I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car

Owl And The Pussycat Competition

2011-02-13T23:30:00.001-08:00

SILENCE! THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. PLEASE FORM AN ORDERLY QUEUE AND LEAVE VIA THE MERCHANDISE-STALL.

Hello. Long time no see. Come in. Sit down. Can I get you anything? How've you been?

Anyway, shut up and listen to me. I've made a zine comic of Edward Lear's 'The Owl And The Pussycat'. It features the famous nonsense poem accompanied by some of my doodles. So, if you've always wanted to see some inky drawings of a cat in a boat, or an owl dancing with an umbrella, or a pig playing a harp, this, my friend, is your lucky day.

Here, courtesy of Helen Power and her fancy-dan camera, are some pictures:

Oh, you want to buy a copy? Why, you can do so here for the modest price of £3 (plus 50p for postage). If you don't want to buy one, that's fine. No, really. It's fine. Go on. See if I care. Although, I should let you know that by way of 'creating a buzz', two of the people who order this ruddy thing within the first week will be randomly selected to also be sent a proverbial 'goody-bag', containing a cat t-shirt (printed by the good folks at DirectWorkwear; see the picture below), a large-ish cat-picture (lovingly rendered on a torn-off strip of beautiful industrial grade cardboard), and some other cat-themed bits 'n' bobs. So, essentially, BUY NOW.

If, for some crazy, unthinkable reason, you don't want to win, I'll simply re-do my random selecting and we shall speak no more about it.

Mel Gibson II - Booze Control

2010-08-31T00:06:00.000-07:00

I've made another Choose Your Own Adventure site, once again starring loveable antisemite and drunken spouse-abuser Mel Gibson. This time the setting is a humble American supermarket. Can YOU guide Mel safely through the perilous aisles?

Click on Mel's furious, hate-filled eyes to play:

In other news, this blog is now technically finished. It begins a new life in the guise of a website - IThoughtIToldYouToWaitInTheCar.com - where you can meet all the friends you've made here - Abstract Mark, insane Roy Walker, Lego Abraham Lincoln with his legs on backwards - albeit in a slightly prettier setting and under softer, more flattering lighting.

There are a couple of new additions, however, such as a gallery of something called Bickering Comics and a self-aggrandising publicity exercise in which I offer free stuff to anyone who asks which can be found here (this bit is taking me ages).

If anyone has any suggestions of what I should do with this blog, I'd be thrilled to hear them (well, maybe not 'thrilled' - I'm not a lunatic).

Choose Your Own Adventure: Mel Gibson

2010-07-17T06:14:00.001-07:00

Hello.

I've created a Make Your Own Adventure-style website in which you, yes YOU!, get to experience daily life as wealthy actor and celebrated racist Mel Gibson. Have fun!

I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car II

2010-07-11T17:51:00.000-07:00

Abstract Mark

2010-07-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

Click and zoom to make it big.

The Illustrated Mondo

2010-06-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

People often come up to me on the street and ask me one of three things:

1 - 'Whilst I enjoy your blog, don't you think there's really not enough photographs of your naked flesh?'
2 - 'What's with all your tattoos?'
3 - 'You're not really famous enough to have people coming up to you on the street asking you things, are you?'

All very pertinent questions, I'm sure you'll agree. For those who ask me question number 3, my answer is this: 'No.' For those who ask questions 1 to 2, this is the blog-post for you. Here is a graphic run-down of my pictorial bodily adornments.

1 - Left Inner-Arm: The words 'I love Travolta'.

This tattoo came about during a brief relationship I had with a mute Sicilian dancercise coach named Amelia Ravolta. This tattoo started out as a clear, understandable expression of my love for her. Sadly, there was a misunderstanding: I unwittingly said 'I hate you and wish to whip you with your own colon' in sign language in one of her classes whilst attempting a particularly frenetic 'robot freak-out'. The colon comment she could forgive but not the part about hating her. Things came to an end and I took the only sensible route and had a 'T' added to the front of her name. On my arm, that is. I was unable to have her surname changed legally by deed-poll.

2 - Left Hand: Pinsky The Dishonest Multigendered Alien.

One summer, when I was a boy, I was sitting in bed when an alien appeared. He clambered through my open window and said 'My name's Pinksy. Just Pinksy. Not Robert Pinks, before you ask. I recently made an appearance at UNI and all they kept saying to me was "Are you related to the poet Robert Pinksy? Can you get him to sign my copy of The Figured Wheel? Can you tell him I loved 'The Shirt'? It really spoke to me, that poem." I don't give a flying damn about whether some crappy poem spoke to you kid, got that! I'm just Pinsky, on its own. Like the popstar Prince or the journalist Bidisha. It just happens to be the same name as that of a successful poet.' He sat down on my pillow. He smelled quite bad and I could see he hadn't shaved for a few days. 'Let me ask you something,' he went on, 'do you think when Prince walks into a room and says "Hello, my name's Prince," everyone in the room goes: "Oh, are you related to the guy who established Prince's Canned Tuna? Do you know Harold Prince, the celebrated musical theatre producer? Are you married to Eileen Prince from them lousy Harry Potter books? Does that make you Snape's dad? Are you? Are you, Prince?"? No, they don't. They go: "Oh, it's Prince. Hey, Prince. Put your feet up, have some salsa." It's like they don't even notice I'm a five-inch biologically multigendered creature with an array of eyes. It pisses me right off. Anyway, listen kid. I'm, like, magic and shit. We're going to have loads of wonderful magical shit happen to us and stuff. It'll be great. But first, you've gotta get your new pal Pinksy some smokes. Your folks keep any cigarettes in the house?'
When I told him they didn't he grew upset. He clambered his way back towards the window.
'Well, I'm out of here, kid.'
'What about all the adventures, Pinsky? When will we have those?'
'Huh? Oh, right... erm... erm... okay, tell you what... save up some money and get my likeness tattooed onto the palm of your hand. Then, when go you sleep, stick your hand under your face. That way I can whisper myself into your dreams. Adios, fuckwit.'
And with that he hopped into the foliage of the sycamore tree by my window and was gone.

3 - Left Forearm: Ronnie Corbett's head on the body of a dancing pig.

This is a tattoo which depicts the head of Ronnie Corbett atop the body of a dancing pig. Previously, it was simply the headless, jigging torso of a pig but my then wife insisted this was 'disturbing'. As she had an irrational fear of Ronnie Corbett, I got my revenge by having his grinning face inked in. Hilarious! Later it transpired that her fear was, in fact, not irrational at all as Ronnies Corbett, Barker, Wood and O'Sullivan had all made a number of unsuccessfully attempts on her life, some of which had involved both pork and dancing. She had told me all of this before. I had simply forgotten. We divorced shortly afterwards. At present her family haven't heard from her for six months and are growing increasingly worried. Still, I settled her hash, right fellas! High five!

4 - Left Thigh: James May experiences an anguishing existential nightmare.

Of the many things Top Gear presenter James May and I have in common, our shared experience of claustrophobic dreams in which we're bombarded with a kinetic series of images of dread and personal horror is the one which makes feel most kinship to him. Many of you will not know this, but James May is perpetually plagued by an abstract, undefined horror which only finds form in his nightmares. He describes these nightmares in vivid detail on Top Gear. This passes most of the show's viewers by as they simply don't listen to what's being said, only do a reflex laugh when they hear the words 'homosexual' or sense from fellow presenter Jeremy Clarkson's tone and pitch that a joke is being made. This tattoo is to commemorate the man - the hidden, haunted man. May, you are my brother. Not all of May's dreams revolve around being trapped inside a vehicle which he's unable to control. Many involve Queen guitarist Brian May appearing to him, in a vast expanse of ice, silhouetted by a pure, silent light, saying: 'I am the May with the lushest hair. Mine is a large, luxuriant shrub of wonder. Each one of my hairs is an aesthetic triumph. Whereas yours, James. Yours is merely the dredges from a widow's plug-hole, parted and draped over your head like a pair of dehydrated seals. On your knees, James!'

5 - Right Lower Leg: 90's comedian Lee Hurst sleepily identifies himself.

There's actually quite a funny story behind this one.

6 - Left Knuckles: some stickmen.

My intention when getting this tattoo done was both simple and pleasant: when I shake my hand so fast it becomes a blur, this little fellow hops up and down on the spot, like in a flickbook. I'd hoped to use it to entertain children and the simple-minded. As it is, it doesn't work. The stick-figure simply becomes a small black blur upon a larger flesh-coloured blur, and I look like a fool, waggling my knuckles about like a mad chimp. The children laughed at me, the simple-minded spat their abundant phlegm upon me. Both of these I can handle: I've been laughed at by children before. And lord knows I've been spat upon by simpletons. However, things took a decidedly dark turn when I visited Chicago where, I learned, the tattoos indicates that I'm a member of an unpopular local Puerto Rican criminal gang and the 'shakey' gesture is one used to display immense disrespect to members of rival gangs. And that's what this blog-post is all about: could someone please arrange to have $4000 in 'Grants' (whatever that means), 800kg of cocaine, and 'some real nice checkered shirts', all wrapped in brown paper and dropped off in the bin, or 'garbage can' as they will insist on calling it, outside the pavilion in Humboldt Park. Then Vasquez Rivera says his boys will release me. I HAVE TO GO NOW.

Dawky And Hitch in 'The Audacity Of Pope' (Part 2)

2010-05-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

Last time on Dawky And Hitch.

Click to make it bigger.

Election Time: George Osborne's Local Campaign Pamphlet

2010-05-04T13:19:00.001-07:00

Click to make it big.

Election Time: I Ask The Questions

2010-05-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

Hello there. Which party has the best economic policies to respond to the deficit? What does ‘MP’ stand for? What’s that smell? Perhaps, like me, your answer to these hard-hitting political questions is ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! Stop asking me! Just fuck off and leave me alone!’ Adrift in a sea of conflicting poll-results and newspaper comment pieces I decided the best way to gauge the mood of the British electorate was to take to my local, the Pug and Shovel, to shoot the political breeze with some of the locals.

JOHN KEATS

Mr Keats. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions about current affairs?
Free country.
I’m trying to gauge the public mood in regards to the upcoming election. Which of the major parties’ manifesto pledges has the most realistically practicably economic policies in regards to the deficit?
Salad cream. Can you believe it?
I’m sorry?
Would you look at that. Do you see that?
What?
Behind the bar. Do you see that?
What? What am I looking at?
Behind the bar. You can’t see it?
Yeah. I mean, no. I’m not sure what I’m looking for.
The sauces, man. The sauces.
The what?
Look. Those little baskets they give you when you order food - do you see them? - they’re just under that dusty Campari bottle. Can you see them now?
Yes. I’m still not sure why they’re-
Now, normally you get ketchup and vinegar. Maybe mayonnaise. Yeah?
Okay.
Well, look at what they give you here: tartar sauce, salad cream, brown sauce, two types of mustard - two! It’s incredible.
Yes. I suppose it is.
Right. When I say so you create a distraction. I’ll nip behind the bar and grab what I can.
What? No, wait. I-
And get ready to run. Anything you want in particular?
No. Please, there’s no-
I’ll get you some horseradish.
Wait, what-
Okay start screaming now. Go on! Now! Go!
Aaaaaargh! Yaaaaargh! Aaaaaaargh!

ROBERT MUGABE
Robert Mugabe, it’s delightful to meet you. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?
Questions?
Yeah, it’s just for a blog I do.
Oh, a music blog?
No, not exactly.
Or is it one of those blogs? Y’know, the steamy ones?
No. I’m trying to get a sense of what the public’s view of the election is.
Know who you should do a blog about?
Who?
Michael Bolton. He’s wonderful. And so handsome!
What, the easy listening singer?
Sure! Although, y’know, there’s a great deal more depth to his work than the pejorative term ‘easy listening’ might imply.
Right.
He’s a wonderful human being!
He is?
Did you know, for instance, that Michael Bolton received the Congress Of Racial Equality’s Martin Luther King Award?
No, no I didn’t.
And, of course, his version of ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ won a Grammy.
I see.
As did ‘Go The Distance’, his song from the Disney film Hercules.
I see. So what you’re saying, basically, is that the media might be drawn to the current story regarding Gordon Brown referring to a member of the public as a bigot because the generally perception is that he’s two-faced and dismissive of the opinions of others? Than he’s an easy target but, beneath the surface, there’s a good deal more substance.
Let me put it another way. Did you know Michael Bolton’s ‘Steel Bars’ was voted ‘Make-Out Song Of 1991’ by the readers of Pop Time magazine?
‘Make-Out Song’?
It means a song which is good for folks to listen to whilst kissing each other. I think it’s an American phrase.
Right. No. Can’t say I knew that, no.
Like, full-on kissing. With tongues.
Right. So, I guess what you’re saying is that, although he might seem an unappealing choice of leader due to his being rough around the edges compared to David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the lack of a PR sheen should in itself be seen as an attractive factor by the electorate?
Let me put it another way. Do you find elderly African tyrants attractive?
Attractive?
Attractive.
Would you mind terribly not touching my leg?
I know the guy who owns this pub. He’s got a spare room upstairs.
Right… listen, I’m not entirely sure I foLLOW YOU! Please don’t touch me there, Mr Mugabe.
I’ll touch you wherever I damn well please.
I thought you were against homosexuality. You had your political predecessor tried and sentenced for buggery.
It’s different when I do it. Mugabuggery, I call it.
Right.
Most people laugh when I tell them that.
Oh, so - sorry, I’m terribly confused now - you’re joking?
No. Take your top off or I’ll have my thugs here beat you. As you can see they’ve both got rugby socks filled with rocks.
Right. Fine. There.
Edgar! Lock the door. Clarence! Here’s a quid. Get Steel Bars on that jukebox. Leave your rock-sock with me. I’ll be needing it.

ASLAN
Hello there. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions about the upcoming election?
What sort of questions?
Well, just how you feel the outcome might impact upon you.
They’re just out to rob you, aren’t they, those politicians? I was only saying as much to Reenie this morning.
Are you referring to the possibility of the Conservative’s industry spending reductions which will affect working class voters, or would you say this is the sort of behaviour we’ve come to expect from any of the major parties since Labour instated the controversial 50p tax rate.
I hate that Alistair Darling. Always got his snout in the gravy train, hasn’t he? He’s New Labour isn’t he?
That’s right I suppose, yes.
I hate New Labour, Viv. Reenie says she hates it too. She comes round twice a week to help with things around the house. Her husband’s diabetic.
I see.
Know that Tony Blair? I hate him too. He’s a warmonger. He mongers war. And he’s a bush’s poodle. He mongers war and then chews on it, like it’s lovely juicy bones. Then he hides it in the garden, Isn’t it terrible?
Yes, when you put it like that, I suppose it-
It’s not always in the garden though. They do that so they can find it later. Do you have a dog, Viv?
No, I don’t.
We don’t want our Prime Ministers eating bones do we, Viv? A dog shouldn’t really be allowed to run a country. Unless it’s a very clever dog.
If we just return to the subject of-
That sort of thing was expected when I was in charge of Narnia - eating bones and digging holes next in people‘s gardens. But I’m a ferocious lion. Look at my fangs, Viv. Are you looking? Do you see them?
Yes. Yes, I see them. I see them.
You can touch my mane too if you like.
I’m… it’s… I’m-
Tony Blair isn’t a lion.
I wouldn’t deny that. However, Gordon Brown is the current Prime Minister.
He’s mad, isn’t he, that Gordon Brown?
I’m not sure that’s strictly-
Know why he’s mad, Viv? It’s all the political correctness gone mad. It’s made him mad. He’s gone mental. It’s no surprise that all he does is sit in a kennel in Downing Street eating bones.
Well now, that’s-
My brother-in-law’s cousin, Barry, he says he’d make a better Prime Minister. He runs the bingo-nights at the Rifle Regiment clubhouse in the residential park. And a smashing job he does of it too. He knows all the calls - ‘unlucky for some - 13’, ‘all on its own - 1’, ‘four fat geese - 3’ - so I’ve no cause to doubt him.
Yes, but-
He met Lulu once. Got her to sign his stomach with one of those marker pens. He got it tattooed on the very next day.
So anyway-
He says he’d take all the foreigners and all the paedophiles and lock them in camps.
Right.
Not the poofs and trannies though.
No.
They should all just be shot in their downstairs departments.
Aslan, thank you.

A LEGO ABRAHAM LINCOLN WITH HIS LEGS ON BACKWARDS
You’re a Lego Abraham Lincoln with his legs on backwards.
Yes, that’s right.
Would you think it’s fair to say that on certain policies the Liberal Democrats remain vague in regards to matters of implementation?
No. No, I don’t think so. Not exactly.
Oh. Okay.
Setting policy in the middle of an economic downturn isn’t an easy job. Vagueness becomes a necessary tool for campaigning. Making overly specific costing pledges for an uncertain future is bound to result in disappointment.
Right. Well, how would you say Nick Clegg compares with Gordon Brown and David Cameron?
I don’t think making a comparison between leaders is ever particularly useful. Wildly disparate leadership styles can be equally as valid as one another. And they can often yield the same results. Also, the dynamics of power are in a state of constant flux within any given party, so-
Right. Can I stop you there?
Is there a problem?
To be honest I’d hoped you’d say some more amusing things than this.
More amusing?
Yes. When I thought you up I thought you’d be a bit funnier.
I’m not totally sure I follow you.
It’s just that as a comedy invention you seemed very promising - a Lego Abraham Lincoln with his legs on backwards - that sounds like something which promises at least a few laughs.
So that’s the sole reason you created me? You don’t actually care about my views on the NHS or defence budget cuts?
Not really. Not unless they’re jokes, to be honest. But you’ve turned out to be really sensible. It’s boring.
You can’t really hold me responsible for that. You’re the one who created me. I’m your creation. Anything I say is your responsibility.
Well, when I came up with you I thought you’d give me more mileage.
What kind of comedy creation is that anyway? A Lego Lincoln with backwards legs?
What’s wrong with that?
Well it sounds sort of funny I guess. The idea that you’d interview such a thing. But that’s all. I don’t know why you thought I’d automatically have anything funny to say.
Okay.
If anything you shot your load on that one. Anything I was going to say was going to be a disappointment compared to ‘Lego Lincoln With His Legs On Backwards’.
Okay, okay. You could make more of an effort. That’s all I’m saying.
That’s not my fault. I’m you, so it’s your fault.
Okay! Jesus.
And now you’re trying some kind of half-arsed post-modern deconstruction of this notion of me being you, just to cover for your failings.
I am not.
Yes you are. That’s exactly what you’re doing. You can’t hide things from me. I’m you. If you keep going on, I’ll tell all your readers everything. About your ‘wank hat’, about how a certain someone ran that tramp over last year and hid him on a traffic island among some shrubs and…
That’s enough.
…and about The Room.
Don’t tell them about the room. Please.
I don’t even think my legs are on backwards in that picture.
Listen, it’s hard enough to find a half-decent picture of Lego Lincoln. One with the legs on backwards just doesn‘t exist. Google it if you don’t believe me. I didn’t think anyone would notice, really. But now you’ve pointed it out, Einstein.
You’re the one who pointed it out, remember. Being, as you are, me.
Don’t try to be clever. You just look like a dick.
You’re the one trying to be clever.
Hey, I don’t need a lecture from my own poorly defined blog-character.
It would appear that’s exactly what you need.
Just shut up, alright?
Don’t get uppity with me. You’re the one who’s sitting typing this whole thing out. You complete freak.
I don’t need this.
Yeah? Well, I - and I’m you, remember - beg to differ. That’s why you’re still writing all of this down.
Oh, God! This is like the end of The Prisoner. My own arch-nemesis turns out to be myself. And I’m a knob.
Don’t pretend you had any idea what was going on in the last episode of the Prisoner. I know you didn’t.
Fine! It’s like, I dunno, Dostoevsky’s The Double.
You’ve not read that, pin-dick.
That’s it. This interview is over.

Dawky And Hitch in 'The Audacity Of Pope' (Part 1)

2010-04-17T08:48:00.001-07:00

(click to make it bigger)

Thanks to Ed for scanning this in. And the people at Canon for designing and building the scanner.

Helen And Ben

2010-04-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

Today I bought some books from Oxfam:

Map Of Heaven

2010-03-10T13:43:00.001-08:00

Here's a map. Is it too small? Well then, click to make it bigger. OBVIOUSLY.

BBC3 Content Generator

2010-03-06T12:56:00.001-08:00

Look! I've made a Content Generator for the BBC's digital channel BBC3:

Simply pick an adjective from the first column, then couple it with one of the nouns from the second column, repeat over the course of a year or so and PRESTO! You've got yourself a licence fee-funded digital station. Well done.

Transcript: Part One

2010-02-22T15:06:00.000-08:00

Lytham St. Annes Gold Radio - 102.6fm, 96.3am and local digital networks.

Time: 01:03am

Hello, good evening and welcome to Music Through The Niiiight!

We just heard new kid on the block Moby there, asking ‘Why Does My Heart Feel So Sad?’ I don’t know, Moby. But fear not - in a moment, we’ll be taking a trip through some lovely fields of gold with that sleeveless Celt-hobbit of the Tyne, Sting. But, before we get to that, let me just say a quick word about why I’m here. Why am I here? Ach, don’t ask me! The only person who has any idea of what’s going on, who knows how I ended up here, who knows more than he lets on as well as, I suspect, having a hand - perhaps even more than that - in the whole bunch of events which have guided me here, is that wee brass pillbox-fella, that chubby little life-bollard, that stumpy man-caddy who always has a plan handy. I’m talking, of course, about Mr Chips.

But, wait. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. Perhaps you don’t who Mr Chips is. You might not have heard of me even but, unless you’ve somehow managed to successfully avoid the headlines of various tabloids and reports on ITV news, I think that’s less likely. Anyway, my name, as I’m fairly sure you’re aware, is Roy Walker. You may remember me from the popular and - I like to think - nationally-treasured gameshow Catchphrase. That’s riiiiight! And, as I’m sure none of you will find it too difficult to recall the fact that I was the host, the frontman, the star if you will, and not Mr Chips who, in truth, was merely my sidekick: on a good day he was a mildly amusing sideshow, on a bad day (and there was a Birth Of A Nation of bad days) he was a comedic dog-lump, a dead weight, forged in a dour-smithery from leaden anti-entertainment, which I was then forced to drag through a twenty-five minute struggle with primetime banality.

