People want to have a say in the plots of the TV shows they watch.

What?

Really?  But that’s…  I mean…  What?

In the good old days, the airing of opinions was confined to your dad ranting about some, barely existent, slight over the dinner table while the family avoided eye-contact.  If someone wanted to voice their opinions to a wider audience, they either stood on a soapbox with a loud-hailer and got pointed at or scrawled their poorly spelled, poorly considered, non-thoughts on the nearest wall (like the artistic effort in the photo).

Now though.  Now…

The internet has given people the idea that their opinions matter.  Worse still, they have the idea that others must be made aware of those opinions.  Instead of harrumphing behind their newspapers, morons can now post comments at the bottom of Daily Mail articles online so the entire world knows how correct they really are.  Instead of sitting down the pub, bellyaching about immigrants eating cats out of wheelie bins, idiots can start Facebook groups calling for the stoning of cat-eating foreign people.

It’s not just the internet, of course.  Simon Cowell and his ilk have their culpability in the public’s erroneous inflation of its self-importance.  Look at fucking Jedward for proof that democracy doesn’t work.

Instant, opinionated, gratification is already buggering up politics.  How many tough decisions get made when the decision makers (who, in the kindest terms, care only about covering their arses) can see real-time disapproval?  Don’t get me started on the democracy that put most of these idiots in power in the first place – that’s a whole other can of educationally subnormal worms.

And now they’ve set their sights on TV.  Sweet Willmott-Brown, I pray the big TV cheeses don’t hear of this.  Plotting by massive, public, moron-committee?  No good can come of it.

Mark my, opinionated, words.

And yes, I’m aware of the irony of blogging these opinions.  The difference is that I’m right but feel free to tell me I’m worse than Hitler in the comments below.

I spent most of the afternoon grumping around the house, scowling and moaning to myself. I secreted myself away from familial company (for their own good) and mainly browsed around the internet, complaining under my breath at much of what I read there.

As afternoon turned to evening, guilt got the better of me and I thought I’d try to do some work. I began scripting a sit-com that I’ve been playing-with and plotting for a while now. My bad mood hampered things though and, at best, I now have four pages of a sit-grump.

On the plus side, an inadvertent typo gave rise to my coining a new word:

Sarcastoic
noun, a person who can endure hardship with little complaint but with considerable grumpy sneering.
adjective: having or showing sarcastoic qualities.

That’s it.  That’s the best thing that’s happened me today.

Stupid cosmos.

Last night she woke up and started groping noisily around her bedside locker for Strepsils.  She found them eventually and rattled the rattly blister-pack trying to get one out, eventually succeeding.  Then she dropped the Strepsil onto the floor and I heard it roll under the bed where the dust-bunnies live.  Undeterred by fluffy nastiness, she fumbled about trying to find the missing Strepsil.  After what seemed like hours, she gave up and went back to the blister-pack.

Rattle… crinkle… rattle… plunk.  She dropped the blister-pack on the floor (Strepsil blister-packs hitting a wooden floor make quite an annoying noise at three AM).  Cue much blind scrabbling about for blister-pack, rattling and skittering it around on the floor all the time.  She finally found it, extracted a second Strepsil (after more rattling) and popped it in her mouth.

At last.  Some peace and quiet.

FX:  Suck, chew, Strepsil clunking against teeth, etc.

Aaaarrrggghhhhh!

If you’re interested, my body is, so far, valiantly fighting off the nasty little cold bugs.  That may be because it’s so tensed that nothing wants to live there.

Instead I do other things.  I drink lots of tea.  I stare out of the window for a bit.  “That internet’s not going to surf itself”, I say and sluggishly click from one site to another.  There are so many unnecessary and inessential draws on my time.  How much masturbation do you think is too much, for instance?  So many pointless things eating into my day.  Eating into the time in which I should be doing something productive.

I need to break this dilatory pattern.  I need to steel myself and get a system going.  I need to turn off my email notifications.  I need to resist the siren call of Google Reader.  I need to stop wondering what’s happening on BBC News and Boing Boing.

Damn this internet.  Damn its e-ticement.  Damn it for its information-allure.  Damn its myriad methods of interrupting what I should be doing.  Damn it hell for its easily accessible pornography.

P.S.  In Sideshow Bob fashion, I am aware of the irony of posting on the internet in order to decry it.

Now, I’m not saying that our evolution has ground to a halt or, necessarily, that we have reached some sort of evolutionary dead-end. What I am saying, is that the Darwinian process of natural selection, or ’survival of the fittest’ no longer seems appropriate to describe the onward trudge of Homo sapiens.

At it’s simplest (which is where I’m best qualified to rant about it), natural selection tells us that favourable traits which aid in the survival or procreation of an organism get passed along more successfully to subsequent generations. In this way, those traits become more common and over lots of generations become the ‘norm’. Thus, the ‘fittest’, or better-adapted survive and those without whatever these traits may have been, don’t.

So, Homo sapiens would, for instance, in the past have gained an evolutionary advantage over his neighbours through the opposable thumb allowing a precision grip. Because he had this snazzy thumb and could put it to use in getting food or attracting a mate (get your coat, you’ve pulled), he succeeded in passing on his thumb to the next generation more successfully than his buddies. The next generation, in turn, used the thumb to their advantage and passed it along. Survival of the fittest. Beautiful. For a hundred and thirty thousand odd years, Homo sapiens has progressed along this principal, the weak being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers and the strong shagging their grieving widows to pass on their (fitter) genes.

That’s all out the window now though. Now we’ve gotten too bloody nice. Our altruism has progressed to such extremes that we’re going around saving the weak from the sabre-toothed tiger instead of laughing as it eats him. Instead of letting a moron kill himself while drying his hair in the shower, we put a warning label on the hair-dryer to advise against it. Instead of letting some idiot slice his hand off in the blender we add a safety feature and put a warning in the manual – Danger, do not insert hand in rapidly spinning blades. Instead of letting a fatty kill himself eating forty Big Macs a day, we make McDonald’s sell salads and cut down the size of their portions so you have to buy two bags of fries instead of one. It’s no longer survival of the fittest, because the fittest (i.e. the ones that aren’t completely stupid) are mollycoddling the weakest (i.e. the morons). No good can come of it.

And, then we should consider attraction. Attractive traits help an organism to get a mate and secure their genes for the next generation. You can still see the vestiges of this, now largely redundant, mechanism in Homo sapiens when you notice a particularly attractive person on the bus or whatever. You might think that this is great and that your attraction to that person proves that natural selection is doing its job. Nope. It’s a vestige, a remnant. For proof, you should firstly consider how often you approach an attractive person towards which you feel the ‘urge’ and, secondly, consider Homo sapiens’ current mating rituals…

Most of our mating (in my experience anyway) is initiated in the nightclub, after the pub and after a shitload of alcohol. Inhibitions are uninhibited – askers are more likely to ask and askees are more likely to slur “yerssss, awwright then” to the question. You don’t need to be the fittest or strongest, just have a big armful of alcho-pops.

Thus, our species is barrelling forward through evolution, hand-holding the morons so that they don’t hurt themselves as they rut their stupid genes further and further into future generations, and mating on the principal of ’survival of the drunkest’.

It’s ironic that Homo sapiens means something along the lines of wise man. Let’s see how many of the grunting morons that will likely outlast our species will be even able to pronounce their species designation, Homo fatuus.