7 Reasons

Tag: 7 reasons

  • 7 Reasons The Cassette Is Better Than The CD

    7 Reasons The Cassette Is Better Than The CD

    1.  CD Case Design Flaw: Part A. Whichever genius designed the CD case was/is not a genius. A genius would not have made the breadth of the case so bloody tiny that the name of the artist/album is impossible to see unless you have your nose pressed up against it. The breadth of the cassette case was ideal. Perfectly readable from a sensible distance and far less risk of adding a plastic splinter to your face.

    2.  CD Case Design Flaw: Part B. One for the environmentalists among you. The CD case uses three parts. The cassette case uses two. It isn’t difficult to work out where Global Warming came from is it?

    3.  Double-sided. When you bought an album on tape, you were in fact getting two mini albums. And A-side and a B-side. Musicians actually took this into account when putting the track listing together. And it made a huge difference. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and What’s The Story (Morning Glory?) were both released on tape. Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants was not. Coincidence?

    4.  Sturdiness. A cassette is to a hammer what a HobNob is a to a cup of tea. The CD is a rich tea finger. Pathetic.

    5.  Write Protection Override. In the good old days when cassettes appeared on every shelf in Our Price, you could go to bed on a Sunday night happy in the knowledge that you wouldn’t ever have to set foot in that store. That is because you’d just used a bit of masking tape on your father’s copy of Born In The USA and recorded that week’s Top 20 over it.

    6.  Manual Rewind. Sticking your little finger into a cassette and giving it a turn one way or the other made you feel in control of your music collection. Sticking your little finger through the middle of a CD and spinning it makes you look like a prick. And you’ll get a knuckle cut.

    7.  Labeling. It was so easy to write on a cassette. Usually it came with specially designed labels anyway. All you had to do was get out the biro. With a CD though, you need a special pen. Does a special pen come with a blank CD? Does it hell. You have to go and find a branch of bloody Hobby Craft. And of course that is miles away. On an industrial estate. Next to a Wickes and Charlies Car Wash and a burger van.

  • 7 Reasons You Shouldn’t go to the Doctor’s

    7 Reasons You Shouldn’t go to the Doctor’s

    1.  Hand-wash.  Little plastic dispensers of antiseptic hand-wash: They’re inside the main entrance, they’re in the reception area, they’re in the waiting room, they’re in the doctor’s office, they’re everywhere!  They outnumber patients by about 40-1; they outnumber patients’ hands by about 20.5-1 (there was a one-armed man).  Why could they possibly need so many?  It will bother you.

    2.  Sick people.  There are sick people at the doctor’s surgery, it’s full of them:  Coughing, retching, groaning, wailing, with blotches, pustules, buboes and weeping sores; it’s more like Hell’s waiting room than Dr Butterworth’s.  If I ever write a historical novel about the Black Death in medieval Europe I’ll visit the doctor’s for inspiration – and just hope I live long enough to complete it.

    3.  Light.  The soulless, ceaseless hum of the fluorescent strip-lights is the soundtrack to your stay in the waiting room.  Worse still, their glow bathes everything and everyone in an unnatural light, giving the room’s occupants a grey, bleached-out pallor that makes them appear unwell, even if they’re not.

     

    4.  Magazines.  Due to the Swine Flu scare they no longer have magazines in my local surgery; no Country Life, no Woman’s Weekly – in fact, nothing to read at all.  Presumably they think our hands would be too slick from the hand-wash to leaf through the pages.  Fortunately, on my last visit to the doctor, I had a copy of Vanity Fair with me, so I pulled that out of my bag and began to read.  My fellow patients – envious, I assume – saw my magazine and started moving toward it.  They rose slowly from their seats and shuffled gradually forward, eventually forming a groaning, coughing semi-circle around me.  With their fluorescent strip-light pallor, obvious wounds and missing limb they resembled the un-dead.  Fortunately, the doctor called me in before they started to feast on my brains.*

    5.  Manliness.  Convention has it that real men don’t visit the doctor.  This is nonsense.  If he has misplaced a limb, his elbow has unaccountably turned purple, or his urine is pure Bovril, a man should visit the doctor.  In all other cases, he should soldier on.

