User:Scott Gall/Rant of the Day/Archive
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[edit] New-look gift vouchers
Those new-look gift vouchers you may or may not have come across this Christmas - they now resemble credit cards! And the funny bit is, the user can now put more money on them just like with some cellphones. Also, any change stays on the card. One of my memories of spending the vouchers was that if you spent a certain portion of the amount on the voucher, you would get just cash in your change, which you could use to spend at another store, but if you still had more than, say, $5 on it, you would get vouchers for what you didn't use (and cash if the change wasn't a multiple of $5,) or at one shop that's now using the card-like vouchers, a "credit note" for what you haven't spent if it was above $5. It's not like that anymore, so now, you might have to pay in cash as well just to get all the money off the voucher. But some things haven't changed, eg. the person giving them sets the amount, but now, they need just one card instead of many vouchers in many denominations.
[edit] Rappers without Profanity
What is the deal with rappers that don't put profanity in their lyrics? Profanity has been in rap since the early Cenozoic Era. In fact, profanity is now a staple of rap and hip-hop music, and now there are rappers whose lyrics are "clean." Clean lyrics just don't have any place in modern rap. Ali G used "cunt" twice just to get his "Ali G, innit" video an "18 certificate." If rap is to function just as well, then it needs profanity, even if it's just saying "fuck" once. We are not in the Victorian era, where it was not polite to say such words. Now here we are in 2006, where our modern, if a little Americanised, culture has reduced the impact of these words. For instance, it's OK to use "shit" 162 times in one 22-minute episode of South Park, words as extreme as "cocksucker" are now used in shows like Deadwood, and even some parodies misattributed to "Weird Al" Yankovic are going hard on the "bad" language. Some people think that racist and sexually suggestive lyrics are good substitutes for profanity. They are, because racist and sexually suggestive lyrics are just as good as profanity at showing that we're not in the Dark Ages any more.
