Reading on the commute

Normally I don't read anything on my morning commute into London and prefer to spend the time reflecting and thinking - daydreaming - writing music in my head - taking arty photographs of people on the train, slowly torturing the guard to death for checking tickets. Why do they repeatedly waste my time? SW trains have introduced barriers so it is impossible to get on a train without a ticket hence making his/her life meaningless - but still they perservere - the Nazi this morning wanted to see my photocard as well - strewth - anyway - I digress.

One rather irritating habit I do have though is reading other people's papers and magazines.

Today I was sat behind a woman who had bought a pile of celebrity magazines. Jeeeez. What have we created here? The celebrity culture movement has never really entered my conscience before and at most has been a mild distraction. I can claim to have never watched one minute of Big Brother or any of the other programmes of this genre. (I'm a celebrity lard arse get me out of here has got talent) I guess I took a passing interest in the death of Jade Goody because it was just so bizarre but I couldn't really relate because I had never watched her past celebrity antics. Ironically, it took a real man (Michael Parkinson) to point out to us the reality of the reality star's short, sad and ignorant life. Ant & Dec, Simon Cowell (God I do hate him - really - that haircut - what a complete wanker - condescending or what?) and Anthea Turner do bring on mild waves of nausea whenever I happen to catch them while accidentally hitting a 3 on the TV remote, but this morning was just a complete revelation to me how totally and utterly banal and shallow the whole existence of the celeb culture is.

I watched as this woman flicked avidly through these magazines. You don't read them as such - you just look at the pictures and read the soundbites - a bit like a comic. The first thing I don't understand is how we can produce a 40-50 page glossy, high quality print packed with full colour pictures delivered for 85p? Does anybody know the carbon footprint of one week's run of all these magazines? Its got to be getting on to something equiavlent of Ryanair's?

Anyway, what got my attention however was the IQ that this particular magazine (Reveal) was levelled at. It appears that the big scoop of the week is that our dearly beloved c-list celebs are - wait for it - 'DITCHING THE DIET'....... I'm not kidding, about twelve pages of full colour pictures were dedicated to a list of women who had gained 10lbs or more in recent weeks because they were DITCHING THE DIET........... On and on it went - picture after picture after picture of c-list wasters who have never actually done anything of any note in their entire miserable lives making headlines by DITCHING THE DIET. Now, anybody with an IQ of 75 or more surely realises that the whole diet industry is sustained by the cyclic nature of dieting. Any weight loss achieved with faddy diets is always regained and usually exceeded. So, let me see, the message given out this time is - hey moronic sub 75 IQ female from Southend - its OK - your icons are DITCHING THE DIET - so its OK for you to continue to be a fat spotty miserable lump of lard (which incidentally the person reading this stuff this morning was) and so the whole cycle is perpetuated.

Needless to say, after a further six pages devoted to Anthea Turner and Peter Andre and his piece of skirt (looks like an Amsterdam hooker to me) - by the way - who the hell is Peter Andre? - did he sing a song or do a dance or something once upon a time? - we then hit the diet pages where I'm sorry, but for me confusion reigned. A further 24 pages are now devoted to faddy diets in direct contradiction to the first 15 pages of the publication. Huh?

Is this a gender thing or a class thing. Do you need to come from Essex or are our women in Britan really this shallow and easily led? Andy Warhol didn't know how right he was with his prediction "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." What he didn't spot was the sickening dumbing down of society that accompanied this phenomenon. Or the 300 Million pound magazine industry it spawned.

Mrs Walnutface

Oh wonderful - the BBC iPlayer has been upgraded

Oh wonders of wonders, the BBC in their infinite wisdom has released a new piece of software which will supersede the much vaulted BBC Download Manager. About time. I have never ever used such a pathetically crap piece of software - full of bugs - virtually unusable. So, in true BBC style, without any announcement or choice, we now have the BBC iPlayer Desktop. No, the concept of upgrading a piece of software didn't seem to be an option to the BBC, we are given a totally new tool and without any warning, the old one is obsolete. (Fortuntely I didn't have anything left to watch in the old thing but I'm betting people who did would have lost their downloads for good when installing the new tool) Now, although the old download manager in general required a Bsc in MicroSoft wizardry to operate, it did download pretty quickly - generally a 30 minute program would be available within 5 minutes. I have just attempted to download last week's 'The Apprentice'. The BBC have decided we are no longer intelligent enough to understand download speeds in Mb per seconds and merely give us an estimated time to complete. After 15 minutes, it was still going to take a further 3 hours to complete. Wonderful, at the expense of a nice pretty front end, the iPlayer is now virtually useless. Lets hope this is just a teething problem with their servers....... So, looks like its going to be streaming tonight.

Mrs Walnut Face