I have been blogging since before the word blogging was invented. Before Google was around, before Facebook, before Youtube, before Myspace, yes, I was blogging. Nothing ever disappears from the internet, and so I was recently able to look back at some of the things I blogged around this time of the year, 15 years ago, back in 1997.
How about three more nuggets:
Towards Twenty Hundred:
What is it with all these loonies calling the year that comes after 1999, the year “Two Thousand?” It is the year “Twenty-Hundred”, just as 1900 was the year “Nineteen-Hundred”.
We don’t think of this current year, 1997, as being “One Thousand, Nine-Hundred-Ninety-Seven” do we? We won’t be calling 2097 “Two Thousand, Ninety-Seven”, it’ll obviously be “Twenty-Ninety-Seven”. It’s easier to say and keeps the tradition of presenting the year in two separate two digit lots.
History talks of 1066 as being “Ten-Sixty-Six” and all that, not “One Thousand, Sixty-Six”. So, if you hear someone assigning the word thousand to any year past 1999, then hit them. It also amazes me that everybody seems to be going mad about celebrating the coming of the year Twenty Hundred.
We won’t have actually counted 2,000 years of AD until the year 2001, because AD started with a year 1, not a year 0. Unlike when we are born. At birth we count the year as being year Zero. Only after 12 months has passed, is it year one, before that it is under one. A child’s first birthday is twelve months after it started being a child. However, when they invented AD, it started counting at one, not zero. So, after the first ever twelve months of AD, it became year 2. Thus, come 1st January 2000 (pronounced “Twenty-Hundred”), a full one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years will have passed since AD started. Why are we going to celebrate this?
Shouldn’t we be waiting until 1st January 2001 (pronounced “Twenty-O-One”), when a full two thousand years will have actually passed? The Queen doesn’t send out telegrams to people celebrating their 99th birthday, does she?
Murder In Pictures and Diagrams:
In the UK they have recently launched a weekly partwork called Murder In Mind. It gives exotically gory details of how some people killed some other people. Each week it highlights a different mass-murderer. It dwells on the finer details, techniques, and methods by which the victims were tortured to painful deaths. It doesn’t really concentrate on the victims as people, how terrible it must have been for them. How terrible each waking day is for those who are left behind. How terrible it is for those who loved and nurtured those who the murderers took away so tragically and pointlessly.
The victims are just forgotten players for the real heroes of the piece, the murderers. Those who survive in daily pain, fear and living hell, because of the selfish actions of the murderers get no mention. They get no money from the sale of the partwork. All it succeeds in doing is putting two fingers up at them and making a small fortune from the sick people who buy it.
And what of the people who buy this partwork? We worry when a man collects photos of naked children. We want everybody in the area to be warned, his name to be on a register somewhere. We hate him. We hate him not for what he’s done – maybe all he’s done is collect the disgusting photos of poor innocent children – but we hate him for what he is. We want to hound him out, remove him from our midst. Tears come to the eyes of any normal parents listening to the unspeakable details of what the child pornographer is into reading about and looking at graphic pictures of.
Yet those who are into learning how to capture, rape and murder are accepted into our society without a bat of an eyelid. Surely this is equal in every way to the evil of a child pornographer? Newsagents would never dream of selling child pornography, yet they happily sell Murder In Mind. It is not even on the top shelf. Purchasers eagerly drool over every sick graphic detail. We allow these people to co-exist with us without being prosecuted or placed on some form of register. We encourage and allow those pre-occupied with murder to happily get off on the gory, precise and accurate details of how to murder and hurt people. Why?
Woman Stink:
What is this currently trendy stink that women are buying? Since just before Christmas I have been subjected to nose abuse in a number of confined spaces. On the train, in offices, in clubs, in shops, anywhere. All over the place women are wearing something terrible. And more of them are wearing it each day.Whatever this perfume is, it makes my eyes water and I start to gag. Five minutes stuck in a confined space with a woman wearing it, and I walk around for the rest of the day with the taste of it stuck at the back of my mouth. If I try to put a label on it, I can only come up with a suggestion that it’s like a bad menstrual smell with a cheap cologne on top. It’s obviously not that though, it’s something they’ve bought or had bought for them. Now, I was talking to a typical fashion-victim style woman-thing the other day, when she asked me what my favourite aftershave was. She was fishing so that she could buy some for her brother’s birthday, and mistakenly thought I was foolish enough to be caught up in that sort of fashion rubbish. I said that since she asked I did not and would not wear aftershave. Yes, I wear mildly scented deodorant, but what point is aftershave? All its purpose seems to be is to make the manufacturers rich at the expense of triggering people’s hay fever reactions. She was as shocked by my lack of interest in aftershave as she would’ve been had I announced that I always went out with no clothes on.
During the twenty minute rant about how men must wear aftershave that she then subjected me to, she could not explain to me the purpose of wearing aftershave, or indeed what it did for her. She agreed that most aftershave had smells that didn’t turn her on, make her want to kill anyone, or get any sense of well-being whatsoever. The only reaction she could report was a negative one to some types of aftershave, but she could report nothing positive. However, she seemed to be of the opinion that it was almost dirty and quite un-natural for a man to go out un-aftershaved. Aftershave….natural? Erm? Give the Advertising Agency that convinced her of that one an award!
Once her rants had died down, I brought up the subject of the terrible stink that some women seem to be wearing nowadays. I spared no colours as I painted the picture of the smell of this offensive perfume that viciously attacked me almost every day. Bad move. As you might expect, the initial reaction that any woman has when someone has stopped to question something they do, was to launch into a huge defence of womankind as if she was fighting for the rights of an entire species under threat of extermination (oh, if only!). Included in this rant were the usual attacks on mankind. Naturally, being cool, calm and collected (and a man) I did not react to any of the goading and kept returning to the subject at hand – the stink. I think she calmed down a bit when I mentioned that she didn’t seem to wear it. (Well, you have to humour women sometimes or they won’t have sex with you.)
She rattled off a number of different brand names that her female network/magazines seemed to be currently into, and after a few thoughts, highlighted one particular one that she and her immediate peer group had also found unpleasant. Her description was that it smelt like bad body odour, especially the longer in the day it was worn. We agreed that this must be the one I’d been vomiting over on the Victoria line. She then announced quizzically that it must be okay really, because it was a reasonably expensive perfume. It must just be us. It couldn’t possibly be that something you spend nearly 40 Pounds for a tiny bottle of, could be wrong.
What could I say? Launch into an explanation of how easy it is to market rubbish by hiking up the price? Explain advertising techniques? Continue with derogatory comments about gullible stupid women being prime advertising fodder? No, it was late. Time to calm her down, and see what the sex options were.
England's England 