take the blame

HELP!! Get writing it now. Write it on your roof in big chalk letters so when the rescue helicopters come to look for survivors, you may stand a chance of survival. You need to act now because you are not going to be protected by the Ministry of Defence. The ineptitude that emanates from this governmental department is such that it manages to make the BBC look like the head prefect. Taketheblame doesn’t quite know how to tell its loyal readers of the sheer reckless abandon that has infiltrated the guardians of our national defences. How important is the MoD? What is its actual purpose?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War the MoD does not foresee any short-term conventional military threat; rather, it has identified weapons of mass destruction, international terrorism, and failed and failing states as the overriding threats to the UK’s interests. The MoD also manages day to day running of the armed forces, contingency planning and defence procurement - sourced www.wikipedia.org/ministry_of_defence

Shit. This doesn’t bode well. That is a considerable amount of responsibility for one government department. It appears they have to deal with and intercept a vast array of information. Where can it possibly keep all of this top secret information? How about on laptops? Why yes! That sounds like a mighty fine idea. Keep all of the secret, sensitive knowledge on terrorism, failing states, raging dictators, weapons of mass destruction, escalating civil war, genocide, splinter cells, manic urban terrorists and failed angry politicians, all seeking to reek some revenge on our little isle, on laptops. And then lose them. Not just one or two. Not even tens on twenties but hundreds!

SINCE 2004 the MoD HAS LOST 659 LAPTOPS. 659!!!!! LOST LAPTOPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s right, employees of the MoD have lost 659 laptops. In just four years. How is that possible? Surely after the first 300 had gone missing somebody of reasonable intelligence - for there must be some working there - would have stepped forward and said something? Maybe something along the lines of…

“Come on people, we have to stop losing laptops full of top secret information. I want you all to make the extra effort not to leave them in hotels, on trains, in taxis or at your girlfriend’s house. We have an important job to do protecting the country and allowing potentially harmful knowledge out into the public domain is not sensible. ”

No excuse in the book is good enough to get anywhere near explaining away this level of stupidity, this level of carelessness, this level of ineptitude. Its a laptop every 2.5 days!!! Every 2.5 days a laptop containing who knows what goes missing from Ministry of Defence hands. Where it ends up is anybody’s guess as only 32 have ever been recovered. They even tried to cover up this level of reckless stupidity by originally claiming only 374 (only!) had gone missing, only to have Defence Secretary Des Browne issue new figures after anomalies were found in the reporting process. Oh YES! It couldn’t be made up. If it wasn’t so dangerous it would be funny.

Seeing as zero people have come forward and apologised for this glaring ineptitude, Taketheblame is here to help out and offer its apologies to anyone affected by this outlandish fault in the way our country is protected and our forces managed. Lets hope no-one dies as a result.

Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire. I got a whole lotta money thats ready to burn so get those stakes up higher…..

So how high do you want them to be raised? The stakes I mean. How much do you have to loose? Las Vegas is a hot bet of mentalism and surrealism. The home to crazy bets and even crazier people. It doesnt sleep and there is no time for there are no clocks on the casino floor. As the hours wear on, the stakes get higher and losses get chased as small fortunes are won and giant fortunes lost. So how high do you want the stakes to go? At the Bellagio Casino on the main strip, tucked away at the back of the auditorium, is a small room known as ‘Bobbys room’, and it is here where you will find the really high stakes you are after. In the early part of the century a team of professional poker players, lead by Doyle Brunson, took on billionaire Andy Beal in what was to become the biggest card game on the planet. Blinds were set, and increased, until at one point in proceedings they were resting lazily at $100,000 and $200,000. That’s a car and a house every time you get dealt some cards. The players had to put 200k just to play their cards. Mental.

But all is not flowers and roses. Head for Vegas while you can, because it wont be here forever. Las Vegas is sinking, and not into the Nevada desert that surrounds it. Visitor numbers are down and gambling revenue is plummeting, the recession is hitting the ravaged, beating heart of America. The money is drying up and there is no-one to blame. In the first quarter of this year gambling revenue was down 4%, the biggest drop since 1970 and serious cause for concern for a city whose life blood is the constant ringing of the slot machine.

After the terror attacks on The World Trade centre when America seemed to hoard its money as if the sky was falling down, Las Vegas carried on regardless, a rolling freight-train. Something different is happening now though, the once impervious city is taking body blows as the global economic takes hold and the desert barometer is showing no signs of letting up. The stock price of the MGM Mirage, owner of 9 hotels and casino resorts on the famous strip, including the aforementioned Bellagio, have tumbled from over $100 before Christmas to under half of that now.