    6.  Discouragement.  They don’t want you to see you.  Why would they?  They might catch something dreadful or you might try to show them your hemorrhoids.  If they really wanted to see you they would open outside of office hours and they’d give you an appointment less than a week into the future.  They might also consent to visit you at home on occasions other than your imminent death.  They do these things to discourage you from seeking medical advice.  If you don’t go to see the doctor, their whole system runs more smoothly.  And that’s the way they like it.

    7.  Feelings.  Doctor’s surgeries aren’t just places to treat your physical ailments, they’re places that are concerned with your general wellbeing too.  These days, they seem just as concerned with your emotional wellbeing as they are with your physical health.  This isn’t necessarily a good thing:

    Bond strode into the uncluttered, homely office.  After some light conversation, the G.P. asked how he felt about his condition.

    “Do you expect me to talk, Dr Blofeld?”

    “No Mr Bond, I expect you to cry”

    break

    No one wants that, who knows where it may lead?

    break

    *Did I mention that I had a bit of a temperature?

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Live In Lagos

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Live In Lagos

    Elbowing us out of the way and lounging on our sofa this week is photographer and all round nice gal, Sarah Ansell. Having lived and worked in Lagos between 1995-98 who better to tell us why to live there? Well, maybe someone who lives there right now, but we don’t know any of those. Obviously these reasons are based on her experiences of life there a few years ago and so they may not be an accurate reflection of life there in 2010. But no one is really bothered about that are they? You can view Sarah’s showcase of work over at SarahCanterbury.com. It is well worth the visit.

    1. A greater tolerance of the M25. Once you’ve cleared the joy that is Murtala Mohammed International Airport, the first thing that strikes you about Lagos is the driving. And I use that word in its very loosest sense. Go-Slows (their wonderful name for traffic jams) are the norm and as for adhering to something akin to a Highway Code, pah! No such thing! It’s each man (or in my case, woman) for him(her)self. Don’t worry about the direction the traffic is meant to be facing – see a space, take it! Add to this all sorts of delights: habitual fuel shortages; attempting to drive through black fumes churned out by ancient vehicles liable to shed exhaust pipes at any moment (MOTs? Hahaha!); avoiding rust heaps abandoned at the side of the road; passengers leaping on and off buses; road sellers trying to talk you in to that must-have plastic toilet seat purchase; beggars on skateboards; and the occasional dead body (sadly I kid you not). As if this wasn’t enough, all is accompanied by the din of a thousand car horns. The M25 is a doddle after this.

    2. Communing with nature. For lovers of wildlife, Lagos is a quite marvellous place to get up close and personal with creatures in a manner you could only dream of back home in Britain. There’s nothing quite like opening your pencil drawer at work and seeing a frantic scurrying of cockroaches to sharpen your hand-eye coordination and speed up those reflexes. Ditto the reaction time on seeing a rat run across your sitting room to hide behind the bookcase when you’re home alone at 10.30 on a Friday night. Or any night for that matter. Also, where else could you have a real live gecko as a wall ornament in your dining room? Lagos is also an excellent place in which to overcome silly phobias – no longer do I run shrieking from teeny tiny spiders (or even the big ones), but embrace them with equanimity. Well, not literally embrace them or they would get squashed and I’d suffer from spider murdering guilt. I should pay homage here, too, to the humble mosquito. Ah, the fun of being awakened from your slumbers by that distinctive whiny noise and having to go into full on Rambo attack mode with a rolled-up newspaper while you’re still half asleep. That’s assuming, of course, that you can locate the bugger.

    3. An appreciation of the finer things in life. Baths with clear water in which you are not perched on grains of brown rust doubling as a makeshift mat. Electricity that works (for electricity substitute telephones, lifts, pretty much anything really) and the knowledge that the power isn’t suddenly going to cut out just as Nasser Hussain faces Curtley Ambrose with 2 runs needed off the last ball. PAH! Hairdressers: I never quite summoned up the courage to have my hair cut there, so trips back to the UK every 6 months always began with a hat wearing trip to the hairdressers – a maximum of 30 minutes after arriving home. I have the fondest memories of the subsequent sheer joy of sporting a “do” for the next six weeks that didn’t make me resemble Hair Bear (Google the Hair Bear Bunch if you’re too young to remember him!). Croquet played on the lawn during a weekend trip to the High Commissioner’s residence in Ibadan. I felt very posh. And mushrooms. Oh how I missed mushrooms.

