Mark Zuckerberg Fan Mail #31,499,075

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I was introduced to 'Facebook' in October 2006, reluctantly, as I was already on Myspace, which could play music. However some of my friends refused to join Myspace, and as I was away travelling, I signed up to stay in touch. It turns out many people had this same experience, and by 2008, myspace was dead, its users all went to your site.Mr Zuckerberg I am writing in Congratuulations for your tireless improvements to Facebook's user-friendlinesss.
By autumn 2008 Facebook had already developed into the most user-friendly website yet. By this stage I was was friends with a complete stranger that I had met playing scrabble on Facebook. Facebookmania had taken the world by storm, thanks to your hard work!

2009 - Facebook now had online chat - no longer would I have to leave messages for friends - I could chat live whenever a friend was online, which was all the time thanks to how user-frriendly it was. Well done Mark! It was around this time you launched Facebook for phones, along with a string of new featues to improve user friendliness. You could see where your friends were, ask your friends questionarres, and every week the page layout would be tinkered with some tiny way. Sometimes I actually thought -wow, Facebook is trying too hard - but I now know that was just your endless striving for user friendly perfection Mark. What a guy.

Lets skip forward another year Mark. Its 2010 now and I've caved in and got a phone that supports Facebook. Peer pressure is a bitch. I dont smoke Mark but I spend a total of 2 hours every working day outside the pub I work in, or in its toilets, poking my friends on FB. I get away with it too, because I've told my boss I smoke and would need smoke breaks outside. Even though he caught me early on, it didnt matter because he too, like all the staff here, have given up smoking but kept the breaks to check his notifications regularly.

2011: More user friendly updates! It is faster than ever. Thank god for timeline. Thank god for Marky Z. Cool companies now suggest sweet products to me using the most sophisticated market aggrigating technology ever letting me know about stuff i didnt realise I needed. I had never thought about ordering a Russian Bride - until now. Big up yourself M dog! - Facebook is the most user friendly thing to have ever been created by humans - I now check my status once every three minutes on average, 24/7 no matter what I am doing. I had to buy a second phone, and can now check my status when I am on facebook - no matter where i am.

2012 - You launched Video messaging - its like I'm the same room as that manic depressive fellow I couldnt shrug off at the Christmas office party and its amazing. A personal gripe is that I no longer have the confidence in my looks since I shattered my front teeth cycling into a lampost while trying to like a Nick Clegg joke. Can you please add a tool to photoshop teeth onto the live feed?

2013 is here and Facebook is now superfast. There is a page for everything. I now no-longer need a job, an education, a dentist or GP, as I have facebook. Your journey to perfect user-friendly technology has come into maturity at the perfect time for me. I am so lucky. You see MZ, Im approaching 30. Its an important time of life for me to document. My best friends are expecting a baby any time now, and I am set to be the godfather; but I needent bug them at all about it until I get an add request from the little fella (we know its a boy, thanks to facebook's gender determination app). I keep checking though, but mainly as I have begun to get panic attacks when I don't have my phone in my hand.


So Congratulations on your success, Mark, You have made Facebook so User Friendly, I can no longer use life without it! 

Love,
Hashtag Johnson. XXXXXXxxxxxxXXXX
Age 24, Oiwa

E2, Friday night, 3am

Footsteps,
Contemplative
Hollow.
Striking at the hungry night amid shattered bottles,
its no wonder they call it Shore DITCH,
but no jewels wash up on this abismal tide,
Just CRABS.

And so sideways we walk,
onward. downward, inward
to the neon yards,
the hot belched curry houses,
of 'Brick Lane'
to be filled with shit,
the prefered condition
of 2013.

Past shrugging cliques of displaced yutes
Who chew their faces old,
before retiring to their hovels
dubstep
Grime
Towie
Death

Big Brother is watching them
and they are watching it.

