Benign Tumour

Dukan play that game

2011-08-12T21:42:00.003+01:00

That's me, now. I know what you're thinking: "Cunt"

So it’s come to this: dieting. “But you’re not fat!” I hear you cry. “That chiselled face. Those muscular arms. That lanky beanpole frame – how can you be fat! What is this trickery?”

Well thanks, but sadly you’ve succumbed to a curious optical illusion that tall people have been employing for decades, passed down in carefully written inscriptions found on the upper edge of door frames in libraries the world over – a sort of Da Vinci code for tallies – and it’s only after you've successfully cracked your forehead against these frames, pushed some tracing paper up against the bruise and rubbed the long end of a labelless crayon against the swelling that you can reveal the secret and… ugh, enough bollocks.

Simply put, if a tall guy – such as I am – is prone to eating lots of food – such as I am – then the advantage of ones height is that you have a larger surface area than most for distribution of fatty deposits. That said, the prime target area is still your gut, but the bonus is that when you’re stood up, in a loose fit t-shirt with a robot fighting a giraffe on it, the fat is stretched out so as to be nearly invisible. But then. THEN. You sit down. BOSH. Jelly rolls.

Now, I’m not an overly vain person, but there’s some mild humiliation, even on one’s lonesome, in watching these belly rolls form when I sit down for a leisurely game of Demon’s Souls on PS3. What started as a long, lateral chipolata with a few token chest hairs on it has transformed into something that resembles a Swiss roll left in a dog basket, replete with a thin carapace of shed dog hair, all pointing in at my inny. Yeah that’s right, my belly looks like Lassie’s distended asshole.

So I tried joining a gym, which as we all know is a cathedral for vanity. It’s a small, local affair, which I decided was preferable to joining a commercial muscle farm where you’re paraded in front of a room of 200 people in all your depressing, out-of-shape glory, the silent cackles of sweaty glares piercing your self-esteem. Yet ultimately it’s still a stinky pit of low-IQ, superficial self-betterment. The swimming pool takes me four strokes to get across, so it’s bordering on mind-numbingly boring (which, depressingly, implies that my idea of swimming-fun is “a long pool”). I’ve been four times since I joined about 4 weeks ago and I’m already bored out of my mind. I need to switch it up to running; but of all things I’m feeling most self-conscious about my goddamn gym wear. Where do these people buy their leotards from? I can barely locate a pair of sports socks. Puma's high street store chain should be ashamed of themselves: they sell nothing but redundant shellsuits and broken dreams. Where are the hyper-ventilated Teflon vests for high-performance mountain hurdling? How am I supposed to get excited about joining a gym if I’m forced to dress like an 80’s cyclist?

So I have a pair of black shorts and some white socks sat collecting dust in my wardrobe, expecting to be lured out at some point for another gym grind. It’ll happen, eventually, but I need something that’s going to quickly kick my metabolism into churning though fat like a fat person through lard. I need: THE DUKAN DIET.

Fuck Atkins man. What year are you living in, 2003? Get with the times, loser. The future’s hottest dieting craze is Pierre Dukan’s “it’s not the Atkins diet, honest” Diet for chubby funsters. The initial premise is largely identical to that of the Atkins diet – eat a disorientatingly large amount of protein during the “Attack Phase” and then watch in amazement as your body resorts to chewing through fat for energy. The difference here, as far as I can tell, is that after a month or so of practically inhaling beef, you’re allowed to eat more or less what you want, provided you stick to a once-weekly proteinathon.

"Easy enough", you might think. "I fucking love steak, me. What's not to like?" Well, I've been doing this for a DAY and I can already reveal that it's about as exciting as drinking paint. My lunch today was a whole chicken breast, a no-fat yoghurt and some water. Din dins comprised grilled cod with onions (not even sure I’m allowed those), some zero-fat yoghurt in which I dripped two drops of vanilla essence (pretty sure that's not allowed) and more fucking water. I caught myself scraping the dirt from under a fingernail on my teeth for some salt earlier – that was the highlight of my eating day.

The problem is, the book (of which I've read one chapter) implies that if you eat ANYthing not allowed, then you fuck it all up. But Tescos Direct, as far as I can tell, doesn't sell the requisite power-diet fibre-stuff "Oat Bran". It sells Oat Flakes, Oatabix, Oat-so-simple, Oat juice, Oat berries, Oat tampons etc, but you want oat bran? Get the fuck oat.

So the rest of my first day on the ha-DUKAN diet was spent gorging on zero-fat yoghurt and guzzling water like it’s Mountain Dew (man I’d kill for some ‘Dew right now). Since then, the sum of what I’ve eaten includes beef, chicken, fish, shit loads of crab sticks, two whole tubs of Extra Light Philadelphia, about 7 cans of diet coke and what feels like 13 litres of water. Have I lost any weight? Have I balls. There was a brief glimmer of hope this morning when I thought the dial had dipped to 99kg, but the I realised a pube was obstructing my vision and I soon realised I was on the 100kg I’d started off at. What a bogus diet. “Attack Phase” my dick. The only thing my body's been attacked with is mediocre flavours.

The question is, do I plod on? I’ve semi-successfully blagged at work that I’m “rooting out an intolerance”, but the more people ask questions, the more I feel like I’m spinning a web of lies that my mere two legs can’t balance on, and I’m not sure I can drag this out long enough. Who did I tell which lie to? When I explained my plan, someone actually said “oh, you're on the Dukan diet?”, and I just laughed nervously and swallowed down another piece of dry chicken, my facial expression reminiscent of a man who’s just sat down on his own testicles.

It’s not until you abstain from all your daily treats that you realise just how fiendish your old snacking habits are. My desk island at work is a haven for biscuit. It’s constantly piled up with the stuff. I used to gorge on them daily, a choccy hob nob a mere arm’s length away, using the temporary serotonin release to save my workplace depression from dipping into the red. But now that I don’t even have THAT to hold onto – sitting there instead with my mouth devastating a piece of long since flavour-deprived chewing gum, sweating like a crack fiend gone cold turkey, my twitching eyeball fixated on the shiny crumb of Golden Cream my work colleague just lost, bouncing near to my mouse in slow motion like sweet baked shrapnel – all that remains is the pure pain that is my job at its most pure.

So I’m giving it 'til Saturday morning to prove me wrong. If I can stick with it through tomorrow night – a Friday and a night out, which presents a true challenge because I’m basically restricted to drinking Diet Coke with vodka, and a drunken visit to the chippy is a massive no-no – then by Saturday morning I should, theoretically, have lost the equivalent of a small puppy’s head in weight. And if I’ve not, I’ll find a puppy, BITE it’s head off, devour it, and then pass it the next day – skull intact – and PROVE I CAN DO IT, YEAH!!

TF Hell

2010-05-12T02:57:00.006+01:00

The irony is that I very nearly have that miserable guy's hairstyle now. Except in blond.

Christ knows if there’s one thing that will make me sweat blood on a daily basis it’s having to negotiate my way home in a moving metal coffin. Correction: being stuck in a tube halfway through a tunnel is more representative of this hell, but everything up until that point is usually purgatorial foreplay of some description.

As a man of no small stature I find cramming onto a tube at rush hour akin to being viciously contorted into the crawlspace of a space shuttle. Northern Line is my tube of choice for getting home – well, it’s not really my tube of choice; it’s just that it’s the “simplest” method of getting home and thus largely the most sensible option. Northern Line tubes - like some, but not all of their other-coloured brethren - possess a curved ceiling, the very apex of which is quite literally the only place I can stand without my head touching its plasticy, disease ridden surface. There may be an inch or two to the left or the right - and having to slightly bend my neck isn’t a huge chore - however at rush hour, if I’m going to be shepherded onto the tube in a gaggle of angry commuters all vying for the best spots in an already busy section, there’s little point in my being dumped by the door because this will incur back injury. Perhaps not immediately, but having to spend any amount of time bent over like a man in a circus mirror is going to eventually lead to pain.

Strictly getting from my office door to my flat door should take all of 45 minutes on a good day. 45 minutes as a commute in general is pretty lengthy, for a London resident, so naturally I want this journey to be as free from environmental torture as I can conceive. Naturally, as we well know, travelling in London tends to be as fun as having the skin on your face gradually peeled back in a sandstorm, and a fraction as entertaining to watch. Is this the fault of the tube system? Often, yes – but largely it’s the result of the cretinous public who stink up my surroundings each day and selfishly deem themselves to be the most important people on the planet at any given moment (when clearly that mantle belongs to ME).

What happened to the dystopian visions served up by films such as Blade Runner, Running Man and Equilibrium? Where are the laws in place that make it a crime for people to be idiots? I need violent justice to deter our fellow man from making these evolutionary substandard displays of selfish idiocy. As such, I have come up with some gentlessuggestions for changes to the commuting process that I think will make life for everyone a lot easier.

Ahem.

Bladed Doors

How many times do you witness some fool dashing for the tube just as the doors are shutting and catching their bag/leg/head inbetween them? I’d say I see this at LEAST once a month, and if I’m seeing it that often then it’s happening a lot elsewhere. Invariably seconds are wasted as the doors often need reopening to allow the Darwinian reject an opportunity to save is arm from being smashed off as the tub enters a tunnel. Not good enough. Install blades on the door sides with katana sharp edges to lop off any protruding appendage and teach a valuable lesson about selfless PATIENCE. Tubes run pretty regularly (unless you’re trying to get a Circle Line it seems), especially at rush hour, and if you missed the tube in front, you can be pretty much guaranteed there’ll be another one along in a couple of minutes time. So stop inconveniencing the rest of the train with your selfish idiocy, and wait – or lose the front of your face ‘cos you got it trapped in the sliding path of a samurai shutting process. The number of times I imagine a person had been cleaved in two when this happens…

Bond-Villain Disappearing Turnstile Floor

I often feel like this would solve a lot of issues in the world. It would also make perfect sense in The Apprentice. I digress.

There should be a time limit on acceptable bouts of idiocy by the turnstiles in a tube station. We’ve all had our Oyster cards fail at this pivotal moment. Most of us with any sense will repeat the Oyster swipe action once - perhaps twice - in order to solve whether or not we had simply mis-swiped. So how about instead of letting these imbeciles see how many people they can piss off immediately behind them, simply pop open the disappearing trapdoor beneath their feet and dispose of them quickly and effectively, leaving the turnstiles free to use by people with more than a 5 year old's grasp of simple mechanism failure. You could even put the idiots who fall into the pit to work on underground repairs and do us all a fucking favour. Or just let them land onto the the tracks to be obliterated by an oncoming tube and have their remains scoffed up by packs of tube rats. Bonus aesthetic points can be awarded to tube stations who dig a shark pit at the bottom of the drop.

If the trapdoor method proves too costly and/or drastic, a simple electric shock could be discharged through the swipe pad to remind the swiper of the punishment for such an abject failure of social awareness. Every repeat swipe will result in an elevated level of electric current until, on the 3rd swipe the perpetrator is fried on the spot and reduced to a pile of ash that can be conveniently collected by a hidden brush at foot level for easy disposal.

Speed 3: Tom Cruise Control

This applies to the streets as well, and is admittedly a hard one to enforce without the need for some sort of government enforced ID system, or any kind of nationwide imposed scheme where the individual is forced to have some sort of tag put on their body (oop, political). These tags could then be read for information by CCTV cameras which can then dish out appropriate punishments. That or upgrade the CCTV cameras so that they have on-board offensive capabilities, such as laser cannons or live ammunition of some description.

Firstly, acceptable walking speed levels should be attributed to each individual to accommodate for things such as age, ability and health. This could either be updated to each individuals ID chip via e.g. a doctor upon appointment, or simply gleaned from clever face and body recognition software built into each camera. Once this is achieved, each person will be required, in certain parts of the underground where walking is prevalent, to walk at their attributed speed and no slower, on pain of DEATH. That way all these slow fucks who clogs up the walkways like human cholesterol can be vapourised instantly and the rest of us who recognise that life is too short can get to the platform and wait for the next train. I’m sick of sidestepping sluggards on the way to my destination. Oxford Street is notorious for being home to countless morons who are obviously picking up on some sort of urban beauty that I’ve long since given up on, as they leisurely stroll around taking in the hideous sights of advertising betrayal and commercial hell. Let’s at least section people off into speed lanes similar to those on tube escalators (the one thing that collective commuter thinking has gotten right) so that those of us with a deadline or merely a willingness to get home before the impending apocalypse are cut a break. Then all those people who enjoy being surrounded by overflowing bins, buses, taxis, shopping bags, and stinky PEOPLE can go about their business without infecting the rest of us.

If we could section these lanes off with a massive wall that would be great.

Smaller Crime Section
People who don’t remove their backpacks before entering a carriage
These people should be publicly flogged or, during rush hour, shot on sight. This is an unforgivable crime during peak busy moments. As if the tubes aren’t tight enough for space, we have to suffer some oblivious fool with no spatial awareness hogging up twice the space.

People who hang off the ceiling handrails inside tubes
These transparent displays of cocky bravado – only ever performed by males of a certain age - are as devoid of impressiveness as topless Frisbee throwing in the summer. It’s not a natural thing to do and nobody thinks you’re cool for doing it. What’s the best thing that’s ever happened in that scenario anyway; a girl has gone “Wow, he can hang off a ceiling rail, I should sleep with THAT guy. What if some situation occurs where my life hangs in the balance and the only way I can be rescued is by my idiot partner hanging off a head-height pole”? No. Sadly passing a strong electronic charge through the handrail can result in unwarranted collateral damage, so it should be down to fellow tube riders to impose a sort of people’s justice and clobber this poor buffoon until he’s a bloody pile on the floor, to be discarded by an apathetic foot shove into the gap separating the platform from the train when the doors open at the next station.

Vertical space wasters
That’s right, I’m talking about small people in the centre of the carriage. In a tube full of midgets, this crime can slide; but the moment anyone hops aboard whose height exceeds the limitations provided by the lowest points of the ceiling’s arch – i.e. by the doors – an instant stock-check of people positioning should be made by all, and bodies should shift accordingly to accommodate. A tall person – yeah, me – simply shouldn’t suffer the backbreaking contortions necessary to fit at the door edge of a busy train. This is 99% of the reason why I won’t get on a packed carriage.

I could probably come up with more but I think I’ve made my point. Which, for those not paying attention, is that I fucking hate the tube.

Gum Disease

2009-05-27T20:36:00.004+01:00

As Karly watched her annoying friend do this for the 76th time, she thanked fate for providing her with the greatest ironic murder weapon to wreak Gum Justice - self-propagating garroting wire. "Let's see her Wrigleys out of THIS one"

I’ve been silent for a while now, and – I’ll be honest with you – it’s for fear of sounding like some sort of hyper cynical cretin. Well, it’s also for lack of material I deem worthy of opening up Word for, but mostly it’s not wanting every post I make to sound like the whiney criticisms of an anti-social incompetent.

So thanks, Wrigleys, Orbit, Hubba Bubba and so on, for yanking me out of this relative calm period – or at least the attempted cessation of aforementioned torment – and leaving me in such a fury that every journey I make, every commute, ever moment shared with another human being in a purgatorial state of travel, is infuriating enough to bring my piss to boiling point. I’m talking about bubble gum, chewing gum, and probably biltong if it were common place. Wrigleys’ gain was society’s loss let me tell you, because of all the things leading to a dissolution of social manners and basic etiquette, I think this has to be one of the biggest perpetrators. (Oh no Sony Ericsson, don’t think I’m letting you get away with YOUR sins: those tinny speakered abominations you call mobile phone walkmans. I’ve reserved a special place in hell for you).

In all fairness I was mostly oblivious to the idiosyncrasies of my fellow man until I started working in an office space, forcing myself into close proximity with the same people on a daily basis, my very soul gradually ebbing away from my upright corpse like squeaking air from a compromised balloon – a metaphorical sigh, if you will. Truly there is nothing more testing of a man’s patience than continued exposure to another human’s intolerable habits. Fidgeting, sneezing, tapping – all the microcosmic activities capable of a sentient being are exaggerated, magnified in a small space until you are literally left with a handful of options: resignation, violent retaliation, or – as I feebly opt for – plugging your headphones into the nearest electrical outlet and listening out for alien frequencies on planet Jupiter (or iPod).

So the last 2 ½ years of sustained office based torture have left me hyper-sensitive to the behavioral patterns of other people, and I think by far the most disgusting of these habits is the open-mouthed gum chew. Doubly so if performed by a lackadaisical female. Triply so if she’s updating her Facebook status on her phone on the bus, a grease stained copy of Chat magazine draped over her leg with a crying, attention starved, chicken nugget fed 5 yr old strapped loosely into a pram.

There’s something infinitely more infuriating about an offending open-mouthed gum chewer (OMGC) when they are engaged in an activity apathetic enough to cancel out all positivity in the nearing vicinity. You know the type: they stand there looking as though a swift blow to the gut would elicit nothing more than a short exhalation of air from the mouth, simply a result of physics in action as you compress their lungs. No emotional exertion, just a simple wheeze, perhaps some dry dust from the face hole, and not so much as a blink to register anything has happened.

Make no mistake, when this sort of person presents him or herself to me, I want to flick my cape aside and pull a Pulse Rifle up from behind my back, grab the top-handle and release a round of 200 or so energy bolts into these walking cadavers, saving them from a soulless existence and making more space for those of us with half a brain to stretch our legs. Yeah, me.

I was sat at the back of the bus the other day on the way home from work and actually made a point of seeing just how many people were chewing gum. The ratio was distinctly in favour of the gum chewers, which REALLY depressed me. In fact the first 10 people at the front of the bus were all engaged in an ceaseless mastication ritual. I had to ask the fat guy next to me to jam his chips into my eyes just to ease my suffering but that wasn’t working too well, so I ran head first down the aisle, trampling a kid in a pram and jumped headfirst through the windscreen where I bounced off the front and fell under the wheels, upon which with my dying breath I punched the bus up into a passing plane. True story.

Generally, if you’re eating ANYthing with your mouth open, you are already less than human. Some people may scoff at the oft-considered archaic traditions of western society, deeming them relics of a bygone era; sometime around the war perhaps. Not me. I think that there are SOME manners that should just be considered common sense. Get rid of elbows on tables, if you must. Even get rid of enforced appropriate cutlery usage, sure. But don’t get rid of the insistence that you don’t display the masticated contents of your mouth to all and sundry. We humans have evolved to take pleasure in aesthetics, and there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about a half chewed bolus of food. I don’t care if it’s the Technicolor repast of a scoffed pasty or the plain, off-white taint of a stick of spearmint gum, I do NOT want to see you’re face contorting around an inanimate object like a cow chewing on cud, certainly if there is no end in sight. In fact, that is THE most annoying aspect of chewing gum – you know that chances are this gum chew could last for your whole bus journey, unless the cretin chewing it has cleverly disposed of it by chucking it on the floor.

Humans aren’t meant to chew for hours on end. We don’t graze our food like cows. Unless you’re training your mouth to slice through metal, you shouldn’t be doing this. Who ever seriously enjoyed kissing someone who had just recently had a mouthful of freshmint gum? It’s not really curing bad breath, it’s poorly concealing it with an overpowering mint stench. If you have bad breath it’s probably because some part of your mouth or throat is rotting away like a poorly smoked ham in the Mediterranean sun, and the only thing that can cure that shit is the dental equivalent of mouth bleach. Besides, if I can smell your breath, minty or otherwise, that means your mouth germs are in the vicinity of my face, and no one needs to be reminded of that.

The sheer banality of gum is another aspect that amazes me. It’s marketed as this tooth saving, breath enhancing, hunger staving wunder product, which – for some god known reason (probably piles of cash) – has the backing of the dental industry. People will take any excuse to have a drop in IQ approved by the health & safety commission. Chewing gum does no more benefit to your teeth than brushing them, so if you’re going to use an item to clean your teeth, stick with a fucking brush, it’s worked for decades now and it’ll continue to do so. If you feel the need to eat, this is god’s way of telling you you’re hungry and/or thirsty – usually the latter – so eat some goddamn food. Worried you’ll overeat? Stop being a greedy fuck and limit yourself, but don’t kid yourself into thinking your eating when really what you’re doing is sucking the life out of an inert piece of rubber. That’s right, rubber. Here’s a better idea, lie on a busy road with your mouth open and wait for a car to run your face over, that way you can get a REALLY deep clean from some industrial strength rubber. Do this instead of sitting opposite me with your sad face, slack jawed, making a meal out of indigestible plant sweat.

An Ode To Fly

2009-05-20T00:52:00.000+01:00

Being a fly poem - or "phloem" - in 5 parts

What is this that I should spy,
With suicidal leanings toward my eye?

A buzzing fly doth swerve and dive

Head first into mine tear duct sty.

But do I cry?

“Why no” say I,
“To cry would be to hide and shy
Away from things that daily try.
This fly doth merely vertically lie
Upon my cranium’s retinal pie”

And lo the fly dies imminently,
And I let out a mighty sigh

“Oh why, dear fly, do regularly
You make a bee line for my eye
When I could kill you ‘til you die.
Cheek for a cheek, and eye for an eye”

I lunge and poke and swing right by

The fly who has so duly tried

And yet my rage does not supply
The right amount of energy

To catch the fly that flies so high

And leaves me feeling melancholy.

“Oh fly, why, why when thy time is nigh
Must thy fly high into my eye?”

“Because I am a lot smaller than you and
if the wind is particularly strong I can be blown in directions beyond my control,
plus the aerodynamics of your massive head -
which lest we forget is a lot higher than most people -
make it particularly difficult to circumnavigate,
especially if I’m having a slow morning.
That make it any clearer?”

“Yup”

No Get Out Claus

2008-12-29T04:08:00.003Z

Leaving Las Christmas with Saint Nicholas Cage

God Christmas is depressing

As one of the few occasions when I actually venture home, it serves as a staggering reminder to why I generally avoid the place at all costs. It’s every horrible family occasion condensed into one focal moment, poorly concealed by a shiny array of red and white fairy lights. Of course, paramount in the reason for this depression and ludicrous cynicism is that fact that this Christmas I am single, which I haven’t been for the last 2 years. Fear not, this is not some lovesick whinge, but I had forgotten how rubbish it is when you are surrounded by family and there is no one actually sane to keep you company.

I was going to attempt one of my end-of-year rants: a wild elaboration on how great my year was; a beautiful elegy on how eventful and wonderful the last 12 months have been for the furthering of myself and my career. Which to an extent, of course, it has. I mean, aside from NOT getting a new job and becoming a superstar DJ ad all those wonderful things I would actually love to achieve and probably could achieve if I just bothered to do something about it, I did manage a job promotion and my DJ career has taken off to an extent… and promptly come back down to earth, albeit gracefully and unremarkably within the space of about 2 months.

But, I’m not in the mood for any of that spirit elevating drivel, I want to bitch and moan and ride this glum wave into the distance – perhaps into the fiery belly of Mordor, which may as well be on the horizon in this poorly explained metaphor.

Firstly, FUCK YOU television for being so unbearably rubbish at Christmas. Repeats of Christmas count downs from years ago narrated by Jimmy fucking Carr with his deadpan, cartoon face are dispersed strategically on a daily basis in amongst sequels to films people have seen countless times, which ultimately leaves me exploring my dad’s expansive DVD collection, a tribute to mediocrity in all its celluloid forms.

The biggest fuck you must go to Uwe Boll, the infamous game-to-movie director who has succeeded in being one of the few filmmakers in the world that has actually pushed me to switch off a movie in disgust. People I implore you, do not purchase, rent or channel-flick to the film “In The Name Of The King”, a movie so bad it actually makes it’s reasonably all-star cast look like a bunch of try hard drama students (or exposes them for the frauds they really are). Matthew Lillard: no wonder you’re not in films any more with that acting atrocity (actrocity?). I suppose the fact that the other actors weren’t really trying is testament to their ability to at least spot a rubbish script; like saying “yeah I know this film is shit, but I’m getting paid a pretty nifty sum so fuck you, it’s not like I have to try”. Whereas your career peaked with Scream and was followed by a stint as a dog’s sidekick.

I won’t complain about my presents (I mean, what’s to complain about a USB paper shredder, some post-it notes and 2 pars of thermals?), seeing as it IS the thought that counts. Well, more to the point, it’s the money that counts, and these things certainly cost money. It may not be a very wise way of spending that money, but anyone willing to part with their hard earned wage packet to try and cheer up someone’s otherwise empty soul has their work cut out for them. There was a time, of course, when friends of the family would buy me presents – that time was 1996 it seems, as now I get a card and one tracksuit, if I’m lucky. Every year, without fail, a particular pair of family friends will send me a tracksuit seemingly stolen from Marlon Brando’s wardrobe. These people obviously have heard I’m tall, so they immediately plump for the XXL option in tracksuits, not realising that, on the whole, XXL means “Really Fucking Fat”, as opposed to “Really Fucking Tall”. This leaves me with enough room in my nether-regions to host an Olympic event. Javelin, or Shot Put perhaps. But, again, I shouldn’t complain, and every other year they do actually send me a replacement pair of comfy trousers that I can wear about the house in slothenly fashion. Not without pants, mind, because these boys are often consummate in displaying the fine contours of my bell end, something not entirely appealing to house visitors (or flatmates), so you need something like a neat pair of briefs to strap that ladykiller in. I digress.

Still, Christmas is simply a time I must put up with each year for the sake of my parents. It’s not really a holiday designed for the offspring anymore – there is a tangible power shift and the parents are now the ones with the most to look forward to as their ungrateful offspring congregate from whatever part of the world they live in. I no longer lie awake with excitement on Christmas Eve, wondering what delights lie in store, praying that under the tree this year lies my carefully selected range of Argos toys, lovingly circled in the catalogue by me and casually dismissed by my parents who instead opt to inject some knitwear into the mix like subliminal masterminds. Instead I invariably stay up squeezing what life I can out of the long-since dried-up well of shit TV and films, maybe bust a festive nut, and then sleep in ‘til at least 1pm while my parents magically find enough of a reason to go to church (I mean, aside from the religious obligation). I wonder, once all this religious nonsense wears off and the current Christian generation all but die out meaning the majority of the population are godless atheists, what will Christmas then become? Presumably it WILL carry on, but without so much as a Son of God to pin it on how will we clutter up daytime programming with no references to Jesus and the bloody nativity? Perhaps we will just have mourning sessions for Woolworths, the shop that – guttingly - never quite made it to 100 years of age, praising its return in 2009 when it was raised from the dead by an independent buyer, some sort of fitting allegory on how our religious beliefs over Christmas time are overshadowed by a bizarre desire to praise commercialism at the altar-like tills; or perhaps by this point Islamic fundamentalists will finally have the Western world by the baubles and we will be praising Allah for our jumbo Sudoku book.

God I am a whiny cretin. Next year I will just make sure my Christmas is a maximum of 3 days spent at home – Eve, Day, Boxing – and I’ll put forward a realistic list of desired items like in the good old days, so that I can actually have something to be excited about in anticipation – something to offset the key-ring from New York. Or maybe I’ll just make an effort this year to sink into reclusion like Howard Hughes, except without the business acumen to make zillions of dollars. Then at Christmas I can just don a noose made out of red and white bungee chord and throw myself off of London Bridge with an actual church bell attached to my testicles.

Yeah that’s right, bah fucking humbug.

Streets A-dead

2008-12-05T14:57:00.003Z

I'm that bald guy at the front, wondering how conceivable it would be to end my life using only my mind

I’ve been living in London now for roughly 2 years, and visiting it since I was about 15, a decade ago. One thing that has always struck me about this grey, cold, unforgiving place is how godamn busy it always is. If it wasn’t for the fact that London is quite possibly the most interesting place in the UK by the fact that there’s so much going on, there’s no way I would live here. Every day is a constant battle against mankind, a struggle for space on the streets and a competition to see who can get annoyed the quickest with his or her fellow man.

This ongoing cause of stress is no more perfectly exemplified than by London’s most famous shopping boulevard, Oxford Street. Oxford Street is easily my least favourite part of London. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I fucking hate Oxford Street. I would rather have the England Rugby Squad take turns dropkicking my testicles than journey down that horrible, horrible stretch of tarmac. Sadly, it’s a journey I often have to make, for a number of reasons whose importance is rapidly decreasing as a result of the damage it does to my patience.

