Mulled whine: My bottom three xmas ads

I feel festive. Mercifully, all the preposterous 'Magick of the Holidays' adverts have by now been whipped offscreen, to be replaced with less pretend solstitial bonhomie, more 'Look, products. This way.' Mind you, it's been the same shit every year since I started paying attention and not just diving into the pile of presents with pine needle-scattering glee, so I'm hardly breaking new grounds in observation here. The following three adverts illustrated a new low in reindeer-piss addled copywriter hubris, at the same time half-arsed conceptually and yet wholly committed in their cynicism and stupid, aggressive greed.

In no order of importance... the perennial Coca-Cola ad. They do that one with breathless choral excitement, 'Holidays are coming... holidays are coming', the juggernauts of the Coke delivery fleet snaking swift and silent through the snow to mass joy from the populace. Incidentally, 'juggernaut' the word comes from India, where Coca-Cola has been driving their lorries over local communities, creating an ecological imbalance and becoming the target of sustained protests from rightly outraged and thirsty (but not for that muck) Indians... So the new ad has a focus on a return to the image they, fair enough, invented: The fat guy in the red suit. But in Santa's snowglobe of sylvan shop windows and gaslight, where brown people aren't inconvenienced, or even present, things are, like the beverage, on the surface a tonic but in actual fact deeply, disturbingly bad. A vast and monstrous looking Saint Nick is viewed at successive stages of a girl/woman/little consumer's life. Like some sinister fat paedo-Claus, clearly engaged in some sort of carbonated drink addiction grooming with the little girl who, over years, comes to like the fizzy black tooth-vexing swill so much she eventually offers her own child to the portly pederast of fizzy pop... Highly unsubtle, and unsuitable. A post-everything cocktail of nauseating thought flat as that three litre bottle in the cupboard that's been there since last xmas.

An attempt to do something different with a traditional figure, presumably an attempt to illustrate how they are the cutting edge high street couturiers that strut funkiest, Debenhams brought you Black Santa Dude. Sporting the merest flecks of grey in his beard and a snazzy red suit, the only thing shaking like a bowlful of jelly with this superfly gift-laying muthafucka is Mrs Mary Christmas's sweet, sweet ass. He cavorts through Claus Towers as a terrible mix of 'Santa Baby' oozes through the speakers, exhibiting his natural and festive rhythm before clambering onto a jet-sleigh and roaring off. As if this already trifle-spoiling concept could get any worse, it includes the injudicious use of the phrase 'DJ Santa on the wheels of steel', which is offensive in the same way as an extended aprés-sprout fart from a brother-in-law whose arse is at your head height because there's no room on the sofa. At some point, Debenhams gave this advert the okay, a misguided decision which made me shake my head all the way to the tills, hungover on Boxing Day and clutching a wad of Chrimble vouchers, mouthing along with Amy Winehouse's 'Rehab' [top ten!], to purchase a 70%-off-in-their-biggest-ever-half-price-sale new wallet.

Quite what Argos were thinking of when they cobbled together the cobblers of their toe-shattering [what happens when they keep curling] 'Once upon a time...' advert is a mystery that should perhaps never be revealed because the entire fabric of the universe might be rent asunder. 'Once upon a time,' it goes, 'a little boy had a christmas wish...' and that wish, manifested as a star, floats out above the rooftops,whereupon the boy's dad cunningly hops from the chimney tops, swings into the sky using other stars and astronomically implausible bodies - pausing only to get a jar of moonbeams for later, presumably - before returning with the wish in an inside pocket to 'take that wish to the place where wishes come true', which is revealed finally to be, crushingly, bathetically, Argos. Other physics-defying parents flock to the shop with captive wishes... Cut to ecstatic infant unwrapping present... Oh dear, where to even begin? In fact, just consider me exhaling dejectedly and stalking to the TV to stab the off button with an aggrieved forefinger.

We're used to businesses pretty much thrusting mistletoe over our collective head and puckering up, but these three, like the chiclet toothed speccy grease slick in a sleeveless v neck top nerd stereotype of Amercan movie legend, had us turning our face away to avoid his sexy sardines on toast breath.

Now it's all over, thank goodness, and after a week of surplus stock-touting ads shot for twenty pence in the sofa showroom with an excitable, possible ADHD-suffering, voiceover guy, we can look forward to a month of 'Hey! Fatty! Fatty fat fat! Whooo-EEE, you're looking porky...' and the new Gillian McKeith diet book, no doubt wth attendant disturbing focus on your waste as an index of health. Say! There goes Gill the Quack! '...Just a wood stick/ has McKeith, dear/and she pokes it/in your shite...' etc etc.

And a happy new year to all our readers.

Politics is merely the decoy of perception

http://www.minusequalsplus.org/blog/
I'm thinking what they're thinking.

if my colours all run dry

The news that humans plan to build a base on the moon is - as ever - a giant leap and a sickening lurch for my heart.

Part of me grew up in the certainty that we'd be in silver jumpsuits toting hoverboards - maybe that's 5000 miles east of where we [note extrapolative 3rd person] are - and responding to this other, kind of glib, BBC article, and being a fan of HHGTTG - h2G2, pah! - since first reading it at 10 years old [1985], I've never thought sci-fi was about future actualities but possibilities, or alternative realities, and in any case, as I've grown older and read more, more than that a reaction, as any writing is, to current actualities - but look... I'm writing this and then it's posted on the biggest message board we've ever constructed... cellphones, CPUs... microsurgery on my parents saved their lives... amazing, and a bit of a stroke of luck temporally and geographically speaking, I believe, well for me, anyway. Nailing virtual tracts to virtual doors, right place, right time...

But as Prince observed:

'A sister killed her baby cuz she couldn't afford 2 feed it
And yet we're sending people 2 the moon.'

Bah! What the fuck is going on?

...not you two though.

I was scurrying across town to attend to some optometrical business on my lunch just there - being a cubicle gopher has ruined my eyesight, official! - and up and down the escalators of the tube there were the usual little posters advertising shoes, finance, West End musicals, sexy underwear, etc. In fact in some of the more modish stations they have electronic screens, which sweep expensive looking graphics across the retina in a full spectrum dominant manner YOU CANNOT TURN AWAY FROM...

There were some examples from the recent Amnesty International campaign, where celebrities are photographed holding up signs saying 'Protect the Human'.

The two examples of placard carrying humanity at Chancery Lane: Russell Brand and Dom Joly.

Human Rights be damned - I don't give Amnesty £6.00 a month to protect those shitehawks.

Dominus in sanctum

I discovered there's a monastery on my street this week. This is particularly entertaining given that the street is two rows of terraced houses in very residential south east London. But there they are at number 69 - the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate Maria House "Our Lady Coredemptrix".

This revelation came about because there was, until last saturday morning, a huge metal filing cabinet inhabiting one of the cupboards in me and girlf's newly let flat. The landlord had arranged for it to be removed, the handyman who was supposed to be effecting this has a really advanced, almost mage-like concept of the term 'unhurried'... Anyway, eventually we said 'handyman' five times into the mirror and he appeared and the cabinet was duly moved... as far as the front garden.

It was a start. It sat there all day sunday, all day monday, and then on the third day, miraculously, it had gone. 'Good work handyman fella', I thought - erroneously as it turned out. For that very night there was a ring at the door and there was a bearded man in a long grey robe. I had just finished a leisurely second supper... sorry, I was drifting off into world of Tolkien there. But really though, it was a bearded man in a long grey cloak, fastened with a brooch, and he introduced himself by asking if we'd got the note about the filing cabinet.

Note..? Eventually finding the recycled envelope and scrabbling it open, I realised Fr George, who stood in front of me, had come to see if we minded that, as outlined in the neatly typed note, a group of monks from a few doors down had carted off the cabinet because they 'could use it.' I explained that it was the landlord's, and that he had purposes for it also. A slightly disconsolate Fr George departed into the night with a promise to return the furniture.

After he'd gone and I'd stopped giggling at the incongruity, I realised that I could do the Lord and the landlord's work in one - well, I was going to say 'fell swoop', but this would have to be more of a beatific swoop I suppose, in one go, anyway. I phoned the landlord and asked if he minded that the cabinet had been, ah, 'found' by some brothers in holy orders along the road, and he gave it all of two seconds' thought before saying 'Let them have it.' (Actually he said 'let them take it', which is an unfortunate qualifier as it does me out of at least a paragraph of comical retributional misunderstanding...)

So I scampered along to number 69 and had a nice chat with Fr George, during which I established that Fr could stand for Father or Friar, as he performs both functions, and also that he used to teach English before having a 'midlife crisis' - his words, imparted with a peculiar air of self-deprecation and self-awareness that here he was, a man in his fifties, running a monastery in a terraced house in Brockley, and, well, here he was - and that they were grateful for the now-legitimately-theirs filing cabinet.

