Dave's Faves 2 November

Track List:
1. Pavement - Cut Your Hair 
2. Menomena - Baton 
3. Slow Club - Giving up on Love 
4. Japandroids - The House that Heaven Built 
5. Les Savy Fav - Pots and Pans 
6. Albert Hammond Jr. - In Transit 
7. Girls - Lust for Life 
8. Titus Andronicus - Ecce Homo 
9. Temper Trap - Need Your Love 
10. Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You 
11. Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945 
12. Japanther - First of All 
13. Chromatics - Kill For Love

My Little McEnroe (fiction)

It took me years to realise that Sarah had been fucking Michael's tennis coach. I suppose I did always think it strange the frequency with which Michael was going to tennis—three or four times a week on occasion, and at varying times. The impromptu tennis lessons sprung upon me out of nowhere; I always thought he was just developing urgent and capricious desires for emergency tennis coaching. 'What a promising young sportsman,' I used to think. I was so proud of my little McEnroe.

I think I really started to suspect something was wrong when Sarah started taking Michael to tennis lessons but forgetting to take him with her. I would come home late to find Michael sitting on the sofa with a bag of crisps in one hand, the T.V. remote in the other and his mother nowhere to be seen.

“Where's your mother?” I would ask.

“She's taking me to tennis,” was his reply.

Things weren't quite adding up. I was fairly sure that going to tennis coaching usually involved some sort of combination of tennis and coaching, but then I never was very good at sport. Michael used to bamboozle me with tales of his sporting victories; stories of how he'd back-slapped the T-ball into the back of the net from thirty-five yards out. It all sounded so impressive.

It finally clicked when one day, in a naïve attempt at familial bonding I challenged my son to a game of tennis, hoping to witness the fruits of my huge investment in lessons.

He didn't even own a racket.

Do you have a nectar card?

I

It's a Saturday afternoon. Peter is in the pub reading the Independent and waiting for Nigel at their usual table: far away enough from the toilets to avoid the smell, yet close enough for them to make frequent trips now that the years have taken their toll on the middle-aged bladders. Nigel enters with a fresh tattoo on his forehead marked in thick black ink and a beaming smile on his face.

“Hi Pete, how's it going?” he asks nonchalantly.

“Hi mate,” he says while finishing the sentence he was reading in the paper, before looking up at Nigel's forehead and sighing. “What have you got on your forehead?”

“It's a tattoo Peter, obviously. It says “no, I do not have a Nectar card.”

“Well, I don't have one either but I don't brag about it.”

“Yeah but, you know when you buy something in a shop and they ask you if you have a Nectar card?”

“Yeah.”

“And it's really annoying because you don't have one...”

“A little bit, I suppose.”

“So I got this tattoo, which explains clearly that I do not own a Nectar card. That way cashiers can just read the information off my forehead rather than having to ask me, and I can just show the cashier my forehead instead of having to tediously explain my situation regarding Nectar cards. I'm literally saving hundreds of hours.”

“But you just say “no.””

“What?”

“When somebody asks you if you have a Nectar card, you just say “no.” It takes a fraction of a second, and you probably say it while bagging up your shopping or entering your pin number anyway, and thus you can exchange the information at no detriment to your inexplicably busy schedule.”

“Hey, why did you say “inexplicably busy schedule” in such a sarcastic tone?”

“You just spent a couple of hours getting a completely redundant forehead tattoo.”

“Yeah but... Okay so I may not save time at the checkout per se, but at least it's one less word I have to say to the cashier. I hate those people.”

“They having a terribly boring job to do and they work for nothing, you could at least show them some respect.”

“But they have spots and smell like grease.”

“So what?”

“And they always wear those stupid jackets. They're like walking advertisements.”

“That's their uniform.”

“Yeah well... I hate poor people.”

II

Nigel is in Homebase, bagging up curtain hooks, batteries and a floral mug. His excitement is tangible; this is the first time he's had the chance to put his new tattoo into action. This is going to be great, Nigel thought, I am such a practical man. This will show Peter who's awesome.

“That's £12.32 please,” said the cashier.

“There you go.”

“Do you have a Nectar card?”

“I'm sorry what?”

“Do you have a Nectar card?”

