If you only know me from my blog posts, you may be mistaken in assuming I’m reasonably cool. ‘Look at him slate the Kings of Leon for selling out. Oh, he’s looking forward to the new Arctic Monkeys album. He’s even been on a barge holiday.’ Well, I’m going to come clean and get my geek on, because I need to discuss Pokémon.
Compared to many other members of my generation, I wasn’t heavily exploited by the franchise. I didn’t collect the pointless cards or watch the movies. I did possess a water bottle shaped like Squirtle though and I played the games.
It is the monumental decision which you have to make at the start of said games that I am writing about. For those who don’t know, you start the game in your Mum’s house (I don’t think the character has a Dad for some unexplained reason), before coming across three poke balls, containing a fire, a water and a grass Pokémon within them respectively, and you have to choose one to become your first Pokémon. Each Pokémon’s strengths and weaknesses work in a sort of ‘rock-paper-scissor’ system: Fire beats Grass, Water beats Fire and Grass beats Water. Yes, sneer if you will, but it is incredibly important. Make the wrong choice and your journeys may be marred by a nagging feeling in your mind that you’ve made an awful mistake.
It’s awfully similar to voting for a political party. In fact, unnervingly similar. Let me explain...
Choosing green is a wasted opportunity. Granted, it looks nice and could prove useful in the long term, but it is the choice of an idiot. It is such a ridiculous choice that the makers of the game have had to completely create a strength for it. I mean, in what twisted and disgusting world does Grass beat Water? Do we all head for green meadows when flash floods are looming, in the hope that grass will be able to defend us? No, Water floods Grass as it does everything. It’s this pathetic fantasy that proves what a laughable choice Grass is. Grass is eaten by cows, constantly walked upon and provides a soft landing for falling humans. It’s a completely innocuous selection. The only possible harm Grass could inflict is hay-fever, and even the more pedantic readers will argue that grass doesn’t give out pollen.

Blue is certainly more popular and has its merits. Many argue that we need it, for the key policies and moves, and in some respects, they have a genuine point. It’s a solid choice and those who put their faith in it have nothing to be ashamed of. However, it’s just a dull and predictable choice. Who wants to meet some two headed cobra in the woods and when you lob your poke-ball at it, the equivalent of John Major comes out? The further parallels are uncanny, as blue and yellow (electricity) are incompatible in Pokémon. Why couldn’t have Cameron looked to his Game boy Colour for advice for who to go into coalition with?
Red used to the only option for the sensible Pokémon player. It’s radical and just gets the task done. Don’t like something? Then burn it and move on. Sick to death of poverty and squalor? Just burn it down and replace it with Welfare State. Fed up of workers being exploited? Set it alight with a minimum wage. Come gather round the flickering bonfire of free healthcare for everyone. None of this ‘tackle’ or ‘leer’ shit, just direct, smoking action. Unfortunately, it’s changed. In the most recent instalment of the franchise, the fire Pokémon is a depressingly cute pig and has become as boring as the blue choice.

A lot like the face of the new reds, Ed Miliband then, who looks and sounds like the type of person who just couldn’t bring himself to make a decision of whom to select, so just stayed in the character’s home town for hours on end, doing the tutorials over and over again, as he feels ‘safe’. If he wants to get into power at the next election, he should use my theories to his advantage. In the next leadership debates, he could interrupt Cameron mid flow and just shout: ‘Look, you can vote for this oversized tortoise with a pair of super soakers on his back or the unidentifiable grass Pokémon that looks like part of an adventure playground at a National Trust park or, if you’re feeling really lucky, that yellow liberal Pikachu, who looks very nice, but will let you down when you need it most. You do that. But I’m a dragon. A fucking dragon! With fire on my tail!’ Yes, I realise that no-one but the readers of this blog would have the slightest clue of what he was trying to communicate, but why not play the geek card, Ed? It’s all you’ve got going for you.

