The contents of a bin

Listen, I’ve sunk pretty low for Review Anything on occasion. For reasons I still do not fully grasp, I once reviewed a woollen ball. I reviewed pegs. Sodding clothes pegs. And yet... this. This is the lowest I’ve sunk on behalf of this feature. Rifling through bins.

Here is an image of the contents I uncovered:

Here is my review of those contents:

The wrapper: I don’t know what this wrapper is for because finding out would mean touching it. It looks crisp, clear and presumably wrapped whatever it was wrapping ably.

The tissue: I do know what these tissues are for because I put them in there roughly half an hour before this photograph was taken. The tissues were soft – Sainsbury’s Super Soft Aloe Vera, if memory serves – and smelled very fine indeed.

A second wrapper (to left of image): Bananas. This definitely contained bananas. Technically, bananas already come bunched and encased within natural wrappers, so this artificial wrapper seems slightly unnecessary.

I would like to add a final note: the bin I reviewed had been emptied fairly recently. Yet more proof that the Guardian’s superlative facilities department is second to none, but not exactly conducive to a thrilling review.

The bin’s contents: 4/10

The Guardian’s facilities department: 10/10

LH

Computer games based on pop stars

The final clause of this suggestion is music to any time-pressed anything-reviewer’s ears, and I’m no exception. Conducting a comprehensive survey of “computer games based on pop stars” would be an actual journalistic enterprise that could potentially involve time and/or effort, so thank God I only had to look at about six pictures before extrapolating some intrinsically worthless judgment. (There was a YouTube video of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood game, but the amount of information contained therein was clearly not just superfluous, but actively contrary to Whitlock & Pope’s requirements. So that’s 22 minutes of my life I still have today.)

You might think the more information you have, the easier it is to review anything: not so. In fact, information often complicates the reductive summaries every reviewer longs to write. So what observations can I make about computer games based on pop stars using the limited materials I have at my disposal? Well, the pixels are relatively large. Sometimes they are brightly coloured, sometimes they aren’t. Granted, attributing any sort of value to these observations is not that easy, but that’s why we employ a numerical system!

4/10

RA

A chunk of yesterday afternoon

16.24 and all is well

16.25 I think I get a fav on a tweet about how much I hate cars. But then it disappears.

16.25 Someone’s phone goes. It has the Opening (default) ringtone. Every time I hear that ringtone now I always think of the Kanye West song 30 Hours. In that song Kanye is interrupted by the Opening (default) ringtone and he says, “It’s Gabe calling.” When I hear the Opening (default) ringtone I often say “It’s Gabe calling” under my breath.

16.30 The BBC sport website posts “Lawro’s predictions”. This week he has gone head to head with Idris “Heimdall from the Thor movies” Elba to guess the results of this weekend’s Premier League football. Elba backs my team to lose at home against Sunderland on Saturday. I make a mental black mark against his name.

16.41 I start thinking about Corbyn: The Musical, which sounds like a load of self-satisfied rubbish and was written by a barrister with the face of a Victorian pie lover. It’s apparently full of cheap jokes at both the Labour leader’s expense and also, for some reason, prominent twitter feminists. I wonder what made the pie lover feel it was necessary to bring this to the world.

16.48 I google some quotes from The Big Lebowski.

16.53 I think a bit about giraffes and how sticky their tongues are. The sun comes out.

16.54 I think about how I am peckish, but yet not hungry. I wonder what this means. I decide that I have conditioned myself to be in a constant state of need, and that this is a consequence of living in a capitalist system.

16.59 I listen to Strive by A$AP Ferg and Missy Elliott. I can’t decide whether I like it or not.

17.00 I go into a meeting about the redesign of the Guide. It goes OK, but does drag on a bit.

Overall this period of time was reasonably stimulating. But the period between 21.24 and 22.17 was to prove more stimulating.

6/10

PM

Some dentistry

I’m not entirely sure what a root canal is. I know what a canal is and I drank root beer once (mini Review Anything of root beer: vile. -10/10), so perhaps a combination of the two?

What I do know is that people who have undergone root canal treatment talk about it in tones more commonly associated with survivors of combat. “You weren’t there, man! You didn’t have to endure what I had to endure.” I’ve always assumed these people were a bit, well, soft. I mean, come on, it’s a tooth. How unpleasant can it…

Oh. OH! *runs to Luke’s bin to vomit*

I’m so sorry for doubting you and your kind, Chris Adams. From the expletive in your tweet, I gather this was a particularly savage root canalisation, and I hope that you can at least find some inner peace in the future.

1/10

GM

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