Laptops and royalty

No longer do I have to wait several hours for my computer to warm up enough to actually do anything. No longer do I have to sit staring into nothingness as I wait for my computer to do rudimentary tasks. My laptop is here and I am happy! I won’t sat it’s perfect but let’s face it, what is? I haven’t had any major problems with it so far apart from transferring my music library across, but I put that down to Sonic Stage freaking out when you take it out of its comfort zone.

I do not even hate Vista like everyone seems to think I should. Maybe I’m not nerdy enough to know what is wrong with it, or maybe I can adapt to change better than your average computer geek and can accept new features, even if they are stolen almost completely from apple. It’s really odd how, as soon as Vista came out, computer geeks the world over were preparing to march on the Windows headquarters and demand the severed heads of everyone in charge. It’s not that bad. In fact it’s better than XP is many ways (cue many angry emails from my many adoring fans…); it has helpful features like the panel at the top that allows you to access all the things you need without having to even press the start button.

Moving away from Vista, the laptop itself is very nice, although the touchpad can be somewhat temperamental and the speakers are woeful, a problem that I solved by stealing the speakers from my old computer. The nicest thing is that the keyboard has roughly the same dimensions as a normal desktop one, so I’m not constantly missing buttons like I normally do when I use a laptop keyboard.

Well that’s my new laptop, I didn’t want to talk about it for too long because some other things have been bothering my lately, namely the ‘scandal’ over the royal family being ‘racist’.

In case you have been living under a rock for the past week, or not in England I suppose, let me fill you in. Last week Prince Harry called an Asian friend a ‘paki’ in a documentary about his time in the military or some similarly pointless piece of television, then a few days later is came to light that Prince Charles had been calling a black friend ‘sooty’ for years. The press, as you can imagine, immediately leapt on this story like a very clingy whore and started throwing accusations like ‘racist’ like monkeys hurling poo. As they normally do, the press conveniently ignored both context and the concept of banter. In both cases the princes did not mean offence and both ‘victims’ have publicly said that they don’t mind the nicknames.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I in no way think the royal family have any place in our constitution and should be forcibly removed, inbred bunch of over-privileged toffs that they are. However they are human beings (barely) and so deserve a little privacy. The press in this case has simply ripped a quote out of context and spun it into a scandal so that they can sell newspapers to the gullible public who will leap wholeheartedly on the bandwagon of political correctness.

It is important to not the difference between racism and banter. Racism is when you discriminate against someone because of there race. This can often entail verbal abuse and the word ‘paki’ has often been used in this way, much like the word ‘nigger’. Obviously I think that sort of behaviour is abhorrent and anyone who uses it should be kneecapped and they beaten to death with the corpse of a porcupine (there has to be a fetish like that somewhere). However when it is used between friends it is generally banter with no ill feeling whatsoever. I have quite a few ethic minority friends and we do this all the time. If I was being really pretentious I’d call it irony, but it’s best not to over think things that much or you get dragged into a horrible spiral of stupidity. Much like the press has over this story.