Acts of Gord

In my spare time at work, I've recently been vastly amused by The Acts of Gord. The site is a stylised "chronicle" of an independent Canadian game store owner and his ways of dealing with his idiotic customers. Whether or not it's real no one's quite sure, but the result looks vaguely like what would happen if Bernard Black ran a branch of Electronics Boutique. One particular favourite, when turning away someone who asked him to install a modchip for playing pirated games:

"If I were to sell you a mod chip I would lose you as a customer. Now, if I were going to lose you as a customer I'd rather do it on a high note like setting you on fire. At least then I would have some satisfaction of a job well done."

When I'm out of the office for lunch, I often go to the cluster of music shops down the road to see if they have anything new or worthwhile around (a rare occurrence). As it happens, I didn't find much that I recognised when I was there yesterday, but I was intrigued (confused, actually) by some of the other things on offer. One of them, "Heaven Shall Burn", had a cover so disturbing that I wondered if I'd wandered in to Silent Hill by mistake - it showed the distorted face of a girl with large needles in her head. On a less appalling note, there was a self-titled album from a band with the awful name of "Dragonland" which had an Egyptian-style cover. I don't remember dragons being a central part of ancient Egyptian culture, really. And there was something by an unpronouncable band beginning with Z that came in an alimunium circular case, making it look unfortunately like a miniature biscuit tin.

The label "Parental advisory - explicit lyrics" is appearing more and more often on music. Unlike films and games, music is unrestricted by age laws - this is an entirely voluntary warning label to put on music, and seems to be used almost exclusively by bands that want to appeal to the "angry" teenage mobs who want to rebel against society by wearing silly black wristbands and destroy us all in their hilariously modified Ford Fiestas. However, I happened across an album by tone-deaf metal-tarnishers Insane Clown Posse that was instead labelled "Extreme Warning". I immediately got an image of Treguard leaning over (with quizzical eyebrows in place) and warning that the music caused a mortal danger to life force. This is probably quite a fair assessment.