I was thinking recently about methods with which to safely journey down Oxford Street in such a way that you are either oblivious to the surrounding rabble or the surrounding rabble were sufficiently dispatched so as to cease being a nuisance on my psyche. Anyone smiling on Oxford Street is either criminally insane or incredibly stupid – regardless, they must die. How can I kill all these fuckers without consequence then go home for a nice cuppa tea and then have enough time to watch Aeris get stabbed in the chest before bed?

The first idea that sprung to mind was the one man tank. Now, this actually popped up on Amazon a while ago as a genuine item for sale. The concept? A giant elongated Dalek with pointed, snowplough-esque front façade and fuel powered propulsion capable of reaching the lofty heights of 40mph.

Now, we all know the issue associated with driving on the road in London. Traffic, one way systems and, of course, bloody congestion charge. Well, FUCK THAT SHIT! Try hopping up onto the pavement with your own Badonkadonk Battle Cruiser, put that mother into 1st gear, stick “Rock the Casbah” on your stereo like some horribly inappropriate recreation of downtown Baghdad and just blast your way down past Uniqlo and into HMV where you can do hairpin bends into the 7” trendy vinyl section with 15 yr olds bouncing off your bonnet. Even the beautifully onomatopoeic name of this godsend vehicle conjures up images of human bodies rebounding off your armoured chassis. Minor modifications could be made ala Carmageddon with the addition of chariot-esque spikes on the sides, or a classic minesweeping chain action on the front.

Apparently, the company that manufacture this little beauty have upgraded it with flame turrets attached to the top and sides. While these may be mostly aesthetic, with a few tweaks and the addition of some Christmas tree lights, you will be one step closer to recreating your favourite Running Man scene involving Dynamo the opera singing fat guy and taking advantage of the highly flammable nature of the well-cologned Oxford Street shopping man.

However, purchasing a small battle cruiser at £11779.9706 is arguably not the most economical way of dispatching of a street laden with tourists and mindless drones. It’s also a rather messy way of getting the job done.

Introducing the Barrett M107 high powered sniper rifle.

This utter bastard of a gun takes .50 calibre rounds – bullets that are slightly taller than a coke can, and about two fingers wide. In short, it’s unnecessarily big and the sort of thing that could kill if you threw it at someone, let alone fired at 2700 feet per second for the barrel of a weapon designed to penetrate steel thicker than a London bus. These bullets were designed for machine guns – not just your poxy handheld automatic rifle, I mean those proper bastard Gatling guns. The sort of gun they used in Predator to tear down a rainforest. Yeah, one of those boys.

Of course, the problem with this is you can’t really just waltz down the street with a gun that probably weighs more than your mum and pick people off. No no, you need a proper vantage point. So pop up Centre Point Tower with it tucked under your H&M cardigan, set it on the cusp of the building’s roof level, twist your cap on back to front and make sure you bring a comfy chair. The benefit of this method is that once you’ve accepted the fact that murdering “innocent” civilians with a gun that could tear the T-1000 a new asshole is likely to result in your lifetime imprisonment, you can accept your fate like a man and just launch yourself headfirst off the roof, plummeting a multitude of stories to your doom, and hopefully taking out some shell-suit clad “Occie Street” parasite in the process.

Really, the coup de grâce for dispatching a large portion of London’s commercial underclass is a simple yet effective method employed by certain members of Islamic fundamentalist groups: the suicide bomber method.

I’d wager that there are few ballsier, more martyr-like moves for making a statement about rampant 21st century commercialism than strapping 20 kilograms of Semtex to your person, running head first into a crowd of WANKERS and flicking a switch that catapults your hate-filled body in a million different directions, taking out hundreds of offenders in the process. You can die happy knowing that you did your bit for mankind. Of course, the downside of this method is that people may pin your actions on terrorist groups, meaning that the real reason behind why your brain is sliding slowly down Zavvi’s display window is incorrectly hidden beneath years of eastern prejudice. Oh, and you’d be dead.

These Are Not The 'Rroids You Are Looking For...

2008-02-20T00:10:00.005Z

Come the final audition, Roger's mime audition was a finely honed piece of silent opera

Ok, I’ll admit, prior to coming up with the title pun I hadn’t intended to part with this information at all. I mean, it’s not something I’m particularly pleased about, though to say I’m not proud would be marginally (margANALly?) incorrect.

Yes, suffering readers, I have a haemorrhoid. A pile. A butt grape. Mould in the old wine cellar.

How did it get there? Let’s just say I was lifting a few cars above what I usually bench at the World’s Strongest Man competition, and part of my duodenum - tired of committing 100% - let go of the proverbial rope, kicked back, cracked open a brewski and pulled a copy of Private Eye from behind a passing bolus. My ass, my friends, had had enough.

Except that of course, this didn’t happen lifting weights alongside some butch, sweaty Nord while picking up ridiculously large inane objects for the amusement of 30-something housewives in Milton Keynes (much to my chagrin). It happened while bent double over a slightly piss soaked toilet seat in some night club in West London. It wasn’t something I realised at the time, of course - it wasn’t comparable to a man tuning his guitar one twist too far and hearing it snap. There was no comedic “twang” to accompany the creation of my rectal bubble wrap. But in retrospect I know it was then. The sheer force with which I was struggling to dislodge two days worth of digested Oatabix was very probably the cause. Ney, it WAS the cause, let’s be frank here people. Heavily oat-based cereals are a relatively new re-introduction to my daily diet (and, now, a short lived one). I clearly could not take the strain of 2 days worth of solid bran feasting – breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack were all changed, subject to my new found fondness for Botham’s bastard breakfast lovechild. The resulting stool – if I may be so bold – was similar in constitution to incredibly dry peanut butter; perhaps peanut butter made with very little moisture, and left to dry in the hot, African sun like a slice of biltong. Perhaps the contents of a Starbar or Reese’s piece. The expulsion process itself was as tough as squeezing two year old toothpaste through the eye of a needle. As I was turning red to help gravitate my poo, the sheer force of what I was doing could turn coal into diamond – my bum was Superman III.

If you’re not down with the ‘rroids (for real!), you are missing out a treat! I went to this party at the doctors office and came out with a goody bag that rocks the shit!

Genuinely, when you’ve been crapping fire through a hole the size of a skin pore, there are few greater things to look forward to than having the cold, hard finger of a nurse keenly poking around in there like it’s their first day out of medical college. And believe me, this was a nurse – it seems that the NHS Walk-in service – great though it is – are only willing to provide unregistered patients with nurses and not doctors. I don’t have anything against nurses, but there’s obviously a few reasons why they aren’t doctors yet, and I’m guessing inexperience is one of them. Having spent a 1 ½ hour bus journey clenching and pretending there isn’t the equivalent of a fully blown bar fight going on in my nether regions with broken bottles and chairs and acid ‘n’ shit, I had just about gathered up enough willpower to see myself through what I figured would be a rather uncomfortable handshake from a person I’d never met before. I wandered – ney walked – into the walk-in clinic and scanned around for what I assumed would be a number to pull, taking note of the fact that the waiting room was reasonably empty, save the obligatory mother and daughter pairings and some guy with his iPod on far too loud listening to Leona Lewis.

To my dismay, I discovered the reception booth where I was to sign in was not detached from the waiting room; which combined with the deathly silence permeating the waiting room meant that being asked what I was here to see the doctor for was not going to be responded to with the gods-honest truth.

“…and what are you here to see the nurse for?”

“well [squints to read name tag] Hamish, it turns out I’m shitting blood in a rather painful fashion from my asshole, do you want me to sign this form in pen or shall I just feel around my buttcrack for some red ink?”

…and then turn around, take a bow, and run headfirst into the first AIDS patient I could see and kill myself through embarrassment.

As I sat there in the waiting room, thinking up amazing puns (which I shall “pile” into later no doubt), I was preparing myself mentally for having to bend over for a stranger. The journey a man goes through for this is a strange one, though in truth I must confess that the prospect of having my rectum examined medically is not really that daunting. I’m not SO red blooded and prudish that I’m going to take it to mean he’s coming onto me in the least romantic, most clinical way possible. I don’t assume this man has spent x number of years at medical school just to get his leg over with the same sex (nah, he probably did it for the pussy innit). My main worry was the pain – and it was going to hurt. In my mind this nurse’s finger had transformed from the dainty digits of a fresh faced 20-something into the rugged, stone worn sausages of a 56 year old ex-prize fighter cum contractor. Plastic gloves would be nowhere to be seen, and all lubricant would be replaced with a thick, rough paste made from sand, salt and vinegar. And he’d probably pick his nose first.

Sadly, as the 5 minutes I had alone with my nurse expired, it turned out all the anxiety and excitement were wasted, and I was to leave the building the same way it came in - unprobed. What a bum deal. Just as well really, ‘cos I know there was a surprise waiting for him up there, and I don’t mean a puppy.

By far the most entertaining outcome of this painful experience (one that is now in its death throes) is the joyous discovery of a medical product called Anusol. I doubt the board of directors that came up with that title spent too much of their lunch break staring blankly into their Subways. In no way can you call a tube of ointment Anusol without sniggering. And apparently it’s pronounced A-new-soul - which I guess is quite apt seeing as mine is currently seeping out from behind me like a broken exhaust pipe.

I'm a fucking loser

2007-10-01T22:47:00.000+01:00

His trip to SpecSavers complete, Ken decided it was finally OK to break out the teeth

That’s pretty much the size of it. It doesn’t end there of course; that’s not ALL I am. I’m many things. Politically incorrect is one of them. Tall is another. Amazing at Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is another. Knowing the full name to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is yet another.

I have a boner for technology. This isn’t strictly news of course. Just look at the amount of effort I’ve put into this blog… ok, bad example. Well, look at the amount of effort I’ve put into this blog compared to you. It’s quite a bit isn’t it? I bet you’ve spent at least a few minutes thinking “Jesus tonight I wonder how the hell he set this blog thing up? I bet it’s not as easy as piercing the plastic on this microwave meal and sitting down in front of CSI: Reading for the n-th time”.

True, it’s not that easy. It’s positively mildly annoying. Feeling guilt over not posting for a blog that is probably read by next to no one (bar the small audience I may have forced it upon on Facebook - oh you can run but you can’t actually hide from those status updates) is not really what I intended. But it’s the curse I’ve set myself. I’ve opened up the burial chamber in a cursed cyber-pyramid and now Guiltankhamen is visiting me nightly in my bed, plucking the hairs from my balls and leaving without so much as a small flannel made from pubes to show for it. He’s just discarding those hairs like they were his own belly button lint. And we all know he gets shit loads of that from the bandages he’s covered in. What the fuck am I talking about?

I’m actually quite busy at the moment and I spend a fair amount of time typing as it is (I seem to use the W, A, S, and D keys quite a lot, guffaw!*), so the incentive for hitting the keyboard when I get home for any other reason than to break it over my flatmates head is small. Anyway, I think a good 30% of this blog is dedicated to me attempting to account for my post tardiness so let’s just drop it shall we?

Tied into my loserishness** is my incredibly geeketry***, pretty much highlighted above in the preliminary paragraph. Indeed, the very fact that I contribute to a blog epitomises my geekdom, like a sort of wizard hat shaped condom (geddit?). But I don’t hide from, behind, or even in front of it (can you hide in front of something?). I try to wear my geekishness on my sleeve like a really sad scout badge, perhaps fashioned from recycled cassette tape and with a “dagger +1” for a logo. I think “geek” is the new “chic”, and I’m so determined to prove it that I will kill every last tight-jeaned, limp-wristed, nu-rave wanker if that’s what it takes. And THEN I’ll prove to you that geek is chic.

It is my true, whole hearted belief that geeks are awesome. This stems from a number of things which I shall run through now.

Geeks are socially inept, thus invariably incapable of “standard” social activities. While at face value this appears to be bad, the truth is that this social ineptitude usually only lasts until the early 20’s, meaning that when the desire to flap-jaws with fellow humans finally comes a-knocking, there are whole lessons in “being a dick” that have been skipped, leaving people (mainly girls) to revel in the fact that said geek is actually making an effort. Your average handsome Joe will customarily be so oblivious to the notion that socialising can be an exercise of human venture in itself (thanks, no doubt, to a lifetime of haphazard compliments and gobbling up over the top remarks on their usually unremarkable personality like it was the very word of God) that they will deem the task as second-nature as taking a dump. No real thought will be put into it. Of course, sadly many a girl has yet to realise that the spotty, smelly freak sat in the corner of the room with the beige t-shirt, trousers, socks and shoes combo has something interesting to say, even if it is a vibrant display of their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts. Frankly, at least you’re getting something new and interesting out of a human being for once - leap on the opportunity, and, indeed, fuck it.
Geeks have incredible hand-eye coordination. This comes from a lifetime of watching porn and negotiating memory RAM sticks into the correct motherboard slot and at the right angle. It also, of course comes from an unhealthy habit for playing Counterstrike and World of Warcraft. And what does this mean for you lucky people? Faster number dialling; quicker key turning; quicker finger pointing. And yes - better foreplay. Oh don’t go thinking those geeky fingers are ONLY good for tippy-tapping at keyboards. I’ll wager there’s not a clunge around that can resist the charms of a finely honed set of geek-knuckles, digits that have been doing the equivalent of 100,000 press-ups each day through sheer keyboard abuse. These guys know how to type html code at an alarming rate. You don’t even know what html code is, let alone what that could mean to your sex life. So don’t even think about it.
Geeks possess a level of insecurity comparable to that of Windows 98 (bazing! Take THAT Bill Gates), and will do everything in their power to make sure they keep you. Of course, this can reach a dangerous level if not watched carefully - let your geek boyfriend\girlfriend get too jealous of your handsomer, cooler mate, and he’ll likely have some sort of breakdown and lock himself in his room with the only signs of life being a persistent clicking sound and a faint waft of Wotsits. Wait - this isn’t really a plus point is it…
Geeks are unintentionally hilarious. What better source of amusement than to watch a geek talk tangentially about a topic that no one can relate too? For a geek, “normies” do this all the time: chatting incessantly about football couldn’t be more alien to them if the topic had quite literally personified itself into some alien life form, with a football for a head and goalposts for legs. And a gun. That fires trilithium crystals. The “fumbling geek” is perhaps the most jovial of the particular breed. The sort who’s a tad overweight, with glasses, with Asperger’s syndrome that means they become fascinated by the menu in a restaurant to the extent that they sit there reading it front to back, oblivious to all others, then daydream about each item on the menu riding horseback through a sepia-toned meadow into the fiery gates of Petrilaqoth where the 5 moons eclipse to bring magic back to the kingdom and the corrupt Lord Kitron enslaves the Pixols to do his bidding… Fuck Tolkein, I could write this shit for a living easy.

Of course, I’m not a relationship expert, nor an agony aunt, nor an anthropologist. So this is sheer conjecture in its purest form, and I am clearly so unqualified for this sort of cross-section analysis of society that I may as well write in to The Sun newspaper and sign up to be their astrologist. It’s also the societal interpretation of racism, what with me largely stereotyping a certain breed of human (though indeed, a breed of human who’s DNA I have myself inherited). I stand by my opinion, however, that your average geek is more worth the insight than your average jock or Abercrombie & Fitch wearing “stud”, who will undoubtedly be a major fucking let down once you get past the fact that he’s used tweezers to shape his eyebrows.

And so we leave him - geekus terribilus - alone in his room, cock in hand, animal porn on his computer, a tear in his eye. Lo, his mother is at his door, a-tippy-tapping, a plate of toasted sandwiches in hand. Let us leave him to shuffle up his trousers while we retreat to our own living rooms to play Pro Evolution Football 7 (or whatever number you kids are on nowadays) and discuss the size of breasts in Hollyoaks. Hang on, turns out we’re not so different after all, you and I… geek and I… You-geek and I-me… whatever

* High five PC 1st person shooter geeks! (This is such a geeky reference it would take someone probably not my friend to figure it out.)
** Not a word
*** Also not a word

3 Times a Lazy

2007-07-06T18:56:00.000+01:00

There's a post on the way. Or two. Possibly three. In the meantime, here's Willem Dafoe.

Social Debtiquette

2007-04-26T13:52:00.000+01:00

I did this once and located a 2 day old piece of sweetcorn. True story

Being of a certain type of stock (100% prime beef baby), I've been brought up to abide by a certain code. Not the Morse code, you silly, unfunny cretin; nor the Da Vinci code, you illiterate, easily-pleased airplane novel buyer. No, I mean the code of etiquette that once permeated society like some sort of shish kebab stick on the BBQ of life. Like a smelly fart in the phone booth of civilization. Like a penis in the vagina of cultural refinement. Yes, I mean manners and, indeed, etiquette.

It's a simple code really; one I fully intend to pass onto my kids. Not because I'm some sort of weird, pipe smoking traditionalist you might find riding around on a Penny Farthing; oh no. It's because it's just bloody better, alright?

When you're passing through a door and someone is close behind you should hold the fucking door open. And I mean close, mind: I don't mean way off in the distance but clearly gonna walk through, 'cos then you make them do that stupid fast walking thing that only idiots too lazy to jog do and they're all like "oh god why is he opening a door for me, I could've walked leisurely through this and now I've got a sweat on and I spilt my coffee and what, is that a poster for 300? Man that looks like a good film, I gotta watch that shit", and then you've not only embarrassed him, but yourself and the entire manners-abiding country you dumb, waste of space; get out of my sight.

It's a simple show of gratitude. Thankfully, this is one rule that most, though not all (chavs, I'm looking at you… ugh, you look rank) abide by. But, like ying and, indeed yang, there is another half to the door-opening pie: the "thank you".

Indeed, the "thank you" is the longest lasting in a long line of pleasantries, harking back to the days of yore when the great god Thjanku walked the plains of Hyrule, gleefully sprinkling joy on the unsuspecting, gritty populace, a populace of peoples what were ungrateful to say the least. So the legend goes, Thjanku got so tired of being the only god in the country of 6'6 stature opening doors and, indeed, passing through them, that he farted, his Thjankful gas settling upon the lie of the land with such density that all who inhaled his joyous methane (or "youthane" as he liked to call it, being ever selfess) instantly became forever converted to outward displays of aural gratitude. Interestingly enough, the phrase "thank you" and the god's name are wholly unrelated.

History lesson over; let me set the scene of the crime. You've held open a door for someone, taking time out of your day to make theirs somewhat better, the door being particularly stiff and cumbersome like a tree trunk in Athenian air. Some little shit minces his way through the gap YOU made him, his mobile phone seemingly a mere extension of his hand, satiating the cellular itch in his ear like he's out of social calamine lotion. Before you know it, the turd has taken liberties, ignored your attempts to share a moment, and fucked off into the ether like a sad, waddling penguin.

What happens next? No, justice doesn't fly down and rip his head off in a manner befitting a particularly cavalier yet suave James Bond-type figure, removing the cork from a champagne bottle. Sure enough, the cunt gets away with it. The situation often calls for a sarcastic afterthought yelp - or more likely, a mutter - along the lines of "no worries fuckplate!", but even if such an outburst was administered, he wouldn't hear it, and indeed, further politeness laws would be breached against you and you'd end up looking the fool.

People like this make me sick to the stomach, so much so that earlier I thought about it and it took me a whole 5 minutes to realise that my fists were so tightly clenched that to say my hands were bleeding would be a massive understatement. Rather, I'd actually penetrated the very skin of my palms with my fingers, forced them through the flesh, bone and sinew, and out the other end, and back round to there starting position. Yes, essentially my fingers had spun round 360 degrees through my hand.

There's one particular breed of etiquette law-breaker who think they perhaps fall outside the law of reciprocal thank you's, feeling themselves exempt of such obligatory pleasantries: mothers with kids. Don't for a SECOND think that because your whinging, moaning little brat is causing you a headache that you can get away with not saying "thank you" when I open your goddamned door. In fact, you should be saying thank you ten-fold, Penfold. I've saved you an extra chore and all you can do is tend to your bleating baby like it's really going to stop crying if you don't punch it unconscious. You CHOSE to have that baby lest we forget. What, you missed the seminar on how annoying kids can be? You've been living where for the last 27 years?

The next person I see that doesn't thank me for holding a door open for them is going to receive a piece of my mind; and not the nice piece. The piece that negotiates award winning headlocks and god-beating Chinese burns. If you don't want a broken neck and an arm like a piece of blu tac that's been rolled in your hands for about an hour too long, then I suggest the next time you pass through a door jacked open by a 6'5" guy with amazing facial structure, you bloody well say thanks.

Festival: Less drivel please

2007-04-11T11:53:00.000+01:00

Idiots

It’s that time of year again folks – the time of year when we’ve had our first glimpse of sunshine. Winter has stopped forcing its phlegm inducing cumshot into our mouths (relish that metaphor) and the sun is out early to make another bunch of undereducated hippy “scientists” paranoid about global warming. It’s a time of year to start daydreaming about the full blown summer; or to start dreading the impending return to grey tinged dreariness we’re, by-now, well accustomed to. I’ve already had my first “beer garden” conversation, and I’ve even had a stroll on a beach. In Britain!!!

As is the great British 20-something tradition, now is the time of year to start booking our festivals. Well, in all reality, the time has just gone – but given my relative slackness of late (I had to mention it somewhere – suck it down whingers, I don’t see YOU writing a blog, and this time I’ve got an excuse: a JOB*) it’s taken me this long to get round to writing about it. Or rather, it’s taken me this long to get pent up on the subject. Read on.

I’ve not been to many festivals. Verily this makes me something of a novice on the subject, and I wouldn’t dare to claim otherwise. I have, however, been to two of them: Lovebox and Bestival. Seeing as Lovebox doesn’t really count on account of being only a day long, I’m happy to make that 1 ½ festivals, for all you pedants. Lovebox lacks that necessary factor of the all-inclusive festival package: camping. Truly camping is an intrinsic part of the festival experience, and rightly so. To sign up to a festival is to invite yourself into a world of uncomfortable, character-making camping, wherein your enjoyment and ability to brag about being a “festival master” is directionally proportionate to your ability not to sleep, or, at least, to sleep on the least level playing field you can. The peak of a mountain, for example, would be the very epitome of the festival camping experience, I’d imagine.

Not that I’d wish to poo poo the notion that camping MUST be done, but I’d imagine you could pull off having a relatively full festival experience without having to displace some discs in your spine. This is not to say that if I had the money I would check into a hotel the first chance I could get and commute to the festival in a gold plated limo, with R Kelly’s “Ignition” blaring out of the speakers, Courvoisier on tap, and a decent quantity of red tarmac laid down for my entrance en route to the main stage: let’s not forget that sleeping at a festival is but a laughable concept anyway. The more you sleep, the more you’re missing out on, and quite rightly so. In which case the camping experience becomes necessary only as a place with which to loosely store your valuables. Tents are the least secure safe-houses of all time. If you were a lowly thief and had the money, you’d do far worse than to buy a ticket to a festival and spend the first or second night trawling through peoples tents, weeding through the empty pastie packets and half eaten scotch eggs, and picking up as many forgotten digital cameras and drug stashes as you can get your grubby, chav-like mits on. Just bear in mind that the guy in the red £10 Tesco value tent has nothing of value. Not even my Everlast watch.

Anyway, I didn’t start chalking up this article as a means of preaching to you about a number of obvious truths that apply to festivals. I’m here to bitch. Don’t think for a second that in the time between my last article and now - as I peel the dead skin from a foot blister - I’ve managed to magically turn my life into something of a positive perspective on things. Who wants to read about that?

Glastonbury can go fuck itself. There, I said it. It’s not that I bemoan anyone’s experience of it – I think it’s perfectly possible for those that go\have gone to have a fully fledged enjoyable time, quality-stamped by Keith Richards himself. It’s not that I would dissuade anyone from signing up to such an experience. I just simply do not want to go. Get it? I. Do. Not. Want. To. Go.

How many varieties of festival are there now? Frankly, if you have the money and the time, you could go to a festival for every type of individual. If you like relentless and often twisted electronic music, go to Glade. If you want Detroit techno and not a lot else, go to DEMF. If you want classical music, go to the Proms. If you want arts, crafts, and the largest aubergines this side of Jordan’s bedside table, go to the Henley Show. Indeed, if you want the cream of pop, Indie rock and mostly commercial dance, go to Glastonbury. But don’t force it down my throat, I’ve made my festival choices and I’m sticking by them.

This year I fully intend to go to Exit and Bestival. The former has been booked, and the latter is a work in progress (or “WIP” as I’ve learnt is the industry shorthand). I’ve had a Bestival experience – it rocked. Hard. There was always something I wanted to see, and if there wasn’t it was a well earned break and a welcome one. The eye fodder there was reduced to an unhealthy number of destitute fancy dress costumes, while the entertainment ranged from the absurd to the obscene. The people were friendly, the vibe was most pleasant, and – for all my snobbishness – there was a relatively non-commercial music selection. In fact, there were at least 2 or 3 of my favourite acts\DJs of all time there. Truly the music policy was right up my rich, middle-class backside.

“But you HAVE to go to Glastonbury”. No I don’t! No amount of mud logged camping is going to persuade me otherwise. Why should I go? “You can laugh at all the idiots there” – that’s the sort of excuse people with no argument use when they try to persuade you that the plebeians who run riot in Glastonbury are anything less than unsightly. I know I know, I’m a snob – but again, this isn’t YOU I’m trying to dissuade, this is ME I’m trying to defend. Sadly I’m of that ilk of people who walk about London turning their noses up at about 75% of the population, and often the sorts of people who attend Glastonbury in their droves.

“But it’s about the EXPERIENCE”. What, and I can’t get my fill of varied arts and music elsewhere? Frankly I’ve SEEN most of what goes on on the TV, and while even *I* couldn’t argue that the TV is a perfect representation of reality, it’s a pretty good window. Nobody edits the Glastonbury TV highlights down to the awful bits anyway, which says a lot to me if the best bits look so rubbish anyway.

“Yeah but it’s GLASTONBURY”. Oh shut up, you lost already.

One day I may actually go to Glastonbury. And it won’t be because I’ve been forced. It’ll be because I’ve strapped 10 kilograms of Semtex to my person and I’ve lost the will to live. It MAY be because I’m at a loss, or because I want to see what all the fuss is about. And, y’know, I might have a good time. But I’m not in a hurry, thank you. There are plenty of festivals I desperately DO want to go to first, and Glastonbury is not one of them. Frankly I hear so many people telling me I MUST go that I’ve already begun having a shit time before I’ve even gone. Well done, Glastonbury-ites, your plan to persuade me worked less well than Bush’s “come ooon” war argument did with congress the first time round. Ha, and you thought I couldn’t do satire.

* Final Fantasy XII

From Busk 'til Yawn

2007-02-14T10:43:00.000Z

John's rendition of "Nipple to the Bottle" took a sinister and ironic twist when 5 seconds later he was glassed in the chest with one of his own instruments

I just saw this guy, about 26, on the tube playing the accordion. No particular sign that he's a tramp, just a gypo trying to make some cash, chewing gum in a really apathetic way (annoying), with his 5 yr old SON walking around the tube collecting money for him. Quite possibly one of the most irritating things I've ever seen. What makes him think that this sort of borderline child labour is encouraging people to give him more money, least of all with the sort of untrustworthy face that makes you jump to the immediate conclusion he kidnapped the child from his cot at birth. And not in a cute sort of Raising Arizona way, but the sort of kidnapping that verges on lifetime imprisonment. I was actually so angry watching this guy playing one of THE most infuriating instruments in the world, exhibiting the sort of enthusiasm you might expect from a WAG at the opera that by the time I got off the tube I very nearly punched a baby in the face. Luckily a granny blocked my fist with her spine.

Busking is a particular breed of begging that I'm generally pretty annoyed by anyway. It doesn't help that for me, the sort of busking you find deep in the gut of the underground system is defined mostly by Jack Jones wannabes singing budget covers, or Japanese women playing ditties on keyboards. The sheer audacity that these people think they are appeasing anything above 5% of the commuting population with their sub-par musicianship (after all, these people would surely have careers if they were GENUINELY any good) is astounding. Even then, these are the 5% of people who would happily listen to acapellas of Yoko Ono singing Pink Floyd by way of orgasm without so much as blinking an eyelid that something was not right in the world. But other than those few bizarre examples of sub-human society, I'd wager that 95% of people HATE the sort of crud being chundered out of busking spots on a daily basis from the duodenum of London transport.

