Kevin

Consider this trilobite fossil, and the journey he* has made. An incomprehensible amount of time ago, he (let's call him Kevin) was scampering around on the sea bed, minding his business. Then, either from no fault of his own or perhaps a tragic misunderstanding, Kevin became a dead trilobite. His delicious soft giblets were quickly eaten by opportunistic creatures that weren't dead yet and keen on staying that way, leaving just his shell, like a chitinous Twix wrapper. Slowly, these hard bits became coated in sedimentary rock, and the sea seeped through the rock and ate away at his shell until it too was gone. All that remained was this fossil imprint of his shiny armoured suit.

For the next 450 million years, not much happened for Kevin, on account of him being dead and now made of rock. The rest of the world though, perhaps spurred on by this life cut tragically short, got busy living. His friends scampered onto dry land. Some evolved into dinosaurs. Some spent long enough on land to evolve into weird dog things, then decided the sea was better afterall and went back in to become whales, which shows that
1: it's never too late to retrain and
2: the Earth is just piss-takingly old.

Eventually humans happened, as they tend to. They invented many amazing things like writing and art and cities and religious genocide and the Evil Dead trilogy and giant ships fuelled by the ancient remains of Kevin's mates. Then one day The Fossil Formerly Known as Kevin finally left the sea too, and was washed up on a beach somewhere. He was picked up by a human, and made his way to London, where he was bought off a market stall by me, to become my third-oldest flatmate. Kevin's knackered corpse has endured throughout literally the entire course of human existence, which by his standards all happened in a blink of his primordial proto-eye.

I suppose the moral of this story is that if you get killed in specific-enough circumstances, you might get to be an interesting curio on some nerd idiot's shelf in a few million years. So... chin up, I guess? Or antenna up as the case may be.

*or she. I am not in the business of sexing trilobites, despite unfounded rumours you may have heard.

PS: yeah I accidentally didn't update my blog for 6 years. Do people still have blogs now it's the future? Whatever , I was in the bog anyway.

LOCOG Directive LXII: Updated No-No List

Greetings, London Inferior. You will know that last orbit, your leaders saw fit to give over Your London to the temporary administration of The LOCOG, which in Its ineffable wisdom brought forth a grand structure upon the vestiges of the Stratford Conurb. A sporting-oval, to which many London Inferiors trudged in order to mandatory delight in demonstrations of physic prowess by a variety of bespoke Sport Golems and such surviving athletes that still remained after the Great Woe. Inferiors and Outer People alike gathered in clutches to view such events as the Paraplegithon, the Trial by Ferret, the always popular Flume of So So Many Knives, and table tennis.

These were great days, and many discs of metal were awarded for satisfactory movement. The Games may be over and the discs and athletes long since recycled, but London remains to languish under the cloud. And so does LOCOG, for It loves you, Its children, so much that It permanently dissolved your leaders and assumed their mantle, and you will agree that since this time, The LOCOG's amendments to Your London have improved it vastly. The grey of the sky is that much greyer. Frowns have been refined into open weeping. The scourge of vagrancy is so much lessened, now that the rain burns even underwater.

Of the many changes LOCOG has forced upon introduced to Your London, perhaps the most important are the many No-Nos and Mega-No-Nos now fearlessly enforced by the pitiless gauntlets of the Beak. It is hard to conceive of the strange time when so many of these infractions went unpunished, but now new No-Nos are being drafted and placed into law as quickly as the Legislatron can convolute them in its ineffable quasi-brain. As such, it is difficult for Inferiors to keep abreast of what constitutes wrong movement, speech or thought. This update, being #582, is for your edification on the latest infractions. Remember that ignorance is not an excuse, an is itself a Category 47 No-No, with the punishment of full or partial ossification.

You will read it.

STANDING UPON THE LEFT OF THE UNDER-RAIL ESCALATOR.
The left flank of the nonstationary plebway is sacrosanct. Standing upon it is a bare bad offence, as it impedes the progress of your fellow Inferiors as they skitter up and down the nonstationary plebways that LOCOG has provided to expedite their progress towards whatever toil or fleeting respite awaits them at their place of destiny.
Upon being apprehended by security optics, the condemned will be temporarily fused with the moving stair via superheating of the footplate. Upon reaching the terminus of ascent/descent, a ricketty trapdoor will be opened to enable the condemned to plummet into The Matmos. LOCOG expresses Its regret that this will also doom any non-offenders travelling on the escalator at the time, but these innocents need not fret; their biomass will not go to waste, as the belly of the World Bear is never truly full.

