with wireless internet access) at just $100 a child is so flawed it is almost laughable - if it wasn’t so cruel. The Nigerian government probably profits from their self inflicted drugs trade at $3 million every month, yet they have let their schools go to waste without basic facilities such as seats or proper roofs.

If innovative ideas like the $100 laptop falls into the hands of people like this, or is effected even indirectly by people like this, or the many greedy western executives such as those at Intel or Microsoft, then kiss goodbye to Africa’s future - and the millions of young people, who’s future will more likely now involve drugs than careers in computing.

I admire my friend Ben, a doctor for going out to Nigeria and plying his trade while learning for his career. It’s a shame the constraints of living in this gear-box of modern corporate machinery can’t release a few more kind hearted people to go and save Africa from the destructive influences of politics and money….before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, I’ll go…but only if they pay me

Further proof that modern life is shit came in the form a Venezuelan ring-tone today.

King Juan Carlos of Spain recently told the Venezuelan president to “shut up” after the appropriately named Hugo Chavez decided to call the King a fascist. It didn’t go down very well.

The ring-tone of King Carlos telling their leader to “shut up” has however gone down very well with the people of Venezuela who have been downloading the ring-tone to their mobiles. So many people have downloaded it so far, its earned $2 million for the corporate monster that really runs our lives.

“It’s a form of protest”, say the Venezuelan students the ring-tone is so popular with. An admirable sentiment. “There are a lot of people here who’d like to tell Hugo to shut up”.

While its good to see people taking notice of the serious stuff that shapes their lives, like politics and corruption, it is slightly worrying that student protests have gone from Tiananmen Square stand offs with tanks to downloading a mobile phone ring-tone. And my worries don’t stop there. In fact the whole of politics has become a Muppet show.

Why does it matter? Well like all important machinery, the systems that run our lives - government and politicians, need to be well oiled and effective.

Well I can tell you now - that’s anything but the truth, not even the whole truth.

You just have to look at the damage Dubya Bush has done to the world to realise the gears upstairs in society’s engine room aren’t spinning quite as smoothly as they should be. Yours truly has been worried by the man for a long time. I took to sleeping in the living room during the 2000 US elections so I could watch the fight long into the night. I soon concluded that if this idiot won there would be a war in the near future. My mum said I was overreacting.

Needless to say, relations between the middle east and America have been a bit strained of late, and the same can now be said of the relationship between Spain and Venezuela. This has an effect on people but all we really care about is the soap operas presented in the news, like an episode of the West Wing. Get real - this isn’t fucking soap opera material - this is men in positions of absolute power taking major liberties. Chavez goes around like a cocky bastard, upsetting heads of state everywhere to the point where he alienates the people of his country from the international community. Businesses go bust, people’s lives are ruined, the quality of life for millions of people goes down the gutter.

The people who elect our leaders seem to be judging them on personality alone, like in some kind of sick x-factor contest. “That Gordon Brown’s a bit boring…bit dour…lets vote for that nice David bloke instead, he says the right things and he has lovely hair’.

I have no doubt Dubya Bush got ‘elected’ in a similar way.

It’s about time we woke up to the fact that if we continue to let politicians run our lives like a soap-opera, we’ll end up living in one and we certainly won’t be the script writers.

When I was growing up, between the ages of 0 and 18 my father worked at Parrs Wood secondary school in Disbury, Greater Manchester as head of art. Before he died from a heart attack when I was 19 he was dedicated to his job and inspired countless kids to be creative and to push themselves to their full potential. By the time he left Parrs Wood it was regarded as a shining beacon of excellence, one of the best urban state schools in the country. It was all due to those talented kids and the staff and management team who released their potential. What’s happening with Parrs Wood now? Let me fill in some of the story of 2000-2007:

The old school was replaced with a huge cinema complex and a new one was built - the most high tech secondary school in England, behind the cinema complex. Something about that didn’t sit easily with me, but its a good cinema so I can’t complain. Regardless, something was not quite right when the new headmaster decided to introduce an initiative allowing the kids to play with their iPods and mobiles in class whenever the urge took them. See this from a teacher’s point of view - it’d be enough to make you quit your job. Twatting kids are annoying at the best of times. When you’ve got a clueless headmaster making rules like this, it beggers belief.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Then came the politics. The school now had not one, but two headmasters. One headmaster, one headmistress. This sinking ship now had two captains steering the wheel. Unfortunately they were reading different maps and at least one of the maps was of the Bermuda triangle. It certainly wasn’t a quadratical triangle otherwise the children would not now have ’poor performance in Maths at Key State 3′. It seems this may be a case of liberals taking over the asylum.