For those few uninitiated among you, the show was based around certain phrases, sayings and proverbs which were then literally animated on a large screen for the contestants to try to decipher. For example, the phrase ‘rock-star’ would be represented by a brief cartoon in which a star shape is established to be made from rock. The phrase ‘at death’s door’ would become a man knocking at a door which was then opened by a crude approximation of the Grim Reaper. The phrase ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ would feature a bag from which a bag-imprisoned cat is somehow ‘let out’. The phrase ‘dancing cheek to cheek’ would be - well, yeah, you get the idea. And it was Mr Chips who was the star of these proverbial dumbshows that were displayed on a giant television at the side of my hosting-podium. If you don’t know what he looks like, the best description I can think of is that of a post-box (the American kind, a ‘mail-box’) which has been inexplicably painted gold-yellow, had a set of metal-tube arms and legs fastened to it, and, for reasons I never could quite fathom, has a large red handkerchief tied cub-scout-fashion round where his neck would be if he had one. From above this handkerchief there peeked out an enormous pair of cartoon-character eyes and the chubby cheeks of an equally cartoon-character-ish smile. He could walk, he could wave, he could do a few other things. But, believe me, that’s as far as his talents stretched.

Ach, don’t think I’m bitter. On the contrary, I’d be the first to concede that, behind the scenes, so to speak, the balance of our personal relationship was tilted firmly in his favour. He was ‘the boss’. And I didn’t mind that. Not really. That was dandy with me. Just so long as you keep in mind that, in a sense - a very real sense, mind - I was responsible for him. By ‘responsible’ I don’t mean I let him sleep in my house, eat my food and spend the pocket-money I gave him (all of which I did let him do, by the way). What I mean is that, much like the way in which the monster was fatefully dependent on his despised creator Dr Frankenstein, Mr Chips’ very existence relied on mine. Some deep stuff, eh?

As for our relationship on the show? Well, yeah, perhaps it is true: I’m a tad resentful about how Mr Chips claimed to remember things. But I remember things the way they really happened. And obviously I owe where I am today to Catchphrase. I wouldn’t be who I am without it. I wouldn’t be here, talking to you now, y‘know! But regarding the later era of the show, the last few episodes of what turned out to be the last series hosted by me, the period when the dark motives of Mr Chips, who I’d taken to be a stronger man, were finally revealed, causing all the things I’d taken to be fixed, true and certain to come unstuck - these are the episodes I’d prefer to forget.

Ach, I say I thought he was a stronger man than he turned out to be but maybe that’s a touch unfair. When I first met him - or, I should say, when I first realised he was a real person - it seemed clear to me that he was a strong, resilient figure. This was a couple of months before I left Catchphrase. I remember I was in my dressing room at the time and, for some reason, I had the telephone receiver in my hand despite there being no-one on the other end. I also remember - and there’s no reason why I should remember this of all things - that I had sketched in the margin of my script-notes a doodle of a group of broken twigs, all broken, twisted and snapped backwards, yet none fully severed from the branch. And it was at this moment, whilst I was thinking about these twigs and the phone in my hand, that there was this slow knock at the door. By this time I’d taken to ignoring people when they knocked - it was always ‘we’re still waiting for you on stage blah’ or ‘so-and-so said she could smell alcohol on your blah.’ But no, when I looked up this time, there was Mr Chips. Ach, that sounds daft! But at the time it didn’t seem daft, or confusing, or frightening. Seeing the big tinny face of a fictional cartoon character fixed into a cheery smile, the bulbous body hovering like a miniature blimp by the closed door, his stick-thin limbs in a constant puppet-like drift-motion, it all seemed logical. It was even funny. Hysterically so, in fact. He was bigger than he looked on the Catchphrase screen, about my height. He manoeuvred the series of pipes that made up one of his arms into a slow wave, the hinges creaking and the stiff metallic mit he used as a hand squeaking back and forth, all a couple of feet in front of me. I just started laughing. I couldn’t see any way in which he could alter the manically delighted expression on his face. It was fixed, cast - he smiled and peered wisely out from behind his smile and I doubled over. Eventually, I fell to the floor, unable to move, my eyes weeping like a pair of tickled lady-slots. It was then, through that blurred, shuddering vision, that I thought how strong he looked, and wise too, appearing gigantic from my floor-low point of view.

When I’d regained myself he drifted away from the door and dropped into my dressing room chair, the heavy barrel of his body causing the cushioning to bounce with the impact. I stifled a relapse titter. A small puff of light glowed beneath his face, lighting up the large lidless eyes and the stubby nose knuckled in the centre of his face, and throwing shadows into the large apple-cheeks that stretched an overbiting slit of a smile over the top of his red neckerchief. With one mit he lowered the front of the cloth and with the other inserted a pipe. He lit it with a long safety match. I heard him take a deep sigh as he shook out the match and let it fall to the floor. When he spoke he didn’t move his mouth or indeed any other part of his face, except for those dark ink-blot pupils in the centre of his bright paper-white eyes which scanned the dressing-room, eventually resting on me.

‘Ach, you’ve had problem or two, Roy,’ the disembodied voice was a loud - a white-noise sound filling the room. ‘I’ve come to give you a hand, fella.’

Obviously, I had no idea what he was talking about. It made no sense. But at least it stifled my lingering giggles. To be perfectly honest with you, I think it was Mr Chips who was having some problems of his own. He sighed theatrically again and turned so I could see his profile, with the curve of a pipe protruding, set against the mirror. He told me he thought it would be helpful for us to be friends for a while and I, seeing not a whole lot wrong with that, offered no protest…

Ach, sorry folks. Here’s me jabbering on like some daft aphid. You didn’t tune in to hear my life story. Patricia, my producer, is making some slightly drastic hand-signals in my general direction… what? What is that, Patricia? Bird? A bee? There’s a bee in the studio…? There’s a bee doing a… oh, sting! Sting. Of course, yes. So here’s wealthy romp-athon champion Sting with his ‘Fields of Gold’

[Song - 'Fields Of Gold' by Sting]

Lovely stuff. ‘Fields of Gold’ there by Sting. And we’ll be continuing with the ‘gold’ theme with Katrina and the Waves in just a second. But just to pick up from where I left off - sorry, I know I have a habit of yakking on - but just to pick up… where was I? Oh, that’s right. We developed this routine, me and Mr Chips. Every morning he would appear in my apartment at the foot of my bed, the pale morning light forming this bizarre aureole around the tub of his silhouetted figure. I’d hear his voice say something like: ‘Come on, Roy. It’s time to get up.’ Then I’d writhe slowly among the sheets, begging for a few minutes more, only to receive the exact same instruction in the exact same tone of voice: ‘Come on, Roy. It’s time to get up.’ Then there’d be this faint flash of light against the penumbra of his body which meant he was lighting his pipe which in turn meant it really was time to get up - no messing about now. I’d dress and wash, and then we’d head off to film Catchphrase.

In the dressing room, both in the mornings before the day’s filming commenced, and in the evenings after it had all wrapped up, Mr Chips would sit in his usual chair by the mirror and read the paper, explaining scraps of news here and there. Later, when everything was done and dusted we’d go back to my place, have some tea and then after a night of sharing a bottle of two of Lame Farmhand whiskey (the majority of which would disappear in Mr Chips’s robust frame) and watching Topless Darts or Midget Weather Forecaston Live TV, I’d go to bed, leaving Mr Chips smiling on the sofa, ready to appear at the foot of my bed and wake me again the next morning. I often wondered what he did at nights. How he slept, for instance, if he did at all. Did he dream? All I know is that he spent the nights, asleep or awake, in the front room with the telly on full volume and the lights up bright. I kept my bedroom door open and, from my bed, I could just see, over the top of the sofa-back, the smooth tip his head. But, whether he slept or not, I couldn’t tell you.

One night, I remember, I had an awful nightmare. The exact details are hazy, all I remember is that it ended with myself sinking in stream of black, sludgy catarrh which slowly carried me into this confused viscera of dark tunnels. I moved beneath vast, green gardens on which I could hear what I thought to be children playing. Then things got really weird - it all got a bit like that trippy bit in Easy Rider. At one point a giant rabbit was pinning my shoulders to the ground with his knees and thwacking me in the face with his colossal erection. I woke up almost screaming and, instantly, Mr Chips was there, his body filling the doorframe. He told me he was going to buy one of the big bottles of Distraught Aunt Meg Gin and a pouch of Sailor’s Crotchpit tobacco (his favourites) from the all-night garage and did I want anything? I said no and he turned to leave, craning back his whole, jointless body to say: ‘It’s alright, Roy. Go back to sleep.’ Then he left. I heard the clatter of his footsteps along the pavement outside and I fell back to sleep.

Anyway, it around this time that we were given this completely unscheduled break from the show at some point early in the winter. That was when things began to go all wrong for us. Especially Mr Chips - not being able to work obviously frustrated him. He was, after all, a consummate artist. When we found out that there was going to be a fortnight off filming we went back to my apartment as usual and I spent the evening watching Mr Chips become increasingly drunk until he was on the point of violent incomprehensibility. The dark holes in the centre of his enormous eyes swivelled around inside his head in synch with a long, incoherent murmur that issued from the slot of his mouth. A boozy, fulvous trickle congealed down his face and along the rim of his neckerchief. I think he said something about the Wetherspoon’s bar-staff and the panda population being in collusion against him. To be frank with you, I was concerned. I’d never seen Mr Chips like this. Sure, he drank, and enjoyed getting tanked. But this was off the Richter scale. He lay across the sofa, still gurgling and moving his arms and legs like a wee turtle trying to claw its way out from under the weight of the alcohol.

Gradually, his limbs and his burbling all drooped into stillness and his eyes fixed ahead of him as though he’d died. I wondered if he perhaps had died, perhaps from some sort of sudden shock of alcohol into whatever circuits and gears operated him. But it was late. I decided he was sleeping and that I should go to bed too. However as soon as I clasped my hands onto my knees to lift myself, he began to speak. He told me had a wife. She’d left him for another man, that’s why he’d come into my dressing room all those weeks ago. It was him, and not me, that need a friend, or - as he stoically phrased it - a place to stay.

I’d never thought of Mr Chips as the marrying kind. Although, admittedly, I hadn’t really thought of him as having any kind of life beyond the boundaries of the day-to-day existence we shared. Indeed, I don’t see, from a physio-technical point of view, how he’d managed to have any kind of intimate relationship with a woman. Nonetheless, he told me, since leaving his wife he’d made his way through a string of meaningless one night stands, conducted in the toilets of various local pubs, the backs of petrol stations and even - and I wouldn’t take what he said as gospel - a graveyard which was in the process of industrial renovation. In a sense, I wanted him to go into greater detail about these meaningless affairs. They’re the sort of thing I’ve always found fascinating and, if I’m being honest, they’re the sort of thing I’ve always found admirable in a chap, if the chap’s got the courage to go through with the whole thing.

But it was his wife he wanted to talk about. And talk about her he certainly did. Unsurprisingly, her name was Mrs Chips. I couldn’t tell you whether Mrs Chips was a ‘real’ woman, in the sense as you’d probably understand it, or whether she’s simply a female version of Mr Chips, like the pathetic drag-act he was occasionally called upon to perform on Catchphrase which involved nothing more imaginative than an addition of long eyelashes, a thick exaggeration of bright lipstick and a large red bow taped to the top of his forehead. However, from the way in which he drunkenly extemporized on the subject of her delicate poise, the exquisite subtleties of her figure, the overwhelming grace of her demeanour, the aching artistry which had clearly gone into the construction of her face - in short, the perfection of beauty - I think it’s safe to say he was detailing more than a physical summary of an identical dustbin-lady.

Anyway, it appeared she’d left Mr Chips. Workaholic artisan that he was, he’d grown too wedded to his job and a younger man - Jamie, an editing-room minion on Junior Stars In Their Eyes who rode to work on a skateboard - had stepped in, found his advances reciprocated and invited her to move into his flat above his parents’ garage. He went surfing in his spare time apparently, this Jamie, and had taken Mrs Chips to the beach. That was all she wanted - she’d always wanted to see the beach and the sea, and he, Mr Chips, had never taken her. Simple as that. He imagined them both together, having passionate, perfume-ad sex on the wet sand, waves exploding pyrotechnically against the rocks in the distance as they both climaxed simultaneously. He reclined heavily into the seat, his wide eyes looking blearily up at the un-shaded light-fixture, the smile stamped into his face looking heavier than ever. He began a long and confused elegy on their relationship: how they’d met at some sort of college - she’d been an art student and, if I understood him correctly, he’d been some kind of amateur stand-up with a promising future in professional sports. From what I could decipher from his gin-riddled blatherings their time together had been quiet and, to be perfectly honest, a bit dull sounding: evenings watching television together, ready-cooked oven meals, visits to their neighbour’s for the weekly 'Whist and Gammon’ night. Quietly, he blamed himself for this depressing, muted quality which flavoured their marriage, his head slipping backwards and his speech simmering into a more soft and velarsome gurgling till it finally reduced to a quiet, babyish snore. I didn’t know…

Ah, Jesus! Don’t know if you can hear that, listeners, but there’s a wee window between myself and Patricia, my producer, and she’s banging like Billyo on it at the moment. Scared the living bejesus out of me, it did. Women! Guess I’d better play you another song the, folks. So, as promised, here’s Katrina and her wonderful Waves with ‘Walking On Sunshine’.

[Song - 'Walking On Sunhine' by Katrina And The Waves]

[To be continued…]

Colla-blog-ration.

2010-01-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

Hello there.

This post is to let you know that there is a new blog, Your Call Is Very Important To Us, which I am writing with my good friend Martin Higgins.

That's all. Good evening.

The Smurfs: A Warning From History

2010-01-07T17:02:00.000-08:00

The following is taken from an essay I was recently lucky enough to have published in Easy Blood-Purists, Raging Ethno-Fascists: The Academic Journal Of Racially Questionable Cinema And Dubiously Portrayed Foreignness In Television. It will form part of the introduction of my forthcoming PhD thesis.

The narrative that is the history of early animated children’s cinema and television is one populated with ghosts. The majority of those films and shows which reach release tend to be entirely forgotten. This forgetting happens for a number of reasons: original reels were frequently destroyed once a film had had its run; television broadcast tapes were routinely wiped to be re-used; often the ‘lost’ TV show or film in question can often be so formulaic and uninteresting, and the animation used so crude and ugly, as to fall outside the field of interest of even the most ardent pop-culture archivist; or, most commonly of all, what Professor Lowell Thomas calls ‘the casual yet mind-bummingly poisonous racism’1 which pervades these childlike cartoons makes for an embarrassing cultural ancestry.

The list of cartoons which have perpetuate a message of overt or implied racism is seemingly endless: The Adventures Of Steamboat Toby The Racially Pure Sausage; Aryan Claus: Viking Santa; Felix The Cat Meets The Evil Chinaman; Mickey And Minnie’s Flaming Cross Antics; Plantation Capers (a cartoon series about the adventures of an idiotically cheery yet savage slave and his more learned fiddle-playing dormouse friend, the setting of which - a landowner’s cotton field - so restricted the scope of the pair’s ‘adventures’ that all twenty-four episodes are utterly indistinguishable from one another); famously, in his earliest appearances, Porky Pig was not merely a anthropomorphic pig who danced around in a dinner jacket and stuttered amusingly but also one who ran a successful slave-trade enterprise through a regime of casually observed brutality: he carried a blunderbuss with him at all times, off-screen acts perpetrated against unspecified female slaves were heavily hinted at, and his catchphrase was ‘Guh-guh-guh-give him forty strokes with the lash!’ The learned Professor Thomas is clear as to why the origins of these often much-loved characters are so rarely recalled: ‘The first time I watched Bugs Bunny in ‘Lynching Larks’, my eyes literally cried. They cried blood, soil, oil, urine, tears but mostly they cried shame: no-one wants to be reminded that the things they celebrate, a cornerstone of their popular culture no less, have their roots in something so boke-inducingly unpalatable. Seriously, it’s like trying to swallow a live slug or something.’2

Among academics, however, the most notorious example of an animation rife with outright bigotry is none other than The Smurfs. Almost all of us now probably think of the Smurfs in their more modern incarnation: a woodland family of kind and friendly blue-skinned creatures whose adventures in and around their community instil the virtues of cooperation and politeness in their 1980’s child-audience. Prior to this, however, they featured in a black and white comic strip in a weekly Belgium newspaper. And before this ‘The Smurfs’ were the subject of a number of pre-talkie era animation features in which, rather than cutesy, gnome-like creatures, they were in fact a vicious band of vampire Klansmen.

The pictures themselves - the brainchild of Kurt C Montgomery, the then elderly head of the powerful Hollywood branch of the KKK (which listed notables such as producer Douglass C Crotchbottom and media tycoon Buckshaw C Bifkin in its ranks) - were an attempt to use the increasingly popular medium of animation to promote its message of white supremacy in as acceptable a way possible. The addition of a vampire context is unusual and no doubt stems from the popularity of screen adaptations of Dracula. However, watching The Smurfs films, it’s clear the producers brought only a sketchy knowledge of Bram Stoker’s creation’s popularity and had almost certainly never read the novel or watched any of the Dracula films: rather than representing vampirism as the traditionally spectral, sophisticated phenomena we’re accustomed to, it shows it as mindless, animal violence. As Otis Bunchlock points out: ‘every single Smurfs film features a horrifyingly ‘blood orgy’ scene, each so protracted and deft in its animation they almost seem to hint at a hidden knowledge of surrealism.’3

Although there remains a clear line between the original Smurfs and the ones we now call our own, the differences are marked: rather than the uniform blue skin and white caps we’ve grown accustomed to, the original Smurfs all wore identical white robes and pointed hoods with swastikas and Klan crosses emblazoned on them, . KKK cinema archivist (and, as I’m legally required to refer to her as, ‘totally proven non-racist’) Grendel Himmler hits on something when she says: ‘The fact that it was impossible to tell any of the characters apart - save for when they yanked their hoods back to feast on the blood of their screaming prey, revealing hideously swollen blue faces - was probably part of the reason the original animated series never made it past the five ‘episode’ mark.’4

The list of major characters, many of whom bear the same names as their latter counterparts, is as follows:

Papa Smurf: rather than being the genial paterfamilias of the Smurfs, Papa Smurf is instead an ancient and stern-browed wizard who, on occasion, appears able to call up on an unspecified Viking deity to control the weather, something he uses to persecute neighbouring minority groups and, on one occasion, in what we would nowadays term an act of ‘pissing about’, to impress a female Smurf at a beer hall dance.

Young Smurf: is shown as enjoying the traditional pursuits of an everyday Klan youth: early morning military callisthenics, saluting his elders, drunkenly tormenting the weaker members of his social group, and spitting at himself in the mirror whilst crying late at night.

Smurfette: is shown as a fecund paragon of womanhood, presiding in full Klan-wear over an implausibly enormous brood of muscular babies, her vast bust the only thing which distinguishes her from the rest of the Smurf family.

Gargamel: rather than the villainous wizard he became in the later Smurfs, Gargamel is instead an ancient and enchanted oak tree which alerts the Smurfs to the presence of nearby black people by secreting blood whenever they’re come within a certain radius. The Smurfs greedily drink of this blood which in turn, it would appear, then furnishes them with their powers to sail silently though the night skies.

Smurfberries - instead of being delicious sarsaparilla fruits so coveted by the Smurf family, ‘smurfberries’ were originally crudely stitched flesh-sacs filled with reserves of drained-off blood

The five episodes which made up the series of films is as follows:

Where The Smurf Things Are- Young Smurf goes astray, encounters danger, returns to the village. To celebrate they kill a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.

A Wolf In Smurf’s Clothing - A wolf emerges from a neighbouring forest and threatens the community’s livestock. After rallying together, they see the wolf off and celebrate by killing a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.

A Lesson Smurfed - Young Smurf cheats during a spelling test. After lying to cover it up he is consumed by guilt and eventually confesses everything to Papa Smurf who, satisfied a lesson has been learned (or ‘smurfed’), forgives him. They celebrate by killing a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.

Sporting Smurfs - Young Smurf steals a football from a friend, Papa Smurf finds out and chastises both he and his friend, teaching them the value of sharing. They then kill a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.

Smurf Surprise! - The Smurfs drift through the quiet sky early on Christmas morning, eventually descending on a small gospel gathering by the neighbouring cottonfields and massacre those gathered. They then celebrate their successful goring by killing the sole surviving slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.

Without fail, at a different point in each of these episodes the producers cut in the final scenes from The Birth Of A Nation.

Although the pictures were only a moderate commercial success, an interesting coda is a marketing agreement with cereal empire Kellogs which came whilst the films were being screened: Smurfs branded groceries which came to dominate the US breakfast market for a brief period. The ghoulishly undead faces of the Smurfs were replaced with the friendlier, more child-friendly cartoons we’ve now become so familiar with. Although the Smurfs were eventually dropped by Kelloggs when organised racism fell out of public favour, the characters themselves remained popular enough to be made into the weekly cartoon series for the Belgian public we now think of as being the originator of The Smurfs.

Such brutal bigotry never again permeated animation to such an unashamedly overt degree, although its effects were still being felt well into the 1970s: in the first few episodes of The Flintstones, for instance, Fred is pitted against a humanoid beatnik tomato called Jerry - a grotesque amalgam of all the stereotypical black, beatnik and left-wing nightmare fantasies of the right; in the now lost pilot episode of Scooby Doo the character of Shaggy, rather than the now iconic cowardly hippie, was depicted as a communist vegetarian who had infiltrated the mystery solving gang and made constant attempts at ridding them of their freedom. A more bizarre example is one of the later episodes of The Jetsons in which George Jetson finds a young Vietnamese refugee attempting to squat in his house and is forced to try to get rid of him in time for his boss, Mr Spaceley, coming for dinner: the final scene in which a large silver serving lid is pulled away to reveal the young Vietnamese boy, roasted with an apple wedged into his mouth, at which the family laugh for the remaining nine minutes of the cartoon until the credit sequence starts, is one of the most unintentionally chilling scenes a Cartoon Network audience is likely to witness.

Some original Smurfs branded cereal packaging from the 1920's. Supplied by SundaeG1rl.

1 Thomas, Lowell - Citizen Klan: White Supremacy In Animation: From Snow White Power To Josie And The Pussyvolk (University of Nowherechester Press) p.175.
2 Ibid. p. 382.
3 Bunchlock, Otis - Screen Heil!: A Seemingly Pointless And Overly In-Depth Study On Racial Violence In Early Cinema (2002, Academic-To-The-Max Press)
4 Himmler, Grendel - Our Incredibly Glorious Ancestors: An Impartial History Of The Heroic Ku Klux Klan (1994, Cultural History Excuses Press), p. 83.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Flan

2009-11-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

People often say: 'We've read your blog. We know your shtick. We're familiar with your so-called 'jokes'. We've seen you making unpleasant stuff up about people - people who aren't able to defend themselves due to their being dead or you blog not being famous enough to garner any notoriety newsworthy enough for them to hear about your tawdry lies. We know all about that. But,' they say, 'what about you? What about the real Richard Vivmeister, or whatever the hell your name is?'

