HSM

I'm so glad my last lesson on a Friday is IT. The class is always warm, stuffy and filled with girls ready to be impressed by my vast intellect. Usually I'll be playing online games, taking a nap or being "forced" to take the CosmoGirl quiz.

And on the subject of Cosmogirl, those tests are so demeaning! Why on Earth do girls do them? I couldn't care less if my inner girl is a total slut or my dream hunk will have blue eyes... (perhaps I do care a little...)

I digress. Last weeks IT lesson was different; a transaction was taking place.

"Have you brought it?"

Robin sits beside me in the corner of the room, he fidgets and his eyes dart from side to side. I'm playing an incredibly stupid flash game.

"The what?"

"Don't play games with me Jingo. Have you got the HSM?"

A smile flickers across my face. He's ashamed. I on the other hand have nothing to be ashamed of. Sure it was illegal, and quite frankly disturbing, but this was how I did business.

And on the subject of business, Torquer dominates the school stationery market. He sells shoddy crap at inflated prices and is known as: "The man who can locate certain things". It's a shame he doesn't deal with the illegal stuff or he'd make a killing.

"Why are you afraid of saying High Sch-"

"Shut up! I don't want anyone to know I like this shit!"

"Fine, fine... Have you brought the Cash?"

"Yeah it's right here" he says, patting his blazer pocket.

We exchange memory sticks. I take the Johnny Cash off him, he takes the High School Musical album (what a loser). Transaction complete. He skulks off to listen to his bootlegged music.

And so we come to the point of this post: High School Musical. Sure the plot is cliched and it's aimed at 9-12 year olds but damn those tunes are catchy! If I wasn't so ashamed I'd buy the encore edition right now and learn all those dance moves.

I tried to get Torquer to listen to the stuff but he threw away the headphone is disgust.

I was going to make this a massive post about my own musical tastes (varied) and my tendancy to sing in public (which freaks people out) but I can't, I have potato chip molarities to write about. Instead I suggest you buy the High School Musical Album, it's very good.

A Crazy Notion

Whilst clearing out my memory stick, I came across a Word file I forgot existed. The Word file contained the beginning of a story I co-wrote with a friend, two years ago; when I was young, naive and dreamed that one day I would become a novelist like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman...

I was filled with such fanciful notions back then. We held the belief that the story would eventually manifest itself into Nobel prize-winning literature.

After writing a few pages, the story was abandoned and stuffed into a memory stick, never to see the light of day.

So after such a long time I read the story. And I thought parts of the story were damn good which is why I've decided to post an extract for you to read:


He stumbled awkwardly through the blackened streets of Dvirkivschyna, his mind as uncertain as the fluctuating MICEX. All his life he had lived a secluded life of religion but after reading the Book, he had been inspired like a Russian peasant to change his life.

The book had changed his life. It had given him a new start. It had inspired him to start a new adventure and release him from the shackles of religion.

He followed the path to the harbour and approached the sand-strewn beach. But the tranquil place he used to know was filled with commotion. He watched a great dark mass of capitalist Russian scum approach the rabble of discontent Ukrainian townspeople. The megaphone blared,

“The Russian Authority does not accept the Ukraine as a legitimate state. Swear your allegiance to Russia or be crushed like the pitiful Ukrainian stink-worm under the proud borsch-eating bear of Russian inequality.”

“As the pitiful spineless Ukrainian people we submit to our Russian Oppressors. Praise be to our borsch eating neighbours!” The townspeople began to walk away donning fur hats. Boris ran in front of them and blocked their path.

“How can you cast away your Ukrainian nationalism so easily? Comrades, you have let me down…” He pointed accusingly to each one of them. This took some time but when he was finished he continued his speech.

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in Ukraine, we shall fight on the borsch ponds of our motherland, we shall fight with growing nonsensical oil referendums and economic treaties of catastrophic proportions, we shall defend our fishing potential, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight in the gas plantations and in the poor quality wheat fields of woe. And we shall never suspend inflation!”

