Dating Nikki: The boy is mine

Posted in Dating Nikki, Lifestyle by

Dear Nikki,

I have been dating this guy for the past month or so. We agreed not to be exclusive at the beginning and I was fine with that. Recently, I’ve started to develop feelings for him and I want to be exclusive with him. He is also dating another girl so I don’t know how to go about it. Help!

Serious Relationship Girl

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Dear Serious Relationship Girl,

In the words of Brandy and Monica’s successful duet The Boy is Mine, you should make it clear to the other woman that boy is in fact yours… in a less aggressive way.

Start off by having “the talk” with this bloke. You may be dreading having “the talk” but it is necessary. Sit him down over a dinner or something else that he really likes (so he’s more susceptible to being putty in your hands as opposed to taking him shopping for make-up or something) and tell him how you feel. Build up the courage to talk to him (it’s easier said than done, I know, but it has to be done), open up and say that you want to take your relationship to the next level and see if he’s open to it. Chances are is that he’ll at least be open to discussion and won’t be a total asshole; if he was, it’d be that much easier for you to kick him to the kerb.

If he is as good as you think he is, then he’ll agree to take things to the next level or at least discuss it. If you’re afraid that he might want to stay as you are, then you have two choices: 1) Do what he wants to keep him happy and keep dating him knowing that he’s still seeing Brandy (or Monica, whichever camp you prefer) or 2) Get yourself out of this predicament entirely, in case you turn into a jealous wreck who will eventually scare the poor bloke off anyway. I can assure you that keeping your feelings to yourself and not having “the talk” will turn you into said jealous wreck.

In the end, everything happens for a reason. If he sees the light and decides to make you his and only his, all the power to you two. If not, there is an even better guy out there who will make you his. I know it sounds cliché and “unrealistic” but it is the truth: don’t be that one that throws all their eggs in one basket when there’s an even bigger basket with much better bedazzling on it somewhere else.

Happy dating… and go the Broncos!

– by The Black Widow

If you have a question or need some good ol’ fashioned blunt advice from #DatingNikki, use the Contact page on our website and put in your comment “Subject: Dating Nikki” or alternatively send me an e-mail at widowslure@gmail.com and put “Dating Nikki” in the subject line. I will respond to your cries for help as soon as possible!

Kindle… Schmindle

Posted in Books, Entertainment, Opinion by

I don’t trust you Kindle users. I’ve seen you around and to be honest, I look at you askance. Askance, and with something akin to pity in my eyes. Or maybe it’s just thinly veiled contempt.

Books come in all shapes and sizes, they have nice covers, you can flick through them and even write in them. Unless it’s a library book… you can’t write in a library book. Book rhymes with “nook” and “cook” and “rook” unless you happen to hail from Yorkshire in which case it rhymes with gobbledygook.

Kindle… dwindle… swindle… schmindle.

The word Kindle, meaning “to set light to” or “to set on fire” seems an ominous sort of  name. Are they suggesting some metaphorical book burning is in order to clear the way for their electronic witchcraft? I remember another chap who didn’t like books and in fact used them as kindling for other books and by all accounts he couldn’t write worth a shit either.

There are books out there I have searched for years to find and to no avail. I’ve trawled through bookstores and op-shops with the vain hope that I might find a second-hand copy of some Kurt Vonnegut title or other. And when I found it, away I would steal, like Roald Dahl’s BFG off to the Land of Dreams… Surely you’ve seen the Quentin Blake illustration of the famous giant? Ah, you read it on a Kindle. Tough titties.

'You is never doing anything unless you tries' BFG (SOURCE: Global Panorama's Flickr photostream)

‘You is never doing anything unless you tries’ BFG (SOURCE: Global Panorama’s Flickr photostream)

When I arrive home with my brown paper bag crinkling against my tweed weskit I slide my papyrus trophy to nestle against her fellow brothers and sisters of the printing press. And there may she wait in silent, bookish contemplation until finally reanimated by human curiosity.

“Do you accept Kindle’s terms and conditions before you continue?’

“Nay, damn you I accept neither. Nor your right to demand any such acceptance, you swine.”

You may laugh at me moving house, weeping with the effort of dragging box after box of words. Me, forcing the unyielding bastards into the back of the car, whilst you charge your Kindle with the cigarette-lighter in the front. Your laughter will turn to bitterest tears when your flimsy Kindle is trapped between a box of my literary heavy weights and a George Foreman grill (he’s so proud of it he put his name on it).