“Ah, I only have fond memories of the 1984 Salcombe Rugby club tour. We put in some absolutely wonderful performances on that travel. I even scored five tries in one match, against St Trinfords. Hang on. What’s that I see? It must be one of my fellow players, for why else would one be donning a hoody emblazoned with the details of that fantastic tour? The initials on your top can only mean that you are John Williams; our masterful prop. How are you, John? It’s been years...”
This is the transcript of a particularly awkward confrontation between a young gentleman wearing a Jack Wills hoody and a confused, southern rugby player. It took 20 minutes for the poor lad to convince him that he was not John Williams. On this occasion, I may have made it up, but these misunderstandings must occur tenfold every day.
You may be surprised, as I was, to learn that Jack Wills was only formed in 1999. However, through clever viral campaigns, including giving the head boys and girls of public schools free hoodies to flaunt to their minors, Jack Wills turnover must surely be as high and dramatic as the comb-overs of the girls who wear it. Some people are so desperate to purchase anything Jack Wills related, that they are delighted when given the opportunity to fork out £5 for a tin of paperclips or £6.50 for some, probably shoddy, plasters, with an emblem of a disabled pheasant on. We are all still waiting in avid anticipation for the Jack Wills branded fax machine (£399.99) and the limited edition Jack Will striped wheelie bins, for all those households who feel physically ill looking at their standard, government blue bins.

Every so often, a catalogue, and I use that term very lightly, is shoved through your front door. Whilst some of the content is utilized to sell you the garments, the majority of the pages are filled with snapshots of the world’s most middle class porno: a grubby public school boy comes to fix an airy vixen’s arga. However, the underlying sexual tension just proves too much, so they end up frolicking in her barn, with the mud-caked John Deere and Daddy’s gun just out of sight. Fortunately, it ends on amiable terms, as the final photo is always that of a communal sing-song round a campfire on an empty beach.

The very few pages dedicated to the actual Jack Wills clothing are laughable. For a start, the models seem to be wearing every item of ‘Fabulously British (But made in a humid sweatshop by Chinese children)’ clothing. Ever been dressing up for a formal event and after putting on your shirt and tie, just thought you should be wearing a pair of garish check shorts and flip flops instead of the matching suit trousers? No? Well you must have considered complimenting your swimwear with a thick, tweed blazer? Wrong again? Of course I am. While they want to portray a sense of British eccentricity, the ending result is the models looking like they’ve just escaped from an 18th century lunatic asylum.
A rather irritating consequence of Jack Wills growing popularity is the numerous other outlets attempting to mimic their success. Take Hollister. Another shop similar to JW: full of your decent, staple clothes, in which a logo of an animal somewhere at the top of the food chain can add a couple of notes to its value. When I visited the Manchester branch, you had to queue just to gain entrance to the products. This wasn’t because it was too busy, but to try and create an atmosphere of exclusivity. In hindsight I have a sneaking suspicion that they might be onto a winner with that idea, because there simply isn’t enough queuing involved in high street shopping. Yes, you do get to wait in line for the checkouts and the fitting rooms, but is that enough for the modern day shopper, who thrives on being sandwiched between two strangers? After you’d been permitted to enter the shop floor, it struck you how dark it was, as another part of the decor was to have eerie rays of lighting up shelves and prices. Why should you bother with a fully lit shop, when you can just have various lamps illuminating the shelves? I imagine the desired effect wasn’t to disguise the basic nature of their clothing, in which a check shirt is considered risqué, under a hazy mask of pretension, but it managed to achieve this.

However, the thing I despise most about Jack Wills is their overall attitude towards clothes. When it comes down to it, the primary functions of clothes are to protect your modesty and to help maintain a suitable body temperature given the external climate, but they also add to your character. Surely what you choose to wear should be an individual statement of who you are, not who you should be. They shouldn’t act as an invitation into an elite group. The main problem with brands like Jack Wills is that they prey on teenager’s fears of not fitting in. Their ‘seasonnaire’ garb and catalogues brimming full of smug arseholes, are just ploys to make teenagers feel redundant and irrelevant, so they can present their clothing as a lift up onto a higher rung of the social ladder. They’ve taken everything wonderful about fashion and just...hang on. Is that a giant, striped paperclip for £1.50? Uh, just ignore what I was saying. I’ve been converted!

Morrissey has done it again. In an interview with the Poet Simon Armitage in the Observer last weekend, he called the Chinese a ‘subspecies’. Quite frankly, no matter how much I love the man, it’s unacceptable, as you can’t dub the whole population of a country beneath you, for the acts of a few senseless idiots. Who knows why he did it? He seems too clever and, more importantly, heartfelt to be a genuine racist. Maybe he’s just out of touch, in a world where journalists are eager to pounce upon a (relatively) harmless remark and scandalise it. Maybe it was for publicity, as no publicity is bad publicity. Whatever. I don’t care. The man’s a genius.

