25th anniversary of a new millennia – China has dragons!

Posted: January 1, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Brief...therefore witty. | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Happy new year!

I hope you had a good one. I didn’t really have ‘one’ – having slept through the celebrations.

I’ve had worse – such as the beginning of the year 2000, which today is the 25th anniversary.

I poked myself in the eye with a Union Jack flag, which was a crap start to the millennium.

And since then I’ve felt unappreciative of the timing of NYE.

It’s always 1000 years since 1000 years ago. Today is just 25 years since a particular 1000 years ago.

Tomorrow, a different millennia will have passed.

Whoops, there went another just then, but that might have been an adorable little century.

There are beginnings and ends across eternity, and I find focusing on only one beginning and end is just a little meagre.

All that time, all those stories, happinesses and sadnesses, era defining events redirecting courses of a trillion ships, and reliable irrelevancies, the things we’ll never know but still happened and will continue to tomorrow onwards…. saving consideration of that solely for each 31st December is a disservice to the time that has passed.

Plus, and more importantly, firework shows are dull.

It’s hard to get a good narrative going with a fireworks show.

They’re very samey – very quickly – so once you’ve seen the first minute of a fireworks show, you’ve already seen the rest. The first 60 seconds is all you need.

After that, you start to feel a bit dopey realising you’re part of a crowd all looking up at the same thing, like a cow in a herd only you’re doing something far less exciting than eating grass.

And it’s not just in-person. If watching-back the following day, you really needn’t watch a New Year’s Eve firework show specific to that year. I can watch 2008’s show and it’s genuinely much the same, as is 2010 in Paris, 2015 Sydney or 2022 NYC.

You also needn’t re-watch just on New Year’s Eve – August is doable too in case you want to insert some boredom in your summer.

I think the narrative issue is because a NYE firework show has to start with a relatively big bang and it struggles to temper its storytelling from there – unlike China’s drone-show last night.

Starting slow, building-up a story, with fewer bangs meaning you could hear the softer music, unleashing the fireworks towards a crescendo featuring a dragon which was so cool that I’m now delighted to announce it was real.

Yes it was.

They had a real dragon.

A real dragon, made in China.

Still, firework shows remain a broadly dull engagement.

I can picture someone in Ancient China living their Ancient Chinese life, attending a firework show for some national celebration, slowly realising they’re board too – partaking in an already old-age custom continued down the line to me as I watch London’s 2024 firework show above the Thames – also bored.

As well as the lack of dragons, I think the issue is the setting.

A dark night’s sky is a perfect blackly-blank canvas to hit with all those colours, but its a bit distant. If you go to a fireworks show, the fireworks aren’t actually there where you are.

A firework beneath your duvet first thing in the morning however – that’ll stay with you, and yes – so will the burns, but let’s focus on the memories.

Real dragons beneath the sheets would also result in burns, but perhaps this is something we just have to appreciate in the passage of time.

Anyway, happy new year.

But remember: millennia happen every day. As do their 25th anniversaries.

Sam

How To Play Pool As If You Were A Good Person.

Posted: April 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

By all means, avoid the blue ball.

Glasses will smash, noses will be blooded, and conversations will be rudely interrupted, all on account of the blue ball not actually being there whilst you swipe full-force at it.

The red, yellow and white however- they’re you’re business. Like the colours of the flag of pool (we’re going to need one of those).

First things first, you need to step back, then forward again so as to assault the table in every sense of the word. Whether or not people are watching you- either they’ll remember you, or the table sure as hell will.

Then we’ll leave you alone, once we’ve dragged you away from the green and that’ll be that for a while.

You’re a good person now, so just give yourself five minutes to enjoy that feeling and then breathe deeply once and make your way back inside.

Although fact that the table is inside is part of the problem.

Naturally- you’re drinking throughout your pool performance. The violence is natural, the pool is natural and the drink is natural- all you need now are some natural surroundings, so a nice meadow in which to enjoy a game of pool is increasingly important now. Have yourself a pool table, and stick a meadow underneath it.

The reason for the act of violence being natural is that it’s svelte, not the violence, the pool table. The violence is not so much svelte as much as it is loud and eventually leaky.

