Garry Potter And The Same Old Nonsense by David Backhim (ready player one ebook txt) 📕

YOUNG PEOPLE AND ALCOHOL
It is both contemptible and lamentable to find most students and twenty-somethings who attempt to obscure their insecurities and self-loathing by herding together at week-ends to numb their senses with large doses of alcohol. Oh yes, we can put it down to ‘part of growing up’ or ‘just a phase that we all go through’, but there is something terribly lacking in individuals who sacrifice large chunks of their spare time in the pathetic pursuit of getting drunk. If certain folk could only see themselves when they are intoxicated or visit a few hospital wards to witness the consequences of alcohol abuse, they would realise that there is nothing remotely sexy, cool, or glamorous about over-indulgence in alcohol consumption.
In Belfast for example, you are nobody unless you are seen to be raising a glass with your mates in a club or wine bar at the week-end. Many poor souls like to surround themselves with so-called mates so that they can forget who they are and what they are, and invest precious time and money into so-called socialising. How often have you witnessed such ‘sociable’ people end up bickering, bitching, snarling, and fighting both amongst themselves and with anyone who dares to look at them the wrong way. So much for being sociable. Frequently, a group of dreadfully insecure mates go out, they cling to one another for dear life, they don’t befriend anyone else, and nobody is welcome to penetrate their sad little circle. There is scarcely a sadder sight in the world than scores of young people, some in their teens, queuing impatiently at a bar, desperate for a quick fix of poison. These people must truly hate themselves.

ACTION FILMS
Is it my imagination or do most cinema-goers get terribly bored if someone hasn’t been killed or violently attacked within the first five minutes of a movie? Precious few people, and they are precious, seem to care much for plot or dialogue. Action films cater for sad, impressionable chavs who draw inspiration from the on-screen Neanderthal nonsense, and replicate the behaviour in their own pathetic lives. Is it no coincidence that thugs like violent movies and own dangerous dogs? You can learn a lot by the ‘taste’ or lack of it that many people possess in films. Any bloke who likes Green Street or any Guy Ritchie/Vinnie Jones rubbish is someone I would not want to associate with. The trouble is that many silly little girls are just so inclined to cling on desperately to hard-drinking, hard-living, Billy Hard. It is a recipe for blood, toil, tears, and sweat. When will you people learn?
Movie billboards such as Miami Vice which portray the cops wearing dark glasses, and Mr and Mrs Smith, featuring the deliciously sexy couple of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt lend such films a glamour and gloss they scarcely deserve. Anyone who thinks that such movies are cool and sexy should pay a visit to a few hospital wards to witness the glamorous consequences of violence. Lying in a bed with your body all mashed up is far from cool or sexy. Action films ultimately cater for the brain dead who are easily amused, in other words for people with a single figure I.Q.

THE BRITISH MIDDLE-CLASS
The British middle-class is a herd of selfish, suburban swine. These middle-aged, moralising, disapproving people are intoxicated with selfishness. The tell-tale signs are when they appear on a television news bulletin, letting off considerable steam about such earth-shatteringly important subject as lack of funding for the arts or Britain ’s association with Europe . Life and death issues such as health service waiting lists, the homeless in their own towns, and famine in the Third World just don’t seem to register on their Richter Scales. It is only self-interest that arouses the British middle-class from their smug complacency. When I see a middle-aged, middle-class individual getting agitated about Europe or interest rates, it is clear where their priorities lie – firmly with themselves.
Rising crime and drug abuse in the inner-cities is of no concern for the selfish middle-class. Even the laws of the land were constructed with emphasis on the interests of property and capital, at the expense of personal safety for every individual. Let me explain. An individual who kills someone through drink-driving or who violently assaults someone is likely to receive a lighter sentence than someone who defrauds a fat cat’s big business organisation. It is fundamentally clear that money is more valuable than human life if the British judicial system is observed.
The biggest travesty is the National Lottery, a poor man’s tax, in which the nation is hoodwinked into spending money on the unattainable goal of a lottery win in order to raise funds for charity. The trouble is that the charity in question tends to be an opera house or a theatre – the staple leisure diets of the middle-class, which is so self-centred that they seemingly can’t help themselves, and certainly has no intention of helping anyone else. The only redeeming feature of the National Robbery is that it is not screened on ITV. Can you imagine what would happen if it was: ‘you will find out what this week’s bonus ball is right after this commercial break’.
That nice young man, Johnny Rotten, in his autobiography ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ accurately points out that the British middle-class are competitive in all the wrong ways: ‘our lawn is better manicured than yours’. What motivates most middle-class people is the need to have a better suite of furniture than their friends and relatives. If I ever become that contemptibly materialistic, I hope that someone will finish me off humanely.