This is why god invented the iPod people, to block out the outside world! when I walk through Bank station with my 220£ iPod, my 75£ Shure headphones, and my 10£ bag form Muji (check me the FUCK out), I don't want to find the soothing inner head space I've finally managed to create for myself disrupted by some 8 yr old recorder playing girl who's been thrown into a world of pain by her parents early because they're spending all their money on fags.

If we’re on the subject of the tube – and let’s face it, we are – let me raise another point. The soapbox I’m on has a good few minutes left in it before the rained on cardboard caves in and I’m left wallowing in the mud like some sort of pig that’s been stretched on a rack. In Iraq.

Considering that they’re supposed to be wizened in their old age, old people have a remarkably consistent talent for doing the most stupid things on the tube. Par example, you can guarantee that the people blocking the archway onto the platform at rush hour will be Aunty Betty and Uncle Fred, stopping a moment to ponder their pocket tube map, Betty fishing around in her flowery handbag for her glasses with the sort of pained expression of a trainee plumber knee deep in a septic tank for the fifth and most familiar time. Damn right the two people who stopped at the bottom of the escalator to take 5 minutes contemplating their next move - like a Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone novel being read by a particularly slow 7 year old - are Bernard and Ivy, Bernard taking a moment to remove his silly waterproof hat and scratch his balding head while her wife does all the thinking for them.

The phrase “respect your elders” seems to lose all meaning when confronted by elders with the sort of stupidity and lack of concern for their fellow human that these fools possess. If you discovered an ancient tribe in the heart of the rainforest and the tribesmen worshipped this sort of ancient intellect, you’d be sorely disappointed. Get the FUCK out of my way granny, if it’s 6pm and I’m trying to navigate my currently rather lengthy journey home each day, the last thing I want to do when I reach the bottom of the escalator is jump a hurdle. And just because you come up to my knees doesn’t make that any more acceptable.

I think if you reach this state as an old person, you should be chained and used to help with the Tube improvements on the weekend, like something from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But without the rescue bit.

BT Phone Moan

2007-01-10T14:35:00.000Z

The Nokia N70 - later used by the Armed Forces to build bomb shelters

There's nothing more pathetic than the empty feeling of hollowness (is that technically a tautology?) one gets after you lose your phone. At what point did we become so irritatingly dependent on technology? At what point did this nasty piece of plastic in our pockets become such an intrinsic extension of our bodily functions? I feel like that monster in Akira is the joke and I'm the punch line.

I feel pathetic. As soon as I lost it I was panicking like a madman - why? There was a time when I didn't even have a phone because the technology was too new. And, yes, I'd probably only ever be expecting a phone call from the one friend I had... OK, I'd probably only ever be expecting a phone call from my mum... Actually, that's not true, I had a special BT number to call home for free from any phone ***1229423252098 - fucking hell, how do I even remember that? (Yeah, I exchanged the first 3 numbers ‘cos I don't want the off chance that people from the Internet are calling my MUM thanks). Why can I remember a stupidly long number like that that I haven't used since I was 13, and not what I had for lunch yesterday? Oh, I CAN remember what I had for lunch yesterday. A hot plate of annoyance with a side of "this is lame". And, presumably, some words.

I think a better way to conduct social operations would be via the method of tapping out the basic phoneticisms of speech on a series of copper pipes, running underground and interlaced through the city like an elaborate plate of quasi-organised spaghetti. Usage of this piping would be limited to business-minded folk, and outside the complex runnings of work only the ordering of stationery and more copper piping would be acceptable.

Some sort of Matrix-esque bust-up of society is looming weightily on the shoulders of the globe. Come friendly T-800s and fall on Slough. The world needs to be purged technologically. Fire with fire. A massively ironic end to a frankly tragic state of affairs.

In some ways the dependence on technology keeps me wet. Indeed I spent a good… 15 minutes in the Apple store on regents Street (that’s a pretty long time to spend in a store for me), salivating over the plethora of white plastic and simple curvaceous font that lay before me. Never before has such lack of capitalization in a proper name pissed me off less. Usually such grammatical oversights, especially in marketing, are conducive to me reaching for the Gillette fusion, ripping the blade off the back, and “precision trimming” my own banjo string, resulting in some sort if embarrassing and highly painful trip to casualty after the resulting regret, panic, but ultimate satisfaction with my choice of self-mutilation (I feel a novel coming on). Luckily, Apple as a company seems like such an irritatingly well designed package that I can’t help but want just about everything in the fucking store. I found myself on the verge of purchasing a remote control for my iPod, a feature that fits between the headphones and the iPod itself, and only really saves me the time it take to reach into my pocket and press the button myself. £35 that would’ve cost me. It came with some sort of onboard computer no doubt (in this case it had some magical radio reception capabilities), but nonetheless, it’s not something I really need. Not on my salary. Nope, I’m saving up for that cordless toaster instead.

Losing my phone has caused a sort of hecticism* I thought only possible during the labour of a newborn child (well, you wouldn’t birth an old born one, lest said baby crept back up inside the womb and came out for another go, like some sort of queue-less water slide at The Blue Lagoon, Newquay). Being out of touch with ones friends, as I have already mentioned, is a major irritance. In my search for a new phone, I entered my local O2 store, and set upon the browsing of new phones available to me. Luckily, I’ve managed to avoid having to pay for a new one given that I’m due an upgrade. Phones nowadays suck. Sure, old phones may have had screens of black and white, or, rather, black and grey (or, indeed, black and Game Boy green), but they were fast. They didn’t store much but they were efficient. They couldn’t look after your kids and wife while you went on a business trip to Miami and frolicked with the most convincing transsexuals this side of Bangkok, but they weren’t bogged down with unnecessary features. I made the error of settling for a Nokia N70 a year ago, under the assumption that, as – at the time – I wasn’t an iPod owner, I could make do with the mp3 capabilities it possessed, perhaps with a minor memory upgrade. I was wrong. The phone soon cluttered up, and after the 3000th message (granted, I probably should have deleted most of them long ago), the thing chugged along slower than a 5MB porn file in 1998. The thing gave up warning me when I’d received a text message, and it’s only saving grace was that in a sticky situation, I could presumably hurl it at anyone who might choose to attack me, and cave their face in fire hydrant style. That or tie it to a witch and prove her innocence at the bottom of a river.

Anyway, browsing these phones in the store magazine (I settled on some Sony Ericsson – the brand change I’m hoping will not cost me my patience. I did, after all, possess an Ericsson 2 years back and the thing was arguably slower than a tractor load of sumo wrestlers), I came across an advert for Nokia and their new line of mp3 phones. English residents may be familiar with these ads; I’m not sure if they’ve hit the TV too, but they’re certainly on billboards and underground tube stations. Anyway, what the FUCK are Nokia thinking?

Shit Nokia Ad 1 states:

“The song that makes you call a number you should’ve deleted long ago”

With a stupid picture of a ginger girl, probably no older than about 16, looking like some sort of 70’s Californian reject. She also looks marginally like a kid – a boy – in a film I’ve seen, and it’s irritating me that I can’t put my finger on it and give some credence to such a statement.

Shit Nokia Ad 2 states:

“1500 tracks. One will make you accidentally call your ex”

This irritating piece of rubbish marketing features a girl with what’s evidently a wig, biting her lip and looking mischievous.

Whilst apparently aimed at girls, I can’t imagine what sort of fucking IDIOT would buy into these ads. Why would I want to do ANYthing as stupid as calling an ex? Why would I want to do ANYthing as stupid as call a number I clearly don’t want on my phone? What sort of sadist finds this sort of thing attractive? What sort of idiot advertising yuppie thinks this is the sort of thing people want to be doing? Admittedly, if it’s done anything, it’s got me talking about them. It’s got me remembering the product\manufacturer name, and irritatingly, it’s got me broadcasting said manufacturer to my bevy of readers. For they are numerous in number and plenitudinous in plenitude. Nokia need me really.

I think a better ad campaign for Nokia would be:

“The song that makes you slit your wrists and run around your front room spinning your arms around so you get the full centrifugal force behind you, spraying the walls red and ensuring the fastest way towards death possible. After you’ve quit Nokia for making shit ad campaigns”

*Hecticism, by the way, is not strictly a real word. It is, however, a fairly sexy, sibilant word that I’m proud to make a part of this blog entry. I should like to praise Google if I may, however, for proving itself yet again to be a fucking efficient search engine. When I put “hecticism” into Yahoo, it took me about 4 page clicks to get anywhere, and actually I didn’t find out what I wanted to about the word (which is listed in the online Urban pseudo-Dictionary), culminating in me heading straight for Google, where I was satisfied within 2 page clicks. Yeah I’m anal about my search engines, but Web 2.0 is all about accessibility and ease of internet use without being bogged down by functions, and Yahoo my erstwhile friend, you’ve failed in that department. You’ve failed. Pack your shit and get out of my office.

Belated Greets & Fellated Meats

2006-12-29T17:14:00.000Z

The true meaning of Christmas: unassuming choir boys with their mouths wide open

Happy Christmas!

I basically wrote the below spiel at, like, midnight on Christmas Eve but managed not to publish it, nearly dooming it to a lifetime in the Draft file. Anyway, here is the annual Queen's Speech as reinterpreted by yours truly:

"I'm off to eat enough food to make a small Ethopian family cry for a week. I hope you all have awesome cracker surprises 'cos inevitably they'll be THAT much more interesting than the presents you get. And I wanna hear all the cracker-gags please. They make my world go round"

Seasons Greetings with Reasons Fleeting

2006 Round Up

2006-12-20T14:04:00.000Z

"Man... What a year"

So: new job, new girl, new temporary living space (i.e. someone elses living room floor). New horizons. Man, times move and flow wit' da times. Wait: that's one of those lazy sentence of English. That I can't be bothered to correct. And I think that last one had an unnecessary full stop. And starting sentences with an "and" is a big no-no. Wait: aren't I using this blog as an example to businesses of my writing capabilities? Better cash that dole check pronto.

The last few months have been a bevy of exciting new prospects: some highs, some lows. Firstly, the job: we all know how long this shit has been in the making. It started with a few work experience efforts at a variety of record labels, none of which were quite ready for me. My last (and final) foray into the world of the record label was at Ninja Tune, a label whos repute is world renowned. Having practically spent 2 months of the year there, my stay culminated in the design and craft of a self-assigned cardboard war montage, and - most importantly - the creation of El Diablo, the world's first and only deadly cardboard ninja. If I can remember to put up a picture, I shall. Seb, my warehouse compadre and manager (a compadre first, no doubt), found himself made redundant in my last week there, and so reckless hilarity ensued. Frankly, hilarity was already an integral part of the Simon-Ninja relationship. Indeed, hilarity reigns wheresoever Simon finds himself. Simon likes to speak of Simon in the 3rd person.

Ninja Tune was cut short and I was introduced rather brazenly into the world of PR: The Press Officer. I've already been informed by a journalist of reasonably high repute that I represent the "bottom-feeder" of the media industry. But fuck him man, fuck him. I'm getting the sort of free, early promo shit from record labels that my mates would kill babies to hear. I mean, he is too - from me in fact. And he's doing an arguably more respectable job. But... fuck you.

So my working day runs like this: I start off waking up in a moments confusion, unsure of exactly where I am. "This isn't Henley\Archway\Brick Lane" I say to myself (those being my last 3 non-permanent abodes in order of familiarity). Then I check myself at the door of sanity and enter the real world. I realise it's before 9am, and congratulate myself on finally managing to wake up before "double-figures o'clock" for once in my life (that's 24-hour clock yo). I contemplate the shower, and - in the current case - decide that showering in the freezing cold ranks just above severing my scrotum with a plastic fork, thus opting out and saving the pleasure for later on in the day once I've collected enough Tube skank to infect a newly born child with the bubonic plague. Breakfast is a packet of crisps on the way to the station, followed by some sort of dodgy, egg based baguette at Pret a Manger round the corner form work. If I've managed to (again) beat everybody else to the office, then there's a half hour wait outside while I pick up a coffee and have a fag. By this point, my bowels are in the full throes of their latest cabaret act, and it's getting to the climactic finish. The coffee and cigarette finish me off, and I walk into the finally opened office a veritable terrorist time-bomb of unstable guts. I contemplate running in screaming, ripping off my trousers Full Monty style and pulling a b-boy helicopter on the floor, unleashing hellish bowel fury on my work buddies and painting the town brown; but that would be unnecessarily harsh and only humorous in the mind of a sick, tall weirdo.

So the PR job is the current "stable" fixture in my life. I say "stable" in those speech marks that often imply sarcasm because I'm part-time with a view to "maybe" getting a full-time fixture. And frankly, I'm writing this at work so I'm clearly not as busy as I *should* be. Then again, nobody else is in the office and 'tis crimbo. I'm doing more work than anyone else in the office today... However, I recently figured out in a pang of economic panic (or panecopamic (TM)) that at the current part-time rate of 3 days a week on £6.50 an hour (huh? Yeah i said £6.50... what? Yeah, I know... London... Yeah I know it's pricey... Look "mum" I KNOW how much money I need to survive in Lon... look I... look BACK off OK) I'm gonna be earning about £7,800 a year. Clearly this is no way to impress the ladies. I need a 6 figure salary and I needs it stat. Enter freelancing.

I get SO much support and hits from the Internet for this blog. Seriously. Microsoft LOVE me. Approx 99% of the hits I currently get that I can check on my statistics website are from Windows LIVE search. And about 50% of those are people searching for "suicide". Those percentages aren't factual, I guesstimated them. But my skimming skills are unparalleled. Regardless, it's disturbing to me that a) suicide is linked to my site, and b) suicide is the most obvious route INTO my site through the search engine. Why aren't people searching for "hilarious Internet writing antics from the mind of handsome tall blond English men" (you can thank me for including you in that later Malign)?

The point of all this is that I figured that, given my apparent writing skillz, I could do this shit professionally and maybe get some Benjamins out of it. And indeed, my first article gets printed in iDJ's February issue; it goes to press - apparently - on the 19th of January. Go and buy it and admire my censored outlook on an artist I didn't really like but had to be positive about. Still, at 10p a word, it's all money in the bank. And that's £35 for a 350 word article. That's not just a random maths attack, that's relevant 'cos it was a 350 word piece I wrote in it innit.

Ultimately, 2006 has been a good year, after the massive, MASSIVE Let down that was 2005. Y'know, the end of uni, the end of stability, the birthing into the new world - I felt like Columbus in America; except in this case Columbus is a 6'5", dashingly handsome guy now sporting rugged all-over facial hair and the sort of semi, demi-mullet (no, not a quatri-mullet - perchance a quasi-mullet) that would make Pat Sharpe hang himself from a large playground slide. And America is a vastly shrunken metaphor for a young, attractive, potentially prosperous but uncertain life. (Stop starting sentences with "and"!!)

Cyster - I missed her

2006-12-10T15:21:00.000Z

Crap pun title aside, my groin cyst vanished. Yey me!

I'm trying to find a flat at the moment so you can all just chill the fuck out on the "where's the regular posting" shit, 'cos I don't need the extra hassle, alright? So all those people chanting outside my window with the burning crosses and the ghost costumes better BACK off.

Pie Chart

2006-11-11T21:54:00.000Z

Super duper pie. Face

I hate maths. I hate statistics too. But I like colours. Which is why Sainsbury's introduction of the traffic-light pie chart on their food products is something of a welcome blessing. For those of us (mostly men and - well - fat people) who can’t be bothered to read the food content figures on the back, let alone attempt to interpret them into some sort of digestible (clever use of food related word there) format that the brain can assimilate, its pretty damn handy.

After the recent Brie Indulgence Sessions, I started to wig out. Those of you not privy to the info should know that I’ve decided that this was the direct cause of a cyst popping up on my person. Rank? Yes. Necessary information? No. Care much? Not really. It’s all part of the story baby, you’re in for the long ride. So, the cyst happened, the hypochondriac in me had a field day, and I blamed it all on those brie bacon and cranberry toasties I'd gotten so damn good at making (2nd only to the amazement that comes from tucking into a cranberry, chicken, bacon, cheese and avocado toastie. In that order of layers. Man that’s the gooood shit). Clearly the brie was passing directly into my bloodstream, via my poor exercise habits, and depositing itself at certain epidermal points throughout my body (“fancy some brie, sir? No really, I incyst”). I know this because a doctor told me. Right before he punched himself in the face.

This lead to me decision to go on some sort of attempt at a health spree. And what better, lazier way of doing this than to abide by the law of the Saino’s “pie chart”.

I should point out, before I go further, that the added humour in my seemingly boring blog entry title comes from the fact that “pie” in certain sects of social speech means “fat”, or “like a fat person”. Like “fuck man, you’re being really pie lately”, or “dude, that bacon, brie and cranberry toastie is seriously pie”. The applications of the word stretch far beyond the noun, though undoubtedly the most pie (or “piest”) one could be is to indulge in a seriously big “pie”. It derives form the ancient phrase “who ate all the pies”.

Back to the point. The Saino’s Pie Chart has revolutionised the way I eat. Being well versed in the laws of the Highway Code (yeah I got 9 points on my license, so what? I got that down to 6 ‘cos I took a speed awareness course, wanna fight about it?), and having an E in my biology A-Level, the new three colour, circular food classification system is highly suited to my intellectual capabilities. So I can literally stroll into Saino's in my chaps, walk over to the microwave dinner isle with all the confidence of a tampax wearing teenager, pick up my aubergine and mushroom bhuna, and swoon in the aisle as I discover that my semi-regularly meal of choice has been polluting my metabolism with enough salt to melt a glacier of environmental significance.

Of course, the whole system surely falls down when presented before those of the public with red-green colour-blindness - what of them? Are they destined to end up fat, rotund, and dribbling cheese? In all fairness, I’m not overly familiar with the foibles of this type of colour-blindness (or any other type for that matter), but I’ve heard rumours (ah, the great reliability of the rumour mill), and the last brown envelope I received under the table at a dodgy American diner tells me that they're not allowed to drive because of the complications that can arise from scenarios featuring traffic lights, and\or incidents where a car chase results in the car in front dumping a boot load of giant rainbow coloured Skittles, whereupon swerving and dodging plays an essential role in driver survival.

Luckily I’m not colour-blind, so my maverick vigilante days are far from over. Though my shameful pigging out sessions in front of the X Factor with a wedge of brie and an industrial sized tub of Apple & Raspberry juice drink (surely the most sugary drink not solely available on the black market since Mountain Dew launched its “Sacchar-In your FACE” ad campaign in 1999) are.

Silver Spoon

2006-10-19T20:36:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed a lack in posts (what, again? Naaaaah).

Well this time it's for good cause. I have a semi-proper job and until I get the hang of it, extra curricular activities will take a back seat.

However, my writing efforts (for that's all they are) continue on a more official basis at Spoonfed which is a website that's opening up in a months time dedicated to providing information on events in London. Expect to find me sacked from that AND the job, and back on my ass in an internet cafe near you soon.

Brie Nice

2006-10-09T17:38:00.000+01:00

Brie Larson: Is she living in a lump near my groin?

So if anyone here is a doctor, get in touch. I'm serious, I need medical help and I ain't paying (thus absolutely no incentive). For some reason I've become a haven for cysts. The sebaceous one I dedicated a poem to last month disappeared (I think it was touched by my serenading and took its leave), but instead I've been greeted by 3 more in the last month, and I suspect I've probably got them in other places I just haven't found yet (thus I'm taking care not to inspect myself in case I suddenly find I've got a colony of them somewhere and REALLY wig out).

This, you understand, is the stuff hypochondriacs dream of... well, have nightmares about. I always get the impression that hypochondriacs secretly have a desire to be ill - they seek it out. I mean, it makes sense, even if I base it on no empirical evidence. It’s not nice though, finding a lump. 4 or 5 years ago this wouldn't have phased me. Indeed, I've had the odd one pop up in the past. Back when my innocence was still in tact, back when (dare I admit it) yes, I was a virgin, back before even the possibility of an STD was primarily reliant on me running bare foot down a needle ridden back alleyway. Also back before I picked up my first cigarette, thus almost ruling out the possibility of cancer. Plus generally in your late teens you feel like your constitution could survive the black plague. You’re invincible when you're young.

But then you reach an age where suddenly you're independent and living one step up from the streets, there's a tramp that coughs on you as you leave the flat and step over the broken syringe, a worrying cough that leaves your wash sink in the morning crawling with pulsating mucus, and now, now there's a fucking bump above your groin and you're wondering if that prophylactic you wore that was 99% safe was only putting in 1% of the effort that day.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and assume that the reason for my recent hill-like epidermis is down to my diet. See, recently I discovered the marvel of brie. Why did this not happen before, in my younger years when my blood vessels weren't already struggling to deal with my smoking habit? Brie is awesome. My mum brought loads back from France (somehow) and I discovered a draw full of it in the freezer. This shit rocks. I've put it on EVERYthing. I'm considering putting it on my cornflakes next, which is just weird (because I don't eat cornflakes). In fact I might just melt it down on a spoon, suck it up in a hypodermic needle and inject it into my eyeballs.

I decided that my body isn't used to the brie, so its probably not quite digesting it - instead the semi-permeable membranes lining my stomach have become confused, and brie is being absorbed wholesale into my blood stream, depositing itself at key points around my body where blood is needed most: i.e. the arm muscles (where I have two cysts) and my groin (well, just above my groin - I'm not quite a walking sponge of STDs yet). Girls, form an orderly queue.

What to do? I’m stranded in London riding the fence between employment and unemployment (yes, AGAIN), and haven’t registered with a doctor. If I register with a doctor here, do I lose my doctor at home? I liked my doctor at home. He was a jolly old man that has managed to avoid resembling a paedophile well into his late 50’s (thus probably the most illusory kind?).

So in ode to my cyclical cyst, here’s another haiku:

Why is it you left
Only to return once more?
You won this round, cyst…

I Heart Love!!!!11!!!!!1

2006-09-16T14:47:00.000+01:00

Have you seen this man?

I think it’s time I owned up.

Basically the reason I haven’t been frequenting blogger.com with updates on my amusing and action packed life\thought processes is because… I’m in love.

I didn’t think it would happen. One minute you’re a normal guy, it’s a normal day on the farm, the sun’s shining a pretty normal way albeit slightly more radiantly, the chickens are clucking and not in an irritating way, but a nice, kinda almost harmonious way, and you leave your normal house to go into normal town for a pretty abnormal iced mocha-choca latte while reading the Observer on a Sunday, and BAM! There’s this hot chick behind the counter picking biscotti out of a big jar with a pair of stainless steel tongs, casually placing it beside a mug of hot cappuccino like Dutch cheese.

This is of course bollocks. Tragically so, as this is pretty much how I envisage a romantic encounter happening: usually I’m Hugh Grant and the lady in question is a sort of Scarlet Johansson look-alike, but more sort of ditzy. And taller. My point is, though, that there seem to be a lot of blogs lately shutting up shop for whatever reason, and I’m constantly stumbling across people who are laming out on updates because some girl has entered their life and made them realise that sex actually IS the best thing. Seriously, an uncanny number of times when I hit the StumbleUpon button I integrated into my browser and come across a blog, there’s been a message saying something like “Site currently down” or “On Break”, with the archived blog totally inaccessible (which is surely unnecessary). Or there’s been a message as the last post – invariably the first one in about 3 months – saying “I’m sorry guys, basically I got this girlfriend and you’re no longer important to me”. I don’t even have a fan base (prove me wrong) and I still feel the need to update this bad boy on a regular basis out of at least guilt.

Basically girls are fucking trouble. Girls will sap the creative life force out of you, that’s just scientific fact. If you read some of Newton’s journals, there’s a patch in his life where there’s a load of mostly blank pages, otherwise filled with hearts drawn in red biro* and – towards the end of the creative lull – the odd page with “why???” scrawled in thick pencil (not an HB nib) and what look like tear stains. Basically, Newton was on the verge of discovering how to bend gravity around a fixed object and thus provide an infinite energy source in the form of a sort of invisible recoil spring. I know all this ‘cos he told me.

All joking aside, it takes a strong, possibly well experienced constitution to prevent oneself from falling prey to the power of the poontang. I’ve witnessed the odd casualty myself. See, if *I* don’t update the blog, it’s just pure laziness. I go through peaks and troughs with my blogging: some days I have loads of ideas, and ill start on a bunch of articles (indeed I have about 8 unfinished articles somewhere in my documents folder but they don’t interest me enough right now to finish) – other days I’ll just not be bothered. But I won’t hide the fact, or blame somebody else. The fact is it IS possible to get regular sex AND maintain a blog (though if someone can help me out with the sex bit, let me know), so I’m not sure why so many people on the internet seem to think they should pack up shop the minute the pussy comes a-knocking, as though they’re all grown up now and the blog is immature. My blog is immature but I’m not stopping it next time I get regular action (which currently looks like never anyhow (boo-fucking-hoo)). To be fair I’ll probably be slower at the start while I get a years worth of sex out of my system within the space of a month, but after that I’ll be sat here, writing in the nude while I’m given head beneath the desk and being made tea afterwards.

...Who am I kidding.

* No shit biro’s hadn’t been invented, but you think this story is even true? You’re picking up on biros while I’m making up wholesale lies about scientists? Prioritise man!

Blog Roll

2006-09-14T01:53:00.000+01:00

Red Alert

This is a slightly edited conversation I just had with a mate on MSN. For the record, I’m “Gamblor” and he’s “Mr. Bale”. This is fairly standard banter for a Wednesday night:

Mr. Bale says (01:09):

arrrgh... having severe paranoia...

Mr. Bale says (01:09):

used this toilet roll at that party on Saturday

Mr. Bale says (01:09):

and looked on the edge of the roll to find a drying red substance?

Mr. Bale says (01:09):

reckon I could get HIV from that?

Gamblor says (01:10):

fuck man

Gamblor says (01:10):

highly doubtable

Mr. Bale says (01:11):

sooo paranoid?? bare pills and weed aren’t good when u discover something like that

Gamblor says (01:11):

sat there motionless, mouth agape, on the bog, toilet roll in hand?

Mr. Bale says (01:12):

hang on...were u filming this??

Mr. Bale says (01:12):

how did u know??

Mr. Bale says (01:12):

exactly my reaction lol

Gamblor says (01:13):

holding that position for at least 1 minute

Gamblor says (01:13):

soundtrack in background: de de derrrrr

Mr. Bale says (01:13):

actually trying to work out whether contact was possible through testing my swipe motion and working out if the wet sludge was thick enough to keep the HIV out?

Gamblor says (01:13):

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

Mr. Bale says (01:14):

so wet?

Mr. Bale says (01:14):

and thick...like a Rolo dessert yoghurt?

Gamblor says (01:14):

arguably not as nice

Gamblor says (01:15):

they're fucking good those desserts

Mr. Bale says (01:15):

yeah man...but kind of dangerous, 'cos u can choke on the thickness?

Gamblor says (01:16):

yeah its fucking sweet too

Gamblor says (01:16):

like Milkybar desserts

Gamblor says (01:16):

basically condensed milk and double cream?

Mr. Bale says (01:17):

yep

Gamblor says (01:17):

absorbed wholesale into the blood and deposited right at the aortic valve

Mr. Bale says (01:18):

smacked down with a spade yeah

Mr. Bale says (01:18):

arrrgh Haagen Daaz in the freezer

Gamblor says (01:18):

fuck

Mr. Bale says (01:18):

speaking of heavily creamy treats

Gamblor says (01:20):

should give it to a recently dumped ex to demolish due to post-dumping depression

Mr. Bale says (01:21):

yeah man comfort eating is standard!

Mr. Bale says (01:21):

(gay?)

Gamblor says (01:21):

comfort eating AS standard? talking about break-ups like a new car?

Mr. Bale says (01:22):

yeah... twin airbags? (your arse after all that comfort eating?)

