These films and thousands more are ruined every day by people who insist on talking

Forget reality television being a mirror on society, it was never true and certainly never will be. It is a micro-cosom of the biggest mistakes that society has created, all together, in one place, being tools. No, if you want a real mirror on society then head to the cinema this weekend.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they behave in a cinema. Most people are just happy to be there, sitting with friends watching the imaginary world go by. They don’t want to cause a fuss, they don’t want to get into trouble, they want to abide by the rules and leave in one piece. This is like society. Most people are just happy to be there. They go to work, they pay their bills, they do what they are told and they understand the meaning of US, not just I. They are happy to survive the day. Then there are the arrogant, self obsessed pieces of shit who think that the world was created for them. They have no idea of what is right and wrong, what is decent and what should be done. They tumble arrogantly through life telling people stories they don’t want to hear, throwing their weight into places it shouldnt be and generally being grotesque excuses for human beings. And sometimes these people go to the cinema and ruin the experience for everybody else. And for this we are sorry.

The credits roll slowly off screen. Silence envelops the cinema. Then it begins. The slow, hushed whispering directly behind you. The film is barely 5 seconds old, how can there possibly be any explaining to do already? Some people are intellectually challenged and cant wait to find out what happens in the film, instead they ask for continued narration from those around them. Usually these people stay at home and talk aimlessly at the wall but occasionally they escape the shackles and enter society. And talk through films.

Then there are the aggressive work talkers who insist on bending the ear of their companions in a mindless tirade about something or somebody at work. Why did these people even bother coming to the cinema and why, on arriving, did they insist on sitting directly behind you? Are these repellent cockroaches so ethereal that they really believe that the audience doesn’t really want to watch Jack Nicolson and would rather listen to them? Of course they do.

People have forgotten that the cinema is actually an artform. Stop talking, we are watching a film!

But nowadays there is a new menace lurking in the aisles of your local cineplex. A new weapon of mass distraction that is not hidden beneath the sand but shamelessly flaunts its bright, illuminating wares all over the darkened cinematic aisles. The mobile phone is destroying the cinema experience for a plethora of cinema goers all over the world. Some people have become so attached to their handsets that the very idea of spending 2 hours without looking at its screen causes blood to ooze from the ears and milk to cascade through the eyes. The result is mass light shows during huge swaths of the film.

Perhaps mobile free zones could be incorporated into the cinema going experience. Leave your phone at the door. Or light sensitive lasers could be mounted on the back of seats that zap any illumination above 10 watts after the film has begun and sends 5oo volts into the seat of the guilty party. That would soon put an end to proceedings.

We would like to Take the Blame™ for anybody and everybody who has had a film ruined by the arrogant dregs of society who insist on going to a place where people don’t talk; and talk. We would like to say sorry for every time your attention has been taken from a poignant cinematic moment by the moronic bacteria sitting 4 seat to your left who has suddenly felt the need to turn on their 200 watt mobile phone screen lighting up the darkened room like Blackpool at Christmas. We would like to take the blame™ so you can go to the cinema and do what you are supposed to do at the cinema; watch a goddamn film. Not talk, not play on facebook on your phone. Watch a fim.

Three billion first class stamps bearing the iconic gaze of the Statue of Liberty have been printed by the US Postal Service. Unfortunately there is one glaring problem; one searing piece of ineptitude that would have left a bitter taste in the ladys’ mouth and should leave most New Yorkers seething: It isn’t the real Statue of Liberty but her less attractive, more slutty Las Vegan replica. Yes, the US Postal Service tried to immortalise the Iron Giant by ignoring her weathered face and using the air-brushed, fake-tanned, plastic-surgeoned, lypo-suctioned, younger – they are always younger – sister. Inept.

The glaring Take The Blame™  finger of ineptitude is pointing straight at the USPS but they bear the scars only of regret, not sorrow.

“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” Roy Betts, a post office spokesman, told the New York Times.

Perhaps forgoing the original for a better looking replica is quite poetic in the land where callus, unnecessary facial alterations are gobbled up like nachos at a Mexican Barbecue but it’s a smack in the face to what she represents and a middle-finger salute to those who live under her watch. If you are going to sell your commemorative stamps to an unsuspecting nation and feel that three billion of the little fellas is a nice round number, at least have the decency to use the original symbol you are trying to commemorate. We take the blame.