The same company has terminated the contracts of over 400 employees to save revenue. New hotels and Casinos are being half built and left to the birds as investors pull out and building firms go bust. A $6 billion replica of the New York Plaza has been shelved and the $3 billion Cosmopolitan resort is half built after the developers defaulted on a $760 million loan from Deutsche Bank.

But of course this is of no use to YOU. The part time American gambler, the dreamer and the steamer, the loser. Big or small, the amount is irrelevant, there is always only ever one winner and we all know who that is. But the casinos never apologise do they? They never take the blame for the bad luck, for the our draw, for the fish that got lucky. For the luck of the draw, the bad cards on the flop or the momentary lack of breath as the balls bounces from red, slowly slowly slowly into black. 22 is nearly 21. Oh so near. Just 1. For all the bad beats on he Vegas strip, Taketheblame holds its hands up and says sorry. The cards were dealt and we are to blame.

If all the BBC’s programming over the years could be stored on celluloid, like in the old movies, and put end to end, like they say, then you could tie a pretty bow around Jupiter and still have enough film to make a roller-coaster back to earth. If all their radio broadcasts could be sewn together into one big long bank holiday Monday ‘best of’ with Jamie Theakston drafted in to front the show whilst all the real djs went on holiday, then the broadcast would last longer than time itself. And you would get pretty bored long before that. In other-words it’s a treasure trove of material that documents the history of Great Britain and has material to teach generations. The cultural legacy of a nation, and its all under the watchful eye of the greatest broadcasting corporation the world has ever known and is ever likely to know. Which means that it will probably get lost, deleted, forgotten about or get accidentally left on a train.

Which is kind of what happened when the archives were opened up on the BBC iplayer, an Internet tool on the flagship website that allows viewers to watch programs online or download them onto a storage device and watch them at a later date. Obviously with such a vast array of material and parties involved in the making of said material, when the BBC devised the iplayer idea they had to adhere to and implement strict copyright procedures in order to protect the art. They did. And it can be breached in 12 minutes by any amateur computer hacker in the land. As Taketheblame has already pointed out, the BBC website cost over 100 million and went way over budget.

Program after program is downloaded off the website and put onto peer to peer and torrent websites all around the world, minus the DRM (digital rights management) system that only allows playback for 30 days before the files self corrupt themselves. With no DRM there is no copyright protection and the programs watched on the iplayer can no longer be tracked by the BBC. Oops.

As the most widely spoken language in the world - and yes, before the Chinese contingent jump on board heckling obscenities and crying like banshees that the jewel of the Oriental languages is more spoken, it is not as some 700 million citizens parler Anglais as a foreign language, which, as any mathematician with 25% of the computing power of a Texas Instrument will tell you, sweeps Chinese aside - it ain’t half difficult to learn. Of the worlds 3000 (ish) documented languages, English is the most vivid and yet sadly is the most populated with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, over 500 000 words and as many again in the form of scientific and technical jargon, making any attempt to master the language nigh on impossible. It would be a lot easier if, as the Eskimos, there was one word for 3956 different meanings. That way you would never say the wrong thing. And we have all said the wrong thing at one time or another.

If Bill gates and the Googleplex ever had a love-in and exchanged some data, swapped some ideas and had a chat about information then they might well check their data-banks. If they did they would find that some 80% of all the knowledge and data stored on their secret underground mega-stores would be in English. That’s right, 80%. It is both fortunate that all of the worlds knowledge and secrets are stored on an indestructible hard disk somewhere in the Mojave desert and unfortunate that when future generations have to read it or dig it out in order to reconstruct the planet after some megalomaniac dictator blew it to pieces, they will have to do so in a thick Geordie accent.

Quite how English came to be so all powerful is something that we will leave to the scholars as they are probably the same people who made it so complicated in the first place. Quite why a language has to have 37 different tenses to describe 3 time periods is something only the very enlightened know. A past, present and future exist for us all; 3 simple spheres of time. Only in English time has been distorted in a way that Einstein proved impossible some 50 odd years ago. His views and thesis on time, the speed of light and its relativity to the global gravitational pull of a billion orbiting galaxies never took the post perfect future continuous passive relative tense clause into consideration. A tense that clearly proves that time travel is possible and happening right now in every English classroom in 1967, 1987, 2345 and 607, simultaneously. Only the past perfect future passive voice is contesting this via the laws of physics and a English paradox has prevailed. All in the space of .5 seconds.

