I’ve been away on holiday for the past week or so. It was a very relaxing vacation, mostly a family affair with a few distant relatives who I have no recollection of ever having met. None of my family had ever met them either, so it was assumed that they were extremely distant. Six degrees of seperation and all that.

Where did we go, you ask? We went to Gibraltar. It’s a lovely place, the moon was very bright due to random and arbitrary equatorial effects and the natives were very friendly, bestowing us with gifts and assorted poisons all throughout our stay in the local hotel. During the day, we would wander the streets, tripping over discarded corpses and shooting bison with our hip-mounted airguns. At night, we would resume the consumption of various intoxicating substances, and Great Auntie Nebulator would dance the Dance of a Thousand Suns before collapsing into a heap on the floor and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

There is much to do in Gibraltar, including the Running of the Taps - a traditional event where several taps are left running for a few minutes while the locals run away from them - Fishing with Microwaves which is a lot of fun, especially under the influence of alcohol and Spanners and Fights, a charming theme park which embodies many of the customs and past-times of this wonderful place.

The only real disappointment of the vacation came at the end, in Gibraltar airport, when we left Great Auntie Nebulator unattended for a few minutes and she was destroyed in a controlled explosion.

I awoke this morning to find a note on my kitchen table. It appeared to have been penned by the hand of The Napster

“Dear Sir/Madam/Dave Lee Travis,

The Napster”

I had previously recieved news that the new service from Napster - Napster-To-Go - is based upon some sort of technological gizmoid that lets you listen to as much music as you want (but apparently only the limited tracks that they let you), for a monthly subscription but, get this, only while you continue that subscription.

Yes, lets all go out now and find another seemingly culturally important and necessary aspect of our lives like, say, music, re-package it and sell it back to the masses in bite-size chunks.

/rant

It was just last night. Or I suppose it could have been any night, it’s not terribly important.

I was listening to one of my favourite albums. For the sake of argument, let’s say it was “Bodysong” by Jonny Greenwood (he of Radiohead fame) which is oh so good with it’s “Chhk-nng-nng” and “Ba-dum Ba-dum-Ba dum” and crazy drum rythyms that make me jump up and dance like so many strands of animated spaghetti.

This album had been purchased some while back from a quaint little music shop on the other side of town. This music outlet only stocked about 40,000 albums, so I did find making a choice fairly difficult, but I found what I wanted and paid my hard-earned moolah to the lovely person behind the cash desk (At least I think it was a person. It could have been a cat, but that’s unlikely).

Upon returning to my warm, festering abode, I unleashed the CD from its wrapping and hurled it with gusto into a nearby CD player and set it going. It was good, and I was happy.

Many days passed. I decided to once again listen to my lovely little disc of musicy CD-ness. It was late at night and the wind was blowing. No sooner had I pressed play and the dulcet sounds of Greenwood’s tortured electronic rythyms had started, when I heard a rap-tap-tapping from the direction of the window. I turned to face said window and to my shock and/or horror, I saw a face staring back at me. It looked a bit like a cat, but it was also wearing some sort of crudely drawn headphones. Realization dawned slowly upon mine face as I realised what it was I was looking at.

“It’s”, I gasped, “…The Napster!”

Suddenly, and without warning, The Napster burst through the window, sending glass and wood and sealant putty and small pieces of metal flying here there and everywhere. It leapt over to my CD player and hurled it to the ground smashing it into lots of little pieces.

“What the…”, I said, as a standard stock response to any event that is both shocking and strange.
“I am here to stop you from listening to music which I dont want you to listen to because I’m some sort of strange corporate cat logo from a big company that cares not one jot about its consumers and is only interested in maintaining healthy profit margins!”. I found The Napsters statement shocking, not least because it was quite lazily constructed and could have been strung out over several paragraphs had the writer of said sentence not been eager to finish writing this dross so he could go off and make a bacon sandwich.
“But why?”, I asked.
“Because I can. Mwa-ha-ha!”. The Napster seemed like he was enjoying this
“But I bought this CD, with my hard earned moolah, from a shop, with the windows and the floorspace and the lovely, lovely DVD displays”.
“That matters not a jot! We have decided that from henceforth, music is only legal and good if it is purchased from our online ItunesNapster store and has sufficient measures installed to prevent it from being copied to another device more than no times, to prevent it from being anywhere near the quality of the original CD and to prevent it from actually being listened to!!”
I was shocked. And appalled. “But who’s this we?”, I asked?.

From out of the shadows stepped a figure, at first glance it appeared he was dressed all in black, but in actuality, he was dressed in pure white, the brightness of which stopped my eyes from working briefly. It was Steve Jobs. Apple Man of Mystery and maker of shiny gadgets that are inordinately expensive but which look so nice and huggable that they override people’s innate sense of not-wanting-to-buy-them. I was overwhelmed with an urge to go out and buy three hundred Imacs, but I fought the impulse.