What I am going to write about though is what caused him to make such a statement in the first place. Don’t worry, Random Tale reader(s) ( Ite Libby), this is isn’t a rant about China, even though they are hardly my favourite country since that thing in the Olympics, where they replaced that child singer with a prettier one. No, this is about my blurry stance on Animal Rights.

Now, I’m not a vegetarian. I’d love to be one for the moral high ground I so very cherish, but meat is lovely. Most of the time, you just forget that it is the carcass of a mother you’re wolfing down, as it tastes pleasant. Once in a while, you do remember this fact, feel a little queasy and eat the vegetables on your plate until the feeling subsides.

Now, does that make me a bastard? If it does, then so are 96.7% of the Earth’s population, who share the same moral beliefs as me. ( Cheers Google.) Our bodies are suited to eating meat, to the incisors in our mouth to the Hydrochloric Acid produced in our stomach to the protease we produce. Also, our family only buy free range chicken to eat and are getting chickens in our garden. ( Woah. Is it me or did this blog get a whole lot more Middle Class?) So surely that’s OK?

Also, I am more than happy to wear Leather jackets, as I feel like James Dean or one of the Ramones in them. I say I wouldn’t wear fur, but it’s only because it’s vulgar and I have never seen real fur on the High Street. So what I’m trying to get at here is, I, or 96.7% of the Earth’s population, in a position to complain about animal cruelty?

How can we complain about Russians sending a Donkey up into the air, when most of us have been known to eat the slaughtered bodies of Cattle, and then ask for seconds? Why do we give front page coverage of the fact that a woman once put a cat in a wheelie bin for under a day, when there are people strolling around in murdered animals skin?

I’m not sure who I’m angry at. It’s probably just at myself for being an awful, hypocritical human being. I’m in way over my depth if I start debating the morals on whether or not we should eat meat, so I won’t. So to prevent this blog from being completely pointless, I would thoroughly recommend you listen to The Smiths album ‘Meat is Murder’. Just don’t think too much when listening to the title track.

Let's get some perspective.

I find, when things are getting a little stressful, that a little perspective goes a long way.

Let's start with the physics. Look at your hand. 99.99999...% of that hand is not there. Despite that, there's an enormous amount of energy in you. If you released all the energy in 1000 people (with the whole e=mc^2 thing), you would have enough energy to power the world for a year. The whole world. A whole year. You'd also be charged for mass murder, but that's not the point.

For every single person on earth, there exists over a hundred web pages. And there's a lot of people on earth. Every single one of them has different opinions and a different viewpoint. If you randomly picked ten of those people, between 2 and 3 of them would probably not have access to drinking water. And those opinions? We haven't a clue what they actually are, and we don't know what 'being conscious' means either. In fact, what we don't know seems to outweigh what we do know.

The person you love? They're mostly made of water. So are you. And both of you two squishy water-sacks are perched on a rock which is flying through space at about 30km every second, and spinning at over 1000 miles per hour if you're at the equator. Oh, and the rock's made of pretty much nothing, just like your hand.

What is this nothing-rock flying around? The sun. A ball of gas, a million miles across, which is hotter than the squishy water-sack that gave birth to you. Oh, by the way, there's something wrong with it and we haven't a clue what it is. Have I mentioned it's also made of pretty much nothing, too?

So each of us is one of billions of these squishy water-sacks on a massive ghost-rock flying at millions of miles an hour around a massive ball of hot, and we still manage to take ourselves seriously?

What strange creatures we are.

I had the wonderful experience a few weeks back of being shouted at by a young man from his Nissan Micra.

"Wonderful?" you enquire, in the slightly-longer-than-comfortable silence after that statement.

"Yes!" I reply, content that my thinly disguised bait has been bitten.

Picture the scene: a few of my friends and I are strolling quite contentedly along the side of the road in a suburb on the outskirts of town. The birds are swaying, the trees are singing. We come to the main road, press the pedestrian button at the traffic light and wait for the little green man to bleep at us.

