Race for the prize

What is this, racism week? First, according to Fox News – Murdoch’s comical “Fair & Balanced” rolling hate generator, spewing fear but not Waitrose adverts into homes across America, not, sadly, updates on cunning plans to foil farmers and details of which bins boast the best scraps – reports on the racially dubious ideas of one Nobel winner. Then the dude who invented DNA, and picked up a Nobel prize (and England Man of the Match award) for the privilege, comes up with some idea about black people being stupid.

Sexy but stupid.

Now Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa parish, Louisiana, refuses to marry a mixed race couple (a black man and a white woman).

He came to the conclusion that most of black society did not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and nor did white society.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell said. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

So piles of piles of Bardwell's black mates can shit in his toilet but a mixed race child will never amount to anything. They’ll never be, say, the President of the United States of America. Or a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Or the England Man of the Match.

Rightwing cant

There’s nothing in this universe more grating than graters. And not far after that, it’s a plucky, nasal, plummy West London twang. But while cut glass Queen’s English isn’t as sharp as it once was, with the likelihood of an Eton-educated PM around the corner, we’d better brush up on our uppercrust pronunciation just to understand what the shit he's banging on about.

Despite the image, the foppish class aren’t all bad. Take jaunty supermarket Waitrose (OK, so they’re part of the John Lewis Partnership, which Daily Mail readers will be horrified to learn is effectively a co-operative), who recently pulled it’s advertising on Fox News over blubbing moron Glenn Beck.

The move comes after shoppers, taking time out from writing stern correspondence to the Daily Telegraph, gave the Champagne socialist chain whatfor:

An angry Waitrose shopper who emailed the chain to express his distaste over its decision "to be associated with this particular form of rightwing cant" received an apology last week.

Not quite how I would have worded it, but I can see what they were getting at.

Cat eat cat world

Shock discoveries in parks are nothing new. But in the days of the internet, bundles of porn discarded in hedges are getting few and far between. People are having to get more imaginative when leaving things for others to chance upon in public spaces. Take Sara Hill, 32, of south London, who, as freebie shitrag the News Shopper reports, made a “grim discovery on Saturday during her daily walk around Sydenham's Southend Park”:

The horse groomer who lives in Bellingham, said: "As I walked up to it I thought it was an old jumper - but then as I got closer I suddenly realised what it was.

"It's one of the most horrific things I've seen. I am a country girl and have seen a lot of dead animals and have plucked chickens - but I wasn't prepared for this.”

It was of course a savaged cat. (It’s pretty gruesome, actually – only the bones and head were left). But who could have done this? Tramps? Mice seeking vengeance? Sara offers:

“There is no way a dog did it, as it would have been ripped apart. And a fox would have taken it away."

In wades “full-time big cat researcher Neil Arnold, who has been studying cat sightings in the area for more than 20 years” with his two pence:

"It looks very much like a large cat would carry out this type of kill, especially when comparing it to other kills I've examined over the years."

(Funny a “full-time big cat researcher" coming up with that.)

"The main animal seen around Sydenham, Penge, Norwood and Bromley is a black leopard - or panther.

"I've seen a black leopard three times locally, and have evidence such as livestock kills, faeces and paw-prints. But kills of animals are the best evidence."

He added: "When a leopard kills, it kills only to eat, to survive, and will rasp away fur with a sandpaper like tongue leaving a very clean kill.

"Domestic cats are on the menu although preferred prey is pigeon, pheasant, rabbit, rats, mice, and also larger prey such as deer and sheep.”

And people?

Mr Arnold also said black leopards are no threat to humans unless cornered, provoked or injured.

Phew. So running the fuck away is fine. There’s more advice on Neil’s blog, which is written in third person, so he must know what he’s talking about.

Helpfully, the News Shopper offers a picture gallery (which I would link to but I'm at work and the pictures are grim as fuck):

See photos of the dead cat - beware, the pictures are very gory.

I would suggest an interactive element, with a virtual stick to poke the corpse with.

Hard cheese

There comes a time in a man’s life when all he can expect for birthdays is booze, socks and James Bond DVDs. But sometimes, a dad craves something a bit more substantial. It’s time to bring out the big guns.

The Pong Cheese Pong Box is hardcore quattro formaggio. Take note of the write-up:

An awesome selection of our most revered and most feared cheeses. These rogues are not only among are best sellers, they are also our strongest, smelliest and most oozy creations.

This wonderful box of cheese 'superstars of smell' makes a great gift idea but would also be more than suitable to send as an act of revenge!

