The Blog of Eternal Stench

!!!EnHanCE yUor Cat's BRAIN 100% GENUINE!!!11

2010-08-29T22:44:00.001+01:00

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EXTRA NOTE your cat must have a FUNCTIONING EPISPANGTRUM for this to work

OK BYE "FRED DENTIST"!!! HUGS OK? xoxoxoxoxoxo

Memorable Quotes: Apocalypse Now (Baker's Edition)

2010-08-15T22:14:00.006+01:00

Kurtz: Cake. Cake has a face, and you must be a friend to cake. Cake and icing are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

Kilgore: I'll eat this whole fuckin' truffle!

Willard: Gregg's. Shit, I'm still only in Gregg's. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in Waitrose dessert and pastries department. Oh man, the yeast rose so fast in Waitrose you needed wings to stay above it.

Willard: When I was back home after my first shift, it was worse. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a Pineapple Upside Down Cake with cherries and sugar.

Kurtz: We train young men to sell inedible bakewell tarts to people, but their managers won't let them write 'fuck' in the icing because it's obscene.

Willard: How many eclairs had I already eaten? There were those six that I knew about for sure. Close enough to smear their chocolate topping on my face. But this time, it was a traditional Mediterranean Baklava, a phyllo dough pastry sweetened with syrup.

Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my management of this bakery?
Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your recipes were unhealthy.
Kurtz: Are my recipes unhealthy?
Willard: I don't see any recipe at all, sir.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you a baker?
Willard: I'm a pastry chef.
Kurtz: You're neither. You're a seven year old girl, using an Easy-Bake oven, to make tasteless cupcakes.

Kilgore: Charlie don't bake!

(credit/blame for last one goes to Alex)

Ads on my TV

2010-03-15T21:16:00.004Z

Nescafe Ad
A bootleg Indiana Jones seeks out what appears to be the distilled spiritual essence of coffee, in the heart of a generic South American jungle. Securing it within his sacred Nescafe jar, he proceeds to a vast cavern full of identical such jars, adding it to the collection. Unfortunately from a distance, the jars look more than a little like they're filled to bursting with luminous yellow weewee. My theory: This man is actually a tramp in the final stages of a fatal alcoholic delirium, fancying himself an intrepid adventurer when all he's doing is wandering out into the local woods, filling discarded coffee jars with his own foetid urine, then hoarding his noisome treasure in the damp cave he calls his home. Here he will surely expire in the near future, to be found in some months' time like a Celtic king entombed with all his worldly posessions. But y'know, with piss.

Lynx Ad
Lynx adverts are infantile and retarded at the best of times, and they need to be; their target demographic consists of priapismic 14 year olds with unrealistic ideas about women. But this latest campaign is just face-palmingly awful.
"Women bore easily", sez the slogan, a very laddish proclamation that doesn't really jive with the hero of the piece's appearance. He's a hipster blowjob in skinny jeans and faux spectacles, and sporting the kind of physique that makes David Bowie look like Conan the Barbarian. Yeah he's a real MAN alright, which is why has hidden robot helpers to frantically change his hairstyle and clothing in order to completely emascualate himself by desperately pandering to the rapidly shifting tastes of his supernaturally fickle date. All this in downright psychopathic and single-minded pursuit of eleven seconds of frantic thrusting followed by two hours of meek apology.

Clearly they're angling for a bit of manufactured controversy here as well, and with such an excruciatingly insulting tag line, they'll probably get it, as they reason that any publicity is good publicity, even if it's people decrying it as offensive. Hell, I'm writing about it and I'm a hugely popular Internet journalist with a circulation of well over two people including my mum and the ghost of my deceased cat. So I guess their clever plan worked, but I'll say this; Lynx smells of failure, and no amount of magic robot arms will distract your prospective bedmate from the fact that you could only afford £2.99 to deaden her nose to the odour of your armpits and ballsack.

Thrush Cream Ad
I didn't catch the product name for this one. It's always fun to watch advertisers try to dance around the gory reality of the female menstrual cycle (which was invented by Tom Savini), and indeed any similar product that in the course of its duties comes into contact with our various manky crevices, be they tampons, french letters or good old bog paper.
This particular advert is a self-consciously low-fi cartoon, euphemistic to a fault, and of course great pains are taken to avoid directly mentioning the fact that it's a cream you daub on your lady-junk, because that would be an admission of the existence of the whole unsavoury process. This would never do, because it seems we're still very prudish about some things.

I for one think this is a sorry state of affairs, the human body is a beautiful thing, and should be richly celebrated. I wait for the day when our dinnertime TV ad breaks are awash with horrifyingly detailed depictions of blood-spluttering minge and fist-sized chunks of beige-brown effluence being wiped out of diahorreah-addled hairy arse cracks, like an obscene harvest reaped by a power shovel from the tortured bowels of lower Hell. All in HD.

Actually on second thoughts...

Seven Deadly Underground Sins

2010-02-11T23:00:00.006Z

1 - Playing a Game of Personal Space Invaders
Like all mass transit systems, the Underground gets crammed during the time known as Rush Hour, which is a mystical period lasting roughly from around the time of the first train until the last one.
This makes it a great place to hang out if you like unwanted physical contact with strangers of questionable sanity or personal hygiene. The majority, of course, do their best to avoid grinding against their fellow passengers, although well-fit girls iz welcome to ignore this rule, innit.
But there are certain individuals (twats) who for whatever reason (they're twats) will assume extremely close proximity to my person even on an uncrowded carriage where there's ample space elsewhere.
For me, this usually takes the shape of a bloke who stands at point blank range with his back to me, then slowly reverses into my face until I am able to discern individual flakes of dandruff.
I have learned to be prepared for such encounters, and when this happens I like to 'read' a chunky book with the sharp end pointing at the offender, so that as they inch closer, it slowly works its way into the spinal column. Once sufficient discomfort is inflicted, he'll usually move away, and won't really have any right to complain, as I was just standing there reading, minding my business. Psychopaths may wish to enhance their passive aggression with a bookmark made out of a Stanley blade.

2 - Premature Entraination
This is the practice of frantically bum-rushing the train as soon as the doors open, heedless of people trying to get off. Before you consider doing this, try to remember three things:

1: people aren't ghosts and you can't walk through them,
2: the doors have JUST opened and aren't going to suddenly crush you, and
3: Fuck you.

3 - Blocking the Escalator
Usually a symptom of cluelessness, being German, or just common douchebaggery, but whatever the reason, some people just can't help but cock-block commuters from getting where they want to go. It happens anywhere there's a flow of people, from ticket barriers to station entrances. But I am choosing to direct the microscope of hatred at the most virulent strain of this behaviour - the dreaded Lovecraftean horror known only as The Stander on the Left.
Now, London Underground's escalators are well equipped with signs explaining that you're meant to stand on the right side so that people in a hurry can scuttle down the left. For the illiterate, there are frequent audio announcements to the effect of "stand on the arsing RIGHT, genius", so there is really no justification for such ignorance. Conversely, there is every justification for barging past, over, and in some cases through these pests.
My approach is a combo of polite words and savage violence. Utter a cordial "excuse me", after which the subject has a grace period of 4 miliseconds to get out of the way before you huff and batter your way past them like a physically aroused Boris Johnson.
Of course, this works best if you're a seven foot tall, perpetually laughing barbarian like what I am, but what to do if you're a skinny little hipster type with bollock-hugging jeans, ironic haircut and thick-rimmed pretend glasses that you don't actually need?
Well, I hate you, but even you can emerge victorious if you're on the way down the escalator. The moment you see your victim, increase speed, build momentum and be sure to stomp loudly on the metal steps so they can hear their swiftly approaching doom bearing down on them like nemesis. You might reconsider this tactic if the person is a small child. Don't. That's the next generation of escalator-blocking scum right there, you know what you have to do!

You'd be amazed how unreasonable the father was when I explained this to him.

4 - Pressing the Door Button
Doing this just marks you out as a newbie who hasn't twigged that the doors open by themselves. Expect to be excluded from all the cool trains.

5 - Charging At Closing Train Doors
Horrified at the prospect of waiting another two minutes until the next train, some Kamikaze commuters mimic Indiana Jones and make a lunge for the door, though you don't see Indiana Jones getting hilariously wedged in and immediately losing his temper. The driver, who takes his laughs wherever he can get them, will enjoy a few seconds' fun crushing the victim in the door before reluctantly releasing them and chalking up another kill.
Such victims will usually be helped on board by good samaritans pulling the doors apart, and you could see this as an example of the essential decency of the average Londoner. However, you'd be wrong. It is an example of moral weakness. If you're not actively pushing the bastard back out again, you're part of the problem.

6 - Staging 'Tubestock'
Busking is now regulated on the Underground, and instead of being turfed out by the Tube's knuckleheads, performers go through an audition process (Charing X Factor! Bam!) and have to stick to designated busking areas. These are deeply magical, and will transform the busker into a farm animal if they stray outside the protective circle. Consequently, the modern Underground musician is relatively listenable and unobtrusive. Fair play to them.
However, there remain a hard core of dedicated musical annoyances who flaut the rules, plying their trade on the trains themselves. By default, these are the ones too crap or insane to pass the proper vetting process, and their MO is to move through the train, playing one song per carriage per station, cajoling innocent passengers to drop coin into their Cafe Nero cup so that they'll go away.
I recently had an encounter with an American hippy student type who, having apparently time-travelled from some far-off age when hippies were relevant, boarded my very-crowded train, lightly injured several passengers while removing his huge guitar from its case, then proceeded to play a wearisome protest song - upon which, wonderfully, everyone stuck their earphones in. A unanimous fuck-you moment that made me proud to be English, though I was a bit gutted when he didn't actually ask anyone for money. Aww, the trust fund baby with the white-bloke dreadlocks just wanted to give the gift of music!

7 - Being Me
I flatten people on the escalator, stab them with books, push them off trains, crush the spirits of young musicians, and worse. Take my advice - if you see me on a train, wait for the next one.

Happy 2010, and now for some pirates

2010-01-22T16:57:00.002Z

I'm just sitting in my girlfriend's flat eating her crisps and waiting for her to get off work and watching News 24 when I see a story ripe with potential for awesomeness - a British couple currently held hostage by Somalian pirates were set to be rescued by special forces, but the operation has been called off due to Whitehall 'bungling'. This pisses me off, the SAS (or Commandos, both are brilliant) are all set to jump out of helicopters or maybe show up in jeeps with machine guns welded to them, then this real-life A Team episode in the making gets nixed just because some empty suit (probably named Daniel or Miles) in Whitehall fails to fill in the correct form or something. I despair at this incompetance, and am entirely sure that the world would be a better place if our special forces were just allowed to do whatever they fancied. Can you seriously imagine any situation that couldn't readily be solved by the SAS bursting in like Regan and Carter off The Sweeney and bashing heads together until everything is sorted out? If you can, send a SAE to You're Wrong.

Pirates in general would have a much harder time plying their vile trade if the Navy had license to go and sink their ships as in the good old days of the 18th century. Not only would it make the area safer for commercial shipping and stupid rich people to sail their yachts, but imagine the morale boost the nation would recieve from the knowledge that our sailors are tearing it up on the seven seas and beating up pirates like Master & Commander but with fuckoff great Gatling guns.

On the note of rich yachtsmen; I hope this couple will be alright, but if you happen to be the sort of person with the means to own a boat, surely there are more placid places to be sailing around in your million quid luxury yacht with 'VICTIM' stencilled down the side in MS Comic Sans? Like for instance, the places without BLOODTHIRSTY PIRATES in them? Say what you like about renting a pedal boat for an afternoon at Blackpool, at least the worst that can happen there is getting your 99 Flake shat in by a divebombing seagull. Pirates are violent dickheads, but some people are just thick.

Twatter

2009-02-12T21:09:00.020Z

Oh, hi! Where have I been, you ask? That's a good question, but I might ask you the same thing. It's past ten and your dinner's cold, and frankly I don't know why I bother anymore. Anyway, it's been a while. I could blame work and personal commitments for my unforgivable failure to update since 2008, but really it's because in the middle of November I was hurled screaming into the sky and awoke on the lightless planet of Ordure IV, placed in indentured servitude to the blasphemous Bivalve Allmother (and her many temporary eyes), doomed to spend my remaining days toiling at the construction of her Ebon Sarcophagus, a vast basalt mausoleum to the million slaves who would die whilst toiling at the construction of the Ebon Sarcophagus, a vast basalt mausoleum to the million slaves, etc.

However, that didn't happen so I can't say that.

Mostly I have been working in a shop that sells board games, card games and associated items. Overall this is a pretty neat job to have, as the majority of time is spent playing games and talking about games with nerds (mostly good nerds, with a modest smattering of the enormous, heavily-breathing ones that bear the seductive aroma of years-unwashed crevices) so the days go fairly quickly. I've been there since August and am now being made assistant manager, all responsibilities and extra dosh, which I guess is pretty good going for a guy that used to eke out a Dickensian pittance milling around in the background of television dramas. I do still find time for that occasionally though, most recently I appeared for like five whole seconds in shit unfunny BBC con man series Hustle, being abused by a posh lady! Stage Magazine said my performance was "like a brilliantine opal afloat in a sea of musty bog-water, otherwise punctuated only by smug gurning twats in their smug suits all smugging around a racially homogenised, inexplicably pristeen Bizarro London where everything keeps slowing down then speeding up for no apparent reason".

Well, it said that after I wrote it in my copy anyway. Using my own tears of frustration.

Anyway, this has all yet to come through, but my whopping fifteen pence pay rise has already come into effect, so I guess this is all gravy. Me + Claude going to San "den of rampaging homosexuals" Francisco in October, so it'll all contribute to the bail money for when they catch the scoundrel smuggling certain sensitive materials into the country. Mo'fugger LOVE smuggling sensitive materials.

So hey, they made a new Star Trek film, about the original characters. I went to see it last week, and I was pretty impressed, although my viewing pleasure was interrupted by the usual cadre of retards that always know when I'm going to see a film and book tickets for the same performance as me. The moving and talking was very good, and the work done by the makeup artists was nothing short of legendary. Leonard Nimoy, well into his seventies, didn't look a day over 23 in his role as Spock. There was even a scene where he met a version of himself without makeup, to show the difference. I don't know how they had it so that there were two of him, I think it's one of those things they done off a computer, like on Red Dwarf except it's funny sometimes.

Anyway, it's a fast-paced, good-humoured adventure with an excellent cast who really bounce off eachother in the tradition of the original series' chucklesome banter. As such, it really fucking annoyed me, because there's nothing worse than a film that's impossible for me to complain about in some small way, but fortunately they indulged me by making the music shit.

I am a gent of simple pleasures - grog, erotic pamphletry of the 17th century and, chiefly, dramatic film music. I honestly lap dat shit up, so I was very excited when I heard that Michael Giacchino, who's previously been responsible for the rousing orchestral soundtracks to the Medal of Honour game series (really bloody good) and Lost (also good, in a discordant way), was doing the score. Unfortunately, it turned out really generic and crap - like, Hans Zimmer crap. There was one identical theme for everything, from orbital skydiving to imploding planet to the climactic Romulan shooting gallery. It might as well have been a theatrical "dun-dun-DUNNNN!" played on a cheap 1900s picture-house organ. The only memorable music in the film came from Alexander Courage (admittedly badass remix of silly original theme) and of course the Beastie Boys, whose work I'd never expect to see in a Star Trek film, and yet it made such perfect, beautiful sense seeing as the Beasties are such humungous nerds.

Anything else? Well, only trifling things: Phasers should go 'ZEEEEEEEEE', not 'PYOO' as this is not the bloody Phantom Menace, and also there have now been two Star Trek films in a row where the baddy is an annoyed Romulan in a gigantic doom-vessel shaped like one of those 'Celtic Fantasy Daggers' you see for sale at new-age shops in dismal Medway towns. Why not mix it up in the next film and have a villain who, say, is a different kind of Romulan, or not a Romulan at all, or a villain who turns out to be a decent chap in the end, or no villain at all? One of my fave things about Star Trek 4...

hang on.

NERD BALLS DESCENDING! AWOOGA!

Ahem, yes, my fave thing about that film (besides the bit where reincarnated hippy Spock wastes the unconvincing '80s punk rocker) was that the alien causing all the grief was just a confused space thingy with no malicious intent, that obligingly buggered off when it had the situation adequately explained to it. See, everyone was friends in the end and plus they totally brought back the whales! A happy sentiment that JJ Abrams might do well to heed, and ought to gain more relevance now Barack Obama is in charge and an end to all war has been declared.

Until he starts enslaving all the white people, of course.

Travel Update

2008-09-17T21:53:00.007+01:00

-Artemiseum Line - service suspended due to the wrong kind of Persian triremes on the track. A replacement minotaur service is in place.

- Passengers are politely reminded to stand on the right side of the escalators, and not to get in a huff when someone hurrying down the left side politely asks you to move. Thank you.

- Escher Line - returning to abnormal service following a part-suspension between Obtuse and Abstruse due to emergency mindfucking work.

- Northern Line - poncing off parents and staying home all day playing Grand Theft Auto. Needs to get job, seriously.

- No no, the RIGHT side. Really, it's quite simple.

- Little Bighorn - heap congested due to many white double-tongues dead by tomahawks of Lakota and Cheyenne braves. Travel by alternative bloodbaths wherever possible.

- Kentish Town and Colindale are no longer speaking, due to Kentish Town finding a pair of Old Street's knickers in its laundry.

- Central Line is strawberry flavoured, Northern is blackcurrant. District and Circle, as lemon and lime, are least popular and will be left over in large quantities when all the nice tasting lines have been eaten.

- Arnos Grove - in service, but perilous. They delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the long dark. Shadow and flame.

- The left side of the escalators now carries a passive electric charge. Hope you're wearing rubber soles, fuckface.

Three Perfectly Reasonable Requests

2008-08-13T23:46:00.011+01:00

I turn 23 in three days' time, an only slightly less terrifying prospect than turning 22 was. The blow of having to add an essentially meaningless digit onto the end of my age is softened somewhat by the knowledge that I have a TOP NEW JOB lined up, and the financial depredations of the past few months will soon be a hazy memory which will be noted in the histories as "The Age Of Not Affording Shit". And the job isn't even a horrible one! It's actually very nicely located directly across the street from the British Museum, so I can pop in there on my lunch break and marvel at the product of three hundred totally rockin' centuries of the British Empire beating up everyone else and filching their religious artefacts. Haha, fuck everyone that isn't us!

Now, when I near a birthday, two things happen. One, I begin to labour under the apprehension that I am getting Old and feel self-conscious about the aspects of my personality which are ostensibly rather childish (like for instance, most of them). Two, I completely forget all the stuff that I've wanted for ages and am now in a position to ask for as gifts. The simple question "so, what do you want for your birthday?" suddenly assumes a dreadful aspect, as I realise that my mind has been wiped clean, (possibly by the malevolent ghost of Hitler) of the mental checklist of crap wot I want.

What I never forget, however, is the stupendously extravagant stuff that I'd never ask anyone for, on account of its exorbitant price, impractical size or plain old uselessness. Here are three of those things. Of course, if you're an eccentric millionaire with a generous streak, I'd gladly accept any of these as compensation for getting older. There's still time left.

ITEM: Headcrab Hat

WHY I WANT IT: It's a cute little head-humper! A plush friend for (half) life, who doubles up as a fetching headpiece for cold winter days! Once I have a headcrab, all I need is a ripped shirt, white lab coat and a few capsules of fake blood and hey, ladies - say hello to Zombie Scientist Benneth! Lurching blindly down the dank hallways of your local secret underground research facility or shopping centre. I'm not sure where to find the lab coat, maybe there's a Science warehouse shop tucked away somewhere, a place like Builder Centre but with more beakers and antimass spectrometers. And crowbars. They must get all that stuff from somewhere. Besides the marvellous opportunities for fancy dress and Halowe'en shenanigans, a zombie scientist outfit would also be great for staging cruel practical jokes on people who habitually play Half-Life in the dark for hours. So, people exactly like myself. Actually I'm working on my blood-curdling 'skinless zombie' scream as we speak!

REALITY CHECK: It's thirty fucking quid for a bit of stuffed fabric! And that's before you factor in the stupendous cost of shipping things from America, which is where the little darling would be coming from. The headcrab farms of West Texas, I believe. Besides this, I would look like I had a dead chicken on my head to anyone who doesn't have an intimate understanding of the Half-Life universe, and I understand this is a group which counts "most normal people" amongst its members. And within that group exists a small but vocal substrate known as "people who beat up people that look hilarious".

ITEM: Zorb

WHY I WANT IT: You're shitting me, right? It's a person-sized hamster ball. That you can get inside and roll around in. How could anyone NOT want it? It'd have a thousand everyday applications - rolling down hills, rolling up hills, rolling to the shops, rolling to work, rolling to criminal court to stand trial for rolling over all those pedestrians... not to mention its limitless potential as a crimefighting tool. I'm no physics expert, but I'm fairly sure that a person ensconced in this ball would be completely impervious to all damage. I'd be confident in rolling it down a mountainside into a tank with nary a bruise. Criminals would learn to fear the inexorable approach of Human Hamster, or at the very least think twice before conducting their criminal activities on sharply inclined planes. If taken to a very hilly location such as the Welsh valleys, it is very possible that one could position oneself at the top of a hill, start rolling, and never, ever stop.

REALITY CHECK: Besides the fact it's a thousand quid, where would I keep it? That is, if I could ever get the damn thing inflated. I'm not sure if you have to do that yourself, but I think I'd go through several foot pumps trying to get my ball erect. And while I don't normally suffer from motion sickness, I can think of nothing more horrible than being entombed inside an uncontrollably spinning, bouncing translucent ball that's full to bursting with litre upon litre of your own putrid, yellow-brown chuck. Well, besides being forced to share a single bed with John McRirrick.

ITEM: Aliens pulse rifle

WHY I WANT IT: Because I got nukes, I got knives, sharp sticks... and this would be a nice addition to the arsenal. It comes in kit form so you have to build it yourself, but in my years of experience as a sad, sad model-building spod, I have accrued the requisite skills to make this a moot point. The pulse rifle is without a doubt my favourite science fiction dingus. Solid, reliable and distinctly more macho than fiddly lightsabers or those emasculated little phasers that emit a hypo-allergenic beam of yellow energy and go "weeeeee". It's an example of why I prefer 'ARD sci-fi - if you point this at a gibbering, ravenous xenomorph and pull the trigger, does the offending party politely go "arrgh" and fall backwards with no visible wounding? Christ no, the bastard erupts into a shrieking, bleeding orgy of corrosive acid blood and shards of splintered exoskeleton, and job's a good'un. It's a classic piece of production design work, and I'd love to have one lying around, set against the day my house is colonised by imaginary gribblies. Or gypsies.

REALITY CHECK: The fact that I might actually end up buying and building this if I should happen across the required disposable income bespeaks my status as a huge, flaming nerd of the basest order. However, I like being a huge flaming nerd, so shut it. At least I don't go around stabbing people. Lately. Anyway, I am sure the initial novelty of owning one would be quickly be dampened by the fact I couldn't actually spray explosive caseless ammunition at stuff with it. And it wouldn't make that fantastic "b'doop-b'doop" sound effect. I suppose it could be converted to shoot little plastic BBs, but that would make me an Airsofter, which is truly the lowest genus of nerd.

I've Been Thinking About

2008-06-18T20:22:00.029+01:00

The new Gladiators

At the moment, my laughable Internet connection is being slowed to a near-halt by a rudimentary but inexplicably bandwidth-intensive Flash advert for the new re-upped version of the Gladiators, featuring a hetrogenous manbaby dubbed "Atlas". It is on a web page I am obliged to keep open, so I am being repeatedly treated to a jerky vertical panning shot of what must be the biggest homo in history since Quentin Crisp mistook a pile of growth hormones for Smarties, and went on to devestate Coventry.

Above: Penis. I have seen this approximately sixty
times in the past 30 minutes.

Atlas is a mountain of chemically-induced musculature, utterly hairless apart from a lustrous golden-blonde head of hair framing the pinched, underdeveloped face of a Down's sufferer. A nightmare vision of the average British worker after an energetic program of interbreeding with Schutzstaffel officers following a Nazi victory. Or maybe Gerard Depardieu's mongoloid bastard, forever consigned to a sound-proofed attic to prevent an outrage.

It's a shame Atlas is a typical example of our Gladiators. When you compare our lot with American Gladiators or pro (guffaw) wrestlers, one can't help but notice something of a disparity in how representative of their nations the two groups are. Steroid-pumped, ridiculously dressed trailer park scratchings to a man, American Gladiators and wrestlers are unmistakeably American. There is no doubt as to which genetic bargain bin they have been fished out of. Conversely, our Gladiators are anonymous airbrushed cyphers apparently hand-reared for lack of personality traits and thereby potential offensiveness to tedious busybodies, and this new crop of 'em are actually dressed up as Italian people.

Rumour has it that in the mystery-shrouded past of ancient Albion, (okay, when my older brother was a kid) we had our own proper televised wrestling, which featured homegrown, morbidly obese arse-kickers like Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. These men were real salt-of-the-earth Englishmen, clad in enormous Union Jack leotards and subsisting on a diet of beer batter and pasties. You could look at these men and really see something you recognised from your everyday life. They were your overweight uncle with an unsophisticated sense of humour, or a lorry driver or serial killer. People you could identify with. I wouldn't give the Gladiators a showball's chance in hell against the old guard. They'd be sat upon.

