Song, by Toad

You know, I fucking hate iTunes.  I hate i-fucking-Tunes for much the same reason that I hate fucking Macs in general.  They are designed for people who don’t fucking know how to use Explorer, for Christ’s sake.  Or Finder or whatever the bastard is called on a Mac.

It drives me nuts.  If you import photos using iPhoto then you cannot find those files in Finder.  It’s fucking ludicrous.  You have to use the search function and then when it tells you where they are you can’t actually reach that path conventionally through Finder, it will only show you the bloody things through search. Basically, you have to use iPhoto, which I would frankly prefer not to do because then your old, imported photos end up in a different place from your new ones.  “Ah, but they’re all on iPhoto”, say the smarmy, gurning Macintosh twats.  Well I don’t fucking like i-fucking-Photo and I would like to be able to choose not to fucking use it.

iTunes is the fucking same.  It’s a spectacularly stupid program, and it refuses to let you organise your music properly.  It loses files, it won’t watch a folder properly, there’s no Explorer functionality in the left-hand sidebar, it’s fucking dreadful.  All my music in a great big long list, are you fucking joking?  Do you have any idea how much music I actually have?  I’ll get RSI in my bloody scrolling finger, you fucking turkeys.

The worst is the watch folder situation though.  Basically, everything I buy or I get sent to me goes into a folder called On Trial, which is always changing as things either get deleted or moved to another folder, for the keepers, called Music Library.  Winamp and Mediamonkey are both capable of keeping an eye on both of these folders and updating accordingly.  iTunes is incapable of doing that.  Most music fans like to organise their collections and keep things where they want them, but what use is software that can’t keep up with that.  Mediamonkey can’t be installed on a Mac at all, and I am raging because it’s brilliant software, and I want to use it.

Basically, Macs seem do be designed for people who don’t want to use computers and I fucking despise them.  I will organise my own files thank you very much, you fucking keep your playschool cartoon kiddie computer hands off the bastards.

Marc Carroll – Idiot World
Elvis Costello – How to Be Dumb
Close Lobsters – Just too Bloody Stupid

Ah thank goodness. The weekend, beer o’clock, beverage time, whatever – slipping into the welcoming arms of comatose alcoholic oblivion, no knowing where you’ll wake, next to whom or how many tattoos you’ll have. Marvellous.

The Edinburgh International Festival of Unbearably Pretentious Thespian Twattery commences this week some time and suppressing the Toad instinct for homicidal artistic criticism will be extremely difficult. It is a trying duty, but one which I nonetheless take very seriously, to have to reduce one aspiring performer after another to tears of desolation by relentlessly driving home the fact that what they are doing, rather than opening anyone’s heart to the possibilities of releasing their inner beauty, is in fact just some sort of pestilential form of spasmodic social syphilis. In fact, rather than giving people the opportunity to think differently about their lives what you are in fact doing, sweetie darling, is pissing everybody off, distracting them from their pints and making an utter twat of yourself in the process.

Congratulations. Won’t you be proud of your pointless fairying about, come the final reckoning:
St Peter: “And how spent thou thy precious earthly days?”
Eternal Soul 1: “Well, St Peter, I worked tirelessly on a cure for cancer.”
St Peter: “Splendid my son, on ye go. And your hippy friend here?”
Eternal Soul 2: “Erm, well, see I tried to express challenging thoughts through the medium of interpretive dance and bongo drums.”
St Peter: “You silly cunt.”

Who’s worse – the poncing thesps themselves or the fat fucking American tourists and crinkly old British coffin-dodgers who give them just enough financial encouragement that they somehow do not end up sticking their fucking knobs in a blender by the end of the Festival and thus relieving the gene pool of their weak and flabby genetic material altogether. Gah. Well at least there are some decent bands playing in Edinburgh for a change. Not many mind, but a couple.

I console myself with beer, gin, music and fornication. Breathe in with me Toadlets… and out… and relaaaaax!

Ad Astra Per Aspera – Everybody Lets Me Down
Elvis Costello – Clubland
Mayor McCA – I Love the Summer ‘Cause I Love the Women
Richard Cheese – Rock the Casbah I think this may now be the definitive version of this song.
Talking Heads – Radio Head