Well, folks, in response I say this: 'Pipe that stupid racket down, because I now present to you some snapshots of my life. These pictures come to you, treasured reader, exclusively from the central photographic section of my forthcoming autobiography - "I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car Of My Life" - in the hope that it might shed some light onto the fascinating, unyielding tangle of enigma that is... ME.'

My grandfather, Ebeneezer Vivmeister, made his fortune during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as many others did, in the world of street urchins. At its peak, his factory employed three thousand urchins. He hit on the novel idea that the bodies of those urchins in his keep who died - either of typhoid, overexhaustion or one of the dozens of severe thrashings they received daily - could be used as a source of nourishment for those urchins who had the reserves of strength and stoicism to remain alive. Thus his factory system - a staff of urchins whose sole occupation was using giant pieces of machinery to churn up their recently deceased brothers and sisters into a servicably nutritious paté on which they would later feed - was a unique, self-fuelling empire. That was until 1904, when an epidemic of 'mad urchin disease' broke out. Within a year urchins were extinct.

I was small as a boy. So small, in fact, that I was regularly goaded into having my photograph taken whilst holding everyday items for scale comparison. Here I am holding a button and a daisy.

The Vivmeister family. That's me on the right. Alongside me are my three brothers: (l-r) Gimpflake, Dotor Spunkfluffer and Pooing Goose. Also, in the centre, is my sister Diane. Or, as was known before she had her name legally changed, Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits. Some say our unusual names were down to the off-kilter sense of humour of our father, also in this picture. But look at his face! He was nothing more than a twisted, sadistic midget whose idea of entertainment was to staple dogs and cats together and fling them over the walls of a nearby nunnery - just to hear their screams!

Ah, here's Sylvie, my first wife. We really did love one another, but the fact that she was conjoined at the arm to a small dog was too much for us to get used to. Seriously, all that yapping and scratching; the endless weeing; and have you ever tried to make love to a beautiful woman whilst a confused, writhing dog pants his meaty Winalot breath into your face and constantly soils himself? Probably not. Well I have - it's no picnic, let me tell you.

Here's me with my second wife, Anita. This marriage was even more short-lived than its predecessor. - in fact we broke up immediately after this photograph was taken. As it perhaps indicates, her obsession with all things Victoriana was simply too much for me to handle. After three marital months of avoiding eye-contact, singing evangelical anti-masturbation anthems every sundown and pretending that the concept of God was entirely feasible, the act of sitting completely still for six hours in a starched wool suit waiting for the Daguerreotype camera to burn this image into its development plate was the final proverbial straw. Reader, I booted her down the stairs! Proverbially speaking, of course.

This is Whazzo, my estranged elder brother. Despite excelling at calculus, Latin and brain-surgery at school, his bizarre facial lesions meant a glamorous career in the circus awaited. Ironically, he's now dead.

This is one of the few surviving publicity shots from 'The Popefuherphile', a short-lived sitcom which dared to imagine a world in which the endemic culture of pederastic sexual-abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is coquettishly sent up when none other than Adolf Hitler, played by myself, is accidentally appointed Pope. Of all the episodes we shot, my own personal favourite was 'A Visit From Adolf's Identical Twin Brother'. In this episode the Popefuhrerphile's brother comes to visit. But wait - there's more! The brother is Hitler's identical twin, and a hilariously hopeless human-wreckage of a drunk to boot! The twin brother was also played by me, a feat which required both the full range of my dramatic acumen and some fiendishly clever camera trickery when it came to the shower-room spit-roasting scenes. Inexplicably, the show was never given a second series.

During my middle to later years I suffered numerous intense religious visions, mostly of Christ. Despite being initially thrilled to get to meet one of the most iconoclastic celebrities in the world, my excitement swiftly dissipated when I discovered that, as you can probably see from this picture, Jesus turned out to be a bit boring a bit creepy. Rather than telling my what God's like or what kind of drinks they serve heaven or even if Hitler really did have one knacker, he just banged on and on: 'don't do this'; 'do do this'; 'people are sort of like lilies in a way, aren't they?'; 'the world will be engulfed by Satan's tormenting hellscapes at some date or other'. What a gas-sack! And his breath - yeesh! I eventually convinced him to leave me alone.

Here I am meeting the Queen. She was lovely. The more keen-eyed amongst you will no doubt have noticed that I'm disguised as a nice-looking young lady. A hilarious jape! Or so I thought - those with eyes which are keener still will note that the Her Majesty herself also looks like a bit of a wrong 'un. Is she in disguise too? No she is not! She sent a lookalike. That's some capital japery, ma'am! She continued to do the same for three dozen subsequent re-scheduled meetings. As did I. In fact, although we never did meet, our two lookalikes eventually found love with one another. A romantic ending to a tale which was given a somewhat sinister epilogue some months late when it emerged they were mother and daughter.

Shortly after meeting the lovely Queen, I died. This is where I'm currently buried. There was a gravestone - a massive, impressive-looking one, carved to look like an inconsolable angel - but, due to a paperwork mix-up, it got cremated and scattered at sea. I've no idea where this field is, but it's fine: I like it here.

In Cinemas Now

2009-11-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

Elliott Bullard: A Life In Seven Chips

2009-11-12T13:35:00.000-08:00

Gambling: the dizzying high of being ‘on a role’; the success-drawn floozies; the booze; the soul-harrowing misery that is crawling about on your hands and knees for 2ps to put into one of the 2p pusher-machines; the booze; the feeling that this time you really will 'turn over a new leaf' as you leave yet another dead hooker in a bin round the back of a motel. It’s undoubtedly a world of glamour.

And now is your chance to own a part of that glamour. Among historians of financial ruin, the name 'Elliott Bullard' is legendary. He is nothing less than Orson Welles of scraping together cash. Among his myriad anti-achievements he:

- Once sold a job-lot of ‘invisible bedsheets’ to a local orphanage.
- Once disguised himself as a ball in a roulette wheel and attempted to land on the number he’d placed a bet on.
- Once disguised himself as a racehorse, entered a race after betting on himself (slowed by chronic asthma and arteriosclerosis brought on by diabetes, he came in last).
- Twice succeeded in convincing provincial mobster One-Eyed Tony that a bucket filled with pebbles was a collection of ancient, priceless glass-eyes that once belonged to Atlantis's emperor One-Eye Caesar.
- Invented Scientology.
- cut off his own hand and sold it as a novelty ‘enchanted paw’ remote-control holder.
- Stole a packet of cocktail sausages and sold them to schoolchildren as ‘enchanted monkey thumbs’.
- Sold his own poo at a ‘celebrity poo auction’ as the poo of Jayne Mansfield
- Pretended to be an accomplished street-caricaturist whilst covertly taking a sneaky Polaroid of his subject which he’d then sell as a sketch.
- Had his name legally changed by deed pole to Peter Sutcliffe and his facial features altered to look like the 1970s strangulation-fan, so he could sue various national newspapers (all court proceedings were thrown out, one judge famously labelling Bullard 'the most pathetic being imaginable').
- Spent a full year travelling door to door claiming to be Roger Lloyd Pack - AKA ‘Trigger’ from the popular sitcom Only Fools and Horses - thrusting old receipts and bus-tickets with 'autographs' on them into the hands of whoever opened the door and demanding payment.
- Spent a full year hiring himself out as a ‘professional ghostbuster’ for Catholic exorcisms, which involved little more than dressing in a mismatched tracksuit, with a leaf blower strapped to his back and crying whilst begging for pennies.
- Tried to sell a tub of candy bracelets on eBay as ‘the Crown Jewels jr.’
- Attempted to pass off a tape recording of a malfunctioning fax machine with himself sneezing over the top as a bootlegged copy of an unreleased Karlheinz Stockhausen recording.
- Shaved a bear’s face and tried to pass it off to the British Zoological Council as a rare new breed of monkey.
- Took an Ikea wardrobe apart and attempted to sell it to the British Museum as original wooden fixtures salvaged from the Titanic, along with a pair of large cracked plant pots which he marketed as the 'the Titanic's cannons'.
- Did many, many more things.

We now present you with a unique opportunity to own a small part of this rich, miserable tale: seven betting chips, paid for by one of Bullard's unique, wretched moneymaking brainwaves and lost to a number of Las Vegas's casinos, each lovingly mounted onto a board of commemorative felt to pay tribute to one of the great innovators of failing at existence.

Don't miss out! Phone 0800 55 333 55 with your credit card details now!

Only £29.99!

You might want to click on this to see it better. Or you might not.

Proceeds go towards the Elliott Bullard Foundation whose main aim is to provide the remains of the late Mr Bullard with a servicable gravestone, although the Foundation's chairman is a strict Catholic so most of the money actually goes towards convincing Africans that condoms give them AIDS. Still, buy one. Go on. Please.

Appendix: Further Lies About George Crumb

2009-11-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

Hello, blog. In a previous post, I drew attention to 'Stop The Drabblington-On-Sea Flyover', a blog maintained by David Jessop in an attempt, as its name suggests, to prevent a flyover from being constructed in his home town but which had sadly degenerated into a series of brief and patently untrue allegations directed at Gordon Crumb, the Councillor overseeing the construction project. Since that post, I have noticed that Mr Jessop has signed up for an account on the microblogging site Twitter, which he plans to use as, in his own words: 'a platform to tell the world THE TRUTH about George Crumb, the pen-pushing pederast.'

Here are some of those 'TRUTHS':

George Crumb rounds up orphans, crucifies them in his back garden and then pelts them with crisps and pick ‘n’ mix.

George Crumb has a series of ties he wears on a rotational basis to show what objects he’s concealing in his anus for his erotic amusement: yellow means he carries a carrot; red means a small, silenced mobile phone he occasionally sends obscene, nonsensical text messages to; and blue means a beloved, rusting pizza cutter from his childhood.

George Crumb has built himself a hollowed-out snowman near St Arnold’s Primary School. This is so he can watch the children playing and tinker with himself whilst safely concealed within.

George Crumb’s garden also contains a large military cannon and a series of large mousetraps. He uses the traps to capture woodland creatures which he then loads into the cannon and fires point blank into a wall of his house.

At Christmas, instead of giving gifts George Crumb goes on a spree of stealing presents, food and clothing from local children.

At Christmas, instead of decorating a tree, George Crumb decorates a giant steel phallus.

At Christmas, instead of singing festive carols George Crumb wanks to dog-snuff.

A video clip for George Crumb’s local election campaign on YouTube shows him laughing as he vomits into a baby’s mouth.

George Crumb sleeps in a large, mattress-less bed alongside the stolen remains of Buster Merryfield.

George Crumb recently held a Council tea-party to raise funds for Barnardos at which he was photographed there offering round a selection of biscuits on a plate to those gathered. Look closely at the picture however, and it becomes clear he was, in fact, secretly dipping his cock into their scorching-hot tea.

Also, whilst relaxing at home, George Crumb wears a turd-monocle. Yes! A turd-monocle!

The lying paedophile Gordon Crumb

Pistol Face!

2009-10-22T14:20:00.001-07:00

Acceptance Speech

2009-10-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

Hello there, reader. As you may or may not be aware, this blog you're currently goggling at was recently shortlisted for the Manchester Blog Awards. Exciting, isn't it? I didn't win, obviously. Still, in the event of there being some kind of administrative error which resulted in my being declared the winner, I wrote an acceptance speech. This was read in my gibbering voice to room full of strangers at the award ceremony in a slightly truncated form. Here it is.

Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. I don’t know what to say. It gives me great pleasure to accept this award for having the best blog on the internet. Of all the people on the shortlist, I was definitely the one who I wanted to win the most. However, I feel I should take this opportunity to give some of the other nominated blogs - the ones which didn’t win - the kind of recognition they deserve.

One of my favourite blogs is Jane Rumbelow’s ‘Trick Or Tito’. In an online world awash with blogs written by new or expectant mothers documenting their child’s every gurgle, coo and successful bowel motion, ‘Trick Or Tito’ stands out: the mother in question firmly believes her child isn’t merely a baby with rudimentary motor skills and an as-yet undeveloped grasp of the concept of language as a means of communication, but, in fact, the reincarnation of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s post-war communist head of state. Her blog-posts lay out her reasons for suspecting this, giving numerous real-life examples as proof. Is the author’s young child really possessed by the spirit of a figure of middling importance in the history of communism? Or is the author merely suffering from a series of linked hallucinations brought on by chronic exhaustion? Who knows. Here are some of my favourite excerpts:

March 10th

‘Last night Charles cried throughout the night, like he has every other night for the past three weeks. Again I tried to ignore him. He’s old enough now, I thought, to learn that I can’t be constantly at his beck and call. By 2am I was crying, my head ploughed beneath my pillow, my mad fingernails clawing away at my mad face in a rage of madness. By 3am, I felt I’d reached a pitch of madness. I could get no madder. I listened to Toby crying. Was I beginning to pick out a pattern in his endless, mind-bending squeals: a few repeated sounds and here and there, like a language? Was this the Yugoslavian language? Do Yugoslavians communicate by means of screaming their language at one another? I don’t know - I’ve never been to Yugoslavia and cannot speak Yugoslavian. By 4am, I’d started to notice that there were subtle yet undeniable modulations in the tone and pitch of his screams as if to allude to some subtle additional meaning to what he was saying. Piece by piece, I felt I was beginning to get the gist of what he was shrieking about. By 5:30 I was proficiently fluent enough in Yugoslavian to follow what he was saying and sat, oddly calm, listening to him list his recommendations for an aggressive economic growth policy within the military. He softened his stance after I’d got up, bathed him and fed him.’

August 11th

‘Another sleepless night. I sat on the living room rug with Toby playing with some building blocks - the sort with coloured letters on them - and showed him how to spell ‘mum’. He tried to do as I showed him but, somehow, managed to instead spell out “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” despite there being neither enough floor-space to legibly replicate such a quotation, and there only being five letter-blocks.’

September 26th

‘Another sleepless night. In the afternoon I left Toby in the living room playing with his toys whilst I made a sandwich in the kitchen. When I returned he had set up what looked like a recreation of the Organ Zaštite Naroda trial of various former members of the collaborationist Ustasa administration, with Skunky the Skunk as Yugslav Catholic figurehead Aloysius Stepinac and Alf the duck as collaborationist statesman Draza Mihailovic. In a break from the accepted historical account they were each handed a crayon and sentenced to fight one another to the death .’

A brief mention must go to 'The Guarded Bard', a blog maintained by millionaire property tycoon Daniel Mayer who was taken prisoner by local gangsters earlier this year. As he waits for his wife to pay the ransom money, Mayer uses an iPhone he’s managed to keep hidden on his person not to alert the authorities to his location, but instead to post brief, evocative poems documenting his hostage experiences onto his blog. Poems such as ‘Death Awaits?’:

I’m handcuffed to a radiator,
So I’ll see you later.
Or will I?

Another genre of blog which is popular these days is the so-called ‘bad science’ variety. These are blogs which are dedicated to unmasking alternative medicine gurus, fraudulent medical quacks, anti-science holistic therapists and the like. One of the best examples of this type is a blog titled ‘Smash The Crystals! Smash Them! Go On! Do It!’ For this blog, maverick doctor and sceptical rationalist Professor Winston Sykes has assembled a team of junior medical researchers, dressed and made them up to look exactly like a horde of zombies and led them in an all-out horror-movie style assault on the home of Dr Angela Ford, a crystal healer, alternative nutritionalist and Professor Sykes’s unwitting arch-nemesis . Here are some samples of the progress report posts from his blog:

March 10th

‘Today we commenced the attack on Dr Ford’s house and, simultaneously, the attack on the unreason, irrationality and quackery which has encroached into the world of professional medical science. Whilst I crept round the back of her house and cut her phone and electricity cables, my team kicked her door down, waggling their painted-green arms about and noisily groaning the word ‘brains’. At the time she was busy cooking in the kitchen. She grabbed a large knife and immediately started slashing away wildly at the army of the undead. The fool! So immediately did she believe that a zombie apocalypse - a possibility so utterly implausible it literally makes me laugh: ha! - was underway, that I felt victory in the air. Sadly, Edgar, one of my students, got stabbed in the arm, severing a major artery. At the time of writing it remains unclear whether or not he’ll be able to use the arm ever again. However, this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of this experiment when I say it’s the most important experiment anyone’s ever done. Humanity hangs in the balance.’

March 16th

‘Success! My team of zombie-doctors have seen Dr Ford after nearly a full week of only hearing the sounds of her pitiful weeping and pleas for mercy from behind her barricaded-shut kitchen door. She emerged early this morning, again in tears, holding a handful of crystals in one of her shaky hands, a dreamweaver in the other and chanting ‘I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. Return to your earthy, soily graves’. Obviously, this mumbo-jumbo had no effect on my “zombies” and she fled up the stairs, locked herself in the bedroom and dragged all her furniture against the door. But not before kicking Kathy, another one of my assistants, down the stairs. She’s sustained spinal injuries preventing her both from continuing with my research and from communicating verbally ever again, but if she could I’m sure she’d say ‘You’re doing sterling work, Professor Sykes. I love you.’’

April 27th

‘Last night Dr Ford destroyed her staircase, filled her bath with tap water and is no doubt awaiting death. Despite this I still sometimes hear her reciting incantations, smell incense being burned, and listen to her thump about above me as she performs yoga poses. All my assistants have now either been hospitalised for indefinite periods or have abandoned me. Susan, the last remaining assistant, left yesterday. She called me ‘a drunken misogynist’. And so it falls to I alone to take this experiment to its conclusion. Hunched at the bottom of a staircase decimated by a woman whose mind I’m tinkering with, moaning occasionally, and touching up my child’s Halloween face-paint, I will prove she is mad.’

Another worth mentioning is local activism blog, ‘Stop The Drabblington-on-Sea Flyover’. Although this blog, maintained by amateur journalist David Jessop, used to be a shining example of an everyday citizens using online media for direct action in local politics - in this case to oppose the projected construction of a new flyover championed by local Councillor Gordon Crumb - recently it has dissolved from a series of posts outlaying complex and passionate arguments against the construction of the flyover to a seemingly unending string of bizarre and briefly worded outright lies about Councillor Crumb himself. Recent lies have included:

October 15th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small hole be built into one of the supporting pillars of the flyover so he can have sex with the brickwork whenever he likes.

October 16th: Gordon Crumb worships a bag of wool he once found which he calls ‘Satan’.

October 17th: Gordon Crumb runs a casino where kidnapped children are accepted as betting currency.

October 18th: Gordon Crumb has a small black patch tattooed onto his penis which spells out ‘Kill All Chinese People’ when he gets an erection.

October 19th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small underground room be built beneath the flyover in which he plans to keep a tramp as his unwilling pet locked in a box full of sick.

October 20th: Gordon Crumb spends his Saturdays collecting the turds of strangers in a small, rusty pot.

October 21st:Gordon Crumb spends his Sundays crouched in a ditch, poking strangers’ turds up his bottom.

A few brief mentions should also go to the following:
'Liver Lover’s Blog' - the online diary recording one man’s quest to eat the liver of every living creature on the earth, which was described by the Guardian’s media supplement as being ‘truly monstrous’.
'Diary of a Call Goat'
'Bites For Whites' - A racist cookery blog

And a final mention must go to the blog on the shortlist which I like the least.

'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Bitingly Satirical Spoof Blog' - the “comedy blog” which, rather than making any kind of attempt at wit or insight within its content, relies instead on meaningless surrealism, pseudo-intellectual references and needless scatological descriptions. Worse still, this is the sort of blog which attempts to excuse itself from its own overwhelming brain-numbing idiocy by repeatedly making references to itself in a pathetic bid to suggest a self-aware gloss of irony which is altogether lacking from the content itself. It also strives, wherever possible, to reference the fact that it references itself, as if this somehow elevates it above what is ultimately infantile repetition. If the author of such a blog were here, in front of you all, reading this, I’m sure he’d attempt to make a further reference - to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he had just referenced himself. And then, no doubt, there’d have to be yet another reference - this time to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced himself. You see? It’s passive aggressive, shit and childish. I’m glad it didn’t win.

Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. Thank you.

Baby Toby at 6 months

Coming Soon... Spooky Soup

2009-10-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

Spooky Soup
A Word Soup Halloween Special
The Continental, Preston
October 20th - 8:00pm

Oh, hello there. I trust you are well. Are you doing anything on the evening of October 20th? Is it important? I thought not. Instead, why not come to Preston's Continental and watch me 'read' at Spooky Soup, a special Halloween-themed edition of Word Soup? I'll be 'performing' something called 'Zombie, He Wrote', the title of which I owe to almost-complete-stranger Alexander Green and which I'm modestly referring to as 'a white-knuckle multimedia assault on your senses'. Also on the bill will be Big Finish Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman and horror-writing actual national treasure Ramsey Campbell.

As a way of saying sorry for having to those of you who attend for having to pay (£3) to sit through the experience of witnessing my hunched and puke-inducingly hideous form shake its way through a croaky-voiced reading of puerile jokes and a lot of awkward moments of silence whilst waiting for laughs that won't come, there will also be free - yes, free! - bookmarks. Each one individually handmade by me. Also, there may - may - be badges. No, I don't love you. It's all part of my community service. If you don't come, I'll come into your home and kill you.

Upcoming Events

2009-10-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

I live in a small-ish city. Until fairly recently it was classified as a town and many of the town-like trappings remain, especially culturally. In fact, a lot of people come up to me and say these words: ‘Hey, you. There’s nothing to do in this dump-hole - it’s a cultural poo-nook which fulfils its claim to be a city in only the most dismissively perfunctory sense when it comes to worthwhile events of an artistic or cultural bent. I hate it here. And I hate you.’

Well I say: shut your stupid face and use your tiny, racist eyes to look a bit harder. Here, for instance, is a list of upcoming goings-on for this month alone:

Counting Your Dickens - from October 12th onwards
Your chance to see an exact replica of Dickens’ birthplace. With a difference. Have you ever wondered what Dickens’ birthplace would have looked like if, instead of being a renowned and world-famous novelist from the nineteenth century, he’d been a supermarket checkout worker from the present-day whose home-life centres around hours-long lone Guitar Hero sessions, eating Morrisons Value brand Wotsits and struggling with child support payments? Of course you have. Well, here’s your chance to experience the actual, bonafide, genuine real thing. Literary! And don’t forget to stop off at the adjoining Gregg’s Official Dickens Gift Shop, where you can get your hands on 100% official Dickens pasties, Jarndyce and Jarndyce Sausage Rolls, and a can of Ye Olde Victorian Coca-Cola.

