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Film reviews of films Other writing Things

My Film Reviews Of Films 2015 Edition

I am going to review all the things I watched at the cinema this year, again.

It turns out mainly I watched quite a lot of cack this year.

Birdman – I liked how they pretended it was all one shot and the drums all went thunk a thunk thunk but I think it got boring after the man was all in his pants and then there were four endings? Calm down Boohoo Batman!

Jupiter Ascending – Never has something so passionately made so little sense. Sean Bean played a bee. A bee. A masterpiece.

Seventh Son – I was hoping this would be enjoyably bad but it was in fact indescribably boring. Some witches want to turn a realm into gold or something, Jeff Bridges looks like he’s lost a bet.

Furious 7 – Film of the year. The cars parachuted out of the aeroplane and then they jumped out of a building into another build and then into another building and then Paul Walker DROVE A CAR INTO HEAVEN.

The Voices – Ryan Reynolds is a “funny” serial killer or something? He cuts the women’s heads off, it’s a black comedy laughing out loud!

Avengers : Age of Ultron – Some more boring shit with robots, I expect.

Pitch Perfect 2 – Not enough singing, and all the bits where they were not singing were really amazingly bad!

Ex Machina – Domhnall Gleeson kisses a robot or something? I imagine it made me think!

Mad Max: Fury Road – Every single thumbs up emoji. All of them.

Jurassic World – You know how unhappy nerds make versions of The Phantom Menace where they edit out all the scenes with Jar Jar Binks or whatever? They should do a version of this where they edit out everyone who isn’t a CGI dinosaur.

Terminator: Genisys – Oh, just fuck off.

Everest – This was extremely stressful and bummed me out a whole lot because it turns out climbing up Everest is a really dumb idea and it doesn’t go at all well! Do not watch this film or try to climb up a mountain!

Inside Out – The people used the computers to make my brain feel emotions!!! U GOT ME AGAIN COMPUTER PEOPLE!!!

Death Of A Gentleman – I spent a lot of time this year watching cricket and according to this film it is going to die soon because of capitalism so that’s bad.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – Yeah, I really gave a shit about the origin story of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., thanks all. Guess what happens at the end? SPOILERS: HE BECOMES THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.! Still, I would probably sit through another one.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg did something? In a car? Not as good as the last one but absolutely fine, probably? I expect some people were disavowed.

Ant-Man – Top tip: put loads of good jokes in your superhero movies and they are actually fun to watch! (Meanwhile Ben Affleck growls about his city while Superman does 9-11 again, etc.)

Legend – It was sweet that they let some 13 year old boys write a film about their favourite gangsters. Tom Hardy was really good as London Bane and the Gay London Bane and then it turned out to have been narrated by a ghost?

Irrational Man – It is by Woody Allen and it has Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone and a murder and Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager in it. Did I like this film? Who knows!

The Martian – It was exactly like the book but you got to see many film stars who you recognise from other films doing it. Well done!

SPECTRE –

Christophe Waltz: James Bond you kissed my dad and now you must die.

James Bond: I disagree.

Black Mass – Johnny Depp played a sort of vampire gangster who hangs out with some very naughty policeman until things get too naughty and he has to wear a hat. 3 stars.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – I liked seeing all the things that I remembered from the past when Wagon Wheels were bigger and also some new things that were a bit like those things but different! Then I watched it again and I liked seeing all the things again again!

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I built 5 stupid Twitter robots and they failed to fill the void in my heart

My name is Ed, and I have a problem. My problem is that I can’t stop making terrible Twitter accounts, of which I have approximately 7,000. One time I pretended to be some sandwich spread and it got a bit out of hand and I ended up writing for the Guardian about it.

But, because I am quite lazy, another thing I do is make robots to do the terrible Twitter accounts for me. For example:

1. The Sausages Robot

@allthesausages was the first Twitter account I ever created (well, excepting my actual Twitter account). It searched for every mention of the word ‘sausages’ on Twitter and retweeted it (manually, it was all we had in them days). I didn’t really know how to write code back then so I bodged it together with a now defunct service called ‘Yahoo Pipes’ but once it was working it was easy enough to copy, so I made a few more.

First was the broadly similar @allthecheeses, then someone I worked with suggested @allyourmums, which searched for and retweeted anything containing the phrase ‘your mum’, and turned to be an effective way of creeping people out for no particular reason.

