By Any Other Name

I've ordered pasta from Pizza Hut. I've had pizzas from Shire Chippy. I've drank lemonade made by Coca-Cola. When I eat a Mars bar, I don't expect red rocks or the bringer of war. I have never yet expected intelligent conversation from Smarties.

If I pick up The Sun in the morning, I don't expect to burn myself, nor to find it incredibly massive and one astronomical unit away. I don't expect to have The Daily Mail delivered daily, nor the Express to run faster than the rest. The Guardian does not watch over me, and neither does The Observer see what I'm doing. I have never yet expected The Times to be a world clock.

This was going to be a lot longer and cover more than food and newspapers, but since the notion against which I was attempting to make a point is increasingly rearing its ugly head, I must endeavour to spread the word as quickly as possible.

Yes, "Marvel Avengers Assemble" is an idiotic name for anything but an action figure collection, or one of those overpriced collect-one-piece-each-week magazines, but, really, who gives a fuck? It's just a name.

Between the idea and the reality

I'm at University now. I thought I'd mention that for those you who don't know me, or who haven't been paying attention. Now that everyone's on the same page, I'll begin.

The seriously sharp amongst will have noticed The Hollow Men has crept its way into my title. I love that poem. Eliot is brilliant in general - without him there'd be no Cats, and that would be a travesty.

The Hollow Men is a truly beautiful piece, all about the nature of disappointment. More specifically, it deals with the inevitability of disappointment. When it's not being ironic, the phrase "that's the way I want to go," ordinarily applies to drifting off peacefully in one's sleep. Irvine Welsh thinks otherwise. Choosing life is akin to choosing "rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home." In the end, though, it's likely that the vast majority of us will die in a hospital ward, low on relatives and without any recollection of events from our last twenty years of life. Medicine is likely to advance far enough to eliminate all but a handful of diseases, car safety will improve exponentially and violent crime is forever on its way out, so the odds of living long past the onset of senility is practically an inevitability for anyone who really wants that. So, it follows thus, we will all end, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

How disappointing is that? Realistically, the death of Thorin Oakenshield is what most people would desire. To have that final victory, that ultimate battle, to win it all, then just leave one's corporeality. It's not quite a bang, but it's far from a whimper. The alternative is to perish in battle, but that is disappointing, too. Granted, it's a bang, but dying halfway through the story, with no epilogue, it's almost, but not quite, as unsatisfying as dying years later, the last remnant of your own forgotten tale.

If I can return to my original point after that pseudo-digression, The Hollow Men deals with the dissatisfaction that every man feels when his idea becomes reality. On a side note, wherever I use a gender specific noun, just read it as the other gender or your favourite non-gender specific equivalent if you're the kind of person to take offence. Back to the point, now that nobody is taking offence from stylistic choices, I can't remember ever imagining something perfectly. I'm often quite close, but the accuracy of the my approximation correlates to the relevance of my past experience. I can imagine a future train journey very well if I know the train, the line, the time of day, who the passengers will be, whether or not I've already read the book with which I'd occupy myself and so on. In the case of University, I had absolutely no idea.

In terms of academic content, I had a better idea than most. Wikipedia, the Open University and the odd visit, for one reason or another, to Newcastle University all gave me an insight into the vast difference between school and this place. The disparity between teaching at schools and learning at University was more of a shock to some than to myself, given that circumstances necessitated my self-teaching onwards from at least five years ago. Even before that, I knew above and beyond the scope of the curriculum by virtue of curiosity, an ability to read, and access to far too many encyclopaedias, atlases, poor excuses for newspapers and very few channels that weren't BBC. Enough autocentricism for now, academia is less than half of the University experience. For some, it counts for closer to zero.

The next most obvious consequence of conscripting oneself to the West Midlands for four years is that, if they're fortunate, your family doesn't live there. This came as no surprise. I was every bit as callous about the lack of brothers and sisters and, for that matter, a mother as I expected to be. Anyone who actually knows me will know just how much I love being one of the five, but I can do that from afar. Perhaps I would have found it more difficult if I were the first to flee the nest, but, as it happens, I am the middle child and the second to put down hooks outside the Northeast. Again, my mother makes it easier. I love that woman, though I never tell her, but living with her isn't half difficult. She does do my laundry, though, and thus I regularly make infrequent trips to the launderette here. It's 100 metres away, and in the opposite direction to everything else in the 'verse, given that the only entrance to this glorified Travelodge is at the opposite end of its grassy courtyard to the launderette. As such, I've been of my own accord less than three times, and that condition satisfied by a margin of at least two. I never expected to do much laundry, so as of yet, I'm yet to mention a condition of this bubble onto which the shadow falls between the motion and the act.

If you've not read The Hollow Men, you probably missed three obscure metaphors by now. Go read it, come back. Done that? Good. Yes, I know, it was in Apocalypse Now. So was I Can't Get No Satisfaction, but they don't mention that every time it plays on Radio 2.

