The shortest month of the year has been and gone confined to the history books as the second snowy month of 2010. February consists of Pancake Day, a day which everyone eats Pancakes surprisingly. Why only on this day, I don't know. Then February also has 'Valaween' hidden in the middle of it. Just in case you were wondering, I got no late Valentine's Cards, so that is another year of receiving (and sending) none. I look forward to yet another year of having my Facebook Status set to 'Single'.
Snow played yet another big part in this the month of February as it did in January, and yet again every moaned about it. They say we had the coldest winter since 1979 and the news was quick to show us yet more images of our nation suffering. Whether it was of monkeys sitting in the snow in a zoo or a tractor ironically being stuck in the snow after trying to pull a car out of a ditch, we had to be constantly told how much devastation this is causing us Brits. Last year, experts predicted Swine Flu to be the worst thing to affect us this winter, with it potentially killing millions, but instead it was the snow. Who could've seen that coming? Well, you would have thought the people at the Met Office.
Would you believe that it is the job of people at the Met Office to predict the weather so we can prepare ourselves? Yet, every time they seem to fail. A good use of money I think - paying people to do a job wrong. Mind you, if we pay our bankers millions of pounds for losing our money, why shouldn't we pay them to not do their job properly either. It seems our country is full of failures, and yet the Daily Mail still wonder why we have foreigners doing our jobs. Maybe it is because they are more competent - just a guess.
While I am on the subject of competence, let’s go back a few weeks ago (To Valentine's Day infact) when there was a smashing interview between a twatting tit and an unpopular growth. Yes, I am referring to the Piers Morgan/Gordon Brown interview on ITV 1. Now I am sure that you are aware of my dislike of Piers Morgan, so you can imagine my surprise after watching an hour long show with him in it that I 'enjoyed'. Well, maybe 'enjoy' is a bit of an overstatement, but I did think it was very interesting. I believe that Mr Brown came across very well in the interview. Granted, I did spend a majority of the interview just being mesmerised by the skin of Gordon Brown's neck and maybe that is what hypnotised me into liking him.
I think the Scot answered all the questions exactly right, despite Piers Morgan asking him really inappropriate questions which no-one wants to know the answer to. Why should I want to know 'How many girls Gordon Brown slept with while at University’? This was a political interview, not Loose Women! The overall interview was near on 3 hours, so it makes you wonder how awful the other 2 hours of stuff was, but that is the positive of editing I suppose. Alistair Campbell (Incidentally, I met his wife at the beginning of February - Fiona Millar - Thanks Mr Karnavas!) and Gordon Brown must be very happy with the outcome of the interview, and I do truly believe that the interview has actually helped Brown's election chances. However, if I'm 18 before the elections, I will still vote Conservative, but at least he tried.
The Winter Olympics happened in Vancouver, Canada during February as well. It became slightly hard for me to watch after that guy died while practicing for the Luge, so I didn't watch much after the first few days. However, I was pretty addicted to it before that happened and I did become quite the expert in Short Hill Ski Jumping as well as the Speed Skiing. How well did Britain do? Shockingly bad as usual. You would have thought with all the snow we have had, we could have done better. The medal we did though was a gold one.
That medal was one for us by a Miss Amy Williams. She competed in the 'Bob Skelton' which is essentially laying front first on a toboggan while going around a bobsleigh track head-first. It seems like quite scary stuff, and luckily I did actually watch this. A positive of them laying front first is that you can see their rear ends very well. The comment I made while watching her being hurtled around the track by the G-Forces for her winning run was that she had a very nice arse. I am not lying either, it is a VERY nice arse that Amy Williams has.
I think we all know that John Terry would have liked it also. Just in case you are not aware due to being trapped on a desert island with no contact to civilisation, he has been accused of sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. Yes, it does seem like something that would be found on the Jeremy Kyle show. John Terry cheated on his own wife with the girlfriend of his former best friend and England Teammate. For some reason, Wayne Bridge has pulled out of the England Football team due to it. I wonder why?
Then of course you have the Cheryl Cole/Ashley Cole saga. What is it with footballers and their ability to 'score away from home' (a nice football based pun for you)? My theory is that they get paid too much to do sod all. They train in the morning and nothing the rest of the day. They have all that money, all that fame and the ball skill (two in one paragraph; look at me go). They have the ability to seduce any woman, so they do, despite how utterly gorgeous their 'WAG's are.
However, you can't talk about failing marriages without mentioning Katie Price, or whatever she is calling herself these days. It was only a few weeks since I wrote a blog about Katie Price's latest gossip and already it seems to be out dated. She and Alex got married in Las Vegas. Then there was talk they were getting divorced. Then talk of him wanting to adopt Peter Andre's children. Then talk that he gets no say in the marriage and that Katie 'wears' the trousers in the house. Then more talk about them getting divorced. Then I am being told that they are happily in love.
I am just confused. I try to use as little brain power as possible when it comes to trying to solve what is happening in modern pop culture because I have better and more important things to waste my time thinking about, like whether I want Cheese or Egg Sandwiches for lunch. However, trying to figure out Katie Price's love life is just confusing. However, this does trigger the question - why do we as a nation care?
Now, I apologise for being a day late in posting this blog 'End of the Month' blog. The reason for this is that I had a mad spasm of a social life. I was actually out and having fun which meant I had no time to write the blog. My weekend consisted of sleeping on a bed with more people than the bed was originally designed for then a sofa, as well as drinking alcohol (I am part of the statistic of underage drinkers, but then who isn't?) and eating far too much cake. However, I would describe the weekend as 'Brilliant', 'Much Needed', 'Extraordinary Fun' and also 'One Of My Best Yet'. If I may be slightly cheesy and ruin this angry persona I seem to have going, Thanks Guys for a great couple of days, and I hope you had a great time Emily.