“Read my forehead.”

“'No... I do not have a... Nectar card.' Oh right, sorry. Force of habit.”

“Well it's not okay. I spent a lot of money on this tattoo; the least you could do is read it.”

“Sorry I didn't notice. I process dozens of customers every day. I have to ask if they have a Nectar card; it's my job.”

“But I have conveniently provided the answer to your question in writing on my face in order to avoid this trouble and save our time.”

“It seems like you're only wasting more time by having this conversation. Do you think I enjoy having to ask everyone if they have a Nectar card. “Do you have a Nectar card? No.” “Do you have a Nectar card? No.” “Do you have a Nectar card? No.” For every single customer. Nobody has a Nectar card; they're completely useless. I know that as well as you. I'm not an idiot. I don't do this for fun, you know? I don't go round all my friends and family asking if they have Nectar cards and discussing the potential benefits of Nectar cards. I work for a multi-national corporation that is affiliated with the Nectar card company and therefore I am required, as part of my contract, to ask every customer if they have a Nectar card, and enquire as to whether or not they intend to get one. You don't need to get a tattoo to tell me how annoying that is.”

“Yeah well... I hate poor people.”

And with that Nigel fled into the distance. The sound of his plastic bags bumping irritatingly against his knees drowned out the cashier's explanation that actually he was from a middle-class family and was working part-time in order to earn a bit of money for himself and, by the way, could he interest Nigel in a Hombase store card?

The Pursuit of the Adolescent Beard

If I were King for a day and I could do whatever I wanted... I would probably be disappointed by the limited power of the monarchy in modern day Britain. But if I was to become King and with this change I gained some sort of sovereignty over the nation there would be one law I would wish to enact. “What is it David? Would you aim to create jobs in order to combat this country's staggering levels of unemployment?” Of course not, guess again. “Would you reform the tax system and make it impossible for the super-rich to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax?” Don't be ridiculous, I have no time for these petty scruples! For there is one issue closer to my heart than anything else in the world; one issue that makes my heart swell with passion and stirs great indignation within my soul, and if I could make one law in this country it would be this: you should only be allowed to try and grow a beard if you are able to attain full facial coverage.

I don't literally mean the whole face, forehead and all; I'm not that ambitious. I just mean the parts of the face where beard usually grows. The parts of the face which, if you were to lie down on your front and rest your head in your two hands, while looking upwards in a naïve and playful manner, it would be the part of your face covered by your two hands. Plus the upper lip too—that is also an important part of the beard situation.

If you do literally have full facial hair coverage—forehead and everything—then maybe overgrown but fashionable facial hair isn't for you, and you might want to shave that. On the plus side though, if you've got a forehead covered in hair then you essentially have fully customisable eyebrows. You can also combat the effects of ageing with a completely manageable hairline, so it's not all doom and gloom.

Growing up as a teenage boy among other teenage boy I encountered so many people trying to grow beards before their time. They would come into school with about twelve hairs on their faces; five around the left sideburn area, five around the right sideburn area and two inch-long hairs protruding from the chin.

“Have you noticed, David, I'm growing a beard?” they would say to me, audibly proud of their achievements. “Where's your beard? Can you not grow a beard? How ridiculous you look standing next to me and my beard,” they would gloat, while twisting both their chin hairs around their forefinger (the adolescent alternative to the classic beard-stroke manoeuvre).

My reply would always be the same: “No. Like you I've also grown twelve hairs on my face, but unlike you I didn't think my face needed to be adorned with pubes. Do you know who else has a beard like that? Have you seen that woman that walks up and down the Botley Road rifling through bins and collecting carrier bags? The one that shouts at you if you make eye-contact, with the questionable personal hygeine? The Bag Lady, that's right. You have the Bag Lady's beard.”

Then they would say, “wow David that's a pretty hurtful thing to say to your friend; you should try being nicer to people and then maybe everyone would like you a little bit more,” or some rubbish like that; I don't know I wouldn't be listening. “And anyway, even if I do have the Bag Lady's beard then you've said the word beard so it's still a beard.”

“No it's not. When a woman has twelve hairs on her face she has a beard; when a man has twelve hairs on his face he has to shave. That's a cutting edge observation about gendered societal responses to body hair for you there.”

