Easter Activities

Easter is upon us and, as the legend goes, this is the time of year that Jesus, having aged at a superhuman speed since his birthday in December, sailed silently through the sky at midnight, dropping hollow chocolate eggs from his mouth and eye-sockets down the chimneys of all the houses which had crucifixes painted on their doors in blood-red paint. It's a myth which is rich in mysteriousness. Like many people, however, I now only look forward to Easter due to the time off work it affords me, and though I'm very grateful towards Jesus for giving up his life in this bizarre fashion so I could get a couple of days added onto my weekend, he doesn't really get much of an opportunity to pop into my thoughts much whilst I'm busy sitting in bed, gorging myself on chocolate and, rarest of treats, listening to Woman's Hour.

Anyway, it occurred to me that you, loyal reader, might be at a loose end during the holidays and so, in the time-honoured tradition of the blogger without ideas, I've made a list of other websites which, I feel, are worthy of your attention.

First up: the sheer mind-warping awfulness that is Tim Westwood put through the micro-grinder that is Twitter. Ironically, given the nature of brevity that Twitter embodies, it's difficult to sum up how brilliant and expansive the experience of reading Westwood's updates is. They're a mish-mash of the sort of street-speak someone who's never seen The Wire probably thinks is used in the show, and insanely mundane observations and activities, such as these semi-random examples: 'Needed to wash the curtains - they've all shrunk by a foot! Now they don't even cover the windows! That's fucked up' and 'On the train drinkin tea & eatin sandwiches - Doncaster I'm comin to shut the city down & turn out the lights!' The highlight so far has been a brief saga with his cleaning lady which I'll string together for you here: 'Cleaner commin around - gotta tidy up so she can clean. Goin take an hour to hang these clothes... Is it wrong to walk round just in just a towel while she cleans. And can I go back to bed while she vacuums?... She uses the same goddam cloth to clean everything - annoys the hell out of me... And she mixes cleaning products together - smells like something's gonna explode! Must get her some rubber gloves... Same cloth for everything - I've tried tellin her but she just doesn't anything I say. Its mad frustrating. I gonna tell her right now!!!!!!... I got a reply - if I drop the towel she might start polishin! She aint that type of cleaner!...Cleaner done - now I can turn my swag on & get it poppin for a good day.' The sheer rock-face of irony that would be obvious to most of being 'street' about your cleaning lady never once occurs to Westwood, who also seems weirdly passionate about porridge.

Also funny, but deliberately, is www.scunt.co.uk, a new-ish Onion-esque site of fake news stories such as 'Clowns Reject EU Treaty', 'Stephen Fry Not Allowed To Die' and 'String Theory To Blame for Horrific Strangulations'. Scunt has only been up and running for a couple of months, has only one 'fan' on its Facebook fanpage (a devilishly handsome chap though he is), and there's not really much more amusing stuff I can say about it without pilfering its content, so just go have a look for yourselves.

In a similar vein, there's The Daily Show, which is incredibly famous and doesn't need a nobody like me promoting it on my visitor-barren blog. Still, I discovered you can view tons of decent-length clips here, starting with a great 'bit' on 'Barackophobia'.

If all those things involve too much concentration on your part and you just want something to sit in front of, slack-jawed and drooling, there is one particular video on YouTube I want to draw your attention to. Be warned, it is possibly the greatest video clip you will ever see. I'm not kidding. Its awe-instilling brilliance cannot be summed up by mere words. Suffice to say, after watching it you will watch it again and again. Nothing will ever seem quite as satisfactory ever again. And I don't just mean YouTube videos - I mean your LIFE!

If you're in the mood for something which is more towards the cerebral end of the spectrum, Joe Moran's Blog is so consistently interesting he could make a book out of his posts. Maybe he is doing, I don't know. Anyway, despite being an intellectual thrill-ride (it's difficult to sell anything sans grandiose hyperbole after the above YouTube clip), and despite being an equally compelling Guardian regular, he apparently doesn't have many readers on his blog. So let's all go and say nice things. But let's not, if we see him passing by our student-halls window, scream his name and then duck out of sight whilst he flails about panic-stricken in the street (for such was my behaviour when, a millenia ago, the lovely Joe was one of my lecturers. I'm sorry, Joe.)

At a somewhat in-between-ish bit of the brain-spectrum, there's the nerd-oasis that is Doctor Who. For some reason there's a bunch of episodes hanging around on the BBC's iPlayer, including the less-than-special Christmas and Easter specials, the mind-manglingly multi-stranded episodes which ended Season 4, and an episode called Midnight which is better than all of them. Watch it and do a big sloppy dump in your troosers.

Penultimately, you could read a book. Jenn Ashworth's book, for those of you who don't know, is now officially published, is in countless 3 for 2's in all good bookshops, and may well make you soil yourself in terror. My favourite bit is when Captain Scumbeard, the swarthy pirate leader, grabs Lady Lola Jiggelton, our heroine, tearing her bodice loose, says 'I'd like to shiver your timbers, lass! Yaar! You can walk my plank! Yaar!' before kissing her with his filthy, stubbly face and makes her 'realise, for the first time in her life, that all that talk of women's rights and freedom was just nonsense - all she really wanted was the rough touch of a burly seaman...' I kid, I kid, it's a great book.

And finally, there's polka. Yep, you heard right. Polka. If, for some reason, you've managed to live as long as you have whilst simultaneously remaining ignorant of traditional Finnish polka quartets, here's your chance to un-ignorise yourself.