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A little bit of history goes a long way, especially in a country which Europeans would claim lacks it, so here is a slice. Where did she come from? The Statue of Liberty we mean. She’s European. By Jove, She’s French. Back before the time of surrendering monkeys and trans-Atlantic hate mongering, the French and the Americans used to be best of chums. Indeed, without the French, the American war against the British might not have ended the way it did. Perhaps it needs to be said that the hatred the French had for the British could well have been instrumental in the French-American love affair. ‘If we can’t beat the English ourselves, lets help someone else have a go‘ might well have been their mantra.

One hundred years after American Independence, a group of French toffs were sitting around a table, drinking mighty fine red wine, getting hammered and discussing the French model of freedom and how it was so similar in philosophy to the new American one. They decided to build a big iron woman as a present and sent it over to New York.

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People are rude. We all know that. Every day city dwellers are forced to put up with one incident after another of pure, unadulterated, wreck-less rudeness. It is time that something out there changed; it’s time that someone took a big hot poker and instilled some manners in the masses. If it has to be forcefully injected, then so be it. Sometimes subtlety doesn’t work and the only course of action is to actively remonstrate and then use violence. Rudeness be gone.

Levels of rudeness vary. At the root level there is the door phenomenon. The single, easiest act of politeness that can be bestowed on a person by another is to hold a door. Obviously society moves too fast for grandiose manifestations of door holding. Gone are the days of chivalry where a single person could wait an entire episode of casualty for someone to arrive so they could hold the door for them. But when entering a shop it is polite to glance behind, weigh up the distance between the next person and the door and make a mathematically sound judgement on whether or not the door should be held. And then hold it. People don’t anymore and we would like to take the blame for it. Not only are doors not held but they are, at times, slammed in your face. If this has happened to you. Sorry.

There are acts of physical politeness which have died and there are lyrical ones. A please. A thankyou. A you’re welcome. An excuse me. A sorry. The politeness that used to ring out across shop floors, cinema gangways and car parking through-fares has been replaced by a chorus of expletives; the language of the garden has been replaced by the curse words of a filthy, rude accumulation of discourteous cretins. We want the politeness back. If you have suffered at the hands of such behaviour, we apologise. If you feel you missed a few simple words of gratitude in response to something you said or did; if they were never forthcoming, we take the blame.

Little old grannies have earned the right to sit down on a bus if they so wish. Goddamn it, even if they don’t so wish. They should be forced to sit down and take the weight off of their 80-year old legs. That could mean that you have to move your over-weight, levi-glad derriere and let your legs take your weight. If it does, do it. For all the senior citizens who have been forced to stand because a disrespectful youth, most probably listening to insanely bad r n’ b through phone speakers, didn’t even entertain the idea of giving your their seat. We take the blame.

Stolen car park spaces. Small nods or a wave when a car lets you out. Keeping right on the escalator. Not jumping in queues. The small things that are so easy to cure should not be clouding your day. We apologise for the rudeness.

Our ethos is simple, we are here to take the blame. Apparently we live in a blame culture; and in a blame culture there needs to be someone who you can turn to when there is nobody else who will shoulder your blame. Whatever the reason, whatever the occasion, we are there for you. From the simple and the transparent – be it stubbing your toe or spilling your tea; waking up late for work or missing the bus – to the arduous, perplexing, intricate and convoluted – your dog died; you hate your boss; the IOC decided to oust you from your abode and build an Olympic sized Ice-rink in your back garden and erect an athletes village in your once pristine street-market turning a once thriving local community into a dull and bland advert for a hotch-potch amalgamation of too much glass, no class and student residents. We are there. Blame us.

Politics, science, philosophy, food, revolution, environment, education, celebrity, television, crime, animals, history, love, money, relationships, family, sport, technology, travel, war, weather, health, business, birthdays, parties, celebrations, drugs, employment, nature………….and breathe…………..cybercrime, nuclear energy, credit cards, pornography, computer games, graffitti, hollywood. Kitchen sink. There is blame.