“Thanks David, you are great.”

“Yeah, I suppose you're right.”

Where was I? Oh yes: don't grow a shit beard. If possible, go back in time and tell your sixteen-year-old self not to grow a shit beard.

Or, you know, do what you like. I probably won't say anything.

Trains for the Dissatisfied (fiction)

When the train to London slows to a standstill in front of me I realise that my carriage is broken. That might sound dramatic or even catastrophic at a push, but I can assure you it's not. Really the train is fine; it pulled up to the platform effortlessly and it will leave in the same way (effortlessly that is; it will continue on it's course through the opposite side of the station if you have to be so pedantic). The train is quite capable of carrying on as normal; the engine hasn't blown. The wheels are resting on top of the rails just as they should; they haven't become de-railed through a collision with an abandoned vehicle or a particularly large pile of dead leaves. No, the problem is not with the whole train but with a single carriage. “Which carriage?” I hear you ask. My carriage, as I said.

At least I can only assume it's my carriage. For you see my carriage—the one listed on my seat reservation—is carriage C, and working from the back of the train I've walked past E and D and found myself at a carriage missing a designated letter. The LED display on the side of the carriage that has provided me with the letters of the preceding ones seems to be out of order. This hasn't stumped me though, for I've managed to deduce, using my advanced knowledge of the alphabet, that the next carriage must be carriage C, and therefore my carriage.

And that is the extent of the faults with my carriage: the LED display isn't working, meaning that inside the train the seat reservations won't be shown electronically above the reserved seats, and thus those that have pre-booked seats are forced to contest with those free spirits who just turn up on trains unprepared and hope to find a place to sit. Like I said before: it's not a big deal.

In fact the problem is even smaller than one may have previously assumed, for there are dozens of seats available for myself and the other passengers wishing to find seats in carriage C of the 9.36 train from Cambridge to London Euston. I discard my reservation and find a seat facing forwards next to a window, which is all I ever ask of a seat on public transport. My satisfaction seems to be shared with all of my fellow passengers except for one woman, whose voice is inescapable:

“The seat reservations aren't being shown,” she observes, “we're not going to get our seats.” Although her language is plain her discontent is detectable. She has two small children following behind her, to whom I assume she is speaking but I doubt they're listening. While her comments may have been spoken at her children they were obviously meant to be heard by a wider audience.

A few moments pass and the ticket inspector starts to make his way down the carriage and the woman approaches him. The aisles are narrow and there's nowhere for this poor man to run.

“Why aren't the seat reservations being shown?” she asks.

“I'm afraid the LED displays aren't working in this carriage,” he replies.

“I have two kids and I went out of my way to reserve seats around a table so that the three of us could sit together. Now there are other people sitting in our places.”

“I'm really sorry about that.”

“Well that's not good enough.”

“I'm sorry but there's nothing much I can do.”

“I'm not very happy about this.”

“I know. I do apologise.”

“Hmm.”

The ticket inspector carries on walking and the disgruntled woman pauses before fitting herself and her two children into two seats; quite easily too may I add.

Why do some people insist on doing that? Why do they have to complain about insignificant things to people completely powerless to change anything? Of course that ticket inspector doesn't know how to fix the LED displays in a carriage. Even if he did have the electronic expertise to repair such a fault it's not part of his job anyway; he's too busy inspecting tickets among other things. Or maybe there are no other things, I don't know, but the point is that that woman was never going to get anywhere directing her complaints at him, and if she stopped to think for a second she would have realised that. Or perhaps she knew full well the futility of her whining but spoke up anyway just to spread a bit of dissatisfaction. I bet on the way here she had a go at her taxi driver about the traffic.

I can't see the point in getting hung up on these things; on the traffic or the weather or the price of fish or the Wi-Fi capabilities of your local Starbucks or the LED displays of a train carriage. Most of the time the problem isn't even caused by anybody you could point a finger at so why bother? It's hard enough to be happy without dwelling on these tedious grievances.

Thankfully the woman doesn't speak up for the rest of the journey and we make it to Euston unscathed. I think she realised rather quickly that two train seats provide more than ample room for the average woman and two tiny children, but I doubt she'll be hunting down the designer at First Great Western trains to thank him for such a spacious journey.  

