I'll still be doing this job when I'm dead

People ask me whether, working in retail, I still get that Christmas feeling. Of course I do. It’s just that the feeling is less one of magic and excitement, and more one of dread, irritation and stunned disbelief that I’m still in the same job at the end of another year.

So I’ve taken a few days off in a last ditch attempt to get a new job before Christmas closes in again. I don’t think it’s going to work. Yesterday I wound up going to London to see a French zombie movie at the London Film Festival. It being a French movie, the zombies don’t stumble around looking all decayed and eating people’s brains - that would be vulgar. Instead, they look exactly like they did when they were alive, only a bit more confused. The biggest fear is that they’ll want their old jobs back. It’s slow-burning stuff - sometimes so slow-burning that you start to wonder if it’s gone out - but has its own special eeriness. It’s called Les Revenants, or, in English - a rather rough translation this, though it should help sales - Shaun of the Dead 2.

the birds is coming

Bird flu is spreading like wildfire - from newspaper to newspaper. How many are going to die? Easy: think of an unbelievably large figure, then double it. No sooner have you got your head round one nightmare scenario than they hit you with something new. You might comfort yourself with the notion that only the very old and the very young will die. WRONG. Bird flu is specifically going to target people in the prime of life. You might reassure yourself that the bird flu virus is really tiny, and can be stamped on. WRONG. Once it mutates, the virus will be at least a mile wide, and able to lay waste to major cities. And there will be 80 million of them.

And that’s just according to The Economist.

how to get a job

I recently saw a report on the news about the top three words to avoid using in a CV. They are ‘hate’, ‘awful’, and ‘mistake’. So then I felt obliged to get out my CV and delete those phrases which - according to these so-called 'experts' - are liable to put potential employers off. Phrases like ‘I hate work’, ‘work is awful’, and ‘hiring me would be a big mistake’. Who’d have thought it, eh? I would have expected them to be more concerned about terms like ‘surly’, ‘incompetent’, and ‘Tourette’s syndrome’, but seems it’s OK to leave those in.

I appear to be advertising XFM

The other day I mentioned on here that the last Magic Numbers single sounds like Only Fools And Horses at the beginning. I was pleased, then, that a week or two ago people were texting Adam and Joe on their XFM show to tell them the same thing. They didn’t seem totally convinced, but I felt slightly less alone.

Similiarly, listening to Jimmy Carr’s XFM show on Sunday, I heard him nail a staple of bad comedy that has obsessed me for years: the impression that’s so poor the impressionist has to say the name of whoever he’s doing before he starts or even while he’s doing it. ‘It’s Rolf Harris! Rolf Harris, ladies and gentlemen!’ (fumbling with comedy beard and glasses). The ultimate bad impression - at least for those of us growing up in the seventies - was always Frank Spencer, who isn’t even a real person. I’ve often thought you could do a whole act based around that. Man lurches around onstage dressed in mac and beret (wrong size, wrong colour) saying ‘Frank Spencer!’ in a bizarre gormless voice. Initially, he’d say it in a triumphant way, then, as he continues to appeal to various faces in the audience without success, the tone would become questioning. Finally, it would be a howl of rage and disappointment. My God, am I insane or would that be hilarious? Could somebody out there do that, and give me half the money please?

the multiplex must be destroyed

I’ve been to the cinema a few times. Before the movie they have that ad that looks like a trailer for Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe at first but then the picture shrinks and goes all fuzzy and it turns out to be propaganda trying to persuade you to see movies in the cinema rather than on pirate DVD. Curiously, one of their arguments is that in pirate DVDs your view is often obscured by someone in the row ahead going to the toilet. OK, and that’s a reason for going to the cinema, is it? Where that never ever happens? Plus, as Mat pointed out, pirate DVDs are usually of much higher quality than that represented here. The pirate DVD makers should sue the film industry for libel.

I don’t like to go on about films, but A History of Violence is the best thing David Cronenberg’s done since Dead Ringers . Touted as a mainstream movie, it’s still recognizably Cronenberg, looking at violence with the same queasy fascination with which he used to observe the weird bodily eruptions of his earlier films. Vaginas growing in your armpits, that kind of thing. Don’t go and see it though. The mainstream doesn’t deserve this picture: we need to get Cronenberg out of the multiplexes and into hard-to-get-to art house cinemas where they won’t even let you in unless you can prove that you’ve seen all of his other movies (except that one about drag racing). That way he won’t get vulgarly successful and end up making The Pacifier 2.