If we were just allowed to harness our two greatest natural resources - abject lunatics and extreme violence - we could do a damn sight better than these airbrushed nancies. If the world does indeed rest on Atlas' shoulders, then we are fucked as soon as he works out how to wank and lets go of the globe.

John Darwin's Bogus Journey

Or, to give him his proper media-bestowed title, 'Canoe Man'. Seriously, with all the fucked-up aspects of the John Darwin 'saga' to choose from, the media latched onto the bloody canoe. Not the hilariously half-hearted attempt at faking his own death, not the deception of his children, not the amusing irony of the surname that the clot shares with one of history's most revered intellects. No. Darwin is Canoe Man. Or at a stretch, Back-From-The-Dead Canoeist. Anne Darwin gets even worse treatment, being referred to exclusively as Canoe Wife, ensuring that her legacy in our collective memory will be the fact that she was married to a bloke who was really, really bad at pretending to be dead. In only a few months, the word 'canoe' has cropped up in headlines more times than it does in an entire year of an Inuit's social calendar.

I find myself wondering what they'll do when they get out of chokey. I fully expect them to gravitate towards reality TV (see Neil and Christine Hamilton for precedent), and naturally John's talent for failing to die in a canoe will make him well suited to one of the eight billion shows that feature a tropical island inhabited by thick shirtless cunts with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Either that, or he'll find work as a really shit superhero - Canoe Man©! The innocent need not fear, as long as their peril happens to be occurring on or directly adjacent to a sufficiently deep body of water!

Anyway, the media shitstorm has died down a lot, because THIS husband and wife team of death-faking, fraud-committing HOODLUMS had a plan for everything... except GETTING CAUGHT! And now they're paddling off... all the way to the COUNTY JAIL!

I'm Sheriff John Bunnell, and these are the World's Most Poorly Executed Scams.

New X-Files Film

Yesterday I happened to stroll into a shop, whilst looking for some muscle oil for my incredible physique. Also on my shopping list was a copy of Gorgeous Yet Masculine Bastard magazine (to see if I was on the front cover yet again), some double-plus-sized condoms (although most men of my size prefer to use a length of fire hose with a knot tied in one end) and some beautiful-woman repellant spray (they're like moths around a candle lately). I discovered, however, that I had in fact wandered into Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue, London's premiere cult entertainment outlet for total sadsacks and virgins. Before I laughed in all the stupid nerds' faces and did not at all go downstairs and purchase the special double-size finale edition of Garth Ennis' Dan Dare comic series, I noticed that the shop was being visited by none other than Chris Creator, the carter of classic sci-fi series The X-Files. He was there to promote the new film, which critics are already hailing with such terms as 'humdrum', 'lackadaisical', 'pabulum', and 'insipid bog-quality pap that fell out of Michael Barrymore's distended anus'. One critic has gone so far as to say he will kill every tenth man who buys a ticket.

Naturally, I threw a breeze block at Carter, scoring a direct hit to the forebrain that so lazily vomited forth the final few unwatchable series of The X-Files, and now a film which looks just as poo. Don't get me wrong, I haven't seen it or anything. I didn't need to, because the trailer told me all I needed to know. Yes, The trailer for the new X-Files has the rare, unwanted honour of being the single most unappealing piece of marketing of recent times. It is the pure diametric opposite of the Watchmen trailer. Its evil twin, if you will, complete with dodgy 'stache.

Hey what's this? A bunch of very cold people in a field of snow! And look, there's Gillian Anderson, who admittedly still looks absolutely gorgeous, and David Duchovny, who looks like he belly-flopped into HMS Invincible's huge deep fat fryer after the final season and fucking well stayed there for the past six years!

I couldn't find an image that adequately conveys Duchovny's new-found
rough-as-fuckness, so here is a computer-generated artist's impression
of him another six years into the future.

Seriously, what the hell happened to him? This bloke had better have been mainlining heroin every day of the intervening years until filming started, because I honestly can't think of any other valid reason why his face looks like what happens to your fingers when you stay in the bath too long. Give it another couple of years and he'll be able to carve out a lucrative career as a stunt arse for Keith Richards.

Anyway, back to the horrible trailer. It seems an FBI agent has gone missing under spooky circumstances, and the only ones that can help are the agency's two most embarrassing, hilariously accident prone goose-chasers, Stan and Ollie. Sorry, Mulder and Scully. But this mystery may prove too impenetrable even for them, so it's a good job they've got this man on hand to render assistance:

Yeah that's right, the Big Yin is a major player in this film.
"But wait," I hear you cry! "Billy Connolly is awful!"

And I reply: "I know! This film's going to be SHIT!"

So yeah, we have lots of snow, a pudding-faced Mulder and Pamela Stephenson's significant other as a psychic paedophile priest, who follows in Sean Connery's footsteps as a Scottish actor who disnae bother wi' tryin' tae dae an accent for fear of being branded a teuchter ba'heed.

Add to this the fact that several fairly major elements of the show's story (I refuse to use the term 'mythology' because I am not Wiki-sodding-paedia) seem to have been discarded without mention, and the general Intrigue-O-Meter© reading of the film's plot comes across as significantly lower than a below-average episode of vintage X-Files.

So yeah, if that's the most exciting footage they can cobble together for a trailer, I am not seeing this film until it shows up on ITV1, ham-fistedly edited for swears, with the news in the middle of it. Happily, a much better X-Files film was released this May, and as a bonus it had Indiana Jones in it.

The London Zeppelin

Ah, Zeppelins. A society can be judged on how it treats its Zeppelins. And I judge our society to be lacking something fundamental. For so many years, they have been relegated to flogging Goodyear tyres, and those little blimps can hardly hold a candle to the massive aerial cruise liners that used to hang effortlessly in the air whilst still giving battleships size issues. There might still be a booming airship industry today, had they not become victims of bad PR ("oh the humanity!" will do that to a product) and the increasing pace of life which favoured smaller, uglier but quicker modes of transport.

But ah! What's this flying over my house? Daily? It's only a sodding Zeppelin isn't it! And it's a Zeppelin NT, built by the Zeppelin company, thus completely authentic. Granted, it's a svelte number that doesn't even approach the size of its lumbering forebears, but it's a bloody good start and it could easily beat up the goodyear blimp. Rides over London are available, starting at the bite-your-fist-expensive price of £189 for a half hour flight. Ow.

Zeppelins tend to feature a lot in speculative 'what-if' sci-fi stories. This is because they are a great lazy visual shorthand to show that the history of your alternate world took a left turn where ours took a right. Oddly, nobody ever chooses to depict their tangential universes by giving all their characters Sinclair C-5s. All too often, the airships' presence is gratuitous rather than logical, like in that Dr. Who episode where the bastards are everywhere for no apparent reason. Another such offense crops up in somewhat-recent FPS game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, where New York finds itself beset on all sides by NAZI BATTLE ZEPPELINS, despite the game being set in (an albeit alternate) 1953, where the lumbering beasts would survive for roughly an eighth of a second if attacked by a couple of tiny supersonic jet fighters. I'm all for Zeps, but I hate to see them squandered in such a lazy fashion.

Back in reality, a further glimmer of hope seems to exist in the Manned Cloud, a 'floating hotel' proposed by a French designer as a low-emission method of air travel. On top of having just the best name ever and being designed by a French mental case, it also looks like a massive flying whale, which will add to the irony factor when I buy one, outfit it with a Pyroclastic Vengeance Cannon, and descend upon the Japanese whaling fleets like a divine wind. Bonsai! I think.

George Carlin Died

I have only one thing to say about this unacceptable turn of events. To quote George:

Fuck.

About the Author

2008-05-06T23:13:00.002+01:00

Born in 1837, the son of a nymphomaniac woman and any one of a group of fourteen sailors, Benjamin Zacharias Euphemia Rainbird was a stillbirth. However, people were made of stronger stuff in those days and, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, Rainbird won a scholarship to St. Asmodeus' College Oxford, studying taxidermonomy. This led to a job dusting the Royal Society's extensive collection of stuffed owls. His place in the world seemed secure, But things took a downturn at the age of 22, when it was discovered that he had been supplementing his income by taking rubbings of the owls and selling them to Hebrews.

"Rendering likeness or likenesses of Her Majesty's owls unto the licentious Jewry" was a High Treason offence at the time (comparable to the modern crime of failing to pay your TV license) and he was sentenced to death. Rainbird spent an unspecified number of months awaiting execution at Newgate prison, enduring many depridations, including the loss of his nipples in a horrific Badminton accident. Fortunately, a contemporary fad for extremely tall and spacious top hats meant that he was able to smuggle himself out of the gaol in an accomplice's headpiece over the course of several visits, gradually replacing himself with an albino simpleton who would go on to be executed in his place.

Although believed dead by the Crown, he decided it was best to leave the country until the shit had cooled off, and so enlisted in the Army, joining Rear Colonel Willie Long-Pinkshafte's legendary "Coventry Double-Enders" regiment, and going on to distinguish himself in the Glorious Welsh Punitive Bloodbath of 1851 by killing eighteen Chinamen and one duck, having evidently boarded the wrong train at Paddington.

Over the following year he continued to carve a one-man bloody swath across Asia, nobody having the heart to tell him to stop, as people were a lot more polite in those days. Eventually word reached him that the infiltration of the Zionist Global Conspiracy into the British government had caused a change in the law, and he was able to return home and reveal his true identity. Even better, albinos had been causing a lot of unrest in London at the time, and killing one by treachery now carried a substantial financial reward, so he claimed the bounty for the man he had duped into dying in prison.

This money, added to a windfall from decades of incapacity benefit fraud (he claimed inability to work due to laziness brought on by French ancestry), provided him funding for a successful campaign to take over the prestigious post of Professor Emeritus of Incorrect Shapes at Uttoxeter Polytechnic, a position he would occupy for the rest of his life.

He married his office bureau, and they had three medium-sized desk chairs together before he found his glasses and realised his error. He quickly obtained a divorce and married his assistant, as he had originally intended to, and together they had several mostly human children. It is not known what fate befell his bureau, but it likely ended its days peniless in a Temperance House for Fallen Furniture. Rainbird only once expressed any remorse for this, when he was heard to wistfully remark; "it was a very nice bureau". He continued to teach, and published several important papers including the now-famed Absolute Wrongness of the Quadtrapezohedrix.

Benjamin Rainbird died in 1903 in a Turkish whorehouse, after losing a long battle with obstinacy, and a rather shorter battle with fifty-eight stab wounds to the groin and anus. This was ruled to have been suicide, bought on by feelings of guilt for his office bureau. He died again in 1954, this time for publicity, and was not heard from again until 1996, when his bestselling autobiography, Life Ain't Nothin' But Bitches And Money, was intercepted by SETI as part of a garbled and extremely weak radio message, which had apparently emanated from an unknown point outside our own galaxy, at a time roughly sixty million years ago.

To date, Rainbird's autobiography is still unique among such works in that it can only be "read" by trekking deep into the desert and having it screamed at you by a maniac sitting on top of a pole, while savage Bedouin hill nomads try to blow your head off with antique rifles.

Now officially retired, he lives a simple, pastoral life in Hell with only his vast ego and seventy-two insatiable wives for company. He enjoys collecting mildew and his favourite food is the red Smarties.

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

"In a very real sense, Rainbird is the unsung villain of his age. A 19th-century dry run for the true monsters that were to come in the 20th, every bit as vile and self-serving as Stalin or Pol Pot, only loads better looking."
- TV Historian the Historian David Starkey (Historian)

"Avaunt! Here laid before us an inveterate poltroon, gad-about and lecchour, who verily doth still owe me fifty fucking quid!"
- William Shakespeare

"This is an incredibly safe car specified to a very high standard, but we could have expected that from Honda. The Legend’s real X-factor is the car’s handling ability which should put a smile on the face of most drivers."
- Adrian Higgins, Auto Trader (quote unrelated to the author)

"Last night was incredible. For the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a real man. Please, please call me."
- Allyson Hannigan.

The Work I've Done With Hoover

2008-05-01T13:46:00.000+01:00

Zero Punctuation, Ben Croshaw's weekly video game review thingy on pretentious video gaming site The Escapist, is one of the few reasons why the Internet is worthwhile. It's a weekly three-to-five-minute session of unadulterated joy, topped only by my other weekly three-to-five-minute session of unadulterated joy, the one involving a secluded location, three long distance lorry drivers and your girlfriend.

When I finished watching this week's edition, however, I suddenly found myself watching an advert for a documentary titled "Where Did Ian Huntley Go Wrong?". Personally I'd say he went wrong right around the time he abducted and murdered two small children, but then I'm not a criminal psychologist or lazy documentary maker. If I was, I would be doing coke off of someone's tits in between brief sessions of half-heartedly writing sensationalist drivel for my tabloid exploitatainment, rather than sitting in my living room complaining at the Internet.
Speaking of detestable media cocksuckers, BBC 6Music's George Lamb show tomorrow will be infinitely improved by none other than the Internet's Delightful Claudia, who will be appearing at the beginning and end of the show, which runs from 10am to 1pm. Make a note in your diaries, Claudia fans!

There is now a functioning Hoover in the house, and today I used it to give my bedroom the first good-an'-proper vacuuming it's had in about 15 years. Now I am free to put down any object without fear of it being instantly leapt upon and devoured by a carpet of dusty grey goo, and I am an instant convert to the Hoovering Way. The Hoover extends life. The Hoover expands consciousness. And if you are one of those tedious bastards who likes to point out that 'Hoover' is a company trademark and shouldn't be applied to 'vacuum cleaners' made by other companies, then the Hoover will shortly be used to remove your nipples. Be warned.

I have recently been making ends meet by doing gardening for Will's mum. It is a great source of work as her garden is huge, like space. Unfortunately, also like space, it is inhabited by monsters, and chief among them is her dog Boo. Boo is huge, in love with me, and expresses affection through random violence. Last time I was there, I was strutting around the garden minding my own business doing incredibly manful things like ripping out stinging nettles WITH MY BARE HANDS and sweeping the FUCK out of some leaves like Conan the Barbarian would, when I turned around to find the great shaggy bastard bearing down on me with inexorable forward momentum.

I have always had slight issues with dogs, as they in turn seem to have with me. What concerns me about dogs is that they don't know what size they are. What concerns them about me is that I am there, and they are either very angry about this, or far too overjoyed by it. This means a small, yappy dog may attack me ferociously because he thinks he's a giant motherfucker, just as a massive dog like Boo may hug me to death because he doesn't realise he's grown way past the point at which "giant motherfucker" ceases to be appropriate, and now is more in the category of "cave bear" or "Welsh person" or "Space Ork".

Anyway, all of a sudden Boo was upon me, running around me in circles, enthusiastically headbutting my kneecaps and attempting to climb on me, so as to bring me down like a gazelle. I picked up and threw a nearby ball to attempt a distraction, but Boo simply watched its trajectory in a half-interested manner and then returned his gaze to me, EXACTLY like the little dinosaur that kills the fat bloke in Jurassic Park, which only served to freak me out more.

Boo continued his good-natured but psychopathic asssault on my person, while I awkwardly tried to fend him off without actually doing anything violent to him. I was very aware that if my employer were to emerge from the house and find me beating the shit out of her beloved dog, my future would contain substantially less money and potentially a lot more imprisonment. In the end, I staggered back into the house with his vast bulk more-or-less riding piggyback on my shoulders. After Boo was apologetically removed from my person, I had a nice sit down and booked some sessions with a post-traumatic stress counsellor.

I may be returning tomorrow, so wish me luck - since my awkward battle with Boo, I feel only pity for any poor sod who might try to burgle that house. If that's the kind of treatment you get when Boo likes you, then you can expect nothing short of dismemberment should you make an enemy of the great beast...

Climb aboard my Doom Zeppelin!

2008-03-24T23:27:00.000Z

Yes, you there, boy! You look a canny lad, with brawn to match! What say you join me on the adventure of your lifetime?
Who am I? Why, my identity is of no import. I am, shall we say, an renegade technologist with unorthodox views that have made him a pariah to his fellow men of reason. But as I said, this is of no consequence. Come now, What say you climb aboard my Doom Zeppelin?

Aah, She is a fine vehicle, is she not? But O, she is so much more than a mere dirigible! She represents the ultimate zenith of this Scientific Epoch's destructive technology! I am sure you will not be surprised to know that her construction cost me the whole of FIFTY English pounds! But the Doom Zeppelin shall soon pay for herself! How? Why, it's quite simple, my boy. We shall hold the world to ransom! The great men of old Europe shall quake in their beds at the thought of my mighty vessel heaving out from between the clouds, hanging tumescent above their cities, ready to spurt fiery pandemonium upon their heads if they do not accede to our demands! Be they Englishmen, French or Prussian, whether they bow to the Kaiser or the Tzar, they shall not be safe from our crusade of plunder and debauch, for the Doom Zeppelin flies no flag but my own! Their crude and outmoded empires shall crumble before my blunt implement of science and reason!

Come, I shall give you the grand tour of your new home...

THE ENGINE ROOM

Here, boy! Ear mufflers! They will stave off deafness from the thunder-roar of the Doom Zeppelin's mighty, opium-powered engine! Thanks to this sixty-ton symphony of pistons and flywheels propelling us through the heavens at nothing less than eight miles per hour, we shall be soaring gracefully over the city of Paris in a matter of mere weeks, and striking fear into the hearts of its greasy inhabitants! But ah, these mighty throbbing organs could not function were it not for my hearty crew! Let us proceed to their dwellings, that you might meet your shipmates.

CREW QUARTERS

Whist, hearty crewmen! This is your new comrade! And these, boy, are the most disreputable and scurrilous coterie of vagabonds, vandals, Visigoths, the most putrescent poltroons, pirates and pederasts you'll ever see assembled! I have hand-picked these men from the most ill-regarded backwater ports of a hundred different nations, as you can see! Levantines and Algerines rub shoulders, Moors mix with Boers, sullen Norwegians, swarthy Quadroons, Laskars, and all the finest scum of the world, all united by the common love of good, hard booty! These are my lads, and I love them just as a man of the cloth loves his altar boys. And all of them, in their turn, shall love you! Now, onwards and upwards...

THE WEAPONS DECK

Here is the most fearsome array of weaponry man has ever seen! Rack upon rack of machine-pistols, bomb bays swollen with ton upon ton of high explosive, enough to sink a dreadnaught ten times over! Here you see why Kings and Emperors will BEG to empty their pockets at the sight of my mighty arsenal! And so too will they empty their very bowels, when they lay eyes upon its centrepiece - the Pyroclastic Vengeance Cannon! Using Science, I reverse-engineered this implement of destruction from an ancient Chinese siege weapon which so utterly vanquished an entire civilisation that it is now only known by the half-remembered name of... Atlantis!
It was bequeathed to me by an aged alchemist named W'un Tun Pu, who with his dying breath begged me to destroy it! This, my boy, is the revolver pointed at the trembling head of Civilisation! And your supple, youthful fingers can alight upon the trigger which discharges its hot volcanic load!

THE TESLA TOWER

Oh, that? No, it doesn't really do anything. It looks good though, doesn't it? All electrical.
Science-y. Mmm.

THE READING ROOM

Ah yes, we may soar above the crumbling cities of Man, but I do not think myself to be above a little light reading! Or should I say, lighter-than-air reading! Ahaha! Ha!

Ahem, yes. Here on these shelves, you will find all the great literary works of mankind. Mmm? Yes, they are all written by myself, of course. I do not hold with the classical tradition, it is an offshoot of the decaying, played-out "society" whose earthly bonds I am so glad to have slipped.
No indeed, here I have assembled something rather better - in these pages you will find the most scintillatingly lurid sexual passages ever committed to paper! Every carnal act imaginible, no matter how foul, physically impossible, or punishable by death, is here! How do I know? Why, I write from nothing but my own experience, and it is extensive indeed! And soon, boy, we shall add great volumes to this grand work, you and I!

I... why do you stare at me like that, lad? Say, where are you going?

Wait, NO, NOT THAT DOOR!

THE BONDAGE CHAMBER

Ah... well obviously, this is my... private exercise room! Yes, that rack there is for, um, toning the muscles of chest and abdomen. Yes, it takes stamina to empty the world's treasuries! And that crewman is tied up for insubordination, and that's just... a special rubber anti-lightning suit?

Wait, come back! Don't be so close-minded! Put down that parachute! Shut that window...

Oh, shit.

Not The Bees

2008-02-08T22:47:00.000Z

Hey, it seems I sort of forgot to touch my blog for about six months. I am finally bowing to public pressure, having recieved over 3 requests (4 requests) to update it.

Much has happened since last time, and unfortunately a great deal of it has been shite. One particular bit of it is so shite that to write about it in a trifling blog would rather cheapen and denigrate it, so I won't. As for the other shite stuff, I will give only a brief rundown:

- This was the illest Christmas ever, and I don't mean ill in the good, hip-hop sort of way. I mean everyone was ill with a debilitating flu virus that had most of my family nigh incapacitated for over a fortnight. It was Christmas' number 1 unwanted gift, and nobody had thought to keep the receipt.

- Slightly before New Year's, I got collared by a deeply unpleasant London Midland Railways employee at Birmingham, as I had erroneously secured a slight discount using my Young Person's Railcard, which, unbeknownst to me, had expired. This resulted in him taking me to one side, reading me my rights (he was under the delusion that he was a police officer) and proceeding to detain me for 45 minutes under "official caution", during which time he all but accused me of grand larceny, attempted murder, and cyber bullying. Anyway, for 'defrauding' (his words) the company of, oh, £3, they may take me to court, which would surely cost them more than £3, but what the hell, if they want to waste their money on bullshit, I am happy to help them. Hell, I could work as an advisor for them, I know all about wasting money on bullshit!

- So I finish reading Making Money, then literally right afterwards, I look at the news and Terry Pratchett has fucking Altzheimer's. It's been caught very early and he seems very upbeat about it, so I will be angry in his stead: Shit fucking fuck bastard cock Wankel Rotary Engine. Why him? Why not Dan Brown?

Anyway, that's all I care to go into. Good stuff has happened also, however. Recend goodnesses that spring to mind include taking Claudia out for face-stuffing purposes at Greenwich's famed celebrity nightspot, Noodle Time. Later we went to the market and I bought a monocle from a retro shop, for the princely sum of £1.50. It goes well with the pith helmet I got for Chrimbo, but really it needs a top hat and a devilish moustache to properly set it off. And in about 60 years' time, I will totally be able to pass for Patrick Moore, which will be brilliant, because I love that guy. He's only slightly younger than some of the stars he snoops at in his DIY observatory, and yet he manages to also maintain Hitchcockian levels of fat-blokeness. My personal theory is that his sizable gravity well (mouth) draws matter (cheeseburgers) towards him, thus adding to his overall mass. No getting wizened for our Patrick, he's far too super-massive.

Another good thing was that I worked a few days for my company at the Toy Fair in the Excel Centre, demonstrating various new games to potential buyers, which means extra moolah to inevitably waste on the awesome things I saw there, when they appear in shops. Among such things were new Airfix planes (I had an awesome, cosmically nerdy chat with one of the original company guys, still kickin' it after, oh, about 50 years), and... Indiana Jones Lego.

God DAMN that company. Every time I stash my Lego junk in the loft and fool myself that I've outgrown it, the bastards release some new, insanely awesome thing that I am morally obliged to own. There were a number of sets, all with fairly generic non-specific names, although they each clearly depict a particular Bit from the films. For instance, one, called "The Lost Treasure", nonetheless certainly seems to feature Indy and Sallah, in an underground temple, Raiding a distinctly Ark-shaped object, which had perhaps been Lost for some time. Another one features the desert truck chase, complete with honest-to-god LEGO NAZIS. Of course they are euphemistically described as "guards" but basically what you get is cutesy little figurines of Hitler's dreaded Afrika Korps, replete with a machinegun-armed Volkswagen. Totally metal. There's also the bike chase from Last Crusade, featuring the Jones boys and a dandy sidecar motorcycle for them to tool about in. Neet!

My company sells educational games and trad games such as chess and backgammon, so we generally tend to attract slightly... odd people. None so odd as the inbred-looking couple who came onto our stall, announced that they have a shop that sells nothing but chess sets, then proceeded to shoot down our every attempt to show them our chess sets with a childish chorus of "BORING". This eventually culminated in us offering them a catalogue, which the husband took, then announced "if you can only afford one catalogue, I'm afraid it's goodbye" upon which the pair of them stormed off as if we'd spat in their soup at our fancy restaurant. Like I said, odd people.

Also myself, Claudia, and The Arnolds© are soon to be going on a fabulous getaway to sunny Brighton for a couple of days, as a joint birthday venture for Claudia and Gillia. N. We will wander around the intriguing Lanes, visit that bizarre onion-topped fake mosque thing, and dine in our hotel's excellently Graf Zeppelin-looking dining room. And of course there's always the chance of an ambush by the Internet's Tetsujin "Steven" Griffo, who lives there. In Brighton, not in the dining room. Although maybe.

Anyway, I have to go now because I must get my head down, and also my keyboard has run out of letters. Hopefully the next update is less than six months away, and will be generally more coherent.