    4. The thrill of living on the edge. I appreciate that living on the edge is not exclusive to Lagos, but it is the only place I’ve lived where the excitement of a Friday night trip downtown included being caught up inadvertently in an exhilarating car chase complete with gunfire. Mercifully I wasn’t driving! A G&T in The Red Lion has always seemed a little tame in comparison since. Then there’s living in a compound surrounded by razor wire & patrolled by gate guards; negotiating army & police roadblocks in bulletproof glassed cars (“have you got something for my Easter?”); being bussed to work with an armed policeman and accompanying security vehicle because the office was in a dodgy part of town; and the very real danger of a potential car-jack. All a little removed from nipping out to Sainbury’s on a Tuesday afternoon in February. Just call me Lara Croft!

    5. The ability to reinvent yourself. Fed up with your mundane existence? Then change it! You can be whoever you want to be. Just pop along to any street corner and pick yourself a fresh identity, complete with sparkly new passport & a full set of supporting documents. You’ll also be well placed to learn from the finest scammers in the world.

    6. A reminder that there’s always someone worse off than you. Lagosians are truly inspiring and I do mean that sincerely – their faith & resilience in the face of adversity is astonishing. Plus they have lots of fab names like Patience, Charity & Blessing and give uplifting names to their businesses. Buying your tin of beans in Goodness & Mercy Enterprises or God’s Favour Enterprises seems so much more edifying than in a store with a name like Lidl (not that I have anything against names like Lidl – I am just using artistic license, you understand). Also, having never lived somewhere before where it took no less than 5 men to drill a hole, I appreciate their inventiveness when it comes to job creation.

    7. The lack of snow. It has to be said that it’s highly unlikely you will be bothered by a preponderance of snow in Lagos. That’s a good enough reason all by itself to live there. Though it can get a bit wet at times.

  • 7 Reasons MPs Should Travel First Class

    7 Reasons MPs Should Travel First Class

    1.  The Importance Of Being Important. Most people like feeling important. It gives them an enormous sense of wellbeing. (Thanks to Damon Albarn for that insight). When you feel important, you feel proud. When you feel proud you take pride in what you do. Generally it means you do something well for once. Just think, if we got 75% of all MPs in first class, Great Britain would be 75% better. Believe it.

    2.  Forget Forgetfulness. Working in first class means you have more space. It means you don’t feel overcrowded or have the sensation that everyone is looking over your shoulder. In this relaxed state of mind you are unlikely to be flustered when you realise you have already pulled into the station. In turn it means you are unlikely to leave important documents on the train. Like the names, addresses and shoe sizes of all your friendly neighbourhood swinging couples.

    3.  The Art Of Complaining. These days the British like complaining. It is a fairly new phenomenon. Usually such pathetic behaviour was left to the French, while those in this country sucked it up and displayed their stiff upper lip. But for one reason or another those days are fast dissipating and now there is nothing a Brit likes more than a good old moan. Particularly if it is about an MP. Letting MPs travel first class gives us stuff to talk about in the pub, listen to on the radio, watch on Question Time and write about on websites.

    4.  The Art Of Moaning. MPs, being British themselves, also like to moan. Moaning about having to pay back expenses or moaning about the lack of fresh water crabs in their moat or moaning about Gordon Brown moaning about David Cameron moaning about Labour moaning about the Conservatives. Quite frankly I am bored of it. The Winter Olympics are on and all I can think about is how cool it would be to put Harriet Harman in a bobsleigh. If we force MPs to travel standard class we will hear moaning about not having the correct environment to work in. I don’t want to hear that. It reeks of an excuse. Stick them in first class and they no longer have an excuse for doing a sub-standard job.

    5.  News Of The Country. Newspapers are free in first class. Perhaps this will encourage one or two of them to read one and find out what is actually happening in this country. Then perhaps one of the two would like to do something about it instead of just talking about it.