Last week a damning offstead report put the school in ’special measures’ so worried with inspector’s of the strategic ‘direction’ of the school’s management. It gives the school a grading of unsatisfactory - the lowest of four possible marks. “There is too much uncertainty across the school, insufficient progress, too many initiatives, frequent restructuring, lack of clarity and poor performance at key state 3 and across English and maths.”

I have my suspicious of what is going on here. Its those liberal ‘have-a-go’ twits who think they know how to run a school with their oh so wonderful stream of intellectualised ideas, undermining the more senior headmaster to the detriment of the whole school. These are the kind of people who could intellectualise a tea pot, spend a quarter of a million pounds designing a new spout, run it by a focus group at a cost of £50,000 per day and end up with a tea pot that doesn’t pour.

In fact most of these people work for the government. They study statistics, look at how most of Greater Manchester are unemployed chavs and rather than do something about it they spend their days discussing Iraq. If I wanted to elect an Iraqi government task force I’d have emigrated to Bagdad when I was 2 years old. I didn’t - I live in Manchester, its a much nicer place but you’re slowly ruining it. Hello?

With Parrs Wood secondary school, never in a modern urban secondary has the raw material been so good. The (mostly) talented teaching staff, the (mostly) bright kids of inner city Manchester and the (huge) investment in a modern high tech school like no other, based on the solid foundations of that shining beacon of light from the 80’s and 90’s.

Yet somehow the pen-pushers have even managed to cock this up.

I read another article in the paper today which I wish I was naive toward. It says that 11 year old girls are so obsessed with fashion, image and facade that they turn into imitations of 21 year olds as soon as they leave primary school. This is a horrible situation if true - a tragic loss of innocence and a perverse curtailing of childhood. This world has gone crazy….we’re out of control.

Maybe the sad state of affairs at Parrs Wood has nothing to do with senior management intellectualising tea pots in the staff room while dunking our money in their cappuccino and laughing all the way to Cyprus.

Maybe they really are doing their best to cope with the worst generation of fucked up young people ever to inhabit the planet.

And to think all I want to see, is people reaching their potential.

It’s not just the schools. Senior management in all walks of life are having a good laugh at us, it seems, from reading the Manchester Evening News today.

Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat. Fireman Sam, Fireman Sam…can’t remember how that one goes but if it was anything like reality - Fireman fucking Sam would be singing ‘Fireman Sam and his black and white pay cheque’ all the way to the bank. Well I digress. It’s not strictly the sound blokes whom put out fires which are taking one giant piss on the public with their rather large hoses, rather it is the Penfold look-a-like pen pushers who are laughing all the way to their off-shore bank account - and that is a long journey and a lot of laughing. 

If our shite-silo of a postal service isn’t enough, take the nonsense that goes on in the Greater Manchester Fire Brigade Here is an organisation who can sack a brave and intelligent Manchester fireman (I am indeed being a little bit sarcastic) for spinning himself about in a tumble drier and posting the results on You Tube for a laugh (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jnam-gkSrI) yet can willingly squander nearly half a million quid of our money on one member of senior management without a care in the world.

The fire chief quit his job with a quarter of a million quid, retiring at the ripe old age of 55 on a sunny Friday afternoon.

But then on Monday they gave him his job back, along with a £100,000 salary for 11 months while they searched around the fire house lounge for a replacement Penfold. Then on Tuesday he went off on holiday to Cyprus for 2 weeks. Presumably he had a good old chuckle in first class on the way. In fact he probably laughed so hard, he snorted caviar over his wife and kids, chocked on his champaign and shot his truffle 12 aisles down the economy cabin.

Much as I’m fascinated by them all - money, politics and media will be the end of civilised society as we know it.

Things I should have done tonight - finish my Facebook application, go shopping for a new mouse on Amazon, put £2000 of stuff on eBay which has been lying about the flat for the best part of 2 months because of all the other distractions which are for more enticing - like frying my knee caps in butter.

Yes you guessed it, I need another holiday.

The problem is - this invariably involves other people. I’d really like to go away properly, like to the moon - but that also involves other people, namely those who work at NASA and I simply can’t afford my space suit.

Maybe I could go to Tibet and seek the solitude I crave, or travel to the artic circles and chat to penquins over a nice cold glass of rum. There is no place like the artic for getting away from it all, unless your bollocks freeze off.

I don’t fancy losing those so I have a different plan.