We rarely encounter that which is svelte in our day to day lives. Apart from babies- they’re fairly svelte, but they haven’t got the arrogance of a pool table. If violence feels svelte to you- then you must’ve been practising.

A pool table will stand there as though it’s clever to have four legs and no skirt on, arrogant and obviously pompous- because somehow it’s winning without playing, whilst also swallowing my balls and not giving them back. It only gives the white ball back, but only so that you can prolong your own agony as you don’t succeed in potting the correct ball and wishing that the blue ball was real.

The house always wins, but you can change the interior before you are made to leave. This doesn’t mean that you should wallpaper the walls, but it does mean that you should take some wallpaper home with you, and perhaps a couple of bricks. The same method applies to pool. Make sure that this cheeky table remembers you- you’re going to lose but leave it a pretty little scar.

That is good pool. Though it may well sour relations with the next player who might well, and justly so, enquire as to why their pool table is scarred and why you have a mouthful of wallpaper. You’re appropriate response is: “Go and do likewise fella, now excuse me…I have a need to flee”.

So the violence is natural.

The pool is natural too, and ties in very smoothly with the naturalness of the drinking.

Drinking is natural owing to the fact that…here it is! Nature is a matter of opinion, with “death by natural causes” being the most debateable.

If I’m eaten by a mountain lion (fine- as long as I truly deserve it) then there really is little more-natural a death to be had by this talkative ape here. But, the police, and hopefully my family, would freak out at the fact that technically I died from being chewed. For some mountain-born kid in the…mountains…it’s likely that being eaten by a mountain lion is comparable for him to a kid in New York dying from being hit by a car. Tragic, and it doesn’t happen to everyone (someone has to be the driver), but- it’s not unnatural. Maybe what’s natural is what’s common in your habitat.

Drinking is happening all around; my town has a raging alcohol and budding weed problem. So it’s natural.

I believe that we have an urge to flaunt the mind’s capabilities when we are drinking, and so either some strong conversation, testy little quiz or a bit of hand-eye co-ordination is what we need at the time of the consumption of alcohol. This is why darts boards, quiz machines and pool tables are found in bars and pubs.

Conversations can also be found here, although they tend to be free of charge. Maybe they won’t be for long, as good conversation can be hard to find and lonely people are plentiful- a very valuable resource for those that sell things in the place of a social life. ‘Whoring your vocal chords’ is how it must be put, since ‘whoring your mouth’ is rather more misleading and much more popular.

All in all, to ensure you’re playing pool as if you’re a good person; be sure to leave the pool hall a little different to how it was when you arrived. Preferably with other people leaving their mouths open as they watch you waddle out with in a funny fashion because you groined the table in a moment of 17 century sexuality- in which you became so aroused by the sight of naked table legs that you grabbed a leg and beat it with it, whilst also beating, with the aforementioned leg,…off.

But how does this relate to you being a good person?

Well, aside from doing what is natural (apologies for not being able to find an alternative word for ‘natural’), you are making a difference.

Change is good, whilst change is also bad, eventually in a good way. If it hadn’t been for the horrors of the holocaust, then the best of human nature would not have been displayed, nor would we have the option to generally be against the holocausts- a cause most aggressively espoused by more good people than bad. So, as an aside, if you want to play pool as if you’re a good person, then play it whilst also being against the holocaust.

Make change of the world’s arse (GHETTO LANGUAGE USED IN WIT- THANKS FOR READING), and then things will be continuing exactly as it always has- constantly changing, hopefully evolving, possibly just changing- lacking a point for which to do so being the reason for it being so.

Sudden and shocking action, unto a room unexpecting it, is a favour to all. Particularly if you don’t know any of them as it is the finest of conversation starters.

Think of it as a social call to those few others that might be there want to contribute to the sudden action. Having a point to the action, let us call it…’momentum’…is something that might matter, as opposed to most things that happen, and do not matter.

Play pool as a good person by making a difference; any way you choose, but I recommend the sudden and shocking method as a call out to the people that might also want to leave the room, which is temporarily the world, a little different from how it was when you first arrived.

That’s about it. The ethos of ‘make change’ prevails above most others- even the one about helping old ladies cross the street- and change is natural, change is good.

You are natural; you are good.

Be natural.

Sam