The real shadow, the headpiece filled with straw, the discrepancy between essence and the descent, is the people. Unlike trains or launderettes, people are intrinsically different. A train goes choo, and a washing machine whirrs, but a person can make those noises and so many more. "Thanks, Captain Obvious," some of you say. "Nice way of putting it," say others. "Stop with the quotes," go yet another set. That's exactly the point. You load up a washing machine, bit of soap powder, hit the button and it washes your clothes. So I'm told. As far as people are concerned, there is no right way through clothes at them. For washing machines, there's no wrong way. That's what it does. I can generalise about washing machines; they don't take offence. People revel in their differences, and I can't even make comments about all of a single group without someone piping up in protest. I'm not complaining either. Quite frankly, people make life worth living. Not even trains do that, and I bloody love trains.

I've met a whole load of people in my life. A whole load - still with the washing machine lexicon, I see. Sorry about that. Nonetheless, just as I based my expectation of mathematics on what I'd seen earlier, I based my entire expectation of who I'd meet, greet, eat, beat, sheet, neat, hang on, the list stopped working. I based my expectation of what people would be likely upon some biased concatenation of every personality I'd ever encountered. That's a lot of personalities. Ordinarily, taking that much information, adjusting it for inflation, dividing by the square of the speed of light and then taking logs would usually yield at least some approximations worth their weight. In this case, no amount of calculating gave me anything like a glimpse at the nature of the people here.

It's almost as though nobody I ever met had anything besides anatomy and culture in common with everybody I've met since. It's terrifying and enlightening, seeing so many new combinations of little idiosyncrasies, culminating in a plethora of personalities, none of which are anything like any conception of my mind. From an existentialist point of view, there's no greater argument against being simply a brain in a jar. My subconscious is incredible: my conscious is an abacus next to its DeepThought, but it would take a machine infinitely more complex to simulate just a handful of us luminous beings. Not this crude matter at all.

Nonetheless, the horror of surprise created by twenty-two-thousand unfamiliar characters pales into insignificance under the right light. That light, to me, is the future. It counts for nothing, making every last one of these beautiful amalgamations appear in an instant, since time - the destroyer of minds, men and mountains - will vanish them all in due course. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Seeing Red

The title wrote itself.

After being beaten by RGS and a further three schools in the UKMT Team Challenge – though, granted, we beat local rivals Whitley Bay High by 9 points, which softens the blow – I went to the cinema with Niall! Bobby took us in his lovely little Corsa, although this meant having to endure Saskia too.

The film we saw was entitled RED, hence this post's title. Any film starring Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren, must be good. Add to that its origin in DC Comics, and suddenly it is brilliant.

Right, enough waffle, goodnight!

Au Revoir Les Enfants... Salut l'argent!

Aujourd'hui, j'ai trouvé un lettre et un paquet par le courrier. Le premier, c'est du Magistrates' Court, et il détaille le compensation que je suis dû par mon attaquer de février ; le dernière est un DVD que j'achète de Play.com ce Dimanche. C'est un film chouette, s'appelle Au Revoir Les Enfants, écrit et réalisé par Louis Malle. J'ai le regardé déjà une fois, mais j'aurais voulu le regarder une plus fois, préférablement sans sou-titres anglais, mais, malheureusement, on ne peut pas les éteindre.

En autres actualités, j'ai redécouverte les Polos! Elles ont des belles menthes.

Ben, ouais, c'est tout! Bonne nuit, mes amis.

Despicable!

So, tonight I ventured to the land of feature-length commercial entertainment once more to witness the enjoyable animated 3Dness which is Despicable Me. Great voice work from Steve Carell – who I'm not often a fan of, however, he is rising in my estimations – and Russell Brand as a Emmet Brown-esque mad scientist.

Having the day off school let me catch up on some work, or, at least, finish one piece of work. Annoyingly, I still have some left to do, but half-term should give me enough time to finish all school-work as well as my essay for Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. I have a brilliant idea!

That'll be all for today. Things on my mind tonight include almost exclusively applications to my big four Universities. I mean, if I get these right, I could be offered a place at one of the greatest academic institutions in the world. That's the previously mentioned three and MIT. Exciting stuff!

Good night froods! I'm watching Lie to Me, Sky1. Tim Roth is brilliant.

The Social Network

I saw The Social Network at the cinema today. It was a fantastic film, and probably still is. Go and see it sometime. Don't pirate it. Pirate music, that's fine. Don't pirate films. The crux of the matter is that, for music artists, the majority of their income – if they're any kind of decent – comes primarily from concerts. The film industry has no such live performances for generating revenue, hence, in not paying to watch a film, one jeopardizes the entire film industry. Don't pirate films.

Back to my original point, which was, oh yeah, The Social Network is brilliant. It has inspired me to increase my geek abilities. For instance, I'd rarely used the wget command on my fantastic, invincible, Ubuntu-running laptop. Currently, I'm testing it out, trying to download scores of photos from MIT's website. I did try wget on Facebook, but, their brilliant tech guys have blocked non-authorized bots, as have wikipedia. On my first attempt at wget, I downloaded around 400MB of data from Newcastle University's website. I'd guess it'd still be going, approaching one gigabyte, had I not killed it.