Each order comes with a warning: they say it's best to make sure that you are in to collect the cheese and claim no responsibility for cheese that's been left to fester on a warm doorstep for a day.

This is where I shoehorn in a gag about revenge being a dish best served cold.

And speaking of Revenge...

Apocalypse Soon

I’ve granted myself until the end of the world to write this post. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give me as much time as I would’ve hoped.

Had my diary stretched three-and-a-half years into the future, there’d be a big red pen mark around Friday, 21st December, 2012. The remaining 10 blank pages I could use to make a chatterbox - that would be nice. Only it wouldn’t be nice because I’d be dead and you can’t enjoy a chatterbox when you’re dead.

The aforementioned date is, of course, when the Mayan calendar stops. Big deal – my calendar ends on 31st December THIS YEAR (and seems to be stuck on May). But then Mayans weren't a bunch of lazy halfwits with scratch-and-sniff trousers with a 12-month VW Campervan jobbie like me. Or the flesh-hungry primitives awaiting the salvation of Catholicism of Mel Gibson’s (god-awful, if you'll excuse the blasphemy, Mel) Apocalypto. They actually built pretty cool pyramids and shit, don’t y’know.

What happens when Mayan time runs out is unknown, but the doom mongers (as apposed to the fishmongers, who’s remit is mainly fish) are getting excited. That’s great, it started with an earthquake, bikes and snakes and airplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid; honeybees, eagles and otters are all fucked; swine flu; knitted soft toys; reality TV; zombies; Vogon Constructor Fleets; cats and dogs living together. CGI is going to kill us all. Or maybe nuffin.

Wikipedia's take on it is more definite:

The world burns in flames.

But while I’m here picking bits of toothpaste out of my t-shirt, there are thankfully those amongst us who are more proactive. Joining apocalypse-battling John Cusack are the likes of portly whistleblower-cum-21st century David Ike (and possibly Jesus) David Shayler, who will not stop "until the truth has conquered the New World Order." Unless there’s a Gregs the baker on the way.

How about other self-appointed saviour Rob Bast, then? He offers some practical advise on his website:

Most home owners have fire insurance, even though they do not expect their house to ever burn. They have it because losing their home and contents would be devastating, and insurance is quite cheap.

The human species does not have an insurance policy that covers a global cataclysm in 2012. Until governments, organisations or high-worth individuals make an effort, my intention is to do the best I can, because at least 1 person out of 6 billion people should make an effort.

Good work, Rob. The rest of you need to get your finger out. That’s all I’m saying.

And now for something completely different

It's been a while. To be fair, in the last month, I've been to Basel, Brussels and Vienna. That's not really a boast – I was mostly working, innit (except Basel, where I was climbing mountains, swimming in rivers and getting off my face on spas and shit).

I was in Brussels for maybe six hours, long enough to find the cashpoint in the station.

Vienna I spent a bit more time in. Stunning city – looks like it was built yesterday, supposing yesterday was 1850. Ultravox didn't write a song about it for nothing. Anyway, there I broke a toilet with my own poo: true story.

So yeah, the point I was going to make is that despite all the neglect I lavish on this blog, I'm actually doing a pretty good job, comparatively. According to Caslon Analytics, some Australians who research stuff when they aren't slapping shrimps five times the size of those found in British waters onto a barbecue grill in a stereotypically brash manner, 60 to 80% of blogs cease to exist within a month of conception. And most of these probably have some sort of purpose, other than mine which seems to just needlessly fill the internet with more words.

What I am offering is diversity. Outside a Raphael Saddiq gig, the sight of a slightly hairy 30-year-old white dude of average height is about as eventful as an episode of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. If this was a bell curve, I'd be sitting right at the top, admiring the view.

But in the world of blogging, I'm an anomaly. I'm chronologically challenged, genderly transgressive and I DON'T GET EXCITED ENOUGH. In fact:

The typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations).

Teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30. Half of bloggers are between the ages of 13 and 19. Following this age group, 39.6% of bloggers are between the ages of 20 and 29.

Better still, one commenter notes that blogging "remains the dominion of geeks, wittier-than-thou twenty-to-thirtysomethings in Manhattan and angry gay Republicans." At least I'm not a Republican.

This all means the odds against me actually getting off my arse and posting this are astronomical. So if you're reading this, think yourself lucky. Or don't. Your choice.

Bad hair day

Sodium laureth sulfate, cocamidopropyl betaine, propylene glycol, PEG-55 propylene glycol oleate, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate – smile, it’s simple. Eh? That’s what it says here.

