Just finished Orwell’s 1984. What would you find behind the doors of your Room 101?
Carrot Top.
Therein lies the conundrum. You see, for me, the greatest terror is the surrounding world itself. I suppose they;d have to give up and shoot me, since I’d likely agree with everything they say and then hunt the bastards down one by one and kill them all.
1. Automated telephone answering systems. Especially those which keep you on hold forever and play crap music (there’s so much great music around - why choose rubbish?) and use the time to play adverts for how wonderful the company’s products are. For an especially malign example, see my site www.ianrowland.com > The Vault > Urban nightmares #3, “Returning CDs to Simply Computers.”
2. Anyone involved in broadcast media production who takes the view that audience size, revenue and dollars are literally all that matter. To heck with quality, with anything that celebrates the richness and brilliance of human endeavour and achievement, that holds up positive role models, that encourages people to think for themselves, that helps young people realise that actually, being a TV presenter is not the highest possible aspiration… sheesh.
3. Politicians. We don’t need them, we don’t need to be screwed by them every which way, and they’re all just mendacious, solipsistic parasites, idle snouts in the taxation trough. There are no exceptions to this.
4. Rap music. Oh please, yes, what the world needs right now is another uncouth, badly-dressed, ill-mannered, loutish loud-mouthed braggart who hasn’t lived long enough to have anything worth saying, and who hasn’t the talent or dedication to bother to learn to sing or play an instrument, who thinks that shouting into a microphone over a drum machine beat in any way, shape or form constitutes musical or artistic talent. (Yes, I know this is just my opinion. Thanks, that’s what this thread asked for.)
5. Very handsome and attractive and good-looking people who moan and gripe and whinge about what a curse it is to be saddled with good looks. This is a personal pet hate of mine. Raquel Welch once said “Being beautiful is like being born wealthy and getting poorer every day”. So the dumb pampered cow she can’t figure this is a darn sight better than being poor or bankrupt to begin with, like the rest of us. Hey, you don’t wanna be good-looking? Fine. Go stick your face in a blender. End of problem.
6. Successful, well-paid actors who think they have a hard working life. No, you don’t. You have one of the easiest working days of anyone who ever breathed. I don’t see any of them packing it on to go stack shelves in Walmart, sell insurance policies or lay bricks.
7. Jeffery Archer and Ken Livingstone.
8. Tracy Emin.