If you have anything you want us to take the blame for. Tell us. Let us know. Post a link. Send a letter. And we will publish an apology, allowing you to sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that the blame rests with us. Go on, don’t be shy.

Barclay’s  Bank has announced pre-tax profits of £6.07 billion pounds and is soon to be followed by the remaining top 5 banks of The UK – HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered – pushing the annual profit of the Big Five up to £15 billion. This comes just a week after David Cameron successfully negotiated a £200 million charitable donation to his Big Society vision from these very banks. Assuming £15 billion is the watermark, this donation equates to 0.013% of the profit.

The sum of £200 million was, like an 18th century school bully, literally thrashed out between the government and the banks last week. A chicken feed sum in comparison to the gargantuan figures being offered up this week; inept in its petiteness.  That they are so proud of this achievement smacks of desperation and is bitterly in-keeping with the rest of the flowery Big Society ideal.

Originally championed before the outset of the 2010 general election, the Big Society has slowly escalated into the modus operandi of the current leader of the British Empire. As the words Big Society slowly fall victim to semantic satiation (the phenomenon where the continued repetition of a word strips it of all sense and meaning; a kind of repetition blindness) it is worth highlighting the original ethos. Over to you David Cameron.

“The big society is about changing the way our country is run… This is not another government initiative — it’s about giving you the initiative to take control of your life and work with those around you to improve things“

He goes on.

“People have the compassion, flexibility and local knowledge to help their neighbours and communities. Our approach will not merely enable them to build a stronger society, it will actively help them to do so”

A sort of Dad’s Army for government. Taking the power from government and placing it in the hands of volunteer groups, charities, neighbours and friends is such a nice idea. They can let little fluffy bunny rabbits dictate planning permission and leave the rubbish collection to the clean fairies. Perhaps flooding response units can be handled by the local school children and the public libraries can rest safe in the hands of the local prisoners, out on day release for good behaviour.

A nice round sum of £200 million should just about cover it. Or it would, if, as according to some, it wasn’t just a big fluffy buzz word dreamt up to pull the wool over the nations unsuspecting eyes; a cover-up for the monumental public spending cuts that are currently being unleashed across much of The UK. More than one labour cynic has labelled the whole idea as doomed. Ed Milliband, speaking in a Sunday newspaper last year he stated that

“No one can volunteer at a library or a Sure Start centre if it’s being closed down. And nor can this Conservative-led government build a Big Society while simultaneously undermining its foundations with billions of pounds worth of cuts to the voluntary sector.”

Cuts? Well such is the state of the record budget deficit in the UK at the moment that £80 billion will be cut from public spending over the next 4 years. Liverpool has already pulled out of the Big Society after having to cut 1500 jobs due to the cuts. So many cuts. At least they can all volunteer now. Local authorities, left right and centre, have been slashing grants to the very charitable and volunteer groups the Big Society hopes will keep the grass and hedgerows looking green and pleasant.

£200 million can barely buy you an injured footballer these days, let alone fixing the world. That such a small amount is deemed a success by the powers that be; that they feel it is the cornerstone to the ideal, is a sucker-punch to the very people whose shoulders The Big Society rests. We take the blame for this ineptitude and for the small sum that they think can bring about the change.

As the annual bonuses for Barclay’s bank top brass currently sits at £2.16 billion, the 0.013% is put into some perspective. Whether The Big Society is blind Utopian Idealism or a serious contender for the future remains to be seen, but it is going to take a lot more than peanuts to quell the monkeys.

Today is Valentine’s Day. At which point, over half the population groan. Obviously the exact figures are impossible to deduce but it is widely believed that at any one point in time around 54% of the human species is single and, well, hoping that February 15th can’t come a day too soon. And what of this lost majority that, year in year out, has to suffer the ignominy of not being able to participate in one of the biggest spending days of the year? This is not cynicism; we are not here to ridicule the happily connected. We are all for love and romance. Let them eat cake. This is just solidarity for the single people who will be spending the night watching Die Hard with the boys, or indeed, Love Actually with the girls. For eveybody who will be spending tonight alone, we are sorry and we take the blame.