I’ve spent the last week working out my tax for last year. In such a situation, anything poses a potential distraction – not even imagining the most ludicrous claim in line with MPs’ expenses. Just anything to keep me away from Excel. Setting up fiendish real-life Heath Robinson mousetraps. Snorting Lemsip. Sniffing out BSG plot loopholes. Jogging. Christ, I’m even writing a blog.

And now I have in my hand a near-empty bottle of my sister’s Simple Regeneration Age Resisting Facial Wash: Green Tea Goodness. And I’m reading the ingredients (“our special blend”). There’s over 30 of the fuckers.

When your grooming regime consists of wondering whether or not to take a set of clippers to your head, face and all, once a week, cosmetics kinda slip you by. But my girlfriend’s latest obsession has lead me to deduce one thing: the beauty industry is pretty ugly.

Take the ingredients listed above:

Sodium laureth sulfate [SLES] - a detergent and surfactant found in many personal care products (soaps, shampoos, toothpaste etc.). It is an inexpensive and very effective foaming agent. It is also a known irritant.

Toxicology research by the OSHA, NTP, and IARC have supported claims by the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association (CTFA) and the American Cancer Society that SLES is not a carcinogen [phew]. However, SLES and SLS, and products containing them, have been found to contain very low levels of the known carcinogen 1,4-dioxane, with the recommendation that these levels be monitored. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers 1,4-dioxane to be a probable human carcinogen (having observed an increased incidence of cancer in controlled animal studies, but not in epidemiological studies of workers using the compound), and a known irritant (with a no-observed-adverse-effects level of 400 milligrams per cubic meter) at concentrations significantly higher than those found in commercial products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration encourages manufacturers to remove 1,4-dioxane, though it is not required by federal law.

Cocamidopropyl betaine – not harmful, but an extract from fungi, namely Trunk Rot. Yum.

Propylene glycol – “known also by the systematic name propane-1,2-diol, is an organic compound (a diol alcohol), usually a faintly sweet, and colorless clear viscous liquid that is hygroscopic and miscible with water, acetone, and chloroform.”

Potential health effects:

Eye
Causes mild eye irritation. Contact may cause irritation, tearing, and burning pain.

Skin
Causes moderate skin irritation. Contact with the skin may cause erythema, dryness, and defatting.

Ingestion
May cause gastrointestinal irritation with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Low hazard for usual industrial handling. May cause hemoglobinuric nephrosis. May cause changes in surface EEG.
Inhalation

Low hazard for usual industrial handling. May cause respiratory tract irritation.

Chronic
May cause reproductive and fetal effects. Laboratory experiments have resulted in mutagenic effects. Exposure to large doses may cause central nervous system depression. Chronic ingestion may cause lactic acidosis and possible seizures.

PEG-55 propylene glycol oleate - moderate hazard depending on product usage. Contamination concerns – ethylene oxide, 1,4-dioxane. Restricted in cosmetics; use, concentration, or manufacturing restrictions - Not safe for use on injured or damaged skin. May contain harmful impurities. Toxicity hazards: suspected.

Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate -

* Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate is NOT a natural preservative.
* It is actually a skin and eye irritant.
* Not recommended for sensitive skin.
* No long term studies on the effect on the skin.
* Not many research studies done on Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate PERIOD.

And you smear this stuff on your face. My girlfriend tells me that this stuff is at the better end of the spectrum, designed for people with sensitive skin. Blimey.

Since this is the internet, where in true geek conspiracy nut style the truth is out there, there’s a whole community of bloggers dedicated to unravelling the ingredients of household cosmetics. Lots of inspiring everyday folk turned biochemists who go “no poo” – this means they don’t use shampoo, which is very bad, but also resulted in comical schoolboy tittering from me. All of these people know more than a lazy dude with no hair and a tax return to do.

And there are companies doing good things, too. Take Aubrey Organics. Better still, Dr Bronner’s are some old school Victorian elixir maker turned modern day pharmaceutical activists. They’ve actually taken companies that have produced goods falsely advertised as organic to court.

They also pose the question: can you get high off soap? I don’t know but fuck Excel, I’m going to spend this afternoon finding out.

Taking the piss

In folklore, the streets of London are paved with gold. And talking cats – you can’t move for the buggers. Only in reality, the capital has the UK’s highest rate of unemployment. Which might explain another fact they don’t tell you about London: that wherever you are, you’re never more than 10 metres away from a toilet attendant.

