David McFarlane

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I’ve got nothing against any of the modern day rap artistes, just to get that out of the way! However the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Curtis Blow, Public Enemy, N.W.A. and The Sugarhill Gang (who might not mean much to your average person) are rightly considered of a much higher standard.

I’ve not always been a fan of hip-hop (or rap, is there any difference really?) - in fact I absolutely refused to even entertain the idea of ever listening to this kind of music when I was younger.

I’m fairly sure it was hearing The Message by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five that really got me interested in what else was out there, and it just kind of went on from there.

What I’m getting at is that you shouldn’t really ever judge a book by its cover. If you keep a truely open mind, you’ll encounter things that you never thought imaginable and have experiences you’ll never forget.

All this from listening to Grandmaster Flash - how very bloody mental!

I’ll leave you with some classic Young MC.

Ciao.

If you keep up-to-date with Scottish football, you’ll more than likely know about Gretna (the team currently bottom of the top league in the country) and their rise up through the divisions over the past few years. It was announced yesterday that the club has gone into administration and I don’t have an ounce of sympathy.

To correct that statement slightly, I have sympathy for the people who work behind-the-scenes at the club and who will probably lose their jobs - I have no sympathy for the personnel who make up a huge chunk of the reported £20,000-£30,000 a week wage bill (i.e. the playing staff).

It’s simply idiotic to be running a club which up until five years ago was lucky to attract 50 people to a game on such crazy sums of money. Yes they have a millionaire owner in Brooks Mileson, but this is no excuse for bad management. We’re talking about at least a million pound a year being spent just to keep the club afloat - even Dunfermline were never that mental!

Some may think it’s sad to see a club in such a state, but why? The people running the club must have had some idea about running costs in the Premier League, so they should have budgeted properly.

The ones I feel sorry for are St Johnstone - I’m sure that they would never have got into such a situation had they been promoted last season instead of Gretna.

But instead we’ll probably get sob stories for the next few weeks about how sad the whole thing is - I for one will not be shedding a tear.

It’s only taken about three months or so, but I’ve finally hit number one in Google for David McFarlane!

No more bothering about the bloke in Australia who sells houses or the musician in Canada, or even the guy who plays for Dumbarton - good times.

Anyway, putting my ego to one side, I thought I’d prattle on about the darker side of the Internet. I’m not talking about 4chan or any hacking sites, but rather the "get rich quick" scumbags that pollute the atmosphere like a fart in church.

If you’ve never seen the whole "make $1,000,000 while you sleep" crap, count yourself lucky - the unfortunate thing is that so many people fall for it. It’s quite a sad fact that some people would rather buy into this shit than actually work for their money. It’s even sadder that the only ones who make any real money from this are the folk selling the garbage in the first place.

It’s confused me for a while why nobody does anything about it. Surely it breaks some law somewhere (if not here in the UK, possibly in the US) but if it doesn’t, it must! To fool people into believing that you don’t have to do any work to make money is just plain stupid.

If you ever have the misfortune to click onto one of these sites, click off straight away - it’s 100% bullshit.

I’ll leave you with a video that makes me laugh a lot, only because the guy getting slated is one of these douchebags.

Toodles.

I’ve not blogged properly at all this month, mainly because I’ve had bugger all time to write anything! For my first post back, I’ll look at some of the talking points in the world at the moment.

The Sun tell us today that Patrick Swayze has five weeks to live - except he hasn’t. He’s undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer and, speaking from experience (my uncle had it not so long ago), there’s every chance that he’ll pull through. Don’t let the facts stand in the way of The Sun though.

HD-DVD has died, which is a pity as the discs were multi-region (i.e. if you buy one in the US, it will work on your UK HD-DVD player) - although it has resulted in some excellent firesales in Australia and America. If you want to see what’s being reduced, I suggest you search here.

In football news, Newcastle are stll doing terribly but Dunfermline are actually starting to play a bit better. My hope’s for the season have changed to praying that Dunfermline finish second and that Newcastle survive (unbelievable that they could actually go down!).

Apologies for the short post, but I was just checking in to confirm I’m not dead.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something more interesting.

Hopefully.

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

I haven’t died, I’ve just been busier than a Japanese prisoner of war - you won’t hear any complaints from me though, no siree Bob.

I’ll be back later today with something, but until then have a good day.

There’s been a bit of a debate (I say a debate, I mean some rubbish in The Sun) about whether the death penalty should be brought back into use in the UK. I’m guessing this is all in reaction to that bloke who killed those prostitutes in Suffolk and that other nutter who killed that girl outside her house - who had the worst defence in history when he claimed he’d had sex with her when she was dead, not alive.

To me, re-introduing the death penalty would be one of the worst ideas in the whole sorry history of bad ideas. Lots of people who have been sentenced to death have later been found to be innocent - which is alarming, to say the least.

How would you feel if your brother, father or son was found guilty of killing somebody and then told they must pay for their crime with their life?

And then how would you feel if they were found innocent after a few years?

What we need in this country is fairly obvious - more police on the streets, parents to teach their children about respect and this whol "nanny culture" disappearing down the drain. I guarantee that if these three things were to happen, hardly anybody would be calling for the death penalty.

