They really ain’t even half-clever bastards

I’ve always nursed a desire to go on Mastermind.  Now that I’ve lived long enough to know the answers to slightly more than an embarrassingly miniscule total of general knowledge questions, it occurs to me that I might avoid coming last; if, that is, I can exercise the self-control required not to flap about when an answer is on the tip of my tongue and then to mutter FUCK’S SAKE when I’m told what it is, like everybody naturally would, because clearly you’re prepped by the Mastermind wardens not to do that as it makes for rather awkwardly shit telly.

The erroneous assumption that a demonstration of knowledge implies intelligence is one of our society’s sad maladies.   People who win Mastermind are NOT actually clever.  I’d be fucked off if I spent months researching from a wide range of sources in an effort to learn everything about a chosen subject as deeply infused with facts as The Life and Works of Bob Dylan, only to be beaten by some idle cunt who manages a score of 20 with no passes on Fawlty Towers, simply because he’s watched the same 6 hours of television again and again.  Or The Harry Potter Novels.  Oh well done, you’ve read 7 seven books and remembered them.  You lazy fucker.  Oh, and you work as a librarian?  One of those busy jobs that means you have fuck-all to do now that they have automatic machines in libraries?  No wonder you know everything about Emily Bronte (short life, one novel, you fucking cheat!)

An equally flawed belief held by many is that a high IQ score makes you a genius.  If you’ve ever sat an IQ test (one set by MENSA as opposed to one of those 10-question internet jobbies that you do and then have to sign up to something they’re selling to get your result), then you’ll realise that having a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re intelligent, and certainly far from being a fucking genius, but quite simply good at doing a certain kind of test.  And if you are good at doing that kind of test, you are invited to join MENSA, a club full of people who BELIEVE that they are the cleverest in the land and desire the opportunity to boast about being in MENSA and joining MENSA’s dating agency so that they can meet other people that are good at tests to have sex with and generally talk to about doing tests and quizzes and being ever so fucking clever.  The pure fact that someone would choose to join MENSA is the surest indicator of non-intelligence and therefore all members should be consequently excluded from MENSA for not being clever enough to have joined in the first place.

What I have NEVER nursed a desire to go on is University Challenge.  As a teenager, considering a university career, the impossibility of answering anything on that show caused me great anxiety and destroyed my confidence.  As a middle-aged adult, the impossibility of answering more than a few questions on that show causes me great confusion as to how anyone aged 18-21 knows that much about science, maths and culture.  What did their parents do to them?  Lock them in a cellar with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and electrodes tied to their toes, with no access to any television channel except BBC2 and a regime of 18-hour a day home-tutoring that forms an educational equivalent of Victorian child labour in its brutality and intensity?  Freaks.

At the other end of the spectrum is that now ubiquitous dumbing down of quiz questions linked to prime-time TV shows trying to make money by getting viewers to text in their answers to patronisingly brainless challenges like, “Which country do English people come from?  (a)  England, (b)  Brazil, (c) Tesco, (d) I’m a moron.”  Why not just ask people to text in, charge them a quid and say that someone will be randomly selected to win the prize?  Do they really believe that there are people out there who’d answer (a) and then consider their chance of success greatly enhanced, because not everyone would have known that?

I wanted to finish this blog post with a rant about the BBC quiz, EGG HEADS, but I have probably exhausted your patience by now and besides a loud beeping sound tells me that my 2 minutes are up; but I’ve started so I’ll finish:  Eggheads - What utter cunts.

Tuesday is Rubbish

My life experience of forty-three years and some months and a few days, seasoned with too many idle moments mindlessly soaking up the trivial mind-farts of hundreds of Twitter abusers, have combined to bless upon me the profound and perhaps even divine revelation that of all the days of the week, Tuesday is the most rubbish.

I say RUBBISH, because to call it SHIT would be to bestow upon it some degree of character that would elevate it above the mundane and arguably credit it with some kind of charm, albeit a crunchingly, hate-inspiring, nasty charm that would put it on par with Monday.

Tuesday ducks the hatred we hold for Monday.  It bears none of the curvy attributes of Wednesday, which teases us into believing that we are halfway to the weekend; it is a poor cousin of Thursday, who can sometimes be so welcoming that he tempts us into premature Friday-night-style behaviours; it shouldn’t be on the same planet as Friday and Saturday, never mind in the same row on a calendar; and it certainly isn’t Sunday, because Sunday is God’s day, and God lets us do what the fuck we want until the evening, when we get maudlin about the death of the weekend and Downton Abbey and ironing our work clothes and shit.

Tuesday has nothing to love or hate about it.  It just hangs there.  Like a barely detectable dried bogey in the nostril of someone you don’t know on a station platform on a grey day, not even gruesome enough or stalactite enough in its formlessness to elicit any nausea, as you nonchalantly glance at it without any subsequent emotion to make you even unconsciously afford it a second glance.

Tuesday is like that uncle that everyone has, the one with the moustache that he’s had since the 70s, who’s just THERE at family functions, whose name you’d forget if your aunt didn’t write it in Christmas cards to you, and even then it’s one of those names that is so characterless and ordinary that you still get it wrong sometimes, especially when you make that one effort to speak to him and you have absolutely fuck all to say; and after your depressingly pointless exchange in regard to the mildness of the day’s weather, you turn away and you would have instantly forgotten if he still HAD that moustache if you even cared to wonder about it.  That’s Tuesday.

If you want to give someone a particularly shit present ever, and I sometimes do, then I can highly recommend a nice beige nylon t-shirt bearing the words EVERYDAY IS LIKE TUESDAY; because that is so utterly VAPID that not even Morrissey would write a song about it.

The only thing that is funny about Tuesday is the phrase See You Next Tuesday, unless someone fails to work out that you are calling them a cunt and instead takes the comment at face value and instantly drops it into their deep brain-well of forgettable and useless things they’ve heard.

The pure fact that after a day’s work, I fill a gap between more work in the evening and loading the dishwasher with the writing of a blog post about how rubbish Tuesdays are, is in itself testament to just how fucking rubbish Tuesdays are.