Random Musings

Still no Samsung news, no sign of the postman squeezing a review Note 10.1 through my letterbox. Still no price of the tablet but the rumours I’ve been picking up on the web are to expect prices almost as painful as the postman squeezing Apple’s new iTesticles through my letterbox…

Did that joke work? Too needlessly vulgar? I don’t know. I’m already too busy to blog with real purpose. I’ve given myself this one last day of hard slog to get the strip finished. It’s now almost fully painted and almost entirely written. It’s just a matter of polishing it, making the text fit the space available and cleaning it all up. I also discovered last night, after about three long days of furious work colouring it in Photoshop that the strip probably looks best without colour, or, rather, with the colours muted or given a warm sepia tint.

Even if the finished result is a disaster, it’s been a learning process. It’s been a frantic few weeks and at times I’ve wondered if I’m insane even attempting this with my limited skill set. Wouldn’t my time have been better served doing something else like growing a beard?

Beards have become something I’ve been thinking about over the last few days. Beards have become vogue among a certain kind of modern hipster. I thought it might be a good trend. I’ve always thought genuine Grizzly Adams style beards reveal a certain approach to living which was essentially good. However, I don’t trust men who trim their beards and that’s the problem I see with the current fashion. It reveals some deep vanity in a person to spend hours in the mirror making those neat shapes with a beard trimmer. It’s the same with men who brush the hair from off their foreheads. It seems to say: admire my big forehead. In my experience: tricky blighters every one of them.

Beards are just one thing that puzzles me. There’s a great Larry David moment which summarises my average day. It’s in Season 7, Episode 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (the episode called ‘The Hot Towel’).  Larry is at a party for Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on the occasion of their anniversary when Jeff and Suzie given them a gift in the form of a song by their daughter, Sammy. Queue a horrendous rendition of the Andy William’s classic ‘You're Just Too Good To Be True’. As the rest of the guests kindly look on, Larry looks around bemused. ‘This is the worst thing I’ve heard in my life’ he announces before he quickly brings the performance to an end.

That’s the state I exist in every day of my life. There are things that just don’t make sense and I’m surprised that I’m the only person these things bother.

For example, why does skimmed milk cost the same as semi-skimmed? From full to semi to skimmed: we’re getting a diminishing product. They’re taking something away so shouldn’t we be paying less for it?

It’s like reading newspaper articles when people leave comments below praising the genius of the writer when it’s the most plodding lump of quasi-journalistic twaddle that has ever been committed to print. It’s almost as unfathomable to me as social media.

Somebody asked me this morning how to get followers on Google+. I stared back at them blankly. I’ve never been able to attract any kind of following. Facebook, Twitter, Google+: they all have left me behind. It’s not out of a lack of friendliness, I hope, but rather a belief that the word ‘friend’ is sorely misused. It’s same with followers. I don’t want followers. People with followers tend to inflict great evil on the world and I’m including Justin Bieber in that generalisation. Readers has always been a good word but I can see why social networking companies had to find other terms to make their services sound special. Except I’m not interested in amassing a totally arbitrary number robots, fake followers, corporate shams, web marketing loons, with a small smattering of real people buried in the mix. Give me one true reader and I feel a reason to write this blog. Except, if you’ve got a beard, then we might have to rethink our terribly sordid relationship…