The Art of Parenting

I feel recently there's been more Michael than camera on this blog. There isn't really a reason for this as the blogs I've been posting haven't really needed my photography skill. But as I started this blog as an attempt to get me off my arse and take more pictures, I will do just do that, but more about that later.

Today we're looking at that 'miracle' that is life, now to keep to my word here is just one picture taken by me of my sister, when she was born.


That picture was taken about one year ago, and now my sister is a bit more grown up and a bit more annoying. I personally call this the sibling rivalry theory. I have another sister who is younger than me but older than the one that is pictured, and she is annoying. I mean extremely annoying, but granted no more annoying than any other teenage girl of her age. However I believe that the older than your siblings get the more aggravating it becomes to talk to them. I suppose in reality even though they are your family, sometimes you can be just completely different people, with nothing in common. Don't get me wrong I really do love my family, maybe not as much as this woman (kudos to the bitchy waiter) it got me to wonder why the hell would anyone have kids in the first place?

It costs on average in Britain, according to "new figures" (who takes the time to do these surveys really?), around £200,000 to keep a child until they are 21. I mean who in their right minds wants to shell out that kind of money? My father told me that he hit his "million" pay mark about roughly about 5 years ago. Now he has three kids including myself, that's £600,000 roughly for him to raise us, that's about £400,000 left for him for bills, mortgage and the rest of that stuff that he has to deal with. To put it more into context I try (god forbid) to image what it would be like if I had a child. Over the past three years of part time work I have earnt in the region £2000, so thats only £198,000 to go. I'd be working after I'm dead if I carried on in the same lame-ass job (more on that coming up).
I mean god, I am very grateful that my dad has paid out this vast sum of money to raise me into a fully grown adult. But imagine if I had fucked up my life completely, started doing drugs and became a rent boy to pay for them? I can't imagine the utter frustration, that must be for him, not in terms of just money, but the life's work that is parenting.


I think this picture safely explains what I'm on about (more tips on parenting here). There are as everybody knows good parents and bad parents, sometimes it is very hard to determine which are which, but sometimes you just know.

I work in shoe store, because a young man like myself got to drink and those strongbow pints don't pay for themselves. I work specifically in the children's department and over the two years I have been working there I have slowly come to hate children and through this I can now understand what good and bad parenting is. I'll give you a quick scenario to explain. A woman comes in with her three "charming" children, and asks whether she can get her offspring fitted with pairs of sandals for each of them.

unfortunately for myself, we've sold out of sandals, because its the end of the summer. So after a bit of huffing and puffing, the woman, decides to get them some new school shoes, while they're in...1 hour later...I am at the end of my tether, with this lot by now (its meant to take about 15 minutes to serve a customer). Numerous shoes have been tried and each child has been complaining with each one in some way or another.

While this has been happening the other two have been running around screaming and the mothers has done hardly anything about it apart from shout at them loudly and give them a quick smack around the head/legs/arse (I'm not a believer in hitting a child, I believe with the right tone of voice and the right look in their eyes, a parent can intimidate the child into submission, same principle as training a pet really). After another 20 minutes of continual aggravation from this family and the woman asking for the manager because I'M not doing my job right, the woman decides to leave.

The children, however have other plans, they continue to run amok throwing shoes around and trying to nick the toys on display. The woman (I cannot call her a mother, simply because she does not qualify the right to even have the title) responded to this by shouting and hitting a bit more, eventually ending her efforts when she put her head on one of the chairs and has a small breakdown. Thankfully a man (who I can only presume is the estranged father of this insane clan) came into the store and shouted at the kids in such a way, it made me shudder and then lead his stupid spouse away out of the store.

This is a fine example of BAD parenting.

I mean who was to blame in that story? Was it the children? No ofcourse it wasn't. Those parents from the moment of the children's birth had made bad choices in "raising" them (more like dragging them up). You can blame television, diets and education all you like, but these are just secondary to the art of parenting. As I have said before it scares me that kids today will be in charge (this now tends reminds me of this in an iconic way). Bad parenting continue to effect these children's lives until adulthood, thus effecting life choices.