The toilet attendant isn’t a phenomenon unique to London – they exist beyond the M25 as well. But there is a sense of social mobility to having someone turn on a tap for you. If you stumbled into the gents in a nightspot in, say, Portsmouth, to find a dude willing to pass you a towel rather than jab you in the eye because he thought you looked at his cock – maybe I did, what of it? – you’d know you were in one of the city’s flashier venues. Or at least that’s how the club sees it. But in London any old pisshole – literally – can have a dude who will insist on squirting soap into your palms, and expect a shiny monetary deposit on his little metal tray as recompense.

With a sigh, this was once more the sight that greeted me in the bogs at the hardly-sumptuous 12 Acklam Road last week when I rocked up at Book Slam (which otherwise was skill). I may be a relatively recent arrival in the Big Smoke, but I know how to operate a tap, thanks.

Even without the presence of an attendant, I’m sometimes shocked by the number of blokes who post-piss (or dump, even) bypass the sink and head straight back into the pub, to shake hands, pinch crisps and grope members of the public. Add a leering fella on a stool offering lollipops (who actually wants sweets stored in a toilet?) with a plate lacking your coinage and the percentage darting straight out the door no doubt rises higher than I can wee.

Now, I’m blessed with both a mighty thirst and a bladder that a shrew would laugh at. Rather than deal with an attendant or avoid washing my hands altogether, I have been known to risk near-accidents and suffer some fairly painful tube rides home. But not this time: I was going urinate and I was bloody well going to wash my hands and all.

So I gave him a pound. But only after I pissed on it.

Watch this space

Playing catch up isn’t as much fun as, say, playing Russian roulette with the cast of Hollyoaks. Provided you don’t lose.

Once again I was a bit slow on the uptake, but I’ve since been binging my face off on space crack. Now I’m only 10 episodes from the end of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Which is good because I still have 10 episodes to watch. But bad because I still have 10 episodes left to watch.

I can’t amble through the internet looking for clues because everyone already knows what’s happened and seem to take delight out of ruining it for me. Even Obama wants to spoil it. Bastards. All of you.

Then there’s the pricks that haven’t bothered watching it yet. What is your problem? You’re falling over yourselves to pour The Wire through your eyeballs just because a couple of Guardian journalists won’t shut up about it. But because BSG is all about robots and space and shit you can’t bring yourselves to watch it. A billion hours of televisual stimuli isn’t healthy whatever it is, but there’s more nutritional value in one hit of BSG than an entire season of 24, for example.

I don’t know much about TV programmes to be honest but I have seen Taxi To The Dark Side, from which I can only conclude that 24 is some form of training video for US interrogation operatives somehow unleashed on the world. BSG meanwhile managed to critique the Bush administration exactly by being about robots and space and shit. It's close but not too close, so they could get away with it.

I have some issues with BSG. Some people (Wired, particularly) have commented on its strong female characters. I can’t help thinking this is misleading. Where the male leads appear complex, especially as the programme hurtles anxiously towards its climax, the women just come across as nutbags. Especially frakking Starbuck.

Also, why are the only black people all fat god-fearing simpletons?

And why don’t more doctors smoke big fat cigars when they treat patients? Oh. Right.

Otherwise, from the distance of space (which tastes of raspberries, btw), this series sticks a mirror right in the face of humanity and dares it to peer in, take a long look at itself and draw a deep breath. Look at all the greasy blackheads and congealed sandwich crumbs! Look at them!

On reflection, even IKEA might be ahead of me on that idea.

Who watches the watchmen?

Us, as it turns out. You and me – the plebs with the cameras. (Sorry, this isn’t anything you won’t have read somewhere else these last few weeks, I’ve just finally got around to writing about it.)

As you’re probably aware, there was a bit of a shindig in London town the other week. A bunch of world leaders rocked up on the promise of free sandwiches. And some peace-loving crusty-types smashed up a bank and headbutted police truncheons. Or at least that’s how it appeared through the gaze of the media. Unless you were reading the Guardian Twitter feed, in which case you were probably keeping abreast of what outfit Russell Brand was wearing.

I happened to be next to the bank in question on that afternoon at the very moment all the fracas occurred. Although I was round the corner and didn’t see the actual break in – I assumed people were taking pictures of Russell Brand. Hence the CS gas thrown into the crowd I felt at the time was a bit of an overreaction.

I did see a dude spray a heart onto the side of said bank, which was nice, and a wall of police officers arrive on horse back – in fact, I was amongst the last people to flee the area before it got “kettled”. Imagine me explaining to my boss why my lunchbreak overstretched by eight hours.

What was missed on the day: most of the people there were either peace protestors or curious workers who just dipped out of Eat. One such man, Ian Tomlinson was knocked over by police officers and left to die.

It took (illegal) photographic evidence from members of the public to reveal this – weirdly, all the CCTV cameras in the vicinity had been switched off. And various officers were seen without identification marks on their shoulders.