There was also @houseofsausages which tweeted every time someone in the UK parliament said ‘sausages’. They don’t say ‘sausages’ in parliament very much it turns out.

2. The Competition Robot

This happened because Ste Curran suggested it to me while we were drunk in a park. You know how companies do marketing exercises where they tweet something to effect of ‘Follow and retweet this and you could win a DVD of Tron!’? Well, what you can do is write code to search for those kind of tweets, and then automatically follow and retweet them, thereby entering competitions without even having to know that they existed in the first place.

So I did that. Even splitting our winnings 50/50 it seemed reasonable to assume that we would soon be very rich men! Well, it was not even as successful as this guy’s similar but more fruitful version, but over the course of a year or so we won:

  • A Call Of Duty poster
  • The latest in a series of alphabetical crime novels called something like G Is For Gun
  • 2 tickets to an event at Ministry Of Sound (I missed the message about this, sorry Ste)
  • 3 books of video game art (if anyone wants these I believe they are currently in a drawer in the offices of The Daily Mirror newspaper)

3. The Josh Whedon Robot

Once upon there was a man named Joss Whedon who invented space cowboys and lots of people on the internet cried because a) the space cowboys had their television programme cancelled and b) he would get referred to as Josh Whedon by people who were either less interested in space cowboys or specifically wanted to wind up the space cowboy fans. This eventually resulted in a Twitter account called @itsjossnotjosh that would look for people who said ‘Josh Whedon’ and correct them.

Because I am an actual child, I set up an account called @itsjoshnotjoss that did exactly the opposite. It’s gone now. It was probably kicked in by some nerds.

4. The French Robot

When I was first learning to tinker with Twitter robots I created a few accounts to test things, so I now have a series of intermittently functioning accounts that respond to my own tweets in different ways – there’s one that tweets them again, but in reverse and one that tweets them again, but with every word turned into a #hashtag (I read in a #webinar that this was #good for #twitter #SEO).

But my favourite one is the French Ed, who sounds a lot classier and more intelligent than me even when he’s talking about the bloke from Smash Mouth eating eggs.

It’s not working right now, because of something to do with Bing, I expect.

5. The “Annoy Alain De Botton” Robot

Remember when for a bit the hot new thing on Twitter was mashing up celebrities and philosophers, e.g. @KimKierkegaardashian?

Well if someone else is doing something amusing on Twitter you should obviously immediately start doing the exact same thing except worse, so I decided to mash up jumper merchant Alain De Botton and George Costanza from Seinfeld. But I couldn’t actually be bothered to write funny tweets, so I made a Twitter robot called @GeorgeDeBotton that just took De Botton’s tweets and changed the nouns to words like ‘Jerry’, ‘Kramer’ and ‘airline food’. I’m not sure it amused anyone else but me, but it definitely ticked someone off as it was eventually suspended.

Oh, and one time I made an account also copied Alain De Botton’s tweets but just transformed them all into capital letters so it looked like he was SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. That one didn’t last very long at all. Sorry Alain.

Anyway I guess the moral is that automating Twitter accounts is an excellent way to annoy Alain de Botton and get free stuff that you don’t actually want. If any venture capitalists want to help me monetise one or both of those things, let me know!

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Shut up, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ isn’t about the afterlife

There is a joke.

You probably know the joke, because it is a fairly famous joke.

It goes like this:

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Answer: To get to the other side!

The mechanism of the joke is this: the listener, on hearing a question about a chicken crossing a road, will naturally assume that a humorous punchline is about to follow. Especially if the question is preceded by the questioner saying something like ‘Would you like to hear an extremely funny joke?’

The actual joke part of the joke is that there is no humorous punchline. You have been tricked. Your expectations have been confounded, assuming you have not already heard the joke, which is, at this point in human history, unlikely. Unless you’re a child or your memory’s broken or you’re from somewhere foreign and have an equivalent joke about an elephant crossing a railway line or something.

Anyway, lately I keep seeing the suggestion that it’s not a trick at all: the meaning of the punchline has been misconstrued, and it is in fact a play on words.

Here’s the earliest example I could find on Twitter of someone making this ‘realisation’, in 2011:

And in 2009 someone asked Yahoo Answers to settle a debate she was having with her daughter:

(From her Yahoo Answers history we can tell her daughter was 15 years old at the time, by the way. Her husband is an alcoholic, and her aunt had a vaginal cyst. Learning sure is fun with Yahoo Answers! Bing it!)

