Great Grimsby, Summer Holidays! What are you doing to me?

It's now officially the Summer Holidays. Not just the extra-early holidays that we post-GCSE students got this year, but for everyone. The Holiday has officially begun.

And that just seems to make everything duller.

It shouldn't really have any effect on me, as I've already been off school for weeks and weeks. But the knowledge that the six-week slog has only just really started hit me as hard as any four-to-fifteen-year-old. Time just seems to slow to the pace of a sloth with sciatica, and the days never seem to end. Ever. I have only just come to accept that all previous days actually ended at some point, but am still coming to terms with the fact that this very day will also reach an end eventually. Apparently, the clock says it's half eight in the evening, so things look hopeful for the arrival of tomorrow. Roll on Sunday, I say, and don't spare the horses!

Anyway, I'm dilly-dallying to an extent, so I apologise, and grab myself by the shirt collar and drag myself back onto the road, again to tentatively venture forth to a valid point to ever making this blog post.
With the the Holidays bludgeoning me with the boredom stick every 20 minutes, I have to find something to do. So I started to do two things. ...No, not including that.
The first thing I started to do was read books. This is a nice change, as I really like reading. Unfortunately, reading falls under the category of activities that are very easily, and unfairly, dismissed as boring by even the most loyal of book-readers, given enough time away from them. In this sense, they are a bit like Pringles or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (I have fallen in love with that show all over again).

Speaking of gameshows hosted by blond people with strange voices who needlessly terrify their contestants and engulf their audiences in darkness, I have also taken to watching Deal Or No Deal. Less because I admire the quality of the show, more because it's a trumped-up pile of exaggerated guesswork and is absolutely hilarious.
Noel friggin' Edmonds is a wonder, that chap. Honestly. He baffles me. Here is a man, a very successful man, who not only rivals Simon Cowell in trouser altitude, but has hair like a lion, wears shirts that could trigger epilepsy in Stevie Wonder himself, and also - here's the kicker - he seems to genuinely believe that Deal or No Deal is a game of skill. I mean, I ask you. I bet the contestants who are chosen to appear on that show are initially intelligent, level-headed people that know that they are going to go home with more than when they arrived, and don't care if they have £250,000 box and except a 'paltry' £24,000 or whatever. They have to appear on every episode until they're chosen to play, opening boxes over and over and over again, and I think this softens their brains. By the time they are picked to have a go at 'beating the Banker' (or, as they've started to say, 'spanking the Banker' - blech), they're nothing short of clinically insane, and are easily moulded by Mr Edmonds into thinking that there's a lot of skill involved in playing the game.
Noel says things like "This game is taking a turn for the worse," or "Yesterday, Suzie left the game with 50p. The day before, Nigel from Ipswitch diddled the Banker out of £63,000. Before Nigel, old Gwen unfortunately won £50. I like the pattern that's emerging. See you tomorrow." What the hell is he blathering on about? He himself tells us at the beginning that the quantities of money (or should I say 'signs with numbers on') are randomly assigned to the inside of the lids of the boxes, and yet he has the idiotic audacity to claim that patterns emerge in the gameplay, and that any coincidence that happens to occur in a gameshow that is broadcast every day is suddenly an almighty sign, a method by which we can predict the future!

...bugger off, Edmonds.
Saying that, I do like to watch DoND. In the same way that I like to watch when a car is hit by a van over the road from where I am standing.

I will continue my rant about Deal or No Deal another time. For now, it's 8 out of 10 Cats, and I'm missing it.

Ciao.