    6.  Strangers On A Train. If the MPs are up at the front of the train, it means there is an empty seat in front of you. Who knows who might join you on your trip to Reading. Maybe a splendidly pretty young thing who doesn’t use text speak? Or maybe a female Canadian Mountie? Or maybe both? Not that either of us would even think about looking at them. We’d be far more interested in cows rushing by our window.

    7.  Fight Club. No MPs with all us ‘different type of people’ down in carriage D, means it will remain the quiet carriage. That has to be a good thing. For First Great Western.

  • 7 Reasons To Love The Letter B

    7 Reasons To Love The Letter B

    1.  B is for Brilliance. Don’t take this website as evidence. Take a look here and here. It is all around us. Brilliance is good. Without it we’d be distinctly average. And no one wants that.

    2.  B is for Britain. Yes, I am biased (and not just because I feel the need to be given the subject of this post), but Britain is the best country in the world. It has history. Spectacular geography. Culture. Art. Morris dancing. Cheese rolling. Test Match Special. Marks & Spencer. Gardens. The Archers. Castles. Cornish Pasties. Colin Firth. Allotments. And me.

    3.  B is for Brown. No, not Gordon. Sauce. Brown Sauce is great. Brown Sauce doesn’t need Piers Morgan to make it look good.

    4.  B is for Beauty. Life is beautiful. People like looking at beautiful things. People are beautiful. People like looking at beautiful people. I like looking at pictures of Sandra Bullock.

    5.  B is for Baths. At the 7 Reasons HQ, the bath is rarely sans person. (Though unlike the 7 Reasons sofa it is never occupied by more than one person at a time). A bath is relaxing. A bath is stimulating. A bath is a place of discovery. Just ask Archimedes. If he hadn’t jumped into the bath on that glorious day in 240BC, we wouldn’t have submarines.

    6.  B is for the Beach Boys. Just to show that while I am biased towards my country I am not xenophobic, I am going to ignore The Beatles – a pretty good band – and head stateside to find the best. Not only were The Beach Boys brilliant exponents when it came to creating the 2:30 pop song, they also created the masterpiece that is Pet Sounds. One of – if not the – greatest albums ever made.

    7.  B is for Buses. Without buses we wouldn’t have seen Holiday on the Buses. Or Summer Holiday. We would also have forgotten about Darren Day five years before we eventually did.

    *See here for 7 Reasons To Love The Letter A.

  • 7 Reasons AC Milan vs Manchester United was a Disappointment

    7 Reasons AC Milan vs Manchester United was a Disappointment

    1.  Pancake Day.  Who the hell schedules a match on Pancake Day?  After all, no one plays on Christmas Day or on Easter Sunday.  That’s because important holidays should, rightly, be observed.  I had to listen to it on the radio while making the pancakes.  Why couldn’t they have played it on Valentine’s Day instead?  I love football, after all.

    2.  Hype.  No mere football match could possibly live up to the preposterous hyperbole that preceded this game.  For a week on BBC 5Live they trailed it as “David Beckham’s AC Milan vs Manchester United”.  David Beckham’s AC Milan?  Am I missing something?  The LA Galaxy player who is on loan at AC Milan?  That David Beckham?  The David Beckham who isn’t the captain, manager or owner of AC Milan?  The David Beckham who doesn’t usually start for AC Milan?  Silvio Berlusconi owns AC Milan and he’s the President of Italy, so to describe the match as “Italy vs Manchester United” would have more accurate and less preposterous than “David Beckham’s AC Milan vs Manchester United”.

    3.  Palestine.  Fergie’s tactics were odd to say the least.  Both Graham Taylor and Alan Green remarked on it.  He set Manchester United up with a five man midfield and had Park Ji-Sung marking the Palestine Liberation Organisation.  I’m no tactical genius, but even I could see that Milan’s goal threat did not come from the P.L.O.

    4.  The Referee.  Early in the first half, Ronaldinho went down on the edge of the opposition penalty area.  The ref didn’t give Milan a free kick.  Technically he was correct, there was no foul, but he obviously hadn’t read the script.  Has he never seen a Hollywood movie?  Of course he should have let Beckham have a free kick from the edge of the area.  The occasion demanded it.  Wayne Rooney obviously hadn’t read the script either.

