I Present To You,The Somewhat Inappropriate Music Shuffle Meme, Because My Hair Is Falling Out And I Need To Retain My Sanity.

I'm a sucker for shit such as this. So I steal them off Livejournal.
Put your music player on shuffle, take the first 20 song titles and add the words "in my pants" to the end of each.
Killer.


1. The Youth in my pants
2. Ode To Divorce in my pants
3. Death and All His Friends in my pants.
4. Gender Bombs in my pants.
5. Hardcore Days and Softcore Nights in my pants.
6. Wuthering Heights in my pants.
7. Teddy Picker in my pants.
8. Losing MyReligion in my pants.
9. Scar That Never Heals in my pants.
10. Too Much Of Nothing in my pants.
11. Amazing Grace in my pants.
12. You Can Do Better Than That in my pants
13. Spitting Games in my pants
14. I've Just Seen A Face in my pants
15. No Cars Go in my pants
16. The Traitor in my pants
17. Knives Out in my pants
18. Albert Camus in my pants.
19. Zombie Graveyard Party! in my pants
20. The Garden That You Planted in my pants


It is stuff like this that remind me that I am still very much a juvenile.
Posner would be so proud!
Or maybe Dakin would be prouder, I'm not too sure.

Does The Archbishop Of Canterbury Know You Talk Like This?

The History Boys (2006)

A group of eight extremely intelligent and raucous boys pursue entrance into Oxford/Cambridge, while dealing with life, words, sexuality, religion and a bunch of other very important teenage things. And they do it all in school uniforms. I feel empowered now.

What I Like About History Boys
1. It has many of the same elements that endeared me to Mean Creek. Consider; a group of predominantly male adolescents, all reasonably intelligent and good-looking, holed up together in a small confined space ( a school, in this case. And trust me, school can feel pretty confining) smoking fags, littering their conversations with liberal doses of profanity, making crude penis jokes, dealing with their sexuality, making life-altering choices, having profound moments of epiphany, and also occasionally dropping their trousers. The only difference is that the History Boys do all this, and more, while spouting lines of classic poetry, literary text, and using very big and hard-to-spell words, all in various assorted accents from across the British Isles.

2. I have never seen the play, but you can sort of immediately tell that the story, setting, premise and most especially the dialogue, was never really originally meant for the screen. There is something subtly different about the entire feel of it, that I have never quite gotten with any other movie. It's a musical but it's not, it's a comedy but it's not, it's a coming of age yarn but that's far too simplistic a description for it. It seems rushed at certain points but at times you feel as though the boys have been sitting in that room discussing Auden and singing Bewitched since the beginning of time. There is very little physical action but the sheer magnitude and

verbosity of the dialogue takes the story much further than you'd have expected it to go. And as you can see, it's making me use more complex sentence construction than I'm typically used to. Oh my cerebrals.

3. It's funny. It's just plain effing hilarious! The French scene alone more than makes up for the fact that Malaysian censors cut off, I'm suspecting, at least 10 minutes worth of particularly diabolical stuff. Although I sort of felt sorry for my parents, who were also watching; some of the boys' accents were so thick and they spoke so rapidly, especially during heated academic discussions, that they had a wee bit of trouble keeping up. Thank goodness for subtitles, then.

4. Despite the crude teenage boy jokes, History Boys actually does make you think quite a bit. The purpose of knowledge, for example. If you're a genius and you can memorize and absorb libraries' worth of information, does it necessarily make you a better, more rounded and intellectual being? Or is it simply for you to utilise at opportune moments, like getting accepted into Oxford or making yourself look smart next to somebody else who may not be as cerebrally gifted as yourself?
Something like that anyway.
Their discussion on the Holocaust, too, was pretty interesting. When you visit Auschwitz, what do you do? Take a picture? Do you smile in it? Should the Holocaust even be taught in school? Can you ever put it into context, as a history essay and nothing else? As the character of David Posner says "But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away. "
Oh David Posner. If you weren't gay I'd totally marry you. Of course, if you weren't gay then you probably wouldn't be who you are.
Does it work that way though? I mean, how far does your sexual orientation go in terms of defining your personality, if at all? Would I be any different if I were lesbian? I know my blog wouldn't have any Sexiest Male posts, for sure. But beyond that?
Forget I said anything. You see what this movie has done to me??

5. The cast. I have not seen the play and I can't comment on the transition from stage to screen, but if the idea was to keep all the original cast for the movie then I must say that was a stroke of bloody genius.

6. It has made just that bit more inspired to pursue my education. Anybody who knows me well would know that I was in a bit of a depressive funk for the best part of May and June. First with the dengue, and then having to go back to school just 5 days after. And how much I hated the school and the people and how I found just the sight of the building in the morning utterly nauseating. I dreaded going back to school when everyone else I knew was in college and doing and being cool things, no matter how many times I was told that Form 6 is technically pre-university level, and that I'd be learning much harder stuff ( which is bull, because everything is hard. Baking a cake is hard) and the only difference between myself and my collegiate buddies was that I was still obliged to wear a school uniform. I've been much better for the last 3 weeks, if anybody's interested. But History Boys has reminded me, to some degree, how much I love words, and what a waste it would be if I didn't take this one shot I've been given. School in real life for me will never be as intellectually stimulating as for the Boys, and nowhere near as hormonally-stimulating ( there just aren't enough hot males in this country. And tourists, expats, and working adults don't count. Neither do the kids from international schools. Unless they're citizens already) but I feel just slightly more optimistic now. Especially since I'm starting English Literature lessons today. Thomas Hardy, here I come.


7. The sountrack. While not always staying true to the year the story was supposed to be set in (1983), it's still a killer selection. How could you ever say no to the likes of Rufus Wainwright and The Smiths? And Samuel Barnett's rendition of Bewitched just about broke my heart and cracked me up at the same time.


(very selected) Favourite Quotes
Posner: Do you ever look at your life?
Tom Irwin: I thought everybody did.
Posner: I'm a Jew... I'm small... I'm homosexual... and I live in Sheffield.
[pause]
Posner: I'm fucked.


Mrs. Lintott: Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?


Scripps: Love can be very irritating.
Posner: How do you know?
Scripps: That's what I always think about God. Must get so pissed off, everybody adoring him all the time.
Posner: Yes, only you don't catch God poncing about in his underpants.


Headmaster: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.

[talking about the Holocaust]
Posner: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.


BAP's Verdict
I can understand if it does not appeal to everybody, but the least you could do is give it a shot.
Personally, I can't wait to get my own copy, and then I can watch all the obscene shit my country's censorship board saw fit to leave out.

And before I forget; a very happy 4th of July to all (two) of my American readers! Set some bloody fireworks off, people.

"Football Is A Very Simple Game; 22 Men Chase One Ball For 90 Minutes, And In The End The Germans Always Win."

Well, maybe that was the case when Gary Lineker was a fit young player himself, 347 years ago or thereabouts. But apparently it doesn't apply any longer.

I wasn't rooting for Spain in particular, but that's not to say I disapprove of them winning. I mean, seriously. 44 years without anything to show for anything? Imagine the magnitude of the inferiority complex there. They even have the word pain in their country's name. Give them a break, no? Plus they played fantabulous football, and I doubt too many people would disagree, unless you're German.
Or Russian.
Pozo-hechos, mis amigos.