Anyway, enough chat. I have Unix commands to learn. Laters interpeeps!

Wacky times with Michael

An eventful night to say the least! Michael dragged me out of the house at 7 o'clock, we got rejected from Niall's house, took a detour to McDonald's, where Karl was having his break, and eventually got back to Niall's house about an hour after that, and watched a film: Yes Man, with Jim Carrey. I mean, we watched Yes Man, which stars Jim Carrey. Jim wasn't actually with us.

After that, the night calmed down, until, of course, Michael did his usual taxiing. Yeah...

Anyway, I have an exam in 8 hours. Sleepytimes are required. Night!

"There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up!"

Great Scott! Tonight, I went to the cinema! There was some kind of audiovisual display at the Silverlink! I think I remember! It was Back to the Future!

I love Back to the Future. It is undoubtedly the best film I've seen at the cinema since Inception; although, I hold Back to the Future with more affection. Doc Brown's eccentricity clinches it.

In other news, nothing interesting happened, however, I am closing in on a finished personal statement, just as the Cambridge deadline closes in on me. What fun!

Anyway, nobody cares about that tonight, certainly not me, as I have rekindled my love for Marty McFly and Doc Brown! Gee, that's heavy.

Night interpeeps!

Return of the Bacon

No, don't worry. It's not the end of a Kevin Bacon trilogy. So many trilogies end with "Return of the..." or at least "The ~ Revolutions." Are there even any Kevin Bacon trilogies? Someone get back to me on that.

The true nature of Bacon's return – yeah man, every frood knows Bacon gets capitalized – was a sandwich. The tastiest sandwich I've had in over a week, for today, on this the sunniest of Sundays, on the thirdiest third day of the most Octoberesque October that ever was in 2010, I returned from rowing at one very quarty quarter to twelve to find in the fridge the most delectable of delicacies: BACON. Oh yes, that's right, happy October ladies and gents! Didst thou enjoy September? I did. I'd rank this September among my top 20 Septembers!

After that, the day went pretty well. All days go well after bacon. Illness? Not today! To porkiness and beyond!

And another, final, thing: thou mayst have noticed that I am avoiding the ridiculous pronoun "you" in all instances and its derivatives. That, my dear fellows, is simple: "you" is silly. Observe the table of personal pronouns:

Nominative	Accusative	Possessive
I	me	my
you	you	your
thou	thee	thy
he	him	his
she	her	her
we	us	our
they	them	their

Doth thou see? Canst thou spot the flaw? "you" is identical to "you." Fortunately "thou" is not identical to "thee." Of course, "her" and "her" are annoying too, but I don't know any four-hundred-year-old alternative which fixes that, except for supposing that females own nothing, however, that would be sexism, and I would not allow it!

Yours self-righteously,
Robin James
Chief of Grammar

Saturday with Niall!

... and Jelly Babies!

Yep, we went to Sainsbury's for a decent bit of binge, then headed back to his place for a bit f Pelham 123. Awesome film. We also listened to a bit of music, some soundtrack and the odd novelty tune on ye olde Grooveshark.

I'm gonna head off now, but not before I tell you all about the relief I feel for having thrown that awful broken bed-frame out of my room. I am extremely relieved! Hooray for Allen keys!

Night froods! x

Saturday

I finally rolled downstairs at about noon, and made a bath from an old sandpit box for the chickens, which, much to my dismay, they didn't appreciate at all. Oh yeah, I hadn't mentioned, I keep chickens.

My breakfast was much less disappointing: bacon, fried egg, toast, tomato ketchup, monster munch, a packet of rusks, a cup of tea - milk & four sugars - and a slice Meat Loaf - Bat out of Hell. Have a listen to my current favourite playlist on Grooveshark.

After that, the next globally interesting thing to happen: I watched Lethal Weapon 2 for - amazingly - the first time ever. "It's just been revoked." True awesomeness. Exeunt.

A film review and impossibilities.

Well, I'm reverting back to English today.

I've just finished deciding that the last question in my little sister's maths homework is impossible. Finding an nth term rule for the following:

2 9 17 27 39

Obviously, it was supposed to be:

3 9 17 27 39

making it a simple n²+3n-1. Anyway, after half an hour of obsessively finding differences of differences of differences of differences I finally came to the conclusion that if 0 occurs anywhere but at the edges of a differences of differences(...) triangle, an nth term using powers of n is impossible.

Now, the promised film review. I saw Grown Ups at the cinema tonight; true to form, Adam Sandler, Kevin James et al. guaranteed a laugh per minute. It was real easy-viewing stuff, recommended for anyone who just fancies a good laugh.

All of this, however, does not make up for the disappointing lack of post today. A whiteboard on Wednesday, a letter from Parliament on Thursday, yet nothing today.