Cunt Of The Month
Omarion: "Come to bed..."For those of you who are lacking in showbiz knowledge, above is a picture of B2K's 'Omarion'; possibly the single biggest cunt in the entire music industry. 'Omarion', as he prefers to be called, is the sleaziest, most arrogant cunt I have ever laid eyes on- think of him as the bastard offspring of Sleazy Mo and Snail, in some bizarre parallel universe where this could have happened. If you've ever seen a B2K interview you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, as Omarion jumps in to snatch every question while his bandmates sit in silence, aghast at his unbelievable sense of self-importance. Omarion loves himself, he reminds me of the ship's cat in Red Dwarf with his vain and pretentious ego. But where the ship's cat had character Omarion is an empty shell, desperately caught-up in his strive for the perfect image. What really pushed me to hand out this inaugural award to Omarion was the article I'd just read on msn. Despite releasing a new record this friday Omarion announced that he was leaving the group to persue a solo career. I mean, WTF, can't you wait until your own band have released the record before you leave? Can you seriously not wait a month, or are you so desperate to steal the limelight all for yourself that you simply have to leave before the single is even out? Selfish, conceited, inflated sense of self-importance are all words that have been attributed to Omarion, the pinaccle of cunthood. Every music video ("I need a girlfriend" in particular) shows Omarion at his cuntish best, the self-styled sex-symbol who reckons he's simply irresistible to women. Look at his lame puppy-dog (read: LAZY) eyes which he uses at every available moment, and his husky, 'come-to-bed-and-let's-get-it-on' Barry White wannabe voice. No, Omarion- you're superficial. You're entirely transparent and you're NOT an international woman magnet. Your bandmates don't need you, you don't help matters and you're only out to line your own pockets. And your final act of selfishness by deserting the band that made you before releasing a single and potentially an album only underpins what a world-class cunt you are. Omarion then- congratulations, you are hereby awarded Starsite's Cunt Of The Month Award for February 2004. You earned it, pal.
Label
Label, Loughborough University's very own weekly magazine, is class. The comic strip Stanley The Radioactive Penguin is so funny I almost dropped my load the first time I read it, and it's easily the English Wee Issue. I'll try and scan up a Stanley episode in the next few days, but I thought I'd leave you with some quotes from this week's Label:
"Whilst Bizkit were once bearable at least on a comedy level, they are now certified shitehawks of the highest order."
"Dear Label, I fed Ben and Jerry's Phish food to my fish and it died. Can I sue?"
"Jade: Gobshite" [Caption on a photo of Jade Goodie]
"We couldn't give a flying fuck about turgid z-list celebrities like Jade Goodie or Edith Bowman"
At least we had the decency to censor the swear words! Oh wait, we didn't. Nevermind then.
The Loughborough Arrogance
Loughborough has a reputation that precedes it, I knew this even before I'd laid foot in the area. It's one that charges nationwide and insights pent-up ill feelings and seems to bond competitors into a united hatred for the sporting behemoth. Where there may be minor prejudices existing inter-club, there is an almost universal dislike for what competing Universities call "the Loughborough arrogance", a self-explanatory term derided from years of sporting dominance.
The facts are not disputed- Loughborough has won the past 20 editions of the BUSA championships outright and pans the opposition almost across the board. In fact, just the other day I heard a story about the Cambridge ladies volleyball team. They'd beaten every team in the country and were pronounced unbeatable, having beaten the top teams convincingly and showing outstanding form. As you'd expect, a showdown to bring the Loughborough ladies down was duly arranged. Loughborough won 21-1, whitewashing the Cambridge team and putting the matter beyond question. I laughed, and turned to my friend and said "they never give up do they?" as he guffawed violently into his tea, lifting his glasses to wipe the trickling tears from his eyes with his napkin.
The desire to beat Loughborough has become obsession for particular Universities (Birmingham please stand up) but when they, some might say predictably, lose they have something to fall back on- the Loughborough arrogance. It's a time honoured self defence mechanism to stop our sporting teams basking in reflected glory, and make the opposition feel the bigger men. Silently, and rather dignantly, the Loughborough team leave the celebrations until the return to campus. Indeed Wednesday night at the Union is dedicated to drinking to Loughborough's successes, and not a damned ounce of shame is felt. The gathered masses celebrate and bask until the early morning, enjoying the unique feeling that only champions will ever know.
Yet the stigma persists in hardened coaches and rubs off onto the youth, continuing the everlasting despising of Loughborough. There is very much an inner circle in Loughborough that is the envy of the other Universities. Things are very secretive here, and if you're not in Loughborough you're decidedly out.
However, until the other week I didn't feel the Loughborough arrogance had replaced my already firmly established homegrown arrogance. Unknown to me though, the Loughborough secret weapon was going to be unleashed on me- the power of association.