Entry - Adults: £5 Concessions: £5
Additional entry fee to Gregg’s Official Dickens Gift Shop - Adults: £5 Concessions: £5
Note: you MUST make a purchase before you will be permitted to exit Gregg’s Official Dickens Gift Shop. We have guards. And they have tasers.

Boyle Male - October 19th at the 8 Out Of Ten Cats Memorial Theatre
A Q&A Session with popular Glaswegian stand-up and ubiquitous television panel-shows panel-member Frankie Boyle in which the questions, which will be handed to audience members at the entrance, are all pointed towards allowing Frankie to launch into segments from his stand-up routines. These include: 'Comedy's predilection for pushing the boundaries of taste and acceptability is seen as both a socially destructive force and one which progressively benefits our cultural consciousness. With this in mind, do have you any jokes about Fern Brittan being fat?'; 'Stand-ups are frequently described as being hungry for the approval of strangers. With this in mind, could you do a high-pitched impression of the Queen telling Prince Philip off for something he's said?'; and 'Some people say comedians are driven by anger. With this in mind, have you anything to say about Heather Mills and always funny facts that she was once married to Paul McCartney and has only one leg?' The Q&A will be chaired by shadow chancellor George Osborne, who will shortly afterwards give a two-hour speech delineating precisely how the western economic system would collapse should Frankie Boyle die. Those gathered will then be invited to take a ride in ‘The Holocoaster’: a painfully slow rollercoaster which takes the passengers through a papier mache recreation of the city of London, mocked up to recreate the scenes of mass anguish and complete annihilation which would take place should Mr Boyle ever be allowed to pass away.

I Jihad The Time Of My Life - October 21st various venues
Experience the thrill of being among a crowd of angry, extreme-minded Muslims. Feel the irrational thrill of accusing soldiers, politicians and passers-by of being ‘butchers’ whilst simultaneously demanding their deaths by beheading as recompense. Experience white-knuckle levels of outrage that people who don’t share your belief system are seemingly able to contemplate questions about it in their minds without being divinely struck down. Hold a nice big sign. For this year's protest the outrage is directed at Muller yoghurts who have been unyieldingly unrepentant that their company name sounds almost exactly like the word ‘Mullah’ and is therefore unforgivably blasphemous. This comes hot on the heels of last year’s successful event in which anger was expressed at the late John Inman for insulting imams worldwide with his surname.

It's Political Correctness Gone Mad In A Handcart! - October 21st various venues
A companion gathering to the Jihad. Feel yet more thrills at being amid a crowd of people who have things to say that 'aren’t that racist, not really'. Hear middle-class people from small, insular towns in socio-economically well-off locations claim that, because they’ve heard the word ‘paki’ being used in a way they deemed non-offensive, those who have a problem with such language have ‘lost their minds’; marvel as housewives from slightly less well-off locations claim the fact that their much-cherished golliwogs have 'become racist' is against their 'indiginous rights' ; stare in awe as large groups of overweight bald white men take to the streets to defend their notions of 'Britishness': overweight bald white men's right to parade about in public, tanked up on cheap lager, directing their collective repressed sense of life-failure towards an imaginary oppressive alien populace by shouting ‘waaaay!’ for a few hours before going home to terrorise their families then spent the night crying in the shower.

Annual Miserable Billionaire Tries To Cheer Himself Up With Fireworks Festival - October 26th to be held in the South-South-West gardens of The Bundy Manor
A family favourite. As usual reclusive, twisted-with-anguish billionaire, Ethan Bundy, spends a small fortune to commemorate Mia, his long-dead love, with a lavish firework display whilst silently watching from behind he darkened windows of his crumbling mansion. Will there be fun? You betcha! Will there be sparklers? Of course! Will Mr Bundy, as he has the past seven years, grow tired of the spectacle after a couple of hours, emerge from his gloomy abode carrying a shotgun in each hand and fire drunkekly into the gathered crowds? Let’s hope not!

Times New Bowman - October 31st day-long event
That's right! The Annual Edith Bowman Festival is almost upon us once again! Join the locals as they gather at Edith Bowman park - which is off Edith Bowman Lane, just opposite the Edith Bowman International Airport - to celebrate and give thanks for the unceasing wonder that is Edit Bowman. As usual, the festivities will include a three-hundred-piece orchestra performing some of the songs she has recently introduced on Radio 1, with the vocals performed by a full male choir in Bowman's characteristically grating and monotone manner of speaking; the ever-popular Bland Comedic Observations Morris-Dancing Troup; and the performance by local schoolchildren of the traditional dance around the 'Bowman-Pole'. As ever, the festival will draw to close with the solemn ceremonial burning of a giant wicker effigy of Edit Bowman whilst everyone links arms around it and chants the traditional thanksgiving hymn 'My Humps', originally by Black Eyed Peas.

Hell Is Other People. Specifically, These People.

2009-09-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

A page found in an old demonology tome. Click to make it big.

A Word From Our Sponsors

2009-08-21T16:07:00.001-07:00

Click to get a better look at the ads...

Scunt Review: On Phil Spector And Charles Manson

2009-08-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

I've finally managed to do another review for Scunt, and you can read it here.

Films: The Movie (Deluxe Non-Eye-Raping Edition)

2009-08-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

Due to complaints from the handful of regular ITITYTWITC readers (hello, mum and Professor Snuggles, her cat), here's a more legible version of the previous post, with the final visual gag made all the more hilarious by being totally removed and instead explained in words...

End Credits

Brad Bradbrad……Guy Workaday
Mary Goodenwright…… Camomile Homespun
Rivalton Shatworthy…. Hugh ‘The Blackguard and Bounder’ Grant
Temptania D’Ample……Jizzella Rider
Chummy Crackwise…… James Corden

Ethic Rex ……Ahmed Wang-Jones
Professor Claw, Well-Known Cackling Tyrant Of ‘Insane Crab Mountain’…… Lazlo St. Croix
Insatiable Ghost of Horny David Crosby……Pablo Redbush
Foul-Mouthed Papier-Mache Winston Churchill……Philip Seymour-Hoffman
Clitoroid, The Clattering Robot Clitoris…… Cueball Fuerrega
Giant Evil Baby……Rusty Murnau
Crazed Withered Vagina…… Melanie Phillips
Lonely Clam……Mimsie de la Crudette
Pops Rocco, the Hideously Burned Clown…… Uncle Merle, the Hideously Burned Clown
Drunken Astronaut Firing Imaginary Tear-Gas Into Zoo Enclosures……Nikolai Holdall
Klaus, The Autistic Goatboy Trapped In A Karaoke Machine……Chester Eggwhite
Nurse Dragged Into Mosquito-Being Underworld By Possessed Klansman……Agnes Hendrix
Angry But Basically Decent Breakdancing Rapist……Noddy Dawkins
Jive-Talking Knife Wound…… Jamjar Lazarus
Escaped Chimp in the Tunnel of Love……. Asquith Treeves-Brambledale
Sarcastic Soufflé…… Hettie Slugblossom
Voice of God…… Sue Pollard
Haunted Banjo……Patch ‘Anti-Semite’ Hickock
Masturbating Snowman…… Curly Brownmark

Music:

‘Music To Attempt To Mug Principal Characters For Plotting Reasons By’ performed by T-Bag and the Mad Dunkrz (© Wee Thugg Records)

‘Let’s Work Together And Get Stuff Done’ performed by Lou Hewitt (© Montage Sequence Archives)

‘My Love For You Will Immolate The Universe Forever’ by Hettie Snitch and her Ballads Of Power (© Lovewolf Music inc.)

Incidental Music By Glenn Branca, George Maciunas and Derek Bailey

Ticking Clock sounds provided by Michael Buerk

The Hands of The Insatiable Ghost Of Horny David Crosby provided by David Crosby

Delicious Gelatine-Based Bonbons provided by Wild Mama Briggatucci’s Catering co. Man, they were delicious. Seriously. You should’ve been there. The lemon ones weren’t really to my taste, but the strawberry were to die for. And I don’t want you to think I’m the sort of credit sequence copywriter who uses phrases like ‘to die for’ at the drop of a hat. These bonbons - I’ve never tasted anything like them before in my life. The whole cast and crew said the same. All of them. Except Cueball. He wasn’t too keen on the gelatine - said he could taste the pork. Which you could, to tell you the truth. But that just added to the flavour. One day Mama Briggatucci brought in some Toffee flavour ones, but they all got snapped up right away. My wife visited me on-set that day. Said I shouldn’t really be hanging around at the studio whilst they’re filming as I’m only getting paid for the hour or so it takes me to put together a credit reel. And that my studio pass, made mostly out of macaroni and an old cassette tape, was an obvious forgery which would eventually get me fired. I told her though - I said ‘Look, honey. I want to be in the pictures. You’ve got to start somewhere. Sure I’m writing credit-rolls at the moment, but some day MY name’ll be up on the screen.’ She didn’t believe me - she cried and called me ‘an alcoholic fantasist’ - but now I’m gonna prove her wrong! I’m gonna put my name right here, at the end of the credits where everyone can see. Y’see, honey. You should’ve believed in me! My name is [at this point the Universal logo blocks the guy's name. See, it's funny, right? Because it was all leading up to him revealing his name. It's a credit-roll sequence. ]

Written by Chalkie Hackright
Directed by Blaze Fiveiron

Films: The Movie

2009-08-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

Click on it. Then maybe get your glasses out. Also, I hope you like squinting.

Mansol Hotels

2009-08-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Page i

2009-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Holy Bible
(New Unabridged Edition)

Copyright © God 2009
This translation © King James II, Various Uncredited Scribes & Dan Brown

God has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. Except the bits about gays, adulterous women and people who dare to knead bread on the Sabbath all being put to death by group stonings. That’s the work of the scribe-hacks. Oh, and those boring lists of a family lineages. You simply can’t get the scribes these days, ladies and gents.

The epigraph on page vii comes from The Evil Has Landed: From Heaven To Hell To 1970’s Rock Music Promotion To Tabloid Photojournalism by Lucifer (Gideon Black-Lace, 1998). Reproduced by kind permission.

The quotations in ‘The Book Of Genesis 8:2-21’ are taken from The Snozzlehounds Wouldn’t Mate: A Year On A Cruise Built For Twos by Noah (Maritime Memorial Press, 1962) Reproduced by divine intervention.

The photographs in ‘The Gospel According To Saint John’ are taken from Just Consider The F*cking Lillies, Yeah?: Portraits Of A Coked-Up Messiah by Jesus H. Christ and Paul McCarthy (Taschen, 1997) Reproduced by miraculous apparition.

An earlier version of ‘The Gospel According To Saint John‘, first appeared in slightly altered forms in the various myth-stories of Mithra, Krishna and George A. Romero; ‘The Book Of Job’ first appeared as a photo-spread with accompanying text in Bizarre magazine under the title ‘Plague Cysty For Me‘; ‘The Revelation Of Saint John The Divine’ first appeared as the film Patch Adams.

This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of religious ceremonies or otherwise, be used for the purposes of making Christmases boring, using a cheap electronic megaphone to shout about gays on street corners, knobbing kids (even if said kids are papally deemed to be ‘hot’), or otherwise have arbitrary meanings ascribed to its content without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of faith or belief-system other than possibly Mormonism and Scientology, but then only for a bit of a laugh, and maybe Baptismal Churches, but even then only really for the gospel music, without which we’d all still be listening to George Formby. Similar conditions are imposed on the subsequent purchaser if he or she is a Satanist who has bought this thing with the intention of reading it backwards: I can think of at least ten things which are more ‘evil’ than wasting your cash on a book whose contents you plan to deliberately misread: you could blind a pensioner; you could fumble about with the bottoms of some barnyard animals; you could put weed-killer in your neighbours’ hanging-baskets; you could, I dunno… look, the list just goes on and on, okay?

All characters portrayed in this book are entirely fictional, with the following exceptions: The Talking Snake; The Guy Who Spends A Weekend In A Whale; The Guys Who All Claim To Be Spartacus; David Icke; Jazz Hound And The Noodle Mutts; The Legion Of Indestructible Ice-Droids (85XMR45 squadron centurions only); and That Guy Who’s Selling Novelty Baseball Caps In That One Verse, You Know The One, He Looks A Little Weird, Like Michael Buerk, Yeah Him.

First published as various scrolls, fragmentary sheets of papyrus and a popular series of bathtime squeaker books about the adventures of ‘Emile the Hobo-Swan' (1000BC - 1985AD approx.)

Printed and Bound by Tyndale & Great-Great-Great-Great Grandsons plc.

Secret chapters from this book regarding Jesus’s teen-years are available from the British Library‘s Opus Dei wing.

ISBN 978-00-5318008-X

Photo borrowed from Jennifer Jordan's top-notch Human Under Construction

The West And Sutcliffe Family Singers Poster

2009-08-07T16:08:00.001-07:00

Click to make it big...

Nick Griffin's Diary

2009-08-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, hello there.

Once again I was invited to read something at Word Soup at Preston's Continental. This is what I read. Since I started writing this thing Nick Griffin has: stated that the EU should bomb boats carrying immigrants; used what were purported to be images of 'traditional British people' in a campaign pamphlet, some of whom turned out to be, among other things, not British but Italian; made a truly bizarre attack on the BBC's production of Robin Hood (his first day as 'a real politician'); and, in an almost brilliantly satirical turn, claimed that black and Asian Britons 'do not exist'. All of this proves that it's impossible to satirise Nick Griffin - he does a much better job of it himself. In fact, there's probably no point in even reading this: you'll just be disappointed by how believable it all sounds. On the slim chance that you ignore that proviso, I should give credit to a Twitter user who goes by the name of realnickgriffin, one of whose joke-posts I've shamelessly lifted in the opening paragraph.

PART ONE

Day 1

I write this on the plane to Brussels. Currently, we are passing over the Belchen region of Austria’s Black Forest. From my sky-borne vantage point I am able to see all the myriad breeds, species, textures, colours and hues of florae and faunae: over a clutch of Douglas firs and pines, a gaggle of snow geese overlap with a flight of jackdaws, a single Golden Eagle visible among them. All of nature here teems and commingles. It is an abomination. One which makes me sick to the core of the centre of the pit of my guts. Once I am Prime Minister I shall make it my first act to declare that no foreign wildlife shall be allowed into Britain. Foreigners will not be welcome. In fact, they’ll be shot, and that includes plants. Following this I shall finally give the British people what they want and declare war on Calais; after that I’ll introduce the compulsory national Morris dancing scheme our nation’s ill-disciplined under-eighteens are so severely lacking. Then I’ll have all gays hanged.

But good lord, I am getting ahead of myself! It’s been so long since I last found time to update this, the personal diary of me, Nick Griffin, Chairman of the British National Party, that I have neglected to document the momentous goings on: after the months-long campaign, knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, undergoing the usual night of unbearable anticipation, and, of course, a lifetime of media-blackout persecution, I’ve led my party to victory. That’s right! The British people have spoken and declared, in their incontrovertible wisdom, that they see myself and my sidekick Andrew Brons as fit to demonstrate and promote our party’s brand of unstinting hardcore patriotism, common sense isolationist economic policies, and virulent anti-minority sentiment. Admittedly, they’ve asked us to do so in a foreign country - ordinarily the natural enemy of the BNP - but a victory is a victory.

Understandably, Brons was elated - a little too elated: during an interview with Sky News he called the result ‘the beginning of our glorious lebensraum’. Luckily, I was stood beside him at the time and was able to elbow my way in front of the camera to make a hasty attempt at convincing the reporter that what he’d actually said was ‘This is the beginning of our laborious ladies’ gowns’. When the reporter pressed me to explain what exactly this meant I thought it best to continue my cunning cover-up in a similarly enigmatic vein: ‘The wooden crumble is paraded in a shower of flared trousers’, I said, after which the reporter backed slowly away in a state of what I can only assume was baffled awe.

And so, to Government. Oddly, I overheard the Sky News reporter say that a number of the newly elected MEPs have recently gone awol.

Day 5

My first day in Brussels.

We’ve spent the past few days being shown round the Espace Léopold, my new workplace. Despite, obviously, being a money-sponging legislation-spinning machine, a cultural piss-dilution factory and literally full of foreigners, it is nonetheless an impressive place. In the gents’ toilets alone there’s classical music piped in through overhead speakers, a selection of organic scented handwashes in the soap dispenser and charcoal sketches by Grosz, Piranesi, and other weird-sounding foreigners lining the walls. Fear not, I managed to put a British stamp on things by doing a poo in one of the urinals whilst no-one was about. And the food! I write this with a mouth crammed with Liege waffles and mascarpone, Ardennes wild boar paté smeared across my face, and a large glass of Huet Le Mont in my hand. Foreign muck, of course, but it will have to do till my wife’s parcel of butter pies, pea water and pork scratchings arrives.

A curious aside: all the meals, snacks and whatnot I order here are brought to me by a serving staff whose appearance is so unusual I feel it worth commenting upon. They all seem to be roughly four foot in height and of a slight build. I’d refer to them as children but there’s no way for sure I can tell: they all wear long purple robes with hoods hanging low over their faces. They do not speak. I can only assume they are examples of some degenerate race which has not yet blighted the shores of Britain. Ah, Britain. Britain, Britain, Britain. Despite the richness of this place, there really is no comparison with Britain. The word alone conjures up images of Empire, courtesy and culture - everything that is civilized. But now I must cease writing, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is on in a second. I think it’s the one where they drink the milkshakes made from koala gonads and kangaroo sphincters tonight. LOL!!

Day 14

A calamity has befallen me. A calamity, so great, so bizarre, so unthinkable a part of my mind remains steadfast that it must be a dream, an hallucination brought on by the vast quantities of filthy foreign food. Were it not for the very real feelings of unendurable physical pain and mental toil I also find myself experiencing, I’d be convinced entirely. Less than a fortnight has passed since I made my last journal entry but, in that time, a lifetime of experience - terror, misery, agony - has been my lot.

It began as I was preparing to make my maiden speech, a work of outright genius, even if I do say so myself: I planned to begin with a verbatim recitation of Goebbels’s 1939 pre-war speech, only with the phrase ‘Jewish cabal’ replaced with ‘the BBC’ and the phrase ‘Slavic subhumans’ simply replaced with the word ‘foreigners’; then I was to move onto a sparklingly satirical poem of my own devising entitled ‘Immigrants In-My-Pants’; and, for my big finish, I had Brons waiting in the wings, preparing to an Al Jolson inspired jazz routine in full black-face. It was going to be a satirical right-wing bombshell. I sat in my office, looking through my notes, giving everything a final check. Satisfied, I ordered a glass of Chateau Neuf du Pape which again was brought by one of the diminutive, hooded serving staff. As the first drop passed my lips I knew it was drugged. Immediately my vision began to haze, the room started spinning and when I tried to stand I dropped to my knees. The hooded figure, now towering over me, reached to pull its hood down. A face, seemingly made entirely of pale, slimy, and sagging flesh - indeed wholly featureless other that a tiny slit of a mouth - gaped down at me, fangs bared and let out a high pitched shriek. Everything went black.

I awoke on the back of a large sledge, made entirely out of stone, being pulled deeper and deeper underground. I sit in it as I write this. There appear to be about a dozen of us, all confused and exhausted looking, surrounded by a squadron of the bald, faceless creatures, their hoods all now down. Initially, when we one by one awoke, we complained in our various languages, demanding to know what was going on. These slug-mole figures responded by brandishing huge whips, once again baring their fangs and setting upon an elderly Norwegian woman in the seat next to me, one of them using its whip to lash her in place whilst the others leapt across the sledge-floor and then gnawed her limbs clean off in a matter of seconds. After that we all quietened down. Naturally, I find myself siding with the slug-mole-people’s hardline anti-Norwegian stance, although the extent to which the slug-mole-people themselves appreciate this remains unclear.

Beyond one of the slug-mole creatures who appears to be guarding the head of the sledge, I can see that we’re being pulled forwards through a tunnel of earth by a pair of enormous worms which are kept in motion by a constant whipping. They like to whip things, our captors. At times they even whip the passing tunnel-walls, the sides of the sledge and, occasionally, each other. You could say that there’s more lash on here than a four-day pub-crawl with a giant heavily mascaraed eyelid. There we go: the first witty observation I’ve ever made and no-one will ever read it.

Only one of the slug-moles seems less keen on the whipping. He seems shorter then the others, slimmer. Whilst they all busy themselves with whipping, he merely stands and observes us. I’d swear he spends most of his time looking at me, but it’s difficult to say as he has no eyes. His face, like those of the others, has only the long, slimy antennae of a slug’s face.

But now I must sleep.

Day 16 (approx.)

After travelling for what must have been at least two days through the endless underground soil-tunnels, we took a diversion through what looked like the outskirts of a large city bustling with slug-mole people. The entire place is criss-crossed with busy sledge-roads, is fully rigged with electric lighting, and, most impressively of all, appears to have all the high-street amenities you’d expect any British town or city above ground to have: a street of take-aways, a lap dancing club, at least a dozen Gregg’s. It’s not all so fantastic, however. There are the sort of depressing ‘modern’ establishments which also blight the streets of Britain: we recently passed what looked like the sort of pretentious ‘gastropub’ that probably hosts ‘arty’ evenings.

After a few more hours we arrived in a prison-camp. As soon as we were prodded and whipped out of the stone sleigh we were put in shackles, also made from stone, which fit around our necks, wrists and ankles. We were taken to a large clearing amid all the prison huts, whipping-posts, and giant worms resting with their nose-bags, our chains fastened to a hoop in the ground. A large slug-mole came and gave a lengthy speech, none of which any of us could understand as it was entirely in the chirruping rodent-language these creatures use to communicate. He cracked some jokes at which the other slug-mole men laughed their hearty, gargling-sounding laughs. When none of we prisoners laughed we were whipped until we got the joke. Then, spurred on by the anti-European sentiment they’d displayed earlier, I made an ill-judged attempt to ingratiate myself somewhat by stepping forward and declaring that despite the unspeakably horrifying brutality which was being meted out to myself and my companions, I saw it nonetheless as a commendable method when it came to cutting immigration figures. I was cut short, however, as the large slug-mole lashed his whip around my arm and used it to make me slap myself repeatedly about the face. This caused my glass eye to fall out and, much to the amusement of all present, fellow prisoners included, I spent a good ten minutes scrabbling about in the dirt looking for it. After inadvertently replacing it with clumps of dirt, eyeball-shaped pebbles, and what I can only hope was a discarded truffle, we were led to a cave, handed pickaxes and whipped until the urge to dig seized us and we began hammering away.

