I had heard the name One Direction but that's about it.

I gathered they were some kind of pop group but hadn't actually heard them until earlier in the week when it was announced that one of them was leaving.

In the news item, they graced us with a clip of the lads strutting their stuff.  As I feared, they were tediously boring, pumping out the same plastic music that all the plastic "boy bands" churn out from that plastic X-factor factory.  I don't know if One Direction are another infliction of the X-factor or one of its clones, but they all look and sound identical to me.

So here we have five lads who look as if they have been plucked from outside any old dole office prancing around on stage pumping out some song that was supposed to set the world on fire, but which just made me turn down the volume of the television.  Old Mrs Rafferty can sing better than that lot, and that's when she's had six gins of a Saturday night.

And now one of them is leaving.  Big fucking deal.  My heart bleeds custard.

But apparently it was enough to feature as a news item.  Not only that, but apparently the pre-teen Twitterati have gone ballistic and are all threatening to cut themselves.  What the fuck is that all about?  Normally I would just shrug and let them cut themselves if they want to, but these are kids who aren't old enough to know better.  I even saw a "tweet" where some kid declared that life wasn't worth living any more if the gang broke up and was threatening to kill herself.  Don't these kids have any parents?  Do those parents seriously not know what's going on in their kids' lives?

Now I believe these idiot children are banding together to buy the band through CrowdFunding.

This should be fun.  I really don't think they have thought this through.  They only need to raise $88 million, and so far have managed to raise a whopping $1,628 [at the time of writing] so there should be no problems there?  And what do they hope this will achieve?  The fact that a band is somehow owned by its fans won't prevent any further defections to normality, or do the fans propose to bung them all in a dungeon for the rest of their days?  Actually that's not a bad idea.

So, at $800 a day, I reckon they will finally have enough in around three hundred years. 

At least I can guarantee that the lads will sing a lot better by then.