Except for The Sun, of course.

So the Oscars is over for another year, and it’s another year where I haven’t seen any of the films up for any of the awards (bar Transformers and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End). I’m tight, so I refuse to spend £6 to go to the cinema (which reminds me, I’m majorly peeved that Odeon have decided not to show the new Rambo film - I was looking forward to that!).

It struck me whilst watching that there’s at least a couple of categories that could be gotten rid of. Sound mixing and sound editing are nearly the same thing (well, they’re in the same ballpark anyway), and surely they could combine the two screenplay categories? The actual ceremony seems to drag on for hours, so I wish they’d at least consider combining categories.

This is a minor quibble though!

I don’t think there were any big suprises this year, and the only person I wanted to win anything (Javier Bardem) actually won - which was nice.

Jon Stewart did a great job as host, but it would be nice to see the Academy try out someone else - personally, I’d give Jerry Seinfeld a shot or perhaps Steve Carrell. Maybe next year.

The highlight of the whole thing happened BEFORE the awards ceremony began - watch the video to see what I mean.

Got to love the Busey.

Following on from my rant (you’ll notice I do that quite a bit) the other day about the tabloid media’s obsession with crime, I now turn my attention to TV’s obsession with it.

Every single person in this country is supposed to pay a TV license, which costs £135.50 a year, in order to watch TV. That in itself is a joke, but the biggest joke of all is that this money is used to essentially run the BBC. I wouldn’t have a problem with that if the BBC didn’t do three things:

1)  Show more repeats of shows everyone has seen at least four times before

2)  Waste money on pap like Strictly Come Dancing or any of that musical guff with Graham Norton

3)  Give us such godawful news coverage

The first two points are fairly self explanatory, but I’ll talk about the last point.

The BBC have a 24 hour news channel (BBC News 24 - imaginative name, eh?). It is rubbish and almost completely unwatchable. Why? Wall-to-wall coverage of nothing.

As an example, I’ll use the whole Madeline McCann thing - when her parents were being questioned about her disappearance, the BBC had more than one reporter outside the door of the police station reporting that the McCann’s were IN the police station. They didn’t run this once or twice during the day, they did it EVERY HALF AN HOUR!!! Picture the scenario of a reporter standing outside a door basically saying "yes, they’re behind that door being questioned" for at least 7 hours. The sad thing is that this really happened.

Getting back to my post headline though, the TV news shows are almost as bad as the tabloid press when reporting crime.

Our local BBC news is Reporting Scotland, and every couple of weeks they seem to wheel out the same footage of people fighting whilst drunk. The problem I have with this is that there is never any news to go along with the footage. Telling everybody that when people get drunk they might get violent is like telling a child that Santa doesn’t exist when they’re 23 - sorry if I’ve ruined anyone’s life with that comment!

I can’t understand why we’re always being told that young people are evil, getting drunk is bad and Sean Connery is a good Scot (live in Scotland then you arsehole!) - it’s all complete rubbish.

I accept that drinking too much is not a good idea, but if you want to do that why should I care? It’s the same reason why I couldn’t give a shit that gangs want to kill each other - it’s less people for me to have to bother about.

When it comes to crime it’s fairly simple - be vigilant, but don’t be afraid.

Easy.

I watched the Newcastle game against Manchester United and genuinely thought that they might have won. How wrong I was.

They started off badly and got progressively worse as the game went on. Even at 2-0 you could tell it was going to be another rout, although 5-1 did flatter the Mancs a little bit. I really don’t know what to make of the shambles that is Newcastle United at the moment - they don’t look capabale of winning games and Kevin Keegan looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else than St James’ Park (and who can blame him?).

I’d like to think that we’ll see a turnaround towards the end of the season, but I have my doubts. Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll stick by them through thin and thinner!

In better news, Dunfermline beat Clyde 2-1. Yes, The Pars are back in town!

Back tomorrow.

Crime exists. Crime has always existed and will always exist, in one way or another, until the end of time.

But why do the tabloId press in the UK constantly have to let us all know how dangerous the world is? As far as I’m aware, almost everybody in this country has a brain and can think for themselves - do we really need to be told that we’re in danger by simply walking out the front door? The answer to this question is obviously a resounding "no", but we still get these bullshit facts in the paper every day about how many serious crimes are commited every day/week/month/year.

Is it right that you should live your life in fear of crime? Again the answer is "no", but again we are told about how dangerous the streets are at night and how innocent people are getting attacked all the time. Innocent people DO get attacked, but more often than not it’s somebody who has provoked somebody else into attacking them that’s the victim - hardly an the act of an innocent person.

How many times have you personally been a victim, or know a victim, of serious crime? I would hazard a guess that some people have had their houses broken into (I have, twice!) or maybe had their car knicked, but I doubt many have been stabbed or shot. So why do the tabloids warn us that gangs of youths are roaming the country out for violence? I have no idea.

This country has more than enough problems without getting people worked up about nothing, so they’d be better off bringing us relevant news instead of crap that will be used as fish and chip paper in a couple of days.

As for TV? That’ll be tomorrow’s rant…