I got into a conversation with the man alongside me on the chain who told me that although he didn’t know how long he’d been here, he supposed it must be about four years and in all that time he’d still no idea what we were digging for. ‘Just chuck a shovel-load into the wheelbarrows when they pass,’ he said, ‘they whip you less if you do that.’ Later on in the conversation he revealed himself to be Richey Edwards, former guitarist with the Manic Street Preachers and, for the past fifteen years, a missing person. Looking down the chain I saw a number of other supposedly ‘missing persons’: the ubiquitous Lord Lucan, Shergar the racehorse, Osama Bin Laden, and former Catchphrase host Roy Walker, who appeared to be talking to an imaginary Mr Chips. Digging pointlessly in a soil-cave with these people as my only companions is, it would seem, my lot until I can escape or am rescued.

During the night I spoke with another prisoner whose name, it emerged, was Pat Sharpe. In his life above the surface had once hosted the popular children’s television show, Pat Sharpe’s Funhouse, but was now merely another shovel-slave on the chain gang. There is, he told me, a way to escape; he said a handful of people had managed to get away, and, as the legend had it, found their way back to the surface. In spite of my penchant for attention-seeking controversial remarks, my racism, and the fact that I now may well have a large slug-mole turd where one of my eyeballs should be, he seemed to like me. He proposed we join forces to escape. He would have gone on if it weren’t for one of the guards, the smaller one who’d been looking at me on the sledge, who noticed we were speaking and used his whip to pull Pat’s mulleted head clean off. He, or perhaps it is a she, also swished the whip over my head a few times but allowed me to live. Why? Is it possible I’ve found a future ally?

Escape. The word itself has by now come to signify some sort of unattainable ecstasy. Fed little food, kept in a state of perpetual uncertainty regarding my future, and traumatised by witnessing the violent death of a friend, I’m beginning to think that my beliefs regarding minority groups, refugees and the generally downtrodden of the world, are maybe poorly thought out. Could it be that I’ve been wrong about everything?

No, of course not! Black ‘rap’ music causes AIDS; global warming is brought on not by industrial pollution and rising carbon levels but by the endless hordes of constantly stampeding feet, dusky and clad in ‘ethnic’ sandals, which inevitably accompany any immigration policy that doesn’t require newly arrived migrants to be shot through the head on arrival in Britain; ‘rape’ was invented by frigid feminists and horny Muslims. Foolish of me to think otherwise, really.

But now I must sleep - in my chains, alongside the late Pat Sharpe’s lifeless torso, his neck-stump and the puddle of blood which has congealed around it.

Day 32

This morning I was allowed a ‘treat’. The smaller slug-mole, the one who beheaded Pat Sharpe, whom I’m now able to recognise easily, came round early in the morning with a stone bowl filled with a steaming soup which, judging by the taste, was made up largely of soil and water. I drank it down greedily nonetheless. Why this act of kindness? I think I will call this slug-mole ‘Pat Sharpe’, in honour of my dead friend.

My headless companion was only recently replaced; his limp, decomposing corpse being dragged by the ebb and pull of the chains until its limbs began to drop off with putrification. A couple of the slug-moles came to remove his body, but not before some tasteless ‘comedy’ - what I can only describe as the most grotesque version of a puppet-show imaginable. This aside, our toil continues, each day indistinguishable from the next.

COMING SOON - PART TWO, FEATURING…

… Fast-cat Amazonian hell-chicks getting their ‘sexy revenge’ on man.

… Journeymen archaeologists who discover God’s enormous brain in the centre of the moon.

… Pent-up nuns who learn how to ‘party down’.

… Vampire ponies, ‘gummie’ zombies, and The Were-Armchair.

… Some really evil chimps.

Officially The Third Most Famous Person In A Room For A Night.

2009-07-15T12:39:00.001-07:00

Unless anyone shows up to watch, of course.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll be reading in my usual unpleasantly scratchy soulless-android voice. But there's the equally usual chances that I'll soil myself, produce some kind of automatic weaponry and go somewhat 'postal', or merely scream blindly in front of the microphone until my allotted ten minutes comes to an end. Whatever form my stroke-inducing fear of speaking in front of more than one person takes, I'm sure it'll be worth the £3 entry fee. Also, there will also be exclusive (and absolutely free) I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car cartoon merchandise, all cut from the same 'mong with a sharpie' cloth as the Tubular LOLs victory t-shirts. Not that I'll be giving away t-shirts or anything. I'm not made of the bloody things, you know.

Blogging The Suburbs

2009-07-02T04:14:00.000-07:00

Bow wow. Currently, the I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car offices are in the process of being moved. It's a lengthy, tedious process: the caviar-dispenser needs recalibrating, the naked slaves have been promised new Giant Wafting Leaves, and (SATIRE ALERT!) the previous tenants left the moat and duck island in a shocking state. More importantly, I'm currently without an internet connection.

So, once again, in the time-honoured tradition of lazy blog-hacks worldwide, here is a list of blogs of note, all of which are proferred under the guise of 'I recommend you go look at these'.

EmiTown is quite possibly my favoutie blog in the internet. It's written entirely in comic-book format, with stream-of-consciousness autobiography as its subject. Emi's twin superpowers - both her art skills and the fact that she posts almost every day - means that, if you want to, you can browse through the blog-posts for hours on end which will, if you're anything like me, leave you with a jealousy-tinted sense of awe. More than that, it's one of the few blogs in which someone I don't know writes about their day-to-day life and I don't find it unfeasibly dull.

Similarly, another comic-book site is Craig Thompson's Doot Doot Garden. I suppose what I'm really recommending here is Mr Thompson's publications, which include, among other things, cult indie comic Good-Bye, Chunky Rice and landmark graphic mega-novel Blankets. But the blog on his site is worth a look, concerning, as it mostly does, the writing of his next book, Habibi, another giganto-comic. Mr Thompson is torn however: on the one hand he's perpetually (and infectiously) enthusiastic about the five-year struggle to get the book written and drawn, and on the other he is fiercely protective of the content. So, instead, you get sketches of page-layouts, discussions of which pens and brushes are the best, details of his various side-projects and, very very occassionally, a completed page from one of the projected 600 plus that make up the story.

In an entirely different patch of 'The Blogtrix' (I've decided 'Blogosphere' is too twatty a word to remain in current use - other potential contenders, I'm sure you'll agree, are 'Blogocaust', 'The Bloginci Code', 'The Good, The Blog And The Ugly', 'Blognosis Murder'... no, I'm sorry, this is getting beyond ridiculous. Anyway) The Secret Little Portabello Mushroom, a delightfully swear-heavy blog written by Katie Taylor (aka 'Shinybiscuit'), consists of the sort of 'musings' I'd write if I had proper journo-skills and the requisite knowledge of contemporary culture, and if I didn't have the sort of attention-span which makes me lose interest in what I'm writing mid-sentence. It's also a blog which

Cancerous Capers is a blog written by Jamie Ross: he documents his diagnosis of, treatment for and recovery from Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Like, I imagine, most of you reading this, the idea of reading a 'recovery' blog fills me with an odd mixture of feelings: 'this is going to be upsetting/heavy/boring/littered with more references to a younger man's 'junk' than I feel I'm comfortable with.' Don't think any of those things, though (except the 'junk' bit): it's a funny blog. That is, not in a 'pity laugh' inducing sense, but genuinely, properly and 'amused laugh' inducingly funny.

I feel thoroughly unoriginal recommending My First Dictionary, as it's quite possibly one of the most popular blogs in the world. There's a reason for this, of course: the posts - pages from childrens' dictionaries given a twisted reworking - are both frequent and consistently hilarious. Ross Horley, who maintains the blog, also posts on the equally brilliant Musty Moments, a scrapbook collection of 'found items' from old local newspapers.

Another I-can't-believe-you're-recommending-this-blog-everyone-knows-about-you-might-as-well-say-hey-I've-discovered-this-awesome-thing-called-'chocolate' blog is Awkward Family Photos which, as the name would suggest, is another blog of 'found' images, this from time the strange and terrifying world of family photo albums, culled from various corners of the internet.

And that, I think, should keep you busy until I return from the new, futuristic, fully-modernised offices...

Shirts of Victory

2009-06-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of the t-shirt which Jack Faulker won thanks to his entry for Tube-ular LOLs. He requested a t-shirt featuring John 'I can't believe it's not rape' Leslie. Here are some photos of the much-coveted shirt:

On the off-chance that Mr Leslie or any members of his legal team are regular readers to I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car, let me take this opportunity to briefly highlight the fact that I state he is a 'non rapist' on the shirt.

In addition to Mr Faulkner's prize-winning efforts, after some consultation with a fellow judge, it was decided that Christina Marie's 'Bastard Cream' was also worthy of one of my 'special school art lesson' shirts for which the (very loose) theme is The Princess Bride:

Tube-ular LOLS - The Winner

2009-06-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

And so 'Tube-Ular LOLs' draws to a close. Much like the Olympics, this was a contest rich in history, heavy with symbolism, beautiful in its simplicity: the victors claim their seats among the elect, the posterity of their achievements immortalising them forever in the minds of us, the huddled pleb-wits who can only look on, agog and dribbling in baffled awe. Much like the Munich Olympics of 1936, the competition was, as most of you can't have failed to have noticed, hijacked for the purposes of nationalist propaganda by an inadvertently successful racist movement: Nick Griffin alone submitted nearly a hundred entries, mostly varying combinations of the following words: 'face', 'wish', 'looked', 'like', 'from', 'Goonies', 'less', 'Sloth'. (More on comedy racist troupe and Freudian analyst's wet-dream, "The British National Party", next time).

Anyway, aside from a brief power-crazed afternoon where I strutted down the street offering the glorious title of 'Tube-Ular LOLs Winner' to passing women, the true winner was obvious from pretty early on. The winning video, which I'll get to in a moment, is the stellar entry of Jack Faulkner, the Jessie Owens of the contest, was discovered through the genius keywords coupling 'Lampshade Chronicles'.

But, two things before we get to to the clips itself: firstly, let's shake hands with the also-rans. A lot of these are actually really good. They're still losers, obviously, but funny ones. Most, but not all, of these were 'sent in' from the good people of Twitter. Cue the music:

From Martin Higgins:
'Lunatic Horse'
'Intergalactic Barbershop'

From David Craig Morris:
'Zoetrope Lunch'
'Nihilism Vagina' (a very close runner-up, I'm sure you'll agree)

From Katie Taylor (now officially the most famous person on the internet):
'Stolen Meat'

From: John 'Naked John' Dewhurst:
'Eyeball Fluff'

From Richard D. Leslie:
'Erroneous Wedding'
'Eccentric Badger'

From Christina Marie:
'Cream Bastard' (you might want to brace yourselves for this one)

From: Claire Laurraine
'Charlie's Unicorns' (also ace)

Someone - I forget who - sent in an entry for 'Dog Time', which also deserves an honourable mention.

My attempts are as follows. Looking through the list, I can't help but think that if these were someone else's entries, they'd be the sort of of person I'd desperately try to avoid, albeit in as subtle and non-provoking a manner as possible:

'Painted Underpants'
'Rape Wax'
'Miserable Duck'
'Nationalist Robots'
'Celebrity Mouthwash'
'Peeled Ventilation'
'Tarmac Spinner'
'Dinosaur Horseradish'
'Musical Spanner'
'Muffin Holocaust'
'Walnut Sprain'
'Aubergine Congo'
'Rice Wizard'

The second thing, before we get to the winning entry is the winner himself: Jack Faulkner is no stranger to the world of celebrity being the son of both tax-crime kingpin Wesley Snipes and gruff moustachioed-type Billy Fane (better known as 'Geoff off out of Byker Grove'). He has, however, more than matched both his parents' achievements with his own range of dog perfumes, a reggae studio album recorded in collaboration with David Boreanaz and Terry Nutkins about the trial of Oscar Wilde, and the now notorious 'Basic Instinct recreation' photoshoot for Maxim. He's a man of few words. When congratulated on his success he responded with four simple syllables: 'Death to the west'.

And here it is, the winning clip: 'Lampshade Chronicles'.

But wait. This heady joyride into the heart of pure excitement is not over yet, my friend. There's more. As a prize for his achievements, Mr Faulkner gets a plain white t-shirt depicting a celebrity of his choice as drawn by me. Anyone who's seen my attempts at 'art' will know my style, such as it is, leans heavily towards the extreme boundaries of what I believe is termed 'outsider'. Indeed, severely mentally disabled people have been known to experience their first ever 'sneer' whilst beholding my work. This t-shirt, I feel, will be different: it will be my 'turn-around' piece. The world will take notice. So, Jack Faulkner, pick your celebrity. It could be anyone: it could be former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl; it could be disgraced stool-sniffer Gillian McKeith; it could be maverick homosexual poet Constantine Cavafy...

As I say, it could quite literally be anyone.

UPDATE EDIT:

The celebrity who is to appear on Mr Faulkner's t-shirt has been selected. It will be former Blue Peter presenter and legally proven non-rapist, John Leslie.

Tube-ular LOLs

2009-05-30T16:05:00.000-07:00

I've invented a new game. Although I'm wary of tooting my own trumpet, I sincerely believe it to be the best game in the world, and I predict it will take the place of all other competitive sports in the near future. I'd predict that some sort of additional messianic-sportlord status is also heading my way, but that's probably slightly less likely, given the Tube-ular LOLs' similarity to a game called GoogleWhack.

I'll lay down the rules shortly. But first, much like the rulebook of Monopoly, you'll have to sit through some 'how the game was invented' anecdotage first. I know: yawn, yawn, bloody yawn! But don't you even think about skipping these next few paragraphs to get to the rules! In fact, that's the first rule: no skipping. If you're not reading this bit you've already broken one of the rules and are therefore disqualified. Although you won't know this because, as I just pointed out, you're not actually reading this. So, really, I'm just chastising the obedient rule-abiders. Hmm, that seems unfair. Okay, okay - scrap Rule No.1. You happy now, you lousy, cheating game-wreckers?

Anyways, here's the 'history' nonetheless: I've spent the last few days trying to think of something worthwhile to post on this blog. After a recent flurry of activity I felt I'd 'dried up', so to speak. So I passed a few hours messing about on YouTube, looking for something funny to post a link to, thereby allowing me to bask in the reflected glory of someone else's hard work/public embarrassment/homemade snuff-film. But it's actually quite hard to find a genuinely funny YouTube clip unless you've got some sort of general idea for what it is you're looking for. After viewing the dismal results of keywords such as 'funny', 'blooper' and (pathetically) 'lol', I found myself typing in bizarre word couplings in the hope that some mind-blowing footage would appear onscreen. Phrases such as: 'epileptic motorcross', 'omelette spinster' and 'fallopian pope'. Obviously, none of these yielded any results whatsoever. Why would they? However, after keying in 'dancing muesli', I was rewarded with this video. Not exactly the life-affirming cack-storm that is melbolofworlds (the work of whom the two or three readers of ITITYTWITC - the catchy acronym this blog is currently going by - who didn't end up on here in search of porn will be familiar), but it's still pretty interesting, in an odd, confusing sort of way. If you can't be bothered to watch the video, I'll summarise: it's a couple of girls doing a dance to a piece of music which I can only define as 'classical clown music'. The word which sums it up is 'weird': weird music, weird dancing, and, given that I was only the third person in the world to view this performance according to the 'views' counter, a weird viewer experience. Don't get me wrong, it's not Inland Empire weird. Just mildly disorientating, a little like watching a behind-the-scenes featurette on the extras section of a DVD without seeing the feature film. Easy weird, good weird.

I tried another search, using the phrase 'mushy chick' this time, which resulted in yet another pretty odd and largely unviewed clip. Again it's some kids, this time arseing about with a stuffed tiger.

Obviously, having just discovered two clips in which some girls prance about, I was wary that, if I were to post just these, there was a good chance I'd be branded a frenzied sex-criminal, pursued by an equally frenzied band of torch-wielding villagers and strung up by my knackers from a lamppost. So I plugged away for further videos: the phrase 'superstitious gravel' threw up this clip of hypnotic and strangely unnerving dashboard footage of a seemingly endless drive through a rocky mountain wilderness; 'cucumber wife', although it sounds faintly amusing, led me to a news clip about a woman being shot in the stomach; and 'owl crusade' provided me with an intentionally funny clip of which I'd otherwise be ignorant. Oh, and there was one more - 'toothbrush ballet' - but that also featured young women dancing about (oh internet, you'll get me in trouble!)

This, I thought, would make a worthwhile blog-post. I could write something about how nigh blind chance had lead me, through a pair of largely random keywords, into these online snapshots, postcards from peoples' lives; about how, rather than using YouTube to watch footage of anchormen being humiliated by wildlife, newsreaders falling over, or the myriad other on-air mistakes which happened to be caught on camera, I was using it to more philosophical, human ends, to explore pockets of the world through a roulette-like language game; that this was the true wonder of YouTube, to be able to briefly share the experiences of total strangers which would have gone otherwise undocumented.

Then I thought: no, that would make me sound insane. Best just make a game out of this. So, the rules, such as they are, are thus:

1. Go on YouTube.
2. Type in a couple of unconnected, random words.
3. Click on the first video result, if there is one.
4. If it's a good video let me know by posting the words you used and a link to the resultant clip as a comment. Obviously, I'm aware that for anyone else to give a flying hoot about my pointless and time-wasting internet game there needs to be some sort of incentive: a prize. Therefore the person who comes up with the best YouTube clip ('best' being determined on a 'randomness of the keywords used' to 'batshit crazy footage' ratio) will win... something. I'm not sure what yet: it may depend on the calibre of the entries, if I get any at all. It could be a paper crown, the sort you get in Christmas crackers, with the word 'winner' written across the front in marker-pen, it could be a cheque for a hundred pounds.

(Please note: the winner WILL NOT receive a cheque for a hundred pounds).

Iggy the Plug Pug

2009-05-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is Iggy. Iggy is the Plug Pug. Due to this blog increasingly being used to promote things which aren't The Blog Itself, Iggy will now serve as a quick and handy visual indicator: whenever I'm posting something which has little purpose beyond trying to get you marvel at my myriad other achievments, Iggy will be here to let you know. Hopefully, the fact that he's a tiny, squishy-faced pup in a pink unicorn costume (borrowed from Le Blog - great name, great posts) will distract you from my shameless, whorelike attempts at reader manipulation. Some of you may have already noticed my subli(love me!)minal messages.

Anyway, today's plug is the fact that I now get paid vast amounts of cash to say whatever hateful and slanderous things about famous people that come into my head, get away with it and then laugh like this: "AH HA HA HA HA HA!" Well, actually, that's only partly true: I'm now an employee of previously plugged spoof news website Scunt. Alongside others (including Martin Higgins), I'll be reviewing stuff whenever stuff happens to take my fancy. Recently Bob Dylan damn well took my damn fancy and you can see my subsequent accusations that he's damn well disintegrating mentally here.

"Because I could, Uncle Bob. Because I could... AH HA HA HA HA HA!!!"

This Is My Brain On the Internet

2009-05-20T13:45:00.001-07:00

Click on my brain to make it bigger...

Dear Millipede

2009-05-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

Hello. I was invited to read something at Word Soup, a regular night at Preston's New Continental. The theme was 'skin'. I read on Tuesday the 19th of May and this is what I read:

Dear Millipede,

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write to you. These past few months I’ve been busier than you could ever imagine. Where to begin? In January the literary agency I worked for went into receivership and I lost my job. As I’m sure you can imagine, this has not only crippled my finances, but has also been disastrous for my once-hectic social life. JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer no longer want me on their pub-quiz team. Will Self, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan announced that they could function just as well without me on their five-aside team, despite this meaning that there are now only four members on the team, thus making them no longer eligible to compete for the Kirkham and Wesham Sunday League Cup. And Philip Roth simply stopped coming round for our usual Mamma-Mia-and-popcorn nights.

I’ve taken on a low-level job in a bookshop, shovelling paperbacks written by the very ‘friends’ who’ve now disowned me back and forth. In February my wife left me. She took our children with her, telling them I’d died in the bookshop, trapped and slowly starved beneath an avalanche of copies of Jeremy Clarkson’s most recent book which, understandably, no-one was willing to handle to save me. They believed her - they are, after all, children.

In March I was forced to move out of my apartment in Winkley Square. I’m currently writing to you from my new lodgings - the corner of a kitchen in a shared house in Tanterton. My room consists of some space, just about large enough for me to sleep in if I keep myself coiled round the pedal-bin, and is separated from the rest of the place by a second-hand shower-curtain pinned to the ceiling. It is not ideal, but at least I have some semblance of privacy. Also, I’m near enough to the fridge to grab a fistful of crabsticks or a triangle of Laughing Cow if I’m feeling hungry.

Amid all of this chaos, misery and failure there was, Millipede, an oasis of hope. And it’s due to this oasis, this tiny drop of dew in a desert of burning despair, that I’m writing to you. What I’m after is some advice, some guidance, some help. In April I was invited to read at an event called Word Soup at the New Continental in Preston. It’s a regular, themed literary event. The theme for the evening I’m supposed to be reading at is ‘Skin’. I’m sure I don’t need to stress to you, Millipede, just how important for me this evening could be. With well-written, well-judged piece of writing I could stun all those present and begin to turn my life around. It would be a foot on the first rung of the ladder - the ladder of success which leads to the loft of renewed happiness. The problem is this: with so much riding on this evening, I’ve become so anxious about writing the right thing that I’ve no ideas at all.

To begin with I thought maybe a story about a racist. Skin. Race. It makes sense. A guy who’s insanely racist - he sits up at nights thinking about ways to kill black people. Then one day he wakes up and he’s transformed into a black man himself. Serious shit, Millipede. It’d be like Kafka’s Metamorphosis only with a more hard-hitting social message. It’d be cool. All the people who’d come to watch me read it would think I was great. This fantastic, fearless guy who isn’t afraid to use his creativity to hold a mirror up to society. Yeah, he doesn’t care if racists thinks they’re good. He thinks they’re bad. They’d love me. The audience that is, not the racists.

But, Millipede, I didn’t get anywhere with this story. I’d thought up the outline of the thing, but that was all. This racist - was he married? Did he have children? Where did he work? The story ended up being three paragraphs long. In the first I set the scene. In the second the man goes to bed thinking racist thoughts. Then, in the third, he wakes up and realises he’s become black. Actually, there was a fourth paragraph, in which the man, pointing at his own reflection in the mirror, says: ‘You are the problem but now I am the problem.’ Still, the whole thing felt like a non-starter. It wasn’t a real story, Millipede. The people who come to this Word Soup event - they’re not idiots. They’d see my attempt at cobbling together some story about race as a basic ruse to win them over on moral grounds.