This is to apologise to every citizen of the world who has to learn English. It is for the countless romantic languages that will die out in the not to distant future as English seeks global domination. However powerful China becomes, its language will not follow suit, it will be English that the global markets talk in. Americans (who luckily for them, speak a kind of butchered English by birth) find the Chinese language with its multiple alphabets simply too complicated to learn. No-one will ever take the blame for English robbing the world of languages barely spoken, so we will.

The supermarket; the barren wasteland of the surreal and inept, a breeding ground of agitation and reckless stupidity, of time wasting and time expansion where one fleeting second can feel like the eternal stretch of existence. Such is the capacity for the human being to be inept in a supermarket - the same capacity can be found in regular shops in a diluted form, but it is when food shopping that the condition can be found in its pure, concentrate form - that books, films and art has been dedicated to the strange condition that overcomes people the moment they step through the doors and into a place that has no other crime other than to sell food.

What causes the condition is yet to be determined by scientists - they have other things to contend with - but what is sure is that it exists and whats more no-one ever apologises for it. The lady who insists on paying for her groceries with a mixture of old silver coins from the Battle of Waterloo and an assortment of gift certificates and coupons from an old copy of Vanity Fair makes your choice of queue so wrong that the invasion of Iraq seems like an enlightened flash of inspiration by comparison.

The battle-axe on till 7 who, the moment you arrive at her isle decides she is now going to close. “I’m closed”, she bellows at you, unprovoked and as if the Germans are coming and she needs to escape the country before nightfall. You are then left to crawl your way back to the isle that you know the little lady from hell is currently holding up with her coupons. (coupons - the most evil word in the English language.) So you wield your misfiring trolley past the crying baby and the little bastard children who insist on staring or mocking you and eventually it is your turn.

Your food has past its sell by date and all you want to do is kill. But you cant because line 7 is in deep conversation with line 8 about her tearaway daughter and the price of an apple that has fallen out of the bag and cant actually be brought as a single item, only as part of a multi-pack. Finally she mumbles at you and slowly pushes your items over the infra red with the speed of a 3 toed sloth high on anti depressants. Any slower and she may as well be hanging upside down from a tree herself slowly munching her bamboo stick. Ten days later and its time to pay but you only have notes which can be clearly seen by the checkout staff who still insist on asking you if you have 23 pence in loose change as it would really make their life a whole lot easier if they didn’t have to count out the correct amount of change even though there is a flashing light beaming the amount onto their iris. You say no and they spit green blood at you through their eyes. The floor of the supermarket tries to swallow you as you make your way to the exit, all the while monitored by the glazed eyes of the soulless victims that are currently dying in the queues, jealousy in the depths of their red eyes tries to flicker to life but then their heads bow and they return to queue juggling in their head. The impossible task a paradox as the other queue always moves faster for you, slower for the occupants of the other.

Taketheblame would like to apologise and until scientists find the real cause, take the blame for all your supermarket ineptitude.

Lets hear it for the bulls shall we? This week in the usually sleepy Spanish town of Pamplona, the 9 day festival of San Fermin has erupted onto the cobbled streets. From the 6th July when pyrotechnics, but more traditionally, gunfire or cannon fire, mark the start of this festival in the Navarre region, until the 14th July when the festival is closed with the singing of Pobre de mi, the town becomes a riot. Literally a bloodbath. The 2 week long festival in homage to Saint Fermin is the wildest street party in the world and if you want to experience you have to be in it but if you want to live through it you have to avoid the rampaging bulls.

Rampaging bulls weighing half a ton or more each, with filed down horns half a metre long running on wet cobblestones at 30 mph is really the only way to throw a good party these days. If there are not herds of wild beasts marauding, starved, thirsty and angry then they are no fun. To make it extra special you get the bulls really agitated by having locals wield newspapers and strike the animals savagely on the nose with them in a show of true bravery and defiance. That, or have drunk and or brainless Americans saunter about clueless or a herd of reprobate students who read Hemingway’s’s The Sun Also Rises and think it is brave to provoke an angry bull. Mix with alcohol and loud music and voila, the perfect street party.

The first running of the bulls, or el encerro to give it its Spanish name, was probably held some 500 hundred years ago or longer, records are not accurate enough to say, but records detailing the bloody revenge of the bulls in Pamplona date back only as far as 1910. The origins of the suicide mission come from when the bulls used to be transported from their compounds outside of the city to the amphitheatre they would later die in, and the local young men would jump in with the bulls to show bravado, much like a joy rider from Kings Heath will steal a car and mingle with the traffic on the M6.