Meanwhile, embarrassingly, two Austrian tourists get their holiday snaps confiscated. So go the anti-terrorism laws…

Now the police will be investigating themselves to review whether their tactics were heavy-handed and whether officers are justified and proportionate in "the use of force" when dealing with protesters.

The force is indeed strong.

Suck my tweet

Unless you’ve been locked up in an Austrian basement for the last 24 years you will be at least vaguely aware of Twitter. It’s a microblogging site where fuckwits yap on about the inane meaninglessness of their lives in the futile hope that someone, somewhere out there isn’t too busy guffing about their self to take notice. (This SuperNews! cartoon pretty much sums up my feelings). Fat chance. Unless you’re Stephen Fry, that is.

Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift and the whole world takes a deep breath. Stephen Fry accidentally posts a picture of a jar of Nutella, the sandwich spread that keeps the cardiology department in Italian hospitals in business, and twitheads fall over themselves to come up with the most vacuous comment.

trinityrs on March 23, 2009
I love nutella!

mongooseson on March 23, 2009
Not my cup of Darjeeling thanks.

GertrudeSusanne on March 23, 2009
Nutella - yummy! If I had been Paddington Bear, that´s what I´d have taken on my journey to the UK :o)) Ta 4 all the great piccies xxx

“I took a massive dump in my brother’s jar LMAO ;-)” I mean it’s not even a giant 5kg tub of the hazelnutty chocolaty goo.


Now that is worth tweeting the fuck out of. (And worryingly, should anything happen to me in the next few months and I become martyred by the 24-hour rolling depression channel that is The News, this is the image of me that will no doubt be seared into the retinas of viewers. In case of emergencies, always keep your kith and kin updated with a fairly recent and decent looking picture of your mug. Thanks Christine.)

Twitter is just too needy. For me, two blog posts in a month is a pretty good figure. I did better than Faith No More, who manged an almost 11 year long gap between posts. But Twitter demands your almost constant attention and I just don’t have that level of commitment. (I notice, for example, very few entries in Barack Obama’s Twitter feed since early Novermber – are you tell me he has something better to do?). “Feed me!” the cute little bird chatters, before pecking out your eyeballs.

My advice: leave the narcissism to the people that have made an artform out of it. I speak, of course, of Russell Brand, a man who would not exist if he fell over in a woods and there was no one there to marvel at/be outraged by him doing it. Here’s just a few snippets from his feed:

"My booky wook is number 6 on the New York Times best seller list. Alas, i want it to be number 1. Please go and intimidate bookshop staff."

Followed by:

"No.1 in the New York Times best seller list is "My Wookie Book" by some arsehole called Chewbacca. We must usurp this illiterate goon."

That and like I couldn’t condense all that down into 160 characters. If you're going to write something that nobody is going to read, at least do it properly.

Police, Camera, Action!

Last summer, Google went around 25 cities in Britain, drive-by shooting 22,369 miles of road – taking pretty pictures, I mean. Sewn together, these 2D images have created Street View, not so much a 3D map of Britain but a moment trapped in amber – complete with fully-functioning Woolworthses. So it goes.

Aside the comical spottings (although Google Earth might have better comedy potential), there are security concerns.

Some people with a less-than-informed grasp of technology (and perhaps reality) (goaded no doubt by the, sigh, Daily Mail) have noted that this is a breach of civil liberties and now, using this tool, anyone can stalk you remotely from anywhere in the world. Or at least the you from eight months or so ago when the photos were taken. If they know your address. And you were there at the time the photo was taken. And they’ve not got better things to be doing like, y’know, rearranging their socks into alphabetical order or something.

Me, I’m just miffed there’s a Winnebago parked outside my gaff, obscuring the view.

Sidestepping privacy issues like a ballet-dancing crab, Matt Brittin, head of Google UK, said that the company has had discussions with the Metropolitan police "and they have said it actually helps track and monitor crime."

But what puzzles me is how Google got around section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which makes it illegal to photograph police officers – the Government claims that it is for security purposes but maybe Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is worried about police officers having their souls stolen or some such voodoo witchcraft. (Incidentally, as Mark Thomas has pointed out, you *can* still take photos of Community Support Officers and if they try to nick you, you can report them for impersonating a police officer – smirk).

Did they pick a day when there were no police officers on the street (insert comment about “bobbies on the beat” here)? Or did the Google cameras shy away from police stations/donut shops/collections of ethnics in need of a good frisking and possibly a shooting?

I would trawl through Street View trying to find an answer, but my underwear drawer won’t sort itself out.