So I thought some more about skin. The next thing I thought of was old age. When human beings get old, Millipede, their skin changes. You don’t know this - you are a millipede. It gets wrinkly, can change shade and develops these weird brown patches. I sketched out a story about a teenager who hates old people. He lives with his grandparents, cursing them constantly. To him they are embarrassing anachronisms, incredibly naïve and stupidly polite. He wishes they were dead because they’re old. But then, one morning, he awakens to find that he has become an old man, and his grandparents have taken his place as young, lithe teens. And they hate him.

Now, it doesn’t take a Comparative Literature PhD to spot the similarities between this story and the one which I mentioned earlier, Millipede, I’ll grant you that. Someone who hates something wakes up to find that he has become that thing, the thing he hates. This is part of the reason why I ditched the idea. Also, when it came to the descriptions of the newly aged teen discovering his sagging, wrinkled body… well, I won’t say it was gross - I don’t want to come across as the oldie-hating teen in my aborted story - but it felt a bit too intrusive. I think, Millipede, if I’d read it, the audience would have been divided. I’d have young people barfing all over one another in a mass gross-out. And I’d have the older members of the audience staring at me with a cold, quiet hatred. Don’t get me wrong, Millipede, my sole aim isn’t to be liked. On the other hand, no-one wants to be the centre of attention in a roomful of people who despise him and are covered in sick.

After this, I thought about the word ‘skin’. Maybe I could be clever and use it in an unexpected way. As a verb, maybe: ‘too skin’. I jotted down the bare bones of a story about a man who’s job it is to skin cows. Obviously my initial urge was to have him awaken one morning to find that he is no longer the man who skins cows but is, in fact, a cow. This, it goes without saying, would have been ridiculous. I thought that maybe he could instead fall in love with a cow, due to her having particularly lovely fur - maybe it reminds him of a woman he’d once loved but who had died. Possibly after she’d been stampeded to death by a herd of startled cattle. This would explain why he took the job up in the first place. A character’s motivation, Millipede, is important in stories. So, I got stuck into this story. It went well. It stretched out to three thousand words by the time I’d finished the first draft. I was pleased with it. I would have printed off a copy and sent it you to read. But you are millipede. As unable to grasp onto the three sheets of A4 as you are the most rudimentary concepts of literature.

Looking back at this story, however, it seemed I’d only very casually set up the character’s situation and psychology. And I’d spent the vast majority of the story concentrating on the consummation of love between the cow-skinner and his cow bride. I’m not one to shy away from the topic of man-beast sexual relations, Millipede, however does a roomful of unsuspecting strangers really deserve to listen to me bang on at length about what this cow-skinner did to a cow’s hooves, her tail, her udders? They would think I was insane, Millipede. Worse, stood there on stage, listing bestial sex acts, I’d get walk-outs, hecklers, maybe someone would even call the police.

That whole area, I decided, was a minefield. I returned to thinking of other ways to write about skin. Skin skin skin. Fruit and vegetables have skin. Could I write a story about fruit and vegetables? Beyond hammering out a tale in which an avocado-hating grapefruit wakes up to find himself in a pot of guacamole, it would appear not. Rice pudding has skin. As does custard. But if I read a story about rice pudding or custard they’ll think there’s something wrong with my brain. It’s not exactly the deep end that touching up cows is, but it’s the same swimming pool.

So, come on, Millipede. What else has got skin? Skin skin skin. There’s a popular tv show called ‘Skins’. Maybe I could write about that. If no-one else at the reading has heard of the show I could transcribe an episode, read it out and pass it off as my own work. Then again, have you seen ‘Skins’, Millipede? It’s terrible. Plus, acting out the parts for all the myriad characters, complete with the incomprehensible youth lingo the show utilises, is going to make things pretty difficult to follow.

Skin was the name of the lead singer of Skunk Anansie. You’re probably too young to remember them, Millipede. They were an alternative rock band who achieved a moderate level of success during the nineties. Skin, their lead singer, went on to have a less illustrious solo career. She was bald and aggressive. Maybe I could write a story in which Skin out of Skunk Anansie solves mysteries - possibly with the aid of members of other British rock bands from the nineties: the drummer out of Reef, the bass player out of Cast, one of the backing singers from the Mike Flowers Pops.

No. No, no, no. Even though you’re a millipede, with no knowledge of the basic protocols inherent in the reader-audience dynamic, I still think even you would know that this is a bad idea. You’re right. This is a terrible idea. Skunk Anansie aren’t really well known enough for me to pull it off. People will either think I’ve made up a band with an equally fictitious lead singer called Skin merely as a hamfisted attempt to address the theme of ‘skin’, or, to those who’ve heard of the band, they’ll think it’s intended as some sort of bizarre fan-fiction.

As you can see, Millipede, deciding what it is you’re going to read in front of a bunch of strangers is an almost impossible task. Whatever route I go down seems to end with me coming across as an unhinged - possibly even demented - pervert. As I’ve been writing to you I’ve even been toying with the idea of reading this letter. I could pass it off as some sort of ironic, postmodern literary exercise. But that too I can see alienating the audience. I mean, look at me - look at the clothes I‘m reduced to wearing now, in my current state. I’ll probably be wearing that t-shirt which has a picture of a piece of toast with a face spreading jam on himself, borrowed from the son of the man who lives in the kitchen with me, on the other side of the shower-curtain. That’s not the sort of thing a postmodern literary thinker wears. Could you imagine W.G. Sebald or Gunter Grass wearing something like that? No, they’d think me a pretentious fraud. They’d hate me. I guess, if I were to read out this letter, I could throw some sort of reference to the very fact that I am reading it into the mix. Second-guessing them, if you will. Would that make it more genuinely postmodern? Would that be clever? How about if I make a further reference - to the fact that I’ve just referenced myself? Would that be clever? And is that all literature really is: being clever? Second guessing all the hateful, dismissive things your reader - or, in this case, listener - can throw at you? That’s a depressing notion. This whole enterprise is depressing. I think, Millipede, the only thing left for me to do is not read anything at all.

Also, and I don’t mean any offence to you by this, but I don’t want people knowing that when I’m stuck for ideas I write letters to a giant non-existent millipede for assistance whose name is simply 'millipede'.

Sincerely,

Richard Vivmeister Hirst

picture borrowed from threadless.com

Freakishly Deformed Cocks

2009-05-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

Before I go any further, I should state that the only reason this post has the title it does is because those words are currently top of my 'keyword' chart. That's right, more people find this blog by googling the phrase 'Freakishly Deformed Cocks' than by any other means. And how proud my family must be to now have this detail made public.

Actually, they should be proud. The main purpose of this blog is currently to serve as an obstacle which web-meandering filth-hounds will stumble across, temporarily ruining their evening of gentleman's leisure and leaving them a few more frustrating mouse-clicks away from the photographs of freakishly deformed cocks they so lust after. Just the sort of service families should be grateful for.

Anyway, as the now too oft repeated phrase above is so popular, I've cunningly utilised it as a post title to ensnare any browsing internet folk into the world of I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car. And for good(ish) reasons: I have something to promote.

On the 19th of May (a Tuesday) I will be reading something called 'Dear Millipede' at the New Continental's Word Soup. Now, I'm a panicky reader: I stutter like I've got war-syndrome, I develop a dry-throated croak, and I sweat like an obese paedo at a christening. All in all a hilarious sight for you all to witness. I might even get a nosebleed. All this and more for the bargain-price entry fee of £3. My inability to stand and speak like a normal person will be underlined by the other people who'll also be reading: Emma Lannie , David Hartley, Andrew Michael Hurley, Annie Clarkson and Tim Woodall, all of whom I now owe a sincere apology for tarring them with my filthily pornographic keyword-brush.

To those of you who have read this far after googling 'freakishly deformed cocks', I was going to include a genuine picture of a disfigured male member but, when I googled for them, the only results which came up were from this, my own blog. And I'm very sorry to disappoint you further but there'll also be, as far as I've been informed, no cocks on display at the Word Soup event, freakish or otherwise. However, in my state of blind stage-panic I am liable to do almost anything, so by all means come. By which I mean 'come along'.

Normal, non-plugging service will return soon.

Your Order #3

2009-04-28T07:49:00.001-07:00

Dear jesusitoldyouimnotvivhowdoichangethisthingithinkikeeporderingstuff

Thank you for your order.

Here are some other items which may be of interest.

Out On A Limb 3: The Silence Of The Limbs

Keanu Reeves stars as Chip Rockwater, a maverick, bionic-limbed detective who, as fans will recall, used his electronic piston-arms-and-legs to pursue Melvin 'Professor Chuckles' Van Reape (Dwayne Johnson) the unfeasibly evil megavillain whose illicit drug racketeering business, underground prostitution ring and scat-movie empire runs through the whole social fabric of Appledale City like some kind of crooked seam, throughout the first two films in this franchise, Out On a Limb and Out On A Limb 2: The Long Arm Of The Law. In this, the concluding part of the trilogy, Rockwater, after losing his robotic arms and legs in a scuffle with a band of magnetic-harpoon-wielding street-punks, is given the opportunity to undergo radical surgery and become the first man in history to receive four full simultaneous limb transplants. Initially Rockwater is delighted to be back in the realms of the fully-fleshed - as displayed in lengthy recuperation montage scenes in which we see him bathing his new arms and legs in the sunlight, wafting them in the cool night air, and dribbling fresh milk over them, all the while gasping ecstatically - but it isn't long before things start to go awry. His limbs seem to have a mind of their own. He unwittingly makes obscene gestures at passing strangers. Instead of reaching out to hug his kids he finds his arms throttling them, poking them in the eyes and giving them a severe noogying. He's unable to stop himself performing the hilarious 'elephant jig' at a colleague's funeral. Occasionally he hears them chuckling. It's not long before Rockwater discovers that the arms and legs which have been grafted onto his body were, in fact, those of his arch-enemy Professor Chuckles, bewitched by some voodoo curse (related in a scene in which the arms and legs have flashbacks). What ensues is an action-loaded study into the nature of identity, family, and what it means to be a man with cheekily evil hands and feet.

Glo-Worm Bubblegum Saxaphone Squad

A landmark in Anime. Wise elder Tadashi and his band of ferretty wood-people find their village under attack from Empress Yumi-Yumi, an airborne and unfeasibly oversized tar-squid - who has the super-ability to shoot what would appear to be webs of musical hair out of her tar-tentacles - and the Fuyu, her sharp-toothed egg-shaped duck-minions who, although lacking her hair-slinging skills, seem to be proficient in the projectile-bleeding of some sort of 'evil fun-glitter' from their nose-hooters. Initially they're after an enchanted dragon's tooth, but that gets hastily forgotten amidst a plethora of irritatingly cutesy sidekicks, eye-raping editing and fight scenes in which the characters get so angry that when they leap into the air they don't seem to stop. There's also an anatomically-bewildering and prophesy-spouting 'lady teapot', a whole load of wise-cracking frogs in hi-vis military outfits and repeat interruptions from something called 'Mega Time Fun Break' in which a troupe of walnut-hedgehog hybrid creatures dance about in a fridge for thirty seconds whilst a clock ticks down in the corner of the screen. The entire running time is estimated at three and half hours, but no-one's ever watched it to the end, so it could be far longer.

Doctor Who - The Ten-nant Commandments

To commemorate the impending conclusion of his reign as the current Doctor, the BBC are releasing one of their ever-popular dvd of 'the best bits' in which the superfluities of suspense, characterisation and plot are all pruned away and tossed aside leaving you, the viewer, with a lengthy blur of unrelated scenes. These includes countless shots of Tennant saying 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' in faultlessly sincere tones, countless shots of him tossing his head to one side and saying 'Well!', and countless shots of him peering at items of alien technology through his glasses and saying 'Oh, you are beautiful!'. The package concludes with a lengthy visual collage of Tennant hitting various pieces of malfunctioning machinery whilst screaming 'No, no, no, no, no, no!'

He's Just Not That Into Poo

Melissa Malone is a normal girl just like any other. She works at Kitten Hospital as a cat nurse in the Hurt Paw Department, hangs out in the mall with her unfeasibly socially diverse range of friends, and spends most of her spare time working towards her PhD in helping homeless and elderly orphans. However, Cassie harbours a dookie-dark secret: she's a scat-hound. Her need to be pooed on is as uncontrollable as the bowel-movement that thrill her so and lands her in an array of hilarious situations as she quests for the perfect brown shower: hiding in the U-bend of a public toilet-cubicle, disguising herself as a roll of toilet paper, posing as a drainage official to spend a weekend gorging herself silly in the sewers of New York City. Then one day she meets AJ: great-looking, with a good job and, most importantly, 'a clean' as her scat-pals refer to them. Can she change her dung-munching ways? From the people who brought you Forrest's Dump, Requiem For A Steamer and The Log Whisperer.

PigPope

When the Pope visits America to bless an ordinary farmyard pig he doesn't expect the US military to accidentally set of an experimental nuclear device nearby. But that's just what happens. In the ensuing fiery meleé the entire population of the village he's visiting instantly melt into puddles of human goo, but the Pope, protected by his holy aura, emerges unscathed. However, he finds the pig he was holding has become assimilated into his body. He has become PigPope, a regular Pope endowed with powers both superhuman and superpig: shooting jets of holy water from his trotter-wrists, using his snout skills to snuffle out clues to bring frocked paedos to justice, rolling about in his own filth. Stars Daniel Radcliffe as The Pope, Bill Nighy as The Pig and Melinda Messenger as Sister Candy Rockwell.

Also out this week:

The Candleweb Sagas - First instalment of this twee multi-film story of enchantment, toff kids and whimsical Victoriana in which an orphan finds out he's actually a wizard prince. What a massive fucking surprise.
I Am Legend Of Hull House - Will Smith stars in this notoriously garbled biopic of Rod Hull, arbitrarily set in a haunted mansion in the Nineteenth Century, which is beset by frenzied attacks from a cult of zombies after the world comes to an equally arbitrary end.
Cop Squad - Much like Police Academy only with Eddie Murphy playing every single fucking character.

Your Order #2

2009-04-27T15:34:00.000-07:00

Dear seriouslymynamereallyisntviv

Thank you for your order.

Here are some recommendations for your next visit

Papal Indemnity by Thornwood Dogberry (Orion £7.99)
Vatican City, 1961. Yet another cardinal has been found murdered, throttled with his own fascia, his mitre stuffed down his throat, and his body strung up by his own rosary. This isn't the sort of day Pope John XXIII, a grizzled maverick with a string of failed marriages behind him, a M1911 Browning concealed beneath his vestments, and a bottle of scotch never far from his lips, had anticipated when he woke up this morning. What is it that links these senseless killings? What is the significance of the hoof-prints that litter each crime-scene? Could this be the handiwork of Pope John XXIII's arch-nemesis: the Devil? Assisted by rookie novice nun, Mary Malone, Pope John XXIII sets about excommunicating lowlifes, making martyrs of double-crossing primates, and demonstrating his infallibility... from the smoking barrel of a blood-glistening pump-action Remington 870. From the author who brought you Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Pope; The Pope Always Rings Twice; The Pope Who Came In From The Cold; and Murder Most Pontiff (winner of last year's Sistine Dagger Awards) comes a new thriller which crackles with nightmarish tension, hard-boiled eroticism, and lengthy passages of dense theological dogma.

The Brown Notebooks by Gordon Brown et al. (Viking £16.99)

In yet another PR bid to prove to the populace that he is just like any other human being, Gordon Brown has given permission for his idle doodlings to be published in book form. 'I doodle whilst on the phone or in meetings,' he says in his introduction, 'much like the members of any other hard-working British family. And I want to share my doodles with you, the British public.' Alongside budget work-out sums and the occasional stick man, there are numerous striking images: a full-page cartoon figure of a 'sexy' pound sign winking whilst saying 'Don't worry, I still love you, Gordy!'; what looks like a sketchy self-portrait of Brown himself vomiting a flume of hammers and sickles from a balcony onto a cheering crowd below; and, perhaps most striking of all, a coloured-in, double-page depiction of a pair of testicles and a penis, on the end of which is a dark-haired, madly grinning face saying, in angry speech-bubble form, 'He was the people's COCK... I can feel the COCK of history on our shoulder... I can only go one COCK. I've not got a reverse COCK... I'm just such a complete COCK!!!!'

A Family Affair: Miscellaneous Royal Poems by Andrew Motion (Faber and Faber £18.99)
A collection of the poems Motion was commissioned to write during his laureateship but which, at the time, went unpublished. These include a beautiful sonnet sequence written in celebration of Prince Philip's 79th birthday (an event now largely remembered solely for the Prince's ill-advised three hour 'minstrel cabaret' performance); a slightly confused ode written in dedication to 'the marriage of Queen Fergie and Prince Jim'; and Motion's final piece written during his time as laureate, a summation of his professional experience and a crystal distillation of his poetic skills titled simply 'Queen':

The wonderful and terrific and lovely Queen,
The lady-king of the Royalty scene,
Is very soft and nice, but she also has power
So when she uses it it's a bit like being whipped with a flower.

Scientology: It's A Religion With 'Science' In The Frickin' Name! Who'd Have A Problem With That! A Bunch Of Jackasses! That's Who! Grrrr! It Makes Me So Frickin' Maaaad!!! by Tom Cruise (Harper Perennial £49.99)
Tom Cruise, high priest of Scientology, sets out in the this book to dispel the myths that surround the world's favourite celeb-gion, making him the first insider to lift the lid on the secretive 'definitely-not-a-cult' cult. 'People think Scientology is all about stupid science fiction stuff, the end of the world and tons of money,' says Tom in his introduction to this £49.99 book, 'I hope to change their minds - with reasoned and balanced argument and, failing that, my gold-plated truth-laser. I'm just kidding!' And, as the glossy colour photographs which make up the body of this work testify, any suggestions that the Church of Scientology is rooted in either a money-worshipping or an overly Sci-Fi mentality are wholly unfounded. Highlights include: photos of Cruise with wife Katie Holmes and child Suri riding hoverboards made out of 'pure money'; pictures of L. Ron Hubbard's cryogenetically reanimated head, grafted to the body of a steel gorilla; and an eight-page spread of the cavernous underground storage ports which house the millions of Armagedobots.

Coming Soon
Philip Roth's novelisation of the entire cartoon strips of Garfield.
Tyrant: Keith Chegwin's explosive exposé of his life with diminutive telly-fascist Noel Edmonds.
The first instalment of Paul Ross's eagerly awaited study of the Seleucid Empire.

Eye on Cameron:As a grim new dawn of tyrannical Tory rule looks all but certain, the Conservative Party are stepping up their early pre-election campaign effort with a bombardment of titles being released next month:

David Cameron - Feeling Blue? We Are Too! (Old Bean Press £4.99)
A title described by Mr Cameron in a leaked press statement as 'the usual blah-blah-blah right wing diatribe dressed up as some sort of ruddy self-help book'
David Cameron - The Cameron Cookbook (Old Bean Press £4.99)
An attempt by the Tories to distance themselves from the 'posh' image they're so often associated with: 'Recipes for traditional British dishes such as Ptarmigan Soufflé, Eton Mess and Soggy Biscuit Pudding.'
David Cameron - I Am Be A Primeminster! (Old Bean Press £4.99)
A concerted effort to attract youth voters, this short book contains snippets from all of David Cameron's major speeches, translated into the 'Lolcats' dialect the youth can understand: 'We has is deep, dark cloud over econummy, an society, and teh whole plitical systum... Today evrywun cans see what a utter mess Labour and this Prime Minister haz made in de Bwitish ickonomy...we's scrap all dem central-impoze targits dey distort cwinical judgement an' make da NHS ansa 2 politicians. Is bad!'

Headers and Keepy-Up...

2009-04-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

...because I've not really been 'keeping up' with this blog in the last couple of weeks or so, but I have given it a new 'header'. Ha ha ha. I'm hilarious.

The new header has taken me so long to do that I wanted to stick it on here as an actual blog-post so people could come and marvel at it, leave some suitably awe-stricken comments and generally create a word-of-mouth interest which would snowball into some sort of international hero-worship of me and my fantastic header. But I decided that was maybe all a bit too needy and have instead done the next best thing: this ironic meta-post you're reading now in which I deprecate myself for my faux 'neediness' and attempt to simultaneously make a equally faux postmodern quip by referring to the act of failing to write a post which you, the reader, are reading. In drawing attention to the mechanics behind this post I have now, of course, created yet another pane of ironic self-awareness through which you, the reader, are now reading this post. And there, as you can see, I've established a pattern of clever-dick self-referentialism and you're no doubt expecting the subject of the next sentence to be the sentence which you, the reader, are currently reading. However, it is at this point that I draw yet another veil of ironic... oh, Jesus! Look, it's a monkey! He's holding a gun! A monkey with a gun! Monkeys and guns, eh? Can you believe it!

Easter Activities

2009-04-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Your Order

2009-04-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks for your order, mynameisnotreallyviv

Here are some recommendations for your next visit.

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats as performed by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats
Having recently decided that the enormous, steaming showbiz turd he left festering on the grave of TS Eliot is no longer colossal enough to match his planet-sized sense of self-importance, Lloyd Webber has come up with a new, 'modern' angle for his much-watched musical Cats The Musical. In an extravaganza production which various critics have described as 'truly senseless' and 'better than the original Cats, I guess,' Lloyd Webber literally stunned his audience by handing over the performance to some actual cats. Sir Andy's own personal collection of cats were wired into the back of a large piano specially for the production, each key on the keyboard linked to blocks of various materials. At the lighter end of the scale foam, some damp, folded-up newspaper, a plastic bag stuffed with some more plastic bags will strike the corresponding cats creating quieter, more restrained mewls. Whilst at the other end the heavier items - an illustrated encyclopedia, a boxing glove filled with some lead horseshoes, the scoop from an articulated Caterpillar digger - will strike down on the tethered moggies, providing louder, higher-pitched sounds. 'I always loved cats as a child,' explains Webber 'but now I hate them and this is a perfect way to get my revenge on them.'

Tupac Shakur - Off The Hook

Fans of the late Tupac finds will be thrilled to hear of yet another posthumous release. This record consists of all the answering machine messages Tupac ever left, both during calls to other people's phones and as those he left as his own various outgoing messages, all set to slick grooves, fresh beats and touchtone electro. Standout tracks include 'If You're Coming Over Bring Sultanas - I'm Gonna Me Some Make Carrot Cake', 'Did I Leave The Keys To My Nan's In Your Jacuzzi Room, G?', and the poignant 'Message To Myself: Don't Forget To Set The VCR To Tape Ghost Tonight.' Fellow undead careerists Notorious B.I.G, Jam Master Jay and that one out of TLC all drop crazy after the tone freestyle.