WEARING OF TINTED GLASSES DURING NIGHTTIME HOURS/INDOORS.
Dark glasses are permitted to be worn solely for the preservation of Inferiors' optic nerves in fleeting moments of direct sunlight. The wearer will remove the offending items when challenged by a Beak, which will crush them under its hoof, then sarcastically replace them upon the offender's physog.
Noncompliance is a Tier 7 Mega-Nono, rendering the felon liable to The Cortical Lance. Following aforesaid procedure, glasses will be returned undamaged - the wearer's permanent blindness now renders their use legitimate.

UNAUTHORISED PONCHO REMOVAL.
Your poncho serves many purposes - It is drab and shapeless, protecting you from individuality and the attention of the opposite gender. Its robust, uncomfortable hessian keeps rain and pigeon leavings away from your pallid frame. But most importantly, the hood prevents Outer People from unintentionally gawping at your physog. It is terrible, and should it be seen, you will be chastised in line with the No-No outlined below.

DISTURBANCE OF OUTER PEOPLE
Away across the Blight, there exist certain other places, where live People. People are like you in basic shape, number of limbs &c, but they are better. They have more bones. Their physogs may be seen.  They are permitted to leave. You may have seen many of these Outer People during the Games, many gawping and some even taking part. Now, Outer People still come over the Wall so as to gawp at the erections left behind from Before, stand in front of them and gawp at eachother very hard so as to remember they were there. They do not come here to look upon you and your fellow Inferiors lolloping about, although at times you may be called upon to caper for their amusement.

UNAUTHORISED MUSICAL EXPRESSION.
The Legislatron decrees that no music will be performed outside the Cone of License, as it has found unfettered performances can rouse in Inferiors memories of those things we may no longer have, such as coloured ponchos or the smiles of children. This in turn can lead to inconvenient upturns in auto-euthanasia which puts undue pressure on already overstretched burn-teams.

IMPROPER USE OF THE PUBLIC ABLUTORIUM
Owing to London Inferiors' insistent tendency to come up with ever more picaresque ways to misuse the public Ablutorium which LOCOG has so benevolently supplied to one in every eight postal codes, it has been necessary to draft yet more regulations regarding its utilisation. Management stresses that every time the Ablutorium is discovered in a less than pristine condition, it must be closed for reconsecration. Here are the latest amendments;

Twenty-Seven. Although their names are similar and they are located exactly adjacent to one another behind identical porticos, there is still no excuse for confusing the Ablutorium with the Abortorium. Complaining serves only to draw attention to one's own incorrectness, and may draw the attention of a Beak.

Twenty-Eight. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that nothing other than night-silt be placed in the banishment pail. The food and animal sacrifices continually sent down by superstitious Inferiors only provide sustenance to the Sewer Trogs. We will never be free of their awful folk music until this foolish practise is ended.

Twenty-Nine. 29.

Thirty. 
Inferiors enacting Rectal Quacks must now limit their volume to 10dB. Newly-installed decibelometers will monitor noise levels, and any anal belch that breaches this limit will cause the offender's cubicle to become positively charged.

The molten slag will be made available to family members within three working days.

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Make CAT do your TAXES!

SNED 10£ QUIDS ONLY TO SULTAN HOGBO OLEG WHIPPLE VON OSTERBERG, PO BOX 419, then WAIT WITH CAT IN GARDEROBE (this is important, MUST BE YOUR OWN GARDEROBE) and watch amazed as we utiliZE CUTTING EDGE HOMOGENOUS ODOUR FREE technolagy to literally FIRE KNOWLEDGE INTO CAT by return of post. Cat will ALMOSTE CERTAINLY not murder your WIFE AND CHILDREN through to deadth!! Money back if this happens and official sorrys about family :oD

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Memorable Quotes: Apocalypse Now (Baker's Edition)

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

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

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

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

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

-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

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

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

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

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!

Yes, you there, lad! You look a canny cove, 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 man. 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, good fellow! 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 cowering 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, m'lad, are the most disreputable and scurrilous coterie of vagabonds, vandals, Visigoths, the most putrescent poltroons, pirates and pederasts you'll ever see assembled! 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 the ancient alchemist Nigel Trubshaw, 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, lithe 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, my good man, 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

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)

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

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.