So the idea is that the chicken, having considered all available options, decides to end its life by crossing the road. This activity, presumed to be fatal, will allow it to get to ‘the other side’, i.e. the afterlife.

This reading of the joke makes sense in linguistic terms, but it does rely on the chicken being able to understand concepts like death, and the afterlife, and also to understand enough about road traffic to pick the moment where the probability of road death is highest.

You could make this claim about the more standard reading, vis-à-vis chickens even understanding what roads are, but I don’t think we really need to assign much knowledge to chicken. It is here, it wants to go there – it may not particularly matter to the chicken that ‘here’ is one side of the road, and that ‘there’ is the other.

(Given the fairly strict stance of many religions on suicide, one could also question the wisdom of using it as a mechanism to reach the other side. Is there a chicken hell?)

The oldest recorded printing of the ‘joke’, according to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, appeared in a New York Magazine called The Knickerbocker. The March 1847 issue contained the following, excellent, version:

There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this:‘Why does a chicken cross the street?’
Are you ‘out of town?’
Do you ‘give it up?’
Well, then: ‘Because it wants to get on the other side!’

I don’t know much about road safety in 1847, but I’m going take a punt and say that roads were probably quite a lot less dangerous than they are today. Maybe the chicken would be at risk of being trampled by a horse. But if I was a mid-nineteenth century suicidal chicken, I’d have to consider other options if I was looking for an efficient death.

The chicken joke is one people learn early in their lives. For some, it may be the first time they learn that life doesn’t necessarily make sense. But it’s okay. We’re grown-ups now. Look yourself hard in the mirror. Then go outside and, carefully, cross the road. For no other reason than to get to the other side.

Are you ‘out of town’? Do you ‘give it up’?

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Film reviews of films Other writing

My Film Reviews Of Films 2014 Edition

I was going to go for a walk and then my mum asked me to take the dog and I didn’t want to because I was worried I would lose the dog or make it die in some way so instead I have decided to review all the films I saw in the cinema except any that I have forgotten.

Saving Mr Banks – this was about Mary Poppins’ dad or something and I think I cried because I was having a DIFFICULT WEEK.

American Hustle – everyone was dumb and/or cross and I didn’t like it.

Gravity – it was funny when George Clooney was Space Jesus.

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty – I guess Ben Stiller wanted a holiday and made this pile of shit so other people would pay for it.

12 Years A Slave – it was bad what happened to that guy and it was weird watching in a big room full of other people. Also Benedict Cumberbatch was in it for some reason.

The Railway Man – it was also quite bad what happened to that guy.

Anchorman 2 – this had one funny joke in it but I can’t remember what it was and the rest was appalling and if you liked this you are a bad person.

The Wolf Of Wall Street – this had good bits like when he’s done all drugs and can’t get into his car, but is 7 hours long for some reason and then at the end of the day it’s a real dude who basically got away with it and is still awful?

Inside Llewyn Davis – this gave me a lot of feelings but then I rewatched it and maybe didn’t have as many feelings but I like the song about the astronaut.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – I don’t remember watching this or why I watched it but it had Captain Kirk in it.

Robocop – they should have made the RoboCop remake be a meta-film about a cashgrab RoboCop remake or something. Maybe a stuntman has an accident and they make him into a RoboCop? I don’t know but it would be better than this although it was sort of weird and funny when they took off RoboCop’s body and he was all just lungs in a jar.

The Lego Movie – 1) It had Lego in it. 2) The best Batman film since the 1960s. 3) Grumpy Harrison Ford obviously refused to play Lego Han Solo, what a twat. 4) Just 100%, really.

Her – like Black Mirror would be if Black Mirror was good although I seem to remember some bits were painfully awkward and made me want to shout “DON’T DO THAT” at the man.

A New York Winter’s Tale – Colin Farrell gets a magic horse and tries to use it to steal some silver but instead steals the love of a beautiful daughter but the beautiful daughter has consumption and he tries to kiss it better with magic but it doesn’t work so instead he walks around New York for 100 years until he can kiss an 8 year old’s cancer better? Also Will Smith is in it as the devil. 10/10

Grand Budapest Hotel – I don’t know. Lots of things happened and it looked pretty.

The Zero Theorem – thin residues of leftover Gilliam with the occasional good bit, then it turns out to have been all about those damned money men at the studios messing with my creativity, maaaan! Oh dear.