    5.  Alan Green.  He came back from some time off to resume his monomaniacal ranting about David Beckham.  Among the first words Green said on taking over the microphone during the first half (after his customary dig at Sir Alex Ferguson)  were, “Beckham, in 24 minutes, has taken two free kicks”, he went on to complain that he had been, “static in the midfield”.  There were 21 other players he could have mentioned, but no, not Alan Green.  The one occasion on which Alan Green didn’t mention Beckham, was when the Man United fans sang “One David Beckham” as he left the pitch.  I don’t know what Beckham ever did to Alan Green, but I hope he does it again.  Frequently and with vigour.

    6.  Behaviour.  As I write this it is over eleven hours since the match ended.  There have been no reports of players drunkenly cruising the autostrada in golf carts or capsizing pedalos in Lake Como.  Why can’t footballers act more like the gentlemen that play cricket and rugby?  Football players are over-hyped, over-paid and over-behaved.

    7.  Excitement.  There were five goals and a last minute sending off, Rooney was brilliant – it was an enthralling and exciting match.  You might wonder how this is disappointing.  Let me assure you, it’s bloody disappointing when you’ve got a piece of paper in front of you with the heading “7 Reasons That AC Milan vs Manchester United was a Disappointment”, which is just as well, really.

  • 7 Reasons to go and Watch Invictus

    7 Reasons to go and Watch Invictus

     

     

    1.  Morgan Freeman.  Usually the veteran actor gets typecast as God, but in Invictus he gets promoted and puts in a superb performance as Nelson Mandela.  His accent is a bit dodgy, but the same could be said of all South Africans.  Either that or they genuinely believe it’s called “Sowt Efrica”.

    2.  Rugby.  There aren’t many decent films about rugby and the depiction of the game is pretty good in Invictus.  It’s not up to the standard of This Sporting Life, but that’s almost 50 years old and is about the wrong rugby – the one they play in the North-West that makes you shout “For fucks sake, run around him” when you accidentally see television coverage of it.  Perhaps I’m missing some subtle nuance of that game, but why do they always run straight into an opposing player?

    3.  Crying.  Everyone loves a good cry – something I often tell myself when I’ve put my foot in it again, and if you’re prone to crying at sport or movies, you’ll definitely cry at the conclusion of Invictus.  Eastwood manages to wring just about every ounce of emotion out of the film’s climax.  If you’re at all sensitive, you’ll cry like a girl – even if you aren’t one.

    4.  Crying.  I didn’t cry like a girl while everyone else in the cinema was blubbing though.  Oh no.  I cried when Jonah Lomu ran amok with the ball and rampaged through the defenceless England backs.  It brought it all back to me; the big bully, those poor little mites, the carnage.  Oh, the horror.

    5.  Sound.  Want to hear rugby with improbable sounds dubbed on?  Of course you do.  Go and see Invictus.  Every tackle sounds like a gunshot within a biscuit-tin within a kettle-drum within an empty water-tank within an Airbus A340 flying through a thunderstorm.  The woman sitting next to me gasped during every tackle.  She may have been mental though, there’s usually one in every cinema.

    6.  England. As the film is based on real sporting events I’m not giving anything away when I tell you that Rory Underwood scores a try for England during the film.  This is great, though the rest of the audience will not thank you for celebrating it.  Trust me.

    7.  Matt Damon.  MAAAATTTT DAAAAAMMMON!!!!!  He is brilliant in Invictus.  His South African accent is convincing and he plays Francois Pienaar with a lovely, understated dignity.  He has also transformed his entire body to play the role.  The shot in which they show his upper torso is entirely gratuitous, but his musculature is astonishing – it is physical evidence of the dedication that he brought to his preparation for the film.  Being much shorter than the real Francois Pienaar, he had to stand on a box for several of his scenes.  I explained this to my friend before we went in to see the film. “Matt Damon’s pretty short”, I said, demonstrating his height with my hand at about chest level.  I then raised my hand above me, stood on tiptoes, and extended my right arm fully, “but Francois Pienaar’s enormous, he’s 6ft 3!!!  That’s…er…an inch taller than we are”.  I have already been made to feel quite silly for that, thank you for asking.