On the morning of each day during the festival, a rocket sounds the beginning of the race and the early risers (for the runnings start at 8 am) bolt. The entrance requirement is merely to be male and alive. The course runs, like the Krypton factor, for some 800 metres. Up Santo Domingo and across the main square and depending on weather conditions, the entrance to Estafeta offer some of the most comical highlights of any race. Are we supposed to feel guilt or sorrow for people who willingly get into a race with 2 dozen huge animals and get hurt in the proceedings? No. This is about the bulls. An apology to the bulls who regardless of how they fare or how much entertainment they bring, are still slaughtered at the end of the el encerro.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7492914.stm

Every bull in this video is killed later the same day. For a country that prides itself on the bravery of such sport, the cowardice shown to the bulls is a contradiction is it not? And since the bulls cant defend themselves, Taketheblame would like to offer its apologies on behalf of a nation that wont. Sorry bulls.

All you wanted was some cigarettes. Not a big ask considering you have worked 67 hours the week before and the huge pile of cash that is sitting in your bank account goes someway to masking the sheer hell of the weeks work; the 59 cups of coffee, 246 cigarettes (its why you need some more), the hell the neighbours gave you, your work colleagues who every day take a little of your soul, not to mention the nagging girlfriend and the flatmates whose eyes you want to cut out with scissors. The thousand pounds that is nestling sweet and cold in your bank account will make it all, if at least not worthwhile, then bearable. Only it wont because when you hit the 4 digit key into the machine and ask it nicely for money, it tells you “insufficient funds’. You can hear the machine laughing at you. You try it again, the infuriation rising in the pit of your stomach like the bowls of Mt St Helen’s, ready to burst into an exquisite ulcer. You know there is money there, or at least their should be, their normally is, its the 26th of the month, there is always money there ready to be exchanged for intoxication.

You haven’t been to the bank for a while but this time you sweep in like the north wind demanding to know where your money is, the clerk tells you to get in line - you hadn’t seen the 27 other sweating cicadas wasting their lunch hour queuing in the bank, now all staring at you as if you had just raped their children - so you wait and you wait and all you want to know is where the money that you worked your fingers to the bone for is, its your money, its your right. So the clock ticks down and finally its your turn and you demand a statement and you receive it and it turns out that you have no money. Your card has been cloned and a man in South Africa has spent all your money.

Card cloning is becoming big business and if you get caught in its vicious web, you are going to be experiencing a whole world of frustration. Your bank account will be frozen and your cards cancelled. You will then have to wait for new cards and pin numbers which will take up to 2 weeks. In this time, not one person will apologise to you. Not one person will say “sorry Mr/Mrs… I know you bank with us and under our watch somebody stole all your money, so we are sorry.” There will be no such apology.

The card manufacturers who have developed the Chip and Pin system that is being so easily violated (http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/saving-and-banking/article.html?in_article_id=425103&in_page_id=7) will not take the blame or apologise - the chip and pin system has been used for a lot longer on the continent and criminals are learning how to corrupt and bypass the mechanism. In an extra kick-in-the-teeth victims are being denied reimbursement because as far as the computers are concerned, the correct card and pin number have been used in the crime. That you have never been to South Africa is of no concern to a computer.

Taketheblame would like to console the victims of debit card cloning and offer our apologies on behalf of those who are truly responsible.

Contrary to what certain musicians, tour operators or record label execs will have you believe, the cost of concert tickets is most definitely rising, and rising at a rate that far outstrips the natural economic increases that control our economy. Paying above the market value for anything is never a nice experience; it can leave you cold, guilty and ashamed. The bands never apologise do they? You don’t hear Madonna saying sorry for the £300+ it costs to get a seat in the toilet to watch her latest tour or The Rolling Stones following suit. Gone are the days of catching a band that you haven’t even heard of for under a tenner at your local pub, they are playing at the Academy in *insert town name here* and it will cost you £20, oh and by the way, if you want a beer then that will be an extra £5.

Alan Krueger is a very intelligent man. He is Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy, director of the Princeton Survey Research Center and professor of economics and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at the really rather prestigious Princeton University in little ol’ USA, and what he doesn’t know about market and price structuring really isnt necessary to know. In a bid to find out if the current rises in the price of a concert ticket are legitimate and in line with inflation, a plan was hatched. A plan that only an extremely insightful, determined and intelligent academic could hatch. (http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S01/18/72I40/index.xml)

Using box office information maintained by Pollstar, an organization that provides concert tour schedules, box office results and other music industry-related data, Krueger discovered “that in the last five years concert ticket prices have grown by 61 percent, while the Consumer Price Index (the measure of the price of all consumer goods) increased by just 13 percent.” There you have it, concrete proof that you, me and we are being ripped off.