Have you even considered the humble librarian? Proud literary custodians since days of yore. Where’s your sense of mystery, your sense of occasion? Where’s your sense of common human decency? Have you even considered the librarian at all? For shame…

The librarian is a bibliophile first and foremost. They care for all the books from Douglas Adams to Markus Zusak (who wrote The Book Thief not “The Kindle Swindler”). They care for them all without passion or prejudice whether it be Jane Eyre or Edward Cullen, Harry Potter or Beatrix Potter, Dorian Grey or Christian Grey. The librarian abides. However I like to think that when the stoic chronicler is confronted with the image of you squinting at Dan Brown on that spineless auto-cue you call an “e-book”, they shed a single tear. What was it J.M Barrie said? “Every time a child reads a Kindle there is a little librarian somewhere that falls down dead.” Something along those lines anyway.

Before you try to get smart with me, I wrote this on a type-writer before sending it by pigeon to an alchemist who transformed it into this format. You may well call me a Luddite and  I very well may be but were I alive in the days of Neil Ludd I’d be on the side of the workers and you’d be a “Fat Cat” trampling us and starving our families in the name of profit and progress. You’d probably have gout.

Bloody kindles…

– by James Andrews

Top 10 Badass Who Villains

Posted in Entertainment, TV by

Let’s face it; Doctor Who has the most badass villains ever! But who’s the most badassest of them all? Solstice Satisfaction takes a look at the worst of them.

All images from various Doctor Who sources, including The Doctor Who Site.

10. Sontarans
sontarans
The frightening soldier-like race only made less scary by the fact that they look like potatos with bodies, the Sontarans are quite fond of killing and think of it as a type of leisure, so that alone should make even the mightiest Time Lord or human companion wary of these potatos-in-blue-suits.

9. Autons
autons
If you work in retail, I feel bad for you son, I’ve got 99 problems, but a store mannequin turning into a killing Auton ain’t one. These “plastic people” are controlled by the Nestene Consciousness and shoot these really nifty lasers out of their plastic hands. They’re also frightening because people are used to store mannequins and will let their guard down. But you shouldn’t. Rose Tyler isn’t in this dimension to save you.

8. Vashta Nerada
Vashta_nerada
“Hey! Who turned out the lights?” If this sentence resonates with you as a Whovian, then you’ll know why the Vashta Nerada are so frightening. I could only describe the Vashta Nerada as a type of darkness that kills you and takes control of your physical body while replaying the last thing you ever said constantly. If you were in a River Song spacesuit. If you were just wearing trackies and a sweater… I’d say it’d be much worse.

7. The Beast
the-beast
The Beast is commonly referred to as the Devil. Or Satan. Or Lucifer. Whatever you’d like to call it. Either way, he is just as scary as every demonic version of him suggests, although I’m pretty sure he’s like 50 feet tall and lives in the fiery depths of hell. Or whatever your version of hell is.

6. Empty Child/Children
emptych
If there is one seemingly innocent line that can freak out a Whovian, it’s this: “Are you my mummy?” What turned one child with a gas mask on into an entire colony of people wearing gas masks all saying “Are you my mummy?” became one of the most frightening things of the entire Doctor Who universe, or Whoniverse. Let’s just say I can’t look at gas masks the same way.

5. Silence
silence
How are you supposed to take the fight to a creature that you can’t even remember? The Silence, who look like regular stereotypical aliens sometimes dressed in dapper suits, are actually deadly in the fact that as soon as you look away from them, you can’t even remember them. Just make sure you carry a marker around with you to let your body know how many times you’ve actually seen them.

4. Weeping Angels
weepingangels
If there is one thing worse than forgetting a creature, it’s not looking away from it. The Weeping Angels feed off time energy and are the reason why Amy and Rory had to separate from Eleven. Their shtick is simple: they are angel statues when you look at them. You blink, and they’re all of a sudden right in your face. Don’t take your eye off them, because the moment they touch you, you’ve gone back way in time and have to live a life in an era you don’t know.

3. The Master
masterjohn
The one Time Lord who is capable of giving the Doctor the heebie jeebies is The Master. His friend. His rival. His nemesis. Only made less frightening by his unpredictable behaviour, the Master doesn’t have the same kindness to humans as the Doctor does. Although, we can take comfort in that Martha Jones once stopped him from taking over the world.

2. Cybermen
cybermen
“Deleeeete!” If you hear this, you should either duck or roll to the side. Or ultimately give up and surrender. Because that is the word a Cyberman will shout before he shoots you and kills you, just like that. Cybermen were once humans who were convered into this robotic killing machines and are completely devoid of human emotions or feelings. What is worse than having no feelings!