Hurr.

What I Did On My Holidays (WARNING: ESSAY-LENGTH)

2007-08-27T20:08:00.000+01:00

Well, then. I done had a birthday. I got older, which isn't so great, but people gave me presents, which takes the edge off a bit. I travelled down to the ancient city of Evesham, which after the recent floods has risen once again from the waves to strike horror and madness into the minds of men. I had an awesome birthday party in the antedeluvian bower of Matt and Gilly, with special guests Maria and Claudia. Gifts were recieved (including superb goblins painted by the Arnolds which you can see in the picture there), Pictionary was played and simply AMAZING birthday cake, created by Gillian, was eaten, booze was drunk and so were we. I also got awesome stuff off Claudia including an Ankh-Morpork City Watch wallet, which will keep my dollars safe from Thieves' Guild members, and a decent razor, so I can now slough off my terrible wiry growth of beard-matter without lacerating my face to such a degree as I resemble Marv from Sin City.

Returning to London, we spent my birthday evening at home eating more cake and drinking wine and opening more presents. By some freak cosmic convergence, my parents got me a City Watch bag. How cool is that? I also recieved plane-oriented giftingtons from brother, before frantically packing our bags for the adventure ahead.

Paris, then. If you base a children's book upon our experiences, then "Ben & Claudia Eat Cheese and Get Shitfaced" would be a good title. If, however, you are a pervert who delights in hearing the minutae of other people's holidays, I will now go into them in tedious detail. Highlights from the over three fucking hundred pictures I took can be absent-mindedly glanced at here.

PARIS: DAY 1

The great thing about the Eurostar is that it leaves from Waterloo, which is piss-easy to get to from my house and constitutes the two-thirds-of-the-way-there point of my commute to work, so I am au fait with its layout and environs. Of course, this is no longer true as they've now relocated to bastard St. Pancras which is all the way over on the other side of town. Fortunately we went just before the transfer, so the trip over was relatively irritation-free, besides being sat in seats with about half an inch of window to look out of during the two and a half hour journey.

Got into Gare de Nord around mid day, minutes later having our first encounter with one of Paris' many transients, who are actually employed by the French government to ensure Paris retains its authentic Gallic vibe. We decided that we could totally walk it from the station to our hotel, and naturally we got rather lost, wandering along pretty backstreets for an hour and a bit until we got our bearings.

After collapsing in our hotel for a few moments, we ventured out onto the streets and decided to investigate Montmartre. Our investigation yielded the following information: A) it is pretty, and B) it is very vertical and slopey with gorgeous buildings, reminding me of San Francisco. Or San Francisco in all those films I've seen. We eventually gained the summit, and marvelled at the view of Paris and the Sacre Coeur. It is quite different to the standard Jesus-based religious buildings, actually it looks like a mosque from the outside. It's only when you venture in and see all the Christ schlock that you're reminded this place is all about the God that you don't get in trouble for drawing cartoons of.

Wandering back down into Montmartre, we passed by the carousel from Amelie and stopped into a restaurant for omlettes and drinks. The food was lovely, and they had spectacularly horrible toilets where someone had evidently been hit by a bowel disruptor set to Fatal Intestinal Deluge. Making our excuses and leaving, we wandered out of Montmartre and onto Boulevard de Clichy, suddenly finding ourselves surrounded by an astonishing array of sex shops, erotic museums and various other such knob-oriented retail outlets. To calm our nerves we stopped off at the Chat Noir and had drinks outside on the pavement. This is where I discovered the wonderful French custom of getting free bits of sausage with your drink. As Claudia is averse to eating dead pig arse-derived meat products, I helped myself to plenty of these throughout the week. Suitably refreshed, we ambled home past the Moulin Rouge, the first of several locations I was already sort of familiar with, due to them being featured in ancient Playstation shooter Medal of Honor Underground. I remember sniping a Nazi off the windmill. In the game, not on holiday.

DAY 2

The weather was beautiful, so we decided to go up the Eiffel Tower, which we were dead set on until we saw the queues and decided we would rather not spend this gorgeous day waiting in line with screaming American teens. This turned out to be a wise move, considering how rubbish the weather was the rest of the time. Instead we wandered around taking photos like the tourist scum we truly were, eating liquorece, and trying not to stare at the huge guns being sported by the French soldiers sauntering around the gardens. Seriously, everyone is packin' a strap in Paris, apparently even the traffic wardens. I swear I saw one policeman with a goddamn Dirty Harry six shooter strapped to his leg. No wonder there's so little trouble on the streets. Sauntering down to the riverside, we had cheese and little bottles of wine on a floating café, then walked down the river, marvelling at the Napoleonic pomposity of the bridges. We crossed the river a few bridges down and took in the Grand Palais (Big Palace) and the Petit Palais (Little Palace), where we discovered a bronze statue of my homeboy Winston Churchill, replete with an engraving of the famous "we shall never surrender" speech. I was so caught up in patriotic fervour, I spent the next few hours running around and neck-punching every German tourist I could find. Eventually Claudia caught up to me and administered my Special Medicine, which calmed me down enough to visit the Place de la Concorde without even screaming "WHO WON THE BLUDDY WAR THEN, EH HEINRICH?" at any children.

That may have been fibs.

Passing through the Place Concorde, we looked at some fountains and the Parisian equivalent of Cleopatra's Needle (ours is bigger, fnarr), then went through the gardens towards the Louvre. There we saw the shittest street performer of all time. It was a bloke dressed up like Tutunkhamen, with gold mask and robe, standing on a box, and his "thing" that he did when you gave him money was to... lean forwards, slightly. He could have at least had the decency to flash people.

We approached the louvre, passing through the mini triumphal arch, just one of the many bits of grandiose Napoleonic bling-architecture in Paris. This one was apparently adorned with various trophies from Boney's victories, but he had to give them all back after he was deposed. Haha, loser!

Leaving the interior of the STAGGERINGLY ENORMOUS Louvre for a later day, we wandered onto the Rue de Rivoli, which features the single most intense concentration of shitty souvenir shops in any city on the planet. Seriously, the whole road consists of nothing but these places, each one selling exactly the same stuff as the last. I purchased some tat for The Folks Back Home and a sno-globe for Claudia which would later explode in my bag, soaking the other gifts and covering them in glittery "sno". Arse.

Before going up the Champs Elysee, which is STAGGERINGLY LONG, we stopped into a restaurant where Claud ate a steak so rare that it had its own knife and was actively fighting back. It provided sorely needed energy for the walk up that seemingly endless road, which eventually bought us to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and its spectacular panoramic views of Paris, which gave us a good impression of how stupidly far we had walked. And plus I also saw a guy down on the road get busted for speeding!

Descending, we got on the Metro home. A few words on the Metro: it is awesome. It travels ridiculously fast, so services are very frequent, and the whole experience is a lot more rough 'n ready than the Underground. Pretty much everything makes a loud noise, from the doors to the seats to the trains themselves, and plus some of the trains have really huge wheels on! Cor!

Back at our manor, we went on a mini pub crawl, had vodka-and-oranges, and were served by an amusing waiter who added exaggerated sound effects to everything. Which was nice.

Crawling into bed, we were woken up in the wee small hours by the very odd pair of middle-aged ladies in the room above us. There was a very thin ceiling between our room and theirs (so thank Christ they weren't a pair of newlyweds), and every morning at about 3AM they would barge into their room, apparently roaring drunk, and proceed to spend the next hour or so throwing breezeblocks at eachother and playing ten pin bowling with 18th century seige artillery, whilst cackling like demented witches. To make things worse, every time they used their bathroom, a high-pressure jet of water would surge through the exposed pipe in our room, making a deafening WHOOSH. Our sleep was not the best.

DAY 3

Rain, rain, go away, you're fucking up our holiday. In contrast to yesterday's glorious sunshine, wednesday's weather would have put Wales to shame in terms of soggyness. For serious. Fortunately our Thing for the day was lunch on board a glass-topped river cruiser, and this was superior. A smorgasboard of foody goodness was dropped in front of us, with delicious salmon, plates o' cheese and lashings of wine, all to the accompaniment of a singer beltin' out show tunes and pointin' out places of interest as the boat ferried us up and down the river. The only downside was the rain obscuring our view of some things as it poured torrentially onto the windows. It was interesting, and I saw a few things I'd never heard of before, like the national library and the extremely funky miniature Statue of Liberty, given to the French government by the American community in Paris as thanks for the full-size one, back in the days before freedom toast. There's also a fullsize replica of the big golden flame from Lady Liberty's torch, standing right outside the road tunnel where Princess Di cashed her chips a decade ago.

Exiting the boat, it became clear we had succumbed to the debilitating effects of the Gallic devil-drink. Heading vaguely in the direction of the Rodin museum, we stumbled along the riverside, singing the two lines of Beyond the Sea that we could remember, like proper lifelong alcoholics, as rain filled our booties.

We eventually made it to the museum, still very much having our slant on, and dried off somewhat as we gawped at sculptures. Unfortunately, with Rodin being a sculptor, most of his stuff was in statue form and displayed outside, so extra soakings were absorbed. We repaired to a café and sobered up with strong coffee, but the rain, now completely torrential, sent us back to our hotel at a stupidly early hour of the afternoon. It finally dried up in the early evening, so we went down the road to a great little café called Les Nivs, run by a big flamboyant red-faced Frenchman and his big flamboyant red-faced French wife, where we reinstated our binge with some lovely white wine and inane chattering. My last memory is running back through a fresh bout of rain, collapsing on the beds, and inexplicably waking up on the floor, roused from my sleep by the nightly artillery duel.

Day 4

Getting up and out nice and early (which, with me and Claudia, is usually just something that happens to other people), we made a beeline for the Louvre.

Pro Louvre Tip 1: Given the immense size of the Louvre, which makes the British Museum look like Lynmouth Railway Museum, it is wise to at least have a vague list of things you want to see, otherwise you will become hopelessly sidetracked. With this in mind, we decided to see the Egyptian section and Mona Lisa, plus any targets of opportunity we could hit on the way. Metro'ing our way there, we were surprised by the Louvre station, which actually has relics in it, some of them without any glass around 'em. They'd last about four seconds in London...

Pro Louvre Tip 2: Avoid the massive queues for the Louvre by taking the super-secret underground Ninja side entrance, accessed from Rue de Rivoli. We did this, passing under the giant pyramid (or "triangle" in Claudia-ese) and conveniently ended up in a prime position to go and scope some 2000 year old dead rich muthafuckas. When we tired of grave goods, we set off for the Mona Lisa, passing a section of the Apollo gallery consisting of completely hideous gaudy "blingitecture" with gilding everywhere and fucktons of marble slapped on the walls. It is decidedly Beckham-esque in there. We also passed by the statue of Nike (the Greek godess, not the fucking shoes), which was accompanied by a big sign saying "DON'T TAKE ANY FUCKING PICTURES" and about 700 people, all of whom were taking pictures.

It was the same in the Mona Lisa's room, which is like a goddamn Cairo marketplace. Being the most famous painting in the world, and because there are lots of cunt-wits who think The Da Vinci Code is actually a decent book, Moanin' Lisa attracts a fair bit of a crowd, and it is sadly somewhat hard to appreciate the lady when you only get a brief, fleeting glimpse of her as you are jostled along by a whole Mafia's worth of crazed Italian tourists. Shame really. Anyway, we managed to survive the scrum and went out into the Gods Room, gawped at some deities, made a visit to the gift shop, then departed for the Latin Quarter.

Now, Maria had informed us there was a really good comic shop on Rue Dante. We found it, went in, had a look around. It was pretty decent. We went out, and there was another one across the street. "Cool!", we thought, for it is a novelty to have two comic shops so close together, or indeed in the same town, back in the UK. So we went in that one, and it was better. We came out and saw there were two more. No, three more.

This continued for some time, until we had worked our way through all FUCKING THIRTEEN of the comic shops on this one street. Evidently they were owned by two competing companies, playing a sort of shop-based game of noughts and crosses. This was nothing but good news for us, and we purchased some fine, cheapo comix from these fine outlets. Claudia got a complete collection of Spirited Away comics and I got the first two volumes of Transmetropolitan for about half the price of what I'd pay for one in London. Bar-gin!

After that we went up the hill to the Pantheon, then down to Notre Dame. This was a repeat of the Eiffel Tower experience, in that we got one look at the queues and did a simultaneous "fuck that".

Instead we just walked around the outside and admired the pointy bits, before scooting across the bridge to a restaurant reccomended by Matt and Gill. This turned out to be the best restaurant ever. For a comparative pittance each, we got to dine out on wonderful food that woulda cost us £305167138196 at home, complete with as much appetiser as we could eat (big basket of sausages, big basket of veg) and - crucially - unlimited wine top-ups.

Several hours and about 800 pounds of food later, we staggered out, and got to go in Notre Dame after all, as it stays open at night while a documentary film about its history plays on a big screen. It's incredibly spooky in there at night, it's like the goddamn Mines of Moria. I snapped some drunken pictures of the Eiffel Tower's searchlight, and home we went.

DAY 5

Well, that's our lot. Back to Merrie Olde Engylande for us. We waited around on the main concourse at Gare de Nord before we figured out we had to go and check in, cos we're 'tards. Amusingly, we had to go through UK Immigration Services. I did my best Polish accent.

We actually had a window this time, which was a luxury. We chatted about what an awesome time we'd had and listened to music as pretty French countryside became pitch blackness became pretty English countryside with differently shaped pylons. Then it was Waterloo, home and the end of our Paris adventure. We were pretty bummed to have to leave, but it was surely The Best Holiday Ever, which more than made up for this.

I called my nan to thank her for providing monies for our holiday, and she asked if we "went anywhere near that bloody awful Eiffel tower?". I swore inwardly, as all but one of the souvenirs I bought her featured the damn thing. Bloody nans!

Right, I've got to go and make my room like like a sane person lives in it, because Jess will be sleeping on the floor up there. Wish me luck.

Confusion to Boney

2007-08-15T16:30:00.000+01:00

I am writing this under considerable mental strain, as all I can see when I close my eyes is mountains upon mountains of cardboard boxes. I went to work yesterday, for the first time in Six Fucking Weeks, to help out with a huge delivery of produce housed in a 20-foot container. What should have been about an hour and a half's work turned into a whole afternoon, as the lorry carrying it was too large to get into the self-storage facility where we intended to stash its contents, so we had to hire a smaller vehicle, fill it with guff from the lorry, drive it to the storage place, unload it, go back for more, lather, rinse, and repeat. Today, I am aching in every part of my body, including some bits that I've never heard of before. I do not miss the boxes. Neither do I miss our new work-experience boy, a posho boarding school friend of my boss' son, who is an haw-hawing upper crust rugby shirt type. You know, the kind who will probably grow up into a banker or something, and finance his private yacht (which is crewed entirely by naked women) by precipitating genocides in South America. Like... so he can sell genocide insurance or something. Look, I don't know how these things work. I'd be doing them if I did.

A few weeks back, Claudia and I braved the floods to visit Evesham, where our little friends live. By chance, our visit coincided with the annual river festival, which featured people's boats done up like pirate ships and strung with Christmas lights and a flyover by a Lancaster bomber. There was also a market which included several stalls selling awful books where the author's name is printed in gold embossed capitals ten times larger than the book's title, a guy selling miracle spectacle-cleaning fluid, and various craft stalls staffed by gentlemen previously seen gracing the sex offenders' register.

WE ARE HAVING A GREAT TIME

After perusing the market for some time, we repaired to a Rough Local Pub and attempted to carry on a conversation over the noise supplied by a gaggle of uproariously drunk fortysomething gentlemen, whose number included, bizarrely, a very quiet and dignified-looking Sikh gentleman with a spectacularly well maintained grey beard and blue turban. We named him Captain Nemo, in honour of the famed science pirate.

"Tell the Gods that Nemo sent you!"

Returning to the river as dusk fell, we were treated to a parade of all the lit-up boats, with musical accompaniment from a child-friendly pop act whose lyrics made heavy use of the word "funk". It was all "let's get funky!" and "Evesham... funk!" which quickly became a catchphrase. They were the sort of band I thought only existed in the universe of The Beano.
Matters concluded with a superb firework display, and then we ambled home among the hordes of stumbling country chavs. Little over a week later, most of Evesham was underwater.
I must have left a tap running.

gleamy!

Hey, get this - this time next week I will be in the most freedom-hating country in the world, also known as France. This is very exciting, as it will be my first visit. In fact it will only be my second time going to another country (not counting Wales, which is a swamp, not a country), because I am a pathetic shut-in. Mrs. Benneth and I will be going by Eurostar, which is great because A) it leaves from Waterloo, which is a twelve-second tube journey away, B) it terminates right in the heart of Paris, and C) it's not a plane. As much as I like aeroplanes, I am never too comfortable travelling in a vehicle which is effectively a thin metal tube full of extremely flammable gases, suspended thirty thousand feet above the world. Of course, I'm fine with travelling in a thin metal tube that hurtles at an obscene speed down a tunnel carved out of the bedrock beneath the god-damn sea.

Anyway, it will be great to see the City of Lights for the first time, in the company of my female accomplice. And it will be interesting to finally find out if French people really are the assholes they are made out to be. Not that I ascribe to the idea of boiling down the identity of an entire nation of people into a cop-out stereotype. No, I prefer to work on an individual basis.

You, for example, are a mingebag.

Arrested For Bloggery

2007-06-09T00:35:00.000+01:00

I saw Nathan Barley on the bus to work. No kidding, this blowjob was the absolute living image of the Cunt. Expensive-looking hoody, self-consciously ruffled hairdo, badly faked "bloke voice" and - worst of all - a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. This was on an exceptionally overcast and gloomy day, as well, further compounding his crime. He was even accompanied by a waif-like sycophantic girlfriend, one of those ones whose function is to look pretty whilst anorexically giggling at his hilarious comments - the worst of which was, upon passing the royal artillery HQ; "that's the army base. That's where they keep all the dead soldiers! Hawhawhawhaw!"

If there were any justice in the universe, there would have been a pair of drunken, lairy squaddies sharing the bus, who would have been only too happy to render him into mulch for such a comment. Instead, he got off unharmed, and went off to his astronomically high-paid job probably designing things like this:

Ah yes, the 2012 logo. A baffling jumble of visual and stylistic what-the-fucks, designed by a consortium of Hoxton fins, for the bargain bin price of £400,000. It is sure to go down in history as the most universally detested icon of recent times, besides the Swastika and possibly Frank Skinner's face. I've got to say that I agree with popular opinion on this one. Even though I don't have two shits to scrape together over any televised sporting event, least of all the month-or-however-long-it-is entertainment blackout that is the Olympics, I still think The Logo© is pitiful, brown-streaked man pants, and I will only become further intrenched in this position as it is inevitably jizzed over every vertical surface in the city over the next five years. This WILL be the case, as Sebastian Coe seems to have final veto over the thing, no matter how loudly the people doth protest, and, inexplicably, he thinks it's any fucking good. I might point out that Lord Coe is also a notorious paedophile, and has claimed culpability for both the Challenger and Columbia disasters because, in his own words, "I fucking despise astronauts". Which shows how much his opinion is worth.

Oh man, my brother got an Xbox, and last week I went round to his and we played GTA: San Andreas in two player mode for the better part of a day. It is stupidly good fun. Our afternoon's rough agenda was to go on a wild Hunter Thompsonesque journey to Las Venturas (the game's lawsuit-avoiding proxy for Vegas, baby), but this was hampered by our inability to resist bloodthirsty rampages on the way there, and the police affection that comes with this. At one point we managed to thieve a light aircraft from a nearby airport, flying over the heads of the Old Bill, only to be blasted from the sky when I foolishly flew us over a military base. Eventually we got there, and realised we hadn't actually planned this far ahead and didn't really know what to do, so we just caused mayhem until I was run over and killed by a tractor driven by a black Elvis impersonator. As you do.

Claudia is now officially Done With University, this very morning I finished helping her move out of her Cardiff student house. This is good for her because she is now back with her family at a stressful time for them, and good for me because I now definitely never ever have to go to fucking Cardiff ever again. I'll miss the place, in a way. The same sort of way you'd miss a disfiguring skin lesion that was fun to pick at. The place is a seething nest of anonymous 'modern' architecture populated by braying self-absorbed students, morose buzzcut scallies, and worst of all, Welsh people. Welsh people, whose one calling in life is to seek out people who are not Welsh, and inform them of their own Welshness, which said non-Welsh people are meant to be impressed by, on pain of being glassed with a shattered flagon of Brains - apparently Wales' favoured alcoholic beverage, which is ironic seeing as it is named after the one thing Welsh people do not have in great supply. Oh, I did NOT!

The coach journey was fun, as directly behind me were seated a pair of complaining toff students, who were apparently either annoyed by or terrified of absolutely everything in the world. When we were stuck in traffic for about 15 minutes, they complained impotently to the driver, as if doing so would make the make him remember that magic button on the dash that deploys the helicopter blades, so as to fly over the traffic jam. Later, when a coach full of school kids drove past and the kids waved and poked tongues out at people in our coach, they responded by calling them "little cretins" and wishing ASBOs upon them. That's right, they were intimidated because some six year olds waved at them. God knows what would happen if they were actually threatened, they may literally have shat themselves to death.

Today was Father's Day, so I decided to wander into town after my coach got into London, with intent of finding shiny gift for pa. My efforts were hampered by the majority of Westminster being closed off due to the Falklands memorial ceremony taking place. That's right - I, Benneth, was briefly inconvenienced just for the sake of honouring some mutilated war heroes. It's a sad testament to the treatment that cowardly, lazy blokes like me - who would last three seconds in the army - are given in this country. Anyway, I did get to see Cherie Blair's gigantic hat. It's the first hat visible from the International Space Station. She wants to watch out, or it'll get punched off by that Mr. Jerky character. Which reminds me, it's his birthday today. I point this out not because I particularly like him, but because this means he is a year closer to dying, whereupon I will inherit the key to his Sex Room, and I'll finally get to find out what's in there. I heard it's full of sex!

Bye!

Today was hot

2007-05-24T00:03:00.000+01:00

I am going to partake in a true English passtime, and talk about the weather. It's behaving as it should again. Last month's sweltering heatwave was difficult to enjoy, as its early (and fatal, in the case of one poor London Marathon runner) onset served as just another reminder that England will soon be either a tropical rainforest, an icy wasteland, or will slip beneath the waves altogether, to join Atlantis. The following gloomy spell wasn't much fun, but at least it was normal. Now, however, it's MEANT to be hot, so it's ok. Today was, as a member of what I am informed is known as "The Working Class" would say, 'fookin' hot as'. This is fine, of course, for most people, but it presents a unique problem for me in that I have to go out and find some sunglasses, if I don't want my eyes to be burned out of their sockets and trickle down my cheeks. And also, I don't want to look like a cunt.

There's nothing wrong per se with modern sunglasses, it's just that they all make you look like a cunt. For me, they all fall into two categories. Category 1 consists of the needlessly streamlined-looking high tech shades for people like this blowjob, who probably still thinks The Matrix is cool:

Then you've got your category twos. These are more offensive still. They are the oversized bug-like sunglasses made popular by Celebrities© and sported by young women who want to resemble Paris Hilton, and irredeemable posing metrosexual arse bandits with immaculately ruffled hairdos and ironic baseball hats;

Right, he is actually wearing Aviators, but you can blame that on Google Image Search's spectacular failure to yield better results when I searched for "dickhead shades". Nevertheless, just look at this cum receptacle. His hat is made out a section of his nan's sewing basket. And his mouth is VERY SLIGHTLY OPEN as is the style with hipster types, because they cannot figure out how to breathe through their noses without fucking it up somehow. I bet he's also wearing a sweater that's too tight for him, and shows off his hideous little bloke-nipples. And I bet he thinks that 'beard' makes him look manly, although he would sheepishly cross the street to avoid any group of young tracksuit-clad men who paid approximately £80 less than him for their own baseball caps. Oh, and he probably owns at least three different shirts with clever mottoes that allude to his penis.

There is probably a category 3, but I can't see it because my eyes are scrunched up into a permanent squint. I bet it looks just as shit anyway. So basically I'm presented with a choice of either looking like a blowjob or a cum receptacle, or just going blind from the sunlight, in which case I'll be wearing dark glasses anyway. I don't know where to turn.

I bet this is how Jesus felt.

A Collation of Happenings

2007-04-05T17:15:00.000+01:00

Claudia visited, and it was very nice. She stayed for a whole week, which is a rare novelty amid the usual fare of fleeting three-day visits. It's been going that way for approaching four years now, so it's a cause for prodigious celebration that she is soon to be living in London, for to be doin' her Masters degree. We visited her new halls of residence and environs, which are nice enough despite the latter including Elephant & Castle. Fortunately there is a route from halls to buildings that neatly cuts out this scum-magnet entirely.