Boris struck a noble pose with a hale of Kalashnikov fire. A ragged cheer went round. His heart welled up with pride at the sight of his Ukrainian comrades spurring him on until he realised that his bodily fluids were pouring from a bullet wound to his chest. He watched his Ukrainian comrades hug their Russian oppressors. He collapsed on the floor, alone, pitiful and lacking in blood.

So to summarise the story: It's about the struggle of one politically minded individual as he tries to prevent Russia seizing control of Ukraine. The plot is weak because it's humour (and it wasn't really thought through)

And I know parts of it are awful and make you want to cringe... I was only 14 when I wrote it.

The reason I'm posting this is because I'd like some feedback on the story, from what you've read of that extract (I would include the whole thing but it's far too long and parts of it are shit).

And the reason for the asking of feedback is because I'm filled with a desire to rewrite and finish the story now that I'm a more mature and capable writer.

Naturally, Torquer has already informed me this crazy notion of mine is destined for failure.

Battling The Elements

"Are you sure you want to be dropped off here?"

It was 8:30. The air was crisp, the Sun was shining and I was in the car to school. Having not had much sleep the previous night (too much hardcore gaming), I was still too bleary-eyed to realise the distance he had dropped me off from the main entrance.

"Yeah whatever," I replied groggily.

As soon as I got out the car, I realised just how big a mistake I had made. As I looked up ahead, a dark, rumbling behemoth of a cloud hung in the air and seemed to be consuming the sky. By the time I reached the path the cloud had displaced the Sun and cast the street in an ominous semi-darkness.

Then the rain came. It felt like I had walked through a waterfall, or mistakenly walked into a lake. The drops beat down upon me like God himself was machine-gunning me with bullets made of H20. I floundered helplessly as the horizontal rain slowly paralysed me with cold, drawing out every ounce of warmth from my body. I tried to run but my limbs were weary, and my blazer felt like a lead jacket.

Had the rain not stopped, I might of drowned. But thankfully it did.

When I told my mate Dave about what had happened, he laughed uncontrollably at my misfortune. In retaliation I shed water all over his bag. That showed him.

"Was it raining outside?" asked another friend, who seemed unaware that I looked like a wet dog.

"No... My boat capsized and I swam my way to school." I replied.

Some people...

***
It's 12:30 and I'm outside playing football for the P.E lesson. Once again there's torrential rain, and once again there's mind-numbing cold. But this time, I have to endure it for a full hour.

And we're 7-0 down. The only thing that will warm me remotely is if I score a goal, but the wind is against us and every time we kick the ball upfield it ends up in the back of our net as if God himself wanted us to lose.

Will this rain ever stop? I thought as Neumonia set in.

But the rain did stop (huzzah!) to be replaced by hail (damn.) and what began as a monsoon turned into a blizzard. I couldn't see a thing as icy winds cut through me like a scythe. It was like God himself was throwing daggers made of ice at my eyes (which I need to see).

It felt like The Day After Tommorrow, except everyone was in shorts. Who likes short shorts? I certainly fucking don't.

But despite the overwhelming odds, a wild kick miraculously lofts the ball over the defense and right into my path. I blink at the ball.

"Run! Jingo! Run!" Someone screams.

And so I'm hurtling down the left wing, muttering obscenities and taking the ball past player after player as I transformed into an incredibly cold and unnattractive version of Cristiano Ronaldo. The cold bit at my hands and face, the hail induced semi-blindness, but I was completely focussed on the goal at the end of the pitch.

And the goal was empty! The goalkeeper had come out! My pace had left the defense for dead and I surged forward towards the empty goalmouth. I hit the ball sweetly and the ball soared majestically through the air. There could only be one outcome!

Now that I think about it, I really should have scored.

I collapsed to the ground a broken man. A humiliated broken man. A humiliate broken man who couldn't get back up because of cramp.