Captain America – The Winter Soldier – The best bit of this film was when Jenny Agutter started doing kung fu stuff and the worst bit was when it turned out it was Scarlett Johansson in a Jenny Agutter mask. Oh and it was funny when Captain America had that list of modern day things he had to check out like Star Wars and Nirvana and sort of neat that they apparently did a different one of those for every country changing the references. But mostly just some stuff happened.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 – more like The Amazing Spider-Man Poo!!!

Frank – this was good but it was weird that he looked like Frank Sidebottom but wasn’t like Frank Sidebottom? IDK why they didn’t make the head square or something. Good song.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past – it had the old X-Men and also the new X-Men in it can you even imagine?

Two Faces Of January – two men want to do a kiss on Kirsten Dunst! Which one is going to do the kissing? Oh no she fell down the stairs!

Edge Of Tomorrow – this was actually GOOD FUN despite marketing that made it look like a boring shootman video game. Sort of like Groundhog Day but instead of fighting his personality Tom Cruise fights aliens *and* his personality. Also he starts off as an arsehole getting his JUST DESSERTS and that is an enjoyable thing to watch happen to Tom Cruise. The ending is sort of stupid but what did you expect?

Guardians Of The Galaxy – everyone liked this so my controversial opinion is that it wasn’t very good woah. It was too dumb to care about things that weren’t jokes and there weren’t enough jokes in it. But have you heard the soundtrack with the ironic dad music LOL?

22 Jump Street – this wasn’t brilliant but was way better than it had any right to be although not as better than it had any right to be than the first one. But apparently the next one is also going to be Men In Black 4?

Gone Girl – was this meant to be a funny movie because I thought it got pretty funny? Anyway the Gone Girl owned Ben Affleck well done Gone Girl!

Nightcrawler – I think this was meant to be funny and I thought it was funny. Jake Gyllenhall is a weirdo who has learned everything from Wikipedia and internet forums for MBAs and decides to become an ambulance chaser in order to make a lot of money and then he does this because capitalism.

Interstellar – I guess they must have sent this film into a black hole because it seemed like it was 70 hours long!!! Anyway it turns out love is better than gravity, but not as good as gravy and then Matthew McConaughey pulls a face.

Mr Turner – Mr Turner was a DIFFICULT MAN who did paintings and then HE DIED. Bye bye Mr Turner.

The Hobbit The Battle Of Five Armies – a dragon crushes Stephen Fry to death and then there’s 3 hours of other stuff and then Billy Connelly is in it for some reason and then The Hobbit goes home.

The Imitation Game – it was also quite bad what happened to this guy who this time *was* Benedict Cumberbatch.

Oh also I saw The Muppet Christmas Carol at a “sing-along” screening and had emotions. The end.

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30 Things To Do Before You’re 30

Because Jesus Christ I’m not bungee jumping any time in the next 12 hours.

1. Shake Jeremy Beadle by the ‘wrong’ hand.

2. Live in Streatham, twice.

3. Get kicked out of Jongleurs, Portsmouth for having a piss in the corner.

4. Appear in BBC Olive Magazine as Daniel Wilkins, Engineer.

189420_508176500090_2762_n

5. Livetweet a solo marathon of all the Police Academy Films.

6. Wake up walking across Tower Bridge at 5am and immediately call your mum to assure her that you don’t need to borrow money.

7. Drink 6 pints of lager then attempt to interview Stewart Lee before what neither of you knew was going to turn out to be a Fathers4Justice benefit gig.

8. Burn a jacket potato in the microwave.

9. Quote Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan in an email to a girl you’re in (unrequited) love with.

10. Wake up with your postcode written on your hand.

11. Play a hexadecimal in a musical rip-off of Tron.

12. Walk out of a screening of The King’s Speech because you’re so drunk you’re about to start ‘getting republican’.

13. Within 24 hours overhear different people describing you as looking a bit like Paul Merton and a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio.

14. Cry on the phone to HMRC.

15. Go to an 80s party as Winston Smith. No-one gets it.

16. Watch every episode of Stargate SG-1.

17. And Stargate: Atlantis.

18. Unwittingly talk about Saint Etienne in front of a man from Saint Etienne in a way that’s personally mortifying but doesn’t provide a satisfying anecdote.

