Ok. Christmas time is here. Cliff Richard is singing in the shops. The shops are overflowing : it's only when I see this many people out and about I realise that it isn't that it's busy, it's just that most of the time this world is Not Busy. There's too many people in the world for the human imagination to fully comprehend and that these people clogging up the high streets, they don't just meagically appear at Christmas. They're always here, and always there, and there's just too many people. Normally there's a war, or a pestilence, or a famine, or something that keeps the population at relatively stable levels, but with the advent of Extinction level weapons and medicine, people just aren't dying in the numbers they used to. There's too many people, and somehow nature will restore the balance. Somehow.

Oh well. That's a cheery Christmas thought for you. In the meantime, I am watching "Raising Hell", the allegedly final Iron Maiden concert from 1993, before Bruce jumped ship. Thanks to charity shop DVD's, these historic, but crap Region-1 DVD is currently sitting in my DVD player, and it's crap. I'd forgotten how ridiculous the sight of forty year old men in denim and sleeveless t-shirts (to a man), all with adolescent bum-length permed hair, and all wearing t-shirts for their own band, were. Ths music mix is appalling too : the default 5:1 has a barely audible Bruce Dickinson, unless you have a super-expensive home stereo setup. (I don't). Of course, you can laugh at it or with it : as long as you laugh.



Oh. Did I mention "master illusionist" Simon Drake? A truly blunt magician who looks like some guy you went to school with who manages to pretend to have women growing out of his crotch, cuts the hands off the bands guitarist and generally behaves like starstruck, cretinous pub bore who hijacked a TV show : it's unsubtle, brain-dead, lowest common denominator shlock-horror from Hamer House Of Crud. Oh, and then he uses that guitarists disembodied robot hands to play a guitar solo which was pre-taped. Normally this would languish in VHS hell, but seen as the only stuff Woolworths stocks on VHS anymore are kids movies (hard, it is, to get jam on a video tape), it's the US DVD I'm watching. Oh. Look. the guitarist who had his hands cut off by a corporate magician has reappeared as if nothing had happened. How crap.

And the guy in the charity shop said I'd lost my credibility by buying a Robbie Williams CD to stick on Ebay. Oh my.

Don't even get me started on ID Cards.
- posted by Mark @ 4:05 pm