***
Two stories of pain and humiliation, both at the hands of the elements. Both events happened in the last week and I thought it relevant to share with you, considering the amount of weird weather England has been experiencing of late.

Only yesterday, walking home from school, I believed I could fly... It really was that windy! I felt like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.

I'm sure some humiliating Mary-Poppins/Wizard-of-Oz-esque tale will emerge with these windy conditions. Hopefully it'll be Torquer for a change and not me.

Bowling

You know how everyone's got that sport which they are naturally good at? Take me, I'm Chinese so I kick ass at table tennis (and I'm also a decent swimmer). Now Torquer (the co-author who never posts - what a dick), is generally considered a laughing stock amongst my friends due to his poor physique and has yet to find his natural sport. (Although to give him credit, he's at times a cat in goal and always beats me in cross-country. My excuse is that muscle weighs more than bone - it must feel like walking on air every time he runs)

But Torquer shocked us last week when we decided to go bowling and unbelievably, he beat us all. OK, so Bowling is arguably not a sport but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that he humiliated us all, and in front of girls. AND I WAS THE WORST.

We watched in disbelief as Torquer transformed from nerd to king-pin, getting strike after strike, oozing in confidence and strutting round like he owned the lanes.

"Another gutter ball Jingo? Tough luck. Try knocking down some pins next time."

It made no sense... How could someone with so little arm strength be so good at bowling?

When it was his turn, he'd saunter up, cool as you like and pick the pink ball. We were foolish enough to laugh at this choice since it was the lightest ball the bowling alley had to offer. Little did we know that the pink ball proved deadly, and Torquer was a sniper. Not only that but the colour matched his thin black jumper and for those brief ball-rolling moments he was a famboyant, iconic, pin-bashing God. I had to admit, the kid had style.

When I stumbled up to bowl, people would take out their camera phones and film me; that's how bad I was. Thankfully, apart from some sporadic gutter balls and a ridiculously low score, I managed not to tranform into a laughing stock. I shan't give you the score incase you think worse of me, but to put it in perspective, you'd have to square my score for it to be anywhere near his.

Unfortunately, his glory was short-lived. Afterwards, as Torquer let the new-found respect of his peers wash over him, the unexpected happened. An actual, real-life girl approached him.

While this was happening I was with some friends shooting zombies on House of the Dead III (he was pulling birds and I was playing video games...). But from what I heard, the girl gave him a paper napkin with the details (name, msn, email et al) of another girl. Torquer then went incredibly red as the girl literally ran off. Aww bless.

My friends had a right old laugh and Torquer lost all the respect he had won. It was obvious to them that the girls did it as a joke to humiliate their friend, but I'm not so sure. I'm still of the opinion that the girls must have been wooed by his sexy bowling ability.

Poor Torquer. What makes it worse is that he kept that paper napkin and has probably framed it or something.

Beckham To Pursue American Dream

Normally when I get home, I like to relax and watch a little SkySports News. Imagine my shock when the top story was David Beckham's move to LA Galaxy, in America. On hearing this shocking revelation I rushed up stairs, switched on my laptop and read up on the story on BBC News.

If you're American and not quite sure of who this David Beckham fella is, think soccer superstar. Think Real Madrid. Think former England captain. And if you still don't know who he is, think husband of Posh Spice and "Bend It Like Beckham".

Beckham had a choice between staying at arguably the most famous club in the world (Real Madrid) and living life as an overrated, over-paid and over-indulged Galatico (also known as "world-beater"); moving to Europe and proving to his critics that he's still got it, whilst trying to reclaim his place in the England squad (who quite frankly miss him); or do the unthinkable and move to America where he'll play mediocre football on a ridiculous wage packet in a league no one respects.

Beckham loves money. He'll endorse anything.

And yet, he chose America over the respect of his peers and the footballing world. He has chosen to throw his career away and become an A-list Hollywood Celebrity rather than a footballer. Admittedly, he is getting £127 million out of the move (which would motivate anyone really) but Major League Soccer? I can really see him forcing his way back into the England set-up there.

