Update on being banned

So, I thought I'd have another go at getting Such As They Are accepted by BlogExplosion yesterday afternoon. I entered all the details again and hit Submit, or whatever.

Then, when I turned on my mail this morning, I find that it's been accepted. Nothing about objectionable content, even though I hadn't changed anything.

Clearly there are several people responsible for accepting/declining applicants, each applying the letter of the law in different ways.

For example, their ground rules state that excessive profanity is not acceptable, although occasional use is okay. I'm sure I fall into the "excessive profanity" camp. And that's fine by me and most of my readers, I think. Context is everything. Take the words "fuck" and "cunt", say. I use both of these liberally, but I hope in a non-offensive and sometimes humorous way. I mostly don't actually intend to offend, believe it or not.

I use those words as a little bit of colour in my posts. Nine times out of ten, I could remove them with no detrimental effect on my message, but I like them. They are words that were suitable for great English authors through the centuries, so why not a piss-poor blog addict like yours truly?

These words are part of my heritage, and I'll be damned if I'll let some blog-hits-exchange site tell me how many cunts I can use. The swines.

This ain’t a scene: or, The unmentionable deity

Of course I'm probably a little more excited than the next soon-to-be-37-year-old man about the release of the new Fall Out Boy album. Indeed, it's on my wishlist of potential Valentine's and/or birthday gifts. But you know what's funny?

I've been singing along to the new single "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race" for a couple of weeks now, whenever it comes on the Kerrang or Scuzz music-TV channels. I may even have caught it on MTV2 once or twice.

Today, though, when I went to SongMeanings.net, I discovered something unexpected. Where I had merrily been singing, "This ain't a scene, it's a damn arms race", along with the falling-out boys, it seems the unexpurgated lyric states: "This ain't a scene, it's a goddamn arms race". And sure enough, I tracked down a version of the song online that confirms this to be true.

So we are now not allowed to use the word "God" in lyrics? Or is it just because it says "goddamn"? Either way, it's fucking stupid and annoying.

Sort of reminds me of the extra whipcracks that have latterly been added to "Gay Bar" by Electric 6, so as to hide the words "war" and "nuclear war" in that song. So instead of the words going "Let's start a war, start a nuclear war," it goes, "Let's start a [whipcrack], start a [whipcrack whipcrack]". How fucking ridiculous is that?

I fucking hate censorship. And speaking of censurial cunts, BlogExplosion has denied me permission to register my movie reviews site, saying "we have deemed the content on your blog as content that is not appropriate for other members". Um, exsqueeze me?