19. Use the Science Museum’s PA system to pretend to be an alien overlord.

20. Send Alex Hern a DVD of The Beaver.

21. Pass out into the Wandsworth Road and smash one of your teeth out.

22. Fail an audition to be on Pointless.

23. Drunkenly slur Andrew Collins’ own name at him after a radio recording.

24. Be in a naked calendar. With your colleagues.

25. Have a hungover snooze on the company sofa and wake up to the chairman of the board looking at you suspiciously.

26. Leave a party because you think it’s funny that your friends’ creepy next door neighbour wants to ‘draw’ you then bolt once he starts asking you if you like his collection of porcelain elves.

27. Look forward to lottery night because you can earn 30p a go for texting drunk people the numbers.

28. Fail to have finished reading any work of classic literature, though you got to the bit in Ulysses where the man has a shit AND listen to the Classic Serial so you’re totally well-read.

29. Come to terms with people calling you ‘Harry Potter’ because at this point it’s flattering.

30. Fall down an escalator, followed by the speaker system you were supposed to be looking after.

 

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Where does Eric Pickles buy his pickles?

This supermarket was destroyed by Cleggmania, yesterday.
This supermarket was destroyed by Cleggmania, yesterday.

The big political question that no-one is willing to talk about is where members of parliament do their shopping. I mean, obviously when they’re in parliament they probably go to that little Tesco Express by Westminster tube station to buy, e.g. a lasagne and a miniature bottle of wine, but what about when they’re at home?

For obvious reasons most MPs don’t publicise the locations of their houses, but the majority of them do have a publicly available address for their constituency office. Almost all of these these are available on the parliament website; about 50 don’t publish one at all so I’ve used either the address of place they most often do their “surgery” events for constituents, or that of their party’s local office, to stand in.

Gathering this data itself was an interesting demonstration of: 1) how difficult some MPs make it for their constituents to get in touch to talk about their concerns (sometimes there’s more information about how to get a tour of the Houses of Parliament), and 2) how bloody awful (and often quite broken) most MPs’ websites are. Anyway, with that in hand we can figure out what their local supermarket situation is.

Average distance between constituency offices and supermarkets

The constituency offices of Conservative Party MPs tend to be the furthest away from supermarkets; on average they have to go almost twice as far as Labour MPs to do their shopping. This is probably illustrative of the fact that Labour tend to do better in urban areas & the Conservatives in rural ones, or maybe it’s because of Global Warming???

We can also see what the closest supermarket chain tends to be for each party’s offices.

conservative labour ld

Interestingly, despite The Co-operative group’s links with the Labour Party (32 of Labour’s MPs are also joint members of the Co-operative political party), Labour constituency offices tend to be closer to Tesco branches, while Co-op branches tend to be the closest supermarkets to Tory & Lib Dem offices.

Lib Dem offices favour Marks & Spencers more than those of other parties, Iceland is a lot more popular with Labour, and no-one much shops at Budgens.

Obviously there are some variables we can’t account for: Chris Kelly, MP for Dudley South, has an office that’s close to a Tesco Express, but maybe he really like Marks and Spencers’ Percy Pigs pig-shaped confectionery items, so makes the 10 km round trip every day to get himself a bag from the Merry Hill store. His terrible website doesn’t mention whether he likes Percy Pigs. Perhaps the government should have a website detailing which MPs like which sweets, to allow the public to get more of an idea about where their representatives do their shopping.

Below you can see the average distance of an MP’s office from each brand’s stores in kilometres, grouped by party. (Based on the closest 40 stores to each office.)

overall

Nick Clegg’s closest store is a Tesco Express at an Esso petrol station, but I reckon he does his mum’s shopping at Londis.

Eric Pickles is closest to an M&S, so that’s probably where he gets his pickles, except on special occasions when he goes to the only slightly further away Iceland to get a mint Viennetta.

I assume I’ll probably have to go on the run now I’ve released all this sensitive government data, but this is bigger than me. People had to know.

(Supermarket data was provided by Chris Zetter, creator of the excellent SuperLocate iOS app. Other supermarkets are available. Here’s a Google Doc of the constituency office data. No accuracy is guaranteed.)

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The 10 Numbers You’re Most Likely To Read In A Buzzfeed Headline

I tracked the RSS feed for Buzzfeed’s homepage for about a month, collecting data on around 3000 articles. About 40% of the Buzzfeed headlines in my sample contain a number, although that does include years. All the numerology is “genuinely” from the internet.