Gamblor says (01:23):

really shit shock impactors though

Gamblor says (01:23):

no brake pads for the suicide inclined?

Mr. Bale says (01:24):

yeah... with a convenient hose in the boot to exhaust pipe yourself to death

Gamblor says (01:25):

fuck

Gamblor says (01:25):

really rank smelly fat car dealer?

Mr. Bale says (01:26):

arrgh they’re soo horrible

Mr. Bale says (01:27):

or that guy from true lies?

Gamblor says (01:27):

what, and it turns out HE's the guy fucking your ex?

Mr. Bale says (01:28):

yeah arrrgh

Gamblor says (01:28):

Bill Paxton’s fucking your ex?

Gamblor says (01:28):

game over man, game over

Poetic Justification

2006-09-06T20:20:00.001+01:00

I am not dead
I am not dying
I'm just currently really bored of trying

...don't worry, we'll be back with more updates soon!

Salvia Divinorum

2006-08-18T13:26:00.000+01:00

Accept all substitutes

Anyone who’s been to university and indulged in the drug under classes will be familiar with the ever popular marijuana leaf, the narcotic of choice amongst chemo patients, Rastafarians, and public schoolboys. Smoking weed is rather like doing a shit load of exercise in a short space of time (bear with me here): you get a minor high followed by a desire to do absolutely nothing while your body sinks into a chair. Sometimes this is accompanied by a series of giggles or chuckles beneath a fixed grin; other times it’s accompanied by nothing more than a blank expression and a stone cold TV-ward gaze that, if isolated and bottled, would sell on the black market under the perfume title “Excusably Bored”. Whenever you smoke weed you’re saying to yourself “I’ve got some free time, and I don’t really want to spend it doing constructive things, but if I don’t do something I’ll get fidgety, so I’ll get high and be happy making my sofa ass-groove sink an extra centimetre”.

You may have noticed, I have a weed shaped chip on my shoulder, the sort of chip you’d find served up on a dustbin lid round the back of fish and chips shop run by a giant cockroach in a trench coat who only understands clicking noises and has a tendency towards wallowing in faecal matter shortly before coming to work. By all means, my qualms with the drug don’t affect everyone. I know enough people seemingly unaffected by it, or at least able to control their consumption of it that they can actually go about daily tasks on it without feeling the compulsion to sit down or avoid society. But my personal relationship with it after 3 years of pretty regular consumption has ended rather sourly and frankly I consider the stuff to be a waste of time. Then again, I say this, but if you handed me a spliff I wouldn’t turn it down. That’s just shitty self-control. But I now no longer buy it.

One of the reasons I fell in love with it initially was related to the rolling process. Sad but true, the spliff rolling aspect of pot smoking was half the fun: constructing the perfect conical spliff, aiming for perfection each time. By the end my spliffs were pretty darn good. A lot of the time it was simply the desire to roll a spliff that led me to smoke the damn thing. Quitting weed is an incredibly easy thing to do. The set backs boil down to sheer will power over a short space of time, and my will power is about as unshakable as the tree in the Birdie Song. Really it should just be a case of NOT buying the drug off the dealer (it helps if they don’t deliver), not even calling the people, or just generally not rolling the spliff if you have the weed in your possession. It’s not an addictive drug per se: the combination with tobacco makes it more addictive, and the sensation you get from the high can be addictive to some.

So quitting mainly proved hard by virtue of not being able to roll spliffs anymore. I took up smoking rolling tobacco more and more as a replacement which was thoroughly unsatisfactory by virtue of being easier and more effortless to roll than stealing candy from a blind, mute, armless child. That’s allergic to sugar. No, a more satisfactory spliff replacement would have to be found, and trucker fags suck.

Enter the internet (stage left). Enter our muse, StumbleUpon, a browser modification that provides you with a “boredom button” that, upon pressing, whips up a random webpage that suits a series of categories you fill in upon registration and deprives you of another 3 minutes of your life that you could be spending NOT staring at a box-shaped light bulb. Once in a while it works and something relatively interesting crops up. One fine day about 3 months ago I was wearing away my mouse button with this fucking thing and I came across a website on the legal drug salvia divinorum. A friend of mine was once in possession of this, and as he seemed to know his shit I figured there must be something to it that makes it worth smoking. Plus you can buy this shit in bulk for next to nothing. Well, by comparison to the sort of extortionate prices you pay for marijuana it’s pretty cheap at least. In the UK an 1/8^th (of an ounce) of skunk – the standard purchase for an individual – costs £20. An 1/8^th is roughly 3.5grams and dealers usually actually only give you 3 grams, in order to make a little bit extra. Basically you get skanked. For £20. Salvia divinorum costs £12.50. For an OUNCE. Needless to say I ordered this shit, under the impression it would replace the spliff shaped hole in my life without all the excess Jamaican Hangover (™) baggage that comes with skunk.

Verdict?: dogshit.

I don’t get this stuff. Maybe I’m smoking it wrong. I’m feeling nothing, it tastes horrible, and I have SO much left! What am I supposed to do with it? Sell it to freshers? The nearest university is about half an hour away and that ain’t worth my time. The taste you get from smoking a joint of the stuff is not entirely dissimilar to the sort of taste you get from eating a raw mushroom, except that you’re not getting any vital minerals or vitamins for your trouble, you’re just getting a lung infection. Yup, there’s a distinct feeling of “this is mouldy” going on when you chug on salvia; a feeling that, in spite of the cheapness of the stuff, you’ve still managed to – yet again – waste more money on drugs than you thought possible, except now there’s salt and broken glass in the wound on account of the fact that this time you’ve waste the money on twigs and general bits of nest.

Scour the internet, however, and you’ll find numerous success stories. A general theme I notice though is that most people get high on it for about a minute. Apparently the best way to take the drug is get high, then sit and ponder the universe for a minute and reflect on your experience. Christ, when did doing drugs have to become such a chore? I wanna get high muthafucker, I wanna get high and not have any consequences save perhaps the odd sore throat. I wanna get high, watch some cliché childrens television on Cartoon Network, and giggle. Plus I wanna get high for longer than a minute. If the miles per gallon of this shit is so small what’s the point of buying it? £3 for a good pill and you’re ruined for about 3 hours or so. Rubbish.

Needless to say I’ve pawned off the offending grey leaf to a more willing friend – let’s hope she’s getting more out of it than I have (she better, she got the stuff for free godamnit).

On a side note, aren’t Marmite Walkers crisps the fucking shit? In fact, if I had the munchies right now I’d have easily polished off a whole six pack of this shit. As a nostalgic trip down short-term memory-loss lane, here is a top 10 of my most treasured “munchy” food.

1. Mars Chocolate Milkshake / Lucozade Orange
- Depends on the time of year. Mars during winter, Lucozade during summer. Milshakes during hot days can leave u thirsty. I once bought 5 types of chocolate milkshake to construct a sort of "uber-shake" in a pint glass. This included Nourishment, Frijj, Cadburys, Mars and Yazoo. It was rough.

2. Cheese & Onion Maccoys
- So much flavour! The crinkles provide the crisps with a larger surface area, meaning you get more taste per square centimetre than your average crisp. Fact.

3. Salad cream laced sandwich
- ‘Cos salad cream can make anything taste good. I once had a salad cream sandwich on the munchies. In fact sometimes I just squirt the shit in my mouth direct from the sauce (badum ch). If you think that’s bad, malign here once ate a spoonful of flour. Not too long ago I saw him walk into the room with the dry end of a loaf of bread wrapped around a bit of red pepper. Roll over Jamie Oliver…

4. Tea & Chocolate Hobnob
- Probably should be higher but I tend to see munchies as involving slightly more irrational food-eating behaviour and tea and biscuits isn’t too abnormal. Except that with the munchies the entire packet would be gone, regardless of whether or not there was one person or 10 people in the room. The tea would probably be unusually sugary too.

5. Er… dunno. Some more shit. I was lean yo, I can’t remember. Christ I didn’t even make 5 and I said 10.

There’s probably some other shit I’ve forgotten. I used to be heavily into Maltesers but now I can’t stand the fuckers so I’m not sure I can wholly recommend them. Chocolate in general is good with a spliff let’s be fair. Shame my sweet tooth has recently been dying a slow death. Not really a SHAME, ‘cos savoury food is so much better.

Oh my God, I just realised I have Start cereal downstairs…

Sebaceous Haiku

2006-08-07T17:49:00.000+01:00

My Dear Facial Cyst,
I hope when I next get kissed
You cease and desist!

Unnatural Selection

2006-08-03T19:19:00.000+01:00

"What's the matter Bert?"

Those of you belonging to the English public may have recently read about the tragic deaths of two innocents who happened to be inside an inflatable art installation when it got caught in a gust of wind and blown 50 odd feet up into the air. Apparently, scientists reckon such a bizarre act of nature can happen when the heat of the sun makes the air inside the inflatable expand, making it easier to lift by even the lightest of breezes. Then there’s the theory that the ropes that were mooring the installation to the floor may have been sabotaged by yobs.

Now, it’s not funny that people died in this accident. But what a way to go! When I imagine myself dying, I’d like to either be in my death bed, with a beautiful hussy straddling my face and copious amounts of morphine ensuring I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on, or I’d like to be doing something heroic, like saving a record box from a particularly large waterfall drop. I wouldn’t like to die by rising 50ft in the air inside a giant bouncy castle and presumably falling and breaking a number of important limbs.

It’s the sort of death that must REALLY piss off the families of those involved. Well, premature death is going to be annoying regardless, but when the cause is through poorly anchored glorified balloons, that’s gotta be rubbing salt in a particularly nasty wound.

The title of this article is actually rather unfair in its relation to the above article. Darwin Awards, for those who haven’t heard, are imaginary awards given to those people who manage to accidentally kill themselves through an immense act of stupidity (the Darwin relation is due to the notion that this is actually improving the human genome by removing particularly stupid genes). Of course, the people who died in the inflatable art accident were not doing anything stupid, so they cannot receive said award.

I once read about a kid who died in a particularly nasty way while trying to fashion a potato gun out of a drainpipe and some petrol. He was making said WMD with his mate, and after they got bored of firing standard potatoes from the machine, they spotted a frog. Naturally, as a kid all you want to do is hurt\maim\kill as many living creatures below humans as possible. So they picked up the frog and dumped it in the spud cannon. Having filled the bottom with petrol and touched a match to it, they were saddened to find that nothing happened. They tried again: nothing. So one of the kids went round the front of the cannon to look down the pipe, and as he did so, the frog fired out, punching a hole right through the kids stomach.

Genius. Imagine being the kids parents and having that one explained to you in the mortuary. Frankly there are a number of worse ways I could imagine being even more embarrassing. Getting locked inside a portaloo and being tipped upside down so you drown in filth would be pretty grim. Dying the Michael Hutchence way of asphyxiating yourself while jacking off would probably be a pretty nasty way of being discovered. Even worse if you had a sock soaked in poppers stuck in your mouth and a butt plug with a pony tail coming off it protruding from your rectum. Covered in faeces (oooh he went there! You didn’t think he could do it but he went there!).

Actually possibly the most embarrassing death I heard about is a true, confirmed story from a friend of mine. Apparently, a friend of a friend of his (so a friend of a friend of a friend of mine, or a friend of a friend of a friend of a blog writer to you) used to frequent a fetish club in Berlin. This person had a particularly fondness for a certain activity that involves the reception of all 5 digits and, indeed, the palm of a males forearm into the anus, and the subsequent removal, and then re-entry of said appendage. In other words he loved getting fisted, royally, by blokes with arms covered in Crisco, a bottle of amyl-nitrate shoved up his nose, or perhaps some sort of beer hat fashioned and remoulded into a “poppers hat” with straws leading up the nostrils for hands free nasal consumption. This guy died from a ruptured colon. And not from going for a particularly nasty shit either. He was fisted to death, essentially.

Now, imagine THAT in the morgue, with your parents. I mean, ok, you’re dead, there’s not strictly any embarrassment because you can’t feel anything, you’re dead (let alone a fist up your ass). But still, the residual embarrassment left behind for your parents to soak up, or indeed any of your friends unaware of your dungeon based activites must be pretty intense. It’s the sort of new you don’t need to hear really.

Doctor: Mr and Mrs Smith… I’m afraid your son is dead.

Mrs. Smith: (Crying) Why doctor, why? Oh why did our son have to die, he was so young!

Doctor: Well, he was being fisted violently by some leather clad, popper soaked biker three storeys underground and they punctured a whole in his duodenum

(Pause, intense crying)

Doctor: Want a lollipop?

Chuff the Tragic (Social) Blag Goon

2006-07-06T02:59:00.000+01:00

Has enough time passed for me to use the phrase: "pray for a tidal wave"?

“Money. Money money money, Ferrari Mitsubishi caviar. Pashmina? Bentley Bentley rowing cigars diamonds gold bars.”

This is an excerpt from an actual conversation I overheard a woman and a man have from a caviar-based picnic out the back of a Rolls Royce in one of the main fields lining the River Thames during the Henley Regatta.

It’s not, of course. People don’t speak like that. But one time of year in Henley-on-Thames, they may as well do. The Henley Regatta is ridiculous. I mean, Henley is ALWAYS posher than your average, certainly in Berkshire, truly one of the most grotesque shires in the UK. Here you will find Slough and Staine’s, two shit holes parodied efficiently and derogatarily by The Office and Ali G respectively, and with good cause. The red brick building landscapes of both towns - and indeed much of the rest of this hovel of a region (Reading, Maidenhead) - is truly about as inspirational as a crack addicted father. "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough", indeed. In fact I doubt it’s no small coincidence that a “slough” is defined in the dictionary as “a hole or low area in the ground filled with mud or water”, and, more fittingly a “spiritual low point”*. So yeah, having a place like Henley, and in fact the adjacent Marlow in a place such as this really makes Berkshire seem like the kind of place you’d love your kids to grow up in if you wanted them to hate you for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s not like crime rates are soaring, or that the buildings are literally crumbling around you, but at least a place like Manchester - somewhere that is undoubtedly greyer and with a higher crime rate – has character and entertainment value. At least you know where you stand in Manchester. The people there are proud of where they’re from. To be proud to live in Reading is like being proud that you masturbate over animal porn.

So once a year the world flocks to Henley to engage in social back-patting on a grossly indulgent scale. Everything is priced up to a disgusting level that would make a pub owner in Kensington blush. Beer is the measly cost of £3.70, while a jug of Pimms – the Henley drink de rigeur– is £20, whereas a litre bottle of the stuff from an off license in un-diluted form is only £13 and makes up about 5 jugs. Its off the scale really, but they get away with murder because of the species of toff that’s willing to empty their wallet in front of the world and show off how much cash they have while their girlfriend\wives\mistresses sip on expensive champagne in plastic flutes wearing massive ordained hats and chatting bullshit about their kids that go to Eton or Harrow. Also be warned that trying to find someone of an ethnic persuasion is a futile venture. You’d be better off trying to find a shred of humour in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

What was my point… I think I was getting (in a round, tea pot shaped way) to the fact that Henley becomes this massive in-joke whereby it becomes overpopulated with people that just want to show the fuck off. No shame. Recently I was re-introduced to the word “chuff”, a word that can only be described in recent terms as “the posh equivalent of chav”. If you’re from the UK or are UK savvy, you’ll know that a chav is the type of rank, inbred and often poor person you’re likely to find happy slapping his way around town wearing a distinct Kappa uniform, or some other stripe based sports wear. In one, monotone colour. They cause general mayhem on a town-wide scale. A “chuff” is the rich, well-mannered equivalent of that: another homogenised cross section of society where individuality is all but ruled out and often noticeable only by the difference in registration plate number, or the specific make of BMW. These people run rife in the streets of Henley and they’re only just barely more manageable than their crack smoking, school-skipping counterparts. Recognisable in their coloured blazers, disgusting corduroys, Oakley’s and slicked hair, they seep out of the social wood work and spend an inordinate amount of cash on their wives, girlfriends or would-be future divorcees. More alarmingly is the pseudo-chuff, the person who, on a day-by-day basis, is not essentially well off, who has perhaps saved up for this once-annual occasion by putting in a few extra shifts selling kitchen tiles at Magnet. Seeing as they dress the same and at least try to act the same as the actual-chuff, they blend in almost seamlessly, only distinguishable by the end of the 4th regatta day when they finally own up to the fact that not only is their wallet empty, but they’re rented car and suit was meant to be back yesterday and they simply can’t afford their 6th bottle of Mumm’s champagne. Inside, they’re embarrassed.

This is why the best way to approach the Henley regatta is to swing it like a maverick. Fuck the purported dress code and don your wife-beater and shorts. Parade around like you just don’t give a fuck. You’ll be told you’re attempt to go against the grain is simply a breach of protocol and wholly antisocial, but really you’re just being normal in the blazing hot weather while Fatty McFat-Fat loses a much needed stone in weight simply by sweating into his Versace cummerbund.

Bizarrely the whole scenario doesn’t piss me off. As long as I’m kept outside the circle of chuff I’m laughing. It’s amusing to me that these people are so willing to empty their pockets unnecessarily. But frankly the whole process does possess a certain insane charm. In an attempt to join the indulgent masses I stole a bottle of champagne from daddy’s Frigidaire as well as a couple of cigars for me and my chums (ra). We shared them on the side of the River Thames as fat people swam by towing upturned umbrellas, and hordes of people made their way down a seemingly endless riverbank towards a school-disco type affair populated by underage and/or under-sexed kids, totally fucked on Pimm’s and letching on the dance floor like it was the end of the world.

Naturally we followed.

* I also found out that it means “something discarded or shed” and to “ignore something”.

Porn to be Wild

2006-06-28T20:03:00.000+01:00

+ + =

A lethal equation

Once again I’m locked out of the house on a not too chilled Wednesday evening. Yet again I’ve decided to while away the hours until one of the house mates gets back by tending to my blog.

It’s annoying, last time I was in a net café I actually wrote quite a bit of stuff but I forgot to save the fucker on my email account so it’s lost in time. And the computer I was at has an upturned keyboard, which I believe is universal techno-head lingo for “this computer here is fucked”. I’ve also been writing a few articles at home (I was there on the weekend) but they’re unfinished. Look, quit your bitching ok, I’m trying goddamnit! More than can be said for the ingrate malign (damn right I had another dig at you). Currently he’s only good for one thing: finding me jeans, and even then he took his goddamn time. Yes malign, it really isn’t summer, it’s “lets-take-the-piss-out-of-you”-er (or “pass-the-buck”-er).

Apparently there’s been some hot air floating around the political forums about bottom-shelf men’s mags. I’m talking Loaded, FHM, Nuts, Zoo… the kind of shit you read if you’re an average pub-faring male, a meterosexual, or a 13 yr old school kid who can’t buck up the courage to blag a porn mag. Frankly, these magazines are dog shit. Seriously, if I wanted to wade through pages of adverts I’d flick through Sky digital’s mostly dog shit channel choices every 15 minutes and see how long it takes before I dive head first into the television. That’s the kind of shit you put up with in a men’s magazine. I’d understand if the publication was free: the best magazine out there (in my opinion) is Vice, a heavily satirical and hellishly funny, un-pc trend magazine that is forgivably laced with adverts due to it’s free nature. And even then the advert count is still a tenth of what you have to put with in FHM etc. plus the quality of journalism makes the whole page turning experience an enjoyable one rather than something of a trip on a journalistic horror movie: scared of what shitty tripe of an article is going to come next (ooh the irony).

Bottom shelf magazines are obviously popular though. Some of you may or may not remember a few older ones, such as Sky magazine. Frankly I don’t remember much about it, except that it was pretty rubbish and exactly like the rest apart from its choice of font and layout. I have no time for generic magazines. Magazines that contain a little of everything but not one specific concept. You’re not getting enough information about one topic. It’s a nothing magazine. It’s great if you like interviews with models and British celebrities about what underwear they wear. Articles that reveal that, ooh, Celebrity #263 likes to have a man call her names in bed. Big fucking deal! If I found out in a men’s magazine that Scarlett Johansson like to have men shit on her face then I’d probably give a shit, but otherwise, why bother telling me that stuff? You’re led to believe that it’s interesting by the blurb at the beginning that goes something like “Late night binge drinking, filthy name calling and – yes – THAT dress. Johnny Dullfuck interviews Scarlett Johansson on page 246!” Christ what a dull story. I may as well talk to a mate of mine. Then again this is all that’s wrong with celebrity culture, or, rather, the public obsession with celebrity. But I’m not gonna go into that. We all know the deal: it’s ridiculous.

Labour MP Claire Curtis-Thomas (damn right I can reference politicians) spoke the other day about upgrading the shelf-height of these so-called “men’s magazines” to the top position, amongst the European porn and oft-ignored copies of Viz. This, of course, would spell near-instant death for the majority of men’s mags. That or it would make the sales of porn increase. You’re either gonna find the idea of reaching for the top shelf an instant turn off, or you’re gonna find the recent additions of less extreme material a perfect excuse for exercising the arm muscle group required for such an activity. Y’know, the muscle group probably only otherwise used in actual masturbation. And who said wanking off wasn’t proper exercise.

Personally it’s not going to affect me. As I’ve hopefully made abundantly clear, not only are men’s magazines a negative concern for me, but porn is also if no interest. I hate porn. What’s the point?

…

I’m fooling no one. Frankly for all you know, I’m sat here naked typing one handed with my balls tenderly cupped in my left palm, Microsoft Word filling up a mere ¼ of my 19” flat screen monitor while 3 windows worth of various European hardcore movies make up the rest of my cyber porn-pie. In a net café.

I leave you with that delicious imagery.

Balding Blog

2006-06-20T18:25:00.000+01:00

Me, 2 years from now

You may have noticed a certain thinning on top lately blogwise. You may not. Frankly you have, because you hawk this blog page like some sort of depraved kiddy fiddler in a playground. Suck it up people, Simon’s on his way to life-ville. I tried to pre-empt this inevitable change a few months ago by signing up another contributor, but his input is even less frequent than mine. It’s ok though, he’s got a job, and frankly the unreliability within his nature is expected (WOAH!).

He has promised a short story though. Which actually excites me somehow. In a pant filling fashion. It’s a different twist on the blog concept. Fictional blogging. Though apparently it’s based on real life. Semi-autobiographical shizzle.

I’m typing this rather quickly ‘cos I’m in a net café (again) and I only paid for half an hour. I’m thinking on an idea for an article relating to my recent experiences working as an intern at a record label, and, more specifically, my experiences with demos. I can hear the heavy breathing of my fans already.

So he returneth...

2006-06-14T17:56:00.000+01:00

Totally unrelated but utterly essential photo posting

9-5’s are interesting. There’s a lot of arguments for and against them, ultimately preventing them from falling into their hellish pit hole and self-igniting until it’s a mere pile of burnt dreams and lost opportunities (what… the… fuck?). Having spent 2 weeks doing my first taste of a 9-5 (and really it was a 10.30-6 so I’m kinda cheating a bit), I can safely say that they’re really not that bad. Then again, I think if you were getting up at 5am to go into work and evacuate the bowels of the dead in an unsanitary morgue, then you’d probably have more to complain about. But the daily grind is generally fine. It helps if you’re doing something that doesn’t scream of boredom of course. Frankly that’s a bit of a lie, the job I was doing was pretty boring, but it was in an environment that wasn’t.

But yeah, the whole work thing is overrated I think. You’ve gotta have options though. And don’t live alone or with parents. That’s a killer. You need to be able to come home from work and have a few fucking laughs to offset the balance of your potentially boring, stressful day. If you’re working 8 hours in a hellish grey sort of ominous hollow breezeblock, return home on a packed tube\bus full of rather large men with interesting opinions on the necessity of underarm deodorant and a worrying lack of shame over flatulence, then get home and spend the rest of your evening avoiding your parents while you surf Myspace for future girlfriends, embark on a marathon 4 hour wank until 2 in the morning when you finally conk out watching Scrubs Season 3 box set and dreaming about pulling ugly girls on a rainy beach, then you’re not gonna be making the most of your youthfulness.

Why am I having such a series of really crap dreams lately (read: the above isn’t an entirely accurate description of my life)? They’re not even nightmares, they’re just really shit, average dreams. The other night I dreamt I pulled some rather ugly girl (although that may just have been a memory). I can’t remember the context, I just remember waking up confused as to whether or not it was a good dream or a bad dream. A mate of mine told me he had a dream where he spent a whole day at work in his sleep, and then woke up and actually had to go to work. That’s like going to work 3 times in 2 days. How shit would that be? God that would be a depressing morning at work.

The new Bigger Big Mac is rubbish. The Big Mac is a fucking con anyway. Who decided it should be the burger that essentially represents MacDonald’s? You think of Maccy D’s, you think of the Big Mac. The burger is a whopping 40% bigger, but it’s not 40% tastier. Though it is about 100% more filling. Unless you’re a fat fuck of course, in which case it probably only fills up a fingers worth of space relative to the rest of your body. The actually meat paddies have the texture of a wet flannel, and taste about as nice. And Big Mac special sauce is fucking gross. No no no, if you want a good burger form MacDonald’s, you want the Daughter Pounder with cheese. The one with the chopped onions and a burger that actually feels like it may just about contain beef. Anyway, all of this fails in comparison to a well stuffed, fresh tasting chicken kebab. And I know someone who would argue that the Zinger Tower Burger form KFC with additional BBQ sauce is the best thing since colour TV.

It’s football fever season. Y’all know it. World Cup is upon us (Christ, again?), which, frankly, is cause for some seriously fucking heavy wide mouth sessions involving noises not dissimilar from whale mating calls (i.e. yawning). At least, though, this time it’s real. Y’know, all other football is like a fucking rehearsal next to the World Cup. Even the European Cup is bare jokes compared to the sort of hefty preparation and fan enthusiasm presented by the Global Mug. England gets ridiculous. Everything is tainted with the George cross. I say tainted ‘cos frankly, as a non-football supporter, it pisses me right off seeing this short of shit liberally thrown over every piece of conceivable merchandise that can be thought of. Who wants a hand held cooling fan with LEDs somehow interwoven into the blades saying “ENGLAND”? Do people actually buy this shit? If you’re interested, you can buy one at service stations across the country, priced at a rather thrifty £20 no doubt.

Someone told me a few months back that football is an awesome sport, not only because it is entertaining, but because it brings countries together. Hmm, there’s certainly a case for that. It puts people of different backgrounds, races and skin colour under the same stadium roof, and it is a seemingly healthy and fun way to let man’s desire to compete and battle other men get some serious airing. But then again, nowhere else except in war do you see the kind of fan violence and racial hatred that a lot of football extremists possess. Recently during an EnglandManchester a man got stabbed. This wasn’t even a racially provoked attack; they were both white and both supporting the same team, specifically the team that won. Yet somehow it managed to turn to violence. Perhaps one guy spilt the others pint, but my point is that football isn’t exactly stopping this shit from going down, if anything its providing people with a meeting ground and an excuse to get their blades out or smash some Budvar bottles over their neighbours face.

But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some football haters bitter rant against the “beautiful game” (per se), I don’t actually have a problem with World Cup football (at least this has some sort of national purpose).

This article is uber late and it’s partially because I’ve actually been busy lately and partially because my compadre is a bevy if disappointment when it comes to meeting deadlines. However, he promises me a short story soon which I think is actually a fucking good idea, and as chief editor of this blog I feel it is extremely important for all things featured here to get my seal of approval.

Malign Fumes

2006-05-25T19:54:00.000+01:00

Rank bitch

I’m sat in an Internet café in Archway, largely (indeed, 95%) because I’m locked out of my mates house (none of them are in and I don’t have keys), and partially because I wanted to spend some alone time writing an entry in my beloved blog. I’ve barely been in here 1 minute and someone has already done the most almighty gust. Needless to say, it fucking honks. I suspect it’s that rather obtuse figure two chairs to my right, the guy who clearly hasn’t showered since at least yesterday, or possibly did this morning but has accumulated a sheen of odorous sweat due to a combination of London’s hot pollution, and his general lack of hygiene. My last 4 days have been populated with a variety of strange and wonderful unique man-farts, all emanating from different people. One such occasion led to a debate about the intrigue that lies behind the human fart: what it is that makes ones own exhaust fumes smell less ominous than someone else, why it is that one seeks out ones own fart and, indeed, that of his companions with a vigour akin to that of a truffle pig, and why it is that some farts smell more potent than others. It was unanimously decided that the relative “enjoyment” of one’s own emissions is a result of knowing that it is coming, and also knowing who’s anus it is coming from. You’re not gonna catch a disease from your own methane gases. To be honest, you’re not gonna catch anything from anybody else either, but you still don’t trust them as much as you trust your own.