Won't somebody please think of the children

Gah.

I can talk. But. What is it about the internet that allows people to voice opinions that would seem a bit OTT in Mein Kampf? For a while I’ve been tracking Speak You’re Branes, an amusing if throw-your-head-at-a-wall-sobering collection of comments scraped from the barrel of the BBC’s Have Your Say word vomitorium, then exposed to public ridicule. Funny. It’s just a pity this seems to be the tip of the iceberg we're making light of here.

(Also, what is it about the internet that allows the continual recycling of clichés, eh? Answers on a postcard...)

Anyhoo, my point is that what should be a valid exercise in democracy just makes you hate people even more. We're just an infinite number of monkeys shitting on to our keyboards.

It’s not enough that the fuckers kickoff about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand without having actually heard what they are supposed to be offended by. Now they are appalled that our children are being subjected to disabled people on TV. In their own living rooms. It’ll be black people next.

Take these considered words from concerned parent "Barry":

"Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on Cbeebies [Cerrie Burnell, who has one arm that ends at her elbow and chooses not to use a prosthetic limb, the cowbag] may scare the kids because of her disability?

"I didn't want to let my children watch the filler bits on the bedtime hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter's mind and possibly caused sleep problems... and yes, this is a serious post."

I think your views might scare your children. Also, as a mate pointed out, the Paralympics must blow your mind.

And don't think the irony of me moaning on about folk on the internet moaning has escaped me.

Whatever floats your boat

My sister works for an unnamed museum that houses a lot of nautical paraphernalia (it does have a name). They collect models of ships. I found a model of a ship on the internet. It is made from food. Mostly meat. Some pastry. She decided to put it forward as a serious piece for the acquisitions department to consider, sending them a rather sincere note. The good thing about an email is that you can keep a straight face:

Dear Steve and John,

Would the Museum be interested in acquiring one of these? My brother suggested it. I think it's long term conservation may be an issue, but it's a very interesting piece. Maybe I should recommend the plans to Jerry?

http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/20080212-The_Meat_Ship

Best wishes,

Here's the reply she got:

that's really quite unpleasant.

Suicide is painless

What do you say when the least mentally qualified of your friends asks you for a character reference for voluntary work for the Samaritans?

Oi!

I wanna work for top topping preventers, the Samaritans innit. Before they'll let me stop people being mental & shit, I need to prove that I'm not some kind of weirdo. Is it alright to put you down as a vouching for type person yah?

Ta.

I guess (hope) that, in reflection, callers will consider their lot to not be too bad after all. "Could be worse..."

For the love of God

That’s the problem with God, he’s always been there first.

The other day, I had a brainwave – God should have a blog. Or at least a representative on earth to write that blog for him. And that representative could be me. I am on earth, after all. I was made in his image, dammit.

I came up with the name “Dear God”, a title that could lend itself to either/both of two concepts:

a) A problem page where conundrum-sufferers can consult the most divine of agony aunts to consider a whole host of concerns.
b) The ongoing sufferings of a clinically depressed deity of sulk wallowing around his bedsit flat after his wife has left him for Hindu god Ganesha (“that elephant-faced bastard”).

Then I discover someone (God, apparently) has only gone and done exactly that. Well, a) at least. Sort of. And their pictures are prettier and all.

Dear God is like a dark tunnel full of tramp piss* on the information super highway to enlightenment. It’s a stagnant oxbow lake of the internet that diverts the course of the blogosphere with a dam of dogma. On it, readers share prayers (shudder) and confessions (great, but never as sordid as you would like) in the flaccid hope that God might get round to reading them. “Email in – send it to The Big Guy”, they yelp (like it doesn’t just go straight to his spam folder). Oh, did I mention they have pretty pictures. Often with little or no connection to the subject matter. But they are pretty.

Take Bobby from Canada, for example. He ditched his missus and began his mission to boff the brains out of an old school friend, only a year later to wind up drunk, penniless and homeless, snivelling in a corner of what presumably must be an internet café seeking spiritual advice.

God, I prayed you would open a door for me to get out of all this, but things worsened,so I stopped that prayer. Sin has taken me way farther than I ever wanted to go and now, it seems as though there is no escape.

Bum. Only the photo department didn’t get the memo. Their idea of Bobby’s plight is this:



Which is a man who has come home from work to discover his wife is cheating on him with another woman, a prelude to a glossy porn ménage à trois involving said man, the wife and the open-minded lover – not really the same problem. In fact, probably rubbing salt into poor Bobby’s wounds.

And God’s verdict?

God Says:
January 8th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
great photo.