In fact, he related, as soon as it had been placed in position in its new home, the drawers had ceased to open, which had caused some concern, on both a spiritual and practical level. 'Never mind,' I joshed glibly, 'it'll work fine now you know you're allowed it!' 'Oh, I know filing cabinets,' he rejoined seriously, 'and there was definitely something up here. But we have a brother who can work on it.'

So I went home with a head full of an appealing combination of tunes by The Chemical Brothers, images of men kneeling and praying over defunct office equipment, and the Keystone Cops scenario I had orginally wanted to enact before my conscience took over, of making them bring it all the way back down the street, right up to the door, and then telling them that actually they could keep it after all, watching them issue a weary sigh of acceptance before turning and trudging back, monks beneath the metal filing cabinet, cowls flapping, the sound of liturgical chants fading with their condensing breath into the cool night air.

Defiant To The Last Weeks' Chip Wrappers

[This is a week of consideration, no interweb and busy, busy work late.]

It was Bonfire Night in the UK: ‘Remember, remember the 5^th of November, gunpowder treason and plot… I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot…’ So we let off fireworks and perhaps burned effigies of Guido Fawkes, a terror suspect from the 17^th century, but mainly doing the whole early autumn leaves and lumber rite, ooh, ah, wasn’t that a lovely rocket? - baked potato? Mmm, thank you, getting a bit nippy out isn’t it? kind of thing… except it was all ruined this year by the news that we had an enforced new effigy for the bonfires, as Saddam Hussein, the Arab bogeyman we managed to catch, was Sentenced To Death By Hanging…

The ghoulish insistence on reiterating the method at every opportunity [he’d asked to be shot by military firing squad, so maybe it was all a bit of knife twisting, metaphorical, that not only are you for it, Sadders, but there’ll be a short drop at the end of a rope and probable ex-dictator big white underpants soiling, not the swift chest bared and last cigarette number that would probably make a bitching mural for martyrdom…] seemed designed to emphasise a display of power, ours. ‘Don’t fuck with us, puppet leaders…’ This assertion of control is a bit feeble, it harks back to the original anti-anti-war argument, ‘Should we leave him in power, then, do you want that?’ which was rubbish then and is even more rubbish now “We” have removed him from power and Iraq is, by any criterion, totally even more fucked.

He did some reprehensible things as a leader, but this is unsurprising, given that that’s what people handed the big stick do [c.f. every head of any state ever, really, c.f. esp. our own Premier, T Blair, whose reminder of the ‘total and barbaric brutality’ of Hussein’s regime entirely overlooks the matter of the fact of his own part in being responsible, according to
which source you go to, of at least as much brutality against Iraqis – either in direct action or by proliferating a situation in which various factions have apparently free rein to run amok, to use the tabloid parlance - as Saddam Hussein was…]

The media coverage also seemed an attempt at finality, ‘closure’, e.g. the potted history the news channels were all running a version of, going from his entry to power, through our support, the now famous Rumsfeld handshake with ‘Our bastard’, as someone said about someone, Hussein’s whole shabby history as a chemical weapon lobbing despot – and where did he get those from again? - to the inevitable ‘strutting on the beaches of Kuwait’ cod-Hitlerian equating nonsense, [and if, by the way, anyone has a copy of a Thingy pamphlet from 2003 with that pic from the Sun that they talk about in that last link, I'd be grateful, etc...] through the first Gulf war exercise in half-arsed military showing off, the full sordid tale of this amplified gangster [we at the controls, turning him up to 11 then leaping back clutching our ears theatrically to the feedback and doing a pantomime search for the plug] to his closing court room denunciations, now ‘Defiant To The Last’ (© Everyone In The World, Nov 2006), as if he was actually removed from the court room and strung from the gibbet the second the judge banged the gavel.

My overriding thought through all of this charade was simply, obviously, I cannot share this glee. I do not support the death penalty. It misses the point, that if it’s a crime to take a human life, taking another doesn’t establish parity. It diminishes our humanity, whatever we view as humanity, if we consider ourselves special enough to make laws sanctifying human life by prohibiting the taking of it and then have the taking of a human life as the sanction for doing so. It does not serve justice, it only emphasises our chimpish viciousness.

At least Blair, when harried, admitted he didn’t think SH should die... But getting up last Monday to the press reports – including the Metro, with its big picture of a noose on the front page, I fucking ask you, exercising the bounds of taste and engaging in some incomprehensible and irrelevant collective exorcism of a ghost of a monster people do not believe in, a monster which has perhaps always just been an abstract to we of the west far away from Abu Ghraib [a Saddamite stronghold of nastiness and butcher’s hooks before the Americans moved in and got into the Overlook Hotel styled bad juju]… made me feel proud to be part of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known. We swept out the ashes with smug grins.

By last Wednesday, it was chip wrappers, today as I post this, it’s been superseded with more casualties on all sides in Iraq, deaths in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, you name it, and it’s all a bit shit, people getting interrupted for no good reason other than we can’t get it together enough to enjoy the sheer stroke of luck that fetched us up here, 93 million miles from the sun, in a prime spot for looking into the cosmos and going ooh, ah, wasn’t that a lovely rocket? Piss.

Today's chip wrappers

Yesterday, TheLondonPaper [shit freebie rag with the ad-line 'We live London'... they not like prepositions, too, presumably...] had this intriguing headline:

BRUNEL UNI ‘BREEDING TERRORISTS’

What, like, in petri dishes? Test tubes? Those big tanks like in 'Star Wars II: Attack of The Clones'?

I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking worried.

relaying the avatarmac

I grew bored with the Nathan Barley aspects of the pic what was accompanying these burblings. Here's one that more accurately reflects my role in universal affairs - Mark from Battle of the Planets. Heh!

Other items: finally, a 'blog of note' that isn't total catpiss! And a similarly cartoon-buffered approach to reality:
http://adoptamicrobe.blogspot.com/

good, and informative, work...

The me pod

I preface this by noting that the inspiring article Oh no, not Steely Dan again [by which I mean suggestive rather than life-changing] from the Manchester Guardian's website [which, like the BBC's, is an example of an existing media node 'getting it so right, IMHO'] is almost completely objectionable in concept. That it is an 'edited extract' implies a number of scenarios, the principal one being me repeatedly swearing, banging on a table and using the words 'money', 'old' and 'rope' in quick succession, and subsidiary rants about there being no surprise that people are apparently queuing up to detonate themselves on mass transit devices when 'we' [the fair folk of the West] are so exercised by apparent patterns in our distractions. No wonder the planet's fucked - we're cortex deep in our own navels.

So having got that out of the way... well, if you're going to write, it has to be about something, obviously, and it's obviously sounding a note of pure writer envy that he's getting money for dilating on such matters when some of us have to engage in other industries to pay the rent... let us turn to digital music. A drunken conversation with sound engineers would tell you that digitising is the enemy of music, waves different, but I suggest you do your own research on that one, as I piss about with words and know little of such affairs. I flirt with techie stuff,but it's just flirting. I am, though, engaged in transferring a lot of my vinyl albums to the laptop for ease of making copies for friends, so I've become chums with WavePad to an extent... even I can see that 'Return of Django' loses masses of top and bottom, and the Arcola remix of Eric B & Rakim nearly killed my soundcard.

Music is often something that's 'going alongside' something else. I'm typing this with 'Live at Leeds' playing in the background on Winamp ['It really whips the Llama's ass,' they claim, and in the face of such blithely confident ungulate abuse, who am I to disagree? As Annie Lennox once almost observed], and while I'm digging it mightily [Substitute, one of the greatest things ever, has just started...] I wouldn't say I was listening to it, really: I'm writing this. [I am also one of those hapless fucks who can't pat their head and rub their stomach at the same time without getting fuddled.] You get the idea.

However, I don't have an mp3 player 'to go', and I don't have an iPod. A posh Walkman - I used to stride about happily listening to bootlegged gigs and copied albums [came to love Surfer Rosa/Come on pilgrim and Bossanova because they soundtracked a walk to work from the east end of Glasgow and back rather handily, for example,] but since I started cycling more I just fell out of the practice. You need to hear that lorry honking. Further, I suppose that I've become interested in the practice of investing a bit of ceremony in music - you know, listening to a record as an act in itself, rather than an accompaniment to a commute or blogging or whatever. If you habitually hear a tune when you're going to work, you will inevitably end up loathing it because of its Pavlovian associations. [Fact!] I hate James Blunt with a passion primarily because when I was once doing a month stint of temping in an almost brain-tamperingly nauseating big bank which shall remain nameless [Halibosis: Bad breath caused by bank-induced bile] , 'You're beautiful' was on the radio about five times a day, and the combination was almost brain-tamperingly nauseating. At the end of the video for 'wise men', he falls to the floor in a forest in flames, which suggests a philosophical canard along the lines of 'if James Blunt falls to the floor in a forest in flames, is it just Mark you can hear sniggering or are there others?'

