Wills And Kate - The Freakiest Show On Earth

A nation rejoices so these two may share bodily fluids without sin

Oh what dark times we, the humble inhabitants of the once great and sprawling British Empire, find ourselves living in. Unemployment is at record levels, gang culture and knife crimes are rising faster than the sea levels and 'The Only Way Is Essex' (England's vile and vacuous answer to America's vapid scripted reality show 'The Hills') has been commissioned for yet another season. On top of all that, our economy flounders as the national debt has reached an estimated 1.1 trillion pounds and counting, not including the amount of money the government doesn't actually own has spent bailing out other countries. Dark times indeed my friends; but wait, what light so sweet and promising shineth over yonder, could it be we are finally creeping towards the end of this collapsed tunnel under which our society has been trapped for over a decade now? Let us edge forwards and find out, for we have nothing else left to lose, save perhaps our dignity.

Surely it must be the light of millions of this nation's inhabitants preparing to celebrate the upcoming union of one of our Country's most treasured couples, HRH Prince William and his blushing bride to be, Kate Middleton. Unless you've been on a mission to gather space debris left floating in our orbit from hundreds of pointless rocket launches as part of your community service for that misdemeanor with the shopping trolley and the World's largest sea urchin, or you simply don't care enough about anyone else but yourself to pay attention to the news or gossip pundits, you will of course be aware of the impending royal nuptials. According to all of the most credible sources, and by those I mean the Windsor family's very own twitter feed and the recent headlines from the Daily Mail, it will be a chance for not only the citizens of Great Britain, but for the entire population of planet Earth to come together and celebrate in the joyous matrimony of our second in line to the throne and some posh bird he met whilst at university. As a mere observer and commentator of the preparations leading up to the big day this article will do it's best to abstain from the nation dividing debate of whether or not the idea of sustaining an outdated and antiquated monarchy in a country which has been governed under a democratic parliament for several centuries now is a worthy use of our taxes. That's called a loaded sentence kids, look it up.

This...On every street in Britain. Oh the humanity.

Now, it must be said that no one else in the world knows how to throw a party like us Brits. That is, however, no one in their right mind would want to be able to throw the kind of parties we are famous for. Compared to the Mardi Gras' of New Orleans, the 'Dia de los Muertos' of Mexican fame or even the bi-annual carpet toss and millipede race held on the winter and summer solstices in St Lucia, British street parties appear about as fun as listening to your forgetful great aunt try and tell you a story about a meal she once had in Denmark whilst a scratchd CD of Celine Dion's  'My Heart Will go on' gets caught in an endless loop in the background. For all our supposed eccentricities we as a nation really suck at kicking back and having a proper shindig.

For those of you unfamiliar with what a British street party entails; imagine a family picnic on one of those benches you find in woods and lakes, except you're having this picnic in the middle of your own road, and every other family in your street has pulled up a bench and joined it onto yours. Nearly everyone is dressed in the colours of the Union Jack, some proudly donning the flag on plastic hats, others going to the extreme length of  wearing suits printed in the garish red white and blue. The table is full of cucumbers; cucumber sandwiches, cucumbers in the 'Pimms' and lemonade, cucumber pies, cucumber souffle and 'cucumber surprise', which is a cucumber cut into the shape of a smaller cucumber. Gaze upwards and you will see strung between the houses miles and miles of...shudder...bunting, those pointless triangles on string which have become iconic as a symbol of British people being forced to have a good time. The conversation is torturous and sedentary at best; when not explaining to an unidentified screaming child that it is covering your leg in mashed up cake and sick you are forced into discussing trivial matters with neighbours whose existence you've spent the past ten years ignoring. In short, slightly worse than Dante's description of the third circle of hell minus the three headed dog.

It gives us a chance to feel like Royalty, who live
a life of 'days off'.