* Piss update – another grizzly dude pissing in public, this time on the wall of the small pub/eatery in Liverpool St station, next to Upper Crust. At 4pm on a Saturday.

I Spam Legend

AdSense has outshone itself once again. This sponsored link appeared in my spam folder:

Vineyard Spam Salad - Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl

Bravo. See also:

French Fry Spam Casserole - Bake 30-40 minutes

Jesus is my bus driver

One for the sloganeering Agnostics out there (pick a side, you fuckers). Brilliant.

Love in the time of So I Married An Axe Murderer

Romance isn’t dead. Nope. In fact, you can order your copy for as little as £3.91, with a two-week free trial.

With Valentine’s Day lurking around the corner like your pretty flatmate and her meat cleaver-wielding Italian boyfriend, it’s probably a good moment to take Christian Bale’s advice and “think for one fucking second” (Yeah, get me being topical). Good job LOVEFiLM is here to sort your life out:

Enjoy a romantic night in this Valentine's with LOVEFiLM.

Now imagine your girlfriend/boyfriend’s reaction when you tell them not to bother booking a table at the local Pizza Express because you’ve got Cocktail in. That look of discombobulation, subsiding to state of utter revulsion sloshing about in a blank stare of disappointment – that’s the face of true love, that is.

Best get your rental list in shape pronto and hope LOVEFiLM don’t try and fob you off with that Jeremy Clarkson DVD you've had skulking in your “low priority” titles for some time now. Like they always do. Bastards.

AdSense and sensibility: part 2

AdSense has excelled itself today:

No more Bloating and Gas

Read about how I found relief from bloating and bloated stomach.
www.Fangocur.com/Bloating

AdSense and sensibility

Evil: smacks of black and white thinking. Back in the days of George W Bush, that seemed to be fine. But Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto is open to interpretation. Surely having a butcher’s at my email, for example, represents a grey area.

Not that I mind. The Google ad generator (AdSense, apparently) in the side bar of the Gmail interface is generally more interesting than the actual email I’m reading anyhoo.

AdSense works by prying into the content of your emails and tantalising you with gaudy baubles of marketing guff, usually hawking the sort of tat that killed Woolworths. Imagine Derren Brown manning a jumble sale stall. If you really must, read about it here.

On the plus side, I can now pretend that adverts are being beamed into my personal mind from some future dreamt up by Philip K Dick. Like in Minority Report when Tom Cruise gets stalked by Gap (Gap Kids would be more, er, fitting). Only more low rent. And therefore not so threatening, just funny.

A recent double-whammy:

Michelle O's hair in secs
Get her look now using quick, easy v realistic, new type of weave!
www.simiweave.com

Cherl Cole Hair Extension
Want Celebrity Cheryl Cole Hair? London Professional hair extensions
www.lucindaellery.com

They’ve got my number. I also got clothes-lined by this heavy-hitting tag-team side-lining the an email:

Birthday Cake
Delicious personalised cheesecakes direct - go on it'll make the day
www.cheesecake.co.uk

10 Skinny Rules
I lost 9 lbs. in 11 days, just by following these 10 simple rules.
FatLoss4Idiots.com

Possibly suggesting that you can have your cake and eat it.

Jack Daniels: “We work hard, we play hard”

Lynchburg: just by the name you can have a guess at the pastime of choice in times gone by. Life may trundle on at a slow pace, but thankfully even here things have changed.

“Everybody knows everybody here,” a generic meat-headed flannel shirt-clad hick drawls in the new Jack Daniels’ advert. Look – spot the ethnic minority. And it’s not just the non-white residents of the Tennessee town that these days get greeted with a great big bear hug – everyone’s invited. As long as they are male, mind.

Of the 361-strong population, can you spot one woman? Nope. Because Lynchburg is clearly one big hairy-bottomed gay commune. Bless. Just ask the village bicycle, “Big Goose”.

“Randy Baxter – everybody around here knows him as ‘Goose’.”

They sure do. And not just because of his waddle.

And what about Sammy?

“My Grandpa told me: ‘Sammy, I don’t want you off the ground any higher than your horse’s back and I don’t want you in water deeper than a bathtub.’”

Er.

All that’s missing is the afterhours disco. There's one for the Jack Daniels distillery suggestion box.

Is there anybody out there?

As opening lines go, Douglas Coupland's JPod takes some beating:

"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."

And now reading The Gum Thief – which considers a middle-aged alcoholic car crash of a man working in a branch of Staples while writing a novel about a middle-aged alcoholic car crash of a couple who swill Scotch, bicker wittily and encounter a young buck novelist who is writing a novel about a middle-aged alcoholic car crash of a man working in a branch of Staples, phew – I can't help thinking that this is sometimes Coupland's world, we just live in it.