Also we visited Hampstead. This was nice, but we sort of got lost immediately upon leaving the station. I blame this disorientation on Hampstead station's lifts, which precisely recreate the extremely uncomfortable negative-G sensation of reentering the Earth's atmosphere in a delapidated Russian Soyuz capsule. So we wandered, dazed, into Hampstead's residential area rather than the bit which has any shops from which to purchase fetching yet useless trinkets. This was not all bad however, because we got to see many different beautiful old houses that we'll one day be able to afford, when Claudia's plan to pimp my tender buttocks to the rich and famous finally pays off. On Friday we braved the hazardous train journey through Kentish hinterlands to visit my sister and her chap in newly-purchased house. This was good fun, we bled the charity shops dry of questionably-sourced goodies, went to the local Chinese (where Claudia made me very proud by actually nearly finishing her bowl of inditerminate vegetable matter in rice), wore a selection of my sister's bizarre hats, and met the strange cat which seems to have adopted them. Good times.

Claudia's gone back to Cardiff now. I miss the woman and the many strange noises she makes. There will be an evening of destruction, however, 18 days hence in picturesque Evesham, to celebrate the end of her exams, upon which she will forever evacuate Cardiff, and hopefully nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Man, my front room is hella stinking of animal piss. Two theories exist to explain this; The first involves delinquent foxes liberally relieving themselves in the back yard. The other, slightly more far fetched theory is that my neighbour is actively encouraging his rottweiler to piss on our fence, thereby wafting heady waves of piss-stink into our house. It may sound paranoid, but it's exactly the kind of low-level passive aggression my family's been putting up with from the miserable cunt for years anyway. Still, I recently found out that his underage daughter has spawned the blasphemous offspring of some anonymous yoof, which is chucklesome. Hahaha, fuck you, other people!

Hey, the "rozzers" totally "busted" a cannabis factory in a house a couple of streets away from me! This is bad news for the local wasters, but great news for me, because now I can go outside without the heady fumes therefrom inducing altered mental states. It was so strong that sometimes I'd go out to do the shopping and end up in an involuntary trip, floating in the fathomless gulfs of some ersatz reality outside of Euclidean space, communing with unnameable polyhedral entities that dance blindly and eternally around the very centre of chaos itself. Which is not what you want when you're asked to enter your PIN number. Anyway, apparently it was this thick green cloud of dope-funk that led the police to the place, possibly having used specially trained Sniffer Hippies. It's great news for fans of inhaling oxygen! There were a few photos of the place in the local paper, and it looked like bloody Cambodia in there. I'd not be surprised if there were primitive tribes living in there, worshipping the grow lights. Also:

- I ate some after eight mints that were in the fridge, even though it was only ten past six. Come to think of it, they do not specify if it's 8AM or 8PM on the packaging. Anyway, some rules are made to be broken, and it's my prerogative to stick it to the Man.

- Some worthless blowjob set fire to the Cutty Sark. That ship has a special place in my heart, I used to play around on it when I was little and it's been a part of Greenwich for so long, which is why I hope someone finds the guy and "Cutties" (cuts) off his "Sark" (male penis!)

- Today I was on a packed tube train returning from work, and a metalhead-type guy next to me had his arms tattooed with basically the entire cast of The Simpsons. They were drawn in that slightly creepy, WRONG style that is the hallmark of all third-party Simpsons artwork attempting to look like Matt Groening drawings. A sweaty Nelson Muntz was grinding into my forearm, erotically! I left the train with half a boner.

That's all I can think of, at any rate.

My Top 5 All Time Worst Possible Deaths

2007-02-27T22:55:00.000Z

5 -Falling Out Of A Plane Without A Parachute

Give me a choice between staying on a doomed plane with a bomb on it or bailing out to fall thirty thousand feet to my death, and I’ll take the big bang every time. Not that being reduced to my component elements by a huge explosion is in any way preferable to, say, having a nice walk or eating a bag of crisps. No, certainly not, but it’d have the benefit of being QUICK. See, it might take you up to five minutes to hit the ground after leaping out of an airliner (depending on how fat you are or aren’t), and that’d be more than enough time for your adrenaline-soaked brain to grasp the true horrifying inevitability of your upcoming appointment with your selected deity, if any. And even worse than that, you’d only be able to scream like a girl for two or three minutes before you wore your vocal chords out. After that all you can really do is try and make the best of your remaining minutes, to try and take your mind off the fact that you are about to be effectively crushed by the weight of a decent-sized planetary body. A couple of suggestions for passing the time:

A) Pose like you’re sitting down with your legs crossed, impatiently checking your wristwatch and tutting at how long it’s taking to hit the ground. If anyone happens to film you on the way down, at least you’ll have a really funny video eulogy for your children to treasure. Although if you haven’t already reproduced, that last bit may be unlikely.

B) While you’re still quite high up, you can convincingly pretend that you are Superman and are flying around the world in order to reverse time to a point in the past where your Lidl coupons are still valid.

C) Conduct a meaningful scientific experiment, to lend some meaning and dignity to your death, by finding out if you can hear yourself fart over the sound of the thunderous wind.

So yes, all in all, I’d rather stay on the plane, then at least I get to cop it in the company of my fellow, screaming, vomiting, praying passengers. And who knows, there might be a lot of doomed desperation-sex going around, and you’ll finally get to lose your virginity. If you’re lucky it’ll be with a member of the opposite sex.

4 - Thrown Out Of An Airlock

I’ll admit that I have read conflicting descriptions of what’s meant to happen to you when you’re exposed to the hard vacuum of space without benefit of space ship, space suit, or space blanket, but none of them sound like much fun. Some sources (Total Recall and an episode of Space Precinct I saw when I was 10) state that your body, without a pressurised environment, expands and explodes as your blood boils in your veins. Others (the numerous space deaths in Battlestar Galactica) that the absolute lack of any heat would flash-freeze your corpse, leaving you frozen in an eternal rictus of horror for a trillion years. After that, all you’ve really got to look forward to is being recovered by alien spacecraft and placed in one of their museums, mislabelled as a “curiously shaped meteorite”. Thankfully, this has apparently never happened to any of our space travellers. It might not be much consolation, but at least those few brave souls who have died during space missions all did so within old mother Earth’s atmosphere. Apart from all those expendible crewmen in Star Trek, although apparently that was fictional.

3 - Zombified!

Now here’s a real Fate Worse Than Death. At least with all other forms of death, however horrible, you stay dead. Here though, you wake up as a walkin’, moanin’, undyin’ ghoul, doomed to walk the earth eating the flesh of the living until all your limbs fall off or you have your head stoved in by a plucky survivor with an improvised bludgeoning weapon. All in all, it’s not a smart lifestyle choice, especially when you consider the possibility that some semblance of your past personality might still buried away somewhere in your maggoty brains, able to witness the horrible things your corpse is doing to mortal folk, yet utterly incapable of stopping it. It’s not all doom and gloom though. Your shambling, oblivious and belligerant new personality will make you ideal recruitment material for London Underground’s ever-helpful team of customer support staff.

2 - Buried Alive

Another one that’s always struck me as particularly horrible. Being prematurely interred ranks pretty highly on my list of ways I’d rather not pop off. Afterall, what’s not to love about suffocating only six paltry feet away from unlimited supplies of lovely, precious oxygen, separated by a hundred weight of earth, in a sturdy wooden box? And with no room to bend your limbs (although in films, prematurely buried folk always seem to have cigarette lighters and enough room to flick it on so it illuminates their faces), there’s not much to occupy yourself with, leaving you no option but to try and headbutt yourself insensible against the lid of your coffin. The only possible hope of extricating yourself would be to know Master Pai Mei’s three-inch punch, with which you could smash your way out and up through the earth to freedom. However, unless you’re Uma Thurman, it is unlikely you posess this skill, and as much as I wish I was Uma Thurman, I’m not*. So I suppose I’ll just have to avoid graveyards and stay in the mob’s good books.

*This is why I do not spend all day naked in front of a mirror. Most days, anyway.

1 - The Bees
Oh no, NO, NOT THE BEES! AAAAAAARRRRGH, OH, MY EYES! AAAAAAAAAAGH!

(A "shout-out" to intergroupie Billybullshot for the farting whilst falling out of a plane idea, and for instigating the meandering conversation that led to this post.)

Don't Mack On Dr. Quinn's Bitch

2007-01-09T22:04:00.000Z

man i gots problems

2006-12-16T16:58:00.000Z

On account of incessant wife-like nagging from solitary commenter "Mr. Jerky", I am updating my shit. Speaking of shit, my lower digestive tract has blown a gasket. Each morning I am awoken by frightful upheaval therein. This has actually been An Issue for quite a while but only recently has it got bad enough that I’ve gone to A Doctor about it. I’ve seen two so far and between them they’ve disinterestedly poked at my stomach (through latex gloves, what are they trying to say about my hygeine?) and determined that, apparently, I have problems with my digestion. I could’ve bloody told them that, what am I paying the bastards for? Well yeah, I’m not paying them, but It’s The Principle Of The Thing. Anyway, I’m due to lose my droid-virginity in March when they poke a robot endoscope camera up my holiest of holes, to see whass goin’ on up in dis large intestine.

Until then, I’ve got to make do with the rubbish tablets they prescribed me, and they’re fucking useless. Picture a drunk chav assaulting an oncoming tank with a broken bottle and you’ve got some idea of how futile these things are at curtailing my intestinal fury. It just doesn’t feel like one of those problems you can solve with pills. I need some conclusively, invasively physical PROCEDURE done. I need something that’ll leave an impressive scar which I can later spuriously attribute to a swordfight with a Prussian baron on top of a burning Zeppelin. I need something yanked out, adjusted, and then put back in the right way round. And I demand it be performed by Doctor Cox from Scrubs, with attendant hurtful remarks.

Anyway, this coupled with the fact that I have a real, boring job has drained my creative juices. Mostly when I get home I just want to drink tea, work on one of my sad model plane kits and make the most of the moonlight hours before I have to crowbar myself out of bed again and traverse half the known world to spend all day in a gloomy, sunless warehouse/office building. I swear my skin’s starting to go a pale Gollum shade of white and my eyes are disappearing as they get "evolved out" in deference to webbed toes and giant Andrew Marr ears, the better to hunt prehistoric trilobites with.

Yesterday was my first company Christmas lunch. It was quite a surreal experience. Seeing co-workers outside of the work context and being People made it weird enough already, without the collection of extremely eccentric upper-class Tories grilling me on my life aspirations. One lady in her middle fifties - I will call her Mrs. Death to protect the guilty - kept telling me how attractive I am, in between mouthfulls of wine and ranting about society collapsing because of "alcohol and the Pill". Before I managed to escape, she’d asked me a number of quite personal questions about personal relationships, and had SLIPPED ME HER PHONE NUMBER. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwww. On the plus side though, I met my boss’s father, an incredibly engaging and charismatic World War Two veteran and OBE, who served as an instructor in the same artillery regiment as my grandad. Who knows, he may have shouted abuse at my gramps! For a ninety-year-old, he’s extremely spry. He still does the accounts for the entire company, and is far more in touch with reality than my boss, who’s a bit... strange.

For instance, when I arrived for work the morning before, he said "I’ve left a copy of the Chinese Times on your desk, there’s an article on Chinese traditional medicine that you’ll find very interesting". I know nothing about Chinese medicine, have no interest in it, and have never mentioned it to the guy. My boss is one weird motherfucker.

Oh, and I finished my Chrimbo shopping yesterday. And no, I didn’t buy you anything.

I'm not dead yet.

2006-11-09T20:57:00.000Z

Real genuine actual update is absolutely coming sometime between now and the time when human civilisation's only remaining footprint on the Earth is a thin layer of scattered plastic shards in the Burgess Shale, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here is a soothing picture.

Extracts From My War Memoirs

2006-07-25T20:27:00.002+01:00

By the Right Honourable Benneth, MC, DSO, OBE, VC, QC, OMG (not pictured)

So there I was, one minute piloting my Spitfire on a solo daylight raid to knock out a strategically vital German sausage factory, and the next my crate's sticking tail-first out of terra firma. It was a nasty old prang to be sure, but not enough to make me review my policy of always flying whilst drunk. Fortunately I had survived the crash with my tobacco pipe intact, but the same could not be said of my femur bone, which was protruding several inches from the side of my leg. I don't mind telling you that it smarted something ghastly. Fortunately repairing myself was only a matter of smacking the offending bone back into its proper position using the butt of my service revolver and then welding shut the wound with a chunk of molten wreckage.

-

The land for hundreds of miles in every direction was teeming with bloodthirsty, vengeful Hun, and my heart was filled with dread - how many luncheons would I miss in the time it would take me to kill all of them? I did some quick maths as I absent-mindedly strangled the solitary German officer who had been attracted by the racket of my crash. Intelligence reported there were at least 100 divisions of Wehrmacht in the interceding 400 miles between me and Berlin, and doing some quick calculations, I figured I'd have to kill at least a hundred thousand of the buggers before I got to Hitler and could go home for biscuits. Even at an average of a hundred Nazis a day it'd still take me donkey's years on foot with my service revolver, and that was only good for six Jerries - after that I'd have to start throwing it at them. And I was loath to loot any German weapons, as I've always found them to be annoyingly quiet.
So I resolved instead to escape back to England to acquire another aircraft, which would speed the process up considerably and bring my next luncheon that much closer. I acquired the officer's uniform, which fit perfectly, and dressed the dearly departed Jerry in my own flight gear. I shoved the cadaver in the wreckage of my Spitfire and left the spreading fire to melt the bugger's chiselled features off so his pals wouldn't notice my canard.

-

Some two weeks later I had learned the German language by insinuating myself into one of their barrack houses and listening in on their inane conversations. To test my lingo I composed a quick series of war poems which, when I gave a recital, reduced my "fellow soldiers" to fits of weeping and got me compared to Siegfried Sassoon by Berliner Zeitung magazine. Now reasonably confident in my conversational German, and anxious to repay my hosts for so graciously accomodating me, I whipped up a crude pressure-activated gelignite bomb using some shaving cream, tallow and bootblack, which I wired to the latrine before scarpering - my reasoning being that the massive explosion would be the perfect distraction for my escape. Also I'd always thought that the idea of a chap being killed on the bog was ruddy hilarious.

-

I was now married to a strikingly beautiful woman named Herman and living in Dusseldorf, where I had set up a small charter flight business. It was on the night of our first wedding anniversary that I remembered I was supposed to be escaping to England. The old bit of shrapnel in my frontal lobe must have shifted again and temporarily done a number on the old memory banks. Last time that had happened was in `26, when I'd spent three years living in a tree in the Belgian Congo and responding only to the name Mawengwe. Anyway, telling Herman I had to take an emergency shipment of bratwurst to Rommel's headquarters, I set off in my cargo plane on a circuitous course towards old Blighty. I was just pottering up the Spanish coast when a night-fighter took me for a Stuka and sent me hurtling into the ocean in a hail of machinegun fire. Some fishermen attempted to dredge me out of the briney, but they were foreign, so I told them to bugger off and leave me drifting. And that's when I met the giant squid...

-

Fortunately the six months riding the squid that took me to the small island off Burma had left me with a considerable beard growth, in which I was able to conceal a bamboo sword I had constructed whilst Kenji and I were building the escape raft. All I needed was the right time to strike. "Raft finished, Mr. Benneth!" said Kenji, making me wish I'd paid closer attention to the English aspect of his ad-hoc reeducation. "We come to island as enemy but now we reave as friend! Now we go to Dear Old Brighty and I rearn how to be real Engrish gentrrman!". My fellow castaway turned to the raft, at which point I took a regretful sigh and thrust my impromptu saber briskly between his shoulder blades. It was a shame to put an end to him in such an ungentlemanly manner, I'd much rather have blown the back of his head off. Anyway, having finished the last of the squid a few days before, I'd need something to eat on the long voyage home. A few years later, when I was galloping the Japanese ambassador's secretary's sister, I humourously noted that that "Kenji" is Japanese for "lunch".

-

I floored the throttle of my Zero as I approached Pearl Harbour and steeled myself for the unpleasant task at hand. It felt a bit cloak-and-dagger to be bombing chaps who were essentially on our side, but if this didn't convince them to join in the fun then they ruddy well deserved a kicking anyway. And besides, they were only Americans. "BANZAI!" I cried fiercely, as I prepared to bring the 'Divine Wind' to the 'enemies of the Emperor', so to speak.

-

I had full confidence in the success of the D-Day invasion, since I had ghostwritten most of Eisenhower's strategy in hospital during the weeks following my return home. Flak bursts shook the C-47's fuselage along with my fellow commandos as we waited for the jump order. I had always found parachutes terribly uncivilised so I declined to wear one, reasoning that Normandy is mostly composed of runny cheeses and farmer's daughters, so I'd probably land safely on something soft. As luck would have it, when we jumped I made groundfall on an obese SS officer who happened to be carrying a map of troop positions throughout western France. I could have handed them over to the group of American paratroopers I came across but, bless them, the simple chaps would probably have just tried to eat or fornicate with anything I handed to them. With this in mind, I sharpened my letter opener and toddled off towards the nearest group of Wehrmacht.

-

"The joke's on you, Adolf," I said, as the bugger who'd started this whole affair brandished the pneumatic horse inseminator in old Benneth's general direction, "that thing's as empty as your lederhosen!" That hit a nerve. He dropped the weapon and lunged at me, intent on killing me with his bare hands, at which point I simply sidestepped as the head Kraut's forward momentum sent him straight into the propellor. The remaining cyborgs, no longer controlled by his powerful psychic aura, collapsed to the floor dead. I was halfway through my witty comment (something about liking my sausages sliced thin) when I heard Churchill cry from the cockpit; "hurry up for fuck's sake, the Enola Gay won't fly herself!". He was right of course, the Russians were converging right quick, and they'd be fairly embarrassed that I’d minced the Fuhrer before they could get their Bolshevik hands on him. I’d have loved to stay and chat, but we had a war to win.

I don't want any spoo.

2006-06-04T23:20:00.000+01:00

Oh, hello. From now on I intend to do smaller updates more frequently, as my brain-sphincter is excreting "hilarious articles" with greatly reduced frequency these days.

Doctor Who, then. I'm not too sure about this series. The first had a couple of duff episodes in amongst the good stuff, but this one has been a thick sludge of duffness from the get-go, with only one or two nuggets of Good floating to the surface, surrounded by shite, like the "chav-tastic" opening episode. And the French costume drama. And the coronation episode and its interminably smug BBC wanking and self-contradictory subplot - "Your dad's a tiny-minded abusive cunt, kick him out! But oh, go after him, `ee's yer old man, the only one yer got!"

Yesterday's was the bastard creative offspring of Doom 3 and Alien, with some vagina-faced aliens thrown in for good measure. It was fun and good by this series' standards, but still pretty stupid. Hopefully though, the Satanic theme of the episode will generate a few enraged complaints from parents, thus continuing the proud tradition of hysterical Who-bashing established by Mary Whitehouse those many years ago. Oh, the episode with K-9 in it wasn't half bad either. My friend purchased a tiddly remote-controlled model of the little robomutt, and we had a funpacked afternoon running over my wee Gieger aliens with it. Simple pleasures.

I completed my terrible training course thing on Friday, which was a gigantic fucking relief. It was full of moody arseholes, including one whose "thing" was brashly going on about Muslims "taking over the country" and saying they've "never done anything for civilisation". I told him about thirteenth-century scientist Nasir al-Din Tusi's contributions to astronomy. Of course he was dismissive, but at least now he'll know who to blame if he gets killed by an asteroid. Cunt.

Alternative Weapons in the War on Terror

2006-06-03T17:09:00.000+01:00

Ghost Suit
Terrorists are a cowardly, superstitious lot, and their fear of ghosts, ghouls and other vengeful spectres is well documented. Recognising this as a weakness apt for exploitation, the army has developed this ghost suit. The suit incorporates a multitude of hair-raising Fright Features, including sophisticated vocal modulation unit (Hasbro voice-changing Darth Vader© mask) which allows the trooper to make convincingly terrifying "wooooo!" noises, and a coating of glow in the dark paint, adding to the psychological impact during night ops, as the soldier runs towards the terrified enemy, who scream "Aaaaaaah! A g-g-ghost!" and run away. Unfortunately the ghost suit is of limited use in combat zones such as spooky castles, ghost trains, haunted mansions and other areas that are already haunted, as real ghosts are very territorial and will chase off any fake ghosts on sight.

Holo-Arnie
A remote controlled three-dimensional hologram facsimile of action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, which fools terrorists into believing they face Arnie himself in combat. Terrorists have witnessed the actor kill literally hundreds of their kind in Hollywood action movies, and are even more scared of him than they are of ghosts. If they are not frightened off by the sight, they will likely try to shoot him, at which point the real Arnie can use the distraction to sneak up behind them and machine-gun them to death. Alternatively, if the terrorists have realised the deception, Arnie can pretend to be the hologram and the terrorists, thinking they're oh so clever, don't waste their bullets on him, but then Arnie goes "hahahaaha! You think this is the real Arnie? IT IS." and turns round and machine-guns them to death. Its use in combat depends heavily on Mr. Schwarzenegger finding a space in his hectic schedule.

V-22 Osprey
This experimental variable-geometry VTOL aircraft, which has a proud twenty-year tradition of killing American flight crews, will not actually be used by coalition forces, on account of how ridiculously dangerous it is. Instead, they will be sold to terrorist organisations at an attractive price. Then, we just sit back and watch as the terrorists' ranks are annihilated by the ship's various electrical faults, terribly designed flight control systems, leaking fuel tanks, sudden explosions and general shoddy workmanship.

Satirical T-Shirts
All American troops are to be outfitted with t-shirts featuring cartoons of Osama bin Laden, the terrorists' equivalent of the Pope, being anally violated by the sharp end of a flagpole bearing those colours that never run, Ol' Glory, the Stars And Stripes©. When loudmouthed US troops drive through the terrorists' home towns wearing these shirts, randomly firing into vehicles and flashing their penises at the locals, the terrorists will know that America is an inherently superior, more civilised country, and will give up their terroristic ways in pursuit of the American Dream.

Scientology
One of the commonly held explanations for terrorists being so angry and frustrated all the time is that their zany heathen religion forbids them from "pullin` themselves orf" and demands that their women be covered head to toe in shapeless black robes, and that this - combined with the belief that if they die in the service of their god (Thor or Zeus or Cthulhu or something), they get their collective freak on in the afterlife - means that many terrorists simply kill themselves in order to lose their virginity. This, of course, is dead wrong. The real reason they're unhappy is because their bodies are inhabited by the ancient ghosts of alien Thetans murdered by the dark lord Xenu billions of years before mankind evolved. Terrorists will be taken into the church of Scientology and, over several years (for a paltry few hundred dollars per lesson), educated about this and other profound spiritual truths, such as why gays and psychologists are evil and why child labour is okay, all accompanied by regular screenings of smash hit sci-fi blockbuster Battlefield Earth. Terrorists will be fleeced of all their money, and those who refuse to renounce their Muslim faith will be subject to threats and costly lawsuits. Either way, the terrorists are made bankrupt and incapable of buying vital terrorist equipment like suicide belts, AK-47s and novelty "Lick Bu$h!" bumper stickers.

Some Things That Need To Disappear From Video Games

2006-04-08T23:52:00.000+01:00

"Realistic" Gunnery
Counter Strike, Rainbow Six and their ilk have made it fashionable to have action game weapons behave like their real-life counterparts would. Or rather, behave like game developers’ faulty idea of how they would. That is, unnecessarily difficult to hit anything with and subject to completely over-the-top recoil physics. Take the Master Chief’s submachine-guns from Halo 2. In Halo the first he was capable of emptying a full-sized assault rifle into an alien’s nads without flinching, and all was well with the world. I mean, Chief is a seven foot tall genetically modified space soldier in powered armour from future, you can just imagine he has some sort of computer thingy that compensates for him. But by the time Halo 2 came out, faux-realistic gun behaviour had come into vogue, and it was no longer acceptable for Chiefypoo to get away with such physics-bending. So now, when you fire his machine pistols, your view immediately begins to drift upwards as the recoil from these tiny little weapons apparently pitches Chief’s entire torso backwards - keep firing for long enough and you’re putting holes in the ceiling. Call me a nitpicker but I think it sort of takes something away from his badass image. And the trend is spreading. Half-Life 2’s guns recoil terribly too, throwing off your aim even on the first shot. I don’t hold a doctorate in physics, but even I know that bullets fired rapidly from a gun are affected by the recoil from the previous shot - therefore it’s not at all realistic to have the first bullet fired from a gun affected by its own recoil, seeing as it travels at the speed of sound and is well on its way to your target’s noggin before the gun has a chance to jerk backwards. If you really want to do realism, try and make it, y’know, realistic. And before you consider going down that path at all, reflect on what kind of game you’re making. If it’s about a futuristic cyborg who fights space aliens, you don’t need to be concerning yourself with real-world physics.
I don’t think most people really care if guns behave unrealistically in computer games, if it means they can shoot something without having to worry about, say, a prevailing wind blowing their bullets away from the target and into a nearby branch of Lidl. Anyone who does care is likely to have a basement full of real guns and a list of all the people who have ever wronged them. And a trenchcoat.

PS: Quake 2 had recoil effects long before any other game, and they felt just right.

Escort Missions
Nobody but NOBODY enjoys escort missions. They invariably consist of shepherding a defenceless, stupid, totally exposed and slow-moving target through an enemy-rich environment, spending more time trying to save your ward from his or her own suicidal artificial intelligence than you do tackling their assailants. Which part of the above is meant to be fun? Games are entertainment, not work. By all means challenge us, but for God’s sake try not to be so lazy about it. I’m the guy’s escort, not his carer while he’s on release from the local day centre. And if we don’t do away with escort missions entirely, at least let me tell the bastard to stand still and hide for five bloody seconds so I can clear out the area ahead, instead of watching him inexorably walk straight into an obvious ambush and belly-flop down the barrel of a bad guy’s machine gun.