Enough fart banter (fanta?), this isn’t an annotated episode of Bottom, it’s a topical and satirical blog, designed to be full of instantly interesting and essential information spewed from the like-minds of people with too much time on their hands.

Which, this week, is ironic. Because this week, and indeed next week, I have joined the ranks of millions going about their daily slog at the office: waking early and returning late, trekking half way across the city in a tube train not entirely unlike a glorified sardine tin, and dedicating hefty portions of your life to a supposedly worthwhile cause. See, this week I am working at the reputable and infamous Ninjatune label, a record label guilty for introducing Amon Tobin, the Herbaliser, Cinematic Orchestra, Bonobo and Coldcut to the world. A record label with serious credibility and a back catalogue that deserves it. I’m pulling a 2 week work experience stint with the intention of possibly being offered a future position, or at least bolstering my otherwise pathetic CV with a view to perhaps bartering my way into another label. It’s not a glamorous internship - packing mail orders, cataloguing boxes, updating databases, doing general dogsbody work – but it’s a damn good foot in the door, and I spend my days surrounded by shelves of dusty cardboard boxes filed with records locked in a small warehouse on the ground floor. The people are cool too, perhaps too cool – I don’t quite look the part with my unique fashion sense of beige khakis and size 14 Reebok Classics (my Adidas trainers are currently gouging out chunks of my Achilles heel due to their box-freshness). Out of the end of al this I also receive a selection of records of my choice, and perhaps some merchandise, so while I’m not getting paid, that Roots Manuva hoody I’ve had my eye on will make a nice addition to my barren wardrobe.

Continuing in the fine tradition of frankly shocking and disgusting blog entries, I watched sections of a film the other night called Irreversible that I really rather wish I hadn’t. For some reason it was deemed at least vaguely amusing to torture ourselves for half an hour while we skipped though to selected scenes of the famously shocking French film, letting the movie play on a particularly disturbing scene involving a graphic close up of a fire extinguisher being introduced at volatile speed to somebody’s head for at least 20 repetitions, and then fast forwarding to a scene involving the anal rape of a certain Monica Belluci, a beautiful actress more widely known for her Hollywood contribution to one of or perhaps both of the Matrix sequels. This scene was at least 15 minutes long, and graphic in its execution. Frankly, WHY any of us thought this sort of disturbing onscreen violence would be a good idea is beyond me. Having not seen the film, I was sceptical as to quite how graphic the French were willing to make the movie, and I was shocked to learn that the film certainly lives up to it’s name, in terms of effect on the human psyche. Sleeping was not easy that night. If you know what’s good for you, don’t watch this film. Or perhaps do, just so you can see the extreme nature of a rape scene that really might as well have been real.

On that frankly sombre note, I leave you. I’m going to try calling everyone again so I can GET INSIDE THE FUCKING HOUSE. I was so desperate for a piss earlier I had to go in a residential area, which I’m not proud of. But it was either that or pissing myself, which I’d have been even less proud of. And my shopping requires a fridge and the bread loaf I’ve been munching on requires ingredients. Adieu.

Doctor Begnin

2006-05-21T13:40:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid it's Social Faux Patis

Why do I invite conversation from people with histories of having addiction or mental problems? I don’t MIND, I mean, I don’t judge them on it. It kinda makes the air in the room a TINY bit weird but that’s just the slight awkwardness. There must be something about me that makes people want to tell me that they’re fucked up. It’s cool, we all have problems, God knows I have my share. I often find myself on the verge of telling people too, but I never go there, not until, like, I know them pretty well. You wouldn’t tell someone you just met that you had problems with your bladder, for example. It’s not really the done thing. If your daily behaviour was something that could possibly affect others in a way that could be taken wrongly, then sure, pre-warning is key. Take Pete from Big Brother. The guy has Tourettes Syndrome, and if he didn’t tell you that and you were an idiot, you’d probably think he belonged in a home. On a side note here, I think putting someone in the BB House with Tourettes is a touch cruel. I’m not saying I don’t think he deserves ot be in there because of his syndrome, I just think that Channel 4 are using him as a source of entertainment in a way different from, say, Shahbaz, an extrovert homosexual Asian man from Glasgow. People will ultimately be laughing at Pete for quite a while. I guess there’s nothing wrong with laughing at something like that, it can be funny, but I think Channel 4’s intentions don’t lie solely in spreading awareness about Tourettes, and lie, rather, in getting more viewers and cash.

Anyway, digression. My point being there’s often a time and a place for unloading a load of heavy issues on a stranger, and usually that place is in a shrink’s office. But not during my break at work thank you. This guy, Greg – really nice guy, couldn’t see him intentionally hurting a fly – took it upon himself in the 10 minutes I had to enjoy two cigarettes to tell me about his drug history, his alcohol addiction, his crazy ex-girlfriend, his parents and his childhood. I mean, fuck. I humoured him the whole while, making sure my responses were sincere, and trying to relate to him by dropping the fact that I smoked a fair bit of weed at university and, yeah, it can mess with your mind. But that next to his revelation that he once injected himself with LSD and tripped balls for a week solid when he was about 15 was like pairing Gary Coleman with Hightower from Police Academy in a tandem bike race. They’re unmatchable.

It didn’t stop there. He was at school, fucked on LSD, and his teacher spotted him looking a bit “weird”. So she asked if he was ok and he laughed and said “yeah”, while simultaneously following a pack of imaginary rats scuttle about her head. One girl int eh class spoke up and said he was totally fucked, so he got sent home, whereupon he apparently created some sort of fort in his living room out of, like, boxes and sheets, got his toy BB shotgun, and proceeded to defend his Trip-turret from parental intruders with a 39 pellet shotgun blast. This, of course, resulted in a 4 day hospital stay, after which he awoke, and said “man that was a crazy night last night”, apparently unaware that a week had passed.

Add on top of this the fact that he was a fully blown alcoholic and you’ve got a pretty interesting Greg. Apparently he told his shrink he wanted to quite smoking too but he has “mental problems too” and his shrink said he wasn’t ready for that step yet. Oh, and his ex girlfriend had a “hypo” (I didn’t ask what that meant) last night and ended up being taken to hospital in an ambulance despite texting a friend of his to say she was faking it.

Crazy ex? Check.
Alcohol problem? Check.
Drug problem? Check.
Problem child? Check.

This guy’s got it all. Girls must be queuing… no I’m being harsh, like I said, he’s actually quite nice, though gives the impression he may be walking a fine line between sanity and whatever the opposite of that is. I really do fail to understand, however, why he thinks this sort of personal revelation in the social forum might be beneficial? Was he, like, expecting me to write him a prescription or give him the phone number for Ricky Lake? I’m just more than a little perplexed to be honest. I may not be a woman with supple breasts and smooth skin, but if I was, I wouldn’t find him endearing in telling me that he’s essential fucked up. Not unless I got off on situations that had had a high probability of future domestic violence.

Another person at my old University had a habit of popping up about one every term in some sort of scenario where both of our friends would overlap. Initially he gave me DJing work in the first year for a night he was doing, which was mostly unpaid but proved useful in setting up at least some sort of name for myself. For this, of course, I was grateful, and despite taking a while to finally pay me any money, he was a nice enough guy. Turns out he had a nervous breakdown whilst on a year abroad and is a manic depressive. Now again, this I learnt from him in a face to face situation outside of the school (shootin’ some b-ball), having not seen him for a year. And within about 2 minutes of a conversation initiating. I don’t get it. Do people look at me and think that either I will be able to empathise with this or that I can cure it? Or do I just associate with the type of person who likes to air his unmentionables in public?

So yeah, I’m thinking a career in TV psychology, perhaps cropping up on Richard & Judy in a discussion about the teenage compulsion for wearing baggy jeans. Or I could be like that bald security guy in Jerry Springer except I wouldn’t look like a walking erect penis and I’d have something to actually contribute.

My god the Eurovision song contest is a massive joke isn’t it? I mean, honestly, it must be an elaborate joke. A veritable treasure chest of badly written Europop sung by talentless X-Factor rejects in front of a large stadium and small television audience. Pathetic. Give it up. Terry Wogan is a fucking comedy genius though. He takes the piss out of everything on there. He knows its shit. Considering how dog shit the UK entry was, it’s nice to know that the BBC realise that the contest is a fucking sham and let Wogan get away with such trans-European abuse. Is he drunk? I have an image of him sat in his viewing booth sipping on his 5^th glass of Glenmorrange in a really comfy granddad chair. Finland won this year with a track that featured the lyric “the day of rockening is here”. Oooh Finland you DO know how to make a man weak at the knees. I’m not sure that it’s better than Lithuania’s entry, simply title “We are the winners”, the sort of song you’d expect was probably written by Chumbawumba. Check these lyrics:

We are the winners
We are, we are!
We are the winners
We are, we are!

We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!
We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!

So, you gotta vote,
Vote, vote for the winners
Vote, vote, vote for the winners

We are the winners of Eurovision
(de Vilnius city a Paris)
(LT United ici)
We are the winners of Eurovision
(chantons la meme chanson)
('cos we got it goin' on)

Everyday you hear us on the radio
(that's right)
And everyday you see us on the news
(yeah)
It doesn't matter in mono or in stereo
(it's better in stereo)
'cos we are here to represent the truth that

We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!
We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!
Go baby!

We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!
We are the winners of Eurovision
We are, we are! We are, we are!

We are the winners of Eurovision
We are the winners of Eurovision
We are the winners of Eurovision
We are the winners of Eurovision

You gotta vote, vote, vote for the winners
Vote, vote, vote for the winners
'coz we are the winners of Eurovision
Vote!

It’s like subliminal advertising without the subliminal bit. Half way through this bald guy started having a dancing fit reminiscent of that tourettes guy’s extravert outburst at the Big Brother opening day. T’were genius. And it almost worked.

Finally, for the regular blog readers, I’m away for 2 weeks. I won’t be totally incapable of accessing the internet but it might be a bit trickier. I know, it’s tragic. What the fuck will all 4 of you do?

Mexi-Fucking- CAN

2006-05-19T00:58:00.000+01:00

You couldn't pick a fight with this guy. You couldn't even concieve of it.

Instant credit should go to ANYone who knows who I’m talking about and recognises the face of the guy above. Danny Trejo, regular stalwart on the Robert Rodriguez film crew, must have been in more films in his relatively short career as an extra than most actors over 60 have been in in their lifetime. Today I came across Warren Beatty’s IMDb web page and he’s certainly only been in a quarter of the films. Actually, what the fuck is with Warren Beatty being SO famous? I mean, Ok, the films he DID do were good, and its quality not quantity, but in terms of prolificacy he’s done sod all. I mean, 29 films: rubbish. He’s about 80 now too.

Anyway, Danny Trejo, living legend. He always crops up in films with dodgy Mexicans in and when he does, oh boy you know there’s gonna be trouble. Trouble or japes. He’s utter value for money. He has the most ridiculously large tattoo across his insanely stocky, built chest and frankly a face that wouldn’t look out of place next to an elephant’s soiled asshole. His acting skills don’t amount to much. They serve the purpose of the role, often involving playing some gang lords lackey. Arguably his best role, and probably the role that shot him to extra-stardom was as Navajas in "Desperado", easily one of my favourite films and possibly one of the best, and certainly underrated western-esque action romances of all time. The guy threw knives. Rodriguez, who directed the film, deserves a fat pat on the back for creating such awesome weapon-wielding characters (a mini-gun in a guitar case? Genius… why is it called a mini-gun? It’s fucking HUGE). He came to an unfortunate end, as he usually does, being mistaken for the Mariachi man himself and turning into a human colander upon receipt of a wild array of Uzi-bullets.

Easily my favourite sequence in "Once Upon A Time In Mexico" is the scene where Johnny Depp’s character is talking to him, and utters the brilliant line “Are you a Mexi-CAN or a Mexi-CAN'T?”. Of COURSE he’s a Mexi-CAN. The guys more Mexican than Taco’s for Christ’s sake. He probably sweats tequila. In fact he probably eats blue agave plants and pisses tequila into bottles for sale at his local bar. A bar that he’s probably smashed to shit on a number of occasions. He’s like a Mexican Chuck Norris. He deserves the notoriety anyway. Of course, what would then come out of the second iteration of that body-induced fermentation process I don’t know. Presumably some sort of uber-quila. Man-quila. Man killer. See what I did there. 187% proof probably. The sort of shit that kills off horrible diseases. And anything else in its path. Destructahol. Haha Christ I’m funny.

Obviously the above quote’s ingenuity is down to Rodriguez’s frequently awesome scripts, but I dunno, adding Trejo in the mix is like finding a fiver in the street. It makes the day seem brighter.

This is an extract from a mini-biography on IMDb. I won’t say anything yet, just read it:

“A child drug addict and criminal, Danny Trejo was in and out of jail for 11 years. While serving time in San Quentin, he won the lightweight and welterweight boxing titles. Imprisoned for armed robbery and drug offenses, he successfully completed a 12-step rehabilitation program that changed his life. While speaking at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting in 1985, Trejo met a young man who later called him for support. Trejo went to meet him at what turned out to be the set of Runaway Train (1985). Trejo was immediately offered a role as a convict extra, probably because of his tough tattooed appearance.”

He’s been in jail. He’s been on drugs. He’s been a criminal. He’s been a BOXER. Armed robbery. I mean, surely this is the hardest man that ever did enter the film industry. Usually you work in film, THEN hit the drugs. This guy did it backwards. Unconventional system you see. He’s a pioneer. He was given a film role, pretty much based on a body augmentation. That’s how immense his tattoo is.

One of my favourite films is “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”. It’s an awesome film, it’s not Oscar winning but it frequently gets high ratings and with good reason. The sheer shock value of watching the film and realising half way through that the movie you rented isn’t a straight Tarantino film but a balls-out gore fest is immense. I had NO idea. I think… I’m not sure If I saw this first or Desperado, but I *think* this was my first introduction to the Trej-meister. He’s the only guy to appear in all three of the Dusk ‘Til Dawn movies. While the latter sequels are apparently rather tripe, I admire his dedication to the franchise. Some might deem it as selling-out,. To those people I would say “did you not READ the biography I posted above? You’re dead.” This guy has stayed in at LEAST 5 different prisons in his time. “Con Air” was like a fucking autobiography to him. He probably helped out on the script. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if those tattoos he has on his arm in the film (a rose for every girl he’s raped!!) were genuine.

That tattoo is of a woman in a sombrero! He just doesn't give a fuck!

Danny fucking Trejo though, eh? Living movie legend.

Canniballs

2006-05-14T19:09:00.000+01:00

Rubbish pair of headphones

How do you become a cannibal? Do you just wake up one day and go “man, I could murder some man-rib for breakfast”. How does this work? At what point do you start craving it enough to go to all the trouble of killing someone to eat them. And what if, when you eat them, they taste like crap? Salad cream can only help so far.

There’s no excuse for it is there? This German dude a year or so ago met this guy online who considered himself “ready to eat”. They met up, and the “victim” (if you can call him that: he was willing after all) got his cock out, whacked it on the table and said “slice the thing off now”. The guy took some sort of pathetic knife which didn’t quite make it through in one go, so had to reach for another sharper knife to finish the deed off. He didn’t even get it off in one go! Surely that’s a priority! The last thing you want is some amateur chef hackifg away at your personals with a series variety of differently sharpened blades. If you’re a guy reading this, there’s probably a hollow feeling in your chest right now and a worrying feeling that if you don’t cover your penis this instant then some supernatural force may actually come and snatch it away from you. Nobody wants their cock cut off. I mean really. Least of all adults who recognise the advantages of having hormones. If you want to lose your penis there’s something wrong with you. It’s one thing to cause self-harm on an S&M scale and another thing to actually sever limbs and mutilate your own body. I wonder if he was hung? To quote Ricky Gervais: is there more meat on an erection? Was the guy thinking “oh this fucking penis of mine. Christ I can’t wait to get rid of it”. And if so, why not opt for surgery? Oh wait, ‘cos he wanted to SHARE IT WITH HIS GERMAN BUDDY. The guy fucking sautéed it with garlic, salt and pepper, then they ate it together. The guy who’d lost the part had his cooked too rare and it was too tough. Apparently “he was furious”. Oh really? Haha, serves you fucking right. You’re an idiot. Then, THEN he says “If I survive until morning, let’s have my testicles for breakfast” (presumably in egg cups).

That’d be a turn out for the books in I’m a Celebrity. Imagine Paul Burrell trying to chomp down a man’s testicle. IMAGINE THAT POPPING IN YOUR MOUTH BURRELL! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

He didn’t survive until morning. The cannibal held the guy in his arms as he lay dying, suggesting to the court upon his trial that there was some sort of bond formed between the two, as though the act of cannibalism was an intimate and beautiful act. Hmm, there’s nothing beautiful about the fact that the man then went about cutting the guys body up into steak sized chunks and stored him in his freezer.

Even more disturbing about this whole travesty is the fact that he filmed it. Why film it? Ok, EAT the guy, sure, if you think you have a desire to eat human flesh that can only be satiated by actually doing the act, but filming it? Why do that? It’s basically because he wanted to watch it again and jack off over it isn’t it. I mean, why else do you film weird shit. He’s not gonna be watching himself or showing it to his family and friends going “Aaaargh what the hell did I do that for? Ewwww that’s horrible. No, not the eye! Man I am WEIRD!” is he? He’s gonna be sat there going “yeah… yeah that’s right… yeah eat the testicle next”. I mean Christ, actually eating a human being… that is fucking wrong. And who has the audacity and vanity to masturbate over themselves?

It’s a fuck of a lot of meat too. And what if the guy was a porker? What is the procedure for eating a human? Are there anatomic preferences for, say, the nicest piece of meat? Like, is the ass cheek the best bit? And are you supposed to cook it or eat it raw? Or is that just personal preference. In fact, can you get, say, salmonella or some other food related disease from eating a raw human? Perhaps he ate all the best bits then put the bones and remaining bits of meat through some sort of chicken McNuggets procedure, scraping every last bit of meat off that sucker and then lightly bread crumbing them for oven baking later. Jamie Oliver would’ve had words with him about that. “Just smash a clove of garlic, chuck that in and season it to taste. Pukka”

Do you eat the brain? Do cannibals eat the WHOLE thing, as though that’s kinda the point, or do they just eat, like, bits. A bit of “wing” or something. Were poppers involved ala “Hannibal”? Oh to see the video just to find out how fucked up this guy is. Then to have my mind permanently ruined for the rest of my life and resorting to lobotomy at age 27 having just eaten my dog.

Only in Germany, I’m telling you. Germany and America. Germany doesn’t even have laws against Cannibalism per se. I mean look at the guy:

He is WEIRD. I’m sorry but at NO point when you’re on trial for that sort of offence do you smile. I mean, not even if someone told the funniest joke. The SHAME you should be feeling for even being caught, let alone being guilty should be so immense you’d be depressed for the rest of your life. At no point should you be comfortable with yourself. I find it hard enough masturbating guiltlessly, let alone cutting off some random guy’s cock and having some sort of fondue session with it.

You can’t argue out of this one though. You can’t say “well, he WANTED me to eat him”, because not only is it wrong in terms of euthanasia and cannibalism BY LAW, but it’s also just FUCKING WRONG. This kind of act is NOT RIGHT. My mate told me the other day about a documentary on Channel 4 where this 40 year old Christian man would meet up with his S&M Master, who would tie him to a crucifix and fist him anally, WITHOUT SAFETY WORDS. Apparently in this documentary you didn’t (obviously) see anything, you just heard the act going on in the upstairs room and the muffled screams:

Master: (Calmly) Ok, and 1… 2… 3…

Christian Fuck-up: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

The camera man then apparently went in there afterwards and there was shit EVERYWHERE.

WRONG.

I bet you’re glad you logged onto the Tumour today. I think we’ve reached a new low. Ok, well, I think I’VE reached a new low then, let’s be fair, malign had nothing to do with this article. I think I’ve ACTUALLY gone too far. If you don’t come back I understand. As a sort of moral compensation, and perhaps to erase any images from your mind of severed penises and shit covered wallpaper, here’s a pleasant link to soothe your day:

http://www.mayyoubeblessedmovie.com/

Actually I think that may be even more disturbing…

PS: Apparently my Morrissey article has been causing an uproar in certain sects in Manchester. I was considering writing an "Aporrissey" (haha) of sorts, but decided that, no, I'm gonna stick by my guns on this one. Otherwise what kind of journalsit am I? [Well, I'm not a journalist for one, but whatever...]

Piece of Smith

2006-05-11T17:42:00.000+01:00

Smug git

I know we have a lot of Mancunian readers here (though admittedly not all are true Mancunians), so this topic may divide our fanbase somewhat (as MASSIVE as it is). I fucking hate Morrissey. Morrissey can suck my dick. Seriously, his music is tripe. Morrissey is music for middle aged people who used to be sort of semi-Goths, or who just plain can’t be arsed. Its pretentious lyrical bollocks rapped around boring riffs and fronted by a guy who looks like that seedy guy who helps out at village church fetes and enters competitions like “giant vegetable”. Y’know, based on looks at least.

I’ve always had serious issues with verbal expression anyway. The only type of singing I’ve ever really liked comes from the original soul and funk years, when people genuinely sounded like they meant what they were singing. Like it was ACTUALLY coming from the soul. Morrissey, for all the apparent effort he puts into his bullshit lyrics, comes across on stage like someone lobotomised him and left only the ability to sing along to the music in his brain, sending him out onto the stage to float about with as much charisma as a stupid 5 yr old child. To be honest I’ve always been REALLY dubious of poetry in any form. Even the most true-to-themselves poets seem contrived. Music is best expressed in musical form, not in verbal form. Too much can go wrong as far as lyrics are concerned, it’s safer to stick to instrumental backing. If you like Morrissey then you’re not listening to him for the music, you’re listening to him ‘cos you buy into his pseudo-political bullshit. It’s like listening to some rank 1^st year Philosophy student in a tutorial at university who wears a beret and stinks ‘cos he wears one of those Macintosh coats wax lyrical about some bullshit and ultimately wrong theory he has about the world. It’s thoroughly unsexy, pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

Christ he’s SO depressing! I’m a firm believer that music shouldn’t be depressing. It can be moody, sure. It can be emotional. But it shouldn’t be directly depressing. I don’t wanna listen to a track and feel worse off than I did before I put it on. To me that is NOT the point of music. It’s like watching a film where everyone gets killed horribly but there’s some sort of forced moral, and its really badly directed and you feel cheated ‘cos the acting is wooden and generally pretty average.

What’s the secret behind Morrissey’s regular ventures into tripe? I’m guessing there’s a massive issue behind it: he’s celibate. When you’re corking your hormones that much you gotta be missing some of the picture. I have respect for certain types of celibacy: monks, for example; but they’re cool and they don’t have a political chip on their shoulder 24/7. Basically Morrissey needs to get seriously laid. He needs some really GOOD sex to make him go “hang on, what the fuck am I doing wasting my time playing with fake meaningless Tommy guns, I’m gonna order 2 grams of coke and hire some hookers!” Then we’d see some funky shit. He needs to get all Sly Stone on our asses.

Politics and music are just generally a fucking boring combination. Which is why I hate U2. I listen to music to escape the real world, not be sucked further into it. ARGH so many reasons to hate Morrissey, so little time.

The other day I was innocently having my hair cut, and in the barbers where they mutilate my mop they had a bunch of music videos playing off of what I think was a VHS video on the screen in the waiting room. (Why they were so budget as to actually record music videos and play them on repeat, I don’t know. It’s not like the shop in itself was a tatty piece of crap). Anyway, there was a fucking Morrissey song playing at the time called “Panic”. Now, as a DJ this obviously hits home with me far more than with your average Joe. But Christ, this is a fukcing onslaught of hefty proportions! Imagine writing a song called “Plumbers are shit”. What is with this constant and unecessary competition in the music industry? Music taste is relative (even if Country and Western is shit), so why both saying "what I do is better than what you do"? Anyway, witness, if you will, Exhibit A, the lyrics to this tune (title “Panic”):

Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again?
The Leeds side-streets that you slip down
I wonder to myself
Hopes may rise on the Grasmere
But Honey Pie, you're not safe here
So you run down
To the safety of the town
But there's Panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself

Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music they constantly play

On the Leeds side-streets that you slip down
Provincial towns you jog 'round
Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ etc.

[Boring]

Ok. Boring. Panic on the streets of a number of cities in the United Kingdom. If we look at the historical context of this track, it was made at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. The song is a response to the fact that Steve Wright played Wham’s “I’m Your Man” on the radio shortly after the disaster was announced on the news (according to this resource). So I’m guessing the song is related to the Chernobyl disaster as much as it is to the failings of Steve Wright. I had to refresh my memory as to exactly where in or around Russia Chernobyl is in order to fully comprehend the irrelevancy of whatever the fuck Morrissey is trying to get across here. Yup, it’s the Ukraine. So exactly where do London, Birmingham, Leeds, Grasmere, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, and Humberside come into it? Us Brits aren’t exactly known for our panic attacks regardless, the 7/7 attacks last year prompting a pretty widespread sense of “fuck ‘em, lets get on with it”, unlike America’s heavy fisted response to everything. So why should we be panicking?

This isn’t my strongest point. Frankly I don’t have any STRONG points, who am I kidding. I just have strong opinions, and my main argument here is that Morrissey is a fucking idiot for underplaying the role of the DJ in our society. DJs and the clubbing scene are often fobbed off as “puerile” (indeed, using Morrissey’s own perception), inviting the sort of hedonism that is frowned upon in our society (happiness is bad!). Firstly, the quest for happiness is the ultimate human endeavour, whether we like it or not. To get philosophical about it (shut up malign), everything we do is an attempt to please ourselves, whether we like it or not. Even hurting ourselves is something we want to do. If someone told us to hurt ourselves against our will and we did it, I would still somewhere within my brain be satiating a desire, perhaps a desire to please that person and thus please myself by pleasing him. There are no selfless acts. People who work for charities are ultimately pleasing themselves first and foremost.

So anyway, Morrissey could argue that clubbing and “the DJ” are politically bankrupt. No shit Morrissey, that’s why we go clubbing. It is possible to have a form of entertainment that ISN’T politically related. That’s ok you realise, it doesn’t mean we’re going to hell. Escapism is not a bad thing. If we spent ALL of our lives knees deep in political issue we would never see the bigger picture. Even Tony Blair takes a holiday once in a while. If the music says nothing to you about your life, then fuck off and listen to some more pre-emo shit and masturbate in your own lack of self-worth and your middle class James Joyce-esque depression, don’t take it out on the hundreds of people who do actually enjoy dancing and going to hear DJs play, even in the 80’s. I hate, as a clubber, being condescended upon by people who listen to shitty band music. I’m not a massive fan of a lot of guitar based band music but as much as I can’t stand a lot of Coldplay shit, I recognise its place and if people relate to the music then it’s doing its job. But Morrissey you have attacked the DJ fraternity and we shall not take it lightly. Eat. Shit.

If you wanna get REALLY anal about it, it’s possible that Steve Wright was merely obeying the radio station playlist at the time when he played Wham. Frankly, DJ’s and radio stations offer the best means of exposure for an artist anyway, so if Morrissey wants to “Hang the DJ” then he’s shooting himself in the foot. Perhaps I’m being pedantic. I think not. Steve Wright’s response to Morrissey, while only modestly offensive, certainly cuts to the serious issues:

Extract (to the music of Oscillate Wildly):

Oh Kylie it's funny but it's true
I wonder why it's never happened to you
Whenever I appear on Top of the Pops
My records go down instead of up up up
And oh I'm miserable now
I'm very very miserable now
I was unhappy with the Smiths
But now I'm down right miffed
Oh Ronny Kray, do you know that I am down right miffed?
Give me one more week in the charts
I'm not just a man with a tree up his ar...ask me ask me ask me
The reason why I've never had number one
It's because I've never really had one.