But he's made it clear he's not motivated by money. Sure he'll be earning $80 dollars a second, but it's difficult mingling with beautiful celebrities and lounging in the Los Angeles Sun. When you put it like that, you can really feel sympathy for the guy.


Being rich isn't easy. Look at all the money he has to count

I really can't see the Americans buying into this. I doubt his arrival will trigger a mass interest in football, a revitalisation of Major League Soccer or cause an influx of top quality players to arrive in America. I doubt the Americans are fickle enough to throw down their baseball bats and hockey sticks just because Beckham's in town.

Still, if it makes "soccer" more mainstream then I suppose it's worth it.

The Blog is Dead... Long Live the Blog!

As you may have noticed, the blog is slightly different to how it was a few days ago. The reason for this was because the blogger template was boring me, and one of my resolutions was to overhaul the blog to bring it into the New Year.

The decision was not a whim. I had been thinking about a new template for some time and had come up with a meticulously calculated plan to transfer the blog to a new template with minimum effort and distress. Alas, as with most of my plans, it failed horribly.

What went wrong was:

I lost all my widgets in the transfer. All the colourful buttons gone. All gone. Now the blog is nothing more than a boring block of text.

The blog title image is a disaster; it's mundane and uninteresting and my attempts at emulating Miao's blog failed. And the colour scheme, as Torquer (the co-author who never posts) put it: "It looks like someone vomitted up mustard".

However, one person did give a positive comment about the new design. Those hours writing and re-writing HTML were not in vain after all.

But there were some improvements. I've reorganised the labels so that they are slightly less irrelevant.

I also separated my links section so that the friends of the blog get the recognition they deserve. The criteria I set was the following:

• Comments occasionally on the blog
  
• Links to me
  
• I like that blogger

Unfortunately, under that criteria, I realised I don't have that many blogging friends. It made me so depressed I even added Mutley to the list (who surprising met most of the criteria).

Now that I think about it what was the point in me doing this? The problems outweigh the improvements massively.

Still, it was time the blog had some change. Feel free to leave feedback on the new layout.

Total War

I feel compelled to write a post about Medieval 2 Total War.

I own three other computer games: Sim City 4000, The Sims 2, Football Manager 2007 but it is the addition of an online feature which has made Medieval such a rivetting game and it has me hooked.

Me and my friends bought the game a while back and started playing battles online. Before I knew it I was caught up in the excitement, formed a clan and became a hardcore gamer. Instead of organising dates to go to the cinema we now organise when to go online... how sad have we become?

The process of online battling involves a lot of waiting. First we would wait until all the "clan" (we set up a clan to gain respect amongst the other gamers) were online, then we would wait for a person to host a battle. We then wait until everyone joins the battle. And then we wait for opponents. We then choose our armies and wait for everyone to finish. Once we are all ready the battle loads and we wait. Only then do we begin the battle, knowing that our prides are at stake.

At any point in the waiting the network might fail and we would need to restart the whole process. I like to think the anticipation heightens the gaming experience.

And afterwards, there'd be much banter about who beat who and who's better than who. All good, healthy fun. (Admittedly, I have been using a lot of l33t speak lately. I'll have to fight the urge to write words like n00b and pwned.)

This is what it's like every time I go online. I escape to a fantasy world of trebuchets and feudal knights and longbowmen.

And who can blame us for liking such a game? The battles are immense and friends who don't have the game often protest about how we obsess over it, how we talk nothing but tactics, how every conversation leads on to Total War.

But they've never tried the game. They don't understand. Seeing us talk about it, they don't want to understand. And a rift is forming that is splitting my friends into two groups.

So to summarise, Medieval is having a detrimental effect my social life. But if it's the price I pay then so be it!

And let's no get started about what effects its having on my education...

You may be wondering why I haven't posted too much on current affairs. Well, it's been a slow news week (nothing of real interest for me to write about). I may do a post on the hybrid embyro scandal... In the mean time, I direct you to one of my earlier posts on the subject.