The World's Worst Tea Towel

About ten years ago now my poor mother was savagely ripped off when she purchased a tea towel from Cumnor Primary School. This tea towel is covered in the self-portraits of local artists and I can only imagine it was produced as a form of egotistical self-promotion for the featured painters. As if this shameless self-endorsement was not bad enough, it gets worse: the artwork on this tea towel is appalling. I am not being snobbish or elitist, the artists on this tea towel truly are among the least talented painters ever to sell a piece of artwork. If you don't believe me, take a look at this picture of the offending article:

Hopefully from this you can get an idea of the low-grade artistry we're dealing with.

These portraits are generally terrible. Very few of the artists actually manage to provide any sort of realistic depiction of their own facial features, and most of them use an incredible infantile form of minimalism when using simple dots for eyes or a straight line for a mouth, which is really quite ineffective at portraying the idiosyncrasies of the human form. I don't know how these untutored philistines have the gall to sell my mother such a weak piece of art. To be quite frank, my nine-year-old niece could provide a better portrait than most of the ones featured on this tea towel. Admittedly at nine years old my niece is older than most of the artists on the towel, but at least she doesn't have the ludicrous delusions of grandeur that these young art students seem to entertain.

I think at this point it is important to show you a number of individual examples, so that you can really see the standard of some of these atrocious portraits. The first one I want to show you is by a man named Joel:

At least I assume Joel is his name.; he seems to have used some sort of snail-like creature in place of the letter 'e.'

This portrait of Joel's is hopelessly abstract, and he seems completely incapable of drawing anything resembling a human being. He seems to have drawn two eyes and then from one of these eyes sprouts two stick-thin legs and one of his arms. Joel has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the human form. It appears that he believes the left eyeball is the central crux of the human body, from which all other limbs and body parts grow. I wonder if Joel even so much as glanced in a mirror or some other random reflective surface before he drew this picture of himself. I highly doubt that Joel's limbs actually sprout from his left eyeball, as I am unsure whether it would even be possible for an eyeball to provide the necessary blood flow and nerve endings in order to control two arms and a leg. If a human could survive with such a deformed body shape, then I don't think they would be able to produce such a life-like image of themselves on a tea towel. Besides, even if this genuinely is how Joel looks, he has missed the point; the tea towel is only meant to be covered in facial portraits, and the rest of the body is superfluous. In order to maintain a sense of congruity with the other portraits he only needed to draw himself from the shoulders upwards. Perhaps he is incapable of following simple instructions, what with all his energy seemingly being spent on controlling three heavy limbs through his left eyeball.

Let's move on from Joel to another young artist called James:

His portrait is at a slight angle because I'm too lazy/incompetent to fix it.

James' picture is another strange one. Like Joel, he seems to be unaware of the places from which limbs attach to the body. However while Joel at least knew the correct number of limbs usually found on humans, it looks like James thinks that he has about 8 limbs, all of which grow straight from his head. I think what James has done, is instead of drawing his own face, he has drawn what he imagines he would look like if he were a spider. It's odd the way such simple instructions can be misconstrued in such a ridiculous fashion. Sebastian is another man that has fundamentally misunderstood the task required of him:

His portrait is that big thing in the middle, in case you too have trouble interpreting pictures.

What Sebastian has done here, is he has heard the instruction "Sebastian, can you please draw a self-portrait for me," and interpreted this as "Sebastian, can you please draw a picture of Diglett from the animated children's television series 'pokémon' for me." Seriously, he has just drawn a picture of Diglett. If you don't know what Diglett looks like, (you disappoint me) study this:

Diglett

Then this:

Sebastian

They're the same! I don't know how he could make that mistake; he must be a total idiot. You know, I would find this funny except my mother paid a lot of money for this tea towel; it cost almost four pounds. Therefore I'm going to do the only reasonable thing I can do, and I'm going to go down to Cumnor Primary School with this ten-year-old, used tea towel and demand my mother's hard-earned money back. She paid for a collection of self-portraits by local young artists; she did not pay for a poorly drawn depiction of Diglett.