To make people feel part of something, which breeds loyalty, they are given a uniform or costume. This makes you inescapably part of a group, and when you see others in similar attire it brings an affinity between you. Social orientations relax as prejudices and discrimination take a back seat to group membership and bonding. At Loughborough there is nothing more powerful than the tracksuit.
Standing in queue to buy mine I felt distinctly isolated. Wearing my Scottish tracksuit not many people presented themselves as being of my clique, someone I could relate to. I stood silently and waited patiently for the queue to diminish. After some length of time, I was at the fore of the queue.
"Medium everything please" I said, as the cooperative clerk reached behind himself to pick up my new tracksuit. My cash departed and I headed to the changing room.
Then, a strange thing happened. I can't describe it; it was like a curious 'power' had overcome me as the zip reached towards my neck. Within moments of donning the hallowed tracksuit I'd broken into an arrogant self-assured swagger out of the changing room, feeling like a million dollars with a fresh outlook on life. The silken Reebok garment matched the contours of my flexing muscles almost perfectly, radiating with a lustrous sheen.
When I had re-emerged I was no longer the black, outcast sheep of old; I was a Loughborough athlete.
I was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ricky Soos, Lisa Dobriskey, Tom Humphreys and all the other elevated superstars that an unassuming would-be athlete like myself can only see on printed paper. What changed was the way they treated me. No longer were they untouchable super-sportsmen, but they were of the same brethren as I! I had bragging rights enclosed within the divine tracksuit that would say without the need for words "I am in the same team as Chris Parr."
The tracksuit invokes fear. It invokes respect and caution, for between each fibre is the vestment of history. Great sportsmen/women like Paula Radcliffe and Seb Coe have proudly adorned the very same tracksuit and catapulted to mega-stardom. Even though I am but a distant branch of the Loughborough tree of excellence I still wear the tracksuit and call myself a Loughborough runner.
Today I walk with my head high. I walk with a swagger, and I run with certainty and fear no one. There is a quote in the student Union which reads:
"They used to call it the 'Loughborough arrogance'- we preferred to call it certainty and belief in our abilities."
That was written almost twenty years ago.
Backblog
You know when people say "I've been too busy to blog" or "NOT NOW ALAN CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?" and you accept it because there's no reason not to, yet deep down you know it's not true? You think they're not in the game anymore and the passion for writing has left; in blogging circles this is referred to as "the kerb." Kayleigh kicked the kerb long ago, as did many a good blog before hers. The commonwealth record for hitting the kerb fastest is held by both Yann and Tete, although Yann just clinches the honorary title with his two one-post marvels to Tete's one.
Yet I would like to make one point clear- with getting pissed on a nightly basis during christmas and the exams that followed I have, actually, been too busy to blog. But these troublesome times are behind me and I see a rainbow form on the blogger homepage from the storm, made entirely from hexadecimal colours and binary code. It's beautiful. And I know at the end of this rainbow there's a pot of gold just waiting for me, or perhaps it's just fools gold gleaming back at me. Or, perhaps, it's nothing but an image imprinted on the screen that can neither be physically touched or quantified with a real-world value. Or maybe it's just a figment of my imagination, mocking me with its Heaney-like hidden meanings and parallels. Whatever it is I can see it, and I know it has significance, even if you and the rest of the perfectly-sane community insist it's nothing but a figment of my imagination.
I'm rambling again.
Anyway, now that the dust has re-settled onto my psychology for dummies library books and I am once again a time-spoiled student, it's time to recap with what's been going on in my life since I last blogged.
In the past three weeks, in between exams, I have travelled from:
* Aberdeen to Falkirk, and then from Falkirk to Aberdeen
* Aberdeen to Loughborough
* Loughborough to Cardiff, and then back to Loughborough
* Loughborough to Ayr, and then back to Loughborough
And then I'll be travelling from:
* Loughborough to Dundee, and then back to Loughborough
* Loughborough to Aberdeen
* Aberdeen to Perth, and then to Loughborough
* Loughborough to Nottingham and back
So with exams you can appreciate that I have been busy! And I'm tired too, all that travelling and racing doesn't come without stress on the body. Then I'm training up to two times each day, socialising, making all my own meals, shopping... yeah, the computer hasn't been a high priority.
