God Bless You, China!

Hello. Does anyone know why the top post is all fucked up? No? Oh well.

First things first: EXAMS ARE OVER! WAHOOO! YAY! WHOOPEE! WICKED! HUZZAH! DANCE PARTY TIME! YAY! LOLZ! etc.
I mean, now the exams are over, I can finally have some fun without the endless rigours of revision and parental pressure about revision, and, my god, the terrible EXAMS and the cold sweats at night and the...

Ok, I lie. At MOST, the GCSEs were a minor inconvenience to me. No, not even that. GCSEs made my life EVEN EASIER than they had been already. Study leave meant that we had days, weeks, even, off school. Getting up late, drinking vast amounts of coffee, sort of easing myself into my chair to read some incredibly easy revision book about the plague or whatever the fuck I was meant to be revising. You want my revision technique? Well, seeing as the exams are over now and nobody's gonna steal it, here goes:

1: Wander into room. Drink water. Look nervously at exercise books full of detailed examples of everything we need to know.
2: Push exercise books onto the floor. Look in the nice simplified GCP revision book, which breaks everything down to the bare essentials, with many brightly coloured pictures and diagrams.
3: Make a list of things I don't know. This is the core of my revision techniques: only revise the stuff that you're SURE you don't know. And when I say 'don't know', I mean 'if a question related to this came up in the exam, I would have no fucking clue how to even start doing it, in fact I would be so confused I would end up knocking myself unconscious by accident with my pen lid'.This cuts out much of the chaff, leaving you with the tricky stuff, which really boils down to not being that hard after all.
4: You have a list of things you don't know. Doodle on this list. Choose the top topic from the list.
5: Take a brand new sheet of paper. Write the title of the topic you don't know on the top of the sheet in highlighter. Then, using a black pen, slowly and oh-so-carefully trace around the outside of your writing. When the pen has dried, add a highlighter underline. Trace round this too. If you're really feeling artistic, add another. Whatever, it's your revision session, go mad.
6: Look up the topic in the GCP book. Typically, a three week subject is condensed into half a page. Read the page, then write, like, two related words under the sheet of paper. Doesn't matter about how neatly you write, you're gonna throw it into the bin anyway. I managed to go through more than 100 sheets of paper in three weeks with this method.
7: Wander around the table, loudly talking to yourself about the topic, but often letting your mind wander off to various unrelated topics eg. the puffy bit of paint where the wall's gone damp, Cassie's boobs, the lyrics to 'London underground', Lucia's fear of anybody being angry at her, the nice stain on the carpet, etc. Once I managed to perform three full laps of the table while ruminating on the plot for Batman Begins before noticing that I'd sort of lost the track of whatever I was meant to be revising.
8: Carry onto the next topic until you get bored. If you still haven't understood the current one, get bits of paper out of the bin and spend ten minutes throwing them back at it while repeating key topic details to yourself.
9: Lose interest, leave room.
10: Watch an Episode of the OC (yes, I know, I'm an addict, fuck off). Have lunch. Browse the internet for like twenty minutes. Re-read your own blog. Watch Trisha, then a re-run of Big Brother. Then slowly trudge back to the revision room, lamenting the explonential growth of your 20 minute break.

So, yeah, that was my revision. And that was my revision at its most brutal and ferocious. Didn't get much more intense than that. And that was all in the last two weeks. Ha ha ha, I just remembered; they wanted us to do three hours a night for the entire Easter holidays, then six hour a day for every day of study leave.

Ahahahhahahahhahaha.

I would be seriously fucked off if I'd put all that work in and I end up with the pissy bunch of papers we got for the exams. My laclustre revision methods got me safely through every damn exam they threw up, with the notable exception of Triple Chemistry and Core Maths 2, but does anyone care about those? No? Seriously? And damnit, I was so looking forward to my career as a plastic chemicalist. Or whatever.

So, yeah, I can't REALLY say that the end of the exams is heralding a massive positive improvement to my social life (ha! I have a blog... it's like the internet equivalent of having both aids AND leprosy AND involuntarily spitting out razor sharp blood soaked needles AND listening to U2) but still, uh... actually, the end of the exams is actually detrimental to my social life. I'm actually going to see and interact with less people than I do usually. And I can't pull the "sorry, I gotta revise" excuse every time my mother asks me to walk the dogs/accompany her walking the dogs/do anything dog related/clear the table/mow the lawn/tell her the time/do anything. I was such a satisfyingly poor son; now I no longer have an excuse.

However, the end of the exams does mean that I can, like, spend some more time with my homies. And GET A GIRLFRIEND! (HAH! I'm an impressively unsucessful boatie with a blog... that's the dating equivalent of being a queer scottish footballer... yes, I went there) But hey, at least you're not a queer CHINESE footballer, eh?