The Black Eyed Please Stop Making Music

Disclaimer: After the publication of this article I was made aware that there is actually a vegetable called a black-eye pea. The following piece of writing therefore contains a glaring oversight on my part, and even though the words I have published are fully editable, I've chosen not to do so because I can't think of a whole article's worth of new jokes. It would be a whole lot less embarrassing for me if you could pretend that I'm being ironically stupid. Enjoy!

The Black Eyed Peas are a band that make popular music for money. This one time they wrote this really good pop song called “Where is the love?” but they later decided that things like innovation and artistic merit got in the way of all the money they could make writing songs about Fergie's lady lumps. I'm not going to dwell on their music too much because I had a delicious mushroom-based pasta dish for dinner and I wouldn't want to throw it all up. Instead I want to examine the cause of their evil, money-grabbing ways, and I think we can trace the problem back to the naming of the band. I mean, how terrible a band name is the Black Eyed Peas?

First of all, what sort of a subject for a band name is a pea? Why would they choose to conjure up associations with a small, boring and insignificant vegetable? Such characteristics goes against the Black Eyed Peas' ethos of attaining widespread fame and popularity at all costs. If they were going to choose a vegetable, surely the pumpkin or the large novelty beetroot would more appropriately capture their aspirations. You know, something that is impressively big but at the same time inherently disgusting.

And these aren't just peas, but “Black Eyed” peas, which is stupid because peas don't have eyes. They don't. I know you might assume that they do, but if you really think about it, they don't. You might have seen a pea with two tiny bruises on it, which may look a bit like eyes, but they aren't. They are bruises. Maybe for a practical joke somebody managed to draw two tiny little eyes on a pea, and then they showed it to you and from then on you always thought that peas have eyes. But I can assure you that those eyes were fake, and that peas don't have eyes. In fact, I can go one step further in the clarification of things and their relation to eyes, and say that no vegetables whatsoever have eyes. This is because vegetables are not animals, and thus they have no need for eyes. I don't know if the Black Eyed Peas have made the mistake of assuming that peas are a kind of animal. Maybe they thought they were the ball-forms of large green woodlouse. Or perhaps they have never seen a pea before; however if this is the case then why would they name their band after a thing they have had such a limited experience with? For all they know peas could be evil or sexist, and I imagine they don't want to be associated with that (although their music does suggest otherwise).

I suppose you could argue that peas look a bit like eyes. I mean, they are spherical, which is pretty much the main feature of an eye. If you were going to make a face out of vegetables then of course you would use peas for the eyes. You would be mad not to. Utterly mad. Then once you've got the peas for eyes I imagine you could have like, a bit of carrot for the nose and... some carrot for the mouth. Perhaps you could use some shreds of grated carrot for the hair. Actually you could use slices of carrot for the eyes, but that would probably be a bit too much carrot; it's important that you keep the peas in there to balance out the pea:carrot ratio. Very important. There are no other vegetables.

But the Black Eyed Peas aren't making the entirely reasonable suggestion that peas look a bit like eyes, but they are saying that peas have eyes, and what's more, that these eyes are black. Why are they black? Have they been punched, or are they some sort of cartoon-style black and white eyes?

There are so many questions left unanswered. If the peas' eyes have been punched, who is going around punching all of these peas? Why would they do that? It seems incredibly unreasonable, what with the pea being one of the most harmless vegetables in the vegetable kingdom (unlike the carrot or the sweet potato). And who is this person that is so inept at punching peas that he is unable to squash said peas, and instead merely leaves their eyes bruised? He must have tiny fists.

If, conversely, the peas' eyes are black because they are involved in some sort of animated cartoon probably aimed at children, then is this a reference to the 1990s BBC children's T.V. series Poddington Peas? I find it very strange that an American pop group should decide to name their band as a sort of homage to a mediocre British children's television series. The Black Eyed Peas are mad I say. Mad. Although I suppose it would make sense if the Black Eyed Peas enjoy Poddington Peas because they are not quite ready to move on to adult television programmes, what with all the big words and attempts at artistic credibility.

All in all: it's a rubbish name for a band, and they need to think of a new one. Perhaps I could help? Will.I.Am, if you're reading this (as you probably are), how about calling your band the Massive Sell-Out Pumpkins? It may not be a great name, but at least it makes sense.