The thing is, the knowledge of how horrific these street parties will be isn't going to stop the majority of Middle England trying to rouse people's spirits in a contrived effort to pretend to the World that we are having fun and enjoying ourselves. This is partly due to our cultural addiction to failure and disappointment, but more than that it is a ploy to get as many foreigners here as possible in order to sell them as much cheap tat disguised as valuable souvenirs as possible. The dark truth is that we use the Royal family as a means to an end and nothing more, they are to us what sideshow freaks were to travelling circuses at the turn of the last century. They are an invaluable source of income to us, so no matter how ashamed and disgusted we are by their appearances and actions we hang on to them, pretending to the World that we love them, whilst secretly berating and abusing them, locking them up in their own castles and chasing them down with our paparazzi minions whenever they stray too far or abdicate.

Continuing the 19th century circus analogy we have unfortunately come to rely on our freak show a little too much, especially since the rest of our troupe are either critically injured or off sick with the flu. The tightrope walker that was our coal and tin mining industry fell and broke its legs decades ago. The acrobats of our fishing industry have been floundering for a while now, and their future is uncertain. Even Piers Morgan, the squishy faced clown, has defected and no longer makes a complete tit out of himself for our enjoyment and derision. We are left clinging desperately onto our precious freaks, and if one of them decides he's going to get married, well then we are surely going to milk it for all its worth, which is probably not very much considering the combined personality of the happy couple is barely enough to halfway fill an ant's skull.

So was that light really as full of hope and promise as it first appeared. Not quite I'm afraid, it was probably a mere trick of the light caused by HRH Prince William being papped whilst poncing around with his wife to be and the flash reflecting off his massively over-sized forehead. As for your dignity, you left that behind as soon as you started reading. Sorry to have disappointed you, but it's not my fault, it's in my heritage.

How Rebecca Black Brings Make Capitalists Out Of Everyone

Adobe After Effects in the hands of a small child

You've all seen the latest contrived musical pop chart mess from Rebecca Black, I know you have because it's everywhere I look these days. Not just on the internet; I overhear snippets of derogatory conversation and notice people 'ironically' humming the tune on the streets, down the sleaziest of pubs and even in the Dreidel spinning back alleys of my local city's Jewish District. Daytime television pundits scoff from their soft red-cushioned sofas and Radio Disc Jockeys scrape the barrels of their humor buckets to eke out as much derision as can possibly be forced from this young teenager like vultures hopping around a decomposing zebra, desperately tugging at the torn sinews and partially rotting flesh of the remaining shreds of dignity held by this girl, barely entering the world of adulthood. 

Rebecca is just one of a small but growing number of manufactured pop princesses who are currently being churned out of Ark Music Factory's production line, a company who are as much the legitimate 'indie' record label they claim to be as McDonalds is a Boutique fine-dining restaurant. This is nothing new; enterprising businessmen have seen the potential in exploiting over-excitable and easy to please teenagers since The Beatles made their first debut. Make no mistake, behind every single crappy song in the charts that barely passes as a listenable tune; let alone showing any passion or skill from the supposed singer/songwriter, there is a very greedy, very rich, middle-aged man rubbing his gnarled hands in glee at the prospect of the new solid gold toilet seat he is going to put in every single one of his yachts as a result. 

You pay this man money so he can spend time with your kids.

The difference with Ark Music Factory is that they make no pretense of hiding this ugly truth. In fact Patrice Wilson; founder and part collaborator on each vomited out 'song', welcomes the transparency of his business by inviting affluent parents of talentless children to turn them from spoilt nobodies into spoilt pop stars for the mere price of roughly $4000. The parents receive ownership of the master recording and Ark help themselves to the publishing rights, which means the majority of money made by your child's warbling belongs to them, if they are lucky enough to be snapped up by the hideous beast that is the frivolously spendthrift and furiously mercurial teenage market.

Go...Bring me home a fortune, child.

Unfortunately for Rebecca, or fortunately; depending on whether you value monetary gain over self-respect, her video went viral a couple of weeks ago. Video's very rarely go viral organically, it is a process one must carefully construct leading me to believe that Ark's owner, Patrice, has a great sense of humor. See, in order to get one's video to garner more than a million views on Youtube, the owner of the video usually places links to it on every forum imaginable, in the hopes that enough people will click on it. Once they have they done that, and depending on whether they think it has merit, the viewer will then post the same link on their Facebook page in an attempt to leech vicariously off the video's success, either because it's a clever and well-formed piece of work, or it's a pile of crap so bad that it can be considered funny to watch. Being a businessman, Patrice obviously recognized that what he had on his hands fell into the latter category, and like a cruel parent shaving its child's hair into a mullet and making it wear a 'kick me' t-shirt before sending it to school to be ridiculed by its peers, he put Rebecca's travesty of a song onto the internet and promoted the hell out of it, waiting for the inevitable tsunami of negative publicity and backlash, carrying with it a sweet wave of money enough for him to surf all the way to the bank.

