A Return To Blogging, Some Shared Music and a Rant About Money!

So. A New Decade. A glittering frontier lays before us. Some would say.
Apologies for my lengthy blogging absence. I had an intensely busy December and then an intensely relaxed holiday.

I had planned to do some specifically "end of year blogs" but sadly never got round to them. Your loss I suppose... ahem. Anyway, I planned to do a big one about my favourite songs of the decade. Intead, I compiled quite a comprehensive Spotify playlist which is...

HERE!

http://open.spotify.com/user/rhysydeesy/playlist/6gpedY8BnOCVH8SnWZmGiB

Please listen and feedback to me, here or on Facebook, Twitter, whatever medium you deign appropriate for this stellar new decade we now find ourselves in. Those songs are my personal favourites, pretty much in descending order. The nearer the top, the more rigid the order. Enjoy! If you don't in some degree then there's definitely somehting wrong with you.

Anyway, I was given a suitable kick to write another blog after reading this page:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8438824.stm

One Billion US Dollars earned across the world in merely a few weeks. The human race has ventured out in unprecedented cinematic numbers and poured money into seeing this film. Now, I have yet to see it, and would really like to, I knew about it long before the general public's brouhaha (what a word. And yes, that was a self elevating, perhaps slightly pretentious cultural claim back there). So I haven't any problems with the film, I hear there are some allusions to Christ coming down to Earth as a man, which is always good- you can't escape Jesus in heroes! (See this blog - http://folkpunkgazesblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/knights-in-shining-spandex.html - and also, Part Two of the most recent Doctor Who Christmas special!)

But. $1billion. It's an absurd amount of money. One of those amounts of money which, unless you were a government or a total, TOTAL moron, you couldn't possibly spend all of. In the perception of your average 21st century Western citizen, it's an unassailable amount of money.

What could that money do?

SO MUCH!

SO
SO
MUCH!

It could take a massive chunk out of world debt.

Build homes for millions. Give facilities, clean water, schools, medical care to MILLIONS.

I'm not attacking the film industry as such, but pointing out the readiness with which we'll part with ten quid (which is pretty much the cost of a ticket seeing as it's marketted as almost a necessity that you watch Avatar and many other films at the moment in 3D- an truly devious exploitative ploy by the film industry. I mean what's the fuss with 3D all of a sudden? It adds nothing. I remember 3D as a short fad when I was about 6-10, marketted for such cinematic epics as Sky-Kids 3D)
Tangent over.
How ready are you to part with upwards of £7.50 to see a film?
Very.
That's evident. The whole planet near enough has demonstrated how ready it is.

But how ready are you to part with that amount for a good cause? A charity? A tramp? Heck, even a busker?
Scarcely ready at all, I would say, for most of us. Myself heartily included. In our often selfish and microscopic minds, £7.50 to a charity, collection tin, or busker seems like FAR too much. It's almost ridiculous for us young people to consider dropping that much change into a collection box. A couple of quid or whateveer jingles in your pocket is standard isn't it?

Well it shouldn't be the standard. In your heart, ask yourself, how ready are you to spare your money- whether it be hard earned or your avenue to a good night out- for someone else? I don't want to sound like an Oxfam advert, asking for "just two pounds a month" etc. I want you to think about yourself- your heart, your motives- so that you can think about others, who are as unfathomably needy and James Cameron is now unfathomably wealthy.

We live in an age where selfishness, "treating yourself" CONSTANTLY (hardly a treat then) and self celebration are all on the rise. We're in a world where we're always encouraged to glorify ourselves. That's shown very clearly in this horribly man-glorifying spectacle - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8439618.stm.

So think. Are you selfish with your money? How ready are you to part with £7.50 for someone else, rather than for your own enjoyment? We're a tenth of the way through the 21st cenutury and roughly 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. And yet in just a few weeks, one film rakes in $1 billion from us.
This decade should be fun.