There are exceptions to this rule of course, the so-called dinosaurs of rock who could charge pretty much any price they care to think of and usually do. Led Zeppelin at the O2, Madonna on any one of her tours, The Rolling Stones on there ever lasting final tour, The Eagles, The Who, The Sex Pistols, Neil Young etc etc etc… they aren’t dead, just taking a tour. Prince once charged $3121 for tickets to his show. Woodstock cost $6 for a ticket, value for money however you look at it. Whether you view the festival of peace and love through nostalgic or cynical eyes, you cant help but think that what it stood for has slipped from the mainstream of music.

Sorry to all those people who have and continue to pay above the odds for a night out listening to music. Such is the power of music to move people that demand will never decrease but sadly Dr Krueger has more bad news for he thinks the price will continue to rise into the unforeseeable future. Sorry.

“Have you seen…’insert any film title here’?”

“Do you mean the original or the remake?”

Everybody has had this conversation and sadly in the years to come you are going to have it every-time you talk to anybody about your favourite film, or indeed, any film. Such is the appetite of film producers to rape the archives and simply remake a film that has already been created, written and acted out before, that one day every film conceived will have its own doppelganger. Taketheblame would like to apologise for this most uncinematic of developments.

If the first time is always the most memorable, then why repeat the exercise in a futile attempt to recapture the essence of the original experience? The reasons why the cinemas are flooded with recycled films are obvious, and they are creative, that is why all remakes are so much better than their predecessors… hold on, no they aren’t, must be money. There is a serious advantage to the tried and tested. If a film, such as Robocop, was hugely successful 20 years ago then there is a high chance that the first weekend of general release will see the film recoup its cost. That it is a pile of rubbish is inconsequential.

The Ring, a Japanese film of immense imagination and genuinely scary was remade into an American fiasco with none of the soul, flair or originality of the original. The same was true of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film so powerful in its brutality that is should not have been touched. Continuing on the horror theme, for they seem to be butchered as much as any other genre, The Amityville Horror was robbed of its demonic core in the 2005 remake and Assault on Precinct 13 was a disaster in itself. That Hitchcock’s ornithological masterpiece The Birds is set for a remake is treason, the outcome potentially as scary as the 2005 remake of Black Christmas was bad.

The Fog, The Fly, The Great Gatsby, The Hitcher, The Hills Have Eyes and The Importance of Being Earnest. The Italian Job, Ladykillers, The Music Man, The Mummy and Friday 13th. They have all had their power, influence and enjoyment taken from them in the pursuit of box office figures, and we are sorry.

Horrendous as the above photo is, there is no denying that such photos should be allowed to exist; taking photos on your wedding day is surely a liberty that even the most unphotogenic deserve. No? Perhaps not one of the great freedoms you would illicit from a lover of freedom but surely a right none the less. Alas, as the nanny state turns up the heat, these photos will no longer be allowed to grace coffee tables across the land as they are being outlawed by government killjoys. Photos of the happy bride and groom signing the register, the point in which they are actually recognised as husband and wife, are actually a threat to national security, a danger to the economy and a potential treasure trove for identity thieves.

The names and signatures of previous couples can be seen in any photograph taken and used in all manner of under hand, criminally insane activities. Using Photo-shop would-be paedophiles, terrorists, arms traffickers and drug mules could gleam the information and use it for their own demonic purposes. And so the Home Office had banned them. That the wedding register is a public document that can be viewed by anyone who cares to walk into the public domain is neither here-nor-there, or perhaps even over looked by the zealots responsible. Absurdity knows no limits.

As the fallout spreads, register offices throughout the land have been battling with their moral compass. Paranoia is creeping under the skin of Bury St Edmund’s registry office. Perhaps minutes before hiding under the table out of sheer fear, a spokesman commented on the ruling,

‘here’s confidential information listed in marriage entries and with photographic digital enhancement you might be able to see those details if a picture were taken‘.

Counter measures have been setup by fractoning registry offices to combat the absurdity of the draconian measure. The brains at Wolverhampton have come up with the cunning idea of using blank, dummy books in their photos, ensuring the privacy and future safety of all involved is maintained.

“our superintendent ensures you cannot take any photos of the actual book. If they want this particular picture we give them a blank book to stand over.”

As another part of our lives is washed away under a sea of government lunacy, Taketheblame would like to apologise to all those future happy couples who will, at best, have to pose with blank register books and more likely none at all.