I hope I die before I get old (seriously, I don't want to go bald). How Pete Townshend cries every night.

The older generations scare me. They wear ties, enjoy horticulture and think that visiting English Heritage sites is an acceptable weekend activity (“oh wow, a pile of stones”). They refer to stereos as ghetto blasters, and in the case of my mother, seem to be on the verge of mainlining tea.

Nary a day goes by (except today, when I’ve managed to avoid almost all human contact) without someone telling me that when they were a lad(ess) they’d be playing innocently in the woods with their pals, frolicking with flocks of cartoon generated bluebirds and often breaking into spontaneous and impeccably choreographed song and dance. This person (if you can’t picture the scene, just imagine Harry Redknapp saying these things. I find him generally representative of this viewpoint in the same way Morgan Freeman is automatically given any wise person role in films) will then go on to bemoan the youth of today’s obsession with X-Stations, Popular Music and Jay-Zed.

What they don’t realise is that, just as they used to sneak out to go jiving with their favourite gal 50 years ago, so we hang around shopping centres and break into cars. It’s the nature of the cultural zeitgeist to generally move towards a more liberal viewpoint, such that I wouldn’t be surprised if in two generations teenagers are regularly creeping out of the house to film hardcore pornography in order to get at their parents. It’s just natural. Well, provided it’s het... (joke).

This was originally part of a much longer piece on the state of society today, until I realised that the first part completely nullified the second and vice versa, creating some kind of terrifying paradox stair loop and instantly putting my laptop in the same bracket as the Large Hadron Collider in the Risk of Destroying the World classifications, which range from Sackful of Kittens to Attila the Hun coming back as a Zombie with access to Nuclear Weapons.

Thanks for sticking with it, and if you’re lucky it’ll be another 5 months ‘til my next post.

P.S. If you haven’t got anything better to do at 10 tonight (you haven’t), then tune your televisual device into the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 4^th channel for The Wave, which promises to be a chilling reconstruction of a 1960’s social experiment gone wrong. I’ve never seen it, but from its Wikipedia page it sounds good.

Hope I didn't mess up the grammar on this one....

An email I received on (strangely enough) Valentine's Day:

"Please permit me to write you for the fact we have no met before. I got your contact from one of our search engines online hence I decided to write you. I would be very interested in offering you a part-time paying job in which you could earn a lot

This Organization is founded to increase employment among the honest, trustworthy and intelligent individuals living in UK and USA to handle some elementary paper work and payroll administration to our clients in UK and USA. Your Obligation is to work for 2hours a day and also listen attentively to given instructions.
Your Job is to take care of all applications with regards to new clients that are willing to register& invest their company in Europe yours is to be filling all documentations from these individual companies which will be sent to you under the companies name.
Salary Terms: 100 pounds/ $150 for each transaction,(each time you render service for the job) Get back to us asap
via email address below if you are interested in the
employment offer.
Get back to us if you are still interested in the offer
Regards,

Dallan Garris"

The reply:

I will consider this job when you learn to write English properly. Your email below should have read:

“Please forgive me for writing to you despite the fact that we have not met before. I (possibly illegally) got your private e-mail address from an online search engine and for some unknown reason have decided to write to you to offer you a morally questionable job from which you could earn money, the origin of which you would be better off not asking.

This "Organization", the name of which I won’t reveal, has the objective of increasing employment among the honest, trustworthy and intelligent individuals in the UK (obviously I can’t include myself in this group), and offers a service handling paper work and various administrative duties for our clients. The job I am offering requires you to work for 2 hours a day and listen to instructions, which will more than likely be issued over a shadowy videolink or via a rasping voice from a payphone cubicle.

Your job is to process applications from new clients who are foolish enough to give the “Organization” their hard earned money for a likely false promise to promote their company in Europe. You will have to file any documentation sent to you under the company’s name

Please be gullible enough to take this (ethically somewhere on the wrong side of laughing at babies drowning) job.

Yours,

Assumed Name”

Please consider hiring the services of a competent translator before contacting me in the future.

Yours,

Dave Cooper

Song of the Day: My Generation - The Who. Note particularly the line "I hope I die before I get old". How did that go Roger?