Posh walkman though it may be, with trillion gig portability in a credit card sized device you can really shut the world off. There is something sinister about the iPod, from its Invasion of the Body Snatchers connoting name to the fact that it's another illustration of the people atomisation necessary in a capitalised society, and, further, an actual physical barrier/layer of insulation between people. Who is it for? Who needs 'up to a thousand albums' at their fingertips? Who even has a thousand albums? You don't like them all if you do. [Further fact!] It's an inducement to purchase more, or download if you're uninterested in copyright laws. There is a compelling argument that music should be live - our obsession with recording [writing included] stems from an attempt to frame emotions, to distil moments, to capture the intangible... why not enjoy the music of life, trains, people chattering, birds, wind in trees? Or, as Depeche Mode once actually noted: Enjoy the silence. ['Words are meaningless and forgettable' is my motto.]

That said, I have always sided with Bruce Springsteen's notion that 'We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school,' if at a slightly cautious distance. I certainly never learned about the Dreikaiserbund from a three minute record, for example. Tunes are good though. But I had them before 'iTunes', and concerted attempts to homogenise, compartmentalise music into a mass of product, where James Blunt has parity with Count Basie, say - and he doesn't, even - are not just wrong to me but indicative of a wider malaise, as noted earlier.

In the article I cited, Steven Levy notes 'a spooky just-rightness, even brilliance, that comes from great song juxtapositions', from the shuffle function. Whaaaaat?! You get great song juxtapositions from selecting which records sit by each other and deliberately playing them in a certain order. That's why musicians sequence their albums in thought out ways [usually]. If you allow randomness into your life, just accept it, don't be disturbed by it. Levy is veering into some cod-profound half-arsed po-mo metaphysics [whatever that little selection of hyphenated signifiers means], and his upcoming book promises to be as exciting and successful as the book Freakonomics he mentions. That, by the way, was non-random sarcasm: Freakonomics was absolute dogshit.

If you live in fear of hearing the same artist more than once in a couple of hours, then write a book about it, you're probably unhinged, or possessed. Look at his name: the frequency of the letters 'e' and 'v' has to mean something evil, devilish. Anyway, it's exercised me long enough. Sunday! I turn to the traditional Observer and the News of the Screws, speaking of evil, and fuck me, page 6, there's Fraser Nelson guest-writing the political column. He was editor at the Glasgow Uni Guardian when I was there the first time [1994]. Now he's the political editor for The Spectator, and making a name for himself on Fleet Street, as they say in the industry [or used to before News International frogmarched the industry to Wapping]. Good luck, Fraze, but I fear you have supped of Satan's icy ejaculate now. On which further note of scarcely masked seething writerly resentment, I bid you a fond adieu, as I retreat into the correctly sequenced 'Eastern Sounds' ['Snafu', indeed!] and pour another coffee with a loud exhalation of happily untainted by diabolic spunk Sunday contentment.

Vorsprung durch technik

We were on the train back from Brighton the other week. It was packed with people returning to London after a day out and the like. Our day out had been nice. The weather was warm and sunny, perhaps the end of the summer [as I type this, thunder rumbles outside and the rain drums on the skylights very soothingly].

I had bought small jars of quince jam and tapenade from BBC employees moonlighting as artisan small jar fillers behind a market stall in Brighton town centre. Tasty fusion food was consumed, several ales were downed with girlfriend's sister, her bloke and their growing v fast child [well, not that fast - he stuck to the milk...]

Back on the train we're ankle deep in Sunday Papers, sharing them with fellow train-goers. Opposite me is this guy Brooks Buford - it says 'Brooks Buford - straight outta rehab' on his T-shirt, and not being an MTVEurope watcher I have no idea that he's a rapper/presenter/whatever... Kind of a post-Vice Eminem, yah?

I'm tickled by the fact that he has a tattoo of Ludwig Van on one arm and Van Gogh on the other [I'm wearing a pair of Vans as well, but mine are trainers.] He also has 'Epiphania' tattooed on a forefinger, possibly in tribute to Peter André, which you can see in the pic below.














I noticed all this detail because as he was tooling about on his handheld gaming device, a new Nintendo DS, this younger looking guy who's standing up next to the doors leans over and says 'Are you playing Super Mario?' and the next thing I'm watching Vic...

...who is an Interactive Media Design student at Bournemouth Uni, trounce Brooks via Bluetooth. It's a transatlantic not face to face face off, and it's massively entertaining.

So Brooks gets whopped 2-0, then Vic had to get off the train with his nice girlfriend Vicki [also a student, at Bath]... He took time to point out to Brooks a gaming tip that if you grab the stars, you get further [although I could just be making that up in an attempt at establishing the hitherto elusive cultural significance analogy this little event suggested.]

Brooks seemed nice as well, and not nearly as surly as his web lair pics might suggest. He was affable in defeat - he just rolled with it. The quince jam is very tasty, by the way.

The sky is beginning to bruise...

It's one of those 'autumn is upon us' days.

The manager at work [slightly fous French gent] came into the office and remarked that it looks like the end of the world... rather oddly, I had, moments before, looked out of the window and wondered if I should expect strange beasts riding across the heavens. A none-more-black sky bulks over the heavy green of trees moping in the rain. A wildcat did howl...

A more suitable activity would be the consumption of toast in front of the Monday Matinée, a black & white number, perhaps involving Fred Astaire.

On which note, I found this antidote to meteorological gloom:


Stylin!

wonderful spam, lovely spam!

Fellow drones may recognise the following, or variants thereof:

"[***SPAM*** Score/Req: 3.0/1.5] Brand new Rock hard manhood, multiple explosions and several times more semen volume

Dear customer.
Achieve astounding results in bed with these products designed to make any man a winnerEnhanced male power and unlimited prowess with your girl The best products for the winning guys

Have more success with women and impress them with your power and stamina in bed"

Not what I want to read at 9.10 am when my palate is Kalaharified by a preceding evening in the pub. I want to be awash with tea, not manfat.

However. The tone of this type of mail is worryingly untidy - 'multiple explosions'! 'several times more semen volume'! The language obviously stems [heh] from the upended yoghurt pot school of pornography, in which visually arresting but unrealistically copious amounts of ejaculate is to be found besmearing faces, butocks, chests, feet... I am reminded of the punchline to one of my favourite jokes, 'Then I wipe my dick on the curtains and she hits the fucking roof.'

This email seems to encourage behaviour that only a launderette could condone. 'Achieve astounding results in bed', I ask you. Good news for detergent manufacturers!
Note to self: weave brilliant journalistic exposé of collusion between big Pharma and website spammers. Eat pie. Take paracetamol. Delete email.

No, seriously, you fucking tube.

Tube being a slangese word for idiot, space cadet...

A slight return on an earlier piece about animal abuse [Horse Feathers].

Today's news:

Turkey Twizzlers Secret Recipe Revealed

Of Mice and Fuckwits

I mean, the first one is pretty deranged, but when you think about why we have so many animals cooped up in the first place, it leads one down a dietary/moral path that I discuss at greater length in the Horse Feathers post.

This second one is particularly unpleasant in concept. I mean, the other one wasn't posted online... 'youtube' is good for a lot of stuff, new progs, hard to get TV excerpts, mash-up video, genius home made films, ads, etc, etc. But... perhaps there needs to be a Dogme style manifesto [subject to the usual collective Wiki-tweaking, naturally] appended to the site that emphasises the illusory and distantiating nature of film, the importance of artistry and that just recording real stuff is not inherently valuable, no matter how grotesque. [Repeated attempts to find the mouse vid have proved elusive, so bear with me if my outrage in this regard is a response to a spoof...]

To return to the film theory bit... I refer to the 'plastic bag at the World Trade Centre' section in American Beauty, which is so very banal, not in the least bit as philosophically resonant as either the film-maker or meta-film maker thinks, and, to boot, emblematic of everything wrong with 'Western Culture' ['I saw some rubbish and just filmed it rather than cleaning up the mess.'] that it just makes me want to, I dunno, thwack poultry with rage. [Not a euphemism, although it would probably not be as soul-destroying to watch if I were to film me 'choking the chicken', as it were, and put it on youtube... well, a moot point.]

DO NOT INVOLVE THE BEASTS IN YOUR SELF-LOATHING!

At least with Jackass, Dirty Sanchez and the like it's people acting/catharting with themselves.

Crocked

Boo! Steve Irwin - brilliant and mad as hats Australian naturalist - has died. A stingray got him, in what was clearly a contract killing funded by irritated aquatic reptiles.
Ah well - as he used to say, 'It's harsh, but that's nature's way.'

The Wicker Man: Evil, Evil, EVILLLLLL

I am quite exercised about this, and anyone who's seen the original version of the film will surely be in accord: whatever do the assorted makers, backers and promoters of the new version of The Wicker Man think they're doing?