Who originally started the love-in is open to debate but most indication points to a couple of early Christian martyrs, and one in-particular. During the reign of Emperor Claudius 2, around 240 a.d, Rome was getting it’s bloody hands dirty fighting battles with anyone who was willing to have ago and a good few who weren’t. During a particularly fiery time the Roman garrisons started to dwindle in numbers and canny Claudius put the diminishing inscription down to men wanting to stay at home with their wives and families (and nothing to do with them all being butchered on the battlefield. Hindsight’s a bitch). So he promptly cancelled and outlawed all engagements. Valentine, being a romantic at heart, took offence to this and married people on the sly. Obviously he was discovered, brutally murdered and had his body parts scattered all over Rome. How sweet. The date? (Today, February 14th, if you’re not following).

Enough of the soppy stuff. History lesson over. If Valentine’s Day were a country, what country would it be? Well, it would be somewhere between Libya and Sudan. In 2010 the GDP of a medium sized dictatorship was jettisoned overboard in search of sex romantic fulfillment. That’s $78 billion, or $200 for every person in the world. But this is nice; this is not a bad thing. Better $78 billion spent on chocolates and roses than oppression, civil war and gun trafficking. Romance is still alive and beating and making people happy and not a thing should stand in it’s path.

The problem – and that’s where we come in – is that so many people are excluded from the day. It would be like short people being excluded from Christmas or the blind from Easter (it’s ok, they can’t read this and there won’t be a braille version.) No other celebration excludes people on anything else but religious grounds. Halloween doesn’t actively pursue evil people at the expense of, smiley, bright ones. “You’re not allowed to participate in this day because your clothes are too colourful” is not the mantra. Lent doesn’t have a bias for fat people. Everyone is welcome to participate or abstain as they see fit. Valentines Day should be for everyone and it is for this, we take the blame.

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People do inappropriate things for love. Sid killed Nancy in a hotel room, then himself with a heroin overdose. Burt Pugach had an affair, got dumped, hired some goons to throw acid in the face of the lady in question, went to prison for 14 years, got out and promptly married her. Lorenna Bobbit famously cut off her husbands man-hood with a carving knife and threw it in a corn field from a moving car 15 miles south of Memphis. Is this what you want? Don’t do anything crazy today, rest safe in the knowledge that we take the blame for your celibacy, tomorrow is another day, and you will save yourself $200.

As the most widely spoken language in the world – and yes, before the Chinese contingent jump on board heckling obscenities and crying like banshees that the jewel of the Oriental languages is more spoken, it is not -  it isn’t  half difficult to learn. Of the worlds 3000 (ish) documented languages, English is the most vivid and yet sadly is the most populated with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, over 500 000 words and as many again in the form of scientific and technical jargon, making any attempt to master the language nigh on impossible. It would be a lot easier if, as the Eskimos, there was one word for 3956 different meanings. That way you would never say the wrong thing. And we have all said the wrong thing at one time or another.

If Bill gates and the Googleplex ever had a love-in and exchanged some data, swapped some ideas and had a chat about information then they might well check their data-banks. If they did they would find that some 80% of all the knowledge and data stored on their secret underground mega-stores is in English. That’s right, 80%. It is both fortunate that all of the worlds knowledge and secrets are stored on an indestructible hard disk somewhere in the Mojave desert and unfortunate that when future generations have to read it or dig it out in order to reconstruct the planet after some megalomaniac dictator blew it to pieces, they will have to do so in a thick Geordie accent.

Quite how English came to be so all powerful is something that we will leave to the scholars as they are probably the same people who made it so complicated in the first place. Quite why a language has to have 37 different tenses to describe 3 time periods is something only the very enlightened know. A past, present and future exist for us all; 3 simple spheres of time. Only in English time has been distorted in a way that Einstein proved impossible some 50 odd years ago. His views and thesis on time, the speed of light and its relativity to the global gravitational pull of a billion orbiting galaxies never took the post perfect future continuous passive relative tense clause into consideration. A tense that clearly proves that time travel is possible and happening right now in every English classroom in 1967, 1987, 2345 and 607, simultaneously. Only the past perfect future passive voice is contesting this via the laws of physics and a English paradox has prevailed.