War Games Where You Have To Do All The Work
As you may have gathered from all the emotionally manipulative Army recruitment adverts that have been showing lately during the break in any TV programme that’s even remotely "yoof-oriented", soldiers work as a team to accomplish their objectives and try to prevent eachother from getting disgustingly shredded into horrible splattery giblets. Going it alone gets you dead very quickly, unless you’re John Rambo. And trust me, you’re not. I wish game developers would realise this because I have played too many games that bill themselves as ‘soldier simulations’ with realistic squad interaction and that, only to lump every dangerous task onto me when I actually play the game. You know the routine - "Hey, [Player]! Clear out that bunker complex! We’ll cover you!", or "[Player], you’re on point!", or "would you mind terribly if we ask you to defeat Hitler on your own? Only the entire army has thrown its back out putting up some shelves and it hurts like Billy-O".

I’m tired of my allies milling around in the distance, trying their damndest to look like they’re taking part in the fight by firing in the general direction of the enemy and only hitting their targets with one or two out of every thousand bullets they fire from their seemingly bottomless reservoir of ammunition. I’m glad that games like Full Spectrum Warrior and the Brothers In Arms series seem to be putting paid to all this lone-wolfery and offering more realistic squad-based hijinks for those who really want it. You can appreciate that developers want to give the player as much to do as possible, but there are better ways to give them that, a prime example being the original Call of Duty games, which put you in the shoes of a different person with a different area of expertise in every campaign, thus retaining variety whilst seeming more believable. However, they’ve slipped a bit with Call of Duty - The Big Red One, in which you play the same bog-standard infantry goon throughout, and yet manage to end up moonlighting as a gunner in a Flying Fortress at one point. Maybe you get two paycheques that way.

Artificial Moronity
As I mentioned in the escort mission bit, it’s no fun having to wrestle with dim allies. The quality of artificial intelligence in games has been subject to a curious reverse-development: It’s actually got more stupid as time has gone by. Characters in games released recently are way more idiotic than I remember them being just a few years ago. While programmers continue to build ever more convincing, immersive worlds, they hardly ever bother to populate them with characters who behave in an even remotely logical fashion.
Now, I hate to pick on Half-Life 2 again. It’s one of my favourite games, next to... well, the first Half-Life. But mentioning the first Half-Life, I’m reminded of the gasmasked government death squad soldiers who dogged you at every turn. They worked as a team. One would throw a grenade to flush you out, then his mate would machine gun your spectacles off when you broke cover. They’d take cover if injured, leg it if the odds were against them and cover eachother’s retreat. In short, they fought like real soldiers would, and they kicked my arse routinely. Then, of course, you had the black-clad ninja assassin ladies, who were far more lethal and cunning than any of the alien monsters.

When you beat them in combat, you felt that you’d actually outwitted them rather than simply shot them enough that they wouldn’t get back up again. Compare this with the AI in Half-Life 2 and it becomes clear something’s a bit wrong. The Combine soldiers are as thick as custard, but oh so much worse are the rebel citizens who fight alongside you. During the assault on the museum towards the end of the game, they pissed me off so much that I herded them into a small room, then used the gravity gun to stick some objects in front of the only exit, thereby barricading them inside and out of my way. Later I was munching up some Combine with my pulse rifle and the bastards reappeared and wandered straight into the firefight and got minced. Yes, they’d managed to figure out how to knock my obstacles out of the way and find me again, but they just couldn’t resist rushing into a hail of bullets. A little consistency is all I’m asking for, guys.

Unnecessary/Pretentious Storylines
I appreciate that there's a "convergence" thing going on between games and movies these days, with storylines becoming an integral part of many games, and I'm sure that they'll only get better as time goes on, but there are some games that DON'T NEED COMPLICATED PLOTS. For instance, if your game's called something like Super Violence Fistfight Extravaganza Ex Part 72, you don't need to hire a Hollywood screenwriter to pen an elaborate backstory to explain why two guys are beating the shit out of eachother. Big ol' muscular guys ain't need no artsy-fartsy narrative pretext to start some shit. Then you've got the games with huge weighty plots that try to DEAL with ISSUES, chief offender being the Metal Gear series - games that play like a very, very long and preachy film where occasionally the main character dies and you again have to sit through the preceeding forty-five fucking minutes of turgid dialogue so clunky the Pope could have written it. The dead Pope.

Bad Guys Who Hang Around Explosive Barrels

Int. - German Bunker Complex - Day

NAZI #1:
Scheisse! The Amerikaner is unstoppable!

NAZI #2:
He is coming this way! We’re doomed! What do we do?

NAZI #3:
Vell, ve could stop taking cover behind der barrels of flammable liquid, ja?

NAZI #1:
.......

NAZI #2:
.......

NAZI #3:
Never mind.

(Explosion)

Ainsley Harriott Facts

2006-02-06T01:30:00.001Z

"This business is fulla unrealistic motherfuckers."

Recently there has been an Internet trend for lists of facts about well-known badasses like Chuck Norris, Vin Diesel and Mr. T (most of them recycling the same facts and just changing the name, which is very lazy) But there’s one man who’s been so far overlooked, and yet is approximately 2000% harder-core than any of those fakers. I refer, of course, to the king of TV chefs - Ainsley Harriott. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Ainsley Harriott Facts.

-The smell of a meal well-cooked brings joy to Ainsley Harriott's heart, but so much greater is his love for that sickly-sweet scent that derives only from the burning flesh of his enemies.

-To achieve his trademark reflective "chrome-dome" look, Ainsley Harriott washes his head daily in the blood of Nazis he has killed with his own bare hands. Ready-killed Nazis’ blood is not sufficient.

-Futhermore, if the reflected sunlight from Ainsley’s head was projected into a solar panel, it would power India for a week.

-Ainsley Harriott never has to actually cook the food on his programmes. He just stares it out until it cooks itself out of terror.

-One day when he was making free meals for homeless orphans, Ainsley tripped over a dinosaur fossil and hurt his ankle. In revenge, he travelled back in time and killed all the dinosaurs one by one.

-Anthony Worral Thompson was once six feet tall, until one fateful day he questioned Ainsley Harriott’s authority. Enraged at this impudence, Ainsley used science to transform him into a dwarf.

-Ainsley Harriott is responsible for the world’s only soufleé which is visible from space.

-He also created the world’s longest, strongest strand of spaghetti. He used it to bungee jump into an active volcano, and then ate it. The volcano, not the spaghetti.

-You know the scar on Gordon Ramsay’s face? That was Ainsley.

-Ainsley Harriott once had an argument with a pushy German gentleman. This event was later referred to as World War II.

-Ainsley spends every summer raiding and pillaging other cooking programmes in his longship.

-If Ainsley Harriott does it, it’s not a crime.

-Chuck Norris once dropkicked Ainsley in the balls. It took Chuck six months to recover.

-Flying Saucer sightings are due to Ainsley angrily throwing inferior cooks’ pies into the stratosphere.

-Ainsley Harriott once baked a novelty birthday cake in the shape of Osama Bin Laden for one of his friends. The likeness was so convincing that it was attacked by a group of MI6 agents. The cake killed them.

-Vin Diesel wishes he was as bald as Ainsley.

-Ever wonder why you don’t see Nigella Lawson on TV anymore? She is still recovering from a one-night stand with Ainsley three years ago.

-The set of Ready Steady Cook is actually Ainsley Harriott’s own kitchen. When the crew go home and the lights are turned off he’s still there, perched on top of the cooker in a state of cat-like alertness.

-If Ainsley says it’s a Red Pepper Day, then it’s a motherfucking Red Pepper Day. Bitch.

Surviving A Nuclear War

2006-01-24T21:14:00.000Z

"Nuclear War?" you say. "Pfah! Didn't we leave that in the eightiesalong with red braces, shoulderpads and all the TV action shows that I am too young to remember but pretend to anyway so I can appear all post-modern and ironic by making references to Mr. T?" It is a common misconception that since the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war has considerably lessened, but do not be lulled into a false sense of security by this kind of misconceived, wooly thinking. Nuclear bombs are now so easy to buy or manufacture that vast quantities of them are now in the posession of rogue dictators, militant extremist groups, terrorists, and quite likely that funny-looking man with the thick glasses who lives down the street from you. As such, nuclear war is definitely something that you should be terrified of, planning for, and having recurring nightmares about - unless, that is, you want your family to die. Do you want them to die? Do you? Because they will, if you don't do exactly as this guide tells you to, and their blood would be on your hands, if it wasn't reduced to ash along with the rest of them. Murderer!

MODULE 1: PREPARATION

It is healthy to maintain a sense of vague worry and anxiety at all times, regardless of whether there is a specific threat or not. Afterall, we live in a dangerous world, especially since the dictators we sell arms to continue to insist on actually using them to kill people, instead of putting them to agricultural uses like they told us they would. This is why we keep having to go and make examples of these people by sending soldiers to blow up the weapons we sold them. That's a matter for the army, but you're on the home front, and what do YOU do when a hundred-megaton airburst comes knocking at your door? Invite it in for tea and biscuits? Of course not. You tell that shockwave to stick it where the sun don't shine - which is ironic, as the million-ton dust cloud disgorged into the troposphere by the blast will blot out the sun for several centuries to come!

Still, although the indomitable John Bull attitude that saw us through the Blitz is admirable, it will be of little use to you when the only remaining trace of your existence is a haunting ashen shadow of your evaporating body contorted into a sickening pose of ultimate horror. What you'll find altogether more useful in this situation is the Government-endorsed SinisTech Defence Corporation Portable Nuclear Refuge©. A spacious and affordable safeguard against the coming devastation, the Refuge© has space enough for your whole family and contains a ten-year supply of dehydrated caviar, champagne and prostitutes. A snip at £*, you quite literally can't afford not to buy one!
* We apologise for the error in the text, but it appears the price of the Refuge© is too high a number for your peasant brain to adequately comprehend. Nonetheless, if you live in London, add several more zeroes to it. For those people on a tighter budget and who generally are not referred to as "Your Majesty", read below.

If you're a low-income family or a black or a gay, you can apply online for a free portable nuclear shelter from the Government. This bunker is slightly less comfortable than the Refuge©, but don't worry, it works. We wouldn't be giving them away for free if we weren't 100% certain they would preserve your expendible lives. The shelter can be applied for during any Imminent Blast Alert and will be delivered within six to eight weeks. In the event of a nuclear explosion, follow these steps carefully to guarantee your survival:

1) Pull the shelter firmly over your head.

2) Poke some air holes in it if you have trouble breathing.

3) Stick your fingers in your ears and hum God Save The Queen.

4) Survive!

MODULE 2: ATTACK

There is not very much you can do during the actual nuclear attack apart from cowering in your shelter, quietly weeping, reading the Bible, frantically copulating or singing along to a few Max Bygraves numbers from the "Hits of the Blitz" CD enclosed with this guide book. Try to look on the bright side: Remember, due to the inefficient nature of the rudimentary chemical explosives used during World War II, your grandparents had to go through this humdrum routine every night as the Germans dropped bomb after bomb after bomb - but thanks to the modern wonder of weapons that can boil an entire city into vapour in seconds, you'll only have to do it once, leaving you with time to enjoy the important things in life.

MODULE 3: AFTERMATH

If you're safely ensconced within your SinisTech Defence Corporation Portable Nuclear Refuge©, there isn't really much point coming out for at least a decade after the blast, as the contents of your Refuge© are a thousand times more appealing than what will be going on outside. Just kick back, relax in front of the widescreen television and rehydrate a couple of hookers. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
If you opted for the free shelter and are alive to be reading this, take the stupid bag off your head and thank your own dumb luck that your component molecules are, somehow, still in the same place they were before the explosion. You will probably have lost some or all of your body hair and skin in the blast. Look on it as less of a loss, and more of a free tan and full body wax. See, it's not all doom and gloom!

It is likely that during the attack, one or more of your family members may have passed away. Should this happen, deposit the corpse outside where your house used to be, in the special wheely-bin your local council will have provided you with. It's the one with the laughing death's head stencilled on the lid. Dismemberment may be necessary for the bin to accomodate taller or fatter relatives. Corpse collections will take place weekly on Thursday mornings, providing there are any bin men left. Should there be none available, you will have to dispose of the remains in whichever way seems most suitable to you. Remember that food will be a primary concern now. There's no shame in cannibalism, and in fact some people find it quite fashionable.

Life after the attack will be hellish. Palls of ashen grey cloud will loom over the totally lawless and chaotic concrete skeleton of civilisation, gangs of psychopaths will roam the land killing at will without fear of punishment, and travel will be incredibly hazardous. In short, things will mostly be back to normal if you live in the North. Some things, however, will have changed drastically. To prepare you for the challenges of your new lifestyle, this last section is given over to general information and advice on the post-nuclear world.

Fallout

Think of fallout as a pleasant wintry snowfall. Right now it may seem strange and disconcerting that tiny specks of radioactive material are falling from the sky and settling on the ground, but in a few months' time it'll feel quite normal to sit on a park bench and watch your adorable hairless children ride sleighs down steep banks of fallout and build cancer-inducing "snowmen".

Zombies/Mutants

One of the more enjoyable side-effects of the radioactive mutating effect of the nuclear aftermath is the humble undead zombie. Huge in numbers, slow-moving and extremely entertaining to run away from or kill with improvised weapons. Make a game out of it, and while away the Nuclear Winter competing with your friends to see how many zombies you can kill within a set time limit. Award bonus points for any cool one-liners uttered when killing a zombie. Mutants, on the other hand, are far more hazardous. While they have been horribly disfigured like the zombies, they have lost none of their cogniscent abilities, and will be understandably full of murderous anger, which they will be delighted to vent upon those humans lucky enough not to be growing an extra set of genitals out of their foreheads. Although if you were to ask me, I'd find that quite useful.

Cruelly Disfigured Landmarks

As we have learned from watching lots of post-apocalyptic science fiction films, most of the world's great iconic structures will be left at least partially standing after a nuclear blast, to illustrate just how irreversibly buggered civilisation is. Plan your next holiday accordingly to take in as many ruined landmarks as possible. We highly reccomend you check out the following: Statue of Liberty Submerged Waist-Deep In the Ocean, Eiffel Tower With the Top Blown Off, Big Ben With the Clock Face Shattered, Mount Rushmore With One Of the Presidents' Heads Knocked Off, and Taj Mahal With the Dome Cracked Open. Oh, and US Capitol Building Overgrown With Vines and Creepers seems to be quite popular too.

Fashion

Of course, one of your primary concerns after the war will be looking good. Important post-apocalypse social functions such as picking through the rubble for rats to eat, throttling someone over a bottle of uncontaminated water, or simply screaming at the horror of it all, demand that you look your best. For your fashion requirements, check out your local crashed airliner. There will be plenty of these available, because when civilisation collapses, it will cause all the airliners in the world to stop working for no actual reason and fall from the sky. Should you come across one such stricken aircraft (easy to spot because the tail fin will always be pointing directly upwards out of the ground), you should have no qualms about looting the dead passengers' wardrobes. Whilst they will no doubt have suffered some damage in the crash, clothing "borrowed" from aircrash victims will look fantastic compared to the roughly-hewn animal furs and thick coating of mud and faeces your peers will be sporting. You'll be the talk of where the town used to be!

Sex

Generally, you will be wanting to do as much of this as possible, even moreso than normal. Fortunately there should be a lot of it going around, partly because social inhibitions will no longer be relevant, and also because pretty much everyone will share your desire to "go out with a bang" as humanity faces the final curtain. Don't worry if you're horribly mutated - ordinary, attractive survivors will soon form fetishes for the "uglies". You may even get so much action that your friends will wish they'd been deformed too! Don't worry about unwanted pregnancies, as the massive levels of radiation will have rendered everyone sterile. Enjoy!

Brief Update

2005-11-29T16:10:00.000Z

Just to let you know a few things:

A: I am still alive.

B: I'm aware the pictures on all my older posts have vanished, this is because the site that was hosting them exploded (for reasons too pathetic to go into here). Anyway, they should be back when I have the time and inclination to heft them all over to my new image hosting site. For now, you will have to use your imagination.

C: George Best died, and I fully intend to mark his passing by doing a celebratory Rumba on his grave. The media have wheeled out the usual dead-sportsman line on his death, proclaiming him a "hero," "genius," and other such superlatives incompatible with a washed up ex-footballer who killed himself with his own lack of impulse control, despite being given a second chance at life in the form of a liver transplant that really should have gone to someone who was actually ill instead a boozy cunt who happened to be famous. Conversely, we have seen almost nothing about the death of Alfred Anderson, one of only four remaining World War I veterans, right after Remembrance Sunday.

Still, while I watch actual news sidelined to make way for football pundits' ten-minute-long tearful farewells to the stupid dead old dogfucker, I am comforted by the fact that now he's corpsemeat, he'll no longer be a drain on the health system. George best was A National Treasure, and I've always thought the best way to keep treasure is to bury it.

This month also sees the sad passing of William Hootkins, the actor who bought to life the unforgettable character of Porkins in the first Star Wars film. Y'know, the big fat bloke who explodes by accident during the Death Star battle. I urge you all to light a candle for ol` Porky.

Walpurgisnacht

2005-10-31T20:00:00.000Z

It's Halloween. If you're American, this means lots of crass rituals involving dressing up and going "trick or treating". If you are English or over the age of 6, it is a matter of supreme indifference to you. This is a fairly poor show actually, seeing as we invented the bastard. As we all know, Halloween was created by druids and vampires in Roman times, to honour the Moon and that. The Mummy was probably involved on some level as well. That guy has his bandaged hands in many pies.

Fortunately this year my house has remained utterly unbothered by trick or treaters (who around here take the shape of sweatsuit-wearing four year olds out on their own without any kind of costume on, demanding sweets). Possibly word started to spread of the small, withered carcasses slowly drying on hooks in my larder, and how their ranks swell every October. The local children now know to steer well clear of the Meathook House.

On the way back home this evening I noticed a lot of lame costume choices walking the streets. Matrix outfits seemed to be a popular choice amongst corpulent adults, while the kids' favourite seemed to be Spiderman. How Spiderman and Neo are meant to be scary I don't know, although I concur that watching Tobey Maguire and Keanu Reeves act is quite terrifying. Right, gang?
Anyway, it prompted me to think up some "alternative" Halowe'en costumes. Perhaps the following suggestions will give people some better ideas for next year's festivities. A fat bearded white bloke dressed up as Morpheus is scary, but not in in the "fun" way.

Shaun

From, of course, Shaun of the Dead. Affect a white shirt with red tie and name tag, black trousers and shoes. Complete the ensemble by getting some red on you, and wielding a cricket bat. A Winchester rifle is a possible alternative, but only if you are fairly confident you won't end up being shot to death by over-eager armed policemen. If possible, coerce an overweight friend into playing the role of Ed.

Ash

The ultimate badass horror film hero is bristling with Halloween costume potential. Blue longsleeved shirt, manly work boots and trousers, razor-sharp jawline and chainsaw for a right hand. If you own the special edition Evil Dead DVD in the spongy "book of the dead" packaging, carry that around with you, demanding primitive screwheads that you be returned to your own time. If you're really dedicated, actually saw your right hand off. A sawnoff shotgun rounds off the costume, and again makes you fair game for trigger-happy coppers. Also, throw copies of the awful Evil Dead computer games at people. That's a whole fresh kind of terror.

Derek Acorah

Dye your hair grey, get a set of gold earrings, and watch with amazement as you are magically transformed into Most Haunted's faux-psychic bullshit artist. Walk around "sensing auras", getting posessed by "robed figures" and calling up the spirits of the dead by inarticulately spouting half-arsed psychic bollocks in your utterly drab, non-mystical Liverpudlian accent. Bonus points for tricking gullible people into thinking they are talking to recently-deceased loved ones and then charging them a handsome premium for the privilege of being exploited by your bare-faced unapologetic charlatanry.

Indiana Jones Gestapo Dude

The chap with the terrifying coathanger from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Work on your vaguely pervy german accent, then walk around on Halloween night, heiling the crap out of some Hitler. If you're feeling adventurous, get your makeup out and recreate the "melt scene".

Lo Pan

Big Trouble In Little China's levitating demon emperor. Especially good if you are actually Chinese or can walk through walls, or both (all Chinese people can do this, but they keep it a secret). Also, you get a choice of the two different Lo Pans - the little basket case in the wheelchair, or the twelve foot tall roadblock.

Cthulhu

The punchline in many a not-funny internet nerd joke, this is one for people who like a challenge -the challenge being that to accurately portray Cthulhu, you'll have to design and build a costume that not only accurately resembles Lovecraft's fabled bat/squid/fat guy/god/whatsit, but actually drives people insane at the sight of it. Extra credit for squamousness and rugosity.

Derek from Bad Taste

The second Derek on the list. Yes, he's a Derek, and Dereks don't quit. Affect a Peter Jackson accent ("what are you dirty hoo-ers doin` on my plenet?"), get a long scarf, chainsaw and, most importantly of all, tie your belt around your head to stop your brain from falling out. For added impact, get some offal from your local butcher and periodically attempt to stuff it back into your ruptured cranium.

Invisible Huge Monster from Lost

Easy, this one. Just hang around in the woods, play some ungodly, horrifying roars on a powerful speaker system and knock over a few trees. But make sure nobody sees you, or you'll ruin the mystery. Are you a dinosaur? Are you a ghost? Are you God? Or are you a physical manifestation of all the survivors' subconscious fears and desires, suggesting that the series' creators owe quite a lot to 1950s science fiction film The Forbidden Planet? Does anyone give a flying testicle?

The Master Chief

I know the Chief is not in the least bit spooky, but I wanted an opportunity to make a "Halo-Ween!!!!" joke. Apologies.

That's all I can think of for now. Bugger off, you bastards.

Kakapo.

2005-10-19T17:19:00.000+01:00

Kakapo are superb. That's all you need to know about them.

A malicious rumour about me has been circulating recently - people are saying that I was raped by Howard from the Halifax adverts. This is total fiction. While I did rape an ape and then steal his cape (as a souvenir), I have never had any contact, sexual or otherwise, with that man. The only explanation I can think of is that he raped someone else and mistook them for me on account of his comically thick spectacles.

A Google image search for "Howard from Halifax" yielded this picture. This probably means something.

I am moderately drunk, on fortified wine. Seriously fortified wine. This wine's got a fuckin` moat and drawbridge. And like all drunks, I am inclined to tell everyone how drunk I am. Nobody is around for me to tell at the moment, so I am telling the Internet instead. I am also drunk on VICTORY, because I just slaughtered Mr. Jerky and his "insane" friend Mr. Beardo in four consecutive Unreal Tournament matches. I wore those fuckers like cheap cologne. I AM THEIR MUM, AND I JUST TOOK THEM TO SCHOOL IN THE CAR OF PAIN. Anyway, I am that kind of drunk where I giggle in an imbecilic manner at everything I type, believing it to be Comedy Gold, only to wake up the following morning, review, and realise that I have produced a bigger load of shit than Bernard Manning on laxatives.

I have been with Claudia for two years from tomorrow, which is brag-able. We spent the weekend being all cooey and lovey-dovey and generally disgusting and pissing off everyone around us, and it was splendid. Speaking of pissing people off, on the way back from town today there was possibly the most annoying girl who has ever sat in front of me on the bus sitting in front of me on the bus. She was one of those Crazy Students whose vocabulary consists of "how random!" and "actually". This one had the particularly annoying trait of saying 'et cetera' constantly and pronouncing it "IG-SETCH-RA". I bet she has a blog where she posts her "thoughts" which she thinks are in the slightest bit original. Oh.

I've been making aeroplane kits. It is incredibly fiddly and annoying, but ultimately it is deeply satisfying when I am done and can stick the finished model on my book shelf and wait for it to fall off. It's like an allegorical lesson that toil and hard work pay off in the end, even in iredeemably nerdy pursuits.

Plane fans will recognise this as a Chance-Vought F4U Corsair. Normal people will recognise it as a waste of time.

Right, enough. It's past my bedtime and my face is falling off. Goodnight!

Computer Q and A

2005-09-30T06:00:00.000+01:00

Answering your questions:
Fergus Braemar Glennoggie McShortbread - Doomed Scotsman

Question:
My computer clock always runs fast. It’s been doing so for years. Every week I have to set it back about a half hour or so. Is there a way to correct this?

Answer:
Garrgh! It's no good laddie, I'm done for. But ye might make it back, if'n I stay here an' watch yer back. Aye, ye go when the barrage is done, and I'll stay here with me gun and make sure none o' them German heathens follow ye. Just do me one favour, boy - when they find me, make sure they bury me with me tam'o-shanta.

Question:
I've got icons scattered all over my desktop, how do I organize them?

Answer:
Gaaakk! Me number's up, bairn. Ah've stopped me last bullet and ah'm goin' fast. Ye'd better get on the noo, they'll be comin' this way afore long. Just don't forget yer old pal Fergus and don't forget what he told ye. An' don't ye forget what he died for, neither. Ah'll ask of ye one thing and nothing more - tell them to bury me with me sporran.