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  • Russian Roulette Sunday – 7 Reasons: The Comic Strip

    Russian Roulette Sunday – 7 Reasons: The Comic Strip

    Well, it’s Russian Roulette Sunday again, and this week we’re re-visiting an earlier topic – possibly for the final time.

  • 7 Reasons Owl City’s Fireflies Is Nonsense

    7 Reasons Owl City’s Fireflies Is Nonsense

    1.  “You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep.” Ten million fireflies? Seriously? Do you know how difficult that would be to organise?

    2.  “’Cause they’d fill the open air, and leave teardrops everywhere.” Erm…if a firefly cried it would just put itself out. In fact it would probably drown itself. Logic fail and animal cruelty in one sentence. Classy.

    3.  “It’s hard to say, that I’d rather stay, 
awake when I’m asleep.” Well of course it bloody is. Even the most accomplished of sleep-talkers struggle to say what they want when they are asleep. Most of them talk about cows.

    4.  “’Cause I’d get a thousand hugs, from ten thousand lightning bugs, as they tried to teach me how to dance.” No, no and no again. So that’s one hug from every ten bugs is it? How exactly does that work then? And what the hell happened to the other 9,990,000 fireflies? Oh, that’s right. They died in a teardrop suicide pact.

    5.  “A foxtrot above my head, a sock hop beneath my bed, a disco ball is just hanging by a thread.” What? What the hell is a sock hop? Is that the thing a newly pubescent boy uses eight times a night?

    6.  “To ten million fireflies, I’m weird ’cause I hate goodbyes, I got misty eyes as they said farewell.” Yeah, not just weird to fireflies buddy. Now stop being a big tart and grow a pair.

    7.  “But I’ll know where several are, if my dreams get real bizarre, ’cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar.” What is wrong with you man? You keep fireflies in a jar? Can’t you afford a lava lamp?

  • 7 Reasons To Watch The Winter Olympics

    7 Reasons To Watch The Winter Olympics

    1.  Primetime. This time around, the Winter Olympics are in Vancouver. That means it will be shown on the TV in the evenings. Assuming you are reading this in the UK that is. Watching sport on a weeknight evening is brilliant. It is what makes life so enjoyable.

    2.  We Might Win A Medal. And if we do, it will almost certainly be won by someone we haven’t heard of. In a sport we know nothing about. But come Sports Personality of the Year in December we will all be voting for her. Or him. Or them. Those of us who aren’t voting for Rory Delap that is.

    3.  Last Chance To See. The British Ski and Snowsport Federation has gone into administration. This could be the last time you get to see Great Britain represented at the Winter Olympics. History in the making.

    4.  Anthems. It gives us a chance to hear National anthems that we don’t normally in the Summer Olympics. The Austrian and the Swiss for example. I can’t tell you whether they are any good or not because it has been four years since I last heard them. But we’ll find out next week.

    5.  Curling. Despite being one of the earliest nations to have adopted widespread use of the vacuum cleaner, Britain is actually quite good at a sport that involves sweeping.  Even more astonishingly, the captain of our women’s curling team is a teenager.  Predictably, she isn’t involved in the sweeping, preferring to leave a big mess containing worn clothes, dirty plates, miscellaneous make up and cds without cases in the path of the stone.*

    6.  Commentary. The Winter Olympics provides commentators with the opportunity to commentate (naturally) on sports that they are none-too-familiar with. It gives you the chance to shout at the TV whenever they make a mistake. But there are also commentators who see it as an opportunity to make a name for themselves. They’ll try and make the sport far more exciting that is actually is. Don’t take my word for it. Watch this. And make sure you stay with it until 2:20.

    7.  Baring (sic) Up Under The Strain. I know everyone has seen this, but I can’t think of another reason. And I chose this particular version of the video because it is called, ‘bob sled chick rips pants and shows her ass in a thong…sexy’. Thanks jimni999
    .

    *This is not true, Eve Muirhead is bloody brilliant – and probably very tidy too.