1. Daleks
daleks
What looks like a rolling machine with a rod sticking out of its head to a non Whovian is actually the most deadly Who villain of them all. The Daleks, the rivals of the Time Lords. The rivalry led to the Time War which left the Doctor wandering the world by himself as the only Time Lord left in existence. Of course, if you need a hand defeating the Daleks, the Doctor has several companions who have been known to EXTERMINAAAATE them. Here’s looking at you, Bad Wolf Rose Tyler.

Be glad that all these creatures aren’t real.

Or are they?

Don’t blink!

– by The Black Widow

Whatever Happened to My Rock N’ Roll?

Posted in Entertainment, Music by

It may be flogging a dead horse to point out that the music industry has gone all to hell over the past wee while but if post-mortem equine flagellation is what is required to make a positive change then Phar Lap and Red Rum need to watch their step in horsey heaven because it’s whipping time…

Reining in on the horse related puns… It does seem that the music industry needs to have a good sit down in a darkened room and have a quiet word with itself. It’s hard to remember a time when the radio has been so painfully difficult to listen to and popular music been so laughably bad.

A coke can for Mr. Derulo as he clearly always forgets his name. (SOURCE: Eva Rinaldi's Flickr photostream)

A coke can for Mr. Derulo as he clearly always forgets his name. (SOURCE: Eva Rinaldi’s Flickr photostream)

Messrs Guetta and Derulo seemingly engaged in some kind of battle for the already blanched souls of the world’s youth. What’s worse is they love it. They really love it. Try and point out that it’s unmitigated shite without any redeeming features, that it’s musically immature, emotionally stunted and sexist to the point of being insulting to the collective intelligence of every woman in the world (take a bow Derulo and Thicke). If you were to point out these unassailable truths, you would be met with derision for being too old to understand and probably you would be called a dick.

 And that’s fair enough. I called by own father a dick when he likened Radiohead to the sound of “a fella being drowned in a river in the fog” and said he “wouldn’t open the back window if they were singing in the yard” in relation to Jurassic 5. The difference is that he was wrong and we on this occasion are right. It’s piss poor music for people who don’t really like music.

You may well point out at this stage that the singles chart has always been insufferable bollocks chosen by the pre-pubescent and the lonely and… yeah, it has but it used to be a battleground. Where there was “Blue Da Ba Dee Daba Da” there was Blur and where there was Crazy Frog there was Belle and Sebastian. Recently it seems the war is has been lost. Top to bottom, song after song with no heart.

Please don’t feel I’m focusing unfairly on the boys. The women are letting the side down just as badly. Forget Regina Spektor and Karen O. Step forward Perry, Minaj, Swift and She Who Must Not Be Named… Ke$ha. These lot make Spears, Aguilera and ol’ humble tits herself Shakira look like excellent role models for youngsters the world over.

It’s Cowell and his ilk. That merry band of music killing morons determined to suck the last dying breath from an already choking music industry. If we allow the musical gene pool to become so stagnant that Simon Cowell is everyone’s daddy then the end result is a music industry born of incest.

Think of One Direction and their compatriots as sperm swimming away up the musical fallopian tube. Not our fastest swimmers I think you’ll agree. So One Direction (living up to their name in fairness), arrive at the egg which bears a striking resemblance to Danni Minogue who smiles beatifically down at tiny Harry Styles (she is 85,000 times bigger than him after all). He wiggles in and as they say, Robert’s your mother’s brother. Now repeat the process again and again and therein lies the problem. Lots of musical halfwits releasing songs with cunning titles like Best Song Ever, kicking their arms and legs at the same time on the musical swings and hobbling around and around the musical chairs.

I suspect many people out there would blame the internet for the decay of the once vibrant music industry and not many would object to that assessment. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke for example, described Spotify as, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.”

It’s hard to disagree with him when it would seem that a great (great) many of us have completely given up on paying for any music at all. A point aptly demonstrated when Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released and fans allowed to pay whatever they chose. The end result was 62 per cent of us decided that what we wanted to pay was nothing. And bearing in mind that was in 2007… I don’t think that percentage would change for the better today.

The result seems to be that to succeed you’re better off appealing to the majority. And considering the meteoric rise of Bieber and Swift I’ll just hold off on putting my faith in the wisdom of crowds.

There are of course more holes in my argument than in the rationale of a pro-gun lobbyist  and there are of course amazing musicians and bands coming out all the time, like The Tallest Man on Earth, The Milk Carton Kids and Cosmo Jarvis just to name a few (pardon the plug), but I think the point I’m making so badly is that for once wouldn’t it be nice if the biggest band in the world was the best band in the world?

– by James Andrews