Question:
When I go into Windows XP, there aren't any file extensions, such as exe, jpg
or txt shown on any of my files. I'd like to change this, but how?

Answer:
Ye've been a braw pal to me, lad. But noo I'm goin' where ye can't follow. The pearly gates be openin `afore me! Ah can see the wide, green glen! Me fair hame! Think kindly o` me when I'm gone, lad, and dinnae forget the deeds I did an` the things I taught ye. On a cold nicht, when the moon is broad, remember me, and raise yer glass to yer ol' pal Fergus. That's all I ask.

Question:
When I try to delete files, sometimes I see a message saying "this file is currently being used by Windows and can't be deleted". How do I delete these files?

Answer:
Ah'll no hear another word about it, lad. Ah'm old, but ye've got yer whole life aheed of ye. Stay here, and ah'll go in yer place. Now ye make sure ye live through this, and ye go back home to yer wee bairn and live a good life. Just make sure they bury me with me pipes.

Question:
I wrote into your column last month about having issues with my CD burner and you suggested that I go on without you because you'd just slow me down. I'm humbled by your selflessness but it's not helping me change my priority settings. More detailed advice would be much appreciated.

Answer:
I'm gutshot, laddie! Ah followed the skirlin` o' the pipes in tae the jaws o'death! Kiss me noo, then walk away and dinnae look back. Ye'll nae see me again.

Question:
My question is regarding a problem that occurred when I tried to copy a folder with all my MS Word files to my USB jump drive. I think I may have accidentally moved the folder instead of copied it, but the folder never appeared on my Drive E: for the jump drive. I then attempted to do a System Restore to a previous day to recover the files, but that did not totally solve the problem. I can now see the folder and the files within the folder, but I cannot open them. I get an error message that says the file is already in use. Is there any way I can recover my files?

Answer:
Fucked if I know, lad.

Titless Pete

2005-09-16T21:20:00.000+01:00

Did I ever tell you about Titless Pete? He was titless alright. He was called that because he got caught in a friendly fire incident during the first Iraq war, whilst waiting for a bus in Dagenham. An Apache pilot mistook him for Baghdad and shot a Hellfire missile at him. His nipples were simply vapourised in the explosion.

By some miracle, the rest of Pete survived comparatively unscathed, but the experience left him deeply traumatised and to add insult to injury, the American government billed him for the missile to the tune of $600,000.

Anyway, the whole incident wrecked his marriage and he spent some time on the streets, before he got a job writing angry letters to Teletext. He specialised in demands for a return to capital punishment. You could always tell if a letter was one of Pete's if it ended with "and I'd pull the lever myself!".

Once he'd saved up enough money from his new job, he travelled to Switzerland to have
a pioneering restorative procedure to get his nipples back. It was a complete success to begin with, but unfortunately the nipples rejected him. Embittered, he returned home to his job, and started writing letters insulting cuckoo clocks, yodelling and Swatches, until one day he was found dead in his flat with a Swiss Army Knife protruding from his back. No arrests were ever made.

Many stories have a moral, but this one has two.

A: Nipples maketh the man.

B: Don't fuck with the Swiss.

Hello Huw.

2005-09-13T15:21:00.000+01:00

Defenestration is defined as the act of throwing (or sometimes slow-motion punching) somebody out of a window. We see this activity glorified, nay encouraged by the media on an almost daily basis. But little mention is ever made of those who pick up the pieces afterwards - the under-appreciated men who tirelessly patrol the streets of our country every night, throwing those people back in. Without these exceptional individuals, our cities would be brimming over with the defenestrated, but like true heroes, these men are humble and modest about their duty, and claim they are "just doing their job". But I and a growing number of others believe their selfless actions should be more widely publicised and celebrated. That's why I am dedicating this blog entry to The Refenestrators.

I went to an airshow at Duxford on Saturday with dad, Justin, Shane and his daughter, which was excellent. We were able to get in free by virtue of my brother's Mob Connections, which was also excellent. I filled my camera with images, too many to post here, so instead you can follow this link to aeroplaney goodness: http://www.maj.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=97511

Despite rain, it was a great day out for all involved, and there were some pretty amazing things to see, including a Tornado jet (loudest noise I have ever, ever heard in my entire life) 12 spitfires in the air simultaneously (first time I have ever been emotionally affected by the sight of some aeroplanes) A B-17 flying fortress (accompanied by the commentator's absolutely hilarious, incoherent ramblings about Those Barmy Brussells Beauraucrats and their devilish schemes) plus various other aerial delights. There was also a big market selling all kinds of aviation paraphenalia, and in among the endless stalls selling incomplete Airfix models, I found a couple of unbelievably cheap army surplus stalls where I got an ammo box, a hat for Claudia, and an old US Airforce jacket, with "U.S. AIR FORCE" written on it. At another stall I noticed there was a box full of old army and airforce name tags, possibly wrenched from the stilll-warm corpses of American servicemen. Anyway, they were only 50p each, so I got one for my jacket. I am now "FLYNT". Grr!

In other news, I heard "we" (the England cricket team) actually didn't lose the cricket for once, an event which has prompted thousands of people to flock to Trafalgar Square to pay homage to the "heroes" for doing what they were paid an absolutely jaw-dropping sum of money to do. Not that I'm having a go or anything. It's great that they won but the media is always so hasty to label victorious sportsmen as heroes, while the people who work constantly to save people's lives barely get a look-in. People like doctors, policemen, firefighters and refenestrators need to be paid their due.

I LIEK TEH FLAPJACK

2005-08-28T23:36:00.000+01:00

I drew hats.

Hello fartknocker. Under pressure of numerous requests and vague threats to update my fucking shit (motherfucker), I'm doing just that. The main reason I have not updated is because I've been experiencing a "creative slump" lately, bought on by the fact that I'm not really anxious or frustrated about anything. I'm feeling pretty great. As Klein observed when her artist friend encountered a creative block, "contentment is the enemy of invention". So I'll just rattle on and on about boring toss nobody's going to read. That ought to shut people up.

I turned 20 a week ago. I'm not a teenager anymore, but I can't say I feel much different. I am still jobhunting, still the same height, my hair is still atrocious and my back is still covered in agonising Black Death-style spots, and I still think you have a shifty look about you.
Business as usual, except I have a zero in my age for the first time in ten years. Cor, fancy that! Oh, and I'm also now addicted to flapjacks. Flapjacks are to me what TEH DONUT is to The Internet's Mark. You should try them, especially yogurt-topped Blackfriars flapjacks. They are sixteen kinds of dope, dogg.

It's an axe. Feel the weight.

I've been getting back into history lately and I have become a Viking fanboy. I can't get enough of reading about those guys, with their beards and bravado and debauchery and longships and healthily take-it-or-leave-it attitude to their excellent pantheon of completely fucking psychotic gods. Oh, and their capacity to kill stuff for basically no reason at the slightest provocation.
I might do a post totally dedicated to them sometime. Anyway, I had a Viking-themed birthday and recieved tons of Norse-centric gifts. Put together, my friends and family purchased me all but one of the sets in the gorgeous new Lego Vikings range, and my dad bought me a big, beautiful, goddamned Viking AXE, which is one of the best birthday presents I've ever recieved. It's properly weighted for fighting so it's a joy to swing it around, and the composite iron/steel blade can be sharpened if I so desire. I am praying for a zombie outbreak at this stage. I also recieved some neat books from my brother, including the Judge Dredd story 'America', which is now my absolute favourite Dredd book ever.

Claudia is suitably amazed

Post-birthday I paid a clandestine visit to Claudia in Birmingham for various activities. We visited various shops and eating establishments and generally had a gay old time, except totally heterosexual. I will not see her again for a month as she ludicrously claims to be going to "America", in the genuine belief that it is actually a real place. People will believe anything they see on TV these days. She has promised to buy me a load of tourist souvenir tat from Washington and New York, and she'd better, because I am not letting her back into England otherwise.

Joe lieks teh alcohol.

I then went to Little Joe's "manor" and we drank lots of alcohol but I don't think it worked because I didn't proposition a barmaid then vomit on her tits and wake up the following day feeling like I wanted to die, which I gather is what's meant to happen when you get drunk. Needless to say I was disappointed. We then watched Viking-tastic action film The 13th Warrior and went out and drank more. I really enjoyed seeing Joe again and also my new-fangled ability to drink ALCOHOL in PUBS with A FRIEND, but I still don't like the fact that one is quite literally pissing one's money up the wall on intoxicating liquids when one could be spending that money on DVDs and useless merchandise that'll last you a lifetime or until you get bored of it and take it down Oxfam. I passed an Oxfam recently and the window display was absolutely chock full of Star Trek videos, merchandise and spinoff books. Someone, somewhere, has died a virgin.

That same day, I visited Woolwich's newly-opened GameStation store, and braving the dense clumps of unmoving human refuse I am reliably informed are called "chavs", I discovered a copy of Max Payne 2 for £7. I think that's about the right price for it. I got through the whole game in less than a week and found it to be a sporadically enjoyable experience. Certain sections of the game were so much fun I found myself quickloading after I'd wasted all the goons so I could go back and do it again. But many bits had me biting holes in the upholstery out of frustration as I arbitrarily died time and time again. That is no fun. I find it oddly perverse to make a game that gives you the ability to slow down time and behave like a movie action hero but then discourages you from doing so with extremely unforgiving gameplay and skimpy amounts of health and ammo. The environments are pretty boring as well, with repeated visits to a fun house modelled on an imaginary Twin Peaks-style TV program that's all over the game despite the fact that exactly nobody is likely to give two shits about it besides the guy who came up with the idea and thought he was a right old clever clogs for doing so. Pah. The ragdoll physics are great fun though. Shotgunning some mook into a pile of boxes and watching them fly everywhere never, ever gets old.

Hunter S Thompson lieks teh alcohol too but he is worried because he has lost his hat.

And finally, dear old dead Hunter S. Thompson was finally laid to rest last week, shot out of an enormous cannon as per his will. They cremated him first obviously, they didn't just fire a decomposing body into the sky and wait to get sued by the poor bastard whose front lawn gets splattered in maggot-riddled Gonzo giblets. Anyway, it was an appropriately unique sendoff for a unique man. I doubt we'll see his kind again any time soon. He was a product of a particular time in history, a one-off, never intended for mass production. Always wearing the right coat while travelling outside the realms of possibilities. He was old for a man of such tastes, and I knew he had to go sometime soon, I just wish he'd died in a more spectacular fashion. Blowing his face off with a shotgun has a suitably classical, Hemingway-esque quality to it, but I'd much rather he'd died in a hail of police bullets after a final mescaline-induced freakout or somesuch. I'm afraid Thompson may be remembered more for his drug-addled sociopathic behaviour rather than his journalism, and this would be a horrible shame.
Reading his work is like having your brain enhanced without the benifit of the substances which he himself regularly huffed, smoked, injected, drank or otherwise mutated himself with.

Ah well, If there's a Heaven, and I hope to God there is, I know he's up there, drunk off his ass and smokin` shit. I hope you enjoyed the ride, Doctor Thompson.

In other news I've heard that Mr. Jerky likes Orc Points:

The World's Wildest Police Horoscopes

2005-06-26T17:52:00.001+01:00

With Sheriff John Bunnell (retired)

Hi, I’m Sheriff John Bunnell. In 25 years as an officer of the law, I saw a lot of high-speed chases, bank heists, convenience store holdups, drug deals gone bad, and a lot more. But no matter how experienced you are, the job can still take you by surprise. That’s why I’m here tonight to provide you with an insight into your future, and perhaps the criminal mind itself.

All the horoscopes you are about to see are taken from REAL Tarot readings by REAL psychics in America and across the globe. Because on the streets, when the going gets tough, the tough realign their chakras.
These are The World’s Wildest Police Horoscopes.

Aries - March 21 to April 19
This week, you yearn for the strength to break free from your emotional cocoon and embark upon a journey of self discovery. But be warned - no matter how far you run, no matter how well you hide, if you make the mistake of running from the Baker County Sheriff's Department, you'll be making an altogether different kind of journey - a journey into the back seat of a police cruiser!

Taurus - April 19 to May 20
Busting through stop signs as if they were green lights, a sense of disaffection at work careens straight into your emotional meridian! As the heavy traffic of Rush Hour starts to kick in, Cops will have to work fast before this vague feeling of malaise snowballs into a full-scale catastrophe!

Gemini - May 20 to June 21
This week's scenario is highlighted by your ability to multitask and balance your act - a skill you're sorely in need of when these Georgia patrolmen administer the DUI test after you're clocked barrelling down the highway at ninety miles per! Later, it is discovered that not only were you driving at FIVE TIMES the legal limit... you were also high on a deadly cocktail of street-bought methamphetamines! Now these Virginia State Troopers have one less drug-crazed maniac to worry about, and you've learned an important lesson: You may try to evade the long arm of the law, but the further you run, the longer it gets!

Cancer - June 21 to July 22
Indecision, even when self-imposed, is not an easy place to be. You'll soon be faced with a choice of which way to turn. You can try the high way, the low way, or the freeway, but in the end you won't GET A-WAY from determined police officers! And soon you'll be learning all about another place that isn't so easy to be - THE COUNTY JAIL!

Leo - July 22 to August 22
Lazy Leo, this week your horoscope is dominated by the need to take control and accept responsibility for your actions. But luckily, you'll have a lot of time to think about responsibility - BEHIND BARS!

Virgo - August 22 to September 23
One by one, the blocks in your path to self actualisation are being removed - though you may be a little in the dark as to what lies ahead for you. These Sheriff’s Deputies prefer it that way - it allows them to lay down Stinger spike strips in the path of your destructive rampage! Moments later and the trap is sprung! Virgo speeds straight over the spike strips, popping all four tires! Running on rims only, with sparks flying from the back of the vehicle like the tail of a comet, you have a moment of clarity, doing the first smart thing you’ve done all day, and surrendering to the police.

Libra - September 23 to October 23
An upsurge of magnetism in your personal and professional relationships will see an old flame return to your life, T-boning a tanker and showering the stolen SUV with pure gasoline! Only moments ago, cops were attempting to bring this renegade to justice - but now they fight to rescue the culprit from the twisted remains the vehicle before it goes up in flames!

Scorpio - October 23 to November 22
Careening the wrong way down this busy freeway, it’s only a matter of time before inspirational Mercury misjudges, and when it does, the results are terrifying - the sedan ricochets off the side of this eighteen-wheeler like a pinball! Just listen to the sound the car makes as it hits the central divider! Incredibly, he’s still conscious, and take off on foot into nearby woodlands. However, the suspect’s courage runs out when K-9 units are bought into hunt him down. This renegade celestial convergence took police on a blistering chase spanning three separate counties, but dedicated officers took the fugitive off the streets - and into a holding cell!

Sagittarius - November 22 to December 21
Things in the workplace will move swiftly, and the time between proposal and action may be refreshingly short - but not as short as THIS Sagittarius' temper when he refuses to accept the ticket and takes a wild swing at Officer Pendlebury!
It started as a twenty dollar fine for a cracked tail light, but because this HOTHEADED culprit couldn't keep his COOL, he's going down for felony assault! He'll have plenty of time to COOL OFF now - IN THE COOLER!

Capricorn - December 21 to January 20
Mars in your emotional house makes you a mess of conflicting wants and desires, spiralling out of control and fishtailing on this dusty, unpaved desert road. Unless you learn to control your impulses, it's only a matter of time before your worst fears become fender-crunching, tire-shredding, rim-rattling reality!

Aquarius - January 20 to Febuary 19
Boxed in by the cruisers, Saturn barrels wildly across the front lawn of your Relationship House, narrowly missing a pedestrian! This horoscope just turned serious. DEADLY serious!

Pisces - Feburary 19 to March 21
Amazingly nobody is killed, and you survive to stand trial.

A PAUL STOJANOVICH PRODUCTION

The Museum of Toys

2005-06-20T01:05:00.000+01:00

As requested by that "Juptin" guy, here are some pictures of my vast toy collection.

My oversized collection of tat, in its full glory.

A happy Halo family. The Master Chief and attendant Spartan homies, plus one of the developmentally disabled Human Marines, a lovable Grunt and a chunky Elite.

Earthworm Jim! Through the soil he did crawl! Also Mulder & Scully, Robocop, some Quake marines, and a still-packaged Jesus Christ, probably "inspired" by Kevin Smith's Buddy Christ.

A couple of old Mister T figures which I had long before it was cool to ironically worship Mister T. This means I am better than you.

My childhood collection of Dr. Who guys. Note my rubbish taste in the Doctor's companions. Except for K-9, he was fuckin` harsh.

A selection of gorgeous Star Wars vehicles made by Micro Machines. Some of these have recently been re-released by Hasbro, but tragically lacking the tiny little pilot figures who could sit in the cockpits.

The baddest motherfucker in all of Middle Earth.

"Get away from her, you BITCH." Ripley tears the Alien Queen a new ovipositor. Mars Attacks Martian tries not to get involved.

It's just a flesh wound.

He-Man and Skeletor, plus Destro and a Cobra soldier guy. Cobra Commander has passed out.

Some of my Lego stormtrooper army, acquired via the magic of ebay.

There, I hope you enjoyed that. If you didn't you really should have, you ungrateful bunch of bastards. There's tons more to see but my uploading gland is aching after all that hardcore mouse clicking, so I'll save the rest for another day.

In other news, I've been reading about this "Freedom Awards" thing that celebrates FREEDOM of expression by way of presenting AWARDS to blog authors who go above and beyond the call of duty to whinge about how George Bush is evil and stupid. I think I should win an award for putting up with those people trying to pass off base political observations as PROFOUND INSIGHTS. I will accept this award in the form of a functioning solid gold space shuttle or a bottomless barrel of chocolate eclairs.

Signs O` The Times

2005-06-13T01:43:00.000+01:00

Some strange, inappropriate, silly or otherwise peculiar signs I've taken pictures of.

I don't know what kind of idiot thought it'd be a good idea to put a picture of the World Trade Center on a sign for an estate agent. It's not an image that's generally associated with structural durability. Also, I like how their web address spells the company name incorrectly.

Zombie-only area.

It's reassuring to know I'm being experimented on.

I just feel sorry for the guy the "ICE" landed on.

Fnarr.

CTRL+ALT+DEL

This one's from the scum-infested council estate which I live on the edge of. For some reason the permanently intoxicated teenage mothers and their millions of illiterate rat-faced spawn just ain't interested in Family Fun Day.

Who left that there?

Next Week's TV

2005-06-12T16:03:00.000+01:00

STAR WARS: THE SERIES

Network premiere of George Lucas' spinoff TV series, focusing on minor characters from the films. In this first episode, cynical wisecracking cantina alien Hammerhead unexpectedly inherits a studio apartment in the fashionable part of Coruscant from his uncle, but before he can get settles in there's a housewarming party to organise, a tyrannical Sith Landlord to contend with, and an unconscious Rodian in the bathroom. Featuring Ted Danson as Hammerhead, and also starring the voices of a million Star Wars fans suddenly crying out in terror.

NEWSFRIGHT

Deeply suspect award-winning current affairs programme, featuring nothing but
grim, sobering stories of youth violence, terrorist attacks and genocide, punctuated by blatant psychological manipulation, randomly-insterted spooky "wooooooooo!" noises and a large trasparent cackling death's head flashing on and off in the middle of the screen throughout the entire programme. This week's edition takes a look at all the horrible things young people in hoodies might do to you, why you oughtn't to trust foreigners, and continues the countdown of 100 Greatest Reasons To Never Go Outside. Hosted by Nick Ross.

THE SOPRANOS

Hard-hitting mob drama, this week's episode featuring special guest writer, dead 1930s horror author HP Lovecraft.Whilst searching for dropped dollar bills under the tables in the Bada Bing, Paulie discovers the long-lost Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and upon opening it unwittingly creates a dimensional gateway through which spews a host of gibbering, starborn blasphemies from beyond angled space. Meanwhile, Tony tells Dr. Melfi about his recurring dreams of Cyclopean cities, and Silvio is jostled by a swarthy Mulatto.

TALKING HEAD NOSTALGIA SHOW #42,0082

Public service broadcast designed to supply work to authoritative TV luminaries such as Jonathon Ross' less-funny brother, some bint off Smack The Pony and Vernon Kay - who all line up to emit standardised nostalgic utterances generated by a computer program, concerning antique television programs broadcast long before any of them were actually born. Tonight's
faux-memories include hiding behind the sofa from Daleks and why that Only Fools And Horses episode where Delboy falls through the bar is the crowning cultural achievement of the 20th century.

STAR TREK: ABSTINENCE

One of several new Star Trek spinoffs frantically released as part of a desperate attempt to resuscitate the ailing franchise after the failure of Enterprise. Taking place in the Original Series timeline, this show follows the exploits of the USS Abstinence, a roving Starfleet STD clinic on a five-year mission to trail after the USS Enterprise wherever it goes and attempt to quell the raging HIV epidemic being spread by injudicious lover Captain Kirk. In this week's episode, Captain Kinsey is shocked to receive a distress call from himself in a future where the Federation has been ripped apart by an especially virulent strain of the clap Kirk contracted on Vulcan, due to time travel or some old shit like that. Guest-starring Wil Wheaton as a nasty case
of herpes. Followed by:

STAR TREK: WARP SPEED

A new, streamlined and ultra-condensed Star Trek designed to cater for modern audiences with high-pressure jobs and limited leisure time and/or attention span, featuring an all-Vulcan crew.

When the ship recieves a distress signal from an unfamiliar alien spacecraft, Captain Sovak immediately destroys the vessel because it's generally a trap when you get a distress signal in Star Trek, which may end up leading to storyline. Everybody agrees with the Captain's entirely logical command decision, thereby negating the need for character tension and so further
reducing the show's running time of sixty-seven seconds. Followed by:

JAH TREK

Same as above but with rastas.

I watched Episode III.

2005-06-08T22:49:00.000+01:00

Here's what I thought about various different aspects of the film.

DIALOGUE
The dialogue, thank Jesus, has improved. Some of the jokes actually made me giggle. Ian McDiarmid gets some great lines to chew on, and everyone else does their best with what they're given. Unfortunately, there's been no improvement in the writing when it comes to Anakin and Padme's conversations. At one point Anakin utters this clunker: "You look so beautiful because of how much I love you."
Retch. That line is so awful wouldn't even make it onto a poorly-translated Japanese Valentine's Day card.

Yoda's forced backwards-speak is similarly annoying. In his original appearances, Yoda only did this occasionally - when he really had something important to say to Luke, he'd drop the speech impediment and talk properly. Now, however, it has grown from a funny linguistic eccentricity into the defining point of Yoda's entire frigging character. He does it ALL THE BLOODY TIME, including when he's ordering clone troopers around. Would you like it if you were in a huge chaotic battle and your sergeant was barking orders at you in incomprehensible reverse-English?
"Around the survivors, a perimiter create!"

Oh, and he doesn't do that crazy little squeaky chuckle anymore. Boo.

THE PLOT
The plot has to be the best of the prequel trilogy. I thought Anakin's perversion to the Dark Side was written quite well, especially the way it stems from love rather than pure malice. It actually makes you feel sorry for Vader, casting his character in a new light.

The spectacularly nasty way Palpatine manipulates Anakin's feelings is well-played - he lures Anakin into the dark by exploiting his fear about his wife dying, and also by quite simply being nicer to the chap than his own fellow Jedi are. The one weak point I can think of is Anakin's strangling of Padme towards the end of the film. This girl is the reason he switches sides and turns into a bastard.
He does it all out of love for her, and so it makes no sense for him to do this, unless he's just disciplining her, trailer-trash style: "Why you always gotta make me Force Choke you, baby?"

It could have simply been that by this point he was so far gone and drunk on his own power that he no longer gave a shit about her, but after he's been encased in his trademark black armour, the first thing he asks the Emperor is if she's okay, which sort of blows that line of reasoning. All in all though, the events in this film are suitably epic, and a definite improvement on that whole “bunch of evil Japanese capitalist aliens blockades some stupid planet nobody cares about” affair.

CGI
I will not dispute that a lot of the computer effects in the new films are jaw-droppingly good - it's just that they're everywhere, all the time, when they really don't need to be. Even dialogue scenes which ought to focus on character interaction are jammed full of eye-boggling computer-generated bollocks going on everywhere and distracting you from what's going on in the foreground. To convey the sheer size of the kind of titanic battles the new films have played host to, CGI is essential - but Lucas uses it for practically everything else as well, including sets and costumes. Part of the attraction of watching the old films is that most of the stuff on screen actually physically exists - real sets, backdrops, model spaceships and iconic props and costumes which became the cinematic equivalent of holy relics. If you look at production stills from this film, it's almost exclusively a bunch of people hanging around in front of a completely bare greenscreen backdrop. Would it really be more expensive to create costumes for the clone troopers instead of rendering them on a computer? The technology to do Stormtrooper suits existed in 1977, and dedicated Star Wars fans knock up convincing outfits in their sheds, so why can't ILM? It just looks better. You don't have to use CGI for everything.