Exhibit A:
Early trailer posters for the movie - UK versions - featuring the burning Wicker Man icon and the phrase 'Evil is waiting.' I stirred uncomfortably in my quotidien wandering.

Exhibit B:
Brand new release date adverts: 'Evil has arrived'. Right.

In short: No.
At length: The Wicker Man is an intriguing meditation on the antagonism of beliefs, the conflict of different cultural and spiritual methods and practices and how one man's truth is another's fairy tale, or comparator, if you want a more scientific sounding word, and a word used in the film by the schoolteacher. It reveals an 'ideological abyss', as the wordy post-grads at Metaphilm suggest. It's simply a great movie, one that handles enduring themes and questions with a mixture of amateurishness, enthusiasm, good consideration and a conviction in the absence of answers, merely an acknowledgment of continuum with/without humans. And the soundtrack's great as well.

What it certainly doesn't do is make your mind up for you as to where you should place the acts of the actors on the moral swing-o-meter. Unless the remakers have just abandoned their film and the posters are a caveat, in which case 'Pointless remake' would be a better phrase for the posters than 'Evil'... Wikipedia's entry on the film: The white eyed child on the US poster signifies what exactly? [pick a reading, codified indoctrino-zombie girl, I shudder to think, it's so tedious] Apparently, making the leader of the cult a woman gives the film a 'feminist slant', and look at this nonsense: "Cage's character is not a virgin like the protagonist from the original film, as it was thought that the idea of an adult virgin in modern American society was too farfetched. Instead, Cage's character has an allergy to bees and has to deal with attacks by killer bees." Delicious. 'Evil', for fuck's sake. Neil LaBute probably believes in 'Post-feminism' as well, the film-tampering wanker. Gah, I say, gah!

New shirt

Just thought I'd try a different look... as soon as I get HTML sussed, I'm going to knock through here, get some windows put in, convert the loft...

'looking Islamism in the eye'

This neat phrase from Nick Cohen the Observer this sunday encapsulates a lot of recent comment in Britain. By 'neat' I imply well-chosen for purpose and also tidy, as in rug-sweeping occlusion. The connotation is that we, the rational scientifically-argued secular west/Observer readers [conflation], must confront 'Islamism', over its apparent unwillingness to accept responsibility for the actions of certain sections of the 'Islamic community'. This is not the time, runs the subtext of Cohen [overtly textual in The Sun, Daily Mail, etc,] to indulge in 'hand-wringing, sentimentalism, etc etc'. We live in a 'very real' climate of fear of people using 'modern technology' to fight a classically dirty terror war. [Has John Reid been reading John Gray?]

Cohen doesn't quite revisit the sentiment 'hang on, it's mostly young Muslims that are setting off all the bombs, isn't it? So don't look at us,' but it's implied. In his brief, loose and ill-considered diatribe he sets up the straw man of writer/former diplomat Craig Murray to further an implied argument that blanket dismisses and totally ignores dissenting positions, the idea that any collection of infomation which contradicts the centrally held line is a 'conspiracy theory', and the further idea that somehow there are no grounds on which Britain/the west can be seen to be at all culpable: it's 'the terrorists' and terrorists alone.

I join the dots in my own eye... Writing personally - and noting the position of relative freedom which allows it - I find it abhorrent that we [citizens of the UK] are dandering along in a society where it is acceptable to play a game of mirrors, endlessly shifting blame and responsibilities and denying that we may have done anything. As if people who engage or attempt to engage in 'terror' do not believe they have a justification for their actions as compelling as we might believe we do for ours. 'Well, we don't go blowing up innocent people.' Yes, yes we do, yes we fucking do. We also make and sell arms around the world and then complain it's a dangerous place. We belligerently and - laughably, crudely - attempt to engineer control of specific strategic energy resources, while cursing gridlock and pollution on a daily basis, and pretend it's about 'democracy'. And then we act surprised when a comparably bellicose response is enacted. This is not rational, this is stupid.

Humans can only take responsibility for their own actions. Anything else is oppression. This, by the by, is true of any religion or system of government, not just the ones that hang 16 year olds for 'crimes against chastity'. So when John Reid says 'people don't get it', that we're under threat, it's imperative to say, 'No, Dr Reid, thank you, I do in fact get it. 'Terrorism' is not the exclusive preserve of one religious or secular system. It stands on a simple and universal premise of brute subjugation of other people by people. Telling people what to think, using violence or the threat of violence. Chimp behaviour. Thank you.'

We're lucky people in the west. We've grown up largely not knowing what oppression really means, or what being hungry means. Well, I have, and I can only speak for me. My good fortune - thus far - is not a source of shame, neither does it absolve me of responsibility for actions taken in my [citizen of the UK] name. I can, however, let it be known that I am entirely unhappy about such actions, and intend not to stop carping until we start to be a little more linked in our thinking and acting. This may begin with the creation of media that informs us of the right to not feel afraid, of media that does not try to stifle debate outside certain rigidly defined parameters, and it may continue as we utilise whatever methods we can to display a little less self-loathing and get out among the universe and enjoy it. This is not a theory, it's a call to action.

GAH, it makes me cross!

This is from the film Waking Life:

'The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies. I’m sick of it, and I’m not going to take a bite out of it! Do you got me? Resistance is not futile. We’re gonna win this thing. Humankind is too good! We’re not a bunch of underachievers! We’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna be human beings! We’re gonna get fired up about the real things, the things that matter: creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit! Well that’s it! That’s all I got to say! It’s in your court.'

Dalliance with dwarves

Fan-fucking-tastic and drily reported news story from the BBC [my favourite font of knowledge], about a Phillipine judge, Florentino Floro who was [defrocked? derobed? debenched? It matters not, he is clearly demented] given the gavel for consorting with imaginary little people.

The dwarves - who the judge names as Armand, Luis and Angel - are understood to be appealing. [Insert hilarious punchline to obvious play on 'appealing' which evades me momentarily.]

Heh! Dwarves...

the war on sense continues

Britain has issued a stark warning that Europe faces a 'very real threat' from terrorism. This is a considerable escalation from the previous level of threat, which was 'moderately real', but still some way away from an 'absolutely real threat', which observers note would be pretty realistic.

Said Home Secretary John Reid: 'We believe that issuing this emphasised reality check should shake some people from their complacency, particularly victims of state and non-state terror everywhere who just want to get on with their lives and wish that ideologues - who also, conveniently, possess all the weapons - would just mellow out a bit because it's not like anyone else never had an idea they liked a lot or anything, into acknowledging that when we say 'real', we don't just mean real or a bit real but hyperbolically real. ' [He didn't really say this.]

'Under previous governments the reality level of terror threat fluctuated between 'actually' and 'properly' real, but of course the methods of terrorists have changed in the 21st century. Mere acknowledgment of the reality of a threat is no longer enough. This kind of terror is so much more terrifying, differs so radically from all previous forms of terror - let us not conflate the actions of Al-Qaeda or its afffiliates with those of the IRA, PLO, Irgun or Baader-Meinhof or their affiliates in the last century, for example - that we have been led to the current unequivocacy with regard to the exact reality of the threat.' [Or this.]

'Neither let us pander to those who would question the reality of the threat. This threat is real.
Totally, utterly, really very real.' Reid responded that he refused to countenance 'weaselly quisling word twisting' arguments, such as the notion that threats themselves are abstractions.

He preferred, he said only to 'deal with very reality. The reality of Britain and America's foreign policy, including 12 years of continual bombardment of Iraq, while admittedly real, is not very real in comparison with bombings carried out for spurious reasons which are clearly not real. So it's totally not our fault, and anyone who suggests that we might all be to blame, and should just stop fighting for five minutes before the species wipes itself out in a mass intransigence incident, is playing into the hands of the terrorists.' [He didnt say this either, more's the fucking pity.]

I mean, really, though.

I don't think I can handle this

Thankfully, Beyoncé Knowles has been enjoying a creative surge.

Her ahead-of-schedule new album which is: 'appropriately entitled B-Day.'

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Is that B-Day as in Bidet or Buh-day?

I depend on B.

More from our volcano correspondent

Now this is what science should be used for. Lava guided melodies!

The researchers involved hope to use similar vulco-musical passages to predict eruptions in other volcanoes. BUT - what if one of the volcanoes is all Wagner orchestral drama and another is 'Rrrrright! Now... haahahahahaaa... Iiiii am an anti-CHRIST!' [et cetera]? Would Etna be a sell-out? 'It's done nothing since Pompeii...'


'I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died...
if i'd never loved I never would have cried...' [I am a rock...]

It might be possible to stretch this music/volcanoes conflation a bit too much, but what if - gah! - they all just sound a bit like Kasabian?

Brrrrrr - that'd be a conflagration you definitely don't want to hear.

Mayon, East of Manila

From the 'ongoing awe at the natural world' folder:

Mount Mayon in the Phillipines could undergo a 'major eruption' in conjunction with the full moon today, scientists conjecture. Bad news if you're nearby, I thought... read on, read on...