Nope, I'm not middle-aged, alcoholic, a car crash or working in Staples. I just aspire to be.

Anyhoo, somewhere amongst the to-and-fro correspondence of its main players, an email address comes up:

blackchandelier@gmail.com

Out of interest, I've sent the following email to this address:

Do people actually write to email addresses they find in books?

(I'm sorry, it was the most Couplandesque thing I could think of.) Well, you've got to, haven't you, eh? I'm hoping this delivers goods, like Homer Simpson's email address, as once revealed (and spelled out) on The Simpsons. Acknowledgment would be nice and all. I'd settle for that.

Get some

I can't believe that I spent all day re-writing the rule book only to go and rip it up this afternoon...

If I could say a few words… I’d be a better public speaker

I’ll keep it brief.

Eighteen minutes. Slightly shorter if you were watching in China. That’s pretty sprightly. Even at that length, I was half expecting President Obama to whip out a Blackberry and start posting key points on Twitter.

It was certainly short enough for BBC commentators to shoehorn in a reference to the longest presidential inaugural address back in 1841. Before they had Facebook and MTV and shit and presumably when attention spans were longer than – ooo, a big crane! Sorry, where was I?

When William Henry Harrison took to office, he delivered a mighty 8,444 word beast. I’ve read shorter books. In fact, I haven’t read any longer books. It took nearly two hours to get through it, putting even my mum’s one-way telephone conversations to shame.

Legend has it that Harrison’s speech was so long that – stood out on a cold 4th March with no hat or overcoat – that he later contracted pneumonia and died some 30 days later. That’ll learn ‘im.

Rivers of piss

My local area is populated by me. Really. This is what UpMyStreet.com has to say about my postcode:

“Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be young, living in converted flats, in multi-ethnic areas.

“These young multi-ethnic communities are primarily found in London, with many living in houses which have been converted into flats.

“Most people are in their twenties and thirties and there are only a few, very young children. The population is diverse. On the whole they are well qualified. Many are in professional and managerial jobs, with good incomes. Others have lower level qualifications and are likely to be office and clerical staff.

“Public transport is by far the most popular method of travelling to work or study. Residents are also happy to walk, and only a minority see the need for a car. At this stage in their lives this type are not really thinking about investing their money. They will spend their spare money on travel, and will take long haul trips as well as European holidays.

“They like exercise and sport, as well as more contemplative pursuits such as the theatre, the arts and self-improvement classes. They are also very interested in current affairs and read The Guardian and Independent as they commute to work.”

I’m also a Taurean and my favourite colour is blue. I do however have to cut eye holes in my copy of The Guardian as I walk to work.

One person who didn’t get the memo is the dude I walked past at about 4pm on Saturday, who was stood on the pavement outside a nearby block of flats, idly shooting the breeze with a mate, flies undone, pissing into the street. He looked like a Telegraph reader to me.

The Tetris Diet: A Square Meal

It’s grey, it’s January – you’ve made it through the Most Depressing Day of the Year only to be smacked in the face with a Tuesday that’s only saving grace is that it’s 24 hours closer to the weekend. A weekend where you can’t afford to do anything, only wallow in your own self-pity, which you'll still be charged for. Sigh. And if you’re not reaching for your crack pipe, chances are you’re binge-eating crushingly cheap MSG-laced fatty snacks fashioned from the gristle and fluff swept off an abattoir floor. Stop moping, blubby – it’s time to starve yourself. But which is the right fad diet for you?

Fuck Atkins, the 2009 eating disorder of choice is The Tetris Diet. And it works like this:

Imagine your stomach is like a 8bit monochrome grid (or think of it in a 16-colour palette if you want to be fancy). Food falls through your faceflap and collects at the bottom. This means if you eat food that slots together, you can cram more in – get it in a row and it cancels itself out, meaning more food can be shoved in through your head hatch.



So here’s the basics to get your head round:
- Stick to cubed or square food. Biscuits are a good staple.
- If you really must eat fruit, cut it into the right shape or try special groomed square Japanese delicacies. Fit in as many square meals as you can.
- After eating, jiggle your body to get food to fall into the appropriate slot.
- Listen to tinny Russian music while digesting.
- Long foods are at a premium – get them in the right slot and you can cancel out four whole rows of food.

It’s that easy, fatso. Don't just stand there inertly, flab rippling in the airflow - stuff some more crap into your mouth, anything to stop your feeble twittering. Just make sure it’s square – got it? Sweet.