Anyway, onwards with March. I predict that this month will bring more devastation, more marital conflict, more crap telly, and also the celebration of a year without an unloved celebrity...
That is a question that I've always wanted to know the answer to, but more so in the recent few months, as I would like to meet the person to see if they really are a complete and utter idiot. The relevance of the story on the public and the world is how I would decide the importance, and is how you would expect them to be ordered. The news is now ordered in a way to grab an audience and compete against other news programs/channels for ratings. The recent Michael Jackson death is a good example of this.
Everyone loved Michael Jackson, that much has been made obvious to us over the past 5 days, and every day since his death it has been the main news headline. Did he die as a result of the drugs he was taking? Did he die because of the stress of his upcoming tour at the O2 Arena? Who will get custody of his children? These are the questions that the news programs have been answering before bomb attacks in Iraq are discussed, the still increasing Swine Flu cases and forgetting the death of Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day as Michael Jackson and was big news until Jackson died, then her dead corpse just got pushed to the back of the news headline to make way for the freshly decaying dead corpse of Michael Jackson.
Another example of similar news stories being ordered differently is the metro crash in America last week which killed 9 people, and the Spanish train that blew up and killed 13 people a few days ago. The metro crash was the news headline of the day, and lots of emotional people were interviewed to give their experience of the tragic accident. Whereas the train explosion in Spain, which had more casualties, barely got a mention on the news, apart from a few dramatic images which made it look like a scene from a Tom Cruise film.
In case you're not aware of this story, a cargo train full of flammable gases blew up as it went through a train station, and as well as killing 13 people and injuring many more, it turned the surrounding area into a small village that looked like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. In comparison to two trains colliding, I think the incident in Spain is actually bigger news myself. 
Geographical positioning and the countries power is usually the contributor to whether something is headline news or whether it gets featured in a quick 20 second news round-up. A fatal accident in America will get much more media coverage than a fatal accident in a less powerful country like Spain, as showed in the recent news.
It even counts for news stories over in the United Kingdom. If someone gets stabbed in London, its headline news, and Gordon Brown comes on the TV and gives his condolences to the family and someone from Scotland Yard will give an update on suspects. If someone gets stabbed in Summerset, it would barely get covered by local news teams, and not the national news, that’s for sure. I know if they covered every stabbing, the first 20 minutes of every news report would be a list of deaths, but that is yet another example of some guy sitting in the ITN newsroom deciding what the public want to hear, and making a decision of whether something is important or not.
I can't have a moan at the media, without bringing up Jade Goody, who died a few months ago of cervical cancer. I'm sure you remember that, because all the gossip magazines have talked about since is her death and how Jack Tweed is coping with the loss. Just because she was in the media spotlight, we all decided that was more important than every other woman in the country who was dying or suffering with cervical cancer. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Numerous members of my family have had cancer, as have a lot of people’s families, and at no point did the prime minister call them brave, or Okay! Magazine never done a tribute to them. And why is she any different? All because she was on Big Brother.
People will argue that without her, thousands of women would never have had themselves checked out, but that was only because the media kept pushing the subject (something good had to come out of it all). At no point did Goody actively tell women to get themselves checked out. She did not die with dignity and it wasn't just her fault, it was the media's fault too. It was the fault of the news for constantly reminding us she was dying. And when she did die, we were shown footage of people crying and flowers being laid outside her house. That is why the death of Michael Jackson has been was compared to Goody's death; the constant media coverage after the death. Now it has become boring. What we need is Michael Jackson's body to spontaneously combust, destroying the whole of America to liven it up and make the story interesting again.
I'm not that sympathetic over celebrity deaths like Michael Jackson and Jade Goody, because people die every day. Maybe a Plumber from Leeds isn't as important as an American who has made a huge contribution to music or a women who has kept the tabloid papers and the gossip magazines in business, however they are still people, so why the news reporter can't just say 'Jade Goody has finally died... Now onto something more important - Barak Obama has just saved the world yet again, this time he managed to stop a meteor from colliding with the Earth.'
It can't all be blamed on the media though; it can also be blamed on you, the British public. It's because you've forced us to live in the world of celebrity, where all everyone seems to care about is either a celebrity’s personal life or who will be the next person to be evicted from the Big Brother house. And with written media dying out because of new technologies, the papers have had try harder to get readers. The Internet means people can access the news up to date, when they want and choose what they do and do not want to read/listen to and is also free.
The news today is concentrated on the recent hot weather. Announcing that today Kent was 4 Degrees Celsius warmer than the Caribbean. It's not a competition. I personally don't really care where we are hotter than, and everyone getting giddy at the thought that we are hotter than the Caribbean islands, but then I don't care about a lot of things on the news. Do I care that 4 people will serve a 44 years sentence between them for smuggling drugs into Britain? No. Do I really care that there is no prospect of a post office sell off? Not particularly. Do I even care that Gordon Brown insists he is honest about his expenses? Nope, couldn't give a flying monkeys (strange expression that).
So why do I even watch the news or buy the Guardian if I don't care about the news? I don't know really, because if I really want to know something, I would go onto the BBC website and have a look. That's sorted then, I won't watch the news again (for a while at least).
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
Just one more thing. Have a look at this video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELyTBXzfQJ8 It appeals to me because it involves Hitler and is rather funny on the subject of Michael Jackson’s death. Have a look, you won’t regret.
