charity shop warning!

Like most 50 year old middle class white males I consider Tupac Shakur to have a lot to say to me. So I was over the moon when I picked up a copy of his greatest hits double CD at a local charity shop.

I rushed home to listen to my latest find but was disappointed. Tupac seemed to have a rather listless, one might almost say female, voice. And rather than hard rapping tunes boasting about bitches and having a bundle with Notorious B.I.G it was all girlie songs. So I checked the CD and it was a Brandy CD. Took me three songs to realise!

Being a double album I grabbed the second CD and my heart sank. It was a CD-R with 'Daniel Bed' written on it. Oh bugger, some 19 year old spotty student called Daniel (not Dan or Danny - middle-class alert!) and his bedroom tracks. But I'm not narrow-minded so I had a listen. It took one bar for me to realise that 'Bed' was short for Bedingfield. HORROR TROSS ALERT!

But I may just play a Brandy track one night ...

a big number two

Sometimes it's fun to wonder how the world would have been if things had just been slightly different. If Midge Ure's Ultravox had trounced Joe Dolce to the number one spot back in 1981 how would our lives be different?

Rather than walking around in pork pie hats demanding 'what's the matter you, gotta no respect?' would we be dressed in casual suits with Star Trek sideburns muttering 'it means nothing to me' whilst looking wistfully into the mists around the Schonbrunn Palace on a wintry afternoon?

Midge, the only singer named (appropriately) after a perennial and diminutive Scottish pest, would today be famous throughout the world, flying his own jet accompanied by literally thousands of scantily-dressed models, rather than chundering around Wiltshire in a twenty-year old Austin Allegro bothering anyone who looks in his direction with a rheumy-eyed exposition on how he knew Bob Geldof and hated Joe Dolce.

Joe Dolce meanwhile would be sleeping with the fishes in Sydney harbour rather than flying his own jet accompanied by literally thousands of scantily-dressed models.

My point? There are two - firstly that the actual content of the universe depends on tiny random events with an infinite number of possible outcomes (allowed in the multiverse or many universe models of quantum physics), secondly that there are two types of tross - type 1, which includes Vienna, the Macarena, Cha-Cha Slide etc, playable at a disco IF the crowd needs to be dragged on to the dancefloor and where there are no real music fans present, and type 2, which includes Agadoo, Pink Floyd, the Birdie Song, Bon Jovi and Cum-By-Ya, which should carry the death penalty if played under ANY circumstances.