Frankly, as humourless as Steve Wright is, I find those last two lines infinitely more poetic than anything Morrissey has ever farted onto paper. Actually Steve Wright is horrendously unfunny and so is that little ditty, but my hat still goes off to him for rebutting.

So, Morrissey = dick.

CraigAsBondNotCraigNotBond

2006-05-03T11:15:00.000+01:00

Not my argument, you understand...

This is not an article arguing that Daniel Craig is a good or a bad Bond. It’s simply an article stating that we have NO proof to suggest he may be either of these things. We have not seen the film. As a philosopher (this is the bit where malign goes “Stop dropping the fact that you’re a philosopher!? Who the hell do you think u are? Jean-Paul Sartre?” and I go “shut up, I got a fuxin degree yo, I’m more of a philosopher than you, you ancient history studying Fido Dido look alike you”), I find these sorts of ridiculously unsound and invalid arguments rife on the internet, and thy really piss me off.

People who claim he is rubbish are idiots. Many people of similar mental calibre exist on millions of forum threads the world over, especially in the IMDb forums. Now, there may be a dozen films at a time that are intended for release in the future that I may have suspicions about (mostly directed by Uwe Boll), but in no way have I the right or the ability to say with complete confidence that any of them will thoroughly suck. Of course, many of them do, but many of them don’t.

Take the new Pink Panther movie for example. Now, I won’t watch this film. Not necessarily because it’s a remake, or because it’s replacing an established character with a different actor, but primarily because I haven’t liked Steve Martin since… well I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever liked him. But I’ve actually read the odd review that dared to give this film 3 stars out of 5, and one of them was in The Guardian, a newspaper not wholly associated with stupidity and\or flippant remarks. Or the kind of blind, cheque-cashing generosity proffered by such classy rags as the News of the World (which manages to find EVERY film amazing somehow).

www.craignotbond.com is a website that has recently had my blood boiling to near bursting point. It annoys me actually that in order to reference the site I have to post the link to it on here, because it only means that it’ll receive more traffic and exposure, but hopefully enough of you will take it for the piece of irrelevant cock-cough that it is, and maybe send in a letter of hate or two. The site has two basic premises to argue from, which I gleaned from an email received from the site Administrator in a cyber-debate I managed to have with him for all of one hour. Essentially Casino Royale will suck because a) Daniel Craig is ugly, and b) its a “reboot”. Obviously remake is not cool enough for 21^st century cyber geeks.

Firstly, I’ve seen the original Casino Royale and I have a few things to pick up on it that might help allay the notion that a remake is wholly foolish. So apparently the original’s filmmaker actually took some artistic leave of his senses and decided to make his Bond movie some sort of self-parodying anomaly that, while not awful, has no real place in the world of Bond. I say “while not awful”, but it’s certainly not brilliant either, ranking a mere 5.1 on IMDb oft reliable public rating system and no doubt making millions of Bond fans the world over wish it had never existed. The film has at least 6 different people playing interpretations of James himself during the film. No doubt the owners of craignotbond.com found these to be the definitive Bonds to play the role in the movie, which they seem to assume must be a definitive version if they think “rebooting” it is a mistake (idiots).

Secondly, Daniel Craig is hardly ugly, and I’d stake my heterosexuality to say so. If he’s too rugged, this is not a bad thing. Bond has slowly, and thankfully, been gaining a rougher edge in time since Brosnan - possibly even Dalton - helmed the films. Dalton was not perfect for the role but he added a certain angry spice that Moore THOROUGHLY lacked. Brosnan developed this and from the look of Craig and from what I have read, the new Bond will be even edgier. Perhaps not as edgy as Woody Allen, I dunno, I could stand corrected…

Thirdly, there has been some furor over the lack of foreseeable gadgets in the new film. Frankly, while the gadgets were cool, they gave the Bond films – certainly the more recent ones – this air of childishness. Bond should be able to carry out his missions without the aid of some ridiculous watch laser that apparently was around in the 70’s but still has yet to be made. I wanna see Bond get into some fuckign tricky situations, where he has to actually use some brains to get out, instead of resorting to his explosive cpock ring or fashioning a glass cutter out of a shoe lace and a starched collar Macguyver style.

Craignotbond.com references a number of polls relating to the public’s opinion about Daniel Craig being Bond. Most of these polls are of the “who do you think should play Bond in the next film” variety. It’s worth noting that while Craig may not be the number one choice on these polls, he is often not far from the top spot, or at least enough people entering into the poll click on the “Don’t Care” button, as much as saying “come on dude who really gives a fuck, Brosnan had to go sometime. Will Craig make a good Bond? I don’t know, but I don’t care either. Let’s wait and see”

Is CNB.com run by a fucking 8 year old? I don’t understand how any adult in their right mind could conceivably dedicate this much of their time to a website with the sole purpose of boycotting Casino Royale, before they even have a chance to see how it turns out. It’s stupid. I contacted the owner of the website to inform him that his arguments were not logically sound, and that slating a film before he’s even seen it is plain stupid. The guy just replied with a “yawn”, which is the internet equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and going “lalalalalalalalala” when somebody tries to tell you something you don’t want to hear.

Ultimately, CNB.com will have no impact on the release and subsequent success of Casino Royale. It will all be a massive waste of time. In a way it’s kinda embarrassing therefore that I should bother writing anything about the subject but I feel I need to express my anger over this matter, if only to exorcise myself of my anti-CNB.com demons.

A boycotting operation working to shut down CNB.com would probably be a far more successful operation. One that I’m not willing to helm however. Someone should though (I’m such a good leader)…

Impranktical

2006-04-21T03:06:00.000+01:00

Me last night?

[Aside note: 3 blog entries in 3 days? Must be Christmas… cue blog drought…]

Last night I got a phone call. It was about 2.13 in the early hours. Sat innocently at my computer, doing the MSN chat thing [stop trying to make being a geek sound so casual - Ed], my phone goes off. It’s a weird number, but I’m not a monster, I take strange calls (I’m also a cold call scammers wet dream). Plus it’s usually someone calling me form a landline I don’t recognise. So I pick up. What follows is a paraphrased annotation of a conversation with a girl called Maya (phone numbers changed. Obviously. I’m not a complete idiot/dickhead):

Phone rings

Simon: (Clears throat in manly fashion) Hello?

An innocent sounding, possibly drunk girl speaks.

Caller: …Hello? Who is this?

Simon: Er… S… Simon? Who’s this?

Caller: This is Maya. What are you doing with my phone?

Simon: Er… what?

Maya: Give me my phone. You’ve got my phone!

Simon: Um… your phone? Excuse me?

Maya: You’ve got my phone, what are you doing with my phone?

Simon: WHAT?!?... What number did you dial?

Maya: 01234 567890

Simon: Er, no you dialled 01234 567899

Pause

Maya: No you’ve got my phone? Why have you got my phone?

At this point I’m thinking this is one of the stupidest or most stubborn people I’ve ever encountered. Does she not realise she’s wasting HER money calling me? All she has to do is redial the number and find out! We continue:

Simon: (Irritated) What?? The numbers aren’t the same! They clearly aren’t the same! You must have dialled incorrectly! Where do you even live?

Maya: Across the stairwell from you…

Simon: (Moments thought) You’re my mother? …Shouldn’t you be in bed mum?

Maya: (Perplexed) What?

Simon: Mother, go to bed!

Pause

Maya: Can I just come and get my phone please?

Simon: What phone do you have?

Maya: A Nokia… an old one. Can’t accept picture messages and its black. Really shit

Simon: Well I have a Nokia. But it can do all of those things and it works fine

Pause

Maya: Can I just have my phone back?

Simon: (Screaming inside) Look, you say you’re across the stairwell?

Maya: Yeah. Look, open the door and I’ll meet you outside.

Simon: Ok.

Maya hangs up.

The dumbest, most embarrassing thing about this whole thing?.. I actually opened my door. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I thought that if I opened my door – a door in a family home, MY family home, a home I know is not inhabited by any females below 60 – there would actually be what was now, in my mind, a hot girl in my doorway.

Actually I do know why. My thinking went like this: young sounding girl in a communal-esque sleeping arrangement? Probably in a halls environment at University. Innocent, drunk sounding? Probably cute and without total control of her faculties. More importantly, some warped part of my brain thought that maybe I’d been witness to some paranormal phenomenon. Images of Emily Rose, contorted and spindly doing a backwards arch in a way conducive to serious future back pain shot to mind. But with a hot girl. And all horror connotations negligent from the scene (though perhaps still unable to move). Even though I’m a philosopher and I don’t believe in the paranormal, that was my first reaction.

Or perhaps, given that I had just returned from a friend’s house and had to unlock and re-lock the house back door to gain entrance, I thought maybe I had picked up a serial killer. And I decided to tempt fate. It kinda makes me feel sympathy for all those horror film idiots who go into the woods. The moments you shout “don’t do it!”

Anyway, moments later I decided I’d call her back. I’m not sure why. I guess I was actually curious as to whether she got her phone. Maybe also to laugh in her face and prove that it can’t have been mine. Anyway, I called:

Ringing. Lot’s of ringing. About to hang up.

Male Voice: (Sleepy sigh) Hello, Horsey Management College?

HAHAHAHAHA. Ugh, backfire. I’m an idiot.

Fire Me Before You Hire Me

2006-04-20T01:44:00.000+01:00

This guy got the right idea...

The majority of readers of this blog are around the 22/23 year old mark. I’d be surprised and slightly worried if anyone above 25 was reading it to be honest, given the puerility of the content that lies within its pages. Though somehow I can imagine President Bush himself sat trouser-less at his desk bricking himself over the sort of stuff we mentally leak into word format. I’m not entirely sure Bush enjoying this blog would be a good thing, but it’s almost certainly untrue anyway, so who gives a fuck. Given our collective readers’ average age then, I can assume that I – also a young sprightly 22 year old – am not alone in my quest to seek some sort of employment in the “real world”, a world that has only recently exposed itself to me, pretty much by opening wide its brown long coat and flashing me its diseased testicles. The world is harsh, dude, like, get with it.

I’ve been job hunting now for about 8 months. It’s ridiculous. The time taken has been caused by a combination of laziness, emotional instability, and general pickiness at the sort of job options out there. Am I alone in finding the sort of job description proffered by an IT Consultant worthy of Most Boring Paragraph Literature of the year award? Do I fight alone in my quest to seek out jobs that do not feature words like “accounts” anywhere in the header? I mean, who ACTUALLY applies for these jobs without the cold, firm sensation of steel indenting their temple? My personal preferred area of work would be within a record label. Record labels don’t even have a fucking job pigeon hole! Is that because there are about as many jobs in the music industry as there are women in my bed? Probably. But Christ it’s depressing.

So recently I decided some bullet biting was required. In bullet time. The fact is, I need cash, and I need it soon. I need to leave home. This place isn’t good for me. Currently I’m too ill to actually leave my fucking room, but when this illness is gone I need to be outta here baby. On the open road. Saying “Fuck you… establishment!” and pulling over in my red Hyundai coupe to periodically slash up against a motorway service phone. So I’ve decided that I’m just gonna sell my soul and get a job that’ll make me about as happy as a 5 year old who’s just discovered his Frosties didn’t come with a toy. For a few years. At least then I can lead a life as amusing as The Office. Or not.

I also decided that having a dream is a really unhealthy thing. When I have kids I’m going to prohibit them from doing anything other than maths and English. They’re gonna think an Xbox is a quadrilateral algebraic theorem. No guitars, film cameras, or paintbrushes in MY house. What’s the point? All the fun, creative jobs mean nothing in the real world. Really. I had a grand old dream about being the next big DJ. But employers don’t care that you’re a DJ: to them that means you do pills every other weekend, you probably smoke(d) x amounts of ganja, and you’re most pressing matters are what brand of shoe you wear (to be fair, all but 1 of those certainly apply to me. Hint: I think Reebok Classics are still cool).

Attempting to find an appealing sounding job is like trying to find acting talent in Paul Walker: impossible. The main problem here is that apparently when you join a big company, you have to use really big, business-like words. Business types LOVE saying things like “strategic”, “vision”, “mission”, “goals” and “objectives”. Christ, get a fucking room why don’t you. Does anyone else find themselves switching more off than humanly possible at the first sign of a word like “productivity”? Are we all doomed to succumb to this bullshit babble?

I did the internet equivalent yesterday of flipping through a jobs newspaper with my eyes closed and putting a finger blindly down at a moment that felt right, and came up with some bullshit yawnathon that had this job description:

“Successful candidates will be responsible for analysing both internal and external sourcesmarketing information and understanding how this information can provide input into a Strategic Outsourcing proposal for a client. Postholders will be involved in all parts of the service provision from client relationship cultivation and management through proposal development and contract construction and delivery”

Ok, I’ve highlighted the words in bold in that paragraph that made me fall asleep. I’ve actually italicised one term because it is so ridiculous in its construction that trying to fathom what it means using only ones brain may induce a coma. Instead I proceeded to put it into Google.

Not only did it only throw up 5 results – suggesting to me that a) this is the sort of term that’s been made up its so rarely used and b) Google was so bored by the choice of words inputted into it’s award winning engine that it couldn’t be fucked to give more results than that – but the one page I clicked on that gave me a description of what it actually means revealed even more boring words and phrasing. Regard:

“The flow for presenting a Strategic outsourcing proposal begins with requirement hearing, proceeds to preliminary investigation and detailed proposal creation, and reaches the submission of a proposal. It generally requires three to four months. (The time and duration vary depending on your requirements.)”

Requirement hearing? Er… let me check my pulse… heart beat feels faint. What’s that? Three to four months?.. Oops, I’m dead.

I would sooner hollow out my testicles and make rudimentary Kinder Surprise eggs, than spend a day working for a firm that encourages “client relationship cultivation”. Have we finally reached the dawn of the robotic age? Can’t we just make friends with these people or something? Why do we have to cultivate relations with clients? Another similar phrasing for this that I’ve found is “face-to-face client liaison”. Imagine telling your girlfriend you’re just going to the pub, her asking why, and you saying “oh nothing, just for some face-to-face friendship liaison”. Ridiculous. Business would be more fun if everyone was like:

“Sup bro?”
“DAYM, Shorty! Wassup ma nig, I ain’t seen you in TIME!”
“Yeah n’ah mean, not since we clinched that deal with Coke innit?”
“Yeah yeah, seen blud seen, so you wanna shift some stock or something?”
“Yeah dude but fuck that, I got me some Cali weed somewhere in my briefcase, how’s about we spark up a zoot and have some jares?”
“Yeah blud ‘nuff restecpa!”

…ok that would never realistically happen, but if business was less tense then everyone would surely be 4123% happier. In fact, let me just get my calculator out… nope I was wrong, 5237% happier. I did round up to be fair though.

I found this in another job description:

“Duties will include: researching advertising campaigns across a range of media; analysing data in order to identify strengths and weakness of campaigns; and supporting senior members of staff in a variety of guises”

Note to self: remember to pack clown, cheerleader and Hulk outfit for work today.

Hahaha. Ok so I’m being pernickety. I would actually do that job if I could wear a costume though. It reminds me of that Trigger Happy episode where they con a guy into going for a job interview and everyone’s wearing a rabbit costume. It’d be bare jares!

So the moral here kids: when you’re growing up, make sure you’re best friend is your dad’s accountant ‘cos otherwise you’re gonna find the real world a fucking bore. Seriously.

Fame

2006-04-18T18:05:00.000+01:00

Please forgive me

Firstly, apologies. It seems on careful inspection of my site statistics (a little service you sign up to that tells you how many hits your site is getting) that we actually have a fan base. This I find remotely shocking. It is, however, in no small part due to my compadre, Malign Rumour, who seems intent on letting everyone within a 50 mile radius know about our literary exploits. Fine by me: shame I know no-one within a 50 mile radius that isn’t over the age of 55 with which to advertise to the same extent. What most amuses me when checking the statistics is that we sometimes get hits from people innocently searching on Yahoo! or Google for “benign tumour”, clearly intending to find something relevant to the actual condition. I find it hard to feel entirely guilty for misleading these people: after all, a benign tumour may be a tumour, but it is not a malignant tumour (though it may be a malign rumour – ho ho ho). Plus it means we’re getting extra advertising, albeit accidentally. What mostly pleases me about this is that I have made little to no effort getting this blog advertised on the web (with the exception of an abortive forum post, which went horribly sour), so the fact that the blog is featuring relatively highly on a search on Google or Yahoo I *think* means that we must be fairly popular. I think that’s how search engines work. To be honest, this is pure unadulterated speculation: the reason it could be doing so well on Google is that Google owns blogger.com and so probably provides a free search function for all its bloggers anyway.

But let’s not play it down. Let’s run with it, assume that the Tume is more popular than coke at a porn party, and revel in the fact that we’re slowly getting the sort of recognition we sorely don’t really deserve. Fame… I'm gonna live forever… I'm gonna learn how to fly!!

Secondly, the reason it’s been a little slow here lately is that my writing has fallen below my personal standards. I’ve written or at least begun a number of articles that I could have posted, but upon careful review I decided that I didn’t want to tarnish the blog reputation for (barely) acceptable journalism. That’s not to say that they will never see the light of day, they just need working on and they ain’t done yet. My progress has also been hampered by the emergence of a new RPG on the market called Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which, I regret to inform you, is proving rather addictive. Yes, my geekish heart is firmly on my sleeve now. It’s hardcore too. Its D&D shizzle. If ANYone knows what that means then we should go for coffee sometime. In a tavern. Leaving our +4 Mage Guild Maces at the dizzle. Or at least my M&S Guild scarf and +1 Navy Overcoat. Well, -1 since it has a hole in the pocket. But at least I didn’t copy it OFF SOMEBODY ELSE (eh, “malign”).

Also I currently have flu. And no not “man flu” as one of my female contacts (no she wasn’t in a game) suggested. Y’know, the kinda flu where you’re not really ill you’re just bitching and moaning and you take everything to extremes when really you’ve just stubbed your toe and the worlds gonna end and blah blah blah. Real proper semi-flu. “Semi-flu?” I hear you ask? Well basically I hurt all over but I’m not coughing and spluttering. So I can admit it, I’m not fully ill, but I can’t actually walk. My knees have imploded. Yeah that’s right. And my hair’s fallen out. And I have no penis anymore… actually if anything my penis has swollen to twice its original size. But not from an insect bite. Er… not from flu either. And DEFINITELY not from this porn I just downloaded.

I watched Ghostbusters last night. I like to think that I’ve seen pretty much all the films that are considered “must-sees”, certainly from the 80’s, and indeed I was convinced I had seen Ghostbusters. But alas, I had not. Nothing in the film was immediately familiar to me. I must have seen the sequel I guess. Or maybe just the cartoon. Ok maybe my friend once had that Slime tower thingummy and I gave it a passing glance. Or maybe I’ve just heard the theme tune. I dunno. Clearly I’m not as 80’s as I once thought. Regardless, this movie kicks ass. And my standards are high. Most remarkable was the fact that I found Dan Ackroyd not to be annoying. ‘Cos honestly I think he’s heavily overrated. I mean, no one can say he’s a particularly good actor without dribbling at the mouth, but seriously, he’s also annoying. I find. It’s like watching your geek mate’s dad act. But clearly the guy has a nose for comedy, and in this film he barely registered on the Irrat-o-meter. But hats off to Bill Murray. How is this guy so fucking consistently cool? Seriously. If Bill Murray was your dad you would just be like “what’s the point of leaving the house? I have all the entertainment and credibility right here at home. Fuck this shit, I’m gonna smoke a doobie with pops and drink some fuckin’ JD”. ‘Cos I would. Countless japes. Incommensurable japes.

Since I started writing this I’ve received two pop-ups from a perpetrator located at http://media.fastclick.net. Anyone else getting these? The smiley’s pop ups. My… god. I haven’t seen anything so irritating since that spot on the inside of my nose. What the fuck is wrong with these people? I decided to investigate their website (you can do the same at http://www.fastclick.net). These people actually claim to be offering an effective web –based advertising service. What, by unleashing upon 2/3 of the world a slurry of “helloooooooo” smileys said by seemingly the most annoying Jerry Springer audience member on the planet. Not only are pop-ups now the most attacked form of internet advertising in the cyber-world, but when they DO get through they cause such an onset of blood-boiling in the victim that if they had a button that said “EMP those fuckers”, they would barely flinch before launching a fist at it and “doing a Bush”.

Anyway, I sent them some highly abusive and untraceable (doubtable) message saying something along the lines of “FUCK YOU”, but sadly I didn’t make a note of its actual contents (which was undoubtedly the funniest shit you’d have ever read). I’m in the process of tidying up an article that is a retaliation of sorts to the dog shit website that’s emerged recently called CraignotBond.com. It annoys me that I even have to link to it to reference it, but that’s journalism. Truly this is the most illogical thing I’ve seen in a long time, but I will get onto that when I post the official thing.

Until then, take care of yourselves… and each other.

I Bereave I Can Fly (aka "I used to think that I could not go on")

2006-04-07T23:07:00.000+01:00

Chuck Bronson: successfully flying with the angels

Those of you taking more than a casual interest in this blog (raise your hands and say “AYE!”… [tumbleweed]) may remember me talking about a Brazilian guy at work who bears more than a passing resemblance to Chuck Bronson. You may recall me ranting off about this guy, calling him a “jokeless freak” or perhaps “the most unlikely man to possess an exceptional girlfriend on the planet” (paraphrasing both to a massive extent there, such is the laziness with which I embark on referencing my own work). Well, I’ve had a change of heart about LOTR Orc Extra #14 (as I like to call him). He’s not that bad. He’s kinda sweet, in a way that only a foreign man over the age of 35 could be. And he’s small. He’s like a pocket size immigrant. You gotta love him. Anyway, what really clinched the deal with Orc #14 was a series of events that happened during work yesterday. Well, only really one event, but an event that had consequence. I actually had to record the moment on video phone for prosperity (and ‘cos I’m a bit worrying like that), but sadly no audio was picked up ‘cos I forgot to turn that function on.

Basically the guy I once thought was this really obnoxious freak intent on ruining my days with really bad jokes and inane conversation turns out to have a heart of gold. You can see why he’s a chick-magnet when he’s sat in the break room at a fucking waiting job listening to a Love Hits CD on headphones with his eyes shut. He actually started singing oblivious to anyone else at one point but I didn’t catch it.

The track he started humming to first for the rest of the evening was a fucking Westlife tune called “Flying Without Wings”. If you can imagine for a second how that sounds coming from a guy who can barely speak English, a guy who probably doesn’t even understand half the words, then you’re halfway to experiencing the sheer joy I felt for the rest of the evening listening to this walking Brazilian solo karaoke machine. Next up, and this truly made my night, he started on with R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”, which was also a joy to behold.

It took my weary mind a while to make the connection, but it turns out that #14 has some sort of desire to fly. Interpret it as you will: perhaps he’s just a soppy romantic, wishing simply to soar up on high on a slipstream of love, riding his model-fit Brazilian wife as a make shift human-airplane; or perhaps as a heartfelt, unheard cry to escape the tyrannous jaws of an old-peoples members club.

Personally I like to think he’s a fucking idiot. Who listens to love songs at his age? Who likes WESTLIFE at his age? I don’t care if you’re Brazilian dude, you ever heard of Samba? Bossa Nova? You’re listening to the worst music England and America has to offer and loving it, when you could be checking out some grass roots shit and getting your dancing shoes on, whisking your comparatively insanely fit wife into bed and getting sordid beneath the mosquito net. Get a fucking grip man.

Yeah I was being sarcastic the whole time.

2006-04-06T18:10:00.000+01:00

It's funny 'cos it's true!!!
Sadly we must continue...

SEMPRE PROCERUS!!

2006-03-28T02:58:00.000+01:00

Proof that tall people officially come from circus'

When I scope for women – women I consider to be viable prey in the game of love, or at least, touching – I invariably look at their height first. Some people go for the face, some for the legs, the ass, the breasts, possibly, though not that often, they go for the size of the gut, either finding a sizable gut a good or a bad thing, depending on the particular predator. Digression. But me: I go for the height.

It’s a simple equation. Tall man + Tall girl = 29.736% match. Already. That’s, like, statistical mathematical fact. And a hefty amount of the work already done for me. You’re either gonna be too small for me or almost high enough. Cos no girls are really 6’5” or more, and if they were that tall, some sort of Channel 4-esque expose would be required and a weird name would need to be invented for it, like “Bodyshock: Giganticism”. Oh wait, something similar has already happened on that. Hmm.

Anyway, call me vain, but that’s my general game plan. And I can eradicate a good 87.34% of the population (statistical, mathematical fact) by keeping my height standard above about 5’9”. Usually if more than one and a half Yellow Pages are required, get your coat sister. Luckily, people in general are getting taller. And luckier still, tall girls are actually usually quite hot. I don’t know why that’s fact, but it is. Hard fact. The kind of fact you could cut a leg of ham with. That hard. Look at a catwalk and the average hard body is tall. And slinky. And snappable. Like a balsa twig.

Now, all this is kinda by the by. I guess my point is that I do look around for tall people. It’s normal for me. Tall people are not freaks. At least, if they’re not taller man me they’re not. I could be wrong, but I think my height is probably about as far as you can go without calling up the circus and letting them know someone escaped. Of course, people have refuted this. To my face. People I don’t know. Oh yeah, it’s great when you’re in a pub, and some CUNT turns to you, does a double take, and says “Christ you’re tall. How’s the weather up there?” and then, in the course of some pained and forced conversation on my part, and because they grew up with little else to entertain themselves than a broken bottle and some bits of bone, I might, if I’m LUCKY, get someone tell me I’m circus-freak tall. And then it’s like all my Christmas’ come at once.

People, for the love of CHRIST think about what you’re about to say when you tell a tall person he’s tall. This is on par with telling a fat person they’re fat (though perhaps not as rude), telling a black person they’re black, calling an orange orange, and so on.

Old people LOVE tall people. I should know. I’m tall. Yeah, I didn’t know either. Thank god for these geriatric saints because if I didn’t have them reminding me all the time at work that I’m tall, I think I might forget and bang my head on the door frame! LOLZOR! ROFLMAO!!111! I often find myself in my local Oxfam, searching for the odd vinyl gem to excite my otherwise boring, New-12”-less existence, and having knelt on the floor to get my sieve like fingers through the mound of acetate crap that inhabits such thrift shops, I get up to find myself the centre of attention in a sea of shiny grey wigs. Heads turn. I can hear the joints creak from lack of cod liver oil. And because old people are deaf, I find myself – with my acute, youthful and almost bat-like hearing – picking up such golden banter as (feel free to adopt Harry Enfield-esque old person impersonation) “my isn’t that young man tall, ooh they’re so tall nowadays aren’t they Beryl, he’s so tall! My how tall he is”. Sometimes, again if I’m lucky – and usually I have to check that I’m asleep when I hear this because it’s usually too good to be true. Seriously it’s like Christmas, Easter and Birthday time all in one day – sometimes they say “I bet he’s a basketball player”.

…

Yes, that’s right, height and basketball playing are both dominant alleles in my genes. You can’t actually have one without the other. It’s like some sort of fully-dependant symbiosis. They need each other to survive. Ney, to exist.

Fools. Apparently I must also be a rower, and I’m probably really good at DIY cos I can reach light bulbs. And I’d be good in a tight spot in the army cos if the bridge went down they could just lay me down horizontally across it. A guy literally just told me at work actually that I MUST be a rower, not because I’m tall (er, yeah whatever) but because I have the rower lingo. The rower lingo? Cunt off shitwad, I’ll give you gaying rower lingo, how’s about I rip off your 5’6” cox-perfect head, scoop your brains out with a rudimentary flint tool and shit in your brain. Then all your friends can call you shit for brains. Which I’m sure they already do [breathe Simon breathe!].

I actually was asked over for tea by a girl once to change her light bulb (double entendre thoroughly unintentional). Like, a girl I hardly knew. She was like “hey Simon, you wanna come round to mine for tea tomorrow?” I was like “hey yeah that’d be cool” and she was like “cool, you can change my hallway light bulb”.