But what I really want is to make the semi-important announcement that I'm back with Leanne! So much has happened between us lately and I'd like to quickly justify how this has happened. [Avoid this coming paragraph if you don't really care]
After new year I saw Leanne in the pub with Beefy, Graster, Cheesy, Shaw, Morna and a few others. I didn't really speak to her, I hadn't spoken to her for ages because she was with that cunt noballs and I didn't want anything to do with it. At the end of the night she spoke to me and said she was sorry for everything that had happened before leaving with Claire and Shaw. She texted me for a few days after that because she wasn't happy with the way we weren't speaking and wanted to be friends again. We went to the cinema to see LOTR and got talking again and things were getting better and I really felt like we could try being friends again. She came to my house a couple of days later and told me that noballs had dumped her because she 'wasn't the right girl for him' (you'll see why in a minute). That saturday I had a race in Falkirk and came home and leanne texted me to say she was with Cheesy, Drew, Claire, Shaw and Tommy in Aberdeen. I came in and got talking to her again in Liquid and things were more relaxed and much better. I was more relaxed because I knew that cunt noballs wasn't with her and she was more relaxed too for the same reason. I gave her a lift home and things were starting to get back to normal. So I went back to Loughborough, and to cut a long story short Leanne came down to spend a few days with me here. I managed to get the room to myself because Cletus offered to stay in Mark's room and we had a fantastic week. We watched a few films off DC, some new Simpsons episodes, we went shopping and did all the things we used to do. The week was so amazing and I couldn't be happier, we're together again and things are definitely back to normal. She regrets ever going out with noballs and admitted he was just a rebound guy and she never stopped loving me. For anyone who still disagrees and thinks noballs isn't the cunt-incarnate, two days after dumping leanne he was caught in Aberdeen holding fiona geddess' hand and admitted they were going out. And fiona... well, what is there to say. I'm bound to have a natural bias after she almost got my sister expelled for sitting there while she poured an entire bag of flour onto her and her revision materials  *LOL*
Leanne left today as a matter of fact, trust blogger to provide me with an impromptu pad to write my thoughts and feelings down. I physically felt a lump in my throat as the train left, which I now think is the male equivalent of bawling your eyes out and crying out to the heavens. I may seem like an emotionless hack to you, you know like Feesh, but I'm sure that lump says more than any hot tears could. I wish I could cry on cue actually, you could get away with anything! "Please Guv'nor [sniff] it wasn't my idea to steal the Knight's sign! It was that evil Feesh... if only you knew what lay behind that dour glare [sobs]." No, I think it would take something pretty dire and irreversible for me to shed a tear. Like the time when my cactus died.
Moving on, it seems my timely death-threats have filtered through to Molly, which is lucky for her because I don't take kindly to people who pester me for a link to their website and don't write on it! What is this, the Ellon Advertiser? Anyway I've got to get on with that Howff post before Beefy pops a cap in my ass, Starsite is back baby, spread the word...
Legs 
Anatomy and SA2
*In your best Eric Cartman voice*
You guys! It's so sweet you guys!
You know what, I'll stop the impersonations right there. Seeing as I have an exam on friday about monkeys and shit (yes, I'm studying psychology...) I'd better do some revision. I did an anatomy exam yesterday and it was the single most hardest exam I've ever sat. Period. Even the human biologists were complaining about how hard it was. Of course I was at a distinct disadvantage, having never done biology beyond 2nd year let alone achieved an A at A level like, oohh, 99% of the class had? Add to this the fact that I can't draw for shit and we have one miserable failure, folks.
Q Using sliding filament theory, explain the effect of sarcomere length on tension production (10 marks)
If you've done higher biology, and you still don't understand this, you can understand the nightmare two hours I endured. Actually, when I was sitting the exam I was thinking to myself "man, this must be what Dabby must have gone through in higher maths." All the letters seem to rearrange themselves into incomprehensible words and then you readjust your eyes and realise that in fact none of them have moved- they really are that long and fucking complicated. Sometimes you can take a guess, you know, if a word starts "uni" then it's a safe bet that it only involves one thing, or if a word ends with "ed" then you can assume it happened in the past. Yet for all my guesswork I could not bluff my way through a fifteen mark monster on the circulatory system of the heart, or the implications of a damaged sciatic nerve.
Truly, I was fucked.
But then when I got back to butler I knew I could rely on DC to cheer me up. So I downloaded another 2GB of porn, films and south park (I have 90 episodes now :D) and then stumbled across a rarity- the official SA2 soundtrack! It's so sweet you guys! Escape From The City, Kick The Rock (wild canyon), Live&Learn, Rhythm And Balance (white jungle)... I... think I'm about to munk...
I'm away to go shopping now, but rest assured, Starsite will be back next week and by then I'll have my eagerly-awaited Howff post up on Scottish Boozing.
Good things come to those who wait.
Do Shrubs Go To Heaven?