And that stunningly inept link brings me onto the main subject of this post, which will probably be, ironically, shorter than the introduction: CHINA. Yes, we all know China is there. We can all point it out on a black map of the world. Ha. I mean, it's over in Asia somewhere. And, I mean, china has given us some of the cultural milestones of the world. For example, Famed Author Amy Tan with her blistering piece of prose 'Two Kinds' (as not used in the GCSE English exam by me), huge pointless terracotta armies, tea, fireworks, and long pointless walls. But, does anyone know the REAL china? Well, me, Joeseph and the Oggster set out on a journey today to find out.

So, we started our cultural voyage of China by checking out Chinese Movie 'Kung Fu Hustle'. Man, this was a funny film. First of all, all the actors talked in a silly make-believe language and all the REAL words were written across the bottom. And also, it's full of the most insane violence and comic skillz ever. I mean, the guy who wrote this must have been totally munted/smashed/destroyed/stoned off his HEAD. I mean, it's the sort of film that you discuss with your buddies when drunk.

"Yo, I got... I got this really good IDEA for a film, man."
"Oh yeah dude?"
"Yeah, it's like, in CHINA, and, like, there are all these OLD people man. And there are all these lunatics with axes and they, like, DANCE their way through the opening credits."
"China, man?"
"Yeah, sweet man, and like, everyone talks silly languages. And there's this old lady who runs at, like, a billion miles an hour."
"Sweet! There could be, like, this lunatic whos actually an old man but is actually the kung fu king and HE CAN FLY."
"And, like, these old people who can, like, do kung fu. And, like this one guy flies in to the air and steps on a bird. Then he meets Buddha in the sky."
"Kung fu?"
"You know it!"
"HIGH FIVE!"

Man, that is one MANLY film, despite the lack of Christopher Walken. There isn't enough Christopher Walken in films nowadays. Or, come on, the woman who played Barbara in the Goode Life. Man, she was fit. She should have been in more porno. But that bit with the woman getting shotgunned was sweet. Pay attention: there will be more shotgun related banter later.

After getting wildly overexcited by the amazing show of typical Chinese life depicted in Kung Fu hustle, we decided on our next Chinese related adventure. Then it hit us. LUNCH. So we went to a Chinese buffet (it's pronounced 'buffey'). Now, when the sign says "All you can Eat", I honestly don't think that you're supposed to take that as a wager. But that's how we saw it. Man, I ate so much rice today. And typical Chinese deep fried chicken. But Joe and Oli managed to outdo themselves. Oliver by being the world's most SHIT vegetarian, and Joe by eating half a duck, in conjunction with his four plates of everything else. Joe managed a really impressive feat of keeping going, despite the waiters's insistence on stealing his plate. I remember one heartwarming occasion.

Waitress: You want me to take your plates?
Ogg: Yes.
Me: Yes.
Joe *Mouth full of delicious duck*: Mrrfhsh.
Me: Don't take his plate.
*The waitress takes Oli's plate. She then tries to take Joe's.*
Joe: Mrrlaraharhphh.
Me: No, don't take the plate.
*The waitress leaves with Oli's plate.*
Me: Hey!

Chinese food is a delicate, delicious selection of specially blended dishes. If you end up throwing up at the end of it, Oliver, I think that you've kind of missed the point of the whole affair. Anorexic bastard. Oh well, I managed to keep my end up by drinking my own bodyweight in tapwater. It was water IN A JUG, but it was FREE! WITH ICE! So, yeah, feeling all bloated and sloshy, we sort of wandered into HMV, where I purchased what is possibly the BEST GAME EVER... Resident Evil 4.

This is seriously the biggest mofo of a game ever. Basically, you're this guy in a forest full of evil hillybillies with pitchforks. The hillybillies try to kill you. You kill them back, with an assortment of shotguns etc. And there's this really evil wanker with a bag on his head and a chainsaw. Thankfully, you get given a shotgun fairly early on, and THEN you get to use it ON WOMEN. Yes, that's right. You can SHOOT WOMEN with a shotgun. FROM BEHIND. Here's a list of things I've killed in this game so far:

About fifteen thousand hillybillies.
Many hillybilly ladies, or as they like to be called, "hillyjillies".
A cow that was stupid enough to get in the way of my repeated slashings.
Some snakes.
A crow... he was asking for it.
Some chicken. I ate its delicious eggs, threw some more eggs at a hillybilly, then killed the bird.

And THEN there's this big scary guy with a nice beard and wild eyes who keeps showing up and cackling madly, before LETTING YOU GO.

Important Supervillain Rule Number One: Never, EVER, half throttle your enemy, tell him your no doubt evil and cunning plan, THEN let them go. This is bad practise, and will result in the imminent shotgunning of your SPINE. By me.

So basically, this is the most manly game ever. Even more manly than me. AND, it was made by the Chinese. Well, if we're going to be factually accurate here, it was made by the Japanese. But the disk was probably made in Taiwan, which was next to China, and they hate each other, so it might have been made by a chinaman. And thus concluded our comprehensive study of Chinese life and culture.

THANKS CHINA!

You made this culture ALL BY YOURSELF. Well DONE.