This is to apologise to every citizen of the world who has to learn English. It is for the countless romantic languages that will die out in the not to distant future as English seeks global domination. However powerful China becomes, its language will not follow suit, it will be English that the global markets talk in. Americans (who luckily for them, speak a kind of butchered English by birth) find the Chinese language with its multiple alphabets simply too complicated to learn. No-one will ever take the blame for English robbing the world of languages barely spoken, so we will.

Lets hear it for the bulls shall we? This week in the usually sleepy Spanish town of Pamplona, the 9 day festival of San Fermin has erupted onto the cobbled streets. From the 6th July when pyrotechnics or, more traditionally, gunfire and cannon fire mark the start of this festival in the Navarre region, until the 14th July when the festival is closed with the singing of Pobre de mi, the town becomes a riot. Literally a bloodbath. The 2 week long festival in homage to Saint Fermin is the wildest street party in the world and if you want to experience it you have to participate. But if you want to live through it you have to avoid the rampaging bulls.

Rampaging bulls weighing half a ton or more each, with filed down horns half a metre long, running on wet cobblestones at 30 mph is really the only way to throw a good party these days. If there are not herds of wild beasts marauding, starved, thirsty and angry then they are no fun. To make it extra special you get the bulls really agitated by having locals wield newspapers and strike the animals savagely on the nose with them in a show of true bravery and defiance. That, or have drunk and/or brainless Americans saunter about clueless or a herd of reprobate students who have read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and think it is brave to provoke an angry bull. Mix with alcohol and loud music and voila, the perfect street party.

The first running of the bulls, or el encerro to give it its Spanish name, was probably held some 500 hundred years ago or longer, records are not accurate enough to say, but records detailing the bloody revenge of the bulls in Pamplona date back only as far as 1910. The origins of the suicide mission come from when the bulls used to be transported from their compounds outside of the city to the amphitheatre they would later die in, and the local young men would jump in with the bulls to show bravado, much like a joy rider from Kings Heath will steal a car and mingle with the traffic on the M6.

On the morning of each day during the festival, a rocket sounds the beginning of the race and the early risers (for the running start at 8 am) bolt. The entrance requirement is merely to be male and alive. The course runs, like the Krypton factor, for some 800 metres. Up Santo Domingo and across the main square and depending on weather conditions, the entrance to Estafeta offer some of the most comical highlights of any race. Are we supposed to feel guilt or sorrow for people who willingly get into a race with 2 dozen huge animals and get hurt in the proceedings? No. This is about the bulls. An apology to the bulls who regardless of how they fare or how much entertainment they bring, are still slaughtered at the end of the el encerro.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7492914.stm

Every bull in this video is killed later the same day. For a country that prides itself on the bravery of such sport, the cowardice shown to the bulls is a contradiction is it not? And since the bulls cant defend themselves, Taketheblame would like to offer its apologies on behalf of a nation that wont. Sorry bulls.

A not so interesting fact is that the Bee Gees have sold over 220 million records. Probably down right scary rather than interesting you would have to admit. That’s a lot of sales and equates to 1 in every 3 people you meet owning at least one album. Maybe Living Eyes from 1981 or the follow up to Saturday Night Fever. Not bad for a band from the Isle of Man. But a sorry state of affairs as far as the British public go. The once heralded greatest musical nation on earth has some explaining to do. Some blame needs to be accredited. Have you ever met anyone that admits to liking them? No, nor have we. All your friends who only like bands you have never heard of, in all likely hood listen to the Bee Gees behind closed doors. And that is not all.

The top 100 biggest selling artists of all time reads like a who’s who of the worst chord sequences imaginable. Garth Brooks, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, ABBA, Julio Iglesias, Whitney Houston, The Back Street Boys for Gods sake!!! Wont it stop? All of these artists and more have sold well over 100 million albums and whats worse is they are likely to be joined by the like of Britney Spears, The Spice Girls, Boyzone and who knows who else. As more and more radio stations pollute our Internet and Myspace churns out mediocrity after mediocrity, the trend is set to continue. And yet everywhere you go, people will never admit to liking these people, they will like The White Stripes and some fresh punk band from Tokyo, Some unknown DJ who scratches the theme from Bergerac over some Italian rap. No they don’t, they like Phil Collins!!!!

Taketheblame would like to take full responsibility for the sordid purchase of the worst records released.