Major major sausage that is, look at the state of it

It was Martin Donnelly's birthday the other day. You're forgiven if you missed it, or if you had no idea who Martin Donnelly was, or is. An Ulsterman with a crook haircut Peter Beardsley would have blanched at, he was a F1 driver, quick in junior formulae, whose top-line career was stymied by arriving at Lotus at about the time the arse fell out of their operation. Saddled with a heavy, gutless Lambo and with a fading team living off former glories and about to lose their Camel cash, his 1990 season was already intensely miserable and literally pointless before round 14 at Jerez in southern Spain came round. Then this happened.

 

He lived. He never made it back to F1, and he never walked properly, but he lived, and he raced again. Went on to be a driver manager. Got a better haircut. Life finds a way, etc.

Fast forward 35 years and your correspondent was tasked with a mission as daunting as old mate figuring out how to walk again: watch the trailer for the new Bruckheimer-produced, Top Gun-remake-dude-directed F1™ movie, without hurling either lunch, laptop or self across room. Now, the F1™ movie is definitely of that big list of stuff that is Not For Me, and yada yada let people enjoy stuff and all that. All racing movies are varying degrees of hot dogshit - at best, they're plotless exercises in pretty period cinematography like Le Mans or Grand Prix; at worst, they're heinously scripted, catastrophically inaccurate fact-free farragos like Michael Mann's Ferrari or the Senna 'documentary'. When the best racing movie ever made is Talladega Nights (and then only the first half before it fucks off to become a Lifetime movie) you know you're in a genre girt by grim. Amongst F1 fans, anticipation is not high for the F1™ movie, despite (or probably because of) the names involved - Bruckheimer, Kosinski (no not the weirdo former Grand Prix bike racer), Brad Pitt and Lewis Hamilton. Frankly, it looks like it absolutely fucken sucks. But that's OK - it's not for us. This is not for the rusteds, it's for the Netflix Plastics (even if it is on Apple).

Your Correspondent got twenty seconds in before reaching the same conclusion as the highly esteemed journalists social media interns at Motor Sport magazine: they're lifting old mate's major, major sausage as a plot point in Pitt's pre-story character arc. A failed old coulda-been wastrel, run out of the paint for various indiscretions, reluctantly recruited back to mentor a young buck with all the promise in the world but all the self-control of Helmut Marko at a sacking-junior-drivers convention: the most original idea imaginable. Unless you've never watched Cocktail, or any of the literal thousands of movies to use the same trope. Including the worst racing movie ever made, Driven with Sylvester Stallone, a movie so bad it's singlehandedly responsible for the death of '90s Indycar, and which used the exact same beats in the exact same sequence.

They don't use the crash in the trailer, but there's only one reason you use that otherwise absolutely unremarkable Lotus-Lamborghini 102 in your historic establishing shots: because of that crash. Or because RJ Reynolds have paid heavy for product placement. Turning Donnelly's career-and-almost-life-ender into lazy character backfill for a Brad Pitt vanity vehicle is only just about stomachable because you know Donnelly just about survives the crash. But why not use anyone else's major major sausage? For this was an era of sausage manufacture on an industrial scale. There were no particular shortage of Big Ones. The year before at Imola, Gerhard Berger walled a Ferrari at Tamburello in a stack grimly similar to the one which would claim his old mate Ayrton five years later. Berger's bus even caught fire, in a far more realistic way than the laughable CGI shit featured late in the F1™ trailer. Spoilers, obvs. Is it just the startling visual of Donnelly lying in the middle of the road strapped to what was left of his race seat, his Lotus having bisected itself in time-honoured fashion - Lotuses having generally built to be fast rather than survivable since the days of founder Colin Chapman, to the fatal detriment of more great drivers than you'd want to think about? 

You just kind of hope Donnelly gets something out of this, but you know he won't. Man lost his life's dream and hasn't been able to walk properly for 35 years, only to have his worst moment used for plot development in a movie with no plot. Bruckheimer better have bought him a nice birthday present.

Your choices are valid (even yours)

A corollary of the Some Things Are Not For Me And That's Fine No Really worldview that I've reluctantly settled into in my enveloping dotage, is the understanding and acceptance that everyone's media choices, within reason, are valid. This is a Big Deal for a late Gen Xer - the generation that built its whole identity, all of its social strata and cache, around media choices - the music you listened to, the comic books, movies, sports or shows you watched. It was how Gen X identified itself and siloed itself socially; goths, punks, comic book nerds, footy heads, internecine in-groups created around media choices. You're a yob or you're a wanker, take your fucken choice. So it's a lot for Gen X to accept and even celebrate that people who like Taylor Swift are inherently OK and not terrible fucken idiots, even if they can be a bit punishing to get on the wrong side of in an internet argument. 

Your man Beeso and I have been recording ourselves talking about music for ten years, which is a large swathe of our kids' lives. Long term listeners will know we've basically taken different approaches to imbuing our kids with music, curating their experience base, expanding their influences, trying to stop them listening to terrible shit that would make them awful people who would be social pariahs - standard Gen X obsessions. In somewhat of a long-running music experiment which has been catalogued on the show over the years, Beeso has happily inflicted his entire music choices on his kids, including basically every week's worth of albums we listen to apart from the ones with naughty American swearing on them (and even then, if it's Little Simz they'll probably hear it). For a few years we even built a playlist for the boys (incisively titled 'The Boys', long before certain nihilistic superhero satires) which we built on week-by-week with new song nominations from review albums.