However you've got to look on the flipside of this arguement as well, sometimes it is outside factors that turn kids into little hell raisers. A parent can't be blamed entirely if their son/daughter turns to a life of crime and drugs. Also what can be defined as good parenting? every person is different, every situation is unique. I guess it is how these situations are dealt with is how you can define a good parent. But when is all said and done to often nowdays parenting is used as a scapegoat like videogames and music in modern society. In truth it takes a lot of balls, determination and struggle to be a good parent.

To look back and my previous question, why people would want to have kids, I try to think of the positives to this to try and answer. Not many spring to mind but I believe in essence its a fact of nature, we are naturally born to reproduce (we've been doing it very well for a number of years now). But maybe just maybe, its to do with love, a unconditional feeling between parent and child made instant at birth. Personally I think thats a load of bollocks though. Babies are smelly, screamy, sometimes ugly creatures, so I can't see the attraction myself, perhaps because being young and having no kids of my own, I don't understand this emotion.

To conclude until I have my own kids I don't think i'll be able to comprehend the task that is parenting, by then I hope i'll be financially stable enough to provide the adequate funds to help with the life time job of being a father, but in my true sceptical style of opinion, i'll end on this point made by the Monty Python boys

"Every Sperm is Sacred". I think not.

Mull it over a couple of times.

MT

P.S. This is definately the last post until August, so see you in two weeks after my holiday.

i'll have been to kendal calling by then and next tim i'll be talking about festivals with the use of my own photographs, what a wonder that will be! Seriously though I have become a very lazy photographer, this stops now...well at least until the next blog anyway.
Oh yeah, I've also managed to not give into twitter still, so maybe I am anti twitter revolutionary afterall.

The state of celebrities today.

I was browsing on myspace the other day and I found a blog posting that I posted just under a year ago, which was about the media taking advantage of the celebrity status of Rockstars (aka those who sing or play musical instruments in rock like way for a huge amount of money). However after a little bit of digging in my computer I found a unfinished blog draft, I presume that I planned to post after the one I spoke about previously. So firstly while I'm drafting the final part of the second post, here's the first blog post.

P.s I've included the YouTube video's at the bottom of the post as well so you know what I'm talking about
P.s.s This is a LONG blog post. You better put the kettle on.
P.s.s.s No, Really there's like three blog posts rolled into one here, personally I'd read them one at a time.

WARNING: I hold no blows, in this entire blog post. This is me being slightly ruthless in blogging, its after many months of built up agression, that i decided to blog this to you. I'm currently working out my issues with my therapist, MR Kissmyass :D

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Where have all the rockstars gone?

I was monging out in front of the TV, the other day (its what us media students would call passive viewing) and then i started to notice that the adverts had some familiar faces on them. first was the American rock singer Iggy Pop doing an advert for swift cover, i thought this was slightly strange, but i continued watching regardless...many advert breaks later, i saw Alice Cooper doing a advert for Sony, and i thought this really isn't right, these guys are symbols of rock, not advertising tools, its really not in their characters. The final straw came when i saw Mr British Anarchy, Johnny Rotten doing a advert for Country Life Butter. Now i can understand the irony of this, that these legends are now selling out to mainstream companies that they protested against many many years ago, but come on guys! can't you find any other more appealing brands for yourselves to advertise and endorse with? I understand that the advertising companies use rockstars like the ones above to create a ironic statement. but it looks as cool as my grandad in socks and sandals (making a relevant metaphor is hard). But here's a few ideas for the above to get themselves into in case they find that they're strapped for cash in the future

Iggy Pop - Life Improvement Books

Johnny Rotten - Apples

Alice Cooper - Pesticides

If this trend of advertisement continues the non-conformist future of rock and roll looks bleak. i mean whats next? Ozzy Osbourne with a reality TV show? oh yeah, i forgot.

Its on the tube ma!

Johnny Rotten and his fucking butter
Alice Cooper and his fucking TV
Iggy Pop and his fucking insurance

Back to 2010...

I find that this is true now in 2010, as it was in 2009, the media still uses rock and roll to promote and sell products, I mean the whole basis of the Rimmel London make-up line uses rock chic themes in their adverts, in an attempt to convince the masses that they will be a cool "rockstar" type if they use their products. However as an active viewer (people with their brain's turned on) I see through the lies and have come to realise the same truth that all media students eventually realise. It's Bollocks. I mean you have to be pretty suggestible to believe that make-up alone will make you become this "rockstar" persona. I'm not being sexist but I believe that the media plays upon women's naivety in the advertising of these products, I mean even the ones who understand this is happening, active female viewers still allow themselves to be sucked into this passive (couch potato though process) way of buying. But I'm going off subject, here's part 2 of last year's blog post.