It's Summer, 1962. In France students were claiming themselves Marxists and anti-imperialists and setting fire to the streets. Meanwhile the cats in down town New York were Snorting pretty patterns into impact clouds of speed off cheap plastic table cloths and fucking each other stupid to a soundtrack of empathy. And that's what I had heard from my domestic cradle in Kansas, so I had quit that scene and travelled half the country on various boxcars with shamanistic hobo dropouts for company. Dropouts who would tear away the normality of the quotidian night with the beautiful freak ballads of their wild lives whilst burning beans on their tincan fires. And I had ended up here. It was 7.15pm on the 3rd of June. I had arrived an hour ago and sat down int he first dump I could find that would sell me a cheap hot drink. Now I was a stranger from a small country town stuck on the wrong side of a big city where I didn't belong. I had a buck fifty in my pockets and nowhere to sleep.

I hadn't eaten all day and the moonshine I had bummed of a bum tasted like bum. My hands were clammy and my mouth was full of cotton balls. And perhaps I could've just sucked the sweat off my knuckles - quenching my thirst and drying my hands all at once, but I cared far too less to give a shit. Plus I would've probably got thrown out and it wasn't exactly warm outside. All I had left to live for was sex. And rock and roll. And drugs. And Cars. And Dr Pepper. And playing it like a true free spirit on the edge of society with no respect for the man and a pocket full of burnt out tooth-picks. I stared at the plain dumb face of the waitress in the two bit café that I had would up in and I told her to bring me some more of her filthy coffee. The bitch turned face into her scumbag kitchen and as she did I took the hip flask from my slacks, drained the acrid chemicals clean and dropped the bottle onto the chess tiled floor. They burnt like the reality of being a tortured artist deadbeat poet anti-hero hobo rebel in a classic American counter culture beatnik novel who was full of rage. And it tasted good.

She returned from behind the curtain. The coffee cost 80 cents, leaving me with a meagre 70 cents to go on with. As she went back across the chess board to her till I figured that I could probably find a downtown shop front to collapse in for a couple of hours before I went to find Ernie and the boys to lend me some bread. Man. So thats what I did. And If you don't like it you can get in the cue with the rest of the sad sack square asshole despots that make life the uphill mass produced escalator that it is. And no I won't write back to your stiffly worded letter, cos I'm too busy living.


ANON "Letter to no-one" Written onto the wall of the men's toilet in a cafe in Greenwich Village. 1962.

No Fun

As over 175,000 people try to convince themselves that risking pneumonia in the torrent, brushing their teeth in their neighbours shit and slipping repeatedly face first into a mud-cake iced with modern age detritus to a sound track of “in the name of love”; many of us are glad that this years weather at Glastonbury is as shit as the line-up.

But year-by-year as the Eavis’s journey further toward the middle of the road, there is also a growing number of hipsters that slag Glastonbury off simply as a way of pledging allegiance to ‘their’ chosen festival, with the competitiveness of a tattooed Millwall FC fan. This weekend especially they’ve felt the need to make the entire web aware that ‘their’ festival is ‘more underground’ and ‘more wild’ than Glasto.

But in order to appear to be a true member, you need the look - usually of strenuously organised, pretentiously executed dressing up. This literal fabrication of spontaneous fun is at the centre of what is becoming wrong with festivals. I already know what several (one is too many) of these people are ‘going as’, to a festival that doesn’t begin for six weeks (“mines a sort of burlesque wench/ rococo harlot, with an aborted gin baby strapped to my stockings”).

Nowadays all the mirth is programmed down onto timetables: Welly Throwing Contest at 3pm, Mud-pack Disco Poetry Slam at noon, Build Your Own Twiglet Dildo Race at 9:15am. And it is compulsory you take part, because often the festivals’ rep of carefully planned ‘wild fun’ is policed by bullying, shaming and naming those that don’t. At one such festival I saw a man scorn a young girl for declining his offer that she join in with his naked flash mob party. When she politely declined, he talked down to her (the repressed cancer of society that she clearly was) saying something along the lines of “Why not? Why can’t you just be free!?”