Shirley Bassey - Things Are Gonna Get Mass-ey!
It's what her fans have quite literally been crying out for: 'We want to hear Shirley Bassey performing the Catholic Mass!' That's what they all cried during her last tour (in many concerts forcing her offstage early), and now that's what they have. On this double disc set Dame Shirley performs the entire Roman Missal, accompanied by a brass-heavy forty-piece orchestra, numerous sexy 'pope' outfits tailored specially for Bassey, and musical guest apearances from showbiz Catholics Ann Widdecome, Richard Williamson and Tony Blair. An additional CD of Pope Benedict XVI performing the best loved songs of Bassey's greatest hits, Vir Of Disctinction, is also available, featuring hits such as 'Diamonds Are Forever' and 'I Who Have Nothing', all translated into eleventh century Latin, performed in a creepy dual-toned sing-song, and featuring Benedict in a single sexy 'pope' outfit tailored specially for him. 'I think we all know what Goldfinger's really all about,' he said. 'The man with the midas touch, I mean come on. And Big Spender. Who's the biggest spender of them all? It's obvious. It's, like, God, yeah?'

Bjork - Face Like A Brain
The first in a series of recordings by Bjork inspired by the cast of the Carry On films, this album, which is based on Sid James, focuses not on the alcoholism, gambling-addictions and crippling misery which blighted his personal life, but on the trademark 'filthy laugh', bawdy humour, cheeky chappy persona which made him such a much-loved comic actor. Standout tracks include 'Hyah Hyah Hyah', 'I Literally Died On Stage Last Night' and 'Only After One Thing, Sweetheart? Why, What's The Matter With The Other One?' 'I'm only doing the dead ones,' says Bjork in a bonus interview, also included on this disc, 'Jim Dale and Babs can fuck right off.'

Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath - Insane In The Hawk In The Memb-Rain (The BBC Slam)
A rare gem finally gets unleashed from the vaults of the BBC! Originally broadcast as part of the BBC's Third programme in the late 1950's, this recording, hosted by Isaiah Berlin, was intended to be a recording of celebrity couplet-loving couple Hughes and Plath reading separately from their own poetry. The tension, however, is palpable and it comes as little surprise when things spiral rapidly out of control, resulting in the first ever on-air bitch-slapping contest after Hughes mutters 'Doo doo doo, black bloody shoe - load of bollocks' under his breath. Plath responds with a string of insults about Hughes's mother in response to which Hughes parries back that these insults are, in fact, more appropriate to Plath's own mother. Things then become much more heated with Berlin, who begins to beatbox midway through the recording, doing little to restrain his guests.

Droid P1906413061FZ - The Best Of Beatles
A five disc-set in which Droid P1906413061FZ gets through the first half of 'A Day In the Life'. When questioned as to why he'd chosen to release this record at this point in his career, Droid responded by saying '01001001 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01101111 01101000 00100000 01100010 01101111 01111001 00101110 00100000'

Depeche Mode Guy - An Update

2009-03-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

For the purposes of ongoing research, due to being literally swamped with comments on my last post (numerous recounts estimate a grand total of three, one of which was posted by myself), I've spent yet another week watching this guy.

That's right, seven days hunched slack-faced in front of my computer, mindlessly pressing 'play' over and over, interrupted only to occasionally shuffle to the bedroom, kitchen or toilet. In this time I've slightly revised my previously expressed opinions of him. I'm less scared, confused and racked by super-strength cringe. And I'm more... I dunno, 'won over'.

To be honest, things have now got to the stage where I can't listen to regular Depeche Mode any more. Regular Depeche Mode simply won't do. It has to be Melbolofworlds. It's Melbolofworlds of nothing. I tried listening to Violator this morning. I ended up slapping the cd player, clawing feverishly at my walls in what could only be termed 'an addict's rage' and screaming 'It's not good enough! It's just not fucking good enough!' The same goes for all music, really. I can't put a cd on, listen to the radio or watch a video on YouTube without thinking something like 'I wish that Depeche Mode guy was singing this instead' (or, rather, not 'instead' but 'as well'). Anyway, one evening I found myself typing the following message on YouTube's messaging service. And, after I'd finished typing, reader, I pressed 'send':

"Hi,

I really like your videos. I wrote about them on my blog a couple of days ago - to be totally honest I was slightly unkind, basically calling you 'Taxi Driver The Musical'. But I don't want you to think I'm now being sarcastic or playing a trick or anything like that - I do genuinely like your videos - a friend of mine used the phrase 'life affirming' which I think is pretty accurate. Your enthusiasm for the music is very visible and extremely contagious. So please upload some more stuff soon if you get the chance. You could be the next YouTube sensation! Are you still taking requests? If so I'd like to recommend 'Steam' by Peter Gabriel...

Thanks and best wishes..."

To his everlasting credit, he replied. I won't paste in what he says (because I still don't want to, y'know, anger him), but his general gist is that his camera isn't working any more and he can't afford to get it fixed or replaced but if and when he does he'll post some new songs up and let me know. He's a nice chap. I'd made a friend online. A thousand huzzahs. Friendship, however, is short-lived. I promptly sent him a response telling him I'd gladly wire him some PayPal-cash if he needed any, or that I'd set up a JustGiving page if he needed more than I could offer. I didn't end my message by listing the sundry sexual favours I'd keenly provide him with but, given the main body of my disturbingly toadyish message, he could easily have read that as a subtext if he'd chosen to. He's yet to reply.

So, the lesson, if there's any kind of lesson to be had (there isn't), is this: just who is the real hammer-waving, nightmare-dweller loon (for I described him thus) in this set-up? Is it the man who posts videos online of himself singing some tunes, dancing about and having a laugh? Or is it the man who repeatedly watches his performances, initiates contact with him and then offers him large sums of money for more, as though he were some kind of performing monkey/whore/monkey in a whore outfit? I'd say the answer is pretty damn obvious.

(It's him.)

Melbolofwords

2009-03-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

I have a recurring nightmare in which I wake mysteriously in the middle of the night, get out of bed, pull the curtain back and see this chap standing in the rain beneath a lampost, soaked with rain and sniggering to his own private murderous thoughts. He's armed with the .44 Magnum of his voice, it's loaded with bullets forged from pure early 90's synth-rock and he's going to fire countless rounds into my ears.

In case you can't be arsed clicking on the link-thing above I'll summarise: it's a guy singing songs on YouTube. Yawn yawn yawn, I know, but this guy has a twist: he doesn't write any songs and he doesn't play any instruments. Technically I don't suppose you could actually call what he does 'singing' either. He's also such an unrelentingly scary individual that the milk in that brew you're currently drinking will curdle in terror. I literally guarantee it.

Initially he seems okay: he starts off kind of chatty, makes plenty of normal-person eye contact with you, the viewer, and, y'know, seems like the sort of decent enough smiley guy you'd chat with if you were, say, on a long-haul flight on your own and you were bored. Not that I'd advise engaging in conversation with anyone on any public (or public-ish) transport, the prospect of talking to complete strangers being so alarming to me that I'd probably pretend to be foreign, make a few 'no comprende' style mutterings in a made-up language and then sit in silence for the next eighteen hours.

Anyway, this guy. Just as you're wondering what exactly it is he's doing he starts singing. I don't mean in the usual boring YouTube acoustic-cover sense. He just presses play on an off-screen cd-player and starts singing along, usually to Depeche Mode, striking Jesus poses for the webcam and then amicably chit-chatting a little at the end of the track. Harmless enough. Far be it from me to stick the boot into the proverbial goolies of some guy who's posted a ton of footage of himself singing YouTube - the sheer prospect of which makes my own very real goolies wither in terror - but no sugar-plated mountain of politeness will disguise the fact that he's a truly terrible singer. Choose your poison: you can listen to him tremble in and out of key to It's No Good; watch him edge towards the screen, laughing to himself whilst crooning moodily along to The Church's Under The Milky Way; or experience his performance of the hitherto unperformable feat of making a U2 guff-epic slightly sound worse than the original version as he dramatically mangles his way through Two Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad. These are all uniformly cringe-inducing clips to witness, indeed to begin with it's a bit like witnessing a nightmare in which the teenage version of myself has been filmed rocking out in my bedroom by a camera secreted behind the mirror and then posted on one of the most popular websites in the world which I then sit down to watch. It's awful. Despite all this he seems to be having fun, most of the time, and the sheer number of tracks he's posted of himself 'singing' (all footnoted by a torrent of abusively bewildered comments) is a testament to his unshameability.

A word of advice though. Just watch one of the video clips. Two at the most. But leave it at that. Please. I'm not kidding. Watching his entire repertoire, as I have (repeat viewings at that), will leave you with a sense that you're watching someone who could be truly unhinged, kind of like Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver: his flat in the background is of an eerily constant tone of plain white dotted, here and there, with what look like repaired holes. Has he fixed up his flat for these videos? Are his walls usually lined with holes? Does this guy, when not filming himself singing along to his favourite cds, punch holes in the walls? I don't know. And then there's his clothes: always a pair of jeans and a t-shirt (again always white). Does he have other clothes? Are these his 'performance outfit'? Does he have a wardrobe full of identical jeans and white t-shirts? Are they all kept in impeccable order? Does he wear white because he likes the way they show up the blood-spatters? Again, I don't know. Every now and then he starts laughing to himself, as though you, the viewer, have just made a joke. And some of his clips aren't even songs, they're just confusing monologues which seem to reference complaints and comments no-one has made about home-made music videos he hasn't even done which seem to include some sort of staged on-screen suicide attempt. And I'm not even going to go into the cryptic 'dedication' song to 'one particular Katie' (he claims to know eight - by 'know' I assume he means 'killed with hammers'). Is all of this an extension of some kind of social thing he does in the real world? Are there more anti-performances, other clips which he's not yet posted? Are all these clips really trailers for a forthcoming mental-breakdown movie starring Christian Bale? And his name, Melbolofworlds, what the hell does that mean? I DON'T KNOW! But, one thing's for certain, keeping in mind these more distressing aspects of his YouTube existence, the fact that he's posted video clips of himself pacing around his bedroom, singing along to Phil Collins, visibly wracked with an inexpressible emotion takes on some truly disturbing new layers of meaning.

On the plus side he takes requests. My vote goes to, ooh I dunno, Inca Roads by Frank Zappa.

"Comic" "Relief"

2009-03-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

Comic Relief, eh? What sort of person would want to say anything nasty about Comic Relief? 'A soulless, android-brained monster,' I hear you say. 'That's who, and we'd rip the legs off this cold-hearted, terrifying creature and use them to beat it senseless with the bloody ends if he came anywhere near us.' Fair enough. Comic Relief makes loads of money for loads of charities. That's a good thing. Not only that, but it makes a concerted effort to explain where and how the money which gets raised will be spent. Also a good thing. A cavalcade of comedy personalities get together, ask you to donate some cash, and then perform to display their gratitude, and all without any pay. Yeah, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good thing too, as things go. Okay, everyone knows it gets pretty gooey, with its light entertainment stylings and endless Westlife-backed tragic interludes, but that's all fish-in-the-barrel detail. Comic Relief can do whatever utter shit it wants to because it's got the biggest cock in the cash-raising men's room.

Or rather, this is how I try to think of Comic Relief. But then I watched it. The whole thing - I actually watched the whole thing. And it was bad. Almost unforgivably bad. It was the televisual equivalent of being stuck in a lift with a schizophrenic office joker who keeps reeling off awful one-liners and then weeps while he shows you photos of his sick children and asks for some spare change. I feel bad saying this. Comic Relief is built upon the very best of intentions and results, but it's also a fetid bog of entertainment bum-sludge.

Things got off to a disappointing start before the actual night of hilarity itself kicked off. A bunch of celebs (hand picked, it would seem, due to my own personal severe aversion to them all) were sent up Kilimanjaro with a film crew. To my dismay not only did Gary Barlow fail to become trapped under some collapsed snow-boulder, thus turning the remainder of the show into footage of him slowly expiring, but also Ronan Keating did not find himself separated from the group and sport-hunted by crossbow-wielding mountain cannibals, and the remainder of the group did not turn on waddling knacker-sack Chris Moyles in a Lord-of-the-Flies-esque blood carnival, breaking open his head with stones, gorging themselves on the hot brainy contents and then dancing beneath mountain moonlight wearing his flayed skin as some kind of ceremonial robe for their new high-altitude-madness-induced religion. No, they all survived, made it to the top and then splashed out on a private jet to carry them home.

'Still,' I hear you bemoan 'surely this bitter pill would be sweetened by the night of comedy which awaited you, you miserable scum-dribbler'. Again, no. Most of Comic Relief was just bad as this pointless televised hike. Not awful or horrible or worthy of a comparison with, say, unnecessary anal surgery. Saturday night TV style host banter, audiences mindlessly clapping along to a girl-band yowl-along cover-massacre of a previously likeable tune, and more reminders that there was 'plenty of stuff coming up' than there was actual stuff to come up - there was lashings of these sorts of things. It settled into an 'easygoing entertainment hell' kind of groove: not the worst experience you've ever had, but there's always that creeping feeling that at any moment things are going to wildly escalate into some uncharted, cringe-heavy family TV twilight zone: Noel Edmonds might pop up, Gordon Brown might try and do a Blair, Jim Davidson might jog onscreen to more mindless applause, shouting 'Come on! Let's give some money for the shirtlifters in Wogland! They've got gay-plague, y'know!' Thankfully the farthest we sunk into Primetime Abyss was when Fern Britton, the Princess of the Daytime Darkness Vortex herself, took Davina McCall's place, alongside Alan Carr, who spent the entire night chanelling the innuendo-riddled soul of Frankie Howerd. But no, in general, the hosting aspect was okay: unfunny, bland, entirely predictable.

It was in the sketches themselves that things went off at a strange, occasionally nightmarish angle. This weirdness crept in right at the beginning, when Al Murray kicked things off with a bizarre, truncated skit about Simon Le Bon. The sketch, inexplicably loaded with a bunch of semi-celebs doing silent background cameos, involves Murray asking two long pub quiz questions before getting knocked out by a Simon Le Bon lookalike. And that's it. I've watched it about eight times now on the internet and I'm still not completely sure I know what's going on. After this I watched Armstrong and Miller join forces with Mitchell and Webb to stitch together some equally baffling sketches, thus cancelling out all memories of Robert Webb's Comic Relief Flashdance performance, the hilarious Yin to Moyles et al's Yang of unremitting pointlessness. Then, strangest and most terrifying of all, Little Britain roped in Robbie Williams for a sketch so freakish, so entirely without meaning, I assumed it was improvised according to some set of rules which remained undisclosed. David Walliams is a mother, Matt Lucas is her daughter and has a sleepover party with her friend, Williams, who is briefly possessed by Satan. And that's truly it. I didn't get it, but I'm willing to accept that as my problem, not the rest of the world: the witnessing audience laughed heartily at sketch, much like those whose laughter is recorded on episodes of Little Britain, all of them seemingly confusing impeccable delivery, sets and costumes for content, invention and wit.

To be fair to the whole Comic Relief enterprise (Friday night's show being a mere Night of the Long Knives in a much broader campaign of 'fun'), there were some good bits. Geoffrey Palmer, who I'm ashamed to say I'd assumed was dead, popped up to do his usual military official schtick, Ricky Gervais ratched his 'Ego Monster Gervais' character up a couple of notches. And nothing - you hear me, nothing! - can ruin the magic of watching Ronnie Corbett cackling manically whilst unzipping his face and then shucking his skin off. Even so, for some reason after about an hour it became impossible to tell whether or not whatever you were watching was actually funny at all. Maybe it was Moyles Contamination, maybe it was the intense video-clips-of-total-misery-and-despair-driven guilt systematically lowering my comedy-mojo standards with each depressing depiction of famine, abuse or illness.

The balance redressed itself slightly when James Corden and Matt Horne appeared: I split my sides. By which I mean I began self harming. I phoned up the number on the screen and paid vast sums of money in the hope that the two of them would agree to go away. When they said 'Funny for Money' I didn't realise they meant they'd only start being amusing when a cash-target was met. (Ironically, this is the level of humour displayed throughout the show).

At one point Simon Cowell popped up in one of the bitesize misery-vids from Africa, tenderly bemoaning the plight of the kids he met who spent their days on a mountain of Westerners' litter, 'scraping together a living in the company of pigs and vultures'. Obviously, like pretty much everyone else in the country, I screamed 'You can talk, you pop-junk prick!' at my screen. And then, to keep on-message just in case anyone was listening: 'You earn more than £50 million a year, Cowell! You give them some money, you smarmy cock-sniffer!' I then paused to think: I only hate Simon Cowell because I've been told to, really. He gives a lot of money to different charities and he lives in this country and pays its taxes, unlike other similarly-salaried types. He's not so bad. But then I though: Yeah, but he is a cock cheddar, isn't he?

This is what's called 'the Bono Effect' - an otherwise entirely worthwhile cause is made to seem pointless due to its being touted out by high-earning celebrities - (or if like me you're just enough of a fan of 'New Year's Day, it can be called 'the Geldof Effect'). Whatever genuine emotion there is to be had is baby-ized and heavily glazed with sugar-puke schmaltz. They give you a few slo-mo shots of a celebrity crying in a village, play some syruppy million-selling boy band, and then start waving their silk-gloved, bejeweled, gold-plated hands in your face for your cash: it all seems a bit wrong. It's this crassly-imagined plebby mindset that really annoys the living tits of me, I think. I realise I'm starting to sound a bit Melanie Phillips now, so I'll quietly mention that I did give money to Comic Relief - I really, genuinely did - and, in an effort to stave off the crippling first-world guilt in my regular day-to-day life, I even give money to non-Comic Relief charities. See, I'm a good person really, aren't I? Aren't I? Yeah? Really? Yeah?

Anyway, almost concurrently to this televised mirth-doldrums there was an epoch-making interview going on in America. Jon Stewart, who lots of people in England haven't heard of, talked with Jim Cramer, who pretty much no-one in England had heard of until this interview, about Wall Street. Sounds thrilling doesn't it? Ostensibly a discussion about how the host of a comedy show (Stewart) had allegedly mis-represented the displayed non-acumen of the host of a populist show about financial markets (Cramer), this interview slowly expanded into a truly gripping analysis of the weak-minded, rose-tinted media reporting that dominates in America, with Stewart using Cramer as a conduit through which to vent his and his nation's anger at the cavalier investors who've ruined the economy. It's deeply uncomfortable viewing, in a dramatic sense. Whereas watching Alan Carr gurning out 'looks like his Red Nose has slipped' style lines is merely uncomfortable in the 'Oh Christ I'm cringing so much I think I'm about to have a stroke' sense.

Oh no, I think I've written an opinion piece. To balance out the pseudy seriousness above and to reward whatever poor bugger's waded through this river of arse-vomit to get this far, here's some ideas for things which, I'm sure you'd agree, would make Comic Relief genuinely worth blobbing down in front of to watch.

The Sunday Night Project Does The Apprentice
In the time honoured Comic Relief tradition of jamming two unlikely shows together, Justin Lee Collins, Alan Carr and special celebrity guest host James Corden all vie for a place on Sir Alan Sugar's workforce. Being Comic Relief the tasks Sir Alan sets for them are, of course, fiendishly tricky, deeply humiliating and utterly hilarious, such as hitting each other with sticks until one of them starts crying; being told by Sir Alan 'Don't not not eat this carrier bag filled with turds and broken glass - well go on, don't not not do it!' and then being laughed at in angry disgust by all present, whatever the contestant's actions are; being sent out into the streets of London to give suck-jobs to toothless bottle-toting tramps whilst the camera-crew look on. In the end, after all the contestants are thoroughly exhausted with shame, it turns out to all have been a hysterical jape played on our three comedians by Sir Alan and they're all fired. By which I mean they're lined up, loaded into a cannon and shot point-blank into a rough brick wall. Watch their blood, skin and organ-matter spatter out the total amount raised to rapturous applause.

The Cast Of The Chris Moyles Show Do A Thunderbird Sketch
In which Moyles, Rachel, Aled, Comedy Dave and special celebrity guest James Corden awake in the middle of the night to find they've all somehow metmorphosised into human flesh puppets with veins pulled taut out of their arms, legs and neck, much like what happens in a scene from A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors. Towering above them, controlling their every agonizing move, and giggling dementedly, an enormous spectral Terry Wogan makes them walk into, hit and kiss one another before leading them all to the top of Broadcasting House where they are made to perform a little jig after which Giant Wogan snips the blood-strings and they all plummet to their doom. Watch as the resulting explosion of jawbones, teeth fragments and fingernails miraculously scatter together to spell out the total amount of cash raised. To rapturous applause.

Tearfully Docking With Horse Cocks Under The Watchful Eye Of A Sniper Whilst Begging For Mercy
Sort of speaks for itself. Starring James Corden.

Dear Customer

2009-03-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

Dear customer,

I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed with the level of customer service in your local branch of our bookseller chain outlets. So disappointed, in fact, that you felt it necessary to email our Head Office and describe the staff who work there as 'uninformed' about their trade, despite the fact that the specific employee you single out is probably about four times more educated than yourself. He even knows the correct way to spell 'disappointed', unlike you. But I think I can read between the lines and I have to say that I'm in complete agreement with you: these people are mere bottom-feeding shop-workers and shouldn't get too up themselves when dealing with the godlike royalty that is you, the customer. Don't they know there's a recession on! You're 100% correct - they should be grovelling about on their knees, licking the dirt from between your toes and be thoroughly grateful for such a privilege. So please rest assured that our priority from this day forward is organising whatever horrendously unfair punishment you feel this staff member deserves: you want his shoes? We'll give you his shoes. You want him to have his head shaved, his clothes taken off him, and all his fellow employees dance round him chanting insults? We'll supply the razors. You want him strung up by his knackers outside the shop entrance, his limbs pulled off and a sign reading 'bad bookseller' hung round his neck as a warning to any other potentially uppity minimum wage workers? You got it. Why? Because the happiness of you, the faceless customer, is far more important than any feelings of unfairness on the part of the staff who've been working for us for years, toiling about in our shops to sell the books we make money on. That's why. We'd literally be ecstatic to kiss your bum-hole clean if we thought you'd give us a smile and shiny penny for the trouble (by 'we' I mean the people who work in our shops, obviously). Anyway, please please tell us what exactly we can do to 'rectfiy' your 'disapointment', as you so beautifully phrased it in your daringly punctuation-free email.