Litter Picking

Instead of sleeping till half twelve, I had to pull myself up in the early hours of the morning (10:30) and trudge to Princes Park, the most run-down park in all of Liverpool (and where all the junkies go at night) to pick litter.

Have a committed some heinous anti-social crime that has landed me community service? No! Far from it.

I was with some friends (we were a group of three), helping out a local charitable organisation which looked after the shoddy park.

Now before you start thinkig I'm some kind of Good Samaritan that goes and does random deeds beneficial to the local community this is not the case. I did this for two selfish reasons:

• It's my Citizenship Coursework Project
  
• Something to add to the CV

Since the three of us were working on the same project we needed to find something we could do as a team and picking litter was the easiest we could come up with. Not only did I complete the coursework for the easiest GCSE available, I also got extra CV brownie points to boot (and Uni's love this kinda thing).

The litter picking itself was unspectacular. We got a health and safety talk and were given our equipment (one litter picker and big black plastic bag each) and negotiated turf with the other litter picking teams present.

As we navigated our terrain, we came across two needles and a variety of condom wrappers (but alas no condoms). The place was pouring with rain and I was glad I was wearing an old pair of trainers; unfortunately, I regret choosing my best pair of jeans which irritated me somewhat, considering we had to walk through swamps of mud to get to the patches of the most sought-after litter.

Despite the rain, and despite the mud, and despite having to deal with disease-ridden needles, it was vaguely enjoyable.

I look forward to the next litter-picking session (for the CV of course).

Resolutions

It's the start of 2007 and you know what that means: People begin writing (and breaking) their New Year Resolutions for the year ahead. Normally, I don't bother with such yearly targets but this year is different. This year I have a blog.

I'm a bit hazy on this subject but I'm sure there's some unwritten rule that states bloggers must post their New Year Resolutions. Or maybe I've just made that up. Either way, here are my resolutions:

1. Achieve academic success
It's an important year ahead and it is vital I get good GCSEs. So basically this year I will need to up the tempo in terms of study to achieve those top grade boundaries or I can kiss that career in Medicine goodbye. Need to get my act together etc. etc.

2. Get work experience
You may not know this but work experience is vital when Unis consider applicants for Medicine so I'll probably end up doing shifts at the local hospital, handing out meals or whatever. Time not well spent but vital for the future. The things I will do for medicine...

3. Get a paid job
You can always count on MacDonalds to provide jobs for people with no qualifications such as I (Well actually I do have some but unless I'm working in the French branch they aren't worth mentioning). I can finally put that National Insurance card to some use.

4. Learn to drive
There's a snowballs chance in Hell I'll get a car but it's a cool, babe-magnet (or so I'm told) skill to have and will keep me occupied over the long Summer once I get my provisional license.

5. Keep my Laptop clean
You be shocked to learn that since buying my £1500 Quosmio laptop I have failed to properly clean it once. So as I looked upon the layer of crap that had accumulated on top of it in disgust, I spent a good half hour polishing it (as if it were a Ferrari) and vowed to keep it in the squeaky clean state it is in now for the whole year at least.

6. Learn to shuffle
These resolutions are getting a bit trivial aren't they? But being such a good cards player (and very modest), not being able to shuffle a pack of cards brings shame and allows my fellows to question my card-playing abilities. That needs to be rectified.

7. Update the blog
Certain aspects of this blog need improvement (and no, it's not the content). My priority for this blog is to find a new layout; one that is clear and easy to read and not a boring blogger layout. Secondly, I need to update the labels; they are getting far to cluttered and overlapping. If anyone can give me any ideas (about the layout) your help will be greatly appreciated.

And that's it. Not as specific or as interesting as I hoped it would be. I don't care.

It will be interesting reading what other peoples' resolutions will be. I would tag some people to write theirs but that seems just too much hard work.

Discovered this cool site: FutureMe. Might write something on it in the future. Should be good.