I'd say the two most grating incidences of superfluous CGI in this film are...
A) The head Clone Trooper taking his helmet off during his last conversation with Obi-Wan, which was so unconvincing it reminded me of the FMV cutscenes from the original Command & Conquer.
B) Obi-Wan cradling baby Luke at the end of the film. The kid appears to have been superimposed into Ewan McGreggor's hands using a 1980s Quantel Paintbox. Could they not just have him ACTUALLY HOLD A FRIGGING BABY? They're not so hard to find, afterall. You can buy them at competetive prices from any disreputable orphanage.

KASHYYKK
Yay, Chewbacca's back! For about three minutes. With the amount of assorted Chewie-oriented merchandise on the shelves out there, I was expecting these scenes to be a pivotal part of the film, but they didn't seem to serve any function other than an excuse to churn out Wookiee toys. Oh, and Lucas yet again blatantly contradicts his own backstory by setting the fight on Kashyykk's actual surface - it's meant to be incredibly dangerous and uninhabitable down there, this being the reason the Wookiees live up in the trees to begin with. It's annoying how Lucas tries to cater to to the fans by finally putting the Wookiee homeworld up on the big screen, but then drastically alters its topography in order for it to serve as the stage for yet another of those wide open battles with so many rubbish CGI robots clogging up the screen that it's impossible to tell what's going on. I thought a vertigo-inducing fight far up in the treetops would've been a lot more exciting.

Oh, and I wanted to see Chewie ripping arms out of their sockets. Wookiees are known to do that.

GENERAL GREIVOUS
What is it with the villains' names in these new films? Their surnames suggest that George Lucas just looked up synonyms for "nasty" or "evil" or "not at all a nice sort of person to spend an afternoon with" in his thesaurus. Darth Tyranus? Darth Sidious? Darth Plagueus? General Greivous? They're all so unsubtle. It's a shame evil politicians in the real world aren't so obvious, because then we'd just know not to vote for the one who wears a black cape and cackles insanely to himself when callously executing incompetant henchmen.

It's a good job they didn't make the original trilogy now, otherwise we'd have had villains like Grand Moff Asshole, Jabba The Right Fat Evil Bastard, or Darth Never-Says-Thank-You-When-Someone-Holds-Open-A-Door-For-Him.

Still, Greivous looks pretty cool and it's a nicely bizarre motif to give a robot some sort of respiratory disorder. He's obviously been at the "deathsticks" again.

SAMUEL L JACKSON
Though the man himself seems ecstatic at getting to be in Star Wars at all, I thought it was a shame he didn't get many great Jackson-worthy lines to utter. Still, actions speak louder than words, and the guy with "Bad Motherfucker" engraved on his lightsaber gets an adequate send-off when he becomes a victim of the Emperor's order to kill every Jedi in the galaxy. Being mutilated, electrocuted, and thrown out of a mile-high skyscraper sounds like just about enough punishment to see off our Samuel.

I like to think that he squashed Jar Jar when he finally cratered.

CLONE TROOPERS
Besides the fact that they're not blokes in costumes like they ought to be, I still have problems with clone troopers. Namely, are these Jedi-butchering supersoldiers the same guys as my dearly beloved rubbish Stormtroopers in the classic trilogy? From the marked decline in their fighting prowess between episodes 3 and 4, I'd say no. My theory is that the anorexic aliens who were cloning them in Episode 2 went out of business and so the Empire, faced with a manpower shortage, was forced to throw open the doors to any old bugger who can fire a blaster, and a fair few who can't. Either that or they accidentally cloned someone really stupid.

Choccy 2

2005-05-31T16:38:00.000+01:00

Under further pressure from that Jerky motherfucker to fucking update my shit (fucker), I present to you my latest offering - a sequel to Choccy, imaginitively entitled Choccy 2.

Welcome, kinder, to another exclusive selection of smarmy observations coated in rich milk chocolate, with a luxurious filling of sarcasm.

WARNING: May be unsuitable for those with an allergy to nuts or being bored.

FLAKE
Flake has always been marketed for its... well, flakiness. It begins to wilt and crumble away to nothing when you open the wrapper. It’s the nine-stone weakling that gets beaten up for its lunch money by the Snickers bars. Apparently we are meant to think this is a good thing, but why anyone actually does is quite beyond me - the fact that it disintegrates as soon as you open the wrapper isn't the strongest of selling points. After all, you wouldn't buy a new plasma screen television if its advert made a big deal out of the fact that it explodes the first time you plug it in, blowing a hole in your wall and crippling you for life. Despite its pointlessly infuriating design, Flake's continued presence in the nation's newsagents indicates somebody's buying it. I don't know who - perhaps people who have a fetish for disappointment - but it certainly isn't me. Whenever I have been unlucky enough to eat one of these things, I've only managed to get about 10% of the chocolate into my digestive system, the other 90% ending up as as a chalky brown sediment all over my trousers, making it appear that the aforementioned digestive system had gone very wrong indeed. Maybe this would be worth it if Flake was sufficiently scrummy as to offset its structural integrity shortcomings, but it isn't. The flavour is utterly standard. If you really like the flavour but hate the flakiness, just buy a Twirl instead. Identical flavour, you get two separate bars, and it doesn't melt into free-floating molecules if you breathe on it. Unless you are a dragon.

HERSHEY BAR
As synonymous with the USA as apple pie, Independence Day, cheerleaders or dealing in moral absolutes, Hershey is without doubt the definitive American chocolate (or "candy" as our transatlantic cousins wrongly call it). Hersheys are not widely available here in England, and as such certain upscale sweet shops charge premium rates for imported ones. In some outlets you can expect to pay up to £1 for a single Hershey. Whether they are worth the inflated price depends on which version you buy, for there are several and naturally you'll like some more than others. Make your purchase wisely. To my mind, the best variety is the one which contains ground-up bits of chocolate chip cookies. It's chocolate, with more chocolate in it. Where else could such a simple yet sublime confectionery concept spring but from the Land of the Free? God Bless America.

HEALTH FOOD SHOP CHOCOLATE
Hip, low calorie alt-chocolate bars come in many differing shapes and sizes, but all are united by these three characteristics:
1 - Holland & Barrett is the only shop in the entire world that will sell them.
2 - They are eaten exclusively by new-agey upper middle class dullards who feel a sense of vague guilt when they eat real chocolate and are inclined to fill their houses with as many health food products, dream catchers, I Ching mirrors and sustainable-source pine furnishings as they can get their hands on, because that's what their horoscope told them to do.
3 - They all taste like plywood.

KITKAT CHUNKY
An ordinary KitKat finger, afflicted with the terrible curse of gigantism. Shunned by the normal KitKats for their freakish appearance, these unfortunate chocolates banded together and formed their own sub-sect of KitKat society, and thus the Chunky was born. Though it is big, blocky and satisfying to eat, The Chunky bar probably contains exactly the same amount of chocolate and biscuit as the traditional four-finger type, but it feels more filling due to the fact that it's chunky. Nestlé seem to specialise in using this kind of subtle manipulation of your perceptions in order to make you feel like you haven't wasted your money on a bar that isn't actually any bigger than the cheaper variant. If the company were as smart as wot I is, they would have long ago realised the awesome market potential of a four-finger KitKat made to Chunky scale. I would say the odds of this actually happening at some point are pretty good, but will probably be restricted to one of the "limited edition" releases they're so fond of these days. What's the point of limited edition sweets? Are you going to stick them in the fridge for twenty years and wait for them to appreciate in value? Decades from now, will Sotheby's play frequent host to auctions of antique limited-run chocolates? Will their new owners, having just shelled out fifty thousand space credits on the finely-aged goodies, decadently scoff the lot at illicit high-class subterranean orgies? Of course not. They're past the sell-by date already.

LINDT LINDOR
Lindor are, effectively, Malteasers without the biscuit. Little balls of Belgian chocolate individually wrapped with love and care by specially selected Belgians, stuck in a box, and sold to you for a stupidly high price, which is justified by the fact it's Belgian and therefore sophisticated and posh, making it popular with bourgeois people who are throwing a party and don't want to go down the all-to-familiar Ferrero Rocher road, because that road leads to some comedian doing the "you are spoiling us" speech, which means everyone is obliged to be politely amused whilst temporarily ignoring the fact that cretins have been doing that at parties for twenty years. Lindor is unassailably delicious, but we must work for our choccy bliss - ergo you must unwrap each and every one before we eat it, unless you enjoy the taste of cellophane. Having to do this over and over again wears away at the sanity, in the same way that individually polishing every piece of shingle on Brighton Beach would. After about ten or so balls, you start to get the feeling that you are in fact being subjected to an eerie Pavlovian "effort = reward" experiment, by a group of men in white coats standing behind a two-way mirror and taking notes on your behaviour. Be aware of these factors before comitting yourself to a Lindor experience, and decide whether it’s worth the effort to get at that fine chocolate, or if it’s all just a load of balls.

My Job

2005-04-24T15:07:00.000+01:00

Two in the bloody morning. I must be insane. I deliver a knockout blow to the alarm clock. I know it's not the clock's fault that I have to be up this early, but I have a tendency to shoot the messenger - especially when it's bleeping deafeningly in my ear. Fifteen minutes later I sit semi-conscious in the back of a minicab, en route to Hammersmith. Hurtling through the nonexistant early morning traffic at speeds I'm sure are less than legal helps me to shake off sleep. We arrive at the Hammersmith Apollo. I cough up my FORTY COCKING QUID cab fare, which actually feels like chopping off an arm and a leg and handing it to the driver. I now understand that expression. I exit the vehicle, my driver wishes me good luck. I'll need it. I hate my job.

Two of my companions have already arrived. Brave souls who, against all reason, got night buses. I consider myself a fairly bold chap, but even I balk at the idea of using public transport at this time of day - this hour belongs to the drunks, drug fiends gibbering demihuman things that shun the daylight and make their warrens in the darker recesses of ancient London - so I err on the side of safety, and safety costs me FORTY COCKING QUID. I hate my job.

Perhaps I should explain why I and my colleagues are in this place at such an hour, and not snoring the wee small hours away in our beds. I and they are film extras. We are waiting here to be picked up by a coach which will take us somewhere in Sussex, where we'll assume the roles of soldiers and civilians milling around a Paris railway station circa 1916, midway through the First World War. The film is called Flyboys and apparently features Star Wars alumnus Hayden Christensen, he who so sublimely portrayed Anakin Skywalker in the towering cinematic achievement that was Attack of the Clones and, come May, Revenge of the Sith. I would relish working with such a talent in any capacity, even as a lowly extra. Maybe I can get his autograph.

I'm joking of course. If I see the little puke I'll ruin those good looks of his faster than he ruined Darth Vader's street cred by playing him as a stereotypical whining adolescent attention-whore.

Here are the coaches. Anxious to get out of the cold, we pile into the smaller one, driven by a kindly-looking fat man, and make ourselves at home. The bad-tempered cockney driver of the other coach enters, furious at our fat guy. Apparently he shouldn't have let us in, because nobody's taken our names yet. Logically it's out of the question to do that whilst we're inside the coach, because that would be a considerate gesture - Cockney doesn't want that, because he's in a bad mood and so everyone else should be too. We object, but not to his face. He probably has the power to fire us. That's the thing with being an extra, even the bus driver can pull rank on you. We are ejected from Fat's coach, and transferred to Cockney's.

We're off, hurtling down the M25 en route to Sussex. Cockney, as if we needed any more proof of his status as a moody little bastard, refuses to turn the heating on. Well, he doesn't so much refuse as blatantly ignore multiple requests to turn it on from freezing passengers. Cockney, if you're reading this, you're a gobshite. And your penis is small. And you look like Most Haunted's psychic charlatan Derek Acorah.

Perhaps idle chit-chat with the others will warm me up. The conversation throws up this nugget of information: Ricky Gervais, of Office fame, is making a sitcom about film extras. Kudos to him, it can't be easy trying to make this job funny. I'm trying, seriously.

We are disgorged into a field in the middle of nowhere. It is still dark. There are no immediately apparent signs of there being a film crew encamped here. Was this all a trick? Are we going to be herded into this field and coldly machine-gunned as an example to other petulant extras, a-la The Great Escape? Thankfully no, the unit base camp was just hiding in the murk. We enter the wardrobe tent, and get suited up. I and several others are playing wounded French soldiers, bandages, dirt and all. After putting our uniforms on, we're escorted outside and presented to a crew member holding some curious-looking hand cranked device. Any speculation as to the thing's purpose is ended when the man starts cranking it, showering us head to toe with foul-smelling sticky theatrical mud. We will spend ten hours covered in this filth. Some of the clean people come over to mock us in our muddy splendour. We respond by attempting to hug them. No further remarks are made.

After breakfast, we're on our way to the location, a train station on the Bluebell Railway, which is a fully functioning vintage steam railway. For the first time in my life I see a real steam train puff its way into the station. I immediately want to ride on it. No time for that now though, someone has just called out for all the soldiers to come to the props trailer to be armed! Fantastic! Two years doing this job and finally I get some artillery.

Wrong. None of us French losers gets a gun, because we're losers. All the black guys in our group, dressed up as Algerian soldiers, get neat bolt-action rifles. Man, I wish I was black. What do we get? Hats. Christ, no wonder we lost.

Filming begins. Action! Apparently. I can't really tell because I can't see. I have been arbitrarily picked to be a blinded soldier, and have a bandage over my eyes. I am assigned a guide, a very likeable extra named John. John is neat. He talks gibberish to me during the filming, attempting to make me laugh. He succeeds. I turn the laughter into tears, and give a powerful performance. I'll get him back later.

A train full of ordinary tourists pulls into the station. None of them have prior knowledge of the filming, and so look suitably dumbfounded when they see a station populated by people from 1916. We wave. As the train leaves, steam fills the air on the platform. In one of the most cinematic moments I've ever experienced outside of a cinema, a French policeman in a long coat strides from the fog like a ghost from the past, and for a few seconds I'm hundreds of miles away, eighty years ago. I like my job.

Lunchtime! Drinks all round. Sitting outside in the sunlight sipping apple juice and listening to the birds sing, I forget for a while that I'm weighed down by coat and boots and tin helmet and covered in shit. Wait a second, is that Bob Hoskins? It is! It's Bob Hoskins! With a beard! He's been cornered by a female American extra, who is banging on at him about how children aren't bought up right in this country. She obviously doesn't realise she's talking to the dramatic powerhouse who bought Super Mario to life. She's lucky he doesn't jump on her head and kill her, then collect a powerup from her corpse. As it is, he's being very tolerant. Then, the resident on-set lothario, who I will call Ugly Short Guy Who Tells Unfunny Jokes, inadvertantly comes to Bob's rescue when he attempts to put the moves on Whining American. Bob uses the distraction to leg it, with a "rather you than me, mate" expression on his adorable, pudgy little face. I like my job.

Back on set, myself and John team up with a smartly dressed chinese guy whom we dub Inspector Crowley, after one of the trains. We embark on hijinks between takes, and plan to serruptitiously insert a kung fu fight into the film. During one of numerous takes, I manage to make John laugh, with the aid of my grotesque front teeth. Revenge! I successfully rid myself of my blind-guy bandages. When quizzed about their absence by the wardrobe man, I deny everything and say he must be looking for another extra who I have just cunningly made up and looks a bit like me. He falls for it. I am the master of deception! Ugly Short Guy Who Tells Unfunny Jokes continues to work his slimy magics with Bob Hoskins' American nemesis.

I'm now put on a stretcher, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand I get paid for lying down, but on the other I'm plopped down on the platform with my head perilously close to where the trains come in. It is quite an experience to have one's head several inches away from a huge moving steam train. The sound of the engine is beyond deafening, and the steam engulfs me. To make it worse, I really need the toilet. Badly. Still, I can use the discomfort to dramatic effect - I am, afterall, meant to be wounded and in horrible agony. Still, I hate my job.

Two hours later, salvation. It's time to get cleaned up, get paid and go home. We file into the wardrobe tent, and disrobe. I frantically strip off my mud-caked clownsuit, don my real clothes, then go to makeup to get my filth removed. I later find out I was the only person who actually realised we were getting this stuff cleaned off - I see other people quite casually walking to their cars to drive home still covered in blood and muck. Perhaps they mean to scare the living daylights out of other motorists. Ugly Short Guy Who Tells Unfunny Jokes appears to have won the heart of the Whiny American - they are exchanging digits. I wish them well, and hope they run off together to produce a litter of Ugly Short Americans Who Whine And Tell Unfunny Jokes. I bid farewell to John. If you're reading, John, thanks for keeping me sane. And keep your beard, it's rugged and manly. Back on the coach I go, homeward bound. On the journey home, I mull over the day and the memories I've gained from it, but also the regrets: A) I didn't get to ride on a train, and B) I didn't get to beat up Anakin Skywalker. Oh well. I get home and collapse on my bed, and do not get up until an hour ago.

It occurs to me that I haven't actually looked at my payslip yet, so I fish the crumpled document out of my bag and see how much money I earned for a day's honest toil...
I like my job.

- © Benneth isnit.

Choccy

2005-02-23T14:37:00.000Z

Chocolate Bars

TWIX

Twix bars employ a brilliant yet simple brand of psychological manipulation. Within a single Twix wrapper is contained just as much chocolate-y goodness as you'll find in any other leading bar, but thanks to the genius two-finger device, it FEELS like there's more. Simply by dividing it into two individual sections, the mad scientist behind Twix has managed to create an impression of great value, and the deal is closed with a tantalising gold-effect wrapper. It all SCREAMS "this is some fine fuckin` chocolate, my friend", and you just can't resist the over-and-under chocolate/toffee/biscuit/chocolate configuration. I used to eat my own bodyweight in these every week when I was about 10, so it's a mystery why I am not now an utterly fat bastard. Oh well, I'm not complaining.Top Twix Tip: Try biting out the biscuit from underneath the toffee, working your way down the bar, until you are left with a long thin strip of toffee which can then be rolled into a ball of unequalled confectionery bliss. Then do the same with the other one. Excellent!

GALAXY

Galaxy is marketed as a high-class society girl of a chocolate bar, promising exquisite taste and smoothness of texture, the kind of chocolate a 1980s Yuppie Power Couple would enjoy with vintage wine and candles.However, once you have committed to your Galaxy tryst, cracks start to appear - chiefly, its stale aftertaste. Galaxy's sophisticated exterior has served a dual purpose - to dupe you, luring you in for the kill, and to cover up the fact that it has been around the block a few times - a fact you only realise when the bar is eaten and it's all too late. The experience of eating in itself was not unpleasent, but once the wrapper is binned you come to the realisation that you have taken part in a tawdry liason with a tarted-up chocolate trollop. There is a bad taste in your mouth, and you realise that while Mars or Snickers may be aesthetically unappealing, working class chocolate bars, they are dependable, earthy and have great substance. Galaxy is merely an aloof tart which has just ticked your name off on a list of many, many prior conquests. Eat one and you may well enjoy it for the duration, but as soon as that bad aftertaste sets in, you realise you have compromised your tastebuds, yourself, perhaps your very soul. In spite of that aftertaste, in spite of yourself, you can't say you didn't enjoy the experience - but once was enough.

YORKIE

Aha, Yorkie, the bar that's "NOT FOR GIRLS". It's the world's very first gender-specific chocolate bar! Everything about Yorkie is masculine. Brick-like chunks of solid chocolate, probably WELDED together in a big factory by hairy men with beer guts, with the "YORKIE" legend stamped down the length of the bar in enormous block capitals. You could only make it more manly if it was molded in the shape of a big erect penis.Unfortunately for all its bravado, the standard Yorkie doesn't quite satisfy. It may be chunky in extremis, but it is about two chunks too short to really be worth it. The King Size model overcomes this inadequacy, but at such an inflated price the average-income family may work hard to justify such an expenditure on chocolate, however chunky it may be.

SNICKERS

I'll not bore you with the old "WHY DID THEY CHANGE THE NAME TO SNICKERS FROM MARATHON" routine, because it's been done so many times already that even Ben Elton doesn't use it anymore. The chunksome toffee/peanut bar Snickers is a lot like the Yorkie in its masculine nature, but unlike Yorkie it walks the walk as well as talks the talk. It has the substance to back up the boasts. Eat one of these fuckers and you feel like you've just demolished a large bag of monstrously fat chips. Whether this is a purely psychological effect bought on by its thick consistency or if they put appetite suppressant drugs in it I don't know, but it works. Boost sells itself as an energy bar, but personally I'd need to ingest about four of those lightweights in order to keep myself going during a long walk - but on one Snickers, you could run a marathon - which is why its original name made a lot more sense than bloody Snickers. Oh crap, I said it afterall...

KING SIZE DAIRY MILK

Cadbury's Dairy Milk is the lord of all chocolate. It has no gimmicks and no clever packaging, for it needs none. You know what Cadbury's is. Everyone does. It's just one of those things you know, like how to walk or who the first man on the moon was. It's part of The Culture. One of those things you take for granted, something you just can't comprehend might one day stop being made. Cadbury's is such an old, well-established brand that it scarecely needs to advertise itself - its mere existence is enough. This lack of widespread marketing made the recent emergence of the King Size version all the more surprising, because it was just there one day. Intrigued and delighted, you bought it, you ate it, and you loved it, because it was Dairy Milk except there was more. More than the standard Dairy Milk, yet sufficiently less than the REALLY big version that you don't feel disgusted at yourself for wolfing down the whole thing in one go. And now, just like its slimmer ancestor, you have absorbed the King Size into your confectionery landscape, and it feels like it was always there.

MARS

I have not eaten a Mars Bar for a long time, for one reason - THEY DRIVE ME INSANE. During a family holiday to Devon in 1993, I was in the middle of a terrible Mars addiction which was turning me into an obnoxious, foul mouthed VIOLENT little sod, posessed with a kind of goblin-like manic energy, single-handedly pissing everyone off and being the sole nuisance in an otherwise wonderful fortnight in idyllic pastoral surroundings. Although I was only 8 at the time, I still look back at that summer and feel ashamed of myself for not having greater self control, and thank God that I had the willpower to break the Mars habit before it consumed me fully, and move on to the mellower waters of the Twix. Mars is sold as "pleasure you can't measure". But for me, Mars was PAIN, maaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

AERO

In these days of chocolate plenty where the average newsagent carries more confectionery than a whole sweet shop would have in the 1950s, your chocolate bar needs a cunning conceit to set it apart from its innumerable peers, lest it simply be lost in a sea of identical competitors. Aero's gimmick, which has kept it going for years, is that it has bubbles in it. Lots of bubbles. For some reason this is a tremendously appealing concept, which is bizzarre seeing as effectively it means that a good percentage of the bar actually consists of... nothingness. Empty space. The ether. So Aero is probably highly popular among Goths, who find great delight in the world's only nihilist chocolate bar. If you want to terraform Mars (the planet, not the chocolate, fool), just ship a few billion Aeros to the planet then crack `em open - the sudden influx of free air contained in all the tiny little bubbles will quickly generate a breathable atmosphere. We can then weave teepees out of all the leftover wrappers and raise the first generation of extraterrestrial children under a blue, delightfully cocoa-scented sky.

NEXT: Crisps.

© Ben Rainbird, and all that jazz.

Aspects of the Gents' Toilets - or The Unbearable Lightness of Peeing

2005-02-05T00:11:00.000Z

Toilet paper
As most gents' toilets are only tended to once every five years, toilet paper is a rare sight. Typically you only notice its absence directly after frantically running into the toilets to evacuate your bowels, then have to wait until nobody else is around and quickly dash to the next stall, a process you may have to repeat once or twice to find one with any bog roll left in it. Try keeping your morale up by whistling the theme from The Great Escape whilst furtively flitting from bog to bog, you'll feel like you're dodging Nazi guards whilst searching for secret weapon schematics or something. If your quest proves fruitless, you must shuffle home in shame, getting odd looks from people who are wondering why there's a swarm of flies following you. If they ask questions, tell them that the flies made you their God Emperor. That'll throw them off the scent, so to speak.

Dryers
A technological marvel restricted exclusively to public toilets, nowhere in the world will you find one of these machines apart from the humble public convenience. This is because they are as effective at drying your hands as a rubber band is at downing an attack helicopter. The standard push-button model is fairly straightforward to use, but are a dying breed - most shopping centre lavvies now use futuristic Minority Report laser-activated dryers which you activate by gesticulating vaguely in their direction, causing them to blow hot air for approximately two seconds before they turn off again. Regardless of how long you hold your hands under the dryer, you'll still be leaving the gents drying your still-clammy hands against the back of your jeans, which to the casual observer makes it appear that you never got to the toilet in time at all.

Urinals
Naturally unique to the gents', the urinals should only be used when all of the enclosed stalls are occupied or if you don't mind exposing your genitalia in front of the large tattooed psychopath who is inevitably also using it. When making use of the urinal it is imperative you look directly forwards and don't let your gaze wander onto one of your neighbours' "Esteemed Members". Doing this will either get you a kicking or an undesired boyfriend. The trough-style urinals contain inexplicable bars of horrible-looking yellow soap called "urinal cakes". Their true purpose eludes me, as all they ever seem to be used for is a target in whimsical games of urinary marksmanship between football supporters. Also known as urinal "pucks", for some damn reason. Maybe the toilet attendants play a disgusting version of ice hockey with them or something.