Do Shrubs Go To Heaven?A quick blog to provoke thought: do shrubs go to heaven? I call this "The Fundamental Flaw Of Christianity." Christians will assert, and swear blind by it, that all humans spend eternity in either heaven or hell depending on the moral transgressions through their lives. But did they ever stop to wonder if plants and fungi suffer a similar judgement? I've asked many a christian and none can answer my question. If it is conceivable that there is not a heaven or hell for plants, then why can't they come to terms that there is simply no afterlife? Why the gross double standard? Shrubs reproduce, grow, breathe, live and die- exactly the same as humans. Yet somewhere along the lines there has been a gross differentiation between shrubs and humans to the point where humans live in eternal happiness (or pain) and shrubs... well, they die. Period. Or perhaps they get rooted in hell, or their plant spirit gets rooted in a garden in heaven. Ahhh, it warms me old 'eart. But why stop at shrubs? What happens to objects which never die? Like a stone? Or a metal girder? There is no life for them, so why should there be an afterlife? This is where Christianity fails. I asked my parents and cletus about this, but where cletus floundered and admitted defeat, ma wales offered a (slightly better but still utterly implausible) possible solution. She claims that a prerequisite for entry to heaven is consciousness, and those without go to purgatory. So, in effect, shrubs go to purgatory. And so do ants, but not dolphins (still with me?) Yes dolphins have consciousness but only in very limited and secondary ways. It wouldn't work if you told a dolphin that if he follows the ten commandments and lives a good life he will gain entry to heaven; They're way too smart to fall for that!Hahahaha!  No afterlife: The shrub
Teaser
A new blog is going to be unveiled in the coming days! Keep your eyes peeled!
Oh yeah, an update from new year:
* Dabby received those unspeakable death-threats after holding me in a headlock after I refused to apologise for apparently for rugby tackling him into a shelf earlier that night. Yet, somehow, I remember none of this.
* Dabby and I were drinking Rebecca's Malted Wine, which is news to me. I thought it was on the house...
* I asked Tom for a fight after he said he'd punch me if I did something. This I remember, and my reasoning is that I didn't want to be threatened. Or something like that. I was drunk.
* Morna's cat drew blood on several occasions, with the marks still on my arm.
* Tete put the cat in the laundry room and I explained my (drunken) Hunter-Gatherer theory. It went along the lines of "if the cat scratches me, and I hit it back, and then it scratches me again, then I maul it!" Seemed logical at the time...
* Morna and Riach got ultra-offended when I said something jokingly about the Tarves "street party" (comprising of three local farmers) and Riach started walking into me. To punish me, no doubt.
Hogmanay
I don't know what that stuff was that me and Dabby were drinking but I can tell you now that I'm never touching it again. My head feels worse than it did on Christmas day due to a one-on-one drinking contest with Dabby that bordered on the ridiculous.
Whatever that stuff was it made me absurdly aggressive and irrational, more so than I've ever been in my life. I don't think the Stellas or Carlsberg Special Brew I had did me any favours either. I did a heap of stupid shit last night that I shouldn't have and said things I shouldn't have. Most irrational of all though was the fact that I woke up in my bed this morning, having walked 8 miles from Tarves to Ellon in the pouring rain. Great for the banter like, but stupid. I did let Beefy and Dabby know where I was going though so that no one thought I'd gone missing. That was some walk, I can tell you! It gave me heaps of time to reflect. I got home at 8 in the morning...
I don't remember everything I did but here's the fragments of what I remember:
I remember chasing Morna's cat around the house, saying that "no cat can outrun me!" When I did eventually get to hold it the cat stratched the hell out of me, drawing blood! I have the marks to prove it! It was stuff like this which is completely out of character for me. I also remember pinning Morna's brother and telling him this is "the power of 6th year!" while Beefy took his shoes off. Except we're at Uni now, but accuracy isn't something vested in me when I'm drunk.
I also made two omlettes that night, which resembled more like scrambled eggs with a block of cheese than anything else. It didn't tase very good either. Also I remember breaking my chain but I don't know how, no doubt I deserved it though. Most curious of all though was waking up with a text from Dabby saying "a friend shouldn't have to hear threats like that from another friend." Umm... okay. Oops. I don't remember what I said but it must have been bad. Makes a change from the usual "Cunt." texts I receive. I really was overly aggressive last night, I have no idea why. Different drinks have different effects on people. that one made me hyperaggressive and irrational. I probably did other stuff, but I'm sure I'll find out in due course. It might shed some light on the texts I have from Dabby and Beefy.
To conclude (because my head is killing me), sorry for being an ass last night. I can't explain it, all I can say is I'm sorry and I won't be drinking that shit again. Thanks a lot for having us round Morna and sorry again for going too far, I know you're pissed off and have every right to be. As far as new year's eves go, it was great!
But I won't be repeating that 8 mile treck again any time soon.
|