THE BRITISH PRESS
The British public get a raw deal from their newspapers. In the gutter lurk several tabloids ( or ‘red tops’) which don’t educate or inform their readers. Their bog standard formula revolves around outrage and screaming headlines, hysteria, panic, sensationalism, trivia, and gossip – some of it malicious. Tabloid journalists are spineless creatures who hide behind their desks and computer screens, and pour merciless vitriol on anyone that they take exception to. To coin a phrase, these peddlers of hate rarely allow the truth to get in the way of a good story. I remain perpetually perplexed as to why so many people sell themselves short by purchasing tabloid rags that offer precious little besides bingo, tits, and sport. Gutter newspapers cater evidently for people with a single-figure I.Q.
At the other end of the journalistic spectrum, we find the pseudo-intellectual newspapers that overwhelm their readers with words and phrases that barely belong in the English language. They word their articles in such an incomprehensible way that only an ‘octo-champion’ on Countdown could remotely understand. While tabloid newspapers are not shy at dumbing down their apparently dumb readers, broadsheets deliver the kind of gobbledygook jargon which belongs only in the confines of a university lecture theatre. Worse still are the week-end supplement magazines that the broadsheets offer. These supplements contain the biggest amount of filler material that one could possibly imagine, with a plethora of advertisements about exclusive offers and holidays so unaffordable that clearly the readership must consist of mega-rich celebrities and drug dealers. My biggest objection to all British newspapers is that if one removes all the advertisements and all the opinionated columns, we are left with precious little ‘news’ items.
Finally, in the middle of the market, are the sermonising, self-righteous, holier-than-thou Daily Express and Daily Mail, which have a collective tendency to pander to the xenophobic little Englanders and ‘Nimbys’. There is only one thing that British newspapers are good for, and that is for eating fish and chips out of.

BRITAIN ’S CONSERVATIVE PARTIES
It is going to be pretty tough deciding which political party to vote for at the next general election, when you consider the following: The Conservative Party are keen to improve the national health service, boost the economy, reduce crime, and revive the education system; while the Labour Conservatives want to improve the national health service, boost the economy, reduce crime, and revive the education system. Alternatively, the Liberal Democrat Conservatives seek to improve the national health service, boost the economy, reduce crime, and guess what, revive the education system. Oh it is going to be an almighty struggle choosing which political party that I will not vote for, when they each have such wonderful plans for the nation. Perhaps I should just pull a party name out of a hat and make the same kind of informed decision that Joe Tabloid and other voters arrive at. If truth be told, the political party that wins most votes is the one with the most convincing liars.
There used to be a predictable cycle in British politics whereby the electorate turfed out the condescending Conservative Party every five years or so in favour of the equally patronising ‘we know what’s best for you’ Labour Conservatives. Nowadays, however, that trend has been replaced by a more tolerant electorate who are prepared to suffer the same patronising Tories in government for about eighteen years before foolishly allowing the condescending Labour Tories to deliver on a fraction of their manifesto promises over a similarly long tenure in office. I am always amused when a political party explains away its’ general election humiliation by suggesting that they failed to get their message across properly. This is a classic example of denial, when the reality is that the voters were only too painfully aware of their ‘misunderstood’ message. Is it also not frequently the case that the people who complain about the government are the very same voters who put them in power in the first place? I guess that ultimately the binge drinking, tabloid reading, soap watchers that comprise an unhealthily high proportion of our ‘informed’ electorate get the government that they so richly deserve.

THE TRIUMPH OF NEW LABOUR
Margaret Thatcher has reportedly claimed that her greatest legacy is ‘New Labour’ – a political party that abandoned its’ socialist roots and re-invented itself in the 1990s as an electable, catch-all party. Whereas the 1972 Watergate burglary was a bungled affair which would impact gravely upon the Nixon administration which sponsored it, the Labour Party’s theft of Mrs Thatcher’s ideological clothes was a spectacularly successful heist. Gatecrashing the Conservative