Er, sorry? Needless to say I didn’t go.

For all my bitterness in this article, I’m actually really cool about the height thing now. I used to get pissed off when people would stop me at work and go “excuse me, just how tall ARE you”, then I’d tell them and they’d be like “YES!! I win” ‘cos they’d have a sweepstake going at the table, but now I don’t really give a fuck. Best not to really. I should get to the real crux of why I is writing this article, which is a very belated response to this bullshit rant I read in the student newspaper at my university in about 2004.

I’m talking about the Student Direct, the largest student newspaper in terms of numbers reached in the UK, possibly Europe. They came up with this weekly section called “Rant” or something, which was basically a small forum for anonymous (the spineless wankers) writers to go off on one about something that’s pissing them off. So one week I’m flicking through and come across said section and sure enough, it’s a bunch of midgets bitching and moaning about tall people.

This, I should point out, is appearance-segregation. The sort you get in schools. But in a university. Populated by 20-somethigns i.e. adults. So the general gist of the rant was that tall people think they own the streets and never look where they’re going, always treading on the short man.

This is fucking bullshit.

a) Last time I checked we were a minority, so we don’t have the NUMBERS to act like we own the streets.

b) We can SEE fucking EVERYthing. More than short people can. It’s pretty hard not to. If a tall person and a short person collide, and this has happened, it’s invariably because the short ass has his head to the ground. If a tall person points his head at the ground he can still see more than a short person, and more to the point, he can see the short person who’s doing the bumping-into. I guarantee you that unless she’s looking behind him, he’s blind, in a tight spot or he’s motionless, then the only person responsible for the collision is the short ass.

c) Short people have MASSIVE height-complexes. Not all, but more-so than tall people. This article pretty much disproves this point, sure, I’m taking one for the team here: but the difference is that a tall person will not go up to a short person and go “Christ your small” in case of offence, whereas a short person seems to have no problem reminding a tall person that he could tickle the underbelly of a flying plane.

d) The world is not designed for people over 6’4”. In case you want proof of this, ask anyone taller to run through the average doorway without ducking. Try to find a tall person on a flight who either a) doesn’t have their legs stuck out in the aisle in full danger of having the refreshments trolley take them clean off, or b) isn’t looking horribly uncomfortable and/or pale from lack of substantial blood flow through DVT. It’s horribly uncomfortable. Small people however could fit in a fucking suitcase so they have NO problems fitting anywhere

e) You ever see a tall person commit a crime on the news? No, because they can’t fucking hide. You can’t walk into a store with CCTV wearing a balaclava if you’re 7’1” because the police need only search around for Tally McTall of Tallston Square to find the culprit. Tall people don’t carry bombs on planes for reasons mentioned in d).

But fear ye not fellow Walk Tall customers, hope is not lost. The world IS getting taller (I think any old person will tell you that, they sure tell me), and slowly the world will be forced to adapt. Darwin smiles ‘pon us, brothers. We are the way forward for human evolution. And if anyone tells you otherwise, donkey punch them in the top of the head...

Service Station Soliloquy

2006-03-16T12:37:00.000Z

Moto service stations: proving that there is a fate worse than a car crash at 100mph
into an oncoming lorry. While listening to U2

Man, one thing I HATE about car journeys (apart form the impending DVT, the traffic, the ease with which one misses road signs, the weather, the monotony of motorway roads, the uncomfortable nature of my seat, the constant fiddling with my air conditioning behind the cup holders to make sure its not too hot, not too cold, and not to steamy on the windows, I could go on) is the fucking service stations.

So here’s the scenario. You’re 6’5”. No car has yet been manufactured with your height in mind. Really. Unless you drive a fucking lorry. I guess. I dunno, I’ve never been in one, they could be equally as life threatening on your legs. You’re tall, your squeezed into a sardine tin of a car, your mum used a shoehorn and her foot to get you in the door, your knees are up by your ears because that’s the only way you can straddle the steering wheel etc etc. You’ve been driving now for 2 hours, and your not entirely sure if you can feel your toes anymore. There’s a sort of phantom feeling. The kind of feeling I’d imagine it’d be like if you had your leg actually amputated and you thought you could feel something but really, you can’t. The kind of uncomfortable numbness you get when you sit on your hand and have a wank so it feels like someone else is pulling you off (never done it. Ever). You’re fearing for your life because the news is populated with tales of the dreaded DVT, and you’re not entirely sure if it’s a sort of new fancy sexually transmitted disease you get from foot fucking an accelerator pedal for too long, or if it’s the scientific acronym for deep vein thrombosis, a silent killer that sneaks onto modes of transports in a sort of stealthy Sam Fisher fashion, and severs the veins in your knees, causing the blood that goes to your feet to go in reverse and cause your heart to explode. You see the sign for the next service station to your left, it says “Chervil Moto 15 miles” or some shit, and you’re literally wetting yourself with excitement at giving your spine a chance to realign itself and save you from a lifetime of sponge baths.

You pull in. It’s a ropey entry, the sudden change in speed is a shock to the system. Inevitably you’re stuck behind a fucking van or something. But it’s ok, you know that within minutes, order will be restored in your skeletal structure and you can once more tower above your short minions like the superhuman you are. You park, lock your stereo away ('cos for some reason chavs, townies, pikeys AND scallies just fucking love hiding out at service stations nationwide) and head towards the Moto.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have pulled into one of those nice new service stations, one that’s left the old “glory” days of the Little Chef and Happy Eater behind, and replaced it with a fully functional, all purpose self sustaining island of sorts. One that’s actually had a make over and doesn’t look like it was designed by an unimaginative Lego man and painted by a guy with IBS. Sadly, even if you HAVE found one of these veritable oasis’ (oasese?) of the tarmac desert, your excitement at the sort of treats you’ll be in store for within will be drastically shattered and brought crashing down to earth with all the blind enthusiasm of a suicide bomber.

The people that inhabit the service station are unlike any other creatures you will ever encounter.

I’m guessing the people that choose to actually work in the middle of the motorway are gonna be one of three things: a) desperate for work\money, b) really into roads, or c) unable to fit in with the “normies” that inhabit real places like towns, cities, and village markets. I’m inclined to think that c) is the most realistic option. The last thing you want, after an arduous journey trekking through the asphalt jungle with your red Hyundai machete is to be greeted at Burger King by the creature from the swamp. I’m talking the most depressed, facially challenged, skin diseased fat person you can imagine. The kind of person who makes losing lifetime control of your bowels seem like a godsend by comparison to being blessed with a face that closely resembles a freshly tendered steak. I don’t want to be put off my meal before I’ve even received it thank you. The speed at which they attempt to meet your fast-food requirements is incredible. It’s like God himself has come down and said “I can tell you this RIGHT now. You’re gonna be here the rest of your life and go straight to hell”, laughed POINTING at them as he ascended back into the heavens, and they’ve just gone “ugh, wha da fuu-in peerrr” (translated: ugh what’s the fucking point) ‘cos they can’t even be bothered to finish words with consonants anymore after that earth shattering news.

I was so enraged after the 7^th minute of her fucking about that I could probably have forgiven Sean Penn for being such an angry asshole over everything. These people have a fucking service to make the lives of tried and weary travellers better. I literally want red carpet and a fucking processional band playing as I pull into these deceptive armpits of the road.

It is with this in mind that I’ve drawn up a proposal to Moto as to how they should change their services and make all our nomadic lives a little better:

a) The Staff at service stations should be either

i. Young and attractive. And offering sex. They should be literally hurling themselves at your feet in awe of your presence. They should be willing to serve your every whim and humour your every joke. They should be keen to make the best and the quickest coffee/burger/lobster platter known to man, and not expect much in return. They’ve got the joys of not being stuck in a metal coffin to rejoice over, what could possibly be more depressing. Certainly not being in the open aired possibilities of a service station.

or...

ii. Old and funny. Y’know, like that grandpa you see who still puts his Christmas lights up in that really big tree every year, even though he’s surely too old to be doing anything other than watching Countdown. He encompasses the sort of virility championed by happy teenagers and he should make you stop and go “Damn, I hope I’m as life-loving as he is when I’m that age”. This guy should be sweeping the floor, not because that’s all he deserves, but because I’m thinking in terms of Hollywood clichés and these guys always sweep the floors. Being janitors in schools. He should be like that old guy in Shawshank Redemption, but without the sad institutionalisation and the ultimate suicidal end. He should make you happy to be alive.

b) They should NOT be:

i. Over the age of 45 and female. These are the worst kind. These women will bitch and moan about all and sundry with their equally menopausal co-workers and will have bad hygiene and a history of hating men. They’d be lesbians if they weren’t too old and cynical to find that sort of behaviour acceptable. They wear unflattering fleece, service station issue blue jumpers and they act like walking black holes of gloom, sucking the life forces of anyone who comes into seeing distance of them.

or...

ii. Spotty teenagers. ‘cos everyone is thinking “that kid is dripping boy-grease into my burger and I’m not gonna be able to tell the difference”

c) They should NOT be extortionately priced to the extent that if you were dying of thirst and hunger and were expecting a reasonably priced small MacDonald’s meal to come to a nice affordable £2.49, then you would be sorely disappointed that your £3 could barely cover the cost of a daughter pounder* with cheese, let alone a meal. Or you really need a caffeine boost in order to survive your journey without falling asleep and waking up with a tree trunk through your stomach, and you’re expecting a can of red bull to fit into a pound, but no, it’s about £1.50 and you can’t afford it, so you DIE. My god, if the government want to cut down on the number of deaths caused by malnourished or tired drivers, then they should fucking reduce the prices if anything! Red Bull should be free on tap in the gents!

d) They should be the adult equivalent of a child’s crèche. With the ball pools. But not too strenuous, and of course, a lazy option. If you’re fat. ‘Cos lets face it, you need to move your legs n stuff if you’ve been motionless except for the lever-like movement of your right foot for the last 2 hours. So a fun way of getting you to move the creaking aching bones of your body as you enter and navigate the service station could be a crazy, dare I say it “cool” way to break up your lifeless journey. And maybe have some zoo animals in there to keep things interesting. Imagine coming off the Grey Endlessness (the motorway to you and me) and finding yourself face to face with an arctic wolf? That’d be straight tits.

e) It should be soundtracked by a wide and varied palette of various upbeat soul or funk tunes. No soulless rock, classical or aptly titled “middle of the road” music should grace the Tannoy. Equally, house music may be considered too inappropriate. In a lifeless, superficial place like the service station, one should be injected with aural soul at every opportunity, not inspired to drop a pill and find a corner to prang out in. Failing that, Al Green himself should be performing live on stage topless, covered in soul-sweat and clutching a handkerchief with which to mop his brow. No fucking Westlife compilation CDs should be sold in the service shop, and NO FUCKING JETHRO LIVE CDS EITHER. Who listens to that guy anyway? Do they think that only clichéd lower-to-middle class 40-seothign men drive on the motorway? Give me some variety! Also, on the topic of the shop, no budget DVDs priced at a not so budget £9.99 should be sold in the “bargain bins” unless the films have actually been HEARD of. Steven Seagal films can stay, on account of being infinitely entertaining, regardless of shittitude**.

Frankly, the only thing they’ve got right in service stations is the toilets. If they spent the time they take to ensure people had the nicest shit ever on improving the less rectal orientated areas of the service station (if only I could distinguish them), then maybe I wouldn’t be gagging to subject myself to the physical pain of an out of practise contortionist and return to my car.

* Haha all the cool kids will be using that variation tomorrow in school.
** And that.

Grumble Pack

2006-03-10T23:29:00.000Z

Me. Just now. When I wrote this

So a number of things occurred to me the other day, whilst pursuing mundane daily tasks and generally using the copious amounts of unemployed time I have on my hands to ponder over some of life’s bigger questions. I’ve written a bit on each of them. I recently posited that the blog (at least my end of it) is getting a bit negative. A lot of complaints and ‘ting. Inevitably this is a sign of my bitterness coming to the fore, but rather than me being “that guy” who sits in the corner of the stereotypical English pub with his head in a pint of Bitter, rummaging a greyish-brown finger into a packet of Scampi fries, I’d sooner be “this fucking guy”, who likes to think he can write humorous (albeit negative) anecdotes and – in this particular case – vaguely nostalgic or domestically relatable fact-nuggets. And immensely long sentences. Again. All those English lessons, pissed down the literary-drain…

Skimmed milk:

I think it’s ok to be healthy. Scratch that, it’s obviously BETTER to be healthy (I guess my reluctance to say that outright is an indication of my inbuilt bitterness towards anyone who’s able to maintain their health better than I am). And I recognise the need to compromise on a number of things in ones diet. Y’know; opt for the healthy cereal bars, get the fatless bacon, eat one lamb shank not two etc etc. But skimmed milk is where I draw the line. Semi-skimmed alone is barely acceptable. It’s like they took a pint of milk, emptied it into a 4 pint container, filled the rest of the empty space up with water, and then repackaged it. Whatever it is that this “skimming” process actually does, it sure ain’t making the milk any tastier. Milk flavoured water is what it is. Rubbish.

R-eject:

Why are there eject buttons on some remote controls? As though that’s going to make the DVD pop out of the drive, back into its box and back on the shelf. It’s laziness without reason. At least the rest of the buttons can enjoy being responsible for maximum obesity nationwide, but the eject button really isn’t necessary. Surely only stupid people use this. People who honestly think it’s in some way helping them towards a movement free life. I could imagine some fat person, wedged into his chair, pressing the eject button, being so overwhelmingly lazy and unsure of what to do with the situation that he sits there for 3 days until he dies from pure, unadulterated, eject-button-letdown laziness. And then Channel 4 doing a documentary on him. Bodyshock: I’m too lazy to finish this sente…

Mars bar and Coke combos:

At my school you used to get small prizes if you did well in a test. Not always, and not from every teacher, but in certain classes, like Latin, they did it. I guess this almost made up for the fact that the subject was fucking boring, though not really in practice. So if you did particularly well, you got given a Mars bar and a can of Coke. I dunno if anyone has tried combining these two together in oral-unison, but it’s fucking horrible. Coke and chocolate don’t mix. Least of all the Mars bar, the evil king of all that is chocolaty, by virtue of being nearly impossible to eat in its entirety anyway. It’s hard to describe what a mouthful of coke and mars tastes like. It’s confusing to the palette. It SHOULD be nice, but somehow its not. Like the idea of an Aeon Flux movie.

Kubb my balls:

Kubb joins the league of ugly fucked up singer/songwriters. Shame on the British public for letting these sorry excuses for musicians creep out from the woodwork and leave a permanent shit stain on the pop charts. Why is it that singer/songwriters seem to be immediately credible JUST by being a singer/songwriter? Like it’s a dying breed or something. If it IS a dying breed, then there’s a reason for that: it’s boring and dance music is more fun than hearing some whiny ugly man complain about why his girlfriend dumped him when it’s plain to se from looking at his car-crash of a face that it’s for one glaringly obvious reason only. How does he excuse smoking a cigarette in the majority of the photo's I've sen him in? Surely only rockers with degrees in being cool can get away with that shit.

And finally, on a positive note...

Square watermelons!!!!

Somebody once genetically modified the watermelon to make square ones that fit neatly into your fridge. Absolutely mind boggling how this shit can be done nowadays. I also read a while ago (and I’m praying it wasn’t an April fools, lest I look like an eedjut) that someone had genetically modified the bananas to come in different colours and flavours. Now that’s fucked up. That’s the fruit equivalent of genetically modifying a human embryo so that they’re a different colour, race, flavour, sex… god knows what else. The moral implications of the banana are tremendous, grandiose, and too much of a headfuck for me to go into much detail with (plus id blow your brain. Oh you think the Tume is just a hack bit of journalism, ranted from the mind of a semi-retarded neo-ape don’tcha? Fact is, recent IQs suggested I am the mental equivalent of Richard Whitely. So there).

Addendum: it turns out that the claims made by newspapers on the re-flavoured banana were false. Instead Chiquita, the largest banana distributor in the world, stated that they wanted to introduce different types and sizes of banana, and thus make different flavours. But no genetic modification was to take place.

Washington P.C.

2006-03-02T21:23:00.000Z

Looks like the joke's on us

America can officially suck my union-jack flavoured dick. Why is patriotism such a flavour of the century over there? Anything which stands in the way of reason is plain stupid in my book. Bill Hicks famously hated patriotism, saying “I hate patriotism...I can't stand it. It's a round world last time I checked”. It may be a cliché to point to Hicks for American common sense, but boy is he right. Being patriotic is just being selfish in worldly terms. It’s contradictory to any notion the US of A may have of being open to ethnic diversity, if they’re even making that claim (hard to tell).

So it was with a hefty sigh that I received the following email in my otherwise just and forward-thinking inbox. It’s hard to be fully critical of patriotic Americans, because at least some of them actually have their kids fighting an unjust war, so to not stick up for Brett Junior is tantamount to pulling the AK-47 trigger themselves (in an over the top, metaphorical kinda way). But it’s when actors get involved that I immediately engage my bullshit-o-meter. There are countless reasons why an actor might want to be seen building the morale of the troops, but one particularly springs to mind. Can anyone say PUBLICITY STUNT!!!???

Far be it for me to pre-judge poor Mr. Denzel’s character here, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I've copied this from an email and attempeted to recreate the same formatting changes but i'ts not perfectly accurate. For all those of you calling me a "fucking misquoting retard". The stuff in square brackets is mine. Obviously. Read this:

The Media Missed this one!!!!

Subject: Denzel Washington and Brooks Army Medical Center

Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel Washington and his family visited the troops at Brook Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas (BAMC) the other day. This is where soldiers who have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the United States, especially burn victims. There are some buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying in the Hospital. BAMC has quite a few of these houses on base, but as you can imagine, they are almost filled most of the time.

[K firstly, far be it for me to downplay any type of war injury: none of it is particularly nice. No one wants a phosphorous grenade going off in their face. But there’s a certain amount of “oh man, these poor guys have been to hell and back and we’ve got Army Hospital beds filling up by the day, pity these guys ‘cos war is pure hell” going on here. But I can’t help but think: how many more fucking Iraqi’s are currently buried under piles of rubble right now, or how many grieving Iraqi families are sobbing on a daily basis because their entire family has been inexplicably wiped out. How many people actually entirely lack the medical facilities more western civilisations can indulge in? I know these soldiers didn’t ask for a war, but I doubt many of them were desperately trying to avoid one either]

While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build. He took his check book out and wrote a check for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it.

[Wow, gee whiz Denzel, you wrote a cheque so that the American Army can whittle it away on guns n shit? What, you think that moneys going towards medi-care? Try doing some REAL good and send that fat ol’ cheque to a third world country where people are dying from some real world shit like AIDS and maybe then I’ll pat you on the back and tell you that your Oscar for Training Day wasn’t the biggest load of bullshit ever. Seriously, can you act any other way? Try doing a movie where you’re not a righteous son of a bitch. Life imitates art…]

The question I have is this: Why do
Alec Baldwin,
Madonna,
Sean Penn and
other Hollywood types
make front page news with their anti-everything America crap, and Denzel Washington's patriotism doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the local newspaper in San Antonio?

[Well I hate Alec Baldwin, Madonna ad Sean Penn as much as the next guy, possibly for a mixture of different reasons, but I’m guessing that at least they’re not just being blindly patriotic. And I fucking hate Sean Penn but no one can accuse him of trying to boost his own career via means outside cinema when he’s consistently pissing people off all the time.]

[Not the face of a man you can trust. He's thinking about his Oscar right now]

[Shit eating grin]

[That girl on the left thought Will Smith was coming]

[She doesn't know who he is]

["I was in Courage Under Fire. Remember?"
"No"
"Hahahaha keep smiling while you still can"]

[Here's Denzel contemplating a cameo on E.R.]

A true American and friend to all in uniform!

[A true idiot]

This needs as wide a distribution as we can create.

[Why?]

GOD BLESS YOU, DENZEL,

FOR YOUR PATRIOTISM!

[See, and then you plaster some sickening American garbage on the end and ensure that all and sundry outside the US are about to lose control over their bowels. Way to alienate yourself from the rest of the world America]

Ultimately this email was just fucking boring. Well, ultimately it was stupid, but boring too. All of a sudden an Oscar winning black actor does the rounds at an Army base, whips out his cheque book, spending money blindly on things that he can afford about 100 times over anyway, and mothers in America start literally wetting themselves, some possibly even imaging how big his dick is. I know I am.

Me, here, NOW

2006-03-01T02:09:00.000Z

This is actually what I look like now

I’m bored. Bored as hell. Can’t you tell? I had a dry spell for 3 score and ten (that’s bullshit but sounds so good) and all of a sudden I’m more prolific in my literary exploits than Poland is at exporting workers. Plus 3 of the first 13 words rhymed. Which is just plain bad.

I want someone to give me some money, or a job. Is that too much to ask [Yes - Ed [Do people still do "Ed"'s?]]? Someone deliver me from this boredom. Currently I wake up, late, look, vainly for work, separating the jobs I want from the jobs I categorically don’t (99%), and then sift through those on the “In” pile, cross reference them with my meagre CV, realise I’m unqualified for 99% of them, and then start looking at porn while I let my mind run into autopilot so I can forget that my life sucks. Hahaha. I sound suicidal\perverse\pathetic but I'm not THAT bad, I'm just terminally bored.

I decided lately that I’m a direct victim of the dream-dashed attention-seeking MTV generation. Y’know: kids nowadays. Our lives are so spoiled with modern conveniences that we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves. There’s so much I could do if I wanted to, but I’m already so fucking bored of all of it. Walking, for example. How boring is that? Who wants to walk somewhere when you can drive? Or stay at home? Or order whatever you need off the net? I’m trying all I can right now not to eat myself into a blob like mass of laziness.

I’ve always been pretty lazy but it’s the lack of desire to do anything that others might deem “normal” that’s brought this on. And its not STRICTLY laziness that makes me not wanna take that walk by the river, it’s the impending boredom I foresee doing it. Why would I wanna look at fucking trees ‘n’ grass ‘n’ shit if I can watch the Firefly box set in the comfort of my own bed?

Man I suck. The bottom line is, as much as I know I’m mostly to blame here, it can be no small coincidence that all my hobbies are media related. I enjoy music ‘cos it’s awesome, but also because I can enjoy it without running 10 miles on a treadmill. I enjoy films ‘cos I can enter a fantasy world without having to kick a ball around in sub zero temperatures. I enjoy masturbating ‘cos I can do it in the comfort of my own central heated room without having to write a thesis on the bowel structure of the lemur. I want quick fixes of fun. It’s the 21st century fer chris’ sake! Me, here, NOW!

I can’t look at a webpage for longer than a minute without having to seek some new form of web based entertainment. I discovered this new toolbar thing called StumbleUpon! Which I KNOW is gonna be the final piece of the boredom puzzle. Once this has finally become boring, that’s it, no more fun EVER. This thing gives me a random webpage based on what other people with similar internet interests think I might like. Everyone votes on webpages they like in a particular interest niche and it gets added to some massive stock pile of bookmarks. So I can usually find a genuinely interesting webpage to entertain me for 5 minutes at the click of a button. So once this has become boring (I give it a month), how else am I gonna get my instant fix of entertainment?

I might join the army. Clearly what I need is discipline. Can you imagine your dad sitting at home all day back when he was a nipper? No, he’d be out playing hoop ‘n’ stick ™ cos that was the shit back then. He’d be out throwing stones at brick walls, or chasing pigeons into moving traffic.

I know the cure, my brothers. My droogs. My breres. It’s a job. I’m not unaware of this. I need that structure and discipline in my life. But I’m, not gonna go down easy. I need a job I’m gonna enjoy, ‘cos I just came back from working in the old peoples restaurant thingummy where I work, and I actually had to leave early I was so bored. I left at least 3 hours early through boredom. They didn’t care. THEY DIDN’T EVEN CARE! I was there for 5 hours, surrounded by Polish people, who don’t speak a word of English, and I couldn’t take it much more. I finally decided to bite the bullet and actually GO to work because I needed the social aspect one can “enjoy” by leaving ones room. But sitting in a room full of people who sound like they’re talking in reverse is not my idea of socialising.

Does anyone else feel my pain? No wonder pretty much 80% of my recent contribution to the Tumour has been of a negative nature. I’m a loving guy! I’m free spirited! I like to laugh, frolic, joke, jape, cape, banter with buddies. But I’m terminally bored. I’m off to play Russian roulette with a Tek 9. If you need me, I’ll be in hell, chatting with Hitler about facial hair and shooting air with Mother Theresa about “what went wrong”. I won’t really. I’ll be sulking about my failed love life. Pah, screw all you guys…

Addendum: My parents have fucked off for a week and I’m taking a holiday? There is not justice in the world. A sit-at-home holiday. I’m drinking their champagne and smoking my dad’s cigars? Who do I think I am? WHO THE HELL DO I THINK I AM???

American History X Factor

2006-02-23T22:38:00.000Z

Raving fashion took a sinister edge after the Nazi's won the parallel universe WWII

This is some twisted, twisted shit. These cute ‘n’ cuddlies would just as sooner call you a “ni**er luvva” than sign your copy of Smazh Hitz. Just when you thought Nazism went out of fashion with the introduction of CIVILISED SOCIETY at some point in, I dunno, 1945 (60 years ago now?), along come Lynx and Lamb, the two demon spawn of Neo-Nazi California. Kinda like the Olsen Twins on race-hating-crack, these pro-white pre-pube hoes form the basis of Prussian Blue, a bittersweet pop act storming the less tolerant parts of America.

A biographical blurb on their website reads like this:

“Recently they received international media attention because Prussian Blue is a White Pride band. The songs they the girls sing reflect their White Nationalist beliefs. Today, if you are White, and proud to be White, it is considered Politically Incorrect by the media. The music that Prussian Blue performs is intended for White people. They hope to help fellow Whites come to understand that love for one’s race is a beautiful gift that we should celebrate.”

Now, I wanna pick up on a few points here. Ok, from the face of things, being proud of ones race is fine. People of African descent are famously proud of their race, and in a racist society that, sadly, much of multi-cultured society is, this is a good thing. A means of defiantly stating “no, we won’t take your shit”. But they’re not necessarily against any other colour. And this is where I consider Prussian Blue to be “Politically Incorrect”. Take another look at the picture heading this article: now, wearing t-shirts with pictures of smiley-faced-Hitler’s on is not exactly the kind of thing that’s gonna make me think that these girls are solely proud of their race. There’s some other shit going on here. This kind of blurb is the kind of thing that seems harmless because it fails to highlight anything negative about what they’re doing. I guess they’re trying to rope in as many ignorant fence-sitters as possible.

I took the liberty of using internet PIRACY to its most useful extent (and for the sake of research), and downloaded these little bitches last two albums, “Fragment of the Future” and “The Path We Chose”. My, what a delight. I’ll take the liberty of giving these babies something of an advised listen, and dissect how fucking dreadful they are and where their parents presumably went wrong (for they must have gone so very, very wrong).

A look over these album track-listings reveals a tasteful selection of numbers with appropriate lyrics you would be happy to leave infiltrating the minds of babies in cots worldwide, or perhaps play at a dinner party when entertaining guests once weekly. “Weiss Weiss Weiss”, to my surprise, was not a misspelled ode to recent Oscar winner Rachel Weisz. The lyrics follow:

Weiss weiss weiss sind alle meine Kleider. Weiss weiss weiss ist alles was ich hab. Darum lieb ich alles was so weiss ist, weil mein Schatz ein Bäcker Bäcker ist. Grün grün grün sind alle meine Kleider. Grün grün grün ist alles was ich hab. Darum lieb ich alles was so grün ist, weil mein Schatz ein Jäger Jäger ist. Schwarz schwarz schwarz sind alle meine Kleider. Schwarz schwarz schwarz ist alles was ich hab. Darum lieb ich alles was so schwarz ist, weil mein Schatz ein Schornsteinfeger ist. Bunt bunt bunt sind alle meine Kleider. Bunt bunt bunt ist alles was ich hab. Darum lieb ich alles was so bunt ist, weil mein Schatz ein Maler Maler ist. Darum lieb ich alles was so bunt ist, weil mein Schatz ein Maler Maler ist.