That you feel 'cheated' (again, I'm quoting you) makes my brain ache with rage: to any average Joe it would look like you simply bought the wrong edition of a book, something which could easily have been sorted out by your going into the shop to swap what you'd bought for the correct edition. Not so. Sweet Jesus cock-tossing Christ, not so. The unimaginable injustice which you received in your local bookshop would put any sensible person in mind of souls whose suffering is of a similar magnitude: Terry Waite, Primo Levi, Nelson Mandela. Therefore we hereby invite you to return to the shop where you'll be allowed to repeatedly slap the perpetrator of this heinous outrage round the face, whilst photographers from the local press take pictures. The entire staff will then be beaten senseless with a lead cricket bat purchased with their own docked wages. You will then be free to carry out whatever further measures of punishment you feel are required and, after that, will be allowed a ten minute 'trolley dash' around the shop, gathering as many free books as you can carry. We'll then buy you a birthday cake, spend a full hour telling you how fantastic you are, and arrange for all our staff nationwide to have t-shirts with a picture of your face on them which they'll be forced to wear on pain of further lead cricket bat reprimands.

I hope this goes some way towards 'rectfiying' your 'disapointment'. If it's not enough, just say and I'll come bounding back to you, like an abused dog desperate for your approval, with some other ideas of what we can do to these scum-dribbling plebs. On the list already: lock them in a box filled with piss and rusted wire then give it a good shake; have them vomit into the trousers of a waiting child whilst the local press look on (they've said they're willing to hang around for this); get the words 'uninformed & disapointing' tattooed across all their foreheads, thus alerting the greater public to the ineptness of these bumbling wattles of bum-lard. It's the least we can do.

With deep, sweaty, balls-out adoration…

Piers Poncenby (Head Office)

Your Horoscopes #3 (Aquarius)

2009-03-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

Aquarius - Fizz! Plop! Splurt! Hear that? Sound like a bunch of affable, childlike noises, don't they? Do not be fooled, however. In reality, what you're hearing is the sound of pure, misery-pissing evil raking its long yellowing fingernails-of-fate down the blackboard that is your very soul. A dark secret from your past, one which you've been keeping nestled in the blackest crevice-hole of your heart, tethered there by rope fashioned from steely denial and rusty manacles forged from molten secret shame, will writhe itself loose and come staggering out into the daylight of the innocuous life you've built for yourself, waggling its grimy, tattered limb-stumps all over your nice clean kitchen counter-tops, belching its black fart-clouds of vomit-gas across your curtains, thwacking its sweaty, scaly member up and down your banister leaving big cock-shaped grease-marks for all to see. This is both a metaphor for what is going to happen and the literal reality. That's right: the hideous mutant twin brother who you've kept tied to the immersion heater in the loft will grow tired of the nightly bucketloads of leftovers-and-water slurry you've secretly been providing him with when the rest of your family are in bed, tired of the radio you keep up there constantly tuned to Radio 3 in attempt to 'civilize' the beast, and, most of all, tired of the hours of scalding pain being perpetually chained against a family-home's immersion heater involves. Maurice, for that is the name he has chosen for himself, will wriggle free and descend from his airless dust-tomb, rifle through your wardrobe to find something more suitable to wear than the Def Leppard t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, the humiliatingly giant nappy and the ludicrously varied selection of hats you gave him when you first locked him away all those years ago, and then appear - hunched, dribbling, but looking now rather dapper - in your living-room doorway whilst you're sitting with your family, sharing a battenberg, watching The Bill and maybe playing with the dog (that bit's somewhat cloudy - it could be a hairy pig you're playing with). A violent, scatological fray will then break out, your freakish double pursuing you around the room, tossing furniture against walls and puking bile down his front; you simultaneously attempting to make a heartfelt explanation-cum-confession to your wife and children whilst noisily soiling yourself in terror. Although your children will seem angry, unimaginably disturbed and sickened - not to mention even facially scarred by the Maurice-beast's acid barf-spray - your wife will appear more forgiving. She'll instruct your children, mid-rampage, to restrain your brother. They'll lash him to the piano stool by his eye-stalks, his sweat instantly dissolving the silk upholstery and the brocade manchette, his thrashing pincer-hands further ruining their innocent faces, and his intermittent vomiting now yielding only chunks of organ amid a black dribble of blood. Your wife will take off one of her shoes and proceed to batter Maurice repeatedly, occasionally shriek hoarsely to you and the kids to join in. You will all take off your shoes and take turns hitting Maurice with them until his head will begin to look like a limp and bruised flesh-flannel draped over a neck-stump. You'll all stop and look at one another, wild-eyed and breathless. You'll think: yes, yes! This ritual-esque group-murder we've committed together will, from now on, give us all a new bond, make us a stronger family unit: after this we can do anything! Later, when you've all managed to stop yourselves from cackling manically and, alternately, weeping and shivering inconsolably at what you've done, and you're all helping to dig Maurice's grave in the back garden, these feelings will give way to an intensely clarified sense of remorse, guilt and shame, all of which will become clarified even further when you look at your children, now so horribly deformed, both inside and out, that they resemble Maurice more than they ever will yourself. You'll think: who was the real monster here? Late that night, after everyone's talked things over a bit, agreed to keep the frenzied execution that went on a family secret, and had some calming fish and chips (you will also have mushy peas but will be unable to finish them due to their resemblance to your late twin), you'll creep out of bed, silently leave the house and begin walk the streets in search of solace. After much wandering, soul-searching and weeping you'll come to a small church on a street corner, its windows dimly lit by soft candlelight. You'll enter, make your way down the aisle and sit down in the confession box where you'll blurt out the whole story - the chaining-up, the years of deception, the grisly murder - at the end of which you'll feel much better. Your relief is short-lived, however, as the kindly priest whose outline you thought was nodding sagely behind the grille turns out to actually be a hideous mutant-creature himself who was not nodding at all but writhing about in mutant-ecstasy at the horrible things he's planning to do to you. You'll die, three days from now, when he tears through the thin lattice-wall, turns you, screaming for mercy, upside down to suck all your organs through your anus and then toys with your desiccated puppet-like corpse á la Weekend At Bernie's, making you repeatedly hit yourself in the face for hours on end. He'll then pull your head off and sprint off into the night to show it off to his other mutant-friends and use it to do a string of hilarious 'glove puppet' gags, after which he'll be declared 'King Chud'. In the morning your wife and kids will decide your disappearance should also be kept a family secret and will celebrate by going to McDonalds for apple pies, you complete bastard.

Getting a bit sick of these now, but more... soon... I guess...

Your Horoscopes #2

2009-02-24T15:54:00.000-08:00

Libra - Beware the apparent good-will of others, especially in the workplace. Willie Harrison - he seems nice enough, doesn't he? He gave you a Tic-Tac this morning and laughed at your impression of Rolf Harris even though it was completely rubbish. What a nice guy! Not that nice, my fine feathered friend. He's actually stealing pound coins from your coat pocket when you go to the toilet. He uses the money he accrues to buy the very Tic-Tacs he then offers you. And remember when you found all those damp tissues in your hood that one time? That was him. What about Angela Lewis? She likes you, maybe even has a bit of a crush on you. She's even been round to your house once. She must be okay. Wrong again. Her names for you are 'prick-stoat', 'smeg-gums' and 'dog-fister' . She was only round at your place as a dare to see how long she could stomach your halitosis-pit of an abode before running out the door barfing all over the place. Her boyfriend was even outside with a stop-watch. Both of them had a night of sweaty, animalistic sex later that night whilst laughing into each other's faces at how much of a loser they both thought you were. 'Okay, okay!' I hear you screech, 'What about Dave Pope? Seems okay, maybe a bit weird but basically a decent guy?' Wrong again, smeg-gums. Remember when he took a photo of you once when you were at work? You thought it was odd at the time - why would anyone want a photo of you sat at your desk, eating Malteasers with the sun in your eyes? - but he didn't explain himself and you forgot about it pretty quickly. You thought: he probably has a good enough reason for doing that. But that blurred picture of your squinty-eyed, chocolate-and-honeycomb-crammed face has been blown up to life-size proportions by Dave Pope at home. He's sellotaped it on top of a life-size photo of a naked lady on his wardrobe. He spends his evenings holding intense candlelit 'conversations' in the nude with this mock-up of a lady-you. Worst of all, he's hacked into the spreadsheets you're supposed to be showing in a presentation to the board on Tuesday. When you load up your Powerpoint slides, instead of presenting an Excel graph detailing your estimates for next year's like-for-like fiscal depreciation figures, you'll find yourself projecting crudely photoshopped images of yourself sucking off a pony whilst Dave Pope - or, more specifically, Dave Pope's head on a horse's body - stands watching in a nearby paddock. You will immediately challenge Pope and die, three days from now, when he corners you in the stationery cupboard and spends his lunch-hour hammering broken glass into your prostate. You final thought will be: 'This is not as painful as I would have imagined.' Nevertheless, it will obviously be very very painful.

Scorpio - The tension between you and a loved one will soon be resolved. After months of bad-tempered awkwardness between you and your wife, you will finally learn the truth when you return home from work early. Your wife will not be in the house as you expect her to be. Surprised, but not yet alarmed, you will turn on the television to see that ITV have resurrected Supermarket Sweep, replacing original host Dale Winton with Neil and Christine Hamilton both dressed in horn-adorned PVC gimp-nurse outfits, and altering the location from some Co-Op in Nottingham to a place called 'Herr Bushell's Dildo Emporium' in Tiger Bay. You watch in astonishment as the Hamiltons introduce your wife and a young man who's with her as contestants; in horror as they dash round the shelves, gathering a mountain of docking harnesses, anal beads, and ben wah balls in their trolley; and in nightmarish disbelief as they dramatically discard their collection of items, so caught up are they in the lust-inducing surroundings, and begin rutting feverishly at the checkout, goaded on by the Hamiltons and the clapping-along-to-the-music audience. In a state of shocked delirium you totter back out of your house, across the busy A road which your garden backs out onto, over the electrified train-lines at the corner, and out into the dark, wolves-ridden Moors. You've decided you're turning your back on our modern society. Civilization, you think, has entered its end-stages. Your horribly mangled relationship is merely a microcosm of this sad, undeniable truth. In this primitive, primordial landscape you will, you're certain, meet like-minded souls, intent on rebuilding humanity. Sadly, all you meet are a few intrepid Morlocks who flay your skin off with their mandibles, feast messily on your internal organs and drag your bones down to their underground lair to be used as tokens with which to barter with the Mole People. And all in three days time.

Sagittarius - Prepare to de-tune your sex-radio from 'Self FM' and get ready to set your brain-stick to 'lady-love'. At a party you will find yourself talking to a beautiful young woman. She seems a little out of your league but somehow you've managed to keep her just about interested. However, a brief lag in the conversation causes you to panic and, without knowing what you're saying, you tell her, in a hushed voice, that you're Bowie Simpipe, the world-renowned masked souspahone player whose true identity is one of the most well-kept and most sought-after secrets in the entire sousaphone-entertainment industry. High on the sense of almighty power this lie - and the subsequent tissue of further lies it engenders - leads you to ask her back to your flat. Panic again strikes when you arrive and realise that, although you have a sousaphone resting in the corner of your bedroom, its purpose is entirely decorative and you've not once attempted to play the thing. The girl, of course, is eager to hear some of Simpipe's univerally-recognized melodies. Not only this, she wants to see the iconic mask Simpipe is recognised by: a one-of-a-kind affair which can only be described as 'a horse trying to eat a whistle-shaped loaf of raisin-bread'. Your attempts at diluting her sense of impending wonder by saying things like 'I burned my main pumping-finger' and 'My lips aren't really the right kind of lips at the moment' will only work for so long. Eventually, you'll find yourself picking the sousaphone up, clamping your eyes shut and making the sort of 'musical' gestures you've seen the real Simpipe do when playing. Incredibly, you'll find not only is your sousaphone-playing credibly half-decent, it's actually amazing. You're playing the fucking thing! You're even better than that toss-skid Simpipe! Your playing is so fantastic, you notice, that the girl literally begins to swoon. Within minutes she's passed out on your carpet, her wine spilled across your Yomut rug, her hair trailing in the little bowl of Pringles you'd put out. To your dismay you learn, later when you're at the hospital, that the swooning wasn't due to your soul-tapping harmonies, but due to chronic asthma which your choice of heavily salted snack had exacerbated to the point of her semi-instant death. You'll be arrested, charged, found guilty of murder and, in a politically motivated sentence, three days from now, eaten alive by an armoured Hazel Blears, a trussed-up Jon Cruddas and a naked Hilary Benn. The one who manages to ingest the most of your body tissue will be declared 'emperor' and will be given a crown made from your veins.

More bafflement from the stars... and - who knows, right? - maybe even beyond... soon...

(...nearly done now...)

Your Horoscopes #1

2009-02-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

Aries - You've had a run of terrible luck recently, haven't you? Car trouble, house repairs, poorly cut fingernails which keep getting caught on your sweater. Worst of all has been the marital difficulties you and your heavily pregnant wife have been going through. Do not worry. All of these problems will come to an end when your wife unexpectedly gives birth to a large talking owl, thus providing you and your family with unimaginable wealth. Your days are passed in expensive restaurants, lavish hotel rooms, and highly exclusive nightclubs whilst the owl - whose personality seems to be some sort of winning combination of Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Michael Palin - makes countless appearances on chat shows. Tragedy is never far away, however, and you will die, three days from now, when you will make an ill-fated attempt to recreate the well-known 'falling through the bar' gag, made famous in the 'Yuppy Love' episode of Only Fools and Horse, in a bid to impress a waitress, skewering yourself through the eye with shards of a champagne flute. The owl will read at your funeral and pronounce your name incorrectly.

Taurus - 'Aargh! Oh my god! Aaargh!' That's you, isn't it? The churning routine of your day-to-day existence is causing you to feel trapped and panicky. But fear not. Adventure awaits! In an act of defiance against this grinding and lonely tedium which so marks your life you will decide to give yourself over to the sea. You join the commercial navy, set sail for the Indies and swiftly make your way up the ranks. Your crew love you, regularly toast their wassail in your honour and compose shanties in which you feature as a hero-figure. This will come to a sudden halt when a joke you make - about being 'shipshape' - creates a moment of silence so awkward that the crew are left with no alternative but to sling you into the hold, cut off your arms, legs and one of your buttocks, and take turns urinating on you, or, as they call it, 'hosing out the shame'. You will survive however, and you make a new life for yourself on dry land as a celebrity survivor. Sadly, this too comes to an end when you die in front of millions, three days from now, when Adrian Chiles allows guest co-presenter Sue Pollard to attempt her infamous 'William Tell trick' on you live on the One Show. She then performs a vigorous song and dance routine over the closing credits with your bleeding corpse in the foreground. No-one rings in to complain.

Gemini - Family, eh? They're a miserable bunch of thieving cretins, their resemblance to you non-existent, and the love and generosity you show them rarely reciprocated. They're usually best avoided. However, whilst walking your dog and musing on how incredibly unhappy you are you will see a minibus pass by in which both your parents are naked, cackling hysterically and smearing themselves with mincemeat. This will set off a chain of long-repressed memories in which you recall that your parents regularly behaved in this way and, until fairly recently, you considered it normal. Is this the key to all your worldly sufferings? You resolve that from now on you too will regularly and unashamedly slather yourself with pie-filling and, as a consequence, your life will be one of joy and liberation. Sadly it doesn't work and you will die, three days from now, from cardiac failure, alone, hunched at the bottom of your stairs, covered in the syrup from a can of pear-halves so cheap even your dog won't lick you clean. All of the paramedics will laugh when they find you and one of them will pose next to your glazed and withered corpse for a photograph which he will then post onto Facebook so that all the world can join in on the joke that is you.

Cancer - Hey, misery-balls! Don't you think it's time you turned that frown upside down? After a period of suicidal thoughts inducing money woes, things are finally about to begin to look up. A surprise meeting with ITV heads of production will result in you being commissioned to compose a new theme tune for an upcoming gameshow entitled 'Paul Ross's They Think It's All Over... There's Dogs On The Pitch!' the set-up for which is that Paul Ross referees a full length game of football but, after an hour, thirty excited dogs are let loose onto the pitch. Your glory will be short-lived however, and you'll die, three days from now, when you attend the filming of the gameshow and Quentin Letts, one of the celebrity contestants, has one of his characteristic hissy-strops and kicks an enormous doberman, sending it flailing angrily in your direction. The music you have thus far composed will be performed at your funeral on a Casio by Letts. The dog will also die during the fracas and more people will attend its funeral than yours.

Leo - Take a deep, beautiful breath of this rose-scented world, my friend - is that love is in the air? After a recent string of depressingly squalid and meaningless one-night stands you will take a stroll past the docks to the Tipsy Toad off-licence in order to buy some cheap rum with which you plan to dowse your raging self-loathing whilst spending the evening alone, eating some out-of-date Special K you got cheap from the corner shop, watching repeats of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, weeping, and tossing yourself raw. It will be just like any other weekday evening. Or will it? No, it will not. Fate will intervene and your plans will be disrupted when you find yourself set upon by a band of young tracksuited girls who surround you, demand your phone and, when you hand it over to them, then use it to make videos of themselves kicking you repeatedly in the groin and calling you 'a paedo gay'. This will go on for well over half an hour. Finally they'll grow bored and disperse, taking your phone and your rum with them. You trudge home. When you get there you find the footage of your assault is already a YouTube sensation. Depressed beyond belief, you find an abandoned multistorey car-park and hang yourself, three days from now, but not before taking your pants off and sticking a wedge of orange into your mouth in order to make your demise look, to whoever finds you and has to cut you down, less like the dismal end of a drab and disappointing existence it truly is and more some kind of fatal wanking mishap.

Virgo - Is it maybe time to go for that career change you've been thinking about? Yesterday someone stapled a crudely drawn picture of some breasts to your tie so that it hung in front of your chest, making them look like real breasts. You didn't even notice till three o'clock. You thought everyone was smiling at you because they liked you and thought you were a nice guy. But no, they were laughing at you. At your cartoon tits. And then today you had to call for help after you tried to change the toner ribbon on the fax machine and accidentally got the crotch of your trousers caught up in the sheet-feed, didn't you? Everyone came in to look at you and laugh. Tomorrow you will spill coffee down your shirt, making your nipple stick out visibly through the fabric. And you will hear a rumour, which has apparently been doing the rounds for months, that you have a gynaecological freakism, specifically one testicle beneath your penis and one above. Your nickname will be 'Burger Cock'. Things will culminate when you sign for a large consignment of office stationery which is being delivered and which then tumbles onto you, pinning you to the floor. Again you call for help, but people only come to laugh at you, stamp their heels into your one protruding hand, and to occasionally defecate joylessly between the gaps in the rubble of stationery which covers you. You pass away, about three days from now, probably from malnutrition and spinal injuries, but the coroner doesn't bother finding out for sure. At your funeral the eulogising minister accidentally refers to you as 'Burger Cock' and everyone laughs. Even your parents.

More enigmas of the cosmos to follow... soon...

25 Things You Don't Know About Me, Me, Me, Me (Not Myalgic Encephalomyelitis)

2009-02-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

1. I have to shave my palms three times a day, and the soles of my feet every fifteen minutes.

2. I was regional air-mandolin champion from 1989 through to 1992. In '93 I was disqualified when it came to light that I was using a real mandolin.

3. I was brought up being told on a daily basis that I had godlike powers (invisibility, omniscience, ability to fly, etc.) but was never instructed on how to use them. I still do not know whether I possess these powers or not.

4. I am totally unable to spell. In order to communicate effectively I have to either dictate or, as I'm currently doing, bash the keyboard at random and hope for the best.

5. When browsing the internet one night, I inadvertently found myself married to a 48 year old Illionois patio salesman named Roy Shipstone. I hastily turned my computer off, tried to forget about it and never told anyone. But the whole thing is legally binding, so keep it under your hat.

6. I tell people I'm a vegan just so they feel like inadequate hosts when I'm round at their houses. When at home I regularly gorge myself on large slabs of Vienetta sprinkled with bacon cubes.

7. I've only been arrested only once after I was caught rummaging through Dean Gaffney's recycling bins.

8. Due to some misinformation, I have a large tattoo of Dan Ackroyd's face on my back. Around the image reads: 'Dan Ackroyd 1952-2005'.

9. I've baked a life-size wholemeal effigy of myself every Thursday for the last three months. I leave the effigy in my back garden so I can watch birds peck away at me, thus giving me a broad idea of what I might look like when I get old, or if some acid-based facial mishap befalls me.

10. I have a crippling phobia of coupons.

11. One of my proudest achievements is a four hour reggae-style musical based on The Shining, with the setting changed from a hotel in Maine to an ice-rink in the Weimar Republic. It has yet to be performed. I sent the script and the score to Joe Pesci, who I had in mind for the lead whilst composing. His agent described my work as 'offensive', 'backward' and 'probably some kind of joke'.

12. As a child I was plagued by vivid nightmares about a figure known as 'Horsecake Plungehoof', a horse whose lips were made of cheesecake and whose feet were made of giant rubber suckers.

13. To keep warm I wear several layers of bubblewrap beneath my clothes. If you've heard the popping sound I emit when I approach, this accounts for at least some of it.

14. I'm ace at thumb-wars. Only last week I defeated my personal friend and the current reigning champion, Noam Chomsky, in a friendly.

15.I have to keep my bottom lip sucked in at all times. If I were to relax it, it would flop down to the middle of my chest and my lower teeth would quickly become painfully dry.

16. Up till the age of 24 I'd never seen snow and had refused to see rain.

17. I have a pet chimp named Horace. He cleans up after me, prepares my clothes in the morning and is currently in the process of learning how to use the hobs. To tease him I put lipstick round his mouth and chant 'Hail Horace, Queen of the hobs!' whilst stomping around him in circles. He hates that.

18. I'm the younger brother of nationally reviled millionaire Damien Hirst. Although we are not close I do have a napkin on which Damien drew a picture of me riding a giant crab.

19. I rarely have the use of both my hands due to having my right one cut off in a fencing mishap. I now have to carry it around in a little plastic pot, thus frequently depriving me of the use of my left hand.

20. As a child I was considered a prodigy after I scripted the pilot for short-lived soap, Albion Market. I also garnered praise for my adaptation of Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War, the three episodes of Press Gang I wrote, and the entire ten series of Minder, which I scripted in a single night and on which filming began in 1979, three years before I was born.

21. My biggest regret is the three Celtic-rap crossover albums I recorded with Tony Benn whilst we were signed to Island. They're awful.

22. Some of you may remember me from my carefree days as a student when, hilariously, I lived in a wheelie bin for a while, much like my hero at the time, Oscar the Grouch. What you may not be aware of is that unlike Oscar I emerged suffering from tetanus, pneumonia and chronic kyphosis.

23. My great-great-grandfather was the inventor of the dice or, as he named it, 'The Cube of Wonder'.

24. I was best man at the controversial wedding in which celebrity anti-Semite Mel Gibson, due to a slip of the tongue on the presiding minister's part, was accidentally married to a Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jet.

25. This is all completely true. I don't hate these things. And I never ever lie about anything.

(A repeat from Facebook)