Ugly Bastards

News outlets the world over (well, the so-called civilised western world) have been reporting that the dating website Beautiful People dot com has been hacked by a virus allowing thousands of "ugly" people on to their site.

For the few of you who may not know, this site only allows you access to it if their members rate you as good looking enough. They employ a staggeringly offensive traffic light system so you can narrow it down a bit... You are also expected to show that you have a bit of money (owning a house is a plus, for example) and that you believe in Astrology. Do people still base major relationship choices on a star sign..? It seems so, sadly, but that's nothing. A few years ago a bunch of members got booted off for putting weight on over Christmas - this shows you the quality of the people involved.

Now there are suggestions that the story is a publicity stunt and the media are being criticised for getting sucked in and there have been several quotes from the guy who runs the site clearly demonstrating what a monumental dick brain he must be. This is not what worries me - the news is full of publicity stunts, like the vicious rumour going around at the moment that Lady Gaga has any discernible talent or that anyone should give a left-handed corkscrew about whatever tv show Cheryl Cole may or may not be on.

No, what worries me is that something as vile, cretinous, obnoxious and odious as this site even exists in the first place. Even more worrying is the claim that they have over seven hundred thousand members. That is seven hundred thousand shallow, moronic, small-minded, vomit-inducing, resource-consuming twat-ends. Or, in today's money, one Donald Trump.

I mean, does this not strike you as smacking very slightly of eugenics? The purpose of this site is for "beautiful" people to meet other "beautiful" people and for them to breed tiny "beautiful" people who will grow up and meet other "beautiful" people and eventually the whole world will be filled with "beautiful" people and a new age of peace and high class nail treatments will be ushered in. What will actually happen is a bunch of people who think a haircut is more important than treating people with decency and humanity will get together with a bunch of people who place more emphasis on choosing the right dress designer than they do on rational thought and together they will bray hideously at dinner parties about how "Simon wore the wrong cuff-links and it was sooooo embarrassing" and then they'll go home and breed another bunch of vacuous oxygen thieves and the whole sorry bag of shite will carry on.

I'm hoping that, within a generation or two, they will suffer horrendous genetic disfigurements leaving them with two heads, no chin, a fatal blood disorder and the sort of teeth you'd find in Steve Pemberton's dress-up box. Y'know. Like the royal family. And then they'll die out.

If that is what happens then not only will the collective IQ of humanity jump several points but future generations stand a chance of being able to exist in a society where what you contribute and how you treat your fellow man are considered to be of greater importance than where you bought your shirt from or how recently you had your nasal hair coiffured.

This sort of thing really makes me angry... Can you tell? I hope that I'm never ever considered to be a "beautiful" person. I hope nobody I know is ever considered to be "beautiful". I hope we're all proud of being hairy walking goo-sacks with the ability to produce weird smells, vomit, toe nails, pubes, bogies, puss, piss, earwax and poo.

I know I am.

iPoones

A brief rant...

If you've got an iPhone and a few thousand songs and a few dozen app's and some photo's and bits and bobs then iTunes is great. It's easy to use, easy to buy stuff, easy to sync your devices, etc.

If you have thousands of songs, a couple hundred app's for your various Apple devices, photo's, films and tv shows then you'd think Apple would love you for spending so much money with them and your library software would work a treat. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case. Since the introduction of iTunes 10 we've seen an already fairly hefty piece of software become even more bloated with useless additions like the execrable Ping (I don't care what tunes my mates bought over the last few days. I am not a sheep.) and the only slightly less invasive Genius. Apple's predilection for using the word genius is annoying enough without them adding something into iTunes that sifts through your library and recommends related stuff. Marketing dude! Get out of my library! Nosy git...

I'm one of the increasing number of people who have some kind of network storage device for all their music, films, etc. My various computers, phones, games machines, gadgets, gizmos and related shiny toys are connected to this device so I can stream my library all over the house. I buy a lot of gadgets and I buy a lot of content. I'm exactly the sort of person that big companies like Apple should adore. Forget saving for my infant sons education! That little box is shiny and it has a little light on it and it goes blip! Sold.

So why is it that iTunes fails so dismally when it comes to what the industry so hatefully refers to as the "power user"? Now that I have so much stuff, iTunes takes an age to load. When it does load it sits there like a grumpy child for five minutes before it let's me do anything. When I try to do anything, it spams my network with a series of massive data transfers for no obvious reason. Any other machine in the house trying to use the network grinds to a halt. If, heaven forbid, you get an entire series of some telly show or other and load it into your library then iTunes will sit and think and grunt and moan and use half your CPU cycles and network bandwidth and piss about some more and display either an hourglass on Windows or a happy spinning beach ball thing on the Mac. I can go and make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, have a cup of tea, digest the food, excrete the food, draw a picture of an elk, talk to a relative, masturbate, practice throwing a teabag into a mug and design a totally new kind of scarf and still iTunes is sitting there with this innocent look on it's face and a fat lot of nothing in it's head.

This is annoying. It doesn't have any data to transfer. The data is all stored on the network drive. All iTunes has to do is add the file to the database and show a pretty little icon of it in the library view. What the hell is it playing at?

After a brief hunt around the net, it seems that I am not alone. iTunes 10 seems to piss off a lot of people - particularly those with a similar setup to me. There is a little link on the Apple website where you can give feedback about their products. I know for a fact that this feedback is looked at. So I think we should moan. I think we should stamp our feet. I think we should whine. Twitter and Facebook have shown themselves time and again to be a major factor in getting companies and countries to think again...

I realise that this cause isn't exactly overthrowing a powerful dictator or tumbling an oppressive regime or highlighting appalling abuse but I still think that when big companies expect you to part with large sums of money with the slickly advertised glossy promise of a life made easier and more fulfilling with the latest shiny toy then they should be held as accountable as anyone else who's making our world a more annoying place.

Or to put it another way, a powerful person can fix stuff and make things better providing everybody else is kicking him in the nuts until he does it. And I'm not being sexist. We can just as easily kick a woman in the flaps.

Get to it, world. Revolt!