“Steve Jobs!”, I shouted, “You have no place here. I am immune to your corporate jargons and your shiny white surfaces that while looking crisp and clean against the white background of your advertising campaigns appear somewhat stupid amongst the clutter on my desk! Begone back to the filth-pit from whence you spawned”.

I rushed over to where he was standing and smacked him in the face with a big pan. He promptly vanished and I was left once again speaking to The Napster.

“Ha! Without Jobs you are nothing! You will never succeed in this world where people demand music that is cheap and easily accessible. Your crazy schemes to turn music into something that is so easily obtainable yet so annoyingly expensive and hard to use, infuriating many and pleasing none will never work.”
“We shall see…”, replied the Napster. “Just wait for Napster-to-Go, it sounds fantastic but its bound to be full of as many pitfalls and difficulties as everything else!”
The Napster disappeared suddenly up its own arsehole, and I was left standing with a smashed CD player and a vague sense of unease. This was only the beginning, I thought to myself, and went off to make a bacon sandwich.

It arrived in the post last Tuesday. I hadn’t gotten around to opening the parcel and using it because I was scared of exactly how awesome this thing was going to be. Turns out this Gravity Gun I ordered over the Internet is so awesome it’ll make your socks explode.

The first thing I did with it was to pick up the postman. He didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing though, so I switched the gun to “Repel” and sent him flying at a ridiculous velocity across the early morning rooftops of the sleepy suburb where I live. A few seconds later I heard a muffled crash. A car alarm went off. “The postman has landed”, I thought to myself and headed back indoors.

The Gravity Gun is a marvellous thing. Invented by the creators of Half Life 2 and built in reality from a few pieces of string and some orange peel, it is capable of grasping an object firmly within its strong, directional gravitational field and then, if so desired, hurling said object many miles in a given direction.

It was almost 11am - around the time when I would head down to the local supermarket to pick up some bits and pieces for lunch. I stood up and decided that, in the pale light of my kitchen, the fridge would look better a couple of feet further left. I hoisted the Gravity Gun and gently picked up the fridge using my carefully harnessed gravitational field. Unfortunately, I had gotten confused with the shoddy labelling on the “Repel” and “Release” switches. After mistakenly pressing the “Repel” switch, I watched with a mixture of awe and disbelief as my fridge moved suddenly a few hundred feet or so east, taking with it several pieces of fridge shaped masonry from my house and the other houses in my neighbourhood which it had chosen to move through at an astounding speed.

Vaguely bewildered, I walked out of my back door towards the supermarket from which I was still determined to purchase various items, Gravity Gun still in my grasp. I noticed that someone had parked their car ever so slightly too far out in front of my drive. This would not be tolerated so, taking suggestions from my increasingly psychotic mind, I hoisted it into the air with the Gravity Gun and, unsure whether or not it was yet another genuine mistake or because I actually found it incredibly funny, pressed the “Repel” switch once again. I had been pointing the car skywards when I hit the switch so, with nary a sound, the vehicle hurtled into the atmosphere at a speed which I had now started to call “Close to a billion feet per three seconds” because, as I have already mentioned, this day was proving somewhat harmful to my mental wellbeing and I was becoming more psychotic with every passing second.

Laughing quietly to myself, I wandered into the supermarket. By this point, a couple of people had noticed my lunacy and had followed me discretely but, because I was slowly becoming a grade A mentalist, my ever-alert mind picked up on their treachery. I hurled myself around and aimed the Gravity Gun at them, picking them up with the merest of effort on my part.

“No!”, they pleaded, “Leave us out of your lunacy, we have done nothing to upset you”. One of them started crying but I, yes I, the King with the Big Awesome Gravity Gun heeded not their words of mercy, but hit once again the “Repel” switch that sent them spinning into what I think was the moon, but it could have been anything. I really wasn’t thinking too clearly.

I turned upon my heel and announced to the supermarket that I was there to purchase some milk, some bread and some ham so I could make some sandwiches. I announced this last part about my intent to create sandwiches with a booming voice, so it would be extra clear. I decided that, since I was now an all powerful being who could perform herculean tasks with the flip of a switch, I had no need of the trivialities of daily life such as actually “walking round the supermarket”. I aimed the gun at what I calculated to be the center of the store and thought about the milk, bread and ham that I wished to retrieve.

The gravitational field converged about a metre in front of the Gun and, since it was directional in nature, affected pretty much everything within twenty metres of the point where I was standing. Although this material probably contained milk, bread and ham, it also contained a lot of masonry, some shelving units, checkout staff, checkouts and a large portion of the rear wall which, I assume was a supporting structure. Experimental results, i.e. the ripping out of said wall with my Gravity Gun, proved me correct and the rear portion of the supermarket collapsed in upon itself.

I turned around to retreat from the carnage and reaslied that I still had contained within the confines of a gravitational prison, several tons of rock, metal, complaining employees and food produce. Having nothing better to do, I fired it in the direction of the sun, knowing full well that it wouldn’t actually get there and instead fall upon the home of some poor ususpecting fool, and turned to face whatever challenge life would see fit to present me with next.