Prostitutes' phone numbers
Not content with filling every phonebooth in the world with calling cards and thus drawing suspicious glances upon any innocent gentleman who has to use it for a legitimate call, hookers also advertise in gents' toilets, with phone numbers hastily scrawled on the wall tiles in felt tip. Some are for males, but the great majority are for ladies of negotiable virtue, leading one to wonder if they themselves stealthily dash into the men's toilets to write them down. If so, do they claim they're transvestites when they inevitably get caught by the male patrons? And more importantly, why the hell am I devoting serious thought to this?

Sinks
Modern public toilet sinks appear to be designed by the same person who thought up the laser-guided hand dryers, as they share their hot-breathed cousins' gleeful impracticality of use. To use one, you are required to hold down the tap with one hand to make it release a pathetic trickle of water, so you have to juggle between hands, washing one at a time, because taking pressure off the tap for a microsecond immediately cuts the modest flow of water. This mechanism is probably one of the many employed to make public toilets "retard proof", the idea being that you can't just turn the tap on and absent-mindedly leave it running until the entire washroom becomes flooded. Be forewarned that the water itself will either be uselessly cold, or hot enough to melt a hole through RoboCop. A perfunctory soap-dispenser thing is usually included, which is for display only. Don't attempt to use it, as it's either permanently empty or has been filled up with caustic lime by some anarchists.

Mirrors
Helpfully placed above the sinks, gents' toilet mirrors provide the clearest, most unflattering image of oneself since the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Looking into them will reveal and accentuate every single pock-mark, zit, solitary inch-long unshaved facial hair and acne scar that your horrific zombie face has to offer the world. As a result your ego will go on holiday and you'll spend several weeks lurching around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, scowling with bitter envy at the walking examples of physical perfection which accost your vision at every step.

Gents
The gents' toilets would of course be incomplete without the "gents" themselves. The term "gentlemen's toilets" originated in the Victorian period, when toilets were wonders of steam-powered Imperial enterprise probably only used by eccentric members of dignitary, the working classes being too ignorant to make use of them, instead humbly relieving themselves into tin pails or out of open windows onto someone's top hat. But since that time the toilets became an equal-opportunity environment, accessible to anyone with a central nervous system. As such most are now the seedy domain of rentboys, muggers, psychopaths, and advertising executives. Thus, the term "gentlemen" no longer really applies. However, there is hope for the future of the public convenience, in the guise of the railway station pay toilets. Which are glorious.
By the simple method of charging people 20p if they want to spend a penny, most undesirables are filtered out of the toilet equation by the principle that they'll be put off the lavvies by having to pay, instead taking their business elsewhere. Unlike almost everything else relating to the rail system, this appears to work perfectly, and thus station toilets are again exclusively the realm of the dedicated urinator.

Honest Advertisments

2005-01-22T12:20:00.000Z

This is an old one, but I'm probably more pleased with this article than many I've written since. It's a bit of speculative writing about what commercials might be like if advertisers actually, y'know, told the truth.

MAN AD
Men! Buy the new man product! As you can see from this shoddy CGI
mockup of the product, it's all streamlined and stuff, like a jet
fighter plane, which, according to our half-arsed psychological
profiling of your beergut demographic, is what still appeals to you, as
you seem to have ceased to develop emotionally somewhere around the age
of 14, and relate to everything in terms of shiny things that kill
people. Rad!

Look at this guy who's using the product right here. He's really big
and buff, and has a standard issue bland FHM underwear model for a
girlfriend, BECAUSE OF THE PRODUCT! He wouldn't be worth shit without
the product, and neither are you, so quit being a homosexual loser and
buy it. Also, from the same manufacturer, try out our new power tool!
It's a cheap piece of shit manufactured for pennies in a Far Eastern
country whose name you probably couldn't pronounce, but hey, it
purports to be made out of the "same metal as the SR-31 spyplane" and
IT LOOKS LIKE A GUN! A gun, which you associate with power and
virility, because it, in turn, looks like a penis!

And look, the battery pack sort of slots into the handle as well, just
like the magazine on a gun! So, you have exactly NO right not to
confirm your heterosexuality by buying this product. As a matter of
fact, if you do not buy it within a randomly set time limit, we will
have the government officially change your sexual orientation to gay.
There is no other way this can be avoided.

DEBT/INSURANCE AD
It's a weekday, it's noon, and you're at home watching Channel 5. If
you were a productive member of society, you'd be too busy working
right now to be watching repeats of Magnum PI, so we can only assume
you are a Ben Elton-style poor student, debt-wracked unemployable loner
or old person with nothing to do other than while away the uneventful
hours of the only life you'll ever have by watching Tom Selleck ponce
around Hawaii in amusingly outdated clothing. You derelict.

Anyway, look, we're offering you the chance to be free of your
debt/insurance worries by way of this really shittily produced advert
with no production values, starring a failed used car dealer who
couldn't sell nukes to North Korea. Call this number now and be treated
with palpable disdain by our telephone operators.

Yeah, they're poorly-trained no-qualifications scum, but even THEY can
get a job, unlike you, you fat fucking failure. Anyway, they will be
happy to help you pay their frankly slave-level salaries by keeping you
on hold listening to shitty synthesizer music for minutes at a time,
each and every second of it chewing up what precious little coins you
have left, as you sit there patiently waiting, hoping, praying that we
can help rebuild the life and the dreams you so hilariously demolished
with your gambling and your drinking and your good old down-to-earth
basic stupidity.

Well, we can't do that, we aren't fucking miracle workers, but we're
more than happy to take your money away in order to make you feel like
there's hope. Which there isn't. Face it, if you actually weren't
scared off by the awful production values of this advert, you fucking
deserve it, don't you.

MOBILE AD
Hello, we are The Benign Phone Company, and we are here to inform you
that your mobile phone - whichever type or however recent it may be -
has reached its programmed obsolescence is now officially out of date
and sad, and will self-destruct in four minutes.

You risk immediate social ostrasication and exclusion from local
nightclubs unless you upgrade to a newer, shinier model with more
exorbitant-price-justifying extraneous features that you don't fucking
need. Look, our phone can play shitty Java games and send out pictures
and stuff. Can yours do that?

Of course it can't, it's rubbish, just like you. See, just like your
hideously overpriced clothes and £80 haircut, your phone is an external
indicator of your worth as a person, so if people see you walking
around with that shitty World War II field telephone of yours they will
immediately know you are sad and worthless.

Anyway, buy the fucking phone because if you don't, all your mates will
think you are gay and nobody will fancy you and the sky will fall.

Also, you can now show what an individual you are by being like every
other cunt and spending large amounts of money to have the privilege of
downloading ironic bleepy renditions of the signature themes to 1980s
television series, so that next time your mum calls you to ask what you
want for dinner, everyone in your immediate vicinity (IE, the luckless
twats who have to put up with your mindless chattering for an entire
bus journey) will know what a groovy, irreverent, postmodern
being you are, as the distinctive tones of the theme tune to The Fall
Guy are piped out cheerfully from your little box of joy.

Either that, or they'll think you're an intensely aggravating prick,
and then secretly entertain cathartic fantasies about shoving the
sodding phone down your stupid little gullet and tightening the
hands-free wire around your neck, you fucking sheep. Jesus, you so
utterly deserve the brain cancer we're giving you with these things.

COSMETICS AD
Hello, demographic. We are here to sell you back the self esteem that
we've been robbing you of for years with our images of unobtainable
physical perfection and lifestyles you couldn't possibly dream of
leading.

Come, buy our vastly overpriced toxic slime, daub it on the relevant
bodypart, and feel the glorious warmth and sureness endemic to being a
fit-in identikit clone with as much individual worth as a brine shrimp.
Remember, you're shit without us, so show us some gratitude, even
though we're the ones responsible for the total lack of self-worth that
you're now trying to alleviate by throwing money at us to have the
privilege of squirting harmful chemicals all over yourself. By the way,
we've craftily formulated this stuff so that over the years it makes
your skin prematurely pallid and wrinkly, so we can sell anti-ageing
cream to you. Yes, we really are that cynical.

Frankly, it's like we're repeatedly bum-raping you with a molten iron
rod and then expecting you to be grateful when we sell you
anti-inflamation cream for your horribly swollen ringpiece. But hey,
what else are you gonna do? NOT FIT IN?

GIRL POWER AD
News just in, female drones! Our executives have informed us that
you're now culturally allowed to be independent and empowered and gutsy
and butch and empowered and powerful and gutsy (as long as you conform
to pre-determined gender stereotypes at the same time).

So, there's never been a better time to show how independent you think
are by buying our shit merchandise in order to help you look like every
other shrieking airheaded highstreet-blocking tracksuit enthusiast.
And if that doesn't float your boat, here: some comedic images of men
being stupid, fat and innefectual! Haha, they are mentally inferior to
you, and clumsy, and cannot satisfy you sexually, so show them how much
more intelligent and sassy you are by buying our product. You
simpleton.

Don't get us wrong or anything, we're GLAD that society pretends you
egg-carriers are equal now, as that means you are now just as open to
exploitation as your dick-having counterparts, and we can explore a
whole new marketing dimension in selling harmful shit to you at
obscenely inflated prices in order to make you think you're making some
sort of right-on, proactive feminist statement about yourself, ignorant that you are merely filling our coffers whilst demonstrating the concrete fact that you're just as fucking moronic and open to suggestion as the slope-browed halfwits you claim inherent superiority over and yet allow yourself to be violated by every night.

INDIVIDUAL AD
Individuals! You're edgy and cool and you don't dance to ANYONE's tune,
save for the recording artists we've informed you are not entirely as
mainstream as the many thousands of others we own.

Anyway, if you think you're badass and independent and soforth, check
out this way-cool new product, designed specifically with YOU in mind,
which for the first time ever allows you to assert how Acceptably
Different you are whilst the product's nice shiny corporate-approved
label shields you from social exclusion on the grounds that while the
product is percieved as making you DIFFERENT, that difference is
APPROVED OF by us and therefore must be "okay".

Afterall, it stands to reason that we - a bunch of fat balding boardroom jockeys in our fifties - tell the young people what's cool. Of course, there's not
just one Individual Product. There's thousands, all of them tailored to
appeal to the tastes we've assigned to you.

For example, here's some "power ade" drink or whatever, targeted
directly at Extreme Sports fanatics, accompanied by footage of really
cool Vin Diesel clones surfing down mountains in much the same way as
we surf the zeitgeist we ourselves have engineered, by associating our
silly drink with extreme physical exertion, though we know that you'll
most likely end up drinking it on the sofa in order to keep yourself
awake long enough to watch late-night ice hockey on Channel 5.

The more critical-minded among you might cluck your tongues in right-on
dissaproval of this sales pitch, but don't worry, we've thought up a
way of exploiting you too! You can rail against us and still consume
objects, as one of our many millions of subsidiaries peddles a range of
products with super-ironic "anti-establishment" slogans plastered on
them, so you can enjoy the euphoria of making consumer purchases safe
in the misinformed knowledge that, by paying an sizable extra chunk of
money for the Che Guevara picture on your T shirt, you are somehow
battling against consumerism. Ain't it great? We've manipulated the
very fabric of human society so that to have your opinions on our
bloody-minded market strategies actually heard, you have to give us
MORE money than if you just kept quiet!

Sorry pinko, but you've lost already. Just accept it, knuckle down to a menial job, and life will be far less painful.

FAILING MULTINATIONAL FAST FOOD CHAIN AD
Hello! We've been plugging up you and your children's guts with
densely-packed meat products for 30 years, and unfortunately we're now
facing financial ruin because you've gone and started thinking about
what you eat, and realised that shovelling forty pounds of cow into
your gaping mouths every day might consign you to an early, very wide
grave.

You're right of course, we've been indirectly thinning out your ranks
(if not your waists) all this time, and now that you've finally
cottoned on, we're buggered if we don't come up with a fresh sales
pitch.

So here's a selection of images in which bunch of thin, impeccably
dressed, impossibly beautiful and ethnically coordinated young people
dancing to sodding Justin Timberlake whilst deriving orgasmic levels of
enjoyment through buying ghastly-looking comestibles from a ludicrously
idealised vision of one of our outlets - instead of being halfway
realistic about it, ergo hate-riddled bovine Kappa-wearing dimwits in
place of the cool teenagers and instead of the perfectly clean, sterile
food-o-matic, a poorly-managed rat colony staffed by slave-wage Orcs
who are entirely willing and able to contaminate your food with any
number of their own byproducts in order to derive a fleeting spark of
spiteful enjoyment in their otherwise hopeless, hate-soaked lives. Frankly, we deserve to crash and burn like the soulless evil scumfucks
we are, don't we.

POST-CHRISTMAS DETOX AD
Hey there, bloodbags! Now, you've been very greedy over the holidays
haven't you. You've been obediently shoving your face full of our
food-like products like we told you to throughout the festive season,
but OOPS! you've gone and developed a noticeable moon-belly, which of
course is unacceptable as it doesn't fit in with the image of physical
perfection you're meant to aspire to.

It would be remiss of us not to exploit the poor physical condition
we've imposed upon you, so here's a selection of dietary/exercise
products we've had lined up since before Christmas. Look, for example
here's that Atkins Diet that everyone's still using even though they
KNOW it ends up fucking killing you, and over there's a ludicrous
"exercise belt" device which we PROMISE will let you shed the pounds
without having to actually make an effort - and more where those came
from! Soon, you - yes, YOU can look vaguely like the contrived
pod-people whose social interactions you vicariously live through
whenever you watch your preferred soap/drama/docusoap/docudrama/Big
Brother knockoff.

And won't that be GREAT?

Of course it will be - you'll be happy for a while because you think
things are going to get better, and we'll have made a fuckload of money
off you in exchange for exercise and diet programs which not only don't
work, but ACTUALLY DO YOU GENUINE PHYSICAL HARM!

Don't worry, you'll sweat off the extra pounds over the year performing
your Assigned Physical Labour, so you should be back to the way you
were before last Christmas just in time for NEXT Christmas, so we can
make you fat again and then sell you the same shit slightly repackaged
until the endless gorging makes you die.

Oh, don't worry about our market dwindling. By the time we've killed you, we'll have conditioned your children to want the same bullshit. That's presuming you manage to breed. Isn't much chance of that if your trouser size stays like THAT
eh? Nope, nobody's gonna want to shag you while you're in that state.
Better get buying quickly or you're never gonna get any! No rutting
until you've paid us for the privilege, lardo. Happy new year!

THAT BLOODY BBCi ADVERT WITH JENSON BUTTON
Hi everyone! Ain't TV just neato? I mean, you're watching it right now
and aren't you enjoying yourself just watching this advert for the
millionth sodding time? Sure you are! If you weren't, you might be
moving or thinking and that'd be intolerable. So, what if TV could
somehow be even BETTER? Well, hold onto your seats, `cause here's the
Formula 1 driver voted "most likely to be mistaken for a bit of
plywood", to tell you: YES! SLIGHTLY! And look, we've kindly written
his name on the back of his chair so you know who the hell he is if you
don't happen to follow sports.

Yes, it's Jenson Button, the man with a voice which still sounds robotic when compared Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. He's here to exhort you to use our silly new "teletext-with-pictures" BBCi service, and we're aiding him in his mission by giving him a script which absurdly compares the experience of watching the telly with that of being in a Formula 1 race, on grounds that both activities involve sitting down and looking directly forwards.

He's a celebrity and therefore a VOICE OF AUTHORITY. He knows what he's talking about!

Well, he doesn't really. If he had any kind of self-respect he'd have
rejected the script outright as absolute fucking bullshit of the
limpest kind possible, but big heavy bags with pound-signs on the side
have a tendency to loosen people up.

So just sit back and enjoy as he sits in front of the telly and mumbles his way through his lines in earnest attempt to make it all seem high-tech and sophisticated, even though he apparently farts halfway through the advert.
This is to fool the more gullible among you into thinking that by
sitting in front of the TV and growing your beer gut, your life will
miraculously become as eventful and exciting as Jenson's, without
having to have any specific talent or make any kind of effort, like he
does.

I mean, Jesus... sure, he can't really talk and he's more bland
than a stack of ceiling tiles stapled to Ben Affleck, but
at least he can do something obscenely dangerous and do it competently.
You people make me sick. What do you want from us? Happiness? Sorry
love, it isn't that easy.

Give us some credit, it's a bit difficult trying to make YOUR life seem
exciting. It's the best we could do. You want true excitement? Go out
and look for it, you pissant.

IRONIC AD
Hello, we're clued up and funny and clever, so instead of trying to
shill our product to you by saying it's great, we're making fun of it
in order to make it appear that we have a sense of humour or even a
soul!

Of course, we don't actually have either of these, we've worked
in marketing for 20 years, and our humanity has long since been
replaced by a nigh-instinctual obligation to stuff our collective
gaping maw with as much of your paltry wages as possible. Anyway, here's
our product in an amusing/unusual situation, isn't it hilarious?
Hahahaha. Oh, hohohohoho. Hoho. Hah. Wah. Waaah. AAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH.

For Christ's sake, I want my soul back. Get me the hell out of
marketing. What the fuck have I done with my life? I can't even
remember the last time I looked at a bed of roses or a wisp of cloud or
a giggling child and thought about it in terms other than how I'd stamp
it with an ugly logo and sell it to you in order to add a few more
zeroes to my annual income. Yes, I am rich. Yes, I have a big house, a
Ferrari, a wife half my age and a mistress half HER age, but I am no
longer capable of relating to anything or anyone in human terms. I am
vacant. Utterly empty. I could have been an artist, or an explorer, or
a great thinker, but instead I sold my soul to the church of Capitalism
and for my efforts I have been stripped of all that makes me a person.
Forgive me, mother. (Sound of muffled sobbing followed by single gunshot and dull thud of body hitting floor)

YOGURT AD
Buy yogurt, cunt.

Books in the Bookshop

2005-01-21T17:29:00.000Z

by Benneth

Aren’t modern bookshops great? You can step into one on any high street in Britain and almost be guaranteed to find the section of the shop where the book you want should be, wonder to yourself how such an enormous chain of shops can so consistently fail to stock the book you want, and then leave. The average high street book shop can be a confusing place, what with all the different genres of literature available - some large shops stock in excess of three or four different types. So to help you identify and understand all these varied volumes, here’s a handy guide which you can cut out and keep, or just use as kindling when you set fire to a suspected paedophile’s house.

CHICK LIT
Chick-lit is SO in right now, what with the second in the series of Bridget Jones films and the popularity of Sex & The City continuing after its cancellation. So, there’s never been a better time to jump on the bandwagon and aid the cause of sexual equality by writing yet another novel about some insecure and frumpy thirtysomething (let’s call her Bridget Clones) whose dreams are fulfilled when she’s "rescued" from her life of secretarial drudgery by some dashing and wealthy hunk - but not before two hundred pages’ worth of padding constructed from achingly postmodern social comedy and jokes about boys and makeup. Generally speaking, the writers of such literature think they’re feminists, but don’t seem to notice that by endlessly "modernising" Jane fucking Austen over and over again, they’re basically promoting the idea that women are useless emotional wrecks who can only gain confidence and social status through buying shoes and marrying into wealth. Chick-lit novels are easy to find, as their covers invariably depict a cosmopolitan-looking woman riding a scooter through a European capital and being eyed by one or more square-jawed charicature males, all of which is drawn in the style of the Pink sodding Panther. Wish-fulfilment for sad thirty year old women, actually read by thirteen year old girls.

FORMULAIC FANTASY SERIES
Reading like an adolescent’s Dungeons & Dragons fan fiction (which it basically is), Formulaic Fantasy Series is a complete mythological cycle taking place in a coherent alternate universe created by an author whose literary vision is so brilliant that it takes about 40 novels to cover it all. Lever open one of these books (you may require a crowbar, these things are heavy) and inside you’ll find just about every fantastical trope you got bored of years ago - Dragons, castles, kobold-infested dungeons, elves, pointy-hatted wizards, muscular barbarians in loincloths and suchlike. With a few notable exceptions, fantasy literature is all exactly the goddamn same, and any new ideas an author may have to contribute are buried under the sheer weight of clichéd plotlines, stupid character names and page-long overdescriptions of violence and the heroine’s physical attributes. Cover art will usually incorporate an Amazon warrior woman wearing ridiculously skimpy armour that only covers up her breasts and crotch (it is well known that these parts are the woman’s most vulnerable organs, not the heart or throat or anything like that), framed by a generic fantasy landscape containing one or more badly-textured CGI castles which the artist knocked up on Bryce 3d. Author obviously regards himself as a modern-day Tolkien.

ULTRAVIOLENT SAS ADVENTURE
At the opposite end of the gender-stereotyping scale from the adventures of Bridget Clones is the boys’ own realm of the SAS Adventure. Conventionally they are written by men who claim to have been in the SAS, and choose to hide their identities, claiming that to reveal their faces would expose them to the stooges of all the evil dictators they singlehandedly overthrew during their colourful career as a top-secret ninja/assassin/fighter pilot/spy/sniper/commando/postman. The plot will usually revolve around some such supersoldier (who represents the author’s somewhat inflated idea of himself) becoming embroiled in some international terrorist conspiracy to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the Queen’s teapot. Along the way there’ll be lots of needlessly graphic violence and loving, nigh-pornographic descriptions of military hardware, all spawned from the author’s adolescent obsession with killing. Readership consists of paranoid military enthusiasts with concealed knives and very dull-looking businessmen on the train. Author’s actual military background consists of a brief, unhappy stint in the Boy Scouts.

RIPOFF TIE-IN COMEDY BOOK
Is your Channel 4 comedy series a success? Yes? Then you’ll be wanting to milk it for all it’s worth before everyone forgets who you are and you end up eking out a living by appearing on nostalgic clip shows. One way for comedians to do this is to release a book of their show, which consists of material they rejected from the actual show because it wasn’t funny, along with text versions of all your favourite characters and sketches, which are exactly the same as in the programme except the pictures don’t move. The Comedy Book is almost never seen being sold at full price, and usually inhabits the cheapest shelf in your local discount book emporium, languishing there for months and waiting to be bought as a birthday present for a friend you don’t like.

CYBERPUNK FUTURO CITY NOIR 2037
In a dystopian near-future ruled over by giant omnipresent corporations, one maverick computer hacker challenges the system. Yes, people really do still write books like this. The Cyberpunk genre should have died the moment the Internet became widely available and people realised that all it actually changed about society is that it helped them call eachother gay more efficiently, but writers still crank out hundreds of identical Cyberpunk novels. And people still lap them up, just like Formulaic Fantasy Series, because people like reading the same story over and over again but with the words slightly rearranged. My plea to the writers of these wastes of trees is STOP PRETENDING YOU’RE WILLIAM GIBSON, because you’re not and even he’s realised it’s no longer the 1980s and moved on to fresher literary pastures. So follow his lead and stop writing about cybernetically enhanced people who walk around in trench coats and take themselves too seriously. If you’re interested in those kinds of characters, just visit Birmingham.

THE LATEST THING
Have you read it yet? Oh, you absolutely must! It’s the latest thing! At some early stage in this book’s gestation, the writer signed some infernal document in their own blood, The Powers That Be thereby declared that it would become a record-breaking bestseller, and that everyone would spend their free time reading it and talking about it. The Latest Thing can belong to any genre - it doesn’t matter whether it’s about merciless criminals stabbing eachother in the head or a psychic milkman, it’ll be snapped up by anyone and everyone, because everyone else is doing it and they want to fit in. For several months the book will be all over the media, it will dominate the droning dinner party conversations of eminently shootable middle-class pseuds, it will silence all rational criticism with the sheer magnitude of its blanket marketing power. You may dislike it, you may openly rubbish it as terrible derivative old toss, but it won’t make any difference. Everyone has already been assimilated. You are alone in your opinion, your attempts to escape The Latest Thing are feeble. You may as well just hide in an old fridge for three months until everyone’s forgotten about it, at which time The Next Thing will appear. Still, at least it’s a book and not a sodding reality TV show.

HARRY SODDING POTTER
Possibly the most irritating thing since genital herpes, the Harry Potter books are the bastard offspring of the Fantasy Series and The Latest Thing. Ostensibly intended for children, the franchise actually owes its success to middle-aged adults who think it’s the best goddamned book they’ve ever read, even though they’re more than old enough to know that it’s exactly the same as The Worst Witch. This blindness extends to the broadcasters who see fit to give over a significant chunk of the evening news to advertising the books every time a new one is released, which is about every five minutes. It’s a familiar sight now - a sychophantic "entertainment journalist" heaps gushing praise on Ms. Rowling, as a queue of adults in fucking wizard cloaks wait patiently to have her sign their copies of the book. Because of this popularity amongst grownups, the publishers have released "Adult Editions" of the books - sadly that doesn’t mean they have swearing and violence in them, it just means that the cover has a suitably boring, grownup-looking picture on the front, so as to make a few more quid out of all the forty year olds out there who feel rightly embarrassed to be reading books intended for prepubescents. Actual children constitute approximately 0.7% of the books’ readership, as they’re too busy developing their battle rap skills and fucking eachother to bother with reading some old bollocks about boy wizards.

Post 1: The First Post

2005-01-21T17:10:00.000Z

Well, hello. This is my brand spanking new blog, which I intend to use for inflicting my creative writing exercises upon you, the innocent and bewildered masses. I hope you'll all enjoy reading my inane bollocks. If you particularly like any of my articles then drop me a comment, as I am a whore for literary praise. Jah bless.