Author: Mosh

I don’t think anyone in the UK could failt to have heard about the protests as BBC screens Springer – a TV presentation of the current West End hit. The musical has won just about every theatrical award over the last year and plays to a packed house several times a day.

So it’s popular then. People do want to see it and are prepared to pay money for it. OK, so we agree on that.

However, according to the usual bunch of moaning, miserable, self-important overly moral types – if you’re not prepared to traipse to London and fork out for a ticket for it, then you shouldn’t be allowed to see it.

Their issues are mainly twofold: excessive bad language and the fact that it takes the piss out of this Jesus Christ bloke. Reports on the number of “swear words” range from 300 to 5000, depending on which source you go to. The Sun very imaginatively came up with the highest number by multiplying each swearie by the number of people saying / singing it simultaneously. Technically correct, but hardly accurate as such.

Then there’s the issue with an actor playing a fictional character (IMHO – I’m allowed one, too) who’s portrayed as a nappy-wearing homosexual. Now, I have a few gripes about this and people who know me will be able to guess them right off, but here we go:

1) Freedom of expression. According to one person in the article linked above "There should be freedom of speech but there should never be freedom for desecration." So there should be freedom of speech as long as it doesn’t insult something that this person believes in? Not very free, then, is it?

2) The fact that they argue that if it had insulted another religion other than christianity that the BBC wouldn’t dare show it. Well, in fairness, christians aren’t as likely to engage in violent assault, rioting, threats and so forth like… ooh, I don’t know… Sikhs in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago. That just popped into my head there.

3) The BBC has had Songs of Praise on every bloody week since forever. There are other christian-friendly shows broadcast on a regular basis. The BBC is supposed to be unbiased and show all views and so forth. So isn’t this just some way towards redressing the balance? I am very a-religious. I genuinely find SoP and the like offensive to some degree. Maybe that’s too strong a term, but organised religion really gets my goat and I personally would like to protest against my license fee being wasted on a load of Thors Hird fans warbling away in some building somewhere. On the other hand, it’s a public network, a sizeable number of the viewers regard this as reasonable viewing content and so I accept this. I don’t like it, but I accept it. All of a sudden I seem more reasonable and forgiving than a raving christian outside Broadcasting House.

4) "It shows Jesus as a homosexual and that is entirely false." Prove it. Go on. Prove it. You can’t even prove the guy actually existed. Nobody knows when his birthday was, or what colour his skin was. They’re hardly going to know if he snogged another bloke or shagged him up the arse. You believe he was white, had a beard, straight as a die (in an age where bisexualism was rampant) and didn’t once think his mother was a bit of alright. Prove it.

5) If you don’t want to watch it… don’t watch it! Frankly, I channel-hopped a bit and saw maybe 10 minutes of it and it looked crap anyway. Mary Whitehouse is dead. Please stop trying to continue the interfering old hag’s legacy.

*grumble*. OK, now that I appear like an evil, Satan-worshipping nazi I’ll stop. Apologies to any regular readers I may have offended – I know some of you are church-goers – but bear in mind I’m really just trying to play devil’s advocate here. Possibly very literally!

Whoops. Too much Alice Cooper in the car the last few days.

Well, it’s Saturday. Courtesy of a few gusts of wind, I’ve had to axe my night out. The A1’s had more than its share of problems over the course of the day and the weather report is for it to get worse later on.

So I thought I’d play one of the games I bought from Sold Out recently. Three games for a tenner and good (if old) titles. Smashing. They even turned up 2 days after I ordered them right before xmas. Even smashinger.

Sim City 3k works a treat, though does look its age.

Freedom Force installs, patches… then crashes. After digging for ages (on the developer’s site, not the publisher’s which doesn’t tell you) I find that it won’t run under Windows XP with Service Pack 2. At least they’re developing a patch (though it’s been in the works for 4 months now). You’d think after this, they’d mention such a problem on a retailer’s web site so you’d know before you bought a game. But no.

Thirdly, another old-timer: Command & Conquer Red Alert 2. This one won’t even install, the setup program crashing out. After several emails from EA support, I think we’ve narrowed it down to one Windows patch. Thing is, since SP2, this patch is not uninstallable so I’ve got another game I can’t play. Though they were trying to blame it on a duff CD. The game comes with 2, both installable, both not working. I tried them on Kim’s laptop (not running SP2) and the game installed fine.