'The volcano has been spewing lava and flaming rocks the size of cars in a quiet but steady eruption since last month.'

QUIET BUT STEADY! 'Flaming rocks the size of cars'!!! I am actually speechless. What on earth constitutes 'a major eruption' to a vulcanologist?


Probably this.

Orange sort of rhymes with outrage, but not much.

'I have just been so incensed by an advert that I ran all the way upstairs to get my laptop so I could splutter my absolute affront at the Orange Animal Tariffs Advert... via the internet.'

I yelp injury at my housemate. But really, though! The advert begins with aerial shots of people, lots of people, groovy beach kind of people, all human racing up and down in the sun, airborn voiceover swoops in smoothly, 'From a distance, people all look the same...' but it's not Bette Midler or Cliff Richard- thanks God! - it's the Orange Four Types of Animal Tariffs Advert Voiceover Man, a distant cousin of that annoying Magners Cider Voiceover Guy - you know, the pint of baileys & coffee bloke who is currently under contract with Magners Cider from Ireland to RUIN as many pop 60s beat classics [like The Zombies 'Time of the season'] as he can by TALKING OVER THEM in an ACTUALLY DEEPLY UNREASSURING Lovable Oirish Rogue brogue about how Magners are all about taking Time, Time Dedicated ToALRIGHTTHESONG'SFINISHEDNOW - who also thinks that adopting the bass baritone baby where you been gravel is the most compelling approach if you're trying to convince people that, hey, y'know, this isn't... it's not selling, it's lifestyle choice provision. Okay?

NO. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I wasn't even talking about Magners. The Orange Four Types of Balloon Animal Tariffs Advert continues. The Voice notes that 'When you get up close, everyone's different.' Following which socio-biological bombshell, the Orange Voice proclaims 'That's why we've brought out four new tariffs...' and then it all degenerates into meaningless babble, beach huts aglow with warm Orange firelight and the sickly green underlit chins of people texting their mates in the hut opposite, more balloon creatures randomly inflated and totemised, Tomcat, Budgie, Goldfish, Dog, I DON'T KNOW, IT'S RUBBISH.

Move back, back to the sudden deflation from 'everyone is different', which is somewhere around 6.5 billion, depending where you look, to 'four tariffs'. [!!! They might as well have called them black, white, brown and yellow.] Move beyond the somewhat tawdry fake Club Tropicana white trouserthon 'I'm A Celebrity Love Island, Get These Bastards Off Me' palm tree beach hut kind of imagery, weaving through the nonsensical Harry Potter/Boarding School 'you get assigned an animal, Badger, Rattie, Mole and Toad, and then you're in that House forever' whimsy, via a tedious torchlit parade of family of humanity virtual chat room bogus sense of community/revolution buzzmeme shite. What is left? The offer, the offer.

Four balloon animals. Is that it? We are clearly far beyond the potential problems of a lack of impact of, or essential respect for, a campaign predicated on the surely distressing idea that there are people who are coming to terms with their need for a fixed-term mobile phone contract and may conceivably require the help of some balloon animal types, to fetishise by way of a deflection from the mundane and financially inescapable mechanics of the actual network deal, one of a handful of uncomplicated, yet inextricable, schemata. This is an advert that shows Orange not only accepts these potential areas of objection but has moved on to the next stage, which is 'And these are the four balloon animals.' Thanks for that. But only four?

FOUR types for 6.5 BILLION people. Pah! You need at least 12 - ask any astrologer. I'm all for keeping it simple, but it would have been amuch better advert. Those two that are in the Orange cinema ones, 'Errrr, Badger, Catfish, Weasel, Mongoose, Otter, Badger,' 'You've had him,' 'Oh piss, er, Badger, Catfish, Weasel, Mongoose, Otter, Starling... Chimpanzee, Elephant... Tiger, Piranha, Woodworm and, er, er, Gerbil.' 'What do you get with Woodworm?' 'Um, tell-tale little round holes. And infinity texts.'

Which, you have to admit, is pretty daft. By the time I got to the Wind In The Willows bit I was all blown out anyway. I'm pay as you go with Orange. It's not like I'm oppressed or anything. [Housemate passes ice cream. Orange logo appears in corner of blog.]

Further activities:

Why not make up your own four Animal Fetish Tariffs?

Mine would be Penguin, Cat, Hound and Chicken.

Noanoa: Meerkat, Badger, Squirrel, Donkey

Tamara: Cat, Hedgehog, Wolf, Beaver

Or read about the Royal Family's network problems... Haw haw! 'Ermine, Swan, Hind, Unicorn.'

on days like these...

Bit of an idle comics reading and snacking day. I have abandoned the self-imposition of 'doing some stuff for work' on a sunday for a small variety of religious, economical, psycho- and physiological well-being reasons.

So! What's been next to the brunch plate? Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry's The Authority: Kev book as borrowed from Brixton Library - use it or lose it! As expected, funny as fuck and lightly didactic. In the flurry of new tabs that followed, ended up in the basement archives of TV Cream, funny as fuck and lightly didactic [theme], and reminiscing with an 'Ah! Oink...' as I scrolled through the Words and Pictures section. They are also right about Bananaman.

[Does despicable little self-satisfied dance to the coffee pot, humming. Dee de dee... yes, yes, the West is best...] Fortune favours the fortunate, obviously. Moral torpor aside, I dab a crumb of pie from my cheeks with a napkin and note that I love the way Ennis uses ideas as target practice for trigger happy impatients in his strips. Boom! Another idiocy bites the dust. Foollowing the library jaunt and a trip to the now defunct comic shop near Leicester Square, been reading Will Eisner, Life's a Bitch [Roberta Gregory collection], The Filth and Fritz the Cat, again. Frustrations and obsessions inked into a soggy pulp. Ace! [There could be a lengthy and preposterously pompous justificatory digression here on where and why this absolute admiration for comics, particularly, as a creative genre, possibly using the term V-effekt, however I will condense it for the sake of brevity to:] Comics rule.

and so it dragged endlessly on and on

As the people of the middle east continue to hurl insults and munitions at each other, it's good to see the rest of the planet taking swift action to bring us to a point which is nearer a preliminary stage in the initial part of the process of beginning to create a draft framework for the structure by which negotiations around really starting to make a breakthrough in getting all the involved parties to agree to some first principles of what might constitute grounds on which we may develop some areas of accord with regard to considering a scenario whereby a ceasefire might take place.

Apocalypto 2: It Gets Worse

Mel Gibson has admitted to 'making anti-Semitic remarks' while being arrested.

Fucking brilliant! I await with eager anticipation the headline 'Gibson admits to fifteen counts of pederasty with diasabled Palestinian orphans'. Then we'd really see it all go Apocalypto.

'Yeah mate, so drunk...Apocalypto.'

Having fallen off the wagon then my bike last night, my self-loathing and sore jaw is mitigated somewhat by the illustrious company I keep.

You're drunk. Step away from the vehicle. That includes bikes, you gash-chinned lush. It's unseemly.

Rain on the way, at last. London swelters, the parks are like scrubby deserts with trees and little oases of flowers, which it is permitted to water. No wonder there's wild-eyed crazed with thirst bunches of hydrophobes lurching about the streets. Times are tense. There's no need to amplify.

Horse Feathers

First off, sorry about the fonts in the previous post. It was supposed to be a moderate level rant, not ALL SHOUTING from about half way. Blogspot not doing what I wanted: as in typo/ blography, so in global human interaction. Ho hum.

So: Last few days, there was a flurry in the sports pages over a jockey, Paul O'Neill, who was thrown by his apparently troublesome horse, CityAffair, after a race [at the start of which he [O'Neill] was reprimanded for whip use]. The jockey responded by appearing to headbutt the horse. He got caught on camera, stewards' enquiry, apologia, possible ban, etc.

There's this undertow of humour to the episode that's irresistible. I mean, jockeys - they're not big lads and lasses. And there he is, O'Neill perhaps thinking 'Stitch that, you awkward bugger' and dropping the nut on City Affair. City whickers menacingly. '"Whoa" yourself, little fella! Take it easy! You were hitting my arse with a stick! DO YOU WANT SOME? I'LL KILL HIM! I'LL KILL HIM!' and two other horses pile in, a hoof round each foreleg, pulling him back. 'Leave it, Citz - he's not worth it,' a warning shoe held up to keep away the furious little fellow, hopping with rage in his dinky, sparkly costume, a cross red-faced pixie shaking his fist. Two mounted police arrive and one of the horses says 'Evening all, what's going on here then?'...