10. The number 22.

The most popular topic for Buzzfeed articles with 22 in the title is “LOL”, a new kind of emotion that is the only way for people on the internet to have a feeling. Other hot topics for 22 include: the royal baby, fast food, mermaids, and printables. Think about a tree: please do not print this internet home page unless you need it for an important meeting or a big poo.

According to internet numerology websites, the number 22 is associated with people who “radiate enormous potential, accompanied by a high level of inner tension resulting from an overwhelming desire to achieve something extraordinary”.

The famous star Taylor Swift had a number 9 hit in the UK charts with a song called 22. Here are the first 22 pictures I got when I Google Image Searched “taylor swift lol”.

22 Taylor Swift LOLs

As of today Taylor Swift has only released 3 fragrances officially, but based on my understanding of human biology it is possible that she has released 19 others unofficially.

9. The number 20.

The hottest topics for number 20? A three-way tie for: “world”, “win” & “philosophy”.

Numerologically speaking, the number 20 is associated with sensitive souls who strive to serve others as best they can, who are likely to have hasty, ill-advised marriages and become public relations agents, artists or interior decorators. I did not make this up.

The first Google Image Search result for “world win philosophy” is this picture of Fabio, famous star of romance novel covers and ex-England football manager. He looks quite cross, and has been married to his wife for over 40 years, but it is not really for me to say whether he made a hasty decision.

Fabio

8. The number 18.

Popular Buzzfeed topics for 18 are “gay best friend”, “best summer” and “terrible sports fans”. Numerology suggests that the number 18 is “sexually powerful”. People associated with it can make good friends, but “despise those who are not as vigorous”. According to Google Image Search, the “best summer” associated with 18 involves this:

best summer 18

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to more fully explore these concepts.

7. The number 17.

And just ahead is 18’s close friend, 17! For Buzzfeed, 17 means animals, life hacks & Saved By The Bell. Numerologists link the number 17 with immortality, which makes sense when you remember that Saved By The Bell’s famous star was the time-commanding immortal Zack Morris. Time out!

time-out

I spent slightly more than a pound on the autobiography of Dustin Diamond, best known to the public as wacky comedy sidekick Screech from children’s sitcom Saved By The Bell. It is not worth slightly more than a pound, although it does contain a letter of apology to all the women he claims he’s slept with. Diamond presents himself as unpleasant, bitter man, the book is poorly written and apparently untouched by an editor. If you are looking to read the memoir of a star of children’s television, I would instead recommend the delightful Blue Box Boy by BBC TV’s Doctor Who’s Adric, who even divides his life up into episodes just like a BBC TV’s Doctor Who story.

Time in!

6. The number 8.

Apparently my life path number is 8! This means that I “have great talent for management in all areas of life, especially in business and financial matters”, although I’m not sure how that connects with my net worth consisting of three or four bin bags worth of stuff best kept in bin bags and a Lego Space Shuttle.

If I were to follow the path of Buzzfeed, I would live a life that followed the tenets of irony, the KKK, Kanye West, Steve Carrell, and ironic photos.

According to Google, this is the most ironic photo of famous star Kanye West:

kayne west irony

I’m not sure that this is that ironic as, according to Yahoo Answers, Kanye West is a very intelligent man who probably has a lot of deep thoughts:

What is Kanye West's IQ

Maybe it’s some sort of special irony, like people who still talk about an Alanis Morissette song from 1995 have discovered. Two Buzzfeed articles in my sample referred to famous star Alanis Morissette, but only one spells her name correctly.

5. The number 12.

(In the following segment, I refer to lasagne as lasagna because of Americans.)

You know when the number 12 was big? The ’90s, according to Buzzfeed!

Famous 1990s television series Friends referenced the number 12 in the episode “The One With The Dozen Lasagnas”. According to the Friends Wikia:

After cooking a dozen lasagnas for Aunt Sylvia, Monica is stuck with them as they were supposed to be vegetarian.

I assume a dozen lasagnas is actually 12 and not 13 because bakers don’t make lasagnes, unless they do. I don’t really deal with bakers a lot in my day-to-day life and I’m not invested enough in this premise to bother phoning a baker. Anyway, a lot of hi-jinx are going on as you know is bound to happen when this crazy gang of Friends is around but also everyone eats a lot of lasagnas!