Just as it begins to do so, we hear a dull thump from over the crest in the road, then another, and another. Slowly, the whining treble overlay of today's repetitive pop fades in over the top, and a small, crimson Nissan climbs over the hill, panting from the exertion. Inside are two shaven-headed men in their late teens to early twenties, shirtless and heavily tatooed. The air pumps itself full of drum machine.

They stop at the traffic lights as they turn red, and we cross in front of them, at this point only slightly scared for our lives. Their small, beady eyes follow us as we make our way, as inconspicously as it is possible to do so in a group of seven or eight, over the pathway of zebra stripes. No one utters a sound.

Suddenly, and completely without warning, the man in the passenger seat leans out of the wide open window, and screams a single, joyous exlamation, beer waving in the hot air:

"Swiss Family Robinson!"

Grinning, he ducks back into the car and, in a squeal of tyres, the car speeds away.

Wonderful.

Was that an insult? Was it a compliment? Was it the result of many hours of careful consideration, or was it completely on impulse? What does it even mean?

I have no idea, and somehow that makes the event that much more memorable and that much more enjoyable. Any world in which people spontaneously do things like that is a world which I am proud to inhabit. So thank you, whoever you were, for an intriguing experience.

Until a while ago, I considered socks a frivolous thing to spend your hard earnt money on. After all, why should I spend money on a few measly socks when I could use some of the same money to buy, say, a good book or a new game? I realised the error of my ways when I was finally left with only five socks, two of which were too small.

You have to ask yourself, why do we buy things in the first place? In fact, why do we do anything? In the end, the only reason we ever do anything is to try to improve our overall happiness. Maybe it doesn't always work, but in the end the overall motive for any action is happiness.

We pay the rent because we know it makes us happier to have a place to live than to have lots of money. We go to work because we know it makes us happier, in the end, to have money than to not bother with the job.

Okay, so why didn't I like buying socks?

A concentrated source of happiness

It's all to do with getting the most happiness out of the least effort. In our culture, money is pretty much the same thing as effort, and so we try to get the most happiness for the smallest price tag.

Which would you rather, a great book for ten pounds or a great book for five? A boring book for five or a great book for five? You always root for the thing that you percieve to have the best money to happy ratio.

My realisation of this fact happened to come as a searched in vain for a second clean sock at the bottom of every drawer and, with a sinking heart, realised that I would have to resort to the sorry looking, slightly greying thing in the corner, looking like it was ready for retirement. Because you see, i didn't realise how much happier it makes me to have socks that don't smell than to have socks that do.

I think until now i had managed to avoid finishing a post with a cliché, but: you don't know what you got until it's gone.

To anyone who knows me, it will come as no surprise that I am about to moan about the teaching of subjects like English. I really hate English lessons.

What annoys me, though, is that I also really love writing, and I used to really love English lessons. This seems wrong.

It is.

Teaching really shouldn't make people hate something that they used to love, it should fill them with awe and fascination at what they have yet to discover, and make them itch to know more. Okay, so maybe I'm being a little optimistic, but I really do believe in it, or something similar.

The root cause, from where I'm standing, is the target based, exam driven model taken on by our modern education system. Now I can see the problems faced by the examiners and by the teachers, and I'm not saying I have an answer, but something's got to change somewhere.

Going back to the title of this post, it's very difficult to mark and compare in a creative art without some element of bias. Pretty much all impressions of art, writing and music are purely opinions, and opinions are hugeley subjective; they're dependant on context, culture and personal taste.

The options for the examiners? There are two main ones:

• a 'vote', taking the average mark awarded by a crowd of different markers, mostly eliminating personal bias
• a set of artificial guidelines that entrants are forced to adhere to
  in order to recieve marks, thus eliminating much of the creative part
  of a creative subject

Obviously, the second is the one the exam boards have settled on.

It's understandable. Exam papers are expensive to mark, and take time to moderate and check thoroughly. Just imagine how long it would take to get your grades back if the papers had to be marked by upwards of five to ten people! At the same time, without guidelines as to what you are supposed to write about and the style you should use, the papers are even harder to mark well. But even so, it's not good enough.

Current GCSE English courses seem to consist of the attitude that you pretty much know how to write well before you even start, and you spend the majority of the course learning how to write in the exact way that the examiner is looking for.