I don't think my boys ever heard it, as beyond a few mix CDs and playlists of swearing-lite tracks from acts I liked, it became pretty clear pretty quick that my kids were going to want to discover their own stuff. So I've been much more hands-off in trying to lab-grow my lads' music taste, which is not to say Beeso is brewing mini-mes, but his lads are only just now at the age where they diverge and discover their own way. Mine are a bit older, and we are less a house of communal noise, more each to their own. Lots more earbuds and on-ear headphones, and not intentionally, less of a willingness to share media. Seemingly I give off Gen X music snob vibes even when I'm trying to be supportive about whatever dreadful crap my family are watching or listening to, so nobody wants to tell me about it. Clearly not a me problem.

So essentially I am the control in Beeso's big music experiment, in that my kids have been allowed/encouraged/obliged to just go and figure it out for themselves. It is not what you would call a well-controlled experiment - I would have notes if this protocol turned up for review - but it's interesting nonetheless. Particularly when you get to see the results. As discussed on this week's ep of tripping balls, the younger one and I had a great chance to compare music notes which led to next week's 'joker' album being a classic which he'd gotten into massively on a friend's recommendation - Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Under The Sea. 

Yes, apparently I'd sent my little boy out into the world to seek his musical fortune, armed only with a Spotify sub and the truth, and he came back listening to... turn of the century Seppo folk indie jangle. 

Oh, and early Kanye. And Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. No, really, it's funny to me that he has somehow independently discovered all the musical acts and styles I have loudly shitcanned for decades (*waves hands at ten years of recordings of us slagging off Kanye*) and now I get to crack-test my newfound readiness to accept and celebrate the validity of everyone's choices, and revisit genres and artists I'd never actually spent any time with. And maybe, just a little, do a bit of gentle nudging. We can get from Pink Floyd to early Led Zep, particularly since he reckons he's not as into the more cinematic later stuff. We can probably get from Kanye to golden-era hip hop, that good shit. Or even just CZARFACE. 

Not sure how we get from folk indie jangle to Fu Manchu, but we can have a crack.

 
The Doctor is OUT. 

Big boat toot

Big boat

Previously on The New World Of Bollocks we discussed things that are Not For Me And That's Fine, Or Whatever. I'm reminded sometimes that 'Or Whatever' is heavily load bearing, and by sometimes I mean every couple of days through what is laughably referred to locally as ‘summer’ as my town is monstered and overrun by shuttle buses and tourist trainloads of comically dressed tourists fresh off a big fuck-off cruise ship freshly parked up at the port in the No Standing zone. Cruise ships are Not For Me. Cruise tourists, even less so.

You're never in doubt over who the cruise tourists are from their uniform. Oversized rainproofs, bumbags and invariably stupid hats, milling around mindlessly, getting in the way, obscuring each other's photos of the same mildly photogenic landmarks, DDOSing the cafes and farmers' market, shouting into the ends of their phone at apparently brain-injured people overseas. They're blocking up the door, they're walking up the escalator, they're knocking on the door of every single store, they're looking for a score, they might as well be dead...

Banger

The one that was pesting around the port most recently was the Celebrity Edge, a monstrous new conveyance with a name like a reality TV show where C-listers compete to be pushed off a cliff the least. As distinct from Celebrity Edging, which just sounds frankly unpleasant.

Why does it come with a handle like a Little Tikes ride-on toy

And, look, fine. I said it was fine alright. I'm not going to go all CRUISE SHIPS DO NO GOOD in storey-high lettering like the people of Lyttelton up the way, although I get the vibe. Having your town periodically ruined is one thing, having your planet ruined by 2900 people on a massively carbon-footprinted jolly is another. There is no carbon-ethical form of international transport short of experimental teleportation or solo yachtspersoning, with either just as unlikely to have you reach your destination alive. But surely cruise holidays are amongst the most offensive wastes of planet, an absolutely pointless form of transport that takes you a net zero nautical miles from your original start location.

But when I say cruise ships are definitely Not For Me, it's not even about the carbon footprint or the sledgehammer impact on harbour towns or the facile surface-level tourist experiences they encourage. It's not even the norovirus. It's just that they are full of the sorts of people who want to be on a cruise ship. Who not only sought this experience out, but paid through the bumbag to do so. Rich boomers harbouring hideous fashion sense and even worse opinions. And norovirus.

I guess it's the mentality of the sort of people who are into all-inclusive package holidays - people who like certainty, like paying up front, like having a solid 6/10 experience at the place they’ve always gone to rather than rolling the dice on something new or exciting, and like being surrounded by people while they're doing it. Incredibly normie behaviour. Not to make everything about teh neurospicy, but you’ve never seen a bigger collection of neurotypical motherfuckers than on a cruise ship. To me, the point of a holiday is to go explore and see things, on my own schedule, in my own time, as far away as fucking possible from those people. Definitely not to have a pre-set itinerary, menu and experience list on a floating Club Med full of punishers and ringed with a ten story drop into shark-infested waters.

Also did I mention the norovirus.

In isolation (not for norovirus), it’d not be too bad to experience the outline concept of a cruise holiday - a gentle sail between pretty locations, stopping off to do little sightseeing tours and foodie expeditions in places you might struggle to get to by car or campervan. But that's assuming you're actually in control of where you go and what you do, and that's also without the Other People. Cruises are for people who like other people. And my people, that ain’t me. As some great British philosophers of the 1990s might have put it:

Fuck right off, thank you very much
I need a holiday from human touch.*

The Doctor is OUT. 

* So it turns out that lyric isn't 'Stop right now, thank you very much, I need somebody with a humid crotch'. Which was somewhat embarrassing at work karaoke.