Does ANYONE understand them? Depressingly it seems not.
If you're joining us late, many years ago there existed a thing oft bemoaned by fans and pundits alike, called the "professional foul". This was a cynical deliberate foul, typically committed by a lumbering centre-half when he'd been skinned by a forward who was then heading clean through on the goalkeeper, but still a long way from goal. The centre-half would blatantly haul him down, making no pretence at a legal attempt to win the ball, and give away a harmless free kick perhaps 30 or 40 yards out.
The forward would thus be denied a chance to go one-on-one with the keeper and very likely score. The defender, meanwhile, would suffer only a yellow card at most – because his foul was in itself usually innocuous (being a simple trip or shove), leaving the referee no grounds on which to issue a red. It was clearly unfair, and something had to be done.
(To enjoy this feature TO THE EXTREME!, install the excellent Spotify and click the song titles to hear the songs. Failing that, I’ll just have to try to paint you a picture of some sounds, but made with words instead of paint.)
In the heady atmosphere of 1985-1986, I never thought I’d live to see the day when The Jesus And Mary Chain – musical revolutionaries, performers of shambolic 20-minute sets of hellish white noise and inebriated chaos, banned from Student Unions across the country because of their concerts’ tendency to end in (sort-of) riots, scruffy council-estate urchins from the industrial wastelands of West Central Scotland – would be having their music celebrated and given away free with copies of The Times.
I guess if you’re right, and if you wait patiently enough, the world sometimes comes round to your way of thinking eventually.
Whatever it is that makes me love football, it’s not the commonly-cited feeling of community, because I’ve never really had that. When I was young I was pretty much the only gay (“Aberdeen fan”) in the village (“town of 20,000 people”) – the vast majority of people in central Scotland support the vile twin icons of bigotry Rangers or Celtic, or (if they have no interest in Irish history) to a much lesser extent Hearts and an even lesser extent Hibs.
Yep, it's so good I actually played it twice, which as alert WoSblog readers will realise is a substantial accolade in itself, so it seems only proper that it takes the No.2 slot as well.
Yeah, bit behind schedule on this one. Sorry. You know how it is.
No.3 – Earth Defence Force 2017
EDF2017 pretty much killed static-console gaming for me. Apart from Super Mario Galaxy (which exists in a separate category to pretty much all other videogames), it's the last game for any of the mainstream formats that I've invested any significant amount of time in, because nothing's ever been this much fun again.
Alert WoS viewers will have seen this a while ago, but as it's my all-time favourite piece of videogames-related art it's worth repeating for the hundreds of new readers of WoSblog. Once you've grasped what it is you won't expect that you're going to watch all nine minutes of it. But you will.
WoSland is planning a two-person weekday trip to London soon. A simple enough undertaking, right?
But of course it isn't. Ever since the UK's railways were privatised by lovable Mrs Thatcher, it's a well-documented fact that (a) we have the most expensive rail network on Earth, and (b) trying to find out the best and cheapest way to travel between any two points is an insane labyrinthine nightmare of routes, operators, countless different ticket types and "magic stations" – places in the middle of your journey where for no obvious reason you can mysteriously slash the price of your ticket by pretending to make your journey in multiple stages, even though you never actually get off the train or even change seats.
There’s been something of a Biblical flood of the-end-of-civilisation movies in recent years. From 2007’s 28 Weeks Later(zombie plague) and I Am Legend (cancer cure gone wrong) to Charlie Brooker’s harrowing alleged comedy Dead Set(another zombie plague), the BBC’s remake of Survivors(lethal virus pandemic) and the same broadcaster’s re-remake of The Day Of The Triffids (er, homicidal walking plants), 2009 mega-budget effects-fest 2012(the classic “solar flares cause planet to boil from the inside”), and right up to this year’s The Road (unnamed catastrophic event), the cultural world is suddenly alive with the mass culling of humanity. Hurrah!
The one avenue for the obliteration of mankind that hasn’t been explored for a while is the classic nuclear holocaust, even though – or possibly because – an increasingly aggressive and powerful Russia has been rattling its sabre on the world stage for the first time in two decades. However, with the imminent The Book Of Eli making reference to a war that leaves the planet a ravaged wasteland, it looks like the atomic menace is back, Back, BACK! Which got WoSland thinking – what’s the bleakest nuclear holocaust movie ever?
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that a person's view on Love And Monsters is the single most telling indicator of their personality – specifically, the personality aspect of whether they're a soulless cretin or not.
L&M is by most measures the oddest episode of Doctor Who since the show's reinvention in 2005. Written by series producer Russell T Davies, it's an episode in which he appears to deliberately burden himself with as many handicaps as possible.
"If you've got the crowd behind you, you're probably facing the wrong way."
- S. Munnery
Reality
"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children, not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