In fact, this problem permeates even into subjects that should supposedly be immune from this sort of thing, such as the sciences. Targets for improvement have driven teachers to teach to the exam rather than the science: you are told what the examiner wants to hear rather than the full, generally accepted, scientific explanation. Thankfully it would be virtually impossible for this to happen in Maths, but that seems to be an exception, sadly.

However you try to approach it, there is a fundamental problem in trying to distinguish from good and bad in a subject where, almost by definition, there is no right answer and no wrong answer.

As I said, I'm not saying I have an answer. What I am saying is that we need to look more closely at how these subjects are taught and examined - this is intended as a proposition for debate, not a rant.

A lot of people have asked me

Some people have asked

Someone once

I asked myself a question this morning: How do you go about being more creative?

It's not an easy question to answer; creativity seems to be something that you either have or you don't. You can take maths lessons, but can you take creativity lessons? I've never seen that on any college prospectus. Sure, maybe art lessons make you more creative, but no one ever says, "Here it is, the golden rule of creativity. Do this and you can't fail." Well, I sure haven't got anything like that, but here's some stuff that helped me to release my inner creativity.

First rule: Write stuff down

We're all people. And people are huge, complicated, squishy things with a tendency to forget things - I'm not sure I can remember the amount of awesome things I've thought of and just forgotten. Who knows how many you've forgotten yourself.

The solution? I have a notepad (several, actually) dedicated to noting stuff down when I think of it, for fear of losing it in the murky depths of my disorganised brain. The thing is, actual interesting ideas are few and far between, and of those only a few will even actually work and by feasible – so you've gotta increase your odds by amassing as many as possible.

Rule number two: Write everything down

You know those notepads of mine? They're never going to see the light of day. Why? Because I write anything and everything that I think of down in them, and well over 50% are damn stupid. It's very hard to judge an idea when you first think of it – just like it's very hard to judge something that you have written or created yourself, because you end up judging it in the context of a mind that's still thinking “oh, that's an awesome idea” or “damn, I screwed that up a bit”.

Strangely, I find it's best to write an idea down, and wait until you forget it. Then, with an unbiased mind, you can come back and review your list of ideas, picking the best out without any preconceptions. It helps you see the bigger picture.

Rule Three: Write everything down, everywhere

It's no good keeping that notepad sitting at home, waiting for the time an idea hits you as you stare through the sixteenth youtube video of the evening. Most of my ideas come to me when I'm out and about, and that's no use if you don't have your notepad with you, so take it with you.

It makes sense really: most of your ideas are going to present themselves at the times when your subconscious is most active – i.e. when it's getting the most sensory input. There's nothing like a stroll by the river with your mp3 player for ideas.

So no, I don't have a real answer to my original question. All I can do is capitalise on the opportunities that my muddled mind serves up and hope for the best.

The front page of the UK's Daily Express newspaper today bore the headline, "The Great Climate Change Retreat". The 'article' describes how a "key scientist" today "admitted" that global warming is not real.

As with many of the things I write about, I disapprove strongly.

In fact, this article makes me want to find Ed Price, the author of this 'article', and give him a good old fashioned thwack around the ear. The Daily Express, he most smugly imforms us, has "led the way in exposing flaws in the arguments supporting global warming". Well I'm sorry, Ed, but I'm not sure your so-called evidence really adds up here.

The main point of the 'article' (assume a sarcastic tone whenever I use this word, please) seems to revolve around this single scientist, Professor Phil Jones, and his statement that there has "been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995". Phil Jones, eh? The same Phil Jones that the Daily Express, just 16 days before, published an article on, calling for his resignation after it "emerged he breached rules by withholding research data from critics"? Was it that Phil Jones you were thinking of? Very reliable source, I'd say.

You see, just because one scientist with a flashy sounding title believes climate change is a lie doesn't mean that his opinion is somehow more valid than the hundreds if not thousands of scientists out there who see the evidence (and here i'm talking about real, independently reviewed facts and figures, not the opinions of a man who, in the Express's own words, "has trouble “keeping track” of the information") as irrefutable proof of global warming.