Et cetera. I don't draw so well, but if I saw that animated I'd about piss myself laughing, proper wiping away of tears. Humans can be so preposterous such a lot of the time. And herewith the proof: The news from the RSPCA is that actually, no, we are being proper bastards to the animals, with a sizeable increase in deliberate, or at least careless, cruelty to animals, by people. [I find it hard to talk about 'animal cruelty' without thinking of the time I watched this cat I knew take two hours to play with, kill and eat a rabbit - one Easter Sunday, no, really! - and dolphins are psychos, and killer whales with their seals and so on and so on... Plus I do eat some animals... Hmmm... ]

Anyway, abuse, cruelty, the wide catalogue of mistreatment meted out by humans on, well, everying else... not feeding animals, keeping them locked up, using violence on them, and this includes a headbutt of a racehorse... Yes, yes - it's a ludicrous scenario in some ways, comical, but actually, there's the wee guy in a prominent sporting role with beasts, resorting to violence on the beasts, the daft sod. It highlights the wider issue, I suppose.

Also just been at an Old Blue Mark Thomas reading/interaction, interesting and wordy, for his new book, As used on the famous Nelson Mandela, interesting and wordy, about the arms trade, arms traders and accountability, weapons development... [Taser firing land mines?! No, really, and go here for the excellent suggestion that these are designed to 'protect non-combatants'...] Couple that to the RSPCA horse's mouth and away we go again on the aversive reactionary gallop from homo sapiens's unpleasantnesses, Swiftly does it. The horror of self and community generated by the continuing amplification of all narratives, shrinking globe and so on and on.

So, excuse me, please, for a quick moment, while I sneak another peek through the Cartoon Network/Norman Thelwell filter at O'Neill windmilling his arms, flailing blows, connecting only with air as City Affair holds him at leg's length, a hoof planted derisively in the middle of the jockey's hat, pushing the peak down over his face and hooting with near helpless horsey laughter, tears springing from the eyes.

People of Earth: GIVE IT A FUCKING REST.

O Lebanon, O Israel. O hapless and absent Anglo-American culture mine.

I was going to write a well-reasoned critique, all balanced historical research and culturally sensitive theory in conjunction with neatly phrased rhetoric and insightful commentary.

What I actually want to say is GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

PUT THE FUCKING ROCKS DOWN FOR A MINUTE!

AND YOU! GIVING THEM THE ROCKS AND GOING 'WHAT?' YES, YOU! STOPPIT!

SILENCE! - SILENCE, I SAY!

Thousands of years on the planet as a species and still fucking trying to kill each other.
Is that it? Swinging jawbones at our age? WE ARE RULERS OF THE WORLD.

It won't get any more overlordy than this - indeed, it's pretty much downhill from here, unless we start developing gills or spacewings presto pissing pronto.

Now can we all just GET SOME SORT OF GRIP, for fuck's sake?

GAH!

Peter Tatchell Misreads Sun Pro-Gay Sex Orgy Item

In what proved to be a tempestuous spat of considerable brevity, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal 'got Rooney sent off' during the 2006 World Cup. Rooney had extricated himself from two tenacious man-markers, and his final foot-setting was either intended for balance or to get the opponent in the nuts - perhaps a touch of both, just one of those things.

The initial tone of the media response, reflecting the group disappointment, seemed to be full of hate, bile and in The Sun in particular - according to one note samba band Peter Tatchell - homophobia. Yet it became clear, as the news emerged that the young lads had put their tempers behind them and swapped conciliatory texts, that there was, in the events and the reporting of the events, indeed, the whole of the World Cup tourney, an undercurrent - nay, roaring overcurrent - of enthusiastically encouraged, extremely gay, very dirty man love more torrid because of its occlusion than anything from the more overt works of Tom of Finland or Pat Califia.

A close reading of the Sun's "offending" page, from top to well-slicked bottom, ilustrates the hands of masters. The banner at the top in the print version was: 'line up to lash the rat', a phrase dripping with associations, allusions. A line-up, gang-bang, 'lash the rat' also appears to be a masturbation euphemism, which given the page's pin-up potential and its proximity to the peaks of page 3 was clearly an incitement to priapismic pulling. There is also the idea of corporal punishment for the pretty young boy who is considered dirty, verminous... lashing with its suggestion of knots, the British naval tradition - 'One in the eye' like Admiral Nelson, whose own 'column' towers over the centre of London - a tradition which, as Winston Churchill once remarked, was naught but 'Rum, sodomy and the lash'.

The phallic tones continue. The headline is underlined by a dart bigger than the actual dart board. Coupled with the military fetishes suggested in the preceding words, we are clearly embarking on a dangerous s&m fantasia with suggestions of uniformed men exacting humiliating revenge. Portugal's small population producing a team capable of beating the better paid and resourced English squad is an affront, the contemporary trope of disproportionate response dictates the unleashing of missiles to 'give Ronaldo one in the eye...' The dart clearly also represents the penis, with the chiselled oval of the flight suggesting both dynamism and a bulbous techno-scrotum of war... We are BETTER, BIGGER, HARDER than Portugal.

The 'Portuguese nancy boy' Ronaldo is the'world's biggest winker', a specifically English wordplay joke, which yet also suggests the other perennial News International favourite topic of cruising men identifying themselves with a brief flutter of the eyelid. Vada that omi-paloni. Ronaldo's eye is the bullseye, the 'bull's eye' connoting associated rural virility, Pamplonic danger... And again the collision, the coupling, of technology with organism. The target with its radiating filaments is overtly a stylised wire and rubber facsimile of the anus. For numerologists and da Vinci code acrostic enthusiasts: the numbers 9, 12,5,20,1,18 and 4, arrayed around the winker's head in a halo, add up to 69.

There is the fact that the 'nancy boy', the Portuguese mince-o-war, his pouty, smirking insolence repellant, got away with it. These sordid, sordid practices succeed. The overall tone of the piece leads one ineluctably to the Carravagian image of Cristiano Ronaldo as the kneeling recipient of a healthy English six gun salute in the bukkake mode.

The trophy is the phallus in excelcis, like Pele's forearm holding a grapefruit. The reaction of the eventual winners, Italy, was supremely fetishistic, an admixture of lingam worship and Roman Catholic ritual, all stooping to kiss the cup, to caress, to lay hands upon it, to revere the trophy-cock. The bitter seeds of frustration crust on our lips. Here's what we could have won, says The Sun, wisting: It should have been us...



Tatchell just isn't trying hard enough!

The Way We Live Today

So, I was surfing about trying to find the appropriate links for an article in the Metro [scum free paper made by the same Nazis that sneeze out Daily Mail etc]. Doesn't matter what, the moment's gone. Anyway, their 'latest metrobloggers' links led me on a sorry five minutes of lunch hour infuriation. Check out this moany cunt.

This blog is one of the principle reasons I shied away from joining in ['entering the blogosphere', dear sweet mysteries of the universe you fucking what?] for so long. It's just so boring, isn't it? 'Check my massively privileged life, and how stupid and frustrating everything else is by comparison. Those pesky beggars! Tennis on TV, what's that all about?! I smoke weed me...'

I try, I really do, to make my intemperate rants at least leavened by a sprinkling of self-awareness, even discomfort, that this is really the best response I can manage.

'DJ Quarry', what's your beef with 'northerners'? Who are, in any case, a semi-mythic breed invented by 'Londoners', fucking hateful also semi-mythical geographically sneery people who think the sun shines out of their arse-city. YOU LIVE IN A TOILET. And more to the point, it's a toilet with a miliion miles of antiquated plumbing. People come here for the money then fuck off home. Every single day. Because it does atrocious farts and then pushes your fucking head under the covers.

Furthermore, lads mags should be the subject of legislation, because they're shit.

My Nightmare

One day, one of the cave dwellers slips free of their chains, haltingly makes their way, blinking, to the mouth of the cave, then stumbles back to report that the shadow on the wall is indeed that of Vernon Kay.

Giant Ass Police Sniper

New cartoon series, 'Assy McGee'. Completely brilliant... but, no, really, seriously, is this a spoof or not? Someone got money for THIRTEEN episodes of this? Really? A GIANT ASS ROGUE VIGILANTE COP SNIPER?!?!?! [voice getting higher and higher with incredulity...]

No, probably not. The internet is a tissue of lies and distractions. Look, a sleepy baby cat. Now get back to work, fuckheads. Money never sleeps.

World Cup: A few preliminary points of irritation...

World Cup! Football excitement. A few preliminary points of irritation...

1. Soccercentric advertising. Beverage companies in particular really like the 'crowd holding up bits of card to form a picture' image - Bud[weiser made by Anheuser-Busch] and Coke in particular in particular. The idea of mass-participation is obviously going to give an corporate enterprise a stiffy, so couple that with actual mass participation imagery... and you have a recipe for CGI-drenched fakery, on every level. NO ONE WHO LIKES BEER LIKES BUD, IT'S PISS. And I like a soft drink, but I don't regard it as a communal rite. Supporters: there for the football, and a bit thirsty. There's nothing else to buy, and you're not allowed to take your own bottles into the stadium. So don't crow about this triumph of informed and enthusiastic consumerism, because it isn't one, it's a triumph of strategic sponsorship arrangement and the illusion of choice.

