fire and forget

The excitement I felt about flying in a helicopter over the Nevada desert and into the Grand Canyon earlier this year was somewhat tempered by the fact we had to weigh ourselves first. The results of that particular weigh-in have seen me spend a lot of time in the gym lately. Having overindulged in the largesse of SmartPlanet and its Easter Egg taste test yesterday, I spent a particularly long session in the gym. Unfortunately, what’s good for the body isn’t always good for the mind, as it nearly drove me nuts.

I can live with the uptempo four-to-the-floor eurodisco technotronic housey trancey bobbins they pump into the place to keep you motivated. It doesn’t bother me that lazy, lazy iTunes and the usurpation of Gideon Coe’s morning slot on BBC 6music by the moronic George Lamb have sapped my motivation to seek out new music. After all, the gym has a choice of channels on the personal screens mounted on each torture device, if I just buy some new headphones, or failing that steal some from Nate.

I can even live with the subtitles on Sky News, even if they do appear to be added by illiterate monkeys with some kind of autocompletion software that has replaced most everyday words with obscure place names. It is live after all, and occasionally spices up dull news stories with non sequiteurs so hilariously random that they can only make the world a better place.

No, what bothers me is the (insert gym chain here)’s recommended artist of the month. For me, recommending music implies that the listener may not be aware of the artist, and will benefit from the wisdom you are about to impart, having been lucky enough to to stumble across an aural delight so wonderful you feel compelled to share it. Gym chain has done the world an enormous aural favour by recomending a little-known starlet-in-the-making who might, just might be the next big thing in 2008: Rihanna.

Yes, that Rihanna; the Brit Award nominee and Grammy winner who was at Number 1 in the hit parade for 10 whole weeks and has been as inescapable as taxes, death and encroaching global meteorological catastrophe for most of the last twelve months. Watch this space, you heard it first in the gymnasium.

Oh, and I’ve lost a stone since Vegas.

Update: this morning I made the mistake of thinking a Sky newsreader had described a “patch of calm” in the Middle East, when thanks to the illiterate monkeys I learned that the region was in fact in “a patch of come.” Classic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 01:10 pm and is filed under wtf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.