Global warming can't be proved outright. But then, nothing can really be proved anyway. In science, certainty doesn't exist; you only have data about what you can observe around you, and theories which seem to work for the data you have. Nothing more, nothing less. So, suddenly claiming that global warming is a myth just because you found some random person with a clever sounding name who sort of agrees with you is complete and utter jibberish.

In the end, it will do much more harm to our world if we wrongly assume that global warming doesn't exist, than if we wrongly assume that it does. Sensationalist headlines geared towards selling cheap newspapers to angry people, who think they have the right to dictate what everyone should think, is not the way to go about debating a serious, scientific issue.

Ed Price, I hope you're taking notes.

Okay, I know, it's been done to death, flogged, buried, then dug up and flogged again, but I have a bone to grind on this one, and everyone knows it's so 2004 to try and think of something new to write about on your blog.rnrnRight, piracy. Just to start things off, I'm fairly against it. Whoah! Step back, mister average internet user; put your flaming, troll-squashing ban hammer down slowly; and let me finish before you DDoS me into next year.

I can sympathise. I really can. Why should we pay for media that's readily available on the internet for anyone to have, free of charge and incredibly easily? It's not theft, not really, I mean, no-one's lost anything, you've just made a new copy and kept it for yourself. Well, yes, but it's not as simple as that. There are three main arguments for piracy:

• one, that you can't steal it because it's just an idea,
• another, that it's fine because you 'try before you buy' so that you don't pay for something you don't want to,
• and the last being that what is being pirated is too expensive anyway, or includes DRM which is too harsh, and 'deserves' to be pirated.

To all three of these, I call bull.

Firstly, and mostly because it seems the weakest argument, the 'try before you buy' argument is downright stupid because there are so many ways of streaming the same content from the net, also for free, and often in a completely legal way. Services like last.fm, YouTube and Spotify have brought media into a new realm: it's easy to access from a multitude of devices, quickly and simply. If you really want to try an album or a song before you buy it, it's not difficult to do a quick search, listen to it a couple of times and decide whether it's worth buying. Hell, it's a lot easier than finding a torrent with a decent amount of seeds and waiting while the whole album downloads. Oh, and it has the advantage of not being illegal.

So, next, you can't steal an idea. I'm not going to get hung up on terms here, since most of the arguments I've seen for this are over the technicalities that prevent you from specifically calling piracy 'stealing'. What you call it doesn't change how right or wrong it is.

An oft quoted example is this: if you had, say, a bike, and I used my hyper futuristic cloning device to make me a new one exactly the same as yours, did I steal it? No, because you still have a bike. No-one has lost anything.

To this I counter that in fact, yes, you are depriving the artist and whoever else is involved the right to have some of your money in return for obtaining some of their music. Think of it like this, would you class stealing an iTunes gift voucher from a store as stealing? After all, those cards cost next to nothing to produce, all you're doing is getting yourself a copy of something from the iTunes store at no charge to yourself. No-one's lost anything, Apple still have their own copy of that music in their servers. Secondly, if you can't steal an idea, you are implying that an idea is worthless, that it has no value. If this is the case, why is a DVD with a film on it so much more expensive than a DVD with no film on it? The film is what pirates would call an 'idea', although I think it's slightly more than that, and yet its presence on the disc ramps up its value by at least 2000%, at a low estimate. So is that 'idea' still looking worthless?

The last point, at least, I can see some genuine issues in. The media industry needs to wake up and see how futile DRM has become in order to build more trust in its consumer base. At the moment, it is almost always a hindrance to the average, paying consumer, and yet cracked versions of games are posted on the net just hours after their release, despite multiple layers of copy protection. And yes, prices could be lower. But guess what? The more people pay for their music, the more money the labels, artists and shops make and the lower they can afford to push their prices in order to get ahead of the competition.

Some people complain that they wouldn't be able to afford to buy music even if they wanted to, and that through their piracy the music industry is not losing any sales at all. Well, tough, I say. If you can afford the equipment to play your music collection on, surely you can afford the music itself as well! If not, perhaps you should have thought of that before and bought a cheaper computer or music player so that you could use the rest of that money on some quality music? It's like buying a coffee machine and then saying, “Oh no, I don't have any money for coffee beans! That means I should get free coffee beans!”

It's not your God-given right to have access to music. It's not in the Geneva conventions. Anyway, you have a right to clean water and you still pay for that with no complaints, don't you?