But wait! The editors of the Friends Wikia have noticed something:

Despite the fact that the lasagnas contained meat (which is why Monica is stuck with them in the first place), Phoebe is seen eating from one near the end of the episode, but she is vegetarian. However, it might be that she scraped the meat off her part, but this is not mentioned or implied at any time.

My explanation for this terrible error is that Phoebe in this episode is not actually Phoebe but is her identical twin sister Ursula pretending to be Phoebe. Ursula was a character from Mad About You also played by the famous star who played Phoebe but they made them twins because apparently Mad About You was once something anyone in the world cared about? Even fanfiction.net only has one Mad About You story, and it’s in Spanish (translated plot summary: “based on the last chapterMabel tells us something very interesting”).

Here are some pictures from the best episode of Friends that someone from the internet has put the corresponding words over the top of:

A GHOST

4. The number 11.

11 is a Master Number, “combining the most powerful male energy” with “the equally potent female energy”, for example in Boris Johnson, art, and James Gandolfini, the most popular topics Buzzfeed has 11 things to say about for some reason.

According to Google this image from the Daily Mail is what represents the combination of the 3:

candle in the wind

A candle in the wind.

2. The number 15.

Jessica O wondered what the meaning of the number 15 could be, and wrote to about.com. About.com’s heaing expert Phylameana Lila Desy told her:

My approach when there are more than one meanings is to choose the meaning that makes the most sense to me personally and not be too concerned about which way may be right or wrong.

Phylameana Lila Desy is a fraud, you can’t just make up what a number means, numbers are science! For instance, Buzzfeed tells us the number 15 is most strongly associated with movies, fashion, bacon fat, and ‘addicted to Nutella’, so it’s clearly a number that indicates you might be a dietary knife-edge away from ruining some ambitions.

Alarmingly this is not the most disturbing thing you get when you look for pictures associated with the phrase “addicted to Nutella”:

nutella-addicted_23

1. The number 10.

A classic number, first popularised by 10th Doctor Who, famous star David Tennant, the number 10 now forms the basis for much of modern mathematics. “LOL” once again tops Buzzfeed’s list of topics, closely followed by “advertising” and “grammar and spelling mistakes”.

Numerology says

through this vibration you have the insight to recognize and understand the needs of humanity, and the ability to bring peace and harmony to all

so in a shocking twist it turns out that by posting loads of “hilarious” Jpegs like

top 10 pffts

this Buzzfeed are actually slowly drawing the psychic energies of humanity towards the perfect oneness that will unite our beings and allow us to experience the true totality of love. If you didn’t “LOL” at the above picture your brain receptors are just not advanced enough to join the next level of human experience 🙁 but maybe you’ll enjoy this word cloud of Buzzfeed topics by popularity:

buzzfeed_word_cloud

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Other writing Things

Small World Syndrome

A picture of Kevin Bacon's face
A picture of Kevin Bacon’s face.

The six degrees of separation theory states that everyone in the world is only six social connections away from anyone else (as in, Doug is connected to Fred because they both know Emily). It turns out this theory isn’t strictly speaking true, not least because of isolated tribe, children raised by wolves and so on, but there is something appealing about the idea that we’re more strongly connected to the rest of the world than might be immediately obvious.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon applies this theory to the Hollywood movie industry, suggesting that because Kevin Bacon has been in lots of films and worked with lots of other actors, it is possible to link Kevin Bacon with any other actor in less than six steps (a single step being appearing in a film with Bacon, 2 steps being appearing in a film with someone who has appeared in another film with Bacon, and so on). Also his name sort-of rhymes with the word separation, so it’s a pun.

Again, this isn’t strictly speaking true: The Oracle Of Bacon website, which uses the Internet Movie Database to track links to Kevin Bacon, counts 32 people who are a whole 8 steps away. These people are said to have a Bacon Number of 8. If anyone with a Bacon Number would like to act in a film with me, let me know.

The concept of a Bacon Number is predated by the Erdős Number, a measure of “collaborative distance” between a person and the dead mathematician Paul Erdős, based on writing mathematical papers together. If anyone with an Erdős number would like to work on a mathematical paper with me, let me know. I’m not very good at maths but I could colour in some graphs or something.

Best of all is the Erdős-Bacon number, which simultaneously tracks the Bacon and Erdős numbers of a person who has both acted in films and written mathematical papers. Natalie Portman has an Erdős-Bacon number of 6. If Natalie Portman is reading this and would like to act in a film with me or work on a mathematical paper with me, or just hold hands for a bit, let me know.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point.