Where have all the rockstars gone? Part 2

In the year 2009, unfortunately the world continued to lose, some of its great talent and I'm not talking about the shit films that Hollywood mainstream brings out everyday. No, it was the death of stars that really shook the press in that year
some of which being Actor Patrick Swayze and Actress Brittany Murphy then her screen write husband Simon Monjack 5 months after her death. All three of these deaths were covered in the news, which is surprising as British mainstream news doesn't usually keep tabs on American media, unless it involves Britain in someway, I suppose these could be classed as human interest stories, but i digress. But none of these were covered in the news more than the late legendary king of pop, Michael Jackson.



Taken from http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/

This truly shocked the world. I mean it was everywhere (If you were didn't know you were obviously living in a cave, I mean I'm sure even Osama Bin Laden even knew and thought "shiiit") It sparked a huge media frenzy.


"The news spread quickly online, causing websites to slow down and crash from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times suffered outages.[194] Google initially believed that the input from millions of people searching for "Michael Jackson" meant that the search engine was under attack. Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia at 3:15 p.m. PDT (6:15 p.m. EST).[195] The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to Jackson's biography within one hour, probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history.[196] AOL Instant Messenger collapsed for 40 minutes. AOL called it a "seminal moment in Internet history", adding, "We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."[197]

Around 15% of Twitter posts—or 5,000 tweets per minute—reportedly mentioned Jackson after the news broke,[198][199] compared to the 5% recalled as having mentioned the Iranian elections or the flu pandemic that had made headlines earlier in the year.[199] Overall, web traffic ranged from 11% to at least 20% higher than normal.[198][200] MTV and Black Entertainment Television (BET) aired marathons of Jackson's music videos.[201] Jackson specials aired on multiple television stations around the world. The British soap opera EastEnders added a last-minute scene, in which one character tells another about the news, to the June 26 episode.[202] Jackson was the topic of every front-page headline in the daily British tabloid The Sun for about two weeks following his death.[203] During the same period, the three major U.S. networks' evening newscasts—ABC's World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News—devoted 34 percent of their broadcast time to him.[204] Magazines including Time published commemorative editions.[205] A scene that had featured Jackson's sister La Toya was cut from the film Brüno out of respect toward Jackson's family"

Cheers Wikipedia

because as you must know, MJ was about to do a world tour. Now it seems a bit suspicious that he died from a prescription drugs just before his tour, proclaiming in his press conference "this is it", its almost like he knew it was coming, weird eh? Of course his funeral was lavish and media covered to the max, with millions tuning in to watch.
Also like all dead musicians, his music sales went through the roof, plus a Documentary film was made about his tour preparation just before his death. This all seems a bit convenient, that this was all in place, plus his doctor was automatically taken as the fall guy for his death, fairly quickly. Now I'm no conspirator, and this could be all true, but can a star like MJ really die? I mean they reckoned that Elvis didn't die after his drugs overdose, or so they say. I mean it would be so easy for a man like Michael Jackson to just disappear. Living it up on a small island somewhere with money he made from his "death" music sales, the world is a big place afterall. There is oppositions to this, like his death records, people who saw his dead body, etc.
But with the amount of money he had, he could afford to pay everyone important involved, so that he could slip away after proclamation of his death. And as for the body in the casket, it wasn't open and could easy just be a Michael Jackson look-a-like or crazed fan. But I shall let facts be facts and continue to presume that he is dead, because the news told me so and they tell the truth right? I think not. I'll leave you to make your own mind up though, about everything I post, but to quote Rock and Rolla; "Rockstars like that never die"
Think about it.

Back to 2010...

When I wrote that post it seemed less depressing, but seeing it is about death in essence, I don't know what the hell I was thinking, but what i said i still believe today, MJ is living it up on some island somewhere. But now turning back to something seemingly more positive.