Now, I don't have a problem with Rebecca, or even Patrice.  As I've stated, this shit's been going on longer than most people reading this article have been alive. It's a terrible thing that there are so many artists out there making better music who don't get the wide recognition, but they're happy making their music and for it to stay underground where the people who really appreciate it will dig deep enough to find it. That's cool. What brings my piss to a boil is the sneaky scoffers hanging on at the sidelines, the aforementioned vultures who realise that enough people hate this girl enough that they exploit this mass bullying for their own monetary gain. Let me give you an example, take a look at this video here.

This is the kind of thing that lots of people love, partly because it makes fun of Rebecca; and everyone is on that bandwagon, but also because it has memorable catchphrases that can be recited to each other across office spaces or prison cafeterias. In particular you may have noticed the 'Everybody's Russian' and 'My hand is a dolphin' quote. The thing is, whilst they do raise a slight giggle at the time of watching, they are not the kind of comedic phrase which I will look back on years later with the same affection. I definitely do not want to spend $15.99 to own a t-shirt with either of those phrases printed on, as Brock Baker (creator of above  mocking video) is desperately shelling them out for, trying to not only make a name for himself as a 'comedic genius', but also earn a quick buck at the same time.

The most infuriating thing about what Brock Baker is doing is the speed at which his greedy little mind must have set to work. Rebecca's video went up on the internet at the beginning of February, but it wasn't until later that month until it actually went viral and people started paying attention to it. Brock's video went up about three weeks ago now, and from the moment it went up he left an annotation saying that soon 'My Hand Is A Dolphin' t-shirts would be for sale. That means in the space of about a week he had the idea of re-dubbing the video, creating it, showing it to friends (who would have said how much they loved the 'dolphin' bit) and began plotting ways of making money off it. That's like Rupert Murdoch accidentally filming an old woman falling over, re-editing it with him giving a catchphrase filled commentary, then promoting the shit out of it on Fox News, earning loads of money off the advertising revenue. No really, it is just like that.

Oh over-exploitable

Anyway, I've found a way we can all make money off this, and hopefully Brock will never be any the wiser. See that image on the right there? That's my little design that is. It's like Brock's one, only more authentic, it has that look of being actually created in a sweatshop by an impoverished child. What I'm doing is giving that away for the low low price of absolutely free. All you have to do is copy it, download it, or even just trace it. Then take that image down to one of those shops which put any image on a t-shirt for about $3. Now here comes the clever bit, get the t-shirt printer to make you about a hundred of them. You then pop them on E-Bay or even make your own site dedicated to the sale of the t-shirt, just like Brock has. Sell them for $14.99 (that's called tactical undercutting, and many legitimate business people do it, so don't worry about offending Brock). Then just wait for the orders to start rolling in.

Pretty soon, we'll all be making money just selling this one t-shirt, and imagine how wonderfully rich we will all be! The dream won't last though my friends, we can only spend our new found money on fancy new dolphin t-shirts to impress our friends and show off to our colleagues for so long. In a not too distant future we will have to dine on the rich cottony fiber whilst all other economies collapse around us. We will need to build some kind of huge ship, an Ark if you will, just to travel the seas searching for an Island untouched by the lascivious tentacle of greed spawned from Brock's mockery. Hopefully an island just like in Robinson Crusoe, with a helpful yet technologically backwards local named Friday, who can show us just how much fun can be had on weekends and which rocks are best for us to sit on, the ones in the front of the island, or the ones at the back.

A bleak future I'm sure, but sometimes one has to face the inevitable. Now go, make those t-shirts and spread the good word of flash in the pan mockery of flash in the pan starlets. It's your duty.