This translates to:

White, all are white, white are my clothes.
White, white, white is everything that I have.
Therefore, dear, everything I have is so white, because my love is a baker, baker.
All are green, green, green my clothes.
Everything is green, green, green that I have.
Therefore, dear, everything I have is so green, because my love is a hunter, hunter.
All are black, black, black my clothes.
Everything is black, black, black that I have.
Therefore, dear, everything I have is so black, because my love is a chimney sweep.
All are multicoloured, multicoloured, multicoloured my clothes.
Everything is multicoloured, multicoloured, multicoloured, that I have.
Therefore, dear, everything I have is so multicoloured, because my love is a painter, painter.
Therefore, dear, everything I have is so multicoloured, because my love is a painter, painter.

Or something thereabouts (yeah I did it in altavista translator and then tried to touch it up myself, so what? Wanna fight abaadit?). Now, the message here is actually a bit cloudy. The song doesn’t just feature the colour weiss, but a number of colours, and from what I can tell, chimney sweep must be pro-white in as much as it’s the seemingly dirtiest job here: a job perhaps suitable only for the dreaded “black man”! But this is lazy: I get the impression that perhaps they pinched these lyrics from some poem of sorts. Everything is going well up until the point where we find out that their reason everything s\he has is white is because s\he is (married to) a baker. Ugh, I’m sorry, there’s not a huge amount I can glean symbolically from this supposed metaphor. And besides, it’s not like bakers have the BEST jobs in the world. Both the baker and the chimney sweep are serving public functions. The fact that Johnny Whiteskin doesn’t wanna get his hands dirty by climbing up a chimney just means he’s a lazy shit. The message otherwise is quite positive. Multicoloured clothes because you’re a painter? Wow, artists are really cool, haven’t you heard? Art is the new art. I just don’t get it.

The mash hit single “Not a Problem” is a slightly more emo sounding number. Check these prize-winning lyrics (man those 13 yr olds really did good schoolin’ proper):

You can stay afraid
Alone in the dark
But at least I’m out here
In the light…
At least I’m not afraid
To say what I think
While your thoughts stay hidden
Out of sight….
So there’s not a problem
With the way I was raised
There’s not a problem
You shouldn’t be afraid

At least I’m not alone
I’ve come out of the dark
While you’re all alone
Inside your own world…
Well its time that you faced
The real world honey
Though you might not prefer
Reality…
There’s not a problem,
With what I believe.

Ok now they’re just getting preachy. Telling me that I’m actually harbouring racist thoughts, I just don’t wanna admit them? Oh of COURSE, it’s in my blood. Look, I’m blonde and have blue eyes too bitches but I don’t feel the urge to wear a pillow on my head every weekend and walk around with a lower case T on my car roof. “At least I’m not alone”? Are you not? Are there more of you or me?

Now far be it for me to correct these little… well, bitches, and perhaps suggest in not so verbose fashion that they “make the tracks more racist please”, I just think that some of their messages lack the blunt messages proffered by such timeless classics as “Die N****r Die!”, and “There’s a black man in my yard, get my gun”. You could probably find hidden messages in loads of modern non-specific music. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”, for example, is possibly infinitely more racist in interpretation, if you wish it to be.

So what’s up with Lynx’ and Lamb’s parents? There’s no way these kids grew up reading Nazi propaganda off their own backs. No child really finds history interesting enough to go buy Nazi paperbacks (unless they have particularly well drawn comics). I used to read my share of history books with lots of pictures and funny facts in when I was younger, but I rarely took sides, and I cant imagine Penguin have a chain of child-orientated pro-white books in their education range.

What gets me so teary eyed about these cutesies likkle wooja-boojas is those frickin’ t-shirts. This may sound dodgy, but if it wasn’t for the things one mind associates with Hitler-esque smileys (i.e. Hitler), I’d buy one. Does that make me a bad person? I’m talking from a purely Nathan Barley-esuqe “that shit is SO cool. ‘Cos it’s not cool? It’s cool ‘cos it’s not cool. Keep it foolish” kinda angle, where being un-pc is fashion-pc. Innit. Blud.

Seriously if you want some disturbing shit, go steal one of their albums (there’s no way I’m condoning people go actually buy this filth). Listening to the opening track “Road to Valhula” on “Fragment of the Future” you’re aurally assaulted by the two twin girls from The Shining. In “Aryan Man Awake” they tell you to “turn that fear into hate” (fear of a “black man with guns bashing down your door”). Most eerie is the fact that this is done in a solely acoustic fashion, meaning that you can’t even laugh at the clichéd thrash metal hate rock you will have expected from having seen American History X. “Hate for Hate” is pretty much self explanatory.

The follow up platinum seller (as if) “The Path We Chose” is full of jaunty uplifting songs also. Obviously this includes the aforementioned “Not a Problem”, a convincing argument for racism if ever I saw one. Disappointingly the rest of the album is mostly the heartfelt scribblings of love deprived 13 year olds. There’s always been something weird about pre-pubes singing about heartbreak and fancying peeps. Michael Jackson only got away with it when he was younger ‘cos he could actually sing something fierce. Anyway, these songs kinda fail to compare to the kind of emotional music they’re famous for.

Anyways (always a good way to start a paragraph), I’ll leave Lynx and lamb alone now. We can only hope and pray that once these sinister little bitches grow up they’ll see how strange and fucked up in the heads they both are. It’s one thing for an adult to make a pro-white decision (albeit a similarly stupid one), but it’s another thing for a pair of impressionable teenagers to fight for such a cause when they surely can’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Think of the Chiiiildren, won't somedbody PLEASE think of the CHIILDREEEN!!!!

Suck on This

2006-02-19T20:18:00.000Z

Who’s a cutey cutey then eh? Ooja booja wooja…

So I was reading the Observer the other day (check me out), and for once actually reading it, as opposed to kinda skimming through it until I get to the crossword and proving to myself how un-verbose I am (it seems I am sporadically illiterate, good at inventing words, as well as bad at writing sentences with enough breathing breaks in them, such as this one which has now gone on far too long without a full stop). One particular article caught my attention: it seems that a team of British scientists are putting their lives on the line for the sake of asthma and hay fever. They’re infecting themselves with parasitic worms called Ancylostoma duodenale which apparently thrive in regions of the world where asthma and hay fever are almost non-existent.

I dunno about you (mate), but the thought of any living thing alive inside my body is pretty fucking gross. These guys take it to the next level though. We’re not just talking, like swallowing one of the little buggers: some of them are letting lose 50 or so of them onto their skin! They trap them under a plaster and wait until they borrow INSIDE the skin, borrow further into their lungs, enter the bloodstream there (why there I dunno), and then get into the intestine, where they latch onto your duodenum and shit a load of eggs inside you. These eggs are ultimately excreted, but the little bastard remains clinging onto your intestine for dear life like two spotty teenagers cling onto each others faces like it’s their only chance of ever getting “some” (more proof that my English skills lack the qualifications for the sort of widespread internet broadcasting I’m aiming for with this bloggamejig (bloggamejig? Well fire me from a cannon and call me Rachel, that’s terrible)).

What brave souls these men are. A look at the picture above is enough to convince me that letting these evil looking creatures anywhere near me is cause for immediate self-incarceration. They resemble those weird teething-phallus’ in the new King Kong movie that gobble up one of the sea crew. 50 of them though??

Freud would suggest that it is perhaps an in built alpha-male-esque homophobia that means that tells me anything resembling a willy with teeth is not going anywhere fucking near me; but I think its probably more to do with the fact that these things LIVE INSIDE YOU. I’m NOT a woman with ovaries, I do NOT welcome any form of living thing inside my body, benign or malign (…that’s not eluding to either my own desire to fuck myself or to be fucked by my writer-in-arms. Honest), and I am NOT prepared to throw caution to the wind for the sake of science.

Still, let it be known that I have the utmost respect for these people so willing to risk their own lives or health for the good cause. If this is the stage we’re at, I wonder what scientists centuries ago were doing to promote knowledge in their field. I can kinda see why leeches came into fashion. And I’m not talking about lawyers. HAHAHAHAHAHA (kill… me…).

Centennial Post Day!

2006-02-16T17:34:00.000Z

Rockafella! If it ain't the 100th post! Check my literary flex innit.

Benign Humour

2006-02-09T17:11:00.000Z

Er...

There’s something I’m straight up terrible at: looking convincing when I pretend to laugh at bad jokes. It’s the sign of a good socialite if he (or she) can laugh at the most God awful joke known to man. I’m talking BAD jokes though. I mean, I actually find bad jokes really funny. As long as the person telling them either a) knows its bad or b) feels embarrassed soon after, and can appreciate that my laugher is aimed at them in an essentially derogatory, yet amicable fashion. I actually kinda admire people who tell shit jokes. That doesn’t even really make sense, but its fact. But some people will drop a joke about as funny as catching your finger in the door, laugh his head off, and not even realise that the few giggles coming out of the room come from himself and that guy in the corner who is being tickled by a dwarf.

This guy where I work* has a habit of making a helluva lot of unfunnies. Earlier today he recounted a wondrous tale of when one of the new staff tipped over a crate of tea cups and they rolled “almost to the other side of the room!!” He pissed himself. I guess the only excuse here for his shoddy sense of humour is that he is from Brazil, and saying anything resembling a joke in comprehensible English is probably funnier to him than watching a naked fat man sat on a vibrating washing machine i.e. hilarious.

KNOW WHEN TO SHUT UP I think is the key thing here. If you say a bad joke, that’s fine, you can rectify the situation by admitting it was rubbish, glowing an intense shade of red, and shutting up for the next 5 minutes until it’s either forgotten or somebody else takes the baton and drops a social-suicide. Alternatively, if you possess a sense of humour that you know is in sync with at least one, preferably two other people in the room, then screen your joke mentally before applying it to the forum. From here you can either ascertain if it’s funny, or if it can be funny in a bad way. If its gonna be funny in a bad way, be prepared to play up to it. Don’t let people think you’re a humourless fucktard. Additionally, unless you’re absolutely confident you can pull it off either way, don’t try this out on somebody you don’t know, lest they don’t understand you’re joking, or joking about joking (“joke squared” – although that would suggest it being a funnier joke, which, being a joke made out of a bad joke, is theoretically (though not always practically) not the case. So perhaps its should be the “square root of joke”…?)

Ultimately I’m terrible at laughing off something that just makes me feel awkward in its humourlessness. No man should be put in a position where you have to lie so outwardly like that. Part of me wants to just do an over the top fake laugh in his face and push him over the service trolley, but sadly I’m a) well mannered and b) chicken shit.

* For the make-believe Martin Scorsese film based on my life, his name would be Jimmy “No Justice”, although his name is Almir. This is based on account of the fact that he is uglier than the backside of a witch-leper, looking something like Charles Bronson’s bastard twin, and yet somehow he's in a relationship with a 29 yr old who is possibly the fittest girl where I work (to be fair this is not a hard thing to be). Ergo: there is no justice in the world. His second nickname is “Almir of Mordor”: one of the Orcs birthed from the very ground of middle-earth in Two Towers in a sport of weird mucous bubble. Lengthier but visually more satisfying when explaining to another.

Holy Shit That's Good Audio

2006-02-05T19:18:00.000Z

It's not quite the season anymore but I don't think anyone can fail to appreciate the absolute genius of this guy's singing voice. Ironically he's about a quadrillion times more entertaining than any of those fucking X Factor schmucks. Simon Cowell can drown in his own faeces...

O Holy Night

Backstory 3: Jamie D'Ipollito

2006-02-05T01:49:00.000Z

Jamie D'Ipollito

We typed "emo girl" into Google Images and got this. Here's her backstory:

In this picture she's simulating a position a slut might hold in a foursome with three guys. This she did for a joke. She wouldn't really find 3 guys who'd want to do her. Though she'd like to
She borrowed the top off her dad
Her dad clearly earns over 100K a year
In African Diamond mining
She's very well travelled, but is inherently racist to her own belief system
She doesn't actually walk to her destination, but floats around the place in a bhudda-esque, cross-legged way demonstrated here
She's just shaved
She wasn't given those friendship bracelets by friends. Hidden amongst them is an official tag from Kansas City Asylum
Her eyes follow you all around the room
She had her teeth punched out fighting a baboon called Kris "with a K" (Kris is a bit pedantic about the spelling, but what the hell he's a baboon)
Her name is Jamie D'Ipollito
She's really a boy. Called Jamie
He used to annoy you in drama
...and breathes really heavily
He thinks he's funny: he was at thirteen, now ten years later he's just fat with heart disease
And gay
Hence the wig
Looks like the fat kid from Drake and Josh

TV will never be as good after Baywatch

2006-02-04T16:34:00.000Z

Plastic as you like. The front row look like their heads have been Photoshopped on

Thank GOD for Sky.

Just when you thought there was literally nothing to get excited about at midnight on a Wednesday evening\Thursday morning, you switch over to UKTV Gold, and there, in all its artificial glory, is Baywatch.

Unashamedly the most ridiculous piece of sex orientated TV EVER made, Baywatch is nothing shot of incredible. Made in the glory days when everything from America had that plastic lens look about it – I’m talking late A-Team, Lois & Clark, early X-Files – Baywatch was something you’d watch on TV if you were a hormonal 11 year old trying to impress your classmates by showing how your balls have dropped way before anyone else (even thought they hadn’t).

From what I can ascertain, the Baywatch formula is this:

(Bare) story --> Baywatch crew filler --> boy\girls starts drowning\falls off water bike\eaten by shark --> saved by Baywatch hotty who dives into the sea in a way not too dissimilar to a paraplegic penguin --> MUSIC VIDEO! --> more (bare) story --> more tits and hot bodies --> filler, I think --> storyline lost in a sea of nipples and sand, and nobody watches the show for the acting anyway...

Not ONLY does this show have David Hasselhoff in it, the tallest man with a perm ever to grace the screen, and considered to have the voice of a god in some parts of the world (also currently advertising Pepsi in Australia. PEPSI HIRED DAVID HASSELHOFF TO ADVERTISE THEIR DRINK), but it has the highest titty bouncing content per square minute ever of any show ever made on TV ever. This is hardly news. But I beg thee to reminisce with me a second and appreciate that Baywatch represented an instantly watchable, testosterone sapping breed of television that’s not quite been surpassed since. Not even The OC can hold such claim to fame, considering it tries so hard to have a storyline that you’re left shouting at the TV “if I don’t see more 20-something barely concealed nipples soon I will switch over to BBC News 24 and watch something that actually demands my attention”. Why does The OC try too hard to be other than it is: a cheap, Baywatch-esque spin-off? Hopefully by season 27 they’ll finally realise that the weekly formula of Ryan breaking up with Marissa\Seth getting back together with Summer one episode and Ryan getting back together with Marisa\Seth breaking up with Summer the next is just plain fucking boring, and just have Marissa sitting their smiling for an hour instead.

Baywatch wasn’t pretending to be top quality programming. But the figures speak for themselves, the show pulling in 145 squillion viewers per episode. You couldn’t help but be slightly entertained by an episode. If not for the tits, then for the shit acting and piss poor storylines. It was like Diagnosis Murder except Dick Van Dykes booze problem and tits is replaced with Yasmine Bleeths coke problem and tits. The lesson? More expensive celebrity habits = better TV.

On a side note, isn’t the spell-check function of Microsoft Word fucking indispensable?

Sorry, “frucking” indispensable… *cough*

Shut Your Leipzig

2006-01-30T21:14:00.000Z

Sage advice from the new CEO of Bitch & Moans Inc.

This has to be the best idea I’ve ever heard. How draining is it when you’re generally quite chirpy, you think “hey, I’ll pop down to the pub, shoot some air with some chums, down some brews, generally let off some steam, and ignore generic-crappy-day-at-work-#243” and then you get to the pub and you’re surrounded by people who moan and groan about “oh god, my housemate doesn’t put the toilet seat down, how fucking gay” and all that shit that nobody really cares about. In fact, how many people could deny that 80% of their conversational topics are moans about something? Or backstabbing. Or gossiping. It’s some sort of grim western admittance that we’re a nation of people who like to bitch. Sure, we live in a country where the weather is about as inspiring as a Damien Hirst painting, but really, we of all people should be trying our utmost to be as fucking chirpy as possible! Surely!

Anyway, back to the point: apparently in Leipzig, there are a number of companies who have a clause in their work contracts stating that if you’re miserable in the workplace, you could get fired. It may sound almost fascist (“SMILE OR DIE YOU FUCKER!”), but not when you realise that you’re actually allowed to sleep in if you wake up feeling miserable. How many people will be cured of depression in Leipzig this summer because they were allowed to get over it in the comfort of their own home instead of wallowing in the mire of suicidal turmoil they endure sat next to Gareth form The Office everyday?

Another thing: If I was prime minister, I would make it obligatory for the British to wear colourful clothing in winter time. What’s the first thing we do when the clouds form an uber-gloom ceiling above us and the temperature drops to absolute zero? We don our greyest or blackest items of clothing and wander around in some sort of permi-sulk, allowing ourselves to blend into the already plentiful supply of grey buildings and camouflage ourselves into misery. Why not wear a shell suit that would make Josephs Technicolor dream coat seem as black and white as a well constructed logic argument (haha there’s a simile for you). Why not dress like clowns? At least then we might put a smile on the person sat next to us on the bus with a Stanley knife under his Kappa hoody instead of inviting him to finish us off by dressing like a dog fixed our wardrobe (and I don’t mean televisions fashion bitches Trinny & Susannah, though considering how fucking cool *I* look I wouldn’t put it past them to actually sabotage my dress sense through eXtreme jealousy).

Bottom line: Britain feels miserable because we, as Britons, fail to do anything about it. We should Brit-on not Brit-off. You can use that if you want…

LCD Visualsystem

2006-01-26T12:37:00.000Z

The kind of guy your mum would love and your dad would hate

I’m naked and ashamed before you, the general public and devoted readers of The Tume (the fuck?), confessing what is surely the most disturbing self-revelation I’ve ever discovered.

I like Quizmania.

Shoot me. Please. I’m not proud of it. It’s keeping me up at night in fact. Literally (badum ch). I’m also hooked on Celebrity Big Brother. I haven’t been into that shit since I was 17. What’s going on?

I’m gonna attempt some kind of casual self-analysis, the sort of psychology sported by Deidre of Dear Deidre fame, or Paul MacKenna. The sort of casual analysis that is more likely to do damage than good. The sort of uninformed analysis worthy of having my legs broken. I’m digressing.

I’m semi-reluctant because this is pub banter really. Not that I’ve had this discussion myself in the pub. But we’ve all wondered. What attracts us to shit TV? We all know its shit. We all want to switch over. But we don’t. Why God, why?

Firstly, I don’t think it’s too idiotic to point out that there’s not often much to watch on TV at 2am. Maybe this is some sort of broadcasting hint that we should really all be in bed, picking one of the top ten hot drinks listed as a question on Quizmania the other day (I’m already hooked enough to reference questions) as our nocturnal harbinger of sleep, rather than choosing to stubborn out insomnia-like behaviour by severing our eyelids off with a rudimentary scalpel crafted by sharpening a coat hanger against a computer fan… maybe, or maybe 2am is considered a time of night when we can be plied with frankly anything. Perhaps the next decade will herald a bevy of broadcasts centred around celebrities taking a shit and hurling it at each other, our fried brains unable to discern the difference between this and the repeat of War & Peace on BBC1. It certainly takes me a few minutes of watching presenter Greggles (argh that’s one annoying nickname) run around like he’s got ADD before I realise that I’ve just tuned into the pinkest game show on earth. It’s designed to overload our senses. Our brains are such mush at 2am that it’s like waving candy before a baby. The massive chunky sets and promises of free cash (for a 60p minimum cover charge) and, perhaps, a chance to win that fucking awesome snake totally rope us in. It appeals to our basic primal desires for quick money. After hearing Greggles (grrr) shout “call us” for the 100th time in 5 minutes, maybe we do start to think “oh well, it IS only 60p”, before we realise that we’re gonna be whacked in a queue with waiting music composed by Gary Barlow that we don’t recognise but that’s making him, and Quizmania loads of cash. Indeed, the fine print on the websites terms & conditions states that:

4. Upon calling the Premium Rate Telephone Number, the Contestant will either:
(i) hear a pre-recorded message indicating that the call has not been successful in substantially the form of: "Thank you for calling 'Quizmania'. We're sorry but you have not been successful this time. Please try again"; or
(ii) be asked to stay on the line and could be selected by the Producer at random to speak to the Programme's presenter live on air and immediately required to give the answer to one of the Competition(s) live on air.

5. If successful the Contestant will be transferred to a member of the production team who will take their contact details. Please note that the total cost of the call remains the same regardless of the duration.

Thus for all their talk about how you might get straight through on Quizmania, chances are you’ll have chalked up a £20 phone bill by the time your microwave chicken tikka masala has cooked. It's fucking confusing really: is it 60p per minute or per phone call? On top of operator charges? What's a Premium Rate Number? Am i missing a label? How does this shit work? So it could be that when they take your contact details you’re still racking up the phone bill. I wonder how much dilly-dallying goes on at the other end of the phone. I’d imagine there are a lot of “mistakes” getting those details down. They probably purposefully hire orang-utans to take down your details, ensuring the proceedings are delayed as long as possible.

So essentially you have to be a borderline retard to want to call in on this show. ESPECIALLY if you don’t know the frigging answer. The easier the game on the show is, the less likely your chances of getting connected are because there’ll be so many other lowest common denominators (or LCDs) calling in, and the harder it is, the less likely your chances of winning are anyway, so why bother? That quiz I mentioned above where you had to list different types of hot drink was insanely impossible. Sure, it had the obligatory Tea, Hot Malt Drink and so on, but the £1000 question was fucking Cider!! Have you ever had hot cider? I know it exists but Christ!

As for Celebrity Big Brother: this year genuinely has some of the most interesting celebrity freaks I have ever witnessed. To backup Malign below, George Galloway - who looks like one of the cast members from Dune - is the most annoying MP I’ve ever seen. Hats off to Channel 4 for ensuring his career is massively jeopardised by giving him the most embarrassing tasks in the world ever: acting like a cat is the creepiest, most degrading thing I’ve ever seen a man over 50 do outside a seedy fuck-parlour. Squeezing into those leotards and doing the robot whilst trying to convey "the emotion you get when you’re confused that your dog won’t come back": Mastercard-priceless. Generally making himself out to be a giant baby by moaning about being nominated, and getting that confused semi-tranny, Pete Burns on his side: also a joy to watch. And what the fuck is with that Burns guy\gal\extra from Star Wars: Phantom Menace? He looks like someone battered him in the face and then he had botox to keep it that way. Freak. No time for that. None. And there should be a drinking game where you get to down each time you see Barrymore cry. It’s ironic, see: using a recovering alcoholic for a drinking game. Sickly ironic.

George Galloway in Dune

Addendum: As much as Greg Scott, of Quizmania presenting fame is annoying, due credit has to go to this quote from his website (which is otherwise humourless):

ACCORDING TO "ELTON JOHN", "SORRY" SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD. UNLESS YOU'RE JIMMY CARR, THEN WHEN ASKED BY CHANNEL FOUR IF YOU WANT YET ANOTHER SHOW - THEN THE HARDEST WORD IS "NO".

Haha, fuck you Jimmy Carr. You know you’re crap when you’ve been dissed by Greg Scott! Eat shit and die…

Polly Darton

2006-01-19T19:20:00.000Z

A redneck farting a tune into a recording toilet while singing into a micro-phone?

No genre of music truly inspires a yawn session more than country and western. I try every day to find more reasons to love

America

, but when you have a nation of people addicted to a genre of music that the rest of the world really doesn’t give much of a noticeable shit about, I think there’s something very wrong about the coffee they’re drinking.

I’ll never (usually) write off an ENTIRE genre. There’s always something good about nearly every genre of music. And I’m sure, somewhere in C&W’s history, someone actually fired out a turd that didn’t quite stink so bad that it had to be sealed in concrete and dumped in the ocean; but from what I’ve heard of country and western, there’s not a whole lot to write home to the range about.

I like most forms of music – I like to think that my palette is as broad and interesting. Most forms of music I like to an extent – indeed, even in pop music, the genre that’s perhaps easiest to pick holes at, there is music that is credible and has good, decent production. But the problem with country and western – regardless of how well made some of it might be – is that I just find it boring. Samey. Irritating. Un-sexy. VERY un-sexy. It’s like really, really bad blues. A lot of people tell me they don’t like Australians because of the accent, and I usually go “you can’t hate a country of people for an accent, it’s not right”. But I actually hate an entire genre for the accent with which it is sung, so perhaps now I can see their point. That whole country bumpkin\redneck sounding thing. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect to hear from some kind of royal variety show performance featuring that guy that isn’t Shane “Rags to” Richie who does the thing with the puppet. And would probably make a reasonable joker in the British Batman. The instruments they use and the way they play them are instantly dislikeable, that whole Hawaiian sounding guitar rubbish. It’s lacking in funk, soul and, I repeat, sex.

I have a general qualm with the fact that most sung music since God knows when is about love, and break ups, and more love, and more break ups, and getting back together, and unrequited love, and love, and break ups, and love fucking love. Country & Western is no exception. There have been some good lyricists, don’t get me wrong. This I am aware of. But your average mainstream country and western is ALWAYS about heart break and living in a trailer and all that clichéd crap that is actually warranted cliché ‘cos it’s so bloody true but so bloody boring.

The worst is when you hear some 18 year old on Top of the Pops singing about how her boyfriend ran away with her sister or something, and you sit there thinking “what the FUCK do you know about love you underage trollop. You should be working in MacDonald’s absorbing grease through your facial pores, not sat on some stool on a stage in BBC Studio 1 pretending you’ve even had a relationship that means anything outside Love Hearts and love bites”. Kids…

WOAH. I find myself ranting inexplicably about something like I fucking hate it, which is something I’m trying to avoid on this blog. Or am I…

A Different Shade of Brown

2006-01-11T21:17:00.000Z

Another satisfied customer...

I hadn’t heard of this until I saw Eamonn Holmes and Lorraine Kelly bring it up (of all people) on “Not Fit for TV”, another shitty Channel 4 “Top Ten” program. I didn’t quite hear the particular celebrity who’s fitness video they were segueing into (I think, actually it was Vanessa Feltz: eewwww that’s like a topical tautology), but they mentioned this practise without going into what it was: anal bleaching.

Now, being the red blooded and curious male that I am, hearing the words “anal” and “bleaching” not only intrigued the porn-lover in me, but the kitchen cleaner too. So, because I happened to be sat at my computer at the moment (ahem), I typed that mother into Google like it’s never been typed before, curious to see what this phenomenon was. And I don’t know why I suspected it might be anything other than what it stated.

For those as clueless as I was 4 minutes ago, it’s this thing – championed by celebs (how surprising) – whereby you have your ASSHOLE BLEACHED by means of some sort of cream. It’s essentially if you think your asshole is too brown.

What… lemme compose myself here… what possesses people to waste there money on this sort of crap (pardon the fucking pun). I’m sorry but a) when was it abnormal for that area of the human body to be any other colour given it’s function and location, and b) who the fuck is gonna see this apparent rear-end anomaly on a regular basis to warrant it being a shit-giving matter (oooh puns left right and centre!)?

Are there boyfriends around the globe looking at their girlfriends Gary Glitter (haha love that phrase) thinking “ewww” for any other reason than the fact that it’s the part of the body designated for the expulsion of faeces? And what sort of man goes “hey honey, your anus is WAY too brown for me to look at [‘cos I’m sure he looks at it all the time], could you please go get some topical peroxide and squat in it please?”

It must be for couples REALLY obsessed with that area because I can think of no other reason to be paranoid about it.

Apparently Jack Nicholson told his at-the-time fling, Lara Flynn Boyle to have it done. JACK NICHOLSON!!! You may be my favourite actor dude but you’re about 80 and I don’t wanna think about you giving marks out of ten on women’s ring piece hue.

That picture above really is great though isn’t it? From a genuine anal bleaching I’ll have you know...