This man probably goes back to London and spends the next year in a suit reminding his bored office colleagues about the time when he dropped aciiid and got his kit off; when in reality he got ripped off and spent sixteen hours freaking out in his tent, while across the field a dreadlocked white band from Bristol rap about how “Jah don’t take coke”, while a tent packed full of rich kids agree wholeheartedly with cocaine induced enthusiasm.

 With all this over-planning, mass pretention, and festival pariah bashing in mind: has something gone wrong with our idea of fun? Are we that centred on popularity and cliques that fun has to be controlled and policed until there are winners and losers? Are we that lost to ourselves that we don’t have a good time unless our Victorian trapeze act garter and fascinator combo looks genuine? Are we so over the welly line in capitalism that all this ‘fun’ needs to be documented and posted onto Facebook from our smartphones as it happens?

Yes to all of the above. I feel sick. But maybe that’s the smell from the Porta-loos? Or maybe that hash-cake magic Dave sold me at the Dubstep tent has just kicked in. Anyway I better dash because if I don’t see twenty bands this weekend then I havent had a good time.

Moaty, It's Gazza

Last night Soccer legend Paul Gascoigne sped south from his newcastle home in a hire car to talk his friend Raol Moat from a armed police stand off.

Speaking to Radio Rothbury in a mobile phone interview whilst speeding to the scene in a minicab, Gazza said:

" Look he's killed one and killed two right? Now the drugs have worn off. Two or three it doesn't matter. It's not all that nice. But he's a lovely bloke really - I've come all the way from Newcastle in a taxi man, It cost me £40 right? I came all the way in a taxi.. I know the guy. He's killed 3, man. It's not nice.. I've got Chicken, and I know you'll laugh, but beer, and a flip-flops. I was in a car crash once, I hit a wall at ninety miles an hour. I've got a jacket, I've got a dressing gown, I've got Chicken, I've got bread. I was in a car once. I've got lager. I've got; got a fishing rod, I've got my fishing rod, I've got his fishing rod. I've got lager. I was in a train crash once. Two friends on the river and just two friends and; "look it Moaty: worst of the worst you're gonna get 20 years right? Maybe 30. Piece of piss man" I was a car once. He's come calm down now man so I know he'll be alright. Theres nothing wrong with him. He's a gentlemen. I was in a plane once.. He's lovely bloke but it's not very nice when you .. His girlfriend slept with another bloke. Don't talk to me right - I'm coming in this taxi man and I've forgot the chicken but the lager. I forgot that. I'll know you'll laugh. Thanks alot. Send us a cheque through the post man".

-with this Gazza hung up.

Witnesses say they saw a minicab pull up to the police controlled border of the seige and a disheveled Gazza unloading a toby magnetic fishing toy and a lettuce wearing only hotel slippers and a hotel gown filled with what seemed to be over thirty miniature wine bottles. Although the police would not let Gascoigne pass through the line they did pass on a message from him to Raol.

Sources say the last thing they heard before the sound of the gunshot with which Moat ended his life was a negotiator shout:

"Raol! That visitor has arrived. It's your mate Gazza".

Hollywood remakes for 2011

Tinsletown is buzzing with the recent revelation of coming MAJOR BLOCKBUSTER remakes:

SPZMG is looking forward to these two features in particular:

Rocky VII

The italian stallion is back to face his most deadly nemesis ever - Alzheimers. Will he prevail?

Saw XII

Jigsaw's rotting remains are dug up and sewn back together in graphic HD 3-D by his demented son, then re-animated via spinal grafted animatron robotics so that his unconscious cadaver can go around slowly jabbing flesh eating virus carrying fetuses down the orapheses of innocent teenage grils in this 5 hour epic. The Daily Star calls it "Spine Tingling".

Extracts from AVATAR treatment document

No.53 =

Names for the expensive mineral:

Hardtogetium

Unobtainium

Outofreachium

Unexplainium

Digindeepium

Plotdevicium

Hiddengen

Futilium

Gold

Note:

Let's go with Unexplainium: Ive been here for eight years.

eg:

a) "Why are those mountains floating?"

b) "This whole region is covered in Unexplainium"

(..Also good = James' idea to just leave any explanation of the floating mountains from script)