Something is missing from our cinemas. The beloved national treasures that were “those fucking Orange ads” have vanished from our screens, after spending the best part of 10 years failing to convince a single person not to dick about with their phone during the middle of the film. Instead we are now treated to an ad for Orange’s parent company Everything Everywhere, featuring none other than Kevin Bacon, who informs us that he, Kevin Bacon, is the centre of the universe.

This is obviously a riff on the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connectedness concept. Bacon explains that he is connected to everything and demonstrates by pointing at a dog called Rover. Amazingly, Kevin Bacon is even connected to Rover, and he explains how:

“I was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, Tom Hanks did Philadelphia, Philadelphia tastes great on a cracker, “It’s a cracker!” was Frank Carson’s catchphrase, Catchphrase was on ITV, same as Coronation Street, and we all know where Ken Barlow drinks: The Rovers.”

Needless to say, this explanation is rather unsatisfactory.

Let’s take it apart:

“I was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, Tom Hanks did Philadelphia,”

We’ve now connected Kevin Bacon to the film Philadelphia. Fine.

“Philadelphia tastes great on a cracker,”

Here there’s an unstated connection here, between the film Philadelphia and the cheese Philadelphia. But they are both named after the state Philadelphia (although the Philadelphia cheese brand was actually started in New York) so this is just about acceptable.

“‘It’s a cracker!’ was Frank Carson’s catchphrase,”

The ‘connection’ here is purely wordplay. Carson is not referring to a cracker biscuit, so there’s some etymological reaching required at the very least.

“Catchphrase was on ITV,”

The problem here is that the quiz show Catchphrase had a stupid name, as it was not about Catchphrases. It did include catchphrases, “Say what you see”, “It’s good but it’s not the one”, “Mr Chips is having a wank”, etc, but the actual puzzles were just about phrases, like “a bull in a china shop”. I don’t think that’s a catchphrase, unless it belonged to music hall act I’m not aware of. So all we’ve got is that both Frank Carson and the show Catchphrase have catchphrases. (Catchphrase did do celebrity specials, but Frank Carson never appeared on one. Frank Carson is now dead.)

“same as Coronation Street,”

I mean, fine. They’re not made by the same production company, but okay.

“and we all know where Ken Barlow drinks: The Rovers.”

Even if the dog was called The Rovers, having the same name as a thing is not the same thing as being connected to that thing. You can’t change your name to Kevin Bacon and expect to share his fat Everything Everywhere cheques, can you?

(If you get a dog, why not call it The Rovers?)

The dog probably isn’t called Rover in real life. He’s almost certainly a special acting dog with a different name like Charlie. So why not just say he’s called The Rovers because his owner really liked Coronation Street?

However, all of this is irrelevant as Kevin Bacon has a much stronger connection to Rover: they’ve both appeared in an Everything Everywhere ad. Rover (or whatever the dog is actually called) has a Bacon number of 1. I would assume that he doesn’t have an Erdős-Bacon number, but you never know.

Posited relationship between Kevin Bacon and Rover the dog
Posited relationship between Kevin Bacon and Rover the dog
Actual relationship between Kevin Bacon and Rover the dog
Actual relationship between Kevin Bacon and Rover the dog

The reason the ad invokes Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is that it shows that Kevin Bacon is very well-connected in Hollywood; this is a metaphor for how connected you will be if you purchase an Everything Everywhere phone contract. But by the ad’s own terms, you may actually find your connection highly variable, to the point where sometimes it barely exists. This is disappointingly unrigorous and Everything Everywhere (and Saatchi & Saatchi, who made the ad) should be ashamed of themselves.

Also, Kevin Bacon doesn’t have the magical ability to create little planets and stars that orbit around him and then throw one of them at a dog. He can’t do that. It’s a lie. (It also seems unlikely that he’s heard of Catchphrase, but I suppose the wanking thing is on Youtube.)

As it goes, Kevin Bacon isn’t even the centre of the Hollywood universe. Dennis Hopper is. Kevin Bacon is the 444th most connected actor in the Hollywood universe. That’s lower than Derek Jacobi (346). And Natalie Portman (420).

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that Everything Everywhere should throw the Kevin Bacon thing in the bin and make a new advert where the metaphor for the strength of their connections is me holding Natalie Portman’s hand, forever.