Apparently there was a philosopher in the late 19th century who shunned travel, preferring to sit at home and recreate the scenes of travel. He would sleep in hammocks and imagine himself floating in the sea on a dingy. He’d pack his clothes into a trunk at night and pretend he was moving to a new destination. One day he’d be in the garden, the next he’d be merrily sat in the kitchen. For him the actual travel was not important, it was the promise of travel and the fantasy which was the best bit.

This way he avoided the expense and dissapointment of a real holiday and at the end of the week his mind would be well and truely rested.

When cave men went on holiday they didn’t book a cruise to the Bahamas. They stacked up their successfully hunted carcasses in their cave and sat in their hammock for a week. This is what modern man needs - a way to unwind that doesn’t involve £500 and a suitcase full of spandex trunks.

My flat mate may well come into the living room at some point next week and see me hanging from the ceiling - but don’t worry Andy - I’ll be in a hammock, dreaming of sandy beaches and blue sea.

In fact, so successful do I believe this kind of holiday can be, I am already taking steps to apply this kind of mental ‘fudge’ to other activities, like relationships.

I have a stick and a coconut wearing a blonde wig and I’m going to buy a wine rack for the living room. Once this is done I can go the restuarant with my girlfriend without having to talk about babies and at the same time only eating rice for 99p a time.

Once this incredible technique is also applied to shopping, my flat mate may one day come into the living room to see me ‘eating’ small flakes of cardboard I’ve cut off from the empty cornflakes box and coloured yellow.

He may try to stop me - but please don’t.

Naievity is the best state of mind of all.

Do you know all those rich and famous people not knowing what the hell to do with themselves? They hang out in nightclubs like the other pathetic creatures that inhabit this planet. Robbie Williams once made an advance on Lindsay Lohan in a nightclub and she slapped him. It’s simply what goes on in every town in England every weekend, dear old Robbie was just exporting a bit of Stoke on Trent to California.

So there are Britney and Paris drinking themselves silly in nightclubs (Britney seems to be exporting a bit of red-neck Texas to California) - and it goes to show that no matter how much money you have or who you are or where you live, we all do it.

Only the nightclubs are decorating to a varying degree of poshness.

Then you reach a point in your late 20’s like I have that you realise who you are and what you want and you’re in a strong enough position to do something about it.

If I think back to how much money I’ve wasted by going to nightclubs over the years I don’t regret it. Acting is easy - knowing who you are comes with time and time is money. But as of today I don’t feel pressured any more be a part of this scene, any more than I do to pretend to enjoy it - and all my mates feel pretty much the same. They’re bored of the night life - we have all found better things to do with their free time.

I have got a new challenge and it doesn’t involve dancing to shite music or pouring my money down the gutter. I am now treating my life like a business - if something doesn’t give you a good return on how much you spend on it, it has to go. At the moment there are so many other things vying for my attention to fill the gap. The jazz club with Andy or go karting, drinking in my local pub with Carrie, going to the cinema or the museums in Salford Quays, visiting friends in Buxton at the Beltane or doing something creative like working on a Facebook application or making a film. Even Wii or Xbox sessions fill my time more productively than binge drinking in nightclubs. When the plus points to life are so plentiful who needs a night club on a Saturday night?

In my hearts of hearts I never liked night clubs very much right from the start. I enjoyed myself quite often but now I don’t enjoy it quite often. I’d rather go to the pub or a party.

I think it’s a shame for England that so many of us under 30 have this dependence on nightclubs to socialise or to get to meet people. Nobody really enjoys it most of the time - I can think of many other things to do with mates, than to go to a night club.

I get excited before going out but it always ends up the same - standing in a club on your own and you go home and you want to die. It’s time to put the myth to bed - nobody always wakes up the next day and thinks ‘wow, that was worthwhile. That was £50 well spent!’

Hopefully nightclubs as we currently know them are dying out. For one thing, the norther quarter bars in Manchester are booming. The nightclubs I know of are not expanding or offering anything new, and the average age of the people who go seems to be dropping all the time. Did it always used to be so bad for nightclubs? I can’t image it was ever the case at somewhere like the Hacienda, drug hound shit pit though it was.

Maybe I’m stating the obvious but there is a subtext worth mentioning to all this. People go to nightclubs for the enjoyment of going home with someone. That she might be fat doesn’t matter when you’ve had 7 vodkas and red bulls. But I’ve come to realise that this attitude is more counter productive to an enjoyable life than stabbing yourself in the ears with cocktail sticks.

27 and 9 months - night clubs are firmly in the past for me…I wonder why it took me so long to figure this out?