Their solution? Mail the CDs and receipt to an address in California. Erm, yeah. Right. That’ll solve a coding problem.

My solution? Return the game to the UK supplier and refuse to buy anything else published by EA unless I get a pre-sales guarantee that it’ll work with SP2. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable seeing as it’s such a prevalant patch.

OK, now I’ve bored you all to tears I’m off to do some maths work instead.

Warning of another possible haitus, folks. I have a very busy last few days with SoftSols coming up, plus a couple of trips around the country to see people:

Thu 6th – Spalding, Lincs

Fri 7th – Spalding, Lincs

Sat 8th – Night out in Durham

Sun 9th – Day of rest

Mon 10th – Drive to Kent

Tue 11th – Tilmanstone

Wed 12th – Tilmanstone

Thu 13th – Reading

Fri 14th – Swansea

Sat 15th – Newcastle for footie (Southampton), Chester for night out

Sun 16th – Travel to Spalding in evening

Mon 17th – Spalding, Lincs

Tue 18th – Office (am) / Pub (pm)

Wed 19th – Recover from hangover

Thu 20th – New job

Fri 21st – New job

Sat 22nd – Travel to London

Sun 23rd – Arsenal away game

Mon 24th – Napalm Death, Camden Underworld

Tue 25th – Travel home

So I’ll have to see how much time I have to do posts! Also, anyone who uses my work number to get hold of me (07810…), please start to phase it out as I’m giving that phone back on the 19th. If you don’t know my personal number and you want it, then please just ask.

I was just working out roughly how many miles this is (about 2000, give or take) and spotted a small anomoly in Autoroute. It reckons the best route from Swansea to Bradford is to get the ferry to Cork, drive to Dublin and get another ferry over to North Wales. Erm.

Also, despite it being Autoroute UK, if you enter a place name that exists outside the UK it seems to put that at the top of the choice of locations you want to drive to. Seeing as the US has ripped off half of our bloody town names, this can be rather annoying. And the bloody Aussies.

Mrs ratboy spoke to me when I got in from work, asking if I’d heard anything last night. Well, the last time I heard things from that house it sounded like someone had left the volume up full on Hard-Core-Porn-O-Vision, so I asked exactly what she meant.

Turns out that ratboy’s dad’s car had been broken in to round the back of the house, in the “secure” area. Well, it’s secure in that you can’t drive the car out of it because of the gates, but people can still get in. These particular filth came from another part of the estate via a couple of fence panels that blew down in the winds the other night.

I have issues with this. Number one, they picked the wrong car – they should have gone for the shitty white car (ratboy’s) and number two, I wanted to trash his scummy motor myself. Needless to say, I’m not exactly sympathetic after the **** that pair have stirred around here. Granted, if I’d seen someone last night I’d have done all I could to stop/catch them, regardless of whose car they were after, but only out of instinct and trying to look out for my own (and Kim’s and Steve’s) stuff.

Besides, they did a crap job just smashing a window and mucking up the inside. They didn’t even nick anything, or slash the seats. ******* amateurs.

The cherry, though, was her comments about “******* scum off the estate or someone” doing it.

Pot.

Kettle.

Black.

I have determined through simple logical deduction and detective work that one of my work colleages is a potential danger to society and should be locked up and the key thrown away. I’ll not name her as she’d probably have me hunted down by her Al Quaida colleagues for grassing her up.

You see, she sells pirate DVDs. And all those adverts I see on TV, at the start of rental discs and at the cinema all tell me that people who sell dodgy DVDs and videos are only using it as a means to fund their other, more nefarious, crimes.

In all fairness, I’m not sure if it’s child porn, people-smuggling or international terrorism in which she’s involved. Either way, I’m a dead man if she finds out I’ve sussed her. Oh, why couldn’t I live in ignorance and just think she was trying to make a few quid before xmas? Why did the flipping film companies have to thrust this knowledge upon me? Ignorance was bliss.

Suffice to say, in the meantime I’ll just keep an eye on her. If at any point I see her slipping someone a small child wrapped in brown paper under the table in a dodgy pub, or walking down the street looking very bulky with curly wires sticking out from under her jacket I’ll bite the bullet and inform the police.

In all honesty I don’t see how she can use a couple of quid a time to buy huge piles of Semtex but these master criminals are clever people. Devious… but clever.