Further to this: adverts like the Honda 'Impossible Dream' one, which I watched with jaw hanging last night. Ok, I'm English-speaking, English-born British, living in London - I want to see England do well. There was, however, something particularly irritating about Honda's long-winded absurdist take on this - a moustachioed Anglo-type [possible elder brother of the 118 twins] races in various modes of conveyance, all in Eng-er-land team colours, while singing 'The Impossible Dream' - crashing over a waterfall to emerge in an England-coloured hot air balloon, rising through the mist.

Honda. That bastion of aspirant Anglitude. Well, if there's going to be a cynicism pissing contest, they started it. 'Hot air', 'impossibility'... the tropes of the advert represent absolute insincerity, ambiguously phrased mockery of everything, a waste of money. EVERYONE is doing it, I single Honda out for ire due to the elaborate and entirely misplaced triumphalism of their adverts. Hate something, change something, hate something change something FOOT THROUGH THE TELLYYYY!!! [Extended breaking glass FX followed by blissful silence] No, I can still hear the sounds of gridlock and a slowly asphyxiating planet... oh, this is the real world, isn't it? No flying cartoon engines here. Still, they support England! ENG-ER-LAND! That's better.

2. Commentators losing the plot.
Wayne Rooney as football's eternal youth, a young scruff in from the park perenially clamouring for a kick about. Last night it seemed like the pundits were queuing up to have a tug onto the acne-pitted digestive biscuit that is 'Wayne Rooney' - the talismanic figurehead, the carrier of a nation's dreams, the fotballer's footballer... the sulky-faced cunt.

HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH! AND he's not a tousle-haired, cap-askew, ruddy-cheeked schoolboy, you slavering perverts. He's 20 years old and a multi-millionaire.

If - IF - England are lucky, they have a potential ambassador for Viagra in thirty years' time. Thank fuck Theo Walcott's not played yet, or we wouldn't be able to see the pitch for all the tissues discarded from the commentary box.



I'm honestly not that annoyed. The multiple refractions and representations of Popworld [which Soccerland is one mighty nation of] seem so numerous, and yet they all fit into one shrinking white dot in the middle of my screen with such ease!

Thanks Be To Bill

Thanks indeed be to Bill. It must be pretty obvious to anyone reading this [post, blog] that the late/early Bill Hicks has been an influence on the writer - well, not so much an influence as pretty much a constant feature in the life of for about the last 15 years... yes, in an influential way but also in an antithetical way... Articles and critques which centre on speculations about a Bill Hicks of the Now seem a bit pointless. His work can be criticised. However, he remains unable to update his philosophies to encompass theoretical trends and modes of thought of the years since his death for a pretty conclusive reason.

Anyway, he's not a leader, that was one of his points, isn't it? For me, extrapolation was always what it was about... and I suppose the last few posts have been proper Randy Pan the Goat Boy...

Heh! What can one say... look abashed... gah! There's no outrunning the goat sometimes. And essentially I'm able at this point in the morning to put it down to the whole of modern western culture being seen as the flight from astral and physical gnosis by religion... [exhales, passes] - what started that one off? Oh, the Tuesday of the Beast, that was it. So conjoin cosmological background, smut, universal awe and frustration at the posturing required... and that I have been currently reading the Bill Hicks - Agent of Evolution biograph by Kevin Booth, which is pretty good and makes nice "man for a'that and a' that" reading.

And outside the sun beams down, the skies are blue, a bird sings at my window, and it's the weekend. So why am I sat in typing this shit again?

[sound of computer closing down, door slamming, sandals shuffling samba-style to the park]

Science vs Faith: The 'debate' continues

So in the Metro today there was report on the latest edict from the Pontifical Council in the Vatican, which said " 'Never before has human procreation, and therefore the family, which is its natural place, been so threatened as in today's culture.' " It blames feminism, same-sex unions, IVF, the use of contraception and abortion. [The edict, not the Metro report.]

Contrast this opinion with these figures from the Earthtrends website, United Nations Population Division, and the US Census bureau, via Infoplease.com [I heart the interweb]:

Population of Earth 1950: 2,556,000,053
Population of Earth 1930: 4, 32,602,000
Population of Earth 2005: 6,453,628,000

The bra-burning faggots running the abortion clinics have got to be stopped! We've only multiplied the population of the planet by 39.6% in just over fifty years! THIS THREAT TO PROCREATION IS EVIDENT TO ALL BUT THE HEATHENS BLINDED BY REASON!

FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

'We're a virus with shoes, ok? That's all we are.'

I'm coming back... I will return... [Beastmania 2]

from the Revelation of St Mark the Peripatetically Enthused

4,xi: And o thankfully did the 6th of the 6th 2006 diminish, taking with it lots of quasi-religious beast-larks.

4,xii: Which was a small bird which did have colossal boots its tiny legs appended thereunto and though it would take off in flight these boots would cause the playful little thing to crash to the ground crushing the people flat thereby.

4,xiii: And with it did 06.06.06, 6th June 2006, June 6 2006 and other even less numeralogicalistically significant combinations thereof ['Tuesday'] take documentaries about the remake of The Omen, explanations of how 'www' is '666' - look you verily unto this contentious and to me thoroughly plausible alternate explanation of 'who the beast "really" is', which did remind me of the contextually contingent nature of words, words, my favourite thing [apart from food, sex, trees, cats, larks, etc].

4,xiv:And with it did depart all the Da Vinci Code Hysteria and tremulous fingering for understanding or distraction in an apparently indifferent cosmos, which gladfully did fade back to a mumbling as of devouts with their face an inch from a wall or floor or a copy of the Metro or the computer monitor as of lunch breaks, for they knew that time was short.

beastmania

Thanks to a confluence of the western calendar and the number six, everyone seems to be talking superstitious bollocks today.

A close reading of the biblical text reveals the number of the magic mushrooms taken by St John on Patmos to be approximately 6.66 dried grammes... Through a glass, very darkly, etc.

More on the beast when I've done at work... proof we're in the endtimes, it's the hottest day of the year and here I am in the basement slaving. Gah!

Your emotions...

I was going to write an extended self-directed diatribe consisting of hair-shredding despair at my feeble and reactionary statements. Reacting against the worlds that intrude so rudely into mine day by day.

Then I remembered that Jello Biafra and the dead kennedys had already formulated this:

You're so boring boring boring
Always tape machine recording
You're so boring boring boring
I've heard all this before
I've heard all this before
I've heard all this before
Your emotions make you a monster
Your emotions make you a monster
Your emotions make you a monster
Your emotions make you a monster

and felt much better.

If 'popular culture' wants to dance round the pile of shiny coins, if we want to parse our lives out with distractive media and obfuscatory rhetoric of scientific progress that in fact deludes us further into believing we're the arbiters of a totalised reality that we're not, even,THAT'S ALL OK. But I'm bored, bored, bored shitless with it. My only saving grace is that I'm not a fiend or monster, to use the Sun argot. I understand a bit of cookery, I love my girlfriend...

...and words and concepts, tropes, memes, hopes & dreams seep about, mixing, melding, melismatically extrapolating from my brain like the fucking big sparking sensation sponge it is. Ready to drip back onto the drained canvas arcing all Dali foreshortened. And balls to you if you think this is indulgent shit - that is the point. Language is reductive but also expansive. Campfire stories, chants, sparks from aboriginal fires saving astronauts in The Right Stuff. fanciful human representations spanning more dimensions than we currently believe proven.

My uncanny x-man power could be beams of words, scratchety lines of script arcing from my fingertips to beat back the bad bastards of Babylon and keep the landing strip clear for the UFOs.

CAN YOU HURRY UP PLEASE ALL YOU E.B.E.s? I'm on my last set of knees here...

this post brought to you by bank holiday hangover, x-men 3, Aliens - why they are here by Bryan Appleyard and an enduring belief in the enduring possibility of enduring evolution in a chaotic universe. Proving we exist by saying stuff and writing it down so we can later reflect and say, look we were thinking about this shit. Passed the time, eh? [etc]

football and women

Like some hapless fuckwit character in 'Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please' [note for people who don't watch British shit-coms inexplicably enjoying series after series despite toe-curling lack of humour: TPOLAAPOCP is about young professionals, their lives and loves. It's arse. In fact, that TPOLAAPOCP initialism is an accurate onomatopoeic representation of a robust stool impacting with the water in the toilet beneath the straining defecator, the closest and most unpleasant correlative I can think of for the show] I trekked across the UK to witness Leeds Utd FC get inexplicably tonked 3-0 by Watford [actually quite explicable, they wanted it and we didn't turn up[and actually while i'm heaping disdain on BBC product by way of deflective ranting, Chris Moyles, 'cuddly' motormouth DJ and Leeds fan failed to turn up to work this morning, the workshy lardbucket. I made it in, porky, make a fucking effort, for Christ's sake.]] on sunday, a scant 24 hours after being dumped by my girlfriend.