I wrote a blog last night drunk. I seem to remember putting up a picture of George Best and ranting on about how England had gone down the pan, just like the fallen from grace 70’s footballer.

When I met my mate Mark in Munich who married a German girl I asked him if he missed the Zeitgeist of England. He said he didn’t. He said: ”England is a place that used to be great. It isn’t any more”. At this point I realised he was right but nightclubs confirm the fact. England is shit. Go to night clubs to find obese girls at every turn, a 4:1 ratio of drunken men learing at them. Loud music opressing you. Wet floors not just in the toilet. £40 quid please. Yes you heard me….give me £40 quid for this. Don’t agree? Then fuck off and be a social outcast. If I met modern England in a night club I’d tell England to fuck off and I’d smash a bottle over England’s stilly little shite 2000’s head…Call yourself a country? No - we’re just a bunch of cunts. Witness students - what a bunch of fucking retards. This is our future, be very frightened of our future. Not ten genius or even 20 can save us from MMU students. You can spot them a mile off - chatting about meaningless shit when they’re supposed to be working in a shop. Students used to listen to David Bowie and start their own band. They now settle for shopping. It makes me sick to the bone…sick whenever I see one. I used to be a MMU student and I only liked about 6 people, the rest of them I fucked off years ago. I’m proud of that. I’m happier to give the drift wood a nudge towards the fireplace any day. In fact thats what we need - a good cull. Sad to say but start in England and we’ll be well on our way.

Well I think my night clubbing days are well and truely behind me now. Again and again my money is conned out of my pocket towards another over priced beer and a headache the next day. My old age means I can no longer keep up with the ravages of weekly binge drinks.

Goodbye night life…hello life.

the fucking pubs are fucking dull
the fucking clubs are fucking full
of fucking girls and fucking guys
with fucking murder in their eyes
a fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
waiting for a fucking cab
you fucking stay at fucking home
the fucking neighbors fucking moan
keep the fucking racket down
this is fucking chicken town

the fucking pies are fucking old
the fucking chips are fucking cold
the fucking beer is fucking flat
the fucking flats have fucking rats
the fucking clocks are fucking wrong
the fucking days are fucking long
it fucking gets you fucking down
evidently chicken town
the fucking train is fucking late
you fucking wait you fucking wait
you’re fucking lost and fucking found
stuck in fucking chicken town

So now the whole world is on Facebook (even homeless guys on the streets of Chelsea presumably) what is the next step for the good olde t’nternet?

Facebook is getting more advanced. Out of the millions that use Facebook, 7000 have made their own applications for it. These range from fluffy pets, to ‘fun’ walls - basically a vehicle for chavs to upload their favourite pornography and happy slapping videos to (I prefer the fluffy pets). These applications cover a range of ideas and topics, and 300-400 new ones are added every day.

Well, dear reader - yours truly’s ears pricked up when I heard some of these amateur applications are making £1000 a day for their owners. Is a new golden age of the ‘bedroom programmer’ upon us? It certainly is no surprise that these early applications (Facebook opened up to public modification back in May this year) are making money straight away. Some 2 million people use the Fun Wall alone. (There are obviously a lot of chavs in the world).

Facebook was recently valued at $15 billion dollars. Microsoft bought a tiny percentage of the company at something like $300 million. If they (or anyone else for that matter) were to buy the rest at this price - that is where that lofty figure counted in the billions comes in. This is impressive stuff for a website business that only began a few years ago in a university halls of residence as an experiment. They still operate from a small office in California (which may however have burnt down in the forest fires by the time you read this)…its a remarkable success story so far. Taken as a whole Facebook now has a global advertising reach to rival the World Cup football, the Olympic games or Formula One. Understandably big companies are willing to pay big money for that kind of exposure. However, the happy smiley open source philosophy at Facebook will probably (sadly) be it’s downfall. No other large company has taken such a risk as Facebook by opening the share of it’s success so dramatically to you or I, with our self made apps. Could you see Vodafone opening up their factories and letting you design your own mobile - and then selling it in their stores off the back of their advertising revenue?

Well either way, while it lasts I want a bite of the apple. All it needs is a good idea - and you can quit your day job. It really is that simple.

The most popular applications feed off our desire to be popular and to come across as a good fuck. Thats the psychology in a nutshell of the entire human race basically. Suffice to say what makes these websites within a website interesting is that they operate in an entirely social context. The psychology behind these ideas is fundamentally different to that of say, Amazon.co.uk

My idea - well I won’t reveal too much so far, suffice to say it involves starting crafty rumours - with a load of game playing arising from that. Facebook will never be the same again after I’ve finished it. I’ll spread my knack for social ineptness far and wide until you’ll be able to spot the 3 degrees of falling out with Kevin Bacon. Everyone has fallen out with someone who has fallen out with someone who has fallen out with someone who knows (and has fallen out with) Kevin Bacon. And it’ll all be because of my Rumours application.