The State of Celebrities today

















Taken from
http://rockstarsgcc.com/

I think the picture pretty much sums up this blog post
Everybody wants to be a celebrity nowadays and theres a variety of ways to do this, thanks to the 'beauty' of reality television. For instance, at the moment the very last (we might be so lucky) Big Brother is on channel 4, 4+1, E4, E4+1 and 4OD (the tidy Internet version).
This show comprises of a bunch selected idiots who apparently have rich enough personalities for them to be displayed on national television (personally I think their collective personalities are as shallow as muddy festival puddle, not Glastonbury mind you, I've been told its like a lake there, but i digress) and the brutish public tune in to watch said idiots chat, bitch and perform generally ridiculous tasks.
After a long period of time, and many evictions later (where the housemates are booted out one by one to the stupid phase of "I'm coming to get you!" by Davina McCall, I mean who does she think she is? Raoul Moat? or something?) there is a "winner", usually the thickest, most shallow of the lot (previous "winners" such as Brian Belo prove my point). They win a cash prize of £100,000 and have many magazine deals which amounts to more money, propelling them in "celebrity" status.
My question is what did these people do to deserve this kind of status, I mean all they did was turn up with their shit personalities, made complete fools out of themselves in stupid pointless tasks and generally made arseholes of themselves. Personally I want to go back to the days of when celebrities actually did something top earn their status, like acting (I mean good acting, like Tom Hanks for instance).
There are of course plenty of other ways to claim fake status or make a complete arsehole out of yourself on Television; there's 'Singing' competition shows like the "X factor", 'Talent' competition shows like "Britain's Got Talent" (to which my answer always is "has it?") and of course my personal favorite, Jeremy Kyle, filling the void for Jerry Springer type show that Britain has needed for years and yes I do mean years, people waited for this shit. I do watch it from time to time just to watch the 'lovely' people bicker amongst themselves, then watch JK come-in with some un-related insult.

Here's a Video on more reality television lunacy
Charlie Brooker understands my point

On another subject however, just a look at a 'celebrity' that has been bugging me for a very long time and I believe that she has earned some 'credit' to be noted in this blog. I'm talking about the Media-Manipulative Excremental Narcissist that is Katie Price (aka Jordan).

















I mean dear god, I really do not like this woman, everything she does I hate, for good reason mind. I cannot really put everything in this blog as I'd be here to Christmas telling why I dislike her so much.
She is the ultimate group leader in "how is she famous?" group of people that I detest. She started her career, taking her top off for money, got huge breasts, then got famous for making a 'tit' (mind the pun) of herself on another reality show (for B-list aka FAILED celebrities) "I'm A celebrity get me out of here" and promptly after that married Aussie singer Peter Andre (who was also on the show) and managed to get huge magazine deals from this, starting her affair of manipulating celebrity magazines. Through a series of television deals she continued her 'career' by documenting her life in her own reality television show, and brought out a few books and released a shit perfume.
Oh yeah and "raising" (more like dragging up through a shit childhood of endless paparazzi) her kids along side all that. Even Michael Jackson's kids didn't get this kinda treatment, no he did the responsible thing and put bags over their heads.
To bring things back to the present day she divorced Peter Andre, which was of course covered by the media, (which to me looked like a publicity stunt, in my sceptical mind, but now after a year, I'm forced to eat my words as it seems to be the only genuine piece of news she has created), he didn't do to badly out of it though, got his own reality television show and his music career was kinda
re-started, so good for him, he definately earned it, I mean you'd have to be a saint to be married to that woman. She then married a stupid cross-dressing cage, fighter Alex Reid, (who later went on celebrity big brother last year and made a arse of himself in the house and when he won) more magazine deals were signed and continued documentaries were made. thank god that's done. I hope you can see what I mean by describing her Non-celebrity life (I now refuse to think of her as a celebrity). Today she has released a statement that she wants to have 20 kids. I'm not fucking kidding. I really hate this woman, I mean anything for a quick media hype and shes all over it. Period.
She'll be faking her death next and then coming back proclaiming shes the next Christ, I can see that happening, seriously.

Breaking news!

I found out she has a pet pig called Bingles. true story. I didn't believe it either at first.
Lunatic of a woman.
http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/katie-prices-pet-pig_1153861

And that's it for now folks. Bloody hell its been a long read, but you got to the end, so give yourself a pat on the back, I feel that Ive vented enough aggression to keep me sane, for a least a week. I've now gone from a blog every two weeks to once a month now so the next one will be in august when I come back from holiday, I might write something interesting in between then but as I say I'm on holiday.
But until then cheers for reading.

MT