As David Hume once noted in a letter to Rousseau: 'Fucking rat's cocks.'

Still eh? You've got to laugh. I came to work [I edit transcripts of things for people] and a government employee, in the context of an open meeting on London's impending drought crisis, actually said 'Water is the lifeblood of life.' Unlucky in love and football I may have been this weekend, but there always remain some consolations.

The criiime isssss life.... the ssssentence isssss DEATH!

Judge Death



Tony Blair







spot the difference comp #2


Well, I don't know if anyone else feels an uneasy sense of impending DEAD PLANET POLICE STATE when articles like this, detailing a Leader's plans to deliver 'speedy, simple summary justice' appear... populist rhetoric always a sign of impending dead political career.

'He tells new Home Secretary John Reid he wants to see whether new laws are needed to tackle the issue of courts using human rights laws to over-rule the government. ' Yes, new boy, make some new ones up! I want to see a new one forbidding politicians. Not from doing anything, I just want shot of them completely. Bah!

So what is 'hard to beat', exactly?

Hard-Fi article in the Grauniad 'film and music' section, The Hard-copy version of which I just endured in the gentlemen's reading room on a quick five minute comfort break at work, on a friday where the arguments for a mandatory four day week seem more compelling than ever.

Working for a cash machine indeed. Alex Petridish talks about them being 'social realists', 'like' Kaiser Chiefs etc. Just as 'the communists' [sweeping collectivisation] then used 'socialist realism' as the only 'valid' mode of art, what we actually see now as a dominant and approved mode is 'capitalist realism', whereby the notion of questioning that we are engaged in a hamster wheel pursuit of a more comfortable wheel is removed in favour of grinning acquiescence to a grinding monotony, a celebration of our enslavement to The Money. And now their posters are everywhere I go, billboards calling them The Band of This Or Any Possible Future Lifetime, must-have DVD footage of a couple of the Gig of This Or Any Age... hmmm.

Spot the difference competition:

Ian Brown, Stone Roses, at Spike Island: 'The time is now, do it now.'
Richard Archer, Hard-Fi, in Manchester: 'It's a Sunday night! Back to work tomorrow!'

Well, cheers, you cunt. For making everything a little bit harder to beat. By adding to this school of corporate approved weekend release, egomaniacal fools like Hard-Fi crush while locked in a doomed pose of uplift. They are a statue of a dictator. Distractive twats who 'want a Mercedes'. And here I am further validating it. Well, if 'western culture' is a stand-up comic, I am an angry heckler and I want my fucking money back.

Digit Al

Little Britain comic Matt Lucas is starring in a £200m campaign to publicise the switch to digital TV.


Look, I'm just back off holiday and have yet to gather my thoughts properly. But if this is already the single most annoying concept in the world, can you possibly imagine what levels of discomfort it's likely to provide in seven years' - SEVEN YEARS' - time? I don't want to get all biblical here - my coat is rather shabby and unnecessary in the clammy heat of London town today - but I see seven years of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And which ad company got the money for this ten seconds of cigarette break inspirational idea?

'Hmmm... I've got it! Digit Al. We'll have Matt Lucas do the voice.'
'You're a genius!'
'Twenty bubillion pounds please.'

Mank Wolfenstein's Weekend News Digest

Heh! This news item about a recalcitrant feline had the best headline...'Therapy and kittens fail to move trapped New York cat'. Someone at the BBC enjoying their job - dig that hip satire on those voguish modes, baby!

Tabloid & TeletextPopworld communique of the week had to be 'OH MY GOD! Preston and Chantelle to wed'. Oh my god! No, i'm actually on my knees imploring here. My god stands next to your god which is a building which is on fire, as Talking Heads once nearly suggested.

Stop telling me about these people for the sweet, sweet love of all that's pure and good and right. The new Posh & Becks, or perhaps our very own Pammy & Tommy Lee, Peter Andre & Katie Price renewing their vows in some sure to become nationally feted annual celebration, vernal equinoxe ... alongside suggestive spring is in the air heteropolitan achiever couple template, Just the two of us, Vernon Kaye & Tess Daly, their very names dripping with connotations of vigorous and enthusiastically frequent hormonal secretions. It's all just so... unseemly. :-/

couplings and recouplings subplot of megapixellated i-podtainment lingering century of the self amplified chav Austen doubtless masks sinister agenda to encourage breeding in docile prole population... ah, wrong forum.

Now this - robot football, yes!- is much more like it.

GOD OF WAR: MY DRUGS HELL

'I just can't be arsed' says former earth-render.

SPAAAAZZY! Spazzy spazzy spaz spaz spaz

Tiger Woods has been forced into making an apology for using the word 'spaz' cazually.

Cerebral Palsy is an inconvenient condition to have. Spaz is a derisive and offensive term. One of those sentences is factually accurate.

SCOPE forbid anyone from using the term 'spaz'. SCOPE used to be called the Spastics Society. But not any more. Now they've rebranded. SO NO ONE CAN USE THE WORD, OR ITS DERIVATIVES, EVER. IN ANY CONTEXT. Let that be a lesson to everyone.

Next time you fuck up a putt, remember to say 'Goodness! I played that shot like a CP sufferer. Who's not very good at putting.'

And next time you say something you wish you hadn't, why not say 'Oops, what a Tiger!'?

That'll show the insensitive cunt.

" It's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."

Kong my whopper

I wish to commend Burger King for one of the most tightly knotted pieces of intertextual marketing it has ever been my privilege to witness. "Kong my Whopper". I know, without breaking stride as I sweep into the eaterie, that this means an outlandish amount of meat, in a bun. Whopper is already pretty big - whopping, even. And now they're offering to Kong - confer Giant Ape status upon - it. Well this super ape inna babylon couldn't be more pleased.

However, fake advertising awards aside - why does everything have to be spruced up slightly to make it seem more complex than it is? BECAUSE IT'S SHIT! This is why Burger King and the like have undone their decent Kong My Whopper work by having started engaging in pithy faux-conversation with the idle muncher of their products. Ambling chat that says nothing printed on the side of fries packs and the like. I want junk food, not an Interactive Meal Experience! What's wrong with you?

Furthermore, they say things like 'We may be the king but you, my friend, are the almighty ruler.' ??? The contemporary vogue for self-emphasis has reached its apogee, or perhaps nadir, here. Conferring deity status on the customers is not clever, it's asking for smite-related trouble. And they don't even mean it anyway! It's like they're saying, ' "The customer is always right", but we're going to buffer this anachronistic sentiment in some cagey language so you think we're being obsequious-but-not-overly-so, and so you know, further, that we're actually better than you because we're right clever with words and that.'

Shut up and Kong My Whopper, burger jockeys, and less of your lip!

And! Sorry to come back to the bread and apostrophe shunners Pret a manger, but they're doing it as well. Astoundingly, they print 'how to make a (sandwich x)' instructions on the side of their sandwich bags. Is this marketing fuckwittedness on an interplanetary scale, or is there, as per BK, a more sinister agenda of customer mockery going on, whereby they gleefully poke fun at the lunch slaveys coming out for their sustenance with NO TIME TO EVEN REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO MAKE A FUCKING SANDWICH ONCE?

Excuse me, I have some troughing to attend to before The Man once again makes onerous demands of my afternoon.

pret a mourir

I know I'm straying ever so close to writing about work things, but there's something about being re-immersed in the semi-fictive universe of employment, the city, etc [of which "'"'"'Popworld'"'"'" is one glamorous color-filled sattelite] every monday that invariably brings the hyenas of irritation guffawing round my door. get this. I was in well-known sandwich emporium 'pret a manger' - which is french for 'nearly food for cattle' - earlier, accompanying a butty-buying buddy. They vend a product called a 'no bread sandwich'.

I bet there's some marketing kid on a zillion pounds a minute being applauded throughout vast marbled boardrooms at Pret-a-deranger Towers for that particular bit of semantic sleight-of-hand. Here is what their own sorry Pret-a-pleurir web dungeon says:

No Bread Sandwich More than Mozzarella:
"Its not a sandwich and its not a salad. Its new and the answer to a good low carb, light lunch.Mozzarella, bistro mix, spinach, avocado, sliced tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, black olives and a drizzle of french dressing."

Hmmm - salad ingredients... plus a dressing... in a dish with a fork. That IS a fucking salad! Pret-a-vomir's "no bread or apostrophes" terminology be damned! And it's not 'an answer to a good low carb light lunch', it just IS a low carb light lunch! Whose life has degenerated to the point where low carb light lunches interrogate their every waking step? Apart from me writing this shit, I mean? And, apart from anything else, I'm seated as I type - and half-asleep.


'More than mozzarella', IAY.