What of the competition? Well, there is an American one which is rubbish and doesn’t have the design or functionality ideas that I have got stored up in my boney skull. Thankfully that application also doesn’t seem to work at all…throwing up all manner of errors. Its dead in the water and another saving grace is that mine will be spelt the English way while his has the improper and vulgar American spelling. Hooray!

So what of Facebook applications turning bad?

Well - be worried, be very worried. Facebook profiles often shine a light on your personality in a truthful way - after all it is you who has written and built the page. All the stuff on my Facebook page is attributed to me or my mates. And people - being the bastards we all are, tend to judge you off it. I’ve done it automatically many times with people I’ve met in the real world. People judge me from what I write in this virtual blog. People have been fired from work over what appears on their Facebook page. A virtual identity will get more and more sophisticated and eventually you won’t be able to tell who is the real you - Facebook.com/andrewreid or Andrew Reid.

As I stroked my white cat tonight, the ideas flowing through my brain about my application generated new ideas and then I realised just how much control I had over the whole thing. The application runs off a central database which contains rumours and without wanting to give too much away, information pertaining to your friend’s opinion of such rumours. This is the core idea.

I could easily (if I wanted to be social excluded and hated for the rest of eternity) manipulate this central database and spread false rumours randomly around an entire network of friends. More importantly, because of the way my idea works - I could flag the rumours as ‘Confirmed’ by the owner. A sense of humour could let you overlook anything too outlandish, but in the real world rumours do start without any basis in fact - something like this could easily happen to you on Facebook - and a fire could start from the smoke and that’d be hard to live down. It may sound detached from real life, but computers have a habit of driving real life in the end rather than the other way round. Just look around you in the office and ask yourself what you are doing there rather than dancing naked through a field of flowers with a blonde haired blue eyed girl. The fact is computers are cleverer and betterer than you in every way possible. You may not even notice what other people see on your page, because the application is smart enough to know who’s looking.

Likewise, if you have a fluffy pet which suddenly decides to eat your entire on-line identity and use it to open a bank account, don’t be too surprised at the strange twist of fate your life has just taken thanks to the good olde t’nternet.

The future design of the internet is social…whether Facebook can hold it all together in once placed without too many major disasters remains to be seen.

After I went to bed last night I started thinking.

Thats always a bad idea. Every complication takes a brand new twist when I mull it over for a bit. I could go to bed thinking about how to cook a pizza and end up the next day trying to put the box in the oven and the pizza in the bin.

And so it is the case with relationships.

Well - I am starting to think, for all the mental prowess of our big human heads - we don’t actually have as much control over life as we think we do.

You start off as a baby with a small head and you don’t have much choice then. A bit later your parents chuck you in a school. A bit later you suddenly have a load of friends but you didn’t choose them. Then you go off for a fresh start at university but your old mates add you on Facebook. At uni you’re given a choice of new people to make friends with. It’s like being dealt a hand of cards. Some people get to meet the next Richard Branson. Some get to share course work with Hannibal Lecter.

Then you marry one of the cards you were dealt because its got nice spades, get a house and suddenly you’ve made some bastards of your own.

In the meantime everyone’s pecking you for money and attention. Your career is making you live each day as a slave when you’d much rather be doing something creative with your valuable existence on Earth, before God calls you in to tell you what a dreadful mess you’ve made of it all.

Throughout the journey your head takes on it’s boney poll frame, people tease you lucidly with fantastic possibilities. Then you go to bed at night thinking about reasons they didn’t happen the last time and why the next time probably won’t be any different. Usually it is the reason that you missed the signal or mistimed the move, or were simply too stupid to grasp the opportunity in the first place.

Then your phone goes and its someone contradicting the last 30 minutes of your exhausting brain cognitive hell spawn.

So you have to start again, with different variables and eventually you come to the same conclusion as before…and then you fall asleep.

This continues for years on end until you fall asleep without waking up and eventually you end up as ash floating up the chimney of Macclesfield Crematorium, into the pale blue sky…dispursing thinner and thinner until you end up as just a bit of gas contributing to global warming.

You go out in an even more undignified and painful way than when you came in. And during the bit in between you just feel irritated.

Welcome to life on Earth! The end.

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